Social media ROI – yes, worth the effort
By Sharon Hill
You may not have heard of Gary Vaynerchuk – I hadn’t – but once you watch his keynote presentation at the 2011 Inc. 500 / 5000 conference you’ll never forget him. He’s been an entrepreneur since age 8, founded WineLibrary.com in 1997, and now owns VaynerMedia.com. He has written two books – The Thank You Economy, and Crush It! Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion- both of which I hurried to Amazon to buy once I saw this video. His presentation on social media and its ROI was one of the most powerful and riveting keynotes I’ve seen on any topic anywhere. If you’re a publisher or broadcaster wondering about the importance of social media for your firm and its bottom line, you MUST watch this video.
An unidentified newspaper owner in the audience asked about monetization of content. “Holding on to what emotionally feels good is a good way to go out of business,” Vaynerchuk responded. Amen.
Here are just a few of his quotes and thoughts that resonated with me: Continue reading
South African Naspers, owner of Polish Allegro, invests heavily in Digital Sky Technologies
The South African based media group Naspers Limited (“Naspers”), which operates globally and owns important online operations like the Polish auction site Allegro, is investing heavily in the Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies which is one of the largest internet companies in the Russian-speaking market, majority owner of Mail.ru and a minority share holder in Facebook and Groupon. Continue reading
Telstra launches social media hub
Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company, has become the most recent telco to launch a unified interface for social mobile, following Motorola’s Blur and HTC’s Sense.
Called Tribe, Telstra’s site lets mobile users update Twitter, MySpace and Facebook simultaneously.
To support the site’s launch, Telstra released figures showing that its five million mobile users were accessing Facebook via their phones 400 per cent more often than in April 2009. At the same time the number of users accessing Twitter had jumped 450 per cent.
“[Tribe] allows customers to manage their social profile from a single, easy-to-use portal that can be accessed from a range of Next G mobiles — not just smartphones,” Telstra’s executive director of mobility products, Ross Fielding, said.
“Best of all, data used to access the service is unmetered meaning most Tribe features are available at no cost to consumers.”
Japan’s Mainichi Tokubai: social media success or troublemaker?
Social media is revolutionizing commerce in some unexpected ways. Every day in Japan 25,000 “regional correspondents” scrutinize the country’s supermarkets for discounts and bargains and post their findings on Mainichi Tokubai’s mobile Web site (Tokubai means “Special sale”).
Mainichi, which publishes Japan’s third biggest daily newspaper, started the site several years ago as an experiment. While it didn’t gain much traction at first, the GFC propelled it into becoming one of the country’s most influential sites with as households did what they could to save money.
The difference between Mainichi Tokubai and most other coupon aggregation sites is the method by which information is harnessed. Correspondents who post savings are paid a small fee for every piece of useful information they hand in before 10am each day. The Web site’s users, who are often the same people sourcing the bargains, then have access to a wealth of savings.
As blogger, Paul Marsden puts it, “t’s a crowdsourced creative combination of Groupon and JustBoughtIt“.
The Times argues that the Web site’s popularity is sucking the country’s retailers into a relentless price war which is adding to the deflationary woes of the national economy.
“Despite the best efforts of successive governments, Japan continues to suffer from the scourge of falling prices,” it wrote. “Supermarkets have protested against the site, which they believe is artificially engendering a destructive price war. Mainichi Tokubai users see it as revenge and a legitimate weapon of ‘infowar’.”
Surely it’s not all bad.
Why should a Web site which hands power to consumers be seen only as a destructive force? As Mr Marsden points out, couldn’t brands use the Mainichi model to promote the sale of their products with retailers who offer the best deals?
There’s a lesson here for our industry too: a prime example of social media done right!
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