Let’s start with your destination:  Say your destination is building a large fan base, your roadmap and vehicles will defer from a destination of having a high engagement rate. For a high engagement rate you will post richer media e.g. images, ask for likes and comments whereas for a large fan base you will rather run a competition.

Choose your vehicles: If you want more engagement you need to choose Facebook and Twitter as your vehicle to get to your destination. You need to keep your target market in mind and also what you want to share. On Facebook you can easily share blog posts, videos, images and ask questions. Twitter, however, is best for short to the point updates. On Twitter 54.6% are women and 45.4% are men.
The statistics will also help you define your vehicles.

Plan your route: Start every month planning your route to get to you destination. Sit upfront with your campaign and schedule all your updates and tweets for the month. Remember to re-view, revise and re-schedule your plan, there might be news in the middle of the month that you can share.

My key, my car, I’m driving:  Remember that your social media platforms are your company’s voice to the public. Never post negative comments on your wall, don’t be aggressive, have a crisis management strategy in place just in case someone wants to bad-mouth your organisation.

Lastly, you are part of the social media world, whether you have a Facebook page/ Twitter account or not, people are talking about you!

Happy Marketing!

1. Awareness
2. Influence
3. Attitude
4. Response
5. Value

But what if there was a different approach we should be taking in our measurement?  One that will clearly define whether or not we need to rework and refine our own messaging and positioning in the marketplace?  The 6^th Key metric, in fact, encompasses them all, and lies in the term we (not so) loosely term: Customer Value Management.

So let us explore…

1. Awareness
   Getting awareness right in the sense of volume to your site, your brand name and your social presence, is a great way of measuring your marketing success.  In terms of Customer Value Management (CVM), though, this does not clearly indicate our success in getting our message across.The measurement here is to ensure that your brand persona or messaging clearly outlines your value proposition, and that it is interpreted this way.  People build trust relationships, and if they do not understand what you’re representing and understand your positioning, they won’t trust your brand and interact.

   It’s not about what you say, but about how they interpret it.

2. Influence
   To measure your influence in understanding that people believe in you so much and enjoy the influence you have in their decision making process, that they want to keep you close. They want you to not only influence them, but also the people around them continuously.
   
   
3. Attitude
   Oftentimes we measure attitude by what we hear people say about our brand or marketing messages.  Let’s turn it around and start by looking at our own attitudes.  If our attitudes are right, if what we say and do make people want to draw near and feel the need to connect and affiliate, then we got it right.  If not, we need to go back to the proverbial drawing board and re-assess where the attitude pointing outwards should or could be adjusted.
   
   
4. Response
   Traditionally response is seen as the response to your message.  Increased sales, increased revenue and more likes and fans in the social realm.  These are all good principles to measure response and have been the driving force behind charts and graphs for years.  And they work.But in terms of the customer and their value, we need to look at our own response to their response.  When faced with a challenge, do we respond with an open mind, or do we react arrogantly?  Do we welcome their opinions on our brand, or follow the regiment ways of mass media, not allowing them to form part of our ethos?

   People don’t care what we know, until they know that we care.
   

5. Value
   And finally – instead of seeing our clients and marketing as just the impact on our bottom line, seeing what value we are adding to them. This is exactly the shift marketing needs to make when we look at our brands becoming interactive instead of trying to dictate to the mass media and enforcing our ideas on the predominantly ‘prosumer’ market.

   Our measurement in engagement value should provide the flexibility and insight to measure whether or not the market is letting us in.

Most of us love the idea (still) of speaking or broadcasting our ideas and values.  The world has changed and is changing as we speak.  New measurement metrics are key to keeping abreast of our client partners, and in this measurement, crucial to our realignment of voice and strategy.

Influence and Collaboration: Robin Pullen, BCI

Instagram, launched in October 2010, allows users to take pics, digitally filter them & share them to various social networking sites including Instagram itself. The application has accumulated 30million users since January 2011 & 5million pictures are uploaded daily.

Upon its launch, Instagram was only supported on iPad, iPhone & iPod Touch. Earlier this month the application was extended to work with Android Camera Phones running 2.2 (Froyo) or higher, seeing more than a million downloads within the first 12hours. The app is distributed via iTunes App Store & Google Play.

Both CEOs posted the acquisition announcement on their respective platforms, adding that the companies would continue to run independently, though the staff would be integrated & work together to strengthen and grow each company independently in areas where the other has achieved success. Mark Zuckerburg’s statement added that Instagram users would continue to be able to share their pics with users of Facebook’s competitor social networking sites as they had been able to before. They will also maintain the ability to have followers & follow other people independently on Facebook.

Users have expressed worry about Facebook’s Privacy policies being carried over to Instagram because of the acquisition, & that Facebook would use information on them gained from Instagram to target Ads to them. Some even adding that they will be closing their Instagram accounts.

With Instagram currently being a fully Mobile Application, the purchase will give Facebook a much sought after ‘in’ to the mobile market.

The acquisition is sure to strengthen Facebook as a force given that the companies are both built on Photo Sharing & have done relatively well in their own rights. We will be watching to see what great ideas & improvements are brought to both these products with the fresh ideas & outlook the new staff will bring to each company.

References:

http://blog.instagram.com/

http://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100318398827991

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram

http://mashable.com/2012/04/09/facebook-instagram-buy/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/facebook-acquires-instagram-for-about-1b/2012/04/09/gIQA180H6S_story.html

http://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2012/04/11/what-facebooks-acquisition-of-instagram-means-for-brands/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-voakes/the-numbers-behind-facebo_b_1418406.html

The Infografic below outlines the Social Media Buzz for the Oscars 2012.

Some interesting finding in this Infographic is that

• The Help generated the most likes on Facebook and Tweets on Twitter, but is did not top the list in terms of Award Nominations,
• Hugo received the highest number of Award Nominations but not much social media comments or tweets.
• Meryl Streep generated the largest global share of voice of all the actresses nominated for an Oscar.

Being part of the Social Media community is like being there at the Oscars.

This is the first tweet at 4:30 pm about Houston’s death and the location.

This tweet is by The Associated Press at 4:57pm without the location.

This sad news broke on social media 27 minutes before being picked up by die mainstream media.  Topsy Labs reported that about 2.5 billion Tweets and re-tweets regarding Houston’s death occurred in the first hour, amounting to about 1000 tweets per second.

This is the power of Twitter.

If you do not have a Twitter account, this is the perfect time to create one. To recognise the power and speed of a tweet and how it can become the ‘Word from your corporation’s mouth’ – and reach thousands within minutes.

Whitney might not have known, but her legacy lives on, and Twitter and all the Twitter fans worldwide ‘Will (really) always love her’…

As this media evolved and took the shape of groups, chats, instant messaging, professional contacts and job portals, some of the pioneers in ‘social for corporates’ have, it would seem, missed the point.

We are bombarded by a myriad of marketing messages daily.  Emails take the average user approximately 2,7seconds to analyse and assess whether or not it will be opened, read, or instantly deleted.  Ad breaks on television are almost longer than the program itself and almost every website you enter has flashing advertising banners screaming for you to hear their message.

What we want, more than anything, is to be human.  We want to have people (and companies) to interact with us in such a way that it is kept fun, inspirational and even emotional.  We want to be respected for our likes and interests – not some marketing faux.

Direct marketing used to know us by name – social media allows companies to ‘know’ us for us.

Getting a company or brand liked by nations on a social space, is certainly then not a marketing message.  It is an interaction.  A care.  Based on the knowledge gained by constant interaction with the ‘we’ following your company or brand.

Social media is a platform, thus, not for marketing products or services per se, but to be and remain social with the people who care about your brand as much as you do… People who believe in your ethos, trust you, and know that your brand development would mean the development of self.

At the end of 2011 there were roughly 200 million registered Twitter users in the world, which puts Twitter at about a third of all Facebook users. Twitter has been boosted with the advent of Smartphones and Tablets keeping people online for longer and wherever they go. “This is wonderful” you might say, “but how can I keep up with the mountains of tweets I get?” Lady Gaga has over 18 Million followers and she is following over 140,000 on Twitter, if all of those tweeted just once a day she would receive 140,000 tweets a day! Here are the top ten tools to manage your “twitterverse”.

1. TweetStats

This is a wonderful tool to measure your Twitter behaviour, it provides useful stats on how much you are tweeting, when you are tweeting and when is the best time to tweet. The best feature that I have found is the measurement of how many of your tweets were “retweeted”.

2. Hootsuite

This is a great looking Twitter management tool which is free as long as you have less than five social profiles to manage. It has an easy-to-use feel with all the stats you might need. It also is available on various platforms and devices.

3. SocialOomph

SocialOomph is another popular management software tool for Twitter that was developed by a South African, Dewald Pretorius who lives in Canada. This tool allows you to schedule tweets for the future at any date, time and frequency. Another nice feature is the ability to “spin” your tweets to prevent repetition.

4. Nurph

This tool allows you to invite friends into a private chat room via a tweet. This allows for longer conversations and connections and works great as a support service. I really liked the feature which archives your conversations for future reference.

5. MarketMeSuite

This is one of many social media dashboards that are available online, but this has many useful features. Here you can connect multiple social networks, including pulling in RSS feeds. A top feature is the ability to Geo-tag users.

6. Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is a Twitter management tool that is similar to Hootsuite in which it allows you to organise your tweets in handy columns. They also have their own Bit.ly service (Deck.ly) to allow shortened URLs in the standard 140 characters. This is not a browser-based application though so you can only manage this from the device that it is loaded on.

7. Twitterfeed

This tool allows you to add RSS feeds to all your social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter. It also has real time stats on the feeds and it’s a great way to create content for your followers automatically.

8. Triberr

This is an invite only community tool that gives you access to “tribes” of like-minded bloggers. A neat feature allows you to do automatic tweeting of other members posts.

9. StrawberryJ.am

This app automatically finds the top mentioned tweets and puts them in order for you of the most retweeted tweets. They also can email you a summary daily so you don’t have to sign into another website each day.

10. Twylah

This app can turn all your tweets into self-branded landed pages according to the topic of the tweet. This creates a beautiful media stream which is proven to decrease bounce rates by up to 4x.

Google’s social rival, the massively popular micro blogging site Twitter, are on the forefront of the accusing camp. After the new search algorithm was launched by Google, Twitter accused Google of trying to drive traffic to their social network by manipulating search results. A Twitter representative made the following statement: “For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results any time they wanted to find something on the internet. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter, as a result, Twitter accounts and tweets are often the most relevant results. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organisations and Twitter users”.

Personally, I think Twitter has a point. Twitter has had a massive social impact over the last few years (the “Twitter Revolutions” for example) and breaking news can often be found first on Twitter. If results from Twitter (or any other site for that matter) is the most relevant, the information should be available first in Google search results. This also ties in with the aforementioned Search Engine Optimisation. If you have to compete with only slightly relevant data from Google itself, you’re in for a losing battle. One option is to embrace the change from a social marketing perspective. But is this really best for the user?

In conclusion, it seems that many are worried that relevant results get pushed down in favour of Google + content. Fundamentally, relevancy is what it all boils down to. Google might not be in the wrong here, they are certainly entitled to promote their social network, but they should not compromise the quality of their search results in the process.

Twitter/Facebook - image credit - www.cbsnews.com

All you need do is sign in to your Facebook account, type ‘Timeline Movie Maker’ into the Search bar at the top, “Like” the page and go to the app.

When the light blue block appears on your screen with a small green block at the bottom saying “Make your movie”, it will start doing just that – make your very own movie!

After this process, you will be able to watch your Timeline Movie and make changes to it by adding or deleting photos at the bottom of the screen in your gallery. On top of the gallery you can even add music to complete a real ‘Timeline Music Video’ of your chosen range of photos.

http://www.timelinemoviemaker.com/

This is fun and so easy!  If you haven’t switched to Facebook Timeline…now is the time to do it!

Quite understandably, especially from the perspective of the United States, the top global topic of 2011 was the death of Osama bin Laden. The deaths of Apple’s Steve Jobs and singer Amy Winehouse were the 5th and 7th most popular topics respectively and Charlie Sheen’s antics landed him as the 4th most popular global topic on Facebook in 2011. The Royal Wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William, which happened in April, is at position 6. The massively popular Call of Duty game franchise, was the 8th most talked about global topic of 2011 with the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Other topics in the top 10 include: ‘Casey Anthony found not guilty’, ‘Military operations begin in Libya’ and ‘Hurricane Irene’.

Facebook also provides country specific status trends of 2011 (you can take a look by following the second link below). Unfortunately South African topics are not provided (I am sure the Rugby World Cup would have featured in one form or another). Some interesting status trends from other countries include: UK Riots (United Kingdom), Skrillex (Canada), Planking and Skrillex (Australia), UFC and Slipknot (Brasil).

2011 has certainly been an exciting, tragic and strange year for the 3rd rock from the sun.

Learn more about Social Media Marketing

Links:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150391956652131
http://www.facebook.com/facebook?sk=app_271705986210152