Could there be a massive exodus on to another platform? Facebook is beyond a platform. With over 2.1 billion users worldwide as of December 2017 and 1.4 billion users logging in daily, that’s 66%. Let’s say 50% of those users stop using Facebook completely. That leaves  over half a billion active users. That still is a lot of people.

At this point, being served ads is the norm. Facebook’s business model is to advertising. People are conditioned for that already. What is concern at the moment is the data breach. To be able to get your data deleted from the third party apps that users gave access to, they would have to contact those companies and request that it be deleted. Facebook is giving users the option to download the archive.

I just did this with my personal account and it is a whopping 1.1 gigabyte of data! It includes the actual video files of what I shared or liked and even images I shared privately to friends.

What does this mean for companies who have invested a lot of money to build up their audiences and serve targeted ads to them? Assuming half of current users abandon Facebook which I believe is highly unlikely, it is a great opportunity for brands to build more trust. People are so jaded now that being more authentic and thinking more of your customer and their needs is what it will take.

Here are some initial steps to take from the perspective of messaging and your customer’s needs:

1. Initiate a content audit and evaluate all the messaging in your videos, whitepapers, blogs and have each person in your marketing team give a summary of how the content can be improved keeping the customer needs in mind.
2. If you have been partnering with influencers to promote your products, invite them to your corporate offices and have a brainstorming session with them. Let them help you with ideas for more creative campaigns and ways to improve your current messaging.
3. Gather up your customer service team and find gaps of where customers needs are not being addressed. For example are questions coming in comments on your Facebook page that are not being answered? Create a goal of increasing customer service by 50% in the next six months. If necessary, hire someone exclusively for listening and addressing the conversations on Facebook and all your other social channels.

In summary, it is a time to take a pause and do some evaluation of how your company is coming across. Are you part of the noise or are you going to make a difference in one of your customer’s lives?

I attended my first IBM conference, IBM InterConnect in Las Vegas last month. Many of the sessions were live streamed on IBMGO including general session presentations on Digital and IT Transformation. Also, there were many breakout sessions which include topics Hybrid Cloud, Mobile, IOT, IT Service Management, Watson and much more.  It asks you for a login, but it’s completely free. This is just the content for IBM InterConnect. As you dig deeper with all the IBM offerings, you will be amazed at everything they are doing. It’s massive.

This is at the MGM grand, one of the general sessions which holds 16,000 people. The conference was held also at Mandalay Bay.

Since I started IBM, I launched the social media strategy for IBM Systems Latin America. Recently, my job role changed to being the social content and influencer lead for IBM Power Systems which are servers for things like supercomputers. For example, IBM Watson runs on Power Systems. You can see more about Power Systems here or one of the social channels I manage. IBM Power Systems is a segment of the IBM Systems Business Unit.

This is a Z Systems  mainframe server at InterConnect, I started a fun hashtag #hugamainframe. This is also the division that my good friend Alex de Carvalho works in.

I just wanted to hug a mainframe. #zsystems @IBMzSystems #ibminterconnect pic.twitter.com/k4cnGfzLyN

— Blanca Stella Mejia (@blancastella) February 23, 2016

And it led Tamara McCleary to do the same. Power Systems, Z Systems and IBM Storage are all part of IBM Systems which is all the hardware that IBM sells andI work in that business unit.

Following @blancastella‘s lead, I had to #HugaMainframe. #MainframesNeedLoveToo #ibminterconnect @IBMzSystems pic.twitter.com/jkXBPPTAWv

— Tamara McCleary (@TamaraMcCleary) February 25, 2016

IBM hosts huge conferences. This one is one of the largest and was attended by approximately 25,000 people! IBM is in the process of transforming itself into a Cognitive and Cloud service company. In future posts, I will start sharing more of what I have learned in the past eight months. It is massive! I am very excited about all the innovation going on.

This is a good video from Ginny Rometty when she spoke at CES 2016 in January so you can get an idea of what IBM is involved in. An example,  IBM is changing the world with cognitive computing in the medical industry like curing cancer and diabetes.

Marvin the Robot was a fun discovery.

Marvin, the Robot playing rock, paper , scissor #ibminterconnnect pic.twitter.com/qBAyJwQoTU

— Blanca Stella Mejia (@blancastella) February 24, 2016

And let’s not forget the finale! Elton John!!

The legend is here!! @eltonofficial#ibminterconnnectpic.twitter.com/W1v6AQA9DO

— Blanca Stella Mejia (@blancastella) February 25, 2016

Lastly, I want to say that I am very lucky to have a brilliant, kind, fun loving manager, Tiffany Winman. She is the worldwide manager for IBM Systems for social and analytics. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Blessed to have an amazingly nice and brilliantly intelligent manager at IBM Systems. #ibminterconnect @tiffanywinman #ibmsystems #ibmer

A photo posted by Blanca Stella Mejia (@micaminar) on Feb 22, 2016 at 5:29pm PST

Content curation is an important element that is often overlooked within organizations mostly because various teams are creating so much of their own content and this strategy is often left at the bottom of the list.

Like an art curator that collects the best art for their gallery, a good content curator cherry picks the best and most relevant content for their industry and shares it directly on their social media channels, includes it as a reference in a blog post linking to the actual content itself or including it in your email newsletter of the top news of the week.

It sets you up as an authority on a specific topic.

With so much data and content on a daily basis, you can be known as a great resource for content your audience is looking for. By taking the time to sort and find the best content your audience is looking for, they will look at you as a go to brand.

Your social media footprint is diversified.

By mixing things up on your social media feed, your digital presence will become less of a look at me push marketing brand and more of an organic community style feed. In social media, many brands make the mistake of posting only their content. Pull your readers in by being seen as an expert in your field.

You save on resources in creating original content.

Let’s face it, creating original content day in and day can eat up your budget in no time. By sharing content with proper attribution, you will look like a rock star. Even retweets with comments works well and shows the content creator that you took the time to read their post. This works well when you are in a research phase for finding influencers and will gain you an easy follower.

Here is the presentation from the event I spoke at.

Update January, 2018. Storify no longer will be supported.

Curation Tools at Florida Social Conference

I’m very excited to be co-organizing Social Media Day South Florida  this year. This is an event that is promoted by Mashable and any city in the world can host their own Social Media Day.

We have been celebrating for the past five years and this year, it will be at the Hyatt Pier 66 in Ft. Lauderdale. Besides being a part of the team, I will also be speaking on getting up to speed in SEO.

Social Media Day was started very grassroots by the local social media influencers. It has grown to a full fledged day with over 30 local speakers of topics in everything digital. Check out the schedule here and don’t forget to get your tickets!

Miami International Airport partnered with us and they created this banner! We are so excited!!

One of our fav days of the year is this weekend- Social Media Day! RT if it’s UR fav day. @SMDAYSFL #SMDAYSFL pic.twitter.com/jndUY01YeE

— Miami Int’l Airport (@iflymia) June 26, 2015

After the full day of learning, we are having a Sunset Cocktail after party at the Pier Top Lounge. Check out this video of the venue with the 360 degree view!

Live Answer who is the title partner is going to have a suite sponsored by Enrique Iglesias and Atlantico Rum. I have been very lucky to get to know  Adam Boalt, the CEO of Live Answer this past month in their collaboration with this event and I can truly say his team is top notch! They are also looking for a marketing rock star to join their team.

And how cool! The DJ from the Miami Dolphins, Supercede will be at the after party.  So I hope you can join us! Follow the hashtag #smdaysfl

This is my presentation at the Bloggers Business Bootcamp at Casalatina Home Expo. My journey with Digital Marketing started with a personal blog and has developed into a full fledged digital marketing career.

This presentation is like a little toolbox to get you started online without breaking the bank and by no means a comprehensive list. It contains a list of my favorite tools after trying out many. Let me know what tools have worked for you.

Photo: “Creating Your Digital Footprint” @micaminar @salfrosceno #BBBOOTCAMPMIA #casalatinamiami https://t.co/NGrpBfzlea

— bohemian babushka (@BBabushka) May 31, 2015

At the Neutrogena suite, many bloggers wanted to take pictures with her. There were so many cameras and people around and I really didn’t want to wait in line. So I managed to take a picture just at the right time when she was posing with Ana Flores, the founder of the conference. It was totally spontaneous. I tweeted it right away without know that Eiza had 1 million followers. I honestly did not know much about Eiza and then I saw my twitter notifcations blow up. Eiza had retweeted and then I got over 100 retweets in that day alone.

Brands look at number of impressions when creating campaigns. Getting a retweet from a celebrity that has over a million followers is a big deal. I saw for the first time the impact of a social media celebrity influencer on my account. I am not saying it to boost my ego because I didn’t get a ton of followers from that retweet. What I am emphasizing is how one celebrity tweet can go a long way when it comes to impressions.

The screenshot above was taken just now, 11 days after the tweet was taken on February 27th. It has had 140 retweets and 193 favorites. Most of the retweets were within 2 days. It was good for my overall impressions on my personal account as well. I had 3.8 million impressions from February 24th through March 2nd. The bulk of the impressions were during the conference from February 26-28th.

I tend to tweet alot during events with alot of pictures, so I usually get some retweets, but usually at the most 5-10 with the approximate 4000 followers I have on that account. I got 119 new followers, but most were from bloggers who attended the conference and were following the event hashtag #weallgrow.

I hope you enjoyed these Twitter stats from just one tweet and how social media influence impacts a brand’s impressions. A tweet like that is short lived, but the number of impressions count for reporting to a brand. I wasn’t getting paid to tweet nor was sponsored by Neutrogina. They had their own hashtag during the event, #mismomentosneutrogena . I  could have tweeted that hashtag and it would have been included in the brands report. But since it was a spontaneous tweet and very in the moment, I forgot. Also, that hashtag is way too long because it take up too much space in a tweet. It is something to consider for brands when creating a hashtag within an event.

Here is the original tweet. Would be interesting to see how many more retweets after 10 days.

@laflowers looks like a movie star too! Aqui con @eizamusica #WeAllGrow pic.twitter.com/itbAoOO3bz

— Blanca Stella Mejia (@micaminar) February 27, 2015

Who would have thought that Facebook would have bought What’s App in February for $16 billion ($4 billion in cash, 12 billion in stock)  back in 2013. It was a huge surprise. Personally, I didn’t use it that much until some of my cousins in Colombia added me to their chat groups. Now I use it every single day and chat to about 40 aunts and cousins on a daily basis.

Not only that, I showed my father how to use it. He is 82 and living in Miami, communicates with his 4 sisters, nieces and nephews who live in Colombia every day. That is priceless. When he doesn’t communicate for over 8 hours, like when he is playing golf, his sisters want to know where he is at.

According to the New York Times, What’s App is now valued at $28 billion even though it lost money. Currently, What’s App doesn’t have ads and I predict that by March, 2015 ads on What’s App will start rolling in. It took one and a half years for Facebook to announce that ads were rolling into Instagram. At the moment, only certain brands with a large following have access to them.

Right now, Instagram is only allowing pre-selected brand partners to advertise. You’re already familiar with these brands on Instagram — adidas, Ben & Jerry’s, Burberry, GE, Lexus, Levi’s, Macy’s, Michael Kors, PayPal, and Starwood — because they’ve built pretty a impressive Instagram presence organically. 

Recently, Citigroup valued Instagram at a whopping $35 billion. And two years ago, we gasped at the $1 billion purchase!  I predict that some major company will purchase Pinterest in the $30 billion plus range. Michael Copeland from Wired Magazine said in October 2013, that contenders could be Google, Amazon or Ebay. I think Microsoft could be a contender. They haven’t bought a major social network and who knows what is store now that Nadella is the new CEO.

Let’s take a look at the main Social Networks owned by huge companies:

• Twitter owns Vine.
• Facebook owns Instagram and What’s App. They tried to buy Snapchat but the offer was turned down.
• Google owns You Tube and Google Plus
• Yahoo owns Tumblr and Flickr
• Pinterest- ??

Pinterest is ripe for a huge purchase because it has much more potential for users who want to use social media marketing and is also very addicting. I personally love it, but I limit my time on it because I can get lost in it in the awesome visuals. Instagram is very tricky because you can’t have hyperlinks in your posts. With Pinterest, you can easily do that and repins go a long way. Sometimes a pin I posted a year ago gets repinned now.

They also have improved their search algorithms this year and have analytics built in. I mainly use Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. If I had more free time, I would choose Pinterest over Instagram and G plus. I did try to incorporate G Plus this year, but it didn’t happen. It also didn’t help that alot of people are predicting it’s demise. Danny Sullivan writes a great post about it putting G+ branding on the side and having more focus on it as an app. 

As a user, I personally cannot engage fully in more than three social networks because I work full time. If I did, I would burn out and I like to balance my life by exercising, hanging out with family and friends, dining, beach, reading and many other things. There is only so much my brain can handle online. For a company, with a full social media staff and depending on the budget, I say go all the way with social media marketing at least 6 to get the most distribution.

Here is a great infographic from Curata on trends for 2015 and Cheers for a productive and exciting New Year!