Today the Gang of Four is light years ahead of its peers. And this lead is not just in one vital area, such as technology. In incredibly short periods of time, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google have done truly amazing things. They have built valu- able brands, released popular products and services, cultivated widespread followings, and generated enormous shareholder value and profits. They have quickly risen to prominence, in the process becoming the envy of thousands of organizations.They have been able to innovate and launch products, services, and even entire lines of business at unprecedented rates. As we’ll ?see in this book, the source of these companies’ competitive advantages stems from many things, including profound customer insights enabled by troves of data, immensely valuable partnerships, highly adaptive cultures, and the intelligent use of technology.

Big Company Syndrome
Historically, as large companies have grown to such dizzying heights, they have begun to show signs of fissure and eventual decline. Examples abound. IBM struggled mightily in the late 1980s and early 1990s. To be fair, it was able to successfully redefine itself as a service-oriented company, a turnaround that has been nothing short of astounding. Kodak was woefully unpre- pared for the rise of digital cameras and printing. More recently, many iconic organizations have lost their leads, sometimes in just a few years. Microsoft comes to mind and is discussed at length in Chapter 9 of this book.
It doesn’t take a genius to recognize the symptoms or diagnose the disease. After some degree of success, large organizations begin to tread water. Over the course of, say, five years, they start to exhibit the signs of stereotypical risk-averse, monolithic organizations. Again, this is well-trodden ground. Many books have been written about how size tends to encumber organizations, along with attendant bureaucracy and other baggage. Call it big company syndrome.

The Gang of Four, however, appears to be largely symptom-free. Each company continues to hire thousands of new employees, enter new and often challenging markets, forge new partner- ships, and launch entirely new lines of business. These compa- nies are doing much more than avoiding the traditional perils of growth, nor are they simply maintaining previous levels of performance. They are somehow increasing their organizational pace of innovation.

I’m looking forward to finishing Phil’s book — I’m still in the first section, but it has been very interesting so far (look for a review soon).

Have you read the book? What do you think?

NOTE: All links above to Amazon are affiliate links. As with any review I do, this is my honest opinion. If you feel differently after reading this book, please share your thoughts in the comments. Thank you for reading!

Related articles

• Phil Simon: Company Building In The Age Of The Platform: 8 Lessons From Amazon, Apple, Facebook, And Google (huffingtonpost.com)
• Book Review: The Age of the Platform: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Have Redefined Business by Phil Simon (blogcritics.org)
• Interview with Phil Simon: The Age of The Platform (newbizblogger.com)

Being an entrepreneur and creating a small self-sustaining business, is vastly different than building a startup that will eventually have to provide returns to investors. Cynthia focuses on startups, with information on different types of funding, what information needs to be provided to investors, and the entire process of creating a product to provide a return on the investment. Every business is different, but there is some basic information that investors want to see. Cynthia sets out what information should be included in different types of documents, including investor presentations, customer presentations and the business plan. This doesn’t mean that the book isn’t helpful for any entrepreneur, but the focus is definitely on startups which will eventually have an exit strategy.

Pros: Real world tips and detailed instructions which can be applied to any business to help from everything from product development to creating a business plan to presenting to investors. This book is full of good information that can make any businesses growth just a little less rocky and certainly more organized and thoughtful.

Cons: Cynthia’s experience is in building startups which eventually have an exit strategy. She’s used to building companies relatively quickly in order to provide return on investment. While she does talk about bootstrapping and other funding methods (which may actually be more effective for many entrepreneurs), they are not the focus of this book. Cynthia also has a slightly negative view of most marketing in that it’s very structured and non-creative (which it can be, but it doesn’t have to be).

UPDATE: I was given a pre-release copy of the book (but didn’t realize it), and I’ve been told that all the editing errors have been fixed in the published copy, so no worries on the editing in any copy you purchase. There are also several places with fairly large editing problems, including The Prologue. If I had judged the book only on The Prologue, I would have demanded my money back. While there aren’t any spelling errors, there are missing words and a slew of grammar issues. And there’s a chapter which ends mid-sentence. Hopefully these problems can be fixed in a future edition because they put a damper on an otherwise very useful book.

Conclusion: Despite the focus on startups with an exit strategy, Startup from the Ground Up is an extremely useful book for any entrepreneur. One of my measures of books is how many pages I dog-ear and how many notes I take, and this book was full of both. I highly recommend this book to any type of entrepreneur.

What are your thoughts if you’ve read the book?

NOTE: All links above to Amazon are affiliate links. I was sent a free copy of the book and asked if I would review it. As with any review I do, this is my honest opinion. If you feel differently after reading this book, please share your thoughts in the comments. Thank you for reading!

Story Potential

Initially, Ryan sets the stage for what happened in his life in the opening chapters. There’s some interesting story lines here. Getting out of trouble of being a gang member to eventually become a successful entrepreneur is no easy feat. Unfortunately, much of the story is glossed over as just a means for establishing Ryan’s history and reputation. Ryan also adds some good stories to some of the chapters as a means of explaining a point or illustrating a situation.  Near the end of the book Ryan realizes that his stepfather really was his Dad in every important meaning of the word.  How Ryan struggled without a good male role model and his relationship with his natural father and stepfather would have made for an engaging story — if only that was the true focus of the book.

Roadmap & Guide

While billed as a roadmap and guide, there wasn’t anything particularly insightful in Ryan’s recommendations.  You’ve probably read them and heard them all before.  I honestly had a hard time getting through the middle of the book and almost set it down. However, there is some really good information about financing and investing, which is a black hole to most entrepreneurs. And some of the insights that are shared with personal stories are helpful in terms of learning from another’s experiences. But the book’s roadmap and guide is shakey at best — there are much better guides in terms of starting and running a business or startup.

Role Model & Lessons Learned

Ryan is definitely a role model for troubled youths who are discouraged about their future.  But, similar to others, Ryan didn’t get out of trouble on his own (although he did have to have the perseverance and grit to succeed) — he found mentors and others in his network to help him out every step of the way.  That was one lesson that wasn’t blatantly spelled out: you succeed because of who you know and the relationships with those people (whether business or personal). Ryan really isn’t a self-made entrepreneur.  He never went it alone.  He always had help: either from his step-father, investors or his business teams.

Verdict

I think Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain: How I Went from Gang Member to Multimillionaire Entrepreneur tries to be both an inspiring story and a roadmap and doesn’t succeed at either. I think it would have been a much more interesting read if it was written as a memoir or story, with insights added as part of the storyline.  There could even be a pretty interesting non-fictional story written around Ryan’s life.  But as a business road map, I wouldn’t recommend this book. If you’re looking for some insights or case studies from someone who has been successful with startups, or need some recommendations for financing or getting investors, there definitely are some good tidbits.

What are your thoughts if you’ve read the book?

NOTE: All links above to Amazon are affiliate links. I was sent a free copy of the book and asked if I would review it. As with any review I do, this is my honest opinion. If you feel differently after reading this book, please share your thoughts in the comments. Thank you for reading!

While the book is full of examples of The New Small companies using technology as a competitive advantage, my favorite example is Chaotic Moon Studios, which helps organizations with their mobile strategies and development. Chaotic Moon is not only interesting from their use of technology (which you would expect from a development company), but also in their use of technology to improve their business model. The term mobility brings to mind smartphones, but Chaotic Moon also helps companies re-publish content and applications across different platforms (for example, from the Microsoft XBox to the Wii). Not only do they help develop “mobile” applications, they also will handle development, marketing and distribution for a share of the revenue if they feel it has a viable market. They  helped News Corp. develop the first ever fully digital daily publication with The Daily iPad application. Using technology as a competitive advantage is at the heart of Chaotic Moon’s business model (even technology companies can find new ways to use technology competitively).

My overall thoughts:

Pros: The New Small is a pretty easy read.  Each chapter covers a topic, starting out with an overview and includes a case study from an actual small business, closing with a summary of main points. If you’re a small business owner or entrepreneur (the target audience), this book does a great job of explaining and showing how small businesses are using technology as a business strategy, as well as giving ideas of how technology can be used for any business (who is willing to try). Even for those with more technology experience, all the case studies in the book are helpful for spawning new ideas or using to show the value of technology to clients or management.

Cons: As someone who is very connected to new technologies and how companies are using them, the main themes of this book were nothing new (but they may be for less technological folks). The structure of the book can be a bit difficult to read at times (in the digital Kindle version), since some of the footnotes run into the content and the headings don’t stand out very well. Since the book is about The News Small, the sentence structure “The New Small knows…” was a bit overused and got a bit tiring to read after awhile.

Verdict: If you’re a small business owner or entrepreneur who is curious about how technology can be used, not only for cost savings and efficiency, but also as a competitive advantage, then I recommend taking a look at The New Small. Unlike many books which just explain how small businesses should be doing something, Phil uses a ton of examples of actual small businesses who are doing exactly what he’s talking about in the book. The proof is in the pudding, and Phil’s book is full of proof. As an easy read, with good explanations and summaries, Phil makes it easy to understand the advantages of technologies so that anyone can figure out ways to apply them to their own organization.

If you’ve read this book, what do you think?

NOTE: All links above to Amazon are affiliate links. I was sent a free digital copy of the book and asked if I would review it. As with any review I do, this is my honest opinion. If you feel differently after reading this book, please share your thoughts in the comments.  Thank you for reading!

A Forgotten Asset: Current Web Presence

Often people forget about their website and other online sites they’ve created for their business in favor of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. But these websites are valuable assets in any online strategy. As Scott, explains, social networks are for having ongoing conversations and places like the corporate website are destinations where people go to do something specific (get information, purchase from you, request a quote, etc.). Figuring out how to unite current websites with social networks may be difficult to figure out, so Scott has provided 7 easy to understand (and follow) steps to a unified web presence:

1. Identify Your Constituents – While this may be obvious, some companies have different audiences with different needs and interests and trying to serve them all in one place may be ineffective.  Properly identifying who you are trying to reach is key to any marketing strategy (offline or on).
2. Identify Actions – Having a clear call to action is one of the most missed parts of marketing strategies for many companies.  If you spend a lot of effort building an audience, but it’s not clear what they should do next, you’re missing out on a lot of sales.
3. Create Conversations – Social networking is obviously about having conversations, but to unify your web and your social networking presence, you need to have them working in concert.  People should know where to find you if they’d like to ask you a question or have a conversation (beyond just a contact form).
4. Define the Content Visitors Want – Some people may be interesting in your promotions, but the great majority of people aren’t interested in being advertised to. You need to figure out what information you can provide that is of interest to your target audience.
5. Define Your Communication Style – How you communicate online should be directly tied to how you’d like people to view your brand. I find that it can help to list out attributes you’d like your brand to have associated with it if you thought of it as a person. Setting this style (and persona) ahead of time helps make sure that no one acts on behalf of the company in a way that isn’t appropriate. Being cool and hip may not work for a button-down accounting firm (although that would be a cool differentiator in my opinion).
6. Send Advertisements – While promotion shouldn’t be any more than 10% of the content you put out, it is required in order to make people aware of your social networking presences and also to leverage your audience to increase sales. Incentives or giveaways can be powerful motivators to get people to connect with you (just look at the success of sites like GroupOn).
7. Use Web Properties – You need to leverage your websites and other online presences to have places where people can take the actions you’d like them to once they’ve conversed and engaged with you on social networks. Social networks are great for short bursts of information and for having conversations, but they aren’t so great at providing in-depth information or for converting sales. Websites can help you provide the in-depth information your audience wants, as well as providing locations where people can perform desired actions for your sales process (request info, purchase, etc.).

While none of this information is particularly new (I use a lot of the same strategies with my clients), Scott presents each step with actionable items and reasoning in a way that makes them applicable to any organization. I ended up highlighting a lot of this chapter just so I could use some of his explanations to get concepts across with my clients. Breaking down the process of integrating social technology with websites into 7 steps makes the concepts more easy to digest and therefore to implement.

Here are my overall thoughts:

Pros: The entire book is broken up into chapters which each stand along fairly well. Each chapter ends with a list of key points to cement in the important topics, but which could also be used to guide implementation of his ideas. There are also some great case studies to see how social media has been used by companies to drive revenue and results.

Cons: I was expecting more in-depth examples in some cases (for example, in creating a social policy — not just in what the policies are, but how the company developed them). Some of the chapters seem more well-thought-out than others, which may be due much of the content being crowd-sourced. The chapter on measurement, for example, had steps, as well as good examples of different ways that a company could measure, but some of the topics that were mentioned within the explanations felt like they were trying to cover ground that was already covered.

Verdict: Enterprise Social Technology is a good read. If you have a company or are part of an organization, that’s trying to figure out how to use social networking within your marketing strategy, this book can serve as a great guideline for getting things started.  I also think it’s a great book for anyone who is involved in social media or who is making decisions about whether to use social media because it covers a lot of the decision making that needs to be done for a social networking strategy to be successful.

If you’ve read this book, what do you think?

NOTE: All links above to Amazon are affiliate links. I was sent a free digital copy of the book and asked if I would review it. As with any review I do, this is my honest opinion. Scott Klososky is also offering the opportunity to receive a bounty for a review, etc., which did entice me to write a review, but not to write what I did. Hopefully you’ve seen that I try to be honest in my writing from the other posts I’ve written.  Thank you for reading!

Setup

You can connect your Twitter, Facebook, Facebook pages and LinkedIn profiles into one “identity” on Sprout Social. Connecting the profiles is fairly easy since Sprout Social takes you through all the steps. If you have more than one Facebook page for your business, Sprout Social allows you to connect them into this one identity to make it easier to get an overview of what’s going on with your business.

Dashboard – Overview

Once you have all your social media profiles connected into Sprout Social, the Dashboard gives you a nice overview of what’s going on, including demographics, recent messages, recent followers, and a social scoreboard.

Inbox – Monitoring Conversations

The Inbox shows all your latest conversations on your social media profiles.  You can then reply to them from the inbox or mark them for followup later. The inbox also shows you comments on  your Facebook profiles, direct messages and mentions of your business name — a very valuable tool for monitoring social media which can be customized to show you the information you want to see.

Discovery – Valuable Insights

The Discovery tool has some very valuable insights once you’ve set it up with keyword, people and business searches (the tools step you through what you need to do).  Unfortunately you can’t get an overview of any of these results, you need to click on each to see them (which makes it a bit harder to monitor). By monitoring the results of these searches every few days, you’ll have a solid understanding of who is talking about you and your company.

Reports – Social Proof

Reporting is one of the most valuable parts of Sprout Social.  For both Twitter and Facebook  you can get a nice overview of how you’re doing with metrics like engagement, influence, message types and demographics which can also be exported. The reports for Twitter and Facebook have different measurements, showing only those appropriate to that network. If you use Sprout Social for sending messages, you also can get more details on how each message performed.

Twitter Report

Facebook Report

Scheduling – Automate Posting

Like many other social media tools, Sprout Social also provides the ability to schedule messages to go out in the future, including automatically sending out posts from any rss feeds (from your blog, for example).  The interface is very easy to understand and any messages that are sent out from Sprout Social can be tracked for their effectiveness.

Contact Management – Building a Network

Social Sprout lets you manage the contacts you have on Twitter by allowing you to add people to your Sprout Social address book. There also is a suggestion tool to see people that you might want to follow, either because they’re already following you or because you’ve had conversations with you or because they’ve mentioned you or your business. You can also cleanup who you’re following by seeing people you’re following who haven’t had much activity lately, accounts with irregular use or people who are not following you back.

Advantages – Many

Having one affordable place to monitor many social networks in once place and get measurements about those metrics is pretty huge. The measurements that are given are also shown in trending format over time, so you can easily use them to see how your tactics are working to improve your engagement and influence online.

Trending Metrics! Being able to see how you’re doing over time is huge for social media measurement.  Metrics which provide snapshots are nice, but you have to see how they’ve increased or decreased over time to understand how your tactics may be affecting them.

Features! Pretty much everything I mentioned above is an advantage.  While there are tools out there that provide parts of what Social Sprout provides, having them all in one place is invaluable.

Price! I have yet to find a tool that provides so much information for only $9/month. You can try it out for 30 days and see if it’s going to work for you, which is another advantage.

Disadvantages – A Few

Clicks are only tracked if you initiate them in Sprout Social. Unfortunately, HootSuite offers more robust scheduling and posting features (as do many other Twitter clients), so I was not able to see any clicks on my posts.

Some of the measurements appear to look at all of your social profiles, but I’m not sure that’s the case. For example, the social scorecard on the Dashboard seems to imply that it’s a score for all your profiles, but the number of new followers is not the same as the number of new connections at the top of the Dashboard.  Likewise, are the engagement and influence ratings looking at all profiles or just Twitter? I think it should be more clear how the measurement or rating is being made.

Not all of the features are available for all of the social networks.  It would be nice to be able to see reports for LinkedIn and see contacts across all the social networks, not just Twitter.  It would also be nice to add others social networks, since Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn may not be ones that are particularly important in some industries.

There are also some features that don’t appear to be working correctly (mostly in the suggestions which is new). Hopefully these get fixed soon because they would provide pretty useful information if working properly. Sprout Social has a nice feedback system to alert them to problems and help users with problems.

Conclusion – Worth a Try

While there are some minor problems and issues with Sprout Social, I imagine that some of these may be addressed in the future.  Sprout Social has a nice support community where you can give them feedback and get problems solved. The measurements and features that are provided are pretty valuable and it’s difficult to find anything anywhere close for the price (pro version for $9/month and business for $49/month). With a 30 day free trial of either plan, there is very little risk in giving Sprout Social a try to see if it gives you the insights you need for your business.

Have you tried Sprout Social? What do you think? If not, give it a try, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Compare Social Mention Trends

Topsy allows you to search and compare up to 3 queries, which can include keywords, domains and Twitter usernames.

These queries can be compared over the last day, week, 2 weeks or month in a nice graphical format which allows you to easily see how the keywords performed against each other.

Social Mention Metrics

Topsy also provides information on the top links in the past 24 hours with metrics on influence, momentum, velocity and peak (which would be more useful if they told you what the top numbers were instead of just higher is better). This chart can also be downloaded in csv format.

Advanced Search Operators

Searches can be highly tailored by using Topsy’s search operators to return exactly the results that you want.

In My Opinion…

Topsy’s social analytics are definitely helpful when you’re trying to see how effective your social media strategy is (especially if you look at the data over the past month). It would be nice if the metrics (influence, velocity, momentum and peak) were more clearly defined. If this trending information was provided over a longer period of time (several months, 6 months, year, etc.) for a reasonable price, it would definitely be something I’d consider paying for.

Have you used Topsy’s social analytics? What do you think?

Business Cards

Out of 50 business cards, almost all of them were processed very well. The four that were not were strangely designed. For each business card, the system stores images of the front and back of the card, as well as contact information. Name, company, phone and email are visible in the dashboard and any of the data can be edited as needed, exported, or archived in Evernote.

Receipts

Shoeboxed processed 2 of the receipts as receipts and 2 as bills. The two classified as receipts were on traditional receipt paper and the 2 bills were on 8 1/2 x 11 paper. It was easy to reclassify the bills to receipts and Shoeboxed also tries to classify the receipts based on categories (auto, fuel, office supplies, etc.). The classification for the one receipt it did auto-classify was off, but I was able to change it and it’s supposed to get better as you use the system. Having receipts in digital form is certainly a much easier way to organize and manage your expense data.

(amounts have been removed in the image above)

Pricing

There are four different pricing levels – Business, Classic, Lite and Free, which differ on the amount of receipts and cards scanned, levels of service and types of services. The Business plan, priced at $49.95/month, includes 500 receipts and cards per month, pre-paid envelopes, 1-2 day turnaround time, and a free quarterly back-up CD. The Free plan includes only unlimited receipts that you scan and upload and a Shoeboxed email address for online shopping and email receipt forwarding.

Mobile

When you’re on the go, Shoeboxed offers a couple of free mobile applications for scanning in and organizing receipts and business cards.  Business cards and receipts are uploaded, verified and displayed on your online account — these scans count towards your monthly limit. You can upload unlimited receipts via an email address. If you allow Shoeboxed to share your contact information with each new contact you upload (so they can include an invitation to try their product), you also can upload unlimited business cards via an email address.

Conclusion

All the data was nicely organized and easy to export into files that could be easily used in other applications. Any errors in the processing were easy to correct. Having Shoeboxed process my business cards makes it easier for me to import that information into my CRM without having to hand enter everything.  Uploading unlimited receipts and business cards via the special email addresses is an extra plus.

While, we don’t have enough volume of business cards and receipts (yet) since most of our stuff is already digitized, I can see this as being a extremely valuable service for companies that do have a lot of receipts and business cards to file — and $50/month to be able to do something more productive for your time is a steal!

Give Shoeboxed.com a free 30-day trial and let us know what YOU think.

Disclosure: Shoeboxed.com gave us a free 30-day trial of their Classic package to review their service. This same 30-day trial is available to all consumers. Links to Shoeboxed.com in this post are affiliate links because we believe that they provide a valuable service that you may find useful. If you’d like to check out Shoeboxed.com without clicking on an affiliate link, click here.

Social Media Search with Options

To get started, you can just type in your company or brand. You can customize based on the type of media:

Or select specific social networks and channels to search:

Results at a Glance

Social Mention‘s results page gives you all the information you need at a glance. Down the center are results with the most recent first.  Each results has the social network or type of content, time of the post, and who posted it.  Results can be displayed by date or by source (which takes some time — seems to do another search) and filtered by time period.

Useful Social Media Statistics Summary

On the search results page are some helpful statistics as well, such as sentiment, reach, minutes on average between mentions, number of unique authors, and number of retweets.

Detailed Social Media Statistics

Sentiment, top keywords, top users, top hashtags, and sources are also displayed along the left side.  Each result can be clicked to see more information.

Subscribe for Alerts

For any search, you can subscribe to the results via RSS or email.  For email, you can set up the email to only send you the latest relevant results (to reduce space) and you can control what sources and results are important.

Access to Data

Each search can be exported as a CSV/Excel file, as can the Sentiment, Top Keywords, Top Users and Top Hashtag reports. The Top Keywords, Top Users and Top Hashtag reports give you to more data that in visible on the Social Mention website.

Real-Time Social Mentions Widget

For those who want to display real-time results for a particular keyword or phrase on their blog or website, Social Mention also offers a free widget:

While this may seem like a great way to display some useful information on your blog and website, just be aware that it’s pretty unfiltered, so negative results can show up as well.  I can see this being useful to display results around a topic instead of a brand.

Conclusion

Social Mention is a free social media monitoring tool.  The price is right and the data is useful. Especially nice are all the customizations available for searches and the ability to get the data out of their system via either email or rss or by exporting to csv/excel files. What isn’t as clear is how they calculate strength, passion and reach.  It would be nice if there was more information there.

The Sentiment calculation includes neutral as positive, plus since it is based mostly on what keywords are used, it isn’t great at understanding true intent (such as if a “bad” keyword is used in a positive way, or vice versa. For example, a sarcastic comment would be mis-labeled). Sentiment is one of the most difficult measures, so it’s nice to have the information, even if you have to take it with a block of salt.

Overall, Social Mention‘s results and information are extremely helpful, especially for trending over time.  The ability to get at the data is awesome for those of us who like to do a bit more digging.  I highly recommend you add Social Mention into your toolkit.

Have you used Social Mention? What do you think?

Klout Score

The Klout Score now take your Facebook influence into account by looking at the number of likes and comments on your content and how many unique likers and commenters you have (and probably how many friends too).  Overall, my score went up, which I’m attributing to the information that was gathered from Facebook, since I haven’t seen the score move in the past 6 months. Influence measurement really does depend on what networks you’re measuring — people are likely to be more influential in some places over others (can we really measure influence with any accuracy?). They’ve also added some Facebook achievements…

Influence Matrix

The Influence Matrix now takes into account Facebook as well, although you can’t really distinguish between the two. It’s based on who you are influenced by and who influences you.  Those people didn’t change for me (nor their scores) and neither did my Klout classification as a Networker. However, where those people were on the matrix did change. And now we can see where the influencees are on the matrix, where we could not before.

Content Analysis

The content analysis just provided a list of some of the topics where I have the most influence, and nothing else — perhaps this section is reliant on the bit.ly information which I don’t have (I use another URL shortener)? Very little information here.

True Reach

True Reach is a measure of the size of your engaged audience, as opposed to the number of people following or connected to you. This looks to be a new measure from the last review and adds engagement measurements from Facebook. The follower mention measurement looks suspect to me since I regularly converse and mention people who I know are following me — does this number seem correct for anyone else?

Amplification

Amplification adds Facebook total likes and total comments (over what time period?) to it’s measurement. I’m also wondering what time period the twitter retweets and mentions are measured.

Network

Network has removed the number of Twitter list inclusions (why?) and has added Facebook unique likers and unique commenters.

Overall

Klout can be a useful tool for measuring the trends of your own influence, as long as you’re aware of its caveats and how it’s measuring.  Some of this information is not fully disclosed (since they don’t want others to be able to reproduce their algorithm), which can make it difficult to make your own intelligent decisions about the data.

There’s a real issue of mixing professional and personal profiles when measuring influence with Twitter and Facebook.  On Twitter, any individual, group, company or whatever can have a profile, whereas on Facebook, companies can only have a page or group.  By only connecting to Facebook profiles, Klout may be mixing someone’s personal Facebook influence with their professional Twitter influence (since you don’t have the option of connecting to a Facebook page).  Klout needs to add the ability to only look at Facebook pages (or let you control the settings) in order to get a good influence measurement for Facebook.

Only using bit.ly for analysis of Twitter content and clicks on links is a big issue as well.  There are many URL shorteners out there, including custom domains, which means that Klout only has a portion of the information necessary to judge based on this info (maybe they properly exclude it from those who are not using it).

If you use Klout as a tool for getting more information about your influence and how it trends over time, it can be a useful (and free!) tool. However, I would not use it as the definitive measurement of influence at this point.

What do you think?

Connections: B-

The number of social media networks and services Postling connects to is not bad.  While it does connect up to the major social networks of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, it’s missing other social networks like StumbleUpon, Digg, etc. It connects very well to my self-hosted WordPress blog, but is missing connections to the Posterous blogging system. Many of the short-comings can be overcome by setting up monitoring of keywords through the web search or through Google alerts in the RSS connection, but those require a bit more knowledge than just connecting to a social network.

Dashboard: C-

The Dashboard gathers the last 5 comments, reviews and tracking (mentions of your brand) into one spot. Unfortunately there’s no way to filter the results by social network and the results are vertical, which means scrolling to see everything.  Only 5 results isn’t very useful for larger brands, but may be useful for smaller companies.  There’s also no controls for expanding or collapsing the result types to make things easier to read.

Stream: C-

While Postling provides connections to many social networks and web applications, only three show up in the Stream: Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr (at least out of the connections I set up).  Noticably missing is LinkedIn. There are controls so you can show only one or some (or all) of the provided social networks in the stream.  I find the stream fairly useless since I have so many Twitter followers – I use lists and keyword searches for filtering which are absent from Postling.

Published Posts: C-

I don’t find the published posts list helpful.  For one thing, I know what I published, but there’s also no way to filter the results by network.  And the results show no comments for posts that do have comments (as shown in the comments page) — for example responses/retweets of my tweets are not picked up as comments here but are on the comments page.

Replying in One Place: B

One nice feature of Postling is the ability to reply to posts and comments all in one place (at least on the supported social networks and websites).  Throughout the application, when you see a mention or comment or post, you’re given the ability to go to the post, reply to it or share it.  This can be very useful for businesses as a time saver.

Reviews & Tracking: B-

Postling nicely puts all your reviews and mentions of your keywords and brand in one place, which you can filter by status, review, photo, story, comment, video or RSS.  It would be nice if you could also filter by social network, and see which social network the post came from (when possible).

Analytics: F

One of the main reasons I use HootSuite for managing my social media is because I get statistics on how many people click on my messages.  Postling provides no such analytics.  There’s actually no analytics at all, except for number of comments on particular updates (no totals, no trends, etc). Adding analytics would be a nice addition.

Posting to Multiple Social Networks: B+

Postling does a pretty good job at posting to multiple networks.  You can update your status to Twitter, Facebook (page) and LinkedIn across multiple brands, even scheduling the update for later.  You can also create a blog post for your blogging platform and Facebook.  The controls for the blog post are very straight-forward.  Unfortunately, I use some plugins in WordPress, as well as styles which are not available, so I’d rather post in WordPress.  But the ability to post to multiple places from one place would be useful for many businesses.

Managing Multiple Brands: B+

Being able to monitor and manage multiple brands is a nice feature (although a paid one) in Postling.  This would be especially useful for companies with multiple products and markets.  Especially the ability to post to all of the various social networks and blogs from one place.

Free vs. Paid: C-

The free version allows you to manage one brand, post to the various social networks and websites for that brand, reply to comments and mentions, add users to accounts and includes a built-in URL shortener. Premium adds 9 more brands, RSS feed tracking, Real-time Yelp & CitySearch reviews, real-time web tracking and instantaneous sharing of reviews for $24.99 per month.

There are a lot of nice features in Postling, but many of them are available in other free or paid applications (HootSuite for example). Without integration with more social networks and analytics, I wouldn’t be willing to pay $24.99 per month, which is almost $300 per year.  The paid version may be worth it if you’re managing multiple brands and have the budget to back the cost.

Overall: C+

Spending time monitoring and managing social media can be a real hassle, especially for small businesses who are trying to wear multiple hats. Postling provides some nice management tools, plus the ability to monitor and post all in one place that may be extremely valuable to small business owners. I think the free version is worth a try to see if it helps you with your social media management. I don’t think the paid version will be valuable unless you’re trying to manage multiple brands.

Have you tried Postling? What do you think?

Quick & Easy Read

I like reading to increase my knowledge and to help improve various aspects of my business. Reading takes time, which means having to choose which books get read. Books that are faster to read are more likely to be chosen (depending on the subject matter), because their knowledge can be gleaned much more quickly.  Randel’s book is a super quick read, which I read it in less than hour.

Textbook-like books are dull to read and just put me to sleep. Reading shouldn’t be a chore. The Skinny on the Art of Persuasion is incredibly easy to read. Randel uses stick figures for illustrations (which are also a bit amusing) and the amount of text on each page is fairly low, which also makes it easier to digest the information on each page.

Actionable Rules & Relatable Examples

Randel teaches the art of persuasion with 15 rules, each discussed with an example. These 15 rules are easy to remember and are repeated several times throughout the book so have a pretty good chance of remembering them when you’re done.

Examples used to illustrate the rules, as well as occasions when persuasion comes in handy, are scenarios that happen in every day life. Because you can relate to the examples, you’re much more likely to remember them in conjunction with the rules.

Thumbs Up

If you’re looking for an in-depth book on persuasion, this isn’t it. But if you want a quick read that gives you some great actionable tips for improvement, I recommend reading The Skinny on the Art of Persuasion: How to Move Minds (affiliate link). Jim Randel has an entire series of “The Skinny on” books, ranging from networking and time management to real estate investment, several of which I’m likely to also read.

Have you read this book or any other in “The Skinny On” series? What do you think?

disclaimer: I wrote this review because I feel that the book has value to you. I was asked to read and review one of “The Skinny on” books of my choice, but I received no compensation other than several of the books to choose from.

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?

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?

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?

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

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 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

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

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