CHAPTER 11

Community Rules: Social Network Development

Don’t Be Late to the Social Networking Party

A friend recently asked me a compelling question about social media marketing for an article he was writing: “How long does it take to see any kind of ROI from a social media marketing campaign?” The answer to that question is an appropriate introduction to this chapter, because it reveals the importance of growing a social network as well as investing in relationships and community through social channels.

If a business like Brian Clark’s Copyblogger Media announced a new software product through a series of demonstration videos promoted on the main web site to the Copyblogger community, via e-mail, and through social channels like Facebook and Twitter, I’d estimate that it would take a few hours to a few days before significant orders started coming in. Why so fast? Brian, Sonia, and their team have already built a hub and numerous spokes as social networks. The Copyblogger Media brand is known among buyers and numerous online marketing influentials as a provider of quality software. Brian has committed to creating content and media for several years, building up a strong online presence and attracting thousands of links and top search visibility on Google and Bing. With those online and offline social connections, search visibility, and credibility in place, barriers to conversion for a new product launch are low.

Now let’s take another perspective. At a recent event, I talked with a small business owner who was lamenting about not updating his website and also that his competition was showing up “all over the place” online. The nature of his product requires some education and suffers from a few common misperceptions. The rapid advancements in technology of his particular product category are not very well known among his target consumer market. However, there’s a substantial amount of search volume and interest on social networks in the solutions provided by his product. This is a classic scenario involving a small business owner with limited time and budget. Having limited resources calls for content, optimization, and clever social promotion. One way to approach the situation might involve a blog and videos of the business owner talking about his prospects’ most frequently asked questions and showcasing implementations of his product. Providing answers though video would certainly engage prospects and inspire links and social shares. Except . . . how would anyone know that his great video content exists? Without a social network in place or an advertising budget, it could take this business weeks or months before they begin attracting significant sales.

The time to start building social networks isn’t when you need them. The time to start is long beforehand, because it takes time to develop relationships. It takes time to listen, participate, create optimized content, and understand which triggers will inspire sales and referrals. If the small business owner mentioned here stays the course—creating useful content, listening to customer feedback, and growing a social presence—he’ll not only increase his ability to reach a larger, relevant audience, but he’ll also be able to tap into a steady stream of new content ideas, customer referrals, and channels of content distribution that can reach even more prospective customers. With a healthy social network and community, he’ll have new channels for sharing optimized content that attracts links and social shares, essential signals for search engines to rank web pages that will drive even more new customers to his business.

A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO SOCIAL NETWORK DEVELOPMENT

Earlier, we talked about understanding what our customers care about and where they spend their time on the social web. Publishing optimized content is only part of the puzzle when you are trying to attract and engage customers and influence them to buy. If customers are spending time on Facebook talking about topics relevant to your business, then by all means you should develop a social presence on Facebook. If customers subscribe and engage by commenting on certain blogs, forums, or LinkedIn groups, then those destinations are candidates for your participation as well.

Increasingly, customers are becoming more sophisticated about their use of online tools, from grandmothers joining Facebook to President Obama joining Instagram. Consumers are also spending more time with multiple social networks and may even transition from one network to the next, as many people have moved from MySpace to Facebook or Facebook to Google+. In order to attract, engage, and inspire your customers, it’s important for brands to have relevant visibility where their customers are. To do that, you must determine where conversations are happening relevant to your products-and-services. In Chapter 3 we talked about implementing a social media listening effort to identify social topics and social channels relevant to your customers’ interests. Now we’ll take that information and work on growing the spokes of our content distribution channels with social network development.

WHERE TO START WITH SOCIAL?

Many companies go after the most popular social networks with a “fish where the fish are” approach. That’s not an unreasonable strategy, but it’s a lot like putting up a billboard on a popular highway. What if your customers don’t drive down that highway?

Choosing a social network based on popularity alone is not effective. Why? Because relevancy rules on the social web. The social media monitoring, surveys, and customer research we talked about in the planning phase will give you the insight into which specific social networks are most likely to reach and engage your customers and connect with industry influencers. At the same time, since there are a handful of social networks that capture the vast majority of consumer attention, the chances that one or more of them would be relevant for your online marketing strategy is pretty good. When that’s the case, we need to look beyond the popularity of the network and also consider how best to use it for our purposes.

CUSTOMERS ARE NOT YOUR ONLY SOCIAL AUDIENCE

A big part of effective content marketing isn’t just about having well-written and compelling content. You must be able to get that content in front of customers who care, as well as people who are influential and can pass it along to their networks. Your approach to social networking should be thoughtful about the customers you wish to engage directly, as well as the influencers who may not necessarily be your buyers, but can help spread the good word about all of that great content you’ve been creating. Forrester Analyst Augie Ray breaks social influencers into three categories, each with varying degrees of influence:1

Of the influencers listed, the potential influencers make up 84 percent of the population, so it makes sense to consider that broad audience in the long-tail portion of your content plan. Connecting with social influencers at any level can extend the reach of your optimized content to attract links, shares, and new customers.

THE ROLE OF “BRANDIVIDUALS” AND BRANDS

“Brandividuals” is a term coined by David Armano to describe individuals who represent a company brand as well as their own. Most brandividuals are viewed as online brand advocates, but the notion of personal brand and growing a network to promote a business is not a new concept. For as long as there has been word of mouth and sales made by referral, there have been individuals growing their networks to promote products and services. Today, there are simply new tools like social networks to make the connections and foster relationships.

There are many modern-day brandividuals, but one who stands out is the head of social media at Ford, Scott Monty. I’ve known Scott online for several years, and we’ve connected in person at many different conferences. On a trip with my son Cameron to Dearborn, Michigan, in 2010, we visited with Scott at Ford’s world headquarters. My son was enamored with the story and history of Henry Ford, so Scott arranged a tour of the Henry Ford Museum and the Rouge truck factory. I’ve always been impressed with Scott’s work as a social media advocate and he’s been instrumental as a driving force behind Ford’s success with social media.

Being able to learn and subsequently blog about the history of this more-than-a-century-old company through experiences at the Henry Ford Museum and sitting down with Bob Kreipke, Ford’s full-time historian, was priceless. Without social networking, neither the visit nor my blogging about the experience on one of the most popular marketing blogs on the Internet would have happened.

Compared to the stories we heard about Henry Ford and Thomas Edison from Bob Kreipke, Ford is a very different company today, as is the automotive industry. It’s not enough just to be innovative, but now you need to be able to innovate quickly and connect with customers in more meaningful ways. Based on my discussions with Scott, Ford is very committed to making those connections. Over the years, Ford has benefited from the broad reach that Scott’s brandividualism has been able to provide. Many skeptics have argued that Scott was putting himself before the brand by using his name as his Twitter handle and using a photo of himself for the profile. However, Scott has in fact put a face behind a large corporation, which has allowed him to have more personal and “real” connections with followers.

If people are active in their industry by engaging, sharing opinions, and promoting themselves and their own ideas, it can result in awareness and growth of a social network. The outcome of becoming known and talked about by others is a personal brand: what you stand for, what your expertise is, and what you’re known for. That personal brand can have a direct effect on the business brand the individual represents, and vice versa.

In an increasingly social world of business, consumers and buyers want to connect with people (versus corporate voices). That means investing in developing content, relationships, and engagement between individuals working for a company and the people they want to do business with. The ease of publishing and the popularity of social networks means that working with brandividuals, either as employees or as influencers in your market, is inevitable. The key for brands that want to leverage brandividuals for network growth is to have clear goals, a vision for what the brand stands for, and relevant communications. The effect can be a mutually beneficial outcome that recognizes the individual’s contribution and inspires company credibility among a new or broader social network.

THE BIG FIVE SOCIAL NETWORKS

In the hub and spoke model we’ve discussed for content marketing and social promotion, the hub is surrounded by a constellation of social networks and channels of distribution. Promoting optimized content through social channels can attract visitors, social engagement, shares, and links. Many online marketers believe that social signals are increasingly important for SEO.3 Therefore, it’s important to understand the opportunities for social promotion of optimized content. (See Figure 11.1.)

Within the context of a content marketing strategy, my recommended approach to growing social networks is based on finding the most relevant places that your customers and influencers spend their time. Because popular social networks and media sharing sites represent the vast majority of social networking activity online, this chapter provides an overview, as well as opportunities for individuals and for companies, for content marketing on each of the top five.

All social networks offer various advertising opportunities, which can also facilitate network growth, customer engagement and even revenue outcomes. Our focus on social networks for this book is on the organic and content marketing opportunities, so I’ll leave Facebook advertising advice to experts like Marty Weintrab and his book, Killer Facebook Ads.

FACEBOOK

When you mention social networks or even social media, one of the first brands that comes to mind is Facebook, which started on the Harvard campus in 2004 and is now worldwide. The transformation that Facebook has made over the past eight years is nothing less than astounding.

• Currently, Facebook has more than 800 million users, and more than 50 percent of active users log in each day.4
• Every minute, there are more than 695,000 new status updates, 79,364 wall posts, and 510,040 comments.5
• In March 2011, more than 690 million visitors used Facebook.com, an increase of 43 percent over the previous year.6
• According to a recent study, the top five countries using Facebook according to number of users are: the United States, Indonesia, India, the United Kingdom, and Turkey.7

Opportunities for Individuals

Facebook has become a vehicle for catching up with old friends, sharing parts of your life with family or friends who are long distance, sharing updates of your mood or relationship status, checking in at your favorite restaurant, and having the ability to “like” groups, pages, or brands. Many groups of friends use Facebook to coordinate get-togethers like parties or even weddings. For well-known business professionals, authors, sports figures, and celebrities, personal fan pages create an opportunity to grow and engage with social networks separate from personal pages on Facebook.

The content publishing and sharing opportunities on Facebook range from 60,000-character status updates to photos and videos. The Timeline feature, enabled for all users late in 2011, provides far more historical information on individuals than any other social network. Individuals are currently limited to networks of 5,000 “friends” or “likes” of Business pages, but individual Profiles can migrate to a Business page, which offers far greater limits.

Opportunities for Brands and Organizations

The application of Facebook for business has become somewhat of a focal point of many online marketing campaigns. Utilizing Facebook as part of a marketing strategy enables companies to:

• Facilitate one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many conversations
• Build connections and relationships with individuals
• Listen to what brand fans are interested in
• Create and cross-promote shareable content
• Offer promotions and special offers
• Interact with current and potential customers

An example of a company that has taken Facebook marketing to the next level is Obeo, a virtual tour and professional photography company out of Salt Lake City, Utah. (See Figure 11.2.) Obeo has taken a very interactive and visually appealing approach, which offers special deals for liking its page, easy sign-ups for demonstrations, recognition of top fans, and weekly trivia to encourage users to return to its page frequently.

Facebook Business or Fan Pages provide a variety of content promotion opportunities using text, images, videos, and applications (apps). Social network growth for brands on Facebook is multifaceted, including content and promotions within Facebook, the ability to integrate Facebook “likes,” and the capability to embed social widgets and commenting functionality on external web pages and offline promotions. Businesses with successful Facebook presence promote their Facebook Business Fan Page everywhere they promote the company website. Along with promotion is the ability to deliver on the brand promise of being useful for customers by publishing useful, timely, and relevant content.

YOUTUBE

YouTube was launched in 2005 by three former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, and sold only 21 months later for an estimated $1.65 billion to Google.8, 9 Video as a platform is one of the most engaging forms of any social media. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video could be worth millions. Many people don’t think of YouTube as a social network or even a search engine, yet YouTube has been ranked second only to Google as a search engine.10 YouTube’s social networking features allow users to connect with other video publishers and viewers. With hundreds of millions of users, YouTube is one of the largest social networks online.

• Within a year of launching, YouTube had more than 65,000 videos available and 20 million unique users per month.11
• More than 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.12
• An estimated 27.9 million men, 34.7 million women, and 21.6 million teens interact with YouTube on a regular basis.13
• YouTube’s user base spans 25 countries and 43 languages.14
• YouTube averages 800 million unique user visits each month.15

Opportunities for Individuals

YouTube has been the launching point for the careers of many popular musicians and pop culture icons, including teen sensation Justin Bieber. YouTube has shown us the best and the worst of the human race—from entertaining Internet sensations like Ray William Johnson, with more than 5 million subscribers, and iJustine, with more than a million subscribers, to the stupid and sometimes very painful mistakes made by amateur daredevils. Using intuitive online tools, individuals can create their own channels to upload and publish video content. YouTube provides users with the ability to interact with videos and video publishers through subscribing, rating, and sharing with external social networks. Videos can also be embedded on external websites. With a built-in social network, YouTube is an attractive option for individuals to promote content and grow their social networks both on and off of YouTube.

Opportunities for Brands and Organizations

YouTube has proven to be a great platform for consumer brands: Orabrush, Blendtec, and Old Spice have gained millions of views and increased sales. In 2009, bottled water company Evian published a video called “Roller Babies,” with US and international versions of the video viewed more than 68 million times.16 (See Figure 11.3.) B2B brands have also succeeded; for example, Cisco has more than 10,000 YouTube channel subscribers, and “The Future of Shopping” video has more than 6.5 million views.17 Creative, useful, and entertaining videos for B2C and B2B audiences inspire sharing among the YouTube community as well as with off-site social networks. Companies can leverage video in their content marketing mix, not only to reach customers with a more engaging format, but also to attract subscribers who complement an overall social network community. Optimized video hosted with YouTube helps video discovery through search engines like Google and on YouTube’s own internal search engine. As new viewers discover a business video channel or individual videos, the network of subscribers will grow, creating a larger community to consume and share.

TWITTER

The 2006 launch of Twitter introduced the concept of microblogging (short, 140-character messages known as tweets) to the masses. After news of natural disasters, political events, and celebrities entered the Twittersphere. The simplicity of Twitter and its ease of use on any device, from computer to tablet to smartphone, have enabled millions of people to connect, share, and engage through short messages. Videos and images can also be shared on Twitter. While many companies grapple with the usefulness and even return on investment of a 140-character message, successful online marketers have learned that the cumulative effect of sharing tweets can grow an active audience waiting to see what will be shared next. Twitter content is public and has been used by Google in the past to influence social search visibility.

• In 2011, Twitter reached 100 million active users.18
• Twitter usage on mobile devices has increased by 187 percent in the past year.19
• A record of 8,868 tweets per second was reached on August 28, 2011.20
• The tweet that was retweeted the most in 2011 was a tweet promoted by Wendy’s that raised $50,000 for foster children.21
• A mere 5 percent of users create 75 percent of Twitter content.22

Opportunities for Individuals

The top 10 followed Twitter accounts are not brands but celebrities. Twitter has become a great resource for sharing your passions, finding a job, and interacting with friends and industry peers. The sharing of news items has replaced the RSS feed for many Twitter users as a way to stay on top of what’s new and current. In some cases, individuals have achieved larger networks than the brands they work for on Twitter. For example, web-hosting provider Rackspace has about 20,000 followers on Twitter, but brandividual employee Robert Scoble has more than 230,000 followers. Individuals can grow their networks on Twitter by promoting useful, timely, and well-written tweets and by connecting with other influential Twitter users who will retweet their messages. As with other social network environments, blatant self-promotion on Twitter is frowned on.

Opportunities for Brands and Organizations

Twitter’s built-in search functionality makes it easier for brands and organizations to target prospective clients more efficiently. Another great use of Twitter Search is finding your competitors and observing how they use Twitter and with whom they’re connecting. As I’ve mentioned in earlier chapters, Twitter chats are also a great opportunity for experts within your organization to answer questions for prospective customers in real time. I’ve participated in numerous Twitter chats on marketing, SEO, and social media topics and have experienced firsthand how chats on Twitter can achieve a substantial reach. In fact, in late October of 2011, I participated as a guest on Mack Collier’s #blogchat, talking about how to live-blog conferences in advance of BlogWorld Expo. Our chat had more than 800 participants, 4,000 tweets, and 29 million impressions.23

Another example of effective Twitter use involves Curtis Kimball, who began selling crème brÛlée from a food cart in the Mission District of San Francisco in 2009. At the time, the crème brÛlée cart was not licensed, so his only way of communicating with potential customers was through the use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. After only a few years, the Creme Brulee Man has more than 20,000 followers on Twitter. Curtis continues to use his Twitter account as a means of letting consumers know where he will be on a daily basis. What started as a small, meager cart has now become a thriving catering and food cart business in the heart of San Francisco.

Promoting useful content and engaging with your network is the most effective way to grow a network on Twitter. As a communications and networking channel, Twitter can be a news source, a syndication channel for blog posts, a cross-promotion tool for Facebook, and a way to survey or poll your community for ideas. For companies that have been successful with Twitter, the tactics mentioned can be useful in these ways and more.

LINKEDIN

Shortly after social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace were created, the founders of LinkedIn saw an opportunity to create a business-centric site for users to connect with and nurture the relationships of business contacts. In a 2006 interview with Businessweek, cofounder Konstantin Guericke differentiated LinkedIn from other networks by saying, “We’re here to build a business, not to create something cool. MySpace and Facebook have done really well. And I think they can monetize what they have built, probably by adding in more e-commerce. But I think the opportunity on the business side is ultimately larger.”24 Since its inception, LinkedIn has seen a steady growth rate and continues to expand its worldwide reach.

• LinkedIn was created in 2002 in the living room of cofounder Reid Hoffman.25
• As of November 2011, LinkedIn had more than 135 million members in more than 200 countries and territories, making it the third largest professional network on the Internet today.26

Opportunities for Individuals

LinkedIn has proven to be an essential platform for individuals to nurture relationships with existing contacts, search for employment, and interact with particular brands and organizations. LinkedIn has also enabled individuals to establish themselves as subject matter experts and participate within groups as well as in question-and-answer forums. LinkedIn is a popular next step to connect with people after exchanging business cards at conferences and business meetings. Individuals can grow their network by searching LinkedIn for others with similar professional interests and by participating in Groups and Answers.

Opportunities for Brands and Organizations

LinkedIn’s search capabilities provide a great means of connecting with the right contacts at the companies that you would like as clients. For instance, say that you are looking to sign up a new digital marketing client at large corporation and are interested in contacting the vice president of marketing. LinkedIn will show you how many degrees of separation exist between you and that vice president, as well as which contacts you may have in common. By working your way up the list, you can facilitate an introduction to the VP without coming off as overly aggressive. Because LinkedIn is a professional networking tool, the recruiting options are very robust. There are special upgrades that recruiters or hiring managers can purchase to make finding candidates even easier. LinkedIn company pages are a great avenue for sharing content about your company, its products and services, recruiting new employees, and sharing information about your team.

GOOGLE+

The launch of Google’s most successful venture into the social networking space has proven to be much more successful than its previous social networking and sharing endeavors such as Google Wave and Google Buzz. Does Google+ offer a secret sauce for improved search engine optimization? Some sources have said that utilizing Google’s +1 button can increase searchability for some sites, but not all, while other SEO pundits claim that the +1 button dramatically increases visits. There’s a bit of an anticipated network effect with Google+. The more users that Google can encourage or incentivize people to use Google+, the more effective it will be as a social network and as a signal of influence on search engine rankings.

• Google+ launched in June of 2011.
• Websites using Google’s +1 button get 3.5 times more visits than Google+.27
• In December of 2011, Google+ passed 62 million users and is estimated to reach 400 million by the end of 2012.28

Opportunities for Individuals

One of the interesting features about Google+ is the ability to separate contacts into different “circles” and share content within those selected circles. This feature has made it easier to interact differently with family, friends, or professional contacts. Video hangouts can be live-streamed and saved to YouTube as part of a content creation and social engagement strategy. Content, images, and video shared publicly on Google+ can appear on Google.com search results within a short period of time. Growing a social network on Google+ involves “plusing” others’ content, leaving comments, and adding others to your own circles. The “plus” is akin to Facebook’s “like” and has become just as ubiquitous on the web, with implementation on thousands of websites. The more of your friends that add you to their Google+ circles, the more often content you share and publish will appear in their search results.

Opportunities for Brands and Organizations

With much anticipation and a little controversy, Google launched an option for brands called Google+ Pages. Many of the same features found on individual accounts can be found on Google+ Pages, including the ability to post updates, upload images and videos, segment those followed into circles, and interact with others’ content. Google+ Hangouts enable interaction with loyal fans through video. Practical applications of Hangouts for B2B organizations might include videoconferencing to answer questions, conduct training, or hold creative pitches. Not surprisingly, at the time of writing this book, Google brands occupy many of the top 10 brands on Google+, including Android, Google Chrome, Google+, Google, and Gmail. Other top brands on Google+ include H&M, the New York Times, and Marvel Comics.29 Most brands participating with Google+ Pages are working to find the proper mix of activity, content sharing, and engagement to build substantial communities. Like many new social networks, many brands will attract fans based on previous social network participation in other channels. Since Google+ is so integrated with Google search results, and both paid and organic search results can be “plused,” brands have every incentive to leverage content promotion and network growth. The more people who have added a brand to their Google+ Circles, the greater the chance that brand will appear in those users’ Google search results.

THE SOCIAL NETWORKING PARTY IS JUST GETTING STARTED

Forrester’s Digital Marketing forecast for 2011 to 2016 predicts that social network investment will increase 300 percent over the next five years.30 The intersection of social content, media sharing, and networking with search, e-mail, and even online advertising has made it an indispensable part of any effective online marketing strategy. Companies that invest in building social networks, develop communities of brand advocates, and offer social media–friendly content will have substantial advantages over competitors that wait until the day they actually need those networks before beginning to develop them. It takes time to build relationships and meaningful connections. The more comfortable a company can become with social tools for both marketing and internal collaboration, the more empowered the organization will be at succeeding on the search and social web.

ACTION ITEMS

Notes

1. Barb Dybwad, “The State of Online Word of Mouth Marketing [STATS],” April 25, 2010, Mashable, http://mashable.com/2010/04/25/word-of-mouth-marketing-stats/.

2. “Why do Affluent Consumers Connect with Brands on Social Networks?” eMarketer, May 10, 2011, http://www.public.site2.mirror2.phi.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008379.

3. “Social Signals Increasingly Important to SEO,” MarketingCharts, January 9, 2012, http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/social-signals-increasingly-important-to-seo-20695/.

4. Facebook, accessed January 2012, https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics.

5. Leslie Horn, “Infographic: What Happens Online in 60 Seconds?” PCMag.com, December 27, 2011, http://www.pcmag.com/rticle2/0,2817,2398097,00.asp.

6. “Growth of Facebook.com Across Global Regions,” comScore Data Mine, May 11, 2011, http://www.comscoredatamine.com/2011/05/growth-of-facebook-com-across-global-regions/.

7. Check Facebook, accessed December 2011, http://www.checkfacebook.com/

8. “Frequently Asked Questions,” YouTube, accessed January 2012, http://www.youtube.com/t/faq.

9. “YouTube,” Wikipedia, accessed January 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube.

10. “comScore Releases October 2009 U.S. Search Engine Rankings,” comScore, November 17, 2009, http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/11/comScore_Releases_October_2009_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings.

11. “YouTube serves up 100 million videos a day online,” USA Today, July 16, 2006, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-07-16-youtube-views_x.htm.

12. Jake Hird, “20+ Mine-blowing social media statistics: One year later,” Econsultancy, March 25, 2011, http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/7334-social-media-statistics-one-year-later.

13. “Reaching Your Audience on YouTube,” YouTube, accessed December 2011, http://www.youtube.com/advertise/demographics.html.

14. “Statistics,” YouTube, accessed December 2011, http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics.

15. YouTube, accessed December 2011, http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics.

16. EvianBabies, “Evian Roller Babies International Version,” YouTube, July 1, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQcVllWpwGs.

17. ciscovid, “The Future of Shopping,” YouTube, October 2, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jDi0FNcaock

18. Twitter, accessed December 2011, http://www.twitter.com.

19. Catherine Smith, “Twitter User Statistics Show Stunning Growth,” Huffington Post, March 14, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/14/twitter-user-statistics_n_835581.html.

20. Twitter, accessed December 2011, http://www.twitter.com.

21. Twitter, accessed December 2011, http://www.twitter.com.

22. Stephanie Buck, “A Visual History of Twitter [INFOGRAPHIC],” Mashable, September 30, 2011, http://mashable.com/2011/09/30/twitter-history-infographic/.

23. Hashtracking, accessed January 2012, http://beta.hashtracking.com/ht-pro-rpt/mackcollier-blogchat-2011-10-30/#tweets.

24. “How LinkedIn Broke Through,” Bloomberg Business Week, April 10, 2006, http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2006/tc20060410_185842.htm.

25. LinkedIn Press Center, accessed December 2011, http://press.linkedin.com/about.

26. LinkedIn Press Center, accessed December 2011, http://press.linkedin.com/about.

27. Kipp Bodnar, “Websites Using Google’s +1 Button Get 3.5x the Google+ Visits [Data],” HubSpot (blog), August 11, 2011, http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/22293/Websites-Using-Google-s-1-Button-Get-3-5x-the-Google-Visits-Data.aspx.

28. Paul Allen, “Google+ Growth Accelerating, Passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day. Prediction: 400 million users by end of 2012,” Google+, December 27, 2011,https://plus.google.com/117388252776312694644/posts/ZcPA5ztMZaj.

29. Lauren Indvik, “The Top 10 Brand Pages on Google+,” Mashable, December 21, 2011, http://mashable.com/2011/12/21/top-10-brand-pages-on-google-plus/.

30. Josh Bernoff, “Interactive marketing to exceed ¼ of all ad spend by 2016 (and how we know),” Forrester Research, Inc., August 25, 2011, http://forrester.typepad.com/groundswell/2011/08/interactive-marketing-to-approach-13-of-all-ad-spend-by-2016-and-how-we-know.html.