Mueller & Co.

If you are a local business that you think Foursquare is your salvation in these challenging economic times, think again. It may just as easily breed mediocrity your business mindset and create an opportunity for your competition to get a hand up on you. As a local business you need to treat every one of your customers, every day, like Queens and Kings. They need to feel special all of the time. Believing that you can simply concentrate on the few customers who use Foursquare to build your brand, and business, is a mistake. Yes, it may give you a little bit more visibility, but the question is how effectively this translates to your bottom line?

recently I ran into a company called PicScout and realized that I really don’t need to worry at all. PicScout offfers a sevice that “fingerprints” my images so they can be identified even if they have been photoshopped and modified. Their service also goes out on the internet and will find my pictures and let me know where they are being used

Social media is not distinct from other online marketing efforts; it is really part of the same effort, one of the many levers that could be pulled to reach strategic objectives. It is just one part of a smart integrated marketing strategy. While SEO is used to drive traffic to your website, and advertising is used to build awareness, social media works in concert with all the others efforts and aims to get more people to talk more frequently in more places about your products, services, and company, with the goal of selling more products, more frequently, and at higher margins.

Last week I speculated that the new Twitter’s native Retweet feature was about search, but it looks like maybe I was wrong; it a may be all about advertising, with search playing a supporting role. Robert Scoble says that at today’s TechCrunch Real Time Crunchup, Dick Costolo – Twitter’s COO, said that Twitter will introduce an advertising model. Scoble speculates that this will be done through metadata. He believes the metadata would be revealed when you mouse over a given tweet. I think that the metadata will be used to instantly generate an advertisement and it will be the ad that is revealed when you mouse over the tweet not the metadata.

I would like to speculate a bit about why Twitter has chosen to architect the new “Retweet feature” without the ability to edit, and why they chose to call it Retweet even though it does not serve the same function as the cultural convention that we currently call Retweet.
Retweet as a Cultural Convention
Retweet, as  a [...]

The act of creating lists may result in a dual class of Twitizen – Those who are on lists of influential people and those who are not. To some extent lists may freeze the status quo of power structures within Twitter as they exist today, Give those with influence even more, and may make it much harder for new users to be discovered which may hinder engagement by the long tale of users

It seems that the question of how to measure Social Media efforts is elusive and a critical component that needs to be addressed as Social Media evolves into a profession. Social Media is a disruptive technology that affects numerous industries. Modern companies have evolved to measure the efforts they put forth and investments made in terms of how much profit or loss those same efforts have generate (ROI). Since Social media disrupts industries and business practices, it is often hard to grasp exactly how social media initiatives perform in respect to ROI. Additionally, new metrics such as, mentions, blog posts, comments, engagement, etc. have arisen as a way to quantify the effectiveness of social media initiatives in terms of reaching strategic objectives.

Sponsored tweets have arrived in earnest and are creating quite a controversy. People are very passionate about this topic and view it as either a great thing or something that will send Twitter to the grave. Ultimately the effect will probably not be so extreme but sponsored tweets will likely have repercussions of varied strength across the entire Twitter ecosystem. Stakeholders include: advertisers, spokespeople, users, and the platform itself – the question is how will this play out and how will these stakeholders be affected.

This type of sponsorship done with integrity is perfectly legitimate and ethical but its ultimate effect is a far cry from unpaid evangelism that charismatic brands organically generate. The very fact that someone gets paid to take an action, alters the actions that they will take. The very fact that they are earning money by promoting a brand affects their opinion of the brand. It is how the subconscious mind works and part of human nature (we have good feelings for things that benefit us). Integrity in respect to sponsored tweets may be more difficult to maintain than many realize.

The social web has begun a profound and irreversible cultural change. The ease and speed at which information is transferred and the ability to share knowledge and opinion with each other, enables us to align ourselves in numerous flexible ungoverned groups. The alignments, immediacy, and interactions that take place give us a feeling of belonging that is core to what it means to be human. Our busy lives in modern western society have largely limited these types of analog interactions and the Social Web is filling the gap.

In case you haven’t heard, Jeff Pulver has gathered 140 of the top social media characters and is hosting a conference to take a look at Twitter. The conference is called the 140 Characters Conference (#140conf) and it is the characters that will define the event. Make sure to take a look at them. The conference will take place at: New World Stages in New York City on June 16/17