The advent of social media as a way-of-life has created a new reality in marketing: word-of-mouth, peer based reviews, testimonials, and complaints now carry an unprecedented amount of weight.

All it takes is a quick stroll through Facebook, twitter, Google, Yelp, and countless other sites to see the staggering amount of content & conversation dedicated to brands.

In fact:

• 92% of buyers have more confidence in info found online than they do in anything from a salesclerk or other source
• 90% of online consumers trust recommendations from people they know; 70% trust … Continue Reading
  
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I believe some of my blogs have become a mix of confessionals and interesting advertising tidbits. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to confess again. And with this one, I’m more abashed to admit.

Here it is…I take part in geosocial networking!

Alright, it’s not all that horrible. But as someone who firmly opposed all of that trendy geosocial mumbo-jumbo, it saddens me to own up to it because, gosh darn it, I was proudly geo anti-social!

You see, once upon a time, I did not own what I call a “fancy phone” or … Continue Reading

Facebook marketers were thrown into a tizzy last week by the suggestion that using 3rd party apps can be detrimental to your post’s EdgeRank.  If that sounds indecipherable, you are not alone.  There’s a lot to know when it comes to making your brand voice heard on Facebook.

Let’s look into the brouhaha more deeply.

Last week, EdgeRank Checker released a study outlining the influence of 3rd party application programming interfaces (“APIs”, more commonly referred to as “3rd Party Apps”) on Facebook engagement.  These apps are commonly used to schedule … Continue Reading

According to the study entitled: Social Media in 2009 Inc. 500: New Tools and New Trends, social media use is growing fast within corporations in the United States.

Seventy-five percent of respondents claimed they were “very familiar with” social networking. As this study suggests, much social media growth is expected in the near future within businesses around the world.

The study also revealed how respondents think social media are here to stay giving you even more reason to stick with it and a representative … Continue Reading

Weekly use of the internet is climbing and because of this, brands may benefit from increasing their online PR output in 2010.

According to Econsultancy’s Rebecca Lieb, citing figures from a recent study by Harris Poll, the average amount of time spent on the web has risen 13 hours since 1999.

Harris Poll also stated that “Hours online may have increased because of the recession.”

Statistics have also shown that individuals between 30 and 39 registered an average 18 hours on the internet a week, while 40 to 49-year-olds spent 17 hours surfing. Therefore,  focusing … Continue Reading

According to emarketer.com, the three phases of a company’s social marketing are trial, transition, and strategic. The more comfortable a company is with social marketing, the faster they will begin to strategize.

This will be great for networking as well company workers. The 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report from MarketingSherpa states that sixty percent of social marketing dollars will go to employee salaries for social media activities such as generating content, and the monitoring social channels.

Social Marketing doesn’t have to be a complicated tragedy. Let Stream Companies plan your … Continue Reading

Today, White Pages announced the incorporation of public social media profiles from Facebook and Twitter into its people search service. The people search on White Pages also provide consumers with direct links to select matching Facebook and Twitter user pages.

This social media breakthrough will be incorporated throughout the entireWhitePages site. By the middle of next year, they expect to significantly expand the number of social listings while adding social networking account information to existing work and residential listings where relevant. Also, the recently launched editing capability will allow consumers to add links … Continue Reading

Stream Companies is now on Google Favorite Places!

To use, identify your phone’s capability for scanning a QR code (the square black box in the bottom right). Once you’ve done that, use your phone’s application to scan the code. You’re then connected to Stream Companies.

Contact Stream Companies today to impress the world with your business.

Marketers monitoring Twitter for mentions of their brand may have noticed that microbloggers are more likely to give or seek information than to sound off about a product, good or bad.

Of nearly 150,000 tweets that named brands, nearly one-half of them were simply “comments”-posts that mentioned a brand, but where the primary focus was something else. A further 18.1% were information-providing and 11.1% were information-seeking.

That left just 22.3% of tweets about brands that expressed an opinion one way or another. The good news for marketers: Twitter users were much more likely to … Continue Reading