Leveraging Social Marketing for Business, Sales and Startups

Following on to the post last month on leveraging social networks to build Web traffic, courtesy of YourBusinessChannel, filmed while in the UK with Ecademy, three more short videos have surfaced from our extended interview on the impact that social media tracking and activity can have for companies big and small on the Web - be it through connecting with potential customers, or simply expanding their brand. The three videos are embedded below - proving to me that I sound as tired as I felt, having just completed a five-hour presentation following the San Francisco to London Trip the day before.


Social Marketing Strategies a Boon for Business

Sales Advice for the Social Web


What Can Social Marketing Do for Startups?

Paladin Advisors Group: My Own "Stealth" Startup

Over the last four years on this blog, you have seen me talk a lot about hundreds of different startups and dozens of large enterprise companies. I have tried to share with you how I consume information and disseminate it outward to the many social networks. I let you know my thoughts on gadgets and hardware, and we have had open conversations about the culture of Silicon Valley, the future of blogging and social media, and we have discussed best practices and trends. But what we haven't talked about much is my job - because for the most part, this blog is as much about you as it is me. But over the last five to six months, I have been working on my own "stealth" startup, gaining clients - and it is soon coming time to tell you all about it. (Especially as Marshall Kirkpatrick mentioned it last night)


Marshall's Tweet from Last Night Deserved Answers
Paladin Advisors Group is a strategic advisory firm for startups and enterprise companies who are looking for guidance in their marketing, public relations, sales processes, customer influence, Web and social media. For the firm, which is a handful of partners large, I am the Managing Director of New Media.


Follow Us On Twitter at @PaladinAG
Over the last few months, I have been working with enterprise companies including Emulex Corporation, and startups, including Kosmix.com and My6sense. For startups, as I have done informally for years, I have been working with them on product feedback and focus, quality assurance and visibility. For enterprise companies, my focus has been on integrating social media and blogging into their strategies, aligning on messaging with PR, marketing and customer service.

As with the advisory roles I have gained with SocialToo, BuzzGain, ReadBurner and others, I will always provide transparency to you and full disclosure on any relationships - and I hope that over the last few years with my activity here and on the downstream social networks, I have gained your trust to provide clarity.

Why do I call this new venture "stealth"? Because it is new, and I haven't made a lot of noise about it. In fact, our Web site is under development. But you can follow us on Twitter to be notified as soon as we have more announcements. (http://twitter.com/paladinag)

And... if you think our services might be a fit for your business, e-mail me at lgray@paladinag.com.

Social Networks' Traffic Stabilizes, Facebook Nears Yahoo!

Facebook Up Slightly, MySpace and Twitter Flat to Down
Despite November being nearly half over, the monthly traffic statistics from October have just been released by Compete.com, and it looks like there are no major surprises in the social networking arena. Despite the recent improvements and continued hype, traffic to Twitter.com decreased slightly, by 2 percent, month over month, tracking at the level it saw in June of this year, and lower than the previous three months. Facebook, the #3 site overall worldwide, behind only Yahoo! and Google, climbed more than 3 percent, to almost 129 million, while MySpace stayed steady around 50 million unique visitors (15th overall).


FriendFeed and Posterous Decline - While Twine Plunges
Where one saw more movement was in the lower tiers, as FriendFeed continued its descent following the Facebook acquisition, shedding nearly 7 percent of visitors, dropping below the 700k mark, from a one-time peak above 1 million, and Posterous dropped more than 12 percent, showing just under 1.2 million visitors. Twine, which once peaked above 2 million, is now just over 120,000.


Yahoo!'s Slow Decline Comes as Facebook Rises Toward the #2 Spot
Facebook's slow but steady growth actually has them looking less in the rear view mirror, toward companies like Twitter (who scored 23 million uniques vs. Facebook's 129 million) and more at the big gun right ahead of them - Yahoo!, which continued its slow descent, dropping just over 1 percent, to 135 million unique visitors. In fact, one more month with the same trajectory would have both networks tied at about 133 million visitors, so we could see a change in placement come November.


Google's Position at #1 Remains Unchallenged (Shown With YouTube)
Unsurprisingly, Google reported in at #1, again, counting almost 150 million unique visitors in the month, according to Compete (which in my opinion is probably low). In addition, the company's YouTube subsidiary tracked just under 85 million unique visitors, good enough for the #5 position worldwide on its own. GMail continued its climb to another 9.3 million visitors, up 98% from this point last year.

Surprisingly, GMail's position is more than 3 times higher than that of Hotmail.com, which has even been surpassed by Apple's Me.com MobileMe e-mail offering. Me.com sported 3.5 million visitors, growing 98% year over year, contrasted with Hotmail's 2.5 million, which decreased 7 percent, according to Compete.


LinkedIn Stays Hot - See Versus Twitter
Interestingly, during the recession, with high unemployment, LinkedIn.com traffic increased 3.3 percent in the month to 15.5 million unique visitors, up 89% on the year. Monster.com, the massive job site, tracked in with 41.5 million unique visitors, good for #20 in the world, up 47% on the year.

Some other sites of note:

• Apple.com traffic tracked at 21.4 million, compared to 15.5 million for hp.com and 13.4 million for Dell.com.
  
• Digg.com traffic decreased less than 1 percent, up 57% on the year, good for 43 million uniques.
  
• Technorati.com traffic was flat, with only 2.8 million unique visitors.

Disclaimer: Compete statistics are known to be imperfect, but they are always interesting.

Attacking the Web's Beverly Hills and Schenectady Problem

Not too long ago, every new site you joined on the Web forced you to provide a daunting array of details about you in order to join. Full pages of pull-down menus asking about your date of birth, your marital status, your home address and other information was standard. But over the last few years, with advents such as OpenID, OpenSocial, Facebook Connect, and more recently, Twitter OAuth, personal identities are becoming portable - letting you sign in with a dedicated login to a new site, and reducing your need to store yet another password.

Kevin Marks, vice president of Web services at BT, formerly of Google and Technorati, relayed at the Defrag Conference this afternoon that under the old way, companies, after accumulating a high number of users, would often find they had an extremely high number of users responding they lived in either Beverly Hills or Schenectady, New York. Why? Because they were saying their zip codes were either 90210 or 12345. They were lying - sick of answering page after page of personal data for yet another Web site.

In the years since, thanks to efforts like OpenSocial, we have seen the rise of Web standards that interoperate, letting you pass along your personal information and credentials to new sites without having to create yet another user name and password.

"Over the last two years, we worked out the sanitization of protocols, so it could fetch things from one site to another," Marks said. "In that time, OpenSocial is up to 1 billion users. There are sites all over the world who are using this."

Marks broke down the solution to the real identity problem into four pieces:

• Me
  
• My Friends
  
• What We Do
  
• The Flow

Tools like OpenID and WebFinger solve for "Me", Portable contacts, through the unification of the Vcard specification, solve for "My Friends", activity streams solve for "What We Do", and new protocols like AtomPub, PubSubHubbub and Salmon are solving the "Flow". As you know, I have been a big proponent of tools like PubSubHubbub, Salmon and tools like Facebook Connect and Twitter OAuth, as they not only pass along data between sites, but also make data pass between sites more quickly. And while they are causing what could be considered a revolution, it is happening through the simple evolution of activity that is already happening.

"All these standards are empirical standards," Marks said. "We first did this with microformats. We asked what people are doing already, and agreed we would do the same thing."

Now, if you do tell companies you live in Beverly HIlls or Schenectady, New York, there's a greater chance that you really do, and maybe we'll believe you.