A Facebook Contest Gone Wrong

by Todd Nilson on January 12, 2012

image of two paths diverging in a wooded setting (two paths. choose one. With thanks to RyanBSchultz via Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License)

There are no shortcuts when it comes to social media contests... only diverging paths

Contests run via social media are no shortcut to “viral” success and overnight Return On Investment.

Over on the Innovation Excellence blog, Braden Kelley relates a negative experience with a Facebook contest that backfired due to poor planning and inconsistent application of its own rules. Of particular interest is the lack of integration Kelley mentions: “I never saw the contest mentioned anywhere – including in my utility bill [it was for a non-profit energy organization] – a friend of mine who enters contests as a hobby suggested that I enter – so I did.”

It’s not uncommon to see companies where the social media manager has been walled off from the marketing group, resulting in skewed expectations around how social media efforts ought to perform and in some cases an antipathetic relationship. An organization that follows a framework approach to social media and leverages a cross-functional team drawn from different parts of the organization stands a much better chance of avoiding these pitfalls.

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What is your social media pH?

by Todd Nilson on January 9, 2012

My Fish Tank by Russell Yarrell

What's the pH of your social media?

 

Social media return on investment is notoriously difficult to quantify as I have referenced here and here. Part of the difficulty in achieving that quantification is that it’s something that affects the entire business ecosystem rather than directly influencing any one part of it.

As a child, I kept tropical fish. Well, to absolutely honest, my dad took care of them and I helped from time to time! But I did feel that they were my pets. Anybody who keeps tropical fish knows that you have to manage the acidity of the water or your fish die.

It occurred to me during a conversation with a colleague last week: that’s exactly how social media operates. Social media is an element of the business ecosystem that can either make transactions more or less likely to flourish, but it’s nearly impossible to say with certainty that this activity has led directly to that sale.

A skeptical CEO is always going to have a problem with that if he or she does not acknowledge the type of investment being made or enters into a social media implementation with unrealistic expectations.

I suppose I could have compared it to global warming, too, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish….

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A plethora of 2012 social marketing and new media predictions

January 5, 2012

Predictions for trends in social media and new media abound in 2012. Here’s one of the longer reports I have come across. It’s from Awareness, a social media marketing software company. There’s a lot in this update to digest. Enjoy and happy new year!

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Chicago’s Top 10 Companies Who Use Social Media Marketing Effectively

January 3, 2012

Yesterday, Crains posted a top ten list of Chicago companies who are most effective at using social media. I have to assume that they limited this to large enterprises since I’m not seeing any of the usual suspects from the realm of startups or social media darlings like GrubHub or Groupon. There were a few [...]

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When Will Your Social Media Strategy Show ROI? (Part 2)

November 16, 2011

Can a cogent argument for positive social media ROI ever be put in front of a company’s executives? In Part 1 of this series on social media ROI, I looked at two of the top Google results and outlined their arguments in brief. From an executive perspective, neither argument seemed to be particularly effective to [...]

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When Will Your Social Media Strategy Show ROI? (Part 1)

November 15, 2011

Of the many executives I speak with on the topic of social media strategy, the question of when social media engagement will translate to ROI arises every time. However, when you look at the top, most influential links on Google for “social media ROI” we find an interesting disconnect. Unsurprisingly, among the top 5 is [...]

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Social Business Experimentation and Enabling Failure Agility

September 14, 2011

Your social business plan needs to build in a tolerance for failure during attempts to innovate—in other words… agility. Although IBM didn’t mint the idea of social business, they have certainly taken up the standard and become proponents of the approach as is pointed out by an article from this week’s Fast Company FC Expert [...]

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65% of US Adults now use social media, Pew Internet says

August 26, 2011

New research has just been released by Pew Internet detailing how social media usage by U.S. adults has continued to grow. Of particular interest in the report is the age data: While the youngest demographic continues to dominate social media usage, the 65+ age category still garners an impressive one in three social media users. Also [...]

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Social Media Non-Strategies

July 23, 2011

Is your social media strategy nothing more than fluff and wishful thinking? In The perils of bad strategy, published by McKinsey, Professor Richard Rumelt outlines a few of the bad habits we’ve gotten into when building business strategies. Failure to Face the Problem The inability to define a problem, says Rumelt, has to be one of [...]

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“I just ripped one sweet tweet” … social media isn’t just for the young

June 30, 2011

I spotted this great video today from HNi, a non-traditional insurance brokerage. I’ve presented to more than one insurance organization over the past year that expressed an interest in being engaged with social media but ultimately decided to stand around with their hands in their pockets over the usual reasons: perceived risk, fear of litigation, [...]

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