Social Media

What is social media?

Social Media includes web-based and mobile technologies used to tum communication into interactive dialogue.  Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as:

“A group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated user content.”

Social Media is media for social interaction as a super-set beyond social communication.  Enabled by ubiquitously accessible and scalable communication techniques, social media has substantially changed the way organizations, communities, and individuals communicate.

Classifications of Social Media

Social Media technologies take on many different forms including magazines, Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating, and social bookmarking.  By applying a set of theories in the field of media research (social presence, media richness) and social processes (self-presentation, self-disclosure) Kaplan and Haenlein created a classification scheme for different social media types in their Business Horizons articlepublished in 2010.  According to Kaplan and Haenlein there are six different types of social media: collaborative projects (Wikipedia), blogs and microblogs (Twitter, pownce, plurk, adocu, twitxr, tweetpeek), content communities (YouTube, slideshare, flickr, feedback, crowdstorm, lastfm), social networking sites (Facebook, myspace, bebo, orkut, hi5, LinkedIn, ning, twitter, jaiku, plazes, skype, phorum, google talk),virtual game worlds (World of Worldcraft), and virtual social worlds (Barbie girls, club penguin, stardoll, gaio, harbo, Second Life).  Other applications inclue social games (SGN, 3 rings, kongregate, doof, café.com, pogo.com), Livecats (Y! live, livecastr, kyte, qik, blogtv), and Lifestream (socialzr, profilactic, lifestream, freindfeed, socailthing).

Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP.  Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms.

The honeycomb framework defines how social media services focus on some or all of seven functional building blocks (identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, and groups).  These building blocks help understand the engagement needs of the social media audience.  For instance, LinkedIn users care mostly about identity, reputation and relationships, whereas YouTube’s primary building blocks are sharing, conversations, groups and reputation.  Many companies build their own social containers that attempt to link the seven functional building blocks around their brands.  These are private communities that engage people around a narrower theme, as in around a particular brand, vocation or hobby, than social media containers such as Facebook or Google+.

Social Media has always been about telling a story to connect with people.  People interact and engage with something that entertains and touches their emotions.  The real way to build a social network should not be by connecting with as many people as possible, but by sharing content and providing information in a variety of creative ways.  Check out this great article that teaches us the ethical way to build a social network.  Here’s a good intro for all you social media newbies out there to check out too.

Social media is not just for twenty-something’s; it is part of everyone’s daily life. In 2004, it was just for college kids. In 2008, the age of the average user jumped to 33. In 2010, it was up ever further to age 38.

The Social Media ROI Cycle

Stage 1: Launch

Focus on launching the Big 4: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  The approach should be executional and focus on short-term.  Your objective should be to create a Social Media presence.  Results are negligible.

Stage 2: Management

Roughly 60% of a company’s efforts are focused on the Big 4.  About 10% of the focus is on creative (content creation) and offer development, 20% on tracking quantitative metrics such as traffic, inbound links, Facebook likes, and about 10% on qualitative metrics such as brand sentiment, survey results and customer polls.  The approach should be tactical and focus on mid-term.  The objective is customer engagement and the results should be to increase traffic.  Engage prospects and customers in some way that gets them to connect with the brand.  For example, buying something, but it can also mean downloading a white paper, Liking a Facebook page, responding to a survey or any other tangible evidence that they’re connecting with your brand.

Stage 3: Optimization

About 25% of the focus is on the Big 4 and about 30% is evenly split among creative and offer development, quantitative metrics and qualitative metrics.  About 25% of the focus is on improving conversion and optimization of campaigns.  Improving conversion and optimization means tracking inbound leads and traffic across social media platforms using Atlas and Dart tracking and watching those leads turn into customers, either on e-commerce landing pages or through B2B lead generation programs.  It also means testing your way into success such as simple as testing two different landing pages.  You could also try multivariate testing that tests more than one component of your website at a time.  The final 20% of a company’s efforts include measuring the success of your campaign on an ROI basis.  This process involves understanding your Customer Lifetime Value (the total revenue the average customer generates for your business during the lifetime of their engagement with  you), then using your CLV to compare it to the results generated by your social media campaign.  Check out Jamie Turner of BKV Digital’s slideshare page and book “How to Make Money with Social Media.”

Story of Facebook

In the fall of 2003, Harvard seniors Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra were on the lookout for a web developer who could bring to life an idea the three say Divya first had in 2002: a social network for Harvard students and alumni. The site was to be called HarvardConnections.com.  The three had been paying Victor Gao, another Harvard student, to do coding for the site, but at the beginning of the fall term Victor begged off the project. Victor suggested his own replacement: Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard sophomore from Dobbs Ferry, New York.  Facemash had already made Mark a bit of a celebrity on campus, for two reasons.  The first is that Mark got in trouble for creating it.  The way the site worked was that it pulled photos of Harvard students off of Harvard’s Web sites. It rearranged these photos so that when people visited Facemash.com they would see pictures of two Harvard students and be asked to vote on which was more attractive. The site also maintained a list of Harvard students, ranked by attractiveness.  After law suits and new partners, Zuckerberg would change the original name from thefacebook to Facebook and change the way we communicate forever.

Facebook is the mainstream social media with over 900 million in personal and business networking tools becoming somewhat of a monopoly in social media.  The history of Facebook is known well.  With the production of the Social Network movie and college students study time being dwindled by procrastinating on Facebook, Facebook is the number one visited website in the world right now.  Yet, how businesses use it is still a relatively new strategy.  Questions of security settings are also constantly being changed by Facebook.  Business objectives for Facebook include optimizing a fan page, finding target markets to engage with, engagement strategies, and groups.

II.  Facebook Page

• Wall Posts: Facebook users can post content to a brand’s fan page.  They can say good things, complain, or talk about a recent experience they have,  post photos straight, and other user-generated content about your brand.
• Comments: Comments are an opportunity to react to a wall post.  Both you and your fans can comment.  They are mini conversations spurred from original post.
• Likes:  The classic thumbs up!  If someone “Likes” a wall post, this means they like the content of that post.  This can also be translated to mean “I agree.”
• Recommendations: Install the Recommendations plugin, which will display personalized recommendations from other Facebook Users.
• News Feed: a feed of what Facebook calculates is the most relevant and important items occurring in your network.  Your goal should be both to react to important items in your business’ News Feed and get your wall posts featured in others’ News Feeds.
• Events & Groups: Used for posting discussions and creating real life events.
• Facebook Timeline: The user is now at the center of the Web experience withFacebook Timeline.  Links are supplanted by likes. The Open Graph also uses Facebook Places as an important location based marketing service.  Partnerships with Bing gave the Open Graph greater influence in search results.

III.  Likes

The Facebook like gives content greater exposure on Facebook and across the open graph.  In addition to creating news feed items and showing connected friends, likes also allows third-party publishers to send future updates to those who have liked their content.  This gives content gives users the opportunity to increase engagement levels, targeted referrals and recurring traffic.  Likes post to a user’s news feed that they “like” specific content along with a link back to the content.   It also allows sites to push updates to users who have “liked” their content.  Likes and recommend actions are the same.

The value of likes is gaining momentum on traditional link-back algorithms as a search ranking currency.  The like button will be able to improve the connected experience offered to consumers and sites will gain trusted referrals as a result.  Facebook users who utilize the like button visit 5.3x more Web urls to engage with content and on average have 2.4x more Friends.  Providing the like button on a website gives content creators access to more socially engaged consumers and their networks.  There are multiple variations and style options for the like button: standard (with and without faces), button count and box count.  Recent reports have shown that sites which use the standard like button with the “show faces” option enabled experience 2-3 times higher click-through rates than buttons without faces enabled.

IV.  Company Pages

You can “like” various companies and their products through Facebook to get updates about the organization on your main wall feed.  You can see their upcoming events or post on their walls to further interact. Businesses pages provide information on hours, address, photos and more.  Facebook marketing is a crucial way to build a fan base and spread word about your business.  Companies can get people to like a fan page by:

• Putting fan page on postcards for direct mailing
• Have it on everyone’s e-mail signature
• Facebook Badge
• Install a Facebook “Like Box” on Your Site
• Incentive:  access content such as an exclusive video, exclusive article, etc.
• Promote your Facebook page using newspapers, media buys, radio, and TV.
• Announce your fan page to your subscribers or customers in a newsletter
• Comment on Industry related Blog Posts and provide Facebook Page link
• Have Sales team ask clients become fans
• Run a fans only contest
• Advertise our Facebook page on a forum or another website
• Do a fan of the month promotion

VI.  Engagement Tactics

Facebook has never officially divulged exactly how to gain greater reach — though it did release an ad product, Reach Generator — there are several tactics known to work.  EdgeRank is the algorithm used by Facebook to determine the most screen-worthy content.  Three factors, multiplied together, determine your content’s value: affinity, weight and time.  The affinity score is based on how often a fan has engaged with your brand content in the past, including page visits.  Weight, or popularity, is determined by the type and quantity of engagement your post receives (e.g. Likes, comments).  Lastly, time and the decay of your post matters; as your content ages and engagement wanes, it becomes less relevant and therefore less likely to appear in a user’s news feed.  Expand your content’s reach by:

• Know your audience:  As you create a new post, you can select it to make that particular post visible to people in certain countries, or with certain language settings.  EdgeRank Checker, a site that helps brands better understand EdgeRank, suggests that brands should evaluate their fans’ historical consumption patterns.  Dive into Facebook Insights as much as possible to understand whether your fans are consuming content at work, on a mobile device or only responding to video.
• Practice brevity and have a call-to-action: Brief, easily digestible posts make it easier for users to consume and interact.  Keep an eye out for relevant current events and don’t forget to post about holidays if they’re consistent with your brand voice and be clear and blatantly tell your fans to “like,” comment or share your post.   Posts with 80 characters or less garnered 27% more engagement than posts that were more than 80 characters.
• Content is king:  quality content is the most important factor to expand Facebook reach.  Photos are the most engaging form of content that brands can post.  Eye-catching and easy-to-consume photos are also weighed more heavily by Facebook when determining EdgeRank.  Employing the words “where,” “when,” “would” and “should” increases engagement.  Have a good variety of content with the right mix of polls, questions, photos and video will keep people engaged and excited about your brand.  Posts that include “would” consistently yield the greatest interaction because they allow fans to agree through a simple “like” rather than writing a comment.   The bottom line is that Facebook wants people consuming content, so its algorithm rewards the brands that create the coolest content.
• Timing is everything: Daily Facebook engagement has three peaks: early morning (7 a.m. EST), after work (5 p.m. EST) and late at night (11 p.m. EST).  Thursday and Friday have 18% more engagement than other days of the week, suggesting that Facebook is a procrastination tool when people are itching to get out of the office.  Healthcare and beauty brands see the most engagement on Thursday.  Sunday is king for sports brands and teams on Facebook, so increase your volume on these days as well.
• Ask for engagement: Use call-to-action verbs such as Like, Take, Submit, Watch, Post, Check, Comment, Click, Shop, Visit, Become a Fan, Tell us, See, Share, Order, and Take Our Quiz.
• Get Creative: Use Gamification of posts: If your city could be any district, it would be ____.   Creatively say thank you to your fans who “liked” a recent post or brand page with a tune that name-checked every single one of them.

VII.  APPS

There exist many apps in Facebook that easily connect with the user’s account.  You can use these apps as actions or verbs for sharing your content.

VIII.  Contests

Contests asking for submissions or votes via comments, “liking” or other Facebook UI functions are prohibited.  You as a brand are responsible for the lawful operation of that promotion, including official rules, terms and eligibility requirements.  Contests or giveaways must be administered within Apps on Facebook.com — on a Canvas Page or a Page App.  Your Page must acknowledge that the promotion is not sponsored, endorsed, administered by or associated with Facebook.  You cannot notify contest winners through Facebook (wall post, message, chat, etc.).  There are several third-party providers that give brand page Facebook guidelines for promotions legally, and most have free trials. A few prominent ones are Wildfire, Offerpop, and Buddy Media.

IX.  Advertising

Facebook Ads allow you to specifically target  your fans’ friends and leverage their relationships.  Facebook Ads are not just a way to reach your fans’ friends, but also your competitor’s fans, and your own fans.  If it’s not clear and obvious who and what the ad is promoting, then consumers will be less likely to recall the ad and the brand.  It’s also important to have some sort of reward or “payoff,” as ads with a reward tends to be more influential over purchasing decisions.  Also, try to have the creative in the ad have one focal point.  Dig into Facebook Insights and turn the most engaging content into a social ad. Your content and ads are one and the same.  Different ads include:

• Premium on Facebook
• Reach Generator
• Logged Out ads
• Sponsored Stories

X. Facebook Marketing Tools and Measurement

A. Facebook Insights

See how many people are participating, liking stories or leaving comments.  It was originally focused on providing metrics for the planning of Facebook Ad campaigns by Page owners, but it has been steadily increasing its scope to include feedback to Open Graph partners.  In addition to activity and demographics on Page usage, it can now provide feedback regarding social plugins such as Likes and Comments.  Sites can track their Like activity and can determine which components are most productive.  Sites using the comment plugin can also see impressions, number of comments and the number of times that the comments were seen and clicked on Facebook.  Facebook Insights provides administrators with the “Friends of Fans” metric, telling admins just how many people they can potentially reach organically.  Friends of fans are extremely important — they are more likely to visit a brand’s Facebook Page or website, purchase a brand’s products and become fans themselves.  Organically, these Facebook fans can easily be reached through the Facebook Ticker, which tracks all user activity.  Keep your fans interacting with your brand, and their friends will see all “liking” activity, comments and posts in the top right of their news feed.

B. Klout Score

• Mentions: Mention of your name in a post indicates engagement with you directly.
• Likes: The simplest action that shows engagement with the content you create.
• Comments: As reactions to content you share, comments also reflect direct engagement by your network.
• Subscribers: Subscriber count is a more persistent measure of influence that grows over time.
• Wall Posts: Posts to your wall indicate both influence and engagement.
• Friends: Friend count measures the reach of your network but is less important than how your network engages with your content

Story of Twitter

One day in February 2006, Glass, Dorsey, and a German contract developer Florian Weber presented Jack’s idea to the rest of the company.  It was a system where you could send a text to one number and it would be broadcasted out to all of your friends-Twitter.  By March of 2006, Odeo had a working Twitter prototype.  In July, TechCrunch covered Twitter for the first time.  That same summer, Odeo employees obsessed with Twitter were racking up monthly SMS bills totaling hundreds of dollars.  The company agreed to pay those bills for the employees.  In August, a small earthquake shook San Francisco and word quickly spread through Twitter – an early ‘ah-ha!’ moment for users and company-watchers alike.  By that fall, Twitter had thousands of users.

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post updates 140 characters long.  Twitter is

“A real-time information network that connects users to the latest stories, ideas, opinions, and news.” 

The service can be accessed through a variety of methods, including Twitter’s website; text messaging; instant messaging; and third-party desktop, mobile, and web applications. Twitter is currently available in over 30 languages.

II.  Twitter Statistics

• Twitter has 500 million users.
• 27%, of Twitter’s user base is active — in other words, only around 170 million people, and possibly less, at the moment.
• The Netherlands has the highest proportion of active users, at 33%, with Japan following closely behind at 30%.
• Top countries include Japan, Netherlands, Spain, U.S., Indonesia, Venezuela, Canada, U.K., Mexico, Colombia, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, Argentina, France, South Korea, Chile, Germany, Philippines, and India.
• Collectively, twitter users are mostly mobile clients (including iPad software): they represent about 61% of all tweets, with Twitter’s own mobile apps and mobile web presence accounting for 74% of that.
•  75 percent of its activity occurs outside Twitter.com via third-party desktop and mobile client

Twitter Basics:

• Who to Follow: Create a professional account and follow companies, individual hiring managers, or other users that can give you solid leads on job openings or other career tips.  While certain companies may tweet job leads, others might use this as a tool to promote their business, inform customers of sales and specials, or simply for leisure use.  Follow all customers or people that might be most receptive to your brand.  Visit wefollow.com or http://www.twellow.com to identify users grouped by industry.
• #Hashtags: It’s called a hashtag because the ‘#’ is sometimes called a ‘hash,’ and using hashtags is a way for you to insert searchable tags and keywords into your tweets.  People use the hashtag symbol # before a relevant keyword or phrase (no spaces) in their Tweet to categorize those Tweets and help them show more easily in Twitter Search.  Clicking on a hashtagged word in any message shows you all other Tweets marked with that keyword.  Hashtags can occur anywhere in the Tweet – at the beginning, middle, or end.  Hashtagged words that become very popular are often Trending Topics.  If you ever encounter a hashtag that you’ve never seen before, use TagDef to look it up.  Hashtags are most effective when used in the middle of the sentence to differentiate color in the sentence and draw a readers eye’s to click on the hashtagged word.
• Lists: A list is a curated group of Twitter users.  You can create a list or subscribe to lists created by others.  Viewing a list’s timeline will show you a stream of Tweets from only the users on that list.
• Questions: Relevant questions about your company:  Respond to questions or points persons to useful information.  Relevant questions about your industry: Develop credibility by answering questions for a product or service they may need.
• Tweets: They use the platform to connect with consumers in meaningful ways, offering everything from special discounts and exclusive content to new product information.  Tweets include requests for support, complaints and feedback, praise (say thank you, retweet it and save it to your favorites), and competitor mentions (monitor for information and data).   Twitter offers targeted tweets to send tailored tweets to specific audience subsets and enables brands to reach specific audiences on Twitter without first sending a Tweet to all followers.

“By targeting users who are most relevant to tweeted content, based on their device of choice, we are able to focus on those who are most likely to respond and react. In addition, Twitter’s commitment to distribute our tweets to a pool of ‘similar users,’ expands our tweet range to a relevant and engaged audience outside of our follower base.” 

Advertising:

Go to the tweet box in ads.twitter.com.  As with all Promoted Tweets, advertisers only pay when users engage with it, and Tweets that generate the most engagement are likely to appear more often.  Best time to tweet is Monday-Thursday 1-3 pm.  Time is on your side!  You can also advertise on business.twitter.com.

Why a twitter follower is more important than an email address:

• Sheer number of people to spread message to all friends instead of one-to-one communication
• Increased number of brand impressions
• Ability to tweet more times
• Tweeting to brand vs. mentioning brand (handle, brand name)

Klout Score for Twitter:

• Retweets: Retweets increase your influence by exposing your content to extended follower networks.
• Mentions: People seeking your attention by mentioning you are a strong signal of influence. We also take into account the differences in types of mentions, including “via” and “cc”.
• List Memberships: Being included on lists curated by other users demonstrates your areas of influence.
• Followers: Follower count is one factor in your Score, but we heavily favor engagement over size of audience.
• Replies: Replies show that you are consistently engaging your network with quality content.

What is Instagram?

A photo sharing application that lets users take photos, apply filters to their images, and share the photos instantly on the Instagram network and other social networks like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Foursquare.  The app is targeted toward mobile social sharing, and in just over one year, it has gained 15 million users.  There are over 15 million users, growing at a rate of 2 million users per month with users uploading 400 million photos in less than two years (60 photos per second).  Ten percent of all photos taken by humankind were taken in the past 12 months.

Instagram is quickly outgrowing Foursquare, the largest mobile social network.  91% of US citizens have their mobile phone within reach 24/7.  25% of people in the US have totally abandoned their laptops for exclusive use of their mobile device and downloading Mobile apps 10.9 billion times and are expected to peak in 2013.  Brands on Instagram that have been successful include GE, Starbucks, and Red bull that have been effective in spreading awareness and cultivating relationships with their biggest fans.

Why is Instagram so cool?  Readers process more information more quickly from images than from text, and thus images drive more audience engagement than text content.  The popularity of Instagram seems to stem from the fact that it allows you to tell a story through visual images.  70% of Facebook user activity is centered on uploading, liking, and sharing photos.  No wonder they purchased Instagram in 2012 for better picture sharing and increased engagement.

Images: Filters, Frames, caption, @tagging, #hashtags, geotag location, Tilt-shift teardrop for creating an illusion of depth, eye button to rotating picture.  Users are posting lifestyle photos that are visually appealing.  People love visual content and photos tell stories. Storytelling is crucial to the social success of your content, and the emotions associated with photos carry a lot of weight. HubSpot has been carrying on a caption content using Integra that literally asks users to tell the story of what’s happening in the photos.

Hashtags: Each Hashtag has its own page, and its own RSS feed where the photos with that tag are displayed. Research what people in your industry are posting by searching relevant #hashtags. This is also a good way to find new people to follow.

• Popular hashtags: #iphoneography #iphone #bw #flashbackfriday #sky #cat #dog

Leave constructive comments, start conversations, and be nice.  Geotagging: Tag your location to make it easier for people to find your account when searching for you.  Photo Competitions: Submit photos to competitions such as instadaily.com.  Measurement: Take a look at Statigram, Inkstagram, or Gramfeed.  Make use of apps and list of Instagram apps.  Instagram is ideal to share stories  and allow followers some insight into you and your world. You can get creative and use these different sites:

• Instagoodies.com-Stikerbooks
• Postagramapp.com-Send actual Integra postcards to your pall
• Printstagr.am-Mini books, teeny books, and posters
• Teenytile.com-Make teeny tile from your photos
• Stickygram.com-Fridge magnets from your Instaphotos

Your brand should maintain consistent posting frequency by posting at least 2 instagram photos every week to see follower growth.  Focus on posting interesting images with good production value and quality photography rules such as light, composition, contrast, geometry, emotion, and processing.  Audience engagement and audience acquisition convert engagement into sharing.

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest allows you to see 100 photos/videos on the screen at one time and share them in an instant.  It’s a social bookmarking site and electronic bulletin board all rolled into one that takes seconds to find and share things.  Follow people (or specific boards) with similar tastes and they can follow you back.  Instead of using written content as substance, it uses images and video.  It allows users to “pin” images and video to a virtual bulletin board they create. They can be photos they took and uploaded, images found on other websites, videos they find online or videos they have created themselves.  A user then shares that pin with their friends, who can then like or repin it to their boards.

The primary purpose of Pinterest is to share your interests with friends through images and video.  There is an ability to post images of your company’s products on your Pinterest board and link them back to your website.  It works as a sort of virtual store catalog.  If you simply display images of your products without contributing other content or sharing other users’ pins, you’ll likely find that people don’t pay much attention

Pinterest Statistics

Pinterest.com has gained over 13 Million users in 2011, it is one of the fastest growing Web 2.0 sites on the net as the fastest site ever to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark.  Pinterest currently is ranked 9th of 1349 in social media & has an Alexa rank of 16 in the US, 59 Worldwide!  Users inbound from Pinterest spent $180 compared with $85 spent from users coming from Facebook.  Users spent less time on the company’s Website, choosing instead to browse from the company’s pin board.  It was reported that 83% of the U.S. users were women.  For January 2012, comScore reported the site 11.7 million monthly unique visits broken down demographically to:

• 28.1% of users have a household income of over $100,000
• 50% of users come from United States
• 50% of users have children
• 68% of users are female
• 97% of Facebook fans are female
• Every user is either a Twitter or a Facebook member or both
• Average time spent on Pinterest.com per user: 15.8 Minutes (That’s 3.7 Minutes more than Facebook!)
• Pinterest is engaging members two to three times better than Twitter.
• Users in the US are more likely to live in mid-west states
• Referring more traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined.

Profile:

• Links to social networks-Find Facebook friends and Twitter Followers
• Top 3 people you repin appear on top right
• Add Keywords to Bio

Pins:

• Use creative pin titles
• Focus on lifestyle, not product
• Use keywords in descriptions
• Tag others using @ symbol
• Credit source for pins
• People in action at work: This is a great way to show personality and create a window with respect to who is doing things and how things are getting done at your organization.
• Your work in the community: Get outside the office and pin pictures of events and work done outside of the bricks and mortar.
• Your product in a unique setting or your service in action: See how many places you can get your product shown or have it take a fictional adventure.
• Show your expertise: Create boards that highlight what sources we suggest reading industry
• Trends that are unique to your industry

Boards:

• Use playful, fun titles
• Include keywords in description
• Pin images from clients
• Repin supporting images
• Create Inspiration collages
• How-to board: pin a photo collage showing the multi-step process

Images:

• Add watermark for identity
• Style product photos
• Use natural light in photos
• Pin photos relating to products
• Make infographic text LARGE
• Pin photo linking to video

Copyright:

• State source when pinning
• Display URL on images
• Use copyright symbols
• Always credit photos

Contests:

• Clients pin product photos
• Pin photo, tag brand to win
• Monthly board contest
• Most repinned board wins
• Pin image of contest rules
• Integrate with other social media networks
• Client videos; use hashtag
• Host board scavenger hunt: The goal of the game is to find the object we are looking for.

Collaborate:

• Create themed group board
• Group Scavenger hunt of boards
• Ask for colleague repins
• Throw a Pinterest Party

Research

• Review other business boards
• Identify Pinterest marketing goals:
• Do keyword searches for pins, boards, and people
• What boards get repinned
• Pinterest knows what you share, but not how you act on it
• Pinterest as a way to tap into their customers’ lifestyles and create a sense of brand loyalty. The themed boards are based on their target audience’s interests, such as recipes using yogurt, nutrition, and being active
• Create some boards that somehow relate to your industry and make visual lists

ROI ON PINTEREST:

• Increase social reach
• Engage fans through effective content by using content development tools such as Pinstamatic, Snapito, and Pinerly,
• Identify and engage with influencers using tools such as PinReach and PinPuff
• Increase lead generation
• Integrate activity with Google Analytics to website traffic

Story of Linkedin

LinkedIn’s early revenue streams were founded by launching job listings and subscriptions, which was enhanced communications and search capability. People need to talk to people they don’t already know in order to get the job done.  Advertising has been successful with them because they have the ability to have a good professional demographic and their ability to build unique business products.  Hoffmantransformed the way people could take control of their professional lives and easily work together to find the right people and right information.

“Linkedin” wildapricot.  1-200 folowers.  Share answers to Faxs.  Use top 10 lists.  Lists are good to post to.  Ask “Let me know what you think?”  Your employees can help you build out your content.

“People go on linkedin to make themselves better and organization better.”

B2b Marketing Nirvana, Click Inteligence to know whou you want to talk with.  Advertising in Linkedin groups, look at saleforce, and hp for brands that have been successful.  Target your status updates, but you need a certain number of follers.  Currently there isn’t anything for spammers or how to post on other company pages.  Some clicks are coming from Bots.  Look into your Data Science TeAM.  Products coming soon from LinkedIn include things for colleges.  How do you use Linkedin for making sales?  Get people into groups to ask questions and answer them.

LinkedIn Stats:

Your employees are updating their personal profiles to show where they work.  LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with 161 million registered users in 200 countries and territories, more than two million LinkedIn Company pages, and professionals signing up at a rate of approximately two members per second.

• More than 80% of members are decision makers
• The standard user is a male 25-45 years old
• 50% of Fortune 100 companies hire through LinkedIn
• 200,000 Industry Groups
• 70% of Jobs are found through networking

Connections:

You can add contacts to your connections by going and adding the people you communicate with through email.  Every person that connects with one of your employees may potentially click on your company name and be navigated to your company page.  There are several groups, professional and alumni based, that you could join and post discussion topics.  These serve as forums to pose questions on best practices in your field, ask for job search tips, and to stay up to date on current industry news to further seek advice for your career.  You can identify networking paths by using the unique feature of identifying how you are connected to various professionals.  Those that you are directly connected with are 1st contacts.  A 2nd contact icon will show when you have a 1st contact that knows the 2nd contact personally.  These icons show when you look at group members, company profiles, and so on.

LinkedIn Company Pages

For marketers, LinkedIn company pages provide excellent opportunities to highlight products and services, link to marketing offers, drawing in leads that are in need of your content or deals, tell your company’s story, engage with your audience, share career opportunities within your company, and drive word of mouth at scale.  For your audience, LinkedIn company pages are a place to conduct product and service research and learn about company updates, industry, news, job opportunities, and companies of interest.  By having a LinkedIn company page, you will greatly increase your visibility across the web, provide company updates, and drive lead generation with call-to-action capabilities in the products page.

You can market to specific people on LinkedIn by using the “targeted audience” option; a box will pop up and go into detail based on company size, industry, function, seniority, or geography. These options are available for employees or non-employees, depending on whom you’re trying to reach.  24 hours after you’ve posted your company update, you will see a few different metrics in grey font. These show the number of impressions, clicks, and percent of engagement with your post and are located on the bottom left side under the preview photo.  You can also use an image that represents your company/brand at the top of your Overview page

Overview:

• Why should someone become interested in your company?
• When was the company founded? By whom?
• Has your company accomplished anything noteworthy since its first days?
• In the summary section, the Overview tab includes company updates, job postings, and new hires. This feed is your company’s way of communicating important messages to your audience.

Careers:

Did you know that LinkedIn Jobs appear in search results and on twitter?  Additionally, LinkedIn is its own search engine for finding jobs and companies.  Post jobs, showcase awards, map out career paths within your company, highlight your best employees, and post jobs that target the right candidates using automated job matching.  Not only can you reach over 175 million professionals worldwide, but you also have the ability to see exactly who has viewed your job, how closely they match your posting, and then dig even further by seeing who the applicant is connected to.

Products:

Your Products (or Services) tab is a great place to collect recommendations and showcase what you sell.  70% of people follow links posted by friends and family, which is exactly why LinkedIn is so important.

Follower Insights:

This section shows company update engagement, follower demographics, company update impressions, and your follower progress including recent users, new followers, and member growth.  Through these statistics, you are able to take an even deeper dive into your page analytics by viewing engagement by clicks, likes, comments, shares, and percentage.  You can also narrow down your follower demographics by seniority, industry, function, region, company size, or employee/non-employee.

Page Insights:

Provides information regarding page visitor demographics including analytics based on:

• Seniority
• Industry
• Function
• Region
• Company Size
• Employee/Non-employee

The great thing about Page Insights is that it shows page views and unique visitors by tab and how many clicks you’ve received on your Products page.

Employee Insights:

With Employee Insights, you can learn exactly which employees have new titles, which have departed recently, which previous companies the employees came from, top skills and expertise these employees have, and which employees have received the most recommendations.

Two ways to find jobs on LinkedIn:

1. Click on the “Jobs” tab on the home page when you log in.
2. Click on the “Jobs” tab located in-group pages.  Be sure to click on “Career Discussions” to see job postings from group members.

Did you know you could see what companies have been recently hired in various positions?  Search for your company of interest, look for the “new hires” section and benchmark yourself against your competition.

Advertising:

LinkedIn Ads allow you to promote your company page through an ad campaign.  You can do this is three easy steps, but each one comes with a choice:

1. Ad Campaign Name: Your ads in LinkedIn are grouped by Campaign so if you’ll be testing multiple targets and goals, you should name your campaign something relevant. There can be up to 15 ads in each Campaign.
2. Ad Destination: Are you going to send them to a page on your website or one of your company pages on the social media network? This all comes down to what your goal is for advertising in the first place.
3. Ad Copy & Image: LinkedIn Ads allow you:

• Image: 50×50 icon
• LinkedIn Ad Title Headline Length: 25 characters
• LinkedIn Ad Body Description Length: 75 characters across two lines.

There’s not a ton of room to work with due to these ad limits, but you can still craft effective calls to action, branding, and visual impact. Remember to test your Ads! Try different pictures, headlines, and offers depending on your goals.

Targeting Your LinkedIn Advertising

Narrow your target audience by filtering members by geography, company, title, group, gender, and age.  Now comes the fun part of social media advertising, figuring out whom to serve your ads to. Without delving into the specifics of the above displayed options here are some suggestions on best practices.

• Know who you’re looking to influence. Are you trying to reach people early in the buying cycle or later? Reaching the right people with the right message is what you are after here. So know who makes the decisions and how those are processed in your target customer.
• Job Titles – Ask! Every organization seems to have a different naming system for the same role so while you’re searching for various positions are open to trying similar roles. You might be trying to target a role but it’s not called what you thought it was.
• Targeting Groups with LinkedIn Direct Ads is another tricky one as groups can be named all sorts of different things. You might want to try searching for group names based around job positions crossed with your target industry or Professional or Trade Associations that your audience might be members of outside of LinkedIn might have a group here as well
• LinkedIn Audience Network Advertising is your last option for targeting. It runs basically like any display/content network would and comes with the same pitfalls.

Setting a LinkedIn Advertising Budget and Billing

Your budget is a campaign strategy component that should be in place before tackling something like this. It would be foolhardy to specify hard figures, but here are some minimum guidelines:

• LinkedIn will set a Minimum CPC for each of your ads and the lowest is about $2.00.
• They also will give you a Suggested CPC Range that might be a good starting point for you. These vary wildly based on your targeting settings.
• There is a minimum daily budget requirement of $10 (~$300/month).

LinkedIn Premium:

• Inmail: Allows you to send a message to any LinkedIn member, without an introduction.
• Expanded Search tool:  Allows you to view full profiles that you are not connected to.  Have alerts to saved searches.
• Profile stats pro: See the expanded list of the titles, regions, and companies of people who have viewed your profile.
• Premium Badge: The Premium badge is featured prominently on your profile and next to your name in search results.
• Open Link: allows anyone on LinkedIn to send you a message for free, even if they are outside of your network.

*There are also upgrades such as a talent finder for recruiters and sales lead generator for sales teams

Klout Score:

• Title: Your reported title on LinkedIn is a signal of your real-world influence and is persistent.
• Connections: Your connection graph helps validate your real-world influence.
• Recommenders: The recommenders in your network add additional signals to the contribution LinkedIn makes to your Score.
• Comments: As a reaction to content you shares, comments also reflect direct engagement by your network.

Google+ Klout

Comments: As a reaction to content you shares, comments also reflect direct engagement by your network.

+1′s: The simplest action that shows engagement with the content you create.

Reshares: Reshares increase your influence by exposing your content to extended networks on Google+.

Foursquare Klout-Tips Done: The numbers of suggestions you’ve left that have been completed indicate your ability to influence others on foursquare.

Klout measures influence based on your ability to drive action on social networks, and has begun to incorporate real-world influence.  The Klout Score is a number from 1-100 that represents the aggregation of multiple pieces of data about your social network activity. We compute the Klout Score by applying our score model to these signals.  The Klout Score currently incorporates more than 400 signals from seven different networks. We process this data on a daily basis to generate updates to your Score.  +K received: Receiving +K increases you’re Klout Score by an amount that is capped in every 90-day measurement cycle to protect the integrity of the Score.

Wikipedia

• Page Importance: Measured by applying a PageRank algorithm against the Wikipedia page graph.
• Inlinks to Outlinks Ratio: Compares the number of inbound links to a page to the number of outbound links.
• Number of Inlinks: Measures the total number of inbound links to a page.
• The Klout Score now includes sources that indicate real-world influence, with Wikipedia as a new primary data source.

The majority of the signals used to calculate the Klout Score are derived from combinations of attributes, such as the ratio of reactions you generate compared to the amount of content you share.  We also consider factors such as how selective the people who interact with your content are. The more a person likes and retweets in a given day, the less each of those individual interactions contributes to another person’s score. Additionally, we value the engagement you drive from unique individuals.  It’s great to have lots of connections, but what really matters is how people engage with the content you create.  Adding more networks helps us more accurately measure your influence and can only increase your Score.

Influence is built over Time

In most instances, your influence should not radically change from one day to the next. The Klout Score is based on a rolling 90-day window, with recent activity being weighted more than older activity.  Retweets, Likes, comments and other interactions on the social Web are all signals of influence. However, just looking at the count of these actions does not tell the whole story of a person’s influence. It’s important to look at how much content a person creates compared to the amount of engagement they generate.

This is Influencer Relationship Management (“IRM”), directly analogous to CRM.  

Neither of these guys are going to solve for this in the near term – but they both provide inspirational examples that can lead us to the right model.  The data lessons of CRM, the engagement, monitoring and gamification lessons of Facebook and Twitter all apply naturally to a community of influencers in an IRM network,

Influencer marketing process:

DEFINE GOALS

Business, Marketing, Strategy & KPI’s.  If I am a marketer setting up a new target list for an upcoming campaign, I want to pull my list of top influencers within a specific category and rank them not only by these generic scores but also by variables that are proprietary to my relationship with these influencers.  SocialSteve when he defined influence from a marketers POV.  We need brand-specific, proprietary scores based upon influencer action and outcomes — the next generation of influencer scores

Put in another way: beyond “contextual scoring” and “individual scoring” marketers need “performance scoring”  - which is only possible in a closed-loop IRM platform where the brand owns the relationship with the influencers.

IDENTIFY INFLUENCERS

Listening plus targeted Google search, as well as more refined recent entries into the arena such as SocMetrics, Traackr, GroupHigh.

Spectrum of Influencer Advocates

• Traditional influencers = Professional
  Top of pyramid: WSJ, NYT, Bieber, etc.
• Emerging (digital) influencers = Power Middle
  From mommy bloggers to niche interest Twitter publishers.
• Influencers by connection = Advocates
  The cream of the crop recruited from Facebook and Twitter communities, consumers, brand email lists, employees, customers.

ACTIVATE

Good old fashion marketing & PR. Messaging, Content, Co-creation of value, Offers, Calls to Action; all the components of brand to influencer/advocate collaboration. Manage the value exchange, whatever that may be.  No mysteries here, just expertise required. By the way, this is Klout’s real value. Klout provides a simple way for marketers to “rent” a set of influencers/advocates to obtain hoped-for outcomes. Klout is basically an email list marketer. The score becomes an after-thought. It can give a marketer a very broad “ballpark” prior to any rigorous planning, but the primary value of the Klout Score is the “carrot” with which they pulled in their user data in the first place. Klout’s promise to consumers was “if you give me your email, I will put a gold star on your forehead.”

RANK/FILTER

Klout, Kred, PeerIndex, SocMetrics, Traackr – they all give us ranking metrics that are useful in varying ways. The big next step here is to provide marketers with the ability to include performance data into the ranking algorithms. (Analytics attached to accessibility is a big step in this direction) This doesn’t negate the generic scores, it adds an additional score to the brand marketer’s toolkit that actually correlates to relevant outcomes.

MANAGE

Manage the influencer data:  store the influencer data in a UI that enables marketers, enrich that data over time, keep the influencer relationship warm (drip!), track what they are doing for your brand across all channels as well as what the brand is doing for the influencers (combine offline & online data & communications).  This is where comes in to play, and where the PR firms mentioned by Greg(comments) need the most help.    In fact, all brands large and small need to manage growing amount of earned and social influencer data.

If we conclude that the real problem needing a solution here is the management of IRM data – what would a platform like this look like in overview?

IRM System

The marketing & communications industry needs a “big data” earned media platform, one that empowers marketers to manage relationships, manage content, and manage value exchange.

• Manage the influencer relationship, and enable the communication with same, at scale.  Brands need to own these relationships, not rent them from Klout. Measure, rank and filter data over time.  This needs to be dynamic list based on response & updated based on new additions to the fanbase.
• Manage content (BGC, UGC, IGC).  Content must be distributed with control and tracking, while allowing for authenticity.
• Manage the value exchange across a spectrum of options. During the length of a brand-influencer relationship, and especially during marketing program activations, there is a value proposition for each party involved and an exchange that takes place.   The values involved here are a subject for another post, the currency can be $money, content, credibility, validation, product or access – either way we need a platform to facilitate this marketplace environment.

The Digital marketing world needs a place for brands and marketers to store and manage the data or IRM.

Influence is “the capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of others.” For marketers, influence is only valuable if it produces actions or changes behavior or opinions of others. This distinctive point is often missed. So as marketers, we want to focus on those individuals that do something to cause an action or behavior change in a significant number of people that favors the brand we represent. “Influence marketing focus on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole.”

1) Traditional influencers – these are the individuals that traditional PR agencies court. They are pinnacle media establishments (Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post) and celebrity-like figures (Mario Batali, Roger Ebert, Tim Gunn) in a specific area of subject expertise.

2) Emerging (digital) influencers – bloggers that have established a large audience following and drive thought leadership in a specific space. The poster child of emerging digital influencers is Robert Scoble. Scoble is a tech blogger whose rise to vast influence started from strong participation and guidance in Microsoft’s NetMeeting support newsgroups, and for maintaining a NetMeeting information website. Another example of an influential blogger emergence from nowhere is Tavi Gevinson who commanded quite a following for her fashion blog. At the prime age of 13, she was a special guest at New York Fashion week.  Emerging digital influencers could also be blogs (PitchFork, Mashable, Gizmodo) rather than individuals by name.

3) Influencers by connection – here we have your everyday “Max” and “Maya.” People who have hundreds of friends … no let me correct that … hundreds of Facebook friends and Twitter followers. If you represent a brand, you want to court these people to produce brand action.

“What do you want to accomplish with social media?”

Are you looking for earned media (mentions of your brand on an influential blog) or people to share your brand with all their friends/connections? Is the influencer expecting or will receiving something in return motivate them?

Think about the types of influencers you want to work with as defined above. Probably you want a mix of the different types, but think about how you are going to connect with each to build a relationship. Think about the action you want to motivate them to do. Think about the bandwidth you are willing to allocate for each.

The minds behind influencer platforms realize that it is not just about accurately scoring influence, but more importantly to allow brands to determine the influencer in their market space AND to make it easier to connect with these people. When both of these functions become easier for brand marketers to execute, then we will see the true value of digital influence tools come to fruition.

Let’s start with Klout since it is probably the best-known influence tool. It is good to see Klout moving from a generic influence score and starting to score on topics. After all, if you are a wine and spirits company and you are about to launch a new line, do you really care about Mashable’s high influence score or are you more likely to want to identify nightlife and alcoholic beverage influencers. Personally, I do think there is too much focus on one’s Klout score for making important decisions. I do not think it tells enough of a story and individual’s specific influence capabilities to spawn brand action. At least not yet.

Kred is an emerging influence platform that is grounded in technical innovation from PeopleBrowser. They provide an influence index much like Klout, but they also produce an Outreach score. So not only is it important to score influence from a reach and subject matter expert perspective, but it is also valuable to understand a scoring for the degree of outbound engagement the individual performs. Kred also has “community” or topical social scoring. One of Kred’s differentiators is that they are transparent with regards to their scoring attributes. They literally show you how points are accumulated.

Appinions takes a slightly different approach. Appinions is a query based influence tool. If I want to understand whom the influencers are of automotive or any other area, you can form a specific query to do so. Appinions does contextual scoring versus individual scoring. Contextual scoring measures the degree of action taken by others (quote you/blog about you, link to you, retweet you) based on what you say.

Klout, Kred, and Appinions pretty much provide you a list of emerging digital influencers. If you want to know who are the people talking about your brand and having strong influence on their connections, you can use a social media monitoring tool such as Radian6, Sysomos, and others to 1) find who mentions your brand, and then 2) evaluate their influence or authority level. Having used both Radian6 and Sysomos, I can tell you this approach is very labor intensive. I am looking for a better solution. I do not think anyone is there yet, but SocialChorus is in the right direction. They offer a way to identify “influencer by connections” and reach out to them to attempt to create brand ambassadors. This is often done on a rewards basis, so I throw some caution there. Sometimes your actions might be perceived a “bought influence” and if that is the perception, your influence marketing can backfire on you.

Moving forward, all of these platforms are opening up their APIs. This means that one company can do the influence scoring and provide another platform the data. I think what we will see going forward is integrated solutions among platform providers such that some will do the scoring and other will handle the engagement activities. This will be a power-combined solution.

One of the things that none of these tools do well, is to cross correlate an individual on all the channels. For instance, the blogging I do here has no contribution to an influence score. If you are reading my post (or anyone else’s) there is a chance that I have some influence due to my social media guidance. But there is no correlation between the SocialSteve Blog, the @SocialSteve twitter account, and my quotes as Steve Goldner that show up in some marketing industry online trade blogs and news sites. This does not play into the algorithm of the influence tool.

There are a handful of key points you should consider in making influence-marketing part of your strategy:

1) From a marketer’s perspective, not everyone is equal. Those that have a strong reach and following AND can drive brand action deserve greater attention and TLC (tender, loving care) from brand marketers as opposed to the general public.

2) There are different types of influencers that you want to engage with and build strong relationships with.

3) A platform or tool should not determine how you go about influence marketing. You should determine whom you want to reach, how you plan to engage and go about building a relationship, and then determine the platform(s) to help you get there.

Social Media tools:

Tools to manage your websites and blogs

1. Disqus: Helpful in attracting more comments to your blog or website.  It allows readers to include media such as YouTube videos in their comments, receive alerts when their posts have been responded to, and reply directly from their email.
2. Janrain:  Allows visitors to your site to easily share your content across their social networks.  Lets visitors sign in to your site with their Facebook, Twitter, or other social accounts and tracks their behavior to help you provide a personalized experience for each visitor.
3. Feedburner:  Allows you to see how effective your blog is at marketing your brand and see how you stack up against other blogs out there.
4. Google Analytics: Provides invaluable insight into which social media channels are driving traffic to your website.
5. Awareness Social Marketing Hub:  Aggregates social network information, the Hub allows marketers to set up workflows in order to coordinate efforts across a marketing team.
6. Syncapse SocialTalk:  Helps you control your presence across different platforms, manage multiple social media accounts from one platform, establish multiple user access levels, and monitor incoming traffic.

Content Creation and Integration Tools

1. North Social: Enhance your Facebook page by creating custom applications that allow your brand to do things such as integrate with Google Maps or Yelp, post HD videos, run sweepstakes, and more.
2. Involer Applications: Provides applications that allow you to easily add polls, RSS feeds, quizzes, music, contests and more to your Facebook and Twitter Pages.
3. ePrize:  This company helps your company create promotions specifically tailored to your social media channels.
4. Storify: Cool tool lets you collect photos, videos, tweets, and other social media content to create a single, integrated story that you can embed anywhere.

Hootsuite: spread social messages, monitor conversations and track results.

In the beginning, I started with the ‘Quick Start’ guide. At the Help Desk, you’ll find a library of tutorials for learning about features or solving problems, and a Community Help Forum to exchange with other HootSuite fans.  If you wish to add more social accounts and news feeds, you need a Pro plan.  Accented Spanish characters like ñ and ü cause issues with the upload process. In some instances the upload would return 500 Internal Errors when using the Bulk Scheduling feature of HootSuite.

Manageflitter

Commun.it lets you manage your community efficiently by cultivating your followers on Twitter and making important connections to build your business.  It organizes your followers into influencers, top supporters, and engaged twitter users.  By grouping, you can focus on influential users and those who have shared your content.  An advantage of this tool is the ability to sort your list according to “most recent” or “highest rating,” which shows your top influences based on their algorithm.  Also a “Consider to follow” feature that gives a list of people to follow based on previous conversations, retweets, and the followers who have been engaging with you.

Tweriod and Buffer helps you find the best time to tweet.  Tweriod analyzes your tweets and your followers’ tweets to give you the best time and day of the week to tweet to get the highest visibility for your content.  This will help you share your content more effectively.

Insightpool allows you to initiate your customer acquisition lifecycle by pinpointing those that could be the most receptive and engaging with them in the most personalized manner. Let us help you raise awareness and build your customer base by converting your competitors’ customers.

inboxQ-Find questions people are asking by setting up a campaign and inserting keywords for the questions people are most likely to ask in your industry.  By helping people, you’re able to establish yourself as an expert in your industry and gain new followers.  Your engagement with them could also help in getting them to follow you back after you have followed them.

Brand influencers-find influencers who tweet your website.  It will identify users who have referred the most visits and page views to your website via twitter.

Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple social media channels through one dashboard.  It allows you to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard, launch marketing campaigns, identify and grow audiences, distribute targeted messages, and provide custom reports using the comprehensive social analytics tools for measurement.  The pricing is free, pro for 9.99/mo, and $1500 for enterprise.  Used by average people, businesses and organizations.

TweetDeck is a social media dashboard application for management of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  Pricing is free and is used by anyone.

SocialOomph: Allow you to automatically follow those who follow you, send direct messages automatically to new followers.

Backtweets: Provides reach and impressions stats, alerts you whenever someone tweets a link to your website, identifies influencers and integrates with Google Analytics to see how twitter activity is affecting your website traffic.

Mentionmap: Maps out your Twitter network so you can see whom you interact with most and what they’re saying.

Salesforce: CRM tool that allows existing customers to pull tweets from their Twitter account into the tool making it possible to assign leads and monitor activity as you would other contacts in a database.

Tlists: the main function of this site is to search public Twitter Lists, but the stats that accompany the lists are great and allow you to see how often the list pushes tweets and what they’re talking about.

BrandChirp:  Makes it easy to find people you should be following.  You can search for new followers by location, who they are following and keywords that they have recently tweeted about.

Details

Competitive advantage

Pricing

Customer base

Rapleaf

Fliptop

Puruprofile

Accuint

Merlin

Tweetadder

Brandchirp

Tweetstork

Crowdtwist

Incentivize, recognize, and reward people for their social engagement, influence and spending.  Competitive advantage: customer relationship and loyalty program.  Customer base: Pepsi, Miami Dolphins, Sony music, zumiez, live nation