1. Over 300,000 businesses have a presence on Facebook and roughly a 1/3 of these are small businesses.
2. Gary Vaynerchuk grew his family business from $4 million to $50 million using social media. Gary’s eccentric personality and offbeat oenophile knowledge have proven a natural path to success with his Wine TV Library.
3. Vaynerchuk found first hand that $15,000 in Direct Mail = 200 new customers, $7,500 Billboard = 300 new customers, $0 Twitter = 1,800 new customers.
4. Wetpaint/Altimeter Study found companies that are both deeply and widely engaged in social media significantly surpass their peers in both revenue$ and profit$. The study also found the company sales with the highest levels of social media activity grew on average by +18%, while those companies with the least amount of social activity saw their sales decline -6%.
5. Lenovo was able to achieve cost savings by a 20% reduction in call center activity as customers go to community website for answers
6. Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice Facebook program incented users to give up ten of their Facebook friends in return for a free Whopper. The estimated investment for this program was less than $50,000 yet they received 32 million media impressions which roughly estimated equals greater than $400,000 in press/media value. Which to put in context is somewhat like reaching the entire populations of 19 states (understanding this doesn’t account for unique vs. repeat visitors, etc.)
7. BlendTec increased its sales 5x by running the often humorous “Will it Blend” Videos on YouTube blending everything from an iPhone to a sneaker.
8. Dell sold $3,000,000 worth of computers on Twitter
9. To put things into perspective, only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive return on investment. This is where the majority of media dollars reside today. I don’t believe the majority of media dollars will reside there tomorrow.
10. “You can’t just say it. You have to get the people to say it to each other,” says James Farley, CMO Ford. Ford seems to know what they are doing, especially with Scott Monty leading the social media charge. By giving away 100 Ford Fiestas to influential bloggers, 37% of Generation Y were aware of the Ford Fiesta before its launch in the United States. Is it any wonder why 25% of Ford’s marketing spend has been shifted to digital/social media initiatives? Ford is the only US auto company that didn’t take a government loan.
11. Naked Pizza, a New Orleans Pizzeria that specializes in healthy pies, set a one day sales record using social media. In fact 68% of their sales came from people “calling in from Twitter.” On top of that (no pun intended) 85% of their new customers were from Twitter. So, yes, social media does work for small businesses. Feel free to have a bottle of Vaynerchuk wine with your pizza.
12. Volkswagen goes 100% Mobile for launch of GTI. The reason that I mention this is that mobile drives social media usage and social media usage drives mobile. More and more we will see most social media usage on the phone.
13. Tweets for a Cause sent out a tweet from Atlanta to encourage support of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. As a result of retweets from such notables as @mashable, @G_man, @zaibatsu and others, the Atlanta Chapter site received 11,000 visitors in 24 hours as a result of this initiative by ResponseMine Interactive.
14. Intuit introduced “Live Community” into their TurboTax® products 2 years ago. Due in part to the resulting word-of-mouth, they have seen unit sales increase +30% each year and have now integrated “Live Community” into their other products like QuickBooks, Quicken, etc. “Live Community” allows customers to ask other customers questions which has proved both beneficial to the customer and to Intuit. In some instances, the customer can answer questions that Intuit isn’t allowed to answer because of regulatory restrictions.
15. Software company Genius.com reports that 24% of its social media leads convert to sales opportunities
16. During Barack Obama’s rise to the White House, he garnered 5 million fans on social media and 5.4 million clicked on an “I voted for Obama” Facebook button. Most importantly this resulted in three million online donors contributing $500 million in fundraising. An astounding 92% of the donations were in increments of less than $100.
17. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center witnessed a 9.5% increase in registrations by using social media.
18. Web host provider Moonfruit more than recouped its $15,000 social media investment as their Website Traffic soared +300% while correspondingly sales increased +20%. They also saw a huge lift in their organic search engine rankings getting on the first page for the term “free website builder.”
19. eBay found participants in online communities spend 54% more money
20. Co-Chairman Alex Bogusky of Crispin Porter & Bogusky puts it best when he states: “You can’t buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn’t mean anything in social media…The old media paradigm was PAY to play. Now you get back what you authentically put in. You’ve got to be willing to PLAY to play.”
21. “Think of Twitter as the canary in the coal mine.” – Morgan Johnston, JetBlue
22. 71% of companies plan to increase investments in social media by an average of 40% because: a) Low Cost Marketing b) Getting Traction c) We Have To Do It
23. “Our head of Social Media is the customer” – McDonald’s

Data/Stats from the Video (sources are listed below by corresponding #):

Stats:

1. By 2010, Generation Y will outnumber Baby Boomers. 96% of them have joined a social network.
2. Social Media is 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 engaged 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. A 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. The percentage of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees?: 80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old women.
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 and 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 (not employees) translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks at a total cost to Facebook of: $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 CEO Jeff Bezos, 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle device, 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; i.e.,  listening first, selling second.
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertisers.

Sources:

1. Source: Grunwald Associates National Study – Info highlighted on Trendspotting Blog
2. Source: Huffington Post
3. Source: McKinsey Study also posted by David Dalka
4. Source: First Stats: United Nations Cyberschoolbus Document
   • Facebook Stat: Mashable
   • iPhone Stat: Apple
5. Source: Facebook
6. Source: TechCrunch
7. Source: comScore
8. Source: U.S. Department of Education Study
9. Source: Attempting to relocate
10. Source: Jobvite Social Recruitment Survey Note: 80% will use social networks in their assessment. 95% will use LinkedIn in their assessment. When we revise the Video needs to be updated changing “their” to “a” primary tool need to see if we bump 80% to 95%
11. Source: Inside Facebook Blog
12. Source: Twitter & World Population Data
13. Source: Attempting to relocate
14. Source: Metro Newspaper
15. Opinion, not a statistic
16. Source: TGDaily
17. Source: www.wikipedia.org – calculated based on # articles per language category
18. Source: China Internet Information Center, Technorati, Wikipedia
19. Source: ClickZ Stats SES Magazine June 8 page 24-25 Chris Aarons, Andru Edwards, Xavier Lanier Turning Blogs and user-Generated Content Into Search Engine Results
20. Opinion, not a statistic
21. Calculated based of Wikipedia article data found at www.wikipedia.org
22. Source: TechCrunchThis says 4 weeks so I may have been a little off here as my source at Facebook had said 2 weeks adjusted above
23. Source: Marketing Vox and Nielsen BuzzMetrics SES Magazine June 8 page 24-25 Chris Aarons, Andru Edwards, Xavier Lanier Turning Blogs and user-Generated Content Into Search Engine Results
24. Source: Universal McCann’s Social Media Research Wave 3
25. Opinion, not a statistic
26. Source: July 2009 Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey (actually 90% now – updated above but video still shows 78%)
27. Source: “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber, Wiley Publishing 2007
28. Source: “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber, Wiley Publishing 2007
29. Source: Starcom USA-TiVo
30. Source: Nielsen
31. Source: Solutions Research Group
32. Source: Henry Blodget Silicon Alley Insider http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-kindle-sales-now-a-shocking-35-of-book-sales-when-kindle-version-available-2009-5
33. Source: Yahoo Finance
34. Opinion from Socialnomics
35. Source: Facebook
36. Music in video provided by Fatboy Slim “Right Here, Right Now” (1999) – if you like it buy the single

A strong personal brand, with an online component is CRITICAL to your success in these challenging times

Whether you’re a corporate executive, a performing artist, or an entrepreneur, it’s critically important to establish your personal brand. We are now facing incredibly competitive times, so it’s even more important to stand apart from your peers. A strong personal brand is the only job security in this day and age!

5 Tips for Building and Managing Your Personal Brand

1. Create a personal brand statement

• What is your unique value proposition, and how can you become an expert in your industry or focus area? Your brand statement must be clear and consistent.
• You need to be able to clearly articulate this to anyone you communicate with across many different platforms both online and in person.

2. Develop online profiles and actively update them

• LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning, Zoominfo
• Be sure to use a high quality photograph (I recommend a professionally taken one) for posting on your profiles.
• Make sure your message (your personal brand statement) is consistent on each profile.

3. Contribute, Contribute, Contribute

• Create a blog about your industry or focus area.
• Contribute to other blogs about your industry or focus area.
• Join industry related communities in discussion forums, on social media (such as LinkedIn Groups), and in newsgroups.
• Add value to others by sharing links and resources that you know people will enjoy.
• Offer to contribute to journalists in your particular area of expertise.
• Speak at industry events and conferences.

4. Register your own domain name www.yourname.com

• At a minimal cost, this is a valuable piece of real estate that can be used to build and manage your personal brand. Create a site that can feature your accomplishments and experience, as well as host your blog. This email address can be maintained throughout your career, and it reinforces your brand every time you send an email.

5. Setup a Google alert (www.google.com/alerts)

• Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of query or topic. You can subscribe to each alert through email and RSS. You can monitor a news story, keep current with your industry and competitors, and see who is writing about you, all at the same time.

*Content summarized from Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand, by William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson

Globally Competitive is a resource center and platform that helps individuals and companies adapt and succeed in today’s global economy. Founder, Brian Hollowaty is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for branding. His companies have been featured in the New York Times, LA Business Journal, and Crain’s Detroit Business. Brian is a consultant with UCLA Anderson School of Management in the area of business development and social marketing.

Are you clear on what you want them to be thinking about you?

Are they thinking of you at all?

The answers to these questions have everything to do with your own individual brand.

Here’s how it works. Designing your brand is made up of the same 5 steps that any corporation, such as Volvo, uses to build theirs. Over the past 20 years I’ve observed that most everyone from corporations to individuals want to jump ahead to Step 4: Getting the word out or Building Brand Buzz. The truth is before you have anything to share about your brand you need to start with a bit of BS – that’s Brand Strategy. This is where Steps 1 – 3 come in.

Before you’re ready to Express your Brand (Step 4) you need to first know what you want your brand to be and what goals you want it to help you achieve. This will dictate all of your choices including things like where to work, or who to hire, where to be seen, your message(s), what mediums are best to reach your targets and the list goes on and on. Literally all of your choices will be directed by your Brand Strategy. It’s critical and it starts here:

Step 1: Introspection

You need to begin to take a genuine accounting of yourself. What skill sets you come to the table with, what talents you have, what your historical experience is that will help to differentiate you and tell a unique story – one that is authentic and memorable to your audience(s). The questions you’ll want to ask yourself are available on the personal branding questionaire.

Step 2: Competitive Analysis

You need to know who else your audience(s) are engaging. This is true whether you are talking about professional target markets and buyers or if you are trying to get accepted into a school or if you are dating – how are you similar and how are you different than those ‘competitive sets’. Professionally, you’ll want to consider if there are others who have specific and unique talents within a particular target segment that is the same as yours? Perhaps they focus on Entrepreneurs of a certain size or geographical area. Or perhaps they specialize in working with Medical Professionals or School Systems or REITs or ________you fill in the blank with your own area of specialization. Once you’ve identified who they are, you need to differentiate yourself to help your target audience choose to work with you; with a certainty this is the only choice they would consider making.

Step 3: Unique Messaging

How do you position yourself? How do others introduce you? You need to make your message clear and compelling. What do you do? Who do you do it for? And then give them a reason to care – or tell them the benefits or a story that exemplifies what they may stand to gain by working with you. So, let’s say you’re in financial professional services responsible for engaging new business . . . ‘I help (your target audience, for example, Surgeons and Medical Professionals) consider the best investments to leverage their hard-earned monies in lucrative and safe portfolios so that they are free to focus on their patients and their families with a sense of confidence that their financial matters are in excellent hands.*

Step 4: Getting your message out there – Creating Brand Buzz

You need to be in front of the right target audience with the right message. Perhaps you can speak at medical associations, you can host a dinner for a group of physicians where you can share relevant information about how you can help them, you can write an article for a trade pub they subscribe to, you can network amongst other advisors they have relationships with to gain introductions. You can become a thought leader and create followers on Twitter and drive them to links on articles of interest, articles you’ve written, your blog, etc. You must select areas for promotion that utilize your best skills and give you the greatest return on your time and efforts.

Step 5: Maintenance

Your Brand doesn’t get built once and then go on auto pilot. Your competition is constantly changing, your target audience and their lifestyle and needs consistently evolve, new relationships are available and need new introductions continuously. New modalities continue to emerge from Linked In and You Tube to Twitter and, who knows what’s next? Those that stay current will lead with their Brand Buzz. How do you stay fresh and relevant to your audience? What new skills, tools, talents, opportunities, do you bring to the table to further the relationships you currently have and to remain competitive in light of new opportunities? If people associate Volvo with safety, what do they associate with your brand?

When you take the time to design and manage your brand, you exhibit the behaviors that support that brand – and do so consistently. A little BS gives you the foundation to authentically ‘be’ your brand. The result is you create a consistent demand for you, your products and your services.

Building a strong brand for yourself means you’re in position to align with the people you want to engage and they are ready to receive you – Before You Even Arrive!

* The content of this hypothetical unique message is based on several notable distinctions including an understanding that surgeons and doctors are not typically big risk takers (exception: when they are also entrepreneurs.) What they care deeply about is getting it right! They cannot afford to make mistakes. So, words like ‘best’, ‘safe’ and ‘excellent’ are a natural fit. If there’s one thing all doctors and surgeons are, it’s overworked. By referring to leveraging their hard-earned monies two concerns are addressed: their investment in a long-term education and the long hours they work, as well as, working smarter by leveraging what they’ve worked so long and hard for. Most surgeons and doctors lack time; often with patients and certainly with family or for self. Addressing this and presenting the possibility of gaining more time to this target segment is particularly relevant. Your own unique message would be further refined by your unique skill sets and experience within this market.

Written by: Michele Lando, President of Skilset Communications, Inc. and author of the internationally acclaimed IndiBrand^TM, Individual Branding, workshop series. For more information you may go to www.skilset.com or you may write mlando@skilset.com or phone 323 255.8900 x130.