Saturday, November 27, 2010

Get to Know Your Neighbors and Stay Connected with OneTwib

OneTwib struck me as interesting because I’m always looking for new ways to connect with people in my local area. With that being said, “OneTwib is a location-based social network that lets you connect with people around you, in your neighborhood, at work or anywhere.” Right from the homepage, you can enter your zip code to set your location and see who’s around you at-a-glance.

Creating an account is easy and they also allow you to login via Facebook Connect. Creating an account allows you to really get involved and see what’s going on in your neighborhood.

Dashboard

Here you can post status updates, see what’s happening in your area and get a quick view of your inbox. There are also separate tabs for editing your location and viewing your contacts.

Inbox

This is where you can view your messages in more detail and also see the messages that you’ve sent.

Who’s Around

Here you can see a list of people who are around you via a map and text list underneath. You can manipulate the map by zooming in and out and moving around. There is another tab that lets you view and edit your profile.

Events

Here you can see events that are going on in your area as well as create and manage your own events. This is a great way to get involved and get others involved. Creating an event is as simple as filling out a little info such as title, description, time, duration, location and attendance requirements.

Message Board

Here there are tabs for messages, classifieds and lost & found. You can choose the perimeter for who you’d like to view messages from; the max is 5 miles. You can also post messages to be seen by people in your area. Classifieds and lost & found should be pretty self explanatory; it’s like a mini version of Craigslist, but just for your neighborhood.

Groups

If you’re looking for yet another way to connect with your neighbors, why not join or create a group? All that’s needed is a title, description and location and you can have your group started. This is great for meeting people with like interests and hobbies.

Unfortunately, OneTwib is really only beneficial if there are other people in your neighborhood using the site. You can, of course, share the site with and invite friends and neighbors (if you happen to have their email address). In my fairly large area of Tampa, I only saw one other person using the site. The site definitely has potential, it just needs the users. What’s your take on it?

Friday, November 26, 2010

Sort Tweets by Relevance and Importance with Cadmus

How many times have you looked at your Twitter timeline and wished that there was an easier way to get caught up on just the important tweets that you may have missed? Well Cadmus aims to fix that problem for you. You may be familiar with Cadmus as a plugin for Seesmic or as an addition to the TweetAgora iPhone app, but it’s also an awesome standalone Web tool.

What Cadmus does is “manages your stream in real-time by displaying the most relevant content since the last time you checked in.” It does this by “placing the most important tweets at the top.” If you want to learn more about the specifics of the Cadmus algorithm, check out Twitter Conversations in Cadmus. So, what’s so great about Cadmus?

Supports Other Services

You can add your FriendFeed account to Cadmus by entering your username and key. This allows you to post updates and comments to FriendFeed from within the site. You can also add your favorite RSS feed to Cadmus for easy access; you can enter each URL individually, or upload an OPML file. RSS feeds do not have any functionality within Cadmus, they are simply listed so that you can click on them and view the actual RSS feed in a new tab/window.

Show/Hide Comments

It’s nice that you can view all comments/@mentions to a tweet with the click of an icon. Items that have comments will have a number displayed to the show/hide icons. You can click it to see what others are saying and also add your own comment/@mention.

For some tweets you may also see “Related Posts” and a number next to it. Clicking on this will show you the same item that has been posted by other Twitter users and FriendFeed users – if you have added it as a service. You can also add comments to these items; your comment can be posted to Twitter or FriendFeed.

Sharing

The share button allows you to retweet on Twitter or repost items on FriendFeed. There is a drop-down menu that allows you to choose which account to share on. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a way to share on both at the same time.

Real-Time

As I already mentioned above, Cadmus is in real-time – no refreshing needed. If however you don’t like this feature, you can use the pause/play button at the top right to stop the real-time updating. This button is found next to the “Post” button, which lets you post your own tweets on Twitter and updates on FriendFeed.

Trends

The best feature on Cadmus, in my opinion, is the ability to view trending conversations and personal trending topics. I am one that has gotten so fed up with the Twitter trending topics, that I rarely pay attention to them anymore. Cadmus fixes the issue by making trending topics personal.

You can view the post popular conversations from the last 6 hours, 12 hours, 1 day, 3 days, or last week. This makes it really easy to jump into conversations and see what you have been missing. Personal trending topics are just like Twitter trending topics, except they only relate to the users that you’re following. This makes it easy to see the most discussed topics among your friends and lets you participate accordingly.

Twitter Lists

Lastly, it’s nice to have access to your Twitter lists within Cadmus. Since lists are great for organizing users by category or importance, this is an even handier method of viewing the most important and relevant tweets. If you have a Twitter list of all your friends or favorite users, you can go directly to the people that matter to you. So as you can see, Cadmus is definitely great to use in addition to your Twitter lists.

Final Thoughts

Do you think Cadmus has longevity in the expanding world of Twitter tools? I definitely think so. I know there there are similar tools out there that do what Cadmus does, but with its elegant yet simple UI and strong features you really can’t deny how useful it is.

Thursday, November 25, 2010

How to Use Social Media to Attract a Higher Advertiser Rate

This post is by Clare Lancaster, of WomenInBusiness.com.au.

As a blog business owner, your brand needs to reach beyond your blog.

Your presence on social media is a valuable one. In some ways, it’s the ultimate opt-in. When someone follows you on Twitter, subscribes to your YouTube channel or likes your Facebook page they’re making a choice to connect with you—and are receptive to your message.

These communication channels become assets for you to cultivate loyalty, relationships, and importantly, influence.

These assets are valuable not only for you, but for advertisers also. More and more, my advertising leads are inquiring about social media reach. They don’t just want a banner ad on my website—they want their brand exposed to my social networks.

There are creative ways to add more value for advertisers (in exchange for higher rates) without being spammy. You don’t want to sell your soul and lose the trust that you’ve built, but there’s no reason why you can’t monetize the attention of your audience beyond your blog.

Ways to use social media to offer more value to advertisers

Publish a blog post to welcome a new sponsor and tweet about it.
Publish a monthly “Editor’s picks” post including from your advertiser’s products/service range.
Continue this by linking to a page within an advertiser’s products/service range from Facebook.
Add a page to your Facebook account detailing monthly special offers that you’ve negotiated with your advertisers.

Make sure in all cases that the line between all advertising/editorial is clearly drawn and appropriately marked.

Add your social media statistics to your media kit and include any extras that advertisers will receive when they choose to book a campaign with you. You’ll get extra dollars for minimal extra work, and your advertisers will receive extra value.

Haven’t separated your personal social media accounts from your blog’s yet? Next week I’ll explore the pros and cons of doing just that.

Clare Lancaster offers blog reviews to help improve the business performance of your blog. She is passionate about helping people make their own path in work and life and can be found on Twitter most days (@clarelancaster).

Facebook Gets Aggressive with Trademarks

Facebook is on its way to trademarking the word “Face,” but don’t worry, you won’t have to change your lingo to “Get out of my countenance” any time soon. According to Inside Facebook, the trademark application only applies when the word “face” is used in specific circumstances. Here’s the language of the application:

Telecommunication services, namely, providing online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users in the field of general interest and concerning social and entertainment subject matter, none primarily featuring or relating to motoring or to cars.

The first part I get, but cars? Is Facebook going into the automobile dealer business? (Facemobiles?)

I can’t begrudge a company trying to protect its turf but are they really worried that someone will confuse Joe’s Faceforum with the one and only Facebook?

What Facebook clearly does worry about is being mocked. TechCrunch reported that Facebook was blocking any mention of parody site Lamebook, even in private messages sent through the system. They show a message that says their Lamebook message was abusive or spam. I sent a message with the word in it and it wasn’t blocked, so perhaps they’ve changed their stance.

Facebook is in the process of suing Lamebook for copyright infringement so it does seem like an odd accident (as Facebook claims in a response to TechCrunch) that Lamebook was being blocked.

But all of this begs the question of just how “big brother” Facebook is going to be when they get their new message system up and running. If their trademark on “face” goes through, will they block messages that they feel uses the word improperly? Facebook doesn’t allow adult content on the site, but what if I want to send a passage from my favorite erotica novel to a friend via the messaging system?

Facebook isn’t owned by the huddled masses, so they can ban whatever they want from its public pages, but once they offer themselves up as a private message system, that’s a different story.

What do you think? Does Facebook have a right to censor private messages sent using their servers?

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Social Ads All the Rage in 2011?

Since people are pre-occupied right before Thanksgiving with purchasing their last minute Turduckens, I thought it would be the right time to drop a chart on you to think about between courses. What better way to fight off a tryptophan induced food coma than think about paid search!

According to Covario, a paid search management firm (shocking that they would do something promoting, err, researching paid search!) that social paid search (is it really paid search or do we not have another way to describe it?) is going to be what all the cool kids are doing in 2011. In fact, they predict that up to 20% of paid search spend will be in the social realm. Not to worry though because that funding won’t come out of existing paid budgets but rather from display etc (gee, who woulda thunk?). Here’s a picture for you to consider from eMarketer.

Considering how off-base many of the Facebook ads are when ‘targeting’ me (even after me telling them they are not even in the ballpark) this is an interesting phenomenon. But hey, we have to have a “What’s Hot in ’11″ poster child so why not this, right?!

Bookmarketing from Facebook

So how does a website capturing 25% of all US based traffic grow? They take over your home page of course!

Recently, many Facebook users (myself included) have been presented with a gray bar at the top of the Facebook website inviting them to make Facebook their home page.

Facebook is using a subtle trick that isn’t much a trick at all; however, Facebook’s approach at bookmarketing is no-doubt convincing tens of thousands of people to change their home page to Facebook today.

The instructions in the gray bar are easy enough to follow and low-and-behold it works, but what is the magical technology behind this? Is it some Facebook JavaScript or Ajax wizardry?

Actually, it’s just a normal button linked to Facebook. In Firefox you can click and drag any text or image link to your home icon and make that link your home page. You can try it out by dragging this link to your home page icon… See. Now your home page has changed. Magic.

Unfortunately, this little trick doesn’t work in the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari or Chrome so I’m guessing the little gray bar is only appearing for Firefox users.

The whole approach by Facebook reminds me of an Internet Checkers opponent I faced in the late 90s. As I prepared my next move, my opponent chatted with me “Hit alt+f4 to change the checker colors to neon”. Being addicted to seeing neon colors I couldn’t resist and after hitting alt+f4 my Internet Checkers window closed, my opponent won by default and he was off to claim another victim on his road to Internet Checkers glory.

While Facebook may or may not care about its win-loss ratio in Internet Checkers, they do care about dominating the social networking world. By framing a fairly mundane yet rarely used feature of Firefox, Facebook is able to appear innovative without having done much beyond recognizing your browser and trying to convince you to change your home page.

The “does it work?” factor alone is likely netting hoards of Facebook users updating their home pages.

I like watching Facebook make an effort of browser based bookmarketing. In the rush of social networking, social news and social bookmarking services we often forget that some of the best bookmarks are those located right below the address bar. Facebook hasn’t lost sight of this and now even more of their users will be greeted by the voyeuristic satisfaction of knowing what their friends are up to, every time they open their browser.

So now I’d like to hear from you. What browser based bookmarketing techniques do you use?

Yelp Joins Check-In Offer Crowd

Yelp is truly trying to leverage its history as the local business review site of choice (depending on your age and your location for the most part). It has rolled out Yelp Deals in New York City and is now giving business owners the chance to provide check-in offers as well.

Mashable reports

With Yelp Check-in Offers, business owners can incentivize repeat checkins and reward patrons with three different offer types: percent off, free or fixed price offers.

Businesses are able to offer one check-in special at a time, and patrons can redeem earned rewards by presenting a special mobile certificate showing they’ve unlocked a particular offer.

Yelp business owners can navigate to the “Offers” portion of their business dashboard to specify offer type and checkin terms — a 25% off discount for three checkins, for instance. Patrons can work to achieve an offer with each venue checkin via the just updated Yelp iPhone (awaiting approval) and Android apps. After redemption, users can start earning the offer again. The approach is not dissimilar to SCVNGR’s system for unlocking rewards.

This is a pure “Look who is doing it too!” announcement since there is no innovation just participation.

Will you be looking to check-in with Yelp to get a deal? Is the deal offer making the check-in cool again? Only time will tell.

Real-Time Social Classified Ads by Yakaz

Paris-based Yakaz has recently launched a new real-time social classified ad system designed to quickly facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers. The Yakaz website offers visitors the chance to view and post to live classified feeds from across the country or in the city or state of their choice.

My initial test drive of Yakaz was a mixed bag of experiences. I started by trying to create an account directly through their web site. Everything seemed to go well, but going on 1 hour I still had not received my verification email, which pretty much left my account useless. I finally caved and used Facebook Connect to log onto the site. I’m sure this is one of those temporary glitches with a start-up, but if you’re impatient you can save some time by using your Facebook credentials.

The default view on the home page is of classified ads from across the United States. I felt this was a good place to start to familiarize myself with the kinds of ads running on Yakaz. The US view showed a wide array of ads covering cars, job offers, pets, real estate, fish tanks and furniture. For the most part, all the ads in the US view look liked they came from actual people posting to Yakaz. Responding to ads was as simple as selecting “Reply to this post” and your near instant conversation with the poster begins.

Wanting to dig a little deeper and see what was for sale in my town, I decided to do a little browsing around the Austin section. Here I found a much different sampling of ads. Most of the ads in the Austin section did not have a “Reply to this post” option, but instead offered you option to “Save this post” or click through to a specific URL.

It looks like the cause of this is that the listings with “Save this post” originate from other sites such as eBay, Craigslist, AutoTrader, etc. As anyone who has launched classified ads can tell you, one of the greatest challenges is the chicken before the egg scenario. How do you get an audience without ads and how do you get ads without an audience? In this case, it looks like Yakaz is borrowing chickens by listing and linking to ads from other websites. I suppose these could be syndication or affiliate deals with these websites, but I could find no indications either way.

Posting to Yakaz is fairly easy. At the top of the “ads” view is a field that says “Tell your neighborhood…”, simply clicking on that field allows you to start filling out your ad. Yakaz has a few clever tricks when you enter your ad including automatically figuring out the price and category based on the text from the ad itself.

While the jury might be out on the size of Yakaz’s audience and the response rate advertisers might get from listings, at “free” the price is right and might be worth an experiment or two. At the very least, perhaps you could try to get rid of that elliptical machine doubling for a clothes rack in your guest bedroom.

Common Thread in Social Media for Business: Hiring

On some level, most larger businesses are engaged in social media. I say larger only because we have discussed the plight of the SMB in this space before and it is not safe to assume they are doing anything at all with social media.

To what degree and with what level of success these businesses use social media varies across the entire spectrum of runaway success to abject failure. This is not unusual because that’s how things work with everything in life, not just social media.

A recent study by Ketchum and FedEx tries to capture just how or to what degree most businesses are jumping in the social media waters. eMarketer shared part of their study with this chart.

This chart almost mirrors a classic bell curve (10 percent on one end, 80 percent in the middle and 10 percent on the other end). What the main differentiator in the middle and upper levels of this scale is not really how they are doing social media but the recognition that there needs to be dedicated personnel to perform the practice or the hiring of additional outside counsel from an agency.

So all of you job seekers that have a Facebook account and use Twitter to some degree or another it’s time to put some lipstick on that resume. Just like the days when search was the hot hiring topic, it looks like your biggest decision is going to be whether you are an expert, a guru, a maven, a ninja or a (fill in the blank).

Let’s face it there are going to be more business and job opportunities in the social media space than qualified bodies to fill them. Mainly this will happen because the industry is still very young. Also, because those who are most savvy in the space regarding the tools have the least amount of business experience. As a result, the application of the tools in business and being able to build a strategy for effective business application of these “fun” tools may not be as available as many businesses would like.

The industry is in for an extended period of settling on hires vs. making the best hire. Before you get your knickers in a twist, I am not saying that younger people who are social media tool savvy aren’t smart. What I am saying is that they lack experience in the business world and thus will be limited in effectiveness in many (not all) cases. That’s just a fact. Same goes for young accountants. You may know all the techniques but how to apply the tax code to the best advantage of a business v. a text book case study is very, very different and something learned through experience.

So for those of you looking to hire social media staff, what do you look for? What are hoping to get from your hires? Are they strategic hires or are they ‘rank and file’ hires? Let us know.

Should You Be Archiving Your Social Media Data?

Imagine throwing all of your company’s hard copy files off the roof of twenty-story building in Manhattan. Tax returns, meeting notes, personnel files, all of it, gone with the wind.

That’s the brick and mortar version of the business data that’s currently speeding along the social media super highway. From public Twitter Tweets to private Facebook messages more and more of our daily exchanges are happening over the Internet and it means we’re losing track.

Sure, you probably don’t set out to send formal communications through Facebook but you’re on the site and Susan’s on the site, so why not just ping her chat box and let her know that deadline was moved up to Tuesday? And remember that customer complaint on Twitter? The one where you promised the guy a replacement part overnight? Forgot about him, didn’t you?

Web 2.0 makes it easy for us to pass information along quickly any time of the day or night. There’s no more 9 to 5, not when the Internet is always on. But this ease of communication can come with a high price tag. We live in a litigious world and if you get sued because of something posted on Facebook, you’ll need those posts to defend yourself in court.

The New York Times recently posted an article called Tools to Help Companies Manage Their Social Media.” In it, they talk with experts about social media record keeping, the reasons for doing it and the means behind it. Everyone agrees that it’s not a simple task but it’s got to be done. For some companies, archiving communication is a legal requirement. For others, it’s just good business.

With the end of the year rapidly approaching, it’s time to put your virtual paperwork in order along with the stuff made from trees. Worst case scenario, if you see trouble brewing on one of your social media channels or a great idea simmering below the surface, take a screen shot. Those few extra seconds could save you a lot of time and aggravation down the line.

What do you think? Do you archive your social media communications?

Home Depot Personalizes Gift Cards with Video

A gift card may seem like the last act of a desperate gift giver, but Home Depot is determined to change that feeling by adding video to their cards.

When sending a Home Depot e-card, you can now upload a video up to 3 minutes long, or, you can use a webcam to record a message. Then, the recipient uses the code they receive in their email to access the video and voila, it’s now more than just virtual money!

Want to spread the love? With one click, you can send e-gift cards to your friends on Facebook, even if you don’t know their email address.

Pretty simple, except for their website, which is confusing. When you hit the site you have a choice of “I’m giving a gift card” or “I received a gift card.” Which would you push if you wanted to buy a gift card to give? Neither one. That link is hidden in the bottom left corner. “I’m giving a gift card” appears to be a tool that allows you to add a video to a card you purchased at a store. I think. . .it’s not very clear, even when you click through.

From all this, there are two takeaways. One, everything old can be made new again with just a little creative thought. Adding video to a gift card isn’t a huge leap but it’s a nice touch that makes this card a little more appealing than the competitor’s card. What can you do to add that extra special touch this holiday season. Maybe it’s about adding a mystery item to all orders over $50 or the ability to send a treat to yourself when you buy a gift for someone else. How about offering a free song or ebook download with gift card purchase.

Takeaway two is, be clear. Leave nothing to chance. Make sure every inch of your website, Facebook page, every Twitter message makes sense to a first time visitor. Check those links and keep an eye on servers for downtime issues. Don’t lose customers because they don’t know what to do next. Your product may sell itself but it won’t be going anywhere if consumers can’t figure out which link to click in order to buy it.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

iBigBang – Your Bookmark Organizer and Desktop on the Web

I know many of you probably don’t use homepages anymore — I know I don’t, but iBigBang might give you a reason to use them again. It’s a free tool that gives you your own desktop on the Web. With that desktop, you can create bookmarks and projects that will make it easier for you to access your favorite and most used websites. Your desktop can be customized to your liking and you can even share bookmarks and projects with friends.

After signing up, the first thing you’ll want to do is go to “settings” to customize your desktop. If your bookmarks are already saved in your browser, you can download and important them to your desktop. You can also do things like customize the color of your menu bar and add your own wallpaper/background or use a predefined one.

Adding bookmarks is done from the “menu” on your desktop. Once you click “new bookmark,” you can enter the URL, title, section (which are like tags or categories), add it to a project (described below) and add a note or two about the website.

Once added to your desktop, icons can be arranged anyway you like by just clicking and dragging around the screen. You can click on the title to go to the website or click the section/topic (that you added) to display other sites that are related to it (see image below). Also, from the menu bar you can search the Web from within the iBigBang interface.

A nice feature they have for organizing your desktop even further is the ability to create projects. Projects are folders that you can use to organize your bookmarks by type, alphabetical order or any other way you choose. These projects can also be shared with friends or kept private. Every time one of your bookmarks is saved by a friend, a message will appear on your desktop letting you know. You can also allow projects to be visible to everyone, which will automatically create a link for you to share on any site.

The only issue with iBigBang is that some instructions and buttons are often displayed in Spanish. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any way to fix this at the moment. Other than that, it’s definitely a very useful tool for organizing your bookmarks in style.

Blogger Insight - Social Media

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Dashboard

Inbox

Who’s Around

Events

Message Board

Groups

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Friday, November 26, 2010

Supports Other Services

Show/Hide Comments

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Sharing

Real-Time

Trends

Twitter Lists

Final Thoughts

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Thursday, November 25, 2010

Ways to use social media to offer more value to advertisers

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Wednesday, November 24, 2010

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Sunday, November 21, 2010

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