Local business reviews are a new kind of social media, in which customers review their experiences with brands over the internet. Business directories such as Yelp, Citysearch, and Yellowpages.com allow for customers to post what they think of the businesses that they have dealt with.

These reviews are seen by the customers who visit such sites, and can serve to gauge the public opinion people have of your brand. The ability of customers to do this has caused the business world to react in many different ways, ranging all the way from ignoring it altogether to overreacting and becoming paranoid. The important thing about this type of social media is that it is transparent. It cannot be altered or removed by the businesses that are being reviewed.

These reviews are important because they affect your brand reputation, they allow you to get feedback from your customers, and they get your brand in the search engines. Because of this, as much as is possible, businesses should respond to the negative reviews to the extent that they can. In many cases this can cause the customer to become a bigger fan of your business than if they hadn’t experienced any problems to begin with, which has a tremendous effect on word of mouth regarding your brand.

One way to do this is through the use of several programs that allow you to track these reviews, such as Cymfony, Trackur, and Marchex. In addition to responding to negative reviews, you can also use these tools to publicly thank people who have given you heartfelt, five-star, positive reviews.

They’re working together to study viewing habits, mobile use, social media adoption and attitudes to sponsorship during the World Cup.

The joint research, undertaken before England’s defeat by Germany at the weekend, was conducted using a panel of 3,300 UK sports fans. It found 44% were likely to watch and share videos, while almost a quarter (24%) were likely to visit dedicated Facebook pages.

Other findings were that a quarter (26%) expect to watch weekday World Cup matches via the internet at work, while a third (33%) said they were more likely to watch games online in 2010 compared to 2006. When asked when they’d be most likely to comment on a World Cup website, 17% said they’d choose to before a game, 21% would afterwards and only 7% would during a game.

Meanwhile, 18% of men planned to listen to podcasts and 18% said they would be downloading World Cup apps to their mobiles.

Mobile has become increasingly important to fans, with 41% of respondents likely to text a friend before the match, 43% during and 45% afterwards. In addition, 27% said they were more likely to follow games on their mobiles in 2010 compared to 2006, and 8% were more likely to watch games on their mobiles.

Just over half (55%) of the panel said they were taking part in World Cup competitions online.

Have you started your social media campaign yet? What have you found to be the most productive way of getting your brand name out there

Using social media will, undoubtedly increase your website traffic. Will more visitors arriving at your site, the advertising potential can significantly increase. To ensure you know where your traffic is coming from and have the ability to segment your traffic, Google Analytics will provide you with a great insight into the who and where of your users.

Once you have planned your target audience, set up customised goals to keep track of whether the right type of user is arriving and interacting on your website. By identifying where your users are leaving, you can quickly move to optimise the weaker pages.

More for social media use, Hootsuite and Tweetdeck are both free, third-party applications that help you easily manage all your social accounts in one place. You can also set up ‘columns’ that notify you of when your brand name or a requested ‘keyword or phrase’ is mentioned in the social sphere. This immediately offers you an advantage to respond to any comments made by customers about your brand. You can also join in with subjects that are of interest to you, providing you with extended platforms to reach out to your customers.

For companies just strating out in the social world, you would find all the information you initially need from these tools, however, once you start enhance your campaigns and find yourself needing additional data, other subscribed tool will be needed.
Need help starting out in the digital market? Get in touch with a bunch of friendly, hard-working marketers looking for the next social media challenge!

Take a look at our tips below, and hopefully you will be in a better position to exploit the social media market for your business.

Blog
Your company blog is the primary starting point of all social media success. As the driving mechanism for attracting website traffic, your site SEO can immensely improve with regular content. User-generated content is highly engaging, and produced regularly and becoming in-demand, you will soon obtain regular subscribers to your RSS feeds.

Social Networks
There are millions of them out there, not all containing the right audience and appeal for every business. The main attractions are Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, but not all of them offer the marketing platform your business needs.

Facebook demands highly interactive and regular content flowing through a fan page. In comparison, Twitter is an easy tool for establishing followers, for whom to advertise your content to in the hope of being distributed further. Linkedin remains the more corporate of the three, creating an ideal location for marketing the profile and individuals of your company.

Multimedia
User-generated content such as videos and graphics are the most popular type on the web. Content needs to be engaging to ensure users return, but also redistribute. Virals have become a driving point for many marketing agencies looking to ‘spread the word’ of a brand. Adding essential characteristics such as humour and controversy will ensure the message reaches a larger audience.

This can be achieved using a brand channel within YouTube and feeding content through the company blog so that the content can be easily distributed via your RSS feed.

As the first instalment of a two-part post for social media, we will reveal essential tools for monitoring social media to ensure desirable brand reputation is maintained next week.

In December 2009, global voice and data traffic reached a combined total of 140,000 terabytes a month, according to Hans Vestburg, Ericsson CEO and president, a massive impression compared with only five years ago.

With social networks continuing to charge up the popularity charts, more users demand the need to access their accounts 24/7. With such a high demand, more than 200 mobile network operators promote Facebook Mobile products across the world, meaning that more than 100 million people regularly use Facebook on their a mobile to interact on-demand.

This can also reveal the marketing potential that mobile phones now possess. With a target audience gathering from a range of demographics, brands are continuously exploiting the popularity to their advantage.

Mobile manufacturers Ericsson, claimed that the rise was identified based on measurements taken from its commercially deployed network infrastructure. Ericsson also said mobile data traffic volumes grew 280% during each of the last two years and further predicted that mobile data traffic will double each year for the next five years.

Hans Vestburg, Ericsson CEO and president, said that this was a ’significant milestone’ that has an impact worldwide, “This is a significant milestone, with some 400m mobile broadband subscriptions now generating more data traffic than the voice traffic from the total 4.6bn mobile subscriptions around the world,” he said.

Do you have a mobile and use Facebook? How much time would you say you spend on the web via your mobile? Drop your comments below, and join the growing discussion of how are mobiles, and even Facebook are making us socially dependant all day, everyday.

The Media Cube would hate to see vulnerable people fall victim to such crimes and have therefore compiled some information to take onboard when socialising in such sites as Facebook and Twitter.

Limit details

Your personal information is just that, personal. Any true information, such as full name and address can seriously risk your identity safety. Do not advertise your details and then fraudsters can not advertise themselves as you.

Privacy settings

An obvious thought would be to keep your profile only accessible to your friends. Some people are oblivious to this and do not realise that their profile is public, when in fact they thought it was private. Check now and be confident that you are not giving strangers a financial excuse to get to know you better.

Be cautious

Don’t believe everything you read and see online. People can pretend to be someone they are not, producing misleading information about various topics, in order to gain your trust.

Verify emails

Not all emails are what they initially seem. People obtain personal information via social sites and pursue contacts in order to further progress fraud tactics. Offers of “Please sign into your account to verify your account” or “What is your account password”, will most definitely be fake, with the intention of making you believe it to be genuine.

Hopefully these four tips can help keep users safer online. Unfortunately we have to live in a world where not all is what it seems. We love to socialise with others online, and hope to see you join us too!

Keep safe online and feel free to say hello @themediacube!