How Video Goes Viral…Cool Infographic

This cool infographic, shared on Mashable today.

Cool Infographic on How Video Goes Viral

Qwiki is Amazing

Qwiki is an amazing new multi-media search engine that creates a narrated mini-movie of your search query on the fly. Assuming this takes off like it’s trending in interest (and it’s still in alpha) this will be an important new signal for brands to understand and leverage.

TechCrunch Disrupt Winner Qwiki Hits No. 1 On Google Trends ‘Hot Searches’ In The U.S..

Infographic: Most Content Sharing Occurs on Facebook

Mashable posted this cool infographic this morning based on research from the sharing widget AddThis. In 2010 Facebook grew as the number one destination on the web for sharing content, outpacing all other sites and sharing vehicles. Still, there’s lots of sharing going on, with a variety of tools used.

 

Infographic Showing How/Where Content is Being Shared

 

 

 

Social Media: Past, Present and Future

Been meaning to post this for a couple weeks but the holidays just seem like such an appropriate time to blog about the ghost of social media past, present and future, don’t they. I thought this was a pretty compelling presentation by entrepreneur-turned-venture capitalist Mark Suster, presented at the Caltech MIT Enterprise Forum in October.

His presentation is a pithy take on where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re headed with the social web. His main takeaway, at least from my read, is that the rise of massive social networks such as Facebook and Twitter inevitably means that fragmentation is on it’s way. The social web is already starting to splinter into more vertically aligned interest groups (i.e. the Birds of a Feather” effect).

This fragmentation of the social web, he finally points out, is why Mark Zuckerberg remains paranoid (after all, where is AOL or even Yahoo! two titans of the early internet today?) and why right now is one of the greatest times since the last wave of digital innovation to work hard and innovate. Great, inspiring stuff.

SocialPastPresentFuture

10 Trends in Mobile Technology

Mobile Gaming

From the Wall Street Journal the top trends in mobile for the coming year. Here they are:

1. Tablets will take over the world
2. Android will take over the world
3. Apps will take over the world
4. 4G will take over the world…eventually
5. Parts for mobile handsets and networks will be in short supply
6. The attorneys will have a field day protecting turf via patent warfare
7. Security and privacy will be insecure and not so private
8. China will screw everyone
9. Your phone replaces your wallet/purse
10. Location, location, location…as in using your phone to broadcast yours to everyone and allowing marketers can know your location so they can bombard you with coupons, offers and other Minority Report-like advertising assaults.

David Meerman Scott

Good reminder from David Meerman Scott, author of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” and other social media tomes, on the lack of distinction between B2B and B2C social media and how, in many cases, asking about the ROI of social media is like asking what the ROI on your telephone system or Blackberries or IT infrastructure is. Sure, bean counters may have tried to measure this at the start of implementing these new technologies and practices but they don’t any more. Social media is really just a communications channel but one that impacts the entire organization…research and development, marketing, CRM, customer service, PR, recruiting, internal communications…so, go ahead an carp about ROI on social media, while the competition establishes their channels of communication…and leaves you in the dust.

David Meerman Scott, posted with vodpod

Social is the New Search

Advertising Sources Consumers Trust

Some SEO experts are now noticing  more traffic is coming to their client’s site from content and links posted in social networks than from Google search. This is a massive behavioral change but one that’s been a long time in coming. It’s being driven by two factors:

1) Search results are still not all that relevant. There’s a lot of junk in organic search, especially when it comes to the search for information and often it takes multiple operations to get to relevant information.  At least that’s my experience. How about you?

2) Consumers and business decision-makers consistently site their friends and colleagues as the number one source of trusted information on products and services. Followed right behind this is ratings and user comments posted online. Brands can run but they can no longer hide behind advertising. If some aspect of your brand experience is off, you will be found out.

An interesting study by virtue on the effectiveness of Facebook posts for brands take this insight about driving brand experience via social media to a deeper level. As they point our in the introduction to “Managing Your Facebook Community”, for the three month period August through October 2010, Facebook reached 35% of the total internet population. Average usage is up to 55-minutes per day. But, like managing the content for a radio station or a cable channel or magazine, although it may be apparent when and how people are using Facebook, the “why” can remain elusive.

The two white paper’s virtue.com developed look interesting. Both are included here for your downloading pleasure.

The Anatomy of a Facebook Post

Managing_Facebook_Communities

Infographic: How Android Is Taking Over

Cool infographic from Gigaom, showing how Android is taking over the world. Imagine how this impacts the world of virtual goods and social gaming, a topic I posted about earlier, here.

via Infographic: How Android Is Taking Over.

Time To Decouple Digital Marketing from Corporate IT

According to Chief Marketer, there’s tension between the CMO and the CIO in today’s corporate environment as marketing struggles to get things done in a new world that demands anytime/anywhere content while the corporate IT infrastructure was designed to handle things like files sizes below 1MB and such. Social media, large video files, real time interaction…who every foresaw these things five years ago? Well duh!

Like everything else in life, the digital evolution is upsetting the apple cart in corporate land. All the nice little sandboxes are having wild animals poop in them and kids from other playgrounds throw sand and remove the sand and do all kinds of other things the sandbox was never designed to do and all the while, what once was such a well-defined playground that now look more like chaos.

What must change here? How about corporate land? How about abandoning those nice little defined kingdoms everyone’s grown so accustomed to and learning to live with uncertainty like all of humanity does when it leaves the office?

See, corporate entities are really just collections of people anyway. It’s really ridiculous to assume we could have such order and control over things when in fact we don’t. It’s just that digital realities have now stripped off the pretense. We all now know we’re not in control. And that’s a good place to be.

It’s time for corporate marketing to assert their intention to move marketing to a separate platform from the IT infrastructure if IT won’t adapt. Because the risk aversion is killing sales and marketing efforts. The sooner companies wake up to this, the sooner they can work out their survival plans. Or not.

Like everything else the digital revolution has changed, there’s no going back. Business, like life, is unpredictable. Get used to it.

CMO, CIO Divide Leaves Strategy In No Man’s Land.

Study: Unhappy Customers Prefer Apologies To Cash

Here’s some interesting research you can put to work in your customer service efforts. According to a recent article on Inc.com what customers want when they have a bad customer experience is…a good, old fashioned apology. Researchers worked with a large eBay seller (10,000+ sales a month) and offered different customers who left negative feedback one of two exclusive options to reconsider their complaint:

1. $4 to $8 to retract

2. An apology

Forty-five percent of participants offered an apology withdrew their complaint while only 23% of participants offered cash withdrew their complaint.

Now, it’s important to keep in mind, it’s not just what you do that matters. It’s also HOW you do it. An automated “robo apology” is not going to cut it. Their suggestions?

• Reach out and touch someone…use the phone when possible.
• If you have to use email, sign it from a real person, with a title and real email address they can respond back to.
• Don’t use a form letter. Make the reply real, short and sincere.

The bottom line is, people expect an automated response and a useless excuse when complaining to a giant company. You stand out from the crowd when you treat your customers like people instead of numbers and costs.

And, remember, each of your customers has a Facebook or Twitter account, a blog, a mobile phone with plenty of social connected apps. Unlike past eras, when customers fumed in silence, today if they don’t like something, they have the power to broadcast their displeasure to the world, which also can show up every time someone searches on your company or brand. Try to put the impact of negative brand equity on your balance sheet.