StumbleUpon Referrals Drive More Traffic, Last Longer Than Facebook And Twitter. Click for the full infographic:
Working in public relations, we’ve all faced this challenge. You stare at your Facebook fan page and ask yourself, “How do we get more fans?” Referring to my colleague Candace McCaffery’s post Making Sense of Measurement: Social Media ROI, sometimes quantity is okay depending on the program and the reach you are trying to accomplish but it should always be backed with quality and fan engagement. Your company has seen organic growth, engaged its audience and seen a steady incline in its fan base over the years, but you’ve finally secured that budget and you’re ready to inject that into your social campaigns. Sitting back and expecting people to discover you via a contest is just like sitting back and expecting people to discover you without the contest, so let’s ask a few questions. You’ve done your research, found the contest that’s right for you, researched 3rd party vendors to build your application, secured partnerships, set your timeline and covered all of your bases. You’ve finalized your prizes, creatives have been…well, created and launch day is here. Now what? Be prepared. Coming out of your contest, ensure that you integrate your opt-ins into your email database and send off those prizes (with the necessary tax forms) quickly. You’ve been looking at the numbers the entire time. Would you do it again? How would you do it differently? Now back to quality engagement. That’s what social media is all about. See my original post on the Cookerly blog.
The world moves fast. Very fast. And it is pretty accepted that how we market is changing. Some may try to cling to world of building offers and pumping them to the four corners of the internet in the hopes of driving some traffic back to your site and, if the Gods smile upon you, selling something. But this is not going to work in the new world order given where consumers are spending their time and how marketers are now shifting their efforts and marketing dollars.
Eric Wheeler, CEO of 33across, recently declared that the “Campaign is Dead.” If you haven’t read the article go back and read it. He makes several claims but the gist is we have to market not based upon an arbitrary 6-to-8-week campaign window but instead must engage with customers 24/ 7/ 365 — even if you only have a marketing budget that only allows you to spend in heavy bursts of 26 weeks through the calendar year. Eric says spend all the time, just do it against the right people. Amen Brother! A marketer needs to have constant pressure (a steady rain shower of marketing messages as an old Marketing Prof told me) that surrounds the consumer and helps them to make a purchase.
Social media is obviously changing all of this. We aren’t waiting for people to put in a query to tell us that they are interested in us, we are constantly sharing and distributing our messages to our consumers to help them grow their brands. Marketers need to be turned on and dialed in 24/7 to what consumers are talking about and need to deploy their messages back to the customers at the pace of consumer conversations.
This phenomenon is called “Real-Time Marketing,” and is a formidable challenge for many marketers to master. In fact, IBM just released a study stating that CMOs are not sufficiently plugged into real-time data to make decisions. This is a huge issue since 82% of the CMOs plan to increase spend in social media but only ~40% actually listen to what people are saying. (And sure, this study is a great example of content marketing to convince you to hire IBM, but hey, we’re all marketing.) I like the cheat sheet on the study instead of reading it; if you are like me just watch the video below to get a feel for it.
The problem of converting insights from listening into action is not going away as the data in social media is unstructured — meaning that making sense of it is really hard. Not to mention the actual volume of data and consumer usage is still growing at a significant clip. Marketers can’t deploy their own technologies to solve these problems and the listening tools out there today do a good job of aggregating the signal but they don’t make it actionable for the customer.
We have written about the need of a marketer to bring technology to this problem - Rise of the Machine in Social Media. And we firmly believe in the real-time marketing scenario. We believe in storytelling. We believe that a marketer should use technology to help them figure out what they should say when. And now is the time for marketers and agencies to increase their technology to help them deliver the most relevant content to their followers.
via: livetout

On one level, the research that emerged from HP Labs Friday is unsurprising: we tend to bow to peer pressure, and it’s as true in social media as in real life. But how much peer pressure does it take, and what other factors come into play? The answers may surprise you. Read more.