Monday, November 29, 2010

Your Twitter Brand Tracking Tool - Tap11


With fast paced social media space one really needs all the help there is to harness the social media potential. Using the right management tools makes your job easier and more fun.


Tap11 is anvanced browser based Twitter client and management dashboard with usefull analytics tools. Tap11 features will help you to manage your online precense, monitor your brand online visibility, and support you to organize effective Twitter handling.


Using Tap11 is easy once you get familiar with the basic three pane UI structure:


LEFT - Feature Menu listing the core dashboard and stats functionality
TOP - Status Updates functionality 
RIGHT - Content UI pane with multi column drag / drop support




Starting with Tap11 is quite easy. Using settings dialog you can add your social media accounts, general alerts settings, and additional manager accounts. Tap11 supports updates to core set of several social media networks like:
Status updates are easy to do and work fast as expected from quality tool. Tap11 supports also the needed multi account functionality and status update helpers like:
  • - URL shrinking
  • - Twitter list support
  • - Scheduled Tweets support
  • - multi manager accounts for team use 
Buzz Monitoring for Twitter with configurable buzzword alerts is nice feature for brand owner. You can set up all your key brand terms to be followed and then track how the brand online visibility changes ower time. 



For dashboard statistics Tap11 provides you account and Tweet level statistics features. Supported trend graphs are:
  • - Followers trend
  • - Listed trend
  • - Mentioned trend
  • - Retweets trend
  • - media views trend
  • - Retweets trend
  • - Replies trend
  • - Link usage trends


For all Apple iPhone, iPod, and iPad users Tap11 also provides a cool iOS App that makes it possible to analyse your Twitter space on the move.

If you need a full function Twitter brand tracking solution, with this kind of a nice set of tools the Tap11 is one to think about. You can start to evaluate Tap11 with free 30-day trial by requesting a trial from Tab11 website. 


#FutureWebTrendsNow





Sunday, November 21, 2010

Manage your online identity and personal brand

Living online is like being in public all the time. What ever you do can come back and haunt you even after a long period of time. What ever you write or do by yourself is up to you, but what about if someone is doing it for you or against you? There is always danger that your content, brand, and your identity could be used by someone else.

Online identity management and personal branding tools and techniques can help you to fight against online identity theft. There are several services and companies that help you to monitor, track, analyze, and build online reputations.

Social media brand protection

Social media branding online is important for everyone because in fast online world your online brand defines what people are going to associate you with. Building a strong personal online brand requires you to register your name from at least most popular social media networks. Claiming your name and other high value brand keywords also helps you to own and control your presence online and eliminate brandjacking. It is advisable to concentrate your activity on 2 - 6 key networks and just claim your name from the rest. Services line KnowEm and Claim.io will help you through this process.



Online social media personal profile management

Now you have started the process of claiming the important social media network names. After a while you will notice that it's getting difficult to manage your overall online profile that is a collection of several social media network identities. For active social media person there is great need for general profile management solution that will help you to expand your online presence and boost your personal brand. If you are not yet using the profile management tools - now it is right time to start. There are various different services around like: kgbpeople, dandyid, and KnowEm. Using Kgbpeople people can search different profiles and monitor their profile on the Web, set alerts, and manage their reputation while online.



Online identity management

One last aspect of managing your personal online Me is to claim your online identity and think that through what online identity providers you will authenticate yourself to various online services. This is already possible and the big social media networks are currently important online identity providers e.g. Facebook makes it possible to log in number of other services. So claim your identity at least from Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft Live. I would also suggest you to register an OpenID identity from one of the OpenID identity providers like: Google, or myspace.

#FutureWebTrendsNow

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Social Shopping - Apps for Consumer Feedback

We all have a passion for brands - we love some brands and we are not so excited about some. Riding this idea appears Socialsmack - a fun social media network for anyone to participate in conversations about their brand experiences while earning activity points, badges and gathering status in a social-shopping-game setup. So in a way Socialsmack is partly information network, partly consumer reviews website and also a social game.



The gaming idea with badges is quite similar than found in Foursquare and it can be quite addictive. It seems that more and more people are willing to share information about what they and how they are shopping and also participate in conversations about their brand experiences. This is a interesting and important social media trend that should be followed closely by businesses and corporations.

Socialsmack is not alone there are other similar social media services like Yelp,GetGlueMyLikesMyBrandz, and Hollrr

Cool social review service that also provides location based features with barcode-scanning is Stickybits. Stickybits service provides each product or brand dedicated product wall where users add comments, photos, and videos.






Monday, November 15, 2010

Quote:





The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.


William Gibson, quoted in The Economist, December 4, 2003



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Protecting your brand online

Protecting your business brand or personal identity is becoming really important for users and modern corporations. Increasing amount of brand related discussion and activity is happening inside social media networks and online communities. 

Entry level brand protection usually means that businesses have reserved domain names for key brands. This is really a must and should also be maintained actively because new domains and domain names come available. Domain name protection will also become more important in future for celebrities and even regular individuals. The best starting point for checking out the free domain names isWhois.net- database.  



Advanced social brand and identity protection requires that you create a social media strategy and define what the important social networks are for you. There are hundreds of different social networks online and you should register and reserve your brand as username.

Image by webtreats

Cool services like knowem and Namechk can help you to find out what desired username are still available with all those different social media networks. 



Using Social Media for Brand tracking

As a modern social media aware business or a person you need to monitor your reputation, check on trends and analyze media mentions for your company, brands, or clients. The whole task to keep up with your brand and how it’s seen online is a full time job.  

You need to find people who are close to your brand, that have the same interests, and are potential customers for you. There are several tools available that alert you whenever your brand, product or name is mentioned, and you can also use those to track competitors. Follow-, reply-, and DM filters are useful tools to analyze twitter messages. Keywords and phrases search can be used to find potential customers and analyze your brands online visibility. For Twitter user some tracking services provide useful management features like tweet scheduling, follow/unfollow tools, and weekly email summaries.



There are various kinds of great tracking services online with different set of tools and price tag. You should just start testing and find out a right set of tools for your personal needs.
For Twitter brand tracking I'm currently using TwitJump and for all around social media tracking PostRankRadian 6, and Social Mention. There are lots of other great tools like:

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Location Based Services or Geo Location based applications

Location Based Services (#LBS) - or Geo Location based applications if you like are a really cool future social media trend that is already happening today. Using the new smartphones users can check in venues like e.g. Coffee Shops and at the same time promote these brands. Usually LBS services also offer businesses a chance to list location while bundling it with a special offers.
Checking in with your friends and to special venues in Foursquare provide you glory in form of badges. You can also leave tips about places you visit - "Try the Bater Chicken, it's so good!"
http://www.iwasaround.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/photogenic.png
There are also LBS services like Whrrl that are more than just checking in. They appear to be more like online games in real world including recommendations and referrals and even real world activation for businesses and corporate partners. If you start discovering different LBS services you might like the nice feature in Gowalla that you can save photos and associate them with places you’ve been. Glympse offers also a new approach to LBS by offering a automatic location tracking you can control. 

The big social networks like Twitter and Facebook currently also provide a possibility to users to add location to status updates and more. As LBS newcomer Facebook has really been pushing to support this feature and has organized LBS campaigns. Other cool Location Based Services you might want to try are Loopt,SCVNGRYelpRallyUp and Plyce


If you like these LBS services come and connect with me. You can catch me up usually in Foursquare or in Gowalla.

And by the way, a warning!  Location Based Services are hugely addictive!

Quote

"B2B social media will be less about marketing and more about thought leadership and crowdsourced feedback."


http://mashable.comBen Parr writing about "What the Future Holds for B2B Social Media Marketing"

Social Media for Sports Activity

For sports fans there are cool Social Media Networks to keep track on your sports activities and connect your sporting friends and like minded strangers. My first experience with sports tracking sites was the old Nokia Sports Tracker when it was in it's early days. There are basically 2 types of sports social media networks: basic status update types and then more feature rich GPS integrated ones. For my sporting needs I'm using the easy and cool HeiaHeia- network connected with Facebook. The Sports-Tracker might be the most versatile sports social media service - there are so many things you can do with it. With RunKeeper you have nice option to connect it with Foursquare and do challenger and earn Foursquare Badges. You might also like to test CardioTrainer and Gps-Sport. All of them offer the possibility to connect with other sports loving persons. Suunto has also nice sports Suunto activity website that provides social media elements.

For all Golf nuts over there you really should test the GameBook score tracking device. GameBook is a easy to use real-time event scoring system which positions players at the very centre of the golfing action. With GameBook device there is also a GameBook Clubhouse - a Golf activity service that offers tools for event management and features for connecting with other players.




Your active professional social media network

LinkedIn is a must for managing your active professional network. Forget business cards - LinkedIn is the business card of the Future and it is now. Find a balance with using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn together. Remember to:
  • fill up your profile
  • join/create communities
  • follow corporations
  • connect with your current and future business partners 
  • connect with your collegues

Using Twitterfeed to integrate your Social Media networks

Really handy tool to convert your blog or website into a RSS-feed so you can e.g. feed your Blog to Twitter or Facebook account. You can also use Twitterfeed to feed your Facebook posts to Twitter and to feed your Twitter posts to Facebook.







Visiting at DIGIExPO Helsinki 2010 6.11.2010. Huge amount of people and some cool new gadgets. The most interesting ones where Samsung Galaxy Tab and Microsoft Kinect. I had  a long discussion about Galaxy Tab and did comparisons between Apple iPad (personal) and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Both of them have really nice touch screen feel. Just perfect devices to surf Web, read email and use Social Media services.


Connect with people who you would like to know

Currently I'm mostly using Twitter to connect new and cool people. Twitter is the best way to reach out and expand you professional network online. Twitter updates through Twitter site, Twitter iPad App or with TweetDeck.