The problem is that many of your site visitors may not know how to create a mobile shortcut, so you should offer instructions on how they can. There are any number of ways to do this: You can offer a link to a page with instructions or place a short video on your site showing how they can create a shortcut on their mobile device.

Here is a short video on how to create a mobile shortcut that you are welcome to embed on your own site:

I’m sure your next question is going to be: How did you get the mobile devices to use those nifty little shortcut icons to represent your website? Read about how to do that on Mobile Web Slinger.

This post is based on the book The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web, which will be released in May 2012, but you can get a review copy from the author today.

Deltina Hay is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Social Media Survival Guide, and the anticipated book, The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web. She also teaches the online version of Drury University’s Social Media Certificate program. Learn more about Deltina and her availability for speaking engagements at Deltina.com. You may also enjoy listening to her video tutorial series on YouTube.

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by Paul Gillin

With so much free and “freemium” software available out there, it seems a waste to pay for features you don’t need. That’s why whenever I’m looking for a new application, the first place I stop is TechSupportAlert, also called Gizmo’s Freeware.

Started more than a decade ago by a retired Australian IT manager, the site has grown to become the most robust source of information on free software that I’ve ever seen. You can find everything from PC tuneup utilities to alternatives to Microsoft Office here, all for free.

Even better is that founder Ian Richards has enlisted a team of volunteers to organize and test the programs they list. Their hands-on reviews are excellent, and there recommendations will steer you to the best stuff. The site has also recently started cataloging great freeware for iPhone and Android devices.

Be sure to sign up for the daily newsletter, which highlights new finds and offers the editors best tips for hacks and tuneups for Windows and Mac platforms. All for free!

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This tip may have appeared in one form or another in Paul’s newsletter, blog, or news column.

Paul Gillin is a writer, speaker and business adviser who specializes in the strategic use of social media. Since 2005, he has written four books and published more than 130 articles about the changes in markets and society being driven by media democratization. His books include , The New Influencers, Secrets of Social Media Marketing and Social Marketing to the Business Customer. Paul writes the monthly New Channels column for BtoB Magazine. He is a research fellow at the Society for New Communications Research and serves on the Procter & Gamble Digital Advisory Board.

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Linking your plus page with your website will verify your page so that it and your website will get more exposure in Google searches. The following video from the Internet Empowerment Series of video tutorials shows you how:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iyuj7ns2OmY

Deltina Hay is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Social Media Survival Guide, already in its second edition. She also teaches the online version of Drury University’s Social Media Certificate program. Learn more about Deltina and her availability for speaking engagements at Deltina.com. You may also enjoy listening to her video tutorial series on YouTube.

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Step One: Know Your Goals

Any good marketing plan starts with established goals. You need to know what your goals are before you can measure how successful your efforts have been to achieve them.

What do you want to accomplish through your social media efforts:

• Sell more products?
• Get more reviews?
• Establish yourself as a thought leader?
• Drive more traffic to your Website?
• Generate leads?
• Increase your fan base?
• Reach a specific demographic?

Outline very specific goals so you can measure the results of your efforts.

Step Two: Establish Your Baselines

Based on your goals from step one, establish measurable baselines you can use for comparison later.

Create a spreadsheet that includes:

• Current sales numbers
• Review counts
• Number of hits in Google
• Website stats
• Other baselines specific to your goals

Clearly, some things are easier to measure than others. Quantitative elements like sales, website stats, and Google hits can be tracked easily; however, more qualitative elements such as thought leadership, influence, or customer satisfaction can be trickier to measure.

You may be surprised at just how many things are measurable in social media. Check out this post entitled “100 Ways to Measure Social Media” posted by Marketers Studio in 2009. This lists demonstrates that there are many things that can be measured. Your job is to establish which items are true indicators of your efforts based on your established goals.

Step Three: Track Your Efforts

There are plenty of tools you can use to help measure your social media efforts. Internal features of social media tools like Facebook and WordPress, free external tools, and paid services can all give you insight into how well certain strategies are paying off.

It is important during this step to use more than one tool to track your efforts. Each individual tool can give you specific insight into one or more aspects of your social media presence. Together, a carefully selected host of tools can give you a complete picture of how your efforts are paying off.

It is also important to focus only on the data that is relevant to your goals. It is easy to get lost in the “numbers” and lose track of your goals. Some of the data may not be relevant to your goals – focus on the data that is.

Internal Tools

Start your tracking and analysis from within many of the tools you already have in place – here are a few to get you started.

Facebook Insights

Facebook’s statistics tool, Insights, can help you track and analyze demographics, engagement, referrals, click-throughs, and more for your Facebook pages. Access this tool from the main menu when you edit any Facebook page.

Facebook Insights breaks down the demographics and activities of a page’s fans. This feature also allows you to gain insight into how users engage with specific content, where your referrals are coming from, how well individual posts are doing, and more.

The latest version of Facebook Insights includes demographics and metrics for overall Facebook page activity, the reach of your Facebook content, the people who “like” your content, and insights on how your content is shared.

When viewing these metrics, keep your goals and baselines in mind.

WordPress Stats

If your website or blog is powered by WordPress, there are a number of good plugins that can help you analyze your site. I recommend WordPress.com Stats, mainly because it is developed by the WordPress.com team.

Using this plugin, you can get a very good picture of how visitors are interacting with your site: which of your posts are the most popular, where your incoming referrals are coming from, which key terms visitors are using to find your site, which outgoing links are clicked, and more. You can drill down to get more details on many of the stats, but keep in mind that only you are going to know which results are relevant to your specific goals.

FeedBurner

Burning your RSS feed or blog to FeedBurner means that your blog subscriptions (either via feed reader or email) can be managed, optimized, and analyzed using the FeedBurner service. You can see which of your posts are the most popular, drill down on your subscriber demographics, and more.

HootSuite

HootSuite is a platform to help you manage one or more Twitter accounts as well as integrate your other social media tools and blogs with Twitter.

In addition, HootSuite has some nice analysis tools you can use to analyze your Twitter accounts. Their pro version also allows you to integrate Facebook Insights and Google Analytics so you have a one stop place to get insight on your Social Web presence.

This tool can help you get a feel for which of your tweets are getting the most engagement, and even attempts to calculate the “sentiment” of your Twitter followers toward your tweets.

Free External Tools

There may still be questions you need answered that the tools above are not able to accommodate. Luckily, there are some free tools that can help even further. Here are a few to consider.

Klout

Klout uses an interesting set of criteria to determine what it refers to as a “Klout Score.” The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses variables on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus to measure what they call “True Reach,” “Amplification Probability,” and “Network Influence.”

True Reach is the size of your engaged audience and is based on those of your followers and friends who actively listen and react to your messages. Amplification Probability is the likelihood that your messages will generate actions (retweets, @messages, likes, and comments). Network Influence indicates how influential your engaged audience is. An overall score over 30 is considered good.

This scoring method can help you pinpoint specific areas where you may need improvement. For instance, the results depicted below demonstrate to me that I should take a close look at why my posts do not get as many “actions” as they should, especially since one of my goals is to increase virality.

There is a fair amount of controversy as to how accurate Klout scores are at measuring influence. But this controversy simply reinforces why the best approach to a successful measuring framework is to use a variety of tools, avoiding the temptation to rely on one “magic” number to measure social media success.

Google

Google still has about the best host of analytics tools at your disposal. Google Analytics can help you track and analyze website and social media visitors. Google Webmaster Tools can help you gain insight into how Google indexes your site, which search terms are used to find your site, errors on your site that may be keeping it from placing properly, and more. You can get advanced metrics on specific search terms with Google Trends, and Google Alerts can keep you informed when certain terms (like your name, your business name, your website name, or your book title) land high in search results.

socialmention

Real time search engines and analytics tools like socialmention can give you good insight into the kind of attention your posts and updates are getting. In addition, socialmention shows the reach, sentiment, and passion followers have for your name or brand. These search engines can also give you insight into the key terms that are typically associated with your brand.

PostRank

PostRank is one of the few paid services that still has a free option. Using PostRank, you can track not only your social media efforts, but engagement on specific pages of your website. It also allows you to track documents like PDFs, videos, or presentations. You can even use the service to analyze your RSS feeds.

You can get a lot of information on individuals updates or blog posts as shown below. Scrolling down this page reveals individual engagement activity, like tweets mentioning the post and more.

Paid Services

There are a lot of social media metrics services popping up now-a-days, but with all of the free tools at your disposal, you won’t likely need them. Large companies, major brands, and PR firms running regular campaigns are typically the target market for such services.

If you do find yourself in need of a paid service, though, here are a few that have earned good reputations in PR and marketing circles:

• PostRank
• Radian 6
• JittterJam

When choosing a paid service, here are some questions to ask:

• Does it integrate your social accounts like Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter?
• Does it measure all of your social accounts?
• Does it measure your RSS feeds, Website, and other documents?
• Does it measure interactions across other social sites?
• Does it show specific interactions?
• Does it measure engagement within your social accounts and on your website?
• Does it show “tags” or key terms used to find your content?
• Does it interface with Google analytics or other analytics tools like Facebook Insights?

Step Four: Stay Informed, but Trust Your Instincts

Don’t get overwhelmed by all the “advice” out there. You know your business better than anyone, so don’t fall into the trap of following advice that does not apply to your goals. I am not suggesting you ignore what others are saying, but I do suggest choosing only a few good sources that can help you stay informed on the latest trends in social media.

Here are some resources to consider:

• Mashable
• ReadWriteWeb
• SocialMedia.biz
• SocialMediaToday

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

I also recommend a slow and methodical approach. If you are building a consistent and optimized online presence that you periodically analyze and adjust to meet your goals, then you are on the right track. Trust your instincts: keep doing the things that are working, and ditch the things that aren’t.

Deltina Hay is the author of The Social Media Survival Guide and The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web. She also teaches the online version of Drury University’s Social Media Certificate program. Learn more about Deltina and her availability for speaking engagements at Deltina.com. You may also enjoy listening to her video tutorial series on YouTube.

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Solis broadly defines the term as:

The Egosystem describes this new environment where people see themselves as the center of everything. Every interaction, with people and businesses alike, revolves around them. That kind of changes the dynamics and balance of the relationship.

Solis goes on to outline six rules of engagement that businesses and organizations should adhere to in order to find success in the “egosystem:”

Rule One: Value

Consumers want to feel valued by the companies they do business with. Feeling valued translates to knowing that the company or brand will go above and beyond to meet your needs. In the Egosystem, the customer identifies their needs as the most important. They want the company or brand to share that sentiment.

Rule Two: Efficiency

Not only does the customer want to feel valued, but they want their time to be valued as well. Thanks to an increasingly mobile and social world, consumers are used to having technology that allows them to often expedite traditionally long, laborious processes. They expect this same level of expediency when dealing with businesses.

Rule Three: Trust

Consumers need to be confident in the credibility of businesses. They want to know that a company will stand by the product, actions and services that they deliver.

Rule Four: Consistency

It is common for companies to offer multiple channels for communication with their customers. AT&T offers email, live chat, Twitter, Facebook, phone and even postal mail. Offering multiple channels is good, but there is no value unless the service you provide is consistent across each one.

Rule Five: Relevancy

This is something that a lot of companies struggle with, particularly when it comes to social media. Many companies use social media as another means of advertising. They essentially spam social media profiles, blogs and marketing emails with product-centric information. However, that’s not what the consumer wants.

Rule Six: Control

We have heard over and over again that the customer is in control. But the idea of control is two-fold. It is clear that customers want a sense of control in that they want to choose the channel they communicate on, and they want the ability to opt in and out of specific engagements.

Read the full interview with Brian Solis by Lauren Carlson on Software Advice.

Deltina Hay is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Social Media Survival Guide, and the upcoming book, The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web. She also teaches the online version of Drury University’s Social Media Certificate program. Learn more about Deltina and her availability for speaking engagements at Deltina.com. You may also enjoy listening to her video tutorial series on YouTube.

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by Paul Gillin

PowerPoint bloat is a growing problem.

As people copy and paste screen grabs and Web images into their presentations, file sizes can grow to 10MB or more. This makes them slow to download, particularly over a mobile connection, and vulnerable to blockage by some mail servers.

There are several ways to reduce PowerPoint bloat without affecting the quality of your presentation. Try these:

Compress Pictures. When you paste an image in to PowerPoint, the program keeps the entire original image there, regardless of how you resize or crop it. This wastes a lot of space. PowerPoint has a little=known option to compress these images and delete cropped areas. It can be accessed by selecting an image, choosing “Format” and then choosing “Compress Pictures.” Use the “Options” dialog to select e-mail quality compression and to delete cropped areas of the picture, and apply to all images in your presentation. This can reduce file size by up to 50% in my experience.

Send PowerPoint Slideshows instead of slides. Choose “Save As…” and select “PowerPoint Show.” This stores your presentation as a self-contained, uneditable movie, which is particularly useful if you don’t want people copying your stuff. File sizes are from 50% to 80% smaller.

Send PDFs. Similar to the Slideshow option, you can save your slides in portable PDF format. Choose “Save As…” and select the “PDF” option. File sizes are typically 1/3 to 1/2 smaller.

WikiHow has more ideas.
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This tip may have appeared in one form or another in Paul’s newsletter, blog, or news column.

Paul Gillin is a writer, speaker and business adviser who specializes in the strategic use of social media. Since 2005, he has written four books and published more than 130 articles about the changes in markets and society being driven by media democratization. His books include , The New Influencers, Secrets of Social Media Marketing and Social Marketing to the Business Customer. Paul writes the monthly New Channels column for BtoB Magazine. He is a research fellow at the Society for New Communications Research and serves on the Procter & Gamble Digital Advisory Board.

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by Dave Evans

Over the last two of weeks as I stopped in at my favorite watering holes in and around Austin, TX  I made it a habit to “check in.” I was using Foursquare and Gowalla, two notable :location-based” social networking services.

Oddly (remember, this is Austin, TX!) I found only one actual “benefit” outside of a rather nebulous ego boost earned while watching my “check in status” climb. (And let’s face it: That, by itself just isn’t worth all that much to a marketer.) Of all of the check-ins , the only real payoff happened at Lucy’s Retired Surfer Bar. Each time I checked in at Lucy’s, I moved steadily closer to a specific promotional offer. This gave me a goal that I could track and encouraged incremental purchases. Lucy’s was only establishment across the many venues I checked into – ranging from bars to cars to airports and even whole cities – that actually seemed to care that I had checked in.

To be clear, there are three distinct motives for checking in, all of which ultimately drive a marketing benefit:

1. Checking in: Letting someone know that (you) are nearby and open for some sort of localized experience – for example, a “check-in” at a retail outlet. Marketing benefit: As a shop owner, you know that Mr. or Ms. Jones has just checked in.You can now sell specifically to this person, increasing your likelihood of a sale.
2. Adding context: This can apply to an activity you are already in the mode of, for example, using a QR code to access additional information related to an event you are attending. Marketing benefit: You can provide the added info needed–on the spot–to pull a browser all the way to a purchaser.
3. Drawing a crowd: Inviting or joining with others who are nearby for the purpose of enhancing a current or near-term activity – for example, meeting at a coffee shop ahead of movie, or diverting altogether in favor of an alternative trending venue. Marketing benefit: You can provide group offers, or indvidualized incentives that encourage (me) to bring (my) friends, again boosting (your) sales.

If you’re not using location-based tools–or, if you have them turned on (e.g., if you have actually claimed your locations) but are not doing anything with them, think about the opportunity your missing. By the way, if you’d like an excellent reference on the use of location-based tools, check out “Location-based Marketing for Dummies,” by Austin’s Aaron Strout and Mike Schenider.

Grab a copy of Aaron and Mike’s book and head over to Lucy’s. Turn on, check in, and chill out. It will all become clear.

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Want more? You’ll find the the continuation of the original article here: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2112150/mobile-social-importance

Dave Evans is the VP of Social Strategy at Social Dynamx, an Austin, TX-based firm involved in the processes that link customer service and the social web. Dave is also the author of best-selling “Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day,” as well as “Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement.” Dave is a regular columnist for ClickZ, a frequent keynoter and leads social technology and measurement workshops with the American Marketing Association as well as Social Media Executive Seminars, a C-level business training provider.

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by Deltina Hay

Social Media Monotony: It was bound to happen.

Like all good things we do for our business every day – balance the books, pay the help, return emails, follow up with clients, floss – we know that networking and marketing are necessary to our business’ success.

My mantra is: If I am not working, I am marketing. If I am marketing, I will be working. And, like it or not, social media is now a necessary part of both networking and marketing.

Lately I have noticed a change in my enthusiasm for social media, and I have a feeling I am not alone. It isn’t that I believe it is less effective or that it is losing its appeal, it is just that I have been doing it long enough to have fallen into a rut.

While trying to think of tips this week, it occurred to me that this may be the best one to offer. Following are some time-honored cliches applied to social media marketing that may help relieve the monotony.

Cure #1: You can’t keep what you have without giving it away.

That is one of my favorite anonymous quotes. I believe that the most successful bloggers write from that place – where it is not about promotion or plugging a product, rather about the sharing of knowledge and expertise – freely, without any expectations.

I know the pessimists in the crowd are thinking that there is no such thing as true altruism, that everybody gets something (if only a way to feel better about themselves) from any seemingly selfless act. And, well, so be it. I get something, the readers get something – sounds like a win-win to me!

Cure #2: Change the circles you run in.

I like to think that my LinkedIn connections, Facebook fans, and Twitter followers are different groups of people. Accordingly, I am hoping that the “circles” I run in on Google Plus also come from a different group.

My strategy is to invite people outside of my usual circles, though, with the intention of widening my network. I try to apply this strategy to all my new profiles.

Cure #3: A change of scenery.

It is amazing how something as simple as rearranging the furniture can improve one’s outlook. Try changing up how you post or where you post from as a cure for your social media rut.

Some of my favorite tools are HootSuite, Ping.fm, and Posterous. Here is a recent post about social media apps that may help, too.

Cure #4: Do something out of character.

My Facebook page posts are pretty predictable. I write about the importance of staying on topic, and try to practice what I preach. However, now and again it may not hurt to mix things up.

Today, I placed a post on my social media book Facebook page that links to a Flickr set with photos from Bastrop State Park in Texas – before the fires – just to break the predictability.

Cure #5: Try something new.

If you have the time and resources, you might consider adding another tool to your social media strategy. I recently started some HubPages and a Winksite to this end. Since I don’t have a lot of time to maintain new profiles, my goal is to recycle my existing efforts into different platforms in hopes of widening my network.

Some other tools presently on my “to do” list include:

• Tumblr
• Diaspora
• awsomize.me
• Netvibes

Hope you find a cure in this post if you are suffering. And we would love to hear what has worked for you!

Deltina Hay is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Social Media Survival Guide, already in its second edition. She also teaches the online version of Drury University’s Social Media Certificate program. Learn more about Deltina and her availability for speaking engagements at Deltina.com. You may also enjoy listening to her video tutorial series on YouTube.

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by Paul Gillin

A little-known but wonderful feature of Google Documents is its forms capability.

You can build reasonably functional surveys and capture results in a spreadsheet. I’m finding value in this feature from both a professional development and marketing perspective.

Whenever I present a speech or training class, I send a short form to the attendees asking for feedback. I built a simple survey in Google Documents to collect this feedback. With just four questions, anyone can fill it out in 30 seconds.

I usually get several responses from every group, and my ratings have been averaging about 4.4 on a one-to-five scale. Now that I’ve amassed a fair number of evaluations, I’m sharing the complete, unedited results with anyone who inquires about my speaking or training services. I find that this feedback from past audiences to be a great marketing tool, since it reflects the opinions of people who attended my presentations.

If you look at the results, you’ll notice that there are some “2″ and “3″ ratings mixed in with the “4s” and “5s.” This is actually a good thing. A few negative reviews helps reinforce the validity of the positive ones. In one case, it helped me to rescue a relationship with the client. I was able to address some dissatisfaction registered by the audience before it became a problem.

Here’s a nice introduction to forms.

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This tip may have appeared in one form or another in Paul’s newsletter, blog, or news column.

Paul Gillin is a writer, speaker and business adviser who specializes in the strategic use of social media. Since 2005, he has written four books and published more than 130 articles about the changes in markets and society being driven by media democratization. His books include , The New Influencers, Secrets of Social Media Marketing and Social Marketing to the Business Customer. Paul writes the monthly New Channels column for BtoB Magazine. He is a research fellow at the Society for New Communications Research and serves on the Procter & Gamble Digital Advisory Board.

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by Deltina Hay

Here are ten of our favorite mobile apps for social media. Do you have any favorites to add to the list?

(Note: Though these links are to iPhone apps, the tools listed have Android counterparts as well.)

6 Staple Apps:

• Facebook for Mobile
• Twitter for Mobile
• LinkedIn for Mobile
• Flickr for Mobile
• YouTube for Mobile: Rather than use an iPhone app, Google prefers its users to access YouTube from this URL on their mobile browser: m.google.com/youtube. The mobile URL offers nice features, all optimized for the mobile web.
• WordPress for Mobile

4 Analytics and Social Media Tools:

• HootSuite for Mobile
• Posterous for Mobile
• Homebase
• Google Analytics

Deltina Hay is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Social Media Survival Guide, already in its second edition. She also teaches the online version of Drury University’s Social Media Certificate program. Learn more about Deltina and her availability for speaking engagements at Deltina.com. You may also enjoy listening to her video tutorial series on YouTube.

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