Now that Google+ has reached 20 million users, in order to stay in the social media game you’ll have four services to keep track of. Facebook and Twitter are the obvious big dogs. LinkedIn, the business social network, has been increasing in popularity and importance. With a huge number of initial sign-ups and very positive press, Google+ doesn’t seem to be going away. Most speculate that once more people start using big G’s new network and business pages are integrated, even more growth can be expected.

So how do you manage having a presence on four different social networks? There is no universally correct way. Everyone should develop their own strategy. To help find how others created theirs, I surveyed a group of marketers in the Ann Arbor, Michigan area. All of them have a strong presence on multiple social networks. The survey asked which of the big four networks they use, what their strategy was, and what impact, if any, Google+ has had.

With these tips you can develop a social media strategy that works for you and effecively targets your audience of followers.

Facebook

With over a quarter-billion users, Facebook is the largest social network. One main difference from Twitter and Google+ is that, for both these networks people have to agree to follow each other in order to “become friends.” This fosters a more personal experience. Users tend to know each other before becoming friends.

The usage chart indicates how people surveyed use Facebook. Personal usage is on the far left in darker colors while Networking and Work is lighter and to the right. This same format is used to show usage for the other social networks. As you can see, most use Facebook for personal, family, and entertainment.

“…when I share things that are more personal or family oriented I sometimes go straight to Facebook.”

“Facebook is more oriented toward keeping up with friends and family relationships.”

“I use Facebook to post more about what I am doing and who I am doing it with.”

Twitter

Twitter is a mixed bag of sorts. Usage is spread fairly evenly except for family use. Twitter is the service that tends to “stay out of the way.” They provide a method for you to share 140 characters of thoughts or links with others. The rest is up to you. Even though it is a very simple, limited interface, people often find it the most confusing. Regular users often have found specific ways Twitter can deliver custom news or information to them.

“…I use it as an aggregator of news or stories from reporters/networks I enjoy, bloggers I read, music news I care about…”

“Twitter is just for fun – mostly just follow/tweet my hobbies.”

“(Twitter) has really allowed me to build my personal brand…”

“I often cross post from Twitter.”

People tend to find their own personal use for Twitter. Often times other services feed into Twitter so they may have personal and work topics in the same stream.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn promotes itself as the professional social network. Its more about creating a network of business associates. People you’ve done work for, companies you’ve worked at. Content can be shared but tends to be more focused to business news or the users related industry. You can see from the usage chart that there is a heavy lean towards networking and work.

“LinkedIn is only about professional networking…”

“I’m not posting entertainment stuff on LinkedIn…”

“I use (LinkedIn) for the forums and to keep a professional network. I rarely find the feed interesting but will regularly use it to see who is reading my profile and to have professional contacts…”

Besides being marketed towards professionals, LinkedIn does not allow you to share photos. One major reason it will always lean towards the work and not personal side of the usage chart.

Google+

Do a a Google Search and you will find dozens of reviews for Google+. It combines many features from each of the other big three. So how are people using it? How should you use it?

“Try not to post the same things on each network. Google+ is the only one that may cross that line…”

“Basically it is a good middle ground between Facebook and Twitter for me.”

“…with Circles I can be more precise in who I share with and really tailor content to that group.”

“I think I’ll enjoy it more when I start following the Twitter audience, bloggers, news, companies.”

“Google+ appears to be a composite of the major social media approaches.”

Finding Your Strategy

Your strategy needs to be your personal strategy. Many of those surveyed spoke on tailoring content to your audience. Keep track of who is following you and determine what would interest them.

“Create and build a personal brand through sharing content that is relevant to the audience, while still keeping one main thing in mind: BEING SOCIAL.”

This quote brings up another important point. Be yourself. You can turn off your followers if all you are posting “seven ways to…” or “top five reasons to…” links. Engage your audience. Respond to them. Let them see who you really are while still staying with in the boundaries of the specific social network.

“Be myself and always be transparent. Also, have fun with it!”

“I definitely think transparency is important, but that doesn’t mean post everything all the time. It just means to be aware of conflicting view points and to not get trapped in an echo chamber of similar content and people. This also allows for more interaction, and much more interesting discussion and connections.

So get out there, post, share, and have fun developing your personal social media strategy.

In this era of smart spending, many organizations are evaluating every expense – including domain names. Sure, domains are dirt cheap through many services these days, but if you have a few domain names, and you buy several extensions to each, you’re eventually spending real money.

So, how important is it to maintain the renewals? As with many things in life, “it depends.” In this case, the root questions we can turn to are:

1) Is there a potential impact to your brand if the domain that lapses falls into the hands of a competitor or other site you’d rather not be associated with?

2) If that happened, what would be the cost? That includes the impact on your brand, legal fees, time that could have been spent on proactive efforts, etc.

3) Most importantly, is the savings now worth the risk of what might happen later?

Chances are that makes it a simple question.

The only real gray area is which extensions are important. You’re going to find many differing opinions on which matter, but here’s our take:

The “no brainers” to protect:

• .com
• .net
• .org

For key domain names, consider also:

• .biz
• .info

And if you do business in other countries (or think you might someday):

• reserve the relevant country extensions as well

The next most commonly asked question is – what about .mobi? Personally, I don’t see it taking off. Technology now enables a site to adapt itself to the browser, which is much more elegant (read: user friendly) than forcing people to learn a new domain extension. A quick check of some popular sites reveals even in highly competitive markets, few companies have bothered to reserve a .mobi domain.

If you are interested in doing everything you can be to protect your sites’ domain name (just owning it isn’t always enough!), see also: http://www.circleid.com/posts/help_domain_name_hijacked/.

Also, please note that there are some good ways to maintain the domain names in your organization that you should think about before things get too messy!

At the end of July, Microsoft Research held its 2008 Faculty Summit to survey the state of computing R & D, which this year included a social media summit. A major topic of conversation included the transition of the internet from a network of documents to a network of people.

As participant (host) and Microsoft Scientist Matthew Hurst explains on his blog, “The PageRank era is marked by a very simple link with no explicit meaning and a simple assumption (a positive endorsement).” But this assumption of positive endorsement is becoming unnecessary as more and more direct evidence of people’s opinions and categorizations of content are available online. Research repeatedly reveals that others take notice of human-generated tags and reviews: “consumers report being willing to pay from 20% to 99% more for a 5-star-rated item than a 4-star-rated item (with variance depending on type of item/service)”, is just one example.

Many are excited by how much less processing-intensive the online content tagging process becomes with this trend – clusters of pages and facts seem to grow organically as a result of human tagging. This helps overcome previous problems related to content indexing within info retrieval, such as the gap between the language that the businesses or organizations use to label their content and the terminology preferred by their customers/users.

But there are challenges that arise as well in this transition that are less discussed. Says one scientist, aptly describing the phenomena, “fragmenting media and changing consumer behavior have crippled traditional [media] monitoring methods. Technorati estimates that 75,000 new blogs are created daily, along with 1.2 million new posts each day, many discussing consumer opinions on products and services. Tactics [of the traditional sort] such as clipping services, field agents, and ad hoc research simply can’t keep pace.” Call it what you will: Brand Monitoring, Online Image Tracking, Buzz Monitoring, Online Anthropology, Conversation Mining, Online Consumer Intelligence, Market Influence Analytics … The challenges remain the same. As an example, I think of a project I did here at Pure Visibility last year, which involved analyzing online review content related to a client’s company. After gathering the reviews (in the hundreds), I was faced with the daunting task of mining them for basic information like the overall majority sentiment expressed, and how this correlated with the source. My ultimate method was mostly manual and more than a little tedious.

Hurst’s blog contains a reference to a new book by Pang and Lee that surveys the state of Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis, (basically, data-mining and classification using human generated content). In addition to interesting facts on the power of opinions like those above, this book clearly outlines the process that such analysis requires, and the associated challenges. For example, incorporating user opinions into a search engine typically requires the following steps:

1. determining whether the user is looking for subjective information
2. accurately classifying docs into the opinionated and non-opinionated bins
3. identifying overall sentiments expressed and or/specific opinion regarding particular aspects
4. summarizing information, including aggregating votes via different rating scales, highlighting some opinions, representing disagreement/consensus points, id’ing opinion holders, etc

The challenges are numerous. To summarize some of the excellent points made by Pang and Lee, I sketched out the following table, which compares opinion mining to traditional text mining:

Opinion Mining	Fact-based Text Analysis
relatively few classes generalizing over many domains/users	often numerous classes (ie topic classification)
represent opposing (binary classification) or ordinal/numerical categories	classes can be unrelated
order can overcome frequency (in importance)	frequency typically correlates with classification
sentiment typically expressed in subtle manner not isolated to single sentence	though dependent on doc length, summarization using single sentence extraction often reasonable
non-trivial task of defining human-preferred keywords	accurate classification possible via data-driven only methods

To clarify on this last point, the authors note that this fact alone does not make the task more difficult than traditional topic classification, since data-driven approaches can be applied to the latter to improve accuracy over classification using a human-picked keyword list. The problem is that the accuracy of a data-driven method for opinion analysis is only about 80%, which is still not comparable to the performance expected in traditional topic-based classification.

While these challenges may seem intimidating enough to remain on the horizon for years to come, the fact that this book was written by a Yahoo research scientist, and one of the country’s top CS schools suggests that the right people are thinking about these trends. Significant changes in how we use the web may not be far off.

It’s strange that we’ve started discussing branding, because there’s been a sudden boost in arguments that search results have a brand impact. This article from Search Engine Watch, for example implies that the paid search advertising executed by John McCain, who is currently spending enough to get four times as many paid search impressions as Barack Obama, will have a positive brand effect.

These assertions are a mystery to me, because they seem to intentionally miss the distinction between something that creates brand awareness and something that results in an actual branding effect. The distinction is actually pretty simple:

Brand Awareness is an “I know about” indicator. It is something people know in their heads.

Branding is an “I feel about” indicator. It is something people know in their gut.

So what I want to know is: how exactly is a John McCain for President banner ad going to accomplish the latter?

It can’t. Awareness is not branding. The only effective measure of branding is whether or not a person CHANGES BRANDS. Exposure to new brands is only part of the effort.

It is strange as an analyst to be making this distinction, but I have seen it repeatedly even among my friends. Branding is incredibly powerful, subtle, and pervasive. People who will insist to their last breath that they are unaffected by brand will be heavily influenced by it (to the point of self-parody). Branding–not awareness–is the only real measure of loyalty or purchasing trends.

The reason I am taking this specific stand is because branding is still the consequence of excellent products that have some emotional impact on a user. Search engine results do not provide that. They provide the OPPORTUNITY for that to occur at a fraction of the historical cost, which a key, critical point. But I don’t want to oversell its value. For branding to truly work there still needs to be that traditional marketing and self-identification that is so very hard to replicate or create.

Stacy Williams wrote a very nice blog post about search engines and their influence on branding in a recent post that I wanted to share. I agree with almost everything the post says; I just think she’s using the word “brand” in a way that might not resonate with people who are actively involved in the creation of the things.

Here’s the essence of the article: search engines create two major effects for a company. First, they give validity to any company that ranks highly for that product category. Second, they level the playing field for other brands of the same type by giving search engine uses a chance to immediately and implicitly compare products in a result.

I’m not particularly impressed with first category of findings. But the second are very exciting. The most compelling finding in the post was this one:

People using search engines are more likely to consider multiple brands (77% did so) than Internet users that don’t use search engines (70%) or non-Internet users (46%). On average, searchers considered 2.5 brands before making a purchase (5).

Yow. That is a big, big, BIG deal.

Why does it matter? In product categories with low differentiation such as cleaning products, cereal foods, and other household items, brand preference is by the far the biggest determiner of purchasing decisions. Some studies suggest that people who have a brand preference choose that brand seventy percent of the time over other brands, more so by far than price, promotions, or comparable benefits. So, the opportunity to get them to even consider other brands is a chance to not only break that preference, but create a loyal consumer who is equally hard tempt away in the future.

Yet are the numbers Stacy describes really associated with branding? I would say they’re not; I would, instead, argue that what she describes is awareness, which is necessary step in branding, but really a very different beast at the end of the day.

A brand is organized around how people feel about a product–how its smell, shape, appearance, or image impacts on them emotionally. Right now, at least, a search engine doesn’t really impart those things to a user. Only the product itself, and the vivid image and marketing message around it, can do so. Without an appealing product whose impact resonates psychologically with a user, the only outcome of awareness will be consideration, then rejection.

A good example of this are studies showing that coupons used in isolation from other methods have almost no impact on long-term brand preference. Any spikes that occur through coupon use generally subside shortly thereafter into the previous brand preference patterns. They are a kind of “awareness”, but they don’t cause a change. It’s this reason that the only measure of advertising effectiveness in branding that has ever resonated with me is advertising’s ability to get someone to switch from another preferred brand.

So, a search engine doesn’t really change the core challenge of branding: getting people to switch. What a search engine does do, however, is create more opportunities to switch for companies with smaller budgets. With a search engine, marketers can introduce a new product to people to at price points that were unheard as compared to television, which remains the primary–and most expensive–medium for generating brand awareness in the United States.

THAT is exciting. THAT is new. THAT is worth all kinds of effort and investment.

Thanks for the article, Stacy! It sure got me thinking.

Why does your business exist? Why should your potential customers choose you over anyone else? What differentiates you from the competition? The people coming to your site may not even know who you are. You’ve got to get this all across to the user immediately, before he or she decides to pass your site by.

After all, when users come to your site, they make a snap judgment about it–whether it has what they want, whether it is trustworthy, whether it is pleasing and easy to use. They scan the pictures and the text to figure out whether this is the site they’re looking for. Good design and good web writing helps people find and learn about your product. Have you given the same attention to your brand? Read More

Today was looking like a good day. I had a few fun projects on my docket and the weather in Michigan was breaking records for January, 61 degrees! But my day was going to get even better very soon.

Arriving at the downtown Ann Arbor offices of Pure Visibility, a little sleepy eyed and still nursing my first cup of coffee, I sat down, booted up my mac and went to my iGoogle home page. Looking at my rss feeds I spotted Barack Obama’s name in the Web Creme feed. How odd I thought. I’d been to his site before and found it to be functional at best with well coded CSS and SEO. Overall I thought it was nice but nothing extraordinary. When I saw the feed, curiosity made me click and what a surprise! Barack Obama’s redesign (www.barackobama.com) took my breath away! Excellent composition, a beautiful palette, and calls to action made the designer in me excited. I have built plenty of sites in my years and this one really hit home. Here are some of the highlights.

Read More

Google recently released a video about the value of Branding (you can see it Here) that was very telling. It was, essentially, an education about how different companies perceive branding and its value, followed by compliments they paid Google about branding. The education portion was about 2/3rds of the video, which is not surprising because Google is not, and will not in the foreseeable future, be a good platform for branding products.

Branding is a difficult thing to quantify and market, but the essential nature of it is something that is at once familiar yet exciting. Ze Frank has a brilliant video blog about branding that sums up the essence of this concept using Jon-Benet Ramsey as the “brand” example. Read More