Tag Archives: Mashable

Blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn

1,734 Uses for Social Media – Look ’em Up in Tamar’s “Text”

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You’ve got to be more than a Social Media Newbie to appreciate the depth and breadth of research that went into compiling the 334-page compendium The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web.

Author Tamar Weinberg is a community manager for Mashable, clearly the best source for Social Media news on the Net —

She knows her stuff AND you will, too, if you get a copy of this book, read it, and follow up by trying our just a small portion of the platforms and strategies described in careful detail . . . just one example:

There are more than ten pages just on social bookmarking sites Delicious and StumbleUpon.

Tamar’s Top Seven Reasons to be on the Web:

  • Establish your expertise.
  • Bring more traffic to your website.
  • Raise search engine rankings.
  • Increase sales.
  • Manage your reputation.
  • Enhance brand awareness.
  • Build relationships.

Here are Nine Strategies for Social Media Marketing Success:

1) Establish goals for your social media marketing campaigns.

2) Create a strategy for executing your social marketing efforts.

3) Communicate effectively with the communities you intend to target.

4) Take charge of the conversation, even if it’s not on your website.

5) Gain exposure from participating among many social channels.

6) Utilize social media to handle a reputation management crisis.

7) Utilize blogs and bloggers to send messages to larger groups of individuals.

8] Leverage existing sites to market your products.

9) Craft content that is currently “hot” within many social media circles.

Some quotes to “get your hands around”:

“You can’t manage something you can’t measure.”

“On the Social Web, conversations happen WITH or WITHOUT you.”

“A Community Manager’s key function is humanizing an organization.”

“Strategy requires teamwork and idea generation.”

“Communities flourish because people are helping people.”

“If you consistently Listen, AND Give Back to your social media community, you will be miles ahead of the competition.”

12 different Online Reputations you should monitor:

  1. Your name
  2. Your company name
  3. Your brand names
  4. Your company executives
  5. Your company’s media spokespeople
  6. Your slogan or marketing message
  7. The competition
  8. Your industry
  9. Your weaknesses
  10. Your business partners
  11. Your clients
  12. Your intellectual property

Personally, I’ve made a list of [a] more than a dozen sites  I’m going to check out in more depth, [b] a half dozen communities I’m going to join, and [c] 10 specific tips I’ve already started to adopt.

PS I really didn’t count, but I’m willing to bet there are MORE THAN 1,734 facts you’ll learn about social media from Tamar’s invaluable text.

For those of you who’ve already read it, let us know how it helped you.

FURTHER INFO FROM TAMAR:

Social Media Strategies

10 Social Media sites to get answers to your questions

Sharisax Is Out There, Twitter

List-O-Rama: Not included on many Twitter Lists yet?

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for listing purposesFeeling left out because everyone’s buzzing about Twitter Lists . . . and you’re not?

Reminds me of how one of my good friends has had two dinner parties at her home in the last few weeks, and I wasn’t invited to either. But she did ask me for this weekend, so maybe there’s hope for all of us.

Fresh from a 30-minute webinar on Twitter Lists by Hubspot, I have decided to weigh in with my own . . .

List on Twitter Lists:

1. First off, Twitter Lists is a brand new social media/Twitter feature, so by the time we learn all there is to know, many aspects will change. And that’s OK. Really. Getting your feet wet in the evolving new technology makes it so much easier to capitalize on the opportunities you will find along the way — this is ESPECIALLY TRUE for businesses who’ve feared jumping onto the social media bandwagon.

a. COROLLARY: That means that the rest of this “List” may — or may not — be useful tomorrow/next week/next month . . .

2. Twitter is like a fire hydrant, according to the webinar, so Twitter Lists are like hoses, according to me.

b. COROLLARY: You can focus your Twitter streams and increase your Reach.

3. Webinar’s HOW-TO: (a) Follow the Lists of people you respect; (b) Create some of your own by going to your Follower list; and (c) Promote your lists via widget, FB, FF, and Twitter itself.

c. COROLLARY: Check out more lists on Listorious and add yours to this directory

4. Instead of number of Twitter Followers to measure your popularity, the new gauge will be how many Lists you are on.

d. COROLLARY: Using either of these analytics is “interesting” — to use the term many English teachers write when we can’t think of something positive to say about a student’s paper/thesis.

5. You can not [now] SPAM the people on a Twitter List

e. COROLLARY: A critical component to Success with Social Media Marketing [SMM} is to personalize relationships and service. Automatic anything is so un-SMM.

6. Teachers can make Twitter Lists for individual courses for in-class or homework discussions

f. I won’t have to use TweetChat which was giving us some trouble when students replied directly to other students, e.g., these discussions sometimes did not appear in the stream.

Posts re: Twitter Lists from the blogosphere:

7. Four clever uses for lists: includes creating mini-communities where every listee follows the list and uses hashtags for discussions.

8. 10 ways you can use Twitter Lists: includes making lists to keep tabs on your industry and your employees.

9. Twitter lists and real-time journalism: Pete Cashmere says we can use our friends as filters:

“For those cast adrift in a sea of content, good news: A “curation” economy is beginning to take shape, tweet by tweet, list by list.”

10. Robert Scoble:

“Twitter Lists are for people crazy about tech news. Techmeme is for lazy people who want all their news in 10 minutes? Heheh. Very fun!” in response to a comment on his post “Techmeme vs Twitter Lists“

— BTW, Scoble is the ONLY “listee” on Steve Rubel’s “List/faves”

Time to “get off the couch” and start LISTING — or at least reading about them. It really is “All about the Buzz”

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Blogging, Facebook, Twitter

From creating Buzz to real-time Trends: Reading my favorite blogs is just like taking out toys and playing with them

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Vegas stripComing back from vacation is Hard Work, but if that “work” is “play,” then it can be a lot of fun — albeit different from three days in Las Vegas to celebrate my birthday.

So my “coming back plan” is to catch up on my blog-reading and blog-writing at the same time.

Where to start?

At the top of the inbox?

Where I left off last?

Any email title that catches my eye?

I decided to start with Adam Singer’s The Future Buzz [my favorite blog]. Adam is only 26, but his depth of experience and passion is amazing. Today he wrote about speaking at PubCon Nov 10-13, so any of my readers who can get back to Las Vegas, please say HI to Adam for me.

Adam’s post Understanding your audience is underrated touched a few chords for me. Here was my comment:

Two responses come to mind upon reading this post:
(1) As a writing teacher, I am reminded of my advice to students to imagine the reader and it makes the writing task so much easier.
Here was a cool example that worked this past summer: Imagine writing an essay about “Why you should exercise.” With no one person/reader in mind, where do you start? Now imagine the reader is your lazy overweight uncle sitting in front of the TV, drinking beer and playing with his remote. Easier to get started . . . and easier to write.

(2) As a marketing teacher, I’d want to share all of your insights with my students to show them the power of intelligent thinking. In this particular post, your five strategy questions provided a great “lesson.” I especially liked the suggestion to find promotions that work and make those your own.

Have you tried a “News Update Network”?

I like social|median for news updates. It’s cool to read “Sharisax’s News Updates” in my email box every day on these five topics: (a) Tech News, (b) Social Networking, (c) Social Media Watch, (d) Media&Technology, and (e) Twitter.

(b) Social Networking news was of particular interest:

“Why I don’t use Google Reader anymore” posted on Robert Scoble‘s Posterous stream — from his Friendfeed account.

The title of the post appealed to me because — although I have a Google Reader account, I much prefer the blogs and news that comes straight to my mailbox. Here’s why Robert dislikes Google Reader: (1) it’s slow [misspelled “slog” at first; appropriate? :-)]; (2) the UI (user interface)  is confusing; (3) too many items to read, which he doesn’t get to; (4) social networking aspects too slow; (5+++) Twitter is so much better!

Robert’s post goes on to show the versatility of Twitter’s new LIST feature, which will soon be open to all. Robert ends his post in the “recommended” fashion to ask how readers view Google Reader. The first commentor suggested that Twitter doesn’t have an RSS feeder like Google Reader. Robert’s response: Everyone he wants to read posts their info on Twitter.

Checking out Seth Godin’s latest “words of wisdom”:

1) Big ideas . . . are little ideas that no one killed too soon

2) Opt-in or opt-out: a thought-provoking consideration of how personal choices should/shouldn’t be automatic, e.g., organ donation [a public good] is “opt-out” while spammy messages are a definite “opt-in.”

3) What you buy when you buy a lottery ticket: The title alone got me. Seth says that buying a lottery ticket is a lot like writing a blog post, and that the motivation is “the thrill of possibility.”

Seth’s Blog is a great one to check out (a) if you are just starting a blog and you want to have a role model who posts short sharp insights very consistently, i.e., at least daily AND/OR (b) if you want to see how a writer can say a whole lot with very few words AND/OR (c) if you simply want to think about some idea of value.

Where to end . . .

Since this is “play,” I could go on and on. But I’m sure I’d lose too many of you. So I’ll quit this post with one last article glimpse, and what better source than Mashable, the premiere aggregator of tech savvy contributors, the ultimate “Social Media Guide”:

One of the stories that caught my attention was the 4 Emerging Trends of the Real-Time Web: (a) Individuals working together [i.e. collaborating] online via specially designed Web platforms; (b) real-time data on shopping, health info and a host of other categories; (c) more valuable search findings that filter out old information; (d) the BEST prices at any one moment in time — WOW!!

If you check out any of these stories, let me know what you got out of them.

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Blogging, Twitter

Top Trends in Blogging & Twitter via Mashable

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This morning as I was catching up with some of the blog posts I missed yesterday, I stopped for a deeper look at the Mashable article on Five Top Trends from experts attending  the recent BlogWorld Expo.

One of my intentions is to find at least one post a day to write a comment or two on — and this article had both “thoughtful” opinions from well-known “thought leaders” as well as some pretty good comments from the “peanut gallery.”

Big Bloggers Tweeting More, Blogging Less

. . . according to Chris Pirillo [whose YouTube video on blogging I showed to my PR students], Twitter allows people to say more “pithy” things with less time and energy . . . pithy, maybe, but “more valuable”? — I think not. Here was the comment made by Micheline and my response:

Micheline Hazou 22 hours ago
Very interesting piece. As someone who is thinking of setting up and starting a blog, I identify with Chris Pirillo ‘s [@chrispirillo] view that “more and more bloggers are tweeting instead of blogging…” The challenge of expressing thoughts, ideas and chit-chat in 140 characters is quite refreshing.
Micheline, as someone who has only been blogging about six months — and also a Twitter fan — I continue to see these social media platforms as two entirely different communication tools. The writer in me may “tease” and/or “direct” people with a TWEET [like an appetizer, I suspect] but the real meal is in the blog post. BTW, if you have not yet started your blog AND would like a tutorial, please check my blog post on HOW TO START YOUR OWN BLOG: http://tinyurl.com/yahjdxk

The Evolution of Twitter as a Platform

Guy Kawasaki, who moderated a panel I covered in a recent report on “Does PR Suck?’, suggested the future value of Twitter was mainly for Business by pointing to the Kobi BBQ success story.

Here Nick and I weigh in on our favorite uses for Twitter:
Nick D. 21 hours ago
The real value of Twitter trends lies in their predictive value – the extent to which they are reliable leading indicators of broader business or social trends. There is some surprising evidence to the contrary coming in – i.e. that Twitter is in fact a lagging indicator in many cases. You can find out more here: http://blog.vanno.com/
Nick, I like Twitter mainly for Search. For example, I have a running list of tweets on my Tweetdeck for “Twitter for business”; “Facebook for business”; “Future of Advertising” and various #hashtags.

Semantic Intelligence

Brian Solis —  one of my “heroes” ever since he brought his PR 2.0 philosophy to my PR students last spring — has the statistics to prove that Twitter is driving towards more intelligent, filtered [and thus USEFUL ?] conversation:

Twitter Curation

Steve Rubel — who was on an HP panel discussing Social Media Roadmap this past summer — suggests that the New Media companies will be filtering and aggregating Tweets of Value and that editors will have a host of opportunities. [Call on me guys :-)]

User Generated Twitter Lists

Leo Laporte, whom I have not had the good fortune to meet yet, echoes the praise for Twitter Lists — new functionality for Twitter that allows people to generate lists for others to follow.

Join the conversation. It’s FUN and INSTRUCTIVE. Read up on these trends and others . . . and then put in your own TWO CENTS!