SOCIAL MEDIA TODAY — When you decide to run a Foursquare campaign for your business, make sure all of your employees know what Foursquare is. I don’t want to rush release a Foursquare special campaign for my two hotels. The Gap is a good example of what happens when you release a campaign, and not all of your employees know exactly what you’re doing. I recently learned that The Gap is running a special for 25% off your entire purchase for Foursquare users. I haven’t been to The Gap in years (my college wardrobe consisted of Forever 21 and Hanes men’s t-shirts with black spandex) so since I needed some new "real people" clothing I figured going to The Gap (with 25%) off would be a great idea...

SOCIAL MEDIA TODAY — For many executives, when it comes to understanding basic stakeholder perception and sentiment towards a company's product or corporate brand in the social web, Twitter is a great and safe place to start. People who 'tweet' want to be listened to, they want to be heard. As such, Twitter is a perfect platform for people to channel their emotions, thoughts, experiences and ideas. There are a number of free Twitter applications available that allow you to run an infinite number of Twitter queries at the same time - such as TweetDeck. As an example, you can start by running the following queries, side-by-side...

SOCIAL MEDIA TODAY — Sometime back, I initiated a discussion thread on the topic "What Motivates People to Be Highly Engaged in a Community?" on Richard Millington’s community site "Commania". This discussion created one of the liveliest threads on Commania, which brought quite a lot of interesting insights into, what really keep motivating people in actively participating in online communities. Having an idea of what drives the most active participants in a community is important for a community manager to keep the liveliness of the community. If it is said that only 1% of the users of Social Media, actively contribute for content creation; then, isn’t it important to know what motivates this 1%?...

SOCIAL MEDIA TODAY — Ask any marketer to draw you a picture of the sales funnel and you’ll get virtually the same picture. There are a number of proposed ways to look at the funnel applied to social media, including a post I wrote last year about the New Marketing Funnel and the new book, Flip the Funnel, from Powered/crayon’s Joseph Jaffe. What’s clear though, is that social media provides definitive means to impacting the "consideration" phase - when a customer makes the leap from awareness of a brand or product to evaluating, before committing to make a purchase. Here are five ways that social media can impact a customer who is considering a purchase...