Social Search Optimization

Josh Palau is the VP of search at Razorfish. If you ever wanted a 15 minute tutorial on optimizing your social media efforts for searchability, well, this is it. (It's 16:13 if you are being precise but worth the extra minute.)

Facebook solid because of older demographics

Great article that's being passed around in our office today from the New York Times on why Facebook hasn't gone the way of Friendster and other here today, gone tomorrow sites.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

"More than demographic stability favors Facebook. The site has shrewdly emulated the “network effects” strategy used by another brand that has long held a dominant position in the computer industry: Microsoft Windows.

Economists use the term network effects to refer to the way the value of a product or service increases in tandem with the number of people who use it. If you’re one of only 10 people in the world with an e-mail account, its usefulness is limited; add a billion more, and the practical value of yours increases apace.

A Facebook member enjoys immediate benefits when each friend joins — these are direct network effects. But the average user already has 130 friends, so unless the user is unusually gregarious, the direct effects won’t increase drastically beyond a certain point.

For an individual member, the most powerful network effects may be indirect ones that come from the huge number of unknown other people in the Facebook world. Their mass attracts, in turn, suppliers of complementary products and services."

Full article on nytimes.com here.

Moma Followup

Last week I shared a little information on the new website at MOMA.  Victor Samra is their digital marketing manager.  Back in February he spoke about the use of social media at the Arts, Culture and Technology meetup.  I think you can see the influence of MOMA's earlier experiences with Facebook and Twitter on the new main site.

NOMA gives a Tweet

Our friends at the Nasher Museum have been using Twitter for nearly two years. Originally the Tweets were directed to early adopters, mainly student groups on the Duke campus. With Twitter more widely accepted now, the messages are designed for a more general population.

The short, direct communication seems to serve the needs of both the museum and its fans. And Nasher is hardly the only one taking advantage.

During a panel session on arts marketing conducted by the Arts Council of New Orleans, Jim Mulvhill, Director of Communications and Marketing at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) talked about how well Twitter was working for them. Here's a brief audio clip from his comments:



Take a look at Jim's NOMA Twitter feed or Wendy Livingston's at the Nasher Museum for yourself and see if there are ideas that you might be able to implement.

YouTube Non-Profit Channels

YouTube is making it easier for non-profit arts organizations to have a video presence on the web.  They've created non-profit channels that allow you to update content anytime and collect donations right there on the page.

It's a very inexpensive way to get started and YouTube offers plenty of tools to build a professional looking page.  Linking back and forth to your main website is simple as well.

The Anaheim Ballet was an early adopter of the technology, establishing their page in the first part of 2007, and is seeing tremendous success.  One of its videos, "Dancers", has reported over 3.8 million views to date.  You can view "Dancers" and other video projects from the Anaheim Ballet's YouTube page here.

You can also learn how to create your own YouTube non-profit channel at www.youtube.com/nonprofits.

Everybody's doing it

There's a new survey out that says 88%, or nearly 9 of every 10 marketers, are using social media to promote their product or service.  No surprise that the most popular tactics used are Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook.

It's a pretty astounding figure.  I'm a little leery of some of these numbers because 70% of the respondents were small business owners (individuals that are less likely to be able to afford other traditional mediums because of cost) and not necessarily professional marketers.  Still it's an amazing indicator of the effect social media is having on marketing.

You can read more about this study, which was conducted by Michael Steizner for the upcoming Social Media Success Summit 2009.   You may find a useful strategy that you haven't included in your social marketing efforts. I thought the charts on the time committed to social media were particularly interesting.

Are fans twittering about you?

My friend Wendy Livingston is the Manager of Marketing and Communciations at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.  She's been a huge advocate for Web 2.0 efforts at the museum.   This has included a number of blogs hosted on their site, plus Nasher entries on MySpace, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and more.

Twitter is probably the least familiar of these to some of us.  For starters its short (140 character) entries and 24-hour feed make it harder to tackle as a marketing channel.  It's hard to feed that beast with new content constantly, especially when time for our non-web marketing duties is already at a premium.

If you're really new to Twitter you may want to check out a great introductory video called Twitter in Plain English.  It's just under 2 and a half minutes long and gives you a great overview of how twittering works.

In addition to posting messages promoting events and activities.  Twitter can give you an opportunity to see how people are viewing your brand.  There are a number of Twitter monitoring services that allow you to type in a word, for instance "Nasher", and watch what others are saying about you in their Twitter messages.  I like Monitter, it's amazingly intuitive and in seconds you can start to see what's being said about your organization.

Even if you never post a single Twitter message you can still make connections with individuals that are already acting as brand advocates for you on the web.  I'd recommend an observation period first, but after that you may decide to approach a select few with special promotions, discounts or insider info.  

Those rewards should help their tie to you grow even stronger.

Social Marketing

Social media outlets are certainly hot topics for marketers these days.  Just at our agency we're creating social networks ranging from a Facebook page for a South Carolina hospital to a Ning community for truck drivers sponsored by Volvo Trucks. 

As a marketing tool we're all learning what seems to be right for our particular market as we go.

I found the Christmas day New York Times piece  on how Broadway is using social marketing very interesting.  Even bigger shows like Shrek are moving slowly as they figure out how they want to use web 2.0.  Check out the article here.