As someone who has a background in marketing to the financial services industry, and who is also social media consultant, I have been watching, with interest, some of the forays into the social web by companies like Vanguard and Fidelity. I have also noticed that many who profess to be holding back on entering into social media actually have most of their registered reps active on LinkedIn and Facebook, but have no real policies in place to guide and support their reps.

Financial Services & Social Media White Paper

I remember that there was a lag time between when email and the Web 1.0 world began to dominate how companies communicated, and when FINRA (the financial services regulatory authority) was able to address this new technology. While these forms of communications were, basically, electronic versions of paper-based communications, the social web is not only more complex, but it supports conversations and information sharing where there is equal participation by all involved. Companies can guide, but not ultimately, control theses conversations, and they definitely cannot control the technology that supports social sites.

I don’t envy FINRA’s task ... read more >>

The Federal Communications Commission will submit to Congress on Tuesday a 10-year plan that aims to make high-speed Internet the dominant communication medium in the U.S.:

The blueprint reflects the government’s view that broadband Internet is becoming the common medium of the United States, gradually displacing the telephone and broadcast television industries.

Sentiment analysis is generating blog headlines again. After reading about the non-response bias of automated sentiment analysis, and that it has no place in social media monitoring, I decided to run a sentiment analysis on sentiment analysis (apparently I like that phrase). I have an account on Biz360 Community from my current project (look for it next week), so I tossed it a quick query and found that the recent buzz was mostly… positive? Hmm.

Here's the thing. Sentiment is not the golden metric. Virtually every social media analysis platform can show you a pie chart on sentiment. At best, it's a first glance—which way is up. Unless you go deeper into the data, all you're looking at is a mood ring.

At the very least, you need to compare sentiment across brands and over time. Yay, it went up! Aw, it went down.

Oh, look, ... read more >>

Perhaps the most difficult aspects of Social Media to embrace are the changes in our behavior and overall philosophy it necessitates in order to earn relevance and ultimately prominence in consumer hearts, minds, and markets.

Simply put, Social Media makes us vulnerable and officially ends an era of perceived control threaded by the illusion of invincibility.

Everything we thought we knew and valued is now in dire need of reassessment. We are entering into a time when we are affected by voiced sentiment in the public spotlight and backchannels of the social Web. What we hear, see and observe can and should touch us.

Businesses are now responsible for not only delivering beneficial products and services, but poignant, personalized, and aspirational experiences as well. This is true today and tomorrow as we compete for the future that is revealed through the actions and words of the people we wish to reach and inspire.

In Social Media, We are All Brand Managers

The process of evaluating, measuring, and defining brand stature was once relegated to a brand manager, expert, or team and shaped by a top-down process of activities designed to reinforce the message and personae. ...

If you run an ecommerce business, chances are your customers – regardless of their age, gender or economic status – are active on social networks and social media sharing sites.

Just consider the statistics from social media monitoring site Pingdom:

• Males and females almost equally use social sites (47% vs. 53%)
• 61% of Facebook users are middle aged or older, with the average age being 37
• 18- to 24-year-olds don’t dominate any particular social networking site; they’re spread out all over

The bottom line: If you aren’t discovering which in social networking channels your customers spend time and include them in your ecommerce marketing mix, you’re probably  missing out on building relationships, community and increasing new customer acquisition through online word of mouth.

Leverage these five social media marketing tips for ecommerce to either get started with more social digital marketing or take your current social strategy to the next level:

1. Go Where Your Customers Are

Very few things in life promise endless options – digital and social media marketing being one exception. From Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn to YouTube, there’s no limit to the ... read more >>

I was asked recently by a potential client what my “philosophy of the web” is. What seemed like a strange question at first made perfect sense when I thought about it.

"mediocrity now howls in protest" by Hugh MacLeod

Without sounding overly simplistic, I think there are 3 types of businesses on the web:

1. Ones that try to milk or exploit the web (think spammers, Zynga, the “make millions on Google” crowd). These people aren’t always dirtbags nor are they breaking the law but they’re looking to take everything they can get without giving much back.
2. Ones that just see the web as another medium to conduct business. Decisions on the web are made the same way any other decision in the business is made. Should we change our health care provider? Should we move our office to another city? Should we invest time in a Facebook page?
3. Ones that have a sincere passion for the web and what it can do for people. These are people who contribute valuable work to open source projects, manage vibrant communities of people, and write about these things because they can’t help themselves.

I whole-heartedly fall into the third category; I love the web and everything it can do. ... read more >>

Plenty of bloggers are talking about the inevitable intersection of social media marketing and search engine optimization. Keyword optimized social content and channels of promotion provide abundant signals to search engines for improved visibility on standard, social and real-time search.

The changing nature of social media marketing and optimization create the need for tools whether for research, marketing and promotion or analytics. Here are 11 social media and SEO tools you might find useful:

• howsociable.com – Social visibility score
• knowem.com – Profile building tool
• Social Media for Firefox – Build a powerful social profile on social news & bookmarking sites
• semrush.com – Find competitor organic search rankings
• Google Insights – Keyword demand trends
• Page Inlink Analyzer – Analyze inbound links, their Delicious bookmarks & keyword tags
• majesticseo.com – Historical back-link tracking
• trackur.com – Social media monitoring
• socialmention.com – Real-time social search & scoring, social keyword research
• bit.ly – Search friendly URL shortening with analytics
• analytics.postrank.com – Track social engagement with combined ...