Social Media

5 Tips On How to Filter Through The Fluff!

Marketers are constantly inundated with information on the #digitalmediasphere – felt like a hashtag was appropriate for this post! The amount of information our brains have to consume on a daily basis is mind blowing, literally. According to Mail Online, each person is drowned with “174 newspapers’ worth of information every day.” FastCompany also published an infographic in September 2010 based on the book The 24-Hour Customer, indicating that we will generate more data in the next 4 years than in the history of the world, adding that the average person is connected 12 hours a day to some form of digital media which translates to 34 billion bits of information per day (an equivalent of two books).

The biggest concern for marketers is the ability to sort through all the fluff and not get bogged down. Recent studies are showing that the level of information we are being asked to break down can cause increased stress levels. So how do we keep on top of the abundance of information and still keep our sanity? Learn how to filter through the fluff and manage your time. Here are 5 tips that can get you started:

TIP #1. BE SELECTIVE. Don’t follow every single person on Twitter who follows you, or subscribe to every blog with the word “digital marketing” in it. Be selective to what you subscribe to and who you follow. Similarly, don’t feel the need to subscribe to every single news outlet, most likely they all end up publishing the same stories within 24 hours of each other anyway. By being selective you can start filtering through the noise and choosing what you really want to focus your brain cells on.

TIP #2. TAKE TIME OFF. Set aside certain time periods when you are active on social media, reading the news, updating your blog, and so on and so forth. We spend most of our waking hours connected to some form of digital media. Sometimes it’s nice to tune out. Take a break and set rules and regulations. For example, when you are at the gym don’t be the person on the treadmill who is replying to emails and tweets. It’s okay to not reply back right away. Let your body relax and do something else. You can set time limits for yourself of when you are on and off, even computers need down time.

TIP #3. UTILIZE DASHBOARDS. Dashboards help aggregate various accounts and create search tabs to sort through specific content. Hootsuite is a great dashboard that allows you to do both. You can add all your social media accounts to this one dashboard so that you don’t have to keep switching between tabs or windows to get up-to-date on all the new content. You can also create search tabs with specific keywords such as “online marketing” or “search engine optimization” and Hootsuite will then aggregate content based on that filter. That way you can sort through the fluff without actually having to do it yourself, the dashboard does it for you.

TIP #4. ACTIVATE GOOGLE ALERTS. There are a ton of free tools available online that help you filter through the data, Google Alerts is one of them. Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your queries. You get the most up-to-date information sent directly to your mail box.

TIP #5. CREATE YOUR OWN READER. Setup a RSS Feed Reader or News Aggregator by adding your favorite blogs, and websites to it so you can keep on top of the latest content without actually having to visit the site. Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.

Hopefully these tips will help you stay on top of your content, and help save you a little time and stress!

Maryam Mehrtash @socialmaryam

Tags: data, digital, facebook, information, marketing, Social Media, stress, Twitter

What If…There Was a 2-Tweet Per Day Limit?

Have You Ever Wondered “What if…?”

I believe innovation, inspiration and imagination begins with someone asking “What if…?”. Sometimes, when we’re in the midst of creating a digital strategy, implementing a marketing tactic or developing creative content, we conform to familiar ideas, paths and practices. But, what if we took a step back and challenged the current norms and limits in today’s online environment? Maybe, just maybe, we can create a spark that will set ablaze the next big success in digital strategy.

I will begin a series tackling the idea of “What if…?” I hope you will come along.

What if…Twitter allowed users to publish only 2 tweets per day.

For some users, publishing 2 tweets per day is already a lot to manage. For other users, it’s a huge restriction. This 2-tweet per day limit will likely affect the serial tweeters and the notorious spam bots the most.

Twitter is filled with a lot of noise. Some people try to manage it by only following back a small number of users, using hashtags to organize tweets or by using the search function to find desired information. Others simply give up on using Twitter.

But if Twitter introduced a 2-tweet limit per day, the noise would be drastically reduced. Here’s why:

• The quality of tweets by legitimate users should increase because they will have to think carefully about what they tweet. For example, “Do I really want to use up my quota and talk about what I ate for breakfast? Or should I save my last tweet of the day in case Google announces they are taking over the World?”
• Spam bots that plague Twitter will also be limited to the amount of spam they can generate in a day.

Limits, when used effectively in an appropriate context can help shape people’s behaviour. By creating scarcity, tweets become that much more valuable.

What do you think about a 2-tweet per day limit on Twitter?

Victor
Digital Strategist

Tags: noise, strategy, tweet, Twitter, what if

Talk about taking engagement up a notch!

Are you sick of hearing about another new Facebook feature? Well, either adapt or get off because this won’t be the last of it I promise you. The social media landscape is all about staying ahead of the curve, and that is exactly why Facebook is constantly experimenting with new features, widgets, and plug-ins that will ultimately increase online user engagement. The last few additions to Pages have done exactly just that!

Whether you “Like” a Page or not doesn’t count towards engagement anymore like it used to.  You could have millions of “likes” on your page but what really counts is whether people are “talking about this.”  This feature measures activity that is initiated by the user, not the administrator, including a wall post, “liking,” commenting, or sharing a Page post, answering fan questions, mentioning a Page, and “liking” or sharing a deal. Media strategists love this new feature because it illustrates actual activity generated by the user, which gives you a pretty good picture of who is really talking about your brand. This doesn’t mean “Likes” are completely irrelevant, but it just goes to show that just because someone “Likes” or identifies with your brand, it doesn’t mean that they will engage or care about it.  Or not care about it for that matter, since “talking about this” also counts trash talking.

Additional metrics that have been added to Pages Insight that would be of interest to media strategists are “Friends of Fans” and “Weekly Total Reach.” Friends of Fans calculates the total number of friends your fans have, giving you an idea of how far your reach could be if all your fans engaged by sharing your content. Weekly Total Reach gives you an assessment of how many total people have posted something about your Page, including news organizations, references, and shares, giving you a clear picture of your Pages’ viral distribution.

Facebook also rolled out a location feature “were here” on Pages that represents how many check-ins a brand has compiled. This is similar to the former Facebook Places that was killed off earlier this year. We knew location based social media activity wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon; it just needed a bit of a facelift apparently. It does make one wonder what Facebook will do with Gowalla’s technology since its acquisition and what location-based changes will come out in 2012. To be able to use the “were here” feature you need to provide an address on your Pages to use this feature. Restaurants, retailers, and other businesses with a physical location for their customers to go to can benefit from this by being able to gauge foot traffic. I don’t really see a huge benefit for business owners with no physical space, artists, or online stores. Also, another downfall to this feature is that if you are a big brand such a Burger King that has multiple locations but one fan Page you can only enter one location and the stats of how many people “were here” will only include that one store. Big brands like McDonalds have figured out a way around this, by contacting Facebook and having their own Facebook rep group all their locations. Obviously, not everyone is McDonalds and can just pick up the phone call Facebook and drop the dough – it will be interesting to see how long this feature will last and what Facebook will do to make it more adaptable for the smaller players.

Lastly, if you haven’t seen the “write a recommendation” feature on Pages you can check it out on the side bar of any Page. Or if you’ve “Liked” a new Page recently you might have received a pop-up widget asking you to write a recommendation to help your friends learn more about this Page. Again this is Facebook testing, and retesting various methods that will stick and work in increasing online engagement! But don’t get too comfortable, as with the launch of Timeline this last week, I’m sure Pages will get a huge makeover any time soon!

The Big Idea of Technology Driven Advertising

Remember the days when you’re on vacation driving down the highway with billboards flashing in your face? Or ads interrupting your musical paradise as you drive away in your convertible? Some made you laugh, others you didn’t even notice.

For the most part those days are gone. The future of advertising has changed forever. It was only ten years ago when advertising was driven by media placements and campaigns. Then the dotcom era started along with YouTube, and it slowly became about creating a complimentary online campaign to a brand’s TV campaign. Now, it’s about experimenting with an abundance of apps and networks that a customer pulls out of their pocket.

The acceleration of innovative change since the smartphone has led to onslaught of new apps. Combine that with powerful social communication tools and our society has forever changed the way we communicate. Today, advertising is not just about creative; it’s become a creative tool for business operations. We believe advertising has become a technology driven creative service that provides brands the opportunity to increase the effectiveness and impact of creativity.

Technology is the vehicle that drives the creative and key message, but in most cases it doesn’t determine what app or network the brand should be on. Nor does it determine what the creative and key message is. For example, we focus on the client’s objectives to develop the big idea based on the insights produced in our research. The big idea always has to drive your creative, not the technology.

One company particularly, is demonstrating how the combination of social and mobile can be a very effective combination to enhance the delivery of a big idea.
American Express has been one of the most active businesses in 2011 partnering with both Foursquare and Facebook to offer integrated seamless deals. Realizing that Groupon could be a major threat to their business, American Express started with a big idea: “American Express takes what you ‘Like’ and gives what you love.”

With this idea in mind, American Express launched two integrated social and mobile initiatives. The most recent one is a new Facebook “Link, Like, Love” app that allows Amex cardholders to sync their card to their social graph. This provides customers with personalized deals based on brands they’ve liked on Facebook. What’s the best thing? The customer does not have to purchase the deal. It’s automatically synched to the cardholders account.

On Foursquare, American Express is doing something similar. Instead of personalized social deals, the customer receives mobile check-in credits applied to their accounts within a few days after they tap “load to card”. The point is, every channel and every medium offers different benefits, but successful campaigns are always designed with one thing in mind, a big idea.

Even the food trucks are finding success by focusing on key messages. For instance, several food trucks in this recent Mashable article have been successful in either:

• Celebrating major milestones
• Crowdsourcing recipes on Facebook
• Building awareness and excitement during dead times
• Offering deals
• Promoting relevant holidays with timely advertising via mobile

Mobile is here now. It’s the future. But it’s only a tool; it’s not an idea. Let us help you establish that big idea.

Tags: American Express, Amex, facebook, foursquare, mobile, Social Media

ALERT™ Tip: Geo-Targeted Twitter Search in Hootsuite

Twitter is a great tool for discovering what people are saying about a company, brand, or any other topic. However, if you are only interested in conversations from a certain location, using Twitter’s search function might not be very helpful.

Overall, Hootsuite is a great tool for managing your company’s Twitter account. One particular feature makes it exceptional for finding conversations from a specific location.

Geo-targeted Search

Here’s how you use it:

1. Log into Hootsuite (or create a new account if you don’t have one).
2. Click the magnifying glass located at the top right.
3. Enter the desired keyword in the Search Twitter field.
4. Click the circular (cross-hair) located right of the search field.
5. In the window that pops up, click the Save as Stream button.

The resulting stream will show tweets that include your desired keyword, in your proximity.

Now if you want tweets from a location that is different from your current city, you will first need to determine the latitude and longitude of the desired location. You can use http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html to figure out the coordinates.

How to Edit Geo-Targeted Search

1. Locate the stream you just created in Hootsuite.
2. Click the inverted triangle located at the top right of the stream.
3. Select Preferences from the drop down menu.
4. In the search query field, replace the existing coordinates with the desired coordinates (make sure you only replace the coordinates section – bolded in this example “canucks geocode:49.2639013,-123.1117966,25km”).
5. If you want to expand or restrict the geo-target radius, change the distance configuration in the search query (25km is the default distance).
6. Click the Save Changes button.

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Tags: ALERT™, geo-target, HootSuite, licensing, magnify digital, search, Twitter