Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Adults Quadruple on Social Networks

The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years -- from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project's December 2008 tracking survey.

Labels: social media, social networks

Posted by Perry Goldschein
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Thursday, January 15, 2009

"Synchronizing Social Networks" Free eBook

As mentioned in Marketing Over Coffee, this free 19 page eBook walks you through the steps needed to synchronize, backup, and expand your social networks and social media contacts. You don't even need to provide an email address.

Labels: LinkedIn, social media, social networks

Posted by Perry Goldschein
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Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Green Social Networks - A Special Report released

SRB Marketing today announced a new, special report titled Green Social Networks. The only one of its kind, the report identifies over 50 total green social networks, ranks the top 15, offers an overview of social networking, and provides tips on using green social networks. The report helps businesses, governments and nonprofits to use social networks most effectively to reach environmentally- and socially-conscious consumers.

Green Social Networks examines the intersection of two powerful, long-term trends:

• A greening economy and marketing industry, where businesses and nonprofits alike are increasingly accountable to their various constituencies, society and the environment, and eager to communicate about their responsibility efforts.
• The rapid growth of social networks, and how they're changing both our work and personal lives.

Taking advantage of both these trends, organizations from those as small as Care2, Green Irenes, and Personal Life Media, to those as large as Starbucks Coffee and Ben & Jerry's, have successfully used social networks to reach green and curious consumers.

Yet the vast majority of organizations who serve such consumers still don't know whether or how to effectively use the social networks to reach their target markets.

Green Social Networks helps level the playing field, enabling organizations of all sizes to jumpstart their social networking relationship and promotional efforts. It helps demystify social networks and identify the ones organizations can best use to reach green and curious audiences.

The report ranks the top 15 green social networks by Alexa traffic and includes Google PageRank for each as well. It also lists alphabetically over 50 total green social networks, providing brief descriptions for the vast majority.

The special report is now available online in PDF format at http://www.srbmarketing.com/pubs_socnet_report.htm. Review copies of the report are available upon request to qualifying members of the media and blogosphere.

Labels: green business, green marketing, social networks

Posted by Perry Goldschein
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Thursday, June 26, 2008

Top 15 Green Social Networks

I'm almost finished with a special report on green social networks. It's going to include an overview of the social network industry; strategy and tactics for using green social nets; and the most comprehensive listing of green social networks to date, with over 50 listed.

It's also going to include a ranking of the top 15 green social networks by Alexa traffic rank. Hint: Yahoo! Green, Care2 and Treehugger are in the top three green social networks. Can you guess some of the other 12?!

Here's an excerpt from the report:

For-profit companies and brands are also starting to get some traction with social network profiles and pages. Ben & Jerry’s has nearly 25,000 fans on Facebook, with a very active Page that includes a video contest, a quiz, and hundreds of posts from its fans. Nike has over 73,000 Facebook fans. There are even two Facebook groups, apparently initiated by Toyota Prius owners with over a combined 1,500 members – something Toyota should probably nurture if it isn't already! Still, it seems most green brands either aren’t yet engaging in social networks, or are getting little traction.

Send an email to the address on our contact page if you'd like to be alerted when the report is released.

Labels: green business, green marketing, social networks

Posted by Perry Goldschein
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Monday, February 19, 2007

Social Networks take over the Internet (and other hype)

When I spoke on interactive marketing as a panelist recently at a socially-responsible investing industry conference, I focused on the tried and true tactics we make work for our clients month in and month out, including search and email marketing. These have worked for years and continue to do very well for many of our clients.

The conference organizers wanted panelist presentations to be plain-english, digestable and implementable by all attendees, including their sometimes less-than-marketing-savvy ones. So, I was a little surprised to have one of my co-panelists telling the audience to forget these kind of tactics and focus on the newest of the new media, especially social networks, because "this is where everything's going!" The marketing media have occassionally echoed that hype.

We have been using and closely examining various social networks in the last several months because of their increasing popularity. Measured by statistics such as page views, the biggest social-networking sites, like MySpace and Facebook, now certainly rival the largest traditional sites on the Web, like Yahoo.

But there are still no best practices in running successful marketing campaigns on social networks -- from our perspective and experience, the medium is too new and finding out what works takes time and money. We suspect that for direct response results, which the vast majority of our small and mid-size clients want, social networks will be hard-pressed to rival search and email -- at least for some time. For branding purposes, they could be useful now and even more so in the near future.

Even as social-networking properties are making some gains in ad revenue, they still lag far behind more established sites. Part of the reason is that social networking traffic shows big differences from traditional portals. Unique audiences (page views) are smaller, and the number of page views per person tends to be much higher. Page views are thus less valuable from some advertisers' perspectives.

While the social networks certainly sell advertising, it is the ability for an organization to interact with other network members where their greatest marketing value may lie. After all, social networks represent the technological expression of word-of-mouth, where people make connections to other people, entertainment and services in increasingly varied and interesting multi-media ways. And most of the online ad industry’s metrics don’t really measure that. These audiences may end up being, in some ways similar to bloggers and blog readers, "influentials," who are thought leaders and/or brand ambassadors in their networks, who pass on information to colleagues, friends and families.

Just as the foundation ad unit of a portal is the banner, for a social-networking site it’s the profile page, an area devoted to one advertiser, and the ability to form interest groups. What those areas and group organization functions offer can be as varied as advertisers themselves, but what they share is a desire to integrate themselves into the social-networking environment.

Guayaki Yerba Mate's and Coop America's MySpace pages, for example, each have just over 300 "friends." Guayaki's MySpace in particular allows its friends to join its network; sign up for and read its blog; communicate by email, instant message or blog comments; view videos and slideshows, and more.

The push by social networks to monetize their unusual metrics could have even more resonance with smaller, special interest social networks. Care2 Connect and the newer Zaadz are examples of these in our environmentally- and socially-responsible niche. These social nets more directly reach the audience that represent our clients' best customers and brand ambassadors, and could become useful tools in the direct marketing mix over time.

For more on social networks, see a recent Media Week article.

Labels: social networks

Posted by Perry Goldschein
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