One challenge with social media is keeping track of all the conversations and times that your name or company name is mentioned. SocialSeek provides real-time results for news, topics, brands or keywords in a specific location or anywhere from either a desktop or mobile application. Search by keyword and location, or just one or the other. Save searches and view updated results automatically every 30 minutes. SocialSeek makes it easy to keep track of what’s being said about your company and brand.

Birds-eye View

SocialSeek provides a great overview of mentions of your brand or keywords in blogs, Twitter, video, images, and events, either based on a location or in general. The desktop application automatically refreshes the search every 30 minutes so you can regular updates. Plus see what’s going on overall, or just in blogs, Twitter, video, images, events or add your own feeds.  You can also filter the results to look for specific people or keywords.

Trends & Charts

Also available are trends and charts on the social search, where you can see activity for your search results over the past 2 weeks (broken out by type), as well as Twitter trends and keyword cloud. While these are a nice addition, they’re not as indepth or useful as charts provided by other tools. It looks like you’re supposed to be able to compare two keywords within the charts, but I couldn’t get that to work — that could be handy for competitive analysis.

An overview of the overall activity of the search for the least few days:

Twitter Trends for the search:

Twitter cloud:

Overall: A Free & Useful Social Media Monitoring Tool

I’ve been using the SocialSeek desktop application on my Mac for the past couple of days.  When it does an update every 30 mins, it’ll send a notification to Growl if there are any updates (which brings up a window with a short update on whatever screen I’m working on). I’ve been able to easily keep track of mentions for sazbean without having to check on other tools, which has been very handy.  The charts are nice, but not as useful as provided by other tools. SocialSeek will save searches so you can easily switch between them, but it only reports on one search a time, which means it’s not as useful if you’re monitoring multiple brands or keywords. But, it’s free, so it’s definitely another useful tool for getting a snapshot of what’s going on for your brand in social media.

Have you used SocialSeek? What do you think?

Klout is a measurement tool which gives an idea of social web influence (at least via Twitter). Their data is used by applications such as Co-Tweet, HootSuite and others. Like Twitalyzer, Klout measures various aspects of Twitter usage and network, but focuses more on how influence and messages are spread via your network.  Just because you have a lot of followers doesn’t mean that all of them are actually listening and engaging with you (and they probably aren’t).  Klout gives you an idea of what your actual reach is and how engaged you are with your network (and vice versa).

When you first signup with Klout, you’ll be asked to connect with your Twitter and Facebook accounts (not sure what they do with the Facebook information, but I’ve since disconnected that to see what the impact is).  You’ll be given an initial score, but Klout takes a bit of time to chug through all your data to give you an actual score a bit later (up to a few hours – they’ll email you).

I’m not sure if this process is really clear.  I was a bit surprised to get an email later saying that my klout score had been calculated (since it seemed like it already had).  Another surprise is that your initial klout score will probably be higher than your actual one, since they have to take some time to process all the data.  I think this is confusing.  They need to make it really clear that the initial score is just that.  Maybe even just show some of the results with a clear message.

Klout score

Klout takes all the data they’ve processes and gives you a Klout score (based on actual reach and engagement and influence of your followers and network).  They also award you achievements – but what achievements are possible to get isn’t clear (seems like you’d like people to know what’s possible so they can strive towards them).

Influence Matrix

Next your network is broken down into your top 5 influencers and influencees (although this probably will change with time and is probably based on last so many tweets).  From these people (who you also can see a score for), they give you an idea of what type if influencer you are, as well as what type of influencer your top 5 influencers are.

Interesting information, but if you’re actually engaged in your network you probably won’t be surprised by this.  After I saw the Klout scores for my influencers, it helped put my own score into perspective.  As an aside, I think there are probably people in my network who I’m more influenced by, which is why I think Klout used the last so many tweets.  I would also expect this to change with time.  Interestingly, the people in the list of influenced by me changed from the initial klout score to the actual.

There’s also a content analysis of the top 5 or so of most influential topics which you cover.  It would be interesting to see this divided up by what topics you’re influenced by and what topics you have influence in to see how you’re sending messages through your network.

Score Analysis

Klout breaks down your score further, into True Reach, Amplification, and Network to give you an idea of how they calculated the score and where you have influence.  Of this information, I found Amplification & Network to be the most useful.

Amplification gives you an idea of the likelihood that your tweets will generate retweets and conversation.

Network gives you an idea of how well your network is working for you (and also places where you can improve).

Content Analysis

I didn’t find the content analysis as useful.  I think there’s better information available in HootSuite about what tweets are getting the most attention and clicks.  Also, the click analysis showed 0 clicks for all the tweets they pulled, which leaves me to believe that they don’t have the ability to collect information for my tweets since I use ow.ly.  Which also makes you wonder how this affects their analysis.

Overall

Klout gives some good information about how well your network is working towards amplifying your message, as well as how engaged you are with your network.  I think they could be more clear about the initial klout score and the actual klout score and the fact that it takes them some time to come back with an actual score.  With 0 clicks showing for all the tweets they pulled, I’m suspicious of how well they measure that aspect of their score (at least with my account), which makes me wonder what my score would be if I did use bit.ly.  As difficult as it is to integrate with different services across the Internet, they need to make these shortcomings clear or at least explain what’s going on.  Klout does give more information on how they calculate the various aspects of their score here.

Klout seems to be useful for looking for trends in your influence (and as a benchmark).  As long as you don’t change anything in regards to the way they measure (like switching to bit.ly from ow.ly URL shortener), you should be able to get some good information on how your influence is changing.  There’s also some nice tidbits of information about your network.

As with all metrics and measurement tools, use Klout as a tool to give you more information about what’s going on in your social web.  I’d recommend using it in conjunction with other tools (like HootSuite & Twitalyzer) to get a clearer picture of your Twitter network. Twitalyzer gives nice recommendations of places where you might want to improve. Some of this information is also available in Klout, but you have to dig a bit deeper (ex. in image mouseovers).

What do you think? Have you tried Klout?

TweetShare has a very interesting niche in the field of Twitter applications — it allows the sharing of files & enables discussion around those files — as well as general discussions.  Let’s say you took a picture at a conference and you wanted to get feedback about it.  Yes, you could use Twitpic or other photo sharing sites to send a link to the photo out via a Tweet.  But, TweetShare allows you to share that photo and then organizes the discussion around the photo so that anyone can easily follow it.

Starting with the type of discussion — get comments, ask a question or create a poll — TweetShare guides you through the process of creating a discussion.

You can either upload a file (images, videos, Office Docs, or PDFs) or embed a file from one of their supported partners (sliderocket, box, screenr, slideshare or YouTube).  Decide how long the discussion should last — from 10 minutes to 30  hours — and you’re all set.  If you’re not ready to send the discussion out yet, you can save it for later (and also save multiple discussions as drafts).

Once you’ve started a discussion (or commented on others), you can keep track of your discussions from the My Discussions page, which gives you a quick overview of your active discussions with some stats.

For each of your discussions, you’ll be able to see the views, audience (how many people are following you on Twitter), retweets and sources.

You can also switch to a public view and have a live chat around the topic.

Probably one of the more powerful features of TweetShare is the ability to create a fan page, which allows you to build discussions via Twitter around your brand, product or event with multiple contributors.

I think TweetShare has some powerful features for collaboration, especially around events or conferences.  It could allow speakers to involve their audience during the talk, and keep track of the discussion in one place (making it easier for everyone involved). With all of the emphasis on attaching a file to the discussion, it’s not required and that actually makes TweetShare even more powerful for creating conversations around a brand, product or event.

What do you think? Have you used TweetShare?

We could program our own WordPress theme.  We could use a free theme and customize it the way we want.  Instead, we use Thesis (affiliate link), a paid WordPress theme.  Why?  Because the features, functionality, support and free upgrades have made it quick and easy to provide and maintain a professional-looking blog without having to jump into back-end code (except when we want to).

We’ve been using Thesis for almost a year now, during that time, there have been 2 major upgrades to the software (free) which have vastly improved the usability and features.  Even the upgrade process has improved.  We’re able to do pretty much anything we want in terms of layout, design and functionality without having to get into the back-end code.  But, we can if we want to, and Thesis provides hooks into back end code so you can do quite a bit all from one file which is editable from the administration panel:

Free themes are great, but you usually have to do quite a bit of customization to get them to look and behave the way you want them to.  Free usually means very little in the way of support or upgrades and you’ll probably end up swapping them out at some point due to something that breaks with a WordPress upgrade.

When installed, Thesis comes with it’s own set of control panels (current version of Thesis is 1.7.  We’re still on 1.6 just because we haven’t taken a few moments to upgrade), which give you control over much of the layout and design of your website, including SEO and navigation options:

Our blog is an important part of our business.  We spend a lot of time trying to write and provide great content, so we didn’t want to spend time messing around with a theme.  Thesis has provided great functionality and upgrades for a one-time price (currently $87 for personal, or $164 for resellers) that has been completely worth it. We’ve been happy with Thesis and recommend it (affiliate link) to anyone looking for an easy-to-use theme that provides control over almost all of your blog (they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee).

Have you used Thesis? What are your thoughts?

Technorati tags: Thesis, WordPress, content strategy, blog, marketing, business

Putting together a webinar and wondering how to promote it? Newly launched WebinarListings.com offers dedicated listings of upcoming webinars week-by-week for free.  Paid listings include being listed at the top of the page for the week, listed on the Facebook fan page, tweeted, and included in a weekly newsletter.  Is listing your webinar on WebinarListings.com worth it?

The free listing is a no brainer.  Any extra exposure for your event is a definite plus.  It offers another place for search engines to pick up your event and a place that’s dedicated to webinar listings (instead of Eventbrite which has all sorts of listings – but still worth posting on).

Paid (or premium) listings will cost you $60/webinar or $200 for unlimited webinars for one month or $500 for unlimited webinars for three months.  What does that get you?  Some nice extra promotion throughout the site and to their subscribers:

The question of whether the upgrade is worth it will depend on how many signups and leads you get for your webinar.

A downside, for either free or paid, is the inability to edit or update your webinar listing without assistance. Rachel, who owns and runs the site, is extremely helpful and accommodating.  But it would be nice to be able to fine-tune and edit the listing as you’re running your own marketing campaigns.

Paid listings also get stats emailed to them afterwards, which is pretty much a requirement for any paid campaign (you want to know how it did).  I’d like to see these incorporated as part of an customer dashboard where you can see ongoing stats on each webinar throughout their listings and be able to edit the listings to improve conversions.  It may also help conversions if the service was able to tie in more closely with some of the webinar providers to support one-stop registrations (perhaps allow javascript embeds in the listings).

WebinarListings.com certainly will help your promotions of your webinars.  While we’d like to see some improvements in terms of functionality and data for customers, trying the paid service out for $60 to see if it improves your signups may be worth it, especially if you use webinars for lead collection.  WebinarListings.com is currently running a few promotions, one of which lists your first webinar as a premium listing for free, so now is a good time to give them a try.

Have you tried WebinarListings.com? What do you think?

Technorati tags: webinar, webinar listings, content strategy, marketing, business

Scribe SEO (affiliate link) works with WordPress blogs and websites to provide easy-to-understand SEO copywriting recommendations.  Even if you know SEO, this tool provides feedback right on the blog post interface, making it easy and quick to optimize any post.  I’ve been using Scribe for over a month now and I have been very happy with the results.

How it Works

Scribe SEO requires either the Thesis theme (paid) or the All in One SEO plugin (free) since it uses the functionality they provide for rewriting titles, descriptions and keywords.  Once you have Scribe installed (which is as easy as any other WordPress plugin), you’ll see a couple of columns in your post dashboard: scribe optimizer & primary keywords, which will be filled out for any post you’ve used Scribe on.  There will also be a Scribe Content Optimizer box in the upper right corner of individual post editor.

After you’ve written a post, you’ll need to fill in the Custom Title Tag & Meta Description fields (which are provided by the Thesis theme or the All in One SEO plugin).  While meta description fields aren’t used as part of Google’s algorithm, they are useful in providing descriptions to people in search results (people are who we’re interested in, right?).  The box in the upper corner will have 3 green checkmarks when the content is ready to be analyzed.

Analyze the post and you’ll get back 6 tabs of useful SEO recommendations and information.  The first tab is the SEO score, which shows your overall score plus analysis and recommendations for your title, description and content.  Scribe is fairly specific about what you should do to improve your score, which makes it very easy to get a high ranking score.

The keyword analysis tab will show you the primary and secondary keywords for your post, with the frequency, prominence and density for each.

If you’re not happy with the primary keywords, the Change Keywords tab gives you information about how to change the post to change the prominence of keywords.

Next is the Tags tab which gives you a list of relevant terms for your content.  These are helpful for adding to the post tags.  I’ve found that not all the tags are really super relevant – mostly because some are too broad for my target, but it’s easy to add them all to the post tags and remove the ones that don’t work.

SERP shows you how your post will look in the results of search engines (SERP = search engine results page), which is nice for making sure the listing makes sense to people.

Finally, the SEO Best Practices tab gives you some basic information that you should consider when optimizing your posts (very informative but not specific to the post that was analyzed).

Does it Work?

I’ve been using the Scribe plugin for over a month – not on every post, but on many of the posts I wanted to promote.  Taking a look at the post we’ve been following in this post: Understanding Facebook Page Insights – it’s listed on the first page of Google for the keywords “facebook page insights” – not bad.

Another post I optimized, Vanity Searches Should Be an Important Part of Your Routine is on the first page of results for the keywords “vanity searches“. Pretty good.

What’s more exciting is that traffic from search engines is trending upwards in the past month.  While not providing conclusive results (yet), Scribe clearly is having an influence on my rankings with Google.

Recommendation

SEO isn’t about blindly following a tool – you should instead use them to make informed decisions.  But if you’re looking for a tool to make it much easier to optimize your blog posts or website, I highly recommend giving Scribe SEO a try (affiliate link).  Plans start at $27/month for 30 evaluations (which may be enough for most business bloggers) and run up to $97/month for 300 evaluations.  You can use the service on an unlimited number of websites since they count only the number of evaluations (evaluation = clicking the analyze button) and can cancel anytime.  Even for those of us who know SEO, Scribe makes it much easier to optimize a post which means you’re more likely to do it.  While optimizing an entire site structure may still require a consultant, Scribe provides an easy, cost effective way to optimize posts as you write them.  Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Have you used Scribe SEO? What do you think?

Note: Links to Scribe SEO above are affiliate links.  While I may get a few bucks if you signup to use the service using the links, I only recommend products which I feel provide good value to you and that I’ve used or tested.  Please feel free to go to the website directly if you prefer.  Either way, I’d love to hear your feedback on the product.

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Technorati tags: SEO, marketing, Scribe SEO, search, search marketing, business

I like to follow the people who are following me on Twitter.  It helps nurture the relationship and makes it easier to have conversations.  Unfortunately, a lot of bots were really spoiling everything.  I saw someone using TrueTwit to validate followers, so I thought I’d give it a try.  I’m pretty happy with it so far.  It does have some downsides, but it certainly has helped cut down on the bot spam and I feel better about following people back again.

TrueTwit has both a free basic service and a paid premium service.  The free service sends out a DM to anyone that follows you (you can control what it says) and asks them to follow a link to a page where they have to enter a captcha.  You can then choose to automatically follow anyone that TrueTwit validates.  TrueTwit offers some follower management through a list of followers – with when a DM validation message was sent and whether the profile validated.  You can choose to unfollow or follow anyone right in the interfaces, which turns out to be a nice way to manage followers.

The Premium service, which costs $20 per year, doesn’t use DMs for validation, instead it runs a Follower Analysis on each profile to summarize the status of each.  You also can choose whether to autofollow anyone that passes the analysis.

I’m not sure the Premium service is worth it for me, but I have been pretty happy with the decrease in spam since I started using the service.  There is a downside in that number of DMs sent out – to anyone that follows you, which can quickly clog up your DM stream and make it hard to see actually DMs you’ve sent out.  I imagine that some people also are annoyed that they have to go through another step to validate, but it’s not a requirement for following you.  I actually go through my list of followers on TrueTwit’s interface to see if there are real people that I’d like to follow back, even if they didn’t validate.  Some people also completely ignore DMs due to all the spam, so they’re unlikely to see the validation request. Filling out a captcha is also not a guarantee that the profile isn’t a bot.  Programs have been getting better at filling them out, but it certainly helps.

TrueTwit is a nice service for improving the real conversations you have on Twitter with real people.  It’s helped me cut down on the spam that’s sent to me and I’ve been fairly happy with the results.  I don’t really foresee going to the Premium service unless I find that the validation really is annoying to people.

Have you used TrueTwit – either on your account or validating with another account?  What do you think?

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Technorati tags: social media, marketing, TrueTwit, Twitter, social networking, business

Twitalyzer goes beyond most websites providing statistics on your Twitter usage, displaying 15 key metrics on an easy-to-use dashboard.  Other sites which provide Twitter statistics usually focus on followers (and follower growth), updates and followees.  While it may be nice to see the growth of your following in a graph, it’s much more useful to know how engaged your audience is and how influential you are.  Twitalyzer gives you a snapshot based on the past 7 days of activity, with trending information available for the last 14, 30, 60, and 90 days (and all time). Best of all, it’s free (at least for now).

Birdseye View

Once you allow Twitalyzer to connect with your Twitter profile, it analyzes your activity and how much your audience is engaging with you and spits out a beautiful dashboard with 15 stats: Impact, Engagement, Influence, Generosity, Clout, Velocity, Retweeted, Retweeting, Referenced, Referencing, Updates, Followers, Following, Lists and Hastags Cited.  Each with trending information (going up or down with some visual information about how much).

Using Twitter as a conversation and engagement tool is important, but it’s been difficult to measure the impact of that time investment.  When working with clients, it’s important for them to be able to get some indications of how well they’re doing and where they can improve.  That information has been available in the past, but Twitalyzer organizes a lot of great information in one easy-to-read dashboard. Once Twitalyzer has been analyzing data on your profile for awhile, you’ll be able to see graphs of trends for all 15 statistics.

Influencers

Knowing who the influencers are in your network is important for being able to leverage them to get your important messages out, as well as knowing who you should turn to for opinions and assistance.  Twitalyzer give you a list of the top 25 influencers for your profile ranked by their impact.  You can also see the impact, engagement and number of followers for every influencer, as well as their retweets for the past 7 days.

You can also see who the top 25 tweeters are that are sending you messages.  These are the people who are trying to have a conversation with you, so it’s a good idea to keep track of them – especially useful for companies. To see who you’re spending time conversing with, there’s also the top 25 tweeters who you’re sending messages to.

Comparison

You may be wondering how you’re doing compared to others.  Twitalyzer gives you a list of the most influential people on twitter (which you can then filter for subjects , keywords and location).  You can also look up any Twitter user to get their Impact, Engagement, Influence, Generosity and Clout statistics.

Recommendation

Twitalyzer is probably the best Twitter statistics site I’ve seen.  The layout and design is well-thought-out and easy to understand.  The stats are meaningful and applicable to business concerns.  And it’s free (at least for now).  I’d recommend checking it out.

Have you used Twitalyzer?  What do you think?

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Technorati tags: social media, analytics, statistics, marketing, Twitalyzer, Twitter, social networking, business

Disqus is a comment system for websites & blogs.  If you’re using WordPress, it’s a simple as installing a plug-in.  I’ve been using Disqus since we moved the blog back from Wordpress.com.  I prefer it over the default system (and akismet) because it makes it easier for our readers to comment and easier for us to moderate – pretty important features for a commenting system.

Installation

If you’re running WordPress, Disqus is pretty easy to install.  Signup for account on their website and they walk you through the steps to install & configure.

Moderation

Moderating can be done from multiple locations & methods.  You can moderate through email by responding to emails sent to you by Disqus (approve, spam, delete), including adding a reply right in the body of your email which will show up on your site.  Through your WordPress administration, there’s also a panel under Settings which gives you access to the configuration and to moderation (it really loads the disqus website in a pane).   You can also moderate through the Disqus website.

You can setup Disqus to work within your comfort zone – whether you have to pre-approve every comment, whether you allow links in comments, what words are restricted and who else can help you moderate.  And for trolls or spammers who get through the system, you can add them to a Blacklist.

Blocking Spam

I’ve had very few problems with spam getting through.  All of the posts that did get through were done manually by a person and were of the “great post” nature – people posting a comment just to be able to add a link to their website.

Customization

How Disqus looks on your website can be customized both in layout and appearance.  They provide a few themes which you can edit to look the way you want through options or through custom CSS.  Comments can either be threaded (so that replies stay together) or just by time (so that all comments are ordered by time, regardless of whether they’re replies).  For sites with a lot of commenting, Disqus also supports pagination of the comments, which is extremely important for keeping them (and the site) readable.

Integration

One feature I really like is how Disqus integrates with other social networks and services.  Readers can login to leave a comment via Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, or Yahoo.  When they leave a comment, they can also share it on Twitter or Facebook.  Disqus also tracks reactions to your posts on Twitter and adds them to your post (as reactions).

Extras

Disqus also provides a few widgets to display comments on your blog on other websites or in the sidebar.  Widgets include recent comments, popular threads, top commenters or a combination of all three.  Widgets can be customized to show as many comments as you want, as well as some general appearance changes like size and color.

Identity

For anyone who logins to leave a comment, you’ll be able to see their name, email, and website (optional) along with how many other comments they’ve left on any blogs using Disqus (and you can read what those comments are), and how many people liked those comments.

For Readers

From the reader’s point of view, Disqus make it easy to login to leave a comment (Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, and Yahoo as login options) and easy to see if anyone replies to the comment (by subscribing to see all comments).  Comments can be shared on Twitter & Facebook and other comments can be rated with “likes”.  Disqus provides a dashboard (called Disqus Profile) so that you can see all your comments across any site using Disqus so you don’t have to login to multiple websites to see who has responded to you.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a step up from the default Wordpress commenting system, I highly recommend Disqus.  It has great functionality for both you and your readers.  Disqus has also announced a Disqus VIP version, so if you have plans of becoming the next best thing, Disqus should be able to grow with you.

What do you think? Do you use Disqus on your blog? Do you like Disqus as a commenting system?

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Technorati tags: Disqus, Disqus Comments, social media, blog, marketing, blog comments, business

Awhile back we had a knock-out-drag-out between HootSuite and SocialOomph, with HootSuite winning handily.  Now, we’re pairing up HootSuite with TweetDeck.  Until recently I was an avid user of TweetDeck for keeping track of my Twitterverse.  I switched to HootSuite because TweetDeck seemed to be dropping a lot of messages out of my groups and mentions (not cool).  Plus, I’m using HootSuite as my Tweet scheduler now (having won over SocialOomph), so it was easier to be in one place all day. But, let’s see how these two stack up:

User Interface: Advantage = Neutral

There are things I really like about HootSuite’s interface, but some of it is preference.  It was easier in TweetDeck to keep track of multiple social networks in one window, whereas you have to click to different tabs in HootSuite.  And adding a tweet with a URL is much easier in TweetDeck, which automatically shortens any URLs you type in the box – in HootSuite you have to put URLs in a separate field to have them shortened (lame!).  On the other hand, updating multiple or one social network is much easier on HootSuite.  I always had problems sending tweets to the wrong place in TweetDeck (but maybe that’s just me).  In HootSuite, you just check off which networks you want the update to go to – TweetDeck was making assumptions and pre-selecting (trying to be helpful) but they were often wrong.  So, I call this one a draw.

Scheduled Updates: Advantage = HootSuite

TweetDeck doesn’t support scheduled tweets, so HootSuite handily wins this category.  TweetDeck is great for monitoring conversations and tweeting in real-time.  But some of us like to have updates go out periodically when we’re not tied to the desk/laptop. Scheduled tweets is necessary for me.

Speed:  Advantage = HootSuite

HootSuite wins this hands-down.  TweetDeck is a memory hog and doesn’t update as often.  They try to give you control over this by allowing you to change your calls to the Twitter-API, but I don’t think most of us know how to tune that to be the most efficient.  HootSuite’s entire interface is much faster (at least for me)

URL shorteners: Advantage = Neutral

TweetDeck allows you to choose between 4 different shorteners and HootSuite uses it’s own shortner (ow.ly). I happen to currently prefer ow.ly because of the awesome stats (see below). But bit.ly (supported by TweetDeck) also provides stats and you can use it for any purpose – making it nice for overall social media strategies.

Photos: Advantage = TweetDeck

Both services allow you to upload photos, but TweetDeck will integrate with your choice of 3 different Twitter photo services.  HootSuite just lets you upload a picture file.  Most of my tweets with photos are done on the run from my iPhone (where I use Tweetie), so this isn’t really an issue.

Statistics: Advantage = HootSuite

HootSuite’s stats are big, bold and beautiful (not to mention useful).  Originally one of my biggest complaints about their service, HootSuite has since updated their stats and they are awesome.  Unfortunately the stats only apply to Twitter accounts right now – but hopefully they’ll integrate stats with the other social network soon.  TweetDeck’s only stats are through supported URL shorteners (bit.ly’s stats aren’t bad and can be used for other social networks).

Additional Social Networks: Advantage = HootSuite

Both HootSuite and TweetDeck allow me to update several Twitter accounts, my Facebook account, and my LinkedIn account.  HootSuite also allows you to update your Facebook business pages and any account you can tie to Ping.fm (win!) – so pretty much anything.

Twitter Interface:  Advantage = TweetDeck

As much as I like HootSuite’s scheduled tweeting, the Twitter interface can get a little clunky with the separate box for shortening URLs and 4 clicks required to schedule a time (plus times can only be on the 5s).  TweetDeck’s twitter interface is easy and fast – great for normal tweeting.

Multiple Accounts & Multiple Users: Advantage = HootSuite

HootSuite makes it easy to add multiple users and control which accounts they can update. For each user, it also keeps track of their timezone and whether you want initials to show up with updates. TweetDeck supports multiple accounts but since it’s a desktop application, there isn’t really any ability to have multiple users per account.

Twitter User Features: Advantage = TweetDeck

One thing I miss about TweetDeck is the user controls – on any Tweet I can do just about anything I can do from Twitter.  HootSuite has most of the features, but not quite all of them.

Conclusion: HootSuite Wins 6-4 (half points for neutral)

HootSuite’s speed, stats and ability to schedule tweets close the deal for me.  What do you think?

Technorati tags: HootSuite, TweetDeck, social media, twitter, marketing, social networking, business

PostRank ranks online content based upon social engagement (how much readers are interacting with the content by commenting, sharing, responding, bookmarking, etc.).  PostRank provides ranking services, blog discover, data services and also analytics.  I’ve had the PostRank plug-in installed for awhile and use it to see how individual posts are doing as well as see what the top posts are.  PostRank Analytics is a paid service ($9/mo or $99/year) which integrates with Google Analytics to provide an overall picture of how well your audience is engaging with your content.  I decided to give it a try to see what type information it was able to provide that I wasn’t getting through the plug-in.

At-A-Glance

From the dashboard, you can track up to 5 sites (maybe more with different packages) and see the average pageviews, engagement & twitter followers for the past 7 days (you assign a Twitter username to each site – although you could just use the same Twitter account for all the sites).  Once you click into a site, you’ll also see graphs of the Pageview & Engagement activity over the past 30 days along with links to daily engagement reports.

Engagement

Engagement is how often readers are interacting with your content.  PostRank assigns points for different types of interactions (like a Tweet is only 7 points but a comment seems to be 10).  It also uses these points to assign a PostRank to every post.  The plug-in only shows you the PostRank, but the Analytics shows you were the interactions were and links to them.  That’s nice information to have.

Events

Another nice bit of information are Engagement Events – or when users interacted with your content which is tied to pageviews so you can see if the interacts lead to more traffic.  These are displayed on a graph over time.  This could be useful for figuring out what times of day make sense to post.

Integration with Google Analytics

Once you tie your site in with Google Analytics, you’ll also be able to see pageviews, bounce rate & average viewing time for each post – which are nice to know when you’re evaluating the effectiveness of that post.

Missing Interactions

Both the PostRank plug-in and the Analytics seemed to be missing interactions.  Many times it would count my own tweets as interactions (which is fine), but it wouldn’t consistently count them for every post.  There were posts which only had a comment listed for engagement points, but when you drilled into the post, you’d see 4-5 tweets listed under conversation.  It also would count comments which were really Disqus (my comment plug-in) linking to a Tweet – but not all the time.  It also wouldn’t always count when someone else tweeted my content, which I know happened more often then what I was seeing in the statistics for the past 30 days.

Gaming the PostRank

It is possible that PostRank is working on their algorithms to prevent people from gaming the ranking – this may be why there’s inconsistency in my interactions.  But it also looks like you can post comments on your own posts and get some interaction points.  Why would you do this?  PostRank is used as part of the Advertising Age’s Power 150 blogs – if you can artificially inflate your PostRank by interacting with your own content, you can get a higher ranking.

Interesting But Not Worth The Dough

Maybe PostRank was having issues lately with their data and that’s why I’m not seeing all my interactions.  I’m simply not impressed enough with the available information to be worth $9/mo (and I was really willing to shell that out if the data was useful).  My main issue is the inconsistency in interactions/engagement.  If that’s not accurate, then most of the information is available to me for free through the plugin and Google Analytics.  If they’re able to fix the problem, I may give it a try again – there really isn’t single place to measure engagement otherwise.

What Do You Think?

Have your tried PostRank Analytics?  Are you seeing consistent results?  Do you like the information/value for the price?

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Technorati tags: PostRank, social media, analytics, marketing, social networking, business

Both HootSuite and SocialOomph provide features for managing Twitter and Facebook (and other accounts).  The services are very similar, and I’ve been a fairly loyal user of SocialOomph for several months now.  But, recently downtime at SocialOomph led me to re-explore HootSuite and I’ve been using it as my primary tool for the past week or so.  There are still some things that I prefer about SocialOomph, but overall I’m fairly happy with HootSuite (at least for now).  Let’s take a look at the details:

User Interface: Advantage = HootSuite

The design of HootSuite is all about the user.  Yes, there are ads, but they’re out of the way at the bottom of the window.  Whatever page you’re on, the “tweet” box is always at the top – which makes it super easy to update the status on Twitter (or Facebook or LinkedIn).  Everything is very clearly marked and fairly easy to find – with the exception of scheduled “tweets” which I had to check the FAQs for.  One other minor annoyance is that the short URL box is separate from the update box – be nice if you just put the URL in the update box and then it found it and shrunk it.

Scheduled Updates: Advantage = SocialOomph

If you’re just talking about scheduling tweets, SocialOomph has the most flexibility – allowing you to schedule either by a specific time, or by so many minutes, hours, days, or weeks ahead.  With the professional account, you can also bulk upload tweets for easy scheduling.  Once you have tweets in the system, you can also distribute them over specific day and time ranges.  The pro account also let’s you mash up and schedule tweets from various RSS feeds.

URL shorteners: Advantage = Neutral

SocialOomph uses bit.ly and HootSuite uses it’s own shortner (ow.ly).  Both are equally good.  By using it’s own shortener, HootSuite is able to provide awesome stats (see below).  But bit.ly also provides stats and you can use it for any purpose – making it nice for overall social media strategies.

Statistics: Advantage = HootSuite

If you want numbers, HootSuite will give them to you.  Big, bold and beautiful (not to mention useful).  How HootSuite did statistics originally was one of my biggest complaints about their service – not enough info in a way that was easy to dig into. If they didn’t listen to me, someone else must have had the same brilliant idea.  Unfortunately the stats only apply to Twitter accounts right now – but hopefully they’ll integrate stats with the other social network soon.

For each Twitter account, you can see the number of clicks – in the last 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days or by date range.  You can also see where those clicks come from geographically, who the top referrers are, and what the most popular tweets were by clicks.  For each individual tweet, you can see the individual number of clicks – I’d like to see them expand on the stats available for individual tweets – so you can see top keywords and time of day, etc.

Additional Social Networks: Advantage = HootSuite

HootSuite allows me to update several Twitter accounts, my Facebook account, my Facebook business page and my LinkedIn account.  You can choose which to update with each new message.  SocialOomph also allows multiple accounts and social networks, but only with the paid account.  I considered the paid account, but most of the features weren’t particularly useful to me.  The Facebook page and LinkedIn options are big for me.

Multiple Accounts & Multiple Users: Advantage = HootSuite

HootSuite makes it easy to add multiple users and control which accounts they can update.  For each user, it also keeps track of their timezone and whether you want initials to show up with updates. SocialOomph also has these features, but only with the paid account.

Twitter Follower Features: Advantage = SocialOomph

If you want some control over your followers – who you follow back, whether you unfollow people who unfollow you, and auto-DMs, etc. – SocialOomph provides some nice ones in the free account.  I’m not a big fan of auto-DMs – I think they’re spammy and a bit insincere – but I do use the vet followers function.  Vetting followers gives you a list of who has recently followed you and then lets you decide whether you’ll follow each back.  For each possible follower, you can see when they started using Twitter, how many tweets, followers and followees they have, plus their twitter profile and how many other SocialOomph users have followed or ignored them.  You can also set it to pre-set followers based on keywords, time started on Twitter, etc (for example, I don’t usually follow back people who just started in the past week unless I know them).  I like to take a personal look at each new follower and SocialOomph let’s me do that right from their interface – clicking on any website attached to the profile and seeing the last 10 tweets or so – very useful and easy to use.

Extra Credit – Cute Icon & Useful Twitter Interface: Advantage = HootSuite

Who can resist a cute owl icon?  More importantly, HootSuite’s Twitter client rivals TweetDeck (biggest feature missing is TweetDeck’s Groups) – keep track of what’s going on while you’re working on your updates.  Win-win!

Conclusion: HootSuite Wins 5-2

So far I’m sticking with HootSuite for updates, but still using SocialOomph’s vet follower feature.  I just like the combination of features and statistics HootSuite offers – and being able to update multiple social networks from a free account is a super win.  For users who are managing multiple accounts and want to manager multiple users as well, HootSuite is very handy.

But don’t take my word for it.  What do you think?

Technorati tags: HootSuite, SocialOomph, social media, twitter, marketing, social networking, business

As more and more consumers start using social media to talk about companies, it becomes even more important for those companies to try to keep track of what is being said.  Social media has increased the use of the web in terms of having real-time conversations (which used to happen mostly via instant messaging).  Now customers can start talking about something immediately and companies often need to respond quickly to preserve their brand.  Sency provides a window into the real time web and what is being said.

In keeping with the same minimalist design used by Google, Sency’s homepage has a search box, a list of “what’s going on right now” and a list of “what’s going on lately”.  The two lists of what’s going on seem to be pulled right from Twitter’s trending topics list.  Using Sency to search for “sazbean” returns two types of results – What’s being said about sazbean and Today’s popular sazbean links.  The first lists any mentions of sazbean – very similar to any Twitter search.  It only seems to include results from Twitter – I didn’t see anything included directly from my blog or other types of social media.  The second result – Today’s popular sazbean links is nice because it shows which links I’ve tweeted have been retweeted – although I believe you can get this information in the original “what’s being said about sazbean” search, it’s still nice that it’s broken out.  Overall, Sency’s real time search seems very comparable to Twitter’s search (or Bing’s Twitter search).  Although the breakout of the links is nice and I could see that as being useful in some circumstances.

Where Sency differentiates itself (at least for now), is in providing widgets with real-time search results based on a keyword.  So, for example, I could create a widget with a search for the keyword “social media” and place it on my blog.  Now, anything that’s said with that keyword will show up on the widget on my blog.  This could also be useful to provide real-time comments on a product or service (if you’re brave enough) – but you’d have to be wary of placing anything real-time on your blog since people could easily abuse it (by tweeting with the keyword to show up on your blog).  I think the service may be more useful as a tool for monitoring many different products and keywords – say on an Intranet or other internal-corporate site.

Another widget that Sency provides is popular links based on a keyword.  This is probably much more useful (and safe) as content to add to a blog or website.  I can create a links widget for the keyword “social media” and the widget will show today’s popular links which include that keyword.

In terms of a real-time monitoring and search tool, Sency only seems to provide Twitter results.  I’d like to see them incorporate results from other sources in order to stay competitive.  There’s also an opportunity to improve on the widgets by incorporating knowledge about language – meaning that the links widget provides links related to a subject of the “social media” keyword, so it knows that it probably should include links which include things like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Have you tried Sency?  If not, give it a try.  What do you think?

Related posts:

• The Real Time Web Continues to be Hot

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Technorati tags: social media, sency, marketing, real-time search, business

WordStream offers a paid keyword and seo tool, which they’ve recently updated with some new features (integration with Google Analytics and their free keyword tool, analysis based on different traffic sources).  I’m taking a look at the paid keyword tool for a separate review (and to see if we want to use it), but WordStream also released a free keyword tool back in September that I thought I would take a look at.  I mostly use Google AdWord’s tools currently.

WordStream advertises their free keyword tool as fast – and it is that – pretty blazing fast, actually.  Which is nice.  You can get access to a full list of keywords much faster than Google’s keyword tool.  And WordStream will email you the full list – although the value of that goes down quite a bit when you’re talking about large numbers of keywords – who wants to sift through a list of 1,108 keywords?

I’m not so sure I agree with the quality of keywords, however.  For example, I did a search for “internet strategy” and the search returned keywords like “zara internet strategy”, “xenocide 3001 internet strategy game”, “what is home depots internet strategy”, “walmart internet strategy”, “ups and internet strategy”, “tigerdirect newegg internet strategy”, “tigerdirect internet strategy 2007″ (among others).  These were all in the top 15 results, rated based on relative volume.  It’s important to realize how much search volume a particular keyword (or phrase) has, but in order to be efficient and cost-effective, you’re usually looking for good keywords that have relatively few advertiser competition – which is information that Google’s keyword tool provides (along with last month’s local search volume and global search volume).

WordStream’s keyword tool did suggest a list of related keywords, which was nice (Google will also do this), so I tried a search that included the keywords: internet strategy, internet, marketing, advertising, consulting, strategy, trends, strategies, strategic, consultant.  This search came up with some interesting keywords, such as “newbies marketing guide” and “automated advertising services” that I did not see in the Google results.  But, again there were pretty useless keywords in the mix, like “internet explorer”, “football ats trends” in the top 10 results (and the results from 8 to 20 were all about sports trends).  The same search on Google provided more relevant results, but the keywords were mostly all very broad, with lots of competition, so not necessarily very useful either (you can narrow Google’s search or look for negative keywords).

WordStream’s information about the free keyword tool compares it to WordTracker and Keyword Discovery, which it may very well compete against (I’ve used both but it’s been awhile).

Conclusion: I’d suggest using WordStream’s keyword tool for keyword discovery purposes – when you’re looking for keywords you hadn’t already considered.  Then, take those keywords and refine your list using Google’s keyword tool.  Tthe WordStream paid tool may be better than Google’s tools, but I’m still playing with it.  In terms of free tools, you’re going to get more information and higher quality keywords from Google’s keyword tool.

Have you used WordStream’s free keyword tool?  What do you think?

Related posts:

• Interview with WordStream founder, Larry Kim
• WordStream Adds Free Keyword Grouper & Keyword Niche Finder to SEO PPC Tools

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Technorati tags: keyword tool, seo, marketing, ppc advertising, business

I just finished reading Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book, Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion
(amazon link), and I wanted to share my thoughts with you via video:

I think this is a great book to read if you own a business and are wondering how to use social media.

Have you read this book?  What do you think?

If you’re interested in reading the book, here’s the link:

• Buy the book: Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion (Amazon link)

About Gary, from his blog, http://garyvaynerchuk.com:

Gary Vaynerchuk has captured attention with his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to build his family’s local wine business into a national industry leader, Gary rapidly leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine. As his viewership swelled to over 80,000 a day, doors opened to a book deal, several national TV appearances, and a flurry of speaking engagements around the world. Gary’s dual identity as both business guru and wine guy has made him the “Social Media Sommelier.”

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Most marketing textbooks are hundreds of pages long and are filled with term definitions that hardly anyone remembers.  When it comes to implementing a marketing strategy, it’s difficult to remember the 4P’s (or 5 or 6 or whatever you follow) so it’s hard to put together a strategy that will work for the particular product/brand/company.  Businesses are hungry for information on how to market effectively and this book takes a hands-on, step-by-step, easy-to-measure results approach to creating a marketing strategy that has been proven to work even at very large companies.  Marketing Management: The Big Picture (Amazon affiliate link) fills the need for a book anyone can use to create an effective marketing strategy.

Information on how to create a marketing strategy is broken into easy-to-understand steps that together form The Big Picture.  The steps are easy to remember so they can be used in real-world situations (who wants to drag out a big textbook).  For each step in the process, the book walks through how to figure out that particular portion of the strategy, who in the company should be involved, and the consequences of different decision paths.

Once you figure out your marketing strategy, you’re also be shown how to measure it’s effectiveness and how to make improvements.  Many companies think a marketing strategy should work right off the bat, but there often is quite a bit of change and improvement that needs to go on before a good implementation is found.  Even with a good implementation, changes need to be made as the product and marketplace evolve.

At just 214 pages, including the appendices, anyone can spend a weekend learning how to put together a good marketing strategy.  I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to create a marketing strategy that works and is easy to measure. The Big Picture Partners also have a companion website with case studies, information, and a blog covering material from the book and updated information.

Sidebar – Am I worried about people reading this book and then not needing strategy consulting? Not really.  This is a great introduction to marketing strategy, but no book is a replacement for years of experience and wisdom.  And good business people know that they should focus on what they’re in business to do, outsourcing whatever someone else can do.  There will be those people who don’t have the budget for outside help, and this is a great book to help them get started.  Even for people who are going to use an outside consultant (or inside employees) for their marketing strategy, this book will give good background information to make the marketing strategy more effective and the process more efficient.

Have you read Marketing Management: The Big Picture?  What did you think?

Marketing Management: The Big Picture (Amazon affiliate link)

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Technorati tags: internet strategy, internet marketing, marketing strategy, marketing, business, strategy, marketing plan

In December of last year we decided to move our blog from a hosted WordPress to WordPress.com (abbreviated as WP.com).  I wrote about the advantages and disadvantages in the post Moving to Wordpress.com – What to Consider. For several months it remained the right place for our blog and I still think it was the correct decision at the time.  But many of the advantages of hosting with WordPress.com have actually been overridden by updates to the WordPress software.  Here are the key reasons we went back to a hosted WordPress…

Complete Control over Site

WordPress.com provides many great themes and widgets, and with a reasonable upgrade ($15/year) you can customize the CSS for one of the themes.  While the selection of themes and widgets was good, there’s a lot that you can do with widgets and themes they don’t support.

Whatever Themes We Want

We purchased the Thesis theme for this site (which I highly recommend – more info in an upcoming post), which allows you to control much of the site through the admin that you normally would have to do through the php.  We wouldn’t have the ability for that level of control through WP.com, and while their themes are nice, there’s something to be said for choosing the right theme for your particular blog.

Widgets, Widgets, Widgets Everywhere…

WP.com has a decent selection of widgets and plugins, but there are so many more great ones out there that they haven’t approved.  Being someone who helps businesses blog, I felt it was important to be able to try out new widgets and plugins without having to wait for WP.com’s time frame.  Being able to finally integrate with Disqus comments was important because I think they have a great way of doing comments (and as a user you can see comments on all the blogs that use their system in one place).

Yay Javascript!

WP.com doesn’t allow any script tags or javascript on their site, supposedly for security reasons, which I can understand.  But this is important because script tags are how you put many widgets from social networks on your site, as well as more critical things like Google Analytics and other statistics applications.  Now we also can link directly to affiliate programs and advertising, which may not be important from your standpoint, but are from a business standpoint.

Stats – The Way I Want Them

Because WP.com didn’t allow javascript, we were unable to use Google Analytics for the blog while we were there.  Google Analytics integrates very nicely with FeedBurner (for rss feeds), Google Ads, and gives us great information about where we’re getting traffic.  WP.com has their own stats system, which I think is based somewhat off Google Analytics, but just isn’t nearly as powerful.  Plus, there’s really not the same level of understanding with their system as there is with Google Analytics in terms of how it figures out the statistics.  All my other sites are tracked with Google, and now I can see everything in one place.

Upgrades & Hosting Much Easier

Since we went to WP.com, WordPress has had several updates to their software, including the ability to install plugins right from the admin, and do upgrades to WP through the admin (this used to take some backend work).  This hassle was one of the major reasons we went to WP.com and it really no longer exists.  We were able to use a local hosting company and have pretty good hosting for what was a reasonable trade-off for the increased control.  Plus, we’ll be able to host multiple sites with the account, spreading the cost out over several projects.

The Trades-Offs Swung The Other Way

When it came down to it, with the upgrades to the WordPress software, reasonable hosting, and full control over the site, the pendulum swung back to going with a hosted WordPress solution.

What about you? Do you use WordPress.com or a hosted version? Why?

Technorati tags: blog, blogging, blogs, strategy, business, wordpress, business blogging

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Seth Godin’s blog is a regular read for me.  I don’t always find use for everything he says, but I think he has a lot of great ideas and certainly can stir up some new ways to think.  So picking up Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable (Amazon affiliate link) wasn’t a stretch.  I had heard a lot of good things about it, so I figured it would be a good read while I was up north at the cabin relaxing.

Overall the subject of the book is extremely important to companies that want to continue to compete in the changing marketplace.  The first few chapters are great explanations of why being a purple cow is important and how marketing has changed, and Seth offers some good examples of companies which have made a business of being remarkable.  There is one very important point Seth makes, that I think is important for all companies:  marketing, strategy and design departments can no longer work independently if remarkable products are going to be properly created and launched.

Purple Cow was a quick and easy read.  Seth Godin has structured the book like a blog – short text excerpts divided by catching titles.  There are some great tidbits of information that are set off with bullets – which can stimulate some great trains of thought.  The case studies are short and to the point, many of which are followed up with some points to ponder. However, there are a few where I wanted a bit more information about what the company did to become remarkable.  There are also several places where a company or product is mentioned as remarkable, but I had never heard of it, which is fine, but I would have liked a bit of an explanation of what they did.  (While I could search for it, I feel like I paid some money for the book, so it would be nice to get the information all in one place).  There is a Purple Cow website which includes a few bonus chapters and additional information.

Purple Cow was a good book for up north.  It would be a good book for the beach.  Most of the information is now widely accepted (the book was originally published in 2002), but still not widely implemented.  The current recession would make a good opportunity to transform a business.  I don’t think Purple Cow would necessarily be useful to Marketers who are in-the-know with current trends online and in social media, but it could spark some great brainstorming.  Purple Cow definitely would be a good book for any higher level management that’s looking for a way to use the recession as an agent of change for their company and for any marketers and product designers just getting into online strategies.

Have you read Purple Cow?  What did you think?

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable (Amazon affiliate link)

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If you’re in the market for a quick and easy mobile website, Winksite is worth a look. A free account allows you to create up to 5 different mobile sites, which can each be customized from Winksite’s library of functionality (which they call channels).  Creating a site is as easy as giving it a name and a unique url (all linked off of winksite.com), and choosing what types of content you want to offer on your site.  The creation process starts with up to 3 pages of text, an option to mobilize your blog (via RSS), and choices from the community & collaboration channels (such as events, feeds, notes, chat, forum, surveys, guestbooks, and links).  You have the option of whether your site appears in Winksite’s directory and under what category and location (and content rating).

The interesting part of a Winksite mobile site is all the community functions (channels) you can include to increase return engagement.  Such channels include a journal, feeds, links, events, reports, notes, chat, forum, surveys, zine, and guestbook to create an almost Facebook-like social site around your mobile site.  You can also invite people to become members of your site, send broadcasts to members and send messages to other winksite’s.

Winksite currently does not offer any statistics other than basics (visits, members), but David Harper, Founder of Winksite, mentioned that may be a revenue model they’ll pursue in the near future.  Winksite integrates with several different mobile advertising platforms, including Google AdSense, admob, admoda and others.  You can control which channels ads showup on, as well as ad frequency and placement (top, botton, random, or top & bottom).  100% of the revenue collected from advertising is retained by the site owner, who can also create what are called self-service ads to advertise sponsors or self-promotions.

While their terms of service clearly says the Winksite’s service is for non-commercial use only, Harper says that they have many commercial sites using the service and have no problem with other commercial organizations using the site.  Harper’s long term goal is to get as many eyeballs on their mobilized sites as possible and build value eventually (he compared their business plan to Google’s).  Winksite has allowed Harper and parent company, Wireless Ink Corporation, to gather deep consumer insights into the mobile market, which they use for other paid services they offer and are developing (mobile sharing/consulting, etc.).  With over 60,000 publishers, including large companies such as Warner, Nokia, and Atlantic records, Winksite’s services are probably “safe” for use for other companies.

Give Winksite a try and let me know what you think.

Technorati tags: winksite, mobile, marketing, mobile advertising, business

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Ever wonder how to effectively use social media for your business?  Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, of Forrester Research, provide real-world information and data on how to make it social media work for your business in their book, groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies (Amazon affiliate link).  The book is packed with data and experience from twenty-five cases, spanning different types of industries, companies and organizations.

If you’re not sure exactly why social media is important to business, Li and Bernoff start off explaining why it is – they term the emergence of social media technologies into the mainstream as the “groundswell.”  Once you understand exactly what the groundswell is, they explain how it can be tapped to help your organization.  The last part of the book focuses on how using the groundswell will change your company and what the future looks like.

One of the strengths of this book is that it doesn’t have a one-size-fits all social media strategy that works for all organizations and companies.  Instead, it examines the use of social media on a behavorial level – different types of people interact with social media in different ways.  Some types will login to a social site every day but never actually interact.  Others post regularly.  Understanding what types of people you have in your particular target audience is key for crafting a social media strategy that will actually work.  The book runs through the different types of people and their typical interactions with social media and how to use this information to craft a winning strategy.

While this book is a year old, the underlying information is still extremely valuable to anyone looking to tie social media in with business measurements, such as ROI.  There’s also a website which provides updated information via a blog and some tools for understanding the possible makeup of your target audience, based on industry and age groups.  I highly recommend this book to anyone considering using social media for their business – it will give you a good idea of what needs to be done to be successful and the twenty-five cases provide good real-world examples of possible ways to use social media for your business.

If you’ve read this book, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (Amazon affiliate link)

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