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.
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.
So I added a widget to my blog sidebar to show where FourSquare thinks I still am. Useless perhaps, but a little neat. While poking around the vast reaches of the WordPress Plugin Repository, I found the Foursquare Venue Plugin for WordPress, which looks interesting. If you have a venue that people may check into, you can extend your WordPress site to show a real-time display of who’s there and who’s the mayor. Add an incentive for whoever the current mayor happens to be (free refills, fries or a discount of some sort, whatever) and you may just encourage more FourSquare users to turn up and check in. Nice. Very Guerrilla, and social too.
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.
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.
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:
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.