Image by Intersection Consulting via Flickr

For those of you not familiar with social media, here’s a brief description: “media that is social”. Funny, but true.

We see so many organizations that begin with social media, and they set up a Twitter or Facebook account and tell us their are doing social media.

When we look a little closer, we can see it’s nothing much at all, and its typically “one-sided”, meaning they only speak about themselves, and nobody is engaging with them.

Maybe the reason is that they didn’t build out a strategic plan with specific goals and targets, as well as not understanding that listening is the second word (after competitive & market research) to learn in social media.

Listening to social media chatter can be done for free. But,  there are (great) paid tools as well.

We always suggest (when a company is engaging with social media), to manually learn about their space, and listen/watch in specific channels (their marketplace).

For example, on Twitter – you can search (search.twitter.com) and find out what’s going on both locally and globally with ease. You could spend 20-40 minutes in the morning searching on Twitter to discover much information about your market.

You may then decide to start following a few key people. Perhaps you download Tweetdeck and set up lists of key people to monitor. That’s a good start.

Furthermore, you’ll search in Google and Facebook for competitors and brands that are in your marketplace.

You’ll do the same for the B2B LinkedIn marketplace. And, of course – let’s not forget YouTube. What is your market doing there? You’ll quickly find out if Twitter works better versus Facebook, for example.

You should go where the fish already swimming. It makes little sense to spend time and dollars on Facebook if your audience is highly B2B centric, for example. (Disclaimer: your research is only part of the equation. It’s ok and necessary to “test” markets. Facebook and Google has a powerful advertising platform, for example).

But, all this research and constant watching takes time. Just like driving a car – if you understand what’s under the hood, you’ll be much more agile and knowledgeable when things go wrong. That’s why we recommend a manual approach, so you can learn & see better.

When you are ready, here are some free & paid social media tools that can help you further:

1) SocialMention

2) NetVibes

3) Google Alerts

4) Radian6 (paid) * recently acquired by salesforce.com

5) Synthesio (paid)

6) Tweetdeck

7) Hootsuite

Now that you understand your market better, are able to listen and monitor, the engagement part comes next. We’ll cover that in our next post. How do you communicate and connect in a natural, non-threatening way?

And, make sure to connect with us on Twitter

Related articles social media tools

• The Ultimate Guide to Twitter Marketing (copyblogger.com)
• Does Social Media Performance Vary by Country? [Marketing Cast] (hubspot.com)
• Tools to Effectively Listen and Engage Social Media Fans and Followers: Guide for Local and Small Business Owners [Francene Mullings] (ecademy.com)

However, it’s a lot of talk, and – it’s as if they forget all the other ways to drive traffic, and more importantly, build conversions on your website.

Well, now you have a chance to test and see if you can leverage the true, tried tested methods for driving traffic quickly to your site, while you build the (sometimes slower) social media programs. (Big note here: not to be discounted, you should leverage Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and others while you test the multi-channel marketing).

You can meet the experts that we have worked with at previous conferences. And you do it all from the comfort of your own home or office.

Click the find out what your competition may already know.

I don’t watch a great deal of television, but I have this habit of news channel scanning. I hop from CNN, to HLN to CNBC to Bloomberg. This habit sometimes raises eyebrows, but it has some great benefits. Aside from keeping me in touch with the world even though I work long hours, It usually provides me with concrete examples of successful and not so successful uses of internet marketing.

As I flip the channel to one of the generic news stations, I find myself in the middle of your typical Thanksgiving shopping feature. You know the one; a rosy cheeked reporter stands in front of a collage of cashiers and people in puffy winter jackets hoisting bags full of goods. I’m guessing at this point that it’s going to be about how the retailers are going to defy the recession and bring in the customers.

I was right. And to my delight it’s about how a particular retailer uses Facebook. Jackpot!

After I’ve gone over the typical details of an SEO engagement with a customer, and we’ve begun to digress into other internet marketing possibilities, I’m usually asked how Social Media could help them to achieve their goals.

They ask me what’s involved and I talk a lot about social bookmarks, YouTube.com, Twitter and definitely Facebook. I propose various scenarios and we ‘him and haw’ a bit and get back to the task at hand; getting their SEO initiative in order. Maybe I should tell them to watch more TV?

Well, I now have a great story to use that’s relevant to the holiday season and researchable to some extent.

Ok, let’s go back to the news story. The retailer being featured came up with an innovative and effective way to leverage Facebook to increase their Black Friday sales. They advertised incentives directly to Facebook.com users. So what, right? Well, there’s more. The campaign included incentives aviable only to the retailer’s Facebook fans.

So you had to join become a fan to get the benefits. Their fans were allowed to visit the store two hours earlier then non-fans on Black Friday and they also received an additional discount on all purchases.

This is a brilliant example of using social media to affect revenue in a timely fashion, grow their customer base and facilitate an ongoing inbound marketing campaign. Enjoy!

Last week, the website TechCrunch.com, reported that a Twitter account containing confidential Twitter documents had been hacked into, and the documents had been published online. Now, the hacker himself, known as Hacker Croll, has revealed to Tech Crunch that he used “Hotmail’s inactive account feature.” to accomplish the hack.

According to Hacker Croll, he was able to access the Twitter account of an employee of Twitter by researching the employee online in order to gain information that would help him to guess their Gmail account password. This helped the hacker to ascertain that the Twitter account was also associated with a Hotmail account, which was currently inactive, but he was able to reset the account and specify a password of his own.

ComputerWorld.Com reports that Twitter is now threatening legal action against some of the sites, including TechCrunch, that have published the stolen documents, but that legal experts were not sure if this would actually succeed.

With so much personal information being stored online nowadays, it only makes sense to take extra security measures when it comes to passwords. So if your password for everything is something that is easy to guess, i.e. your birthday, middle name, or child’s name, you owe it to yourself to consider changing it to something more secure.

“You Kin’ Do It” the new Dunkin’ Donuts integrated advertising campaign is being promoted via the Dunkin’ Donuts’ Twitter Page. The message of the campaign is that consumers can accomplish everyday tasks even in tough times—ostensibly while drinking Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and is a take off on the current “America runs on Dunkin’” campaign.

“Prevailing over life’s daily challenges deserves acknowledge and appreciation, especially in difficult time“, Frances Allen,  brand marketing officer at Dunkin’ Donuts said in a recent statement. “’You Kin’ Do It’ shines the spotlight on the accomplishments of hardworking Americans, while reinforcing that Dunkin’ Donuts will continue to fuel their busy day and provide a bit of happiness without blowing the lid off their budget.”

The campaign features videos that have been posted on YouTube, including a snowed in man digging his way out of his driveway, and an office worker with a mountain of paperwork to accomplish.

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• Brands on Twitter: Value Despite Debate
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Profiles is a control panel that allows users to manage all of their Yahoo activities and social connections and, according to Yahoo, the full version will also include management of interests, activities, and social connections across the Web.

“This new profile is not intended to be a new social destination on Yahoo,” Jim Stoneham, Yahoo’s vice president of communities, said in a recent blog post. “Rather, our plan is to integrate social as a central dimension into the services you use every day.

Yahoo is also testing a new home page that will allow users to track their friend’s actions across the web, and the latest versions of Yahoo Messenger allow users to see the Yahoo Buzz and Twitter updates of their friends as status messages.

“Ultimately,” Stoneham added, “our goal is to unify our social experience and connections not only on Yahoo, but anywhere you travel across the web.” 

What other Twitter accounts and serious players in category “Internet Marketing” do you think should be followed or at least considered? And, how do you determine their authority and quality (to be added to the list)? Hat tip to Rich Page for seeding the list.

Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim)
http://twitter.com/andybeal

Seth Godin
http://twitter.com/SethGodin

Search Engine Roundtable
http://twitter.com/seroundtable

Rand Fishkin (SEO Moz)
http://twitter.com/randfish

Mike Buonomo
http://twitter.com/SearchBuzz

Search Marketing Gurus
http://twitter.com/smgurus

Fumi Mastubara
http://twitter.com/newmediazoo

Copy Blogger
http://twitter.com/copyblogger

Eric Friedman
https://twitter.com/EricFriedman

Danny Sullivan
http://twitter.com/dannysullivan

Duct Tape Marketing
https://twitter.com/ducttape

Barry Welford
https://twitter.com/BWelford

Search Engine Guide
http://twitter.com/SEGuide

Craig Ritchie
https://twitter.com/craigritchie

Doug Hudiburg
https://twitter.com/dhudiburg

Gator Herb (Marketing Sherpa)
https://twitter.com/gatorherb

The Product Guy
https://twitter.com/theproductguy

Search Marketing Gurus
http://twitter.com/storyspinner

DJ Francis
http://twitter.com/DJFrancis

Newspaper Girl
http://twitter.com/NewspaperGrl

September 15, 2008— In the wake of the recent hit-and-run tragedy in Boulder, Colorado, which claimed the life of three-year-old Marten Kudlis comes the highly criticized decision by the Rocky Mountain News to cover the child’s funeral using the popular social media networking site, Twitter.

While Twitter has been used to cover speeches and news stories on an as-they-happen basis, this incident marks the first time that the site has been used by the mainstream media to report a funeral in real time.

“Coffin lowered into the ground,” one post, or “tweet” from the Kudlis funeral reads, followed by “family members shovel dirt onto the grave.”

Critics stress that it isn’t the use of the social media networking site by News reporter Berny Morson  that has them upset, but rather what they feel is extreme insensitivity to the Kudlis family and Boulder community as a whole and that any live coverage of a funeral like this would be just as intrusive.

Neither Mr. Morson nor the Rocky Mountain News were available for comment at press time.