The Brooklyn Museum in particular embraces these platforms and integrates them into their website. These interactive features compliment their rather ‘typical’ website, which is used to provide basic information on exhibitions, operating hours, etc. for a cost effective interactive experience.

A prime example of their willingness to interact with a younger, social media savvy audience is none more evident
than on Twitter. With over 320,000 followers, the Brooklyn Museum updates their account on an almost daily basis, using it to interact with potential visitors, as well as promote their new exhibitions. Unlike some companies, interaction is not only based on their ability of the business to directly relate to the tweet by nature of organization, but on a personal level. The Brooklyn Museum takes on the role of a friend as much as it takes on the job of promoting their institution.

The Museum’s Facebook Page takes a similar approach, and effort that has gained them over 45,800 ‘Likes’. The account is primarily used to inform the public of their featured events and to answer questions. There is less direct interaction than on Twitter, but they manage to still interact with their base. The comments and answers received on both ends create a nurtured community of museum fans.

The Brooklyn Museum treats their YouTube account like educational television. It provides a look behind the scenes for those that want more information on the features they’ve seen or were thinking of seeing.

This behind the scenes access is reinforced in the Brooklyn Museum blog updated once to twice per week. With several contributing authors, the museum’s employees share their intimate relationship with their work with the public.

The blog allows readers to access animated podcasts, stories, and pictures of how employees set up their public art experiences. It also shows their dedication to the museum and their efforts to constantly improve and bring life-long memories to its visitors; inspiring readers to visit.

The museum has used social media to reach out to potential and repeat visitors by making it an operational tool in its business. By more than just having a presence, they have been able to attract thousands of new visitors. Art will always be art, but the museum as a corporation with employees, expenses, assets, and liabilities have used social media to sustain and improve its business model. They are a prime example of a business that has been willing to change as people and the way they interact with brands/activities has changed.

New Facebook Friends List

The Custom Friends List Feature was already available. I am sure that many of you have custom listed many friends in categories like: Schoolmates/Classmates, Colleagues, Best Friends, Just Friends, Extended Friends, Family/Parents, Relatives/Extended Relatives, “Not so Close Friends”, “Have to Keep them as Friends”, etc. Facebook rolled out a new set of friends list standardizing and defining them into specific categories:

• Close Friends
• Acquaintances
• Smart Lists (Work, School, Family, City)
• Subscription (Following/People You Follow) and  Subscribers (Followers or Fans)
• Restricted Friends

Close Friends or Featured Friends

Close Friends are those, whose updates come to you as notification when you add them. However, you can turn off the notification from the Close Friends List Page. The updates from the people tagged as Close Friends, will also have higher priority in your homepage news feed, than others.

Who are the best candidates for Close Friends?

• Buddies that you want more updates from
• Updates from family members you don’t want to miss
• Someone you have crush on
• Who’s updates are more important than normal friends
• Friends you share common interests with, etc.

Acquaintances

Updates from your Acquaintances will be rarely shown in Facebook homepage news feed. But, you will not miss their most important updates, like: Relationship status changes or migration to a new city. Rather than un-friending, this list can be a good choice to keep your friends with the mute button pressed.

People with probable candidacy for Acquaintances:

• Your close friend who updates noting but Gaming Resource sharing (assuming, you don’t like them)
• Link spammers or self promoting friends that you have to keep
• Your high school bullies,
• Annoying family members or relatives,
• Someone you don’t want to interact with much, but want them to get your updates to them, etc.

Smart Lists

Facebook introduced many smart lists (friend lists with a lightning icon) in the friend list feature. e.g. colleagues, family members, classmates, and local friends within same city. When you mention your work place (company), education institution, and cities; you will find them as separate friend list in smart lists, like:

• Family members and relatives
• Colleagues, boss, and friends within same company you mention on your profile
• Classmates from school, college, university or other institutions
• Friends and buddies in the same locality/city that you currently live in.

When you mention multiple companies and education institution, you also get smart lists for each company and institution. Family members are filled by the various relationships defined on your profile. But, you also have the freedom to go to the Family Smart List Page and add new family members without defining any relationship. In Facebook, you can not mention more than one city. So, the list for local friends can have just one listing.

Optimizing Custom Friend List

Custom Friend Lists is an old feature. But, since you now have smart lists, it is better to merge some lists and remove the unnecessary custom friend list from Facebook. However, for getting better updates, you can still have some custom friend list to serve your purposes. With the new changes, you can optimize them to serve your needs. Some Custom Friend List optimization techniques are:

Merge Friend List

If you have already defined a list before, you can go to the close friend, acquaintances, smart list pages and merge the existing list to make a separate channel for various types of Facebook friends you have.  This will help you to utilize the predefined friend list by Facebook better.

Delete Some Custom Friend List

Since you already have some predefined friend list, it is wise to delete some of the custom friend list. This will help you to avoid duplication. But, make sure you merge the lists before you delete them.

Create Some New Custom List

For various purposes, you have the freedom to create more custom friend lists. One of the problems with the new friend list feature is that, you cannot see all colleagues and classmates together. But, you always have the freedom to create new custom friend list for them and merge them together from the previous lists.

Restricted Friends

The friends that you keep in Restricted Friend list will not see all your updates on their homepage, but they will get to see all your public contents that you tag them in. Otherwise, you are mostly mute to them. Unless, they define you as restricted friends, they are not mute to you. Facebook friends that you can put in this list are:

• Your boss
• Your competitors
• Friends from other companies, always trying to spy on you
• Your opponent or political contender
• Someone you don’t want to get any idea about what you are doing, etc.

Subscribers and Subscriptions

Facebook also rolled out the Subscribers and Subscription feature in the new update. This makes Facebook more like Twitter and Google Plus, where you can have followers and follow people without adding them as friends. Subscribers and Subscriptions are not actually friend lists as they are not ‘friends’.  In another word, you can define them as your personal celebrity and followers.

Subscribers: When someone subscribes on your profile, s/he becomes your fans and follower of you public posts only. In analogy with Twitter, this is the list of “Followers” you have.

Subscription: When you subscribe someone on their profile, the Subscription tab in your Timeline shows the people you are subscribed to. In analogy with Twitter, this is the list of “Following”. You will get updates on only their public feeds on your homepage.

You can activate subscription from the Subscribe Button Page. Celebrities who have large fan-base, they can use this feature to make their Facebook profile as the major media of communication or public updates. The public updates, however remains within the walled garden of Facebook. And to see them, you need to be logged into your Facebook Account. So, this is a bit different than Facebook Fan Pages for celebrities.

There can be 4 types of Subscribers:

Regular Subscribers

These are the people that hit only the “Subscribe” button on your profile. They are your followers that have interest in your public feeds. I am quite optimistic that, many marketers will come up with tips and tricks to increase your subscribers in near future.

Friend Subscribers

When you add a friend now, through friend request, you automatically subscribe to his/her public updates. But, when they add you as friend, they also subscribes to your feeds. This type of mutual subscription is called Friend Subscribers.

Unfriended Subscribers

Your friend is also subscribing to your updates. When you remove or unfriend a friend, you automatically unsubscribe from his/her updates. But, the subscription to your public feed is not changed at your unfriended friend’s end. So, s/he still remains subscribed to your feeds. So, these types of subscribers are called Unfriended Subscribers. When you plan to remove unwanted friends, you will eventually increase the number of Subscribers.

Pending Friend Subscribers

When you hit the “Add as friend” button on your new friend’s profile or somewhere else, you automatically get subscribed to his/her public updates, even if s/he  does not add you back as friend. However, you will not see his/her updates, unless you add him/her or subscribe to his/her feeds. And once s/he adds you, you don’t remain a “Pending Friend Subscriber”, you become a “Friend Subscriber” or just friends.

Other Types of Friends You Can Have on Facebook

Mute Friends

What happens when you hit the unsubscribe button on a friend’s profile? The result is a mute friend. This is will turn off all the updates from a friend. This is why it is a bit different than Acquaintances. Acquaintances are semi-mute friends whose important updates are shown to you. But, without un-friending a friend, you have the freedom to mute a friend by unsubscribing from their friend as well as public updates. However, as a friend you will have the freedom to visit their profile or timeline to see their updates.

Deaf Friends

This is the just the opposite affected party who mutes friends. These types of friends totally unsubscribe from your updates and do not respond to any. But, just like mute friends, your updates can be seen by your unsubscribed friend on your profile.

Subscription in Friend List

In case of pending friend subscribers, you have public updates of a person that is not yet your friend in Facebook. But, Can you add a subscription in Friend List so that the updates come to a specific friend list? The answer is no. I guess Facebook needs to open up this feature.

The refreshed version of this service keeps a lot of the same characteristics that in the past attracted millions of users, but it also features a lot of new additional settings and options, making this good-old website even more attractive to active web users.

The YouTube co-founders consider this website a new one, completely redesigned with new homepage and interface. They add that the idea behind Delicious is to keep it’s original purpose, but they seriously plan to fix the way users find out new links and web destinations.

Through settings and features such as “Stack”, users will be able to group their favorite links, which later they can share with other friends and Delicious users. The collection can be public and other users can subscribe to it and get notifications every time new website is added to the stack. Each of the stacks can feature their own profile images and description.

The new Delicious also introduced improved tags and keeps all the past API calls the same.

As an active Delicious user, I’m very happy to see this refreshed version and even happier to know that this website is no longer in the hands of Yahoo, which is really surviving some tough times… but that’s really a discussion for some other times.

Check out this video with on the new Delicious.com:

Social media as a marketing tool has allowed the average person to get a first hand glimpse of their favorite celebrity’s lives. The advent of smart phones has integrated pictures and movies into this experience, broadening interest and allowing for a more personal experience. The direct influence and manipulation of knowledge via a VIP’s social stream has also allowed these savvy business-men and women to market themselves and their brands in a whole new way. Entertainers participate in social media to promote and market themselves, by using their lives for content development. They keep their base engaged and responsive to push their product; be it music, movies, books, etc.

An illustrative example of this is Justin Bieber. The teen pop icon recently hit 12 million followers on his Twitter account. These ‘Beliebers’ as he calls them are so engaged in his daily activity, it is said that his account alone requires 3% of Twitter’s server.

The success of his account is largely due to his already popular music fame. How he uses this is what makes the account a great example of Social Media use. The account fundamentally enables conversation and sharing. This is the basis of social interaction. It is also what businesses strive to achieve by partaking in social media marketing.

Bieber shares his preferences, encouraging users to follow suit. The realm of influence he holds in the minds of consumers is where his real marketability and ability to generate revenue comes in. He recently did so by promoting his adoration for Sean Kingston’s album. By doing so, he opens up the conversation by stating his personal preference, and persuades others that the album will also be to their liking based on his ‘stamp of approval’ of the work. He further allows conversations by asking his followers to let him know about THEIR daily activities and preferences.

The result is an attentive and engaged audience, increasing the likelihood that they will become conversions to a desired action (sales, attendance). Building an engaged community is essential is any social media marketing strategy.

In the case of his personal account, promotion doesn’t come from Bieber as much as it comes from his fans; a welcomed return for his interactions. Followers will generally tag him in their post of unrelated activities throughout their day. Bieber is alerted to the post and responds to his follower, as they were personal friends. His comments on their daily activity spark excitement amongst those following him, and tend to follow up their new message with tweets of praise and /or excitement. On many occasions, this feeling of inclusiveness in his life and his ability to reach out to them and make them feel special and has strengthened his core fan-base, making it easier for them to inadvertently promote on his behalf by tapping into their own realm of influence. This is often done through either social means, or word of mouth marketing.

Bieber’s Twitter account makes people talk. Companies thrive for the level of personality and influence that he has. Bieber has followed the first rule of social media. Listening. He makes people talk, and in turn, they spread the word about the Justin Bieber brand world-wide; an integral part of his own marketing and source of revenue.

Communication and content development are not only two vital aspects to the 7 Pillars of Digital Marketing, they hold true consistently throughout several alternative marketing means. This is the manner in which Social Media was meant to used. It’s most likely how we use it as individuals. It’s when a corporate approach overwhelms your instinct, reaching people on a personal level becomes difficult. Bieber’s account is what many businesses intend on accomplishing, and illuminates the ideals of a ‘community’. Your sales, branding, and reputation management can all begin with listening. Try it.

You will be able to find the “Subscribe” button right on user’s profiles, on the right side next to the profile name.

When you press the button Subscribe, you can choose which updates you want to receive, and Facebook gives you 1) All Updates, 2) Most Updates, 3) Only Important as main options, with filters available per update category (life events, status updates, photos, videos, games…).

And of course the subscription option doesn’t work for every status update you publish, but only for the updates that you make public.

To active this new feature, head out here.

This occurrence has pushed some companies and government agencies to structure their social media strategy to this. The US Geological Survey reports and monitors earthquakes. Before formulating their market strategy, initial research included monitoring Twitter activity to see how people addressed, approached, and spoke on the topic. They found that after a natural disaster, people immediately began to tweet about it. They identified (or reaffirmed) Twitter as one of the fastest, if not THE fastest information channel and decided to use this information to their advantage.

The USGS gathers and re-uses tweets to quickly locate earthquakes. The agency has developed its own Twitter-based application which indicates tweet counts from the cities that were affected, and list these tweets almost instantly. The USGS application geo-codes tweets, allowing them to tell the difference between an earthquake area and those that comment on the occurrence but do not experience them. The concept of listening and offering information to users has brought the agency over 147,000 followers.

Whittaker’s Chocolate, a New Zealand chocolatier and the Portuguese Sagres Preta, maker of chocolate stout beer, bravely decided to create their website only using chocolate, their main ingredient.

Everything from the interface design to the navigation and the social icons on their website is made of chocolate!

The idea is brilliant, and with this approach these two companies are showing that advertising should be fun and honest, not boring, false or evil.

To better promote this initiative, the companies also accompanied the campaign with videos of how the websites were done – from idea to execution. Check out one of the videos that went viral on the web:

Delicious, isn’t it!?
If you would like to reinvent your own website and find a creative way to promote your products like these two brave companies, feel free to get in touch with us.

As a final thought, I’ll just share this excellent quote from the great Jerry Della Femina, who said:

“I honestly believe that advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.”

Twitter use in Marketing : between Yes and No

It is very well known that many companies use Social Media to promote their services and  products. What makes the difference among them is the way each creates the brand awareness.

The first company that deserves attention is Etsy.  They started using Twitter in December 2007, having as main concept to share the newest posts from Etsy’s blog. When they realized Twitter’s potential, they decided to create a new ‘behind the scenes” concept for their tweets: to share with followers tips, provide pieces of information about upcoming events and promotions on the site and alert them to the newest/innovative products from Etsy sellers. But the strategy does not end here. If one goes deeper, it is more about creating focus groups from their followers by actually retweeting individual Etsy sellers and monitor ideas instantly.

In fact the company’s goal is to build a community and at the same time to observe it and share pieces of information about impressive ideas and products.

What happens if we talk about a film studio like Paramount which does not have any marketing budget for its movie?

Amy Powell, EVP of Interactive Marketing Strategies and Film Production at Paramount Pictures, thought of a simple strategy: taking into consideration that the film was called “Paranormal Activity”- audiences would react to it only if they could see it. Nothing is easier than that. The Studio found horror movie fans, put them in front of the film and taped their reactions.  The videos went viral and represented the essence of the marketing campaign for this movie.

The BIG QUESTION comes: Did they use Twitter?

The answer will be surprising… NO. The reason is simple: on Twitter, activity stops late at night; but that was actually when Paramount needed audience (a horror movie means first of all be watched late night).

These are two examples of companies from different industries that chose to use and respectively not to use Twitter as part of the marketing strategy.

So, as a final question: to use or not to use Twitter as part of the Marketing/ PR Strategy? Everything is related to the budget, target and ultimately industry… and why not – intuition.

Article inspired by:

http://www.casestudiesonline.com/

http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/6047-case-study-paranormal-activity-takes-over-twitter

Let’s take a look at Jet Blue’s Twitter account, and see how they’re approaching the situation.

By just reading the brief profile description, Jet Blue lets you know the purpose of their Twitter account and how people should approach interaction: “Have a question? Follow us and let us help!” The number is users increased for every passenger that has to report a problem. He or she knows that any question that may have regarding the airline and their services are a tweet away. Twitter grants the possibility of a direct response. As many have learned from experience, emailing a company representative does not ensure quick results. As quick, on-the-spot interaction is the very point of Twitter, people are likely to bring their problems to this forum for an easy answer. It also helps that Twitter is highly accessible via phone for many. Twitter as a CRM becomes efficient for both consumers and the company.

Having a look at the structure of each tweet Jet Blue publishes, we see that it is uniform. This allows followers to feel like they’re following the company and not individual workers, who they may or may not feel connected to. You will notice the “digital voice” in all tweets are the same; also creating brand consistency.

With more than 1,600,000 Twitter followers, Jet Blue uses Twitter to create brand awareness and manage public perception by accommodating their clients in the digital sphere. Jet Blue like many brands has adopted the philosophy – “go where customers are”, and use it highly effectively. This puts brands awareness and CRM all under one roof.

This marketing strategy has affected Jet Blue positively. It poses the question “Why not fly with an airline that really cares about me, the passenger?” For implementation purposes, responding to messages each day is involved and time consuming. However, in the long term, Jet Blue has decided that building customer loyalty far outweighs any monetary investment this strategy requires. Jet Blue’s Twitter becomes not only the place to go to have your questions answered, but to share the unforgettable moments of your trips and holidays. A company trusted will always win battle of customer loyalty.

With more than 115,8 million users and counting, about 61% increase compared to same period last year, and revenue of $121 million in Q2/11, compared to $54,9 million in 2010,  this professional social network is really onto something….

Check out the following First Earnings Announcement PPT by Jeff Weiner and Steve Sordello for more details on how this social network is becoming a key player in the online business world:

Furthermore, take a look at the following PPT by Amodiovalerio Verde, in which he outlines some very interesting stats about LinkedIn, such as:

• 58,5% of the 116 million users are male
• The users from the following 10 countries represent 80% of all LinkedIn members: US, India, United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada, Netherlands, France, Australia, Italy and Spain
• About 68% of users come from Europe and North America
• Almost 50% of the users have titles such as managers, principals, owners, CEOs or vice presidents
• About 40% of the users work in companies with more than 10,000 employees

For more LinkedIn facts, check out: