sign reads dont give up using up arrowTerms like “blogging,” “tweeting” and “liking” are continuing to gain traction in the lexicon of the marketing industry –or so it seems. New research from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth shows that the use of blogs, Twitter and Facebook among the Fortune 500 actually leveled off in 2011, and the results have me wondering: Are the nation’s largest companies giving up on social media?

via Are Corporations Giving Up on Social Media? – Forbes.

Apart from restaurants, there are few businesses whose fates are linked as closely to online reviews as hotels. That’s why Accorhotels’ move in late 2010 is considered so bold.

Last September, the hotel chain began featuring reviews from TripAdvisor on some of its sites. Since Accorhotels has no control of the TripAdvisor content, it’s a bit like posting every review of your restaurant — not just the favorable ones — in your window. “There’s no question TripAdvisor plays hugely in this space,” says Melissa Parrish, an interactive marketing analyst at Forrester Research who covers the travel industry. “They make or break certain kinds of hotels.”

via How Hotels and Travel Companies Are Nailing Social Media.

Earlier this week I posted on smart markets, a challenge for companies conditioned and organized to broadcast agendas. The post focused on the need to make the market smarter about your product, your organization and the way you do business. Easier said than done.

via Do Organizations Need a Chief Content Officer? – Forbes.

If you are like most small businesses, you and your team are stretched thin. If you even have a team. All day long you are servicing customers, delivering products, managing finances and doing whatever it takes to keep your business up and running. The last thing you need is to waste time. But for many small businesses, that’s exactly what they are doing when it comes to marketing with social media.

The typical small business Facebook page is a ghost town. It might have some pictures of the business, a few posts about an event six months ago, and a handful of followers who joined when the page launched. On Twitter, there might be a couple posts a month and none of them are related to any customer question. The same is true for Foursquare. Groupon is like going to the casino: there’s a good chance you’ll come home with empty pockets.

It’s hard to resist the promise of marketing in social media. It’s personal, efficient, and it is growing at a remarkable rate. Your customers spend most of their media time on these sites and they are discussing product experiences and researching purchase decisions. But that doesn’t mean that every business should drop everything and start a Facebook page or a Twitter account. This isn’t like buying an ad in the newspaper or the Yellow Pages; You don’t just set it up and walk away.

To make the most of your social media marketing, you need to have a plan. Social media is about having an ongoing conversation with your customers, not droning on about your business while they ignore you. You have to put in the time to cultivate your existing customers and attract new ones. Yes, this will take a little more time and thought, but that’s why it works. If you “set it and forget it,” you are wasting your time. Guaranteed.

Here are six steps to make sure you don’t waste time in social media:

via Social Media is a Waste of Time | Inc.com.

Sometimes you need to know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.

The same goes in life and card games as it does for the vendors who are assisting in your company’s social media marketing and content development.

The prevailing sentiment is that any customer-facing social media activity should be done by the in-house marketing team.

While that is great on paper – and desirable for a lot of reasons – it’s not a very realistic world view for a large company that is just getting started in social media and online communities.

With that in mind, selecting the vendor who will be interacting with your customers, and creating content on your behalf, that your customers will be reading, becomes a very important decision.

via The Art of Hiring Social Media Vendors – 10,000 Words.

Adding a few visual game elements to a brand’s site in order to “gamify” a marketing strategy and increase engagement just isn’t enough. To be done right, gamification must take a behavior-focused approach.

For instance, by offering rewards for user actions, consumers are more likely to engage with a brand — that is, visit the site more often, register, linger and invite friends. But while gamification is a major buzzword among interactive marketers today, game use isn’t new.

So what’s making gamification so popular today? Consider these four factors.

via 4 Reasons Every Online Brand Should Explore Gamification Strategies.

Women are more likely to use social networks than men, says a new study by Rebtel, the world’s largest independent mobile VoIP company. The survey (conducted across 2,361 U.S. adults ages 18 and up) examined three key metrics related to social media and voice/phone consumption, specifically:

Expected frequency of use of social media communication methods in the near future.

Social media consumption habits of online U.S. adults when communicating with certain people.

Popularity of social media communication among online U.S. adults if they could only choose one method to communicate with certain people.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, women have been revealed as being more social than men overall, with women being 68% more likely to use social networking or media to communicate with friends other than in-person. Assuming that those surveyed also represent the much-larger U.S. population, that’s 75 Million women communicating with friends via social networks vs. 57 Million men.

via Social media – Women do it longer, but men do the talking.

Process is important when launching a large-scale social media strategy. Create a process that is easy to follow; that doesn’t leave any room to guess; and is reality-based, with regard to the amount of time it takes for the company’s management and senior staff to approve actions.

By creating processes, it gives others in the company guidance for how they should approach social media adoption in their own departments.

If you get an e-mail from someone in your company asking about creating a Facebook Fan Page for Product X, instead of responding with a list of questions, instead e-mail them with the relevant document to get the process of Facebook Page Development started.

The same goes for determining who will be that page’s community manager. Create a process that is to be followed from start to finish.

via Embracing Process-Oriented Social Media Strategy Development – 10,000 Words.

http://mashable.com/2011/09/16/social-media-peer-pressure/

On one level, the research that emerged from HP Labs Fridayis unsurprising: we tend to bow to peer pressure, and it’s as true in social media as in real life.

But how much peer pressure does it take, and what other factors come into play? The answers may surprise you.

HP Labs computers scientists, including veteran online behavior researcher Bernardo Huberman, asked 600 participants to answer a few simple questions about online photos. Which of two baby pictures is cuter, and which of these two couches (above) would you choose to buy for a friend?

Whichever one they chose, the researchers rigged it so the other picture was shown to be more popular, using a Facebook-style Like system. The participants then had a chance to change their minds. Each time, however, they changed the number of Likes each picture got, and waited for a different length of time before giving them a second chance.

The result: 22% of people were swayed by the peer pressure — but only if there was a long gap between the first and second chance. Given the chance to change their mind immediately, only 14% of participants did so.

Most interestingly, people were only likely to change their minds if there were a moderate number of Likes on the other side. As soon as the Likes on their choice of picture were outweighed by 20 times or more, participants dug in their heels and stuck with their original choice.

Translation: if there’s a large number of people who disagree with us, we’re stubborn as hell. If you want to persuade someone to change teams, make sure their side does not appear to be outrageously unpopular, crushed by a giant weight of evidence. That, as I’m sure you’re thinking too, could explain a whole lot about politics.

Huberman’s advice for marketers? “Rather than overwhelming consumers with strident messages about an alternative product or service, in social media, gentle reporting of a few people having chosen that product or service can be more persuasive.”

Check out the full study, in PDF format, here.