Finding The Right Social Media Strategist

Many large companies have extended teams managing their social media strategy and community managers who interact with customers, but there are still many organizations, especially non-profits and small businesses that are just getting started. One question asked during my San Francisco Social Media Week panel presentation really stuck with me, “If I’m looking to hire someone to do social media on their own, what can I expect from that one person?” It seems like a straightforward question, but the answer really lays in the foundational building blocks of the organization. This brings me to the organizational challenges that all social media managers face:

1. Who is your executive champion? Do you have the right senior leader who will help cut through the organizational challenges and pave a path to success?

It will be challenging to gain traction for a social media program without an executive champion who is willing to prioritize social media appropriately against other marketing and communications initiatives. A champion can help ensure the social experience is integrated into all the other parts of the organization – customer care, marketing, product development – and that social has a place at the table. You’re not looking for an executive to create the strategy or execute the programs, but you are looking for a champion who is willing to be educated on how social media can augment other functional areas of the company.

2. Do you have the right “silo buster” as your social media lead?

Virginia Miracle has some great tips on Social Silo-Busting. I have found that the greatest predictor of success is looking for someone who has an entrepreneurial past and is not afraid of boundaries. It is crucial to find the right internal employee who can pivot into a new role as social media lead (maybe this person has a track record of gaining consensus on challenging problems) or to hire the right external person who can pull the right levers in your organization and bust silos. The social media lead should be prepared to give non-threatening advice to an executive who is much more senior but also, work closely with communications managers to execute on the strategic plan.

3. Once your social media organization is on track, how do you evolve beyond the Social Media Help Desk that Jeremiah Owyang discusses in his recent report (which Ogilvy 360DI participated in) and achieve Escape Velocity?

Social media organizations get more budget and credibility as they demonstrate results, but there is always that inflection point when you need to evolve from Social Media Help Desk and create an organizational structure that supports social media in a scalable and strategic way. Your social media leader’s entrepreneurial drive to make change happen and proactively adapt the organization will be the deciding factor in how your social media program evolves. This underlines the importance of finding the right leader who can build a social media organization through collaboration not coercion.

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Make Your Facebook Fan Page a Party

This guest post is by Caz Makepeace of y Travel Blog.

Facebook Fan pages are swiftly becoming a standard extension to blogs’ brands and messages. This is a highly effective form of engaging with your target market and building a community around your brand.

If you focus on making your Fan page your homepage for the social web, you can create a page that serves as your mini-hub. Then use it as your platform to connect on a deeper level.

Today’s currency is engagement

People like to socialize with, and ultimately do business with, people they like and trust. So it’s very important that you’re actively engaging with your followers and they are engaging with you—hence the word “social”. That’s how you build strong and rewarding relationships.

From personal experience, by building an engaged and interactive community through our own travel blog’s fan page, our community member numbers grow every day. And although ours may not have as many fans as some other Fan pages, it does have a great deal more engagement, which is not only important to us, but important to Facebook.

Facebook rewards you for building relationships. The degree to which you engage with your fans, and how much they interact with you, determines whether your status updates show in your fans’ news feeds.

Strive for social success first, not marketing success

There are five critical errors most people make when they start using social media for business.

The secret to our success has been very simple. We made the intention for our Fan page to build an engaged community and start conversations. We wanted to create a place where those within our travel community can meet for some socializing and fun, not just get travel tips and information. Our intention is not to use our Fan page purely as a marketing tool.

Although we know it’s a highly effective tool, we do not build our fan page community based on this. If your intention is just to use your page as a tool to promote your products, that will clearly come through, and your success with Facebook will be limited.

Think of those who are most successful in your niche. I bet most of them began blogging by building their brand and a community first, and any monetization came later. First, build a passionate community based around social interaction and sharing. Any monetary rewards will come naturally later on.

Make your Fan page a party

We approach our Fan page strategy as if we were hosting guests at a party. For us to remove all thoughts of the page being a marketing tool, we had to think of it as the type of place we’d like to hang out. So our intention was to make our fan page more like a party. We love to socialize, and have never been shy in hosting parties in real life in any of the countries we’ve lived in. After all, isn’t that what the “social” part of social media is all about?

We invite and welcome

First of all, we invite and we welcome visitors. No one will come to your party if you don’t first invite them. We have clear invitations set up on our blog and all our other online platforms. And when our new guests arrive, we warmly welcome them in. We tag and give a shout out by video to every 100th guest. And we also have a “Fan of the Month,” which is the person who has contributed the most to the community in that time.

We interact and respond

This is our biggest recommendation for keeping social media “social.” How long would your party last if you didn’t talk to your guests? Or worse still, if they spoke to you and you ignored them? We do not ignore our guests. We respond to every comment left on our Fan page. Yes, it takes work, but we value our community members and suggest you value yours. Fostering a community involves a strong leader who supports, encourages, recognizes, and inspires.

Managing fan comments has become much easier since we started using a great free app called Hyper Alerts.

We ask questions and share

To be interesting, you must be interested. The best way to get to know new people is to ask questions. Remember, people like to talk about themselves, so let them. Don’t make the conversation all about you, what you’re doing, and your opinion.

Ask questions as a way to get your fans to share, to stimulate conversation, and to give advice. A lot of people won’t open up initially if they don’t feel like someone wants to listen or will respond. Be the listener and when your guests do answer the question and share, be the responder. Continue to ask questions throughout the conversation to encourage a more in-depth discussion.

At least once a month, we have a status update that runs something like this:

“Go ahead and introduce yourself:

1. Where are you from?
2. Where are you currently?
3. What is your favorite travel destination?
4. Can we help you with anything?”

This gets people to open up and feel welcomed. Sharing helps others to make new connections and form bonds. Simply through this particular update, community members become aware of others’ geographical locations and special interests, and can connect more directly. Sharing also shows that you are interested in and care about your fans. We also make an effort to share other people’s articles, videos, and blog sites through our Fan page.

Every Friday we have “Post Your URL Day,” when we encourage other travel bloggers to post their URLs and a three-line description under their status updates. From the URLs posted, we randomly choose a winner to do a featured interview on.

We say it with photos

Pictures really do tell a thousand words. Being in the travel industry, we find there’s no better way to inspire others and stir emotion than through travel photos. So we post a daily travel photo of a destination we have personally visited.

We also post random photos from our day-to-day lives. That way, our community members get a behind-the-scenes look into our life that creates a deeper connection.

People love to look at others’ personal photos, and Facebook is great for that. And did you know that using photos to stand out in the Facebook news feed carries more weight than text updates when it comes to your Facebook EdgeRank Score?

We play games

Everybody loves a good game—especially if they’re at a party and there are a few beers involved! There won’t be beers at your Fan page party, but you can still have a good time. We run a “Where in the World” game, where we upload a travel photo from somewhere in the world, and our fans have to guess the location. This stirs interaction and creates a fun vibe.

We also have “Happy Hour” once a week, where we encourage our fans to post a link to their favorite blog, website, or resource on the Web. Take some time to think of games you can play on your Fan page that relate to your niche and encourage participation.

We run competitions

Once you have enough fans engaged and interacting at your party, consider introducing competitions with prizes to let them know you appreciate them. We run photo contests every second month with a different photo theme which relates in some way to our prize. Last month’s prize was a backpack sponsored by Kelty, and the photo theme was National Parks. Fans get to vote on the best photo, and the top five are then sent to the sponsoring company, which selects the ultimate winner. Competitions like this are a win-win for you and your sponsor, who gets exposure to a new audience.

New ideas for a fantastic fan page party

Keep thinking of new ways to make your Fan page—and party—better. Don’t initially approach Facebook asking, “How am I going to use this as a monetization tool?” Instead, ask “How am I going to make this the fun place to hang out?” That’s the way to create an engaged community.

Don’t just create a Fan page, create an experience. Get this right, and the rest will naturally follow.

How much of a community are you building around your brand on Facebook?

Caz Makepeace has been travelling and living around the world since 1997. Along with her husband Craig they are the founders of y Travel Blog. You can visit her Facebook Fan Page or sign up for her

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Twitter for Customer Service? Fortune Puts it to the Test

The answer to a customer service question should always be accurate, as simple as possible while still covering the problem completely and it should arrive in a timely manner.

For most companies, this means running customer service phone lines or responding to email, but some intrepid explorers are giving Twitter a whirl. It’s a logical step, seeing as how people love to use Twitter to complain about companies, so why not use the same method to turn the consumer around?

The folks at Fortune decided it was time to put this new option to the test, so they took their problems to eight companies known to have customer service agents manning Twitter. They dealt with banks, airlines, shopping sites and even got technical assistance for their cable TV. In each case, they delivered the question by Twitter, Phone and through the company website.

Care to guess which method was most effective most of the time? It was our old friend the telephone.

Of the companies tested, only Microsoft, Rubbermaid and Comcast Cable were able to completely solve the problem by Twitter but it wasn’t a short process. It took Comcast twenty minutes and several replies before the rep offered to refresh the box. Seven minutes into a phone call, the reporter got the same result and it took only five minutes when he connected through online chat.

What’s clear from their first hand testing is that poor customer service often stems from a failure to communicate and that’s hard to get around when you only have 140 characters. Simple answers and answers that can be solved through a forwarded link, are really the only kinds of customer service problems Twitter is equipped to deal with. Anything more complicated and the required amount of back and forth posting is simply too great.

Now if you’re thinking, not my end of the company, doesn’t matter. Think again. Poor customer service can undermine everything a good marketer puts out there and it can happen in a flash. We’ve talked about this before and it can’t be emphasized enough. Acquiring a new customer is hard work, keeping that customer is even harder, especially if you have the rest of the company working against you.

As a marketer, you may not be directly responsible for customer service issues, but you should still make it part of your routine to scan social media for problems. Sending a “how can I help you” tweet to an unhappy customer might be all that’s needed to prevent a public blowup. Just make sure that you actually do help them once they contact you or you’ll be compounding the problem.

The other thing we can take away from Fortune’s test is that social media isn’t the solution for everything. Yes, it feels like it’s the key cog in the works these days, but there’s still no substitute for talking to an actual human. Don’t let your social media drive keep you from practicing tried and true marketing and customer service techniques.

Now, let me get that door for you and if you need a place to stay, I can recommend a great hotel where they give you a hot, chocolate chip cookie when you check-in.

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Love Is Indeed A Battlefield

I think Pat Benatar had it right when she sang “love is a battlefield” almost thirty years ago. Love is, and will always be, a space for our hearts’ inner most fears and desires to be won or lost for all to see. Love is just that motivating, inspiring dangerous and sometimes, simply nuts. And Valentine’s Day brings all the vastness of love to a head and often times, leaves some of us out in the cold. That is, until social media showed up.

What with all the social media marketing efforts flying around for Valentine’s Day, such as being able to send loved ones an Angry Birds - themed Facebook valentine or sending a virtual gift from CBS’s Mad Love Facebook Page, it is easy to assume that Valentine’s Day has lost all of its remaining sentimental value. However, I would argue that social media is actually beneficial for all the lovers out there. With tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Yelp or even a recent startup (that connects to Facebook to help people find local & gift recommendations that match a loved one’s taste), making plans and sending gifts has become a simplified process. Now, there is really no worry (nor excuse) to not have plans, a gift or even a simple status update to showcase your love for another on Valentine’s Day.

Check out this video from Socialnomics to see just how easy social media has made it for anyone who needs to pull together great Valentine’s Day plans at the last-minute:

Now, if you are single on this heart-filled day, you might wonder “what about me?”, especially given some unsatisfactory results on large dating sites due to fake profilers and high subscription fees. Well, you’re in luck because social media can help you out too.

With all of the personal data available via social networks, it is much easier to leverage the information to establish safer & more reliable dating connections. One such way is through Facebook apps such as Matchmaker from Match.com. Or through dating network sites such as Zoosk and Gelato (the self-proclaimed “Friendfeed of dating”), that both pull in your social media data to help you find a better match. All of these developments, even with one as funny as Grouspawn (where you get $60k if you had a first date with a Groupon coupon that resulted in a baby), will continue to flourish and use social networking & its valuable data to establish great love connections. And if nothing else, at least it could be a great date story to share with your friends over Twitter, Facebook or even Flickr the next day.

So, the next time you are trying to win over a crush’s heart, solidify your love for your significant other or just not feel too lonely on Valentine’s Day, remember that social media is on your side — there to help you make love connections a bit easier to establish.

What do you think? Do social media platforms hinder or help on Valentine’s Day?

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Bible Thumping, Brainwashing, and Pimping—Your Keys to Blog Success!

This guest post is by Jason Towne of TopThreeDaily.com.

I’m new to the blogosphere, but thanks to tips from ProBlogger and a few others, I decided to make the plunge and start my own blog. It’s only been a little over a week. The day after my site went live I had nearly 2,000 pageviews and 500 unique visitors. Within the next 24 hours those numbers doubled and then I soon passed 8,000 unique visitors and 20,000 pageviews. In the week that we’ve been up, the site rose over 2.4 million spots on Alexa.

Keep in mind I had no experience whatsoever with blogging, social media, or technology. How did I do it?

Optimizing the WTF? factor

The first and most important thing I did was to research what, and how, blog posts go viral. I began by researching the concept of linkbaiting, starting with ProBlogger’s classic post, and then continued to study Buzzfeed, Popurls, and other sites to get a feel for what gets spread around. One thing I learned is that titles that make people say WTF? are winners. For instance, my first viral article, 6 Bible Thumping Tips that Will Save Your Butt!, only had a chance because the title was so intriguing. I know this because I sent out that exact same article twice, with two inferior titles, and it went nowhere. When I changed the name, it took off like a rocket.

Now that I’ve had several viral articles in a row, I’m confident that a quality title is everything. Here’s a trick that I use.

First, focus on either list posts or how-to guides. Both of those bring amazing results over and over. Second, think of something that’s traditionally considered a “negative,” combine it with a “positive,” and you’ve built instant interest. For instance, “Bible Thumping” is usually used in a derogatory way, but “saving your butt” is a good thing. You could do the same with any negative and any positive. For instance, diseases are bad and money is good. So how about an article titled, 5 Diseases I Would Pay Money To Get. Then go research and find some rare, cool disease that has positive benefits. I would click on that.

Ask yourself this question when considering titles: “Would this title make a person say ‘WTF?’”

Befriending Reddit

Keep in mind that I was new to social media and blogging, so I was working by trial and error. What I’ve learned pretty quickly is that Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and StumbleUpon are great if you already have a presence on those sites. If you’ve been using them for some time and have a lot of friends and followers, then you should definitely submit your stuff. However, if you are a newbie like myself, then Reddit should become your instant best friend.

The reason is that Facebook and Twitter are only as good as the number of friends you have. If you have no friends, then you’re submitting your work to nobody. Digg and StumbleUpon are great if you already have some time put in. I didn’t, and when I submitted my articles to those sites they were seen by absolutely nobody. If you’re new, you’re better off not submitting your stuff to them—let someone else (who is established) eventually do it for you.

However, Reddit is a different story. The great thing about Reddit is that when you submit an article, picture, video, or whatever, it is posted instantly for all Reddit users to see. If they like the title then they click on it, and you’re in business. The better your article/picture/video is, the more they will then share it with their friends, and so it starts to go viral.

Here’s an example. I posted an article called called How Bad Boys Control Women (The Real Jedi Mind Trick) on Digg and StumbleUpon, and it wasn’t looked at even once. Then I posted that same article on Reddit and it blew up. I was swarmed with visitors and it began to spread like wildfire. Reddit gives you the initial chance that all the others just don’t offer.

Browsing the Web

Unless you’re a creative writing machine, you probably can’t write blockbuster linkbait articles every day, so the next-best thing is to browse the web for material. I found lots of good material that was a bit older, but very well written. I then got permission from the author to either repost it on my site in whole or repost part of it with a link back to their site. Since the article was out of favor anyway, everyone agreed. What this did was allow me to create a new post on a cool topic, reword my title, and submit it to Reddit. This gave me a massive pageview boost, and helped the original site the article came from get a new lease on life. Everyone won.

Here’s the best example. I was short on creativity the other day, but I remembered hearing on the radio about the police arresting this pimp and finding his business plan. I tracked it down online, put it in a brief article I wrote, then posted A Pimp’s Actual Hand-Written Business Plan. I then tossed it on Reddit and within 12 hours I had gained 15,000 new pageviews. Pimp = negative, business plan = positive. If you’re still not convinced the title strategy works, go back and take a look at the title of this article. You clicked on it. It works.

Have you tried writing titles like this? What title tactics have worked best for you? And what’s your experience with Reddit? Let us know in the comments.

Jason Towne is a published author and former Hollywood script doctor. He currently runs the best-of-the-web blog, Top Three Daily, which came online on Jan. 26, 2011 and is already starting to have an impact on the blogosphere. Towne is also a freelance article writer, consultant, father, and husband. You can follow his posts through his

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CMO’s View Traffic and Conversions Among Top Measures of Social Media Success

Some may already be saying “Well, what else would you use as a measure of social media success?” but it appears that the C-suite marketers are getting on board as well.

The early stages of determining social media success have been dominated by questionable metrics such as number of followers and other variables that are considered soft measurements. Some information provided in January from Bazaarvoice and The CMO Club via eMarketer tells the story of C-level marketers applying the same hard measurements to social media as they have been moving to in all other areas of marketing, mainly conversions and revenue generation.

The jump made from 2010 to 2011 as to the importance of conversions is dramatic. It is bigger than revenue generation likely because it is still quite difficult to tie revenue directly to social media since there are many influences in the eventual purchase of an item beyond just social media.

Other data from the study shows that despite the seeming ‘unsexiness’ of blogging and community building (as compared to social media plays like Facebook and Twitter) they are the techniques that generate the most ROI in the eyes of these high level marketers.

As the C suite starts to get on board with more definitive or finite measures of social media success how will that change the use of the mediums? Are the days of simply acquiring followers / fans / likes as a measure of success gone for good? According to these findings, not completely and they will likely never just become completely irrelevant.

What will happen, however, is that over time the C suite will continue to identify those success metrics that will make their jobs easier and hopefully change a disturbing metric that they live with every day: the average life span of a CMO is somewhere between 22 and 24 months.

Ouch. Now that’s finite.

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Medical Monday: Do Baby Boomers Use Social Media?

This past weekend I went with my family to my great-Aunt’s 96^th birthday.  The whole family met in Long Island, coming in from other parts of the island, New York City and as far away as Connecticut.  As we were leaving, I thanked her 60+-year-old daughter for inviting us, and that’s when she uttered the phrase that left me thinking all weekend - she said “I’ll post the photos on Facebook.”

Had my 30-somethings friends said that, I wouldn’t have batted an eye, but since when were my baby boomer-generation family members actively using social media (nonetheless Facebook)? I began to wonder, do boomers actively use social media?

Some quick research made me began to realize, that they are, and the number of boomers turning to social media is increasing. A recent article in Advertising Age reported use of social network sites such as Facebook in the 50+ demographic grew 88% between 2009 and 2010 (to a total of 47%). Of those age 65+, use doubled to 26% making them the fastest growing segment. [i]

And with the first wave of the generation hitting the retirement age in the next year, I began to wonder, are boomers using social media to talk about healthcare?  Is this an effective place for marketing healthcare products to boomers?

A search online brought another conclusion. I found anecdotal evidence of boomers sharing their experience with products and disease categories online (especially among those they live with daily such as arthritis).[ii] What was interesting was the number of boomer-aged caregivers turning online for information, experience and support who are taking care of their own older parents.

I realized that a lot of younger boomers have the dual role of being both patient AND caregiver, making them an even more appealing target audience.  They are actively looking for information for two members of the older generation.  This made it no surprise to learn that boomers who are caring for aging parents are even more heavily reliant on sites like Facebook than boomers in general.ⁱ

So what have I learned from this exercise?  I’ve learned when looking to reach boomers, don’t rule social media out. My new mantra: have faith in social media, but always do your research.

---

[i] Advertising Age, November 23, 2010

[ii] Note, every disease category is different and we recommend tailored listening work be done in the appropriate treatment category before engaging in a social media campaign

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A Second Look: 6 Types of Twitter Tools That Come in Handy

Tweet

We go over so many tools here are Blogging Tips that many of them are often forgotten as they’re buried deeper into the archives.

I thought it would be nice to go over a few Twitter tools that are useful and definitely worth a second look. If you’re an avid Twitter user, it’s a good idea to use a tool from each of these categories to help with productivity, build your brand and get the most out of Twitter. Since this list only includes past posts from Blogging Tips, it will not address any new tools (which I’m sure there are many of) that may exist in each category; so feel free to add those additional tools in the comments!

Schedule Your Tweets

If you don’t have much time to spend on Twitter yet still want to appear active, 3 of the tools listed on 5 Ways to Schedule Your Tweets (2 are no longer available) can help you schedule future tweets. Scheduling tweets is also great for promoting a product or service. You can schedule 1-2 tweets per day for a certain amount of time, but just be sure to change up the wording as much as possible for each tweets. Twitvance is also a great tool for scheduling unlimited tweets.

Clean Out Your Followers

If you are following over 200 or even 100 people on Twitter, it’s just impossible to manually clean out your followers (ie. inactive users, spammers, etc). You’d have to go to the page of each user and then look at their tweets to see when the last one was posted and then check out what type of content their posting. No one has time for that! Luckily, there are lots of tools out there to help you clean out your followers. None of the tools listed on 4 Twitter Account Cleaners are still around, but the tools listed on Four More Twitter Account Cleaners along with Refollow are sure to come in handy.

Sift Through The Junk

Let’s face it, the amount of spam and shameless promotion on Twitter is getting out of hand. There is so much that it is often hard to find anything useful in your Twitter stream. After using one of the Twitter cleaners above it shouldn’t be so much of a problem, but just in case here are a few tools to help you filter through the junk and find the tweets that matter: Cascaad, TidyTweet and Filttr.

Shorten Your URLs

Most Twitter tools come with an integrated URL shortener, but surprisingly Twitter.com does not have that feature (yet). So if you are in need of a short URL or want to tool to help you condense URLs while browsing check out 9 Short URL Services and 8 URL Shorteners for Quickly Sharing Links.

Keep Up via Alerts

If you’re an extremely busy person, keeping up with Twitter can be impossible and hiring help is just out of the question for most. Having to login each day and look through thousands of tweets can be a pain and many users just give up from frustration. If you’re looking for a more convenient way to keep up with Twitter, then opting to receive alerts is a good idea. With TwitterAlerts you can receive notifications by SMS, email or IM for an unlimited number of keywords. If you want to keep up with specific users instead, I find that IFTTT handles that job quite well.

Backup Your Tweets

Lastly, you want to be sure that you are backing up your tweets on a regular basis. There is nothing worse than building up a Twitter account for a year or two and then losing it all (trust me, I know). Plus, there’s always something weird going on at Twitter and users often complain about missing tweets. You can save yourself the hassle by using one of these 10 Twitter Backup Tools for Preserving Tweets (plus 8 bonus options at the end). You know what they say, it’s better to be safe than sorry; make sure you’re safe!

(image source)

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View All of Your Favorite Content in One Place with Faveous

Tweet

If you use sites like Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to find and favorite interesting content then you’ll love Faveous. Right now Faveous is a very basic service in its “first private alpha,” but if you check out the features page you’ll see that there are a lot of new things coming soon. What it does is import all of your favorites (and “likes” from Facebook) into a single location so that you have easy access to them.

Connecting your desired services is easy and takes only a minute to authorize each one. If you want to manually add content from other sites not listed above, you can do so via the bookmarklet or Chrome extension. Content added manually will be displayed on the Faveous tab.

Your content will begin importing right away and you can view all items together or separately by choosing a tab. The search box on the right side of the page is also a nice touch because you can search through all of your favorites and find exactly what you’re looking for. Right now there is no way to actually organize your favorites, but that is coming soon. Honestly, I think it’s fine without that feature since there is the ability to search, but some may feel differently.

As I mentioned above, Facebook items are not actual favorites, but “likes” on videos, links and pages. If you’re visiting a blog and “like” an article, things like that will be imported as well. Faveous does not to import likes on statuses and comments.

Right now, the only option for each item is to delete it. Clicking on the Google Reader, Facebook and YouTube items will take you to the actual page on that service. Unfortunately, the only things clickable on Twitter content are links included in tweets (not usernames).

On a final note, I feel that Faveous has staying power and potential. We have enough services out there that let us view all of our content and very few that let us focus just on our favorites. Users want a site that is easy to use and doesn’t require too much work and Faveous offers just that. Why bookmark content when you can have it automatically imported from the social network itself? The latter method is definitely more convenient and helps to increase productivity.

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For Bloggers, Who Will Be the Next Digg?

Tweet

It wasn’t that long ago that, for bloggers and other Webmasters, being on the front page of Digg was something of a Holy Grail. It meant an instant tidal wave of traffic, a lot of great publicity and, of course, major bragging rights.

However, Digg’s traffic, since the launch of the “New Digg” in August has waned. Though it is certainly still a traffic powerhouse, it’s no longer end goal for bloggers and webmasters, especially now that the front page of Digg is different for almost every logged in user.

In short, Digg is no longer the guaranteed traffic rush that it once was and, though sites continue to target it, it is no longer a lone champion or clear leader like it once was.

So what site or service could take Digg’s place? It’s a hard question to answer, especially since there may never be another site quite like the old Digg. But there are candidates that could do it or at least create something similar. Consider the following:

1. Reddit

Reddit is the natural choice for most. As a social news site, it’s similar to Digg in many ways, namely that users submit stories and vote them up or down until they reach the front page or fall off, but it’s also very different in many regards as well.

First, where all of Digg’s content links out, much of the content that climbs the charts in Reddit is self posts and image links. Most of the links that do point to other sites go to mainstream media outlets or a small number of high-profile blogs. Very few blogs, especially ones not about technology or politics, reach the default front page of Reddit.

But also like Digg, Reddit is fragmented with the front page being different from user to user and users being further divided into subreddits. Though Reddit can be a huge driver of traffic (according to Alexa it’s been more popular since New Digg was launched), from a webmaster standpoint, it’s a completely different beast than Digg, especially in terms of targeting.

2. Twitter

Many think that the problem is that sites like Digg have become obsolete and the Web has gone from social news to social networking. If that’s the case, Twitter is a logical choice as it certainly has a great deal of traffic, millions of active users and, most importantly, an extremely viral nature.

However, few people read everything in their Twitter stream and nearly everyone sticks to their particular circle, no matter how large or small it is. This means that, for a story to generate an extremely large volume of traffic, it has to either be picked up in a very viral way by hundreds of separate users or simply be tweeted out by a major Twitter user or celebrity.

3. Facebook

Facebook has many of the same advantages of Twitter including an even larger user base, powerful sharing tools and a robust network of tightly-connected individuals. However, Facebook just isn’t nearly as viral as Twitter, though people routinely share links on Facebook, they don’t share links from those they are as following as Twitter, partially because Facebook doesn’t have a “retweet” culture like Twitter.

Facebook, for the most part, works best with sites that already have a large volume of traffic, giving them a good number of people to post their content. Of course, as with Twitter, there is as lot of traffic to be found by targeting power users, however, that’s hardly a substitute for the (slightly) more democratic Digg.

4. StumbleUpon

Like Reddit, StumbleUpon passed Digg in traffic (according to Alexa) around the time of New Digg. It’s also a democratic site and one that a wide variety of sites seem to do well on. Users Stumble posts, users who might be interested in it are shown the article, they then vote up or down and, the more thumbis up a page gets, the more views it gets.

Indeed StumbleUpon can drive a LOT of traffic. But StumbleUpon is not a site as much as it is an extension or a bookmarklet. Also, as great as a StumbleUpon swarm is, the effect tends to be more drawn out, taking, at times, over days.

This means that there is no front page to reach and no way to know how large the swarm was, other than looking at your traffic.

Bottom Line

Of the four above, StumbleUpon is probably the most Digg-like, that is, at least for bloggers. It provides a strong burst of traffic, one that can, at its peak, easily compete with the Digg effect. It also has a good combination of democracy and targeting that gives just about any site a good shot at seeing massive amounts of traffic, so long as it has good content.

But that being said, there’s nothing out there right now, nor likely to be for some time, that’s like what Digg was. There’s no runaway leader is social news, no site that every blogger pines to get their work on the front page of. While there are some great niche alternatives, there’s nothing with the same presence and dominance as old Digg.

However, that might not be such a bad thing. Given that many felt that the traffic from Digg was of such poor quality, the alternatives that are out there may not generate as much traffic, but they may generate higher-quality traffic. This means fewer visitors, but more actual readers.

In short, the direction social news and social networking is taking is one that gets away from a system with one king that serves everyone and provides a tidal wave of traffic to a system that better targets content to the interests of readers, sending fewer visitors, but more engaged ones.

Though bloggers may not feel the high of a Digg effect for some time, they may feel a much greater one, the joy that comes from a steady stream of dedicated traffic built up over a long period of time.

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Study Shows Social Media Impact Lags Search and Email

Amidst all the hubbub about social media being the cures to all business ills there are some numbers that paint the medium as less of a silver bullet and more like one with a lot of potential and a lot of room to grow.

ForeSee Results has conducted a survey of 10,000 online shoppers. The report is titled “Social Media Marketing: Do Retail Results Justify Investment?”. Although it is not advisable to draw broad stroke conclusions from any one piece of research, the findings here are interesting in that the more traditional online marketing and customer acquisition methods of e-mail and search had more impact on site visits (along with real old fashioned brand recognition).

The next chart shows the power of social media as an influencer. Search comes out as the mass acquisition leader but with lower conversion rates as compared to social media.

This points to why there is a desire on the part of businesses to get more people engaged in social media because they simply convert better. Think of social media as the long tail of Internet marketing and promotion in a study like this with less volume but more qualified leads. Also of note is the higher satisfaction numbers on those folks using social media.

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Groundhog Day, 21st Century Style

After a monster snowstorm pummeled much of the country last night, Punxsutawney Phil tweeted out his annual prognostication at around 7:30 a.m. EST this morning:

The tweet—which was retweeted more than 100 times within the first hour it was posted—is one of a daily stream the celebrity rodent has been sending out over the past month in buildup to today’s Groundhog Day event. Punxsutawney Phil has been on Twitter since 2009, entertaining followers with his stream of snarky Twitter updates from his personal handle, @GroundhogPhil. Now, with 1,250 followers, more than 372 tweets and a spot on @ScottMonty’s “Humor” Twitter List, Punxsutawney is becoming quite the social media star.

Following up on our post last week about using brand mascots in social media, Fresh Influence talked to the creator of @GroundhogPhil, Greg Swan, a digital strategist in Minneapolis, who started the handle for fun and continues to run it, he said, until an official representative of Punxsutawney requests to take it over.

In 2009, Swan said he saw a missed opportunity for promoting Groundhog Day in social media and decided to start the handle. A year later in 2010, when @GroundhogPhil received more than 1,300 retweets and major news pick-up by The Huffington Post, National Geographic, Urlesque, and Good Morning America, he said, “I knew I had something special here.”

“What surprised me most,” Swan said over e-mail, “is how easy it was for me to brandjack a beloved, historic character from halfway across the country with hardly any effort. It’s a key lesson for any company or brand who hasn’t yet secured their social media channels and started engaging with advocates in their preferred environs (in this case, Twitter users who like Punxsutawney Phil).”

However, Swan’s experience tweeting for @GroundhogPhil does not necessarily make him an advocate for using brand characters in social media. Explaining his advice over e-mail, Swan elaborated:

“I’m not the biggest fan of brand mascots in social media, mainly because few companies have the predilection for the amount of investment it takes (research, strategy, writing, monitoring, reporting, etc.) and high-level of risk in social media. A good social character is engaged with its followers, is dedicated to updating content for the long-term and most importantly, provides value. If a brand is committed to all of these things, they will be successful.”

For Punxsutawney Phil’s take on using Twitter, however, Fresh Influence decided to ask him personally—read on for a Q&A with the famous tweeting groundhog himself:

Fresh Influence: How and why did you get started on Twitter?
Punxsutawney Phil: I was on Twitter before all the egotistical social media gurus and Justin Bieber-loving pre-adolescents. That makes me 85 years old in groundhog years.

FI: What are some of your favorite responses you’ve received from your fans via Twitter?
PP: I’m continually surprised how violent and mentally imbalanced humans are when it comes to my responsibility to end winter. I get all kinds of tweets with threats of physical harm, kidnapping and even eating me (apparently I would taste like chicken).

FI: Are you a mobile user?
PP: Mobile? I live in a burrow and sleep all winter.

FI: I see in addition to Twitter, you also have a Foursquare badge in your honor. What’s your favorite aspect of social media?
PP: I can’t tell you how excited I am for 2011. This year people can check in at my burrow, enjoy some delicious grasshoppers and watch me defecate in the corner. Who wouldn’t want a badge for that?

FI: Forget the weather. What are your social media predictions?
PP: Mainstream media reporters will continue to struggle with using “Tweet” as a verb. Katie Couric will finally learn what an @ sign means. Newspapers will think putting Facebook Like buttons on their articles is a social media strategy. Oh, and the TSA will start live-tweeting those porno-scans, much to the horror of Jesse Ventura.

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ifttt – Your Personal Assistant for Internet Tasks

Tweet

At first glance, I was a bit overwhelmed by the possibilities of ifttt (short for If This Then That). After setting up just one task though, I was really impressed with how easy it was to get ifttt working for me. Not only does it take you step by step through the process in a clean format, but it only takes a a few minutes to complete. The concept is simple: you create tasks that follow the philosophy, “if this happens then do that.”

ifttt lets you create tasks (“triggers and actions”) by using different channels. “Channels are the unique services and devices you use everyday, activated specifically for you.” There are a number of channels already activated for you when you first sign up and you can activate even more from the channels list. Tasks can be turned on and off whenever you choose and you can have up to 20 active tasks at a time. So, I’ll take you through the process of creating a task.

Step 1

Click on “this” to choose your trigger channel.

Channels available here include: Craigslist, Delicious, email, Facebook, Google Reader, phone call, Posterous, SMS, Tumblr, Twitter, weather and more. Most channels will require some type of activation/authorization, but you only have to do this once.

Step 2

Choose your trigger type. The number of options here are dependent on the type of trigger channel that you choose. Since I choose Google Reader as my trigger, the options pictured below are what is available.

I want all of my shared items to be automatically posted to Twitter, so I will choose the “new shared item” option.

Step 3

Here is where you actually create and customize your trigger fields (if any setup is needed). For Google Reader, there is nothing required here so you can move on to the next step.

Step 4

Now you’re going to click on “that” to choose your action channel. I, of course, chose Twitter.

Channels available here include: Delicious, email, Facebook, Google Reader, Instapaper, phone call, Read it Later, SMS, Twitter and more.

Step 5

Once again you will have options here to choose from. For Twitter there is only one option and that’s to “post a new tweet.”

Sidenote: If you want to see all of the available options for each trigger you can do that by clicking on an individual item from the channels list. This will let you activate inactive channels as well as view all of the available triggers.

Step 6

Here you can customize your action fields. For Twitter, you can choose which “Add-ins” to use in your tweet. For instance, maybe you want to include the item author or a snippet of the item content or you want to include your own comment (noted in Google Reader). ifttt lets you decide just what to include and in what order.

Step 7

Lastly, you can enter a description for your task so that you can easily differentiate it from other tasks.

Once you have more tasks setup you can filter them, delete, edit, turn on/off and view when they were last triggered from your tasks list. From the number of channels and options available on ifttt, you can see just how useful of a tool it really is.

If you are a social media power user like myself, then ifttt is definitely a must use tool. Unfortunately, you will need an invite to join (the site is barely a month old), but it shouldn’t take too long to receive. Once you are able to give it a try, I hope you’ll enjoy ifttt as much as I do!

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Keep Twitter Group Discussions Private with Privately

Tweet

If you’ve ever wanted to have a private conversation on Twitter with just a group of people (instead of the whole world) then Privately is for you. Privately is a mixture of threaded group conversations and DMs. Conversations can only be seen by users who have been invited and replies are displayed chronological order.

Once you sign in via your Twitter account, you’ll want to set your preferences. You can enter your email so that you can receive notifications and use your Gravatar. Using your Gravatar is optional, if not selected Privately will use your Twitter avatar instead. You can also set your notification frequency preference.  If you want to know ASAP when new messages arrive, then it’s best to choose every hour.

There are no special features about the site, you simply enter the username(s) that you want to start a conversation with and enter your message. Once started, you can add replies just by entering your message (no need for @mentions). You can also mute conversations that may be getting on your nerves.

Privately is currently an invite-only beta site, but it doesn’t take long to receive an invite. Another way to get an invite is to have a registered user start a conversation with you. Once registered, you will receive 10 invites and for every unregistered user that you start a conversation with, it will use up one of your invitations. When you start a conversation, a DM is sent out from your Twitter account to the user(s) with a link to it.

I love the simplicity of Privately. It eliminates the need to join yet another site just to have private conversations with your Twitter friends. It will be nice to see how the site is improved in the future.

If you would like to give Privately a try, you can send me an @mention and I’ll start a conversation with you; currently I have 7 invites left.

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Social Media … or Social Blogmarking?

This is a guest post by Devesh of Blokube.

What is “blogmarking”? Many of us already use and understand social media, but very few of us tap into the great and growing potential of social blogmarking sites.

Blogmarking is the process of you bookmarking your blog post on a blog bookmarking site. Blogmarking can also be referred to as blog bookmarking.

How blogmarking works

The blogmarking process involves you writing a post on your blog, looking for a great and active blogmarking site, and then submitting your post to the blogmarking site.

Your post will be ranked on the site based on the number of votes it gets from users. If your post has a great title there is every chance that it will get a lot of eyeballs. If it’s good, it’ll likely get a lot of votes, and moved to the front page of the blogmarking site.

While blogmarking works just like social bookmarking, the concept is different. A social bookmarking site is highly influenced by power users who determine which posts can be promoted to the homepage. Most of these power users have been on the site since its inception, and they read and work on the site rigorously. It’s not easy for just anybody to become a power user.

The concept of a social blogmarking site is different from this, as any post can be promoted to the front page on the basis of the votes it receives from site users. If you’re not familiar with blogmarking, here are a few blogmarking sites:

• Blogengage.com
• DesignFloat.com (focuses on design news only)
• BizSugar.com
• Blokube.com (disclaimer—this is my own site)

Social media … or social blogmarking?

There are many ways to spread the word about your blog while building stronger relationships online. Currently, the key most popular options are social media sites. So let’s look more closely at the pros and cons of social media sites in comparison to social blogmarking sites.

Social media sites

You’re undoubtedly familiar with social media sites and are using them to promote your blog. Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and so on, allow users to create a profile, providing photos, website links, biography information, and a host of other personal details.

To get solid traffic from social media sites, you usually have to be very active on those sites, and that can take lot of time.

Advantages of social media sites

First, let’s look at some advantages of social media sites.

They’re open to anyone: A major advantage of social media sites is that they’re open to anyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re a new blogger or you’re already established, you can easily open an account on any social media site you love, and you can begin to interact with others immediately.

They foster community: Social media sites also encourage discussion and community interaction—that’s the main reason why they were established. Take Facebook as an example: a lot of your high school/college friends probably have a Facebook account and you can easily get in touch with them through the site. Another community-related advantage of social media sites is that they encourage personal discussions and people will be encouraged to discuss and interact with you if they know a lot about you as a person.

Disadvantages of social media sites

Even though making use of social media sites has strong advantages, it also has disadvantages.

They can help build relationships and brand loyalty, but take time and dedication: If you observe how marketing is done on social media sites you will notice that influence matters. Those with bigger audiences, greater popularity, and stronger reputations will have more success with social media sites than those of us who don’t. Social media sites also require you to spend a lot of time building your profile, especially if you’re a new blogger, and even though the results you will get will be great, this takes considerable time.

They’re littered with ads and spam: Another major problem with social media sites is that they can be havens for spammers, and many are laden with ads. Since it’s very easy to join social networks, a lot of people who are just using the site for spamming purposes join, and this can lead to a lower-quality service.

Social blogmarking sites

Social blogmarking is the process of submitting your blog content to social voting sites and blogging communities.

Many bloggers don’t utilize the power of social blogmarking yet, but it’s a great way to get traffic and connect with other bloggers.

Advantages of social blogmarking sites

They’re less time-consuming than social media sites: A major advantage of social blogmarking sites is that they tend to consume less time than social media sites. It doesn’t matter if you’re a new or established blogger, you have an equal opportunity to gain exposure. What matters most when trying to get attention for your blog is not your influence or reputation, but the title of your post and its content.

They help you connect with other bloggers in your niche: Another great advantage of social blogmarking sites is that they allow you to get in touch with other bloggers in your niche. Since these sites are mainly used by bloggers (where social media sites are used by a much broader audience) they make it easy for bloggers to get more targeted traffic. For example, I notice that I get more links to my articles when I submit them to social blogmarking sites because most people reading my content there are bloggers, and they’re more likely to share it on their blogs if they like it.

They allow users to comment and vote on their favorite articles: Another major advantage of social blogmarking sites is that they allow people to comment on blog posts through commenting systems like those we see on everyday blogs. It’s also easier for bloggers to connect with others using this feature.

They’re a great way to share favorite blog bookmarks: Social blogmarking is a great way to share your favorite blog posts with friends, family members, and your readers. Content can easily get lost in the social media space but with blogmarking it’s easy to share your content with other people who care about your blog.

They champion quality content: If your main aim as a blogger is to find quality content to link to, or you’re a reader who wants to read more about a niche subject, social blogmarking sites are highly effective because they are always moderated. The quality of the blog posts you’ll find there is usually high, and the sites are spam-free.

Disadvantages of social blogmarking sites

They’re very specific: The major disadvantage of social blogmarking sites is that they’re very specific, and they don’t yet have broad appeal among general or mass audiences. For example, most of the current blogmarking sites focus on blogging tips and making money online, so it’s often difficult for bloggers in other niches to make effective use of these sites.

They’re not well-known yet: Social blogmarking is a relatively new concept, so although social blogmarking sites are growing their audiences, the concept hasn’t yet gained the same traction that social networking sites have achieved.

Getting started with social blogmarking

Social blogmarking has its drawbacks, but it also offers a lot of advantages. You don’t have to have a high profile or a huge following to succeed at social blogmarking.

Have you tried social blogmarking? Where do you think this field is heading in future? Feel free to share your views in the comments.

Devesh is young entrepreneur and author of Blokube, a social voting site for Bloggers and Intenet Marketers. Follow him @blokube and join Blokube on Facebook.

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