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How Consumers Interact With Brands on Facebook [STUDY]

September 12, 2011 By Erica Swallow Leave a Comment


People interact with their favorite brands on Facebook far more than on any other social network, according to a recent study of online consumer behavior.

The study, conducted by Constant Contact and research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey, analyzed the behavior of 1,491 consumers ages 18 and older throughout the United States and revealed a number of details about how people interact with brands on the world’s largest social network.

When it comes to “Liking” brands on Facebook, the reasons are varied, but for the most part, respondents said they “Like” a brand on Facebook because they are a customer (58%) or because they want to receive discounts and promotions (57%).

SEE ALSO: 13 Best Practices for Restaurants on Facebook

Being a fan, for the most part, is a rather passive activity. A whopping 77% of consumers said they interact with brands on Facebook primarily through reading posts and updates from the brands.

A measly 17% of respondents said they interact with brands by sharing experiences and news stories with others about the brand, and only 13% of respondents said they post updates about brands that they Like.

The study also pointed to a number of encouraging stats for businesses, including:

  • 56% of consumers said they are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after becoming a fan on Facebook
  • 51% of consumers said they are more likely to buy a product since becoming a fan on Facebook
  • 78% of consumers who “Like” brands on Facebook said they “Like” fewer than ten brands

Contrary to another study published in February that stated that 81% of consumers have either “unliked” or removed a company’s posts from their Facebook News Feed, this study reports that 76% of consumers said they have never “unliked” a brand on Facebook.

For brands looking to make the biggest impact on Facebook, it is essential to share compelling content, minimize marketing messages and refrain from overwhelming readers with too frequent updates.

View the complete study here:

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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.

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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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5 Ways Merchants Can Start Utilizing Facebook Credits

August 23, 2011 By John Corpus Leave a Comment

facebook work image

John Corpus is the founder and CEO of Milyoni. Milyoni helps companies monetize fan pages for live concerts, movies or sporting events or by selling merchandise. Follow the company on Twitter at @milyoni.

Facebook Credits are hot. More and more businesses — both large and small — are exploring how they can incorporate Facebook Credits into their overall social strategy. But they all have the same question: How?

The most common use of Facebook Credits has traditionally been to purchase virtual goods in social games, such as Zynga’s FarmVille and Mafia Wars. New digital content from entertainment and lifestyle companies such as movies studios, concert promoters and sports teams has created an even greater awareness for how to use Facebook‘s “social currency.”

Universal Pictures just launched a campaign offering cult film The Big Lebowski for rent directly through the movie’s Facebook fan page. It was made available to rent on-demand for 30 Facebook Credits.

Other retailers are issuing Facebook Credits as incentives in exchange for some type of action, like social engagement, online purchases or brand loyalty. Shoebuy.com, for example, ran ads on Facebook offering 50 Facebook Credits with any purchase from their site. The GAP UK also provided Facebook Credits to customers who signed up for its email newsletter.

As your business looks to get into the Facebook Credits game, here are some things to consider.

1. Sell Digital, Not Physical Goods

Facebook Credits can be used to purchase virtual goods, digital goods and Facebook Deals. They still cannot be used to directly purchase physical goods or redeem anything outside of Facebook. Now, however, there are a variety of digital goods and content available (Skype calls, music, movies, additional ammunition for game battles, etc.). There is an endless list of opportunities to monetize.

2. Incentivize Fan Engagement

While the real value of a Facebook Credit is 10 cents, the perceived value is much more. As little as 30 Facebook Credits can give users access to movies, live concerts, dozens of games and more. Additionally, there are some events and entertainment where Facebook Credits may be the only currency accepted. Credit are a lot like “airline miles” that fans will seek out and accumulate from issuing companies.

3. Think Globally

Facebook Credits are an international mode of payment available in more than 47 currencies. Whenever possible, incorporate the global community in your promotional efforts. While the U.S. still makes up a large portion of the Facebook population, there is significant growth in other countries. Live concerts on Facebook, for example, have drawn participants from more than 25 countries. Recent success stories include concerts by Widespread Panic, David Gray, and even new bands like The Parlotones.

4. Deploy Digital Content

Over time, users accumulate Facebook Credits from many different brands. Think about simple ways to offer fans valuable digital content. Why not host the launch of a new music video or movie release to reward existing fans and recruit new ones? While the average Credit balance may be low today for Facebook users, expect it to grow significantly as Facebook Credits become more mainstream as the social currency of choice.

5. Be a Sponsor

If your app is consuming Facebook Credits, seek out brands and partners that will sponsor or promote your app and offer Facebook Credits to their fan base as an incentive. If you are planning on offering Facebook Credits to entice new fans, consider finding a relevant movie, concert or other credit-based event that you can promote alongside it to make the offer more appealing.

Facebook Credits may seem like uncharted territory, but that also means there’s a wealth of opportunity. With 750 million users, Facebook is the must-use vehicle for companies looking to connect, engage and monetize fans. Those who take advantage of it early can look forward to better relationships with current fans and a valuable tool for earning new ones.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Jakob Steinschaden

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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.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, scanrail.

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HOW TO: Personalize Your Marketing With Social Data

August 12, 2011 By Patrick Salyer Leave a Comment


Patrick Salyer is CEO of Gigya. Gigya makes sites social by integrating a suite of plugins like Social Login, Social Analytics and Game Mechanics into websites. He can be reached on Twitter @patricksalyer.

The term “permission marketing” seems pretty self-explanatory. It encompasses activities like someone opting-in to receive emails from your company or promotional offers from partners. Simple enough. But evolutions in social data gathering have advanced the concept and opened a treasure trove of ways that brands can effectively reach and understand their audiences.

While social data opens up a world of opportunity for marketers, it’s also important to balance gathering data on your customers and, well … creeping them out.

One of the easiest ways to gain access to social data is to enable social login on your website. Visitors can log in to your site without needing to manually fill out registration forms and you get a glimpse at their social graph. Below are some ways to effectively gather and use social data via social login while doing right by your customers and prospective customers.

Transparency is a Good Thing

Gaining access to social data doesn’t have to be a shell game. Your users will actually appreciate the transparency of a social login because they benefit from their social identity being pulled into your site. It allows them to see if their friends are also on site via activity feeds, game mechanics or whatever other social elements you have on your site. When you’re pulling in their social data, show your users exactly what you’re accessing and give them a sense of what you’re going to do with the data.

Don’t Get Greedy

Social network profiles come with more information than you really need. Don’t tick off your visitors by taking more than is useful — for example, their profile and interests may be more than enough. Facebook, however, offers 39 specific permission object queries (78 if you count looping in a user’s social graph) and LinkedIn has more than 200. You probably don’t need to see that much from your site visitors and, in fact, asking them for more than four specific permissions during authentication can lead to a significant decrease in conversions.

So just ask for the pieces of profile data which you think will be most helpful to your business. If you decide that you want to gain access to different pieces of profile data, you can always go back and change the permissions.

What to Do With Social Data?

Gaining access to social data is only half of the equation. Once you have that information, you have a number of options for cleverly and tastefully keeping your users active on your site and eventually marketing to them. One technique is to use the friends list data to show them what their friends are doing on the site (via activity feed) or show them their rank relative to their friends and other users (via game mechanics). Once they see that their social graph has been pulled into the website, your site visitors will be much more likely to engage with content and share with their friends.

After you’ve built a healthy user base, you’ll be able to pick out your power users and influencers. For example, if you own an online sporting goods store, you can use social profile data to dig into your visitors and establish which influential users (those with high numbers of social network friends/followers) are interested in basketball. Having that information is incredibly valuable as you can subsequently offer those specific sets of influencers relevant, targeted content. This will make their experience that much more enjoyable and entice them to share with their social graph.

With Great Data Comes Great Responsibility

Hyper-specific ad targeting is another means to monetize social data in a safe, non-invasive way. However, as with collecting that data, ad targeting should be done without violating your individual users’ privacy. This is especially important in ad targeting since their data is handed to third-party advertisers. Advertisers salivate over the prospect of being able to target influential and high-intent consumers. Consider segmenting your users by degree of influence and essentially place a value on each of those segments so that advertisers can decide how they want to spend their money. This way, you can target without releasing your visitors’ identities.

Social Data Doesn’t Have to Be Creepy

Marketers don’t need to act like Big Brother in order to effectively gather and use social data to benefit their business. Your site visitors shouldn’t feel like their privacy is being violated when they log in. Instead, they should feel like they’re entering a tailored experience. That trust needs to be nurtured through transparency and moderation. Permission marketing is set to grow through the next few years. However, marketers will quickly find that collecting and using social data is done best with some restraint.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, kizilkayaphotos

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Book Marketing: How 4 Authors Are Finding Success With Social Media

August 1, 2011 By Andy Meek Leave a Comment


Andy Meek is a senior business reporter for The Memphis Daily News. You can follow him on Twitter @AndyMeekTN.

The book industry is in upheaval. The recent news that Borders will liquidate and shutter all of its 399 stores is the latest sign of print’s unstable market.

In many ways, tech advancements have forced the industry’s deterioration. While print struggles to catch a foothold, tech-savvy authors are managing to bridge the gap. Therefore, I’d like to introduce four tech-savvy authors whose statuses range from rookie to bestseller. Thanks to social media, they’re writing their own rules about branding and fan engagement.


1. John Green – The Fault in Our Stars




Author: John Green

Twitter: @realjohngreen

Facebook: John Green

Website/Blog: JohnGreenBooks.com

John Green’s latest book, The Fault in Our Stars, is riding high on the charts. It recently landed the number-one spots on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. But here’s the thing – his story won’t be published until 2012.

Green promoted the book to his 1.1 million Twitter followers, according to The Wall Street Journal:

On (a) Tuesday afternoon, he posted the title of his new book on Twitter, Tumblr and the community forum YourPants.org. An hour later, he upped the stakes by promising to sign all pre-orders and the entire first-print run, while also launching a YouTube live show. Mr. Green discussed his plans for signing the book and also read a section to give viewers a sense of what The Fault in Our Stars would be about.

On the same day of the WSJ article, Green responded by tweeting, “I am genuinely uninterested in marketing, but I am VERY interested in being part of awesome communities.”

Publisher @penguinusa also tweeted the news: “did you hear? @realjohngreen’s new #ya novel THE FAULT IN OUR STARS is #1. One catch, he’s still writing!”

To which Green could not resist shooting back: “@penguinusa HAHAHAHAHA Don’t make fun of me corporate overlord or I will refused to finish it! ;)”


2. Laura Hillenbrand – Unbroken




Author: Laura Hillenbrand

Twitter: @laurahillenbran

Facebook: Laura Hillenbrand

Website/Blog: LauraHillenbrandBooks.com

Earlier this year New York Times bestseller Laura Hillenbrand – the author of Seabiscuit – participated in a new media experiment to promote her new book Unbroken, which follows a WWII pilot who was shot down, only to survive a Japanese prison camp.

NPR produced what it described as a “book club-meets-social media experiment” across its Facebook, Twitter and web presences -- places where Unbroken was widely discussed. On the NPR Books Facebook Page Hillenbrand also contributed to the discussion.

By achieving direct access to the author, readers like Robin Politowicz became inspired to write back:

Laura,

Was there a moment in your research that just stopped you in your tracks? A particular incident or injustice or cruel twist of fate (of which there were so many) that gave you pause? Wonderful book – listened to the audio version on a long vacation drive, and had to think of errands to run once we got home so that we could finish listening :-)

–Robin Politowicz

Dear Robin,

Good question! There were so many breathtaking moments in Louie's story. I think the one that was most striking to me was the one when he was on the raft, and the Japanese bomber began strafing him and his raftmates. This was incredible enough, but in seeking cover under the raft, Louie ended up having to fight off sharks, striking them in their noses while the bullets showered down. I can't imagine that there's been another man in history who has been simultaneously fired upon and attacked by sharks. That he survived it continues to amaze me.

–Laura


3. Blake Northcott – Vs. Reality




Author: Blake Northcott

Twitter: @ComicBookGrrl

Facebook: Vs. Reality

Website/Blog: BlakeNorthcott.com

If you’re a new writer who’s looking ahead to a seemingly daunting publishing task, take a tip from Toronto writer Blake Northcott.

She recently self-published Vs. Reality, a work she’s calling a “comic book-inspired urban fantasy novel.” The Kindle version is now available through Amazon.com.

During the nine months spent writing her comic and movie blog, she amassed a 16,000-strong Twitter following, and collected more than 1,700 personal Facebook friends. Furthermore, in the space of one week earlier this month, her re-launched blog got 4,500 page views.

To put the numbers in perspective, her Twitter tribe is roughly the same size as that of publisher Image Comics. And a few days ago, Goodreads.com notified Northcott that she is the tenth most-followed Canadian on the site.

Northcott’s social media presence includes what she describes as an “instant feedback mechanism that tells me people are listening.”

“People are so passionate about books, comics and movies,” says Northcott. “When you connect with them on their level, and they know you’re legitimate, they respect you a lot more. Social media facilitates the ‘secret handshake’ where you get into the club, and people know you’re one of them.”


4. Duane Swierczynski – Fun and Games




Author: Duane Swierczynski

Twitter: @swierczy

Facebook: Duane Swierczynski

Website/Blog: Secret Dead Blog

If Quentin Tarantino ever decided to put down his camera and pick up a novelist’s pen, the result might read like the action-packed work of Duane Swierczynski. He writes hard-boiled thrillers that have the inventiveness, colorful characters and crackling dialogue of comic books.

His latest book, Fun and Games, was released a few weeks ago. To coincide with the release, Swierczynski devised a promotional contest that met with great fan approval.

To boost his pre-order numbers, Swierczynski invited fans to send him a confirmation once they had pre-ordered the book. In return, he randomly picked winners to which he sent personally chosen prizes - for example, signed copies of his five previous novels, a copy of Rockstar Games' recent title L.A. Noire, and even the right to name a minor character in the third book of his current trilogy. Additionally, he sent everyone who pre-ordered his book an offbeat postcard he picked up from the road, complete with a handwritten note of thanks.

“I was just talking to a friend the same age as me [late 30s] about how much harder it was to find like-minded people back in the early '90s,” says Swierczynski. “Sure, there was 'zine culture, but other than that, you couldn't help but feel kind of all alone in the universe ... Social media makes it so much easier, and so many people I've met online have turned out to be good friends in real life. So [social media] is not really a ‘strategy’ – it's a matter of craving that hive-mind experience. And as part of that hive-mind, you should give as much as you take.”

Image courtesy of Flickr, matthileo.

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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

More About: facebook, Google Plus, information, Overload, social analytics, social media, social networking, twitter

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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

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What Twitter Can Learn From Facebook [OPINION]

July 25, 2011 By Tom Anderson Leave a Comment


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

Tom Anderson is the founder and former president of MySpace. MySpace sold in 2005, and Anderson left the company in early 2009. You can find him on Google+, Twitter or Facebook.

Sometimes when you follow a trend, you fall flat on your face.

Early adopters of Google+ have declared that Twitter is now “obsolete” and that they are “bored” using Twitter. Most suggestions for improvement are a list of Google+ features that Twitter doesn’t have.

Yet, even while Twitter’s own CEO, Dick Costolo, has maintained that Twitter will remain simple, the company’s founder and executive chairman Jack Dorsey recently let go four key product people from Twitter, indicating some kind of change is in the works. So what’s @Jack to do? What does the future of Twitter look like?

Taking Measured Risks

Facebook is actually instructive on this front. One of the things that founder Mark Zuckerberg and crew have done exceptionally well is to know what and what not to incorporate from competitors. They’ve evolved their vision, but instead of jumping on every trend, they’ve found ways to expand by incorporating the best innovations of their competitors into a holistic vision that’s kept Facebook growing.

When Facebook had 12 million uniques thanks to nearly every college user in America using the service and MySpace had 80 million uniques (what seemed like “everyone else” at the time), it was a bold move to open up the site to the outside world. In hindsight, it may have seemed risk-free, but it could have killed the entire feel of Facebook. They moved slowly, adding companies, high school students and eventually went fully public. It wasn’t a given that this wouldn’t destroy the closed, private and wonderful service Zuckerberg had created for college students.

When Twitter became a significant force, Facebook tried to acquire the youngish company. A deal was never reached and Facebook ended up up incorporating the status update into the newsfeed — which really made the newsfeed more interesting than it ever would have been otherwise. Again, a great move that fit in with the evolving vision of Facebook as a “sharing platform” (before that, Zuckerberg used to talk more about “efficient communication“).

But it’s also instructive to look at the things Facebook did not do. To compete with MySpace, lots of people thought Facebook should offer some level of profile customization (definitely controversial), but even more thought they should launch a music service. Facebook toyed with the idea by briefly allowing users to put some apps on their profile pages, and they gave priority status to iLike, a music service that let you create playlists. I’d heard rumors at the time that Facebook had actually built a full customization platform for profiles that they never launched. Just this month, Facebook decided to allow users to put images and videos into comments (something that probably would have been too MySpace-y back in the day). Facebook knew when to add feature at the right time. And that music service? Well, it may still be coming.

What This Means for Twitter

So what does this teach us? It’s difficult to extract a lesson or set of rules from these examples. It’s hard to know how to evolve your service, and it’s hard to say what Twitter should do to continue its growth trajectory. I think the answer lies in trying to step back and understand what’s the real value you provide to your users. How can your service evolve to realize that mission without following every trend that rules the day?

In Twitter’s case, is the 140 character constraint really a benefit or is it a leftover relic of the text-message infrastructure that smart phones have replaced? As pundits and users, we can all make our demands about what we want from Twitter, but that probably only tells us about our own personal biases. Twitter will undoubtedly do better to analyze its own data to understand its own user behavior.

Then they can look at those numbers in the context of competitors’ numbers that are public. Who’s driving more engagement, where and how?

You might say, you and I don’t know jack about Twitter. Only @Jack knows jack about Twitter.

Depending on what he learns, he’ll make the tough decision of what to change and what to keep the same. Maybe he’ll test, iterate, analyze and revise. He’s already decided he needs a new product staff, so change seems to be coming.

No answers here, but hopefully they’re the right questions.

Editor’s note: This post was adapted from a post originally published on Google+.

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