JitterJam – Integrated Social Marketing Software for Business

As Chris Penttila wisely pointed out in a July 2000 article for Entrepreneur magazine, “Giving employees a change of scenery—even something as simple as walking around the block—can help trigger new ideas, new enthusiasm and a boost in morale that will have at least short-term benefits for your organization.” The company retreat, once just “another inflated part of the [dot-com] bubble”, need not be elaborate to be effective. eHow.com provides a ten-step plan for “balancing productive meetings and social merriment,” while Meetingsnet offers tips on how to avoid The 7 Deadly Sins of Business Retreats.

Here, from the Entrepreneur article, is one example of a low-key off-site meeting that led to great results:

When it came time to revise the marketing strategy at Crawford & Associates, Crawford held the staff meeting at her home. Employees brainstormed and wrote various ideas on a giant piece of butcher paper. “There was a great stream of consciousness in that meeting that we could never have had at the office,” Crawford says. “Being in a different place allowed us to get rid of distractions and pay attention.”

Company retreats can also be highly effective for building team unity in an age when telecommuting and a widespread workforce are becoming more prevalent. The team from WooThemes.com is distributed across the globe, but earlier this year they got together for “a week-long working ski trip in the Austrian Alps,” a productive business trip they also managed to turn into a social media success.

Whether you bring your team out to a patch of grass behind your building, to the coffee shop down the street, or to a mountain resort, getting them out of the office from time to time is an excellent way to boost morale and encourage creative, outside-the-box thinking.

Have yourself an amazingly fun Fun Stuff Friday!

Thanks to Chiff.com for providing some of these links.

Today we announced JitterJam’s integration with Google Apps™, as well as the addition of the product to the Google Apps Marketplace™. JitterJam’s integration with Google Apps allows users to sign on to JitterJam with a Google account or Google Apps e-mail address; to connect to Google Calendar to record all outbound communications and promotions; and to cull new contacts from a Gmail inbox with JitterJam’s powerful database and communications tools.

Here are some details on how we think each of these new features will benefit you and your business.

Single Login
Users can take full advantage of Google’s single sign-on capability to access JitterJam without an additional user ID or password to remember and manage. If you are one of  the 25 million employees whose employers are already utilizing Google Apps, or one of the 176 million individuals who use Gmail, this is great news. If you’re signed on to Gmail or Google Apps already, then logging into your JitterJam account doesn’t even require you to enter a password.

Gmail Integration
JitterJam’s integration with Gmail provides a powerful way to identify potential new customers from within your inbox. Set JitterJam to search for leads it finds in mailing lists and groups, or automate the process of entering prospects who have e-mailed you into the database. Imagine collecting contact information for active participants of an industry-specific LinkedIn group with just one click. These are enthusiastic, committed prospects, and with JitterJam’s Gmail integration it’s now that much easier to begin the process of developing and deepening those relationships.

Integration With Google Calendar
JitterJam updates Google Calendar every time you send or schedule an outbound communication. This allows your team to monitor what messages are being sent and when, keeping every team member updated and informed. Those team members who are not as active in social media will be able to keep track of what messaging is being sent, from within a product that they are already using to keep track of their meetings and other engagements. And those team members who are active in social media will be able to see where their efforts are aligning with the efforts of the rest of the business.

Easy Configuration
Just a few clicks and you’re ready to go. Integration with Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google’s single sign-on capability is easy to implement, easy to use, and will make it that much easier for you to succeed with JitterJam.

Intrigued? We hope so. If you haven’t already experienced all that JitterJam has to offer, please consider scheduling a demo or signing up for our one month free trial.

Many businesses looking to engage customers and prospects via social media channels have a limited amount of time and resources to devote to that task on a daily basis. But a lot can be accomplished in just thirty minutes a day. Here is a three-step plan for managing your company’s social media to-do list.

Build a list of manageable, actionable items. At minimum, this list should include replying to Twitter @ replies and direct messages; to wall posts left on your business’s Facebook Fan Page; and to mentions of your company, brand, and products made across the Web on both social networks and blogs.

Populate your list automatically. Set your social marketing platform to push all of the interactions listed above directly to your to-do list. If possible, have it flag high risk items (based on the inclusion of a specified word or phrase in a search result) and do whatever it else it can to create priority levels for you.

Review your process regularly and revise it accordingly. Identify tasks you are spending a lot of time on, as well as which efforts are paying off and which are not. If you only have thirty minutes a day to work on social media, you need to spend that time wisely. Don’t get caught up in a routine that isn’t working. Always be on the lookout for ways to improve and streamline your process.

Earlier today, we posted a new video to our homepage that illustrates how JitterJam can help you with managing your social media to-do list, and much more. I hope you’ll give it a look, and then consider signing up a free trial or a personalized demo.

Hand Drawn Social Media Icons by rafiki270 CC BY-SA

So, let’s say you’re looking to add to your Website a list of the social networks your company is active on. You could go the text-only route. Or, you could grab official icons and buttons from the sites themselves. But what about doing something a bit more creative?

Artists across the Web have created a slew of fun social media icon sets, many of them free to use. And these sets make it possible to organically integrate social media icons into nearly any Website design you can think of, whether you’re an artist in search of something hand-drawn or a band in search of something just as grungy as your sound.

Paddy Donnelly has origami icons, and Icon Texto has plastered the logos of popular social media sites onto soda cans. Dawghouse Design Studio has a set of woven icons for the craft stores out there, and someone’s even designed a set for the landscaping company that’s getting down to business on the Web: it’s cut from grass.

For more, visit these round-ups by Design Reviver, Blissfully Domestic, and 1st Web Designer. If you’ve got another set you’d like to share with us, leave it in the comments below. And then, hey, why not get outside and have yourself and amazingly fun Fun Stuff Friday?

Today marks the fortieth annual celebration of Earth Day, and it is an understandably popular topic across the Web right now. Both the phrase “Happy Earth Day” and the hash tag #EarthDay are currently trending topics on Twitter. But there is one specific Earth Day-related search phrase we’ve been really interested in all day, and that is “Earth Day resolutions.”

Why Earth Day resolutions? Well, a resolution is actionable—it’s something someone wants to get done. And there is therefore an opportunity to help. For a business in the eco-friendly space, Earth Day resolutions offer a wealth of possibilities. To name just one example: a search on this simple term would bring up dozens of potential customers for a cloth bag manufacturer (ditching plastic shopping bags has been a popular resolution choice).

Days like this need not (and should not) be exclusively about direct, immediate conversions, however. For the eco-friendly business, like the client who first turned us on to the idea of Earth Day resolutions, establishing a presence in a holiday- or event-related conversation can be just as much about showing a passionate dedication to the ideals set forth in the company’s mission statement. Letting customers and prospects know you care deeply about the same things they care about is never a bad move.

Either way, if your company is engaged in social media marketing, the opportunity to help or to inspire on a day like today is one that should never be passed up.

In addition to my work at JitterJam, I teach creative writing at Lesley University. And one of the principles I harp on in my lectures there is the concept of the ideal reader. The ideal reader is the person who we are trying most to reach and to please every time we sit down to write. We can’t have a million ideal readers, I tell my students. We have to pick just one.

Too often, we blast messages out with too general an audience in mind. We do it because it’s easier, and because we don’t always know who among our audience is interested in what. But, in today’s world of personalization and customization, that approach just doesn’t cut it. As marketers, we need to identify an ideal reader for each and every message we send.

This is where database-driven social media platforms like JitterJam can help. Database-driven applications allow us to capture and continuously update details on when and where customers are willing to be contacted, and, most importantly, on what they’re interested in being contacted about. This is the key to deploying content tailored to specific groups within your larger audience.

Here’s a game plan:

1. Gather preferences. Whether you enter the preferences into the system yourself or you implement a public-facing customer preferences panel (like the Make Me Happy™ page found in JitterJam), make a point to gather information on customer interests and preferences as soon as possible after your initial contact. Then establish a customer communications schedule (where you’ll ask your contacts to update their records) to help keep that data up-to-date.

2. Write/speak with a specific audience in mind. Identify the ideal reader or recipient of your message early, and shape your content accordingly. If a group of contacts loves your widgets but doesn’t want to hear anything about your gizmos, be sure to scrub your message of any gizmo-related promotions. If you’re sending a video out to a group of contacts who prefer to be reached by Twitter, embrace their appreciation of brevity and make it short. Or, if you are speaking with a group of your staunchest advocates, take care to avoid the introductory verbiage they may have heard or read a thousand times before.

3. Customize even the standard messages. Every company has templates for standard communications like welcome messages and monthly newsletters. And while the bulk of the text of those messages isn’t customizable, I think it’s almost always possible to throw a little personal attention into the mix. Even if all you do is add a sentence or two at the top of the message, acknowledging the recipient’s business or field of interest, you’ve gone a long way toward proving to that person that they are more to you than just a name and an e-mail address on a long list of other names and e-mail addresses.

Work and play need not be mutually exclusive, according to Darell Hammond, Chief Executive Officer of KaBOOM!. In an article for The Huffington Post, he writes, ”As CEO of a nonprofit dedicated to saving play for our nation’s children and communities, I can’t lose sight of the fact that adults need to play, too!” And, given the fact that KaBOOM!’s offices are home to a slide and a tire swing (in addition to the somewhat more standard foosball and ping pong tables), I don’t think Hammond has lost sight of that fact yet.

Office amusements need not be that organized or permanent, mind you. Jason Bartholme’s SEO Blog has compiled a list of seven office games you can play with your coworkers that don’t involve any heavy equipment, and this video illustrates what’s possible with office chairs, cubicles, and a little imagination.

You can even bring the fun with you when you’re on the road, if you’re bold enough to bring a Razor scooter along. Case in point: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh skating around the offices of Meetup.

Whatever you do, the point is that having fun around the office—particularly on Fun Stuff Friday—is a great way to blow off steam, bond with your coworkers, and improve office morale.

What kinds of fun and games happen around your office? Let us know!

When you track your social media relationships in an intelligent contact database like the one that’s at the heart of JitterJam, it’s important to periodically clean up your database to make developing legitimate prospects into customers a more efficient process. Here are three tips:

Identify Spammers. Any good contact database that’s pulling data from Twitter is going to bring in both the contacts you are following and the contacts who are following you. This maximizes the number of potential customers you have to work with, but it also introduces the possibility of spammers making their way into your database. Identify them by querying the database to create a list of contacts who you don’t follow and who don’t follow you. Among this list, you are likely to find spammers who unfollowed you at a certain point, once they determined you weren’t going to reciprocate. Confirm that they’re spammers in a couple of ways. First, look at their profile pictures. If they haven’t bothered to upload a profile photo, delete them. Second, if they’re constantly retweeting things without providing any insight or context, and posting very little else, delete them. And third, if the content they’re posting isn’t relevant to your business, delete them. Cut out the noise!

Analyze One-Way Relationships. Are there people who are following you, who you haven’t followed back, but who you should be following? And what about the people you’re following who aren’t following you back? Are they worth continuing to follow? If they are worth following, is there anything you can do to get them to finally reciprocate? Analyze all of the one-way relationships in your database, and scrub the list accordingly.

Tag Contacts for Follow-Up. Are there contacts who you don’t feel comfortable deleting right now, but who might be worth getting rid of in the future? Use your database’s tagging system and create a group of contacts to pay closer attention to in the coming months. Then review this group first-thing, the next time you clean your database.

Have you cleaned your social media lists and databases yet this spring? Is it something you plan on doing this year? Drop us a note in the comments, and let us know what you did, and how it’s working out for you.

When it comes to listening in social media, searches on common terms can produce an ear-splitting amount of volume. Here at JitterJam, we’re trying to sell a product that incorporates social media listening and engagement, and that means that we’re searching social media channels for the term “social media,” which, it turns out, is a term that gets used a whole lot.

A human being can only participate in so many conversations per day, and a search on “social media” alone brings in too many results to be useful to us, so refining our social searches makes the conversation load much more manageable.

Possible refinements include adding words (like marketing and best practices), and modifying words (like searching on “social CRM” or “social marketing” instead of “social media”). But something I hadn’t experimented with as much before today was adding limiting words to a search to restrict results.

What’s the biggest cause of clutter for us when listening for mentions of the words “social media”? Links. Plain and simple, the amount of links being shared via social media about social media is immense. This is useful to us when we’re looking for great content to share. But, when we’re looking for people and companies who we think could benefit from the use of our product, the links get in the way. So, this afternoon, I did something simple and tried excluding “http” from a search.

The results narrowed substantially, but were still so vast that I needed to further refine them. I added the word “help” (figuring that this would bring up users searching for help with their social media efforts) and Bingo, I had a manageable search (about 300 results expected per day) to begin mining for potential customers.

What search terms are giving you fits or have given you fits in the past? How have you refined your searches to get more useful results? Let us know.

“[W]hen you give engineers the chance to apply their passion to their company, they can do amazing things.”

That quote comes to us from Google software engineer Bharat Mediratta (in a 2007 interview with Julie Bick of The New York Times), and Google has certainly proved the statement accurate. Google’s 20% time policy encourages employees to spend 20% of their time working on projects that they’re passionate about but which don’t necessarily fit into their job descriptions. And the projects that have resulted from this (to one extent or another) include big name products such as Gmail, Google News, and Google Reader.

This is nothing new, of course. As Scott Berkun points out in this 2008 article, 3M’s 15% time rule in the 1950s helped usher into existence both masking tape and Post-It notes.

As you can imagine, this is a much-beloved perk of working for Google (big enough that it appears on Google’s Jobs page). And companies big and small could benefit from some version of it. Lifehacker has some tips, as does Google developer Joe Beda.

Ever produced anything awesome in your spare time at work? Are you encouraging your employees to follow their passions on the job (within reason, of course)? Leave a note in the comments below, and let us know.

Then get out there and have yourself a fantastic Fun Stuff Friday!