I like Zappos, because they are good at social networking, online and offline. I like Amazon too, because they provide the easiest way of shopping online.

I wrote about Zappos’ social marketing activities earlier. To me, they are the one company who gets social media!

• Zappos’ Facebook page and Twitter are well integrated
• They fully leveraged all types of media (pictures and videos)
• Their employee engagement is very high: it’s a place naturally to be social - it’s personal!

People can comment on Amazon’s acquisition from different perspectives. To me, I wonder how Zappos’ social gene can be passed and emerged into Amazon. I’m not sure if that is a benefit from business value part, but I do see it would help to shape the culture and the company’s social value.

Tags: amazon, Facebook, social media, Social network service, Twitter, Zappos

The beauty of social media is that there are so many ways of doing it. To some people, this might sounds challenging, if it’s viewed as “too many things, where to start?”. If you look at from a different angel, it actually shows how social media is powerful, and can be very easy and simple at the same time. One example that I just saw while I was looking at my Facebook page:

• Target posted a simple feed to the fans “Targets want to hear what you think about our guys’ clothing selection” and there are 3 more detailed questions within the same feed.
• Within the first 12 hours of posting, it received over 250 Likes and 800 Comments!

two screenshots:

1, how this campaign shows up on my personal profile page:

2, all comments of Target wall:

Why this is so exciting:

• the cost is so low: it’s just a facebook feed. it’s so easy & quick to implement and doesn’t even require any money!
• the response is huge: look at the numbers of responses within the first 12 hours. Comparing with your traditional campaigns or research, how can you get feedback this quick?
• it’s a great way to get customer feedback: it’s almost like open ended questions. All the comments are from the Target fans and it’s great insight and valuable data!
• it’s a great way to keep the dialogue and build communities: traditional media and research won’t give user any chance to interact, but in this campaign, people can see each other’s comments - that’s the best way of building WOM

Conclusion: don’t be scared about social media. It can be simple and easy. The point is that you need to get started somewhere now!

Tags: Facebook, On the Web, Online Communities, research, social media, social network, Social network service, Twitter

Facebook is hot within consumers and it’s  becoming hot for businesses too! Looking at all different Facebook business pages, the ones that I think are the best so far are Zappos, Target & Britney Spears (yes, it is a business page!…too bad that Facebook don’t have celebrity specific pages).

I like these pages because they utilize the most of the key elements of what a business Facebook page could do in a meaningful way. To give you some ideas, below are several reasons why they are good:

Zappos’ page has Twitter information on the Wall page, which can be seen easily. I tried to find Twitter information for other business pages and most of the time, it’s not there:

Zappos’ Boxes page is integrated with Zappos’ blog RSS feeds:

Both Zappos’ photo & video pages have lots of recent entries. Same as Target & Britney Spears pages:

Target’s Vote page has a nice campaign:

Britney’s event page lets you reserve all the concerts & events right on the page:

Feel free to share what your favorite Facebook Business pages are

Tags: Britney Spears, Business, Facebook, google, On the Web, RSS, social media, target, Twitter, Zappo

As a lot of you know, I follow several companies in my library. LinkedIn is one of them.

People discuss how sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter can monitize. These sites have been trying different things to find the right answer for themselves too. One old technique is to monitize the content (hey, content is still king). LinkedIn is showing some banner ads on their more and more popular Answers pages. See my screen shot below:

Tags: content, Facebook, linkedin, social media, social network

Happy Friday!

To save time and put things in a more organized way, I decided to create some pages in this blog as my library, that captures my regular finding around the topics that I’m interested, such as Crowdsourcing, Mobile, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and China.

I update these pages in stead of writing all different small posts. Check out these pages if you are also interested in these topics

For other topics that I have more to say, I’ll continue to write as separate posts.

Tags: amazon, china, Facebook, linkedin, mobile, Online Communities, social network, Twitter