Financial Services Miss Social Media Opportunities With B2B Clients.

America just celebrated Independence Day, a reminder of the rhetoric from one Thomas Paine. Paine was a revolutionary intellectual and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His pamphlet, "Common Sense," was the most circulated piece of writing of its time and presented the American colonists with powerful arguments for independence from the British.

Though published in 1776, the method of Paine's influence is still a modern phenomenon. The instant popularity of Paine's pamphlet as it was near instantaneously  circulated amongst the American colonists closely mirrors the way social media can spread ideas today.

Paine's pamphlet was essentially a political blog, which now proliferate. Politicians are using social media because it's a way to engage people. Some tech-savvy politicians have even adopted the growing social platform FourSquare, a location-based social network that allows users to "check in" at locations. Consider Patrick Kennedy, a 27-year-old Democrat from Arkansas, and his campaign for Congress. Kennedy "checked in" when visiting constituencies, giving supporters the ability to stop by and meet with him.

Because social media presents an opportunity to engage with the public, it is also a crucial tool for businesses. Kennedy was the first congressional candidate to embrace FourSquare, but many businesses beat Kennedy to it. For example, Starbucks is using Foursquare to encourage customer loyalty and offer customer rewards. People who frequent Starbucks and use FourSquare to check in at retail locations earn customer rewards. In fact, the user who checks in most frequently can even earn discounts or free drinks.

Local businesses in Baltimore are starting to embrace FourSquare as well. Miss Shirley's and Ben & Jerry's are among the businesses using FourSquare to reward customer check-ins. Starbucks, along with many other businesses, have found that FourSquare can bring a significant increase in traffic and sales to any brick-and-mortar business.

Thomas Paine was limited by his means centuries ago–but we are not today. With ever-evolving technology and social networking tools, the public is now online and interacting with politicians, companies, and whoever else is ready to sign on.

The company is using traditional outlets such as print ads and television spots, but has also adopted tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube to spread their message. BP, which didn’t previously have a YouTube channel, now has one of the most subscribed channels with over 800,000 views.  BP also created a microsite dedicated to the oil spill cleanup operations, hosted on the company's main Web site. This is an important outlet to present up-to-date information on what viewers are interested in seeing.

BP was prudent to understand that the internet is a crucial part of spreading their message. However, the digital world is a transparent one – and BP is quickly learning this. Social media, although a great tool to convey content, is simply a tool. BP must still produce engaging content to communicate. Modern communication tools allow the message to spread easily, even if the message is that CEO Tony Hayward wants to get his life back.

BP had a very weak social media presence before the catastrophe and has been quick to adopt the tool as a means of communication. However, the effort certainly has its flaws. For example BP restricted the ability to comment on their Facebook page and disabled comments completely on their YouTube channel. These actions limit the effectiveness of social media, removing the conversational element that engages users. The company has improved their social media presence, but has made and continues to make mistakes in the process. Logging into the digital world, however, was not one of them.

Albeit a PR disaster, the situation does provide an interesting case study on how a company must adapt to the changing marketplace in order to communicate its message. Think your company may want to expand beyond the traditional outlets? It’s probably a good thought.

Read more about this campaign on Mashable

Simply put, the semantic web gives us more than just raw data; it shows us the context and relationships behind and between those data.

Student Kate Ray interviewed a flock of researchers, entrepreneurs and other innovators for her 14-minute documentary, Web 3.0. Ray is a journalism/psych major at NYU who has done extensive research on the semantic web. Her subjects include World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee, Hunch.com CEO and inventor Chris Dixon, and a host of other semantic web experts.

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

It is essential you give the participants, your clients and potential clients, the value they demand for their time. Anything from a free sample to a brief moment of humor to an informative anecdote can create value. What's important is that the participant is rewarded for their engagement. In return, the reward for your company is a new brand ambassador. Social marketing's effectiveness comes from the trust you create with your clients, your client's friends and your client's influencers. And the more brand ambassadors you create the greater your chances of success.

What value has your marketing efforts created for your clients today?

Nielsen analyzed over six months of survey data from 800,000 Facebook users in response to more than 125 Facebook ad campaigns from 70 different brand advertisers. After analyzing the data the study concluded that earned media and social advocacy contributed to Facebookers being much more likely to notice ads, absorb their content and make purchases.

The data clearly shows that the social advocacy of earned media played a substantial role in the performance of homepage ads on Facebook. According to the data, ad recall grew from 10% to 16%, awareness doubled from 4% to 8% and purchase intent quadrupled from 2% to 8%. That last metric is perhaps the most telling, and shows that when a Facebook user advocates for an ad, the ad is 4x more likely to result in a purchase.

In the organic impression department, Nielsen found that “those users exposed to both the ‘paid ad’ and the organic impression remembered the ad at three times the rate of those just exposed to the paid homepage ad,” and that “homepage ads increased awareness of the product or brand by 4% on average, but exposure to both homepage ads and organic ads increased awareness by a delta of 13% versus the control group.”

The bottom line is that the more the user was exposed to paid and earned media — with a combination of both packing a powerful punch — the greater the ad recall, awareness and purchase intent.

The study, which surveyed nearly 400 customers, showed that smartphones are taking on the defacto role in business communication.

Here are some highlights:

• Smartphones and intimate relationships tied at 40% for the number one thing respondents can’t live without.
• 79% of respondents use their smartphones to conduct most business calls, versus an office phone or home phone.
• 34% use a smartphone more than a computer for business. 7% even said they don’t take their laptops with them when they travel for business if they have a smartphone.
• 48% of respondents said that at least two-thirds of their phone communication is via smartphone.

None of this data is particularly surprising, except for the shift to using a smartphone as a primary business device. Thanks to platforms like Android and the iPhone, you really can do a lot of work from your mobile device.

This survey also underscores the importance of including a strong mobile strategy to your companies marketing initiatives. The growth of the mobile web has been exponential — and we’re still just at the beginning of this cycle. Based on the current rate of change and adoption, the mobile web will be bigger than desktop internet use by 2015. Now is the time to position your company for this transition.

Is your company positioned to take a strategic technological advantage over your competition?