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It looks like Harvard may turn out to be the epicenter of all things from the social web. Urban legend has it that it was there that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg borrowed discussed developed the true beginnings of today’s social networking giant. Now foursquare has struck a deal with the school to have a ‘branded’ version of the product. Foursquare has been busy cutting deals as of late that range from business applications to good causes. The deal with Harvard is interesting for sure as TechCrunch elaborates Harvard is the first university to use Foursquare to help its students explore the campus, the school notes today in its paper. Foursquare has set up a special Harvard page on the site that includes a special logo, and a series of tips. If you follow this special account, you’ll be able see and contribute to all the tips for the school involving the various venues on campus. “We believe that Harvard’s participation will allow our community to engage with friends, professors, and colleagues in new ways. We also hope visitors and neighbors will benefit from the platform as it grows through use,” Harvard’s digital director of communications tells the schools’ paper. The paper explains how students can earn mayor badges by checking-in to venes, and earn points by leaving these tips. Foursquare apparently made a special Harvard Yard badge to mark the partnership. Students that check-in a certain number of places on campus will see it. You can see where something like this is heading from a revenue standpoint. The more that foursquare becomes ingrained in the community of Harvard or any other affinity group the more likely it is to be sold as a marketing vehicle to that audience. Of course, there is fear that marketing and advertising might ruin the fun but I think we are all getting over this free nonsense. Free is a beautiful entrée (entrance not meal) into markets but it doesn’t pay the bills or the payroll in the long run. I would love to hear from our readers about how they use / interact with foursquare because I will be honest I have never used the service. I am not the right demographic and that’s more than fine with me. As a marketer, however, it doesn’t matter whether I use it or not. It only matters that I understand what value is derived by foursquare’s users. Heck, if we had to all be full-on users of every tool out there in order to be ‘legit’ no one would get any work done. So you foursquare fanatics check in and give us your location opinion.

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Foursquare Goes to School

Many people mistakenly think that joint ventures are only effective if you are a large player in the market that your business or product falls under.  However, the truth is actually quite far away from that statement even though they are usually most notable when they involve joint ventures.  For example, most people in the online community already are away of the joint venture effort between PayPal and EBay.  The good news is that you can have the same success with a joint venture if you plan properly and take full use of everything that such a deal can offer. The essence of joint ventures is based around the premise of helping a small less known company get a leg up on the competition by using the customer base or popularity of another business.  They are designed to help out small businesses by joining up with another company to share a customer base and promotions in exchange for either equal advertising and promotion efforts, or a small percent of the commission on sales.  This is reasonable given that the sales would not have happened without the aid of the joint venture. For a company that does not have a large budget or the ability to advertise a joint venture is an easy way to gain access to a new wider customer base or potential target market.  Generally they work out best when you explore businesses that are not your direct competitors, but are closely associated such as a company that sells Quickbooks if you provide accounting services.  Of course, the logical question that most people have is how to find a joint venture partner.  It is highly unlikely that they will come to you, so the best way is to get out there and research potential partners online.  LinkedIn is also an excellent business resource online that provides plenty of social networking opportunities and connections to businesses that may be looking for potential partners.  The more time you spend investigating the opportunities the more you will see them fall into your lap.

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Joint ventures are not just for the big guys

If you have spent any time around the social media circles discussing business success stories you have heard a lot about Dell. In fact, you have probably heard so much about Dell that you know that the have claimed to have generated around $3 million in sales through their Twitter efforts. Of course, this is of interest because measuring success in social media is one of the most important topics that the industry can take on. Well, now Dell has updated their data so it’s time to spruce up those decks touting Dell’s social media success. Bloomberg reports Dell Inc., relying on social- networking sites to drum up sales of personal computers, said its promotions on Twitter have helped generate more than $6.5 million in orders for PCs, accessories and software. The number of users signing up to get Dell’s tweets has risen 23 percent in the past three months and now numbers 1.5 million, said Manish Mehta, vice president of Dell’s online unit. More than 100 employees send out the tweets — Twitter’s 140-character messages — over 35 different channels. The $6.5 million number is what has been generated since the inception of these efforts about 2 years ago. So let’s face it, this is not the kind of number that makes everyone say “Wow, this is a runaway success!” since Dell is a $61 billion company. Regardless of that, Dell is committed. “It’s a very vibrant channel for us and it’s growing aggressively,” Manish Mehta, VP of of Dell’s online unit said in an interview. “It’s not just our reach and growth that has progressed, it’s that it’s happening globally.” Dell reaches Twitter users in 12 countries, including the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, China and Japan. Brazil’s Twitter users spent $800,000 in the past eight months, Mehta said. Now, the industry will continue to show off Dell as an example of Twitter generating revenue and that’s fine. My question is to anyone at Dell: How much do these efforts that generates this revenue cost? What is your ROI based on the time investment of your staff etc? Once these numbers are revealed then there will really be something to talk about.

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Social Media Darling Dell Updates Numbers

I’ve been a contributing analyst for the eConsultancy/ cScape Customer Engagement Survey over the past few years. The 2010 edition has just landed and I thought I would share with you the data that jumped out at me. Email Newsletters Fading? The 2nd Customer Engagement Survey saw businesses focusing their efforts on using email newsletters to improve customer engagement. An incredible 69% of companies stated that they had measured a tangible improvement through their e-newsletter campaigns so it was not a surprise that 59% planned to invest heavily in email marketing by the time we came to the third survey. By contrast, investment in social networks – such as Facebook – was down on the list of priorities with only 36% of companies planning to increase their investment in that area. Social Networks See Huge Investment So, what happened now we are on survey four and looking at 2010? Those that took a chance and invested in social networks saw a big return on investment. For companies, email newsletters still rated as the tactic offering the highest tangible improvement (67%) but a whopping 44% – almost double the percentage from 2009 – have discovered that social networks helped increase their online customer engagement. That return on investment has clearly caught the attention of both companies and their agencies. In 2010, the survey predicts that 61% of company executives will be increasing their focus on social networks , while agencies are even more bullish, expecting their clients to spend more on social networking (66%) than even email newsletters (41%). Twitter’s King of Engagement Perhaps the most stunning statistic is the percentage of companies that plan to invest in Twitter as a channel for customer engagement. In last year’s report, Twitter barely registered with survey participants with just 7% of companies realizing improved customer engagement from Twitter, hence only 13% planned to invest in Twitter in 2009. What a difference a year makes! Twitter has seen massive growth and companies are scrambling to make the micro-blogging channel a key part of their customer engagement efforts. In fact, with 35% of companies seeing an improvement in their customer engagement from Twitter in 2009, almost 44% of companies plan to increase their investment in Twitter in 2010. That’s a three-fold improvement over last year! Engagement = Conversations What conclusions can we draw from this? Well, it’s apparent that companies are realizing that customers expect engagement to be a two-way dialogue. Email newsletters are a great way to keep customers updated but they don’t really engage them. Instead, companies are seeing measurable benefits of actually having a conversation with their customers be it via Facebook, Twitter or whatever, making them willing to invest more of their marketing/PR budgets to reap the fruits of that engagement. Want to get your hands on all the data? Get your copy of the cScape/Econsultancy report!

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Customer Engagement Survey Shows Twitter is King of ROI

At the rate Yahoo is dumping its own technology and partnering with others, the only thing left that will be “Yahoo built” will be these bloody big pens: A little over a year since Yahoo announced the expansion of Yahoo Profiles, the search engine, portal, social network , we-don’t-know-what-we-are company is apparently ready to ditch its own social network aspirations and jump into bed with Facebook : It will enable them to connect with Facebook friends on Yahoo!, view a feed of their friends’ related activity on Yahoo!, and share content—such as photos from Flickr or comments on news stories—with all of their friends on Facebook. The content that consumers share with Facebook friends will then create a loop that drives visitors back to Yahoo!. OK, so you can’t blame Yahoo for making this move. After all, social networking is Facebook’s strength, and not Yahoo’s. But, I’m starting to worry what Yahoo has left to call it’s “strength.” When your business is supported by the strength of other companies, it becomes very easy for your foundation to be undermined by them.

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Yahoo Partners with Facebook, Plans to Focus on Selling Big Pens?

Social media marketing means when you use all the resources of social networking such as online communities, blogs and so forth in order to market and publicize your products. Social media marketing had been gaining great popularity because of its convenience and wide reach. The most common Social media marketing tools are Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. The way that Social media marketing works is to create an awareness and tempo about the vents, videos and blogs so that it is able to attract people’s attention towards it. This is almost like advertisement but in this case you are reaching out to the right people. Social media marketing is a way in which fans themselves talk about the brands that they prefer and in turn get to promote them. It is almost similar to word of mouth publicity. The best thing about Social media marketing is that there is a great amount of influence of the end users. They are able to comment and post articles about their experiences. Therein the control of the organization diminishes and this becomes a first person account. People tend to believe this more than the advertising spiel that they get to hear every day. The way that Social media marketing is headed we are sure that it is going to be around for a long time to come. Therefore when you participate in all the social networks available online you can form an internet marketing tool called Social media marketing. Social media marketing has several advantages linked with it. Let us look at a few of these: * There is an increase in the website traffic and you can track the visitors to your website. * The moment you are able to track your visitors to your website the task of converting them into a sale becomes easy. * You get lots of people viewing specific pages hence the kind of exposure that you get and that to towards people who matter is incomparable to anything else. * The brand value that you are trying to build up gets promoted sooner. As more and more people get to know it they start talking and discussing it. * The feeling of associating with the brand and the brand recollection happens. This helps the customer to retain the brand and build up brand loyalty. * Your business will develop further and you will be able to reach out to a wider range of customers.   In order for you to take advantage of this kind of advertising to the fullest what you need to do is to write and post articles frequently. You can leave comments on other people’s blogs and so forth. In the end you have to gain visibility.

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Getting the maximum out of Social media marketing

We spend all day talking to each other about the importance of social media. I agree that it is important. We also seem to yell a lot about how social media can cure many marketing ills. I am often included in that kind of talk as well. We act as if social media is right for everyone to some degree or another. I feel that way most times but I am beginning to wonder if this is not putting the cart before the horse for the SMB (small and medium business) market. The Center for Media Research shared a report that tells an interesting tale regarding the SMB and social media. According to a new Citibank / GfK Roper survey of 500 small business executives across the United States, 76% have not found social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to be helpful in generating business leads or for expanding their business during the last year, while 86% say they have not used social networking sites to get business advice or information. Why is that? Well, the next point tells the tale. The survey found that general search engine sites such as Google and Yahoo! trump small business-focused sites and the WSJ.com as destinations for small business owners to seek business advice or information. 61% of respondents say they rely on these search engine sites. The first reason offered for the apparent lack of social media sophistication is the lack of time. I don’t disagree but I think it may be more basic than that. I think it’s lack of trust. Most small business people are literally just starting to understand the basics of good web design and development so the social media thing is way ahead of them. Is it because they aren’t smart? No. It’s more likely that they aren’t just suckers who listen to everyone prattling on about social media and how it is the light unto their path to profits. Many small business folks live around many small town folks. Small town folks may be using social media but they aren’t telling all of their cool friends in some urban center how they just crossed the street and are now successfully maneuvering down another block to do that again. They live where people are trying to get on with life in a difficult economic environment. As a result they are not interested in the latest and greatest social media trends. They are interested in getting what they need at the right price from someone they trust. Search engines and a good web site are more than enough to accomplish that in the vast majority of cases. Here’s how business owners in this poll see social media So go ahead and complain that I and the SMB just don’t get it. That’s cool. You have your opinion and it counts just as much as the next guy’s. What’s interesting though is that the battle cry of the hip or the Fortune 500 is yelled on a field far, far away from where a lot of people work, live and purchase. In fact, these aren’t battlefields at all. They are just simple places where people want some solid information they can trust and not just the referrals of ‘friends’ who wouldn’t know them if they stepped on them on their way to the next street corner.

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SMB’s – Behind the Curve or Right on Time with Social Media