The Socializers | social business

Spend 36 Hours with Lorrie Thomas, The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course: Online Marketing!

admin January 14, 2011 No Comments

Nathaniel Hansen, CEO of The Socializers, (traveling in Athens, Greece) caught up with Lorrie Thomas, CEO of Web Marketing Therapy (traveling in Austin, TX) today for a quick interview on the release of her new book The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course: Online Marketing.

1. What’s one of your favorite Internet Marketing tips from your new book released today, Lorrie?

My #1 tip from my online marketing book is the healthy reminder that it is not all the geeky-cool wild web tools out there, it is HOW we use the tools strategically to make and grow relationships. At the end of the day, marketing truly means making relationships. This reminder is our compass that heps us choose the social web tools and decide how to use them.

2. What do you see in 2011 in the world of the Internet and social networks?

For 2011, I see a smarter use of social networking. The use of social networking as an interactive Rolodex will continue, however, community development, service and collaboration will explode. People seem to finally get that social web tools merely amplify traditional networking we do live 🙂

3. I hear that this book is a course and the reader can actually take an online test for certification upon completing the book. Say more!

The 36 Hour Course to Online Marketing does have an online exam that can get readers a certificate in online marketing! There are 100 quiz questions (instructions of where to take them online are in the book) and it is such a smart way to grade your comprehension and boost your resume! McGraw-Hill has been a wonderful partner in this book process and their certificates are such a nice bonus.

4. What conference(s) do you recommend attending in 2011?

As the CEO of a virtual company, I first recommend attending every webinar you can to get the most bang for your buck. Web Marketing has a channel on BrightTalk.com and I’m launching a 36 Hour Online Marketing channel this year too. Devour every Hubspot webinar you can! I am attending the eMarketing conference in SF, Social Media week in SF and RISE Global in Austin live this year, check all those out!

5. Love seems to be a BIG theme lately in your posts. Any thoughts on how Love is important in the world of Internet Markting?

Ah, love :). When marketers love their current and prospective customers, everything falls into place. Love keeps us ethical, boosts how well we communicate and keeps things gentle. May we all embrace love!

Find more on Lorrie Thomas, The Web Marketing Therapist at http://www.webmarketingtherapy.com/.

Business Presence 2011

admin December 19, 2010 No Comments

Consider some of the steps below as you move into 2011.

1. STUDY: http://mashable.com/ + http://www.readwriteweb.com/ + http://techcrunch.com/ + http://thenextweb.com/ + http://www.web-strategist.com
2. MAKE A BUSINESS PLAN: http://bit.ly/make_it_happen
3. GATHER AUDIENCE INTELLIGENCE: http://bit.ly/audience_intel
4. REFINE BUSINESS PLAN (based on intelligence)
5. CLAIM YOUR PROPERTIES IN THE SOCIAL INTERNET: http://knowem.com/
6. PREPARE CONTENT: http://bit.ly/content_grid + http://www.behance.net/products + http://mashable.com/dev-design/design/
7. GO MOBILE: http://on.mash.to/go_mobile
8. BUILD AN APP: http://on.mash.to/create_app
9. SCHEDULE YOUR CONTENT DELIVERY: http://hootsuite.com/ + http://www.socialoomph.com/ + http://www.ping.fm/
10. MONITOR AND ADJUST: http://bit.ly/audience_intel

Social Fishing Rods: The W’s of Social Intelligence Gathering

admin December 15, 2010 No Comments

The W’s of journalism can be a great starting point for asking questions in social intelligence projects. See below expansion of the W’s for social intel, business intel and general social media monitoring work.

Note that the trend in 2011 will be towards integrating “action buttons” WITHIN social intel panels so that community managers can take meaningful and potent action on real-time intelligence.

Another take on this is that actionable tools like BuddyMedia will integrate increasingly powerful business-related intelligence within their already robust metrics panels, informing pre-campaign strategic process and whole-campaign adjustments. Research.ly is an example of a tool where one receives real-time intelligence from social networks and can act on that intelligence using a Twitter posting field.

Punchy insights from real-time data will inform strategic thinking AND the functionality of “social action” buttons used by non-analytical/non-technical Community Managers. Social Intel Tools will merge with Social Management Tools.

▪ WHO:
•Who are your current followers? Who follows them? (GIST)
• How can I take all of my connections established using social media + my contact database, and visually map out a path from my organization to those individuals/companies that will be beneficial to our initiatives? How can I clearly identify the connection paths, labeling what type of connection it is, and the role of the individuals? (PeopleMaps)
•Who is talking about your brand/product/services/employees? (Social Listening Tools)
•Would any of these individuals make good brand ambassadors, community managers, or customer advocates?
(WeFollow, PeerIndex, Klout, Listorious, Research.ly)
•Which of your current followers are already key influencers in your niche or a related vertical?
(WeFollow, PeerIndex, Klout, Listorious, TwitterGrader, Research.ly)
•Who influences them? And who influences those influencers?
(WeFollow, PeerIndex, Klout, Listorious)
•What Twitter lists are these influencers on or following?
(Listorious)
•How influential are those people in your niche?
(Klout)
•Which of these influencers receive tons of comments?
(ConvoTrack, Technorati, Listorious, CoComment, Backtype)
•Which have tons of followers?
(Listorious)
•Who are the top influencers for your niche?
(WeFollow, PeerIndex, Klout, Listorious)

▪ WHAT:
•What are your stakeholders/fans/allies saying about you?
•What questions are they asking? (Quora)
•What are customers feeling about your brand/product/services/employees?
(One of the world’s greatest experts in the field of discovering sentiment and feeling – Life Analytics)
•What reactions do these stakeholders/fans/allies have about your brand/product/services/employees?
•How can you engage your followers/key influencers beyond a passing mention of the brand/product/services/employees? (Consume Brian Solis and Seth Godin material).
• How can you engage your employees/team members in more effective collaboration and gain insight based on collaborative feedback? (Spigit, 37 Signals)
•What percentage of the conversations are positive, negative or neutral?
•What are the actions of “peers” or the circle of customers around the brand/product/service in social networks?
•Are your customers/typical purchasers active in social networks? What is the ethos of their online culture?
•What are useful resources to research your brand/product/services/employees/vertical/niche? (Social Tools, Twitter Tools, The Journalist’s ToolBox, TwentyFeet, SproutSocial, Research.ly)
• What apps might provide access to my ideal followers/customers/fans/influencers? (AppData)

▪ WHERE:
•Where are your stakeholders/fans/allies located in social networks? (Flowtown, IntroMojo, GIST)
• Where do I stand in relation to my competitors in terms of traffic, share of voice, engagement? (Compete, Alexa, Klout)
•In which of the following are the conversations happening about your brand/product/services/employees?:
-Twitter (Listorious, Twitter Search, Twazzup, Topsy Search)
-Facebook page-threads, Facebook groups, Facebook Key Influencer wall-threads (Facebook Insights, All Facebook Page Leaderboards, Booshaka)
-blog threads (Social Tools, CoComment, Backtype)
-forum threads (Social Tools, CoComment, Backtype, Board Reader)
-web communities (Joongel)
-top-of-mind comment threads (Board Reader, Social Tools, CoComment, Backtype)
-video comments/shares (YouTube Keyword Tool)
-photo comments/shares (Flickr Advanced Search)
-presentation comments/shares (Slideshare search window, Scribd search window)
-LinkedIn groups/comment-threads
-location-based networks (4sqSearch)
•Consider the relative merits/benefits of joining a well-followed conversation vs. creating one.

▪ WHEN:
•What time of day are people talking about you?
•What time of the week/month/year?
•Are the conversations event-driven?
•Are the conversations cyclical/seasonal?
•How do you keep the conversation going during the off-season/non-event times?

▪ WHY: (beware of analysis paralysis on this category!!)
•Why are there spikes in conversation around your brand/product/services/employees?
•What events occurred, what specific words were said, what personalities were involved?
•The answers to the above questions can inform the broader WHY question.
•Create the BIG picture with a Montage (FuseLabs Montage) or hashtag/@-sourced/RSS-sourced real-time publication like Paper.li. Publish all of your findings as a report. (How to Write and Publish an eBook).
• Leave where you are and begin something new. Learn how at Startup School, at Seth Godin and through Tim Ferriss.
• Stay where you are and make a change. Same as above + read Charlene Li’s Open Leadership book + Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategist blog.

Create the action!

admin December 12, 2010 No Comments

Gary Shapiro suggests a comeback “based on innovation of entrepreneurs, rather than new federal spending on government jobs.” 100% agree! The invisible hand of the market always moves faster and better than the heavy hand of government. Private contractors and specialists go direct, by creating the action vs. reacting to the action.

When a culture where Critics have ruled Creatives realizes the necessity of training Creatives to use critique as fuel for entrepreneurial activity…then that culture shall evolve into a blooming tree giving life to all in its shade. Let the love affair that ought to exist between Critic and Creative begin and may many strong and bright progeny be born.

Viva les entrepreneurs!

Customer Intelligence in a real-time social eco-system

admin November 18, 2010 No Comments

The pressing need in customer intelligence is a solution related to a real-time eco-system. One deeper philosophical issue in this space relates to variable velocity, to quote Lee Bryant. Tools like PeerIndex and Recorded Future do a good job of segmenting and defining the truly staggering flow of data AND audiences interacting with that data. Datasift (http://datasift.net/) is a leader in architecting methodologies for analyzing the complex fabric of the social Internet.

For an important new study on Customer Intelligence Trends 2011, see the following Forrester Report: ‎”At the same time, the demand for insight — not just data — in real time creates a challenge but also a huge opportunity to extend the value of Customer Intelligence throughout the enterprise. Leading CI professionals who evolve and adapt to these trends will quickly find themselves at the nexus of the business.” ~from Customer Intelligence Trends To Watch In 2011 (http://bit.ly/customer_intelligence_trends_2011)

WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: DEFINITIONS
(Some basic info below)

Business intelligence (BI) refers to computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments or associated costs and incomes.

BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of Business Intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics.

Business Intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS). Though the term business intelligence is often used as a synonym for competitive intelligence, because they both support decision making, BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes while competitive intelligence is done by gathering, analyzing and disseminating information with or without support from technology and applications, and focuses on all-source information and data (unstructured or structured), mostly external, but also internal to a company, to support decision making. (SOURCE)

The global business intelligence (BI) software market is projected to reach $12.4 billion by the year 2015, driven by the growing need to empower all stakeholders of businesses with right information at the appropriate time.

Uncertain economic conditions, intense competition and increasing volumes of organizational information are forcing enterprises to seek efficient means of deriving value from information for improving the overall efficiency of business processes. In this regard, BI technology is emerging as an essential tool for identifying new revenue-generation opportunities as well as to control unproductive expenditures. BI offers tools, processes and applications for facilitating organizations to analyze and consolidate data gathered from various sources for optimizing operational performance and for improving business decision-making. BI and analytics software helps organizations to analyze the information built up over the years, which resides in the enterprise systems. (Source)