Social Media Marketing
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, December 21st, 2007
The other day I posted the Facebook hoax Funwall message and wanted to follow up on the aftermath. There’s been a lot of discussion about this hoax in the blogosphere and turns out that my mentioning it brought many new visitors to this blog (welcome!). The message was indeed a hoax (as if that wasn’t obvious). Apparently it was created by 2 girls with bad grammar and nothing better to do with their time (get a life ladies). There’s talk that they will be cast out of the network (Social Network purgatory if you will….). But you have to give it to them for creating a viral meme. Word of the hoax spread quickly and Facebook itself reacted on its blog by outlining how they communicate with users in the event that they need to do so.Here’s an excerpt:”We will never use any of the following methods to tell you information, or ask for you to take an action:
Your Wall
An inbox message from a friend— in other words, chain letters.
Messages spread through Applications—if an application is telling you that Facebook is about to shut down, report it.”
Since Facebook is becoming the SN of choice for business users the prevalence of messages like these will simply put off this new audience so its good to see Facebook react proactively and professionally to counter.
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, December 20th, 2007
How to manage your Facebook friends is something everyone should consider when joining a social network. Marc Cuban the Blog Maverick and owner of the Dallas Mavericks had a good post last week pointing out how he adds Facebook friends. He gets almost 100 requests to add new “friends” daily and given the number of friends he has he recently hit the 5k friend limit and had to start weeding. Here is how he does it:
“The first layer has my real friends. Those people who who I have actually met in real life and who I enjoy keeping in touch with. FB provides a great way to keep up with things with them via pictures, notifications, etc.
The 2nd layer is people who I have tangential connections to. They may just live in Dallas Fort Worth. They may be self proclaimed Mavs or MMA or movie fans, or in groups I’m in. For whatever reason there is something about them that I could connect to.
The 3rd layer is emerging as a very unique and interesting network in FB. Its what I will call “The Power Layer.” These are people who in whatever industry they are in , retain some level of power. Having them as FB friends, although very simple and non committal, gives me some level of access to them, and them to me. These are people that if they sent me a FB mail, i would certainly read and respond to , and I think they would do the same.”
I myself have different strategies for different social networks. I choose to network in Facebook and add friends only if they fall into the following criteria:
a) I know them in the real world (friends, colleagues, business associates, former co workers, school mates etc),
OR
b) They are people with a shared professional interest (in my case its Internet and Social Marketing).
By controlling the friends I add I can manage the feedback, network with a trusted community and avoid letting FB suck up too much of my time.
Now MySpace is another story altogether. You could say I am a MySpace slut: I’ll make friends with anyone (until they spam me at which point they are swiftly deleted)- but thats a story for another blog article on another day (and I have a business reason for doing so).
What is your Facebook friend strategy?
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, December 19th, 2007
I recently received a Facebook Funwall post claiming to be from Mark Zukkerberg regarding the over population of Facebook. I thought I would forward it so you could get a good laugh at the grammatical errors and typos (its attached below). As my friend Jamie pointed out, Facebook has other ways to track whether you are using your profile regularly and this is probably a hoax to slow down the system not to mention that they “kindly ask for donations” – aye right! Here it is:
Attention all Facebook members.
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are active or not,If you’re active please send
to other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
this message to show me that your active and not deleted.
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, December 11th, 2007
Always leading edge, Capulet Communications have done it again with the release of their new e-book Getting To First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook. I found the link to this little gem in my inbox this morning and I am looking forward to some excellent holiday reading as it promises tactics to drive more traffic, increase on-line visibility and viral effect, develop blogger relationships and market your offering effectively on Facebook. I’m already looking forward to the full length book.
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, November 30th, 2007
Right now there’s so many exciting developments in new media, marketing and on the Internet in general, that its becoming quite a task to decide which makes me the most cheerful. November saw Google announce Open Social and Facebook enter the Internet advertising market with SocialAds, the XO was launched as was Kindle which lead me discover my first reason:
Askville by Amazon is a neat application, you can ask the community any question about any topic and with any luck the community comes up with satisfactory answers. I always have questions so I expect I’ll be using it a lot.
Docstoc – has a wide range of business templates and documents available to share. There’s some debate about the quality of some of the documents therein but the concept is great especially for small businesses.
Zoho – I Stumbled upon this on-line solution aimed at providing everything from word processing and spreadsheets to CRM and project management.
Kijiji- I like Craigslist and use it regularly to good effect so I was pleased to find this Canadian alternative.
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, November 26th, 2007
Following the launch of our Out-Smarts Facebook page last week, I was asked by Christine at Bluelime Media to write a blog post for their blog about setting up a Facebook business page. For step by step directions on how to do so you can read the post by clicking here.
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, November 09th, 2007
There’s an interesting article in this week’s Business in Vancouver about Second Life and its real life tax implications: “Taxing Events in your business Second Life”. Beware any foolhardy Second Life entrepreneur who thinks that making money in the virtual world is free: the tax man may be watching. The bottom line is that earnings your avatar makes are tax deductible just like earnings in the real world and should be recorded as such. (FYI the the Linden $ is currently trading at $.003 Canadian and holding its own better than the US dollar is these days!).
The article suggests having 2 avatars – one for personal pleasure (whatever that maybe) and another if you intend to do business in SL. By doing so you can easily track spending and income for tax purposes.
Apparently there’s a whole person dedicated to helping companies maximise the value of their SL ventures over at PriceWaterhouseCooper’s downtown office. I have asked this question before and I ask again, what self respecting business man has the time to sit on SecondLife and wait (and wait and wait…) while SL loads and reloads? Well I think I see the answer: one with plenty of patience who sees a growing potential market place as referenced by the $1,063,606 US spent in Second Life over last 24 hours alone. Little wonder revenue Canada has their eye on SL.
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, November 07th, 2007
Its all very well having a company blog and contributing to it regularly but you have to ask: are we doing everything we can to ensure that our intended audience can reach us? If you don’t submit your blog to relevant blog and search engines your efforts will be handicapped. Here’s a list of 10 sites that you should consider submitting to to promote your blog and reach more people (listed in no particular order).
- Technorati
- Ice Rocket
- iBlog Business
- Add-Me
- Sphere
- Blog Search Engine
- Google Blog Search
- Yahoo Feed Submit
- Blog Top List
- MSN
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, November 06th, 2007
This week the buzz in the social networking arena has surrounded Google’s OpenSocial announcement on Friday and the upcoming announcement expected from Facebook tomorrow. It seems that right now it pays to be social.
Google’s entry into the social networking arena with OpenSocial was fanfared on Friday. OpenSocial is a collaboration between Google and major SN players like LinkedIn, MySpace and Ning to facilitate building social networking apps and to encourage third party participation. The idea is that through application standardisation the development of social networking applications and add-ins will be easier and a shared API will lead to ease of deployment across different SN applications.
Facebook in turn is taking a run at Google on the Internet advertising front. With a big announcement expected from Facebook today rumours are circulating that the company intends to use data collected from user profiles to offer ads highly specific to interests and needs a la AdSense. Considering the personal data that Facebook has collected and the fact that Facebook is considered to be more authentic (profiles in Facebook are more true to real life than say MySpace), its really no surprise that the company is looking to harness this.
From a user perspective these developments can only be positive. The easier it is for companies to implement social networking technology, both on their web sites and Intranets, the better for enhanced communication, community and customer service. The integration of social networks will mean less time in the login and learning process for people like myself who use these networks as valuable business development tools. These, together with the ability to advertise to a highly targeted audience are all positive steps in the evolution of the social networking space.
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, November 03rd, 2007
Something on the light side for the weekend from a great cartoon strip about a 5 year old who uses voice recognition software to blog.
