We live in a world where interruption marketing continues to slide into oblivion. Our lives are busier than ever and the clutter around us is deafening. How do we reach our target audience in this changing marketplace without interrupting them? Are Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and social bookmarking just a fad?
I challenge you to watch this video and consider if social media has a place in your marketing budget. Yes, it’s time-consuming, takes a big commitment to stick with it, and it’s hard to track ROI, but the fact is, social media is here to stay and it’s changing the way we market all products and services to consumers and to other businesses.
We’d love to talk with you about your social media marketing challenges. Give us a call if you’d like to discuss the possibilities for your business.
This is a great video to open your mind to this exploding thing called Social Media. It will affect every area of your lives, especially your marketing and communications!
At Fireworx Digital one of the ways we give back is through an organization called Y-Malawi. Y-Malawi is a groundbreaking model for partnership between churches in the US and frontline organizations in Malawi, Africa, providing community-wide sustainable development and transformation in the areas of water and food security, healthcare, education, evangelism & discipleship, youth programs, and economic development, including micro-finance.
What I love about Y-Malawi is the organic nature of its growth. Unlike many 501-c3 non-profts, it doesn’t have a big top down organizational staff. It’s largely run by volunteers. I’ve been active in Y-Malawi since its inception and together with my team developed their website www.y-malawi.org, marketing materials, an extensive 30-page “Giving Catalog”, and an online giving store. What’s really exciting though is I recently started a Ning community for Y-Malawi, which now has over 350 active members. What’s amazing is to see how these members are interacting with each other, posting their trips to Malawi, discussing new sustainability ideas, sharing stories and basically doing what you might expect a vibrant community to do. My daughter Jennifer was our third member, didn’t really know much about the organization at all at the time, and now she is leaving tonight with some of her friends for a 15 day trip to Malawi! Does that show the power of a social community?
I know I’m somewhat biased as a major social media proponent and consultant, but I don’t believe Y-Malawi would be seeing this organic growth without the interconnectivity that comes with the social networking technology of a site like Ning. It has taken Y-Malawi’s static web presence and put a real, live, transparent, personal face on it. This organization is in its infancy and we’re excited to see where it will go as we are adding all the other aspects of social marketing to further spark its momentum.
Interesting… A few months ago I connected to an old friend 3,000 miles away on Facebook that I hadn’t seen for over 10 years. He is 50 years old. But what was really amazing is that his mother, a grandmother with 10 grandkids, asked me to be her friend. I’d say Facebook has hit Gladwell’s proverbial tipping point.
According to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Facebook is now nearly twice the size of MySpace worldwide!
In November 2008 Facebook drew 200 million unique worldwide visitors; more than 1 in 5 people who accessed the Internet that month visited the site. When sites are that big growth generally stagnates, but in Facebook’s case it’s still skyrocketing. In December, 222 million people visited the site says newly released Comscore stats, a 10.8% month over month growth rate. 22% of the total Internet audience went to Facebook in December.
Facebook now has nearly 100 million more worldwide users than MySpace, which added 4 million new users in December to 125 million total. The page view difference is more dramatic - Facebook had 80 billion monthly page views in December v. 43 billion for MySpace. Just six months ago the sites were about the same size.
With Facebook’s micro-targeting capabilities and massive growing audience, it can’t be ignored in any serious marketer’s media mix.
I’ve been using tinyurl for some time now and love it. However, I came across this really cool service that not only shrinks your long url, but also allows you to add notes and tags and track detailed analytics. You can track your audience’s clicks wherever your url is posted; on social networks, emails, blogs, etc.
