Well folks, it’s about that time of the year where people all over the country give thanks and appreciation for the people and things that made them who they are today. Since Thanksgiving is tomorrow, I thought I’d share 10e20’s list of thanks from each employee. Unfortunately, I didn’t really bother to poll my coworkers since we’ve all been so busy, but I figured I could make an educated guess as to what they’re all thankful for and just wing it. Enjoy!
Chris is thankful that his Search Spam card came out almost as awesome as Tony Adam’s:
The likeness is uncanny!
Danielle is thankful that the mysterious nine month growth in her abdomen ended up being a baby and not just really, really bad indigestion.
Not a food baby, just an actual baby
Greg is thankful that the Detroit Lions have won TWO games this year. That’s like two Super Bowls in one season!
The “We Don’t Suck as Bad as Last Year” official trophy
Patrick is thankful that he finally found a Chopsticks partner to jam with:
“First we tackle Chopsticks, then we’ll try Heart and Soul.”
Jake is thankful that he only has to wait one more week before Lawman premieres on A&E. Steven Seagal fan 4ever!
The new, slightly pudgy face of justice
Victor is thankful for this video (and everyone else should be too):
PJ is thankful for Left 4 Dead 2. (Okay, actually I’m thankful for it, but I’m guessing he would be too if he plays the game. There’s nothing more satisfying than meleeing a zombie in the face with an axe.)
This is how I will spend my weekend
Rody is thankful that someone was able to explain how Twilight works because, quite frankly, the hype over this saga makes absolutely no sense.
Twilight fans
Charlie is thankful for his new best friend:
BFFs for life, yo
And I am thankful for a great new job, fantastic coworkers, and a supportive, encouraging new boss and mentor. Happy holidays to all of us from 10e20! Hope you have a day full of gravy and awesomeness. 
Ok, so you may not have the Twitter following that @apluskor @britneyspearshas, nor may you ever. But there are a few things you can do to increase that followers number in your profile.
Avatar: check, Background Design: check, Bio: check
Here be the basics. People want to know who and what they are following. If you don’t have an avatar to me, that is a big Twitter Fail. Use the two simplest ways of showing and telling potential followers what you or your business is all about. Design a Twitter background that reflects your ideas and slap on a nice picture of yourself or your company logo, mascot or colors. Also tell me about yourself in the bio line; this is a simple way to tell me more and show me where else you reside online and off.
I find it hard sometimes not to just follow someone back out of politeness; however, if I get to that profile page and none of what is listed above is included or I don’t find anything interesting in their stream then I say oh well, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and leave without following.
Private, Why?
Don’t set your tweets to private. Plain and simple. When you shield your account from the general public, you’re going to get fewer followers than if your account were publicly accessible. People like getting a sneak peek of someone before deciding whether they want to follow him/her.
Links to your Twitter Page:
Linking to your Twitter page from other social profiles like Facebook or LinkdIn will help with adding more followers. The more links to your Twitter profile out there, the more chances of someone checking you out and following you. Have a bunch of friends on Facebook? Ask them if they are on Twitter. “Oh yeah you are, well what’s your user name?” Add your Twitter URL to all of your signatures, go ahead- pimp it out! Make a comment on a blog? Why not add your Twitter name underneath the post?
Follow Reciprocators:
Reciprocators are those who will probably follow you back because they have about as many followers as they have people following them. If you come across someone who follows a large number of people and has a big following, chances are this person will follow you back once you start following him/her.
Timely Tweets:
During peak times is when you should try to tweet your best stuff. This will help maximize your retweet potential. The time of day? 4PM Friday EST. How did this number/time come about? Viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella in “The Science of Retweeting” spent nine months analyzing roughly 5 million tweets and 40 million retweets. #followfriday anyone?
#FollowFriday?:
Some would say add this to the list of helpful ways to build followers. Follow and recommend people, and follow users who retweet your stuff the most. However, personally I rarely look at anything with #followfriday on it. What are your thoughts?
Tools of the Trade:
This site scans the Twitter public timeline for new twits to tweet. A few times a day they calculate individual statistics for each twittering twit within the database.
A site application that allows you to make targeted searches by categories. Great way to find specific industries, businesses and people to follow that may reciprocate.
They offer tools that allow you to tweet more efficiently with lots of automated functions like scheduling tweets, track keywords, follow those that follow you, etc.
If you follow some of these tips, I am sure you can begin to see the follower count in your Twitter profile increase. These are just a small fraction of all the possible ways to increase the number of people following you. For more tips, check out Mashable’s Twitter Guidebook — they have a huge list of the basics to the advanced for those hungry for more. Also check out Fastcompany’s post called Nine Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted. While you’re at it, follow me @patrickwinfieldand us @10e20 
Why You (Might) Need a Social Media Consultant
Nov 23, 2009 by Rebecca Kelley | Business, Social Media MarketingEarlier this month I came across a post on Brains on Fire called “Why You Don’t Need Social Media Consultants.” The author of the post basically says that social media is common sense and that you shouldn’t need to hire a consultant to help you essentially be yourself on social networks. From the post:
“If you listen REALLY closely to their advice, you start to realize that most of it you already know. Because you have all the basic tools you need: Your humanity. Your ability to communicate with people around you. And your intuition. Because when you think about it, using social media is just a natural extension of yourself. Asking questions. Listening. Responding. And remember, social media apps are tactics. And tactics are tools. Sure, you might need some guidance on how to use that bandsaw, but you picked up a hammer and pretty much got the gist after you hit your thumb a few times.”
I agree with the author…to an extent. I think social media is easy to grasp because I do it for a living and know the ins and outs pretty handily. However, as the post comments point out, you’d be surprised how many people have a problem with social media marketing, if not for themselves then for their business. It’s one thing to create an account on Twitter for personal use and update it with what movies you’re excited to see and what you’ll be cooking for Thanksgiving. It’s another thing to figure out the best approach and highest ROI for a company profile.
The best argument I can make pretty much echoes the one Danny Sullivan made last month when he countered Derek Powazak’s opinion that SEOs are b.s. We’ve all heard the “SEO isn’t rocket science” argument and that “all you need to do is hire a decent web developer.” In Danny’s post (read it if you haven’t yet — very eloquent), he points out various scenarios where people DO need SEO, like a real estate agent who doesn’t know how to rank for her local market, or a man who sells shipping cases and has dupe content/dynamic URL issues. Sure, all of these issues seem like a no-brainer to us, but for many business owners and webmasters, they’re hard issues to tackle without a little bit of guidance.
I think it was Danny who had a great analogy in justifying why you would hire an SEO (or SMM) consultant, which I’ll paraphrase here: “Everyone knows that you need to exercise and eat right to stay healthy and fit, so why would anyone hire a personal trainer or nutritionist?” Sure, everyone knows that in theory, but some people need the support and guidance of an expert to help them get on the right path to wellness. Other folks need a customized diet and regimen that works specifically for them and caters to their individual needs.
Look at that guy needing to hire someone to help him build muscle! What a sucker!
And that’s no different than a business hiring a social media consultant to help them determine where they need to participate and what exactly they want to say to their audience. Maybe they just need to learn the basics in order to get the ball rolling, or maybe they have an in-house social media marketer but signed on for a company-wide training led by you to help everyone else understand the importance of SMM. Or maybe they’re all well-versed with social media but need some guidance on how to roll out a contest or sweepstakes across multiple social networks. Whatever the need, lots of people still require the help of a social media consultant, whether it’s for a few quick questions or to help with a full campaign.
I argue that yeah, lots of people don’t need a social media consultant, just how lots of people don’t need SEO help to get their site ranking well, or they don’t need a personal trainer to get in shape and achieve washboard abs. But others do need help, even if on paper social media may seem like a “no-brainer.” It doesn’t mean that the company is stupid for not being able to do it themselves; if anything, it’s great that a company is able to identify an area where they’re deficient and are hiring people to help get them up to speed. Isn’t that better than complete ignorance of a situation or, worse, mishandling something because you’re too proud or cocky to hire outside help?
We work with a lot of great clients and teams of smart, successful people. Helping them with their social media efforts is extremely rewarding because we get to lend a helping hand to a variety of issues, from basic training to building customers to running advanced campaigns. Some companies and people don’t need our help, and I say good for them, but a lot of companies do need some advice and assistance, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
PubCon 2009 Recap: Twitter Landscape – Hot Topics and Trends
Nov 20, 2009 by Greg Finn | Conferences and EventsWhile I attended Pubcon last week, I had a chance to catch the “Twitter Landscape – Hot Topics and Trends” panel. It was one of the first Twitter panels in a very heavy Twitter lineup. The session had some great speakers (including 10e20 bossman Chris Winfield) and ended up with a really big turnout! I took some notes from the session and wanted to share them on the blog. Here you go!
First up was Warren Witlock, who wrote the book “Twitter Revolution.” His presentation was titled “the Secret to Selling Stuff on Twitter.” Yet he let us in on a secret: The key to selling stuff on Twitter is to not try to sell stuff on Twitter. There are a few easy steps to doing well with Twitter. They are:
Step 1: Listen
The key is to listen and read what people are saying. While Twitter might not be around in 5 years, the effect of the revolution will be. We will be communicating differently and those that listen will prosper.
Step 2: Love
Let someone know you care Don’t be too promotional – the message needs to be genuine for it to be effective.
At the end of the day, social media can grow 100x what it is today. It is worth the time to put in the effort and do it right.
Warren said that PeopleBrowsr was a good tool to use and you should probably check it out.
Next up was Dan Zarrella from HubSpot. Dan wrote an article about the Science of Retweets and this presentation is about that article. He started by dropping some retweet knowledge. 3% of all tweets are retweets and over 60% of retweets have links in them. The URL shorteners can have a big affect on the “retweetability.’ From what he has seen, Bit.ly works the best.
The top keyword for retweets is “you,” followed closely by “Please” and “Retweet” as 2nd and 3rd respectively. The least retweetable words are descriptions of what people are doing. Smarter comments and saying something new tend to get retweeted a bit more. Nouns are also great for retweets, as tweets about things are highly shareable. Obviously, news is also a great topic for retweets.
For more information, you can download his entire report.
Next up was Chris Winfield (Disclaimer – this is my boss) from the one and only 10e20. For him, Twitter is about asking questions. To Chris it is just a tool for communication. What exactly is “pulling a Winfield”? It is using questions as tools to help accomplish tasks. Twitter wrote a blog post for him. Twitter did a presentation for him at SES Toronto (275 answers in 90 minutes!). Twitter questions can do a lot of things and are quite powerful. Current example – he used a question about Pubcon to find out who would be at the conference, then made a Twitter list with the answers to track his Pubcon friends.
Don’t just make it all about business; help build your relationships. Chris shared a great story about how USA Today did a full story on Michael Dorausch because of Twitter.
Some tips for asking questions on Twitter:
- Use mystery for your tweets
- Ask qualified questions that people can answer
- Don’t make it all about business
- Respond to answers – make it a two-way communication
How can asking questions help your business?
- Conduct polls to learn more about customers, or send people to polls on your site (PollDaddy and Twtpoll are some nice tools)
- Poll the masses — 10e20 accomplished some important tasks based off of suggestions
- Actually converse with your audience. By monitoring his conversations, Chris landed a large Fortune 100 client.
Next was Kate Morris, freelance search marketer from Austin, Texas. Kate took a look at the landscape as a whole. A lot of things have changed over the past few months. RIM is developing a Native Blackberry Twitter app – businesses are getting involved and embracing this communication. Twitter is changing the way people build things. Motorola is making a phone that has instant access to Twitter and Facebook. .
What does this mean to you? To sum it up, three things: Marketing, Brand Development & Word of Mouth Influence. Twitter is huge for these, and these are so important to your business. Also, customer service is really important and that is where the power of Twitter is really prevalent.
Overall, this was a well rounded panel that got a great response from the audience and had a solid Q and A to follow. Great job all!
This is one of the first Twitter panels in a very heavy Twitter lineup and has some great speakers (including bossman Winfield) and has a really big turnout! Let’s get it on.
First up is Warren Witlock who wrote the book “Twitter Revolution”. His presentation is titled “the Secret to selling stuff on Twitter:” Yet he lets us in on a secret: The Key to selling stuff on twitter – don’t try to sell stuff on twitter. There are a few easy steps to doing well with Twitter, they are:
Step 1: Listen
The key is to listen, read what people are saying. While Twitter might not be around in 5 years, the effect of the revolution will be. We will be communicating differently and those that listen will prosper.
Step 2: Love
Let someone know you care Don’t be too promotional – the message needs to be genuine for it to be effective.
At the end of the day, social media can grow 100x what it is today. It is worth the time to put in the effort and do it right.
Then Warren said that PeopleBrowsr was a good tool to use s and you should probably check it out.
Next up is Dan Zarrella from HubSpot. Dan wrote an article about the Science of Retweets and this presentation is about that article. He starts by dropping some retweet knowledge. 3% of all tweets are retweets and over 60% of retweets have links in them. The URL shortners can have a big affect on the “retweetability’,” bit.ly works the best from what he has seen.
The top keyword for retweets is “you” followed closely by “Please” and “Retweet” as 2nd and 3rd respectively. The least retweetable words are descriptions of what people are doing. Smarter comments and saying something new tend to get retweeted a bit more. Nouns are also great for retweets, as tweets about things are highly shareable. Obviously, news is also a great topic for retweets.
For more information, you can download his entire report.
Next up is Chris Winfield (Disclaimer – This is my boss) from the one and only 10e20. Twitter is about asking questions for him. To Chris it is just a tool for communication; he uses Twitter for asking questions. What exactly is “pulling a Winfield”? It is using questions as tools to help accomplish tasks. Twitter wrote a blog post for him. Twitter did a presentation for him at SES Toronto (275 answers in 90 minutes!) Twitter questions can do a lot of things and are quite powerful. Current example – he used a question about Pubcon to find out who will be at this conference then made a Twitter list with the answers to track his Pubcon friends.
Don’t just make it all about business, help build your relationships. Chris shares a great story about how USA Today did a full story on Michael Dorausch because of Twitter.
Tips:
· Use mystery for your tweets
· Ask qualified questions that people can answer
· Don’t make it all about business
· Respond to answers – make it a two way communication
How can this help my business?
· Conduct polls to learn more about customers, or send people to polls on your site. (PollDaddy and Twtpoll are some nice tools)
· Poll the masses, 10e20 accomplished some important tasks based off of suggestions
· Actually converse with your audience. By monitoring his conversations, Chris landed a large fortune 100 client.
Next is Kate Morris, freelance search marketer from Austin, Texas. Kate is taking a look at the landscape as a whole. A lot of things have changed over the past few months. RIM is developing a Native Blackberry Twitter app – businesses are getting involved and embracing this communication. Twitter is changing the way people build things. Motorola is making a phone that has instant access to Twitter and Facebook. .
What does this mean to you? To sum it up, three things: Marketing, Brand Development & Word of Mouth Influence. Twitter is huge for these, and these are so important to your business. Also, customer service is really important and that is where the power of Twitter is really prevalent.
Overall, this was a well rounded panel and got a great response from the audience and had a solid Q and A to follow. Great job all!
My colleagues (well, mostly Chris and Danielle) share a lot of pictures of family, friends and their daily lives, so I figured it’d be fun to incorporate the occasional image into a social media pic tip. 10e20’s first SMPT, courtesy of lil’ V, is “Stay comfortable”:
What do we mean by “comfortable”? Well, if you’re creating a social presence online, whether it’s for yourself, your company or for a client, you want to make sure that all parties involved are comfortable with where you’re participating and what you’re saying. If you’re offended or put off by the comments you see on sites like Digg and Reddit, you should find someone who can stomach the remarks to share your content for you. If you’ve got someone managing your Twitter account and he’s being too colorful with his language, find a more suitable replacement. If someone asks you to share a link on Twitter or Facebook but you object to the content or disagree with it, don’t feel obligated to pass it along anyway just because you’re friends.
Ultimately, everything you post and share reflects back onto you and your business (or your client and their business), so it’s imperative to be comfortable with your messaging and the avenues where you participate. Remember, it’s your reputation. While you can’t control what others say about you, you can control what you put out and where you hang out in the social sphere. Make sure you’re happy with your messaging as well as the sites where you’re spreading these messages. For both you and your clients, a little comfort goes a long way when it comes to social media success!
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9 Useful Social Media Extensions and Plugins
Nov 18, 2009 by Patrick Winfield | Social Media Marketing, ToolsFor any social media user at any level, add-ons and plugins can be of great help in saving time and creating new opportunities. Some of the listed are for specific sites, while others are more general. Check out some of them and see if anything can work for you.
Social Media for Firefox Extension
This tool is the the ultimate time saver for building powerful social media accounts. One of the secrets of top Diggers, Stumblers, Navigators, etc, is being the first to submit stories already becoming popular on other social news sites. For example, you can browse Reddit to find good stories already submitted and be the first to submit them to Digg. You can browse Digg and be the first to Stumble pages that are becoming popular there.
StumbleUpon Add-Ons
StumbleUpon helps you discover great websites that match your interests. Simply click the Stumble button and see the best websites. There are over 500 topics to choose from, and, the more you use it, the better your recommendations become!
Digg Firefox Add-Ons
As you browse the Web, you can see whether or not the web page you are currently viewing has been submitted to Digg and, if not, it lets you submit it with just one click.
Glue for Firefox Extension
Glue (formerly BlueOrganizer) connects you with friends around things you visit. Glue works automatically as you browse popular sites about books, music, movies, wines, restaurants, gadgets, stocks, actors, TV shows and other everyday things around the web. The Glue Bar appears right on your current page to show you friends who looked at the same things and what they thought.
Shareaholic for Firefox Extension
If you use sites like Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Gmail, and Twitter, you’ll want Shareaholic. Winner of the Extend Firefox contest, Shareaholic enables you to quickly and very easily share, bookmark, and e-mail web pages via a wide array of your favorite web 2.0 social networking & bookmarking sites — such as Digg, Facebook, Gmail, MySpace, StumbleUpon, and many many others. This is the ultimate add-on for the link sharing junkie.
Add to Any Buttons
Help your visitors share, save and subscribe to your content with Add to Any widgets.
Add This Button
Makes it easy for your visitors to bookmark and share your content with others.
Yahoo! Buzz Buttons
Stories with the most Buzz may be published on the Yahoo! home page – you can impact what millions will see on Yahoo!.
ul.timate.info Add-Ons
The Mozilla Firefox add-on aims to simplify the way people interact with social network sites including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and FriendFeed.
What add-ons or plugins do you use? Share in the comments below or tweet your response to 10e20!
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Business.com Social Media Survey Results (and What They Mean for Your Business)
Nov 17, 2009 by Rebecca Kelley | Business, Social Media MarketingBusiness.com recently published the results of a social media study that surveyed about 3,000 North American business professionals to see how social media is used and how it impacts their working lives. Below is a summary of the findings, as well as areas of opportunities based on the results.
Result #1: Webinars and podcasts are used by 69% of the business professionals surveyed.
What this means for you: Since webinars and podcasts were cited as the top social media resource for business professionals, if you’re a B2B maybe you should think about incorporating some tutorials onto your site. Offer something useful and interesting that your audience can digest visually (videos), audibly (podcasts), or interactively (GoToMeetings, webinars, etc).
Result #2: Facebook is dominant for B2C companies (83% of the respondents use it compared to 45% for Twitter), while B2B companies seem to use both fairly equally (77% have a profile on Facebook and 73% have a Twitter account).
What this means for you: More and more companies are using social networking sites to reach out to their customers. You need to decide if maintaining a presence across multiple sites is ideal for your company. See what your competitors are doing and note how successful their efforts are. At the very least, register your brand names and hold onto them — you don’t necessarily have to set anything up, especially if you don’t have time to properly manage your social presence, but you should at least nab your profiles before someone else does.
Result #3: Of the people who use social media for business purposes during work, 62% visit company/brand profiles on social networking sites, and 55% search for business information related to these sites. From the survey results: “Consultants and marketing communications professionals are the most active users of social media as a resource for business information, particularly in micro (<10 employees) and small businesses (10-99 employees).”
What this means for you: Companies should think twice before blocking social media sites at work, as there’s clearly considerable business value in allowing employees to use social networks for research, competitive intelligence, marketing, etc.
Result #4: The average company surveyed was in the process of planning or executing at least 7 different social media campaigns; however, over half of the respondents working on the campaigns have less than 2 years of experience using social media for business purposes.
What this means for you: The learning curve for social media marketing has gotten pretty massive and steep in just a short period of time. A lot of businesses are starting to understand the value in social media marketing but are ill-equipped and ill-staffed to get started. This presents a huge opportunity for knowledgeable consultants who are experienced in Internet and social media marketing to pick up some clients and spread their wealth of knowledge across different companies.
Result #5: Two essential social media success metrics identified in the survey are building brand awareness and improving brand reputation. However, nearly 66% of the companies that stress the importance of these metrics aren’t sure how to measure them or interpret standard/easily accessible performance reports.
What this means for you: Social media ROI can be tough to measure but is still a top concern for business who are engaging in social media marketing. Come up with regular reporting metrics (like referral traffic from Facebook and Twitter, track/chart positive vs. negative mentions over time) for your business or your clients and be consistent with your tracking and your reports. The changes may be subtle, but every little effort counts in the grand scheme of things, especially when your goal is to make money.
Raise your right hand and repeat after me.
I [insert name], Chief Marketing Officer of [insert company name], do solemnly swear to:
- Prevent squatters from taking over our company URLs on Twitter or other major social media websites and get them back if/when they do
- Prevent employees from reserving important company names, brands and products on social accounts and later leaving the company and taking important passwords with them
- Have a positive response for consumers talking about our brand in social media websites
- Create good video content for YouTube and other major video sharing websites
- Work with my advertising agency to run new creative / media buys which includes our company’s social media URLs
- Make sure my web development and creative team put a Facebook or Twitter badge on our main websites
- Work with my web analytics team to create custom reports so that I can see KPI’s for social media activity and referrals
- Make absolutely sure my board, my investors, my CFO, and my CEO understand that we need adequate budget for social media marketing
And I will never allow:
- My marketing team to tell me that they don’t know how fast our social media audience is growing
- Legal to say we cannot run contests or sweeps
- Marketing consultants to tell me that the only way to participate in social media is by creating a branded community that we control where we invite all of our brand advocates and try to sell them things
- My CEO to tell me that we cannot have a blog on our website or that there is no time for anyone to blog
- My kids to tell me they know more about social media than I do
- Myself to think that:
- social media marketing is something that gets instantaneous results
- social media is nothing more than glorified press campaigns
- social media is about selling our products to people who “hang around blogs”
- social media marketing means buying ads on social networking websites
- everyone who says they are a social media expert is an actual social media expert
- apps are the entirety of social media opportunity
- …or to be behind the curve or unaware of new and emerging social media sites and emerging technologies that help consumers connect with and understand our brands, products and services
Congratulations, you may now hold your head high and move into social media marketing with confidence and grace. You will not be battered by your colleagues for not knowing enough, nor will you be pushed around by Legal, PR, Web Development or Management committees who say “you can’t.” You are now empowered to succeed and to do better than your competitors by connecting with your consumers in a meaningful and effective way.
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The best session I attended this week at Pubcon was Competitive Intelligence: Know Thy Competitor Well. It had a great lineup of speakers and the place was packed full of attendees. In case you missed the panel and wanted to learn a bit more about how to monitor your competitors, I’ve got a recap handy for your reading (and monitoring) pleasure.
If you’re new to competitive monitoring and don’t know where to start, here are some tips:
- Hubs. Find and identify the easy ones. Look for places to find content ideas, links, sites that can help with keyword research and sites linking to more than one competitor.
- Press. How is your competition using press? This can help generate ideas by keeping up with trending opportunities, linking opportunities, etc.
- Review sites. Where are your competitors getting talked about? Who’s writing about them? How are these reviews getting done?
- Forums. Which forums are your competitors hanging out in, and how are they participating?
- Local search. How does your competition stack up on local search? Do they have any sort of local presence?
- Directories. Find the sites/directories that are linking to more than one competitor and see if you can get added to them.
- Anchor text. Find and identify everything there is to know about how the competition ranks.
- Unique domains linking in. Analyze how many unique domains are linking to your competitor to get a better idea of the work that’s ahead of you to get equivalent rankings.
- Strong content. Keep an eye on your competitors’ strongest pages.
Michael shared a bunch of sites that he uses for competitive monitoring:
- Quarkbase — find out everything about a website, such as the most recent and popular pages people have submitted from this site to social media sites.
- Topsy
- Viralconversations.com
- Bit.ly — how many people have clicked on a particular link
- Tweetmeme
Use more than one site when monitoring, because each site will pull up slightly different information, and it’s important to have a comprehensive and varied view. Pay attention to who is talking about your competitors and note any patterns you find.
Plan a competitive monitoring course of action:
- Research how, where, and when your competition is engaging in social media
- Look for points with high levels of engagement or other success metrics
- Dissect their network, looking for their inner circle
- Join their network or build your own
The other Michael on this panel recommended using incompetence to your advantage. Find out who’s linking to your competitors and point out any misspellings, outdated information, etc that you come across to see if they’d rather link to you instead. According to Streko, if it’s on the web, it’s fair game. Snoop snoop snoop. What they hide from the engines is your advantage.
Know your competitors’ presence:
- Monitor their social activity
- Use alerts to your advantage
- Use organic and paid keyword tracking
- Use SEM Rush
Use tools to compete. Watch their Alexa ranking, know their Compete score and use Quantcast data if it’s available. Set up similar sites if you can, then open up the lines of communication and request a link exchange. Also consider advertising on their site, since Adwords should give you a semi-accurate reading of their traffic.
Andy went through a great list of different things to track. For your competition, track the company name, its CEO, its products and locations, etc. Keep an eye out for new products and features, media placements, sympathetic bloggers, etc.
For rants, track your company’s brand plus words like “sucks,” “defective,” “crap,” “poor,” “expensive,” etc. Try to poach their unhappy clients and customers, promote your alternative product, or use their feedback to improve your products.
Also track your competitors’ employees. Keep an eye on their blogs, social profiles, photos, videos and social presence on the web. “Loose lips sink brands,” as Andy put it. You can gather damaging evidence, glean new information about upcoming products or company news, or find potential hires. Also scour your competition’s job listings to find out information about new locations opening up, job turnover, expansion, products in development, etc.
You can also use Google to track a lot of competitor activity:
- Google.com/alerts via email or RSS
- Google Sidewiki
- Local listings
And you should be paying attention to Facebook. Read/monitor your competition’s fan pages and identify who their fans are. Search posts on Facebook and mentions to see who’s talking about them and in what way.
Track your competitors’ URLs too. Andy shared some good resources you can use:
- – Domaintools.com/registrant-alert will send you an alert any time a certain email address is used to register a domain name
- Domaintools.com/mark-alert will give you trademark alerts (whenever a competitor is registering a trademark)
- Oodle.com/job will alert you to job postings (the company name, location, skills/position)
Here are some advanced competitive monitoring tools. They vary in price but are worth checking out.
- Socialmention.com
- Trackur.com
- Radian6.com
- Visibletechnologies.com
It’s been a hectic week in Las Vegas for Pubcon, but I’ve managed to sit in on a couple sessions and pick up a few tidbits of advice from the panelists. Below are some helpful tips about PR and brand management that I gleaned from two sessions this week.
Social Media and PR
Top tips from the Social Media and PR session:
- Online PR should incorporate search and social media reach (via Guillaume Bouchard)
- Capitalize on social media for PR by building and leveraging relationships, researching where you need to spend your time (be social where you need to be), and enabling your message to be shared by optimizing for the social audience (via Joanna Lord)
- If you’re not building trust, you need to evaluate what it is you’re doing and how you’re doing it (via Pat Strader)
Online Brand Management Strategies
Top tips from the Online Brand Management Strategies session:
- The different stages of the sales funnel are Category Awareness, Brand Awareness, Brand Consideration, Brand Preference, Purchase Intent, Purchase, Customer Retention, and Advocates. Each of these stages is impacted by branding. (via Sean Jackson)
- Build and maintain your social media profiles — don’t just “set it and forget it.” Also, build links to your social media profiles so that they can rank better for brand and reputation management purposes (via Kenny Hyder).
- When it comes to crisis communication, you need to have strong internal communication with your staff. Policies must be laid out in advance to advice employees how they can respond in a crisis, and honesty and accountability are typically the best policies with employees and vendors (via Tony Wright).
- 6 tips for dealing with negativity online (via Krista Neher):
- Humanize your brand (it’s easier to hate a company than a person)
- Listen and try to understand the problem
- Thank them for caring
- Be transparent and explain
- Build a community of passionate brand defenders
- Know when to walk away
