Sweet Social

Mobile Social Media

I was just reading an article about the growth of Mobile Social Networking, and it got me thinking about how we might be missing the obvious. Yes, according to Comcsore, between April 2009 and April 2010, the number of people who accessed a mobile application grew 28% from 54.4 million to 69.6 million, the number of people that accessed a social media application more than tripled over the same time period. While other categories of apps also experienced triple digit growth year over year (News apps, sports apps and banking and weather apps are among those categories) social media apps far outpaced the other categories.

What we may be missing here is that, although the apps to access social media are great and provide a lot of utility to stay in touch and keep others informed about you, are we missing the biggest social media app for the mobile phone entirely? Isn’t Text a social media app itself? It’s a way to engage, state an opinion, keep in touch with others, and others to keep in touch with us.

Yes, if you tripled the 69 million number (number of people that accessed social media apps), it doesn’t even come close to the number of people that send Text messages each and every day. In the US alone, 2.5 billion text messages are sent each day and 203 million people have Text messaging packages on their phones. The ubiquity of the phone and it’s attachment to our person as a lifestyle is something that is here  to stay.

My only point is that, yes, Tweeting from a mobile phone or checking Facebook while on the road from your phone is great, but let’s not forget about the app that got us here in the first place, Text. It is a legitimate social media app, and mobile because of its ubiquity is a legitimate social channel. Short of an actual face to face or phone conversation with someone, Text is the next best method to engage in dialogue. Don’t lose sight of those two points when looking at social media tools or developing your social media strategy.

Thoughts from our recent social media webinar

Well, it was really a great session last week, the webinar about integrating Social Media into Demand Generation Efforts. In case you missed it, here it is: http://bit.ly/btnzBc and the slide share is below  

A lot of great, real life examples of how companies are using social media in their marketing mix. Experts from Eloqua, TDGarden, SBLI (Savings Bank Life Insurance Company) and the Republican National Committee and yes, the Pedowitz Group, the guys behind Sweet, discuss their unique challenges as well as overall common goals from social media. Lots of good nuggets from each organization. Each company is tackling social media differently, each is also using Sweet in some respect.

 

I think the thing that struck me as the most interesting was that we are still so new in this process that many benchmarks for social media have still not even been established, even from companies that you might think  have it “all figured out” and have a firm idea of what they should be doing and what they will get in return. It’s not the case. Nobody has it figured out yet, and there is also not a “one size fits all”. But, there are some very good Best Practices that are clear. Just a couple that I heard were:

·         You must look at your content differently depending on the platform

·         You must give a reason for someone to follow you, don’t just re-purpose offers from your website.

·         There are a lot of tools out there to help with social media efforts, but look for tools that have definite integration points with your existing systems.

And, based on a lot of the questions that I saw come through from the webinar, companies of all shapes and sizes are still trying to figure out how best to dip their toe in the water, and thinking about how to measure it’s contribution to revenue. Many are still just trying to figure out how to start a dialogue on social media. I also think what struck a chord with many marketers who are accustomed to lead scoring in the traditional sense, is that Sweet is a perfect way to add another dimension to an individual’s lead scoring profile. A very novel concept!

Enjoy the webinar and as always, we’d love to hear your feedback as well. Lots more to come!

 

The Sweet Team

 

 

 

Welcome to Sweet-Let's Kick it off Big!

Welcome to the inaugural post for Sweet Social, the ultimate informational site for Sweet, the latest innovation from the Marketing Guru's at The Pedowitz Group. We plan on providing information about social media and demand generation as well as tips and tricks for those that are using the Sweet platform.

Let me just say that Sweet is the only tool on the market today that helps quantify and act on social media activity to drive demand and revenue (enough about the shameless product plug).

We are very excited to announce the first a Social Media webinar that is a perfect case for Sweet. On May 20th, at 2:00 pm, the webinar Drive Demand with Social Media will take place. The cool thing about this webinar is that it will mainly be real enterprise marketers talking about how social media strategies, tools they've used, and results they've achieved through extending campaigns to social media platforms. The webinar is put on by Eloqua, the leader in Marketing Automation. There will be lots of good information about how orgs like the RNC, TD Bank North Garden and SBLI are using social media in conjunction with their Marketing Automation platforms, but THIS IS NOT A PRODUCT PITCH, so don't worry! You'll even hear a bit from "yours truly" about how we, as people responsible for driving demand for clients, view the social media channel. 

Here it is, no pressure! http://bit.ly/d3Mpro 

Lot's more to come about the webinar, and the official launch of Sweet in the coming days, so stay tuned.