Everything we've written in February, 2009
Social Media
Do incentives work?
posted by Jason Fleck @ February 25th, 2009
Earlier today, I was directed - on Twitter - toward a contest at Smashing Magazine. However, this contest wasn’t your typical contest. Like usual, there were decent prizes offered, but to enter, you had to comment below the post with your location and what the weather was like outside. Still nothing earth shattering, right?
Well, the catch to this contest was Smashing Magazine wouldn’t give away any of their prizes until their comment count reached 5000 entries. Let me tell you, that’s A LOT of entries. Right now, it’s over 8100 entries which is over 81 pages of comments. I can honestly tell you I’ve never seen so many comments on one post.
Result? They’ve probably pulled in more readers, more subscribers, and more ad revenue off that single blog post than the combined cost of the three prizes. Mission successful? I do believe so, yes.
Another example of a successful incentive campaign is the ShoeMoney Twitter contest. In this contest, Jeremy Schoemaker offered entrance to his contest by following him on Twitter and sending out a simple tweet:
Just entered to win a flip minoHD. Just follow @shoemoney and retweet. http://xr.com/fliphd”
What were his prizes? 2 flip mino’s and a possible MacBook Air if his follower count surpassed 20k. His follower count never hit 20k, but he did get over 6k followers in under 3 weeks. Mission successful? Most definitely.
The moral behind these two examples is that it doesn’t take something with a large monetary value like a car to motivate people to spread your cause. Sometimes all it takes is a fun gadget and some imagination.
Are there any other cool contests going on right now? Let me know by commenting below.
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Web Strategy
Does Google have a Threat?
posted by Jason Fleck @ February 11th, 2009
Some say Twitter will take down Google and others say Google owns the NOW web. Who’s right? In my opinion, neither.
Google has all the info and Twitter has the speed, but ultimately they serve two very different purposes. When dealing with a search engine, such as Google, one has to remember that whenever he or she searches a topic, the top results are going to be from sites with the best optimization. Those results have nothing to do with relevancy in respect to time. Google’s bots might gather all the most recent blog posts or message-board posts in close to real time, but it’s still not as fast as Twitter. So in those regards, Google DOES NOT own the NOW web.
However, Twitter isn’t the ultimate solution either. Does Twitter have the masses of information Google has?
Nope.
Twitter does have the time relevancy and a slew of pertinent information, but it could never be Google. Plain and simple. Maybe someday, something will overtake Google, but that day isn’t today.
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Interview
Cory Hartlen Interview
posted by Jason Fleck @ February 2nd, 2009
I was given the opportunity to demo the super sweet, super solid Radian6 social media monitoring solution. The nice guy on the other end of the line was Cory Hartlen, one of the account managers for Radian6. After he gave his demo, he allowed me to ask him a couple of questions dealing with social media. Here are his responses:
What exactly is your background in social media?
My background in social media is not very extensive. I started like everybody else viewing different blogs as a way of extracting different information. I was in the financial industry before this and started actively engaging in social media for some clients that were asking hard and tough question that I might not have had an answer for, so I started looking at different blogs and different financial news sites as a way of being able to extract information for clients. I had an opportunity in the last three months, I do believe it was the first of September that Radian6 came across my radar and I was completely blown away. I thought it was such an incredible tool and the ability for it to do what it does I thought was something so neat. Why wouldn’t I want to be a part of it given the state of the financial industry at this moment in time.
…so for other social things that I guess I’ve done. I had been a bar tender for almost a decade and I was a stand up comedian as well. So a lot of my social experience comes from that.
From your interactions with your clients and just being a part of Radian6, what do you think are some of the larger problems companies face when diving into social media, and does Radian6 help alleviate any of these huge problems?
Yes. The biggest thing I find is intimidation. People are intimidated by the space. Now, people that are new to the space, don’t exactly know how to take it on. They prefer to be ignorant and not listen as opposed to at least find out what people are saying. I find the Radian6 tool allows people to grow through social media so in the beginning they can use a bottom-up approach by using the name of their company and see what people are saying about them or perhaps one of their product lines. Then as they grow, they can start to participate in the space by locating the specific areas of the space that are important for their brand and their company. So if they decided to develop an engagement strategy they now have a full list of conversations that are happening so if they choose to participate they now have a tool they can do that with.
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If everyone at Radian6 is as friendly and helpful as Cory, they have a great staff there. I also contacted Amber Naslund through Twitter and she was extremely helpful answering the questions I had. They offer a powerful tool that can be used to engage your customers. Keep up the good work!
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