The global growth in social networks is attributed to the need to connect (courtesy of Social Hallucinations)
After thinking about what’s truly different around the world with the increasingly widespread popularity of the social web, one word struck out especially loud and clear.
Real-time relationships.
There are almost 20,000 photos tagged with “Skittles” on Flickr (courtesy of PaPeR.cLiP)
First made in 1974 as a hard shelled candy, Skittles is part of the MARS stable and is easily recognisable for their multi-coloured sugar shells with the letter “S”. The candy brand shocked and awed the world back in March this year when they transformed their corporate website into a real-time social media portal. The new website also incorporates a floating widget pulling in content and inputs from Youtube, Flickr, Wikipedia and Facebook. To get onto their home page, all content producers – photos, videos, tweets – need to do is type the word “skittles” or tag them and Voila!
Skittles was able to initially generate a huge amounts of traffic (more than 1332% in a day) by people who were simply curious to see their own “skittles”. It also generated a tremendous amount of publicity and buzz online.
Don’t forget that Time (and Effort) IS money (Courtesy of shaphoto)
As the world continues to go gaga over how social media transforms the way we reach customers and do business, we need to bear this in mind:
Social media marketing can never be FREE – not even when you don’t pay a cent in advertising.
Can you stand out in the crowded world of social media? (Designed by Freepik)
You know what is paradoxical about social media?
The fact that as social technologies continues to evolve and develop, human behaviours and characteristics remain largely the same.
Courtesy of gapingvoid.com
Incubated and hatched just three years ago, Twitter was then a little chick in a nest, struggling to find its way in the world of social media dominated by giants.
Today, it is huge, with staggering growth rate of 1,382 percent a year (compared to 228% for Facebook).
Here’s a riddle.
What job allows you to drink endless quantities of fine wine, live in a Victorian mansion, and do all the blogging, Facebooking, Tweeting, and chatting that you want?
Give up?
I just completed marketing maven Seth Godin’s book on leadership titled “Tribes – We Need You to Lead Us”.
As a long-time fan of “Sethology”, I have always marvelled at his cutting edge ideas and thought provoking approaches to marketing, lapping up past works like “Purple Cow”, “The Big Moo”, “The Dip” and “Meatball Sundae”. I am also an avid reader of his wonderfully written blog, which is a must-visit site on my list of must-visit sites.
In the age of social and digital media, your ultimate goal is to create a business that others will share freely about. That in a nutshell is what Word Of Mouth is all about.
But how can you increase the shareability of your business? What techniques can you use to improve Word Of Mouth for your business?
Is social media marketing just a myth? (courtesy of Snap Trends)
I love dabbling in social media in its various forms, be it blogging, facebooking, twittering, youtubing (occasionally), plurking and flickring.
Digital conversations are addictive, and I can spend an entire day just reading blogs, following tweets, retweeting, commenting on facebook photographs, chatting on MSN, uploading photographs on Flickr and so on.
If you think being a personal blogger is difficult, wait till you try corporate blogging. It isn’t just a walk in the park. Just ask Coleman (a fellow media socialist), who wrote this excellent post on making your corporate blogs succeed.
But then, isn’t blogging just about shooting your mouth/fingers off and saying whatever you want to say. After all, it is the age of conversations, and everybody is a citizen journalist. Besides, people don’t want to just hear the filtered, fluffed up, fantastic stuff from the gatekeepers (like yours truly).