followers

Madonna’s first on twitter

Madonna entered the show. She’s finally on Twitter. And what a show it has been since her live debut  on twitter  as #MadonnaMDNAday!! The account’s got over 88,000 followers and she held a live discussion with fans with over 240 tweets in the little time she spent online on 5th April. That’s to celebrate a week from her release of the new MDNA album.

Madonna "From tonight's Twitter live chat." 05 April 2012
Madonna tweeting on 05 April 2012. Source: Madonna's Facebook Page: "From tonight's Twitter live chat."

Click here to like the above image on Madonna’s Facebook Page.

I’d have said Lady Gaga followed the queen of pop in almost everything… but this time round, Madonna is the later comer to the scene. I’ve written about Gaga on YouTube and Twitter in the past, and also compared her to Obama’s performance online. Madonna’s personalised tweet to Barack Obama is “#Obama2012: Are you coming to my show in Washington, D.C.? Make a girl from Detroit happy.” Twitter dev has put together a list of her other more famous tweets. In case you almost forgot about the exchange of pleasantries during that MTV Awards night in 2003, Madonna also asked Britney to go on stage and do it again… “please come on stage and kiss me again. I miss you!!”

Madonna could probably bash every twitter record! But this may also be the end of her appearance there. After all, the tweet that announced the live session said “Madonna joins Twitter for one day only to answer fan questions and celebrate the release of her MDNA album. Got a question? #AskMadonna”. The account used for the lives session (#MadonnaMDNAday) has not sent any tweets since.

What’s next?

Kia “I Like It” – is integration with Siri next?

I thought that “I like” was a facebook fans thing. But it, along with the FB thumbs-up icon, are now being used by Kia in a global marketing campaign to attract more followers.

At no point does the ad ask you to go and “like” Kia’s facebook page. I found the ad on YouTube in Italian and German after having seen it on TV. The respective facebook pages each have about 35,000 likes.

The real success is in the global page with 1.1 million + followers. The “I like Kia” section is consistent on country pages. And this resonates well with what Doug Schumacher from Zuum, reveals about Kia’s extraordinary 17% increase in facebook fans in 2 weeks (Full report here).

Kia comes with a 7 year warranty. Reliable.

Kia adopts the term closest to facebook, “Like” as part of its brand. Social.

A reliable car manufacturer that is fast becoming part of the social fabric. The next thing we know, it will be tethering an internet connection with your iPhone, taking commands on Siri and giving you personalised updates as you drive. I like it.

KIA “I Like” Brand website

Inside Facebook Insights

Previous posts on How to build a succesful Social Network and Social Media Campaign Fundamentals both stress the importance of understanding how to measure the effectiveness of the network and campaign used to build it. Facebook Insights is one of the tools provided specifically for the purpose.

But Insights are not easy to interpret and I am glad that the Product Guide for Facebook Page Owners is an excellent document for anybody who wants to make sense of the numbers.

For example, one would ask: how well am I doing with the increase in people who “like” my page? Where are they coming from? You can tell how many people liked your page after they found it linked on another person’s profile (who already “likes”your page). You can tell how many people arrived directly to your page, and so understand how effective the link in your email signature, or on your blog, actually is. There are other monitored sources such as stories displayed in people’s news stream, ads, suggestions people make to their friends and recommendations made by FB.

But “likes” are hardly the only important thing! What is the conversion rate to page views and active interactions? How do you know if activity is happening on your page or outside and does it matter for you? Do you want to bring followers and fans closer to you – directly to your page? Then maybe you should be considering ways of growing your Facebook page following.

Good luck! Post this post to your Facebook and encourage people to comment!

How to build a succesful Social Network

In my post Social Media Campaign Fundamentals I spoke about how to start the journey and how to monitor the success of that journey. Enhancing the chances of success of that journey is the purpose of this blog post. A journey in social media is as succesful as one’s “social” capabilities – the art of living together or enjoying life in communities or organized groups[1].

Let’s figure that you start a Facebook page and start posting interesting content. Naturally, you will speak about with your friends and they will come and visit. They will like your page. And they will return every now and again to monitor what you’re saying, because your activity alerts others when you post. This is presumably not the only thing you want because as we go along in time only the friends who are really interested in your area of activity will come and visit.

What you want is social networking and thus, to put together the largest possible following from the extended community around you. This is where your friends, and then their friends, bring others and your online community extends beyond those people that know you directly. Use your activity in the community to indirectly bring in members of that community to you by linking to your page and building your own succesful social network:

  1. Do not spam or harass people as this is counterproductive.
  2. If you are active in the online community already, it’s easier. But if you aren’t, you will easily integrate especially if you are already known offline. Join the online communities that matter – ask yourself and your friends which are the relevant existing pages or groups on Facebook; people you should link with on LinkedIn and Twitter; blogs that already discuss the subject.
  3. Become active by commenting positively on other people’s activity, contributing useful content you find on the web, and posting links to your blog (if you set one up). You may be recognised as an expert in your physical community and this gives you an edge on a newcomer to the area because you will know how to tackle an argument and building a followup. It will be a challenge to extend or replicate this on the Internet, just like building a community of followers on any open broadcast medium like TV. Be selective and sensitive to the nature of a blog when deciding what to say in your contribution to it because you are doing this to attract (not push away) people to your own page or blog.

Good luck building your social network!


[1] Definition thanks to Princeton WorldNet – a lexical database for English

googlegoesgaga… Lady Gaga does it again!

In my post of Feb 9th, I compared Obama to Lady Gaga. She had 8 million followers then, a number which increased at the rate of over 20,000 every day to count 8,831,651 as I write. Lady Gaga hasn’t been sleeping on her online success and followed on the steps of Obama / Biden’s “Transition Project” (December 2008) which allowed any registered user to make or vote on questions that the Whitehouse then answered.

Since then YouTube put together the Worldview Channel and Barack Obama was back to answer questions in January 2011, followed by UK Prime Minister David Cameron, US Parliament Speaker Joe Boehner and now… Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Lady Gaga’s official YouTube channel now allows people to ask questions and vote for the most popular ones which she will answer. This Gaga project is open till the 18th March and, with this degree of openness, the star has joined a league of world leaders conquering web 2.0 tools to engage with her fans! The woman does not stop there with social media! She accepts questions also over Twitter with any tweet tagged #GoogleGoesGaga being syndicated directly to the channel and qualifying for voting. And in her own words…

Millions must be searching for “Lady Gaga” on Google as that term scores 69/100 in Query Popularity on Alexa. This especially when compared to “Barack Obama” (52/100); “Obama” (57/100); and “Whitehouse” (40/100).

The question submission and voting uses Google Moderator. It was launched in September 2008 and first used with a bang the following December in the Obama / Biden Transition Project – “Open for Questions”. Since then Change.gov, the project’s website, has now closed. Google Moderator continues to make crowd-sourcing a reality and is now a freely available API.

Twitter puffs as Barack Obama quits!

Barack has put up the barricade and quit smoking! Back in June 2009, Obama had admitted to the occasional puff. But now, according to wife Michelle, he’s been clean for about year. Congratulations Mr. President! But what does this have to do with a blog that talks about what’s happening in the digital world?

Michelle Obama broke the news of the anniversary of the last puff to reporters at the Whitehouse yesterday. The BBC and the Guardian reported it in the UK along with many other papers. Google grabbed it and put it on Google News. But I got to know through Twitter… as literally thousands of people found this event to be of great value to their own cause of quitting smoking. I just searched ‘Obama smoking’ in Twitter and a few minutes ago somebody said “Yayyy Obama quit smoking. If the president can do it, anyone can. :)” And I guess that Melissa’s 860+ followers  will be pleased to share that point of view. So, thank you Michelle for bringing such good example from your household to the world at large. Twitter did the job of bringing it to the masses – even those who don’t care about this type of news. Power of the internet.

Twitter now has over 190 million users (source: Quantcast as quoted in Wikipedia). It’s users are said to generate about 65 million tweets – short, 140 character messages which can be broadcast or directed specifically to other users. I looked up the more successful tweeters of all times and Lady Gaga has over 8 million followers with just over 600 tweets in the last three years. Lady Gaga’s followers increased by over 10 thousand a day ever since the 21st January! So how does this compare to Barack Obama? He follows less people (145,000 when compared to Gaga’s 700,000) and gets less followers (6.6 million). He also tweets more. Yet that’s comparing an American President to one of the top performing pop performers who has sold over 55 million records!