the Web Chef's e-Bytes

10 Facebook Facts from SeeWhy,Inc.

US Grocery Chain Social Media Followers - Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr

Here's an interesting infographic from Pace Communications of the social media followers for key grocery chains around the country.  Not too surprising is the commanding lead that Target and Walmart have in a couple of these rankings, with Walmart placing in all 4 Social Media groups.

Top 5 for Facebook Followers (thousands)

1. Target - 1,048
2. Walmart - 1,032
3. Whole Foods - 246
4. Costco - 117
5. Trader Joes - 100

Top 5 Twitter Followers (thousands)

1. Whole Foods - 1,756
2. Walmart - 27,673
3. Target 17,388
4. Sam's - 9,834
5. Wegman's - 6,478

Top 5 Flickr Followers (thousands)

1. Target - 1,182
2. Trader Joes - 733
3. Safeway - 656
4. Kroger - 538
5. Walmart - 305

Top 5 YouTube Followers (thousands)

1. Walmart - 17,231
2. Target - 120
3. Whole Foods - 41
4. Winco - 11
5. Pathmark - 2

Source: Pace Communications

Best Twitter Tools at One Forty

Best Twitter tools at One Forty: By Profession, Function, To Promote, Personality or Use Case.

(I don't know) The BEST Twitter Tools -- YOU do!

View more presentations from pistachio.

@theWebChef Twitter followers continues growth

I came across a Twitter tool called Implu that creates an embeddable graphical representation of your history on Twitter over time. Implu states that I created @thewebchef account on 2008-07-16 at 08:40:48.

Testing an e-mail blog posting

Typepad is adding some shortcuts for blogging that allow you to blog a link directly from your browser, e-mail a blog posting to a specific e-mail address or post from your Smartphone to a specified address. This is a test of the e-mail blog posting of an article that I just wrote for IBMadison. The article "What's the Buzz? Tell Me What's A Happening" can be accessed here.  The article reviews social media monitoring tools and includes some case studies of the same.

You can follow me on Twitter @thewebchef

Paul J Gibler
the Web Chef & Principal Consultant
CONNECTINGDOTS, higher resolution marketing
consulting, training and public speaking
629 south shore drive
madison, wi 53715-1705 USA
608 255 4092

Update
The links in the original e-mail did not go through. As such I still had to update the posting.

Update 3: Saving on the Web - Tweets, Coupons & Deals

Coupons.com, has a new commercial that they are running promoting "a better place to save" by using their service - click, print and save.  The ad shows a humorous approach to saving by eating the free samples in the grocery aisles. Beyond Coupons.com, if you are looking for savings you can sign up for deals and coupon Tweets from savings aggregators like these:

• BargainTweeter
• Coupon Cabin
• CouponSources
• CouponTweet
• CheapTweet
• DealTweets
• Poor Man's Guide

If you are a retailer and have deals to share consider expanding your network by communicating the deals through these Twitter sources.

New content
Webware author Don Reissinger has put together a review of a couple of the services listed above and adds a couple more:

• JustBoughtIt - Where users tweet the price they've just paid for something
• Schmap - track user reviews for a particular city
• TinyMassive

Update 2
TechCrunch announced that Savings.com has been re-designed along with a new addition to their board. They also have a database listing at Crunchbase with 48 companies with online coupon opportunities.  Other sites referenced in the comments at Techcrunch are Savingg, SlickDeals, FatWallet and DealTherapy.

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New Posting on IBMadison "Advancing by Retweeting"

Are you interested in learning how to use Twitter as part of your social media strategy?

If so, you might find my new blog posting at IBMadison -"Advancing by Retweeting" interesting.  The posting gives you 12 key steps to get going with Twitter.  It also analyzes some of the local, national and international businesses in Madison, Wisconsin that are using Twitter and briefly looks at some of the credit unions around the United States that are using Twitter.

Still confused about Twitter terminology? 

See this very informative post "The Non-Fanatical Guide to Twitter" from Deanna Zandt, that defines a tweet, retweet, #hashtags, followers, following, direct messaging, etc.  For additional resources related to Twitter see Scott Williams' blog posting "105 Twitter Tools".on BigIsTheNewSmall and for ideas on how to use Twitter in business, see Meryl Evans posting "62 Ways to Use Twitter for Business" at Web Worker Daily.

Happy tweeting!

Paul J Gibler, MBA
the Web Chef
@thewebchef

Large Company Digital C-Suites Rare

Two recent studies point to the lack of adoption of digital tools in the C-Suite.  One study conducted by Forbes Insights found a significant difference in Internet utilization based on the age of the respondents.  Not too surprising this study found that C-Suite participation in social media tools was lowest among those 50 and over.  Among the 50+ crowd only 4% were likely to blog weekly compared to the under 40 segment where 56% of executives did the same.  Using newer microblogging tools like Twitter was common with the under 40 group, where 56% read or generate posts daily, compared to the 50 plus segment of only 3%.

Meanwhile UberCEO looked at Fortune 100 CEO participation in social networks and found it to be very slim according to MarketingVox.  Of the total only 2 had Twitter accounts (with one being basically inactive), 13 had LinkedIn Profiles (only 3 with more than 10 connections) and 19 personal Facebook pages.  UberCEO found that no CEO in the Fortune 100 group had a blog that could be easily located by searching on their name.  Here's a slide presentation of their research along with some recommendations that Fortune 100 and other C-level executives should note as they develop their social media strategies with their corporate communications teams.

Fortune 100 CEOs and Social Media

View more documents from Sharon Barclay.

Forrester Projects Growth of Interactive Marketing

Forrester Research has released research results projecting that interactive marketing spending will increase to about $55 billion by 2014.  The interactive portion of total marketing spending is projected to grow from today's 12% to 21% of all advertising spending in the same period.

According to MarketingVox, the report shows that social media spending will grow at the fastest rate over this five year period, reflecting a projected 34% compound growth rate. Search marketing will maintain its lead in terms of total dollars spent, but will grow at a slower rate of 15%.  e-Mail marketing will have the slowest growth rate over the 5 year period.

Forrester also is projecting that overall ad spending will be declining as more dollars are shifted into lower cost interactive channels and marketers continue to watch their spending.

My name is Alice. I want to be your direct household goods supplier.

Madison, WI-based Alice has launched to be your direct household goods supplier.  From the founders of social shopping service Jellyfish, since sold to Microsoft for $50 million, Alice.com has received positive press in the local media and in the technology media with a recent review in TechCrunch, a major web 2.0 and technology blog.  According to TechCrunch, Alice has over 6,000 goods and has a robust search engine that allows you to search by room, by product type, by price point, by coupon availability and by your philosophy (green products).  The service creates a profile with a reminder system for when you should be expected to re-order the products you've previously ordered.  It also crawls the web to find coupons for the products offered at the site.  The other neat feature, according to TechCrunch, is that it has a built-in shopping comparison engine that crawls the web to compare Alice's prices with those of other online vendors of the same product.

When I registered on the site, I found that they also had an interesting feature with coupons displayed as a footer on the site that you could scroll through.  The coupons had a limited offer in terms of the number available helping create some imagery of scarcity and urgency around that particular offer.

In terms of social media, Alice has three blogs - a founder's blog, a community blog and a company blog and also is on Twitter where they had 1794 followers. 

Interestingly the Alice favicon is a duck.  I'm not sure why, since the logo, at least in its beta version, is a stylized box or doorway.  The tagline is everyone needs an alice, so maybe Alice will later be introduced as the duck. 

I initiated a live chat session with an Alice representative and found the responsiveness and knowledge to be a positive.  I asked the rep why the disconnect between the favicon and the logo and she indicated that the duck was symbolic for "getting your ducks in a row" and that the duck does show up periodically throughout the site.  She rightfully suggested that I register on the site to see what she meant.  What I found is that the duck is the metaphor for the categories of items that you might want to add to your shopping cart as you can see from the screenshot on the right. Once you're in the site you make the connection with the favicon duck, but somehow before you've registered it isn't totally clear.  With the tagline "everyone needs an Alice" I assume that Alice is the duck helping me shop.

When I went to the community blog I found what might be considered another tagline "we heart household products" and at the company blog they are using "welcome to the alice company blog".