Are you addicted to white papers, just as I am? Well, my friends at Awareness, Inc. have put together an epic list of the top 10 social media whitepapers of 2012. Enjoy the white paper goodness. And try to tweet every once in a while so we know you’re still there, K?
Source: Awareness Inc.
To help you understand important shifts in the social media landscape and how they affect marketing, Awareness Inc combed through the juiciest research findings from 2012, pulling out 10 studies and 30 essential takeaways for any successful marketer and created a guide to help you with them . The ten white papers included are: Read the full post >>
It is my great pleasure to present another post from my colleague Laurie Shook. Laurie brings her vast social media expertise and passion for enterprise 2.0 to bring you her insights from Cisco Live.
How do you use social media to create a more engaging tradeshow experience? Based on the pervasive hash tags and social media tracking boards at last week’s Cisco Live in San Diego, Cisco has confronted that challenge successfully. Part of the secret is creating a Social Media Hub.
Cisco Live, which is an industry seminar, tradeshow, and user group conference for Cisco customers and partners, featured its Social Media hub prominently on the tradeshow floor. Although a social media hub has been used for several years, this is the first time the hub has moved out from the back office. As many as 5 people supported the tradeshow hub, which featured several live monitors, and was built with the following social media tools: Read the full post >>
Again, I admit… I love me some Awareness Inc. And they’ve recently put together a white paper and infographic on leveraging social influence for marketers. Please note: I do not receive incentive from Awareness Inc. for posting content or whitepapers that is produced by them. Nor have they asked me to post on their behalf. I simply believe in what they do.
As a marketer, your ultimate objective is to influence your audience to believe certain things, to behave in certain ways and ultimately to consume or buy your products and services. Sure, your performance may be judged by a very specific set of metrics, but at the end of the day your objective is to influence your audience. Read the full post >>
I’m not going deny it… I’m quite fond of the folks at Awareness Inc. Not just because they afforded me the awesome opportunity of personally visiting and meeting the folks running the
Super Bowl Social Media Command Center, but because they also put together some phenomenal reports (see the
State of Social Media Marketing).
In their most recent whitepaper, they explore something nearer and dearer to my own passion: engagement.
“Engagement” is a hot word these days but what does it really mean? Why is it important? How do you drive it? How do choices such as the day and time of a post affect interaction with content, engagement and loyalty? This paper explores those questions, citing research and comments by social media marketing thought leaders, and drawing on a recently completed analysis of aggregate data collected across all Awareness, Inc. clients, including more than 250,000 posts published to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Slideshare, Flickr and WordPress, and the 31+ million interactions on those posts over the course of 2011. Read the full post >>
I recently came across this excellent post written by Jeffrey Cohen of Radian6, 6 Layers of Social Media Content Strategy, and also Mark Smiciklas’ graphical interpretation of Jeff’s metaphor. I loved it so much that I decided to take it one step further and create an infographic from it, adding some of my own thoughts on an effective social content strategy.
Content creators are often inspired by their surroundings when developing ideas for their social media profiles, but their content strategy is the guiding principle that makes it all work. Good content marketing plan contains a number of different elements including theme, audience, tone, publishing channel, etc. But how do all of these components come together to form a cohesive strategy? Well, it really is as easy as making a cheeseburger. Read the full post >>
An exclusive, in-depth look into the Super Bowl’s first ever social media command center, the folks who ran it, and how the convergence of technology and people created the ultimate online Super Bowl experience.
Me with Taulbee Jackson, CEO of Raidious
You would think that, the day before the biggest sporting event of the year, the people in charge of the Super Bowl’s Social Media Command Center would be frantic, running around and putting out last minute fires. So imagine my surprise when I walked in and found it to be quite the opposite. Entering the offices of Raidious — the Indianapolis-based digital communications company behind the social media command center — the air was full of activity, but the mood was quiet and calm… almost, I dare say, serene. Read the full post >>
Top Areas For Social Marketing Investment and Biggest Social Marketing Challenges in 2012
From Awareness, Inc
Creators of the Social Marketing Hub
The definitive social marketing industry report.
In December 2011 Awareness surveyed over 320 marketers from a wide variety of industries and levels of social marketing experience. This report brings to you those insights and benchmarks to solidify your social marketing strategy, grow your social footprint and engage with your audiences for maximum return. You will learn how leaders allocate resources, discover the top social platforms and social media management tools they use, social marketing investment priorities, and the practices companies will adopt to ensure 2012 is the year of the social business.
You will notice some underlying themes in this report: Read the full post >>
Below is an excerpt from ANA Marketing’s The Five Drivers to Creating and Maintaining Brand Loyalty
. Visit the ANA Marketing web site to read this post in its entirety. To discover more tips on using social media to build your brand, register for the ANA’s course on The Art and Science of Brand Building that begins on April 18, 2011 in New York, NY.
Cheryl Riina, independent consultant, discussed the five drivers to creating and maintaining brand loyalty. Riina stated that 80% of business comes from 20% of customers, as brand loyalists are committed “true believers.” Technology has revolutionized the way we do business. Resulting from the combination of a radically transformed marketplace, revolutionized communication, and the challenging economic environment, we now have a “more experienced, more demanding, harder-to-please, and tech savvier consumer.” Given the challenges, one might assume that brand loyalty is a phenomenon of the past, but customers want to be loyal because they save time and simplify their lives with loyalty. Brand loyalty creates many benefits for a company, including the following: Read the full post >>
The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) is the advertising industry’s oldest trade association, founded on June 24, 1910 in Detroit, Michigan by 45 companies to safeguard and advance the interests of advertisers and consumers. ANA Today Insights is a newsletter that provides market information on indispensable business insight, collaboration opportunity & industry advocacy. Visit the ANA web site for more information and how to become a member.
In a world dominated by social media every marketer is now a publisher and every publisher is now a marketer. Mass socialization is taking place, with consumers spending more than six hours per month engaged in social media. Fifty-five percent of U.S. adults have a Facebook page today. This rise in consumer conversations means that people are listening to what brands say and how they respond to consumer issues online. When organizing internally for social media, marketers have to first fight the myth that it “can’t be done.” Read the full post >>
If you haven’t seen the flurry of conversations the past two days, let me be the one to tell you that Forrester has just released a very insightful report on the use of Location-based Services (LBS). Specifically, the use of applications such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt as a means for companies to engage and interact with consumers. LBS applications, as an emerging technology, has a lot of consumers (of the people surveyed 84% had never even heard of Foursquare, Gowalla, or Loopt) and brands wondering if it is technology that is all hype — not surprising since any new technology has a period of adoption while users determine it’s stickiness. Read the full post >>
