Premier Social Media

Jul 27

Desktop or Web-based Twitter Client?

Social Media Classroom, Twitter 4 Comments »

Ever since Twitter took over the 140 character world of microblogging, there have been hordes of clients and apps popping up, trying to make our tweeting experience better, richer, easier. Everything is covered, from multiple accounts, to Twitter team management and tweet analytics. But before getting into analyzing features and options in order to choose your preferred client, there is one first decision to be made: which type of application will you choose, a desktop one or its web-based version?

The main benefit of web-based clients is obvious – they are location independent. Wherever you find a computer, laptop, smart phone or notebook with an Internet connection, you can log in and start tweeting. If you’re thinking mobility and lack of restriction only, they easily win, and desktop clients can be altogether dropped. But their biggest plus is their biggest con as well.

The anytime-anywhere feature makes one want to just log in and do their tweeting from wherever. Some of the devices you might be tempted to use might steal your password and you’ll have hackers or other ill-willed people accessing your Twitter account or accounts, and make a royal mess out of them. If you’re traveling, it’s even worse! It will take a while until you realize you’re account has been compromised.

Even if the computer or device in question is not in any way dangerous, it’s easier to get a browser-based malware infection than have your installed software under attack. One cause is the lack of proper protection – most free or cheaper Antivirus applications don’t really offer extensive Internet security options.

My advice is to stick with desktop based clients if you’re not tweeting a lot and usually from the same few computers. If however you need to go for the browser client, pay extra attention to where and how you log in and do your tweeting.

Jul 19

Ten Travel Sites for Business Travelers

Today's Best 14 Comments »

Traveling on business? If you need some sites to plan your trip, gather information, make friends, the following might be just what you need. Instead of opening overly expensive travel guides, click on any of the these links, for a unique experience, that will show you new places through the eyes of real travelers, just like you and me. I’ll be going to my country (Dominican Republic) on a business trip for the first time to provide a consultancy to a group of Tech Start-Ups on the use of Social Media. You know me! in the excitement of the trip, I’ve done some research and I am happy to share the results with you.

Triporama – helps you plan group trips. If you want to organize a getaway for your team, or business partners, this is one of the best choices. You can create a group trip page, then send invitations to the people you want to participate in the discussions. This way, all the participants get to research the destinations, contribute with ideas, and get a map of the itinerary.

Real Travel – provides social hotel reviews. In addition, users can share their experiences through personalized travel blogs. Another interesting feature is the “places visited map” that allows users to pinpoint all attractions they visited and then share these with their friends and family. For business travelers, the cool part is the social hotel reviews, more real than everything featured by TripAdvisor.

Maupintour will make your business trip extraordinary. The only problem is that they don’t offer packages all over the world. But even so, less is better, and for exclusive luxury journeys you only want the best. This summer they have a sale on European tours.

whyGo Business – part of the BootsnAll Travel Network, they provide expert travel guides with tips and information for making the most of your work related trips. Advice includes topics like how to find hotels with free WiFi, how to get a business class upgrade and much more.

Home & Abroad – a trip planner. Although somehow bulky, it’s interesting because it provides tips on what to read before you go. For business travelers, the most interesting feature is Groople now operated by Short’s Travel Online, which is an exclusive travel operator for businesses.

TripIt – helps organize trip details into one master online itinerary (even if arrangements are booked at multiple travel sites) and lets you access travel plans online, share them, check-in for flights, or print an itinerary.

Stay.com – another travel planner. It lets you create customized guides according to your preferences. Free and easy to use. The advantage I see is that the guides are really compact, and look professional. You save paper, trees and the money you’d otherwise use to buy a printed guide.

Concierge – features expert travel guides to over 200 top destinations, with expert recommendations on hotels, restaurants, attractions, shopping, and nightlife. An array of travel tools, lists of the world’s best and hottest hotels, and features from Condé Nast Traveler magazine are also on site.

National Geographic Traveler – a travel magazine you should bookmark. The only site that clearly makes the distinction between tourism and travel, it championed sustainable travel before it was cool. Provides valuable information for all types of travel needs, including business.

Travel Smith – travel clothing – versatile, easy-care clothing that doesn’t require dry cleaning when you’re out in the Back of Beyond.

Are you using any of these sites? What is your experience with them? Would you like to recommend a new site? Join the conversation, the comments are open.

Tagged with: business travel • travel guides • travel sites

Jul 09

Raise Money for Your Startup through Crowdfunding Sites

Business 22 Comments »

We recently talked about crowdsourcing graphic design, and mentioned a few resources for the purpose, including 99designs, CrowdSpring and the new, social Prova.fm. Today, something more solid for business owners who need venture capital or seed investment. If you have a startup idea, but you cannot bring it to life because of lack of funds, you might want to take a look at the following resources.

Grow VC is a global crowdfunding platform for seed funding startups. Grow VC will help you find people around the world who are serious about investing. The site also offers resources that will help you learn from other business owners, learn from funders’ expertise and much more. It is a paid-membership based community. 75% of your membership fees goes into a community fund that gets invested back into promising startups members of the platform. The decision who these promising startups are is in the hands of the community. If the promising startups begin making money, the members who made a successful decision make money too.

Future of funding & the virtual Silicon Valley

View more presentations from Grow VC.

ProFounder hasn’t open its doors yet, but it is worthy of attention. Profounder has already received media coverage, and it’s main features are explained by Anthony Ha of Venture Beat as follows:

It looks like ProFounder is aimed both at entrepreneurs who are trying to raise some initial funding for a tech startup, or a more traditional small business.

From the website, we learn that ProFounder will go live in the fall. In the meanwhile, interested parties can already search ProFounder’s knowledge base articles, browse public discussions, or create a new discussions if they want at ProFounder’s support site.

Tagged with: Crowdfunding • Crowdsourcing

Jul 07

Track Your Twitter Reputation with Chatterscope

Social Media, Twitter 3 Comments »

Any online entrepreneur knows how important reputation monitoring is for business. But real-time streaming made it impossible for many companies to monitor and respond effectively to brand mentions. Small businesses hire Twitter account managers, who watch the trends, and attempt to “catch” every brand mention. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they don’t.

Now Chatterscope, a tool developed by Lewis PR, solves the brand monitoring problem on Twitter. The service not only tracks brand mentions, but it also sends alerts, analyzes positive and negative sentiment mentions, and then provides historic trend analysis of those mentions.

With Chatterscope you track brand performance over time, and you can also benchmark these trends against competitors, industry peers, organizations of a similar size, ownership status and by country. The sentiment analysis is based on Chatterscope’s own algorithms, a technology based on keyword proximity, and not on semantic analysis. Chatterscope works by searching for mentions of your Brand against our its of words which indicate Sentiment. The database is split into four broad categories – Supergood (for extremely positive sentiment), Positive, Negative and Superbad (for extremely negative sentiment).

You will notice that there are some limitations to the technology (Chatterscope can’t search for words it’s never heard before, nor understand unusual phrasing), but overall, the results are rather accurate. Note that Chatterscope is not measuring the influence of each Tweet, which will obviously vary depending on the number of followers, topic, engagement level etc.

Can you think of any other Twitter reputation monitoring tools? And what do you use to track tweets mentioning your brand?

Tagged with: brand monitoring • Chatterscope • lewis pr • reputation monitoring

Jul 01

Is Crowdsourcing a Viable Choice for Your Business?

Community, Small Business 5 Comments »

A good design is vital for online success, as important as content and context. Agency quality designs are expensive, and small businesses often prefer a DIY approach, that doesn’t always work. There are a number of resources to support such a choice, from “design your own logo” software, like the free logo maker by HP, to free banner makers and free website builders.

There are advantages and disadvantages to the above. If you only want to have fun, and your online presence is not entrepreneurial, these tools make sense. But for a business, an “out of the box” solution doesn’t stand out. As a business owner, you have to look for solutions that differentiate your brand and your overal image from your competitors. Like it or not, you have to spend a bit to make this happen. Not a fortune though, if you choose to crowdsource your design.

Wikipedia defines crowdsourcing as the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call. Basically, when you post your project, you’ll name your own price. In most cases you have to pay a listing fee. If the designs submitted are not to your liking, you don’t have to select any. Feel free to call for entries again. Obviously, there are already many online websites that offer such opportunities. Here are a few to choose from.

With CrowdSpring.com you can get all kinds of designs, from logo and stationery, to clothing and industrial design. They offer writing services as well (including brand and company names, taglines and larger content projects).

99designs.com does pretty much the same things, minus writing services. But 99designs is more popular, and the designers’ community is larger. 99designs is a Webby Award winner, which says a lot about the power of its community.

Prova.fm is a newcomer, a bit different from the above, and I think it deserves more attention. Here is why: it’s a beta site, powered by crowdsourcing and designed by Prova’s community. Basically still a work in progress. The focus is broader – here you can crowdsource everything from logos to banners, billboards, calendars, brochures, catalogs, mouse pads and other promotional articles. You can also submit calls for radio advertisements, TV commercials, website videos and other creative media.

What’s even more interesting is that the contest entries have an “i like” button that lets visitors vote for a design they like – an effective way to get free feedback from the community – sure, provided that a designer doesn’t send an army of friends to “like” his/her work, in the hope to influence your decision and win the contest. But remember that the final decision is yours and yours alone and you never have to buy what you don’t like.

All these sites are risk free. You only lose the listing fee, but considering the sizes of their designer communities, it’s almost impossible not to get what you need. Typically, logos are priced at $220 – if you pay more, you get more entries, obviously. So what do you think? Would you crowdsource your designs, DIY, or rather hire a pedigree professional?

Tagged with: Crowdsourcing

Jun 22

Community Manager Role

Social Media 24 Comments »

In the last two months, I’ve recruited 3 new Community Managers for our clients. This is just in line with my predictions for 2010 since 80% of companies will establish a social media presence this year (I just made up that number). However the ones who create a community manager position are making a statement and getting ahead of the game. It’s not too late to catch up. According to AdAge yesterday, “the hottest job in marketing might just be the community managers” and this is just starting. We’ve been placing community managers for over 3 years and currently there are 7 managers out there building the internal position for our clients.

You might be convinced already about the need of a community manager in your company/organization but!! What do you ask? What will his/her role be? Where do you place the community manager? Who can supervise such a delicate position?

The role of the community manager is really to lead the orchestra. You have the music writers, those who play the flutes, the violins, the bass, and so forth. Each instrument is unique and plays amazing music. But when it’s played in harmony together, that’s when the magic happens. So let’s take it from here:

Competency Builder: The first role of a community manager is that of a social media trainer. No longer can you afford to remain a total ignorant in the field of social media. Much less to keep the rest of your staff in the dark. A social media expert comes on board to bring everyone up to speed on this new revolution in the way the world communicates. The training is mutual since the community manager must learn a lot from management and all staff about the brand they represent.

Brand Evangelist: When we hear the word “evangelist” we take for granted that he’s gone through a serious conversion process. Don’t expect your new community manager to be your evangelist without making him/her first fall in love with your brand. The community manager is the bearer of good and bad news. The level of ownership he’ll take on that news will determined the success of his role. The ideal scenario is when the community manager comes from within. But watch it! just because the guy from accounts receivable loves using Twitter, that doesn’t make him a community manager. And much less, don’t expect him to take on the role “on the side” while still doing his old job. That’s just a guaranteed ticket to failureland.

Bearer of fruits: Often, I am asked what are the key performance indicators of the community manager? my answer 100% of the time is: Tangible Fruits! not to write x number posts per month, or to keep a twitter account or manage a community of x. It’s really to bring the twitter account to x number of followers and interactions, to lead a community to x action, to manage the sentiment towards the organization, to bring x sales, to get x leads, to generate x ideas, to manage x projects and so forth. There are tons of measuring tools to keep track of these tangible fruits. Both the community manager and the brand will have a strong interest to keep track of all results. Once you’re able to put on a plate those tangible fruits for management, then they’ll be the ones begging your to bring more, create new positions and build your social media team.

Connector: Here comes the hardest role for the community manager. Usually new community managers can be outspoken prima-donna! A good community manager will have the role of connecting your organization both internally and out with the world. Social media is mainly a communication tool that yes, can also be used to make sales, PR, marketing, client service and so forth. But if that new blog didn’t serve to enhance the internal communication and highlight the stories of the key players in your organization, you’re wasting a valuable tool. The community manager should have it as a priority to connect staff, connect customers, connect fans, connect potential clients.

What is a community if it’s not a group of people in communion, united, being one! That’s the orchestra effect. At that point, all the fruits from one individual can suddenly become the harvest of many. In summary, the community manager’s role is to allow each member to shine by playing his/her unique music without losing the sense of “being one of us” – This can only happen if the members have been properly trained, if they have been converted and if they feel connected.

Are you ready?

Tagged with: Business • community manager • Social Media

Jun 08

Attention consultants: social media is for you

Social Media, Social Media for Consultants 12 Comments »

Often professional consultants underestimate the use of social media. They see it as a waste of their billable hours and they also think that the space is already clutter with noise. If you are a consultant, I have news for you: Social media is for you. This is of course if you are willing to take the time to learn the hows of the game. Here are some initial tips:

Learning tool: you can use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or any other social media platform as a learning resource. It will give you access to peer groups and communities where sharing and discussing best practice and common issues is daily bread. On Twitter, look for the chats and parties that meet via a “#” hashtag. On LinkedIn, not only join the discussion group and become a permanent observer. You need to join the discussion and provide answers. After you’ve earned their trust, then start posting questions too. On Facebook instead, look for the right group with real active members. Ideally the fan page or group will be open to all to post and not dominated by the brand/group owner. Hey, if you can’t find it on your specific niche, congratulations! you have the great opportunity to create your own. I can assure you that many others are in your same situation and will soon join you.

Networking tool: you no longer need to wait for that annual conference or limit your reach to your local community. Social media is as global as it can get. I’ve gotten jobs in countries and states where I had no previous contact. The networking that takes place via social media is amazing. I must say that I have also found some of my best friends and clients. You can do this too.

When and where to start? No doubt that the time is now. Just jump in and you’ll learn as you walk and fall. I’m still walking and falling (for real). With regards to the where, I’m still old fashion when it comes to where. To me, the tipping point of any social media deal, networking or relationship is when the “offline” meeting/hug take place. It’s as magical as it can get. So yes, start online, look for your target audience, find those in your field and also network with other consultants in your geographic location. But then, you must make sure you set up those coffees, go to the networking events, tweetups and conferences in your area. Then you’ll be on your way to making sense of social media. Results will be evident sooner than you think.

Then come back here and share your experience!

Tagged with: consultants • Social Media • tips

Jun 04

Facebook Is the Best Market for Advertising

Google 14 Comments »

No other Internet company has been facing more critique than Facebook recently, yet somehow this is still the most visited social network in the world, in fact, according to Google, this is the most visited website in the world period.

The information is extremely valuable for advertisers, who will now know where to run their campaigns to reach an overwhelming majority of users. Google released statistic information about Facebook and other sites on May 26, 2010; in a list of the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by DoubleClick Ad Planner. Below, the top ten sites list, featuring number of unique visitors, page views and reach for each site:

Google Ads will not be shown on all these sites, but only on those that publish AdSense units (sites from the Google Content Network). However, these sites have their own advertising solutions, so the information is vital if you want to run a campaign outside Google AdWords.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be an AdWords user to benefit from DoubleClick Ad Planner’s powerful statistics. This is a service offered by Google free, and it will help:

Define audiences by demographics and interests.
Search for websites relevant to your target audience.
Access unique users, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.
Easily build media plans for yourself or your clients
Create lists of websites where you’d like to advertise.
Generate aggregated website statistics for your media plan.

Is DoubleClick Ad Planner something you would like to use? What other tools are you currently using to determine relevant markets for your advertising campaigns?

Tagged with: DoubleClick Ad Planner • Facebook • Google