Each week, I compose a newsletter for our team that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, social media, mobile, communications and marketing in order to keep our wider team up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in their jobs. These are those links.
If you have additional links, sources or ideas that might be helpful, I'd encourage you to add some via a comment below or tag me in Google+. And if you’re on Flipboard, you can get these links in the This Week in Social Media Magazine.
Google Maps get more social, the role of social and television, where traditional media is heading, Facebook gets all #cool, Twitter opens analytics to all, making progress on social metrics, the NSA's use of big data and more - it's This Week in Social Media.
Industry
- Could IBM be the Google for large enterprise organizations?
- Think email is dead? Think again. In the first quarter of 2013, email grew by 11.6% year over year for all industries, and the open rate was 24.4% versus 22.2% in 2012.
- PwC has the outlook for traditional media through 2017. For traditional channels, television and out-of-home are in the best shape, with radio showing modest gains and print losing share.
- What's prompting users to spend more time on social sites in Australia? Mobile.
- The world has changed dramatically in the age of the Internet. Check out 10 facts about what people do on the web.
- If you've ever gotten pushback from an executive who thinks social media eats into productivity, perhaps you should help them understand what smokers are costing their company, in productivity, downtime and healthcare costs.
- There seems to be a relatively minor impact of social media on TV in terms of buzz. Could it be because TV viewing in age cohorts under 35 continues to drop? We still see increases in television viewing time in age brackets over 50.
- In the unsurprising to anyone category, marketers are more enthusiastic about online advertising than consumers. In the Adobe study, consumers find traditional advertising a better source of information. It could be because the digital marketing practice needs to do more to create unique products and units rather than co-opting traditional methods online.
Content
- Content marketing as a practice falls into both communications and marketing, and both are writing for audiences. Here's what journalists can learn from content marketers.
The Platforms
- Facebook will streamline the number of ad choices available to advertisers.
- Could Facebook be working on its own RSS reader? With Google Reader preparing to sunset on July 1, it's a possibility.
- Hashtags are now part of the Facebook experience, making it possible to track public conversations about topics.
- The secret behind Facebook's success: small interactions.
- Twitter has opened its analytics platform to the public under its ads dashboard, effectively allowing anyone to view the performance of their tweets.
- Google acquired the social mapping and travel app Waze for $1 billion.
Metrics/Measurement/Big Data
- Big news in measurement: the Conclave has established the first cross-industry, vendor-neutral standards for social media measurement, and is supported by the Institute for Public Relations (IPR), International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communications (AMEC), Digital Analytics Association (DNA), Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and Society for New Communications Research (SNCR). The areas of focus for measurement are:
- Content and Sourcing
- Reach and Impressions
- Engagement and Conversation
- Influence
- Opinion & Advocacy
- Impact & Value
- The standards are also listed on www.smmstandards.org and are open for comment until July 31, 2013. A downloadable document is also available.
- The role of big data and the recent NSA/Verizon phone spying dust-up.
Bookmarks/Read-Watch-Listen Later
- Avinash Kaushik, the highly respected digital marketing evangelist for Google, looks at eight silly data myths that marketing people believe. These mistakes include focusing on likes, page views and impressions, as well as confusing KPIs for metrics. Well worth a read.
- Speaking of page views, Mitch Joel takes a deeper dive in the Pageview Industrial Complex, asking hard questions about the need for display ads and how we create attention around valuable content.
Commentary
Unless you've been living in a cave, you're aware of the controversy around the NSA and data collection. Now, most of this is purported to be more innocuous metadata, such as frequency of calls, numbers dialed, countries, etc. In short, the kinds of data that bundled together, can help ferret out patterns that may be cause for concern regarding terrorist activities.But it seems that the public furor over such activities concerns the possibility of government agencies being able to eavesdrop on common citizens. And the concern is not just relegated to consumers. The likes of Google and Facebook are concerned about the level of intrusion from as well. The fact is that they've each contributed to the technology that makes tracking and spying possible is ironic. Even more so when you stop to consider that their very business models are predicated on their ability to create custom ads based on what's in your email or that you've interacted with on the social network.
But consumers are getting more savvy. And while customized content may be preferable, they don't want marketers to cross the line. Consumers think there are too many technologies tracking their behavior, that companies collect too much information and that third parties shouldn't be the beneficiary of that information. They collect data on you all the time.
Privacy cuts both ways. While netizens may be loathe to give up more information about themselves, it's this very action that allows marketers to customize content and experiences.
As we move into the future of customer service, it's going to be increasingly common for customer service representatives to use more publicly available information as part of their interactions. The key is not to make it feel too scripted or intrusive, lest customers get creeped out.