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According to a recent Forrester Research survey of internet marketers, 2009 is going to be a big year for social media and mobile marketing. The chart below explains it all (via Marketing Pilgrim):

Forrester Marketing Survey Results

My only concern with these results is that it skews heavily towards more savvy internet marketers and does not reflect the larger business landscape. I base that on the fact that I don’t see any evidence that 80% of all marketers are currently using SEO and Pay Per Click advertising.

Based on that assumption, can we hypothesize that the growth in social and mobile marketing won’t be as strong as Forrester predicts?

Forget paid hosting packages and haggling for parked domain names. Just do what my friends at Boone Oakley did and host your website on YouTube:

According to the initial stats, the “site” is performing wonderfully.

Disclaimer: I have partnered with Boone Oakley for search engine marketing support for some of their clients. Despite being a little weird (in a good way), they are great people.

I Twittered under the username @AndrewCMiller for a long time before launching RichmondWiki.org as a side project. At that time I created the @RichmondWiki account to update people in Richmond on the project, but I lazily started using it for ALL of my Twittering.

To avoid confusing both accounts’ followers and relaying wiki information to personal followers and personal information to wiki followers, I’ve re-activated my old account and the breakout is such that:

• @AndrewCMiller will be my personal and business-related twittering
• @RichmondWiki tweets will be related to wiki stuff only so that people that are interested in the RW project don’t have to listen to all of my personal ramblings

Thanks for following!

How are these #followfriday tweets useful to anybody?

Would you follow these people?

I’m not trying to pick on anybody in particular, which is why I used examples from multiple users and left out their names. It’s just a good example of how NOT to add value to a communications network.

The Failure of #followfriday

In the past year I’ve watched the #followfriday phenomenon evolve from personal introductions to mass shout outs in an attempt to help other Twitter users grow their networks and become more like the self-proclaimed “power users” or “social media gurus”.

Here are my problems with the aforementioned #followfriday executions:

1. It doesn’t tell me WHY I should follow any of these people. Are they helpful, funny, informative, or otherwise unique?
2. It FAILS to communicate what they can offer me or what I can offer them. Do they need my services? Do I need theirs? Do we have anything in common other than being one of your followers?
3. It doesn’t build VALUE for your followers or the people you “pimp”. Based on my experience with being called out in several mass #followfriday messages, the only new followers it attracts are the aspiring “power users” that follow everybody. Then the cycle repeats itself next Friday.
4. It sacrifices QUALITY for quantity. It tells the world that you value a large follower list more than the relationships with the people on that list.

I understand the #followfriday concept clearly: introduce your network of followers to other twitterers that they should follow. Hence the name “followfriday”. It’s the Twitter equivalent of introducing people at a cocktail party and saying, “Bob, meet Sally. Sally also trains racing snails. I’m sure you’ll have a lot to talk about.”

Now You’re Doing It Right

Just like a personal introduction in real life, a #followfriday mention can be a great way to match up people you know with others that can help them or add value in some way. The key is, you have to tell me WHY.

This wouldn’t be a productive post without a proper example of doing it right. Here’s my #followfriday recommendation: You should follow @LimaBeads because Kevin and the Lima Beads team are a great example of a company that treats its customers as people, rather than social media sheep.

I recently discovered that The Collegian, the University of Richmond’s student-run newspaper, is online and published in a very cool WordPress theme. So, naturally, I subscribed to the RSS feed and love reminscing about the “good ole’ days”.

A recent post caught my eye called “25 Things I Learned at UR“. Although similar to the “My 25 Things” Facebook meme that I dislike, I clicked over and settled in for a quick jaunt down memory lane.

I started off nodding and smiling at the first few items, such as:

1. Walking around campus and asking every acquaintance about their general well being. This instinctual habit throws off my friends from home, who don’t quite know how to respond: “Er…I’m okay, I guess. Thanks for asking.”

and…

7. Looking forward to the beginning of every semester to check out the new batch of exchange students.

After that it started going downhill.

8. Every moment is a Facebook moment.

Facebook wasn’t around when I was in school, and I didn’t graduate that long ago (Class of ‘03). Okay, starting to feel a little old.

12. Learning fratty lingo: bro out, freshman skeeza, care, etc.

Hmmm…not sure but I can probably guess.

I could go on, but I don’t want to give away too many sordid details about my college experience (my parents read this, and they still think they paid for a late night study sessions and weekend cultural activities).

After all, it was years ago and thankfully Facebook had not yet been invented to document every single detail of our transgressions. So I have that going for me, which is nice. Sorry college kids, your exploits are captured, documented, tagged, shared, and waiting to be dug up several years from now when you run for office or apply for a job.