International Parking Institute - Social Media Demystified
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Transcript of 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.
6 February 2011 l International Parking Institute
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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
8 February 2011 l International Parking Institute
But people dont connectwith youbecause you are promoting
yourself to them. People connect withyou because you are informing them.
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theparking professional l www.parking.org/tpp l February 2011
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.
theparking professional l www.parking.org/tpp l February 2011