There are good things and bad things about Facebook. A good thing is it is constantly improving and looking to make its experience better. A bad thing is it often doesn’t communicate its changes well with its users, which often results in groups springing up displaying their hatred of its latest version. I always wonder why it doesn’t supply a simple two-minute video explaining its new features like so many other applications.

In the earlier days of the platform we used to use groups to bring like-minded people together but these days I tend to use fan pages for clients. If you have a fan page and you are looking for some advice this post is pretty useful.

In my opinion, the key to a good fan page is to make sure you use it for conversation and not just broadcasting. Try to keep your fans engaged with interesting content, special offers and insights they wouldn’t get anywhere else. A fan page is not an advertisement, there needs to be something in it for the end user – we must remember that.

I was checking out the insights section of my fan pages the other day and I thought when do people use Facebook these days? Is this now changing with our internet culture as there are so many other platforms, groups and tools to use? In other words, what time of day do people log-in to Facebook now? I ask this question because the latest statistics from consultancy suggested:

Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.

If this is true, then the time when your fans log-in could be critical to getting them to see/read your latest news and competitions.

When is the best time of day for your client to write their page updates?

If I am guessing I would say 9am, 1pm and around 8pm if my friends are anything to go by but that’s all it is a guess.

So I am asking Facebook to add user times and a bit more insight to its INSIGHT section. There was a brilliant post last week by Webdigi on how to get around the insight section and use Google Analytics for your FB stats instead but that too had a few flaws.

So I guess until Facebook hears our call, I think we will have to use Google Analystics. What do you think should be added to fan page insights to make it more useful for communications purposes?

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How many of us have seen pointless PR embargoes? Well this video pokes fun at them and the world of social media marketing – genius.
 

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To be honest fans and followers aren’t accurate indicators of a user’s influence anymore as both can now be purchased or users can use one of the many autofollow tools Wadds highlighted in a post recently. There has been a lot of procrastination over whether you should even look at them at all anymore. My personal view is you should take all Twitter numbers with a pinch of salt and take a wider perspective. No metric is perfect but make sure you look at several rather than one in isolation as this can often give you a false view. Twitter metrics include:

1. Follower numbers?
2. Status Updates?
3. How interactive they are? Do they reply or simply broadcast messages?
4. Lists – how many Twitter lists are they included in?

You could also use a Twitter ranking system from tools such as Twitter Grader or Twiiterholic but often I question how useful these number are they don’t really tell you anything tangible.

Another metric which can be used is how often are the users’ messages retweeted. So following my recent post about the top Twitter statistic tools, I thought I would add to this with the finest ReTweet tools which are currently out there. Here are my top 10.

1. Tweetreach – This basically searches Twitter and looks at everyone who tweeted and who follows them to make a set of calculations. The reach is the total number of different people who would have seen tweets on this topic in their Twitter stream. This takes into account people who follow the same people. It looks back through the user’s last 50 tweets but you can buy a pdf report for $20 which goes back further.

2. twitteranalyzer.com – this is a great tool which shows you lots of interesting statistics. Click on reach at the bottom and you can see how far your tweets have travelled.

3. Retweetrank is apparently a representative of the number of times a user has been retweeted by others. It lets you find the ranking of any twitter user. Along with the rank, the latest retweets of the user are shown and an RSS feed can also be grabbed for the same.

The top users, who produce the best content, and have been most retweeted recently, are listed in a leaderboard system. I question how useful the rank is as it doesn’t really give you anything tangible unless you compare it with another user in this particular system. 
 

4. TweetMeme is a another service which aggregates popular links on Twitter. It categorises them into categories, subcategories and Channels, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what you’re interested in.

I like this app as it is a nice and clean design and is pretty easy to use and find interesting content.

5. Twidentify.com searches everything but it apparently ranks results based on who gets retweeted the most. It uses the number of retweets as a measure of influence. You can also run a trend search and it creates a nice line graph as illustrated below which I suppose you could add to your reports.
 

6. dailyRT is another tweet aggregator that gathers the most popular tweets on twitter and displays them using its own scoring algorithm and filters.

Hot tweets displays tweets in order based on their dailyRT rank and can be filtered by all items in the search box.

Live tweets displays tweets in real time as they gain popularity and are also filterable by all items in the search box. This is useful for events as you can filter the tweets based on #hashtags and keywords to find key topics people are shouting about.

7. RTweetist this is a tool for discovering trends, popular topics and popular people by tracking Retweets. It apparently monitors Twitter for fresh links and ranks them according to how new and popular they are. The main homepage looks a little dull and dated to me but the tool itself is quite quick at pulling data from Twitter. The main drawback for me is there are no statistics or pie charts that I can find.

8. ReTweet Mapper This is a viral marketing scientist’s own search of ReTweets. I am not sure what I think of this because it didn’t really produce any results for the few searches I performed but quite a few people seem to like it.

9. ReTweet radar provides you with a large category cloud of trending topics to drill down in on as well as displaying the most retweeted links and tweeple.

10. Backtweets is pretty responsive and useful for seeing all of the Twitter links associated with a term.

Added Extra
Repeets.com apparently scans Twitter for all the ReTweets and displays the recent and most popular ones. I can’t rank this service as on the day of writing it wasn’t working.

Finally I would like to offer a hat tip to Jon Bishop who had a list of his top six ReTweet monitoring tools, most of which I have also used in my list

This has been cross posted on: The Tweasier Blog

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This got me thinking, even though we all know that newspapers are dying a slow and painful death why don’t they see it and address it now as time is passing them all by quickly?

Why aren’t they focussing all of their efforts into creating better news sites which have everything to offer locally, so people don’t stray from the hard version to better more up-to-date local online news sites or blogs. It may sound obvious but it is still happening with regional after regional dropping down to weekly versions. If they just used a cleverly integrated social and traditional strategy they could keep their audience and make the switch easily but they all seem hell bent on sticking to their traditions and then they end up becoming weeklies having still not sorted the very issue which is beating them.

Only the other day I met the creator of a new local based social network which provides news to it’s local community and the owner told me even though he had contacted the local newspaper to give them free advertisements and access (because he valued their opinion) they refused because they sensed a threat. Let’s face it the local newspapers already have the upper hand on the competition, as they have a captive audience already reading their material and people buying into their material. Everyone else can see this is happening why can’t they and why don’t they address it today?

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“According to data from Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), a private-equity firm, spending on public relations in America grew by more than 4% in 2008 and nearly 3% in 2009 to $3.7 billion. That is remarkable when compared with other forms of marketing. Spending on advertising contracted by nearly 3% in 2008 and by 8% in the past year. PR’s position looks even rosier when word-of-mouth marketing, which includes services that PR firms often manage, such as outreach to bloggers, is included. Spending on such things increased by more than 10% in 2009.”

This is true I think a certain area of public relations is really starting to thrive and that is the digital PR sector. Three or four years ago when we started to speak to clients about social media it took me and my team about ten minutes to explain to them what a blog was and what it did – now everyone is looking for the next big social media tool to use. The tool of 2010 is without doubt Foursquare with people checking in and out all over the place leaving others who have never used it slightly bemused.

Every day we are seeing new digitial pr or social media specialists springing up, some with experience in public relations and a lot without. My good friend Jed Hallam mentioned it on his company’s blog today:

“I feel like social media is (in the UK, at least) in an odd state at the minute (maybe it’s just hit the trough of disillusionment or something) and I don’t think anyone quite knows what to do.

“Agencies don’t really seem to keep pace with audiences, some clients still see it as gimmicky, big traditional agencies like to hire ‘social media strategists’ to ‘sort out that internet stuff’… The list goes on.”

Jed’s right we are at a bit of cross roads now with social media because clients know what Facebook, Twitter, Xing and Linked-in are. I strongly believe these newcomers who have sprung up all over the place charging clients money to set up Facebook pages will drop off and we will be left with the good PR practitioners who know how to react properly in a crisis and how to use these tools to engage better with an audience and customers. I mean it’s all very well setting channels up when things are going smoothly and it’s all good fun but if something goes wrong and things spiral out of control it must be managed by a trained professional and that is a PR person.

The truth is PR people are often undervalued when compared with the big budgets of the advertising sector but now that the game has changed forever, I think that the perception of PR professionals will change too.

Do you think the game has changed?

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“The club wishes to make it clear that no Manchester United players maintain personal profiles on social networking websites.
Fans encountering any web pages purporting to be written by United players should treat them with extreme scepticism.
Any official news relating to Manchester United or its players will be communicated via ManUtd.com.”

Now for me this is an interesting development, we have all heard about senior directors in various corporates banning the use of social networks like Facebook in work hours but we have never seen a public statement from a Premier League football club banning all usage of them from their players.

The trouble is footballers have been causing trouble left, right and centre with their usage of Twitter and Facebook and the clubs haven’t really got to grips with how to deal with them. Some players have used their networks to engineer moves to other clubs, some have vented their disgust at being dropped from their teams and others have just not thought about what they are doing when they have updated their statuses.

Here are my top five footballer social networking faux pars:

1. Darren Bent allegedly attacks Tottenham’s chairman as his transfer to Sunderland dragged on and is fined £80K.
2. A professional footballer nicknamed “Motor Mouth” reveals he plans to leave his club Crystal Palace for Fulham on his Facebook page but manages to inform the site’s 2.7 million London network members.
3. American Striker Altidore is fined by Hull City FC after revealing why his boss dropped him for the game with Portsmouth FC to all of his followers.
4. Liverpool winger Ryan Babel enrages manager Rafeal Benitez by writing on his Twitter page two days ago: "Hey people, I got some disappointing news, I am not travelling to Stoke. The Boss left me out the squad. No explanation.”
5. Thierry Henry apologises for “Hand Gate” the day after the match with Ireland.

If you are interested in footballers on Twitter here is Sport Blog’s Top Ten Footballers on Twitter.

Personally I don’t think Manchester Utd should have banned the players from using all social networks. I think they should have provided some type of formal training and explained the parameters of what they can and can’t do. For instance, we all know that the footballers are properly media trained before they go in front of a camera. They know how to answer interview questions, so why can’t they update their own social networks it doesn’t make sense? The players just need to use common sense before pressing update. In other words, don’t talk about transfers, don’t slate the manager and don’t criticise the club in public. There are three straight away – I could probably write 30 or so if I tried.

The fans love following their favourite players because it gives them some insight into their lives and this has to be good for the clubs. The truth is there is a lot of money involved in this industry and footballers are a completely different animal to the corporate world but I would always recommend training first and foremost rather than outright banning all usage. We will have to watch and see if the other clubs follow suit to finally put a lid on this but somehow I don’t think they will.

What do you think is Manchester Utd using the right approach?

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In light of that fact, I thought it would be good to share some useful Twitter tools with you – so you can measure that and see how you are doing.

The truth is Twitter is all about conversation, not just marketing offers, although that said they do help to a certain point. To my clients I always recommend no more than 10% marketing messages on any of your social channels, the rest should be useful, fun and engaging otherwise people will simply unfollow you or your client.

So if you want to measure how successful your communications campaign has been online what do you do? I always recommend using a decent analytics package as a starting point there are loads available but the one I use for this blog is Google Analytics because it is free. I mean what’s the point of creating more web traffic if you don’t know where it came from or why?

There are hundreds of twitter tools that measure different statistics out there but many can be a bit of a waste of time. I have been through most of them in the last few years and given them some kind of test, so I thought I would share my top 10 with you – so you can use them to measure how effective your Twitter campaigns are.

1. TweetStats –  This is another great Twitter app (which just turned two years old from Damon Cortesi) basically it graphs your Twitter stats including Tweets per hour, per month and Tweet timeline. It’s not the most beautiful of sites but the functionality is great – cap tip to Damon!
2. TwitterGrader – this is a well put together tool which looks at your profile and gives it a ranking – it also has an api which could be useful for developers.
3. Twitterholic – this tool looks at all of the local twitter users in your area and gives you a ranking.
4. TweetVolume enter a few words and see how many times they appear on twitter. 
5. Tweetmeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular.
6. TweetValue – this shows you how much your twitter profile is worth in $
7. TwitGraph this sites looks at your profile and then measures your tweets and provides you with data in a colourful pie chart format.
8. TwitterMeter This was a great service which is now on hold hence its ranking.
9. TwitterPoster this tool creates a kind of picture/mosaic that represents your users with the most followers with bigger icons.
10. Twitterank this works like a Google page rank but on Twitter but it seems to have broken on the day of writing. However, it gets a rank because it was supposed to be a good tool.

If you have a good tool to recommend, please feel free to share it. For instance, I know Hootsuite and Bit.ly are also great stats tools to measure your link popularity but if you have more please just add a comment and let me know.

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I live in Harrogate in the north of England and work in Leeds regularly and we have had the worst snow in 30 years. I was particularly proud to see our home town as the focus of the national news as the chaos continued last night. Yesterday, we were one of the places worst hit. I have included a couple of images to show you just how bad it is in my area. I have decided to work from home again today as my car is even more covered today despite me trying to dig it out yesterday.

Anyway, where there is a problem, there is a clever Twitter app. So here is a Twitter mashup by Ben Marsh which shows you where people are tweeting about UK snow and how bad it is coming down. Due to the fact that the snow is going to be around for some days yet – I thought it was worth posting about to stay abreast of things that are going on. It’s actually quite fun too to follow what is happening and where. The media in the UK has covered the snow well and kept us informed but i have been particularly interested in reading my Twitter friends tweets from around the country.

All you do to use the Twitter app is tweet the hashtag #uksnow and the first half of your postcode, and rate the snow that is falling out of ten and your tweet arrives on the map. Even better this is also available on the iPhone. This is a very useful app especially at this time of year but I doubt people will be using it in July – maybe we will have UK/US sun.

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Nick uses the latest psychology tools to transform team members into high performers that in turn create more business. His programmes focus on enhancing key interpersonal skills that improve personal focus, confidence and overcoming challenges faced by modern executives by developing language and body language skills that give you an edge.

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Hi my name is Nick Hill and this is my first post on Chris’ blog so nice to meet you all and hope you enjoy the post.

I believe the success of any PR consultancy is strongly reliant on the skills of its account management teams as they are its life blood.

Convincing someone to ‘try your agency’ from a pitch situation can and should be relatively easy, retaining their loyalty as a customer for a number of years is the real challenge, but this is what creates long-term sustainability for any PR company. If you or your account team don’t develop your interpersonal skills to cope with all those different client ‘types’, you may run the risk of forward thinking competitors keeping their clients and eventually taking yours as well.
Without getting too intricate, every one of your clients has a series of very different and unique patterns of behaviour. In very basic terms, some will communicate with their hands more than others, some have differing voice ranges, they move and ‘behave differently’ and some even look at you in the eye, then look away, then back, then away…..it’s sometimes bizarre! They’re all different and that’s what makes client handling so interesting.

Each client has different traits, preferences and language styles. The trick which will really give you an edge in the boardroom is being able to identify and respond to the different types of communication and behaviour when dealing with your clients. People buy from people and there are techniques for identifying how people ‘prefer’ to be communicated to and how you can respond to them as they want you to.
I’d like to share a couple of examples with you. As well as maintaining the client relationship, account managers or directors typically have a remit to keep that client and increase spend with your agency.

When meeting with directors and particularly when dealing with sales situations, you want to find out if a person is ‘motivated towards’ achieving objectives or, ‘motivated away’ from consequences of not attainment of those goals. In language terms, people often concentrate on talking about what they will avoid, rather than gain. That’s OK, it’s their ‘preferred way’ of dealing with the situation. When dealing with these types of people you don’t want to be focussing on communicating the benefits of the solution you are providing if your potential client is motivated by the avoidance of the consequences of not having it. You’ve got to communicate to them on their level! By doing that you are satisfying an underlying behavioural preference of that person and that’s a good thing I’m sure you’ll agree.

Another ‘pattern’ to look out for is which ‘representational system’ a person is using. It sounds complicated but what this means is the senses (Visual – sight, Auditory – sound, Kinaesthetic – touch) a person uses when communicating. For example, a client might say “Oh right I see what you mean”. That would indicate your client is using their visual system to process their communication.

If they use the terms “I like the sound of that” or “get a grip of the situation” they tell you that your client is using auditory (sound) and kinaesthetic (touch) senses to describe their communication. OK I am sure you are thinking about your own clients, maybe what you do and say, right now in your head, but thinking ‘why is this important?‘

Well if you know how your client likes to be spoken to, it increases the levels of ‘rapport’ you can have with him or her, you can do this by ‘matching’ the client’s representational system.

For instance:

Client: “You see what I mean?”

You: “Yeah, that looks alright to me too!”

Rather than,
Client: “You see what I mean?”

You: “Yeah, that sounds alright to me too!”

It’s this type of detail that can and will give you the edge when you are dealing with existing or potential clients. If you are a member or a leader of an account team I am sure you already know the basics of growing an account, that’s not in doubt here. But what really increases your client loyalty is not growing the account, but knowing the account, inside and out. So my advice would be improve your communication skills using a few simple techniques, before your competitors picks up the phone to your client and does it instead.
It’s all about rapport and communicating to a person on their level….

Hope you enjoyed that and find it interesting on some level. Who knows, I might get invited back here again!

I write regularly about improving communication techniques and interpersonal skills on my blog, so feel free to add me to your subscribers or follow me on Twitter.

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