Mediaboss Marketing

Social marketing develops buzz, creates loyalty, and engages customers. What's not to love? A winery with an upcoming wine-tasting, for example, might create a page about the event on its site and then link to it on social media sites, along with links to articles about the wines, recipes for foods that go well with the wines, and other related content.

Engaging the customer has always been fundamental to doing good business. It's just that now that engagement often starts in digital, social media realms.

The trick is to figure out how to make one's content as interesting as all the other content that shows up in the newsfeed, and this is where social media marketing companies come in.

Social Campaigns

As with other marketing, social media marketing works best when it's part of an overall campaign. This is the service provided by VerticalResponse and its recently acquired social media campaign platform, Roost.

(click image to enlarge)

With Roost, business owners can create an integrated social media campaign complete with Facebook (Nasdaq: FB), Twitter, and LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) updates and tracking. It also offers a continuously updated library of content related to a business or product, so owners can post links to interesting articles for their social media friends and fans.

"We built Roost to help busy owners and operators be effective," Alex Chang, VerticalResponse's VP of social platforms, told the E-Commerce Times. "[They can take] 20 minutes on a Sunday night and start a great social media campaign."

Using Roost, a business can create a campaign of a variety of types of posts that go out to social media sites over time, and it can then measure how well those posts do in terms of engaging fans by tracking comments, shares, click-throughs and retweets.

It can also tie the social media campaign to an email campaign, with links to specially created Web pages and other content.

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Seamless, Smart, Successful Social Marketing

Public release date: 31-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Sarah McDonnell s_mcd@mit.edu 617-253-8923 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In 2004, a trio of researchers at Columbia University began an online experiment in social-media marketing, creating nine versions of a music-download site that presented the same group of unknown songs in different ways. The goal of the experiment was to gauge the effect of early peer recommendations on the songs' success; the researchers found that different songs became hits on the different sites and that the variation was unpredictable.

"It's natural to believe that successful songs, movies, books and artists are somehow 'better,'" one of the researchers wrote in The New York Times in 2007. "What our results suggest, however, is that because what people like depends on what they think other people like, what the market 'wants' at any point in time can depend very sensitively on its own history."

But for music fans who would like to think that talent is ultimately rewarded, the situation may not be as dire as the Columbia study makes it seem. In a paper published in the online journal PLoS ONE, researchers from the MIT Media Laboratory's Human Dynamics Lab revisit data from the original experiment and suggest that it contains a clear quantitative indicator of quality that's consistent across all the sites; moreover, they find that the unpredictability of the experimental results may have as much to do with the way the test sites were organized as with social influence.

Numbers game

In their analysis, Alex "Sandy" Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Science, his graduate students Coco Krumme first author on the new paper and Galen Pickard, and Manuel Cebrian, a former postdoc at the Media Lab, developed a mathematical model that, while simple, predicts the experimental results with high accuracy. They divide the decision to download a song into two stages: first, the decision to play a sample of the song, and second, the ensuing decision to download it or not. They found that, in fact, the percentage of customers who would download a given song after sampling it was consistent across sites. The difference in download totals was due entirely to the first stage, the decision to sample a song in the first place.

And that decision, the researchers concluded, had only an indirect relationship to the songs' popularity. In the original experiment, one of the sites was a control, while the other eight gave viewers information about the popularity of the songs, measured by total number of downloads. But on those eight sites, the number of downloads also determined the order in which the songs were displayed. The MIT researchers' analysis suggests that song ordering may have had as much to do with the unpredictability across sites as the popularity information.

"We've known forever that people are lazy, and they'll pick the songs on the top," Pentland says. "There's all this hype about new-age marketing and social-media marketing. Actually, it comes down to just the stuff that they did in 1904 in a country store: They put certain things up front so you'd see them."

Quality, not quantity

More here:
For music, social-media marketing doesn't trump quality

Source: Facebook.com

Lost in the shuffle was a lesser-played story of two guys who own a small pizza joint in New Orleans. As part of the news story for NPR, they were paired with a Facebook ad expert who set up a campaign for them to see if Facebook

The pizza joint owners spent $240 on Facebook advertising and after asking every single customer how they heard about them, realized not one had come from the ads. Failure. Waste of money. End of story, right? Nope.

Heres the story that people missed. For small businesses which create over two-thirds of net new jobs, and employ more than half of all working Americans Facebook is less about advertising and more (much more) about engagement, which Ill explain below. The real story is that you, the small business owner, possess the engagement skill in spades and can use it to grow your business. I call it Engagement Marketing.

You know your customers

We all do business with small businesses. Think about those you frequent on a daily or weekly basis: your dry cleaner, Web designer, wine merchant, day care provider, barber, or deli, to name a few. The person who owns the business, or the employees, greet you by name, ask about your spouse or children, get you what you need, and wish you a great day. We leave feeling good.

This is such a common occurrence, we dont even think about how remarkable it is! This personal touch or creating a WOW! experience is the cornerstone of Engagement Marketing.

Customers look to you for answers

Engagement is talking with your customers versus marketing at them. If a customer comes into your nursery, for example, and asks about a plant and soil conditions, you give the answer. This is what you, as the small business owner, do naturally every day. Why? Because it keeps customers coming back.

Now, take this engagement and put it online. When customers connect with you through Facebook, follow you on Twitter or subscribe to your e-newsletter, you have the same opportunity to help them, and keep them connected to your business even when theyre not physically doing business with you.

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Social Marketing: Engagement Equals Endorsement

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NEW YORK, NEW YORK--(Marketwire -05/31/12)- Over 200 corporate executives will gather in New York on June 13 - 14 to discuss how to incorporate social media into digital marketing - and broader business - strategy.

Social media has had an enormous impact on some of the most fundamental assumptions of business practice. The relationship between a business and their consumers has changed completely - and irrevocably.

The great levelling of the playing field that social media has engendered has led to plenty of corporate opportunity - initially around digital marketing - but also very real risks.

The New York Corporate Social Media Summit is a third time event devoted to investigating these risks and opportunities, and social business more broadly. It's a conference designed exclusively for a corporate audience and brings together leading experts from within business to discuss challenges, opportunities, and best practice.

As business social media's impact has grown, so has the Summit - to the extent that it is now the leading event in this space. This year, corporate vice-presidents from companies like American Express, Diageo, Citi, McDonald's and Gap will share their experiences and insights on social media marketing and more generally, business social media, with an audience hundreds strong.

Some of the key issues to be discussed include reputation preservation and crisis communications, integrating social into core marketing, embedding social media across your organisation, internal governance models, measuring the impact of social engagement and core social media marketing best practice.

Nick Johnson, founder of Useful Social Media, who are organising the event, says

"This is a fantastically interesting - and challenging - time for businesses. Social has changed business in many ways - and those who are prepared stand to benefit from the many opportunities that corporate social media offers them. This conference is designed to help corporate digital marketing, communications, strategy and social media executives to learn from the leaders - those who have real experience of managing - and leveraging - this changing business environment."

For more information on the Summit: http://usfl.so/MWPR.

Useful Social Media provides business intelligence on how large corporations can leverage social media for business advantage. We publish thought-leadership and analysis on our blog, produce long-form briefings and write in-depth research reports. Our conferences are widely recognised as the best in the field of corporate social media best practice.

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Global Marketing and Communications Vice-Presidents Gather in New York to Discuss Social Media's Impact on Digital ...