Social Media Examiner released their annual Social Media Marketing Industry Report earlier this year, and Patricia Redsicker created a nice infographic to illustrate the results.

Today I presented to the Executive Education program at the Newhouse School on the topic of content production, which we love here at OSG. Below are the slides to the presentation (I’m happy to clarify anything).  Some of the main areas covered:

• What is “content”?
• Social Writing & Brand Journalism
• Why is a content production strategy important and how can it benefit your existing communications and marketing programs?
• Content creation vs content curation
• Some tools and examples

Did you know internet users around the globe – 30% of the world’s population (PS that’s 2,095,006,005 people!) – visit Google more than any other website, but spend most of their time on Facebook?

An infographic from Go-Gulf (via Ragan) displays more really interesting stats about worldwide internet use.

Interesting stats:

• The equivalent of almost 4 million years is spent online in a month by the collective internet-using population.
• The average global internet users spends 16.months online… though in the states it looks more like 32 hours.
• The top 10 countries in terms of percentage of population online ranges from 85% (in the UK) to 7.5% (India)… it only goes down from there.
• Social networking is the most popular activity online.
• Chinese users spend the most amount of time shopping online.

Related articles

• Almost 8 new Internet users added worldwide every second (infographic)(royal.pingdom.com)

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• Checkout This Amazing History Of Internet : 1996 vs. 2011 [Infographic](thetechnologycafe.com)

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This weekend was Graduation Weekend at Syracuse University, so our team had a few things up our sleeves for the festivities.  One of them was live Pinning of Commencement.

Inspired by last month’s live Pinning of a bridal show by Oscar de la Renta, we were able to capture a lot of the day’s memorable moments.  While our team didn’t have as much backstage coverage as the la Renta team did, we were able to achieve the following:

• Used photos from many of our platforms. There were streams of photos being taken and shared on multiple platforms. We centralized them, and shared them across platforms when possible. This was important when you think about the viral component of Pinterest, and the fact that you want users to come back to “you” even when they’re five steps removed from your network.  By grabbing photos from Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter or our website, we were able to link most of our Pins back to one of our own properties.
• Highlighted quotes from our graphics team.Sarah Ostman, the student on our Pinterest team, was simultaneously creating graphics of many of the speakers’ memorable quotes and pinning them to add to the board.  These ended up being some of our most re-pinned pieces of content.
• Showcase of all community members. By using a crowdsourced approach, we were able to capture many different aspects of the ceremonies, everything from the big names (Aaron Sorkin was the commencement speaker), to students, to audience members. We were also able to capture some visually-appealing parts of the process, such as student cap decoration.

This ended up being a great addition to our social media initiatives for Commencement, and we think there’s plenty of room to build from them as well.

Do you have any suggestions for live pinning or creative ways to use Pinterest for events?

Related articles

• Oscar de la Renta to Live-Pin Bridal Show on Pinterest(mashable.com)

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• Aaron Sorkin Tells Syracuse Grads: You Are ‘Super Dumb’(huffingtonpost.com)

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There’s still work to do after you get the writing done on a new blog post. Afterall, you want to get this in the hands of as many people as possible, right?

Divvy HQ (by way of Ragan Communications) provide us with a quick checklist of to-dos to get through before publishing blog posts.

I was plowing through the May issue of Harvard Business Review and came across some good statistics on Twitter that can help us all make better tweets.  The full article is worth a read (it’s a quick one, so why not!), here are a few highlights:

New Twitter accounts are being added at a rate of 11 per second! (Significance: This stat actually has nothing to do with improving your tweets, but was pretty significant anyway, and demonstrates the increasing need to provide value on the platform)

36% of tweets are “Worth Reading.” (Significance: We all can do better)

Random thoughts are considered worth reading 36% of the time, with most of those cases being “funny” or “exciting.” (Significance: Tread carefully when thinking out loud, and ask yourself if people will actually care or have a response – whether they keep that response to themselves or not)

82% of respondents think that asking questions of your audience is at least somewhat effective. (Significance: When not overused, asking interesting questions can be an engaging tactic)

Tweeting for the sake of tweeting and giving your followers a “good morning” when you wake up is considered worthwhile by only 20% of respondents. (Significance: Sometimes not tweeting at all is the better bet)

Giving your opinion about something is considered worth reading only 30% of the time, and it works better if you don’t do it often and if you’re particularly witty or useful. (Significance: Don’t whine, and don’t do it on a regular basis)

A few more stats below:

We do a ton of writing around here for clients – blogging, eBooks, white papers, press releases, etc – and we know the value it brings, both tangible and intangible. But it’s nice to put some numbers behind content marketing, which includes not only writing, but video, photos and other types of rich media.

A few numbers, not to be ignored:

• Companies that blog get up to 55% more traffic
• They also get up to 97% more inbound links (which search engines like!)
• They can get up to 434% more indexed pages in search engines
• Blogging companies get up to 25x times more business leads

Dr4Ward pointed out this great infographic from inBlurbs on revenue generating content:

Related articles

• Websites With More Content Generate More Customers [New Infographic](hubspot.com)

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• Blogging: 3 Secrets To An A-List Blog [Infographic](mindjumpers.com)

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I don’t know about you, but we’ve been hearing a lot more about privacy and legal issues when it comes to personal social media accounts and employers.  Check out the infographic below for some insight:

Via: Online Background Check Resource

The February issue of Entrepreneur magazine had a great (and short and sweet) article of how singularly important praise was in business.

We care about this sort of thing (or at least care about how it effects performance ), so aside from providing the great resources in the article, we thought the accompanying graphic was pretty good too:

The Community Roundtable recently released a report giving an in-depth assessment of to what point community management has evolved over the past several years, and highlights four stages of communities as a framework under which to run your community management team and processes within your organization.  Each stage lays out key indicators to identify which stage your organization is in, along with several great prescriptions and initiatives to follow while actively managing your community (Note: Even if you find yourself pegged into one community type or another, I suggest looking at the descriptions and suggestions in the other community types, as they are very insightful).

Key takeaways:

• The CR definition of community is “a group of people with unique shared values, behaviors and artifacts” (they “share unique characteristics, shared goals and have a relationship density much higher than you would see for a general group of people using a common social network).
• There are three common community structures: Exclusive, Discrete and Distributed.
• Usually, communities become sustainable only when members feel they – not the organizations sponsoring them – have a say in the future of the communities.
• Community management is continuing to mature, with best-practices and definitions still being worked through. Now is the time to start laying more of a foundation for the space.
• Internal employee communities are on the rise, which have different adoption patterns and participant needs than external communities focused on marketing or customer service.
• Technology is the key enabler of online communities and yet it cannot alone ensure a successful community.
• Community leaders are seen as Explorers, Builders and Translators.
• Using their framework, communities are described using the Community Maturity Model (CMM), and are bucketed into Level 1, 2, 3 or 4, with CMM1 being the least mature and CMM4 being the most mature.
• CMM1 organizations are described as either new to the social media space, or in a state of “chaotic jumble of different teams using different technologies with an inconsistent understanding of the opportunity, risks, challenges, needs or interests of the organizations.” Much of the prescriptions for these organizations lie in putting some level or organization and strategy to this process.
• CMM2 organizations – or “Emergent Communities” – are “consumed with the task of organizing, assessing opportunity, researching, learning, developing an operational approach, and marshaling resources.”  At this point the process is more proactive, with more budget likely being allocated to the process, and prescriptions focus on ways to incorporate more of the organization and work towards scalability.
• CMM3 organizations have reached full-blown Community status.  The major milestone in this phase is that organizations are seeing real business returns from their community. This comes, however, with new challenges around sustaining and managing growth, with prescriptions that focus on doing just that, as well as adding more depth and sophistication to the processes.
• CMM4 organizations – “Networks” – are those that have “undergone major philosophical, cultural, and structural chances or have been built a networked organization from the start” and multiple areas of the organization fall into the community. Shared decision-making and networked communication are key characteristics and there are significant documented resources on all aspects of the network for the community to access and use.

You can view the full report here.

Related articles

• Community Management Continues to Mature [REPORT](socialfish.org)

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• Community management – How they do it(contentgeeks.net)

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• My Community Manager: The purpose and a realization(mycmgr.com)

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