JitterJam – Integrated Social Marketing Software for Business

What are people talking about on Twitter? Everything. And anything.

How do you find out what’s hot on Twitter? Take a look at what’s Trending. What’s fascinating is that real-time conversation is organic–it has its own life, and grows its own way, and the things people are talking about can sweep the globe–but also can be localized.

How do you find out what’s trending? Go to your http://twitter.com page and view the Trending list (scroll down and look below your searches and lists). What’s cool is that you can see what’s trending across the country, in various global regions or cities. You can change the location and see what’s hot in different areas. For instance, right now Waka Flocka is hot in Seattle. In London, it’s Andrew Lloyd Webber. Worlds apart in geography and in music!

How does this help your social marketing efforts? It’s good to know what people are talking about. If its related to what you do, the products you sell, the brands you market…well, you want to know what people are saying in your market. If it’s not related to what you do…well, it could be just for fun.

After all, it IS Fun Stuff Friday!

Unless you’re able to step away from your desk on a regular basis (which can be useful, but might not be possible), conversation overload in social media can seem downright inevitable. Here are three tips to help keep your head from spinning off your shoulders.

1. Narrow Your Searches
When it comes to seeking out new conversations to participate in, search can be either a powerful ally or a dastardly interloper. The key is to narrow your search terms so that the results returned to you are small and manageable. Searching for “books” isn’t going to be nearly as helpful as searching for the particular genre of books you’re selling, or a specific title that you’ve identified as competition.

As with segmenting existing contacts into groups, you should schedule time to work on conversations in each of your major search areas. Alternating topics on a regular basis will help keep you fresh. After all, it’s hard to talk about the exact same aspects of a product or service day in and day out. Change it up!

2. The Four Ds: Delete, Delegate, Defer, Do
In 2007, Merlin Mann delivered a now-famous talk about the concept of Inbox Zero. In it, he proposed an email management system that would keep a user’s inbox message count at zero 100% of the time. Why not apply those same techniques to your social media workflow? Once per hour, do this: A) Delete irrelevant messages; B) Delegate questions that can be fielded by others; C) Do tasks that will take less than 60 seconds; and D) Defer those tasks which will take longer.

How you manage to do these things will depend upon the software you’re using to run your social media marketing campaigns, but each should be possible. And when you clean out your social media inbox on a regular basis (whatever that inbox might look like), that feeling of conversation overload can be avoided. Then you can move on to the rest of your job without feeling like you’ve dropped any balls along the way.

3. Measure Effectiveness and Refocus Accordingly
Measuring ROI in social media marketing doesn’t have to be difficult, and it is necessary if you’re going to successfully avoid conversation overload. So, the first step here is to make sure that you can track the effectiveness of your campaigns. If you can’t, you need to find a product or service that will allow you to do so. (Might I suggest JitterJam?) Next, examine your results on a regular basis. Find a schedule that works for you and stick with it. Then, once you see what’s working and what’s not, reevaluate how you’re approaching things. Keep plugging away at what’s working, and either step away from unproductive conversations or find some new way to interact.

Got any other ideas on how to manage conversation overload? Please leave a comment below.

One of the primary goals of any social media marketing campaign should be the translation of online relationships into real world transactions. And I think that part of the way we accomplish that is by meeting face-to-face with the folks we know mostly through our computers. A lot of business can get done via the Web, or the phone. But sometimes it’s that face-to-face meeting, and the handshakes that goes with it, that seals the deal.

Local events — from Tweetups to PodCamps, and everything in between — run on a regular basis in cities worldwide. PodCamps (extended community-organized unconferences, usually held over a weekend), are scheduled for 2010 in Toronto, London, Salt Lake City, and right here in New Hampshire. Tweetups (smaller meet-ups organized on Twitter), are also quite popular, and often run on a monthly basis. And then there Social Media Breakfasts, Social Media Club events, and a whole lot more.

There are many places to keep track of upcoming events — Upcoming.org and Eventbrite are just two of several popular options. That can make filling your calendar a bit of a chore, but local organizers are beginning to do more work to keep things simple. Here in New Hampshire, several of our most active meeting planners have created a shared Google Calendar to keep all event information in one place. If there isn’t a similar calendar for your area, why not start building one?

Now, go and have some fun on this Fun Stuff Friday!

This video, featuring Barry Judge (CMO of Best Buy), is worth a few minutes of your time. In it, Judge raises two points crucial to success in social media marketing.

Talk With Customers, Not At Them. Like many brick & mortar companies, Best Buy’s marketing strategy used to center around television and print media. They ran ads that targeted every consumer within earshot, shouting to the world about their low prices. But then came the rise of Wal-Mart. And after that, of course, came Amazon. And suddenly low prices — best buys, if you will — were no longer as unique a value proposition as they once were.

As Judge points out, the target can’t be everyone anymore. There are too many people to reach, and those people have too many alternatives to choose from. So, the strategy can’t revolve around you and your company controlling and disseminating the message. The truth is: you can’t control the message, and you might not even be the best person to spread it. You are just one part of the conversation about your brand and your product. The customer is another part, and a far larger one. With the rise of social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook (and even blogs), customers are now able to share what they think about a product or service at anytime, in any number of places, and with a potential army of like-minded fellow consumers.

Hence, the importance of social media monitoring and expeditious social media response. You can and should be getting your message out there. But you need to be constantly monitoring how that message is coming across to your potential customers and how that message might be transforming as it’s passed from one person to the next.

Every Mobile Phone Is Now A Response Device. Whether the device in question is a simple messaging phone, a more advanced smart phone, or one of the newer, so-called app phones, I think Judge is right-on when he talks about the power of our mobile devices. Customers can now respond to ads instantaneously, and from anywhere. Whether they see a billboard at the subway station or a full-pager in a magazine at their dentist’s office, they have a device in their pocket that allows them to act on the offer immediately. In many cases, they can buy something right then and there from their phone. And they can also pass on the offer to friends in any number of ways (text message, email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.).

Something Judge doesn’t mention: phones with ubiquitous Internet access are also making it easier for customers to comparison shop without even leaving your store. If a customer has doubts about whether you’re offering the best price, and if you don’t give them a good enough reason to stay and shop with you, it’s all too easy to find someplace else that will give them the buying experience that they crave.

Many of the products we use (or are advised to use) in social media are free to access. But no product, regardless of the price tag or lack thereof, is free to use. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, or the latest and greatest service that bloggers, Twitterers, and Facebookers are raving about — there are always costs involved, particularly in staff time.

Here are four particular cost areas to consider:

Resources. You need people to make these things look good, and you need people to keep them running. WordPress blogs come out of the box looking very much like thousands of other WordPress blogs. They also end up looking like very lonely places if they’re not updated on a regular basis. It’s blatantly obvious to even the most casual Web user — whether they’re 100% conscious of this or not — when the blog or Website they’re looking at has a cookie-cutter design. And users are also well aware of the virtual tumbleweeds rolling by on sites where there’s less life than they’d find in a ghost town.

Setting up a Twitter account provides similar hurdles. And while it is theoretically easy to change your background, to fill out your full profile, and to tweet on a regular basis, theoretical ease isn’t quite the same as actual ease. You need to get it done, or you need someone to get it done for you. And it takes time!

Dedication. We live in the age of the Next Big Thing, in a world where it’s ridiculously easy to find something new to obsess over, something new to occupy our precious free time. If you’re not delivering constant content through your marketing channels, people will forget about you and move on. Regardless of your market, it is crucial to keep customers engaged in the product and the message year round, on a weekly (if not daily) basis.

The flip side of that, of course, is not to overdo it. But I’m a believer in going all-out, then listening to your audience, seeing if they’re feeling oversaturated, and only reigning things in as necessary.

Messaging. Just as press releases, white papers, and other more traditional marketing efforts require serious thought, so too do social media campaigns. It’s harder to create a meaningful message in 140 characters than you would think. And then there’s the issue of how well the information coming through these new channels is tying in with the rest of your marketing message. It’s easy enough to hand responsibility for your Twitter profile and your Facebook fan page off to an Intern. But if that Intern isn’t clued into the master plan, you could be sending out messages that are erroneous, poorly executed, or, in the worst-case scenario, flat-out false. Once something’s out there on the Internet, it’s out there to stay. And that means that, even if you do farm this work out to someone else, a portion of your workday is going to have to be devoted to making sure that the messages which come out from your brand, regardless of which channel they are distributed through, are on point.

Monitoring. You also need to track how effective these free messages you’re sending really are. Ask yourself: which posts, tweets, and status updates are driving the most traffic? Which are generating conversation in the comments section? And which are being shared on Facebook, or retweeted on Twitter? If you can’t answer these questions now, you need to find a way to answer them. Because, while these products might be free to access, there are always going to be costs associated with actually using them. And you need to be able to justify those costs, whether to yourself, or to your boss, or to your shareholders. Or else you may be out of a job. Or out of business.

Does this mean that you need a full-time staffer whose sole purpose is to execute your social media masterplan? Well, no. It would be nice, but it’s not 100% necessary. What you need, at minimum, is someone who is thinking constantly about how to put these free tools to good use, and how to get the most bang for your staff-time buck.

Photo Credit: free-sign by koka_sexton. CC BY.

As a blogging platform, WordPress is fairly ubiquitous. There were 202 million users worldwide in September 2009, according to Jason Calcanis. And if you’ve ever scoured the Web in search of ways to customize your WP site, it might have seemed as if there were just as many themes to choose from. Some of them are good, and many of them are bad. But, regardless of what you’re finding, the plethora of choices can make putting together a WordPress site a real chore. And if you’re looking for free themes, the task can be downright painful.

There is hope, however! This week, Barb Dybwad posted her picks for 14 Fantastic Free WordPress Themes over at Mashable. Here are the two that struck me the most:

Dybwad positions Irresistable (Woo Themes) as a theme more fit for a personal blog than a professional or corporate one, but I think its slick, clean interface—with clearly delineated areas for blog posts, photos, and a social stream—would work for any organization with a diversified mix of content on offer.

And, for the business owner looking for something a little bit more traditional, iBusiness (New WordPress Themes) offers above-the-fold space for both a bold, extra-large photograph and a brief, focused About Us blurb or mission statement. Below that, there’s also room for a blog and a clearly laid out sidebar with several calls to action.

If none of Dybwad’s choices seem like the right fit for you and your business, another useful resource is Best WordPress Themes. It breaks down free and premium themes both by number of columns (1, 2, or 3) and by intended use (magazine, photo gallery, or specialized).

I hope this is helpful to those to you who are looking to put a fresh coat of paint on your WordPress site, and I hope that, if you have any additional theming resources, you’ll share them in the comments below.

Now, go and have some fun on this Fun Stuff Friday!

There has been a great deal of attention placed on social media as the next great channel for marketers to reach customers–and for good reason. Social media has provided consumers with a voice in the market. Companies that engage with those vocal consumers have the opportunity to gain greater insight into their customers and markets, develop direct relationships with their customers and hone their messages for their intended audiences. As a result, they have the ability to reap higher returns on their efforts and provide a better experience for their customers.

While social media offers great new marketing opportunities, businesses should consider social media as one element in their marketing strategy and marketing mix.

According to Edelman’s recently published 2010 Trust Barometer, 65% of people need to hear something about a company three to five times from multiple sources to believe that the information is likely true. Edelman goes on to say that “to advance reputation, companies need to be everywhere, engaging everyone.” Between 40% and 50% of people trust stock/industry analysts and business publications for information about companies while 35% of people believe information gained from conversations with peers.

What this study points to is the need for businesses to utilize many different avenues to get their message out and to reinforce the same positive brand, product and company reputation across multiple marketing channels. Social media can be–and should be–a core component of that marketing mix, but it should not be the sole focus of a company’s efforts.

We have a tradition here at JitterJam. It’s Fun Stuff Friday. Our team always does something fun on Fridays, whether it be a tasty snack, a frosty beverage (Jim’s favorite), or squishball dodgeball…we relax a bit to wind down our week. (Thanks Katie!)

Fridays on the JitterJam blog will follow in that tradition! So here’s our first installation of Fun Stuff Friday on the new JitterJam blog–Twitter Backgrounds!

Have you played with your Twitter background? It’s a way to further brand your social identity, and it’s fun!

Here’s the @jittergram Twitter page before the new background:

Before...

I just wanted to do something simple for the time being as I’m working to determine a style for new collateral and branding, so I took some colors from the website and created a simple background.

After...(link opens our live Twitter page)

It makes it easy for potential customers to see my brand and my URL. There are some tricks to size of the left bar, size of the background, etc. Here are some “how to” resources for you to learn how to make your own!

• Mashable’s How To Create Twitter Backgrounds
• Croncast Twitter Background Guidelines
• Interactive Insights Group Blog (lots of links to other resources and tutorials)

Now go and have some fun on Fun Stuff Friday!

Have you ever followed a person or a company on Twitter and received a “Thanks for the follow, here’s our website” direct message from that “person” in response?  Does that feel like an authentic voice or a pre-recorded message? Is this a business practice that you want to adopt for your first social outreach to a new contact?

Social media has enabled business to see first-hand what consumers are saying about them and to directly address, engage and captivate them. Yes, captivate. The practice of sending an automated response to a Twitter follower (or anyone who engages with your business through a social account) is contrary to what social media is about! To many consumers that are using social media, these automated responses are red flags; they signal that the business is focused on marketing to them rather than talking with them. The business has lost them at first touch.

Think about the last time you sent an email to a company and received an automated response. While it was nice to know that your message was received, did you glow with satisfaction? Putting that into a social context, is that the first impression you want to give to a current or potential customer? Social channels are about fostering open and direct communications with people. While the interesting content that you’d like to share with people is a great candidate for “scheduled” outbound communications, make sure your first interaction with someone is real, live and personal. You’ll begin to set the stage for a trusted, positive relationship.

In our last post, “What Do I Say?,” I wrote about how to become a member of the communities that you, as a business, serve. You want to engage potential customers that are talking about your markets, your products, your brands, and one of the best ways to do that is to be seen as a member who contributes to the conversations–not just one that pushes your own message and agenda to the masses.

You want to start engaging current and potential customers that are talking about your products, brands and markets, but you are overwhelmed at the sheer volume of conversations taking place on the real-time web. You search for conversations but are wading through the myriad of irrelevant chatter. So how do you find relevant conversations? You’ll find a few tips below that pertain to Twitter, blogs and some other social channel searches:

Check and adjust your criteria often. Searching for relevant conversations is more of an art than a science. Conversations change from day to day, and your search criteria will have to change with the ebbs and flows of the conversations. For instance, an outdoor gear products company that is searching for conversations about camping might suddenly be inundated with conversations that surround camping out to buy tickets for the Miley Cyrus tour. If you have created and saved a search that’s related to camping, you’re going to have to filter out this anomaly. NOT is your friend in a search.

Add keywords to focus your search. Camping might be a great keyword for your search, but it’s very general. That outdoors gear company might want to narrow in the conversations to ones that match “camping and gear not Miley” or even camping and trip and plan not Miley to focus on those people who might be planning a trip or looking for gear. Try out different mixes of keywords to see how these changes impact the quality of your results. Too few? Maybe the words are not the right ones. Too many? Try adding some additional words to pinpoint your focus.

Try following “conversation trails.” One way to find new people is to follow conversation trails. One person tweets about camping. Look at who re-tweeted the information. Look at who that person has on his/her Twitter camping list. Another person posted a blog entry about camping gear. A number of others commented and posted links to their blogs. And so on. Conversation trails = an informal community that has formed around a topic of interest–and one example of a community you can join and engage.

Try searching Twitter hashtags. Have you been curious about the little # tags that people have been placing in their tweets? Those tags are used by Twitter to make it easier for everyone to find tweets related to common interests. Brands create and use unique hashtags to not only help their customers find their content but to help others find content and people that are related to them as well. The #camping hashtag might help the outdoors gear company find people interested in camping or lead to new conversation trails.

Use your own voice to have others find you. You’re not the only one searching for relevant conversations. Post some interesting content to your blog, to Twitter, to your YouTube channel. Use keywords and hashtags to help others find you. And they will. The more you say that adds to the conversation, the more people will be interested in listening.

To those  of you who did a web search on Miley Cyrus tickets and ended up here, thanks for visiting.