Future Case

Social media marketing in Asia has doubled in the last year however companies in the region are still to master the potential of the medium, according to a new report from Burson Marsteller.

The public relations firm found that 81 percent of the companies listed on The Wall Street Journal’s Asia 200 Index use social media, which is up from 40 percent in 2010, however it also identifies a number of issues around the use of the channel in the region.

Many companies in Asia are not making use of social media as part of a long term plan, according to the report which finds 62 percent of the social media accounts recorded to be inactive. Equally, “the great majority” of active accounts are updated infrequently having been set-up for short-term marketing initiatives.

Of those that are active, the report concludes that strategy is lacking with firms not adapting their communications to the demands of new media. One third of the companies using social media are focused on basic outreach to media and influencers through ‘pushed’ messages – chiefly around new products – while many fail to create new channels for corporate news, instead piping all communication to consumer audiences.

Social networks and microblogging – which includes China’s Sina weibo and Tencent weibo as well as Twitter – were unsurprisingly the most used mediums across the seven markets, although the use of video grew significantly as the chart below shows.

via Social media marketing on the increase in Asia but issues remain.

Taken from Wired

Brandon is a Wired Science reporter and freelance journalist. Based in Brooklyn, New York and Bangor, Maine, he’s fascinated with science, culture, history and nature.
Follow @9brandon and @wiredscience on Twitter.

What do Bill Belichick defensive schemes, Tom Clancy novels, Google+ and Facebook have in common? The answer is that all are so byzantine that they leave many people scratching their heads to figure them out.

For NFL playbooks and spy novels, such intricacies are the norm. Social networking should not be that way. The trouble is the latter is rapidly descending into a black hole of complexity that you now really do need one of those Missing Manuals to figure out the basics.

With all of the news coming out of Google and Facebook this week, our relationship with social networking sites has entered the dreaded ”it’s complicated” stage. That’s a shame, since it’s simplicity that attracted us in the first place.

Google’s minimalist interface and ability to execute a search exceptionally well is what catapulted it to the forefront. It made us quickly see just how bloated other services like Yahoo had become as they aimed to become portals. Now Google is a complex portal.

Facebook, much the same, rose to prominence because it was just so simple compared to others. Back in 2007, author/pundit Jeff Jarvis praised its “elegant organization” as the nucleus of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s genius.  Now, however, the interface has grown a lot more complicated. It too is a portal.

Somewhere along the way both Google and Facebook lost sight of keeping things simple

Today Google+ and Facebook are locked in a features arms race the likes of which we haven’t seen since Microsoft Word defeated Wordperfect back in the early 1990s. Both are rapidly adding buttons and gizmos to keep a fickle public in their grasp.

On the one hand, some might see this as a smart move. History has shown us that no single community or social platform has had staying power more than a few years. Users get bored, new platforms emerge and there’s churn. Features encourage tighter connections, more sharing and increase the emotional switching “costs.” It can keep users in their fold – even the disgruntled.

But there’s a balance, and both are starting to go too far

via Social networking enters the dreaded “It’s Complicated” stage — Tech News and Analysis.

Via GiGaOm

Amid all the noise and fury over Google’s policy of requiring real names (or at least real-sounding names) on its new Google+ network — a policy that Facebook also has, and one we have been critical of in the past — it’s easy to forget that there’s a pretty large web service that doesn’t much care what your real name is. Although it does prevent you from pretending to be people you aren’t, Twitter doesn’t block or ban users for having pseudonyms the way Google and Facebook do. Why is that? I think it’s because Twitter realizes it can provide plenty of value for users (and thus for advertisers) without having to know your real name. The social web is about reputation and influence, not necessarily names.

I started thinking about this again, not just because the real-name issue continues to draw heat from Google+ users — and because Facebook’s real-name policy threatened to become a legal issue if legislation that was being proposed by Congress passed — but also because I had a chance to re-read Clay Shirky’s excellent take on group dynamics from 2003, in which he talked a bit about identity online. If you haven’t had a chance to read his presentation, I highly recommend it. Before he became a media guru, Shirky spent years studying early online worlds such as LambdaMOO and The Well, and his insights are worthwhile for anyone interested in the topic of community online.

When he gets around to the issue of identity, Shirky says that he generally avoids the topic because it “has suddenly become one of those ideas where, when you pull on the little thread you want, this big bag of stuff comes along with it” — something just as true now as it was eight years ago when he said it. He notes that while anonymity doesn’t work well in group settings (as supporters of Google’s policy like to point out), the answer isn’t necessarily requiring real names, but rather some structure that allows for persistent pseudonyms or “handles.”

Not real names — persistent identity with reputation attached

There has to be some permanence to these handles, Shirky says, because otherwise there’s no reputation hit to changing your online name and behaving completely differently — and users need to be able to know who they are talking to or interacting with from one minute to the next, even if they don’t know their real name. As he puts it, weak (or non-persistent) pseudonyms don’t work well because:

I need to associate who’s saying something to me now with previous conversations… If you give users a way of remembering one another, reputation will happen, and that requires nothing more than simple and somewhat persistent handles.

Does that sound like any kind of online network you know of? It sounds a lot like Twitter to me. In a recent open house at the company, CEO Dick Costolo talked about how the service doesn’t really care what your real name is — all it wants to do is connect you to the information that you care about. And if that information happens to come from a “real” person, then so be it; but if it comes from a pseudonym, then that’s fine too. Twitter isn’t necessarily married to the idea of users having pseudonyms, Costolo said — it’s simply “wedded to people being able to use the service as they see fit.”

I think Mat Honan at Gizmodo hit the nail on the head in a post he wrote about Costolo’s remarks, in which he talked about how Twitter doesn’t care what your name is because it has realized that you and your activity are just as valuable to advertisers with or without a real name. That’s because advertisers want to target their messages based on interests, demographics, reputation and influence — things that have little or nothing to do with what name you use. You could argue that people who use real names are more likely to tell the truth about their age, marital status etc., but even those aren’t the real goal.

Reputation and influence matters — not names

The reason why services like Klout have been gaining steam is that advertisers and marketers are looking to build a “reputation graph” that they can tie to the interest graph they get from watching behavior on social networks. They need to know not just what is being talked about but who is saying it, and whether they are influential. Does their real name matter? Not really. Did anyone care that Perez Hilton used a fake name as he built a small media empire under the noses of the mainstream media? No. Advertisers certainly didn’t care, because he had influence in the markets that they were interested in.

Shirky’s point is that for a functioning online community, all you really need is some kind of system for attaching reputation points to a user’s “handle” or pseudonym. Klout is trying to do that with a number that rises and falls based on your activity on networks like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Tumblr. It may not be the best system, and Klout has its share of critics, but it is the closest thing we have right now to a reputation graph that is based on Twitter and other social-network activity. If you behave badly and you lose followers, your ranking falls, regardless of what your name is.

That kind of penalty — a loss of status, a loss of followers, etc. — matters to most users (other than pure trolls, or what online researchers call “griefers”), and so they will behave in ways that protect it. It’s the same in successful online communities like Slashdot and Metafilter, where users have invested a lot of time in their online personas, whether they use their real names or not (I’ve talked about this before as being a little like levelling up in online games like World of Warcraft). And of course, the “real” names of many Twitter users and gamers can be discovered fairly easily with a web search.

Google has made it clear that it wants Google+ to become a central kind of “identity service” that it can build other services on, although it’s not clear what kinds. But the real-name requirement must be based on something other than just wanting to have a well-designed online community or network in which people are free to share information, because Twitter has shown that doing this doesn’t require real names — and never has.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Klobetime and Danny Cain

Through Twitter @DespokeMedia

By Rachel Esterline Social Media Club Great Lakes Bay President | 0 comments

Posted: Sunday, September 11, 2011 9:30 am | Updated: 9:51 am, Sun Sep 11, 2011.

TicketKick.com, a site that helps people fight traffic tickets, utilizes Facebook, Twitter, Digg, blog posts and blog comments on other related blogs, backlinks, press releases and articles as part of its branding.

As part of its social media outreach, Sara N. Schoonover, Ticketkick.com’s vice president, follows these key fundamentals when it comes to taking the company’s marketing online:

“Branding your business in any particular industry is key to getting noticed,” Schoonover said. “We’ve committed ourselves to staying on top of the hot topics in the social media world related to our industry.”

Schoonover recommends having a clear vision of your company’s image before posting online.

“Imagine how the public would view your business through your posting,” she said. “Are you deviating from your brand image or personality that you’ve created for your company through a specific comment or blog?”

Professionalism is key when posting. Schoonover offers several simple tips.

“Never bad-mouth people, other companies or the government,” she said. “Always triple-check for grammar and spelling errors, even when posting on Facebook or Twitter. You want people to see what you’re talking about, not get distracted by your grammatical mistakes. Don’t use all caps and capitalize correctly.”

Additionally, she recommends avoiding speaking negatively about specific topics.

“Even for seemingly negative topics, such as red-light camera tickets in our industry, we always try to word our comments in a way that turns it into a positive, like what people can do when they get a red light camera ticket,” Schoonover said.

To help control what goes out on the Web and to minimize potential errors and problems, Schoonover said small businesses should assign specific people to be in charge of social media.

When dealing with negative remarks about a business online, Schoonover said the company representative shouldn’t be defensive.

“Always try to respond with a comment like, ‘Thank you for your honesty,’ which is exactly what the public wants to hear. Then contact that person directly in private and be very helpful, concerned and friendly,” she said. “You’d be surprised at how that person may very well delete their comment or respond. Your other happy customers will be quick to defend you as well.”

via Important social media fundamentals for businesses – Midland Daily News: News.

For brands, social media is a relatively new marketing platform that has grown exponentially over the past few years. And investing in social media now has never been more important, as experts say social media is on target to be a $30 billion industry (per year) by 2015.

Hiring a talented social media manager to take your brand from 1 fan to 1 million is a major factor in determining your business’s success and failure. We tracked down the globe’s finest social media managers behind brands such as Virgin America, The New York Times, Gizmodo, Flavorpill, Thrillist, TOMS, NASA, Intel, Etsy, HowAboutWe, Vanity Fair, Samsung, Fast Company, ELLE and even interviewed our very own Amalia Agathou from The Next Web. These aren’t just talented individuals. These are human beings pioneering a new profession.

When an issue arises, these are the men and women that have to spring into action. Do they use Hootsuite, Radian6, CoTweet, Vitrue or Awareness for social media monitoring? Where do you spend the most time? How do you keep conversation colloquial yet still professional? How do they encourage user-generated content, commenting, gamification, social aggregation and what’s the art of content curation? And what about geolocation? Are they on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Trumblr, Gowalla, Loopt, SoundCloud, Slideshare, vYou, Flickr or even GetGlue? What do they think of Google+? Which is their fastest growing media account? And do you ever sleep? We ask them here.

Continue via Meet the 18 people behind your favorite social media accounts – TNW Social Media.

Surprisingly, newspapers are paving the way for using social media effectively. That theory has come true, as a recent case study published by the Nieman Journalism Lab shows how the LA Times has embraced social media alongside a smart SEO strategy, to bring its traffic numbers through the roof. It’s implemented a new social strategy that included Facebook commenting and a higher emphasis on the blog section of its site that has seen readers more engaged, and their visits increase at a time when other, larger, rivals are seeing a decline in traffic levels.

In March this year it saw 160 million uniques to the site, compared to 189 million in May. And this compares with a year on year increase of 5%, when the New York Times saw a decrease of 18.8%.  So what’s the secret sauce and what can we learn from it?

If you’re going to blog, do it well

When the concept of blogging first emerged it was a huge talking point and a must-have on every online marketing strategy. Newspaper blogging is an essential part of most strong social media strategies, for how it can make your site a living, breathing extension of your brand and also the value it can drive in SEO. This consideration should be secondary, but it’s still important.

The LA Times has shown that if you’re going to have a blog, you need to do it well and dedicate the time and resource it needs in order to work. In the traffic report on the Times, the managing editor discusses how it’s changed the blog section on their site to include reports and mirror longer style articles. He explains how it ensures fresh content on the site, that is more informal and conversational in manner.

He says “Most of our blogs are reported stories…What we’re seeing is big increases in our blogs, and that’s where a lot of the breaking news is.” A quick look at the blog section on the site shows the extent of information available here.

via How The LA Times is winning with social media – TNW Social Media.

Mobile applicationss with augmented reality features are becomingly increasingly popular among luxury brands, whose consumers have come to expect a certain amount of engagement, quality and innovation.

Augmented reality lets brands highlight products in a way that seems more immersive and intriguing than commercial. Brands such as Audi, BMW and Zenith watches are already using augmented reality to engage mobile consumers.

“Augmented reality is a unique opportunity to engage users in a personalized way by adding content to their environment wherever they are,” said Deborah Hall, managing director at web2mobile, Toronto.

“For luxury brand customers, there is an opportunity to create a magical experience,” she said. ”It creates that ‘as if’ in the minds of the consumer, nudging them to imagine for themselves a different reality.

“This takes luxury brand marketing to a new and mobile level.”

Read on via Does in-app augmented reality work for luxury brands? – Luxury Daily – Mobile.

Oh, why not.

ILIKE SILVER PENDANT The Internet has inspired artists, designers, fashion catwalks and museums, and certainly has been an inspiration for Lysander Follet’s iLIKE Silver Pendant. For a round of Facebook-inspired jewelry, young French designer Lysander Follet from French studio Minigorille has created a pendant that is fully handmade out of silver 925. It’s a limited edition, 30-piece pendant made in Lyon, France that may look familiar to some of you social network lovers out there. That’s right, the design is formed in the shape of the “Facebook Like” button icon that you use every day. For lovers of the largest social network in the world, here is an original jewelry gift to offer or to be offered. This limited edition iLIKE Silver Pendant is available at selective shops around the world. Published: Jun 27, 11 • References: minigorille and viacomit.net

Taken from Trend Hunters