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

It’s the year of change. Internet is at the center of all the changes. Omaba represents all the possible bigger changes from all perspectives. I can’t wait to see more exciting things / changes to come online.

“The Internet has not seen anything like it until yesterday with the inauguration of the new President, Barack Obama. Internet traffic hit a record high - slowing, but not crippling the Internet. Online traffic to view live video streams of the big event spiked so high that the Internet’s top 40 sites slowed by as much as 60 percent when the ceremony started at 11 a.m. according to Keynote Systems.” (from WebGuild)

And, “at precisely 9:01 AM PST, after President Barack Obama took the oath of office, the Government of the United States of America launched a new Website for the White House, which is the official office and residence of the President of The United States of America.” (from WebGuild)

Most of the social media sites have participated in Obama’s campaign. The two sites - change.gov and the new one whitehouse.gov - are all well designed and full of social media tools. This is so exciting!

Tags: internet, obama, social media

I shared my view of 2008 in my last blog entry. Now, here are some social media trends to watch in 2009:

Tags: Add new tag, social media, trends

Here I am - back from my crazy two weeks of working on one online application project. It feels so good to finally open a page and start writing

And the topic has to be LinkedIn again. They simply have a lot of news and interesting stuff to pay attention to. Now they plan to launch its own ad network. Here are my thoughts:

• It is almost like a “why not” thing. The tricky part is the timing of getting ad network into its portofolio. Other social networks seem to do this in their early stages (MySpace, FaceBook…). LinkedIn takes a step by step approach, as they always do for their other features. They don’t push too many or too big things all at once. In stead, they chunk them out and digest piece by piece. This gives them time & resource to focus on and reduces the risk of getting wrong into any unclear directions.
• Don’t worry about money. Money comes not because you open your wallet or you invite them to come. Money follows people, idea and real value. Adding advertising to monetize your product / site is important. But if you do that only for the sake of doing that, money usually doesn’t flow in. In stead, focus on the value you create and the people you serve, money usually flows in itself.

Here are two articles on LinkedIn’s ad network news: one is from TechCrunch; the other is from Hitwise.

Lastly, this slide shows the profile of LinkedIn users:

Tags: ad networks, linkedin, social media, web marketing

Hitwise pulled out one piece of data analysis that is really interesting. They put the traffic numbers of MySpace and Back to School / Education together. The table shows how web, especially social web, is changing our life, our kids’ life so much:

myspace-versus-education

Tags: data, myspace, social media, social network, web analytics

Everyone is doing web redesign. I commented on the Mint redesign couple weeks ago. (Maybe corporate sites should have something similar to WordPress’s Themes, so they could keep change the web site skins)

The real topic that I want to talk about today is: web redesign is not a done deal. It is actually only one part of your web site’s iterative testing. Collecting feedback and doing usability after redesign open a door for the further improvement. You can also look at web redesign as a long tail effect:

• the redesign itself is a big head - lots of things have changed on the site
• the continuous refining after the redesign - move some content around, enlarge a button, get rid of some useless steps - all these little things might add up to big impact and better enhancement to the overall web site improvement. This could be the long tail

Look at TechCrunch’s redesign blog and LOOK at the 6-page long comments on this blog. These are free and first hand user feedback on their redesign. No matter how the redesign itself did, better or worse, if TechCrunch really listen to their users voice and act upon those feedback, I’m sure that their site will be eventually be better. It’s a win-win situation: better site and happy users!

My advice is: redesign is not the end of the game:

• take it as the start of your iterative optimization opportunity
• ask your audience how you did, what they liked and not
• React on their feedback.

This is the best way to get your redesign money paid off

Update:

Another example is jQuery’s redesign post & user feedback.

One more TechCruch redesign comment

Tags: redesign, social media, techcrunch, user generated content, web redesign

I was reading my RSS news. I landed on Viewzi’s website from one article “3 Unique Search Engines of the Future“. Viewzi is being considered as one of these 3. As reading their blog, I found out one blog titled “Internal Report” written by their intern. The page gives a list of people’s profiles that the intern worked with…these profiles really crack me up…hoho…Each profile seems so real. It is a good idea to have interns to create this blog and probably only they can tell all these real stories in a fun way.

Tags: blog, social media, social network, user generated content