Market Penetration
• Facebook No. 4 Worldwide in Most Trafficked Site
behind Google, Yahoo, and MSN—340 Million
Unique Visitors in June 2009 (TechCrunch, August
2009)
• Facebook surpassed My Space traffic in May 2009;
although My Space holds more advertising
• Twitter gained 3000% increase in users from May 2008 to
May 2009
• Classmates.com is the 4th most trafficked social networking
site
• Linked In ranks 11th among social networking sites
(Comscore, August 2009)

Top 25 Social
Networking
Sites

What Works
5According to a new study by Anderson Analytics of 5,000
users: U.S. social media users:
• 61% of social media users are under age 35
• 75% said Facebook was their most valuable network,
65% who cited MySpace
• 30% said LinkedIn was their most valuable network
• 12% said Twitter was most valuable
• 32% of male respondents said using social media for
business/career
was a key benefit, 22% for females
Time Stamp: 7/17/09

Glass Half Full?
• Almost half the nation’s internet users now
take part in online social networks, such as
Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Linked In,
almost twice the rate of a year ago
• --The Conference Board; June ‘09
• No. 1: Facebook, used by 78% of all
participants in social media
• A quarter log in at work

Myths: Social Networking
• It will become a time suck.
• I’ll lose my privacy.
• I’m not tech savvy enough.
• My personal and professional lives will collide.
• My mistakes will come back to haunt me.
(Think twice before you type.)

Benefits of Virtual Community
• Build credibility and trust. Real person, real
accounts, active participation.
• Lower cost/free advertising. Avoid automation
and spamming.
• Create an online presence.
• Boost and advertise new business.
• Stay in contact with customers. Recruit. Customer
service.
• Instant updates and event management.
• Find employees or business partners.

Social Media Branding

White House Benefits:
Healthcare
LA Times, August
10th

Sometimes Yes,
Sometimes No

Papa John’s Success
• The power of free pizza to collect email
addresses from Fan pages

50% have Followed a Brand
in Social Networking

Update ‘Em

What Works

What Works

What Works

Does it Work?

Budgeting Parameters
• What are your overall objectives and campaign
timeframe?
• How much is your marketing budget? Production alone
of a national TV spot averages $303,000. And, social media has a longer
lifespan.
• What other tactics are you using and are they
working? Are traditional methods really working?
• What are your internal resources? Are you just jobbing out
setup and development or managment?
Budgeting is on a per company basis.

Policies for Employees?
• Deloitte LLC found in its 2009 survey that
almost half of respondents said a policy would
not change how they behave online.
• New areas of law: Electronic Discovery Thrives
• Example. Delta Air Lines Attendant wrote blog
as a diary and posed for photos of a slightly
undone uniform. Delta fired her. Her book is
now out: “Diary of a Dysfunctional Flight
Attendant: The Queen of Sky blog.”

Suggested By Forrester
Sample Corporate Blogging policy
• Make it clear that the views expressed in the blog are yours alone
and do not necessarily represent the views of your employer.
• Respect the company’s confidentiality and proprietary information.
• Ask your manager if you have any questions about what is
appropriate to include in your blog.
• Be respectful to the company, employees, customers, partners, and
competitors.
• Understand when the company asks that topics not be discussed
for confidentiality or legal compliance reasons.
• Ensure that your blogging activity does not interfere with your work
commitments.

ESPN Puts the
Hammer Down
• The guidelines say that on-air talent, reporters and writers are
prohibited from having sports-related blogs or Web sites and
that they will need a supervisor’s approval to discuss sports
on any social networking sites.
• They will also be restricted from discussing internal policies or
detailing how stories are “reported, written, edited or
produced.”
• No Tweeting on ESPN business.
• Aug. 10, 2009

Getting Organized
• The Idea: Think about your industry’s buzzwords
• Follow Journalist Rules: Who, What, Where, When, and
Why
• Keep to less than a hour of research for a post. Pick out a
few resources that are consistently useful for research.
• Brevity—under 500 words wins the day (depending on
topic/audience).
• Get people to respond. Links to further reading, etc.
• Images to text. Video, Audio, Images, Charts, Graphs.
• Get the word out. Promote it. Tweet. Email to lists. Post to
forum. Facebook it.
• Edit after the fact, if need be.

Rules: Self-Imposed
• Would Mom have been ok with it?
• To Be Critical or Not: Interesting perhaps.
Will it cost you a black eye in your
communities of interest?
• Can you Back It Up with facts from elsewhere?
• Timing. What works on posting.
• Linking to other blogs and resources that are
trusted.

Elementary Watson
• Good Blog Scoresheet???
– Informs? Educates? Edutains? Offers Opinions?
– Encourages Stimulating Commentary or Avoids
Commentary But is Timely
– Links of Value
– Part of a Community (your website, your
profession, your industry hot topic)
– Current, and Updated Regularly.
– It follows a Path of Targeted Audience Content.

Teachers, Parents,
Students

Targeted and Niche-
Oriented

What Makes YOUR Blog
Good?
• What is your objective? 2 readers? OK if it is
the right readers.
• Point-of-View. Yours.
• Targeted Audience.
• Do you promote it?

Readership is Relative
• Education Blogger Rankings
• By Postrank, here are the top 8 education blogs based on engagement over 30 days in
January:
• Rank Blog Name
• 1 Joanne Jacobs
• 2 Panda’s Thumb
• 3 BlogHighEd
• 4 High Techpectations
• 5 Ewan McIntosh’s Edu.Blogs.Com
• 6 Moving At The Speed of Creativity
• 7 Around The Corner
• 8 Dangerously Irrelevant
• Technorati currently tracks more than 63.1
million blogs. Over 5,000 of them are about
education.

Blog Example

Measurement Qs
• Define your purpose.
• Create goals and micro goals.
• Will you use it to conduct research, connect to
new brands, vendors, influencers, correct
misperceptions, or build business?
– How many people are exposed to your ideas?
– How many people are going to your website or
online presences?
– Are people engaging you?
Mary Huffman, IMPACT
Marketing, PRSA Leaderserve
Group

Talking to Bloggers
• Be useful. Perhaps the most powerful way to connect with a blogger, proving useful to them
means that in some small way, they owe you one.
Here are some different ways you can make yourself of use to other bloggers:
• Watch over the blog. Let the blogger know when you see factual mistakes, spam comments
or broken links appearing on the blog. Bloggers are always eager to correct this stuff and
often rely on readers to let them know when a problem has arisen.
• Correct design flaws. Bloggers are not always code gurus. Design elements can display
incorrectly or not display at all — or look funny in certain browsers. If you have some skill
with HTML/CSS you can point out any issues.
• Spread their ideas. If you’ve written a post sharing some of the blogger’s ideas, make sure to
email them about it.
• Leverage your skills. If you really want to get on a blogger’s radar, use your skills. If you’re a
Photoshop ninja, offer to design them a new logo, or to customize some graphics on their
site. If you’re a fitness fanatic, offer to consult with them about an exercise plan.
• Write guest-posts. Bloggers like guest-posters, because a guest-post means they don’t have
to worry about writing content for a day.
Source: http://northxeast.com/blogging/how-to-talk-to-bloggers/
• Develop name-recognition.

Blog Research: Top 100
Lists
• http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/
(Top 100 Most Popular include Masahable, TechCrunch,
Huffington Post, Engadget, Boing Boing)
• http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/
food_and_drink/real_food/article5561425.ece
(50 Best Food Blogs)
• http://healthinsurance.about.com/b/2008/09/19/to
p-100-health-care-blogs.htm
(Top 100 Healthcare Policy Blogs)

Job Talk and Social Media
Top HR
Blog

Must-Read HR Blogs
Suggested:
• --CareerHub
• --Cheezhead
• --SixDegrees from Dave
• --Gautam Ghosh
• --Insourced Employment and Jobs Blog
• --Evil HR Lady http://www.hrworld.com/features/top-
25-blogs-121907/
• --good to know.

Microblogging:
Cause Tweeting

Follow Categories for
Research

Talking When You are
Silent?

Jobs

Future of Twitter?
• Denial of Service Attacks Rising
• Issue Date: Daily 'Dog - August 17, 2009,
Experts Say Twitter in Need of Drastic Changes to Survive
• It's been a tumultuous few weeks for microblogging service Twitter. After two separate denial-of-service attacks
shut down the site earlier this month, several security firms predict that Twitter accounts will continue to be used
as command centers for harnessing a botnet of virus-infected computers, CNET reports.
• And now experts are positing that sweeping changes should be made to Twitter—or else it could be in trouble.
Slate's Farhad Manjoo, for example, points out that the site is known for "its regular brokenness." It crashes so
often, he says, because it's run by a single provider in a single office building, as opposed to email services, which
are supported by scores of providers. "Twitter went down so often because the idea behind Twitter—sending out
short status updates to the world—became too popular for one company to handle."
• Manjoo is in favor of a solution made by programmer and Scripting.com blogger Dave Winer, another big Twitter
critic. Winer suggests that Twitter will not last long in its current form—and it must create a system managed by
several different providers connected by common web protocols. Otherwise, attacks like the one earlier this
month will continue to plague the site.
• Ultimately, Manjoo feels that Twitter must adapt or be swallowed by the competition. "It won't be hard to build
competitors to Twitter—systems that do as much as it does but whose decentralized design ensures that they're
not a single point of failure."
• Other critics point to Twitter's lack of revenue model and poor potential for monetization. CNET "Software
Interrupted" blogger Dave Rosenberg says Twitter is "certainly not guaranteed to be lucrative." He suggests
Twitter should morph into something more akin to RSS, or a "dump pipe," as Rosenberg calls it. He explains that
dump pipes are "something that media sites like Yahoo and AOL have been good at leveraging for years."
• Despite Twitter's flaws and challenges moving forward, however, Rosenberg makes an optimistic observation: "The
service has introduced a new way to communicate that is unlikely to disappear overnight."

Interactive Aggregation

Search: The KingPin in
Social Media

Free Updates on Key
Topics

Aggregators: People
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Social Media for Research
Links for Resources at:
http://delicious.com/WebResearchLinks
Compiled by PR Consultants Dave Schmidt and Dawn Yankeelov, 2008

Get Connected
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