Some people talk the talk while others walk the walk. Well Dan Zarrella walks and talks better than most when it comes to social media. He is an award-winning social, search, and viral marketing scientist and author of the upcoming O’Reilly media book “The Social Media Marketing Book”. You could say that we were thrilled by the opportunity to pick his brain, but that would be grossly understating it.
Like we were saying, Dan was kind enough to answer some questions for us…
Dan, your new book “The Social Media Marketing Book” is described as a resource for choosing the best of the social web’s unique marketing opportunities. What’s the most unique use of social media that you’ve seen to date?
Most unique use is an interesting and difficult question. Once an idea works well, others copy it. I love what Dell did with IdeaStorm, which Starbucks and others also eventually did. I love the now cliché ComcastCares Twitter account example as well. BlendTec’s “Will it Blend” campaign was awesome. And I hear that Victoria Secret’s Pink line has a great Facebook presence.
We work in a niche industry, albeit a large one (the built environment), primarily focused in B2B marketing, is social media for everyone?
It is. Not all social media is for everyone, but there is something from the social web that can be used for every kind of business. I’ve seen a ton of great examples of powerful b2b marketing with social media technologies as “far out there” as Second Life. IBM has done some great things with Ballet Pixelle there.
Reporting continues to be a hot topic. It’s safe to say that we’ve yet to find a service that can offer us everything we need. Do you have any recommendations on the best tools to track the performance of your campaign?
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention HubSpot’s software package. But in the end I think most flexible reporting systems can be customized to provide pretty good insights. Social media analytics is a tough problem, and that’s an opportunity too, if you’re having the problems, so are your competitors.
Previously you campaigned against Twitter’s Project ReTweet. Now that it’s officially available to all users, has your opinion changed at all?
It hasn’t and honestly my position has been strengthened because nearly all the post-launch feed back I’ve seen has been negative. When I first wrote the blog post about it, there were a few people saying good things like “let’s wait and see.” Lots of people did that and now formed the same opinions I had.
What would you do to improve it? We’re a bit disappointed that there’s still no synergy with different clients (although we expect it) and there’s no option to add your own commentary.
I would change the attribution system, to show the ReTweeter’s name and avatar. I would add the ability for a ReTweeter to add her own thoughts, and I would add a streaming ReTweet API so that researchers could get every ReTweet posted with the new method.
Being a “scientist”, we know you like to tinker with things. What trends are you currently examining?
Augmented reality. And not just in the sci-fi virtual reality way. The gap between online social media and the real world is closing fast. Driven by powerful mobile devices and hyper local platforms like Foursquare this is the space I really see taking off in the next year or so.
Okay, one final question. If you could predict the future, what’s the next big meme we should look out for?
As I mentioned above, the real world is going to become important again.
Buy a copy of Dan’s new book. You can also find him all over the Internet. Dan has written extensively about the science of viral marketing, memetics and social communications on his own blog and for a variety of popular industry blogs, including Mashable, CopyBlogger, ReadWriteWeb, Plagiarism Today, ProBlogger, Social Desire, CenterNetworks, Nowsourcing, and SEOScoop. Follow him on Twitter.
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Tags: Dan Zarrella, ReTweet, social media, social media analytics, The Social Media Marketing Book, Twitter