When I was growing up, we had a set of encyclopedias in our house. I often looked at these encyclopedias as a child, and thought that if I read all of them, I’d know almost everything (Of course, I never did read all of them). The access I had to information was bounded by what [...]
Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
January 13, 2012
4
Shift 1 – Exponentially increasing information will dramatically change marketing
By Paul Adams in Advertising, Marketing, Social Media
December 29, 2011
3
How to understand Facebook: Use it.
By Paul Adams in Social MediaOne of the most common set of questions I’m asked by people trying to understand the rise of the social web, and how it will impact their business is: Is Facebook a fad? Why do people spend so much time using it? How does Facebook work? Why are businesses on it? In almost all cases [...]
December 18, 2011
21
Stop talking about “social”
By Paul Adams in Social MediaAs I read, watch and listen to other people describe the changes in our industry, I’m consistently seeing two problems: – Not enough people are recognizing that the web is being fundamentally rebuilt around people, and that this is going to change how all of us do business. – Too many of the people who [...]
January 11, 2011
2
Influence is bidirectional
By Paul Adams in Social MediaThere is an interesting thread on Quora about measuring online influence, with some solid ideas from Brian Solis, Karl Long and others. My contribution to the discussion was to get people to stop thinking about influence as something unidirectional, and think of it as bidirectional: The problem I see with most of the tools claiming [...]
Tags: Influence
April 17, 2010
7
The fans + followers arms race
By Paul Adams in Advertising, Social MediaMarketers are trying hard to increase their number of fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter. This makes sense. It gives them an audience of people who expressed an interest in what they have to offer. The question marketers need to ask is what they are going to do with all these new fans and [...]
March 17, 2010
3
‘Virality’ is not a success metric
By Paul Adams in Advertising, Social MediaI recently came across this fantastic piece of advertising. It’s all about having a friend share it with you (as they personalise it), so watching it from the link will miss the point. I need to tell you what it is for to talk about it, which slightly ruins the experience of watching it, so [...]
November 7, 2009
1
Using number of fans/followers as a success metric is risky
By Paul Adams in Brand, Social MediaMeasuring ROI on social network activity is hard for marketers. Many use ‘number of fans’ or ‘number of followers’ as a success metric. If the number trends upward, things are good. However, in research, I’ve often seen people become embarrassed by the brands/companies that they have become a fan of. “My friend told me to [...]
October 11, 2009
1
How to build a business using social media (Answer: Offline interactions)
By Paul Adams in Social MediaA month ago I heard Mari Luangrath speak at the IDEA conference in Toronto. The theme of the conference was “Social and Experience Design” and Mari was speaking to us as someone who had built a successful business using only social media tools. How had she done it? What advice would she give other businesses? [...]
Tags: Brand, Social Media
September 17, 2009
0
The local maximum of social media
By Paul Adams in Brand, Sociability, Social MediaTara Hunt as published a nice presentation on how people need to “forget about social media strategies, and think about customer-centric business strategies”. I’ll add another layer of complexity. They also need to stop thinking about what people do on the web, and start thinking about how the web fits into the rest of people’s [...]
Tags: Facebook, Local maximum, Social Media, Twitter
September 16, 2009
2
The misperception of “real time”
By Paul Adams in Brand, Social MediaMany people are excited about “real time”. Technologists get excited by updates in real time, news in real time; marketers get excited about customer feedback in real time. But what is real time? I’d argue that when we think about real time, we should be thinking more holistically about how people form memories and brand [...]
Tags: Real Time
