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Digital in Review: Top 10 Posts in 2010

December 30, 2010

Posted by Suzanne Marlatt

Edelman Digital, Chicago

Follow on Twitter @edelmandigital

Since 2010 is coming to a close, we wanted to showcase some of the top posts from our Edelman contributors this year. We’ve had over 100 Edelman employees contribute their perspectives to EdelmanDigital.com since the re-launch of the site in March 2010. Here’s to another great year and even more contributors in 2011!

5 Reasons Your Social Media Strategy Will Fail by Michael Brito

I’m normally an optimistic person and maybe I should have titled this “5 Tips to Make Your Social Media Strategy Succeed,” but sometimes pointing out the negative side of an issue is more effective. Nonetheless, here are five ways brands go wrong when creating social media strategies for their businesses: Read more…

Ben & Jerry’s: A Bold and Digital Reality by Libby Pigg

It’s not every day that a client asks you to create something that is meaningful, innovative, creative and fun.

Okay, with Ben & Jerry’s, it’s every other day. In keeping with Jerry Greenfield’s motto “If it’s not fun, then why do it” they have really outdone themselves this time. Read more…

Visualizing The Web & Social Networks by Suzanne Marlatt

Seeing is believing and visuals are powerful. I’ve collected a few visualization tools for Facebook, news feeds, and Twitter to let you view networks and conversations at a glance. Read more…

Six Digital Trends To Watch by David Armano

My colleague Steve Rubel and I wear many hats at Edelman. One of those hats is keeping an eye on the trends unfolding in real time and deriving meaning from them as they pertain to organizations and brands. Attached to this post is a slideshow where we identify what these trends are and at a high level how your organization needs to plan accordingly for them. Read more…

Four Geolocation Trends to Watch by Andrew Foote

There’s no doubt that 2010 has been a huge year for location-based services. Although consumer adoption is still relatively low, the growing popularity of apps like Foursquare along with the launch of Facebook Places signals that location services are on track to hit mainstream awareness and usage. Read more…

End Predatory Blogger Programs by Caleb Gardner

You may or may not have seen the post today by Liz Gumbinner of Mom-101 regarding mom bloggers working for free. If you haven’t already read it, I’d encourage you to do so. Liz makes some fantastic points about an emerging theme in the parenting blogger community: marketers don’t respect us enough to pay us for our time. Read more…

Tips for Running an Effective Facebook Page by Jessi Langsen

There’s been a lot of buzz recently about what it takes to run a truly effective corporate Facebook page. The Social Media Examiner highlighted the pages of a few folks doing it right. A well-managed page can make a big difference in a company’s social (and financial) bottom line so today we’ll take a look at the “why” behind the success stories. Read more…

Confessions of a Social Media Rookie by Maria Prysock

Have you ever been asked in an interview, “Facebook or MySpace?” Well, I had to explain during my interview with Phil Gomes, senior vice president for Edelman Digital, my many reasons for favoring Facebook. Read more…

Engagement Through Play: How games shape the new reality by Antoine Soussaline

During a recent talk at TED, psychiatrist Stuart Brown used a series of photographs taken by Norbert Rosing at a kennel outside Churchill, Manitoba, to demonstrate the power of play. Read more…

Jiepang – the Chinese Answer to Foursquare by Cathy Yue and Roman Olney

Recently, I was given an introduction to the popular social networking site “Foursquare” from Steve Rubel, SVP/Director of Insights at Edelman. It made me feel compelled to write about a Chinese language based social network application called “Jiepang (街旁)”. So my colleague Roman Olney and I have created the following short article. We hope you find it useful! Read more…




Image credit: Tom Novot




Digital Digest: July 20

July 20, 2010

Posted by Jason Dojc

Follow on Twitter @jdojc



Derek Sivers: How to Start a Movement

With help from footage from Pemberton Music Festival in BC, Derek Sivers explains how movements really get started. (Hint: it takes two). We talk a lot about influencer engagement but to make a movement, the first followers are as important as the influencer.

Six Steps For Dealing With Detractors

Dealing with detractors is perhaps one of the biggest pain points for companies just starting and even well entrenched in social media marketing. Jason Falls points to Forrester’s classification of detractors and offers some advice.

The Real Life Social Network

On Facebook everyone gets lumped into one big bucket called your friends. In real life, you have multiple independent groups of friends that form around life stages (school friends, work friends, camp friends, neighbourhood friends, hockey friends). Furthermore, within each group you have strong ties, weak ties, and temporary ties).

Word of Mouth and Social Media: A Tale of Two Burger Joints

Sobleman’s has been a staple in Milwaukee for the last 12 years building a steady customer base through word-of-mouth. AJ Bombers also built it’s brand through word-of-mouth, but in a considerably shorter time. Social media was the accelerator. And AJ’s owner doesn’t measure ROI. “This is a restaurant built by social media. This is the only way we know it. We can’t say what it would be like without it.”




Digital Digest: July 12

July 12, 2010

Posted by Jason Dojc

Follow on Twitter @jdojc


How to Organize A Successful Meetup

While the social media world is a great place to forge connections with people. Eventually, you want to meet up with them IRL (in real life). Enter the meetup, an event geared to get to know your friends, likers, and followers in person. Mashable offers a how-to post.

Brands Offer Incentives for Location-based Check-ins

Now there’s a reason to check-in (while others start gaming the system). Starbucks (client) introduced its first-ever national “mayor special” with Foursquare that rewards store mayors with dollar discounts on Frappucinos. In the U.K., Domino’s has a Foursquare promotion running that offers free pizzas and discounts to Foursquare users who check in at its locations.

Social Media Platforms 101

Eloqua has put together a neat 38 page e-book covering all the main social media platforms and how they work. Great reference for training newbies.

Social Networking Affects Brains Like Falling in Love

“Neuroeconomist” Paul Zak has discovered, for the first time, that social networking triggers the release of the generosity-trust chemical, oxytocin, in our brains. And that should be a wake-up call for every company. Professor Zak recently visited Edelman’s New York office and his findings mesh well with Edelman’s trust barometer.

Win with Web Metrics: Ensure a Clear Line of Sight to Net Income

Web measurement guru, Avinash Kaushik, preaches with evangelical fervor on the need for businesses to compute the economic value of their web presences. Web interactions should be bucketed into price, cost, market share or market size which have a clear line of sight to net income. If you can’t find that line of sight then maybe it’s not a very important metric.

The Rise of Fake PR and How to Manage it

Fake PR cases seem to be on the rise.The most notable of course have been the following: the fake BP Global PR Twitter account, the General Mills press release hoax, and now, the fake PR account for AT&T.




Quick Hits: July 8

July 8, 2010

Posted by Lizz Kannenberg

Edelman Digital, Chicago

Follow on Twitter @lizzkannenberg


@EarlyBird to offer Twitter users “promoted deals”

Bargain hounds on Twitter are now able to follow the official @EarlyBird handle for relevant, timely offers and deals from Twitter’s advertisers. Twitter will partner with select advertisers to give followers of the account the inside scoop on limited-time or –quantity offers. It remains to be seen whether branded accounts that rely on offering last-minute deals (like JetBlue’s Cheeps, for instance) will be affected, since offering deals not available elsewhere is a key component of many branded Twitter strategies.

Facebook and Twitter battle for control of connected TV

As Google and Yahoo launch their social television platforms (Google TV and Yahoo Connected TV, respectively) designed to connect your TV to your friends’ Facebook and Twitter are shoring up resources to tap into the social TV ad market. The two social media giants are vying to be the leader in key areas of the new technology, including “socially-targeted TV advertising, pay-TV content recommendation, TV show marketing, next-generation EPGs and interactive viewing.” Perhaps the most interesting point to ponder is the assertion that the dominant position will go to the platform that “is able to establish themselves as the primary way to connect with friends and exchange information” because those are two very distinct strengths, and one could argue that Facebook excels at the former while Twitter dominates the latter.

The NBA takes the plunge with Twitter’s new ‘promoted trends’ by sponsoring “LeBron James”

In an effort to harness some of the tremendous buzz around the free agency of hoops superstar LeBron James, the National Basketball Association took advantage of Twitter’s new promoted trends to bump the topic “LeBron James” to onto the list of trending topics. While it may seem like James’ name might already be a trending topic, the NBA hopes that sponsoring the term will drive users the league’s website instead of outside news sites. James also joined Twitter this week (@kingjames), gaining more than 150,000 followers in his first seven hours as a member.

Twitter Search volume up 33% since April

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced at the Aspen Ideas Festival this week that Twitter Search is handling 800 million queries per day, up from the 600 million per day he reported at the Chirp developers’ conference in April. While Twitter’s growth in user base is a major contributing factor, the value of the Search function’s ability to give insight into conversation trends and real-time information is driving major traffic for Twitter. This will likely have a huge impact on the site’s ability to generate revenue through its new ad platform.

YouTube, major film directors want to know what your day looks like

Renowned film directors Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald are partnering with YouTube to create a wholly user-generated documentary film about life on all over the world over the course of one day. Participants are being asked to film part of their day on July 24, 2010 for possible inclusion in the doc, which will debut at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. The project is interesting because it’s an extremely high-profile example of crowd sourcing content for repurposing as mainstream entertainment. Though this has been done numerous times (and with varying degrees of success) by brands in the past, YouTube’s project relies not on a prize or reward but on the public’s desire to share the intimate, mundane details of their personal lives. Sounds a bit like social media in general, doesn’t it?




June: Popular Posts

July 1, 2010

Posted by Edelman Digital

Follow on Twitter @edelmandigital


Tools To Measure Your Twitter Influence

I was a little reluctant to write this post because much of the Twitter community is fixated with follower count. I see many tweets, even in my own stream, of certain people announcing that they reached 500, 1,000, 5,000 Twitter followers as if it’s some sort of huge achievement like receiving a Grammy Award or something. Read more…

Tracking Twitter Trends

On any given day there are 750 tweets per second on Twitter for a total of 65 million tweets per day. With an overload of tweets daily it can be difficult to grasp what is really trending at any given moment. Use the tools below to quickly find current Twitter trends and trending conversations. Read more…

Visualizing The Web & Social Networks

Seeing is believing and visuals are powerful. I’ve collected a few visualization tools for Facebook, news feeds, and Twitter to let you view networks and conversations at a glance. Read more…

Advice For Future Interns

Even if the job market is booming, post-college internships are still important. Internships are a great way to learn more about a company or industry and help identify what you want to do as a career. Just like shoe shopping, it’s all about the right fit, and internships are a valuable way to find your fit. Read more…

Foursquare Launching Badge Rewards

What’s in badge? Many Foursquare users have been wondering whether or not acquiring all of those colorful circles would ever translate into something tangible, and Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley arrived at the Mashable Media Summit Tuesday armed with an answer Read more…




Quick Hits: July 1

July 1, 2010

Posted by Caleb Gardner

Edelman Digital, Chicago

Follow on Twitter @calebgardner



Mashable Live-Streams Social Media Day

Mashable’s Social Media Day, a day to “celebrate the revolution of media becoming social”, brought social media addicts together in meetups around the globe. How did they compensate for the time zone differences? By using Ustream to broadcast several of the meetups as they happened. Unfortunately, Chicago wasn’t one of the streams offered. What’s up, Mashable?

Twitter Moms Care for Content Over Coupons

An important study done by eMarketer that shows moms care about more than getting discounts. They want to read relevant, useful information that they can retweet. Here’s a highlight:

Check-In Apps Make Entertainment Social Again

A new round of social networks is trying to connect users with similar tastes in entertainment. The most popular, GetGlue, allows users to “check-in” to certain activities, such as reading a book, watching a TV program, or drinking a bottle of wine. The aim is to share a history of your offline activities in the hopes of connecting online. These kinds of sites are still growing, but I expect interest from brands to be just around the corner.

Social Networking Makes You Want to Cuddle

In my favorite news of the week, a fascinating study proves that the same chemical is released in the brain when connecting socially online as when falling in love: oxytocin (the “cuddle chemical”). If there was ever a biological reason for companies to enter the social space, here it is.

Posterous On A Mission to Be Your Blog/Photo Sharing Service/Everything

Posterous is making a bold move to get more users from other services. A few days ago, it announced on its blog that it was going to spend 15 days making it easy to switch from 15 different “dying” platforms. Obviously this didn’t sit well with its competitors, some of which went so far as to announce legal action against it.




Quick Hits: June 27

June 27, 2010

Posted by Amanda Mooney

Edelman Digital, Chicago

Follow on Twitter @amandamooney


Write Your Headline- Write the Future

In honor of the World Cup, Nike has launched the largest LED screen in Johannesburg to display fan-submitted messages from Facebook, Mixit, QQ, and Twitter in support of their favorite players. As NOTCOT reports, The messages will appear across the LED screen which triggers an animation of the player mentioned. The user is then pinged back with a photo of their headline on the Life Center”.

Facebook Nears 500 Million, Seeks World Domination and One Billion Users

500 million friends may not be enough, it seems. In an interview with Ad Age editor Abbey Klaassen, Zuckerberg expressed his interest in bringing in one billion global users. To do so, Facebook will need to step up its efforts in China, Japan, Korea and Russia. Currently, Russia is doubling sign-ups ever six months but it will take considerable effort to make this goal feasible. While Facebook has not shared specific strategies to user acquisition in Asia, we believe Facebook will need to consider providing locally-relevant adjustments to its platform to address the unique digital culture in each region. Additionally, the potential for Facebook to manage the data of over one billion web users will only further scrutiny of its privacy standards.

Facebook Integrates SEO Within Open Graph

As Facebook moves toward its goal of connecting one billion web users around the world, it will become an even more important source for search. To-date, search functionality has been rather limited but now, Open Graph will allow sites like TripAdvisor to optimize content for Facebook search results. This presents an enormous opportunity for brands to reach its growing userbase.

3D Sound Creates Incredible Mobile Gaming Experience

As Paul Bennun Somethin’ Else says, “With iPhone in hand and ear phones plugged into your lugs you can dive into this 90-minute psychological zombie thriller set in Papa Sangre’s evil mysterious palace, with the objective of saving the soul of the person you love. The game is set in complete darkness and the player has only sound to navigate through the story, aided by vibrations and movements. It’ll be different for every player, too; the pictures in your mind will be different from everyone else’s because audio can stimulate the imagination instead of replacing it”.

“Ummmm, my dad just friended me?!”

As eMarketer reports, 78.2% of teens online are active users of social media and no more than one-fifth of teens like having their parents in their network. 58% of younger teens “hate it” while older teens were more receptive to the idea of hanging out with their parents in their networks. If they happen to co-exist in the same community online, about one third of teens completely restrict access to their content. It’s important to consider this dynamic when planning a program targeted toward both parents and teens. They are still figuring out what they’re cool sharing with each other on their personal profiles and navigating a brand program that speaks to both of them may be a total turn-off for teens. Personally, my dad is still in my friend requests queue awaiting approval… We’ve talked about it. He’s cool with it. Oh, and he definitely has more friends than me on MySpace.




Quick Hits: June 18

June 18, 2010

Posted by Blagica Bottigliero

Edelman Digital, Chicago

Follow on Twitter @blagica


Twitter Launches Places

Ever wonder where folks are when they tweet? With Twitter Places, now you can. At first blush, it will be interesting to see where everyone physically is when tweeting the phrase, ‘I’m at the gym’. Imagine creating a graphic highlighting the various parts of the country’s tweeters who are currently partaking in some healthy activity. Marketers can use this data to provide real-time solutions to their consumers. Example: A large group of Chicagoans in Daley Plaza are tweeting about their much needed 2 pm coffee craving. Within minutes, Starbucks (a client) could appear and provide everyone with their mid afternoon caffeine fix.

Facebook Provides a Solution to Remove Former Page Admins

I’m sure you’ve been there: you set up a Facebook page for a friend, client non-profit organization, etc., but no longer manage the activity on that page. Enter Facebook’s new solution of old admin removal. Today, anyone assigned as an Admin on a Facebook page can be removed. This slight enhancement should encourage all Facebook admins to ensure that their pages are current.

$2.74M Awarded in Assisting with Local Content Creation

The yearly recipients of the Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge were announced this week. The Challenge awards recipients with funds to enhance local information. Of the 10 recipients, Windy City Citizen founder, Brad Flora, was rewarded $250,000 to create a real-time local ad network. By using the Facebook status messages and tweets from business owners, Nowspots aims to provide ad revenue to news sites, while providing timely and relevant information to the site’s visitor.

Now Available – The Vuvuzela App

The World Cup is in full force, as are the traditional horns used by soccer fans around the world. As you watch any World Cup match, don’t be surprised to see Vuvuzela chatter in your Twitter stream or Facebook Newsfeed. From broadcasters looking to muffle the sound to broadcasts to how-tos for removing the sound from one’s personal viewing experience, the Vuvuzela has become a meme. Should you like to continue with the trend, you can have your own Vuvuzela in your pocket or you can Vuvuzela any site on the web.




Quick Hits: June 10

June 10, 2010

Posted by Suzanne Marlatt

Edelman Digital, Chicago

Follow on Twitter @edelmandigital


New Launches in Search for Bing and Google

This week there were updates to both Google and Bing’s search platforms. Google announced their new search index called “Caffeine” which provides 50% fresher results for web search and it’s the largest collection of web content they’ve offered. This means your searches will produce more relevant content than ever before. Bing (client) released their social search which showcases trends, Twitter updates, and Facebook results all in one search. The results from Facebook will include status updates and shared links.

2/3 of US Internet users watch at least one video online per month

While 66% of US Internet users currently watch a least one video online per month eMarketer is estimating that by 2014 this number will rise to 77%. Within this study it is estimated that 18-24 year-olds watch the most video online and the 65+ age segment currently ranks last as a viewer group. As online video becomes more accessible via tablets, phones, laptops, and streaming devices I wonder if we will surpass the estimate eMarketer has in place?

Twitter To Begin Wrapping All Links With Official t.co Link Shortener

Twitter announced earlier this week that they will soon be rolling out an official URL shortener for all links shared on Twitter. Once this feature launches, all links shared via third-party clients or from Twitter web clients will be wrapped in the URL t.co/xxxx. Twitter has hinted that the new URL shortener will also tie in analytics.

Report: 23% Of People Over 50 Prefer Facebook As Their Social Network

A new report by AARP indicates that more than a quarter of Americans age 50+ use social networks. The most popular network is Facebook, followed by MySpace, LinkedIn, and finally Twitter. Another statistic from the study found that 49% of 50-64 year olds consider themselves extremely comfortable or very comfortable using the Internet. This research should be kept in mind when planning future social media programs.