Social Media Marketing

Wouldn't it be great if customers who had questions about your products could get the answer from other customers? Wouldn't it be wonderful if customers brainstormed on ways you could improve your service processes? Wouldn't it be tremendous if you could see trends in service needs and adjust your p...

Facebook is tracking your comments for ad opportunities. On Tuesday, Facebook announced its new advertising platform, called "Sponsored Stories." The new ads will be integrated near the user's news feed. Advertisements can be prompted by words that appear in apps, statuses, check-ins and "likes." A ...

While marketers have long pursued the mobile or "third" screen, this channel is just now becoming a realistic option for most brands. Meeting consumer demand at the precise moment of that demand is not just push marketing, either. The new mobile environment empowers consumers to initiate the interac...

As someone who sees value in at least some social networking sites, I'm more than a little uncomfortable with all the attention that Wall Street suddenly is directing toward this sector. For the past few weeks, we've been bombarded with stories about the potential for various social networking compa...

Sometimes it's best to say you're sorry. Groupon's CEO, Andrew Mason, released a subtitled video on YouTube apologizing for problems Japanese customers experienced during a New Year's promotion. Groupon's deal-of-the-day site offers promotions and discounts to local markets. The company emphasizes s...

Facebook dropped a privacy bombshell on an unsuspecting user base before the start of the holiday weekend: Going forward, it will make a user's address and mobile phone number accessible as part of the User Graph object. That means that users' addresses and mobile numbers are now available to third ...

In November, as the crowds of caffeinated holiday shoppers began to swell, Starbucks baristas received a corporate edict: slow down. Going forward, they were to make only one drink at a time, no matter how many customers were waiting in line. According to sources, Starbucks customers were complainin...

Consumers today don't want to interact just with other consumers. Increasingly, they expect to interact and communicate directly with brands and companies themselves. Over the past few years, companies have come to see these communities as a valuable asset, nurturing them as part of a brand's offeri...

A major source of Facebook's success is its "social graph," a term coined in 2007 by company founder Mark Zuckerberg to describe the network of relationships between Facebook users. Facebook's social graph is a valuable component of the Facebook platform. The robust mapping of relationships and pref...

All the recent news about Facebook -- from its founder being named Time magazine's Person of the Year to Goldman Sachs placing a $450 million bet on its future profitability -- makes it clear that social networking platforms are hot commodities. It's also clear, however, that not all social networki...