Social Media Blog by Michael Brito
Insights into the social web & real
time community engagement
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This may seem obvious to some but I come across many brands (big and small) who have yet to optimize their content distribution network. A content distribution network is sometimes referred to as the “hub and spoke” model of a brand’s web presence. The hub serves as the “base of operations” and could be a web page or blog. The spokes are the brand’s “off domain” web properties and can include sites like Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and Twitter. One trend I have noticed is that many brands are using their Facebook fan pages as the hub and leveraging multiple media channels to drive traffic and awareness to these pages. Friend and colleague Steve Rubel calls these “Digital Embassies.”
An optimized content distribution network tightly integrates the hub and spokes so that users can connect with a brand in the communities they choose. For example, if brand X’s hub is a blog, [...]
I think it’s generally accepted by many social media folks that one characteristic of social media is transparency and disclosure, well … maybe that’s two characteristics but they almost mean the same thing.
Being transparent (or real) in a conversation and disclosing who you are is really the first step in building trust with people online. It’s the same dynamic when building relationships in the real world, not that online isn’t the real world of course but you catch my drift. If I wasn’t transparent with my wife when we were first dating, and then issues began to arise after the fact, there is a good chance that we wouldn’t be married today. Same goes for big companies.
Back in June, I attended a Blog Council event in Chicago and met some really awesome people from companies like Dell, P&G, Nokia and Allstate Insurance to name a few. It was great opportunity [...]
If you have ever watched Law & Order, then you know who Fred Thompson is. He is also running for the GOP Presidential Nomination. Thompson and team are the first Republicans that have fully embraced the concept of social media. Let’s see, he has a Myspace and Facebook profile with about 2,500 friends each; and he’s on Twitter with 400 or so friends. He has a fairly new Youtube channel with 500 or so subscribers and 15,000 views; and his blog is completely optimized to ensure that his content travels; one characteristic of social media optimization. Lastly, he has an embeddable widget that allows for contributions to his campaign which is a great viral marketing strategy.
And, here is something really cool. It’s not his staff that is blogging, it’s actually Fred. And, it seems that his transparency (a characteristic of social media) on issues is helping him shoot up in [...]
Don’t be deceived by the title. Advertising will never ever ever ever go away. Despite what Al and Laura say in their book, Advertising still works and is here to stay! However, social media is taking the market by storm for several reasons. I personally think its customer engagement. When customers feel engaged, they become loyal brand ambassadors with a strong emotion of belonging. This is something that can’t easily be taken away by a competitor. When a company can create that dynamic of two-way communication between a customer and a company, they are more likely to help foster long term, profitable relationships with them. Here are some recent headlines about companies that are adopting social media strategies as a part of their overall marketing mix.
In the news this week it is reported that hgtv.com is launching a social networking site for their target consumer group. Users of the site will [...]
Over the last couple of months, there has been a allot of buzz around Social Media Optimization (the New Rules of SMO, the Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing and Treating Social Media Optimization as another Distribution Channel) and the list goes on. However, what I haven’t noticed is any discussion on how to measure social media optimization. We all know from Marketing 101, that the ability to measure the effectiveness of marketing initiatives and calculating a ROMI (return on marketing investment) is imperative to a company’s bottom line. In fact, just yesterday; Comscore announced a research and development initiative that is designed to provide comprehensive measurement of conversational media such as blogs and community-driven sites.
With that said, let’s jump right in on ways you can measure social media optimization today because we all know that Comscore studies can take anywhere from 6 months to 2 years before we can [...]
According to ClickZ, a recent report by research firm PQ Media on political ad spending reveals that direct email accounted for roughly 80 percent of the $40 million spent online by political advertisers leading up to the current midterm elections. This strategy makes perfect sense since political marketers can leverage geotargeting in their direct marketing efforts. Indeed, direct email marketing is an effective tool and she be used as part of any integrated marketing plan, but what about social media?
I have been blogging about social media for a little over 3 months now and I have noticed that there aren’t many bloggers talking about the need for politicians to use social media as a channel to communicate their marketing messages. David Wilson, author of the popular Social Media Optimization blog titles one of his postings “Politicians Interested in Social Media” but cites that many politicians talk about social media but [...]
Thanks to Christian Mezei of SEOpedia, he has posted some interesting findings on how to get an article on the home page of Digg. He points out his post doesn’t represent a method to let users know how they can trick the Digg’s system, rather to inform on how the system really works. We all know that to get on the front page of Digg, however, there absolutely has to be some value in the actual content of the article. I personally don’t use or like Digg for my own reasons but wanted to let you all know of Christian’s post.
Technorati Tags: social media, social media optimization, social media marketing, digg, digg Algorithm
As social media begins to dominate the marketplace, it is imperative for marketers to include this growing channel into their overall strategy planning; millions of impressions are at stake. Dove has done an excellent job in leveraging social media in their mix. According to Ad Age, the “Dove Evolution,” a 75-second viral film created by Ogilvy & Mather was uploaded to YouTube.com on Oct. 6 and has been viewed over 1.7 million times since. Compare this to Dove’s 2006 Superbowl commercial that resulted in 500 million impressions and it’s not that significant. However, the cost for the Superbowl ad was $2.5 million; whereas there was no cost whatsoever for Dove to upload “Evolution” to YouTube. The conclusion is simple: stronger ROI from a YouTube Video than Super Bowl ad.
Technorati Tags: social media, social media optimization, social media marketing, socialmediaoptimizaion, dove, dove video
