SonnCom Marketing Blog

Monitoring to Identify relevant KOLs and Platforms for Your Brand

PostMaster — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 17:56:59 +0000

After several similar projects for marketing clients, sonncom is offering a standard research program to identify your key opinion leaders in social media as well as the relevant platforms, where conversations about your brand take place.

Most marketer’s questions are:

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

Sonncom is offering to research these questions and to put them into an easy to read form. This research is best suited for multi-brand comparisons, be it that your company needs to compare a number of similar product brands, or that you have numerous competitors to compare.

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

PostMaster — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 17:07:28 +0000

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

PostMaster — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 17:00:20 +0000

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?

PostMaster — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:41:56 +0000

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…

The Top 10 Social Media Events of 2011

PostMaster — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 07:32:04 +0000

This is the time of the year when round-ups, look-backs, year reviews and top 10 lists are being published and I can just not resist to publish one for social media. But that’s because I found a nice one on socialmediaweek.

Their ranking:

The Arab Spring
Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear plant disaster
Wikileaks affair
Charly Sheen’s Twitter success
Anthony Weiner Twitter Scandal
Hurricane Irene
Rebecca Black “Friday”
Social Media IPOs
The Royal Wedding
UK riots

To the article >

In Germany, I could not think of any big event – the only thing that came to mind was the “zocco limone” fun in the blogospere, but I did not even find it anymore in my searches. If you have some links to it, let me know.

Digital Marketing Budget Trends (Infographic)

PostMaster — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 08:44:42 +0000

Take note: The company blog and LinkedIn are the social media sites that have generated most customers, followed by Twitter. Facebook just 4th.

How, when and where do people share?

PostMaster — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:16:10 +0000

Forget Viral, Videos Go Social Today

PostMaster — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:49:30 +0000

Is there a difference between viral video and social video?

Social Network Feature Adjustments (The Facebookisation)

PostMaster — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 20:02:48 +0000

Google Plus just added the pages feature and companies worldwide are eager to use it. Twitter added the ‘action’-feature, which is a kind of Twitter timeline. With these adjustments the similarity race between the three leading social media players has entered another stage.

How do marketers decide what to use? They better don’t. Twitter is very small compared to Facebook and its penetration differs widely from country to country. Google+ has just started, is the smallest player so far, but Google as a platform has a much bigger user base than even Facebook. And you never know where your target group or parts of it communicate.

Being a marketer you better have a Facebook page, build a Google+ page and you want to be present on Twitter. And if you know of any other target group agglomerations – be it on Foursquare, or in one of the numerous communities and forums – then your brand better has a presence there too.

That does not sound very strategic. But it is not a matter of strategy. You need a strategy, but whatever your strategy is, you also need to establish online presences that have a chance to collect followership. So plant your seeds into all platforms and check what works.

Unfortunately, this means to play along with the competitive product developments of today’s internet companies. But chances are that these adjustments will lead to a fragmentation of usage and we will enter the next stage of social media development (and hopefully find a better word for it). One such development could be the consolidation of social media audiences. Another possibility could be the tiring of users to constantly update and read updates. Or the platforms could take to more aggressive feature battles that are not to the benefit of users.

Siri after a year of smartphone stupidity

PostMaster — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:19:35 +0000

Siri after a year of smartphone stupidity