Tag: facebook - Page 2

I have just spent over a week in regional and rural North Queensland. In the past few years, I have travelled north for a couple of reasons, but namely for work and for a charity I set up in the rural township of Charters Towers.

It's been humbling and a great reminder of what is important in life.

What was once a hobby can now be a lucrative career, as social media becomes a unique branch within a company’s communications department.

If you don’t believe me check out all the ads for social media experts that now pervade seek.com.au. They are many and varied and companies will pay six figures for the right person.

Analyst group Merrill Lynch recently found that spending among women in the US is a staggering $5 trillion dollars a year.

Just as important, is that whilst women determine their own spending habits, they also influence men's spending habits.

Earlier this month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg held an hour long live-steamed Q&A from the company’s Menlo Park Headquarters.

The idea was to answer questions about the direction Facebook is taking. There were the usual superfluous questions, but the one question that was on many marketers’ minds was: what happened to the organic reach on my Facebook Page?

The lines blurred sometime in the last 10 years, but I don't know exactly when it happened.

Having started my first business at 25 years of age, specializing in technology marketing, I thought I had it all. A marketer who understood technology marketing and who could talk the talk which at that time seemed to be, the height of the dot com boom, the most lucrative marketing position one could hold.

Then of course, someone came along and started talking about company culture, and marketers took a turn to start embellishing the on-boarding process of new recruits, with a mixture of "people marketing" with "technology marketing" - and for a time, that was all the rage. It seemed to be the only thing people were talking about and marketers started to play a role in human resources, giving recruiters and in-house HR managers the tools to "sell their brands" like they were a front line sales executive needing to close the deal in order to reach their quotas.

UPDATE: There were 70,000 plus views within 48 hours of publishing story.

Who would have thought that a blog titled "Why married women are more successful" would receive 54,256 views in less than 24 hours, 555 likes, 634 comments, 702 Facebook likes, 2,632 shares on LinkedIn and 79 retweets on Twitter? I did. And that's exactly why I wrote it. I am a new author on LinkedIn and I know a thing or two about blogging and going viral. If I just write about marketing, at most, I will get between 1,000 and 10,000 views over a week. If I write about something personal - more. But if I write about something that people have strong opinions on or that hits a raw nerve - the sky is literally the limit.

One of my good friends is incredibly talented. She has worked for some of Australia's most successful fashion houses as a designer and a few years back decided that she wanted to start her own brand.

I am a big advocate for women that have a go. Her label and namesake Sophie Moran Inc is worn by celebrities, models and people throughout the world that fall in love with her simple designs, great fabric and the wearability of her product. The brand is fun, sexy and can be worn anywhere. It's also a great gift for your nearest and dearest.

Like many great designers, she started her business from her kitchen table and it is now seen in more than 70 stores around the world. Her marketing is simple. Facebook. She cannot make enough product to cater for the demand from the stores that stock her products and her friends. Facebook showcases her latest designs and who is wearing it with what.

All the models are friends who just so happen to be either famous (and fabulous) or incredibly good looking. You won't see any anorexia girls on this page. Just healthy, sporty stylish women that genuinely love the Sophie Moran brand.

This is one of her latest designs. Check out her Facebook page and let me know what you think! As an Australian fashion designer, she rocks - big time!

I really don't want to mislead you, but there are some truths about social media that you need to be aware of.

Social media is powerful - undeniably so. It has the strength and depth to make or break a brand. It can cleverly make a company or person appear more successful than they really are. It can make you famous, rich and powerful.

Out of the wood work, names that were not known just five years ago, are now ranked in the top brands online in the world. 

But is this 'social media' thing all that its cranked up to be?

It feels like the birth of the sweeping social media phenomenon occurred just five seconds ago, with Pinterest’s viral growth to dizzying heights, Facebook’s takeover of Instagram and Twitter launching the new network, Vine.

The new medium is continuing to grow and evolve, spawning a new phenomenon of its own: visual social media.

Like moths to a flame, humans are innately drawn to visual elements including images, photographs and sensational design. As more of us are increasingly mobile and engaging with social media on smartphones, viewing an image is far less tedious than squinting to read a few lines of tiny text on a moving train.

Let’s start this blog with a simple exercise. Go to your Facebook page and look at the last 10 statuses you posted. What are they mostly about? You may want to think before posting if most of your statuses revolve around work complaints, drunken weekend antics or overstate political opinions.

A study by University of Scranton and UC San Diego researchers found that Facebook status updates stick in the minds of readers for longer than you think – one status alone is 1.5 times more memorable than sentences from books, and 2.5 times more memorable than faces of strangers, representing a remarkable difference in memory performance.