Josh Billings

Thomas Edison

- Seth Godin

Seth’s Blog: Magic beans, TV and the web

via The Altimeter Group:

by Charlene Li

I’m releasing today a new research report that I wrote in conjunction with Wetpaint called “ENGAGEMENTdb“. The study looked at how the 100 most valuable brands — as identified by the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands ranking — engaged in 11 different online social media channels. We critiqued the brands on not only their breadth of engagement across these channels, but also their depth, such as whether they reply to comments made on blog posts. Each brand was given a numerical score. The top 10 ENGAGEMENTdb brands with their scores are:

1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie - Yahoo!/Intel (85)

The report is available at http://bit.ly/KRGNt and the main site is at engagementdb.com (includes ways for you to do a quick ranking of your engagement). A very neat interactive feature of the site is the ability to see the rankings in different ways, from highest to lowest scores, alphabetical, etc.

Four Quadrants of Engagement

While each company in the study received a quantitative score, the ENGAGEMENTdb study revealed that companies fell into four specific categories in terms of their breadth and depth of investment in social media channels — Mavens, Butterflies, Selectives, and Wallflowers.

• Mavens – brands that have made social media a core part of their go-to-market strategies and are very active in many channels; usually driven by dedicated teams assisted by company-wide awareness and participation.
• Butterflies — brands that recognize the need to be in many channels but have only met with real success in a subset of their activities; these companies are usually spread a bit too thin.
• Selectives – brands that focus on just a few channels and excel in those; these efforts are usually initiated by an internal evangelist.
• Wallflowers — brands present in only a few channels and very lightly in those; these brands are sitting on the sidelines and are wary of the risks. They are still trying to figure out the best next steps and investments in social media.

Read more about Social Media engagement »

by Kimberly Mackey MSCP, CMP

via Nation’s Building News
Nation’s Building News Online for September 7, 2009

It seems like you can’t even turn on the news these days without hearing about Facebook, and there is a very good reason for that.

Next to Google, Facebook is without a doubt the fastest growing Internet phenomenon we have seen.

Facebook says it has more than 250 million active users, 120 million or more who log on at least once a day. But before you think that Facebook only appeals to young people, let’s dispel one myth about social networking right now. It’s is not just for kids anymore.

According to two leading aggregates of social media statistics, IStrategy and Mashable.com, the 55-plus and 35-54 age groups — the two groups many, if not most, of us target — are the fastest growing segments of Facebook users, at almost 515% and 190%, respectively. And Facebook is not only growing in popularity, it’s bringing in results.

Read more about how Facebook is helping Realtors »

via AllFacebook.com

Posted by Nick O’Neill on September 7th, 2009

This is Day 20 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.

This actually has to be one of the more challenging tasks. In order to get a boost in your fan base, it’s important to get users to invite their friends. So what methods are there for getting users to invite their friends? The first and most obvious method is to ask users to invite their friends. This can surprisingly have a large impact. The other day I asked my users to invite their friends and a few people invited hundreds of their friends. The problem with this is that it doesn’t maximize the impact you could theoretically have by providing some sort of incentive.

By incentivizing the user to invite their friends to your Page, you increase the likelihood that one of their friends will actually be interested in your company or brand. On applications Facebook has strict rules surrounding incentivizing invites because many applications has used this feature to force users to spam their friends. While the restrictions don’t exist on Facebook, the best invite responses will come from those that aren’t forced.

Go ahead, read the steps, you know you want to »

How To Kick Start A Community –an Ongoing List Categories: Community Marketing

Posted on August 14th, 2009
by Jeremiah Owyang

One of the top 10 questions in social media marketing asked is “How do we kick start our community?”  This post aims at providing some resources for brands that are preparing their community strategy.

The old adage of the field of dreams isn’t true -if you build it–they won’t neccesarily come. Brands must have a kick start plan to be successful with their community. Below, I’ll list out some practices I’ve heard from companies that have had successful communities, and I’d ask you chime in and add more ways, let’s get started, I’ll be as specific and actionable as possible.

Read the whole article… a must for anyone looking to build an online community »

via Mashable:

August 25th, 2009 | by Soren Gordhamer

Soren Gordhamer is the author of Wisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the Creative and Constantly Connected (HarperOne, 2009). His homepage is www.sorengordhamer.com. You can follow him on Twitter ().

1. Make Content Increasingly Relevant

2. Go Where Your Customers Are

3. Loosen Control from the Top

4. Decide What Channel to Use for What Purpose

5. Let the Conversation Happen

Read the whole article »

via Mashable:

September 4th, 2009 | by Josh Catone

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable () regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. If you’ve used Twitter () for more than a couple of hours, you’ve probably already seen a tweet or two containing a word with the hash symbol (”#”) attached to it. That’s what Twitter users call a “hashtag,” and at any given time at least one of them can usually be found among the trending topics on Twitter. But what exactly is a hashtag?

via Mashable:

September 8th, 2009 | by Christina Warren

Today enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com announced the next evolution of its web based CRM product, Service Cloud 2. With Service Cloud 2, Salesforce.com is focusing on integrating social media into companies existing customized CRM systems.

via Mashable:

September 9th, 2009 | by Stan Schroeder

We’ve reported on the tremendous growth of both Facebook and Twitter month after month in the last year or so, but looking at Compete’s stats for August, we’ve got neither good nor bad news, as the hottest social networks have stagnated when it comes to new visitors. Part of the reason could merely be the lazy days of summer, which causes a drop in traffic on almost all Internet destinations. Since traffic growth was almost flat on Facebook and Twitter in both July and August, we can probably expect some healthy growth again in September. Summer hasn’t been bad for everyone though, as some social sites have done very well in July and August.

via Mashable:

September 9th, 2009 | by Jennifer Van Grove

TweetDeck () is fast becoming the de facto accessory for social media fanatics. The Twitter desktop application is certainly seeing formidable competition, mainly from the likes of Seesmic (), or web-based alternatives, but their ultimate mission is to become more than just a Twitter () app and be a browser for the real-time web.

Read more at Mashable »

HOW TO: Get Involved With Twestival Local This Week

September 9th, 2009 | by Barb Dybwad1 Comment

If you’re interested in doing good on Twitter, you’ve got an amazing opportunity coming up just around the corner.

Where Twestival Global brings together charity-minded Twitterers around the world in support of a single cause, Twestival Local brings the focus back to doing good work in your own community.

Over the next three days from September 10 through the 13th, volunteers will be hosting fundraising events for local charities in 133 officially registered cities. Check out the map to find out what events are happening near you and how to participate.

But even if there isn’t an official group organized for your city or town, there’s still a way you can get involved in helping promote Twestival initiatives, building community around ideas for local change, and ideally gathering together some volunteers to organize actual projects on the fly.

The Twestival Project initiative has been organized to encourage and promote smaller-scale or ad hoc projects that can be done during the run of Twestival Local. To get involved, you can join up with other Twestival Projects already underway in your city. Or, take the initiative to start a project in your city.