Gremln lets you manage your activity on all of the major social networks at the same time. The main dashboard resembles a TweetDeck layout, with the ability to set up multiple panels that track different types of activity across different accounts. You can add panels that track Twitter activity–including some fairly sophisticated Twitter searches–Facebook accounts and Facebook Pages, and LinkedIn. You can also add RSS feeds and blog searches, which makes this a truly integrated home base for anyone managing content across social networks and blogs.

Once your panels are set up, you can manage the content across all of your networks. Gremln has included a nifty translation feature that lets you translate posts into all major languages, from Afrikaans to Vietnamese. You also have the ability to “quote” tweets — modify the content before re-sharing it, in the original ReTweet style.

Gremln makes it easy to post content across multiple networks and to manage multiple accounts from the same dashboard. You can schedule one-time posts or schedule recurring posts with a great deal of flexibility.

Where the tool really starts to go from useful to interesting, however, is when it comes to social media analytics and ROI measurement.  The platform pulls in analytics from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, in addition to offering you web site traffic analysis.  It has the ability to set goals and track performance against those goals.

The company has also created its own URL shortener, called Brev.is, and if you use it to create the links you send out, you will be able to track your clicks all the way through to your landing page, a feature that Gremln calls Target Pages and which is available to users who pay $59/month for the small business version.  Down the line, the company is planning to add integrated analytics features that will  let you see the flow of traffic from your social media efforts to your web site, according Ryan Bell, the president of Gremln.

Enterprise-Level Collaborative Social Media Management

Gremln offers a number of enterprise-level team and franchise social media management features. It includes the ability to grant different levels of access to additional users. If you specify guest-level access, then all of the content from that user is subject to approval. The company also offers a white-label version of the platform, which lets you create a custom skinned and branded environment, creating a tool to manage decentralized content creation across multiple divisions or franchises.  Bell told me that his team is currently working with a financial services company to develop a compliance management panel that lets you specify certain words that would automatically trigger a moderation requirement–he expects these features to be available in mid-March.

The basic version is free, and it lets you manage up to 5 accounts, a slightly more robust version (up to 10 accounts; ability to manage Fan Pages, include web analytics, etc.) is available for $6 per month.  More details are available at http://gremln.com/.

Gremln currently has 100,000 users, and hopes to reach 1 million in the next 12 months.  Will you be one of them?  Which social media platform do you use?

Please email marissa@modernmediapartners.com if you have additional updates, or a social network that you feel should be on the list.

Facebook’s IPO Estimates Put Market Value of Average User at $89 to $118

According to Facebook’s SEC filings this week, the site now has over 845 million active monthly users.  Analysts are estimating that the company’s IPO could value the social network at between $75 and $100 billion.  At the high end, that means the market would place the value of the content and other interactions produced by the average Facebook user at $118.

The filing included a Letter to Investors from Mark Zuckerberg’s, in which he positioned the company in light of the social value it was creating.   Among other changes, Zuckerberg believes that Facebook will change the way consumers interact with brands:  “We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.  We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.”

• Facebook Inc. filed for an initial public offering Wednesday that could value the social network between $75 billion and $100 billion, putting the company on track for one of the biggest U.S. stock-market debuts of all time. (WSJ.com)
• Facebook’s astonishing rise is a metaphor for the emergence of the Internet as a tool for individual self-expression and collective organization. (Time)
• Facebook’s future growth is being driven by user behavior that it has so far failed to monetize: mobile. (GigaOm)
• Facebook’s Platform paid out $1.4 billion to developers in 2011 (Inside Facebook)
• “In the event that Mr. Zuckerberg controls our company at the time of his death, control may be transferred to a person or entity that he designates as his successor” (New York Post)
• How the average investor can get in on the action… (Reuters)
• … and here’s why you shouldn’t bother:  Facebook’s IPO: Do Not Buy (CNet)

In other news, Paul Allen estimates that Google Plus has passed 100 million users this week…

When it comes to measuring ROI, the largest percentage (38%) measure interactions with consumers: the number of fans or followers, likes, comments, etc.  One in four tracks increases in revenue, and 15% track increases in brand awareness from social media marketing activities.

Of those that did not have a strict ROI measurement in place–measuring the increased value against the cost of the investment–100% still believe that social media delivers business benefits.

Most marketers (94%) still rank Facebook as a top channel,  followed by Twitter (74%), blogs (41%) and LinkedIn (32%).  Google Plus was not yet on the radar at the time this survey was fielded.  Why do marketers value Facebook fans?  44% said the reason was new customer recruitment; 18%  suggested that Facebook fans have higher conversion rates and make more frequent purchases.

See more stats from this study in this Wildfire infographic.

How close are you to being able to track a return on investment from social media?

Even though a majority of its employees already were quite active on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, Vestas did not see any need to rush into social media.  The company stuck to its knitting, building more of the 43,000 turbines it has installed for customers in 66 countries across six continents, while it studied this new thing called social media.

The company’s group communications department started by monitoring social media sites to find out what people around the world were saying about Vestas. They didn’t want to jump in too soon with nothing to say.

“We approached it with curious caution and slowly started to build a presence, says Kasper D. Borch, Web Editor of Vestas.com.  “If you engage in social media activity, you need to have some interesting and substantial content for the other users. Done wrong, social media can backfire and create bad will and angry users instead.”

Slowly, Borch and his team turned from passively listening to actively engaging in dialogues and conversations.  While he admits that “we are only at the very beginning,” Borch likes to point out that more than 5,000 people have hit ‘Like’ on its Facebook page, it has more than 4,000 followers on Twitter and the videos that Vestas has uploaded to YouTube have been viewed more than 140,000 times by people from all over the world.

Being active in social media has begun to pay off for the communications team.  Sky News reached out to Vestas via Twitter about a burning turbine in Scotland.  Borch was surprised the news outlet relied on social media rather than the phone or email, but he and his team were prepared to respond quickly.

As it gets more experience, Vestas’s social media efforts are expanding.  While most of its Facebook and Twitter posts are rather dry press releases about new sales or installations, the company’s marketing team has been promoting contests such as the Global Wind Day photo competition from related organizations to encourage more interest in wind energy.

Borch just has one simple piece of advice for anyone who wants to participate in the online conversations, regardless of topic: “Listen!” he says. “And always be humble and polite when asking or answering questions.”

Are you feeling pressured to keep up with social media first-movers?  Or are you taking the time to listen before jumping in?

A total of 52% of all adult cell owners used their phone to call a friend for advice, look up reviews of a product online, or look up the price of a product online while they were in a store.  One third (33%) used their phone specifically for online information while inside a physical store—either product reviews or pricing information.

The study found some demographic patterns.  Cell owners who look up online product reviews are more likely to be between the ages of 18-49, to be urban or suburban (vs. rural) and to have attended college–but they are less likely to be white.  These groups are generally the same ones more likely to use their phone for online pricing information.

This has huge implications for brick-and-mortar retailers:  One in five “mobile price matchers” ultimately made their most recent purchase from an online store, rather than a physical location.  Of the respondents who use their phone to compare pricing while in the story, 35% purchased the product at that store.  But 37% decided to not purchase the product at all, while 19% purchased the product online, and 8% purchased the product at another store.

Pew points out that this equates to 5% of all cell owners who purchased a product online this holiday season after looking up its price online from a physical store.

Do you use your phone to comparison shop while you’re in a store?

The UN is committed to social media as a way of engaging its diverse constituencies and raising awareness and gaining support for a variety of causes.  Here we outline a number of ways in which the organization is using social media to drive its business goals.

193 Countries. One Social Media Strategy.

Leading the charge is Nancy Groves, social media manager at the UN’s headquarters in New York. Groves, who previously worked as a librarian at the UN, recently outlined her efforts in an interview with Mashable.

Groves is part of the UN Secretariat, the body charged with carrying out the day-to-day work of the organization. But there often are a vast number of differing opinions and points of view among the UN’s 193 member countries. Thus, it can take a significant amount of time to get permission to make her posts.

In December, four social media experts, @adamhirsch, @alecjross, @rachelsterne and @sree, trooped over to the UN headquarters in New York to offer their advice to some 300 United Nations staffers as well as students and journalists on how the UN can best harness social media tools to reach their global objectives. You can view a video of the entire session here.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Answers Questions via Social Media 

But it’s not just the social media team that reaches out to the public. Last September, for the first time in its history, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon answered questions submitted from Twitter, Facebook, LiveStream and other social media networks. The conversation was moderated by Juju Chang of the ABC television network.

According to an article in Social Times,  upwards of 5,500 questions were received from around the world. More than half came from China, including one that asked why so many people die from hunger in Africa when there’s enough food in the world to feed everyone.

Crowdsourcing the United Nations Strategy on Youth and HIV/AIDS

For the two months before Christmas last year, the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS  invited people aged 15 to 29 to help create and shape a new United Nations strategy on youth and HIV/AIDS through an online collaborative project using several social media platforms to facilitate the development of new policies to combat the pandemic.

Called CrowdOutAIDS.org, the initiative’s name alludes to the popular concept of crowdsourcing, which consists of letting large undefined groups of people collaborate and come up with innovative solutions for tasks traditionally performed by individuals (see the press release from the UN News Centre).

The Social Media Campaign for Human Rights 

“Our social media human rights campaign focuses on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and aims to help more people know, demand and defend human rights,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay in a statement.

The campaign launched by the High Commissioner’s Office followed an online discussion on Facebook and Twitter called “30 Days and 30 Rights,” which counted down to the UN’s annual December 10 celebration of Human Rights Day with a daily post about one specific article of the Declaration.

Education and Awareness–in Six Languages

Turning back to the UN Secretariat: its primary goal is to get out educational messages from the world body–information about the UN’s mission and its various efforts around the world. That includes “warts and all,” not just its vaunted humanitarian work saving and improving lives. The social media messages often include details about famines, wars, genocide and other disturbing news.

It’s neither easy nor quick, as all social media posts have to go through the UN’s political review process. Groves and her team have to be careful with language and wording. To avoid offending anyone or causing an international incident, she relies on a peer editing process.

Once approved, the posts must be translated into ALL of the UN’s six official languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish).

To speed up the process, the team often will re-use content that has already been approved for use in a press release or video, for example.  But the social media specialists can move quickly when needed, as they did during the earthquake and tsunami in Japan when they used Twitter to connect victims and relief centers.

Working for diplomats, Groves and her team learned quickly to deal diplomatically with people who post questions and comments that are less than flattering about the UN. Although there are many of these, the social media staff tries to respond to every question and criticism, often with links to statistics pages or other information.

Does the UN’s mandate to tweet in 6 languages and meet the needs of 193 members make your social media strategy look simple?  Or do you deal with a similar level of complexity? 

South Africa’s tweets were more than double those of runner-up Kenya, with 2.47 million tweets.  Nigeria was ranked third with 1.65 million tweets, followed by Egypt (1.21 million) and Morocco (745,620).

The majority of tweeters (57%) in Africa are posting via their mobile device.  The population using the micro-blogging service skews quite young: 60% of Twitter users on the African continent are in their 20′s, while the average age of Twitter users world-wide is 39.

What are they tweeting about? 81% of African Twitter users polled reported that they use the platform to talk with friends.

When does Twitter serve as their main source of information?

• For 76% of respondents, it’s the place to find international news
• 69% use it to find the latest entertainment/gossip
• 68% use Twitter to stay updated on national news
• 43% check Twitter for their sports updates
• Just 22% search for jobs on the micro-blogging platform

Study data also revealed that Twitter users on the continent are generally active on a variety of platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn. The study found that “Twitter is helping to form new links within Africa,” as at least half of the Twitter accounts followed by survey respondents were based on the African continent.  60% of respondents “mainly follow African tweeters.”

One surprising element of the research was finding that, for the most part, public figures haven’t joined Twitter in Africa. According to the study (with some exceptions) “business and political leaders were largely absent from the debates playing out on Twitter across the continent.”  Study authors concluded that as Twitter grows across the continent, governments, businesses, and development agencies can’t afford to stay out of this digital space, as reported by PCMag.

Click here to see Portland’s infographic on how Africa tweets.

Please email marissa@modernmediapartners.com if you have additional updates, or a social network that you feel should be on the list.

Tumblr Reaches 15 Billion Monthly Pageviews

Tumblr CEO David Karp revealed new statistics about the blogging platform’s continued growth at this week’s Digital Life Design conference.  Tumblr now has 15 billion impressions monthly and an audience of 120 million people, according this sound clip from The Next Web. The average Tumblr user spends upwards of 30 min on the site each day.

Back in early 2011, impressions were at just 2 billion, showing a remarkable increase in the past year.

Karp focused on Tumblr’s plans for 2012, including a “more deliberate international effort” that will involve “spending more time overseas” and dealing with foreign press.  The majority of Tumblr’s traffic is international, with just 40-45% coming from the US.  Karp spoke of significant growth happening for the platform in both Europe and South America.

Karp also mentioned that 2012 would be a big year for both revenue and product development.

Alas, Twitter did not say it so succinctly as that.  They started out with a bit of philosophical butter to salve the corporate conscience…

“As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.”

This breathtaking piece of Bay Area doublespeak attempts to equivocate between the free and the not free.  We’re all “free,” says Twitter, only the “contours” are different. Americans can be neo-Nazis. The French and Germans cannot be neo-Nazis, even though they are generally considered to belong to free societies.  Does it not then follow that China can also be considered a free society, only with slightly different “contours,” arising naturally from the bumps and bulges of culture and history?

This is nonsense. Freedom of expression, in any meaningful, practical sense, is a Boolean term.  Either it exists or it doesn’t. In the United States, France and Germany it exists; in China it doesn’t.

In the next paragraph Twitter gets more specific:  ”Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world.”

Note the weird new pusillanimous adverb “reactively.” We’re going to cooperate with the authorities, but only if they tell us to.  I suppose this nice distinction between self-censorship and censorship, between “reactively” and “proactively,” matters to Twitter. To the rest of the world it probably doesn’t.  Tweets withheld from “a specific country” — the place they actually matter — won’t affect real outcomes.

This is not an easy issue.   A censored version of Twitter may do more good than no Twitter at all. As a privately held company Twitter has every right to operate where and how it wants.
But Twitter and services like it have been developed by free people, in a society where freedom of expression is a core principle.  Extending Twitter to societies that don’t share that principle means compromising both the principle and the service.

Twitter should be clear about the compromise it’s making. Trying to couch it in politically correct terms does not make the issue go away, and it does nothing to help them earn the trust and respect of the users on which their business relies.

Background on this issue (we will continue to update this list as we find more articles with different points of view):

• Tweets Still Must Flow  (Twitter Blog)
• Country Withheld Content (Twitter Support Page)
• Chillingeffects.org/twitter (Cease and Desist Notices: Sent to Twitter)
• Worried About Possible Restrictions On Twitter?  Here’s How To Get Around Them  (The Next Web)
• Twitter to selectively ‘censor’ tweets by country  (BBC News, with comments from Reporters Without Borders)
• Twitter to Censor Content in Certain Countries (Mashable points out that the announcement comes one day after Twitter announces it will be available “available in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu — languages … spoken in many countries associated with strict government media restrictions.”)
• Thoughts on Twitter’s Latest Move (Jillian York, Director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation says “this does not, in my view, represent a sea change in Twitter’s policies.  Twitter has previously taken down content–for DMCA requests, at least–and will no doubt continue to face requests in the future.  I believe that the company is doing its best in a tough situation… .”)
• Relax: Twitter’s New Censorship Policy Is Actually Good for Activists (Mashable argues that the new policy will actually allow for less censorship, not more.)

The site hasn’t yet added its own version of Twitter’s popular Fail Whale, but today users noticed that something had been taken down:  the Pinterest search box.  According to Pinterest user Maggie McGary, a friend noticed that the search function seemed to be hacked or broken yesterday, with all searches returning the same set of results.  Today, the search box is missing completely.

(To see a screen shot of the search box, check out Brankica’s post, Pinterest Traffic Generation SEO.)

Did the pressure of massive growth create a problem?  Or was the system hacked in some way?  Either way, tens of thousands of users–and a rapidly growing number of brands–are eagerly awaiting its return.

We’re working on getting more details on what happened & will update this post with any new developments.

UPDATE:  Here’s how Heidi Kay (@PediaStaff) described the problem she was seeing with Pinterest’s search functionality yesterday:

UPDATE 1/27:  this morning, the search box is back where it belongs!