Social Media Explorer

Viralheat Plants Stake As Affordable Social Media Monitoring Solution

2010-02-06T19:20:29Z

The landscape of social media monitoring solutions has always had about four tiers. There’s the mostly manual but free, the entry-level business pricing (around $100 per month), the standard (about $500 per month to start) and the expensive (“research” approaches that go into the thousands per month.) While Scout Labs made a big splash a year ago with their $99 per month price point while still offering much of the same features and functionality of the more expensive options, there has still been a gap in the market.

For the small (or frugal) business that wants less manual work but more features than Google Alerts or Social Mention but can’t afford $100 per month or more on social media monitoring, there is now a solid option. Viralheat launches a new set of features and pricing today that includes an entry price point of $10 per month, a “marketing professional” level of pricing at around $30 monthly and a premium/business price of $90 per month. While there are some features and functionality that are lacking compared to your $500 per month services like Radian6, Sysomos or Techrigy SM2 — or even Scout Labs for that matter — Viralheat has them all beat on a few bells and whistles, too.

Why Viralheat Is Worth Considering

Let’s say you’re a medium to large business. You want to search for keywords around your brand and a few key competitors, plus some industry topics. With Viralheat’s top tier plan, you can search for up to 40 topics — set up as “profiles” in their system — and gather much of the same data the higher-priced competitors offer. Even at the medium package, you get 20 profiles which is more than enough searches for most companies. Viralheat doesn’t charge you by volume, either, meaning 5 gazillion results doesn’t cost you any more.

The metrics you see in Viralheat are spot-on what many marketers and public relations pros are looking for: How many conversations, what was the sentiment and tone of them, where are they happening by platform and who are the top influencers. Viralheat breaks all that data down in a unique way, however. You can look at metrics by platform, say Twitter, and see the individual Twitter users who talk about your brand most, the ones who talk bad about it most and prioritize those lists based on reach. So if one dude is hammering you daily, but has four followers, the system lets you know he’s probably not a high priority for outreach. Today marks the launch of their Facebook integration which appears to give you all the same powerful analysis of your Facebook fan pages and public mentions of your brand there, too, which is a big plus. While others, like Sysomos, do a good job of this, Viralheat calls it out a bit better.

The sexy metric I noticed that isn’t as easy to find, though is probably available in other services, is the “Total Impact” which seems to essentially be an eyeball count. While that metric alone is flawed and not something you should focus on, the C-level folks like telling their chums over lobster bisque, “Our Tweeter presence reached 14.5 million people last month.” (Which is what Dell’s “impact” was according to the charts I saw during my demo.)

While geographic filtering is an inexact science, Viralheat also allows you to filter your data by distance from a zip code, state, province or country. This has enabled the start-up to grow internationally while under the radar in the U.S. (They launched in June of last year.) While you may not be able to narrow all of your platforms (blogs, forums, etc.) down to the city level, if you’re a law firm practicing in one state only, this is helpful.

Compete and Quantcast traffic data is available on websites that pop up in your scans with a single click, which PR folks will probably find very useful. The tool has email alerts for spikes in traffic or behavior so you don’t miss anything significant and the API offers a pretty open pipeline out of the tool. What this means is that your data is very portable and can be integrated into your own metrics analysis or reporting mechanisms. (Most of you will need your developers or IT staff to do this, but trust me, it’s a good thing.)

Another feature that jumped out as unique is your ability to make a top-layer of data public by sharing it with the Viralheat community. Their public-facing data resource, Social Trends, offers up a superficial but insightful scan of the brands being monitored by the system. If you’re big into transparency and sharing the conversations around your company with others to judge for themselves, this is allows a peek behind the curtain without showing everyone all the gory details you may not want to share.

For public relations firms or advertising agencies, the premium level of service also gets you white label privileges. You can brand your email reports/alerts and the dashboard so the service makes your clients feel like you’re on your social media A-game.

The technology is home-grown, which some people see as a negative, but co-founders Raj Kadam and Vishal Sankhla are smart dudes. Smart people trying to solve the same problem usually come up with some different angles on solutions. Their natural language processors feed a custom algorithm (which can be said of anyone who offers sentiment and tone) but their algorithm is different, which can be good. One of these days, I’m going to test 3-4 different services on the same data and see what happens. (Let’s see how quickly all the firms hide from that one. Heh.)

Finally, Viralheat is web-based and a SaaS (software as a service) approach. You can sign up and be running in five minutes.

Why Viralheat May Not Be Right For You

While the 40-profile, $90 plan allows you to search for a ton of information at a reasonable price, there’s no way to lay each profile’s data over another within the Viralheat system. You can look at your brand. You can look at your competition. But you can’t look at your brand compared to your competitors unless you export the data and play with it in your own spreadsheet.

Similarly, if you’re a metrics nut and like drilling down and manipulating the data a hundred different ways, Viralheat is limiting. Relevant posts are brought into the system and are searchable, but appear on pages as one long stream of headlines with little options of filtering and rearranging. The data is there, but the functionality of the tool is rather utilitarian.

The service does pull the content it finds into a database rather than indexing it. This can cause the performance of a tool to be laborious and clunky. But Viralheat is a cloud solution and seems to move along nicely on a strong web connection. Once you start searching for a keyword, your data backfills 30 days worth of content. While backfilling the data (allowing you to see mentions of your brand beyond 30-days past your first search) beyond that is possible, it is not currently supported by the software.

The Bottom Line

Viralheat is an awesome solution for the low-price point customer. As your business scales, you’ll probably need something more robust, but for the small business, consultant wishing to monitor the web for a handful of clients and the price-savvy brand manager who sees social media monitoring as more of a tactical tool than big-picture data resource, this is an excellent option.

As always, my view of this is just one opinion. If you’re using Viralheat, tell us what you like and dislike about it. I’ll be testing it out for a client or two in the coming weeks. If you get the same chance, please report back. The comments, as always, are yours.

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Corporate Blog Success Starts And Ends With Business Metrics

2010-02-08T13:55:05Z

The social media purists will tell you that a corporate blog serves as a community hub for your brand. They say it gives your customers a connection point to your company and engenders a sense of community. In some cases that’s true, but you’re going to see me exploring corporate blogging a lot more this year to follow up on a theory that your “community” or “audience” for your blog isn’t what you think it is. That, and the ultimate judge of a corporate blogging effort must be more closely tied to success metrics than making everyone feel good.

As you know, I’ve partnered with Compendium Blogware, Debbie Weil and Jay Baer for a research project and some other extensions of that project this year. Part of that partnership gives me access to case studies of Compendium clients in addition to the external research we’re doing. One such case study caught my attention recently.

Aprilaire’s corporate blog has seen a 1,000 percent traffic growth in the last year. Yes, that’s 1,000 PERCENT, not people. Pretty strong. (For reference, Compete.com says their corporate site in total had 50,000 unique visitors last month, so we’re not talking 4 visitors to 4,000 either.) The social media purists will probably jump on that statistic and say, “See! Building community and engaging in conversation is what social media success is all about.”

Don’t jump to conclusions there, hippie.

Aprilaire approached corporate blogging with capturing leads through search engine optimization and winning keywords as their primary goal. Using Compendium’s system, which turns a blog into a keyword and search-driven model rather than a single-author, ego platform, the company began climbing the organic search rankings. Of their 1,000 percent traffic increase, 80 percent of it came from organic search results. Mission accomplished.

What Aprilaire did is approach corporate blogging with business metrics in mind. Community and conversation are part of the effort, sure. But even if they all but don’t exist — at this writing there was but a single comment on their last 10 blog posts combined — your corporate blog can (and should) drive your business. The Aprilaire blog features good content focused on targeted keywords and drives traffic. This traffic isn’t their “community” but rather web searchers trying to find content on the keywords Aprilaire is writing about. When they arrive on a blog post, there are clear calls to action on the page and links to action items (more information requests, landing pages, etc.). The blog converts more readers into customers.

Don’t get me wrong! Engaging in conversation, building community around your brand and bringing humanity (and human-ness) back to the marketing table are all vitally important to a company’s social media success. But please know this can be done in one or many channels and others, even a corporate blog, can focus on driving business.

Go look at your blog’s traffic. How many of your visitors are finding your content for the first time (through search or referral links)? How many are your, “community?” What does this tell you about your blogging approach? The comments are yours.

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Weekly Top Posts: 2010-02-07

2010-02-07T05:00:00-00:00

Wanna Neat Job In Public Relations?

2010-02-05T17:22:22Z

Waggener Edstrom Worldwide is hiring a public relations account director in their Seattle office. They reached out to me with an offer to post an ad for it over there in the sidebar. As we’ve discussed before, I only accept advertising from companies whose product or service is relevant to many of you and I insist those advertisers provide me with some subject for editorial content to accompany the ad as well.

The requirements gave them pause since the folks helping them with the advertising offer weren’t used to this editorial-advertising hybrid, so I decided to help them a bit with the post. It’s part of trying a new model, I guess.

The job description says they are looking for a senior leader for both clients, team and the agency as a whole. It reads like a senior account position and they say relocation funds are available. It seems the position is pointed toward a client or clients in the technology industry as well. If you are a senior level public relations person, you should click the ad here and check it out. Waggener Edstrom is a well-established, reputable agency with a nice roster of clients.

My only concern about the posting is there’s no mention of social media. Either they’re folding the requirements into their talk of strategic planning and, “creative tactical ideas,” or it’s still not something a senior level account director at Waggener Edstrom has primary responsibility for.

Not that this is a reason not to seek the job. It appears to be a very nice opportunity. But, as I’ve said before, social media most appropriately fits into the purview of public relations. At a minimum, PR professionals should be charged with integrating social media tactics and strategies with traditional communications methods.

Perhaps this is a chance for the public relations folks in all of us us to review our job descriptions and see if they fit the new media world.

Is public relations responsible for social media in your organization? Are senior-level managers expected to know and participate in social media strategy and tactics or is it something left to the junior staff members?

Tell us your story. The comments are yours.

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What Every Company Should Know About Social Media Policy

2010-02-03T15:45:19Z

A social media policy is a company’s first line of defense against risk in social media marketing. Shockingly, only one in three companies has a social media policy in place. While I’m sure that the majority of marketing managers and decision-makers who read Social Media Explorer are ahead of the curve, there’s a good chance your company doesn’t have a written policy.

*UPDATE* – eMarketer published a story and research on companies without social networking policies just hours after we went live with this post. 69% of American companies do not have social networking policies for employees.

Part of the problem is that a social media policy is a misnomer. Your company should have social media policies. It’s not just making rules for who can blog and say they work for you. It’s more than just telling employees what they can and cannot do on company computers. Here’s a list of some social media policies you should consider:

Employee Code of Conduct for Online Communications
Employee Code of Conduct for Company Representation in Online Communications
Employee Blogging Disclosure Policy
Employee Facebook Usage Policy
Employee Personal Blog Policy
Employee Personal Social Network Policy
Employee Personal Twitter Policy
Employee LinkedIn Policy
Corporate Blogging Policy
Corporate Blog Use Policy
Corporate Blog Post Approval Process
Corporate Blog Commenting Policy
Corporate Facebook Brand Page Usage Policy
Corporate Facebook Public Comment/Messaging Policy
Corporate Twitter Account Policy
Corporate YouTube Policy
Corporate YouTube Public Comment Policy
Company Password Policy

While it may seem frivolous to spell out policies for every social network, that’s not quite the point. Different networks have different implications for different companies. YouTube, for instance, is a fertile ground for anonymous commentors and lets-see-if-I-can-say-the-eff-word fodder. If your company or employees have reason to be on YouTube, it might be best to have a policy to prevent any future embarrassment if they’re outed as an employee while behaving like the crowds.

By having written policies for your employees in personal and company use, your customers or audience in their behavior in interacting with your company and processes in place for handling social media content production and user-generated content handling, you mitigate risk and keep your lawyers happy. In my experience, when policies are in place, the “no”s you are used to hearing from legal and compliance suddenly become “yes”es.

While there are several excellent pieces of advice from around the web on what you should include in a policy or how to write your own (see below), I was recently asked to review a product called the Social Media Policies Toolkit offered by Toolkit Cafe. The Toolkit features templates for many of above types of policies. With them, you can either plug your company name in and go, or use as a basis for your policy creation.

Frankly, I was so impressed by the templates, I asked the Toolkit Cafe folks if I could not only recommend their product, but use it and even participate in any affiliate program they might have. You may have noticed their advertisement in my sidebar recently. I do recommend this product and will use it as a basis of policy creation for clients in the future. As always, I recommend the policies be customized and catered to each specific client’s needs, but the bases and best practices are covered with these templates. The kit is available for $149.00.

And yes, I do profit if you purchase after clicking on the ad or the links above. If you wish me to not profit from the recommendation, you can visit http://toolkitcafe.com and purchase free of the affiliation. Regardless, if you’re working on or planning to work on policies for your organization or clients, you should have this tool in your arsenal.

The Toolkit Cafe products (they also offer similar kits for Six Sigma, Budget & Finance, Telecommuting, Windows 7 and IT Governance) are geared toward Information Technology managers and directors, but are wholly useful to other disciplines.

And, as if snooping around my brain to land in this post, Seyfarth Shaw Attorneys emailed me last night to let me know of a webinar they are producing tomorrow, Feb. 4, at 1 p.m. ET, called “Untangling Web 2.0: Understanding The Implications of Social Media In The Workplace.” The webinar is free for the firm’s clients and $100 for non-clients. I plan on attending to see what Seyfarth Shaw labor and employment attorney Devjani Mishra has to say about risk and social media. The webinar is scheduled to include tips for implementing an effective social media policy, best practices for the use of social media to attract and screen job applicants and special consideration for employer-sponsored social media activity.

While I know little about Mrs. Mishra or Seyfarth Shaw and cannot endorse the information they’ll present (I’ve not seen it), the legal perspective will be good to hear. I promise to report back … likely live on Twitter.

Does your company have a written policy? Does it include all or part of the above listing? What challenges did you find writing it? If you haven’t written one yet, what specific company challenges are you concerned about. Share if you can and let’s discuss in the comments.

Social Media Policies Needn’t Be Draconian. But You Do Need One (Shel Holtz)
Businesses Need To Formalize Their Social Media Policies (ReadWriteWeb)
The Need For Corporate Social Media Policies (Sysomos Blog)
The Other Side Of Social Media Policies: Employees Rights (Mizz Information)
The Right Way For Media Companies To Create Social Media Policies (MediaShift)
3 Great Social Media Policies To Steal From (Mashable)

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What Inbound Marketing Is And Why You Should Have It

2010-02-01T01:10:32Z

I spend zero dollars marketing my business. “Marketing” in its traditional sense includes advertising, baiting media outlets with press releases and, to paraphrase David Meerman Scott, buy, beg and borrow for leads and attention. The way people find out about my business is through two primary mechanisms: Word-of-Mouth recommendations and finding me through search engine results.

Word-of-Mouth, in this instance, is inclusive of people passing recommendations online. If an account manager at a public relations firm is looking for a social media consultant and asks his or her network online for a recommendation and my name surfaces, that’s word-of-mouth. When that recommendation comes from an electronic source, we have a tendency to say it’s not word-of-mouth. Machines don’t have mouths so we can’t quite wrap our head around the inclusion.

But when we’ve spent only time and energy producing digital footprints that enable machines to make those recommendations, we’re not buying or begging for the attention. We’re simply making it easy for potential customers to find us. This is called, “inbound marketing.”

Some examples of inbound marketing:

You blog about interior design and, because you use several relevant terms to people searching for an interior decorator, begin to climb in organic search rankings. Emails or phone calls come in (inbound) from people asking if they can hire you to decorate their homes.
You find and share valuable content with people interested in stock market tips on Twitter. Some of your followers start reaching out to you asking if you can help with their investment advice.
Your thoughts about your industry become noted by your peers and you wind up ranked on a Top 10 List of blogs relevant to your field. Potential customers go searching for experts in the field and find the Top 10 List, thus finding you, and call you to inquire about your services.

Friday I took a call from a gentleman who makes speciality software for a niche industry. He has little reason to know who I am or even where to turn for social media, public relations or Internet marketing advice. He spent a couple of hours last week researching those three topics online and, “my name kept popping up.”

This is inbound marketing at its finest. I spent nothing more to acquire that customer (I haven’t yet, but for the sake of argument, let’s say I do.) than the 45 minutes or so each day I spend sharing good content on Twitter and Facebook, 3-4 hours per week I spend writing blog posts and 3-4 additional hours per month I spend writing my monthly newsletter. That equals about 20 percent of my time, which is about what many businesses spend on marketing in some manner.

I provide content that is of interest to people wanting to learn or know something about social media, public relations and Internet marketing. I share similar content from other people who do the same. And the calls, emails and other messages keep coming in.

This is your primary reason for using social media marketing. Yes, there are others. No, I don’t recommend most businesses use only social media and/or inbound marketing techniques the way I do. But if you’re looking for a way to get a leg up on the competition, there’s a pretty good chance they either aren’t using inbound marketing, or they aren’t doing it well.

The pros and cons of inbound marketing are interesting to consider as well. While you can spend significantly less money than traditional, outbound marketing, you can also spend considerably more time producing the content and other digital footprints that attract leads. Depending upon your business, you audience, your content and so on, this varies.

Perhaps the biggest pro, in my opinion, is that the leads you gain through inbound marketing are pre-qualified and are looking to buy your particular product or service. This not only enhances your chances of making a sale, but makes a world of difference on the relationship you can build with that customer. They come to you ready to spend. They want to give you their money. If you “sell” someone on your services, there’s a cautionary skepticism about spending their money with you.

When your customers choose you rather than you targeting them, you are more than a vendor.

For more about inbound marketing, you should get to know the folks at Hubspot, come to an Inbound Marketing Summit or do a search for the term and see who’s talking about it.

But inbound marketing isn’t new. People have been doing forms of it for years. Think on the process a bit and let me know how you’ve been performing inbound marketing. The comments are yours.

IMAGE: Raised hand by Charles B. Ming Onn on Shutterstock.com.

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Who Is Watching Our Waggle?

2010-01-29T01:12:53Z

Karl von Frisch spent years studying honey bees. He was fascinated with how bees found sources of pollen and communicated that back to their fellow hive mates. As he studied, he discovered the bees that actually find the pollen do not return to lead others to it. Instead, they perform intricate dances within the hive that vary depending upon a variety of factors.

When food is within a certain distance of the hive, the dance is circular. When food is farther, the dance is a sort of figure eight with what he called a “waggle” in the middle. The speed of the dance, he discovered, had to do with a more specific distance to the food source. The dance included a straight movement to indicate direction of the food as well.

As simple as it might sound, understanding bee communication is rather complex. von Frisch also discovered bees can distinguish between colors, communicate information about the odor of a given plant and more. As intricate and layered as that understanding is, it’s not nearly as complex as human communications.

To our knowledge, bees communicate the necessary messages needed to survive. We assume there’s no small talk in the bee community. We also assume they don’t have satire, variety in tone, background and environmental conditioning that alters how they perceive and react to their fellow bees. Human communication is so very complex. Understanding it is nearly impossible.

This is why technology excites me. Because much of our communication is gravitating to a digital world — a platform where little zeroes and ones makeup every output and can be measured — we have a unique opportunity to find our waggle dance. How do humans communicate information? Who are the scouts who find the information? How do they dance to illustrate the distance, direction and odor of it? How does their audience respond?

When I look at social media monitoring tools, the marketer in me has to take note of the volume, tone and categorization of online conversations. But the explorer in me wonders when one of them is going to really study communication, not just influencer metrics. Who is going to start reporting that X blogger said Y which resulted in a viral spread of Z for your brand? Then who is going to turn that into an understanding of how to replicate the bad and minimize the good?

Online tools impress me quite often. But we are 10 years removed from the dot-com bubble burst. We’ve only scratched the surface of technology that is possible. And we’ve only started to understand communications.

The best is yet to come.

Image: Honey Bees by Tischenko Irina on Shutterstock.com.

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How Well Do You Know Your Audience?

2010-01-26T02:57:14Z

I worked with a major consumer product goods company once that insisted that a particular product it offered was to be marketed to men. New to the fold and not afraid to ask the obvious question, I said, “Why not women?”

All the market research in the world told them women didn’t like their product. All my personal experience told me they never asked an important audience: women.

: Image by GlowPlug via Flickr

It’s easy to assume we know our audiences. It’s easy to take the charts and graphs the big research companies give us and say, “Okay, we know who to target. We know what they want.”

So, you think you know your audience. Did you know that if you want to market to women today you have a better chance of reaching them via television by advertising on sporting events rather than soap operas?

You have three opportunities to guide your thinking in marketing and social media and none of them alone are 100 percent effective. You can assume. You can conduct market research. You can ask.

Which one are you doing? Which ones should you be? The comments, as always, are yours.

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Why Social Media Is Critical To Modern E-Mail Marketing

2010-01-22T14:08:08Z

Once upon a time, e-mail marketing was considered intrusive, at best. Sure, there were plenty of people willing to sign up to get coupons and discounts from their favorite business, but if you were an “e-mail marketer” you were just a rung or two above a telemarketer on the scale of professions people didn’t like.

The factor that gradually changed the environment of e-mail marketing in the last 10 years is content. Companies today are focusing more on relevant content aimed at consumers who opt-in to the messaging. It’s no longer an e-mail “blast.” It’s a gift-wrapped package of goodness the receiver wanted in the first place.

You can thank the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 for a lot of that. But I think you can also thank the consumer demand that produced a shift toward a content-centric web, the immediate precursor to what we call social media. Content is king. If you deliver good stuff, people will consume it.

I’ve called myself an e-mail marketer for a mere four months now. Sure, I’ve helped clients with their e-mail efforts, too, but I started my own e-newsletter in October. Thanks to my e-mail partners at Blue Sky Factory, I’ve learned a graduate degree’s worth of information about e-mail in that short time. That, along with my previous experiences, leads me to one firm conclusion: Social media is critical to modern e-mail marketing.

It’s All About The Content

A good e-newsletter is like a series of very useful, short blog posts put together in a fashion that serves the audience good information in bite-size portions, then perhaps directs them to where they can find more. Coupons and discounts still serve a purpose, but if you spit out 300 words or so of just company news that doesn’t resonate with the subscribers, you soon won’t have many. The same content rules apply in blogs and social media outposts. The content has to be good.

Growing Your List Is Now About Sharing

You can’t just buy lists and add them to yours anymore. Legalities aside, your audience won’t appreciate the practice and you’ll be labeled a spammer. Promoting your list is a great jump-start, but the way you’ll grow qualified, interested audience members is when your current readers share your content. Whether it’s the “Forward To A Friend” button or social media sharing on sites like Twitter and Facebook, your readers will grow your list for you so long as you provide them both reason and motivation to do so.

Great content (the hub, if you will, of social media) begets great sharing (one way you build trust in social media) which grows your audience and helps you build a community (often the aspiration of social media marketing). And that community is a collection of people who voluntarily signed up to be in your tribe. They are your influencers, your fans, your ambassadors.

The area I’ve focused most of my studying upon recently is the Share With Your Network (SWYN) effect. In fact, D.J. Waldow and I have prepared a free webinar on the SWYN effect. We’ll present it as one of Blue Sky Factory’s free webinars at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT Wednesday. You can sign up to attend here. And if you’re occupied at that time, Blue Sky will have it available shortly after at their webinar archives.

As a bit of a teaser, here are some interesting items you’ll learn more about in the webinar:

Exploring Social Media (my newsletter) saw a reach increase of an astonishing 107 percent from November’s newsletter.
With good SWYN metrics, you can tell which singular subscriber spreads your message to more people, helping you identify your biggest brand influencers.
Incentivizing sharing produces real results that grow your list to people who want to be on it.

And if you think e-mail is sooooo 2006, we’ll help you understand why it’s not.

In the meantime, tell me how you use e-mail marketing, or how you would if you don’t currently. What challenges and questions do you have about e-mail marketing that either I, or your fellow readers can help with. The comments are yours.

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Weekly Top Posts: 2010-01-24

2010-01-24T05:00:00-00:00

BuzzVoice Makes Blogs Accessible, Portable

2010-01-24T01:29:29Z

I sat in the audience at SOBCon last May astonished at the presentation given by Glenda Watson Hyatt on accessibility and social media. Glenda, who has cerebral palsy — and I say “has” instead of “suffers from” because if you’ve ever met her, you know damn well she doesn’t suffer from anything — is probably the leading authority on technology and accessibility. I learned that day that for all the people Social Media Explorer serves, it doesn’t serve everyone well. Today, it takes a step closer to doing so thanks to BuzzVoice.

You’ll notice the sidebar now includes a widget, just under the search box, that says, “This Site Talks!” Hit play and you can listen to real time, text-to-voice processing of the posts here. Let it run and you can listen to post after post in reverse chronological order. While the posts as podcasts (yeah, you can even subscribe in iTunes) feature is cool, the reason I’m so excited to be a part of BuzzVoice’s Real Time Radio beta is because it gives a level of accessibility to those with visual impairments.

BuzzVoice, formerly known as PimpMyNews, has been offering their technology up for a couple of years now, but with a primary consumer focus. Their product essentially allowed you to subscribe to your favorite RSS feeds as podcasts. I use BuzzVoice’s iPhone app to listen to my top 6-8 blogs via podcast as I commute to work. While I could certainly take the SME RSS feed and reposition it as a podcast, but making all that work and look nice would probably require more brain power than I have.

Enter BuzzVoice’s new publisher focus with the real time radio widgets. The platform provides real-time audio translations (and the voices aren’t even all that awkward) of your blog to give your audience the ability to enjoy the blog on the go … or if they have visual impairments. The widget allows your blog to become a streaming radio station, of sorts. You can stream live, subscribe to the podcast version in iTunes, access it via the BuzzVoice iPhone app and even grab the widget to share on other sites.

Give it a test drive. BuzzVoice is in beta with the publisher’s platform right now and wants your feedback. Drop them in the comments below or email publishers@buzzvoice.com.

While there are just a handful of publishers who are a part of the Beta program, they go live to enable everyone to have their blog offered in real time radio format next month. To ensure your site is in the offering, email them your site’s RSS feed URL at publishers@buzzvoice.com.

And they’ve given me 10 private Beta invites to hand out. If you’re interested, drop a request in the comments below. I have to choose the 10 based on some prescribed criteria, but let me know if you’re interested and I’ll reach out if there’s an invite left.

Review: BuzzVoice Talks and Tick Talk for iPhone (macworld.com)
Blogworld Expo 2009 – Getting Buzzed by BuzzVoice (johnchow.com)
BuzzVoice reads aloud to you almost anywhere (tuaw.com)

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The Personal Power Of Social Media

2010-01-20T04:58:30Z

Monday was my birthday. I normally ignore it. After 25, there’s not much to look forward to. A few years ago, my parents would call, a few other relatives would send emails and maybe a co-worker or two would remember and wish me happy birthday. The world of social media changes all that.

From Sunday through Tuesday morning, 172 people posted public messages on my Facebook wall wishing me Happy Birthday. Another 10 or so emailed me on Facebook privately. Another 79 people Tweeted birthday wishes. Almost 20 people sent me private Twitter messages with birthday nods. Add that to the 12 emails, two text messages and one phone call from someone other than my family members and Monday was a pretty awesome experience for one of the world’s newest 37-year-olds.

: Image via Wikipedia

As you think through how you’re interacting with your customers online, don’t forget the social customer relationship management opportunity you have. If a birthday is incorporated into their social profile and they make it available to you, you can be a part of making each individual customer feel special. Sure, cluttering their lives with coupons and “Happy Birthday” promotions can turn them off, but if, mixed in that Facebook wall onslaught, I saw the community manager from a company joining in the mix, it would make me like them a little bit more.

The data is out there. As is the opportunity to make your customers feel special. You just have to harness how you’ll do it.

And if you were one of the many on Monday … thank you, ever so much, for making my day special.

What is Social CRM? An Introduction (thecustomercollective.com)
Buzzstream Improves Social CRM And Monitoring Tool For Marketers And PR Reps (techcrunch.com)
The Difference Between Personal CRM and Social CRM (frontofficebox.com)
Social CRM: Can Your Customers Find Your Brand Online? (socialmediatoday.com)
Should Social CRM be Automated? (socialmediatoday.com)

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Apparently, It Was All About The Conversation

2010-01-19T21:51:51Z

Forrester Research’s Social Technographics Ladder has been the cornerstone of many social media marketing efforts constructed in the last few years. The inactives-to-creators rating of how people use social media essentially shows that most people are either inactive or watch the social web; a few join networks; some collect content; a few (about the same number who join) play critic, commenting on other’s works; and a small number actually create content.

In their latest report, Forrrester has revised the Technographics Ladder to add another type of participant — the Conversationalist — or someone who updates their status updates and participates in quick conversations on Twitter and Facebook. This development is interesting because for years social media evangelists have been preaching that, “it’s all about the conversation.” Guess they/we were right.

The report, written by Groundswell co-author Josh Bernoff, displays a new ladder that shows increases across the board in the percentage of people participating in each rung, except of course the “inactives” which dropped from 52 percent in 2006 to just 17 percent in the last quarter of 2009. Creators jumped from 13 to 24 percent in the same time frame; critics from 19 to 37 percent; collectors from 15 to 20; and joiners from 19 to an astonishing 59 percent.

If you had any doubts that social media would last, I think you can erase them now.

The new category of “Conversationalists” encompasses 33 percent of online participants. No so coincidentally, we talked about a marketing category of “Conversationalists” in Monday’s four methods of Twitter marketing post, along with one called, “Conversational Marketers.” The fact Forrester now recognizes this segment of online users is significant. It implies smart marketers should find ways to engage those consumers. Dare I say, “to participate in the conversation?”

Does this mean you have to market on Facebook or Twitter? No. But if 33 percent of the online audience is chatting it up, why not consider it? For more information about the Conversationalists, check out the report. Bernoff blogs about it on the Groundswell blog. I’ve said before think Forrester Reports are unbelievably useful, but a tad pricey. You can purchase it for $499 on the Forrester website. They do have a satisfaction guarantee.

What do you think this new designation means for marketers? How does it change your approach, if at all? Is this just a recognition of what we all knew already or is Forrester solidifying a notion we’ll all now take to market? The comments, as always, are yours.

Forrester Research’s new Social Technographics ladder (stuartbruce.biz)

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