Greatly Increase Your Impact on Twitter with Twitalyzer

There are tons of tools out there that let you view your statistics on Twitter and see how influential you are. Twitalyzer is an impressive Twitter analytics tool that goes above and beyond. Even though there are 3 types of paid accounts, you can get everything you need and more just from the comprehensive free account.

To get started either enter your Twitter username and go, or login via Twitter OAuth. Without signing in you can only see your impact score, influencer type, location, network (the people you converse with most) and most commonly used hashtags. Signing in, on the other hand, gives you “free access to trends, sentiment, tweet & tag analysis and more,” which I’ve listed below.

Metrics and Measures:

Profile – Here you see the basic info mentioned above: impact score, influencer type, location, network and hashtags. You can also click on those users in your network to see basis stats about them too.
Metrics – This is an organized grid that lets you can see statistics based on a 30-day average regarding impact, engagement, influence, generosity, retweet stats, referencing and more.
Reach – This shows you your potential reach of users based on your networks’ contribution. Once again you can see basics about those in your network (potential reach, effective reach, influence).
Goals – “Setting goals for key Twitalyzer metrics will allow you to better gauge your organizational or personal benchmarks in social media.”

Comparison and Context:

Dashboard – This is for paying customers only. It gives you a glance of your recent Twitter activity.
Context – Here you can view your impact compared to all the other users that Twitalyzer tracks. You’ll get an impact score, median score and percentile.
Comparison – This is where you can compare yourself with any other Twitter users. Just enter their username and Twitalyzer will compare the stats between you.
Recommendations – A very useful section where you can get tips on how to make a better impact on Twitter.

Other sections and sub-sections:

People and Groups – Network activity, influencer types, retweeters, locations and more.
Tweets and Tags – All tweets, tweets, retweets, hashtags and sentiment.
Activity and Analysis – Activity by day, last seven days, activity by hour, site referrals and link clicks.
Administration – Upgrade your account.

Subscription Plans:

Individual – $9.99/month
Business – $29.99/month
Agency – $199.00/month

*Keep in mind that subscriptions are automatically taken out of your account each month, until canceled.

If you’re stuck on any area or want to know more about what it means or how it was calculated, you can click on the “learn” button that is provided for each area. There are some sections where they even supply a “tweet” button so that you can share your results on Twitter. You can also add users to your Twitter lists directly from the site. All of this and more are provided with the free account.

So, if you’re really looking to boost your influence on Twitter and also build your network, Twitalyzer is a great tool to help you along the way.

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Mt. Dew Does Facebook Without Facebook

Starting today, Mountain Dew is launching a new Facebook ad campaign designed to drive people to “like” their fan page. What’s new about that? Facebook isn’t involved.

The zesty soda’s new creative will carry a Facebook “like” button that will send an update to the news feed of anyone who clicks on it and show them which of their friends already do the Dew.

The banners were created by Mountain Dew’s ad agency folks and placed on trendy websites such as The Onion, Crave and Funny or Die. According to AdWeek, this is the first time an advertiser has run an ad of this kind but they won’t be the last.

The odd note in the story is this:

“According to sources, the data generated from this effort will be available to Facebook alone, and not Mountain Dew, its agencies or the participating publishers.”

Does this make sense? Mountain Dew is going to run a campaign but they aren’t going to be privy to the results? They will, of course, see any change in the number of people joining their fan page and if they have a sudden glut, they can probably pin it on the new ads. But how can it be worth paying for ads that you can’t track?

What I also find interesting here is that while most people buy ads on Facebook to send traffic out to their homepage, here’s Mountain Dew buying ads out here to send them in.

Is it worth paying for an ad that sends traffic to your Facebook page and not your home page? We’d like to hear your thoughts.

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Eventbrite Asks How Much is a Facebook Share Worth?

Online ticket seller Eventbrite recently published a study that claims that sharing in social media can be quantified with a dollar amount. They boldly claim that their report, “Social Commerce: A First Look at the Numbers,” is the “first tangible data to quantify the value and impact of social media in driving eCommerce.” I don’t know if I completely buy either concept, but let’s take a look.

Eventbrite put together a series of tools that allowed them to look at ticket sales of a particular event before and after the event was shared on Facebook, Twitter and by email. What they found was that ticket sales rose proportionally to the number of times the event was shared between friends. Boiling it all down, they figured that Facebook was worth an average of $2.52 per share while Twitter was only worth .43. Email came in second highest at $2.34.

Across the board, Eventbrite says that social media sharing accounted for an extra $1.78 per incident compared to sales on events that weren’t shared in this manner. They also found that sharing was the best way to drive traffic back to their website with an average of 7 visits for each “share.”

I’m not surprised that sharing raises dollars or traffic. We know that peer-to-peer communication is an effective way of promoting any product. I’ve bought tickets to events I wouldn’t have known about had it not been for a post from a friend, so I know it works. I don’t know that it’s as easy to quantify as Eventbrite makes it sound. The large discrepancy between Facebook and Twitter is interesting, too. Why such a gap? Is it that a Facebook post can be graphical and thus more eye catching? Is it the fact that the post stays in view longer where a Twitter tweet is here and gone too soon? And look at email, coming in a close second. Frankly, I’m surprised to see that people are still email recommendations to each other. It’s rather “two tin cans and a string” compared to the ease of sharing on Facebook, isn’t it?

But even if these numbers only apply to Eventbrite’s ticket service, it’s good news all around. It’s proof of what many of us are seeing but haven’t tried to quantify – that social media is an excellent marketing tool that can raise your bottom line every time someone mentions your product online.

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Fresh Thinking: Social Media for Social Good

Call ‘em the Click-Change Artists. A new social media movement centers around the notion that doing good no longer requires rolling up your sleeves at the soup kitchen or seeking out neighborhood artists to support (though we’d certainly never disparage such types of old-fashioned philanthropy). The web now offers a new way for too-busy types to donate their time — and bucks — to feel-good enterprises. And, judging by the response, social media enthusiasts are more than happy to oblige.

Case in point: Social media phenom The Pepsi Refresh Project — where webizens vote for what social causes they think should receive a donation from the soda giant — has now garnered more votes than the last Presidential election. Other sites like mammoth microlending facilitator Kiva.org allows Bob in Boise to pledge a small sum (starting at $25) to a fledgling businessman in rural Africa — and nearly 800,000 people have forked over $160M on the site to date. Later this year, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes expects to launch non-profit-focused networking site Jumo.com, aimed at directly pairing up regular people and hard-working organizations on the ground in needy spots like Haiti.

And it’s not just traditional non-profits that have benefitted from this do-good online movement. At Kickstarter.com, a crowdsourced arts initiative, visitors can pledge money to support rising artists, musicians and documentary filmmakers. According to a recent piece on PBS.com, $6M has been raised for film projects on the crowdfunding site since April 2009. (One factor helping spur the site’s growth: Donations are rewarded with small gifts, like a DVD of the film once it’s made.)

Another area where donating is a haute topic is fashion, where the buzzed-about Fashionstake.com offers a similar initiative for budding designers. It’s not only about helping support young brands, the site’s president and co-founder Vivian Weng told Stylelist.com recently. “The idea of immediate, direct feedback from consumers is one of the reasons that designers have been excited to work with FashionStake,” she says. “Designers don’t get that kind of feedback through normal retail channels.”

In fact, the ability to foster that unique personal connection — whether it’s to “tell” a designer what you’d like them to create by way of pre-order, or to lend $25 directly to a mother in Cambodia growing her rattan furniture business — that seems to be fueling this surge in support. Some clever social media watchers have dubbed it the P2P approach — and it’s clear the ability to provide a small, personal connection in the vast web is a method that’s working.

Photo: iStock

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MetroTwit – A Simple Twitter Client for Windows that Delivers

In my search for a light yet efficient Twitter client for my Windows desktop, I came across MetroTwit. Though it’s for all versions of Windows, it’s optimized for Windows 7 and requires .NET Framework 4.0. They do warn that since it is still in beta, “you will run into bugs and crashes.” All of their features and functionality are not yet complete but they are diligently working on completing them. When it comes to Twitter clients, I’m extremely picky. Yet, after a thorough evaluation I have decided to use MetroTwit as my main Twitter client for Windows. Here’s why.

Columns

I love Twitter clients that have columns because I find it easier to keep up with everything at once (timeline, replies, messages, etc). MetroTwit’s columns can be resized and reordered. The above picture shows you the different types of columns that you can add. Columns are automatically refreshed, but there is also a refresh button if you want to do so manually.

Notification Alerts

Alerts are displayed on the bottom right corner of your screen in toaster fashion. Though there are not any customization options for the toasters, you can select which items you’d like to be notified about. You can also choose to enable a notification sound for specific items as well. Notifications show you “excerpts from new tweet updates as they cycle through.”

Windows 7 Taskbar Integration

There is an option to keep MetroTwit in the taskbar when minimized, or send to the notifications area. If you have Windows 7 then you’ll want to keep it in the taskbar to reap the benefits of the unread messages counter. You can also choose which items are included in that counter under settings. In the preview window (that you get when clicking on the icon) also has a refresh option.

Other great features include:

• URL shortening via bit.ly (use your own account & API key).
• Auto-completion when typing usernames and hashtags.
• Both a “night” (dark) and “day” (light) theme to choose from.
• The option to delete DMs (something that really comes in handy).
• Conversation view and option to map a tweet (though these do not seem to be functional yet).
• Clicking on a user’s name brings up a mobile style profile (which can also be added as a new column) within the app.

MetroTwit is probably one of the most simple yet elegant Twitter clients I’ve seen for Windows. It’s perfect for what I was looking for. Something like Tweetdeck can be so bulky and HootSuite is so bloated now with all the new features. MetroTwit helps me keep up with Twitter and I don’t have to sacrifice PC speed or resources. Sounds like a winner to me!

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Google’s Q3 Numbers Don’t Show a Company in Trouble

Everyone’s favorite pastime these days seems to be predicting the imminent demise of Google. Whether it’s because Bing is becoming a real competitor (to which I say puh-leeze) or that their unbalanced revenue generation with depends so much on search marketing ads or their difficulty with the social side of the web or how they are shuffling executives and losing talent. Those are the majors but the list goes on.

Well, yesterday Google reported its third quarter earnings and it doesn’t appear that this perception is quite aligned with reality.

From the Google Investor blog

“Google had an excellent quarter,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “Our core business grew very well, and our newer businesses — particularly display and mobile — continued to show significant momentum. Going forward, we remain committed to aggressive investment in both our people and our products as we pursue an innovation agenda.”

Corporate speak? Sure is but there are numbers to back it up. I highlighted some obvious “look at the increase” stuff but look at the numbers as a whole. It tells a story not often heard in business these days.

Google reported revenues of $7.29 billion in the third quarter of 2010, representing a 23% increase over third quarter 2009 revenues of $5.94 billion.

Google-owned sites generated revenues of $4.83 billion, or 67% of total revenues, in the third quarter of 2010. This represents a 22% increase over third quarter 2009 revenues of $3.96 billion.

Google’s partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $2.20 billion, or 30% of total revenues, in the third quarter of 2010. This represents a 22% increase from third quarter 2009 network revenues of $1.80 billion.

Revenues from outside of the United States totaled $3.77 billion, representing 52% of total revenues in the third quarter of 2010, compared to 52% in the second quarter of 2010 and 53% in the third quarter of 2009.

Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 16% over the third quarter of 2009 and increased approximately 4% over the second quarter of 2010.

Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 3% over the third quarter of 2009 and increased approximately 2% over the second quarter of 2010.

Traffic Acquisition Costs, the portion of revenues shared with Google’s partners, increased to $1.81 billion in the third quarter of 2010, compared to TAC of $1.56 billion in the third quarter of 2009. TAC as a percentage of advertising revenues was 26% in the third quarter of 2010, compared to 27% in the third quarter of 2009.

Other cost of revenues, which is comprised primarily of data center operational expenses, amortization of intangible assets, content acquisition costs as well as credit card processing charges, increased to $747 million, or 10% of revenues, in the third quarter of 2010, compared to $667 million, or 11% of revenues, in the third quarter of 2009.

Net cash provided by operating activities in the third quarter of 2010 totaled $2.89 billion, compared to $2.73 billion in the third quarter of 2009. In the third quarter of 2010, capital expenditures were $757 million, the majority of which was related to IT infrastructure investments, including data centers, servers, and networking equipment. Free cash flow, an alternative non-GAAP measure of liquidity, is defined as net cash provided by operating activities less capital expenditures. In the third quarter of 2010, free cash flow was $2.13 billion.

Ok, so let’s review. Increases in revenue across the board with total with a year over year increase of 23% for the quarter in a time when the economy is arguably getting worse and not better. Enough said because their core business is still strong and there is no real competitive threat in the foreseeable future. The only way this gets dinged is if people search less and that’s not going to happen.

Greg Stirling reports from Search Engine Land

Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg disclosed the following revenue numbers:

$2.5 billion in display (non-text) and $1 billion in mobile ad revenues. Google’s CFO said there was some small overlap in these numbers (i.e., AdMob).

The New York Times reported

“Where’s the next multibillion-dollar business after search?” said Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management at Google, on the call. “There’s your answer. It’s display and it’s already here.” About mobile, he said, “Clearly this is the future of search and the Internet.”

Looks like Google is serious about this one since they are actually advertising it in traditional channels.

So for all of the talk of Google’s stumbles and weaknesses there is no real evidence that there is trouble….yet. There is always the chance for Google to become completely complacent, fat and happy thus letting their lead slip through their hands. I just don’t see it. With the lack of real competition in search they only need to stay awake at the wheel to keep that lead in place. They do that pretty well. Yes, they could stand to be more innovative but innovation can also be taking place in other areas outside of the core search business.

Then there’s Android. MG Siegler does a god job of examining this part of Google’s present and future over at TechCrunch. Here’s a snippet

Schmidt called Android “probably the largest single platform play in the market today.” And going forward, he thinks that’s only going to increase as more and more people buy smartphones. At the same time, “in the open source approach, that means we give the software away, which is always paradoxical. People say, well how do you make money from that?,” Schmidt was quick to jump to.

“The evidence we have is that people who use Android search twice as much as everything else,” Schmidt continued. “So, clearly, there is more revenue associated with those searches.”

Oh and lastly, while the following number is not going to impact overall unemployment numbers at least Google is doing something that others are using the economy as an excuse to not to: they are hiring.

“Simply put, we’re on this growth agenda at full throttle,” said Patrick Pichette, Google’s chief financial officer.

Google hired 1,526 people in the quarter, which included the postgraduation hiring months, bringing the total number of employees to 23,331.

So while I am not a Google apologist because they, like all other companies, are far from perfect, it’s real difficult to sit here and grouse about their troubles, issues and apparent fall from grace. I’m not seeing that. Are you? And if you are is it because of your distaste for all things Google or are you basing it on reality? If it’s reality then please explain because I must be missing something.

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Not Your Father’s CRM…This One’s Social!

We have been hearing a lot about the idea of Social CRM or sCRM as the next big wave in the customer relationship lifecycle. As more and more of us move our interactions not only with each other, but with brands to the online arena, many brands are scrambling to put in place the people and processes required to engage with today’s social customer.

I recently read that the social customer is the one who owns the relationship, and that it is the job of the brand to earn the customer’s trust. While this may not seem like a far departure from traditional customer relationship management (CRM), the process of managing, massaging and nurturing these relationships has shifted dramatically.

So what is Social CRM and how does it differ from Traditional CRM?

SearchCRM.com defines CRM as follows: “CRM (customer relationship management) is an information industry term for methodologies, software, and usually Internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organized way.”

Where I think traditional CRM fails is that it is too focused on the technology. Email is usually at its core and the focus is mainly on a one-way push of information, with the overarching goal being to grow the customer’s profile information. Engagement is limited or virtually non-existent, and today’s savvy customer has all but grown numb to canned-SPAM and advertising, which traditional CRM can at times mirror.

On the other side, Brent Leary, co-founder of CRM Essentials, defines Social CRM as “…all about people and community.  It’s about how your company intends to participate in the ongoing conversations taking place in the industry.  How you embrace non-traditional influential people like popular industry bloggers, and social sites on the Web frequented by your audience.”

While the overall goals of traditional and social CRM are similar-find, attract, and win new clients while retaining current relationships-where I feel the two differ the most is with this idea of “participation.” Social CRM should look to empower the customer, amplify the conversation, create everyday engagement between the brand and the customer, and provide remarkable experiences that will move the customer beyond the purchase, to becoming an advocate for the brand.

We believe that social CRM is a strategic discipline that requires engaging not only the customer, but influencers in a collaborative way to drive both advocacy and lifetime customer revenue.  It is more than a type of technology, or a set of communication channels - it is a fundamental recognition that (in a connected world), growth and profitability are dependent on nurturing a long-term relationship with one’s best (and best-connected) customers.

So what are the key components of Social CRM?

• Listening: Understanding what customers, prospects and influencers are talking about in relation to your product, service or brand is ABSOLUTELY VITAL. Using listening tools and dashboards to uncover “talkable,” important topics will not only help find, attract, win and retain customers, but will also help detect and issue or crisis before it becomes one.

• Customer Influence Mapping: Influencer mapping ensures that you are engaging the right people to meet your business objectives and helps to develop a roster of partners and potential brand ambassadors.

• Engagement Planning: in order to create real and sustained word of mouth, brands must create “remarkable” experiences and content coupled with everyday engagement. This will not only help to create a steady and valuable drumbeat of customer stimulation, but drives them into some level of purchase or purchase consideration and to openly share word of mouth (advocacy) that drives their social graph into both your traditional and social CRM systems.

• Measurement: One of the keys to succeeding in social CRM is experimentation and iteration. Brands will succeed by trying lots of things. But they need a reliable measurement model to know if they are winning or losing on any given day.

At the end of the day, social CRM is all about creating engagement. It is about obtaining insights from your customers and influencers that will make their experience with your brand better. It is about creating a more direct way of talking and engaging with your customers with the goal of developing long-term relationships and building ambassadors for your brand.

So what have you done to create everyday engagement and remarkable experiences for your social customer? As a social customer, what are some good experiences that you have had with brands?

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Study: 64% of CEOs Not Bothering With Social Media Engagement

Weber Shandwick is one of my favorite PR firms because Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross–its Chief Reputation Strategist–is a kindred spirit, when it comes to reputation management.

In particular, she’s fascinated by the role of the CEO in a company’s reputation management efforts and her latest report, Socializing Your CEO, does a great job of analyzing the social media habits of CEOs of the world’s largest 50 companies.

What did Web Shandwick learn about the top CEOs of the world?

• 97% communicated either through traditional or online channels
• 64% are NOT engaged through company websites or in social media
• 36% engaged through company websites or in social media
• 28% posted letter or message on company websites
• 18% incorporated video/podcast on company websites or YouTube channels
• 16% have a profile on Twitter (8%), Facebook (4%), MySpace (4%) or LinkedIn (4%)

The study also found that the CEOs of the most admired of the 50 were more actively engaged online (41%) those companies that had mediocre reputations (28%). That begs the question: do these companies have better reputations because the CEO is more active on social media, or because these companies have great reputations, the CEO feels safer engaging social media?

So, these “engaged” CEOs, where are they actually engaging?

As you can see, they’re still not the most social people in the world. Just 18% posting videos and podcasts and a measly 8% active on Twitter (that’s 4 CEOs, for those not good at math!)? And, not a single CEO had a company-affiliated blog!!! What up with that?

(Note: I have no idea why a Wikipedia Page is included here. Weber Shandwick’s research is usually spot-on, but considering Wikipedia profiles are static, lifeless, profiles–generally created by Wikipedia editors–it really has no place in the list)

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New Digg CEO Says Sorry . . . But Why Did He Have To?

You know the story. Digg changed the site in order to bring it more in line with modern social media. The old school Diggers got mad and threatened to leave. Kevin Rose said, oops, we messed up, then he left and Matt Williams took over as CEO and now he’s trying to dig out from under the mess he’s been handed.

Williams decided that the best way to address the problem was to say hello and I’m sorry.

“As many of you know, the launch of Digg v4 didn’t go smoothly, and we’re deeply sorry that we disappointed our Digg community in the process. Thank you for your patience and your extremely candid feedback — we hear you loud and clear.”

Loud and clear? I bet. It’s a funny thing about the Internet, people think they own it. Not only own it, but that they have certain inalienable rights to it even when it’s free to them and costs a company a lot of money to run.

I’m not saying the new Digg is perfect. I liked the concept when it first went up but with time I’ve found it more confusing than the original. Posting is easier and the site in general feels more organized, but I feel like I’m missing out on a lot and I can’t ever find the links I’m looking for.

The problem is that Williams is talking about putting back many of the features that caused Digg to become a private playground in the first place. Like the bury button. Once the most powerful bookmarking site in town, people started looking elsewhere when a small percentage of the people appeared to have control of the majority of the site. You can bet it’s these same people who complained the loudest, because Digg took down the gates and made the playground open to all.

Williams says;

“Our top priority is to make Digg as good as it used to be.”

More to the point, they need to make Digg better than it used to be and better than it is now. They do that, not by bowing down to the loud crowd, but by using the talent they have to take what was a useful site and bring it in line with current social media trends.

Being a CEO doesn’t mean never having to say you’re sorry. But in this case, it feels like Custer calling for a retreat and not an honest mea culpa.

What do you think? Does Digg have something to apologize for or are missteps just a part of rejiggering a popular website?

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Bing Partners with Facebook for Personalized Search

Search engines are fine if you want to know the capital of Alaska or how to make the perfect omelet, but what if you can’t decide on what movie to see or what book to read? Sure, you could check out the hundreds of reviews found all over the web, but why trust total strangers when you can get advice from your friends instantly on Bing! And by friends, I mean your Facebook pals, many of whom are probably as unknown to you as CullenLuver47 who left a movie review on Amazon.

Bing is the latest program to get bitten by the Facebook bug and you’ll see it in your results when you use the “decision engine” to search. They’ve cleverly tagged it: Bing Social Search: Now it’s personal. Here’s how it works.

When you use Bing to search a topic, (Iron Man 2) the engine will reach out to your Facebook friends to find out which of them “liked” the object of your desire. After an initial return of results, you’ll see a special Facebook section that details which of your friends expressed an interest in any links that fit the topic.

Bing is also initiating Facebook Profile Search which pops Facebook links when you search a person’s name. Where the engine gets smart is in the ranking. Says Bing;

When searching for an individual, Bing looks at a person’s Facebook network and surfaces results that make the most sense based on the relationships the searcher has with people on Facebook. For example, results for common names such as “Bob Smith” will be ranked higher if a person shares mutual friends or networks. This “social distance” is used to provide people with the most personally relevant answers for people searches.

Now that, I’m on board with. I’ve never had good luck finding people with Facebook’s search engine, but Bing’s version sounds like a winner.

As far as the “Liked” part of the social search, it may be fun but I don’t know that it’s really useful. In their press release, Bing makes reference to a “richer set of signals that take into account not only relationships between data but relationships between people.” Their example is this. Should I go see Inception? My friends know I like Leonardo DiCaprio, so yes, but they also know I don’t like movies with guns, so they’ll advise accordingly. Now that’s an informed decision, but does Bing think they can teach a search engine to return a complex, “human” result like that? I suppose that the more data a computer collects, the more accurate the predications but I don’t think Bing is going to discover my dislike for artichokes anytime soon.

It would be freaky though. If I searched for Italian appetizers and it warned me not to bother with antipasto salads because they contain artichoke hearts. From there it’s just a skip to to the search engine that returns only the words “Not Going to Happen,” when I search the phrase “how do I lose 50 pounds without exercising.”

What do you think of Bing’s new Facebook combined results? Helpful or just another company jumping on the social media bandwagon?

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Media General Partners with Groupon For Local Deals

Newspaper publisher Media General has teamed up with Groupon in hopes of driving new traffic to their associated newspaper websites. They’ve started with the Richmond Times-Dispatch and have labeled the offering the “Richmond Daily Deal.” Groupon gets a “powered by” in the logo.

The deals work just as the do on the Groupon website with some slight graphical twists and obviously a much more local focus. When you click on the “buy now” link, you’re taken to the main Groupon website where you can sign in with your Groupon account or Facebook login. It’s assumed that the two companies are splitting the profits but there’s no word on who is making out on the higher end of the deal.

Media General says they expect to add the Groupon deals to online newspapers in six other markets by the end of the year. The company operates the Tampa Tribune out of Florida, Richmond Times-Dispatch out of Virginia and the Winston-Salem Journal out of North Carolina, so it’s likely these markets will be seeing their own deal pages very soon.

I can see the advantage for Media General, but what’s the perk for Groupon? Is it enough that they’re getting access to the newspaper publisher’s email lists? Or does teaming up with local websites, give Groupon a shot at a niche they wouldn’t have had otherwise?

What do you think?

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How Not To Follow Up After a Conference

I’ve been attending blogging conferences since 2007. Through conferences I’ve been able to meet some amazing people. However, through my own ineptitude I’ve not done a great job of following up with everyone that I’ve met. The photo above is an actual box that I have filled with missed opportunity, missed connections and missed business opportunities. Some business cards are over 3 years old. Might be a little late to follow up with those folks. So here is my surefire guide on How to Screw up Follow Up.

Step One – Collect cards like Pokemon
Some conference attendees are whipping out business cards and collecting them all like crazy. I’ve been in a group of people having a great conversation and then someone comes up and hands you their card out of nowhere. Will you remember that person at all? Will you follow up with that person? Most likely not. So, the key to follow up is to actually meet people and talk to them, make a connection and then exchange cards. You do not have to collect them all. More meaningful connections make for much better follow up.

Step Two – Glance at the card and shove it in your pocket.
Taking a business card and shoving it in your pocket after a cursory glance will be a way in which to immediately forget the person who gave it to you. When someone hands you their business card take a good look at it. is there something interesting that you can talk to the person about? There should be something on that card that you can ask a question about. People love to talk about themselves so give them a chance to do it. So don’t just take the card and put it away, try and make that mental connection, if you don’t then it is unlikely that you will actually follow up.

Step Three – Try and remember everything in your head.
When you are at a conference you are going to meet so many people and trying to keep everyone straight in your head is an incredibly futile task. After you meet someone and take their business card you should make some notes for yourself. Make a few notes directly on their card. This will give you reminders as to who the person is when it comes time to follow up.

Step Four – Go home, put the cards in a box and hide it away. You’ll get to them in a few weeks. Really, you will.
If you stick everything into a box and leave it there waiting for a the right moment to hit you to follow up then you will never do it. The box above has three years of cards that I was going to follow up on in a couple weeks. As you can see that never happened.

So How Do You effectively Follow Up?
When you get home take a stack of 5 -10 cards, open up your e-mail program and enter all the card info into a new contact. Also write in the notes that you made about the conversation that you had with the person. Then write them a follow up email reminding them about the conversation that you had and how much you enjoyed it. Repeat until your giant stack of business cards are gone. Do this within 2 weeks of the conference just not the first day you are back unless you can schedule the e-mail to go out a day or two after the conference. Many people are dealing with their own thing and playing catch up the moment that they return from a conference so don’t get lost in the shuffle.

Additional Tips.
When you add the new person as a contact put them in a group for that conference so you can pull up everyone that you met at a specific conference. Make sure that you add in notes that you want to remember about that person, likes, dislikes and the like.

Hopefully your conference experience will be a fruitful place to make meaningful connections with great new people.

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Keyword Winner – Targeted Keyword at Your Fingertips

We already know that blogs are a winning formula for any business, but you can’t simply expect to throw a blog up there and hope for success. Instead, you need to focus on producing quality content, then leveraging social media, seo and wordpress plugins to make that magic happen. A new wordpress plugin called Keyword Winner will soon be released from my friend and fellow blogger Daniel Lew.

What Can Keyword Winner Do For You?

The end goal of this wordpress plugin, is to get you more traffic and better rankings in the search engines. How is does this, is by helping you with writing your blog post titles and other key points to getting that extra edge in the search engines.

With so many of us focusing on paid advertising, it’s always important to never forget about the BILLIONS of free targeted traffic that is out there every day in organic search results. Keyword Winner can help you get there.

While the product hasn’t officially launched for sale yet, many beta testers and bloggers are seeing the first results of what Keyword Winner can do. To give a better idea on what Keyword Winner can do for you, check out this promo video.

Make Money with Keyword Winner

Right now Daniel Lew is doing an amazing job of getting pre-launch promotion for his Keyword Winner wordpress plugin, and he’s still looking for more! The launch is going to be big and many people will be ready to buy when it becomes available. This leave a big window of opportunity open for you to cash in. Join the Keyword Winner JV program and you will earn 50% commissions on top of a bunch of bonus prizes.

Be sure to check it out and sign up to the mailing list where Daniel will show you how others are already creating review sites and getting ready to cash in at launch time.

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Could Twitter Become the “Must-Buy” Ad Platform of the Future?

Could Twitter become the “must-buy” ad platform of the future? It’s not going to happen next week, but The New York Times says that Twitter is gearing up in hopes of becoming more than a fast blip on the radar. Many feel that the act of promoting Dick Costolo from COO to CEO is a sign of things to come. The article also notes that Twitter has a group of employees working on advertising instead of just one. But interest in becoming a sought after ad platform isn’t enough to make it so.

NYT quotes Ian Schafter of Deep Focus as saying;

“Agencies are uneducated, brands are uneducated and to a certain extent, Twitter is uneducated. There are no best practices. There are just hunches about what will work.”

Last week, Costolo spoke at the Advertising Week annual conference and he was confident that Twitter had the formula down for making it work. Seeing as how the @earlybird program was abandoned shortly after it began, one has to wonder.

Whether or not they’ve figured out the secret to making Twitter ads work, Twitter has gone from six advertisers to forty and Costolo says they expect to more than double that number by the end of the year.

In addition to the Promoted Accounts, which we talked about here last week, Twitter is also working on a self-serve tool for local business. The lack of geo-location targeting has been an issue for the social media site making it a much more effective tool for global brands than local restaurants, but Costolo says that they’re working on a way to scan tweets for location clues that will help them match up customers and clients.

The Promoted Tweets program is going well-ish.

“According to Twitter, on average 5 percent of people who see Promoted Tweets are clicking on, replying to or forwarding the ads — much higher than the less than 1 percent of people who click on a typical display ad.”

This increase in clicks comes from the natural behavior that surrounds Twitter. It’s designed to get people to click, forward and reply to links, unlike display ads which a large segment of the population have learned to ignore.

So we all agree that Twitter can be an effective marketing tool, but why pay for it? Most big brands have their own Twitter account and use it to keep up a conversation with customers. Is paying for a promoted tweet going to be better than what they’re pushing on a free account?

If you believe Costolo, the answer is yes. He says that the demand is bigger than their ability to handle it all at this point. Because of this, they’ve hired sales execs from Google and Facebook and a former Fox advertising exec to help move things along.

If Facebook is the model, then Twitter should have a bright future in paid advertising. But will it be the “must-buy” ad 2011? What do you think? Would you pay to have your ad on Twitter?

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TNS Puts Results of Huge Digital Life Research Project Online

If you like stats and graphics, you’ll go positively mad over a new website by custom research agency TNS. The website is called DiscoverDigitalLife.com and it’s a public repository for the massive amounts of data collected in regard to consumer’s online behavior and attitudes.

The study covers 48,804 people from 46 countries, ranging in age from 16 to 60 and TNS claims they’ve discovered “major changes in online behavior.” They probably have but it will take you awhile to find it if you try to dig it out yourself. To help you, TNS has turned all the facts and figures into pretty graphics and it’s impressive.

When you visit www.discoverdigitallife.com you’ll find a “taster” sampler of data that delivers a lot more than your average appetizer. Right away you can choose from several small pdf presentations including a look at the six lifestyle segments and the drivers of online behavior.

Where it really gets fun is when you click on what looks like a video graphic which actually opens up into an interactive visualization of data. Once inside you can choose to look at sections such as “What Are They Doing” and “For How Long.” Inside those pages are dropdowns for categories such as shopping, entertainment, social media and email and each of these presents a screen of colorful boxes, each representing a country in the survey. Click a country box and you get an even more detailed screen with more graphics and more data.

Says  TNS Chief Development Officer Matthew Froggatt;

“This study covers more than twice as many markets as any other research. It is the first truly global research into online activities, including all the key emerging markets of the BRICs and many of the ‘Next 11′.  We have also researched beyond basic behaviour to provide more detailed data into attitudes and emotional drivers of that behaviour.”

TNS was kind enough to offer some of the key findings in their press release:

• Globally, people who have on-line access have digital sources as their number one media channel .  61% of online users use the internet daily against 54% for TV, 36% for Radio and 32% for Newspapers.

• Online consumers in rapid growth markets have overtaken mature markets in terms of engaging with digital activities .  When looking at behaviour online, rapid growth markets such as Egypt (56%) and China (54%) have much higher levels of digital engagement than mature markets such as Japan (20%), Denmark (25%) or Finland (26%).  This is despite mature markets usually having a more advanced internet infrastructure.

• Growth in social networking has been fuelled by the transition from PC to mobile .  Mobile users spend on average 3.1 hours per week on social networking sites compared to just 2.2 hours on email. The drive to mobile is driven by the increased need for instant gratification and the ability of social networks to offer multiple messaging formats, including the instant message or update function. When looking at how the digital landscape will change in the future, research shows that consumers expect their use of social networking on mobiles to increase more than use through PC.  In the US, for example, a quarter (26%) of online consumers expect their use of social networking on a PC to increase in the next 12 months compared to over a third (36%) who will be looking to their mobile to increase usage. In Australia the figures are 26% and 44% respectively, and in Sweden they are 28% and 53%.

And did you know that folks in Malaysia are the heaviest users of social media? They spend an average of 9 hours a week with Facebook, Twitter and the like and they have an average of 233 friends, making them the most popular people as well. Brazilians are also fun folks with 231 friends while Japanese social media users have the lowest average number of friends at only 29. How sad.

Says Froggatt:

“The Internet is a huge part of life in the 21st century but how it affects our lives varies depending upon where in the world you live.  We’ve seen that in mature markets where people have been online for years and where access is ubiquitous, the Internet has already become a commoditised item that consumers take for granted. However, in rapid growth markets that have seen recent, sustained investment in infrastructure, users are embracing these new channels in much more active ways.”

Discover Digital Life is an excellent asset for anyone doing business internationally, but it’s also just a fascinating look at how the internet is changing the world.

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Internet Marketers, Tear Down That Wall!

There are many images of walls in history and they are usually not the best things. When they are destroyed, however, there is celebration and progress. There was President Reagan’s famous call at the Brandenburg Gate of the Berlin Wall “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”. From the pop culture side of things, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” paints a picture of the self-destructive behavior that happens when walls are constructed to keep the outside where it supposedly belongs: outside.

So what’s this have to do with Internet marketing? I contend that it has everything to do with how the industry conducts itself and the damage that it is doing in the process.

For some reason, Internet marketing and the social media industry has decided that staying insular and incestuous with our opinions and information is a good thing. We run around at events and slap each other on the back about how smart we are. We gloat over big numbers of followers and fans but never reveal the dirty little secret that most of the people doing the following are the same ones slapping each other on the back thus the group never really grows other than in ego and self-importance.

What I am trying to say here is that the industry needs a “Take Your Internet Marketer to Work With Their End User” day. I can’t tell you how many times I have shown people, real smart people who are much smarter than me, some of the features that Google has for Google Android devices. Part of me is surprised as I think “I wrote about that at Marketing Pilgrim two months ago and they don’t even know it exists?!” Then I pinch myself and realize that the VAST majority people are not glued to updates about Internet marketing, social media and new tools. Our industry just thinks they are.

For instance, with all of the recognition in social media and search marketing circles that Matt Cutts or Chris Brogan has, how many people outside the industry have a clue who these guys are? Not many. Even more interesting is that they don’t care either. Why is that? They just want the result. They don’t care about the process or even the gadgets or the ‘celebrity’. This is the mass-market person that our little industry ignores on a regular basis and at great risk to the future speed of growth of the industry.

Rather than just rant, here are some suggestions to make this a better industry that reaches more than just the cool kids:

Do real research about real people – Our industry is not unlike others in that we sponsor ‘research’ which is really a PR move dressed up as research. It is usually about some level of usage around search engines or Twitter or Facebook and it’s usually conducted by talking to marketers about their views on marketing. Well, honestly, that doesn’t help much. People trying to use social media for their business need to know about how their customers respond and interact, not their favorite marketers.

Have conferences for end users not industry insiders – Whenever I attend or speak at a conference I am amazed and annoyed at just how Internet marketing industry centric these events can be. Many attendees at major conferences are people who do search and social marketing services for others for a living. Rarely is an audience made up of a majority of people who are from the outside trying to learn more. The recent Local Marketing Expo that I spoke at in Virginia Beach was a nice shift as most attendees were there to learn about how the Internet can impact their business. Of course, we as ‘experts’ rolled them with way too much information that at times was more than I could handle so I can only guess that the SMB seeking knowledge was overwhelmed too.

Stop talking over everyone’s head – We need to stop talking as if everyone understands our language. Most people don’t and they are not real impressed when we make them feel stupid by using buzz words and industry lingo in our conversations. People are hungry to learn about Internet marketing and social media in layman’s terms and our industry as a whole does a bad job of doing just that. We need to slow down and help people where they are and speak to them in real world language. Rather than racing them to the next best thing how about we just help them get a strong basic foundation on the Internet? Or is that beneath us?

Get out of the office and talk to someone not in the industry – When we retweet that great ‘find’ from one of the social media glitterati and think we are helping mankind with passing along this information we are simply yelling into our self-created echo chamber and then thinking and acting like we are accomplishing something. We need to stop talking to each other and instead talk to the people who need help in understanding this stuff in terms they can digest and eventually apply.

What if you didn’t talk to another social media / Internet marketing insider for a week and instead sought out only people who were interested in learning more about these disciplines because it’s not what they do 24/7? Do you think more work would get done and the spread of this great stuff would move more quickly? I think so. Get away from the screen and into the sunlight. Talk to people who are hungry for knowledge at the end user stage. They need help so give it to them.

Stop the social media PDA’s, please! – If we have to suffer through more public displays of sucking up to industry people who are ‘important’ we will suffocate under our own perceived self-importance. There are plenty of people out there with the chops to hang with industry insiders on a skill and knowledge level (and likely even blow their doors off) but they choose to do work for clients instead. While I would love to hear more from them maybe that’s just the point. Do more work and less promotion. We’ll find out about you if you are good because you will have done something and not just said something.

So I ask that we “Tear down this wall” that we have created in this industry. If we stop feeding off of each other and simply get out in the mainstream there will be much greater things ahead. Right now, the Internet marketing and social media industries are experiencing stunted growth due to this insular approach to how we do business. It’s time to expand and move beyond the self-imposed boundaries and really see where this thing can go.

I am sure that many of you reading this are saying “I do that! I am not one of those!”. Good for you. Tell us how you are different in the comments. Tell us what you or your company does to be out amongst the regular folks rather than glad-handing the industry. Maybe it’s just a matter of showing others that it is truly being done that’s needed.

Sure, this is another rant to some degree but I feel better. Too bad no one outside the wall will see it .

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