Every Google search is a hand being raised. So is every tweet, blog post, and Facebook comment with a complaint or question. Do you call on those raising their hands?? If not, you are missing an incredible opportunity!
Every social complaint or question is the “low hanging fruit” of a brand’s chance to interact with consumers. But it’s not just ANY chance – it’s a chance to interact when you have the consumers full attention “and” PUBLICLY, to engage in a way that can, and often will, catch the attention of an entire audience. These kinds of comments are visible, relevant and actionable, and brands need to have a plan to engage.
A well-structured contest — wisely integrated in social media, encouraging participation of groups, and easily enabling the sharing and including of the social graph of participants — will bring consumers into your brand experience. Savvy marketers can leverage contests to increase both short- and long-term return.
Facebook has done an amazing thing – they now own the word “friend”! The problem is that they have devalued the word while adding value to their brand. Let’s take back the word “friend” and fill it with value again!
I met 
I had the honor of spending time in Colombia as part of my involvement in Social Media Week in Bogotá (#SMWBOG), sponsored by Café de Colombia. My colleague, DJ Edgerton, co-founder & CEO of Digital Innovation Firm 
Bloggers are amazing people who add a great deal of value to my life and work – and in my social media saturated work/life, that means a great deal! 
Marketers used to be able to get away with intrusive advertising, placing online ads as pop-ups, highly distractive Flash animations, and a variety of other methods designed specifically to grab shoppers’ attention. However, consumers have changed and are no longer enticed by ads (or other marketing tactics) that interrupt them… it’s as though they now have a built-in attention spam filter that automatically blocks the ads from their awareness.
Successful social media marketing is all about relationships, with the highest ROR (Return on Relationship) coming from relationships with your Brand Advocates — those people who are so delighted by your product/service/brand that they can’t wait to tell their friends and their whole social networks about their experience. Here are 12 ways to build your Brand Advocates to increase your ROR:
The more social media use becomes a way of business and a way of life, the more we are seeing – and will continue to see – issues around data collection and user privacy. It of course makes sense for marketers to leverage this data, but in my opinion, we’re going about it in the wrong way.
Until recently, “social media fatigue” has been the most dangerous “condition” that we social media marketers have had to combat. Now, however, with the recent trend toward frequent deep discounts and coupon offers, we are risking an even more serious condition of “offer fatigue.”