Toot sweet…Ping.fm & HootSuite

Social Media Guru 2006

Back in 2006 I remember talking to a client about the trials and tribulations of blogging for business, and as with most executive bloggers his greatest concern was time. Did he really have enough time to deliver the type consistency a first rate blog needed? Truthfully he didn’t, so we set up a multi-user blogging system to distribute the “blogging-burden”. This way my client’s company could post on a daily basis with out any one person dealing loom ‘n’ doom of the dreaded blogging-deadline.

sabbatical 2010

Fast forward to 2010 and I found myself in a simliar conversation, but this time it centered around Social Media. With the introduction of  Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc in addition to her existing blogging duties, my client began to see large chunks of her day being gobbled up by the multi-headed beast known as Social Media Marketing. So on top of her already daunting daily duties as the Marketing Director, she began to feel the burden of a marketing interns everywhere, spending her many a  morning updating the company’s various social media properties.

So her “Ask” was; “How do we engage all of our Social Media Properties with out me having to spend hours engaging each one, one at a time?”

Luckily I had gone through a similar situation when I returned from my 365 day sabbatical from the world of consulting. As I began to rebuild my Social Media presence I found myself spending hours be-bopping around my various account; Post on Twitter, wander across they virtual way to check out my Facebook feed; than bounce over to LinkedIn message my contacts, etc, etc, etc. So being the mensaian social media marketer that I am, I set about finding an application that would allow me to update my status boxes across the board  while taking in all the info my networks had to offer. What I ended up with was a mashup of  Ping.fm & HootSuite.

ping.fm's networks

Wonderful simplicity. Ping.fm is a simple and wickedly useful service that enables you to manage your status updates across 50+ social networks at once. As you become a citizen of more and more of the social media sites updating all of them can be incredible time drain, but in using ping.fm you are able to post one single update in Ping.fm and the update is automatically sent to all of the social media sites you earmarked during the Ping.fm set up process.

The draw back to using a service like Ping.fm is you run the risk missing out on the emerging conversation that happens outside of the service. This is where the fantastic service HootSuite comes in. HootSuite, a social media dashboard, allows users to manage their Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Foursquare and Ping.fm accounts through a singular interface. The company bills itself as “The Professional Twitter Client” and from my mountain top view, I have to say it’s not only the best “Twitter Client” around but the best “Social Media Client”.

Multiple Network Views

Hootsuite allows you manage multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, and with its integration of the Ping.fm API it allows you to stay on top of virtually every social media site you’d care to join. What’s even sweeter is you have the ability to grant access to multiple editors, to any of your existing accounts. This comes in handy when you have a corporate Twitter or Facebook Page account and would like to grant you members of marketing team posting privileges.Additionally HootSuite provides tracking information on your tweets, and multi-stream viewing of all your various networks.

Combing HootSuite and Ping.fm displaces a lot of the temporal concerns with Social Media Marketing and allows for consistent messaging across all of your social media networks. So take the sting out of keeping your network up to date and get signed up for Ping.fm and Hootsuite today. Of course once you get setup should you need any help with that ornery Social Media Marketing gives a shout, the Bedouin is back from sabbatical.

How much is your wall worth….$3.60

What’s the average facebook fan worth? According to a study conducted by Virtue, about $3.60. According to Virtue’s research a Facebook Page with 1 million fans is worth a minimum of $3.6 million in earned media annually.

Pulling from 45 million fans, sampling data across varying pages, virtue was able to determine a wall post impression to Fan ratio of approximately 1:1. In other words a page with 1 million fans can create 1 million impressions with a single post…Holy Moses smell the roses! Now post twice a day for a month and your creating 60 million impressions…wholly small country Batman! Any one who has put a PPC campaign together can appreciate this mind bending numbers.

To get to the $3.60 facebook fan valuation, Virtue assumed a $5.00 CPM, which gives a page with 1 million fans a value of $360,000.

So are you leveraging your social media assets to the fullest? This simple valuation puts the importance of a Facebook Fan acquisition strategy center stage. So grow that fan base, with Facebook Ads, kick ass apps and exclusive offers.

If you’re have questions about maximizing you Social Media ROI please give us a call, shoot us a message or throw up a quick smoke signal (the orignal twitter).

BD1i

Social Media Not a ‘Marketing Play’ for Starbucks – mediabistro.com: AgencySpy http://bit.ly/dnyfDM

How do you define social media?…

I’ve been actively involved in the world of social media since 2003 as an entrepreneur and consultant, and it seems to me we often lose sight of what social media is really about, human interaction. Blogs, Wikis, Tweets, Mashups, Widgets, Rich Internet Applications, so on and so on, are awesome. I mean I flex my nerdosity  every time  I see a kick heiny  web app as much as the next Sleek-Geek, but it’s like getting super jazzed about a new shovel…a really awesome and shiny shovel, but a shovel none the less.

Like any tool they allow you to create something beyond their intrinsic value. Facebook and MySpace allow you to reconnect, and maintain those connections, with long-lost friends. Blogging allows give you the opportunity to engage in conversations outside of geographical and timagraphical boundaries. Twitter, the web app de jour,  can keep all on your friends and family up to date on real time decisions about the conflict between having Chipotle or Panchero’s for dinner. Like any tool, social media applications need to be used with a comprehensive strategy  built around user engagement that takes into account the audience you’re trying to reach and the conversation that you are hoping to have.

 

Social media lads and lasses, your time is now

As the United States of America ushered in a new era of leadership, and as an aging generation saw the labors of their youth come to fruition, a generation on the ascent tweeted, facebooked, streamed, and dugg every second of it. 

During President Obama’s inauguration Twitter saw 5x the normal tweets-per-second and about 4x the average tweets-per-minute (graph). Facebook enjoyed an average of over 4,000 status updates per hour Tuesday morning, peaking at 8,500 updates every minute during President Obama’s inaugural speech. The President’s speech set a new record for simultaneous streaming-video with 7.7 million video streams, according to content delivery network Akamai Technologies, which provides the NYTimes.com, Ustream, Viacom, WSJ.com, and other leading networks with support for live streaming.

The truth is all of these technologies are still in the early stages of their life-cycle, andas they continue to mature  we will find new and innovative ways to leverage them, ushering in a new age of citizen participation in government and a sense of togetherness that hasn’t been felt in generations.

I am grateful Bedouin|Interactive has the opportunity to be apart of this great transformation I and am inspired to have a leader like President Barack Obama.