Unless you’re a Coca-Cola of this world, if you want to launch an online community, your user acquisition strategy will be key. No one will accidently stumble across your page, like it and become a lifelong fan.  You need to work, and work hard to get people to commit to you – and even that commitment can be transient if not managed correctly.
The problem is, gone are the days of social media novelty. As consumers, we are now inundated with brands in social media slowly pushing themselves further and further …

Ok – so I obviously missed the boat first time round with YouTube’s Search Stories Video Director but this is fun and further emphasises the importance of solid SEO in how you/ your company are perceived (yep – I know mine is pretty poor and am trying to work on it). Fun stuff aside, it provides a useful tool to show clients how they are currently performing in Google and therefore provides the opportunity to demonstrate how certain influential sites/social networks impact on results. Oh, and you have your choice …

Let’s move on from saying we need objectives, benchmarks and KPI’s for social media activity – the reality is we know this has to happen and hopefully, by now, our clients understand this too. We also know that to get to a realistic and actionable benchmark, we should have been measuring the activity we have been running, what’s worked, what hasn’t – what got our audience really excited and what was ignored. The truth is we have the technology to do this (time to get down and dirty with analytics …

Ad:Tech 2010 and mobile was definitely an area that screamed ‘come and listen to what I have to say’. Not only were there numerous agencies showcasing their expertise but the mobile marketing seminars were packed to the rafters – standing room only in most cases. So was there anything that was presented this year in mobile that I was particularly bowled over by? In all honesty, probably not – the same buzz words were being wielded about (geo-location, incentivisation even QR) BUT what does make you sit and take notice …

So Facebook has launched a page for PRs – about time! It’s quite staggering that we have been creating and community managing pages for clients for the past few years and yet it is only now this channel of support/advice appears.
With the rapid monetisation and policy changes of many of the tools/services that used to be available for free, this should hopefully provide a useful resource covering new policies, design features and sharing tools (I’m hoping in the same ilk as development blogs such as All Facebook and Inside Facebook …