How Diverse Is Your Social Media Audience?
Picture the audience that you think is currently reading your tweets, streaming your videos and liking you on Facebook. According to the 2010 US Census, your picture might need some tweaking. As the census indicates, Hispanic and African-American audiences are the fastest-growing segments of the…
Social Media Stress Test: How Much Can You Handle?
When the US recession was in full swing, the government conducted a stress test of the banks to see how much trouble those banks could handle before they’d collapse. Understanding potential worst case scenarios should, in theory, help an organization avoid them. Have you conducted…
Online Contests: A Low-Stress Way to Reach More People
Want to get your brand in front of more people? Try an online contest! Online contests are a fast, easy and low-stress way to earn a high-volume return for a relatively small investment of time and energy. Whether participants can win a $200 Threadless gift…
What Your Customers Can Teach You About Your Own Company
As Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy this past September, Fast Company ran an excellent summary of Blockbuster’s woes by author Adrian Ott. Her take? Blockbuster misunderstood why people were choosing Netflix and Redbox in the first place, and they could never recover from their own clouded…
Customer Loyalty Drives Social Media Budgets
According to research in US markets, companies who say they use social media primarily to strengthen customer loyalty spend almost twice as much on social media as companies who use these same tools primarily to increase brand awareness. These findings reinforce the “conversational” nature of…
Why Social Media Never Moves in a Straight Line
“Social media scientist” Dan Zarrella recently investigated the path a story travels when going viral in social media. His findings? Rarely does a piece of information succeed socially because of one person, or by following one straight line from “new” to “known.” For example… In…
Social Media Is Closing the Age Gap
Image by Diego Lorenzo F. Jose on Flickr, who includes this description: Who says an old dog can’t learn new tricks? My dad just turned 60 and is newly retired. I got him an Ipod Touch to play with 🙂 Diego’s father isn’t alone in…
How to Read Your Customers’ Minds
On Mad Men, the ad execs of the 1960s rely on focus groups and psychologists to understand their clients’ customers. Today, we have Twitter, Facebook and blogs. Instead of employing tricks and misdirection to learn what people really think about a product or a brand,…
How Do You Convince a Brand to Talk About Something Else?
Let’s say you’re at a party. It’s casual. It’s social. Everybody there is talking to somebody else — some in groups, some in pairs. All except one guy. A guy in a suit. A guy who’s moving from group to group and arbitrarily shouting unwanted…
Facebook Is Not Twitter: Treat Your Audiences Differently
If you’re just beginning to use social media, Twitter and Facebook may seem very similar. And while it’s true that both services… Are built around publicly shared “status updates” Enable users to “follow” or “friend” each other Can be simultaneously updated through third party services…