2010 December | Social Media Explorer

7 Reasons to Launch an Internal Blog Before Going Public

by Mark Smiciklas · December 9, 2010

When we talk about a corporate blog, the first thing that likely comes to mind is a “public facing” channel where organizations connect with external audiences. What about internal blogs?

There is a lot of learning and risk associated with launching a public facing blog including audience analysis, content strategy, the use of tools, the development of guidelines, understanding best practices and developing implementation discipline. An employee-only blog presents organizations with the opportunity to soft launch their public facing initiative – offering up the ability to develop strategy, test ideas and practice tactics within a safer internal environment.

13 comments

Tracking The Elusive Influential

by Jeff Larche · December 8, 2010

Sorry, Malcolm. You’re still on the hot seat. I was initially planning to call this An Apology To Malcolm Gladwell: Your Book Isn’t Crap After All. I was inspired by news of amazing work in the field of social media analytics — news that suggested that real Influentials were finally captured “in the wild.”

That was before I dug deeper. The facts are that some cool data mining techniques are helping one company leverage their own “Influentials” (Gladwell calls them Mavens), but the work isn’t scalable to other industries. The only thing we can say for sure about these Influentials is they’re helping someone half a world away pick up more cell phone minutes. Here’s the research that got me so excited.

14 comments

Reader Poll: What Book Should Jason Write

by Jason Falls · December 7, 2010

I can assure you this is little more than a lark, but I’d love to hear what you have to say. I’ve been approached a couple times about writing a book and have never felt the need or desire to do such. Still, the idea is intriguing, though I wouldn’t want to write just another social media marketing book.

So take a gander at the poll question below and tell me what you think. What should I write about, if I were to do so at all? Philosophy, practical/tactical stuff, overall marketing philosophy, not about social media at all, pulp fiction, non-fiction about my crazy family? Love to hear your feedback.

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Social Media Does Not Equal PR

by Stephanie Schwab · December 7, 2010

Lately I’ve gotten involved in a number of discussions with public relations people who are trying to leverage social for their clients’ needs. Some of these people are socially active, but not entirely socially savvy; I feel like I sound like a broken record when I use the words “engagement” and “sustained” and “slow build” over and over again to try and describe how social media works. So I’ve put together a comparison to show some of the ways in which PR and social media are different … because they are. Really different.

63 comments

INFOGRAPHIC: The Science Of Blogging

by Jason Falls · December 6, 2010

Social media mad scientist Dan Zarrella is at it again. Dan has the coolest job in social media, in my opinion. HubSpot pays him to research metrics behind everything. He’s done scientific analysis of Tweets, presentations and more. On Thursday, he’s presenting a free webinar on The Science Of Blogging which I’m sure will give you a dozen or more nuggets of information that will make your blog better, or at least more effective. Go sign up and do the webinar. You’ll learn something. And it’s free. Can’t beat that.

6 comments

How Many People Actually Consume Your Content?

by Jason Falls · December 6, 2010

How do you measure the number of people your digital marketing efforts reach? More specifically for those of you using content marketing, blogging or similar activities on your website, how are you quantifying that success? Is it Google Analytics or other website measurement tools? Is it the number of RSS feed readers for your syndicated content? A combination of both?

To put it bluntly, if your CEO passed you in the hall five minutes from now and asked, “How many people read our blog each day?” what number would you quote?