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Winners of our Enterprise Social Technology book competition…

April 29, 2011 By 1 Comment

We had two copies of Enterprise Social Technology by Scott Klososky to give away to two lucky readers who left helpful tips for using social media for business in the comments section of the review. There were some great examples and it was difficult to choose winners so we entered names in to the Penguintronic 1000 2.0 randomiser machine and it spat out…

Fiona McAuliffe & Rob Z!!! Well done guys, please email your mailing address to thesocialpenguinblog@gmail.com and we will wing the book to you shortly!

Thanks to all who left comments and to Scott Klososky for the prizes.

Stay tuned for more social media goodness from The Social Penguin Blog and our band of merry men. And women.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized

Book Review – Enterprise Social Technology by Scott Klososky

April 26, 2011 By 13 Comments

 

I’m a Penguin. A very clever Penguin with some serious social media smarts. However I do enjoy a good social media based read and Enterprise Social Technology by Scott Klososky falls in to that bracket.  The tagline for the book is ‘helping organizations to harness the power of social media, social networking and social relevance’ and I do believe that by taking the 12 step process illustrated in the book, businesses and organisations of all sizes will gain a strong grasp of the processes, techniques and best practices that must be utilised in order to benefit from the social media space. Read on for the full low-down…

Let me break this down for ya’ll…

Positives

  • The book has been crowd-sourced, meaning the reader gets a balanced & varied view
  • Very well structured that aids understanding but also ensures the book can be used as a guide
  • Each chapter has key aims with a nice ‘key point’ summary at the end of each
  • Very helpful section regarding the part that each area of a business can play in a social media strategy
  • Strong focus on ROI and how to measure it

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

5 Questions With… Stu Bradley from Floxx (social media/apps)

April 20, 2011 By 6 Comments

 

Have you heard of Floxx? It’s the ‘beautiful social network’ that encourages people to share sightings of good looking people via their smart-phones and uses geo-location to map the flow of aesthetically – pleasing individuals. Read on for the low-down from behind the scenes at Floxx…

Please tell us your name and job title…

Stu Bradley, Director of Marketing and Social Media

Describe Floxx in 140 characters or less…

Banter that got out of hand, and actually turned into a viable idea for a social network!

Who’s behind it?

Rich Martell is the founder of the site, and after angel investment from former Dragon’s Den dragon Doug Richard and Silicon Valley investor Kevin Wall, there is now a small team working on apps and new features on the site.

Floxx

Is Floxx answering a basic human need for recognition of beauty?

Ooh, deep question!  Given our tagline, ‘the beautiful social network, obviously that’s a part of it.  However, I think there’s more to it than that – as well as enabling people to put themselves out there (by posting about someone) without the risk of being humiliated, the site also functions as a way of mapping out up and coming areas of cities.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve turned up at a club and paid in, only to find the place totally dead inside – in time, this is a problem Floxx could help to solve!

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

Twitter – What is your tweet volume doing for your reputation?

April 17, 2011 By 4 Comments

 

This post originally appeared on my Posterous site, I thought you lovely Penguin readers might want to have a read, so here it is…

First and foremost, I love Twitter, it helps me so much in my life, both on a personal and business level and it’s fair to say it has played a huge part in my career development. But something has bugged me for a while and it has to do with the Tweet volume of users. There are people out there who send in excess of 300 tweets per day, even though they are clearly employed either by a business or on the behalf of clients. How can any serious work really take place inbetween the creation and sending of said tweets? Of course, it’s important to share information, give opinion and join in with discussions, but the level that some people operate at must have negative effects on their productivity and in-turn their value as a business asset. Before anyone jumps on me, I am aware that I have racked up a fairly high number of tweets (13,352 in 17 months – approx 26 per day) but not at a level that I feel interupts my working day (a lot of my Tweeting is carried out pre/post working hours or during breaks).

Put yourself in the shoes of a potential buyer of your service, lets say you are a consultant. They will research you online, it’s a given in this day and age. What might Google (other search engines are available) spit back at them? A LinkedIn profile? Your blog? Sure as heck your Twitter profile. So they dig a little deeper and find that you are sending a tweet every 5-10 minutes, some of them they may find valuable, but there is only so much value to be had from sharing information. That potential client will want real value for money, they will not want to pay you to tweet (from your own account anyway!).

In this social web world we operate in, the impression you put across on any channel you use counts for so so much. Don’t lose focus on the fact that you have a job to do, a job that provides you with the lifestyle you choose to lead. Twitter is a beautiful thing, don’t let it turn ugly by overdoing it. I know someone who lost their job due to the employer being rather miffed at their Twitter use during working hours. Everything you do Twitter is out there for all to see, so you can have no excuse when the soup hits the fan.

What do you think? Are you a high volume tweeter that maintains a strong work output? Are you a ‘buyer’ that would be put off by a consultant’s level of tweets? Are you guilty as charged?

Come say hello to me on Twitter

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

Social Media – Sometimes it pays to say nothing – by Kelly Forbes

April 14, 2011 By 8 Comments

 

You’re an idiot and your product never works, I’m so never buying here again

You suck…

Ah social media, a happy place where everyone loves each other and no one is ever nasty or mean. Your brand is adored by all and the only things people have to say about you are sweet and nice. Of course the reality is that you are just as likely to be subjected to sarcastic, rude and down right abusive comments in social media as you are anywhere else. The big difference in social media is the speed (light speed it seems at times) at which things can turn ugly if you don’t have some guidelines in place to help.

Having clear terms of engagement is something that’s often skipped over when considering social media policies. (If you have them at all that is.) Most times it’s left to your own judgement when deciding who you should and shouldn’t respond to and if you haven’t invested any kind of training in to the staff who manage your social media you may end up like these cautionary tales.

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

The state of Corporate Social Media in 2011 [Stats]

April 8, 2011 By 1 Comment

 

Never before has the term ‘theatre of public opinion’ been so applicable – with the growth of social media, companies are constantly in the spotlight.  Twitter, Facebook and other platforms have changed the way that businesses communicate, market their brand messages and engage with their consumers – this is old hat now, we are already (or should be) socially aware!

It’s common to see brands with hundreds of thousands of followers and friends – clearly the chance for interaction has never been greater. Yet in a recent Twitter survey, 53% of corporate accounts did not ‘humanise’ their brand, 68% had less than 1,000 followers, and 15% were completely inactive – hardly an example of social media best practice!

Social media has many powers – to engage, alienate, create mistrust and make us customers for life who will continue to be brand ambassadors for as long as companies value our relationship. A pretty empowering marketing tool then……and therefore it’s rather unsurprising that corporate take-up has been so significant!

  • 79 out of the Fortune 100 are using social media as major channel for their marketing and communications
  • 88% of surveyed US companies say that their budget will increase for social media in 2011

But is there more to come from corporate social media adoption? Will 2011 show us new, innovative ways companies can leverage its power to improve their business? Will brands continue to take social media seriously?

In my opinion the answer to all of the above questions is an emphatic ‘yes’ – and I would expect you share that view. It’s a view backed up by a recent survey carried out by the team here at Useful Social Media. Of US companies surveyed in 2011, 100% said that they were placing an increasing importance on social media as a marketing tool.

And social media as simply a marketing tool is only the start. The survey results indicate 2011 will be an interesting year! Although we can’t predict the future, we have been able to make some educated guesses on how corporate social media will change and evolve over the next twelve months.

The briefing written about our survey results is called ‘The State of Corporate Social Media in 2011’.  Our aim in producing the document was to put together solid facts and statistics on corporate social media adoption; along with information on how this adoption will evolve. The briefing covers:

• How large business organises social media expertise within their organisation

• Current and predicted budget levels for social media

• The development from social media as a marketing tool to its broader role within business

• An investigation into the differences in corporate social media between Europe and the USA

To get your copy of the briefing click here.

Is your corporate business making best use of the social media channel? What challenges are you facing, tell us in the comments below and let’s see if we can all help.

Thanks to Harry Rollason from usefulsocialmedia.com for this guest post and great stats. Check their site for further insight and data.

 

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

Tech & Web 2.0 Changing Consumer Purchasing (Experian stats) by Claire Field

April 2, 2011 By 5 Comments

 

Life used to be simple. Options were few and far between, and we knew what we were getting into. You were either an A person or a B person, who when you needed to make a purchase would ask your friends, though you’d typically already know their answer as it was likely they’d be an A or a B person like you.

OK, so it’s never been that clear cut, but shopping did used to be a lot simpler. Nowadays:

  • 10% of consumers use their mobile in-store to check prices of goods elsewhere before purchasing.
  • 5% of respondents have actively sought feedback on a purchase in store from Twitter or Facebook.
  • 4% of all those surveyed will make a purchase based on an offer sent to them based on location eg Facebook Places.
  • 60% of food sales are influenced by online activity, rising to 80-90% for other categories.
  • 40% of respondents use price comparison sites before purchasing electrical or white goods.
  • 20% of commodity-type purchases are influenced by reviews.
  • 12% say their purchasing decisions influenced by voucher code sites and collaborative buying sites like Groupon.

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Filed Under: Consumer Opinion, Guest Blogging, Social Media Stats Tagged With: , , , ,