Unified Studies - Portland Social Media, Web Design, and Web development

New survey from Razorfish - 40% of People "Friend" Brands on Facebook

40% of People "Friend" Brands on Facebook...that is one of the findings from a new survey from Razorfish who questioned 1000 "connected consumers". ReadWriteWeb does their usual excellent breakdown and analysis here.

Another crazy stat from the survey....33% of respondents report they get their news from Facebook. That is both amazing and....hard to believe...but there it is!

Simple takeaway...brands/businesses ignore the social web at their own peril...true this survey is "connected consumers" but...it won't be long before that category includes just about everyone.

unified studies currently working on....!

Some of our current clients include:

Hand in Hand...The Hand in Hand Center for Jewish-Arab Education is Israel was founded to build peace between Jews and Arabs in Israel through development of bilingual and multi-cultural schools...(developing a comprehensive on-line strategy)

CAN...The Creative Arts Network - CAN collaborates with other Arts organizations to develop a Regional Response To Arts & Culture Funding Crisis  - it is about expanding the conversation beyond the typical creative community and forming strategic alliances with all those who benefit from the arts - the broader public. (redesign and rebuild of website)

AllPrep...non-profit accredited schools for students who seek a self-paced, rigorous education outside their traditional public school program. (working with new design by MBT Marketing to rebuild using ModX as a content management system)

and looking forward to a presentation Thursday night at the South Waterfront Umpqua Bank, on Social Media Strategies for Small Business.

Hospitals, Health Care and Social Media

The Health Care system is something that virtually every citizen interacts with over and over. As such it seems like a natural for those within the system to try exploring how social media might be of benefit to their customers/clients, as well as how it might impact internal communications and processes.

Ed Bennett, who is, according to his blog, a hospital web manager in the University of Maryland medical system, gave a presentation on Hospitals and Social Media at the  J. Boye conference e-Health track. He cites some interesting examples of social media usage...for instance, the MD Anderson Cancer Center used Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to promote use of referring physician portals...and tracked a 9.5% increase in registrations.

Henry Ford Health used Twitter in it's education program, to do a series of live Twitter-casts of surgeries....with real time Q and A with the surgeons, and garnered national press attention...and had over 500 following in real-time.

Innovis Health used a blog and Twitter during the floods in Fargo, North Dakota...they created the blog and had an update up in the first hour of the emergency...which lead to decreased media demands, and freed up phone lines for emergencies.

I can definitely see how, in the very competitive field of health care, using social media properly can become a real differentiator between service providers, and a potential real competitive advantage.

Social Media - ROI

From Dag Homboe's blog, a spreadsheet to help you in calculating your ROI in regards to your Social Media plan.

Dag says" For this research, we identified 13 parameters that play a role in determining the ROI of Social Media.  It is not necessary to include all parameters in a ROI calculation – pick the parameters that make sense."

Dag also goes to the trouble of explaining thoroughly his reasoning in the build-out of the spreadsheet, and also how to best use it.

Social Media ROI spreadsheet

The Thought Bubble - 25 Must Read Social Media Marketing Tips

Most articles/blog posts on social media marketing are short churns of phrase. The motivation being..."Gotta post something today, keep the page views up, become a thought leader, add some followers, engage my hoped-for audience"....and 90% of the time the post is merely a regurgitation of the acknowledged fundamentals of social media marketing. The dearth of actual original thought in SMM "thought leaders" is...I would say "alarming" but it doesn't warrant the use of a word that should be used in conjunction with something far more serious.

I'd like to start a meme today about how so much of the writing today on SMM is based on nothing. The same people saying the same things to each other in....well, it's either an echo chamber or a vacuum. It's the same, conceptually, as the NASDAQ bubble, the housing bubble, etc., a whole lot of activity, word churn, energy and money swirling around a mountain of expectation and perceived (or imagined, or hoped for) value.

We shall henceforth call this "The Thought Bubble".

Sure, SMM, and social media and the conversation is all good stuff. And I love, and agree with Gary Vee-WineTV, yes, it's a revolution. But an economy cannot be built on a lot of experts singing to a bunch of other experts the same old song in the hopes that a few companies will hear the siren song and pay to hear it as well. There's a lot of back-slapping and McLovin' going around.

Now that I've said that...here's a great article on Social Media Marketing from a bunch of the usual suspects! Seriously though, it's a long, pretty in-depth read. A lot of it, of course, can be boiled down to "Learn to Listen", and many of these thought leaders lapse into agency-speak that is tortuous, and comic. Hey, expert, read your thing out loud. Does it sound smart, or like a load of crap-speak? OK...it sounds smart...still, does it mean anything other than learn to listen? If not, just say learn to listen  and leave the 10 dollar words in your novel.

One of the good points made in the article is from Geoff Livingston - Senior Vice President at CRT/tanaka.  He speaks to the importance of companies having a larger communications strategy that social media is a part of...he says, in part:

I think they should nail down a higher strategy first.  It’s a common error, and one I face often where I have to unify and re-activate littered social media properties that have been abandoned due to little interest. Going back to that core strategy, that core value an organization has to offer is the heart of where social media strategy begins.  Not playing with Twitter because it is hot.

The best stuff in this article is from actual companies talking about their challenges/successes i/r/t SMM, like HP...but it's all worth a read.

25 Must Read Social Media Marketing Tips

Advertising as Failure - Jeff Jarvis

Jarvis writes (and videos) on Buzzmachine of the notion of advertising as failure.

He says in part: "the ideal relationship a company should have with its customer is that it produces a great product the customer loves and talks about and thus sells; there is no need for advertising there."

True enough, and this is naturally where the concept of social media and listening come into play, as everyone knows now. Customer evangelists spreading the word, company listens and responds to concerns and problems, a two way conversation.

I think this begs one small question...isn't advertising sometimes used to get a product in front of some consumers, not always because the product is a failure that needs to be propped up by advertising?

New companies should consider the "too small to fail" approach when launching. Launch as small as you can, so you can be as nimble as possible, so you can change your strategy on the fly if need be...or change your PRODUCT on the fly if need be. It's the companies with giant burn rates that have to advertise their way into the consumer's heart. Combining the too small to fail approach, with the conversational tools available, and a targeted media and advertising spend to "grease the wheels" of beginning the conversation might be a good hybrid approach.

Spymaster, twitter and user-driven innovation

The backlash took less than one day to set in on @Spymaster.

Spy vs. Spy

Although there are plenty of ways for the twitter user to filter out the spymaster tweets (as described in the comments from the above Techcrunch article)...lots of folks are talking about how Twitter needs to do something about it. I think I am siding with the "twitter doesn't need to do anything" crowd. I think it should rely on the client/developers to see what problems arise and deal with them, and let twitter remain the "platform"...one thing spymaster is doing is getting users and developers to look at the infrastructure and ecosystem  to try to puzzle out solutions...or point to ones that already exist.

Many of the most useful twitter "features" came from the users...@replies, hashtags, etc. This is a (sorta) pivotal moment for Twitter when they will need to decide whether this ("this" meaning spymaster being perceived as spam, and as a degradation of the twitter experience) is actually a problem or not. I think this falls into the user-driven innovation pile, and this will inevitably influence the evolution of Twitter...we can't say yet if that's a bad thing, and some would argue that evolution is neither good nor bad, it just is. I think spymaster is a very very clever use of twitter, and the first of an onslaught of social games I am sure.

But, the bottom line is, (I think) users (and I include developers in that term) will figure the best way out of this "problem". People say "zombies" ruined Facebook. I have had a relatively zombie and poke-free Facebook existence, and I expect my twitter experience won't be ruined by a few spies.

Non-profits, social media, and cause marketing.

Wow...here is a pretty comprehensive breakdown of a social media campaign, run by Scott Henderson of MediaSauce for Share Our Strength. The best part is the post-op he does, identifying where mistakes might have been made...no campaign is perfect.

Cause Marketing or Cause Me to Puke Marketing

Any non-profit looking to jump into the cause marketing pool, should read and learn. From Beth Kanter's excellent blog.

Enterprise Micro Sharing Tools Comparison

Enterprise Micro Sharing Tools Comparison 11032008

Publish at Scribd or explore others: School Work Research twitter status

Government 2.0 video from change.gov

A slick video from change.gov, extolling the virtues of social media in governing...not just campaigning.
New Media: Government 2.0 from America.Gov on Vimeo.