Betalabs is packing for San Francisco to attend the ad:tech, the largest online marketer conference.

It takes place in April 11 – 13 in the Moscone Center, downtown San Francisco, and nearly 250 companies are exhibiting such Microsoft Advertising, Rapleaf, comScore,  and LinkedIn, just mention a few ones. Among the absolut prominent speakers are directors from Google, PepsiCo, LivingSocial, Yahoo, BBDO, eBay, OgilvyOne and many more.

We are excited to see and hear about the latest and greatest from digital marketing, and especially social media, and we´ll be informing you via tweets @grupobetalabs and @menummila . We are also proud to join the Foursquare folks at the Foursquare HQ SanFran for the global Foursquare day party on April 16th! Follow us and do not hesitate to contact us for a chat. We will be more than happy to help you with social media strategy and analytics.

and the winners are…

Macy’s,

Merry Christmas

and

Santa Claus!

- Happy Holidays!

The social media phenomena 2010 – an overview

With only a few days till Christmas it is time to wrap up the social media year.  The major common denominator is huge growth supported by impressive figures, such as Facebook sales ($2bn up 150% from 2009 and value >$40bn), and users in LinkedIn, Twitter. The mobile location-based solutions such as Foursquare, Facebook places, Gowalla and others, have introduced a whole new social media element and increased the variety of channels thus even lowered the barrier to enter to social media.  Indeed, they managed to construct a bridge between physical and virtual presences by providing versatile user-friendly and game alike applications that take place in real physical environment.

Further big phenomena have been social shopping (group-shopping) like Groupon and the breakthrough of tablets, especially the iPad with a constantly growing number of applications. All these have resulted in a growing amount of companies adopting social media to their digital tools portfolio and a clear boom in social media advertising.

For 2011 we anticipate even stronger role for the content and a more disciplined approach for social media supported by strategy, policies, and advanced analytics. And naturally, there will be news and new applications galore probably addressing various types of crowd-sourcing and shopping, and of course mergers and acquisitions.

Some brands and their social media Christmas presence

For the end of 2010 we took a brief look at some brands’ Christmas campaigns and presence in social media. Amazing but the presence was not very impressive.

K-Mart’s  “Share Your Christmas Story” and Macy’s “Believe” were in our opinion the best ones. K-Mart has created its own Christmas Community with people sharing experiences, traditions, and photos. The participants can win gift cards. There is also a facebook application with the same name but we are not sure if it really is from K-Mart. We think that K-mart has a good tactic to engage but we found it esthetically fairly modest. Also operationally, the image link in one corner of the homepage only might indicate that the company does not yet really trust too much on social media. Otherwise the company page is very Christmas flavored and nice.

Macy’s “Believe” is a charity program with a Christmas wish list application with several social features such as a celebrity wish list.  Macy’s will donate to make-a-wish foundation $1 per each delivered letter up to $1 million. We really like the visual realization of the app as well as the way how it is optimized and linked with www.macys.com.  Total, “Believe” is a great combination of commercial initiative and social media and the best Christmas campaign we could find.

EBay has added a “Holiday” tab to its Facebook site which takes the visitor to a quite nice-looking page that is linked to www.ebay.com. The links to opposite direction are either totally missing or at least not well visible. Dell is one of the most successful brands in social media but it does not show any Holiday theme at all in Facebook which we find odd. Frankly, the large e-commerce retailers do not seem to celebrate Christmas with impressive social media campaigns.

The comparison of large European department stores with the US counterparts demonstrates the market maturity: From the group of eminent players such as Harrods, Galeries Lafayette, Kaufhof, KaDeWe, La Rinascente, and El Corte Ingles virtually none is running any significant Christmas campaigns in social media.

Santa Claus and other Christmas keywords

Last but not least we checked out how Santa Claus is doing in social media. Although there is only one real Santa Claus, there seems to be quite an amount of Santa Claus profiles in Facebook.  Of course there is only one twitter account for @Santaclaus with full 429 followers anda total of 3 tweets… Overall, the Santa is not doing well at all in social. We also found a deeper research on Santa’s social media strategy or rather the lack of it. We kindly recommend Santa to outsource social media for 2011 since that’s where his vast audience is.

Finally, we compared the tweets of some frequent Christmas keywords: Merry Christmas and Santa Claus in 3 languages: English, Spanish, and German. The statistics are provided by twitwinner. Please see the results below. Happy Holidays and Felizes Fiestas!

Every organization, regardless of the activity level in social media should establish guidelines for social media use of the employees. This is simply because an increasing amount of people – including the employees – uses social media.

The guidelines should not be a complex set of rules that hardly anyone understands but rather common sense instructions with ethical and legal considerations in order to avoid misunderstandings and critical information leaks, but also to define the type of preferred communication style.  By providing social media policy training to its employees the organization assures the tone and style of the dialogue and mitigates potential and costly risks involved to miscommunication. This means that well prepared guidelines do neither control nor disable your employees but rather empower them by maximizing the “safe areas” of conversation. It is crucial to remember that in social media the organization can never own the conversation neither can it totally control it but it can control the platform where the dialogues take place which makes it responsible.

How to create a social media policy that works?
(by University of San Francisco)

Two major approaches should be considered:

1. Standard approach where only selected employees are permitted to represent the organization, and
2. Enlightened approach where any employee can participate to public conversation.

The major differences are in control, training, content amount and style, motivation and encouragement, and protection. So which approach to select? That depends mainly on the organization size and the industry you are in. Apparently training and control are easier in SMEs than in large, global organizations, and some industries such as the financial and pharmaceutical sectors deal with more critical information that needs to comply with legal and ethical rules. For these reasons especially large corporations such as Intel, IBM and many more have adopted the enlightened approach.
Other key issues that should be taken into account are:

• Application (who does the policy apply to)
• Disclaimers (legal protection to all online presence)
• Transparency and Identification (use real names and mention the company that you work for)
• Perception (how to communicate personal and professional opinions)
• Negative Content (the tone and of voice of criticism)
• Confidentiality Policies (the confidentiality policies are also confidential)
• Disclosure of Financial Information
• Customer or supplier references (do not mention names or disclose any information of new products that
  are not yet launched)
• Use of company logos
• Posing in company uniform
• Copyright laws
• Conversations should add value (e.g. Interesting content, areas of expertise)
• Regulated industries
• Professional advice (act professionally, understand potential risks, protect yourself)
• Consequences (think twice, get informed about possible consequences)

What does a Social Media Policy look like?

The Best Buy CEO Brian J. Dunn tells in Harvard Business Review about their company approach. The company implemented a social media policy in 2009 after some undesired experiences in employee social media practices. Their policy applies to all some 180000 Best Buy employees and it is built on the following cornerstones:
- always disclose that you are a Best Buy employee when you talk about the company (protect the brand, protect yourself)
- keep nonpublic financial or operational data private
- in generally, “if you find yourself wondering if you can talk about something you learned at work – do not.”

Mr. Dunn also brings up some other key points such as the values, ethics, and confidentiality that the employees are expected to obey every day. Perhaps the major takeaway is that employee responsibility does not end when the day is over; it applies to all social communication, even when you are off duty talking with your family, friends or neighbors – both online and offline.   Please read more about Best Buy Social Media in Harvard Business Review December 2010.

Post writing / 12.14.2010

Read also on mashable about Social Media Policies of Best Buy, Adobe, IBM, and Weber Shandwick.

“Participation in Social Media and Interactive Marketing is no longer revolutionary. It’s crucial.

In 2009, companies with dedicated social media activity boosted sales by over 18%, while those with minimal or no presence saw a 6% decrease. As 2010 marks a shift in consumer mentality from recession to recovery, companies must adjust their strategies according to how customers make purchasing decisions. Brand differentiation will be key, and companies must be at the forefront in areas like social web, mobile apps and SEO in order to create a distinguished customer experience.” - iStrategy

Whether your goals are higher brand awareness, more website traffic, improved customer service, product development, reputation management, SEO improvement, or advanced recruiting, what you need is strategy.

We want to keep up with the best and latest thus will proudly be attending the iStrategy summit in London, Millennium Gloucester Hotel, Oct 5-6^th. Among the attendants will be the most prestigious and famous global brands such as Adidas, Chanel, Coca-Cola, Facebook, HSBC, Kelloggs, LEGO, Microsoft, Nike, Nokia, Pfizer, Puma, Red Bull, Sony, Twitter, and Walt Disney.

We are convinced that the summit will be very productive and exciting and we kindly encourage you to follow the tweets #iStrategy2010 and #grupobetalabs. Do not hesitate to contact us later in October to get assistance for your company’s social media strategy.

Let’s click together!