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A recent study revealed 20 percent of tweets published are actually invitations for product information, answers or responses from peers or directly by brand representatives. Now we learn that Twitter users are actively paying attention to brands on the popular information network.

According to research conducted by Performics and ROI Research, about half of Twitter users who were introduced to a brand on Twitter were compelled to search for additional information.

The companies studied the activity of 3,000 users of social networks in the U.S. Of those polled, 70% use Facebook, 40% use YouTube, and 22% use Twitter.

Participants were presented with roughly 100 questions that explored how they discover products in social networks and also their thresholds for advertising and marketing.

The survey found that 48% of those who came into contact with a brand name on Twitter went on to search for additional information on search engines compared to 34% on other social networks, which to be clear, is also an impressive number.

The inspiration, it seems, was tied to a desire to surface additional information about a product, service, or brand with 30% claiming they wished ... read more >>

One of the so-called rules of social media is that you should adopt a personal voice. After all the medium is all about helping companies look less monolithic and to engage on a one-to-one basis, right? Well, not necessarily, according to Ann All’s article in IT Business Edge. Content is content, and as long as you are producing unique, interesting subject matter, you may still find an engaged audience lapping it up. Ann points out that the IT Business Edge profile on Twitter and Facebook fan page are little more than warmed-up RSS feeds. This is fine for their audience: it’s more about putting links to useful articles on the networks where their audience congregates.

I’d say I largely subscribe to this view, and some of our own corporate Twitter accounts are not conversational: they just point followers to useful content, eg. BRMS Updates. With practically no promotional effort, we’re getting at least 1 new follower per day. And the followers know what to expect. If we do need to engage with our audience on a more personal level, we’ll probably open up a fresh profile to handle this.

After all, is social media really that different from the traditional media that went before it... read more >>

• Repetitive consistent marketing performance
• Theory of constraints or other type of process flow analysis
• Process standards - including decision-making frameworks and metrics
• End-to-end systems that integrate with ERP & HR systems

Here is the thing about operations. It was developed as a discipline to take a complex problem and make it repeatable - think about assembly line as an example. For large companies it is much more important to have consistently good marketing than to have big swings in marketing. In the broadcast era, marketing operations were artificially simplified because you could access a huge volume of customers through a relatively small number of channels. It allowed everyone in the value chain to get a little op... read more >>

If mainstream media is not talking about your company, but customers, employees and partners are writing about you online, will that help move the needle on coverage? One of the first questions a reporter asks is whether they can speak with a customer.

In the age of Google, you should be less worried about the traffic that comes to certain pages of your site and pay more attention to whether people are talking about you or not. All those instances create a searchable impression - your online footprint and reputation.

We know that online evidence matters even if your customers don't buy from you online. Especially if you're in a complex B2B space, buyers will Google what you do. They will research options to gain a better understanding of what they think they need before the clock gets ticking in a consulting situation, for example. 

Today it's not an all-or-nothing proposition between your company site and sites hosted by communities, forums, and yes, mainstream media. I'm seeing a very good evolution of media online. Where mainstream media may not have been interested in what you can teach and share, you can now do that yourself for those who are interested in what y... read more >>