Huge Bear Surprises Crew on EcoBubble Photo Shoot in BC
If anyone ever tells you they can guarantee a video will go viral, don’t trust them… it’s not a guarantee anyone can make. One strategy though, is to make your video clever — which Samsung has certainly done with this one. Well done.
Category Archives: Social Media
Social Media Video 2013
This may not look new if you’ve seen previous versions, but Erik Qualman’s social media video has been updated now for 2013. If you have any lingering doubts, check out the stats sources.
Simple Rules: Creating Viral Anythings
Aside
There’s a simple rule about rules for creating viral anything, whether it’s viral video or tweets or photos or whatnot. The rule is this: anyone who tells you how to do it in a step-by-step way is just blowing smoke. If they could do it that easily, they wouldn’t be talking to you about it, they’d be off using their pixie dust to command obscene amounts of consulting fees — and there’s no way they’d give away the secret sauce for free.
Social Media ROI & “Tweeting for Dollars”
Last week while discussing social media ROI, I made the statement that attempting to directly measure revenue from social media will mean the social media efforts won’t be effective. To be clear, as I went on to say in my post last week, I’m not suggesting that social media efforts not be monitored. What I wrote was that
There’s no direct link between time or money spent on social media pursuits and revenue. Sometimes there may be a direct return, but this is the exception and not the rule. Social media pursuits have a gradual but cumulative effect over the long term, which translates indirectly to increased revenue for your business. The more directly you try to align social media with revenue, the less effective it will be, because it violates the most basic principle of social media interaction.
Social Media in Manitoba Provincial Politics: Would it Have Mattered?
In the Manitoba provincial post-election Tweet-stream, @susie_parker kicked off a brief discussion about how there was little to no social media activity from the political parties. If you were following, you may have noticed that none of them seemed to have a social media strategy at all. One comment ran along the lines that during a busy campaign, they wouldn’t have had time to tweet consistently or effectively. (I’m paraphrasing and interpreting some brief tweets here.)
The comparison to Barack Obama’s legendary campaign was inevitable for his effective use of social media. Would social media have changed the outcome of the Manitoba election? Not likely — as @miguelcarrasco tweeted:
Social Media ROI & Unicorn Mortality
Last week I attended the first meetup of the Marketing & Technology group, which turned out to be a great first meeting. Since the intersection of marketing and technology is where I’ve lived and played for more than a decade now (since it was just a lonely crossroads), I’m looking forward to seeing the group grow and evolve.
The first meeting featured a discussion panel, to which Ryan Caligiuri posed a number of questions. Several of these had me wanting to interject, like the question of measuring social media ROI (Return on Investment), a practice which some have completely discounted as inadvisable or downright impossible.
Movie Response: The Social Network
I finally broke down and saw The Social Network, despite my personal prohibition on ever seeing another movie where the dialogue includes the cheesy line, “This is our time!” The movie is a dramatization of the founding of and eventual lawsuits over Mark Zuckerberg‘s founding of Facebook.
My first thought was that this movie should do for Facebook what Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price did for Wal-Mart in terms of negative publicity. And at the end of the day, that’s probably apt. Anyone who’s seen the movie can easily see the negative impact that Wal-Mart has had on communities and will deplore many of its corporate practices. They might even remember that as they stand in line at the checkout — but they won’t stop shopping at Wal-Mart. So maybe the comparison works. When something has that much momentum, you can change your opinion of it, but you still end up supporting it one way or another.