Social media impacts many areas of business from marketing and PR, customer services, sales, research and development and of course reputation management. Tying all the data together, making sense of it and then making the right decisions regarding how best to act on it can be a challenge and is a constantly evolving area. Below are links showing the latest ideas, thoughts and opinions from leaders in this space:
2016
TheNextWeb – Why Slack and its army of bots is the OS for your office: “People commenting on Slack Platform, however, seem to pay little attention to a crucial piece of the puzzle. Botkit and Slackbot.”
Kurzweil: New ‘machine unlearning’ technique deletes unwanted data: “Machine learning systems are becoming ubiquitous, but what about false or damaging information about you (and others) that these systems have learned? Is it even possible for that information to be ever corrected? There are some heavy security and privacy questions here. Ever Google yourself?”
ZDNet: Twitter rolls out algorithmic timeline by default: Here’s how to disable it: “Twitter has made a major change to its service on Thursday, rolling out an algorithmic timeline by default, as it hopes to attract new users by making it easier to find content. This is a 180-degree turn from the reverse chronological order timeline Twitter has had since it launched in 2006.”
ChiefMarTech: The race for the #1 and #2 marketing technology brands: “Al Ries and Jack Trout, who essentially invented the concept of “positioning” in marketing, wrote a terrific book in 1993 called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. It’s a fantastic read, and even though it’s more than two decades old, I believe it’s as relevant today as ever.”
July 2013 Links:
Econsultancy – Business Intelligence Meets Web Analytics: Breaking Down the Silos: “The Business Intelligence Meets Web Analytics Best Practice Guide is aimed at data and web analysts, marketers, executive management and agencies that work with web analytics data and aspire to deliver more business intelligence from their investment.”
Altimeter – It’s time to get smart about Social Data Intelligence: “… even the best strategy for collecting, analyzing and interpreting social data is just a set of pretty charts unless it is connected in a meaningful way to business objectives and, as importantly, actual business data.”
Twitter.com – Experimenting with new ways to tailor ads: “Starting soon, we will be experimenting with a way to make ads on Twitter more useful to our users in the United States by displaying promoted content from brands and businesses they’ve shown interest in. Users won’t see more ads on Twitter, but they may see better ones.”
June 2013 Links:
AllthingsIC – How the military use social media: “The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has a comprehensive communications campaign Think Before You Share to encourage people serving in the armed forces to consider their actions online. Its focus is along the lines of ‘it may not just be your friends and family who see what you write’ and ‘consider the sort of YouTube hit you want to be.”
May 2013 Links:
Econsultancy – Five lovely new features that mean Google Plus is about to take hold: “Here’s a brief summary of the main G+ improvements in effect today.”
SocialMediaToday.com – 1 in 10 young people rejected for a job because of their social profile: “New research from ondevice showed that one in 10 people surveyed have been rejected for a job because of their social media presence. And, the majority (two-thirds) are not concerned that their use may harm future career prospects.”
Forbes – World’s best corporate websites: Bowen Craggs & Co., a London consulting firm that advises companies on how to improve the effectiveness of their online presence. “To put together the index, a dozen Bowen Craggs staffers spent four months pouring over websites and online communications of 84 large corporations. It considered companies with the world’s greatest market capitalizations, with roughly a third coming from the U.S., a third from Europe and the rest from other parts of the world. Then it rated them on a points system in eight categories that cover how well companies serve investors, the media, job seekers, customers and society. It also looked at the effectiveness of a website’s construction, the clarity of the message conveyed, and how easy it is to contact people inside the company and get questions answered.”
April 2013 Links:
BusinessInsider – The fascinating spread of content through social networks: “How does content evolve along the different paths it takes on different social networks? Let’s take a look at expected versus unexpected events, which each have very different pulses in the form and speed information travels around these events”
Oxfordjournals – Cascading behaviour in complex socio-technical networks: By the end of 2012, Facebook had 1.06 billion monthly active users 1. Over 60% of them were active on a daily basis. Twitter claims to have 200 million users 2 producing over 400 million tweets each day; and Google+ is the fastest-growing network ever with over 400 million subscribed users, 25% of them active 3. According to the International Telecommunication Union, more than 6 billion mobile phones around the world are currently in use 4. All these figures are indicative of the radical transformation that affects how we interact and communicate, but also how we confront the research of those communication patterns: we can now capitalize on massive amounts of data to advance theoretical approaches that, so far, had to rely on small datasets or analytical models lacking in external validity. In the middle of this transition, a new scientific paradigm 5 is brewing under the label of ‘computational social science’ (CSS) 6; 7; 8, a shorthand for the new avenues of research that the massive amounts of data generated by information and communications technology (ICTs) are opening up.”
March 2013 Links:
Techcrunch – Pinterest Launches New Data Analytic Tool for Businesses as it Prepares to Monitize. “Pinterest has started rolling out Pinterest Web Analytics, a tool that will allow businesses to see how many visitors the content-sharing service is referring to their sites.”
WMG Innovative Solutions – £1.2m HAT project to create a personal data repository of digital life and a home platform for future services and products. “Research led by WMG at the University of Warwick is creating a physical personal digital repository that will record and hold data on both a person’s digital footprint and the physical patterns of their daily home life. The repository is owned by the individual (much like money in our banks) and could be used to trade and shape future services and products to individuals.”
February 2013 Links:
Econsultancy – How John Lewis uses Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. “Unlike Walmart and Tesco, John Lewis doesn’t publish its own social media guidelines online, however in a previous interview its social community manager said that content is key, “with a tailored approach for each social media channel.”
Adweek – Pinterest’s Retail Problem. As more shoppers use the online scrapbook to showcase brands, retailers struggle to keep pace. “Fashion retailer H&M is pretty popular on Pinterest—in spite of itself. Over the last month, the social scrapbooking platform’s users have pinned, repinned, commented on or liked the brand’s products 145,000 times, according to Pinterest analytics firm Curalate (H&M is not a client). The problem is, a good number of H&M’s popular pins feature dead links—an increasing problem for retailers, said Curalate.”
Business2Community – UK Social Media Statistics for 2013. “We’ve trawled through the publicly available data* to give you the best that we can find on usage and demographics for all of the key platforms at the start of 2013”
Hootsuite – Social Media for the Enterprise. “A Business Case Video. ”
BenMartin.pro – Selling Through Social Media: Infographic.
January 2013 Links:
Dan McKinley – Design for Experimentiation: Talk and Slides. “I first presented this at the Warmgun 2012 conference in San Francisco. The video here is a reprise of it from Etsy Labs in Brooklyn.”
Econsultancy – 14 Reasons Behind John Lewis’ 44% Increase in Online Sales. “It proved to be a fruitful Christmas for John Lewis, with like-for-like sales up 13% in the five weeks to December 29 compared to the same period in 2011… Online sales grew almost three-times faster at 44.3% and now account for a quarter of all group sales… So how has John Lewis managed to pull off such a massive increase in online sales? Here’s a run down of some of the reasons behind its continued success…”
Econsultancy – 40% of UK consumers used reserve and collect over Christmas such services over Christmas. “retailers that have adopted it are driving a significant proportion of sales by using click and collect. Here’s just two:
– Check and Reserve accounted for 29% of Argos’ £819m sales in Q1 2012.
– Halfords introduced a click and collect service two years ago, and now 86% of all its online sales are for in-store collection.
December 2012 Links:
23/11/12: Econsultancy – Amazon goes social, launches Pages, Posts and Analytics. “brands continue to invest in their social presences, and challenges notwithstanding, many are still trying to figure out how to convert social to sales and track the process. That combination of social investment and desire to drive sales apparently hasn’t gone unnoticed by online retail giant Amazon, which this week began launching its own Amazon Pages offering modeled after popular social sites”
23/11/12: New York Times – Banned on Wall St.: Facebook, Twitter and Gmail “For young Wall Street employees who live their lives through social media, working at a big bank can feel as if the plug has been pulled. Most financial firms ban Facebook, Twitter and Gmail, and block most music and video streaming sites.”
21/11/12: The Verge – EyeSee mannequin silently collects consumer data for overzealous retailers “With the luxury goods market sagging under the weight of a sluggish economy, some retailers are turning to more surreptitious and rather controversial means of targeting consumers.”
21/11/12: zdnet.com – Big data has potential to double telco prepaid revenue: Globys. “Prepaid mobile customers can change carriers at the drop of a hat, but data-analytics applications company Globys has found a way to keep this group loyal to their telco providers, while also making them spend more.”
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