Are You a Digital Native or Digital Immigrant?

August 10, 2011

Mike Dickman Business, Social Media Digital Immigrant, Digital Native, Facebook, Google, iPhone, LinkedIn, Mobile, Social Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Xbox, YouTube Leave a comment

by Mike Dickman

Have you noticed that in the last 5 years, electronic gadgets no longer come with user manuals? If you want to learn how to use your new iPhone or Xbox, you jump on your computer and ‘Google it’. That is because the majority of users are considered to be Digital Natives – those whom have grown up with electronic devices. The rest of us are Digital Immigrants, those whom have had to immigrate into the new world of technology. That is why this thing we refer to as Social Marketing seems to be so foreign, so scary, and childish. And by the way, when did Google become a verb?!

Recently, I spoke before a group of business people regarding Social Marketing and how they could become engaged, without being overwhelmed. The first thing I wanted to clarify was the difference between Social Media, Social Networking and Social Marketing.

Social Networking is something all of us have been doing for years. We all have been participating in local Chamber events and fundraisers. And, while some may think they are doing it to support the cause, the real motive has been to network, right? The only difference is with online networking, you don’t need to leave your home or office. It’s quite a bit less personal from what we are all used to, but it works. And, in some cases, it can actually provide the social courage to join a group or participate in a conversation.

Social Media can be defined as the software which is used to participate in social networking. So, think of the Media as: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and the latest, Google+. These are the tools that marketers use to market their brands and products, socially, online.

Social Marketing is the act of preparing a marketing plan based on the use of Social Media and incorporating the social aspect with the business’s overall marketing objective.

Notice that the words ‘Networking, Media and Marketing’ are all words that we have used as part of our Marketing dialogues for years. However, the key to Social Marketing is in the word ‘Social’. Social Marketing is just that – SOCIAL. It is word of mouth marketing, peer-to-peer. It is all about a conversation, referrals and sharing.

So, some of you are probably thinking that you don’t need to be chatting with a bunch of high school and college kids on a social network. “They are not my client or prospect demographic.” But did you know that the fastest growing age group on Facebook is 55-65 years old? And, a new user joins LinkedIn (considered to be the ‘professionals’ social network) every second. This year, more than 93% of marketers are using social media for business. And it’s major brands that are doing this. Why? It’s because they can have a persona. They can appear to be human. They can influence thoughts and behavior because we think of them as peers or friends – because we LIKE them.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that just because you are participating on a social network on your computer that you have everything covered. Social Marketing goes far beyond the social networks and desktop computers and extends your marketing into the mobile realm. Are your business and personal reputations mobile ready? In my next article we will discuss taking your marketing mobile. And we don’t mean sticking a magnet on the side of your car!

This Is Google Changing All of Information Sharing

June 28, 2011

Mike Dickman Social Media Facebook, Google, Social Marketing, Social Media, social media marketing, Social Networking, Social Networks, Twitter, YouTube Leave a comment

by Mat Honan

This post originally appeared on gizmodo.com

Google announced a new social sharing project today called Google+. It’s among the company’s most ambitious ventures to date, up there with Gmail, Android, Chrome and, yes, Search. It represents Google’s very future. It’s going to be huge.

Google+ is a concerted effort meant to turn the ship around. Google famously has a poor social track record. Buzz and Wave were failures, so it needs to get this right. But Google+ goes far beyond just sharing status updates or photos with friends: It aims to change the very way we share and communicate. As it notes in a new blog post today, “We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests.”

While there is much more to come, there are three major pieces announced today:

Circles

Circles let you share selectively with certain groups of people. You create a new circle, add contacts to it, and can share with just those selected people. As Google says “[t]he problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food—wrapping everyone in friend paper—and sharing really suffers.” This seems to be somewhat like Facebook’s friends lists. But the big difference is that it isn’t a walled garden. You don’t have to opt into Google+ to be included in a circle. If I want to add someone to it who’s not a Google+user, I can do so via email and they can still take see the things I want to share with them.

Sparks

Sparks is essentially a topical section that delivers news videos and blog posts on subjects you define. But moreover it lets you discuss those things with other people, or as Google puts it, “nerding out and exploring subjects together.” This is something that Google is almost uniquely positioned to deliver. If you think about your Facebook feed, or, say a Tumblr tagged feed, they contain items placed there by humans. Google can deliver an endless supply of newly relevant items using an algorithm.

Hangouts

Hangouts is an online meetup space with live video that includes up to ten people. But it’s designed to let people come and go, dropping by at will, rather than be locked into scheduled meetings. It sounds a bit like Campfire with video.

Mobile

Mobile is the last major component announced today, and it has several moving parts. The table stakes are that you can always add your location (or not). Instant Upload automatically adds your photos to a private album online. Finally, Huddle is a group messaging tool that lets you communicate with a self-selected circle on your mobile device.

But these are just the beginning stages, the initial rollouts that are part of a much larger project led by Vic Gundotra. Wired’s Steven Levy followed Google+ from the inside for more than a year, and has the inside scoop. As he notes, it’s a huge drive by Google. In fact it is, more or less, Google’s future—an internal Manhattan Project meets moon shot.

Developed under the codename Emerald Sea, it is a result of a lengthy and urgent effort involving almost all of the company’s products. Hundreds of engineers were involved in the effort. It has been a key focus for new CEO Larry Page.

The parts announced Tuesday represent only a portion of Google’s plans. In an approach the company refers to as “rolling thunder,” Google has been quietly been pushing out pieces of its ambitious social strategy—there are well over 100 launches on its calendar. When some launches were greeted by yawns, the Emerald Sea team leaders weren’t ruffled at all—lack of drama is part of the plan. Google has consciously refrained from contextualizing those products into its overall strategy.

That overall strategy will begin now, with the announcement of the two centerpieces of Google+. But even this moment—revealed in a blog post that marks the first limited “field tests” outside the company—will be muted, because it marks just one more milestone in a long slog to remake Google into something more “people centric.”

“We’re transforming Google itself into a social destination at a level and scale that we’ve never attempted – orders of magnitude more investment in terms of people than any previous project,” says Vic Gundotra, who leads Google’s social efforts.

The entire story is worth a read, complete with outsized personalities, massive stakes, and secret murals. But the takeaway is that this isn’t just about social networking. As Levy notes, it’s much bigger than that: It’s about organizing information around people.

As Tim Carmody points out on Twitter, “Google doesn’t actually care about social. Google cares about identity. Social (such as it is) is a means to an end.” And: “Not accidental that social, identity, apps, & browser are all linked. This is Google’s play to control the whole stack like Apple does.”

I agree. Google’s biggest screwup wasn’t ceding social space to Facebook. It was ceding identity.

Google wants to get to know you, and help you to get to know yourself. It wants to be the go-to place where you show who you are and what you care about to your friends, your family, your coworkers and the entire world. It wants to be the key you use to unlock the Web and the internet as a whole, the passageway through which all your interactions flow. Today is a big step in that direction.

4 Winning Strategies for Social Media Optimization

October 23, 2010

Mike Dickman Social Media Blogging, Blogs, business, content, Facebook, Google, List, Lists, optimization, Search, search engine optimization, SEO, sharing, Social Media, social media optimization, widgets Leave a comment

by Jim Tobin

This article first appeared on MASHABLE.

Jim Tobin is president of Ignite Social Media, a leading social media agency, where he works with clients including Microsoft, Intel, Nike, Nature Made, The Body Shop, Disney and more implementing social media marketing strategies. He is also author of the book Social Media is a Cocktail Party. Follow him on Twitter @jtobin.

Social media optimization (SMO) is the process by which you make your content easily shareable across the social web. Because so many options exist for where people can view your content, the content model for the web has shifted from, “We have to drive as much traffic to our website as possible,” to the more pragmatic, “We have to ensure as many people see our content as possible.”

You’ll still want most people to see your content on your site — and if you’re doing it right they will — but helping people view content through widgets, apps and other social media entry points will accrue positive benefits for your brand. The more transportable you can make your content, the better.

If you’re ready to get started with a social media optimization plan for your organization, read on for an overview.

Why Social Media Optimization Matters

Before we get to the practical, let’s start with the “Why,” as in “Why you should care about SMO?” As you can see from the chart below, social networks are driving an increasing amount of traffic to an increasing number of websites. Sites like Comedy Central, Forever 21 and Etsy are seeing more traffic from social networks than they see from Google

. How social referral traffic is performing for you most likely depends on two factors:

1. How interesting your content is; and

2. How easily shareable you have made that content across a variety of networks.

Image credit: Gigya

In other words, SMO can lead to increased traffic to your site, as friends encourage their friends to digest specific content. If you can appeal to a given person, their friends are statistically more likely to be interested in the same thing, so you’re likely reaching a well-targeted audience. Further, it also leads to improved search engine optimization, as major search engines count links as if they were votes for your site.

SMO isn’t just about building a bigger social media presence for your brand. Whether or not your organization has a strong social network presence, the social networks of others can be leveraged to great effect.

Read more . . .

Why Facebook is Like High School

October 22, 2010

Mike Dickman Social Media Facebook, Facebook Algorithms, Facebook News Feed, Innovation, Social Media, Tech Leave a comment

by Thomas E. Weber

This article first appeared on The Daily Beast.

How does the social media giant decide who and what to put in your feed? Cracking the Facebook Code.

The more digital our daily lives become, the more perplexing the questions seem. Will the growth of social media destroy our notions of privacy? Is democracy helped or harmed by the cacophony of opinions online? And perhaps most confounding: Why does that guy I barely know from the 10th grade keep showing up in my Facebook feed?

If you’ve ever spent time on Facebook, you’ve probably pondered that last one. The social-networking giant promises to keep us connected with our friends in exchange for pumping a steady diet of advertising at us—but the algorithms Facebook uses to decide what news to pass along can seem capricious or altogether impenetrable.

The Daily Beast’s one-month experiment into Facebook’s news feed yielded the following discoveries:

A bias against newcomers
“Most Recent” doesn’t tell the whole story.
Links are favored over status updates, and photos and videos trump links.
“Stalking” your friends won’t get you noticed.
Raise your visibility by getting people to comment.
It’s hard to get the attention of “popular kids.”

Facebook, much like Google with its search algorithms, consistently refuses to go into details about how it picks and pans content (save a few glancing details this year about the enigmatic engine that powers it, EdgeRank). So, with the mystery of that 10th-grade friend in mind, The Daily Beast set out to crack the code of Facebook’s personalized news feed. Why do some friends seem to pop up constantly, while others are seldom seen? How much do the clicks of other friends in your network affect what you’re shown? Does Facebook reward some activities with undue exposure? And can you “stalk” your way into a friend’s news feed by obsessively viewing their page and photos?

To get the answers, we devised an experiment, creating our own virtual test lab within the confines of Facebook and tracking thousands of news-feed items over a period of several weeks. The focal point of our experiment: Phil Simonetti, a 60-year-old Facebook newcomer who allowed us to dictate and monitor his every move.

Like a half-billion people before him, Simonetti joined Facebook and began typing in his status updates. But in this case, Simonetti’s only friends were a hand-picked roster of more than two dozen volunteers who agreed to sift through their news feeds for the duration of our experiment, dutifully recording any Phil sightings.

As our volunteers checked in with their reports, some remarkable findings began to emerge:

1. Facebook’s Bias Against Newcomers. If there’s one thing our experiment made all too clear, it’s that following 500 million people into a party means that a lot of the beer and pretzels are already long gone. Poor Phil spent his first week shouting his updates, posted several times a day, yet most of his ready-made “friends” never noticed a peep on their news feeds. His invisibility was especially acute among those with lengthy, well-established lists of friends. Phil’s perpetual conversation with the ether only stopped when we instructed our volunteers to interact with him. A dynamic which leads to…

Read more . . .

DEAD OR ALIVE: The World Wide Web

September 11, 2010

Mike Dickman Business, Social Media, Uncategorized Facebook, Internet, Social Marketing, Social Media, Twitter, Web, WIRED Magazine, World Wide Web, WWW 2 Comments

by Mike Dickman

Is the Web Dead?

I just finished reading an article in WIRED magazine which really got me thinking: Is The Web Dead? To get a better understanding of this position, think about how you use the Internet each day. You get up in the morning, log in to Facebook, check your wall, check Twitter and see if you have any more followers, and log into Pandora so you can stream your favorite music all day at work. You’ve been all over the Internet, but you have yet to hit the Web.

Today’s Internet visitors are spending most of their time on Apps such as Facebook or Twitter. Facebook has now even surpassed Google in the amount of visits and duration of visits. YouTube is the largest search engine on the Internet and you’re reading this article on a Blog, on the Internet and off the Web.

With the growth of social sites, the Web is losing steam and lots of traffic. And, with the like of Starbucks and CocaCola gaining more than 90,000 new Facebook Fans PER DAY, it would seem inevitable that the reign of the Web, could be dead.

The Web is just one of many applications that exist on the Internet, which uses IP and TCP protocols to move packets around. The revolution is the architecture, not the specific applications, which is built on top of it. Today, the content you see in your browser (largely HTML data delivered via the HTTP protocol on port 80) accounts for less than 25% of the traffic on the Internet – and that is shrinking. The applications that account for more of the Internet’s traffic include peer-to-peer file transfers, email, corporate VPNs, the machine-to-machine communications of APIs, Skype calls, online games – including Xbox Live, iTunes, VOIP phones, Netflix movie streaming and more.

In April, I re-posting an article released by Morgan Stanley which stated that the number of users accessing the Internet from mobile devices will soon surpass the number of those accessing from PCs. This will only accelerate the rate at which the Web is left behind as more applications, which will make web browsing from a mobile device easier, are accessed by these users. For the sake of an optimized “web” experience, users will forgo their general purpose browsers.

So, as the Internet moves from our desks to our pockets and our view history confirms that we are an application minded social society, where do you see the Web is headed and do you believe THE WEB IS DEAD?

Responding to Bad Publicity Online

August 30, 2010

Mike Dickman Business, Social Media Facebook, Social Media, Social Monitoring, Twitter Leave a comment

This article first appeared on Bloomberg Business Week.

Every business loves social media marketing when customers are raving about them in Facebook status updates and Twitter tweets, but what happens when there’s some bad press on a social network? How do you handle a potential public blemish without making it into a full-fledged stain? While the downside of social media marketing is that we cannot control what people say about our businesses, we can use these powerful connectors to make things right.

The key is not to engage in a public dialog with the person who is making the negative statement. A he-said-she-said battle in a public forum could exacerbate the situation. You can and should reach out to the person as quickly as possible with a simple “How can we help you?” and then attempt to take the dialog offline.

On Twitter you can use a Direct Message, and on Facebook you can use the Messages feature to communicate privately with disgruntled customers out of the public eye. Or, in your how-can-I-help response, provide a customer support line for the customer to call. (Make sure it’s open and staffed when you’re giving out the number—you don’t want an already unhappy customer dialing two minutes later, only to find out the office is closed.)

Once offline, treat the situation as you would an unhappy customer coming into your store or calling on the phone. More than likely, if you remedy the problem, the once disgruntled and vocal customer will again take to social media to praise your response, potentially turning bad publicity into good publicity.

What about a public response from you directly? Forget it. Instead, let your fans come to your aid. That’s one of the many upsides to social media marketing: Happy customers will provide both word-of-mouth referrals and defend those companies they prefer doing business with. Let these people be your social media knights in shining armor.

Eric Groves

Senior vice-president, global market development

Constant Contact

Mike Dickman

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