Back in the earlier days we used the term “e-Business”. Web sites were commonly prefaced with the letter ‘e’. Products and services were e-this and e-that. But what business is not ‘e’? It didn’t take long for the ‘e’ to drop. We quickly realized how redundant and useless that little prefix was. It provided no additional information to any word because the fact was – everything was ‘e’.

The ‘Social’ in ‘Social Media is a useful terminology because it helps organizations understand a fundamental shift in how consumers think, work, and live. ‘Social Media’ may be just another buzzword, but the fact that media is social is no fad. The ‘Social’ in Social Media, like the ‘e’ in ‘e-Business’, will soon be implied, redundant, and unnecessary. Media that is not inherently social will die and one-way communications will simply be ignored.

The cluetrain has left the station. Is your company on board? If not, here are 49 compelling facts you can use to help them get a clue.

Facts of Social Media

1. By 2010, Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers.
2. 96% of them have joined a social network.
3. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web.
4. 1 out of 8 couples married last year met via social media.
5. Years to reach 50 million users:
   • Radio: 38 years
   • TV: 13 years
   • Internet: 4 years
   • iPod: 3 Years
6. Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months.
7. iPod application downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months.
8. If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s fourth largest.
9. China’s QZone is larger, with over 300 million using their services.
10. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that, on average online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction…
11. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum.
12. 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees.
13. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year old females.
14. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire population of Norway, Ireland, and Panama.
15. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices people update anywhere – anytime.
    • Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences.
16. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé.
17. In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen.
18. What happens in Vegas stays on
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Orkut
    • Bebo
    • Flickr
    • digg
    • myspace
    • YouTube
19. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
20. YouTube hosts more than 100,000,000 videos.
21. Wiki is a Hawaiian term for ‘Quick’.
22. WikipediA has over 13 million articles.
23. Studies show it’s more accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica.
24. 78% of these articles are non-English.
25. If you were paid one dollar for every time an article was posted on WikipediA, you would earn $156.23 dollars per hour.
26. There are over $200,000,000 blogs.
27. 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
28. Word of Mouth is now World of Mouth.
29. 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
30. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.
31. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
32. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them.
33. 78% of customers trust peer recommendations.
34. Only 14% trust advertisements.
35. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI.
36. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do.
37. hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009.
38. 17% of 18 to 34 year-olds have watched TV on the Web.
39. Only 33% have ever viewed a show on DVR/TiVo.
40. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone.
41. 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle.
42. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation.
43. We no longer search for the news – the news finds us.
44. In the near future, we will no longer search for products and services – they will find us via social media.
45. Social media isn’t a fad, its a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.
46. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook daily.
47. It’s a people driven economy.
48. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy – listening first / selling second.
49. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertisers.

Source: Socialnomics^TM

Social media monitoring often gets lumped into very traditional departments inside organizations, and when this happens, certain aspects of the practice can be overlooked. There are many features of social media monitoring beyond its ability to help manage your brand’s reputation.

The four cornerstones of social media monitoring are (1) Competitive Analysis, (2) Product Development, (3) Reputation Management and (4) Outreach.

Competitive Analysis

Social monitoring can be an extremely effective way to keep tabs on your competitors. In fact, depending how thorough of a job you do, you can effectively use social media monitoring to legally spy on your competitors. The kind of information that can be unveiled can be worth its weight in gold. So long are the days of wondering exactly what your big brand competitors are doing. The only social efforts that are even remotely hidden are some interactions on Facebook. Other than that, most things are free game, and can be effectively monitored. It is not difficult to unearth specific strategies and tactics your competitors might be launching in the social sphere.

Another area regarding competitive analysis that should be thought through is the metrics obtained from your competitors’ overall brand health. Now that you are able to identify specific campaigns they are running, you should be able to assess the overall reaction of a campaign via sentiment analysis comparisons.

Product Development

In the past when a company needed to conceive new ideas for products they would research what their target market wanted via focus groups and other outside research agencies who would mine traditional media clippings. Granted those are still effective practices; however, now that users share anything and everything online, companies have the ability to tap into a vast wealth of knowledge from their customers. There is huge potential for brands to effectively use social media monitoring to help supplement the product development process.

Reputation Management

When fellow social media practitioners discuss social media monitoring it is generally in regards to customer service and reputation management. When companies setup a process for monitoring it generally involves an employee(s) reading posts/tweets/videos/images and deciding whether or not they deserve a response. When companies make the decision to spend budget on a social monitoring plan this is typically what it gets ticketed as, a means to monitor and react to customers.

Unfortunately, as I have noted, there is much more to monitoring a brand and reacting to customers than the customer service angle. Simply sticking the oversight of your monitoring plan with the brand manager or customer service representative typically means many of the additional benefits of social media monitoring get kicked under the rug. If you must go this route make sure those in charge of the plan are educated on the real ramifications and make sure they have the means to share information with other channels quickly and efficiently.

Outreach

The benefits of running targeted blogger outreach campaigns via social media monitoring insights can be quite significant. If you are skeptical, listen up. Monitoring really is a means for discovering your passionate customers. Utilizing those fans and turning them into fanatics can have a huge impact. What you do with those individuals discussing your brand is up to you; however, here are a few things you can do to help market your products:

• Send a blogger who mentioned your product free product
• Bloggers who discuss your brand consistently can be asked to join a bloggers club
• Customers who mentioned your site without directly linking to it can be asked to link to the site with custom anchor text
• …

How Social Media Savvy are you ?

Nowadays it seems that everyone wants to work with someone which is social media savvy. Interestingly, this can mean different things to different people. At the extremes it could mean the difference between someone who thinks they are savvy about social media because they actively participate on Twitter and Facebook and someone who integrates, implements and measures SEO in all business communications.

Help me find out your social media savvy-ness by answering the following questions:

1. How personally familiar are you with social media?
2. Do you have a search- and social media-friendly Web site?
3. Do you blog?
4. Which blogs do you read on a regular basis? How often do you comment on blogs?
5. Are you familiar with the popular feed readers? Which one do you recommend?
6. Have you ever uploaded a video to YouTube?
7. Have you ever uploaded digital photos to a site like Flickr?
8. How many followers do you have on Twitter? How many Friends on Facebook? Connections on LinkedIn?
9. How do you use your cell phone besides making calls?
10. How do you address both SEO and social media?
11. How do you measure the ROI of your social media engagement efforts?
12. Have you ever been blacklisted by a blogger?
13. How do you track and analyze online coverage and link-backs?
14. What do you do when something negative appears about you/your client/your company on the blogosphere?
15. How do you gauge whether it’s worth spending time with an online community?

Should agencies be involved in social media communications, or whether the only way to maintain an “authentic voice” is for companies to undertake it all themselves.

Here are different activities an agency can undertake – legitimately and effectively – to help companies engage in social media.

1. Baseline Audit and Audience Research

One of the first steps in any communication initiative should be an online audit to both understand the current environment and to set a baseline for measuring results of future activities. Alongside an the audit, learning to understand your target audiences is fundamental.

2. Corporate policies

Whether your company is engaged in social media or not, it is important to set boundaries around social media. If you are engaging in proactive outreach online, it becomes a somewhat more involved process covering more areas (for a quick start, check out this ebook on corporate social media policies)

3. Workflow processes

What happens when you spot an issue? When someone asks a question? When someone discusses your company with other people? When someone criticizes you? Who is involved in the response? What will you (and won’t you) respond to?

These are the kinds of questions you need to consider before the occasion arises, and which experienced agencies have encountered often enough to help you answer.

4. Social media training

While it doesn’t take much expertise to send a tweet, the norms of communicating in social media channels can require education and explanation. Social media can require a bit of a departure from the way companies have traditionally communicated. It doesn’t mean anarchy, but traditional “messaging” approaches don’t fly so well in these informal channels. Agencies can help to transfer the necessary knowledge around this to clients new to the social media realm.

5. Social media scoping

You don’t need to be everywhere online. Twitter and Facebook might not be the right places – perhaps your audience is primarily hangs out on forums or message boards. An agency can help to scope-out the right places for your company to establish a presence online.

6. Campaign extension

Unfortunately, Online Communication is still often at a point where it is called-in last minute to support other initiatives, whether it’s announcing something that’s already decided or supporting a marketing/advertising program. At those points, it can be difficult to come up with anything effective that benefits the organization. Agencies aren’t a silver bullet, but again they can contribute ideas.

Where will we be in Five Years ?

We’re approaching the end of 2009, and many people are wondering what the future will bring. While no one can predict for sure what the Internet holds in its future, there are indicators and trends that can point us in the right direction.

A ton of technologies are ripe for further development in the coming few years. Social media and related apps are definitely going to be at the forefront of the Web for a long time. But plenty of other technologies are on the verge of becoming mainstream, either because of more social acceptance or because of advancements in hardware and applications.

Micro-Payments For Quality Content

Some companies are already making strides in the micro-payment arena. Many current systems accumulate a big number of micro-payments before paying out a single larger payment. But that may change in the future; you’ll be able to spend micro-payments as soon as you get them, rather than having to wait for them to add up.

Micro-payments will likely be popular among online magazines and news services, as well as other providers of in-depth content. Micro-payments might also be adopted by artists and content creators to defer costs and make a profit.

The most prevalent current micro-payment systems are within MMORPGs (massively multi-player online role-playing games). These systems use credits that are usually a fraction of a dollar to buy and sell things in the game. There are numerous cases of people actually earning a living through these systems.

PayPal is already offering support for micro-payments at a rate of 5% plus € 0.05 per transaction. Amazon is also experimenting with micro-payments through its Flexible Payments Service (FPS). Dedicated micro-payment systems are also starting to crop up.

Micro-payments of the future may be closely-related to mobile payment systems. Payment via cell phone opens up whole new area of economic opportunity, particularly in areas where cell phones are more prevalent than computers. Being able to make and receive very small payments, the equivalent of a euro or less in many cases, via a mobile device paves the way for many in developing nations to participate in the Internet economy in a way that only a few years ago might not have been deemed possible.

Magazines In A More Interactive Format (Wiki, Digital Video, Etc.)

There’s some question as to whether the majority of print magazines will even be around in five years. Another magazine seems to close every week, often with little or no notice. And how can we be surprised? With mobile devices now fully capable of delivering great content while we’re on the go, what niches do magazines serve? A magazine used to be a good cheap read that we could pick up to check out the latest trends in one field or another, or quick portable entertainment while we’re on the go. But the mobile Web does all that and more.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we won’t have magazines in five years, just that the majority of them will be online, and they’ll have a lot more than just text content. Magazines will be infinitely more interactive, incorporating wikis, video and audio content, and in many cases their own social networks. Some print magazines are already preparing for the change and have websites that could very easily stand on their own. And a whole new breed of online magazines is appearing in a variety of formats. Some hold on to the page-flipping print format (except digitally rendered), while others have broken free and are more blog-like. Whatever the format, they are providing faster, cheaper and more user-friendly content than their print counterparts. The trend is likely to continue as costs for everything but Web space go up.

More Collaborative And Real-Time Content

The Web has long been used by people to collaborate on projects with colleagues or clients who are not geographically close enough for a face-to-face meeting. But recently social media has made a whole new level of collaboration possible. Writing projects are particularly popular and seem to do well across a variety of platforms. Twitter novels and stories have been co-written. Novels have been written entirely on Facebook, with input from readers on the work in progress. Even textbooks have been written by collaboration.

As broadband Internet becomes more widely available worldwide, collaborative projects will only get bigger and more frequent. Real-time updates and interaction make it possible to work on practically anything in a collaborative environment. Some projects will consist of small groups of people who already know each other, while other projects will bring together hundreds or even thousands of participants who were till then strangers. There’s really no limit to how many people could participate.

Technology that allows collaboration has been around for years. File sharing has almost always been a part of the Web, though new tools make it easier and more efficient. Services such as Zoho and Google Docs allow writers to collaborate on a single document, tracking changes by each participant and allowing others to revert to earlier versions if necessary. Other services let users communicated in real time through video or audio chats in a collaborative workspace. Improvements to these technologies are likely to continue, and new technologies developed.

Augmented Reality In Mobile Web Applications

Given that most mobile devices now have built-in digital cameras (some with video capability), people would naturally now want functionality beyond simple photography. Augmented reality applications can have a range of potential benefits, from making it easier to find your way if you get lost to letting you identify the person sitting across from you at a party.

That last example has many security and privacy experts worried. Facial recognition software is improving all the time, and pretty soon using an augmented reality program on your mobile phone to find out who a person is might be possible. You’d just snap a picture of them, and the app would cross-reference it with social networking profiles and photos across the Web, eventually coming across a match. From there, you could see whatever information the person had chosen to make public about him or herself.

While many people still see augmented reality as the stuff of science fiction, the truth is that at least rudimentary apps are already available. Layar, a free augmented reality app, is available for both the iPhone and Android-based phones. It uses layers provided by a variety of content providers such as Flickr, Wikipedia and Twitter to display an overlay of information on your mobile screen. Other apps will likely follow.

Search Engine Optimization Will Be Less Important

Search engine optimization may become less important in the future as Internet users rely more on recommendations and social media to find information. Already, people are asking questions on Twitter and Facebook instead of Google. This means that high-quality content and usability will become ever more important, because users are more likely to recommend a website if they have found it easy to use and useful. Also, search engines themselves will be smarter, meaning they’ll be able to better discern a Web page’s usefulness to a particular user.

source : noupe