Mathew Ingram of GigaOm recently wrote about Facebook's challenging ad business model. It touched on an issue I've been thinking about of late with regards to finding the right voice on a company Facebook page. In short, Facebook is the most personal of any of the social networks. It's not far from the truth to say that the reason that almost all of Facebook's users joined the network in the first place was to connect with personal friends and family.... Continue reading

Image credit Case Central (client) Caught in my Facebook news feed yesterday was this Wall Street Journal article about the CFO of fashion retailer Francesca's Holdings Corp being fired for improper use of his personal social media channels. Specifically, he used his public Facebook page and Twitter channel to share confidential financial information with personal opinions. The Journal article transcribes a few, but these are the most egregious: On March 13 Mr. Morphis posted on Facebook about a company earnings... Continue reading

You may be thinking that this post's headline doesn't make sense, especially if you have tried to push social media initiatives through legal approval. But it probably got you to read this, so bear with me and let me know at the end if you still don't agree with it. I'm just back from SXSW in Austin (and dried out as well). The conference is so large now that it's had to spread out over hotels a half mile or... Continue reading

There is a pattern to the responses I hear when people first try out Google+. "I'm on Google+ but I don't know what to do with it." "I'm not sure why we need to spend time on this when our audience isn't on here." "Why should we dilute our social presence when we have Twitter and Facebook?" It all sounds awfully familiar. That's because it's the same thing we heard when Twitter got started, and a little bit with Facebook... Continue reading

One thing for which social media is great is providing a platform for anyone to share with the world what they are thankful for at this time of year. We agree and have been doing that on Beyond the Hype for five years. In 2011, we have many important reasons to give thanks: Our loyal clients and long-time friends of the agency that have been the most important part of our success and the reason we could celebrate our 25... Continue reading

For 25 years, our business cards have had "Boston" printed on the bottom as one of our locations (along with Austin). In actuality, our Boston office has been located in a few places along Route 128 -- Boston's technology corridor -- during that time (Lexington, Burlington and now Woburn). But, location-wise it's close enough and makes more sense to have Boston on the cards rather than Woburn. In less than a month, our cards will reflect our true location, as... Continue reading

For communications pros in New England, The Publicity Club's Bell Ringer Awards are a big deal. Last night, the Pub Club (as it's known in our circles) held its 42nd Annual Bell Ringers Award Ceremony at the Waltham Westin hotel and LP&P was well represented at a table with members of four teams up for awards. Each team was guaranteed at least a "Merit" award, but we all wanted more -- at least a Gold, Silver or Bronze Bell. By... Continue reading

The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual "State of the Media" report yesterday and on the surface, it describes an improved business environment after "two dreadful years." Peel it back a couple of layers, however, and there are some stark statements about the future of the industry and who is in control. Tipping Points For the first time, Pew's research shows that more people get their news from the web than from print newspapers. Television still sits... Continue reading

Earlier this week, a colleague pointed out an announcement made earlier this month of a (yet another) new social media monitoring tool by -- wait for it -- Alcatel-Lucent! This vividly illustrates the trend towards these tools being positioned as and used for CRM and customer service and support more than anything. In this case, here is a product positioned for use primarily in the call center for visibility into customer complaints and general negative brand sentiment via social media.... Continue reading

I'm a day late in bringing you another prediction for 2011. This has been a good week to catch up and got a little too heads down on doing just that... Last week, I wrote that "social" will start to fade from our lexicon (when the word is used in the context of social media's impact on business), and that niche social networks based upon "identity-knowledge-reputation" will start to take hold. So, with the New Year's celebrations nearly upon us,... Continue reading

I'm watching the livestream of Mark Zuckerberg's keynote chat with John Batelle and Tim O'Reilly at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Batelle just asked the question, is there just one social graph, or are there several and is there just one ring to rule them all (meaning Facebook)? Zuckerberg answered that there never will be and Facebook's goal is the bring all of the social graphs together through its infrastructure and interoperability, etc. It's hard to argue that... Continue reading

Not surprisingly, the iPad reality has not met the hype. Ah, well. Arguably, there is more anticipation for tonight's State of the Union, so to coincide with that I'd like to conclude our two-part series on the state of social media -- particularly from where we sit in the B2B tech and life sciences work. Yesterday, I wrote about how our clients should approach their company-level social networking efforts and how to take action on the listening they have been... Continue reading

Google changed the game for marketers and communicators last month when it became a real-time search engine. Little was known about how Google's algorithms changed to integrate social media-based content into its search results. But MIT's Technology Review got the scoop on that this week in an interview with Google Fellow Amit Singhal. In essence, Google adapted its core algorithm to rank information like Tweets in much the same way it has ranked web pages for a long time. Here... Continue reading