We try to feature social media marketing case studies on Now Is Gone.  Though this list is far from comprehensive for all the great work being done out there, it continues to reaffirm the power of this medium.  We’ve recently updated the Case Studies Page (see tab in the masthead) with these case studies:

Have a social media marketing case study? Want us to feature it on Now Is Gone? Email your link to geoff [at] livingstonbuzz [dot] com, and we’ll write it up and include it in this list.

One of the immutable laws of blogging (and building a community) is “share and share alike.” If you’re truly serious about cultivating relationships, remember it is what you say and not where you say it that matters. This notion still gets mishandled by some, who are depending on old metrics like page-views and click-throughs. The new measure that matters is influence, and you can’t influence people by switching to a partial RSS feed. Partial feeds just end up anno-

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There are three new case studies housed here on Now Is Gone.

The Gold Group brought is Five Lessons Learned from the SIGGART campaign, a social media effort revolving around eco-friendly water containers. I love case studies that feature hard numbers. Check this out:

SIGGART drew more than 12,000 visits from about 8,000 people. Each visit was a whopping 17 minutes on average; compare with Nielsen’s most recent benchmark of 49 seconds per average U.S. web visit. In total, SIGGART was viewed for 204M user-minutes or, we’d like to offer, 204 mums.

Lewis Green documented how blogging has benefited his business. How is this for hard numbers? “L&G Business Solutions increased revenues by 100 percent in 2007 over 2006, 40 percent of that due to the blog attracting new clients as well as referrals and leads…. [Blogging] accounts for about 25 percent of the marketing budget (includes time) and 40 percent of the revenues.”

Last, but not least is Dell’s Incredible Turnaround, which was written up here yesterday. Moving from Jarvis’s Dell Hell to an intense social media campaign over the ensuing two years, to having Jarvis laud Dell in BusinessWeek = the greatest brand image reversal to date in the social media world. Kudos to the Dell team. I like this one because ROI can be more than just sales. Dell was not a well-liked company out here two years ago, and they’ve done a 180 in two years.

The Gates Foundation has been using a wide variety of social media tools to get the word out: Facebook, MySpace, YouTube videos. The goal: Change perception of Generation Y towards education issues for the forthcoming presidential election. The results?  More than 80K YouTube views, significant community development on Facebook and MySpace, and 4,000 information kits ordered.

Kyle Flaherty brought us this Social Media Case Study: CMP’s TechMash. This was a micro campaign targeted at a very small community.  What I liked about it was that it used a variety of social media tools to produce an actionable result: with direct access to more than 100 people to attend the TechMash show next year. Kyle’s goal is to continue this effort and garner 400 by spring time.

Yesterday, Todd Defren wrote up another example of a social media news release from Eurekstar.  Lots of juicy links in here, photos and even an embedded video.  The SMNR has viral enablers with email, tags, etc.  In short, the ability to “easily re-purpose and broadly share this news” is what makes this news release form so exciting. It would be great if Todd came back and amended the study with some coverage or resulting posts.

All three of these case studies are permanently linked to on our case studies tab. If you have a case study you would like highlighted here, email me at geoff [at] livingstonbuzz [dot] com.

Part of participating in social media is sharing. Bloggers such as Todd Defren are rightfully calling for us to share more practical and successful social media case studies.

So, last week, I dug up a few case studies I had been saving as my own best practices guide and shared them at my main blog, Communication Overtones. This included one I had written up as well.

But it didn’t seem like enough. Geoff and I came up with the idea to start a running list of social media case studies here at “Now Is Gone.” It is the perfect venue to share and share alike. So you might notice the bright, shiny “Case Studies” tab in the top right corner. And selfishly, we can take a look at some great best practices on a regular basis.

So, consider this post a “call for entries.” Write up your case study on your blog and let us know so that we can link to it, and while you are at it, turn it into a pdf and send it to Jen McClure at the New Communications Review, where you can find a growing list of case studies as well. Better yet, enter the Excellence in New Communications Awards, which are due on September 28, 2007.

In a comment to this thread on David Jones’ blog, Brendon Hodgson made a comment that really resonated with me:

I also tend to think there’s way too much punditry out there and (still) not a lot of crunchy doing (for clients, and for ourselves)…I’m feeling less inclined to read those who talk, and focus more of my time on those who ‘do’….”

So, let’s show off all of that crunchy doing!

tags: Case+Study, Case+Studies, PR, Marketing, New+Media, Social+Media

As you were reading before being so rudely interrupted, partial feeds just end up annoying readers. So much so that they quickly become ex-readers.

Let’s look at a case in point. The book “Freakonomics” was a bestseller a couple of years ago, and the authors (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner) are embarking on a sequel. They readily admit that the sequel was not a slam-dunk until they saw the reaction and readership of the Freakonomics blog. At its peak, the blog had tens of thousands of subscribers - and more importantly, an amazing community of commenters.

A Dramatic Shift

This chart marks the day - August 7th - that the Freakonomics Blog relocated to the New York Times. Its traffic didn’t die, it just got swallowed up into the overall Times site. Moving to the Times was a savvy move, providing a great new base of online readers. However, moving to the Times also meant switching to partial RSS feeds, and ditching many longtime readers.

(I wrote about the move in August, including links to much whining and moaning from Freakonomics fans. I also did a breakdown of another community-altering change that I maintain is a bigger threat.)

Old-School Thinking

The move makes all sorts of business sense for the New York Times. Grab a blog with tens of thousands of subscribers, and pull them in to your site. Only it doesn’t work that way anymore. The point of RSS is freeing the reader to dictate the time and place of consumption of information. Many follow dozens of feeds at once, and can do so with the feeds nicely aggregated and assembled in one place. Make that reader break his stride by switching to another program and entering an address, and you’ve just created an unwelcome disruption.

Simply put - many of the most vocal and most active members of that blog’s community left and didn’t come back. The content was interesting, but not enough to warrant a couple of extra clicks. Let me repeat that: the content was interesting, but not enough to warrant a couple of extra clicks. Such is the nature of online communication. We have the technology to allow for free and unfettered flow of our half of the dialog, and now we want to take a commercial break in the middle?

Compromise Denied

It’s not like the community bailed without a fight. Some would argue the larger sin came days later. Several members of the Freakonomics community suggested that if ads were required by the New York Times - that they be placed in the RSS feed itself. The Times could maintain an ad-free partial RSS feed, and an ad-supported full RSS. The latter was shot down, with no explanation from the wizards behind the curtain. The community wanted to find a way, and instead was turned away.

The New York Times still gets a significant share of traffic. As you can see from the Alexa rankings, the NYT red line didn’t change its trend at all once it absorbed the Freakonomics traffic.

However, if you’ve already got traffic like the New York Times, then partial feeds might be for you.