THEN
Marketing and branding were about pushing your message to consumers. You sold them what they never knew they wanted.
Marketing used to be all about the product or service.
What made your product unique from anything else on the market? What was the value-add in your version versus a competitor? Did you have the best price or experience for the money?
Facebook Connect has been around for a while now. And in Internet years, The Huffington Post has been around forever. Both have core strengths – social networking and news, respectively. So to marry them and give birth to Social News, makes sense.
This brainchild – HuffPost’s version of a digital water cooler – debuts today.
As I write this post, the HuffPost’s social news experiment has only 760 users in its community. But with nearly 1.7 million comments on the site alone last month, the chances are high that the hypothesis – the project will get more interesting as more friends join – will be proven.
Did you know that you can use the selective twitter application to tweet directly to your facebook fan page?
This is a great free app that helps integrate your social media so you’re updating from one place AND you’re choosing what you want to send to your facebook page so you don’t overwhelm your fans.
Follow the instructions below to integrate your accounts
Twitter backgrounds can now be interactive…
Installing and activating your page with Clickable Now is good practice. Your followers, customers, and constituents may be using either browser, and this is just one more step that will help ease the process for people who want to interact with you on the Social Web.
Install the add-on or script into your browser from here, then give Clickable Now access to your Twitter account. Once you do, it’s pretty simple (See the screen shots below):
The beauty of Twitter is in its brevity. This also applies to the fields you’re given for the profile information on your account. Here’s how you can maximize the limited space you have on your page.
Remember: These tips for making the most out of your profile will get people to your page. But the quality of what you tweet and the level of interaction and engagement that your company or organization demonstrates, is what will gain and keep the subscribers.
The first release of Facebook Desktop for Adobe AIR application is mediocre at best. (Note: You need Adobe AIR installed for the application to work.)
What you see in this screenshot is what you get. It attempts to do what Seesmic, Twhirl and TweetDeck have done for Twitter. But all three of these have worked because Twitter has a very simple and limited functionality. People don’t expect to do much other than update status, retweet, reply, direct message and favorite.
[Adam and I have 15 invites each for the private beta of Aardvark, which is a new social answer-sourcing tool. Leave me a comment with your email or Twitter name if you want one.]
So what is Aardvark?
It’s an IM client from which you can ask a specific question like “What’s a good easy bike path in Irvine, CA for a beginning cyclist?” And it’ll send the query to others who claim to be experts in cycling nearby.
We talk about social media tools and their growth rates in our posts often. But I think it helps to take a look at a snapshot of where the social media sites are from time to time.
The nature of the Internet, coupled with media buzz such as @Oprah’s debut onto Twitter this week makes it such that the social media landscape could change in a matter of months, days, or even minutes. Taking a look at positive and negative growth will help your venture (and ours) understand where the people are going to for their information… and thereby where your current efforts are best focused.
Whatever your venture – non-profit, independent or private company – trendspotting can help you understand the buzz around your brand. Similar to observing and analyzing stock prices over a period of time, trendspotting can give insight into how media coverage, special events, product releases, etc. influence the public’s perception of a brand on different social mediums.
With so many new media sites publicly releasing their APIs, there are many trendspotting applications available, and more on the way. Which trend apps to apply to your organization depends on your industry and needs. Filtering the important trends from the rest of the noise is what sets a great social media strategy apart from an average one.
Here, we take a look at some current comparative trendspotting tools available today.
The average Facebook user has 120 friends.[1] Imagine your reach if 80% of your contacts became a fan of your service, and 30% of their friends became fans, and so on. Now pair that potential with the growth figure of 50 million users just in the first quarter of this year. This equals 1/4 of their 200 million total registered users to-date.
The team at Facebook has understood the power of these numbers, and are finally exercising the true marketing potential in the “social network” beyond targeted banner ads.