span lang=”EN-GB”>A while ago, I saw a fantastic slideshow on slideshare.net by Marta Z Kagan, a Social Media Marketing guru based in Boston, Massachusetts. The catchy title, “What the F**K is Social Media” is probably what first caught my eye. It’s really worth watching to get an overview of the current reach and penetration of social media.
I’ve replayed the slideshow to myself several times over, mainly because the figures are just so staggering, it’s almost hard to believe. These numbers are a sign that the internet has changed, customers’ expectations have changed and, as a result, marketing has to change.
What is ‘social media’?
What is social media really? Wikipedia broadly defines social media as “the use of electronic and internet tools for the purpose of sharing and discussing information and experiences with other human beings”. Kagan sums it up nicely saying “social media is people having conversations online”.
The platforms for these conversations include of a number of mediums. Some are communicative, others are collaborative and others include multimedia or a combination of all three. Social media can take many forms, but one of the key elements that sets all of its incarnations apart from “traditional” media, is that social media is produced to be shared.
Don’t be deceived into thinking that social media only comprises social networking sites. Sure, sites like Facebook and MySpace get a lot of coverage and have massive numbers of active members. In fact, Time magazine wrote in October 2007 that social networking sites are officially more popular than porn!
Social media is anywhere were people interact, talk, engage, share and create.
Other examples of social media include wikis, microblogging, blogs, social bookmarking, photo sharing, video sharing, podcasts and many others. Social media represents a major shift in the way people interact and communicate.
What’s the fuss?
There are over two and a half million articles in English on Wikipedia. 75% of Americans watch at least one video online a month. YouTube alone has hundreds of millions of videos being viewed daily. There are over 200-million blogs on the internet. Just under 60% of people online have joined a social network. Facebook has over 100-million active members: it is the most-trafficked social networking site in the world and the fourth most-trafficked website in the world.
So we know that social media has massive reach. What now? And what does this mean for marketers and brands?
The rules of engagement
In a nutshell, it’s about conversations and creating a dialogue with your customers. Users want to control and customise their own online space and experience.
As social networks and social media continue to grow, it’s becoming clear that they are also starting to aggregate.
This is obvious when one considers developments such as the announcement of Facebook Connect; which will allow for trusted authentication, for your friends to follow you on other sites and will save you having to create multiple profiles. Google Social allows developers and communities to work off one open API for a similar purpose.
At the same time, social media is also fragmenting around niche interests. This is the perfect place for brands and marketers to hit that “sweet spot”, and talk to an audience that is interested in your message.
Now the trick is getting involved
People don’t want a new website. They want content and applications to make their online space their own personal one. This is where savvy marketers can really capitalise; if something is targeted correctly, there is massive potential for it to spread virally within a community.
Think about how you can add value.
Whether you’re thinking about widgets, blogging or creating social media profiles and personas – be interesting! Don’t bore people – and remember to listen. Social media is about creating things to be shared and to be enjoyed.
To succeed in social media marketing you need to ensure that you are transparent, inclusive and consumer-driven.
Jonathan Andrews
http://www.articlesbase.com/social-marketing-articles/internet-marketing-web-20-style-727729.html
July 26th, 2010 at 6:37 am
Can you fix this IE7 CSS problem?
I’m having a nightmare with a CSS rollover on my site.
We managed to use hacks to get this working in FF2, Opera, and better: IE5 and IE6.
We’ve had no joy with IE7 (which should be the easiest, no?)
The problem is in the on-hover in our navigation bar.
When you hover over each link the colour of the background and the text invert, which looks great and is a very common way to do navigation links.
When viewed in pretty much everything except IE7, this works great! However, in IE7 the background colour doesn’t stretch all the way to the bottom, leaving a 1px tall line of the original colour.
This might be hard to understand so check it out here: http://www.logon.ie/internet-marketing-blog/
Note when you run the mouse over Home, Services, About etc, the rollover effect. Try this in IE7 and another browser.
The style sheet is here: http://www.logon.ie/wp-content/themes/Internet-Marketing-Blog/style.css
If anyone has a fix for this issue please help save my sanity!
Thanks!
July 26th, 2010 at 11:39 am
You may want to reduce the width on your a:hover.
Remember box model adds width, border, margin, and padding to get the final width.
You might also try reducing the font-size by 1px on the hover state.
References :
July 26th, 2010 at 11:41 am
how about adding
padding-bottom: 1px;
would that work? So far as I can tell, the hover background is the same colour as the band below, so it doesn’t matter if it overlaps. *update* no, it doesn’t work.
I have been playing around, and it seems that IE7 doesn’t pay a lot of attention to padding on your links, even when not in hover mode. As you are using the same colour you are sitting on, this isn’t noticeable except with your heavily contrasted hover colour. The only solution I can think of is to choose a different hover colour that doesn’t highlight the fact that the bottom 1px isn’t changing. Just to see what was happening, I changed the standard background for your links while playing to yellow, and although I could see the problem was still there, it wasn’t glaringly obvious, in fact you had to look quite hard to see it.
I loathe and despise IE7 btw, even more than i disliked IE6 and prior. Why bother copying tabs from Mozilla when you package it up in something that looks like a dog’s dinner?
References :
http://www.thewebsitedesign.co.uk
July 26th, 2010 at 11:43 am
from looking at your page it looks like the 1px gap is due to a hidden overflow. tested it by adding border 1 solid red. the links showed me top, left, and right borders but no bottom border. so that means its being covered.
an easy fix without messing with the rest of the code is by adding position:relative to id=navigation anchors which will bring the links to the top so it wont be covered.
#navigation a {[your code]; position: relative}
tested in IE7, FF, and Op with no problem
References :