Women take Social Media Privacy more Seriously than Men do

Social media privacy awareness is increasing among Americans, according to a new study. However in the battle of the sexes, women trump men when it comes to locking down the privacy of profiles.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a new report that details trends in privacy management on social media sites in 2011 compared to 2009. Pew surveyed 2,277 adults, age 18 and over.

According to the report, “As social media use has become a mainstream activity, there has been an increasingly polarized public debate about whether or not ‘privacy’ can be dismissed as a relic in the information age.” The report addresses new data surrounding the privacy settings people choose for their social networking profiles.

In 2011, almost two-thirds of adults (63 percent) reported they currently maintain a profile on a social networking site, which is up from just 20 percent in 2006. A majority of those (58 percent) say they have their privacy settings set to private so only their friends can see it, while 19 percent say friends of their friends can view it and 20 percent say their profile is completely public.

Women, however, are significantly more apt than men to keep their profiles private. Sixty-seven percent of female profile owners restrict access to friends only, compared to 48 percent of male profile owners. Men, though, are more likely than women to choose partially private settings (23 percent versus 16 percent) or fully public settings (26 percent versus 14 percent).

While women are reportedly better at controlling their profile privacy, they’re also more likely than men to “unfriend” people, a trend that Pew says is on the rise overall.

According to the report, “Over time, as social networking sites have become a mainstream communications channel in everyday life, profile owners have become more active managers of their profiles and the content that is posted by others in their network.”

Read complete at PCWorld.com

How To Get 60 Million Users Without Using Any Social Media

Most viral online content relies heavily on social media to spread the word.

Flash sale design site Fab, for example, reached 1 million users in five months thanks to a social sign up scheme.

How did sites become popular before Twitter or Facebook existed? And how do you spread the word if your target demographic doesn’t tweet?

Michael Acton Smith is the cofounder of Moshi Monsters, a fast-growing site for kids that has 60 million users. Founded in England in 2008, it wasn’t always easy for Smith’s site to get traffic.

His target age group is between ages 6 and 11. That is too young to create a profile page — it’s even too young to add a pin on Pinterest.

After one year of pounding the pavement, Moshi Monster’s traffic began to take off (see chart).

We asked Smith how he’s created a viral product without using any social media at all.

Create your own social features

Moshi Monster may not have Twittier or Facebook integration, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t social.

Moshi Monsters is really just a social network for children. On it, they can send monitored messages to friends, share links to their monster’s pages, or adopt and play with a pet monster.

If you can’t use other social media sites, find a way for users to engage with each other without ever leaving your domain

Read more

3 accurate metrics for ROI on social media campaigns

Businesses are struggling with how to evaluate the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. Currently, most companies are using a variety of metrics to measure diverse campaigns across multiple departments. These metrics fail to provide an overarching picture of which marketing programs are increasing their revenues. There are five metrics that accurately measure success in terms of ROI and revenues from social media for all enterprises, both big and small, B2B and consumer web, and across multiple geographies. The following post provides case studies for three of these five metrics. I will outline the other two metrics in a subsequent post.

1. Social media revenue conversion measures how many people become customers through social media referral channels.

Challenges: Social media is great for creating awareness and engagement, but it is hard to measure how many people convert to customers. Facebook’s last click attribution attempts to measure customer conversions by tracking which Facebook links sent people to other websites. However, this doesn’t work well either because there is a delay in the conversion.

For example, someone might see that a friend has posted a link to a brand’s website on Facebook. However, the brand has no way of tracking who clicked on the link, or finding out the social influence of her friends, or if she ultimately made a purchase. Privacy rules also limit companies’ ability to track the entire social shopping cycle. And unfortunately, Facebook Insights (which provides Facebook page metrics) does not offer any context to help the brand discover what motivated someone to click on a link.

Best practice: As the associate director of social practice at Moxie Interactive, Daniel Cho has tackled the problem of measuring social media conversion. When Moxie was tasked with developing social media programs for Verizon Wireless, Cho says, “We focused on total ROI. We put a social metrics layer on top of web metrics. We measured social media conversation volume, sentiments and engagement, which is the number of comments, links and Facebook shares.”

Cho used Wildfire to build a Facebook tab for a Verizon Wireless sweepstakes promotion. Although he could not measure which channel was a better referral channel, he was able to successfully track the social media conversion rates. To do this, he used the number of sweepstakes entries as his main metric. For the secondary metric, he used Wildfire and Google Analytics to calculate the number of tab visits (equivalent to impressions) and opt-in emails.

2. Facebook engagement measures a brand’s ability to communicate successfully with their customers on the social network.

Challenges: Most global brands have multiple Facebook fan pages. Different products and specific regions have their own pages, which are managed by different groups within the company. Businesses need an integrated view of engagement across all fan pages and Facebook app campaigns, so that they can understand what increases their numbers of fans and how this growth compares with industry standards.

Best practice: Many companies use a hybrid solution to track fan page engagement, such as Mediaplex or Google Analytics tags embedded in their Facebook apps combined with Facebook Insights.

SocialBakers the only provider of social media analytics tools that offers an integrated Facebook leaderboard for all brand pages. Their key engagement metric, called “page score,” consists of a combined index score of Facebook page fan growth, content quality and post quality for each fan page.

Ami M. Blaire, senior vice president of marketing at Social Games International, says, “The engagement ratings, the ability to test against and within a competitive set from SocialBakers as well as the contextual metrics are the most valuable tools. Secondarily, the ability to segment by territory and market is and will continue to play a valuable role as we define the best set of programming and promotions.”

3. Social customer support metrics measure the impact of customer support on brand health and the cost of staffing a social support program.

Challenges: Today, people expect their favorite brands to have customer service representatives available on Twitter and Facebook. Companies are trying to figure out how many staff members they need to devote to social customer support and how to best measure the success of such programs. There are several tools commonly used by companies that measure the ROI by counting the number of users supported via social media, but this does not reflect success at a strategic level.

Best practice: Best Buy provides support via Twitter and measures customers’ feedback on the quality of support through a proprietary survey.

Gina Debogovich, a social media lead at Best Buy, told me about how the business shifted focused from measuring return on invested capital to return on engagement.

In 2009, 3,000 Best Buy employees volunteered to answer customer questions on Twitter (@twelpforce) as part of their daily work responsibilities. Through this program, Best Buy was able to estimate the volume of questions from customers and develop consistent, quality answers from its employees. In three years, 50,000 questions were answered. The concept of using employee engagement as a key metric led to the residual value of highly-engaged employees becoming a great social support staff and customers becoming evangelists for Best Buy.

Source: GigaOm.com

How To Develop a Social Media Marketing Strategy That Works

Having a marketing strategy is good, but having a marketing strategy that works is great!  Whether it’s measuring the ROI on your social media efforts or saving a dying business with social media, building a social media marketing strategy is one of the basic building blocks to leveraging social media for your business.

Many businesses believe setting up Facebook and Twitter profiles will do a world of good to them and that’s their definition of joining the social media bandwagon. However, the truth is that using social media requires a careful thought process, strategic planning and flawless execution.

In this post, I present 5 proven tips which will help you build a social media marketing strategy “that works”!

Observe Others and Analyze Your Marketing Strategy

Very often, businesses jump on to Facebook and Twitter without even analyzing what they need out of these social networks. They claim that since their competitors are using social media so they have no other choice but to adopt social media. Sooner than later, such businesses are caught off-guard and their social media ambitions reach a tame end.

I reckon it’s important for businesses to analyze how social media can help them. They need to observe how people use social media and how their competitors are leveraging it. Analyze your business needs and how various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others can fulfill these needs.

Read complete at SMedio.com

Facebook: Is social media envy making you sad?

The online personalities we’ve created for ourselves nowadays may be much more realistic than they were back in the Myspace years (I know I’m not the only one guilty of posing, applying tonnes of make-up and Photohopping EVERYTHING, right?!), but even now they’re still not completely accurate representations of ourreal lives. After all, you can’t possibly express everything that happens from day-to-day online! So although someone may seem to have only the most idyllic, fun-loving, photos and status updates on Facebook, that doesn’t mean every second of their life is filled with holidays, gorgeous friends and lovely clothes.

Although I’m sure we’re all well aware of this, it’s sometimes hard to not feel a little envious of that blogger with the designer wardrobe, time to cook cupcakes every night and a seemingly perfect job. But that green-eyed ‘Facebook envy’ feeling is only natural, right?

Well, a new study conducted by a team of sociologists at the Utah Valley University found that the way we view our lives and ourselves could very much be dependent on how much time we spend online, which is hardly good news for those of us who need to constantly check social media a lot as part of our jobs…

The research took around 400 students and asked them a series of statements about their lives, such as “life is fair” or “many of my friends have a better life than me”. They were then asked all kinds of questions about Facebook, including how much time they spend on the social network, to see if there was any correlation.

Read complete at: Shinyshiny.tv

Who Owns Your Followers? Time To Revise Your Social Media Policy

Earlier this fall, a judge ruled that a lawsuit filed by PhoneDog.com against one of its long-departed employees, Noah Kravitz, has merit. According to Eric Goldman’s Technology and Marketing Law Blog, the company is suing Kravitz over three points, including trade secrets and misappropriation of the account. The ruling, reported by Goldman and the New York Times, states that Kravitz is liable for several hundred thousand dollars in damages, calculated at $2.50 per month per Twitter follower.

This isn’t the first conflict over who owns your Twitter account, and it certainly won’t be the last. When Rick Sanchez left CNN he kept his account but changed the name. This is what Kravitz did when he left PhoneDog.

What this means to me is that now more than ever you need to get your social media policies firmed up and clarified. As in, start a conversation with your corporation counsel asap.

Dell’s senior legal counsel Ryan Garcia recommends that any firm creating a social media policy take the time to understand how they are going to be using social media before they put anything together. “You also want to cover both extreme cases, where someone is an experienced social media user before they came to the company, as well as a neophyte who learns while on the job.” There is risk involved in both situations: a Twitter pro could get sued by his former employer, as in the case of PhoneDog. Or a newbie could garner a bunch of followers and then take this newfound popularity to a competitor.

If you don’t have any written policies, several social media policy collections exist that are only a click away. The best one is from social media consultant Chris Boudreaux, who has assembled more than 175 sample social media policies in this database. You can sort by industry type and download as many as you care to read. “The point is to clarity when an account belongs to the company, and when it belongs to the brand,” says Boudreaux. “Regardless of the court decision, all brands should implement written agreements with employees who maintain social media accounts on behalf of the brand, so this kind of situation never becomes an issue for the courts.”

Back in 2009, the @IBM Twitter account was registered by an IBM employee. “We simply asked the employee if we could have the account,” said Tim Washer, who worked for IBM then. Luckily, the employee transferred ownership. He set up a YouTube account where his humorous videos are posted, and “I always treated it as if IBM owns it.” You may not be as fortunate or have as big-hearted employees working for you.

Another issue is that many corporate IT policies prevent anyone from disclosing any kind of corporate information to the public. If this is interpreted to mean some product announcement that is Tweeted or posted online is at issue, then you might have a problem enforcing this aspect of your policy.

Boudreaux has some suggestions as well, and it is all about establishing clear-cut guidelines. “If a brand is paying an employee to maintain an account on its behalf, and wants to retain ownership of the account, the brand should establish an agreement with the employee that includes the following:

1. Specify that the brand owns the account (not the employee)
2. Ensure that the employee stores the login credentials in a centralized location (perhaps in Marketing or HR)
3. Define who is authorized to change the name displayed on the account”

Source: ReadWriteWeb.com

Related articles

• Time To Revise Your Social Media Policy on Who Owns Your Followers (bjconquest.com)
• Time To Revise You Social Media Policy on Who Owns Your Followers – ReadWriteWeb (readwriteweb.com)

Find right social network for business

Talk to some executives and they use the phrase “social media” as if it is a homogeneous monolith, like every platform is the same and they are all equally worthy of a corporation’s attention.

That’s not the case. Like every medium, you need to know who frequents each social network and to what extent.

For example, Facebook’s advertising “wizard” tells me 15.7 million Canadians over the age of 18 are on that social network and 8.1 million of them are women. Facebook claims to have more than 800 million users worldwide. In other words, it’s a safe bet whatever demographic you might want to reach is on Facebook.

Twitter, on the other hand, has more than 300 million users, according to Wikipedia, with 50 million active daily. Last April, the Financial Post reported Canadian Twitter penetration at 18 per cent based on a comScore Inc. study, sixth in the world. Interestingly, a June 2011 Pew Internet research report pegged Twitter penetration at 13 per cent of online Americans. All of which is to say Twitter is relatively niche as compared to Facebook.

Not only that, but Twitter demographics skew a little older than some other networks, although Hollywood stars are changing that and attracting the younger set to Twitter. According to 2010 data gathered by DigitalSurgeons.com, the typical Twitter user is female, between 26 to 34 years old, in college, has an income between $26,000 and $50,000, and lives outside the United States.

Read more

B2B Marketers Using Social Media More and More

We have watched the B2B space lag behind in the Internet and social media marketing space for most of the existence of the industry. That’s not a knock on the B2B space really because the nature of Internet marketing lends itself much more readily to B2C plays.

Of course that doesn’t mean that social media doesn’t work for the B2B space. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth and as B2B marketers continue to see just how these options can fit into their business and marketing plans this area of the Internet is just starting to truly see the light. This epiphany of sorts could make 2012 a very interesting year in the B2B space for social media marketing.

As shown by some statistics from a study conducted by eMarketer , social media is being used. It’s the continual evolution of exactly HOW it is being used that will mark the arrival of the marketing tool to the space.

Read complete at MarketingPilgrim.com

Why Recognizing Your Employees on Social Media Is Great for Business

Social media has opened countless new avenues for promotion of all kinds. As a result of blogs, Twitter, Facebook and more, it’s as if we all have access to a bullhorn, and thus, the ability to promote ourselves whenever and to whomever we choose.

Within your company, surely you’ve grappled with the use, disuse and even misuse of social media. But have you thought about using it for employee recognition? Communicate your staff appreciation by employing social media as a positive acknowledgement tool. It’s a highly visible and yet low-cost way to show your support.

Zoomerang interviewed 1,180 small to mid-sized business decision makers and 500 consumers for its study, “Marketing in a Digital World.”

They found that the three most important reasons small businesses leverage social media are:

• To connect with customers.
• To increase visibility.
• To self-promote.

It’s time to add employee appreciation to the mix.

Read complete at Mashable.com

Should Social Media Determine Your Employment Status?

You are an employer. You have are interviewing a potential employee. You find information on a social media site that the employee does drugs, posts about parties every night, posts pictures that are not conducive to the image your company wants to have, or hates some people of a race not of that employee’s race.

You are an employer. You find out on a social media site that a long time and loyal employee hates his or her job, has been skipping out of work early, is spending time on your clock on social media sites, or is saying negative things about your company or other employees.

You are an employer. You are concerned about your employee doing any or all of the above and you want to get access to the potential or actual employee’s social media sites to do your due diligence?

What are your rights? What are your boundaries?

I find myself a little outside of my element this week insofar as I do not practice labor/employment law or unemployment compensation law. I guess this is more of an opinion article that I am used to writing. Hopefully employers, human resource experts, and other attorneys will provide some insight.

There are some reports by national news media outlets that employers are requiring potential employees to disclose their social media account names and passwords as part of the employment screening process. At first glance, I thought such information was an incredible invasion of privacy. At second glance, perhaps this is the way to really know an employee. What happens if an employee is posting negative information about his or her employer online? Should that matter?

Read Complete at OldNorthEast.Patch.com