Jan 03, 2011
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Archive for the ‘social networks’ Category
This post (written based on the presentation embedded above) explains how the Facebook “Like” button is poised to kill online display advertising as we know it, and help you understand why the social networking giant has been valued at $50 billion. It is the second in a series of posts about marketing with Facebook. The first post with about marketing with Facebook Pages and Facebook Ads. Let’s get started.
At first, the web was about surfing the information highway. Then it evolved into a place where the focus was on web content, pages, databases and documents. Today, it has become a place to connect with friends and trusted colleagues. The web of tomorrow will be about finding relevant content from our friends, signaling the end of algorithmic search as the dominant means of locating relevant content online. Read the rest of this entry »
Categories: Facebook, social media, social networks, socialmedia, socialnetworking, socialnetworks, Uncategorized2 CommentsNov 15, 2010
With the social media policy prohibiting command from blocking access to social media indefinitely on their nonclassified network, the US Department of Defense made a public decision to embrace social media, the origins of which I profiled on my blog earlier this year. This podcast is about the shift from command and control to a network hierarchy inside the US Military.“We’re in the churning point, [and we’re moving] from hierarchical to networked structure,” says Jack Holt, director of emerging media at the US Dept. of Defense, who I sat down with at the PRSA International Conference in DC last month for this podcast. According to Jack, when it comes to social media, DoD is moving from command and control to a more distributed, network hierarchy, a move that depends heavily on teaching service members not so much about social media tools, but rather the path to peace in a networked world.Beyond public relations and public affairs applications of social media, the larger opportunity social media networked information technology presents is the ability to better manage knowledge inside to organization, and better preserve organizational intelligence in an organization where service members frequently transition in and out of different operations and commands.Other topics discussed include: The Blogger Roundtable at DoD Live, social media training, Al Qaeda’s online effectiveness, use of video at the Gaza Flotilla Raid and speed versus accuracy. Follow Jack Holt on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jack_holt.RECOMMENDED PODCASTSABOUT THE PODCASTER@EricSchwartzman provides online communication training, strategy and social media governance to public relations, public affairs, corporate communications and marketing specialists. He has extensive experience integrating emerging information technologies into organizational communications programs through public speaking, hands-on training seminars, consulting and the development of corporate policies on social media usage.
His clients have included Boeing, BYU, City National Bank, Environmental Defense Fund, Government of Singapore, Johnson & Johnson, NORAD Northcomm, Southern California Edison, UCLA, US Dept. of State, United States Army, US Embassy of Athens, the United States Marine Corps and many small to medium-sized companies and agencies.
Eric is the instructor behind PRSA’s top-rated social media training seminars, the Social Media Boot Camp and the Social Media Master Class, which are offered monthly in the US.
His book “Social Marketing to the Business Customer” with Paul Gillin about B2B applications of social media communications is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders.
Aug 12, 2010If you want to get an idea of what I cover in my Social Media Boot Camp or attend the workshop remotely, I’m live streaming my Los Angeles session on Aug. 18-19 from 9 to 4pm PT right here. So bookmark this page and come back anytime during the workshop to view the live stream.
Attendance is limited to 24 and my workshops are very interactive. I will be taking questions from attendees as they roll and helping people one-on-one through-out the course of the Boot Camp. But that only goes for paid attendees. You can audit via the web for free, but questions and one-on-one counseling is limited to the folks on site.
I will not be taking questions from the chat room. Also, I make no guarantees as to the quality of the audio or video, but we have a pretty good prosumer rig, a live camera operator and a Sennheiser shot gun mic so hopefully it’ll be more than watchable. I’d certainly appreciate your feedback as a comment to this blog post if you’re inclined to share it.
For Upcoming Social Media Boot Camp dates, visit www.SocialMediaBootCamp.com.
Feb 08, 2010
It will probably come as no surprise that the pre-dominant activity on SlideShare, according to the company’s CEO Rashmi Sinha, who I spoke with recently about the launch of their new branded channels, is B2B lead generation.
B2B sales cycles exceed those of B2C, because the former requires someone be walked through a process, learn best practices and see relevant case studies to arrive at a purchasing decision. And currently, PowerPoint presentations are the popular media used in business to get that done.
Google Adwords and online display ads may bring the horse to water, but before a B2B customer drinks, they need a more comprehensive understanding than ads can provide, and presentations solve that problem.
But just what kinds of presentations work best at actually generating leads on SlideShare?
That’s one of the questions I asked Rashmi, in a conversation that also touched on the shortcomings of user-ratings, making sharing beneficial to community members and encouraging high quality business conversations by discouraging anonymity, which is available as a special episode of my “On the Record…Online” podcast.
But if you’re looking to generate leads on the SlideShare, and you want to know how to do it, here’s a cheat sheet directly from SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha:
1. Get Personal — SlideShare may be a business-to-business social network, but the service’s real strength is its ability to promote business with personality. To see how this works in practice, check out SlideShare’s homepage on any given day and see what types of presentations rank high. You’ll find dryer, text-heavy presentations — though packed with useful information — are much less popular than those with a strong dose of personality and individual flair.
2. Visual Essays Work Best — In the real world, when you use PowerPoint as a visual aid, you are able to to narrate your presentation. But on SlideShare, your deck has to speak for itself. Using imagery to add visual punch works to communicate more information with fewer words. It’s more attractive to viewers because it requires less effort to look at pictures than it does to read.
3. Serve an Underserved Audience – Most of the content on SlideShare is tech-oriented. So if this is your addressable audience, you’re prospecting in the most competitive of SlideShare’s markets. If, on the other hand, you’re visual essay is about some type of subject-matter that’s less prevalent, you may be appealing to much a smaller audience, but there’s also much less competition, so the probability of converting members into leads is higher.
4. Presentations as Media – On SlideShare, your presentation is media. And good media is different from a good presentation. While good presentations include all the ins and outs at the expense of requiring more time and attention, effective media typically promises quick gains for a small time investment. A SlideShare presentation that works as a lead generation tool, is less about driving actual purchasing decisions than it is about sparking someone’s curiosity. Lead generation is about opening doors, not than closing them.
Rashmi says SlideShare is fixing the broken “white paper download paradigm,” one of the more common ways B2B marketers generate sale leads online. The problem, she says, is that in the white paper download model you have to forfeit your contact information before you know whether or not the content is any good. By introducing a social layer of comments, embeds, favorites and downloads within an active B2B community, SlideShare lets members use a social filter to more efficiently identify what might be compelling content for them.
Are you using SlideShare to generate leads? is there anything I’ve missed that can add to this post?
Mar 12, 2009
It seems Nielsen had their fingers crossed when they released a report yesterday that claims “Social networks/blogs now 4th
most popular online category – ahead of personal e-mail.”
Adweek reporter Brian Morrissey ran with it in an article titled “Nielsen: Social Networking Overtakes E-mail in Popularity” which is how I found out about it.
But according to Trend Stream CEO Tom Smith, author of the popular Universal McCann study “When Did We Start Trusting Strangers [PDF]” – and featured guest in the next “On the Record…Online” podcast – the claim is misleading because the Nielsen study only measures webmail.
No desktop email or mobile email usage numbers are considered in the Nielsen numbers. Tom says he’s also skeptical of their definition of social networks, calling it “pretty broad.” You can download the Nielsen study and make up your own mind here [PDF].
“It’s not trendy but I still think email is the most important, immediate and utilized communication and influence tool particular in the developed web markets such as US and UK,” said Tom in an email. “That said long term social networks will become core communication platforms to rival email. I just ran some research in the US on video sharing and the number one way to share videos was email, way ahead of social network distribution.”
I recently blogged that for organizational communicators, email is more important than Facebook, basing my opinion on Tom’s research that 99% of all active internet users rely on email daily, making it most popular online communications channel. What do you think? Is email still the most important online communications channel? And will it hold that status through 2009?
If you’d like to discuss this subject directly with Tom, he’s going present his latest social media research at the upcoming Digital Impact Conference in NYC April 30-May 1, which I’m co-chairing with Elizabeth Albrycht.
Categories: email marketing, social networks