Published On: Sun, Aug 1st, 2010

The Week That Was in Social Media [ROUND-UP]

Overview
I, like many others read a fascinating article on Read Write Web looking at the top sources of web referral traffic. This was a very insightful piece looking at what broadly occurs across the web and the article provided some great data that will assist when planning where to allocate resource. For info and perhaps unsurprisingly: Google, Facebook, Youtube and Stumbleupon were the best in class, but I found the margins of dominance interesting, particularly in comparison to Twitter.Amber Naslund from Radian6 highlighted 5 hot topics to watch – I’m particularly interested in the Social CRM and Measurement & Accountability conversations and look forward to seeing how they evolve over the coming 12 months. I’ve included a great post by Todd Defren who discussed the intricacies of the agency-client relationship and how important it is to be honest, yet diplomatic in your dealings with clients – as always, a thoughtful post from Todd.Brian Solis spoke about making branding and marketing more sensory and emotional to inspire action. This really is interesting stuff from Brian and I’m going to place more emphasise on enhancing the sensory experience of our campaigns. Finally, I’ve included a post by Jed Hallam – not only for his eye-catching and provocative title, but for reminding us all about the importance of context in social media monitoring. Context is everything.

Analysis: What are the Web’s Top Sources of Referral Traffic?
If there’s one thing we know about Web authors it’s that they are constantly seeking new sources of traffic for their content. It doesn’t matter if you’re a blogger, a marketing manager or a small business owner, there is simply no reason to invest time with content creation and Web design if no one is coming to read it. For this reason, it’s important to figure out where to actually invest time for the greatest ROI.

5 Social Media Topics to Watch
If conversations are any indicator of what’s important in social media right now, there are certainly some hot spots. And based on a high level glance at the industry overall for the past year, we can pick out a few topics that really seem to have the attention of the business world, including us. Here’s a look at just a few of the leading indicators of what the social media discussion entails today (and that’d be over 64,000 conversations just in the last month alone):When Clients Want “The Truth”
What do you do when the client wants to know what you really think about how their in-house PR manager is doing, or howcum their story isn’t getting more ink, or whether their strategy is off-kilter? You wouldn’t think “the Truth” could be such a sticky issue, but it certainly can be, due to the lopsided nature of the relationship.  Truth exists only when there is some level of equality.Once More, with Feeling: Making Sense of Social Media
I was recently asked at a communications and marketing conference for senior executives when Social Media would start to appeal to all senses including, vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. It was an interesting question and the first time that I had heard it in public. My response was that it is already in full effect. To go one step further, much of the work I’ve studied and also the focus of much of my own work fuses aspects of sensory branding and marketing with elements of experiential and emotional marketing to appeal to the senses as well as to the emotions that inspire action.

Social media monitoring: absolutely pointless
Social media monitoring is a complete waste of resources. Total waste of money, time and understanding. Yep. You know why? I’m guessing by now you’re either really intrigued or really angry. Hopefully both. Social media monitoring is completely useless without context or clear outputs. What are outputs? Your next steps once you capture something. What is context? Context means understanding the data, turning data to information. Something meaningless to something useful.

About the Author

- Marketing Manager with a passion for inbound at HubSpot, Founder of Growth Hack Talks, Blogger at Ben-Cotton.com and Chief Quaffer at CraftySwine.org .

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  1. […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Christian Hughes and Ben Cotton, Ben Cotton. Ben Cotton said: Social Media weekly round up: http://wp.me/pEMSR-fU […]

  2. […] This post was Twitted by Net4wiseowls […]

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