Posted by: tim in social media, Bizabacus on
Nov 13, 2011
Can’t sleep? Why? What gets me up and out of bed?
Ideas I want to capture that came to me after a bit of rest. I write them (long hand) down in my Moleskine – doing drawings.
There is something still about the feel of paper that helps me think better – I love a good pen (Mount Blanc). The ideas seem to flow a bit more rich when I use paper and pen. It’s peaceful to have a light shine down on the page in the morning rather than shine at me from a screen while I sit in my study to capture an insight that emerged from the unknown scribe that visits in my dreams.
Posted by: admin in social media, marketing on
Aug 4, 2011
Social media may be a massively dispersed way to contact millions of people all over the world... but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some statistics that show you how to get the most out of it. Here are 4 facts you probably didn’t know about the best times and days to tweet, blog and post to Facebook.
1. Facebook Users are Most Active at 3:00 pm
So if you want to update your Fan Page or just have all your friends see pictures of your cat, doing it in the afternoon is the best time.
2. Retweeting happens the most between 2:00pm and 5:00pm EST. Tweet then to see best results
It does make sense when you think about. Office workers tend to lose focus in the afternoon, and with a lack of focus, the chirp of Twitter becomes a siren's song.
Four years ago, most people were pretty happy with their cell phones. They were slim, they slid or flipped and they had sexy names like the RAZR. Today if university students don’t have a smartphone, they probably refer to their phone as a “dumbphone.”
According to reports published in May, overall, cell phones sold 19% more in year over year sales, but Smartphones were increasingly becoming the default purchase. Sales of Smartphones increased 85% year on year. That statistic is amazing. Consumers are flocking to devices that allow them to consume media anywhere and access the internet from anywhere. Cell phones already outnumber TV sets 3 to 1 according to BNET. This isn’t a trend. It’s a mobile revolution.
Posted by: admin in social media, Bizabacus, 1to1Real on
Aug 3, 2011
The goal of social networking sites is to link people to people. We created Bizabacus because we realized that people aren’t the only entities online that need to be social, and people online aren’t always searching for other people. We decided to stop discriminating against businesses when it came to social networking!
What does that mean?
Every other social network makes you sign up as a person first. People need to create fan pages on Facebook, people need to set up and maintain Twitter accounts… heck, Google+ doesn’t even want you if you’re a business. Considering how much commerce takes place on the internet, and how people actually USE the internet, this seems like a big oversight, doesn’t it?
“We cannot solve the significant problems we face today at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them…” Albert Einstein
When I was a kid I couldn’t stop reading comic books. I loved superhero adventures. When DC and Marvel comics came to life and started appearing in theaters with advanced storylines and special effects I was once again captivated. Certain to thrill, I anxiously made my way to the theater. The one that stuck with me the most, with similarities to the emergence of Social Media in business and life, was Iron Man.
Every business in the world right now is trying to tap into the power of the collective voice of social media. The problem is in order to do that, businesses are first, sending their customers away, and then yelling to try and get them back. How is this a good system?!
Every time someone thinks they’re being a savvy marketer, and puts one of those ‘Follow me on Twitter’ or ‘Check out our Facebook page’ buttons on a website, what they’re doing is telling customers to leave their space – where they control the message – and go into the world of social media. What are those customers going to do when they get onto Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn? Are they going to remember the message, or will they find a million reasons to be distracted?
These customers are going to do the exact same thing you do when you hop onto a social network – check your messages, catch up on gossip and comment on the latest episode of Game of Thrones… If you go to a social media site, you’ve done more than left a website; you’ve left the marketing message behind. This is not great relationship building. Clicking a ‘Like’ button may mean you get a fan, but it doesn’t mean you’re getting engagement! Marketing like this will not create a valuable customer relationship.
Marketing shouldn’t be a verb. I firmly believe that marketing isn’t something you do to someone, it should be a conversation. I’m not the only one who’s convinced marketing needs to be better, and that’s why you hear so many experts today talking about Conversation Marketing.
The market today is basically a bazaar. Everyone’s mingling and everyone’s stuff is on display - view any global village market and it’s pretty easy to see the similarity between the internet and a busy street in Dhaka.
The problem with the ‘bazaar’ state of the market is that everybody is yelling. You’ll soon discover what the caliber of the conversation is when you see a business trying to join the market. Businesses are yelling at potential customers “buy ours, buy ours, no, don’t buy theirs, buy ours!!” and yelling at other businesses, “mine’s better! No my product is better! We have a testimonial!” Blah blah blah.
The way people use the internet is changing.
Most people don’t even make it all the way through a YouTube video before they lose interest and go onto the next thing. When you get a long email, do you read the whole thing or just skim the relative parts? Twitter is massively successful because the 140 character limit boils updates down to only the most essential details. Meanwhile, more and more websites are offering interactive chat as a customer service tool. Internet users today are more than willing to spend a few minutes chatting to a real person, but they’re not interested in trying to read a long FAQ…
Online behavior tells us internet users are rapidly becoming more impatient but conversely, they’re far more willing to interact and to get engaged on a one to one basis with companies online.
So clearly this means the website is dying.
Did I lose you? Let’s think about this for a second…
It’s all over the news and hard to miss – comedian Gilbert Gottfried has been fired from his advertising gig for tweeting insensitive jokes about the tragedy in Japan. While this garnered quite a bit of media attention, it certainly wasn’t the first poorly thought out tweet that made the news – less than two months ago, the entire internet went up in arms when fashion designer Kenneth Cole made a glib comment about the revolution in Egypt was about access to his spring line.
A poorly thought out tweet can cause big time pain and negative publicity, but it’s not just big companies and famous people that are starting to feel the sting when they screw up in the increasingly important sphere of social media. From individuals fired for complaining about work on Twitter or Facebook, to small businesses that felt the wrath of the internet for incredibly stupid publicity campaigns, there is a whole new minefield of social media etiquette to learn.
Here are 4 simple tips to keep in mind should you be on the wrong side of a social media screw up!
CMAEON made a worldwide impact with the official unveiling of our new Social Spaces at CeBIT, the world’s largest technology expo. Attended by almost 340,000 thousand delegates from 90 countries, CeBIT 2011 was the perfect place to unveil the revolutionary new social aggregator.
Social Spaces are another powerful feature of 1to1Real. When setting up a social space, businesses large and small can aggregate social media accounts (like Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, LinkedIn etc, etc), blog content and marketing into one easy to set up and manage space with lead capture mechanisms.
The ability to tame the disconnected mess of social media is something the business world has been waiting for - with integrated lead capture and marketing, Social Spaces can provide measurable ROI, which means that Social Spaces are the going to finally end the debate over the value of social media as a marketing tool.