For those of you who may be new to Twitter and are wondering how to manage growing number of friends and followers on twitter these tools can offer a solution. If you want to follow back people who are following you or opposite – unfollow people who don’t follow you back check out these amazing tools.  Read More

If you are like me and wonder what all the fancy speak means when SEO is being explained you might find this SEO Glossary helpful.  Please understand that SEO is all about relevancy and popularity.  If you want to learn quickly where your website might need SEO help, go to http://www.websitegrader.com and type in your domain.  If are selling products online and want to see how you stack up against your competition go to http://www.spyfu.com and type in your domain and see the statistics on your competitors and how they might be beating you to the punch.  SEO Glossary

One of the most popular arguments of why NOT use social media is that it’s too hard to track and calculate ROI.  Here are 10 tools to utilize when monitoring your social media presence and ultimately verifying the success of your campaigns:

1. Google Analytics – This is a tracking service offered free by Google.  By creating a campaign in Google Analytics that allows you to track back any and all links you post to yout website, you’ll have an immediate ROI.  Google Analytics is a great tool when used correctly, so you’ll need to make sure you have someone knowledgeable on your staff to set up a campaign sucessfully.  Once the link goes active, you’ll be able to see how many people clicked through to your website and track where they went or what they purchased upon visiting.  make sure you capture any sales derived from links you’ve posted on social media sites by setting up goals within your analytics campaign.
2. Backtype – A real-time, conversational search engine that gives you an update about what people are saying about your company and products.  Compiled from Twitter, blogs and social networking article sites such as Reddit, Backtype allows you to effectively understand which bloggers will help you and your company establish a presense as an industry thought leader and could lead to an additional story about your company.
3. Twitter Search - Gives you a live feed of people discussing your company on Twitter.  Check up on trending topics involving your company to find the latest compliments, issues and opportunities.  Can’t find anyone talking about you?  Twitter’s a great place for your company to start the conversation and get noticed by potential customers.  Developing an online community of “followers” helps you have candid conversations with people who may not otherwise have any exposure to your brand.
4. Facebook Fan Pages - Facebook is used for individuals to connect, share photos, and relate to like people.  This social networking site offers many opportunities for small businesses to expand their audiences externally.  Whether your’re trying to develop new talent, increase ecommerce, or simply build brand awareness, Facebook offers measurement tools within a groups’ admin rights.  By measuring number of fans, amount of comments and shares, you can benchmark where you started and set goals for impressoins and click-throughs.  Here you can tell if what you are putting our is actually being read and from there what those fans are doing with that information.  Are they clicking back to your website? Sharing it on their own pages?  Facebook might seem like a big project, but by listening and measuring, your time spent will have a good ROI.
5. Addict-O-Matic - Similar to Backtype, Addict-O-Matic creates a custom page highlighting conversations, pictures, videos and articles mentioning your company.  If you’re looking for an all-encompassing snapshot of the buzz you’re creating online, Addict-O-Matic is the tool for you.  From a coporate perspective, Addict-O-Matic is the perfect tool for a busy CEO.  It allows you to stay on top of your online presense without signing into each individual service.
6. Website Grader - A free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website.  Website Grader scores your website based on things like website traffic, social popularity and SEO and then provides basic advice on how to improve your website from a marketing perspective.  The tool is a perfect compliment to a well-positioned social media campaign, as it helps make it easier for search engines to find and identify your corporate website.  As a CEO, utilize this tool to evaluate where your website currently stands and where it has room for improvement.
7. Compete.com - Gives you the opportunity to compare your website’s popularity and analytics to those of your competitors.  By entering your website address, as well as up to two competitors’ website addresses, you’ll be able to see a line chart highlighting the traffic to each of the websites as well as top search terms and referring sites for each company.  This is a great benchmark tool to help track success of your competition.  If your competitions’ score is higher than yours, research what they’re doing onlie and create a campaign that incorporates their successes.
8. Delicious – A social media bookmarking site that allows users to tag, save and share web pages in one place, Delicious helps you to better understand whether or not people fid the content you’re publishing interesteing and relevant.  The more people adding your website to Delicious, the more popular your website becomes and the higher it appears in search rankings.
9. Digg – Digg allows people to share contnet published anywhere on the web.  Once an article is shared, users can vote on the internet of the article and increase its popularity.  As popularity increases, your article is sorted to the top of the Digg pile, appearing for more people.  Oftentimes, you’ll find a select group of people are “digging” your content.  Follow up with these people as thay may be interested in your industry or company specificallly.
10. Social Meter - Social Meter scans major social networking websites to analyze a webpages’ popularity.  It looks at link-backs on websites such as Digg, Delicious, Google search and Technorati and tallies any results in a comprehensive bar chart.  By releasing relevant information via press releases. Twitter and blogs, you can increase your social meter score.  The higher the score, the more people are reading your content.

By: Lois Arbogast, Vistage International

If used properly LinkedIn can be a great tool for creating opportunities.  This is a great article with some pointers on what you should do.  Again, be sure not to join groups and sit on the sidelines without getting involved.  Do not spam since constantly pushing your products or services all the time without interacting with people individually could be a turn off.  Try and connect on a personal level with people and the best way to do this is customize your invitations by adding their first name and why you want them to join your network.  If you are an Open Networker and you are just looking for volume be careful about who you accept especially if you are sharing your connections.  Learn More

Scott McLeods and Karl Fisch follow up their debut “Did You Know” video with this gem that speaks to the Social Media Revolution that is taking place on the planet. What I found interesting is the statistic on Blogging. There are over 200,000,000 people posting content daily on Blogs, Twitter and approximately 34% of blogging is opinions about products and service. Never before has word of mouth had such exponential influence on consumer behavior than  Social Media. To learn more go to www.socialnomics.com

I have been following Steve Goldner on Twitter and LinkedIn and he has put together a series of videos on how to go about using Social Media which I highly recommend viewing to those who need more information on what this explosion is all about.  I think many people are still jumping in on the buzz and failing to understand that Social Media is a dialog and not a monolog.

You may want to read my post on the “The 6 Most Common Mistakes on LinkedIn” as I continue to see after monitoring many of the discussions going on within the groups I belong to that many people are still spamming and not engaging in relationships directly with people or learning how they can help them in their business.

The view the videos on how to go about using Social Media visit http://socialsteve.wordpress.com/

Featured on www.thebuzz.com

image credit: addicted eyes (modified under cc 2.0 license)

This is a well written article on www.thebuzz.com that explains how Blogging is a great way to build a well-trafficked home for yourself or your business on the web.  A Blog, which is based on Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is a great method to organically increase your rankings by aggregating keyword dense content that is indexed by the search engines each time a post is made.   Many marketing bloggers are swooning over Twitter, FriendFeed, and other instant, fast-paced social communities lately but RSS is changing the way user generated content is distributed on the world wide web.  Read More

Posted by Bertalan Meskó in Healthcare, Slideshow.
trackback – Forwarded by Dr. Dwight Tapp

A few weeks ago, I talked about return on investment (ROI) in healthcare and I mentioned the term ROC. Instead of ROI, in the world of web 2.0 we should think ROC: Return On Connections

•Positive word of mouth
•Service recovery
•Message Influence
•Brand Monitoring
•Instant Feedback

Here is a new slideshow that focuses on this topic and provide us with many insightful pieces of advice:

This is a very well done slide show created by Marta Kagan of PRWeb. There have been so many view points expressed about Social Media and it tends to get confusing depending upon who you listen to but this presentation captures them all and is well worth viewing.

Recently posted on Wired…. Need an e-mail list of customers or readers and want to know more about each ? such as their full name, friends, gender, age, interests, location, job and education level?

Facebook has just the free feature you’re looking for, thanks to its recent privacy changes.

The hack, first publicized by blogger Max Klein, repurposes a Facebook feature that lets people find their friends on Facebook by scanning through e-mail addresses in their contact list.

But as Klein points out, a marketer could take a list of 1,000 e-mail addresses, either legally or illegally collected and upload those through a dummy account which then lets the user see all the profiles created using those addresses.  Given Facebook’s ubiquity and most people’s reliance on a single e-mail address, the harvest could be quite rich.

Using a simple scraping tool, a marketer could then turn a list of e-mail addresses into a rich, full-fledged set of marketing profiles, with names, pictures, ages, locations, interests, photos, wall posts, affiliations and names of your friends, depending on how users have their profiles set.

Run a few algorithms on that data and you can start to make inferences about race, income, sexual orientation and interests.

While that information isn’t available for all users, Facebook changed its privacy settings in early December so that certain information can’t be made private, including one’s name, current city, profile picture, gender, networks and friend list (the latter can be somewhat hidden from public view).

Anyone with your e-mail address can harvest that information, the company admits.

That’s unacceptable, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Kevin Bankston, who says that’s not the Facebook people signed up for.

“Just because Facebook users want to share personal info with their friends does not mean they want to share it with any nefarious parties on the internet,” Bankston said, “but that is exactly what Facebook is forcing its users to do.”

With the new privacy settings, users can shut off being found by their name by changing who can find them on Facebook or by web searches.  But even if you restrict as much as you can, if an outsider knows your e-mail address, they can find the rest of your profile information that Facebook now designates as public, namely your name, profile picture (if you’ve uploaded one), current city (if you’ve filled one out), networks (if you’ve joined any) and pages you are a fan of, according to Facebook.

“If someone knows your e-mail address, they can find you even if you’ve restricted search privacy,” Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes told Wired.com.

That’s very valuable information to marketers, who can use it to evaluate their product, understand their user base better, create targeted marketing materials or sell the information to others.

But Facebook says it works to catch rogue marketers and sets a limit on the number of e-mail addresses that can be run through its system, according to Noyes.

“We’ve developed several systems to detect and block malicious use of the Friend Finder,” Noyes said. “For example, we don’t allow users to upload contact lists past a certain size. We also block users who upload contacts at an anomalous rate.

Still, the onus is on users to make a decision about their information, according to the company.

“However, we encourage people with concerns to configure their privacy settings appropriately,” Noyes said.

Users should know that the information exposed in this little hack is not unlike that which is turned over to third-party applications whenever you or one of your friends installs an application, including such things as quizzes to decide what kind of pet you are.

It’s not clear if any marketers are using this loophole, but it would be very difficult to know

Facebook is pushing its users to share information in an attempt to keep Twitter from eclipsing the site as the center of the net’s online conversations. The site hopes getting users to publish more publicly will make it the place people turn when they need to find recommendations, a function currently dominated (with great profit) by Google.

But privacy activists say Facebook has broken the contract with its users. Some groups have filed a formal complaint with the FTC, saying the recent changes are illegal.

Augmenting marketing data to learn even more about customers isn’t new, and has been offered by companies such as Choicepoint for years. Rapleaf offers a strikingly similar service to the demonstrated hack for companies willing to pay money.