Jeff Esposito

AUGUST 2, 2011

I have watched this TED talk from Mashable ‘s Adam Ostrow a few times and each time catch myself pondering what will happen to all of the digital media that I have been creating when I die. On one hand I know that this blog will fall victim to a domain takeover with another Jeff Esposito taking the helm to annoy people, but with some of the other pieces of content. they’ll live on in perpetuity.

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Jeff Esposito

APRIL 11, 2011

Towards the end of last week, I stumbled across an awesome initiative from the Jimmy Fund that will allow folks addicted to social media to put their time behind the keyboard to a good use. How can you do that you ask? Well if you visit Help Attack!, you can pledge a monetary amount that is tied to status updates or Tweets for a 30 day period. At the end of the month, you simply donate the money to the Jimmy Fund.

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Jeff Esposito

JULY 19, 2011

During the South by Southwest conference in March, I talked to a lot of folks and asked them for a piece of advice for small business owners looking to participate in social media. There were a ton of great tips; we turned the top 15 into an eBook for the Vistaprint Micro Business blog. Some of the contributors include Shelly Kramer , Eric Berto and Jeff Cutler.

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Jeff Esposito

MARCH 21, 2011

Over the past few weeks, I have seen chatter suggesting that Facebook fan pages will replace websites for companies and individuals. Stephen Haines of Facebook notes , “companies’ interactions with their customers could take place so often on Facebook that company websites would fall by the wayside,” but I am not buying it. The interactions on Facebook are truly impactful for any business, the problem is your company does not own the customer experience, conversation or content – Facebook

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Jeff Esposito

AUGUST 14, 2011

This is a guest post from Jason Mollica. . If you want to get a reaction from a public relations or social media pro, ask them about influence. You are sure to get answers from each end of the spectrum. Some will say influence is misconstrued as “ popular. ” Others believe that follower numbers measure influence. But is influence really measurable? Klout and Edelman believe it can be.

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Jeff Esposito

MAY 17, 2011

A little over a year ago, my bank account got hacked. It sucked and the phone support at Citibank couldn’t help me out. So out of frustration, I turned to the best place I know to get help – Twitter. After some back and forth over the phone, their social media team had me fixed up right. Ever since then, I thought they had the social game right and would use it to help repair their image post-bailout era in a similar fashion to the auto industry.

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Jeff Esposito

AUGUST 22, 2011

This is a guest post from Michael Dolan. The entire public relations industry is in the last spasms of a loud and painful demise. PR is useless in the 21st Century because everyone is their own personal brand and their own personal media. The gatekeepers took a permanent vacation the minute the media world hit the web and John Q. Public became John Q.

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Jeff Esposito

JULY 11, 2011

This is post is part of the Institutionalizing Social Media series. To see previous installments or to learn more about the series, click here. One of the biggest and more oft-debated questions in the social space is how much time a company should devote to its social media efforts. There is no blanket time allotment or suggested industry standard, so how do you decide the level and time commitment to social media that is right for your company?

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Jeff Esposito

OCTOBER 3, 2011

There is no question that social media is the most useful innovation or tool for the public relations industry. It has leveled the playing field and allowed easier access to reporters for public relations pros. This has also served as the catalyst for more meaningful relationships between journalists and flacks. That is great for the industry and clients hungry for coverage, but social media also has a dark side.

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Jeff Esposito

SEPTEMBER 15, 2011

Last Sunday was a great week to be a coach potato watching the NFL. The docket was filled with tough games to pick that made for some excellent viewing. For those of you just tuning in, I have decided to use Lithium’s Social Media Monitoring tool to use social buzz to create my picks for the season ( click here for a full methodology). In week one, this method I finished up Week 1 with an 11-5 record , not too shabby if I do say so myself.

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Jeff Esposito

JANUARY 12, 2011

When I first started exploring this thing we call social media nearly three years ago, I don’t think that there was a day that went by that I didn’t learn something new from the opinions of folks just like you or me around the web. I was thrilled to see people debating issues in the open and getting to answers through constructive conversations. Flip forward to 2011 and for some reason I keep repeating a rhyme I learned in my grandmother’s Jersey City kitchen: Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep,

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Jeff Esposito

MARCH 28, 2011

I used to think Yelp was pretty cool. Kinda like that slightly-older but still-in-high-school boyfriend you had way back when: he knew the best people, the best places to go, but once you graduated, you just knew he wasn’t really your style, so you went your separate ways. Yelp, like that ex of yours, is a great resource for information on local businesses, showing restaurants’ hours and menu offerings, publishing user reviews of everything from beauty salons to churches, and listing great local

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Jeff Esposito

JULY 25, 2011

Believe it or not, beer has taught me a lot about social media. Now we’re not talking things of what not to do on the space or talking about how crunkdiddly I was from imbibing way too many cold ones. We are talking my other hobby when it comes to beer – brewing it. You see brewing beer takes a lot of time and attention to detail, much like building up a social presence or campaign.

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Jeff Esposito

JULY 17, 2011

This is post is part of the Institutionalizing Social Media series. To see previous installments or to learn more about the series, click here. Social media is one big contradiction. Its strength is its fast pace and evolutionary nature, but that’s also one of the biggest obstacles when trying to institutionalize social media. Rapid changes to existing networks and emerging “next-big-thing-” platforms can leave even a battle-tested social media manager’s head spinning.

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Jeff Esposito

JUNE 13, 2011

This is post is part of the Institutionalizing Social Media series. To see previous installments or to learn more about the series, click here. As you begin to put your social media plan into action , perhaps the biggest thing that you need to do aside from the rollout is to establish what you are measuring. Now, the metrics can be different for each entity within your company, but you need have something that you can measure and benchmark against.

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Jeff Esposito

OCTOBER 31, 2011

This post contains video, please click here if you cannot view. This video book review takes a look at Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter’s Humanize (Amazon affiliate link). The book is a must read for any budding executive or person looking to incorporate a human side to a business. My favorite part about the book was the underlying references to the Matrix and changing the way that folks are wired to think.

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Jeff Esposito

OCTOBER 17, 2011

This post contains video, please click here if you can’t view. On a recent trip from Disney I contemplate one of their best practices – exiting through the gift shop. This is the second installment of a three part series. Have you done this for your company?

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Jeff Esposito

JANUARY 3, 2011

One thing that I truly love about my job is that I am passionate about it so it doesn’t feel like work. I am fascinated by the way that the social ecosystem works and its nuances, but it’s not my only passion or hobby. Shocking, I know. Aside from all things social, I am a passionate imbiber of craft beers and home brewing. In general the two rarely intersect, so I was ecstatic, to say the least with my Christmas Eve experience.

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Jeff Esposito

SEPTEMBER 19, 2011

Image: Wikipedia. My favorite thing about the WordPress blogging platform is that outside of the backend system, no two blogs operate the same way. This is mostly due to third-party plugins that meet certain requirements that bloggers have. Over the past few years, I ave tried dozens of plugins to accomplish goals for the site. Below are six that I’ve found extremely useful and I’d suggest you check them out and install them onto your blog.

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Jeff Esposito

JUNE 29, 2011

This is post is part of the Institutionalizing Social Media series. To see previous installments or to learn more about the series, click here. As social media continues to gain more traction throughout companies, practitioners in the space will be asked the tough questions about the business value of their efforts in the space. If you find yourself in this position, don’t let the acronyms KPIs and ROIs spook you.

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Jeff Esposito

MARCH 8, 2011

This post originally ran on CommsCorner , but I wanted to share with you in case you missed it. Earlier this month, Adam Vincenzini and I had an interesting talk on the state of social media around the world. One thing led to another and we agreed to take a page out of the playbook of two of the world’s best piano men, Billy Joel. and Sir Elton John, by banging out on our keyboards for a joint composition.

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Jeff Esposito

JUNE 6, 2011

What does it mean to be Likeable? We all know that Facebook has the Like button, but what does it truly mean to be liked? In Dave Kerpen’s new book Likeable Social Media, the question is explored and validated with real-world examples of companies excelling in the space. When I first talked to Dave about the topic in mind-to-late 2010 about the premise and what Vistaprint was doing with the company’s Facebook page, I had no idea how he was going to translate the case studies into act

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Jeff Esposito

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

This is an interesting video on the amount of time that Americans spend on Facebook from the Wall Street Journal. Would you believe that 16 percent of online time is spent on Facebook? Wonder what the overall time on social networks is.

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Jeff Esposito

MARCH 9, 2011

On March 10, I’ll hop on a plane from Boston Logan airport and head across the country to Austin, Texas for this year’s SXSW conference. My plan is too learn, meet some cool folks, conduct a business meeting or two, and maybe engage in a shenanigan or two, but really who is counting? I also wanted to see if I could crowdsource a project, aeBook that will be free to benefit a community that is in dire need of advice and assistance – small businesses.

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Jeff Esposito

FEBRUARY 1, 2011

My buddy Nick Gosselin passed this along to me and I had to share, because it is hilarious. It also seems like a better forecast than we don’t know.

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Jeff Esposito

APRIL 26, 2011

I really love how ESPN gets their commercials hyper local. This one with Dustin Pedroia is especially awesome on two fronts. One he is my hight and is called the laser show and two, Esposito is referenced as the best. A win-win in my book. Thanks to Nick Gosselin for pointing this out — RELAX. This post has a video, click here if you can’t view.

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Jeff Esposito

MARCH 30, 2011

Jeff Esposito asked me to write a guest post here on the topic of social media measurement. The following post is not about social media measurement. Yesterday, Tac Anderson wrote a post about an issue I know too well: bloggers’ neglect. As I’ve been going through the list of people I follow on Twitter looking to see who has blogs that I should be following I couldn’t help but notice a trend: people were neglecting their blogs.

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Jeff Esposito

AUGUST 1, 2011

Anyone who reads this blog regularly can attest to my passion for social media and for exploring ways companies can leverage these technologies to better interact with their customers. What you may not know is that I am also a huge Red Sox fan. So when I got an invitation from the Boston Red Sox to visit their home offices for a Twitter focus group, I could not have said yes quickly enough.

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Jeff Esposito

AUGUST 16, 2011

This is a guest post from Nick Gosselin. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “ There can ‘t be good living where there is not good drinking.&#. So true Mr. Franklin, so true. For those who know me, I’m an avid craft beer enthusiast interested all facets of the industry. I enjoy keeping tabs on what my favorite brewery’s have coming down the pipeline, as well as chatting with other enthusiast (we usually call them beer nerds) about what they’re drinking and attem

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Jeff Esposito

JUNE 2, 2011

There is no question that Twitter is my favorite social network. It is short hits that cut to the chase and there is no room for crap in 140 characters. I won’t say it was love at first sight, but after about 100 Tweets, I was hooked. I must also confess that I am a social media junkie, so my love affair and ease of use does not apply to the non-geeky populous who flock to Facebook like it was the last piece of dry land in Waterworld.

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Jeff Esposito

NOVEMBER 16, 2011

Welcome to Week 11 of the NFL season, the last week where teams have a bye and seven weeks until the start of the NFL Playoffs. How has your team fared? Perhaps a better question is how are you doing in selecting the winners for each weekend’s games? Hopefully you are faring better than my 72-73 record after 10 weeks after a 7-9 showing in week 10. Seeing that record you might be thinking to yourself as to how a guy who used to work in the NFL was performing so crappy in terms of weekly picks.

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Jeff Esposito

MAY 31, 2011

This is post is part of the Institutionalizing Social Media series. To see previous installments or to learn more about the series, click here. After setting the groundwork for a social media structure across the company, it is important to set up a roadmap for future success. This will not only help you get all of your ducks in a row, but it will also help the organization see where you envision the company playing and being integrated in the next one to five years.

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Jeff Esposito

SEPTEMBER 8, 2011

I am not sure about you, but today feels a lot like Christmas morning to me. Instead of a whole bunch of presents that say that they are from Santa, the NFL has given us a juicy season opener between the New Orleans Saints and the defending Super Bowl Champion Green Bay Packers. Like many football fans, I enter pools to pick the winners of each game.

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Jeff Esposito

AUGUST 4, 2011

Man this was one odd week, full of ups and downs. On one hand it was uber-productive, but on the other, I had one nasty stomach bug come through me for two days so I couldn’t play with Baby Espo. How was your week? Hopefully it was pretty good and you have great weekend plans. With that said, enjoy this week’s edition of Five for Friday and catch you on Monday.

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Jeff Esposito

SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

Earlier today I gave a presentation with Lithium’s Joe Cothrel during WOMMA’s part of Social Media Week in Chicago. Some key takeaways included: Understand your business goals. Understand your customers’ needs. Set rules of engagement. Be rigorous on your measurement. Choose the right tools for the job. A Case Study in Social Media Measurement: Vistaprint.

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Jeff Esposito

AUGUST 8, 2011

Dear Google, You started off so very nice with Google Plus. It was clean, had a lot of white space and then I could share what I wanted with who I wanted and see information from who I wanted. It was lust that I was hoping would turn into love. Maybe not as big as my man-crush on Twitter, but at least a decent platform that could supplant Facebook, which I am not a giant fan of.

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Jeff Esposito

SEPTEMBER 6, 2011

I did a lot of head shaking while reading Michael Brito ‘s new book Smart Business, Social Business, a Playbook for Social Media in Your Organization. Now this shouldn’t be read as a nod of disapproval, but rather a mixed bag of agreeing and wondering why more businesses aren’t looking at social outside of its own little silo. The book is geared to two main audiences; the first is the social media practitioner with the other being a C-suite member looking to turn social into mo

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