Get Noticed
A Guide to Social Media Marketing Techniques
Mar 9th
In my previous article, I was somehow critical about the state of advertising in social media. I do believe that marketing is a necessity in a free market and that it can give great results when done with integrity. And by that, I mean not disguising Ads into user generated content. And I have to admit, there are a number of companies that just do that and they have gained a lot as their customers have gained also. In this post, I will talk about a few techniques that can be used on social media for marketing purposes. As you know my philosophy, I’m against black-hat techniques when it comes to selling products, so everything here might sound very boring to some…
Social media for promotion
Let’s say a friend of yours just had a great deal at Best Buy. The deal is so good that he had to tell you, which led to you buying that same product. That’s great because Best Buy benefits from word-of-mouth marketing here. First, they promote their products and then word-of-mouth happens with sales flowing. Social media offers very much the same possibility. When people retweet or tag a page on Facebook, their friends get notified which is the same as if they had talked about it. Now what’s great with social media is that marketers can easily measure the impact of their campaign by using a brand management and monitoring solution. Some companies have used this technique with great results and their increased effort in this direction is just a proof of it.
Broadcasting techniques
When markets are global, broadcasting become effective way 0f marketing. There are marketers that use Twitter to reach as much people as possible. Of course, having a lot of followers helps in this technique. However, social media is very good at minimizing the cost per person reached. A follower will not cost more than a few cents to acquire so people can be reached for a very cheap price.
Customer retention techniques
It is common knowledge to say that customer retention is an important issue for marketing. It is also known that personalization of customer communication is a big factor in customers loyalty. The good thing with social media is that it can create a community around a certain brand which is going to be active about how to deal with a lot of things. The marketing management’s role here is to coordinate and participate in the conversation and get to know the customers. since distance between the customer and the company is diminished, effort can be spent on stuff like keeping in touch with customers and receiving frequent feedback. Again, brand monitoring is great when it comes to sensing important issues that need to be addressed. Here, the idea is to turn the fire off when things get nasty on social media.
Local business marketing techniques and Social media
With location-based social media gaining popularity, businesses that offer services need to be present on those platforms. Don’t forget that there are intangibles involved with services, so it’s always good to adopt cutting edge techniques and have a presence where your competition isn’t really present. Also, people are increasing using things like Google Map to look for services in their area. So marketing needs to be there and be active so it can get the right king of attention for the business.
Marketing techniques and integrity
Of course, all of these should be done by user accounts that clearly indicate a link with the brand. Without this indication, companies are misleading consumers about the nature of the messages that they are sending out there. While this technique can be fruitful in the short run, people will end up uncovering the deceitful methods and things can get worse than if no effort was spent on social media at all.
A Critical View About Advertising on Social Media and the Need for User Code of Ethics
Feb 27th
Generally speaking, I’m very against a lot of promotions and advertisements that happen on social media. That’s not because I despise advertising, but more because a lot of ads on social media are actually disguised as user generate content. Things got so ugly that the FTC had to step in and impose regulations on how to advertise on social media. Recently, there was a class action filed against Yelp for extortion, where the company is accused of asking for money in exchange of good reviews. How did things get there and should we get rid of marketers?
Advertising is unavoidable in a free market
The great thing about capitalism is that all have the freedom to choose a trade out of their own decision. There is no government that will impose it’s view on how the economy should be run. Rather, it is an ‘invisible hand’ that dictates or at least suggests picking one trade over another. Basically, when one has to take its own competences as well as that of its surrounding when deciding upon the trade to choose. For example, someone who is good at repairing cars must also see if there are other mechanics in the area where he wants to open his business.
Here, free market must have a mechanism in which suppliers can promote their products or services in a way with which consumers will be able to decide between a few competing suppliers. In other words, every business has to be allowed to communicate whatever it is offering to the market, but also, every consumer accepts to invest some of its time to take knowledge of the different offers available on the market. Without this implicit agreement, free market wouldn’t exist meaning that there won’t be any competition and that things will end up in monopolies.
Advertising needs space to communicate its messages
We live in a physical world. Therefore, even things that seem abstract like communication needs a medium to travel. One very simple way of communicating is through sound. If I shout loud enough, then every body on the planet will hear me! I wish I could do that…
But there are other ways of communicating. For instance, posters are used a lot everywhere to communicate messages to people. In a similar way, the Internet is also a medium to communicate. Of course, it seems abstract because everything is bits of information, but if you think of a wall of information where your favorite news or email is displayed, then it is easy to see that that little space that is used for advertising is taking a piece of physical space. My point is that this is the second pillar of marketing, meaning that it needs to have access to all the space that it can use to communicate its messages.
Social media is a damn good space to advertise
Since social media has attracted a great amount of attention lately, it is only natural that marketers throw themselves at the platform. The same why big displays on the highway are used by marketers to advertise their products, a few pixels on a web page can also be used to advertise. But there is something about social media that is different from traditional platforms for promotion: it is new. Since it is new, people don’t deal with it the same they do with other platform. When we see a ad on a poster, we know it’s an ad because we have been trained for it.
The new thing with social media is in the agreement that all users have to exchange with complete strangers. We have tons of Twitter friends and followers and we are friends with Facebook people that we have met on Mafia Wars. So somewhere, we have all agreed to have a place where we could exchange with people we do not know of, something that we don’t do in real life. Now the problem is that having people to cooperate on an open platform doesn’t guarantee that malicious agents will not infect it.
Imperfect information and market failures in social media
The problem with marketing on social media is that consumers and suppliers are in a game of imperfect information. When a suppliers pays someone to write positive feedback about a product, there is practically no way for the consumer to find out who is behind the good review. Of course, consumers could check the reviewer’s history and try to estimate to what degree it can be trusted. But then, people have to spend a lot of time figuring out who is trustable or not. Even worse, there is no guarantee that someone who has been a reputable source of reviews has integrity in the future.
It is precisely this reality of social media that malicious agents exploit in there advantage. This is where the market fails to deliver value or that value is not delivered in an optimal way when dealing with advertising through social media. The problem is that people will take bad decisions because they will be deceived by user generate content that is not really content but only advertising. Trying to avoid deception at all costs could lead to pathological situations where consumers will have to spend an undefined amount of time screening reviews to make sure of their legitimacy before taking a decision. Since there is no guarantee that the consumer will get anywhere by screening he might become victim of paralysis by analysis and not be able to take a decision.
Advertising on social media must be regulated
Knowing that markets can fail, there could be an attempt to regulate supplier behavior on social media. FTC’s attempt to fine bloggers who don’t disclose payments is one of them and it could be a safe bet to say that more regulations are to be expected in the future. These regulations will impose that advertisement must be clearly marked and differentiated from real content. What it means in terms of the agreement between consumers and suppliers that I describes earlier, is that consumers are willing to have a piece of that physical space reserved for advertising. For example, people are willing to have the right sidebar on Facebook be reserved for advertising. Of course, this is going to take space that will not be used by Facebook to display otherwise useful content. That not-displayed-and-useful content will have to be places somewhere else on another page and accessing that page will mean that the consumer will have to perform a click.
Consumer lassitude and the failure of regulations
It might seems to be little effort in exchange of living in a free market, but it is still effort that means a bigger server for Facebook, and a whole lot of clicks if we add up all those clicks by the 300 million members. As a result, there is a general lassitude among consumers in regards of advertising. It is as if all consumers know that they have to deal with advertising for free market to function, but that at the same time they are fed up with being exposed to it.
It is because of this feeling that people disregard publicity and it is the same reason that pushes marketers to use tricks to avoid the defense mechanism that all consumers have developed against advertising. In other words, regulations will not regulate supplier behavior but only force them to combine secretly with malicious agents. Now the challenge for legislators and law enforcement is to prove the existence of secret combination between a product supplier and a social media reviewer. History shows that this is a very difficult task that succeeds only under a few strict conditions.
Consumers must be aware of the different forms of advertising
Since regulations will not stop businesses to use fake reviews to promote their things, consumers must learn to use social media in a way that would detect fake reviews. To take an example from day to day life, fake reviews would be like walking in the street and having someone come up and say: “Pepsi’s so good for the stomach, I tried it and its great. You should do the same”. How do we know that this person is working for Pepsi? Simply because it doesn’t make any sense for a sane person to go out there and say such a thing to someone he doesn’t know. Therefore, our reflex is to thing that the person is crazy and that the message that he is communicating should be disregarded. Marketers are very aware of this fact and that’s why they don’t invest in such techniques!
Now my point is that the should be common understandings among social media users about what is the ethical way of interacting to each other. The same way that there are norm in society about not going to a stranger and talk about Pepsi, there should be norms of ethics for proper behavior on social media. My point is that consumers must adapt their attitude and behavior to a new media for communication if they want to take full advantage of the benefits the it offers.
The Economics of ‘Mass Tweeting’ And ‘Mass Following’
Feb 15th
I have briefly discussed the concept of mass tweeting as a tactics used for garbing attention to the mass tweeter’s account with the hope of transforming some of those who are followed into followers. I have stated that mass tweets can only lead into attracting one kind of Twitter users, that is ‘mass followers’. This is a normal phenomenon since mass following requires searching for certain keywords, which means that those who tweet a lot have more chances of being found in search queries and eventually followed by mass followers.
What I will question in the current post is the common belief that such tactics are futile. Indeed, many would argue that mass tweeting is bad strategy for marketing since it attracts the wrong kind of crowd. I would argue the opposite. I think mass followers and mass tweeters are the right kind of crowd to be in touch with, especially for those who are into social media marketing. I will try to explain why it is so.
Mass tweeting will not only attract mass followers
First, we have to understand that mass tweeting will not only attract mass followers. There will always be a small amount of ‘curious’ Twitter users that will follow a mass tweeter simply because of the fact that there are tons of people who listen to Twitter streams and that most of them are ‘followers’ who don’t tweet that much. These curious users are valuable because they have the potential to blossom into qualified leads, meaning that if they are exposed to the right message, they will be interested in the product or service that is promoted. Since the proportion of these curious users will be small compared to mass followers, it will be hard to justify the investment of all that effort in gaining only a few potential qualified leads.
Mass followers can be profitable too
However, a closer examination of mass followers will show that they are also valuable to a certain degree. Mass followers might not become qualified leads, but they know that most of their followers will not be qualified leads either because they have been acquired through either mass tweeting or mass following. Therefore, the mass follower has to adopt a more rational relationship with most of his friends and followers. He will have to enter into a ‘retweeting association’ with his followers meaning that they retweet each other in other to profit from each other’s ‘curious followers’ that they have each amassed through mass tweeting and mass following!
Now, this is going to create serious traffic to a promoted product or service only if there are enough marketers connected to each other and constantly retweeting each other. This implies that they all use some king of automatic retweeting application that saves them from having to be retweeting 24/7.
The effects of automated tools on Twitter user experience
Who says automatic application means spam. My view is that while this is close to black hat social media optimization, it is not so bad since the marketing/SMO community seems to be very small compared to the whole Twitter network of 25 million users. In other words, these automatic retweeting software will only not seriously affect Twitter’s quality of service or user experience because spam will be filtered out by the ‘curious users’ who happen to be part of the SMO clique. However, these software will insure the majority of marketers that there message will reach a critical amount of curious users, hoping that they create the proper word-of-mouth.
Google Wave Follow Feature: Social Media Market Penetration Strategy
Feb 6th
Facing increasing danger coming from Facebook as number one website on the planet, Google has to do something about positioning itself against social media. The easiest thing to do for the giant was to use its existing capabilities, i.e. information retrieval, to index social networks. Google will become a social search engine and a real-time search engine.
But all this is not enough in my opinion. There is something that social media do that search engines cannot do and that is offering interaction between users who are holders of knowledge and who are willing to share it. Of course, Google has Friend Connect and has also bought Orkut to have social media products in its portfolio, but those are definitely not competition to Facebook. So Google has to come up with something different, something that offers new communication capabilities to users. Well, that thing is Google Wave.
Google claims that the Wave is chatting 2.0. This is mainly because 1) your ‘waves’ are broadcast, 1) what you type is broadcast in real-time, and 3) you can follow waves. So basically, we could say that Google Wave is Live Messanger meets Twitter! Now the analogy with Live Messanger is not so important. What really matters is that Google Wave can do something that Twitter cannot do so well: instant messaging. While it is possible to use Twitter for instant messaging, things get complicated when you want to follow a stream of conversation when you have of a lot of friends and followers. In other words, Google Wave is disruptive to Twitter’s domination of the broadcast-based communication model that it is dominating. My opinion is that Google can slowly take pieces of market away from Twitter and having a strong network of application developers complement the platform is going to be very helpful.
The Social Search Engine
Jan 26th
In the war search engines are leading against social media, it all looks like the latter is winning. Real-time trends are so important that Bing has incorporated them into its search suggestions. Since Google is pretty much doing the same, then it isn’t just a way for one engine to compete against another. It is more a technology competing against another.
Apparent contradiction
My view is that the social media is a disruptive alternative to search engines. There is something that social media does that search engines cannot do but for which both are competing: the transfer of knowledge. Search engines are about retrieving information and knowledge is transferred once the person has 1) found the right keyword, 2) found useful webpage and 3) read and understood the webpage. Social media on the other hand transfers knowledge from one user to another as they interact. Therefore, social media has nothing else to offer that the possibility for people to interact. As a result, indexing the content of social media seems at first sight to be useless.
Why this move from software giants?
What Microsoft and Google are trying to do is take advantage of the fact that social media generate content to have bigger indexes. Don’t forget, search engines without websites to index are like a social network without users. What they hope by indexing social networks is to keep trace of a conversation between two users and hope to extract information that can later be useful to others who would be in the same ‘cognitive state’ than those who initially had that conversation.
Your Twitter Followers Are Worth Their Retweets
Jan 25th
If you’re into Twitter for business, then you are into word-of-mouth marketing. You should look for people who retweet a lot and start retweeting them. Anything else is a waste of time in my opinion. Of course, companies use Twitter as a tool for customer support or relationship management but Twitter’s unique capability is in empowering promotion.
Retweet as indicator of social behavior
Since Twitter is a social media, it is expected from its users to be sociable. Now, what would be considered socializing on Twitter? I would answer this question by asking another question: what is the point with having followers or following others?
It becomes obvious from this question that the role of followers in Twitter is to perform word-of-mouth for the person they are following. So following someone on Twitter is one way of saying: “I like your stuff, i’ll let people know about it”. Now this ‘I’ll let people know about it’ part is achieved through a particular feature on Twitter: retweeting.
From here, it social practice for professional users to retweet each other out of necessity. If two marketers are mutual friends and that they roughly have the same number of followers, they will be better of retweeting each other since each will benefit from the followers of the other.
The importance of having lots of followers
This is why it is so important to have a lot of followers on Twitter. By having a lot of followers, you have a higher reach and more people are likely going to retweet you. As a result, for the same effort required to write a tweet, you will have better return.
However, there is another indicator of value for your followers: they should be retweeting a lot. If you have the choice between 1000 followers who retweet 1% of your tweets in average, or 100 followers who retweet 15% of your tweets, which one are you to choose? I bet you’ll take the 100 followers who retweet more frequently.
Facebook Soon Number One?
Jan 21st
Facebook is number two on Alexa since september 2009
Facebook has been world’s second most visited website for more than 5 months now. Taking into account that Google is the default page for most browsers, it is pretty much an unavoidable website. Whether they want to admit it or not, Google and Facebook are in competition for at least one thing: traffic. My view is that they are competing for more than just that. I believe Google and Facebook are two different ways of offering a platform for transmitting knowledge. However, the interactive nature of Facebook place it in a stronger position to fulfill this need. In this regard, using Facebook to get knowledge from our network is going to slowly replace what we used to obtain from Google.
There is another space where Facebook can take pieces of traffic away from Google and that’s in browsers default page. This trends is already happening for hardcore Facebook users. With people increasingly spending time on Facebook, this trend will only be on the rise. Facebook was already number one website for 2009 Christmas where people spend a lot of time sending greetings. I also believe this is not a glitch but more a trend towards Facebook dominating traffic on the Internet.
A New Definition for Social Media Scam and the Need For Regulation
Jan 20th
Social media scam is now a common thing and most people are aware of its existence. It takes many forms and can sometimes be difficult to recognize. One thing is sure, social media scam is on the rise as Google Insights will give the graph on the right for ‘social scam’.
This is how social media scam will grow in the future
Since it is such an important phenomenon, I thought of going deeper into the subject and see if the traditional definition of scam fits with the different kind of scam that is performed on social networks.
What is social media scam?
The Free Dictionary defines scam as a fraudulent business scheme; a swindle. Therefore, a fraudulent business scheme that is performed on social media would be called social media scam. Let’s now find out about the definition of advertising. According to The Free Dictionary, advertising is “The activity of attracting public attention to a product or business, as by paid announcements in the print, broadcast, or electronic media”. The keyword here is ‘paid announcements’. On TV, advertisement regulations stipulate that there should be clear indication of whether the shown content is informational or promotional. These regulations origin from studies that have shown that advertising can have perverse effects on people and especially children and that guidelines should be followed when ads are produced and broadcasted.
My point with all this is that the definition of social media scam should be broadened to include disguised or camouflaged advertising. Unfortunately, the same type of regulations that are effective for traditional media like TV aren’t imposed onsocial media, which are heavily used as a platform for camouflaged advertising. This is precisely why the FTC is going to fine bloggers who advertise without disclosing payments information
The future of social media regulations
If we compare social media with traditional media, then the picture is not going to look good for legislation. Prof. Herman and Chomsky have worked extensively on the concept of ‘manufacturing consent‘ where they stipulates that mass media creates a content that converges towards certain ideas that are biased towards the benefits of the American elite. Now, the biggest democracy on the planet wasn’t able to elect a government that was going to regulate mass media to offer a more neutral content.
Since social media offers the same kind of power to the elite, it is most likely that the same thing is going to happen to social media. Of course, any one could go there and open a blog, a Facebook account, a Twitter account and promote what ever he feels like promoting. But the truth is that his voice is never going to be heard if he doesn’t dispose of resources comparable to big media to promote content.
Since government cannot be relied upon to regulate social media, it is up to users to regulate it. And this can be done in one way only: increased awareness and involvement of all users. In the same same way where click rings and retweet rings are pushing for their interests on social media, other groups should gather on social media and use network effect to push for their own voice. This involvement will lead to a more useful social media than what we are witnessing right now.
How To Turn Wikipedia Into Bullshitpedia
Jan 19th
I strongly believe in Wikipedia as a sanctuary for objective information away from the many marketing schemes that plague the Internet. It is only with disgrace that I read this article encouraging businesses to have favorable content on Wikipedia. According to this article, Wikipedia is generally known as a source of unbiased information making it a great place to squeeze a few biased statements about businesses. Of course there is a comity of experts reviewing content and making sure that everything is within norms, but they will never be able to filter everything since there will be more submitted articles that reviewers.
Once again, a whole bunch of malicious agents invade social media and transform it into an ineffective entity. Clearly, when the submission of an article about a corporation is made by the corporation itself, how can one expect that information to be objective? There is just no way this can be the case. My advice to Wikipedia users: beware of what you read and be more attentive to the sources in an article.
“You Are Right If You Have More Followers” – Google
Jan 17th
Like all corporations that see their innovation capabilities gradually slow down as they get bigger, Google find it appropriate to apply the same logic it uses to rank webpages for tweets. In other words, the number of people following a source would be similar to the number of backlinks a webpage receives.
Well, I don’t really want to start a philosophical discussion about the relevancy of such assumption. What I would like to say is that this decision goes in line with Google’s core business: advertising. The marketer’s job is to get people converge to it’s product. It is therefore natural that the marketer does everything in its power to get people link to a webpage or follow a certain Twitter account.
Therefore, Google is doing only one thing and that is to create a tool for advertisers. People who use Google software with the idea of looking for information are going to be disappointed since they aren’t really using a search engine, but more a marketing channel.