From the monthly archives:

April 2010

How To Know If Your Business Is Social

by Jason Falls · April 30, 2010

Sitting beside Janice on a flight is a fascinating experience. She’s naturally social and refuses to let you not be. Mind you, she isn’t annoying or overbearing, but pleasant, friendly and interesting. She asks questions that make you feel important, a part of her life though you’re really not. She’ll interject a factoid or two about her own story if the opportunity presents itself, but mostly puts you on stage and appreciates your little soliloquies of self-reflection.

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25 comments

More Proof The Echo Chamber And Reality Aren’t Related

by Jason Falls · April 29, 2010

New research released today by Edison Research and Arbitron tracking three years of data and surveys related to Twitter use further solidifies the notion that the social media world is far different from reality. “Twitter Usage In America: 2010” shows that while 87 percent of Americans are aware of the microblogging site, only seven percent actually use it. For comparison’s sake, Facebook’s awareness rate is at 88 percent. Usage? 41 percent.

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15 comments

Waxing Poetic On Email Marketing

by Jason Falls · April 27, 2010

Email Hack
Image by Ross Mayfield via Flickr

I probably don’t talk enough about the power and effectiveness of email marketing here. I should do that more often. More and more with clients I find myself recommending email marketing strategies and for a lot of reasons.

The main reason I believe in email and email marketing is that real people still use email as their primary communications method. And by real people, I mean those outside the social media echo chamber. I wax poetic on the subject today over at the Blue Sky Factory blog. For more of my thoughts, pay them a visit.

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14 comments

Why You Shouldn’t Trust Automated Sentiment Scoring

by Jason Falls · April 26, 2010

Automated sentiment scoring has evolved as the feature du jour of the social media monitoring platforms of late. So many services were offering it, even big players like Radian6 had to bring it to the table for fear of losing prospects. It’s not enough to tell brands how many conversations are being had. Social media monitoring services have to now must report on whether or not they like us.

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64 comments

We’ve Only Just Begun

by Jason Falls · April 23, 2010

You can believe all the Forrester reports and eMarketer statistics you want, but the truth is when research firms survey people about social media, they normally ask social media people. Citibank asked more than 550 small business owners across America several questions about Internet and social media use for their companies. The survey, which wasn’t conducted by a social media-friendly company using social media tools to ask questions of a social media-adept audience, came back with some results many would find surprising.

Citibank, N.A.

They didn’t shock me. Wanna know what real businesses are doing with digital marketing? Here’s a few of the findings:

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38 comments

A Corporate Blogging Tool Worth Blogging About

by Jason Falls · April 21, 2010

If you are a regular reader here at Social Media Explorer, you know that I’m a strategic advisor to Compendium Blogware and have been involved in a corporate blogging research project with Compendium CEO Chris Baggott, corporate blogging expert Debbie Weil and fellow social media marketing practitioner Jay Baer. Our research to date has shown that as many as 80 percent of corporate blogs report that the vast majority of their traffic comes from first-time visitors, erasing the myth that we blog for some loyal community.

Image representing Compendium Blogware as depi...

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13 comments

Four Search Engines Marketers Should Know About

by Monica O'Brien · April 19, 2010

You’ve heard of search engine optimization on sites like Google, Bing, and now even Twitter; the question is, what’s next? Marketers in the digital age need data and content, and there are lots of innovative tools coming out to organize the vast amount of stuff that’s out there. Here are four search engines that will be making huge waves in search by 2012:

OneRiot – The Real-Time Search Engine

The Pitch: “OneRiot crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services, then indexes the content on those pages in seconds. The end result is a search experience that allows users to find the freshest, most socially-relevant content from across the realtime web.”

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89 comments

Social Media Events Worth Attending

by Jason Falls · April 14, 2010

A question I’m asked routinely is, “What are the best conferences and events to go to for social media?” Assuming the point is to find out which ones I think are great for learning social media marketing, I certainly have my opinions. Granted, some of the events I’m enthusiastic about are ones at which I speak, some of those also offer me affiliate arrangements where I get a percentage of each sign-up, but I hope you know by now I don’t endorse or profit from anything I wouldn’t recommend even without those perks.

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23 comments

Are You Retaining Your Customers?

by Jason Falls · April 12, 2010

My personal interactions with brands are normally the types of things I would share on Twitter or my personal blog. While I’ve occasionally shared some brand run-ins here, I prefer to write about the good things brands are doing rather than the bad. Using Social Media Explorer as a personal rant platform seems a disservice to you, somehow.

But I think my love affair and subsequent fallout with a recent brand has some lessons in customer retention we can all use, so please forgive the indulgence. There will be a point.

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32 comments

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