Americans spend nearly a quarter of their time online on social networking sites and blogs, up from 15.8 percent just a year ago (43 percent increase) according to new research from The Nielsen Company. The research revealed that Americans spend a third their online time (36 percent) communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging.
A senior PR agent at a large agency once said to me, rather cynically, that if a client asks ‘can you do this?’ the answer is always yes, then you go and figure out how to do it.
No doubt there’s a bit of this when it comes to online pr and social media, levels of purported expertise vary hugely, so here are seven questions I’d recommend asking a prospective online pr agency/agent, to establish if they really ‘eat their own dog food’.
1) Do they write a blog? If they aren’t blogging at all, put the phone down or call a taxi. If they’re blogging less than once a week, you have to question their content led online pr strategy – do they really believe in it?
2) How many connections do they have on LinkedIn? – Anything less than 100 connections and they’re playing at it.
3) Are they a mayor of anywhere on Foursquare? OK, this is quite new but if they say yes, you’re talking to a proper social media geek that’s interested in what’s next, not just what’s popular now. More »
B2B marketers are equally split in their take up of blogs and social media and are bottom line focussed, a US survey has found.
50% of B2B marketers in the Genius.com/BtoB magazine survey said they don’t blog, 49% don’t use Twitter, 43% don’t use Facebook and 25% don’t use LinkedIn.
Many are also not using Adwords or SEO tools.
The key success measurement for B2B marketers is revenue, with 61% focussed on revenue generation, followed by sales agreements (40%) and qualified leads (39%).
Over five times more marketers cite revenue generation as a key metric than they do website traffic or impressions (12%) or click-through rates (12%).
Twitter is the preferred tool of marketers, closely followed by Facebook, a survey by online business magazine, SocialMediaExaminer.com has found.
The 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, which canvassed opinion from almost 2,000 marketers, indicated that 88% of marketers use Twittter, while 87% use Facebook.
In third place was the online professional networking platform, LinkedIn, with 78% usage while 70% used blogs. Online video sites such as YouTube had the next-highest usage rate, at 46%.
An earlier version of this survey, released in 2009, found that blogs were in second place at 79%, and Facebook in fourth place at 77%. This would suggest that Facebook is growing in popularity for marketing and PR purposes. Another interesting finding was that men were significantly more likely than women to use YouTube or other video marketing tools. More »
The use of LinkedIn for B2B sales prospecting has increased by 47.8% since last year, according to US research from OneSource, reported in Emarketer.
Around 20 percent of those polled were also increasing their use of blogs, Facebook and Twitter for prospecting purposes, though the overall majority still do not use social media for prospecting.
The most popular approach for gaining qualified leads remains outbound prospecting, which was rated 3.7 out of five for effectiveness, followed by the company website (2.9), inbound calls (2.6), email campaigns (2.6), shows & events (2.5), social networking (2.1) , direct mail (2.1) and webinars (1.8).
In January Hubspot research showed that 45% of US companies who have used LinkedIn for marketing had acquired a customer through the site. Company blogs were considered effective for 43% of respondents, while Twitter for 38% and Facebook for 33%.
Grammy award winning musician Alicia Keys is looking to recruit a ‘Head Blogger’ for her website ‘I am a superwoman’ – www.IAAS.com, reports Brandweek.
The advertisement, posted on Monster explains that Alicia Key’s voice has reached millions, but now she needs help “to blast it into the blogosphere”.
The goal of the site is “is to create an online community connecting, inspiring, and broadcasting important topics related to women”. the advert says. “You will be the main voice of the website aiming to motivate and encourage women all over the globe!”
Final candidates are to be interviewed in New York as part of a news segment on a national TV network morning show and in London, at the Black Ball.
80% of visitors to company blogs are coming for the first time, a survey from Compendium has revealed.
The findings suggest that a company blog is more important as a new business tool than was previously thought.
First time visitors come from two major sources, referring sites and search engines, confirming that good quality content that is keyword optimised, will pull traffic to company sales funnels.
Research amongst Furlong PR customers suggests that 75% of blog traffic comes from social networking sites and 25% from SEO.
Compendium’s survey also looked at use of Twitter. Approximately 43 percent of companies surveyed had established a Twitter account.
Twitter usage was highest among B-to-B companies with 87 percent maintaining an account.
Ben Southall, the Briton who won the ‘best job in the world’ competition to be Queensland Tourist Board’s PR representative this summer has confessed the six month experience has left him tired out and in need of, yes, a holiday.
During his tenure as a one man publicity machine the tourist board calculate that Southall posted sixty blogs on www.islandreefjob.com representing 75,000 words, along with 2000 photo uploads and 750 tweets.
“It was a job that needed 18 to 19 hours work every day,” he said. “Not just the interviews and the social side of it, but also sitting up late at night blogging and uploading pictures, it’s very time consuming.”
The demands on the normally indefatigable Southall’s time show through in his recent Twitter posts: “Bashing out the last of this years blogs – its Boxing Day what on earth am I doing!?!”
Leaving no social media channel unploughed, Southall also recorded 47 video diaries, the last of which is below.
It’s not all over for Southall though, Queensland Tourism have rehired him on an 18 month six figure contract to promote Queensland around the world. Meanwhile, he’s got a few, very well deserved days off.
The standout figure for me from Econsultancy/Bigmouthmedia’s Social Media & Online PR research is that 54% of companies see lack of resources as the main barrier to better customer engagement.
Tell me about it, maintaining a daily blog or any other type of regular online content is no frivolous task. No way most companies are going to pull that off without some outside help. While content is hard, you can at least measure the bejesus out of it.
No more mealy mouthed EAV (equivalent advertising value) conjecture for online PR, oh no, the free magic that is Google analytics will tell you exactly how well each post is doing (I have big hopes for this one).
So while there are thousands of similar, fit looking 27 year old footballers turning out all over the country on a Saturday, there’s only one that scored 5 goals in a Premiership match last week. How a good blog became Jermain Defoe I’m not sure, I’m not even a Tottenham fan. What I do know, is he’s a goal scorer (pick him Fabio), as is this week’s Ad Age top ranked viral from Heineken:
Embedded this at the bottom of a post on Wednesday but it really deserves separate billing, especially on a Friday. Indebted to @gsterling at Local Social Summit#lss09 for showing it to us.
80% of visitors to company blogs are coming for the first time, a survey from Compendium has revealed.
Ben Southall, the Briton who won the ‘best job in the world’ competition to be Queensland Tourist Board’s PR representative this summer has confessed the six month experience has left him tired out and in need of, yes, a holiday.
The standout figure for me from Econsultancy/Bigmouthmedia’s 