The Rise of Pinterest

Pinterest is a pinboard-styled social photo sharing website. Users create and manage theme-based image collections. Pinterest is the new social media superstar and one of the reasons is the long time users spend on the site: 89 minutes per user!!!

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Social Media Monitoring: 3 Things You Want to Know

You want to know your target groups discussion topics and where these discussions take place. And you want to see typical examples of these discussion threads.
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Social Media Monitoring

The benefits of monitoring social media can be divided into 4 categories:

1. Content: Information on what the target group is communicating online about your market, the products, your brand, your company and their needs.
2. Reputation: Information about your target groups’ sentiment towards your company and brand, reputation issues.
3. Channels: Information about your target groups’ online whereabouts. Which platforms are they frequenting, in which networks are they members, which forums and communities do they visit and which blogs do they write and read.
4. KOL Identification: Finding out about your  key consumers and opinion leaders. This can be of great value for PR, direct marketing, customer service and CRM.

Find out about detailed processes, available tools and possible software solutions: check out the Social Media Monitoring Handbook and the Social Media Monitoring Package.

Monitoring to Identify relevant KOLs and Platforms for Your Brand

Companies’ awareness of monitoring social media to gain valuable market research and insights is rapidly growing. This is what marketers are burning to find out:

1. What is the reputation of my brand (compared to my competitors brand).
2. Where do people mention my brand?
3. Who is mentioning my brand and does she/he have a significant audience volume?
4. What are typical examples of my brand’s mentions

The research can be done by hand or with the support of cloud based software solutions. To individualize the research, a mix of both is necessary. Do not forget to check your competitors’ brands as well. Find out more about the tools and possible software solutions: Social Media Monitoring Handbook and the Social Media Monitoring Package.

Microlistening – Obama’s Secret Social Media Weapon for the Re-election Campaign

Microlistening is a term from the spies: using small devices like microphones and miniature cameras to hear and see things without your victims knowing. Barack Obamas campaign management takes micro listening into social media. A special task force in Chicago is hiring software engineers and mathematicians to use social media monitoring for campaign optimization. Read the fascinating article at Bloomberg.com:

Obama’s Re-Election Path May Be Written in Will St. Clair’s Code

The Barvatars at Chez Icke

Chez Icke is a recently opened “mobile” bar in Berlin. Located in a market hall in Kreuzberg, a notorious district of the party town, it is trying to combine nightlife with online life by offering barvatar service. You can check in on Chez Icke’s website and address  an actor who is sitting at the bar with a hat that bears a camera. Through the camera you can see whats going on in the bar from your home. You can mix yourself a drink and use your computer to interact through the barvatar, who will take your initiative proposals. See for yourself:

Silly Street: Joke or Reality? Turn the tables, earn money on Facebook?

You may have heard of the Californian lawsuit against Facebook‘s new advertising feature – “Sponsored Stories”. These ads let marketers use you as a testimonial as soon as you like their page on Facebook. It looks like this:

Facebook's new Sponsored Stories Feature

Then I found a program, that – if it were real – let you turn the tables and enabled you to ask for your advertising money. Unfortunately, there is no website for this and it appears to be a joke. But the thought is nice…

This program would provide you with a unique code that every time you are evangelizing about a brand or product on a blog, in Facebook or twitter, will count your audiences and send an invoice to the marketing department of that brand. Oh phantastic science fiction…