5 Social Media Tools You Don’t Know About (Yet)
July 1, 2008 | 4 Comments
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At Ignite, we do a lot of research on the Social Media Language tools out there, and some are certainly more effective than others. I’ve dug up these 5 tools that you don’t not know about, and can be great sources to get your brand out there once they get rolling. Get in while the getting in is good.
BlogUpp! – BlogUpp! is a nice widget that can help you promote your company’s blog. It’s relatively simple and free to use, but you have to embed a widget on your own blog for it to work. This widget displays snapshots of other blogs in the BlogUpp! network, and shows the intro to the most recent post upon rollover. There’s no sign up necessary, thank goodness, and the widget looks sharp and not too much like an ad. The interface seems simple enough to use, and there is even an option to put some money behind your campaign to push out your blog. Seems interesting and worth a stab—after all, if it’s free and doesn’t require a sign-up, then why not? Check out the BlogUpp! blog for more information.
Twellow – Twellow is another Twitter tool, similar to Summize that allows you to search tweets from across the network in specific categories. It’s basically a Twitter search engine. Either search a term or choose from one of the many categories, and you’ll get a terrific list of Twitterers and a snapshot of what they’ve recently tweeted, their number of followers and other information that is essential to knowing whether or not to follow them. This is a valuable site that you can use to funnel and direct who you are marketing to, and one of the supplemental applications that makes Twitter a powerful tool itself.
Yumondo – You don’t know about Yumondo because it’s so spanking new that you need a Beta invite to join up. I’m predicting that it is a service not unlike BrightKite, but with a little more information and less superfluous. Your business likely exists in a place, and that place has people in it. As far as I can tell, the service lets users aggregate information about the areas in which they live according to places, events, things and groups—all perfect niches for you to engage. I’ll let you know more about this after I get my Beta invite.
BragThis.com – Social Media users are self-centered, confident, and want everyone to know it. It’s about time someone created a network that takes all the modesty and pussyfooting out of the equation. BragThis.com is that site. This is a network that allows users to show off their attributes and experiences through bragging to others. You can also customize real world items with your brags, so if you want a t-shirt with your latest bitchin’ steam-punk watch on it, then you can just plug in your content and order away. Why is this an important marketing tool? Well, if you can boast and brag about the things you do well, you can sell yourself to others. The site is still low in its user base (it apparently launched today) but seems like just the type of masturbatory network that makes social media as popular as it is.
Scoutle – As a writer, I am not the best person when it comes to doing the leg work of getting my content out there—lucky for me, along came Scoutle. Scoutle essentially allows you to create “scouts” who will meet other scouts and promote your content and let you know about content that might interest you. The frequency of scouts meeting is based on the quality of the content of your blog or website, so without having to worry about aggregation, you can concentrate on producing great content. This seems like an easy (and free) way to get your blog out there without much effort. Here’s a little more info from the Blog of an Internet Marketing Addict.
Social Media Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them (6 of 6): Thinking anyone cares about your brand
June 30, 2008 | 1 Comment
I promised you 5 social media marketing mistakes and how to avoid them, but today, at no extra charge, is a bonus sixth mistake. And this one is a biggie. The sixth and potentially most problematic social media marketing mistake is:
Thinking anyone cares about your brand.
The Allstate Community Forums is a perfect example of this. It doesn’t have a chance to succeed as it is today because it is fundamentally flawed in concept. Allstate dramatically overreached in their efforts and assumed that people would want “a place to speak your mind on the things you care about and exchange ideas, information and experiences with other folks like you.” It was nice that they didn’t try to focus on selling Allstate insurance, but still they had a couple problems with the direction they did choose:
- The topic matter was so broad that they opened themselves up to competing with the very largest social networks out there, and they didn’t carve out a niche for conversations around a particular subset of topics; and
- Even if people wanted a place to discuss absolutely anything, would they want to do that with Allstate branding wrapped around it? Um. No.
Allstate might have done better by adapting their strategy this way:
- Focus on discussion around life-changing events (because those are when you consider your insurance needs);
- Understand that a forum like this is going to grow somewhat slowly and you’re going to have to invest heavily in great content around life-changing events to pull people in.
- Alternatively, they could have decided that what people really want to discuss on this sort of site is their insurance needs, their problems with Allstate customer service, etc. Because that’s how the few people using it today are using it.
- In that case, analyze the top 25 or so types of phone calls that customer service is getting and build forums around those issues, with meaningful info.
In some ways, Allstate is trying to do the right thing. They’ve left up a forum where they are called “theifs” (yes, spelled exactly like that) and the moderator didn’t jump in right way to deal with it. Instead, their customers have largely stepped up to tell the poster that he’s a fool.
Nevertheless, the concept they went with is too big, and it looks like their investment in it in terms of sharing their expertise is too low. They should redirect it now.
So when you’re working on your social media marketing strategy, remember that nobody outside of your organization really cares about your brand. Think a bit bigger and you’ll find what they really care about. Engage in efforts around that and you’ll be one step closer to success.
~Jim
Note: I said in the video that nothing had been posted to the forums in six months. That was incorrect. I was reading the join date of the moderator. There is activity on the site still. Not much, but some. My apologies for the error.
8 sure fire strategies for your social engagement campaign
June 27, 2008 | 3 Comments
Social media engagement by definition is any attempt at reaching out to another individual on the web. Traditionally this has taken the form of a PR pitch, but times are changing. There are many more avenues in which to engage a user, and the tactics that should be employed are taking on new forms. In large part, like most things, the more authentic and transparent you are with your social outreach the more successful you will be. If you think buying a list of emails, and spamming them with cookie cutter copy is going to work, then you might as well go back to work on marketing your reverse-funnel money making system.
Below are some great angles to take with regards to social engagement:
- Start a contest and explain to the user that you are informing them that the contest is available for a limited time.
- Offer an interview with the CEO of the company that you are engaging for and make it available for download on a limited basis.
- Release a new product and ask for beta testers
- Release news to a site per contingency that it will be exclusive, or that they will have their hands on the content before it is released mainstream.
- Interview users and explain that their customer service feedback will be featured on the website.
- Explain to the individual that their assistance will be rewarded with the actual product you are in charge of promoting.
- Offer an interview with the author of the site, explain you are going to be posting it on your site with link backs and a press release of the interview itself.
- Explain that the developer of the product is only a call away.
The key here is to develop a tactic that relays to the user the sense of exclusivity. If the user feels like you are sending something to them that was sent to 398,456 other people, then they are no doubt going to mark your email /correspondence as spam very quickly.
Bottom line here is you have to be creative when partaking in social outreach. Can you think of any other ideas?
Explaining Rich Internet Applications
June 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Websites bore me. There, I said it. This includes the many bloated social networks that pop up on an hourly basis. I’m a minimalist. Even my sentences are short. I just want my web applications that do exactly what I need them to do — nothing more, nothing less.
I spend most of my time on my desktop and not in my web browser, which is the inverse of many people I know. Most of my friends and colleagues do much of what they do via their browsers (check email, gather information, play games, etc). This is not to say that I’m not online — that would be ridiculous. I live online, I just don’t want to have to work around unnecessary functionality within a browser to get my stuff done.
This is where Rich Internet Applications (RIA) come in. From da wiki:
Rich Internet applications (RIAs) are web applications that have the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. RIAs typically transfer the processing necessary for the user interface to the web client but keep the bulk of the data (i.e., maintaining the state of the program, the data, etc.) back on the application server. RIAs typically do the following:
- run in a web browser, or do not require software installation
- run locally in a secure environment called a sandbox
For the record, I hate the term “Rich Internet Applications” — I much prefer Distraction Free Browsing, but I digress.
RIAs enable me to utilize certain web apps directly from my desktop — or atleast that’s how I use them. I’m not referring to widgets, by the way — I don’t like those either (that’s another post). RIAs tend to have a smaller installation footprint, which in turn means minimal work to get the app up and running. Many of you have installed Twhirl — all that really took was installing Adobe AIR. Upgrades to apps tend to be done transparently and in the background and they tend to be mostly OS agnostic.
Adobe AIR seems to be the most popular tool used by RIA developers. AIR is a runtime environment that can use many existing web technologies (Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, and Ajax) to create desktop applications. Many of the AIR apps that I have come across tend to be browserless and operate as true desktop applications, which makes me happy. I don’t want to have to rely on bloated browsers to get my stuff done. By going the desktop app route, these applications can take advantage of unlimited local storage and file system access. Browser-based applications are limited by the restrictiveness inherited by using a browser (ie, cache limits, potential crashes, etc).
eBay Desktop is a great example of what I’m talking about. Here’s an application that exists completely outside of the browser, yet offers all of the functionality of a traditional browser — and more. Other AIR-based applications include:
Twhirl
Spaz (my preferred Twitter app)
WebKut
Pownce desktop
CraigsList Desktop
Adobe Media Player
List of AIR apps
You know Microsoft would be in the mix, right? Well, they are — with an application called Silverlight. To be honest, I dabbled with it about a year ago, but have not had a reason to check back in. Unlike AIR, Microsoft is positioning Silverlight to be a direct competitor with Flash and Flex — I’m not a Flash/Flex guy, so my interest in learning more about Silverlight is low. Let me know if you’ve seen any interesting Silverlight applications out there — would be interested to see how it’s being used.
Other promising applications in this space include Mozilla’s Prism and Safari’s Fluid projects. Actually, these are VERY cool. Both technologies are based on something called Site Specific Browsers (SSB), which is a technology that enables you to create desktop-like apps out of individual websites. Why would you need something like this? Well, if you are a multi-tab Firefox poweruser like me and have experienced a crash that took your Gmail down with it, you’d begin to see how valuable something like Prism and Fluid would be. Imagine having a crash-proof (or somewhat crash-proof — things always crash) Gmail or Digg client? Like AIR apps, SSBs are desktop applications and have a tighter integration with your OS than traditional web applications. More importantly, SSBs come sans the annoying chrome that come with web browsers (menus, toolbars, blah blah blah). This is distraction free browsing at its best!
Other real world uses of RIAs
Twitter is a good example of its potential. As described above, eBay has already created a very useful app that their community has taken a liking to. How about taking Tripit.com off of the web? If you are a Google Reader user, use Google Gears to download your feeds onto your laptop and read them offline. How’s about a currency converting RIA? Maybe a word or phrase translator?
Personally, I’ve found incredible use out of Mailplane — a Gmail RIA. It has all of the functionality of Gmail, plus more. Very useful to me. For my RSS reader, I use Newsfire.
What RIAs do you use? What new RIAs would be useful for you?
Introducing YouTube Annotations and the Interactive Card Trick
June 25, 2008 | 2 Comments
YouTube just rolled out some new toys. Right now you can see them by going to the YouTube homepage. They include an address book of your YouTube friends, an updated Inbox, and YouTubeMobile. But two of the new features, YouTube Annotations and YouTube Insight, are worth talking more about.
My favorite (and I’m sure will be the most talked about) are the You Tube Video Annotations. Now you can take videos or pictures and simply insert comments, or better yet- links to other YouTube videos or channels. And YouTube gives you three methods to insert the comments: a speech bubble, a spotlight, and a note. YouTube made a series of videos to explain how to use them, and we made a series of videos to experiment.
This is such a great way to make internet video even more interactive, and with YouTube making it so easy, it’s bound to be a viral sensation. It’s still in beta, so of course there are some drawbacks at the moment. The biggest is that you lose the annotations when you embed the video on an outside site (but they say this will change). Also, the videos can be kind of aggravating to watch because there is a lot of buffering even with a high bandwidth. There are some problems if you place a comment in a very specific place, because they tend to shift and move around a little when published (as you will probably find on our experimental videos). But for the most part, the application of the annotations seems to be simple and almost glitch free. (Because I can’t embed the videos with annotations in this post, click on the following links to see some of YouTube’s featured videos: Interactive Card Trick, How to Use Video Annotations, and Interactive Shell Game.)
The other feature that launched in February but YouTube is now promoting is YouTube Insight, or Google Analytics for your videos. These easy to read charts straight off Google Analytics will make YouTube more interesting for individuals, but could be very valuable for companies or people wanting more ROI for their videos.
Just one more car on the social media highway and I’m pretty pumped about it. Have you made an annotated video or watched one that was especially great? Share it with me and I’ll leave you a link!
Social Media Marketing–Marketing with a twist
June 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment
As social media changes the way companies communicate with their audiences, there is one thing that we shouldn’t forget–Social media marketing is still marketing. The difference is, social media marketing targets audiences online where there is more noise, more competition, and more skepticism as to credibility. This means social media marketing campaigns need to be even more strategic than a regular old marketing plan. There are four important steps marketers take that we shouldn’t forget:
1) Conduct Research: You must still take the time to analyze your competition. Who are they? What are they doing online? Have they successfully (or unsuccessfully) used social media to reach your audience? Have they given your audience what they want? Or could you be even better? Second, you still have to know your audience. Not only who they are, but where they are online. Listen to the conversations. What is your audience talking about? What types of information are they looking for online? How are they finding it? How are you going to give them what they want and more?
2) Define your goals: You can’t measure success without definite goals. You need to know what you hope to get out of the campaign. If you’re a small company creating an internal social network, would 80% participation satisfy you? If you’re a national brand, would 10,000 hits to your website be enough for a positive ROI? Is it more important to have 10% of your visitors buy now or for there to be 100,000 visitors who keep coming back? A solid set of objectives will help define the marketing strategy.
3) Develop a Strategic Message and Method: While advertising campaigns are all about staying on message, social media marketing campaigns have a little more leeway. As we’ve said a hundred times, social media marketing is about conversations. And it is impossible to have true dialogue if you are constantly worried that the conversation may go off track. However, you have to keep in mind the purpose of that conversation. Online, word choice matters. When presenting your brand, keep in mind who might be looking for your information and how they may be looking for it. Is your audience searching in Google for health tips or on MySpace for something to do this weekend? The words you use will determine whether they find you.
4) Measure and Evaluate the Results: Social media is still relatively new, so we often don’t know how high to set the mark. If we can’t reach it, then maybe we set it too high? But then the question becomes, how do we reach that point? Did we set the bar too low? Of course, meeting and exceeding our goals make us feel good, but does this mean we could have done better?
Feedly Puts the Fun Back into Reading RSS Feeds
June 23, 2008 | 8 Comments
Other members of the Ignite Social Media team laugh when I rant about Google. “Great technology. Ugly user interface.” Google Reader is a great example of that, but now there’s a solution to get your RSS feeds served up with some design consideration and some added features. This is my review of Feedly, a Firefox plug-in that only works in Firefox 3.0.
Here’s a screenshot of my Google Reader list of social media marketing blogs. From it, we can conclude a few things:
- Mashable is a feed hog. Signal to noise ratio for me is out of whack; and
- It just looks like a chore to go through this feed reader, doesn’t it? No fun.
Now let’s compare that with what Feedly does to the same list of feeds.
They’ve basically wrapped a design around the feed list that looks very similar to the design of CNN.com. They’ve got some featured content with images along the left hand side and a list of other articles down the middle. Sources that are in your reader are along the right hand side, and you can easily click on to get articles just from that source. When you do, it looks like this:
Beyond the massive visual improvement, Feedly adds functional improvements that make it a better way to read your RSS feeds:
- You can easily Tweet any article you find interesting. When you do, a box opens up with the title and the URL shrinks to a TinyURL automatically. Add a comment, or don’t, and hit a button and you’ve tweeted it.
- You can recommend articles that you like, and Feedly serves content based in part on recommendations.
- And you can easily email the article to a friend or coworker.
- Apparently you can add an article to Del.icio.us easily too, but I’ve got to upgrade my Delicious plug-in apparently.
Sound hard? It’s not. Set up takes about 30 seconds. Want it? Upgrade to Firefox 3, then install Feedly. It’s not just Google Reader, either. Feedly works with MyYahoo, Bloglines, Netvibes, and more. You’ll read more feeds, learn more and share more.
I Dare You to Get Healthy at Livestrong.com
June 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment
On Tuesday of this week, the Lance Armstrong Foundation and Demand Media launched a new daily fitness and wellness living site called Livestrong.com. I flew up to NYC on Tuesday evening to attend the launch party, and had an absolute blast. I was impressed with both the LAF and Demand Media teams, and their desire to help people all over the world lead fuller, healthier lives.
Demand Media did a great job building the site. Unlike social networks like Myspace (built by Intermix Media, the former company of many Demand Media employees) or Facebook, Livestrong.com is sharply focused on health and wellness living. Familiar social networking functions are integrated with fitness and healthy living content including articles, tips, videos, and more.
What makes the site really unique is the Dare feature. Members can dare themselves or friends to set up and break goals. The site enables users to track progress by checking in each time the user logs in to the network. The site provides a long list of dares such as “run a marathon” or “quit smoking” in categories like Eat Well, Be Active, and Get Healthy. Users can also suggest new dares to the Livestrong.com team. Goals and progress can be made public for all users on the site, viewable for only a user’s friends, or private and viewable only to the user. Once dares are accepted by a user, the site acts as a virtual trainer or coach and provides tips during the journey to complete each dare.
I dare you to get healthy at Livestrong.com — sign up.
Social Media Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them (5 of 6)
June 19, 2008 | 1 Comment
Ok, we’re in the home stretch. Today we’ll talk about the fifth mistake in our top 5 mistakes in social media marketing series. And, you might think that would be the last one, right? But wait, there’s more! We’ll close the series shortly with a special 6th mistake–at no extra charge. I know… Right?
Today’s mistake is trying to apply traditional marketing tactics to social media marketing. This is probably THE most frequent mistake we see. Marketers are trained to control the message, to boil things down to the 3 talking points we want stressed and to answer every question with one of those three. (Trust me, I did it for years when I did political PR work.)
Social media is about facilitating a conversation within a community versus controlling a conversation to a community. Big difference.
It’s natural to start with what you know, which is “We’d like to do a campaign that conveys X and Y.” Good start. To make it work in social media marketing, you have to flip that around. Ask instead:
- “Who cares about X and Y?”,
- “What conversations are already taking place about X and Y?”, and
- “How can we contribute to that conversation in a way that adds value and builds our brand in this space?”
If you get the paradigm shift, you’re on your way to succeeding in social media marketing.
5 Social Media Tools for Learning Language
June 17, 2008 | 7 Comments
In college and high school, I used flash cards, vocabulary lists, and even audio programs on tapes to learn new languages (Spanish in high school, German in college). Each of those tools is helpf
ul in some capacity, but in the end, the quickest way to learn a language will always be through real conversations in that language. Some new social media websites will allow you to do just that.
Check out these 5 social media tools for learning language:
1. eduFire.com - This web app allows language learners to connect with language teachers for one on one tutoring sessions by webcam. The platform is simple to use, and content on the web page is great. Payment is arranged through PayPal, and each tutor sets an hourly rate based upon their experience. They also have flashcards and videos of lessons in multiple languages.
The video chatting system setup has two spots for streaming video (one for the tutor and one for the student) and a chat room right beside the two video screens. This format is really the best of both worlds. On the one hand it is casual because it is a normal video chat, but the tutor also has the ability to post links and write out full sentences (which helps with grammar) in the chat window.
2. StudiVZ.net and other International Social Networks - After the successful growth of Facebook in the US, entrepreneurs in countries all over the world are creating social networks for college students using Facebook as a model. These entrepreneurs take the best parts of Facebook, then make changes to allow the program to fit in better with local culture. StudiVZ looks and feels very similar to Facebook, but is all in German. The company also has sites in French, Italian, Polish, and Spanish.
Language learners can use social networks like StudiVZ.net, Vostu.com (Spanish), vkontakte.ru (Russian) to meet people in foreign countries (and in their native country) who speak the primary language of the site. Join groups, make friends, and start conversations - even poke (gruschle in German, ha ) in the language you are studying.
3. Lingro - Lingro bills itself as “the coolest dictionary known to hombre!” — I definitely agree. Lingro is an interactive dictionary for use with websites. Enter the URL of a website, enter the language and direction of translation, and click the arrow. Now the page loads, but each word on the page is click-able and attached to a dictionary.
For instance, I entered welt.de (a German news site) and German > English. Then, while reading an article on the German soccer team, I came across a word that I was not familiar with. I clicked on the word, and instantly a small window pops up with the English translations of the word. Also, if the word is in a link, a small window pops up above the word asking if I’d like to follow the link. This interaction is great, but what’s even cooler, is that Lingro will track the words and sentences you look up on other web pages. If you register, you can save this data and create a kind of automatically generated vocabulary list — awesome!
4. Chinesepo - Chinesepo.com bills itself as “not your parents’ language instruction. This is learning on your terms.” Very cool. They center their service around four main activities: Listen, Review, Practice, and Reinforce. A user can listen to ChinesePod lessons on the site, or download them as mp3s to listen on the go. Review activities are centered around a PDF file for each lesson, with vocabulary, conversations, and exercises. Practice activities are live chat sessions with real tutors. Finally, a series of flashcards and vocabulary games are available for reinforcement of learned material.
5. Livemocha - Livemocha offers services similar to eduFire, but with a few more added features. Livemocha offers self-study lessons, professional tutors for one-on-one sessions, and community and chat tools for meeting friends and conversing live. Additionally, the Livemocha system has motivational and goal setting tools, allowing users to compete against each other.