Social Media Marketing Posts That Are Igniting- 9/26
September 26, 2008 | 1 Comment
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Here are our top picks from the social media marketing scene this week. Enjoy 
Making Social Networks Profitable
An article on how Google is applying its expertise in search to the realm of social media. Google is currently in the process of developing an influencer ranking system on MySpace and Facebook to make ads on social networks more relevant. Over here at Ignite we can’t wait to see Google’s definition of an influencer.
StumbleUpon Marketing - White, Grey and Black Hat Tests and Tips
Cesar shares some great discoveries in his StumbleUpon use. He runs ads, stumbles, and partakes in some shady tactics, sharing insight on which ones return the best results. A great read for any hardcore Stumble marketer.
StumbleUpon has updated its algorithms.
StumbleUpon according to Dr. Algorithm, has updated their algorithm. One of the biggest changes he notes is that StumbleUpon now has the ability to verify those webmasters who are submitting their own sites in an attempt to artificially inflate traffic.
Great post, complete with screenshots detailing changes made to the Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Yahoo, MySpace, Digg/Digg Mobile, MobileMe, LinkedIn, Delicious, and Last.fm site designs in the last year.
5 Social Media Tools for Great Writing
September 25, 2008 | 2 Comments
I decided to put a hold on the next installment of my series Using Social Media Marketing to Promote Yourself as a Brand to bring you something a little less involved, but hopefully useful nonetheless. I do a lot of writing, (though not as much as I should) and when I do, I am always impressed at how using social media tools is entirely beneficial. The list caters to bloggers, but hopefully there are some things here you can use to help in your creative writing, too.
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5 Social Media Tools for Great Writing
- StumbleUpon – I love StumbleUpon. It’s the type of social application that allows you to explore the web in a roulette-wheel way, where you can happen upon some really great inspirational content to fuel your blogposts or just get the creative gears going. For a more direct approach, the search function of StumbleUpon can be a valuable engine. Unlike Google, if you punch in your search term, you’ll get a slew of sites that other users have found interesting. If you stumble on something, chances are that someone else has given it a thumbs up. If a site is good enough for crowds, it’s good enough for me. SU is probably best used when searching for ideas of what others are doing, and can help you find material to back up what you are saying, or you know, just give you some great ideas.
- Twitter – Speaking of the wisdom of crowds, half of the cool stuff and news I hear about comes to me from my Tweeps. This news / info is easily plugged into blogposts, and can serve up some great inspiration. Additionally, you can always use this service to ask a question to anyone listening and get a variety of opinions. Who needs research when your friends and followers probably know the answer already, right?
- Digg, etc. – Digg and its brothers, Reddit, Propeller, Mixx, and probably some others are great resources to listen to what others are saying, and to get the news as it becomes available. Now, I don’t recommend that you “steal” anything from popular articles, but honestly, how much of the web is actually new content, and how much of it is “borrowed”? If, for nothing else, a lot of the articles in these places will make you say, “Hey, I can do better than that!” So put your money where your mouth is, smart guy.
- WeBook – This one is less about blogging and more about collaboration. For the uninitiated, WeBook is essentially a platform to help produce user-generated books. The tagline “writing loves company” says it all. You can join in to existing projects and give feedback or count on other members’ advice to refine your own work. My own experience with the service is limited, but it looks at the least like it could be a lot of fun.
- NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month is right around the corner (November), so it is high time to kick your writing into gear and finish that novel you’ve been thinking about forever. Now, while the act of writing a novel itself isn’t especially an aspect of social media, the message boards on the NaNoWriMo site are top notch. There are lots of folks searching for advice and inspiration, so your questions might be their questions. These people are prolific, and they are willing to lend a hand and share their own experiences, too. The end goal of the project is to write 50,000 words in 30 days, and even if your novel is no good (the first draft won’t be, so don’t worry) it will get you in the habit of writing every day, which certainly won’t hurt your writing.
Of course, there are some great blogs out there with tips on becoming a better writer, but when it comes to social tools to help you on your way, these are at the top of my list. I’ll be doing NaNoWriMo again this year, so if you want to keep up with my progress and follow my updates on Twitter, you can follow me here.
Social Media Marketing Example #2: Best Western
September 24, 2008 | 3 Comments
To continue the series, “26 Social Media Marketing Examples In Detail“, I’m moving on to Best Western.
What are they doing?
- Widgets
- After poking around on their site, I got curious about the sub navigation that said, “Knock, Knock“. After clicking on the tab, I discovered that Knock Knock is actually a desktop application that delivers package offers for Best Western, as well as weather, and links to travel tips and tools. Unfortunately, this useful little application is not available as a web application (like Google Desktop), and it’s location within an interior page makes it more difficult for people to grab. (Best Western of France has a version of this, but it doesn’t have the functionality of Knock Knock, and has less than 100 users).
- You must be Trippin’ is the name of one of their blogs, and no I’m not trippin - it really is its name. This blog is a multi-user blog, with 2 real people and the rest character names (in my opinion they should pick one or the other, but I digress…) My initial reaction of this blog is that it is a good concept, but the content on it needs to have focus. One minute it talks about deep fried foods, and the other it is talking about spools of twine. I’d prefer this blog to be centered on how to plan road trips on the cheap, or when the best time to book hotel accommodations, but that’s just me.
- On the Go with Amy is the name of another one of their blogs, which has a single contributor, Amy Graff. The site is transparent in that it discloses that Amy is working on behalf of Best Western, and it does a good job tailoring to the audience of “traveling with kids” (which is a great target audience for Best Western).
- Facebook: Currently the US Best Western doesn’t have an official presence, but I did find that the UK version created a Fan Page to commemorate Best Western’s 30th anniversary. The page contained really cool pictures of a life-size cake the shape of a Best Western bed and interesting videos I showed to my colleagues. It seems they have content that could become popular, but the centric nature of this fan page around the 30th anniversary means that the page is likely to remain at a stand-still.
- Video
- BestWesternTV is the name of their branded You Tube channel, which is supposed to be used to hold fan contests and showcase hotels. From taking a look at the videos posted to these contests, it looks like chances are looking good for winning (The most popular video contest garnered only 13 videos). Here’s also a glimpse of the type of content Best Western is placing on You Tube, and it may explain why:
- Google Maps
- I added this because I think Best Western needs to train its Best Western managers to observe and claim their Google Map listings. Since I typically choose my hotels on proximity, affordability, and user reviews, I rely heavily on Google Map listings because they include this information as I map out my travel. The downfall to overlooking these listings is that Google will pull pictures from other sources on the web (leading to out-dated, generic, or misleading photos), and the local hotel itself misses out on important marketing opportunities (like the ability to add Google coupons for free).
Do you know of other things Best Western is doing within the realm of social media marketing? If so, feel free to add it in the comments below!
Not on Twitter? “You might as well not have existed.”
September 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment
This video is hysterical. The Twitter Song, by Ben Walker, (aka You’re No One If You’re Not on Twitter) is getting a lot of play by social media geeks (like you, admit it!), and it’s so worth sharing.
Ironically, Ben has only 595 Twitter followers as of this moment (relative low for a viral video star). I bet he breaks a thousand by end of week… You can follow Ben on Twitter here.
(Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter here, although I don’t sing…)
I just may have to buy Ben’s new Twitter Song t-shirt, too… 
Hat tip to BL Ochman’s great blog for the head’s up.
~Jim
Social Media Club RDU Re-launch: Who Owns Social Media?
September 23, 2008 | 1 Comment
Hi all! I just wanted to make sure all of you had heard of the official re-launch the Social Media Club RDU tomorrow (in case you’ve been hiding under a rock!). No longer am I manning the club by my lonesome, the folks at iContact (James Wong, Chuck Hester, and Taylor Barr) as well as Wayne Sutton, have taken the lead and are making it bigger and better!
Tomorrow’s event will be a panel discussion of “Who Owns Social Media?” and will be a mashup of PR professionals, Marketers, and Social Media Experts, each providing their own perspective and insight on who owns social media within a large organization. Yes, our very own Jim Tobin will be up there battling it out, so be sure to bring some hard questions for him
Here are the details:
When: Wednesday, September 24th @ 7pm
Where: iContact
2635 Meridian Parkway, Suite 200
Durham, NC 27713
Why: Free Pizza+The ability to make Jim sweat = reason enough for me!
Hope to see many of you veteran social media clubber’s, as well as some new faces.
Quick Vote: Which Book Cover Would You Choose?
September 22, 2008 | 15 Comments
I need your help. My new book, Social Media is a Cocktail Party, is going to production in the next week. I’ve been presented with two designs for the cover. Neither one is 100% yet, as there’s some wording that needs to be tweaked, but overall, they’re pretty close.
Most folks around the office here have chosen their favorite, but we thought we’d get better feedback if we asked all of you what you think. So, without further ado, here are the covers. Take a quick look (click on them if you want to see them bigger), and then tell me: Which one is your favorite?
Cover 1
Cover 2
Now, Your Vote
Thank you for the vote! Lisa and I really appreciate the input and would love to see why you voted the way you did in the comments below. Tell us, what did you think about each design?
Social Media Posts That Are Igniting- 9/19
September 19, 2008 | 3 Comments
These are our top picks for the week in the social media marketing landscape. Enjoy
Ask.com Re-Launches AskKids.com Search Engine for Kids
Bill Hartzer gives a great review of the new Ask.Kids search engine. It would be interesting to see how else they could monetize the results. Kids could easily be marketed to, but not in this way.
50 Ways to Take Your Blog to the Next Level
This is a great look at how to increase your blogs content, design, and readership.
Top 5 Reasons Why Blogging Rocked Our World
Interesting account of how blogging has changed the world we live in today. This post could probably alternatively be named Top 5 Reasons Why Blogging Can Benefit Your Brand.
Social Media: You Are Wearing Me Out
How many social media sites are you on? Do you check them constantly or do you focus on only a few. It seems some people are being worn out by too much social media. The suggestion in this post is to focus your interests. Marie Adam’s comment that follows the post also targets how social media marketers can benefit from quality vs. quantity as well.
Ad Agencies Team Up on Social-Media Standards
“SMAC’s aim is to create a set of standards for social-media advertising, sometimes called “engagement advertising,” that mirrors the standards set for print, television, and display ads.” Only time will tell how effective this is, considering that most advertising channels on the web are reluctant to standardization.
StumbleUpon undergoes some changes
StumbleUpon has undergone some changes as of late. Along with a new redesign of sorts you can now have more than 200 friends.
In the battle to replace Twitter, no winners emerge
September 18, 2008 | 4 Comments
Social media geeks, myself included, have been looking for/waiting for the “Twitter Killer” to emerge over the last few months. While Twitter’s famous crashes seem to have lessened, the stream of consciousness style doesn’t seem to facilitate effective conversations as well as we might hope.
- In July of 2007, we pownced on Pownce.
- In March of 2008, we began to Plurk.
- In July, we turned to Identi.ca.
- Last month, we looked at newcomer Rejaw.
- This week, the chatter is about Fidj.it.
I even wrote a very positive review of Rejaw, and I still think it’s the best of the bunch in terms of functionality. The chart below shows the spikes in traffic that each of these sites have enjoyed:
The Pownce bounce was the highest for a long time (in July 2007, it was about 250,000), but Plurk passed it a year later with their debut, which was well-timed in the midst of severe Twitter outages.
All of this is impressive, however, only until you add the king of the area, Twitter, to the chart:
Suddenly, things don’t look so impressive for the Twitter competitors. It’s clear in talking to people (and reading mainstream publications), that Twitter has crossed over into the mainstream. That’s going to be tough for the other folks to beat.
When we look at the competitor’s daily velocity on Compete (meaning a snapshot of whether they are growing by day or shrinking by day), we don’t see much good news here either. Over the last 45 days, Pownce had some growth toward the end of August, and Plurk’s had some very minor spikes, but since September 1, Plurk, Identi.ca and Pownce are all in negative territory. I see others talking about fatigue from trying all these sites and I’ve personally used them all a lot less in the last few weeks as client needs continue to grow.
At the end of the day, though, technology is one thing, while community is another. Anyone building one of these apps needs as much emphasis on attracting users as building the site, because we’re well best build it and it will come.
What do you think? What’s your favorite micro-blogging site? Are you starting to see some fatigue in keeping up with all these locations? Let me know what you’re seeing.
The Joys of the Command Line
September 17, 2008 | 1 Comment
Everyone who has a computer has access to a command line. It’s a shame that more folks aren’t taking advantage of this very useful and cool tool. Things like “ipconfig”, “ps -aux”, etc are old hat to those living in the command line. For some Linux-based users, you can even do fun things like create images via the command:
convert -size 1080×120 xc:white -font Times-Roman -pointsize 100 -fill gray -annotate +20+80 ‘Ignite Social Media rocks!’ -fill black -annotate +23+83 ‘Ignite Social Media rocks!’ -trim +repage logo.png
then do something like this:
qiv logo.png
(I personally would use “open logo.png”)
Lonely and need someone to compliment you on your new haircut? Vain OS X’ers (and there are many of us) can type this into their terminal:
say I do not care what anyone else says, you look incredible
Command lines were initially, and to a certain extent still are, the domain of programmers, sysadmins, and the like. With the proliferation of web-based services, this has created a whole new audience of potential command line users. Case in point, everyone uses Twitter. A lot of people use Twirhl to access their Twitter account — this is a web service at play. Twirhl is an interface built in AIR that is accessing the Twitter API or web service. All of this is nice and good, but why be forced to keep up with all of the upgrades in AIR and whatnot when all you really want is to know what Jim Tobin had for lunch (and you want to know right now, dammit). As much as I like AIR applications, I will alway have a soft spot in my heart for basic command line no-frills functionality. Don’t worry about dazzling me with the latest visual doodads, just gimme my information and keep it moving.
Here comes the command line to save the day — no fluff, just pure functionality. Here’s what I see in when I access Twitter:
Impressed yet? Ok, probably not.
You may not know it, but most of you are already using a form of command line — it’s web-based and it’s called Google. Just type in some search parameters and you’re good to go. Simple and elegant ain’t it? There are many other web-based apps that either strip the Google experience down to its command line essence or builds on top of it and takes it to new heights.
An example of the former is Goosh.org. It is a web-based interface to Google that mimics a traditional unix-shell. So you can fire up the site, key in your search commands and watch it spit out your results:
An example of the latter is YubNub.org, which I’ve always been very impressed with. It bills itself as “a (social) command line for the web”. It functions pretty much like Goosh, but also allows users to extend it by writing custom commands. Unlike Goosh, you aren’t tied to Google, but, rather, can query virtually any site that has a searchable database (eBay, Amazon, IMDB, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, flickr, etc). You can also lookup PHP functions and run regx patterns against a string — for those who care. A vibrant community has developed around YubNub, which has been cranking out add-ons like crazy. Want to integrate YubNub into your browser (there’s even Chrome integration)? Check. Want YubNub on your Desktop? Check. Need nerdy integration into Emacs? Done. Want it on your phone? Need you ask? The list of things you can do with YubNub goes on and on.
All of which leads to the new kid on the command line block — Mozilla’s Ubiquity . According to Mozilla, Ubiquity is an “experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.” The best way to explain it is to give the example everyone else has given:
With Ubiquity, a user can, for example, type a restaurant name in an e-mail, select the name, option-click to bring up the Ubiquity command line, type “map” to generate a Google Map centered on the selected restaurant, and then drag that map to embed it into the e-mail so it can be shared.
I have not had a chance to really check Ubiquity out, although Brian has found a lot use out of it. Kind of cool, though.
Anyway, I love seeing the programmer’s workhorse (ie, the command line) finally get some love and attention. It’s great to see all of the different ways new pockets of the online community are using the tool — I’m just scratching the surface with this post. How do you use the command line?
Social Media Marketing Example #1: Animal Planet
September 17, 2008 | 4 Comments
To jump start the series 26 Social Media Marketing Examples In Detail, I will start with a review of the popular channel, Animal Planet. Here’s some of my findings (along with a slideshow to easily see these efforts without visiting each link!):
What are they doing?
- Widgets:
- Killer Clips Widget: This nifty, grabbable widget allows Animal Planet to display some of its most popular videos - animal attacks (my personal favorite, I admit). This widget is hosted on Yahoo widgets, and currently has over 10,000 installs. I think this is a smart branding move, and it also offers the ability to easily embed across multiple social networks and blog platforms. I always appreciate that functionality
- The Daily Cuddle: To offset the Killer Clips widget, they also created a widget called, “The Daily Cuddle”, a widget that delivers pictures of cute pets. On the widget wrapper I noticed the “Submit Photos”, but found this only leads you to a landing page, where you are instructed to send your picture to an email address (where the pictures are then hand selected). I love the concept, but the execution is a little too labor intensive. I’d like to see this widget give value back to the end user by allowing the widget to become completely customizable by the end user.
- Killer Clips Widget: This nifty, grabbable widget allows Animal Planet to display some of its most popular videos - animal attacks (my personal favorite, I admit). This widget is hosted on Yahoo widgets, and currently has over 10,000 installs. I think this is a smart branding move, and it also offers the ability to easily embed across multiple social networks and blog platforms. I always appreciate that functionality
- Blogging:
- The Animal Planet has developed a series of blogs based on specific TV Shows hosted on the network. This is an excellent way for a large network to inspire and nurture specific conversations with its niche audiences. Many of these blogs are active before and during a season, and go quiet during down-times, but this seems to build excitement within readers rather than disinterest. I also noticed that these blogs seem to keep users more engaged with the series itself, as many comments held suggestions and ideas on what producers could do to make the shows more interesting.
- One such ongoing blog is called the “Pet Trends” blog. I noticed that this blog is trying to use social media in an organic way by developing its own meme called Trendy Tuesday. This meme is an ongoing weekly giveaway of a current pet trend, and seems to engage audience members rather well. I’d like to see the blog have more content added based around pet trends, but this is a good start.
- Social Networking:
- Facebook Fan Page: Currently the fan page does an excellent job providing widgets and interesting discussion topics, and has around 3,207 fans. I noticed offhand that they kick started the page with the question, “What would you like to see on this Fan Page?”. I think this is a simple, yet very beneficial question. Fan pages should be geared with the fan in mind, and this is one way to create a more effective page. I also wanted to point out that the Animal Planet has a representative to respond to comments, which makes it feel as if the page is dynamic and more conversational
- Video:
- Branded You Tube Channel: Animal Planet has a branded You Tube channel with all the bells and whistles. Even though this is an expensive purchase, it is smart because many of these videos are interesting enough to spread virally, and this helps the Animal Planet become the source. I noticed early on that the page is frequently updated with new videos, which could be one reason it has a rather high number of channel subscribers.
- Website Video: Overall, I was a little disappointed that not all of the videos on the Animal Planet website were embeddable. In my opinion, the easier these are able to cross boundaries, the better. I’d like to see better integration with the videos on the website and the videos hosted on the You Tube channel.
- Any others you’d like to add to this list? If there is anything that I’m leaving out, feel free to make reference in the comments below.
