Book Rules

There’s a difference between building a community on Facebook and advertising on Facebook. Yes, the former is a means to the latter, but the objectives are different. A number of the articles we reference in Firestarter are about integrating your brand in social media environments by building communities and offering value to existing ones. The following article touches on those strategies but focuses on more of a nuts and bolts approach at marketing on Facebook.

Every week I speak to countless businesses and no matter what they are selling, most businesses want to accomplish one thing: sell more. While they know that Facebook advertising can help their business, most don’t know where to get started. Another large percentage of businesses may have dabbled in advertising on the site but they haven’t been able to obtain the conversion ratios they are looking for. In this guide, I’ll walk you through 10 of the most important laws for businesses when advertising on Facebook.

Not all of the laws are strategies that should be implemented. Instead these are laws that define how Facebook advertisements function and general perspectives that you should keep in mind when creating your advertisements. Some laws will describe immediate actions you can take while others are more broad. All of these laws should help you improve your overall Facebook advertising experience.

1. Facebook Is Least Effective At Direct Sales

If you’ve come to Facebook looking for instantaneous sales than you’ve come to the wrong place. Facebook presents businesses with the opportunity to reach their target market throughout the entire marketing cycle. While a small percentage of users are ready to purchase while they’re browsing Facebook, a much larger percentage of users are going to make a purchase in the future if not now.

Fortunately you have the opportunity to build an ongoing relationship with your customer and that’s what Facebook is most useful for: building relationships. It’s a platform to build ongoing relationships and “remarket” to your customers, as Facebook says in some of their own marketing copy. Understanding that these users are not ready to purchase is key to success on Facebook.

As I outlined in the 5 phases of the Facebook sales funnel, Facebook is about relationship marketing. As Wikipedia describes, “Relationship marketing differs from other forms of marketing in that it recognizes the long term value to the firm of keeping customers, as opposed to direct or ‘Intrusion’ marketing, which focuses upon acquisition of new clients by targeting majority demographics based upon prospective client lists.”

2. Create A Greater Volume Of Ads That Target Less People

Often times on Google, advertisers will create an ad which targets every person in a single country and then split test two ad versions against each other. On Facebook this model will do nothing but cost you money. Placing a generic ad that’s targeted at an entire country, without any additional targeting, will do nothing but get you a lot of clicks and waste a lot of money for the most part.

Facebook provides 11 targeting factors for advertisers (with three new factors announced yesterday). Below is an outline of each of those factors:

1. Location - Facebook enables advertisers to target by country, state/provice, city, and metropolitan areas. All advertisements are required to have a location selected. This should be pretty straight-forward as to which location you’d like to select.
2. Age - Age is a standard demographic factor. Most marketers that have a well defined target-market will be able to select their age.
3. Birthday - This is one of Facebook’s latest advertising targeting filters. It should be pretty obvious what types of ads should be presented to people who’s birthday it is. Try wishin the user a happy birthday and offer them a gift for higher conversion rates.
4. Sex - Gender is another typical targeting filter for Facebook.
5. Keywords - Keywords will are based on a user’s profile information including Activities, Favorite Books, TV Shows, Movies, and more. I believe job titles are included in this field and I typically spend the most time trying to brainstorm effective keywords. What types of products do your customers like? What’s their job position within an organization? Spend time on this field and you’ll be rewarded.
6. Education - While you can target based on their level of education, this is most effective for targeting ads based on the schools that people went to. Want to announce a reunion for the University of Illinois class of 1996? This is a great way to promote it.
7. Workplaces - This is another great targeting filter. Often times you will know the companies that your target market works at. If you are looking to get new clients or looking to spread awareness within specific organizations, this filter can be priceless.
8. Relationship - Want to target people that are about to get married? This is a great tool for that. If you are a bar or club, you most likely want to go after those people that are single. While this filter can be useful, you also need to keep in mind that selecting any of these settings will remove all users that haven’t selected a relationship status in their profile.
9. Interested In - This factor is useful if a user’s sexual preferences are relevant to whatever you are advertising. I tend to skip this field for most of my ads.
10. Languages - If your ad is in English but the user speaks Chinese, it’s probably not a good idea to be displaying ads to them.
11. Connections - The connections fields were launched yesterday by Facebook and they enable you to include and exclude users based on pages, events, and applications that the users have joined and you happen to be the administrator of. If you’ve created a Page and don’t want the ads to display to people who have already joined, this is a great way to avoid duplicate clicks.

If you aren’t taking advantage of the numerous targeting factors then you aren’t using Facebook advertising effectively. In order to have an increased conversion rate on your advertisements, increase the targeting in order to make the advertisement more relevant for the users. Relevance will get people to respond to your ad.

3. Friend Users Before You Sell To Them

Facebook is about relationship marketing, not direct sales (as I described in the first law). That means it’s more important to build a relationship with a potential client or an existing customer rather than closing a sale right away. So how does this law show up in practice? The most obvious form is through the Facebook Ads for pages and events.

Through these advertisements, users can become a fan or RSVP to an event directly from an ad. At that point, you have the opportunity to interact directly with that individual and build a relationship. If you had directed a user to your website, you would have been forced to have them enter a form or make a purchase right away. The odds of getting a user to fill out a form or make a purchase immediately is far less than getting them to become a fan of a Page or RSVPing to an event.

In addition to having an increased conversion, you are also now able to reach out to individuals directly if you wish. For example if someone RSVPs to an event, but you don’t know who they are, you can send them a message welcoming them to the event and inquiring about more information. This form of relationship building is used to build lasting customers, not one time purchases, and it is core to Facebook marketing.

4. Understand Your Market

On Google, a shoe retailer will develop an advertisement that targets people who are “looking to purchase shoes”. These advertisers will look for people who are carelessly misspelling a word while searching for something in order to convert them into a customer. It’s a great model for generating one-time sales but unfortunately these advertisers don’t always understand their market.

In order to become an effective Facebook advertiser, you need to have effectively defined your market. This will help you to take advantage of the 11 targeting factors that Facebook currently provides. To help define your market, you can go through the market segmentation process. This involves defining the need your company satisfies and then more thoroughly defining who your customer is.

After exhaustively defining who your customer is, you’ll be more effective at defining the targeting factors to be used in Facebook advertisements.

5. Set Advertising Budgets With A Goal In Mind

It’s extremely easy to spend a lot of money on Facebook advertisements by “experimenting”. I can’t tell you how many people I know that have aimlessly spent thousands of dollars on Facebook advertisements but couldn’t point to tangible goals that they had accomplished. If you set a budget on a campaign for $20 a day you should know what you would like to receive for that money.

Yes, we all want customers, but as I’ve continuously emphasized: Facebook marketing is not about instant sales. With that in mind, below are two practices that are good to keep in mind when setting your goals.

Think Long-Term

In terms of sales, the payoff will be further down the line so be prepared to spend over weeks and months, don’t blow your budget in a day. Unless you are an affiliate marketer (who has distinctly different goals), you should be invested in the advertising for the long haul. A one-week campaign is not going to bring you riches, but a long-term investment in advertising can produce measurable results.

This means don’t spend beyond your means for one week and have no money left at the end. Instead, set reasonable budgets that you’ll be able to handle for longer periods of time.

Measure Initial Conversions As Fans, Comments, and Likes

Since most users will not make a purchase right away, you need to make sure that you are at least engaging them. Would you go out on a first date with someone and then wait two weeks to call them back? If you want to see them again I hope you don’t wait two weeks to follow-up. The same goes for your fans. Follow-up with your fans often and consistently.

6. Monitor Your Ad Performance And Adjust Accordingly

Now that you’ve defined your goals, it’s time to track whether or not you’ve achieved them. Throughout each Facebook advertising campaign, you should be tracking how well the advertisements perform. Are you on track to reach the goals that you’ve set? Are your advertisements achieving a reasonable click-through level?

Facebook provides advertisers with a number of monitoring tools including their basic ad manager area as well as downloadable data about each campaign you are running. If you visit the ad reports area you can download three types of reports to determine how your campaigns and ads are performing: advertising performance, responder demographics, responder profiles.

The primary things to monitor are clicks, click through rates (CTR), actions, action rates, and CPC. Each of these variables will differ depending on what type of campaign that you’re running but in theory, the more targeted your ad, the higher click through rate you should have. Additionally, your click through rate will tend to go down over time as your entire target population views your ad and decides whether or not they want to respond.

7. Test Landing Pages Versus Facebook Pages

In traditional online advertising, users are directed to a landing page from which they are prompted to fill in information in a form. This information is then typically used to send marketing literature. On Facebook, you want to build relationships but if the relationships you are building aren’t generating any revenue, you may want to diversify your advertising strategy by including some landing pages.

Yes, building relationships are extremely valuable and despite those users never making a purchase, they can become effective brand advocates that ultimately drive new customers to your business. For smaller businesses, investing in brand advocates is often considered to be a costly proposition which is why investing in some direct sales is always useful.

The point of this law is that Facebook advertising combined with relationship marketing cannot be your only strategy. You need to generate sales and sometimes that means being direct and converting a customer. If you want another phrase to summarize this law: “diversify, diversify, diversify”.

8. Split Test Ads By Demographic

An advertiser once told me that women tend to react more often to advertisements that have the color pink in them. While I doubt this is consistent across all women, this could be true for a large portion of them. The only way to find out if it is true is to split test different ads within that specific demographic. I’ll use an example to illustrate this rule.

Let’s say that you’ve created an advertisement that’s targeted at CEOs of companies in the Northeast region of the United States. You can create two advertisements and compare which version of the ad results in a larger response. An example lesson learned would be that “CEOs in the Northeast region tend to respond better to ads with the word ‘influence’ over the word ‘power’”.

As you narrow your targeting, you can begin to adjust your advertisements even further. For example, as a second step you can now create separate ads for CEOs in the Boston area and CEOs in the New York metropolitan area. Each step along the way you should be refining your advertising copy while incorporating some of the lessons learned from the previous steps.

As you increase your targeting, you can incorporate some of the lessons learned from previous steps.

9. Develop Creative Ad Copy

This honestly has to be one of the most important laws. Conversion is primarily about two things: your ad copy and the landing page. If your advertisement doesn’t provide a call to action, there is a good chance that the user won’t respond. Facebook ads for pages and events already provide a call to action but generic advertisements don’t. If you offer the user something for clicking, there’s an increased chance they will click.

The best way to determine effective ad copy is to take a look at the existing sites around the web. Which are the ones that you see most often? Even if the ads appear to be annoying, if you continuously see them, there’s a good chance that they are doing something right. Click on ads and see what types of products are being offered and what the pitch is.

The best way to improve your advertising is through research and other advertisers provide you with plenty of free information. While copywriting books can assist with writing effective headlines as well as how to structure landing pages, your best information will come from other ads. Also check out magazine racks at book stores and see what headlines are being used. Often times you will find great headline ideas there.

10. Don’t Over Target

In the eighth law I outlined how the more that you target, the more you can begin to hone your ad copy. While increased targeting can increase click through rates, determining how to most effectively target sub-segments of your customer population can be costly both in time and in money. While you should most definitely take advantage of Facebook’s targeting features, it’s more important that you get your company’s name out there and then build the relationships.

Everything in marketing is a balance and the last thing you want to do is spend all of your time increasing ad relevance while not interacting with the users who are clicking through on the ads. Spend time tracking your ads’ performance but also make sure that you spend time connecting with all the people that respond to your ad.

If you aren’t following through with the marketing process then you aren’t going to generate new customers.

Conclusion

Improving your advertising is something that takes time and patience. On Facebook, marketing is about relationships, not immediate sales, so set your budgets and advertising plans with that in mind. Facebook advertising is still a relatively new offering and marketers are just beginning to understand how to use these advertisements most effectively. With these 10 initial laws, all marketers should have a great starting point.

To download a free PDF copy of this guide and to learn more about how Facebook can be used to effectively market your business, enter your information in the form below.

Source - All Facebook

Manifesto Of The Times

The global downturn has triggered a massive shift in how people feel about the way of the world. Change is in the air and “regular” people are now empowered to take action and make the changes they feel are necessary for a better future. The Generation M Manifesto is a great summary of the profound shift in our cultural, social, political and economical landscapes. Let the revolution begin!

Dear Old People Who Run the World,

My generation would like to break up with you.

Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.

You wanted big, fat, lazy "business." We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce.

You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.

You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.

You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.

You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today's markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.

You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better.

You didn't care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.

You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.

You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.

You wanted more money, credit and leverage — to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters.

You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We're not for sale: we're learning to once again do what is meaningful.

There's a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I'm going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation "M."

What do the "M"s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It's a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth "M"s.

Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday's way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government. Who's Gen M? Obama, kind of. Larry and Sergey. The Threadless, Etsy, and Flickr guys. Ev, Biz and the Twitter crew. Tehran 2.0. The folks at Kiva, Talking Points Memo, and FindtheFarmer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Jeff Sachs are like the grandpas of Gen M. There are tons where these innovators came from.

Gen M isn't just kind of awesome — it's vitally necessary. If you think the "M"s sound idealistic, think again.

The great crisis isn't going away, changing, or "morphing." It's the same old crisis — and it's growing.

You've failed to recognize it for what it really is. It is, as I've repeatedly pointed out, in our institutions: the rules by which our economy is organized.

But they're your institutions, not ours. You made them — and they're broken. Here's what I mean:

"... For example, the auto industry has cut back production so far that inventories have begun to shrink — even in the face of historically weak demand for motor vehicles. As the economy stabilizes, just slowing the pace of this inventory shrinkage will boost gross domestic product, or GDP, which is the nation's total output of goods and services."

Clearing the backlog of SUVs built on 30-year-old technology is going to pump up GDP? So what? There couldn't be a clearer example of why GDP is a totally flawed concept, an obsolete institution. We don't need more land yachts clogging our roads: we need a 21st Century auto industry.

I was (kind of) kidding about seceding before. Here's what it looks like to me: every generation has a challenge, and this, I think, is ours: to foot the bill for yesterday's profligacy — and to create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity.

Anyone — young or old — can answer it. Generation M is more about what you do and who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: do you still belong to the 20th century - or the 21st?

Love,

Umair and the Edge Economy Community

PS - Fire away in the comments with thoughts, questions, or — because I've left a ton of awesomeness out of this post — more examples of Gen M people and organizations.

Source - Harvard Business Publishing

From Push To Pull

Traditional influence has followed a systematic top-down process of developing and pushing “controlled” messages to audiences, rooted in one-to-many, faceless broadcast campaigns. This system is quickly becoming antiquated as the socialization of the web and online content has triggered a media renaissance that brings power to the people. Discover the new meaning of influence and the tools you need to remain relevant in this brave new world.

Traditional influence has followed a systematic top-down process of developing and pushing “controlled” messages to audiences for decades, rooted in one-to-many, faceless broadcast campaigns.

Personality wasn’t absent in certain mediums, it was missing from day-to-day communications.

For the most part, this pattern seemingly served its purposes, fueling the belief that brands were in control of their messages, from delivery to dissemination, among the demographics to which they were targeted.

It scaled very well over the years, until it didn’t…

Unbeknown to many companies, a quiet revolution was amassing over the last two decades. And, slowly but surely, the whispers eventually intensified into roars.

The socialization of the Web and content publishing disrupted the balance and is now forcing a media renaissance that is transforming information distribution, human interaction and everything that orbits this nascent ecosystem.

It is the dawn of a democratized information economy, which is engendering the emergence of champions and visionaries who endeavor to manifest a more media literate society while transforming the way we publish and share relevant content.

The Social Web heralded the arrival of mainstream consumer influence and a global ecosystem that supports and extends their observations, complaints, opinions, and recommendations.

It served as a great equalizer, capsizing the existing balance and redistributing influence.

Not only is it changing how we create, decipher, and share information, but also it is forever reshaping how brands and content publishers think about their markets and the people who define them.

We are Media

We the people demanded personalization in engagement, improved services that put the customer back into the spotlight, and acknowledgment that our feedback would incite a more value-added circle of overall communications and product adaptation.

Although there were numerous, sensational attempts to silence us through the misdirection and suppression of critical yet ignored or unheard experiences, insights and feedback, we have emerged influential and consequential to the bottom lines of businesses all over the world. As consumers, we fervently stormed these new platforms and staged a social revolution that forced the attention of those who so readily dismissed us – silence was no longer golden.

Social networks and platforms have transcended the role of the consumer from customer to authority, ambassador and critic. Those who master their domains are developing persuasive and important communities around their areas of expertise, interests and passions and now possess the prowess and authority to direct, instruct, and steer decision makers and referrers.

Aside from the disciplines and behavior our profession dictates, we are far more than communicators, marketers, publishers or chroniclers of life events. We are also knowledgeable people with ideas, opinions, observations, and experiences that cannot be discounted. We bring opinions, experiences, rapture, and frustrations to each conversation as a consumer. But when its time to reach our peers and colleagues, we regress to broadcasters and purveyors of information and lose site of how what we represent truly impacts those we’re trying to reach.

We essentially lose perspective and personification.

In the end, we earn the influence that our activities and shared experiences justify and warrant. Our presence and participation impacts the decisions and impressions of those around us. We connect people to products and services and ultimately assist in the governance of future actions among those within our immediate social graph as well as the graphs that link our friends, their friends and also the friends of friends (FoFs) network.

As a brand manager and also as someone who’s responsible for extending the company’s products and value propositions to the marketplace and building meaningful communities and relationships, I personally welcome you to a new genre of distributed influence, one where we must earn authority on both sides of the conversation – as representatives and consumers.

We are the people we’re trying to reach.

Building a Bridge Between Brand and Markets

We’re paying attention to a-list bloggers, from technologists to moms to lifestyle to politics and everything in between and forgetting or ignoring the magic middle, those bloggers who actually inform and interact prospective customers.

We’re blindly jumping into social networks and engaging with the “avatars” tied to keywords instead of identifying and recruiting those who can help us create valuable, thriving communities that support the exchange of pertinent information.

Tastemakers and trendsetters are the new influencers, but their roles in affecting consumer behavior are not derivative of the Social Web. Instead, these tastemakers and trendsetters who individually contribute to a more influential public are now readily discoverable courtesy of the search boxes and APIs that facilitate their recognition within the communities of consequence. Social Networks, blogs, microblogs, and all other forms of people-powered platforms provide a looking glass into the interaction between consumers and also the ability to discern the level of authority each one possesses.

You’ve heard it time and time again; “People do business with people they like.”

While that’s true, they also spend money on products that help them do something that they couldn’t do before based on existing needs and desires or frustrations with current experiences. Therefore people are looking for answers, not necessarily friends. They’re seeking societies where they can learn, share, and contribute. And they’re using the tools, channels, and networks to connect with one another.

Listening counts for everything nowadays and it’s by and far the easiest step in embracing and ultimately leading the transition from an introverted organization into an extroverted, community-focused human network.

It sets the foundation to not only listen and respond on the front lines, but also it necessitates the modification of the entire infrastructure to adapt to the real world needs of customers and the insights they choose to share.

This is a privilege and an opportunity.

It’s the shift from top > down broadcasting to a more holistic methodology that embraces consumers directly using the tools and channels they use to communicate. In order to build a bridge between brand and markets requires the personification of the company and it’s ability to not only humanize its story, but also listen and respond to input and dialogue through words and the adaptation of products and services.

Direct to Consumer (D2C) Connections

Influential customers collectively create a network of information beacons that help others successfully navigate within their respective markets and industries. We’re awakening to a new era of stature and authority that augments broadcast communications with the participatory groundswell of user-generated leverage and impact. In the world of Social Media, brands can also earn influence using the same tools and networks that have empowered bloggers and tastemakers alike.

So how do you establish a D2C program that tunes into inbound feedback, fosters relationships, and creates a foundation for material evolution? How do you identify these beacons and genuinely approach them to potentially establish a collaborative engagement?

Authoritative customers and bloggers are noticeably absent from mainstay databases and systems that have long helped marketing and public relations identify traditionally influential voices. The systems and algorithms required to accurately identify conversations and the people who fuel their public development. Most of this “real time” technology that is facilitating potentially prominent conversations and also the ability to discover them is just now demonstrating promise and proving value.

Since everything starts with systematic listening, we can’t sit and wait for existing applications and solutions to acclimate to the dynamic of our business and supporting markets. We need to identify and embrace the tools that help us find out who’s important to us right now. And here’s the good news, most of them are free.

Listeners Make the Best Conversationalists

Actually listening, hearing, and internalizing the words of others inherently qualifies someone as worthy of engagement. Interaction, however, is measured by the exchanges that further the development and direction of the hosts of the original conversations as well as those who were peripherally observing and affected.

Tastemakers and those who’ve earned the ears and eyes of their peers are either dubious of corporate outreach or opportunistic in assessing the overall potential. Your approach counts for everything. And, this is not – at least for the purposes of this discussion – about buying or leasing the outcome of the interaction.

Those who pay attention to the dynamics, intricacies and psyche of the words, tone, and nature of the dialogue can make the difference between simply responding, reconciliation, and resolution. But please take note, if the process of listening and responding was relegated to simply searching keywords and responding to specific instances, “by the book,” this currently coveted role quickly downgrades to the general ranks of basic conversational competence.

Conversation is simply conversation, regardless of tools. The qualifications to maintain dialogue are trivial. The true question is what is it that we’re trying to accomplish as the task of simply showing up to the table is honestly, child’s play.

When discussing social media and participatory protocol, let’s no longer share the examples of standing on top of a table during a cocktail party and obnoxiously yelling out messages at the crowd. Honestly, this is an example social etiquette, not strategic social listening and engagement.

Identifying influencers is one thing. Engaging people and enticing not only attention, but ultimately establishing an association and striving to earn allegiance takes far more than interpersonal adeptness. Our aspirations and benchmark must rise higher than the basic ability to “communicate, communicate, communicate.”

We need to be acutely informed, open, and enlightened individuals who can engage at both an empathetic and genuine position.

As you listening?

Are you really listening?

The type of listening I’m referring to here, isn’t simply identifying updates or threads tied to keywords to inject canned responses, generic questions or disconnected updates based on the nature of the conversation.

Listening requires a dedicated infrastructure and support system; essentially the ability to not just hear something nor placate or acquiesce the emotions and concerns of real people, but the capacity and alacrity to adapt based on the information and insight that’s absorbed.

It’s the power of inflection.

The Mechanics of Attentiveness

Who’s responsible for listening? Someone has to take responsibility for the process of listening and channeling conversations. In some cases, a community manager is hired to act as the central hub to all internal departments. In other cases, PR has taken over the responsibility of listening, reporting, and analysis. In other organizations, the function of monitoring, observing, documenting, reporting, trending, and conversation management is outsourced to an agency that specializes in new media. Depending on the firm, you can expect to pay between $2,500 – $7,500 per month for daily tracking/documentation.

It’s this function that serves as one of the most important roles in the transformation of any organization from an inward focus to an outward extension. The intelligence and insight gathered during these exercises tells us everything. Most importantly, it reveals where we need to start and what is actually transpiring in this enthralling and persuasive landscape.

It’s where we need to start. It’s how we assess the opportunity. It’s also the only way to gauge the volume, velocity, and resources required to properly interpret, process, and address the situations that require our attention.

While jumping into Social Media is a given for some companies, others need to substantiate the effort in order to justify the shift in or creation of dedicated budget and personnel.

Before we can discuss ROI, we first need to understand the proportions of the investment required. The distance between perplexity and resolution is disclosed through research and appraisal. There isn’t another way around it. The answers lay in the process of searching keywords and reading, watching, absorbing, and logging the responses you encounter.

Hearing Aids and Prescription Glasses

I’m not suggesting that you’re losing your hearing or your sight. I’m metaphorically referring to the fact that we need assistance in order to hear and see relevant conversations and the related people and communities where they emerge and inhabit.

As you’ll see that the list is of tools to identify influencers, unearth and listen to online conversations, and track their paths, relevance, and status, is extensive and the available services and options will only continue to multiply. The ONLY way to understand, truly grasp and appreciate, the tools that are right for you and match the needs of your organization and existing processes and workflow is to endure the undertaking of manually searching for relevant information.

Automation is helpful in that it saves time and conserves precious resources, and in some cases, provides us with answers to questions we never new to ask. The systematic procedure for distinguishing, tracking, analyzing, trending, and reporting conversations and would be influencers requires a direct experience in order to understand the differences in results between a hands-on approach and those run through algorithmic software.

I know. There are only so many hours in the day and it’s not possible nor scalable or sustainable to do everything alone. However, the truth is, that this is how you learn. This is how your garner perspective. It establishes a benchmark. This is the investment you’re making in yourself, your career, and your future.

Just do it. You’ll thank me later.

Now, let’s review the tools available so that we can start the process of uncovering the unknown and plotting our next courses of action.

Help me keep the list up to date and complete. Please add resources in the comments section.

Searching The Social Web

Collecta: Collecta is the first true real-time search engine that monitors not just Twitter but the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media sites, including Twitter, Flickr, among many others. Unlike a traditional search engine that displays indexed results and are ranked based on a series of links and ranking, results and trends in Collecta are updated in your search stream are as they happen – as they appear online. Think Twitter Search, but for the entire Web.

Google Alerts: Email updates of the latest relevant results for keywords on the Web, blogs, or some indexed social networks.

Microblogs

PeopleBrowsr: A dashboard for managing communications across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, FriendFeed and other social networks. The service also doubles as an integrated search network for each network in connects and the ability to track and manage automated or customer responses to the results for key words – providing an all-inclusive communications management platform.

FriendFeed: FriendFeed is a microblog that aggregates content from multiple networks into one, easy to follow collective stream. Friends can follow, comment, share and “like” updates and also spark threaded conversations based on their activity. Since FriendFeed can import updates from multiple properties such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, LinkedIn, and roughly 50 additional services, it provides a highly curated source for curated search. The advanced search feature in FF allows users to search the entire network for keywords that are syndicated through all 58 networks within the community.

OneRiot: Formerly Me.dium, OneRiot crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg, YouTube, and other social sharing services, then indexes the content on those pages instantly. The end result is a search experience that allows users to find fresh, socially-relevant, human curated content. It also displays a link to the person who first shared the item online.

Google Query: Expected to launch soon, Google Query will provide the ability to search microblogs similar to how users can search and sort data within Technorati, by date, influence, location, language, etc. Here’s the current description used in Google’s localization service: Recent updates about QUERY. This is the MicroBlogsearch Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format.

Twitter Search: search.twitter.com, oneriot.com, Twazzup, Collecta.com all provide the ability to search Twitter (and in Collecta’s case, the entire Web) for real-time results related to a key word. For a more detailed search based on timeframe, location, hashtag, people, and sentiment, try search.twitter.com/advanced.

Twitority: A based Twitter search engine solution that allows users to sort results by any, some, or a little authority.

Tweefind: Provdes search results that appear in order of user rank.

Twazzup: Like Twitter Search, Twazzup displays the tweets in chronological order based on your keywords. The results also reveal other potentially relevant keywords, events, and hashtags associated with the subject matter you’re researching based on the patterns of those who collectively share similar updates. Results also include a list of top trendmakers as well as related pictures, videos, and most popular links related to your search criteria.

Twingly: Like Twitter Search, Twingly also provides results for other mainstream and niche microblogs such as Identica, Jaiku, Pownce archives, among others. Also see Blogsearch.

Blogsearch

Technorati: Considered the largest blog search engine in the world. Technorati tracks “blog reactions” (keywords) and blogs linking behavior.

Blogsearch.google.com: Similar to News.Google.com, Google Blog Search allows users to comb through blog posts for relevant discussions and also to identify authorities on any given subject. Google alerts are also available for blog search results.

Blogged.com: A community for identifying blogs and bloggers that cover particular topics from what’s popular to “the long tail.” Blogs are rated by the community as well as by blogged.com editors to provide a human perspective.

Twingly: Provides “spam-free” search results of blogs discussing your keywords. Results can be sorted by Twingly rank (a vetted process of rating individual blogs), time, and language. Results include a link to the profile of the host blog.

BackType: Usually blog comments do not appear in traditional or blog search results. BackType is a conversational search engine that indexes and connects millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media so people can find, follow and share comments.

Forums/Usergroups

BoardReader: Accurately find and display information within the Web’s forums and message boards.

BoardTracker: A forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information contained in forum threads.

Go directly to the source:
Google Groups
Yahoo Groups
Ning
Meetup

Listening + Conversation Management Systems

BuzzGain: A complete listening, influencer identification, relationship management and reporting solution, BuzzGain helps identify conversations containing keywords in blogs, media, and social networks and also the influential voices behind those conversations. Using the integrated research tools and reporting tools, users can also document and visualize trends, add commentary to results and publish customizable reports. It’s free during its public beta perios.

HowSociable: Provides a free look into brand visibility metrics by allowing a user to enter a keyword, name, or phrase and identify the content transpiring in 22 networks.

WhosTalking: WhosTalkin.com is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding important topics. It serves as a hub for search results on blogs, news networks, social networks, video networks, image networks, forums, and tags.

FiltrBox: Real-time social media and web monitoring, Filtrbox monitors thousands of mainstream news outlets, blogs, and social media in once place. By consolidating results in one dashboard, users can eliminate redundant searches and alerts. Users can also import their Google Alerts to manage noise, remove duplicate results and consolidate disparate results feeds.

Radian6: Radian6 is focused on building a complete monitoring and analysis solution for PR and advertising professionals so they can be the experts in social media. The Radian6 listening platform monitors the social web to uncover conversations related to specific brand on millions of blog posts, viral videos, reviews in forums, sharing of photos, twitter updates. It also provides the ability to analyze buzz about a company, products, issues, competitors, and outcomes of specific marketing campaigns and social media investments.

Buzzmetrics: Delivers trusted brand metrics, meaningful consumer insights and real-time market intelligence to help clients apply the power of consumer-generated media (CGM) to their businesses. BuzzMetrics services and solutions uncover and integrate data-driven insights culled from nearly 100 million blogs, social networks, groups, boards and other CGM platforms. The services include brand monitoring, brand connections and customer relations, consumer insights, and brand campaign planning and measurement.

Trackur: Online reputation monitoring and social media listening tools, Trackur scans hundreds of millions of web pages–including news, blogs, video, images, and forums—and reports any discoveries that match relevant keywords.

Visible Technologies: Helps users listen to and learn what consumers are saying about their company/brand in the blogosphere and social media communities. It also fosters customer engagement by enabling users to effectively participate in these discussions by placing the right messages in front of the right audiences for a more direct connection.

Sentiment Metrics: Sentiment Metrics social media measurement dashboard enables users to monitor and measure social media and gain actionable business intelligence to develop more targeted marketing, improve products and increase profits.

TNS Cymfony: Provides expert interpretation of how corporate messages are picked up across traditional and social media sources, enabling the ability to measure results and discover trends that affect the bottom line. Whether the goal is to influence the brand perception during a new product release, marketing campaign or even through a crisis, TNS Cymfony’s market influence analysis tracks consumer preferences across traditional and social media sources and provides the ability for listeners to act and engage quickly to keep perception on track.

BrandsEye: Traces and assesses online presences and provides real-time Reputation Score for both the user’s brand as well as their competitors. This allows companies to monitor the sentiments and opinions of their own customers, while making educated judgments about how to respond to attacks on their online reputation.

Cision Social Media: Social media monitoring of over 100 million blogs, tens of thousands of online forums, over 450 leading rich media sites, along with a complete database of influential voices on the web and in social media.

Techrigy: SM2 is a software solution designed specifically for PR and Marketing Agencies to monitor and measure social media. It works with the company’s Social Media Warehouse system that tracks blogs, wikis, message boards/forums, video/photo sites, mainstream media, blogs, microblogs, and social networks.

Trendrr: Tracks the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time.

SocialMention: A social media search platform that aggregates user-generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.

Show Me The Money

Social media is great and all but what does it do for my bottom line? Convincing senior management and those that are skeptical about the benefits of social media is a difficult sell. After all, social media is new territory and doesn’t provide immediate/concrete results. A recent study suggests that an investment in social media has significant returns for those that do it right. Evidence from the study might help sway non-believers.

A new study released by enterprise wiki provider Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group shows that the brands most engaged in social media are also experiencing higher financial success rates than those of their non-engaged peers. To determine this relationship, the study focused on 100 companies from the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands survey and the various social media platforms they used like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis, and forums. Although it's difficult to prove for certain that the companies' involvement in social media has led to their increased revenues, the implication behind the new data is that it has.

After examining the companies and their social media activity levels, the brands were ranked on an "engagement scale" where scores ranged from a high of 127 to a low of 1. Those brands that were the most engaged saw their revenue grow over the past year by 18% while the least engaged brands saw losses of negative 6%.

Four "Engagement Profiles"

The study grouped the brands into one of four engagement profiles that related to the number of channels they're involved in and how deep that involvement is. At the top of the list are "mavens," the brands heavily engaged in seven or more social media channels - like Starbucks and Dell, for instance. "Butterflies" are like wannabe "mavens," and are also engaged in seven or more channels but are spread too thin, investing in some channels more so than others. "Selectives" focus on six or fewer channels but engage customers deeply in the ones they've chosen. Finally, there are "wallflowers," or brands engaged in six or fewer channels with below-average engagement; these include companies like McDonalds and BP.

Out of the top 10 brands engaged in social media, the mavens dominate the list. All of the top 10 are mavens and have seen financial success even in a down economy:

1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie - Yahoo!/Intel (85)

$$$ Does Social Media Pay? $$$

Of course what everyone really wants to know is whether or not social media actually pays off in terms of dollars and cents. This study seems to show that it does. The most-engaged brands are significantly outperforming their peers across numerous industries in both revenue and profit performance. They have even sustained strong revenue and margin growth in spite of the economy, notes the report.

Whether this correlation is actually a causation cannot be proven with the data on hand, it can only make the implication. Given the large number of companies analyzed and the consistent findings, it seems probable that social media has had a major impact on the companies' financial success.

It's also worth noting that the level of engagement appears to be a factor, too. The companies deeply engaged in fewer channels ("selectives") delivered higher gross and net margins than those only lightly engaged in more channels ("butterflies"). It other words, as the report says, "it's not about doing it all, but doing it right."

The ENGAGEMENT Web Site

Along with the complete study, available here, an accompanying web site has also been launched at www.engagementdb.com. On the site, companies can compare their social media efforts with the top 100 cited in the report. They can also opt to detail their social media efforts for inclusion in the online database at the site for future research and study.

Source - ReadWriteWeb

Why Your Age Doesn't Matter

Communication strategy has traditionally relied on demographic targeting tools. This model has been integral to marketers for ages but it’s far from perfect. The reality of the situation is that we didn’t have any better alternatives when tailoring our communication plans. Now, with the proliferation of communication platforms where people willingly giving out their personal information, there are substantially better ways to ensure the right people are hearing your message. Come find out why age doesn’t matter any more.

There was a time when age used to matter for marketers. We would buy media based on presumed age ranges of audiences in the hopes that this bit of demographic information would help us reach the right people. In fact, this is one of the most time-honored traditions of marketing planning. It is also one of the dumbest. The thing about age is that it was always used as a proxy for interest. If you knew that someone was a male between the ages of 18-34, you could make a guess that they might like sports, or need deodorant, or drink beer.

The inherent problem with this model is that you are just guessing at relevance--but at the time this was the best you could do. Today, you can do better. Online, people are telling you what they are interested in. They are broadcasting their interests. Their activities are not a hidden black box, they are out in the open. So you don't have to guess that a 25-year-old male who is watching football might eat your pretzels--you can use social media and active listening to find the 41-year-old mom who has already told her friends those pretzels are her favorite food in the world. Oh, and by the way, you can find the five friends she shared that with too.

This is the power of the online environment and the new ability of targeting. Marketers don't need to rely on the crutch of age demographics any longer. The problem is, most sites and publications selling advertising still rely on these. So the TV spots, magazine ads and online banners are still being sold largely through these empty demographics, while what marketers need to care about is far different. Here are a few concrete reasons age demographics are generally a waste of time:

1. People are age shifting and not living lives based on traditional stereotypes for their ages.
2. The top end of a demographic (34) usually has almost nothing in common with the low end (18).
3. Age demos leave out influencers, gift buyers, and others for whom a message may be relevant, but don't fit the age requirements because they aren't the ultimate recipient of the product.
4. Focusing on age can take you away from emotional or relevant benefits.
5. People lie about their age all the time.

So if you do leave age aside, what matters more? Relevance. If you find the right 25-year-old who thinks like a teenager, or a 36-year-old mom (who may technically be outside your age demographic), then that's a good thing. The only way to do it is to stop blindly thinking about age demographics and refocusing on methods of targeting that actually matter such as interests, affinity groups, location. This doesn’t mean you can forget about tailoring your message to different groups and age ranges, but the point is that you need to think of your audience in terms of action and interest--not artificially created groupings of age.

Once you do that, the places you buy media will start to follow suite. They will sell advertising based on what their audiences do and what they say and not what drop down box they chose as they were trying to register hurridly for access to a site. You have the power to demand more intelligence from the places you spend your marketing dollars. The marketers who do so will be the ones that do more than simply filling out columns on the same measurement spreadsheet year after year. As a side bonus, they will be the ones that find their marketing working much better as well.

Source - Fast Company

Link Bait Strategy

With Facebook membership reaching critical mass it’s more important than ever that your branded content is accessible through Facebook. This fact is exponentially relevant considering Google’s algorithms do not account for content shared between friends and family on Facebook (don’t forget that “word of mouth” is the most powerful persuasion tool). Learn why the link bait strategy is going to be increasingly important as Facebook continues to gun for Google.

This weekend, my mother-in-law asked me to enter a life of crime.

Not in the real world, of course - she’d like the father of her grandkids to remain jail-free. No, instead she invited me to play that Mafia game that’s so popular on Facebook.

Not interested in the game, I politely declined. But when my mother-in-law, who has just joined Facebook, becomes part of an online trend, that’s a sure sign that it’s hitting critical mass in the population at large.

Facebook is quickly becoming the immovable object that will soon butt heads with Google’s irresistible force.

Strength In Overwhelming Numbers

Facebook claims that its subscriber base over age 35 doubled in size between February and April of 2009 - just sixty days. That’s not only impressive for a site as huge as Facebook already is, but it means that your mother-in-law is likely on Facebook just like mine, and one of them is probably about to order a Mafia hit on the other.

That growing audience means traffic to any website that gets a link on Facebook. How much traffic? The analysts at Hitwise claim that celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton now gets more traffic from Facebook than from Google - more than 7 million pageviews from Facebook alone. If that trend increases, then the current wisdom about web traffic is about to get turned on its ear.

How Facebook Kills SEO

Traditional search engine marketing seeks to draw the attention of people searching for particular terms in Google, Yahoo, or other search engines. And that’s going to continue to be useful for a long time.

But the rise of Facebook creates a growing segment of the web that’s completely invisible to search engines - most of which, Facebook blocks - and can be seen only by logged-in Facebook users. So as Facebook becomes ever larger, and keeps more users inside its walled garden, your web site will need to appear in Facebook’s feeds and searches or you will miss out on an important source of web traffic.

What’s the best way to keep your links in front of Facebook users? The ever-more-important linkbait strategy.

How Linkbait Gains Us the Favor of Our New Facebook Overlords

Regular readers of this and related sites are already familiar with the linkbait strategy, which is this: create content that multiple outside sources will link to because it’s funny, controversial, interesting, or otherwise compelling.

In other words, generate great content.

Now, once you’ve got your compelling content posted - or ideally, even before you do - you should have some way of injecting that content into the Facebook sphere. Perhaps you’ve built up a large network already, for yourself or your site. Perhaps you’ve got a widget on your page that allows readers to post your link directly on Facebook. Or maybe you just ask a few friends to post the links on their own, and hope it takes off from there. Your tactics may evolve over time, but the most important part is that you’ve got to write something people want to link to - the essence of the linkbait strategy.

The Hits Just Keep on Coming (We Hope)

So… as linkbait becomes more important for Facebook (and, let’s not kid ourselves, Twitter, too), what does this mean for future traffic trends?

It means that, more than ever, you’re going to have to continue to generate timely, quality, compelling content that attracts Facebook links as well as non-Facebook links. And once Facebook users get to your page, you’d better have a plan for how you’re going to keep them on your site, and keep them coming back later.

Why is that? In part, because Facebook links are invisible to Google - and therefore don’t contribute to your PageRank. Facebook links make no lasting direct contribution to your site’s SEO, and as Facebook drives an ever-larger percentage of traffic to your site, that means quality content will overshadow all other SEO techniques.

Facebook wants to be the Google killer… don’t let it kill your site, too! Start planning today to get Facebook users to your site and keep them coming back for more.

Source - CopyBlogger

GTFOH

Space, the final frontier. Believe it or not, some people are investing time and money in technology that will allow for marketing in space. A company called Moon Publicity is working on a business model that would essentially sell media on the moon. Needless to say, this would trigger a serious outrage and we don’t anticipate seeing “space marketing” coming to life any time soon. Either way, it’s an amusing thought.

Remember the 1990s? Anything was possible, what with the birth of the Internet and the zooming economy. No wonder, then, that one company wanted to loft a 1-square-kilometer billboard into space, which would be as bright as the moon, while Pizza Hut toyed with the idea of burning its logo into the moon's surface.

The billboard was scuttled because space debris would have knocked it out of orbit (provided it could even get there); the Pizza Hut scheme died when the wild and crazy ad guys realized that 1. It's an offensive idea. 2. The logo would have to be as big as Texas.

Well, some fools never learn--or, at least, will never stop trying to make ads as annoying as possible. Moon Publicity claims to have invented (but not built) a lunar rover whose tracks would create enormous drawings in the moon's lunar dust. The company suggests that these drawings might include logos, domain names, memorials, portraits and even--God help us--the initials of your sweetheart.

Of course, there's no atmosphere on the Moon. The images would last well after your first divorce, and even well after out society has crumbled--that is, thousands of years. As David Kent Jones, the "inventor" says in a press release: "This new commercial incentive will turbo charge space technology development. Shadows are just the beginning; eventually robots will be planting crops on other planets."

He is, of course, happy to take your money in pursuit of this dream/nightmare. Through October 20th, the company is accepting bids for the branding rights to 44 lunar regions, starting at $46,000. (Can anyone actually claim the rights to a portion of the moon?)

Gizmodo wonders if it's only a matter of time until some fools pull something like this off. Personally, I hope I'm dead before then.

VIDEO HERE

Source - Fast Company