As companies continue to expand/extend their social footprints, they are increasingly benefiting from both the resulting traffic they are receiving from people sharing content from their websites with others as well as traffic to areas of their website containing user-generated content (UGC) from search engines. I refer to these concepts as Social Referrals and Social [...]
The Value of “Social Referrals” vs. “Social SEO” (and Differences!)
June 30th, 2010 · View Comments
Tags: Marketing · Social Media · Strategy
Location-Based Marketing – “Mayors” or “Mascots”?
June 18th, 2010 · View Comments
I’m as excited as anyone about the social marketing potential of the ‘real-time’ web, particularly as it applies to the mobile/location-based space. As more and more people flock to apps such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and BriteKite to document their every movement, everyone from local businesses to global brands are taking notice and trying to put [...]
Tags: Marketing · Social Media · Strategy
The Science of Word of Mouth (infographic)
May 14th, 2010 · View Comments
Here’s a really nifty infographic I came across via the recent Smash Summit event’s blog. While it doesn’t contain much information I haven’t already read/seen elsewhere, it provides a nice at-a-glance visual overview (unfortunately, the chart doesn’t cite it’s data sources). Print it out and hang it over your water cooler (click to enlarge)
Tags: Industry News · Research · Social Media
A “Real-Time” Look at Social Web Growth
April 9th, 2010 · View Comments
I recently came across a pretty nifty widget that illustrates the exponential growth of the “social web”. Similar to the famed National Debt Clock, although the chart doesn’t pull in “real-time” data, the information it dynamically presents is based on a number of key social web data points from a number of sources, i.e.: 20 [...]
Tags: Industry News · Research · Social Media
A Visualization of the “Social” Landscape…
March 24th, 2010 · View Comments
For those of us working on the front-lines of social marketing, we’re often faced with the challenge of clients telling us they are looking for one thing (i.e., “We want to identify and directly engaging 5,000 of our most passionate customers by developing a customer community”), but measuring the success/value of such initiatives against another [...]
Tags: Marketing · PR · Research · Social Media · Strategy
Want Word of Mouth? Make it Easy for Your Customers to Share (Offline)
February 26th, 2010 · View Comments
While I know it’s very easy for us marketers to all get worked into social media hysteria, let’s not lose sight of the fact that over 80% of Word of Mouth recommendations happen offline. Twitter might be “sexy”, but face-to-face is still king. That being said, I find it surprising that more brands aren’t providing [...]


