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As you may know, I spent some time in November gathering responses to a 10 question social media use survey. The need for this survey grew out of the success of the Future of Social Media webinar Denise Wakeman and I held this past October.
After the webinar, we realized that many people still had questions about using social media effectively to build influence, credibility, and visibility. The two areas that participants asked about very frequently were content creation and syndication. People seem to be wondering what kind of content, and how much content to produce, and then, also, how to distribute their content most efficiently across the social media platforms.
Along with this, people had questions about growing their Facebook fan page, using remote blogging sites like Posterous, and how to set up their own content syndication streams.
We had more than 300 people respond to our survey, and the results are available for opt-in/download. We’ll be using this data to build a online marketing coaching program which we plan to launch in March 2010. Our goal is to demystify the process of online and social media marketing so your efforts make sense, and bring you the results you want.
If you’d like to get a copy of the survey results, and get on the notification list for this new program, please visit this link and sign up. Remember to confirm your subscription so you can get the report, and please retweet on Twitter if you wish to do so (retweet buttons are in the document itself.) You’ll need to be able to open .pdf files to access the results.
Our goal is to make 2010 the year your online and social media marketing finally makes sense!
Here’s the link to get the results:
http://www.mindsharecorp.com/go/socialmediause/
Happy New Year!
See you in 2010!
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Let me preface this post by saying I am a huge fan of Seth Godin’s. I admire the way he thinks and his vision. But I do have concerns about his latest venture.
I was just reading about Brands in Public, a service launching soon which focuses on helping gather information about your company or brand and aggregating it in one place. As a brand subscribed to the service, you can (for $400/monthly), respond to any feedback or comments about your brand, as it is listed on the page.
While I certainly agree for the need for online reputation management, my strong feeling is that this is a service each of us must do for ourselves. In Seth’s post, he does mention that it is something you can do on your own, presuming you have sufficient resources to do so.
My concerns about this stem from two main issues. First, I have issues with the idea that Brands in Public will become the middlepeople between companies and their customers. Essentially, because of the reach and traction I expect this service to have, they are becoming the arbiters or monitors of what is being said. They have put themselves into a judge/jury type position in terms of content, and I believe that if enough paying clients complain, certain information will be reduced in its importance or removed entirely. In a sense, by aggregating the information, they can also change the information.
I agree that this type of service would be useful. I understand that there needs to be a revenue model. I just have concerns about any service which is supposedly for the public good, but can allow a reshaping of public sentiment based on who is paying for the page.
In a way, this process is removing or at least reducing the community driven aspect of online brand management.
My second issue with this service is that if you don’t invest with them, they are gathering all the data about your company, and you, essentially have no control over it. Again, because of their reach and influence, they are likely to become the authoritative voice on issues- even if their information is wrong or incorrect.
I don’t expect that I’ll have to worry, and you, as a small business owner, may not either- but the fact is, should any inaccurate negative information appear about you or your company on Brands in Public, you or I are unlikely to have the resources to combat it adequately. At minimum, this means the continued perpetuation of misinformation. At maximum, it could mean lasting damage to our businesses or reputation.
I don’t think that Brands in Public is a good idea as it stands. A better way to approach it may be to use the resources and knowledge of Brands in Public and work with businesses to build their own self managed brand pages. This way, Brands in Public can help businesses accomplish a key objective (which Seth himself notes is a good idea) without putting themselves in as middlepeople of a company’s online brand management.
What do you think?
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