The world celebrated the Social Media Day on June 30. The social media has brought a revolution in the lives of millions of people across the world. Be it Twitter, Facebook, Orkut or any other social media or social networking sites, they remain the hot destination for all Internet users. The digital world has changed forever and it is believed that social media will completely replace the conventional media over the next 25 years so.

Leading website Mashable not only decided to celebrate the Social Media Day on June 30, but also arranged a number of social media meetups, which are being held all over the globe.

The information shared on social media sites and the awareness campaigns launched on those, has indeed changed the mode of communication. The impact of social media is clearly visible on Education, Business, Media, Office, Relationship etc.

Mashable claims that it has arranged 600+ meetups in 93 countries. Great number indeed! And the number is growing fast.

Online video advertising will overtake television advertising according to AD2One Group, one of the largest third-party advertising agencies in the world.

AD2One predicts video advertising will show a 78% growth by 2012, with brands distributing more professional-quality video content online than on television.

“The equivalent of TV advertising online video marketing is attractive because it's much cheaper and accurately targets key audiences without any wastage. It offers far superior targeting and offers tangible results, delivered through analytic tracking," according to Roddy Walshe of Ad2One Group.

Walshe continued: "The big challenge for marketers using online video advertising where it is tempting to use videos disguised as entertainment is to weave the commercial message into editorial content for greater impact."

"The onus will be therefore to focus on creative content that entices the online visitor and engages with them effectively," he added.

Companies looking to boost responses to email marketing and promotion schemes may want to consider including social buttons, following the release of new figures.

GetResponse's Email Marketing and Social Media Integration Report found that the inclusion of three or more social buttons, such as MySpace and LinkedIn, boosted the clickthrough rate for direct email marketing by up to 55 per cent and on average the inclusion of social media buttons produced a 30 per cent higher response rate to direct email marketing material than to those without the facility.

According to the report, direct email marketing containing a Twitter sharing option is the most effective single social media button for generating a response, increasing clickthrough rates by 40 per cent on average.

Social media has opened up a whole new, cheap world for company marketing. For entrepreneurs, business owners, investors, and consultants, one of the most exciting prospects of social media, lies in the ability to dramatically amplify your visibility and value proposition among existing and potential stakeholders.

"The possibilities of connecting with people are endless," said Ernesto Verdugo, a consultant specialising in internet marketing. "Right now almost 30 to 40 per cent of our business comes through social media."

According to a recent survey by YouGovSiraj, 80 per cent of UAE's consumers use social networking sites to make purchasing decisions. In other words, that's a sizeable captive audience out there who could be targeted by small businesses.

Online essentials

According to YouGovSiraj, 70 per cent of the group surveyed said that they would look for online reviews before making a purchase decision, while more than 80 per cent said that they would look for the website of the seller.

Their growing popularity is demonstrated by the number of local institutions including social networking in their marketing campaigns. However, despite this display of confidence, online marketing is still in its early stages where UAE-based businesses are concerned.

The 2010 Social Media and Marketing Report shows a significant 65 per cent of marketers surveyed have only been involved with social media marketing for a few months or even less.

"In reality most of the businesses around here have no clue on how to use these tools in order to grow these businesses," said Verdugo. "For example, according to FedEx, 37 to 38 per cent of their business globally has come from social media while in its UAE offices this remains dormant and untapped."

Social media has many platforms that can be utilised, depending on the structure and the sector the business is in. Unlike with other media platforms, marketing of social media generally takes the form of transmitting many smaller messages on a daily basis to followers.

But sifting through the vast expanse of the online world to stamp your presence on select platforms can be daunting for those not familiar with cyberspace. All that is needed is knowledge the basics.

Because of the demographics of online users, a key in using social networking sites is to let go of all those established corporate attitudes and become more informal with the audience.

"Social media acts as a watering hole where certain people of certain groups gather to get information," said Verdugo. "This is great for businesses that are looking to tap into a certain community. There will always be a group somewhere that suits your business."

According to the recent survey, social media marketing significantly raised the exposure of businesses, as attested to by 85 per cent of the respondents. Another gain was in drawing higher web traffic to these businesses, vouched for by 63 per cent of those polled. Another 56 per cent cited the way social media marketing helped build new business partnerships.

For those looking to get started, Rick Itzkowich, vice-president of marketing at VP Productive Learning & Leisure, says the easiest way is by creating a presence on the web and building up from there. "It's often very overwhelming when people first get started," he said.

"My suggestion is they break it down and understand it. They don't have to do it all at once, they can just get a domain name to get started and build off of that.

"It doesn't have to be perfect or all at once, you can take one or two strategies and implement it. I use what I call the learn-do model."

Verdugo advocates the importance of "value" in online marketing. "The most important online marketing tools are free — if you can provide value beforehand just enough to let them know there is more available if they pay, people are willing to buy anything from you," he said.

"For example, I offer an online book. By doing this I have already developed a relationship and people are far more eager to listen to what I have to say. In less than a year over 12,000 people have downloaded that book which allows me to gain visibility.

"I also gain credibility by gaining their trust. Once you've gained these two, you have a much more captive audience more willing to buy what you have to offer."

Good value

Larry Loik, founder and president of The Real Estate Investor Network, believes the key is to give good advice and good value.

"For example, a hotel can add value by offering ‘10 helpful tips for when you come to Dubai'. Customers respect you more."

Along with value, the power of recommendation is more important than ever with the introduction of social media. Those old faithfuls when it comes to doing any business — reputation and integrity — will also come in handy.

"Because we're so time-poor we're relying more on what other people recommend, so we don't have to spend the time looking it all up," said Itzkowich. "Because of this, it's important to be mindful of building a relationship with your client. If you abuse that you will never be able to regain your credibility."

Once a small business has got the hang of how to get on to the right social networking sites, they can try and offer incentives to attract the online customers. "Offer people something if they go online that they can't get off-line," Itzkowich added. "For example, airlines are making online bookings cheaper than off-line."

Link baits are one way of increasing awareness on social media websites. Digg and StumbleUpon can be used to divert and direct people to a particular business's site and the information that is there. Becoming popular on social news websites like Reddit comes with access to a sizable number of links, some of which may be topically relevant.

For all those small businesses out there, the universe of social networking sites is up for grabs. Go for them!

Google maps

Aside from social media platforms, there are other ways to instantly boost a firm's on-line presence. One is to use the Google Map.

"One of the most under used on-line marketing tools would be the Google Map," said Larry Loik, president of The Real Estate Investor Network. "Businesses can get themselves on Google Map for free and when a search is conducted by someone looking for a service.

"Just by being on Google Maps, they will instantly be placed on top of the search with their company's names, location and number."

Another way that could work is by putting up a video. "The biggest thing is to just video tape yourself, it doesn't even have to be professional," Loik added. "It automatically puts you at the top of search engine rankings. The trick is to have fun with it. Everyone loves a bit of comedy."

It's become increasingly commonplace for businesses to use social media to connect with and learn about consumers.

PR firm Burson-Marsteller studied the 100 largest companies in the Fortune 500 list and found that 79% of them are present and listening, using at least of one of the most popular social platforms to communicate with their customers.

Twitter is the social media platform of choice among the Fortune Global 100. Between blogging, posting to YouTube, updating Facebook, and tweeting, the companies seem, by and large, to be most active via Twitter. Eighty-two percent of the Fortune 100 companies tweet on a weekly basis, posting an average of 27 tweets a week.

Fifty-four percent have at least one Facebook fan page, 50% have at least one YouTube channel, and 33% have at least one corporate blog. Twenty percent of the companies use all four social media platforms.

According to Neilsen the number of Internet users who visited a social network or a blog increased by 24 percent from April 2009 to April 2010, while the average person spent 66 percent more time on those sites during that period.

About 75 percent of all Internet users visited a social network or blog in April 2010, and they spent 22 percent of their online time - more than 110 billion minutes - on those sites, Nielsen said.

That's more than twice the number of minutes Nielsen recorded a year earlier. The average person spent 5 hours, 51 minutes on these sites in April, compared to 3 hours, 31 minutes per person during the previous April.

And according to Nielsen, Facebook was the third most popular online brand, with 54 percent of all Internet users visiting the site. Google, which reached 82 percent of online users, was still first, while a combined MSN, WindowsLive and Bing drew 62 percent of the audience. Yahoo was fourth at 53 percent.

Facebook is the main driver of this trend. Since early 2009, the Palo Alto company has increased membership from fewer than 200 million to nearly 500 million. However one of the largest growth areas for social media is Niche community applications where investment is increasing as users move to Niche social sites.

But while the average user spent 1 hour, 21 minutes on Google during April, Facebook users were logged on an average of 6 hours.

The Top 15 Twitter Users & Influencers in Dubai (that have the word Dubai in their profile)

It’s a tricky one to work out – who is who on Twitter – who is worth following and who should be paid lip service.  One thing is clear is that those people (Mention no names) that are quite clearly using automated tools to only drive recruitment are not faring well in the influence space.  Why – well there are a multitude of reasons but I guess it starts with how the hell you actually measure Influence or I suppose “Tweetefluence” in the first place.

Diggs Wefollow (and we can’t get access to the algorithm so this is hearsay) seems to measure influence based on the number of users that respond to your tweets, click on your links, add you to lists and the conversations you are having.  It’s interesting to note that one of the most influential users on Twitter in Dubai “ADNATION” www.adnationme.com   www.twitter.com/adnationme doesn’t have a million followers but does have a lot of conversation threads going on – what does this mean for Twitter in communications departments – well I suppose it’s the same old mantra – conversations are king when it comes to twitter and social media. 

This is not to say that automated tools don’t have a place, we use a mixture of automated tools and scripts in combination with a developer account to try and work out who we want to engage but I can assure you the majority of the work is very much manual. That said since using our Twitter account to strike up relevant conversations our little (or not so little these days) team at H2O has driven a large amount of business using this free tool for B2B in the past couple of months.

I should paraphrase this by saying that these results from Digg are skewed anyway as the algorithm seems only to be based on the keywords in the users profile – but hey ho you can’t have everything.  I am still sure that major news channels and publishers knock the spots off of Tweeters – but still it’s  interesting to see who the top 15 Tweetfluencers  (with the word Dubai in their profile) are , let me put you out of your misery.  It was going to be 20 but I just got sidetracked by everyones blogs so now its just a lazy 15…..Press Read More

Protecting Your Company & Employees – Legal Considerations for Social Media in the Workplace. 

Again a request from customers relating to exactly what the potential risks are relating to staff and their use of social media platforms online.  This is an incredibly tricky blog post, simply because there are very few case studies to use to formulate a well thought out post, and because laws differ from region to region.  Certainly if you haven’t done so already and you are responsible for Human Resources, Corporate Communications or even the running of a company you should be drafting up policy documentation relating to how your employees use social media platforms within and outside the workplace.  So what are the risks? There are lots of risk points for any corporation or person but here are a few that I can jump on right away and suggest at least an interim solution in terms of policy.

You’re Employees – Speaking on behalf of your brand

Google Side Wiki – What Brand Managers & PR Companies should be aware of

I have been requested to pull together a quick overview on the new Google Side Wiki functionality by a number of our PR partners this week as it is obviously of serious importance to most brands.

This is in effect "a game changer" for brands and communications professionals, so important in fact that if you are working within the corporate communications, PR or brand management sectors you should really read and then re-read this post.   So firstly let’s structure this blog post so it makes sense. As a techie i understand my blogposts leave a lot to be desired.

•    Understanding Google
•    What is Google Wiki in a nutshell?
•    What is the impact to communications professionals?
•    What are the best practices to reduce your risks and protect your brand?
•    Legal Implications
•    Our two cents

Understanding Google.

Google of course needs no introduction, especially on a blog like this one.  In terms of Google Wiki what you need to understand is that Google is a noted supporter of network neutrality – no big deal, H2O is also a supporter of Network Neutrality but of course we don’t own the worlds search market, these guys do.

"Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet. The Internet has operated according to this neutrality principle since its earliest days... Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet. In our view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online”

That’s interesting stuff; the key take home is that Google believe that the internet should be a democratic platform, from a brand perspective that means that Google fundamentally believe that if people want to comment on your brand then they should be free to do so.

Marketing professionals and media companies that want to get to grips with how Social Media can be used in your marketing campaigns in the Middle East will not want to miss the Social Media Marketing Forum in Dubai.  There seems to have been a high demand for case studies during the Social Media Forum which for the first event of its kind specifically for Social Media was attended by over 200 people with standing room only for the latecomers.  There are a number of corporate companies speaking at the Social Media Marketing Event that will be sharing their experience, as such I think the event is probably going to be invaluable to marketing and communications professionals looking to use social media tools and develop best practices.  You can check the full information on the website socialmediamarketingme.com .  The event is on the 7-8th of December.  More details>

During the main conference on 7-8 December 2009 attendees can learn from presentations and case studies from senior local and international speakers, as well as interactive discussions on crucial issues. 
 
Key topics to be discussed include; overcoming social media marketing challenges in the Middle East, leveraging social media to drive traffic to your site, understanding available tools and technologies and managing online communities.

From the Panasonic Gitex Site "To see it is to believe it!  You can see the product at the GITEX stand simply visit www.panasonic-gitex.com or follow the updates on You Tube Twitter or Facebook.

Seeing really is believing, he high-resolution 3D previously experienced only at amusement parks and movie theaters is soon to be an in-home reality, with a direct-view plasma display.

Social media has become the current buzz phrase of the information age. But what is it and how does it work? And how can it help you grow your business?

Social media is user-generated content created online using various new technologies which allow people to produce, share and read information. Individuals are now publishers as well as readers thus changing the information and communication paradigm.

Blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, podcasts, twitter, Wikis and YouTube are now a particularly popular way of communicating for some demographics.

One of the benefits of such technologies is that it allows individuals to potentially communicate and interact simultaneously with a myriad of people worldwide; at low costs and with increased efficiency. For businesses, this can be considered a revolution into an untapped business market.

TED-X Dubai

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx, basically it’s a localized TED with business leaders, forward thinkers and good speakers invited to present themselves on TED-X Dubai.  There seem to be a lot of people in Dubai that think that this is going to put them on Ted.com – it isn’t, but it is a great local forum for sharing of your information and new and exciting ideas.

Mattress Dominoes - World Record Attempt
A great example of Viral Video Marketing using Mattress Dominoes

Major props go to Bensons for Beds & their agency Wand for pulling off an amazing viral marketing campaign which for just a few thousand pounds (guestimate) must have delivered amazing results having been featured on BBC world wide and MBC and other major US networks.

It really is a fantastic example of how a good idea well executed with some seeding and links to some major news agency journalists can really deliver amazing value for money – with millions of views on You Tube and god knows how many on major news networks I would be very interested to understand exactly how Bensons for Beds benefited from the campaign – certainly the back of their truck door was very well placed explaining that they had the best prices in the UK.  Without further ado here is the video!