Speak No Evil – Why Trust Isn’t a 4 Letter Word in Social Media
Now is the summer of our discontent. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For social media, one hand giveth (instant spread of the Bin Laden news) while the other hand taketh away (seemingly daily stories about a company or person doing it “wrong”). The most egregious occurrence of late […]
Customer Stalking – When Is Your Twitter Response Too Fast?
Guest post by Neicole Crepeau, an Online Strategist at Coherent Interactive. She blogs at Coherent Social Media. The other week, I was participating in Jay’s hashtagsocialmedia.com chat on social media. (It takes place every Tuesday at noon EST.) The exchange is below: @jaybaer #sm107 BONUS Q4. How important is speed of response on Twitter? And […]
Eureka! A Free Search Engine That Will Juice Your Email Marketing
Considering that just about every company of every size sends email to its customers, this post probably applies to you. Do you need design inspiration? Ideas for how to make your emails look snappier, with more compelling layouts? Do you want to keep tabs on your competitors? What emails they are sending, and when? Do […]
Holding Hands and Pointing Fingers – Promoting Social Outposts with Specificity
Specific promotion works. Vague promotion fails. I learned this first-hand when I ran azfamily.com, a pioneering local website in Phoenix powered by several TV and radio stations. We strongly encouraged our TV news anchors to reference the website on-air. I tracked traffic to the site on a second-to-second basis when it was mentioned on TV, […]
Will Geo-Targeting Jump Start Twitter Advertising
Guest post from Matt Krautstrunk, an expert on VOIP phone systems based in San Diego. He writes extensively at Resource Nation. When it comes to small business advertising, social holds seemingly endless opportunity. Small business owners are not only experimenting with social advertising, but they are investing in social even more so than other, more […]
Using Location-based Services for Content Marketing
Sure, location-based services like Foursquare are great for customer engagement and loyalty rewards. But they are also potential sources of great content. When we say “content creation” what we usually think of is the company in question creating informational materials themselves, and putting that information on a website, blog, and/or YouTube. But when you look […]
Why Won’t Facebook Give Us a Love Button?
Last week, Facebook celebrated the one year anniversary of the “like” button, the popular successor to the “fan” button, and the tip of the spear of its Open Graph gambit that it hopes will allow it to become the plumbing of the Web. By any measure, the “like” button is a smash hit. It is […]
The 7 Ways Good Agencies Mimic Gandalf the Wizard
Guest post by Marjorie Clayman, resident blogger at www.margieclayman.com. She works at Clayman Advertising, Inc., her family-owned full-service marketing firm. Somewhere along the way, the social media world was given carte blanche to poke fun at agencies. It seems like every week there is a new post or article about how “agencies” don’t get it or how […]
Debating the Future of Social Media Management
Join Mark W. Schaefer (whose {GROW} blog is a must-read) and me for a fireside chat about social media centralization vs. decentralization. While Mark and I agree about nearly everything, we have a difference of opinion on one particular topic: social media management and the role that social media will play within organizations. I contend […]
Is This The Greatest About Us Page Ever Written?
This is an era without information gatekeepers, and every company needs to think of itself as its own TV station, magazine, and newspaper. This puts a spotlight on businesses’ ability to tell their own stories with nuance and impact. Those stories don’t have to be solely contained on your blog, or your YouTube videos, or […]
The Reality of Competition in a Maturing Social Marketplace
Interview with Steve Lundin from Big Frontier when I was in Chicago for a presentation of The NOW Revolution. We discuss: Competition and social media gurus, wheat, and chaff; The future of Twitter and its stickiness problem; Agencies stubbing their social media toes; Do social crises create measurable business declines; The path to social ubiquity […]
An Easter Surprise, Using QR Codes for Instant Sampling
I’m a big fan of QR codes and similar technology. Maybe it’s my failing memory brought upon by encroaching middle age, but the ability to snap a photo of something rather than remember a URL is a big win in my estimation. In fact, we included 22 Microsoft Tags (similar to QR codes) in The […]
History Repeats – Facebook is the new AOL
My piece of a panel discussion on trends at SocialSlam in Knoxville, Tennessee a great event put together by my friend Mark W. Schaefer. History Repeats: AOL, Facebook, and Castles of Data View more presentations from Jay Baer Starting in 1992, America Online (AOL) spent more than $300 million sending floppy disks and later CDs […]
Don’t Ignore Social Media’s Research Value
Co-written with Kyle Mensing, an economics grad with a creative bent who is trying to merge business and social. Our intrinsic understanding of opportunity cost is what defines us as people. Our preference of city to country, work to play, beer to wine, restaurant to home cooking, video games to books, television to the outdoors, […]
Is Twitter Massively Overrated?
I was thunderstruck by new social media usage data released by Edison Research and Arbitron. In this thorough study of the media habits of Americans ages 12 and up (conducted annually since 1998), the survey authors have put a statistical fine point on something I’ve been pondering for a while: Is Twitter Massively Overrated? From […]
Joining Forces With Content Marketing Institute
We’ve entered an age where every company needs to think of itself as a TV station, as a magazine, as a newspaper. Telling your story in a relevant, authentic fashion across a multitude of modalities is the marketing of the present (especially for B2B). Since I started in strategy, information architecture, persona development, and content […]