Research found that while 40 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds spent 11 hours or more every week online, only 3.5 of those hours are spent on social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, according to Burlington, Mass.-based Burst Media, an online media agency.

The survey of 1,900 adults was conducted earlier this month and found that 53 percent of respondents belonged to at least one social networking site.

“There is no denying the fact that social networks are hugely popular, but it is important to recognize that Internet users still spend a significant portion of their time online visiting content sites,” said Chuck Moran, vice president of marketing at Burst Media, in a prepared written statement.

Mary is awesome!! She is always smiling, has a great attitude, has a kind word to say and makes you feel special. I am a big Mary fan.

- posted by Dora Yee Kwok on the “I Love Mary @ McDonalds/Chandler” Facebook group

Mary Moss may be the most successful headset-wearing brand ambassador in the country. She’s manned the drive-thru at a McDonald’s in Chandler, Arizona for four years, and during that time has developed quite a following.

The McDonald’s restaurant where Mary works doesn’t have a following, SHE does. After all, the secret to McDonald’s corporate success is sameness and replication. Having a disproportionately awesome anything at a single location throws off the whole business model. But Mary is defiant in her ability to stand out. She embodies the principle of social media being about people, not logos.

Imagine how many drive-thru employees you’ve encountered in your life. How many do you remember in a positive connotation? Of those, how many would take the time to “fan” on Facebook?

But yet, 722 people are fans of Mary Moss on the official Facebook page dedicated to her drive-thru prowess, a page that she had nothing to do with, and didn’t even know about until a drive-thru regular (she has groupies) told her.

Says Mary about the secret to her success (in an article in the Arizona Republic):

“I think a lot of people just expect quick service, and it surprises them when they get a certain amount of personal attention. Sometimes all it takes is a smile and a quick compliment to turn their day around.”

Mary has it exactly right. In your struggle to find the perfect social media strategy, to out-execute the competition, to create something “viral” it’s all too easy to forget that almost every big thing started out as a very little thing. And most of those little things became movements (amazing manifesto by Spike Jones here on movements), for one very simple reason: they exceeded expectations.

If you’re looking for the social media breakthrough for your organization, think about Mary. Consider how you do business every day, and how you could alter those processes just a bit so that you’d be delivering something exceptional – something that exceeded expectations.

How will you find your Mary? Are there other examples of small things becoming big things?

(photo by Tony the Misfit)

Link to original post Convince and Convert. Social media strategy and actionable ideas from Jason Baer.

In the last few weeks I’ve explored why more law enforcement officers and agencies are not jumping on board the social media bandwagon; the dangers of official or unofficial officer use; and the importance of a good social media policy, whether or not your agency is officially using social media.

What now?

Social media is overwhelming. The number of sites, the numbers of people, the amount of information. Even administrators who want their agencies involved may be unsure of where to start. This may be why so many departments focus on Facebook and Twitter: they make it easier to manage it all, make interactions one-way.

But agencies need more. As I’ll explain in the next few weeks, Facebook and Twitter don’t make an entire social media program. For one thing, agencies have to be able to hear what’s going on in the community—not just use a new medium to reach out. And they have to know how to build a strategy, not just rely on the latest tools.

Whether you’ve found a good, reputable social media consultant, or are reading the best social media blogs and learning as you go, at some point you are going to have to implement the strategy. When it comes to day-to-day maintenance, because many law enforcement agencies no longer have the personnel to commit to extra duties, what can they do?

Professor Carter F. Smith has an interesting idea: use interns. While this idea has met with criticism in corporate circles, Smith proposes supervised social media outreach. In effect, this would make the intern part of a social media team rather than “in charge” of a program:

Under the guidance of an experienced academic, and directed by the agency itself, interns would:

• promote the police department using a variety of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Yahoo!Groups, etc.
• maintain the Twitter account with posts reflecting arrest trends, wanted persons, Amber Alerts, and other police information needing immediate public assistance.
• maintain the department’s Facebook Fan page, to include promoting events and monitoring communications
• inform the department representative of any problems exposed in the social media domain so the department can determine how to respond appropriately.
• monitor police-related communications (comments regarding the department or criminal activity in the jurisdiction) may also be included.

Fit the intern to your agency

Smith’s plan follows the formula many law enforcement agencies have begun to follow, but a wide variety of possibilities exists according to an agency’s needs—including the need not to be directly involved in social media just yet.

Some of the most important takeaways from this particular article:

(Social) Media Research: Which social media platforms are your main media contacts using? Are they blogging? Using Twitter? Do they want to be contacted through any of these by your company? This is a long term project, but might be really helpful to some of your colleagues who are apt to “pitch first and ask questions later.”

(For police departments, “main media contacts” doesn’t just mean reporters—it means the community, too. If you’re concerned that only a percentage of your citizens are using Twitter, find out what else they might be using.)

RSS building: I’ve said before that an RSS feed is one of the most important tools for any communications professional. If you’ve never taken the time to set up an RSS reader to monitor social media activity around your brand, your client or your industry, this is an awesome task for an intern. Once it’s set up, though, you have to use it! Here’s a good place to start.

Blog monitoring: There are hundreds of millions of blogs, and probably hundreds that reference your brand or industry. So how do you choose which ones to follow? I’ve written about this before, but perhaps your intern can conduct some research and report back about the most important blogs in your niche.

These two items have to do with “listening” to what is being said about the agency online. The foundation to social media success, it means the ability to communicate with citizens about what concerns them the most—not what you only think are their biggest concerns.

Social media doesn’t have to be overwhelming, and neither does finding someone to help you implement it. It also doesn’t have to be costly or add too much to someone’s workload. If you can find the right intern from the right college, putting an intern on a department’s social media team makes sense—for the intern, the college, the agency, and ultimately, the community too.

Clearly, thanks to services like Twitter and Facebook, there is now a global conversation. What’s not clear is how businesses can meaningfully embrace it. How can social media augment, fill out, and improve the customer experience?

1. Only hire people who embody your brand

It’s disheartening how typically little regard management has for their staff, as witnessed by their onerous policies and procedures for “appropriate” communication. Two companies who lead the way in using social media, Southwest Airlines and Zappos (disclosure: Zappos is a client of Adaptive Path), empower their staff to engage with social media on the company’s behalf. What allows them to be comfortable with this is that both companies have extremely particular hiring practices that ensure their employees embrace the company’s values.

What’s great about this approach is that you don’t need corporate social media policies — just let your staff do what they do. What’s challenging about this approach, at least for other companies, is that most don’t hire with same intent and fervor.

2. If you do need policies, keep them lightweight and human.

Not every company has the luxury of Zappos and Southwest to wholeheartedly trust all staff members to converse with the public. For those companies, guidelines help staff understand how to appropriately engage. The trick is to write the guidelines in a straightforward, human manner, and not to overwhelm with corporate- or legal-ese. Intel’s set of social media guidelines are thorough and clear, and would probably serve as a great starting point for any organization.

3. Experiment, prototype, pilot — try stuff out.

This is good advice for any initiative, social media or otherwise. Not sure how you should best use social media? Try different things. Join Twitter and start talking. Put up a page on Facebook and see what happens. Launch a small community on your website, and see if people gravitate toward it. For each of these activities, make sure you’ve devoted the time and effort that will allow it to succeed — don’t assume that because people don’t immediately flock to the initiative, it’s a failure (or, even worse, that engaging in social media is thus not worth the trouble). Evolve your efforts and see what sticks. ENGAGEMENTdb published a report of the brands leading in social media, and Starbucks came out ahead, notably for their willingness to try a lot of different things, some of which have succeeded beyond expectations (most notably with My Starbucks Idea, capturing customers’ love for the brand and transforming that energy into smart new initiatives).

4. It’s a conversation, which means you both listen and take part.

The worst offenders are those who see social media as simply another platform for marketing communications, blasting press releases and other promotions without regard. In a discussion within Adaptive Path, a colleague said, “It’s not a megaphone, it’s an ear trumpet!” And while that is definitely a more refined notion, it’s insufficient. While it makes sense to track social media to see what’s being said about you, if you don’t engage, you’re simply not part of the conversation.

I’ve categorized and compared 7 social media channels that are currently being used by both B2B and B2C brands. I’ve suggested which type of brand works best in each channel.

(click here to view full size)

Blogs:

Generally, blogs work better for B2B brands because they require a certain level of prior knowledge and interest. The effort required to follow blogs generally means that the audience already has an interest in the industry. That is why there are so many industry-based blogs.

B2C brands can still take advantage of 3rd party blogs; but generally don’t get the ROI required to justify maintaining their own blog

Micro-Blog:

For a similar reason, B2C brand’s likely won’t find the value in maintaining a micro-blog. However there are exceptions, and this particular channel is evolving.

B2C brands are starting to exploit micro-blogging for customer service. Additionally, some B2C brands are figuring out ways to integrate the real-time functionality of micro-blogging platforms into their marketing efforts.

I maintain, that at the present time, this channel is still better suited to B2B brands; but I can recognize that it has value for B2C brands.

Social Networks:

There are many types of social networks; many niche social networks are specifically designed for B2B brands, and, therefore, are better suited for them. (e.g. LinkedIn)

Excluding those social networks that were designed for a niche market; I suggest that social networks are better suited for B2C brands. The reason is that brands can take advantage of being introduced to their potential customers through their friends.

People have the ability to ‘discover’ brands their friends like. Additionally, many social networks offer in-network multimedia communication options. Example: Facebook allows you to create a dialog with your audience through images, video, text, and interactive applications; while Twitter allows you to create a dialog using text & links only.

B2B brands definitely should take advantage of social networks; but many social networks are better suited for B2C brands.

Video Sharing:

This channel was close to being equally suited for both types of brand; but due to the nature of many recent viral video’s and video channels, I suggest this channel is better suited for B2C brands.

Again, it would be a mistake for B2B brands to ignore the potential of this channel; but this channel is often used as functional support to a B2B campaign; rather than the crux of the campaign. (A great exception would be the BooneOakley linked Youtube video set)

Social Bookmarks:

Easy to maintain, and easy to integrate into campaigns. Although these bookmarks might be used more by B2B customers; the SEO opportunities, and findability support makes them just as useful for B2C brands.

In my opinion a good social bookmarking strategy is rare, but could be powerful. If you examine the engagement options available through sites like delicious, stumble upon, and digg; you’ll quickly realize that many B2C campaigns do a very poor job integrating this channel with their campaigns. The potential is there, but unrealized.

Image Sharing:

Again, it might seem that this channel is made for the B2B market; but I’ve seen many great B2C campaigns that involve image sharing sites. Although not as engaging as video sharing sites, image sharing is quick and easy to use.

The integration of image sharing in B2C campaigns helps me conclude that this channel is just as good for the B2C market as the B2B market.

Podcasts:

In the same way blogs are better for B2B brands; I suggest podcast are better for them as well.

Again, there have been B2C branded podcasts that discuss relevant issues to their target audience; but they rarely produce the ROI required to produce them. Many B2C brands that attempted to produce their own podcasts have discontinued their efforts in favor of sponsoring a 3rd party podcast.

Over at VentureBeat, Matt Marshall is reporting that Twitter will introduce its first revenue-generating series of premium services.

In an interview with co-founder Biz Stone, it was revealed that Twitter is in the initial phases of introducing commercial accounts to businesses seeking detailed analysis of activity in and around the brand on the popular network as well as other data not available to Twitter users directly.

In the next phase, Stone indicated that Twitter may also debut a new set of corporate-specific API’s that would allow the company to insert a customer layer over the profile and other aspects of the network to more effectively engage with the community, while increasing strategic visibility.

Stone revealed to Marshall, “Twitter will still be free for everybody and we’ll still tell them to go crazy with it. But, we’ve identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit.”

He further elucidated, “We want to build statistics or analytics that let users know — ‘How am I doing on Twitter?”

This news is the latest in a short series of information bursts following the company’s announcement that it is rolling out a new set of APIs to integrate geo-location into Tweets, mostly likely to contend with rising competition of geo-location networks such as Loopt and FourSquare and also as a potential generator of hyper-local advertising revenue.

Tired of delivering the typical stream of status updates on Twitter ()? Why not try some of the following ideas for other things you can do with the service?

Thanks to an open API and a philosophy of interconnectivity, Twitter’s vast array of third-party services has you covered on a number of alternative uses for the famed microblogging tool.

Let’s take a look at a few of them.

1. Share Files

If you want to send a person-to-person file privately, check out FileTwt. You’ll have to sign up for an account on the site to enable private file-sharing up to 20 MB in size. The downside is they don’t use OAuth for authentication.

2. Exchange Business Cards

When you sign up, the service will pull in the data from your Twitter profile as starter information, and you can add other details to customize your card.

3. Share Music

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To that list we’d also like to add Songza, a very easy to use music search engine that lets you easily tweet any track you’re listening to by clicking the song name and selecting the “Share: Twitter this” option.

4. Share Images

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To this list we’d also like to add that Flickr added Twitter posting earlier this summer as well, so if you already use Flickr () to host your image collection, this is a great way to also share photos to Twitter in one fell swoop.

5. Share Videos

We’d also like to add TwitVid.com () and 12seconds.TV () to that list. The latter perhaps obviously limits you to only 12 seconds’ worth of video, but it meshes well with the spirit of Twitter’s 140 character homage to brevity.

6. Raise Money

There are still some limitations to using Twitpay as a Twitter payment platform, but for the adventurous there could be money to be made from selling your own wares via the service. Or, take a cue from Wi-Fi startup SkyBlox, who used Twitpay to raise a portion of their funding via Twitter.

7. Lobby for Health Care Reform

8. Screencast

You have 5 minutes to record your videos including the ability to pause and restart, and you can preview the screencast before sending it out.

9. Play Games

Spymaster isn’t the only game in town, either. Check out some of these other alternatives for getting your Twitter game on as well.

10. Social Bookmarking

Delicious ()

Enter Fleck Lite, a simple bookmarklet-based tool that will both generate a shortened URL based on the page you’re sharing and archive the collection of links you’ve shared for later reference. If you share a lot of links on Twitter and want a convenient way to remember them for later, definitely give this one a try.

11. Be Someone Else

Unfortunately, due to lots of attention from the interwebs this app is currently down. But hopefully you’ll be able to return to your regular schedule of Twitter voyeurism soon.

12. Start a Petition

Check out several startups helping you start petitions on Twitter, from Act.ly () to Twitition and more.

13. Find a Job

From finding new people to follow in your industry to making use of tools like TweetMyJobs, Twitter offers an unprecedented chance to find out about new opportunities and connect with potential employers in real-time.

For non-profit organizations and other charities, social media is potentially an incredibly powerful tool to get the word out, connect with constituents, rally support, and even raise money.

But, like for any business, social media will only pay dividends for charities if they utilize it properly. You can’t just sign up for a Twitter account, create a Facebook Fan Page and then watch the donations roll in. It unfortunately just doesn’t happen that way.

Getting the most out of social media is hard work and requires patient diligence. But the eventual rewards are potentially enormous. Here are five essential tips for charities to get the most out of social media when promoting their cause.

1. Remember: Social Media is a Conversation

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You’ll get a much better return on your investment in social media if you take the time to actually engage your followers, friends, and constituents. Don’t just broadcast information, consume it as well. That means doing things like asking your followers for feedback and ideas, and involving them in the decision-making process at your charity. Engaging your social media fans and creating a more involved constituency is a long-term positive for your organization.

By creating that personal connection with your followers, you’ll be more likely to turn those followers into die-hard fans — i.e., people that will evangelize your cause, spread the word, and participate in future campaigns.

2. Be Active and Responsive

Ideally, this means that you have the resources necessary to hire a social media or community manager whose sole job it is to think about how to keep activity levels on social media high and keep people engaged. But at the very least (and perhaps more realistically for many charities), it means creating a routine where you hit your social media accounts at least a few times each week. Set up a schedule that assures you get new blog content out a few times during the week, that you send out a handful of tweets every day, that you respond to Twitter @replies, blog comments, and Facebook messages within 24 hours, etc.

Also, pare down your social media presence to only the essential sites. It’s better to really kick butt on two or three sites than to have inactive accounts on twenty. Inactivity only hurts your brand and turns users away, so be careful not to bite off more than you can chew. Focus instead on the sites where the people you are trying to reach are the most active.

3. Be Personal and Authentic

Remember, you’re talking with people, not to them, so it helps if they can relate to you as a person. For charities, the social web is less about marketing and sales than it is about establishing relationships and connecting with people on a personal level.

4. Encourage Sharing

That means two things: 1. consistently put out quality content, and 2. lead by example. The former point is obvious — the higher the quality of the content you share with your followers, the more likely they will be to spread it to their friends. The latter, though, is just as important. Your constituents will be far more likely to share if they can simply follow your lead. In other words, if you want your friends to share what you put out, you should share out the relevant, quality content that they publish. You should also use your social media accounts to publish or link to content from around the web in addition to your own content (e.g., share links to articles from outside sources about the topic with which your charity deals).

5. Make Social Media an Organization-wide Activity

Of course, if you go this route, you should also strongly consider creating a social media policy to make sure everyone is on the same page. A social media policy doesn’t have to be big and complicated, it simply needs to outline your charity’s goals and expectations and how people in the organization are expected to conduct themselves when dealing with constituents over social media channels.

BONUS: Love What You Do

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser