Socialsama

Just thought some of y’all might be interested in this article on Mashable.  I have copied 3 of the tips.  Click on the article for all 10.

Who the hell does Arrington think he is?  Did he put a bunch of money and time to start a risky company?  I don’t know how Techcrunch started, but he is way out of line here.  If Foursquare gets a good offer from Yahoo, they should take it.

Don’t Sell Out, Foursquare. Not Now. Not To Yahoo.

Yesterday I started listing ways to make your content more effective.  Today, I finish the list out.  Feel free to flame me in comments if you wish.

5. Borrow

Just as you refer folks around, you can, and should, riff off their content.  So if someone in your field says something particularly relevant, quote them with attribution and a link to their site, and say something relevant to their point.  Mix these “quoted” posts with content of your own to create a true conversation.

4. Use the tools

You should have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and depending on your business, perhaps MySpace, LinkedIn, or other networks.  Almost every business should also have a blog.  But these aren’t the tools I mean – after all these are just where you put your content.  Good tools are feed aggregators, Google Alerts, Social Mention, twitter search, and a social media management platform (Spredfast is one).  These tools will help you find relevant content and keep you abreast of the fast moving torrent of news and information getting uploaded every minute.

3. Put a stake in the Ground

Put your neck out there sometimes; prognosticate; declare something ineffectual or stupid.  Even if you end up being wrong, it’s OK; your audience will forgive you.  A little controversy is a great way to get some traffic and call out some of your other ideas.

2. Measure yourself

Getting feedback on your content is absolutely necessary to improving it.  Put in place mechanisms to measure how many followers, friends, and blog viewers you have, then measure the relative success of one days’ content versus another.  What seems to resonate?  What doesn’t? Even if you have spikes around exogenous events (other product launches, big company announcements), try to capture the spirit of what was conveyed.  Of course not every day can be a big news day, but every day can show improvement in your quality and effectiveness of your content.

1. Have Fun

Social media didn’t just create legions of narcissists, it also gave them the opportunity to share the self love with everyone else.  As it happens, those folks with the biggest personalities seem to succeed the most in this nascent field.  You don’t have to be the next Perez Hilton (in fact, given what you decided for 9 & 10 above, you probably shouldn’t be), but you must infuse your personality into your content.  Staid whitepapers aren’t what cuts it anymore.  If you are having trouble developing your voice, I suggest you revisit #5.

If you have made it this far, keep the following in mind: avail yourself of the tools, measure your activity and create relevant, charitable content, which reflects YOU.  Your tweets, posts, and updates will soon develop the following they richly deserve.

Have you wondered what social media does for your business or your brand?  I am sure you have heard quite a bit about Facebook, blogs, and Twitter.  I mean, everybody’s doing it.  You should be, too.  But how do you know, really, what you should be creating?  Hopefully this little guide will help you strategically and tactically develop effective content.  The first three in this list are definitely on the strategic side – then I get down to brass tacks on how to create successful content without killing yourself.

10. Define your Goals

As in most things, you should first define your goals.  Are you trying to build brand awareness or serve existing customers (they aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive)?  Understanding your end goal helps considerably with the content you need to create.  A highly technical blog or tweets or Facebook page will often miss the mark if you are trying to build the brand of the over arching corporate entity.

9. Understand your Audience

Part and parcel of defining your goals is understanding who you are trying to reach.  Just like a brand awareness driven blog will have different content than a customer service blog, so will a site that is made up of say BladeServer administrators versus Lotus Notes users.  Certainly this step isn’t rocket science, but often times a blog, Fan page, or twitter stream might be too unfocused.  Your target audience could be a very lucrative, exclusive, or powerful bunch, even if it is somewhat small relative to your overall brand.  Two good examples of this phenomena are the IBM System X Blades blog, twitter, and Facebook fan page and the community developed by Solarwinds.  Both approach somewhat esoteric groups but do so effectively by tailoring their messages to their respective audience.

8. Integrate into the Community

Your content isn’t the only thing important to your audience.  You must be not only an expert on your topic(s), but you must also read and review what others are saying.  This concept will come in handy later, in the tactics section.

7. Unlock your Assets

Your company probably has lots of collateral materials already created – press releases, marketing slicks, powerpoint presentations, white papers.  Mine these for potential blog posts and references from microblogs (twitter/facebook/linkedIn status updates).   Don’t reinvent the wheel – your company has content bottled up – unleash it!

6. Refer your Audience Around
Strangely, you should send your audience away as often as you send them to your site(s) or your own content.  Since you are part of a community, you know what else is being said out there; a good member of the community sends her followers to some of those other resources.  You should of course bring your audience back to your own content to download whitepapers or contribute to the discussion there, but you will get more followers and commenters and fans by actually revealing good content from other places to your current audience.  Don’t of course link to your competitors, but if you find a blog or site that compares you favorably to them, flog that article like mad!

Check back for the next 5 tomorrow!

Christina Warren put together a top 10 list of tools for B2B social marketers, and, naturally, Spredfast was on there!

Like anything else, social media marketing is easier, more efficient and more effective if the marketer has the right set of tools. While hundreds (if not thousands) of tools and services exist for social media marketing, many are still primarily aimed at either consumers or B2C marketers. Fear not B2B marketers — there are still plenty of great tools out there than can best address the unique needs of the B2B space.

We’ve raided our own toolkits to come up with some of the best tools and services for B2B marketers that want to get the most out of social media.

…

Spredfast is a tool that can monitor, manage and measure various social media solutions. You can use it to manage multiple accounts or to schedule content. Spredfast can also be used to do real-time monitoring of persistent keyword searches in search engines, RSS feeds and Twitter and Facebook streams. It can also index relevant and competitive sites. Spredfast also offers metric reporting and tracking so that you can better understand what methods are working best and what methods might need some tweaking. Spredfast starts at $50 a month.

We have been working hard to get our philosophy about managing social media initiatives and the strategic thinking about social.  Nice to see our platform getting recognized for our efforts.

Sorry for the light posting.  It has been one of those months.

HootSuite is integrating with Foursquare and MySpace.  Hadn’t considered FourSquare, but might make sense.  I haven’t been hugely interested in the product itself.  But we did integrate MySpace a few weeks ago and we have always integrated with Wordpress.

Well, game on then.  Our product still kicks theirs to the curb…

Will FB get $2B in rev in 2010?  That would be something like 4-5x growth over the past year.  Unless it is mostly Zynga and by extension the text spam companies paying it (and by extension you Farmville players), I am not seeing it.  But the WSJ says its possible (from TechCrunch).

Oh and Kincaid reports on this other nugget:

Well how about that.  Good for CoTweet.

I think this combo actually makes perfect sense.  I could also have seen a DemandMedia or Adobe or Yahoo scooping them up.  I wonder what other companies are like CoTweet running around…

Erick Schonfeld gives three reasons why Google Buzz was launched before its time – but really they are reasons to launch at all.  The final reason is the key:

We have seen this effect for awhile now – as have our customers.  More and more of the traffic to our site is not generated through search engines specifically.  To be sure, we certainly get a chunk from them, but solid leads are far better from our social media activities than from paid search.  That trend is only becoming more pronounced.  Social media directly undermines Google’s relevance (course I don’t see anyone else directly profiting from that change…).

Facebook money… facebook’s way of making money.  Annoyed by Facebook applications?  Hoping FB does something to curb their ubiquity on your stream?  Well, don’t look now but Facebook’s incentives just got twisted.  By taking a cut of the applications through Facebook Credits, FB will have every reason to make sure high performing apps make it in front of the most people.  And this revenue stream I understand.  So is Facebook ultimately a massively multiplayer online game system?  I’d say yep.