Avril Lavigne: Excellent Social Media Marketing Example
August 27th, 2010. Published under Social Media Marketing. No Comments.
I know I haven’t been blogging in a while (work has been keeping me too busy) but to make it up for it here is what I believe is an excellent example of how to use Social Media to develop your brand by reaching out to your market (customers/clients).
Avril Lavigne gives a great example of social media marketing in the music industry by connecting with her fans by allowing her them in her world. She makes a simple YouTube vlog, speaks to her audience directly and gives news to them, and show them around her studio. So Simple!
In the music industry where CD sales are going down, it is increasingly important to connect with fans if you want them to buy your CDs and buy tickets to your shows. Connecting with your fans makes them care more about you so they want to encourage you and see you more. With access to music so easily nowadays on the Internet, if music fans don’t care about you, they will download your music for free and won’t care to attend your shows because they are disconnected from you.
Picture from Avril Lavigne’s Facebook Page
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Nielsen vs Social Media
May 17th, 2010. Published under Social Media Marketing. 1 Comment.
Very interesting news from Mashable: NBC Turns Television into a Social Media Game
If the program takes off, Fan It could possibly serve as a precursor for redefining metrics around television viewing audiences. The television ratings system has remained relevantly unchanged since 1950. One company, Nielsen Media Research, has always been responsible for audience measurement and those measurements play a significant role in determining network advertising rates. Data from social networks could become an important new element in measuring audience engagement.
Read the full article : NBC Turns Television into a Social Media Game
It will be very interesting so see how Nielsen will adapt and if Social Media will in fact become a better audience measurement. The proper Social Media Analytics can definitely calculate engagement, which can be much more interesting for advertisers. It is pretty exciting to think about a future where the value is more in terms of engagement rather than volume of audience.
Sorry no YouTube embed for this post because I couldn’t find a clip that I wanted that didn’t have embed disabled so here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z63y1ZmxzjI
Photo by: Edgar Zuniga Jr.
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Why Social Networks are Important: The hidden Influence of Social Networks
May 13th, 2010. Published under Social Media Marketing, Video. No Comments.
Very interesting deep analysis of social networks as an entity or an organism by Nicholas Christakis. Not online social networks but any social networks and their importance in defining or predicting our behaviors. It is 20 minutes but very well worth your time.
My first thought is that influencers of social networks are the one who will be at the center of the organism rather than being on the edge. The type of person that Christakis mentionned who like to “wrap themselves” with people around them.
I like what Christakis said about how social networks are inherently good/positive (or at the very least needs positiveness to be sustained) because we all cut ties with anybody who is not good to us. If everybody is bad to each other, no real social networks can be sustained.
Social networks are based on trust. Can you imagine a world with weak bonds? A world where we can’t trust anybody?
The reality is it’s the same online or offline.
Twitter, like any other social media, is simply a tool to develop, maintain and grow your own social network and in order to develop a large network, we need to give in order to receive. We have to give a reason for others to follow us on Twitter. It isn’t by always taking from others that we can build a strong social network. Hence the importance of tweeting relevant information and ReTweeting interesting information from others. It is also the reason why spammers can never develop any form of network because people will cut them off and block them out.
If social networks are inherently or intrinsically good, then I think it is important to dig deeper and find ways to propagate the positive rather than the negative.
At w.illi.am/ we have been doing mappings of influencers according to our client’s markets and objectives, we have talked about demonstrating the bond between the influencers or even between the influencers and the different social media platforms. This video definitely makes me want to take our mapping further. It took Christakis 5 years to create a social network mapping over 30 years… I have no idea how soon I can pull this off! 
What do you think? Looking at it from a high level, knowing this information how would you look into influencing a social network now? How would you market your message, product or brand through this organism to create ripples?
The craziest thing in all of this is that Facebook and Google currently own this data.
photo by: vitroid
What the New Facebook Like Really Means.
April 27th, 2010. Published under Facebook. 1 Comment.
Neil Sarkar from Vaynermedia couldn’t have explained why the New Facebook Like that allows us to bring everything we like on the web in our Facebook any better.
A shallower API learning curve and better integration with existing tools may seem convenient for developers and irrelevant to non-developers, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Look at Twitter — despite a miniscule and skewed user base as compared to Facebook, they joined the conversation when CNN et. al. noticed their explosive growth. This growth was primarily a function of two factors: rapid innovation and low barriers to entry for new user interaction (one-click follows etc).
For the full article you can read here : How Facebook’s f8 changes will affect you in 600 words or less.
I think that everybody, even from a non-marketing background, understood that the new Like Anything, Anywhere of Facebook is huge. However, I believe that Sarkar shed light on something that most of us didn’t even think about and I have already seen the new services using this API that popped up every seconds. A great example is Like Button.
The scary thing is that Facebook just destroyed one of Twitter’s main advantage. In the next months or so, expect to have a lot of services based on the Facebook API. This new Facebook ecosystem will probably overpower a lot of the noise that Twitter makes in the news.
If you have no idea what the hell I am talking about, here is a screen capture of IMDB integrating the New Facebook Like (In less than 24 hours might I add).
Reporting a web page that you like straight into your friend’s News Feed or on your profile page’s wall is nothing. The true power of the Facebook Social Open Graph is this: Take a look at the information that Facebook publish about you and your friends.
You might want to take a 5 minutes to change your Facebook settings and protect your privacy! 
If you set your pictures as public, somebody can easily make a mash up of your pictures and post it on YouTube… Others could make a song based on your Status updates! I would love to have a service that reports back to me the jobs available in my Facebook network, tells me who I need to contact and the friends I need to speak to in order to get to that contact (disclaimer : I am not insinuating that I am looking for a new job. I am very happy where I am right now 
) . The same could be done for generating business leads!
With that in mind and without having to think about any coding. What kind of service would you want developers to create?
How can I Know who Clicked on my Links on Twitter?
April 20th, 2010. Published under Twitter. 2 Comments.
A friend recently asked me how can you tell who clicked on the links that you shared in your tweets?
Bit.ly is great because it allows you to know how many time your links has been tweeted, shared on Facebook or on other platforms.
However, when you have 300 or 1,000+ followers, how can you tell who clicked on what?
I don’t know.
I think this type of Twitter Analytics would be a very important feature that Twitter and other social media platforms can offer and monetize from. As a marketer, it is a great added value to know who clicked on my links and how often. Give me that info in a CSV and that is a great way for me to interact further with my community. I can tell who are my greatest fans or followers without having to make an educated guess on how many times a person has ReTweeted my message.
I see you coming… who cares? The most important is the engagement right? RTs are more important than the number of people who clicked on my links! Well… I disagree, especially when you have a massive following, identifying your enthusiasts is the best way to convert them into evangelists.
I believe evangelists are active fans of our brand and products. Enthusiasts are passive fans of our brand and product and should not be ignored.
By identifying who are our biggest enthusiasts, we can do a much better job in engaging with them. Moreover, with the advent of social media, corporations cannot direct all of their messages to their corporate presence. The importance is on providing value to our community. Therefore, we cannot track all our efforts on our website. It is as important to analyze how the collection of our messages are taken in by our community than the volume of traffic driven to our website.
I am much more interested to know how many people have clicked on our links and how often rather than how many times our links have been clicked or how many followers we have. It would be a great opportunity for us to measure our influence rather than going by the amount of followers (which can be very misleading and completely meaningless).
I have mentioned Twitter a lot but I believe the same is a necessity in Facebook. However, this can be an issue with their privacy policies (although this has not stopped them from leading their population where they want but I digress…). I don’t think we need to know who visited a page or profile and how many times but knowing who clicked on the published links and how often they clicked is crucial for effective Social Media Marketing.
I believe this is a great base on which Twitter can develop a monetizing model without having to use an advertising platform.
What do you think?
Thank you to @Anouknl for the blog post idea!
Photo by: Medmoiselle T
The Death of Facebook
March 2nd, 2010. Published under Facebook. 4 Comments.
No, I am not talking about Google Buzz. Nor another “Facebook Killer” that will appear anytime soon. Truth is, the only Facebook Killer is Facebook itself. The mainstream social networking website is so big that at this point, the only way for it to die is by committing suicide and right now, … The tanto is already drawn and the Hara Kiri isn’t far.
I am bored with Facebook and all the blog posts about how Facebook is slowly becoming MySpace are true. Facebook became dull for the very same reason it was exciting:
because of its News Feed.
Lately, I do not get the right news from my News Feed anymore. I don’t know what it is in its algorithm but I just keep getting news from people that I don’t care much about and the people that I do care about, well they can’t seem to crack into my feed. Don’t come and talk to me about the “hide” function. I might not care much for a certain person but that does not mean that I want to shut that person away completely. There is also another function that allows you to get more news from certain people… guess what, that does not work either.
The reason for this problem is because Facebook is no longer about Friends but about acquaintances. That is not necessarily a problem. The problem is in the vomit of impertinent information. What I liked most about Facebook was the ability to view pictures of my friends and acquaintances and of course the small window in their life once in a while. I don’t know what happened but pictures are almost devoid from my News Feed now. In fact, I get more news about Mafia Wars than photos. I already hid all the applications in my feed, yet the information I get is still boring.
Facebook needs to step up the editing of their News Feed or people will drop it for another service that can deliver the news from their social network more efficiently. The interesting thing is that Facebook was recently granted a patent for its News Feed. It will be interesting to see if that means Facebook will become lazy and stop innovating or it will keep improving it. The strength of Google is also the weakness of Facebook. Google’s popularity is directly linked to its ability to return relevant information as opposed to the other search engines at the time.
Facebook needs to do the same.
Facebook needs to return relevant information in its News Feed. Either by providing better control to their users or by doing a better job at tracking the activities of their users. If it doesn’t…
Hara-Kiri.
What do you think? Are you bored with Facebook too?
Photo from Wikipedia.
We are the World 25 YouTube Edition
February 23rd, 2010. Published under Thumbs Up, YouTube. No Comments.
Great social media initiative by 50 artists on YouTube that got together and remade the late King of Pop’s hit “We are the World“.
I think it is great to see people across the planet get together for such a great cause and I think this is a great testament to the power of Social Media bringing people together. My only pet peeve is that there isn’t enough call to action for the cause. Rather than just having a link in the description, I think there could of been a clip at the beginning that incites people to donate to Haiti.
Personally, I prefer The YouTube version to the latest “We are the World 25” (25 is for the number of years it was made after the original).
At first, I didn’t understand why a lot of people criticized this version of Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie’s “We are the World” but after I heard the auto-tune, I agree. I don’t mind the rap (minus Kanye West, I felt he stood out like a sore thumb) but the auto-tune really killed the emotion of the song. I am all for diversity but chemistry is more important to me.
Nevertheless, I applaud all the artists, well known or not, that got together to help Haiti – that earthquake is heartbreaking.
On a Social Media Marketing perspective, I like how the end of the original clip incites engagement by inviting the viewers to download the song, make their own version of We are the World on YouTube and add it as a video response. Rather than simply broadcasting (pushing) their content, they encourage the collectivity and interaction with the audience. Bravo!
photo from wikipedia.
Google Buzz: Facebook Killer?
February 10th, 2010. Published under Facebook, Video. 2 Comments.
Google has been making multiple moves under the radar aiming directly at Facebook for over a year now. I already discussed how Google opened Facebook Events to the world with Google Events and how that can benefit your business better in spring 2009. In fact, Google announced their version of Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, as early as 2008.
With Facebook attacking Google’s search market with their improved search within social networks conversations. The war between the two eGiants is surprisingly quiet. With Google Buzz, this war just got more interesting:
Will Google Buzz kill Facebook or Twitter? I don’t think so – not anytime soon anyway. Not because of Google Buzz but because Facebook and Twitter are powerhouses and it takes a long time to bring them down. I think the service is quite interesting and offers great features but Facebook users will keep using Facebook for now.
Unlike Twitter, the service of Google Buzz does not differentiate itself enough from existing popular social networks right now. Moreover, the key word here is social networks. Twitter’s social network differ’s from Facebook. That is why it is working and will continue to work.
The relationships you have on Twitter are not the same as on Facebook.
I have yet to see how my relationships will be different on Google Buzz. We will just have to wait and see. For now, Google Buzz just seems to offer more of the same thing. I don’t believe that is the best way to attract people away from Facebook or Twitter.
As for how can marketers take advantage of Google Buzz? It is simple, successful social media marketers must focus on developing relationships. The key is to develop trust from communities (disclaimer: very technical article drawing links between SEO and SMM).
In order to be trusted in these communities, you have to invest a lot of time and contribute a lot. Therefore, it is important for social media marketers to gain authority in communities because in the near future, I wouldn’t be surprised to see social media sites a la Wikipedia and YouTube to allow some dofollow links.
Once trust is developed, it doesn’t really matter what social network you are using. In the case of Google Buzz, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of the same people from other social networks.
Picture by: invisiblegaijin
Using LinkedIn to Grow your Business
February 9th, 2010. Published under 101. 2 Comments.
Very good infographic of how to use LinkedIn to grow your business by Pedro Laboy. The overall LinkedIn Marketing Strategy is not much more complex than what is shown here.
There is, however, one thing missing. The Answer section of LinkedIn is the most powerful tool this social network has to offer. Anybody is encourage to ask a question about any industry and members of the LinkedIn community (inside or outside your network) can answer. The person asking the question is then invited to rate what he felt were the good answers and to choose what he thought was the best answer. The number of best answer is then shown on the profile of the member who answered the question best.
That dynamic incites people to share their expertise because the more “best answers” they can display on their profile, the more trust and credibility they build.
That is crucial for business development.
Yes, the secrets to LinkedIn is essentially just that. The hardest part of LinkedIn, just like any other social media, is the time commitment. That is why outsourcing your social media needs can really help you focus on your bread and butter. An alternative is to create an internal communication strategy and policy that will encourage as many employees in the company to be involved as much possible. Rather than having one person working 40 hours a week on developing relationships in LinkedIn, you can have 10 employees spend 4 hours a week. That is less than 1 hour a day.
Striptease vs Parental Control
December 9th, 2009. Published under Thumbs Up, Video. 3 Comments.
Parental Control Striptease: User Engagement done right! I stumbled on this and though it was genius. An Ad done by Terra Brazil. Don’t let the guy stop you and try and go until the end
This is a great ad and you know what? Banner ads are in flash as well. Who says you cannot do something in the same concept? Sure this one takes a long time to load but if you can stream a YouTube clip (which is, by the way, also flash), you can make a banner ad in this type.
This is amazing user engagement. I was fighting against the little guy and clicking play every time he stopped the vid. I want to see the girl strip damn it! I don’t remember the last time I engaged with an ad so long. It sure beats your shoot the bulls eye and win a free iPhone spams/scams!
What do you think? 
