Social Media, Social Engagement News & Guidance

Trying to get over the IPO debacle, Facebook keeps rolling out the updates with a new iOS Camera app to better view, manage and send photos between you and your friends.

If you’ve been following the fortunes of SharePoint, or ever searched for a SharePoint alternative for enterprise collaboration and document management, you’ve probably come across UK-based huddle. In the coming months you’re likely to see more of it following the successful completion of Series C funding worth US$ 24 million.

Have you heard of social marketing and engagement platform Vitrue? Well it was just acquired by enterprise content management giant Oracle, with plans to add its capabilities to the Oracle Cloud.

Social marketing is expanding beyond the social media and marketing teams as many companies embrace the concept “employee advocates.” Unless you are in a circle of social media gurus or happen to be one, you might not be aware of this new trend of leveraging employee advocates to promote a brand. However, it seems to be taking root, and social media solution provider Dachis Group has announced a tool that makes it easier to do.

Facebook’s IPO isn’t the only thing happening in social media. Microsoft has finally launched its experimental  social network, So.cl. The company released details about the network back in December after accidentally leaking the homepage a few months earlier. So.cl is live. Why should anyone care?

While most branding experts have come to agree that social media platforms such as Facebook are necessary customer relationship tools in the 21st century, many of them still have a hard time stating exactly why this is so. Quantifying the value Facebook provides branding efforts is not an easy task, but Polygraph Media is releasing a new application called Polygraph Reports aimed at making determining the hard value of Facebook branding efforts a little easier.

Today, YouTube celebrates its seventh birthday. Hard to imagine that our social video sharing platform is growing up. And while YouTube users upload 72 hours of video every minute, it’s not just kids, cats and Justin Bieber. No, YouTube has become a valuable enterprise tool, used to showcase training videos, demos and closer looks at new products. 

The word on social influence is starting to sound a lot different than it did a couple of years ago. Not only are people quickly abandoning the concept (most in favor of social advocacy) -- they're hating on it, too. A recently popular example comes from Tom Scott, creator of a tool called Klouchebag. The self-billed "standard of asshatery" basically flips a 180 on Klout's algorithm for a cutting -- albeit entertaining -- insta-douche-o-meter.

For marketers, the new message is clear: digital popularity doesn't matter one (c)lick when it comes to building brand loyalty.

Or does it?

By the end of Friday, after a few stumbles, it seemed like a job well done for all involved with Facebook's public debut. Since then, there's be a steady stream of moaning and complaining; apparently everybody wanted to be an instant billionaire.

Facebook has just made its phenomenal initial public offering at NASDAQ, and industry observers are talking of how big the impact of the social network's IPO will be, outside of newly-minted millionaires and billionaires of the Internet age. But, apart from Facebook's new found influence and clout in the financial scene, there is also one additional driver of growth for what can be considered the de facto social network for most of the world's online citizens: Asia.

Facebook starts life as a public quoted company today, creating billionaires, millionaires and new hope for those working away at tech start-ups everywhere. Follow the company's first day on the NASDAQ here.

Startups are quite adept at turning brands into verbs, or even ordinary verbs into brands. You can now "google" things you want to search for or "tweet" short updates online. Brace yourself for another potential verb that's about to become very popular in the social media scene: buffer. 

One of the newest social networks, Pinterest, may be about to achieve something that neither Facebook, Google+ or Twitter have been unable to accomplish at scale. No, it’s not creating a social network made up almost entirely of women. Pinterest may be preparing to monetize all of those shared photos of things you wish you owned, which could make the social network one of the stickiest e-commerce destinations ever.

When I cracked open the e-pages of Steve Nicholls' new book, Social Media in Business, I was immediately hooked, especially when I read this:

"Organizational problems are really cleverly disguised people issues. Social media is a people issue; the technology is the enabler. The attitudes and beliefs of people will be more important than the technical issues."

Those words, in a book targeted at those in the enterprise, are the first CIOs, CTOs, CEOs and others in the C-suite will read (provided the read the preface). It’s refreshing as well as revolutionary. And that’s the point.

Like many voices at a party, the many kinds of social media conversations all compete for attention. To help deal with what it describes as the “anarchy” of social media marketing in many agencies, social enterprise software provider Buddy Media is announcing major enhancements to its social marketing suite.