Online Reputation Management

70% of online consumers have said they use the Internet to research everyday grocery products. (Prospectiv, January 2008)

41% of Europeans claim to have changed their mind about what brand to buy as a result of researching choices online, according to EIAA's latest Mediascope survey. (Mediascope Europe, November 2008)

Brands with the highest "social media activity" (includes reviews) increased revenues by as much as 18%. (Media Post News, July 2009)

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The Science of Building Trust With Social Media

The Internet-era has made establishing trust an increasingly complicated issue. Our finely tuned ability to read facial expressions does not apply to e-mail, and emoticons are, at best, an imperfect substitute for sarcastic inflection (raise your hand if you’ve ever gotten into trouble for typing something that was meant to be a joke). So, how can we establish trust when our online identities are often little more than an avatar and few lines of text?

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How the Resort Industry is Using Social Media

A growing number of resort and spa destinations are spreading their wings and reaching a wider customer base via social media. With the help of social networking platforms and niche bloggers, vacation spots are broadening their branding efforts from the sand to the slopes, and connecting with potential patrons they may not have reached through traditional advertising.

Here’s a look at some of the social strategies these getaway companies are employing and what we can learn from their success.

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How Social Engagement is Changing

There certainly is a lot of commentary regarding the usefulness of social media marketing, as well as the numbers of people that are engaging in the conversation. According to recent studies conducted by PostRank, we have been able to illustrate what is happening in the Internet’s social community — how people are communicating, what is changing, and where people are doing the talking.

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Starbucks Gets Its Business Brewing Again With Social Media

Let's get this straight right away: Return on investment in social media is not measured in how many friends you have on Facebook or how many followers you have on Twitter. It's not calculated in trending topics or YouTube comments. It should, in fact, be held to the same criteria other marketing channels are: Did it move your business?

It's done just that at Starbucks, which is a digital

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You're Using Social Media but Just Who Is Overseeing It All?

Social media is undoubtedly shaking up the digital landscape, but it looks to be shaking up the corporate suite as well.

As brands try to foster loyalty with Facebook pages, show innovation on blogs and address customer concerns on Twitter, social media is threading its way through the marketing and sales, research and development, customer-service departments and more. All of which gives rise to the question: Just whose job is it anyway?

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Report: Facebook Pages Create More Loyal Customers

Researchers at Rice University have published a report that examines the dollar value of Facebook fans on the sales of Dessert Gallery (DG), a Houston-based bakery and cafe chain. The study found that Facebook fans became more loyal customers.
The Report
Read it here

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Can brands now create a bigger buzz through Gmail?

Google recently introduced a social networking feature, called Buzz, in its email service Gmail. Soon people started comparing Google Buzz with Twitter and Facebook and wondered if the Gmail’s new feature would pose any serious threat to the leading micro-blogging and social networking sites. More significantly, would marketers embrace Google Buzz in the same way they had adopted Twitter and Facebook to reinforce their online presence and also to better connect with their consumers.

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Is it Becoming Less Critical For Businesses to Have Websites?

According to data from Compete, Facebook has become a bigger traffic source than Google for some sites, and for many others, it is right up there with Google as a major traffic source. If it can drive the traffic, then that means the people are already at Facebook. You can be on Facebook without having your own website. Businesses can build a Facebook Page, complete with analytics provided by Facebook itself, and they can spend time making that page a good one.

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G 6:20 PM  No comment

7 Things to Consider for Social Media in the Enterprise

Marketing and communications folks are all over social media. They implore company executives not to be left behind. Your company absolutely must get on the social media train this year before it leaves the station. So they go around and get management, sales and ultimately the president of the company all excited about this shiny new thing. Then it’s time to create the magic. That’s where the technology department steps in. Sure, many of the best online marketing folks these days know how to throw around a little web coding. Maybe they even know Joomla from Drupal (, but it’s unlikely that they know about what it takes to roll out a relatively new, third-party technology across the entire corporate structure.

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G 9:46 AM  No comment

Why Social Media Means Big Opportunities for Women

Women have firmly established their presence on the social web, and account for the majority of users on many popular social media sites. But what does this mean for the future of women in social media?

One word: Opportunity.

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The New Facebook Home Page Guide That You Must Read

Confused about the new Facebook home page? While it should be pretty easy to use, there are a number of things that have changed that you should be aware of. Whether it’s a new location for the logout link, or hidden friend lists, many users still haven’t completely figured out the way the new Facebook home page works. In this guide we explain how to use the new home page and have a complete video tutorial included at the end.
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In Virtual Strike, Belgium's Ad Agencies Close Their Site

Belgium's ad agencies started a one-week virtual strike today to protest the way clients conduct pitches in their country.

Many advertisers in Belgium have stopped following an industry charter that sets norms ranging from an acceptable number of agencies in a pitch (no more than three) to contributing to agencies' pitch costs. So far, almost 20 agencies have closed their websites except for displaying one paragraph each of an open letter to clients that runs across their home pages, from one agency's site to the next (famous.be).

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Read the Message here

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Seth Godin: The Tribes We Lead

From professional sports mascots to balloon animal makers, some communities are so extremely niche that they could only properly thrive on the Internet. So argues blogger and author Seth Godin, who believes that our revolutionary new connectedness has brought human culture back to its roots, and that tribes (groups of people mobilized around a shared interest) are the present and future of all web content.

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Stefana Broadbent: How the Internet Enables Intimacy

As social media changes our social lives, speculation has abounded for years on how the web may be disconnecting us from intimate interactions in favor of meaningless quests to rack up followers and “friends.” Not so, says Stefana Broadbent, who explains that social networks function the same way online as they do in real life. While we may have lots of friends, we only really communicate regularly and meaningfully with a handful of them, and social technologies like e-mail, texting, and tweeting allow us to do so more often across time and space.

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Evan Williams: Listening to Twitter Users

With a couple of anecdotes building the ultimate social media case study, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams discusses how a little side project called Twitter became a game-changing phenomenon with the help and input of the very users who made the service a success. From innovative marketing uses to core functionality, Williams provides the evidence for what we knew all along: Users know best.

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G 7:54 PM  No comment

Clay Shirky: How Social Media Can Make History

In this talk, consultant, professor and author Clay Shirky discusses the unprecedented immediacy of real-time citizen journalism made possible by social media and the nearly ubiquitous access to mobile web technologies. From the election crisis in IranIran Iran to the massive earthquake that shook China in May of 2008, Shirky discusses how media is made on the ground, as-it-happens, via the social web.

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G 7:51 PM  No comment

Alexis Ohanian: How To Make a Splash in Social Media

Alexis Ohanian of Reddit.com tells the quick and hilarious story of how the social web provided some unexpected help to Greenpeace in halting the Japanese whaling industry. Internet marketers take note: The meme is all powerful, and it cannot be controlled.

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G 7:49 PM  No comment

Social networking: Tapping into love@work

Are you online all day, and spending a good part of the time on your favourite social network? Very likely then you’re also celebrating romance online.

There is surely a gift that has caught your attention which is ideal for your V-Day date or a bunch of red roses that you could send to the girl you secretly admire. It popped up on your screen even as you were chatting online.

Online social networking is getting bigger and bigger and it’s actually changing relationships inside out. Says Upen Roop Rai, director, Times Internet: "In a big way it is the current flavour of the youth and the way they are going about it will be much larger than what email had started out to be."
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Restaurant chains take to networking sites

The quick-serving restaurant (QSR) chains in India have found an easy and inexpensive platform to connect with their target audience—social networking sites. Many QSR chains like McDonald’s, Mainland China, Pizza Hut or the new entrant Jus Booster Juice have opened accounts in Facebook or Twitter. They connect with their fans and followers on a daily basis, provide them updates and special offers.

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Why You Need Facebook For Your Company

Now, new data released by Facebook and third party researchers show just how influential Facebook has become in our daily lives. Combined with several critical adjustments to how Facebook publishes “news” and intersects with other sites, the state of Facebook is mind-blowing. And important for business.

Here’s 11 things about Facebook that you need to know:
Here...

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Reasons to Have a Facebook Page and Ways to Make it Better

I don't have to tell you that Facebook can be a tremendous source of web traffic. There's a good chance that most of the people you know are on it, and the ones who aren't may be eventually. The social network is consuming more and more of people's time, and thanks to mobile devices, it is always accessible. If you don't have a Facebook Page, you may be missing out on not only traffic to your site, but a chance to engage with customers and ultimately help your brand's reputation.

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G 11:44 PM  No comment

4 Best Practices to Leverage Niche Social Networks for Conversions

Perhaps it's a bit of an inside joke, but National Instruments Corp. is accustomed to using graphic language with its customers. So when the Austin, Texas-based graphical programming software company decided to create a proprietary social network, its consumer base also made its affinity for the business and its products as clear as black and white.

More than 125,000 community member fans of the picture-based programming language later, Deirdre Walsh , NI's community and social media marketing manager, boils down the secret to best leveraging niche social media networks for conversions: "We provide more of a, I would say, trusted adviser role than we do a guard dog role."

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Survey: Its Time to Realize That Baby Boomers Are Social Media Influencers

Baby boomers are more concerned about health care costs than the state of the economy, and they're logging on to Facebook to chat about it, reveals a study funded by San Francisco-based Continuum Crew, a communications firm concentrating on mature consumers.

Marketers that don't personalize online campaigns for the "have-it-my-way" generation are missing out on a great opportunity, Continuum Crew President Lori Bitter said in a prepared statement that announced the Jan. 20 release of the survey.

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Is Google Bad at Social Media or Really, Really Good at it?

Google often takes a lot of flack for not being incredibly successful with its social media efforts. Most recently, Caroline McCarthy and Tom Krazit tackled this subject in a CNET article claiming that "Google struggles with social skills." I would not go so far as to say that I completely disagree with them. They make plenty of factual points that are simply undeniable. Orkut hasn't set the world afire. Jaiku and Dodgeball didn't work out. YouTube was pretty much established by the time Google bought it, and even since it has not been the financial success many would have assumes it would be, despite its enormous popularity.


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G 8:38 PM  No comment

The technology pro's greatest enemies

Everybody keeps a list of the people who make their jobs and lives more difficult, even if they never write it down. It's a safe bet that IT pros' lists are longer than most.

You might think IT's greatest enemies are cyber criminals and malware authors. But far worse are those who make the lives of these evildoers that much easier. In fact, the greatest enemies of IT are members of the community IT serves: from clueless suits to annoying power users, from miserly managers to those friends and family members who are always hitting you up for free tech support. Any one of them can keep you from doing your best -- or getting anything done at all.

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