Welcome!

At Media Socialist, we want to discover and understand everything in the social media realm. Think of it as an experiment where we’ll try out more social media than is healthy, and we’ll report our findings to you.

• Scroll down to read articles about social media, including these popular topics:
  
• Learn about social media, and share your knowledge in our new Social Media Catalog. It’s like Wikipedia, but exclusively for social media.
• If you think we’ve missed something awesome in social media, or you’d like us to test it out before you waste your time, suggest it!

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How to measure social media: A practical approach

Benchmarking is the only way to measure the efficacy of a social media campaign. Don’t think social media is an entirely different animal just because you aren’t familiar with it. Because of the ad hoc nature of social, there is no universal way to approach it, but here’s what I’ve done for social campaigns:

1) Research the situation, organization and publics as you would normally. This will prescribe whether social media is the best approach. For example, if you’re trying to reach a demographic that reads newspapers more than news Web sites, reconsider social media as a key strategy. Save it for tactics. If the target publics and stakeholders align with the focus of the program, campaign or project, go to the next step.

2) Strategy. Establish goals and objectives for the campaign. If you want to increase social media impressions 50 percent by 1st quarter 2010, for example, you need to establish where the program is currently. For existing programs, it’s easy to use an online measurement tool like Compete to gather approximate unique visitor figures for any given Web site mentioning your program. The free version of the service gives you figures back one year. If a current search for the site does not exist, you’ll have to create one. It takes a month to aggregate new data. If this is the case, begin anyway. Relationship building cannot start soon enough. As for finding mentions of your program, set up a search term (“Matt’s widget emporium” NOT “toys” NOT “stuff”) on high-traffic platforms (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr) and click search. Refine the search term to make it more efficient if it’s not pulling the mentions you want. Click the RSS feed button on the page and it will give you the code for an RSS aggregator (I recommend Google Reader). Or, you can copy the URL in the search bar and paste into the Google Reader subscription. You can also set up an RSS feed using Google Alerts. This is another free service from Google that allows you to pull mentions from blogs, news and other Web sites.

If you want to make ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN your efforts garnered the coverage, use a unique URL service, such as HootSuite, tr.im, budurl, bit.ly, etc. This allows you to enter any URL (like the one for your news release), shorten it into a unique URL and track how many people click it. It also serves as proof that you earned impressions — not the vendor — at evaluation time.

3) Choose your tactics and implement the plan. This often relies heavily on blogger relations – not simply e-mail, but several channels. The best relations often come from a pull model—allowing the influencer to use content that fits his or her theme. Give the blogger/social media thought leader a place to pull information and rich media from. This comes in the form of a social media release , or SMR, (not just a news release with hyperlinks). Measurement tip: House it on your Web site if you can. This makes it easy for your IT people to run analytics (5 Ws and H of your microsite’s traffic). Or, if you lack resources, make your own site to house the SMR. You can run your own analytics with Google Analytics for free. Search Mashable to find all the tools you need.

4) Evaluate the efficacy of your plan. Keep in mind, social media is fickle. If it revolves around human interaction, it’s impossible to determine causation. We aren’t saying a commercial caused customers to convert in rafts; those old advertising and marketing tactics are over.

However, keep this in mind when measuring: Don’t think in terms of activity and results. Think of outputs and outcomes. You can quantify how many e-mails you send social influencers, how many impressions you get from your unique URLs, and all the other outputs it takes to sustain meaningful relationships among various social media. Take screen caps. Count unique visitors. Put it in Excel.

Keep communicating, even when the program is over. You’re creating more than a transactional relationship.

Posted in measurement | No Comments »
Tagged with campaign, communication, measurement, PR

Social media test: Who can make my rental car journey happen?

As a social media proponent, online contact forms and 800 numbers don’t provide the personal touch and transparent answers I crave in interactions with companies, so this blog post is a test, to see who’s out there listening (and who’s responsive).

I have a rental car need that shouldn’t be too difficult to satisfy. I’m flying to San Francisco to visit my sister before Thanksgiving, and would like to drive with her down to San Diego to see the rest of my family. I’m flying out of San Diego, so it would be a one-way drive, and I want to do it in one day to avoid paying for multiple days of renting (especially because the price goes way up for one-way rentals).

I initiated online quotes with Alamo, Enterprise, Hertz, and National – all companies I have a discount with – but the online systems leave so many questions:

• The pick-up and drop-off times vary by location. How can I figure out which location(s) will make it possible to make the drive in one day?
• I’m not familiar with these companies’ policies, so I don’t know if they do after-hours drop offs, or if a one-day rental constitutes a business day, or 24 full hours.
• I’d like an economy or hybrid vehicle, but I can’t tell which cars will be available.

I really need a human to guide me through this unfamiliar territory, so I’m curious which of the rental car companies monitor social media, and which are willing to offer personal customer service to make this trip work.

So basically the question I’m posing is: Can I make this roughly 500-mile California drive in one day, and with whom and how can I do it?

Thank you to any company that can help! (You can e-mail me, or find me on Twitter.)

Additional details:

• As I won’t have a car in San Fran, any rental location near public transportation would be helpful.
• I’m not driving all the way to downtown San Diego (unless I have to), and I’ll probably be on I-15 to avoid Los Angeles, so any drop-off point in Escondido or Poway, CA would work too.

Extra search keywords to help companies find this: Budget Dollar Thrifty Rent A Car

Posted in Blogs | No Comments »
Tagged with alamo, budget, california, car, dollar, enterprise, hertz, national, rent, rent a car, rental, thrifty, trip

Another Twix-up!

Before you use Twitter to store your ATM PIN numbers, remember, it can’t be trusted. The micro-blogging platform, which is dominated by a culture of open, public communication, also provides some privacy: direct messages and protected profiles.

But as the L.A. Times pointed out last night, the latter is prone to a major security hole: Google.

Many of those protected messages can be found through Google’s search engine. The results page shows an index of the tweets it has logged…

For example, a search for Bill Clinton’s [private] profile spits out the first few words of tweets.

While the full text of @billclinton’s tweets remains hidden, and the links dead-end, these snippets (on the right) appear (for now) on a Google results page, simply by using the site-specific Google search syntax: site:

In April, a different security screw-up afflicted Twitter’s other “private” function: direct messages. For a few hours, direct messages (DMs), which are intended to be private communications, like e-mail, were delivered to the wrong people.

Here’s what showed up in my inbox (left). (Mind you, I know none of these people, and none of the messages were intended for me, especially the last one.)

Moral of the story: Twitter’s great for public dialogue, but think twice before sharing anything else. You never know where it might end up.

Posted in Micro-blogging | No Comments »
Tagged with LA Times, Twitter

Name squatting the Fortune 50 companies on Twitter

The companies of the Fortune 500 generate the greatest revenues worldwide, and undoubtedly require a lot of manpower to sustain their day-to-day operations. Due to their size and complexity, these big companies are often slow to enter social media spaces like Twitter. Who should be the voice of the company? What about legal? Don’t we have bigger fish to fry?

By the time some of these giants decide to join the conversation, they may find their trademarked, and extremely recognizable names have been taken, name squatted out from under them, and Twitter, constantly bogged down by its growing infrastructure, is often unable or slow to respond to trademark issues.

In searching for Twitter accounts for the top 50 Fortune companies (via Google), some interesting facts are discovered:

• 33 of the Fortune 50 companies appear to have an official Twitter presence. Those that don’t are mostly oil companies (Exxon Mobil, Valero Energy, Marathon Oil, Sunoco) and health care companies (Cardinal Health, CVS Caremark, UnitedHealth, AmerisourceBergen, WellPoint).
• The majority of the Fortune 50 companies (37), whether on Twitter or not, appear to have at least one of their trademarked/ideal names squatted as a username. Some of these names may be squatted by the company itself, but considering most of these companies are on Twitter and not using these usernames, it’s more likely that a third, unauthorized party has taken hold of the powerful username.
• The Fortune 50 companies on Twitter average relatively low numbers of followers. Their primary accounts combined (about 1.3 million followers) garner as much interest as @ICHCheezburger, or about a third as much as @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher). Their popularity is skewed though, by @DellOutlet, which accounts for about 1.2 million of those followers. Removing Dell, the remaining 32 companies average about 4,000 followers each (at the time of this writing).

After the jump is a full list of the Fortune 50 companies with squatted usernames.

KEEP READING »

Posted in Micro-blogging | No Comments »
Tagged with Fortune 500, name squatting, Twitter

What the F**k is Social Media: One Year Later

Marta Kagan, US Managing Director at Espresso gave a keynote last year titled “What the F**k is Social Media.” This keynote is comprised of a nice overview of the space along with nice statistics that the last year has afforded.

Some key takeaway points:

• Visiting social sites is now the 4th most popular online activity-ahead of personal email (Nielsen, Global Faces and Networked Places, 2009)
• Social media is like word of mouth, on steroids
• Because, dear friend, social media is a f**king force to be reckoned with (insert yoda image)
• 1,000,000,000 web links, news stories, blog posts, and notes are shared on Facebook every week

If nothing else, take note of the slide design. A nice departure from the text-heavy presentations that all-too-often make the journey from projector to screen.

Posted in News, Social Networks | No Comments »
Tagged with Espresso, Facebook, Marta Kagan

Top Social Networks Here and Abroad 2009

Last year I compiled a large list of popular social networks in the U.S. and around the world. Using recent data from Alexa, I’ve updated the list for June 2009.

What’s Changed Since Last Year

• Facebook, which had already beat MySpace globally, surpassed its rival in the U.S., and stole a lot of traffic from other global social networks.
• Twitter stormed into the Top 10, becoming the #3 social network in the U.S. and #7 globally.
• LinkedIn, Tagged, and Ning have doubled their global reach.
• Yahoo! 360, Live Spaces (by Microsoft), and imeem halved their global reach.
• Last year’s fastest growing social network, V Kontakte (Russia’s #1 website) moved from #6 to #5 on the Global Top 15.
• Last year I overlooked the extremely popular (in China) Baidu, and popular deviantART (in the U.S.).

“Global rank” and “U.S. rank” represent web traffic compared to every other website (not just social networking sites). “Reach” is the percentage of worldwide users who access the site. Numbers in green have improved since last year; red numbers have suffered.

TOP 10 SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES IN THE UNITED STATES

Now look how the rankings change when you include users outside the U.S.

TOP 15 SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES WORLDWIDE

KEEP READING »

Posted in Social Networks | No Comments »
Tagged with AdultFriendFinder, Alexa, Angola, Australia, Badoo, Baidu, Bebo, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, China, classmates, Cote d'Ivoire, Del.icio.us, deviantART, Ecuador, Facebook, Flickr, france, friendster, hi5, imeem, india, iran, Iraq, ireland, Italy, japan, Kazakhstan, LinkedIn, Live Spaces, livejournal, mertroFLOG, mexico, Microsoft, mixi, MySpace, Netherlands, netlog, new zealand, ning, orkut, Paraguay, Peru, portugal, romania, russia, skyrock, sonico, South Africa, Spain, switzerland, tagged, thailand, Twitter, ukraine, united kingdom, united states, v kontakte, Vietnam, yahoo, yahoo! 360

SocialReach - Reaching into your privacy

I’m engaged, so I see a lot of wedding services advertisements on Facebook. Film school ads pop up, because I was a film major. Some simply say, “Are you a 24-year-old male?” to grab my attention. These targeted ads don’t bother me because the advertisers don’t learn any of my personal data; they simply click a few checkboxes to drill down to my demographic. My data is aggregated and anonymous.

So while watching a video at TodaysBigThing.com, a strange image surprised me. Your standard “Test your IQ” ad appeared on the right, but it was REALLY targeted. The ad featured five of my Facebook friends’ profile pictures and names, but I wasn’t on Facebook (or even logged into Facebook). And what really creeped me out was that these aren’t simply five random people from my friend list; these are five of my closest friends!

Without clicking the link, I checked the source of the image: SocialReach.com, the “leading social monetization platform,” according to their website. They write, “For advertisers, we combine sophisticated behavioral and predictive technology that allows you to reach the right people with the right ads at exactly the right moment.”

I have no idea how SocialReach executed this kind of ad or if it falls within the accepted third-party use of Facebook user data. I’ve submitted the incident to Facebook and we’ll see what happens.
In the meantime, I have so many questions about this. I’m half weirded out and half impressed:

• How did they move this personal data outside of Facebook’s walls? Is that allowed? It reminds me of Beacon, Facebook’s attempt to take what we do outside Facebook and bring it in, as a form of internal advertising, but this is the opposite.
• I imagine the source of this must be a rogue Facebook app, which was granted access to my data, but which one? I don’t use many, or involve my friends in many.
• How was it smart enough to differentiate my closest, real friends from my other, assorted contacts? Maybe these are the people I share the most common Facebook friends with, but how would it know that?

Anyway, I’m baffled. We’ll see if Facebook knows what’s up.

Posted in Social Networks | No Comments »
Tagged with advertising, Beacon, Facebook, SocialReach

Social Media Revolution

It’s been a week since the Iranian government announced President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s landslide election victory over popular reformist candidate Mirhossein Mousavi, which sparked lasting, national demonstrations. Protesters believe the election results are fraudulent, and see this moment as an opportunity for change, or perhaps revolution.

Certainly, if a revolution is possible, it has been aided by social media technology, which is embraced by Iran’s significant youth population. (“More than two-thirds of Iran’s population is less than 30 years old”!) The Iranian government has taken many steps to stop the spread of information, reportedly including media censorship and intimidation, blocking Internet and cell phone access, and even sending police to destroy civilian computer hardware. For those able to circumvent the government’s restrictions, social media has been crucial to keeping the lines of communication intact, both between Iranians, and to the rest of the world.

Last year, the U.S. presidential election drove significant traffic to many social media sites, and likely played a large role in Twitter’s 202% growth and The Huffington Post’s 70% growth from May to November 2008. Iran’s election, though, is truly highlighting the power of these communication tools to shape politics, and some social media sites have changed the way they operate to accommodate this historic use of these channels:

• Twitter once again provides news value. While Iran’s media censorship (or perhaps our own ethnocentrism) has effectively kept the protests from commanding the U.S. 24/7 cable newscycle, defeated presidential candidate Mousavi reminded his supporters via Twitter that “One Person = One Broadcaster.” Simply search “#iranelection” on Twitter and you’ll find constant stream of Iranian news-sharing. (In fact, the #iranelection hashtag has consistently been one of the top trending topics for the past week.)
• HuffPo’s live-blog has all the latest news. Shining in the traditional media blackout is The Huffington Post, whose admirable Nico Pitney is live-blogging the updates from Iran. Where once viewers turned to CNN for the latest coverage of world-shaking events, an individual blogger is currently outperforming his traditional media colleagues by leaps and bounds. (I’ve been glued to this live blog daily to keep up.)
• The uprising begins to affect the way social media businesses operate. Twitter proprietor Biz Stone announced Monday that their scheduled maintenance would be moved to the middle of the night in Iran, to avoid excommunicating Iranian protesters.
• YouTube embraces its news role. Tuesday, YouTube reminded users that while they do not ordinarily allow graphic, violent videos, the videos coming out of Iran serve an important news service and will not be taken down. They’ve also collected some of the most important videos on their blog, Citizentube.
• Google provides translation aid. To better facilitate the open exchange of information across cultures, Google added Persian (Farsi) last night to their Google Translate tool.
• Facebook follows suit. Also last night, Facebook opened their Persian-version of their site.

It’s heartening to see as popular as the social media giants get, they still recognize their core values of open communication. For those of us in the business of social media, these kind of events bring legitimacy to social technologies that are often criticized as narcissistic or wastes of time. But more importantly, these technologies provide a true democratic playing field for individual voices to shape their societies. Especially when lives have been lost and many more are on the line, communication is vital.

Above photo by Shahram Sharif

Posted in Blogs, Micro-blogging, News, Social Networks, Video | No Comments »
Tagged with Citizentube, election, Facebook, Google Translate, iran, the huffington post, Twitter, YouTube

Tonight’s the night for Facebook usernames!

In just over 4 hours, Facebook will allow users and Page admins to choose unique usernames! What this means, like on many other social media sites, is that users can obtain much more desirable, convenient, easy-to-remember URLs. Gone are the days of http://facebook.com/people/Chad_Brunswick/92219538. Hello http://facebook.com/chadwick! (Or whatever.)

At 12:01 a.m. tonight, Eastern time (assuming no technical issues crop up), head on over to Facebook’s Username page to choose your one-time-only, permanent, non-reversible, non-exchangeable, non-transferable new username for your personal profile and also any Pages (not groups) you’re an admin for.

Hold up, though, before you go off brainstorming; there are some rules:

• Must be at least 5 alphanumeric characters (periods included, but not spaces or underscores as I understand it)
• Your profile must be older than 3 p.m. Eastern, Tuesday, June 9, 2009, to be eligible.
• Your Page must have been created on or before May 31, 2009, and have had at least 1,000 fans by then.
• You can’t use “generic” words, like “flowers” or “pizza.” Who knows how many of these have been blacklisted?
• Many trademarked names will also be blocked, and if you happen to pick one up, it will probably be taken away.
• Don’t make a spelling mistake/typo, because you’ll be stuck with it.

Good luck everyone! When Facebook becomes the sole form of communication in the near future, and we never venture out of our homes, you’ll wish you had the sweetest Facebook username ever!

Click here to choose a username! | Read the original Facebook blog post | Facebook Help Center: Usernames

Below the fold: Why the 1,000-fan rule for Pages is causing frustration.

KEEP READING »

Posted in Social Networks | No Comments »
Tagged with Facebook, Pages, username

45,025 comments! I’m so popular!

When hundreds of spam comments flood your blog everyday, that’s the kind of discouragement that will keep you, the author, from returning, let alone posting, very often. What’s worse is when spambots simultaneously attack your wiki site as well.

Losing the will to continually sift through all the spam, I’ve neglected Media Socialist for four months, and devoid of human presence, the site has been rampant with lifeless, blog-sucking leeches. They made hundreds of link-filled edits to the Media Socialist Wiki, and left 45,025 (likely Cialis-selling) comments on the blog, hundreds of which passed through Akismet, WordPress‘ built-in spam filter. (And those numbers don’t include the hundreds, perhaps thousands I manually deleted.)

“Why me?” I cried. “The owner of an insignificant blog that no one reads?! Don’t these spammers realize there’s no one here to click their links?”

Fortunately, there’s a solution! And one week after it’s implementation, not one spam footprint on this blog or wiki. It’s like I lit a Citronella candle on the homepage!

Bad Behavior, created by Michael Hampton, is a PHP-based spam killer that appears to work very well. It’s a simple plug-in install for the blog, and a fairly simple upload to my MediaWiki-based wiki server. I’m just impressed that one solution fixed both my spam problems!

Posted in Blogs, Media Socialist, Wikis | No Comments »
Tagged with Akismet, Bad Behavior, MediaWiki, spam, wordpress