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4 Successful and Creative Facebook Contests

September 11, 2011 By Todd Wasserman Leave a Comment


This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Years ago, if a marketer wanted to run a contest, he’d have to run print ads and hope that people would take the time to fill out an entry form and then mail it in. The Internet made things easier, but you still assumed that consumers would somehow find their way to your website.

Facebook adds another layer of ease to the process: Consumers are already there doing something else. If the promotion looks interesting enough, filling out an online form isn’t that big a deal. Rodney Mason, the chief marketing officer of promotions agency Moosylvania, says Facebook-only promotions have a lot of advantages. “One would be the ease of use,” he says. “You can also connect with people who’ve already opted in for past promotions, and everybody’s on there all the time.”

But Facebook didn’t just add ease of use to contests, it totally changed the motivation behind entering them. Nowadays, the prize seems secondary. The main appeal of Facebook contests is to communicate something about yourself.

These four highlighted contest campaigns illustrate this. In each case, users get more out the program than a gift certificate or whatever the nominal prize is: They also get a forum to define themselves to like-minded people. Maybe the best prize you can offer these days is bragging rights.

1. Contiki Vacations’ “Get on the Bus” Promotion

Travel companies have a natural advantage when it comes to promotions because, after all, planning a vacation is often half the fun. Planning a free vacation is even more fun. Contiki, a travel firm that caters to the 18-35 year-old demo, dropped a promotion in mid-February that let winter-weary web surfers imagine their perfect vacation. The winner got one of eight vacations worth around $25,000. The promotion harkened back to Contiki’s roots — in 1961, a young New Zealander named John Anderson arrived in London for a European journey. Lacking money and friends, he came up with a clever plan: He put a deposit on a minibus and found a group of people to travel with him. After the trip was over, Anderson tried to sell the minibus, but no one wanted to buy it, so he advertised the European trip again and Contiki Holidays was born.

Accordingly, the “Get on the Bus” promo challenged fans to get a crew with four friends together, choose a trip and then try to get as many votes as possible in order to win. Yes, that’s right, votes not Likes. Bob Troia, CEO of Affinitive, the agency that created the promo, says just as the program was launching, Facebook changed its policy about the use of Likes, which prompted the use of votes instead. Nevertheless, the effort, which ran from February 23 through March 31, garnered 8,000 Likes for Contiki and generated more than 10 million ad impressions through Facebook shares, Likes, tweets and blog coverage. One reason for the success was a feature that let users and their friends create a bus, which incorporated music, movies, Likes and interests that users had in common via their Facebook profiles. Says Troia: “We wanted to go beyond ‘enter and win’ and create an experience.”

2. Maybelline’s “Show Us Your Red Lips”

More proof that consumers are looking for experiences as well as prizes: Maybelline New York ran a promo for its Super Stay24h lipstick in Switzerland that offered the chance to be the face of the product on the Facebook Page in Switzerland. Despite that modest payoff, the promotion got 183 responses in three weeks. Part of the reason was that the contest was pretty easy to enter: All you had to do was take a picture of your lips. A lot more people — 9,000 — voted in the contest than entered it, leading to a dramatic jump in the product’s Facebook fans. Before the contest, the Page had 3,000 fans, but when it was over, there were 13,000. Perhaps you don’t need a huge prize to lure contestants, just the chance to strut one’s stuff before some peers.

3. Coca-Cola’s “The Recycling King”

For whatever reason, Israel seems to be on the cutting edge of location-based Facebook promotions. First there was the Coca-Cola Amusement Park promo in Israel last summer that let kids “like” park attractions by checking in using RFID-enabled bracelets, and now there’s the Recycling King program. Give Coke and agency Publicis E-Dologic an A for effort: The two tracked down every recycling bin in the country (there are 10,000 or so) and registered them on Facebook Places. Users them competed to see who was the “Recycling King,” by checking in to the most bins. The program proved to be popular. Users uploaded more than 26,000 pictures of themselves recycling, and there were more than 250,000 checkins.

4. Blocket.se’s “The Funniest Classified Ad on Blocket”

Let’s face it, Swedes aren’t known for their sense of humor. To Americans at least, the country summons images of black-and-white Ingmar Bergman films and disposable furniture. But apparently, the Swedish populace likes a joke as much as, say, the Finns. Realizing this, Blocket.se, the Craigslist of Sweden, ran a contest for “The funniest classified ad on Blocket.” The contest sought real ads, which users could submit by uploading an image. Blocket’s jury chose 20 finalists, and then Facebook users could vote for their favorite among the list and follow the results.

Thanks to the rib-tickling stunt, the site received 31,000 new fans in 18 days, and 34,000 people installed the Blocket app. The winner? An ad for a Volvo that had been driven into a ditch. The seller wanted the buyer to retrieve it from the ditch. Oh, those Swedes!

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Why Mainstream Social Networks Complicate Our Identities [OPINION]

September 1, 2011 By Jamie Beckland Leave a Comment


This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

Jamie Beckland is a digital and social media strategist at Janrain where he helps Fortune 1000 companies integrate social media technologies into their websites to improve user acquisition and engagement. He has built online communities since 2004. He tweets as @Beckland.

People are naturally social creatures. That’s what makes social media such a powerful concept. Social media channels allow human beings to sort themselves into groups and factions seamlessly, and maintain intimate relationships at greater distances than ever before.

But as anthropologist Herbert Spencer describes in his theory of the social organism, society is a system of interrelated parts that operate interdependently. Social media users understand that concept intuitively, and segment their relationships accordingly.

For instance, you are not the same person at work as you are among friends on a Friday night. The things you talk about, the vocabulary you use and the friendships you maintain in different contexts are the products of years of learning how to interpret relationships cues. From flirting to non-verbal communication, the way we present ourselves to others is constantly shifting based on whom we are talking to, and why.

The current social media environment has evolved to reflect this reality. It is made up of a number of independent social channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc.) that allow users to create and maintain separate and distinct parts of their identity with different social circles. For example, your friends are on Facebook, but you find business colleagues on LinkedIn.

This disconnect creates complications for anyone attempting to use social data to connect with customers or prospects. Where do you find the most appropriate audience? Do marketers need to maintain an ever-increasing number of individual social channels? How can we create a system that is scalable?

How Google+ Makes Social Networking More Confusing

The Google+ approach aims to simplify managing relationships, but ultimately fails because it works against people’s natural behavioral patterns. This is why Google+ faces an uphill challenge to adoption. Google+ allows users to define their own “circles” of contacts, like “High School Classmates,” “Family” or “Classic Car Fans.” The platform seeks to merge distinct interaction groups together into a unified experience. Users spend time creating the circles they want to share with, a tactic that helps push information into your contacts’ streams.

But the system breaks down once you try to consume content from a variety of different sources in your own stream. Suddenly, college roommates are mixed in with professional contacts, or people you’ve never actually met. This requires additional cognitive effort of the user to filter content by relationship, rendering the experience frustrating and confusing.

Social Networks Come With Baggage

Initial response to circles was positive, but was driven more by the temporal desire to refresh and bucket one’s relationships. Since Facebook’s popularity surge in 2008, people haven’t really been asked to categorize their friends in a social network. And naturally, in the course of three years, a user’s interpersonal relationships have likely evolved. Maybe you moved, and no longer see your old neighbor anymore, or your relationship has changed.

People grow, reinvent themselves, move to new cities and find new interests. Hanging on to your baggage from five years ago is actually a huge hindrance, and the psychic energy to maintain those old selves is more than we can cognitively manage. Therefore, we gravitate toward manageable and flexible social networks that change along with us.

Multiple, Smaller Social Networks Are Inevitable

In fact, since people are already comfortable managing multiple versions of their personas, it’s more likely that we will create increasingly narrow identities across multiple services, rather than defining ourselves on one platform. Fred Wilson writes about the nine identities he maintains on a regular basis, with full knowledge that this is just a smattering of the total personas he has created online. There’s much value in having distinct identities for different purposes — entire businesses like About.me are built on maintaining them.

Marketers must learn to identify and adapt to these different identities. They inform the potential social media interactions between a customer and a brand. For instance, messaging and status updates for one product should be tackled very differently, depending on the social channel. For example, the Droid Users group on LinkedIn may be interested in a device’s productivity benefits, while the Droid Facebook Fans may be more inclined toward gaming apps.

Additional narrowly cast identities, in fact, become the key to understanding the psychographics of users. An individual who explores a sailing forum, and is also an expert in the TiVo community, seeks a unique perspective that no large umbrella social network can fully provide. For social marketing to succeed, it needs to study the myriad of contexts and networks in which people identify themselves.

How To Create Marketing Value in a Multi-Node Social Landscape

Unfortunately, the large social networks are too busy competing with each other to tackle the challenge of various user identities, of an evolving view of consumers aggregated across multiple identity platforms. Instead, social networks run toward their defined identities: Facebook for friends, LinkedIn for business, etc. They do not represent interests or values in any significant way.

The challenge for marketers, then, is to create this structure themselves. Businesses must dissect the various selves that people choose to represent them in any given interaction (or transaction). By tying together multiple identities, marketers now have the power to create a more nuanced, unified understanding of their customers than ever before.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mammamaart

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5 Social Media Tips for Scoring Your Next Job

September 1, 2011 By Marc Hoag Leave a Comment


Marc Hoag, CEO and co-founder of Venturocket, is a California-licensed attorney with an econ degree from UCLA and a strong background in math and science. Marc’s mission with Venturocket, first conceived nearly 10 years ago, is simple: to help make the world a more productive place.

Unless you’re fortunate enough to be deliriously happy with your professional life, the odds are high that you’ll be looking for a different job in the future. On the bright side, the fact that you’re reading this article means you know how to navigate the Internet — a point in your favor. So how can you use that ‘net savvy to most effectively court the employer of your dreams?

Your cover letter and résumé may still be your opening gambit, but the life you lead online increases in relevance every day, especially as a resource for potential employers. Companies are turning to social networks and media more than ever. A recent study suggests that nearly 90% of companies will use networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for recruiting, and that nearly 80% will review a candidate’s online presence and behavior before making a hiring decision.

Since social media presence will likely be investigated and considered prior to your next hire, you’re going to want to put your virtual house in order.

1. Keep Your Profiles Clean…

The first step is a matter of common sense, but nonetheless a vital task: Do not make an idiot of yourself online. One would think this advice is hyper-obvious by now, yet it seems that all too often we encounter a new article profiling an employee’s shortsighted tweeting or a large company’s bafflingly insensitive Facebook status. A golden rule of television is, “When in doubt, your mic is always on.” The same applies to the Internet: Everything you post, tweet or comment on is being recorded, and will come back to haunt you. Not to mention, if a tweet can get you fired, it can also prevent you from being hired the next time around.

2. …But Show Some Personality

On the flip side, however, is the danger of being too careful. While you’ll want to avoid putting up those incriminating and obscene photos from your Vegas bachelor party, don’t let fear prevent you from posting anything at all. An employer will be looking for a candidate who is social and outgoing, who has a demonstrable knowledge of networking and communication. They’ll also be looking for somebody with character, who stands out from the crowd.

If all you’ve shared are the same bland qualifications that are already attached to your résumé, your potential employers won’t have the excitement of learning something new about you. Be bold, be opinionated, be unique — just do it without cursing or detailing your hangover symptoms. Take a tip from Nicholas Allegra, the iPhone “hacker” known better as Comex, who turned his notoriety into an internship with Apple.

3. Spread Yourself Around

When crafting a proper online appearance, you’ll have better luck sharing the right things once you’ve shared them in all the right places. Twitter and Facebook are essential platforms, but at a bare minimum, you should also maintain a fully fleshed-out profile on Google+, LinkedIn and About.me. Get your name out to as many sources as possible — you’re building strong SEO for a vital product: yourself.

4. Target Your Message

When an employer Googles your name, make sure that the first thing they find is a result you’ve handcrafted for their perusal. You may even wish to secure your own domain name and build a website about yourself. Witness the efforts of Eric Romer, who launched a blogging campaign that proclaimed his eagerness to work for a company (he was hired a day later). Or take a tip from Louis Gray, whose demonstrated love and dedication for Google+ got him hired as a product evangelist.

5. Connect With the Company You Want to Work For

This leads directly to the next tip regarding your online activity: Don’t be afraid to actively engage the company you’re courting via your tweets and status updates. Any business actively checking a potential hire’s online profile will most certainly have a social media presence of its own. Therefore, start following its tweets, “like” it on Facebook, etc. Be careful on LinkedIn, though; it’s something of a faux pas to add someone to your network if you don’t personally know him. Still, nobody says you can’t check out the LinkedIn groups and communities to which he belongs.

While you’re at it, don’t forget that a company’s social media isn’t just a place to make yourself heard — it’s also the perfect opportunity for you to observe the company’s actions. How is the company interacting with the public? What insight can you glean from its tweets and statuses? What kind of culture does it display, and what are its subjects of interest? Take meticulous notes, because these are the kinds of things you’ll want to keep in mind when sitting in the interview chair.

Start reinforcing your digital persona now. In the coming years, companies and recruiters will only become more thorough when evaluating new candidates’ online behavior.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, SchulteProductions

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HOW TO: Manage Social Media Accounts for Multiple Clients

August 18, 2011 By Brian Honigman Leave a Comment


Brian Honigman is a social media account manager at LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics certified partner that also specializes in social media, search engine optimization and PPC. You can follow him on Twitter @LunaMetrics or @Brian_Honigman, and read his blog at BrianHonigman.com.

Most brands have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and many other social platforms, not to mention multiple profiles within each service for different store locations, branches, audiences or product lines. As an agency that manages social clients, understanding how to keep these social accounts streamlined and organized is important for the continued success of your projects.

Here are a few tips for keeping the social workflow under control.

Delegate from the Beginning

Your first concern when trying to keep your different accounts organized should be leadership. Without a dedicated project manager delegating to other employees, many details can get “lost in the sauce.”

Immediately after the sales team closes a deal, one project manager should be the main decision maker and point-of-contact. High-level social strategy decisions should be the responsibility of that person, while they delegate implementation and welcome strategic suggestions from the team.

Hypothetically, your agency has American Express as its social client. It would be vital to keep the content and engagement consistent throughout each of the client’s profiles and social accounts. Leaders on the project may choose to delegate a geographic territory, such the profiles associated with American Express’ Asian market, to a specific team. Delegated work flow based on the market or platform helps to lower the chances of cross-pollination and inconsistency across the client’s accounts. The disbursement of responsibilities among different employees will help identify problems quickly and avoid confusion.

Organization is Vital

Keep the client’s administrative details, usernames, passwords, assets, graphics, essential links, etc. in a unique location for all project contributors to quickly and easily access. Dropbox, Google Docs and Basecamp are helpful tools for this type of online collaboration, helping to keep your entire team on the same page.

Organize a concise editorial content schedule for each client’s social accounts. Remember to account for overall strategy and unexpected announcements as well. Plan no more than a month’s worth of content ahead of time. In fact, two weeks worth of advanced planning is ideal. Designate when and on what platform content will be tweeted, shared, posted and viewed – timing is crucial to prevent mistakes. However, planning too far ahead of time can hinder post relevance and newsworthiness. It’s a delicate balance, but necessary when managing multiple clients across their numerous accounts.

Management Tools

Dedicated leadership and organization can only go so far when helping manage a client, especially one with a robust social media following. Social management requires additional tools to keep track of brand mentions, ensure continued engagement, and connect branded accounts with brand advocates. Here are three useful tools to consider:

Monitoring Brand Mentions

The size of your agency and its resources will help determine which of the many social media monitoring tools fits bests. Enterprise level agencies might try Sysomos, a tool that determines brand discussion and engagement by keyword. Associate particular clients to keywords, and then monitor the resulting groups. This way you can focus on tracking the activity and buzz around certain key phrases.

Google Alerts is another tool well-suited for all sized firms – especially because it’s free. Google Alerts logs new content based on infinite keyword variations. The service sends alerts to your account whenever your specific key phrases are mentioned on the web. Alerts gather insights from bloggers, forums, public social profiles and other websites. They can be especially helpful when that content relates to your clients. Register separate email accounts for each client’s alerts. For instance, set clientXalerts@gmail.com for one client and clientYalerts@gmail.com for another – the designation will help keep your alert system organized.

Keeping Track of Engagement

Being responsible for dozens of social media accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers can appear overwhelming, especially when you attempt to engage with every wall post, comment and retweet. A social media management tool like HootSuite can help ensure that your team doesn’t miss a single chance for fan engagement. For example, if a Facebook wall post or a tweet needs a response, managers can assign a particular team member to answer that content. Once the team member engages with that post, a “replied” notification appears in the HootSuite interface.

Connecting Brand Advocates with your Brand

Twitter’s Advanced Search is a wonderful way to search the Twitter universe for brand mentions, even if a user hasn’t specifically @mentioned your client. Let’s use the Bacardi brand as an example. Most of the first-page results for “Bacardi” aren’t linked to their account, but the brand is still mentioned in many other tweets. Reach out to these newly discovered brand advocates, and follow interested customers for future conversations. Go out of your way to find and organize brand mouthpieces across your various accounts, and engage them to foster activity around your clients’ accounts.

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45 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed

August 6, 2011 By Stephanie Buck Leave a Comment


At this point of the week, you know the features roundup is headed your way! The only difference this time around is that our tech features involve things like beer and Shark Week!

Okay, now that we’ve gotten your attention, tune in for the latest in social media obervations, startup tips and geeky gadgetry galore. Pack your brain with fascinating facts about the history of mobile phones. Satisfy your curiosity by discovering where those darn-cute Google Doodles come from. And tap into the best LinkedIn apps for sales teams. It’s your world — we just write for it.

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Social Media

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Sharepocalypse Now: Why Social Media Overload Means New Opportunities for Startups

July 31, 2011 By Nova Spivack Leave a Comment


Nova Spivack has several ventures in production that focus on the real-time stream, including Bottlenose (for filtering the stream), StreamGlider (a new mobile stream delivery platform), Live Matrix (the schedule of the live web), and The Daily Dot (a new online daily newspaper about what’s trending online).

The social media landscape is changing quickly, but this change won’t be immediate, or for that matter, efficient. And that’s going to be a big problem for all of us.

I believe that Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn are fundamentally different, and thus, should not be in competition. However, I’m not sure the companies themselves see it this way. It’s likely they will continue dedicating resources to competition instead of differentiation.

And while the social media gods fight it out in the clouds above us, what will happen down here on Earth? What about all of us, the little people — the users?

We’re entering a new era of social network chaos, and this, in turn, is going to create new needs and opportunities for startups.

The Sharepocalypse

Welcome to he “Sharepocalypse,” a new era of social network insanity.

In the Sharepocalypse hundreds (if not thousands) of online friends share content with us across various social networks, culminating in massive information overload. Our lives will become more fragmented, we will lose productivity, and we’ll perpetually be playing catch up.

Granted, we’ve heard this song before. But I argue that the movement will reach a fundamentally new level of chaos — and the data from my portfolio of companies bears this out.

The Sharepocalypse causes (and is caused by) social overload — an evolution of information overload. Because the distinctions between each social network are not entirely clear, we feel obligated to maniacally juggle different apps and social networks just to keep up and be heard everywhere.

It would be one thing if all our social messages were part of a single, parsable, filtered stream. But instead, they come from all different directions. The Sharepocalypse is aggravated by social streams that originate in many competing silos. We spend nearly as much time hopping between networks as we do meaningfully digesting and engaging the content within.

Furthermore, the more we engage in cross-posting, the more noisy and redundant each network will become. Social overload begets more social overload. In a room where everyone is shouting to be heard, the mob shouts even louder.

And it’s not just one room full of people shouting — it’s many. Among the social networks of Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and other social outlets, which network is the most appropriate forum for any given post? But wait, it gets worse. Now we have to choose among Circles as well.

Google+ circles are mini virtual sharing networks, and they’re potentially infinite in number. What circle or list or group should you share with? But first, how well organized are your circles? Do they overlap? Are you sure that by only sharing with certain circles you can reach everyone you need to? No.

On top of all the social noise we experience, look forward to new noise from brands. Brands are becoming more lost and confused about how and where to communicate than ever before. Predictably, they will try to reach us redundantly, everywhere, all the time to make sure we see them. Social media consultants, on the other hand, will have a total field day, because ultimately they will benefit most from the chaos.

To make matters worse, it looks like Microsoft may now be on the verge of launching a new kind of social sharing service. And many other companies will follow, I’m sure. Why not every mobile company, for that matter? Why not every big brand? Even celebs may start their own social networks in which fans can share and compare their adorations.

And I’m not talking the micro-networks like Geni and Dogster. We’re moving toward a landscape in which social networks and sharing mechanisms will be built into the DNA of every site and service.

As Mark Zuckerberg has argued, everything that can be social will be social. I agree…and that’s the problem.

Choice Overload

Nobody is going to know where to share or where to look.

How will you know if you missed anything important? Which networks will you visit to get updates from friends, from brands, from publications you follow?

The sad truth is that you can’t get it all in one place.

In fact, choosing with whom to share is going to become harder and will require more thought. Ironically, by trying to solve this problem using “circles” and other gestures, Google+ may just be piling on more disparate channels. Therefore, many people will simply opt to quickly and easily share everything with the public, rather than denote a special group or circle with which to share.

The fact is, when people have to ponder a choice, they often opt for the easier alternative: don’t choose at all. This is classic choice overload theory. Many studies have shown that choice overload leads people to make fewer choices. People become stressed when they have to choose from too many options at once.

It’s a perfect storm: A massive expansion of networks on which to share and track information, but all the while, its users have less and less energy to make choices. The result will be a lot more confusion and noise.

Soon we will long for the days when we were unplugged, cut off from the global brain, and able to, at least once in a while, enjoy that rare feeling of being up-to-speed.

A New Category: Social Assistance

The Sharepocalypse will generate an expanse of new problems. However, this will generate a new opportunity for social assistance — a new category of software and services — and therefore, a ripe environment for startups.

Social assistance will be the next frontier spawned from social networking, and we’re all going to need it. We’ll require help managing our online relationships, tying our streams together, sifting through the noise, keeping up with what matters personally, finding who and what we need, and remaining productive.

Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Microsoft will all struggle to deliver acceptable signal-to-noise ratios to their users. But they will be focused on solving this problem within their silos, rather than across all platforms. I call this approach “vertical social assistance” because it focuses on assisting people only within particular networks. Because each service is biased toward its own social graph and content, it’s unlikely that any of them will help solve the horizontal overload. Understandably, it’s not in their interest to enable users to make better use of competing services.

This world of fragmented messaging systems is akin the early days of email in the 1980s, when users of one network were unable to communicate with another. It was a mess. Eventually, email gateways were created to link these disparate networks. But the problem wasn’t fully solved until everyone adopted a single set of standards, and all the email networks connected into one common fabric.

Unfortunately, the unification of email networks and standards immediately killed of a lot of the smaller email networks and client makers. But through simplification, the world became less complex and more connected.

The question is, will something like this ever happen for social media? Will we see the social networks connect into a common fabric anytime soon? Right now, the major social networks own the content — it’s captive on their platforms. If that were to change, and you could read any social media message anywhere, they would have to compete on features alone — and that’s another can of worms.

What I call “horizontal social assistance” is the opportunity to access and use social media messages in a unified way. This approach is different from the vertical social assistance approach because it would span across all networks. The users of social networks need this capability in the same way they needed email unification. However, until all the social networks agree on standard profiles, messages, contacts, groups and streams, it’s not going to happen. And to be frank, such an agreement is highly unlikely in the near future.

But it could happen if some neutral party takes the initiative.

In the meantime, many other social assistance resources will emerge that target a range of different needs and opportunities, including:

  • Social Relationship Management (SRM): : Services that help people create, organize and manage sets of social network relationships — for example, sets of people to follow and/or share with on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc.
  • Social Awareness: Services that help people keep up with their social networks, especially among a user’s friends.
  • Social Curation: Services that help people organize and make sense of their streams and messages.
  • Social Personalization: Services that help people sift through the network noise for information most relevant to their particular needs and interests.
  • Social Analytics: Services that help to measure online social behavior and trends, optimize engagement, monitor activity and communicate more appropriately.
  • Social Automation: Services that help to automate activity in social networks, like automatically updating your status, helping to increase your influence, suggesting what to share, matchmaking, alerting, and using bots to intelligently interact with and assist users.

Because social assistance will become so necessary, both vertical and horizontal social assistance could mean interesting opportunities for startups. Ventures that provide vertical social assistance for particular networks, like Google+ and Facebook are going to be early build versus buy acquisition targets. These are rapid innovation opportunities for individual developers or small teams.

Ventures that attempt to solve the harder problem of horizontal social assistance will have a chance at building longer-term independent value. Some may become strong stand-alone ventures, or larger exits, but they will also be more technologically challenging, requiring larger teams and more capital.

One thing is certain: The Sharepocalypse is here and, as a result, social assistance will soon be the cutting-edge of social media innovation.

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, Kileman, and Flickr, World Bank Photo Collection, zipckr

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38 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed

July 30, 2011 By Stephanie Buck Leave a Comment


Aaaaand…we’re back! The list might seem intimidating, but this week’s roundup of top Mashable features will ultimately save you loads of time otherwise spent scouring the web for tech resources.

We’ve compiled the past week’s features, how-tos and insights into a handy little package — and it’s just for you. Presenting everything from geeky galleries to thoughtful think pieces, this handy guide is here to help.

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Tech & Mobile

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The Future of Social Customer Relationship Management

July 29, 2011 By Killian Schaffer Leave a Comment


Killian Schaffer is VP/Strategy Director, CRM for Cramer-Krasselt/Chicago. You can follow him on Twitter @kschaffs.

Currently there’s a lot of buzz around social customer relationship management (CRM). Social media platforms and technologies like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare are transforming how companies market their products and engage audiences. But when you’re also concerned about delivering results to your clients, you’ll do well to study the evolution from traditional CRM to sCRM.

Like different forms of intelligence – abstract, practical, emotional – customer data reveals different value traits that help to assess each individual. Then we can develop programs to extract revenue from that data.

While “transactional” value has been a mainstay for decades, the web and its social media platforms have introduced new “relationship” and “influence” measures. The more comprehensive data complements CRM’s traditional indicators:

  • Transactional: Determines a consumer’s monetary value based on purchase recency, frequency and dollar amount. Database marketers have relied on these attributes for decades.
  • Relationship: Predicated on information sharing activity, the type and depth of information shared by consumers is directly related to their value to the brand.
  • Influence: Evaluates the consumer’s social potential as an “earned media partner” based on their publishing frequency and social graph responsiveness.

The seamless integration of what we call the “Value TRInity” — transaction, relationship and influence — will be the future of CRM.

Some marketers are already combining aspects of the Value Trinity. Quirky outdoor outfitter Moosejaw not only encourages its customers and fans to interact with the company via Facebook and Twitter, but they’ve also created communications programs and established a rewards program that ties an individual’s transactional activity to his social web activity.

Some travel and hospitality players are ahead of the curve as well. Several hotels have been inviting guests or offering upgrades on rooms based on their high Klout scores, and therefore their increased ability to influence others. Similarly, PR agencies have been forging relationships with key influencers via blogger outreach programs.

These programs can no longer be practiced in silos — firms need to integrate social media, PR, customer service and loyalty programs in order to benefit from the Value TRInity.

Earlier this year, American Airlines launched a Facebook page and quickly grew its audience from 2,600 likes to over 200,000 in fewer than three days. Moreover, the AA Mystery Miles promotion secured visitors’ AAdvantage numbers, enabling it to evaluate participants’ transaction, relationship and influence measures.

As the practice of CRM evolves alongside the social web, it’s critical that we not only think in terms of measurable data, but also about the integration of social behavior to provide a true and accurate reflection of valuable customers. Success will be defined not by chasing influencers, high-volume buyers or friends-of-friends, but by leveraging the Value TRInity to forge enduring, mutually beneficial relationships with your brand’s true friends.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, turkkol

More About: crm, custmer relations, customer lifetime value, data, facebook, klout, Revenue, social media, twitter

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40 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed

July 24, 2011 By Stephanie Buck Leave a Comment


Coming at you with the weekly roundup of features you may have missed on Mashable. Can you handle our collection of Google+ tips, mobile how-to’s, and general geekery? We thought so.

We especially hope you love the editors’ picks this week because we have a hunch they’re exactly what you need. Read on for the latest in tech resources, gathered together for your convenience in this handy one-stop guide.

Editors’ Picks

Social Media

For more social media news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s social media channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Tech & Mobile

For more business news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s business channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Business & Marketing

For more business news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s business channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

 

Image courtesy of Flickr, webtreats.

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46 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed

July 16, 2011 By Stephanie Buck Leave a Comment


Get ready for Mashable‘s weekly roundup! This week, we’ve performed original Google+ analysis, prepared you for the Mac OS X Lion release, and pointed you toward the best fictional Twitter accounts. We’ve celebrated startups and mourned space shuttle finales.

So review the list of important resources you may have missed over the past week. Tune in for more great stories and tools coming at you sooner than you can say “Spotify.”

Editors’ Picks

Social Media

For more social media news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s social media channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Tech & Mobile

For more tech news and resources, follow Mashable’s tech channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Business & Marketing

For more business news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s business channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

 

Image courtesy of Flickr, webtreats.

More About: business, List, Lists, MARKETING, Mobile 2.0, social media, tech, technology

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Filed Under: Facebook, Google, search engine optimization, Social Networking Tagged With: acquisitions, Blogging, business, Business Lists, Channels, ecommerce, Facebook, faketown, features, funding, Gadgets, gaming, google plus, How-To, infographics, List, Lists, Marketing, Mobile 2.0, Mobile Apps, Mobile Lists, search engine optimization, SEO, social media, Social Media Lists, Social Networking, tech, technology, Twitter, Web 2.0, Web Apps, Web Design
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