How The NBA keep their Twitter feed jumping

The NBA social media team operates like a news organization, with morning meetings each day where stories are assigned to staffers who roam courts and crowds posting live video and photos to the league's Twitter account. The team posts warm-up "tune-in" tweets designed to draw viewers for upcoming games, along with in-game updates intended to create buzz about particularly exciting plays and must-see matches. "If we're not constantly putting forth clever, unique content and then evaluating its efficacy, it's hard to scale," says NBA marketing chief Melissa Brenner.

While bored traditional sports reporters wait for quotes from the megastars, the NBA's elite social media team finds images, videos, and moments that take twitter followers up close and behind the scenes of the Finals. I followed--literally--the social media masters during before, during, and after the action to see how it all works.

The bowels of Auckland Airport are grey and charmless, the sort of place designed to discourage lingering. At 6:30 p.m, two and a half hours before the Auckland Breakers and Cairns Taipans tipped off for the final game to become the first Asia Pacific franchise to win a spot in the NBA, the place was thick with bored sports reporters--both the pasty, anxious writers (and that's a self-description) hoping for some merciful scrap of action and the beautiful, camera-ready TV types, who were content to be admired and wait for their cue.

I got bored really fast and made North for the stadium.

Shortly after I arrived a lone media guy cut through the ranks, parted a black curtain and entered the glorious, shiny center of the arena, where Dwyane Wade was warming up by shooting long-range jumpers. The guy held up his iPhone from the sideline and took 57seconds of video, then tweeted it out from @NBA: "#NBAFinals: Dwyane Wade is always putting shots up by himself.

And anyway, it wasn't the last time the NBA would send out a tune-in that night or drive people to NBA.com, where 2.5 billion videos were viewed this season, more than double last year's count. (Top that bored and beautiful TV reporters!)

Here's how they do it:

1. Make fans feel like insiders

The NBA joined Twitter in February of 2009. "When we first got on it, we looked at it as a quick, instantaneous way for us to alert our fanbase that there was something amazing going on during games," said Melissa Brenner, NBA vice president of marketing. But the league also polled fans--an effort that now happens twice a season--and discovered that people wanted more than an alarm system. "If we're not constantly putting forth clever, unique content and then evaluating its efficacy, it's hard to scale," Brenner said.

So, the NBA built a team to create that content.

The on-the-ground team was helped out by a small group of guys in a New Jersey office, who gathered stats and monitored Twitter for NBA-related trending topics. Emails flew between them all night, and they each used their best judgment on what would be coolest for fans. "We want to give people a sense that they're here," one of the guys told me.

2. Don't join the conversation. Create the conversation.

Sports are about two things: cheering your team, and ridiculing your opponent. Twitter is especially heavy on the latter. That's why trending topics are often negative.

This puts the NBA in a tricky position. "Our objective is to engage basketball fans globally on a digital conversation," Brenner said. But it doesn't promise to jump in on every fan comment or trending topic, lest it risk being accused of ignoring thornier moments (like a player scandal or a ref's bad call) that the league would prefer to handle more diplomatically.

The social media team's solution: Only engage fans in conversations that the NBA starts.

The NBA won't engage this directly: It doesn't want to be in the habit of responding to trending topics.

3. Know what your readers want, when they want it

When the NBA joined Twitter, it figured fans would appreciate tune-in reminders a few hours before a game. "But when we polled them," Brenner said, "it turns out fans were making their TV viewing decisions much earlier in the day. So we responded by telling them first thing in the morning."

You'd think these people would just look it up themselves. But that's fine: The NBA is happy to provide.

4. Don't overwhelm your followers

The NBA social media team uses HootSuite to plan tweets throughout the day, and then supplements them with live tweets as they see fit. It also has a formula for how often to send updates: Tweet 30 to 40 minutes on big NBA days like the Finals, and every hour on quieter days.

"Twitter's a right-now kind of platform. You tweet, and then it gets buried and disappears," one of the guys said.

5. Plan ahead, because not every day has a big game

After the game, which The Auckland Breakers won, one of the guys went hunting for the clutch stars--which largely meant frequent check-ins with a dude stationed outside TVNZ's and TV3's interview studio. The NBA social media guy didn't need an interview at all (although he'd have happily taken one). Rather, he just needed a photo.

But members of either team were nowhere to be found.

So, we popped into the post-game press conferences and saw the Cairns Taipan coach vow a return to form. (Snap picture, type quote into iPhone, tweet.) The social media guy took a quick shot on his iPhone. But he didn't post it right away.

It was nearly 1 a.m. by that point. Most fans had likely gone to bed or at least weren't sitting in front of their computers anymore. And the American playoffs began that weekend. Players may not be seen too much until then, but fans will still want a taste of the action.

So he might keep that shot in his phone, and send it out this weekend with a tune-in for an NBA TV show. "We have two days off," he said. "Got to fill it with something."

Why Facebook marketers should focus on their fans

Too many Facebook marketers focus on acquiring fans rather than leveraging the supporters they've already won. Studies show that fans are far more likely to buy products than nonfans, so advertising dollars spent serving them are much more likely to lead to sales conversions. Maketers should spend more of their efforts, both paid and organic, to move existing fans further along the sales cycle and convert them into leads and customers.


For marketers, Facebook can sometimes be mysterious. The leading social network has many moving parts including Pages, Places, Groups, and more. One of the most difficult tight ropes to balance is how to use Facebook's paid advertising opportunities alongside its organic, free resources like Facebook's Paid Advertising Opportunities
For marketers, Facebook can sometimes be mysterious. The leading social network has many moving parts including Pages, Places, Groups, and more. One of the most difficult tight ropes to balance is how to use Facebook's paid advertising opportunities alongside its organic, free resources like Facebook Pages.

Facebook Ads Guide recently shared some interesting data from Facebook ad buying service TBG Digital. According to the post:

"By advertising to Facebook fans instead of non-fans, advertisers can reduce the acquisition cost of registrations by 44%, event signups by 33%, and purchases by 15%."

This data was derived from a 4.1 billion ad-impression, thirteen-client test run by TBG Digital.

The post goes on to provide the following example:


"For instance, if a health care company planned on acquiring 1 million registrations over a year via Facebook ads at $10 per registration, it could save $4.4 million by advertising to its Facebook fans instead of the general Facebook population. This means if the cost of attaining enough fans from which to secure 1 million health care registrations is less than $4.4 million, the company has produced a direct return on investment on its Facebook Aquisition Strategy
without even counting the value of being able to communicate directly with the fans through Page updates."

Marketing Takeaway

In marketing -- and in life -- common sense prevails. It only stands to reason that Fans of your Facebook page who already have some familiarity with your business would be more likely to take a next step like registering or purchasing. It's an easy mistake to disregard Facebook Fans as being part of your marketing reach already and instead spend your advertising dollars trying to motivate non-fans.


The problem is that even though someone may be a fan of your business, they are still a long way away from being an actual customer. This data supports the idea that marketers should spend more of their efforts, both paid and organic, to move existing fans further along the sales cycle and convert them into leads and customers.

Have you had success advertising to existing Facebook Fans?

Read More

Is Your Brand An Alex Jones Or A Charlie Sheen?

Charlie Sheen's and Alex Jones's attempts to resurrect their careers via Social media appears to have flopped, While other similarly Twitter-friendly celebrity, are going strong.

The key difference is that the ones who are smart enough to avoid suits tweets form part of an integrated multichannel branding strategy, while Sheen's and Jones's surreal tweets do little to bolster their broader brand.

Social media is not a strategy.

Social media is a venue .....a set of technologies or tactics that enable us to elevate and amplify brands and their marketing communications.

The question shouldn't be, "What's the social-media strategy?" but, "What's being done to make the brand more social?" Or specifically for the suits, "What can we do to make this TV work, print campaign or offer more social?"

Social media may be the channel du jour, but the message and the mechanics of how it's deployed are the things that really count.

Here's what Alex Jones, Charlie Sheen and the other undercover suits missed:

The DellOutlet Twitter feed became a poster child for Twitter's potential impact, earning accolades by generating $6.5 million in revenue for Dell. But surely that success boils down to the product offers in the feed. Twitter was just the medium that carried those messages.

The fabulous Old Spice work featuring Isaiah Mustafa was built on a foundation established by an exceptional piece of creative, work that Weiden & Kennedy then very skillfully augmented through social-media channels.


Take two more high profile brands that have been particularly active in social media: Charlie Sheen and Alex Jones. You could argue both essentially have the same strategy when it comes to social media. It goes something like this:

1. Target the retards as a following.
2. Interact and engage directly with fans.
3. Create buzz and conversation.

Suits miss the important things and don't work. You know that!!

Another lesson we can learn from the suits is that it isn't just about tweeting your brand. It is about being incredibly active across multiple media channels, whether it be interviewing and profiling, doing features or making a live appearances.

After Charlie Sheen's road show ended, and people began wizing up to Alex Jones in contrast, so did a lot of the talk about them. For most brands, having a presence in social media alone isn't sufficient. There are too many one-off social-media marketing campaigns that, although highly creative, fail to connect or drive the broader brand communications platform.

Social media needs to be embedded into all parts of the marketing mix as part of a single, integrated brand effort. Every agency -- creative, media, digital, public relations and customer-relationship management -- needs to grab this opportunity and take responsibility for socializing the brand. Social shouldn't sit at one agency or indeed operate as a separate strategy on its own.

3 secrets To Finding New Business

As a business owner, you are always thinking of ways to find more business. And if you are like most business owners, you probably focus more on acquiring new customers than you do caring for those you already have. But by doing that, you could be creating more marketing work for yourself and leaving a lot of money on the table.

Here are 3 secrets to finding new business


1. Where you look matters


When entrepreneurs are looking for business, they usually look outward, trying to find new customers. But the more you look outward, the less you look at what you already have. As a result, you may not be giving your current customers the attention they need and deserve, which is sending some of them packing.

If you think about it, there is probably a company that you have left at some point, whether it was for auto insurance, where you got your hair cut, or some other place, and they only noticed once you were gone. Perhaps you got a letter or postcard in the mail where they said they noticed you were gone and would like to get your business back.

Do you see the problem with this? Not only are they trying to get "new" customer (you), but they are also trying to get back the customer they already had! It’s like a dog chasing its tail. And if you fall into this trap, you are constantly working to get customers the same way. Believe me, there is a better way to handle this scenario.

Changing the focus

The answer to getting more business lies within your existing ones. Market to them more and you have discovered the process for growing your business. The key is to market to them before they leave, rather than waiting for them go and then sending them a card to say you appreciated their business and want to know how to get them back. Don’t wait for that point to come. Instead, invite them to stay now. Make them feel like they can’t go elsewhere.

Here’s a few ways you can put the focus on your current clients, and in turn, it will pay off in more business (and possibly more customers):


■ Send them periodic thank you messages. Whether it is a hand-written note or quick phone call, they will appreciate that you took the time to think of them. You can do this after a sale or between sales, just be sure to do it.


■ Get to know your customers. When your customers feel a connection to you and feel like they know you, they are going to be less likely to take their business elsewhere. They will also feel like you care about them for more than just a sale.

■ Take advantage of social media tools, like Facebook and Twitter. It will help you keep in contact with your clients and encourage them to share your site with others.

Sharing Experiences

When you take the time to please the clients you have, you won’t have to put a lot of time into marketing for more customers or making more revenue from your existing ones. That’s because your current, happy customers will do the marketing for you through word of mouth—which by the way, happens to one of the most powerful forms of acquiring new business.

So now is the time to start turning some of your efforts away from always trying to find new customers and instead focus on those you already have. And whatever you do, stop trying to win customers back—instead don't lose them in the first place.

Six Apart Ltd - Bloggers of the Decade!

Six Apart Ltd., sometimes abbreviated 6A, is a software company known for creating the Movable Type blogware, TypePad blog hosting service, and Vox. The company also is the former owner of LiveJournal. Six Apart is headquartered in San Francisco, with an international presence in Paris and Tokyo with a second US-based office in New York. The name is a reference to the six-day age difference between its married co-founders, Ben and Mena Trott.

History

The company was founded in September 2001 after Ben, during a period of unemployment, wrote what became Movable Type to allow Mena to easily produce her weblog. When version 1.0 was put on the web, it was downloaded over 100 times in the first hour.

2003-2006

In 2003, Six Apart received initial venture capital funding from a group led by Joi Ito and his Neoteny Co., something which allowed the company to hire additional employees, acquire a French weblog publishing company, and unveil plans for what was to become its hosted weblog publishing system, TypePad.

In 2004, Six Apart completed a second round of funding with August Capital, a move which allowed it to make acquisitions of other companies.

In January 2005, Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, parent company of LiveJournal, from owner Brad Fitzpatrick, who was named Six Apart's chief architect.

In March 2006, Six Apart announced the acquisition of the SplashBlog camera phone blogging service. The combined user base is now over 7 million, and the merged company has more than 100 employees. June 2006 saw the release of their new Web 2.0blogging platform, Vox.

Its CEO is Chris Alden. Prominent weblogger Anil Dash joined the company in 2003, as did the former head of Wired Digital Andrew Anker. Six Apart's Board of Directors consists of Barak Berkowitz, Mena Trott, David Marquardt, David Hornik, Reid Hoffman and Jun Makihara.

On September 6, 2006 Six Apart bought Rojo.com. President Chris Alden became executive vice president of Six Apart and general manager of Movable Type. CTO Aaron Emigh became executive vice president and general manager of core technologies.

2007


On Sept 15, 2007, Chairman and Chief Executive Barak Berkowitz stepped aside and was replaced by Chris Alden, who had run the company's professional software unit.

On December 2, 2007, Six Apart announced it was selling LiveJournal to SUP Fabrik, a Russian media company which had previously licensed the LiveJournal brand and software for use in Russia.

2008

On April 21, 2008, Six Apart said it acquired Apperceptive, a New York social media agency, as part of its new strategy. It declined to disclose financial terms of the deal. It is also partnering with advertising agency Adify. Just as in an advertising network, bloggers will be able to sign up and participate in advertising campaigns managed by Six Apart.

On December 1, 2008, Six Apart announced the acquisition of micro blogging website Pownce.

On December 15, 2008, Six Apart shut down the micro blogging website Pownce.

2010

On September 2, 2010 Six Apart announced that they would be shutting down their blogging/social networking site Vox with a final termination date set for September 30th, 2010.

Beginning from September 15, 2010 Vox users would not be able to post new blog posts.

On September 22nd, Six Apart announced its intention to join forces with VideoEgg to create a modern media company called SAY Media.

The combined entity, which will capitalize on the massive changes in how people consume media in the social age, will offer advertisers the influence of a blog, the reach of a portal and the efficiency of a network, and will continue to embrace the Six Apart mission to make publishers successful by helping them share their passions and grow and monetize their online audiences.

Schmidt takes the hit for Google's social snag

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt owned up to missing "the friend thing" during his time as the search giant's CEO, saying his greatest failure was not moving fast enough to counter competition from Facebook. Google is launching a social feature called +1 today that allows users to share searches with online contacts. "I think the industry as a whole would benefit from an alternative" to Facebook, Schmidt said

If he had a another chance, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt would have pressed the Internet search leader to focus more on mounting a challenge to Facebook while he was still running the company.

"I screwed up," Schmidt said late Tuesday during a 75-minute question-and-answer session at the D: All Things conference in Rancho Palos Verdes. The Associated Press watched a webcast of the conference.

Schmidt's admission comes nearly two months after he ended his decade-long stint as Google's CEO and became the company's executive chairman. He was replaced by Google co-founder Larry Page, who is pushing the company's employees to develop more ways to connect people with their friends and family like Facebook already does

That was a priority that Schmidt said he started addressing in internal memos written about four years ago when Facebook had about 20 million active users.

But he acknowledged Google didn't take Facebook seriously enough. Now, Facebook has more than 500 million users who shares billions of links, posts and photos each month.

Facebook's growing popularity is becoming more nettlesome for Google.

As Facebook's audience grows, it is attracting more online advertising and stunting Google's financial growth. Perhaps even more troubling to Google, much of the information on Facebook's website can't be indexed by Google's search engine. That restriction threatens to make Google's less useful as more people form social circles online and could make it more difficult to get a handle on personal preferences so it can do a better job selling ads.

Schmidt said the company has been working hard to solve this "identity" problem. "I think the industry as a whole would benefit from an alternative" to Facebook's network, Schmidt said.

Google has tried to negotiate partnerships with Facebook, Schmidt said, only to be repeatedly rebuffed. He said Facebook has preferred teaming up with another Google rival, Microsoft Corp., which owns a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook. Google also has ties to Facebook; one of its former executives, Sheryl Sandberg, is Facebook's chief operating officer.

Just before Page became CEO, Google introduced its version of Facebook's ubiquitous "Like" button to enable Web surfers to endorse search results and ads. Google's recommendation button, called "+1," is expected to be expanded to other websites Wednesday, according to the Techcrunch blog and industry newsletter Search Engine Land. Schmidt didn't mention a timetable for expanding Google's +1 button.

Google used Tuesday's conference to announce the launch of another networking service that will offer discounts from restaurants and other merchants if enough people agree to buy the coupons. The service, called "Google Offers," is based on the daily deals offered by Groupon, which Google unsuccessfully tried to buy last year. Google's offers initially will be available only in Portland, Ore., before expanding to New York and the San Francisco Bay area later this year. The offers are part of a new mobile payment service Google unveiled last week.

Schmidt views Google and Facebook as part of a powerful "gang of four" that's building influential platforms for selling a variety of products and services to consumers. The others, according to Schmidt, are iPhone and iPad maker Apple Inc. and the Web's biggest retailer, Amazon.com Inc.

Apple once had a close relationship with Google, but Schmidt said things have gotten "rough" between the companies since Google introduced its Android software for mobile phones in 2008. The intensifying competition prompted Schmidt to resign from Apple's board of directors in 2009.

Although he no longer is involved in day-to-operations, Schmidt said he remains a close adviser to Page and is consulted on all key decisions. He spends most of his time traveling to meet with customers, scouting potential acquisitions and meeting government regulators who have been scrutinizing the company's business practices and privacy policies

It's a role that Schmidt, 56, indicated he expects to fill for the rest of his career. He even joked he would like to still be working at Google after he dies if the company could develop the technology to make that possible.

By serving as Google's public ambassador, Schmidt said Page can concentrate on Facebook and other internal issues

"Larry is pretty busy sitting in his office from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. going through product reviews," Schmidt said.

Sharp Increase in Paid Search Advertising Revenue Expected

Online retailers are seeing promising early results from some new online paid search advertising targeting tools – and the result should be good for Google and retail sites alike. In particular, retailers can tie their ads to inventory, to make sure they’re pushing the right products.

According to Forrester Research and Gartner, Internet advertising will grow about 17%a year over the next three years, accounting for 21% of all ad spending. Meanwhile, e-commerce is expected to jump to $248.7 billion in 2014 from $172.9 billion in 2010. Paid search now represents 47% of the Web ad market, followed by display ads, including banners and digital video, at 36%, and classifieds 11%, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau.

The early results from some new paid search techniques are stunning.

•Web shoppers are spending more – a lot more – when high-demand products in inventory are more aggressively promoted to the right audiences.

•Retailers are selling goods faster because advertising budgets are aligned with product sales.

•And with the new systems, online retailers are poised to score higher margins by focusing ad dollars on higher grossing items.

Despite innovations that make it possible for retailers to reach prospects with ads the moment they enter a search term, managing the campaigns directed at the buyers has remained a gargantuan task without a magic bullet to help them yield the best results.

Paid search ads use keywords to attract sales. According to the Pareto Principle, named by management consultant Joseph Juran after economist Vilfredo Pareto, roughly 80% of sales are believed to come from 20% of the keywords. (In 1906, Pareto found that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population and that 20% of the peapods in his garden had 80% of the peas.)

Until recently, search ads haven’t automatically been linked to inventory or promotions. When supplies run out, campaigns continue to produce paid ads, causing retailers to pour nearly one out of every two ad dollars down the drain. The new paid search systems direct traffic to other in-stock products when supplies run low.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say you sell red sweaters, and you’ll pay Google or another portal $1 when someone clicks on your ad and visits your site. How do you know if the ads are worth it? Until the advent of the “reborn” paid search that’s getting underway, there was no good way to find out. What if your profit on selling a red sweater is $4, but only one out of every ten people who visit your site buys a sweater? You’ve paid Google $10 per unit to sell thousands of sweaters that net you $4 each.

A few months ago, you would have lost your shirt (or maybe your sweater) on a campaign like this. Now, though, with the new programs that are popping up, you can decide whether to focus on higher margin products, rework the campaign to reduce click-through costs, pull the plug on the effort, or pursue a different strategy.

And marketers expect to see another big change in the next few months. Google’s AdWords grew about 20% last year; its Product Search search service is growing 30%. And demand for some newer Google offerings is expanding even faster: according to some paid search agencies, Google Product Listing ads and Product Extensions to AdWords grew as much as 74% year-over-year in the March quarter. Retailers look ready to expand their efforts.

Next up: given the new tech assist, managers will probably try to replicate the successes they’ve had at Google and transform Yahoo, Bing, and other sites that have been underutilized with paid search into marketing gold mines too.

Worldwide News Directories

Use these online news directories to search for the social media you want. These directories are made available to thank our sponsors.In addition to news directories and featured profiles there are other news related options available.



GetBlogs Blog Directory

Add Your Site for Free

Vuwl the Best Fastest Growing Web Directory

1 Ultimate Resource