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At midnight on Friday , Facebook will gave users the chance to claim a cleaner URL for their pages. What was once a messy string of numbers and letters could simply be changed to facebook.com/YourNameHere, for example. The move may make it easier to find other people and companies, but did the social networking site give businesses enough time to gear up? Did you get yours? I got mine check it out http://www.facebook.com/robert.blaise
The recession has altered consumers’ purchasing habits in many subtle and profound ways, and marketers need to be aware of the new dynamics that drive their decisions. Cheesy and commercial is out. Quirky and grassroots is in. Done right, marketing via social media can be highly effective. The cost is negligible, and the potential — if your message goes viral — can be incalculable. Social marketing offers a new way to interact with consumers, but aside from being another channel, it requires a different mindset to achieve results. This is Web 2.0, where the consumer is in charge of the message and will angrily resist big brand pressure and broadcast marketing. Content needs to have merit to thrive in the social space, so cheesy slogans are out and well-thought comments and humor are in.So where to start with this new medium? That depends on what kind of business you are in.
Big brands and high-budget marketing departments have a part to play in the new social channels; viral campaigns that include fun or interesting content thrive on YouTube More about YouTube and other video-sharing sites.
The report is out Facebook is ranked as the number one U.S. Social Networking site based on the amount of time spent on the site. According to Nielson Online Facebook is currently the largest social networking site in the United States based on the amount of time spent online. Over the past year, the time spent on Facebook has increased 700 percent in contrast to MySpace, Facebook’s largest competitor, where total time spent has decreased 31 percent. Not surprisingly, Twitter managed to post impressive growth of 3,712 percent.
Twitter still represents a serious threat to Facebook but the company (Facebook) continues to post impressive growth statistics despite the presence of significant competitors. Yesterday there was also a bit of a debate over Facebook’s video service versus MySpace’s video service which currently holds the title for most streams over the past year. Some were arguing that total number of plays is not an accurate measurement since Facebook’s video service is used for sharing personal videos, not general media.
The anonymous nature of the web acts as a tax on anyone who is an honest merchant. Sales are driven by perceived value, and many marketers spend 90%+ of their time & effort on front end marketing and optimizing their sales channels, while providing little to no substance to anyone who buys from them. By the time those customers get to people like us, they are already more distrusting, cynical, and jaded due to having been scammed - in many cases multiple times.
To someone new to a field, scams often look more legitimate than the real thing. Just ask anyone who has spent their share of the 100s of millions of dollars on acai diet reverse billing fraud promoted through fake blogs advertised on the Google content network. Quality vs Perceived Quality
In terms of sales, the quality of the product or service is typically nowhere near as important as how much mindshare you have. That last sentence sorta reveals one of the major weaknesses of most non-salespeople. You can’t just focus on having the best product and think that will be enough. You have to use push marketing until you build enough momentum that it starts becoming a force of its own. And it needs to be periodically refreshed through advertising, public interaction, and viral marketing.