Entrepreneurs, business owners and marketers can do a lot with the social media tools that have emerged over the past 5 years. To help you get started, here's a few ideas about what you could do, with some example of exactly how some organisations are maximising the return on their effort.
More Posts On Social Media - Enjoy!
Showing posts with label Social Media. Show all posts
The Tweet Crowd - Not As It First Appears
IF YOU think money can't buy you friends, think again. In the online world, it’s possible to purchase a crowd of fans. One thousand cost only £15 on average, according to estimates by Barracuda Networks, a network security company. Yet these friends won’t meet you for drinks after work. In fact, they don’t even exist. They are pixels on a screen.
A large share of social-media followers of the biggest companies are not human, believes Marco Camisani Calzolari, an entrepreneur and professor at Milan’s ILUM University. In a recent study he quantified the proportion of computer-generated fans or inactive users following big brands on Twitter. To decide whether a follower is human, Mr Calzolari used various criteria, including the number of posts from a fan’s Twitter account and the use of correct punctuation in tweets. According to this research, by June 2011 nearly half of Twitter followers of computer maker Dell—about 700,000—were bots.
Some politicians also seem to have many fake followers. Mitt Romney, the former Republican presidential candidate, became the focus of media attention when his Twitter following swelled by 17% in a single day in July. On close inspection, a significant proportion of Mr Romney’s followers appeared to be fake profiles. In Italy Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement lost momentum when Mr Calzolari made a similar claim about the followers of the comedian-turned-politician.
There is no indication that any of the companies mentioned in Mr Calzolari’s paper have bought followers-rogue bots often attach themselves to people and brands without payment. But some firms do buy a social media following. Fake profiles are at the centre of a very vibrant and growing underground economy, says Barracuda Networks. On eBay, the e-commerce site, for instance, the firm’s researchers have found 20 sellers offering to set up such profiles.
For start-ups a strong social media following can boost business. A small mum-and-dad shop struggling to sell its wares can look like a booming upstart thanks to a swollen Twitter account, or an artificially high number of Facebook likes. For major international companies, an underwhelming number of followers in the early stages of engagement with social media can be galling at best and damaging to brand perception at worst. Buying crowds of fans — even if they aren’t engaged with the brand — can give an artificial boost to a business.
For now, the trick works. “Normal people don't know yet that there is this black market. Most have total trust that a brand's followers are real,” says Mr Calzolari. But brands are already finding diminishing returns. When everybody has a large following, the impact is much diminished. And consumers are starting to cotton on to sharp practices. “The number of followers is a superficial measurement unless they are engaged,” argues Carly Donovan of Ogilvy Action, an arm of Ogilvy & Mather, the advertisement and public relations agency. Money can clearly buy you friends — just not always very good ones.
A large share of social-media followers of the biggest companies are not human, believes Marco Camisani Calzolari, an entrepreneur and professor at Milan’s ILUM University. In a recent study he quantified the proportion of computer-generated fans or inactive users following big brands on Twitter. To decide whether a follower is human, Mr Calzolari used various criteria, including the number of posts from a fan’s Twitter account and the use of correct punctuation in tweets. According to this research, by June 2011 nearly half of Twitter followers of computer maker Dell—about 700,000—were bots.
Some politicians also seem to have many fake followers. Mitt Romney, the former Republican presidential candidate, became the focus of media attention when his Twitter following swelled by 17% in a single day in July. On close inspection, a significant proportion of Mr Romney’s followers appeared to be fake profiles. In Italy Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement lost momentum when Mr Calzolari made a similar claim about the followers of the comedian-turned-politician.
There is no indication that any of the companies mentioned in Mr Calzolari’s paper have bought followers-rogue bots often attach themselves to people and brands without payment. But some firms do buy a social media following. Fake profiles are at the centre of a very vibrant and growing underground economy, says Barracuda Networks. On eBay, the e-commerce site, for instance, the firm’s researchers have found 20 sellers offering to set up such profiles.
For start-ups a strong social media following can boost business. A small mum-and-dad shop struggling to sell its wares can look like a booming upstart thanks to a swollen Twitter account, or an artificially high number of Facebook likes. For major international companies, an underwhelming number of followers in the early stages of engagement with social media can be galling at best and damaging to brand perception at worst. Buying crowds of fans — even if they aren’t engaged with the brand — can give an artificial boost to a business.
For now, the trick works. “Normal people don't know yet that there is this black market. Most have total trust that a brand's followers are real,” says Mr Calzolari. But brands are already finding diminishing returns. When everybody has a large following, the impact is much diminished. And consumers are starting to cotton on to sharp practices. “The number of followers is a superficial measurement unless they are engaged,” argues Carly Donovan of Ogilvy Action, an arm of Ogilvy & Mather, the advertisement and public relations agency. Money can clearly buy you friends — just not always very good ones.
Sharing Coca-Cola's Thinking on Content Strategy Development
Coca-Cola share their thinking on content strategy development, talking about their ‘liquid and linked’ approach to future creativity through content excellence.
And here's part two of the series
And here's part two of the series
Social Campaign: HP and Movember are the Ultimate Mo-Mance
With a million limited edition Movember HP bottles, a facebook competition giving fans the chance to become the ‘HP Face of Movember’ and win cash towards their Movember fund by uploading a picture of their moustache to the website, this is a match made in heaven for the saucey brand with the strapline ‘a sauce of manliness’. That's right ...
Social Campaign: IKEA's Showroom on Facebook
Wonderfully creative, brand relevant ideas like this demonstrate why interest in social is high these days.
Social Campaigns - Volkswagen 'The Fun Theory'
Another staggeringly good Social Media Campaign, this time Volkswagen tested the idea that you can get more people to use the stairs simply by making the experience more fun !
Social Campaign: Board Games in Central Park!
Another engaging campaign from our friends over the pond. This gang turned Central Park in NYC into an interactive board game and museum. More than 50 notices with QR codes were placed around the park for visitors to scan and connect to content unlocking the park’s secrets e.g. trivia questions about movie scenes filmed in the park and a video answer delivering the clip to their mobile handset, views from the past and more.
Social Campaign: Ford's Fiestagram linking Instragram with Facebook
Ford claim this is the first campaign in Europe to link Instagram and Facebook ... whether or not that's true, over 18,000 images were shared by consumers across Europe ...
Social Campaign: Comodo Restaurant in NYC Engages Diners on Instagram
Comodo's awareness raising and footfall stimulation campaign had truly global reach. Anybody travelling to New York may well consider dining at the restaurant now they have achieved, albeit probably only for a short period, a form of global fame and recognition. On a tiny budget, the campaign engaged customers to help them create a noise in an impactful creative use of new technology.
Study shows why being Unfriended on Facebook Hurts
According to a study published this summer, the more you use Facebook the more emotional ties you have to different interactions on the social platform. Jennifer Bevan, a professor at Chapman University in California, authored the study on negative emotional responses to being unfriended along with some of her undergraduate students, two of whom are listed as co-authors.
The group of students wanted to gear the study toward something they interacted with every day. The social media platform Facebook fit the bill; being something almost everyone could relate to. The researchers found that the tailored identity you create and nurture on Facebook is what makes the process of being unfriended so hurtful.
It hurts most when users felt they were unfriended because they of something they’d done on the social network, although the study showed Facebook users are usually unfriended because of offline-related events.
Why does this matter so much? “I think it’s a testament to how important our Facebook identity is,” Bevan says.
Our digital avatars are changing the way we relate to each other and reflect typical social interactions. Peer aggression in the form of exclusion has been around since the early days of AOL’s Instant Messanger Buddy List, says Nancy Willard, author of “Cyber Savvy: Embracing Digital Safety and Civility”.
But what causes one to unfriend a friend? There are several reasons to justify removing someone from your friend list. Willard offered one possible scenario.
“My daughter has unfriended people because she does not want to have people judge her negatively based on the friends she keeps,” she said. “So when she unfriended a girl who was posting sexually provocative images, this was done for a very good reason.”
Other reasons for unfriending are excessive status posting, someone who is seen as dramatic or to avoid being influenced by someone else’s lifestyle choices.
The research team admits there isn’t much research yet into this field of online interaction.
“You’re basically manipulating that relationship,” she said when asked if the effects of unfriending can be seen as malicious. “I think there needs to be more cyberbullying research.”
Paul tells us he has about 200 friends on Facebook, though he doesn’t check them daily. That doesn’t mean the social network isn’t the first thing he checks in the morning. “Facebook is the next step down from the real world for us,” he said.
Have you ever been unfriended on Facebook or other social networks? How did it make you feel? Let us know in the comments.
Facebook Stats by Country
Came across Socialbakers.com recently which provides daily updated Facebook stats for more than 200 countries. Click a country to see country-specific statistics.
Check it out for yourself here
Tracking social media - The mood of the market
MARKETS, the classical economists instructed, rely on information. But what if there is too much of it, not too little?
The web and social-networking platforms have resulted in an explosion of words. Many firms apply artificial intelligence technology to get the gist, and use that as a trading signal. One study in 2010 by researchers at Indiana University analyzed millions of tweets to predict the movement of the stock market three days later with an 87% accuracy. Such success has unleashed a new fashion for Wall Street quants to plug so-called "sentiment analysis" of social media into their massive models.
Until now these indicators have been fairly blunt, usually tracking a handful of companies on a two-dimensional scale of positive or negative sentiment. But on June 25th Thomson Reuters unleashed no fewer than 18,864 new indices, updated each minute. The system, developed by MarketPsych, a start-up in California, can analyze as many as 55,000 news sites and 4.5m social media sites, blogs and tweets (though on an everyday basis, the number it crunches will be much smaller). The indices quantify emotional states like optimism, gloom, joy, fear, anger—even things like innovation, litigation and conflict. And it does it across a slew of assets: 40 equity sectors, 29 currencies, 22 types of energy and materials, 12 agricultural commodities and 119 countries.
Parsing tweets to measure "innovation" or "litigation" might seem of little value, even if it can be measured accurately—a big if. The techniques of natural language processing are embryonic and highly imperfect. Tweets for example, are often ironic or sarcastic, which humans immediately understand but computers do not. However, presuming that the indices actually denote what they purport to measure, they are not so much meant for a person to use directly, but for hefty computer algorithms to factor in on a continuous basis. In that sense, relative changes over time may have merit.
This may help prevent what is known as "model crowding" or "quantagion" (a neologism of "quant" and "contagion"), explains Rich Brown of Thomson Reuters. The idea is that many funds' models rely on similar underlying data, so that when one melts-down, they all do, as happened in August 2007. And because everyone trades on mostly the same signals, the effects get exaggerated. Hence, quant investors are keen for new data sources to add to their models, to give them a unique trading strategy.
The new indices associated with an asset or country cost around $1,000 a month and go north from there. Yet are they useful? The verdict is out. Take the index that is informally called the "Bubbleometer" (pictured below), which is a measure of "speculative" conversations among investors over the web and social media platforms.
When the Bubbleometer is compared against the Standard & Poor's 500 Index between September 2009 and May 2012, it mostly follows the big swoops. But examined closely, one sees the Bubbleometer act erratically. For example, in late 2009 and early 2010 it showed speculative sentiment cooling just as prices were rising. In Spring 2010 it was first a lagging indicator that share prices would rise, then a leading indicator they would retreat. At midyear, sentiment and prices were inversely correlated. In autumn 2010 the Bubbleometer held steady within a narrow band, while the index jumped almost 15%.
Of course, this is not to say that a bit of clever maths won't uncover interesting patterns that are not visible to the human eye. It is useful measure of "bubbleocity," stresses Mr Brown of Thomson Reuters.
Successes from harnessing online sentiment analysis remain to be seen. One fund that famously began trading on Twitter signals in 2011, Derwent Capital in London, recently closed its fund (it plans to offer the metrics for free to retail investors who use its trading platform later this year). Similarly, MarketPsych, the firm that compiles Thomson Reuters' sentiment indices, formerly used the data for an in-house fund that has since been shuttered as well.
True, the value of data or an index can often be better exploited by third parties than the firm that cobbled it together—no one would think that Dow Jones would be filthy rich if it kept the industrial average to itself. However, it raises eyebrows that the firms capable of measuring market sentiment are willing to provide that data to others rather then keep it to itself. If it were so valuable, why would they make it available at all? The telling is in the using: let's see how investment performance improves or deteriorates with yet another signal on which to base trading decisions. After all, the classic economists aspired for perfect information
Advertising Campaign: Volkswagen Use The Force
Volkswagen put this ad on YouTube the week before the Superbowl in 2011 and got significant buzz. The 60-second spot featured a pint-sized Darth Vader using The Force (turned out it was a key fob secretly used by his dad) to start up a 2012 Passat. It has netted over 100 million views on YouTube, and was also a trending topic on Twitter at the time.
A rep for Deutsch, the ad agency that created the spot, says although advertisers sometimes release their Super Bowl ads the Friday before the game to get network TV coverage, it's unusual to air the ad a few days prior to that.
"The Force" as the ad is known, ran in the second quarter.
Here it is. Enjoy.