Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Pinterest Business Accounts

Pinterest Business Accounts: This Week in Social Media

By Cindy King
Published November 17, 2012
On SocialMediaExaminer.com

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news.

To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

What’s New This Week?

Pinterest Rolls Out Business Accounts: Pinterest now offers a set of free tools and resources for businesses. There are new terms of service for businesses. To set up your Pinterest business account, go here.



You can now use Pinterest for business.

LinkedIn Enables Profile Editing on Mobile: LinkedIn makes it possible for mobile professionals to edit their profiles on the go.  ”Now you can update your profile with a new headline, add recent skills or add a new position so your professional identity is always up to date.”


Discussion From Our Networking Clubs: Thousands of social media marketers and small business owners are asking questions and helping others in our free Networking Clubs. Here are a few interesting discussions worth highlighting:



YouTube Makes it Easier to Watch Videos on TV: There’s a YouTube app update for Android and Google TV that “automatically pairs your devices on the same WiFi. Just find a video on your YouTube app for Android—like the latest video from GoPro or H+ The Digital Series—click the TV icon that appears and the video will play instantly on your Google TV.”


This new YouTube on TV feature is "like a remote control—you can pause, scroll or skip to the next video with your mobile device as it plays on your TV."

Facebook Launches Social Jobs Partnership Application: The Social Jobs Partnership (SJP) unveiled a Facebook app to ”make it easier for people on Facebook to find and share employment opportunities.”


"The new SJP app is a central location where recruiters can share open positions with the Facebook community sorted by industry, location and skills."

Here’s upcoming news to watch:

Facebook Now Testing “Ranked Comments” on Business Pages: Currently only a few people have this feature. “Ranked Comments” means that the comments with the most engagement will float to the top.

Facebook Adds Sources of Friendship Under Users’ Friends Tab: You can expect to see “more information under the Friends tab on users’ timelines, indicating how many of the user’s friends were recently added, from high school, from college or from work.”

Here’s an interesting tool worth noting:

Leaderboarded: A tool for companies to create their own online leaderboards powered by social data.


Monday, December 3, 2012

The End of the Expert: Why No One in Marketing Knows What They're Doing

This is a very interesting and on point article about how drastically the landscape of marketing has changed over the last 15 years. It is not only been a radical shift but now today's marketer must keep up with the ever-changing technology. One of the best points in the article is how you don't need to be a marketing expert, you need to be someone who is interested in and passionate about marketing. Someone who wants to stay on the trends and be creative to cultivate and nurture the new company/customer relationship.

The End of the Expert: Why No One in Marketing Knows What They're Doing
by Dorie Clark, Contributor

Richard Branson's Virgin is one company that's succeeding in the new era of marketing.  

It’s a stark verdict from a prominent source. “There are hundreds of thousands of people who were trained and mentored, and studied classical marketing, and they got good at it,” says Clark Kokich, chairman of digital agency Razorfish. Unfortunately, the world has changed – and that education is no longer relevant. “If your self-worth and your confidence is based on you being an expert, you’re in deep trouble, because there aren’t any experts,” says Kokich, author of Do or Die: Surviving and Thriving in a World Where the Old Ways of Marketing Aren’t Getting It Done. “Sure, there are experts in some fields. Someone may be really good in SEO or in mobile. But there aren’t any experts in making this transition.”

In the late 1990s, digital marketing debuted to great fanfare, but it was still fundamentally about advertising to customers. But in the past several years, new social and mobile tools have upended that paradigm. “The focus has really changed,” Kokich told me in a recent interview at the Inbound Marketing Summit, where we were both keynote speakers. “It’s less about advertising and more about creating an experience that transforms what it means to be a customer of a brand. And that change has really caused a lot of consternation in marketing because none of us were trained to do that.”

As a model for the future, he cites the iconoclastic examples of Richard Branson’s Virgin; Nike’s “Write the Future” campaign, in which youth competed to be identified as a rising soccer star; and the “Epic Mix” campaign by the Vail ski resort, which leveraged digital technology to help friends connect, track each other, and compete on the slopes. To succeed in marketing moving forward, he says, “What you need more than expertise is curiosity, someone who’s interested in what’s happening, loves change, and wants to develop ideas and drive change. If you’re not one of those people, you’re going to hate what’s going on in marketing and you won’t be effective. I have friends who have told me they’re just trying to hang on before people realize they don’t know what they’re doing. But I don’t think you can fake it another five years. You’re just not relevant if you’re fighting the reality of what’s happening.”

So how do you begin to “create brand experiences” instead of relying on past methods of advertising? The first step, says Kokich, is to “ask a different question.” He advises companies to pull together a cross-section of company and agency staff – “everybody that’s responsible for building anything that touches the customer” – put them in a room and ask: “What do people hate about doing business with us, and can we use digital to fix it?”

The wrong frame, which too many companies use, is “This is what we are, and how do we shine it up?” Kokich believes more fundamental change is necessary. “We talk a lot in marketing about the importance of being good storytellers. Well, we need to be good story changers, because telling a story isn’t enough. Customers can see right through a great story about a lousy product.”

If you succeed in the new marketing, Kokich says, the benefits can be profound: “Companies like Virgin or Vail fundamentally altered their market position, because they fundamentally altered the way they did marketing.”