Late this spring a new search engine snuck onto the scene. Kurrently (www.kurrently.com) allows you to search Facebook and Twitter in real time.
Put any search term or combination of terms into Kurrently, and instantly receive the scrolling results with Tweets and Facebook status updates organized by date stamp. The results automatically update as you watch.
I tried it with "drew mclellan" and found quite a few Twitter and Facebook mentions that I hadn't caught through the normal tracking methods.
It's been pretty tough to find a way to accurately gauge Facebook buzz but this should help considerably.
Interestingly, the developers have added an RSS option. You'll see it on the search results page. When you click on the Subscribe, a window pops open and invites you to pay as much as you would like, via PayPal, for the subscription.
An intriguing question – what's the convenience of the feed worth to you?
Regardless of the RSS subscription option — this is a very slick tool. Check it out.
Why does that matter to you? Let's look at these truths:
Social media is in its infancy and the volume of content is just going to grow.
Websites that welcome consumer feedback and ratings are beginning to go mainstream, which means every Tom, Dick and Harry will be sharing their opinions about every product, service and store pretty soon.
Study after study shows that consumers are ranking the reviews, opinions and recommendations of the average Joe blogger or reviewer above those of "official sites."
In other words, your customers — be they happy, amused, annoyed or so mad they could spit — are talking about you and the entire world is listening. Including Google.
What do you do about it? Several things, including:
Create a listening/monitoring plan for your company. You need to not only know what's being said about you — you need to know when/how to respond to it. If you can react quickly to problems aired in public, you can quiet the rumble and also demonstrate your customer service style.
Create content. The only way you are going to outperform user generated content is to create content of your own. There are a ton of ways to do that effectively from online video, e-books, blogging, an article bank on your website, etc. If they're the only ones talking…guess who is going to be relevant.
Share and connect. Don't count on just your own efforts when you think about creating and distributing your content. By creating alliances and collaborations, you build an online network that will help you introduce your efforts to the world. Think of it as social media compound interest!
The 2010 version of "let's get an article in the newspaper, because that's free!" is "we'll get bloggers to write about it!"
Not a bad PR strategy. In fact, when employed correctly — it can be an awesome one. It's the "employed correctly" part that people seem to bang their head against the wall on.
For many of you, this should be part of your marketing efforts. But, you can't and shouldn't just fumble around in the dark. You need to do it well and correctly. Otherwise — the blogger will give you what you don't want — bad ink. (Check out this blog…it posts examples of bad pitches! And show you how to do it better.)
A few years ago, the folks at Ogilvy PR created a Blogger OutReach Code of Ethics that I think is still incredibly relevant. Here's a bit of it:
OUR APPROACH
We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.
We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea for every social media campaign.
OUTREACH
Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.
We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and whom we work for in our outreach email.
If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.
We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t, and we’ll make a best effort to spend time reading the blogs we plan on contacting.
In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.
NEW! As available, we will provide you with links to third party information/blog coverage of the campaign we are pitching to you. (via Web Strategy with Jeremiah and MC Milker)
Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.
That's just the start of it…check out their whole code by clicking here and decide how much of it you can modify, use, and borrow. If you're going to reach out to bloggers — do it well and responsibly. You can gain an influential friend…and some valuable ink!
This is one of the toughest marketing truths to swallow. Just because we have all these ways to connect — does not mean your audience wants to hear from you every hour. You're just not that interesting.
Check out this e-mail I got from a reader. Pay particular attention to the 4th paragraph:
"Perhaps you could write about how some people engage is relentless posts on LinkedIn–like once an hour, yet say absolutely nothing. I have a LinkedIn connection who works for a major ad agency here in Des Moines, touting himself as an advertising phenomenon, and always shows up #1 on my LinkedIn page every time I log on.
I have to confess that I don't tweet and can't be bothered with it. I am far from being alone in this, by the way. So his blurbs show up and they are mostly gobbledy-gook. Sometimes I click on them thinking they might lead me somewhere interesting, but they don't go anywhere.
So I emailed him saying I would like to be able to see what he has to say at a glance since he's a permanent presence at #1 in my LinkedIn hit parade. Maybe he could be clearer. He didn't answer, but I noticed he didn't post anything for several hours. When he did, he was slightly clearer. Then the more he posted, the more he went back to saying nothing.
So I decided just to hide his posts permanently so I didn't have to be bothered any more. Interestingly, I couldn't figure out how to reactivate someone's post once I turn off their lights. I suspect my reaction was the opposite effect he was attempting to have on people.
Goodbye ad genius–out of sight and out of mind."
Not only are you boring people if you blather on and on — but you gain a reputation for being all talk. Is that really why you're investing all that effort?
There's a whole lot of "talking at" someone going on in all forms of marketing — traditional and digital. It's a lot easier to just fire off a statistic, fact or link than it is to actually have a conversation, ask a question or connect with someone.
Confident that you're not guilty? Check yourself against these:
Are you tweeting, updating your Facebook status or LinkedIn account multiple times a day — spouting resources but never connecting with the people listening?
Do you only Facebook message people when you are having a sale, holding an event or in some other self-serving way? (Oh…and do you do that in a mass msg sort of way?)
Do you always initiate Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook conversations — as opposed to joining in someone else's? (In other words…do you only care about what you want to talk about?)
Remember — it's the cocktail party rule of social media that earns credibility and respect online. And no one wants to hang out at a cocktail party with someone who can't shut up about themselves!
Our friends at HubSpot did an excellent job putting together a very comprehensive glossary of social media terms that we should all familiarize ourselves with.
Many of the terms include links directly to the tool, site or even more information. A treasure trove for all!
We need to take a stand on the idea of anonymous comments. And the stand is — they need to go away.
I think this problem has its roots in the newspaper industry. When they starting creating digital versions — they wanted to take advantage of the interactivity of the web. And in the newspaper industry — it's all about the numbers (subscribers, pass along rate, etc) so it's no surprise that they wanted a huge volume of comments as well.
No doubt, someone told them that people will comment with more frequency if you don't ask for their name or contact information so voila — the anonymous or the "use a nickname, not a real name" comment was born.
Sadly, this has seeped into blogs as well. And as more companies wade into the social media waters — many marketing types, looking to justify the time and efforts spent on the tools — point to the comment count with pride.
But what really are we counting?
I don't care if you're talking about a traditional newspaper's website or a blog — when you allow anonymous commenting, you disrespect the topic, the conversation and the readers.
These are not conversations — they are verbal vomit.
It's perfectly logical that the anonymity invites people to behave in ways they wouldn't if they had to identify themselves. And it swings to both ends of the spectrum. On the one hand — they're vicious in their personal attacks, cruel comments and judgments. On the flip side, they can completely bypass the topic all together in an attempt to get some link love/attention for their product or service.
So what do we do about it? We say no.
We write to our newspapers and ask them to actually be responsible for creating real conversations on their sites. By demanding, just like they do in their traditional letters to the editor section, that commenters be identified (and verified) by name and city.
In terms of social media — if you own a blog, fight back. Here are some of the things I've done to combat the problem:
Have a stated comment policy (see the visual above) that says you will delete anonymous comments
Actually delete them — even if they are relevant (you can e-mail the person and ask them to re-submit, using their name)
Close comments after 30 days (many of the back link seekers go into your archives to tuck key word rich comments where they think you'll ignore them)
Actually respond to the comments — you'll get lots more of them if people think they're not talking into a black hole
Whether it's someone calling themselves "MoonDog127" and ripping into someone based on a story in a digital newspaper or it's "Korean Wedding Dress" leaving 27 random comments on your blog — we need to recognize the conversation deserves better.
What do you think? Is there ever a place for anonymous commenting?
Social Media Marketing GPS was written using Twitter as a content platform and distribution channel. Toby Bloomberg conducted 40 Tweet interviews with 40 prominent social media marketers including people from Dell, Comcast, Marketing Profs, BlogHer.
The list of folks that Toby interviewed is varied and impressive. I think you'll find their thoughts illuminating and very human.
12 chapters take you from the importance of social media to ethics to the social enterprise, tactics, sponsored conversations, blogger relations with a few case studies.
The goal was to create a comprehensive body of knowledge that could serve as a roadmap (GPS) for developing a strategic social media plan.
Toby's thoughts were if this could be accomplished in a series of 140 character tweets it might help ease the apprehension for people new to social media, while at the same time, providing a review and offering some interesting ideas for those more experienced.
Let's face it — Facebook is becoming a significant element in many business' marketing plans. And with good reason. As the member mark approaches 400 million — it's hard to imagine an audience that does not have a strong presence there.
It's also a potent tool for establishing your personal brand.
But at what cost? Facebook's most recent policy changes have people in a panic. There's more talk about leaving Facebook than I've heard in a long time. Most of that talk is ignorant panic. The truth is…most people don't understand the privacy setting and the risks well enough to know if they should leave or not.
I'm not suggesting that it's not an important issue but I'm guessing most people don't really know how to safeguard against the kinds of exposure we're talking about. People know they share a lot of stuff but they really don't know who is or isn't able to see it.
So let's add this up. Facebook, for most businesses and professionals, is someplace we should be. And, we have no idea if our privacy settings are what we want them to be. So what do we do?
You go to Reclaim Privacy. (reclaimprivacy.org) They've created a browser bookmarklet that will tell you exactly what's going on with your Facebook account AND help you fix it. All for free. (God love the internet!)
You simply drag their link to your browser's bookmark bar and then log into Facebook. Once you're there, just click on the link in your bookmark bar and voila, a window pops up and assessed your privacy settings. Here's what mine looked like:
It not only told me which areas were secure…but as you can see by the red and brown boxes… it told me when I should worry and when I was definitely not secure. But the best part is — with a click on the blue boxes, it fixed (or gave me the chance to fix) the issue.
As with most things — there is a happy medium. Thanks to the free tool from Reclaim Privacy, we can keep using Facebook without worrying about over exposure. Or without having to be Facebook fanatics who know how to modify over 170 settings located in 50 different spots. We just need to click the mouse!
Imagine glancing out your front window just as the moving van pulls in at the house across the street. Oh goodie…a new neighbor!
As soon as the moving van unloads everything and pulls away, you brush your teeth, run your fingers through your hair and head over. After all… you've got to check them out, right?
Their garage door is still open and it's packed with stuff. You start rummaging through the boxes and are pumped when you see the power tools. You have a lot of uses for those! You hear the door leading into the house open up and a startled man looks at you in surprise.
With skipping a beat, you look up and say, "Hey neighbor! Nice to meet you. Mind if I take these tools for a couple days? I'm finishing my basement and…"
I know…it sounds crazy doesn't it? Everyone knows that you don't treat a new neighbor that way. The proper way to get to know a new neighbor is to take over a little gift or some freshly baked cookies. You ask if there's anything you can do to help them settle in. Maybe you watch the kids while they unpack or you offer to bring dinner over so they don't have to worry about getting to the grocery store.
In other words — you give without expecting to get something in return.
The same is true in social media. When you get a new neighbor in the form of a Facebook fan, Twitter follower or blog subscriber — you don't dig through their proverbial garage, looking for what you can get from them. You don't immediately try to sell them something or make them jump through a bunch of hoops.
And yet that's exactly what most businesses do. Automated DM tweets pushing their product, Facebook updates that are all about them and blog posts that are just self-promotional press releases.
No wonder most companies abandon their social media efforts and declare it all a waste of time. Because they're lousy neighbors.
Social media is an all or nothing proposition. No… I am not suggesting that you air all your dirty laundry, that you passive aggressively comment on a specific person's behavior on your Facebook updates or that we should all know how your marriage is going based on your tweets.
That's a discussion of discretion and propriety, which we'll hold for another day.
I was talking about how some people are clinging to the idea that they can embark into the world of social media and somehow maintain very distinct and separate personal and professional lives. You know…"I use Facebook just for my friends and LinkedIn for business contacts."
Life isn't that clear cut. And let's take it out of the social media realm for a minute. Do you know if your favorite client has children? Do they know if you like coffee? Ever share vacation photos or a book you love with a business associate?
Of course you have. We are human beings. And if you're doing business exceedingly well — odds are your customers are also your friends.
So what in the world makes us think we can or should keep those two interwoven worlds separate in social media? Does the fact that I posted photos of my daughter's play negate my ability to help clients with their marketing? If I tweet on occasion with an old college buddy, does that erase the tweets with insightful social media links and commentary?
That's not to say you shouldn't have a strategy for how you want to handle your social media exposure. You have a reason — often a business reason — for being there. And you shouldn't lose sight of that. But just don't create artificial barriers to the point of the extreme.
As Amber Naslund said at the recent SOBCon conference — "sooner or later the mash potatoes are going to touch the peas."
There are no divided plates in social media. So you might as well figure out how to blend your worlds. I hate to break it to you… but they're already blended.
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Late this spring a new search engine snuck onto the scene. Kurrently (www.kurrently.com) allows you to search Facebook and Twitter in real time.
Interestingly, the developers have added an RSS option. You'll see it on the search results page. When you click on the Subscribe, a window pops open and invites you to pay as much as you would like, via PayPal, for the subscription.
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