Enchanted at SLA 2012

Guy Kawasaki was the keynote speaker at the SLA 2012 conference in Chicago this week. Guy is the former chief evangelist of Apple -- he was one of the original marketers of the Macintosh. He is a venture capitalist and now the co-founder of of the news site Alltop.com. I was among the thousands of information professionals that got to hear Guy tell us what it takes to really enchant. Will you only fly Virgin? Do you tell all your friends how Apple has changed your life? That is enchantment! Kawasaki's new book Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions is about how you can have that same effect on others. Whether you are an entrepreneur with a new idea, trying to get your dream job, convincing someone to write a check to your favorite charity, or selling the services of your library, you can use the power of enchantment.

It's not the same as being enchanted by Guy Kawasaki live and in person, but you can see him on YouTube and you can find his Enchantment PowerPoint deck on Slideshare.

Pinterest for Business Research

Clearly, we all love Pinterest. It's the fastest growing social network and shoppers spend more money via Pinterest than Facebook. But can you do more than pin recipes, shoes and interior design? Well, yes! You can do business research! Now of course, it's not the first place we'd turn for business research, but you can still learn plenty of interesting things about a company on Pinterest. You can find out about a company's culture, how they interact with their customers and what things they value. You might even pick up on future company plans. Even venture capital firms have Pinterest pages. Here are a few Pinterest pages and boards we think are good examples of using Pinterest to learn about companies and industries: Bessemer Venture Partners: Bessemer is a large venture capital firm and you can learn a lot about them on their Pinterest page. They've got their portfolios and exits pinned, and they even have boards dedicated to portfolio companies by industry.

Pinterest is a great place to find infographics. Here's a board dedicated to Social Media & Internet Infographics:

HomeAway, a site for vacation rentals, engages their customers not only with vacation homes to stay in, but also, contests and interior design ideas:

This board is dedicated to "Brands, Businesses & Blogs"--this is a quick way to see how lots of different companies are using Pinterest:

There's even a page to help businesses succeed with their Pinterest campaigns:

Social Currency: More than just buzz

We have looked at how companies can monetize their social media with Social Commerce and we've introduced you to Famecount where you can find the popularity of brands, now with help from Vivald-iPartners  we examine how it all fits together to create Social Currency. The report Social Currency: Why brands need to build and nurture social currency explains that "today, one of the most important strengths of a brand is its social currency, the extent to which people share the brand or information about the brand with others as part of their everyday social lives." Social of media has changed how brands are built. "Social media sites are actively used today by major brands to strengthen customer service, introduce or co-create new products and entertain people." A high social currency commands a price premium and creates brand loyalty, but it takes more than just buzz. "Companies need to learn how to make their brands more social, and how to interact in new ways with their customers.

The most interesting part of the paper explains that although there are 6 components of social currency (affiliation, conversation, utility, advocacy, information and identity), brands don't need high scores in all 6 to have a high currency. Different categories of products have different needs. Categories like fast food and beer seem to be less dependent on providing a strong sense of community, whereas airlines and IT rely on their user-base to exchange news, hints, and other information.

Social Commerce: Monetizing Social Media

Social Media, everyone is researching it these days and everyone wants to know how to make it pay. I ran across this white paper from syzygy group that describes social commerce as a "fusion of social media with e-commerce." Social commerce includes 6 dimensions: social shopping, ratings & reviews, recommendations & referrals, forums & communities, social media optimization, social ads & apps. The simple definition is "helping people connect where they buy, and buy where they connect." Amazon has been bringing customers together and getting ratings and reviews in their online store for years, and now stores are popping up in Facebook. 1800Flowers and Gilt Groupe now sell their wares right there so you can more than just "Like" them. There is also potential for brand building by creating associations in the minds of customers. Researchers are using psychology measures from social intelligence to gauge brand worth (see chart below). Next week I'll cover more on the new subject of a brand's social currency. The report is available from Social Commerce Today. Their site is full of the latest news on the subject. Check out all the companies making social commerce a reality and see if they are  cashing in.

Social Media Plan Template

Marketo is offering a free Social Media Plan template. The plan includes the tactical objectives you can use to accomplish two primary goals of social media. Download the Social Media Tactical Plan Template below, and find out where to budget your time and resources to maximize your organization's social media efforts.  The customizable social media tactical plan helps you:

• Measure the value of social media strategies
• Efficiently create tactical objectives
• Drive more unique traffic to your website
• Convert anonymous traffic to known visitors

It's a simple template, and you probably actually know what you should be doing already, but the template will help you outline the necessary steps to keep track of your social media and provide you with some ideas for how to measure your success.

Social Media Map

Trying to keep up with all the social media platforms available can be pretty overwhelming. Luckily the folks over at Overdrive Interactive make it easy for us with this great Social Media Map. You can download the map for free after providing some basic information and the downloadable PDF comes with live links.

Famecount: Social Media's Most Popular Brands

Last week we talked about corporate use of social media and today we're going to see which brands and companies are the most popular. Famecount keeps track of brands, celebrities, media, sports, games, music and politicians on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. They'll give you rankings for each service by region and they also break down each category so you can come up with some pretty specific charts. On the "Facebook Stars" tab, I can break down the brand category to Auto, Food & Drink, Fashion, Restaurant, Retail and Technology. These charts will show me the total number of fans as well as fans per month, week and day:

I can also see most popular brands over all channels combined:

And trends of the fastest growing brands:

Famecount gets their data directly from the sources and you can read more about how their data is calculated here.

Corporate Use of Social Media

Recently we talked about how SMBs are using social media and today we're going to take a look at how some of the larger corporations put social media to work for them.  Burson-Marsteller has a great report out entitled "The Global Social Media Check-up 2011".  It's a great report and gives us insight into how some of  the Fortune 100 companies use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, etc.  Over the past year, they report "an 18% increase in FortuneGlobal 100 companies using Twitter, followed by a 14% growth in YouTube channels and a 13% growth in companies using Facebook pages."  And typically corporations have more than one account: On average they have 5.8 Twitter accounts, 4.2 Facebook accounts, 2.7 YouTube channels and 6.8 blogs. IBM alone has 76 Twitter accounts! That's a lot of communication, but who's listening? Corporate accounts average about 5,076 followers on Twitter and 87,979  "likes" on Facebook. According to eMarketer, most people follow a brand "to get updates on future products":

Fans and followers can get anything from customer service to a new job. TiVo is among the many companies who post jobs on their Facebook page:

And Glaceau's smartwater is hoping their new YouTube video will go viral:

SMBs Double Use of Twitter

eMarketer reports that small and medium-sized businesses doubled their Twitter usage from 2009 to 2010. According the the “Local Commerce Monitor-Wave 14” study from BIA/Kelsey and ConStat, last year 1 in 5 SMBs used Twitter for local marketing.  SMBs' overall use of social media is growing. "Twitter was still behind many other social media tactics, with nearly half (48%) of respondents using Facebook for marketing and a quarter using some other social network."  35% of the SMBs surveyed had increased their use of links and ads on social media sites over the past year, and "46% planned further increases in the next 12 months." 25% of SMBs increased their use of customer ratings and reviews in 2010 and 39% expected to increase usage of reviews before the end of 2011. Not surprisingly, younger businesses (those under 7 years) were more likely to use social media for marketing.

For more on corporate uses of social media, stay tuned to bizologie. Later this week Laura will cover The Global Social Media Check-up 2011 report from Burson-Marsteller.