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Thursday 30 June 2011

Google+ invites

Google+, the search giant’s answer to Facebook, is currently in a “limited field test.” However, it looks like Google has opened the floodgates to the masses.

The Google+ project is the company’s social initiative that brings friend streams, group video chat and group texting to Google’s millions of users.

For the last few days, Google+ invites have not been available to the public, but apparently Google is prepared to test the service with a larger group. Google+ users will find a button that allows them to invite their friends on the Google+ Stream page. Invites are also available if a Google+ user shares content with a non-user via email.

Google+ invites are in high demand. I sent just one tweet and posted one update on Facebook, and I have received over 100 requests for invites. Request for Google+ invites are flooding Twitter.

Are you on Google +? Have you gotten a Google+ invite yet? Let us know what you think of Google’s social service in the comments.

Update: Google has closed off invites after just a few hours. Demand was “insanely high,” according to Google SVP of Social Vic Gundotra.

Wednesday 29 June 2011

My Space SOLD for $35 Million Only...

The day that the web has been buzzing about has finally come: It seems that MySpace has been sold to an advertising network called Specific Media for a mere $35 million.

News Corp. declared it was ready to sell MySpace in an earnings call in February. The media company was reportedly hoping to get $100 million out of the sale.

News Corp bought the site for $580 million from its original owners, but MySpace’s traffic has plummeted in recent years.

All Things Digital reports that the deal will close Wednesday but has not yet been signed. News Corp. will reportedly hold a 5% to 10% stake in the company.

Other reports this week indicated that close to 50% of the site’s staff could be cut after the sale goes through, and it’s likely that any further iterations will focus on music.

Wednesday 22 June 2011

Obama Set To Actually Use Social Media Himself for 2012 Run

If there is one thing that the recent Twitter scandal surrounding NY Rep. Anthony Weiner did it slowed the use of social media by politicians. If there was ever a silver lining in an otherwise pathetic situation this may have been it. PC World reports



The “Weinergate” scandal caused a significant drop in tweeting politicians. According to VentureBeat, after the scandal “the number of tweets by Republican members of Congress dropped by 27 percent, while those of Democrats dropped by 29 percent.”

Of course, the US is gearing up for yet another fun filled presidential election process that promises to be full of promises which in turn usually means its full of something else too but that’s beside the point. President Obama established his ‘mastery’ of the social media arts in the last campaign and possibly won the election with the base of voters he motivated through online channels.

Expect more of the same this time. In light of recent political Twittertastrophes though the campaign is reigning in the control as noted on the president’s website

Starting today, you’ll notice something new about President Obama’s Facebook page and his Twitter account, @BarackObama.

Obama for America staff will now be managing both accounts, posting daily updates from the campaign trail, from Washington, and everywhere in between. You’ll be hearing from President Obama regularly, too; on Twitter, tweets from the President will be signed “-BO.”

Why make the change?

As the President said when he launched this campaign a few months ago, he’s focused on doing the job we elected him to do — so he’s counting on all of us to lead this organization from the grassroots up, helping to shape it as it grows.

That’s nice.

Of course, my first question is “Who had control of this before last Friday?” We all knew that the tweets previously were not done by the President but this announcement seems kind of odd considering there are currently 8.75 million Twitter followers for the president’s account. I suspect many think they are hearing from the president himself (a testament to the intelligence of many Twitter users). The NY Times clears that up a bit

During the 2008 campaign, Democratic National Committee staffers wrote all the tweets to the @BarackObama account, according to a White House spokesman.

Why hasn’t Obama tweeted before? There’s a Washington culture of letting the underlings handle mass communications. While many Hollywood celebrities passionately type their own status updates, it’s more common among politicians to let employees manage their social media accounts.

As for Facebook? That’s really donation central. Here’s the landing page for the Facebook presence and it’s all about the benjamins.



So as we gear up for an election season here in the states that is sure to be heated, what will likely be one of the most active participant sports will be the watch to see who sticks their social media foot in their mouth the furthest. You know it’s going to happen. Heck, all it took was one weiner to press a wrong button and the wheels were ejected off that wagon.

Will a bigger fish go down in history as social media’s poster child for what not to do? Stay tuned. I bet we’ll have a weiner winner sooner than later!

5 New Social Media Management Platforms

A new class of social media management platforms for small businesses makes social media marketing — such as posting to Facebook and Twitter — much easier.

In this article, I review five of these platforms: Postling, Breeze Social, Roost, Sendible and Social Guides. My review will address the following points:

1.User-friendliness;
2.Social networks included;
3.Availability of analytics;
4.Unique features;
5.Perceived shortcomings;
6.Price.

Postling: Comprehensive, Affordable



Postling emphasizes posting content across wide network.


Postling allows users to publish content to almost every popular social media platform — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress, Tumblr, Flickr and a number of others — as well as to rating and review sites like Yelp and CitySearch. Postling users can schedule posts to any or these networks in advance, a feature that is common in almost all social media management tools.

The dashboard itself is well designed, intuitive and easy to use. All posting capabilities — blogs, status updates, video or image uploads — are located in the left-hand sidebar, as is a menu of the sections contained in the dashboard, such as analytics and published posts.

One unique feature is that comments left by readers on blog or social network accounts are placed on the home page of the dashboard, enabling users to respond from within Postling itself. That is truly a time-saver as it prevents the need to visit each social network individually.



Postling includes comment stream on dashboard home page.


Another of Postling's features is the ability to publish a single-page website containing the user's Twitter feeds, blog posts, Facebook updates, and biographical and contact information. Think of it as a social media profile or "hub." Unfortunately, there appears to be no way to customize the page by adding graphics or changing color schemes, so its usefulness as a marketing tool may be limited.

Postling supports multiple users so that more than one person within a company can contribute content. Permissions can be set on each user to provide editorial control over the publishing process. Also, social media accounts can be organized into separate identities, which Postling refers to as "brands." For example, a user can maintain his or her personal social media accounts under one brand and business accounts under another.

Users are sent a daily email containing a digest of activity on the social networks from the previous 24-hour period. The platform also provides monitoring capabilities, allowing users to track keywords like the business name or competitors' names. Users are notified via email whenever any mention of those keywords is discovered.

One shortcoming is in the ability to see new Facebook Fans and Twitter followers. Postling places value on quality over quantity in that it lists new followers individually on the dashboard's home page based on their degree of influence as determined by Klout, a popular Twitter influence measurement application. However, Postling provides no place to see a list all new followers at once, which would be a nice feature to have. Also, even though Postling has an analytics dashboard, the information is very basic. A more comprehensive, detailed set of analytics would be a welcome enhancement.

Postling's price is within range of small businesses. There are three levels:

•Starter is free but only supports a single account, one brand and one user.
•Plus is $9.00 per month and supports up to three accounts, three brands and three users.
•Premium is $49 per month and designed for those who manage multiple accounts. It supports up to five accounts, five brands and an unlimited number of users.
In my opinion, the Plus account would provide everything a small business owner would need.

In short, Postling is a comprehensive social media management platform that is reasonably priced and easy to use.

Breeze Social: Makes Posting Easy



Breeze Social focuses on saving time.


More than anything, Breeze Social is focused on saving the user time. To that end, the site offers three options: "Write a Post," "Manage in 10 Minutes," or "Stay Awhile."

Write a Post

This option is for those who have content ready and are ready to publish. The posting interface allows users to add images, schedule posts, and choose the social networks to which content should be distributed.

Manage in 10 Minutes

Those who are pressed for time or need help in deciding what to post can use this option. Content suggestions based on company profile, industry, location and competitors appear in rotating order above the posting interface. Alternatively, users can choose from a row of buttons that, when clicked, return relevant content suggestions based on activity within their Twitter and Facebook accounts.



Breeze Social content suggestion buttons.


The content suggestion feature is a key selling point for the platform. According to Breeze Social product marketing manager Teddy Quinn, "We wanted to take all the worry out of not knowing what to talk about on the social web and our constant stream of relevant information does just that for every Breeze Social user regardless of business size or niche."

Stay Awhile

This option also contains content suggestions. Additionally, it lists posts from the past seven days along with analytical data about them. This information is provided so that users can conduct research before posting to gain a better understanding of which posts worked well and which didn't — hence, the term "Stay Awhile."

Breeze Social lets users interface with a more limited number of social networks — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumbler at present — than Postling.

The platform lacks detailed analytics, but does provide what it refers to as a Breeze Social Score, which is a "measurement of the total number of people who see your messages, the number of people who are actively engaged with you, your recent activity level, and the level of response it's generated."

Like Postling, Breeze Social offers users the ability to post to multiple accounts. There is also no way to see new Fans and followers.

Breeze Social's goal, according to the company, is to make posting a "breeze." Due to its lack of features, however, I find it less useful as to tool to manage a full social media engagement program. But the platform is free, which is good.

Roost: Helpful for Campaign Creation



Roost has its origins in real estate.


Roost came out of the real estate industry as a search engine that listed properties available for sale. However, in recent months the company has abandoned that business model and recreated itself as a social media management technology provider.

The platform is oriented around creating social media "campaigns," which are series of posts scheduled over a defined time. Like Breeze Social, Roost provides a content library to aid the user in generating ideas for posts.

Roost's interface steps users through a campaign-creation process that starts with the destinations to which content will be posted. The platform supports Facebook and Twitter. Following that, users decide the length of the campaign, from 1 to 30 days. Roost then provides several categories of content suggestions, including ideas for links, status updates, quotes, questions and photos.

A unique feature is something Roost refers to as "My Circle," which is a network of friends on Facebook, who the Roost user then invites as "My Circle" members. When users post messages to Facebook or Twitter, My Circle members are notified and encouraged to share the post with their respective networks.

Roost is still tied to the real estate industry, but any small business can use it. Essentially, it is a posting interface to save the user time and relieve the burden of social media management overload.

As to price, Roost bills itself as "Free Now, Free Forever," although there is a premium version intended for use strictly by Realtors.

Sendible: Combines Social Media, Email and SMS



Sendible combines social media with email marketing, CRM and SMS.


Sendible is, by far, the most comprehensive of all the social media management platforms included in this list. It combines social media with email marketing and SMS (text messaging) technology.

The list of Sendible's features is long and includes:

•Social dashboard designed to manage posting to blogs, Facebook and Twitter;
•Autoresponders;
•Email marketing;
•SMS/text messaging;
•Contact lists and groups;
•Brand reputation monitoring;
•Multiple users and multiple accounts;
•Analytics (including the incorporation of Google Analytics);
•iPhone app.
The platform provides support for an extensive list of social networks and includes: social bookmarking sites such as Delicious; photo sharing from Flickr and Facebook; and location-based social networks like Foursquare.

Sendible pulls in posts and comments from sites like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr so that users can respond from one place. Each post is analyzed and messages that need urgent attention are highlighted.

The platform provides a detailed set of analytics and even facilitates the use of Google Analytics. It tracks clicks, referrers, shares, comments and more. For merchants who want to track the return-on-investment of social media, this integration is very helpful.

In addition, users can check what's being said about their brands on blogs, news sites, social networks, and in comments. Sendible's sentiment analysis highlights the mentions should receive a response.

Lists of contacts can be uploaded and organized into groups, which makes Sendible a social customer-relationship platform that can be used in concert with its email marketing and SMS functions.

Due to its robust nature, the interface takes some getting used to. Each primary function appears in a horizontal row of tabs across the top of the dashboard, with contextually relevant menu items located in the left-hand column.

For such a comprehensive tool, the pricing is surprisingly affordable, starting at just $9 per month for one account. The most popular options run about $20 per month.

Social Guides: Focuses on Social Commerce



Social Guides focuses on social commerce.


A newcomer to the social media management scene is Social Guides, which is designed to combine social media and social commerce applications into one platform.

According to the website, Social Guides enables users to:

•Discover their social reach and find top Fans;
•Schedule updates to Twitter and Facebook;
•Set up a "Welcome Tab" on Facebook;
•Run an exclusive social deal.
Social Guides separates its platform into three different products: "Social Dashboard," "Social Deals" and "Social Listings."

Social Dashboard
The dashboard controls all engagement activities, including scheduling and posting status updates, creating a custom Facebook Welcome tab using the fangating option, and running social deals.

The interface reminds me of Postling in that everything is organized into a clearly visible menu of options. Also like Postling, it has a list of all the comments from Twitter and Facebook that reference the user. There is also left-hand sidebar that contains a list of top Fans, a lightweight analytics widget, and an overview of the user's engagement activity.

Social Guides has one feature that is lacking in many of the other platforms: the ability to find new Twitter followers. It identifies these potential followers using four criteria:

•Non-followers. People the user have followed, but who have not followed in return;
•Find Followers. Find new followers based on keyword searches;
•New Fans. A list of followers who have referenced the user in tweets;
•New Followers. A list of recent new followers.

Social Deals
What separates Social Guides from the other platforms in this list is its use of social commerce. Merchants can offer deals in one of two forms: special discounts and exclusive offers to Fans and followers. The interface used to create the deals is simple and requires only three steps. First, the merchant chooses the offer. Second, the merchant defines the offer's details. Third, the merchant schedules the dates and times when the offer will run.

Social Listing
Again, like Postling, Social Guides has its own form of a publicly-visible social media "hub" that users can promote if they choose.

Social Guides is free; it is powered by WordPress.

ConclusionEach of these platforms comes with its own set of special features and benefits. Postling is comprehensive and very affordable. Breeze Social and Roost focus on saving the user time by providing relevant content suggestions. Sendible is the most comprehensive platform of all and integrates social marketing with email, SMS and CRM. And Social Guides distinguishes itself by focusing on social commerce

IBM Aims to Bring Social Media Into Compliance





IBM (NYSE: IBM) is promising to deliver a solution that will enable companies to include information from social media platforms in their regulatory compliance reports.

Compliance capability is "fundamental to reducing a barrier that many companies have encountered as they look more closely at using social media for business process integration," Alistair Rennie, IBM's general manager of collaboration solutions, said in a teleconference on Monday.

IBM is expected to formally announce the new solution -- called "Actiance Vantage for IBM Connections" on Tuesday, the opening day of the Enterprise 2.0 conference taking place this week in Boston, but the solution won't be available for purchase until the third quarter of the year.


A Social Media Cloud
In addition to unveiling its regulatory compliance offering, IBM also plans to use the Enterprise 2.0 stage to announce plans for opening a data center that will offer cloud-based social media solutions to companies in the Asia Pacific Region. The center, to be based in Japan, is scheduled to start turning on social media platforms for Asia Pacific customers by September.

The seeds for the regulatory compliance solution were planted as far back as January 2010, when the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority -- a watchdog agency for U.S.-based securities firms -- issued guidance on the importance of monitoring and tracking information passed through corporate social media sites for purposes of regulatory compliance, Rennie said.

Social media content is like all other content created by companies, meaning it's subject to the same rules, laws and customs, he pointed out, citing a February 2011 report from Gartner (NYSE: IT).

"By the end of 2013, half of all companies will have been asked to produce material from social media websites for e-discovery," the Gartner report states. "So, enterprises need an overall governance strategy for all applications and information, and this strategy should include content created on social media."

A Blended Solution
Against that backdrop, IBM is partnering with Actiance, a supplier of e-security and compliance applications, to develop its social media compliance offering. The solution will blend Actiance's e-compliance capabilities into IBM's Connections platform, which offers a range of tools for building and managing social media channels such as blogs, wikis, forums and virtual communities.

Once it is available, the solution will be a major advancement for companies in regulated industries that have struggled with how to maintain a certain level of security and integrity around important data that might be floating through corporate social media channels.

"We continue to see social media growing as a tool for business transformation," Rennie said. "It's difficult to find a customer that doesn't want to take advantage of the potential of a social business environment, but -- as is the case with every major technology change -- we continue to run into questions about managing security and risk."

Real-Time Data Tracking
Actiance Vantage for IBM Connections will address those issues, Rennie explained, by giving companies tools to monitor, track and analyze data generated in social media posts and conversation threads.

"This all takes place in real-time," he noted. "I can't overemphasize the need to track this information in real-time. The pace at which information moves in a social environment is unlike that of most traditional collaboration environments."

The new IBM solution will give users a dashboard through which they can monitor social media traffic and pick out bits of information that need to be saved for purposes of regulatory compliance, Rennie said.

"With the Connections technology, every piece of communication is auditable," he explained. "We also are using advanced analytics that will allow for recommending that users view content they might not have found on their own."

For the past two years, IDC has listed IBM as the leading producer of revenue from social media software, and Rennie believes these new offerings should help it maintain that position

Social Media Analysis in Six Steps





Whether you're a seasoned social media user or a beginner, you can benefit from this three-part series focusing on social media planning, broken down into the following parts:

1.Social media analysis
2.Social media strategy
3.Social media plan
Asocial media analysis should define an organization's online goals and target market as well as the existing resources it has to apply to social media efforts.

A social media strategy should include how an organization can improve social media optimization for its existing website as well as recommendations of other social media tools and how an organization can leverage them.

For each tool recommended in the social media strategy, the social media plan should include an overall strategy for applying the tool specifically to an organization's needs and tactics for managing and optimizing the tool. The resulting plan should reflect the needs and resources outlined in the social media analysis and strategy.

6 steps for completing a social media analysis
1 Perform a SWOT analysis in addition to the items below.
The Canadian site SEO Wizardry has a nice example of social media SWOT analysis.

2 Define the organization's target market.

• Here is a good article by Success Designs on how to do define your target market (they have some other good resources here, too).
• And another by Blog Case about marketing to your target audience

3 Define the organization's online goals.

What, specifically, does the organization want to accomplish with social media?:

• Get the word out about their brand.
• Offer a platform for getting a specific message out.
• Target new customers.
• Sell more products.

4 Assess the resources available to the organization.

• Outline the resources the organization has on hand to facilitate social media efforts.
• Estimate how many hours a day the organization can afford to expend on social media efforts based on this outline.

5 Analyze the organization's existing website:

• Is the organization's existing Website social media optimized?
• Does it offer ways for visitors to interact, share or collaborate?

6 Analyze the organization's existing social media efforts.

• If the organization already has some social media accounts in place, are they optimized?
• Does it seem they are offering content relevant to their target market and goals?

more to come soon....;)

Social Media Return On Investment? A different perspective





Do "likes" and retweets add up to sales? Who knows? And who really cares? We're in the I Love Lucy era of social-media marketing, a golden age of unaccountability.

THIS YEAR, AUDI RAN the first-ever Super Bowl commercial to feature a Twitter hashtag. Did you miss that watershed moment? Don't feel too bad: The hashtag -- #ProgressIs, a take on the carmaker's line "Luxury has progressed" -- flashed on the screen for just a second, near the end of a surreal and entertaining ad that featured millionaires trying to escape from a minimum-security prison, and a cameo by, who else, sax man and Lite-FM staple Kenny G.

In addition to pushing the hashtag on TV, Audi purchased a Promoted Trend ad from Twitter, and it hired Klout, a startup firm that combs through Twitter and Facebook in search of the most "influential" people online. Klout helped Audi find more than 1,100 people to reach out to about the campaign -- 200 of them received an Audi travel mug and flashlight. Klout's Audiphiles tweeted more than 12,000 times about the hashtag, creating a viral chain of Audi-related chatter online. The company then chose the best tweets containing #ProgressIs; the winner, @jetsetbrunette, won a trip to California to test-drive some Audis, and she also got to choose a charity to which Audi donated $25,000.

But what did Audi get out of all these influencers' tweets? Did the Twitter campaign prompt anyone to consider buying an A8, say, or to go into a dealership to test-drive one? Did seeing the #ProgressIs tweets at least inspire an outpouring of positive brand feelings toward Audi?

The company doesn't know. "Today the equation to measure that doesn't exist," says Doug Clark, Audi of America's general manager for social media and customer engagement. Audi has a full-time team monitoring its presence on social-media sites, it's constantly posting new content, and it has even held special events for the most devoted members of the online Audisphere. The best Clark can do to suggest that all this work has paid off is offer a study by Visibli, a social-marketing analytics company, which recently found that Audi has the most "engaged" fans of any entity on Facebook. Audi's more than 3 million obsessives apparently outshine even Justin Bieber's minions in their willingness to click the like button.

Clark concedes that, so far, he doesn't have any numbers to prove that all this engagement has resulted in, you know, selling more cars. Amazingly, the company isn't too interested in finding out, either. For Audi, Facebook and Twitter "are places where we know tech-minded consumers are active, where they're seeking to engage with the brand," Clark says. "But can I say that a fan is more likely to buy an Audi? No."

Audi, like almost every major brand in the world, is jumping onto Twitter and Facebook in a big way. EMarketer estimates that 80% of companies will participate in social-media marketing this year, nearly double the number of just three years ago. All of them are feverishly working to get consumers to "engage" -- to "like," to tweet, to comment, to share. And they're spending a tidy sum to do so. According to BIA/Kelsey, a media consulting firm, companies spent about $2.1 billion on social-media advertising in 2010; the number is projected to grow to nearly $8 billion in 2015.

The gold rush has inspired a wave of tech startups, like Klout, that are looking to help firms navigate the tricky social-ad scene. These companies promise to monitor and measure the impact of Facebook and Twitter campaigns, and to find the best ways to boost those efforts. Despite this technology, though, social-media marketing often feels like a throwback to the golden age of TV: At least so far, marketers can't predict or measure the impact of their campaigns with anything near the precision they're used to elsewhere online.

What's more interesting is that brands truly don't seem bothered by this. Being on the leading front of marketing while not having to account for their efforts liberates them. "We're trying different ways to help us better understand the 'value' of a Facebook like," says Brad Shaw, Home Depot's VP for corporate communications and external affairs, echoing several other social-media marketers. "But at this point, revenue is not the intent." Applied to social media, William Goldman's famous line about Hollywood would go something like this: Nobody knows anything, and they don't care. You're forgiven for wondering: #ProgressIs? #Really?

RANK AND FILE




LATE IN 2007, JOE FERNANDEZ, a young tech-obsessed guy, had to get his jaw wired shut for three months while recovering from surgery. The only way he could communicate with his friends and family, he says, was through Twitter and Facebook. But he found his medically imposed silence to be a revelation, rather than an ordeal. "I could tell people my opinion on anything instantly, and the people who trusted me were acting on what I said," Fernandez says. "It hit me that for the first time, word of mouth was becoming scalable and -- even more important -- the data about all of these interactions were available."

Fernandez quickly began working on a way to tie all these data into a comprehensive picture of each of our online lives. What he came up with was Klout's signature product, the Klout Score, an integer from 1 to 100 that summarizes every person's influence online. The score is determined by a number of factors -- including how influential your followers are and how many people retweet or respond to things you say online. It has become, in some circles, an important measure of influence. People are reputedly putting Klout Scores on their résumés, and a few brands, such as Las Vegas's Palms Hotel, are using Klout to identify potential online VIPs for preferential treatment. Justin Bieber, of course, is the king of Klout: He has a perfect 100. Everyone else is second fiddle. Barack Obama gets an 87, the Dalai Lama gets an 86, and Jay-Z struggles with a mere 67. (For the record, I earn a 64 -- good enough for "thought leader" status and probably the only time I'll be this close to Jay-Z in any public ranking.)

Klout has now amassed enough data to measure the influence of 75 million people online, and it can slice and dice these numbers. For instance, Fernandez says Klout can identify the most influential people who talk about sneakers in Seattle, or the most-listened-to tweeters on skin-care products in San Francisco. When companies come to Klout looking to target those influencers, the company can track how their messages echo across the social-media landscape. How many extra tweets did Nike get by focusing on those Seattleites?

But what Fernandez can't track is what happens when people read all those comments or tweets: Does the marketing change anyone's feelings about Nike? "I think we'll get there eventually," he says, musing that over time, brands will give Klout -- and other social-data-analysis companies -- sales information to correlate with online chatter. Still, the problem won't be easy to solve. For one thing, social-media marketing, unlike search ads, catches most customers when they're far away from making a purchase decision. This makes it menacingly difficult for firms to determine what ultimately led to a purchase. Was it something you saw on Twitter or Facebook three weeks ago, or was it the drive-time radio spot you heard this morning?

Wildfire CEO Victoria Ransom is bringing corporate Facebook fan pages to life via contests and sweepstakes. | Photograph by Robyn Twomey



That gets to the second reason that social-media marketing hasn't yet proved itself: So far, advertisers aren't asking for any proof, and that limits the ability of firms like Klout to figure out if what they're doing really works. "My life becomes a million times easier if I can show that if you spend $1 with us, you get $1.10 out," Fernandez says. But for many big brands, the amount of money being dedicated to marketing on Facebook and Twitter is small compared with the rest of their advertising expenses. "For a lot of our clients, what they're spending with us is coming out of their 'experimental' marketing budgets," he says. In other words, they don't feel much pressure to account for their efforts. "No brand is challenging us on this. We challenge ourselves way harder than any brand does."

One current alternative is to embrace less sexy, but more Internet-friendly, direct-response advertising models. "Sweepstakes, contests, and coupons have always been popular, long before the Internet was around," says Victoria Ransom, CEO of Wildfire Interactive, another Silicon Valley advertising startup. Like Klout, the three-year-old firm was founded by accident. Ransom and Alain Chuard came upon the idea while running their previous company, a global adventure-travel firm. They wanted to expand their firm's Facebook presence, "but we realized pretty quickly that we were going to have to give people a reason to become fans of our page," Ransom says. The company had run sweepstakes on its site before, but it found that translating those to Facebook wasn't very easy. "We figured we weren't the only ones facing that challenge," she says. The company created a way for all kinds of businesses to create their own promotional applications on Facebook. "Within a few weeks, we'd received calls from both Kayak and Zappos," Ransom says. "We went, 'Oh, maybe this will be bigger than we thought it would be!' "

Wildfire's twist is making sweepstakes and contests social. They're built as Facebook apps, and they're promoted widely on Twitter. Ransom says that Wildfire can often track the success of its campaigns by integrating with its customers' transaction databases. For instance, the firm recently ran a promotion for Jamba Juice that allowed people to collect a "lucky" coupon from Jamba's Facebook page. You'd only find out the value of the coupon if you took it to a Jamba Juice store, and some of the coupons would pay out cash prizes of up to $10,000. The campaign drove tens of thousands of people to Jamba Juice locations; every time someone used one of Wildfire's coupons to make a purchase, the smoothie chain could credit that customer to the promotion.

Still, Wildfire's campaigns suffer from a problem that's common with social-media marketing: Because they're so new, and because they often depend on catching uncertain viral cascades, their performance is difficult to predict. "If we put a dollar in the Google machine, we know exactly what's going to come out," says David Sobie, VP of business development at HauteLook, a Nordstrom subsidiary that runs a members-only, daily-discount fashion site. Sobie has run many campaigns with Wildfire, and he says, "We're often surprised -- things that we didn't think were going to take off have been incredibly successful. And others, where all the metrics suggested that something should have been successful, have turned out not to be."

Klout CEO Joe Fernandez, right, is creating an “influence graph” for social media and then adding brands to the mix. | Photograph by Robyn Twomey



NOT LONG AGO, I was offered a tour of the customer-service department of the future. It's a bright, gleaming space; costs almost nothing to operate; and boasts the friendliest, most knowledgeable representatives in all of American commerce. Where is this call center? And who runs it?

It's online. And it's run by you. Lithium, a 10-year-old company based in Emeryville, California, builds and hosts online discussion forums for companies to let their customers help themselves, and it's one example where social media already seems to be helping companies pay the bills. For companies like Comcast, which have high-profile rapid-response complaint centers, Lithium's technology has revolutionized customer-service operations, usually an expensive part of the business. CEO Lyle Fong estimates that Lithium's work revamping AT&T's online community resulted in AT&T saving 16% on telephone customer support in January 2011 compared with 2010.

We're a long way from Bieberville, but this being social media, no one wants to talk just about minimizing call volume. At Home Depot, Lithium powers a vibrant discussion site where customers discuss home-improvement projects and the products and instructions to use them. "We can look at how your users interact with each other on your site," Fong says, "and we can tell you, 'Hey, here are your community members who are going to be your most passionate fans, and if you treat them right, they're really going to give back.' " At Sephora, another Lithium client, the discussion site has become a place where some of the company's most feverish fans -- women who spend 10 times more than the typical customer -- log many hours offering advice to everyone who comes along.

Sephora hasn't calculated all the additional sales that this system has generated, nor the labor it might be saving now that its best customers, rather than employees, are answering people's beauty dilemmas. Bridget Dolan, Sephora's VP of interactive media, says that at some point, the company may decide to do just that. Right now, though, "we aren't saying, 'Does every dollar we spend turn into revenue?' " she admits. "No one here is hounding me for the ROI."


Tuesday 21 June 2011

Twitter’s New Follow Button



Currently, most websites include social media icons that link to their social media profiles; typically you will see icons for Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Twitter has just launched a Follow button, that when placed on your website, allows visitors to follow your Twitter account with a single click. No longer do you need to worry about your visitors being taken offsite to Twitter.com and then not making their way back to your webpage.



The current Twitter icon is second from the left, amongst typical social media icons:



The new Follow button is pretty straight forward. It keeps the two-tone Twitter blues and bird and will automatically have your account follow the account connected to the button if you are logged in to Twitter.



You can access the code for the Follow button to add to your website here: https://twitter.com/about/resources/followbutton

Vanity Fair’s main page is an example of the new Follow button in action:




The new process of following through the use of the Twitter Follow button:



The process of following through the use of the Twitter icon:



Don’t confuse the Follow button with the Tweet button. The Tweet button allows visitors to your website to share content from your website to their Twitter followers with a click of a button your website.

Examples of Tweet buttons:



http://twitter.com/goodies/tweetbutton

There are many benefits to using easily identifiable Twitter icons, the new one click Twitter Follow button and the Tweet button. Twitter continues to release new ways to enhance your website and increase engagement with your audience. We look forward to seeing how these onsite buttons will progress in the future.

Wednesday 15 June 2011

Facebook Testing Real-Time “Happening Now” Feed


Facebook has begun testing a new feature in the news feed that allow users to see what their friends are liking, sharing and commenting on in real time.

The Happening Now sidebar appears in a column to the right of the primary news feed, duplicating much of that content in shorter form, as shown in the screenshot above from Dazeinfo.

Users can click on an update to pull up more information without leaving the feed:

At present, most users see a list of upcoming events, recommended Pages, ads and pokes:

It’s not yet clear whether the updates on the sidebar have character limits, a la Twitter, but the resemblance to the Twitter feed is unmistakable.

Facebook says that it is only testing the feature with a “fraction of a percent” of Facebook users, but “may expand it to more people” in the coming weeks.


Google +1 The end of SEO as we know it?







Just copy and paste the following code into your site



Happy +1 'ing :) !!!

Thursday 9 June 2011

The Social Media Simplicity Toolkit


New York Internet Week is upon us again. On Monday morning, there was a panel hosted at the Four Points by Sheraton Manhattan Chelsea titled, “Social Media Simplicity Toolkit: How to Avoid Over Complicating your Brand Online”.

The panel consisted of Stephen Zangre, Manager of Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook; Jared Feldman, CEO & Founder of Mashwork, a social media listening software solution; Myles Kleeger, General Manager of Strategic Brand Partnerships at Buddy Media; and Chris Phenner, Vice President of Business Development at digital advertising firm TBG Digital. Karen Robinovitz, Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer at Digital Brand Architects acted as moderator.

The majority of the interactive discussion focused on brand presence on Facebook. Here are a few of the top takeaways from the discussion:

1. Less is More

All the panelists agreed: brands that keep things simple garner the most engagement. “More complicated is not the best course,” Zangre said. He noted than a simple, sharable consumer experience is often better than an advanced, complicated custom application. For contests, promotions and sweepstakes, the lower the barrier for entry is, the greater the engagement from consumers will be.

Kleeger also reinforced that brevity is aligned with success. In a recent study conducted by Buddy Media, Facebook Wall updates that were under 80 characters in length received 27% more engagement from consumers.

2. Don’t Sell, Engage

“Hard selling is a big mistake,” said Zangre. “Brands, it’s not all about you here [on Facebook].” Brands have to give their target consumers something useful and interactive to continually win over their attention on the platform and hopefully turn them into brand advocates. Brands should be cultivating relationships with their consumers, not barraging them by simply broadcasting only self-serving messages.

Feldman put it best with an interesting quote: “You don’t follow a comedian’s page because they are funny – you follow them because you want to laugh.”

3. Know Your Target Audience

The inevitable question of “how does my brand get more Likes” was asked. Phenner, a self-professed ‘Likes arms dealer’, discussed how knowing who your audience is and what their interests are is key. Research is paramount. “Know what the people you want to target are interested in, and then give it to them,” Kleeger added.

4. Be Able to Answer the Question, “Why are we on this Platform?”

It sounds like a simple question, but many brands jump into Facebook and other social media platforms (due to hype, because their competitors are there, because they saw an article about it) without being able to answer, “What does your brand want to accomplish by being on Facebook?”

The answer can vary widely based on the brand’s greater business goals, but there needs to be a clear underlying purpose for that brand’s presence on a social media platform that can then be measured against. All the panelists agreed that brands need to have goals and a comprehensive content strategy that caters to those goals before their Facebook presence even launches.

5 Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Business

This is written by a friend of ours, Tammy Fennell from Marketmesuite!

As more and more users flock to social media, small businesses must find a way to use these channels to reach their target markets. It can often seem daunting to cut through the social media clutter; however with these 5 strategies, you’ll be well on your way to social media marketing success.

1. Narrow Your target
For small businesses, it's important to connect with people in your geographic area, especially if you are a brick and mortar operation. Targeting your social media posts to a specific area or keyword set ensures that you are only interacting with viable leads.

There are hundreds of thousands of status updates getting published every minute, so cutting through the clutter has to be a top priority. Start small. Start out familiarizing yourself with tools like search.twitter.com, and you can eventually move on to using a more business-specific tool like CoTweet or Hootsuite.

2. Be Proactive
If you simply assume that “if you tweet, they will come,” you may be waiting for a long time. You need to find out who you should be interacting with and go after those people. Join Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, check out PeerIndex.net lists on your genre, and look at a person’s Twitter Grader score. There are so many tools out there whose sole mission is to make it easier to target your exact customer, so make use of them.

3. Some Automation Is Bad
When you’re having conversations with potential customers, you need to be real. Spam is one sure-fire way to turn people off. You want to start a conversation with qualified leads, and grow that conversation organically. You don’t need 500 people a day to respond to you. Instead, having 5 or 10 qualified leads will add much more to your bottom line.

Does this mean you can’t streamline the process? Of course not! Some automation is okay. For example, scheduling updates, pulling in from your RSS feed, these are all great time savers. It’s fine to even have a few templates ready to reply when you see people tweeting or posting on Facebook about something, but never automate the interaction because the results could be incredibly embarrassing.

Back in the day when these sorts of apps were allowed by Twitter, I tried an app for my antiques business that would automate replies without human interaction. I set it to look for a rare German figurine, and asked it to send them a specific tweet if they found it. Since I was not manually reviewing the matches, I had no idea that the same name of this German figurine was also a well-known Pokemon character. I had a lot of confused people @replying me. Templates are fine (there’s only so many ways you can answer a certain question) but make sure you’re reviewing who you are replying to!

4. Don’t Miss the Giant Gorilla
As a SME owner, you are expected to wear a lot of hats. When your social media hat comes off for a little while, you don’t want to leave your followers with nothing. Schedule some helpful posts for your followers, fans, and group members to read while you’re busy doing other things, but never leave them hanging for too long.

Social media is a great way to field a lot of customer requests, support, and even research. Set up searches for keywords related to your brand and put in the time to handle requests daily. Just make sure you set up enough ‘nets’ so you never miss the ‘giant gorilla’ in your business.

Because social media conversations happen in real time, you can usually put out a spark before it becomes a full fledged fire, often in 140 characters or less!

5. Give Others Credit
There are so many collaboration opportunities in social media. Retweeting is a great way to show your followers you have your finger on the pulse of your industry, but a big mistake is just posting a load of unattributed feeds as your own. You should always give credit to the original author of what you're tweeting. First, it shows your users you’re monitoring the field and curating some great content for them. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, it’s a great way to get the attention of the person whose content you are pushing. You can start a lot of great strategic partnerships with a simple “RT.”

Key Marketing Takeaway:
Social media sites are exploding with users. As a savvy business, you can focus your efforts and concentrate on creating interactions that will help turn the social media noise into traffic which converts.

For a business without a lot of time or a very large marketing budget, social media is a great place for a targeted interaction to become a viable lead.

Tuesday 7 June 2011

SEO tips for Facebook Pages


As Facebook becomes an increasingly important commerce platform, brands are starting to direct users straight to their pages on the site.

Unfortunately it can be difficult to get Facebook pages to appear in the SERPs, even for larger household names.

I thought it would be useful to take a quick look at a few Facebook Page optimisation techniques, and some of the more common SEO problems on the site...

First of all, time for a quick infodump:

In 2010 “Facebook” was the single most popular search term on Google, with almost 25bn separate search requests.

During the same period, Facebook reported that its own internal search had almost doubled, accounting for around 2.5% of US searches (and we'll look at this again later).

It's not a stretch to imagine that figure increasing significantly in the future, particularly as new generations of users become more comfortable with the idea of Facebook as a search engine.

These are massive numbers by any standard, and assuming that regular users aren’t always accessing the site through search then we can reasonably guess that the already huge social network is still growing, and fast.

Despite this a 2010 survey by Brightedge.com suggested that of 200 major Fortune 500 bands on Facebook, 70% did not appear in the top 20 Google results, even for brand specific search terms.

There are a few reasons why it can be difficult to gain decent SEO traction using Facebook, but let’s start with an obvious one:

Google and Facebook hate each other.

OK, so that’s a provocative and not-quite-entirely true statement, but for the SEO in the street, it can be a frustratingly accurate one.

Despite the professional rivalry however, optimising for external search is actually fairly straightforward. Facebook releases limited data onto the external web, so initially at least you can dispense with a lot of the more complicated under the hood tinkering you take for granted with a regular site.

Let’s look at what’s out in the open:

Likes

There’s a lot of talk in social media about influence, but on Facebook, popularity counts for a lot.

How you go about getting extra ‘likes’ is an entirely different kettle of fish, but in general the usual social buzzwords apply: Relevant, regular, engaging content please.

URLs and naming conventions

The most visible element on the web. Keep it succinct and branded. It’s also worth thinking about other channels you operate on.

If your Twitter account is @GreatDonuts, don’t call your Facebook page ‘We make Great Donuts’. That may sound obvious, but it’s often overlooked.

Privacy

Not to be patronising, but there is occasionaly confusion over privacy settings and in the past I have come across a few page owners who’ve inadvertently locked their page down.

While there are cases when you only want to display content to fans, do a quick double check to make sure anyone can find you easily.

Multimedia

Unless you're a band, that's images and videos to you. I’d hope that any serious marketer would already optimise here, but it’s easy to forget to name or tag a Facebook picture properly, especially if you’re adding it using an external CMS.

Again, consistency counts.

Info and about

These are one of the most important places to put your keywords. Get a good SEO copywriter to optimise your information page.

Most visitors won’t read the information page, but it’s a good place to park some dense, keyword-heavy copy. Similarly, you’ll also want to put your brand name (or better still, a link) in the ‘about’ box.

Everything else...

Since the reintroduction of iFrames, every landing page is a separate company microsite as far as SEO goes, so make sure you’ve put aside enough time and resources to optimise everything on them.

Don’t (just) rely on being popular to generate authority. Again, consistency and attention to detail will help.

Unfortunately there is a fairly limited lifespan for most social media.

Most posts on Facebook receive around half of their ‘Likes’ in the first 90 minutes, before slowly grinding up to around 95% a day or so later, so you have a fairly small window of opportunity.

It’s also relatively hard to build a legitimate link-building campaign around a tab unless you are doing something long running and particularly awe-inspiring there, and you will also run up against UX problems.

Usually tabs won’t have optimised navigation, so directing to older content can confuse users. In addition, fresher content is generally more likely to appear in the SERPS.

As mentioned, all of these are fairly straightforward, but unfortunately that’s not the end of your SEO efforts.

Never mind the SERPS

It’s often said that Facebook is a walled garden, and the wall holds whichever side of it you are on. Facebook is now well on its way to 700M users. Another massive number, and as any social guru will tell you, one that businesses can’t afford to ignore.

Always remember that for Facebook users, being redirected to your site to purchase is often a major turn-off.

Facebook are on Facebook –they don’t want to be on your site. This has seen a lot of companies leaping into the F-commerce arena in an attempt to lower abandonment rates.

Whether you are setting up second home or considering ignoring platform instability and throwing all your eggs into Facebook’s basket, once all those searchers have found Facebook, they like to stay there.

From an SEO standpoint, this means that concentrating entirely on SERPS might not be the best tactic, instead, you may want to focus on Facebook’s internal search.

Whenever you type a search term into Facebook’s autocomplete search bar and hit enter, Facebook takes you directly to the top-ranked page.



In many cases these are determined by sheer popularity, but there are also a number of other weighting factors that can help get you into the drop-down menu that appears.

Yes, there is a ‘search more’ option, but unless they have a very specific page in mind, most users will never bother with a second click.

Optimising for Autocomplete
Again, Facebook centres its search results around personalisation, and beefs things up a bit with a learning algorithm.

It’s far from perfect, but search for ‘Pizza Hut’ once or twice, and Pizza Hut will begin appearing in your results every time you type in ‘PI’. A feature which could be especially useful for local businesses looking for repeat visits.

Again, autocomplete factors are based around user names, your history, and your friend’s history.

These are then balanced against various features and apps, and here’s where we run into trouble.

While optimisation isn’t complicated, it’s subject to change based on Facebook’s whims and there doesn't seem to be any cohesive logic behind how things are weighted, so it's probably better to optimise across the board to be on the safe side.

Let’s look at our main targets:

Pages and posts


Keywords are what matters here. When setting up a page use best practice and keep it branded and succinct. There’s little you can do about personalisation other than targeting users with a lot of friends geographically using ads.

Questions

Facebook is currently promoting Questions. They’re weighted heavily, so get you community manager asking away as often as possible.

So far, Questions don’t seem to feature in external SERPS either, so again we’re reminded of the importance of internal search and Facebook’s desire to wall its users.

Optimisation is again pretty straightforward:

1.Keywords in title and answers
2.Links in answers: You can link directly to related pages within the 'Add options' field for Questions. So far there's no real data on how this affects authority, but it's obviously beneficial to add your own or affiliate pages in here:



Groups and Apps

Groups and apps don’t appear to be hugely important to Facebook, possibly because they may conflict with the interests of branded pages. Areas to remember include:

1.You or an immediate friend is a member/user
2.Number of total ACTIVE members.
3.Keywords in the group title and content.
Oddly enough some research has suggested that Admin name might also be a factor here, particularly if there’s a keyword in the name. In other words, if your name is Johnny Axe-deodorant, your group could do well…

All these factors are pretty walled-in, so short of PPC it can be a struggle. Keep stuffing those keywords and inviting friends/employees/family pets etc...

Events

With the advent of Places check-ins, Events have become more important for general page traction but are otherwise relatively unimportant and difficult to optimise.

Various quirks in Facebook search mean that obvious factors like location or number of attendees don’t seem to have a massive effect, but it’s safest to assume that some or all of these will be indexed, especially as Places becomes increasingly important. Cover your bases and keep it simple:

1.Frontload keywords in event titles.
2.Gather as many ‘I’m attending!’ replies as you can.
Even if there’s no SEO payoff, there is some virality to be grabbed from events so it’s a useful PR tactic.

Incidentally (and please be very, very careful here), you can also directly invite users to events by email, so this could be a good way to initially build a following.

In addition to these, you might want to consider targeting Bing! more as it's now powering the internal web results and it isn't unreasonable to assume that it will be featuring Facebook results more prominantly in the future than Google, and it's always worth putting keywords into your general wall posts as a matter of course.

For the moment, optimising Facebook pages is a fairly straightforward, albeit time-consuming process. The results and effects of your efforts may be subject to change however so overall it makes sense to cover as much as possible.

Much of the on-page optimisation might charitably be called grey hat as well, with a heavy reliance on keyword stuffing, so never underestimate the importance of good copy. In addition it appears that shorter updates and titles (Under 80 characters) are more appealingto users. Make sure you have solid, optimised copy across your page, and while there is a lot of talk about influence and relevance in social media, there’s no doubting that on Facebook, sheer popularity also counts.

Friday 3 June 2011

5 Reasons To Get In On Facebook Commerce Now

Here are five reasons why now’s the time for Facebook commerce.

  1. Facebook is already a mall
  2. Users will start spending more time on business pages
  3. Your customers are on Facebook
  4. Facebook commerce can relevel the playing field for retailers
  5. Facebook Credits and Deals will make shopping convenient

However, there are hurdles to getting going with Facebook commerce, namely:

  1. The growth of platforms with the potential to host commerce is greater than just Facebook — no one should be assumed to be down for the count, especially the startup that’s still just a few notes on an iPad.
  2. Brands can effectively bring Facebook technology to their existing websites with satisfactory results; that may not change.
  3. As shopping becomes increasingly conducted on mobile devices, F-commerce appears to be even farther behind the pack than Facebook’s other mobile initiatives.