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Why You Need to Adopt a #blockopotamus – Brian Meeks

March 29, 2011 By 4 Comments

 

I read this post by Brian at 18:06 (GMT today). It made me laugh and resonated big time. At 18:15 I tweeted Brian and asked if he would be up for a guest post. He delivered the below piece of delight to me at 18:59. That is fast ya’ll! Enjoy… (small scale profanity warning).

I don’t believe in hate.

You know what really pisses me off?

I hate it when people jump on to Twitter and think that it is a world where people piss money and fart gold dust. They wonder into our nice little community, start sending links to win an ipad 2 (revenge of the ipad), and don’t have the decency to change their freaking avatar from the egg.

Bastards!

Twitter is a powerful world. If one is a celebrity, on a massive cocaine and porn star bender, one is able to build a following over night. These rare and delusional people are able to instantly bestow eyeballs on anything they wish, with their 140 character magic wands. If you have a clever video of a cat doing something adorable, and it gets passed on by a celebrity, while he is taking a break from ‘Winning’, then it could go viral in a matter of minutes.

I Believe This Is Brian

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Filed Under: Social Media Marketing, Twitter Marketing Tagged With: ,

Great Social Media Video Interview with McDonald’s (curated)

March 28, 2011 By 2 Comments

 

This video interview with Rick Wion from McDonald’s (conducted by Mark Schaefer) perfectly sums up many of the processes and considerations that are key to  any social media activity (focusses on Twitter). It discusses:

  • The need to listen and to do real groundwork before jumping in
  • What you can learn from listening
  • How you can resource (an admittedly large) a customer focussed Twitter presence
  • The challenges of maintaining momentum and growth

Food for thought – should you put such emphasis on individual personas when using social media channels for customer care? Does this run the risk of falling flat on it’s face in the event of those people moving on? Please discuss below.

Enjoy!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bprXzCPWUnU&w=640&h=390]

Filed Under: Digital Marketing, Social Media Interviews Tagged With: ,

Social Media – How To Curate Content Well

March 28, 2011 By 1 Comment

 

Over the past 12 months the social media space has been engrossed in the need for brands and organisations to curate content for their audiences. Curation can be an effective way to build you up as a supplier of filtered content, saving people time when it comes to dredging through the quite frankly bewildering levels of content that is thrown our way on a daily basis.  Time is money right? Think you can help people save time? Perhaps you can, but why not add your unique viewpoint to the content you are collecting and sharing?

curation is important

So many Kings, not enough time! (image credit - businessinsider.com)

Read on for more tips…

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Filed Under: Social Media Marketing Tagged With: , ,

Social Media – Are Metrics Squashing the ‘Social’ Part?

March 22, 2011 By 2 Comments

 

Return on investment. Measurement. Metrics.  No doubt you are sick of hearing about all of these. Blogs from far and near will give you sound advice on what you should be measuring in order to appease the people at the top of your business. You need to have a measurement and reporting system in place, of that there’s no doubt, but I wonder what you are actually doing with the data?

You may have a picture of the interaction levels on say, Facebook or a real sense of the growth of your followers on Twitter or even how many unique readers your blog has. Great.  Figures look nice in tables, even better in pie charts and even sexier in an ‘infographic’ but they mean zilch unless you are really learning about your audience and making positive actions based on those findings.

Don't Let Metrics Squash Social

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Filed Under: Digital Marketing, Social Media Customer Service, Social Media Marketing, Social Penguin News, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Social Media & The Evolution of Cats – Kelly Forbes

March 18, 2011 By 3 Comments

 

Cats have really had the internet meme down for quite some time now. When Icanhazcheezburger (or Lolcats) came along in 2007 everyone realized just how much mileage could be made from funny pictures of cats. Many emails and memes shared later (Google Basement Cat for a start) Cravendale have taken that one step further and are trying to start their own internet cat meme, only these guys are going for the viral video campaign (ala Old Spice) instead of cats with captions.

Captions on Cats

Captions on Cats

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Filed Under: Digital Marketing, Guest Blogging, Social Media Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

Can We Stop Footballers Being Twits On Twitter? – Euan Black

March 10, 2011 By 9 Comments

[tweetmeme source="social_penguin" only_single=false http://www.thesocialpenguinblog.com]

In the past, footballers have been kept on a relatively short leash when it comes to airing their views through the media. You’ll notice that it’s generally the same guys who are involved in press conferences and post-match TV interviews, because the clubs select the players who are the most accomplished public speakers.

With the introduction of Twitter, clubs have lost a lot of control over their players’ communication with both the public and the media. Whilst most of us have the ability to click ‘delete’ and erase unwanted tweets/posts, usually without causing too much damage, players with hundreds of thousands of followers (Cristiano Ronaldo has 1,897,963) do not have that luxury. It’s particularly evident when you consider that many of their followers are journalists, sniffing around for the slightest hint of a story.

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Filed Under: Guest Blogging, Personal Brand Tagged With: , , ,

Social Media Abbreviation Poll – And the Winner is…

March 5, 2011 By 3 Comments

 

You may have seen our poll that attempted to gauge opinion on the best abbreviation for ‘social media’ - well, the results are now in and one thing is clear – social media types across the globe like to keep it simple…

Ranking of votes in winning order (usable responses  – 130)

‘SM’ – 37% of votes

‘SoMe’ – 20% of votes (seems my revulsion at this option is not wide spread!)

‘Soc Med’ – 15% of votes

‘Social’ – 5% of votes

‘S+M’ – 1% of votes

The remaining 22% was made up of ‘other’ responses, these included; no abbreviation, ‘so media’, ‘sodia’, ‘s media’, ‘s-med’ and ‘sociam’

So there we have it folks the clear winner is ‘SM’ – now can we make that the standard? What do you think?

Huge thanks to Petya Georgieva for directing her readers to the poll on her Higher and Higher Blog and also to Ragan’s PR Daily for covering the poll in their daily newsletters both in Europe and worldwide. And of course thanks to all who voted, left comments and spread the word!

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Filed Under: Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Stats Tagged With: