Socialsama

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.

Well, it’s official.  We have gone out hard launching the product. The dev folks have really stepped up to get us ready and Porter Novelli has been terrific on the PR side.  Thanks to everyone who helped out.  Below are a couple excerpts from the articles that are already out.

Austin startup tracks social media efforts

By Lori Hawkins | Wednesday, January 20, 2010, 03:42 PM

Social media campaigns have become standard marketing fare, but measuring their effectiveness is still next to impossible.

Austin startup Spredfast says it has the answer with its new Web-based software that helps companies manage their social media efforts.

…

Spredfast has managed more than 200 campaigns since September for clients including IBM Corp., Cisco and AOL. University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center used Spredfast to promote its Edgar Allen Poe exhibit, while Austin restaurant Truluck’s kicked off its social media outreach with the software, adding 659 Facebook fans in four months. Now Truluck’s is using Spredfast to integrate its blog and Flickr photos as well.

“We can measure every piece of content you distribute,” says Ken Cho, Spredfast co-founder. “That lets clients automate the task of collecting metrics, and immediately determine the impact of their message.”

…

And

Spredfast Fashions Social Media Into a Corporate Dashboard

By Liz Gannes Jan. 20, 2010, 5:32pm

Managing your social media presence at times seems like a full-time job, but for some people it actually is one. And professional social media-ites need professional-grade tools to do what they do. A new service called Spredfast, launching tomorrow from Austin, Texas-based Social Agency and already used by IBM, HP, AOL, the Sierra Club, Cisco, Intel, Monster.com and the Salvation Army, is a completely web-based social dashboard with more features than you can shake a stick at.

…

However, the Spredfast product, which costs $50-$100 per month per campaign, offers these key features:

• It is multi-user, with multiple access levels, calendaring and scheduling tools.
• It’s integrated with a whole bunch of services: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr, with support for WordPress, Blogger, Moveable Type, Lotus Live Connections, Drupal and most XML-RPC-enabled blogging platforms. Users can respond to conversations from within the site.
• It offers its own metrics system that helps you compare week to week how your brand or campaign is doing. So, for instance, getting a new fan on Facebook or getting a “like” on a post would earn you a point. Then you can see in a pretty chart how your engagement is trending vs. previous weeks.

Plus, said co-founders Kenneth Cho and Scott McCaskill, upcoming features include: importing conversion stats from Bit.ly links, exporting reports to PDF and email, and an iPhone app.

…

Great stuff – really exciting over here.  If you want to check out Spredfast, just hit the link.

If folks were unaware, we have a product called Spredfast for managing social media.  Well, this week we are officially launching the product.  But not today!  That would be silly given that it is MLK day.  And not tomorrow since that would be the day after a 3 day weekend, which would also be silly.  So later in the week stay tuned.

But I bring this situation up for a few reasons:

1. Gain awareness from my readers about what we are doing (shameless plug)
2. Mention that we are a live case study for product promotion via social media
3. Recognize that, in some sense, we are cheating.  We are getting the help of PR firm Porter Novelli in this launch.

Now the 3rd point is probably not entirely fair to us.  I have never said firms should eschew other forms of PR or marketing and only do social media.  In fact, I firmly believe the opposite.  Firms should certainly use all tools at their disposal that they can afford and that make strategic sense for themselves.  We aren’t running a super bowl ad, for instance, but we are doing PR.

At any rate, we should be able to get some hard numbers on ourselves and some detail on how it went – how our campaign has gone from the beginning, what we did along way, what changed the game, etc.  Which will be an interesting set of blog posts over time…

Well, I think Ken has it really spot on here.  I think private label social networks indeed have their place (after all, I started a private label social networking company), but several steps lie between limited/no existing online community and full blown social networking.  Many of those steps are much, much more cost effective and far less time intensive than going whole hog into a private label social network.  In a related idea, I think people get too hung up on the tools as they think of social media and social networking.  An online community does not have to be whiz bang coolest new widgets with neat tricks you can do on your profile.  An online community can revolve around a variety of tools, from forums to Facebook groups.  The part that needs to be cohesive is the company direction about social media, not necessarily every system your company is using.

Now on to Lee. I thnk Lee’s point about superficiality deserves even more emphasis. Lee showed how the actual engagement with social media can be much more than mindlessly pinging that kid you knew in elementary school on Facebook. I think the abstraction you can take from his post is that there are very meaningful ways companies can use these existing tools and communities to effectively communicate with their customers, contacts, partners, and others. I guess what I am trying to say is, just as when television first came out, it probably wasn’t widely thought of as the communication tool it was to become – people had radios after all (as my grandfather famously said, no one is going to want one of those). Similarly, these social media tools offer a way to revolutionize the relationship companies and organizations have with their customers and members.