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Hiring a Social Media Agency? Read this First! News Flash: Not everyone who says they understand or have used social media actually knows what they are talking about. I know, that’s not much of a news flash for many of us. We’ve been watching as this tremendous growth of social media has created a mass-market of companies selling huge lines of BS to brands who honestly don’t know the right questions to ask.

They are like really smooth men with pick up lines that are so brilliant you don’t even see them coming. They know if a company is looking for help with social media, it is likely because they don’t understand it themselves. Therefore, if they talk in buzz words and “fake it ‘till they make it” the company will never realize they are clueless. This is so prolific you can’t really point a finger in one direction. Social media is a great strategy for every company. Social media isn’t the “right” answer for every company. You must have a presence on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and… We have an experienced social media team.

Pollinators are the New Marketing Influencers | Target Pollinators on the Web. Forget influencers. If you want to make money, target the "pollinators. " That's the new term for the 20 percent of the Internet population that has disproportionate buying power and is loyal to the niche websites that focus on their passions. Pollinators are the focus of new research called "Beyond Influence: Where to Find and Engage the New Power Consumers Online. " The research was conducted by digital media platform Martini Media and market research firm Added Value. The study found that while the Internet has served as a great equalizer, giving every consumer a voice and the opportunity to influence, it also has spawned this new breed of "uber-influencers" called pollinators. Beyond influencers "Pollinators are like influencers on steroids,” said Nima Srinivasan, senior vice president of Added Value.

Pollinators read more, share more, influence more, and engage with ads more than anyone else online. Huge marketing potential But it's not just your product they are willing to talk about. Do You Know The Real Cost Of Social Media? [Infographic] These days if you’re not using social media to build your brand then you’re way behind the times. But many companies are fooled into thinking that social media marketing is free, or at least close to free.

A new infographic published on Focus.com uncovers some of the costs of using social media for marketing, from staff costs to external fees, advertising and more, and discusses whether the ROI makes social media spending worth the cost. The infographic begins with a simple statement. “With social media at the height of its popularity, advertisers and companies find it an easy and trendy means of expanding their marketing horizons. While many companies may be fooled by the free cost to open a social media account, many fail to consider the expenses that go into running a social media campaign. Do the benefits really outweigh the costs?” According to the infographic, running a social media campaign is far from free. Megan O’Neill is the resident web video enthusiast here at Social Times. Can you become influential on Twitter merely by Tweeting a lot? A bit more than a month ago, I asked the question: Can you become influential on Twitter, and get a high Klout Score, merely by Tweeting a lot?

To test this, I set up an experiment, which involves four Twitter bots that automatically tweet the output of the Unix fortune command-line application. Fortune randomly outputs mildly humorous quotes, and was often used on Unix to produce a ‘welcome message of the day’ upon login. The four bots Tweet once every minute, once every five minutes, once every fifteen minutes and once every thirty minutes respectively. They are completely anonymous, have no avatars or custom user profiles set, and do not follow anyone. Now, after 80 days of running the experiment (Jules Verne style), there’s a set of pretty hot data available. The Data (the good) Let’s start off by simply plotting the amount of followers for each bot against time: We can clearly see from this graph (quite surprisingly), that each bot accumulated followers linearly. The Followers (the bad) 6 tips for avoiding SM failure. “Social Maturity” We've been working on a major piece of research to answer a fundamental question now affecting our clients: “How do companies change as they adopt social technologies?”

Today, we’ve published the report: Accelerating Your Social Maturity: How To Move From Social Experimentation To Business Transformation, which you can also find as a new chapter in the newly updated paperback version of the Groundswell book. Staying true to the nature of the research, this was a collaborative effort involving analysts from all nineteen of the roles Forrester serves across Marketing & Strategy, IT, and the Technology Industry, but it was ultimately written to interactive marketers like you who are often on the front lines of social media for their organization. So what did we learn? Ultimately, we found that most companies fall within five stages: Laggards: the dormant stage. So what does this all mean? 5 Ways To Be Recognized as A Social Media Influencer. Can You Recognize A Social Media Influencer, When You See Them? Well the obvious answer is yes, absolutely you can. Think of some of your favorite Social Media Influencers, why you choose to follow them and how they influence you personally.

Although many of the effective principles are paralleled, leading and influencing in the world of social media can sometimes be more difficult than leading/influencing in a traditional leadership/work settings. The social media influencer has to lead purely through relational, cause and content equity. There is no positional equity, hierarchical leadership or formal boss. Social Media Influence is not simply about the numbers but rather about value. On the other hand @revrunwisdom is probably one of the most influential individuals on Twitter.

Actress @Alyssa_Milano is a social media influencer, not because she is an actress but rather because she adds tons of value by sharing relevant content, promoting causes, sharing her life and being herself. Internet users per time zone (chart) Posted in Tech blog on May 19th, 2011 by Pingdom We know that there are approximately two billion Internet users in the world, but how are they distributed? More specifically, how are they spread over the world’s time zones? The world population isn’t spread evenly, and neither is the Internet population. We couldn’t find this information anywhere, so we collected the data ourselves and did the necessary calculations to be able to put together this chart. We hope you will find it useful. To learn more in detail what we did (methodology, etc.), check out the “How we did it” section below. Notes about the infographic: The time zones shown also include any “uneven” time zones, e.g. Some things we learned from this survey Two time zones stand head and shoulders above the others in terms of the amount of Internet users they contain: UTC+8, which passes through eastern Asia, and UTC+1, which passes through Europe and Africa.The largest time zone bracket is UTC+8 (503 million Internet users).

The 5 Rules of Social Media Etiquette. Just today an acquaintance told me her mother-in-law wrote a defamatory statement on Facebook about her. Although she let it roll off her shoulders, I was surprised that someone would do that to a family member. A leading family law firm Bross Bennett warns how damaging digital communications can be if used incorrectly, with detrimental affects going further than recipients and online communities and right into the courts of law. Just this week, a US court slashed maintenance payments to an ex-wife because of her blog posts. It can happen where users of social media don’t think before they post. Once they post, it is out there for just about anyone to see and even use.

“It’s important that everyone thinks about the possible consequences before they type. On the other hand, Bennett says, “If used correctly, modern technology can be very helpful. As a way to keep oneself in check, here are five rules of good social media etiquette: 1. 2. 3. 8 ways to protect your FB privacy. By Mark W. Smith, Detroit Free Press Posted 5/16/2011 11:08:01 PM | As Facebook becomes the window to the Web for its more than 500 million users, the security of the social network has never been a hotter topic. While it can be hard to make a Facebook account completely hack-proof, you can do a lot. Here are eight Facebook settings that you can check now: By Justin Sullivan, Getty Images file By Justin Sullivan, Getty Images file 1. Your first stop should be your privacy settings, which you can get to under "Account" at the top right of any page.

Here, make sure you're using a set of custom settings. Unless you use your Facebook account as a completely public page, every single one of these options should at least be set to "Friends Only. " 2. To make the previous tip more powerful, place your Facebook friends in lists. To do this, go to "Edit Friends" under the Account menu. You also can add a friend to a list as you accept their friend request. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. This one is even scarier. 8. How to be reconized as SM Influencer. 5 Tools to Schedule Your Tweets. With Hootsuite being down I saw myself and lots of other people in dire need to continue scheduling tweets. So here is a list of 5 other services, which will allow you to schedule your tweets.

They are all up and running. 1.) Twuffer Twuffer lets you schedule tweets on a clean interface and is completely free for you to use. 2.) FutureTweets is very similar to Twuffer and a service that is dedicated to allowing you to schedule tweets. 3.) In case you were looking for a slightly easier method, Buffer might be interesting to you. 4.) This is another interesting tool allowing you to schedule your tweets in order to remind yourself about things you don’t want to forget. 5.)

Twaitter is another tool which might take a bit of time to familiarize yourself with. Ok, that's it I hope the downtime of Hootsuite will end soon and if you are in desparate need for another scheduling tool, I hope the above ones help you with it! Connect: Authored by: Leo Widrich. A Call to Socialize - Julie Ruvolo - Digital Anthropology. Reputation Damage Control. It is no big surprise that we’re big supporters of transparency here at Trackur All shameless plugging aside, it is pretty obvious that both companies and individuals often get more heat for their efforts to cover up their wrongdoing than they do for the actual misdeed itself.

So what happens when you get into hot water? Do you have a plan for executing damage control? How about preventing it in the first place? Often, simple prevention is much less costly than clean up –both in dollars and reputation. We’ve outlined a few of our favorite tips for helping prevent the need to break out that ‘reputation crisis control’ plan below. Monitor what is being said about your company online and let people know you’re listening. If someone has a problem, fix it.

It seems pretty simple, but if you read the news you know that many companies often panic and try to hide mistakes instead of simply fixing things and moving on. How Twitter & FB tipped the revolutionary equation. Perhaps it is time to update the phrase "The pen is mightier than the sword" to "The Internet is mightier than dictators. " By Othman Laraki, contributor While the above statement is made tongue-in-cheek, it is undeniable that we are living through a time of accelerated change.

Suddenly, we are witnessing decades-long regimes being challenged by oppressed populations. It is not entirely clear what has changed, but the advent of the Social Internet seems to somehow be involved. As is frequently the case, reality is somewhere in between. The Revolutionary Equation People revolt as a function of three variables: discontent (general measure of dissatisfaction), cost of dissent (personal cost dispensed by the government to those who dissent), and expected mass (expected volume of people who are willing to express their dissent). Discontent Let's consider a distribution of discontent among a population.

Cost of Dissent A government has a relatively fixed ability to dispense "cost" for dissent. 7 Levels of SM Engagement. There are seven stages to social media engagement from shallow monitoring to deep peer to peer economies. How deep is the rabbit hole of social media? Is your organisation doing the minimum they can do, or are they quite advanced? I put together this diagram to show the steps from shallow engagement such as just monitoring to full engagement including co-creating products and services. It’s probably worth noting that every baby steps stage in social media engagement is valid – from little acorns big ol’ oak trees grow Stage Zero - What is Social Media? Doesn’t know, doesn’t care about social media. Stage One – Internal and Enterprise approach to Social Media Social Media means “waste of time” – Facebook and Twitter are blocked at the firewall because we don’t want people wasting time on social networks, even on their lunch break.

There are plans to set up an internal blog, wiki, collaborative knowledge management system, Yammer. Stage Two: Social Media Monitoring and Eavesdropping. 5 Simple Web Apps For Saving Time at Work. This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Much has been made of some excellent mobile and tablet apps that let users stay productive on the go. But let's face it — the majority of your work is still done at your desk, and much of it, perhaps, in a web browser.

And despite all your settings, apps and software, there are always those little pain points that cost you time and productivity. They're not major issues, but little tasks that could be quicker and easier. Enter the humble web apps that, while overshadowed a bit by the smartphone revolution, are still the bread and butter bookmarks of daily workplace productivity. We've highlighted five free online tools that are simple, clean, and built to knock out those cumbersome work tasks, no downloads required. Got a few bookmarks that you can't get through the work day without?

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 5 Free and Easy Listening Tools for Social Media Monitoring. Do you wonder what your customers are saying about your product or service across the web? Listening effectively to your customers can be a very insightful experience. The better you are at listening; the better you can understand your customer’s wants and needs. With the rise, and seemingly universal adoption, of social media amongst consumers, businesses can now listen in on conversations regarding their products and services if they have the right tools.

Although you cannot control these discussions, you can monitor them and respond accordingly. Here are five free tools to include in your social media listening tool belt: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Once you get your “listening headquarters” all set up you will find it hard to turn off. Listening to what people say can teach you a lot about what you are doing right, and perhaps more importantly, what you are doing wrong. Which tools do you use for your social media listening efforts? Connect: Authored by: Jason Miller. Why your Biz Plan need a Shot of SM. How Marketers Use SM. 6 Verbs You Need to Understand for the New Web. How to Build Your Reputation on Social Q&A Sites. History Of Mobile Operating Sys. Mobile By The Numbers [INFOGRAPHIC] Mobile RSS Readers. Avoiding social media legal woes. How NOT to Respond to Criticism or Bad Publicity in Social Media.

15 Best of the Best Articles about Twitter. Social Media New Uses by 2012. Facebook to replace company Web site? Ignorance (of Social Media) is Risk. Why Mobile Social Applications Appeal to Human Nature? 6 tools to measure your personal branding efforts. Reputation Economy. Don't make these social media blunders. Digital America (Internet, Twitter &FB Stats) What Are Your Social Media Goals? 6 Secrets of Social Media Success.