Finally, Google+ has launched Google+ Pages for Business.
To bring you up to speed with this new offering, we’ve just launched our newest ecourse, Marketing Through Google+. Click here for details.
Oh, and check out this video to whet your appetite for the new service:
A completely non-random selection of recent tweets and posts about the NZ Election Campaign, to show the dangers of social media in the wrong hands:
Lin Nah (@lin_nah) on consistency:
Journalists Jessica Mutch (@mutchjessica) and Claire Trevett (@ctrevettNZH) on Winston Peters:
Ben Dominkovich (@bendom) channelling John Minto:
Jeremy Elwood (@jeremyelwood) and Craig Ranapia (@cmranapia) demonstrate the power of the simile:
Bridget Williams (@DawnMaiden) on near-misses:
Google+ shares some of the stuff behind the scenes with its new “What’s Hot” feature. Details via the video and on your own Google+ page.
At Facebook’s September F8 Developer conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced a range of new features tied around the Open Graph protocol. What’s Open Graph? A clunky name for the software hooks that enable developers to link their website content back to Facebook, so that stuff people do on your website gets reported back to their friends.
What are the new features? Here’s a taster video:
For the geeks among us, here’s a link to the documentation.
These new features are still in development, but you might like to give some thought to how you might use them to socially supercharge your own website.
A useful collection of social media stats from the Exploring Social Media conference held earlier this week in Boston:
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the last thing we need is yet another social networking diversion. Sheesh — Facebook has more than 750 million users, isn’t that enough already?
Actually, despite Facebook’s seemingly unassailable head start Google’s newest social foray, Google+, is worth considering.
It comes from the ‘Plex, of course, so that suggests it might be worth a look … but there’s more to Google+ than just its provenance. Check out this little slideshow first, and then we’ll be right back.
Even without an overarching commentary, you should get the general idea: we all have different groupings of friends, and don’t necessarily want to share the same information with more than one subgroup.
It is currently possible to segment your Facebook friends into different groups, and share your stuff with only designated groups — but it’s neither easy nor convenient. Google+ comes with that functionality built-in, in the form of what Google calls circles.
That’s the first and most important concept contained within Google+. We’ll discuss others in due course.
Google+ is currently available only by invitation. Head here to get yourself on the invite list.
One of the more interesting stories of the week comes courtesy of the Harvard Business Review, which reveals that many of today’s oh-so-awesome social media insights actually track their provenance back to a 1966 study on word of mouth by Ernest Dichter, who HBR describes as “the father of motivation research”.
Some key insights gleaned by HBR from that nearly fifty-year-old study:
A major Dichter finding, very relevant today, was the identification of four motivations for a person to communicate about brands:
The first (about 33% of the cases) is because of product-involvement. The experience is so novel and pleasurable that it must be shared.
The second (about 24%) is self-involvement. Sharing knowledge or opinions is a way to gain attention, show connoisseurship, feel like a pioneer, have inside information, seek confirmation of a person’s own judgment, or assert superiority.
The third (around 20%) is other-involvement. The speaker wants to reach out and help to express neighborliness, caring, and friendship.
The fourth (around 20%) is message-involvement. The message is so humorous or informative that it deserves sharing.
We can’t say we’re surprised that these insights were coined so long ago — human nature doesn’t change all that much. If we made the effort, we daresay we’d find similar threads woven through essays by classical Greek and Roman philosophers as well.
Plus ça change …
Thinking of running a contest on Facebook? Then here are seven questions you need to consider:
Here’s a useful guide to Facebook Contests (free, registration required).
You’ll also find Facebook rules explained and expounded in our Facebook Kickstart programme.
It’s been evident for some time that social media plays a significant role when it comes to travel –and no surprises there. When you’re planning to visit somewhere you’ve never been before, who else would you ask first but friends who have already been there? Social Media simply extends the already-elastic definition of friends to include friends-of-friends-of-friends.
Now a new British study by online travel agency sunshine.co.uk reveals that more than half (54%) of U.K. holidaymakers use social media to plan their holidays.
They review hotels, resorts and destinations online, requesting personal recommendations from other online users, using social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to gather information and reviews about a particular place before they book.
According to the survey (reported by Go Timeshare):
Almost every single person polled out of Sunshine’s 1,102 British holidaymakers said that yes, they do use social media and the internet to look up resorts before choosing exactly where they want to holiday.
They were then asked to select all that applied from a list of possible answers about how they went about researching their future destination/accommodation and the results were
61% said they used Facebook to share and post comments and photos, whilst 17% said they used Twitter to do so.
A recent study by social brand consultancy Headstream identified the Top 100 Social Brands in the UK. You can download the full report here, but these are some of the findings that are most relevant:
A. THE TOP TWENTY SOCIAL BRANDS
B. THE INTRODUCTORY VIDEO
A collection of talking heads which will give you a bit of an introduction to the Social Brand 100.
C. TEN KEY LEARNINGS
And here, reported by WallBlog, are the ten key learnings from the Social Brand 100 study:
1. Social brands don’t just send messages, they create value for people and communities.
2 Social brands are happy to exchange rigid control of their brand for greater involvement with people.
3 Social brands manage their brands in a more human context. It is less about the word of the brand guidelines and more about the spirit of the brand, often replacing formality around tone of voice in favour of expressing brand character, values, purpose and cause.
4. The types of content that social brands can create categorised as providing information, utility, entertainment, reward, incentive or something that reflects a person’s character and what they value. Brands are still totems to what we believe, reflecting our personality.
5. Timeliness of response is a critical indicator of social enablement. Social brands are agile and responsive to the needs of people, relishing opportunities as they arise.
6. Being appropriate in social doesn’t mean using a lot of brand outposts. The use of brand outposts is driven by what is most relevant for the community.
7. Negative and positive sentiment is acknowledged and accepted by social brands
8. Social brands create, develop and encourage behaviors that mirror community or individual behaviors. They meet and exceed expectations, often delighting people in doing so.
9. Social brands are true, compelling, authentic and transparent.
10. Social brands simplify their intent and continually act to achieve it. They have established what they want to achieve and ensure everything builds towards this commitment. To be a social brand you have to be a good brand, a good employer, make good products, provide good customer service and have a moral centre to your purpose by those that represent you.
