Social Media Or Phone Book?

Social Media Or Phone Book?

Old habits die hard! Despite the rapid fall in percentage of people
looking for services through the yellow pages, business owners are
still bowing to the traditions and spending substantial amounts of
money on phone book advertising.

As you are reviewing your advertising budget I am sure you always have
in mind what's in it for you, and there is a time where you must make
an educated choice.

In a recent national radio interview one of the speakers was asked how
they did their searching for services like plumbers, or products like
restaurants in their neighborhood. One answered "I go online" and the
other one said "Word of Mouth".

In fact he revealed that he had expressively asked yellow pages NOT to
deliver the phone book to their place...But that request was declined
because the only credibility left to the phone book is its distribution!

Is it a better idea to rely on your website and your social media
marketing for your lead generation? Here are 5 reasons why the answer is
more and more overwhelmingly YES:

1.Unlimited Brand awareness
Using the web and in particular social media, there is no end to how much
information your can give about your brand. This is free, renewable
advertising real estate, with a unique chance to showcase your point of
difference. Buying this amount of space would be totally prohibitive in
print advertising

2.Interactive advertising
Online you are able to get instant feed back from clients about their
experience but also from people who haven't used your business yet. You
get to create a relationship before purchase

3. Instant Word Of Mouth
Social media marketing creates a conversation that may never happen at
the pub or around the dinner table. It also allows word of mouth to spread
between strangers. You can easily do your market research by surfing a business's
facebook wall

4. Standing Out Of The Crowd At No Extra Cost
Custom designed facebook fan pages are a key to initial interaction. As more
people use Facebook to do their research, many more businesses use custom
design to improve visitors' first impression. Check this tool to give a great
reason for visitors to "like" your page. Why buy a big expensive ad on the
phone book?

5. Controlling Brand Reputation
The Conversation you are having with your clients and prospects is a much more
credible way to control first impressions than dominating pages of print
advertising. This is where small to medium businesses have the opportunity to
compete on a level playing field, even with big companies

Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market

The emotional roller coaster captured on Twitter can predict the ups and downs of the stock market, a new study finds. Measuring how calm the Twitterverse is on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7 percent.

“We were pretty astonished that this actually worked,” said computational social scientist Johan Bollen of Indiana University-Bloomington. The new results appear in a paper on the arXiv.org preprint server.

Bollen and grad student Huina Mao stumbled on this computational crystal ball almost by accident. Earlier studies had found that blogs can be used to gauge public mood, and that tweets about movies can predict box office sales. An open source mood-tracking tool called OpenFinder sorts tweets into positive and negative bins based on emotionally charged words.

But Bollen wanted to build a more nuanced emotional barometer. He used a standard psychology tool called the Profile of Mood States, a quick questionnaire that is used frequently in pharmaceutical research or sports medicine.

The original questionnaire asks people to rate how closely their feelings match 72 different adjectives, including “friendly,” “peeved,” “active,” “on edge” and “panicky,” and uses the responses to measure mood along six dimensions: calmness, alertness, sureness, vitality, kindness and happiness.

Bollen and colleagues checked a huge Google database to see what other words are commonly used in conjunction with the original 72 adjectives, and added those words to their lexicon. Then the researchers took 9.8 million tweets from 2.7 million tweeters between February and December 2008, selected the tweets that indicated a confession of emotion (tweets that included the words “I feel” or “I’m feeling,” for instance), and ran the test on the entire data set.

“We’re using Twitter like a psychiatric patient,” Bollen said. “This allows us to measure the mood of the public over these six different mood states.”

As a sanity check, the researchers looked at the public mood on some easily-predictable days, like Election Day 2008 and Thanksgiving. The results were as expected: Twitter was anxious the day before the election, and much calmer, happier and kinder on Election Day itself, though all returned to normal by Nov. 5. On Thanksgiving, Twitter’s “Happy” score spiked.

Then, just to see what would happen, Mao compared the national mood to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. She found that one emotion, calmness, lined up surprisingly well with the rises and falls of the stock market — but three or four days in advance.

“I sank into my chair. That’s a pretty big result,” Bollen said. “It was one of those ‘Eureka!’ moments.”

But this surprising correlation said nothing about whether Twitter could be used to tell the future. To test that idea, the researchers trained a machine-learning algorithm to predict whether the stock market would go up or down, first using only the Dow Jones Industrial Average from the past three days, then including emotional data.

The algorithm did pretty well using stock market data alone, predicting the shape of the stock market with 73.3 percent accuracy. But it did even better when the emotional information was added, reaching up to 86.7 percent accuracy.

“Including this mood information leads to higher accuracy,” Bollen said. He stressed that their algorithm is highly simplified, and not the best stock market predictor anyone could come up with. But “we’re presuming on the basis of what we found, if you have some kind of super-duper algorithm and you add our time series, its accuracy will go up, as well.”

The fact that Twitter mood could predict the stock market’s movements even in the middle of 2008 is also significant, Bollen added.

“This was probably one of the most difficult periods to predict,” he said. “We had a presidential election, we had what looked to be financial Armageddon, we had the start of what has been the deepest and greatest recession since the 1930s… If our algorithm was able to predict Dow Jones Industrial Average in that period, we figured that may establish some kind of lower baseline. It could do a lot better in other periods of time.”

But why does it work? “The short answer is, we don’t know,” Bollen said. It’s reasonable to assume that people’s moods will have some effect on their investments, he says, but more research is needed to figure out exactly how.

“It’s a pretty interesting result,” commented computer scientist Sitaram Asur of HP Labs. But even though the correlation is there, Asur is reluctant to believe that the moods captured on Twitter can cause the stock market to change. Not everyone on Twitter plays the stock market, he notes, or even lives in the United States. And he would like to see the algorithm used on tweets from a wider span of time.

“If it is true, if we can actually find this correlation to be consistent, that will be a very important result,” he said. “But right now, I would be cautious about saying how important this is.”

Bollen agrees that the result has some shortcomings. “We need to expand this,” he said. The next step, he said, is to “put some of our money where our mouths are, and try to do this in real time.”

Social Media for Business is About Giving, Not Taking

Many organizations – and particularly businesses – still look at social media and wonder, “Where’s the value?” From their perspective, social media fails to deliver the goods. And the bad news is, from their perspective, it probably always will – because the question “What can I get out of social media?” misses the very point of social media.

At the heart of the misunderstanding is the question “Why is social media here?” Consider Facebook, for example. Was Facebook created to help users share their experiences and find like-minded people, or was it created to serve the needs of stalkers? Okay, that question was too simple. But if you change the second option to “to help corporations improve their profits by leveraging the social networks of unsuspecting users”, the answer would be the same.

Harsh, you say? Perhaps. At least from the business’ perspective. But from the average Facebook user’s perspective, corporations who use social networks to reach out only for financial gain are seen as outsiders – just short of “creepers” and “lurkers” (see Urban Dictionary).

By design, social media are venues for giving, not for taking. And to users, a participant’s motives are self-evident.

30 years ago, there would have been less scrutiny on organizations attempting to leverage social media for financial gain – had there been social media. In the ‘80s, it was cool to be a taker. Yuppies flaunted their earnings and their consumption, stocks (and retirement funds) were on the rise, and everyone-who-was-anyone expected to retire by age 55. Takers suffered a setback with stock market crash of 1987, but the mindset rebounded with great resilience, turning a blind eye to the footloose behavior of the ‘90s in favor of more big corporate gains. Then, with the new millennium, came the collapse of Enron, the creation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and a growing public distrust in corporations. To a new generation, “taking” was no longer cool. And it was this new generation that gave birth to social media.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that the current generation is innocent of “what’s-in-it-for-me” behavior. Quite the contrary. After all, this is the generation who brought us Napster (the illegal version) and Limewire. What I am saying is that the spirit of social media – from Myspace to Facebook to YouTube to Photobucket to Wordpress – is about sharing. Users turn to social media to share their ideas, their creations, their social circles, and their influence.

And as long as corporations engage with social media for the same reasons (or ostensibly the same reasons), then engagement can work.

Such examples of corporate sharing aren’t even difficult to find. Philanthropy is an obvious place to start, but stopping there would miss the point of social media. Because money isn’t the biggest asset in the social vault. Knowledge is.

So, start a dialog with your customers. Share your manuals (even on products you no longer support). Develop slide presentations that educate (not sell). Create infographics. Promote responsible behavior (which, for brewers, could include curbing sexism). Make a difference.

In brief, if you want to get something out of social media, you have to stop trying to take.