A short interview with Colm Long, Facebook’s Director of Operations for Europe, the Middle East and Asia I carried out on behalf of Donegal County Enterprise Board (I’m the disembodied voice and the shaky hand on the camera). Colm was just about to present a seminar as part of Donegal’s Business Week 2010. Here he talks about how small business can effectively use Facebook (and other online media) to promote themselves. The full video of his seminar will be available online shortly.
Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
Interview with Facebook’s Director of Operations Europe, Middle East and Asia
Monday, March 8th, 2010Tags: b2b marketing, Facebook, internet marketing, Social Media
Posted in Advertising, Inbound Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »
Social media and snake oil
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010Who’s legit and who’s fake when it comes to social media? Two contrasting views on the topic come from Olivier Blanchard with his article “Is your social media director qualified?”, and “Attacking the social media lynch mob” by Jay Baer.
Olivier has high standards and trenchant views on who’s qualified to set the social media agenda. He says there are three types of social media directors:
- the first type are “super smart, talented, experienced in a broad range of disciplines, have an established foot print in social media space”, are recognized as thought leaders and are passionate about what they do.
- type 2 “isn’t quite as savvy but isn’t lacking in talent, smarts and enthusiasm”.
- type 3 is “the bad type…. con artists… shams”. You get the picture.
I’ll let you self-diagnose. Olivier goes on to provide some tips on how to spot your ideal candidate, including “applicant can tell a personal story involving either Digg, Seesmic or both”. Scary stuff. There doesn’t seem to be much room for the amateur enthusiast in this definition.
Jay Baer has a different outlook. His view is “just because someone takes a more tactical approach to social media, just because they don’t measure ROI the way you do, just because they focus on small business and you don’t, does not mean they are charlatans… And this notion that you can’t be good at social media unless you’ve been doing it for years is utter crap.”
I’m inclined to agree with Mr. Baer. There are a lot of bright people out there who are just beginning to turn their attention to social media, particularly those working in B2B marketing. I don’t expect their lack of previous experience is going to prove much of a barrier, given the speed with which they’ve adopted and exploited a host of other technologies to date.
Anyway, I’d like your views on other categorizations of prospective social media directors. I’d particularly like to see some that are funny (humour wasn’t prominent among Olivier’s list of preferred characteristics).
Tags: b2b marketing, Social Media
Posted in Inbound Marketing, Marketing, Social Media | 2 Comments »
A manager’s guide to Digital Marketing
Monday, February 15th, 2010This is a presentation I gave recently on Digital Marketing, aimed at business managers. The presentation lists the online tools you can use before describing each digital marketing technique in a little more detail. Topics covered include web-site design and landing pages, Google pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, email marketing, online PR and various forms of social media. You can find this and other more detailed guides on the main DohertyWhite website too.
View more presentations from DohertyWhite.
Tags: b2b marketing, internet marketing, Lead Generation, online PR, Social Media
Posted in Content, Email Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Marketing, Pay-per-click, Public Relations, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »
10 Trends for Social Media in 2010
Thursday, January 28th, 2010A great presentation on 10 Trends for Social media this year from C. Edward Brice, brought to my attention by the B2BMarketingZone newsletter. There are a lot of stand-out slides highlighting the move of budget to social marketing, the convergence in mobile internet access with the growth of social media and touching on topics like augmented reality and social gaming. As mentioned in my last post, there are lots of implications for B2B marketers. For example, if people begin moving most of their personal communications to Facebook and Twitter, what happens to email marketing as a way of reaching them? If more people learn about products and services from social networks how does this effect search engine optimization and pay-per-click? With the prediction that more people will access the internet from their mobile device than from laptops or PCs by 2013, how does this effect social media usage and general online habits?
Tags: b2b marketing, Email Marketing, internet marketing, mobile marketing, Social Media, social mobile
Posted in Email Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Pay-per-click, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »
Global time spent on social networks rises 82%
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010A news item from MarketingCharts today reports an 82% rise in time spent on social networks, based on research from the Nielsen Company comparing December 2009 with December 2008. Global consumers spent an average of 5 hours 35 minutes in December 2009, compared with 3 hours 3 minutes a year previously, and unique audience figures rose 27% from 242 million in December 08 to 307.4 million in December 09.
Facebook had an almost 100% increase in unique visitors from December to December, while Twitter recorded 579% growth from 2.7 million visitors to 18.1 million.
The MarketingChart piece also cites a recent survey by Prompt Communications of 300 consumers in Boston. This showed that 96% of them used Facebook to communicate with friends and family on a regular basis, which trails the phone (at 99%) but beats text messaging (93%) and email (91%). We saw something similar during a recent client engagement. As part of the assignment we helped create some ‘buyer personas’ for digital music consumers and validated some of these personas on a college campus in Ireland. The 10 students we interviewed rarely used email, and stayed ‘within’ Facebook for the majority of the time they were online each day, using it almost exclusively to interact with classmates, friends and family, partly driven by their wish to keep their mobile phone bills as low as possible.
I’m note sure what the takeaways for B2B marketers and sales teams are just yet – this will depend on the social media usage of decision makers and influencers at your target customer organisations. But based on this research you can assume a lot if not all of your target buyers are active on the social networks. Combined with a predicted surge in smart phone sales (which means more people accessing Facebook and Twitter using these devices while on the road) there are obviously implications for your 2010 promotional plans if you want to be noticed by your prospective customers. One big long term impact could be on email marketing strategy – will email begin to decline in importance as a promotional tool over the next 5 years, replaced by intra-social network messaging?
Tags: Facebook, MarketingCharts, Social Media, Twitter
Posted in Inbound Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »
