Micah Pratt Promoted to President of Jennings Social Media Marketing
By Chelsea Lewis, social media marketing manager of Jennings Social Media Marketing
Congratulations to Micah Pratt! Pratt has been promoted from director to president of Jennings Social Media Marketing.
Pratt is excited about the new opportunities this promotion will bring. “I am very honored to be given this opportunity to further do what I love. Working at JSMM has been such a blessing and I look forward to advancing my role in the company in this new position,” said Pratt.
Jennings Social Media Marketing Attends KCnext Summer Networking Event 2012
By Chelsea Lewis, social media marketing manager of Jennings Social Media Marketing
The technology industry in Kansas City has significantly evolved since its inception. Jennings Social Media Marketing is proud to be a part of the Kansas City community and is honored to see how far Silicon Prairie has come!
There was a lot to celebrate and discuss at this year’s KCnext summer networking event, ranging from Google Fiber, arriving in Kansas City, to what is next for the technology community.
Each year we look forward to attending this networking event. It gives us the chance to see old friends while making new ones. We would like to extend a big thank you to KCnext for hosting this event and we are already looking forward to next year!
Pictured above, Micah Pratt, director of Jennings Social Media Marketing, Steve Roatch, CEO of Twentyseven Global and Allison McGown, executive administrative assistant at Jennings Social Media Marketing
Facebook Monetizes Pages With Check-In Coupons
By: Chelsea Lewis, social media marketing manager of Jennings Social Media Marketing
Marketers have constantly tried to figure out what is the best way to reach consumers on Facebook. There has never been a clear answer to the Facebook consumer engagement problem, but recently a new solution may have come to light: coupons.
Wildfire Interactive recently performed a study that focused on randomly sampled Facebook campaigns to see which got the highest response rates and earned media.
The report speculated about why such campaigns tend to be more shareable. One possibility is that questions let the user discover an aspect of one’s personality they may have been unaware of. Another is the show-off factor: Quizzes let users display their knowledge of trivia and “pick your favorites” challenges let users express their good taste.
The benefits to creating such widely shared campaigns are that they draw new users into the fold. The chance of a pick your favorites query being clicked by a friend is 27%, while quizzes and trivia contests rate 15% and 13%, respectively. From there, the data is encouraging as well: 82% of friends who click on a News Feed post for a quiz will take the quiz. Some 74% of those who click on a coupon offer in their News Feeds will download the coupon. Overall, the study found that earned media could account for up to a 12% boost in engagement rates.
Though the study highlights broad categories that do well with users, it also advocates adding personality to the offers, getting into the consumers’ heads to see if such an offer might be appealing and working in a gamification element that rewards users for sharing.
To read the entire article click here:
Jennings Social Media Marketing Reviews Pinterest Top Picks & Facebook Face-Off
Posted by: Valerie Jennings, CEO of Jennings Social Media Marketing
I think Pinterest just might be it for this year. I love this social networking site. Here are my favorite brands on Pinterest right now. Check them out and don’t forget to follow us!
I also picked a few new Facebook timelines that did an excellent job rolling out their brand, using a great cover photo, milestones and telling their amazing stories.
Pinterest Picks –
1. Kate Spade
3. Whole Foods
4. WSJ
5. Mashable
Facebook Face-Off –
2. Burberry
3. Coca-Cola
4. Old Spice
5. Red Bull
How Can Non-Profits Take Advantage of Pinterest?
Posted by: Valerie Jennings, CEO of Jennings Social Media Marketing
I cannot believe how Pinterest has exploded. While it’s been around for a short-time, its user base has amassed quickly, making one wonder about why you should jump on Google+? They are different, but when Pinterest is said to refer more website traffic than Twitter, it’s sort of a no-brainer.
This article written by Mary Wider for Social Media Today: Pin It To Win It: How Non-Profits Can Tell Their Story on Pinterest, does a nice job highlighting how organizations can utilize this fabulous social networking for referring website traffic, momentum, fundraising and maybe recruitment.
Don’t forget to follow the new Jennings Social Media Marketing Pinterest boards.
YOUR MESSAGE
Use a board to explain your work. Put direct links to your website or to news outlets where your work was mentioned. This starts your non-profit story, who you are and what you do. It also gives you a chance to link photos and sites that fit with your message. In other words, you start to build a brand image and association. Building a story is incredibly important for non-profits. People want to know what you stand for and your motivation behind your cause.
EDUCATE
Set up a board that is solely for educating your followers. Resources, statistics and news articles that will let your followers discover more about you.
ACTION BOARD
Set up a separate board with call to action plans for your followers. Let them know how they can get involved with your organization. Spell it out via your pins and direct people directly to websites where they can take action.
COMMUNICATION BOARD – Show what you do.
Use this board to show the results of your work. Share stories from people directly affected by your work or showcase the projects you have worked on. If you can pin to a story in the word’s of people affected by your work, it’s an even better way to sum up your story.
Using these four board ideas creates a storyboard for your organization. Some more board ideas to add to your story include:
- Where We Work: show places in the world where your organization operates
- Faces: If you can share the faces and stories of people you work with, even better. When running a non-profit is it better to put faces and stories to your work. Hook followers in with an emotional connection.
- Donate or Purchase Board: If your organization focuses on donations or selling items that go towards monetary donations, use a separate board to set that up, sort of like the gift shop at the end of your story.
Above all, non-profits should start taking advantage of Pinterest and its ability to drive direct traffic to websites. Direct traffic drives up the search results for your site as well. It’s time non-profits started using all the social media tools at their disposal to spread their message and communicate with people globally. Pin it to win it.
Jennings Social Media Marketing Launches Facebook Contest In Response to Fan Poll
Posted by: Micah Pratt, director of social networking R&D
Jennings Social Media Marketing (JSMM) announced their most recent Facebook contest, following a small poll the company posted on Facebook over the summer. Enter for a chance to win social media marketing services by JSMM just in time for the holidays by “Liking” us on Facebook and signing up via the sweeps tab.
The winner of the contest will receive a boutique style campaign which may include a social media evaluation, channel branding and designs, channel updates to social media sites and organic search engine optimization analysis.
Valerie Jennings, CEO of JSMM, said they polled their Facebook fans and asked which grand prize they would most like to receive: an iPad, Mac computer, iPod or two free months of social media services from JSMM. The two free months from JSMM won with an overall majority. “We are excited to reward our fans in time for the holidays and hope the grand prize winner really takes advantage of this opportunity,” said Jennings.
Jennings Social Media Marketing is a full service company that utilizes the art of online storytelling with the science of measuring quantifiable results. JSMM creates comprehensive social media marketing, mobile, Web videos and website design and development strategies. The company represents publicly traded to medium-sized businesses across the U.S. and overseas including technology, sports, sustainability, entertainment, travel, financial, health care and real estate (www.jenningssocialmedia.com).
InformationWeek.com Reviews Tips for Business Facebook Pages During the Holidays: 51% of Consumers Are More Likely to Buy From a Company After Becoming Their Fan on Facebook
Posted by: Micah Pratt, director of social networking R&D
The holidays are just around the corner, and businesses are finalizing their marketing campaigns to optimize the shopping rush. Here is an article from InformationWeek.com, written by Kevin Casey, about how companies can prepare their social networking sites in time for the holidays.
4 Tips: Prep Your Facebook Page For Holidays
Will your company’s Facebook page help you take advantage of the holiday shopping rush? Consider these tips for SMBs and fine-tune your strategy.
Small and midsize businesses (SMBs), like Santa Claus, should be making a list and checking it twice. But rather than sorting out who’s naughty or nice, consumer-focused concerns should fine-tune their Facebook presence in advance of the holiday shopping rush.
Among the reasons: The bevy of market research showing shoppers increasingly turning to social sites before they make purchase decisions. Consider this recent study, which found 51% of consumers are more likely to buy something from a company after becoming their fan on Facebook. With the annual flurry of capitalism known as holiday shopping looming large, it’s time for retailers and other consumer-focused SMBs to make sure they’re ready to reap the rewards.
That means doing a bit more than putting up a page and hoping it connects with customers, according to Laura O’Shaughnessy, CEO of SocialCode, a social agency that emphasizes a quantitative approach to performance advertising, with a particular focus on Facebook. The firm recently added LinkedIn to its mix, and is considering the likes of Twitter and Google+.
Socialcode itself has an interesting SMB story. The 50-person agency was born as an internal department of The Washington Post Company, which owns–in addition to the flagship newspaper of the same name–a number of media, education, and other businesses. O’Shaughnessy said that the results of Facebook programs for the company’s various brands were so strong that it began shifting money away from its Google adverting and spending more on social. Later, Socialcode was spun out as an independent subsidiary and began signing on external customers.
In an interview, O’Shaughnessy shared these four tips for optimizing your Facebook activities in the coming weeks.
1. Set goals. The businesses that get the most out of their Facebook presence are the ones that have goals behind it. “Step one is deciding: Is my goal to drive people into my restaurant, is it to drive people into my store, is it to introduce a new product, is it to get people to buy my product?” O’Shaughnessy said. Without a clear sense of what they want to accomplish, SMBs, can’t make efficient use of their resources.
2. Design a campaign with a “viral accelerant.” O’Shaughnessy said the most powerful, effective Facebook campaigns place heavy emphasis on sharing. That often means developing an application, game, or a related microsite to encourage people to spread the word–no matter what the word is. “You want to make sure you’re taking advantage of the sharing activities that are going on,” O’Shaughnessy said.
While a development-intensive application might require a bigger budget, O’Shaughnessy noted that there are sharing-oriented things marketers can do on a smaller scale. She gave as an example a nonprofit client that found strong results simply using a light application aimed at sharing badges on Facebook walls.
“The most important thing about Facebook is really perpetuating that social sharing–getting one friend to spread, in this case, a badge to another friend,” O’Shaughnessy said. “Then all of that person’s friends see that action, so you get this immediate lift.”
The Future of Google+: Integrating Brand Pages with the Social Network’s 40 Million User Profiles
Posted by: Micah Pratt, director of social networking r&d
Last Wednesday at the Web 2.0 conference held in San Francisco, Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president in charge of Google+, discussed the possible changes coming to the social networking site. One of those changes included the idea of Google+ brand pages for companies anxiously waiting to reach out to the more than 40 million users. Here is an article from Mashable.com on what Google+ brand pages could look like when made available to companies.
What Google+ Brand Pages Could Look Like [PICS]
A few weeks ago, Mashable contacted some ad agencies and asked them to imagine how brand pages on could change in light of that platform’s planned redesign.
Just as Facebook was announcing its tweaks, though, Google was on track to add brand pages to Google Plus. Though it looks like that will happen any day now, the integration hasn’t been announced yet. Meanwhile, a handful of brands, including Ford, are already enjoying the possibilities.
There are several barriers to designing brand pages for Plus. For one thing, it’s hard to stand out the way Plus looks now. The somewhat rigid format has a leveling effect. But Colin Murphy, director of social for Skinny, one of the agencies that accepted our challenge, says there are potential advantages to Plus, too. “A primary gripe among Facebook and Twitter users is that brands bombard them with messages they don’t want or care to see,” said Murphy. “In its current form, Plus doesn’t solve that problem, but Plus Brand Pages might, if they implement Public Circles.”
Skinny outlined how this might work with a hypothetical example for Mini, the auto brand. In this case, a Mini Countryman fan could join the Countryman circle and see just Countryman updates in her feed. “This level of selectivity isn’t possible on Facebook or even Twitter, unless of course you are a fan or follow the specific product you’re interested in — but there’s a major drawback to that method because the user has to seek out content streams,” Murphy says. “With Google+ it’s all in one place, and the all the admin has to do is feed pertinent content to the appropriate circles.”
In addition to Skinny, Fantasy Interactive created some fictional Coca-Cola and Starbucks brand pages. Are these on the mark? We’ll know soon enough, but in the meantime, let us know what you think of these agencies’ vision of how Google+ can accommodate brands.
Social Networking “Friends” Politics: How to Make Facebook Ads Work to Political Candidates’ Favor
Posted by: Micah Pratt, Director of Social Networking R&D
The 2012 presidential election will be like one never experienced before. Social networking sites are playing a role in these elections that wasn’t imaginable four years ago by hosting debates, facilitating the political conversation and connecting candidates with voters in the digital world. Here is an article from CMO.com, written by Kim Soth, senior vice president of business development & marketing at Jennings Social Media Marketing, on how to get Facebook ads to work in your favor.
Five Ways to Make Facebook Ads Work For You
There is much talk in social-media circles about how to build your audience organically and that, for the most part, it is the best way to build an audience. It is certainly a good way, but it shouldn’t be your only strategy. We suggest that if you are a new company or are launching a product, you can do a great job of building fans with Facebook ads, which offer a great alternative to your marketing strategy. What’s more, Facebook ads are not nearly as complex as Google AdWords—but don’t let the simplicity fool you. For our campaigns we’ve found that Facebook ads, on average, deliver a higher click-through rate than Google AdWords.
For example, we were brought in to help promote a senatorial race. After a month of struggling to gain fans on Facebook, we eventually doubled the candidate’s fans in a week by running ads: We picked up 1,500 fans for a total cost of around $1,000.
So if you think this strategy might be for you, here are five tips that will help you make Facebook ads work for your campaigns.
1. It’s about testing. Always run multiple ads targeting the same “Likes and Interests,” and keep your Likes and Interests the same while testing different ad copy, headlines, or images. What needs to remain the same as your control for a general test is your Likes and Interests keywords. You can test many controls, but the simplest is Likes and Interests. Facebook targets audiences off of two variables: Users and Likes and Interests: If you change these in two different ads, then you don’t have an apples-to-apples test.
2. Likes and Interests matter. Likes and Interests are essentially keywords you are targeting for your campaign based on what shows up for a user. You don’t want to use random Likes and Interests keywords. To make Likes and Interests work for you, it’s important to target based on what is associated with that individual in some way—associations they belong to, things they like, where they work, what they are fans of, or what they’ve written on their walls.
It’s is important not to get carried away and add a hundred Likes and Interests keywords just because it’s cool to see the numbers of possible audience continue to rise. It would seem that big numbers of audience is a good idea, but it’s actually counterintuitive. You want to choose highly targeted Likes and Interests keywords that are tightly associated with your ad copy. Don’t choose a keyword just because of its audience reach. You want to make sure it matches everything you know about the ad copy. Just because someone rides a motorcycle doesn’t mean he is interested in a Harley. One person might buy sports bikes, another might buy BMW motorcycles, while another might be really into Harleys. So it does no good to blast all of them with a message about Harley gear.
A Huge Thanks to Mobile Commerce Daily for Featuring Jennings Social Media Marketing & Frank Ancona Honda: Car dealership boosts social media engagement with mobile bar codes, SMS
Posted by: Micah Pratt, director of social networking r&d
Thank you to Chantal Tode at Mobile Commerce Daily for interviewing Valerie Jennings, CEO of Jennings Social Media Marketing, and Jason Heard, Sales Manager at Frank Ancona Honda, about the launch of Frank Ancona Honda’s QR code and SMS campaign.
Car dealership boosts social media engagement with mobile bar codes, SMS
Car dealership Frank Ancona Honda is adding SMS and QR codes to its social media efforts to enhance customer engagement.
Frank Ancona Honda currently has a mobile site and is active in social media. It will expand these efforts going forward with QR codes and SMS as the traffic to its sites via mobile continues to grow.
“We need to expand into mobile to support our growing customer demand on smartphones,” said Jason Heard, sales manager of Frank Ancona Honda, Olathe, KS.
“We are utilizing mobile sites right now and this is the next step to not only expanding our mobile presence, but also adding more engaging to our social media practices,” he said.
Marketing Insight
Jennings Social Media Marketing is managing the dealership’s mobile marketing rollout.
Jennings Social Media Marketing has been working with Frank Ancona Honda for almost a year managing its social media.
The dealership is also working with KickANotch for mobile tracking.
QR codes and SMS will help Frank Ancona Honda engage with its customers via social media channels and mobile as part of its ongoing marketing activities around local events.
Mobile will also help the dealership track the effectiveness of its marketing.
“We are currently sponsoring several events in the local market and the QR codes will help us understand the impact of having our cars on display at these events,” Mr. Heard said.
Jennings Social Media Marketing Reviews Mobile Apps’ Usage: 50% of Mobile Consumers’ Prime Time Overlaps With TV
Posted by: Eric Johnson
As the popularity of smart phones continues to rise, it was only a matter of time before the mobile screen began to catch up to the big screen in terms of usage. A new study conducted by a mobile analytics firm, Flurry, points out that approximately 50 percent of mobile consumers are utilizing mobile apps during TV’s prime time.
Flurry also reports that mobile applications currently reach more than 20 million U.S. consumers per hour and the number of active iOS and Android devices in the U.S. is estimated at 110 million. These numbers reflect a significant impact to prime time viewing habits.
For TV broadcasters, prime time is 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. In radio, programming and advertising are all about morning “drive time.” On the Web, the popularity of social networks like Facebook, instant messaging like Skype and video-on-demand services like Hulu are pushing up usage in the evening.
So what time of day do mobile apps find their biggest audience? A new study by the mobile analytics firm Flurry shows the audience for iPhone and iOS apps rises steadily during the day and peaks at about 9 p.m. That’s when half the U.S. app audience is using apps. “Mobile consumers are using apps either instead of, or along-side prime-time television and the Internet,” stated a Flurry blog post on the study.
The finding contributes to a growing body of research suggesting that two-screen viewing is becoming increasingly common while people are watching TV. The relative size of the TV audience during prime time was larger than that for mobile apps, at more than 60%. But app usage remained higher than TV from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., and higher than the Internet almost all day. The Internet’s reach peaked at 7 p.m., when 40% of the audience for that medium was on the Web.
Mark Zuckerberg Reveals Major Facebook Updates at F8
Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development
Over the years, Facebook has been known to make small changes to how users operate on the social networking site. With Google+ becoming a threatening competitor, Mark Zuckerberg made serious changes to Facebook. On September 22, Mark Zuckerberg explained exactly what the 800 million users could expect from the new and improved Facebook at its annual developer conference including:
•Timeline: a stream of information about you
•Facebook Gestures: turning any verb into a button, similar to the “like” button. Example: Reading a book.
•Open Graph: third-party companies can connect their apps and services to Facebook using a one-time permission from the user to share stuff on Facebook
•Subscribe: subscribing to strangers or celebrities to receive posts from them without being Facebook friends
•Ticker: a real-time list of what your friends are posting
•Media: watching TV and movies, listening to music and reading news all within Facebook
How Social Media Has Changed the Game for Search Engine’s: 1/4 of Twitter’s 5 Billion Tweets a Month Contains Links to Content
Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development
Sharing and finding content over the Internet has become easier then ever, and now social media is changing the ways search engines track quality content. This article from Mashable.com takes a look at how social networks have impacted search engines.
How Social Media Affects Content Relevance in Search
Old school SEO pros cover your ears, or be prepared to adapt your craft: Search engines are changing, and social media is a huge part of that change.
Bing, Google, and an increasing swath of nimble little search engines like Blekko and DuckDuckGo are incorporating social data into their results. This is potentially great news for new businesses trying to achieve visibility in search. It’s less great news for sites that rely heavily on link buying (illegal, but hard to catch), producing huge volumes of borderline-useless content (long-tail, content farm approach), or just really old domains (previously an SEO trump card).
Both Bing and Google admitted in interviews that their search results are positively affected by social signals, such as tweets, Facebook Likes, and +1s.
“As ideas, thoughts, questions and answers are shared more freely and easily than ever, the increased amount of information from social sources provides great benefits to users,” says a Microsoft spokesperson for Bing (who asked to remain anonymous).
“The links that you build through social media, the references, the authority — all can have an impact in various ways on how you are ranked and listed even in ‘regular’ search results,” says Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, in an email interview. “Social media allows for people to provide more trusted signals.”
Search Engines Adapt to SurviveSince the early Internet days of Excite and Webcrawler, the principal goal of search engines has been to help people find what they’re looking for. Google rose to dominate the industry by tracking better indicators of content quality than anyone else. It developed a complex algorithm that measured which websites were “voting” for others by linking to them.
Essentially, it was social media, but for websites rather than people. If your site had lots of links from relevant sites, your Google rank climbed. Plenty of other factors, like putting keywords into headlines and titles, remained in play (and continually evolved), but the game changer of the last decade was links.
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry emerged to help webmasters play the “me rank higher” game with Google. On the one hand, website owners attempt to adhere to Google’s standards and prove they are high quality (creating relevant, high quality content and formatting it to Google’s taste). On the other hand, shadier sites try to trick Google’s secret formula, “pretending” to be good content without having to bother with creating useful stuff.
Location-Based Mobile Services Becoming Increasingly Popular: Over 25% of Americans Have Used Location-Based Services for Recommendations
Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development
Using location-based services to find the closest restaurant or to get directions is becoming the newest trend in mobile technology. Here is an article from The Washington Post on how Americans are using location-based services.
Over a quarter of American adults use mobile location-based services
Not many people are “checking in” using services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, but over a quarter of Americans are checking out their surroundings using location-based services.
The latest research from Pew’s Internet and American Life Project found that 28 percent of American adults have used mobile or social location-based services to get recommendations such as the best-rated nearby cafe or directions from their current location.
Only about 5 percent of those surveyed used services that post their current locations, though smartphone users were more than twice as likely to signal their location to their friends. In a similar vein, about 9 percent of all users used the location-tagging options on social media.
As once might expect, younger smartphone users are more likely overall to use check-in services, but there was no clear divide on age when it came to hitching a location-tag to a Facebook or Twitter message.
CNN: Smartphones Make Up 35% of U.S. Mobile Market
Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development
According to a recent story on CNN.com, smartphones still do not make up the majority of the U.S. market. However, we cannot ignore the value, power and influence of these mobile devices that are about to change the way we conduct business, review products, make buying decisions, and most importantly, interact with our friends.
Why smartphones still haven’t taken over the U.S. market
Smartphones may attract nearly all of the marketing hype and news coverage, but comScore’s latest statistics show that smartphones still comprise only a minority of the U.S. mobile market — about 35%, as of July 2011.
The other 65% of U.S. mobile handsets in use are “feature phones” — which tend to be much less expensive to buy and own. Often, these phones do not require a pricey two-year wireless service contract with hefty early termination fees.
Even though smartphones cost much more, these devices have been getting popular with U.S. consumers, even in light of the country’s economic recession. After all, a 35% market share is nothing to sneeze at — especially considering that smartphones have only been widely available in the U.S. for about five years.
At some point, a majority of U.S. mobile users will indeed own smartphones. But that shift won’t happen as quickly as early forecasts anticipated.
Back in March 2010, the Nielsen Company proclaimed that smartphones would overtake feature phones by 2011. Specifically, they predicted that by the end of Q3 2011 (about a month from now), most U.S. mobile users would own smartphones.
That ambitious prediction doesn’t seem to be panning out.
For over a year, comScore has been publishing monthly mobile-market-share statistics that show the percentage of U.S. smartphones. I’ve been tracking these figures. Based on this data, it looks like it’ll be roughly October 2012 before smartphones actually take over as a majority of U.S. handsets.
Social Media and Mobile Applications: 8 Best Practices for Deploying a Top-Ranked Mobile App
Posted by Micah Pratt: social networking research and development
The convergence of social media with mobile applications has led to cross promotional marketing, and if done correctly, can lead to major success. Here is an article by Krishna Subramanian from Mashable.com about eight ways to make sure your mobile application gets noticed.
8 Best Practices for Deploying a Top-Ranked Mobile App
Developing a mobile app is the easy part. Getting that app noticed is difficult. And getting the app to go viral is like winning the lottery. Yet many developers get millions of downloads time after time. How?
It’s all about app store SEO, and some developers have mastered it. Here are a few tips and tricks of the trade to help get your app to the top of heap.
Time Is of The Essence
The first two weeks of an app’s life are critical and will likely determine its future visibility in the app store. Top applications develop popularity within two weeks of release, and most applications have a tendency to drop in chart position over time. Remember, whatever you do — marketing campaigns, cross distribution and so on — the quicker you do it, the bigger the impact.
Jennings Social Media Marketing’s Press Release Picked Up on Major News Sites Including Businessweek.com, Yahoo!Finance.com & Reuters.com: Veterans Funeral Care Triples ROI With Jennings Social Media Marketing
Veterans Funeral Care tripled its Facebook “Likes,” organic SEO, engagement and exposure via Jennings Social Media Marketing during a promotional campaign (www.jenningssocialmedia.com).
Jim Rudolph, president and CEO of Veterans Funeral Care, said they hired Jennings Social Media Marketing for social media promotion of their company and for a specific event. “It should be said: I waited until the last minute. Team Jennings jumped in and in 24-hours was working magic. We had around 200 people who ‘liked’ us on Facebook in two weeks and there were more than 800 ‘likes’ shortly after that. Valerie (CEO & founder) got our Marketwire press release on MSNBC. You can put me down in the ‘very happy’ category. This is my second project with them, and I’m a believer,” said Rudolph.
The goal of the Veterans Funeral Care social media project was to create brand awareness by getting new Facebook users to “Like” the page (http://www.facebook.com/Veteransfuneralcare), generate search engine optimization (SEO) and engagement. A targeted Facebook ad ran, focusing on veterans, veterans groups and Flag Day which resulted in the Veterans Funeral Care page tripling its Facebook “Likes” in a few weeks to 815. For organic SEO, a targeted Marketwire press release was written and distributed to generate traffic, millions of impressions and get picked-up by major news websites including, but not limited to, MSNBC, Reuters and Yahoo. The Twitter strategy focused on re-tweeting, sending @mentions, tweets and following veterans’ organizations.
Jennings Social Media Marketing is a full service company that utilizes the art of online storytelling with the science of measuring quantifiable results. Jennings creates comprehensive social media marketing and Web advertising strategies from website design and development to viral videos. The company represents publicly traded to medium-sized businesses across the U.S. and overseas including technology, sports, sustainability, entertainment, travel, financial, health care and real estate (www.jenningssocialmedia.com).
Thank You to Thinking Bigger Business Media & David Conrads for Interviewing Valerie Jennings, CEO of Jennings Social Media Marketing, On How to Handle Employees’ Online Social Media Activity
Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development
Valerie Jennings, CEO of Jennings Social Media Marketing, was recently interviewed on how to handle employees’ social media activity. The emergence of social media has given many employees the same capabilities and tools as their employers which can be both beneficial and risky. Business leaders are wondering how to control the social media activities of its employers and to what extent. Here is an article from www.ithinkbigger.com, by David Conrads, on how to handle social media in conjunction with employees.
Social Media: Handle With Care
Do you need a policy to guide employees’ online activities?
While the benefits of social media are great, there also are risks—particularly as employees have access to the same tools and audience as the company.
As with so many things having to do with technology, social media is evolving so fast that businesses are scrambling to not only grasp its full potential, but also understand the risks and to come up with a consensus on best practices for its use.
The casual way in which many employees share their personal lives online can give a business owner nightmares. After all, TMI—“Too Much Information”—is one thing when it comes to an employee’s social life, it’s quite another when it involves company business. Leaders can’t afford to ignore the potential problems.
More Questions Than Answers
What are appropriate guidelines for what company information employees can share online? What liability is the company exposed to from employee posts that flow through the company’s server? How does a company protect its reputation from offensive postings by an employee on a personal account? Even large corporations are just now exploring answers to these questions.
“It’s an ongoing management problem,” said Valerie Jennings, CEO and founder of Jennings Social Media Marketing in Kansas City. “Social media has really cost a lot of organizations time, energy and money on so many different levels. It’s a blessing to have these resources, but the risks have to be managed or they can really hurt the brand.”
Valuable Data: More than a billion opinions posted online about products & services last year
Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development
Today, more and more marketers are turning to online marketing programs because of the noticeable role that peers play in consumers’ purchasing desicions. What many of these interactive marketers are failing to realize is the volume of social data created by the influence of peers in purchase decisions. Here is an article by Nate Elliott, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, about how to effective utilize social data.
HOW TO: Utilize Social Data More Effectively
Last year, American consumers posted more than a billion opinions about products and services online, according to data collected by my company. With peer influence playing such a prominent role in consumers’ purchase decisions, it’s no surprise many interactive marketers are tapping into that influence via viral marketing programs and influencer outreach.
However, the vast majority of marketers ignore the staggering volume of social data all this influence creates. And those who do study social data typically use it for the wrong reason: to measure the brand impact of their marketing campaigns.
Social Data Is Often Based On Small Sample Sizes
With so many opinions posted online, you might assume it would be easy to find a reliable sample of data to analyze for brand impact. But even popular consumer brands often find it difficult to collect usable social data.
For instance, I recently reviewed a listening report for a global sporting goods brand — one that sponsors leading teams and athletes around the world and has strong brand awareness. I was surprised to see that the brand was mentioned in social media only a few hundred times each week in the U.S., and less than 100 times each week in other key markets around the world.
To make matters worse, the low quality of many social sentiment analysis tools reduces sample sizes further. When listening tools can’t decide whether comments are positive or negative, they’re usually labeled as having “no sentiment.” Three-quarters of the mentions for this brand were tagged as such, leaving less than two-dozen weekly usable posts in some markets.
If you asked your market insights team or your survey provider to analyze 25 consumer survey responses, they’d tell you it’s impossible to find statistical significance in such a small sample. The same standards must be applied to social data as well.
New Smartphone Study Shows Dramatic Shift In Culture: Smartphone Users Spend More On Virtual Goods In Games
Posted by Valerie Jennings, CEO of Jennings Social Media Marketing
A new study indicates there’s a dramatic shift to “smartphone culture,” where people are using social networks and downloading media such as games on their phones, according to Magid Media Futures: Mobile 2011. Among the findings, smartphone users spend more on virtual goods in games than social networking users do.
Here is the article which highlights the key findings from the study. It seems like we all need to understand the changes that smartphones are bringing with them. I will share more on this topic as articles circulate online. Please let me know if you see anything that we should share: valerie @ jenningssocialmedia.com.
Smartphone ownership grew 35 percent from 2010 and the installed base is expected to reach half of the U.S. population in a few years.
About 45 percent of smartphone users play games on their phones. Smartphone owners are three to five times more likely to play games, use social networks, and access the internet from their phones, in comparison to traditional feature phone owners.
Magid found that among those who play games on their phones, the majority use the phone as their primary gaming device. Of those who do not play smartphone games, 55 percent said they may start playing in the next 12 months. One third of smartphone gamers who have not spent money on smartphone games say they may start in the next 12 months.
In 2010, only 10 percent of respondents said they were interested in buying in-game virtual goods on smartphones. This year, the number is 46 percent. Smartphone users spend more money on games and they spend more money, in comparison to social networking games. About 13 percent of smartphone gamers have bought virtual goods on their phones, spending an average of $67 last year. By comparison, social networking users spend $25 a year. About 8 out of 10 social network gamers have not spent any money over the past year in social games.
The survey was conducted online and included 2,482 people, of whom 2,051 were between the ages of 18 and 64. Data were collected from April 15 to April 20.
Jennings Social Media Marketing Reviews Mashable.com Article: Why do People Follow Brands?
Posted by: Jamie Sutera, VP of R&D
According to mashable.com article, Why Do People Follow Brands? “On Twitter, Facebook, and dozens of other social sites, normal consumers often choose to keep tabs on the brands they love.”
“In fact, many brands have highly optimized their marketing and PR strategies to accommodate that behavior, even going to far as to do one-to-one CRM (that’s customer or consumer relationship management) through avenues such as Facebook and Twitter.”
“As social CRM specialists Get Satisfaction found, many consumers who follow brands online are only in it for the perks. Around 40% of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter users in a recent study said they followed brands to get access to discounts and special deals.”
Mashable Announces: Unfazed by Facebook, Google Rolls Out Social Search Globally
Posted By Jared Cook:
Here is a recent post from Mashable, written by Stan Schroeder, about Goolge expanding their social search feature to 19 more languages.
Unfazed by Facebook, Google Rolls Out Social Search Globally
Google will roll out its somewhat controversial Social Search feature to 19 more languages next week, the company announced on its official blog.
Launched in October 2009, Social Search is a feature that combines regular search results with publicly available data created by your friends’ social media activities.
Your “friends” are quite loosely defined and include people in your Google Talk friends list, your Google Contacts, people you’re following on Buzz and Google Reader and other networks you’ve linked from your Google profile or Google Account. Google can also find your friends on public networks such as Twitter and Facebook and gather the data from their public connections as well.
The feature was recently the subject of controversy, as Facebook hired a PR company to push negative stories about Social Search in the press. Facebook claims that Google’s practices raise “serious privacy concerns,” and it’s unhappy with the fact that Google can use Facebook data for its service without Facebook’s permission.
For the most part, Google has stayed silent about the issue, although it’s noticeable that in its latest blog postabout Social Search, Twitter is mentioned three times while Facebook is nowhere to be seen.
Social Search should be available in 19 languages next week, with more languages on the way. Check out a video overview of the feature below.
Facebook Drives More Traffic Than Twitter
Posted By: Kerry Phouthavong
Facebook has quickly been emerging to surpass Twitter in driving traffic to their website. Facebook users have been driving traffic to many of the top news sites, making it evident that Facebook’s corporate strategy has been what is differentiating themselves from other competitors, including Twitter. A recent article on mashable.com, written by Sarah Kessler, includes statistical data and more on the significance in increasing traffic.
The study looked at Nielsen data from the 25 news websites with the highest number of unique monthly visitors. About 35% to 40% of traffic to the sites came from links on other sites, as opposed to readers typing in a URL directly or clicking to another page on the same site.
Unsurprisingly, Google dominated this referral traffic. On average, the company’s search and news products accounted for about 30% of all clicks. But Facebook also referred a significant percentage of each site’s audience.
The Huffington Post was boosted the most by Facebook referrals, which accounted for 8% of its unique visitors. The New York Times derived 6% of its traffic from the social network.
For all its success at breaking news, Twitter did not have the same effect. The site with the highest percentage of traffic from Twitter, The Los Angeles Times, could only credit the micro-blogging platform with 3.53% of its traffic. Twitter referred a much smaller percentage of traffic to other sites in the study.
Part of the discrepancy between Facebook and Twitter referrals is their disparate user bases. Facebook has more than 500 million users while Twitter has 200 million accounts— many of them inactive.
Valerie Jennings 
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