10 social sites, posts and tools worth checking out

Posted on December 10, 2009 by marc meyer

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. My Twitter stream is my RSS. Below is a compilation of sites that make me better at what I do. They cover the gamut of posts, tools and resources that someone new to social media or not, should investigate and bookmark and then share with others who might benefit.

1) This first post title 30 top blogs for social media updates is pretty good, simply because there were a few blogs (not many) that I did not know about. As well, the post also contained some links to other worthy posts.

2) If You Care About Search, You Must Care About Social Media and I do. This post rocks it contains video interviews with Vanessa Fox-pay attention to her video, she brings up a lot of solid valid points about search and social- As well as Lee Odden who stresses that you cannot ignore the intersection of search and social.

3) Check out the rankings of the Big Money Facebook 50 of the best brands utilizing Facebook. How many are you fans of?

4) A couple of weeks ago Shel Israel did an interview with E-consultancy promoting his new book Twitterville. If you don’t know who Shel is, Google his name. Pay attention to the examples Shel mentions in the interview.

5) Neoformix is a cool data visualization site, which for me helps in dumbing things down for yours truly so that I can sometimes understand them better.

6) Check out the 11 players in this post on the brief history of social network enterprise collaboration tools How many did you know about?

7) Sally Falkow is really a smart person, she recently cranked a pretty sweet slide deck

8. I’m a big fan of the Inbound Marketing University (IMU) they offer free marketing retraining programs for marketing professionals—as well as marketers between jobs—looking to gain new skills to get ahead in the competitive workforce.

9) Here’s a quick one, How popular is your website in the web 2.0 world?

10) Lastly I thought this was cool, monitor Twitter lists for keywords with Listimonkey

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Monitoring The Tiger Woods Brand

Posted on December 9, 2009 by marc meyer

If you did not notice Tiger Woods has been in the news a lot lately. How much? Lets take a look at some visual representations utilizing some of the exact tools that you would use to monitor your brand. Then I’m going to ask you a very simple question at the end of this post.

First we’re going to use the Trend search from Blog Pulse to create a graph that plots “buzz” about Tiger Woods in the blogosphere. We’re going to look at a 6 month window.

How about some search analytics from Compete? Notice an uptick?

Icerocket also tracks blog mentions and real time search trends, look at it’s graph and check out the numbers below the graph.

One of the most impressive and visually appealing of the tools that I used was from Trendrr which allowed us to track qualitative, quantitative, real-time, sentiment, and competitive trends. For the purpose of this post, we looked at Google results, tweets from Twitter and blog posts on Google..

Driving the point home, we now look at Google Trends.

So your team Tiger or your the brand manager for your company and you see these kinds of results. What are you going to do to repair this? What is your first step? How would a large organization manage its reputation after taking a hit like this? What does Tiger do now? What will repair a reputation damaged to this degree? What does Nike do?

Coca-Cola knows how to work the crowd on Facebook

Posted on December 3, 2009 by marc meyer

As I was reading through The Big Money Facebook 50: Companies making social media work.article yesterday, I saw that Coca-Cola was the number one brand on the list. I wanted to see why so I decided to check it out. When I got to their page I was greeted with this.

Which prompted me to ask or question on Twitter the following:

The answers came fast and furious. Surprisingly or not, they were mixed and I can see why. As social media marketers and brand execs struggle with the best way to have conversations wrapped around their brand, they always run the risk of reverting back to a push style method of marketing. And that’s the rub.

What if consumers prefer that method? Or just don’t care? They just want whatever the brand is willing to give them for free, and they don’t care. So with that being said, giving up all of my contact information, profile information and my friends information for what might be behind the welcome screen doesn’t matter. Apparently not. Or the promise of what might be behind the curtain is compelling enough for me. Given Coke’s status as the number one brand on Facebook according to this list, I think we know the answer.

So what’s my point? Yes the conversations are important but sometimes customers don’t want to talk with brands, they just want what the brands are willing to give them provided the customer is willing to give up its privacy. Do you really think that Coca-Cola is that sexy of a brand to be worshiped all the way into the #1 spot on Facebook? No. It’s the allure of what might be.

11 Must Save Social Media Links For The Week

Posted on November 24, 2009 by marc meyer

I have thousands of bookmarks and chances are you do too. From a social media purists standpoint, it’s good karma to share links and websites that are worth a second look. Here are 11 of them in no particular order.

One of the smart guys out there is Jay Baer, last week he wrote a post titled the 11 Must Do’s For the Serious Blogger. As I have been wont to say on various occassions, not all of you should or can blog. Jay’s post is for those that can, and are serious about it.

Do you know what a KPI is? If you are an online marketer of any kind and don’t know, then quit reading and go work out, eat some yogurt, or go to Starbucks. For those that do know the importance of KPI’s, here’s a great little checklist of sorts titled, 35 social medis KPI’s to measure engagement.

If you use Tweetdeck or Seesmic for Twitter, you know the importance of grouping the people or topics you follow. Well Twitter responded by creating Lists. So how do you make heads or tails of that? Try out Listorious, which will bring some order to your chaos.

If you use Twitter for content and I do, it’s my filter for content. But I don’t like when I DON’T know about something and I should. There is no good way to avoid this, it will happen. Enter Twitter Tim.es, which generates a personalized ‘newspaper’ for you based on what the people that you follow are talking about.

Speaking of things happening now, check out this cool little app, Surchur, real time search and real time discovery.

I’ve said this before but my friend Ken Burbary has assembled one helluva wiki of social media monitoring solutions. It is the best, most complete list that I have seen out there on the topic.

Want to see what kind of influence you have based on your Twitter presence? Well, Edelman has put together a pretty cool little tool called Tweetlevel. Don’t read too much into it though, It’s just another tool that measures your presence in the ether.

Last month JD Lasica put together a nice deck of the top 10 pharma efforts in social media that dovetailed nicely into the FDA hearings on social media 2 weeks ago. If you care about Pharma’s involvement in social media, then this is a must read, if you don’t, then keep moving…

And 2 for the road…

BatchBook is the social CRM built for small businesses and entrepreneurs, I thought this had a lot of promise because it addressed a niche that doesn’t get the same CRM love that the enterprise gets.

I read this post and already knew the answer, Is Facebook getting uncool for 18-24’s?

I hope this helps make things easier, enlightens you or simplifies your work flow. Either way, feel free to share these with others who might benefit.

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#SocialMedia Tweetchat #35-Stop Campaigning & Start Conversing – The New Marketing Paradigm

Posted on November 23, 2009 by marc meyer

Build a relationship, garner trust and a customer will never leave. Sounds pretty easy!? In fact we have been talking about it since the dawn of time (social media time anyway) with the Cluetrain Manifesto that started in 1999 and identified that the Internet has forced marketing to be more about conversations than messages. Since then we have Valeria Maltoni the Conversation Agent (a past moderator here), a great book called Naked Conversations written by Shel Israel (an upcoming moderator) and Robert Scoble and countless other examples. So why is it that companies still market via campaigns and agencies still win business with this approach?

A classic example of movement for the sake of motion? Possibly. Consider all the money and effort that goes into concept, strategy, creative, execution of marketing campaigns. Brands spend all that time creating a pitch to consumers, introducing themselves time and time again, selling stuff to unwilling customers then when it’s done, they see how much product was sold, cut off the pitch to those customers and prospects then rinse and repeat the whole daunting process all over. So where is the conversation part of this we have been talking about now for at least 10 years? Not the cordial, “wave to each other at a cocktail party” conversation but the relationship conversation that lasts for months, years or longer? The conversation where you find out what each other needs and wants (notice I said both), you know, a real relationship not a manufactured one.

So what does that look like and how do marketers break out of the campaign mentality? Think about the impact of this scenario: A company with multiple brands has a consolidated marketing department focused on customer relationships. They are in charge of courting the consumer and understanding how they live, work and play. From that relationship, the company understands what products (Brands) can help that customer and how they add value to that consumer’s life. Then the Brands become stewards for helping those customers buy the things they need (considering people like to buy things yet do not like to be sold). The company pours their monies into acquiring a customer once then facilitating their purchases across the various products. This is very different than what happens today as each Brand pays to acquire the same customers over and over across all brands independently. This may be some utopian dream to many but the speed of communicating and the ubiquity of access to communicate is forever changing the old norms and customers have left that station. Companies need to figure out how to adapt and soon.

We are very happy to have Tom Martin moderating this topic on tuesday. Tom spends a lot of time in this space covering all aspects of branding, marketing and social media and brings a creative approach to his work. He will help us work through this topic and facilitate a great learning opportunity for all of us. The topic and questions will be:

Stop Campaigning and Start Conversing – The New Marketing Paradigm

1) What is the difference between a marketing campaign and a customer conversation?

2) How do agencies have to change in order to create conversations instead of campaigns?

3) What are some examples of brands or agencies that have succeeded in making the jump from campaign to conversation?

The chat will take place Tuesday 11/24 at noon EST. We will use the #sm35 for the event