Exactly what is Word of Mouth?

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Blogs. Status updates. Family photo albums, political tweets, viral videos. In the age of the social web, many people broadcast themselves to the world, but not everyone does it in the same way. Using fresh data from the Trendstream Global Web Index—a recurring survey of more than 50,000 users of social platforms in 18 markets—we mapped by country how people are sharing information about themselves online. We looked at five broadcast behaviors: blogging, managing a social-network profile, sharing photos, sharing videos, and microblogging.

The map that emerges shows an East-West divide in users’ broadcast behavior. Asian users are more engaged with the social web than users in the West, where social networks are popular but other behaviors lag. Chinese and Indian users, for example, are three times as likely to microblog, or tweet, as American users. They’re also twice as likely to share videos.

The most common elements included by companies with a social media communications plan were resource-allocation guidelines for ongoing activities, registration of branded usernames on social sites and research into competitors’ use of social media.

Statistics

Twitter The Better Business Social Tool?

Running through the statistics, it seems that Twitter is a more favorable business social tool. A higher proportion of people are more receptive to brands on Twitter than on Facebook, though I do admit that this isn’t an apple-to-apple comparison.

The Social Marketing Hub was designed to make the social media management and tracking responsibilities manageable for large enterprise organizations. The platform does so by presenting users with the ability to create content — photos, blog posts, video, files — and automatically post it to all or select social sites with just a few clicks.

These destination sites are referred to as channels, and the Hub supports updates to all of the following: Facebook (), Twitter (), YouTube, WordPress (), Flickr () and Awareness-branded online communities. Of course, the Hub includes management for multiple accounts on each of the various channels.

threadsy lets anyone combine all of their existing email, Facebook, Twitter, and chat accounts in one place. For email, threadsy supports Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, MobileMe, AOL Mail, and IMAP accounts. threadsy is a full-featured email client with support for folders, archiving, drafts, and custom email signatures.

For chat, threadsy supports Google Talk, Facebook Chat, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Myspace, and others through integration with Meebo. threadsy uses the recommended secure access methods from Google, Facebook, and Twitter and industry-standard encryption for other services.

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threadsy groups all of your messages into 2 buckets: everything directly to you from email, Facebook, and Twitter in one column and your Facebook News Feed and Twitter stream in another. This organization insures important messages directed to you don’t slip through the cracks.

Focus on the people

threadsy creates detailed profiles of the people you message with. When someone sends you a message, browse their latest photos, website profiles, and Facebook and Twitter updates.

These days, sharing isn’t just caring--it’s ensuring virality, especially on Facebook. And Dan Zarrella, the Hubspot viral-marketing scientist who gave us nine proven ways to get retweeted on Twitter, knows exactly how to encourage it.

Although Zarrella freely admits that that correlation does not necessarily imply causation, he’s also adamant that, in this case, “it’s certainly a hint.” And after poring over his findings, which he sent to FastCompany.com exclusively, I’d definitely agree. Below, a look at Zarrella’s seven most effective ways to get shared on Facebook:

1. Talk about sex.

2. Solve a news mystery.

3. Don’t harp on Twitter. Or Google. Or iPhones.

4. Keep it short and sweet.

5. Drop some digits.

6. Add visual aids.

7. Post on weekends.

On Twitter, there are just five degrees of separation between you and almost everybody else on the service. After analyzing over 5.2 billion friend and follower relationships on Twitter, social media analytics and monitoring firm Sysomos determined that nearly everyone on Twitter is just five steps away from each other and about half of all the people on Twitter are separated by only four steps.

The famous six degrees of separation also still hold true on Twitter. These six steps cover 98% of all Twitter friendships. The most common friendship distance on Twitter, however, is just 4.67 and if you visit all of your friends and friends of friends up to a distance of five steps, chances are that you will see about 83% of all Twitter users.

Those brands with a genuine interest in customer engagement and a commitment to push beyond the expected have maintained a high profile social media presence that continually nets them advantages the rest don’t get.

One key advantage is that they’ve developed important media relationships. These relationships open doors for both parties. The press have immediate access to standby contacts anytime they need an extra quote or example for their upcoming piece. In return, the brands get an instant audience responsive to pitches on innovative social media use cases or quirky marketing campaigns. The cycle repeats itself until a particular story becomes saturated or eclipsed by a newer trend.

Right now there’s no brand mastering the press better than Starbucks. Their relationship with Twitter in the initial rollout of Promoted Tweets has ensured that Starbucks gets a major mention in every mainstream and new media article on Promoted Tweets. It is especially fortuitous for them that their sample Promoted Tweets screenshot served as the only visual representation of the official Twitter ad format when the news first broke. The company has managed to maintain this social media favor with the press for years now, also recently making a huge splash with their loyalty program partnership with Foursquare

As we jump into the brave new world of paid “twinfomercials,” a few points bear remembering when deciding how best to leverage this social media sea-change:

1. The Acceptance of Advertising. Twitter’s core demographics are familiar with paid online advertisements. They largely accept that the best things in life cannot remain free if providers fail to leverage the financial opportunities they bring about. They do, however, want their preferred platforms to be as discreet as possible in pursuit of profit. And, above all, they want full disclosure of how their engagement is capitalized.

Twitter’s approach to advertising has so far been one of the more transparent and open to feedback we’ve seen in the social media space. And by remaining transparent to its community, as Twitter has successfully done to date, the platform could avoid many of the same pitfalls that continue to plague just about every new update Facebook has let loose on its half-billion users.

2. Advertising Alone Won’t Do the Trick. Despite the eager hopes of corporate communicators and brand managers who might be looking for the path of least resistance, promoted tweets are no silver bullet. They, and whatever future developments roll out in the months ahead, are but one instrument in a symphony of Twitter engagement tools. Used in coordination with sustained, value-driven engagement, they will certainly help to amplify messaging. Made to stand alone, however, they will unquestionably fail in a marketplace that values continuous personal interaction.

3. Tailor Your Advertising to Twitter. Corporate marketers need to step up to the plate and take it upon themselves to create value-driven Twitter ads. This is not another opportunity to rehash a Facebook Mafia Wars advertisement or show users how they too can have a ripped six pack. Advertisers need to sit down and think about how content is used and shared on Twitter, and, importantly, what makes a Tweet (paid or not) successful.