Starting a business? Start it right on social networks.
With earned publicity increasingly hard to find and start-up ad budgets small, social media looks like a sure-fire way to promote a business on the cheap. Social networks can help new owners build their trade but the model is different from the top-down, broadcast marketing of traditional media. And while many sites are free to join, the time and effort you’ll need could run up your costs.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Sarah Needleman interviewed a few start-up owners for their take on using social media. Their conclusions?
Join social networking sites as a consumer first.
Get familiar with the tenor of the conversation on each site.
Secure your business name on the sites in which you’re interested.
Make sure your business is fully functioning before joining.
Talk with visitors, friends and followers rather than at them.
Engage your audience with contests, surveys and social offers.
One more tip that wasn’t in the article: don’t ignore traditional media and methods. While a press release isn’t the same as a conversation it could start one.
Jim Marshall, the man behind the iconic Marshall amplifiers, used by rock stars such as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend of The Who, has died aged 88. Marshall, who helped make the ear-shattering sounds of the 1960s possible, died on Thursday. Here he talks to the BBC about Jimi Hendrix.
A fifth of American adults say they have read an e-book in the past year. They read more frequently than their print-loving counterparts and they’re more likely than others to have bought rather than borrowed their most recent book.
A fifth of American adults have read an e-book in the past year and the number of e-book readers grew after a major increase in ownership of e-book reading devices and tablet computers during the holiday gift-giving season.
The average reader of e-books says she has read 24 books (the mean number) in the past 12 months, compared with an average of 15 books by a non-e-book consumer.
Some 30% of those who read e-content say they now spend more time reading, and owners of tablets and e-book readers particularly stand out as reading more now.
The prevalence of e-book reading is markedly growing, but printed books still dominate the world of book readers.
E-book reading happens across an array of devices, including smartphones.
In a head-to-head competition, people prefer e-books to printed books when they want speedy access and portability, but print wins out when people are reading to children and sharing books with others.
The availability of e-content is an issue to some.
The majority of book readers prefer to buy rather than borrow.
Those who read e-books are more likely to be under age 50, have some college education, and live in households earning more than $50,000.
Most of the findings in the Pew report come from a survey of 2,986 Americans ages 16 and older, conducted on November 16-December 21, 2011, that focused on people’s e-reading habits and preferences.
Email is still the more popular mode of Internet communication but teens prefer texting, according to a pair of surveys. Is the split a harbinger of a shift in corporate messaging?
According to a new global survey 85% of adults use the Internet for email while 62% use it for social networking. Private research firm Ipsos conducted the survey among 19,216 adults in 24 countries.
Parse the demographic by age and you get a different story. A 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 54% of teens were texting daily in September 2009. The quantity of those messages is also increasing at a quantum rate. Half of teens sent 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month, and one in three were sending more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month. Output ranged from a high with older teen girls ages 14-17 of 100 messages a day to a low among the youngest teen boys of 20 messages per day.
“Text messaging has become the primary way that teens reach their friends, surpassing face-to-face contact, email, instant messaging and voice calling as the go-to daily communication tool for this age group,” the study said.
Since the survey, the Pew Center reports that the volume of texting among teens has risen to 60 texts for the median teen text user. In a separate survey, the center said smartphones are gaining teenage users. “Some 23% of all those ages 12-17 say they have a smartphone and ownership is highest among older teens: 31% of those ages 14-17 have a smartphone, compared with just 8% of youth ages 12-13.”
Texting could increase as more teens acquire smartphones, and their preference for communicating may supplant email as teens move into the workforce. While it’s overshadowed by social media use it’s a trend marketers might want to monitor.
The stakes continue to rise for print publications.
Last week came news that for every dollar publications earn on their digital editions they lose ten times that amount in print advertising revenue. A new survey out today suggests that gulf will only continue to widen.
Fifty-nine percent of U.S. marketers plan to spend more on social media display ads in the coming year, according to a study by Advertiser Perceptions. Some 31% expect to spend more on ad networks/exchanges and 15% plan to spend more on agency trading desks. An 80% increase in the mobile space will lead an overall increase of 43% ad spending, eMarketer reports.
Whether the shift is good or bad is a moot point. It is what it is. The eyeballs have moved to digital. Print needs to migrate, too.
A report out today by the Pew Research Center suggests the large digital companies have wrested control of the news you receive from the traditional media companies.
Rather than siphon viewers from news sites, mobile technology is increasing news consumption.
Major digital networks like Google and Facebook increasingly exert control over news content and delivery.
Here’s the bright side of the report:
“New research released in this report finds that mobile devices are adding to people’s news consumption, strengthening the lure of traditional news brands and providing a boost to long-form journalism. Eight in ten who get news on smartphones or tablets, for instance, get news on conventional computers as well. People are taking advantage, in other words, of having easier access to news throughout the day – in their pocket, on their desks and in their laps.”
Here’s the dark side:
“At the same time, a more fundamental challenge that we identified in this report last year has intensified — the extent to which technology intermediaries now control the future of news.
“In the last year a small number of technology giants began rapidly moving to consolidate their power by becoming makers of ‘everything’ in our digital lives. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and a few others are maneuvering to make the hardware people use, the operating systems that run those devices, the browsers on which people navigate, the e-mail services on which they communicate, the social networks on which they share and the web platforms on which they shop and play. And all of this will provide these companies with detailed personal data about each consumer.”
It’s like allowing the electric company to control your data, or the telecom companies to tap your phones. For free. Then charge you for delivery.
Who are the 66% of adults who use social media networks? Chances are they’re college students. They represent the majority of people on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Digg and Reddit, according to Online MBA and Mashable.
Mercedes is taking its marketing on the road. The luxury carmaker plastered the side of its new F-Cell car with LEDs and mounted a camera on the other side. It then streamed video of its surroundings to the display, turning the car into a chameleon, virtually invisible except for the wheels.
Mercedes toured Germany to promote its zero-emissions hydrogen fueled model. Judging from the video the stunt gathered a lot of attention, especially from onlookers who mugged for the camera, and a few minutes of video fame.
Facebook and its IPO might grab the headlines but image-sharing site Pinterest is grabbing viewers.
“According to comScore, Pinterest usage in the U.S. shot up from less than half a million unique visitors in May 2011 to nearly 12 million in January 2012,” eMarketer reported today. That’s a faster rate of adoption than the latest darling of the social media world, Tumblr. U.S. traffic at that blogging site traffic rose from less than 7 million unique visitors in late 2010 to more than twice as many a year later, comScore reported.
According to its website, “Pinterest is a virtual pinboard. Pinterest allows you to organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. You can browse pinboards created by other people to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.”
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Sarah Needleman interviewed a few start-up owners for their take on using social media. Their conclusions?
