StumbleUpon: We have a client who is doing very well on StumbleUpon which is driving five figures a month of traffic. I feel that we are only scratching the surface for their site and our focus for the fall will be to make that 6 figures a month..

Twitter: I need to get back it using Twitter. Alex and Barbara gave a great talk on Tuesday night about different ways to use Twitter and Alex has has rolled out a Twitter ap called Easy Tweets that is really useful. You can follow me on Twitter here.

Fark: Fark is one social site that I have not used much, but I have been reading about Glen Allsopp’s successes on Fark. Any time someone blogs about getting 550,000 visitors in one month from a social networking site you have to sit up and take notice. So Fark will be one main focuses for August.

As reprted in eMarketer 61% of respondents said they had checked online reviews, blogs and other online customer feedback before buying a new product or service.  Of those who looked for reviews and other feedback, more than eight out of 10 said such evaluations had at least some influence on their purchases.

These numbers are basically unchanged from a Deloitte & Touche study that that we blogged about last fall.

What made the eMarketer report interesting though is that they identified the optimal number of reviews to have on a product page. According to a February 2008 study commissioned by PowerReviews and conducted by the e-tailing group, nearly one-half of US consumers surveyed who shopped online four or more times per year and spent at least $500 said they needed four to seven customer reviews before making a purchase decision.

If your company is selling products on-line then this is priceless information. By setting up each product page with 4-7 customer reviews you will increase your online sales.

Disclaimer is that if you are a real estate agent, your first step should be to put up a blog. Once you have an active blog, then you can work on social media sites:)

Site 1: Facebook

Facebook is a great way to connect with, and stay connected to, former clients, friends and marketing partners. But Facebook is also a great way to network online.

Log onto your Facebook account and go to your profile. Click on the education tab and fill out your high school and college. After saving your profile, you’ll find links on the bottom of the education page to find your classmates.

Befriend your classmates and send them a message. Who knows, maybe they will be the market to buy or sell real estate or know someone else who is. Ah, the power of social media networking

Site 2: LinkedIn

Linkedin is an often overlooked business social network by realtors. What I like about LinkedIn is that your profile page is your online resume. The more details you provide about yourself and your success the better the picture you can paint for prospective customers.

LinkedIn also has a neat feature called LinkedIn Answers where you can ask questions or for research. Want to hear what people are thinking about the real estate market or different suburbs? Ask your focus group and get answers.

Site 3: Meetup.com

Meetup.com is a great way to get out and meet prospective customers. Sign up for a free account and then look for groups that interest yet. Not real estate groups as they will be full of real estate agents? Once you have your groups you can RSVP and go to the meetings.  Introduce yourself to as many people as you can and try to get to know them. These are your future customers so be happy and inviting.

Did I miss any social networking sites that work well for real estate agents?

Now this is not the first time that a luxury brand has hooked up with a social network. Last year I blogged about how Neiman Marcus had picked YouTube as a place to publicize its 100-year anniversary.

What surprised me where comments by Travis Katz, managing director-international operations for MySpace.

Travis was talking abut MySpace demographics and he claimed that:

“There’s this misperception in the market about MySpace being a youth site, a site for teens. But 85% of our audience in the U.S. is over 18, and 40% of all moms in U.S. are on MySpace.”  He claims that MySpace reaches more people making $100,000-plus than other social-network competitors, such as Facebook and Yahoo 360.

Now I am sure that Travis Katz has access to much better demographic data that I do but  a couple of his claims I find are hard to believe. Are 40% of ALL moms in the U.S. really on MySpace? Do an informal poll of your female co-workers and ask them whether they use MySpace. My guess is that it is a less less than 40%. In  the past MySpace has had a problem with bots creating tens of thousands of users profiles which makes me wonder how many of this 40% are active users?

I have some skepticism about the second claim that MySpace reaches more people making $100,000-plus than other social-network competitors, such as Facebook and Yahoo 360. I see a lot of businesses actively working on using Facebook because of the demographics. Other than Cartier can you name another luxury brand that is targeting MySpace users? You would think that with users with that kid of earning power that the Financial companies, luxury auto manufactures and Jewelers would be all over MySpace. That they are not makes me really skeptical of Travis Katz claims.

What do you think? Is MySpace the destination of choice for soccer moms and the rich?

Video is not a new thing to the web. Pre-social media (say 2 years ago) a lot of sites had video. Characteristics of video pre-social media was:

• Long Videos (20 minutes was not an uncommon size)
• Stick on their own pages (usually pop-up pages with no content)
• Rarely found by search engines or users!

Now consider what video is today. Instead of a nice to have feature videos have become strategic assets that can be watched across the internet, not just on a company’s web site. Characteristics of videos today are:

• Videos are much shorter and focused in length (under 5 minutes)
• Video’s are featured on sites and on pages surrounded by content
• Video’s are portable in that they can show up in multiple locations
• Search engines and users are actively looking for them

How to get started
You don’t need a super expensive video camera to get started. We use Flip Video  which is small and easy to use. The picture quality is ok which I like as it looks more viral or homemade.

Say that your company makes widgets in five colors. Instead of producing one long video on widgets, I would recommend making  4-5 shorter videos that talk about red widgets, blue widgets, green widgets, etc. The red widget video for example is embedded within a web page that discusses red widgets.

Now you have five portable assets that can be distributed across the Internet. They can be uploaded to the search engines so that it can show up in the organic videos results, or to social media video sites like YouTube or MetaCafe where its reach is far greater than when someone just visits the website. You can include them in your Facebook site or use traditional social media sites like StumbleUpon, Muixx and Propeller to increase the awareness of your brand.

The downside is that by sharing you might wake up one morning and find out that the tactics(s) that you have been using successfully no longer work. Either because the search engines manually adjusted your site, or because a lot of people started to use that tactic thus devaluing it.

This is a topic that Aaron Wall at SEObook.com wrote about today and Brent Csutoras wrote a great post on Shoemoney.com recently about over sharing.

In Brent’s post he gave several examples of where people have shared their successes on a blog and then seen their competitive advantage disappear almost overnight. Bob Mass back in 2002 announced he was selling PageRank via his Ad Network. Google read this and manually penalized his site and it took him 4 years to get his PageRank back!

In the social media space Lyndon Antcliff  who is one of my favorite social media bloggers wrote about a a piece of social media linkbait that went to the front page of Digg and was mentioned on a television news broadcast. The problem is that Lyndon gave the inside scoop on the piece and mentioned that the linkbait article was not true. He called it satire.

Overnight Lyndon got Matt Cutts attention at Google (never a good thing) and the client severed his relationship due to the negative media exposure. Lyndon later commented that the short lived fame from exposing the success of his campaign was not worth it. He even decided to remove the original post from his site saying, “At the end of the day it did more harm than good discussing publicly such effective tactics.”

Unfortunately that is a position that I find myself in. We run social media campaigns for our own properties as well as for client sites. All of our clients have seen substantial increases in traffic, leads and conversion since we added a social media component to their online marketing strategy. If I continue to disclose what tactics we are using and our client sites lose the competitive advantage they have, we are doing them and ourselves a disservice.

Starting today I will not be disclosing any techniques and tricks that we are currently using. Instead I will be focusing on more general social media topics and tactics.

MySpace has traditionally made money because of its heavy focus on entertainment (nee video), so the alarm bells must be going off at News Corp. that MySpace has seen its online video market share fall from 8.9% to 5.1% in one year. That is a 42% drop which is huge.

The only other company that has seen a similar drop is ManiaTV.com which saw its market share plummet by 64%.

For biggest battle online is being contested by ABC and NBC through their proxy sites Veoh.com (ABC) an Hulu (NBC). In May, Disney-owned ABC made its first public move to embrace online distribution by signing up with Veoh.com.
The move is a defensive play against Hulu, the NBCU-News Corp joint venture and ABC has previously announced plans to release an embed-friendly player this fall, though not ruled out working with Hulu.

While Veoh.com shows up much higher in Compete’s ranking of on-site video viewing visits, Hulu.com actually plays host to ABC visitors slightly more often (4.7% vs. 4% in May).

“For IHG, we’ve been tasked to measure and understand how our social marketing efforts relate back to an increase in room nights. This approach is different than many – if not most – organizations today who measure engagement.”

That is an understatement. How to measure ROI on social media marketing is something that stumps many companies. Is social media marketing advertising and thus ROI should be calculated like other advertising campaigns? Typical measurements there are revenue or length of time spent on the site.

Or is social media marketing different than advertising and thus ROI calculations should be more engagement related like story uploads and guest comments, or links (the SEO measurement)?

Whatever measurement track you take should not stop you from listening to your customers according to Jeyaram:

“Each organization will need to develop their own strategy of how to best engage with their customers. Right now, I think a lot of companies are listening and watching before jumping into the conversation. At this time I think organizations are just beginning to realize the potential and the impact of social marketing on their communications and engagements with their guests.”

So how do you measure the success of a social marketing campaign? Is Imfeld Jeyaram right and that it is all about the revenue?

Why should anyone care about a subculture of homemade video makers, or the fact that some people watch amusing clips on the Internet instead of looking at TV? “I don’t understand how this is going to impact my life,”

The response by Professor Wesch was:

“It will impact politics — it will impact who gets elected this year. And I think it can be argued that Obama would not have taken the election without social media. Clinton with her machine would have just ran right over him.”

This is a really interesting observation. The Yes We Can video’s  have received over 15 million views on YouTube and the Obama Girl videos have been seen well over 10 million times combined and the Obama certainly used social media like YouTube, Facebook and MySpace to reach out and energize its young supporters.

But would Barack Obama have won the nomination without the help social media?  I agree with Professor Welch that the Internet and social media gave his campaign the momentum and word of mouth that it needed to get going, especially in the early days of the campaign.

What do you think? Did social media influence the Democratic primary?

Facebook attracted more than 123m unique visitors worldwide in May, an increase of 162 per cent over the same period last year according to ComScore, a company that monitors websites. That compared with 114.6m unique visitors worldwide at MySpace, Facebook’s leading rival, whose traffic grew just 5 per cent during the same period, ComScore said.

The findings mark the first time that Facebook, launched in 2004, has taken a significant lead in unique visitors, after ComScore’s April traffic figures showed the rivals in a virtual tie. They come at a time of change inside Facebook, as the one-time upstart attempts to transform itself into a leading media company. Several members of the original executive team have left the company in recent weeks.

MySpace is still significantly more popular than Facebook among US residents and, with $1 billion in revenue last year, is probably more profitable. Facebook is a private company and doesn’t disclose sales figures but the Financial Times reported it made $150 million worth of sales last year.

MySpace seems to be in a major period of transition. Their web site traffic seems to be peaking and advertising revenue is not at the levels that Fox expected. When people talk about advertising on social networks, they talk about Facebook apps, not advertising on MySpace.

MySpace last week launched a redesigned home page with simpler navigation and less noise after users complained it was difficult to use and featured garish, cluttered profile pages

“We asked people why they didn’t go to MySpace,” MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson told The Guardian. “A lot of people thought it was too hard to use, they thought it was a music site, or a content site. Privacy was a concern, or they’d say it was a site for teenagers.”

Rupert Murdoch the outspoken chief executive of News Corp, which bought MySpace for the now bargain price of $580 million in 2005, said Facebook had “done a great job of being flavor of the month the last six months of last year” but it was not a real social network and was basically a “directory”.