Equally as interesting is user response to public posts:

An average of 0.77 “+1s” per post
An average of 0.54 replies per post
An average of 0.17 re-shares per post

The study concludes:

At the end of the day, Google Plus simply does not show the same level of ravenous user adoption and engagement that we’ve seen in other social networks[.]

This is more than a little disingenuous; RJMetrics scraped the public timelines of 40,000 random Google+ users. Because of the fundamental structure of Google+ as a user I don’t need to post publicly at all; every interaction I have on the service could go through one or more of my circles, which could all be private (and thus invisible to this study). So there’s a strong argument that says this data only looks at the very top of the trees without seeing any of the ecosystem below.

I thought to myself, “Great, a feel good story about someone trying something new and succeeding.” But I was wrong.

The article details a small pizza joint in Louisiana that was trying to drum up some new business before buying a new building. Though they had been curious about Facebook ads but were too timid to try it themselves, so hired a “social media ad guru”. Don’t get me wrong, advertising and developing creative can be a tough job, and it’s ok to be timid. What left a bad feeling in my stomach though, was the way the article brushed off social media advertising/marketing as a dud and something that has not been thoroughly tested.

What did that “guru” do? If he was a “guru”, why didn’t it work? What went wrong? Did they manage bids, creative, landing pages? What was the action of the ad? What was the intended result?

Doing this for a few years now, it made me mad that NPR would just leave it like that, citing even GM has pulled their [Facebook] ads because they didn’t see the initial increase in sales they were looking for. What!? GM sells cars, among other things, all over the world. They probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars testing and analyzing their ad creative, cost, performance, CTR & yield. And after all of that made an informed decision that they can easily purchase advertising with greater exposure, in places that contain a highly driven demographic that will perform better, even if better is an increase of 0.0125%.

The bigger question is who. Who was this “guru” and what did he do? Did he try and make the ads perform better for this company, how? The articles makes it sound like this “guru” pretty much took his client’s money and ran. As a “guru” he should have known that Facebook recommends that marketers target at least 20,000 people with their ads. This gives the ad a fair chance at finding it’s target and gaining some traction. Also working against this campaign was it’s focus. They seemed to be throwing ideas at the wall hoping something would stick and take off. But NO form of advertising works like that. Sure during the creative process there’s a little “free-thinking” and off-the-wall ideas but they are usually coming from an informed idea process. Knowing the audience and the intended action and that actions result is an important step toward making socially based advertising work. Getting more “Likes” for your Facebook page does not equal selling more pizzas. Motivating users to get out of their seats and to actually do something requires not only a motivating factor, ie – a coupon or promotion, but something they will get value from.

Social media marketing (SMM) can be very, very fickle. Most people think you can just wing it or hire a “social media ad guru” to do it for you. Truth is, you need to know who your audience is before you can target and advertise to them. The pizza shop should have taken some time and asked some of their current customers what they like, where they live in relation to the shop. Focusing on your current customers will help determine who your potential customers are. You also need to assign a value to different actions so that you can calculate your return on investment (ROI) in the end. How much is a “Like” worth to you? How about a new loyal customer? Those are the important questions.

We run campaigns on Facebook, Google, & LinkedIn on a regular basis for our clients. Sometimes we hit the jackpot and some times we hit a dud. It can be very frustrating and upsetting when the ‘perfect campaign’ you set up, doesn’t work. It is even worse when you’ve run the campaign before with tons of success but the following week or month it fails and falls flat on it’s face. It takes daily monitoring and making adjustments we can not only manage cost but see what is working, make adjustments and apply that thinking to other campaigns that might not be performing as well. We put a lot of effort into the care and management of a marketing dollar to ensure that it gets put to good use. It’s not something that you can do once and forget about. Advertising, just like a car, requires regular maintenance and sometimes a shiny new set of wheels.

Colleges and Universities are offering more and more courses online giving students from all around the opportunity to learn from the comfort of their home and on their own schedules. While his is becoming an important part of our culture where taking a few years off just isn’t an option any more, traditional students are becoming more and more tech-dependent than there predecessors from even a few short years ago.

38% of students can’t go more than 10 minutes without checking their smartphone or other device.*

Today more than 90% of college students regularly communicate with their professors via email and more than 70% require technology to aid them in their studying.

What does this mean for us? It means that if we really want to get in front of college level students we need to get away from targeting them through a regular web presence and start thinking mobile and not just smartphones. Location based mobile advertising and optimizing website’s landing pages for tablet devices will be critical to get in front of this demographic. And it won’t just be enough to “be there” – just like a good social media strategy you’ll need to be involved, interacting though your presence in some way.

So here’s a look at your modern day college student and their life with technology.

*How Tech Is Changing College Life [Infographic] via Mashable

Fans get to know who plays Katniss allowing another personal connection.

I thought that The Hunger Games hype would eventually die down, but I still see mentions on all social networking sites, like Twitter and especially Tumblr. Lionsgate and agency Ignition were able to turn a series of books (that I had never previously heard of) into a blockbuster with marketing campaign focused on the fans.

Together, the companies planned a creative campaign using separate hashtags, as well as engaging activities on multiple social platforms. Their concept was fans first, second and third. They listened to what the fans wanted and played off of that. So, Lionsgate created online events for the fans to participate in. My personal favorite is the #HunderGames100, a puzzle game that requires fans to find puzzle pieces on 100 different online locations. This game required Twitter and Facebook usage to participate, which is a fantastic way to connect the two platforms.

Lionsgate didn’t want to isolate the fans to solely teenage girls by focusing on the love-triangle. So, they created other ways to tap into each age and gender demographics. Male fans played online video games, focusing on training for the games. On Tumblr, fans could follow Capitol Couture, which focuses on the creative fashion of the future in Suzanne Collins’ books.

The marketing team did not ignore traditional media though, such as print ads, television, or outdoor advertising. They actually used the traditional sources to direct to their online campaigns. They would include the hashtags in print, and introduce the release of a trailer by the actor Josh Hutcherson on TV shows (like on Good Morning America) while advertising the trailer and Hutcherson’s appearance online. Lionsgate used the Internet as a way to amplify the traditional media.

The campaign was all about the fans and their interactions, and created a personal experience. For instance, the different activities inspired fans to be a member of a district, train for the games, and cheer on their favorite contestant by learning about the actors and their portrayal in the films. I think the most impression attribute about the entire campaign is how they successfully connected multiple social platforms and made it appealing to all gender and age demographics. With the movie already out, they are still releasing new events and games to continue the hype until the next movie (scheduled to release in November 2013). Even though I expected Hunger Games to die down, I’m not disappointed to know that it will continue on. I look forward to the next movie and may just participate in some of these games myself (online games, that is, not The Games).

To read more in depth about The Hunger Games marketing campaign, please read the article that inspired my blog, Inside “The Hunger Games” Social Media Machine.

To start, I’d like to point out that I am not a fan of politics and don’t really know, or adhere to, any one school of thought, on any one topic, at any one time. However I did find this article and infographic about how social media and wikipedia, specifically, have become essential tools for potential candidates for political offices.

As most of you know, SEO is a huge deal these days and a major part of SEO, thanks to Panda, is a site’s content. Utilizing a site like Wikipedia, candidates have been able to update their page’s content on a regular basis and through creative copy writing clean up or even increase awareness of their actions while mitigating Wikipedia efforts to prevent bias in it’s open encyclopedia. Some have even been able to combat negative events in their public history by creatively moving the mentions from the main article to footnotes. All this while driving valuable SEO traffic to their websites and increasing their ranking in the Google machine.

It just goes to show how important good, up-to-date, curated content about your brand all over the web is just as important as maintaining your own website. It’s important to keep an eye on sites like Wikipedia and other’s that host your brand’s name and keep details about you on the web. Some of this is user generated and other times it’s maintained by a few people that work for the site. Whatever the case is, they typically don’t have access to the inside track and much of the information being shared about you is probably out of date, or even worse incorrect.

I’d be interested to see just how far this unlikely partnership of social media and politics will go over the next few years but one thing I am sure of is that it won’t be ending in November.

Hold your smartphones (and your wallets) close for this one!

Created by: BusinessDegree.net

OK. So it’s a specialized form of Group targeted towards colleges and universities, right? What’s the big deal?

A whole lot. Here are 12 ways Facebook’s Groups For Schools could have a huge impact on everyone:

1. While it’s limited to schools for now, we’re betting that it won’t be too long until Facebook “Groups for Businesses” and/or “Groups for Organizations” rolls out. When that happens it’s going to be a hugely disruptive force for intranet, business collaboration, and third-party file sharing “cloud” industries. Why spend loads of money creating and maintaining an intranet when Facebook’s done it for you?

To read more of Sean’s Top 12 Ways Facebook’s “Groups for Schools” Will Change Higher Ed (and maybe everything else) please visit April’s idfive Whitepapers.

And while you’re at it, if you would like to receive more insightful articles written by the lovely team of idfive, please sign up to be a part of our mailing list.

And I only say that because of two other statistics that I am all too familiar with myself:

1. 59% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more each week and..
2. 33% of marketers report using social media for 11+ hours each week

If folks are investing that much time toward effective social media marketing than how are only 30% of businesses outsourcing that work load?

Infographic by Patricia Redsicker // Data pulled from Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Marketing Industry Report