The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Crowdsourcing

Aliza Sherman has an excellent new book on the dynamics of crowdsourcing, The Complete Idot’s GUide to Crowding. While I have never been crazy about “Idiot” guides to anything, this book is far from a guide on an idiot would use. As Sherman points out, crowdsourcing leverages social networking ecosystems and tools, as Facebook and Twitter, in order to tap into the power of many people. In this guide, Sherman explains not only the the theory, but athed practice of crowdsourcing and actually shows readers how to use it. 
• A practical, prescriptive guide for those who want to put the ideas in such books as The Wisdom of Crowds and Here Comes Everybody into action.
• Step-by-step instructions. 
• Insightful anecdotes from the world of crowdsourcing.

 

Five, no Six Types of Social Media Integration

In John Bell’s recent article “Five Types of Social Media Integration,” he identifies five key ways that companies need to integrate their social media activity within the organization. Integration is important because, ” to get the most out of social media, brands need to integrate it across the enterprise.” While many have noted this in the past, few have identify key elements of such integration.

Five basic type of integration:

1. Paid, Owned, Earned – Combining the power behind your own Web site and Facebook page, with some purely social strategies like engaging influencers or inspiring a community to share with sympathetic advertising geared to increasing reach and presence you will have a more successful program.

2. Global & Local – Big multinationals in B2B and B2C often split budgets between the corporate center, often called ‘global’ and the local market.

3. Across the Enterprise – HR, IT, Legal, Finance and Product Development are just three examples beyond the marcom and customer service units that are increasingly affected by social media.

4. Inside & Outside the Organization – Addresses what does the staff at the brand do and what do their agencies do.

5. Inside Every Job – Brands need to work hard to deliver the training that will help grow proficiency and confidence.

I could be wrong, but there might be one missing integration point, or at least one that could be more transparent:

6. Throughout the Value Chain – The value any company deliveries to its customers is the result of a complex set of inter-connections up and down the business value chain. Their products come from supplies, which in turn are customers of someone else. No company is an island in that they can not truly do it all themselves. As such, it becomes an imperative to integrate, if not merely coordinate, social media through the value change. At a minimum, this process reduces message conflict, and at best, adds real value to all consumers.

The Rise of the QR Code

 

Geoff Livingston capture my attention with a comprehensive review of the QR code adoption. I agree with his assertion, this is the “ultimate expression of technology and identity, transcending online and physical space.” While QR codes raise numerous privacy issues, they are still a great example of technology innovation.

 

Here are my top five favorite QR related articles from Mashable’s QR News and Review:

Why QR Codes Are Poised to Hit the Mainstream

MOBILEThe QR code, or quick response code, is simply a two-dimensional bar code that came into being in 1994 and found a large audience in Japan. Stateside, however, QR codes — while clever for tying real-world objects to online content…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HOW TO: Create and Deploy Your Own QR Codes

MOBILEWhat’s black and white and super-confusing to wrap your head around? If you’re unfamiliar with QR codes, not to worry. Those fuzzy boxes on business cards and promotional swag are easily scannable information barcodes. Essentially, you point your camera at…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why the Best Online Marketing May Be Headed Offline

BUSINESSHamilton Chan is CEO of Paperlinksand Paperspring. Through its iPhone app and QR web platform, the just-launched Paperlinks platform makes context-sensitive marketing plug-and-play for small, medium and large businesses.

The hyperlink is the fundamental building block of the Internet…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

QR Codes Help Consumers Shop for Wine

BUSINESSSelecting the right wine for every occasion is a form of art most of us only pretend to understand. That’s why Lion Nathan Wine Group, a wine owner and importer, has put QR codes on wine bottles to help everyday…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Find and Redeem Location-Based Coupons on Your iPhone or Android

MOBILEThis post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details…

 

 

Gartner’s Top Ten Enterprise Social Media Success Factors

Tom Austin, an analyst at Gartner, has just released the results of a multi-national client-based study on success criteria for social and collaborative investments. While not necessarily scientific in nature (e.g., meeting the strict definition of necessary and sufficient criteria), it is hard to argue with the practicality of the final results.

Here is a summary of Austin’s top ten rules:

1. Define what constitutes success in using social media.

2. Get agreement with the business lines on success/failure criteria.

3. Study existing work patterns and add value selectively – lessons learned from others pay big success dividends.

4. Ignore “siren call” of social and infrastructure merchants.

5. Evaluate the culture(s) in your organization and work within your cultural constraints.

6. To make progress with the new, it needs to be 10x better than the old in order to be adopted within your organization.

7. Not everyone is an expert! Build a variety of skills (what is done) and capabilities (how well it is done).

8. Users will go outside the social media model if you make it too difficult for them to understand and work.

9. Minimalism is to be revered – less is more.

10.   Be organizationally inclusive at start – involve cross departmental groups like legal, ops, security, etc.

Week 13: Practical Aspects of Social Media (PAOSM) Tweet (Recap)

Week 13: Practical Aspects of Social Media (PASM) Tweats (recap) Here is a recap of the thirteenth week’s worth of Practical Aspects of Social Media (PASM) Tweats:

61/101 Buy in for social media necessary for success. Employees should start tweeting. http://tinyurl.com/2ase9rj

 

62/101 Benchmarking social media activities necessary for success. How do you measure up? http://bit.ly/diEVTD

 

63/101 Social Media Vitality Index (smVI) measures success of company marketing programs. http://bit.ly/c02hYt

 

64/101 Brands need to present consumers with a human face when they engage with  social media.  http://bit.ly/dmFXqO

 

65/101 Companies need to clear #policies of what can/can’t be said thru social networks while  at work. http://bit.ly/dBm8Yt

Previous weeks:

Week 12’s recap here

Week 11’s recap here

Week 10’s recap here

Week 9’s recap here

Week 8’s recap here

Week 7’s recap here

Week 6’s recap here

Week 5’s recap here

Week 4’s recap here

Week 3’s recap here

Week 2’s recap here

Week 1’s recap here

70 Social Media Facts for 2010

Sorav Jain at Social Media Today has compiled a set of wide ranging social media-oriented facts for 2010. No matter what your take is on social media, this is most like some tidbit of information that will be of interest.

General Facts

1. Australia has the most number of established users of social media in the world, followed by USA and UK.

2. In terms of the impact of social networks on advertising, word of mouth is the popular option with 78% of customers trust peer recommendations on sites. While, only 14% trust advertisements.

3. Advertising has also been impacted greatly because of social media with only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive return on investment.

4. Facebook, Blogspot followed by Myspace are the top sites visited by under 18s.

5. An average user becomes a fan of 2 pages every month.

6. 24 out of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing declines in circulations because the news reaches users in other formats.

7. 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are linked to user-generated content.

8. *In a sample survey of 2884 people across 14 countries, 90% of participants know at least one social networking site.

9. * In a sample survey of 2884 people across 14 countries,72% of participants of the internet population are active on at least 1 networking sites. The top 3 countries part of at least 1 network site was Brazil (95%), USA (84%), and Portugal (82%).

10. * In a sample survey of 2884 people across 14 countries, users of social networking sites are saturated. Connected people feel no need to further expand their membership on other social network sites.

11. * In a sample survey of 2884 people across 14 countries, on an average, users log in twice a day to social networking sites and 9 times a month on professional websites.

12. * In a sample survey of 2884 people across 14 countries, sending personal messages is the most popular online activity. The top 5 activities online are sending personal messages, watching photos, checking status, reacting to others’ status, and uploading pictures.

13. * In a sample survey of 2884 people across 14 countries, people have about 195 friends on an average.

Source: •

*Online sample survey of 2,884 consumers spread over 14 countries between the age of 18 to 55 years old by Online Media Gazette.

 

Facebook Facts

14. Facebook has over 500 million users.

15.If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 3rd largest country.

16. An average Facebook user spends about 55 minutes a day on the site.

17. An average Facebook user spends about 6.50 hours a week on the site.

18. The average Facebook user spends 1.20 days a month on the site.

19. Facebook’s translation application support over 100 languages.

20. There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)

21. Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events

22. Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month

23. More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.

24. ** In a sample survey of 2884 people across 14 countries, Facebook is studied to have the highest penetration. The top 3 sites include Facebook (51%), MySpace (20%), and Twitter (17%).

25. **Over 300,000 users translate the site through the translations application.

26. **Over 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month.

27. **Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites are integrated with Facebook.

28. **There are over 100 million active users accessing Facebook currently through their mobile devices.

Source:

• *Online sample survey of 2,884 consumers spread over 14 countries between the age of 18 to 55 years old by Online Media Gazette.

• ** Statistics from Facebook press office.

YouTube Facts

29. The most popular YouTube video – Justin Bieber, Baby ft. Ludacris has had over 374,403,983 views

30. ** YouTube receives over 2 billion viewers each day.

31. ** 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube by users every minute.

32. ** 70% of YouTube users are from the United States.

33. ** More than half of YouTube’s users are under the age of 20.

34. ** To watch all the videos currently on YouTube, a person has to live for around 1,000 years.

35. ** YouTube is available across 19 countries and in 12 languages.

36. ** Music videos account for 20% of uploads on YouTube.

Source:

• ** Statistics from YouTube press centre.

 

Blogger Facts

37. There are over 181 million blogs.

38. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.

39. ** The age group for 60% of bloggers is 18-44 years.

40. ** One in five bloggers updates their blogs every day.

41. ** Two thirds of bloggers are male.

42. ** Corporate blogging accounts for 14% of blogs.

43. ** 15% of bloggers spend 10 hours a week blogging.

44. ** More than half of all bloggers are married and/or parents.

45. ** More than 50% of bloggers have more than one blog.

Source:

• ** Statistics from Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2009.

 

Tweet Facts

46. 54% of bloggers post content or tweet on a daily basis.

47. 80% of Twitter users use Twitter on mobile devices.

48. There have been over 50 million tweets in 2010.

49. The 10 billionth Twitter’s tweet was posted in March 2010.

50. **There are over 110 million users of Twitter currently.

51. **180 million unique users access Twitter each month.

52. **More than 600 million searches happen on Twitter every day.

Source:

• Box Hill Institute: Box Hill Institute (Social Media at Box Hill Institute)

• **Statistics from Twitter and the Chirp Conference.

 

LinkedIn Facts

53. Of the 60 million users of LinkedIn half of them are from outside US.

54. By March 2010 Australia alone had over 1 million LinkedIn users.

55. 80% companies use LinkedIn as a recruitment tool.

56. **Every second a new member joins LinkedIn.

57. **Almost 12 million unique visitors visit LinkedIn every day.

58. ** LinkedIn has executives from all Fortune 500 companies.

59. **1-in-20 LinkedIn profiles are accounted by recruiter.

Source:

• ** Statistics from LinkedIn press centre and SysComm International.

 

Wikipedia Facts

60. If $1 was paid to you for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156 per hour.

61. *Wikipedia has the maximum number of articles at 3 million articles. This is followed by, German (1.08 million), French (958,000), Italian (697,000), and Spanish (608,000).

62. **69% of users edit Wikipedia to fix errors.

63. **73% of Wikipedia users edit Wikipedia because they want to share knowledge.

64. **4.4% editors of Wikipedia’s are PhD’s, 19% of the editors hold master degrees.

65. **Bad weather usually results in more number of updates in Wikipedia.

66. **13% of the editors on Wikipedia are women.

Source:

• Social Media Today

• * http://www.axleration.com/15-interesting-facts-about-wikipedia/

• ** http://pochp.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/surprising-facts-about-wikipedia/

 

Foursquare Facts

67. Over the last first year of Foursquare, it has more than half a million users, 1.4 million venues, and 15.5 million check-ins.

68. * Foursquare is five times larger than Gowalla.

69. * Foursquare is growing 75% faster than Gowalla each day.

70. **Foursquare passed the 3 million users milestone in August 2010.

 

Social Media Vitality Index (smVI)

We are all looking for good measuresß and metrics to judge our social media success upon, but few allow us to achieve this outcome as well as the Social Media Vitality Index (smVM). smVI simply measures the amount of revenue from new social media programs over the last 12 months compared to all other revenue generated by marketing services, expressed in percentage (%). For example, if your social media program contributed $5M of the total $100M in revenue, for the last 12 months, then you have a smVI  of 5%. Socially healthy companies, it is desirable to have smVI between 10%-20%. Translated, the revenue of the company will turnover every 5-10 years based solely on social interactions alone. Not bad. See PAOSM 63/101.

 

Social Media Spending Increasing To Create Top line Revenue

Understanding how other companies respond uncertain economic conditions might not immediately help in dealing with day-to-day activities, but contextual benchmarking does help elevate the fear that one might be going it alone. A recent study conducted by Duke University and the American Marketing Association, documented the rise of hiring, budgets, and social media spend over next year, is one such benchmark. While the economy continues to move sluggishly ,it does appear that companies are seeing value in investing on most things social media. Here is a brief summary of the key research results:

CMO’s are focusing mostly on market penetration (sustaining innovation), secondly on new products for new markets (disruptive innovation):

>> Market penetration (sustaining innovation – introducing current products and services to current markets): 44%

>> Product and service development (sustaining innovation – creating and introducing new products and services to current markets): 26%

>> Market development (sustaining innovation – adapting current products and services to new markets): 18%

>> Diversification (disruptive innovation – new products/services to new markets): 13%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, it looks like companies are still holding onto deriving revenue from their current base. While the “why this is true” has not been addressed in the study, anecdotal data tends to support the notion that companies have not yet found “systematic approach for capturing value in new markets.” It appears that most find this kind of disruptive activity very difficult, a point I address in other blog postings (e.g., Reinventing Innovation).

Social Media offers growth potential in effort to capture value (monetization):

>> Social media budgets will grow from 5.6% to 9.9% this year.

>> Over the next five years, social media budgets will increase to 17.7% of the total marketing spend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

B2B (business to business) outpaces B2C (business to consumer) spending and outcome expectations:

>> B2B companies plan the greatest increase in social media spending this year, jumping to 11% from 6.5% last year.

>> B2C services continues to grow from 2.9% to 6.9%.

>> Social media spending is expected to jump from 7.5% to 11.6% within the next year and upwards of 19% over the next five years.

>> B2B product and B2B services will scale to 15.3% and 18.9% respectively.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social media experience and skill necessary for success; as such, hiring on the rise:

 

>>50%f of companies expect to hire new media marketers 2010

>> 61.4% and 77.5% will fill new marketing roles 2011 and 2012, respectively.

>> Only 27% are expected to look at university graduates.

>> The most sought-after skill sets include: Internet marketing, innovation and growth, social CRM, and brand managemen

 

Coexistence – Human and Artificially Intelligent Tweeting

I had planned on writing a comprehensive article on the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Tweet world. It had been a while since I had looked into the viability of the field and I felt a lot had probably changed over the last 12 months, much of which had probably not been well documented. Well, I was half right.

During my research, I came across an article “Automating Twitter: Can Humans & Robots Tweet in Harmony?” by Lauren Litwinka. Lauren does a great job at covering all the basics, so rather than try to rewrite what has already been written so well, I thought it best to just share and point out some of the hightlights.

If you are planning to use social media as part of your corporate marketing program, then developing a Tweet Bot strategy is essential for your success. It is impractical to think we humans can keep up with all the necessary activities associated with an effective tweet-based social media program. Scan for tweets, understanding their content, managing account, looking for effective followers, etc., overwhelms our limited ability. A human based tweet-oriented social media system will not scale on the backs of human. Think I’m wrong, just ask JetBlue or Starbucks.

An effective tweet-oriented program requires you to think about:

>> Leveraging Automation to Help Building Relationships

>> Leveraging Automation to Help Manage Your Account

>> Leveraging Automation to Help Enhance Your Tweets

>> Leveraging Automation to Help with Tracking & Monitoring

Lauren gives several solutions in each category, so check out her well written article. With this as a basis, we now need to address the question of whether these solutions have some meaningful return on investment; that is, can we capture value as well as they create it? This is the basis of my next article.

Corporate Tweets – Rubber Meets the Road

Tweeting in your social media network can be a challenge, one complicated when you look to use it for more corporate marketing activities. Not only do we have the traditional 140 character limitations, but crafting that right message that is both interesting and professional is more art than science.

Folks have written at length on some of the necessary (without them you fail) and sufficient (done in large numbers you might succeed) characteristics of social media-based tweeting. Victoria Akers, in her “Mastering the Art of Good Tweet to Promote Your News” article, lays the foundations for seven necessary tweeting characteristics. John Kremer goes even farther in his eBook, Twitter Mania Manual, by discussing over 151 ways to tweet and other sufficient tweeting characteristics. All-in-all, good advice from everybody.

At some point, however, the rubber needs to meet the road and theory needs to be turned into practice. You have to take that blank white page and begin to craft words that work. Cognitively, this is the most difficult time for most people, since humans are better critics than creators.

To get over his hurdle, I suggest the time tested method of “just doing something.” Putting that first test tweet on a blank page will get the eyes, brain, and hand feedback process working. Studies have shown that right after that first brainstorm sentence, 5-9 nine others will immediate follow. Remember, it’s easier to correct than to create.

When looking at those early tweets, consider the following characteristics in your maturation process:

>> Not say what they are doing, say why.

>> Be kept simple – no fluff.

>> Be personal – use first person (I, he, she) language.

>> Use hash tags (#) – make more search friendly

>> Leave room for others to retweet – 120 characters, at max.

With this preamble as a basis for discussion, here is a real example from a current client.

Client: Large producer of whole house media (audio and video), lighting, and control systems.

Program: Increase sales of a popular whole house audio systems that streams personal content as well as cloud-base music (e.g., Rhapsody).

Social Media Component: Being one of many components, prospects will be giving a chance to tweet their discovery of this new whole house audio capability.

Goal: Create a series of tweets that can auto populate “Tweet Now” buttons presented at the end of a registration process

Candidate Tweets:

1.

Strongly recommend you checkout #theProduct; life will be great when I can listen to #music throughout the #house. <<shorten url to website>>

2.

Had it with limited ability to listen to #music throughout my #house. Considering buying #theProduct. <<shorten url to website>>

3.

Don’t know how they do it yet, but #theProduct will let me listen to #music throughout #house. Check them out. <<shorten url to website>>

4.

I want to do it throughout the house! Considering #theProduct as a way to listen to #music everywhere. <<shorten url to website>>

Shorten URL:

tinyurl:  http://tinyurl.com

So, what do you think? Are they effective? How can they be improved? Would like to see your thoughts and suggestions.