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© Will Lion
"We don't think of social as a destination. We think of social as a dimension." ~Ari Balogh, Yahoo! Chief Technology Officer commenting on how Yahoo! will make services associated with social networking part of the fabric of their existing sites and not just another service. (Source: NYT, Bits) Social Media is hype. People don't understand it. Companies are scared of it. For what? They're only a bunch of silly programs that are touted as the next big thing, just like email and the internet and computers and the telephone and the television and radio and countless others. So why is Social Media causing such a stir among people AND companies? All the technologies I have mentioned above have been used for many reasons. The main reasons businesses use them are to influence consumer decisions to empower them to buy. Social Media functions a little differently than that traditional paradigm and this is what scares people who are used to doing things a certain way. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Well, it was broke. Traditional avenues of multimedia such as newspapers, television and radio are broadcast mediums that companies buy advertising on to tell ... read more >>
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News University kicks off another another series of journalism training courses this week with the first in its Social Networks webinar series. I’m pleased to present the first event, Social Networks: The New Architecture of the Web, on Tuesday, Apr. 14, 2009. The series is developed with the Knight Digital Media Center, a partnership of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. I’ll be partnering with JD Lasica on other programs in the series. This webinar-based program is intended to brief news editors on the emerging tools and tactics of social media as they wrestle with thhe challenges of creating reader communities. We’ll look at both the content and revenue sides. My second presentation, in fact, is Social Networks: New Revenue for News Organizations, on June 16, 2009. The cost of each webinar is a modest $24.95. In addition to the webinars, there will be assignments and group projects that can help you better understand how to build social networks and deliver new products and revenue. Come join us! ![[Slashdot]](http://slashdot.org/favicon.ico) ![[Digg]](http://digg.com/favicon.ico) ![[Reddit]](http://reddit.com/favicon.ico) ![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif) ![[Facebook]](http://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico) ![[Technorati]](http://technorati.com/favicon.ico) ![[Google]](http://www.google.com/favicon.ico) ![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.stumbleupon.com/favicon.ico) 
 Link to original post... read more >>
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Bob Buch, the VP of biz dev at Digg spoke at Web2.0Expo and provided some good ideas that were blogged at ReadWriteWeb. There’s more, of course, in the article, including a finding that if you unbundle the social bookmarking sites from the Share This widget, you get a lot more click-throughs on those sites, in this case Digg, Yahoo, Buzz and StumbleUpon. Hmm, interesting. And that you should hire social media experts for your company if you wnat to make the most of social media. Well, duh, but then again it must need to be said. And automatic syndication of content, as in Facebook Connect. Thanks for sharing, Bob! And RWW, too. 5 Ingredients for Social Media Success- Sharing: If you love something, set it free
- Integration: Don’t try to do everything yourself
- People: People who know: ROFLCopter, LMAO, PWND, Noob
- Platform: One to one is now one to many
- Authenticity: Stay true to your core competency
     
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Yesterday I had a great opportunity to speak on the phone about social media and marketing with some people from the marketing departments of about 20 national governing bodies for US sports. This was made possible by Tim Yount (VP of Marketing, USA Triathlon), who I met last month at the IEG Sponsorship Conference in Chicago. After the conference ended, Tim invited me to speak on the call yesterday and talk about social media — what it is, why it’s important, and some key steps organizations should keep in mind when getting started. Thanks to Tim for having me on the call yesterday and thanks to everyone else for taking time out of your day to listen. I hope it was beneficial and please feel free to contact me with any more questions you may have. If you’re from one of the organizations from the call, thanks for checking out my blog. For everyone else. here are some points I shared today about social media marketing and six main principles. What Is Social Media Marketing?Social Media marketing is a huge buzz word these days, but what does it really mean? I think it really boils down to this (and I’m definitely not the only one who has said this before): Social media marketing is wh... read more >>
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An interesting question put on Linkedin group here by James Wright is What kind of metrics are currently out there for social media marketing? Some responses were - - number of "friends" on Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn,
- number of blog subscribers,
- number of comments on blog posts,
- the number of links to blog posts,
- the number of brand related tweets
- where your leads are coming from
- a Google alert for phrases that are important to your business,
- referrals from embedded content/re-tweets that originated (use www.tr.im)
- ROI
- a follow-up email or sign-up page that asks "How did you hear about us?"
- Cost per lead,
- cost per engagement,
- cost per action
Some recommended tools were - (Ajay- Let me know if you know any more tool... read more >>
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 You can think of social media as a set of tools that organizations can use for a variety of purposes - customer service, branding, promotion, relationship-management, etc. Just as with any toolkit, you’re not going to use every tool every time.
Sometimes the hammer fits, but if you’re trying to measure something the hammer is pretty much useless. Similarly, sometimes a blog will fit perfectly, while other times YouTube might be a more suitable tool. Sometimes (say it ain’t so!) social media outreach won’t fit at all. If social media represents a set of tools - what’s in your toolkit? Over the last two years my online toolkit has shifted back and forth as tools have come and gone. Recently, however, I’ve noticed a bit more stability in the services I use. Is this a reflection of a slightly maturing marketplace? Or just of a tough economy? Here’s my current toolkit. I use these tools pretty much every day: read more >>
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There are two big questions in relation to using social media on the minds of most experienced marketers: scale and measurement. This is about achieving scale. Scale Most marketers believe in the superior persuasive ability of word of mouth marketing. They recognize social media as a digital platform that expands the impact of WOM and also makes it measureable and, therefore, "budget-able." Still, everyone wants to know how you can significantly expand the reach and impact of your efforts and how you can operationalize enough of your effort to hope to get the ROI in the neighborhood of rational. So there is scale to impact and scale of operation. At the same time you are trying to achieve scale, you have to avoid underming the principles of word of mouth marketing that make teh discipline relevant in the first place - authenticity of opinion and the personality of the communications The last thing you want to do is to turn your social media effort into a email CRM program where you are trying to hit your target with enough frequency that a small percentage act but before you piss a majority off with a flood of email newlsetters. 
Three Steps to Scale We have been planning and deploy... read more >>
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 A lot of people are trying to figure out how to leverage social media, how to montenize social media, or how to simply use social media to their best financial advantage. There’s books, webinars, ebooks, social media experts, independent experts, and pundits who all have their own advice and opinions about how social media works. Some people make it sound like a complex web of formulas and rules, when in reality social media is simply people.
To understand how best to leverage social media you only need to know how best to leverage people. For me, I like to use the illusion that everyone has pockets full of “good will” currency. Now, just like real life, some people are born with more currency than others. The good news is that you can garner more if you have none. Everyone in social media goes around giving and taking from each other based on the exchange of entertainment value, favors, help and etc. Let’s put this into an example. Mary wants to get news out about her Etsy shop, but she’s not sure how to do it in Social Media. So she joins Twitter, Facebook and starts a blog. Currently Mary’s social cash is pretty much $0. Now if she has some friends she knows already outside of he... read more >>
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Social media is not about Facebook, Twitter, blogs, yada yada - and if you really want to understand it you have to look behind the scenes and see what is going on. Here's the story, its about the separation of content from its means of distribution. Sounds rather bland until you actually grasp what this means.
From the year dot until Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type and the printing press, information had no means of mass distribution, except through storytelling. Gutenberg’s invention made the widespread distribution of information possible and it also cemented a marriage between information and its means of distribution that lasted for 600 years. Within this marriage, distribution became the dominant partner because it almost always cost more money to distribute stuff than it did to create it in the first place. This relationship between information and distribution - which could be termed the Gutenberg principle - meant that the flow of information within our society became institutionalised to generate the revenues necessary to pay for the high costs involved (printing presses, TV and radio networks etc). The institutions that evolved around the... read more >>
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