Most recently, Social Media Express briefly reported that nearly three quarters of all companies currently have a social media strategy. However, for companies who want to increase customer engagement with the social media initiatives, the right suite of tools used to engage with customers was the most important decision.

Currently, companies have several ways to keep in touch with customers and to converse with them. Facebook, Twitter, corporate blogs, all are adapting to the different needs and wants of customers. But to know what are the social media technologies that Fortune 100 companies used, the below infographic provides a tip on this space.

(Credit: iStrategy)

Besides, major takeways from the data:

• 20% of Fortune 100 Companies are using all four of the main social media technologies (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Blogs).
• 82% of the Fortune 100 post quick updates and response customers on their Twitter account per week.
• Fortune 100 Companies on average post 3.6 posts to their Facebook Page’s Wall per week.
• 50% of the Fortune 100 Companies have a YouTube account and upload 10 videos on average per month.

While it was visionary for most of the Fortune 100 companies to use the aforesaid Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Corporate Blogs, but there are much room for this space to grow especially the data shows that only 20% of these companies used all of the mentioned four technologies. Companies must realize the measurable benefits from having the use of social media technologies tied to their goals of increasing business revenue.

StumbleUpon is simply huge! For stumblers, not only they love to share the fun, interesting and yet attractive content via the “Stumble!” button on the browser toolbar, they also influence the Web direction and popularity of content with the process of Web page discovery and thumbs-up voting, i.e. “I like it!”

However, did you realize, Webmasters, social media users, and Internet marketers everywhere are using this social booking site as a way to grow their traffic. So, if you’re wondering what exactly make StumbleUpon so appealing, and why you should include it as one of your essential social media tools, the infographic below will shed some lights.

Happy Stumbling!

(Credit: BlueGrass)

As social media continues to grow, we are unsurprised to learn that most of the companies are currently using some form of social media. However, using your best estimate, do you know how many of these companies have a social media strategy when using and spending on social media?

In a survey that conducted by King Fish Media, and co-sponsored by HubSpot and Junta42, they found that nearly three quarters of all companies surveyed currently have a social media strategy, and of that who don’t the vast majority will within the next year.

(Credit: King Fish Media)

Specifically, seventy-two percent of companies they surveyed said they had a social media strategy. This figure largely contrast to the category of the undecided that only amounted to one percent only. Although nearly three quarters of the survey respondents said yes, but still a remaining quarter of respondents don’t have a social media strategy game plan when adopting social media in the company.

While the numbers are interesting, it’s pretty scary to know many companies are investing their social media without a game plan. If you work as an interactive marketer responsible for the social media campaign, this survey should act as a wake-up call for you if you want to keep your audience engaged. Creating social media such as corporate blog, podcast, videos, social network like Facebook Page are not specially built to carve out more productive customers, you’ll still need a strategy besides all these social media tools!

Recently, Edelman Digital APAC and Brandtology have joined together data mined the online conversations across the Web to get their take on Asia Pacific Brand Index. The outcome? Twitter tops in the following Asian countries like Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore as the buzziest channel in Asia Pacific.

In fact, the data mining and analysis covered 8 million posts, the netizens’ millions of perspectives, more than 350 technology brands and 4,000 regional online channels across eight Asian markets. However, only the results in term of buzziest channel in these five Asian markets include Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore indicate that Twitter was the top channel for technology conversations.

Although the presence of Twitter and its impact was more visible than it is today, Twitter was not popular in these three selected Chinese-majority China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. However, it’s important to consider these two factors. First, many Chinese users in China are having difficulty in posting to Twitter and other social media sites like Facebook due to the blocked by China’s “Great Firewall” system of Internet censorship. Second, a Twitter’s direct competitor Plurk is very popular in Taiwan, and many politicians and brands in Taiwan are reportedly satisfied with the service and successfully building a big following via Plurk.

Nevertheless, with the data released, as shown in the below picture, companies and brands must recognize that Twitter is no doubt growing in importance especially in Asia Pacific – and it is growing at an extraordinary speed.

(Credit: Edelman Digital)

Microblogging site like Twitter has become popular quickly over the past few years, and many brands have their Twitter accounts set up in order to interact with their users online. However, to keep their users (followers) engaged, and maintaining tweeter relationships, brands need to know what are the reasons for tweeters to follow a particular brand on Twitter.

To explore this question, a study conducted by ExactTarget asked users what has motivated them to follow a company, brand, or association on Twitter and they found out 38 percent of the respondents follow a brand were “to get updates on future products.” Among other respondents, 32 percent said they aimed to stay informed about the activities of a company.

(Credit: ExactTarget)

In fact, tweeters are receptive to promotion and one of the primary motives for them to follow a brand was to save money on the products. This explains why 31 percent said they follow a brand “to receive discounts and promotions,” 30 percent “to get updates on upcoming sales” and 28 percent “to get a ‘freebie’ (e.g., free samples, coupon).”

With this data, brands who want to connect with the tweeters should have a basic glimpse of what tweeters want in minds before they display an affinity interest to them. At a minimum, a brand should experimenting with Twitter and focuses on one or two areas such as using Twitter to communicate promotion so that it can develop a valuable community in the long run.

There are more than billion of Web sites across the Web, but is that very important for one to brand a domain name before he / she starting a site? And if the answer is yes, how?

According to Verisign’s domain report June 2010, the first quarter of 2010 hits over 193 million domain name registrations across all of the Top Level Domain Names (see the picture below), as well as regains its footing especially it recorded an increase of more than 1 million domain name registrations, or 0.6 percent, from the fourth quarter of 2009.

(Credit: VeriSign)

In fact, branding a domain name is still very important although most of the short, keyword-rich domain are now cybersquatted by the professional domainers / or domain firms. However, there isn’t a general rule when comes to naming a domain name. With a bit of imagination, many great sites have successfully built their domain name brands. Here we trying to offer some useful tips:

1. Borrow the domain ideas from the well-known sites

Examples: schooltube.com, teachertube.com, filestube.com (YouTube)

2. Adding suffixes in the domain name
Examples: like add -ster such as Friendster, dogster
Or
Adding -r in the domain name like Flickr
Or
Adding -able, an adjective suffix like the popular social media blog Mashable
Or
Adding -izer in the domain such as Scobleizer.com, Waffleizer.com and Technologizer.com

3. Make use of the .us Top Level Domain Name
Examples are: del.icio.us, rubylicio.us, cyclelicio.us

4. Build a brand on top of Twitter with the new “Twit” word
Examples are: Twitscoop, Twitpic, mp3twit, etc.

However, avoiding the word Twitter in the domain as this will be the case for Twitter domain squatting.

5. Adding the regional name in the domain
Examples are: AirAsia.com, nokia-asia.com, disneychannel-asia.com, just to name a few.

6. Use your domain word twice
Example: boingboing.net, mymilanmilan.com.my

Happy domain name branding!

Let’s face the fact: The blog you’re running, whether it’s your personal blog or you’re in charge of a corporate blog, it’s getting more difficult to stand out. As the number of blogs rise (BlogPulse reports there is 65,956 new blogs in last 24 hours) and it takes an extra hard work in order to make your blog a huge impact in your niche. Note that the figure reported by BlogPulse is the number of identified blogs in its database.

Of course, success requires hard work, but the fact that the ease of set up for some blogging platforms such as WordPress will only make some blogs harder to develop readership and and influencing outsiders due to the fierce of competition.

Take another look at the figure of WorPress.com, a free blogging platform and we’re unsurprised to learn that 334,320 new posts are posted today.

However, it does not mean that most blogs are struggling for developing readership, the successful blogs can usually attract hundred of thousand visitors everyday. But before you start out the blogging journey with the lofty goals about engaging your audience, please keep in mind the basic few things that make a blog successful:

Who is Your Audience?

• What is the new, and interesting content that my audience are interesting?
• How can I become an authentic voice in the field that I am embarking on?

What Do My Competitors Do?

• What topic of the posts of my competitors that I like and dislike?
• Do they get a lot of comments?
• Do their posts rank well in search engines?
• Do their posts get a lot of back links?

Do some research, and don’t let poor usability, and uncertain objectives that make your blog lose traction.

Don’t approach your Facebook page without a strategy, claimed Altimeter Group that funded the study entitled, “The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing.” In the study, Altimeter Group interviewed 34 vendors, agencies, and experts, including Facebook, Gigya, Horn Group, Inside Facebook, Janrain, and KickApps. They not only found the eight success criteria for Facebook page marketing that brands must follow, but also develop an internal quantitative scorecard to evaluate the Facebook efforts.

Altimeter Group’s own survey of Facebook page marketing reveals that:

• Brands must clearly articulate expectations, so fans will know how to best interact with the page.
• Brands must keep their pages current and consistently adding fresh content.
• Brands that enable fans to have conversations with actual page administrators have the best chance at creating deeper relationships and brand loyalty.
• Brands must engage with fans in the manner which they are already accustomed. Two-way dialog spurs interaction, trust, and the spread of information.

To know more about the study, read the paper as follow:

via [@christineptran]

Many large companies have started corporate blogs; it’s now not pertaining to the question like: To blog or not to blog? But how effectively the corporate blog is? How the corporate blog impact the business goals set, and etc?

To answer these questions, Corporate Blogging tips has recently profiled a succinct list of 67 of best examples of corporate blogs.

However, take a closer look of each one of these best corporate blogs, we have likely found that some of them didn’t should be considered as a corporate blog.

When it doesn’t carry the corporate dot com?
1. Amazon Corporate Blog
2. Analog Devices Corporate Blog
3. Best Western Corporate Blog
4. Masi Bicycle Corporate Blog
5. Wear Dated Carpet Corporate Blog

When it is running a pipe
EMC Corporate Blog

When it is nothing to do with the company products but a news portal
1. Guardian Corporate Blog
2. The New York Times Corporate Blog

Perhaps when a corporate blog not qualify to be called as corporate blog, then what should we define them? A well-run news portal, a personal blog endorse by the organization, or…

Social media sites such as social networks, blogs has become a global phenomenon, especially with Facebook recently reporting user figures surpassing 500 million.

Although we know this digital paradigm shift is driven by million of people who like to share such things like location, hobbies, their own content, but do we know how much of time we spend on these social media sites?

In a newly released study of Nielsen on what Americans do online, they found that Americans spent 22.7 percent of their online time on social networking or blogs in June 2010, a 43 percent increase compared to June 2009. Moreover, the study also revealed Americans spend one third of their online time, i.e. 36 percent in communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging.

However, although social media sites are increasingly drawing people into their territories, it hasn’t pushed email and instant messaging into obscurity just yet. Given the statistical data significance, email remains as the third heaviest activity online (8.3 percent share of time) while instant messaging is fifth, accounting for four percent of Americans online time.