Erik Qualman's Blog, page 661

Top 20 Social Media IPOs = 50% Failure Rate

Facebook’s IPO will be next week. It’s anticipated to open on May 17 between $28-$35 per share and a $96 billion valuation. So far Social Media IPOs have been mixed. Thanks to Mashable’s Todd Wasserman we can take a look at the performance of 20 of the biggest Social Media IPO’s. Looks like an even 50% chance for success…or failure.
1. Yandex (YNDX) -20.8% from its IPO Price

Yandex, a Russian search engine, raised $1.3 billion when it went public in May, making it the biggest social media IPO of the year.

 

2. Zynga (ZNGA) -5%

Zynga raised about $1 billion in its December IPO, but shares fell on the first day, leading some to question whether the social media IPO bubble had burst.

3. Renren (RENN) -76.4%

The so-called “Facebook of China” is way off its $14 IPO price.

4. Groupon (GRPN) +13.1%

Say what you will about Groupon, the company’s stock is currently trading above its IPO price.

 

Image courtesy of Flickr, Groupon.

5. LinkedIn (LNKD) +37.2%

One of the highlights of the year for social media IPOs, LinkedIn’s stock price surged on its first day and has held on to much of those gains since May.

 

Image courtesy of Flickr, Adriano Gasparri.

6. Bankrate (RATE) +36.5%

The personal finance website operator is another success story.

7. Pandora Media (P) -37.4%

Pandora, the music streaming site, opened strong in June, but has fallen off since then.

8. HomeAway (AWAY) -14.8%

Online vacation-rental website HomeAway is down since its June IPO.

9. 21Vianet Group (VNET) -39.7%

Chinese Internet data center service provider 21Vianet Group raised $195 million in April and then saw a steep decline in its stock price.

10. Qihoo 360 Technology (QIHU) +17.9%

China’s number three Internet company is still doing well despite pricing its shares above their proposed range in March.

11. Tudou Holdings (TUDO) -63.6%

Another poor performer, Chinese Internet company Tudou is way down from its August debut.

12. Jive Software (JIVE) +27.9%

Jive benefited from a late-in-the-year (December) IPO, but so far the stock price for the company, which helps businesses communicate using Facebook-style tools, is up from its IPO price.

13. Demand Media (DMD) -59.8%

Online content creator Demand opened well in January, but is way down since then.

14. Phoenix New Media (FENG) -51.9%

The Hong Kong-based Phoenix raised $140 million in its May IPO.

15. Angie’s List (ANGI) +26%

Another latecomer, consumer review website Angie’s List, is doing well since going public in November.

16. Jiayuan.com International (DATE) -45.6%

Another victim of Chinese IPO fatigue, Jiayuan’s shares fell 4.4% on its first day of trading in May.

17. Zillow (Z) +15.2%

Zillow, which provides prices for real estate, did well in its June IPO and looks to finish 2011 up as well.

18. Carbonite (CARB) +11.2%

Carbonite, a data backup firm, had a successful IPO in August, a brutal month for the market.

19. FriendFinder (FFN) +0.7%

FriendFinder, the publisher of Penthouse magazine and operator of websites like AdultFriendFinder.com and Cams.com, went public in 2011 after backing out from an IPO the year before.

20. Bazaarvoice (BV) +1.26%

Bazaarvoice, the ratings, reviews and social commerce software provider out of Austin, Texas has a virtual monopoly on its market. As long as Yelp doesn’t encroach on markets like coolers (Rubermaid) and electronics (Best Buy) Bazzarvoice should remain strong (full disclosure – I’m on the Advisory Board for BV).

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Bing & Facebook Declare War on Google with Social Search

Bing announced today it is changing the search game. As discussed in my best selling book Socialnomics (2009) the ultimate winner between Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple may hing on which company figures out social search.

Social Search: The New Frontier

Microsoft and Bing are going all in on social search and why not? Google has already defeated them on the traditional search front. As an investor in Facebook, Microsoft can do what Google cannot, integrate deeply with Facebook. I’ve been harsh on Facebook in their inability or even lack of desire to improve their search functionality. Facebook could own this new market of social search, but perhaps, behind closed doors they have been working with Microsoft to partner on developing the social search market. Social Search will eventually replace search as we know it. Will it also cause the replacement of Google?

The New Bing

“The New Bing”, includes a sidebar to better understand what your friends like and don’t like. View the video below or on www.bing.com/explore/new to see how this works.

Social Search

If you’d like to be a beta user of “The New Bing” then you need to go to http://www.bing.com/new and submit your e-mail and they will send you an invitation when it is ready in the coming days.

The new experience will consist of three parts:

The New Bing is transforming search through integration with industry leading companies such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Quora to bring in the best information from across the web and social networks, and present it in a way that makes sense. The new Bing will be comprised of three distinct columns:

· Core Web Results: Relevant, Comprehensive, Trustworthy

Bing will continue to deliver relevant, comprehensive and trustworthy results. Core web results on Bing make it easy to focus on the links you need to get things done, without the clutter of social updates.

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Bing hopes to change the search game with it's New Bing which will focus on Social Search.

· Snapshot: Get It Done Faster

Bing is helping you take action and complete tasks faster with the new snapshot pane. Located between the web results on the left and the new sidebar on the right, snapshot brings relevant information and services to your search, including maps, restaurant reservations and reviews. Through partnerships with industry leading companies such as Yelp, Open Table and Fansnap, Bing is helping you do more and get things done faster.

· Sidebar: Social Search Done Right

Bing believes that connecting you with people who can help you with your task is a natural step in the evolution of search – one that simplifies actions you take today like asking friends for recommendations – while unlocking useful knowledge from your social networks. With sidebar, Bing is bringing together the best of the web and letting you share, discover and interact with friends like you do in real life.

o Ask Friends: As you search, you can post questions to get help from your Facebook friends. You can also “tag” friends Bing suggests might know more about the topic.

o Friends Who Might Know: Bing suggests friends on Facebook who might know about the topic so you can go quickly from searching to doing. Suggestions are based on what they “like”, their Facebook profile information, or photos they have shared, allowing you to easily ask them about relevant experiences and opinions.

o People Who Know: The new Bing also identifies top experts and enthusiasts from leading networks like Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, LinkedIn Google Plus and Blogger, so you can do more.

o Activity Feed: In the sidebar activity feed, you can see real-time posts and queries, answer friends’ questions and “like” interesting posts. Since these activities show up in both Bing (activity feed) and Facebook, you can comment on them from either place.

o Always present, never intrusive: The sidebar, located on the right, will appear as part of ever query, allowing searchers to decide when/how to interact with it.

In the coming days we will beginning rolling out the new experience in the United States. To be among the first to preview the new feature, visit http://www.bing.com/new.

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Social Search: Bing's new social search (New Bing) is its most innovative endeavor since it's launch 3 years ago

 

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A new trend in social advocacy: donating Twitter characters

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Now you can donate your social capital too

You can donate clothes, canned goods, old eyeglasses and even your rusty ’87 Yugo to charity. Now a growing number of causes are urging donors to chip in their unused Twitter characters, too.

It works like this: send a tweet through special app, and any unused space is filled up with a public-service announcement like “Support injured servicemen and women” and a link to the charity.

Groups are using it to drum up support for Japanese earthquake relief, fair trade efforts and – this month – the Wounded Warrior Project, which helps injured veterans.

“Many people add a bumper sticker to their car or wear an advocacy bracelet to show their support of a specific cause,” said Pam Wickham, vice president of communications for Raytheon, which is funding the Wounded Warrior effort.  “But stickers and bracelets only have an effect on people who are actually there to see them. Social media advocacy has no limits — and better yet, it gets people actually engaged in your cause.”

Last year an ice cream company used the concept to promote May 14’s World Fair Trade Day. A website counter showed a running tally of donated characters.

The Japan Up relief campaign took a more visual tack, posting a graphic of a tattered Japanese flag that was slowly restored as people donated characters.

The idea is to contribute “social capital” as a kind of free publicity, said Mark Wilson of the Boston Group, which designed the Raytheon campaign.

“You’re basically donating your influence,” Wilson said. “It’s a very powerful indicator of participation.”

The Raytheon campaign, called Hashtags for Heroes, adds mobile applications for the Android, Blackberry, iPhone and iPad.

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Campaign targets multiple platforms

 

The Boston Group built the app in-house over 3½ months, Wilson said.

The Apple app store took about a week to test and approve the iPhone app. Approval from the Android and Blackberry app stores three or four days, Wilson said. None of the stores asked for any changes.

Programmers also built a set of browser plug-ins and a website. Stephanie Schierholz, a former NASA social media manager recently hired by Raytheon, helped guide the writing of 133 standardized tweets for the program.

Ads in Defense News, Politico, and the websites of the Wall Street Journal, the National Journal and Roll Call urge readers to download the apps. A video available on YouTube shows users how to use them.

Raytheon launched the program on May 3 and collected more than 87,000 characters in the first week. The company has also built a microsite featuring profiles of veterans, interviews, slideshows and a counter showing the total of donated characters.

“I think we’re at the beginning of a trend,” Wilson said. “In this day and age, that’s what it’s all about – connecting with as many people as possible with as great a frequency as possible, so that people learn more about this cause.”

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The New England Patriots support #HT4H

While there’s no receipt and you can’t write it off on your taxes, these twitter donations can be just as powerful as cash, Wickham said. “Awareness and advocacy are powerful motivators in any community, and the online community is no different. “We’d love to see not just thousands of characters donated, but thousands of new supporters of the Wounded Warrior Project That’s the power of social media.”

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10 Ways People Use Facebook to Spy on Others

You would think that when it comes to social media sites like Facebook, the people who use them are, well, socializing, right? Well, apparently not everyone is in a particularly social mood when they log in. Via Christine Kane of Internet Service Providers, here are 10 ways that people use Facebook to spy on others:

Checking Out Their Profile – Unless your privacy preferences are set accordingly, your personal info is not private. It requires action on the member’s part to safeguard from public view what that member wants to keep to herself, or limit to friends.
Friending – Once a person has become a friend on Facebook, they can keep tabs on your status and posts fairly simply. The tendency to automatically friend someone who friends them can open doors that best remain shut.
Fake Profiles – If someone wants to spy on another, and cannot expect to be friended using their actual persona and avatar, they might create a new one that appears less objectionable. This is one way of circumventing privacy settings, and another is …
Spoof Profiles – it’s also possible to use the same name as another of the person’s friends to create an entirely new profile. They can select a friend on their list whose profile suggests a limited use of Facebook (ie, no profile photo, little personal info provided on profile), and pose as that other friend on a different account, adding mutual friends to the new profile as well.
Friending Your Friends – It’s not uncommon for members to confirm friendships with unknown people based purely on the fact that they have mutual friends. So, the logic goes, they must be OK. Not necessarily.
Sending Gifts – It’s just a friendly gesture in most cases, but it also opens your private info up to access by the 3rd party app that the gift was sent through. This in turn leaves your private info open to sharing with others who may want to access that info too.
Reading posts – Although someone may not have access to your profile directly, they may be able to keep tabs on you through your friends’ walls and tagged photos.
Adding an RSS Feed – In order to continuously keep up with your status, it’s possible for a member to simply add your updates and posts to their feed and then see whenever you are logged in, right from their desktop or website.
Send a Message – Social engineering attempts to gain access to private info works essentially the same. In this case, Facebook provides the option of sending a message to someone who isn’t already a friend. It’s the first step toward gaining someone’s trust.
Instant Personalization – Apps and programs that can be linked to your Facebook profile, are another means for others to spy on you. For instance, you’re reading a news article online and wish to make a comment. The website offers you the option of logging in, using your Facebook profile. Non-members can access your profile by following the link from your user name.

Source: Internet Service Providers

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Leveraging Internal and External Social Influence [Infographic]

With 90 percent of purchases subject to social influence, it’s no surprise that savvy marketers are looking to leverage social influencers to increase sales and awareness. Influence is the single most effective and most enduring marketing asset. To help shed some light on the subject, our latest white paper, the 3 Keys to Influence: Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital gives marketers a framework for maximizing their social influence strategy by specifically, outlining steps to leverage both internal and external brand advocates. Here’s an infographic we put together to give you some key insights from the white paper.

 

 

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Exploring Strategies For Successful Social Engagement with Travis Unwin of Sitewire

As part of our interview series on effective use of social media marketing, I recently caught up with Travis Unwin, Director of Media Strategies for one of Awareness’ partner agencies Sitewire, a full service digital marketing and interactive advertising agency.  The agency now counts more than sixty consultants who provide their clients with the necessary tools to successfully engage their customers in the digital space. Sitewire’s client roster is full of leading brands including Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Sears, The Capital Grill, and Sage. Additionally, Sitewire works closely with a variety of technology partners like LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo!, Yelp and YouTube, to develop innovative solutions for their clients. Travis shared some of his team’s best practices for social media strategy and engagement.

 

When it comes to creating social engagement, Travis and his team follow these rules:

Be Empathic —The secret to successful social engagement is empathy. In the era of real-time conversations, engagement starts with participating in the customer dialog. According to Travis, the first priority for social teams is to take care of the customer – “we are responsible for the voice of the customer, and customer service is responsible for the voice of the client.” This is why Sitewire’s consultants share diverse backgrounds – marketing, consumer psychology and customer service.

 

Don’t “Post and Walk” — It is all about the dialog and building meaningful relationships with your customers, says Travis. Your social followers respond within the first hour of your posting, so “don’t expect to share interesting content at 9 p.m. if you are not going to be there to reply to comments.”

 

Be Consistent — As with any relationship, consistency in posting and sharing content on social channels is key to a brand’s ongoing success.  Once customers see brands posting with a certain frequency, they will expect brands to continue to deliver with the same frequency.  Change your posting routine and be prepared for the ensuing backlash. That said, a brand can choose to be “consistently inconsistent”. The important takeaway is that brands need to realize they are in the business of consistently meeting customer expectations.

 

Add Variety — Social content needs be a mixture of transactional and community-driven posts. Interactive polls and “fill-in-the-blanks” quizzes are among the most engaging content that keeps your customers coming back.

 

Track Success —Travis will be the first to tell you that tracking the success of your social campaigns is the recipe for long-term success.  His team is adamant about tracking customer interactions and needs and feeding that insight back to their clients so brands can improve their products, delivery, and overall customer experience.  In addition, Sitewire tracks a wide spectrum of sales-related data from social and web channels, although, as Travis says, we are still early in our ability to understand the full social impact on sales.

 

Remember that the best place to start your social engagement strategy is by first examining your business goals and objectives. As a socially-savvy marketer should, Travis sees the job of his team at Sitewire as business strategists first, with an eye towards how social marketing can support these objectives.

 

For more on Travis you can visit his very successful alter ego – Evo Terra.  Evo Terra, Travis’ pen name, came into existence in 2002 to “help authors and publishers be even more awesome.” Co-founder of Podiobooks and ePublishUnum, Evo has managed to help a number of authors along the way, while also successfully bringing to market the podcasting best-seller Podcasting for Dummies.

 

Tweet us your top engagement tips!

Help share the knowledge. Share your top social media engagement tips with us and our community on Twitter by tweeting to #AwarenessTips.

 

Mike Lewis

@bostonmike

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Is Your Small Business Being Social Enough?

[image error]You are running a small business that seems to be stuck in neutral and you can’t quite figure out why that is. If that’s the case, have you checked to see whether or not you’re being social enough?

For the successful small business person, he or she has gravitated toward and not away from social media as part of their online market scheme, especially given the fact that more and more consumers are using social media in their everyday lives.

With a successful social media campaign, small businesses can bring more traffic to their site, boost branding awareness of the products and/or services they offer, and build a relationship with both present and potential customers.

According to research (2,200 interviews of business owners and major executives at companies with fewer than 500 employees) provided earlier this year at the “Insights: Small Business Summit” in Northern California, approximately 80 percent of small business owners and high-level executives report they now utilize a social network, however only 57 percent report doing so as a component of a marketing plan.

The research noted:

LinkedIn was most utilized for business purposes (50 percent) and the least in regards to personal usage by major executives (9 percent);
Twitter gets the second highest usage by businesses (38 percent) and third highest when it comes to personal reasons (21 percent);
Google+ saw the third most usage for business (26 percent) and the second most utilization for personal purposes (26 percent);
Facebook received the least amount of business usage (12 percent) and most utilization for personal reasons (30 percent).

In the event you have been slow to the dance when it comes to social media usage for your small business, keep these things in mind:

Use social media to promote events – Social media is a great venue to promote events involving your company. If you are holding an upcoming sale, have promotional items the public should know about, seminars etc., make sure the word gets out on your Facebook fan page, Twitter page, Google+ page, Pinterest, any YouTube presence you have and more. The pages can and should also be used to share industry related information with consumers. In the event you run a small business that promotes healthy ways of life, use your social media connections to make note of when you’re running seminars on healthy eating and working out, etc.
Use social media to link to worthwhile news – Your business that promotes healthy means by which to live should use social media to link to studies and research on how to eat better, exercise better, monitor one’s health, etc. If your business is sponsoring an event to test people’s cholesterol for example, use social media to spread the word about who, what, where and when.
Use social media to network with others – Given that networking is a major part of successfully promoting one’s business, social media plays an important role here. While you are not out to give your competition free advertising, it essentially comes down to scratching their backs while they do the same for you when it is a win-win proposition for everyone involved. This is also true with those that do not compete with you. The realtor that is asking for a little plug on your social media channels will hopefully be willing to do the same on his or her venues to promote your business.

At the end of the day, you may be surprised the positive return on investment (ROI) you receive from using social media to promote your small business.

Plus the fact, being a social business owner is sure better than being anti-social.

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Understanding and Leveraging External and Internal Influence for Increased Sales

As marketers, our ultimate goal is to influence others – to develop affinity for our products, to act in support of our values, and to choose our brand over those of our competitors. Leveraging influence is the single most effective and enduring asset we have in our marketing arsenal. In our new e-book, 3 Keys to Influence: Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital, we explore the ways to harness influence to grow a brand’s social capital and positively impact critical business drivers such as sales.

 

If there was any question that influence fuels word-of-mouth (WOM) and drives support for brands in social media marketing, consider the following:

-        90 percent of all purchases are subject to social influence.

-        90 percent of consumers trust recommendations from people they know.

-        67 percent of shoppers spend more money online after seeing recommendations from friends.

-        Fans of brands are 51 percent more likely to buy.

 

We define Influence as a brand’s ability to affect or prompt action among its key constituents. We believe influence is comprised of four distinct elements. These are:

-        Authority (or expertise): The degree to which a brand is widely viewed as an accepted and reliable source of information and advice on a given subject or industry, usually based on specific domain expertise. For example, Apple knows about product design, mobile devices and mobile apps.

-        Reputation (or trust and integrity): The way in which a brand positions its authority. Some brands consistently share their views on a topic or industry. For example, Patagonia has a reputation for being environmentally conscious.

-        Rank (generally expressed numerically, such as with a Klout score): A brand’s perceived reputation and authority relative to others in a specific industry or domain. Rank is often used to identify and prioritize, or score, influencers online. It is the key way to identify an initial set of influencers external to your brand.

-        Status (or social standing): A brand’s social standing as compared to others within a particular industry or topic domain. Similar to reputation, a brand’s status in the ecosystem is affected by the consistent display of authority and reputation.

 

To harness influence, brands should turn to brand advocates – those who support, endorse or would personally recommend your brand to their network. Brand advocates can come from external sources, like domain experts, or internal sources, such as your top buyers.

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You’ll want to weigh your business goals before defining exactly how you want to include internal and external influencers in your campaigns. Take a new product launch, for example, you’ll want both domain experts and loyal brand users to spread the word about it.

 

For example, when Springpad, a free app built to help people stay organized, re-launched in April of 2012, the effort was bolstered by leveraging both internal and external brand advocates. People who had previously used and loved the product used WOM and social channels to tell their world how much more they loved Springpad after the updates.

 

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For a step-by-step guide to identifying and leveraging both internal and external influencers, plus how to run a successful advocacy campaign, download our free e-book, , 3 Keys to Influence: Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital.

 

We want to hear from you, marketers! How do you identify and engage influencers to drive business results? Share your thoughts and best practices with our community on Twitter (use #AwarenessTips).

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Evolving Social Media Analytics: Insights from Marshall Sponder

Social media analytics is rapidly evolving, always challenging the ways marketers measure and draw insights from web and social media. To get the inside scoop on the current state of social analytics we turned to analytics guru Marshall Sponder. Marshall is the author of Social Media Analytics: Effective Tools for Building, Interpreting, and Using Metrics and the founder of Web Metrics Guru, who speaks regularly about social media measurement, platforms and analytics at coveted industry events, including the recent Social Media Analytics Summit in San Francisco (you can watch his presentation here). Fortunately, we got a chance to sit down with him to learn about the latest thinking around social analytics and what marketers need to know to stay on top of their analytics game.

 

Marshall defines social analytics as the data that measures key activity and engagement around people’s social graphs. He would be the first to tell you that data is not that meaningful unless it captures what really matters.  Marshall reminds us, as he always does in his industry keynotes, that social media measurement is hard. Here’s why: there is really no defined processes and standards around it (despite industry efforts), most companies still cannot clearly articulate what success looks like, while most of social data (90% of it, to be precise) is unstructured and hard to reign in for business insight. In one of his latest industry sessions – this one coming all the way from Sydney, Marshall advised companies to start their measurement journey by first determining how they envision customer interactions and then measure how interactions are actually happening. Next, brands need to audit how they measure the interactions they can capture (as some interactions will remain elusive) and zero in on the two to three key performance indicators (KPIs) that clearly indicate how well social media campaigns are doing.

 

It may surprise you to hear that the most valuable insights companies need, those insights that can help them make sense of their social media efforts, may indeed be locked away from the company’s social analytics vault.  This data, which Marshall refers to as “ultraviolet data”, is like ultraviolent light – it surrounds us but is invisible to the marketer’s eye. Ultraviolet data is data that brands may not be currently capturing but data that is the key to understanding a brand’s audience.  Examples of such data include comments where people speculate what may happen in the future, or location-based check-ins and corresponding comments.

 

There is no doubt that social media data, and its ultraviolet equivalent, present real data aggregation, normalization and analysis challenges – a lot of times marketers are simply not equipped to process big social data. Marshall sees the relevancy of big data and all the heated discussions surrounding the topic as very relevant for social analytics. He explains that current processes for big data analysis are “like boiling the entire ocean” for a few valuable insights.

 

To avoid the big data conundrum, companies can turn to Social CRM – new methodologies and toolsets that collect the social media chatter by tying it to prospect and customer profiles. Equipped with that data, marketers can then tie social with purchase information to model sales effectiveness. Marshall recommends brands follow these tips to understand how many people are buying a product because of social marketing efforts:

Tie social to sales — Tracking the sales effectiveness of social media boils down to marketers’ ability to track social marketing efforts down to the individual sale – whether that is an actual sales through coupon redemption, a donation through a click-through, or showroom visits due to a location-based ad. When marketers can track each social action, then they can track sales effectiveness
Integrate social analytics with web analytics — Marketers cannot get the full picture unless they marry social data to web data. Web analytics allows marketers to capture the activity from social channels and tie it to deeper customer interaction insights on a brand’s website – this in turn provides marketers with the “ultraviolent data” they need to understand what makes people tick…and buy.
Monitor Social CRM developments—Social CRM tools are on their way to resembling their traditional CRM counterparts, capable of not only capturing social profile and interaction data but evolving to tie that data to transactions. The latter will make Social CRM a key arsenal in the technology stack for today’s marketers.

 

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that even great thinkers like Marshall look up to their peers for insights and inspiration – after all, big social data is no small challenge. Gary Angel, the president and CTO of Semphonic, wins Marshall’s award for overall analytics thought leadership, followed by Eric Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified, and Jim Sterne, the founding president and current chairman of the Digital Analytics Association. His favorite social marketing experts are Chris Brogan, Seth Godin, Brian Solis, Larry Smith, Oliver Blanchard and Dave Kerpen.

 

To learn more insights from Marshall Sponder, you can follow him on Twitter, read his blog, or check out his SlideShare. For more on social analytics, and you can harness external and internal insights for business value, download our complimentary white paper, Actionable Social Analytics: From Social Media Metrics to Business Insights.

 

How do you make sense of the ocean of available social data? Have you successfully tied social marketing to sales? Share your thoughts and best practices with our community on Twitter (use #AwarenessTips).

 

Mike Lewis

@bostonmike

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George Zimmerman’s Defense Team Turns to Social Media

[image error]As their client looks at potentially years behind bars in the shooting death of a Florida teen, attorneys for defendant George Zimmerman are turning to social media to assist in his defense.

Zimmerman, while currently out on bail, is facing second-degree murder charges. If Zimmerman, who claims he shot Trayvon Martin in self-defense, is eventually convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

Reports indicate that the Orlando-based Mark O’Mara Law Group recently came up with Twitter and Facebook pages, along with a blog to defend Zimmerman in the social networking world. O’Mara has been practicing criminal and family law for nearly 30 years.

According to comments from the law group on Facebook, “It is unusual to have a page on Facebook like this for a legal defense, but there is such strong public interest about the case, we felt it was appropriate to open a forum for conversation and to provide a proper means for you to address the law firm.

Meantime, a blog post from O’Mara’s Law Group notes “We feel it would be irresponsible to ignore the robust online conversation, and we feel equally as strong about establishing a professional, responsible, and ethical approach to new media.”

Unlike back in the mid-1990s when the O.J. Simpson case garnered a ton of attention worldwide in the media spotlight, there were no social media options for people to turn to and voice their opinions. Now, however, Facebook and Twitter are but two of the sites where the public can converse with complete strangers as to Zimmerman’s innocence or guilt.

As Zimmerman’s defense team sees it, they can turn to social media in an effort to discredit and remove fraudulent Web sites and social profiles that put their client in a bad light.

They also look to use SM to give Zimmerman a voice, along with assisting in raising funds for him. According to the defense team, a decent amount of money has been raised through the public to defend Zimmerman.

So, do you think O’Mara’s social media sites dedicated to defending Zimmerman will in one way or another sway the public’s view of their client in the weeks and months to come?

Photo credit: usatoday.com

 

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