The Next Big Thing in Social Media

March 31st, 2010 | Posted in Blog | No Comments
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Make Sure Trends Make Sense For Your Business Before Following Them

What’s the next big thing in social media? Is it Google Buzz? Is it Chat Roulette? Is it Foursquare? Is it Gowalla? Is it something you won’t hear about until tomorrow, next week, or next year? While it is certainly a good idea to be aware of trends, it’s also important for businesses not to get to fixated on them, and go rushing into things that may or may not make sense for them.

Shiny Object Syndrome

As 10e20 President Chris Winfield discussed with us at Search Engine Strategies last week, a lot of people get caught up in “shiny object syndrome”. This is essentially where businesses get caught up in the hype surrounding the latest service, trend, or fad, and feel like they have to be involved to stay relevant, and jump in because of that.

This is not the best way to go about things. “You should never get involved in something, just because you think you have to,” he said.

Winfield made a great point: think about if you had put a large amount of time and money into a Friendster strategy or an Orkut strategy, only to find that these networks would never offer you the benefits you could’ve received from using these resources on a Facebook strategy.

It’s important to consider your goals and think about what you need to measure in your social media efforts, from a business standpoint. “Not all companies should be measuring the same exact things,” notes Winfield.

Portability

Perhaps the best approach you can take is to have a relatively portable social media strategy. In other words, look for ways to engage with customers that don’t limit you to a particular service. That way, if they flock to a new one in the future, you can go along with minimal hassle. Maintain consistency in your brand’s persona and how you deal with customers, and you’ll probably find that this can be transported from one channel to another, despite technological adjustments that may need to be made to the strategy.

One good thing that businesses likely have to look forward to is a more open web, which will allow users of separate services to communicate with one another. Just yesterday, Cliqset and Status.net claimed to have implemented the first live example of the Salmon protocol, and for the first time ever, the users of two independent, public web entities are able to communicate with each other, without being on the same service as the person they are communicating with.

“This is a great demonstration of Cliqset’s larger vision of social networks being siteless, and we think it’s going to be the future of how all services interact and, more importantly, how users of these services interact,” Cliqset tells WebPronews. Major social media players are already heavily involved in similar initiatives.

Time Spent On Social Networks Up 60%

March 22nd, 2010 | Posted in Blog | No Comments
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Average global user devoting two more hours per month

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other such sites are – in general, anyway – doing quite well on a global basis, according to new stats from Nielsen. Nielsen revealed this afternoon that people all over the world are dedicating a lot more time to social networks.

A report stated, “On average, global web users across 10 countries spent roughly five and a half hours on social networks in February 2010, up more than two hours from the same time last year.” Italians and Australians actually took the lead, too, beating the U.S. average of 6 hours and 3 minutes by 25 minutes and 22 minutes, respectively.

Then here are a couple more interesting findings: “Overall, the active unique audience to social networks grew nearly 30%, from 244.2M to 314.5M in the last year. In the U.S., the average active unique audience grew to 149.M from 115M in February 2009″ (which also works out to 30 percent).

Time Spent On Social Networks Up 60%

Time Spent On Social Networks Up 60%

Facebook made Nielsen’s last points of comparison anything but close calls, though. It beat the other social networks by wide margins in terms of “% Reach of Active Social Users,” “Sessions per Person,” and “Time per Person.”

Facebook, then, would appear best positioned to find advertisers and generate revenue outside the U.S.

Facebook Unseats Google As Most-Visited Site

March 15th, 2010 | Posted in Blog | No Comments
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Social network beat search engine in the U.S., according to Hitwise

Although the “thud” wasn’t verified until this afternoon, it seems that an online giant fell a couple of days ago. According to new data from Hitwise, Facebook managed to beat Google in terms of visits between March 7th and March 13th, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. for the week.

The graph visible below makes the changeup pretty clear (blame the sloppy enlarged bit on us, not Hitwise). What’s more, it doesn’t look like Facebook’s going to relinquish its lead anytime soon.

Facebook Unseats Google As Most-Visited Site

Facebook Unseats Google As Most-Visited Site

Heather Dougherty explained, “The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame.”

Then here’s one more interesting fact, courtesy of Dougherty: “Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.”

Anyway, this development represents a major win for Facebook. The ability to represent the social network as the number one site should count for a lot as corporate representatives talk to advertisers and investors, and could result in a direct boost in revenue. A further snowball effect in terms of user interest might occur, too, since most people like to be part of something that’s popular.

How Important is Your Domain Name to Your Brand?

March 9th, 2010 | Posted in Blog | No Comments
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Cover Your Brand’s Bases With Your Domain Name

How important is your domain name to you brand? Most online businesses would probably consider it to be quite important, and with good reason. Sometimes before searching, customers may simply opt to go to the “yourbrandhere.com” URL simply because it makes sense. Now, sometimes that URL is already taken, and for start-ups, that’s something to consider in itself.

As Monte Cahn, Founder and President of Moniker mentioned in a recent interview with WebProNews, it’s a good idea to make sure the domain name is available when coming up with a name for your brand, or at least make sure that you are able to acquire it. Products have their own brands, and this way of thinking can also be applied to them in many cases. Cahn notes that even the big companies make mistakes in this area. For example, you would expect Apple to own iPad.com, considering the huge announcement about the device the company made this year, but someone else has that domain.

Cahn also stresses the importance of covering your brand in terms of domain names. This means getting all variations possible. Get typos, different extensions and country codes, etc. Use 301 redirects on misspells of key brands (including singular/plural versions). However, when it comes to domain names for different products, he says it’s best to build sub-sites around those with their own content, which can help drive link juice, SEO value, and traffic.

Getting the .com that reflects your company name is not always possible, unfortunately. In these cases, it may serve you well to find a different aspect of your brand to center your domain around, but this will require a greater level of promotion of that URL than a simple companyname.com. For example, if there are unique key phrases within your company’s slogan, you may find such an opportunity there.

Domains should be easy to remember, not too long, easy to spell, relevant to your brand, and avoid complicating characters such as hyphens. I think one key to a successful domain name is simplicity, although there are always exceptions to the rule.

   

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