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Social Media: Connect and Support Conversations

Published by admin on January 23rd, 2012 | No Comments »

Today, it is not enough just to write and push out content. Social media is not just another marketing channel you can use to reach your target audience. The biggest mistake companies and brands make is to use social media as just another marketing channel to sell a product. It’s much mare then that.

Content should be created with a goal to inspire a conversation. Social media is about a two-way stream of conversation. People are no longer willing to be passive bystanders – they want to take an active part of the conversation. With well crafted content, it can help you build your brand, improve your product marketing, and improve your customer service. And it’s easier today then ever.

Customer engagement can get you through the toughest of times – it can be both a customer acquisition and retention strategy.

Engaging Your Audience

Followers on Twitter, Likes on Facebook and Website traffic are all good and well, but is your target audience engaging with you?

Over ninety percent of the Internet users active in social media say they expect a company to have a social media presence and to be able to actively engage with that company.

Despite all their marketing and PR efforts, Sun Microsystems was still perceived as a faceless corporate giant before it was purchased by Oracle. When Jonathan Schwartz started blogging, during his tenure as a technology evangelist and CEO at Sun Microsystems, he put a human face on the company, engaged with the users and developers and he helped to change those perceptions.

Intel, Microsoft and HP have also demonstrated how to connect and succeed with social media.

A study by Booz & Company and Buddy Media, shows that social media is coming into its own as a customer service tool, a way of conducting market research and even a way to handle internal communications. It all points to the fact that companies of every size are getting serious about social media and that means more money and resources going to support the cause. You have to deliver genuinely interesting and valuable content that meets the needs of your audience and actively engages them.

Facilitating Conversations

Word of mouth has long been the holy grail of marketing. Think back when you were going to purchase something and asked your friends and colleagues for recommendations. Now, it’s your social group online. Peer reviews, opinions and comments are now the number one influencer prior to purchase or decision online. Not only do you want them engaged with you, you want them talking positively about you to each other. Facilitating these conversations should be your ultimate goal.

Make it easy for them – provide excellent content that they will want to share and discuss. And then give them tools to make it easy to do this – send to a friend buttons, share this, bookmark this, subscribe, discuss, comment.

Since word of mouth, online conversations, reviews and comments are regarded as the most trusted forms of information today, getting people to talk about your product or service should be your goal.

Here are some examples:

Example 1: “Although I have not tried any other screen protectors for the iPhone 4, I have installed two different types (not SGP) on the iPod Touch. In comparison, the Steinheil Ultra Oleophobic was the easiest to apply (with a minimum of fuss and squeegeeing of air bubbles), the thinnest, and the closest in surface characteristics, both visible and tactile, to the glass itself. In use, it is the least visible and obtrusive of any screen protector I have used–although my experience is admittedly limited.” This comment was posted in the Amazon Forum.

Example 2: Ski Area Maps: “The best ski trail mapping app out there is Maprika – it uses “paper” resort trail maps and also shows your location fairly accurately with GPS. Selection of ski resorts it has is rather limited, but all major ones are there. Huge bonus is that you can see where your friends are on the hill. It’s easy to meet up after you took a break. The app is free, so it’s easy to try .” This comments was found on myStreamboat forum.

By providing an arena where people can connect with each other is a good way to help you connect with your critical audience. Small business is a perfect example. StartupNation is an example. StartupNation forums is a platform to learn, educate others, share stories, tips & tricks, and to provide constructive feedback.

So, jump in and find the platforms that you can create, contribute, and influence a constructive conversation. For help with your social media goals please see us at Matrix Marketing Group.

Tags: small business, social media, Social media marketing, social media strategy

Pick Your Social Media Platform & Creating and Delivering Content

Published by admin on January 3rd, 2012 | 1 Comment »

There is a wide range of social media tools to choose from and the task can be confusing. But if you have all your data collected, analyzed, and your content strategy in place, it’s easy to select the right tools for your campaign. Your research will help you with where to start.

If the majority of the conversation about your product is on Twitter, you’ll need a custom designed Twitter account. If you have brand evangelists making videos about your company, get a branded YouTube Channel up right away. So each social network platform will require a customized marketing plan.

Click to Enlarge

Here’s the list of social media tools:

Search Optimized press releases
Social Media News Release format – with multimedia and social bookmarks
Search optimized articles
News Feeds (RSS) to syndicate all your content
Socializing your news content – ‘share this’ buttons, tagging and bookmarking
Blogs
Micro blogging (Twitter)
Podcasts
Images
Video
Social Networks – Facebook, LinkedIn, niche networks
Social Media News Sites – Newsvine, StumbleUpon, digg
Widgets
Social Media News Room – gather and present all your social media content on your website

Now let’s move on the creating and delivering great content.

Creating and Delivering Content (Part II)

Once you have a content strategy (remember our past blog on the story engine) based on solid research great ideas will come to you about what to create and how to deliver this content.

Experimenting with a Facebook page and a Twitter feed often isn’t enough. You have to create supporting content – a company blog, an interactive website, interesting articles, images and videos.

You want bloggers and online reporters to write about you and send you traffic? Give them excellent content.

A resort or hotel should be writing about their destination – give people ideas of where to go and what to do. Use great images and videos. Take a look at how Big Sky Resort did this.

A non–profit can create compelling content that motivates bloggers to write about their cause. Feeding America: this is a great non-profit blog. It has it all:

Superior content
Non-intrusive yet effective calls to action
Good use of multi-media such as photography and video
Superb use of story-telling to align with objectives
Attractive and functional design
Convenient social sharing
Features that involve key stakeholders

Good content not only sparks conversations it also build links and draws the interested reader back. People will share the content and they’ll link to it from blog posts and tweets. This can raise your search visibility and drive lots of traffic to your content. Need ideas with a story engine stop by and visit us Click Here.

Tags: small business, social media, Social media marketing, social media strategy

Identifying Online Influencers & Developing Your Content Strategy

Published by mmgTweets on December 16th, 2011 | 5 Comments »

What is influence? Influence is the ability to alter or sway an individual’s or a group’s thoughts, beliefs, or actions.

What influences people online has changed dramatically in the last few years. The idea that the person with the most followers or subscribers has the biggest influence is no longer valid.

Today, influence is about authority, trust, and accuracy. You want to reach the bloggers and social networkers who have influence – those who can cause others to take action, change their perception and/or their behavior. It’s no different then what’s been taking place in PR for decades.

And they might not be the A-list bloggers or power users in a social network. It’s someone that other people trust and listen to. They’re the ones who send traffic to your blog or your website, because when they link to you or recommend your product, their followers tend to take action.

So, how do we measure influence? Although this is not yet an exact science, here are some of the parameters we use to determine which blogger and networkers to focus on.

Traffic – Unique visitors, page views, RSS subscribers
Inbound Links – Primarily contextual links from well-ranked sites and blogs
Reader Engagement – Time spent on site, comments
Recommendations – Retweets, bookmarking, tagging and sharing of content
Connections – Number of followers/mutual connections across multiple social sites
Track Record – Age of domain, number of blog posts, length of engagement
Traffic Referred to your site or blog – analytics tells which referring sites send the most traffic
Conversion rate of those visitors – what is the rate of conversion for each referring site?

Building flexibility in using different styles of influence is the key to achieving personal objectives while building or maintaining relationships. Now let’s discuss how you might develop your content strategy.

Developing Your Content Strategy

Back in 2001, Forrester Research asked people why they returned to a website and the overwhelming answer was ‘content.’ Well it still true today.

Success in social media depends on the quality of your content. It’s about engaging people and the key to engagement is good content. In social media people are creating, reading, saving, tagging and sharing content. If you don’t produce the kind of content they value, it won’t get re-published or shared.

How do you know what kind of content to create? Listen and observe. Get to know your markets and customers.

In the past we had to rely on agencies to have a ‘bright idea.’ But when you really listen to your audience content opportunities easily come to mind.

Example: Today we work in a telecommuting environment, so for many jobs employee’s still need to be connected. The online conferencing company realized an opportunity to connect with these companies and employees via informative articles and social media with their experts. Today GoToMeeting is one of the leading online conferencing company’s.

Example: a regional small business chiropractor involved in back rehabilitation (a blend of strength training and flexibility movements) found out that women turn to blogs for information, advice or recommendations. And what they value most is a review or comment from someone who has used their service. Typically, women most often call the chiropractor’s office – it was obvious that they needed to create content around the stories of women who had suffered with back pain and benefited from this program and get it to women bloggers.

Telling your story online in the right place to the right people gets results. But you need a well-thought out content strategy based on solid research to get those results. To begin develop a 6 month editorial calendar, just like the magazine have done for years. With your story engine you can excite and educate your audience.

Tags: small business, social media, Social media marketing, social media strategy

Discovery: Bloggers and Relevant Communities

Published by admin on December 6th, 2011 | 8 Comments »

Every day another blog, social network or social media site seems to pop up. There are now literally thousands of places online where conversations are taking place.

Here’s some stats for 2010:

107 trillion emails were sent
255 websites
1.97 internet users
152 million blogs
25 billion tweets
800 million Facebook members
100 million LinkedIn members

How can you effectively divide up your time and resources so that you participate in the places that make sense for your business?

Part of your research – listening to what’s being said online – has to include who is talking about you and where the conversations are taking place.

Here are some examples:

An online college discovered that there is conversation about online courses in online learning forums, students talk about online college degrees and so do humans resource professionals. These people all have their own niche social networks. There is also a lot of chatter about online courses on Twitter as well.

Once you know where the majority of the conversations take place you can proactively allocate your resources to optimize your ROI.

The following research graph captures the results of where people are sharing influence online in Social Media and networking sites, as well as blog posts, rating and review sites.

According to eMarketer the number of influencers is growing, as more and more people publish content online. These stats are a bit outdated; however, they provide an interesting projection on the number of American adult Internet users who are word of mouth influencers:

No longer is it about how many people did we reach, it’s have we reached the right people who want to engage and communicate with us?

Find the bloggers who talk about your company or product and those who talk about your industry, but have not mentioned your company.
Monitoring blog posts – even if you do it manually in Google Blog Search – will show you who is writing on a certain key topic. You should also track mentions of your brand and generic keywords that describe what you do in social news sites like digg, Newsvine, and StumbleUpon (for more information on monitoring click here).
Track content about you and your industry in social networks like Facebook and Twitter, as well as smaller, niche networks that are relevant to your brand or organization.

There are so many small social network built around a group that is passionate about a subject. Find the ones that are relevant to your company or organization.

Niche social communities:

43 Things, A social networking site that targets goal-setting, members are interlinked by the goals they are going after and the goals they have completed.

ModCloth, an online retailer of vintage and retro clothing from independent designers, joined Instagram this summer. After creating an account, ModCloth discovered a strong pre-existing fashion community.

Care2, Green living beyond just social networking, Care2 offers email, blogging, shopping, and more, all catered to those wishing to live a green life.

BlackPlanet, One of the oldest social networks, and the most popular special interest social networking site, BlackPlanet caters to African-Americans.

The same applies in social news sites, like StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Digg. Find members who talk about you and about your industry or competitors. Once you have the full list, you can rank them according to influence.

Members of these communities won’t respond well to advertising messages; instead, take the time to understand the networks’ specific culture and then determine how to assimilate and participate in a manner that supports overall goals, such as increased brand loyalty and awareness.

Establish Your Share of Voice

Published by admin on November 15th, 2011 | 16 Comments »

There millions of conversations online every day. When you tap into the ones about your industry, what share of voice do you have?

Your share of voice (SOV) is the total volume of advertising you own in a market. While advertising is important, with social PR, your share of voice is much more complex and diversified over many platforms. A Share of Voice is a brand’s or group of brands’ advertising weight expressed as a percentage of a defined total market or market segment in a given time period.

In planning for public relations you should be monitoring these to understand your brands total SOV and sentiment:

Blogs
Microblogs
Message Boards and Forums
Wikis
Video and Photo Sharing
Social Networks
Traditional media

Do people use a generic description of what you do, or do they talk about your products or services specifically?

Example: Do adult learners talk about online educations and colleges or do they mention specific brands and products? Do they mention your product? What percentage of the total conversation about online education mentions your products?

Are the comments positive or negative? What is the ratio of positive/negative? Are your key messages appearing in these conversations? If not, what content is trending? How are your competitors faring in these conversations? The context of your content in a competitive set shows how your brand stacks up against competitors online.

Markets are Conversations

Share of voice leads to market share which leads to sales. Establishing and tracking share of voice used to be an advertising metric, but since the most trusted form of advertising is now conversations, it’s become an important one for social media. A gain in Share of Voice is an important measurement for social media programs.

Let’s shift to “Setting Goals and Benchmarks”

Listening to the online conversation allows you to tap into what people are interested in right now, what they talk about, and what they like and dislike.

Why are you doing it? In the end you have to produce results and this is where you should write it down. There are a lot of different goals. What has to happen so you would say it’s working? Select the one that makes most sense in your business:

Sales
Brand awareness
Brand reputation
Share of voice (SOV)
Customer loyalty
Lower support cost
Reduce R&D spend

In the beginning select just one of these and build your strategy to achieve that. “Don’t try to boil the ocean.” After you have made some progress with your initial goal and have real measurable results that reflect on your bottom line then you can select another goal from the list.

This information will give you the insights that lead to the goals you should pursue in social media.

Everyone on the team has to agree on what target you’re aiming for, and how you’ll know when you hit it… or not! And set the benchmarks before you start so you know what you’re measuring and where you are now. Then you can go forward and track your progression.

Here are a few business goals for social media you can think about:

Brand Reputation: The “iPhone Tracking” conversation caused a flood of negative comments about Apples data tracking. They set a goal to reverse the problem. The ratio of positive to negative comments became one of their key performance indicators and they maybe achieving their goal. More recently the battery drain in the iPhone 4S.

Increased Brand Awareness: For this project, the challenge was clear: Increase awareness among college students for the launch of Adobe Student Editions in North America; they wanted students to know that they can purchase Adobe products at a steep discount for students (up to 80% off the full retail price).

Facebook is a natural fit to help Adobe reach college students. But, they also know that students are bombarded with media each day. We needed to engage with students in a way that would be fun, show them what they could do with our products, as well as let them know about the discount.

About 10% of our page visitors played the game and, of those who played, 6% clicked the “Share” button at the end of the game, and 6% clicked “Buy Now” at the end of the game. Due to this game and media placement, our page received over 6,000 new fans too.

Increase share of voice: New Belgium Brewing, located in Fort Collins, CO, increased its social opportunity that resulted in a co-branded Skinny Dip beer promotion with the environmental website Grist.org. Grist developed an educational Facebook quiz about water advocacy sponsored by Skinny Dip beer. The quiz was promoted virally and through traditional online ads on Grist. The campaign has logged over 3,200 engagements so far resulting in more than 1,380,000 impressions.

Thought Leadership: Sun Microsystems is a perfect example. CEO Jonathan Schwartz credits blogging and social media with the revitalization of their brand (Jon’s blog).

Increasing Sales: Dell has found a way to use Twitter to generate sales. InternetNews reported that Dell has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts via Twitter. People who sign up to follow Dell on Twitter receive messages when discounted products are available the company’s Home Outlet Store. They can click over to purchase the product or forward the information to others.

Sony have proved the power of Twitter with a fairly covert social media campaign that incentivized people to purchase their products. They offered over 1,500 Twitter users the chance to build a customized Sony Vaio laptop, as well as offering them a 10% discount. And it worked, as they reported an increase in Sony Vaio sales from Twitter in that period of $1.5 million.

Reduce R&D spend: Microsoft, Dell’s Idea Storm, My Starbuck’s Idea, and Crayola’s kid’s comments have all tapped into the insight of their customers. In a survey, 98% of consumers indicate, “I’d definitely buy a product I helped to evolve.” And for the company, it gets valuable feedback to help define its product strategy and reduce R&D cost and expensive customer service spending.

Just do it! Start small and build on it. Get out there and do it. Every day.

Remember to click the RSS to get this and future feeds and share it with a friend.

Social Media Monitoring Tools: Find Your Brand’s Social Mentions and Listen

Published by admin on November 8th, 2011 | 12 Comments »

More and more businesses are engaged or are getting into social media. Social media is the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue. Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter are some of the main outlets for social media, but there are numerous types of social media like blogs, wikis, forums, chat rooms, etc.

What social media monitoring tool do you use? CoTweet? HootSuite? Seesmic? Have you ever wondered who else uses the tools you use? Matrix Marketing Group out together a list of which social media monitoring tools are best, and how marketers, entrepreneurs, PR folks and consultants are using them.

So, try out some of the free social media monitoring services and this way you get a sense of what is available and fits your needs.

We have collected over 50 social media monitoring tools. Here’s the list:

Addictomatic (http://addictomatic.com)

Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s a tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and get info on what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on. You can personalize your results dashboard and keep coming back to your personalized results dashboard for that search. News pages provide the latest headlines on topics such as entertainment, politics, shopping, sports and more.

Blogpulse (http://www.blogpulse.com)

BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. Blogs, a term that is short for weblogs, represent the fastest-growing medium of personal publishing and the newest method of individual expression and opinion on the Internet. Different searches include basic, advanced, trend, URL and conversation tracker.

Boardreader (http://boardreader.com)

BoardReader allows users to search multiple message boards simultaneously, allowing users to share information in a truly global sense. Boardreader is focused on creating the largest repository of searchable information for our users. Users can find answers to their questions from others who share similar interests. Our goal is to allow our users to search the “human to human” discussions that exist on the Internet.

Boardtracker (http://www.boardtracker.com)

Discover the influencers, monitor and protect your brand and reputation, find and engage your customers and critics. BoardTracker is a forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it is posted.

CoTweet (https://cotweet.com)

CoTweet is a comprehensive Web-based social media engagement, management and reporting solution that helps companies of all sizes engage, track and analyze conversations. The free version is for individuals and organizations that manage a small number of Twitter accounts and need only basic features to engage and manage their conversations. Free version includes scheduling, conversation history, email notifications containing your latest mentions, team collaboration tools and access to Twitter follower profiles.

Facebook Search (http://www.facebook.com/search.php)

Facebook search is notoriously bad and will not find much, but if you have nothing else to do then give it a shot. It relies heavily on your social graph so the results you get may not be meaningful for your target audience.

Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts)

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (blogs, news, etc.) based on your searches. Enter the topic you wish to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you’ll receive. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include: monitoring a developing news story and keeping current on a competitor or industry.

Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com)

Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice. Your results include all blogs. The blog index is continually updated, so you’ll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results.

Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends)

Trends allows you to compare search terms and websites. With Google Trends you can get insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns of websites or keywords. You can compare data for up to five websites and view related sites and top searches for each one.

HootSuite (http://hootsuite.com)

Monitor and post to multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Create custom reports from over 30 individual report modules to share with clients and colleagues. Track brand sentiment, follower growth, plus incorporate Facebook Insights and Google analytics. Draft and schedule messages to send at a time your audience is most likely to be online. HootSuite has the dashboard for your iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android.

HowSociable (http://howsociable.com)

Free monitoring tool for measuring your brands or keywords using 32 social networking sites. HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.

Icerocket (http://www.icerocket.com)

Blog Tools, create your own Trend Graphs with the IceRocket Trend Tool. Enter keywords to see mentions trended over time. Trend Tool, enter items to see mentions trended over time. Enter up to five queries under Trend Terms. Type in the label you would like associated with each query under Display Labels. Search tool for blogs, web, Twitter, Facebook, news, and images.

Klout (http://klout.com)

Klout’s mission is to help every individual understand and leverage their influence. Klout measures influence in Twitter to find the people the world listens to. It analyzes content to identify the top influencers.

Mentionmap (http://apps.asterisq.com/mentionmap)

Explore your Twitter network. Discover which people interact the most and what they’re talking about. It’s also a great way to find relevant people to follow. The visualization runs right in your browser and displays data from Twitter. Mentionmap loads user’s tweets and finds the people and hashtags they talked about the most. In this data visualization, mentions become connections and discussions between multiple users emerge as clusters.

Monitter (http://www.monitter.com)

It’s a twitter monitor, it lets you monitor the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying. Just type three words into the three search boxes and within seconds you’ll start seeing relevant tweets streaming live.

NutShellMail (http://nutshellmail.com)

NutshellMail lets you organize, monitor, and interact with all your social networks from a consolidated email digest delivered directly to your favorite inbox on a schedule that you choose. Nutshellmail supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Ning.

Omgili (http://omgili.com/graphs.html)

Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. The Buzz is the percentage of the term out of the total number of discussions Omgili covered on a specific date.

PostRank (http://www.postrank.com)

Postrank has two tools. The PostRank Analytics (https://analytics.postrank.com/) gives you insight about your sites engagement scores and. Social engagement analytics covers over 20 of the top social networks. Find out who are your influencers, which content drives engagement, what posts are most important. And the best part is that you can also monitor your competitors. You can connect PostRank with your Google Analytics to get even better results. PostRanks top ranked content (http://www.postrank.com/main) helps you to find most important blogs on any topic, use it to monitor your competition

Quarkbase (http://www.quarkbase.com)

You can find out how good a site is, get comprehensive website details, discover competitors and analyze them. One can call Quarkbase ‘whois on steroids’ or ‘imdb for websites’, which provides detailed website information like people, traffic, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity and much more.

ReviewAnalyst (www.ReviewAnalyst.com)

ReviewAnalyst is a tool that lets hotels and restaurants take a proactive approach to user-generated reviews, blogs, videos & images. With ReviewAnalyst, you can track, analyze and react to what people are saying about your business on the major travel, review, and social media sites.

The most important goal of our application is to make it simple and easy to manage and monitor user-generated content about your hotel. Greater efficiency allows you to be more successful with your Social Media strategies. We also provide email alerts and weekly updates to help keep even the casual observer current on the latest activity.

Radian 6 (http://www.radian6.com)

Radian 6 is an application allows you to engage with your customers via social media. This is one of the best tools around because it allows you to smoothly, and discreetly uncover the most prominent opinions of top influencers in the social media arena. You can also measure and track engagement while determining which conversations in chat rooms, forums, etc. are having a major influence towards the online perception of your brand.

Samepoint (http://www.samepoint.com)

SamePoint.com tracks millions of conversations, taking place across in blogs and social media sites. SamePoint converts discussions into web pages, or permalinks, and organizes them within a tag cloud. SamePoint can serve as the nexus where the conversations meet, providing a single place for all discussions on a specific topic.

SharedCount (http://sharedcount.com)

Track your shares, likes, tweets, and more. Enter a web address of a page and find out how much it has been shared in different social networking and bookmarking sites. Currently includes Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and StumbleUpon.

Seesmic (http://seesmic.com)

Seesmic is a suite of social media management and collaboration tools that provide everything to build their brands online. Seesmic has applications on every platform, including mobile, and a marketplace of third-party plugins. Seesmic gives you social media monitoring, updating and engaging in real time.

Social Mention (http://socialmention.com)

Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content into a single stream of information. It allows you to track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors over one hundred social media sites.

SocialPointer (http://www.socialpointer.com)

SocialPointer is a real-time social media marketing platform for marketing agencies and individuals, It enables them to track, monitor and respond in real-time to relevant social mentions and user conversation. SocialPointer lets you monitor, listen, respond and engage.

SocialOomph (http://www.socialoomph.com)

Schedule tweets, track keywords, extended Twitter profiles, save and reuse drafts, view @mentions and retweets, purge your DM inbox, personal status feed — your own tweet engine, unlimited accounts.

StepRep (http://steprep.myfrontsteps.com)

StepRep provides an overview of the conversations people are having about your business online. Anytime your business is mentioned, anywhere on the web, you’ll hear about it. Sources are scanned continuously to bring you the most complete and up-to-date data on how your business is perceived. The data is broken down and analyzed in reports that can help you target your marketing and increase your online customer engagement.

SocialSeek (http://socialseek.com/app/home)

Get all the latest tweets, news, videos, photos, and more on any topic you want in one place. There’s a Socialseek site for everything and you can even make your own. I found some of the news sources other tools missed.

Surchur (http://surchur.com)

Surchur is the ultimate dashboard to right now. The surchmeter shows you how popular a keyword is on different sources: surchur, blogs and twitter.

Technorati Blogsearch (http://technorati.com)

Search Technorati and note the authority and rank of the blogs listed in the results. Authority measures the site’s standing and influence in the blogosphere. Rank shows what position this authority gives the site. It is not a very good tool for lesser known blogs as it misses a lot of great sites.

Tinker (http://www.tinker.com)

Tinker helps you stay on top of your favorite events by showing you the latest buzz from Twitter and across the social web. Create or follow an event stream by choosing a keyword. An event could be anything: the Oscars, a new iPhone release, a movie premiere, a book launch, or a Superbowl party. Tinker also lets you search for the top news, topics and places people are talking about.

TipTop (http://feeltiptop.com)

TipTop Search is a Twitter-based search engine that helps you discover the best and most current advice, opinions, answers for any search, and also real people to directly engage and share experiences with. A search on any topic reveals people’s emotions and experiences about it, as well as other concepts that they are discussing in connection with the original search.

Topsy (http://topsy.com)

Topsy is a real-time search engine. Topsy indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain. Topsy’s algorithms identify influencers for any searchable criteria, using these influence calculations to rank results. It displays results for related terms and articles, trending topics, identifies experts (influencers) and shows you trackback pages for everything in its index.

Trendistic (http://trendistic.com)

Trendistic allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals. This way, it shows how the frequency of one to four-word phrases fluctuate over time. The result is a visualization of what’s popular Twitter users. You can enter a phrase in the search box to see how its frequency varies over time, or several different topics separated by commas to see how they relate: try comparing “skype” and “microsoft”(http://trendistic.com/skype/microsoft), to see how powerful it can be.

Twazzup (http://www.twazzup.com)

Twazzup is real-time news platform. It allows you to filter the news out of live Twitter content. It’s useful for understanding who are the influencers on a given topic and what are to trending sources.

TweetBeep (http://www.tweetbeep.com)

Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything, with hourly updates. You can keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL, Great for online reputation management, catching all your @replies and @mentions.

TweetPsych (http://tweetpsych.com)

TweetPsych uses linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. The service analyzes your last 1000 tweets. It works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content distribution platform.

TweetReach (http://tweetreach.com)

TweetReach is a social analytics tool that provides detailed metrics on the impact of your social media conversations. TweetReach measures the impact of social media conversations. It is a simple way to measure how many accounts received your tweets, how far your message has traveled, and who is influencing the conversation about your brand or product.

Twendz (http://twendz.waggeneredstrom.com)

The twendz Twitter-mining Web application uses the power of Twitter Search, highlighting conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in. Using the twendz application gives a glimpse into what’s on people’s minds and their emotional reaction. Mining Twitter conversations alerts you to brewing trends, conversation topics and points of view.

Twitalyzer (http://www.twitalyzer.com)

Twitalyzer knows who is in your social network and where they live, allowing you to be more targeted in your outreach efforts. Twitalyzer provides Twitter’s most robust benchmark reporting, ranking Twitter users ten different ways.

Twitrratr (http://twitrratr.com)

Twitrratr built a list of positive keywords and a list of negative keywords. It searches Twitter for a keyword and the results are cross-referenced against adjective lists and then displayed accordingly.

TwitterCounter (http://twittercounter.com)

Twitter Counter is the number one site to track your Twitter stats. Twitter Counter provides statistics of Twitter usage and tracks over 14 million users. Twitter Counter also offers a variety of widgets and buttons that people can add to their blogs, websites or social network profiles to show recent Twitter visitors and number of followers.

Twitter Grader (http://twittergrader.com)

Twitter Grader lets you check the power of your Twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded. Just enter your Twitter username and you’ll get an instant grade and report. It looks at a variety of factors including the number of followers, power of those followers and the level to which you are engaging the community.

Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com)

Use Twitter Search if you need to find out what’s happening in the world beyond your personal timeline. Twitter Search lets you search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through our service. Advanced Search allows you to create your queries using many advanced operators.

Twitter StreamGraphs (http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterStreamGraphs/view.php)

A StreamGraph is shown for the latest 1000 tweets which contain the search word. You can also enter a Twitter ID preceded by the ‘@’ symbol to see the latest tweets from that user. The default search query is ‘data visualization’ but a new one can be typed into the text box at the top of the application.

Twitturly (http://twitturly.com)

Twitturly tracks the URLs flying around the Twitterverse and provides a real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter. When someone tweets a URL, Twitturly applies it as a vote for that URL. The more votes a URL has in the last 24 hours, the higher it ranks on Twitturly’s Top100.

WhatHashtag (http://whathashtag.circulorojo.es)

WhatHashtag is service that allows you to find the most used Twitter hashtags for the keywords you enter. Search for the keyword and you will automatically get the most popular hashtags used worldwide to discuss your topic. The result retrieves the last 1.000 tweets related to your keyword, and orders hashtags by frequency of use. Using WhatHashtag you will gain visibility when tweeting your opinions, being read beyond your followers in the most effective way.

Visible Technologies (http://www.visibletechnologies.com)

This social media tool focuses mostly on putting into action effective social media strategies. Visible Technologies has successfully helped many companies manage their online branding by doing something so many companies fail to do – listen to their customers. Utilizing the truCast product, companies can listen in on what is being said about their brand online.

WhoUnfollowedMe (http://who.unfollowed.me)

Who.unfollowed.me is a service that helps you track your unfollowers, in real time, without waiting for a DM, or email. It allows you to check your unfollowers on your schedule, every 15 minutes, without waiting for an email or a direct message

Wildfire Social Media Monitor (http://monitor.wildfireapp.com)

Measure your performance. Glean insights about the growth of your social media fanbase on the leading social networks. With daily tracking, you have visibility into growth trends small and large. Gauge your social media success against others in your industry by comparing your follower bases across the leading social networks. Alert system will inform you of meaningful trends and activity that’s relevant to your social presence.

This may seem like a lot to jump into, try not to get overwhelmed. Once you get your listening plan all set up you will find it hard to turn off. It can be a real challenge to monitor everything at first so take it in strides and find what works best for you. Good luck from Matrix Marketing Group (www.matrixmarketinggroup.com)!

Tags: monitoring social media, social media, Social media marketing

Social Media Marketing: Listening to the Conversation (Part I)

Published by admin on November 3rd, 2011 | 8 Comments »

For the past two years or so, the social media trend has delighted, baffled, and concerned marketers and advertisers all around the world. They have had to learn quickly that the different ways consumers access the internet across multiple time zones, networks, and devices is forcing them to change the way they do business.

For the past 100 years companies have had the luxury of deciding what they will produce and sell, what their brand message will be and how they will deliver it to their audience. The Internet changed that. We’re in the age of social media marketing. Strategy in this new business environment is just as vital as it has ever been. Don’t get distracted by the slew of new social media tools or lured into spending resources just because “everyone is on Twitter.”

So where do you start? Start by first listening to the online conversation.

Many organizations just want to jump into a conversation. They often chose blogs, but we recommend that these organizations first test the climate of conversations before actually jump in. While there are dozens of free tools that can help measure the conversation, many of these tools are not designed for in-depth analysis, benchmarking, or to show the impact of traditional media on businesses and their markets.

So even “listening” to the conversation is not as simple as it might seem, whether that listening is part of a preliminary process to understand the environment or an active monitoring program to measure the impact of some event on a corporation’s reputation or strategy. And to back up even further, merely making the decision to engage in, and measure, consumer-generated media is just the first step, given that the influence of social media itself is often difficult to pin down. But don’t fret.

Social media offers you the opportunity of doing in-depth research at virtually no cost. It is possible to set goals and get ROI, but you have to know where you’re going and what you want to achieve. Tap into the online conversations (just like with press clipping before the Web) to find out:

who is talking about you
what they are saying
is it positive or negative
where are the conversations taking place
what communities talk about you
what are your competitors doing in social media
what’s the buzz about them
what content resonates with your audience
are there subjects of interest you could provide content for
what social sites have the most conversation
who are the “fire-starters” you need to connect with
who are the influencers in these blogs or communities
where are the opportunities and threats

Once you have this information you can allocate your resources wisely. You’ll know where to start and what social sites you should be concentrating on. Once you understand what being said it’s much easier to plot a path to your destination. A social media marketing strategy is your road-map. So, what’s up next? The next conversation with be a comprehensive list of social media tracking sites. (www.matrixmarketinggroup.com)

Tags: small business, social media, Social media marketing, social media strategy

Marketing Audits: Why Principles Of Accountability In Marketing Are Useful

Published by mmgTweets on October 31st, 2011 | 6 Comments »

What is it? A marketing audit is a comprehensive, systematic, independent and periodic evaluation of a company’s marketing assets. It is an effective tool in reviewing the competence of a marketing strategy, analyzing the objectives, policies and strategies of the company’s marketing department as well as the manner and the means employed in attaining these goals. Think of it like an annual medical checkup.

The marketing audit of a company or division is reflected in the degree to which it exhibits five major attributes of a marketing orientation: customer philosophy, integrated marketing organization, adequate marketing information, strategies orientation, and operational efficiency. Each attribute is measured. The audit that you completed is based on those five attributes mentioned above.

Click here to start your marketing audit. Once completed we will have your results back to you within 48 hours.

A company’s management should do a marketing audit on a regular basis to determine a reference point, reflecting evolution in external business environment, internal experience, and strategy development.

More audits are being performed in financial departments today due to the irresponsible behavior of a few top executives. Why stop there? Might it not be useful also to look at marketing investments as a fertile field for scrutiny? A marketing audit would measure profit and loss just as an accounting audit does. That is, it would measure return on investment (ROI). This article points out the benefits a company can derive from measuring the ROI of marketing to see whether this vital activity is being used to its full potential.

The Problem

While marketing budgets are often being cut because they are seen by many executives as a superfluous expense item, marketing has evolved in some quarters to go beyond a discretionary item in the budget to being a critical component of tight budgets in the present economy. This evolution has been driven by several factors, a key one being a new perception of how important marketing is for growth. Simply understanding that better marketing is crucial is not enough, however. The impact of a company’s marketing programs is often poorly measured, so their full potential cannot be known nor fully realized. Given the current depressed economic climate, it is essential for a company to be able to measure its ROI. When a company cuts marketing spending, it cuts the one function whose sole purpose is to increase sales.

History

Over the past twenty four months or so, many high technology and other companies were blind-sided by the economic downturn and did not know how to react. When some firms finally figured it out, it was too late. Jobs were lost, budgets slashed, market share lost and company value diminished. Of all times to stop investing in activities designed to sell more, a recession or period of soft demand or uncertainty would seem the worst; yet companies do it all the time.

Further, limited internal resources are causing increasing competition between marketing and other departments. Companies are looking to increase their new prospects while shortening the sales cycle by improving the marketing efforts without increasing the budgets. When budgets are thus limited, it is important to know which tactics within the program are working and which are not, so strategies can be realigned accordingly. In effect, the push for ROI is intended to justify marketing and demonstrate its effect on the company’s bottom line.

The Solution

Yearly, semi-annually, and monthly audits in the sales and marketing organizations can help marketing executives, top management, and investors ensure they are doing the right things to help drive growth for their organizations. Information gleaned from these audits can align the marketing organization and put in place the scorecard to keep it on track.

A marketing audit is a thorough examination and evaluation of marketing practices and results. It offers a baseline for performance measurements and a framework for effective business planning to maximize positive external perception and demand generation. Many companies choose to measure the quality of marketing by the amount of generated leads as a means of determining marketing effectiveness. Measurements, an audit, must be based on marketing strategy and programs based on pre-established criteria that include factors such as quantity of leads, sales cycle reduction, and lower cost per sale. Periodically, this audit can be revisited to see if the changes have had a positive impact on company performance in the areas of sales growth and company value, or indicate where adjustments may be required, such as positioning, or demand generation on the sales cycles.

The audit helps the organization understand aspects of strategic importance in sales and marketing. Its results become the blueprint for strategic decisions, for future sales and marketing plans by tying funds for sales and marketing to direct sales and leads generated. For example, if the sales cycle is twelve months, the associated income must be discounted back to the date the marketing program funds were spent under the “time-value-of money” concept.

Additionally, an audit helps the company determine the value of a sale and a sales lead. Value of a sale itself is fairly easy to determine-income generated after all expenses incurred-but the value of a lead is trickier. Is the lead strong or weak, we ask. What is its income potential? Where is it in the buying cycle? What are the chances of closing the lead? Marketing measurement programs-audits-that factors in all of these variables provide a detailed picture of a marketing program’s ROI and are critical for a company to stay in business.

There are no permanent “right” answers in marketing. Customers’ needs and wants are moving targets, and marketing programs require testing and retesting to find the most profitable formula. A marketing audit is the way to achieve success by providing an interim report card to help you and your staff tap into inherent resource. Whatever industry your company serves, whether or not you work with a marketing agency, your company executives should insist on developing robust measurement practices to assess and demonstrate effectively the value of your marketing efforts.

Click here to get a free marketing audit in less than 48 hours>>>

George Schildge, Senior Partner at Matrix Marketing Group a full-service marketing and public relations firm that helps business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) small to midsized companies with affordable marketing, branding, and growth strategies. He can be reached at www.matrixmarketinggroup.com or 650.229.8510.

Tags: marketing audits, performance marketing, startup, turnaround

A Guide: Social media strategies for small businesses

Published by admin on October 25th, 2011 | 5 Comments »

Social media marketing and the businesses that utilize it have become more sophisticated. More small businesses are beginning to understand how to best leverage online tools to build a community and recognize that an online conversations are the foundations of social marketing, but most do not know what is next.

Click here to see what people are saying about your company>>>

For the next 4 weeks, we will walk you through strategies for small businesses that may already have small online communities and understand how to create an online presence, but don’t know what to do next. So be sure to follow us.

We will begin with the definition of a social media strategy. It is a technique that goes beyond the typical social media presence. Before moving forward with a social media strategy, it is important that your business understands social marketing, has experience engaging consumers, and that you possess an understanding of online marketing. Follow us for the next 6 weeks and you will have the tools for success in this new social web.

And here’s an outline:

Social Media Overview
Follow and Listen to Conversations
Establish Share of Voice
Set Goals and Metrics
Find Bloggers and Communities
Identify Key Influencers
Develop a Content Strategy
Pick The Right Tools
Create and Deliver the Content
Engage and Facilitate Conversations
Measure Results
Conclusion

At the end of the 6 week process we will publish the Whitepaper just in time for the holidays. Call us anytime and we will offer you an one hour consulting session to help you kick start or improve your social media objectives. If you can’t wait give us a call at 650-229-8510 or see our website and get started today!

Tags: Bloggers and Communities, Share of Voice, Social media marketing

Faceoff+: The Battle of Facebook and Google+

Published by admin on October 20th, 2011 | 3 Comments »

Google+ was recently fully released to the public in an effort to compete with Facebook.

But Google is a Search Engine. Why would they compete with Facebook, a social media website?

Google has grown exponentially in less than 10 years starting as a search engine (GOOG). Google has expanded its business from a search engine into creating a browser, mobile OS, e-mail and more since their start. They provide a lot of free tools to compliment their other products like Google Analytics. This data tracks any user’s interaction with a website. Google is no longer just a search engine, they are in the data business. Google is a billion dollar company that makes a majority of their revenue from AdWords which is an online advertising solution for businesses. They have created an advertising platform that has revolutionized the world of marketing.

Facebook provides more personalized data; an opt-in of who you are and what you like. To tie in that type of information to your search history can provide more information about you, giving context and feedback to their search results for their customers (advertisers). Google released Google Plus in late June for beta testing and grew rapidly.

With its still-in-limited-field-test social network Google+, Google looks poised to challenge Facebook head-on in the increasingly important social media space. Some analysts give the edge to Facebook with its large head start — the company claims more than half a billion active users worldwide, half of whom log onto the site each day. Other pundits point to Google’s large number of users across multiple products along with its engineering prowess as factors making it a formidable challenger.

Users

Google has a edge globally, according to ComScore Data Mine: Google reached a billion unique visitors worldwide, while Facebook rang in at 713.6 million.

Source: The Nielsen Company

Google’s lead is narrower in the U.S., where it had 155 million unique visitors from desktop and laptop computers in May compared with Facebook’s 140 million, the Nielsen Company reported. The Nielsen survey does not include mobile devices.

However, Facebook users are reported to be unhappy with the social media site. Last year, it scored “in the bottom 5% of all measured private sector companies and in the same range as airlines and cable companies, two perennially low-scoring industries with terrible customer satisfaction,” according to the July 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business Report.

Conclusion: Google is still the Internet’s leading brand in terms of number of users. Facebook has an enormous base of regular users who spend a considerable amount of time on its site — much more time than on Google. However, Facebook’s users were not particularly happy with their experience last year. It will be interesting to see whether Facebook can boost it’s customer satisfaction scores. So who wins? The social media customer. Whenever there is competition it tends to create a better product experience.

Phone: 650-229-8510

Marketing Audits: Why Principles Of Accountability In Marketing Are Useful

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