Social Media Marketing Institute

The Swedish actress Greta Garbo was famous for her blonde hair, sultry eyes, and the saying” I want to be alone” – a statement that was attributed to her desire for personal privacy as a celebrity.  Today, thanks to our online engagement, we all seem to be celebrities of a sort, and our personal privacy has become more of an issue than ever before.

As part of our online activities, we commonly share, photos, locations, opinions, job information, trips and much more every day.  To most consumers, transparency means more than knowing what companies are doing as part of their business process – it also means providing personal information as the price for participation in many Web 2.0 sites.

As I speak and teach around the country, the  most common reason people give me for a reluctance to participate in sites like Facebook , LinkedIn, Foursquare and Twitter is a concern that their participation means an invasion of that privacy. Recent studies bear that out showing that 6 out of 10 consumers surveyed don’t trust online companies to protect their privacy, and 1 out of three don’t believe that they can protect their privacy when they participate in online activities.

Millennials, our digital natives, have less concern over privacy, which may speak to their ease of adoption and enthusiastic participation in the online world. They are willing to opt-in to location tracking or on-line tracking, and expecting to share private information, almost half of those surveyed expected some sort of reward for providing personal information to companies on their websites.

Interestingly enough, though privacy is a concern, 61% of social; users, say they would share even more personal information if they were given better and clearer controls over their privacy settings, allowing them to choose what they want to share and who they want to share it with.

If you operate a blog or web site, knowing what people want is crucial. To help you understand how consumers feel, and what they want , a great visual was created by our friends at MDG Advertising, summarizing studies performed by Anonymizer, Harris Interactive, The Ponemon Institute, and the Consumer Institute for Citizen research.

Music has a special place in social media.

Music may be one of the ultimate social objects. Our lives are influenced by music, from the first songs our parents sang us, to the learning songs we sang in school as little children, or the school anthems and fight songs that colored each sporting event so vividly that the memories stay with us for years. And as we grew, we chose our own music, songs that underscored our days and evenings, playing in the background through the turning points of our lives. Who among us didn’t think, at least once, that all of the sad songs that played on the radio right after we broke up were there for us and about us?
The methods of music distribution have grown and changed in the last 125 years or so. From the first Edison cylinders, to 45s or LP vinyl, then CDs, and finally digital file on dedicated players, computers, and our phones. But there has always been the question of cost, storage, and transportability to challenge the music lover. With a proliferation of devices, the new challenge was finding a way to listen to your music when you wanted to without consideration for the devices you had handy.  Using the internet to host music libraries was a simple, yet elegant solution, once bandwidth was no longer a problem.

Portable music devices went through a  similar evolution.  People went from huddling around portable radios or phonographs to buying highly portable devices with headsets and no speakers, though the Sony Walkman is with us no longer, the hipster with their headset moving to the unseen strains of their song of preference is with us yet, rocking a smartphone or a media player, focused and serene in their self-absorbed solitude. But music is, at its core,  social. We sing along, we share music, we talk about performers, we dance  , and we even do Karaoke when we have been sufficiently lubricated – so how do we reconcile our solo enjoyment with our social desires? By using services that allow us to share what we listen or experience it in common, while our listening preferences are utilized by the system to seek out new music we might enjoy.

The new music paradigm is subscription based systems like Pandora or Spotify or Rhapsody that allow us to access large music libraries at our own time with a variety of devices. Now, our one subscription can make our work day move faster at the office, play through our home media system, on our smartphone, or as the background to the party as it streams through our laptop.

Below is a great infographic from G+ (no, not Google Plus, G+) that details the way technology has changed our access to music, and its impact in our online communities. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Is your musical source of choice here?

Everybody loves short cuts. Most social media tools are so easy to initiate that people don’t recognize the need for adequate training to use them in an ethical and effective manner. Of course I may be prejudiced since I spend so much time providing technology and social media training, but most people seem to have difficulty achieving business goals on their own.

For most, the challenge is making a paradigm shift to inbound marketing. Their old traditional marketing programs are shoved into new marketing channels, and though the company can claim to have a presence on social media channels, they are not building community, gaining business intelligence, or driving business in these new venues. But for others, the problem is simply that they are overwhelmed. They have difficulty adopting the appropriate channels for their communication because they are confused by the overwhelming choices, and the ever changing landscape of social media.

Our good friends at ColumnFive and Flowtown have rushed to the rescue with the infographic below. Though it is not a substitute for a knowledgeable consultant, or a live course or seminar, it can be a great tool for busy people that have no clue where to start. It will at least help you begin to differentiate the trees from the forest so you can begin to determine where your business might engage most effectively, or where your existing marketing resources might do further research  about expanding your online campaign.  So bookmark this, print it out, share it with your marketing team, or just use it as a cheat sheet for your next cocktail party but most of all use this as a tool  to help you determine  which channels to get more training on so you can deploy effectively.

Pinterest is ao online pinboard  share images that interest you. My favorite description of the site is “a place where women dress children they don’t have, furnish homes they don’t own, and save photos of vacations they haven’t taken” . But whatever it is, there is no question that the site is hot.  As of January 2012 Pinterest is driving more traffic than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn — combined and is almost equal to Twitter.
In some respects Pinterest is a social bookmarking tool like delicious, but its graphic nature makes it visually appealing. And the impact of social proof – our herd instinct is amazing. Like may others, I got an account, and found myself being followed daily by lots of people, who it seems were waiting for me to do something interesting.

The applications for retail operations are obvious, and even businesses like real estate are struggling to find ways to use this newest and hottest social tool. Social referrals seem to have even more impact on how we find things than search – the holy grail of online marketing.

Our good friends at ColumnFive and Monetate are ahead of the game as usual, bringing us the latest numbers on the Pinterest craze. Enjoy, I’m going to be pinning this to my Pinterest page as soon as its published. What do you pin to yours?

There’s an old saying “When God gave us two ears and one mouth, he was trying to tell us something”

Listening is important - there’s no denying it. Its half of the online conversation. In fact, judging by the number of people that just read and lurk, listening is arguably the most important part of the conversation. It is easily more important for businesses in today’s world than ever before, because more people are talking and reacting in public than ever before.

The value of listening is obvious to brands according to Forrester Research. Though only 50% of brands responded that social media  was a core function of their marketing program, nine out of ten have some form of monitoring program in place. Eight out of ten respond to customer feedback online and almost 70% incorporate customer ideas to their business process. Brands as well as consumers are constantly watching Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social channels to determine what their customers think and how they are expressing their satisfaction- or the lack of it!

With the ROI of social media still an elusive concept for many businesses, there seems strong agreement that the key to determining the value of your social media efforts is to be found through the listening process. But differnet industries use different channels as part of the process.

Here’s a great infographic from our friends at ColumnFive and GetSatisfaction about how brands listen in the online space.