Are you inside the Circle of Trust in Social Media?

If you have by any chance watched the movie, ‘Meet the parents‘ (Hollywood Chick flick) than you have surely understood what I meant by the circle of trust. In the movie, the character played by Ben Stiller is in continuous investigation by the character played by  Robert De Niro.

Source : shirtquarters.com

In the movie, Ben Stiller is to marry Robert De Niro’s daughter but Robert De Niro, being the Ex-Spy, doubts the identity of Ben Stiller and goes to his limits to verify it.

In the movie, Robert De Niro makes a circle and tells Ben Stiller that he needs to be admitted inside the Circle of Trust before he is permitted to marry his daughter. The whole movie oscillates between Ben Stiller moving in and out of the circle of trust.

This scenario fits perfectly in today’s social networking sites. Social networking sites are totally dependent upon the trust. I may have more than 1000 followers in my twitter network but the amount of people that I trust and respond is very few. Similarly, I have around 400+ friends in Facebook and same goes there. Not everyone is in my circle of trust.

Hence, if you are a social media evangelist or marketer then you need to understand that you are inside the trust field of your network. But where do you start this trust.

Source : umw.edu

Trust starts from the authenticity of your profile and your references around. For example, in my profile I have my purpose clearly defined and the link in my profile takes to my company page, from where people can clearly find my other networks and verify my profile.

I even have my photo as a profile picture. Isn’t that nice because I see so many people with out any profile image in Twitter.

But like in the movie, people are always like Robet De Niro, full of doubts. So you need to keep proving your self and being there.You are always kept under test and you need to pass them everytime.

The moment you falter in your effort is the moment you lose that trust. Trust is not like a medal which you win one time.

Instead it is an ever going process of continuous effort and there is no short cut for that. If you look at so many successful profile in Twitter, you will immediately figure out that they are trusted profiles. Therefore, in social media try building trust in your network. But remember, to be admitted inside the circle of trust, even you have to open up your circle for others. So let me ask again, Are you inside the Circle of Trust?

Who is the king – Conversation or Content?

It is an interesting topic of discussion which can involve a lot of different arguments. But I feel that it is a question of Chicken and Egg? Which came first? We don’t know but we are sure of one thing that both are important. Both the content and the conversation are the two side of a coin.

Source : socialedge.org

Content gives a context for people to talk about. Without content, there isn’t any subject hence the conversation won’t flourish. Imagine talking with your friends? What is it that you talk about?

Obviously, they are movies, music, people, concepts, theories, relationships and so on. These obvious things that I have listed are content, they provide context to your conversation. As a result of this context, we have conversations and discussion, and by the end of discussion we have a community or friendship.

Community has a life of its own and has its own values. It has been and always be the main goal of any business - creating community. But as I wrote above, community is a result of conversation and conversation is a result of context or content. I hope I made it clear. So is there any point arguing about the content versus conversation? I don’t think so.

Finally our goal in social media is to generate community and good amount of conversation to take your service viral. Viral doesn’t always mean millions of views, even hundred of genuine interests could be considered viral. But the main question remains, how do we generate conversation?

Conversation

Remember, I told you about the content being the context. If you have understood what I meant, you will immediately know that you have to provide enough reasons for your readers to comment on your content. How do you do that? It requires understanding of your services and the kind of community that you want to build.
Now, the question of how to generate conversation is a vague one because there are many ways to influence people.

But there are certain core fundamentals which apply to all the social media activities:
1. Be real and genuine (this point out your content).
2. Have a voice one something (something related to your cause).
3. Be passionate about that something.
4. Lead your cause (show some leadership).
5. Be open to conversation (which means allow users different ways to express to you).
6. Respond to queries and be helpful.

Now these points looks fancy and idealistic, but the truth is that it is the only thing that actually works in social media or even real life. It’s like when someone asks, “What is the secret to success?” and the answer is “Hard work”. It looks plain and un-innovative but the truth is a truth.

Social media also provides a great opportunity to share content, in addition to generating contents. So to end this post, I am embedding a great presentation on How to create advocacy and conversation? The presentation provides a great insights into conversation. Let me know you thoughts on the post and please do share your thoughts on it.

Conversation is the key in building brands in Twitter

For those using Twitter as the main channel to promote brands and services in the Internet, day to day conversation in the Twitter is an important aspect of the marketing plan. Though many consider 140 chars a place to embed the link along with their pitching statement, the conversation has never lost its importance.

Conversation is by far the best and the last resort for building relationships in the online networking sites. Following or being followed cannot be considered as an act of relationship. Those are the mere factor of courtesy which we show in the online medium.

The act of communicating with each other and understanding each other’s motive is what drives the relationship ahead. And Twitter is the best place to listen to conversation and be a part of it. Recent research from 360i, have shown that conversation makes the 43% of the total tweets in the Twitter.

Research Graph, Source : readwriteweb

The graph above shows that Self-promotional and Seeking/Giving Advice in total only make 4% of the total tweets.  This brings us to the 43% conversation which is the gold mine for building brands in the Twitter.

Unlike many other networking sites, where the conversation between groups and people are visible, it is very difficult in Twitter to track conversations and be a part of it. Its is also very difficult to keep track of your own conversation in Twitter. Hence, the way conversations happen in Twitter is very different then in any other networking sites.

More over the 360i reported that :

“After analyzing some 1,800 tweets sent between last October and March of this year, 360i says that while just under half of consumer tweets are conversational “@ replies,” only 1% of these are directed at brands.”

In the report, they have mentioned how brands use Twitter as a means to share information and news, missing the bigger part of conversation.

Conversation is and will always be the core of marketing in Social Media Channel and it is not going to change. For more complete report, you may want to check the full report : Twitter & the Consumer-Marketer Dynamic.

Please add your views on the topic.

Proposal for Social Media Marketing Plan

Writing a proposal for a social media marketing can be a real pain because there is a whole gamut of things to be covered. But if you start with the fundamental of social media marketing and address some of the high level strategies, it will create a platform between you and the client to put more details on the plan and work around it.

Here is one of the sample marketing proposal which I wrote, I hope to share it with our readers and get feedback on it.

Defining the Scope of the document

The document contains a high level strategy for implementing the social media marketing to an companyABC. By the end of the document, reader must be clear on methods and resources required to implement the social media campaigns.

Source : penn-olson.com

Methodology

The Social Media Campaign will incorporate four different steps:
1. Requirement Phase
2. Research Phase
3. Implementation Phase
4. Monitoring and Operation Phase

Requirement Phase

Goals and expectations from companyABC will be laid down and accordingly will be used to plan the social media campaign.

Research Phase

Research Phase will involve finding the facts the figures around the business and use them to understand the appeal of the content needed to be generated.

The research phase will also involve finding the probable competitors in the social media and monitoring their activities.

Implementation Phase

Once the research work is complete, the implementation phase with start. The implementation will start by creating social profiles in the major networking sites. It is better to start with the key networking sites and then branch on to others because having too many platform will only increase the overhead of the company.

Implementation Phase will consider:
1. Writing blog post on daily basis.
2. Promoting the articles in social bookmarking and social networking sites.
3. Engaging with fan base via Facebook Fan Page and Twitter with relevant content(multi-media).
4. Setting up distribution channels across networking sites to send effective messages to people.
5. Setting up Social Profile Advertisement through different Ad Platform.

Monitoring Phase

Source : ovrdrv.com

1. Setting up system to track special keywords related to the business.

2. Tracking the traffic of the website and comparing with the activities in the Social Media Space.

• Activities in Social Media Space like Twitter and Facebook.
• Tracking the amount of interactions in Social Profiles.

3. Tracking the click Stream via Buzzom’s link tracking framework(nxy.in).

4. Creating Reports on the campaign Weekly basics.

Every social media campaign has a goal, may be it is not a direct ROI but they do have attainable and tactical goals.

Some of the fundamental and tactical goals of campaign are:
• Building buzz and conversation.
• Increase the traffic to the site.
• Increase the fan following in Facebook FanPage and Twitter.
• Increase Feed Subscriber.

The proposal ends with an approximate costs and figures for whole marketing plan.

Let us know what you feel about the plan and its coverage of the whole social media marketing plan.

Demystifying Twitter Marketing now available in Kindle

The successful reception of our two products buzzom and buzzom premium has given us a lot of confidence over the social media space.

But a story and an experience can go unheard if not shared. Hence, we worked together with all the inner faculty members and external partners to write a book that would summarize all our experience and knowledge over marketing in Twitter.

We have humbly named the book as “Demystifying Twitter Marketing”. Let me summarize what you will get from the book.

1. Brief history and structure of today’s social media space.

2. Twitter and its relation with business.

3. Success stories of Twitter Marketing from CEO of InRev Systems(Maker of Buzzom).

4. Learning ways of analyzing your Twitter Success. (using Twitter Analytics).

5. Twitter Case Studies of businesses who have succeeded in Twitter.

Lastly, the book ends with thoughts from pro twitter user Jody Nimetz (Blogger and SEO Expert).

We are a product development company, hence we could not end the book with out some detail’s about building an application over Twitter. At the end, we have our developer speak on how to build application over Twitter, encouraging everyone to try on their own.

So Please get your copy soon and share the story. Thank You.

We have the book in two formats : PaperBack and Electronics (Currently Available only for Kindle).

Price : $12 Only

Price : $15 Only

How to do Profile Analysis in Twitter?

When we started buzzom, the first thing that we approached was the Profile Analytics. It was the key function which allowed us to analyze any Twitter profile and calculate their relevance to the users.

The importance of profile analysis is gaining a lot of attention due to the leverage Twitter gives to every individual. Everyone in Twitter has their own brand value and everyone in Twitter has their own influence range.

But in this saturated market of analytics, what does it take to make the perfect score and to measure the brand value of a single profile with accuracy. We have been thinking about it a lot and have invested ample amount of time going through the data and observing the emerging trends in Twitter.

Does measuring profile be of any value to business?

Source : informing-arts

Really. How can a profile score help you may good decision. In fact how can we be so sure that a score can reveal everything about the profile?

But the key point is not the score but the requirement of businesses or marketers which gives such scores some value. In a business, you are continuously monitoring your social media channels and its impact on your traffic or sales.

Social media monitoring is very similar to your web analytics. In web analytics you are looking at traffic details and their referrals. In social media, you are looking at the growth of your followers and watching the impact of you tweets through ReTweet count and so on.

Based on these analysis, you make your social media strategies and control your activities in Twitter or other social media platform. Hence, understanding the profile of your network and your selves, you can understand a lot on how you could run your social media campaigns.

What are the best attributes to monitor while judging Profile?

First of all, there are basically two kinds of profile analysis - quantitative and qualitative. In quantitative, you look at followers count, followings count, Tweet count, ReTweet Count and so on. In qualitative analysis you look at the contents being shared, their sources, their category and so on.

Source : umich.edu

But let me give you few key indicators that you immediately notice when you open some one’s profile.

1. Name
2. Bio
3. Followers and Followings
4. Tweet Volume and Activity

What does this say about the profile? Though the list is quite small, it reveals a lot about the profile. In addition to these key numerical details, you cannot ignore the quality of contents being shared by the profile.

Spam and fraud profiles can be detected easily within few seconds of observation. But in order to find the real influence of the profile, you need to go one level deep into the tweets and their tweet stream.

If you find a profile with high mentions then they probably have high influence. But that is not enough, the characteristics of people who mention is also very important because they give weight to the profile. For example, getting mentioned by automated profile is not a very value addition to your profile. But getting mentioned by real people is a lot more valuable.

I will list down some of the major scores which will help you define profiles in Twitter with a lot of quality. These are some of the plans for new Buzzom Score which is under research.

Network Analysis

Reach : Number of Followers, Number of List and their followers.
Mutuality : Number of following and followers. (Ratio of Following and Followers)
Reach is a fundamental quantity that determines the growth of the campaign. The more people the cause or the product gets received by, higher the visibility of the service. But these reach has to be classified as real people and not automated profiles. Though automated profiles (bot) has their own advantages, having more human in your network makes all the difference.

Source: atomthought

Social Actions Analysis

Affinity : Number of people the profile has mentioned and the number of unique people who have mentioned profile. (excluding RTs)
Generosity : Number of RTs done by the profile.
Recency : Number of Tweets in last 7 weeks.

After the reach, it is important to understanding the engagement between the profile and the people in his/her network. High level of engagement means closer community and strong bonding. Activity also means the dedication towards the profile given by the user. An active profile has more potential and credential over inactive profiles.

Brand Analysis

Reactions : Number of RTs and mentions received by the Profile.
Promoter : Number of unique people RT-ing or Mentioning your Profile.

Ultimately, after the reach and social activities you need to look at the popularity of the profile. There are some very high brand names in Twitter which are talked by people every minutes. You can call this the high brands in Twitter.
I hope the post below throws some light on the Twitter Profile analytics. There are many stones left to be un turn but this can be a great start for any business seeking to make sense.

Please provide your feedback and comments.

What is Social Media Campaign?

The foundation of society has been build upon the strength of connections between people. It is the relationships between people that define community. At the heart of these communities lie the common belief and common cause. Taking this form of social model into consideration gives a clear meaning to online social platforms.
Communities either offline or online is a tremendous opportunity for businesses to leverage their products and services. But how does a social media campaign start and what defines it?

Go Social

One of the first thing that a business needs to do before starting a campaign is Go Social. This means creating social profiles like Youtube Channel, Twitter profile, Facebook Fan Page, Blogs, Micro Blogs and so on. Not all the platforms are the best fit for everyone but one can always try to be creative and model the channel for their benefits.

Context

Context is the primary factor of social media campaigns. In order to engage with people in social media, you need to give people a context. Context creates conversation and conversation creates discussion, which finally brings community into existence. This community thereby solely becomes the evangelist of your product or service. But what is context?

Source : radicalblogs

Fundamentally context is about providing your customers a reason to talk about your service/product. People by nature has a tendency to vent out, either expressing their desire or hatred towards a service/product. If you look into popular brands then you can clearly see what I mean by context. People has this strange relationships with the products & services which drags them to either shout in 140 characters or write a 1000+ long blog post. Which is actually amazing and the really essence of social media campaigns. Influence as many people as possible to talk about your product/service.

Hence, social media provides a platform to interact with your customers and improve their experience. This engagement with customers is your investment in social media and it requires resources from humans to investment in social tools.

Relevance of Social Media Campaigns

Unlike offline social campaigns, online social campaigns are highly quantifiable in terms of influence and community growth. Internet is a data rich platform where every action can be traced and recorded 24/7. There are many tools which can help you answer some of the key questions about social media campaigns:

1. The key influenced location of the campaign.
2. The profile of the influenced communities and their trend.
3. The volume of conversation being tracked in the online platforms.
4. The effect of campaign on the traffic and conversion rate in your websites.
5. Some basic statistics like how many people clicked on the Ad and so on.
6. Sentiment of people towards the service and product.

These are some of the key questions that can be easily answered giving business a better edge to make decision and design a product.

Steps to Social Media

Generalizing the social media campaign allows us to put some of the major steps required :

Source : piercemattiepublicrelations

1. Create platform
2. Engage and Participate
3. Encourage and give Context
4. Reward communities
5. Monitor and analyze results
6. Incorporate results into actions in service or products

Benefits of Social Media Campaigns

After saying so much, I guess the benefits rise on its own. Social media campaigns allows you to create a community around your product/service.

This in itself is the greatest achievement which is very difficult to achieve otherwise.

Some of the more visible benefits would be:

1. Indirect promotion of service/product from word of mouth.
2. 24/7 sales due to crowd sourced CRM.
3. Huge database of content being produce over the net increasing trust among people.
4. Direct reach to customer’s behavior and feedbacks.
5. Creates spring board for future products idea and promotion.

In a nutshell, Social Media Campaign is all about the engagement between the business and customers. The one who can convert that into successful and long lasting relationship stays longer in the game.

How to Maximizing Your Event ROI with Social Media?

We found a great presentation on Maximizing Your Event ROI with Social Media. You are very glad that Buzzom was featured as one of the many tool which can be used by the marketers.

Here is the complete slide on the topic:

Importance of Landing Page in Facebook Fan Page

Facebook fan page has gained a lot of popularity among business users. Today, every business has a fan page and it has  minimum of 1000 fans. Not only that, it has also become a virtual platform for discussion and sharing of ideas among people. In addition, Facebook has more than 400 million users making it one of the hot spot for marketing.

But like all the other technologies and tools, it requires certain skill sets to operate them properly. There are many factors influencing the success of the Facebook business page. Among all, content is the most important one. Facebook Fan page is very similar to Twitter, businesses can engage with their customers or fans. You require a dedicated person to be engaging with people. Please do not assume that having an automated system is going to solve all your problems. They are helpful but not complete solution to your business.

What is the most important aspect of business?

The profile of business is the most important of all the other details that a business can showcase. This profile could include a demo video, interview, clear presentation of services, product details and so on. Therefore, filling appropriate details of your business in Facebook fan page is of utmost importance. Have it clear and brief.

Buzzom's Fanpage details

Importance of landing page

After filling the forms and all the other details. It is time to know users more closely. Remember that there are many ways in which a user will land in your fan page.

1. Through friends recommendation

2. Through business web page

3. Through search engine and so on

You can easily see the problem here. Many people who come through business page or blogs will get lot of information about your business from the website itself. Hence, they won’t have any problem figuring out your fan page. But for people who land in your fanpage through recommendations or search engines, it requires a separate landing page where all the information about the page is given.

This will make sure that when users land in your fan page, they get clear idea about your business.

Creating Landing Page in Facebook

Creating landing page on Facebook is supported by a technology called “FBML”. Its very similar to HTML. You can use it to create a static and dynamic pages similar to HTML web pages.

In order to get started you need to add FBML application to your fanpage. Simply search for “FBML” on the application list in facebook and add it to your fan page.

FBML listing in Facebook Application

For more detail about FBML check this link out.

Positioning Landing Page

Once you have created the landing page, you can go to the setting of the fanpage and make it appear on the front. This means that when a user visits your fan page, he/she will be directed to the FBML page instead of the default wall.

Once you can achieve this, you will immediately start to understand the power of landing page and the control you have over the user flow. You can create the landing page however you want to. This gives you better turn over than having default fan page settings.

Buzzom's landing page

The above figure is the landing page of Buzzom. You can see that I have included the buzzom’s youtube channel at the front page and below that is the place to refer the pages to other friends from your network. Now, it solves my two problems, one through video users are engaged with buzzom’s product and second if they find it important they will share it with their friends. And the landing page just does that.

Conclusion

What I have tried to show is just the tip of the iceberg. There is more to fan page than just a landing page. Landing page is just one of those key factors which are always missed.

Other helpful details:
Schedule your Blog Feed to your Facebook Fan Page

If you have any suggestion or comments on the topic please post your comment below.

How to find targetted audience in Twitter?

This might be one of the toughest things to do in Twitter. As Twitter is all about communities, everyone is searching for targeted followers. Most people start by searching for people through tweets and bio. But here I am going to give a different way of finding communities. First let me list out some of the known ways:

Source : ning.com

1. Searching tweeple through Tweets.

2. Searching tweeple through bio and location.

3. Going to long lists of directories of Twitter-List and finding relevant groups.

What else can you do beside this? Well, there is one very efficient way to find communities. It needs a little bit of researching. You first find the top influencers on the relevant subject matters. For example, if its social media marketing is your target than names like Chris Brogan is the right choice, SEO experts then Avinash Kaushik. the goal is to find crowd around the brand associated with your service or product.

Why are these people important?

Source :itbloke.net

The fact that they are the experts in their related field, and that they have high influence over the crowd makes it very relevant. They have a genuine crowd of people relating to those field. So identifying key epic points of crowd in important.

What do you do now?

The best way to get get involved in the community is first to listen them and then only engage. You surely don’t want to be the odd man out in the community.

Hence, the best way is to start following them individually or categories them in a list and follow the list. Once you are inside the community, you can slowly start engaging and helping each other out. That is the only way it works in community and its no different in Twitter.

I would say that in every field there is a epic center of influencers. Find them and track their followers. It takes time but its the one of the easiest and best way to proceed.

Now if you want to reduce a little bit of hard work, you can always use the Cross Follow Options of Buzzom. Its on the left hand side bar, under TwitIn. You can type the id of influences and find their followers and followings easily. The difference with this with respect to going to their following and followers list in Twitter Page is the easy follow button and one click profile detail view which will save lots of your time.