Social Media Strategies and Technologies

I have visited so many corporate website’s, can’t remember the exact count may be in the order of thousands but my best one was not from any of this traditional sites built with cutting edge technologies instead a video website made by BooneOakley using Youtube platform.

What could be the perfect example of thinking out of box for building a complete corporate website as a video  by leveraging the Youtube annotations support to make it just as ease to use as a traditional website for navigation.There are  millions of videos worth watching  on Youtube but this one standout as it represents a complete corporate identify of a marketing agency represented as a visual story and in fact they don’t have any traditional website like rest  of the crowd.

Below is a snippet of the post from Youtube Blog on this video:

At YouTube we often talk about the creative opportunities online video presents marketers and agencies to tell their story in unique and powerful new ways. But only rarely do we see these creatives fully utilize the flexibility in design that video experiences provide.

What is your take? - isn’t this pure awesomeness?. I love it :).

While Myspace is struggling to keep up it’s growth and user engagement because of high expectations set by Facebook in the industry, there is more bad news to MySpace woes from eMarketer with projections on Social Network Ad spend to fall  in 2009.One of the major challenges, currently Myspace is facing apart from leadership exits is  most of it’s users are ditching MySpace profiles for Facebook .

The story on Facebook side is bit different, while it is posting impressive user growth but still unable to come up with a good business model to make more cash than they currently burn and struggling to make cash on it’s fame.

The eMarketer now forecasts that total US social network advertisement spending will decline 3% to $1.14 billion in 2009, from $1.18 billion in 2008.

While social networks ad spend seems to be on decline mode but social media marketing budgets are  projected to gain in 2009 as more and more brands/organizations realize the potential of new medium and cost advantages it has over traditional marketing platforms, Forrester estimates that Social Media Marketing budgets will grow at larger rate than any other forms of digital marketing in a market research report released on projected digital ad spending for next 5 years at recent Forrester Marketing Conference.

Do you think brands engagement using social media better for consumers than traditional marketing channels?, please share your thoughts.

The conversationagent has released a report on “Marketing in 2009″,which has very useful insights from 12 experienced marketers.This report includes advice from seasoned marketers on social media marketing, social media measurement metrics, social media directions, developing internal brand, social media execution and predictions for 2009. While there are heated debates among ‘Social Media Experts’ on using measurement metrics and calculating  ROI!, because how one can effectively measure the outcome value from an engagement with people? and how can you put a price tag on the value of a conversation?, however in this report you will find how certain metrics can be used to measure the effectiveness of  your social media marketing.

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Summary of the report:

• Start your social media efforts with specific objectives and goals in mind, first listen to create a customer engagement.
• The key to measuring effectiveness of engagement from social media efforts is to have measurement metrics in place.
• Social media tools are only facilitators of message, you first need to understand the new medium to effectively use it.
• Social media marketing has low entry barrier in terms of cost but requires high caliber of knowledge to define, execute and refine the consumer engagement model.
• Social media does not replace marketing—it enhances marketing efforts as an additional indirect communication channel.
• The major entry barriers for organizations to use social media are internal legal policies, very minimal understanding of tools among leaders, lack of internal knowledge and co-ordination.

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