I quickly tried to take stock of my qualifications. I had written a book on social media and I serve as Chief Strategist at a social media marketing firm. Check. But what about my academic qualifications? Well, I went to college. I have taught a few courses at colleges and graduate schools, both the traditional standup variety as well as the new online courses. My books have been used as college textbooks. And my oldest daughter was in the throes of her college selection process. While not devoid of experience, it felt like my academic experience for this project was a bit on the shallow side.

So, I decided that I’d apply the experience I do have–more than 30 years in business–to see if some of the behaviors that I’ve noticed in those organizations have any parallels to academia. Was more of my experience relevant than I’d first thought?

So, both as we prepared the survey questions and as we checked the results, I tried to consider how social media might be playing out inside universities in similar ways to how these communication tools have infiltrated businesses. Now, I understand that there are limits to how much that applies. While both companies and colleges are communities, students are far more close-knit, I believe, than the average group of employees–and they have a relationship-building shared time line that is far rarer in business. Still, there is very much the sense that younger people are more comfortable with social media in both kinds of institutions, even while the older people wield the authority. Those in charge in both places also know that they somehow must acclimate themselves to this new tool in order to remain relevant to those young people that they lead.

I also sense that there is more than a fair dose of fear in those leaders. Fear that they are not up to the task of mastering (or even understanding) social media and even a fear that they will look silly even to try. In business, many of the leaders have tried to get the younger folks to “do” social media on behalf of the company, only to find that they don’t have the understanding of the business and of customers to do it well.

The results of the survey bear out some of these parallels.

The greatest use of social media among faculty is YouTube videos, which might skew towards people assigning videos to watch (or viewing them in class), rather than creating the content themselves. It is common in business to see less usage of Twitter, blogs, and other forms that more likely demand creation rather than mere consumption. Our survey showed similar results in academia. Less creation of content might be an indication of the fear we noted above, or less confidence in the skills of creation vs. those of curation (selecting the right content developed by others).

One surprise for me is that usage of social media in academia far outpaces that of business. Our survey shows that over 90% of faculty uses social media either for professional purposes or actually in their classes, or both. Contrast this to the mere 47% of employees who use social media in the workplace (McKinsey, 2010). Despite the expectations by business people that academics are behind the times and cloistered in a slower-changing environment, nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to social media. The wide disparity between professional social media usage between academics and business people marks the modern company as one that is far slower to change at least in this respect.

It’s trite to say that professors can learn a lot about social media from their students. They obviously do. Perhaps a more interesting conclusion is that business people can learn a lot about social media from professors. Today’s students, who will form the next wave of professors and business people, will show no such timidity in their use of social media. Today’s professors and business people can learn from each other to keep up.

Comments

Such musing is a way to introduce some new stats from internet monitoring and analyst firm Pingdom on how the internet has exploded in growth since the beginning of this century, in just ten years. If the 1990s were the time of embryonic development, experimentation and no way ready for a global mass market, then the 2000s – especially since 2005 – were the time for the start of enabling a mass market to develop around the world that enables people anywhere with a connection to the internet to do amazing things.

In the words of Pingdom:

Here is how much the Internet has grown since the year 2000.

There were only 361 million Internet users in 2000, in the entire world. For perspective, that’s barely two-thirds of the size of Facebook today.

The chart really says it all. There are more than five times as many Internet users now as there were in 2000. And as has been noted elsewhere, the number of Internet users in the world is now close to passing two billion and may do so before the end of this year.

The Internet hasn’t just become larger, it’s also become more spread out, more global.

1. In 2000, the top 10 countries accounted for 73% of all Internet users.
2. In 2010, that number has decreased to 60%.

This becomes evident when viewing the distribution of Internet users for the top 50 countries in 2000 and in 2010. Note how much “thicker” the tail of the 2010 graph is.

That’s one heck of a 5″>long tail.

Read Pingdom’s post for more detail including comparing top countries then and now, and how internet use in Nigeria has grown by a whopping 21,891 per cent. Must be all that email traffic with offers of “Cheap Viagra®” (have you noticed how those emails always include the registered trademark symbol?) and “genuine fake Rolex” that we all get.

In any case, it really is amazing to see the extent to which the internet has become an essential tool for connecting people around the world in such a short time. Pingdom bases its analysis largely on data from Internet World Stats, itself a very useful information source.

I wonder what 2020 will look like. That’s only ten short years way.

Comments

That chart, seen below, seemed to show that social media usage in almost all forms had leveled off or even dropped depending on the type of social media in question.

Of the most interest to me was the drop in usage of blogs by the SMB crowd. While I understand why this might be happening, it is somewhat discouraging to see it happening for real.

I understand because maintaining a blog that is worth the time is a drain. It’s a drain on time and just about every other resource at the SMB’s disposal. The trouble is, most things that have a higher cost also have a higher value. Blogging is definitely one of those.

Yes, it’s hard to find time to write. Yes, it can be hard to determine what to write about. Yes, the act of writing itself makes getting a root canal seem like a Caribbean vacation to many. All that aside, I still don’t think there is a more valuable way to express expertise and to support just about every action in your business than through a well thought out and executed blog.

As for the rest of the social media options out there? It looks like people are staying with (although not necessarily increasing usage of) outlets like Facebook. Why is that? I suspect because many people find it easier to post a quick Facebook update than they do to craft a blog post. I get that but I don’t really agree with it.

Here is my quick list of recommendations to the SMB’s that want to win at the Internet marketing and social media game.

1. Offer a strong blog for your business (if applicable) at any cost. It tells the story that supports sales efforts, backs up referrals, gives existing customers another touch point with you and so much more.
2. Use social media for its real strengths, which are customer satisfaction, industry reputation, brand and personal reputation building for the general public. Social media is not necessarily the lead generation panacea that many tout it to be. If you take the pressure off that aspect, then you will still get leads and they may even be very well qualified.
3. Commit the time and resources to research what you need rather than chasing after every suggestion you find when searching Google for “SMB social media” (unless of course you find results that are attached to my activities )
4. Work with the reality of social media for the SMB and not the fantasy of the image of social media as the beginning and end all for the woes of the SMB market.
5. Stick with it and work it. Have you ever heard the phrase “Plan the work and work the plan”? No better advice for social media and the SMB. It’s not easy but it has real benefits when applied correctly.

So while the numbers may indicate that the love affair between SMBs and social media may be cooling off a little, maybe it’s just the lust of the initial attraction that is gone. Now it’s time to see how the relationship will work for the long term and see just what it can mean to a business to be friends with social media and not fall in lust with it.

Comments

Dave’s Answer:

In its quest to be all things to every user, Facebook has again tweaked its interface, adding a feature that Yahoo Answers has had for eons, that Google’s experimented with variously, that’s been part of LinkedIn for a while, and that’s obviously near and dear to my heart with Ask Dave Taylor: the ability to ask your followers and fans a question.

On Facebook, it’s called “Ask Question”, ingeniously enough, and it’s actually pretty neat how they’ve integrated it into the newsfeed and interface, though I’m sure not everyone agrees. Maybe we should ask them!

More seriously, I will also say that in the week or two since the feature was released, I haven’t seen a single question show up in my news, so perhaps it’s not getting the widespread adoption that the Facebook team were hoping?

Anyway, on your main page, instead of the status box ready for input, there’s now a little strip of links along the top, one of which is “Ask Question”:

You can see here that I’ve clicked on “Ask Question” and typed in what I believe is a perfectly reasonable question (at least if you’ve seen the daft film Monty Python and the Holy Grail). To submit the question, I click on the “Ask Question” button and, since it’s the first time I’ve asked a question…

Yeah, yeah, I’m good with this. I click on “Ask Question” and it offers the ability for me to add photos, add a further description, even turn it into a poll (that’s cool!). I can also add topics, which are presumably keywords, but I’ll skip it all and just choose “Done”.

Now in my newsfeed – and presumably that of everyone I’m friends with – this shows up:

A short time later my friend Steve pops up with the correct answer:

Notice here that I can vote the answer helpful / not helpful by clicking on the buttons. Nice. In fact, I like Q&A systems that let you vote on the value of an answer, so I have to say that Facebook took its time and did a very nice job implementing the Ask Question feature. Now the real question: is anyone going to use it?

Comments

Tweetshare Tweetshare as the site says is the Facebook fan page taken to the next level. Certainly it moves beyond Facebook to blogs, YouTube and so on where users can share content and receive feedback on their work by creating Twitter Pages around their content or brand. It works in a very simple way.

Tweetshare turns every comment about your content into a tagged Tweet that is shared with the Twitter community, virally promoting your content.   Tweetshare thus integrates your content directly into the Twitter stream.

ComTweets is like Linkedin in Twitter. More precisely, it is a community for businesses on Twitter where companies and organizations come together under one hood to interact and communicate amongst the coworkers. Sign in with your company email address and soon you will be connected to your co-employees. You may then share messages, comment on other’s posts, also interact with customers and use the tool for marketing your brand or products.

TheCadmus Cadmus gives relevance the prime spot in its service model. To elaborate, Cadmus is a real time service that can be used to manage the Twitter stream (also Friendfeed and RSS) by displaying the most relevant content since the last time you logged in to your account. It therefore removes the clutter of the old posts clogging up the streams and also draws out the trending topics that are hot amongst the people you follow keeping you updated all the time eliminating the chances of missing out any conversation.

Twaitter One of the most widely used Twitter apps for business is used by companies to promote their products and interact with their customers. With a number of features like tweet calendar, managing multiple accounts through Ping.fm integration, forming groups, multi-account management and so on, TwAitter is a potential player in the business app market. They even offer a translator to post tweets in any language of your choice.

Twitterfeed Almost all of us are well aware of this app, as TwitterFeed offers the most seamless way of automatically managing the feeds from your website posting them directly to social networks. It also keeps track of these feeds providing real time stats to analyze the performance of your Twitter marketing.

Twitterlive Twitterlive falls along the along same lines as Twitterfeed and allows users to post the feeds automatically to Twitter, track the clicks and collect real-time traffic data.

SpokenTwit Why write updates when you can speak and tweet? That’s exactly what this Twitter app allows users to do. All you need to do is register your phone number that will be used for tweeting and chirp around. The spoken tweets will display in your twitter stream.

Nsyght This app allows users to aggregate, share, and search their twittersocial graph in real time. Nsyght also supports threaded discussions, email alerts, inline video and photo display, and support for other services like Facebook, Digg, Stumbleupon, Flickr, Vimeo, Delicous, and Last.fm.

Buzzom Buzzom is a one stop solution for all your needs giving the best of features to manage your Twitter account in the most efficient way. Finding people from the gigantic list of Twitter users could have never been made so seamless. Buzzom is the only known Twitter app to offer people search based follow. Automatically grow your network by following the people that match your interests, follow back those who follow you or flush ones who don’t.

The premium version takes the Twitter experience a step ahead by allowing users to view their twitter performance through stats, scheduling tweets to stay active on Twitter even when they are not available, managing the direct messages and spam easily and posting updates to different social networks from one place. 

A very new feature of the brand management gives businesses an opportunity to launch their Twitter campaigns and monitor their performance amongst their target audience.

Comments

Why should the music industry care? Just as Apples iTunes App Store opened up new avenues to  deliver and monetize music, the Chrome Web Store will offers a new opportunity to reach a much larger set of potential customers – anyone with a computer or web enabled device.

For example, an artist or label could sell a web app with music plus bonus content. Another could sell access to a complete audio and video catalog or a regularly updated stream of content.  The possibilities are endless. Google has just provided a music bigger sandbox to experiment in and a much clearer path to monetization.

Comments

Pandora was the clear leader among adults in the US who have listened to online-only radio in the past year:

1. Pandora 42%
2. Rhapsody 6%
3. last.fm 5%
4. Yahoo! (5%)

In The UK & Canada -

In the UK, where Pandora is not legally available but the music streaming service Spotify is, broadcast radio holds a clear edge for listening. A total of 31% of UK smartphone and iPod Touch users said they listened to broadcast radio in the past week using the apps on their device, compared to 21% who reported listening to web-only radio or streaming services.