Ric Dragon
Contributor

Ric Dragon

Connect

About Ric Dragon

Ric Dragon is the author of the DragonSearch Online Marketing Manual and Social Marketology (McGraw Hill 2012) and the ceo/co-founder of DragonSearch. He is a regular speaker for Google at their Get Your Business Online seminars. Dragon frequently speaks about the convergence of social media, process, information architecture, and sociology.

Ric Dragon's latest articles

Performance marketing

Finding Tumblr’s Place In Your Social Strategy

  Jonathan Gillette is credited with first using the term tumbleblogs to refer to short-form or microblogs in 2005.  In the following year, a 20-year old David Karp would borrow the term to name his new microblogging platform, Tumblr. Tumblr launched in 2007 and within weeks had over 75,000 users. In 2012, Yahoo! acquired Tumblr […]

Performance marketing

Cross The Effectiveness Threshold In Your Social Media Marketing

Whenever Scotty would say to Captain Kirk, “She’s brrreaking up, Captain,” or even, “She can’t take it anymore,” he was suggesting that the Starship Enterprise’s condition was going beyond a threshold from which there was no turning back. Thresholds exist in many parts of our lives: economies, diseases, pharmaceuticals and marketing. We don’t simply carry […]

Customer experience

Content Marketers, Kill The Blog Category

Plato said Socrates thought very little of the then-newfangled objects that were books, arguing that the written word impinged upon man’s ability to remember and to think. In the early 60s, Marshall McCluhan went on to write about “media determinism,” an idea suggesting that our communications technologies shape the way we think. Anyone who has […]

Performance marketing

How To Create Case Studies To Improve Your Social Media

At the time, it was the largest potential business contract of my life — my budding marketing agency had the opportunity to provide services to one of the most significant cultural institutions in the world. The inevitable question was posed: “Can you provide us with some case studies?” My reply: “I’ll get back to you.” […]

Performance marketing

Tapping Into Community Research With Facebook Graph Search

The digital marketing world is aflutter with talk of entities and structured data, and how both are contributing to the rise of semantic search. Google has rolled out its Hummingbird update, while Facebook has its Graph Search. Both represent big leaps forward in easing searchers’ access to the information they’re seeking. The creators of social […]

Performance marketing

Deeper Dive On A Facebook Marketing Case Study

In last month’s article about how great community management is beginning to emerge in smaller organizations, I used an example from Seagull Outfitters, courtesy of Marty Weintraub at aimClear. For this post, I went back to Weintraub for some additional information. Seagull Outfitters is a regionally dominant Minnesota Canoe Area Boundary Waters outfitter. Located at the end […]

Performance marketing

Invasion Of The Community Managers

On many evenings, walking down the street in uptown Kingston, NY, you’ll feel the sidewalk vibrating to the beats of music emerging from the BSP Lounge, a popular venue for independent contemporary music. If you happen to stop in on an evening when the audience turnout is thinner than hoped, you’ll find BSP’s marketing chief, […]

Customer experience

Seize The Social Media Day With Ownable Moments

When Oreo made its Super Bowl run around, professional marketers around the world shared a collective gasp. “How did they create the design and get it past legal so quickly?” we wondered. If you’ve been a close observer of Oreo’s social media marketing efforts, you’ll know that their marketing team has been making those sorts […]

Performance marketing

Managing A Social Media Marketing Team

The surgeon leans over the patient, whose abdomen has been surgically opened. “Forceps,” the doctor barks. The nurse hands the doctor a stainless steel instrument. Again the doctor demands, “scalpel!”  The nurse dutifully hands the doctor the necessary tool. We’ve all seen the drill in countless films and television shows. But, the process of a […]

Performance marketing

Book Review: What’s The Future Of Business? By Brian Solis

Author and speaker Nancy Duarte has said that speakers must take their audience on a hero’s journey (YouTube video). In doing so, the speaker doesn’t assume the role of hero – the audience does. The speaker is the hero’s helper. Spokespeople for The Coca-Cola Company announced last year their ambitious goal of doubling the company’s overall […]

Performance marketing

Surprising Twitter Stories Emerge At Conferences

The season of marketing conferences is upon us, which provides opportunities to discuss Twitter marketing with brand-side and agency marketers from near and far. It was at one such conference, the famous SxSW, that Twitter debuted back in 2007. Now that six years has gone by, was Twitter still the talk of the show in […]

Performance marketing

Twitter Locally

Twitter is the ham radio of social media. With it, you can sit in your basement (figuratively) and connect with like-minded individuals near and far away. Never mind that you enjoy nibbling on Manchego cheese while listening to Harry Belafonte songs, you can be sure that somewhere, someone shares those passions – and it’s on […]

Performance marketing

Something Has Changed At LinkedIn

If you were to invoke fairy tales in the world of social media, you might compare LinkedIn to Cinderella. While the step-sisters Facebook and Google Plus have been preparing for the Prince’s big party, LinkedIn has been quietly going about an incredible overhaul of its system and is building up a larger and larger user base. Many […]

Performance marketing

The Twitter Ecosystem

The big news of the week was that Google has surpassed Twitter in the ranks of social networks, taking second position behind Facebook. While pundits argue about whether those G+ users are active or not, it seems that the growth of Google’s social mega-platform is simply a matter of time. But then, there was another […]

Performance marketing

A Brand And Its Twitter Army

In 1886, a case was brought before the US Supreme Court: Santa Clara County versus the Southern Pacific Railroad Company.  The case was remarkable in that the Fourteenth Amendment was invoked, an amendment that was originally written in the aftermath of the Civil War to provide protection to former slaves. In this case, it was invoked […]

Performance marketing

TweetLevel: A GPS For Twitter

The dog never ate my homework. Or at least, I never tried to use that as an excuse, which is odd, considering my family actually owned a dog kennel. To this day, the memory of homework sends chills down my spine — I just wasn’t one of those people who dashed off their evening assignments with ease. […]

Performance marketing

A Twitter Relationship Management Tool

As a bona fide Internet nerd, I dream about some odd things. At the top of my list is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that spans all social media. If you call over to Zappos after ordering your newest pair of beach shoes, the person answering the phone will be able to pull up […]

Performance marketing

The Fallacy Of Twitter Marketing Rules: Different Approaches For Different Objectives

Our little baby is growing so quickly! Just yesterday, well, in 2007, Twitter was debuted at SXSW. It was the same year the iPhone displaced the celebrities and politicians on the cover of Time Magazine.  By the time the vice presidential candidates debated earlier this month, over four million tweets concerning the debate were exchanged. The […]

Performance marketing

A Virtuous Cycle Of Twitter Community Management

What if a prominent journalist followed a brand’s Twitter account and no one noticed? No one on behalf of the brand reciprocated the follow. In an ideal situation, the journalist would have been thanked, added to a list, and engaged. Ouch! It’s easy for community managers to get caught up in the daily and hourly […]

Performance marketing

How Marketers Can Tap Into Twitter Lists

“He’s makin a list, He’s checkin it twice” -Santa Claus is Coming to Town, ‪Haven Gillespie People love lists. In the opera Don Giovanni, the licentious main character’s servant Leporello maintained a list of his boss’s conquests. As children, we might have been encouraged to make lists of what we wanted for our birthday, while our […]

Performance marketing

Tips For An Effective Twitter Chat

Fourteen years before Twitter had its debut at SxSW,  professor of educational psychology and semiotician Gary Shank wrote a paper titled Abductive Multiloguing: The Semiotics of Navigating the Net, in which he describes the concept of the multilogue: “It is as if everyone who is interested in talking can all jump in at once, but […]

Performance marketing

Good Morning, Twitter

Just about each and every morning, business strategist Liz Strauss (@lizstrauss) goes over to her window overlooking the Lake Michigan shoreline of Chicago and takes a photograph. She then posts the photo to Instagram and Twitter, often with a message bidding her followers a good morning. She’s even got a different hash tag for different […]

Performance marketing

Filling the Sales Pipeline with Twitter

The very subject of this post makes me shudder:  the idea that social media in general and Twitter in particular, should be used for lead generation is horrifying. At least it is if we use old-school sales approaches to new-school social media.  At its best, social media is one of the greatest revolutions in communications […]

Performance marketing

Should Community Managers Follow Back On Twitter?

Facebook may have its friends, Google Plus its circles, but Twitter has always used the ambiguous term “follower.” Odd, only because a follower could bring to mind one of those unfortunate people that drank the grape Flavor Aid with Jim Jones. But pool-side in Cancun, you might catch your significant other following an attractive person […]

Marketing operations (MOps)

How To Curate Twitter To Build Content & Engagement

Thanks to John Heywood, a writer and courtier to Henry VIII, we have classic epigrams like “Haste makes waste,” “a penny for your thought,” “beggars can’t be choosers,” and “the more the merrier.”  My favorite is “you can’t have your cake and eat it, too,” which Heywood actually recorded as “Wolde ye both eate your […]

Performance marketing

Once Upon a Tweet: Telling Stories In Twitter

In November 2009, author Rick Moody published the entirety of a short story tweeted out in 153 hourly posts. He didn’t simply take a story and break it up into tweet-sized chunks, but specifically wrote it on Twitter. Moody said that he saw Twitter’s character limits as “some strange, poetical limitation that would be fun […]

Performance marketing

Slinging Hash Tags: Community Building In 140 Characters

On October 28, 1939, an auctioneer sold off the entire company-owned village of Chichester, located in upstate New York: each and every house; factory building; the old social hall; and even the two-roomed schoolhouse. Seventy years later, this small hamlet isn’t unlike most other small rural communities. The grocery store exists only in the distant […]

Get the must-read newsletter for marketers.