Did you realize “we” don’t trust advertisements anymore? Only about 14% of consumers still trust them. The majority relies on their peer’s opinion before they will buy something. A trend defined before as “The Groundswell“. The best way to stimulate peer recommendations is word of mouth. But for marketeers this is hard to handle. Social media provide us a way to stimulate and even monitor this word of mouth process to a certain extend. The Social Media Revolution 2011 movie by Erik Qualman, writer of the best selling book “Socialnomics“, shows us the current status. It’s a great update of his previous video’s which you can find on the Socialnomics YouTube channel.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SuNx0UrnEo

Source: Geek and Poke

When someone is having a phone call in a public area we in general don’t like this. Compared to this, communicating by social networks is a lot better, less noisy.

But social media can be a bit to attention consuming. It happens too me as well.

Source: Geekandpoke

Tweetboard is the new kid on the social media block. This new tool, released just some days ago, promises to stimulate social media interaction among the visitors of a single website or blog. Will Tweetboard proof its value? Let’s just give it a try to find out. Just click the tiny “Tweets” label at the left to see the full box and feel free to discuss. The video below tells the rest of the story.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjmiwPOCt3Q

Tweetboard is a micro-forum type application for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream in near real-time, reformatting tweets into threaded conversations with unlimited nesting. Conversations that spun off the original conversation are also threaded in-line, giving your site visitors full perspective of what’s being discussed.

Tweetboard is supposed to be a powerful viral tool that engages your website visitors. Each time someone posts (or replies) via your board, a link back to the corresponding conversation is appended to their tweet, creating a viral stream of Twitter traffic to your website.

I am really curious whether or not this will work. What do you think? Why not give it a try at the left side of this page?

It might sound like big words: “social media revolution”, but hopefully you will agree something is happening in the online world. An increasing amount of people shares information and their opinions online. They by-pass traditional information sources and distribution channels and decide based on the opinion of like-wise people they meet online. Before I already wrote it’s no longer a question whether or not it will influence your business. Today they main question is when and how it will affect you. The following (recently updated) movie shows in very short time what’s happening.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZ0z5Fm-Ng

Today two of my social media students at the University of Gdansk presented their final case. They made use of a very funny South Park movie showing the (non)sense of being online friends. It shows we might treat social networks now and then a bit too serious. We had to laugh a lot and I would like to share it with you.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SgkfghupFE

Currently I’m testing both Foursquare and Gowalla. These tools enable me to check-in at locations I visit. In an interactive way I’m investigating my own neighbourhood and unknown cities. The competition part of the applications make it even more funny to use. By visiting a location often you can become the Major of that side on Foursquare. Of course people already started faking their check-ins to gain points. Therefore, Foursquare decreased the distance from the spot to login. And to prevent further abuse they hired the Foursquare Cops (LOL!)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4rfzYul9O8

Social media are there to stay, whether you like it or not. At its best you can make advantage of them by including social media into your marketing and communication strategy. But at least you will have to follow what people are online telling about your brand, product or you in person. But how do you do that? How can you prevent this becomes a time consuming task? I will explain two tools which I use frequently.

Every day huge amounts of information are being added to the Internet. Think of blog posts, reviews and comments, news items and updates from various social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook andTwitter. It is impossible to keep track on everything. Yet this is important.

It’s fun to see how others write positively about you. A thank you message by you should follow. And it’s even more important to act quickly when someone’s sharing their dissatisfaction. An accurate response to a negative expression is a very good impression among online users. Everyone realizes you can make mistakes. This is not a shame if you at least react with an appropriate response.

Fortunately, there are several tools that continuously scan the Internet for new expressions. Besides several expensive solutions, there are two very good free solutions: Google Alerts and Social Mention.

Google Alerts, e-mail with the most recent Google search results

With Google Alerts you receive daily or weekly by email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on the query you have defined yourself.

You can use Google to search for any random keyword, think of:

• Your company name
• Product name
• Names of employees
• Names of competitors and industry relevant keywords

On the page of Google Alerts the requested Alert can be created. In the above picture you will see I created an alert for the following “search string”:

“peter horsten” OR phorsten OR petersopinion

Determining the right search string is relatively simple by using the Google advanced search page. Enter the keywords Google should continuously search for. Click on “Google Search” and the Google search box shows the search string to copy.

You will receive an e-mail to confirm you would like to receive the alerts, instantly, daily or weekly. Once you start receiving the alert a quick analysis of the e-mail message will show whether or not immediate action is needed.

Social Mention, real-time social media search and analysis

Social Mention, the Google Alert for social media. Gradually, this distinction is disappearing. Google Alerts, like Google, now fully focuses on social media as well. The basic concept of Social Mention is similar. Again, a search term can be made (also to be determined using the Google advanced search method described above) and the result will be send by e-mail as well. The big difference is that you can instantly watch the result online, including additional statistics.

What I recommend?

Normally I don’t mind to share my opinion …. In this case, I think both solutions are useful. Social Mention certainly has the advantage of the immediately visible online result. Tuning the search terms is therefore more convenient. Social Mention also gives more additional statistics. On the other hand, Social Mention mainly shows results from Social Networks and Google Alertsseems better in showing results like blog posts.

Advice: Just try them both and see for yourself what is best and / or works most enjoyable. I invite you cordially to share your opinion below. Let’s learn from each other!

I just came along a nice blog post by Drew McLellan, Social Media Cheat Sheet, where he presents the Social Landscape created by CMO.com. The sheet shows what social media can be used best depending on your personal aim. The bottom line conclusion for me is that you have to make you will be on YouTube to gain most from social media.

Just like Drew states I’m frequently asked what social media site somebody should use. In general I tried to figure out what social media site would fit best. Based on the Social Media Cheat Sheet from now on it’s possible to provide a better answer.

Depending on your aim you can now choose the best performing sites. To achieve this you will have to be aware what you want to use social media sites for:

• Customer communication
• Brand exposure
• Driving traffic to your site or
• SEO?

Analysing CMO.com’s social media landscape I conclude I will have to do a lot more on YouTube. I’m curious about your opinion!