Social Media
What’s The Strategy?
Dec 4th
“How can social media improve my business?”
“It depends…”
“You mean…?”
Its funny how people expect a quick one liner answer to a question like this. I wished there is a quick answer but unfortunately its not as simple as it sounds.
Social media is not just about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, internet, online banner advertisements. These are social media tools. To get into social media, the first thing you must have in mind is your goal and what strategy you want to use. The strategy must be unique to your business, and no blind copying because a strategy custom-tailored for another business (though might be in the same industry) might not have the same effect to yours.
There is an interesting article I came across, “Social Media Not The Answer for Weak Brands” which quotes that social media is akin to better weapons & bigger army strength in a war, but ultimately it is the warfare strategy that leads to a win. The emphasis is to get the strategy right, then use social media as a platform to execute the strategy.
Although I truly believe in the strength of social media, I’d not want business to think and believe that social media IS the ULTIMATE everything to help improve businesses. Social media is a tool and a platform that can help businesses reach out to target audience, engage with them, interact with them, understand them, maybe even as a channel to test responses for new product/service roll out. All these information leads to better understanding of the business, which can then be used to improve business processes, realign products/services offerings, offer new products/services and of course (hopefully), lead to a bigger bottomline.
Thinking about using social media for your business? My advise – start with the end in mind, that is what is your goal, then think about the strategy to deploy, then only which social media platform to use. 
Monitoring Social Mentions
Nov 25th
Woke up this morning and thinking whether is there any tool that can just give a feel about how the conversations are developing around one particular topic in twitter. After some googling, I found TweetFeel [www.tweetfeel.com] and I just needed to type in the keyword of the item I was interested in to see what are the conversations in twitter. According to its website, Tweetfeel monitors positive and negative feelings in twitter conversations and it is displayed in clear & simple way. Yup, the and 
faces. I typed in “2012″ and below is a screen shot of my search. Tweetfeel comes in free & paid version.
But that’s just twitter. What about the whole social media mention? I mean, there are so many social media sites out there, some that I don’t even use but every voice counts! Then I bumped into Social Mention [http://socialmention.com] whereby according to its website is a ‘real-time social media search and analysis’. I did a search for “everyoneconnects” and I selected “All” (yes you can choose Blog, Microblog, etc etc) since I want to know the conversations in the whole social media scene. It has total count of positive, neutral and negative sentiment, top keywords, top users, top hashtags and sources. You can download these information in a CSV format so you can slice and dice the data. A social rank score based on popularity is also given to the search term. It includes how often the search term is mentioned (note: everyoneconnects is mentioned every hour).
The screen shot as below :-
There are other solutions out there, which requires payment. Of course paid solutions has more features & plus points which I fully recommend if you are into social media marketing business. However, if you just want to poke your nose into how your small campaign is performing – using these free tools will suffice.
BTW – since you are reading up on social mention, don’t forget to check out my other post- “Must Have Twitter Tools” whereby I share some of the (free!) tools I use.
Must Have Twitter Tools
Nov 23rd
© Photographer: Jayster | Agency: Dreamstime.com
Twitter is now one of the most talked-about social media tool, and there is also a growing amount of tools to help if you are using Twitter for marketing your product/brand/company. Each tool has their own purpose, and I’ve compiled the below based on my research (which I’ve also used extensively to track the progress of my campaigns). You will notice that some of the tools uses different measurement methods & terms to quantify ranks/influence, so it can be pretty confusing if you use more than one. It can be very highly ranked in one and so low in another. I use it as a guide to measure the campaigns and where required I used it in my reports as well.
TWITTER TRENDING TOOLS
(1) Trendsmap [www.trendsmap.com]
It is a real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world. Just type in the location and you will see the top trending topics in the specific location. Alternatively, you can also move/zoom around the map and click on the topics for more information. They also have a “Hot Topics from around the globe” and “Featured Cities from around the globe”.
(2) NearbyTweets [http://nearbytweets.com]
This is a geography-centric social tool for networking and a business tool for building customer relationships and monitoring real-time buzz. This tool can be used to monitor real-time buzz in a location within a specific radius, using specific keywords. If you are looking for people in your area who are discussing on a specific keyword, this is a good tool to use.
(3) Twitt(url)y [http://twitturly.com]
The tool that track and rank the URLs people are talking about on Twitter. It works on taking note of URLs people tweet and applies it as a vote for that URL. The more ‘votes’ it accumulates, the higher its ranks on Twitturly’s Top 100. Twittulry only shows the 100 most popular URLs over the last 24 hours, and uses smart algorithms to catch spams and robots on twitter.
(4) Breaking Tweets [www.breakingtweets.com]
Read world news twitter-style. According to the website, it is seeking to prove the value of Twitter as a breaking news source and journalistic platform. I don’t use much of this though.
(5) Tinker [www.tinker.com]
You can search for top news, events, topics and places in top conversations on Twitter and Facebook. Just need to type in the search box.
TWITTER RANKING TOOLS
(1) TweetStats [www.tweetstats.com]
Curious about your twitter statistics? This tool gives you a graph to show the total tweets by month and also your tweet density by time. The graphs also show your average hourly tweets, and the interface you use to post your tweets. Interestingly it also show whom you reply to and whom you retweet to!
(2) Twitter Counter [http://twittercounter.com]
You can compare your stats with another two other profiles in their main page. It gives you a prediction of total followers for tomorrow and in the next 30 days ~which I believe is calculated based on the historical data of your profile’s followers. If you have a blog/website, there is a twitter widget that you can customize and used. They offer a premium version that allows you to compare multiple twitter accounts, view larger graphs, download the statistics and more.
(3) Twitterholic [http://twitterholic.com]
This is really for fun, I believe. It shows you your total followers, friends(whom you follow) and updates(total tweets) and then tells you your rank on twitterholic (my rank as of 23 Nov is 83,225…there are tons of people who are more addicted to twitter than me..hahaha..) and also your rank according to your location (my rank is 24 in Kuala Lumpur… *awww* come on, I’m just a nobody).
(4) TwitterScore [http://twitterscore.net]
You can check your profile score – and according to their page, the score is based on your followers and their popularity, the amount of people you’re following and the amount of updates you have and “other few things”(this is exactly what’s being said in the website!). It seemed like every Twitter score has got their own calculation methods and styles. How did I score? chewmeiling scored 5.1 out of 10.
(5) TwitterAnlyzer [www.twitalyzer.com]
This toosl tells you your influence, signal, generosity, velocity and clout. It has got all the explanation on what all these items meant ~ just too much for me to cover in this post. It also tells you who your key influencers are. My influence is just 3.5 out of 100, and is apparently ’slowly developing’.
(6) Twitter Grader [http://twitter.grader.com]
My rank is 201,348 out of 5,705,454 on this one with a grade of 96.5 out of 100. It gives you a short summary of your own profile. Their algorithm depends on number of followers, power of followers, updates, update recency, follower/following ratio and engagement.
TWITTER ALERT & SEARCH TOOLS
(1) TweetBeep [http://tweetbeep.com]
The tool that allows you to keep track of conversations that mention you, your company or anthing at all with hourly updates. It has the ability to keep track of who’s tweeting your website/blog even if they are using shortened URLs. Amazing! This is absolutely good for online reputation management. If you know what Google Alert is, then you’ll know what Twitter alert is? The free version offers you 10 free alerts by keywords (you can set the alert to be hourly or daily) and specify even up to by whom, to whom etc. More detailed that Google Alert. Paid version gives you more alerts. I’m using this to track the keywords I’m monitoring.
(2) Tweet Seek [http://www.tweetseek.com]
This is a Twitter search tool for keywords. It works like a search engine except for its searching all the tweets for the keywords you are looking for.
(3) TwitterHawk [http://www.twitterhawk.com]
The tagline they use is “twitter targeted marketing” – in a nutshell the tool allow you to do keyword search automatically and you can enter draft responses you want to send which can be automated or manual. It does real time searching and you can target your messages to the right keywords in an automated mode. I kind of like this but I’ve not used it. Once you sing up, you get 10 free tweets. [Paid Solution]
(4) ObjectiveMarketer [http://www.objectivemarketer.com]
Currently still in beta, this is a centralized campaign management system for social marketers. According to the website, it offers comprehensive analytic on campaign and channel performance with actionable insights. You can sign up for a 30 day free trial signup thereafter you can upgrade to a fully paid daccount. [Paid Solution]
TWITTER CLIENTS
(1) HootSuite [www.hootsuite.com]
This is a professional twitter client that allows you to tweet, monitor keywords, manage multiple accounts and more. You can even schedule tweets ~ especially useful if you have time-sensitive tweet. Thanks to Josh Lim for that tip The current version allows not only Twitter, but also Facebook, LinkedIn and Ping.fm. It is currently a free beta version.
(2) Sendible [www.sendible.com]
It calls itself as a ‘complete messaging platform’ ~ and you can tweet and update your facebook status from this client. You can schedule email, sms and social network messages ahead of time from one place. They have a free version (which comes with an ad liner with every of your message) and paid versions starting from USD3 per month (I’m not sure if their prices differ by country as I notice the last bit of the pricing URL indicating country=MY).
(3) Social Oomph [www.socialoomph.com]
I just tried out this twitter client, and it offers more functionalities than the one I have used. You can still do the tweet scheduling by minutes & hours. At the same time you can track keywords, save and resuse drafts, schedule DMs to new followers (and even have a few versions), Automate follow & unfollow, amongst others. I’m using the auto-follow function with rotating DMs to new followers-And this is the FREE version! If you want more functionalities, opt for the Professional version, which gives you more keyword search funcitonalities, private tweet viewing, manage DMs with automatic spam control, manage multiple accounts with their integrated console.. and many many more. You just have to go to their website to see the long list of functionalities.
The above are the tools I use currently, and I’ll update it as and when I find a tool worth using & mentioning. If you would like to check up new tools, you can also go direct to One Forty [http://oneforty.com] which showcases the best twitter apps for iPhone, Blackberry, Web & More.
P/S : On my Android, I recommend using iTweet ~ which is fast & equally appealing to the eyes