There’s already been volumes and volumes written on social media. There’s a lot of great stuff out there, and this reference center is my attempt to filter it out for you. These are the most helpful, most insightful, and most actionable articles I could find on social media. If you have a great resource you want to share with the rest of us, feel free to leave a comment or email me: tony at launchyourmovement dot com. Also be sure to check out our case studies library.
Best Practices
- Mashable: Social Media Guide for Small Business 80+ of the most helpful links written with a small, nimble business in mind (December 2009)
- Smashing Magazine: Social Network Design: Best Practices and Examples This principles are for those of you building an online community – but they really apply for anyone trying to bring a group of people together (online or offline)
- 13 best practices implemented by 200 US Charities Surprisingly, but not really – non-profits are using social media creatively. They tend to be more passionate than businesses, and thus their stories are quite compelling (and contagious) (Nov 2009)
- Open Social Wiki: Social Media Design As soon as people arrive to your network for the first time, don’t be shy to give them the opportunity to engage & “take action” immediately. (on-going)
- Jeff Bullas: 15 Best practices of social media utilized by top 100 brands One of my favs: “each channel provides a different dimension of engagement” (July 2009)
Tactics & How To’s
- Twitter writes it own success stories (April 2010) On-going examples at @cleveraccounts
- TechCrunch: How to build an engaging facebook fan page Now that you’ve got a good facebook page up and are interacting well with your fans, what’s next? This is a great post on taking it to the next level. (March 2010)
- socialmouths: How to run successful contests on Twitter Don’t forget that the benefits of these contests are in the process (not the prize) and all the networking that happens throughout it all (March 2010)
- eMarketer: Combining the strengths of social and email Social Media and Email don’t compete against each other, they can perfectly complement each other. 2010 looks to be the year the two really get integrated. (March 2010)
- Mashable: 8 ways to avoid when building an online community When it comes to social media, some say “just go experiment,” while others say, “we’re not ready to go there.” This post gives weight to being somewhere in the middle – while there isn’t necessarily a “right” way, there are some wrong ways to avoid (January 2010)
- Mashable: How to implement a social media business strategy Yes, that’s right – social media & business strategy in the same sentence. Great post, though I don’t necessarily think “social media” is really a strategy per se, but a toolkit/set of tactics to support your current strategy (December 2009)
- Mashable: How to gather feedback using social media Add these to your market research portfolio -the days of exclusively doing surveys & focus groups are gone (September 2009)
- Mashable: Social Media Policies from 80+ organizations This probably only applies to bigger corporations, but the principles & thought processes apply to all organizations. (September 2009)
- 13 ways to monitor conversations about your brand Not ready to plunge into social media yet? At the very least, start listening to what people are already saying about your brand/product right now (June 2009)
Social Media Movements
- CNN: Coffee Party It all started with one person starting a page on Facebook (March 2010)
- Mashable: #beatcancer This 1-cent-donated-per-tweet one broke the Guinness Book of World Records. (October 2009)
- NYT: How Obama Used Social Media Where ever you are politically, Obama’s rise to power is largely due to his effective use of social media. His team essentially created a movement. (November 2008)
- Bobmarketing: How Ron Paul raised $10M through social media (PDF) Very detailed analysis (good stuff on how they used digg.com) on how Ron Paul’s team raised their $4M “money-bomb” in one day. Good example of a movement that was already going strong that social media leveraged even further.
Calculating ROI
- SMROI: Defining Social Media Once and for All This is a great step-by-step video explanation of how to do it. Bottom line is that you still gotta measure by the bottom line. (February 2010)
- Brian Solis: How to Measure ROI in Social Media – Revisited Measuring ROI is still a conundrum but 2010 will be the year real metrics are tied to their efforts (Feb 2010)
- Jeff Bullas: 8 Steps to Demonstrate Positive ROI for Social Media Marketing Measure 4 meaningful things: attention, participation, authority, and influence (Nov 2009)
- Socialnomics: Social Media ROI (youtube) Provides lots of examples of companies who have grown revenues or cut costs through social media. Pretty nifty & nice presentation, though I would take some of the statistics with a grain of salt. (December 2009)
- Mashable: How to Measure Social Media ROI In short, you can’t. Increased sales may have occurred, but can you really tie it to specific social media efforts? Still, it’s worth digging into.
Research
- Mashable: What Social Media Users Want Apparently, twitterers want news, facebookers news & community, myspacers want to be entertained (March 2010)
- Mashable: The Current State of Twitter Twitter continues to be a odd bird, even after 10 billion tweets. 1% of visitors account for 35% of visits. 40% of tweets is pointless babble. (March 2010)
- Brian Solis: Time Spent on Social Media up 82% In December 2009, the average user spent 5.5 hours on social media. When you put it that way, it sounds small – don’t Americans watch that much TV in like 2 days? (February 2010)
- Fortune 100 Companies Using Social Media 82% are Fortune 100 companies are using SM, but so far, not very well — more as an additional PR channel rather than engaging in conversation (Feb 2010)
- Pew Internet Research Center: Social Media & Young Adults Blogging is down for young adults (because they’ve switched over to social networking, e.g. facebook, and mobile). Also a little counterintuitive -teenagers don’t use twitter (February 2010)
- Vitrue: Top 100 Social Brands These are the “most social” or most shared brands. Not surprisingly, iPhone and Disney are at the top of the list.
- How the top 500 fastest growing companies are using social media The bottom line is that these private companies are far outpacing large corporations when it comes to social media and blogging. Is this a size/nimbleness factor only or something else? (Nov 2009)
- Mashable: Social Media for Social Causes As you may have guessed, the younger generation is very passionate about causes and compassion initiatives. Marry that up with social media, and you’ve got a perfect storm brewing for those who know how to capture a movement. (March 2009)