Social Media Midterm

Influence (Section 7, History of) Influence and influencers are marketing concepts established when Gabriel Tarde who wrote his book, L'opinion et la foule, in 1898 In 1944, sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld published his seminal book, The People's Choice, which examined the 1940 presidential election and the factors that shaped voter behavior and action in Ohio.

Publishers and marketing professionals had a keen interest in forming relationships with influencers after realizing the economic benefits of these friendships. Influencers are further discussed in Chapter 4 of this course pack

Investment of Time is High for Social Media because the Data is Unstructured No matter how much an organization streamlines their business processes, it takes significant amounts of time to do things well. How much time? The amount of time spent working with digital data (Web copy, images, blogs, online video content, social media posts, as well as other forms of information, etc.) is relative; some may think 20 hours a week is a lot, while others disagree.

However, the truth is that much of the digital information we are dealing with is what we commonly called "unstructured."3 Unstructured data take a lot longer to work with than when the information is structured

In this chapter, we cover the development of Internet search engines and the analytics behind Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing

organic and paid Search engines rank organic results based on more than 200 ranking factors in an algorithm. By contrast, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) focuses on paid search business solutions Indexing helps classify a site correctly for searching purposes on page: Content quality as determined by search algorithms. • Off page: Links from other websites, search engines, social media and email.

Advantages Low production costs: There are low startup costs to capture video (most digital devices can record and upload digital video directly to YouTube). Extensible: Sophisticated video editing tools are free or inexpensive and accessible to almost anyone.

• YouTube analytics: YouTube provides sophisticated analytics to channel owners on their uploaded videos. • Advocacy: Videographers and musicians have additional training and playbook resources that encourage creators to improve their skills and build their audience

Internet Timeline 1993: Mosaic was the first freely available browser, which soon spawned Netscape. Mosaic supported gopher, file transfer protocol, and network news transfer protocol

1998: Google Search founded on September 4, 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google Search differentiated itself from other search engines by focusing on the relevance of pages based on patterns formed in hyperlinks. 2004-2009: The popularity of the WWW equated to a rapid growth in users, content, and sales, both B2C and B2B. As a result of the popularity, there is an emergence of new players, such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube, and LinkedIn—the social networks we are familiar with today.

Online Video (YouTube) Section 3 (Midterm)

According to eMarketer, online video and vlogging are among the most consumable content on the Web and people are increasing the time they spend daily, from 54 minutes in 2014 to a predicted 75 minutes in 2018

The first point we want to make is that the growth of social media and its proliferation makes it imperative to study its analytics. However, many of the "Intermediate Metrics" such as likes, shares, posts, and pins have turned out to be poor proxies for Return on Investment (ROI) Social Media Analytics evolved to focus on online audiences and their activities. Thus, the creation and analysis of digital data need to be considered together, as one unit During the early period of what we now call "social media" (2003-2011), social media was considered a new phenomenon. Today, social media, marketing, and analytics have fully merged, as shown in Figure 9.2.

Activities in social media differ somewhat, based on the channel. What we have found is a fragmentation has evolved where we cannot understand the activity in a social media channel without the analytics created just for that channel. Much of the data from one channel is incompatible with the others, and even when it has the same terminology—i.e., shares, likes, friends, etc.—this doesn't always mean the same thing and cannot be added together with integrity.

Blogs 2 Blogs that are consistent in their topic (and use of certain topic words) tend to do better in search engine results listings9 (which generate a substantial amount of traffic to many blogs)

Blogs were created in the age of search engines and leverage social media by integrating with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other social sharing applications.

Blogs Blogs are one of the first forms of social media that evolved the early 1990s the choice channel for reputation and brand-building. A blog is a type of online personal space or website where an individual (or organization) posts content (text, images, videos, and links to other sites) and expresses opinions on matters

Common types of blogs focus on travel, cooking, fashion, art, music, parenting, etc. Businesses may also have blogs to cater to their consumers. Blogging does not require technical knowhow or programming skills.

Disadvantages (tested for on Midterm) Stiff completion: With so much new content uploaded every moment, the videographer has a hard time gaining viewership (especially if they have not developed an audience yet). • Low attention span: Viewers need to engage with a video within the first few seconds, or they will not watch the rest, and this may be a reason why video- enabled platforms such as Instagram have become so popular.

Consequently, videographers need to be good storytellers to captivate their audiences with their content. • Viral sharing: While many videographers want their videos to go "viral," few ever do. In most cases, videos need to be planned and seeded in various online locations first, which requires spending money on advertising, having a knack for appealing storylines and great timing. Also, most of the videos that go viral are professionally produced (with rare exceptions). • Ownership: YouTube technically owns any video that is uploaded to its platform.

Is Data the New Oil?

Data is created so massively and quickly that new ways to process and store it have become necessary. Data growth requires individuals who know how to work with the data. By 2020, he predicts, "digital is the business; the business is digital

Yelp (Section 5/Midterm material) However, until now no one knew how important the online star rating could be for a local business's fortunes. In one study, local San Francisco restaurants found that small improvements in their online Yelp ratings significantly impacted their bottom line.32 The study was done in San Francisco by two economists at the University of California, Berkeley. The economists collected reviews and daily reservation availability for 328 restaurants on Yelp during May 2012. The results of the study found moving from 3 stars to 3.5 stars increased a restaurant's chance of selling out during prime dining times increased from 13% to 34%.33

Even better, moving from 3.5 stars to 4 stars increased the chance of selling out during prime dining times by 19 percentage points. But star ratings are not always a reliable indicator of the quality of a venue, as some businesses could inflate their star ratings in order to drive more customers to visit their locations. However, ratings are directly impacted by a retail business's quality of products and services in the eyes of its customers; consistently improving the customer's experience should improve a venue's online ratings.

Facebook (Section 5, history of) Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is an online social network service where users can create profiles, upload photos, and video, send messages and keep in touch with friends, family, and colleagues Facebook Pages A business can benefit from a Facebook page. A Facebook page is a source of advertisement, communication node, and network, which connects businesses to customers. However, Facebook pages have many rules, regulations, and laws surrounding their use for businesses. Facebook and Google have cracked down on fake news posted and fake news sites promoted on their platforms.

Facebook Messenger Facebook Messenger is a mobile application created for friends and family to communicate and is also an innovative tool for shopping, marketing, productivity, and personal improvement. Facebook Messenger uses "bots" to automate messaging. Bots may appear to some as the opposite to what is intended for social media but may be necessary due to the massive amounts of data compiling. Bots exist for many business types and categories

Local Audience

Facebook continues to add more capabilities to their data tracking of members, including their exact location. Google does the same, in fact, all the platforms have that data since mobile devices broadcast their location; in this case, the location is used to broadcast targeted ads within one mile of an advertiser's brick-and-mortar location/store.18

Reddit (Section 5 / Midterm) The name Reddit is a play-on-words of the phrase "read it," Users earn "Karma" on their profile. When posts and comments The perception of Reddit in the media has changed over time. Several years ago, Reddit was used more for Web traffic generation and link spamming than anything else. Since then, Reddit has transformed into a more legitimate way to obtain information (curated by an enthused community) than most mainstream media (especially during and after the 2016 US election, some have more respect for Reddit than they do for the mainstream press), in fact, some prefer specific SubReddits for accuracy over articles that appeared in the New York Times in 2016! In a weird, almost Twilight Zone way, much of the mainstream media has become "fake news" in the eyes of many, which has elevated other outlets, including Reddit.

Frankly, Reddit is known by its members as a place where unfiltered ideas can be discussed. Since its creation in 2005, Reddit has grown into one of the most influential communities on the Internet and has given birth to interesting collaborative projects that reflect a group character and value system.21 Examples of Reddit collaboration include:

Facebook (Section 5 - covered on Midterm Facebook popularized the concept of "virtual friends" and now is "home base" for many social media users. But just as some of us do not like to hang out at home Still, people spend more time on Facebook than any other social network In fact, the real customer of Facebook is not its members; rather, it is the advertisers who are mining the vast amounts of data generated by the content that members generate and consume.

In 2016, Facebook introduced a new algorithm "favoring friends" that shared stories rather than publications sharing stories.16 Because of many subtle algorithmic and policy changes, Facebook's organic reach has steadily declined (and, consequently, Facebook's advertising revenue increased), However their strategies backfired in 2018 as Facebook's stocked tanked due to the Cambridge Analytica debacle

According to Wired Magazine, the average American spends nine hours a day glued to one or more screens creating and/or consuming social media content

In Chapter 3 we examined the history of social media; in this chapter, we go in much more detail regarding leveraging social media though the use of Social Media and it's Analytics. Social media is such a big part of the fabric of society today that it is almost impossible to imagine our lives without it. Moreover, these days it is more present than ever, and it includes rich analytics and targeting capabilities, some of which we will cover in this chapter. Social media is one of the most powerful technological developments to happen in recent years The rise of "social media" has given us a voice in the world and the result is that social media has merged with marketing and analytics.

If we are going to engage with the world via social media authentically, it cannot be expected to be fully automated and consequently requires time to create content, along with a significant amount of content curation. While algorithms can help, they cannot eliminate all the work—nor should they

Instead, let's focus on making the time we spend more efficient (algorithms and streamlined processes can help with this). For the sake of brevity "unstructured data" is the information one must look at with one's own eyes and ears to understand (as shown in Figure 1.1 in Chapter 1). We have found that to understand the "context" of a statement or word; we must directly examine it—bots, algorithms, and other automation can't help much here.7

In November 1989, Bernes-Lee created the three protocols—HTTP, URL, and HTML—that we now know as the "Web," For the most part, the communications infrastructure remains invisible to the average user, unless it breaks

Internet of Things—devices talking to devices—creates Intelligent Web

Local Search Optimization Brand awareness: A brand is seen and recognized by consumers in a top search result once a branded search term or the name of the brand is searched for.

Lead generation: Organic search can acquire potential consumers through the content or targeted keywords used. Paid search aids in search and Web Analytics, which can be employed in Return on Investment (ROI) calculations. Social media marketers strive to develop search engine strategies to make their websites appear at the top of search results

Positives • Very helpful for strangers and travelers to find the best local venues based on their current location. • Provides local venues with a way to engage with customers and build a reputation, especially for new customers. • Provides actionable analytics (in some cases) that improves the quality of a venue's service or offerings.

Negatives • There have been several fake reviews and fake reviewers. • Yelp encourages customers to voice their opinion, but that is not always a positive thing as some customers are impossible to please or are otherwise unreasonable. • There have been isolated cases of vendors suing customers who left negative reviews or vice versa. The laws around the liability for negative reviews are not very clear.

Snapchat Features • The My Story feature allows users to broadcast multiple Snapchat pictures or videos, for friends' multiple viewings, over a 24-hour period. An example is users will show an event that happened on the commute to work, an even that happened in the morning after arriving at work, lunch, commute home, and arriving home.

On Saturdays, Team Snapchat produces various live stories expressing the events of Snapchat users around the world. These stories or compilation of "Snaps," are referred to as an event. Snapchat also allows users to experience a festival or holiday in a different part of the world through their smartphones.

Tumblr (owned by Yahoo David Karp,7 the founder of Tumblr, created a platform that made it easy for creative people like him to post anything The future for Tumblr has darkened since Verizon acquired Yahoo in 2016

One of the reasons that Yahoo failed to reap a return on their investment is that Tumblr's audience is composed mostly of millennials (who are predisposed to be distrustful of most advertising). Besides, millennials are hard to target with online advertising and avoid websites and applications that use excessive advertising on their sites

Influence (Section 7 - Midterm material) Role Models as Influencers Often, we can think of our parents and siblings as "influencers," in other cases it is a mentor or role model, perhaps a celebrity, religious leader, politician, or even a book (author) can be influential. However, influencers have a relationship not only to what they influence but also to its value.

Popularity as Digital Influence Klout (owned by Lithium Technologies) is an example of a platform attempting to measure and score how much influence someone has mainly on Twitter and Facebook (and a few other online channels). Klout measures online influence by using data from various social networks to gauge a specific user's Klout Score, which is a number between 1 and 100. However, Klout does not track a user's influence beyond the specific social media channels it collects

Reddit (History of, part of Section 5) Founded in 2005 by UVA roommates Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, Reddit has become a major entertainment, news, and social networking website where community members can submit their content and share other content, like an online bulletin board system.

Reddit.com is a combination of hundreds of "forums" that are each centered on certain topics (i.e., sports teams, funny videos, and movies). Reddit's unique contribution to social media is the invention of the "SubReddit," which acts as a bulletin board around a subject and can include collaborative efforts (covered in more detail in Chapter 4 of this course pack).

Research (tested for on the Midterm) Pinterest has potential as a market research tool. • To detect any website where images have been "pinned," enter http://pinterest. com/source/"domain.com." • Note the boards where pins were posted. • Study the boards where images came from in the domain in question, and save them (paste many of the pictures from the board in a Word document) for later analysis (look for interesting similarities and trends). • Discover the list of all the followers of any board that a user is interested in by clicking on the "Followers" link.

Simple investigative approaches yield potentially actionable insights.45 Pinterest is a platform that has so far been embraced by woman more than men (this has shown up in just about every demographic study of the platform)

Web 3.0 Intelligent applications: Intelligent applications customize and personalize the user's web experience with insights forged by geo-location services, predictive analytics, and Big Data. Through the invention of intelligent devices and software, the Internet of Things was produced.

Smart fabric: Smart fabric refers to processed and shared information and its location, whether it is in cloud computing, Hadoop, iBeacons, mesh networks, intelligent devices, or data lakes. Also, in 2015, Verizon acquired AOL which didn't turn out that well. Verizon created a synergy as an ISP and coupled it with the large content publisher, AOL (later consolidated into OAuth - see https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/verizon-says-oath-dead-meet-verizonmedia-group-n949631) which recently tanked

Snapchat (Section 5, History of) Snapchat has become one of the top three social media platforms, in particular for millennials, who favor it over all others.29 Founded in 2011, Snapchat's founder, Evan Spiegel, came up with the idea for the platform while attending a class at Stanford; he wanted an easier way to communicate with his friends than the other social platforms offered

Snapchat Stories are a feature of Snapchat that allow users to post multiple pictures to their "My Story" feed. The My Story feed is intended for friends or everyone to see, depending on a member's settings. A year after launching, Facebook unsuccessfully tried to buy the Snapchat for $3 billion.

Snapchat

Snapchat is one of the top three social media apps among millennials, dominating 33% of the demographic's smartphones right behind Instagram and Facebook (at ~44% and ~75%, respectively)

social media can be defined as an Internet-based platform with capabilities to allow users to upload text, videos, audio, and graphics. Social media and Web 2.0 are often used interchangeably, but they can be slightly differentiated by their "back to the roots of the Web" or "forward-looking, futuristic" direction.

Social media platforms began to emerge around 2004 Since then, there has been a steady rise in adoption, and now most people who are online have at least one social media account.

Web 2.0 is the version of the World Wide Web that most of us have experience of. Long tail: This is a term popularized by Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson in 2004. It refers to many products that sell in small quantities and is contrasted with the limited number of bestselling products. Search engines: These pick up specific keywords that when used in a search, can narrow down results from the infinite amounts of unstructured data.

Social media: Social media are websites and applications that focus on communicating and sharing through mobile devices and stimulate social networking. Geolocation: Mobile devices broadcast their location to Internet Service Providers via global positioning system (GPS), near field communication (NFC), and geofencing. GPS simplifies navigation by eliminating the need for physical maps, which saves time and energy.

Text Analytics

Text analytics did not formally exist until about 1975. The simplest way to explain text analytics is the method of turning text into numbers, similar in structure to a spreadsheet so that statistics and other types of analysis can be run on the data all search engines—are powered by text analytics

For our purposes, once Internet technology was developed, it was made to be accessible and extensible to the public circa mid 1990's. The Internet allowed search engines and social media to emerge as specific online marketing disciplines that students and practitioners could study and master

The Internet, formerly called Arpanet by the Department of Defense (DOD), is a global network of interconnected networks that was created in 1983 as a way for researchers to quickly and freely communicate. In 1990, the now famous computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, which opened the network for everyone, nationally and internationally.

YouTube (Section 3, History of) The introduction of YouTube marks the beginning of the viral video era YouTube is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, view, and share videos. It was created in February 2005 and has been owned by Google since late 2006. Three former PayPal employees and coworkers of Elon Musk created the YouTube server: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. It originated as a new online dating site called "Tune in Hook Up In 2015, users were recording and uploading 4k videos from their smartphones

The content creator's world continues to expand with the introduction of streaming live video. Mobile device users can now broadcast a live video stream of their choosing, for free with Twitter's Periscope, Amazon's Twitch, and Facebook Live An important feature of YouTube is the YouTube channel. YouTube is a great advertising channel and offers a variety of ad types and formats. Marketers utilize YouTube influencers by sponsoring these users and using their network of subscribers.

Social Media History Since social media is reliant on the content generated by users, users are encouraged to share their interests, passion, and insights. With posts from specific users, marketers can peer into consumer behavior at an individual or group level, but they are not limited to passive research Billions of people flock to social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, where they share, tweet, like, and post content. Social media analytics is based on the underlying tools, measures, and technologies of a social media platform. By replacing the personal computer with a smartphone, a user had the freedom to document what is happening around them and share it in real-time

The neural nets are used to analyze footage from live webcams and mobile camera devices In layman's terms, while using social media, the platform learns and adapts to what users post, watch, or like, and provides additional content, advertisements, people to follow, or content that the platform believes will appeal to the individual.

Custom Audience Facebook and Twitter are similar in that they allow a list of email addresses, accounts, or phone numbers to be uploaded to their platforms and used as a basis for targeted advertising both on the platform and outside of them, based on first and third-party cookies. Targeting a specific audience that one already has is more efficient than just serving ads to anyone on the social network (because the audience is already identified and partly understood

Triangulating data in a data warehouse and the rise of Data Lakes and Data Mists also brings up intriguing possibilities to create custom audiences within the data in a data warehouse (or cloud) Lookalike audiences are used to extend the reach and success of marketing campaigns. The selling point of lookalike audiences is that return on investment metrics tend to be much better.

Twitter (Microblogging) (Section 4, History of)

Twitter is an online microblogging service that allows users to post and read short messages called "tweets." A tweet is a text message limited to 280 characters. In fact, Jack Dorsey, a well-known entrepreneur, was one of the original founders of Twitter Hashtags The hashtag (#) symbol is used to mark and categorize keywords or topics in a tweet

Twitter (Convered in Midterm) The tweets themselves—and the hashtags they contain—are the most important part of Twitter because they let users know what trending topics are.

Twitter's Biggest Value May Be as a Data Analytics Platform The value of Twitter may ultimately reside in the data analytics capabilities The one strength Twitter has over other social media platforms is its "open" data nature. All the data on Twitter is accessible to anyone who has API access to it (although large amounts of data can become expensive to collect and store)

• Snapchat allows users to add specific tags to "Snaps." These tags are referred to as Smart Filters. For example, working in Manhattan, a user can snap friends and add a Geotag by swiping to the left or right on the picture. These Smart Filters are based on the location of the user and differ from place to place; location services need to be on for location filtering to work. Also, anyone can create a tag through Snapchat by paying a small fee. Swiping left on a snap after the time will show the temperature tag. This feature is used to express the weather outside. Swiping left again allows for filters to be added to a picture. Much like Instagram, different lightings, tints, and enhancements can be added to Snaps to add an artistic element to photos.

Using Snapcash, by typing a dollar sign ($) and an amount of the sign ($20), Snapchat users can transfer funds to one member to another. • Snapchat also has a private chat option along with a live video chat that is like Facetime, providing an option to save a user's Snaps as photos. Snapchat is adding new features on a steady basis, and no doubt, by the time this book is published, there will be much more to add.

Seeding Content—Make It Go Viral Most successful viral campaigns do not happen by accident. Viral Content is usually seeded with paid advertising and outreached to targeted lists of people to get the right attention, faster. Viral seeding involves sharing videos in a very targeted and deliberate way to increase their shareability.

Various elements of the seeding strategy include targeting influencers, grounding the video content in a common theme the audience can relate to. Placing the video on social media and sending a link to the video on targeted email lists.

Viral Marketing Viral marketing has changed a lot since the days of the dancing babies and funny cat videos that became popular on YouTube circa 2006 (Section 6).

Viral marketing is not something to depend on, but is now becoming much closer to a "science" now and is just another form of "paid media Viral media might as well be "paid media," in many cases the advertisers pay for the viral.

whereas the Internet is the global network of interconnected devices, the Web is composed of interlinked hypertext documents (e.g., websites) that can be accessed through Web browsers such as Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge/Internet Explorer

Web 1.0: Read-Only Web 2.0 Blogs, Blogging, Wikis Read-Write Web 3.0 Personal, Portable, Extensible Focused on the Individual Streaming media, Live streaming, Data Waves User Engagement via collected metrics Web 4.0 Converged Personal Assistant Bots/Intelligent Agents/Drones Artificial Intelligence/ Algorithms Cross Channel Measurement Programmatic Advertising

Web 4.0

Web 4.0 is relatively new and directed to emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things, quantified self, private clouds, intelligent computing, embedded intelligence, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence.

Interest Tracking and Demographics

When sharing content on Facebook users now can target that message specifically to a specific audience such as parents of newborns.17 Even without advertising, Facebook allows users to do basic audience research that is relatively sophisticated. Consequently, any member can research audiences based on location or topic based on the anonymous data from Facebook users that were collected by their activities, likes, and so on.

Metcalfe's Law

With Metcalfe's Law, the more network nodes (social media accounts, mobile devices, etc.) involved in a social network, the more likelihood the message will spread the costs involved yet remain flat because the network does most of the spreading and bears the costs

Viral Media (Section 6, Midterm material

Without a doubt, almost everyone would like to crack the "viral code" and figure out how to get people who are strangers to share their content massively, but there is no known formula allowing a content creator to "dial in" vital content on demand. For most people, viral marketing is really hit or miss, with a lot more misses than hits. For your content to go viral you need two things to happen

WordPress

WordPress was founded in 2003 as a self-hosted blogging open-source software and independently owned, Matt Mullenweg is the founder of WordPress He designed WordPress as a blog tool that would alleviate work for content creators while still providing quality content to readers

Yelp (covered in Section 5, history of)

Yelp was founded in 2004 as a restaurant and retail review site; it grew quickly and went public in 2011 If a marketer wants his or her content to be shared or "go viral," they should target like-minded individuals, along with their family and friends.

Fundamentals of Twitter • Followers: Followers are people who follow a user on Twitter. If another user follows someone, it means that: • Another user will show up in that person's follower list. • Another user will see that person's tweets in his or her home timeline whenever he or she logs in to Twitter. • The person can send the other user direct messages. Although there is an option to send direct messages to anyone based on the receiver's account settings. • Following: A follow on Twitter is a subscription to an account. Those tweets will appear on the follower's Twitter feed. On Twitter, following another on Twitter means:

• A user is subscribing to another user's tweets indefinitely • Another user's updates, retweets, and favorites will appear in the home tab. • Another user can send the user direct messages. • Private accounts must provide their permission to be followed. • Tweet: A tweet is a 140-character message. It can include a video, picture or link. • Retweet (RT): A retweet is a repost of someone else's tweet. One way to gauge the popularity of tweets is by measuring retweets. Popular tweets can get many retweets, and several celebrities are paid for their tweets.22 It is important to note that only the tweets from public accounts can be retweeted.

Throttling and network congestion: As the Internet becomes saturated with video and audio content, it had become challenging to watch the video due to network congestion, especially when videos stall while playing.

• Data: Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn consider their "data" as the most important asset they have; they provide targeting for the advertiser, but they are not in the business to building audience lists for advertisers. • Privacy: When advertising is run in social media, that advertising is usually matched with a specific user's account, based on the information the social network has on the individual whose account it is (i.e., a Facebook user ID, a Twitter account handle, etc.). Consequently, reviewing to the advertiser exactly where their ads are appearing in social media would be a violation of their users' privacy. If that were not enough reason, social networks regard the data of their members as their most precious asset—they will provide the results of advertising (clicks, impressions, etc.), but not who it was shown to. As a result, marketers who want to build customer lists are frustrated by the privacy policies put in place by social media platforms to protect their membership.