Thursday, June 10, 2010

Fortune 100 Are Loving On Social Media


According to a new study out by Burson-Marsteller, the Fortune 100 are all over the social media scene.  More and more, companies are creating social media positions or departments as part of their efforts to keep up with consumers or clients.

79% of the Fortune 100 are present and listening, using at least of one of the main social platforms to communicate with their customers.

20% of Companies are using all four of the main social technologies (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Blogs)

82% of the Fortune 100 update and engage with customers on their Twitter account per week.

Fortune 100 Companies on average post 3.6 wall posts to their Facenbook page per week

50% of the Fortune 100 have a YouTube account and upload 10 videos on average a month

This is no surprise. 
 
Fortune 100 companies should be on the social media sites.  Theyhave the luxury of having large contact lists to use to start their programs. They are high profile enough to have searchers come to them. This is a great way for them to learn not only what people are thinking about their brand but also about their entire industry.
 
But what I thought was interesting, when you look at the companies in the Fortune 100, is how many are business to business rather than consumer companies.  Many of them have very specific target audiences.  I wonder how many of their tweets and updates are being read by those clients and how many are more going out to the public.  Either way, they are using social media to boost their visability and interact with the public.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Quit Facebook Day

As most of you don't know.  Yesterday was "quit Facebook day."

The social media campaign protesting the site's new privacy policy did manage to get 30,000 of Facebook's 500 million followers to drop their pages. It was a drop in the bucket, but overall the bucket still got full.  Last week, Facebook modified their policy.  Facebook also publicly denounced rumors that it would sell information to advertisers.

As the Brittish Paper, the Telegraph, reported:
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of Facebook, last week rolled out a new simplified "privacy dashboard" to make it easier for people to lock down their personal information with a single click. He said that any setting applied to Facebook accounts would also be applied retrospectively, and that any new features or elements added to the Facebook site would automatically default to that privacy setting.

The changes were prompted in part by growing criticism from Facebook users who were concerned that some personal details were being shared with other users and third parties without their explicit knowledge or consent. The anonymous organisers of the Quit Facebook protest group said in a note on their website that although Facebook gave users a choice about how to manage their data, they weren't "fair choices" and Facebook made it "damn difficult for the average user to understand or manage this".
Maybe their protest would have been more successful if they were better and using Facebook.