Community Management

On Tuesday AOL hosted a Social Media Salon for Internet Week New York where the differences between social media and community management were discussed.[read more]

A customer shares an insight within your company’s online community. He somehow found the time in between meetings, phone calls and lunch to share a suggestion, idea or complaint in a discussion thread. “It would be great if the XYZ product would … ,” he writes. What does your company do with that customer input?[read more]

Social relationships

In a noisy, distracting world, we are bombarded. We start each day feeling as if we are behind. Data noise is everywhere. Over 100 million bits of information come in through your visual system—every second! In the midst of this chaos, you need to build, manage, and nurture your relationships.[read more]

Adam Naide, Social Media & Digital Marketing Lead at Cox Communications

I had a chance to sit down with Adam Naide, Social Media & Digital Marketing Lead at Cox Communications to discuss some of the topics that you will see at the Social Shake-Up Conference where Adam will be speaking. The following is a transcript of that conversation.[read more]

It isn’t just your imagination – the internet is becoming less of the “too nice” place that The Atlantic speculated it was turning into and advancing into a state of “social rudeness” where arguments are increasingly made public rather than privately discussed.[read more]

A warning, from an ex-digital activist, that keeping a low profile, or no profile, is a tactical risk when it comes to reputation management in the 21st century.[read more]

Blog audience bonding

Connecting with your audience, improving your ‘About Us’ page, fighting content challenges in B2B marketing and many more tips have been offered this week by expert bloggers and content marketing pros. Here are some recommendations to follow for content marketing success.[read more]

Venn Diagram of Samy & Amy Meltdown

Yelp may not be the go-to source for restaurant reviews. Why? Amy's Baking Company has 1131 reviews, 99.9% of which are snarky, mean, negative “reviews.” How many of those 1131 reviewers actually ate at the restaurant and how many just piled on for flash mob social media bashing? 99.9%[read more]

Even though Tumblr is often forgotten by brands, it’s still a massive community. In fact, the absence of brands (and the only recent emergence of in-stream advertising) may play a big part in the site’s continued rapid growth. More than 107.5 million blogs and 50.5 billion posts have been created on Tumblr, including the more than 70 million new posts that appear every day.[read more]

Photo credit: Dark Jedi Tumblr 

This post is a love letter to my fellow community managers, as well as a brass-tacks discussion on the practice of community management – the dark and the light side of it. It is also a call to action for community managers to take a proactive stand against burnout — while working all the time may seem like the right thing to do for our communities in the short term, burnout renders us useless to these same communities.[read more]

Write a controversial blog post, tweet someone you wouldn’t dare to on a normal day. Post content that you know will piss someone off. This is how you push the envelope in Social Media, and it is the only way you’ll learn what the boundaries truly are with your audience.[read more]

social media meltdown / shutterstock

It’s easy to read about best practices, nod your head in agreement, and then move on. But the fine folks Amy’s Baking Company are in the middle of writing a modern cautionary tale that shows just how important keeping control of your social self really is.[read more]

As you may have heard by now, The Onion recently became the latest in a string of large news organizations to be attacked and have their Twitter hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army. They were able to regain control fairly quickly, but in a surprising twist, they also decided to publish a blog post detailing how their security was breached.[read more]

Facebook insights gives you a fabulous amount of information, but it is only as good as the user using it. To increase your Facebook reach, your goal should be to get as many shares, likes and comments on your posts as you can. The more you have of the "big 3," the higher your reach will be.[read more]

Marketing master? (Image: thecomeupshow / Flickr)

What if you created your own ‘Wu-Tang Clan’ of internal experts assigned to attract and build specific segments of your market? What if you leveraged the audiences they built on their own to create a powerhouse when you brought those experts and their communities together?[read more]

Chris Hadfield

Astronaut Chris Hadfield has successfully returned from a 5-month mission as commander aboard the ISS and has undoubtedly inspired a generation through his unprecedented use of social media and content creation. If you haven’t followed his exploits, not to worry, he has bestowed upon us an absolutely amazing library of content on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.[read more]

What May 11, 2013 brings to the political fate of Pakistan will be determined in some hours of having written this article. Whether that is a "Tsunami of Change" or a "Perception of Stagnation" with the same old leaders reclaiming the helm, we can be sure of the unprecedented role that social media has played in the lives of Pakistanis.[read more]

Patience is one of the hardest things to have when it comes to building online communities. Many business leaders want to believe it’s as easy as creating a Facebook page, combined with asking (or begging) for likes and within days they’ll have an instant community.The truth is that communities take time. Just like relationships are...[read more]

Annette Shaff / Shutterstock.com

Last month, Foursquare’s CEO Dennis Crowley addressed rumors that Foursquare’s growth had become stagnant, which he said simply weren’t true – in fact, they consistently see their numbers grow by 10-30% each month. However, he did admit that Foursquare was no longer the “shiny, new thing” in the world of social media.[read more]

The engagement and activation of your community can assist with virtually every stage of product development including idea generation, concept screening, concept development, commercial viability analysis, beta testing, and commercialization and launch.[read more]