Just how big is Facebook, really?

According to TechCrunch, big enough to encroach on Yahoo’s position of ‘third largest Web property in the world’, trailing none other than Google (#1) & Microsoft (#2).

In the U.S., Facebook already has the second highest number of unique visitors per month – surpassing Yahoo for the first time in January. Compete.com also reports that of all time spent online in January, 11.6% was on Facebook, compared to less than 5% on Yahoo and Google each.

What does this mean to you?

Well, I don’t have the answer to that question, but I can tell you what it now means to some of our clients for whom we’ve recently started advertising on Facebook –> more qualified customer leads + a desirable cost = more $$$ for them.

The following story is about a lead generation client (Client A, for anonymity), but Facebook would certainly be worth testing if you’re in an e-commerce space too.

We created Client A’s Facebook account back on January 26. He’s a local advertiser, only seeking clients within a close radius of a heavily populated metro, so we set the Facebook geo-targeting to just 10 miles around his city.

Within 18 days his campaign spent just over $500, generating almost 600 clicks, but these numbers don’t tell the whole story yet:

When we dig into our Google Analytics reporting for Client A’s Facebook PPC traffic, we can see that his $500 in spend produced 11 highly valuable customer leads:

By highly valuable, I mean that Client A knows his customer lifetime value and has been able to determine that each new customer lead is worth $600 to him.

So for a ~$500 cost, with 11 new customer leads worth $6,600 (11 x $600), we’re talking about a superior ROI from Facebook in just 18 days!

It’s important to note here that Facebook is only producing 5.5% of the overall leads from our top 5 traffic sources, so it’s not going to replace Google AdWords anytime soon. Facebook is however, turning out to be a solid supplemental lead source for Client A.

1. Track your conversions with a reporting service like Google Analytics.

2. Utilize Facebook’s demo/geographic targeting to focus on a niche audience.

3. Set your bid price within Facebook’s suggested CPC bid range.

4. Use a captivating image in your ad (you can combine an image with text).

5. If you generate a strong impression share initially, but then it trends downward over time, you should rotate new ad creatives to keep a fresh message in front of your audience’s eyes.

6. If you are unable to generate any substantial impression share at all, then try experimenting with different or fewer demographic segments. You can also try targeting a larger geographic area to boost your ads’ reach.

Facebook advertising is included in our paid search management service, get the full story on what we can do for you.

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(Via Unofficial Google Analytics Blog.)

(Via Latest Adobe News.)

How Google Wave is Changing the NewsNovember 22nd, 2009 | by Leah Betancourt

It’s not too often that legacy media learns a new mass communication tool along with its audience. But that’s exactly what’s going on now because of Google Wave. Although it’s still invitation only and in preview, the real-time wiki collaboration platform is being used by some media companies for community building, real-time discussion, crowdsourcing, collaboration both inside and outside the newsroom, and for cross publishing content.

Google Wave m”

(Via Mashable .)

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If attendees at KMWorld 09 needed any further convincing that working in interconnected environments where people operate in social networks is an important issue, here’s some brand new research out today from the Society for New Communications Research suggesting that C-level execs are increasingly taking this new set of conditions seriously!

Via ZDNet ..

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Wow! Top execs say they are influenced by social networks

This is a new research study from the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) is very important because it shows that company executives are influenced by their online networks.

And the trend is growing. The influence on business decisions by online communities is at its highest in three years.

The research was conducted by Don Bulmer from SAP and Vanessa DiMauro.

Here are some key findings from this survey of 365 business professionals:

- Professional decision-making is becoming more social – enter the era of Social Media Peer Groups (SMPG)

- Professional networks are emerging as decision-support tools

- Professionals trust online information almost as much as information gotten from in-person

- Reliance on web-based professional networks and online communities has increased significantly over the past 3 years

- Social Media use patterns are not pre-determined by age or organizational affiliation

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These are all very interesting findings. Especially the high level of trust that decision makers have in regards to their online communities. It’s good to have some real data to match the anecdotal stories and observations.

There is more survey data here on Don Bulmer’s blog: Everyday Influence: SNCR Research Reveals Social Media’s Impact on Business and Decision Making

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(Via The FASTForward Blog.)

Today’s post is written as a resource for the Kent State University Entrepreneur Extravaganza where I will be a presenter with Rob Felber of Felber & Felber Marketing. Click here to read his post.

As an entrepreneur, I’ve come to realize that knowing how to improve your networking will improve your ability to market and brand your business.

Why is networking so important to entrepreneurs?

1. Starting and running a business requires  many facets of talent and experience.
2.  Having friends and business acquaintances who can help you find the right answers and resources is powerful.
3. By networking you get connected to other people who can and will help.
4. When you know a lot of people, there are more answers at your fingertips
5. As an entrepreneur, you need resources to bring your idea to market

Step-by Step Networking:

Keep your business cards in your right pocket, with your left pocket free to put their business cards.  If there are name tags provided put it on the right side of our lapel (people look to the right  when they shake hands.)

Don’t have a plate of food in one hand and a drink in the other.  How can  you shake hands? Grasp a business card? Don’t be chewing when someone wants to introduce you to someone else.  Just because there is food there, doesn’t mean you have to eat it.

Depending on the event, on your way there think about some casual small talk subjects for some of the casual conversations: weather, sports or other general, non controversial topics.  Have some short good answers ready for the common opening questions: where are you from? how did you get involved in this organization (if the event is hosted by an organization) and the favorite: ‘what do you do?’

A good networker is always ready for the what to you do with their 30 second commercial/elevator speech.  I’ve found that just launching into the full 30 seconds is a real conversation killer, so be prepared to  have a more back and forth conversation.

The 30 second commercial works when you are seated in a room of business professionals and the person at the microphone says: let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves, where we are from and what we do.  When it’s your turn, you stand, take a breath and tell the group who you help, why it is helpful to them, the name of your company and your name.  Meanwhile, you’ll be listening to the others to figure out who else you’ll need to meet before the event is over.

After the event:
Follow up after an event makes all the difference.  Either enter the contacts into your database or use an online contact system like Linked In.  Send an email to the person you promised to supply information to. Write a handwritten note to someone you will want to stay in contact with.  Perhaps schedule a phone call or meet for coffee to get to know more about the person and their resources.

You’ll want to reach out and connect two people who could help each other. That is where networking really gets strong.  When you become the connector you become the resource.

Online Networking
Many of the same concepts apply on line.  Your 30 second commercial is incorporated into your summary statement on LinkedIn. Or much shorter on your 140 character profile on Twitter.  Some advantages of online networking: you can move at your own pace, on your own time. It is searchable to find who you want or what you need, even when you don’t remember or know their name. 

Networking on line or in person is a key for entrepreneurs.

Helpful Links to Improve Your Networking Results:

• How to Build Your Network
• Top 10 Professional Networks for Women in Finance
• 10 Online Networking Tips for Entrepreneurs
• Tips for Effective Business Networking
• Business Networking Advice: Interviews
• 50 Ideas for Using Twitter for Business

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(Via Branding and Marketing.)

Take a look at pages 9 and 10 in this slideshare presentation. It’s the push versus pull marketing.

I believe it is the outbound megaphone style of traditional advertising tactics and methods are become much more ineffective. Getting comfortable with the ‘nontraditional’ inbound tactics of pull marketing (more commonly used for consumer marketing) can make a powerful difference in marketing your company in this decade.

If you do decide to use social media marketing for your B2B business, here is a great post with 10 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips from Mashable by Ross Kimbarovsky. Hat tip to @QueenBusiness.

Does it make sense for you to use social media tools for your company? Why… or why not?

”

(Via Branding and Marketing.)

(Via CNET News.com.)

(Via Squidoo : Plexo : Seth’s best blog posts from the last 2 years.)

Posted using ShareThis

As Twitter becomes more and more popular, the quality of tweets (Twitter updates) seems to be taking a dive. I attribute this to a couple side effects of the relentless population rise:

1. An increase in conversational, challenging, and defensive tweets.
2. The use of tweets to mass-distribute unoriginal ideas and propaganda.

Conversational Tweets

I wasn’t among the earliest adopters of Twitter, but I’ve been a member long enough to remember the days when you were more or less likely to know everybody you followed, and vice-versa. In this environment, Twitter’s concept of a ‘reply tweet’ was ideal, facilitating a mix of public statements and conversation among friends.

As the Twitter ranks grew, it became more common to stumble upon people we don’t know, but whose work we admire, or whose thoughts are original and worth reading. I follow a number of people whose reputation is well known to me, and they have no idea who I am. This is fine, because I am getting something of value from their tweets, while my quiet observation is generally of no bother to them.

But Twitter’s egalitarian implementation of reply tweets allows responses to tweets even from somebody you don’t follow. This has many positive effects, because a genuinely helpful or insightful person can respond intelligently to a tweet, and have a fair amount of confidence that the original author will receive their feedback. In short, Twitter replies enable the masses come to your aid, sing your praises, or perhaps less conveniently, to call you on your bullshit.

Calling bullshit can be a useful service, but on the internet it tends to become a pathological blood sport. Some members of internet society become so invigorated by the opportunity to prove somebody wrong, that they’ll stop at nothing to quench their thirst for victory. They stretch facts, bend logic, and insinuate false intentions for the chance at glory. The chance to prove you wrong on Twitter.

So here we have a system on which millions of users stake their personal reputation, and where some significant percentage of users makes a pathological game of trying to assassinate those reputations. The more followers you have, the greater the number of idea assassins you have at your quite unfortunate beck and call. When even the most innocuous of statements invites pointless scrutiny, the original author is bound to get defensive. This leads to an unfortunate and noisy interchange that looks something like this:

• MacLover: Man, these new MacBooks looks awesome, but I don’t think I can buy one unless they put Firewire ports back on them.
• Apple4Ever: @MacLover If you hate Macs, you should just buy a PC. There’s no point in complaining about it. Just buy a PC if that’s what you want.
• MacLover: @Apple4Ever What are you talking about? My freaking name is MacLover. Of course I love Macs. I was just making an observation about the new
• MacLover: @Apple4Ever MacBooks, they’re sooo close to being perfect. I wish they would make a MacBook that is as fine-tuned as the old PowerBook 12″.
• Apple4Ever: So buy a PowerBook 12″.
• * MacLover Head Asplode *

This conversation is agonizing enough for the people involved, but the poor followers of MacLover and Apple4Ever had to follow along, utterly disinterested (unless they turned on ‘Only show me @replies to people I follow,’ which can be a good idea). In this scenario, Apple4Ever is assassinating MacLover’s ideas, scraping the bottom of the barrel for any controversy that could possibly lure MacLover into a personal dialogue.

People in MacLover’s position would do well to ignore such bait, but it’s not always clear cut. The 140 character limit in Twitter makes it difficult to completely express a thought without ambiguity. Conversational moods such as sarcasm and irony are hard to convey, and the audience is filled with people who are chronically deaf to such tones.

So Twitter is filled with people who care that their thoughts be expressed with accuracy and meaning. And it’s also filled with people who, because of boredom or lack of attention, are hell-bent on causing rifts that invite confrontational interchange. This is a recipe for lots of misunderstandings and escalating hostility. It sucks, man.

To improve the quality of conversational tweets, I propose a little more consideration on both sides of such conversations:

1. To the would-be idea assassin: take a step back and examine the tweet you’re responding to. Does it actually say what you’re alleging it says? Are you making a leap of logic to start an argument, just because you’re in the mood for a debate?
2. To the would-be defensive tweeter: breathe. The person egging you on is one drop in a puddle next to a lake abutting an ocean. Their provocative tweet is only visible to you and some subset of their followers. Chances are, most people will never see it.

I’d like to think I’m never the idea assassin myself, but I am sure we all have the tendency sometimes. As for the defensive tweeting, I’m positive that I do it to a fault. So I’ll be trying especially hard to take my own advice #2 above.

Tweet Propaganda

Twitter connects a hell of a lot of people. The idea that a simple viral tweet message could prompt others to act in a manner that itself perpetuated further tweets, is irresistible to commercial marketers and internet stuntmen. The simplest form of viral propaganda on Twitter is the simple word-of-mouth repetition of ideas in an author’s own voice. I wrote about Word Of Tweet Marketing just over a year ago, after being impressed by the growing impact Twitter was having on my own company’s sales and reputation.

As people recognize the power of word-of-mouth dissipation, it becomes tempting to spread every good idea that comes along. Every funny joke. Every classic YouTube video. Every friend worth following. Since people are lazy, and rephrasing an idea in one’s own voice takes time, the phenomenon of the ‘retweet’ emerged. People annotate a tweet with ‘RT @whoever’, implying that the contents are being more or less repeated verbatim. Great for the spread of ideas, terrible for the individual personality of a Twitter account.

But even a retweet involves some personal involvement by the account owner. More and more, we’re seeing examples of tweet propaganda where the contents of the tweet are entirely machine made. A classic example occurred a few weeks ago, when a steady flow of ‘Don’t click this URL’ messages began pouring into peoples’ tweets.

The gist of this prank was that clicking the URL took you to a page where, if you clicked another URL after being warned not to, it would submit a tweet to Twitter under your logged in account name. A classic example of the power of reverse psychology.

There was no financial gain for the perpetrators of this idea virus. Just the satisfaction of Twitter being virtually painted, for a few hours, with identical tweets from thousands of different accounts. People who fell for the trick were embarrassed and apologetic, recognizing that the tweet was not only of no value to their followers, but also posed the risk of snaring them into the same gag.

In other cases, the propaganda is voluntarily added to a person’s twitter stream. Some vanity services, for example, will do an analysis of your twitter account and tweet the results with your permission. Often, the permission is thinly veiled or questionable, and users end up apologizing that they ‘didn’t realize it was going to tweet that.’

Tweet propaganda is still young, and people are still grappling with where to draw the line. By engaging in a viral process of any kind on Twitter, you’re trading your originality to be part of a larger scheme. Depending on the terms of the scheme, it could be beneficial to you and your followers, or it could be annoying and embarrassing.

Just a few days ago, a controversial form of tweet propaganda came by way of the MacHeist promotion. Their so-called TweetBlast rewards buyers of their bargain software bundle with extra software if they agree to let their Twitter account be used to promote the bundle. If you follow more than a few Mac users, you’ve no doubt seen the tweets by now:

One of the nice things people like to do is share information about great deals. This makes viral marketing a natural avenue for sales and bargain discounts. But there’s a distinction between a person, writing in their own voice to endorse a sale, and a mechanized robot puking thousands of tweets into the system on behalf of users looking for a freebie.

Michael Lopp recently wrote about The Art Of The Tweet, and touched upon something that I think is important and appropriate for this discussion. In a section titled ‘Add a Bit of Yourself’, he discourages the excessive use of re-tweeting, and opens with a bold rationale for this discipline: Twitter is you.

More Of You, Less Of Them

Ultimately, the quality of tweets is closely related to how much of you there is in them. When you forfeit your individuality to a commercial promotion, or to the vain attempt to either defend your own honor or assassinate somebody else’s, you compromise your own tweet quality.

Whenever anybody complains about some aspect of Twitter, a fair number of people like to respond reflexively: ‘If you don’t like something, don’t follow them.’ This advice is fine, but apply it to the other fine things in life, and you quickly find that it leads to stasis, a situation where the state of the art does not advance for lack of iteration and refinement. If nobody reviews and offers opinions on books, movies, fine arts, poetry, etc., then they are all liable to degrade in quality over time.

My intentions in being critical of Twitter and the state of declining tweet quality is not to bask in my own whining or seek consolation or apology. I honestly think that by rethinking the situation, we’ll decide what kinds of tweets are of best service to us all.

Certainly, different subsets of Twitter will have differing standards. There is room enough in Twitter for all attitudes and priorites, but I’ll be filling my follow list with the people who put the ‘you’ into Twitter.

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(Via Red Sweater Blog.)