Social Networks

Sarah Worsham / Dec 3, 2008

Treat Social Networks like Online Dating

Now you may or may not have dated recently, but we all have had experience with someone who comes on too strongly or is self-centered. Let’s say you are at a bar and someone approaches you with the following:

I’m new in town. Can you give me directions to your place? I can drive us there in my hot new bmw.

Even delivered as a joke, statements like that will probably put you in a negative frame of mind towards deliverer. What if, instead, they said something like:

Hi. How are you doing today?

Polite and seems interested in someone other than themselves. The difference between two alternatives seems pretty obvious, but we see similar approaches in social networking (or even regular networking). Here’s some comments I’ve gotten on various social networking sites:

Great to see you here! I invite you to stop by my profile, sign my guestbook and check out my blogs! and while you’re there please add me to your list of friends 🙂 I look forward to networking with you.

I’m not trying to sell you anything, but here are my areas of expertise: ____, ____, ____

I don’t know about you, but those types of introductions are real turn offs. Information about yourself and your business should be in your profile. If someone wants more information about what you do, they’ll look it up. If you want to explore the network to find connections, don’t carpet bomb the place with what are essentially advertisements. Take a few minutes to find people who might make a good connection and leave a more personal comment asking about their business, blog or website. Read discussion posts, help people out and learn more about people from what they post. If you think of social networking like dating, by being more personable and polite, I think you’ll find much more effective contacts and not annoy everyone.

Do you have any social networking horror stories you’d like to share? Please do in the comments section below.

(photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: social networks, social media, internet marketing, social media marketing, social media strategy, internet business strategy

Sarah Worsham / Dec 1, 2008

TwitScoop for News & Business Intelligence

Want to know what’s hot on Twitter right now? TwitScoop gives you a quick snapshot of the top words in a tag cloud that updates every 20 seconds. Hover over any of the words to get a view of the last 5 tweets with that word highlighted. Click on a word to get a graph of its usage over the past 6 hours, day or 3 days. If you see an interesting tag cloud, click the “Tweet this cloud” button to save a snapshot of the page, with the option to send a link to Twitter (its kind of like freezing time). Here’s a link to the snapshot I saved of the twitter cloud. A widget is also available to add the hot trends tag cloud to your blog or website. Or subscribe to TwitScoop on Twitter to be updated with links to top events.

For more in depth results, choose a keyword or username to search for. Twitscoop will give you an overview of the tweets which you can click on to get more details – the last 20 tweets with the keyword highlighted and a graph of the usage over the past 6 hours, day or 3 days. If there are new results, Twitscoop will periodically update the page with a reminder to refresh to see new results (which doesn’t interupt your current research). Click the “Tweet these results” button to save your results, giving you a link or an option to send a link to Twitter. For examples, this is a link to the results for “social” that I just investigated.

TwitScoop is good tool to get a quick view of what’s going on or for research into what has been said about a certain topic (if it was within 3 days). Unlike TweetScan, there isn’t an RSS feed to subscribe to results for periodic updates, but TwitScoop’s graphing capabilities can give you good information of how a topic is trending.

Technorati Tags: twitter, social networks, social media, internet marketing, social media marketing, social media strategy, internet business strategy

Sarah Worsham / Nov 25, 2008

TweetScan for Business Intelligence

Twitter can be a powerful tool for getting your message out, but it also can become part of your business intelligence arsenal. TweetScan can help you keep track of what is being said about your company and products and get updates via email, rss or on their website. You can scan up to five phrases for daily or weekly delivery. Best of all, there are no ads or spam in the emails. It also can be used to check for lost replies and direct messages. TweetScan’s homepage has a keyword cloud representing hot topics on Twitter. You can also search for specific keywords by particular users.

Using TweetScan for business intelligence may take a bit of experimentation. Obvious keywords are your twitter username, company name and any brand names for products or services. Less obvious keywords are those which may represent hot topics in your particular industry. For those, try looking at industry blogs, forums and publications to see what’s hot and then use the TweetScan search functionality to see what people are saying about it.

Obviously this type of business intelligence works best if your industry has a large number of Twitter users. But it can still be useful for keeping track of general industry topics. Twitter’s usage is also growing fairly quickly since it easy to tweet from mobile phones, browsers and desktop applications. From a business intelligence standpoint, it is a rich environment for research because Twitter users tend to be actively engaged in the community (even if they are only broadcasting and not interacting).

If you use Twitter for Business, please share in the comments how you keep track of conversations and important topics.

Technorati Tags: twitter, social networks, social media, internet marketing, internet consulting, internet business strategy

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