Web

Guy Kawasaki's blog on American Express had a piece a few days ago, about TweetMeme.

TweetMeme not only tracks popular tweets (here's Alltop's TweetMeme aggregate), it also tracks how many times a post is re-tweeted. Here's why that's interesting:

The Tweetmeme retweet button is more useful than Digg as an indicator of the quality of a link because Digg is about a small number of selected people getting stories onto the Digg home page. The assumption with Tweetmeme is that if you retweet a link, you are telling your followers that it leads to a good site, and you are putting your reputation on the line. If you digg something, you are not risking your reputation nearly as much—if at all.

I plan on adding the TweetMeme button (sample shown here) to my blog tomorrow.

Why? Well, now that I'm using Gigya Socialize for Drupal to push my blog posts out to both Twitter and Facebook, TweetMeme should help me keep track of where they go - at least on Twitter, which I frankly care more about anyway.
Guy's post

UPDATE: as I might have known, as with many things in Drupal - "There's a module for that!".

In this case, the TweetMeme module (surprise!).

Right now, all it does is add the TweetMeme badge to your posts. But it's smart enough to know the Blog posts's URL, as disctinct from the main page URL, so that's handy. You can see it in action at the top right of this post, if you're reading this on the web site.

Later, I'll dig through the project's issues etc. to see if there's plans to add the button to the RSS feed.

Here's an insight from the always-worthwhile Seth Godin's Blog.

Consider that conference attendees lavish attention on the marketers & products they've come to see, whereas when we see advertising for those products in other contexts we probably just ignore it - or actively loathe it.

Which of those environments is better for reaching your customers? One where they've made a great effort and perhaps spent some money to come see you, or one where they're actually trying to do something else and you're in their way?

Here's a quote from Seth:

...advertisers treat prospects online as targets, as victims, as people to subject to interruption. Conferences treat attendees as royalty, as paying customers who invested time and money to be there.

And that's the difference. As long as your site is about something else and the ads are a distraction, you'll see CPM rates drop. As soon as you (or the advertisers) figure out that creating online communities aligned with the advertising, where attendance is a choice by the consumer, then you're creating genuine value.

Seth's post

So in building online communications - should we plan on interrupting the audience with ever-more-stupid ads, or should we create an environment they'll be eager to participate in?

Seems to me the proper use of social media for business is to create an attractive gathering place for your customers - one that's aligned with their operational needs, interests, etc - and become part of the conversation. You will then be a host rather than a salesperson.

Or you could just keep pummeling your visitors with banners. How's that working so far?

B. L. Ochman's "What's Next" blog always has insightful commentary on corporate life and communications in the internet era.

Here's a piece on a favorite topic of mine - the dysfunctional nature of the modern corporation; specifically how sprinkling "magic social dust" on your organization won't get you better customer relations, or higher sales numbers.

This is because - surprise - most companies aren't any good at communicating.

From the article:

Dear big companies: If you want to try using social media - start inside. Create a wiki, internal blogs, company-wide IM, a help line where any employee has access to any other employee's knowledge at any time.

Full article

And of course, a counter-list to the previous list (fewer items, but I guess since they're "sins" they each weigh more...?)

Here's a taste:

Social is PR

Social media is too big for one department. By defining social media in a purely public relations or communications capacity, it limits the scope of your campaign. Keep in mind that in employing social media, there are functionalities and benefits to other departments (e.g. product development, service and support, research), so include those departments as ways to deepen and continue your engagement with consumers. Your audience wants to know more about you than just what you're selling; they want to know about what you do, who does it, and how you do it.

One way to ensure you avoid the pitfall of operating social media in a silo is to ask yourself who else in the organization should participate, and how else can you leverage your social presence beyond just product launches and news events?

Takeaway: PR is great for news and launches, but social media creates the ongoing and sustained interest between news and launches.

Hard to see what the "sin" here is - looks to me like simple short-sightedness, something which everyone who's ever done business with a corporation of any size ought to recognize.

But I guess "Sin" in a headline sells better than "boo-boo", eh?

Full article

ClickZ has this brief list of suggestions for building a following for your company on social networks.

Here's a favorite (fits in with the "Get slightly famous" strategy):

Let go of your secrets. Sharing your knowledge with other people breaks down barriers of engagement. Don't sell a success package for $19.99; instead start a blog. (For example...this article!)

While we all love lists, how do we know this one's any good? Other than appeals to authority (ClickZ is fairly well-known) I guess we don't. We're all figuring this out as we go along, aren't we?

Full Article

Twitterhawk is a service that flags tweets based on your keywords, and allows you to auto-respond - or respond later, by hand - with your marketing message.
From the home page:

TwitterHawk is a real time targeted marketing engine that will find people talking on twitter now by your chosen topic and location, allowing you to really hit your target mid conversation with ease.

It will periodically search twitter for you and either auto-reply or generate a list of matches for you to respond to or reject from your twitterhawk account.

Seems the best thing to send in your tweet would be a link to your site or service.

Here's a use case from their website:

Let's say you just opened a new coffee store in Queens and wanted to let people know about it. As part of your advertising efforts, you could setup TwitterHawk to search for things like "coffee near:Queens within:8mi" (of course you could simply search world wide if you are global).

We would then periodically (at a frequency determined by you) find twitter posts that mentioned coffee by users that are actually located within 8 miles of Queens such as
'@cracksh0t Oh I could really go for a coffee right now' or
'@loxly Coffee... my one true love'

Depending on how you set your search up, the system will then either send the response automatically right then, or it will add it to your matches list for you to check over and confirm.

Should there be a match for coffee on something like '@coffeeh8r I cannot stand coffee!!!' you can simply remove this from your matches list.

Twitterhawk can track how many links you send and how many of those result in click-throughs - sort of a CPC model for tweet-marketing.

So - is this spam? Or smart context-sensitive communication?

Twitterhawk's services page

Well!

I've certainly been gone for a while.
After a great bloodletting at the agency I was working for, I'm now out on my own - and spending most of my time trying to get a new business going.
While it's still not really ready for public viewing, a small site is up - and I've committed to get back in here and post some more cool stuff for marketers.

MediaOnTwitter's mission is simple: It's a geographically organized list of

"Journalists, Bloggers & Media Outlets on Twitter"

Link

Another list, referenced at MediaOnTwitter:
http://micropr.wik.is/List_of_Twittering_Journalists

And another: http://www.twellow.com/category_users/cat_id/50

These sites could be gold for anyone attempting to create a 21st-century online press center. Obviously any PR department should be following all the relevant journalists - now, how about a tool to aggregate their tweets, organized by relevance to your agenda? Sort of like LinkedIn's "Company Buzz" application (discussed here) but more focused on professional journalists...

Would someone get on that please?

Here's a link to Virtual Greats, with a blurb about the company:

Virtual goods represent a $1.5 billion global market. Virtual Greats is the first company to create a platform to bring high-value, copyrighted material into virtual worlds and social networks. We are the world's leading virtual goods sales and distribution system, connecting celebrities, artists and content creators with a new generation of fans through the online trade of likenesses, fashion, catchphrases, and other virtual representations of real-world talent.

These folks came to my attention because of a post on the Millions Of Us blog. I'm quoting this extensively because the link from my reader is returning a 404:

Virtual Greats launches Snoop Dogg/ Tila Tequila Virtual Goods with Rockyou’s Super Pets in Myspace and Facebook
from Millions of Us by Reuben

I am so excited about this news from our sister company Virtual Greats for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is the first time we’ve extended premium virtual goods into virtual worlds running within the world’s largest social networks.

For those of you not up to speed, Super Pets is a virtual pet experience that allows you to adopt a pet, train it and battle it against your friends’ pets. Within Facebook, Super Pets has 417, 000 monthly Active Users and within Myspace, it has 4.5 million monthly Active Users. One of the challenges brands had in being sucessful in Second Life was that while the monthly active population was large (and the time per user, enormous), there was no good way to get in front of all those users. Well, in Facebook with Superpets we’re now in front of an audience half as large as Second Life, and in Myspace, in front of one 4.5 times bigger than Second Life.

As for what we’re selling, we’re starting simple with items like winter hoodies for your pet that say Snoop’s cathcphrase, “Drop It Like it’s Hot” (you can see one on my avatar below, styled as a raccoon as a nod of the hat to my man Loic LeMeur and his Seesmic Logo.

So now I'm wondering - is Millions of Us moving away from being a mostly Second Life oriented shop?

Here's a convenient little app from LinkedIn - it watches Twitter and catches tweets referencing keywords associated with your profile (companies, schools, etc.)

Company Buzz is an application that allows you to see what people are saying about companies and topics you care about. Company Buzz uses information from your profile such as companies and schools to find relevant discussions on twitter. Company buzz also shows you how frequently your company or topic has been mentioned and the top words associated with your company and the topic. You may add new topics and customize existing topics with new search terms to get just the results you are interested in.

(Marginally) more info here.