Web Business by Ken Burbary

3 New Media Tools You Should Consider

As new tools and services constantly spring up on the web, I’m often evaluating the ones that look promising and incorporating them into my Digital toolbox. I’ve developed some new habits around 3 tools that I want I share with you, and hope you’ll find them as useful as I do.

Posterous - Posterous officially labels itself as “the dead simple place to post everything”. It can be used a lifestreaming platform, like Steve Rubel does, a simple blog, or as I use it, an aggregation and distribution service for the media that I create and share. Like many of you, I participate in a disparate collection of social media outposts (Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Blogs, etc..). I spend a great deal of time reading, commenting and sharing the interesting media I find with others in my network that I think could benefit from it. However, this can become burdensome and time consuming, as I’m forced to constantly copy/paste/edit links, text, and media to get it right way before sharing it on a particular network. Rinse & repeat for each social network. This gets old fast.

Posterous solves this problem, and quite efficiently I might add. My media sharing is now “1 stop shopping”. Posterous supports virtually all of the most popular social platforms, and integration with your accounts is simple and straightforward. Once setup is completed, you can use email or bookmarklets (for advanced users that want to customize the html) to autopost your shared item. Posterous supports a wide range of media types, which allows you to share photos, music, videos documents, and links with your other networks.Instead of manually sharing media & links on each of the networks Iparticipate in, now I send it to Posterous, and they take care of the rest of the distribution. It also has some useful features like custom domains, integration with Google Analytics for tracking, and some native reporting (views, comments, favorites).

Go ahead and see Posterous for yourself. I’ve been using it regularly at http://kenburbary.posterous.com

What the Hashtag – This service is specific to one social network, so if you’re not using Twitter then skip this section. If you are using it, you’ve probably come across hashtags (Read here for a explanation of what hashtags are). “What the Hashtag” aims to do one thing, and does it well. It provides you with the ability to easily group and follow all conversation with a unique tag. For example, I missed blogchat last week. Blogchat is a weekly discussion on Twitter, started by Mack Collier, to discuss blogs and blogging best practices. Using “What the Hashtag” makes it easy to catchup on the conversation. What was said, who was what, and when it occurred. This is useful because there are often very informative, and relevant conversations around events, conferences, webinars, etc.. that I want to follow but may not be able to due to other commitments. “What the Hashtag” solves that problem for me. It’s my own personal Twitter time machine. I get to quickly and easily cycle back to that conversation, follow what was discussed, and identify who I may want to follow up with after the fact or take further action.

View the #blogchat page on “What the Hashtag” and see for yourself:  http://wthashtag.com/Blogchat

Vitrue Social Media Index – This is a social media measurement service. It attempts to provide an easy to understand measurement of a brand’s share of online conversation. It uses a proprietary set of technologies & algorithms to generate an index score for each brand. The index score itself is ok, but the real reason I use the tool is because it provides a quick answer about which channel online conversation is occuring in the most. For example, let’s say I wanted to know how much of the online conversation about Ford Motor Company is on blogs, versus the other channels (social networks, video sites, etc…). Vitrue provides this for you. All you need to do is supply the search term (brand name) and you get immediate results. This information is useful because it can get you started in the right direction. Then you can use other monitoring & analysis tools like Techrigy SM2 to take a deeper dive into the area of interest.

Vitrue provides a free and directionally correct answer to validate a theory or idea you may have for your brand/client’s brand. This is much quicker, not to mention cheaper, than paying for a commercial monitoring tool to get the same answer. To be clear, use the right tool for the job. Vitrue provides quick and dirty snapshots that can be used for research and/or some decision making, but be sure to use other tools if more detailed information is required to make a decision.

Social Media’s Mount Everest, Helping Toxic Brands

During the past 6 months, I’ve talked and written a lot about how engaging in Social Media can help your brand. There can be numerous benefits. In fact, Social Media Maven Chris Brogan has already written what Social Media does best. And expert Mack Collier wrote a thoughtful article some time ago, describing how Dell has successfully integrated social media into its marketing communications and culture. Both are worth your time to read.

We’re delirious with Social Media mania right now. For good reason, in most cases. However, there is one important question that a brand needs to ask before jumping into Social Media. Is it right for my brand? How and where can it be useful for us? Translation: Does it make sense to engage in Social Media.

Sure, for many brands the answers may come easily. A strategy will emerge, tactics will follow. The excitement and energy that comes with entering a new channel will also.

However, what if you’re a toxic brand? What is your current brand perception is in the dumps? What if your current customers are your most bitter and harshest critics? What if your product is far inferior to the competition? How can Social Media help you under these circumstances (and I believe it can)?

What brand could I possibly be describing? Sadly, I’m using my favorite, and home town, NFL Franchise as my test subject. The Detroit Lions brand is at an all time low. They set an NFL record for the 2008-2009 season by losing every regular season game, finishing 0-16. Ticket sales are down. Home games are blacked out on local television because of it. The Lions franchise is the laughing stock of the league. And I, like many other thousands of fans, DO NOT LIKE IT. I’m a life long fan (I know, I know, spare the glutton for punishment jokes) and want to see them succeed, so much so that I’m devoting this time & energy to blogging about it.

I have my own ideas but am looking for your perspectives. I’m hoping to tap into the collective wisdom of the Social Media crowd, and answer these 3 questions:

1. How can the Detroit Lions effectively engage in Social Media to help improve their brand image?
2. How can the Detroit Lions effectively engage in Social Media to increase sales of tickets and merchandise?
3. How can the Detroit Lions effectively engage in Social Media to improve the relationship with their customers and fans?

Couldn’t this become the perfect case study? If Social Media can help save a brand like the Lions, lifting them out of the brand perception toilet, then one could argue the right Social Media strategy, integrated into an overall marketing strategy, could be a difference maker for any brand? And collectively, we have an opportunity to help make that happen.

I am VERY interested in hearing your input. Please share your ideas and opinions in the comments. With any luck, maybe…..just maybe…the Lions will be listening. And if they aren’t, I’ll do what is necessary to take the answers to their doorstep. Viva La Lions!

Mine the Gold in Social Media through Conversation Search

Google has transformed our lives with its uncanny ability to answer the question, “What is X?”.   Enter any term and Google will tell you what it is and/or how it works. If Google’s spiders can find a web page, you can find the content within it using Google Search.

Enter Social Media.

The proliferation of real-time, mass conversation online is something that Google hasn’t done as good a job at keeping up with. Opportunistic individuals have taken advantage of this fact to create specialized conversation search engines. Currently they do the best job of finding “Who is talking about what, and where”.  There are many tools online that do this. Some, like Social Mention and Samepoint scour a large portion of the social media landscape, while others like Twitter Search focus on a single social network. For purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on demonstrating how you can use advanced features Twitter Search that often get overlooked.

Much like Google search, Twitter search is very straightforward. Enter a term and it will display a results page that shows all mentions of that term, or combination of terms, that are being discussed on Twitter. You can also search by Hashtag to view all Tweets with that tag. These features are only the tip of the iceberg that Twitter Search offers. By clicking the “Advanced Search” link, you’ll see a feature-rich search page that offers.

People Search

Is ideal if you:

• Want to find all tweets from your favorite Twitter personality
• Want to find all tweets to a particular person
• Want to find all tweets mentioning a particular person

These methods of searching can be useful if you want to catch up on a particular topic between people, follow all replies directed to someone, or  monitor buzz on a specific person.

Location Search

Ever wonder who else living  or working in your city is on Twitter? Enter your location and select the distance radius. You’ll most likely find other people, in some cases extremely close, near you that you had no idea about. It’s a great way to expand your Twitter network by adding new conections that bring new and different perspectives.

This method of searching can also be useful when attending conferences or other events, and you want to search & find which other Twitter users are near you.

Date Range Search

This is a great way to find that tweet that you loved but didn’t save, or couldn’t easily find because it happened  more than a day or two ago. Often times, you’ll have a conversation with someone and need to go back and reference one of the tweets. The date range search makes it easy. The only thing you need to remember is a rough idea of when the conversation occurred.

Attitude Search

Automating sentiment analysis has not yet perfected, even with the best natural language processing technologies on the market. Despite being imperfect, there are insights that can be revealed by experimenting with searches to uncover the positive or negative tones in the key topics. Try both, you may uncover something that really surprises you.

Link Search

This is one of my favorite search options. Remember, one of the primary reasons many people tweet is to share links that interest them, or links they think will be valuable to their network. Shared link tweets are an important way to keep up on news, trending topics, and key blog posts. It’s easy to miss links though, because Twitter conversations happen quickly. And your attention span cannot scale with the noise on Twitter. It’s simply not possible, even with tools like Tweetdeck. So, this search method makes it easy to catchup on what you missed.

Enter the username of the person you want to search for link tweets from and check the “Containing Links” box. You’ll be returned their tweets that only contain links. You can then easily scan the links without having to wade through all the conversation in between them.

You can take this even further, by subscribing to the RSS feed generated for any Twitter Search query. Add the feed URL to your favorite reader, and you will have automated your search. I use this method to keep up on link tweets from key folks I follow Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang, Mack Collier, Aaron Strout and Alan Wolk.

There are surely creative people out there that have invented more sophisticated ways to search twitter conversations, and you’re EXACTLY the people I want to hear from. Please share any power search tips you have!