How job seekers can use today’s digital market

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The 2011 job market is ending on a positive note. With unemployment shrinking to a mere 8.6% — its lowest level since May 2008 — and a steadily growing economy, businesses are planning on hiring and recruiting even more as their confidence in customer demand builds.

How Job seekers can use today's digital market

In this new, growing market, those seeking their next dream job should cultivate their presence and contacts strategically in places where employers will be on the lookout for the best talent. According to the MSU survey [PDF] of more than 3,000 companies conducted last month, social media has flourished as a burgeoning recruitment strategy, becoming a more mainstream approach for companies of all sizes and industries, even the most conservative. For job seekers, social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter have established new ways getting discovered by employers, as well as directly reaching recruiters and hiring managers.

Here’s the scoop on what job seekers should know in order to be successful in today’s digital job market.

Your Social Media Profiles Are as Important Your Resume (If Not More Important)

The MSU report asserts that 36% of companies surveyed are using social media for recruiting. In today’s competitive market, recruiters look for the most current information on candidates, which is readily and easily available on social networks. Job seekers should actively include links to their complete and up-to-date Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter profiles in their applications. When creating your profiles, do not just import your resume — it often contains too much detailed information. Rather, build your profile from scratch with a concise description of your prior experience to grab a recruiter’s attention. To make yourself more discoverable, search engine optimize your title and skills.

Be sure to use social news streams as a dynamic extension of your traditional resume. Employers are interested in candidates who are passionate about their work. Job hopefuls should share interesting and relevant news about your industries and areas of expertise, demonstrating their knowledge and establishing yourself as an essential player in the fields. While the social news dialogue ought to maintain a professional tone, you should also reveal yourself to be a fun, authentic individual.

80% of Success is Showing up

Social media enables us to stand out, to be more noticeable, to differentiate ourselves from the masses and to tell the whole story behind and beyond a one-page resume. When contributing to your news streams and profiles, choose current topics of interest, start participating in discussions about your professional field and industry trends, and share your own hands-on tricks of the trade. Many companies are now making use of Facebook Pages that are dedicated exclusively to careers and hiring. These pages are generally run by recruiters and talent acquisition professionals that are looking to attract and hire candidates. Savvy job seekers should make use of these pages and proactively ask questions about job openings, the specifics of a company’s interview process, or any upcoming career events. Responses are generally instantaneous, and you will quickly establish connections within the company.

Additionally, every field has its own industry thought leaders broadcasting on Twitter. You should follow the influencers in your field, contribute to the discussion and share it with others who might be interested. Take advantage of @-mention feature to keep participants engaged and include hashtags to increase the visibility of your tweets.

You should also join LinkedIn Groups related to your field or moderated by a company you are interested in. Since hiring managers are always on the lookout for team players, you should establish a reputation by sharing your opinion, answering questions and offering advice in the group discussion forums. Join specific company groups to gain additional insight and keep up on the latest hiring news. Recruiters are very active in these groups, and taking steps to establish a positive LinkedIn presence will help to assure that you get a call.

Social Networks Enable Direct Interaction

There was a time when contacting recruiters on job sites and boards was difficult, and proactively reaching out to hiring managers was nearly impossible. Social media has created a culture of openness, and has all but eliminated the ‘black hole’ that resumes have fallen into for decades. Many companies even highlight their recruiters on job postings; not only can you contact a recruiter directly, but you can often view recruiters’ and hiring managers’ social media profiles before contacting them.

Job seekers need to connect to recruiters who are hiring in their field and location. If you don’t know them directly, subscribe to them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter to stay current on all job openings, and work towards developing a positive relationship with them.

Your Networks Help You Find Jobs (and Help Employers Find You)

More companies than ever are cutting their job advertising budgets, opting to channel their recruiting efforts through referral hiring. The MSU report indicates that 44% of companies use referral hiring, and 49% tap into alumni networks in order to recruit. Companies are drawing on their employee’s social networks to share jobs and attract the most qualified candidates. The more extensive your personal network is, the greater your odds of encountering these unadvertised job opportunities.

Grow your networks by reaching out and connecting to people with whom you have either professional or personal relationships. If you don’t know the person well, begin by subscribing to their feed or ask a friend for an introduction. As in real life, opportunities can arise from any connection — a co-worker, a friend, a neighbor, etc. Many companies publish their job openings and career events on their Facebook Pages, so connect to the pages of companies that are of interest to you to start receiving active job openings in your news feed with little effort.

With the economy on the mend and hiring rates rising, job seekers should not hesitate to break into the social media sphere. Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter offer an abundance of ways to connect with companies, foster your professional reputation, gain exposure to job postings, and ultimately, realize your professional aspirations. Establish your online professional brand and presence now. Your dream job is waiting for you.

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Facebook Timeline is your digital resume

For those of you who don’t know (have you been living under a rock?), Facebook is slowly debuting the Timeline to its 800+ million users. Currently, this update is available for those who opt in, but it’s rolling out to replace the Facebook profile we’ve all come to know, love, and obsessively study.

As much as jobs folks like me like to think Facebook users automatically think about their careers when Zuckerberg rolls out a new feature, I’ll admit that it’s not the case. So, I’m here to say the new Timeline profile format has made Facebook more job-search friendly than ever. After all, it’s a resume. That’s right. When you stop and look at it, Facebook’s Timeline is effectively a resume. From the giant cover image at the top to the chronological organization down the line, your Facebook profile is a resume for your life, not just your career.

What Does This Mean?

In recent years, it’s pretty common knowledge that an increasing number of employers are turning to the likes of Google and social media to learn more about applicants and current employees. Once Timeline goes 100% live, expect this number to explode.

Until now, the Facebook profile has provided a current slice of a user’s life. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty details or look a week, month, or year into the past, it takes some searching and clicking. With Timeline, employers can learn more about users by searching specific time frames and seeing how the details mesh together.

Ultimately, Facebook is going to become the go-to site for more curious employers and clients. Personalized and manicured Timelines are simply going to be more attractive.

How Can I Use This To My Advantage?

Don’t spaz. Fortunately, the Timeline makes presentation easy for those of use who aren’t as Facebook-savvy as we’d like. Privacy settings will remain the same, posts will fall into place, and you’ll find that mixed media fits into a pretty snazzy arrangement.

​Check the locks. It’s true that no privacy settings are going to be changed. However, those dorky status updates you wrote in 2006 are going to be a whole lot more accessible on your Timeline. Facebook gives you seven days to review the new format before your Timeline goes live, so do your due diligence now.

Pick your crowd. Along with overall privacy settings, your Timeline is going to work a whole lot better if you refine your audiences. Organize your business contacts into a list so that they’re the only ones who can see your industry-specific content. Personalizing your profile to fit the crowd will make your Timeline look so much better.


Facebook Timeline is your digital resume

Customize. One of the most striking differences you’ll find in the Facebook Timeline would have to be the cover photo. It’s smack dab at the top of your profile, so make it nice. Pick something that works for everyone who could possibly see your profile. You already know that picture from the New Year’s party isn’t going to work.

Prioritize. If you’re an active user, then all your content isn’t going to fit on your Timeline. While Facebook automatically guesses what content is important enough to be expanded, it could definitely use your input. Expand the information you think is important so that it can be seen by the right people.

Do you think the Timeline is similar to a resume? How else can it be used in the job search? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

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How to promote your website content

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OK, you’ve got a great new site and planned out a fail-proof content strategy. You’re going to be posting all sorts of interesting and insightful blog posts and newsletters, and everyone is going to come to read it. Then they are going to hire you to do work. Right? If you build it they will come. Isn’t that the way it works?

Not really…

While we are big proponents of a strong content strategy, simply putting the content out there is not going to drive traffic from far and near to come visit your site. You have to spend the extra time promoting your content as well. Producing the content is the first big step, and it is definitely going to send you in the right direction, but promoting that great content is just as important.

Newsletter Promotion

One great piece of content that is actually a promotion tool as well is an email newsletter. Just to be clear, when I say “email newsletter,” I am referring to long-form content that is well-writen and is distributed via an attractive email that includes a graphic, an abstract of the article, and a link back to the site.

The email should alert subscribers and drive them to your site to read the content, not deliver it all straight to their inbox. If you just deliver the full article, then it just becomes content, not a promotion tool. However, by providing an abstract of the article, then drawing the readers back to your site, you not only are promoting the newsletter content that lives on your site, but it also makes the reader aware of the other content you have to offer.

I would also recommend watching the webinar by Dan Zarrella called “The Science of Email Marketing,” to learn more about the best times to send your newsletters, the best words to use in subject lines, as well as some real data about frequency and the importance of subscriber freshness.

Blog Digest

While on the topic of email marketing, you should also consider putting together a digest email that promotes your short-form content (think: blog posts) by sending out a weekly or bi-monthly (or whatever frequency is appropriate) email that includes a list of recent content with links back to the site.

A digest can serve as a reminder to the user of all the content you are continually publishing. A relative few people utilize RSS readers, as most would prefer to receive the updates right in their inbox, so we suggest giving them this option.

Promotion through social media

I hate to be one to jump on the bandwagon, but the fact of the matter is that social media is one of the best ways to promote your content, if you do it well. You must determine what social media platforms are appropriate for your target audience. Is Facebook the way to go, or are most of your users active in LinkedIn? Or maybe they’re early adaptors and you want to promote on the new Google+.

Odds are, it is a mixture of social media avenues, and a mixture of active and passive promotion. Active promotion refers to you actively posting your website content to your social media pages. Passive refers to enabling sharing options on your site to leverage the social networks of your readers.

What we do to promote our content through social media is not going to work for everyone, and what others do probably won’t work for us. But, I will use Newfangled as an example.

Whenever we send a newsletter or post a new blog post, we promote it by first tweeting about it. Usually Chris Butler will tweet it once it is published, and it will usually get a couple of re-tweets from others in the office.

The other social media avenue we utilize is LinkedIn. We started a group on LinkedIn which is fairly active, and we promote discussion in this group. Because of this small, engaged audience, it makes LinkedIn a good place for us to promote our content as well. Joining active, tightly-focused LinedIn groups can be very beneficial because it enables you to reach a very targeted audience. Some other niche groups I would recommend are the PJA Advertising: This Week in Digital Media group, or the HOW Mind Your Own Business group, just to name a couple.

Use your website

Sometimes the best promotion tool is your own website. A website that is focused on content strategy should have various avenues to promote the all-important content.

For example, we have the ability to publicize newsletters and blog posts in specified areas of our homepage so that they are seen as soon as a user hits the site.

Another way we publicize within the site is our related content sidebar widget. If you look over to the right on this page, you’ll see a sidebar widget at the very top that suggests other related articles that you may enjoy. This is a more passive promotion, but we have noticed that it can be quite affective.

Make it personal

Occasionally taking the time to send a uniquely crafted, regular old email to someone who you think would enjoy reading and benefit from the content can really stand out. Promotion doesn’t always have to be to the masses – it’s OK to promote content at an individual level.

These are just a few examples of how to promote your content. Clearly, there are other ways to promote your content and your brand, but remember, writing the content is only half the work. The other half is getting it into the hands of people who want to read it.

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What you need to know about Google+ brand pages

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Google has decided to breathe down Facebook’s neck with a new social network that looks an awful lot like Facebook, only with a plus sign attached. Soon we’ll see a Google+ version of Facebook’s wildly popular product pages, even though Google’s group product manager, Christian Oestlien, announced today that it would temporarily be shutting down non-user profiles, while opening up a beta program for those who apply.

Before we can predict Google’s upcoming “public” version of product pages, we need to acknowledge the differences between Facebook and Google’s strategy. Even though Google presented the world with a product that is 97% similar to Facebook’s product, it is attempting to differentiate itself by fulfilling a real need in the social world — the need to divide your friends into different groups, just like in real life.

Google is attempting to distance itself from Facebook by mainly creating “circles” that allow you to divide the people you know into groups and share individually targeted content. This might seem like a small difference, but in the social world, a slight change in delivery can completely affect the nature of the interaction. For example, Facebook requires that you accept every friend, but Twitter makes it a bit easier for people out of your network to follow your newsfeed — creating a more “open” environment.

All of our clients at FanGager, including global organizations like American Express and Microsoft, are looking for methods to target specific audiences on social networks — like posting wall messages for women only. My assumption is that Google will attempt to capitalize on this void, and apply the notion of building individual audiences to its version of pages. This will allow page owners to communicate with different groups through one main page.

So, according to this logic, the products page will only look similar to personal profiles when logging in. Perhaps in addition to asking what circle they want to join, surfers will also be asked if they wish to join circles based on a specific category — such as those looking for discounts, for brand fans or for fans of the brand’s spokesperson. This way, they can choose the value they get personally when visiting the page.

The next stage will be combining all of Google’s unique abilities into a section of the product pages, such as its map services and the business services basket. This may include the unique features of Google Analytics, which could feature not only the page’s results, but more importantly, the movement from the Google+ page to the website; linking the visitor’s social engagement with sales and other ROI goals.

So, who wins and who loses when Google+ launches its own version of Facebook product pages?

Short-term loser: brands First of all, Google+ shut down any brand pages already created and is now controlling access to a beta program that will be great for brands that get in early like Ford and MTV but bad for everyone else. It creates a period of uncertainty for brands, as well as another platform they need to be concerned about.

But on the plus side, this delay will give brands some time to get used to the platform and start developing a strategy. Brands will still have to train its social media managers and focus resources that may already be taxed by other social sites for the new marketing platform. But, for now, brands can figure out how, and if they should, create messaging that will be consistent across all its social networks, along with the daunting task of managing more fans.

In the long term, brands could be the overall biggest winner of the targeted “circle” trend. If all moves forward as it should, and other sites catch up to the trend, brands will be able to develop more individualized messaging that will meet specific ROI goals — i.e. sales, website traffic, etc.

Immediate winner: fans and customers Once the pages are officially launched, fans will be able to create their own experience and conversations with brands. So, instead of receiving “white noise” from product pages, they will potentially receive what is only relevant to their individual interests. This can include information on specific discount promotions, customer queries on individual products or issues and other unique requests. Basically, they will now have the ability to get what they really want out of the brands they follow.

Facebook The social network will do what it always does — pressure itself to be better. (As shown by yesterday’s new product rollouts.) Expect it to continue to expand its product pages with new applications and services. Sure, it’ll probably add similar Google services (its only fair), like more advanced data analytics and targeted fan engagement activities. But I don’t think Facebook is worried, yet, due to its current social dominance.

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Content future of Google+

I have been spending time on Google+ since its launch, and though people on Google+ are talking a lot about Google+ (isn’t that breaking the first rule of fight club?) every day I begin to see its potential take it into different directions — not based upon the platform itself, but rather based upon its interoperability with Google’s other properties. Seamless YouTube video integration. Real-time photo sharing via Google Photos. Music library streaming via Google Music. Document sharing. Connections via Google Talk. Surely, more features will be rolled out over the coming weeks to millions of users still trying to figure out the purpose of the platform. And that’s the beauty of platforms — the users get to figure out how they are ultimately used, and shape their evolution.

But it seems that there is a path that Google+ is headed down, with or without our complicity: a media-sharing and discovery powerhouse. Its tight integration with Google’s own suite of content creation and consumption products and properties make Google+ a wonderful real-time content-sharing and discovery engine. As we have seen with Facebook, nothing engages consumers like good content in their social networking streams, and there is no shortage of that in the Google ecosystem to proliferate and reverberate through Google+’s echo chamber.

Echo chambers often start out as just that, until they become more mainstreamed. Twitter has been on this path for years, and is about to take their next great leap, iOS5 and iPhone integration. With “Share With Twitter” an option throughout the new iPhone operating system, millions of people will be introduced to a service that has been differentiated enough from Facebook to attract celebrities and their fans, as a means of constant connectivity — especially around spur-of-the-moment photos and videos. With a Twitter/Apple alliance, more photos and videos will be shared via Twitter than ever — putting Google in a position to defend their territory.

Enter Google+

Play around with Google+ for 10 minutes on an Android-powered phone and you’ll get an idea where this is all going — to the same place that Twitter is: real-time multimedia content sharing and discovery. Photos you take get instantly uploaded to the cloud (via your Google account) and displayed in your streams, and +1s on links and content get factored into Google’s search algorithms — and your profile. If you want further proof that Google is in the content sharing/discovery/curation/programming business more than ever, take a look at YouTube’s experimental redesign.

I have ranted a great deal about the importance of brands’ commitments to making their content portable (and better and more plentiful), and it seems that will never have been more important than it will be within weeks, when critical masses start adopting the new features of platforms and gateways that they know and love, connecting to each other around content that they all find relevant, sharing it with others they know will care.

Brands are about to get two very important content distribution channels (in addition to Facebook), and should be developing their content distribution strategies now, if they haven’t already. Facebook will likely remain a channel for consumers to have a relationship with the people and brands they “like,” but Google+ and Twitter look to be on a collision course as channels that may drive significantly more content shares and views due to their platform, device, and software integrations. Add Google’s Search and product importance into the mix, and you don’t just get distribution, you get filing, storage, and streaming as well.

Google+ is not a fill-in-the-blank-killer just yet. But it will impact the way we find and share the stuff that we find interesting — especially for those dependent upon Google products and mobile devices. If you’re a brand, figure out how to get interesting very quickly, as the quality of your content is going to affect how and why people engage with you across every device and platform.

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Google+ epic success or epic failure

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Google+ is headed for 20 million members by this weekend, and, depending on who you talk to, it’s either an epic success or an epic failure. But I think many of my esteemed colleagues are looking at Google+ from the wrong point of view.

Everyone is writing about circles, privacy, hangouts, and whether people will switch from Facebook to Google+. But much more interesting stuff is and has been going on behind the scenes. Brands, publishers and agencies should take note and prepare to participate.

The real meat of Google+

The real meat of Google+ is in Profiles , mobile payments, and authorship claims — all of which are going to solidify Google’s dominance (ComScore reports it’s the first company ever to hit 1 billion unique users a month) as the world’s best damn search engine, online, in the cloud, and in mobile. You’ll find me on Google+ here.

I think Facebook will continue its dominance as a social scene, and Google+ will become the dominant social network for business. Sure there are glitches in Google+ features now, and there’ll be more. But Google is listening and already changing and adapting to what people want within the Google+ beta. They’re thinking way beyond today, into a future where all online content will be integrated, and the semantic web will be in full effect.

Authorship claims

Google says that claiming authorship of your content “gives Google what we need to better identify you as the author of web content.” When Google detects content you’ve marked as yours, they’ll list that content on the +1 tab of your Google Profile (they’ll do this automatically as soon as you’ve +1′d at least one webpage). As Search Engine Journal notes, at the very least, though, it’s phenomenal news for those who write.

I believe Google’s use of the +1 button to identify authorship of online content will be a sea change in search, in influence building, and in online reputation management. Google already has the Google Checkout payment system and merchants already show up in searches for products.

Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks open to businesses, Google already has built-in productivity apps for enterprise, including email, in use by more than 200 million Gmail users, plus more than 3 million businesses using its Apps. Google has announced that Apps will undergo some sort of massive version change on July 19, and that surely will be related to Google+.

Ufuk Kayserilioglu reports that Google confirms that it already is testing some interfacing of Google+ with Google Apps and they’ve already begun to offer additional email storage upgrades for a fee.

How to get your business ready for Google+:

  • While businesses are asked not to create a profile on Google yet (and ones that do will find them deleted) you should be adding the Google +1 button (Google’s version of the tweet this or Facebook like button) to your websites, blogs, content and ads. It is likely that these “votes of confidence” from users will show up on their Google+ profile pages and be integrated into Google’s search rankings’ secret sauce. These are already being incorporated into Google search-engine results.
  • Apply for a Google+ Entity Profile to be part of the beta testing of including brands in the Google+ experience.

The biggest negative

The biggest negative I see is that integration of Google+ features (circles, email, documents, photos, chat, hangouts, etc.) will let Google know even more about what we search, who we interact with, what we like, where we go and with whom (calendar, maps, directions) and our search results will adapt to those preferences, which is the opposite of what I want search to do. This is a very dangerous trend that could have huge political, social, and business implications.

Issues are complex

The issues are complex, and it’s way too soon to write Google+ off as a failure, say it doesn’t matter, or to think it’s the holy grail.

The one thing that’s for sure is that it’s one of the more interesting social concepts to come along in a long time. And you can bet Mr. Zuckerburg is burning the midnight oil this week wishing he couldkill Googlewith his great big hunting knife.

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50 social media stats

1. “Social media accounts for one out of every six minutes spent online in US.” (Journalism.co.uk)

2. “Seventy-seven percent report that they use social media to share their love of a show; 65% use it as a platform to help save their favorite shows; and 35% use it to try to introduce new shows to their friends.” (TVGuide.com study via TVNewsCheck.com)

3. “Facebook users are overall more trusting than non-internet others. Pew reported, 43% of survey participants were more likely than other internet users to feel that most people can be trusted.” (Pew Internet via Social Media Club)

4. “22% of all grandparents in the UK are using social networks, according to Mashable. The study, which collected results from 1,341 grandparents from the UK, showed that 71% of grandparents who use a social network use Facebook, 34% are on Twitter and 9% use the business social network LinkedIn.” (Mashable via Social Media Today)

5. “In the first four months after its January 2010 launch in Russia, Facebook use grew by 376%, and today more than 4.5 million people use the site regularly.” (comscore.com via Mashable)

6. “The ‘Weinergate’ scandal caused a significant drop in tweeting politicians. According to VentureBeat, after the scandal ‘the number of tweets by Republican members of Congress dropped by 27 percent, while those of Democrats dropped by 29 percent.'” (VentureBeat via Marketing Pilgrim)

7. Instagram “currently has a user base of 4.25 million in only seven months, with ten photos being posted a second.” (prsarahevans.com via TechCrunch)

8. “It only takes 20 people to bring an online community to a significant level of activity and connectivity.” (Ning via TheNextWeb)

9. “Nearly twice as many men (63%) as women (37%) use LinkedIn.” (Pew Internet via prsarahevans.com)

10. “In the last election Google was the largest player — the Obama campaign directed 45% of its online campaign dollars to the search site.” (Advertising Age)

11. “59% of adult Facebook users had “liked” a brand as of April, up from 47% the previous September. Uptake among the oldest users appears to have been a major factor in this rise.” (eMarketer)

12. “In 2010, 29.3 million readers read some 270 million pages of Post journalism each month, a record for The Washington Post. Of that, 28.1 million did so online and, while [Washington Post] brought in 4.2 million new readers on average each month compared to the previous year, [they] also lost some 35,000 print subscribers in 2010 alone.” (Forbes)

13. “25% of hotels [are] still ignoring social media.” (TravelClick via Econsultancy)

14. “Businesses are paying Twitter $120,000 to sponsor a promoted trending topic for a day. […] That’s up from $25,000 to $30,000 when the feature was launched in April 2010.” (via Poynter)

15. “AOL’s newsroom is now bigger than The New York Times’.” (Business Insider)

16. “Mobile is one of the fastest-growing platforms in the world. With 40% of U.S. mobile subscribers regularly browsing the internet on their phone and a projected 12.5% of all e-commerce transactions going mobile by the end of the year, it’s a channel that you need to be aware of. According to Google, mobile web traffic will surpass PC traffic by 2013.” (60 Second Marketer)

17. “Twitter is 6-7 times smaller than Facebook.” (via Social Media Today)

18. “There are now 54 million active Mac users around the world.” (AllThingsD)

19. “130 million books have been downloaded from iBooks.” (AllThingsD)

20. “Users say they’re more likely to buy if a business answers their questions on Twitter.” (NYTimes.com)

21. “Nearly half (42%) indicated that if they’ve already allocated a portion of their marketing spend to social media, they would increase this spend over the course of the year. Only 8% of those surveyed indicated that they would decrease social media spend.” (The Next Web)

22. “13% of online adults use the status update service Twitter, which represents a significant increase from the 8% of online adults who identified themselves as Twitter users in November 2010. 95% of Twitter users own a mobile phone, and half of these users access the service on their handheld device.” (Pew Internet)

23. “According to HubSpot, small businesses plan to spend 19 percent of budgets on social media vs. only 6 percent in larger businesses. A similar gap is shown for blogging with 10 percent of budgets for small business vs. just 3 percent for large.” (Hubspot via ClickZ)

24. “33 percent of its worldwide traffic is inside the United States.” (Problogger)

25. “Facebook has three times as many accounts as Twitter, and 20 percent of Twitter’s users produce at least 80 percent of the site’s content.” (Problogger)

26. “In early March, Google removed from its Android Market more than 60 applications carrying malicious software. Some of the malware was designed to reveal the user’s private information to a third party, replicate itself on other devices, destroy user data or even impersonate the device owner.” (Network World)

27. “Groupon is on track to bring in between $3 billion and $4 billion in revenue this year alone. Facebook’s 2010 sales were reported to be only around $2 billion in its sixth year of existence.” (Knowledge@Wharton via MSNBC)

28. “A study of 24,000 consumers across the 16 largest countries found that those who are most connected, living on the cutting edge of social media tend to be more ‘prosocial’ than average, being more likely to do volunteer work, offer their seats in crowded places, lend possessions to others and give directions.” (TheNextWeb)

29. “99 percent of Android devices are vulnerable to password theft.” (MobileCrunch)

30. “Recent estimates put less than 10% of the population using Twitter, far less than other social sites.” (Advertising Age)

31. “More than 3.34 million mentions were recorded over a one-month period of people making social asks.” (PRsarahevans.com)

32. “David Poltrack, CBS Corp., announced that, based on a new research study, ‘age and sex don’t matter when it comes to increasing TV ad effectiveness.'” (Forbes)

33. “An average of 40 percent of the traffic to the top 25 news sites comes from outside referrals, the study found, with Google Search and, to a lesser extent, Google News the single biggest traffic driver.” (via AFP)

34. “Almost one-in-four South Africans use social media as a tool to look for work, but are concerned about the potential career fallout from personal content on social networking sites.” (Kelly Group via BusinessReport)

35. “The percentage of US parents who allow their children between ages 10 and 12 to use Facebook or MySpace more than doubled from 8 percent a year ago to 17 percent now.” (via NY Post)

36. “33% of Facebook posting is mobile.” (Dan Zarella)

37. “Fully 69% of visitors to news.google.com ended up 3 places: nytimes.com (14.6%), cnn.com (14.4%) and abcnews.go.com (14.0%).” (Journalism.org)

38. “85% of media websites now use online video to cover news.” (SocialTimes.com)

39. “”Social media advertising spending will increase from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $8.3 billion by 2015.” (BIA/Kelsey via Direct Marketing News)

40. “Facebook is approaching 700 million users and Google handles over 11 billion queries per month. World-wide there are over 5 billion mobile subscribers (9 out of 10 in the U.S.) and every two days there is more information created than between the dawn of civilization and 2003.” (via Lee Odden, TopRank)

41. “Twitter reported that the network saw more than 4,000 tweets per second (TPS) at the beginning and end of Obama’s speech [re: death of Osama Bin Laden]” (AllTwitter)

42. “65% of all social media related to the royal wedding has come from the U.S. in the past month [April]. The U.K. has been responsible for just 20%.” (USA Today)

43. Re: the Royal Wedding: “911,000 wedding-related tweets were tracked in the past 30 days. That’s about 30,000 per day and accounts for 71% of all social media.” (USA Today)

44. “According to NPR’s internal usage data covering January 1 through mid-April, users who request audio — maybe a station stream, a national newscast, or NPR Music content — view twice as many pages as those who only read the apps’ content. On average, audio streamers rack up 4.2 pageviews per visit versus 2.4 for the text-only crowd.” (Nieman Journalism Lab)

45. “Twitter penetration rates in Canada are among the highest in the world, according to new data from online tracking firm comScore Inc., which suggests that nearly one in five Canadian Internet users over the age of 15 regularly visit Twitter.” (via Financial Post)

46. “Traffic from social media has highest bounce rate. […] If you’re looking for ‘hyper-engaged’ readers, those that click through five or more pages on your site, forget the guy who came from Twitter. A link from another content site is three times more likely to be engaged, and someone coming in from search, is also above average.” (Marketing Pilgrim)

47. “”Digital services accounted for an estimated $8.5 billion (28%) of the $30.4 billion in 2010 U.S. revenue generated by the 900-plus advertising and marketing-services agencies that Ad Age analyzed.” (Advertising Age)

48. “Total Facebook spent on lobbying, Q1 2010: $41,390. Total Facebook spent on lobbying, Q1 2011: $230,000” (Huffington Post)

49. “Nearly seven in 10 tablet owners reported spending at least 1 hour per day using the device, including 38% who spent over 2 hours on it. And while just 28% consider it their primary computer, 77% are spending less time on desktop or laptop PCs since they got a tablet.” (eMarketer)

50. “According to a Network Solutions survey, the use of social media among SMBs has grown over the years, rising from 12 percent in 2009, to 24 percent in 2010 to 31 percent currently.” (Search Engine Watch)

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How to properly use Twitter for marketing & PR

Twitter is a tool for “micro-blogging” or posting very short updates, comments or thoughts.  In fact, since Twitter was designed to be very compatible with mobile phones through text messages, each update is limited to 140 characters.  Truly, a micro-blog.  Another way to think of Twitter is like a cross between instant messaging (IM) and a chat room, because it is an open forum, but you restrict it to the people with which you connect.

I have to admit I have not always been sold on Twitter.  At first I did not get it at all.  Then I thought I understood it, but thought it was stupid and useless.  Then I used it a bit more and got some more followers and followed a few more people.  Now I think it has some value, especially as a marketing and PR tool.

Ideas for How to Use Twitter for Marketing & PR

  1. Engage your CEO in social media.  Social media is a great way to have a conversation with your market and make and mange connections with prospects, customers, bloggers and other influencers.  But for a CEO, the typical routes to social media can be hard.  Especially if you are a larger or global company.  A CEO typically has little time to write a blog or answer lots of messages and friend requests on Facebook.  I cannot tell you how many CEO blogs I have seen with only 1 or 2 posts because the CEO never had time to update the blog after the first couple entries.  But, Twitter is limited to 140 characters per update, so it is all about short thoughts and comments.  If your CEO can send a text message, they can use Twitter from anywhere in the world as a marketing and PR tool.  Twitter is actually perfect for CEO or founder who is always on the road meeting with people and who has some interesting opinions on your market.
  2. Keep in touch with bloggers / media.  It is really easy to follow someone on Twitter (see below). And you’ll be surprised how often they decide to follow you as well.  In fact, I have lots of people I consider “famous” in the marketing and PR worlds following me.  In my opinion, this is a way easier way to connect with influential people in the media than calling and emailing them.
  3. Monitor your company / brand on Twitter.  A while back we noticed that Guy Kawasaki mentioned Website Grader on Twitter.  Well, of course we had to let him know a bit more about Website Grader and maybe ask if he would also blog about it?  The result was this blog article on Website Grader which drove a good amount of traffic and leads.  (See below for a cool tip on how to easily monitor people talking about your company on Twitter.)
  4. Announce specials, deals or sales.  If you are a retailer or anyone who often has special offers, you can use Twitter to announce these deals instantly to a large audience.  You know those commercials from Southwest Airlines about that “Ding” application you could download and would then alert you about specials on flights?  Well, Twitter can be used as a kind of free version of that.  Dell and Woot have done just this type of marketing, with a lot of success.
  5. Live updates on events or conferences.  If you participate in a large trade show or run your own corporate event, you can use Twitter to announce last minute changes, cool events that are happening (“Just announced, David Meerman Scott book signing in the exhibit hall until 11am”) and more.  It is a great last minute marketing tool.
  6. Promote blog articles, webinars, interesting news and more.  Its really easy to post a link to something in Twitter, and I often post links to blog articles on this blog, or other news articles relevant to blog.  A good idea is to post articles on other websites that are relevant to your business, like a customer success story or other PR coverage.  If you have other content that is appealing to your audience like a free webinar, post links to those too.

 

Using Twitter for Marketing & PR – A Step-by-Step Guide

  1. Sign-up and post a profile.  Visit Twitter and click on the “Get Started – Join” button in the middle.  The rest is simple enough that I think you can figure it out without my help.
  2. Write some updates.  The beauty of Twitter is that the 140 character limit is the great equalizer – I am about as good of a writer as Shakespeare on Twitter.  Post a link to a news article you liked with a one line comment, mention an interesting thought you had, or tell everyone what you are cooking for dinner.  Just write something.
  3. Make friends.  Making friends on Twitter is pretty easy.  Just surf around the web on your favorite blogs, people’s Facebook profiles etc, and when you see a Twitter box that tells you what they are doing click on it.  That will bring you to their profile and then you just click on the “Follow” button on the top left and you are now following them.  Most of the time they will then follow you back, and the audience for your 140 character insights will have grown by one person.  You can get started by following me: Martin on Twitter.  You can also click on the people that other people are following to find more people to follow.
  4. How to post URLs.  Twitter is based on 140 character updates.  If you have a really long URL, that doesn’t leave much room for  Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short.  Give it a shot if you have a long URL that you want to market on Twitter.
  5. Monitor conversations about your company.  Even if you don’t join Twitter yourself you can monitor what people are saying about any person, company or brand.  This is quite useful from a marketing and PR standpoint.  Twitter has a search engine that lets you do just this.  For instance, here is a list of everyone who is talking about Caotica on Twitter.  You can subscribe to these searches by RSS to keep yourself updated.  Another tip is that you can “follow” all the people you find talking about your company (just click on their username to go to their profile).  If they are talking about your company, they would probably be pretty happy that someone from the company wants to follow them.
  6. How to “chat”.  Using the @ symbol before someone’s Twitter username is how people have “conversations” in Twitter.  This makes their username a link to their profile so other people can follow the conversation (sort of).  For example if you wrote “@mvolpe thanks for the cool blog article about Twitter today” that would be a way of telling me you liked this article. Try it out.  It’s not IM (instant messaging), but it is sort of like a publicly broadcast IM service.
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How to protect the reputation of your small business Online

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By now, most small business owners understand the important role the Internet can play in helping to raise and drive interest and demand for their products and services. With all the innovative online technologies out there, it’s easy to feel tempted to rush into things. Please, for the love of your business, slow down.

Before you worry about launching a Twitter channel or pitching a post idea to a local blogger, you need to take a step back and consider how online conversations might impact the reputation of your small business. PR blow-ups aren’t just a problem for big companies — there are risks for small businesses, too. Online engagement requires the same level of planning and thought you give to other parts of your business. Here are four tips for protecting your small business — and livelihood — online.

1. Research & Planning

Thinking through the details is the most important way you can start to protect your reputation online, whether you have a small bakery outside Detroit or a multi-national corporation. Ask yourself these important questions before you do anything:

  • What are my goals and objectives?
  • Who am I trying to reach? Where do I think those people are online?
  • What online channels or social media sites might be the right fit for my business?
  • How much time do I realistically have to invest in this?
  • Am I prepared for negative conversation about my products and services?

Use the intelligence you gather to assemble a plan, and think modestly to start. Remember, the goal is not to get on every social media channel out there. You should instead be contributing in the places online that make sense for you.

2. Monitoring & Listening

Like research and planning, listening to online conversations is a critical part of protecting your small business’s reputation. There are a couple of reasons why.

First, before you start communicating, you should know what others are saying about you, your competitors and other similar businesses. This background information will help you determine what you can share that others might find of interest or value. It will also help prevent you from sticking your foot in your mouth. If you open a butcher shop, you’d want to know the most influential foodie blogger in your area is a vegetarian before you shoot him an email about your new organic bacon, for example.

Monitoring conversation is also important because it will help you uncover complaints and other problems that you might not otherwise know about. This is directly connected to how you respond to negative comments, which we’ll explore in a moment. There are number of easy ways you can monitor online conversation, such as using a tool like HootSuite for Twitter and Facebook and Google Alerts for blogs and traditional media coverage. Mashable has a number of great articles with more information on how you can do this affordably.

3. Joining the Conversation

How you engage in conversations online will vary depending on the channel you pick, whether that’s Facebook or Foursquare. No matter what channel you choose, you can help mitigate risks to your business by planning ahead, being committed and showing transparency.

  • Planning ahead. Like newspapers and magazines, big companies often create editorial calendars for their online communications, aligning things like company events and press releases with messages on Facebook, Twitter and blogs. Your small business might not need an elaborate spreadsheet to schedule your updates, but you should look ahead and think through the news and information you might want to share in the weeks ahead. Try creating your own calendar every two weeks. After you give that a try, you can do it more or less frequently, depending on what works best for you.
  • Being Committed. When you join conversations, online communities will expect you to stick around. Oftentimes, people may have follow-up questions or new issues may arise. Don’t post something and disappear. Keep your editorial calendar current and keep checking back on old posts and respond again, if warranted. If you don’t, people will begin to see your online interactions as self-serving or lazy, and you will lose trust.
  • Showing Transparency. Lastly, always be transparent about who you are and what you’re doing online. This is extremely important. Whenever you join conversations, whether it is emailing a blogger, commenting on a Facebook post or responding to a comment about your business on Yelp, always be very clear that you are responding on behalf of your small business. In some cases, it may even make sense to include your email address so people who would like more information can reach you. Online communities hate feeling misled — even if it is completely unintentional. Above, you’ll see a great example from a small indie record shop in Cleveland on how to keep your community informed about important policy changes that impact them in a friendly, casual and professional way.

4. When Conversation Turns Negative

Before you hit the ground running with your digital communications plan, there is one last thing to consider: What will you do if people write nasty things about you, or even worse, an issue explodes that could deliver a devastating knock-out blow to your business?

The risks can be scary, but the good news is that by preparing in advance and following the guidelines discussed above, you can manage those risks. The most important thing to do when you receive negative feedback is to respond as soon as possible — and that’s true of almost any online channel. Below is an example from Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C. This is a successful response because it is prompt, open to the public and offers an apology to the customer for his inconvenience. There is nothing wrong with admitting a mistake or apologizing. Most people will stick with you if you work to make things right.

Our last point — and this is really important — is to be very cautious about deleting negative comments. By overreacting to negative discussion, it may look like your business has something to hide. This chips away at the community’s trust in you. You also will lose a valuable opportunity to change opinions. Thoughtful responses to negative comments are a terrific opportunity to engage your customers, help correct their complaints and potentially turn them into advocates. Don’t throw that opportunity away by simply making an uncomfortable discussion disappear.

Do you have more tips for small businesses looking to engage online communities? Let us know in the comments below.

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New Social Media features for marketers to be aware of

Facebook Launches the Subscribe Button

This past week, Facebook launched a subscribe button, which allows you to choose on a user by user basis “whether you’d like to see all updates, most updates, or just important updates from another user.” It also allows you to open up your profile to subscribers who are not your friends on Facebook. 

By opening up more of its content to the public, Facebook is increasing your content’s chances of showing up in search engine results. Facebook’s subscribe option also allows individuals to grow their following and determine which content they want to make viewable to certain groups of friends or subscribers. 

Marketing Takeaway: When publishing content in social networks, make sure you are making it publicly available. This will enable your content to reach a much broader audience beyond your direct network, extending its reach. In addition, be sure you’re optimizing your social media posts and updates with appropriate keywords for your business to help it get found by searchers. This will increase the impact your social media posts have on organic search traffic to your website.

Twitter Announces Twitter Web Analytics

Twitter announced last week that it will be releasing its own official Twitter Web Analytics tool. The aim of the tools is to help “website owners understand how much traffic they generate from Twitter as well as the effectiveness of Twitter integrations on their websites.” It will allow marketers to determine:

  • How much of their website content is being shared on Twitter.
  • How much web traffic Twitter generates for their website.
  • How effective their Tweet Button integration is.

As an inbound marketer, measuring your various marketing efforts is an important element of success. Understanding what is working and what isn’t allows you to focus your energy and limited time where it can impact your business the most. 

Marketing Takeaway: Always be on the lookout for new ways to measure, and gain a solid understanding, about your marketing efforts. If you don’t already have integrated marketing analytics software that offers these types of analytics, consider one. Analyzing your marketing programs and understanding where your traffic and leads are coming from can help you improve your campaigns, do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.

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