Kansas City’s Data Center & Internet Hub Increases Website Traffic With Social Media and Cuts 75% of Google Adwords Budget
Posted By: Jamie Sutera, VP of R&D
1102 GRAND, Kansas City’s data center and Internet hub, saw a 200-300 percent increase in its website and blog traffic, and cut 75 percent of its Google Adwords budget. The marketing ROI is part of an ongoing social media campaign with Jennings Social Media Marketing (www.jenningssocialmedia.com).
Darren Bonawitz, principal of 1102 GRAND, said that Jennings Social Media Marketing helped 1102 GRAND have a better perspective of online marketing strategies. “We were in need of marketing experts and that is exactly what we found in Jennings Social Media Marketing. We have worked with Jennings Social Media Marketing for approximately two years. In that time 1102 GRAND has had an increase in website traffic, saved 75 percent of the budget on the Google Adwords campaign, been requested for more interviews than we can handle and been able to realize significant quantifiable results through additional revenue,” said Bonawitz.
Bonawitz added that the focus on social media is extremely beneficial. “Jennings Social Media Marketing implemented many facets of social media marketing including Facebook, Twitter, e-newsletters, blog, case studies, organic search engine optimized press releases and Web videos. Social media is such a vital tool because it is constantly working. We have had so many great results, and it is hard to argue with results,” said Bonawitz.
1102 GRAND is a Midwestern carrier hotel and network neutral collocation facility specifically enhanced with the infrastructure to host and provide services to an array of global network operators including carriers, service providers and enterprise customers who demand highly secure and connected, customized solutions for their core networking equipment. 1102 GRAND offers a wide array of collocation options including cabinets, cage space, suites and space for private data centers, all of which are connected to a carrier neutral Meet Me Room, housing nearly 30 carriers and service providers including AT&T, Level 3, TeliaSonera, tw telecom, Zayo Enterprise Networks, and Hurricane Electric (http://1102grand.com/).
4 Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2011
Posted By: Jared Cook
2010, often referred to as “the year of social media,” has come and gone. As we move forward into 2011, we will continue to see social media evolve and grow.
Below is an article from Mashable.com, written by Tim Ferriss, providing his insight into-
4 Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2011
Ah, social media marketing. Fewer things are so lavishly spent on, yet so poorly measured. Here are a few predictions for 2011 related to where the smart money and dumb money will go. Special thanks to a number of high-volume retail experts for their insights, including Ryan Holiday, director of marketing at American Apparel. Read on for our predictions and let us know in the comments what you think social media marketing will look like in the year to come. 
1. YouTube Beats Yahoo — Video Will Convert
YouTube
is the second largest search engine in the English-speaking world. That’s right: YouTube is bigger than Yahoo. Zappos, as one example, added simple videos of people holding shoes and moving them around to its sales pages and increased conversion rate from 6% to 30%. When I look at the traffic sources for my book trailer on YouTube, the biggest referrer isn’t my own blog. It’s The Huffington Post. I customized the video and text content to a niche (but sizeable) outlet that didn’t exist two years ago: Huffington Post Books. With proper targeting and syndication, this 50 second video almost immediately propelled my book from an Amazon rank of approximately number 150 to 30, now stabilizing at number four in all books. We usedRankForest to track this sudden change.
2. The Full Resurrection of E-mail
Groupon has an e-mail list of at least 15 million strong in the U.S. (the company says it’s 30+ million if you include international), which goes to show that a true permission asset can be worth nearly $6 billion on the bidding table. E-mail addresses are a safer long-term investment than social media features. Think about all the money companies spent advertising their MySpace
pages in 2007. Even on Facebook, your direct messages to fans are relegated to a second tier inbox no one reads. This is something you don’t have to worry about happening in e-mail marketing. Among 20- to 35-year olds, at least, their physical addresses change more frequently than their e-mail addresses. The smarter marketers will budget “social media” acquisitions based on lifetime value (or a set duration, like 6 months’ retail purchases) of e-mail addresses. One major retailer did the math and learned that an e-mail subscriber is worth roughly $20 a year in annual online revenue. Knowing this number allowed the retailer to: 
- Calculate the value of the real estate it gives the e-mail signup box at the register in stores. It turns out to be one of the most lucrative converters in an already competitive area.
- Easily say “Yes” or “No” to requests to participate in contests/sweepstakes by judging return on new e-mails acquired.
- Calculate what the company can spend to build its list.
There are companies like Opt-Intelligence that can be paid a CPA (cost per action) for what are called “co-regs.” Co-reg example: If you’re signing up for an account at NYTimes.com, and it says “Get 4 issues of Golf Magazine FREE!” someone paid for that because they knew it will make money based on lifetime value. After the above-mentioned retailer quantified what an e-mail subscriber was worth, the company was able to double its subscriber base in less than eight months. The majority of that growth came not through spending money upfront, but from the redirection of already existing resources in ways that weren’t possible before calculating that number. Let’s say that added 500,000 e-mail addresses, each worth $20 in 2011; that means an additional $10 million in revenue with no significant capital outlay. Aaron Ray uses the same tactics for the “free agent bands” (major acts who’ve left a label) at The Collective. He figures out how many tickets you sell through your fan club, how many downloads come from your e-mail list, and how much traffic you can drive through Facebook and Twitter. It’s critical for two reasons: 1) For accurate revenue/sales/attendance predictions, and 2) As ROI metrics to justify investments for growth. This also allows loss-leader campaigns. Even if the math on a Groupon deal is razor thin, a smart retailer (online or offline) can acquire e-mails through a special form they set up and add an extra $20+ per transaction, per our hypothetical example. Many companies can afford to give product away for “free” if they have the right metrics. Most companies don’t, which leads us to number three.
New Social Media Business Trends for 2011
Posted By: Jamie Sutera, VP of R&D, Jennings Social Media Marketing
Social Media is an important aspect to many businesses. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, blogs etc., are among the most popular ways to communicate and network. Business owners everywhere are utilizing social media in order to grow and manage their companies. Below is an article from http://venturebeat.com, written by Gary Halliwell, that reviews social media business trends for 2011.
According to the article, social media is always changing so it is important to stay on top of social media trends. Haliwell compiled a list of social media trends for 2011 to “help entrepreneurs make the most of this exciting marketing opportunity.”
Social marketing will move beyond Facebook and LinkedIn – A recent Harvard research study showed that information and influence travel up to three degrees across a social network. The information you communicate to friends, family and colleagues is often passed on beyond your network – possibly to thousands of people, most of whom you will not even know. Similarly, the information you receive each day may have traveled two or three degrees before it reaches you.
This is where the meat is for social marketers. In our connected world of Tweets, blogs, emails and posts, this information transmission is captured in electronic form, and what we know as “word-of-mouth” in face to face interaction has become “word-of-digital”, and it’s incredibly track-able and useful.
2011 and the years ahead will be a time when marketers start to get away from thinking of social marketing in terms of the limited information posted on Facebook or LinkedIn, and start to figure out how to influence and encourage the transmission of information across the vastly larger real social networks their customers inhabit.
Socially adept companies will align the needs of employees and customers – Social is about “we” – a dimension that few companies are used to operating in. “We” includes the inter-connectedness of customers on the internet, airing complaints and raving about things they like, creating resonance for brands both positive and negative. Just as importantly, and perhaps less intuitively, is that “we” also embraces employees.
I’ll again refer to Zappos, as it achieves customer excellence by ensuring employees and customers are aligned by delivering happiness to both employees and customers. Management knows that reacting to customers in real-time requires employees who are motivated, empowered and creative across the whole organization.
In 2011, we’ll see more companies embrace Zappos’ approach to social as integral, and large corporations relying on their inertia will feel the hot breath of excitement from fully motivated competition.
Millennials will take another step forward into the breach - The shift to greater social connectedness will continue to move forward in 2011. In 2010, at a recent conference about social media in Boston, not one of the 500 attendees was below the age of 30. As a result, a lot of the discussion about social media was that of fear, uncertainty and doubt.
As younger people begin to turn up at these sorts of conferences, expect the conversation to change into discussions and enthusiasm for the possibilities of social media, as opposed to the threats. Help is on its way, but it may be too late for larger more static companies where management think social is a cocktail in a bar.
Social will penetrate deeper into company structures – The Fall 2010 NetProspex Social Business Report analyzed over 2 million contact records of folks within the largest companies in the nation. The trends offered an interesting view into 2011.
Not surprisingly, marketing decision makers had the heaviest use of social media. Interestingly, our study also showed human resources professionals ranking 2nd for social network usage. CEOs, meanwhile, were number 11 on the list, outpaced by office managers and customer service reps. This is a trend that will hopefully reverse, as more CEOs see the power of social media to network and to amplify their thought leadership.
Go live or go home – In his recent book, Real-time Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott gives many examples of companies that suffer from not reacting in real time to customer issues. Going “real time” means preparing an organization to react to what’s happening in their world, cohesively and adeptly. It requires planning for the future with room for ambiguity and change, and the flexibility to react from the top to the bottom of a company.
Going real time is something most companies, especially large ones, are not geared to do. Generally, management selection is based on planning, organizational and political skills. Now that customers have the power they do with social communication, in a conversation that is visible to all, Scott’s premise is that creativity and improvisation is required in the real-time culture that customer relations now demand.
The good news is that this pressure will create excellence seen in live performance, but 2011 is still the beginning of painful transition for the majority of business.
Thank you to Becky Bosshart, Writer for Recharger Magazine, for Featuring Valerie Jenning in a Recent Article
Posted By: Jamie Sutera, VP of R&D
Thank you to Becky Bosshart, writer for Recharger Magazine, for interviewing Valerie Jennings for a recent article. During the interview, Jennings discussed social media trends. According to the article, Valerie Jennings, who created a blog for InkCycle, said the company is building brand awareness of its eco-friendly ink cartridges using online reviews, and Sarah Thompson, LaserNetworks’ marketing manager, explains what new bloggers should expect from social media (hint: it’s a long-term investment).
Facebook Announces Map of the World – Relationships Revealed
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga
Facebook intern Paul Butler created a new visualization of Facebook relationships. He used the image of a map to demonstrate the connections that exist on Facebook with regards to geographical location. Read the article from mashable.com below.
The World’s Facebook Relationships Visualized [PIC]
Click the image for the full-sized version.
This is what the world looks like, according to the Facebook social graph.
Facebook intern Paul Butler was interested in the locations of friendships, so he decided to create a visualization of Facebook connections around the globe. How local are our friends? Where are the highest concentration of friendships? How do political and geological boundaries affect them?
Study Shows Twitter Surpasses Facebook as Marketing Tool
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga
A new study by SocialTwist reveals that Twitter links produce more clicks than links shared on Facebook. Twitter and Facebook are used for marketing as well as personal use. According to this study, Twitter proves more effective than Facebook at reaching customers. This article written by Barbara E. Hernandez from Entrepreneur.com highlights the pros and cons of both Facebook and Twitter.
Twitter Crushes Facebook for Marketing
Facebook makes up 78 percent of traffic among all social network sites and micro-blogging site Twitter accounts for 5 percent, but on average “tweets” with embedded links get 19 clicks while Facebook’s shared links only get three clicks, according to a study by SocialTwist.
The marketing firm, which offers viral social media marketing campaigns, analyzed more than a million shared links through its Tell-a-Friend widget that lets people share information on Websites. SocialTwist measured success by a clickthrough rate, a term for the number of clicks on a link that takes a user to a specific destination.
The survey yielded other surprises, such as that MySpace still has 15 percent of social media market share.
If you’re using Twitter or Facebook to reach out to customers, here’s what each service has going for and against it.
Ring In the New Year with 2011 Marketing Trends
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga
As the Holiday season approaches, the year is coming to a close. We look to the next year with anticipation and curiosity. What will 2011 hold for social media? This article written by Eric Tsai from B2C Marketing Insider reveals the four most expected trends for social networks, businesses and marketers.
4 Internet Marketing Trends For 2011
As we’re approaching the end of the 2010 there are numerous developments with businesses using social media. I had predicted that brands will need to figure out how social fits into their overall brand strategy by identifying where the leverage is with social media and how to manage it.
Online communities are now everywhere there is access and common objectives. Even social networks are interconnected themselves pushing and pulling content across various channels.
For business owners, bloggers and marketers, we have to realize that the landscape is changing and will continue to shift towards attentive reach, not frequency.
Instead of trying to reach broad targets of demographic groups, investing in paid media we find valuable organic content becoming more powerful, ranking higher by search engines and shared by passionate communities.
Need more facts to back up the growth of social media? According to Harris Interactive:
- 9 out of 10 (87%) online adults use social media
- Highest percentage (22%) uses social media less than 1 hour per week
- Highest percentage of 18-34 yr-olds (17%) uses social media 6-10 hours per week
Social Media Coupons and Promos Reach Audiences and attract “Followers” for Brands
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga 
More than half of consumers follow at least one brand on a social networking site. A new study shows that consumers chose to follow a brand in order to receive a deal or promo or to find more brand information. This article from InformationWeek.com was written by Alison Diana and it reveals the results of the new social media research.
Coupons, Promos Attract Social Media Brand ‘Followers’
The majority of consumers are willing to follow a brand on Facebook or Twitter — especially if there is a financial motivator such as coupons or special promotions, a new study found.
In fact, 60% of consumers polled follow at least one brand via a social network, and one in four said they did so in order to search for coupons or promotions, according to a poll of more than 15,000 residents of the United States and Canada by Empathica, a developer of customer experience management (CEM) solutions. Thirty percent cited their desire to seek more information on a brand, the study found.
“The challenge for companies is to identify the triggers that make consumers want to follow their brand, further engage with them and keep them top-of-mind,” said Gary Edwards, Empathica executive VP of client services. “Our survey results suggest consumers show preference to interacting with brands that offer coupons and promotions via social media outlets. It’s important for brands to recognize consumer preferences and what will help encourage them to visit an establishment.”
Foursquare Check-Ins Show Where Shoppers Went on Black Friday
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga
Retailers promoted their Black Friday sales heavily this year. Social media was a reliable tool for many retailers who chose to use apps, Twitter and Foursquare among other social media tools. This article written by Jolie O’Dell from mashable.com uses graphs to show where shoppers checked in on Foursquare.
Which Retailers Got the Most Checkins on Black Friday? [STATS]
We’re still breaking down the metrics for Black Friday 2010, but if Foursquare checkins are any barometer, Target probably had a pretty good day.
A tiny percentage of the population uses location-based checkin tools like Foursquare; and in all likelihood, these digital citizens are more likely to be shopping online than in stores during the holiday season. So numbers gathered by Trendrr and AdAge represent a tiny sliver of what in-store numbers might have actually been.
The number-one store by Foursquare checkins was Target, which captured almost one quarter of all Black Friday checkins — no small feat considering the substantial Foursquare marketing efforts of other brands.
Thank You to Social Marketing Hub for Featuring Jennings Social Media Marketing
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga
Thank you to Social Marketing Hub for featuring Jennings Social Media Marketing in a recent post. The article includes a video and explains how Jennings utilizes strategy to create innovative marketing plans. The post can be seen here.
Groupon Launches Holiday Store
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga
Groupon is a prime example of the growing popularity of coupon and check-in businesses. Groupon launched a holiday store today. The store, Grouponicus, will offer new deals daily with a focus on holiday gift options. This article by Kit Eaton at fastcompany.com reveals the growing focus on social media shopping.
Check-in/Coupon Business Exploding: Groupon Gets Into Digital Music Downloads
Groupon is soaring like a rocket at the moment: Today it opens the Grouponicus Store, with Rihanna’s new album as the star offering and social media links a-plenty built in. It’s the latest sign that the check-in/coupon digital marketing phenomenon is exploding.
As well as the “variety of unbeatable features that have made Groupon a global phenomenon” the press release states, “LOUD will be available as a $5 digital download in the inaugural holiday store of Groupon, the Grouponicus Store, beginning November 22, 2010.” That’s a pretty big coup for Groupon, given the big-star status of Rihanna, and the fact that LOUD is running at $9.99 in Apple’s iTunes store–the biggest music retailer in the U.S.
The company is calling it a “first of its kind” deal, and while it’s definitely a success, it’s probably almost as much thanks to the clever marketing that Rihanna’s team are using for the new record, which includes “aggressive” social media activity across the usual suspects of Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.
Jennings Social Media Marketing Wishes You a Happy Thanksgiving: How to Utilize Social Media to Plan a Perfect Thanksgiving
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga
It is time to make the final arrangements for the Thanksgiving celebration. There are parties to plan, food to make and traditions to begin. Social media tools can help you finalize the details. There are many new holiday themed applications to help you get ready for the holidays. This article from mashable.com written by Mollie Vandor shows how social media can assist you this year.
HOW TO: Plan the Perfect Thanksgiving With the Help of Social Media
On the fourth Thursday of every November, Americans engage in an annual feast that reminds us of our country’s humble origins, and give us a good reason to get together with family, watch football and stuff our faces until our pants don’t fit. It’s the official start to the holiday season, and it can either be a fantastic day full of food, family and fun, or a total nightmare full of burnt turkeys and busted travel plans.
Fortunately, you can always turn to the social web to help you plan for the big day. In fact, the Internet can help you prepare a feast, assist you with your T-day travel and keep you entertained once the pie is gone and the plates are cleared. And that’s definitely something to be thankful for.
Twitter Tests New Analytics Product
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga
A select group of Twitter users have tested the new Twitter Analytics product. This development has been rumored all year, but it is now official. Users will be able to see data about their account for free and in one central place. Here is an article from mashable.com by Adam Ostrow that shares the news.
Twitter’s Official Analytics Product Has Arrived
Twitter has started inviting a select group of users to test a new analytics product, Mashable has learned. Such a product has been rumored for some time, and a Twitter executive said earlier this year that Analytics would debut by the end of 2010.
With Twitter Analytics, users will be able to see a plethora of data about their account; for example, information about which tweets are most successful, which tweets caused people to unfollow, and who the most influential users are that reply and retweet their messages.
In the images below, you can see how some of this data is charted. A bar graph over 6-hour increments shows you mentions, follows and unfollows, for example, and you can filter tweets by categories that are defined as “best,” “good,” and “all.”
Turn this Black Friday Green: How to Have an Eco-Friendly Black Friday
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga
Thanksgiving preparations have most likely begun in your home. You may be pulling out your decorations, adding to the growing dinner shopping list and filling up your calendar with family gatherings. The holiday season requires extra energy. If you are planning on doing holiday shopping on Black Friday, check out these energy saving tips. You can make the holiday season more green with a few simple steps. The advice in this article by Jennifer Barry at Earth911.com explains how to save time while being mindful of your energy use.
5 Steps to an Eco Black Friday
Black Friday: A day where millions of shoppers, still weary and full from the previous night’s Thanksgiving feast, flock to retail stores across the country at pre-dawn hours to fill their carts and bags with deals aplenty as the holiday shopping season officially kicks off.
Phew. Are you tired from that description? We are too, but as wearisome as that might have been, it’s nothing compared to the drain that can be Black Friday. While deals abound, crowds, traffic, early hours and the like can make the day after Thanksgiving a drain on your energy and the environment.
But don’t fret. Follow our easy guide to a greener Black Friday, and we promise you’ll not only reduce your environmental impact, but perhaps your stress level as well.
Jennings Social Media Marketing Press Release Posted On MSNBC and Bloomberg: Kansas City Data Center & Internet Hub Increases Website Traffic With Social Media & Cuts 75% of Google Adwords Budget
Posted by: Carlee Vellinga
Jennings Social Media Marketing’s press release regarding their work with 1102 GRAND, the Kansas City Data Center and Internet Hub, was posted on major news sites including MSNBC.com and Bloomberg.com. The press release reviewed Jennings Social Media Marketing’s tactics for increasing website traffic and cutting 75 percent of the Google Adwords budget for 1102 GRAND.
Darren Bonawitz, principal of 1102 GRAND, said that Jennings has helped his company better understand online marketing strategies. “We were in need of marketing experts and that is exactly what we found in Jennings Social Media Marketing. We have worked with Jennings Social Media Marketing for approximately two years. In that time, 1102 GRAND has had an increase in website traffic, saved 75 percent of the budget on the Google Adwords campaign, been requested for more media interviews than we can handle and been able to realize significant quantifiable results through additional revenue,” he said.
Thank you to Kansas City Business Journal for Featuring Jennings Social Media Marketing
Thank you to Suzanna Stagemeyer for featuring Valerie Jennings on the KCBizBeat Blog. The article explains how managing a brand online involves much more than maintaining a Facebook or Twitter account. Valerie shows how a variety of social media tools encourage the right kind of online traffic.
Social media: Gain or pain?
The use of social media seems to keep growing among businesses of all types, but it can be difficult to judge the efficacy of those efforts.
The Kansas City Business Journal and staff members are active on Twitter and Facebook (our KCBJ page hit 1,000 Facebook fans today), but in the overall picture, the ROI seems relatively small. Granted, that’s measuring traffic, not intangibles. And social media efforts still require an added layer of work.
I’d be interested in hearing what other Kansas City businesses are seeing.
Read more: Social media: Gain or pain? | Kansas City Business Journal
Proctor & Gamble Launches Social Good Campaign
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga
Proctor and Gamble’s new social good campaign aims to provide clean drinking water for people in need. They have created a new widget which bloggers can insert into their blog which converts a single click into a day’s worth of drinking water. Read this article from mashable.com about the innovative social good campaign.
Procter & Gamble Launches Widget to Convert Clicks into Water
What if the one click it took to open this story could also provide enough clean drinking water for one person for an entire day?
Major consumer goods company Procter and Gamble (P&G) has launched a widget that bloggers can embed into their blogs in several days. For each click they receive from readers, P&G will donate a day’s worth of clean drinking water (about two litres) to someone in need. The goal is to generate 100,000 days worth of clean water by the end of the year.
Started in August, the widget is part of P&G’s “Give Health Clean Water Blogivation,” which showcases the power of female bloggers to help improve the lives of people in need. The participants have already donated more than 20,000 days of water.
Jennings Social Media Marketing Press Release Posted On MSNBC.com; Social Media Marketing Doubles Enrollment at Montessori School
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga
The services that Jennings Social Media Marketing provided helped to double the enrollment of Smithville Montessori Academy (SMA). Robin Hilmes, director of operations at SMA, said that after 90 days she began to see drastic results. “Jennings Social Media Marketing made our website attractive to the right audience. Also, SMA was featured on websites that appealed to its target audience such as sheknows.com. SMA started getting phone calls and e-mails from people who wanted to know what our product was. Thanks to the increase in website traffic and media coverage, SMA doubled its enrollment,” said Hilmes.
Additionally, Hilmes said that all of the services provided by Jennings Social Media Marketing continue to be extremely effective. “Jennings Social Media Marketing hosts the SMA website, manages the blog, Facebook, Twitter and the e-newsletter. These tools are very beneficial to our organization. Now, parents can experience SMA on a variety of levels. They can interact with SMA through all of the social media outlets. Social media just makes it easier for parents to be heavily involved,” said Hilmes.
This press release focusing on Jennings ‘ strategies was posted here on msnbc.com.
Internet to Surpass 2 Billion Users This Year
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga
More than 2 billion people will be Internet users by the end of 2010. Developing countries have the lowest percentage of Internet users, but more than half of new Internet users this year will be from those developing countries. This article written by Stan Schroeder provides statistics about growing number of Internet users globally.
Internet to Surpass 2 Billion Users This Year 
The number of Internet users will surpass 2 billion before the end of 2010, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said in a report.
The current world population is estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau to be 6.876 billion, which would mean that approximately 30% of the population will be online at the end of this year.
There will be 226 million new Internet users this year, 162 million of which will be from the developing countries. Despite the fast growth of Internet users there, the developing countries still have a long way to go to catch up with the developed world.
How Social Media Can Improve Corporate Social Responsibility
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga
As companies focus on their financial, environmental and social impacts, they must shift their attention toward better communication. Social media allows companies to communicate more freely with their stakeholders, clients and customers. David Connor offers tips regarding social responsibility.
How to Use Social Media for Better Corporate Social Responsibility
There was a time when companies used to get away with almost whatever they wanted to because they had the ability to control the vast majority of the communication about their activities both good and bad. In the prehistoric days before the World Wide Web, traditional press officers pushed out paper press releases whenever they thought they had something that would impress an audience. The bad stuff, or even the just not so glowingly positive, hardly ever got past the reputation guardians.
Coincidentally, on a parallel track, a growing movement in and around business was emerging touting something called corporate social responsibility (CSR); the balancing of a company’s financial, environment and social impacts. In the beginning, the web offered an increased amount of corporate information available. Although still rigidly protected at source by the press officers, the initial explosion of readily accessible data and search tools created more opportunities for weaknesses to be noticed for those who cared to go looking. Then social media arrived and upped the ante exponentially.
Now everybody (and especially activist groups) with a mobile phone could if they had the slightest inclination, access this overwhelming amount of information then analyse, filter and broadcast their opinions to their own and often substantial and influential networks. This near instantaneous transmission of corporate misdemeanors had bypassed complacent press officers whilst visionary marketers spied a new era.
Doctors Utilize Social Media to Attract New Patients
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga
Medical Groups are learning that social media is a helpful marketing tool. Many doctors and Health Care providers are beginning to utilize deals and promotions on sites such as Groupon and Foursquare. Doctors are offering discounted medical services for those who check the sites. This article from The Los Angeles Times illustrates the way the medical field is changing as doctors find innovative ways to attract new patients.
HealthKey: Doctors Experimenting with Social Media
Monica Dillon wasn’t happy with her eye care provider, so when she saw an online deal for an exam and glasses for $50, she clicked on it.
The accountant, who lives in Columbia and works in Washington, doesn’t ordinarily get medical care without a recommendation. But the offer was too good to resist — and, as she notes, there would be no surgery or undressing.
“The timing was right so I jumped on it,” she said about her purchase via Groupon, a deal-of-the-day e-mail sent to tens of thousands of people in the Baltimore region and millions nationwide. “I’d be more cautious about laser surgery or hair removal. That would take more research. But this worked out; they found a problem with my prescription.”
Katzen Eye Group, the company behind the deal, is among the growing number of health care providers testing the latest in social media. They’re intrigued by the opportunity to attract new patients who might have no or little insurance for specialty services, and to provide information and services to current patients.
Web pages, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts have become a staple of businesses. The newest trend are dealmakers such as Foursquare (a mobile application allowing participants to “check in” at locations and win small rewards), Scoutmob (e-mails that promise discounts at hot spots in cities such as Washington, though not yet Baltimore) and LivingSocial (a Groupon-like deal site).
Report on Online Marketing: How Effective are Facebook and Twitter?
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga
Twitter and Facebook are effective marketing methods which are growing in popularity. Austin Carr’s report on online marketing techniques provides graphs and statistics that show that among social media sites, Twitter is the most effective tool for click-throughs.
Twitter Crushing Facebook’s Click-Through Rate: Report
What is the most effective way for marketers to spread their message online? Facebook? Twitter? Company blogs? Email?
According to a new report by marketing firm SocialTwist, Internet sharing trends have shifted heavily shifted toward social networking, but other platforms still have a strong presence for word-of-mouth advertising. SocialTwist analyzed more than a million referral messages send using the company’s Tell-a-Friend tool, a widget that lets users share sites through social media.
In the last year, social networking sites saw a 10% increase in usage, and a 16% bump in click-throughs. Overall though, email still accounts for 55% of referrals.
However, when it comes to click-throughs, social networking sites are far more effective, accounting for more than 60% of the market share.
Social Web: Guardian of Net Neutrality
Posted By: Carlee Vellinga
The social Web has encouraged entrepreneurs and business leaders to continue defending web neutrality. This article by Jon Goldman on mashable.com outlines the important factors of net neutrality.
Why the Social Web is the Guardian of Net Neutrality
The spread of broadband Internet access allows us to explore and devour an array of content (entertainment, news and information) with a convenience and speed unimaginable to those accessing the web a mere five to 10 years ago. And in the past two months, discussions within the Internet and media industries about the continued viability of net neutrality have centered on those issues of convenience and speed.
Proponents of net neutrality have come out in full force rallying around the notion of a free and uninhibited Internet; one controlled only by consumers’ imaginations and desires, rather than corporate profits. They argue that an Internet divided into separate and potentially unequal access points would give favor to those companies willing to pay top-dollar to have their content and entertainment available to consumers and businesses who are also willing — and able — to pay a premium for access.
Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes articulated why net neutrality is so important when he told Information Week that “Preserving an open Internet that is accessible to innovators — regardless of their size or wealth — will promote a vibrant and competitive marketplace where consumers have ultimate control over the content and services delivered through their Internet connection.”
