Last week Facebook announced several important changes to their user experience and Open Graph at their annual f8 developer conference. Those changes have important implications for how users consume and share content, how brands need to approach content development and seeding, and how 3rd-party sites...
In the immediate aftermath of the now-epic Old Spice Guy YouTube response campaign, Facebook fan interaction spiked by 800%, the brand's Twitter following grew by 2700%, 1.4 billion impressions were generated, and more importantly, product sales surged 27% over six months to establish Old Spice...
In my first post on this topic, I outlined four different approaches to calculating social media return-on-investment (ROI): Direct, Correlated, Relative, and Proxy. There's a reason for that order: if you can calculate direct ROI for any of your campaigns or programs, and it's not...
It has become the great debate in social media marketing: "What's the ROI? How do you measure it?" Or more directly put: "Does it work? How can you tell?" Beyond being a hot topic for pundits to debate, social media return-on-investment (ROI) is something we...
Simply put, some industries are just better positioned for success in social media than others, and the cruise industry is a perfect example. They have a fun product, one that creates life experiences and stories which cruisers love to share with their friends, and which...
When Facebook announced last week the launch of Deals - in effect, the missing business component of their Places location-based check-in functionality - almost lost in all the buzz about mobile coupons and loyalty programs was talk of what I think may be one of...
In case you hadn't heard, Facebook launched yet another category-redefining feature last week. This time they shook up the still-emerging world of geo-location services, where buzz-worthy startups like Foursquare, Gowalla and Booyah (MyTown) had been steadily and somewhat quietly testing models, adding features, and building...
Each time a significant new development hits the social media landscape, the Ignite team will pull together a short analysis of the impact it might have on our clients. "Significant" in this case is pretty simple to define - if it creates new opportunities, or...
Enterprise business intelligence analysts are getting a new toy to play with, this one addressing the rapidly evolving field of social media analytics. SAS, practically our neighbor just up the road in Cary, NC, launched their new Social Media Analytics solution this past week in...
Number one: What's your objective?
Number two: How are you going to measure it?
These two questions aren't revolutionary - they're among the first questions that should be asked at the start of planning for any new project. Yet they often seem to get...
"Brand ambassador" is one of those fungible terms in marketing - it could mean fans who are just really passionate about a brand or product and share their love on their own accord, or it could mean a branded, deliberate program by a company to...