Social Media Marketing Made Easy

Attracting Users to a Social Network

2012-03-09T03:18:00.002-08:00

Post New Content Daily

The first and most important goal that should be accomplished through social networking software is to create new content everyday. A website that gets stagnant will not be able to be utilized to attract new consumers. They will begin to get bored and move on to something else. But this can be prevented by posting new articles, blog posts, press releases and photographs on a daily basis. The information that is placed on the website can even be updated two to three times a day to keep it as fresh as possible for the consumer. This is a great way to get more attention on the website.

Make it Entertaining

Placing boring articles on the website will not get the attention of new users. That is why the content that is posted on the social networking software should be fun and engaging. Articles and blog posts should reflect the content that can be found on the website as well as be entertaining to the consumer. And pictures should depict the latest products and services which are being offered by the company. Have fun with the content while still remaining professional and ensuring that all items posted reflect the good reputation that the business has built.

Gear it Toward the Consumer

The way to attract new consumers and keep older customers coming to the website is to create content that they want to see. The clients will leave feedback through the social networking software. These comments should be used to find out what the consumer wants to see and the type of content that they enjoy. From there the business can create article, blog posts and photographs that meet the standards that the consumer has set. When they see the content that they requested, it will keep consumers coming back everyday and the company will have no problem attracting new clients.

Make a Commitment

When you begin to build a social media presence, make a commitment to the website. Make sure that you are able to post content through the social networking software on a daily basis. This will allow you to attract new consumers to the website as well as keep existing consumers coming back for more. These posts can come in the form of wall posts, blog entries as well as articles which center around the type of products and services that the business sells.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6910295

5 Facebook Tips For Business

2012-03-08T03:22:00.000-08:00

When Facebook started gaining momentum, thanks to the increase in its number of users, the idea of connecting with people excited not only the members who gamely created profiles for themselves. Business owners began to see a huge potential that could change the landscape of buying and selling by readily reaching out to the more than 150 million users who are actively using the platform.

Businesses of any scale are now strategizing their approach towards using the strengths of Facebook in driving site traffic towards their respective pages. However, because of the grand scale that has to be dealt with, there is reason for businesses to get intimidated, causing a momentary standstill while weighing options. Below is a helpful list that will guide you through the basics so you can maximize your Facebook experience.

1. Start by creating a business profile which will serve as your official account. This is where users can send their inquiries through Facebook messaging/chat.

2. You can double the marketing presence by creating an official Facebook Page. This is quicker since users only need to hit the "Like" button to subscribe to your page and not wait for your confirmation to their friend request. Once you appear in the user's profiles, your updates will also appear on their news feeds. The more widespread the subscription is, the better the chances to go "viral," resulting to a boost in SEO rankings.

3. Gear up on promotions and special occasions by creating Facebook Events. If someone responds and accepts the invitation as a confirmation that he/she is going to the event, this update will be seen by those belonging in the network of the said person.

4. Update regularly. Just enough that your presence will be felt, but not too much that it will cause users to unsubscribe from your updates for the nuisance caused by spamming.

5. Do not create an account just for the sake of exposure. Remember that once your page is out there for the public to see, you have to interact with users by responding to questions and comments. Your page is their alternative to reaching you faster online with their concerns. You can filter them out according to relevance, but just don't miss the chance to talk to the people, because eventually they will become influencers.

These cited above are just some of the things you can start working on to widen your online network. However, it is best to understand first what you want and need, because the use of social media platforms also depends on the type of your business and the marketing strategies you want to focus on.

Moreover, these strategies may need to be altered and changed in accordance to changes to the platform, as they have done recently. This is why using us for consultancy and/or management is highly beneficial for your online presence to keep up with time. While users are either throwing fits or expressing appreciation over the recent changes in Facebook, your main goal is to adapt to permanent changes that the site will enforce for your business page and strategies to stay on top of its game.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6850653

How To Write A Great Twitter Bio

2012-03-07T03:32:00.002-08:00

Twitter allows you only 160 characters (about 20 words) for your bio. That means your bio must capture the attention of a potential follower in only a handful of words. Writing 20 words shouldn't be tough, but it's actually harder to write succinctly than it is to write at length. But if you take the time to write a good Twitter bio, you will reap the rewards in more ways than one. This article provides four great tips on how to write a great Twitter bio that will make people interested in following you.

Tip #1 - Include Your Area of Expertise

Your expertise should be included in your bio, showing off what you are good at. This is the moment to show off your skills so that people can decide if there's something they can learn from following you.

Tip #2 - Use Your Keywords

Don't neglect your keywords. Using relevant keywords in your bio helps people who have the same interests to find you., and will also help you show up in search results. In addition, using keywords in your bio will help you pop up in Twitter apps that group users together by interest. For example, can you guess what keywords this bio is targeting? "The latest happenings in social media, plus tips on using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare and more." If you guessed "social media" plus the four major social media sites mentioned, you'd be correct.

Tip #3 - Mention What You Offer

Mention what you offer within your profile. Show potential followers how useful you can be to them. Here's an example: "Beer hawker, entrepreneur and owner of The Good Beer Company. Food fanatic. Avid geek. Blogger and social media enthusiast." When you read this bio, you instantly see what they offer.

Tip #4 - Write with Personality

Last, include a peek at your personality in your Twitter bio. Personality takes a profile from ho-hum to intriguing - someone others will want to follow. In the example above, you get a sense of the writer's personality from the use of words such as "hawker", "fanatic" and "geek". Someone who uses those types of descriptors is probably casual, unpretentious and enthusiastic about his interests.

Tip #5 - Get Help

If you're stuck trying to come up with a good Twitter bio, ask for help. If you have a friend or colleague who has a way with words, ask them to write a bio for you. Or simply ask a couple of people to give you feedback on the first word that comes to mind when they think of your name or your business. Combine those words and you'll have a great Twitter bio. You can even ask for input on Twitter!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6903743

6 Tips To Gain More Customers With Your Social Media Marketing

2012-03-06T06:30:00.000-08:00

Social media marketing is the wave of our business future and you must learn to utilize it now or your competition will. No matter what industry you are in, you must get a social buzz going to add creditability to your business. This is the bottom line. Here are 6 simple tips to get you started.

Tip 1: If you have employees why not ask them to put their personal blogs on your company website. Having your employee's blogs on your website shows your consumers and employees that you are a company that cares about their employee's perspectives. Sharing your company's values with the world will make your marketing brand more pronounced and solid.

Tips 2: You must stay on top of your social media sites and if you the business owner cannot then you need to hire someone who can. You need to blog at least once a week and Facebook every other day. Also use LinkedIn and Twitter at least once a couple times a week. If someone follows your company on Twitter you should follow them back. Making sure you stay active in your social media outlets will show consumers that your company is grateful for their customers and that you care about what they have to say.

Tip 3: Give out something for free at all of your social media outlets. Depending on the product or service you sell. If you are a marketing company you could give away a free Ebook about website promotion. If you are a veterinarian you could give out pink and blue collars. You must make sure you give away something that pertains to your industry. You are only limited by your imagination and your budget.

Tip 4: You can increase your social media reach if you tie in all of your social sites with each other. You will need to make sure all of your templates from each social media site will match your company's website. Your company brand is very important. By tying all your sites into your website your company literally can reach billions of online consumers.

Tip 5: Your company can sign up for free with Twellow to find people who are in your industry. Twellow is the yellow pages for Twitter users. Also sign up with Tweepi to get people and businesses that are targeted to your industry niche.

Tip 6: Look at the most popular social media sites within your industry. What is their niche? Can you do it better? What about their page grabs your attention? You should use these pages to get an idea of how you want your sites. You need to figure out how to set your company apart from others. Give consumers a reason to come back to your social media site and to share your updates. You should make sure you do contests and offer free stuff that has a real perceived value.

When you are doing a special sale make sure you put all the information about your sale on all of your social media sites. Another great way to keep customers coming back is to offer special discounts each week. Your goal in social media marketing should be for consumers to get to see a side of your company that they do not know. Get your brand identity out there and consumers will feel personally involved and will be back for more. By implementing some or all of these tips you will see how social media marketing reaches a whole new market demographic and can be extremely lucrative for your company. Till next time, I wish you vast success in all of your social media marketing endeavors.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6904734

6 Changes With Facebook Timeline

2012-03-05T02:26:00.000-08:00

Today Facebook announced to brand marketers the world over that, within the month, everything they knew about fan Pages on Facebook would be overturned. While you get your brand ready for the new Timeline format, here are six important changes to keep top-of-mind.

1. Updated Look and Feel
What’s new: The format of Timeline for brands is quite similar to Timeline for personal profiles. It employs a cover photo at the top of the Page, and the Page is separated into two main columns by a dividing line, which represents the passage of time. This format provides brands with new options for self-expression: They can outline their corporate history with milestones (such as product launches, store openings, etc.) to construct a narrative for their audience.   

Recommendation: Milestones present an important and dramatic opportunity to educate the public, humanize the brand and remove a perception of corporate anonymity. Our analyses of Page engagement have continually shown that brands posting content that depicts behind-the-scenes activities, exclusive updates or promotions encourages user interactions and promotes higher engagement rates. Using interesting milestones to craft the story of the brand over time (and updating the Timeline with new milestones as they happen) can help to stimulate conversations around major achievements.

2. Reduced Tab Visibility
What’s new: The new Timeline format does not have the left-side panel of links, which could include hundreds of different tabs. While applications still exist, they’ll display differently, in rectangular panels underneath the cover photo. The width of the Timeline and the space allocated for native apps like Photos means that only three tab panels are viewable at any given time. To see more, users must expand the tab panel by clicking a drop-down box.  

Recommendation: For marketers, this major change means that the three above-fold tab apps need to be considered carefully — this will be one of the first things users see when interacting with your brand on Facebook. Brands will want to switch up which tabs are visible “above the fold,” according to current company objectives or project popularity. A good Page analytics tool will be useful for determining which tab to promote on a day-to-day basis.  

3. No Default Landing Page
 What’s new: With the new Timeline Page format, you will no longer be able to set a default landing Page, a favored feature for many savvy brands. The option was one of the primary ways to control the first (branded) impression a user encountered. Since there are no more tab Pages, there is no way to set one as a default. This will drastically change user impressions when they first visit a brand’s Timeline Page.   

Recommendation: You will need to apply new and careful attention to all the top messages in the Timeline, as they will be the first objects seen by visiting users. Likewise, Facebook ads for brands will become ever important, as ads will be one of the major ways brands on Facebook can control a user’s experience. Setting up an advertising campaign for a Facebook promotion or new application will be the only way to guide new and clicking users directly to that application (as landing on this Page cannot be achieved by default).
  
4. New Way to Feature Content
What’s new: One major new feature that marketers will love is the ability to “pin” certain posts to the top of the Timeline. Similar to marking a blog post “sticky,” so that it remains at the top of a blog for a specified period of time, pinning a post to the top of Timeline allows it to precede any other content. A pinned post is distinguished by a small, orange flag. Brands can pin only one item at a time, and the pinned item then exists in two locations — as the top item on the Timeline itself, as well as within its chronological place. Once unpinned (which happens automatically when a new item gets pinned, or the item has been pinned for more than seven days), the post remains in the chronology of Timeline posts, but there is no visual history that it was pinned in the past.   

Recommendation: Since you can no longer create a default landing Page, pinning items to the top of the Timeline will become every marketer’s go-to strategy for highlighting new and interesting content. We will begin to see savvy brands design posts specifically to be pinned, whether images, a well-designed call-to-action, a statement about brand value, or a message calling for the user to click one of the tab panels under the cover photo.
  
5. Current Tab Content and Applications Become Outdated
 What’s new: The new Timeline layout displaces Facebook’s existing Page tab configuration (including a tab’s 520-pixel width), and replaces it with a new 810-pixel layout. As a result, existing Page tab content will look centered in the middle of the 810-pixel layout without any adjustments. All applications that remain on a brand’s Page will need new application icons (the new dimensions are 111×74).

  Recommendation: The most pressing updates for brands will be to update the images and tab functionality of the above-fold two apps. As these are the first tabs users will see, they will likely be the first to be interacted with, or entirely ignored if not optimized for the new experience.  

6. Private Messages Between Brands and Users
What’s new: Finally, brands will be able to send and receive private messages with users. This allows for much deeper consumer interaction, and will also enable Page managers to take extended customer inquiries off the Timeline and into a private message.   

Recommendation: Be mindful of noise in the Timeline. Since the real estate allocated to each post depends on how engaging it is or how much interaction it has received, it can be easy to clutter your Timeline with customer inquiries. When these inquiries can be better serviced in a more one-on-one manner, reach out to the consumer with a private message and resolve her question. It’s a good opportunity to yield both a happy user and a clean Timeline.  

Timeline for brands will certainly shake things up for social media marketers who seek to make an impact on Facebook. One thing is for sure though: The way content is shared and viewed within a Timeline Page is incredibly important. Brands that constantly create engaging updates and share important milestones will stay at the forefront of users’ attention. Create and rotate new apps for engagement, pin relevant and timely content, and update the feed with user-friendly dialogues to stay relevant in this new space.

Six Google+ Business Page Tips

2012-03-02T02:35:00.000-08:00

Here are six steps to help your business grow in Google+ influence and in search engine results.

These steps will increase your chances of getting seen on Google+, and more importantly, help Google drive traffic to your page.
#1: Fill Out Your Page

The first thing you need to do is create a page for your business. For step-by-step directions, check out Kristi Hines’ How to Set Up a Google+ Page for Your Business.

As you’re setting up your business page, focus on using keywords as you fill out the Introduction in your Google+ page’s About section. Use both the keywords you want to rank high on and the keywords your customers are using.

And as you fill out this section, be sure to think about what would be attractive to your customers. The day Google opened business pages, Chris Brogan tweeted:
brag tweet

Read over your page and ask yourself if it's bragging about how great your business is or if it's engaging your customers.
#2: Add Links Throughout Your Page

Google+ business pages allow you to add links in lots of different places. Take advantage of it! You are able to create links in the Introduction section.

In the image below, you see examples of inserting links as phrases (like “fundraising training”), as a web page (like “FundraisingCoach.com”) or as a straight web link (like “http://fundraisingcoach.com/subscribe/).
google plus about page link opportunities

Help drive traffic to your own site by using all the link opportunities on your Google+ page.

These links will help you get found in searches. And more importantly, they will help customers go directly to your website.
#3: Make Use of the Hover Text

As with setting up personal Google+ profiles, you can influence what people see when they mouse over your business name in Google+. They might do this when searching on a topic or simply responding to a post.

So you’ll want to have a compelling, short tagline.
hover card

The tagline both explains your business and fills in the "hover card" on other parts of Google+.

google plus hover card

The extra words on this hover card come from the business' tagline on their Google+ page.

You can see that only the first five words of the tagline made it onto the hover card, so make them count!
#4: Promote Your Business Page Everywhere

One of the best ways to get people to follow your Google+ business page is to let them know you have one! In addition to putting the link in your email footer and on all of your other social media pages, you can add a badge to your site.

Google+ offers a way to make a badge. But a prettier way to make a badge is to use a site like Widgets Plus. This site allows for an impressive amount of customization.
Widget

Adding a badge to your site allows people to circle your business without having to go over to Google+.

Including an interactive badge helps people circle you while on your site. They don’t have to go to Google+ to do it. As soon as they circle you, they’ll be able to see your updates in their news feed.

Getting people to circle you is crucial. Being in more people’s circles, or having more Google+ followers, improves your position on regular Google searches.

And at this point, businesses can’t circle people until people have circled them first! You’ll want to be aggressive in telling people about your Google+ page so you’ll be able to share with them too.
#5: Get Your Employees on Google+

Because your posts are generally only seen by the people who’ve circled you, you want to encourage your employees to set up personal Google+ profiles. You can’t tell them how to use those profiles. But you can ask that they add your website as a link in their Links section. You should also ask them to share your business page and its posts with their friends.
#6: Be Interesting

Steps 1-5 set the foundation for Google+ dominance. But only interesting posts will keep you there. Unfortunately, interesting is defined by your customers. Here are some tips to make your posts interesting:

Experiment across platforms. Try posting the same updates on Facebook and Google+ and see where you get the better response. You’ll be surprised at how the followers interact differently.
Try posting your blog in Google+. If you already have a blog, rather than simply posting a link to it in Google+, try posting the text and the link in an update. Posts that take up more of someone’s news feed seem to gain more traction than the Twitter-like 140-character updates.
Use pictures and video. Pictures and video work incredibly well on Google+. People are far more interested in sharing images then straight text posts.
Be quirky. Google+ users are very interested in sharing and commenting on quirky posts. So if there’s any way for your business to do something quirky, it will help people become interested in you. One great example is this picture of a Crockpot from Jeremiah Owyang. Posted soon after Google+ opened, his question generated lots of conversation about food and workplaces.

quirky update

Being interesting on Google+ involves a willingness to be a bit quirky.

What could you ask your followers that would make your company seem more “human” and generate comments?
Google+ Is Open for Business

While still new, Google+ is open for business. And it will benefit your business both in search engine results and increased interaction with customers.

Twitter Is Selling Your Old Tweets

2012-02-29T02:47:00.002-08:00

Twitter has sold a bunch of old tweets to a firm called DataSift, which will analyze them for marketing purposes.

The Mail Online reports that DataSift is the first such company to get access to the tweets, which go back two years. Another 1,000-plus companies are on DataSift’s waiting list.

DataSift confirmed the report to Mashable, but Twitter could not be reached for comment. The former has launched a product called DataSift Historics, which lets companies extract insights and trends that relate to brands, businesses, financial markets, news and public opinion, a rep says. DataSift will analyze public tweets, not private ones. If you delete a tweet, it’s deleted from DataSift’s archives.

Selling old tweets would be one way to monetize Twitter’s archive. So far, Twitter’s focus has been on building revenues by advertising to its 100 million or so active monthly members rather than selling its data.

Twitter makes the bulk of its revenues through advertising. A private company, Twitter doesn’t disclose its finances. However, eMarketer estimates that Twitter will earn about $259.9 million this year and $399.5 million in 2013.

The latest revelation is sure to rankle privacy advocates, who have so far focused on Google and Facebook. Both of these companies have been accused of having too free a hand with consumer data.

What do you think? Do you care what Twitter does with your old tweets? Sound off in the comments.

Google Launches iOS App For Blogger

2012-02-28T03:18:00.000-08:00

Google has finally launched an iOS app for Blogger, giving the blog network’s millions of users a simple way to write, manage and publish posts from their iPhones.

The app, available for iOS users 3.2 and up, is rather straightforward. It allows users to compose and publish blog posts complete with photos and geotagging. It also lets users view and edit their published and draft blog posts. It mimics the simplicity of the Blogger for Android interface, though. Users can also manage multiple blogs from the interface.

While the app works for the iPad, it only works in compatibility mode. Hopefully an iPad app is in the near future.

This is the first official Blogger app for the iPhone. BlogPress created an unofficial app that Blogger endorsed, but an official app has been long overdue. The blogging service, once the world’s largest blogging service, has been overshadowed by WordPress, Tumblr and more lightweight competition. Google recently started investing in an overhaul of the service in an attempt to make Blogger relevant once again.

What do you think of Blogger and its new iOS app? Let us know in the comments.

Facebook Hits New Traffic Record

2012-02-24T04:54:00.003-08:00

With its most recent privacy backlash seemingly behind it, Facebook surged ahead to a new traffic record in the U.S. during the month of June. According to comScore, the social network pulled in more than 141 million unique visitors in the U.S. during the month, beating its previous record (set in May) by better than 11 million.

Year-over-year, Facebook’s traffic has nearly doubled, from 77 million unique U.S. visitors in June 2009. As a result, as you can see in the chart above, Facebook has blown past its social networking competition –- most notably MySpace and Twitter, both of which have shown little growth in the past year according to comScore.

Twitter, however, is quick to point out that it is still seeing record traffic in terms of tweet volume, a result of users accessing the site through third-party clients and mobile devices instead of its website.

In any event, Facebook’s continued growth puts it within striking distance of Google for title of most visited web property in the U.S.; the search giant had a total of 179 million unique visitors across its sites in the month of May.

Is there any end in sight to Facebook’s growth? At the moment, a recent survey suggesting teens are starting to suffer “Facebook fatigue” is about the only bearish news to report about the social network, but there is that pesky movie about the company’s controversial beginnings that hits theaters in October.

38 Million Americans Visit Social Networks on Mobile Devices ‘Near Daily’

2012-02-24T04:50:00.002-08:00

by Peter Pachal 6

Are you reading this story on your phone via a link on Twitter, Facebook or some other social network? You’re not alone.

A new study by research firm comScore says 64.2 million U.S. citizens use their mobile devices for social networking, with more than half of them doing so “almost every day.”

A full 38.2 million people use social networks on their phones or tablets on a “near daily” basis, according to the report. What exactly are they doing? Reading updates from friends, the study says, with 84.6% of mobile social networkers checking out “posts from people known personally.” Posting status updates was the second most popular activity, with 73.6% of users partaking. It’s important to note comScore counts reading blogs as social networking.

While the study found users are most likely to read posts from friends, it also says people are increasingly using their social networks to interact with brands and organizations. Almost 58% of U.S. users read posts from companies or brands, and about 32% are said to be likely to click on ads while social networking.

The overall number of people experiencing social networks through their phones or tablets is surging. That 64 million figure is up 77% from the year before, and daily users are up 88%. That growth is tied directly to smartphone adoption, which comScore says is up to 41.8% of the phone-owning audience — up from 27% just a year ago.

SEE ALSO: Social Networking on Mobile Devices Skyrockets

The top app that people use to get their social on is Facebook. On both iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) as well as Android, Facebook is the top social-networking app on mobile. Twitter is a distant second, much lower in the ranks than Facebook and even placing behind the social game Words With Friends on both platforms. (The list of top apps on iOS and Android is below.)

Although mobile social networking is rising rapidly, it’s not the reason people buy a smartphone. The study says a particular phone’s social-networking abilities was far down the list of factors in a purchase decision, the No. 1 being the network quality of the mobile service provider. The phone’s operating system and overall app selection also rank highly.

How often do you get social on your smartphone or tablet? Do you think the comScore study accurately reflects how people use social media on mobile devices? Let us know in the comments.

Twitter unhappy about Google's social search changes

2012-01-11T14:45:00.000-08:00

Twitter has complained about changes made by Google to integrate its social network Google+ into search results.

The new feature, called Search plus Your World, will automatically push results from Google+ up the search rankings.

Tweeting on the news, Twitter's lawyer Alex Macgillivray described it as a "bad day for the internet".

Google is determined to push its social network in the face of continued rivalry with Facebook.

The current changes were about even greater personalisation, it said. It already includes personal search history in its search algorithms.

The three changes are:

Personal Results - which enable users to find information such as Google+ photos and posts, both their own and those shared specifically with them, that only they will be able to see on their results pages
Profiles in Search - both in autocomplete and results, users will be able to find people they are close to or might be interested in following
People and Pages - helps users find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable people to follow them with just a few clicks.

"Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more," said Amit Singhal in the firm's official blog.

"But clearly, that isn't enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they've shared with you, as well as the people you don't know but might want to... all from one search box," he added.

Twitter's general counsel Alex Macgillivray tweeted in response to the changes: "Bad day for the internet. Having been there, I can imagine the dissension @Google to search being warped this way."

Mr Macgillivray had previously been employed at Google.

Twitter expanded his point in an official statement.

"For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results any time they wanted to find something on the internet.

"Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we've seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and tweets are often the most relevant results.

"We're concerned that as a result of Google's changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that's bad for people, publishers, news organisations and Twitter users."

Google hit back at the criticisms.

''We are a bit surprised by Twitter's comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions," it said in a statement.

This refers to a technical barrier which makes it difficult for Google to rank Twitter information, a spokeswoman explained.

There is also little sharing between Google and its other big rival Facebook.

Stepping into the growing row between the three firms, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told MarketingLand magazine that his company was not favouring its own social network over Facebook and Twitter. He said that all would be treated equally if the two rivals granted the search giant the right permissions to access their content.

Search expert John Battelle said in his blog post that social search would mean little until Facebook and Google settled their differences and offered consumers what they really wanted - Facebook data integrated with Google's search.

"The unwillingness of Facebook and Google to share a public commons when it comes to the intersection of search and social is corrosive to the connective tissue of our shared culture," he said.

Social Media in Plain English

2012-01-04T11:46:00.000-08:00

Twitter is dead. Long live, Twitter!

2011-12-09T06:27:00.000-08:00

Twitter is dead. Long live, Twitter!

The Internet’s most popular microblogging service got a major upgrade today, rolling out a brand-new look and a bunch of new features. The update is the most comprehensive and wide-ranging change Twitter’s ever done, revamping its website, its apps for both iOS and Android, and even its recently acquired social-media integrator, TweetDeck. Here’s a closer look at what Twitter’s done and why.

What’s Different
When you visit the new Twitter, you can quickly see the site’s been reorganized in some key ways. Everything fits into one of four labels:

Home: This is your old news feed, only better. Whereas before media in tweets like photos and videos was viewable on the side, now you can see them right in the tweet (you still need to click). You’ll also be able to see information about @replies and retweets for a particular tweet by selecting “Open,” a new option. Twitter says your feed will now appear “consistently” across platforms. which apparently was a problem before.
Connect: This is where all your @replies and mentions will be. Not a lot new here, but Twitter says you can type in someone’s handle will let you learn more about the person and connect instantly.

Discover: Twitter appears to have supercharged its search functions and put the results here. More than just a place to look for trending topics and hashtags, Discover will identify stories and trends based on your connections, location and language.
Me: Here’s your Twitter profile, made bigger, neater and with more activity recorded. Your information now appears on the left instead of right.

Twitter’s mobile apps have been given the same four-column treatment, with streamlined interfaces and a new design. In a subtle change, the old pen icon for drafting a new tweet has been replaced with a quill.

On the back end, Twitter’s updated its API to allow embedded tweets (more on those in a bit) and some better interactions with various other apps and platforms, like WordPress (disclosure: WordPress is Mashable‘s content management system).
Why Twitter’s Doing It
Twitter says it wants to make its interface more inviting to new users, while giving existing users better functionality. But there’s no doubt that a large part of the change has to do with accommodating ways to drum up revenue. Twitter has recently been experimenting with ways to point users toward its advertising services, though it’s done so clumsily at times (case in point: the ill-fated “dickbar” on the iPhone, named after Twitter CEO Dick Costolo). The redesign brings with it opportunities to steer users toward sponsors, specifically through the new branded pages (see below).

What’s Gone
We’ll have more information on this after we’ve had a chance to give all the new Twitter apps and the site a thorough hands-on, but on iPhone it appears users can no longer copy and paste from a tweet. Users no longer can translate tweets in other languages. Options to mail, repost, or save links to Instapaper appear to have been removed. And the redesign makes it less convenient to switch accounts.

An important difference on the Web interface: Profile names are now emphasized whereas the user’s “handle” was front and center before.

(Thanks to Mashable readers for pointing out many of these changes.)
Embedded Tweets
If you have a website, you can now embed individual tweets on a page. It’s sort of like Storify, but just one tweet at a time. From the embed, you can retweet, reply or favorite the tweet, and you can follow the user as well — all without leaving the page. Links and other dynamic content remain active.

You can see the option to embed a tweet on any tweet’s “permalink” page, accessible via the new Open button. Importantly, tweets that are on private accounts won’t give you the option. Twitter told Mashable. For more on embedded tweets, check out our hands on.

Twitter also improved its buttons that appear on many websites. Now a Tweet button can include a specific hashtag or @mention, an easier way for sites to get their readers tweeting to specific people and about specific things.
Brand Pages
Just like Facebook and Google+, Twitter now has brand pages for companies. Although many, if not most, companies already had their own Twitter accounts, brand pages allow for more functionality and interactions with followers.

A report in Advertising Age says brands will be able to customize the page with large logos and extended taglines. They’ll also be able to promote tweets in the timeline on their own pages, letting them highlight their best content. Brand pages don’t cost anything, and they’re available to companies large and small.
User Reaction
According to a poll of Mashable readers, many users (almost 41% of respondents) love the new changes, saying that the site is “easier to use,” “fantastic” and “pretty kewl.” Some have risen concerns about the features missing in iOS and the necessity of the change, however.

On Twitter itself, the overall response appears to be positive, with many users reacting with enthusiasm. Most of the negative reactions have to do with mobile, with a few also complaining about the usefulness of “Discover.”

In contrast to some of its earlier moves this year, Twitter appears to have handled its platform-wide revamp deftly, and the majority of is users are pleased. If it can work out some issues on the mobile side, it may have scored a home run. But the real question will be if the new Twitter can actually serve the company in the area that matters most to all companies: making money.

Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better with Tony Robbins

2011-11-15T12:07:00.000-08:00

Have you ever wondered why perhaps your online business isn't where you want it to be?
Despite what you have tried, you may feel that something has been holding you back, but what?

In this video, Tony Robbins speaking at the famous TED conference, who has had a huge influence on the success of our business, shares with you some of the reasons why.

The great news is that you can see Tony in LONDON for the first time in years in May of next year.
He has a 2 for the price of 1 offer which is incredible which EXPIRES this Friday so take our advice and sign up and we will see you there at the fire walk !!!

Find out all about it here ...http://www.amiando.com/e/ffizno

Click HERE to make 2012 your best year ever!

Are We Missing the Big Picture of ROI in B2B Social Media?

2011-10-31T14:53:00.000-07:00

Most B2B companies either think that social media is not worth investing in or they just can’t see the ROI of social media. The answer you will get most of the time is, "My clients are businesses and they are not on social media."

Are we missing something here? Did we forget something?

Some social media experts have said that the ROI of Social Media is that your business will be here in 5 years… Ok I can see why they say that but are we missing the big picture?

Are companies paying attention to social media? Do they read status updates on Twitter and Facebook? Are companies interacting with their potential clients on social media?

Let’s read that last questions again, are the actual companies on social media? Isn't it the case that behind companies there are actually real people?

Companies are managed and run by real people, real people are social, they enjoy conversations and value authentic relationships, and more than 70% of this people are on social media.

Few months ago I went to a live interview with a well-known successful business owner, investor and entrepreneur Lord Alan Sugar and when he was asked to describe a normal day in his life he said, “I wake up in the morning, I have my coffee then I sit at my computer and read what is happening in the world using Twitter.” This is what many business owners and decision makers are doing these days .

What is the ROI of social media?

A single successful interaction with a single person who influences a multi-million dollar deal can often justify social media investments.

How much longer will businesses miss the big picture?

Here are 7 steps to start implementing social media in your business
Know your audience; are they local or worldwide? Which industry? What are their needs? Are they using social media? If they are, what social networks are they on?Are the employees on Social Media?
Choose the right social media channel; not all social media channels are right for your business. This will depend on you knowing your audience and the type of industry they are in.
Create a social media marketing plan; treat it as part of your traditional marketing plan, this might become the most effective part of your plan over the next years.
Create community; it's not about followers, it's about brand advocates. It's not about followers; it's about active followers, it's about people waiting for the information you share and following your lead.
Choose the right content; create leadership content to keep high-level decision makers engaged
Measure the results on all social media strategies you implement to invest more in the ones that bring the best results
Reward your followers. You will get more coverage in the press and attention to stand out from the crowd.

It's no longer about whether to do or not do Social Media; it's about how well we do it.

How to Move Your Facebook Tabs to Secure Hosting Required by Facebook

2011-10-10T02:03:00.000-07:00

Heads up, page admins! As of October 1st, Facebook announced that any iFrame page tabs not hosted on a secure server under HTTPS will not be displayed to users browsing under HTTPS. This article will tell you what you need to do.

According to Facebook’s Cat Lee, ”The content will not be accessible for users with secure browsing turned on. There will be a page that states something close to: This app does not support secure browsing.”

To help page admins locate a budget-friendly and secure hosting solution for their page tabs, I did some digging and located some great hosting companies offering low-cost secure hosting solutions.

There are certainly others, and I have provided some guidelines for making the right hosting choice. I have also laid out some of the basics of hosting and security certificates.
Facebook and Secure Browsing (HTTPS)

In February, Facebook introduced the “Secure Browsing (HTTPS)” option. Since then, when browsing under HTTPS, any page tab content not hosted securely displays a popup with a warning that the page is not secure. Users have to click on the popup before viewing the tab content.

Page tab creators had the option of providing a “Secure Page URL” to display to HTTPS users. As of October 1, a secure URL is mandatory, and page tabs not hosted securely will no longer be displayed to users browsing under HTTPS.

What Is Secure Browsing (HTTPS) and How Do I Get It?

When a web page is hosted on a server enabled with the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) protocol via a security certificate, content sent between a user’s browser and the server hosting the secure web page is encrypted, and no one can intercept confidential information such as credit card numbers, Social Security numbers or any other information you type into your browser.

All web hosting companies offer security certificates in most of their hosting plans, either a shared SLL certificate, where all sites on a single shared server are sharing a certificate, or a private SSL certificate, available to websites with a unique IP (web address). For Facebook page admins, the shared SSL is a low-cost and workable choice.
Shared SSL Versus Private SSL

If all you need is an affordable option for hosting your page tab’s “index” page (the iFramed page you host yourself), you can consider plans that offer shared SSL on a shared server, which is the cheapest option. Although not a good choice for an e-commerce site, shared SSL is fine for meeting Facebook’s requirement for a securely hosted page. Beware file size restrictions on shared SSL!

In researching this article, I did notice that BlueHost and HostMonster (both owned by the same parent entity) put a file size restriction of 100KB for each embedded file on your page (images, audio, video, etc.) which would be far too restrictive for most iFrame page tabs. But I didn’t see this shared SSL restriction anywhere else.
Some Popular Web Hosts That Offer Low-cost Secure Hosting

The following hosting companies all offer low-cost hosting, and most include a shared SSL option. I did some informal polling on the HyperArts fan page and the following companies stood out.

Note: “Bandwidth” is the total amount of data transferred from the server each month and this number increases as your website is accessed more often; “disk space” is the total amount of storage space that is provided for the files associated with your site, including log files and MySQL databases (but not email).

DreamHost has been around for years and is generally well-regarded. However, DreamHost doesn’t offer shared SSL, and their phone support, which costs extra, is minimal.
Minimum for secure hosting: $14.15/mo. (hosting: $8.95/mo. + private SSL: $1.25/mo. + unique IP: $3.95/mo.)
Bandwidth and disk space: unlimited
Support: 24/7/365 email support (response within 24 hours), premium support (3 phone callbacks/mo. + unlimited live chat) add $9.95/mo.
Hosting Plan Comparison

BlueHost offers a full array of budget hosting options. Although they offer shared SSL, there is a file size limit on each page of 100KB per included file, and BlueHost warns that “any embedded data (images, audio clips, etc.) larger than 100KB will be truncated.” So this limitation may not work for you.
Minimum for secure hosting: $5.95/mo. (with shared SSL)
Minimum for private SSL: $12.20/mo. (hosting: $5.95 + private SSL: $3.75/mo. + unique IP: $2.50/mo.)
Bandwidth and disk space: unlimited
Phone support: 24/7/365
Hosting Plan Comparison

HostGator is a popular budget hosting company in Texas that’s been around since 2002. They offer several very low-cost hosting plans, including the “Hatchling” plan beginning at $3.96/mo. and the “Baby” plan for $6.36/mo.
Minimum for secure hosting: $3.96/mo. (with shared SSL)
Business Plan (includes unique IP + private SSL): $10.36/mo.
Bandwidth and disk space: unlimited
Phone support: 24/7/365
Hosting Plan Comparison

Lunarpages, although it seems more geared to business-level hosting, does offer a “basic” low-cost hosting package, but no shared SSL.
Minimum for secure hosting: $18.15/mo. (hosting: $4.95/mo. + private SSL: $8.25/mo. + unique IP: $4.95/mo.)
Bandwidth and disk space: unlimited
Phone support: Mon-Fri 7am-7pm PST; Sat-Sun 7am-3:30pm PST
Email support: 24/7/365
Hosting Plan Comparison

InMotion Hosting is another popular hosting company that offers the full range of hosting services, including budget packages.
Minimum for secure hosting: $5.95/mo. (with shared SSL)
Bandwidth and disk space: unlimited
Phone support: 24/7/365
Hosting Plan Comparison

Although GoDaddy states that its primary business is domain registration, they have also become a popular hosting company, offering the full range of hosting options. Although I tend to like hosting companies whose primary business is hosting, GoDaddy seems to have a pretty good reputation. However, they do not offer a shared SSL plan.
Minimum for secure hosting: $14.99/mo. (unique IP + private SSL)
Bandwidth: unlimited
Disk space: 150GB
Phone support: 24/7/365
Plan Comparison

HostMonster, located in Utah, has been around since 1996. It appears that HostMonster and BlueHost are owned by same entity, although their prices and offerings differ. Like BlueHost, HostMonster offers shared SSL but has the 100KB file size limitation, which may be a non-starter for those considering this company. They offer just one hosting plan, with optional upgrades and add-ons.
Minimum for secure hosting: $5.95/mo. (with shared SSL)
Minimum for private SSL: $12.20/mo. (unique IP: + $2.50/mo. + private SSL: $3.75/mo.)
Bandwidth and disk space: unlimited
Hosting Features
What to Consider When Selecting a Hosting Company

When choosing a hosting company, the devil’s in the details. Here are some things you should consider:
How many domains can be hosted under the account? This can range from one to unlimited
Does the hosting include free domain registration? Many hosting companies are also registrars and offer a free domain registration when you sign up
Does the hosting company offer 24/7/365 phone support? Most, if not all, will offer 24/7/365 email support, but I’m much more comfortable if I can get someone on the phone when my site goes down
What are the restrictions on bandwidth and disk space? These days, many plans offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space, or at least very large limits
How do different plans compare? For each host, go to their plan comparison page and study it carefully
Web host review sites: There are many from which to choose. Web Hosting Geeks is a good one, but there are many others

A well known dictator struggling with his Twitter followers!!

2011-09-23T04:04:00.000-07:00

10 things you need to know about Facebook's latest update

2011-09-22T08:40:00.000-07:00

Facebook has this week revealed two major changes to the social network’s design in a bid to give its 30 million UK users more “real-time” information.

Now when you log in, you will find a new ticker in the top right of the screen providing “live” details of what your friends are doing.

This can include items such as comments left on other people’s statuses, pictures and video your pals may have added and any new friends they’ve accepted.

Facebook bosses hope these changes will encourage users to respond more quickly to what is happening on the site.

As well as the Ticker, a new-style News Feed has also been introduced. It now ranks updates by what Facebook believes are your ‘Top Stories’, rather than putting them in chronological order.

The more you interact with the automatically chosen Top Stories, telling Facebook which are important and which aren’t, the more the technology will learn what you want at the head of your News Feed.

On Facebook’s blog, its bosses promised: "Now, News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper. You won’t have to worry about missing important stuff any more. All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top. If you haven’t visited Facebook for a while, the first things you’ll see are top photos and statuses posted while you’ve been away."

These updates are slowly being rolled out over the next few days so if you don’t see it on your account yet, have patience.

And to help you make the most of this latest Facebook redesign, we’ve come up with some handy tips below. We also want to know what you think about it too. Do you like what Facebook has done or should they have just left things as they were? Leave us a comment.

1) You cannot remove the Ticker but you can make it smaller Just click over the double line at the bottom of it until a double arrow appears and then move it up and down.

2) Hovering over an item in the Ticker will bring up a larger window on the left of it showing any comments, photos, video, maps or other images associated with that post.

3) If you’ve not logged in to Facebook for a while, the News Feed will display the best posts from your friends for the period of time you’ve been away. It automatically places posts higher in the list according to a number of factors including the type of update – for example a birth, marriage or engagement – or those with lots of comments and Likes.

4) A small blue triangle in the top left of a News Feed post signifies it as a Top Story. Clicking it unmarks its Top Story status and tells Facebook not to put others posts like that one at the head of your feed. The more you do this, the more Facebook learns what type of updates you consider most important. You can also choose to make something a Top Story by hovering over the top left and clicking the blanked-out triangle to make it appear fully.

5) Hovering over the top right hand side of a News Feed post brings up a downward pointing arrow. Select this to display a menu of options. This allows you to choose what updates you wish to see from any particular friend or page you’re subscribed to and allows you to remove their posts totally from your News Feed.

6) Facebook now displays photos and videos much larger in your News Feed. Clicking one creates a bigger pop-up of the image. This can then be tagged, commented on or Liked. To close it, just click outside of the pop-up box.

7) If you don’t want details of how you are using Apps to show up in the Ticker, go to Application Settings and click Only Me under the Customise menu. This means no one else will receive updates on your app use but you will need to do this for each app you interact with.

8) Top News and Most Recent are now combined as two separate elements in one News Feed. You simply scroll down to see the recent ones rather than clicking a button to make these appear in their own feed.

9) If you’ve hidden posts, friends or other updates from your News Feed, you can call them back again by editing it. Click the pencil icon next to the words ‘News Feed’ in your left hand menu and then select Edit.

10) To customise your News Feed even more, you can use the Lists option. It is on the left hand menu. Add people to different Lists that already exist such as Close Friends or Family or create your own ones by selecting “More”. Then by clicking the List name, you’ll generate updates in your News Feed only from the people in that list.

What do you think of the cahnges? Comment below to let us know!

Why companies watch your every Facebook, YouTube, Twitter move

2011-08-31T07:55:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time companies could afford to be rude. Unhappy customers would grumble to a few friends, withdraw their custom, but there was little else they could do.

Today, they still tell their friends, but they do it online, using social media websites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Take the Canadian folk singer, Dave Carroll. After nine months of complaining he had had enough.

United Airlines baggage handlers had damaged his $3,500 guitar, but the airline refused to pay compensation and its customer service agents were less than courteous.

So he made a music video about the experience and on 6 July 2009 posted it on YouTube. Within three days it had been watched half a million times; by mid-August it had reached five million.

United had a massive public relations crisis at its hands, not least as thousands of other unhappy customers now came forward to vent their frustration.

These days one witty Tweet, one clever blog post, one devastating video - forwarded to hundreds of friends at the click of a mouse - can snowball and kill a product or damage a company's share price.

It's a dramatic shift in consumer power. But what if companies could harness this power and turn it to their advantage?

Not everybody gets it. Not long ago the communications team of a multinational retailer was taken by surprise when journalists called to ask about huge technical problems in half their UK stores.

The team did not monitor Twitter and hadn't heard about the crisis; the journalists did and had.

The boundaries between news and social media are getting more and more fuzzy," says Jorn Lyseggen, chief executive of Meltwater Group, an online media monitoring company.

"Social media is like a toddler, but nobody yet knows what promise that toddler holds," he says.

But a rapidly growing number of companies - from young firms like Meltwater, Attensity, Radian6 and Alterian - to business software giants like the SAS Institute - is offering help.

What's the social media story?

At Alterian, for example, the social media database currently holds about nine billion postings, with 50 million more added every day.

At the most basic, these tools measure the volume of social media chatter. Researchers at Hewlett Packard showed that they can accurately predict a Hollywood movie's box office takings by counting how often it is mentioned on Twitter before it opens.

It gets trickier when companies try to measure "sentiment", whether the deluge of social media comment is positive or negative.

When bad is good

Click to play

Rory Cellan-Jones: Why Starbucks wants to have millions of Facebook 'friends'.

It's a crude science, with accuracy levels as low as 60%, as analysis falls victim to slang and subculture. "This movie kills" can mean something different in Bradford to Boston.

Some social media tools don't allow users to customise their "sentiment dictionaries"; other firms like SAS throw plenty of business analytics and teams of linguists at the problem, which in turn makes their tool more of a fit for companies with deep pockets.

But even the best software would probably judge the tweet "This board is really bad" as a negative comment, although it might be the ultimate praise among skateboarders.

One European clothing company, popular with inner city youth in the United States, admits privately that its social media team is baffled by its customers' ever changing slang, and even the online Urban Dictionary provides little help.

Social media is quickly becoming a customer relationship management system, as companies have "for the first time access to people's minds in real-time," says Jorn Lyseggen. The tools on offer provide companies with dashboards that show trends, hot topics, the reach of brands, customer mood and how competitors are doing.

Most companies are still cagey about showing off their dashboards. After all, this is their reputation laid bare ... although what they see is hardly a secret: anybody (with enough money) can subscribe to a social media analytics service and do the very same research.

High impact

Social media may be all the buzz, but in reality "only a few firms get it [and use it], it's of peripheral interest for most", says Tom Austin at technology consultancy Gartner. Few realise that using social media has become much more than customer service and reputation management.

Click to play

Steven Georgiadis from SAS explains how social media monitoring works

For the comms team at German company Hotel.info, marketing without Twitter or Facebook is already unthinkable.

The hotel reservation company, with websites in 17 languages, started dabbling with social media a year ago, to see whether its customers were happy - and to monitor how it compared to rival reservation services.

Throughout the day a team of five checks the Meltwater dashboard. "I can't imagine us not using social media anymore," says marketing manager Deniz Guen.

Not only does it help to keep customers happy, social media campaigns, she says, have a much "higher and immediate" impact than traditional marketing.

When hotel.info advertised a picture competition through both its email newsletter and Twitter, both generated about the same number of submissions.

Probably unremarkable, except the newsletter goes to 2.2 million subscribers, while its various Twitter accounts have just 12,000 followers.

When Ford introduced the compact Fiesta car in the US market, it offered 100 people the chance to drive the car, on condition that they review the cars using social media.

On YouTube, the Fiesta videos were viewed more than 6.5 million times, and - more importantly - towards the end of the campaign more than 50,000 people had expressed an interest in buying one.

Early warning system

Spot the difference: the fake BPGlobalPR account has 188,366 followers...

With few exceptions, for example computer maker Dell, social media do not work as a direct selling tool. But, carefully used, it allows companies to build passion for their products and services.

Most importantly, it can act as an early warning system when something goes wrong.

But many social media tools are poorly integrated into the corporate workflow, says Steven Georgiadis, head of customer intelligence at SAS.

If your system tells you that your customers are unhappy about a product or service, it can be mission critical that the tool immediately alerts the team in charge of it.

It also makes business sense. Good use of social media can reduce complaints and costly calls to a service centre, says Ian Campbell, chief executive of Nucleus Research.

... while the official BP account has a mere 18,481 followers.

But there are dangers. Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway warns that the obsession with social networking can make management lose focus.

If a company needed a random tweet to alert them to a problem, surely something was wrong in the first place.

And if a company asks the social media database the wrong questions, then it will get the wrong view, and draw the wrong conclusions, warns Malcolm Lightbody, programme manager at SAS.

Clumsy companies

To survive the world of social media, companies have to throw away their old marketing playbook.

If they don't get it right, at best they look as awkward as Dads joining their daughters on the school disco dancefloor.

At worst they will experience a meltdown like oil giant BP during the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, when the firm first ignored social media, and then saw its official Twitter account @BP_America mercilessly lampooned by the fake @BPGlobalPR.

What's the buzz? Social media tools show whether a company is in the firing line

Even in normal times social media marketing has its quirks. Offering big prizes in competitions may work for newspapers but flops on Twitter, report social media marketers; but when the prize is Twitter-sized, the impact can be huge.

One important rule, says Tom Austin, a social media expert at consulting firm Gartner, is try to sound genuine, "don't push... and don't pretend you are hip".

Just as readers can quickly tell whether a chief executive's blog is really written by the boss or the PR team, Twitter and Facebook don't lend themselves to hammering home the corporate message.

"Once companies have worked out that they should do something with social media, they usually don't know how to do it," says David Eldridge, chief executive of Alterian.

Gartner's Tom Austin warns: "If you want to influence the people who influence your customers, that's a very powerful game, but it's also very dangerous if you get it wrong."

Meltwater's Jorn Lyseggen calls it "super-scary" and says he "would caution companies who want to enter social media before they are ready".

It works best, believes Mr Austin, when companies "add value" to the Twitter conversation, for example by giving fans sneak previews, or providing advice and feedback.

However just 6% of companies feel ready to engage in such one-on-one conversations with their customers, according to a survey by Alterian.

The holy grail of social media metrics

As companies are getting to grips with social media, the very business model of customer relationships looks set to change.

What if the shopping website you visit presents you with special deals on cameras because it knows that you talk a lot about them online.

Creepy, some will say. Better service, reply the corporate social media visionaries.

But first they have to find the holy grail of social media monitoring: identifying who is truly influential amidst the cacophony of voices.

Don't be fooled by numbers; it's not about how many friends or followers somebody has, but whether they make an impact.

Reputational economics

Web ventures like Klout and Peerindex, with tools that are more rough than ready, are already turning this into a business.

They claim to be able to measure the influence Twitter users have on specific subjects.

Soon social media software could alert a hotel receptionist that the scruffy guy checking in deserves extra courtesy because he is likely to mention it to 10,000 "friends".

When Virgin America recently launched new routes from California to Toronto, it used Klout to identify a small group of social media "influencers" and gave them free flights. This generated thousands of tweets, triggered press coverage and delivered more immediate impact than traditional advertising.

Josh Klein, a technology consultant and author of Hacking Work, calls it "reputational economics", where both customers and companies spend their social capital to get the best deal.

"Consumers are spending their attention on social media," he says, but firms don't know how to repay them properly. "There's no manual for that yet."

There probably never will be.

Social media are dynamic, and today's Twitter may be tomorrow's forgotten website. "Don't assume that what works today will work tomorrow," says Tom Austin at Gartner. "Your model has to be continually adapted."

Facebook Facts 2011

2011-08-16T10:52:00.001-07:00

Via: Social Media Frontiers

Google to Acquire Motorola Mobility

2011-08-15T05:45:00.000-07:00

Combination will Supercharge Android, Enhance Competition, and Offer Wonderful User Experiences

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. & LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. - Aug. 15, 2011 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: MMI) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Google will acquire Motorola Mobility for $40.00 per share in cash, or a total of about $12.5 billion, a premium of 63% to the closing price of Motorola Mobility shares on Friday, August 12, 2011. The transaction was unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies.

The acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a dedicated Android partner, will enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem and will enhance competition in mobile computing. Motorola Mobility will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. Google will run Motorola Mobility as a separate business.

Larry Page, CEO of Google, said, “Motorola Mobility’s total commitment to Android has created a natural fit for our two companies. Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers. I look forward to welcoming Motorolans to our family of Googlers.”

Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility, said, “This transaction offers significant value for Motorola Mobility’s stockholders and provides compelling new opportunities for our employees, customers, and partners around the world. We have shared a productive partnership with Google to advance the Android platform, and now through this combination we will be able to do even more to innovate and deliver outstanding mobility solutions across our mobile devices and home businesses.”

Andy Rubin, Senior Vice President of Mobile at Google, said, “We expect that this combination will enable us to break new ground for the Android ecosystem. However, our vision for Android is unchanged and Google remains firmly committed to Android as an open platform and a vibrant open source community. We will continue to work with all of our valued Android partners to develop and distribute innovative Android-powered devices.”

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals in the US, the European Union and other jurisdictions, and the approval of Motorola Mobility’s stockholders. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2011 or early 2012.

LinkedIn sees 120% rise in sales

2011-08-05T03:38:00.000-07:00

Business networking site LinkedIn has reported a 120% rise in revenues between April and June in its first results as a publicly-traded company.

Revenues hit $121m (£74m). Net profit rose to $4.5m from $4.3m a year ago.

In May, LinkedIn became the first major social networking site to go public, looking to cash in on investor appetite for social media firms.

But many analysts say that after the dotcom boom of a decade ago, we have now entered a social media tech bubble.

LinkedIn priced its shares at $45 in May, but the share price more than doubled on its first day of trading.

A $100 share price values the company at about $10bn, although the price has fallen to about $95 a share since then.

The LinkedIn website allows users to create professional profiles online and share them with others.

Investment planned

Ken Sena, analyst at Evercore Partners, said that the company's numbers for the April to June period had to be good to support the "lofty valuation".

Its membership base increased 61% on the same quarter last year to 115.8 million.

Chief executive Jeff Weiner said in a conference call that the site was adding about two members every second, and that it had more than 120 million members as of Thursday.

LinkedIn's profit was a much better result than expected, with most analysts forecasting a loss in the quarter.

The company itself has warned that it will not be profitable in 2011 as a whole, as it seeks to expand by investing aggressively.

Too Busy For Social Media Marketing Could Be Fatal

2011-07-10T01:28:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who runs a nationwide “traditional” business, and business has been down, like it has been for most people. I suggested that he add some social network marketing initiatives, and his answer was he is “too busy.” He is not alone, according to a recent study, which concludes that only 47% of companies use social media today for marketing, despite the fact that 78% of executives polled feel it’s critical for success.

What’s the problem? It seems to me that there is abundant proof in the marketplace of the financial returns to both large and small businesses, the low cost of entry, and the ubiquity of social networks. Dell announced years ago that it had earned $3 million in revenue from using Twitter, and other businesses report daily on increases in web traffic up to 800%.

I suspect that a good part of the problem is that startup and small business owners still don’t know where or how to start. They don’t know if they should move to social networks for lead generation, branding, customer loyalty, or for direct marketing and e-commerce. My advice is to pick one, start slow, and spread out as you learn. Here are some specifics:

Create a business profile on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. A business profile starts with a business account using your company logo as your picture (avatar), rather than your photo or a picture of your cat. If you are in consulting, you are the business, so use a professional headshot. Don’t mix your personal and business profiles or messages.
Develop a marketing strategy specific to this media. Don’t use the same message on Twitter you developed for email blasts and postcard blitzes. Social media demands two-way communication, rather than outbound only. Read everything you can about viral marketing. It’s not free, so budget appropriately, but not excessively.
Start social networking with peers. Pick a base, such as LinkedIn or Facebook, to be your community, and work the territory, much like you may have learned to work a room of peers at a tradeshow or convention, or local business organization. Find out what other people are doing, and what works for them. People love to share what they know.
Experiment with social media tools. The basic tools are the platforms like Twitter and Facebook. But don’t stop there. There is TweetDeck to help you use Twitter, and YouTube for video sharing. A most valuable tool is WordPress or TypePad for blogging. You need these to add the human element to your business or service.
Proactively learn from the experts. Maybe it’s time to sign up for a few free Webinars, or even invest in an expert consultant in this area. Successful people don’t wait for their kids to teach them about new technologies, or wait to be the last one on the block to try new things. It’s all available for “free” on the Internet, but your time is a valuable resource.
Define relevant metrics and measure. That means first take some baseline measurements of, for example, lead arrival rate today, and costs associated with your current media marketing. If you don’t have this baseline, you will never know if you are making progress. Then continue to measure and learn what works, at what cost.
If used correctly, I guarantee you that social media marketing can improve your business with new leads, by bringing traffic to your website, creating a buzz around your product or brand, creating inbound links to increase your search engine ranking, and improving loyalty and trust with your customers. How could you be too busy to work on these things?

Of course, if you found this blog though your own initiative, I have to give you credit for being ahead of the pack. So print it off and deliver it to a friend who is not so high-tech. My challenge to you, then, is to kick it up a notch! When is the last time you produced a video for your business, or a podcast, or sponsored a contest with free gifts? Or are you too busy?

Day 1 of our Live workshop today in London

2011-07-09T04:19:00.000-07:00

Right now sitting at the back of our workshop in London, Paul explaining our strategies on Twitter and everyone seems really interested and interacting with us.
We have a full room and everyone came here early, its great to see people so motivated!
Later on I will be sharing our strategies on Facebook, it is great to be able to have these Live workshops and be able to have 1 to 1 with all the people here, that is way we keep our workshops to very low numbers, so we can get to interact with everyone and make sure they come out of the workshop been able to just keep running their business online.
Here a look of how our workshops are....

Facebook integrates Skype video calls

2011-07-08T10:29:00.000-07:00

Kicking off what he promised would be the start of “launching season 2011” as well as the start of a new era of social networking, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced an integration deal between Facebook and Skype during an event at company headquarters in Palo Alto. The service will allow Skype users to see Facebook updates within the Skype application, and Facebook users will be able to video chat with each other.

Skype jumped the gun and pushed its Facebook integration page live before Zuckerberg had actually gotten around to announcing the deal at the press conference, and Facebook’s own blog followed suit.

See more of our latest Facebook coverage
or add an alert for future coverage of Facebook.

Social networking has evolved into an era in which the question of whether or not this concept would grow into a real movement has been answered, Zuckerberg said. He confirmed that Facebook now has 750 million users, but downplayed the number as less important now that Facebook has become nearly ubiquitous in much of the world: “You don’t measure the value of the Internet by how many people are using, it, you measure by the quality of the apps and how people are using it.”

The new video chat service is just part of a redesigned chat service that lets Facebook users only see the friends they exchange the most messages with in their chat window, as opposed to just anyone from their friends list who is online at a given time. Facebook also launched a multi-user chat service that lets you set up a chat conversation with three or more people as part of the new chat service.

But it’s the video chat that will get the most attention, given Google’s recent launch of Google+ and its Hangouts feature. Skype is the engine for this service, and it’s pretty simple: just click on the name of one of your Facebook friends and click a video icon to request a video chat. Group video chat isn’t available yet, and it’s also not available on mobile, but the video service is rolling out to Facebook users over the course of the day.

It’s an interesting gambit for Skype, given that Facebook has more users than Skype and the service would allow people to bypass Skype’s desktop application completely. Skype CEO Tony Bates pitched his company’s participation as a gateway to the Web for Skype, a company which is pretty much a standard voice-and-video-calling service on the desktop computer and has rolled out several popular mobile applications.

But users of Skype’s application will also be able to do a lot of the things they do within Facebook right from that application, such as read status updates, post new status updates and chat with friends. And Business Insider reported that the two companies are working on a way for Facebook users to call phone numbers, perhaps using Facebook’s budding payments system, Facebook Credits. That’s something Google (NSDQ: GOOG) also allows from within Gmail Chat, although Google’s service is free inside the U.S.

Of course, it’s also worth noting that Skype is folding into Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), a large investor in Facebook with close ties to the social networking service. Zuckerberg said that Facebook and Skype were working on the integration project anyway when the Microsoft-Skype deal started to take shape and pushed ahead once they both realized that Microsoft—perhaps Facebook’s biggest friend in the tech industry—wouldn’t stand in the way of anything.

10 Things to Consider As You Move to Google+

2011-07-06T14:30:00.000-07:00

Something interesting is happening with Google+. We’re all freaking out because we can’t import our Facebook and Twitter friends.

Here we’ve spent years (in most cases) building communities on something we don’t own and guess what? Our friends and fans aren’t moving to the newest platform with us. Or they are but we don’t know it because not only do we not have their email addresses, we don’t have their Gmail addresses.

This is why it’s so important to build community on a platform that you own. Sure, you need all the social tools and the content curation and the fun apps that make your stuff look cool, but they all should drive people back to something you own.

In this case: A database.

Following are 10 things to consider as you add the newest social network to your toolbox.
1.Who are your customers, prospects, and referral network? You have to know this. And you should be building a database of everyone’s email addresses. You can do this through blog subscriptions, newsletters, and registered content. Yes, you need to have Twitter and Facebook and (now) Google+. But you have to be driving those people back to something you own, where you can collect their data. We don’t know yet what or if Google will be providing businesses, in terms of data on its customers, so best to collect it yourself now
2.It’s hard work and you must be willing to do it. And this doesn’t mean just on the social platforms. It means with content and building community and engaging your audiences and stroking their egos by commenting on and sharing their content.
3.Your content had better be good. If it’s not all good, publish only that which is. If that means you only publish a blog once a week or a white paper once a quarter, so be it. If you’re charging for content, price it accordingly, but make sure it’s better than anything else in the industry. Find different ways to share your content. Things such as an Instagram feed of photos from work, a Tumblr blog of those photos, a podcast series of two minute segments that help your audiences, or videos that show how your product works in the real world.
4.Video. I mention video above, but there had better be tons. And it all needs to be on YouTube and then embedded on your blog and your website. We do this in the sidebar of Spin Sucks and on the home page of Arment Dietrich. It’s easily shared in about, oh, three seconds. Don’t worry about making it professional or snazzy (sorry, Tony Gnau!). Buy yourself an HD camera (I have a Flip, though they’re going to be extinct soon, and it cost me $150) and start shooting stuff. Even your phone will do.
5.Access. As a consumer, how exciting is it when the CEO answers your email or allows you to voice your concerns? Steve Jobs (though not very good at it) does this and it blows people away. Granted, we’re not all Steve Jobs, but people want access. Maybe it’s once a week or once a month. Add the element of surprise and do something simple like answer the customer service line or return emails. It will go a lot further than any PR, advertising, or marketing campaign.
6.Virality. I’m not saying you can plan to make something viral, but you never know what is going to go so you have to do a lot. What will spread (cough, a blog post about nothing, cough) is what you least expect so don’t be afraid to put something out there that isn’t perfect. People like to know that we’re all human.
7.It’s not about the numbers. It’s about making the web work for you 24/7. It’s about monetizing new products and services via the social platforms. It doesn’t matter if you have 100 followers, or 100,000. If only 50 of those 100 or 100,000 buy, those are the 50 you need to engage. And let’s be real. Wouldn’t you rather have 50 percent of your followers to buy than less than one percent?
8.The A-list sucks. You’re not a star. None of us are. Read Geoff Livingston’s guest post about this on Danny Brown’s blog. Think about it. Absorb it. And then do business just like you’ve always done…by treating your customers, prospects, and advocates like human beings whose opinions matter to you.
9.Add in some personal. No one likes to talk to the person at a cocktail reception that can only talk about work. The same goes online. I built a Tumblr blog of the recipes I create. People love this. It’s automatically shared on Twitter and I get as many, if not more, comments on that stuff as I do all the business content I post. And I tweet maybe once a day; every other day most times.
10.Grow from the bottom up. Just like in real life, we all have to start somewhere and that means the bottom, in most cases. You want to look like you’re all about your community; your customers, your prospects, your advocates, your influencers, your stakeholders, and your employees. If you look like you’re in it only for the money or you’re only using the social tools to push your message, no one will care and no one certainly will give you any access to them, including an email address.
And, above all else, make sure one of your goals is to build your database. Don’t abuse it. Don’t spam people. Have it in cases such as moving your community to a new platform. Or for an emergency such as Twitter or Facebook dying.

Google+ invites

2011-06-30T02:13:00.000-07:00

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.

My Space SOLD for $35 Million Only...

2011-06-29T11:41:00.000-07:00

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.

Obama Set To Actually Use Social Media Himself for 2012 Run

2011-06-22T15:19:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-22T14:56:00.001-07:00

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

2011-06-22T14:56:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-22T14:45:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-22T12:07:00.000-07:00

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."

Twitter’s New Follow Button

2011-06-21T11:15:00.000-07:00

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.

Facebook Testing Real-Time “Happening Now” Feed

2011-06-15T16:01:00.000-07:00

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?

2011-06-15T12:55:00.000-07:00

Just copy and paste the following code into your site

Happy +1 'ing :) !!!

The Social Media Simplicity Toolkit

2011-06-09T14:42:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-09T14:25:00.000-07:00

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.

SEO tips for Facebook Pages

2011-06-07T08:34:00.000-07:00

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.

5 Reasons To Get In On Facebook Commerce Now

2011-06-03T16:20:00.000-07:00

If you aren’t participating in Facebook shopping in one way or another, you’re really missing out.

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

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

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

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.
Brands can effectively bring Facebook technology to their existing websites with satisfactory results; that may not change.
As shopping becomes increasingly conducted on mobile devices, F-commerce appears to be even farther behind the pack than Facebook’s other mobile initiatives.

Facebook statistics in the US

2011-05-31T15:25:00.000-07:00

A Bank of America survey of 418 U.S. consumers under age 50 found that 96 percent of them use Facebook.

We find it interesting that the bank considers its sample to roughly resemble the U.S. population and therefore meant that nearly all Americans use Facebook. If 418 people were truly a random sample, it would mean all people under age 50 in the U.S.

So we’re not going to agree with the assertion that this represents the whole country. Aside from that, B of A’s statistics are very insightful, so below we’ve reproduced the 18 charts summarizing the survey’s findings.

Why Twitter Removed Favorites And Lists From The Twitter.com Sidebar

2011-05-31T15:06:00.000-07:00

On Friday Twitter made some design tweaks to Twitter.com, which included the removal of the Favorites and Lists links from the home page. Both of these used to sit in the right sidebar below the data about who you were following and who was following you. Not no more. They’ve been whacked.

Fear not – they’ve not been completely erased. You can still access your lists from the menu in your main panel, and all of the sidebar information is now housed on your profile page. Visit that and you get one-click access to favorites and lists, plus that all-important list tally at the top-right of the sidebar. And if you want to add a user to a list, simply visit their profile page – this option is now controlled by the same dropdown button that lets you block somebody.

But, here’s the thing: most people won’t have picked up on this change. Others won’t care. Which leads me to ask: in the bigger picture, is this decision by Twitter indicative of something more permanent?

Twitter casually announced the change via their @support profile.

Here’s the new-look homepage sidebar.

And on your profile.

And here’s how you add somebody to a list.

Notice how the add to list option is right next to the block option. Not exactly the smartest design choice. It’s all so very half-hearted, which I think tells us quite a lot.

So why has Twitter done this? Partly I think to make the place look tidier and to avoid repetition, but I’m also going to speculate about something else: Twitter is in the process of phasing these features out. Or at best, putting them very much on the back burner. Why? Because my gut tells me the vast majority of ‘normal’ Twitter folk don’t use these tools. And those normal people make up the bulk of the network – hundreds of millions of users.

Let me explain. For some people Twitter lists are really useful. I use ‘em a lot. If you’re a blogger or journalist and always looking out for the next big story then lists are even more useful, as they allow you to track dozens of users closely and easily. And if you’re one of those ‘power users’ who followers a bazillion profiles so almost a bazillion will follow you back, then lists are absolutely essential. Otherwise, how could you possibly keep up with the five or six people who actually care about you?

But for your common or garden Twitter user, lists aren’t that important. They don’t need to closely monitor every tweet of a select group of individuals. The average Twitter user (wisely) isn’t following tens of thousands of people. They’re following a couple of hundred, max. They don’t need to obsess over them. Things are fine. Really.

And while the Favorite functionality definitely has some fans, this move will go unnoticed by most users, simply because they weren’t using the feature in the first place. Hot scoop: favorites are mostly used by Twitter’s early adopters and the tech blogger crowd, certainly to any level that matters. Personally, I haven’t favorited anything since 2009. That’s not proof of anything, of course, but I’m going to say it again to see if it makes a difference: I haven’t favorited anything since 2009. See? Nobody is using it.

In all seriousness, from what I can tell by checking out the members of my network and what I hear from new users, most people don’t favorite all that much. Typically a tweet is favorited because it was funny or because the person wants to read a link when they have more time, but how often (honestly) do you go back and pour over your favorites? Much like anything on Twitter, there’s some serious time decay with this stuff.

And Twitter really missed a trick here. If favorited tweets were openly shared amongst your followers and ranked and measured accordingly, the mechanism could have been adopted all over the internet (via a Favorite button) and turned Twitter into a data powerhouse. Think Facebook’s like button meets Favstar, and you have a product and a system that would have had serious legs. Instead, we have something semi-useful that some people use from time to time. Why favorite when you can retweet? Why should you have to do both? Why would you? It’s all a bit meh – and Twitter knows this.

What’s weird about this is Twitter was talking about introducing a variation on the ‘like’ button way back in May 2009. It never happened. The best they could do was the wildly unpopular internal retweet. Back then, I wrote about how I wasn’t a fan of the use of ‘like’ for stamping your approval on something, because you don’t always like the thing you want to share. Sometimes it’s bad news, and liking it seems a serious breach of good etiquette.

But Facebook’s like has clearly caught on and now it’s just an accepted part of the internet consciousness. So while they may still try and build something to compete with this in the future, it certainly isn’t the Favorite functionality that we have now.

This is all speculation on my part. Not much more than a hunch, or a gut feeling. I do this a lot. I’ve been right before and I’ve been wrong before. Time will tell. But something about the way Twitter sees the Favorite and List functionality has shifted. There’s been a change, and they’re less important as they were before. And it seems very probable that this is because they’ve never been important to the very large, very important and very influential majority of the user base. They may not get rid of these features completely, but I suspect something else is coming along that will make them both redundant, and even easier to sweep under the rug.

How to Spot A Social Media Expert

2011-05-30T12:42:00.000-07:00

I understand that there is a healthy society of humble naysayers who scoff at social media expertise. So I will warn you in advance, this post will piss you off.

Look around and you’ll see that Job boards are packed with openings and almost every company is trying to either train or recruit an expert of their own.

The hard part is spotting them.

I can give you a few pointers:

Marketing Acumen:

A social media expert understands the relationship between advertising, marketing, and sales. They are well grounded in the science of selecting targeting audiences and the art of winning hearts and minds. This doesn’t mean that your social media expert needs to come from the marketing department. They just need a healthy respect for the role social media plays in the marketing process.

Accountable:

Anyone can tweet all day and call it a job. However, the real social media expert realizes that their activities has to contribute to the company in a tangible way. They have to “move the needle” and show how their activities are turning strangers into brand evangelists. Beware of people who stress conversations over profit and “likes” over accountability. These folks will leave your business popular and bankrupt.

Social Scientist:

Social media is 80% psychology and 20% marketing. The best social media experts are students of human nature. They are fascinated by group psychology and love “people watching”. Social Media pros want to understand why certain people are influential and what makes them tick. They also can’t resist engineering the perfect viral storm.

Content Marketing Savant:

A robust social media plan requires a constant infusion of smart, relevant, and entertaining content. A social media maestro knows how to create and re-purpose content like a managing editor at a tabloid magazine. They aren’t afraid to publish and get nervous when they are not shipping.

Intensely Curious:

Social Media is a moving target. What you know today is old news tomorrow. A capable social media expert stays tapped into the latest developments across all digital marketing channels including social media. I’m not referring to passive reading. Instead, look for people who actively research and dig for new insights.

Collaborative:

A Social Media program works best when every stakeholder contributes content, ideas, and support. Effective Social Media managers aren’t afraid to persuade, beg, poke, and push for cooperation from every corner of the organization. They know how to create relationships that result in a steady supply of fresh info to power content across multiple platforms.

What I Didn’t Mention

Tool Expertise:

The actual tools of the social media trade aren’t difficult to master. It takes about 1 week to be a proficient tweeter. The same goes for navigating and manipulating Facebook, LinkedIn or upload a blog post. Tools don’t make the social media expert, the social media expert uses tools to achieve their goals.

Introvert vs. Extrovert:

You don’t necessarily need to be a social butterfly in the RW (real world) to crush it online. It helps but its not required. I’ve watched intense introverts build communities, woo customers, and recruit brand evangelists.

A Personal Blog:

Although I would love for every social media professional to run a blog this isn’t a prerequisite. Many experts are busy running their corporate blog and don’t have gas in the tank for their own gig. Instead, I look for results they were able to achieve for their company or clients.

Twitter: How to Optimize Your Content

2011-05-29T05:33:00.000-07:00

So you are present on multiple social media platforms and have a select group of people who you talk to. Likewise your Linkedin account also doles out great deals of advice on your industry and about opportunities at your firm, but then what is Twitter doing for you?

Have you too discarded it as a complex device with 50% inactive users worldwide, or you felt that your words don’t add to your presence online? It's time you change that philosophy and start tweeting. If you are a newcomer reading this article I suggest you go through my feature for those just Starting on Twitter. Once your basics are clear and you are ready to give Twitter a go, keep the following in mind:

•Talk about experiences, views, opinions that are central to your brand or personality. So if you are a brand that’s into hygiene, talk about anything that relates to aspects that are averse to your brand's central belief, e.g. - corruption, dirt, scandals, etc. Ensure that your talk is contextual to your brand and not far away from what it believes in. Also, ensure that it is relevant to what is being spoken in that point of time in the newspapers or television.

•Be funny. When you are funny, people not only like what they say they also share it. So when people know it’s you who is saying this stuff they want more and listen. This causes your word to be spread and increase your reach within the network that you have established. This is a ROI.

•Ask questions so that people respond. Remember mentions? Yes people responding to what you say will increase your mentions and thereafter increase the network your tweets reach out to. Each time you ask a question you also have the chance to receive views and opinions that people have about you. Now that, too, is ROI.

•Make it a habit to tweet. Do tweet each time you have something interesting to say or share. If possible tweet at least 5-8 times a day and remember to spread what you share. Don’t tweet 6 times in a row. Tweet with well spaced intervals or else people will be bored and unfollow you. Also, do not share information that’s been shared before or is apparent.

•Use major trends to your forte. If you see something that is a trend and that can be used for your brand, add it to your tweets. Use trends only and only when they make sense and have a brand fit and never otherwise. Also never use trends in each tweet.

•Leave trails. Leave links to your twitter profile every time you make a blog post or a comment on the World Wide Web. This is if people agree to what you have said they will also like to hear more from you.

•Make it a habit to respond to those who follow you. Thank them or simply follow them back. As a check you may also ask them as to what encouraged them to follow you. But remember its good etiquette to thank those following you.

•Retweeting is a fantastic option to use to share information. But if you are retweeting someone be courteous enough to use their twitter handle to show the source. This is something you would like others to do for you as well. So its important to put things into practice.
These are just a few simple tips to get tweeting but tweeting efficiently. Remember they are several people who tweet but few who make sense and drive content passionately. The ROI on Twitter is multifold, but only when you are doing the right thing.

Social Media Recruitment Tools

2011-05-26T08:28:00.000-07:00

Back in the day, big organizations with fat budgets spent a lot of money on recruiters — sometimes with good results. But what if you want to or have to do recruiting personally.

Since time is the only resource more scarce than dollars, recruiters are always on the hunt for slick new tools and apps that can address the labor-intensive process of finding and hiring great people. With the advent of social media and cloud apps, there are some great new solutions out there. From automated applicant responses to upgraded versions of old recruitment standbys, there’s a new guard of socially focused recruiting tools designed for your every hiring need. Here are a five to take note of.

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1. The Resumator

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What it is: Applicant tracker, social recruiter, email replacer

How it works: This tool helps hiring managers keep real-time tabs on where their job listings are posted and who’s looking at them. Upload a job description to the site and it automatically posts it to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. After that, The Resumator tracks candidate resumes, and applies its own algorithm to rank applicants on a five-star scale. Better yet, it takes care of a part of the hiring process that often gets shortchanged — sending automated email replies when resumes are received and when a candidate must be declined. It also has a Twitter-like “What Makes You Unique” feature, where applicants describe what sets them apart in 150 characters or less. It’s a great way to quickly get a sense of the candidate’s personality.

Cost: $49 to $399 per month, based on volume

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2. Jobvite

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What it is: End-to-end social web recruiting and tracking tool

How it works: Jobvite is an SaaS platform that delivers a seamless and social recruiting process before, during and after the interview. It leverages the very best source for great hires — your own employees — by allowing them to see your company’s open jobs and send targeted invitations to their friends on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Once their friends or contacts get into the pipeline, the referring employee can track the interview process. The tool also matches prospective candidates with job listings based on matches found in their social profiles, providing a way to find qualified “passive” candidates that, frankly, are more likely to be the folks you’ll want to hire.

Cost: $500 to $10,000 per month, based on company size

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3. LinkedIn Talent Pro

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What it is: Extra access to the world’s largest professional network

How it works: If your and your employees’ networks come up empty on a key hire, it might be worth paying for access to qualified candidates that are outside those existing connections. Before you hire a recruiter, consider spending some money on LinkedIn Talent Pro. A Talent Pro account provides access to virtually everyone on LinkedIn and includes helpful extras like premium talent filters and expanded profiles. Subscribers can receive up to 15 notifications per day when Talent Pro finds a match among candidates that meet your stated criteria for the role. Because LinkedIn users consider their profile to be their “work self,” candidate searches based on job-related keywords can yield nicely targeted results.

Cost: $399 per month for an annual plan, or $499 on a month-by-month basis

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4. BranchOut

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What it is: A Facebook app that allows users to easily network within their social graph

How it works: Most businesses ask for references from candidates they’re considering for hire, but BranchOut users can get broader insights, since the app collects feedback from the candidate’s own network on questions like, “Would Jeff make it to work in a snowstorm?” or “Would you want Nina as a boss?” BranchOut also makes it easy to connect with people in your extended social graph, and tap into their personal experience with potential candidates. Although still somewhat limited by the fact that only a small percentage of Facebook’s 500 million users include their job history in their profile, BranchOut can help reveal helpful contacts in your network and lead you to your next great hire — or wave you off from a bad one.

Cost: Free for users and recruiters, but charges $99 to post premium job listings

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5. InternMatch

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What it is: Match.com for companies looking for student interns

How it works: InternMatch is a recruiting service solely focused on part-time or unpaid internships. It’s a super-early stage company that debuted at a 500Startups demo day I attended last month, so be aware that they are only covering California, Washington and Oregon at this point. The service benefits from its tight focus, and also provides a lot of free advice and templates that can help any organization be more successful in recruiting and managing a college intern effectively. In my experience, the right intern can yield a really high ROI, but more often they become a very expensive “go-fer.” InternMatch raises the odds that you get the former.

Cost: $99 per listing, with a money-back guarantee if you don’t hire a new intern within 90 days

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These tools make it easier to efficiently tap all of our increasingly digital networks and communication tools to find great hires. They should help you broaden your search, more efficiently harness your and your current employee’s social networks, and stay organized in the process. Whether you’re hiring for a startup or looking for summer interns who can do more than make coffee, these tools can help without costing an arm and a leg.

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Unfazed by Facebook, Google Rolls Out Social Search Globally

2011-05-19T06:12:00.000-07:00

Google will roll out its somewhat controversial Social Search feature to 19 more languages next week, the company has announced on its official blog.

Launched back in October 2009, Social Search is a feature that combines regular search results with publicly available data created by your friends’ social media activities.

Your “friends” are quite loosely defined and include people in your Google Talk friends list, your Google Contacts, people you’re following on Buzz and Google Reader, and other networks you’ve linked from your Google profile or Google Account. Google can also find your friends on public networks such as Twitter and Facebook and gather the data from their public connections as well.

The feature was recently the subject of controversy, as Facebook hired a PR company to push negative stories about Social Search in the press. Facebook claims that Google’s practices raise “serious privacy concerns”, and it’s unhappy with the fact that Google can use Facebook data for its service without Facebook’s permission.

For the most part, Google has stayed silent about the issue, although it’s noticeable that in its latest blog post about Social Search Twitter is mentioned three times while Facebook is nowhere to be seen.

Social Search should be available in 19 languages next week, with more languages on the way. Check out a video overview of the feature below.

http://youtu.be/4hAgiIXuNbs

HOW TO: Poll Consumers on Facebook

2011-05-18T01:30:00.000-07:00

Facebook polls and surveys can be a great way to engage your fans with questions that build loyalty or provide you with valuable feedback. Facebook is often touted for its ability to create a community, but too often brands let those online communities lie fallow on their fan pages. It’s not enough to send a stream of updates without listening to what your fans (your invaluable evangelists and consumers) have to say.

To help, we collected some simple ways to poll your consumers on Facebook, as well as a mini-list of best practices. Once you start polling, let us know what worked for you in the comments below.

Tools and Resources

Facebook Questions is the in-house poll service from Facebook. Located at the top of your wall and below your profile pic, Questions lets you customize polls in a manner of ways. You can submit an open-ended question or click on the “Add Poll Options” tab to create a custom multiple-choice poll. You can add up to three options. Pro tip: You can link those responses to groups or individuals on Facebook by tagging the name with an “@” when you start typing. This is handy if you want to drive people to your various options.

While you can’t limit your question to a specific demographic (i.e., the question is broadcast to the entire Facebook community to answer), individual Facebook Pages can ask Page-specific questions. To do this, simply click on the “Questions” tab at the top of the Page’s wall. Still stuck? Check out Facebook’s official FAQ.

Poll is an app, meaning you’ll have to allow it access to your account. Poll operates a lot like Facebook Questions (above), but it has some extra options for tracking your respondents, purchasing premium features like ad blocking, and the ability to hide header tabs. It also allows you to add more than three options to your customized questions. That may not seem like much, but Poll has attracted more than 2 million active users so far, and corporations such as ABC, 20th Century Fox, Nintendo, Pepsi and Wimbledon have used the app.

Poll for Facebook is a free service with a slew of options including the ability to include a poll title, introduction text and advanced features such as creating a custom URL and privacy options. You can specify if you want answers as multiple choice, text or a comment thread. You can modify the appearance further by using HTML tags or adding a tab to your YouTube page. Premium users can add images, too. Poll for Facebook is the most customizable and easiest to use of the available options, attracting major corporate users like the Food Network, the Baltimore Ravens and Clarins Paris to the service.

Poll Daddy Polls offer another take on customization. From the “Create a Poll Tab” you can add an image, customize multiple answers, and select where you want the poll to be posted. It’s simple and to the point, even if it has just 300,000 active users, making it relatively small when compared to its brethren.

Status Updates can be used in place of the more feature-rich polling apps discussed above. If you’re just after some quick, informal engagement with your fans, consider simply asking a question via your page status.

Basic Tips

Once you set up your poll using one of the options above, here are some simple best practices for deciding how and what to ask.

Ask a real question. People on the Internet are great at sniffing out when you really are interested in their response and just asking a question because it’s been a while. Don’t ask questions that are just self-promotional. Something like “What product of ours do you love the most!?” isn’t going to go over well.
Ask question you actually want answers to. In the same vein, if you’re going to ask questions, come up with something that will help your business. Try to get constructive feedback about your products or ask what your customer would like to see more of. If you’re a musician for example, try asking what kind of bonuses your fans prefer (backstage pass, free tickets, advanced orders, etc.) and then offer the highest-voted perk.
Ask questions that are topical or relevant. This is a tricky one. Try to find memes and keywords that are both in the news and relevant to your brand. It’s one thing to poll your audience on what they think of Charlie Sheen, but they could be turned off if that has nothing to do with your business or products. Kenneth Cole gave us a pretty good example of what not to do.
Be clear why you’re polling. Decide what you want out of your poll: Are you looking for more loyalty, honest feedback, brand exposure? Having this in mind will give you focus and make your polls more useful for your business. If you’re looking for exposure, ask yourself if your poll is something that your fans would share with their own friends. Facebook is great for spreading your message — but only if it’s a message worth spreading.

The Most Complete Twitter Application List Available - 2011 Edition

2011-05-16T12:50:00.000-07:00

I believe this is the best, most complete and accurate list of valuable Twitter applications available on the internet right now.

To be fair, I absolutely have merged and plagiarized other older and outdated lists that I found (the larger ones are credited below). However, I spent a good deal of time to clean out the dead applications, delete the apps that were overly quirky or being developed, focus more on the apps that increase productivity, and add in many of the new great apps that have come out over the past six months - particularly in the productivity / business apps section where my primary interest lies. I have also tagged the tools that cost money / have a premium option ($) as well as if they have a valuable free option (F/$).

Finally, while application selection can be a personal thing, I tagged my favorite app (*) in each category.

I will try and update this list over time, but you can be assured that as of May, 2011, every site on this list has been tested and is up and running (or tagged as being in beta/alpha). I don't guarantee that the apps all work, but the sites were definitely up and running.

Simple Web Based Clients and Twitter Viewing Tools

Twitter.com (*): Can't go wrong with this -- web, iPhone, etc.
Twalala: On-line browser beta Twitter tool that allows you to filter out / mute tweets you wish to ignore.
Hahlo: Another good web based and iPhone optimized site where you can view tweets and tweet.
iTweet: Similar to Hahlo - auto updates.
TwitStat: Mobile web client (supposedly has analytics, but I didn't see it)
Splitweet: allows multi account Twitter management.
Twimbow: In alpha, but seems like an interesting web based browser if you can get an account.
TweetVisor: Interesting new activity based web twitter client
Twazzup Reader: Good web based Twitter Client

Directory And Top User Search Tools

Just Tweet It: A twitter directory sorted by interest
Twitaholic: Similar to WeFollow - Lists top 1000 Twitter Users by followers.
FameCount: Active users on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube
Twitrank: List of top 150 Twitter Users By Followers, People They're Following, and updates
Twellow (*): The Twitter Yellow Pages -- Find people by area of expertise.
We Follow: Find celebrities and follow-up people and key areas of expertise.
Tweetfind: Twitter Directory with Social Listings, Twitter Lists & Tools
TwitterPacks : Answers the question: If someone were joining Twitter today, who might they follow?
Start4all: Directory of Twitter related web pages
FollowerWonk: Search Twitter Profiles By Keywords / Sentences. Can compare two users as well for overlap
Twiends: Tool to grow your Twitter / Facebook / YouTube following by trading likes.
Fan Page List: Social media directory of Twitter & Facebook Brands / Celebrities / etc.
Increasr: Very similar to Twiends, a Twitter follower tool

Track The Latest Trends and Tags

Hashtags (uses Trendistic data): Shows graphical 7 day trend on keywords and names of people that used that keyword.
Serendipitwiterrous: Search for tweets of a certain person using certain keywords
Trendistic (*): See trends in Twitter - trending tags, 24 hour, 7/30/90/180 day graphs
Twitscoop: See key trends and events on Twitter -- post Tweets in response.
TwitLinks: The latest links from the worlds top tech twitter users.
Tweet Scan: Show top and search keywords.
Tweetmeme (*): Good site to see the latest and hottest stories / images.
Twemes: Worldwide tags & Trends (Twemes)
Monitter: Twitter monitor which watches up to 3 keywords in separate columns in real time.
Twistori: Quirky live stream of Tweets showing loves, hates, believes, wishes, etc.
Twitturls: Find out the latest URLs posted on Twitter
Twitturly: Similar to Tweetmeme - latest and hottest stories / images.
Twendz: Explores Twitter Conversations and Sentiment
Topsy: Real Time Search For Twitter
Sulia: The Interest Network - See top headlines.
Favstar: Favorite funny tweets
Twazzup: Realtime search results from Twitter

Segmentation and List Grouping Tools

Formulists (*): An excellent app that will help built personal lists for you based upon certain criteria / keywords.
Group Tweet: Tweet with only a particular group of people
Crowd Status: Create and find out the status of a certain group of people on Twitter
Twitter Groups: Tag your followers into different groups. Send a message to the entire group at once.
Triberr: Interesting site that will retweet everything in the groups you join.

Twitter Utilities

bit.ly (*): The King URL shortener - many twitter apps use bit.ly directly or can leverage their bookmarklets
Ping.fm (*): Extremely valuable service that lets you publish your updates to many social networks at one time.
Tweet Burner: Track the links that you post on Twitter - URL Shortner
Twitter Split: Interesting script / tool you can install to allow you to track links in tweets you post.
TrueTwit (F/$): A Twitter validation tool that helps automate some key services. Free and paid services are useful.
Twit Longer: Allows you to send longer Tweets
Twitter Keys: Blog Post & Bookmarklet with little icons & images you can add into your tweets.
Mokumax: Nice free app to schedule branded tweets
TwimeMachine: Way to see all your past Tweets

Integrate Twitter with Files, Images and Videos

Twitpic (*): Share photos
Twitvid (*): Share photos and videos
Autopostr: Update your Twitter when you post a Flickr picture - In Beta, no invites available.
Twixr: Share pictures on Twitter via your mobile phone
Twixxer: Share photos and videos on Twitter
MobyPictures: Share your images across multiple sites including Twitter

Twitter Background Sites

Twilk ($) (*): Cool site that Create a background image of all your followers / who you follow. Paid takes out advertising
Twitrounds: Another Free Twitter Background Tool
Twitbacks: Create free twitter backgrounds.
Free Twitter Designer : Free Tool To Design a Twitter Background
Twitter Images: More free images
Twitter Backgrounds.org: MORE free images
Twit Background Images.com: MORE
Twitr Backgrounds: and more.
Twitpaper: More.
Free Twitter Layout: oh, and more

Summarized Reports / Digests Of Social Activity

Gist (*): A great app that tracks activity and tweets for your contacts across all social platforms. Integration with Outlook, iPhone, Android, and more. Definitely worth a look.
Nutshell Mail: Delivers a nice daily e-mail report of your Twitter, Facebook, and Social Media Activity.
Twilert (*): A good free app that will provide a daily digest of tweets via e-mail of search terms & people
Tweet Beep ($): Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything, with hourly updates via keyword tracking.
Stream Spigot: Creates a digest of tweets for a person or list delivered via RSS or a web page you can visit daily.
Social Oomph (*): This is also listed below as a paid app, but the free version gives you a nice daily summary of Twitter Activity by keyword / user.

Cool Ways To See Your Tweets And Followers

TwitterFountain (*): Very cool way to view tweets by person/ keyword in real time on big screen (trade shows & events).
TwitterCamp Nice way to view tweets on a big screen or monitor
Twit100: Provides a unique view of the last 100 tweets from your followers.
TwitArcs: Interesting visualization tool to see how a user's tweets are connected
Twitter Spectrum: Visualization tool that shows how two keywords are connected via Twitter keywords.
TwitterBrowser: Lets you browse ones friends graphically.
Twitterfall: An interesting real time browser of Twitter activity by keyword / user / etc.
Twylah: An on-lin Flipboard type view of your Tweets. In Request only Beta - Here is mine.

Follower / Unfollower Tools

Does Follow: Simple tool to see if one person follows another person.
Manage Flitter ($): Clean up and manage your followers. Also has some analytic stuff.
Tweeter Karma: See who you are following that is not following you and visa versa. Can mass follow those you don't follow.
Qwitter ($): Get a daily report showing unfollowers. (I could not get this to deliver info to me)
Twerp Scan: Interesting way to drill down into who you or your followers are following.
Twitspam: Track and Report Twitter / Social Network spammers
Is Now Following: Tracks when you add new followers and tweets it
Fllwrs: Keep track of your followers / Unfollowers
Twitoria: Shows activity of the people you're following to stop if they haven't tweeted in a while.
FollowCost: What's it "cost" to follow someone (how frequently do they update / tweet)?
Just Unfollow: Unfollow those that are not following you.
IsFollow: Find out who is following who by entering in two usernames.
Tweet Find Tools: Good free tool to unfollow people that don't follow you. Also has tweet scheduler
Friend or Follow: Another app to see who doesn't follow you and visa versa.

Twitter Account Analysis tools

TwentyFeet (F/$) (*): Excellent summary of stats across multiple sites. First Twitter & Facebook account are free.
Klout (*): An excellent app to track and rate your social media activities (Facebook & Twitter, LinkedIn to follow).
Empire Avenue: Similar to Klout - only more complicated with a "virtual investment game" built in.
Crowd Booster: Another good analytic tool
Peer Index: Another good analytic tool
My Tweeple ($): Twitter Account Evaluation Tool. Follower counts, ratios, tweet counts. Review Recent Tweets (See what your followers are saying), Follow-back, hide or block new followers. Create Tags, Notes, and Share. Good tool to export your entire follower list to a csv file.
Twitter Counter: Good Twitter Analytics / Comparison & Statistic Tool. Also has some good blog scripts and Twitter Tools
Twitter Grader: Analyses your Twitter account on a 0-100 score. Computed based on how complete your profile is as well as the number and influence of your followers. Also shows top users in categories. Good basic stats.
Tweet Stats: Graphical representation of your Twitter activity including time of day posting, interface used, etc.
Tweeple Twak (in alpha): Supposedly track your friend gains and declines. Site is up, but can't see what it does.
Twit Graph: Similar to TweetStats, but weaker and has more advertising
Twoolr: Another Twitter Analytic Tool
Twitter Ratio: Find out your friend to follower ratio.
Retweet Rank: Provides a ranking on the number of Retweets You Have
See Tweeb and SocialDash Under the iPhone Apps section for a few good iPhone Apps that provide statistics

Business Social / Twitter Suites & Tools

MessageMaker ($$) (**): A shameless plug for my company's (One To One Global) product that is designed for organizations and companies to deliver messages to tens, hundreds, or thousands of social endpoints (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and then provide amazing aggregated reporting. Fantastic for companies with multiple brands, franchises, and organizations looking to leverage their sales team's or employees. Contact me if you're interested in learning more.
Pluggio ($) (*): One of my favorite personal apps to help find valuable content, schedule tweets, and get reports on your activity. Free version is ok, paid version is justified.
Tweet Adder ($) (***): PC & Mac tool to help build a targeted list of followers and un-follow those those that don't follow you back. Sends thank you messages to new followers. On my must have list.
Tweet Whistle ($): Similar to Tweet Adder as well. Mac and PC version to build your followers.
Twittenator ($): Similar to Tweet Adder. Seems solid, I've just become used to the other.
Sprout Social (F/$) (*): Easy to use dashboard to manage your social efforts with attractive analytics.
Social Oomph ($$) (*): A complete Twitter Automation and Analytic Tool. Free version also very valuable for keyword analysis reports, follow backs, and reporting.
Timely: An interesting app that analyzes and schedules Tweets based upon the best time to deliver them
Tweetag: Browse tweets via tags and receive e-mail notifications.
Tap11 ($): Real-Time Intelligence and Engagement Platform for Twitter & Facebook
Twaitter ($): Social Media Suite handling scheduling of tweets, statistics, other info.
Twollo ($): Targeted follower building tool based on keywords with auto-follow
BufferApp ($): Similar to Pluggio in that you can build a targeted list of tweets that it will intelligently deliver over the course of the day.
Radian6 ($$): Very valuable monitoring and Analytic Tool
TweetBig ($): Another good suite with auto follow-back, tweet scheduling, analytics, and other stuff.
CoTweet (F/$): Tool to help empower teams to monitor and engage with customers across multiple accounts
Mutual Mind.com ($): An enterprise level social media management platform
TweetSpinner (F/$): Manages followers, rotates profiles, archives and schedules tweets.

Twitter Integration With Your Site or Blog

Add Tweets: Make Twitter Update Widgets for site or blog using javascript
Feed Tweeter: integrate Twitter with Plurk, your blog and delicious
Follow Me On Twitter Buttons: Follow me on twitter buttons
Loudtwitter: Ships your tweets to your blog.
PingTwitter: Automatically update your Twitter Account when you publish a new blog pos
Siah Design: Free Twitter buttons and animated GIFs you can use.
Stammy's RSS To Twitter: Not too many people have access to a Ruby-enabled server so the author decided to make a simple PHP script to get the job done.
Twignature: A decent translated Japanese app to take your username and create a usable Twitter signature for websites & e-mail.
Twit This: Add this option so people can easily tweet information from your site or blog
Twitter Tools: A wordpress plugin that lets you integrate Twitter with your blog. You can send your updates to your blog as well as create tweets directly from your blog
Twitter for Wordpress: Script displays latest tweets on your blog
Twitterfeed: Post your blog to Twitter through your RSS feed
Twitter Updater: Automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post
Twitter Wordpress Sidebar Widget: A wordpress widget where you can send your tweets to your blog
TwitGIF: A translated Japanese app that creates an animated GIF from your latest Tweets.
Chirrup: PHP Script that allows you to collect Twitter comments for your site.
Dlvr.it: Deliver Your Blog To Twitter, Facebook, and More
DiggDigg: One of many Wordpress plugins that integrate social sites.

Twitter As An Organizer

Remember the Milk: Manage tasks on Twitter as well as set notifications for yourself
Twittercal: Integrate your Google Calendar with Twitter
My Chores: Track your chores
Planypus: Make plans and export them to Twitter

Polls and Surveys on Twitter

Lazy Tweet: Find answers to your questions by posting "@lazyweb" or "@lazytweet"
Twitter Answers: Another question site with a nice layout so you can easily get answers to your questions.
Twitter Polldaddy ($): A complete poll and survey site that also offers Twitter Options.
Twittpoll: Join some twitter polls and receive the results in 24 hours

Twitter Advertising Networks

Twittad: Place advertisements on your profile
Magpie: Advertise with 5 tweets and get paid
TwitCash: Scheme to make money on twitter

Twitter and Music

Twittytunes / FoxyTunes: Tweet what you're listening, watching or reading regardless what player you are using.
Blip.fm: Listen to music and tweet it to Twitter

Twitter Backup Utilities

Tweetake (*): Backup your twitter account
Twitter Safe: Another place where you can backup your account.
Tweet Scan Backup: Backs up your Twitter Info

Adobe Air Clients and Multi-Platform Clients

Snitter
TweetDeck (*) : One of the best out there, free and definitely worth a look
TweetPad visualizes statistics on the source of the incoming messages.
Twhirl
Twinja
Pwytter

Twitter Tools For Mac

There are a million of these, so I'll just list a few of the ones I use in addition to TweetDeck, Twitter, and Echofon that were mentioned elsewhere. Open the Apple App Store and search for Twitter to find many more.

Twitterrific: ($) Paid Mac Client.
YoruFukurou: A good free app with multi-account support.
Socialite ($): Very powerful, not cheap ($19.99), but solid app that I got with a bundle one time.
Twidget: A mac dashboard widget.
Twittereeze is an extension to Twitterific. It allows you to set your iChat, Skype, Adium status to your twitter status.

Twitter Firefox & Other Plugins

TweetStalk: A firefox addon that allows you to follow / stalk people without them knowing it.
Hootbar (*): Formerlly Twitterbar, powerful way to post messages from address bar
Twitbin: A Firefox extension that allows you to post and receive tweets via the Sidebin.
TwitterFox: Sits in the status bar of Firefox. Send updates and keep an eye on your friends.
Echofon For Firefox (*): Another sidebin extension
TwitterLine: A Headline Toolbar for Firefox
Yoono (*): Supports updates to Twitter Facebook LinkedIn YouTube GTalk AIM
Shareaholic (*): Share webpages with your friends on Twitter. Can be integrated with your Firefox Browser
iTwitter: iGoogle gadget that have ping.fm, twitter videos, twitter news, twitter tips, twitter tools and more.

IPhone Apps

There are a million iPhone Twitter Apps, but here are a few of the ones I have and use.

Tweetlogix ($) (*): My favorite Iphone App - easy to manage multiple accounts, etc.
Echofon (F/$) (*) : My second favorite
qTweeter ($) (*): Got to have a jailbroken iPhone, but an awesome app to quickly pull up an app and tweet images, video, location, etc. Available via Cydia.
Tweetdeck (*): Along with Hootsuite, one of the most popular apps used today.
Seesmic: Nice app that allows you to easily log on to multiple Twitter, Facebook accounts.
Hootsuite (*): One of the most popular tools out there.
Boxcar: Good app that does push notifications for multiple social sites.
Tweet-r
Twinkle
Twitterific
Twittelator (F/$)
SocialDash (*): One of the only iPhone Apps that provides access to Facebook and Twitter statistics on things like Klout.
Tweeb: A good iPhone app that provides Twitter account analysis (Tweets, Buzz, Clicks, etc.)
Ubersocial: Blackberry, iPhone, and beta Desktop App with great promise.

Non-iPhone Mobile Device Twitter Clients

ceTwit: A windows mobile twitter client.
JTwitter: A java twitter client for mobile phones.
Tiny Twitter: A Java twitter client to send and receive tweets for mobile phones and devices.
Twidroid (*): An application for android mobiles.
TwitterBerry: Update and receive Tweets from your BlackBerry.

Windows & Misc. Clients

Mad Twitter: Built like Twitterific for Windows
Twitterlicious: Supports proxies, have a read-unread system and auto-refresh mechanism
Twitux: GTK+Twitter Client
Deskbar Twitter: Update Twitter on Ubuntu
Twippera: Twitter widget for Opera

Mobile Phone Applications With Twitter

Dial2Do ($): Use your voice to tweet as well as send text and do e-mail
Vlingo ($) (*): iPhone, Android, Nokia, Windows Voice activated app
Qik (*): Share videos and Tweet (and e-mail) them across MANY phones
Flix Wagon: Similar to Qik - only for Android.

Integration With E-Mail / Messaging Applications

Yahoo Messenger Twitter Sync Plugin: Integrate twitter with your Yahoo Messenger
TikiTwit: Integrate Twitter with iChat
Twittermail: Part of TwitterCounter - update twitter, send images, and longer tweets via email
Twinbox: Update Twitter with your Microsoft Outlook
TwitEmail: Allows twitter users to send HTML emails with attachments

Useless, Funny, & Misc. Twitter Sites

Secret Tweet: Imagine PostSecret + Twitter. Tweet those secrets
Curse Bird: Find out who's swearing on Twitter
Tweet What You Eat: Tweet what you're eating at the moment - track your calories and weight
Foodfeed: Similar to Tweet What You Eat, but just the tweet info
Xbox 360 Gamer Tag: Automatically update twitter with what you are playing at a certain moment
Trackthis: Track your packages via Twitter with this tool
Bkkeeper: Share what you're reading on Twitter
Commuter Feed: Share tweets on traffic and transit delays
Foamee: Fun way to tracks who you owe coffee or beer to
InnerTwitter: Signals you through chimes where you have to let go of your thoughts.
Post like a Pirate: Talk like a pirate on twitter
Roll the dice: Give you the power to roll a dice on twitter. Useful when you're betting or playing games with your friends.
Xpenser: Track your expenses with twitter
Twithire: The place where you can tweet job postings
GasCalc: Tracks your gas usage and MPG on Twitter
Fuel Frog ($): iPhone App with Twitter integration that also tracks Gas Usage and uses Twitter.
Deal Tagger: Shop and share on Twitter
Textgasm: Tweet your secrets
Twitter Nonsense: Daily Twitter Comic Strip
Twitterbox: A Twitter Client for Second Life
Stocktwits: Lets you follow stocks on Twitter.
Twictionary: A repository for all sorts of words used on Twitter.
TweetValue: Tells you how much your profile is worth in US dollars.

Once again, I credit the following posts for providing some of the information I used here. However, these posts are old, have many dead links and are missing many of the best new apps that are out there.

The top SEO tips for social media profiles

2011-05-12T04:54:00.000-07:00

SEO (search engine optimisation) and social media have been moving closer together over the past couple of years. Now it seems they’re more integrated than ever, particularly as Google increasingly experiments with bringing in social elements into search results.

You can’t really afford to know one without the other, as you risk doing half a job or missing out on potential traffic. To help with this, we’ve compiled some of the top SEO tips across social media profiles, so you can make sure you have your house in order. Bear in mind that all of the below are recommended as general good practices to stick to – not promises of top positions for your keywords. I would always recommend that you run your social media profiles with your community in mind first and foremost, then consider best practices for SEO after.

These are tips to implement alongside the natural conversations in your community. Many of these tips apply for internal search, such as through Facebook Pages as there will be certain restrictions on the content Google will and can index.

Keywords in Facebook Page updates
It can often be a bit of a push and pull between writing content purely with the user in mind, and writing content that has one eye firmly on SEO. Good practice for SEO copywriting can still apply when you write your updates on your Facebook Page. Since everyone that searches on Facebook has the ability to show results by ‘everyone’, individual posts you write on your Facebook Page could be crucial for getting found by people searching for something current. I wouldn’t advise you let this guide your content strategy overall. Don’t try and write about the royal wedding if it bears no relevance to your brand or community, but when you’re writing updates, think about the keywords that other people might be looking for that could lead them to your Page.

Writing anchor text on your Facebook Page
The same rules of good linking still apply on your Facebook Page, such as linking often and to relevant Pages. In certain places, Facebook also gives you the option to use anchor text in your links, which is a good practice to adhere to. You can do this in the ‘notes’ section of your Page for example. Here you simply write out the code for anchor text as you would normally, replacing the content with your own website and desired anchor text:

When you publish this it will appear as anchor text on your wall. Remember to use relevant keywords in the anchor text, that relate to the page you’re pointing to.

Link often on your Facebook Page
Sending links out from your Facebook Page in general is important in helping to improve your SEO rankings within Facebook search. You should take advantage of the places that Facebook gives you to do this, including the wall and Info text. One of the most important places to link from your Page is in the ‘About’ box on the side of your Page. While you can’t put anchor text here, you can include a standard link, such as in the screenshot below:

Keywords in Facebook photo captions
Even though certain activity within a Facebook page is ‘no follow’ by Google, you should still retain good keyword and linking strategies in all places. This is often overlooked in the ‘photos’ section of your Page, where it can be tempting to stick it up quickly and share it on your wall. The description is on your photo permanently however, so remember to include relevant keywords in the photo description text. Again bear in mind meeting the needs of the user and the search engine. You’re talking to your fans first and foremost so include the keywords naturally in the text, but paying careful attention to those keywords you might want to be found for, both in Facebook and Google search.

Keywords in your Twitter bio
In your Twitter profile, your ‘bio’ is actually the meta description of your Page, making it an incredibly important aspect of SEO on your Twitter profile. Make sure you’re including relevant keywords here that relate both to the general content of your tweets as well as the website you want to promote. This can often be overlooked in terms of keyword optimisation, but should be well-considered, albeit within 160 characters!

Use bit.ly or tiny to shorten links on Twitter
Using URL shorteners is often done on Twitter profiles mainly as a way of making links more readable and easily sharable as they reduce the amount of characters used within the tweet. They are also incredibly important in terms of SEO as well. Using url services such as bit.ly or tiny.url use permanent 301 redirects to your content, meaning that your original url benefits from the SEO juice, and not just the tiny url itself.

Keywords early in tweets
In an individual tweet, the first 27-40 characters count as the title tag within a Google search result. It’s important therefore to include your desired keywords early on in the tweet itself to make it more likely to rank in searches. This is what will be indexed by Google so it’s important to keep to this structure as much as possible, while not distracting from the actual conversation in Twitter. Keep these keywords relevant to the rest of the tweet and any URL you include for consideration of the user as well as search engines.

Followers boost your PageRank
This might not be a direct tip, but it’s an important consideration. The more high profile you are judging by the number of Twitter followers you have, the more your PageRank will improve within Google, having a positive effect on your search results. These followers are indexed as ‘inlinks’ to your profile – i.e. Google recognises one Twitter account as linking to yours as a relevant link. Try and attract these followers by tweeting popular, relevant content, which sits very much in line with your natural Twitter strategy.

Use Twitter directories
There are some very easy ways that you can build links to your Twitter profile, while also getting in front of new followers that may be interested in your content: Twitter directories. Through different sites you can link to your Twitter profile, often with the option to add in additional keywords, that should strongly relate to the page you’re linking to. Check out this article from CNET, for a great list of Twitter directories you can add your profile to.

Tweet Often
As much as this is a consideration for your natural Twitter activity, it’s also important for Google search results, now that they integrate tweets into their main search results. If you’re tweeting often about current topics then you can help improve your chances of appearing in Google results. These Twitter links are also contained prominently above the fold in Google search engine result pages, so is a great way to attract new followers, provided the content is in some way related to your core product or service.

Name your Twitter profile picture

A nice little SEO tip to follow here. When uploading your Twitter profile picture, make sure to name it with a relavant keyword that relates to your Twitter profile. The image file name is contained within the link when you click to expand, so avoid just using the file number, as shown in the example above. You can see this yourself by hovering over your profile image in Twitter. Also be sure to use hyphens in between words in the file name, not spaces.

Double keywords in a Youtube video
Obviously, using relevant keywords throughout the title, description and keyword section of your video on Youtube is important. But a good tip to follow is including a keyword twice within a title, such as ‘Facebook Tips: SEO Facebook tips for your business page’. This is good in terms of SEO to get an incredibly important keyword listed twice, but is also good from a usability point of view, as you provide an easy to read format, telling people what your content is about. This is the perfect balance between writing for people and SEO.

Repeat keywords in the video title
Often when it comes to adding in keywords to your Youtube video, you try to add as many relevant keywords that you can think of. While this is good practice, help Youtube out a bit when it comes to displaying your video by repeating words contained in your video title throughout the description and keyword section, as it will help your video to be shown both within Youtube and Google search as this pulls in Youtube video results as standard.

Leave a video reply
Google and Youtube like video pages that have a lot of links built into them, as it shows the relevance of the video content. A great way to do this, which also provides a new organic community around your video content, is by leaving a video reply to related videos within Youtube. You can do this while you’re logged into the correct profile for your Youtube video channel. When you’ve found the video you want to reply to, click on ‘Leave a video reply’ on the right hand side. This will bring up your videos, which you can select and leave as a video response on the page. Use this according to best practice and avoid being too spammy a this could have an adverse effect on your actual content!

Write a full script for your videos
A great way of adding in extra text around your video is to consider writing a full script in the description. Here you can put in additional keywords that are featured in the video and it also allows people to find out more about the content of the video. Next to the title, the description is the second most important thing about your video so make sure it’s well optimised.

Get active on Quora
Google recently announced that they were adding activity on Quora such as asking questions or adding answers into their indexed realtime search results. Quora is a great place to network and build your community anyway, but now that this has such as direct effect on Google search, it should be considered by most marketers and businesses. As these feature in the ‘realtime’ section of a Google SERP (Search Result Position Tool), best practice both for search and your community is to make sure you’re answering and asking questions often.

What Social Media SEO tips do you love? Share them in the comments!

Famous LinkedIn Profiles - Social Media vs. Social Networking

2011-05-12T04:39:00.000-07:00

Seems like everyone has "social media" in their profile these days, or at least about 600,000 on LinkedIn do (search for social media on LinkedIn to see). This got me wondering about the difference between two terms we all use a lot to describe Internet-based applications: Social Media and Social Networking; what is the difference? Social media allows anyone to broadcast content that others can discover, share, and comment on, while social networking allows people to connect around shared interests. Both types of software are used as part of broader marketing campaigns and both generally rely on viral marketing to bring in new users and so can grow at exponential rates.

The latest trend in advertising is to tie celebrities and authoritative voices into interactive advertising campaigns, although arguably this isn't all that new since advertisers have been using celebrities to market their products for years, known as the "celebrity endorsement". SocialMediaMarketing.com describes a case study where they recruited influential bloggers to lead as ambassadors as part of a large scale marketing campaign. Say Media took this one step further when they acquired the Typepad blogging platform last year. This is social media.
There is a special case of social networking I'd like to zero in on for this blog posting: What happens when famous people use social networking tools? In some cases such as the examples I give below, I think these people are trying to use social networking platforms as if they were social media platforms, and in my opinion, this usually fails spectacularly. Barack's campaign is one notable exception, but that was unique because his campaign invented a new way to use social networking tools, and I'd hesitate to call this either social networking or social media. I think we need a new term for this. Any ideas?

I recently discovered that a number of famous people appear to have their own LinkedIn profiles. At least I'm assuming these are real as I expect they would have been torn down if they were fake. Here are my personal favorite examples of celebrities trying to use LinkedIn as if it were a social media platform. I've just requested a direct connection with all of them. If I get any responses, I'll come back and edit this blog posting and let you know who let me in!

Sarah Palin's profile is just downright funny to read - her summary ends with such badly written English, you have to wonder how this could still be here online, but there it is:

"My fellow Americans, come join our cause. Join our cause and help our country to elect a great man the next president of the United States. And I thank you, and I -- God bless you, I say, and God bless America. Thank you."
Bill Gate's profile is awesome in it's conciseness. With only 38 connections it's pretty clear Bill is not using LinkedIn for its social networking capabilities. I'm guessing he wanted to try it out at some point and just abandoned his account. Maybe he thought his profile description would be a good way to describe himself to the LinkedIn community.
The man does not need to say much in his profile. He calls the Gates Foundation, the largest foundation in the world, "A humble initiative", and Microsoft, one of the most dominant software forces in history, "A small monument". A bit of false modesty? He never finished college though, so I don't know. One of his public recommendations appears to be this comment which probably wasn't meant to be public so I am a bit surprised that he'd post this:

"Great job on your promotions. Please contact executive assistants at MAP92112 @ gmail.com to work out details of future promotions."

Like Gates, this guy doesn't need to say much. His job description for being President simply says, "I am serving as the 44th President of the United States of America." This is the complete opposite of Bill's profile: millions of connections - over three million on facebook alone. This is not social networking in the sense that most people think of when they think of LinkedIn, yet at the same time, he never posted anything new on his LinkedIn profile so there could not have been much social media going on either. I think this was something else, neither social media nor social networking; it was a badge his fans could put on their profile to show their support to their own network.

Talk about not needing to say much, Britney has the shortest profile of the group. This is the entire profile:
Summary

It's Britney Bitch!
Specialties
Dancing and singing

With only 23 connections and not being open to accepting new connections, I'm guessing she's not using LinkedIn. I think the only reason she has a profile there is to provide a link to her real fan site.

Half of UK businesses ban social media at work

2011-05-12T04:27:00.000-07:00

A study has revealed that almost 50% of UK companies prohibit employees from using social media at work.

The research, carried out by Lewis Communications and HCL Technologies, found that from the 2,500 businesses surveyed, 48% ban their workers from posting updates on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites.

So, whilst previous research has shown that social networking should be encouraged at work as it boosts moral and improves productivity, it seems that many companies still take a dim view of employees mixing business with pleasure.

And in a week that sees the very act of tweeting brought into the legal limelight with the super-injunction cases, it’s worth considering why businesses are still afraid of social media.

Most companies are comfortable with staff taking ten minutes out for a cup of coffee, a cigarette or a chat in the canteen. So what’s wrong with staff posting the odd status update or firing out the occasional tweet?

There seems to be a notion that employers are worried about sensitive information leaking to the outside world, or employees writing detrimental things about the company. But people can leak information or bad-mouth their employer outside of work hours anyway, so I don’t think that’s the real issue here.

It’s the seamless integration between work and social media that is really concerning companies. It’s all too easy to get distracted when a steady stream of tweets and status updates are arriving in via a minimised browser. Moreover, it’s difficult for employers to know when this is happening, whereas walking off for a coffee is more noticeable and transparent.

And then there’s the issue of smartphones. Even if employers block certain websites at work, most people these days have mobile access to social networks.

So, a blanket ban does seem a little absurd. Surely a ‘during allocated breaks or lunch-time’ approach would suffice, with employees’ contracts clearly stipulating that anything bad written about the company on a social networking website (either during working hours or otherwise) will lead to disciplinary procedures.

People should be trusted to manage their tasks effectively. If employers feel the need to force people off social networking sites completely at work, it’s akin to them saying they don’t trust their staff. Not the best way boost morale in any workforce. What do you think??

Social Media Creates Better Consumer Experiences

2011-05-11T02:14:00.000-07:00

With the use of new technology and social media tools, businesses are able to understand their customers’ needs and wants in ways never before possible. Fortunately for internet marketers, we have amazing technologies and tools at the tip of our fingers that allow us to listen and respond to customers on a whole new level. Gone are the days of mass impersonal messaging in advertising and marketing. These days, there are new ways to engage in conversation with your audience and get the feedback you need. With these results, we have the power to give consumers not only exactly what they want, but how and when they want it.

How can you find out what consumers want?

Social Media Sites

Social media is completely revolutionizing the way businesses interact with their customers. Stored information from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and other networking sites can show us what brands they and their friends like. With this data, companies can now listen and respond to what it is people really want.

For example, Carnival Cruise Lines does a great job at listening to what people are saying. Their team monitors Twitter and Facebook for any mentions of their brand using the platform Tweetdeck. Social Media Manager from Carnival Cruise Lines Eric Schechter states, “We not only listen to the good, but also to the bad, correcting any customer service or providing service recovery if possible. We take into consideration what people write on our Facebook page and use these suggestions and comments to improve our cruise ships, guest experiences, etc. Social Media builds trust by being able to directly engage in conversation with the people who build and make our brand what it is.”

He continues to explain how the consumers “voice” actually builds the brand. “Now, with consumer generated content, customers turn into your brand ambassadors. By simply uploading pictures, videos, or commenting about your product or service, they are essentially building free PR for you! What’s better then free advertising?!”

Below is an example of Carnival Cruise Lines promoting conversation with customers through Facebook.

Another example of successfully understanding the needs of your consumers is a Facebook campaign by Target. Target launched a back-to-school Facebook page targeting college students living in dorms. The page included interactive games, photo and video posting opportunities as well as a discussion board. They offered a fun quiz application and colorful graphics which captured the interest of college students. In result, the page attracted a surge of new traffic and allowed Target to connect users to not only their brand but to receive insight on their products and customer service, both positive and negative. Marketers could then use this information to make changes to their current strategy and learn what exactly to continue doing and what to change out or improve on.

On the flip side, with the emergence of social media many consumers have also used this as an outlook to post negative comments and to vent or rant about products or services. Companies need to understand that this is not necessarily a bad thing. It gives the company an opportunity to fix the problem and a chance to learn what they can improve on in the future. If you are a business, check out this interesting article on how you can respond to negative social media reviews and turn it around to a positive.

One example of a company responding to negative feedback positively is Gap. After 20 years with the same logo, in 2010 the company decided to revamp it with a new one. This resulted in a frenzy amongst customers all over social media networking sites. Followers of the business posted negative comments about the new logo. So what was Gap left to do? Nothing but the obvious. They were able to take this feedback as constructive criticism and give people what they wanted – the original Gap logo back. In result, the negativity turned positive as it created buzz for the brand, increased sales that year, gave people a voice in the company and gave them back what they wanted.

In conclusion, internet marketers are using social media to help them better understand customers. Whether it’s listening to suggestions for new products or turning a negative review into a positive buzz, businesses are taking advantage of this new medium. A few years ago companies would have killed to have these channels of communication with their consumers.

Social media can be an extremely powerful channel if you have the right internet marketing company that knows how to use it correctly. If you’re looking to understand what your customers want on a whole new level, let an internet marketing professional help. Contact Mannix Marketing, Inc., your local Upstate NY internet marketing company to learn how you can use social media to create better experiences for your customers.

Changes in Store for Facebook Groups

2011-05-10T12:03:00.000-07:00

Anyone who says the days of Facebook Groups are over might want to check their inbox - chances are, they'll find at least a few emails from the last day or two with a subject line of "Someone-or-other updated the group Blah Blah."

So what's all that about? Right now, it looks like the tail end of Facebook's October '10 revamp of Groups functionality, when the social giant pretty much scrapped the old Groups format and replaced it with something that behaves sort of like a cross between a Facebook business page and an email listserv (remember those?). After the change, anyone who wanted to create a new Facebook presence for their club, carpool, PTA or what have you was forced to decide between creating a new-style group (with its dramatically different user experience) and a business page (more official, perhaps, but impossible to get an announcement or other message directly into members' inboxes - particularly after Facebook's Messages upgrade, which shuttles all business page updates into what's essentially a spam folder.) Frustratingly, there wasn't an option to upgrade old groups to the new format, resulting in what were essentially two (or three, if you count business pages) totally different methods of using Facebook to interact with small groups of people.

Despite the usual forum backlash after the Groups rework, Facebook continued to insist that the only way to convert an old-style group into a new group was to start from scratch, meaning admins had to earn all those group members back again. Until this week. Well, sort of. If you admin an old-style group on Facebook, and navigate to it, chances are you'll see something like this at the top of the page:

Great. Or is it? Here's the thing: Click on that "Learn more" link, and you'll see that some groups are eligible to be upgrade immediately, others are slated for automatic "archiving" and Facebook isn't exactly forthcoming about which are which. If you're in that former category (and you'll know you are because there'll be an upgrade link next to the "Learn more" callout), no sweat: click and you're done. You lose a few things - the ability to give admins titles, the "recent news" box and the info box under the group's profile pic, and the ability to affiliate with a network - but other than that, you're good. (Until you have to start explaining to all your group members how to actually use new groups, which can be a pain - particularly since group defaults mean each member gets email notification of every post on your group's wall. And you can't change that on their behalf; they've got to adjust their own notification settings. Will this mean a goodbye to heavy group Wall interaction - a gold standard for Facebook engagement? Watch this space.)

If you don't have the option to skip the archive process and immediately upgrade your group, here's where it gets tricky. No one's certain yet if all groups will receive that option in the future, or if some have simply been cherry-picked for the chance to change. Inside Facebook speculates that it might have something to do with some combination of group size, activity and maybe even age, but as with so many Facebook changes, no one really knows. And, as of now, there's no window for auto-archiving any more definite than "the next few months"; so if you admin an old-style group, it's probably worth keeping an eye on your page to see if/when you're invited to upgrade.

If you're not invited and Facebook automatically makes the switch for you, their help docs say, you're still preserved - except that you lose all your members and will have to re-add them. That's right; they're all gone. If your group is a small one, and all the members are your friends; this isn't such a huge issue; you can add your friends to a new-style group with the click of a mouse. If they're not your friends, you'll either need to rely on the good graces of mutual friends who are group members or contact those folks via some other means to get them to request admission to your group - because with new groups, even public ones still need someone from within the circle to approve a join request. With that in mind, if you're biding your time waiting for Facebook to give you the upgrade invite, you may want to make a list now of your current group members - and warn them that there might be some changes coming.

Do you admin any groups, and if so, were you given the option to immediately upgrade? Have you been getting a glut of notification emails in the last few days from groups that have made the switch?

Facebook – The Ever Growing Network That Connects The World

2011-05-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

Latest reports revealed that Facebook and the Chinese search company “Baidu” are considering a deal for a new social Network in China.

As of March 31st 2011, Facebook had as many as 664 million subscribers worldwide, meaning that one third of worldwide internet users are signed up to Facebook.

The creation of the new Chinese networking platform would mean another big step in Facebook’s attempt to conquer the world.

Sohu.com reports that Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and Baidu CEO Robin Li have been preparing this partnership over the past year. The Chinese government currently blocks a number of websites due to strict privacy laws, with illegalities including pornography, gambling and any anti communist content. Facebook is already amongst the blocked sites, something that Zuckerberg has long since been openly seeking to change.

As a result Facebook and Baidu have come up with a social networking concept solely for the Chinese population, without any international integration. At this stage the union has not been officially confirmed, however Facebook has admitted that it is currently evaluating the practicality this concept.

Whilst Facebook’s success is set for further global growth, the business is not without obstacles. Having only recently survived a court case against the Winklevoss twins over claims that Zuckerberg had stolen an idea for a social networking platform whilst working for the brothers in his time at Harvard University, a former employer named Paul Ceglia has now issued a complaint with the Federal Court in New York over ownership of Facebook. Ceglia claims to possess emails dating back to 2003 that apparently show Zuckerberg promising an 84% stake in the then fledgling business.

As the latest Internet World stats (IWS) show, the continuing events mentioned have not hurt Facebook’s popularity. Day on day its network grows, and we can only be curious what the future will bring.

Facebook World Statistics – March 31, 2011/Subscribers by World Regions

Source: Miniwatts Marketing Group, Internet World Stats, Facebook subscribers for March 31, 2011. Notes: a) Population 2011 data comes from the US Census Bureau; b) Facebook user figures come from Facebook, Socialbakers,and other trustworthy sources; c) Mexico is included in Latin America and Turkey is included in Europe, according to the United Nations country classification

Explore Twitter’s Evolution: 2006 to Present

2011-05-05T07:07:00.000-07:00

Fresh off celebrating its 5th birthday in March, Twitter isn’t slowing down any time soon. In fact, April turned out to be just as eventful as any for the social media powerhouse.

In April, Twitter introduced a new version of its homepage with a sleeker design and revamped pitch to potential users; expanded its Local Trends feature to 70 more cities and countries; and updated its search tool to make it easier to find new people to follow. Meanwhile, talks about Twitter’s future intensified as CNN reported UberMedia — the company behind UberSocial, Echofon and Twidroyd — is “outlining plans” to develop a Twitter-like competitor. But Twitter users, have no fear — Mashable‘s Chris Taylor says Twitter “is a lot more robust — and unrepeatable — than it may seem.”

This month has gotten off to a fast start as Twitter was abuzz on May 1 with speculation and subsequent confirmation of terrorist Osama bin Laden’s death. At one point that night, Twitter recorded 5,106 tweets per second, which is the third highest tweets-per-second tally behind only numbers registered during New Year’s Eve 2011 in Japan and the destructive tsunami there in March.

Busy two month so far, eh? We think so, which got us interested in finding out how the Twitter activity in April and May stacks up against previous months. So with the help from Mashable‘s new Explore page, we delved deep into some of the most memorable moments in Twitter’s eventful five years of existence.

Twitter’s Abridged Timeline

March 2006: Dorsey creates Twitter. On March 31, he publishes the first tweet ever, which says, “just setting up my twttr.”

July 2006: The microblogging service officially launches to the public on July 15. Later this month, co-founder Biz Stone explains what Twitter is in a hilarious video on YouTube.

March 2007: Twitter turns 2.

April 2007: The Twitter service becomes its own company.

October 2008: Dorsey steps down as CEO to assume a less-intensive role as chairman of the board; co-founder Evan Williams replaces Dorsey.

November 2008: Twitter passes 1 billion tweet mark.

March 2009: Twitter turns 3 on the heels of a Nielsen Online report indicating Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year.

June 2009: AP Stylebook adds Twitter terms, and concerns over Twitter’s flatlining growth emerge.

July 2009: Twitter earns spot in Collins English Dictionary as a noun and a verb.

September 2009: Twitter changes default avatar to a picture of a bird.

October 2009: Twitter passes the 5 billion tweet mark.

January 2010: NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer sends the first unassisted tweet from space aboard the International Space Station.

February 2010: Users start clocking in more than 50 million tweets per day.

March 2010: Twitter turns 4.

April 2010: Twitter’s advertising platform, Promoted Tweets, goes live (see video below).

June 2010: Twitter users set a new record for tweets per second — 3,085 — during Game 7 of the NBA playoffs between the L.A. Lakers and the Boston Celtics. That record was short-lived though, as users broke it later in the month with 3,283 tweets per second at the end of the World Cup match between Japan and Denmark. Twitter rolls out new ads in trending topics section.

July 2010: Twitter search results begin showing people, too. Furthermore, Twitter starts offering personalized suggestions of users to follow with a feature called “Suggestions for You.”

August 2010: Twitter launches the “Tweet Button,” an official option for web publishers to count retweets and let their readers easily share content (see video below). Twitter surpasses MySpace in number of unique monthly visitors. Between August 2009 and August 2010, Twitter grew 76% to 96 million unique visitors, while MySpace dropped 17% to 94 million.

September 2010: Twitter begins rolling out the new Twitter.com web interface, adding new ways to embed multimedia into the stream (see video below). Twitter changes the default avatar picture to a drawing of an egg.

October 2010: Twitter co-founder Evan Williams steps down as CEO, handing the title over to COO Dick Costolo.

January 2011: eMarketer predicts Twitter will triple its advertising revenue to $150 million in 2011. Twitter users in Japan set a new record for tweets per second — almost 7,000 — in the moments just after the country entered the year 2011. Twitter put together this cool map visualization that shows activity spreading west, from time zone to time zone, as each new region welcomes the new year.

February 2011: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak steps down amid a groundbreaking digital revolution in which Twitter played a much-debated role. Users, among other methods, put hashtags #Jan25 and #Egypt in their tweets. Rumors swirl about whether Google or Facebook will buy Twitter for as much as $10 billion.

March 2011: Twitter turns 5 and sees the return of Twitter inventor and co-founder Jack Dorsey, who officially comes back to the company as executive chairman. Also, Sharespost values Twitter at $7.7 billion.

April 2011: Twitter introduces a new version of its homepage with a sleeker design and revamped pitch to potential users; expands its Local Trends feature to 70 more cities and countries; and updates its search tool to make it easier to find new people to follow. Talks about Twitter’s future intensify as CNN reported UberMedia — the company behind UberSocial, Echofon and Twidroyd — is “outlining plans” to develop a Twitter-like competitor.

May 2011 (as of May 4): Twitter use ramps up on May 1 with speculation and subsequent confirmation of terrorist Osama bin Laden’s death. At one point that night, Twitter records 5,106 tweets per second, which is the third highest tweets-per-second tally behind only numbers registered during New Year’s Eve 2011 in Japan and the destructive tsunami there in March. Reports of Twitter’s TweetDeck acquisition surface, saying an announcement about the much-rumored deal may be made in a few days.

Social Media Statistics 2011

2011-05-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

Social Media Statistics 2011

By 2010 Gen Y outnumbered Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest between the United States and Indonesia (note that Facebook is now creeping up – recently announced 700 million users)
Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 600 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
80% of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….
The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the population of Ireland, Norway, or Panama. Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
80% of Twitter usage is outside of Twitter…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
Only 14% trust advertisements
Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
90% of people that can TiVo ads do
Hulu has grown from 70 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
According to Jeff Bezos 40% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media
More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

The KISS Method for Determining Social Media ROI

2011-04-30T04:05:00.000-07:00

Attend any corporate meeting on social media initiatives and it’s likely that you’ll hear a question or two along the lines of “how is this selling us more product” or “what’s the ROI on these activities”? Unfortunately, many social media strategists get caught up in the numbers that relate specifically to social media and they forget about the numbers that are meaningful to their business.

Obviously, each business or organization will have different Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that determine the success of social media activities, but many organizations can benefit from using some, or all, of what I call the K.I.S.S. method. No, it’s not “keep it simple, stupid”, with respect to social media, KISS stands for the following:

K is for Knowledge management – For the last 10 years, the nebulous term “knowledge management” has been used to try to identify ways to capture the knowledge stored in employees heads and turn it into meaningful information that organizations can use. The dangers of ignoring knowledge management is that employees who leave your organization take their “tribal knowledge” with them, resulting in loss of access to the information and increased training costs for the persons’ replacement. The loss of this knowledge can ultimately impact your customer satisfaction if the tribal knowledge was never captured in any organizational knowledge base.

To avoid the loss of employee knowledge, you can leverage social media by creating an internal platform where your subject matter experts can share their knowledge, thus preserving it for organizational use. Wikis, idea networks, blogs, and social Intranets are a great tools that can be used to encourage employees to share what they know.

Keep in mind that you may need to provide employees with incentive to participate. Explore whether it would be beneficial to offer monthly incentives to those employees that contribute the most valuable content using internal social media tools. A $50 restaurant gift card that saves you thousands in training costs and keeps customers happy is usually a good investment.

I is for Intelligence – Think of social media as a direct pipeline into information about your products/services, your customers, and your competitors. If your customers don’t like your products or services, they will share their displeasure via reviews, tweets, and posts. The same holds true for your competitors products/services. Additionally, if you listen closely, your customer and potential customers will tell you what they want from you with respect to new products/services. Take that one step further and engage with the community that makes up your customer and prospects, and you can identify new ideas that might not have been developed by your R&D department.

S stands for Sales – Social media can be a great way to connect with your existing customers and empower them to become your brand advocates. Customers are great if they continue to use your product, but they’re even better when they share their experiences with others and encourage their friends and family to try your product. This isn’t a new concept, it’s been around forever and have been successful (remember Faberge shampoo’s “and they told 2 friends and so on…” campaign?)

Social media also offers a significantly cheaper medium for advertising then traditional print, TV, and radio advertising. Look for ways to get your ads in front of highly-targeted consumers using social advertising on channels like Facebook and YouTube.

Don’t forget that social media can also give your sales professionals an easy way to identify new prospects who are looking for a product or service that your provide. LinkedIn Answers and Twitter are great ways to find new potential customers.

S stands for Support – One of the most often overlooked value propositions for social media is that of customer support. Anyone who has ever worked in a call center knows that the most expensive way to provide service to a customer (other than coming onsite to their location) is to have a call center technician help them on the phone. That’s why call centers track important metrics like First Contact Resolution (FCR), Time on Call (ToC), Cost per Call (CpC), and – of course – Customer Satisfaction (CSat).

By capturing your organizational knowledge (via the “K” of Knowledge Management), you can enhance your internal call center knowledge base, allowing your call center technicians to locate and provide answers more quickly, which could decrease Time on Call and increase First Call Resolution. Decrease in TOC and increase in FCR often results in an increase of CSat.

As you can see, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to start thinking of ways that engaging your employees and customers through social media can improve your operations, open up opportunities, and positively impact your customer satisfaction.

Have ways that you have implemented the KISS method or have additional ideas for positively showing a ROI for social activities in your organization? I’d love to hear about them in a comment or a Tweet.

Top 10 Social Media Myths

2011-04-29T11:29:00.000-07:00

It's 2011, you've got the social media covered for your company, right? Between Twitter, Facebook and Videos and...what’s that? You're confused and concerned that it's all so complicated and possibly not really useful to your business after all? Have no fear. We will break down the common myths and misconceptions about using social media for business.

Myth 1 – Social media is for kids, not business.

Social media is a broad term, but it covers most of the ways people share information over the internet. If you want people to talk about your company or product, you have to make it easy for them to do it online.

The various social media outlets, including YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, forums and blogging, all make it possible for a business owner to answer tech questions, perform market research, promote sales or new products, support dealers and distributors and even become a daily part of their customer’s lives.

The result is incredible ROI – for very little cost beyond time/labor, you can communicate directly with consumers, without a filter, and increase both the bottom line and long-term brand awareness. Each aspect of social media has interesting features and all have their own benefits and pitfalls, which leads us to our second misconception.

Myth 2 – A business needs to be equally active in all forms of social media or it isn’t worth doing anything.

The great thing about the various social media outlets is that they can be coordinated into a single cohesive campaign – or you can treat each as a separate media channel. A new video can be shared on Facebook or a blog post promoted on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean that you must do everything at once. If you only have time for one forum, or you just want to tweet once a month about clearance items, then start there. It’s still an additional audience, and it’s still one more place for search engines to find your company or product. That’s the secret of social media marketing - they key isn't communicating immediately with the people who follow your channel (although that's very satisfying) it's caching all that content you create for people to read and absorb in the coming days, weeks and months as search engines index what you wrote and bring it up as a search result for people seeking answers and content.

Myth 3 – Participating in forums means posting constantly, many times each day. Who has time for that?

We could do a whole article devoted to the use of forums, but basically, sponsoring a few popular forums in your market gives you the ability to search and post answers to questions, as well as share blog posts or videos about your company. Posting frequency depends on your resources and interest, but the most important people who see your post are not the forum members; they are people stumbling into the forum thread via search engine.

Think about it; when you search for something new (say, you just got a new mobile phone and are curious about features) many of the results that come up will be forum posts where someone asked a similar question. You’ll scroll through the answers, and if there’s a satisfactory one, you’ll leave with the information you needed. Therefore, it is not the frequency of your company’s forum posts, but rather the completeness and quality, which will endear you to members and searchers alike.

Myth 4 – My company offers high-end products to an exclusive audience. Won’t all this tweeting, blogging and Facebooking take away from our mystique?

Here’s the thing about all use of social media, both for personal and business use: nobody is forcing you to post photos of messy workshops or proprietary schematics. You control the content and the message. Social media may be friendly, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be used in a classy manner, just as a cocktail party is different from a frat party.

If you want to maintain a high-end feel, keep your posts formal. Make sure grammar and punctuation are accurate. Post high-resolution photographs from your catalogs, or link to well-respected publications featuring your products.
Being accessible doesn’t make you common, and more importantly, if you aren’t on the web, your fans will make unofficial profiles to represent you and then you’ll have no control of your company image.

Myth 5 – We have a blog on our website. Why would we start a Facebook page to compete with our own site?

No matter how exciting your company website is, it probably isn’t the homepage for hundreds of thousands of people across the world. When you have a Facebook fan page devoted to your company, there’s a good chance that your post will be in their newsfeed at least once a week or more and you can use it to push traffic to your blog.

Now you might be saying, “Once a week? But I post more than that, people must see my posts every day!” and that brings us to a very common mistake regarding Facebook.

Myth 6 – If you post every day on Facebook, you’ll be annoying and people won’t like your company.

We’ve heard from many companies that are afraid of over-posting and becoming like “Farmville” or “Mafia Wars” (By the way, you can block those apps while still maintaining a relationship with the person who plays them, just hover the cursor on the right side of the post, hit the “x” when it appears and click “hide …Farm Wars…”. You’re welcome.)

At this point, most regular Facebook users have more friends and interests than will fit on their screen in a single visit, and Facebook sets the newsfeed to a default called “Top News” which is actually a sort of “favorites,” meaning it’s the people or companies most clicked by that user. If you aren’t in the Top news, the Facebook user won’t see your post that day unless he or she switches over to “Most Recent” and even then, your posts will move down the viewer’s wall during the day as new posts are made by their other contacts.

This is good, because it means you can post every day without alienating your fans, (although we don’t recommend more than once a day unless you are offering live updates from an event or contest). The quick turn over of posts also means you can repeat posts, or post similar information. It will be new to much of your audience!

While daily posts aren’t annoying, daily Facebook messages are. Since Facebook messages go straight to people’s email, sending sales notices or product updates as a message is basically spamming. That’s a quick way to get your page or profile blocked.

Myth 7 - We have to post about our products every day.

So now you’ve been won over to the idea of updating blogs, forums and Facebook pages often, but with what? Daily repetition of the product line is bound to get boring, both for the reader and the company making the posts. So what do you post about?

Use your social media outlets to post detail shots, behind the scenes tours, history, employee bios, helpful tech, entertaining events, relevant trivia, and vintage videos, or to ask questions for your market research. Find out what products your fans would like to see, or encourage them to ask tech questions or post their own stories and photos.

People love to feel like they have inside information, so if you post a quick bio of your lead technician or video of an R&D session, it gives your fans a real feeling of connecting with your company. As mentioned earlier, only post what you are comfortable sharing.

Maybe that’s just macro shots of fasteners or details of the fine stitching on a product. If it is something that isn’t available anywhere else, your audience will view it as worthwhile content.

It’s important to post product links occasionally, but if you make machine tooling, your posts needn’t be solely sales links to chamfer bits. You can post links to videos about new machinable plastics, or articles detailing the proper maintenance of lathes. As long as the links you post don’t mention your competitors, your readers will associate the helpful or interesting information with your company.

Myth 8 - Flickr is just for people sharing wedding photos.

Going back to the main reason for using social media (increased web presence), Flickr is one of the easiest ways to use social media. Simply upload the same images you use for web catalogs and label them with product info, keywords and weblinks and you have one more place which will show up for customers when they make searches. As an added bonus, bloggers searching for images to illustrate their own stories may grab yours from Flickr. Make sure they have watermarks!

Myth 9 – We don’t make enough videos to have a YouTube Channel.

YouTube allows you to make playlists and add videos posted by other users to your channel. If you notice your company or product in customer’s videos, add them to your channel and you’ll have one more place where customers can see you and reach your company on the web.

Along with adding customer videos to your playlists, make sure you tag your own videos as you upload them. Tags are the words at the bottom of photos, blog posts and videos and they are a useful way to help search functions find your posts and videos. On YouTube, tags are especially important as they greatly affect the frequency and position of your video in search results.

The best results come from including a detailed description of the video, and including tags that you see on videos with a similar theme. Don't be afraid of tags like "awesome.” A lot of people spend their free time searching general terms like "awesome video.”

Myth 10 – Once it is set up, we can just leave our profiles and fan pages alone except for when we post links.

Nothing is sadder than a Facebook fan page full of spam or a Twitter mailbox with 600 unanswered direct messages. A social media site is very much like a real party. A good host interacts with all the guests, cleans up messes and sends rowdy guests outside.

The reason social media has the word “social” in it is because it is based off interaction. It is important to make sure that whoever is monitoring your company’s online activities will be able to answer tech questions, reply to friend requests, link to dealers and diffuse tense situations or customer squabbles.

Don’t start up a giant social media campaign and attend it half-heartedly. It’s better to participate in only one outlet and do it well, than to set up profiles everywhere and leave them neglected like digital ghost towns.

There are many great tools available to help make managing your social media easier and more effective, and if you don’t have the time or personnel to run a full social media campaign, there are several good marketing and PR firms with social media experts who are happy to discuss and maintain your company’s social media presence.

Hopefully this has inspired you to log on and get to know your customers and fans. Social media is like a free ad in a magazine, or a booth in a worldwide trade show. It takes a little effort, coordination and manpower to get things rolling and keep it staffed and active, but it’s good for your company.

How to Monetize Social Media

2011-04-25T10:16:00.000-07:00

Companies are not only getting the word out about their brands using social media such as Facebook and Twitter but are also making money.

Many business executives have not found sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Myspace, and Linkedin useful in making money. Building genuine online relationships that are also good for the bottom line is not so easy. There is a lot of trial and error. But while monetizing social media is difficult it is not impossible. There are companies that are getting the word out about their brands using social media and are turning a profit.

Take The New York Jets. The NFL team launched their Ultimate Fan social game in September 2010, which was the first revenue generating Facebook app to be backed by a pro sports team. The application lets football fans do online what they would normally do at home and in stadiums—root for their favorite teams and players, predict game scores, and hold a virtual tailgate party with other fans from across the globe. Ultimate Fan has since lured four major sponsors integrating their brands: MetLife, Motorola, SNY and HotelPlanner.com. This year, 10 percent of Jets sponsorships include a social media component; the team is planning to bump it up to 50 percent by next year, according to a spokesperson.

The Jets also communicate regularly on Twitter. They even advertised a Twitter-based contest to win tickets to their 2011 AFC playoff championship game against the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Jets are able to engage with their fans and make them feel like they are part of the team. They are leveraging social medial to capitalize on their fans' passion for the team and their willingness to share that fervor.

Like many companies, your social media efforts have started small and grew organically. To capitalize on those efforts to generate sales and revenues you need to have a team of people dedicated to your social media presence. You also will need a deep understanding of your audience, a creative vision, and a way to measure results in order to execute a successful strategy, says industry experts.

Here are some ways your social media can be monetized.

How to Monetize Social Media: Build Brand Awareness

The first step is to use traditional media or word-of-mouth advertising to drive awareness and traffic to your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Linkedin or Myspace pages, says Jamie Turner, author of How to Make Money with Social Media. Unless you already have a recognizable brand like Nike or Apple, your brand needs to develop social media magnetism before you can look to make any money. You also need to create circular momentum across many platforms when designing your social media campaign, says Turner. By providing multiple channels for users to talk with you, you let customers choose the channel that they are most comfortable with, he adds; and by doing that you increase the likelihood that they'll connect with your brand in any number of ways.

How to Monetize Social Media: Engage Your Audience

Social media is about having a dialogue. When you have a dialogue with a customer or prospect, the communication is much more fulfilling and much more profitable, says Turner. The PETCO brand has developed a strong presence in social media. The pet store chain has a YouTube channel, its Facebook page generates a lot of discussions among pet owners, and there's lots of activity on its PETCO Scoop blog, which has received hundreds of 'likes' and comments. PETCO's customers are true pet lovers and treat their pets as part of the family. The company tries to keep conversation going by aiming Facebook and Twitter posts so that there's an explicit question to answer, or at least a specific piece of information to which people can react. Industry experts stress that you have to know your community and know how to take part within that community and through that create great content or conversation that will raise awareness and increase sales.

How to Monetize Social Media: Offer Special Promotions

Dell Computers exemplifies a company that is selling products using social media. Its Twitter page, @DellOutlet, offers discounts exclusively to followers. Dell might tweet 15 percent off any Dell Outlet laptop or desktop with a special coupon code entered at checkout so they'll know which tweet you are seeing. @DellOutlet also points you to a specific web page. There is some interaction in terms of chats with tweeters. @DellOutlet has garnered more than 1.6 million followers and generated more than $2 million in incremental revenues for Dell. Traditionally, Dell would have spent a lot of money running print ads. Today, they can write a 140-character promotion to reach customers.

PETCO is yet another example. The company provided a promo code to their customers for $40 in free shipping. The person who shared their code with the most people won a $500 PETCO gift card. About 40 percent of the sales that resulted from this promotional push came from new consumers. The desire to save a few bucks drove loyal PETCO customers to connect with the larger pet owner community and spread the word about the store via social media.

How Ben & Jerry’s Uses Social Media to Launch a New Flavor

2011-04-25T09:59:00.000-07:00

Imagine Ben & Jerry’s famed cow mascot Woody, storming into your office moo-ing and dancing with you while dishing out scoops of their new ice-cream flavor, Clusterfluff (yes, I know the name is quite interesting). The next thing you know, the entire office is Clusterfluffed.

As part of Clusterfluff’s launch in Singapore, the folks from RIOT brought the Cowmobile to Singapore for the first time ever. The Cowmobile will then go to specific locations based on “mooo” requests from fans on Facebook.

Over a period of 5 days (4 – 8 April), all fans needed to do was to Like Ben & Jerry’s Facebook page and “mooo” their request via a specially created application for the Cowmobile to request for a stopover at their office, school or home.

More “moos”, more chance.

In just 5 days, 784 requests were made and the amount of Facebook Likes increased by more than 28% (1,412). Twitter followers increased by over 15% (155) with 186 mentions and re-tweets. The Cowmobile went to 31 different locations and gave out a total of 5,960 free scoops of Clusterfluff.

Riding on that momentum, Ben & Jerry’s 12 of April Free Cone Day resulted in an additional 592 Likes on Facebook and 270 mentions and re-tweets on Twitter. The massive amount of re-tweets propelled the Free Cone Day message to appear as a Top Tweet on Twitter’s homepage.

The Free Cone Day came with a good cause as members of the public were encouraged to donate their dime for the Dyslexia Association of Singapore (DAS). A total of over $14,000 was collected that day.

Based on RIOT’s statistics, for the campaign month of April vs March, Ben & Jerry experienced an
•Increase of 912% in new Facebook likes
•Over 446,000 impressions (+552%)
•+1490% in post feedback
•+486 Twitter followers

Report: Social media marketing goes mainstream

2011-04-22T14:00:00.001-07:00

Social media has gone mainstream and “nearly every business on the planet is exploring social media marketing initiatives.” So says Michael A. Stelzner

This study surveyed over 3300 marketers with the goal of understanding how marketers are using social media to grow and promote their businesses.

A summary of the report’s primary findings:
• Marketers place high value on social media: A significant 90% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business.
• Measurement and integration are top areas marketers want to master: Onethird of all social media marketers want to know how to monitor and measure the return on investment (ROI) of social media and integrate their social media activities.
• Social media marketing takes a lot of time: The majority of marketers (58%) are using social media for 6 hours or more each week, and more than a third (34%) invest 11 or more hours weekly.
• Video marketing on the rise: A significant 77% of marketers plan on increasing their use of YouTube and video marketing, making it the top area marketers will invest in for 2011.
• Marketers seek to learn more about Facebook and blogging: 70% of marketers want to learn more about Facebook and 69% want to learn more about blogging.
• The top benefits of social media marketing: The number-one advantage of social media marketing (by a long shot) is generating more business exposure, as indicated by 88% of marketers. Increased traffic (72%) and improved search rankings (62%) were also major advantages.
• The top social media tools: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs were the top four social media tools used by marketers, in that order. Facebook has eclipsed Twitter to take the top spot since our 2010 study.
• Social media outsourcing underutilized: Only 28% of businesses are outsourcing some portion of their social media marketing.

How to use Twitter chat to increase sales

2011-04-20T16:10:00.000-07:00

Have you participated in a Twitter Chat? If not, you’re missing out. Twitter chats have a number of benefits, including:

Learning–Chats are usually focused on a specific topic. They are places where people share their knowledge.
Sharing your knowledge–If you like helping others to learn and grow, chats can be very rewarding.
Meeting new people–I’ve found some great people to follow through Twitter chats.
Gaining visibility and sharing your content–When your stream fills with topic-specific tweets containing a hashtag, it tends to be noticed. Chats also give you a chance to share your own and other relevant content.
Gaining followers–Just as I’ve found people to follow, others have followed me when we’ve met in a chat or they’ve seen my tweets from the chat.

If you’re new to chats, here’s some information about how to find and participate in them, with a few tips for getting the most out of them.

What is a Twitter Chat?

Twitter chats are discussions that happen in Twitter, via hashtags. People meet online in Twitter at a specific time and use a specific hashtag, such as #solopor or #blogchat. Usually, chats are an hour long and have a facilitator, who may provide questions that people discuss in the chat.

How do I find a Twitter Chat?

One great resource is this spreadsheet that shows Twitter Chats by subject and gives you the day, time, and hashtag, among other information.

How do I participate?

There are a few ways to do it. You can use Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, or another client, or even the Twitter UI. In a client, create a stream/column using Search to search on the hashtag. For example, if you’re participating in #blogchat, create a column based on a Search for #blogchat. If you don’t already have one, create a column for @ replies to you, as well. In Twitter, you can open Twitter in multiple windows/tabs. Do a hashtag search in one window, and use the other to view your mentions.

Once the chat starts, you watch for the facilitator to tweet the topic or questions. Then, respond by tweeting your answer and ending with the chat’s hashtag, such as #blogchat. Including the hashtag makes sure the tweet shows up in everyone’s chat search.

Another alternative is to participate through a service such as TweetChat.com or the new ChatTagged.com. You login with your Twitter handle, and then enter the chat’s hashtag in the search box. TweetChat or ChatTagged displays the chat, automatically updating as new tweets come in. They allow you to tweet and reply to tweets in the chat. Best of all, they automatically postpend the hashtag, so you don’t have to type it.

If you use TweetChat, you’ll still want open a Twitter window with Mentions displaying, so you can more easily see replies just to me. ChatTagged does this for you, displaying a separate window with mentions.

That’s ok. This isn’t like a real world conversation, or even an IM session. You won’t read every tweet in the chat. Read what you can or what catches your eye, and respond as you can. People often go off on little side threads, discussing an answer in greater detail by replying all, while using the hashtag. Keep an eye on your mentions so you can see when someone is replying to something you’ve said.

Some Tips

Be prepared to share links. I often open bit.ly, which I use as my URL shortener for my best posts. You may also want to open SnapBird so that you can search for a tweet you made or create a trunk.ly list of your tweets for reference. I often want to reference either something I’ve written, someone else’s blog post, or some study or research I’ve tweeted about. I open these sources so I can find content quickly.
Retweet other people’s good tweets. If someone says something in a chat that you think is spot on or really good, retweet it. It’s a way of recognizing people’s good comments, as well as indicating agreement.
Invite others. Make a point of inviting other people you know who might find the chat interesting. And consider making a general tweet out to your followers recommending the chat.
Participate even when the chat is over. The chat hashtag is available for relevant tweets even after the chat is over. Sometimes, a new study or blog post comes out after the chat, that is relevant to it. Tweet the link to the hashtag. If you had a side conversation with people about the topic, @ them as well.
Consider summarizing the chat. Chats can be good blog fodder. You may want to summarize the consensus or tips you got via the chat, giving due credit and quoting tweets, as appropriate. Many hosts archive the chat, making it easier to reference tweets. Otherwise, you can always search the hashtag.
Oh, and don’t forget the thank the host and participants!