SXSW09: The Future Of Social Networks
View more OpenOffice presentations from Charlene Li.
Need to Organize Your Tweeps?
June 9, 2009 By
How many followers do you have on Twitter now? How many are you following? Do you know who you are following or who is following you? What causes some of your followers to stop following you? Josh Catone writes today in “10 Twitter Tools to Organize Your Tweeps” in Mashable that if you are like many of us, “You’ve followed so many people, it’s hard to keep up, and it’s probably time to do a little housekeeping.”
photo credit: Nils Geylen
Here are Josh’s “10 Twitter Tools” to check out:
1. Twitter Grader – Using a detailed 5 piece algorithm, Twitter Grader assigns every users you run through its system a grade from 1-100. Using this tool you can investigate how engaged the people you’re following are and that can help you decide if you want to keep following them.
2. Twinfluence – Twinfluence is a scientific approach to measuring the influence of Twitter users. It’s another set of metrics you can use to help you figure out who you want to follow.
3. Tweetcloud – One of the most important factors when deciding whether you want to follow a Twitter user is what sort of content they tweet about. If someone tweets mostly about topics you don’t care about, they might not be the best person for you to follow. Tweetcloud creates a tag cloud of a person’s tweets to give you a bird’s eye view of the type of things they tweet about.
4. Twitter Karma – Twitter Karma is a great app that lets you sort through all of your follows and see who’s not following you in return, who you have a mutual follow/follow-back relationship with, and who is following you that you’re not following back.
5. Friend or Follow – Friend or Follow does essentially the same thing as Twitter Karma, helping you figure out who your friends, follows, and fans are on Twitter. The difference is in the presentation, and it might be a little easier to use for those with a large number of follows or followers.
6. Qwitter – Once you’ve done your initial cleaning, Qwitter is a nice app that will update you via email whenever someone stops following you. It will even let you know what you tweeted that caused them to stop following you, which could be useful (if you lose five followers every time you tweet about your cat, for example, that might be a hint to stop talking so much about your cat if you want to retain followers).
7. Nest.Unclutterer – Nest.Unclutterer will automatically block Twitter users who are following more than a certain number of people or who have been inactive for a certain number of days. You can specify those thresholds and white list certain tweeps so that they are exempt from the cleaning. Nest.Unclutterer is actually less about who you’re following, and more about making sure people following you are actually friends you want to be associated with.
8. Twitoria – Twitoria scans through your Twitter account and finds anyone who has been inactive for the past week, two weeks, month, two months, six months, or year.
9. TweetSum – TweetSum digests all your new followers, rates them using what they call the DBI (”Douche Bag Index”), a number that supposedly weeds out Twitter users likely to be annoying, and then lets you easily follow them back or categorize them as tweeps you don’t want to follow. You can see a list of recent tweets for each new follower as well, which is helpful.
10. Tweepler – Tweepler is a new follower management application that lets you make quick, one click decisions about whether to follow people back or drop them into an ignore pile (out of sight, out of mind). In addition to being able to view recent tweets, Tweepler gives helpful stats about new followers, such as average tweets per day.
What are you using to organize your tweeps?
Is your Brand Boring?
May 14, 2009 By
According to Josh Bernoff, senior analyst with Forrester and co-author of Groundswell (my favorite book to date on social media), there are two kinds of brands in the world–brands that people like to talk about and brands that people don’t like to talk about.
In his recent post “Social Strategy for Exciting (and Boring) Brands”, Bernoff writes, “Brands that people don’t like to talk about – I’ll call them “boring” brands – are everywhere. If, like most marketers, you market a boring brand, then you’re really earning your living as a marketer. That’s because you are trying to get people interested in something they don’t really care about.”
Bernoff is right–it can be difficult to get people or rather potential customers interested in a brand that is viewed as boring.
In his post, Bernoff writes:
The boring brands have different problem, but social applications can help them, too. The key with boring brands is to get people talking about their problems, since they won’t talk about your brand. In advertising, you can force messages on people watching other things. In a social context, this fails miserably.
Applications that talk about customers problems create “borrowed relevance,” since you generate talk they care about, then make yourself a part of it. And in perhaps the most dramatic example, Procter & Gamble knew girls wouldn’t talk about tampons, but would talk about music, cliques, and school, so it created beinggirl.com as a vehicle to deliver (very quietly) the occasional feminine care products message.
The key –whether using social media or traditional public relations and marketing– is to focus on talking about your customers problems and how you are helping to solve them. The key to success if you have a boring brand is not the product or service you are selling but how you are changing lives or companies through your product. But, this is a bitter pill for many companies to swallow. Many of the boring brands have fallen in love with their products and don’t want to accept that they are not the story. The engaged, happy customer is the story.
At the end of his post, Bernoff writes:
If your brand is talkable, your social efforts will surface the brand enthusiasts who have the most influence. If it’s boring, your social applications will help you find your rare but valuable brand enthusiasts, or even generate a few. Pay attention to these people. Because as advertising clutter rises and word of mouth becomes more important, they’re about to become some of your most important corporate assets.
How are you driving interest in your brand?
Questions Brands Should Be Asking About Twitter
May 13, 2009 By
I had other plans for my blog today but on my way to writing I stopped by Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang and read his blog “7 Questions Some Brands are Asking about Twitter.” This is an excellent blog for any company contemplating their Twitter strategy to read.
Below are the questions that Owyang wrote that a handful of others brands are starting to ask:
- Should we create multiple accounts for different divisions? How should we name them? How should the content be different?
- Is it ok to just tweet out news on our main corporate account? Or should we be conversational?
- How do we get our corporate reps (sales, product teams) to use this tool, and be conversational?
- Should we follow folks? If so, what’s the protocol? Should we only follow folks that follow us? We don’t want to appear like ‘big brother’
- What are the tools to use to manage multiple authors/tweeters?
- How can we find other examples of B2B twitter examples?
- How should we brand our Twitter backgrounds images?
Based on my experience with clients, Brands should also consider asking:
- Whose voice should we be using? CEO, Marketing? Should we identify who is posting?
- How do we jump into conversations? And should we?
- How much time should we be spending on Twitter?
- What image for our Brand should we be using? Should it be a photo of the author or company or brand logo?
- What’s the proper balance on our Brand’s tweets? Should it all be self promotion or should we be informational?
- What is our purpose?
Any questions I missed?
Pharma and Social Media; Can They Coexist
May 8, 2009 By
For nearly five years (2003-2008) I was the Public Relations counsel for a provider of predictive analytics and reporting software solutions that counted many of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies as its customers. My client’s software enabled life science and pharmaceutical researchers and analysts in drug discovery, development and clinical trials to more efficiently and accurately mine their data and utilize predictive analytics for their analysis. The work these researchers and analysts are doing is exciting and newsworthy.
However, there were many obstacles we ran into in getting the news out about the progress and innovation these researchers were achieving. The biggest hurdle was not with the individual researchers and analysts, but instead with the pharmaceutical companies’ corporate public relations and legal departments. So this week I was intrigued to see on Twitter that the April issue of Pharma Marketing News was “all about pharma & social media.”
photo credit: Sebastian Bergmann
John Mack sets the stage for the issue by writing in the article “Social Media Opportunity or Nightmare” :
“Michelangelo’s nightmarish painting Last Judgement includes the image of a poor soul being dragged down to Hell by the devil’s agents. That image often comes to mind when I hear proponents of social media trying to persuade pharma marketers to just “dip their toe” in the social media waters. The other image I see is a shark lurking just below the water’s surface!”
Mack went on to argue:
“Many pharma marketers within drug companies and within agencies that work for drug companies are trying to move the needle forward to develop guidelines that the industry can follow. So far, however, they have left patients, physicians and other stakeholders out of the discussion. They have forgotten that patient empowerment built the very social networks that they wish to engage in. Personally, I believe pharmaceutical companies need to become truly patient-centric companies BEFORE they can even consider engaging in social media.”
Mack’s article reminded me of Jeremy Owyang’s blog “Troubled, Some Pharmaceuticals Turn a Blind Eye to the Blogosphere” from June 14, 2008 . In Owyang’s blog he reports:
“While this may not hold true for every pharmaceutical company, I recently met one who had banned it’s employees from monitoring blogs, social media and the online conversation.
[Why did this pharma company ban their employees to monitor blogs? If a patient complained about a treatment or medicine having ill-effects, then the pharma would would be liable to take action]. Responding to every customer can be very, very costly, considering how many people may be talking about medicines, often anonymously in online forums.”
It’s exciting to see that the pharmaceutical industry is now realizing it needs to be discussing and establishing guidelines for social media. Will pharma and social media be able to coexist? What do you think?
PR 101: Articles Win Over Ads to Get Consumers to Act Study Says
April 24, 2009 By
What is the best way to get consumers to visit your website and follow your brand? The answer–not advertising but public relations efforts resulting in articles mentioning your brand.
eMarketing reports this week in “Brand Mentions Preferred Over Ads” that according to ARAnet, based on polling by Opinion Research Corporation:
Compared with banner ads, pop-up ads, e-mail offers and sponsored links, articles that include brand information were most likely to lead US Internet users to read-and act. When it comes to getting someone to read or take action after viewing content, it turns out PR related functions – namely, placing your client in a story – are more effective than online advertising tactics.
photo credit: christopher.woo
The eMarketing article quotes ARAnet president Scott Severson:
“A key finding for marketers is that younger audiences respond to information that reaches them in the form of articles. More than two-thirds of the respondents between 18 and 34 said they conduct Internet searches for products or services they read about in online articles either very frequently or somewhat frequently.”
How about you? Do you react to company pitches more often through advertising or by articles?
The Social Reef from Jeremiah Owyang
April 23, 2009 By
Social Reef: An Industry Perspective
View more presentations from jeremiah_owyang.