Archive for December, 2009
GOSO Wins Best in Show Award
GOSO is a web and social media marketing suite for auto dealerships and the brainchild of the BOALT team. GOSO.com went live in November at the Digital Dealer Conference and we’ve been making splashes in automotive circles ever since.
Well GOSO made another splash today when it was announced that GOSO was awarded the Best in Class in the Automobile category by the Interactive Media Awards. The Best of Class Award is the highest honor awarded by in IMAs.
This is how the IMAs describes the award:
Best in Show represents the very best in planning, execution and overall professionalism. In order to win this award level, your site had to successfully pass through our comprehensive judging process, achieving very high marks in each of our judging criteria – an achievement only a fraction of sites in the IMA competition earn each year.
For those of you that haven’t seen GOSO.com, jump over and see what an award winning site looks like. Congratulations to the GOSO team for all of their hard work.
It’s the holiday season. A time when everyone gets to be a kid. A time when most kids look to the big guy in the North Pole to answer their holiday wishes. I remember sitting down and writing my letter to Santa. I gave it to my parents expecting jolly Saint Nick would read it in front of his fireplace but times have changed.
Santa on Facebook
Of course writing a letter to Santa is an important part of every child’s life but nowadays most kids are on Facebook. So what is Santa doing to stay up to date with kids today?
A quick search on Facebook brings up none other than Santa Claus and his 950,751 fans. (Which to me seems a little low for a man that delivers gifts to billions of children a year.)
Santa’s wall in plastered with messages from children from all nationalities. From Spanish, to Russian, to English, to French. It’s all there. A truly global village. Children of all ages have embraced social media to ask Santa for Wiis or to confess their never-faltering belief in him.
Once you’ve posted your wish list on Santa’s Facebook wall, jump over to the NORAD Tracks Santa. North American Aerospace Defense Command has provided Santa tracking information for more than fifty years. Just this year NORAD has expanded their Santa tracking abilities. NORAD is now on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, TroopTube.mil and OnStar.
NORAD tracks Santa on Twitter
Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr once said, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” It holds so true today. So what if kids are posting there wishes on Facebook. Sure they might not be handwriting a letter but it’s nice to know they still believe wishes will come true.
Many people who are using social media are getting into trouble because of a simple mistake when it comes to how they measure success.
You see someone who everyone looks to as a social media superstar and it is easy to think you are modelling their strategies. By matching what you believe they have done to gain their position, but observing the surface activities, it’s possible to mislead yourself into thinking you are discovering the correct behavior to get where you want to go and achieve your goals.
The problem is by only looking at the visible, you completely miss the underlying strategies, testing, and most important, mistakes.
Not everything your social media hero does is either a good fit for you, or even successful for them!
All the best leaders in any field will try things to see if they work. Making mistakes is sometimes how we learn best!
A good example of how people get things wrong is by how we measure up one social media personality against another.
While most people would agree that the number of friends, fans or followers a person has is a good guide, in fact this is normally a bad proxy for how effective a social media user is …
- Followers can be gamed quite easily, or even bought!
- Follower count does not always relate to how engaged those followers are.
- Who followers are is as important or more important as how many you have.
The behaviours you want to learn and model are those that encourage engagement. Track and test everything you do against quality rather than quantity.
How do you know you have the right social media audience then?
- Is your content shared and retweeted?
- Do you get a high percentage of clicks for the number of fans/follwers you have?
- Are your articles being liked, commented on and replied to?
What all these come down to is are human beings responding to your activity?
Focus on people, gaining and keeping their attention, and metrics that measure how well you gain a response.
Then you know you are on the right track.