Social Media is Channel Specific - Trust Your Neighbor?

Check out an interesting infographic on influences of social consumers.  Search channels dominate social media channels for personal finance, restaurants, and travel.  In contrast, social media channels dominate baby, beauty, electronics, and music product buying behavior.  The underlying message seems to be that you trust your neighbor's opinion in some areas of buying but not others.  Also interesting is the high involvement of social consumers to interact with a brand via Facebook and write an online post about a product or brand.

I can see search for personal finance as you want reputable sources providing that advice.  I'm surprised about restaurants and travel - perhaps you are also looking for more reliable sources of information.  Maybe that's why Starwood Hotels has introduced a comments section on their website.  I would have thought electronics would rely more on expert opinion as well.  

Why "The Social Media Management Handbook"?

No textbooks currently exist for a course in social media.  Textbook publishers (and their authors) are wary of the rapid changes in technology and the challenges of updating.  That leaves professional books which don't have the study aids and course materials.


Here are relevant professional books for social media:

·         The Social Media Management Handbook: Everything You Need To Know To Get Social Media Working In Your Business by Robert Wollan, Nick Smith, Catherine Zhou, Wiley, 2011.

·         The Social Factor by Maria Azua, IBM Press, 2010.

·         Social Media Marketing by Liana Evans, Que, 2010.

·         Manager's Guide to Social Media by Scott Klossosky, McGraw Hill, 2011.

·         The Social Media Business Equation by Eve Mayer Orsburn, Cengage 2012.

The only textbook I know about is:


By Michael Solomon, Pearson, forthcoming 2012 (textbook)

"The Social Media Management Handbook" was selected because of a greater focus on principles rather than current examples which will be outdated very quickly.  The downside is the need to provide current examples although there are many: Missoni for Target is one example.  The management orientation is well-suited for a business school rather than the practitioner who implements a social media campaign.


For an undergraduate course we don't explicitly cover many of the chapters (see strikeouts) as the material is quite dense.  Here is the table of contents:


Introduction: What Is Social Media?
I Social Media Strategy for Organizations.
1 The Power and Business Risks of Social Media (Nick Smith and Robert Wollan).
2 How to Develop a Social Media Strategy (Chris Boudreaux).
3 Social Media ROI: New Metrics for Customer Health (Kevin Quiring).
4 Selling Social Media within the Organization (Robert Wollan). (but be familiar with basics)

II Marketing and Sales in Social Media.
5 Social Media and the Voice of the Customer (Chris Zinner and Catherine Zhou).
6 Integrating Social CRM Insights into the Customer Analytics Function (Rayid Ghani and Sarah Bentley).
7 Using Social Media to Drive Product Development and Find New Services to Sell (Adi Alon and A.J. Gupta).
8 Social Community Marketing and Selling (Robert Wollan and Andre Trochymiuk).
III Customer Service and Support with Social Media.
9 Using Social Media in Customer Service and Support (Stephanie Sadowski).
10 Social Media: Responding to Customer Complaints (Todd R. Wagner).

11 Staying Out of Trouble: Complying with FTC Disclosures (Chris Boudreaux).

IV Beyond the "Pilot" Phase: The Core Components of the Agile Digital Enterprise.
12 Creating and Implementing a Social Media Technology Platform (Anatoly Roytman and Joseph Hughes).

13 Social CRM on the Move: Mobility Implications for Social Media Programs (Greg Jenko, Lars Kamp, and Saj Usman).

14 New Rules for Tools: IT Infrastructure Implications and Options for Supporting Enterprise Social Media (Robert Wollan and Kelly Dempski).

V Empowering Employees for Social Media Success.

15 Culture Traits, Employee Incentives, and Training (Christine Eberle).

16 New Roles and Responsibilities (Chris Zinner and Vanessa Godshalk).

17 Social Media Policies (Chris Bourdreaux).

18 Social Media, Collaboration, and Value Creation in Organizations (Robert J. Thomas).

URL Shorteners are Tracking You

URL shorteners like bit.ly or goo.gl serve a useful purpose on tracking links in micro-blogs (and hyperlinks on web pages).  As you can see from the first figure for bit.ly, there is useful data like a histogram of clicks, source (referrers) of traffic, and location details (countries).

Just be aware that a history of the Twitter conversations with that link is also available (bottom of second figure).  Such a record of conversations would be useful for identifying those in your community (e.g., bloggers who consistently link to content you do).  But it also works the other way - others can see your interests.

Half Life of a Social Media Link

Some interesting data from Search Engine land on the half life of a social media link.  The half life is a little less than three hours.

How do you keep tweets in front of your audience?  I'm not sure tweeting again in a few hours makes sense except of course for important ones.  I wonder if time of day made a difference (e.g., regional or international interest)?

In any event, one needs to balance your message with intrusion into your neighbor's digital community.

Update 27Oct11
StumbleUpon has a new infographic on the half-life of StumbleUpon content (400 hours).  It makes sense given these links are human curated.  But a company can't really self-post its content.

Update 08Nov11
Klout's study of the half life of retweets show that higher Klout scores have a longer half-life of retweets except for those on the low-end (presumably followers actually follow).

Why Social Media Milieu?

I'm comfortable with my digital identity.  I have a CV website for anyone who wants to know what I do professionally.  The website Healthcare IT Academic Resources speaks for itself.  I have a blog for my courses to post helpful resources.  You can follow me on Twitter.  What do I need another blog for?

Okay to be honest - I need to try out Blogger and see if I can use it in my classes.  The title came about because many of the account names beginning with "social" are taken.  After trying out numerous names that are available (ask), I settled on "milieu" as it speaks to the social media environment that encompasses our lives.  We choose to varying degrees the depth of digital penetration into our lives but it is always about finding your comfort level.  Each one of us must balance the social community that we surround ourselves with and personal privacy.