A version of the following entry is cross-posted today on Chicago Carless.
Last month on Chicagosphere, I wrote a popular post about how social media helped save a financially struggling local business. Unfortunately, social media wasn't enough to save a popular Oak Park coffee shop. Lido's Caffé, the home of a longstanding coffee klatsch that germinated on Twitter--my coffee klatsch--succumbed to the ailing economy last week. Yet in the shop's failure is a lesson in online community--and how to translate it to real life.
A new survey from comScore this week (reported in TechCrunch) suggests that social media has a positive effect of holiday purchases. Last week, the survey firm asked 425 shoppers nationwide about their buying habits this holiday season. As many as 28% said that social media had affected their purchasing decisions this year, including online product reviews and Facebook and Twitter posts from friends and trusted influencers.
Local bloggers can lose a lot of sleep figuring out how to boost their traffic numbers. Following a cardinal rule from the world of public relations might help. Don't just know who your audience is today: know who you want your audience to be tomorrow. Answering three simple questions right now will help you determine who those audience members should be...and how to reach them.
Last week, local dining-industry PR shop
Restaurant Intelligence Agency wrote a blog post telling clients to
concentrate on exclusive media pitches or risk being blackballed by angry reporters. As long as three years ago, however, media watchers began warning that exclusives can actually do more harm than good in a highly interactive, Web 2.0 media world. Who's right?
Anyone who's ever followed anyone on Twitter will be aware of my biggest pet peeve about the world's leading micro-blogging service: impersonal, automated Direct Messages, or DMs, thanking you when you follow (i.e. subscribe to the updates of) a fellow Twitter user. Perhaps the worst of these canned-ham responses are the ones immediately inviting you to join the person you've just followed on Facebook.
The assumption seems to be all social networking sites are the same: if you like me here, you'll love me over there. The Internet is a bad place to make assumptions like that. Twitter and Facebook couldn't be farther apart in the ways--and the whys--their respective communities mingle with each other. Here are four reasons why bloggers using Twitter shouldn't push their Facebook pages on their followers, told from the perspective of a hapless new follower.
