MH1 Web Design Blog

from Mashable.com

WARNING: Facebook Malware Attack Behind Distracting Beach Babes Video http://mashable.com/2010/05/22/facebook-beach-babes/

by Brenna Ehrlich on www.mashable.com

Despite Facebook privacy changes and serious cases of Twitter Fail Whale, social media use has increased astronomically since this time last year: During December 2009, global users spent an average of five hours on social networking sites, up from three hours in December 2008. That’s an 82% increase.

Nielsen just released a report on its blog detailing increased social media use, and the results are impressive, while not exactly shocking. Some highlights:

- Social networking sites are the most popular online destinations globally (based on the amount of time people spent there in December), with games and instant messaging coming in second and third, respectively. (Side note: As gaming becomes more popular on sites like Facebook, it will be interesting to see how this affects time spent.)

- In December, Facebook was the most popular social networking site globally, with 67% of social media fans logging in. In addition, time spent on Facebook has been on the rise; globally, people spend close to six hours per month on the network.

- In the U.S., people continue to spend more time on social networks, but year-over-year growth for Facebook and Twitter individually outpaced overall growth for the category at large.

- Twitter was the fastest-growing social networking site in December 2009, during which it had 18.1 million unique visitors. That’s up from 2.7 million unique visitors in December 2008. Still, month-over-month, unique visitors decreased 5%, lending credence to the notion that the microblogging site’s popularity may be flatlining.

Here are some charts from Nielsen showing social media’s ascent:

So what does all this mean? Basically what we and a bevy of social media experts have been saying for months now: Social networking is a force to reckoned with.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter are getting the most eyeballs, which means we have to figure out how to use them to their maximum potential — whether it be by optimizing ROI or attempting to mine them for journalistic purposes.

Today the question on every companies mind is “Is Social Media Worth It?”.  Dominos pizza would tell you “Yes” without hesitation.

Last week a video leaked out of two Domino employees doing revolting things to a pizza. Although claiming to be a hoax, the video got millions of views within minutes as it went viral on twitter and other social sites. The video is currently unavailable due to copyright claims done by one employee, but unfortunately for Dominos pizza the damage was already done. CNN has covered the story as well saying the employees have been sentenced to jail time.

Outraged at the video, people on all social media sites (mostly Twitter) were asking Dominos what was going on and how they would counteract this. Once again, unfortunately, Dominos was not on Twitter to discuss what was going on and how they would make things better. Dominos was doing and saying things but just not covering social media sites.

The President of Dominos pizza in the US did make a you tube video to discuss the measures being taken.

However, Dominos biggest failure in this viral disaster was that it was not on Twitter to pick up what was being said about them. So the lesson of the month is that Social Media is not just about viral marketing but for customer relationship as well. Especially relevant when there is an online crisis!

Realizing this, Dominos has reacted positively and set up a twitter account, which has over 1,000 followers already, and they are communicating about the issue openly. If you notice that their twitter name is dpzinfo it’s because they also failed to secure their company’s name on social media sites (highly recommended) and someone else has squatted on their name.

It seems companies would rather learn the hard way. Social media, although time consuming, can save your company at the end of the day. A good start to recovery by Dominos but they are another example for all companies out there to realize how powerful Social Media is.

View what people are saying now on Twitter about Dominos.

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from Wolf21 Internet Marketing Solutions

Southwest Airlines has been an early adopter of Social Media with a great corporate blog, Nuts About Southwest, and investment in the voice of the customer. They have actually listened to customers through their blog, Twitter, Facebook and other communities online and improved their service because of it.

by Chris Crum, WebProNews

All of the search engines are rushing to incorporate more social media elements into their interfaces. Examples of this are evident in things like Google and Bing’s deals with Twitter and Facebook. You can see it in Yahoo’s new Twitter tab for news results. You can see it in Google’s Social Search lab. Really you can see it in everyday search results.

A lot of Internet users spend a great deal of their time socializing or using social media sites in one way or another, whether that is to connect with others or simply to obtain information. Information is a key component of social media that often takes a backseat to communication in discussion of social media tools.

The fact of the matter is that more and more people are getting more and more of their information from social sites. That could be in the form of following a news publication on Twitter, following company updates on a blog or a Facebook page, or something as simple as a friend sharing a link.

Given that people are getting more info from social media sites, of course search engines want a piece of that, because their whole reason for existence is naturally to help users find what they are looking for on the web.

So, it stands to reason that if you want people to find information that you are producing, it can help a great deal to publish information and participate in conversations on social media sites. Never mind that users of those particular sites will have access to it. The general public will as well by way of search, regardless of whether or not they are a part of any particular community.

In an interview with WebProNews, Vanessa Fox, who used to work for Google, talked about reasons that businesses should be thinking about social media with regards to search. It’s about visibility. If you are having discussions out there about relevant topics, they could appear in search results not only in real-time search, but further down the road as well.

In other words, if you have a conversation with a peer on Twitter about some topic related to your niche, there is a good chance the resulting tweets of that conversation could appear in search results for that topic on Google, even a year from now, if that tweet happens to be relevant enough. That’s just an example (note: it’s hard to say at this point, just how tweets will impact search once the Google-Twitter deal starts showing results).

There are a variety of ways in which a social campaign can contribute to your performance in search engines, regardless of what these recent deals might produce. Like Lee Odden of Top Rank Online Marketing recently discussed with WebProNews, you can optimize your social content.

The web went blog crazy a few years back. Marketers found out that blogs were great for achieving search engine visibility because of the content and links that can come from them. It’s not that different with social media now. The web has largely moved into a social media-heavy phase, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Search engines obviously know this and care about it.

As Fox says in her interview, it’s getting to the point where more businesses are starting to realize that they need to be involved with social media. However, surveys still frequently suggest that many are reluctant, and even if they do engage to some extent, they are still holding back, and not reaching the potential they could be. You know search is important to marketing on the web. Really, it’s important to marketing, period. If you operate on the web or off, your customers are on still online, as Fox noted. Social media is growing increasingly important to search. And search is only one aspect of online marketing. There are many more benefits to social media than that.http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/20/if-you-care-about-search-you-must-care-about-social-media