Erica Glasier: Oversocialized! Social media & interactive futurism from sunny Winnipeg

You get to rub (possibly the wrong way) elbows with the smart and famous! Steve Rubel, Senior Vice President/Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, lifestreamer, AdAge and Forbes columnist and avid sports fan, has personally told me to ‘buzz off’. I earned it for protesting that he nearly roped me into signing up for Google Buzz, when I (kind of  ironically) went to comment on his ‘buzz’ about social media overload.

Steve has tweeted 10,095 times (as of this tweet), so that means .009906% of the time, he’s talking about me!

I should also take this opportunity to note with gratitude that I get a large amount of traffic (for me) from comments I’ve made on Steve’s lifestream, and that Steve’s readers spend by far the most time of any visitors to my site reading content—an average of  12 minutes each over 5 pages! Some smart fans, Steve Rubel’s lifestream has.

/sense of accomplishment for today.

This is the kind of real-time, granular brand monitoring you can achieve with social media (Doritos is pictured here). Brand Bowl 2010 demonstrated the percentage of positive and negative reactions on Twitter to Super Bowl ads and extracted people’s reactions down to the most frequently-used words, as the reactions were happening.

Twitter may not be where your audience is talking about you—I’m still blown away by the recent stat that only 1.45% of Canadians tweet, as opposed to almost 20% of Americans—but this shows the level of sophistication available to brands interested in monitoring their influence & measuring their social media ROI. As a marketing nerd, I’m inspired by this.

You may have felt like this.

The spread of smartphones and location-aware mobile technology is opening up a (smaller) world of local marketing possibilities.

3 words: location, location, location. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

You’re the CEO, Senior VP of Marketing, and Chief Janitor of your very own local small business. You typically place an ad in the yellow pages, stuff a few dayglo flyers in mailboxes, and have a brochure website with an infrequently-updated ‘news’ section (because frankly, you can’t think of a whole lot of news with which to fascinate the public). You’ve heard of this new-fangled socialized media thing, but near as you can tell it’s all retired ladies stalking their in-laws and teenagers sending untoward photos to each other. But you also hear it costs less than fluorescent photocopies.

With major marketing superpowers like Pepsi skipping the superbowl and Coke basically declaring websites obsolete in order to refocus ad dollars on social media, Local Small Businessmen can safely assume the research is in, and traditional advertising isn’t. Social media is officially a great publicity channel. But what makes 2010 the year to dive in? Continue reading

Doesn't he just look like he can barely contain his brilliant tweet?

There’s a tweet in there somewhere! If you need a lovely blue bird to illustrate a pithy blog post you’re writing about Twitter, or something, feel free to download a big version of this illustration here.