Exploring Degrees of Online Sharing

by Samir Balwani on June 29, 2009 · 4 comments

Many people that consider social media, think that the targets are too small a demographic to be worthwhile. They say, “What good is targeting, 15,000 people when I can create an ad that will reach many more than that?”.

Although, on the surface, social media may seem to be a waste of time, because of the ability to organically share, the basic numbers can be misleading. To fully understand how content is shared on the web, we must understand degrees of sharing.

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What Does Degrees of Sharing Mean?

When a consumer shares some sort of content, they enter a chain. The content must have originated from somewhere, allowing us to count how many shares have happened. That number, is the degree of sharing.

Degrees of Sharing

In other words, when the source disseminates information, that would technically be first degree sharing. If a consumer passes it along, that act would be a second degree sharing. As you can imagine this can go on to the nth degree, however, each successive share becomes less likely.

Degrees of Sharing

When we are trying to convince consumers to be “social”, we are focusing on 2nd and 3rd degree sharing. We focus on the 2nd and 3rd degree, because this is where the content is most likely to be shared. However, realizing that successive shares do occur is important.

Why Is It Important?

In social media, degrees of sharing is integral because each degree increases the number of viewers, exponentially.

Consider a business blog that has 500 daily visitors. If 10 of those visitors tweeted the the article, or sent it to Facebook, the article could be seen by all their friends.

Potentially, if 100 people shared it to their 200 friends, the article (at least the headline) could have been see by about 20,000 new viewers. Remember that the number is just a rough estimate, because it doesn’t take into consideration who is online, or friends that ignore the headline.

But, now that 20,000 new viewers have been exposed to the article, 2,000 of those users (assuming 10% of readers will use some kind of social media, down from the 20% we assumed above) may pass it on to their friends.

traffic_twitterA Tour Through a Large Blog’s Traffic

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By the time we reach the 3rd degree of sharing, 420,500 people will have seen the article. You can see how quickly content can pass along social media.

How to Take Advantage of Degrees of Sharing

Now that you know how powerful sharing can be, what techniques can you employ to take advantage of the phenomenon?

The first thing to do is reducing sharing obstacles. This includes, ensuring that you have clearly defined social media buttons and an “e-email this” button. Include social proof to convince consumers that other people are sharing it too.

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Once your site is social media friendly, take the time to optimize which social sites you’ve included and their location.

Consider emphasizing or prominently placing share buttons for sites that spread content to friends (example: Facebook, Twitter, or Myspace). This way readers are more likely to spread content to friends versus sites like Digg, where it has become more difficult to get content to become popular.

Writing quality content that people want to pass to their friends is difficult, but the reward for creating that content is great. Making it simpler to share the article and keeping “social media” in mind while creating posts can increase the likelihood that your content will be spread.

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8 Ways Social Media Should Change Your Marketing

by Samir Balwani on June 22, 2009 · 5 comments

Social media has turned our fundamental understanding of “marketing” and “advertisement” upside down.

It has changed the way we think about connecting with customers and afforded us a number of new tools to do just that. So what exactly has changed?

Personality

The idea of the big gray company has been shattered. Being an unreachable, distant, better than you, entity is no longer sustainable.

Instead, consumers want to talk to a company representative like they would a friend. They expect multiple points of connection, each offering something unique.

Targeting

Because of the digital aspect of social media, campaigns can be extremely targeted. Determining social profiles based on the site’s demographic, or writing a specific blog post for specific readers is an example of how to target a campaign.

This is different from the old model of buying ads and hoping the right demographic is hit. Consider how much money is spent buying a Superbowl ad. With that capital, a brand could afford a truly fun and long term social campaign.

Track and Test

Similar to targeting a campaign, because of the metrics available, many aspects of social media can be tested and tracked.

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Keeping data on blog posts, messaging, and all other aspects of a campaign, can help a brand fully understand and estimate what to expect from a strategy.

Unlike offline promotions and advertisements, many of social media’s metrics can be tracked in real-time, allowing you to make changes on the fly.

Commitment

Many people are afraid to let go of online and offline advertising because of the short-term work involved. Create an ad campaign, do the research, and then let it free.

Social media is a stark contrast to the old marketing model. It requires a long term strategy and a high level of commitment. You better be continually using social media profiles and interacting with your consumers, or they’ll forget about you.

If you’re going to disappear from the social space one day, it probably would’ve been better if you never entered it to begin with.

Involve Everyone

When a brand begins to explore social media, it’s not a departmental concern, but instead affects the company as a whole.

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Marketing the brand is no longer the sole responsibility of the “marketing” department; but will incorporate everyone from customer service, product development, and even public relations.

For many brands the decision to engage in social media will require a major paradigm shift in their understanding of company organization.

Requires Something New

On the web, content is king. Well, that’s not entirely true. Creative content is king.

The truth is that there is so much information out that that consumers are always looking for something new, creating, or exciting to grab their attention.

Where once you could emulate successful case studies; now, brands are forced to think of something different that connects with their customers and engages consumers.

Money Does Not Always Equal Results

Until recently, in the world of advertising, the more you spent on ads, the greater your immediate return. In social media, that is not the case.

It’s correct to say that the more resources you have available, the more likely you will see a greater return. But your campaigns and promotions need to be exciting too. Money is not the only factor anymore. You can spend million on social media, but if your idea is boring, no one will care.

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Whether or not you current connect with your consumers online, you should be preparing by putting the processes in place. You may not plan to engage in social media marketing now, but you never know what your consumers will do to force you into the social space.

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Yoostar: Outreach Case Study

by Samir Balwani on June 13, 2009 · 6 comments

About 3 weeks ago, I had an awesome opportunity to see a demo of a new product called Yoostar. I’m not going to talk about the product (although, you should definitely check Yoostar out, it’s awesome!). Instead, I’m going to tell you why I would count the Yoostar outreach campaign an amazing success.

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Yoostar’s marketing decided to outreach to bloggers and invite them to see a presentation on the product they’re releasing. So since I’ve already recommended that sometimes emailing bloggers is a great idea, let’s look at what Yoostar did right.

The Initial Outreach

The first thing Yoostar marketing did, that jumped out at me, is that they pitched me really early. They gave me almost a month lead time, to make sure I was free.

I think many brands forget that people have lives, and bloggers won’t drop everything for you; be courteous to them.

Secondly, the email was written as if it came from a friend, and they had definitely read my articles. Not only had they read my blog, but also my guest posts on Mashable and Techipedia.

Another interesting thing that they did, was that they offered priority dates to bloggers. Yoostar gave us the first say at what times are best for us. This really excited me, because it showed how they understood a blogger’s ego.

Finally, they didn’t make the email all about them. They realized coming to a presentation may not seem fun (even though their product is awesome!). To give us a reason to be in the area, the email suggested I make a day in NYC, which is exactly what I did.

The Presentation

When my girlfriend I arrived to the demonstration, we were greeted and treated like royalty. The actual Yoostar product is exciting, but the presenter’s passion really sold the product.

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A key take away for product launchers is, bloggers are emotional beings. If you get really excited, we feed off that energy and get excited too.

After seeing Yoostar in action, I was given a press packet as a USB thumb drive. They made it easy to have all the information we would need to write a detailed article.

The Follow Up

Our interaction didn’t end there though. My contact from Yoostar continued to follow up with me, asking if I needed any information, and even offered to try to get me a Yoostar product!

Most importantly though, from these follow up emails, I never felt pressured to write something about the product. In fact, more often than not, it felt like talking to a group of friends, that were passionate about their product.

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Even if I hadn’t written about the experience, they would’ve won. I know I’m going to buy their product, and have already convinced a number of my friends to get one too!

Why It Worked

Their outreach program worked because they took the time to explore new verticals and truly understood what I write about.

They made me feel like a rock star the whole time, and went out of their way to cater to me.

The relationship didn’t end, and I got all the information I could need.

Finally, they had an exciting product and a group of passionate employees. These two things are key to any social media success.

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Conversation Focus – Don’t Forget the Others

by Samir Balwani on June 9, 2009 · 2 comments

When so many of us talk about social media, we talk about “the conversation”, as if it’s some kind of holy grail. The problem I have with the term is that, not only is it short sighted, but also ties us to the idea of message control.

So what’s wrong with “the conversation”? Well the simple phrase implies that there is only one conversation.

The truth is that for most brands, consumers are talking about multiple topics. Some are good while others may be negative.

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An important part of a social media strategy should include recognizing the many topics and conversations on the web. From there, the brand should actively track any news and developing topics.

With this information, the brand can effectively frame the conversation; quickly responding to negative stories and promoting positive ones.

Knowing everything being said about the brand and industry can give you the proper information needed to decide on a successful overall strategy.

If a brand notices certain consumers are continually starting new, positive stories, it may be worthwhile to reward them.

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Also, overtime, the brand may notice a patter between topics, promotions, and outreach. Recognizing how long it takes for a conversation to develop from the announcement of a new promotion, could help a brand better time promotions for the most buzz.

However, there are some obstacles that need to be overcome. Tracking all the data will require fairly advanced processes.

First, tracking every mention and determining the topic, validity, and sentiment, must currently be done by hand (as far as I know). Because of this, a brand would be required to dedicate a number of resources to this task alone.

There are some tools available to expedite the process, for tracking mentions and buzz.

Of the many available, I use three extensively; Google Alerts, Google Blogsearch, and Yahoo Pipes.

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Google alerts is a service offered by Google, which will alert you every time the search engine indexes a new page with the keyword you specify. For example, you could create an alert for “BMW”. Every time a new page is indexed with the word “BMW” in it, you’ll receive an alert, either in the form of an RSS feed or eMail.

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Google blogsearch is a search engine just for blogs. It returns the latest blog posts for your query, and even allows you to filter by date. Blogsearch also offers an RSS feed for your query, keeping you up to date with the latest posts.

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Finally, Yahoo pipes can help you separate out topics from feeds. The service allows you to manipulate and aggregate RSS feeds, offering a number of filters.

I use Google alerts and Google blogsearch to create feeds surrounding a specific topic, for example “Social Media”. Then, use Yahoo pipes to create separate feeds for separate topics.

For example, by adding the “Social Media” feed, then applying a “Metrics” filter. Now, the feed will only output articles about social media metrics. The reason to track everything, and then filter out conversations, ensures that you do not miss a new topic.

Tracking and monitoring all the conversations on the web is important. If a brand focuses too much on “the conversation”, the one taking place right now, they may not be ready for the others that are growing. In the end, being caught unaware online can mean many missed opportunities.

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Tackling Spam on the Social Web

by Samir Balwani on May 20, 2009 · 6 comments

Social media is the next evolution in how we use the web. However, with all the great things that have come from our new found ability to connect on the web, we’ve also made the creation of spam much easier.

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Nowadays, it’s easy for almost anyone to create a presence on the web. With our quest for ease, we’ve made it easy to automate the process. Until we’re able to differentiate spam from actual information, we’ll be unable to properly index and search the social web.

Problems:

One of the biggest problems with social media is that currently, many websites allow you to create unlimited profiles. One person can create hundreds of Twitter accounts, each of which can send out a Twitter message, quickly cluttering the web.

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A second problem is that unlike the current web page structure, conversations can jump incoherently. Consider a conversation taking place on Facebook through status messages. Each individual status update would make little sense, however collectively they can offer a large amount of information.

Also, we currently have little ability to to understand true connections and consumer intent. What I mean by that is, how do you differentiate between a spammer friending a spammer versus a true friend? Profiles can artificially inflate connection numbers, making them seem more important than they actually are.

Lastly, the overall speed at which new data is introduced creates an issue for search and indexing. Right now, we’re unable to quickly assign authority and trust to new content. We can assign trust to specific users, but lose out on new influential users.

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Examples of Problems:

The most powerful example of the problems with the social web is Twitter. Consumers can quickly and easily create multiple profiles, and send many messages.

Not only are spammers able to disrupt the streams of other users, through @ replies and direct messages, but each individual profile and tweet creates a page to be indexed in our conventional search engines.

Lastly, each tweet also influences the latest trend. With enough profiles and messages, a spammer can manipulate what topics are trending upwards. On the social web, topics trending offers insight into the latest news. Obviously, being able to affect this nefariously, can quickly make trending data useless.

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What Needs to Change:

The first things that needs to change is our ability to detect spam signals. Determining patterns in how actual humans interact with each other on the web may give use ways to differentiate between an actual user and spammer.

Secondly, introducing an API or data sharing system to find patterns might be needed. The data need be anonymous, because of the privacy issues associated with it. Without all the information, our understanding of the social web will continue to be incomplete.

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Lastly, we need to change how we return search results. The current system of ranking only by importance needs to evolve to include temporal affects. A trustworthy result should not always outrank a semi-trustworthy result, if the latter is newer. Newer pages should be given a greater weight for rank.

What is Happening Now?

Right now the closest thing we have to a search engine for the social web is Twitter (scares the crap out of Google). However, this “search” does not separate out spam from trust. Neither does Twitter search assign authority to influential

Patents:
Method and Apparatus for Detecting Spam User Created Content

The present invention provides methods, apparatuses and systems directed to automatically detecting spam user created content. In a particular implementation, there is provided a method for processing spam contents, which comprises: maintaining a plurality of key information databases; receiving user-created content and at least one of a service ID and a content category ID of the user-created content from one or more users of a user-created content hosting site; selecting one of the plurality of key information databases based on at least one of the service ID and the content category ID…

System and method for developing and using trusted policy based on a social model

A trust policy is constructed based upon a social relationship between real-world entities. The trust policy may determined based upon a social network and social network maps. The social network map provides a framework to determine social distances. The trust policy provides quick and secure access to desired or trusted nodes while providing security from entities outside the trusted sphere of nodes. The trust policy determined by the social distance may be used for various types of applications including filtering unwanted e-mail, providing secure access to resources, and accessing protected services…

Social Analytics System and Method for Analyzing Conversations in Social Media

Conversations in an online content universe are monitored. A social analysis module analyzes individual conversations between publishers in the online content universe. Publishers that influence a conversation are identified.

Related Videos:


Semi-Supervised Learning: A Comparative Study for Web Spam and Telephone User Churn by David Siklosi


IR in Social Media (IRSM) by Matthew Hurst and Alexey Maykov

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