Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

It should come to no shock to many of you that I am, and have been, a huge fan of Twitter since I first created my @khawe account in the spring of 2007. Over the 2 years I have been on Twitter I have tried just about every Twitter tool out there, over time I have settled on certain ones that are either the best for what I need or I am just comfortable using.

Here is a summary of all of the current Twitter tools I prefer to use through out my day.

• iPhone: When i first got my iPhone I started using Twitterrific, but slowly became annoyed with its UX and functionality. I tried a couple of other apps but eventually settled on TwitterFon - which I have been using ever since.
• BlackBerry: Since I have an iPhone the need to use my BlackBerry on a regular basis has diminished. However, the only app I have used - and would recommend - is TwitterBerry.
• Desktop Client: I was a big fan of Twirl for a long time but eventually moved on to TweetDeck. TweetDeck has been fairly stable for me since I started using it, plus the grouping of friends and UI really can’t be beat.
• URL Shortener: You can’t use Twitter on a regular basis and not have a preferred URL shortener - mine is Bit.ly. Bit.ly provides the basic functionality you need but with click tracking, great tool to see which of your tweets people are actually interested in.
• Twitter Management: Since I have multiple Twitter accounts (personal, professional, etc) I use SplitTweet to manage them all - great tool to send out one Tweet to any / all accounts without logging into each one separately.
• Page Tweet: Say you are reading something on a website that you feel your Twitter audience would appreciate / like, instead of copying the URL and title of the article I use TwitThis to automatically share the contents with my followers.
• Wordpress Plugin: I have used just about every Twitter WordPress plugin out there and have had some issue or another with all of them. The Twitter Tools plugin isn’t perfect but it does what I need (auto post to Twitter blog posts and pull in Twitter feeds) and is fairly stable.

I am sure there are better Twitter tools out there, but these are the ones that work best for me. How do you use Twitter? What tools do you prefer and why?

Dont forget to follow me @khawe on Twitter.

The true value of Social Media properties like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and millions of other websites & services dedicated to connecting people has been a question lingering out there since the term “Social Media” was created. Yes some of these websites drive millions upon million of visitors on a daily basis, but very few actually have put together a comprehensive (and successful) monetization strategy. I have wrote a few blog posts on this topic and have had numerous conversations that usually end up with people agreeing to disagree.  However, over the past couple months I have seen the power (and value) of Social Media first hand - starting with an ad on Facebook.com.

What I have listed below in chronological order is how Social Media has directly impacted a music band and how a cheap click on Facebook resulted in countless new fans.

• A few months ago I saw a Facebook ad for a band called “One Day as a Lion” - the Facebook Ad was targeted directly based on me listing Rage Against the Machine as one of my favorite bands in my profile…the lead singer of ODaaL is Zack de la Rocha the former / current lead singer of RATM. Having never heard of ODaaL I clicked on the ad - which probably cost the advertiser $.10 as Facebook ads are dirt cheap.
• After finding out more info on the band and listening to a couple of their songs I went to iTunes and bought all 5 songs on their new album ( 5 x $.99 = $4.95 - $.10 CPC =  $4.85 “profit” on click).
• The day I bought the songs I mentioned what I was listening to on both Twitter and Facebook. I freely promoted the band with a link to their site and my approval to a direct audience of 1,200+ people (# based on Twitter followers and Facebook friends). The tweet / update was also seen on a various other blogs / RSS feeds.
• Based off of that Social Media messaging I received 15 Twitter replies, 5 Twitter direct messages, 8  Facebook comments, 4 Facebook emails and 6 emails. 1 click on a $.10 ad resulted in the band being part of a social conversation consisting of at least 38 people who never heard of them before.
• Of the people I talked to about the band through Social Media methods, 6 of them subscribed to the bands mailing list and 54 total songs were purchased.
• So do the math - that one click resulted in an unknown (but decent) amount of people being exposed to the band, at least 7 people who are now directly engaged with the band through email and a total of 59 song purchases on iTunes. This example also only takes into account my one tweet / status update but I mentioned that I was listening to the band on numerous occasions and I know of other Social Media conversations that took place based on my “approval”.

Granted the above example works very well for the music genre, however there are many elements that companies of all shapes and sizes could take advantage of. At its core Social Media is about connecting with people and in the end isn’t that the goal?

Every month the Oxyweb Blog puts out a “world map of social networks around the world”. The map is a visual representation of the most popular social networking services on a country by country basis - rankings are based on Alexa data.

I love looking at this map for many reasons, the biggest being people in the United States tend to look at the social networking / media world from a MySpace vs Facebook standpoint. However, as you can see from the multitude of colors on the map that just isn’t true. It is a big and growing world out there and each country operates differently - this is the challenge and excitement of doing International Digital Marketing. Marketers in the U.S. do not even mention Google’s Orkut, however they dominate India and Brazil - two of the fastest growing economies in the world. Obviously Social Networking conversations should start with the big players, however sometimes you have to look outside your window and see who else is coming up the driveway.

Here are the map changes from September 2008:

Facebook gains Bahamas from Hi5
Facebook gains Belgium from Skyrock
Facebook gains Cuba from Hi5
Hi5 gains Cyprus from Facebook
Hi5 gains Luxembourg from Facebook

Here are the changes from august 2008:

Facebook gains Albania from Hi-5
Facebook gains Austria from MySpace
Facebook gains Bahamas from Hi-5
Facebook gains Italy from MySpace
Facebook gains Libya from MySpace*
Facebook gains Libya from MySpace*
Facebook gains Madagascar from Skyrock
Facebook gains New Zealand from Bebo
Facebook gains Qatar from Orkut
Facebook gains Uruguay from Orkut
Hi5 gains Syria from MySpace*

Check out the full-sized Social Networking Map Here…

Facebook went “live” today with Live Web Search functionality within their site search box. The integration was part of Microsoft’s $250 million investment in Facebook last year and has been long in coming. When Facebook users start to type a search query, along with “Search Facebook” and related network information, there is now a “Search the Web” feature. When choosing to search the web the user gets Live.com web results integrated into the Facebook UI with Microsoft AdCenter results displayed alongside the results. When a search result is clicked the user is taken to the Live.com search engine result page.

From the Facebook blog: “By integrating web search into Facebook, you can increase the information available to share with your friends, family and coworkers on the site. For example, your friend may invite you to an event at a new restaurant. Without leaving Facebook, you can check out the details of the restaurant on the web. Or, say you see photos in your News Feed about a friend’s recent trip to Dubai. Inspired, you can search the web for more information about travel without having to leave Facebook. Along with your search results, you may also begin to see ads for products, services or other things that are relevant to your query. “

Microsoft says that this is the first step in their partnership with Facebook and are currently exploring additional ways to “integrate Live Search more deeply into the Facebook experience”. This is certainly not the last we have heard on this and I am sure there will be better integration of Live Search within Facebook. However, looking at what went live today how much is this really going to do for Microsoft? I am sure Microsoft will see some incremental revenue from their ads, but I question how many people are actually going to search the web while within Facebook. For those that do search the web I would have though there would be better integration of Live Search within the UI - is this really going to take search share away from Google and Yahoo? No, it wont.

I hoping this is just a first crack and better integration will be coming shortly. Lets go Microsoft!

Back in February Yahoo launched their social voting / bookmarking with only a handful of hand-picked publishers. Well finally Yahoo Buzz is now open to the public…let the spamming and widget adding begin.

Yahoo Buzz basically operates like Digg, or similar sites, where users vote for the stories that interest them. The more times a story is “Buzz’d” the higher up in the results they show. There is one key difference between Yahoo Buzz and other social sites - Yahoo allows “editorial discretion” when it comes to headlines in order to prevent serious gaming.

Here is how Yahoo describes the Yahoo Buzz process: “First, we determine the most popular topics that people are searching for on Yahoo! Then, we showcase the most popular stories within those topics, based on activities like voting and emailing stories to friends. Stories with most Buzz may be published on the Yahoo! home page - you can impact what millions will see on Yahoo!.”

So what is the big deal? Who really wants to add another social widget to their website / blog? Bottom line is that the top Yahoo Buzz stories get pushed to the Yahoo.com homepage - this link would obvioulsy generate a serious amount of traffic to the linked website. If it wasn’t for the possibility of stories hitting Yahoo.com I would be ho-hum on this.

I would obviously recommend adding a Yahoo Buzz widget to any blog / website under the category of “why not”. However, I am not sold on the traffic impact for the 99.999% of stories that don’t get to the Yahoo homepage.  Yahoo Buzz definitely deserves some monitoring in terms of  how stories get ranked and what kind of traffic it generates.

I will post a follow-up story once I have gathered enough information.