January, 2010 | Soshable | Social Media Blog

How can Social Media be the Backbone of a Company?

January 31, 2010 by JD Rucker 6 Comments

There are three camps into which every company in the world falls:

Those who don’t know or don’t care about social media
Those who care about social media and think it can be useful
Those who think social media can be the backbone of the company

If you were to break it down by percentages, the “Social Media is the Backbone” camp would most likely be the smallest. While business owners are starting to agree that social media has a place in their business, few would be willing to bet the farm on it. They are prudent, thoughtful, and wise.

Then again, many of them (depending on the type of company) would be incorrect.

Social Media Seminars Before and During NADA 2010

January 27, 2010 by JD Rucker 5 Comments

I have the honor and privilege of participating in two batches of automotive social media seminars in Orlando this year. One, the Automotive Marketing Boot Camp, will be more of a training-class setting that includes 5 trainers offering their insights for nearly 4 hours each on different aspects of marketing. I am doing the classes on social media itself.

Even though 4 hours seems to be a long time, believe it or not you could double that time and still have more to cover in the realm of social media for car dealers. The opportunities are endless, the risks are many, but regardless of what a dealer does or doesn’t want to do in social media, they need to understand that having a presence in some form or fashion is required, even if just as a defensive stance against those who would go after their name.

This event is not for those people. It’s for people who are ready to take their marketing to the next level. Hands-on, extremely informative, with small classroom settings geared to give everyone a one-on-one feel and to be able to take away tremendous value from the event.

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Filed Under: Automotive Social Media Tagged With: automotive marketing

Social News “Darling” Imgur Has Staggering Statistics

January 27, 2010 by JD Rucker 1 Comment

When Imgur.com first hit the scene a year ago, it quickly became the “hip” way to post, host, and share images on Reddit. Digg took notice and it soon became the most popular image site there as well.

A year later, one thing is certain – Imgur’s numbers as a result are nothing short of amazing. While these numbers are nothing compared to more well-known image sites such as Flickr, Photobucket, or Imageshack, it is still impressive considering that the traffic is almost entirely social media driven.

Click to see the full view.

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Read more about social news on this blog.

Filed Under: Digg, Reddit, Social Internet Tagged With: imgur

How Can Users Benefit From The Real Time Web

January 18, 2010 by Evan Britton 6 Comments

One of the most talked about topics of 2009’s was the real time web. Even as 2010 has begun, more and more articles are written about the real time web and more and more startups have launched. Even Google has begun mixing in real time results into their search engine through the “Latest Results Box” that shows up for many information based searches.

With all the noise and hype surrounding the real time web – it should be that users can greatly benefit from all of these new technologies. However, it seems that many internet users still aren’t using these tools to benefit from the real time web. You don’t have to use Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media service to be able to take advantage of the tools that are out there. Below, we have reviewed several of the things you can do today – to become better informed about what is going on.

One of the coolest aspects to the real time web is to learn about the latest trends. When a bunch of people discuss what is going on in the real time web, these topics are tracked to see which is being mentioned the most. Many sites offer the latest trends, and often, these trends can show you breaking news before it is picked up by traditional sources. What The Trend is the early leader in the trend space as they not only show the latest trends but also they show you reasons why each trend is popular right now.

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Filed Under: Social Freshness, Social Media Tagged With: real time web

Selling with Social Media: The Old Fashioned Way in a New Media Day

January 16, 2010 by Erin Ryan 8 Comments

“Knock, Knock” is the sounds that use to symbolize a salesman’s presence, with a great haircut, suit to match and briefcase in hand.

Although presentation was of importance, it wasn’t exactly what got him in the door; and even though what he was selling may have been what the client was looking for, it would be his persona that would get his pitch heard.

Reviving Old Habits in New Media

Yes, that sounds like a scene from the 1950’s and although years and technology have taken on a predominate role in the way we sell to others, doesn’t mean that the old way of doing so doesn’t still play an important role in how we sell today.

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Filed Under: Automotive Social Media, Facebook, Social Media Marketing Tagged With: social media selling

Long Tail Search Comes To Life in Social Media Marketing

January 5, 2010 by Ronald Fortier 7 Comments

We all work in a business dominated by people with infomercial expectations of zero effort and immediate results. They are all looking for that quick fix. They salivate at the thought of finding those magic search terms. They dream of finding the greatest automated social marketing system that will instantly produce hordes of highly targeted conversion ready traffic. Don’t believe me? There are 277,000,000 search engine responses on Google when searching using the term free twitter apps.

It is time to stop running your dealership on the lottery ticket business model, and it is time to begin social media marketing that will provide you persistent long term traffic to your site.

Digg Dupe Checker Fail

January 5, 2010 by JD Rucker 2 Comments

Digg has moderators, as they have acknowledged in the past. For those who believe that the moderators are screening the stories before they’re allowed to hit the front page, I can say that either they were asleep on the job or it just isn’t true.

Filed Under: Digg Tagged With: digg dupe fail

How Twitter and Facebook Saw 2009 in 1 Word or Less

January 3, 2010 by JD Rucker 8 Comments

On December 31, 2009, Andy Carvin from NPR asked people on Twitter and Facebook to sum up the year in one word. He then ran the results through Wordle to generate a word cloud.

As you can see, some found hope in 2009 while others found it to be exhausting. Many considered 2009 to be bittersweet, challenging, or tumultuous. If you look a little closer at some of the less-popular words, you’ll find interesting descriptions such as suckage, bizarro, craptacular, and autotuned.

One word and its plural stood out as the overwhelming favorite description amongst social networking users: Change.

Click the image to enlarge.