Category Archives: Twitter

How To Seed Your Social Network

: Image by luc legay via Flickr

David Spark (@dspark), a veteran tech journalist , founder of Spark Media Solutions, who blogs at The Spark Minute, has done a lot of research to see how people succeed at growing their social networks. He discovers the patterns and dishes the inside how to’s at 12 Inspiring Stories of Successful Social Networkers. They are all interesting and helpful examples, but I particularly liked:

Seed Your Network

“For six months and with only 150 inactive members, the LinkToCharlotte LinkedIn group was languishing. LinkToCharlotte’s goal has always been to connect local businesses and people in the Charlotte, NC area. Founder Andrew Kaplan decided it was time to juice the membership of his group. In June 2008, he reached out to local influencers who could attract others to his local network.

Already having ties with professional sports teams, tourism, and political advisors, Kaplan sent out personal invites to their respective marketing departments to join the group. Quickly seeing the benefits of being part of Kaplan’s local industry network, they in turn sent invites from their lists to join his network as well. Today, LinkToCharlotte’s LinkedIn () group has grown to 2,000, plus it has expanded to include groups on the NING platform, Facebook (), and Twitter ().”

Take a look at how the LinkToCharlotte LinkedIn group , NING platform, Facebook (), and Twitter () all play off each other. It’s a road map to creating and leveraging your social media assets.

Let me hear what you think if you’ve created or are creating something like this.

Social Media Changes Forever The Web Business Model

: Image by Laughing Squid via Flickr

Remember when the Net roared on the scene and created new business models not even imaginable before? “Opportunities where Amazon is 34x bigger than Barnes & Noble, where NetFlix destroyed Blockbuster, and where Skype is worth $2.6B while telecom companies drop like flies?”

Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear Software reflects on what’s happening on the net today where, as he sees it…. and it sounds pretty reasonable to me…the same pattern is emerging, just in a different guise.

In, Why you have to engage in social media, even if you don’t want toJason talks about how social media has already changed the rules of the game. Here’s his take:

“The days of “have a website and advertise” are over. It’s too expensive to be noticed on an Internet that’s already full.

Social media is the only way LinksFor.Us could get traction. If Darren Rowse or Brian Clark talks about it, it’s visible. If it hits the front page of Digg, it’s visible. Once it’s visible, once you have things like incoming links and lots of regular traffic, then you have a shot at using traditional SEO techniques for staying visible. But social media is the only way to overcome static friction (short of spending crazy money).

Social media is already changing the rules of the marketplace, just like the web did a decade ago. It’s still early of course and no one — not even the experts — knows where all this is going. But it’s clear that times are changing again, and those that don’t jump in will go the way of print media.

Want examples?

In a test run by BazaarVoice, Rubbermaid discovered that adding customer reviews to their website increased sales and decreased returns of their products. Skeptics said sales of low-rated products would crater. What actually happened is that sales of low-rated products increased. When shoppers were questioned, they explained that when they read why someone else maligned the product, often they disagreed or didn’t care about that particular problem. If the price was right, it was worth buying anyway.
Fog Creek software makes millions of dollars from FogBugz, a bug-tracking system. There’s hundreds of bug-tracking systems — free, cheap, expensive, open-source, commercial — yet Fog Creek is highly visible and successful with no advertising. How? Because the founder, Joel Spolsky, has built an incredibly popular blog about writing software. He was before his time; before RSS he wrote essays and notified you by email when a new one was posted. It’s widely agreed that without the blog-before-it-was-called-a-blog, Fog Creek would likely have remained an unknown consulting company with a few struggling products.
Nike allowed people to build and order custom shoes on their website. Skeptics said deep customization is too expensive, design-sharing is too complicated, and people need to try shoes on. Wrong! Once the site took off, Nike created physical stores where you could do the same thing. Joaquin Hidalgo, Nike VP of Global Brand Marketing says those stores now “represent 25% of our revenue.”
Speaking of shoes, Zappos also sells shoes on the Internet. CEO Tony Hsieh is so convinced that their legendary Twitter presence results in sales, he even wrote a popular beginner’s guide to Twitter. He insists that Twitter and other forms of open communication are required for excellent customer service; employees are trained in Twitter. Zappos raked in $1B last year even with the recession; they’re doing something right.
Oddly-named marketing site Marketing.fm gets double the traffic of marketing.com. One has a blog with useful content and one doesn’t. Guess which is which.
Zeus Jones describes 16 more terrific examples. (Thanks to David S. Finch for digging it up.)”

Conclusion: better jump in now while you still can and keep leveraging up with social media. Or, as Jason puts it, “Will there be another new thing someday? Sure.

But today and for the foreseeable future, this is the world. You have to jump in even if you don’t yet understand it.”

It’s Not All About Twitter & Facebook: Other Fast Growing Social Sites

: Image via CrunchBase

It may seem like Facebook and Twitter are all we hear. But that’s just a piece of the huge social networking puzzle. Bebo seems to be one to watch: keep track of friends on other social sites in one place. I’m giving that a try and also putting together a social network using Ning as a platform… really incredibly simple and powerful. Here’s Adam Ostrow‘s take on the social scene in The Fastest Growing Social Sites:

Each month (and often more frequently than that) we take a look at trends in social networking, by the numbers. Recently, we’ve focused on Twitter’s astronomical growth – now up better than 2,500 percent in one year – and Facebook’s climb to become top social network over MySpace ().

However, this month there are a few other trends within the numbers – provided by Nielsen Online – that highlight a few other storylines within the social media space, as well as continue to put meat behind the trends we’ve been covering over the past few months.

Here are some notable developments from March:

Ning, which recently announced that more than one million social networks have been creating using its service, is currently the 2nd fastest growing social networking property. It’s traffic is up 283 percent year-over-year, and it now reaches a total of 5.6 million people in the US.

Bebo, which we recently reported saw a one month surge of nearly 50 percent on the heels of a redesign and AIM integration, has grown 148 percent in the past year, and now reaches more than 6.1 million people in the US.

This is significant because Bebo is known mostly for being big overseas, but insignificant in the US. The next few months will tell us if this was a one-time pop thanks to AIM integration or a continued trend thanks to some innovative things Bebo is doing with Socialthing.

LinkedIn () continues to be one of the quickest growing social sites and has more than doubled its size in the past year. It now reaches better than 15.8 million people in the US, ranking it 3rd in total size behind Facebook () and MySpace. It’s no doubt being buoyed by the weak economy and high unemployment as people turn to the site and their connections to find work.

As for “the big three,” the story remains much the same:

Twitter () is now growing at a mind-boggling 2,565 percent. In total, it reached more than 13 million people in the US during the month – and that’s just on its website (i.e. – not counting clients like TweetDeck () or Seesmic Desktop ()). Next month will likely see this total continue to swell, thanks to huge mainstream media events like Ashton Kutcher versus CNN and Oprah jumping onto Twitter.

Facebook continues to extend its lead over MySpace. In March, it saw 69.1 million visitors, versus 55.9 million for the News Corp-owned social networking site. In fact, MySpace was the only social networking site measured in the Nielsen survey that saw its traffic decline year-over-year.

So, while not much changed at the top of the social media landscape in March, there are certainly a few new storylines emerging that will be worth watching going forward. The full report – sorted by growth rate – is embedded below:

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, alexsl

How To Follow A Social Media Road Map

As Chris Brogan said recently, having a social media strategy is no easy task. It takes a lot of hard work. But if one follows a proven path, some of the difficulty falls away, and the process becomes easier. One still needs discipline and consistency, but the path to success is clear. Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success provides, among other elements, a social media road map:

“However you look at it, SEO and social media work well together as long as there is a framework for doing so. One way to build SEO and social media programs efficiently is to follow a social media roadmap:

1. Find the audience; understand their behaviors, preferences, methods of publishing, and sharing. Most companies that are involved with the social web in the channels where their customers spend time have a good sense of where to start. Many companies are ahead of the game by tracking their audience via social media monitoring software that identifies keywords, conversations and influencers such as those pictured in the Radian6 screen shot below.

2. Define your objectives. Objectives are often driven by marketing or sales, and SEO has long been directly accountable to substantial improvements in web sales. Social media is not direct marketing though, so different objectives and measurements apply. The role of SEO in a social media effort is to directly influence discovery of social communities or content via search. Do a search for Zappos on Google, for example, and you’ll easily find more than shoes: Twitter, Blog and a YouTube () channel are all on the first page of search results.

Indirectly, social content can boost links to website content, improving search traffic and online sales.

3. Establish a game plan. The game plan for reaching objectives in a combined SEO and social media effort will often focus on content and interaction, since it is content that people discover and share. Whether a keyword-focused strategy for reaching goals means publishing new content or creating an opportunity for consumer-generated content, it must involve proactive promotion and easy sharing amongst members of the community.

4. Create a tactical mix. The tactical mix for a social media marketing effort is based on doing the homework of finding where the desired audience spends its time interacting with and sharing content. Whatever the tactical mix is, it’s an investment in time and relationships – not a short term “link dump” to promote optimized link bait. Much of the content creation and promotion for a social media marketing effort happens within the tactical mix and, of course, that means optimizing content for keywords.

Whether content is created by marketers as part of a social destination like a niche community or a promotion vehicle such as an interactive ad, keyword glossaries become useful for writing headlines, deciding on anchor text for links and outreach activities like blogger relations.

5. Measure your goals. Goals measurement should roll up to the specific objectives, both direct and indirect. Leveraging both social media monitoring services as well as web analytics can provide marketers with the insight to improve results. Radian6 and Webtrends have recently announced a partnership that will bring web analytics and social media analytics together all in one interface. In the meantime, marketers can use specific measurement tools to monitor the effect of their social web participation as well as the search engine performance of SEO efforts.”

It’s all about results. If you don’t measure you won’t know what your results are. If you try this, let us hear how you do and what you’ve learned you’d like to share. In social media, we’re all in this together

Energize Your Website Or Blog With A Google Gadget

: Image via CrunchBase

Given the enormous commitment of time and energy it takes to maintain an interesting and robust website or blog, I’ll take all the sophisticated, tech-savvy help I can get. I keep a keen eye out for those “widgets” or “gadgets” as Google calls them, those tiny pieces of automated code that you can install on your page to work tirelessly behind the scenes.

Google Gadgets For Your Webpage offers you everything from mundane functions, like clocks and weather, but also gadgets which can make your site a lot more interactive, like Desktop Chat, Google Talk, Twitter or Facebook, right from your own page.

Yesterday, I started experimenting with Google’s customized RSS feed, which can bring your favorite “stream of news and updates” from your favorite sites to your own webpage. It’s very simple. You just grab the code or tweak the colors, size etc., then grab the code. I started first by installing several customized RSS feeds, in different colors, or “color coded”, putting up social media, tech news and updates, and “5 minutes for Mom” on my site, AdvancingWomen.com. I am so pleased with that, I put on Twitter and Facebook. Next I will be adding Google Talk to a number of pages. Well, I’m pretty blown away with what Google offers so easily. I can tell you I’d been wrestling with some other RSS feeds for awhile, and having trouble to get them to look and act quite the way I wanted. So the simplicity and dynamism of Google’s Gadgets was a big hit with me. Give it a try. And let us know what you think and what gadgets worked particularly well for you.

Did I Forget To Mention Nambu?

Nambu is a “social messaging experience” and I should have mentioned it with all the other “social screens” you can use to keep up to the micro-second contact with your social ecosystem. Maybe I slipped up because it’s Mac OS only at this point. Or maybe it’s just a bit too head swirling to keep up with the dizzying number of new apps to keep your social contacts up to the nano second. But, at some point you have to choose, and this is another choice:

Explore the various sections of Nambu for OS X here, and click on the sections you are interested in learning more about.

NAMBU OS X FEATURES Twitter FriendFeed Identi.ca Groups Filters Links Trends Twitter Search Twitter Threads Multiple Accounts Multiple Column View

Picking A Visual Desktop App for Tracking Your Favorite Social Sites

: Image by luc legay via Flickr

There are all kinds of apps popping up to help you keep in touch with co-workers, friends and, of course, your favorite social sites at a glance. Niche connection sites like Yammer and Socialcast let you connect with people in your organization. Blellow is a new and promising communication and collaboration tool for communities of interest, like entrepreneurs or web developers. It’s getting plenty of buzz at the moment. Guy Kawasaki even Tweeted today about having his own Twitter at http://laconi.ca/trac/; best I could tell, kind of a bare bones, do-it-yourself Twitter. But the epicenter of connection right now is for social sites, apps enabling the second by second buzz or real time news, trendy happenings, mainly on the web, gossip and daily trivia, like, as Guy Kawasaki puts it “my cat rolled over” or, more interestingly, and conveying that you are definitely in the loop, “I’m on the plane from Barcelona.” Duct Tape Marketing, today, even explained how you could set up your own social media dashboard.

The One Page Social Media Dashboard

I looked at it, and, although doable it seemed like a bit of a project. I’m leaning more towards Jennifer Van Grove‘s preferred screen Skimmer: Visual Desktop App for Tracking Your Favorite Social Sites. Here’s how she sees it:

“You’ve got Facebook friends, Twitter followers, Flickr Flickr reviews photos, and probably plenty of other social sites that you keep your eye on. So how do you keep up and engage with all the new content that’s constantly being added by friends?

You could try social aggregators and lifestreaming options like FriendFeed FriendFeed reviews or Strands, but if those are just too much, but interacting with Facebook and Twitter updates isn’t quite enough, you can find a happy medium in Skimmer — an Adobe AIR desktop client for Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and Blogger.

Skimmer, which launches in beta today, is equal parts content aggregator, lifestream, and status updater with a penchant for visual stimuli. The site aims to strip away some of the bloated feature sets of other desktop apps, enhance your overall viewing experience, and keep the content dynamic but limited to five of the most popular social sites.

Once you download and install the application, you can connect your Twitter Twitter reviews, Facebook Facebook reviews, Flickr, YouTube YouTube reviews, and Blogger accounts to start getting a stream-like view of your contacts’ updates. You can even view TwitPics in-line, filter your feed by keyword, service, or contact groups, and cross-post status updates to Facebook and Twitter. Skimmer also offers a few viewing and customization options, so you can alter the size and color scheme of the app to make it fit your personal preferences.

Where Skimmer really shines is via the Flickr and YouTube photo and video viewing experiences. Not only is the application’s design sleek, but it provides a superb, freshly-windexed window into content from both sites.

With Flickr, you can view you or your friends’ photos (quickly skim through sets or the entire photostream), view counts, and comments, as well as watch slideshows, with an experience is arguably more visually impressive than Flickr itself. With YouTube, users can view videos, comments, tags, views, and ideally do the same for videos from friends.

Skimmer is very obviously a beta service, and even though some of the bugs diminish from the overall experience, it’s still an interesting and entertaining desktop application that doesn’t try to do too much.”

Let me know if you set this up, and how you like it. I’m off now, I wish to Barcelona, but, more likely, to watch my cat roll over. ( But, come May, to D.C. for web business building, and possibly in June to Barcelona.)

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Category Archives: Twitter

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