Everyone is a Publisher with Social Media

Becoming a publisher is easy these days! Just create a blog or communicate through social media and there you are – a publisher.

I have to tell you about a book I purchased last week and wish I had purchased it sooner, “The Social Media Bible” by Lon Safko and David K. Brake. I only paid $12 for it on Amazon and it is packed with 821 pages of everything you never knew about social media including Tactics, Tools and Strategies. It even has interviews with the most successful Web site entrepreneurs on the Net. If a subject on social media is not included, I don’t know what it would be. 

One success story that was particularly interesting in the book  (although all the stories are I am sure) was the story about Arnold Kim, a blog publisher. His Web site www.MacRumors.com is one of the most popular sites on the Web, with 4.4 million viewers a month. Now, that is huge! It is estimated that his site is worth about $25 million, but he isn’t selling, at least not now. Kim was a medical physician who left his practice (making six figures) to still making six figures from advertising sales, banner ads and sales commissions from products on his blog. This is every blogger’s dream!

So, one of these days although I love my job, I would like to retire from the rat race and sleep until 8 or 9 a.m. Now, I am thinking about how to make a blog profitable. I have a method. As a creative person, I find that I am most successful doing what I love. I love to write. That’s a start! Now to just find out what to write that people will read. Mmmmm! A little more difficult! But, I think I will do what I am always telling my grandchildren. Find your passion and do that! Success will come… Until we meet again! Look for me on the Net.

Kids create a viral marketing buzz

Forget about advertising. The viral bandwagon has created a buzz that is keeping retailers hopping – and they love it. Silly Bandz, the latest kid craze is literally selling off the shelves. 

When the little girl who was lost in the Everglades in Florida mentioned Silly Bandz on Good Morning America, kids went crazy for the colorful thin silicone bands that were never advertised – but created the hottest viral buzz through the social media to date. For only $3 for a pack of 12, kids started buying them like hotcakes, texting their friends when they find them in a store, put it on their Facebook pages, and the viral buzz is spreading across the country. 

Of course, other brands started getting involved, Forever Collectibles are marketing Logo Bandz and licensing sports leagues and entertainment properties. A store can sell about 1,000 packs an hour and it is all word of mouth. The company is making them for the National Football League, the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association plus about 200 colleges and universities. Disney, Marvel Comics, DC Comics and Warner Bros. are looking at the licensed bands. The CEO Michael Lewis said they are selling 500,000 licensed packs of bands daily. Pretty soon, they will be in all the major retailers, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Target and CVS. 

Problems? Some schools have banned them because the kids get too distracted trading them in class. 

How long does a fad last? Years ago before the social media scene and the new way of marketing on the Internet, fads were introduced through traditional sources, newspapers, magazines, television and radio. According to the experts, fads go through cycles. They enter the market fast, consumers become obsessed, millions are sold in a short time and then sales decline fast. The first stage of the cycle is the product development stage, next the introduction, then growth, maturity and then the declining stage takes place.

So, if you come up with a crazy idea, like the pet rock or the Hula Hoop or Silly Bandz, don’t give up. It could be worth millions.

Why didn’t I think of that?

How much is your Facebook page worth?

Have you ever wondered if your Facebook page was worth anything? I really never thought about it – until now. The social media management company, Vitrue, has released a free tool to determine the value of your Facebook page. How can they do that? Well, evidently you just submit your URL to the Social Page Evaluator, and the app will tell you what it is worth – based on the number of fans, number of posts per day, and number of interactions, among other things.

How interesting! So, I decided to try it on my Facebook page just to see how this thing works. First, I had to find out my Facebook URL which I do not happen to have memorized. I can barely remember the URL of my blog. Since I don’t go into Facebook that much, I always enter through my e-mail. Yep, my e-mail. There is always something from someone on Facebook in my e-mail so about once a week or so, I will go and check it out. You might say I’m a lazy Facebooker!

Well, it isn’t as easy at all that! First, it won’t tell you as an individual what your Facebook page is worth – it only analyzes the worth of a commercial Facebook page. Duh! I should have known that.

So, I decided to put in my university’s Web page to see what it is worth. We haven’t had it very long but it does have 2,629 fans. The evaluator is nearly six pages long and has a graph with the potential value also. It includes the post frequency, a page value chart and page value history. It even gives you an option to compare values of brand pages on Facebook with up to three other brands. Pretty nifty!

Facebook going to location-based marketing

Facebook is at it again! More changes are in the works as Facebook is looking to combine social networking with location-based mobile marketing, probably this month.  

In collaboration with McDonald’s, Facebook users will be able to check-in at restaurants and share the menu with friends. It seems pretty simple at first, but the implications are huge! Now, for instance, a restaurant or store could conceivably offer a special promotion to consumers who come into the store and share their location with friends. There won’t be any need for traditional advertising. With 450 million users and 1 million added every day, Facebook extends itself into a new marketplace. McDonald’s will be the first to market with the new location-based system. 

Facebook is keeping quiet right now on this one but they did say they have been working on a location feature. Since Facebook announced its Open Graph feature that adds social connections to third-party sites so that users’ friends can see activities, some people have complained that it should have been and opt-in feature.

It may be a huge benefit for retail stores and restaurants but I am not so sure I want my location known to the world. As one social media agency CEO cautions, look at www.PleaseRobMe.com and think about it before posting your location.

After Facebook launched the Open Graph, New York Sen. Charles Schumer asked the FTC to create guidelines on how people’s information can be used on Facebook.

I haven’t really noticed yet how the Facebook Open Graph has affected me or if it has! Maybe it has but I haven’t noticed.

Gaming and Advergaming in Mobile Marketing

Universal has just launched an iPhone game to promote “Land of the Lost” starring Will Ferrell that will open next month. The strategy is to use a game to introduce them to the film. The game has 25 levels with sound bites and film clips of the movie.

 

Bet there’s an app for that! Apple has been credited with the increase in mobile phone gaming usage by providing downloads from its Apple App Store.

There won’t be any ads in the application and the app is a free download at the Apple iTunes store. After completing some of the levels, gamers can watch clips of the movie or check out photos from the film. 

Dallas-based Blockdot launched the iPhone game and Universal wanted a game that could stand on its own as a fun and engaging experience with branding as secondary. 

So, is it a game or an advergame? Does it really matter? There’s a app for that! 

If you think about it, most of the games on the Internet are sponsored by a company or designed for a company. Does that make them all advergames? 

According to a study by Pyramid Research, wireless subscribers are growing at a rate of 16.6 percent and by 2014, they predict that the mobile gaming market will reach $18 billion. A lot of the growth is in developing countries and some of the most promising markets are Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Poland, Russia and South Africa.

One reason for this is the fall in prices for handsets and not having PC’s and gaming consoles easily available in many countries. So, I hope that in the next couple of months the prices for the iPhone drop significantly because I will be in the market for one as soon as my contract is up with my old phone.

A World of Transparency

I found an interesting Web site while researching this week called “The Big Money” (www.bigmoney.com).  Besides “The Big Money Facebook 50,” the site reports on everything from Google to the “Facebook Fans Valued at $3.60 Each.” A social media marketing firm Vitrue examined data from its clients on Facebook with a reported 41 million fans and found that 1 million “translates at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year” which equals a value of $3.60 per person.

Of the 100 largest companies in the Fortune 500 list, 79 percent of them use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or blogs to communicate with customers with 54 percent of those on Facebook.

It sure feels like we are worth a lot more than $3.60.

In April, Facebook announced a plan to spread its online social network to other Websites with “social plug-ins” and four senators said that Facebook needs to make it easier for subscribers to protect their privacy. The plug-ins will make it easier for Facebook users to share information on other Websites. And it all depends on the user’s privacy settings as to how much information might be seen by other people.

Bottom line: Information that you had not communicated could be broadcast to your friends and family on Facebook. Mmmm! Not so sure about that! If I share some information on one of the plug-in sites, then every one of my Facebook “friends” will also see the information. Even the Federal Trade Commission is checking in on this one! 

It is still up in the air but the first Websites to use the plug-in will be Pandora, Microsoft Corp.’s Docs.com and Yelp, the business review service.

Pretty soon, we will all have to acknowledge that whatever we do or say on the Web is transparent. Can you imagine that? A planet of transparency!

Top 10 Tweeting Dos and Don’ts

The past two weeks, I have been Twitter-saturated and now have to sort out all the “dos and don’ts” to do Twitter right. I learned that spamming is huge on Twitter and I suspect that a lot of businesses are spamming and don’t realize it – or maybe they do. But, with 140 characters total, a person can sound boring and directing someone to your Web site all the time won’t make friends and influence people.

I need to put all the suggestions and warnings into some kind of order so I won’t make the mistakes that drive people away. I have discovered a prevalent message in all the articles I have read on using Twitter, listen, learn, engage and integrate. I have developed a Top 10 list of some of the best ways to get the most out of Twitter with those four things in mind:

1. Follow people who share interests in common with your business. Many times they will follow you back.
2. Begin by giving. Give people something interesting to see on the Internet that goes along with your common interests.
3. Continue to follow new people. When you make a new Twitter friends and enjoy their tweets, consider following their friends.
4. Customize your Twitter page with an interesting background.
5. Listen to what people are saying.
6. Provide twitter specials and sneak previews. Share picture previews with your twitter followers that show items you are developing and that will go on sale shortly by using http://twitpic.com
7. Vary your tweets. Be careful not to act spammy. Be friendly, fun and share interesting information.
8. Don’t be a show off, use poor grammar or be too personal.
9. Don’t overtweet and be sure to thank people for their tips and promotions.
10. Build relationships and build trusts.