Category Archives: marketing

Best Twitter Apps

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If you’re going to use Twitter….. and you should…. you might as well get the best apps to support you…. to make the process faster and more automated. Serious users consider Tweetdeck a must.  Also Hellotxt can be useful, since it updates from web, mobile, sms, email, 3rd party applications, API to more than 35 social network at the same time.

You can also take a look at the 21 most popular Twitter applications ranked by TechCrunch that produced these monthly traffic results:

1. Twitpic 1,236,828
2. Tweetdeck 285,864
3. Digsby 233,472
4. Twittercounter 212,200
5. Twitterfeed 149,812
6. Twitterholic 147,164
7. Twhirl 143,333
8. Twitturly 88,793
9. Twtpoll 74,154
10. Retweetist 60,051
11. Tweepler 51,304
12. Hellotxt 45,754
13. Twitdom 45,411
14. Tweetscan 44,463
15. Tweetburner 41,754
16. Tweetvisor 31,621
17. Twittervision 30,708
18. Twitterfall 29,592
19. Monitter 25,433
20. Twibs 17,168
21. Twistori 16,229
22. Twitbin 14,986
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Guide To Using Twitter For Business

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Whether you’re a big business or a small business, you need to get the word out, particularly in this tough economic time.

This is Derek Halpern’s one-stop source for all Twitter resources that relate specifically to business. You will learn how people acquire customers and grow their business using Twitter. Additionally, you will see a few examples of large companies who use Twitter effectively.

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The Ultimate Resource To Use Twitter Effectively.

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Hopefully, like me, you are learning to use Twitter to enhance and increase your business.  Here’s some help getting there:

How to Attract and Influence People on Twitter — The Ultimate Twitter Resource , Derek Halpern great collection, broken into targeted pieces.

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Twitter Captures WSJ And Mainstream Business

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In case you are asking yourself if your business or association is ready to start tweeting, you can stop asking.

Even the high, conservative guru of business, the Wall Street Journa,l is not only reporting on tweeting but is tweeting itself. http://twitter.com/WSJ

As WSJ.com as reported on the Twitter phenomenon infiltrating mainstream America:

“Doctors are using Twitter to update patients about office hours. Local groups such as the Los Angeles Fire Department are using it to share details about service calls with interested residents, occasionally with graphic descriptions of the victims’ conditions. And dozens of major companies, like computer maker Dell Inc., use Twitter to share deals and product news with people who sign up for the service.”  They also report on a mobile Korean taco business, selling spicy Bar-b-que tacos  getting 400 customers in customers at night by tweeting out their location.”

Is there anything Tweet can’t do?  Perform brain surgery?  Tweet out Hamlet in snippets?

Well, kidding aside, that still leaves plenty it can do, and what it can do for your business can be pretty amazing.  For the basics, go to Using Twitter For Business

Tell us how you’re using Twitter, and we’ll start a dialogue of people or businesses with interesting Twitter uses.

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Twitter Or Facebook ? You Need Both For Different Reasons

My social Network on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter...
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Sudha Jamthe is a new technologies, product marketing and social media guru.  She has written a very thorough and, I think, insightful analysis that sorts through what your goals and expectations are of both Twitter and Facebook.  Turns out that though there are many similarities there are also some stark differences in what you have able to achieve through these different platforms.  It’s well worth reading, particularly if your goal is to reach out to a specific market.  Here’s an excerpt, but for the entire piece, go to Sudha’s article:
From the Eyes of an Enterpreneur: 15 Similarities between Twitter and Facebook and 5 HUGE differences and what it means for social media.

“My personal take on this is that we are at an early stage in the social media game and this competition is going to create new innovations that will shape the market to the next level. It is not about users on one social networking poking and sharing;we are entering a new level of interaction where realtime interaction, mobile, international and location awareness are going to allow for new ways of interaction for us as consumers and for businesses to engage with us .

Don’t underestimate the power of search

Facebook is closed, you cannot search any of your own feeds or status updates or comments or likes. You have a basic keyword search that allows one to find friends or applications.
Facebook allows google to crawl public profiles and lets google bring it more users.

Twitter absolutely shines here!

Summize was built using twitter api and later bought by twitter and became twitters powerful search tool. It also speaks to how open completely open the twitter API is, but that’s a different discussion!

Twitter search allows you to search to find conversation happening on any keywords and subscribe to it as a RSS feed. It is like having a Google SEM engine sending you customers to your RSS feed every 10 seconds.

This is getting marketers excited because now you have the power to watch your brand conversations, you can do live market research to find the pulse of products, brands and messaging.

Growth Patterns Tells the Real Story of Divergent Paths

Facebook is growing at 1 Million users/month with increased internal users.
Twitter has an organic growth with more companies joining it and experimenting with it.

Twitter is a community or has several communities built into it with its own set of rules and accepted behaviors.

Eg. Adding #tags, #Fridayfollow at end of tweets on Fridays to recommend new friends to follow etc.

So as new users join twitter they enrich their community and become part of it sooner than facebook where the user has to go through the learning curve for each user one user at a time.

So the twitter story is about faster engagement while facebook is about faster user acquisition.”

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Simple Tools To Make Your Web Site Or Blog More Social & Interactive

Meebo
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All of us online are not only in Web 2.0 but in the increasingly powerful social networking era.  Static information still has a place but the tsunami of web use is in the social networking space.  So not only should you incorporate the sharing tools in your new work on the web, but you have the opportunity to go back and add a snippet of code to your static product pages which will make it become alive and interactive and more appealing to your users.

Duct Tape Marketing tells us how in Enhancing Social Funtions on Web Sites. So here’s the game plan:

“The web has become a terribly social place and that raises the expectation of most web site visitors. The ability to add content, comment, rate, review, interact and share information found when surfing the web has become standard fare.

By adding a few simple scripts and widgets you can easily add tremendous social functionality to any web page or blog. Giving your visitors, prospects and customers ways to share and amplify their voice is a great way to enhance their experience of your business online.


JS Kits – This is one of the dead simple easiest ways to add rating, navigation, polling, chat, reviewing and commenting to any web page. You simply copy a line of code and you are in business. Getting customer reviews and reader comments on web page, usually a blog function is great for static product pages.

Social Ad Units – Popular Media recently introduced something they call Influencer Ads. These banner ad type units allow you to place ads that contain an entire social media follow-up system. When someone clicks on an ad for your webinar, they can automatically post it to Facebook or send it to a friend with personalized follow-up. This is a great tool for contests and registration incentive campaigns. (You can see this in action here)

Meebo Me – This simple IM widget can be embedded on your site to allow visitors to initiate an IM chat instantly when they visit your site. This can be a great way to add customer feedback, help and interaction functionality.

Add to Any – These widget allows visitors to easily subscribe to RSS content, share, bookmark or email content using many of the commonly used services.”

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Making Money From Activism on the Web

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The Obama Model Web 2.0 – Social activism, bordering on a movement, is a whole new concept. Well, maybe it’s a rebirth and reconfiguration of a Web.1 concept. (According to Humanity.org, these are the top 10 Social Activist Sites: The World Revolution, Ashoka, Changemakers, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Earth Fund, Afribike, Grupa hajdeda da…, The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), and Youth Against Aids (YAA) ).  But it does use a whole new set of social media tools that did not exist until recently.

Or maybe it’s another transformation of an even older concept, corporate social responsibility or CSR.  Two prime examples are ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s, which not only promotes support sustainable and safe and environmentally friendly methods of food production but seeks and supports nonviolent ways to achieve peace and justice as well. Another vendor, Whole Foods Markets, goes to the ends of the earth, literally, to find delicious and unusual products.  Whole Foods then partners with local farmers and producers, even including direct micro-credit loans to their vendors, in order to bring quality to their customers, and, at the same time, lift up emerging economies. It has been a powerful formula.

But now there is a new model on the web, inspired by the Obama’s extremely media savvy campaign. It is a model where activism is not rooted in a bricks and mortar organization but driven, primarily, by viral marketing on the web and the formation of a communities of interest.  Or are they movements?

Whatever you call them, you can use the same model.

As set by Tim Leberecht in Obama Inc. – Web activism for profit:

“A recent example of this kind of Obama Inc. start-up, San Francisco-based firm Virgance, was featured in the Economist this week, and the article indicates that social impact in an activism 2.0 world is shifting from a welcome side benefit to an integral component in the business models of Internet entrepreneurs. The new kids on the web have internalized the lessons from the Obama campaign, and now they want to make a difference, too – and money. The Economist describes Virgance’s model as “for-profit-activism.” Named after a plot device in Star Wars, the company aims to support social causes through a multi-pronged campaign platform that resembles the way Obama for America mobilized its supporters, and it typically consists of four core elements:

1. A web-empowered volunteer network

2. A presence on Facebook

3. A team of paid bloggers to promote the campaigns

4. YouTube viral videos

Among the first Virgance-supported campaigns are 1BOG (“one block off the grid” – aiming to convince homeowners to switch to solar energy), Carrotmobs (public contests that incentivize retailers to become green), and Lend Me Some Sugar (based on the Facebook application that gives users virtual sugar cubes for donations to a cause of their choice).

Virgance is not the first for-profit-do-gooder of course; there have been plenty of others whose business model combines bottom line thinking with social value: the Economist, for example, puts Virgance in a line with Project RED. But Virgance is more like Facebook Causes. It adopts the forces of “Here Comes Everybody” and builds its entire business on a social web platform, embracing the principles of open-source, mass collaboration, and transparency: “If a for-profit company did the type of work that non-profits often do, but did it more efficiently, would people trust it the same way they trust non-profits?” the Virgance web site describes the company’s ambitious mission. ”What if everything the company did was completely transparent? What if it was open source? If we can create this kind of company, and succeed, how many other companies would follow our example? Along the way, could we change the face of the business world itself?”

Does that language sound familiar? The Obamapreneurs are adept at turning their campaigns into movements. Clearly, the Obamanization of business – both in terms of substance and style – has arrived in reality, and we will see more Obama Inc.’s in 2009.

On February 27-28, IESE Business School will gather entrepreneurs, scientists, foundations, and corporations at its annual student-run Doing Good and Doing Well conference in Barcelona. It’ll be interesting to see how the Obama gem will make its way into the more old-school world of CSR (corporate social responsibility).”

If you have set up something like this or thought about it or want to or know someone who has…. write us. Share.  We can all master this with the help of each other.

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How To Blow Your Own Horn Via Online PR

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Ok.  This post is about press releases. It may be too wonkish for you and, if it is, move on.  But, before you go, you might at least want to look at these 2 links:

1.  Releases are well written: This link, several layers deep, tells you how to write something really of value to the user, so it gets her or  his attention.  Doesn’t necessarily have to be a press release.  Can also be a “white paper” on your site outlining the advantages or benefits it offers.  I’m planning to use this as a guide myself.

2. Integrated Twitter Option. Power user tip: PRWeb is releasing a “Tweet It” option for your press releases that will tweet your press release for you the second it goes live. Be sure to take advantage of this brand new feature. Twitter is awesome at spreading news in a viral fashion.

Now on to the meat of the matter. We’ve been stressing for a long time the importance of developing your own brand.  Brand You. And, short of dragging your mother to all your networking events, or having a blazer made out of testimonials for you…. I’m kidding…you are the only one you have to shout out your story.

So what’s one excellent way to do it.  I say this with the recognition that every now and then one has to pay for something to get it executed most effectively.   If you think you will never pay for a press release, under any circumstances, well then, there is always twitter. And also some free pr services, but you may not be exactly sure what you’ll get from those.  For now, let’s turn to Sugarrae aka Rae Hoffman in her PRWeb Review

“I’m often asked when I mention doing press releases for website promotion, branding and visibility what online press release distribution services I recommend, if any. The truth is that I’m a longtime user of PRWeb, have spent thousands of dollars running press releases with them and am pretty pleased with their services.

When I first started doing serious press releases several years back, I signed up with PRWeb – partially because they were very visible at industry conferences like PubCon and partially because they offered (and still do offer) a series of free webinars that explained how to use the service.

I was making the leap from being a small site affiliate to creating true affiliate brands and knew press releases had to be a part of my marketing strategy. With the roles of traffic and branding playing a larger and larger part in top search engine rankings, utilizing every opportunity you have to get publicity, including press releases, is becoming more of a necessity.

The PRWeb offerings

PRWeb has tried to simplify their offerings over the years to give you a choice between four main press release packages:

  • Standard Visibility aka the $80 level
  • Social Media Visibility aka the $140 level
  • SEO Visibility aka the $200 level
  • Media Visibility aka the $360 level

While the site touts tons of features for each, the main (read, important) differences aren’t that difficult to spot.

Standard Visibility ($80)

The cheapest of all the available options, standard visibility gets your release listed on the PRWeb network (which gets about 2-3 million unique visitors per month), in Google News and Yahoo News. Additionally, you’ll also get access to basic statistics about how “well” your release did such as headline impressions (cumulative, by week and by day), full page reads (cumulative, by week and by day) and the ability to compare the statistics of one (or more) press releases to another (useful in identifying the best days of the week to send out releases and which features help make your release more appealing).

Social Media Visibility ($140)

This option gets you everything included in the Standard Visibility package with a little increased distribution. Specifically, your release will be sent to an additional list of about 35,000 opt-in journalists, a “media digest” list (a list of about 4-500 regional reporters or 150-300 vertical reporters – your choice) and will also be distributed on the Pheedo network (which means your release will receive exposure on the relevant high profile sites in Pheedo’s network).

SEO Visibility ($200)

The “SEO Visibility” package, in my experience, is often the most misunderstood. PRWeb, along with every other known press release site, has long been treated differently by Google. The links from within your press release, with or without anchor text are not going to give you much (if any) “inbound link value” in the eyes of Google. Then why bother with the SEO Visibility package? A few reasons.

The SEO Visibility option comes with everything included in the Standard and Social Media Visibility options as well as distribution to an additional regional or vertical media digest list (for a total of two), inclusion with relevant premium vertical publishers (like Entrepreneur.com) and the ability to embed an image within your release.

In addition to that increased distribution, you can also specify anchor text for your links, keywords to include in the url of your release when published on PRWeb. If the links don’t “count” then why does either of these options matter? To begin with, at first glance, a press release looks much neater and more professional with “anchor text” vs. www.mydomain.com/the-long-ass-url-to-the-feature-were-announcing.html as the links to the features, people or products being announced.

Additionally, PRWeb has numerous distribution channels and should someone from those channels decide to publish your release on their own site, you’ll likely find more value in that re-published release linking to you with anchor text rather than long and ugly url strings.

Specifying keywords to use in the url of the release hosted on PRWeb will increase (however slightly) the chances that your release will rank well in the search engines based on the domain age, trust, branding and traffic of PRWeb.

Additionally, you also get access to additional statistics called “Search Engine Hits” (which is a bit misleading since it is actually search engine visits, not “hits” as traditional SEO folk would identify “hits”). You’ll get to see the percentage of total search engine traffic each of the major engines sent to your release (Google News, Google, Yahoo, MSN and “other”) as well as the top 20 keywords that drove that traffic. Unfortunately, while they show you the % of traffic each engine sent, they don’t show an aggregate number of “total search engine visits”, which PRWeb says they’re working on providing.

Media Visibility ($360)

This package includes everything in the three previous packages, but with some additional “heavy artillery” distribution via the Associated Press and by having your release sent to a distribution list that includes the top newspaper in 100 designated marketing areas (DMA). It also includes the ability to include video with your release, access to additional geographical statistics (which is essentially a Google maps mashup showing you the location of people who have read your release) and the ability to export all of your statistics (you can find an example export here).

What to watch out for

PRWeb makes it incredibly easy to get your release in front of the right people (your release will need to do the rest) but it does have a few caveats you should be aware of.

Linking limitations

Links, even with the SEO Visibility package are limited to 1 per 100 words. PRWeb’s reasoning is that Google News seems to prefer this ratio and anything above it risks the release not being included in Google News. Since press releases traditionally are supposed to be short and to the point, you might find you quickly run out of links and are then editing your release to bulk it up to get another link or two in. However, note that if you contact PRWeb and explain you’ll take the risk of not being included in Google news, they will allow your release to go through providing the number of links isn’t excessive (aka obvious spam).

RSS groupings

PRWeb has the ability to group your releases, which is especially useful for those submitting releases on behalf of clients. However, note that underneath each release published is a section called “Other releases by the member” where other releases in the same grouping appear. So if you don’t want sites connected publicly, be sure not to connect them in your account by putting them in the same RSS grouping.

Editorial Scores

PRWeb doesn’t give much information about how it doles out editorial scores, only that each release receives a score of 1-5 (with 5 being the best) and that an editorial score of 4 or higher is required for your release to be distributed to Topix, Yahoo News and eMediaWire. If you get a score below a 4, you’ll want to edit and improve your release and submit it for another review to ensure maximum exposure. That said, I’ve never really had a problem getting an editorial score of four or above.

Three power user tips

  • PRWeb is releasing a “Tweet It” option for your press releases that will tweet your press release for you the second it goes live. Be sure to take advantage of this brand new feature. Twitter is awesome at spreading news in a viral fashion.
  • Press releases are listed on PRWeb based on who paid the most. You can buy additional “stars” above the four packages listed to show higher than other folks if you’d like. Whatever package you buy, you might want to consider paying a few dollars above the package price. So, if you buy the 200 dollar package, pay 203 dollars. This will bump you above all other press releases who only paid the 200 dollar base price without you having to buy another entire star for 40 dollars.
  • If you’re interested in trying out PRWeb, I’d suggest signing up for an account and then attending their free daily webinars as soon as possible before spending any actual money submitting a release.

My experience

As I mentioned, I’ve been using PRWeb with success for a few years now. Our releases are well written (we do them in house) and always submitted at the 200 dollar (SEO Visibility level) though I admit I didn’t realize everything that came with the Media Visibility package until I did this review and will likely use that level for our next “big” announcement.

The statistics of our last five releases published are as follows with the most recently released press release listed first:

(impressions/reads/email forwards/prints/pdf)

  • 116561/1990/0/17/0
  • 146304/2229/0/17/40
  • 107428/1542/0/14/40
  • 128481/1824/0/15/26
  • 98241/2122/0/9/27

Our releases all have gotten us several links a piece and we also have three business deals that have been very good for our sites that came from releases we’ve issued putting us on that company’s radar in the first place. Press releases, and PRWeb as a distribution method, have earned their spot in our marketing budget.”

For more great stuff, go to  Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Do you have marketing and pr tips of your own?  Let us know.  We’d love to hear from you.

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