It's just coming up to ten years since I participated in the first UK workshop on this new thing called blogging. During the ensuing decade I have formed a number of social media tenets that have so far stood the tests of time.
One of these is simply that social networks work best when they span the on- and off-line worlds; when face-to-face leads to 'linking-in', and when 'friending' leads to meet and greet.
Of course, another tenet was that at some juncture we'd stop differentiating between on- and off-line in the same way we don't feel the need to qualify whether a conversation was held in person or over the phone, but what's a contradiction between friends?
And the combination of on- and off- has worked in my favour recently. I had the benefit of a highly receptive audience at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp 2010 who went on to view and tweet and my presentation about influence on slideshare.net, which then helped catapult it to slideshare's homepage as their most discussed document of the day.
So how can you start making the combination of on- and off- work to your advantage?
Lots of great posts for you this week. Enjoy!
Philip and the MarCom Professional team.
Why the iPad won't save Publishers (and what to do about it)
by Andrew Swenson of wordpost
Photo Credit: Renato Mitra
With print sales falling faster than tween girls are falling for Justin Bieber, book publishers are getting a bit panicky. In not so modest desperation, they’re looking for a savior… Enter the iPad.
Advertisers are lining up for periodicals, and according to the Wall Street Journal, breaking out their checkbooks for iPad deals. This has caused some minor elation, even among more traditional book distributors.
This, I think, is foolish.
Fact: the iPad won’t save publishers
This is a given. More...
Influence - The bullshit, best practice and promise
by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP
Here is the presentation I just delivered to Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp.
It seems to have gone down well from the Tweetstream (some Tweets cut and paste below). Thanks so much to the panellists, particularly as you had approximately zero seconds to prepare!
UPDATE 2nd April 2010: I'm delighted that my presentation on slideshare.net has, according to emails I received from slideshare, been their most discussed document on Twitter and Facebook, globally! That means the presentation was promoted to their homepage too. More...
Many marketing and communications professors are criminals
by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott
One student literally cried on my shoulder. Sobs and snot. (Really). I had never met her before. She came up to me after a speaking gig to tell me her story.
Another student asked: "Why do my professors not know about social media?"
Another emailed: "Two years going through an MBA program and Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were never mentioned!"
Another: "Did I waste my money on a 1950s education here?"
Another: "Only one professor in 4 years understands today’s world." More...
Social Networks are Touchpoints for Customer Acquisition and Retention
by Brian Solis of PR 2.0
Touchpoints serve as the point of contact between a buyer and a seller. As the race to socialize commerce escalates, these touchpoints represent the nodes that define the human network, connecting people across the social Web and uniting them around common interests, themes, and movements.
While the technology to connect buyers and sellers on the social Web is universal, the architecture for true engagement is antiquated. Customers are flocking to the social web to not only connect with friends, family, and peers, but also the brands that attract their attention. More...
E-mail Marketing is Making Social Connections
by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes
eMarketer reports that in 2009 e-mail marketers started to get social, but 2010 will be the year social media makes e-mail marketing more powerful. Social media is a complement to e-mail marketing, because it provides new avenues for sharing and engaging customers and prospects.
"Even though people are spending more time using social media, they are not abandoning e-mail," said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst. "The two channels can help each other, offering the opportunity for marketers to create deeper connections." More...
E-Reader Buyer Attitudes and Usage Behaviors
by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes
The media publishing industry needs an upside trend. Perhaps this is it. comScore released the results of a survey of 2,176 Internet users regarding their awareness, attitudes and opinions of the Apple iPad and other e-readers or tablet devices.
Results were analyzed across age and gender profiles, as well as the iOwners (a comScore term) consumer segment -- defined as those owning either an iPhone or iPod Touch.
Consumers were asked several questions regarding their awareness of various e-readers and tablet devices and their past purchase behavior or intent to purchase these devices. More...
Social Media Metrics
by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott
Jim Sterne has written an outstanding book called Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment which releases this week. This is the third book in my New Rules of Social Media book series (following Inbound Marketing and Get Seen).
Readers of my blog and those who have seen my talks will know that I am very critical of the old "ROI" version of measuring marketing. You can hear my Epic ROI Rant where I go off on the topic for a few minutes (resisting the dropping of F-bombs the entire time). More...
Book review: Antony Mayfield's Me and My Web Shadow
by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications
Proponents of social media in the UK and US will almost certainly have come across Antony Mayfield’s work. He’s a senior vice president at iCrossing, a digital marketing firm, that works with brands including Coca-Cola, Toyota and Channel 4.
We’ve only ever met once very briefly but Mayfield feels like an old friend. I read his blog and follow his tweets. Therein lies one of the benefits of maintaining a strong web shadow.
Managing your own web shadow is important says Mayfield as our lives increasingly move online. More...
iPad is a great business for Apple, but it won't save print
by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications
The iPad could prove to be a smart way for Apple to grab part of the publishing market as a content aggregator. But it won’t save print media by providing a new audience as Apple fanatics are predicting. In fact it could hasten its decline.
At best it’s another chapter in the unfolding story of the fragmentation of media. Publishers must make their content available on yet another platform and be prepared for Apple to act as gatekeeper.
If the iPad is successful the only winner will be Apple. More...
Enterprise Social Strategy Begins With Discovery
by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks
Starting a strategic social media plan can be overwhelming to a mid-to-large company. There are a few big questions that often cause organizational paralysis...the most daunting of which is "where do we begin?" followed by "what's happening that we don't know about?" But knowledge is a catalyst to action. And, as with the formation of most effective business strategies, you need to understand it in order to set a course of change.
So in order to begin to formulate a social media strategy within enterprise, the first place to start is to conduct a discovery audit: More...
Broadcast 2.0 v. Open Market
by Andrew Swenson of wordpost
Beyond all of the iPad hype, beyond the lovers and the haters and the blenders, there’s a really serious question lurking, and Doc Searls nailed it in his brain dump response: Do we want the Internet to be broadcasting 2.0 — run by a few content companies and their allied distributors? Or do we want it to be the wide open marketplace it was meant to be in the first place, and is good for everybody?
On closed systems
Searls, Cory Doctorow, Dave Winer, Mark Pilgrim, Alex Payne (cf. this post also), Tim Bray, and Peter Kirn, take the side of the open marketplace. More...
A Prediction: Twitter to Predict the Future
by Brian Solis of PR 2.0
Trending topics reveal much more than the objects that captivate the hearts, minds, and keyboards of Twitter users around the world. Twitter’s trends is a cultural mirror that reflects the state of attention and intention. And as such, Tweets then offer an MRI that visualizes the minds of consumers and more importantly, serve as a crystal ball that reveals the future of products and services before and soon after they’re released.
For the most part, however, the vast amount of precious insight is widely untapped. More...
Mike Litman’s blog as model for the future of a media
by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications
If you want a glimpse at what a media outlet might look like in the future take a look at how Dare’s Mike Litman has developed his blog. Using a similar model to Newser he’s curating content from around the social, marketing and PR web and presenting it in a highly visual format. And it’s working – he’s currently broken into the top 150 in the AdAge ranking of marketing blogs.
In Mike’s own words:
“Traffic in raw terms dipped a little in the first month since I changed things around a bit but its normalising again (up 90% in the past month). More...
Durrant's Jeremy Thompson on the Gorkana deal
by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications
Durrants has acquired Gorkana less than five-months after its acquisition of Metrica.
Durrants is a business that under the leadership of managing director Jeremy Thompson has set its sights firmly on modernising the workflow of PR agencies and in-house teams. I caught up with Thompson this morning to ask him about the deal.
The Daily Telegraph is reporting that the deal is worth £20m. How did you arrive at a valuation and what’s the structure of the deal?
We are not sure where The Telegraph got its numbers from but we are not disclosing the consideration. More...
