There’s a lot of talk about first-mover advantage among social media pioneers. But sometimes it’s better to take your time, according to the folks at Vestas, the big Danish wind energy company. Read →
It’s difficult to move quickly in social media when every post must first be vetted by an international bureaucracy and then translated into six languages. But that hasn’t fazed the United Nations, which maintains a very active presence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr and YouTube. The UN is committed to social media as a way of engaging its diverse constituencies and raising awareness and gaining support for a variety of causes. We outline a number of ways in which the organization is using social media to drive its business goals. Read →
British wireless and mobile provider O2 is running a holiday campaign complete with personalized messages from Santa on YouTube. Using the hashtag #O2santa, followers can tweet Santa a message they’d like him to read, and he will create and post a personal video on his YouTube channel in response. The aim is for followers to then share the video via social platforms, tweeting the personal message or emailing a link to the video. Read →
Social media has transformed communication in many industries, turning the traditional one-way model into two-way interactivity. Lately, many television broadcasters are finding innovative ways to create buzz and enhance the second screen relationship with their fans. Read →
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines’ latest endeavour, meant to promote the launch of a new “24-hour service to social media,” involves posting videos on YouTube of live replies to tweets sent to @KLM. This innovative campaign was announced via Twitter on September 19, and ran from 12 noon until late in the evening. Any tweets sent to @KLM might receive a ‘KLM Live Reply’ – KLM employees lined up holding letters to become a ‘living alphabet’ 140-character response. Read →
Earlier this week, the blog for link-shortening service bit.ly announced results from a study of the ‘half-life’ of links coming from Facebook, Twitter, email and YouTube. The data reveals that different types of links rise and fall at different speeds, and how long a link stays ‘alive’ also depends on the platform it was posted on. Read →
Performance marketing agency Performics recently released a report about the interactions between consumers and brands on social networks, and found that 52% of respondents strongly or somewhat agree that voicing opinions on social networking sites can influence business decisions of companies/brands. Read →
Smart marketers know that one of the major advantages of social media in business is its ability to build deep two-way communication. That’s taken to heart at Whole Foods Market, where just 5% of the tweets are promotional and 10% content-based. The rest – a whopping 85% – are responses to customers. Read →
New data from comScore’s Video Metrix service reveals that 178 million U.S. Internet users – 85.6% – watched online video content in June 2011, with an average of 16.8 hours per viewer. U.S. internet users engaged in an all-time high of over 6 billion viewing sessions during the month, and viewed over 5 billion online video ads over that time period. Read →
John Green is a best-selling author of young adult fiction with plenty of fans: 1.1 million Twitter followers, 61,714 Facebook friends, and 525,676 YouTube subscribers. And those fans went crazy when he used a YouTube video to announce the title of his next book and then promised in a tweet to autograph every single copy ordered in advance of publication.
So what if it’s not scheduled to come out until next May? That certainly didn’t deter his fans and followers, who within hours made “The Fault in Our Stars” the No. 1 book on both Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. (A week later it’s only fallen to No. 12 on Amazon). Read →