Social Media Week 2012 – Miami

Marketing Personal Branding

Today, social media week Miami hit it out of the park with some amazing speakers. I was able to catch two great discussions that were broadcasted live on LiveStream.

Oops! Social Media Mistakes and Learnings

The first discussion was “Oops! Social Media Mistakes and Learnings” which focused a lot on social media policies in relation to employee management. The discussion focused around a key point that I can not stress more; the importance of having a company social media policy in place BEFORE you begin using social media. While it is always nice to think that there will not aggressive, rude, or “sensitive” posts or tweets about your company, you need to be prepared for the “what if” situations.

For example, what if an employee tweets a negative and inappropriate comment about the company to their public Twitter profile? Having a standard or policy in place on what employees are allowed and are not allowed to say online, (in regards to the company) will make incidents such as that much easier to handle.

Not only should your policy include internal standards of maintaining your brand image in social media, but it should also include standards on how to respond to “sensitive” posts about your company by non-employees.

The key to monitoring your brand online is being honest, transparent, and quick to respond. Above all, do not ignore or delete negative comments. You do not have to address all negative comments in a public forum, comments are often addressed offline through Twitter direct messages or Facebook messages.

A great FREE tool that you can use to monitor your brand online is SocialMention.  In real time, SocialMention aggregates all the user generated content that mentions your brand into one information stream. It pulls content from Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

Other key takeaways from the “Oops! Social Media Mistakes and Learnings” event were:

  • Try to keep all posts/tweets as organic as possible
  • Create a conversation calendar
  • Every engagement with a follower can be an opportunity
  • When creating a social media policy for employees, balance maintaining company values and not scaring employees off from using social media
  • Recommend to employees that they avoid talking about the company, but encourage talking about the industry

Personal Branding Through Social Media

The other event that I watched, was “Personal Branding Through Social Media”. During the event a tremendous panel discussed how to harness the power of social media to build your personal brand.

The panel included the following social media experts: Gabrielle Bozza from Made You Famous, Gerard Bush the Chief Creative Director of the BRPR Group, David Sugarman from Sugar Time Sports Management, Susset Cabrera the president of Peacock Public Relations, and Anne Owen the publisher of Miami magazine.

The panel discussion focused around creating a new persona; a digital reflection of who you are as a person and as a brand. When creating your personal brand you have to be prepared to defend yourself, your posts, and your tweets.

Some of my favorite takeaways from the “Personal Branding Through Social Media” discussion were:

  • Put your personality out there, otherwise people will get bored
  • You must be prepared to defend yourself
  • Be consistent but don’t be overly careful
  • Social Media – touch the world in 15 minutes

Also, if you want to watch either of these discussions you can find the videos for both the “Oops! Social Media Mistakes and Learnings” and the “Personal Branding Through Social Media” events on LiveStream. You can also watch all of the events live here: Social Media Week On LiveStream. If you do watch any of the events live, I highly recommended following the corresponding hashtag on Twitter as well. There are some great Twitter conversations, thought, insights that happen throughout the eventsFor example, today while watch these events I followed #smwmiami , it made the broadcast even more exciting and got great insights from the other viewers who were tweeting. To see all the Social Media Week 2012 events check out their website here.

Image: David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Pinterest, the Newest Game Changer

Pinterest is truly the newest game changer. Since they launched (10 months ago) more than 13 MILLION users have registered. So why is Pinterest a game changer? Here, are a few reasons why they are not a forced to be messed with:

In the U.S., the majority of users are female, but in the U.K., they’re male. Like I discussed in a previous post, International Social Media Trends, platform use can vary greatly by  country. While you may be using the same platform to reach customers all around the world, your audience may be very different in France than it is in China or the U.S.

Though Pinterest has not rolled out official brand pages, there are over 100 brands that are leveraging the new platform to reach customers. A feature that makes Pinterest a great marketing tool for companies is that it allows the ability to control who can pin to your boards.   For example, as a company you may not want followers to be able to pin to each and every one of your boards, so Pinterest gives you the option to can create some boards in which pinning is restricted to the admin, others that allow multiple users to pin, and community boards in which anyone can pin.

So why should your company join Pinterest? Because Pinterest is driving more web traffic to other sites (such as your company’s website) than Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube COMBINED! Just because Pinterest is the new “fad” doesn’t mean you should disregard its power. If you haven’t tried it out yet, I recommend it (though be prepared, it can be quite addicting).

Via blogs.constantcontact.com

Via Scoop.itBeing Your Brand

Social Media Marketing By the Numbers

Via Scoop.itBeing Your Brand

You can not argue with the cold hard numbers on the power of social media marketing (well you could, but it would be a losing battle). This infographic from Mashable shows the power of social media marketing in regards to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and location based services (such as FourSquare) strictly through numbers.

So what can a strong social media campaign do for your brand? Well for Old Spice, one month after they launched their “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” social media campaign they saw HUGE jumps in their followers/fans:

  • 60% increase in Facebook Fans (approx. 650,000 new fans)
  • 2700% increase in Twitter followers
  • Doubled YouTube subscribers

I would definitely classify the Old Spice campaign as more than successful!

In addition, this infographic breaks down the success of the Katy Perry Purr, EA Games Bulletstorm, Free the Children, Nie Widen Bohren, and Under Armour social media campaigns. How can you deny the power of social media when there are over 4 billion “things” shared on Facebook each day and almost 400 million Foursquare check ins during 2010 alone.
Via pinterest.com

How a Subject Line Can Make or Break Your Email Marketing Campaign

Via Scoop.itBeing Your Brand

Next time you pen an email subject line think twice about the words you’re using.   Click the link below to see a great infographic showing the best times to send emails, when people read emails most (6 a.m. surprisingly!), and what words to use in the subject line. Using this info you can increase the number of responses and create a successful email marketing campaign. Make your email stand out from the hundreds which flood our mailboxes everyday.

Each day we spend about 2.5 hours emailing, both reading and writing emails. We also are quick to delete emails, selecting ‘delete’ for more than half of the emails we receive. Our emails typically fall into the following categories:

  • 1/2 of emails are quickly deleted
  • 1/4 of emails are archived to reference later
  • 1/4 of emails we open, read, and respond (or follow the request)

It’s all about the subject line when it comes to emails, using the right keywords can increase your opening rate drastically:

  • Instead of “speaker” use “conference”
  • Instead of “join” use “apply”

Via mashable.com

Social Media Week 2012

Today I was able to watch two great live presentations from social media week 2012:

  • Moves Like Jagger: Customer Service Evolved- from Social Media Week San Francisco
  • Applying Big Data Analytics to Social Media Data – from Social Media Week New York Business and Innovation

At the end of this week, I will do a recap of all the tricks and tools I learned from the different speakers and panels.

If you are interested, you can watch all the presentations, panels, and events from all over the world live online. You can even tweet in your questions, and they will answer them while you watch. I recommend watching the Applying Big Data Analytics to Social Media Data panel discussion, some really impressive social media analytics tools were discussed. All of the past event videos, which were originally live streamed, are available at the bottom of each event page (ex: at the bottom of the SMW NY Business and Innovation page).

Click following LiveStream link to watch presentations for Social Media Week live from New York, Hamburg, London, Miami, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Paris, Singapore, Toronto, and Toyko. LiveStream

Also, check out the Social media Week Real Time Inforgraphic. It is very cool! Real time info on the top trending topics, check-ins, hashtags, handles, tweets, and events. Below is a screen shot of the global Social Media Week Real Time Infographic.

Use the following link to check out the: Social Media Week 2012 Real Time Infographic

Social Media Week 2012 Real Time Infographic

International Social Media Trends

I  started wonderinGlobal Social Mediag how social media trends and usage differs by country. Based on Facebook’s fact sheet, international users make up a big chunk of the market. Over 80% of users are outside the U.S. and Canada (WOW!), 676 million active monthly users to be exact. That is a lot of users/followers that can make a big impact on an international social media campaign.

So, if your company is already in the international market, or thinking of expanding here is some info that might come in handy when devising your strategy:

Top social media platforms by age group

A few of the top platforms for social media users 18 and under are (globally):

  • Formspring
  • Skyrock
  • YouTube
  • Facebook
  • Dailymotion
  • Fanpop
  • Kaizin001
  • SchulerVZ

A few of the top platforms for social media 18 – 30 are (globally):

  • MeinVZ
  • Badoo
  • Facebook
  • Netlog
  • Flickr
  • YouTube
  • LinkedIn
  • StudiVZ
  • Twitter
  • Tuenti
  • The Student Room
  • DevianArt

The top 5 social media sites globally are:

  1. YouTube
  2. Facebook
  3. Qzone
  4. Twitter
  5. Pengyou

The top 5 countries with the highest percent of population online are:

  1. Sweden
  2. Denmark
  3. UK
  4. Germany
  5. Canada

Interesting: The United States isn’t in the top five, it is actually #8 with 78% of the US population online. Check out how all countries rank: (http://www.internetworldstats.com/)

It is also interesting how social media uses differ by country; for example, blogging is the most popular form of social media in France, while chatting and social networks are most popular in the UK.

The importance of the topic of the social media platform differs by country, as well. A platform called DeviantArt, which showcases user generated art, is very popular in Australia. Qzone is a Chinese Global Social Networkbased social media platform that is nickname based. Qzone users are not required to use their real names (which is required by Facebook). Amino.dk is a business focused platform for entrepreneurs and the self-employed; it is  popular with the online community in Denmark. An online advice site, Gutefrage.net, and a professional networking site, Zing, are both very popular in Germany. In Japan, a platform called 2-Channel is even more popular than Facebook, it allows users to post anonymously and does not require registration.

Thoughts:

Based on the different country trends, it is clear that it is very important that research into a target market’s use of social media is critical, as well as thinking outside of our normal Twitter/Facebook/YouTube bubble. While Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are very popular in other countries, the other country specific big-players should be taken into account, as well.

If you are interested in more stats on the international social media trends, check out this great SlideShow

Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image: FrameAngel / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Why Wikipedia Is Important For Your Social Media Strategy

Many times Wikipedia is overlooked as a tool for both branding and social media. Wikipedia at its core is a collaborative information source and a social media. It is often one of the first listings that appears in search results, and is many people’s first choice when they want quick information.

A big reason that Wikipedia should not be overlooked is because Facebook pulls information and images directly from Wikipedia pages for the info sections of community pages. Community pages are Facebook-administered and auto-generated. Community pages were auto-generated from keywords Facebook users  often used in reference to their “likes”, interests, and work. So, there is probably at least one (if not more) community pages out there with your company’s name.

Since community pages are Facebook-administered, it is important to keep content up-to-date on your company’s Wikipedia page, or create a Wikipedia page for your company so that the community page is not blank.

The majority of Facebook users are  unaware that companies do not actually control community pages, so your brand can still be damaged by incorrect content pulled from Wikipedia. In addition, only a certain amount of content will be pulled from the Wikipedia page. (Approximately 250 words though this number varies greatly across pages)

Below are screen shots of the Macy’s Department Store Facebook Community page and the Macy’s Department Store Wikipedia page – Same content!

Macys Facebook Community Page

Macys Wikipedia Page

How to Brand Yourself Online and Offline

Brand strategy is not limited to businesses anymore; it is now expanding into the idea of branding yourself. I was introduced to the concept of branding yourself during my senior year at Tulane when everyone was getting ready to apply for jobs, specifically the idea of branding your online identity.

Personal Brand StrategyBut, when I thought about it a personal brand does not exist solely online. Actually, a personal brand strategy can be applied to networking (online and offline), applying for jobs, and career goals.

It is important remember when you are developing a personal brand strategy, that it is just as important for you to monitor your online brand as it is for companies.

Also, don’t forget to keep your brand information up-to-date (job position, promotions, or new skills) and to build an active community around your brand (make sure your Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook posts are relevant to your personal brand strategy).

If you are interested in developing your own personal brand strategy, check out this infographic about things to remember when creating your strategy.

How To Create Your Personal Branding Strategy? #infographic

Image: nokhoog_buchachon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net