It's no secret that a variety of industries are starting to scour social media sites to get a deeper level of understanding on their target consumer.  It wasn't long ago that we had the chance to talk with KELO-TV here in Sioux Falls about social media data mining and specifically, how banks and lenders are determining loan risk based on social network findings.

The newest vertical to find value in social media data mining is debt collection agencies.  We talked with KELO-TV on a "Money Matters" segment about this trend, what consumers with debt problems need to understand, and the legality of this practice under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.

Yes, this is another post about social media.  Sorry.  But this time, it's about the over-use - dare I say, abuse? - of social media.  While social media marketing has certainly demonstrated that it can be impactful when properly implemented as part of a larger plan, there are enough wasted social media attempts out there that a national holiday should be considered.

Here's the thing.  For every one plumbing company that has gotten a job by having a Twitter profile, there are 49 that are on Twitter for no other reason than some "social media expert" told them they should be.  Can a Facebook fan page bring you business?  Absolutely.  But during the social media gold rush of the last two years, marketers have lost sight of a very important metric.  It's called ROI.  If we simply do social media for social media's sake - with no metrics in place to gauge return - online marketing will quickly get tossed into the same un-trackable tactic bucket as billboards, print ads, and blimp sponsorships.

Two primary factors have caused this issue.  One is the amount of executives and business owners that are un(der)-educated on social media marketing.  A certain level of hype creates an environment for opportunists to sell services that don't need selling or in some cases, shouldn't be sold at all (see dot com era).  The second factor is the low barrier to entry for consultants in the social media space.  Requirements to become a social media consultant = Apple computer, 20+ hrs/wk spent on Twitter, a wrinkled blazer, and horn rimmed glasses.  Actually, it looks like I just described myself...but I digress.

I'm not a social media hater by any means, but I am a realist.  Social media is an important piece of almost all of our clients' marketing plans.  But it's only a piece.  In some cases, that piece is bigger than others.  The bottom line is that the social media wave needs to be ridden differently than it did a couple years ago.  It's much more than Twitter profiles and custom Facebook tabs.  It's about trackable, traceable tactics that drive business.  

Oh yeah, Larry King is on Twitter. Sure he is.

With the growing popularity of Facebook comes a corresponding increase in friend requests. And in turn, an increase in people ignoring those requests.  Based on some exhaustive research, below are the five most popular types of Facebook friend request snubbers according to our analysis.

1. The Normals. Quite possibly, the most common species of Facebook friend ignorers.  If they know you, they will friend you.  If they don't, they won't.  Yes, you may live in the same town or have four friends in common with them.  Big whoop. They don't care.
2. The Protectors.  It's nothing personal, but for many Facebook is a personal look into their private life, whereby LinkedIn or Twitter may be more for professional use.  For that reason, many people choose to ignore the friend request from a business colleague, vendor, and someone they met at a mixer.  Don't take offense at the Protector species, they just don't want you seeing pictures of them sipping pina coladas on the beach in Cancun.
3. The Easily Annoyeds. Based on the first glance at your open profile, they don't like what they see.  Incessant and mindless posting, an addiction to obnoxious games, constantly posting photos of kids (guilty), etc.  The Easily Annoyeds like a clean news feed.  Yes, they know they can hide your feed, but what's the point of accepting a friend request and then hiding that person's feed?  Keepin' it real.
4. The True Friend Litmus Testers.  Would you come to their funeral?  If not, the True Friend Litmus Testers kick you to the curb.  Some people take the "friend" label on Facebook quite seriously.  Sure, you may have went to band camp back with them in junior high, but are you really friends? They would argue no, and hit the ignore button with a certain level of satisfaction.
5. The Paybackers. The Paybackers enjoy ignoring friend requests in order to feel empowered and even popular.  Examples include the high school athlete who sends the emo kid a friend request and gets denied, or the ever popular case of the ex-boyfriend who gets snubbed by a still bitter ex-girlfriend.  The most vengeful of all Facebook snubbers, the Paybackers have a bone to pick and have found their medium of choice.

There are certainly more, but these are some of the more popular breeds as determined by Click Rain's extensive accepting/ignoring of friends over the years.  Disagree with any on the list?  Leave your comments below. 

Click Rain President Paul Ten Haken recently had the chance to discuss the impact of social media marketing in healthcare with Cataract & Refractive Surgery Today, the leading publication for that vertical.  Below is an excerpt, but you can read the entire piece here if you are so inclined.

The numbers speak for themselves, but Paul Ten Haken, an online marketing strategist and president of the online marketing firm, Click Rain, Inc. (Sioux Falls,SD), is happy to interpret them. He explains that, as people become more “addicted” to their electronic devices, the odds of reaching them through print advertisements or direct mail have drastically diminished.

“A recent statistic shows that 20% of people underage 25 [years] check Facebook or Twitter before they get out of bed,” Mr. Ten Haken said. “As we increasingly turn to social media tools as life tools, it is going to be important for business[es], including medical practices,to get involved in social networking so that they can communicate with consumers who prefer that method of interaction.”

Video and information-sharing sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter were once the domain of students and people in their 20s looking to connect electronically with friends around the corner and around the world. These social networking sites have quickly evolved into much more. It did not take long before professionals began to leverage the power of social media technology to reach, educate, and engage clients and colleagues. YouTube makes it possible for users to see the keynote speech of a missed conference or to easily share patients’ testimonials with prospective patients. With Eyetube.net,physicians can view a colleague’s new phaco technique in real time. Facebook simplifies the process of sharing information about professional events and accomplishments as well as select personal tidbits with various stakeholders in a practice, and Twitter streamlines that process even further.

“One of the greatest benefits of social media is that it allows an organization to build some character and personality for itself,” Mr. Ten Haken said. “It’s one thing to see the physician in the white lab coat and quite another to see that he’s a dad who coaches tee ball and has a golden retriever. It enables patients and prospective patients to relate to the physician, and it provides an additional level of comfort.”

Read the entire article from Cataract & Refractive Surgery Today

Foursquare offers playful way to engage customers
By Paul Ten Haken for the Sioux Falls Business Journal

In a world where social media tools quickly come and go, Foursquare is the newest application that is quickly gaining steam.    Foursquare is a location-based social networking tool that centers around “check-ins” in order to update followers on where you are located.  Users create accounts and utilize the GPS capabilities of their smart phones to check-in at various venues – offices, bars, restaurants, shops, etc. When a user checks in at a location, all their Foursquare friends are notified. The user with the most check-ins at a location earns the title of mayor for that location, in addition to numerous other badges that can be earned.  In addition, Foursquare provides real-time venue stats that allow business owners to see their most recent check-ins, most frequent visitors, gender breakdown of visitors and more. It’s half game, half social media tool and does present some unique opportunities for businesses that are willing to take ahold of the growing Foursquare craze.  Specifically, its B2C potential is intriguing. Here are three easy ways a business can wrap a Foursquare strategy into their marketing mix with fairly minimal effort.

Incentives for the reigning mayor.  As a way to reward your best customer, consider creating an incentive for the reigning mayor of your business on Foursquare.  Some ideas include offering the reigning mayor a reserved bar stool, his or her name on outdoor signage, free drinks, or a running 50% discount.  The better the incentive, the more competition for people to become the mayor and thus, the more visits to your business.

Specials for check-in frequency.  In addition to incentivizing the reigning mayor, how about an offer for some of the other regulars? For instance, a 25% off coupon for everyone who checks in three times in one week.  Frequency incentives are nothing new to business, but utilizing the Foursquare platform to do so is a great way to reward your best customers while engaging them in a game-like setting.

Adding “To Do’s” for visitors.  One feature of Foursquare allows you to add a “to do” item for your business.  That to-do item is displayed to users when they check-in at your business.  Business owners can create a to-do list of desired actions – everything from trying the chicken burrito to coming back on Wednesdays for Hawaiian shirt day. Think of it as a way to subtly steer customers toward the products and services you want to move. 

With over one million users, Foursquare is quickly passing the “sniff test” as more than a passing social media fad.  It’s important for businesses to realize the opportunity Foursquare presents for increasing customer loyalty and positioning among a niche of early technology adopters.  I’m still waiting for the first Sioux Falls business to create a Foursquare incentive campaign.  Who wants to be first? 

It's not often that Google introduces big changes to their search technology.  Sure, they roll out subtle tweaks and enhancements here and there, but the underbelly of the Google search monster remains relatively constant.  Until now. 

Google Caffeine was announced last year and is finally making it's way out of beta and into the Google indexing system. In summary, Google Caffeine is going to be a more frequent and faster way of indexing web content, ensuring that search queries return the most recent and relevant information on the web.  Currently, Google crawls the web in a sporadic fashion, dumping indexed content into a directory and returning those directory results when a search is performed.  Thus, it is possible for some content to wait days, weeks, and even months to get indexed (depending on the SEO efforts and a variety of other factors).  Google Caffeine - among other things - seeks to reduce that lag by continuously crawling the web and indexing content faster than even before.  And as the social web continues to grow, this will be critical in ensuring search relevancy. Love it.

Click Rain President Paul Ten Haken recently had the opportunity to present at the 2010 Sioux Falls Business Conference on new technology marketing trends.  Check out the recap of the event below.

Businesses should monitor social media growth

Sioux Falls Business Journal • June 2, 2010

The recent roll-out of the Facebook open graph has marketers licking their chops.  It also has an increasing number of consumers and privacy advocates raising their voices in concern.  However, there is another privacy issue that is surfacing and it involves the mining of public social media profile data to build social profiles of consumers.  These social profiles, in turn, are being used by companies to determine things like an individual's financial liability and credit risk level based on their friends, pages they like, and other publicly accessible data. 

KELO-TV in Sioux Falls recently highlighted this "Digital Dossier" issue and asked Click Rain to weigh in on this trend and what consumers can do to protect themselves.

The online marketing space changes quickly. Too quickly at times. Today’s social media shiny nickel is tomorrow’s MySpace (oh snap, Rupert Murdoch!). With our heads continually buried in the digital trenches, here are a few trends we’ve seen surfacing in recent weeks.

The Facebook Open Graph is a Pretty Big Deal

Facebook recently rolled out the “open graph”, which will allow developers to integrate Facebook protocols (e.g. “Like”) with their online content. Said another way, Facebook functionality can now live outside of Facebook and across the web. We’re tinkering with it on our site and are expecting to see some widespread use of this in the weeks/months to come. Privacy advocates, however, are already crying foul.

Foursquare is Taking Off, But…

Speaking of shiny nickels, that would be Foursquare. If you don’t feel like your life is enough of an open book, then you need to try Foursquare. There are some very obvious B2C applications for it, but we are anxiously awaiting to see if/how B2B companies will be able to wrap the Foursquare craze into their new media mix. We have a few ideas of our own on this.

Twitter Growth is Slowing, But Engagement Increasing

Not sure we need to say much more than the above headline states. A recent eMarketer reports says that by 2012 nearly one-fifth of US Web users, or 36 million people, will be on Twitter. Unlike Facebook, Twitter is still trying to find a viable business model. (They are kicking the tires on “promoted tweets” right now, but the jury is still out on whether or not this is a good idea.) The only certainty here is that as their userbase grows, so does the platform potential.

Other things like iAds, HTML5, Twitter’s @anywhere framework, Android OS, the iPad, and QR codes are starting to become common online vernacular and are going to have a big impact on the way our digital media is consumed. Fun stuff ahead….we’ll be keeping our eyes on the road.

I've had my iPad a little over 48 hours now and pathetically, I've spent many of my waking hours kicking the tires on its functionality.  While I am an Apple user and enjoy the usability and reliability of Apple products, I am far from a hardcore Apple evangelist.  That being said, the iPad is an unbelievable and mind-blowing piece of technology.  And sorry folks, it's much more than just a big iPhone.  Being in the tech field, it's going to change the way I am able to do business on a variety of levels.

After playing with it for a couple days, here are a few of the pros and cons of the iPad.

Awesome

• The display is brilliant. Client presentations (as well as watching movies on airplane flights) just got a whole lot cooler.
• When held horizontally, the touchpad keypad is surprisingly easy to use.  I have never been a fan of touchscreen keyboards and have always used a QWERTY keyboard on my mobile devices, so I was skeptical of how I would like this feature of the iPad.  Obviously I can type faster on my laptop, but after two days am already getting pretty darn fast typing on the iPad. I still may spring for the keyboard dock down the road.
• Tweetdeck for iPad is excellent.  Everyone has their own Twitter app of choice, but I've been pretty faithful to Tweetdeck over the years.  If you like Tweetdeck, you will love the iPad version.
• The screen lock toggle switch is must if you plan to use the iPad for "actual work".  It prevents the screen from toggling layouts against your desire and is very easy to turn of/on.
• Holding the internet in your hands on a tiny tablet creates an intimacy with the web that we haven't felt before.  That sounds a bit odd, I know, but for the first time since the laptop the internet experience has been reborn.
• The same suite of functionality that make the iPhone so great - finger flick scrolling, grab zoom in/out, etc. - are all present. 

Not So Awesome

• The audio quality is crappy.  Granted, the external audio is more of a "bonus" of the iPad than a marketable feature, but don't plan on using your iPad as your primary music source without scoring some external speakers or a sound dock.
• It's very droppable.  No handle and a slick body make me nervous every time I handle it.  I have a case coming in the mail to protect it, but I know it's going to take a tumble one of these days.  I may have to start wearing my Neumann's again.  
• I'd love to be able to quickly toggle between running apps.  Maybe there is a way to multitask, but I haven't uncovered it yet. Looking forward to that in v2.0.
• I have no idea how I am going to keep this screen clean. Black car owners, you know what I am talking about.
• The app store for the iPad is a bit light right now, and there are very few "business" apps (which is what I primarily intend to use my iPad for).  Assuming the iPad apps start rolling out in droves - which they will - I am anxious to see what productivity tools I can get my hands on.

The lists could go on, but hey, I've only had it for two days.  You simply have to experience the iPad in order to judge it for yourself.  I'm not one to overstate the importance of technology given the rapid pace at which it changes, but the iPad is certainly more than a fad. A "game changer"? Possibly. 

Oh, and if you enjoyed this post, please show your appreciation by buying me one of these.