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How much do online community managers earn?

by Rebecca Weeks Watson, November 4, 2009 | Comments (1)

Survey results reveal salaries, roles and satisfaction levels of social media managers

Have you ever wondered what level salary you should pay your social media marketing employee? Or maybe you're curious what you could earn as a community manager within a large corporation?This month, Forum One Networks, an events and research consulting firm, revealed results from its “Online Community and Social Media Compensation Survey.”Initiated in July 2009, the purpose of the study ...

Goodbye demographic and contextual targeting

by Rebecca Weeks Watson, October 15, 2009 | Comments

Peerset offers psychographic targeting that touches interested audiences with precision

Once upon a time, media teams bought broad categories of audiences in the hopes that a portion of these groups would be interested in the ad’s message or product. Then they turned to content and started buying keywords, which unleashed bidding wars and worries about online media becoming a commodity. Behavioral targeting flew in with angels' wings, and media buyers ...

Tagged: why underrated but profitable?

by Rebecca Weeks Watson, October 12, 2009 | Comments (1)

Third largest social network offers social discovery to users who average 14 minutes per session

While the head-on competition between MySpace, Facebook and Twitter stays hot, Tagged is in the backdrop building its user base by hundreds of thousands every week. The company’s revenue stream is sourced from ad networks as well as direct sales, and unlike many social networks, is profitable.I interviewed Steve Sarner, Vice President of Sales, to learn how Tagged is positioned ...

New rules on blogger payola and relationships

by Rebecca Weeks Watson, October 8, 2009 | Comments

The FTC requires bloggers to clearly disclose any "material connection" to an advertiser

Effective immediately: If you’re a blogger (and who isn’t these days?) and fail to disclose paid reviews, endorsements or freebies, you could face up to $11,000 in fines from the Federal Trade Commission, according to revisions to the agency's "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising" published on October 3. The agency, which protects consumers from fraud ...

Update your Facebook wall on Tuesdays

by Rebecca Weeks Watson, September 29, 2009 | Comments

Users' highest click-through rates occur on Tuesdays and Wednesdays

Although the click-through rates (CTR) for general display ads on Facebook have been rather low, the click-through rates for content appearing on brand pages' walls are as high as 6.49%, according to data from Vitrue, a social media management firm. This is an extremely high response rate compared to other online ad placements and formats. However, in this case the ...

How brands market through social media

by Rebecca Weeks Watson, September 23, 2009 | Comments

Experts offer tips about how to create, manage, and measure a social media campaign

"Trying to remove something from the Internet is like trying to remove urine from a swimming pool."And, "You can't just aim to get people from Facebook to your destination. People are the destination." These are just two of the quotes I heard today at Adweek's Social Media Strategies event in San Francisco, where high-profile marketers and agencies convened to discuss ...

Why your privacy policy matters

by Rebecca Weeks Watson, August 26, 2009 | Comments (1)

Building customer trust and online credibility starts with TRUSTe’s privacy seal

I bet you or someone you know has been a victim of online identity theft. When it happened, you probably vowed to never use that particular site again. Or maybe you worry that your cookies are being tracked for unethical purposes. As people spend an increasing amount of time consuming content, sharing info and buying products online, what’s being done ...

Facebook puts another limit on profiles

by Rebecca Weeks Watson, August 14, 2009 | Comments

Why you need to turn your "friends" into "fans"

Facebook has proposed it will soon ban users from “using their personal profiles for their own commercial gain," while selling status updates to advertisers as explicitly being singled out as a violation, according to an article on Techrunch. It’s important to note that there is a distinction between a “personal profile” and a “fan page.” Supposedly Facebook is trying to ...

How to host your own Twitter party

by Rebecca Weeks Watson, July 29, 2009 | Comments

Gain exposure and traffic by organizing a group theme on Twitter

First things first. What is a Twitter party? A Twitter “party” is a fast and fun way for people to connect and discuss a topic of choice via Twitter. The word “party” is misleading because it’s not an invitation-only, in-person event full of booze and finger food. Rather, it’s a simple online construction: Twitter users enter a message that includes ...

Win-win for advertisers and communities

by Rebecca Weeks Watson, July 23, 2009 | Comments

New marketplace, Linqia, provides ad sales leads to relevant social networks

How do advertisers and media buyers find niche social communities which their target-customers participate in? Not easily, that’s for sure.It’s time-consuming to stay up-to-date on newly launched communities, and then tedious to search for the right salesperson’s contact information. But recently, a new online marketplace called Linqia emerged that enables advertisers, or any business trying to market through social media, ...

Betting on a network of webisodic content

by Rebecca Weeks Watson, June 8, 2009 | Comments (1)

DBG creates, produces, and distributes long-form branded video content

Instead of building individual video destinations across the Web that users have to find on their own, why not distribute content to places where massive audiences already exist? This is the position being pursued by Chris Young’s fast-growing startup, Digital Broadcasting Group (DBG). The DBG Video Network, which now includes 2,600 sites that reach over 111 million unique users, can ...

How to use Twitter for business success

by Rebecca Weeks Watson, April 2, 2009 | Comments

Learn these tools and techniques before following people and posting content

Having used Twitter for the past three years, Sarah Milstein has gained a wealth of knowledge about using the platform for business success. At this week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, she led a session that described effective Twitter tools and techniques, posting, audience development and smart integration. One point she kept reiterating was that as people are going ...

Six free ways to grow your traffic (part 2)

by Rebecca Weeks Watson, March 12, 2009 | Comments (1)

How to use social news sites, sharing tools and widgets to increase your audience

If you lack a marketing budget, use the following three powerful approaches to instantly increase your site’s traffic. You can read three additional free social media tactics in Part 1. Get exposure on social news sites Social news publications and aggregators enable people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Web. These sites, such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Fark, ...

Six ways to grow your traffic for free

by Rebecca Weeks Watson, March 3, 2009 | Comments (3)

How to use social media, audience research, syndication, and other tools to increase your audience

Let’s be honest: developing content in today’s user-generated media world is easy; marketing that content successfully is not.Numerous bloggers and site owners regularly ask me to explain how they can drive traffic to their sites in order to support their monetization goals. After all,quality content (or a unique product) leads to traffic, traffic leads to branding, and the combination of ...

High-quality video becomes affordable

by Rebecca Weeks Watson, February 24, 2009 | Comments

Leverage this virtual network to produce videos that reduce your costs and increase sales

Suppose you’re a small business owner with a new product or service that would be best sold by “bringing it to life” on the Web. You instantly begin dreaming of having a short online video that could show off your product and be easily shared with prospective customers. If only you could afford and find the time to locate a ...

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Rebecca Weeks Watson Director, Business Development, Real Girls Media

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