You can connect with Jason John @jasonpk146, LinkedIn, and visit his company’s website at Gilt.

View Sprinklr’s YouTube Channel for more videos on Social.

Study Results

Overall, Facebook found that brand-related posts, were the most significant predictor of page engagement.

Facebook also reported on several content posting best practices to consider, depending on your Facebook marketing goals:

• Goal = Generating Shares: post about topics related to your brand and leveraging photos, photo albums, and video content.
• Goal = Generating Likes: Post about topics related to your brand and using a clear call-to-action, such as “Like this if …”
• Goal = Generating Comments: Again, make the post about your brand, and spark discussion by posing a question in your post.

Read more details on this study and tips to increase Facebook engagement at HubSpot.

Here are highlights from the report:

- Over half (59 percent) of participants spend 6 hours or more each week on social media.  Meanwhile 33 percent spend 11 hours or more.

- It is safe to assume that the majority of us believe there are a lot of benefits to working in social media marketing.  The top two benefits are increased exposure and increased traffic.

- Social media marketers wear many digital marketing hats.  The top three activities that these professional participate in is email, SEO and event marketing, in the appropriate order.

Read more details on this report at socialmediaclub.

A new infographic takes a look at which global brands are making the most of their Facebook presence.

View the full infographic at Mashable.

To state that Twitter has 10 million active accounts is impressive because this means almost one in seven of the population of the UK — has an active Twitter account.

80% of users in the UK also access Twitter from their mobile devices compared to Twitter’s global average of 55%. This higher percentage for UK users seems puzzling until you look at the differences in mobile data packages in the UK compared to the US.

Read more on this story at zdnet.

The infographic includes guides for responding to positive and negative comments—something that’s often overlooked by page managers:

View the full infographic at prdaily.

It’s like watching a sports game, but the game is a business.  In the “behind the scenes” you can see how even the losing team wins.  You see how hard each agency works and how they each approach the creative process.

Still, there were a few things about the show that were bothering me.  Despite all the talk about “social” these days, the focus felt distinctly traditional.

Flipping through my Twitter stream the other day, I saw from someone I respect, Ariel Dos Santos that I wasn’t alone.

Proud I finally picked the winning concept on #thepitch. Social business principles seem to be missing though. Need more than ads.

— Ariel Dos Santos (@agds) May 8, 2012

While the ideas that they come up with are (sometimes) exciting and inspiring, they are decidedly one-way in their approach.

The anchoring concept seems to be “the commercial,” something I find doubly ironic since the people who are creating/doing most of the work are the so-called “Digital Natives”.  Do “digital natives” watch commercials? I would bet not.

In fact, I have watched all the shows on DVR (shout out to my Windows Media Center) and haven’t watched a single commercial in 3 episodes. In other words, the creative process of making the commercial is actually more interesting to me than all of the commercials in the show itself.

I suppose this is the ultimate nod to the power of “Content Marketing” and “Brand Journalism” in today’s world of fragmented audiences and tools allowing us to block out interruptions of all kind.

And that is one of the things, I believe, to which Ariel was referring.

1. Be a Storyteller
   Instead of a commercial, which is about interruption, tell a story that gets people involved in your brand. In a social world, as Sprinklr sees it, this is the function of the Content Manager.
2. Community-Source Ideas
   Recognize that good ideas can come from anywhere. This is one of the key roles of the Community Manager which we at Sprinklr see as not just a moderator, but someone who can find good stories for re-purposing (and why we give them the tools to identify and route these ideas all over the org).
   Now, I will say that the leveraging of Mac Lethal by the McKinney team (episode 1) was a good example of this, but it was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of possibilities and finding that “big idea.”
3. Start the Conversation
   Why not use the print or TV to drive people to social properties where their preferences and interests could be further explored? Or, even better, where they could (for free) amplify idea that the brand began? With the exception of one funky mobile play, I haven’t seen much of that. In Sprinklr’s mind, this is where the Subject Matter Expert and the Social Strategist MUST be integrated and coordinated in any/all campaign planning. Otherwise, you are leaving a lot of potential Social activity on the table. Big miss. What’s more, there are not thinking multi-channel here…so many different ways to extend the campaign via social and engage the community.
4. It’s More than Marketing
   Once upon a time, marketing was its own siloed function. Not anymore. Now, any campaign that you start is going to have social ramifications (whether you plan for them or not). Customers will tweet/post/video about the brand and it could impact HR, PR, Customer Service (which is why we have specific focus areas on these) well beyond marketing. None of those folks seems to be in the room with the VP/Marketing and his/her team. They need to be. In our mind, this is critical to doing Social@Scale (which is what all of these brands will be doing when they launch these campaigns. The only question is whether they will be doing it well or not.)
5. Metrics and Governance
   We’re definitely not seeing much talk about measurement of the campaigns. What’s more, we’re not seeing much from the agencies about how they will help the brands speak with one voice when the campaign goes beyond their one-way broadcast approach. You need an Escalation plan and you need a corporate-wide system of reporting so that the can measure the impact of the effort (when it does spill over into social) in terms that relate back to the business.

Maybe I am asking too much for a 1 hour reality show that is already really good. I just think that there’s a danger here, which is that agencies and brands will default to playing to their strengths of broadcast and not continue to drive social business principles into every single corner of their communications efforts.

- Blog by Jeremy Epstein, @jer979, Sprinklr VP of Marketing

Steps to Building a Social Media Program

1. Start with the end in mind and define the objectives/goals/target: What are the business objectives and what role does social media play in helping accomplish those goals?

2. Define the Social Media Strategy

3. Develop the Content Plan: Determine the specific tactics regarding the content.

4. Execute it

5. Measure and Enhance

Read more details on each of these steps at Forbes.

56% of CMOs view social media as a key engagement channel, but they still struggle with capturing valuable customer insight from the unstructured data that customers and potential customers produce.

You might be wondering how to move beyond the intricacies of community management and inbound marketing to become a company that harnesses social data to drive strategy and product marketing.

The process can be broken into two main areas:

1) building listening stations and dashboards on relevant topics, and

2) sifting through the data to find actionable intelligence.

Read more on how Marketers can harness social data for product development at Hubspot.

Pop culture icon Marilyn Monroe was barraged with fan mail during her prime. Facebook fan pages for top brands receive an equal amount of cyber clutter

How times have changed!  Is this how YOU dress when you are sorting through your morning emails?

Fan mail today – for celebrities or brands – has exploded in volume. Top brands have millions of fans connected to their Facebook pages and there is far less effort involved in leaving a comment that it is to mail a letter.

In essence, social media teams are in the daunting position of juggling hundreds of different conversations each day.

Sprinklr’s new “Facebook Streaming” feature gives Community Managers the ability to effortlessly sort through their correspondence, automatically archiving messages the moment the company sends a response.

If the dialogue is ongoing, a message will automatically pop back into the regular Facebook stream whenever the fan replies.

When a Community Manager logs into Sprinklr, every message in their Facebook stream is a fresh one requiring action. No more confusion about which comments need a response and which ones don’t.

And more importantly, other Community Managers will not accidentally respond to a message already handled by a colleague and instead devote their resources to the team’s “To Do” list that never ends.

Sprinklr’s Facebook Streaming is like having your own personal filing assistant to keep your message flow uncluttered.

Be happy that you’re not signing autographs!

(Sprinklr clients can watch a slideshow on the Facebook Streaming feature here).