First up was Warren Witlock, who wrote the book “Twitter Revolution.”  His presentation was titled “the Secret to Selling Stuff on Twitter.”  Yet he let us in on a secret: The key to selling stuff on Twitter is to not try to sell stuff on Twitter.  There are a few easy steps to doing well with Twitter. They are:

Step 1: Listen

The key is to listen and read what people are saying.  While Twitter might not be around in 5 years, the effect of the revolution will be.  We will be communicating differently and those that listen will prosper.

Step 2: Love

Let someone know you care  Don’t be too promotional – the message needs to be genuine for it to be effective.

At the end of the day, social media can grow 100x what it is today.  It is worth the time to put in the effort and do it right.

Warren said that PeopleBrowsr was a good tool to use and you should probably check it out.

Next up was Dan Zarrella from HubSpot.  Dan wrote an article about the Science of Retweets and this presentation is about that article.  He started by dropping some retweet knowledge.  3% of all tweets are retweets and over 60% of retweets have links in them. The URL shorteners can have a big affect on the “retweetability.’ From what he has seen, Bit.ly works the best.

The top keyword for retweets is “you,” followed closely by “Please” and “Retweet” as 2^nd and 3^rd respectively.  The least retweetable words are descriptions of what people are doing.  Smarter comments and saying something new tend to get retweeted a bit more.  Nouns are also great for retweets, as tweets about things are highly shareable.  Obviously, news is also a great topic for retweets.

For more information, you can download his entire report.

Next up was Chris Winfield (Disclaimer – this is my boss) from the one and only 10e20. For him, Twitter is about asking questions.  To Chris it is just a tool for communication.  What exactly is “pulling a Winfield”?  It is using questions as tools to help accomplish tasks. Twitter wrote a blog post for him.  Twitter did a presentation for him at SES Toronto (275 answers in 90 minutes!).  Twitter questions can do a lot of things and are quite powerful.  Current example – he used a question about Pubcon to find out who would be at the conference, then made a Twitter list with the answers to track his Pubcon friends.

Don’t just make it all about business; help build your relationships.  Chris shared a great story about how USA Today did a full story on Michael Dorausch because of Twitter.

Some tips for asking questions on Twitter:

• Use mystery for your tweets
• Ask qualified questions that people can answer
• Don’t make it all about business
• Respond to answers – make it a two-way communication

How can asking questions help your business?

• Conduct polls to learn more about customers, or send people to polls on your site (PollDaddy and Twtpoll are some nice tools)
• Poll the masses — 10e20 accomplished some important tasks based off of suggestions
• Actually converse with your audience.  By monitoring his conversations, Chris landed a large Fortune 100 client.

Next was Kate Morris, freelance search marketer from Austin, Texas.  Kate took a look at the landscape as a whole.  A lot of things have changed over the past few months.  RIM is developing a Native Blackberry Twitter app – businesses are getting involved and embracing this communication.  Twitter is changing the way people build things.  Motorola is making a phone that has instant access to Twitter and Facebook. .

What does this mean to you?  To sum it up, three things:  Marketing, Brand Development & Word of Mouth Influence.  Twitter is huge for these, and these are so important to your business.  Also, customer service is really important and that is where the power of Twitter is really prevalent.

Overall, this was a well rounded panel that got a great response from the audience and had a solid Q and A to follow.  Great job all!

What do we mean by “comfortable”? Well, if you’re creating a social presence online, whether it’s for yourself, your company or for a client, you want to make sure that all parties involved are comfortable with where you’re participating and what you’re saying. If you’re offended or put off by the comments you see on sites like Digg and Reddit, you should find someone who can stomach the remarks to share your content for you. If you’ve got someone managing your Twitter account and he’s being too colorful with his language, find a more suitable replacement. If someone asks you to share a link on Twitter or Facebook but you object to the content or disagree with it, don’t feel obligated to pass it along anyway just because you’re friends.

Ultimately, everything you post and share reflects back onto you and your business (or your client and their business), so it’s imperative to be comfortable with your messaging and the avenues where you participate. Remember, it’s your reputation. While you can’t control what others say about you, you can control what you put out and where you hang out in the social sphere. Make sure you’re happy with your messaging as well as the sites where you’re spreading these messages. For both you and your clients, a little comfort goes a long way when it comes to social media success!

Social Media for Firefox Extension

This tool is the the ultimate time saver for building powerful social media accounts. One of the secrets of top Diggers, Stumblers, Navigators, etc, is being the first to submit stories already becoming popular on other social news sites. For example, you can browse Reddit to find good stories already submitted and be the first to submit them to Digg. You can browse Digg and be the first to Stumble pages that are becoming popular there.

StumbleUpon Add-Ons

StumbleUpon helps you discover great websites that match your interests. Simply click the Stumble button and see the best websites. There are over 500 topics to choose from, and, the more you use it, the better your recommendations become!

Digg Firefox Add-Ons

As you browse the Web, you can see whether or not the web page you are currently viewing has been submitted to Digg and, if not, it lets you submit it with just one click.

Glue for Firefox Extension

Glue (formerly BlueOrganizer) connects you with friends around things you visit. Glue works automatically as you browse popular sites about books, music, movies, wines, restaurants, gadgets, stocks, actors, TV shows and other everyday things around the web. The Glue Bar appears right on your current page to show you friends who looked at the same things and what they thought.

Shareaholic for Firefox Extension

If you use sites like Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Gmail, and Twitter, you’ll want Shareaholic. Winner of the Extend Firefox contest, Shareaholic enables you to quickly and very easily share, bookmark, and e-mail web pages via a wide array of your favorite web 2.0 social networking & bookmarking sites — such as Digg, Facebook, Gmail, MySpace, StumbleUpon, and many many others. This is the ultimate add-on for the link sharing junkie.

Add to Any Buttons

Help your visitors share, save and subscribe to your content with Add to Any widgets.

Add This Button

Makes it easy for your visitors to bookmark and share your content with others.

Yahoo! Buzz Buttons

Stories with the most Buzz may be published on the Yahoo! home page – you can impact what millions will see on Yahoo!.

ul.timate.info Add-Ons

The Mozilla Firefox add-on aims to simplify the way people interact with social network sites including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and FriendFeed.

What add-ons or plugins do you use? Share in the comments below or tweet your response to 10e20!

Result #1: Webinars and podcasts are used by 69% of the business professionals surveyed.

What this means for you: Since webinars and podcasts were cited as the top social media resource for business professionals, if you’re a B2B maybe you should think about incorporating some tutorials onto your site. Offer something useful and interesting that your audience can digest visually (videos), audibly (podcasts), or interactively (GoToMeetings, webinars, etc).

Result #2: Facebook is dominant for B2C companies (83% of the respondents use it compared to 45% for Twitter), while B2B companies seem to use both fairly equally (77% have a profile on Facebook and 73% have a Twitter account).

What this means for you: More and more companies are using social networking sites to reach out to their customers. You need to decide if maintaining a presence across multiple sites is ideal for your company. See what your competitors are doing and note how successful their efforts are. At the very least, register your brand names and hold onto them — you don’t necessarily have to set anything up, especially if you don’t have time to properly manage your social presence, but you should at least nab your profiles before someone else does.

Result #3: Of the people who use social media for business purposes during work, 62% visit company/brand profiles on social networking sites, and 55% search for business information related to these sites. From the survey results: “Consultants and marketing communications professionals are the most active users of social media as a resource for business information, particularly in micro (<10 employees) and small businesses (10-99 employees).”

What this means for you: Companies should think twice before blocking social media sites at work, as there’s clearly considerable business value in allowing employees to use social networks for research, competitive intelligence, marketing, etc.

Result #4: The average company surveyed was in the process of planning or executing at least 7 different social media campaigns; however, over half of the respondents working on the campaigns have less than 2 years of experience using social media for business purposes.

What this means for you: The learning curve for social media marketing has gotten pretty massive and steep in just a short period of time. A lot of businesses are starting to understand the value in social media marketing but are ill-equipped and ill-staffed to get started. This presents a huge opportunity for knowledgeable consultants who are experienced in Internet and social media marketing to pick up some clients and spread their wealth of knowledge across different companies.

Result #5: Two essential social media success metrics identified in the survey are building brand awareness and improving brand reputation. However, nearly 66% of the companies that stress the importance of these metrics aren’t sure how to measure them or interpret standard/easily accessible performance reports.

What this means for you: Social media ROI can be tough to measure but is still a top concern for business who are engaging in social media marketing. Come up with regular reporting metrics (like referral traffic from Facebook and Twitter, track/chart positive vs. negative mentions over time) for your business or your clients and be consistent with your tracking and your reports. The changes may be subtle, but every little effort counts in the grand scheme of things, especially when your goal is to make money.

I [insert name], Chief Marketing Officer of [insert company name], do solemnly swear to:

1. Prevent squatters from taking over our company URLs on Twitter or other major social media websites and get them back if/when they do
2. Prevent employees from reserving important company names, brands and products on social accounts and later leaving the company and taking important passwords with them
3. Have a positive response for consumers talking about our brand in social media websites
4. Create good video content for YouTube and other major video sharing websites
5. Work with my advertising agency to run new creative / media buys which includes our company’s social media URLs
6. Make sure my web development and creative team put a Facebook or Twitter badge on our main websites
7. Work with my web analytics team to create custom reports so that I can see KPI’s for social media activity and referrals
8. Make absolutely sure my board, my investors, my CFO, and my CEO understand that we need adequate budget for social media marketing

And I will never allow:

1. My marketing team to tell me that they don’t know how fast our social media audience is growing
2. Legal to say we cannot run contests or sweeps
3. Marketing consultants to tell me that the only way to participate in social media is by creating a branded community that we control where we invite all of our brand advocates and try to sell them things
4. My CEO to tell me that we cannot have a blog on our website or that there is no time for anyone to blog
5. My kids to tell me they know more about social media than I do
6. Myself to think that:
   • social media marketing is something that gets instantaneous results
   • social media is nothing more than glorified press campaigns
   • social media is about selling our products to people who “hang around blogs”
   • social media marketing means buying ads on social networking websites
   • everyone who says they are a social media expert is an actual social media expert
   • apps are the entirety of social media opportunity
   • …or to be behind the curve or unaware of new and emerging social media sites and emerging technologies that help consumers connect with and understand our brands, products and services

Congratulations, you may now hold your head high and move into social media marketing with confidence and grace. You will not be battered by your colleagues for not knowing enough, nor will you be pushed around by Legal, PR, Web Development or Management committees who say “you can’t.” You are now empowered to succeed and to do better than your competitors by connecting with your consumers in a meaningful and effective way.

Matt Siltala

If you’re new to competitive monitoring and don’t know where to start, here are some tips:

• Hubs. Find and identify the easy ones. Look for places to find content ideas, links, sites that can help with keyword research and sites linking to more than one competitor.
• Press. How is your competition using press? This can help generate ideas by keeping up with trending opportunities, linking opportunities, etc.
• Review sites. Where are your competitors getting talked about? Who’s writing about them? How are these reviews getting done?
• Forums. Which forums are your competitors hanging out in, and how are they participating?
• Local search. How does your competition stack up on local search? Do they have any sort of local presence?
• Directories. Find the sites/directories that are linking to more than one competitor and see if you can get added to them.
• Anchor text. Find and identify everything there is to know about how the competition ranks.
• Unique domains linking in. Analyze how many unique domains are linking to your competitor to get a better idea of the work that’s ahead of you to get equivalent rankings.
• Strong content. Keep an eye on your competitors’ strongest pages.

Michael Gray

Michael shared a bunch of sites that he uses for competitive monitoring:

• Quarkbase — find out everything about a website, such as the most recent and popular pages people have submitted from this site to social media sites.
• Topsy
• Viralconversations.com
• Bit.ly — how many people have clicked on a particular link
• Tweetmeme

Use more than one site when monitoring, because each site will pull up slightly different information, and it’s important to have a comprehensive and varied view. Pay attention to who is talking about your competitors and note any patterns you find.

Plan a competitive monitoring course of action:

• Research how, where, and when your competition is engaging in social media
• Look for points with high levels of engagement or other success metrics
• Dissect their network, looking for their inner circle
• Join their network or build your own

Michael Streko

The other Michael on this panel recommended using incompetence to your advantage. Find out who’s linking to your competitors and point out any misspellings, outdated information, etc that you come across to see if they’d rather link to you instead. According to Streko, if it’s on the web, it’s fair game. Snoop snoop snoop. What they hide from the engines is your advantage.
Know your competitors’ presence:

• Monitor their social activity
• Use alerts to your advantage
• Use organic and paid keyword tracking
• Use SEM Rush

Use tools to compete. Watch their Alexa ranking, know their Compete score and use Quantcast data if it’s available. Set up similar sites if you can, then open up the lines of communication and request a link exchange. Also consider advertising on their site, since Adwords should give you a semi-accurate reading of their traffic.

Andy Beal

Andy went through a great list of different things to track. For your competition, track the company name, its CEO, its products and locations, etc. Keep an eye out for new products and features, media placements, sympathetic bloggers, etc.
For rants, track your company’s brand plus words like “sucks,” “defective,” “crap,” “poor,” “expensive,” etc. Try to poach their unhappy clients and customers, promote your alternative product, or use their feedback to improve your products.

Also track your competitors’ employees. Keep an eye on their blogs, social profiles, photos, videos and social presence on the web. “Loose lips sink brands,” as Andy put it. You can gather damaging evidence, glean new information about upcoming products or company news, or find potential hires. Also scour your competition’s job listings to find out information about new locations opening up, job turnover, expansion, products in development, etc.

You can also use Google to track a lot of competitor activity:

• Google.com/alerts via email or RSS
• Google Sidewiki
• Local listings

And you should be paying attention to Facebook. Read/monitor your competition’s fan pages and identify who their fans are. Search posts on Facebook and mentions to see who’s talking about them and in what way.

Track your competitors’ URLs too. Andy shared some good resources you can use:

• – Domaintools.com/registrant-alert will send you an alert any time a certain email address is used to register a domain name
• Domaintools.com/mark-alert will give you trademark alerts (whenever a competitor is registering a trademark)
• Oodle.com/job will alert you to job postings (the company name, location, skills/position)

Here are some advanced competitive monitoring tools. They vary in price but are worth checking out.

• Socialmention.com
• Trackur.com
• Radian6.com
• Visibletechnologies.com

Social Media and PR

Top tips from the Social Media and PR session:

1. Online PR should incorporate search and social media reach (via Guillaume Bouchard)
2. Capitalize on social media for PR by building and leveraging relationships, researching where you need to spend your time (be social where you need to be), and enabling your message to be shared by optimizing for the social audience (via Joanna Lord)
3. If you’re not building trust, you need to evaluate what it is you’re doing and how you’re doing it (via Pat Strader)

Online Brand Management Strategies

Top tips from the Online Brand Management Strategies session:

1. The different stages of the sales funnel are Category Awareness, Brand Awareness, Brand Consideration, Brand Preference, Purchase Intent, Purchase, Customer Retention, and Advocates. Each of these stages is impacted by branding. (via Sean Jackson)
2. Build and maintain your social media profiles — don’t just “set it and forget it.” Also, build links to your social media profiles so that they can rank better for brand and reputation management purposes (via Kenny Hyder).
3. When it comes to crisis communication, you need to have strong internal communication with your staff. Policies must be laid out in advance to advice employees how they can respond in a crisis, and honesty and accountability are typically the best policies with employees and vendors (via Tony Wright).
4. 6 tips for dealing with negativity online (via Krista Neher):
   1. Humanize your brand (it’s easier to hate a company than a person)
   2. Listen and try to understand the problem
   3. Thank them for caring
   4. Be transparent and explain
   5. Build a community of passionate brand defenders
   6. Know when to walk away

Using the same avatar or similar one on all your social network accounts can help to establish your brand and make it easier for other users to recognize you and feel like they are familiar with you and your accounts. Using an image of yourself as an avatar can bring you more credibility and trust. People want to get the feeling that there is a real person behind every email, profile, website or whatever other thing that represents yourself and the services you provide.

What to use?

If you are a company, use the logo. Having trouble fitting your logo into those universal square dimensions? Try to use a portion of your logo or an icon that is in the same styling. Another option is your symbol. This could be a picture of something that represents you even further than the logo, for example we use Charlie for our Twitter profile pic.

If you are creating a personal account, the best option would be a simple photograph of your head shot. Try to use an updated picture — you don’t want to deceive people. Imagine that face-to-face meet up and someone says how different you look. I get that sometimes — my beard comes and goes

Changing your avatar too often can be confusing to people trying to find you by your photo or the avatar they are used to seeing associated with you. If you must change it out, make sure you have a good reason for doing so. I know that personally when I scroll through my TweetDeck during the day, I look for specific people by their avatars first. If they change them often, it is harder for me to spot them. However, if they are interesting enough, I will find them, regardless if they have a new avatar.

Creative Business Card Ideas

MOO minicards are smaller versions of the classic business card format. They allow you to print 100 different images on the fronts. This can be great with promotions or coupons.

Here is a great business card Flickr set of inspirational, beautifully designed business cards. Also check out the Business Card Group Pool at Flickr for some more creative ideas.

Humor can be a great way to capture someone’s interest and keep in memory. It also serves as an icebreaker of sorts and can easily get a conversation moving along.

Virtual Business Cards

Some are advocating a paperless business card world, but the technology (or acceptance of this technology) isn’t there just yet. Sure, it’s cool to ‘bump’ your iPhones and share contact information (or maybe you would rather shake?), but not everyone is carrying an iPhone and this makes virtual cards unstable.

There are also hundreds of sites that offer services to make a virtual business card. Card.ly and Contxts allow users to make a “tiny” portfolio online in which they’ll be able to integrate into networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) or share via SMS.

Although I think the main idea and green aspects of a paperless business card are commendable, I won’t be jumping on that anytime soon (much like how Kindle hasn’t make the paper page go the way of the dodo yet). I recommend recycled paper for card, as the environment matters. The one big advantage printed business cards have over any virtual method is that they serve as a reminder. Once information goes into your phone or PDA, how likely is it you’ll remember to look at it again?

What to Do with All Those Business Cards You Have?

CloudContacts is a service that scans all of your business cards that you have gotten over the years from conferences and networking events and transcribes and connects your business cards on social networks, email services and CRM systems. This allows you to access your business card contacts from anywhere in the world. Or you could just throw them all away…

Personally, I have a bin of business cards that I have gotten or collected because I met the people or I just saw the card and thought it was visually appealing. Some are beautifully designed and given such personal touch, while others are clean and classic. Whatever the reason that I saved these cards, I like the tangible aspect of them- hard proof that they are out there doing business! These cards are more than just information about how to contact someone; in a way, they are a piece of each person.

Making the most out of your business cards can sometimes be the difference between making a connection or breaking one. By using some creative ideas and utilizing other networks, you can be sure to stick out of the stack of cards.

• Thanksgiving
  Pilgrims, Maize and Native Americans – oh my!  Everyone loves some good T-giving linkbait so talk about the worst foods, what really happened on that first Thanksgiving, or anything related.  Just get this in early as it will be saturated on the week of the 22nd!
• Twilight: New Moon
  This is some movie that is based on popular books about werewolves or Vvmpires or something.  It will be huge – I have no other advice than that
• MMA
  Strikeforce is going all in on a primetime deal with the world’s best fighter, Fedor Emelianenko, airing on CBS.  How will it work?  Could it fail, and if so, why?  Can MMA be a primetime event?
• 2012
  Who doesn’t love a good disaster movie?  Talk about the flaws, what could be true or any other aspect of the world ending.  As long as the world doesn’t actually end, you will have a lot of success.
• NBA
  The season just opened at the very end of October, and this is one of those rare times where the NBA is relevant.  How are the rookies doing? Are Shaq and Kobe ok?  There is a lot out there so get some early season jabs in and use professional hoops to give you a hand!
• Motorola Droid
  The best Andoid phone yet launches this week on Verizon.  They use creative ads for promotion and the phone has some cool new features.

• Winter
  While this sounds dumb, there are a lot of opportunities that you can create around this upcoming season.  This can be tied into virtually any niche, from how to prep your house/garden for the cold to winter essentials for the family.  The coming cold is a great opportunity for hot content!
• V
  This is a TV show that is new on ABC and features aliens as “visitors.”  Could this really happen?  Do aliens exist?  If so, would 29 ships hover over major cities?  What are the best alien moments in movies/television?  This series might be short-lived, but I think it can help you out while it does.
• Elections
  While voting just wrapped up, the results are a great opportunity for content.  Take a look at the closest voting, surprises and the underdogs that won.
• Avatar
  This is going to be the biggest movie of 2009 and contains a variety of topics from the technology of the special effects to the social and cultural implications of the plot.  December will be packed with Avatar stories, so do yourself a favor and get in early.
• Christmas
  Sound early?  It’s not.  If you have “best buy lists” or top gifts, the time is NOW.  In December those lists get too saturated, so your best option for prime visibility is as soon as possible (and it will have a much longer shelf life).

Have any other hot topics for the month of November?  Feel free to share examples below!

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