Yoono - Useful Multi-task Tool - Yoono is an Internet plug-in that creates a sidebar on your browser (but you can decide if you want it visible or not). You can pick from 10 social networks that you update or follow the most. After putting in your settings, Yoono shows all updates on the social networks you chose to view and any RSS feeds you follow. Yoono is great because you don't need all those tabs open and you can update several profiles at the same time.

ShareThis - ShareThis is a nifty widget. You can add it to your web browser toolbar, a blog, and it also appears as an option when you right-click. ShareThis allows you to send anything you find on the web (e.g. cool picture, good blog post, interesting article, etc.) almost anywhere (e.g. email, Twitter, Digg, etc.). It's similar to the ReTweet button.

StumbleUpon - The web is enormous, so how can you cut your searches down to only what you want? With StumbleUpon, you give sites a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Based on your ratings, StumbleUpon suggests sites you might like or are similar to sites you rated. Another sweet feature is to Stumble. StumbleUpon sends you to a randomly selected site, which is typically pretty fun.

TweetLevel - This is a new tool from Edelman, that measures your importance on Twitter. TweetLevel grades your Twitter profile out of 100 points, based on influence, popularity, engagement, and trust.

• Influence - Are you interesting (to other people)
• Popularity - How many follow you
• Engagement - Are you socially active
• Trust - Does anyone believe what you say

The higher your score, the more important you are.

Social Mention - Want a free real-time analysis of you or your company's web presence? Good, because that's what Social Mention does. You can easily track and measure what people are saying on more than 100 social media platforms. Social Mention aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.

The top three reasons that small business owners avoid developing their online marketing plans and stay away from social media is lack of capital, lack of time, and lack of skills. This is where a blog will fit your needs perfectly—it is relatively cheap to incorporate into your site, requires very little time, and you do not need any special technical skills or writing expertise to use it. View this guide for tips on getting started with a blog and for best practices on maintaining it.

What is most important to having a successful blog is to understand that it is like hosting a networking event on your site, around the clock. People can read what you’ve written, which should be entertaining and informative. They can also participate by asking questions and posting comments. This can become a sounding board for revealing your areas of expertise and truly helping potential customers. It can also be a place for your current customers to tout your goods or services.

The beauty of the blog is that it does not need to be a picture perfect dissertation of what you do; as a matter of fact, it is better if it is more conversational and speaks to the masses. You can also have fellow employees or business associates write posts to expand your reach. One cardinal rule of blogging is to not only start this conversation, but to respond as well—keep the interaction moving.

Learn more and get started today!

He started by explaining why SEO is/should be important to PR Professionals.

In a 2008 Journalists Use of Search Survey by TopRank, we discovered that 91% of journalists use standard search to fulfill a component of their job whether researching a story or locating a subject matter expert.

With journalists writing for more channels and with less resources making your content visible within search is critical.

Here are Odden’s 10 SEO Tips:

1. Number one thing to do?
Magic answer is that it depends on the problem.
However, if you choose one item to tackle make sure your website is crawlable. If the site isn’t crawlable, then really nothing else you do in terms of SEO will matter.

2. Understand and Optimize PR Tactics
The content that is likely already being created as part of the PR campaign is low hanging fruit in terms of SEO.

Optimize the following content with keyword phrases (or those terms that journalists might be searching) to help your content become more visible:

• Press Releases
• Letters to the editor
• Online Newsroom
• Media kits
• Corporate blogs
• White papers
• Webinars/demos
• Newsletters
• Real world interviews published digitally

In addition, Odden introduces the audience to the idea of Micromedia Optimization. Now that tweets and soon status updates are being integrated into the search engines, it’s important to optimize the content regardless of the channel.

3. PPC vs SEO for PR
SEO is long term, part of a content process and contingent on content and links over time.
PPC is on-demand, pay to play and an alternative to natural listings. If you have something you need to draw attention to right now, PPC is perhaps the more viable option as you can have ads live within minutes.

4. Keyword Research
In order to optimize your existing content, a list of keyword phrases needs to be developed.
Here’s how you build the list:
1. Brainstorm phrases
2. Import to a keyword research tool
–Google Keyword Tool
–Google Insights & Trends
–WordTracker
–Keyword Discovery
–SEM Rush
3. Find popularity and variations of the original keyword list
4. Create a keyword glossary

When creating the glossary, be sure to segment by popularity and category to ensure no important phrases are missed.

5. Basics of OnPage SEO
When optimizing a website, newsroom or landing page, don’t forget to include keywords in the following places:

• Title Tags
• Keyword Placement within content
• On-page titles
• Navigation links
• Body copy
• Keyword text links
• Image alt text

6. Get more from Press Releases
Press releases can be more than a vehicle for distributing messages. If optimized, it can also serve to pull journalists (and even prospects) to the content hosted on a website or within a newsroom.

To optimize your press content for search visibility, remember to:

• Research and identify target keyword phrases
• Optimize the release for 1-2 phrases
• Include a Call to Action (link to landing page, so you can track activity)
• Develop and Optimize Landing Pages
• Post to Newsroom
• Pitch to Media
• Distribute via RSS
• Leverage Wire Service Distribution
• Measure Results

Here are 7 tips specific to Press Release Optimization:
1. Think up and to the left
2. Optimize for people first, search engines next
3. Use keywords in Title, Subhead, body
4. Don’t obsess over keyword density
5. Aim for a 500 word release to use target keyword 2-4 times
6. Use keywords in links to company sites
7. Add media: images, podcasts, video

7. Newsroom Optimization Tactics
Online newsrooms can be an added resource to draw journalists in, if it is optimized and can be found via search.

To optimize your newsroom or to get one started, follow these tips:
1. Consider using blog software to manage your newsroom, very search friendly
2. Share/Save Bookmarks
3. Leverage keyword categories
Chronological archives don’t benefit the search engines or the user. No one wants to search through years of press releases – as opposed to clicking on a category of content like ‘SEO Tips’.
4. Cross link from optimized content to relevant content on the website

8. Link Building
Links ‘electrify’ content in search and can significantly improve search rankings.

Earn links with great content and by deploying the following:

• Promote content socially
• Link up with partners
• Cross link internally
• Embed links in releases
• Social bookmark pickups of release content/coverage

When creating hyperlinks, be sure to use keywords in text:
Yes: Red Widget
No: Click Here

9. SEO & Social: Yin Yang
SEO and Social Media can be very complimentary to one another, so if deploying both (or even parts of both) be sure to integrate for highest impact.

Optimize Social Media for Search
The role of SEO in a social media effort is to directly influence discovery of social communities or content via search.

Link Building for SEO Through Social Media
Indirectly, social content can boost links to website content, improve search traffic and online sales.

10. Measuring & Selling the Value of News SEO
After deploying some or all of the above, it’s important to tie back to results.

There are are many different ways to attach measurement to the optimization of news content and here are a few to get you started:

• Newswire service metrics
• Web analytics for landing pages and websites
• Google / Yahoo alerts
• Monitor blog search engines (via RSS)
• Press release landing page conversion tracking
• Social media monitoring
• Inbound links
• Pickups on blogs
• Pickups on other websites
• Pickups on publications
• Search Rankings

Don’t think those will work? Odden recommends using the power of the competitors.
Are your competitors receiving better social or standard search visibility? If so, that’s often a compelling data point for decision makers.

What tips do you have to add for optimizing news content?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | PRSA09: Top 10 SEO Tips for Public Relations | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

In response to overwhelming demand, LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, will return to Washington, DC on December 8 and 9 with a new revised curriculum for their acclaimed workshop, “Getting Ahead with Google Analytics” I attended a version of this program last year and it was terrific.

Sessions, specifically designed for beginners, intermediates and advanced users, will cover all the newest tricks and latest developments, and show you how to leverage one of the world’s most powerful analytics tools to gather more meaningful data, analyze it with greater insight, and use what you find to improve your website’s performance.

You can attend for half a day, a whole day or both days and take advantage of special pricing that starts at just $199 for a half day of deep-dive learning.

Find out more and register today! If you have any questions, contact Robbin Steif or call LunaMetrics at 412-381-5500.

If you build a local breaking news Twitter site from this slideshow tutorial, let us know @pkitano and we’ll LIST it!

Getting customers to talk about your product or service isn’t as hard as you might think. A viral marketing campaign that provides them with a way to connect with others you serve, a compelling story they can share, and a subconscious nudge is all they need.

I’ve found three strategies that make viral marketing especially contagious.

Provide A Way For Your Customers to Interact. Getting customers to spend more time online talking to  other customers is one way to help them spread the word. For example, add a chat room to your website.

People talk about what they do. And if they are using your site to connect with others sharing the same experiences, they can’t help but tell others about their experience. Pretty soon, you see folks using your chat room that are interested in your product or service, but want someone’s opinion whose used it before. If your product or service is good (and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be) then those prospects are fertile conversion for your business.

Make Your Product Easy to Work into Conversations. This is about your brand. For example Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan has become cliche. I remember using it all the time as a motivator when I ran. I still use it today. And every time I think of Nike.

Tell Your Customers to Spread the Word. Social media sharing tools like Share This prompt your customers to share information about product or service with friends. You can also run a “Tell a Friend” campaign and give away discounts to those customers who comply.

When you give reasons for customers to talk about your product or service, they will. They just can’t help it. Those curious about what you’re doing will show up at your website, and converting them is easy. As they hear more great stories about your business from others, they’ll be convinced yours is right for them. And you customers did all the work.

As Your PR Guy, I can help you set up a viral marketing campaingn for your product. I mix social media and public relations strategy to create an experience to engage your customers in conversations about your product, service and business.

You’ve most likely heard of RSS feeds, but you might still be wondering exactly what they are. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” RSS itself is just the format for delivering regularly updated web content. Blog feeds allow readers to keep up with the newest info posted on different sites, and people “subscribe” to the feeds of their choice.

Enter the “Feedreader”

For example, there are 25+ blogs out there that I enjoy reading on a regular basis. I want to keep up with them because they help keep me up date with all of the latest information in my niche. However, I don’t want to have to go out to the web and pull up each blog individually every day just to see whether they have been updated. The solution to this is to use a “feedreader” to see all of my favorite blogs’ latest content all in one place. Feedreaders allow you to access new content in two main ways: through the actual reader itself or via email updates. One of the most popular feedreaders and the one that I use is Google Reader.

The Business Use

Why is this important for marketing? Two reasons: 1—It’s a great way to stay current and educated on the things going on in your niche or market through blogs; and 2—It provides a simple way for people who are interested in you and what you have to offer to stay informed. You want to remain on people’s radars consistently so that even if they are not ready to buy from you now, you are able to stay top of mind for them when they are ready to. Just like an email newsletter helps to build and strengthen a relationship with its subscribers, a blog does the same with those who subscribe to its RSS feed.

By its very nature, social media allows content to be shared and spread far and wide across the internet, resulting in more exposure for you and your business. Therefore, it’s crucial to be able to share your blog’s content through multiple channels. For example, many social media platforms and services such as Facebook require you to provide an RSS feed address in order to syndicate (publish) your content.

Managing Your Own Feed

Blog platforms such as WordPress come with feeds already built in and it’s pretty easy to find the RSS feed of your own blog. Just type your site’s address into a browser and add /feed right after it. I use a service called Feedburner through Google to manage my feed and give me detailed statistics on my site’s subscribers and traffic. I suggest you “burn” your feed as well to keep track of your subscribers at http://feedburner.google.com.

Now you know a bit more about RSS feeds and why they are such an integral part of having your own blog—or keeping up with the ones you like to read the most. I’d like to know—do you use a Feedreader?  How many blogs do you read on a regular basis?  Let me know your thoughts in th comments.

Post from: communicate value

What is RSS and How Can it Help Your Marketing?

Have you ever had this scenario unfold? You’ve just created some amazing content, everyone that you’ve shown it to absolutely loves it and can’t wait to release it into the wild that is the web. You throw it on your micro-site, company website or blog and wait for the inevitable take off. After all the content is great and that’s all that matters right?

Wrong. Great content won’t mean much if you don’t cover the basics for activation and sharing.

Despite what you have been told, content is only king when it has been fertilized and nurtured. A farmer wouldn’t just throw seeds into the ground and just hope that they grow. Why would you do the same with your content?

1. Target a specific audience for activation. Not all content is the same. The content that will work on Digg will not necessarily thrive on Delicious. Why? Different audiences. Just like any medium you need to play to your base. Seeding effectively will be key here.

2. Build in sharing capabilities. Now make sure that those sharing capabilities adhere to both your audience AND work effectively. Cutting and pasting a url isn’t going to cut it anymore. People have built in sharing networks and audiences that you need to ensure you leverage. Nothing is worse than receiving a mess of code instead of a nicely formatted sharing option. Test before you deploy.

3. Bite-size content. Organization is vital here. Does the design of your micro-site or blog lend itself to becoming viral? Can you even find the share button? Is your content brisk, organized and lend itself to scanning or a quick pan? If you can’t get attention in the first 5 seconds once they hit your desired landing page, you need to redesign the experience.

4. Actively promote your content on multiple platforms. Integrated marketing works for a reason. Multiple points of attack allow for a broader audience and a better chance of success. You should always cross-pollinate your marketing efforts not just from a brand standpoint but from a content standpoint as well. Consistency=Success.

5. Check for the originality of content and utility. Great content usually has been thought up on some form or another in almost every genre. A variation or similar campaign might already be out there. Don’t get caught ripping something off. If you do. The Internet will hurt you.

All the things above take only a commitment of time, testing and thought. If you start doing these on a regular basis this will become like second nature to you. (I have this as a sticky note in My Documents.)

Can you think of any other simple things to check before releasing your content?

This isn’t written for the social media savvy as much as it is written for a creative at an agency. (Who I think should have a completely symbiotic relationship with a developer anyway.)

Photo Credit: Bud_caddell

 The Lost Jacket was founded in 2008 to create synergy between old and new website ideas. Today there is a battle brewing between the static and the dynamic. The trend is to move towards dynamic integration and community building. Let Lost Jacket help you find your place on the web, and reevaluate your SEM, SEO and Web Marketing Techniques through the use of New Media Techniques and Web 2.0 Marketing.

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How much attention do you pay to the headline of a blog post or other content you write?

I always think that the headline of a blog post, newspaper article, news release or other piece of written material is the most essential thing to pay attention to when you write that content.

A compelling headline or title is usually how you’ll get the attention of people when they’re doing things like I do most days – scroll through a list of headlines of content in my RSS reader.

I don’t see photos or other visual attractions, just words upon which I’ll make a rapid almost subconscious decision on whether to give the content the headline leads to any attention, or skip and continue scanning.

As an example of making headline creation an art if not a science, look to the Huffington Post and what they do to write compelling headlines as reported by the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard university:

From direct mail to web design, A/B testing is considered a gold standard of user research: Show one version to half your audience and another version to the other half; compare results, and adjust accordingly. Some very cool examples include Google’s obsessive testing of subtle design tweaks and Dustin Curtis’ experiment with direct commands and clickthrough rates. (”You should follow me on Twitter” produced dramatically better results than the less moralizing, “Follow me on Twitter.”)

So here’s something devilishly brilliant: The Huffington Post applies A/B testing to some of its headlines. Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the wood that everyone sees.

Headlines have always played the most promotional role in news, charged with selling readers on the articles they adorn, so it only makes sense to apply the best tools of market research to their crafting. Think of it as a more rigorous version of magazines adjusting their covers based on newsstand sales.

The extent to which the Huffington Post goes to test how compelling their headlines are is doubtful wither it’s a feasible activity for your average blogger.

Yet thinking more about the headline of your post, and then writing a compelling one, is advantageous in a world where your great post is competing for attention among all the other great posts out there.

Luckily, there’s help close at hand, starting with Copyblogger’s How To Write Headlines That Work. Some good advice there. And check their series on writing headlines with even more tips and tricks.

If you use Twitter, you’re already well ahead in practicing a technique of concise communicating, squeezing all you need to say in 140 characters or less. Good practice for writing snappy headlines.

Now you have a good reason to use Twitter!

© 2009 - visit the author for more great content.

The success of your blog, or any social media effort, depends on your willingness to solicit feedback and take corrective action when necessary. If you want to have a successful blog that supports your organization’s goals and adds value, improvement should be continuous. You need to pick the right hard data points, or metrics, that will help you harvest insights and improve your blog.

Analyzing your blog content
First, you need to set overall goals for your blog and understand your audience. Next, you need to know the right metrics to use, and employ the proper tools to collect the data. Most important, you need a strategy—either for yourself or for a team—to gather insights from your metrics. Remember, it isn’t about the numbers alone.

Avoid Analytophilia
Alexandra Samuel coined that phrase in a post on social media analytics and metrics about the greatest peril of social media: analytophilia.  It's about obsessing on raw numbers and constantly checking the number of Twitter followers or retweets or Facebook insight clicks.  She recommends that you don't go into your analytics or stats program without composing a specific question first. I've been advocating this approach for a long time and offer you a set of data points and questions.

Here are seven tips to help you start measuring social media efforts.

1. Readership growth
This means content consumption. There are two different kinds of web viewers: subscribers and visitors. Subscribers have made a commitment to regularly receive (and hopefully read or at least scan) your blog. Visitors are people who occasionally visit your blog. You should pay attention to monthly trends of content consumption over time. This will tell you a lot about your readers’ satisfaction with your content.

• Hard data points: Look at the feed subscribers trends from Feedburner and unique visitor trends from Google Analytics. Understand how Google Analytics calculates unique visitors and how Feedburner calculates subscribers, but please don’t get so hung up on the geeky part of measurement that you don’t have enough time to gather insights and apply them.
• Gathering insights: Is the number of visitors and subscribers increasing? If not, why? If yes, why? Think about your publishing frequency, the length of posts and the mix of topics.

I get a notice when someone unsubscribes to my blog. I send them a personal follow-up e-mail asking why. I’ve received excellent feedback from my inquiries about how to improve the blog’s publishing schedule, topics and more

2. Reader engagement index
This looks at how much your readers are interacting with you and your content, as well as how they are sharing your content with others.

• Hard data points: For this, I use the PostRank tool, which ranks your blog posts with a number from 1 to 10. I pick out all posts that score a perfect 10. The scores are based on analysis of the “5 Cs” of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting and clicking. You should understand how this model works, but don’t get distracted by trying to find flaws in how engagement measures are constructed.
• Gathering insights: What topics do the posts that receive high scores cover? Are these posts longer and more in-depth, or short and focused on one topic? Do they include information from a lot of outside resources? What’s the tone—formal or informal? Do they include tips? What is the quality of the conversation in the comments section? What did you learn from the conversation your readers started? If you have a group blog, are there differences between authors? Why? Did anything surprise you?

I have discovered a number of patterns in my highest ranked posts—for example, length, titles, the number of ideas covered in a post, the tone, style and so forth. This has been the single best source of improving the quality of the content on my blog.

3. Reader bookmarking
This measures whether readers are bookmarking your content for later retrieval which provides some indication of how much they value it.

• Hard data points: You can find out about bookmark saves from PostRank numbers, although the program doesn’t make it efficient to grab data over time. Remember bookmarked items can also positively influence your blog traffic.
• Gathering insights: What was the topic of the post that was bookmarked? Are the posts focused on providing tips, resource roundups or other formats? Are there patterns? And if so, what are they?

4. Conversation rate:
This is the amount of commenting and conversation that is happening on your blog.

• Hard data points: You can get a list of the most commented on posts from PostRank. If you use Wordpress, Joost Blog Metrics will give you a post-to-comment ratio.
• Gathering insights: What is the style of the writing? Do posts with more questions in the title and questions in the end generate more comments? Did you do any outreach to encourage commenting? Is there a conversation happening between people who comment? What do you do to facilitate it? What’s the quality of the commenting—are you learning? Are the comments positive or negative?

5. Authority
This is the number of links to a post. This metric gives you an indication of the value of the content by showing you how many people are linking to your content. It can also influence traffic.

• Hard data points: Conduct an analysis of the number of links to a post using Yahoo Site Explorer.
• Gathering insights: Pull out the top 25 linked posts on your blog. Analyze the types of posts (content and format) that get linked and the impact of that linking in referrals using Google Analytics. Are there any patterns?

6. Page views
This is the number of times a page (unit of content) was viewed. I’m not sure how much this will tell you about your content quality, but it could give you some insights about your outreach.

• Hard data points: You can get these metrics from Google Analytics.
• Gathering insights: Why are certain blog posts getting higher page views than others? Look at the referral traffic (including which sites visitors to your site click from or what keywords they searched to get to your site or blog). What was your outreach strategy?

7. Industry index
This metric involves evaluating your performance in relation to other blogs in your space using the same metrics.

• Hard data points: I use the List of Change, which indexes several hundred nonprofit blogs across different metrics.
• Gathering insights: I review other blogs on the list to see if there are ideas that I can incorporate into my own blogging. Where is my blog on the index—high or low? What are the qualities that the top five blogs have in common? How do they compare to my blog?

This may seem like a lot of work, but it takes me about an hour every month to gather up the numbers into a spreadsheet and then set aside some time for reflection on how I can improve my blog. It is an essential part of my blogging process and success.

This article was originally posted at CW Bulletin.

As a humble member of various social networks including Twitter it never fails to amaze me how lame some businesses are in their approach.

I don’t know what is happening inside the brains of the people behind this behaviour on behalf of companies. But it is like they’ve forgotten what it is like to be a real person.

Here are five sins that I’ve seen businesses commit in social networks:

1) No foreplay

Social networking is precisely that ’social’, that means it works just like real life.  How many times in real life do you just walk up to someone and say: “Hi I’m X, do you want to buy my product?” without saying “hi”, making some eye contact & introducing yourself?

In real life, apart from outbound telemarketers, we typically shoot the breeze for a while before launching into the hard sell.

2) Not being real & not letting staff be real

One of the reasons that @comcastcares and @zappos have worked on Twitter is that there were real people behind those accounts & they backed it up with consistently having real people there. Some companies forget that the social nature of these networks means that they need to be more transparent and open up to the outside world. It’s time to personalise the experience in the social world. This also means letting your staff be real people too.

3) Not being interesting

Are you interesting? What have you got to offer? Besides your products why would anyone bother interacting with you socially? Many companies seem to assume that their products are fascinating – but let me assure you, apart from a few special brands like Apple, most people don’t give a toss about your product especially in a social context. That means you will need to be interesting on a personal level. Being helpful & friendly can go a long way on this front.

4) Not getting the culture

Each social network has its own culture and mores of behaviour. Woe betide a company that messes with these. Important questions to ask about your social network presence: Are you interesting? What have you got to offer? Does your brand make sense within the social network context? There is nothing worse than being in the wrong place in the wrong outfit – it’s like walking into a biker bar in your best preppie outfit.

5) Lack of consistency

Are you consistently friendly, helpful and real? If not it jars with the human beings that you’re interacting with in a social context.

One thing that characterises all the problems listed above is that they reflect a lack of understanding of the social contract inherent in social network participation. Social networks mean that the traditional marketing context & the social contract that goes with it are absent.

For example, in the traditional marketing context there is social contract – you try to sell stuff to me & I consume your media, potentially taking up your offer. But in social networks the social contract is more like you’ve joined me in my living room. The social contract here is about being sociable and making human-like contact with other people.

The essence of the social web is that it enables humans to be human.  Where in the past we had to conform ourselves to the constraints of the technology and participate within a pure business or marketing context now we are free to be human.  The people in businesses need to reimagine how to interact with customers on a human to human level.

Generating Leads with Slides

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

This week, one of my favorite content sharing sites introduced a new way to generate leads.

I’ve long been a fan of the social media sharing site Slideshare. Slideshare allows you to upload presentations, much like YouTube videos, and then have them converted to flash movies that can be viewed on line and embedded into web and blog pages.

The site has grown significantly over the last few years and is also a great place to get some really good and really bad examples of PowerPoint use. Presentation owners can enable all manner of viewing, sharing, and downloading or choose to keep the files for private viewing only.

Slideshare has added a new feature, called LeadShare, that looks very worthy of some testing. Now when you upload your slides you can set-up a LeadShare campaign that allows you to embed a form in your presentations and capture leads of viewers. These LeadShare campaigns can be embedded on other sites too. You have a lot of control over the form and even when in your presentation your prospective lead sees the form.

The “white paper as lead” approach that employs a similar capture method has been around for a long time and companies that engage white paper lead generation organizations can pay as much as $100 per lead. The LeadShare system, giving you access to over 2 million visitors a day, can generate leads for as little as $1 a lead.

The jury is still out as to whether this format will prove effective at generating leads, but I think it’s something you could test very easily.

With more and more marketers jumping onto the social media bandwagon, a lot of questions come up. Is it possible to track metrics and ROI? What are other companies doing? Why isn’t it working? Being prepared to answer  questions like these can make a difference in how a company interacts with social media and if they can succeed.

How can we track social media?
Unfortunately, there is no one “most effective” social media tracking system. Marketers across the web are still working to figure out how to measure social media, how to attach ROI, and how to sell the benefits of participationon the social web  to those that don’t “get it”.

Social media marketing isn’t like an email campaign where you can track the number of emails sent out, the number that were opened, the number of clicks, visits, leads and conversions all in one process. Much of what happens in the social media world happens behind a login and the old ways of tracking web visitor analytics just doesn’t work in that scenario.

Just like any kind of marketing, each company has their own set of objectives and reasons for reaching them via social media channels. That means different methods and approaches to the listening, monitoring and measuring of both social web and web marketing activities at large. The field of social media analytics is still very new.  Here are 7 considerations as you evaluate what will work best in your social media tracking.

Quality over Quantity
This has been said again and again and lots of people still feel that the more followers/friends/subscribers/connections they have, the better. The reality is, quantity is not and end goal for lead or sales generation outcomes. What good is it to have 13,000 followers if 1/3 of them are spam accounts and 1/3 are auto followers who will never engage with you? Sure 13,000 looks good to those who can only focus on numbers, but what is the quality of those 13,000?  Seth Godin mentioned at the MIMA Summit that all you need is an audience of about 1,000. But it needs to be the right 1,000 people.

Hearing vs. Listening
Have you stopped to think about who is actually paying attention in social networks? A person or a brand may have X number of followers or friends, but how many of them are actively listening at any given time? How many people do you ACTUALLY reach when you post a tweet, make a status update or blog post?  Subscriber counts and reach are two different things. Think of it like a college professor talking to students: How many of them are paying attention during a lecture? With social media participation it’s the same thing; you need to realize that not everyone is always hearing what you have to say and factor in the difference between connections and actual reach.

Engage & Participate
Effective social media marketing is about is engaging and participating. If  a marketer joins a social network and focuses on promoting themselves, product or company, they’ll get an entirely different set of outcomes than those they have goals for.  Think about it. Social means to be conversational, friendly, helpful. When participating in social channels, talk to other members of the community, participate in the conversations and give people a reason to interact with you. Add a little romance before you ask to get engaged

Social Media is About Being Where the Conversation Is.
Marketers need to stop and think about where their audiences are online and where relevant conversations are happening. That could be niche social networks, forums and blogs. Those niche areas may have fewer people, but will more than likely have more engagement value for relevant products or services being shared.  To find those niche communities and conversations, use social media monitoring software. Free tools include Google Alerts or Social Mention. Low cost tools include Trackur and PostRank Analytics.

Assign Value to Get Value.
Whether it’s a tweet, retweet, a status update, comment, photo upload or story submission, if you want to find out how valuable it is you have to assign a value. It doesn’t matter how or what that value is, but setting up some sort of system will help determine what’s working and what’s not.

Define an Objective.
Before jumping into social networking, it’s essential to set an objective. Going in and participating with social network and media sharing sites just to participate may not bring the kind of results you’d like. A clear objective as part of a social media strategy should be set so you know what you are working towards. It will guide your messaging, behaviors, networking activity as well as the kind of content you seek and share.

Social Media is An Investment.
Social media success takes time. The seeds of relationships need to grow and you’ll need to invest what’s needed to make it work for whatever end goals that are set. Expecting results in a month or two isn’t realistic; it may take a year or more. It really depends on the Roadmap that guides your Audience > Objectives > Strategy > Tactics > Tools > Measurement.  Effective social media participation is about building a network, building trust, and that doesn’t happen overnight. Be patient, do it right, and you’ll be rewarded in the long run.

What other considerations should be in this list? If you’ve undertaken new social media programs with your company, what were some of the measurement and analytics hurdles that you overcame?

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It’s a given–we all want to do more in less time with social media.  The good news is that there are lots of tools to help automate your social networking activities.

Although I don’t encourage automating your whole experience (that would be missing the point), there are some useful productivity-boosters worth checking out.

1) Ping.fm: Want to update your Twitter status as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites all at the same time from one place? Ping is great for this.  Tools like Ping are one of the top “secret weapons” of the most successful social media marketers.  (Finally, a way to be in multiple places at one time! )

So, if you have something to say to your Twitter followers but that you would also like to share with your Facebook fans and friends and your connections on LinkedIn, you can—without going to each site and logging in separately.  Ping has the ability to update over 40 different social networks.  This is a major time saver!

Plus, you can even create groups, so that if you only want to update LinkedIn and Twitter but not Facebook, for example, you can do that.  It’s definitely worth exploring.  (It’s also worth mentioning that HelloTxt is another service that has very similar capabilities.  I just happened to have started and stuck with Ping.)

Ping also has a toolbar you can install for your browser, making it simple to update update your social networks with a link to and description of any web page you are on.

2) Hootsuite: I consider this to be the ultimate Twitter tool—and its ability to automate so much of your Twitter experience is truly incredible.  It’s definitely another top “secret weapon.” Hootsuite is free and web-based and here are just some of its most useful features:

•    Pre-schedule tweets to go out ahead of time (great for “set it and forget it” marketing)

•    View multiple columns to see @ replies, direct messages, keyword tracking and more

•    Manage multiple Twitter profiles

•    Have multiple administrators for your Hootsuite account

•    Monitor keywords of your choice

•    Integrate with Ping.fm to update many social networks including Facebook and LinkedIn

•    Track statistics of how many people have clicked on the links in your tweets

•    Automatically feed RSS to your Twitter stream

•    Create groups of friends by simply dragging and dropping them into columns

I also love the “Hootlet” bookmarklet, which you simply drag to your browser toolbar so that you can quickly tweet out any web page you are viewing.

3) Selective Twitter Status: If you use both Twitter and Facebook, you’ll want to take advantage of integrating the two in order to reach even more people without any extra effort.

Selective Twitter Status is an application you can add to your personal Facebook profile and/or Fan Page in order to update your Facebook status with your tweets.  Once you have this application installed, you simply add #fb to the specific tweets you want to make your Facebook status as well.

4) Facebook Fan Page to Twitter tool: If you want to do the reverse and send your Fan Page status updates to Twitter, you can do that by using Facebook’s Twitter tool.  This is really great because you are allowed to use over 140 characters for status updates on Facebook, so when you update Twitter (which has a 140 character limit) with a longer message, it inserts “…” along with a link back to your Fan Page so people can finish reading your update.  This means more people are driven to your Fan Page from Twitter.

Those are four of my favorites, and ones I use on a daily basis.  Any other tools you would add to list?  How do you manage your time with social media?

Post from: communicate value

4 Must-Use Productivity Tools for Social Media