James Cooper is a strategist on the Content and Community team at Social Media Group (SMG). Follow @jamescooper
You’re probably familiar with and may, at some point, have used air quotes. But have you heard of an air hashtag?
Stowe Boyd showing the air hashtag at Defrag 2009. Image: Maggie Fox.
A few weeks ago, I thought I was quite clever and original when I crossed the index and middle fingers of my left hand over the index and middle fingers of my right hand to form what I called the “air hashtag” for my colleague, Karly Gaffney. Karly seemed to like the idea.
However, I soon suspected that something so simple must already exist in the vast web of ideas. Sure enough, after asking around the office here at Social Media Group, my suspicions were confirmed. Maggie Fox, SMG’s CEO, shared a picture she snapped of Stowe Boyd doing the four-fingered air hashtag at the Defrag Conference in November 2009.
(Needless to say, it seems I’m a “bit” late to the air hashtag party.)
Through a more thorough investigation, I found that, in addition to the four-fingered sign, there is a hand gesture version of the air hashtag, which Neil Patrick Harris’s character, Barney Stinson, so dramatically demonstrates in the CBS series How I Met Your Mother.
I’m in favor of the four-fingered sign because it lends itself to photographs, whereas Barney Stinson’s gesture clearly does not. However, Stinson’s gesture does have the advantage that it can be done with one hand.
So what do you think? Should the four-fingered sign become the standard? Or should it be Barney Stinson’s flamboyant air gesture? Or should we scrap the idea altogether?
The internet is full of content which can quickly become a blur to internet users. The quality bar for content has been raised. Continually producing high quality content is not always enough to reach your ideal audience anymore. Content overload is now a reality!
Marketers need to make adjustments to strategy and tactics in order to differentiate content, reach the right audience while they are in content consumption mode, and help solve problems. These adjustments require a detailed understanding of your audience such as: topics of interest, common problems, and the delivery method of content.
April 17, 2012 / Comments Off on SuperNova Awards 2012 / Posted in: Blog
Constellation Research has announced their second annual Constellation SuperNova Awards to celebrate and recognize leaders and teams who have overcome the odds to successfully apply emerging and disruptive technologies for their organizations. Our own Maggie Fox will be part of the all-star judging panel in search of these innovators.
Do you or anyone you know embody the spirit to innovate, overcome adversity and successfully deliver market changing approaches? Think you have what it takes to be subjected to a vigorous set of criteria that reflect real-world and pragmatic experience? Then you could be a SuperNova and represent the best of the best among the early adopters and innovators in the market.
Deadline is May 31 and semi-finalists will be announced June 29. Apply today!
Are social media sites the “killer app” for reaching a female audience? And where do female web users congregate? The great growth surge seen by social photo-sharing site Pinterest is driven by women, rather than the males who more often make up the demographic of geeks and early technology adopters. And BlogHer’s latest annual study, Women and Social Media in 2012, found that women who read blogs actively make more purchasing decisions based on that social weapon of choice than on Facebook and Twitter.
Clearly, women lead the social and spending uses of certain regions of the Web. Maggie and panelist Elisa Camahort Page, Co-Found & COO of BlogHer will explore these new realities and more, discussing:
Women who hold leadership positions in social media companies
How women are making a difference in the world through the Web
The implications from these numbers for online and offline cultural change
How an analysis of women’s use of social tools could impact your marketing plan
Interested in joining the discussion? Register HERE!
Big Data is discussed everywhere these days. It’s now understood as an unavoidable fact of life that data is being collected everywhere about nearly everything you and other consumers and businesses do online. But beyond that, it’s often a mystery as to where that data goes and how it’s used, supposedly understood only by a priesthood of big-company geeks and analysts – whatever, and wherever, THEY are.
Can we regular users and small businesses make use of Big Data, or will it always be the domain of the math whiz or Google engineer?
The nature of complex sales has changed dramatically with the adoption of the Internet as a research tool. People on the sales end are much less in control of the process because customers can now find out much about the supplier without asking them directly. Now vendors are adopting some of the same capabilities provided through the Net – researching the needs of potential customers and clients, discovering what will bring value to their companies. The B2B world is becoming one where negotiation can become more well-informed before it even begins. This webinar will cover this changing landscape, addressing questions like the following:
How do sales people train to operating in the Enterprise 2.0 world?
What tools are available today to both vendors and buyers that did not exist 5 or 10 years ago?
This week’s roundup is all about Social Media Week.
Social Media Week “offers a series of interconnected activities and conversations around the world on emerging trends in social and mobile media across all major industries. Annually, SMW attracts more than 60,000 attendees across thousands of individually organized events, with half a million connecting to the conference online and through mobile.”
With that in mind, I’m going round up some of the most buzzed about items from Social Media Week 2012.
#SMW2012 Halftime Report
On Wednesday, Synthesio published a half-time report infographic of Social Media Week awesomeness. It includes a look at top influencers, most buzzed about keynote speakers and trending topics. Speaking of infographics, Social Media Week, with the help of Nokia and The Guardian is publishing a real-time infographic on their homepage that tracks a real-time Twitter feed, FourSquare checkins and the answers to polls.
There is a tonne of great content created and shared at Social Media Week’s 1,040 events. Here are few items of interest.
Highlights from SMW San Francisco
Michael Procopio collected presentations from San Francisco social media week events and published them via storify. I love the range and variety of topics covered.
Creating Music Community in the Digital Age
From Social Media Week NYC comes this report on a keynote by Chris Kaskie, president of Pitchfork Media, a site established in 1995 and devoted to music with a healthy dose of indie rock.
If anything, Kaskie was grieving over the disappearance of the carefully curated, tangible collections of music recordings we used to own — like the LP collection he still looks forward to handing down to his children, rather than the password to a cloud full of digital playlists that seem likely to be more commonplace. “You don’t own anything anymore,” he said. “How do you get people excited about anything when it’s so fleeting?” Of course, Kaskie and his panelists had a ready answer to that: you get people excited about music by turning it from an industry into a community. In days of yore — Kaskie joined Pitchfork in 2004, when Friendster was still in ascendance — building a community meant launching a music festival where people could share the experience of music. (Indeed, Pitchfork’s festival has become a centerpiece of the summer festival schedule in its hometown of Chicago. Last October, the franchise expanded to Paris.) Today, community means Twitter, where Pitchfork readers endlessly debate the site’s notoriously polarizing reviews. Community also means Spotify, feeding a steady, frictionless stream of your music tastes to your Facebook friends.
SAP Conference for Social Media Week 2012
Maggie was in Palo Alto this week with our clients at SAP for their Social Media Week celebrations. SAP is one of the most progressive social enterprises on the planet with over two million members in the SAP Community Network. Their Social Media Week offerings did not disappoint. Check out the video replays on their site. The most popular video is CMO Jonathan Becher on the challenges of transforming his organization to embrace social media as part of their DNA and not treat it as a marketing megaphone. Check it out.
Presentations from SMG’s own Social Media Week Event
Big Media got big in the ages of broadcast and print, when corporations controlled the flow of content and consumers had few opportunities to interact and contribute. That balance has shifted radically over the past decade, as billions of consumers have discovered the social Web and mobile communication and were given easy tools to become content creators themselves.
In this webinar, our panel of experts will discuss the plight of Big Media – whether old business models have become obsolete, and how audiences have changed – and what it’s doing to save itself as an industry. We’ll consider questions like the following:
Where is today’s audience spending time and what content sources do they pay attention to?
Where is Big Media behind the curve of change in how it provides and gets paid for content?
What scares media corporations about the content models being invented on the Net?
What has the industry done so far in its attempt to retain its power?
How must Big Media evolve to stay profitable?
Sure to be a great discussion! Register now, HERE!
February 6, 2012 / Comments Off on February Speaking Engagements / Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized
SMG speakers will be coming to a city near you! Throughout the month of February, three members of the SMG team will be speaking at events across North America, check out if they will be coming to you:
February 14, 2012, Las Vegas, NV
Tactics and strategies for engaging customers, clients and the public on the newest social network.
Speaker: Maggie Fox, register online here
February 15, 2012, Palo Alto, California
Discussing The Great Content Disruption: How Content Marketing is Changing Everything
Speaker: Maggie Fox, register online here
February 16, 2012, Toronto
Discussing advances in our understanding of behaviour and decision making, how insights are collected in a fully digitized world and new tools and opportunities. A must for those looking to understand narratology, gamification and how to leverage online advocacy!
Speaker: Patrick Gladney, register online here
February 22-23, 2012, Toronto
Discussing Social Marketing to Business vs. Consumer Audiences: What’s the Difference?
Speaker: Ruth Bastedo, register online here
More companies now are monitoring Twitter and other online social channels and responding in real-time – often within hours or even minutes. They know the power of social media and the capability of bad news to spread like wildfire. They also recognize the opportunity to influence the message by jumping into a conversation sooner rather than later.
Join this panel to examine:
Why social media and customer service are made for one another
How your company can jump into social monitoring
Notable corporate social media gaffes and what was learned from them
Best practices for companies actively engaging customers online
The cost-effectiveness of social media monitoring and immediate response as customer service tools
January 31, 2012 / Comments Off on Webinar Today – How Content Marketing is Changing Everything / Posted in: Blog
Today is the day! Don’t miss out on our free webinar with Maggie Fox on “How Content Marketing is Changing Everything,” at 12 pm EST / 9am PST brought to you by Social Media Group and Social Media Today. She will be joined by C.C. Chapman, co-author of “Content Rules” to explore how you can (and should) think about content creation and how to effectively use great content to earn attention and shift marketing from push to pull in a billion-channel universe.
