The Real Reason Your Customers Don’t Like You on Facebook
In addition to the controversial redesign of the news feed, and announcements from the f8 conference about the new Timeline profile and app-fueled Graph Rank, was another very interesting Facebook-related development last week. My friends (and client) ExactTarget released part 10 of their social media research series. This one is called “The Meaning of Like” […]
Does QR stand for Quasi-Ridiculous? (an analysis)
I understand QR codes are the new “it” thing, the Taylor Lautner of calls-to-action. And indeed, given the increasing ubiquity of smart phones (41% in the U.S. according to new research by my client ExactTarget), many of your potential customers have the capacity to interact with your QR code. But whether they will or not […]
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 […]
Why You’re Pissing Off Half Your Facebook Fans
Sure it has 600 million members and is significantly more compelling than any film made by Nicholas Cage in the past five years, but even with those inherent advantages, Facebook for business is hard. It’s not just that Facebook has a distinctly Favre-like approach to features and decision-making. Or, that Facebook is very clearly in […]
Why I’m Competing With You. And You. And You. And You.
Social media changes the very fabric of corporate competition. It used to be that your competitors were the people that sold similar goods and services, or operated in the same geographical area. No more. Now, you’re competing with Coke. With McDonald’s. With Chevy. And Zappos. And Jet Blue. And every other company on the planet. […]
Invitation Avalanches, Attention Infidelity, and the Science of the Social Break-Up
Is the golden goose poisoned before it’s even an adult? The current relationship between companies and consumers via social media and email is unsustainable. The backlash has begun, and abuse of any one channel has a spillover effect on consumer attitudes toward other channels. That’s one of my main takeaways from fascinating new research from […]
A Day I’ll Always Remember
And as one chapter ends, another begins. Today is the official release date of The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter & More Social, my new book co-written with my friend Amber Naslund about how companies need to retool from the inside out to meet the real-time business challenges presented by […]
Why Looking in the Mirror Makes an Ass Out of U and Me
Believing your customers are just like you – or homogenous in any way – is a psychological bear trap that is difficult for even the savviest marketer or executive to escape. It’s human nature. We figure that since we like tennis, and we know a few of our customers that like tennis, it stands to […]
It’s More About the Social Than It Is About the Media
Sure, the gadgets and gizmos and the apps and androids of social media make it more convenient for us to interact with one another, and with brands. But it’s not really about the bits and bytes and data and Dick Costolo, is it? It envelopes us, but technology is only the third most important “ly” […]
Ra Ra Wrong. How Facebook’s Cheerleaders Are Blowing Smoke
Part 1 of a 3-Part Rant I realize it’s in the best interests of Facebook, the media, application developers, and sometimes even brands themselves to concoct pseudo-science that “proves” that people that “like” your company are instantly turned into a zombie army of influential advocates. But it’s simply not true. Despite a pile of coverage […]
Why Social Supports Email in the Interactive Marketing Hub
A big distinction between email marketing and social media marketing is the difference between actual audience and potential audience. Email is all about actual audience. If someone signs up for your email updates when you send one out, that person will receive it in almost every case. Will that open it? Approximately 25% of the […]
The 3 Amigos: Email, Blogging, Social Sharing
For a while now, there’s been too much talk about social media vs. email vs. search. All of these tactics can work together seamlessly to create a robust, optimized content marketing engine that pays real dividends in increased website traffic, and conversions. A collaboration between RESMARK Systems (a provider of hospitality software), Western River Expeditions […]
Is Twitter for Business Even Worth the Trouble?
We built our own Frankenstein. We are spending countless employee hours tweeting, retweeting, responding to tweets, figuring out whom to follow, secretly following celebs and athletes, and designing custom Twitter backgrounds. Nobody forced companies to get involved with their customers in this way. There was no law, edict, or pitchfork-wielding band of angry citizens. We […]
3 Reasons Email is the Coolest Vampire Today
Guest post by Jeff Rohrs, who heads up the Marketing Research & Education Team at ExactTarget. A driving force behind the company’s SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy, Jeff is also co-author of the ExactTarget/CoTweet SUBSCRIBERS, FANS & FOLLOWERS Research Series. He lives in Cleveland and has not, to his knowledge, ever been bitten by a vampire—although he […]
Are You Treating Your Fans Like Cattle
Email ain’t dead yet. When they wake up, 59% of consumers check their email account before anything else online, according to new research from ExactTarget (disclosure: client), in a sweeping survey of 400+ Americans. (play with the data in the super cool interactive tool below) This correlates well with a similar, but far less statistically […]
Getting Serious About Social Media
My clients at ExactTarget yesterday published a terrific, free executive briefing called Letter to the C-Suite: Getting Serious About Social Media. It includes a dozen letters written to C-level executives (in general) about what they need to do to take social media to the next level. Reading them through, I really wish we could have […]