Briana Tomkinson › Comments

Blog about New Westminster, B.C. - Briana Tomkinson

"... the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits ii. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network." - Briana Tomkinson

Premium-level shopping mall Sherway Gardens is giving time-deprived consumers the opportunity to shop from the comfort of their own homes through an online personal shopping tool at SherwayPersonalShopping.ca. - Briana Tomkinson

"Twitter users say the microblogging tool now ranks second only to company blogs as a valuable social-media business tool, MarketingProfs said.On a five-point scale, 41% of survey respondents say Twitter delivers "great value" to their company, ranking well ahead of LinkedIn (25%) and Facebook (17%). Corporate blogs rank at the top of the list with 52% saying the medium delivers great value." - Briana Tomkinson

Interesting argument that Twitter is a truer representation of a person's personality than Facebook, due to the fast-paced, instant pace of updates. The time spent establishing a Facebook presence gives a person more time to construct an ego-based view of who they'd like to be vs. Twitter's stream-of-consciousness communication. - Briana Tomkinson

"An immense new laboratory of human relations is taking shape. Millions of us are playing, working, flirting, and socializing online—and producing oceans of data. Duncan J. Watts, a Columbia University sociologist now on leave and heading a research unit at Yahoo!, marvels at the change. "When I started network research 12 years ago, we had virtually no data," he says. Now he and his team can study the network behavior of 295 million e-mailers and legions of the 200 million Facebook users. For social scientists, Watts says, this flood of data could be as transformative as Galileo's telescope was for the physical sciences: "It gives us a new understanding of our world and ourselves." - Briana Tomkinson

Last fall, Adobe, the maker of popular software titles such as Photoshop, Acrobat, and Flash, worked with interactive advertising agency Traction to create a social media engagement initiative. The core of the campaign was a game that asked fans of the Adobe Students page on Facebook whether they thought a series of images were "Real or Fake?" And users responded, with more than 11,500 plays in the first two weeks -- 6 percent of which culminated with the user clicking "Buy Now" for the product promoted on the final game page. - Briana Tomkinson

Employees are two times as likely to go the extra mile for their company and almost four times as likely to recommend it to others if they are satisfied with the ways in which it communicates difficult decisions, according to a recent Ouch Point survey from Opinion Research Corporation (ORC). - Briana Tomkinson

Study highlights disconnect between employer/employee views on appropriate use of social media and blurring of personal/professional life. - Briana Tomkinson

Understanding that all clients' needs at their core are basic human needs and passionately fulfilling those needs is the key to keeping most clients an agency would have lost. You must repurpose your agency's strategy, people, operation and processes to meet those basic needs to enjoy increased client retention. - Briana Tomkinson

Despite the growing use of the mobile web, the study found that slow connections and extra fees are still the primary barriers to both increased use (among current users) and adoption (among non-users) in both countries. - Briana Tomkinson

The basic breakdown: groups are fine for small clubs and individuals, but pages are better for larger brands. - Briana Tomkinson

Great overview of crisis management techniques for social media. The most important one in my opinion: establish a presence in the communities where your customers are talking about your brand *before* there is a crisis. - Briana Tomkinson

Forrester research presentation on the social technographics of B2B buyers. - Briana Tomkinson

Lollapalooza integrates Facebook Connect. Results so far: pageviews are up 99 percent, page views per visit are up 34 percent, and the average time on the site is up 20 percent. - Briana Tomkinson

Wolfram Alpha: For searching complex queries, localization, precision, calculation & comparison - Briana Tomkinson

Power Moms - women between the ages of 25 and 54 with at least one child and who participate regularly in online activities - currently represent 19.2% of the active internet population in the US and wield a record level of online influence that continues to grow, according to (pdf) a report from Nielsen Online. - Briana Tomkinson

Incorporating video into emails — a simple enough concept that wasn't even possible two years ago — improves click-through rates by 2-3 times, according to a recent Forrester report. - Briana Tomkinson

Air Force's "Web Posting Response Assessment" is a straightforward flow chart that demystifies the process for its bloggers to decide whether to respond to critical comments. - Briana Tomkinson

Title on this one turned me off at first, but when I actually took the time to read it, it turned out to be a well-reasoned argument that "failure" depends on perception. At the least, it's an invitation to scrutinize just what was done, and may reveal the insight needed to do better next time. As the article says at the end: "In many cases [of so-called failures] there are elements of success that can be launchpads for future successes and lessons learned." - Briana Tomkinson

Brands that people don’t like to talk about – I’ll call them “boring” brands – are everywhere. If, like most marketers, you market a boring brand, then you’re really earning your living as a marketer. That’s because you are trying to get people interested in something they don’t really care about. - Briana Tomkinson

Last fall, a New York-based startup called Aviary went live, offering digital artists an online image-editing tool with features that could normally only be found in expensive software. Last month, the company released software that lets anyone integrate these tools into their website; some sites are now using the software to reinvent the way that they use images, allowing visitors to contribute cartoons for contests, modify photographs in newspapers, and even tweak the overall design of an online storefront. - Briana Tomkinson

Dynamic people don't watch TV. Neither do people who rank high in openness and leadership. Dynamic people, described as always on the go with a hectic lifestyle, are 50% more likely to watch less TV than the average person and are 59% more likely than the average person to watch less than an hour of TV daily. - Briana Tomkinson

"for social media to succeed, one of the first steps was to help the culture adjust and understand the new media. " - Briana Tomkinson

In the post-destination web era the secret to breaking through won't be advertising. A new study from ARAnet in conjunction with Opinion Research Corporation confirms what PR execs have known for years - we are far more likely to take action when reading online articles that include brand information (51%) compared to search engine advertising (39%) or banner ads (25%). - Briana Tomkinson

The study found that local search - the practice of using online search tools to find local businesses, products, or services - grew 58% in 2008, reaching an annual total of 15.7 billion searches. By comparison, overall core US web searches grew at a much smaller rate of 21% year-over-year, nearing 137 billion searches by the end of 2008. Local searches now stand at 12% of core searches on the top 5 portals, according to the YPA. - Briana Tomkinson

MyBlogSpark is a program to anyone with an interest in GM brands. According to AdWeek, so far about 900 people have signed up, meaning over 700 of the participants are blogging social media moms. There is no actual compensation for reviewing products, just insider access, some samples for review, and maybe a few freebies. - Briana Tomkinson

Ford now plans to begin delivering Fiestas to dealerships in the summer of 2010, and in preparation the company wants to build some buzz around the brand with the young, cash-strapped Millennial crowd who will be its most likely buyers. To do that, the company ran a social-media contest to recruit 100 U.S.-based “agents” to drive the first Fiestas in the U.S., shipped straight from the German assembly plant. (Once the brand is up and running, U.S. Fiestas will be made in Mexico.) These agents will use the cars for six months, each one taking his or her ride on self-initiated monthly “missions” and posting the record of their travels to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, as well as to the Fiesta Movement microsite. - Briana Tomkinson

Each day, CheckFacebook.com tracks data reported from Facebook's advertising tool to help marketers and researchers understand how Facebook is spreading across the globe. - Briana Tomkinson

To succeed in the social media space, marketers must focus on relationships, not technologies, according to Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies and founder of Altimeter Group. - Briana Tomkinson