International Parking Institute - Social Media Demystified

8/8/2019 International Parking Institute - Social Media Demystified

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SOCIAL MEDIA

4 February 2011 l International Parking Institute

Ted Janusz

Twitter, YouTube, Facebook,

MySpace and LinkedIn DEMYSTIFIED


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Did You Realize these Stats?: Nearly 247 million Americans are

now Internet users thats 73 percent

of the population.

43 percent of online consumers belong

to a social network.

74 percent of social network users send

messages to their friends as part of their

daily routines.

87 percent of parents of teenagers are

online.

96 percent of Generation Y participates

in social media?

Why Social Networking MattersDepartment store magnate John Wanamaker

once said, Fifty percent of my advertising

dollars are wasted. The problem is, I dont know

which fifty percent.

But there is one form of marketing that

always works personal recommendations.

Eighty percent of all purchases are not based on

full-page newspaper ads, but rather on word-of-mouth advertising. And here is why:

The average American adult has a direct

sphere of influence of 52 people. Think about

the number of contacts you have in your e-mail

address book or the number of friends you may

have on Facebook. Ill bet the number is even

greater than 52.

In addition, if you are an average adult, you

know 400 peoplepeople you went to school

with, work with or you know socially. If you

assume that each of those 400 people knows

400 others (of course, there would be some

overlap, but lets keep it simple), you now have

an immediate network of 160,000 people. Andif you assume that each of those 160,000

people know 400, well, you are up to 1/3 of the

U.S. adult population.

And which are customers likely to sprea

about your parking facility, good news

bad news?

Your average satisfied customer will tell fiv

to eight others. Your average upset customer (

you have any) will tell ten to 16. In fact, one

five will tell 20 others how angry you hav

made them, and Web 2.0 now makes it easi

and faster for them to do so.

Introducing Web 2.0Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace anLinkedIn are five applications we will discuss

this article that are components ofWeb 2.0,

theparking professional l www.parking.org/tpp l February 2011

The average Americanadult has a direct sphere of

influence of52 people.


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popular term for Internet applications in which

the users are actively engaged in creating anddistributing Web content.

Web 1.0 probably consisted of the Web sites

you saw back in the late 1990s, which were

nothing more than fancy electronic brochures.

Web 1.5 would have been something like

Amazon or eBay, sites on which one could buy,

sell and leave reviews. What Web 3.0 will look

like is anybodys guess!

Lets look specifically at the five Web 2.0

applications previously mentioned.

Tweet, TweetAccording a recent LinkedIn Research Net-work/Harris Poll, 69 percent of Americans do

not know enough about Twitter to even have

an opinion.

Twitter is like text messaging, only you can

also do it from the Web, explains Dan Tynan,

the author of the Tynan on Tech blog. Instead

of sending a message to just one person, you

can send it to thousands of people at once. You

can choose to follow anyones update (called

tweets) simply by clicking the Follow button

on their profile, or vice-versa. The only rule is that

each tweet can be no longer than 140 characters.This is fine, but what is the business application

of Twitter?

The University of Oklahoma uses a Twitter feed

for several reasons:

Identify the best places on campus to park.

Provide information on lot closures due

to construction.

Answer parking questions from the

campus community in real time.

A typical post from the universitys parkingstaff: Good Monday morning, drivers! Youll

find open spaces (175) in the Asp Avenue

garage and 150 in the Elm Avenue garage.

The University of California at Irvine, Georgia

State, and Texas A&M are just a few of the

other universities that use Twitter to provide up-

to-the-minute information on parking conditions.

To get a quick introduction to Twitter, you

can access an online guide from Tony Hsieh,

the founder of the online shoe store Zappos and

a Twitter evangelist, at www.twitter.zappos.com/start.

To see how you can use Twitter

promote your parking organization, please viwww.business.twitter.com/twitter101.

To follow in real time what people are sayin

about you and your parking facility on Twitte

type in your search words at www.search.twitter.com

Top Web SitesAccording to Google Trends, four of the to

Web sites in the United States are:

MySpace

YouTube

Google

Facebook

MySpaceTom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe designed

Web site to provide a service at no charge

regular people looking for a way to connect wi

others having similar likes and dislikes. MySpac

was initially popular with bands, who didnt wa

to go through the hassle of creating and main

taining a Web site, but sought a way to distribu

their music, photographs, videos and oth

information to their fans and would-be fans.



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YouTubeYouTube was started by three former employees

of PayPal, and then sold to Google about a year

later for $1.65 billion dollars.Unlike the other Web sites we discuss here

that allow for the posting of words and photos,

YouTube is the number one video-sharing Web

site. Best of all, you can post your video on the

site for free. A simple Flip video camera

(priced at under $150 on Amazon.com) can do

the trick for you.

What is the business application of YouTube?

Lets examine three successful examples:

Fast Pass Parking officials at the University

of Texas at San Antonio have posted

a short video promoting Fast Pass, a

pre-loaded debit card. Blendtec A Utah-based manufacturer of

blenders, armed with a total marketing

budget of $50, decided to post a series of

videos entitled Will it Blend? In these

videos the company attempted to pulverize

items such as golf balls and iPods. The first

eight episodes resulted in three million

downloads in a week. Even better for

Blendtec, they sold out of the $600 blender

in the first 24 hours.

Diet Coke + MentosCheck out the

geysers this combination creates! WhileCocoa-Cola stayed away from promoting

this phenomenon (perhaps out of fear of

litigation), Perfetti (the maker of Mentos)

jumped in with both feet, posting both a

large link to YouTube on its Web site and

sponsoring its own contest. In the process,

they sold a lot of mints.

The key to business success on YouTube:

Do not post a video of someone from your

department in a head shot saying blah-blah-blah.

Nobody will view it. To be noticed by the

younger audience you are trying to attract on

YouTube, be sure to be humorous, offbeat or

very personal.

And take good care of your customers. What

kind of damage do you think United Airlines

customer Dave Carroll has done with his

humorous little video United Breaks Guitars

on YouTube? So far the video has nearly 10

million views from around the world.

Google

Rather than using the Yellow Pages, 97 percent

of consumers now use the Internet to shop locally.

Ninety percent of these searches start with a

search engine.Consumers use Google, the most popular

search engine with over a 70 percent market

share, over a billion times each day. To make

sure that your parking facility has a presence

there, register for a free Google Places listing at

www.google.com/places.

FacebookFacebook was originally created by Mark

Zuckerberg, intended for use by his fellow stu-

dents at Harvard University as The Facebook.

It was meant to be an online replacement of thebook one receives as a freshman when entering

a college or university containing photos and

other information about incoming freshman

classmates. Within 30 days, about half of the

students of Harvard had a profile on the site.

Facebook soon spread to other Boston area

colleges. Presently, approximately 85 percent of

all college students have a profile on Facebook.

Why does Facebook matter?

According to ComScore, in May 2009, Facebook

for the first time surpassed MySpace in th

number of users in the United States.

Facebook has been able to overtak

MySpace as the number one social networkinsite in the world because it no longer has th

stigma that it is just for high school or colleg

students. Anyone may now join Facebook.

The fastest growing segment of users

Facebook is now neither high school nor colleg

students, but rather females age 55-65. Why

With the rest of their family on Facebook (th

average user spends an hour a day on the site

its the best way for them to keep up with th

stories and the photos of their children an

grandchildren!

According to Social Media Revolutionhere is the number of years it took each of th

following to reach 50 million users:

Radio 38 years

Television 13 years

The Internet 4 years

iPod 3 years

Facebook has added 100 million users in th

last nine months!

According to the Facebook Global Monito

here is a listing of the percent of a country

citizens (not just the percent of those citizenwho are online) who currently maintain

profile on Facebook:

Iceland - 53 percent

Norway - 46 percent

Canada - 42 percent

Hong Kong - 40.5 percent

United Kingdom - 40 percent

United States - 35.5 percent

Chile - 35 percent

Israel - 32.5 percent

Bahamas - 30.5 percent


But people dont connectwith youbecause you are promoting

yourself to them. People connect withyou because you are informing them.


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Why has social networking, especiallyFacebook, become so popular?Social networking allows so much more than

e-mail or text messaging. In addition to writing

on someone elses wall, Facebook allows for

the sharing of photographs and videos. Facebook

is the number one photo-sharing site on the

Internet, with 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the

site each month. At a glance, you can see and

read what all of your friends are up to. And

because you choose your friends on Facebook,you can virtually eliminate spam, and spam

composes up to 90 percent of all e-mail.

What is the business application of Facebook?People have a profile on Facebook, whereas a

business has a page.

You and I can have friends on Facebook,

while a business has fans. Over 1.6 million

businesses now have Facebook pages.

For example, Seton Hall University and

Rutgers University have parking-specific

Facebook pages with updates on parking andother transportation services.

To create a page for your parking facility on

Facebook (which is free), first register for a

Facebook profile.

To quickly get started on Facebook, view the

instructional video at www.eightoclock.com.

The Differences Among the PopularSocial Networking SitesMySpace is a social networking site for bands;

and other music and entertainment.

Facebook is a site at which you can poke yourfriends, play games, and post photos on your

profile and comments on your friends walls.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, is like the

corporate boardroom. No fun and games here,

this site means serious business. It was the

last major social networking site to allow

photographs. Even now, each LinkedIn user

exhibits only one.

LinkedInLinkedIn is a professional contact database

launched in May 2003 by Reid Hoffman,formerly of PayPal. Its members can create a

profile and network with its more than

million members in 200 countries. Membe

include executives from all Fortune 500 companie

LinkedIn has the oldest, and wealthiest, use

of the major social networking sites:

Average age 41

Six-figure household income

Two-thirds are male

Four-fifths have college degrees

Four Quick Ways to Maximize YourParticipation on LinkedInA question I often get asked in my conferenc

presentations is, Ive signed up on LinkedI

Whats next?

Though LinkedIn does not come with

users manual, you dont need to be a comput

whiz to derive immediate benefits fro

the site.

Here are four quick and easy ways to maximiz

your participation on LinkedIn:

1) Groups To network with as many people ayou can, join as many relevant groups as you ca


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99 Percent Information and

One Percent Promotion

The key to social networking tools is to have

lots of connections, says Guy Kawasaki, the

original Macintosh evangelist. Its a numbers

game. The more people who are connected to

you, the more opportunities you have.

But people dont connect with you because

you are promoting yourself to them. People

connect with you because you are informingthem.

Kawasaki concludes by saying, You need to beinforming people 99 percent of the time and then 1

percent of the time you can promote your business.

The New Free TV or Newspaper?In my conference presentations, attendees often

ask me, Give me the bottom line, how can I use

social networking sites to make money?

There is a danger for businesses to view the social

networking sites as the new television or newspaper,

but on which a business can advertise for free.

If you are going to go there, you had better go

for the right reasons, says Seth Godin, author ofthe best-selling book on marketing, Purple Cow.

And if your reason is to sell more stuff, please

dont bother. Its not going to work. People dont

care about you. They just dont.

On the other hand, if you can use social

networking sites as ways to connect to real

people, just for that sake alone, not because you

want to sell anything, then its a great way to

spend a half hour a day.

Godin concludes, And what we are finding,

as a by-product of that yes, in fact, your

business will do better, because you are a trusted

member of the community. Not because youare trying to sell stuff.

Successful marketing using any of the Web 2.0

applications means an ad cannot look like an ador

else it will be rejected immediately by the social

networking visitors. Your customers on averag

are subjected to 1,500 to 5,000 advertising impre

sions each day. (Just walk into your neighborhoo

superstore!) Since they have successfully learn

how to block most of these interruptions, yo

clients are six times more likely to read an artic

from you than an advertisement. n

Ted Janusz is a professional speaker, authand marketing consultant and will be speakin

at the 2011 IPI Conference & Expo in May

Pittsburgh. He can be reached at ted@januspr

sentations.com or 614.440.7487.


Documents

International Parking Institute - Social Media Demystified