Monday, June 21, 2010

Why Paid Media Is Required For Successful Social Media Marketing

Here's a video stream of a panel I participated on at the OMMA Social conference. The panel was titled "Using Paid Media to Drive Earned Media", and has some essential advice for brands trying to use social media in their marketing mix. The bottom line message: nothing beats the viral engagement of social media for influencing consumers, but by itself, doesn't scale big enough or timely enough without support of paid media.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Technorati Media Is The 24th Largest Web Property In US

comScore just released its Top 50 US Web Properties report, and I'm happy to report that Technorati Media has risen to the 24th position. So in addition to our rank as the 4th largest social media property, we're also the 24th largest web property overall. Download the report here.

Monday, June 07, 2010

Technorati Media Now The 4th Largest Social Media Property

comScore just released the May web property ratings for the U.S., and Technorati Media's premium social media network was named the fourth largest social media property.

We launched Technorati Media almost two years ago, and since then, we've grown into the largest social media ad network. Congrats and thanks to our cooperative of blogs and niche social network partners for helping us grow -- woo hoo!!

Note: Technorati Media's audience is actually substantially larger than this comScore property measurement. comScore's calculation only counts sites that have assigned their traffic to Technorati Media for their marketing purposes. We work with many other sites as well, and in April 2010, over 248 million people worldwide saw Technorati ads.

Sunday, June 06, 2010

Hangin' With Joe Montana At Union Street Fair

Yesterday was the Union Street Fair, San Francisco's closest thing to a Mardi Gras type event (women wearing skimpy halters, public intoxication and guys peeing in bushes). Just by dumb luck, my buddies and I got a table next to 49er legend Joe Montana at Perry's on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant (that has to be THE best seat for the Union Street Fair BTW).

We ended up having 4 rounds of drinks BS'ing with Joe for a good deal of it (my head hurts; those 4 drinks were only the start of the day...). He was totally down to earth and talked to us as much as we wanted (though we didn't exactly get in his face the way about 300 other people hovering around our table did with cameras and autograph papers and handshake requests; we did our best to obnoxiously ruin as many papparazi shots as possible). He talked about moving back into the city, our favorite restaurants in his 'hood, the rigors of being a celebrity in public (he contributed more to that than us...) and more, including this fun little excerpt:

Me: "Dude, when I was at USC, I hated your guts!"
Joe: "Hey, that's okay. You guys will be on probation next week"
Me: "What's up with the Nikes?" (he's a spokesman for Sketchers, yet he was wearing Nikes)
Joe: (shrugged shoulders) "Can't wear 'em all the time! I need a break every once in a while."
Me: "Don't worry, I won't tweet a photo of you in swooshes."
Joe: (raises glass to mine)

Anyway, it was a pretty fun experience being at a big SF event with one of the biggest SF legends.

Thursday, June 03, 2010

Engage or Die: The Impact of Social Media in Business

Years ago, when bloggers were first earning worldwide attention and influence, Technorati was among of the first major efforts to organize the millions of blogs and related conversations into a useful directory. Over time, Technorati became the hub that connected bloggers with wider audiences and eventually advertisers.

But blogs were just one part of the social media revolution. Social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the like, expanded the ability for anyone to publish, share, and discover information. Along the way, social media became a focal point for businesses, and any organization or cause really, as social media champions realized that the ability to connect directly with people could have positive and even profound effects.

And that’s where things went completely haywire almost overnight.

Expert advice poured in from everywhere. Technorati Tags were covering social media went from a humble beginning to a dominant category within months. But even with all of the advice, discussions, and communities dedicated to helping one another, the steps from asking and answering the right questions to getting started to determining success were hazy at best. Many books have since hit the shelves to help us figure everything out. But very few have given us clear and practical instructions to do something beyond the obvious. A new book just hit the streets and it was written to do just that, provide direction in order to make social media work for any business.

Written by my good friend Brian Solis, who also contributes to Technorati, Engage! sets out to become the “complete guide for brands and businesses to create, cultivate and measure success in the new web.”

Link: http://bit.ly/engageme

The book kicks off with a bang. “Engage or die!” he exclaims. His point is that we either figure this out and take a leadership role or as he suggests, we’ll find ourselves out of touch and inevitably, out of mind.

Written in two parts, Engage begins with taking us back to school. By enrolling us in the New Media University, Solis resets all we know and think we know about social media tools, networks, and services so that he can introduce new concepts and methodologies that he builds upon throughout each chapter. Starting with 101 and working our way through an MBA program, I was surprised by just how much new details emerge. Perhaps, we just took these networks at face value as they’re intended to be easy to use. But Solis, introduces us to the sociology and psychology of social networks and how consumers are using them to find and share information and in turn, also earn authority that deserves consideration into all of our marketing, sales, and service programs.

The second half of the book explores everything needed to start programs, determine the resources needed, how to sell it internally, and most notably, how to measure ROI and success.

Solis provides worksheets to help us begin planning. He also introduces exercises that help businesses introduce personality and character into their brands, a step that Solis believes, is crucial in social networks. He also tackles a subject that is becoming increasingly important as more people dabble in social media marketing. He outlines how to separate personal and professional interaction and profiles to create an online persona to excel as brand representatives, while also defining business and personal boundaries.

Engage goes far deeper than I could possibly write about in one post. The book also delves into strategies for social CRM, organizing workflow around conversations, how to create and build communities, and also how to find influential customers and prospects to spark word of mouth.

Perhaps this is worth noting.

The book is dense and definitely has a thud factor. If I had any criticisms it’s that Engage requires a significant intellectual and time investment. It’s not a quick read nor is it written for everyday people. It is long and covers scores of topics, strategies, and program ideas and it is wordy. Solis himself makes no apologies for this stating at the beginning of the book, that there are no shortcuts for doing this the right way. I guess that’s why he calls it a “complete guide.” In fact, the manuscript was far more inclusive than what made the final cut. The “deleted scenes” as Solis refers to it, is available online at www.engagingbook.com along with new information that continues the learning.