Social media has quickly emerged as a significant part of an average consumer's daily life. Each day an individual participates in social media they are providing valuable data about themselves to those keeping track. This data, however, is only as valuable as their ability to analyze and uncover the underlying connections, relationships and patterns. There is an immense loss of opportunity if businesses are not able to connect the dots to uncover insightful, useful patterns among the disparate [...]

Read More: Why Developers and Brands Need Real-Time Understanding of Customer Data

old_register.png There is a sometimes violent argument from some social media advocates about the idea of monetizing your blog activities. To the more hard lined, there is never an appropriate time to “sell out” your audience. They nobly cite editorial integrity, journalistic creeds, and the dangers of bias from being too close to the money when asserting your opinion.

On the Other Hand…

On the other extreme side, you have the blogs compl [...]

Read More: Top 10 Questions to Ask Yourself before Pitching Brands for Your Blog

Do you follow brands on Twitter? If so, how many – two, five or maybe ten? Most likely, according to a recent study, if you follow a brand on Twitter, you are more likely to purchase from them. Constant Contact and research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey did a study on how consumers are interacting with ...

Read More: A New Study Shows Brands the Importance of Twitter Followers

It's very interesting to see brands that have the strength, passion and appeal to actively involve people in a relationship. They do it through outreach activities and by stimulating people's interest. It's fascinating to follow brands that are able to draw attention and engagement to a level that people are spontaneously willing to be involved. [...]

Read More: Brands people want to be involved with

I've been thinking a lot about Ragu and the "crisis" they created by tweeting their video to social dads in a very offensive, and spammy, way. Having read what C.C. Chapman (here, here, and here) and Adam Singer and Arik Hanson and Michael Schechter (on this very blog yesterday) wrote, I think everyone is missing [...]

Read More: The Lesson Brands Can Learn from Ragu

There are many ways to assess the value and benefits of social media marketing. A recently released study by L2 of the beauty industry reveals relationships between companies’ commitments to digital/social strategies and shareholder value.In its latest Digital IQ Index, L2 compares the digital and social media initiatives of key companies in the growing beauty products industry — Estée Lauder, Sephora, Limited Brands and others — with their activities a year ago. The findings have relevance for [...]

Read More: Learn from This: Battle of the Beauty Brands

What a week. Not only did I have to endure a half hour ‘debate’ (I use that word loosely) from ‘experts’ (I’ll use that word even more loosely) on the future of social media without any mention of social behemoth and often underrated YouTube, but I had to control my inner (or ever-growing outer) geek [...]

Read More: Brands: Have Facebook’s announcements sealed our F8?

I have to be honest, the headline is a bit hypocritical. I spend most of my time helping businesses embrace the opportunity to understand customer needs and engage with them in ways that they appreciate and value. Contrary to popular belief however, everyday consumers aren’t flocking to social media to build relationships with their favorite [...]

Read More: People use social networks to connect with friends and family, sometimes brands

A nice deck from Constant Contact and Chadwick Martin Bailey looking at people's behaviour towards brands on Facebook: The headlines are: Consumers interact with their favorite brand on Facebook far more than they do on other social networks 56% of consumers said they are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after becoming [...]

Read More: Behaviour towards brands on Facebook

The brilliance behind the Polaroid camera was instant gratification. No wonder Instagram has adopted the nostalgic camera tech as it's logo. Instagram has indeed captured the childlike wonder of many iPhone users (yes we know, they NEED an adroid app). How many? Well, even though the 6 person company is less than a year old [...]

Read More: 23 Brands Using Instagram And What They’re Doing Right

Instagram, a photo-sharing app for iPhone users, has become a widespread sensation among individual users, and now big brands are following their lead. I love using the app. It can be addictive and give you added inspiration for taking more interesting photos with your phone. Instagram allows the photo taker to have a little fun [...]

Read More: 5 Ways Brands Are Using Instagram For Brand Awareness

Community management is one of the most important elements in the relationship between a brand and its community: it's the activity that creates connections and facilitates the exchange of ideas. A few days ago Jeremiah Owyang published some interim analysis on the topic. It clearly shows the importance of cooperation between a brand and their [...]

Read More: The connection between brands & people

More brands are electing the use of social media for an increase in name recognition this holiday season. In keeping with the Bizo survey, brands are aiming their marketing efforts toward social shopping into the fall season; and then without stopping, they are going all the way to the holiday season.The increased presence of their brands in social media will raise shoppers’ awareness of the brands, which will lead to more product sold online and offline.

Read More: Brands Betting on Social Media for the Holidays

Twitter has just stepped up its activity on the photo sharing side of things with the launch of a new image gallery feature. Essentially this pulls in photos that users have shared on their profile in chronological order. You can see the most recent photos on someone’s profile instantly, but clicking into this brings up an expanded image gallery where you can view all the photos that have been shared via third party apps, showing up to 100 photos from January 2010.This is a great addition by Twi [...]

Read More: How brands can make the most of Twitter's new image galleries

Those little buttons pack a big punch. A single act of social sharing may only take a split second, but make no mistake; it is in reality a complex, simultaneous exchange of two of the most important forms of value that exist today—social currency and social data. Sharing buttons themselves are important as “the point [...]

Read More: As sharing buttons battle, brands and consumers win

On August 18, 2011, a group including Tom Guarriello, Matthew Mahoney, Tim Bursch, Sean Bohan, Jeris JC Miller, Nancy White and Christopher Carfi held a Google+ Hangout to discuss different scenarios that were enabled by Google+'s announcement that it was...

Read More: Google+ for Customer and Brands: Scenario Planning Summary [video]

sxchu_300pxpeople_1279618_52418125.jpg randombuzzers_pic.png dell_pic.png einsteins_pic.png Is your business creating buzz through social marketing?  By definition, social technologies have the ability to facilitate and drive word-of-mouth marketing campaigns.  Random House, Dell, and Einstein Bros. Bagels ar [...]

Read More: Social Business Snapshot: How 3 brands generate buzz by employing social technologies

Social media is on target to be a $30bn industry (per year) by 2015. It's an industry that every smart brand is engaging with and therefore pouring its resources into. Today, Buddy Media, an incredibly successful SaaS platform for brand’s Facebook Pages, announced its latest research, which examined the digital footprint of 64 speciality retail brands via 350 data points across four dimensions: Site, Digital Marketing, Social Media, and Mobile.For the study, Buddy Media partnered with NYU Stern [...]

Read More: 11 brands with the highest "Digital IQ" in social media

Social media is on target to be a $30bn industry (per year) by 2015 and Facebook is growing faster than any site in history. It is the #1 place to have a community for a brand because it touches every single vertical across the enterprise: customer service, sales and public relations.Let's take a look at the 10 biggest brands on Facebook, the social content distributors and gamers like Facebook itself, Texas Hold'em Poker (Zynga) and YouTube; pop stars like Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson, Eminem, Sh [...]

Read More: The 10 biggest brands on Facebook: What's hot and what's not

What: Google+ Scenario Planning for Customers and Brands When: Thursday, August 18th, 10am PDT / 1pm EDT Where: Via Google+ Hangout (http://l.ccarfi.com/18aug11) Who: Anyone interested in actively participating How: Just show up at the URL noted above with your strategy...

Read More: Google+ Scenario Planning for Customers and Brands