Simone Favaro

Overviewing Social Media Education

Simone Favaro — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:13:18 +0000

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

Simone Favaro — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:52:27 +0000

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.

Source: ComeScore

Avoid rendundant information using social media

Simone Favaro — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:55:13 +0000

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

Simone Favaro — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:09:17 +0000

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?

A little bit of make-up renewing

The forgotten social media

Simone Favaro — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:54:12 +0000

An old motto said that you have to know where you are from in order to know where you are going to.

When Mark Zuckeberg created facebook, his main purpose was to create a tool able to get people in touch and to know the day by day of your friend. The same motivation it was about mySpace before the Facebook’s birth. Motivation still alive in a large part of the 2.1 billion internet users.

Even if often blogger and social media experts use to point out the conversation as the main driver in social networking, reading about social media marketing and attending to workshops it seems that the human part of social media has been forgotten.

The “X step to” and “how to” approach suggested by many blog posts often highlight the human part in social media relationship but they treat it as a variable in a complex analytical model without describing exactly what does it mean.

Perhaps it is the natural development. Anyway the more you remember why people use social media and the less you think in business-mind oriented approach, the more you will be effective. So, It isn’t philantropy to just remember that in social media there are human beings, nor target or audience.

Social media beyond marketing & communication

Simone Favaro — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 07:00:07 +0000

In many presentions I find on internet about social media for business, I observed a focus on social media used as a tool for marketing communication activities. Even if the marketing and communication usage is the most common one and, probably, the most attractive there are many business case linked to the use of social media as a business development tool or, sometimes, as a business model.

Collecting some business case from the web, I tried to highlight this approach during the speech I had last friday at Ekonomi Universitesi in Izmir-

I would be glad if you have more business case to suggest. It would be nice to create a non “Marketing Communication” list of social media usage.

Turkey: fast growing Internet and digital business

Simone Favaro — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:49:22 +0000

Turkey has grown from 10,2 million users in 2006 to 35 million in 2010 achieving a 45% of penetration rate. Turkey, according to InternetWorldStats.com, is the forth in top10 european countries for the total amount of Internet Users, even if the penetration rate is under european average estimated in 58% (2010), ranking Turkey at 43rd position on 52 countries included in the list.

Collecting data and informations from different source, I’ve prepared a document aiming to build a snapshot of Internet’s state of art in Turkey. The “Turkey and fast growing Internet” is available on SlideShare under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).

Turkey and the fast growing internet

View more presentations from Simone Favaro

According to ComScore, Turkish people are the most engaged visitors as number of pageviews per user (more tha 3.000) and it is ranked 3rd in time spending with an average of 37 hours. The Digital Agenda for Europe shows that Turkish people (40% and above) use internet in order to gain information about news, good and services, health and downloading entertainment contents. The content producing and the usage in daily life management is limited to a maximum of 30% internet users. Furthermore looking at the top20 visited websites list, we can guess that just below to the international website such as Facebook and Google, the most visited websites includes turkish portals and newspaper’s websites.

COMPANIES ARE ORGANIZING THEIR INTERNAL PROCESS AND DEVELOPING E-COMMERCE

Companies are organizing theirself to speed up and to improve processes. According to Digital Agenda for Europe 21% of Turkish companies adopt CRM software, against the 17% european average. Furthermore 65% of Large Enterprises and 34% of SMEs integrate internal processes sharing electronic documents. The external business communication instead is at an early development, seeing less the 20% of enterprises exchanging electorinic document, e-invoices and adopting supply chain management technology.

E-commerce is in a early stage. According to Digital Agenda for Europe, 5.2%Turkish population and the 13% of Internet users purchase on-line are. Companies selling on-line are the 8.1% in the Large Enterprises and the 7.8% in Small and Medium entersprises. B2B eCommerce seems to be more widespread seeing 11.2% and 11% of Large and SMEs purchasing on-line respectively.

SOCIAL NETWORKS NOT FOR PROFESSIONAL PURPOSES

Facebook is the main social network used in Turkey. With a total amount of 24,5 million users, Facebook is used by 89% of internet users and the 34% of population (InternetWorldStats.com), ranking the country at the first position in Top6 internet users european countries, followed by UK.

Twitter is used by 16% of Turkish Internet Users and the Turkey has been ranked as 8th in the ComScore “Top 10 Countries in Internet Penetration for LinkedIN.com and Twitter.com” report. Friendfeed is the other micro-blog widespread, obating 10% of his traffic from Turkey, ranked by Alexa.co, as the 3rd country for relevant traffic.

LinkedIN, instead, is uncommon network for turkish people. Indeed the business network registered in October 2011 less more than 830.000 turkish users (2% of Internet Users), growed of +9% against September. The typical LinkedIN user is a male professional 25-34 years old, working in a large Enterprise (>10.000 employees) in Manufactoring or High-tech industry. The female/male ratio is less than 1 to 3.

About groups, the most popular is Turkish Business Network. The Networking Group opened in 2008 counts more than 53.000 subscription (about 6% of Turkish LinkedIN Users).

CONCLUSIONS

For the early internet development and the progress by companies in organizing processes, Turkey is a next-frontier for internet based services. Because the early stage, It suffers a unstructured and underevaluated usage of the internet potentials, limiting to a “passive” approach. However the news about start-ups and the adoption of technology for process optimization – required by the fast growing economy – let us to say that Internet will play a key role al least in the economic system.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

A little bit of make-up renewing

Simone Favaro — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:34:55 +0000

Because a living blog is always updated adding categories, menu widgets and any type of contents, sometimes it needs a little bit of restyling. So I’ve given a little bit of make-up, not acting on the look & feel – also if I changed the theme – but organizing navigation and categories.

The navigation bar is more simple. I added a Blog Updates collecting the news like this on blog changes. The Blo(g)dissey page is now an under-page of Who’s Simone because it is strongly related to the personal journey. In the future this session will be improved adding other information about me. Furthermore I added a social card menu linking my about.me profile where you find the link to my social accounts and you can follow my streamlife.

The categories were simplified, translating in English all of them (except for Comunicazione, because WP doesn’t let me change it) and I’ve added an English category that will collect all posts written or translated in English

The Social-it.y widget was improved adding the rss feed link to the blog and the Google+ Account.

These are almost the changes I made. Not so deep, but I hope will get the navigation more easy and conforting.

Is Facebook running too fast?

Simone Favaro — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 14:37:55 +0000

Well, during the latest F8 which has taken place on thursday, Facebook has launched the Timeline feature.

Since January when has been annunced that the Zuckerberg’s Network has been losing users in US, Facebook started a development competition that is involving security and privacy settings, groups and fanpage. Following the launching in beta of Google+, Facebook has been starting to develop many features such as the more recents featured lists, the subscribing option, the real-time activity streaming and, few days ago, timeline profile.

Too much in less than one year? I think so. The ratio we have to consider on features is the learning curve required to users to accept and learning at the best the innovation. An overflow of update should stress out users and shall create a block in using it. It’s clear that Facebook goal is to arrest the potential competition of Google+, becoming an all-inclusive social network, inglobing twitter, friendfeed and google+ feature. Anyway the continuing and fast changing in user experience could create an opposite result, getting users far from the usage.

From the business side, the continuing improvement shall get companies in difficult on social media strategy, especially for those companies that haven’t enough budget to build a dedicated team to follow the innovation. Furthermore, enterprises will have more difficult in monitoring ROI due to the continuing and fast updating of tatics required from the new feature.

Which will be the impact of these strategy of fast improvement?

La rete non è anarchica, ma qui è un gran casino

Simone Favaro — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 07:30:54 +0000

Dopo l’Innovation Jam 2011 – organizzata dallìAgenzia per la diffusione delle tecnologie per l’innovazione - che si è tenuto la scorsa settimana, ForumPA lancia il contest “Le tue idee per una PA Migliore“. Poi, siamo a settembre e ricomincia il solito calderone di eventi / convegni / conferenze sull’innovazione, i social media e sui reumatismi di mia nonna.

La dispersione di energie e di iniziative è infinita. Se la diversità e la molteplicità porta a una differenziazione e un pluralisnmo informativo, dall’altro il bombardamento a cui ci si espone rischia di portare ad una Infobesità, in cui il contenuto buono si mescola con il rumore di fondo.

Vogliamo aggiungerci poi tutti i gruppi, le iniziative, stati maggiori, sergenti e caporali dell’innovazione?

Il fermento dal basso che esiste attorno al paese Italia e alla voglia di rinascita è ammirevole e positivo. Il problema che vedo all’orizzonte, tuttiavia, è la mancanza di massa critica per poter far veramente la differenza. Ho il timore che tutte le energie positivamente investite da organizzatori e partecipanti soffrano di un campanilismo 2.0 e che, come in puro stile italiota, faccia iniziare la guerra del primato sull’innovazione. Temo che inizi la competizione pessima dettata dall’arrivismo e di assistere a una Babele di voci, a cori senza un direttore d’orchestra dove, nonostante la qualità elevata dei membri, il risultato sia solo un gran casino…