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Social media tools are becoming ever more popular amongst businesses throughout Australia as a way of offering special promotional deals and offers to their loyal fan base and followers.
Adding this additional interactive level with customers not only continues to build on your company’s brand awareness, and improve customer satisfaction but also encourages customers to continually purchase your products or services when they may not have until this particular ‘deal’ or ‘promotion’ caught their attention.

National Brand/Marketing Manager of EB Games, Debra McGrath talks about how EB Games distributes exclusive beta codes and offers through its ‘tweets’ on Twitter, which now has over 6000 followers. Their objective with social media was to make the user experience on these networks fun, useful and enhance their customer’s experience, with no particular focus on revenue goals.

Smart marketers know how powerful and influential word-of-mouth can be, and utilising social media to encourage this continual word of mouth, promotes interaction with customers in a simple way which will make aid in getting your brand name out there.

Twitter has proven a real hit for online promotions and brand awareness for Virgin Blue and Jetstar which actively offer specials deals and offers with their followers. Fast growing pizza chain Crust,  has a ‘Free Pizza Friday’ competition, getting fans to tweet ‘I’m entering @ Crust-Pizza # CrustFreePizzaFriday’, for the chance to win five free pizzas for that night.                                                                                                              Chief Executive, Michael Logos from Crust stated that although it was hard to track the exact revenue that came in from their online presence, Crust chains have definitely noticed the increase in sales as well as enjoying the increased ability to communicate with customers in real time.

Founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg announced the newly developed features and products of Facebook. Most notably docs.com, which is an online document editor and viewer like Google Docs but connects directly to Facebook and uses all of the new social features. This allows users to share documents with friends on Facebook, edit them with input from friends and also find out what documents friend’s have uploaded onto Facebook via their profile.

Microsoft already have document collaboration solutions for the corporate market so this partnership will ensure that there are more functionality available for the user as compared to Google Docs.

Facebook is moving towards creating an interconnected web where links and pages are related and shared online. Their vision can be described as:

…one connected to Facebook’s brain via hooks — and four of those hooks are expected to be unveiled at f8:

* Facebook Connect 2.0 with auto-login features
* Facebook Presence Bar
* Share/Like buttons
* Facebook Location

The main benefits can quickly be seen for students and other Facebook users outside of the corporate environment.

What do you think about Facebook wanting to integrate every aspect of the user experience into one place?

We all know that social media is a powerful networking medium for businesses to create and increase their online presence.

Businesses that are actively involved in social media and seen as very social online are easier for people to refer. Using social media networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter can be very advantageous for businesses to promote themselves to become more connected with their customers and socially involved with various communities.
People may be more likely to refer your business if they can see your active participation and engagement with others through tweets, Facebook comments and blog posts.

Below are some tips from the article ‘Why You Aren’t Getting New Business Referrals’ to actively encourage referrals from your customers through social media:

• Monitor your primary social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and thank people, to show your appreciation if they are talking about your business (of course not if they are saying negative things about you).
• If people are saying negative things about your business, ask them why this is the case and see if you can help. Being active with negative feedback can help you find out a solution to prevent this from being a regular occurrence.
• Engage (with your users, fans, customers) by using social media to inform and assist them by being approachable and helpful.
• Keep in touch with existing customers and clients to ensure you are not forgotten, such as sending a mail newsletter each month.
• Ask people for referrals through all the forms of social media. It’s as simple as that. You may even like to promote a special offer for existing clients if they send you through a referral.

Just when you thought there could be no more social networks left to invent, Google joins the social network party again. The reason is they say again is that roughly the same time last year, they made an announcement about a little project that was to become Google Wave
Then there was Google SideWiki which was another social functionality provided by the search giant.

So my question is where does Google Buzz fit into the equation? And the answer I have come to is that I am not too sure.

When Google Wave was announced, I had many of my non-tech friends come up to me and ask plenty of questions about the news. They wanted to know whether or not they needed Facebook, Skype, et al anymore because Google was going to promote this fantastic collaboration tool for both business and pleasure.

Last night however, not one of those people was asking me about Google Buzz.

Now I am not saying it is a guaranteed fail on Google’s part – it’s not really comparing apples with apples. But one of my associates on Twitter (@DDsD) made a very good point:

@BenTortora Not entirely,Google Buzz is like a non-real-time wave.. but that’s what people are used to, wave is too complicated for most.

And I completely agree with that statement. That is the exact spot where the application needs to sit. However, many people are active on one of the following networks:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Foursquare

And from our research and questioning of social network users, not many want another aggregator or somewhere else to connect with people. With Facebook and MySpace about to launch full-blown email services, taking with them their massive existing user base – it seems Google is on the defensive trying to make their email client social.

Another reason why I am not completely sold on the service is the same reason why those aggregators never really perform as well as the networks independently – people are connecting with different groups of people on different networks. I know myself personally, I do not add anyone I have not met face-to-face on my Facebook; I don’t have any personal connections – only business – on LinkedIn; on Twitter I connect and share with both friends, strangers, industry leaders and bloggers that I follow. Aggregating all those different status updates and links would add more noise to those networks - the last thing any user wants from a service.

I guess it all boils down to the fact that I am not really a power user of Gmail to begin with, and the announcement hasn’t really swayed me to become one. And if Google wants it to be Wave for the masses, they are going to need to bump their awareness campaign past forcing people to check it out when they sign into their Gmail.

Foursquare is being the dubbed ‘the biggest thing to hit social media in 2010′ and is set to rock our world just like Twitter did in 2009 (safe enough to say it’s the biggest thing to hit social media in 2010 because we are yet to see out our first month but things still look very promising). It grew in popularity in San Francisco, spread across the US and has just been launched worldwide.

Foursquare is a location-based social networking medium. It is a mobile application which allows you to “check in” every time you visit a destination via your phones GPS capabilities. Locations can be anywhere from shops, bars, cafes and restaurants being the most popular, through to workplaces, banks and parks. Once you’ve checked into a location, Foursquare will then broadcast your whereabouts to your friends and recommend places to go and things to do nearby. The Foursquare website promotes that this is a great way to meet up with nearby friends and learn about their favourite spots and the new places they discover.

Foursquare.com describes itself as an “urban mix tape”, making lists of your favourite things to do and share them with your friends. Foursquare keeps a record of your actions, creates To-Do lists and suggests new things to check out. It shares other user’s experiences in particular locations. For example, if you checked into a restaurant it would unlock a tip suggesting an item from the menu. The game of it is that as you cruise along checking into locations and adding tips for others, you earn points and unlock badges. If you become the frequent Foursquare visitor to a location then you become ‘the Mayor’ until someone else overtakes you and steals your title. Mayors are eligible for freebies such as coffee, ice-cream etc depending on what that particular location may offer through Foursquare.

Example of Foursquare badges

The business applications of this new service are immediately clear:

1.       Customer Intel - invaluable information on how often customers frequent your business, knowing what they are saving about your products and services

2.       Word of mouth Advertising - your own customers recommending your products and services to others!? Wow! Doesn’t get any better than that!

3.       Direct Marketing - want to reward your loyal customers? How about offering a discount to a new customer to inspire them to try a menu item or buy a product?

4.       Potential to Rank in Search Engines - as Foursquare builds up authority with the search engines then their recommendations and listings are likely to rank. So if your business has some rave reviews and comments then you will potentially list in local search results

Why this will work? People love to let other people know what they are doing and how cool it is. People love to earn badges and would all love to be the ‘Mayor’ of something. My recommendations? Get ready for Foursquare to become a big thing. If you’re prepared to jump on this wave then you are sure to have a kanuna of a ride and save yourself being dumped in the shallows.

If you could sum up the latest and greatest buzzword/bandwagon for 2009 (yes, the year is almost over), it would be the whole social web movement. It is the year where Australia really began to take notice of it and ask what it is all about. Everyone was asking everyone for advice, how to setup the accounts, and more importantly, how they could justify wasting time on Facebook/YouTube/et al and still get paid for it.

As is the way with all these movements though, all the snakes came out of the grass offering social media campaigns that generate a whole bunch of talk, crazy promises and empty wallets. By the time the clients realised that their money disappeared with no return, it was too late - they already had lost faith in social media.

That’s why Olivier Blanchard’s slides are so great about social media. In a fantastic display of biting humor and wit, he calls out all those that launch into a campaign without really stopping and thinking about what is going on. We salute the fact that he has taken the time to make those in charge responsible and being able to restore marketing department’s faith in social media.

So sit back and flick through one of the best presentations on the topic this year.

Recent sources have confirmed talk that both Yahoo and Google are now looking into striking up deals with Twitter. These sorts of deals are big news because if undertaken would greatly improve the versatility of the results the search engines serve.

Twitters last reported monthly user volumes of 54 million that generates an excess of a billion tweets. This large amount of fresh user generated data produced on a daily basis could be hugely beneficial to the search engines in that recent and relevant tweets can be integrated into a search result. These listing would play a big part in generating more related, relevant and most importantly up to date results for its users.

This deal if swayed in the direction of Microsoft would most certainly assist its search engine Bing to further increase much needed ground on its main competitor Google.

Though these types of changes would be sure to benefit both search engines and Twitter alike it appears that the social media giant Twitter is in no hurry to make a decision on the matter or to reveal precisely how much data it is willing to release. With recent valuation figures of around the 1 billion dollars it is understandable that they would be in no hurry, they always have the option of investing in their own search engine and taking on the current big players.

Social media is growing rapidly, but a common question is, exactly what industries is this relevant too and even more importantly which ones are growing and which are not?

A recent study conducted be Nielsen online showed that an excess of 17% of internet users time is spent in social networking. This amounts to around 108 million dollars in the month or August of social media advertising revenue. Even though a small portion of this would equate to substantial exposure some industries simply don’t have a large enough presence to justify the effort of getting involved.

The top 5 growth social networking industries out of a possible 13 shown by this study are:

1. Entertainment
2. Travel
3. B2B
4. Automotive
5. Health

The top five in revenue size as of August 2009 are:

1. Web Media
2. Telecommunications
3. Public Services
4. Retail Goods & Services
5. Entertainment

The travel and automobile industries in particular have shifted considerably from other online streams to social media along with finance and retail goods and services.

For a more detailed breakdown of the study conducted please visit the Neilsen Online Article here.

Reports on the official Facebook blog claim that it now serves more more than 300 million people around the world.

What does this mean?

To put this into context, the entire US population is just over 304 million and more than 12 times the population of Australia.

Not only that, it is also collecting more revenue than it is currently spending on maintaining the site. Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on the official company Facebook blog:

“We’re also succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. Earlier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow positive sometime in 2010, and I’m pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter. This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term.”

This means that Facebook will be able to develop and test out more features and products. Just like Google labs, it is allowing users to test out these prototypes by activating or downloading any of the prototypes listed.

From a marketing point of view, this may allow people or organisations’ more ways to connect to their followers. The future of Facebook looks quite rosy and will definitely be something keep an eye on.

Twitter is a communication platform that helps connect business and their customers. It can help a business act as an information portal to quickly up-to-date people interested in their company. It allows business to gather real time market intelligence and feedback and foster relationships between partners and customers or anyone who is interested about their work and business. As an individual user, you can Tweet to tell a company that you have had a great, or indifferent experience about their business, as well as learning about great offers and product deals.

When you combine tweets that are quick to write, easy to read, public, controlled by the recipient and exchangeable anywhere you have got a really powerful, real time communications medium.

You might be asking, so how do businesses use Twitter? Twitter connects you to your customers instantly in a way that was never before possible. For example, let’s say you are at work for a custom trailer manufacturer. If you search for your brand, you may find people talking bout how great the trailers are and sharing information about trailers and boats. Or you could find small complaints or queries that your customers would not intend to contact you about. You can find real valuable customer feedback that you could make the choice to respond and rectify or use for future reference and planning. It’s inevitable that others will offer bad feedback which you can turn around a bad situation and prevent bad publicity. It’s commonly known that listening and engaging with your services can ultimately lead to happier more satisfied clients and key product and service improvements.

Twitter isn’t just about the immediacy it also allows you to build long term relationships with customers, allowing you to have direct access to your customers and shrink the emotional distance. These factors can make Twitter an essential piece of your companies digital online business strategy.