Are you good at Twitter? Do you know how to book that face? Perhaps even post more pictures than just food and cats on Instagram? Well, if you’re a quick talker and a proud minute man or woman, Pizza Hut would like to interview you for 140 seconds about its Social Media Manager job. More » 
Austin-based Mass Relevance may be more deep-rooted in the sports social media space than any company not named Twitter or Facebook
The two-year-old startup curates and analyzes social chatter to highlight relevant posts and analyze overall conversation for a surfeit of brands, media companies and digital agencies across several industries. So pervasive is Mass Relevance’s reach, in fact, that Twitter made the company its first official social engagement and curation partner last year.
Sports make up a significant chunk of Mass Relevance’s work; its clients include Major League Baseball, ESPN, the New York Giants, TaylorMade and others. But why the special relationship between sports and social? We recently interviewed Mass Relevance founder and CEO Sam Decker to explore just that
Pew studied Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram to get a better look at what types of users were on these social networks in 2012.
Social media managers looking to prove their ROI of what they do, today have a new option for tracking social analytics, thanks to the official public launch of a service called Ohtootay. Crazy name aside, the solution lets companies track their efforts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and elsewhere. But one of its more unique features in this crowded space is something which allows businesses to track their posts all the way through to website conversions, even when the original post didn’t point directly to their e-commerce site.
Ohtootay was founded by Mark Otuteye, and yes – that’s where it got its name. Mark is a former Googler and the CEO of AES Connect, which has been in the consulting business since 2007. The company helped a number of major brands with their Facebook applications, including some notable examples which he can’t talk about on the record. A few AES clients have included Sephora, Coldwell Banker and Nickelodeon, however. It’s from his company’s experience in the social media space that the idea for Ohtootay got its start: it was built in response to what AES’s customer base needed.
One of the platform’s standout features is its competitor comparison tool. That is, it can track what your company’s performance looks like versus competitors on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and even the iPhone App Store, Android app store (Google Play) and Facebook’s App Center. “In some senses, Ohtootay is compete.com for social media and mobile apps,” Mark explains. “And we believe that angels, VCs and social media managers that are armed with this kind of data will be way more effective decision makers than their peers who only navel-gaze at their own data in isolation,” he says.
Another key differentiator between Ohtootay’s solution and others is a feature that lets marketers track Pinterest pins all the way through to website conversions and associated sales. This works even when a client shares a pin that doesn’t point to their own e-commerce site, and it’s likely to be the biggest selling point for this platform. Mark explains that other social analytics companies do something called “last-click” attribution.
“That is, they can say ‘Pinterest caused this sale’ only when a sale happens immediately after you click a Pinterest pin that points to their own website. That’s OK for impulse buys that happen in one click, but it’s not good enough for enterprise sales in which customers do weeks of research (much of it on other sites) before making a purchase,” he says. “What if a customer clicks on your pin that points to a relevant infographic not on your own site, later Googles you, and then decides to buy? Other analytics software will mistakenly tell social media managers that ‘Google’ caused this sale even though the customer’s first contact was through content you curated on your Pinterest boards.”
This last-click bias is a problem that over-exaggerates Google’s importance, and under-reports the role social media played in generating that sale. It’s something marketers have been after for some time, but haven’t yet been able to do because of the way social media sites are structured. To make this work, Ohtootay generates custom URLs (a company can use their preferred URL shortener as well), and then uses cookies to track the user. When that user arrives on the company’s e-commerce site, custom code embedded there will tell Ohtootay when a conversion actually happens.
Ohtootay has been operating in private beta with about a dozen testers for the past three months, but is today available to all. There’s a 30-day free trial, and then a $399/month/user charge. Going forward, Mark says the next addition will be an option that lets marketers track their profitability by allowing them to add their social media budgets to the platform. That will show them not just the dollar amounts of sales, but what it took to get there.
San Francisco-based Ohtootay is currently a bootstrapped team of ten. Sign up is here.
Facebook is planning to make a bulk of its money from advertising, that’s no secret. When you’re logged into the social network you’ll see display ads on the right-hand side of your Newsfeed that loosely fit your interests. The company is also dropping “Sponsored Stories” directly into your Newsfeed as well, so it seems like nothing is off-limits at this point.
In the past, the company has used your web history for ad targeting and with the whole Beacon debacle, turned your purchasing and liking into “social ads” that freaked everyone out. It seems like we’ve come full circle since Beacon, as one user has explained how he became an unexpected spokesperson for an item that would make some people blush.
Nick Bergus is like any other Internet user, he found something funny online and posted it without thinking twice. If it’s funny it’s worth posting on Twitter or Facebook to get a laugh or two from your friends. You might even get a bunch of likes.
Little did Bergus know, his funny post would be turned into an advertisement paid for by Amazon.
55 gallons of what?
If you’ve ever spent some extra time surfing around on Amazon, you know that there are some really odd things you can buy on the site. Up until a year ago I didn’t know that you could buy toilet paper in bulk on Amazon, but alas you can. Bergus found something else I didn’t know you could buy on Amazon, personal lubricant. But not just a little tube of personal lubricant, a 55-gallon drum of personal lubricant. I’m not sure how he found it, but obviously he was stoked that he did.
On Valentine’s Day he thought this would make a great tweet and Facebook post along with a link to the item:
A 55-gallon drum of lube on Amazon. For Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life.
A week went by and then one of his friends noticed that his post made a return visit as a Sponsored Story next to his Newsfeed:
This isn’t just a one time showing though, as his friends are telling him that they see the ad every single time that they log into Facebook. Oops. Facebook clearly saw the post by Bergus as a popular piece of data when it came to this product, so Amazon is now paying to have it featured. There’s no telling how many people have seen this ad and recognized him in the photo, but it must be pretty embarrassing for him.
So be careful of what you post on Facebook, or you just might become the next spokesperson for it.
Bonus material – This review for the product on Amazon is too funny not to share:
A little over a decade ago, I bought my 55 gallon drum of lube. I never thought I’d use it all but a few days ago the pump finally ran dry. I’ve had a lot of good times with it. My wife, too. And not just what you’d think. One day I just hosed down our hardwood-floored hallway so I could use it as a slip-n-slide. You shouldn’t think of this as a ‘purchase.’ It’s an ‘investment.’ An investment sure to pay off in spades.