Influencers & Community Marketing » social network

Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies

eCairn — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 23:54:54 +0000

We would like to invite you to join us at the Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies Conference, taking place April 4-6, 2011 in Boston, MA.

Our CEO, Dominique Lahaix will be presenting during the Results track:

Case Study on Adobe Community Mapping & Influence Outreach (Forrester Groundswell Award 2010)

There is a broad community beyond Adobe’s own ecosystem, where relevant and influential people socialize online. This presentation will drive the audience through the process of finding and profiling a virtual community and manage an efficient influencer outreach campaign.

We would like to offer you a special 20% discount to join us at the event. To have your discount applied, mention priority code: SPKRM2305DL -Register here.

We are very excited to be a part of this event, and are pleased to be able to extend this invitation to you and your team to become a part of this conference. We hope that you will make plans to attend this informative, industry-leading event.

If there are any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at conversation@ecairn.com!

Ready to Engage your Tribe?

eCairn — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 19:32:23 +0000

Here is the new two minute presentation for eCairn, enjoy!

Adoption of Social Media by the Gaming Industry

arthurecairn — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 23:38:29 +0000

The presence of social media is not something that big developers and publishers like Electronic Arts and Activision have ignored. Just last week, developers of the highly anticipated Starcraft 2 announced that they will be adding Facebook integration into their upcoming title. Big players in the video game industry always play on the bleeding edge of developments in technology, marketing and business models; social media is no exception. So, if social media is the new marketing frontier, where do game developers stand?

Let’s take a step back first; before the social media boom, publishers were already creating online forums and moderating feedback from users. You would easily find feedback from users on what features they liked the most, and what features they hated. Sentiment was as simple as collecting and organizing feedback from magazines and website reviews. Marketers and producers who were tech savvy enough would post forum polls and track discussions from commercial and independent forums. User feedback on the internet was manageable, and located in pockets of communities that the astute marketer would easily find.

Today, the widespread presence of syndicated, published and independent blogs, news about upcoming titles spreads faster than publishers plan for. Biased news leaks and raw speculation leave poor impressions in the minds of discerning gamers. It is difficult to predict and find key community influencers who spark the strongest opinions. This puts developers in a position where they have little to no control of community sentiment before the release date. There are so many different influencers and communities that affect sentiment about a product; it is beyond the control of marketing directors and community managers to find the right one.

The video game blog community is large and extremely active.

Some developers have found a way to regain some of that control. Bioware Corp, well known for creating large open ended worlds for gamers to explore, created the Bioware Social Network. http://social.bioware.com/home.php? This network has become a haven for fans to create their own dedicated blogs, share media, experiences and provide essential feedback for the developers. This gives Bioware increased ability to monitor continued sentiment, maintain customer retention, and build up reputation and hype for future game releases.

By creating their own pocketed community, Bioware hopes to bring a majority of the conversations into a community they can easily monitor, just like in the old days. That alone is not enough; creating an in house community excludes the tens of thousands of conversations of lesser known small to medium gaming influencers and blogs that heavily influence the opinions of readers and writers of larger communities.

There is no doubt that it takes quite a lot of resources to develop and maintain social networking campaigns, let alone the metaphorical social media crusade Bioware launched. In an industry where even small developers have a great chance to make it big, where do they find the tools to reach out to these gamers and influencers? Let’s face it, most developers don’t have the resources and manpower to launch their own social network. These guys need to partake in guerilla marketing; they need to find efficient yet effective methods to bring themselves closer to the tipping point. They need to stimulate the nodes where conversations between gamers and influencers generate the most buzz for their brand.

In short, it’s expensive to launch large social media networks and campaigns. The little guys are going to have to play smart to stay on top of the game (no pun intended). If only there were a powerful yet inexpensive way for small to medium developers to engage the communities and influencers that make a difference for them… =]

Posted by: Arthur Huynh

Social Profile in Blogs: How many?

laurentpf — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:04:20 +0000

In the course of our (very long) days, we’ve built deep list of blogs on various topics ( > 100 blogs).
Now that we’re capable of detecting automatically if bloggers display their social network profile on their blogs, we got curious about the differences in the percentage of those who do and don’t across topics. By the way, the most frequent profiles are those of LinkedIn and Facebook.

The 7 lists we used for our empirical study are Personal finance (1501 blogs), Blogging (968 blogs), Social Media Marketing (698 blogs), Gaming (429 blogs), Cosmetology (400 blogs), Wireless (240 blogs) and Enterprise 2.0 (35 blogs). A quick note to state that we don’t pretend having found all the blogs in those categories , we found a lot of them but we don’t know where the end is.

The differences are huge as you can see and point, most of the time, to a poor level of integration between people’s blogs and social profiles:

At the top is Social Media Marketing – No surprise, we were expecting it. Bloggers in this category stay on top of the social media wave. Our figures show at least a third of Social Media Marketing bloggers display their social network profile on their blog. Right now Conversation(tm) detects only badges on the home page; but in the future, we will detect them on the about page too.
2nd is Enterprise 2.0 with a bit more than 20%
3rd is Wireless with a litte more than 10%
4th is Enterprise Security with a little less than 9%
Then we got blogging (~4%), Cosmetology (~3%), Gaming (~2%).
Last is personal finance (~1%)

Now let’s look a little deeper at what’s happening in our list of Social Media Marketing blogs.

Some blogs are group blogs where we typically don’t expect to find social network badges. If we take a swag at narrowing to only blogs from individuals, it would probably bump the percentage to the vicinity of 50%. Not bad!

But the story really gets interesting with this last experiment: On a small sample (10) of blogs from individual bloggers who didn’t have a social network badge in their blog, we found their profile in LinkedIn and, 8 times out of 10, the blog is listed on it. Honestly we don’t think its that way on purpose (i.e: bloggers don’t want readers to find their social network profiles). It’s more a data integration issue.

Conclusion: There’s a long way to go before we see a tight integration between blogs and profiles so you can go seamlessly from one to the other in order to have a complete picture of the bloggers you like. With the exception of blogs hosted on a social network (niche social network), the infrastructures are separate (blogs powered by wordpress, typepad and so on, profiles powered by social network platforms) thus the issue.

If you’ve read that far, you may ask yourself: So what? Why is that important? Why do I care?
The answer is quite straightforward. Nowadays, when we see a piece of content from someone, we go and google them or check if we find them in social networks because it gives us more information about the author as well as additional ways to build a relationship with them if we desire. We do that all the time and I’m sure you do too! The issue discussed in this post makes it harder than if one little click was all it takes to go from a blog to a profile.

Here, one of our job is to deal with fragmented infrastructure and bring them together in a seamless and meaningful user experience so we see a nice issue to solve. Let us know what you think!

Conversation™ Updated – Ad Network, Facebook, LinkedIn and more.

laurentpf — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:18:38 +0000

Our baby is growing! No kidding, we’ve added several cool features to Conversation™, eCairn’s web application for social media marketers.
So here it goes:

Social Network Integration

People’s profiles on social networks typically tell you a lot about who they are, what they like and who they know. Profiles are also a great tool to connect with them. We’ve run into people who prefer not to receive email but are ok if someone contacts them through their social networks. With our recent release, Conversation™ detects Facebook and LinkedIn badges when they’re present on blogs.
Users of the application get a summary view of:

the presence of social network profiles
the social networks available

In addition, they can access individual profiles in one click from the application.

Blog Card

The blog card contains a wealth of information to help you analyze a blog and determine if it fits your criteria for your buzz, outreach, viral or advertising activities. With this feature we’re introducing our new paradigm dubbed Place/People/Conversation -> If you’re a marketer, you want to know where your target market (prospects, customers, influencers…) socialize online; you want to understand who they are and what they’re talking about. Indeed, you may elect to advertise on relevant sites, do an outreach to relevant people, and buzz in relevant conversations. It’s now easier, thanks to the blog card. We think this new paradigm fits better with marketers’ usage of social media. Over time, expect the whole application to move toward this new user experience.

Here’s an example of the kind of information you will find in a blog card:

We’ve some interesting data on how the presence of advertising or social profiles vary amongst verticals and we’ll share them with you very soon. So stay tuned.

By the way, remember those features come on top of those we added in May, like ad network detection and more….

If you’re interested in trying Conversation(tm), we offer a one month free trial for an unlimited number of users.