Maximise breakthrough by leveraging influencers

Utilise social currency to amplify experiences and drive conversations

Humanise the brand by driving the audience conversations

Strengthen the emotional connection with the brand by building relationship

Target influencers with engaging assets to act as platforms for conversation

They are all true. But such of BS-bingo, aren’t they?
If you’re looking for more such “taglines”, see whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com.

• Use Bullet Points: Just like I’m doing here, separate some lists into bullet form which not only breaks your post up into sections, but helps people skim your ideas if necessary
• Use Section Headings: I often use H2 and H3 tags to define different sections of my posts. This way, I have a clear outline of my beginning, middle and end, so visitors can decide to read just one section or all of them combined.
• Bold important sentences: If people are going to skim your posts, make it easier for them to take value from it by highlighting your most important points
• Use clear sentences: Unless you’re trying to appeal to English literature graduates, you don’t need to use fancy words or complex-sentence structures. Keep your sentences simple. And remember: What you say is far more important than how you say it.
• Break things up with images: Another good way to structure your content, without using headings, is to use relevant images to break things up. I like to have one in the introduction, as do many other bloggers, and more throughout the post, depending on the length of it

I keep this article simple too. You can find much more resources from useit.com.

For example, if your target customer:

• spends five hours a day on Facebook
• sends 120 text messages and half a dozen tweets a day from a smartphone and posts photos, videos, and blogs around the clock
• “checks in” regularly using Foursquare at favorite retail locations to become “mayor”
• relies on a plethora of mobile apps like Google Maps to get from one place to another, RedLaser to check prices on SKUs at Kroger or Best Buy, and Fashism to crowd-source advice from others while shopping
• and subscribes to Groupon or LivingSocial for alerts on local deals…

there’s a good chance you might want to know what it’s like to live a life like that. There’s an equally good chance that knowing what it’s like to live your customers’ media might change the way you use marketing and media to reach, influence, and interact with your customers. It might even change what you do radically.

Source: HBR

Initial letter from Brian

Kevin’s reply:

Worth to read. Really good points.

However, there are several important aspects that need to be thought through if an attempt at taking over Facebook is to be even slightly successful. Here are the 7 most important trends that I consider are vital when creating and launching a new social network such as Google Me…and that need to work to convince me to make the switch:

At the end of the day, these keywords shouldn’t be important only for Google, but for all of today’s successful software industries…

Article originally published on Blue Barracuda Blog

ECI Partners bought a 60% stake in the i-level group in April 2008 in a deal that put a value of £46.5 million on the business founded by Charlie Dobres and Andrew Walmsley.   The structure of the transaction included loading the group with £32 million of debt, much of which carried an interest coupon of 12%.

Anyway, the most interesting part in terms of social media is the headhunting game in Twitter, happening now in real time. All i-Level employees get job offers publicly over Twitter. Wonder how many of them will find a new, better job like that?

Search for i-Level in Twitter and see what comes up

UPDATE: Successful marketing in Twitter – UK marketing firm Engine acquired i-level’s social media unit Jam!

How does it work? You use location-based apps to “check in” in a place. Phone’s GPS locates your location  and determines what “venue” you might be at, giving you option to select a location or create a new location. You can broadcast your “check ins” between your friends to see where they are now or where they frequently go. You can also leave location-based tips for friends to discover later, or participate in social competitions, or the ability to unlock digital badges, stickers, and prizes.

I’ve been amazed of its usefulness right after I installed it on my phone last weekend. Dozens of users have left useful tips about Tallinn. Finally I have usable application to answer the vital questions:

• Where to go to eat?
• Are there any of my contacts currently around to grab a quick coffee?
• Where is the closest … ?
• Does this city have … ?
• …

In additional to user’s benefits, it surely offers wide range of opportunities for digital marketers too.  Such as:

• Drive repeating customers to your business
• Get your customers to recommend your business
• Offer special deals to fans of your business
• Offer special deals to anyone around your business
• …

The beauty of location-based marketing is that it is instant.

I felt embarrassed of the results. I thought I had optimized my personal brand on the internet, as Google displays the results just the way I want them. Although I never use the Neti.ee search, according to TNS Metrix Neti.ee is the most popular internet portal in Estonia.

Everyone probably knows that already, but it’s often overseen: Google is not the only search engine and even if you’re well SEO’d for Google, Bing and Yahoo, local engines might display some really odd results that need optimizing too.

In this search, some of the first results are really random pages that would never appear in Google with those keywords – their PageRank ought to be 1 .. 2 of 10. But despite of their low popularity, one needs to optimize/edit their content as well. And boost up

PS: Did I really start this post with “googled”, not”searched”?

The number of commercial Pages in Facebook is vastly growing in Facebook. More than 100 Estonian companies have now their Facebook page. Customer servicing and interaction moves from “googleable” static websites. From Facebook Pages you can find objective data and reviews about products and services.

Facebook is trustworthy information source. As you google for information, one might find quite a lot of irrelevant and fake information. Yet Facebook is currently quite non-spammed. Real reviews from real people. In example, if I read restaurant reviews from Google, I can never be sure that this is authentic feedback. If my friend recommends a restaurant over Facebook, I would really look forward visiting it. Which do you trust more: a friend’s reviews on product or services, or googling for info and finding (fake?) reviews and potentially non-objective feedback?

Facebook is also a framework of search – if it keeps users in its own community, users don’t need to click external links. For corporate customers it means advanced user behavior analysis. For private persons the benefit is more personalized search results.

There is also potential threat for Facebook. Facebook’s key success factor in terms of search, is to manage its clean and objective content. Only if Facebook manages to keep his content objective and non-spammed, he might become a start page for any information search.

Obviously threats of Facebook inspire Google to develop its own services further. And develop more integrated mix of services and intelligence – gMail, Analytics, Orkut, etc.

Luckily, both Facebook and Google users benefit from that. For companies it is important to enhance your social media presence and build trust with customers. Customers will gain better services and products, more tailored search results.