Social media is most often used to keep friends connected with friends. However, every once in a while, something happens that ignites the social sphere with discussion, news, controversy and caring.

These are some of the most powerful, impactful, viral and moving social media events of 2011.

Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

Japan’s earthquake and tsunami touched the world. The resulting chaos at Fukushima and the nuclear radiation brought increased concern about nuclear power globally. The world pooled together its resources to help Japan recover.

An hour after the quake hit Japan, there were reports that Twitter was experiencing 1,200 tweets posted every minute. And at most times today, eight or nine of Twitter's top 10 Trending Tropics — such as #prayforjapan, #tsunami and #japan — were directly related to the earthquake and tsunami.

On Facebook, people not only posted thoughts and prayers for the people of Japan, but also used their updates to tell friends and family where they are and how they are doing. Facebook pages related to the disaster, such as Japan Earthquake, also popped up, grabbing nearly 3,000 followers in about 12 hours.

Death of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was one of the most iconic and influential people of the Silicon Valley. He revolutionized three different industries: The PC industry, the music industry and the animation industry.

Steve Jobs, along with Steve Wozniak, created the first personal computer to have an integrated keyboard. They were the first to create a completely workable all-in-one computer. He created the iPod, the first mobile device capable of holding over 1,000 songs. He created iTunes, the most popular music store on the planet. He also helped found Pixar, which created the first computer generated full picture movie in history.

Internet users likely broke records as they jammed Twitter with tweets marked #iSad and #ThankYouSteve and flooded Facebook's news streams, swiftly spreading the news of Steve Jobs's death. Twitter activity hit 10,000 tweets per second following the announcement about Apple's co-founder death.

UK Riots

The riots in the UK were blamed in large part to social media. Riots were organized and incited through text messages, social media sites and other forms of Web 2.0 communication.

During the riots, questions of how much control governments should or shouldn't have over mobile communications became a central concern.

Here's a video that reveals how English rioters used Social Media.

Death of Muammar Gaddafi

Muammar Gaddafi, died on 20th October, 2011 during the Libyan Civil War 2011. He was fired at by the NTC and captured alive but wounded after taking refuge in a large drainage pipe with his loyal bodyguards. In a video published soon after, he can be seen draped with a cloth and his body being paraded and kicked by anti-Gaddafi protestors.

On Twitter, many users expressed joy at Gadaffi’s death, including tweets in Arabic saying things like “God is great” and “Libya is now 100% DEGAFFINATED”.

Social Media IPO’s

Pandora IPOed at $2.56 billion, LinkedIn IPOed at $4.2 billion and Facebook’s IPO is estimated to be at over $50 billion, creating over 1,000 millionaires overnight.

Social media has taken over the web sphere and social media sites, which hardly had any attention at all just five years ago, are poised to take center stage of both the internet and the business worlds.

Hurricane Irene

Hurricane Irene had windspeeds so dangerous that President Obama declared an evacuation of New York City. In addition to whipping up the seas and the winds, Hurricane Irene also whipped up the twittersphere.

Tweeters were using social media to keep one another up to date on danger zones, safety tips, family information and more. It put social media to a humanitarian use. More than a million Twitter messages were posted about Irene.

A Facebook page was created to help strangers try to return found items to their owners. As of today, more than 98,600 people had "liked" the page and many had already posted images of items they've found.

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When it comes to social media, there are two factors that drive success: Social Media Optimization (SMO) and engagement. Often time’s these two are confused with one another. Though they’re related, they actually address completely different fields within the social media sphere.

So what is SMO, what is engagement and how are they different?

What is Social Media Optimization?

Social media optimization is the more quantitative side of the social media equation. It’s what allows marketers to tackle social media in a systematic and scientific manner.

Let’s say you’re trying to get a certain fan page to go viral. One way you can measure this in SMO terms is through what percentage of people repost your posts.

So if you post something on your wall and it’s “shared” by 1.5% of your fans, that gives you a benchmark metric to measure against. If you track this number whenever you post status updates, you can very quickly start to get a sense for what kinds of things get passed along and what kinds of things don’t.

This is just one example of SMO in action. SMO can track visitors to a page, the number of shares, number of likes, peak traffic times, best days to post and a whole slew of other statistics that you can use to optimize your campaign.

In other words, SMO is the systematic and scientific approach to getting more people to like your page, more shares and overall a more powerful brand effect.

What is Engagement?

Engagement on the other hand is a completely different ballgame. Engagement is the qualitative side of the social media equation.

It’s how engaged your fans are with your work. It’s how emotionally vested they are in your brand. It’s how excited they get about your product when they tell their friends about it. It’s how much they think you care about them.

Fostering engagement doesn’t come from statistics and calculations. Instead, it comes from regularly connecting with your audience in an engaging dialogue.

If you want to foster more engagement, make it a regular goal of yours to foster more activity from your users.

Ask them questions. Get them talking to you and to one another. Host contests that get them involved. Create games for your users. Ask for their feedback.

Pull them into your brand experience. Your users should feel like they’re part of your community.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

It’s important to realize that if you want to succeed on social media, you need to use both optimization and engagement.

If you only have optimization, you’ll have a very technically well run campaign, but it just won’t have that “buzz.” That “buzz” is what causes social media campaigns to take off like wildfire. It’s what gets people to stick around. It’s what people remember.

On the other hand, if you only have engagement, you’re probably not getting as many people to your pages as you could. If you’re not posting your updates at optimal times, if you’re not tracking what kinds of content your visitors like, if you’re not using systematic testing to determine what really works, you’re probably going to have a hard time succeeding in the long run.

In order for you to have a vibrant social media campaign that engages a lot of people, you need to have both optimization and engagement.

Start out in the area where you’re weakest. If you already have an engaged community but haven’t been tracking your metrics, work on your metrics first. On the other hand, if you already have a scientifically well optimized campaign but your user base lacks passion, start out by increasing engagement.

That’s the long and short of what SMO is and what engagement is. In the long run, you want to master both to get your campaigns to really take off. Your campaigns must make scientific sense, but they also need to capture the heart of your fans.

Video marketing is one of the hardest hitting, most powerful marketing tactics in today’s fast paced online world. Videos take a lot less effort to consume than reading text, they can be a lot more fun and they can spread like wildfire through the internet.

There are two main ways to use videos: To bring in moore traffic to your website, or to build relationships and credibility with existing vistors.
 

Using Video Marketing to Bring in New Traffic

Websites like YouTube, DailyMotion, MetaCafe and many more have millions and millions of visitors visiting them every day. A good video can easily get a few hundred thousand visitors; and a great video can even get several million.

In addition to the “going viral” effect, you can also bring in traffic to your website simply by creating videos that people in your industry want to share.

For example, if you’re in the weight loss industry and you did a top notch video on what scientists say about the top 5 diets in the world, it’ll probably get passed around. It’ll be “shared” on Facebook, “tweeted” on Twitter and reposted on message boards all over the world.

Videos spread, whether it’s through viral marketing or through individual shares.

Using Video to Improve Brands, Relationships and Sales

Another place where videos can come in handy is in communicating with your existing customers. Using a video allows you to convey a lot more than if you were just using text.

Videos where you’re actually on camera talking to the audience can do a lot to build trust. People now actually have a face they can put to the brand. They have someone they can relate to.

When it comes time to make a decision on which product to buy, they’re much more likely to buy from someone who they feel like they know than someone who they’ve only interacted with over text.

Even if you’re only using PowerPoint-style presentations, videos can be very powerful. It allows you to communicate in images, audio, sub-videos and more.

How to Create an Effective Video

The most important part of getting good video is to get good audio. If you produce a video where the image is a little fuzzy, it won’t kill the video. However, if the audio is fuzzy and people can’t hear what you’re saying, your whole video goes down the drain.

Invest in a good set of microphones. If you’re appearing on camera, consider investing in wireless mics.
Filming the video can be as easy as creating a PowerPoint presentation or using other presentation software to create the video while you do a voiceover. You can also have someone film you speaking from one or more angles.

The whole production can be done for under $500.

Editing can be done on high end software like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premier by a professional editor, or using free software like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. For simple videos, the quality difference won’t be big, though it’ll make a big difference for more complex projects.

Once you’ve filmed and edited the video, the final step is to launch your video with a kickoff. Send it off to your email list, as well as your Twitter feed and Facebook page. If you have a blog, post it on there as well.

Are you using videos in your business yet? If not, now might be a good time to look into it. Video marketing is an exciting way to both bring in new traffic, as well as to build a relationship with your existing fans.

There is little doubt that social media is truly revolutionary, the 400 million users of Facebook, the glitterati-twitterati and the numerous bloggers who found celebrity by dint of their blogs, they will attest to that. Hence, as a small business, you will want to take advantage of this concept and try to get as much benefit out of it as possible, which in this case is marketing. While trying to do so, you would want to also ensure that you don’t come across as a desperate company that is bent upon hooking customers every possible way. The trick is to maintain a fine balance between marketing and creating brand awareness, without overwhelming them.

Here is a checklist that will help you work out a social media plan relevant to your business and also guide you in your efforts to execute it.

Know What You Want From Social Media: On social media, brand awareness can go in either direction. If your social media plans don’t pan out, you can end up with a lot of unwelcome negative publicity on your hand. So, be clear about what you want to use the platform for, and how you intent to achieve it. Do you want to use it as an instrument to gauge customer reaction, or would you rather use it as a forum your customers can use to air their views and grievances? Unless you are clear about your expectations, your social media plan in all likelihood will remain a haphazard exercise that will leave you with zero ROI.

Test The Waters: if you are one of those people, still mildly bewildered by the very idea of Social Media (really, there is no shame in admitting it), my advice to you will be to take things slow. Pushing too much promotional information into their followers’ signal stream is a mistake that most businesses new to the space end up doing. You can start by building a blog or creating profiles in the more prominent social sites to touch base with your customers, then slowly ease into your interaction model. The goal is to lure in potential customers and familiarize them with the product, try not to go trigger happy (or more specifically in some cases, tweet happy), and inundate your followers with messages they’ll be forced to label ‘junk’. Read the rest of this entry »

The other shoe has dropped. Google has officially made a foray into the realm of social networks. (No, now is not a good time to bring up Wave, which Sergey insists is a success – yeah, whatever you say, Sergey.) On 9 February 2010, they unveiled Google Buzz – “a Google approach to sharing”. And apparently, the only solution for the problem of ‘oversharing’ of social expressions on the web. It is but the natural course of events, considering Google’s we-need-to-have-a-finger-in-every-pie attitude. And web domination is not (quite) web domination without a social networking tool.

Coming back to the topic at hand, what exactly is Buzz? From what I can see, it is a robust, not to mention ambitious, email application masquerading as a social networking platform, which also doubles as an aggregator – of status updates, images, videos and links – all in the name of social curation.

Now, how does it work? In a clever move that almost makes up for the mess that is Wave, Google has released Buzz directly into Gmail. So, the next time you log in to your account (this is when I interrupt myself  to say that only Gmail users get to use Buzz), you may just find yourself with a spanking new Google Buzz account. No need to sign up anew, no installation of any kind required. Just click on the Buzz tab beneath the Inbox tab and you can get Buzzing. As Google reports on their official Buzz page, they are still in the process of rolling out this service, and it may take a couple of more days before it is active in all Gmail accounts.

When Buzz is active in your account, you’ll be taken to such a page when you log in.

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Social media had a smashing year in 2009. No one can dispute that. The web-wide popularity of social networks and social media sites reached a never-before high, and set the ball rolling for several revolutionary changes on the Internet. It is expected to do even greater things and touch greater heights in 2010. Let’s take a look at what social media experts think this year has in store for social media.

1. Social Media Will Get Real – The web is already beset by the real-time craziness, and I am so not overstating things. When real-time search debuted (on social media) last year, it was received so well that all the traditional search folks jumped to get a piece of all the real action. This year social media will take the real-time aspect on web one step further and work as a veritable web trend forecaster.

2. Social Media Marketing and Businesses – This year social media marketing will gather momentum as more and more businesses turn to this revolutionary method of internet marketing to promote their wares on the internet.

3. Social Media Vs. Email – The days when marketers almost exclusively depend on email marketing for all their promotional activities on the Internet will soon be over. This year will see online marketers choosing the very versatile social media with multimedia elements and nifty sharing options over emails.

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Over the past few months, some important changes have been underway at Facebook. Some are already noticeable when one visits the site, but there are others yet to become apparent. If you have no idea what I am talking about, come a little closer, I’ll tell you, “Facebook’s ditching its regional networks!” (I know, it’s no scoop, but did you really see that coming? If you subscribe to the Facebook blog, you probably did.)

My reaction to this revelation, though, is largely that of indifference, it doesn’t affect me one way or another. Probably because my activities on Facebook have never been network based, I have always taken care to set my privacy settings at ‘Only Friends’, which ensures that only the people on my friend list have access to my profile and the contents. And to be honest, except for the fact that it could possibly indicate the geographical location of a user, I’ve found the concept of regional network rather useless. In my defense, even Facebook admits (sort of) that these networks turned out to be pretty useless, apparently only 50 percent of the users ever joined regional networks.

Facebook first mentioned of a change in status quo in their 03 June post on their blog:

“…To make the site easier to understand, we’re taking the first step towards removing these regional networks…since they did not adequately reflect a world where people choose exactly the audience with whom they wish to share…made sense for those who wanted to be more open when Facebook was small, but they lost their utility as the site became global…”

In addition to frequently publishing posts regarding the matter on their blog, over the months, they have also maintained an active discussion thread for users to comment, air views and give suggestions.

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5th November ’08 was a historical day for the U.S & the world for more than one reason.

First, it was the election of the first ever African-American President, Barack Hussain Obama.

Second, and perhaps a bigger change over the long term was the crowning of the Internet as the king of all political media. It marked the end of an era of television that started with John F. Kennedy & the beginning of the Internet Presidency.

Obama & his team did a commendable job in coming up with an optimum mix of offline & online mode of election campaigns. The telling difference between him and the other was that he made his presence felt not only on television but also on the Internet.

Here are the 3 amazing tactics that Obama so effectively used to get himself to the White House:

1. Online Fund raising: With the great number of people online, there was a huge opportunity for funds to be raised on the net. The Obama team recognized this and realized that it would be easier for people to make donations online and with a sum of money they would be comfortable with. This strategy appealed to many and resulted in 94% of the funds coming in sums of $200 & less. A million little donors became the way forward.

This way, the Obama campaign was not dependent on a few rich people who would donate only to get some influence in the government. But instead, successfully reached out to the common man through the Internet, which helped them raise a little over a whopping $600 million in contributions, which poured in from over 3 million donors.

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