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.
Salesforce’s biggest bet yet, smartphones begin their global dominance, social media trends in India, The Atlantic discovers the secret to audience growth, Altimeter Group’s latest report and more - it's This Week in Social Media.
Industry
- Salesforce.com will spend $2.5 billion to acquire ExactTarget, the cloud marketing company known primarily for its email marketing prowess. This will finally make Salesforce's Marketing Cloud a full-fledged marketing services operation.
- Last week, we shared the 2013 Internet Trends deck from Mary Meeker; this week, The Atlantic takes a look a the 11 most fascinating charts from her presentation.
- Once again, political upheaval is seeing traction from social media over local media - this time in Turkey.
- India is seeing the benefit of social advertising for branding, according to the Ernst & Young Social Media Marketing: India Trends Study 2013 report. While Facebook and Twitter receive the bulk of attention, other networks such as Pinterest, Google+ and Foursquare also rank well.
- The affluent demographic in the UK is engaged digitally, spending 21 hours a week online on average. Other facts about them:
- They're also wary of it, exhibiting a lower than average amount of engagement on social media
- 61% of them have financial transactions at least once a week online
- 81% rely on user reviews to help them make decisions
- Smartphone adoption has now surpassed 50% in major markets worldwide, with many more expected to hit that mark in 2014.
- Stumped for how to get your executives involved in social media? Hubspot has the answer.
- The Atlantic Wire has been building its audience by using this revolutionary technique: actually participating in conversations online.
- We Are Social takes a look at 10 provocations for the digital/social future
Content
- How Harvard Business Review has transformed itself from traditional journal to a social media publisher.
- There's room for short-form and long-form content on the Internet. The way the brain connects with some of the deeper descriptions and longer narrative is crucial to how we perceive storytelling.
- Why doesn't social media work like paid media? Because it's relationship-based, not transaction-based.
- Here, for your edification, is the ultimate list of content marketing tools.
The Platforms
- Television programs are often discussed widely on social networks. If you've recorded your favorite show or are waiting for it to be available in a streaming format, you may run the risk of seeing spoilers. Now, with a special Chrome browser extension, you can avoid seeing TV spoilers on Facebook and Twitter.
- LinkedIn may have some competition. News Corporation (which owns MySpace) is expanding the Wall Street Journal site into a platform for users to network in addition to read news.
- Expanding its own features, LinkedIn will give users the ability to share photos, documents and presentations in their status updates.
- The sponsored posts on Tumblr have begun - and so have the complaints.
- Vine (think Twitter video) is now available as an Android app.
- Twitter has expanded lists, allowing up to 1,000 lists with up to 5,000 members each (this is up from a limit of 20 lists, limited to 500 members)
- According to a survey by Burst Media, Google+ is now in second place for number of users, trailing Facebook but leading Twitter.
- Online gaming company Zynga announced that it will lay off 18% of its global staff to save money and focus on mobile.
- Here are five ways to grow your YouTube audience: determine your success metrics, understand the power of SEO, know your audience, engage with your audience (the 90:10 rule - 90% interaction, 10% content creation), and develop a programming strategy.
- Foursquare has devised a tie-in to the HBO Series "Game of Thrones." Challenging the people of New York and San Francisco, Game of Cones pits the ice cream shops of the coastal cities against each other. This could very well be part of the pilot program Foursquare is running with local businesses.
Legal/Regulatory
- Beware of what you share publicly. A recent study shows that 1 in 10 people aged 16-34 have been rejected for a job because of what they've posted online. This is a global phenomenon, with China being the most aggressive in this area, at about 2X the rate in other countries.
- Also, be sure to read the fine print. You may be giving away more than you think.
Metrics/Measurement/Big Data
Bookmarks/Read-Watch-Listen Later
- There's a difference between "fan" and "advocate" as far as your brand is concerned. Fans are great and are many in number, but won't take action on behalf of your brand the way advocates will. The key is how to treat them differently and how to move them to become advocates.
- From the Altimeter Group comes the Collaborative Economy, an economic model where ownership and access are shared between corporations, startups, and people. This results in market efficiencies that bear new products, services, and business growth.
- This could have easily been placed in the "Content" section above, but because it's longer form and there are many elements to this publication, it makes more sense here. The End of Content is an H+K publication, containing the following sections:
- Why “Content Marketing” is A Model for Disaster – And Why Journalism is the Answer. Essentially, content marketing focuses on content first; journalism focuses on the audience first. And good stories have multiple voices, not just the corporate voice.
- Layered Narrative Storytelling: A Journalistic Standard for Creating Content. As media unbundled, our ability to tell stories unraveled; our ability to tell stories became fragmented. Applying a journalistic approach to the layers of paid, earned, owned and shared media will allow for an emotional connection across all of them.
- The End of Content: Storytelling Using the Layered Narrative System. Begin with the audience and figure out the channels after the story is set. What's the story - How to tell the story - Where to tell the story.
- Data + Storytelling: Emotion Must Be in the Equation. A good story connects us with ourselves and others; a great story connects us with being human. Sometimes, it's important to go further than data.
Commentary
Now that LinkedIn is giving us features like photo updates, tagging other individuals AND the ability to share documents, it would seem that traditional enterprise systems are being given a run for their money. Of course there is a need for higher security, privacy protocols and protecting company information, but aren't we at a point yet where we have a commensurate level of user experience inside the firewall as we're accustomed to outside of it?According to a recent Towers Watson report, use of social media for internal communications is on the rise. If employees are the biggest advocates a company can have, then we should be giving them every opportunity to not only share information easily outside of the firewall, but to engage in sharing behaviors internally. The platforms on which companies base internal social networks speaks volumes about the culture they're building with their employees. And if a company wishes to establish a culture of knowledge sharing, transparency and innovation, it's not done through outmoded systems that don't encourage the same.
Without doing so, such companies run the risk of employees finding easier more modern ways of interacting that could be outside of official channels, lowered morale due to constant frustration, and decreased productivity because of time wasted trying to manage a non-user-friendly system.
Instead of watching the outside world zoom by, taking a page from the LinkedIn and Facebooks of the world and applying them to the enterprise could result in a world of progress.
Image source: splorp (Flickr)
