Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

5 Greatest April Fools Moments in Social Media

Anyone involved even tangentially in social media has come across the term linkbait - the creation of articles whose sole purpose is to generate traffic, links, and eventually lead to a rise in Google SERPS.  I find that linkbait reaches a point of saturation when themed around specific events - April Fool’s Day is one such event.

At the risk of overwhelming readers with endless links of poorly planned April Fool’s Day jokes and gags, let’s turn out attention to the 5 best April Fool’s Da of the day:

5 - Buying and being like Twitter.

Identi.ca buys Twitter.  Many of you may not remember Identi.ca - the open source solution to Twitter - when it first came on the scene.  Basically, Identi.ca gained a microblogging market share when Twitter had performance and scalability issues, though it has all but lost its momentum after Twitter stabilized some.  The Guardian claiming that news can be told in 140 characters barely missed being formally included in this list.

4 - Nine Inch Nails Strobelight.

NIN has previously made press featuring The Slip as a free download if you put in your email.  This time around, if you try putting in your email to get Strobelight, you get the Windows blue screen of death.

3 - Weird Digg Popups.

Digg had a disappointing showing last year, showing different symbols when trying to Digg a story, which ended up resulting in performance issues.  They were smarter this year with Internet memes popping up after following a Digg.  I would have ranked this higher had the popups not shown up after every Digg.

2 - The return of Zaibatsu?

Even though this turned out to be false, it was kind of cool to think that Zaibatsu was back on Digg, even for a moment.  Maybe he’d be quiet on Twitter then. (Chill Reg, we all love ya)

1 - Reddit pwns basically every social media site ever.

As we can see, Reddit has really outdone itself this year.  Reddit is a top tier social news / crowdsourced content site, but today it really took the cake and flexed its creative muscle.

The homepage was skinned to look like Digg, the Science subreddit like Slashdot, Worldnews like whitehouse.gov, etc. You get the idea;  pure awesomeness.

Social Media offers B2B Companies New Options

Have you ever been invited to a free meal & ended up with a sales pitch? I just received one of those invites this week. The invitation said that it was a great speaker who was going to talk about ‘healthy living’. When the person who sent the invitation called for an RSVP, I asked what the product was. Sorry… not interested in Melaleuca. That’s my choice as a consumer. I really have trouble with the lack of transparency. The same rules apply to online interaction in social networks & communities. You don’t go to a party & sell products, right?

My online community work started in the B2C world. Now our focus at Techrigy is primarily B2B. It’s not much different. The advent of social media networks has offered new opportunities for B2B companies to connect with potential customers. B2B’s can now leverage their presence in social networks & communities. BUT, it has to be within the social expectations of the site/community.

How can B2B companies utilize social media?

• Be helpful & provide resources. White papers are a great way to provide high level information in your industry.
• Create a blog & provide a place for dialogue. People searching for information & your type of products will find your site.
• Join social networks and participate in them.
  • Answer questions in LinkedIn. We have people trying our Freemium due to their seeing our team answering questions on LinkedIn
  • Twitter is a  very successful lead generator for us. We monitor Twitter for people looking for our service & reach out to them. It’s done in a helpful way and is appreciated.
  • In Facebook join groups & get involved.
• Create a community for your customers
  • Join their conversations, provide assistance & help your customers succeed with their businesses

The BIG question is where should focus your resources? The web is a big place. How can you find which social media networks are right for your presence?

Social media monitoring is becoming imperative. It allows your business to easily identify & locate:

• who is talking about your products and competitors
• who your advocates are so that you can engage them
• conversations on your industry topics
• where those conversations are happening at

And after gathering that information it’s easy to join the social networking sites and participate in the conversations. If you provide helpful information people will come to trust you and relationships will develop. From there it will become natural for you to offer your services to others as a part of your presence. Again we’re using our own tool to guide our interactions online. Techrigy SM2 offers real time alerts and it makes it easy for us to engage.

Here’s a list of other B2B companies that are creatively using social media tools & communities.

• SAP Developer Community
• Autodesk communities
• Hubspot
• Intuit/ Quickbooks are doing creative campaigns for small businesses
• TechCrunch wrote about Dell using Twitter

Update: This article has some good ideas for  Using Twitter for Lead Generation

Kudos to Connie Benson, 2009 Fellow of the Society for New Communications!

Our own Community Strategist, Connie Benson, has been selected as a 2009 Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR). I’ll let her share the details but big congratulations are order for Connie!

Here’s a snippet about Connie’s plans for her fellowship year:

“During 2009, my research project will focus on how organizations are using social media monitoring, the related metrics and best practices and standards. This will be part of a larger collaboration project with the Web Analytics Association.”

Head over to her post and join the party going on over there in Connie’s blogosphere.

Social media is the new marketing nexus

Joe Marchese of socialvibe has a great Mediapost column on why social media agencies will become the new Agencies of Record for brands.

I take his prediction a bit further in my comment to his post:

Social is becoming the central hub that connects marketing, customer support, product development and reputation management. This is a primary change in the way companies interconnect with markets and customers and the new agency of record has to be prepared to wade into all of these business divisions and unite them. My guess is we’re going to see an entirely new agency model emerge that is not hampered by the silos you describe. Among our customers we’re seeing the early adoption and growing understanding of this new nexus- and interestingly most are either PR or ‘digital’ agencies. Very little uptake with the media-focused agencies so far. As with PPC/SEM/SEO adoption, they tend to lag a bit in adopting new models. This time around lagging could prove disastrous because the move into social media is happening very quickly

Twitter activity during the Super Bowl, a visualization

This is very cool.

Next Iteration of Social Software: Automated Connection Mining Software could form ad hoc social groups

This would be a very interesting functionality to emulate down the road:

IBM looks at a matrix of connections across various social platforms and tells how valuable a connection a suggested friend would be to help you manage friend requests.
A little speculation…

Next stage of the social web: development of cross-platform communities based on shared interests that are ‘discovered’ by social ‘connection mining’ software.

AdAge: Survey says few CMOs think they’re effectively tracking social media

This article should be viewed an indicator of an approaching tipping point in social media monitoring and marketing:

“The survey of 400 executives found that 56% said their companies have no programs to track or propagate positive word-of-mouth; 59% don’t compensate any employees based on improvements in customer loyalty or satisfaction; and only 30% rated their companies highly in their ability to handle or resolve customer complaints.”

“One problem for marketing executives is that they’re not clearly in charge now of managing the customer experience, customer loyalty or social media today, given that public-relations, sales, consumer-affairs and research-and-development departments all have a stake in those areas now.

Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, said marketing should take the lead in overseeing the customer experience and satisfaction. And he said addressing deficiencies in tracking and analyzing consumer feedback and buzz may be the key way CMOs can stake a claim to leadership.”

“From our standpoint, if there’s anybody who needs to be accountable for the customer experience, it’s the CMO,” Mr. Neale-May said. “Clearly what marketing needs to do to cover a lot of ground we’ve lost in the organization is more analytics, predictive modeling, and data integration and aggregation.”

That’s exactly what SM2 was designed to do.

(From Advertising Age)

(BTW, AdAge, why do you have a splash page? Don’t you know that it kills traffic by 50%?)

Social media and the government in an Obama administration

Wired has a great article on the current state of the US government’s use of both traditional sites (there are 24,000!) and social media and how President Obama’s administration will affect the future use by the Feds.

There are things they can’t do by law:

“No We Can’t
Barack Obama wants to transform the way the White House connects with the public. But there are plenty of obstacles standing in his way.
A Ban on Endorsements
Since the government cannot endorse commercial private organizations, some federal Web pages cannot link externally.
Restrictions on Revisions
The Presidential Records Act requires the preservation of all written communications, which limits Web page modification.
Survey Rules
A detailed approval process is required to “survey” more than 10 people. Soliciting user input may fall into this category.
Access for the Disabled
The Rehabilitation Act requires that all government Web content be made reasonably accessible to those with disabilities.
The US Constitution
The First Amendment’s prohibitions on restricting speech may limit the federal government’s ability to filter user comments.
Purchasing Rules
Federal agencies must follow contracting rules when they make commercial software purchases costing more than a certain amount.
License Agreements
The Feds can’t draw on content from sites like YouTube that require terms-of-service agreements based on state laws.”

From Wired.com. Highly recommended.

SlideShare: Techrigy’s CEO Aaron Newman on Social Media Marketing 101

What is Twitter? NYTime’s David Pogue explains why it is important

Pogue, in his usual usefully populous style, explains Twitter for newbies.

Money quote:

“I’ll admit that, for the longest time, I was exasperated by the Twitter hype. Like the world needs ANOTHER ego-massaging, social-networking time drain? Between e-mail and blogs and Web sites and Facebook and chat and text messages, who on earth has the bandwidth to keep interrupting the day to visit a Web site and type in, “I’m now having lunch”? And to read the same stuff being broadcast by a hundred other people?

Then my eyes were opened. A few months ago, I was one of 12 judges for a MacArthur grant program in Chicago. As we looked over one particular application, someone asked, “Hasn’t this project been tried before?”

Everyone looked blankly at each other.

Then the guy sitting next to me typed into the Twitter box. He posed the question to his followers. Within 30 seconds, two people replied, via Twitter, that it had been done before. And they provided links.”