Marketing Autopsy Blog » social networking

Pointless Babble Is King: Twitter Study Almost Hits the Mark

Cuong Huynh — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:59:50 +0000

Pear Analytics recently did a study on how people are using and consuming Twitter. The study took 2,000 random tweets from the public timeline in English and in the U.S. over a period of 2 weeks, from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and was posted by Ryan Kelly. While I applaud the effort and think they are on the right track on providing a super-value added study to the public and marketers, I wouldn’t call this a conclusive study. Ryan mentioned that they will update it regularly so that’s a good thing.

Here are the results of the study with the categories defined by Pear Analytics:

Pointless babble 40.55%
Conversational 37.55%
Pass along value 8.70%
Self promotion 5.85%
Spam 3.75%
News 3.60%

You can read about the details of the study yourself (link at end of this post.) Some of the most surprising results are the following:

Self promotion and spam are not as prominent as many have complained about.
News represents a very small amount of activities, despite recent media buzz.

So it looks like issues that affect many people (like the Iran election and spams) that receive huge news coverage also tend to pump up public impressions about Twitter and exaggerate their real impacts. The real numbers seem to show that these are not much of a problem; you just think they’re big problems because they’re constantly in your face or they annoy you a lot. With more refinement (such as extended time of day included in the study) we may see an increase in these numbers.

I look at this study as work in progress with better updates to be expected. Here are a few issues I see that should be resolved to improve the study value in the future:

Pointless babble is not necessarily a negative thing as its name may suggest. This category needs more refinements as this big group represents many important pieces of information, both to consumers and marketers. For the consumers and individuals, it is exactly the social aspect of social networking, and people will continue to socialize the way they want to. All you can do accept it and understand it, not control or eliminate it. And this social spaces and activities are exactly where marketers need to be to understand consumer behaviors.
The time periods of 11:00 am to 5:00 pm CST is too limited to really understand Twitter users in the U.S. It’s only 6 hours of each of the time zones. At a minimum I think the study should begin at 6:00 am to midnight for each time zone. As it is, it merely tracks only the lunch to early evening hours of east coast time (noon to 6:00 pm, entirely missing 12 hours of east coast tweets,) and includes only the mid morning to mid-afternoon hours of west coast time (9:00 am to 3:00 pm, again entirely missing 12 hours of west coast tweets in the morning, late afternoon and evenings.)

See the original Pear Analytics post on “Twitter Study Reveals Interesting Results About Usage.”

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Pointless Babble Is King: Twitter Study Almost Hits the Mark

Corporate Blogging – Minimum Must-Have Elements For Successful Strategy

Cuong Huynh — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 01:38:27 +0000

Regardless of how popular or visible Twitter is currently, your corporate social marketing and new media strategy still need to maintain an effective blog. Twitter or FaceBook alone cannot solve all your marketing challenges, but a corporate blog remains a very strong and viable marketing channel. Whatever you do, you’ll need to pay special attention to 2 key elements of corporate blogging: content relevancy and trackable analytics.

Content Relevancy

Content has been king, and will always be king for your corporate blog. It’s hard to defeat great content using anything else, tricks or otherwise. If you don’t have great content, then whatever you do won’t affect your site’s popularity or traffic in any meaningful manner. In fact the goodness of your content correlates directly to how relevant you are to your prospects and customers. Are you providing the right information that your prospects are looking for, at the time they’re looking for it? Are you making available help to solve your customer’s dilemma in a timely manner? Are you providing solutions that eliminate your clients’ problems before your competition does? In short, your corporate blog is a very powerful tool, and it can help you provide relevant content that is totally under your control.

Trackable Analytics

Analytics play several different important roles. One, it can help you find out what visitors are looking for and how they are finding them. It can also show you how your company may be able to satisfy that need. Two, it can be used to help guide your content generation plan. As we discussed before, relevant content is critical, and knowing what content is relevant before you generate it is a no brainer. As a bonus, trackable analytics can also give you a roadmap with which to directly engage with your audience, at the specific time and place in the blogosphere when they congregate.

Tips to Running Effective Corporate Blog

So how do you maintain a strong corporate blog in order to engage with your customers, build your brand, while at the same time drive potential sales? Consider these following tips:

Go where the buzz is. Know where the conversations are taking place that either talk about your brand or discuss something that your brand can help solve. Get involved with genuine desire to help, to build relationship and to establish yourself as subject matter expert. No marketing spiel is needed here; just stick to the facts. That’s what people are looking for. To help with this discovering and listening task, there are social media “listening tools” available to help.
Making and maintaining contact. Once you find out where you can beneficially contribute to the conversation, interact with both those already familiar with your brand and those new to it. Think carefully before you engage to make sure you understand the conversation and meaning behind each and every conversation thread. Again your involvement in the conversation must be relevant and helpful, or at least contributes on an informational level, otherwise you’ll be looked at as someone just out for personal gains. Lastly, maintain all social networking etiquette at all times, because you need to. To read more on social networking etiquette, here are a couple of articles to help: SEO and Social Networking as Reputation Management Tools, and Putting Twitter in Your Marketing ToolBox.
Maintain a powerful corporate blog. Make it exciting. Make it attractive. All rules about good website designs still apply, including easy and clear navigation, fast loading speed, simple yet effective interface, etc. And most importantly, post fresh and relevant articles often, and invite interaction and feedback.
Stay in control and work smart. A successful corporate blog doesn’t have to cost an arm or a leg. Once you established your plan and strategy, it’s easy to post new posts, it’s cheap to use monitoring tools and follow/track the blogosphere, and it’s painless to participate in dialogue to help other people. Corporate blogging does take time, so it helps to keep it simple and institute a routine and stick with it.
Continuously develop your social networking and new media skills. Common stumbling blocks abound. They include falling behind with regular posting of fresh and relevant articles, failing to follow and keep engaged in conversation threads, running up against corporate policies that should have been created at the beginning of your corporate blogging venture, and not taking advantage of all possible effective social networking traffic channels. You may be leaving free customer traffic on the table without realizing it.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Corporate Blogging – Minimum Must-Have Elements For Successful Strategy

Creating a Social Media Strategy? Don’t Forget the Legal Team

Cuong Huynh — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:23:48 +0000

Think lawyers are expensive? Maybe so. But it’s cheaper to bring them in before you have a problem. This common wisdom holds especially true for your corporate social media strategy, which is why your social media team should have a legal representative as well.

It should be a requirement to make legal professionals part of your team from the inception. Bringing them in on the back end to clean up a mess is never desirable. Plus it doesn’t make for a great collaborative relationship, because you messed up and you now need legal’s help. And solving legal problems on the back end is never pleasant. It’s far better to know and establish legal rules of the social media road before you’re entering into and engaging in conversations on social media sites. Let’s face it, corporate social media activities are really public relations (PR) in the new social networking space. Therefore it makes sense

Part of the POST method, your new media team should, at a minimum, get legal involved in the O (Objectives) and S (Strategies) phases. At a generic level, legal can help you stay out of trouble, guide you in all policies relating to news media and customer-facing communications. Legal can also provide you with guidelines on what an employee can and cannot (or should and should not) do in the social media arena. Here are some specific roles of legal participation within the social media team:

Social Media Policies. Comments, backtracks, discussions on and off of your site. This covers locations both within your own websites, blogs forums, and on other websites, blogs and forums. It also controls how your employee(s) should start new topics, and how to resolve complaints and negative feedback. Legal can provide guidance.
Authorized Corporate Bloggers. If you’ll have just a few key individuals actually doing the engagement with the outside world, establish rules for them to follow. Otherwise if you encourage a wider employee participation, then have a different set of rules applied to all. The key words here are guidance and coordination, not hindrance. Legal can help establish rules.
Social Media Interaction. We all know that the Internet is always open, and with the global reach that it provides, the corporate social media team (and therefore your company) is also always open. Consumers worldwide are active in the social media space all the time (and especially after work within their local time,) your social media team must be ready to engage at any time of day, within reason. This is especially critical when a potential issue (positive or negative) about the company and its products is going viral. So you’ll need to be involved early. Legal can help define the dos and don’ts.

With all these guidelines in your pocket, you are now ready to go all out and promote your company, products and services. They will protect you while you’re out there engaging, supporting and solving your customers’ problems.

So go ahead. Build your social media team. Select the best and sharpest marketers, PR people, and technologists. Just don’t leave out the legal rep.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Creating a Social Media Strategy? Don’t Forget the Legal Team

Marketing Basics and Building Buzz – What About Integrity?

Cuong Huynh — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:07:21 +0000

We’ve all been bombarded with Michael Jackson’s news in the last few weeks. While many, fans and non-fans alike, were affected by his death in some way, MJ’s father went on the offensive to promote his new business venture just days after. In these modern days, I guess there are still salesmen so blinded by money that they sell their souls too. So now’s a good opportunity to get back to basics. Marketing basics, that is.

Marketing – whether push or pull, traditional or online, outbound or inbound – is a game of either creating your own buzz, or riding someone else’s buzz. Creating your own buzz is tough to do, unless you have something new, unique with mass appeal to tell people about, or you can ride on your own reputation built over time. Riding someone else’s buzz, on the other hand, is quite easy. It’s popular for those who want a quick spike in their marketing performance and return on investment. It’s a legitimate marketing technique if done properly.

Here are a few “riding someone else’s buzz” ideas:

Associate with well-known or recognizable brand names. It’s all about attention grabbing, and household names and celebrities give you instant buzz and attention.
Hot topics or stories of the day. By definition these are already hot, so huge attention base already exists. All you have to do is make it relevant to your products, services or situation.
Controversial or outrageous people and stories. These can come from anywhere and take many shapes and forms, but the bottom line is the controversial and the outrageous command free publicity, which also benefit from its natural viral characteristic.
Stealing someone else’s great content. Even though this works well, it’s short-lived. Therefore it’s not recommended, and it’s against many laws, including the social networking law.

I may be guilty as the next guy who mentions MJ is his post. And maybe I am. But more importantly, if this post can stop a few marketers and help them think about what they do just for a little while, it’s done its job.

So, no, marketing basics do not start with what you may learn in business schools, from others in the industry, and certainly not by your desire to be successful. They start with you and your integrity.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Marketing Basics and Building Buzz – What About Integrity?

How to Build a New Media Corporate Marketing Team

Cuong Huynh — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 23:29:52 +0000

You know what I’m talking about. New media. You know, social media, social marketing, blogging, and Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc, for your company? Many have found success where many others have failed. In the corporate environment, pursuing social media marketing is a full-time job.

Corporate social networking functions require individual special skills and knowledge, plus clear corporate objectives and goals. For companies that want to get with it in social media and marketing, don’t just try a few things here and there using inexperienced resources. What you need is focus and dedication. The key is to develop a clear reason why you want to be in the blogosphere, and provide dedicated resources to achieve those goal.

Here are the minimum considerations that must exist for your social media marketing to stand any chance of making a difference. Anything less will be just a waste of your time, money and human resources.

Establish a clear corporate social networking policy, the rules of engagement so to speak. It does not have to be detailed or elaborate, but it needs to have the basics in place. Remember this is still emerging technology.
Create your team from enthusiastic and knowledgeable individuals. They don’t have to be your best marketers or sales persons. In fact they should not be. The key characteristics you’re looking for include: being savvy with new technology and tools, being passionate about the company, its products and services, and above all, being honest with high ethics.
Empower and authorize team members to do what’s best for the company. If your team is knowledgeable and passionate, then they’ll do anything to ensure the best interest and protection for the company and its reputation. They are smart, and they’ll do the right things.
Always be on the look out for opportunities to go viral, especially in support of customer-generated viral media. All you need is to be there, provide support, and maybe give a little nudge. It’s social marketing after all. Do it right and you’ll attract loyal followers.

What about corporate legal? Do you need to get their blessing all the time? Probably not. Just do what’s right. Here’s what I mean. As long as you’ve made the proper communication with legal department and addressed corporate policies from the beginning, legal may just be your best friends in the company to get your social networking job done.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

How to Build a New Media Corporate Marketing Team

Twitter’s Achilles’ Heels May Be Its Biggest Challenge

Cuong Huynh — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:34:18 +0000

Twitter is a great tool as many would attest. It can do so much with so little and provide the intimacy, simplicity and immediacy that not many other platforms can even come close. While many social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace can expect to continue to command large memberships and usage, Twitter needs to get its act together before its Archilles’ heels bring it down. I’m talking about Twitter spams, and to a less extent, Twitter’s lack of a business/commercial model.

In recent years, it seems that there is a new social network kid in town every year that gets all the attention and leaves everyone else in the dust. This year it’s Twitter. Last year it was Facebook. Before that, MySpace. For Twitter, numerous third party tools and applications have been created to make it even easier to use while providing amazing additional features. But because of the (seemingly) lack of strict quality guidelines of what the users can and can’t do, Twitter spams are becoming prevalent.

Twitter spams are not out of control yet, in my opinion. But it’s reaching a point where it hinders additional explosive growth of the Twitter platform. Sure there are many new users signing up. But I think the vast majority joined out of curiosity and not necessarily needs. And let’s face it, Twitter itself is simple but not very intuitive, so it requires somewhat of a learning curve on the part of new users, and requires them to stick with it to “get” it. Coupling this with high potential for spams will probably keep Twitter to the status of being just another cool, but niche, tool for individuals, and just another tool for business, as opposed to a great tool for the mass and an essential tool for marketers.

But then again maybe we’re trying too hard to make Twitter our own. According to Twitter creator Jack Dorsey as reported on theonion.com, “Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them….” Mr. Dorsey said about how Iranians are using his tool that, “I couldn’t believe they’d ruined something so beautiful, simple, and absolutely pointless.” According to theonion.com, “he is already working on a new website that will be so mind-numbingly useless that Iranians will not even be able to figure out how to operate it.”

So the fact remains that Twitter will do whatever it wants to do. And lacking a clear (publicized) business/commercial plan, we’ll just have to take Twitter for what it is right now and be glad that such tool exists. Only the strong will survive, for both Twitter and its users.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Twitter’s Achilles’ Heels May Be Its Biggest Challenge

Marketing and Customer Service Are Really One and the Same to Customers

Cuong Huynh — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:41:04 +0000

Most businesses sell some sort of products or provide services to other businesses or consumers. This selling or providing process relies heavily on the staff in marketing and customer service department of a company. Marketing can be seen mainly as a pre-sale responsibility, while customer service traditionally takes care of the customer after the sale. In actuality, and most importantly in the current social media environment, the line between marketing and customer service is becoming more and more fuzzy. In fact from the customer point of view, marketing and customer service of a company may be slowly becoming one and the same.

It’s the case of “marketing promises me this, but service gives (or not) me that.” It’s one of the classic examples of customer dissatisfaction, and in the social network environment, the news goes far and wide, at a very fast rate. What a business needs to realize are two things:

Customers are now talking, researching and sharing on the Internet, in general, and on social networking sites, in particular.
You need to be where your customers are and engage them, especially with those who make the most noise.

The best customer experience is achieved when customer desires and needs are fulfilled by your products or services (good marketing,) and their issues are resolved quickly and satisfactorily (good customer service.) If these do not give you strong reasons to get your business into the social networking arena, then I don’t know what will.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Marketing and Customer Service Are Really One and the Same to Customers

Getting Used by Social Media Marketing?

Cuong Huynh — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 22:35:55 +0000

Back in August 2008, Peter Kim blogged about “How to set an ego trap” on his beingpeterkim.com site. He received lots of feedbacks from both regular readers and the “influentials”, as Guy Kawasaki calls them.

Mr. Kim wrote, “In a nutshell, social technologies use game mechanics to get users hooked on participation. People often get addicted to ego-stroking system feedback, until they can temper their usage (addiction?)” He gave a few examples to illustrate how well-known bloggers have used social networking for viral marketing and promotion, for both products and services. These can be read on his blog so I won’t repeat them here. For each example Mr. Kim observed some simple yet important characteristics. In one, he noted, “So why did it work? The offer was simple. It was personalized.” In other, “So why did it work? The offer was limited. It was relevant to the bloggers and their readers.” And in the third example, “Why did it work? Game mechanics – competition and a somewhat objective comparison scale…” Mr. Kim ended the blog with the some suggestions on how to set an effective “ego trap” with your own offer:

Keep it simple.
Make it scarce.
Personalize it.
Use numbers.
Appeal to the head…and the heart.

So now you may ask, “Ego trap or just human nature?” I would say probably both. It’s all about feeling good and important. We’re all humans, and many would agree that feeling good and important are two of human’s strongest straits – they’ve helped build empires and cause wars in our history. It’s all about self-importance. That’s why face-to-face networking works. That’s also why social networking works.

It’s no surprise we’ll use social media and networking to our benefits, and we’ll be glad to be used by the medium. So here’s a question: We’ve done face-to-face networking in older times. We’re now doing social networking in the Internet age. How do you suppose we’ll network next? Let your imagination flows.

About Cuong Huynh

Cuong Huynh — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 07:17:38 +0000

Cuong Huynh advises businesses and individuals on marketing communications, social networking, and new media strategies.

Specialties:

Marketing Communications, Brand Identity, Social Media & Viral Marketing, Trade Shows, Press Releases, Public Relations, Marketing Metrics and ROI, Advertising, Marketing Plan, Client/Vendor Management, Creative Services, Art Direction, Search Engine Optimization, Web 2.0, Blogs, Web Applications, Graphic Design, Marketing Video, Desktop Publishing

View my presentation: Social Media Marketing: Creating Cost Effective Marketing Channels For Small and Medium Businesses.

If you need to talk to me about your social media marketing strategy, please contact me via the Contact Page.

View my profile on cthmedia.net. And if you haven’t done so, subscribe to my RSS feed.

Also follow me on Twitter
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Enjoy my other blogs:

About Marketing Autopsy

Cuong Huynh — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:53:32 +0000

Thank you for visiting Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Marketing Autopsy Blog is a place to collect, share and discuss the good and bad marketing ideas, with special attention on enterprise social networking, new media, inbound marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. It’s also a place to collect new thoughts, tools and trends about the ever changing marketing world.

It is undeniable that in marketing it is critical to keep up with techniques, ideas and tools that are continually developed and made available. Learning must be unrelenting so that we can effectively serve our clients/employers in any business climate. There’s nothing like a great marketing campaign executed efficiently, with innovation and creativity, on time and budget, with measurable results and buzz, all while achieving established goals and our client reaps the benefits.

Today online marketing strategy is even more critical as inbound, social network and viral marketing give a whole new set of challenges and opportunities. In this environment, it is important to understand what to do as much as what not to do in inbound marketing and SEO marketing.

Critiques, suggestions and ideas are always welcome. Please subscribe to Marketing Autopsy Blog if you haven’t done so already. Also follow me on Twitter @cuonghuynh.

Cuong Huynh

Marketing Autopsy Blog » social networking

Pointless Babble Is King: Twitter Study Almost Hits the Mark

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