There are a number of good utilities available for managing multiple social media and social networking properties like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Hootsuite has become our recommendation and the tool we are implementing for clients. Here are some of our main reasons:

1. Multiple accounts: Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple Twitter profiles, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook profiles and Facebook pages.  It allows posting to one, many or all accounts at the same time.  You can also organize tabs and columns to group accounts by personal preference.
2. Browser integration: We recommend Mozilla Firefox and Hootsuite has an add-in that is required for our clients to make sharing information and scheduling tweets and post in advance an easy task.team members
3. Metrics: skip the url shortener, Hootsuite does it for you but adds tracking for each link
4. Security/User control: Multiple users can log-in to Hootsuite and have privileges to the same account without access to the primary user-name and password.  this is a deal-maker for any entity that wants to spread responsibility for social accounts across more than one person.

We had been using Ping.fm for some applications such as mobile updates and embedded gadgets in igoogle home pages as a dashboard for small business users. Note: this is still useful of you are updating your status or posting to a lot more sites than just “Primary accounts” like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.

Over the past six months or so we have tested a variety of applications like:
Co-tweet
Tweetdeck
Seesmic
Twhirl

All have powerful features however Hootsuite has the best current offer for business.  Recently reviewed by Jennifer Leggio in the ZDNet article, “CoTweet vs. HootSuite: Battle of the business Twitter apps,” Hootsuite came out on top.

Other related articles:

HootSuite Blossoms Into De Facto Corporate Twitter Tool
Getting Quick’n'Dirty with Hootsuite
Professional management tools for Twitter: HootSuite and CoTweet
HootSuite Helps You Juggle Multiple Twitter Accounts

We have been gathering a list of negative (as well as positive) behaviors for a class we intend to launch entitled, “Twitter: Business Ethics and Behavior.” Our original intent was an exercise around how to sell without being obnoxious, how to build authentic relationships and having a following that matters. It should come as no surprise that our focus group and crowd-sourced feedback led to the conversation itself. Semantics and syntax were at the core of most people’s impressions.

Social business in public “social media” spaces now requires professionalism. If you are using Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Orkut, Bebo or posting live video on Youtube, Vimeo, Viddler or Justin.tv for business than these are the idioms your audience thinks it’s best to avoid.  Keep in mind, your children are going to read this stuff ten years from now when they search for you online.

8.5 Slang Expressions Not to Use in Business

1.  That looks dope

2.  Dude*

3.  Brah, Bro or broddy

4.  Mang (as in, “Whas up mang?”)

5.  Hollar at me

6. Baller (unless your profession is basketball)

7. Homie

8. Come hang?

8.5 Dog, dawg or my dawgness

*Dude may be used as an expression of extreme excitement, for example, “Dude!  Excellent work on that project” – use sparingly unless you really are Jeff Bridges in character.

The experience of providing services and training in social media marketing and integrating those efforts into traditional marketing and PR strategy has led us to some concrete observations.  Our business is shifting into social business design.  Online platforms for community engagement and relationship development now impact every point in sales, marketing and customer service.  It will become difficult to segment business functions.  Tools will continue to be developed to monitor the real conversation that is happening around business brands and concepts.

The graphic below represents the evolution of marketing.  Note: The marketing “pie slice’ could be easily replaced by another business function. The rate of  change has reached light-speed.

Social Media Marketing Mashup

All four quadrants represent areas of significant change that must be considered together.  The effect can either be social business strategy consideration across business models or newer tools, platforms and tactics will be misapplied in a vacuum.  This means business will either ask the questions:  “How does this affect our process?  Where can we gain efficiency?  What has to change?” or it will hire interns or agencies to simply run Twitter and Facebook as if they are merely additions to their battery of marketing vehicles.

I look forward to discussing social business design and social business strategy, particularly in the business-to-business environment in future posts, but I thought I’d offer a simple real life example:

Social networks are forging relationships and allowing groups to form ad hoc around products and issues.  This can be as simple as two people talking about seeing a new movie via twitter and fourteen (14) people end up seeing a movie together.  They all check-in on Foursquare and learn there are 3 other friends at the movie.  Now 17 people divide into two groups and go out for dinner after the movie based on Yelp reviews found on their mobile phones.  Relationships are deepened.  Behavior is openly shared and public sentiment spreads rapidly.

]]> http://socialmediapath.com/social_media/social-media-marketing/feed/ 2 http://socialmediapath.com/social_media/social-media-business-tip-know-keyboard-shortcuts/ http://socialmediapath.com/social_media/social-media-business-tip-know-keyboard-shortcuts/#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:40:31 +0000 Jeff Marmins http://socialmediapath.com/?p=596

Something I learned about being proficient on a computer, as simple as it sounds, is not being “mouse-dependent.”

Here’s a secret (sort of). The software you use to manage social properties is your browser. Irregardless of hardware platform, social media, blogging and online research are easier and faster if you:

1. Use your keyboard in addition to your mouse
2. Know and use the right-mouse button
3. Understand and take advantage of your browser
4. Group your online activities by bookmark folder and browser window

I’ll discuss #s 2 – 4 in a future post.  Let’s make you a bit faster with keyboard shortcuts for now

Do you use your mouse for everything besides typing?  Here are some steps to being more proficient:

Print out (yes, on paper) the keyboard shortcuts for your Web browser (especially if you do social media for business).  I also recommend printing the keyboard shortcuts for your operating system.  Post them near your desk, and/or copy them onto your computer desktop.  Look them over twice a day for a month.  You’ll get faster as you memorize each keyboard shortcut. Do this for your mobile device too!

Here are some links to most of them: Note: these can be found in most browsers and operating systems by looking under the Help menu or pressing F1 on your keyboard.

Operating Systems:

Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows XP

Microsoft Windows and Explorer Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard Shortcuts for all Microsoft Products

Macintosh OS X Keyboard Shortcuts

Internet Browsers:

Mozilla Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts

Internet Explorer 8  Keyboard Shortcuts

Safari Keyboard Shortcuts

Google Chrome Keyboard Shortcuts

Opera Keyboard Shortcuts

Mobile Handheld Devices:

Apple iphone Keyboard Shortcuts

Android Keyboard Shortcuts

Blackberry Keyboard Shortcuts

Palm Pre Keyboard Shortcuts

Microsoft Windows Mobile Keyboard Shortcuts

Google Tools

Google Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts

Google Reader Keyboard Shortcuts

Thanks to Forrester Research for developing this tool to determine the mix of your perspective audience in social media. It’s based on Forrester’s Social Technographics® consumer classification model.

Social Media Path subscribes to this model as a tool for understanding your target audience.  Our business is based on building social strategy by first examining customer behavior.  The result is clear expectations and better customer relationships.

Features of this profile:

• For an explanation of these groups (Creators, Critics, etc.), see a presentation (8 slides) or read Chapter 3 of Groundswell
• Bars indicate the percentage of the selected demographic that are in each Social Technographics group.
• The white marks indicate the same percentages for the whole population of the country selected.
• The index indicates how the demographic compares to the population — a score of 100 means the demographic is the same as the population average.
• The message “No data available” appears when you request a profile for which Forrester survey samples are not large enough to provide a reliable answer. This occurs for age groups in Japan, Metro China, and South Korea. To see profiles in these countries, set the Age to “Not specified”.

Despite our company name, I’ve never been a fan of the “Social Media” idiom.  It implies that we are engaged in something new.  What has changed is the platform of delivery (now two-way and relatively constant), the rate that word-of-mouth can travel and the ways that effectiveness may or may not be able to be directly measured.

The phrase “Socialnomics” fell into the same marketing-twist-semantic-massage bucket for me.  Well, in deference to my Dublin, Ireland colleagues at Simply Zesty, I’m embracing the term.  After all, the depth of impact in how marketing, sales, service and product quality must reinvent and perform is economically revolutionary.  Simply Zesty produced this video.  It’s a hot, energetic bundle of evidence:

Seth Godin said, “The value of blogging is the meta-cognition of thinking of what you are going to say.  It’s the process.”

What a valuable minute and a half.  Watch this exceptional short video…

Not that long ago I taught a workshop on using Google tools for  Social Media Marketing.  [Igoogle and google's gadgets make for an easy sole practitioner / small business social media dashboard].  There were some questions concerning search in general, though.  What could be more important than getting to the information you need quickly and efficiently, whether social media related or not? I hope these methods of search on Google will get you to the information you need faster:

Searching for: A phrase verbatim
Type in the box: quotation marks
Results: Find only the exact phrase in the exact order as entered.  Example: “Stunt Kites”

Searching for: A specific product or topic regardless of the site
Type in the box: intitle:“Any phrase”
Results: Searches the title of a page only.  Microsoft Word intitle:templates will give you any pages that mention Microsoft Word and have the word ‘templates” in the title.

tip:Use allintitle:”any phrase” if you only want to search titles and not any other part of a page’s content.

Searching for: This but not that.  Narrowed down information by excluding terms
Type in the box: minus sign (hyphen)
Results: Macy’s -parade give’s you all the store info without any images of Bullwinkle balloons

Searching for: Documents, Presentations, Spreadsheets, PDFs
Type in the box: filetype:pdf, filetype:doc,  filetype: ppt
Results:ONLY the filetype you requested such as boilerplate Profit and loss Statement filetype:xls

Searching for: Something only on one site
Type in the box: site:
Results: food allergies site:www.webMD.com finds information only from WebMD.  You can also add a “-” like this: food allergies -site:www.webMD.com to get information from everyone else except webMD.

These are just a few examples.  You can do a lot to refine your Google search results.  You can find common special characters here and a good list of search operators like the ones above here. See also Google Search Basics and More Search help at Google.

Here’s a quick clip on how-to send an update to all or some (based on demographics) of the fans on your Facebook fan page via Facebook message.

I thought it important to re-post this entry from Seth Godin’s blog.  Seth is a favorite author of mine and a critical thinker for our time.  We’re struggling with the idea of intellectual property vs. transparency and open technology.  It’s necessary to have debate around the subject, however Seth offers some basic ideas around Trademark, Copyright and Patent law.

How to protect your ideas in the digital age

If we’re in the idea business, how to protect those ideas?

One way is to misuse trademark law. With the help of search engines, greedy lawyers who charge by the letter are busy sending claim letters to anyone who even comes close to using a word or phrase they believe their client ‘owns’. News flash: trademark law is designed to make it clear who makes a good or a service. It’s a mark we put on something we create to indicate the source of the thing, not the inventor of a word or even a symbol. They didn’t invent trademark law to prevent me from putting a picture of your cricket team’s logo on my blog. They invented it to make it clear who was selling you something (a mark for trade = trademark).

I’m now officially trademarking thank-you™. From now on, whenever you use this word, please be sure to send me a royalty check.

Another way to protect your ideas is to (mis)use copyright law. You might think that this is a federal law designed to allow you to sue people who steal your ideas. It’s not. Ideas are free. Anyone can use them. Copyright protects the expression of ideas, the particular arrangement of words or sounds or images. Bob Marley’s estate can’t sue anyone who records a reggae song… only the people who use his precise expression of words or music. Sure, get very good at expressing yourself (like Dylan or Sarah Jones) and then no one can copy your expression. But your ideas? They’re up for grabs, and its a good thing too.

The challenge for people who create content isn’t to spend all the time looking for pirates. It’s to build a platform for commerce, a way and a place to get paid for what they create. Without that, you’ve got no revenue stream and pirates are irrelevant anyway. Newspapers aren’t in trouble because people are copying the news. They’re in trouble because they forgot to build a scalable, profitable online model for commerce.

Patents are an option except they’re really expensive and do nothing but give you the right to sue. And they’re best when used to protect a particular physical manifestation of an idea. It’s a real crapshoot to spend tens of thousands of dollars to patent an idea you thought up in the shower one day.

So, how to protect your ideas in a world where ideas spread?

Don’t.

Instead, spread them. Build a reputation as someone who creates great ideas, sometimes on demand. Or as someone who can manipulate or build on your ideas better than a copycat can. Or use your ideas to earn a permission asset so you can build a relationship with people who are interested. Focus on being the best tailor with the sharpest scissors, not the litigant who sues any tailor who deigns to use a pair of scissors.