Stories about viral messages creating unprecedented demand make great reading. Don’t be fooled by the hype. You are more likely to win the lottery than create a profitable idea virus. Inflated expectations reduce your credibility and increase your risk.

Setting realistic goals, objectives, and expectations is the best thing you can do for your initiative.

The low barrier to social media entry

Article source: RSS http://socialmediatoday.com/debraellis/241553/setting-realistic-social-media-goals-objectives-expectations

You may be thumbs up when it comes to flashing a smiley face or any of the canned emoticons that functionally do nothing for your personal brand image. Emoticons are the equivalent of wearing the same dress or jacket everyone wears. My mother who was a fashion designer had an expression for that: “You see yourself coming and going.” In other words: you’re just like everyone else. Or, worse for personal brands: you are like ANYONE else.

You become a commodity

Not that it’s a fatal error to slip in a snoozing or

Article source: RSS http://socialmediatoday.com/danshwabel/241505/not-emoticon-emotion

With the annual celebration of Thanksgiving upon us here in the U.S., many people pause to think about what they’re thankful for: family, friends, TiVo, the Yankees not winning the World Series…

I’m thankful for all of those things too of course, but also for the development and growth of social media. Here are a few reasons why:

Social media makes it easy to reconnect with old friends and co-workers. How did we do this before? There were ways: reunions, phone calls…but most often, we just didn’t. Now, social media tools like Facebook and LinkedIn make it easy and

Article source: RSS http://socialmediatoday.com/tompick/241639/5-reasons-i-m-thankful-social-media

When was the last time you challenged your audience?  I’m not talking about running a contest to see who can post the most ridiculous YouTube video or how many people will donate to your website. Any greedy moron can challenge people that way.

Writing online comes down to two things, informing  your audience or entertaining them.  The great authors are able to do both at the same time, and the very best are able to add another layer of challenge onto that.  That’s what I want to be reading.

I don’t want to read another half-assed lesson on how to make LinkedIn

Article source: RSS http://socialmediatoday.com/jay-dolan/241793/why-aren-t-you-making-me-think

Loyal customers are the holy grail for most businesses. However, most brand and customer loyalty programs totally miss the mark.

A key focus of many programs is rewarding customers with points for purchases. However, when you use this as the cornerstone of your loyalty program, your customers become fans of your program instead of your brand. This more closely resembles bribery and while bribery can be highly effective in the short term, it almost never works over the long term.

If and when another competitor offers more points per purchase,

Article source: RSS http://socialmediatoday.com/joeyt/241653/humanization-customer-loyalty

There is no doubt that when it comes to internet innovation Google definitely has some great tools and I will admit to be an advocate of Google. If at any point I need to search for something online, I simply “Google it”.

However, last week while talking about Facebook and Google in the office something was brought to my attention. One of my colleagues questioned if Google focuses too much on the back end of their social media initiatives, rather than on the social aspect. Do they approach their social media projects

Article source: RSS http://socialmediatoday.com/buzzersation/241326/google-socially-awkward

Dollars. Cash. Money.

That’s how our society, by and large, judges the success of an enterprise, a business, an organization or a company. But, are we truly successful simply because we’ve made a lot of money? I don’t think so.

Most of us want the same thing, at the end of the day. We want to be better. Better people, better professionals, better friends, better husbands, better wives, better bosses, better employees. And, I think that is a worthy goal. There are a lot of tools at our disposal to help us

Article source: RSS http://socialmediatoday.com/andrew-gall/241705/make-your-business-better-social-media