Overviewing Social Media Education

Posted on 27/01/2012 by Simone Favaro

Source Image: Scuola Media Virgilio

Due to an advising project I’m working at, I reserached the offering in social media education. In particular I focused on USA, Italy and Turkey. Analyzing the informations collected (about 100 training and certification programs) I identified three kind of offerings:

The Generic one, usually focused on general topics such as “how to build a social media marketing plan” or “the social media management”. The objective of this courses is giving a basic understanding of social media world and contents usually are entry levels. In the description there is a redundancy (spam) of keywords such as strategy, effectiveness, efficiency and go on. This courses are usually targeted on marketing managers and executives, sales managers and sometimes CEO.
The Technical one, I find out the specialized programs, usually focused on social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN. Here too, descriptions are full of “effectiveness, strategy, efficiency” but add to them the “how to do”. The target are quite the same, but not for the CEO and some developer.
The Process-Driven one . Not so frequent, these kind of courses and programs are designed on Industry or has a goal-oriented approach, such as: “Social Media in Turism”, “Social Media for Lead Generation” or “Social Media for Chemical”. These programs usually mixes in the right way the strategic and operative approach, giving the basic for both designing and executing a social media plan. [Personal Note: I’m quite proud to find out the Italy as the country using more this approach].

Pointing out to a price-positioning analysis, (no. of hours / price) I found that Generic Courses are the most expensive. The Technical One are the cheapest and the “Goal-Driven” have a wide range of pricing, in relation to specific topic. What all the analyzed trainings are missing is the methodology of teaching, usually avoiding the “Training on the job” and “practical use”.

Is this your perception too ? What would you expect from a training course on social media?

Two Turkish Newspaper sites in the Top 10 European Internet Information

Posted on 20/01/2012 by Simone Favaro

Hurriyet.com.tr and Milliyet.com.tr are respectively the 3rd (with 10,4 million users) and 5th (with 9,6 Million users) most visited newspaper websites in Europe, according the recent overview on Internet Usage in Europe released by comScore.

Source: ComScore

Going deep in analysis of sites visited prior to visiting the newspaper websites, It emerges that Google sites preceded at least the 12 percent of visits to the top 5 Newspaper sites. At least 10 percent of visits are preceded by a visit to Facebook, second only to Google Sites. (This data includes both direct referrals from Facebook links and visits initiated by direct user navigation following a visit to Facebook.)

Facebook plays a keyrole to drive traffic to the two turkish newspaper websites.The percentage of inbound site traffic preceded by a Facebook visit was highest at Turkish site Milliyet, where it accounted for nearly a fifth of traffic (18.9 percent), whereas Facebook visitation also preceded a 10% of inbound traffic to the Hurriyet.

Also in this report, as previously highlighted, Turkey is the 5th largest country in Europe for internet the amount of Unique Visitors (23,3 Million of Unique Visitors), the first in the average of Page Views per visitor (3.845) and the second in hour spent per visitor (32,2 hours) , following the 38 hours of UK.

European Country per number of Visitors, Hours Spent and Pages Visited

Source: ComeScore

Avoid rendundant information using social media (#FridayTips)

Posted on 19/01/2012 by Simone Favaro

Authomatism in social publishing and syndacations are helpful because they helps you to keep your presence alive in your accounts. The basic idea is: I connect all my accounts each other in orther to share (shot? spam?) contents on my other accounts. However the main problem is that bidirectional connection risk to generate a loop where your post are duplicated more than once on each network. Compliments, you’ve just joined the spam country club.

So, expecially if you use social media as a professional tool, it’s important to avoid redundancy and spamming your network.

Here it is how to do:

Choose your hub.

Depending on contents you want to share and the target you want to achieve, chose the main social media target. In your choice consider how it will publish the content, how it will manage the stream and how much it is open to syndacate with other social media. For instance, Twitter will show a textual headline with a link but no images (the new interface would resolve this problem), so It’s important to give a relavant description to your link also because this structure will be propagated to other social networks.

If you don’t know exactly wich one to choose, I suggest to take a paper and list down in a matrix structure all your accounts. For each account list the popular type of contacts you have (i.e. Friends, Business, Gatekeeper), how actually you are using it and how is the reaction of community basing on some statistical data.

For a first knowledge of tool available look at “The best new social media analytics tools of the year (so far)“

Make a map of your flow

Take pencil and paper and draw the map with connection you want establish between networks. You can choose to have only one hub and connect all accounts to it, or to build a propagation stream. Whatever is your choice, to have a map will help you to take the appropriate decisions to build your stream.

Connect to others profile

Once you choose the hub of your streaming, connect the choosen hub to other social media profiles. Different from some months ago, many social network such as Facebook (or Google Plus) no more permit to automatically import RSS feed into your account. Usually you have to use third party application to connect the accounts. To link twitter to facebook I suggest the well integrated Twitter For Facebook. Almost every social network offers integration tool with Facebook and Twitter, so it wouldn’t be so difficult to take them connected. If It is, let me know!:)

What if I want re-organize all my flow?

If you already have a flow and you want to rebuild it, I’m sorry but the only secure method is to de-authorized all the connections and rebuild them using you social flow map!

Last but not the least

Pay attention to the network you’re using and content you are sharing

As I said: automatically connecting is helpful and an easy way to manage your social media experience but almost every social media are based on different concepts and intents. Facebook is more intimate and require a personal involvement. Twitter is most “Fast Food” and require much partecipation. LinkedIN is most professional and content shared are business. So, it’s important that you share the right content to the right media. But why and how to do is a topic for a next post…

Which level of social media integration are you using?

Improving and optimizing the information gathering on web

Posted on 13/01/2012 by Simone Favaro

Due to the proliferation of websites and the growing avaibility of information it’s difficult to keep themself update without selecting the source of informations.

The common approach (and probably the most sure one) is to follow the most known and trusted source. As well as I did, you probably collected your preferred sources based on personal trust or because the reputation given by people you trust. The Strenght is you use “certified” sources. The Weakness is the risk to have only one a point of view and to miss more suitable informations for your needs.

So, how to search for new sources on topic you are intersted in? It is enough to merge google search into your google reader account. This is also a good practice to monitor your on line presence (you need only for searching your name :-))

Let’s start:

ARRANGING THE SEARCH

make a search on Google (for instance: “B2B Marketing”)
under the section “Search” in the left sidebar select “News“
go to the page’s bottom and click “create an email alert for [you'll find your search query here]“. You will reach The Google Alert page

SETTING THE ALERT

Select the result type you want (Default is “News” but you can choose Blogs, Videos, Discussions, Books). You can choose “All Items”, if you prefer, but I suggest to limit the search in 1 category.
Select the requency of updates. This is how often Google Alert will send you notifications. Depends on the goal of your search, but usually 1 time per week is enough.
Tell how many results you want. You can choose “All results” or “Only the Best”. If you don’t have any particular need and your search is quite generic, I suggest to choose “only the best results” in order to avoid an overload [remember, you have to filter it]
Set the deliver to option. You can decide to get the notification delivered to your email account or to a feed. The first option is useful if you don’t have any feed reader but you will have more emails in your inbox. You can choose the Feed option only if you have a Google Account and you configured the Google Reader. If you did, the results will be pushed into your Google Reader Account.

Will you find your new “source” ? You can manage it as you were used to do: adding to your bookmark or importing feed into your feed reader and that’s all.

Have you any further methods to improve and organize your information’s sources?

Simone Favaro – Strategic marketing, PR, Social Media, Business Development

Forging the future

Two Turkish Newspaper sites in the Top 10 European Internet Information

Improving and optimizing the information gathering on web