It’s the business of engagement, of interpretation, of reaching people before they reach the product or service they love. Social media from an instrumental perspective has helped evolve a sub-class of new society based on their participation in online activities. It has changed the way we look around us.

Earlier it was considered a platform for socializing, a window that connects people, an auxiliary for leisure, a corner to share emotions and share ideas. Over a period of time it transformed into a major marketing pillar. From start-ups to local business and multinational corporations, all businesses recognized the need to expand their presence online using sites that connect and involve direct human participation.

Days of traditional marketing through newspapers, magazine advertisements, posters and television commercials seem to be fading. The size of human engagement online is greater than conventional marketing mediums.

Marketing, no matter conventional or technocratic, blows away barriers and distance between potential customers and the product. A real-time analogy tells us that online marketing through social media sites makes far-reaching interactions with millions of people at the same time easy.

Simple Facebook or LinkedIn user statistics are enough to support the view that, in comparison of conventional marketing, digital marketing through social media is powerful tool because it engages an unthinkably large number of people.

It all takes places beyond fun, games, status updates and tweets; an unimaginably vast playground filled with digitized thinking.

According to the Digital Marketing Ramblings‘ website release of statistics of the number of people using the most popular social media sites, Facebook is on the top slot with 1 billion users, followed by YouTube with 800 million users and 4 billion views per day, QQ with 700 million users, and the Micro-blogging platform Twitter has 500 million users.

Further, Sina Weibo has 400 million users and LinkedIn has 175 million users. According to Media bistro, in their social media marketing industry report, 83 percent of marketers believe that social media is important, and about 94 percent of marketers use social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter for business purposes.

A tally among the tools reveals that Facebook is in the top slot on the preference list of marketers, followed by Twitter and LinkedIn. This is testimonial information with an indication that social connectivity will be helpful for businesses based on customers’ presence.

However, some critics argue that as users gradually move to mobile phones from the computer, advertisements need to undergo technical renovation to keep the communication line alive, or else days are numbered for online marketers.

According to Mashable, Kleiner Perkins’ partner Mary Meeker illustrated the financial gap in her annual trend report that says mobile phones occupy 10 percent of people’s media consumption time and commands only 1 percent of advertising budgets.

It’s an indication that marketing will undergo change following consumer decisions; it means that as screen size expands or contracts (from personal computer to laptops, from tablets to mobile phones), advertisements will change to fit them.

But perhaps, no matter to what platform on-line marketing may divert, it is for sure days of digital marketing are greatly radiant.

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Boca Raton, U.S.A. — LinkedIn, a business to business social media site whose membership now exceeds 175 million with an average of two members joining per second. Ray Knight, Chief Envisioneer Officer of The RaynMakers, is considered a LinkedIn guru and has partnered with TransMedia Group to offer his knowledge to professionals seeking clients and to businesses looking to grow.

“Most individuals and  businesses know what LinkedIn is and have a presence on it, but very few professionals know how to properly utilize the site in order to generate more business. I’m excited about my partnership with a public relations leader like TransMedia Group and look forward to helping businesses make LinkedIn a valuable tool,” said Ray Knight, CEO of The RaynMakers.

Knight has spent eight years working with LinkedIn profile creation and optimization. He helps businesses better position themselves within LinkedIn with completed profiles that rank high in keywords. Knight has achieved page one position for a number of clients including executives and business owners alike including:

• Attorneys
• Catering Companies
• Consultants
• Consumer Goods Executives
• Doctors
• Digital Revenue Executives
• Financial Executives
• Indoor Environmentalists
• Limousine Owners
• Moisture Instruction Experts
• Real Estate Executives
• Spa /Wellness Centers

“We are so pleased to be linked in with Ray Knight as his expertise will help individuals and companies leverage the LinkedIn network. His knowledge will help businesses and our clients maximize their LinkedIn ranking position and search results, which will equal more business,” said Tom Madden CEO and Founder of TransMedia Group.

For more information, visit www.transmediagroup.com/socialmedia.php.

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The banking and telecommunication sectors in North Africa have not utilized the power of social media yet, according to Amine Jabali, Managing Partner, Peppers & Rogers Group.

Social networking is becoming more and more relevant in today’s world, especially in the North Africa region. As evidenced by the impact that Social Media has had in fueling the Arab Spring, the companies should embrace this new trend and place increasing focus on Social Media activities. In fact, they need to enter the ‘Social’ era with a structured approach and best practices in their Social Media adoption.

“Telecommunication companies reacted but they have not used the full potential of social media; they have responded only by providing the gadgets, but the telcos are yet to leverage the use of social networking to generate revenues,” Jabali argues. The telecom companies, even the banking sector can leverage through building advocacy or affinity. “As an example, the telecom and banking sectors can create clubs for high school or university students using the power of social media. You can talk to this group of people and know their interest/needs and can bring them forward to be more loyal to you in the early stages of their professional lifecycle,” Jabali suggests.

Jabali notes that customers nowadays are not only intelligent, but also becoming more and more demanding. “It’s not about ‘I’ll take what you give’ anymore. It’s about ‘provide what I need’. It is a challenge for the firm, but we see that companies are adapting to new challenges,” he asserts. “We see more and more customers purchasing smart phones not only because they have cash, but because they know the value of what they are paying for,” he adds.

Many companies have already reaped significant benefits from incorporating Social Media as part of their strategy, by being able to effectively and efficiently build new and reinforce ongoing relationships with existing and potential customers. Marketing can use Social Media to drive brand awareness, deliver relevant information and generate new leads; Customer Support can leverage social channels to respond to enquiries and complaints, as well as solicit customer feedback; whereas Sales can utilize Social Media to support customer acquisition strategies.

“Social Media can also be instrumental in managing and protecting corporate reputation,” Jabali notes. Unhappy customers can reach out to thousands of online users through Facebook, Tweets and other Social Media channels and the adverse effect to company’s reputation through such outbursts can be staggering if the appropriate remediating actions are not taken.

Companies need to have a comprehensive Social Media presence to provide the customers with an ‘always on’ channel that is able to meet their sales and service needs. “Pioneers in Social Media in North Africa will find that investing in this new channel will create not only brand awareness and social engagement with their targeted segments, but also to generate consistent uplift of revenue year after year,” concludes Jabali.

Image Courtesy of  Studentersamfunnet i Bergen

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Some question the potential that social media has to offer, while others are utilizing and benefiting through what social media has to offer. Social media may be one of the greatest tools in marketing today, for several reasons.

Two of the most commonly used social media pages are Facebook and Twitter. Most companies are starting to pick up on their benefits of having social media accounts set up within these sites. According to InsideFacebook.com, Facebook has 712.4 million users worldwide in September and Twitter has 100 million active users.

Facebook is being used as a form of communication and interaction between the consumer and the brand. Brand pages allow not only the brand to interact with consumers, but also for others to review and share their feelings towards the brand. From this feedback, companies are creating more of an interpersonal relationship with their customers.

Marketers also, are able to target a certain audience with paid ads, ensuring that these are placed on the page that fits their defined audience. This ensures that the ad is appearing primarily to people who are more likely to click the ad. Twitter is another great tool that elicits some confusion. Twitter can be used as a mouthpiece for the company, which makes it excellent for PR purposes.

On Twitter, companies share news regarding their company, this allows followers to keep up with said company. By giving your brand a voice on Twitter, Twitter will categorize your Page and place your page under recommendation for followers, related to the content posted by users on twitter.

Through Facebook and Twitter, companies are creating a niche for themselves. It’s possible to get an understanding of what these brands represent and how these companies want consumers to view their brands. Social media is a great way to provide customer service to followers, and keep an audience engaged and updated at the same time.

That is why it is important for company pages to always respond to consumers’ posts. In a study done by Evolve24, about 83% of Consumers have positive feelings when contacted from a company from a tweet a user posts. Traditional marketing is slowly declining, yet it is not to say that is dying out.

There is still a lot of power in traditional marketing, that may be too hard for social media to convey. If a brand were to reposition itself, television ads would be a powerful medium to display this new position for the brand. Combined, these two create a powerful voice and should be included in successful marketing campaigns.

The more impressions from, traditional marketing and inbound marketing, the better odds are of being noticed by potential clients.

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New social networks are being released every day. What makes each one unique is their individual focuses and functions, though they all have the common goals to increase social relations and to establish contact with the professional world, educational target, medical network, travel communities, and so on.

The focus is usually developed based on the needs of the public. Opensoft, a Portuguese company, saw a need for the business environment, and they are trying to put this new model  in the competitive world of social media. Spreadd is a Portuguese startup focused on business environments and tries to differentiate itself from LinkedIn and Facebook, arguing that it is actually able to create opportunities to companies through the improvement of a collaborative environment.

Facebook offers big opportunities to reach target markets and great tools to develop marketing and communication with the public. However, there are limitations in developing sharing tools inside the company, since a social network is not a business-oriented network if it has other focuses.

LinkedIn, on other hand, is a business network. However, it allows people to connect to each other, but doesn’t solve the match problem between people and tasks, which Spreadd promises to do. The inefficiency inside of companies created by issues, such as employees repeatedly doing the same tasks and assigning the wrong employee to perform a task, can impact business performance.

It can be solved through a better sharing, communicating, and collaborating environment. The ambitious goal of the project is be a perfect network solution to small companies, big organizations, and even the ones geographically dispersed.

The network has been in the testing stage for the past six months, but it has already been seen as a solution to companies that are already using basic sharing tools, such as e-mail, instant message systems, internal networks, and blogs. Such tools have a time-gap between assigning the task and seeing the task completed, which is the issue Spreadd is trying to solve.

The Opensoft project will be going to Silicon Valley in California to accelerate the development of the business. It will be an important part of companies concerned with transparency, increase in opportunities, and creativity. There are high expectations coming from this developing season.

The goals the company have made will be able to help all companies interested in increase competitiveness through efficient information sharing. For companies that want to get a head start, they can sign up using a company e-mail address, which will be added to the Spreadd’s social network, and wait for a developed version of Spreadd to become available to the public.

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The importance of social media in Turkey has increased considerably in recent years, which in turn has led to a mounting interest in the phenomenon and its overall impact on the Turkish society. Sharing her opinions on the matter, Gulay Ozkan, a Turkish internet and mobile entrepreneur, suggests that the increasing popularity of social media is mainly to do with the large percentage of young people in the country’s current population.

Different types of social media, such as Facebook or Youtube, can indeed be very appealing to young people all over the world. Turkey is a country where 70 percent of the population is actually under 35 years of age, a fact that makes her explanation both valid and rational. “Social Media is a very hot topic at the moment as it brings freedom to a culture that traditionally is shy”, Gulay says.

She lays emphasis on the idea that social media offers free and open communication, which is perhaps the aspect that appeals the most to young Turkish users. Currently, the most popular social network in Turkey is Facebook. The popularity of the well-known networking website rose to such an extent that Turkey has now become the fourth largest nationality on Facebook in the world.

However, Twitter and personal blogs have also gained popularity recently. Turkey’s mobile penetration is larger than internet penetration, which is an immediate consequence of people’s using mobile phones to access their favorite social networks. Gulay also predicts that this trend will grow even more in the future.

Increasing internet censorship is still a problem in Turkey, a situation that has led to numerous protests organized by youth groups. Although some networks such as Youtube may still be banned there, the restriction does not seem to prevent young Turkish people from freely accessing it by using DNS switching and other proxy settings.

This can be interpreted as a sign that the population is ready and wishes to open up to the new form of communication. In fact, it has been this extensive use of social media which have allow Turkey to join the global community. Information spreads far easier and faster via different kinds of social media outlets than via traditional media or educational platforms.

The importance of social media also extends to Turkey’s public relations campaign. There are many instances when international public opinion on Turkey have been shaped and influenced through the use of social media, which should propel the country to engage more in the use of social media as a means of promoting its own image.

One such example is the case of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan abruptly leaving a panel discussion on Gaza with Israeli president Shimon Peres in 2009. His gesture received a lot of media attention. At the time, hundreds of thousands visited Youtube to watch the video of the Prime Minister. Links of the video began to be circulated via Facebook, fan groups and other web applications were launched, all of them carrying the name of Erdogan.

The politicization of social media in Turkey is becoming more and more obvious. Many analysts recognize the role social media is starting to play in politics. “For the past two years, as the political environment has become more severe, the political weight of social media has increased,” Ozgur Uckan, a professor at Bilgi University, said in an interview discussing the relation between social media and politics in contemporary Turkey.

“Blogs on the one hand and social media on the other have begun transforming into a political agora, a forum space,” he added. However, the politicization of social media is seriously threatened by internet censorship. Besides Youtube, many other websites, such as Blogger, have also been banned in Turkey. This phenomenon has led to the foundation of groups such as “Don’t Touch My Blog”

Moreover, national protests have been organized in reaction to the government’s attempts to impose internet censorship. Such is the case of the national, multi-locational protests that took place on May 15 in response to legislation planned to impose filters on internet access.

“I think we will see more of these sorts of interactions in the future,” says Yaman Akdeniz, a law professor at Bilgi University, who also added that political parties themselves have begun using social media in their campaigns.
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