Social Media Marketing at Radford

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Gary R Schirr

The social media class played a major role in a new recruiting video for RU!

Posted in Higher Education, social media marketing | 1 Comment

B2B Selling: Content has ALWAYS been a winning strategy!

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Gary R Schirr

I had an interesting conversation on Twitter and LinkedIn with Sander Biehn (@sanderbiehn), who is an an evangelist for  Social Selling at AT&T. The conversation was prompted by an article on the importance of creating good corporate content that I had  tweeted.

During our discussion, I mentioned my sales approach during my earlier career as a salesperson and sales manager, and belatedly realized that there is nothing new about a content focus for B2B Sales! When I was selling bonds and fixed income derivatives and later online platforms and services for derivatives trading I used content to sell for me.

Continue reading →

Posted in Content, Selling, Social Media | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Blogs that a Student of SMM should Follow…

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Gary R Schirr

I suggest that my new social media marketing class start following some blogs immediately. Below is my current list – any suggestions for improvement?

  1. Social Media Explorer                       
  2. Hubspot Inbound Marketing Blog
  3. Mashable Social Media
  4. Technorati Blog
  5. All Facebook
  6. Social Media Marketing Magazine
  7. Grow! from Mark Schaefer
  8. RU SMM Class Facebook Page
  9. My blog

 I want to keep the list to a manageable size but want them to get information they needs to be social media savvy. Again suggestions solicited!!

Posted in Higher Education, Social Media, social media marketing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

My Social Media Reading List

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Gary R Schirr

I teach undergraduate and MBA courses in social media management. In the courses I stress experiential learning, especially projects such as a campaign for a personal passion, self-branding, or consulting with an organization. I tell my students that the only way to learn social media is hands-on.

I personally started blogging and then tweeting and benefited from mentoring with Mark Schaefer and Kent Huffman and learning together with Cheryl Burgess. However, on reflection I have also benefited from reading some wonderful books on social media.

Take a look at the books I list and most importantly let me know ones that you think I omitted!

THE THREE GREATEST BOOKS ABOUT THE SM Phenomenon

  • The Cluetrain Manefesto
  • Groundswell                                        @charleneli + @jbernoff
  • The Tao of Twitter                             @markwschaefer

Three other Great Books about the phenomenon

  • The New Rules of Marketing & PR  @dmscott
  • Socialnomics                                        @equalman
  • Likeable Social Media                        @davekerpen

Other really good books about SM and specialized topics in social media (alpha by author)

Continue reading →

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Sports News used to be about games and matches: Current Quiz

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Gary R Schirr

Can you remember when “sports news” used to be about games and matches and such?

A current sports quiz (4 quick questions):

1. Is Notre Dame’s star linebacker:
a. A cynical self-promoter who used a tragic story to finish runner-up for the Heisman?
b. Dumber than a hoe handle?
c. Both a & b

2. Are the “journalists” at Sports Illustrated, NY Times and AP:
a. Cynical promoters who liked a story with legs
b. Dumber than hoe handles
c. Lazy, really lazy and unprofessional

3. Will future Heisman candidates have to campaign on the field of play?

4. Bonus: How can you tell when Lance Armstrong is lying?

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A Bloggers 2013 resolution – check out Reddit and Triberr

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Gary R Schirr

I have already publicized my personal new years resolutions – to lose weight and produce a lot of pages on some major projects that I committed to (and to tweet a  report of my weekly pages typed and weight lost every Weds morning…)

Every blogger should have resolutions also. My blogging resolutions for 2013 are:

  1. Figure out Reddit and how active I want to be,
  2. Figure out Triberr and whether I should participate,
  3. Post every Tuesday (minimum) on this blog, and
  4. Figure out what to do with my other blog, servicecocreation.com.

I signed up for Reddit two weeks ago and installed the button on my blog, but really haven’t explored it yet. My typical daily hits pattern on this blog (which still lags the older one) is to have 150-250 hits on the day of a new post and the following two days and then go down to 10 per day or less on Sunday and Monday before a new post. Sunday night, with only 5 hits for the day,  I experimented with hitting the Reddit button on two recent posts – A presentation lasts FOREVER and Would you trust your daughter’s beach pics to Zuck. I had over 200 hits in 24 hours. No new comments, but presumably new readers. Reddit has my attention.

I have noticed my two favorite bloggers, Mark Schaefer and Cheryl Burgess are using Triberr. I couple weeks ago I read and interesting article describing Triberr as the bloggers best kept secret. Triberr would also seem to merit attention!

The need to post at minimum weekly is obvious. As is the need to figure out what to do with my two blogs (and another I have been considering). I may be back to my readers for suggestions on that…

Anything else that belongs on my blogging resolutions???

Posted in Blogging, Klout, Social influence, Social Media, social media marketing | Tagged , , , , , , | 8 Comments

A presentation lasts FOREVER!

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Gary R Schirr

Today when you step up to the podium at a conference you must realize that your talk may well last FOREVER!

Last year at Mark Schaefer’s wonderful Social Slam, I gave a 15 minute talk about how I crowdsourced the whole process of creating a new course in social media marketing – from grant request to syllabus – using Twitter and my blog. At the time I wrote a post about the great conference and the novelty of talking while everyone else in the auditorium was tweeting.

Later in the summer my daughter text-ed me that my speech was on YouTube. I just checked and it now as more views on YouTube than the estimated crowd of 300 when I gave it live.

Fortunately I am fairly happy with the talk, but… I might have left out a somewhat snarky comment about the host (who is a WONDERFUL guy) cutting out when I started talking… and two or three other asides.

Something to keep in mind – All talks live forever. Will it affect your presentations?

Posted in Higher Education, social media marketing | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Can Twitter Enforce New Year Resolutions?

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Gary R Schirr

I am a big believer in New Years Resolutions… And some of them have come to pass!

In the past couple years my social media network, especially twitter and this blog, have helped me keep up on social media trends and helped me develop SMM courses, acting as both a personal learning network and co-creation platform!

So I naturally got to thinking whether my social network could help with resolution execution.

Are you familiar with “Quitter’s Inc.?”, the short story of Stephen King (1978)? In it an organization spun-off from the Mafia claims 98% success in curing smoking. Once you sign on with Quitter’s Inc. you are expected to quit smoking cold turkey. You are under surveillance: if you backslide the organization kidnaps a loved one and tortures them with escalating electric shocks or worse.

I plan to use the same simple concept adapted to social media. Two of my primary resolutions are to (1) lose weight and (2) finish a couple of key projects. Each Wednesday morning I will tweet how much weight I have lost and how many pages I have typed from the previous Wednesday and whether I have met the minimum goals of 2 pounds and 5 pages.

Tens of thousands of tweeps are available to ridicule me if I give up, or consistently fall short of the weekly goals!

Not as macabre as Quitter’s Inc., but hopefully effective…we will see!

Posted in innovation, social media marketing | Tagged , , , , , , | 13 Comments

Would you trust your daughter’s beach pics to Zuck?

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

We heard the resounding answer yesterday: NO!!

Instagram and Facebook have “clarified” the new privacy settings for Instagram after a furor caused by the original announcement of the new rules.

The original announcement indicated that Instagram and Facebook had the rights to all of your content including the right to use your photos in ads:  “A business or other entity may pay” Instagram to display users’ photos and other details “in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.“

Today Instagram “clarified” away advertisers ability to use your pics… Clearly Facebook backed off its original plan due to the swell of protests.

Why does Facebook have one PR disaster after another with regards to privacy or other changes in its service. One answer is the clash between the freemium model used throughout social media and the desire of these companies to grow revenue. (More about this in my next post.)

But I think Facebook is a special case because of the corporate DNA from founder Zuckerberg. We all know the famous stories:

  • Developing FB while telling the Winklevoss twins he was working on their Harvard-only social network,
  • Disputes with his former roomate and co-founder,
  • His famous reply to why clients gave FB access to their private data: “They trust me…dumb f***s”,
  • The change in algorithm that reduced viewing of FB pages posts just as FB started pushing promoted posts for FB pages,
  • Strange  and confusing changes in privacy settings,
  • Etc.

I discussed this issue in a previous post: The Social Network – The IPO. I believe that a lack of ethics and disregard for privacy is central in the corporate DNA and corporate culture of Facebook. (Sorry to mix metaphors.) I believe that FB’s corporate slogan should be:

Customers trust us, the dumb f***s!

If you rely primarily on your Facebook page for your organization a good question for you might be:

Would you trust your business to Zuck?

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Top 11 Social Media Sites

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

It is interesting to browse through the top websites as assessed by Alexa here: TOP Sites

Eleven of the top 100 websites are social media sites. (I have also included an estimate of recent total monthly visitors, when I found a credible estimate somewhere else on the web.)

Note that blogging is understated because it is not dominated by a social site. For example, according to WordPress there are more blogs using WordPress software on a private site than using the WP blog hosting site that is used in this ranking.

The top eleven ranked by Alexa:

Platform(s)                Social Media                Monthly Visitors             Alexa Rank[2]

  1. Facebook             Social Network               850 million                                2
  2. YouTube             Video-sharing                 800 million                                3
  3. Twitter                Micro-Blogging               250 million                                9
  4. LinkedIn             Professional Network    110 million                               14
  5. Google+               Social Network               100 million                                —
  6. WordPress          Blogging                               —                                           22
  7. Tumblr                MicroBlogging                  13 million                                36
  8. Pinterest             Social Scrapbook              11 million                                38
  9. Blogger                Blogging                                                                              47
  10. Flickr                   Photo Sharing                                                                    56
  11. Instagram           Photo Sharing                                                                    98

[1] Wikipedia estimates (October  2012) unless otherwise cited; the sites are ranked by the Alexa ranking for consistency

[2] Alexa web site rankings at http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo World Ranking

[3] Top 15 social network sites, October 2012, eBizMBA http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites

Posted in Social Media | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment