A blueprint for retailers?

First of all, a very nice, indepth analysis of how Walmart is using its key social media channels – Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. A more than usually thoughtful article, and definitely worth a read if you’re in retail, or just want some inspiration generally. Of particular interest is the way that Walmart have used the Facebook Milestones function to showcase the rapid spread of their stores. They’re also using it for some good “soft” messaging – emphasising their CSR and focus on sustainability.

The growth of the main Walmart brand page vs the smaller pages created for local stores is also intriguing. Depending on your viewpoint, it either gives weight to the “digital bumper sticker” argument – that many people Like brands on Facebook as a way of just giving them a Thumbs Up, rather than because they want to engage more closely with the brand – or proves that the kind of expertise and resources available to Head Office are necessary to make a success of Facebook. Without studying the individual store pages it’s hard to know, but an interesting study nonetheless.

This week’s changes at Facebook – Links and Graph Search

No, they never stop tweaking. This week, Facebook has announced that it is changing the way that it handles links in the News Feed, making them more prominent and with a lightbox view function on click.  Full details here.

But the big news was the new Graph search. Having called the world’s press together for an announcement, the media were a little overexcited to say the least, and the big reveal was initially met with disappointment from those who were hoping for a big departure such as a Facebook smartphone. That said, it didn’t take long for the “is the new Facebook search going to slay Google” type headlines to start appearing.

Graph Search is primarily a way of mining more information from within the Facebook database, and leveraging the preferences of those in your social network to “short cut” finding things you want. It can also be used as a full Web search engine, although this is based on Bing search capability so personally we’d be, well, surprised, if the results pose any kind of a threat to Google at least for now.

Whilst Graph search offers some fun possibilities, it does also depend rather heavily on the quality of the social network you’ve built in Facebook and how closely that network reflects your “real world” likes and dislikes in the present. For example, my network is heavily biased towards keeping a sneaky eye on those I went to school with – but that was in a very different time and place, and that particular group of people wouldn’t be my first port of call if I was looking for a restaurant in New York (that’s what Twitter is for, isn’t it!).

If you want to sign up for early trials of the Graph search function, you can do so here.

Trying too hard on Twitter?

Next up, a semi-serious article from Digiday suggesting some Twitter guidelines for execs who are the wrong side of 40. Some of them we’re not sure about (we love our emoticons and see that changing) but other guidelines make some good points – for example, we’d be very happy to see the back of  the old “Tweets are my own opinions” biography cliche, which has transplanted awkwardly from other media.

Website Revamp without the stress

A good proportion of clients coming to us for training do so because they’ve either just completed a website revamp, or are in the middle of it and want to launch their social media presence alongside the new site. We recognise these people by their short fuses and general resemblance to wrung out dishcloths. That’s an exaggeration, but it’s certainly true that the whole process is stressful for many and downright painful for a few.

HubSpot have just produced an excellent free template for tackling your website revamp in a structured way, which we’d definitely recommend to anyone about to start on a review project. Along with talking to us about web designers who can be trusted to do what they say, when they say…

And this week’s Giggle Prize goes to:

If you’re feeling a bit down after Christmas, have a look at our final link. From the makers of Awkward Family Photos comes the Christmas Edition…guaranteed to make you grateful that the whole thing is safely over with for another year.  And also give you a good selection of “what were they THINKING?!!” pics with your afternoon coffee.

Integrating Instagram into your social media strategy

Some helpful thoughts from Flowtown on how specifically smaller businesses might make use of Instagram. Provided you can cope with adding another channel into your mix, and have “on the ground” staff with the right mindset to produce engaging and relevant images, Instagram is well worth considering.

Facebook Reach continues to decline

Have you noticed that your Facebook post statistics are looking a bit poorly lately? We certainly have. Even taking the simple “X people saw this post” numbers which appear on each individual post, we’re seeing a fall of anything up to 70+ on the equivalent numbers from a few months back. This article from We Are Social has a lot of detailed data on the issue and some debate about what’s really going on here. As we noted earlier this week, Facebook have now launched a new option for Likers to see all of a page’s posts, but there’s no doubt that the task of getting your content in front of Likers has been getting harder recently.

Too wired to sleep?

An increasing number of us are connected to the internet almost round the clock, via our Smartphones. This is great for social media, but possibly less good for our mental and physical health. Mitch Joel’s piece on Sleeping with your Smartphone talks about the size of the problem and suggests we start observing better smartphone hygiene in bed!

And finally….

In this week’s silliest slot, a (presumed) Twitter addict appears to have named their baby Hashtag. We’re really, really hoping this is a spoof.

Say Cheese!

The week’s biggest news was undoubtedly Facebook’s acquisition of the Instagram app. If you use Twitter much, you won’t have been able to avoid Instagram – it has a huge following from users who love its ability to render their whole lives in retro-cool imagery. (If I sound a bit jealous, it’s because until very recently the app was only available for i-phone, and I’m an Android user! – Kate). Predictably, Instagram users were underwhelmed by the news, to say the least – here’s a roundup of witty user reactions from Mashable.

It’s an interesting move though, and there was a huge amount of industry comment and speculation on the potential impact of Facebook’s purchase, and the implications for their future development directions. Read what everyone else thought here: Why did Facebook buy Instagram?

Google Panda  – the return

Further changes to Google’s Panda algorithm had a big impact on some sites in late March. If you’re dabbling in Search Engine Optimisation, now is a good time to get an updated view of what’s a good idea in terms of link building strategies, and what you need to start avoiding. Luckily, we found an excellent article delivering just that – 7 link building strategies to avoid

Used Friends Reunited lately?

No, us neither. But it’s still around, and has had a good shot at a relaunch. We’re not convinced it has much hope of regaining the ground lost to Facebook at this point, but it’s interesting to see what they’ve been up to. The relaunch is all about nostalgia..

And Finally

In the “interesting stuff” section this week, we note that 59% of adult internet users are on at least one social networking site. And to help digest the implications of that, we really recommend this article on the impact of social media on concepts of privacy in the US . It’s very thought provoking stuff, and crucial if you’re marketing to the younger generations. If you’re over 25,  just because you wouldn’t share or participate or reveal something personal in the public space of social media, don’t rule out marketing campaigns which involve any of those – your target market see things VERY differently.

That’s all for this week, have a great weekend!

Eat our chocolate -it makes you dumb

We kick off with Snickers, who enlisted the use of Katie Price (aka Jordan)’s Twitter account to promote the chocolate. Initially, Katie’s 1.5million + followers were surprised to see her usual vacuous timeline (sample tweet: “get that horrid women (sic) out of bb, I dislike her”) filled with comments on quantitative easing and the Eurozone debt crisis. The mystery was solved, though…

Thereafter, normal service was resumed- including an explanation to Lord Sugar as to what had been going on. The mind boggles:

So, you might be temporarily overcome by an interest in significant world affairs, but a bite of a Snickers will restore you to brainless glory. As my Nan would say, “they just didn’t think it through”.

When “brand engagement” goes bad

Next up, McDonald’s. Now, you’d think that any brand with an army of detractors the size of theirs would fight shy of introducing a hashtag which could be easily subverted, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t? You’d be right. Earlier in the week they began sending out tweets using the #McDStories hashtag, which was intended to promote the positive effects on farmers of growing for McDonalds.

It took precisely no minutes at all for the ever-mischievous Twitter community to pick up on the hashtag and start using it in ways that, as McDonalds was later to comment, “did not go as planned”. Like this:

You really have to wonder if McDonald’s marketing department is run by actual clowns. How else could they not have worked out by now that Twitter is not Hello! magazine? If you put something out there, you better be sure that you don’t mind the rest of the world joining in – and their agenda might not quite match yours.

LA Fitness will help you lose that pound of flesh

And finally, the gym chain LA Fitness. For variety, this time the clowns seem to be in the PR department. One of their customers appealed to Guardian Money for help terminating a gym membership that she could no longer afford, following a series of exceptionally unfortunate events.

Now, you may or may not believe that people should always be held to contracts they’ve signed for the long term when, y’know, stuff happens, but it doesn’t take a business genius to work out that once the story goes to print nationally, there’s probably more to be gained from making a one-off exception than by demanding your pound of flesh. LA Fitness took the opposite view –  and the story was picked up on Twitter. An avalanche of negative tweets followed, including many suggesting that more liberal-minded folks might like to boycott the chain. It’s now looking as though the family’s gym fees will be met by well-wishers, and LA Fitness is firmly installed as this week’s incarnation of evil.

This week’s useful links

New small biz social media case studies

Always good to get new case studies of social media success, especially from smaller businesses who’ve done it on a budget. This collection of 9 small business social media success stories is excellent, showcasing a wide variety of businesess from a photographer to a (female) carpenter. It’s a bit light on results, but there are some good ideas in there which might inspire you.

The art of Pay-per-click

Starting or running a Google Ads (pay per click) campaign? With the tight word restrictions, writing your ad can be a lot harder than you expect. Some good advice here from Hubspot on how to write great PPC copy

And just for fun….

This isn’t brand new, but we enjoyed it so it’s getting included anyway. 24hours of Twitter in London visualised – fascinating!

That’s it for now, have a great weekend and do feel free to share any thoughts or great articles you’ve come across this week in the Comments!

Social media news

This week’s biggest story has been SOPA – the Stop Online Piracy Act being proposed in the US. You’ve probably heard it mentioned, and may be aware that Wikipedia, Reddit and a number of other large social sites closed down for a day on Wednesday 18th in protest and to raise awareness of what’s being proposed.

While most of us agree that content creators need some protection from unlicensed usage, as is so often the case when modern technology and the government and legislative processes meet, this proposal is a ridiculous knee-jerk overreaction which genuinely risks hitting the Delete button on key aspects of the internet. If you’re interested in learning more about SOPA and its potential effects, try this: SOPA will take us back to the dark ages

We’re still seeing some interesting end of year data coming in (see also our social media stats 2012 roundup). This infographic illustrates the top brands which were active on Twitter in 2011, and isn’t necessarily what you might expect. I mean, sure, McDonalds is a massive brand, but the scope of material for being interesting, educational or funny on Twitter isn’t exactly huge. Just goes to show, you can find a way to make it work even if all you have to talk about is dead cow.

More data out, too, about our favourite social media site, Google +. Apparently Google + users are spending only 5 minutes per month on the site – less even than the equivalent for MySpace, which is generally agreed to be dying on its ex-hipster posterior.

Although we take anything in the Daily Mail with a pinch of (cancer causing) salt, this article about the communication habits of couples stood out as something we really hope isn’t true. It seems that although we can all be in constant contact with everyone these days, one in four couples speak for less than ten minutes a day. With an amazing two thirds of people saying they’d rather spend time on Twitter or Facebook than eating with their partners, it seems as though a savvy marketer may have more chance of connecting with Joe (or Jane) Public than their partners do!

Tweet of the week

If any of our readers aren’t yet convinced by the case against autoposting social media content, maybe this screenshot will convince you: autopost fail

And finally…

If you find yourself surrounded on all sides by “social media experts” and want to sort the wheat from the chaff, this is the best article we’ve seen yet to help you do so – and made us laugh out loud along the way. 10 questions to evaluate a social media expert.

That’s all for now folks – feel free to add any top posts we’ve missed, and have a great week!

Here’s what you might have missed this week…

The latest social media craze is Pinterest – a site which helps you create a virtual “mood board” of images and articles around a theme. This article from Mashable demonstrates some of the more advanced features, but also links through to their Beginners’ Guide if you want to find out what it’s all about. Pinterest: 13 tips and tricks for cutting edge users

Facebook:

Now that discussion forums are being phased out of the core Facebook Page offering, administrators need to add their own forum. This article looks at the benefits of doing so, and also includes a link to a “how to set it up” guide which is really helpful. 7 Reasons to add a Chat forum to your Facebook Page

Meanwhile, a travel company poll has revealed that the average UK holiday maker uploads their holiday snaps onto Facebook within a mere four hours of landing. They must bring back less laundry than we do, is all we can say! however, this – along with some of the other stats, like the fact that more than half of those questioned claimed they discuss their upcoming holiday more than twice a week on Facebook in the runup to takeoff – just underlines what a huge opportunity there is for Tourism businesses (hotels, attractions, restaurants) to market themselves through this channel. Average holidaymaker puts photos on Facebook within 4hrs of landing

Social Media to support visitor drive for 2012

While we’re on the subject of tourism, Visit Britain has just released a range of projects promoting “friends and family” tourism to the UK in 2012. We think they’re on the right track, helping people who live here and love it “show and tell” their overseas friends and relatives why they should be visiting. Visit Britain unveils social media toolkit for Olympic year

Social media strategy

If you’re not already following Mark Schaefer’s blog, we’d suggest you check it out. This week’s article on 5 ways corporate culture determines social media success is especially relevant – even if you’re a smaller company and a number of the “executive” roles are played by one person, it’s easy for some of the attitudes mentioned in Mark’s article to put the kibosh on your (or your agency’s!) efforts.

And finally…

An older article, but one that we’d not seen before, and we think is such a comprehensive roundup that it needs to be shared anyway! Social media etiquette is always a hot topic, especially for marketers who are new to the medium. As each social media site is unique, so is the associated etiquette – and this article covers each and every one of them, in great detail. Even if you’re a regular social media user, there’ll be something here you’ve not considered before! So take a look at http://www.techipedia.com/2008/social-media-etiquette-handbook/

That’s it for now, have a great weekend and do feel free to share any outstanding news or articles you’ve come across this week in the Comments!

On the radar this week…

Twitter – big changes to the Twitter.com site

The “new twitter” interface (yes, another one) is being gradually rolled out to the UK now. Not sure what the logic is behind who has it and who doesn’t – so far, our main accounts and most of our client accounts are still using the old version but judging by the comments in our Twitter feed, the majority of people seem to have had theirs upgraded. Some of the niggles associated with recent tweaks also seem to be being ironed out, for example “your tweets, retweeted” seems to have been rehomed alongside @mentions, which actually makes some logical sense, rather than within the chaotic “activity” area. Meanwhile, Twitter has also introduced “Brand pages”; a completely new development and obviously aimed at starting to crystallise some income for Twitter.

It seems that unless you have the “new” Twitter enabled on your own account, you won’t be able to see the new brand pages either – so don’t be surprised if nothing looks different yet!

Best Practice social media campaigns 2011

The first of the year’s roundups is out, with a nice selection of great campaigns from econsultancy. If you’re looking for inspiration for a big campaign, you could do worse than start here.

The elusive New Facebook Timeline – possibly coming soon. Still.

A bit like the Yeti, we’re starting to wonder whether the rollout of the new Facebook timeline is going to remain legendary and only supported by rare glimpses. However, the rumour is that it really will be rolling out in the UK over the next few days.  Alongside that, there’s also a new function to allow the public to send messages directly to Business Page administrators – a very sensible idea since currently there’s no way to make contact with a page owner unless they’ve chosen to reveal their identity via the Featured Page Owner section.

42% of UK small business owners stumped by social media strategy

A new study by Epson has suggested that despite lots of UK small business owners registering themselves on Twitter (60%) and creating Facebook pages (31%), almost half admit to having “no idea where to start when it comes to using social media for online/digital marketing” . That sounds about right to us, based on our own work with SMEs – the “what buttons to press” part is fairly easy to learn for some, but the strategy side, and how to really make it effective for the organisation, is trickier.

If that’s you, you’d benefit from one of our private social media training sessions where the focus is as much on what to do as how to do it – one for the New Year perhaps!

This week’s top Tweet

The one that made us smile this week came from @madeupstats : ” Thanks to smartphone autocorrect, 1 in 5 kids will be getting a visit from Satan this Christmas.”

Have a great week!

Social media sites & tips

Facebook’s business page “Insights” statistics have had a thorough overhaul, and it’s vital that you make good use of these if you’re growing a Facebook community. All the information you need about the changes is here, including a link to Facebook’s own online tutorial:  Facebook Insights changes

We’ve written before about how to be a star on LinkedIn, but this infographic takes a lighthearted approach to making sure your profile is “fit” for purpose – with increasing numbers of potential clients checking you out on LinkedIn, it’s important to make sure your profile does a good job for you!: LinkedIn Boot Camp for marketers

If you’re running a company blog, this article provides a great guide to five questions your company blog should answer. Blogs are time consuming to maintain, so  it’s always worth reviewing regularly whether your blog is meeting your original objectives.

Search & SEO

We know a lot of you found this article very useful, with lots of tips beyond basic search: How to Google like a ninja. Great for making sure you keep tabs on every mention of your company – socialmention.com is another excellent tool for this, too.

Starting & growing a business

Being in the early stages of creating a business is exciting and fulfilling, but it can also be downright frustrating and depressing at times. These tips on how to avoid entrepreneurs’ depression are well worth a read.

The fun slot

A couple of pieces that made us go “uh?!” this week – how the “once in a lifetime” 11/11/11 date looked on Twitter, and Facebook reduces six degrees of separation to 4.74 – you’re more closely connected to the rest of the human race now than at any other time in history!

How to trend on Twitter…for all the wrong reasons

Web agency SapientNitro released what amounts to a hymn to “I’m so cool” employee smugness onto YouTube. The result probably wasn’t exactly what they were hoping for.  Econsultancy takes up the story here.

Facebook Events function improved

Use Facebook Events to spread the word about promotions or open days? They’ve just added a map facility to the Events function – great if you’re inviting new customers who haven’t visited you before.

More Twitter viral spam

Another new spam Direct Messsage is doing the rounds this week, although hopefully it’ll be less appealing to most business users than the previous ones about negative blogs! If you get a message along the lines of “I know who has a crush on you – click here” – just don’t. You might also want to let the sender know that their account has been compromised.

Google + and SEO

We wrote in the last roundup that we suspected G+’s main expansion strategy to be based on effectively coercing businesses to use it for the search engine benefits, but our friends at The Fountain Partnership have expanded on this with an excellent article on how an active Google Plus page can boost your PPC campaign.

Very interesting, as it suggests that for some businesses, a strategy based on increasing visibility of your G+ purely for SEO reasons may make sense.

Other articles well worth a look for the small business marketer:

Are you marketing with YouTube? Maybe you uploaded a few experimental videos, got disillusioned when they failed to go viral, and abandoned them? If so, there’s a good piece here about injecting new marketing life into old YouTube videos.

For many businesses, increased visibility on Google and other search engines is one of the key benefits of developing a social media presence. It’s good to have at least a working knowledge of other aspects of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and the old days where keyword stuffing and link farming were all that was required are long gone. This great roundup of 6 best practises for modern SEO from Mashable is required reading for anyone marketing online – even if you can’t do it all, it’s good to be aware of the various aspects and changes.

The Fun section:

Meanwhile, this video was going super viral all over Twitter and the nation’s inboxes. It really is irresistible, especially if you’ve ever owned or walked a dog with tendencies to disappear into the hunt zone!

Hopefully, this’ll help our readers get to the most important news for them as SME marketers.

This week’s biggest Social Media news

Arguably, the release of Google + pages for businesses. Which, so far, haven’t changed our views on G+ one bit.

Other than the customer service potential of the “hangouts” feature (live video chat, basically), there’s very little here you can’t already do on Facebook; and Facebook has a much broader church of active users.  Our money is on Google’s dominance strategy being mainly based on favouring G+ related activity in search results. Which is a shame really, as they’re basically holding us all to ransom rather than luring us in with great functionality.

And also…Twitter changes

Twitter has been gradually rolling out a new “Activity” tab to users’ Home view.  The new tab contains all sorts of great information – for example, you can see at a glance which accounts your Twitter friends have just started following, a great source of implicit recommendations. BUT, it’s all jumbled in together with tweets your friends have favourited or retweeted, and retweets of your own stuff. If there was a filter to allow you to choose what kind of activity you want to view at any time, it would be fantastic. As it is, there’s just way too much going on.

And, much worse, the old “your tweets, retweeted” drop down has been removed – so if you want to find out who’s retweeted you, you have to dig through ALL the activity of EVERYONE else you follow. Or to put it another way, you effectively can’t.  The best way around this is to retweet manually and stop using the ReTweet button – which is a good idea anyway, see this post from Marian Schembari if you want to know why. We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.

So, on to our pick of this week’s articles. Happy reading!

Some people have been finding that Twitter is apparently unfollowing accounts at random. Here’s how to check and why it’s happening

LinkedIn has just released Facebook Insights style statistics for groups – great if you’re growing a community there and need to understand their activity. LinkedIn unveils Dashboard for Groups

In a further change to the Newsfeed format, Facebook has reinstated the old “new stuff first” option. This has implications if you were benefitting from higher visibility due to a lot of interaction on your Business page posts, or have users who generally have large numbers of friends.

It’s always a good idea to know where your weaknesses lie before starting on a project. This excellent article from Smedio highlights the most common areas where you might need help with your social media campaign.

Looking to improve your website? (You should be, constantly!). Here are five great example of product copywriting – and the principles apply even to services businesses.

And finally…Google has announced yet another algorithm change for search rankings, “freshness”. Makes having a blog even more valuable, as you stand much more chance of being the most up to the minute publisher of content on a particular topic!