Pinterest charging forward

Pinterest, the new buzz in social media sites, is charging foward and capturing huge numbers, particular among women. Here’s a great marketers’ primer on Pinterest and how to use it. Thanks, again, to our friends at Search Engine Watch.

When and How to Use Social Marketing

One-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many communications methods avail themselves as effective devices in social media marketing communications. But how and when does the savvy marketer employ the right social media method?

The answer lies in the understanding just where in the consumer buying process the target market currently resides. Author Erez Barak helps the savvy marketer to understand which method or methods to may be most useful in his recent Search Engine Watch article “3 Social Marketing Communication Methods: When & How to Use Them.”

Recruiting first time freshmen or transfer students? Grad students? Pushing attendance at a seminar or conference? Looking for a bigger audience for your webinar or online offering? Barak’s article may be of help.

UMSL Adopts Temporary Signs Policy

UMSL Temporary Signage Policy

Steve Jobs’ 20 Life Lessons

For a year-end departure from our standard marketing-oriented articles, here’s a Mashable link to a fascinating and very worthy read. Steve Jobs was certainly iconoclastic, warts and all. The twenty lessons mentioned in the article are such that they’re not “here’s what you should do,” but rather a “lessons good and bad” from a master of succeeding.

Enjoy and best wishes for a happy and prosperous 2012.

Social Media and Marketing: What’s in Store for 2012?

(from CASE BriefCASE, December 2011) It’s the end of 2011, which means it’s time for predictions for the upcoming year. Marketing and social media experts foresee interesting developments for 2012, both for professionals and users.

Several groups have weighed in on possible trends:

Further integration of social media and marketing: Harvard Business Review’s blog calls it “convergence emergence” where users can check in to a business or institution, pay for services with apps, provide feedback through social networks that can be seen in real-time on billboards or tickers—and meet other users who are in the same area or interested in the same products.

Internal convergence: “Today we talk about mobile, social, marketing, public relations, advertising, direct mail, email, customer service and sales as if they’re working in silos,” writes Ragan Communications. “But 2012 is the year it needs to integrate…You’ll see these disciplines all work together as if they’re in a circle and not in silos.” MediaPost adds that 2012 is the year when social media becomes a standard line item for marketers in much the same way that search functions did. “It’s an always functioning piece of the marketing pie,” the online publication writes. Social Media Explorer predicts that this will result in job positions that integrate data, marketing and app development.

Influence measurement: While Klout and other companies that provide social media analytics have already attempted to measure social influence on Twitter, 2012 will see a continuation of this trend. Social Media Explorer says it won’t “be the year that a perfect tool emerges, but it will be a year for broad adoption of the ranking tools and lots of C-suite talk about ‘influence’ in general.”

Gamification: Check-ins on programs like Foursquare and SCVNGR are already popular on campuses and cities, but 2012 will see further integration of levels, badges and points in other areas. According to Harvard Business Review, “HR, [government], healthcare and even business management” will all integrate game-like qualities.

Further migration of content from print to digital: “You’ll see a big swap of print moving to the tablet in 2012,” predicts MediaPost. BLEgroup notes that “[school] districts need to be prepared for this instant access to new material and anytime, anywhere access.” It predicts that less expensive devices and Android apps will provide viable alternatives to the iPad, which is currently dominating the market for tablets, and that these devices will be provided to schools across the country. Digital e-books and online archived materials will also continue to replace textbooks in education, according to BLEgroup. “The tablet is becoming the student’s backpack.”

Other predictions include an increase in social television, led by tools like GetGlue; crowdsourcing inventions and start-ups with tools like Kickstarter and Quirky; congressional legislation on Internet privacy; and continuing use of email marketing.

Video’s big, really big, numbers

Think video content is “catching on?” Believe it, says Search Engine Watch. According to comScore Media Metrix, about 201.4 billion videos were watched during the month of October. To watch all those videos (which average about 5.5 minutes each), one of our ancestors would have needed to start streaming video about 2.1 million years ago, that’s in the Pleistocene period. That ancestor on cavetube might have caught the super volcano Yellowstone take-out about half of Wyoming and Montana.

Google sites, themselves, carried 88.3 billion videos during October. It would take 486 billion minutes to see them all, that’s about 924,658 years of screen antics.

So, who’s watching all those videos? Turks lead with 93.6 percent of Turkish Internet users watching video during October, followed closely by Canada with a 90.9 percent video consumption.

Big numbers. Another reason pointing out why it’s important for UMSL to post video content in our quest to best-communicate with our constituencies.

Is America at a Digital Turning Point?

In another end-of-the-year think piece, the Annenberg School at USC produced this insightful column about where we are and where we’re likely headed in the digital future. The end of newspapers? The end of PCs? The end of privacy? Check it out here.