So, you’re a Facebook savvy individual and you know your ReTweets from your @replies. You’ve checked into Google HQ on Foursquare via your 3G enabled company-expensed iPad. Because of this important business acumen you’ve been tasked with defining a social media strategy for your company. Great!
But like many of us surrounded with so many dizzying social media opportunities and our unfathomably large brains looming above our shoulders, perhaps you still unsure of where to start?
Never fear, things are simple really. Just apply the age old rules of courtship and you’ll be well on your way.
Look smart – first impressions make a big difference in the dating world, but they also apply to your web profile. Keep it clean, keep it smart and keep it relevant.
Don’t boast – yes, we know you have lots of great products/deals/opinions and you want to share them with your fans, but don’t appear too needy. Users nor lovers want to hear about how wonderful you are every update so give them a break. Let them talk about themselves too.
Ask permission – be chivalrous to your date and you should do the same to your fans and followers. Use their data wisely; don’t give their vital statistics out to all and sundry.
Be yourself – you can’t hide behind your Facebook profile, be yourself, be honest. If someone wants to slag you off, deal with it calmly.
Be faithful – they have ‘fanned’ you, you have their commitment, don’t neglect your early adopters when you are off in search of new and more attractive friends. Be generous and offer value in return.
What did we miss? Comment below with your tips on going-steady with social media
“Parkour…for those who can’t be arsed”. So says the opening statement on the lying down game’s Facebook page which boasts nearly 100,000 members. The lying down game has been going on for a while, but has only just started to be noticed by the wider community. To play, you need to have your hands flat against your sides and your toes pointing at the ground; “As if you were standing, but vertically challenged. FACE DOWN!!!”
During the recent World Cup, the game got some very good publicity from John Terry having a go during one of England’s matches. Playing the game can be very addictive and I regularly see the same person playing the game in the area where I live.
Due to curiosity, I tried the game myself, and I can easily say that it was the most fun I have had in a long time. So my advice would be to try it yourself and to get your friends playing as well.
Harry Henderson joined Jam for a few days work experience – and penned this post.
I’ve never liked spam. Not even as a kid, it was flaccid and tasteless and I just couldn’t see the point of it.
Well that hasn’t changed, and as progress would have it, I’m jibing at its electronic namesake now…
Thanks to a filter built like Cerberus, I don’t get too much of it on email or Twitter, but I get slammed with it at home on the landline.
Most of this telespam is pre-recorded messages for kitchens/broadband/gas.. or even worse – 20 seconds of silence stacking up on the answer machine. (I’m beginning to feel a little sorry for the answer machine and have taken to putting my own messages on it, just so it hears a real voice once in a while.)
Anyway, spam on the phone is just really annoying. And I think it could get a lot more intense for everyone with the growth of geo-location services.
Right now, innovative opt-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla are relatively small, but they’re growing rapidly (Foursquare has grown to 2m users globally in under two years). With Facebook set to launch geo–location services imminently, a lot more consumers are going to be providing and receiving updates about where they, and their fellow humans are.
Brands of course are getting in on the action, with some big names likes Dominos, Debenhams and Starbucks running campaigns on Foursquare to good effect by rewarding loyal early-adopting consumers. McDonalds are also rumored to be one the first brands to trial Facebook’s service.
This emerging area offers big opportunities for brands to stand out on the high street and connect with consumers in what’s been dubbed the ‘last six feet’. It will also provide brand owners with invaluable data about who visits, when and where.
With location based ad spend predicted to grow to $4.1bn annually within five years, there’s a real danger consumers are going to be spammed by unscrupulous or naive companies who’ll fail to respect consumers privacy in an effort to get their attention.
So here’s the brief; get yourself a smart, sharp and thoroughly streetwise approach and you’ll find yourself making hay, not spam, in a hot new marketing channel.
As a social media planner, I log into Facebook every day to research, plan, manage and moderate on behalf of clients.
As a person living in London in 2010, I use Facebook every evening to easily keep in touch with a core group of my friends, and passively keep up to speed with a few hundred other people-who-I-no-longer-physically-see. In return for these stalking rights I reciprocally allow this outer group access to my updates.
Being a social media practitioner and a web savvy individual, I know how to tweak the Facebook security settings to prevent Google and the 400m+ other Facebook users from seeing my holiday snaps and inane status updates.
I definitely know about the settings on Twitter. There is only one. ‘Protect my tweets’.
Well, I thought I knew all about the Facebook security settings – until I saw this infographic on the New York Times. It shows how ludicrously complex Facebook settings actually are.
While 50 settings and over 170 options does give precise control over security, it does increase the chance for error – particularly when you consider that 4.6m of its users are 55+. I guess increased complexity comes hand in hand with managing such a large and open web platform.
With the recent news of AOL’s plans to sell or scrap Bebo, we thought it timely to have a look at how they’ve been doing lately. While Facebook has been lapping up new users, Bebo has been on a steady decline, along with Myspace, as the two become closer and closer competitors.
Bebo has a higher percentage of 15-24s using the site than Myspace has, yet unlike Myspace, Bebo is losing their female audience more quickly than their male audience.
One of Bebo’s particular talents is captivating the Scottish and Northern Irish, and perhaps they have a future as a niche northern destination.
Despite the massive decline, Bebo is still bigger than Twitter and Myspace, with 4.77 million monthly unique users in the UK.
It’s not over yet.
Michelle Yeadon is a trainee social media planner with team Jam
As all you Gmail users probably are aware, this morning Google launched a new leap into the Social Media space. They call it Google Buzz, and it works very similarly to Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?” sharing functionality:
You are able to share thoughts, links, photos, videos, RSS feeds etc. What sets it apart from Facebook, aside from one obvious thing, is that you are able to pull in content from your social networks or utilities such as Picasa, flickr, Google Reader and Twitter. This is a great functionality that facebook is lacking, and will probably do so due to equal lack of collaboration partners. All this is done straight through your Gmail account and is shared to your Gmail contacts. You are able to follow peoples’ Buzz feeds, or bring in random content from all your contacts.
Of course this has taken Twitter by storm (around 3,189 tweets over the last 6 minutes on ‘Google Buzz”) , and is the second highest ranking topic at the moment. However, even though it holds high share of buzz, it is not really received well:
According to me the biggest difference between Buzz and Facebook is also why I don’t think it will revolutionise the Social Media world: Gmail is not the forum where you want to share thoughts, party pictures or funny videos to everyone. My contacts in Gmail differ quite a lot from my friends in Facebook. Even Twitter gets around this problem due to a level of anonymity within the micro blog. As I have used my Gmail account for professional correspondence, I run the risk of sharing my content to unintended recipients.
Even though it could be considered a nice effort by Google to try to break into even another space, I don’t think they will succeed. I use my Gmail account for sending emails, for which it is great, but that’s what I will continue to do, nothing more. I’m not saying that Google hasn’t succeeded before in branching out, but this time they are moving in the wrong direction.
But an even more important question, what happened to Google Wave? I haven’t heard anything about it over the last months. This email system that was going to revolutionise the email world, did it flop?
Being Friday and the end of a somewhat busy week I was delighted to come across this video. I feel that such machines should exist in every work place.
Coca Cola invites college students in the U.S to experience the happiness factory via “the happiness machine”. When visiting their vending machine they get a little more than expected.
So far it has racked up 1,223,441 views on YouTube. The only distribution sources for the video were a tweet from the Coke Twitter account and their Facebook fan page. Interactive YouTube feature have been used to great effect as the video finishes with a call to action “Share the Happiness” alongside the question “Where will the happiness strike next?”.
As we saw last weekend, buzz isn’t enough to predict the winner – there’s something good going for each of the contestants, so which one is the best prediction?
Olly Murs has had the most buzz since 10 October and during the week leading up to this weekend’s final.
Source: Brandwatch
Stacey Solomon has the most fans on Facebook.
Source: Sum of Facebook pages with 100 or more fans
Joe is winning in the polls.
Forums on the Daily Mail, Digital Spy, Entertainment.stv.tv, PopSugar, StudentRoom and UnRealityTV forums all agree that Joe will win.
StudentRoom forums
Entertainment.stv.tv
DigitalSpy forums
So what’s the best predictor of who will win?
Buzz gave some indication of who would be voted off earlier on, but now that it’s down to the last three, buzz isn’t reliable enough. Stacey has a lot of Facebook fans, but it could just be her personality giving her fans. Polls are the closest to the actual vote, so I’m willing to bet that Joe will win this weekend.
Really like this Facebook campaign by Ikea, One of those ideas that you think…damn that is so simple I wished id thought of it.
To promote their new store opening in Malmo, Ikea set-up a Facebook profile for Gordon Gustavsson, the store’s manager. Pictures of the stores showrooms were uploaded to Gustavsson photo album. Any friends of the Ikea Facebook page had the opportunity to tag themselves in photos in order to win free furniture. The first user to tag a specific product in a photo would receive that item for free. This use of Facebook photo tags generated a great deal of online publicity as the photos spread around the social networking site. The photo tags appeared not only on the specific users profiles but also in news feed. This in turn basically used Facebook for one big word of mouth promotion…. So simple and effective
What will it mean for Facebook? Well, there’ll probably be the compulsory whinge period whilst people get used to it, before everyone forgets how it used to be (check out my comment in MediaWeek in 2008 – it’s at the bottom of the page). Then there’ll be the changes that need to happen to apps and pages if they’ve been developed for a 760px wide tab.
Update: These updates will happen in February 2010.
In the mean time, here’s some pics (via PC INpact of course):
