If you have several thousand dollars sitting around, waiting for a new technology IPO, you probably have been watching and possibly anticipating the forthcoming initial public offering of stock from Facebook.

If you are like me and a whole bunch of other people you don’t have money to invest but are not less interested in the news. It is possible the Facebook IPO will become the fastest growing, most profitable stock IPO ever offered. Or it might not. But regardless of what happens to the stock itself, the news has implications far beyond investment portfolios of the rich and famous.

Some in the industry are saying “As goes Facebook, so goes the industry.” If the IPO is successful that bodes well for the entire social media industry. If it flops, that is a signal that the industry itself might be teetering on the brink; another bubble just waiting to burst and take unsuspecting investors with it. No matter what the Facebook IPO does (and chances are it will race out of the gate like a thoroughbred) it is bringing a great deal of scrutiny and interest into the industry as a whole. People are taking a serious look at the social media industry and discovering that it has a great deal of growth and profit potential. Not all companies are alike, however, so just because a company allows “status updates” or “posts” doesn’t necessarily mean it is geared toward success.

How successful the Facebook IPO does will no doubt have far reaching implications on the wider Social Web. It will likely encourage investors unable to take advantage of it to start looking at other social media companies and judge them for their profit potential. It also forces everyone in the social media industry to begin accounting for its actions; producing the proof on paper that they don’t just know how to ‘Tweet’ but also know how to turn a profit and please investors.

Regardless of what happens to the Facebook stock on Friday, everyone involved in the social media industry stands a chance to reap some benefit. What the industry does with this new ‘political capital’ will determine whether it is truly a growth industry or just another pipe dream.

After years spent privately toiling on its social network and growing its user base without any outside interference, Facebook is finally growing up as a company and tapping the larger public market for funds.

The company has set an IPO price of $28 to $35 a share, valuing the company by as much as $96 billion. That would rank it as the largest Internet IPO and one of the largest IPOs in history, according to Renaissance Capital. Still, the price is a tick lower than the initial $100 billion valuation many had expected from Facebook.

Pricing an IPO is always a tricky proposition. The company wants to set its offering price as high as possible, because that generates the most cash for the business itself.

Click here to read more about the Facebook IPO.

According to two surveys presented at the 2012 annual convention of the Southwestern Psychological Association in Oklahoma, City, social media does not seem to help salespeople sell at all. Oh, it surely expands their reach and increases the size of their network, but when it comes to actually selling something, salespeople are still on their own.

In other words, having a social media presence is good for business because it raises brand awareness, but don’t expect it to actually sell your product for you. People just aren’t like that. Unless they are actively looking for your product or service, having a social media network to promote it likely will not increase your sales.

Does this mean social media marketing is pointless? No, of course not. in fact, revenue can be and is regularly generated by social media, just not in the ways in which we are all most familiar. Social media may not be able to sell something as effectively as an individual salesperson, but it can drive visitors to a web site or even a brick and mortar store, where your sales funnel can do what it is supposed to do, and close the deal.

If social media were able to close sales we would see a huge increase in the number of unemployed sales people in the world. However, a salesperson cannot effectively increase brand awareness or engagement with end-users the way a social media network can, so depending on what you are trying do, both are sorely needed.

The surveys, reported by behavioral scientists, Trelitha R. Bryant and George W. Dudley at Behavioral Sciences Research Press in Dallas, Texas, were presented April 13, 2012. Bryant and Dudley asked 4,768 salespeople (67% men, 33% women, average age 40) in more than 1,000 U.S. companies which form of client communication is most helpful for generating new sales.

The salespeople were surveyed as part of a standard assessment protocol for sales professionals which included the Sales Preference Questionnaire (SPQ*GOLD®), a psychological test used worldwide to detect emotional discomfort associated with prospecting for new business. Almost 70% (+/-1%) said established forms of communication (face-to-face and telephone contact) were most helpful generating new sales. Only 10% (+/-.14%) claimed email was most effective and less than 10% said other forms of computer-mediated communication were most effective. Results were not age-related.

Click here to read more about the surveys.

How Do You Do What You Do?

Hootsuite has been the go-to tool for social media marketers for some time now, offering a plethora of tools designed to help make the job of using social media for marketing purposes easier and more effective. They already offer connectivity to Facebook profiles and pages; Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, WordPress, MySpace and more. They have an extremely effective suite of analytics tools which can show you at a glance how well a Tweet or link performed, who clicked on and from where. They have also offered a one-step link shortening shortening feature which has been a real time-saver.

But that’s not all!

This week Hootsuite announced an entirely new suite of tools designed to make it easier for corporations to allow teams to collaborate on social media marketing projects. These tools will help brands stay on message, coordinate social media marketing efforts and increase efficiency. At least, that’s the plan anyway.

Given Hootsuite’s track record for producing effective social media management tools, however, I would think that these latest tools will be every bit as effective as promised. Plus, a whole lot more.

“This is a product that’s overdue and clearly needed. Social media used to be one intern,” says Ryan Holmes, HootSuite CEO and founder. “Now it’s multi-million-dollar teams at the planet’s largest companies. Customers are asking for enterprise-grade support, and Teams is a powerful, intuitive solution.”

So what’s inside the box?

- Plan sophisticated social media campaigns months in advance with robust scheduling features.

- End rogue tweets with powerful permission settings. Limit who can post what to which networks – from the CEO to the summer intern.

Click here to read more about Hootsuite’s new tools.

It’s Anybody’s Guess

When it comes to politics the only hard and fast rule is not to discuss it at the dinner table over the holidays. Otherwise, everything else is up in the air.

Politics are a fickle business and despite the power of social media and the coveted “viral message” effect, it is not translating into political success. This might be due to the fact that everyone has equal footing online. Since social media tools are (mostly) free to use, how much money you have to spend on your campaign has little bearing on whether or not your message is shared, heard, responded to. If you have volunteers, you have the makings of an effective social media network, regardless of the message you want to get out (which is sometimes a scary notion.)

Prognosticators abound when it comes to the multitude of political races, but they have yet to find any correlation between a candidates social media interaction and their ability to get elected (or re-elected.) This might be due to the difference between the people who actually vote and the people who use social media. For the most part, senior Americans are the most likely voters, while younger Americans are the most likely to be using social media. Perhaps this is the disconnect. For now, nobody is certain.

What is certain is that social media alone, while being arguably the world’s most powerful communication tool, is still not quite up to doing the marketing job all by itself. So, as my boss, Lori R. Taylor always says, if you want a truly effective marketing campaign be certain you use a mix of traditional and social media marketing. Period.

It’s a complicated picture when it comes to social media’s impact on elections, according to a study of four 2010 races by NM Incite.
Generally, the more buzz a candidate got, the better he or she did in the voting booth, the study found. But the percentage of overall buzz often differed quite a bit from the vote total.
The researchers studied four races – Barbara Boxer vs. Carly Fiorina for U.S. Senate in California; Marco Rubio vs. Kendrick Meeks and Charlie Crist for U.S. Senate in Florida; John Kasich vs. Ted Strickland for Ohio governor, and Martin O’Malley vs. Bob Ehrlich for Maryland governor.
In three out of four races, NM Insight found, the candidate most frequently mentioned on social media ended up winning the election. The one exception was in the Kasich-Strickland race, where Mr. Strickland had 54% of the buzz but ended up losing at the polls.

Click here to read more about politics and social media.

Remember The Alamo!

San Antonians are looking to re-invents themselves and their city, hoping to become a technological hotspot, attracting business and thought leaders to the southwestern city. In order to accomplish this, says local blogger, Ignacio Albarracin, For the Express-News, all San Antonio citizens should become better acquainted with social media.

While it is surely true that social media can work wonders when it comes to promoting your business, brand, product or service, it remains to be seen whether social media can indeed be an accurate reflection of a community. For instance, if more people in your neighborhood use social media than across town, does that make your neighborhood more attractive to tech businesses? Is social media usage a good indicator of technological savvy, or just another example of online activity?

These are great questions, but what Albarracin is looking for are solid solutions. His belief is that by using social media the citizens of San Antonio can re-invent themselves and demonstrate to the world that they “get it”; they understand the importance and relevance of technology; that they embrace thought leaders and innovators and will be more welcoming than communities which do not “get it.” How this new interest will be viewed, however, is something no one can predict.

Albarracin certainly has a point when he says that cities whose populations are more widely connected via the Social Web are better incubators for industry and innovation. Studies have shown the better connected a community is, the more you are to find success there. But in my opinion, social media alone is simply not strong enough alone to bring about the sort of change he is looking for. Once again I need to repeat that social media is only a tool. It is not an end, in and of itself. What really matters is how that tool is used.

To demonstrate the potency of social media look no further than the Arab Spring. The government of Hosni Mubarak dominated Egyptian politics for roughly three decades. Then voices of dissent began using social media to share views and discuss action plans.
All this had a dramatic impact on international public opinion since many people around the world also had access to these same social media tools. This pressured many national governments to change their stance relative to the Mubarak regime.
I am not suggesting that San Antonio needs to use social media to do anything as dramatic as what happened in Egypt. I am simply making the case that social media can be a powerful driver for social change.

Click here to read more of Albarracin’s point.

Measuring Effectiveness Is Key

The biggest problem with social media, some might say, is its lack of metrics. There are too many social media networks doing too many things differently for businesses to keep track of what works and what doesn’t. This is a fairly simple enough problem to solve if you sit down and consider the basics of business.

Social media is a fantastic communication tool, I think everyone understands this. However, in business it is not enough to simply communicate your message. What you need to do is convert the people you communicate with into paying customers or clients. That’s what really drives business. After all, we’re not in business to simply talk to people-we need to earn revenue, make a profit, if we expect to survive.

To this end there are a number of tools which are available to help you understand how effective (or not) your social media marketing efforts are. These tools can help you measure clicks to links you post via Twitter (which Hootsuite makes available in their Pro package) or simply measure traffic (where it comes from, what browser they use, etc.) to your blog or web site (which is available through Google Analytics.

However, one of the most effective ways to measure whether or not social media is having a desired impact is to take a look at your bottom line. If your business has changed nothing in the past year, except adding a social media marketing program, it is not a leap to assume the increased revenue (if you had an increase) would be an effect of the social media campaign. There are other factors to consider, especially if you are outsourcing your social media management or even simply dedicating some internal hours to it, but again, those come down to analysis of your profit and loss statement.

You also have to consider what sort of messages you are using via your social media marketing campaign. Are you pursuing brand awareness or trying to drive customers to an annual sale? The former is much more difficult to track over the short term while the later is simply a matter of a dollar count.

Before you start fretting over your social media metrics sit down and analyze exactly what you are trying to accomplish. Once you do that it will be much easier to find the answers you are looking for. And to create more questions….

Back in the dawn of the social networking age, organizations relied almost solely on simple, standard metrics, such as the number of Facebook fans and likes or the number of Twitter followers and tweets/retweets, to determine their success. Those metrics are still important, but organizations today are developing more sophisticated metrics to measure their progress in meeting increasingly granular social objectives.

That makes it difficult to prescribe the social metrics that matter most, because what matters will differ depending on your organization’s size, industry, products, current goals for social, and so on. But some increasingly important social media metrics can be applied widely. Here are five that you should consider now.

Click here to get the list from BrainYardNews.

Quick: What’s the fastest, most effective way to communicate with your existing customers? Chances are you answered “social media.”

When it comes to the many ways businesses use social media, handling customer service issues has risen to the top of the heap. And not because businesses have pushed it there, but because customers have demanded it. If they can find you on Facebook or Twitter, they (rightfully) expect you to be monitoring those channels and ready at a moment’s notice to handle whatever issue they might have. Those companies who have failed to recognize this important role social media plays in customer service (and there are many) have paid the price for their ignorance.

Social media is arguably the world’s greatest communication tool. But communication is a two-way street. At least it is today. Long ago, when television ruled the media world, broadcasters could send out a signal and as long as they ignored the telephone and the mail, they heard very little from the people who were receiving their messages. There were a few examples of letter writing campaigns having any effect on television during it’s almost 75 years of dominance (the original ‘Star Trek’ series being one such example) but otherwise, communication was decidedly one-way.

Social media presents new opportunities and new challenges for business. On the one hand you can now communicate with your customers more effectively than ever before. On the other hand, they can do the same–connecting with your business through every social media channel in your network, and expecting an immediate answer every time.

Businesses that recognize this and respond accordingly will have the most success when it comes to social media marketing. Businesses which are slow to react to change, well, we all know what happens to them.

There is often a great divide between the various departments that are engaged in social media throughout the enterprise — marketing, corporate communications, PR, investor relations, online sales, and the contact centre — with each running their own siloed operations.
When issues do arise, the following scenario is all too common: A frustrated customer searches online for answers to a question. If a solution can’t be found, a call is placed to customer service. While a discussion with customer service will resolve most issues, some customers will find the interaction only aggravates matters by experiencing long waiting times, having to repeat information and sometimes a lack of 1st call resolution.

Whatever the result, a significant majority of consumers will take to social media to air their experience – whether that is by highlighting a negative experience or indeed promoting a company after receiving excellent customer service. By Tweeting their opinion on a particular brand, consumers have considerable power to either enhance or harm brand perception, and the number of consumers doing so is growing fast.

Click here to read more about social media and customer service.

How Do You Perceive Your Business?

I was struck by the first sentence of an article I read today: “A company’s digital channels directly reflect what they do in the physical world.”

It seems odd that companies would need to be reminded of this, but the fact is, they do. Social media began as an online toy. It as a way to make friends, play games, share funny stories or pictures and simply connect with family. Those early days of the Social Web quickly gave way to more grown-up versions of the social media tools we had learned to use. Today businesses regularly use social media to connect with existing customers and clients, attract new customers and clients and drive revenue. A social media profile is a practically a requirement for anyone doing business today, whether they are doing business online or offline. The tools we use to do this are mostly fun, and entice people to engage in ways which are meant to entertain, but this is not a time to be frivolous on the Social Web.

In fact, businesses have repeatedly run into trouble for being too playful online; posting things which their customers find inappropriate. Social media campaigns continue to cross the line when it comes to good taste, causing a deluge of poor publicity and public outrage.

There is no reason, at this time, for businesses to see their social media campaign as anything other than extension of their core business. It should reflect their principles and values and be a part of their company program, not separate from it. Social media managers should understand this (we at Rev Media Marketing surely do!) and should strive to understand the business they are promoting and adhere to a strict plan as determined by the people they are working for.

In this way the business will derive the full benefit of what social media marketing can provide and avoid costly (and sometimes stupid) mistakes.

Speaking last week at the UX Masterclass, a biannual user experience class hosted by the UXalliance, Strydom explained that companies perform sales, marketing and customer service through their social media accounts.
For this reason, she says, it is essential that they manage their social media accounts as they would formal channels by ensuring the social media channel has functional integrity.
Strydom explained that the team managing a social media account must have a variety of skills so that they can quickly resolve problems reported by customers via a social media platform.
For example, she says, the team should include people with good communication skills, who can manage the front end by engaging with customers on the social media platform. This must be complemented by people with project management skills on the back end.

Click here to read more of Strydom’s suggestions.

There have been a recent spate of social media inspired parties that have resulted in thousands of dollars in damages, shootings and rampant drug use. The only part of these stories that has changed from three decades ago is the social media part.

And frankly, that has a lot of people freaked out.

Social media is the world’s most powerful communication tool. With a few clicks it is now possible to reach more than a billion people. That means if you’re planning to throw a party you don’t need to post leaflets on telephone polls or even hand out flyers at school to attract a crowd. You can have a thousand people there in a matter of hours.

This is good from a marketing perspective. If you’re client is having a concert or show of any kind you can almost guarantee them a decent sized crowd. However, if your plans are less altruistic; if you’re planning an illegal party with underage drinking, social media is your new best friend.

However, once again we have an instance of the tool being blamed for its use, rather than putting the blame on the user where it belongs. I can use a hammer to drive a nail or to smash a window. One action is legal and the other is not, but the hammer itself is not to blame.

If you are using social media then you are familiar with its ability to mass communicate. You know what you can do, or what can be done with the right message, and you also know how easy it is to spread misinformation or use it the wrong way. But no matter how you have seen it used there is always a person, a human being, behind the messages you have seen. If their intentions are good, then the social media messages they spread are likely good as well.

If, however, the reverse is true, that’s when we have problems.

The buildup for the house party on Allison Road was brazen – spread rapidly and broadly through Twitter, Facebook and fliers for days in advance. Free liquor all night, bikinis, foam and disc jockeys were promised for an entry fee of at least $10. When the event – held at what some called “the mansion” – eventually happened last week, it spiraled out of control with hundreds attending, streets crammed with vehicles and a shooting that left one high school senior dead. The slaying has trained a spotlight on the large-scale, sometimes illegal parties spread through social media. Authorities and experts say while teenage partying is not a new phenomenon, such large-scale, organized events spread through social media are growing and difficult to monitor.

Click here to read more about social media gone wrong.

What’s A Tweet Worth To You?

Read an interesting article from Adobe Systems today talking about the value (or lack thereof) some people place on their social media efforts. According to the Adobe Digital Index report social media marketing is being undervalued by nearly 100% by some folks, which I take to mean they believe it has no value at all. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom and does little to truly recognize the power of social media marketing as a true driver of web traffic.

That is exactly what Adobe measured, in fact, the ability of social media marketing to drive web traffic. According to their recent report on social media marketing, which analyzed more than 1.7 billion visits to more than 225 U.S. companies’ Websites in the retail, travel and media industries, marketers themselves were most likely to undervalue the impact of social media because of the metrics they used to track interaction.

For instance, when someone looked at social media as a factor in click throughs, they tended to undervalue its impact when clicks were low. However, when Adobe looked at site traffic derived from social media marketing they found an abundance of evidence to suggest that visitors were finding their way to the site via social media marketing even if they weren’t clicking once they got there.

This then points to a real disconnect between what many people expect from social media and what it can deliver.

If someone comes to your web site and doesn’t click on the preferred button, or opt-in to your newsletter, or even remain there very long, this doesn’t mean the conveyance they used to get there was faulty. It means your squeeze page or call-to-action is faulty. Social media cannot force people to click where you want them to click, it can only deliver your message and attract people.

Much like a carnival barker draws people into the tent, social media can announce and communicate. It is up to you to close the deal.

So before you eschew the value of your social media network for driving revenue (or whatever it is you want it to do) be certain you are gauging accurately when it comes to what social media marketing can and cannot do. There is no point in throwing out the baby with the bath water, after all.

Key findings of the report include:

• The use of last-click attribution, the most common attribution model used by marketers, may cause marketers to undervalue social media’s Website impact by up to 94 percent.

• First-click attribution models more accurately capture the benefits of social media in engaging customers earlier in the buying process.

• Significant differences in the results of first-click versus last-click attribution data for various social media sites may cause marketers to change how they allocate the budgets across social and other digital channels.

Click here to read more of their findings.