FACEBOOK LAUNCHES BUSINESS CARDS SERVICE

This article titled “Facebook Cards takes networking back offline” was written by Mark Sweney, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 5th January 2012 13.10 UTC

Facebook is to encourage users to take their virtual brand into the real world with the launch of a new service enabling them to create personalised business cards based on images and posts from their profile.

The new service, called Facebook Cards, is being positioned as a “new model of social-business networking” that “bridges the gap between online and offline”.

Facebook Cards, which will become available for the social networking giant’s 800 million-plus users globally from 5pm on Thursday (GMT), has been developed in conjunction with UK-based digital printing business Moo.com.

The social networking giant believes that the time is right to launch the service because users will be able to make creative business cards thanks to the launch of the new Facebook Timeline product late last year.

In one word what do you think?

Crowd Sourcing A Pictorial Essay:The Political and Cultural Events of 2011

Do the following images show the effects of successful crowd-sourcing events? Yes, by relying on a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call to create and build a rich human interaction. Crowd sourcing can be ignited by political or cultural cause, emotional trigger, social media, public stage, and user control to share personal feelings with the world. These public demonstrations also display social experiment and work of art.

By engaging with your audience at a unique place, creating a two-way conversation, and not exclusively relying on digital technology, your social media efforts have a better chance of succeeding.

Social Media and The KeystoneXL Pipeline: Has It become a Social Strategy?

A multi-billion dollar controversial oil pipeline, and a little social media lobbying, that is what we saw in August of 2011.  Some fake Twitter accounts and tweets with fake links to materials in support of the project.

Brant Olson, a campaign director with the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) noticed the tweets. Olson discovered that the Twitter accounts traced back to Keith Brockmann, a paralegal in a law firm run by a registered lobbyist for the Nebraska Energy Forum.

Three months later, social media forces are growing, with environmental groups suggesting that this one issue will decide if they support Obama in his run for a second term.

Here is a look at the social media activity as of December 21, 2011, surrounding the KeystoneXL pipeline. I down loaded these KeystoneXL conversations from a social monitoring tool earlier today.

KeystoneXL Pipeline Social Media Activity

KeystoneXL Pipeline Social Media Activity

According to NPR, Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman said it would create “more than 100,000 American jobs.”

And earlier Wednesday on the Senate floor, Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas said the project “promises 20,000 immediate jobs and 118,000 spin-off jobs.” They all seem to be getting their numbers from the same source: TransCanada Corporation, the company behind the project.

One of several environmentalists concerns is that the pipeline could spill into Nebraska’s aquifer that supplies it with water.

If you follow these digital conversations going forward, you will likely find that social media and the presidential election will play an important part in shaping Obama’s and other presidential candidates decisions about the KeystoneXL project.

Have You Ever Wanted to Know What Everyone Has Been Searching For On Google? Now You Can!

Everything Google -the  annual Google  Zeitgeist report,  a look at how the world searched in 2011.

Digital Strategy and Social Media

PSFK Image
The fastest rising search trends list is as follows:

1. Rebecca Black

2. Google +

3. Ryan Dunn

4. Casey Anthony

5. Battlefield Three

6. iPhone 5

7. Adele

8. 東京 電力 (TEPCO)

9. Steve Jobs

10. iPad 2

Where Are People Getting Information About Restaurants and Other Local Businesses?

People looking for information about local restaurants and other businesses say they rely on the internet, especially search engines, ahead of any other source.

Newspapers, both printed copies and the websites of newspaper companies, run second behind the internet as the source that people rely on for news and information about local businesses, including restaurants and bars.

And word of mouth, particularly among non-internet users, is also an important source of information about local businesses. – Pew Internet

Can Parents Effectively Monitor and Reduce Bad Behavior On-line?

Pew Internet Study: On-line Behavior

Image: Rexi Media

The latest Pew study finds that even when parents friend their children on social network sites (39% have done so in this current study), it does not necessarily head off problems on those sites. Fully 87% of parents of teens are online and 67% of those online parents use social network sites.

And of those social network site-using parents (who have children who also use social network sites), 80% have friended or connected with their child via social media. That translates into 45% of all online parents of teens and 39% of all parents of teenagers who are “friends” with their children on social media sites.

Parents who have friended their child on social network sites are more likely to report using parental controls.

Teens who are social media friends with their parents are also more likely to report that they had a problem with their parents because of an experience on social media.

A notable number of teens also engage in online practices that may have the potential to compromise their safety online.

Close to half of online teens have said they were older than they are in order to access a website or online service, and a third have shared a password.

44% of online teens admit to lying about their age so they could access a website or sign up for an online account. Social network site-using teens are twice as likely as non-users to say they misrepresent their age online in order to gain access to websites and online services (49% vs. 26%).
30% of online teens reports sharing one of their passwords with a friend, boyfriend, or girlfriend.
47% of online girls 14-17 say they have shared their passwords, compared with 27% of boys the same age.

Read Entire Pew Internet Report

Google research

Google research shows that mobile based searches tend to be localized; they are also valuable in the conversion of customers to a location or product purchase.

Mobile Purchase Conversion Rates

Are Local Businesses Marketing Online? You May Want To Before The Competition Does

The graphic below is based on a February 2011 survey, 83% of small business owners interviewed were not involved in any kind of mobile marketing.

Small Business Mobile Optimization

In June, a second survey found that 48% of SBO believe mobile marketing is very important. While there appears to be an increase in SBO’s desire to market their brands on-line, the market is not mature. This means your brand will be more easily found with less mobile/digital competition now.

Increase in Small Business Mobile Marketing

Research suggests that mobile shoppers buy a product or service shortly after finding it (about 1 to 2 hours), and that PC shoppers spend up to 1 week before making a purchase decision.

If you are working with clients that have a small business, you should talk to them about mobile marketing, and its related marketing research. It is also important that they understand how to strategically use their mobile analytics data found on their website analytics dashboard.

The sooner they begin their mobile web site optimization, social engagement and some level of rich media awareness branding, the more ROI they will realize.

Do You Know Who Your Customers Are? Consumer Intelligence, Not More Data Is The Answer

A recent Forrester Report of 137 global customers found that the top problem marketing professionals experience today with their intelligence data is creating a single view of the customer.

 Creating The Customer Persona 

For many companies, consumer data collection has doubled in size because of social media engagement and digital marketing activities. One of the ongoing problems marketers have had is that intelligence data are siloed and not turned into useful consumer insights.

Marketing professionals and analysts alone can not always translate intelligence data into one single view of the customer, particularly when it is collected from different parts of a company’s business operations.

One of the ways to make sense of customer data is to employ a cultural anthropologist, or even a psychologist to help create a customer personality (persona).

What marketing and operations managers are now realizing is that these cultural and social specialists may not be capable of handling the strategic side of data analysis, and putting it into action on a company wide-level.

One skill set that is predicted to solve this dilemma is the Customer Intelligence professional. CI’s are responsible for taking consumer intelligence from different parts of an organization, and employing it as a strategic asset throughout the company. This is generally a difficult tasks considering many division managers have their own vision for achieving their business goals.

Forrester’s recent research predicts that the customer intelligence professional will be the future go-to person responsible for driving marketing performance and business strategy throughout the organization.

We are now in the age of the “customer”, and this fact has changed the customer intelligence landscape. Collecting data in nontraditional ways such as unstructured, online and mobile make the analysis and collection process more difficult. Determining what data is useful and should be acted on, converting it into intelligence, and using it for business strategy throughout the company will be the CI’s challenges going forward.

CI’s will also be expected to help shape and deploy, on an enterprise level, customer intelligence data and turn it into a corporate strategic asset.

Many brands’ customer conversations, intelligence collection, and digital activities will grow online and become more complex. There will also be greater need to have deeper understandings of human behavior and use it strategically, beyond what quantitative and qualitative analysis are currently doing. One way to do this for CI’s to be directly involved in the organizational strategy, process, technology, data, and measurement activities of your company’s team.

Pew Confirms Teen Internet Usage: Do Geographic Differences Matter?

A new Pew Survey finds that – “There are relatively few demographic differences when it comes to how often teens go online, although older teens are likely to do so with greater frequency than are younger teens. Are you surprised?  Fully 53% of teen internet users ages 14-17 go online several times per day, compared with 30% of users ages 12-13.”

This is important information if you are creating a mobile marketing campaign using location based apps such as Foursquare. Knowing that geography generally is not a roadblock to capturing a teen audience, will allow you to concentrate on other user metrics based around content, time of week, and shopping preferences.

Because the percentage of teen users using the internet has almost doubled from 2004, mobile optimization of your website is obviously very important.