Talk It Up!

Six Social Media Tools I'm Glad I Discovered in 2010

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As a social media geek and content curator, I'm always trying out new toys and apps. There were a lot of remarkable tools that became available in 2010. To cap off the year, my top six:

1. HootSuite This Twitter app turned social media curation tool has grown dramatically in the past year. I use both the web interface (on my laptop) and the iPhone app. Not only does it enable posting and tracking of multiple streams for multiple Twitter accounts, the owls over at HootSuite headquarters also added Facebook status update posting as well as posting to any Facebook Page that you have administrative rights on. I became a fan of its scheduling ability, as I tend to take an hour each morning to schedule the day's Tweets and posts for the various entities I represent, and when HootSuite added the bulk Tweet scheduler tool this month, I thought I'd died and gone to social media manager heaven. In fact, I even pay for the Pro version so I can manage six different Twitter accounts, five Facebook accounts/Pages and LinkedIn to boot. More than worth it!

    

   

    

2. Google In-Page Analytics This is a nifty visual report available from the Content section of your Google Analytics reports. It enables you to visually analyze your website pages in order to assess how users interact with those pages, and helps you to analyze click patterns at a glance. For visual learners like me, this little tool helps me to see at a glance whether the visual layout is working or not.

   
   


3. SEOMoz's Open Site Explorer is a link popularity and backlink analysis tool, perfect for those of us who want to optimize the sites we manage without spending all day delving into the murky world of SEO. Enter a site and see an analysis of up to 10,000 links as well as page and domain authority and linking root domains.

    

   
   
   

    

4. Twitalyzer is a Twitter analysis tool offering "serious analysis for social relationships." It offers graphs and analysis not only of the Twitter account's Klout and influence, but it also drills down into analyzing the level of influence and reach of the account's friends, reTweeters and influencer types. Likewise, the free service offers a plethora of insights into Tweets, tags and sentiment as well as attractively graphing the user's activity by hour, day, week or month.

    

   
   

   
   

   
   

   
   

   
   
   

   
   

5. Poll Everywhere (hat tip to Shauna Causey for turning me on to this!) is an audience response system that uses mobile phones, twitter, and the web. This is a fun tool for kicking off a live presentation with a quick audience poll and viewing the real-time results, live, on your slides. Responses are displayed in real-time on pretty, real-time charts in PowerPoint or Keynote.




6. KnowEm Handy service for securing your name or brand across every social site where it is available. Just starting out? Select your consistent brand ID and find out every site where it's available. Got a few accounts but want the freedom to expand? Go here to see where your brand ID is still available.
7. And a bonus... Zippo iPhone app Not as earth-shattering for social media management, but a lot of fun all the same. I've used this app in countless movie theaters, karaoke venues and other live events, and it's always fun to hear the giggles cascading through the smoke-free audience as I sway with the music. :-)

What about you? What are your must-have tools of 2010? Any apps, analyzers or content management tools you can't live without this year?

Engaging in communities of interest: doing the work

Holly Browns shares with Social Media Breakfast Seattle  how to engage as a brand in communities of interest

This week, Holly Brown, Chief Innovation Officer of R2 Integrated (and former strategist for MRM Worldwide, Ogilvy and Mather, Microsoft and Disney) offered insights at Seattle's Social Media Breakfast on a burning marketing challenge: in the age of social networking and peer recommendations being valued over that of corporate representatives, how is a well-intentioned brand supposed to communicate with its fans and detractors? That is, how and where is a brand supposed to engage?

It was a packed event, and I'm happy to say that Brown shied away from easy answers, tips, tricks and tools. Instead, she focused on insightful questions that marketers can use to determine the best approach for their brand. My best takeaways:

The state of the social web

• Marketers are facing now the same issues in the new social media space as when the internet was new: who, what and how to engage there.
• A shift has occurred in marketing; so let's acknowledge it. Companies used to control the message. With social media, customers control the message.
• The web is a buying engine, and communities of interest (such as forums, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc.) are where the action is.
• What is unique about social networks in comparison to the original internt (Web 1.0) is that the create a situation allowing for serendipitous discovery of information. 

Configuring an engagement strategy

• When determining which communities of interest to engage in, the number one qualifier should be the relevance of discussion and participation happening therein. "Fish where the fish are."
• Social Media is integral and foundational; it's not to be tacked on to an existing strategy. Social media participation is the hub not the spoke.
• And if you're not convinced yet, the best idea for having research and a rationale for your engagement strategy: in the marketing world, solid rational equals budget. 
• Many ask how to build community. Don't. Don't "build community;" instead figure out how to become an invited guest in the social space.

And Brown's final word of advice: when you implement, keep in mind that automated tools can't do everything. Measurement is all well and good, but there is no replacement for getting into the community, listening and engaging to make qualitative decisions and evaluations.

Missed it and want to hear more? Listen to Holly's podcast interview here, or her slide deck below:

 

Brands as Publishers in the Age of P2P Communications

View more presentations from SMB Seattle.

Why no one clicks on your Twitter links

Twitter metrics reveal curation wins over original content

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When I was researching the best skills for a Community Manager to have, one of the qualifications that came up was this: a combination of head (penchant for analytics and measurement) and heart (warm, welcoming personality).

And I still maintain that the best way to build one's Twitter presence is though being a caring, personable, generous person, rather than by primarily gaming the analytics. My top Twitter tips are usually "be a real person, not a brand" and "listen, ask questions, be thoughtful and fun."

So I was a bit disheartened when I delved into my new favorite Twitter analytics tool, Twitalyzer, to see the clickthrough rates of the last week's Tweets. What I saw surprised me for one primary reason: the type of Tweet that consistently got the most clickthroughs, on a daily basis, was not original content spilling from my brain, helpful links to popular events or even single reTweets of valuable content.

It was an automated Tweet.

More specifically, it was the Paper.li "newspaper" of the most popular Tweets and links aggregated from my Social Media Favorites list and formatted into a daily newspaper-type format. (Uses for Paper.li papers here.)

What was remarkable is that this daily automated Tweet, with almost no effort on my part, provides content that is so compelling that it averages ten times the number of clickthroughs as any of my original content Tweets.

Ten. Times. As in, my last few Slideshare posts have averages about 20 clickthroughs each, and the Paper.li Social Media Favorites Tweet averages about 220 clickthroughs.

Anyone else beginning to fear the robot apocalypse? Are robots more relevant than humans?

In this case, as one of my favorite social media strategists, Kristy Bolsinger, pointed out, this just means that followers are enjoying the luxury of the filter. In short,

It's the curation that matters.

Paper.li takes the most popular links from the folks I have deemed my favorite social media experts and aggregates them. What's actually happening is that my followers are telling me, loud and clear, that they value curated and aggregated content.

Each link by itself might be relevant, but what's most relevant is the algorithm that organizes the links from the preferred friends list and presents them in a curated, hierarchical and consistent format. As Micheal Foley said, "It's a consistently branded, well-known experience. I know what I'm getting every time I see that tweet in my stream."

And it's worth mentioning that this is the least self-promotional Tweet type of all: the content is aggregated from my valued friends, not from any of my own content. There is no Heidi here, just what Heidi's friends have posted and clicked on.

I'm not going to stop reTweeting or positing original content any time soon, but this information does reinforce one very strong concept of the social web: in the age of information overload and filter failure, the highest value is placed on targeted, curated content.

Score one for the robots.

Social Media for Brand Managers

This has been an amazing week! Not only have I made a great deal of headway on one of my year's goals, to give at least 10 live social media presentations at conferences, but I've also met a ton of fabulous people and made some wonderful connections in the process.

I have to give huge, whomping shoutouts to Shauna Causey, Eric Weaver and Kenji Onozawa for helping me to set, organize and strive to reach my goals for the year. You guys are awesome, and I'm becoming so much better for knowing you and sharing my goals with you.

And of course, thanks to Jenn Matthews for giving me the chance to guest star at today's Huzzah event on Search and Social Revelations. The group was fantastic, and I enjoyed meeting everyone!

For today, the focus was on company management of a brand. But as I always say, people want to interact with a person, not a brand. So brand managers should:

• Include employees in the process
• Define the brand
• Encourage employees to show individual personality
• Set guidelines (fewer is better)
• Trust employees to represent themselves and the brand well
• Research and revise

The full slide deck:

Social Media for Brand Managers

View more presentations from Heidi Miller.

Day 1 for a Social Media Marketing Manager

Dilbert hits it. File under "it's funny 'cuz it's true:"

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The Internet IS for P0rn: Social Media Lessons Learned from Avenue Q

This weekend was very first BarCamp Seattle, and it was a phenomenal experience. Organizers Colin Henry, Andrew Woods, David Albrecht, Jeremiah, Scott Phelps and Dylan Wilbanks did a great job of creating a fun, casual atmosphere for geeks to thrive in.

And maybe it was the early morning, the beautiful sunshine, the magnificant geekitude, or the lack of coffee. But the ideas started coming at me as my head replayed strains from my favorite new musical Avenue Q. I've already written that this musical is the figurehead of Generation X and its willingness to embrace change: if you don't understand Generation X, watch Avenue Q, and you will.

And let's face it; Gen X is what gave us Web 2.0 and all these social uses of new media, anyway. So it's no wonder that everything I learned about social media I learned from watching the crazy muppets of Avenue Q.

Everything about social media I learned from watching muppets sing:

The internet IS for p0rn. Lyrics and video. P0rn producers were early adopters of the internet (if not its initiators). Why? Because they have a keen understanding of their customers' needs and wants. They know the subject matter that titillates their customers and keeps them coming back. They know what content will inspire a customer to break the pay wall. They know how to inspire customer loyalty. In short, they never stop applying metrics to the customer experience and tweaking their content accordingly. They know exactly which videos, topics and headlines appeal to each demographic of their users, and they use that information to adjust the content of their sites.

Everyone's a little bit racist. In Avenue Q, the muppets sing about acknowledging the prevalence of racism, even among the most tolerant-minded of folks, and propose

If we all could just admit/That we are racist a little bit,

we could all get along much better. This is also true in social media: communities are not homogenous microcosms of thought, but rather a place where people of common interests gather. "Common interests" doesn't necessarily translate to agreement or even mutual respect. That's why community management is so important: we are all a little racist, so within a social media space, establishing rules of participation are essential. Create a crystal-clear Terms of Use to explain what the community is and isn't for and what type of comments and contributions are and aren't acceptable.

You can be as loud as the h*ll you want when you're makin' love. This song, belted by the character Gary Coleman (usually played by a woman) is a tribute to the inherent animal nature and messiness of human lovemaking. There are times to be proper and quiet, but

When you and your partner are doin' the nasty/don't behave like you're at the ballet.

The social media lesson learned here is that passion doesn't fit neatly into a box that you can control. Truly passionate engagement shouldn't fit neatly into an online space you monitor between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Like loud sex, it should be creative, innovative, experimental, willing to fail, welcoming of feedback, and it should happen in real time in real space with real people. It should be a little messy, welcoming of ambguity and uncertainty, and shouldn't be approached with too much commitment to the original plan, so that new bits can be improvised--while appreciating what is happening in the moment.

Everything is only for now. For now lyrics. The finale and piece de resistance of the musical might be seen as pessimistic by some; Zen by others. In the end, not all the muppets find a happy ending or a purpose to their lives. So they croon:

Everyone's a little bit unsatisfied/Everyone goes 'round a little empty inside

Each time you smile/It'll only last a while

Life may be scary/But it's only temporary

The social media lesson here: your hits, your traffic, your campaign and even your humiliation at that online gaffe is only for now. Engagement happens on a daily basis, and reputation is built over time, not in a month. Old Spice is only for now. Dell Hell is only for now. Even the BP oil spill is only for now. What's important is not just how successful you are now (although that's not to be sneezed at), but what lessons you take away from both your successes and your failure.

Seattle is the land of startups, and one thing I've learned is that the culture here is based on accomplishments. What can you point to that you did, and can you explain how and why you got those results? Even if the venture failed, what story can you tell about your last campaign? What myths have you exploded? What lessons did you learn? 

With social media, as with many other projects, we are often venturing into the unknown and making guesses based on past experience and case studies. None of those provide any real assurance that this campaign or effort will succeed this time, and anyone who claims 100% guarantee is crossing their fingers behind their back. What is important is a flexibility of approach: if one type of content or engagement isn't working, it's time to try something else.

Personally, I think Avenue Q is underrated for the tremendous amount of widsom that muppets can convey. The attitude toward life is overly realistic, often crass, leaning towards optimism, and with a sort of Zen fatalism thrown in. Approaching social media the same way isn't a bad idea.

Managing your brand: how to set up a Google Alert

The number one question after today's wonderful social media panel at the Women in Nuclear conference was this: how do I set up a Google Alert?

The first step in any social media effort is listening. And if you're creating a social media presence online, whether that be for yourself (your personal brand) or for your entity or organization, your first move is to be aware of the conversations that are already happening around that topic.

So let's start with the easiest and most obvious monitoring: what are people saying about you as a person?

I believe firmly that absolutely everyone, from the CEO down to the receptionist, should be aware of her image online. And monitoring is the key to awareness. As personal branding guru Dan Schwabel Twittered recently, "Your first impression isn't a handshake anymore. It's your online presence." How many of you have researched someone you have a first meeting with by Googling him? It's a best practice for both personal and professional connection. And more than half of employers Google potential employees. Even if you're not looking for a job, it's smart to know what your connections will find when they Google you.

How to set up a Google Alert in five easy steps:

1. Go to www.google.com/blogsearch and enter your name surrounded by quotation marks into the search box and hit Search Blogs.



2. In the left hand side bar, under Subscribe, click Blogs Alerts.



3. Under Type, choose Everything. This will return not only blog mentions but Web results and mentions on social networking sites as well.


4. Under How Often, choose Once a Day (unless you want to receive several emails a day).
5. Under Deliver To, enter your email address. Click Create Alert.



For a preview of today's mentions, Google now offers a handy-dandy Preview Results box, so you can see the top five results for today.



And that's it! Now you're monitoring your online presence. Check your email inbox and scan daily to see mentions. And while you're at it, you might want to choose a few topics you'd like to track. For example, for Spoken Communications, I have Google Alerts set up for "contact center," "call center," "IVR," "customer experience," "customer service" and a few others. They provide a wealth of content useful for researching and creating blog posts and informative tidbits to post to our Twitter stream.

Questions?

No excuses: Top five free social media monitoring tools

I've talked before about the first step in launching any social media campaign is listening. And I had the delightful opportunity to sit in on a real, live session by one of the web's premier marketers, John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing. He gave oodles of rich advice and tips, both on general marketing and on social media interactions. My favorite quote from his social media talk?

"You can get tremendous value without saying a thing."

So very true! You don't have to dive headlong into social media and Twitter about what you had for lunch. In fact, please don't. Nobody really cares. Take some time to listen first without the pressure of being interesting and delivering value. Plus, any campaign should start with a hefty amount of research in order to determine the best strategy for building conversation and relationships.

And for goodness' sake, as your momma told you, listen before you speak.

What are you listening for? Good question. Here is are some questions you should seek to answer before settling on a strategy:

• Where is your brand most often mentioned--blogs, Twitter, Facebook, forums, podcasts?
• What is the sentiment of your brand's mentions?
• Where are your competitors most often mentioned? What is the sentiment?
• Where are your industry's keywords most often mentioned?
• Where are the discussions about industry trends and topics taking place?
• Who are the key contributors to those discussions on both sides of the argument?
• What are the most popular topics in your industry? Who is discussing them, where and how?
• What is the connection between online discussion and real-life events? What real-life industry events do the passionate contributors attend?

Now that you're armed with curiosity and an Excel spreadsheet (the social media manager's favorite tool), invest in each of these free tools:

1. Google Alerts for tracking mentions of your brand, your competitors' brands, industry keywords
2. Google Reader for establishing one nice, easy location to house all the feeds created with Google, blogs and Twitter alerts
   
3. TwitterSearch or, when it's fully rolled out, Google's awesome real-time update search for tracking mentions of your brand, competitors' brands, industry keywords
4. BoardTracker for monitoring forum discussion
5. Backtype for monitoring comments

And thanks to Jantsch for turning me on to BoardTracker and Backtype--I'm already seeing some very interesting discussion in comments that Google Alerts had missed around one of Spoken's industry keywords, IVR.

Dealing with negative WOM online

Linda Bustos recently posted this research on how consumers use social media to both complain about customer service and evaluate service before a purchase:

About a year and a half ago I posted an article Negative Word Of Mouth: Crisis or Opportunity? which included some findings from a Society for New Communications Research study:

• 59% of consumers use social media to vent their frustrations about customer service experience, and research other companies’ customer service before dealing with them

• 74% choose companies/brands based on others’ customer-care experiences shared online

• 72% research companies’ customer care online prior to purchasing products and services at least sometimes

• 84% consider the quality of customer care at least sometimes in their decision to do business with a company

• 81% say blogs, online rating systems and discussion forums can give consumers a greater voice regarding customer care, but less than 33% say they believe that businesses take customers’ opinions seriously

• Search engines are the most valuable online tools for this research. Those rated of no value include micro-blogging sites like Twitter (39%), YouTube (27%) and social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (22%)

via www.getelastic.com

What does this research mean for companies and organizations?

First, organizations must monitor social media--period. Companies need to know what their happy and unhappy customers are saying and how their brand is being discussed online.

Second, if 59% of customers are complaining via Twitter, their blogs and Facebook, brands must go where they are and meet them in their spaces. Don't expect customers to play by your rules and call in their complaints via your comment or complaint line; outreach is essential.

Third, offer to help. Online complaints deserve online responses. Frank Eliaison of Comcast has the right idea: simply go in asking, "can I help?" No defensiveness, no addressing customers' exaggerated claims. Just askwhat you can do.

Fourth, track your own customer service ratings and interactions online. The number I found the most stunning here was that 72% of consumers check a company's customer service reputation online before purchasing goods or services. I pessimistically believe that if that were really the case, companies such as AT&T and Dell, with notoriously bad customer service ratings, would never garner any new customers. Still, knowing that consumers are educated and verifying our reputations means that companies need to, too. And doing social media outreach such as Comcast is modeling right now can cause a huge shift in attitude, even if overall customer service is still lacking.

Finally, read Linda's great advice in the above-quoted article on managing reputation online. She gives some great tips for handling negative comments and feedback, especially via Twitter.

Top Five Skills a Community Manager Must Have

 A lot has been written on this new field of community management. The good news is that, since the idea of this type of position is so new, we're all still formulating the requirements, skills and best practices for community management. As a Community Manager for Knight Pulse working under the guidance of our fantastic Chief Community Manager Kristen Taylor, I find that we are redefining the position almost every week.

And that's a good thing. If the needs of the position are changing and developing, it's because the community it is serving is changing and developing, too. Stagnation kills communities.

In the past week, as our community emerges and develops, I've taken a look around at this new position of community manager. What is it, really, and what skills do good community managers have?

What is a Community Manager?--the research

The kickoff post by our favorite omnipresent dude, Chris Brogan, stresses the need to listen first, then reach out to the industry; only as a third action does he list engaging in the community the organization has created for the CM to manage. And others echoed his sentiments: Nancy White expanded on his post, adding essential skills such as fast reading and writing, big-picture thinking, and participating in communities outside the organization's own walled garden. In fact, she authored several additional posts, including one musing that the new community management is different from the old forum moderation in that it's now more about outreach: "spawning connections, not keeping existing connections organized." She points out that we are not so much managing members as analyzing the vibrancy within (and outside) a community and seeking where to respond, mapping out relationships. (Her third post on listening rather than "managing" as a CM skill is here.)

Connie Benson took the definition to a more practical level, mapping out key responsibilities for a CM, including producing content across Web 2.0, monitoring conversations online, strategizing outreach and advocacy, training fans to become effective brand ambassadors, tracking online visibility and a host of other tasks. And Dawn Foster on Web Worker Daily wrote a series of posts explaining what a CM does and what you should and shouldn't expect yours to do. She even shared her slides on SlideShare--thanks, Dawn!

Top Five Skills a Community Manager Must Have

All that being said, what does a Community Manager need to be able to do? What makes one CM great and another one merely adequate?

1. A passionate desire to listen first. The first half of a CM's job is to listen, monitor, socialize, aggregate in communities outside that of the organization. In short, his job is to pay attention. A community manager should be out in the field, monitoring blogs, podcasts, Twitter, FriendFeed, Seesmic, Digg and a host of other social media tools in order to find out what people who aren't yet community members are concerned about. He should be listening for their concerns, their issues, their complaints, and what they think is so cool they have to tell their friends right away. 
2. An always-on mindset. Community management doesn't happen from 9:00 to 5:00. Ask Frank Eliaison of Comcast--he and his team monitor the Twitterverse (and other locations, undoubtedly), for mentions of Comcast, both positive and negative. And their response time is measure in minutes, not in days. People have come to expect a speedy response, even if that response is "I'll check into it and see." Taking days to respond just isn't good enough.
3. Humility and flexibility. Actually, these skills are essential for any marketer, but let's talk about them, anyway. The manager's job is not to direct the community; it's to analyze the direction in which the community chooses to flow. An active, vibrant community will follow its own threads and forge its own path; it will find a direction to take based on the desires and interests of its members. So a CM's job is less to "manage" or guide the development and more to communicate the ever-changing direction to the community's members. For this, a CM must be humble--if the community isn't interested in the content she produces or in the type of content she had expected the community to produce, she should have the agility and humility to set her original expectations aside and go with the community flow. One of my new mantras for this year is a little phrase I created to remind me of this: Open your eyes; close your expectations.
   
4. A lot of heart. Nancy White talks about the heart/head duality; and she's dead on, in my experience. A CM must have heart and a personal touch. He is the kind of person who sends personal DMs to every one who follows him on Twitter instead of relying on an automated program. She's the kind of person who will email the entire list individually and personally instead of using a blast template email. He will welcome every person into the community, answer questions (or introduce you to someone who can) and send regular, supremely human (sometimes geeky/silly) updates to let you know what's going on. (Have you seen Loic Le Meur's updates on Seesmic?)
5. A lot of head. In addition to spending time in the trenches getting to know community members personally, a CM needs to be able to step back and see the big picture. She should be able to spreadsheet all the members, interests, clicks, etc. within a community, create a chart to show trends and strategize a direction for more community involvement. She should be able to filter information and discern trends, both at ground level and up at 10,000 feet. She should have her finger on the pulse of the community, and the numbers to back up and prove it.

I suspect that this  list will grow over time, but I'll ask what Chris Brogan asked: what would you add to this list? Or subtract? Community Managers, what other skills did you discover you needed to do your job well?