Make belief – The official blog of Renaissance Creative

A favorite hobby of bloggers who specialize in social media and online communities is producing elaborate infographics to prove a point. Most of them are interesting, but a few really drive the point home.

Here’s a good example of that from ZDNet’s Enterprise 2.0 blog about community management:

When talking about social media with a skeptic, I like to remind them that social media has been around for about 10 years, and blogs have been around for closer to 15. Only in the last two years has social media become commercially viable. I whip out that line whenever I hear people dismiss a new evolution in the social media space as being a ‘fad’ or purposeless.

The latest evolution in social media, geolocation, has dealt with the same withering criticism by non-users. The difference is that the commercial applications of geolocation are much clearer than they are with Facebook or Twitter. There are many companies and services vying for geolocation users’ hearts, but right now that crown belongs to Foursquare.

Geolocation’s early adopters who saw the commercial appeal included Starbucks, who signed a deal with Foursquare to promote their Frappuccino Beverage by offering a discount to the “Mayors” of individual Starbucks locations.

Now it has begun to trickle down to SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses), who are also beginning to offer discounts and benefits to customers who “check-in” at their store.

Here are some tips that SMBs can use to engage their customers, encourage them to check-in and get them to tell their friends:

One way to know if your brand or company is doing well is if a community of customers exists around it online. In the pre-Facebook days, identifying the existence of a community around a brand was not easy. But now, thanks to Facebook and other social platforms, it has become easier.

During a meeting this afternoon with our client, III Forks — Jacksonville, we discussed their Facebook Fan Page, which has attracted 670+ local fans. We discussed ways to create a greater sense of community for its fans, and ways to deliver more value to them.

If you own an iPhone and have a Twitter account, chances are good that you’ve used Twitter to complain publicly about something AT&T has done, or in some cases, has not done. It may have seemed like no-one from AT&T was listening. We now know that is not the case.

Today Ad Age published an article detailing AT&T’s new social media plan, aimed at helping customers and ultimately turn negatives into positives. From the article:

On a normal day, AT&T has 10,000 mentions on social networks, but during stressful moments like these they rise precipitously. The marketer is out to calm those twit storms by staffing up its social-media customer-care corps. The team, led by its first-ever social-media strategist for customer care Shawn McPike, has been building steam since August of last year and is now poised for full-scale launch.

AT&T has the opportunity to duplicate the success that Comcast has experienced with @ComcastCares, and in the UK, BT (British Telecom) with @BTCare. With a company the size of AT&T, there will always be upset customers. But when you add social media to the equation, customer discontent is amplified and spread very quickly.

Earlier this week Forrester released new projections for the tablet computing market. While many expected the projection to be high, it is doubtful that anyone expected what Forrester has in mind.

Over at mobile marketing blog Mobile Marketing Watch, they have a breakdown of what Sarah Rotman Epps of Forrester laid out at the Untethered conference:

She expects 3.5 million tablets — including the iPad and other tablets — to be sold this year, growing to 20.4 million in 2015.  In addition, she expects desktop sales to drop from 18.7 million units in 2010 to 15.7 million units in 2015.

Take into account that Apple is selling about 1.2 million iPads per month, according to Apple Insider, and you soon realize that tablet computing is here to stay and its impact on web and digital marketing will be significant.

Because of the hype surrounding both the iPad and tablet computing in general, it is likely that digital agencies are being approached by their clients about whether they should take the plunge and develop their own iPad application.

If a client asks about developing an iPad app for their product or brand, first ask them these three questions:

1. The most basic iPad costs $500, and the 3G-enabled iPad costs $650. Are your core customers buying them?
2. The most successful applications on iPhone and iPad are games, so if your app is not a game, are you OK with not ranking highly in the app store?
3. Do you have an iPhone app, and if so, how successful was it? What would be different on the iPad app?

Having an iPad application means offering content all of the time. It is a media consumption device more than a media creation device. You can send e-mails and do most everything that you can do on a laptop or desktop computer, but with the iPad, the experience is different. The screen is large, so design and user experience is much more important.

The iPad offers brands a way to interact with its customers in a new way. But it also requires brands to be more open to these changes, as they are happening rapidly.