Will instant communication kill e-mail?

Facebook is moving into the e-mail business. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, calls it "modern messaging system" and users soon will be entering into the @facebook.com world. This announcement reinforces the idea that in the future people will be more interested in instant communication than traditional e-mail and services like Gmail or Yahoo Mail will have to deal with the consequences.

An article by Brian Barret published on Gizmodo, give us a good idea of this trend that may be possibly change the future of cyber communication:

"Zuckerberg insists that this isn't going to be a Gmail killer, and for the time being, at least, he's right. But Facebook's looking towards the future, towards a generation that's steadily and increasingly been abandoning email for instant communication. And the more we abandon email for text and chat, the more Facebook's going to be the communication hub."

You can read the full article HERE.

The Nike hit on Facebook

A recent article published on Bloomberg Businessweek about advertising on Facebook gives us an example of the way big companies are using the social network for advertising purposes.

During the last World Cup, Nike produced the video "Write the Future" that was originally posted on Facebook before moving into TV, the traditional advertising channel. That new way of approaching advertising not only saved big bucks to the company but also became an incredible way of reinforcing the brand's name.

The following is an excerpt from the article:

"The video started as an ad on the site. Then it was passed from friend to friend, often with comments and members recommending it. In the resulting discussions, the clip was played and commented on more than 9 million times by Facebook users—and helped Nike double its number of Facebook fans from 1.6 million to 3.1 million over a single weekend. Getting the ad onto Facebook cost a few million dollars, according to the companies".

If you want to read the full article please click HERE.

Social media charts

Today, I read a post with some interesting charts about the popularity of some social media sites. Click HERE to read the full article.

Can Facebook ads take on Google Adwords?

According to Inside Facebook, the social media giant could reach this year the billion point mark in terms of revenues. Half of that comes from ads.

Keeping on mind this, do you think that Facebook ad platform represents a serious threat to Google Adwords?

This is a sentence I read from an article on Daily India:

"Much of Facebook’s revenues comes from advertising with half of that coming from their ad platform. Facebook ads are still in its infancy when compared to Google Adwords and it pales in usability and efficiency to Google’s. But if improvements continue it may challenge Google down the road as the top ad platform on the net."

It's Facebook time

These are good days for Facebook. The social media giant is near to reach 400 millions users around the world and the promising future of social media gives Facebook a lot of good reasons to smile today.

The new trend in terms of optimization seems to be oriented towards the SMO (Social Media Optimization) and it's going to be interesting to see how SMO will play along the lines of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Take the following note from this article I read today in Min Online:
"Just as “SEO” became the key to publishers riding the search engine ecosystem, “Social Media Optimization" may be the buzzword for the next few years as more and more of us discover news and information through friends on Facebook and Twitter."

In addition to this trend, Facebook is now generating more online traffic than Yahoo and Google' Buzz is just a response to accomodate the company to the impact social media is generating on the Internet.

Keeping on mind all this, Facebook is starting to set up the pace on the Web and when a company does that, there are many reasons to be happy and confident about the future.

How social media is affecting online traffic

According to an analysis carried out by the Palo Alto firm Gigya, "Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites."

This interesting note appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle website.

Another part of the article I found interesting was this:

"...David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy for the digital marketing firm 360i of New York, said the importance of search engines isn't going away.

"But there's always been one downside to search," he said. "Consumers only spend about 5 percent of their time online searching and the other 95 percent of the time at the destination. Social media is quickly accounting for a large percentage of that 95 percent. Google's biggest acquisitions, DoubleClick and YouTube, have been all about playing a big role in the rest of consumers' Web usage."..."

It's going to be interesting to see the evolution of this trend.

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn numbers

I took the following information from the post "The Big Three Social Networks Have Emerged as Professional Networks: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter" written by Don Bulmer:

- LinkedIn: LinkedIn has approximately 50 million users worldwide in 200 countries. The membership on LinkedIn is growing at roughly one new member per second. When LinkedIn launched in 2003, it took 477 days, almost a year and four months to reach the first million members. The last million took only 12 days. Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members.

- Facebook: Facebook has over 300 million members with 150 million that log in at least once per day. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook are 35 years and older and according to Facebook more than 2 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared across the network, each week.

- Twitter: Twitter has more than 32 million members with the segment of 45-54 year olds being the top demographic and 25-34 year olds following closely behind at second. It has been found in other studies that baby boomers and senior citizens are more likely to join Twitter than their grandchildren.

I thought this was something interesting to share to get a picture of how social networks are doing today. If you want to read the full article, click HERE.

How to screw up your social media

Today, I read a very interesting article that talks about different ways to ruin your social media efforts.

Catharine Taylor, the author of the article "Eight Ways to Ruin Your Social-Media Strategy" points out eight common mistakes that occurred when managers deal with social media strategies. This is the list:

1. Pretend you can do without it
2. Play down the costs
3. Act like you own the conversation
4. Fear empowering your employees
5. Assume you have little to learn
6. Take negative feedback personally
7. Fret about return on investment
8. Understimate the power of seemingly small efforts

After reading this article, I couldn't stop thinking about the way my previous company managed its Facebook campaign. Taking into consideration the author's list, this is my personal reflection of the mistakes my company did:

1. Pretend you can do without it
My manager always thought social media was useless.
2. Play down the costs
He set up a campaign with the conviction that the only thing he needed to do in order to succeed was creating a company page on Facebook.
3. Act like you own the conversation
The language on the page was everything about "we are the best", "come and play", etc...
4. Fear empowering your employees
My manager was scared to death with the idea of people devoting time to Facebook during working hours. For him that stuff wasn't real work.
5. Assume you have little to learn
He didn't care about social media, he didn't believe in the fact that maybe user engagement could bring new ideas to the table affecting site improvement.
6. Take negative feedback personally
After we created the page, there were three groups on Facebook talking very bad about a pop-up campaign that we were using with an affiliate partner. My manager thought it was useless to interact with these angry users and try to deal with the problem.
7. Fret about return on investment
We placed some ads on Facebook with zero results in terms of ROI. After one week, he decided to abandon forever social media strategies.
8. Understimate the power of seemingly small efforts
He thought social media was useless... he didn't even know what Twitter was.

To that list, I would like to add one more thing:
Our site was oriented towards the Spanish market yet the page we created on Facebook was in English language!

What I saw on my previous company was probably one of the worst social media campaigns ever built. I blamed my manager for the failure of this campaign which unfortunately was one of the numerous problems he created with his management style... no wonder why the company eventually closed down.

Do you unfriend a lot?

And the word of the year according to the New Oxford American Dictionary is.... unfriend!

What does unfriend mean?... this is the official defintion:
Unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a "friend" on a social networking site such as Facebook.

Example: "I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight."

So, do you unfriend a lot?

To read full post click HERE.

Friendly social media guide for small businesses

I don't know for how long this document has been running in the cyberspace but today I discovered Dell's Social Media for Small Businesses guide on Facebook. Apart from being an easy-to-read manual (you can actually download the whole thing), this guide is divided into different sections that provide real case scenarios of companies that have taken advantage of social media to promote their own businesses.

To take a look at the guide, click HERE.

Should social media drive traffic to your site?

I came across two opinions about social media that are quite different.

The first one goes like this:

"The point of using social media as part of a marketing or PR strategy for a small business is to drive traffic and generate sales." Peter Shankman, founder and CEO of The Geek Factory, a boutique marketing and PR strategy firm in New York City. Read full article HERE.

The second one goes like this:

"Facebook marketing is not about driving traffic to your web site. Keep Facebook users on Facebook." Online Marketing blog. Read full article HERE.

So, my question is this: Should social media drive traffic to your site or not?

A short social media business example

Today, I read a short but useful post written by Massimo Paolini from the Examiner.com. He provides a short scenario which exemplifies the way a small business can promote its activities using social media tools. Check it out:

"Let's say you have a hair salon in Willow Glen. First, you'll want to create your own fan page on Facebook. Post pictures of your store and staff there. On your Twitter account, you can send out "tweets" about specials and new stylists or products. Advertise on Craigslist, and make sure your website is bookmarked on del.icio.us. Add more pictures on Flickr especially if your stylists are creating unique styles--and ask customers to post reviews on Yelp."

Click HERE to read the full post.

Social Media World Map

The other day, I came across an article featuring a map of the most influential social sites around the world. According to that analysis, Facebook is the most popular social media site in the world. However, reading some of the comments people left in the post, it seems there are some inaccuracies in the results. Click the image below to read the post.