Sure, social media takes a lot of time, but probably not as much time as you think.

Too many companies and organizations are reinventing the content wheel for every social outpost they maintain. A better approach is to create a content ecosystem that allows you to repurpose and cascade your best information.

Instead of a series of self-contained initiatives, build yourself a content ladder.

Here are 5 steps to get there:

1. Understand Taxonomy

If you want a new pair of glasses, the Yellow Pages is a frustrating neighborhood. Look under “G” for “glasses.” Not found. Look under “E” for “eye glasses.” Nope. Only when you look under “O” for “optometrists” do you find what you need. It’s an example of an industry with poor understanding of taxonomy – the words and phrases used to describe products and services.

Taxonomy is incredibly important in social media because it’s the most direct link between the worlds of social and search marketing. Remember, your most important customer is Google, and your content ladder needs to maximize your chances for search success.

When creating and promoting social content, include specific, relevant keywords and search phrases wherever possible. (This is especially important now that Google and Bing are incorporating social content into real-time search results).

Find keywords and search phrases to include in these four places:

Google Analytics (or whatever Web site analytics program you’re using)
Look at your keywords report to find phrases that are driving traffic to your site. I recommend using a mixture of your Top 25 phrases and some that are highly relevant to your business, but perhaps aren’t sending as much traffic as you’d like at present.

Social Mention (or a paid social media listening package like Radian6, if you have one)
Go to www.socialmention.com and search for your company or product name (in quotes), and set the pull-down to “all.” You’ll then see a search results page that shows a comprehensive list of places you’ve been mentioned on the social Web.

On the left hand side, you’ll see a keywords chart that lists common terms associated with your name in social media. Consider adding some of these to your list if they differ from your analytics results.

Twitter Lists
How your company or product are referred to in consumer-created Twitter lists can yield important taxonomy insights.

Go to your Twitter account, and click on “listed” next to your followers count, and see how the lists that include your Twitter account are named. Consider including some of these phrases to your master keyword list.

Incorporate your phrases into your social content wherever possible, but only when relevant. Nobody appreciates keyword spam on the social Web.

2. Seek Content Inspiration

Creating successful social media content isn’t just status updates. Take your top keywords (including your company name, product name, etc.) and search for them on Google, Bing, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and SocialMention.

What shows up in these search results? How much photo and video content appears? Content from your competitors? From fans? You’ll be amazed at how many content-creation ideas this simple exercise can generate.

3. Understand Your Frequency Schema

The key to a content ladder is organizing your rungs. Your scenario may of course vary, but for illustration purposes let’s assume you have a Twitter account, Facebook fan page, blog, and email newsletter.

To create an efficient ladder, you must understand the comparative publishing schedules that you typically employ for each of these outposts. Ordered from most frequent publication to least, let’s assume that your program looks like this:

• Twitter (5x/day)
• Facebook (2x/day)
• Blog (3x/week)
• Email (1x/week)

Create your own integrated frequency schedule to better understand how your outposts interrelate.

4. Test & Track

Create a piece of content (remember to include your key phrases), and post it to the first rung in the ladder (Twitter, in this case) Use a tracking system (I prefer bit.ly) to determine how popular that specific piece of content was with your audience.

Remember however, that many factors influence popularity at the individual content piece level. Don’t make assumptions – test them. Vary time of day, day of week, phrasing, link placement, and other options, and thoroughly document your results.

Social media scientist Dan Zarrella has some excellent research on social content best practices.

5. Tweak and Repurpose

The content pieces that are most successful on the first rung of your ladder should be appropriately tweaked and redeployed on the second rung of your ladder (Facebook).

Test and track content success on Facebook using bit.ly (or number of likes and comments), and add the most effective content pieces to the next rung on the ladder (blog). Note that as you move down the ladder, your repurposing will be more complex – a blog post requires substantially more content than a Facebook update in most cases.

If a piece of content is successful on your blog (measured by visits as determined by Google Analytics, perhaps), add it to the next rung – your email newsletter.

By understanding how your various social outposts can work together at the content level, you can develop meaningful efficiencies. Also, because a sprinkling of the content included in the lower rungs of your ladder has already proven successful on higher rungs, the relevancy and popularity of your content should increase for most fans/readers/subscribers.

Of course, this content ladder approach assumes that you do not have the exact same audience for each of your social outlets, and I believe that to be an entirely realistic assumption. You may have some overlap (especially with Facebook and Twitter), but consumption of status updates and consumption of blog posts and email newsletters are meaningfully different activities, and attract different groups of fans.

What do you think? Worth a try?

View full post on Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting

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My current JAVA project requires a lot of check points, for example, 1. if the format of the ID passed is correct, then go ahead and 2. check if ID exists or not, if it does, 3. then check if ID has some kind of specific attributes or not and so on!

So, I was using the regular if-else for something like 6-7times!

if([condition]) { [do this] }else if([condition]){ [do this]}else if{[do this] }else if([condition]){ }else{ [do this]}

When I looked back at the code, it sucked! The deep nesting of the if-else construct made the code hard to understand and comprehend!

Comic Via

So, I searched a little for some logical if-else construct alternatives and I came up with these three useful techniques;

1. Ternary operator (?:) and
2. Logic Grid
3. Switch Statement (It is also a good alternative which makes the code look good. Its also pretty easy, so I won’t cover it here.)

Lets take a look at the 1st and a simpler process using ternary operator:

1. If-Else Construct Usage;

Usage of ternary operator in the above example;

[condition ? value if true : value if false]

Ok, so that was easy! Now lets take a look at LogicGrid technique which is very impressive and and an elegant way!

2. If-Else Construct:

Using Logic Grid: (C++ code here changed to Java)

The logic grid method is amazing!! Once you get hold of it, you will always use it, the code is much more organized and understandable now!

View full post on the lost logbook

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During February 2010, more than 9,200 participants joined ‘FebuSave’, a month-long national savings campaign created by ANZ to encourage Australian women to develop a regular savings habit. It was part of an innovative social media campaign that delivered some impressive results.

SOCIAL MEDIA CASE STUDY
Client: ANZ Customer Segmentation
Campaign: FebuSave
Time Period: Mid December 2009 – Mid March 2010

ANZ launched a new nationwide campaign to encourage women to develop a regular savings habit following research that found 53% of women do not save money on a regular basis.

Research commissioned by ANZ into the savings habits of women found:
• One in five women surveyed said they typically spend all their pay packet or regularly dip into their savings for basic living expenses.
• More than half (58%) have less than $5,000 in savings and 33% less than $1,000.
• 51% of women would last less than three months on their current savings if they lost their job and still had to pay their usual bills.

In an effort to raise awareness of these issues in the community and encourage Australian women to set financial goals and take action towards achieving them, ANZ created ‘FebuSave’ – a month-long savings initiative that ran from 1st to 28th February 2010.

At the end of the month, FebuSave participants reported back on how they performed against their savings goal, with three ‘FebuSave’ participants being rewarded with $5,000 in an ANZ savings account of their choice.

The Social Media Challenge:

1. Using social media, how could ANZ create awareness and capture the engagement of Australian women online?
2. Could social media participants rally Australian women to take part and have fun with Febusave, whilst creating debate about the financial security of Australian women?
3. Would social media increase participation in FebuSave? (Target several thousand in the inaugural year)
4. How could ANZ leverage social media with its own limited participation? (For example, not having a Twitter presence for FebuSave)

The Solution:

Identify Five influential women who are active online social media participants were identified. These were:

• Three were founders of the most successful online communities for Australian women

• Deborah Robinson, Founder of www.australianwomenonline.com.au

• Sandra D’Souza, Founder of www.askher.com.au

• Leigh Sundstrom, Founder of www.allforwomen.com.au

Australia’s leading wedding blogger, Dorothy Polka of www.polkadotbride.com.au

Leading and active social commentator Kate Carruthers, with her own popular blog, http://katecarruthers.com/blog/

Engagement:

ANZ under-took one-on-one engagement with the five identified online influencers, rather than a general blog outreach program

ANZ’s research on Women and Money was shared with the online influencers to assist in formulating the social content strategy. The approach for FebuSave was a “conversation of story telling” about financial decisions that women face. . (These stories ranged from getting in serious debt over wedding plans and saving for financial goals, to specific relationship issues with money and questioning if there’s enough to retire on)

Social Content & Distribution Strategy:

The social content strategy was set as organic storytelling and content distribution, through word of mouth, rather than provision of fixed materials from ANZ.

Recruitment:

The five influential online women were engaged as official Blog Ambassadors for FebuSave. They were also happy to recruit other blog FebuSave supporters from their networks. ANZ provided the research information, but there was no “on message” focus. Each blog ambassador shared their own insight into women’s relationship with money, its importance and how they may like to write about FebuSave for their audiences.

Wider Media Content Strategy & Social Engagement:

ANZ provided a web platform for the FebuSave campaign, with ambassadors featured on, www.febusave.com, and a blog badge widget. All ongoing interactions with the blog ambassadors and the wider blog supporters were a personal one-to-one engagement basis. The blog ambassadors also made social connections to the FebuSave media ambassador, Antonia Kidman and prominent FebuSave supporters, including Sarah Wilson.

The campaign was also supported by print, broadcast and online media and via traffic generated from www.anz.com. The website content focus was on how much women could save from giving ‘something up’ from coffee to shopping to shoes, and encouraged participants to focus on their own savings
goal. It offered savings advice from coaches, access to helpful tools and enabled participants to share their savings tips. The widget focus was on how many women were giving up a regular source of expenditure and saving to build community.

ANZ also created an incentive by offering a competition for those who participated in FebuSave. Participants could win one of three $5000 savings accounts.

The Results:

Approximately 50% of traffic sources to the site were linked to social media, with many thousands of pages indexed on Google, pushing SEO results.

In excess of 2,600 blog posts were generated by the five blog ambassadors, their recruited blog FebuSave supporters (a team of 28 leading online influential women) and a wider net of bloggers.

The originating posts drove a 61% message repeat on social networks.

More than 9,200 participants signed up to FebuSave, far exceeding ANZ’s initial expectations.

Over 4,500 savings tips were posted to FebuSave by participants, demonstrating a high level of engagement and passion.

The Team:
Client: ANZ Customer Segmentation & Network Marketing
Social Media: Bendalls Group
Creative: M&C Saatchi

Public Relations: ANZ/Pulse Communication
View full post on Media Hunter

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Clearly, there’s no shortage of data and possible social media success metrics.

Advanced social media analytics and ROI calculations often require tying together disparate systems, and looking for causation (or at least correlation) between social media success and business outcome.

At the most granular, day-to-day level, this necessitates visiting your various outposts and your social media hub, determining your progress on each, and graphing it out over time.

Or, you could just use Swix, the super slick new social media scoreboard that just works.

Swix aggregates as many as 100+ of your social media metrics, and presents them in a unified, visually digestible fashion that will be the darling of any Excel hater.

Need to see the increase in Twitter followers over time? Presto, a pretty graph in about 3 seconds flat. Want to compare the historical growth of your RSS subscribers to your YouTube channel subscribers? Done.

Want to print out all your key metrics on one piece of paper, for easy distribution and circulation within your organization? Click.

Easy, One Time Set-up

To build your Swix success metrics (which they call “pods”), you just log-in to your various social outposts or hubs, and agree to a data exchange. If you have all of your passwords and such handy, the process should take about 5 minutes.

Events & ROI

The Swix team understands that to understand social media’s true impact, you must track over a lengthy period, while simultaneously accounting for external factors that could skew results disproportionately.

Thus, they have a built in “Events” tool where you can plug in anything out of the ordinary, and that occurrence will show up in your integrated Swix reporting. A new product launch. A write up on a blog. Trade show. New YouTube video that goes viral. You’ll be able to easier understand how these events drive social success using Swix.

On the ROI front, Swix CEO Scott Lake (@scottica) told me that the company puts as much emphasis on tracking the “I” as they do the “R”. That’s why there’s a built-in calculator where you can input your costs (hard costs + labor costs) for each social media outpost, and the system automatically calculates your ROI. For example, you can determine in an instant what the cost and return per view is for a YouTube video you spent $5000 on to generate 25,000 views. The math isn’t that tough – you could do it yourself – but the ease-of-use and data presentation of Swix is exceptional.

Future Plans for Facebook

For now, Facebook doesn’t allow outside access to Facebook fan page metrics, so that’s the one large hole in the Swix data set. Mr. Lake believe that access will be granted however, allowing his company to deliver a whole suite of new Facebook data points into the Swix system.

Swix also plans to publish its own API so that third-parties can push and pull Swix data into other applications.

A white label version for agency use is also in the works.

And It’s Free

For now, Swix is in beta, and very much wants feedback from people interested in social media measurement. They’ve only been around approximately 8 weeks, and they already have thousands of customers.

For now, the service is free, so if you’re interested, sign up soon. Mr. Lake told me that beta customers are likely to receive a discount when Swix switches over to a monthly fee service.

I’m a big fan of these guys. They solve a problem, and they solve it well (and for now, free). Check it out and let us know what you think in the comments, won’t-cha?

View full post on Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting

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How To Design Your Template On Blogger?

Blogger dot com has been bit by bit (that’s why it counts), making some enhancements in it’s platform for some time now. Several improvements have been made since they launched “blogger in draft” and recently they have made yet another addition to it’s features which is the reason why it is still my number one choice when it comes to free hosting and why I wrote a post that provides some tips on how to become a better blogger.com user. The most recent addition to blogger.com is the ability to design your own template. While there are many free blogger templates on the internet, Google decided to launch this feature so you may “put out” the creativity within you:)

What’s Interesting about the blogger template designer?

For one, it’s the ease of use. The only tool you need is virtually just a mouse and the rest is up to you. You can customize your layout, colors, width, backgrounds, number of gadgets and just about anything else. With this new tool, there is no need for any knowledge in coding as you can easily design your own template and be unique. How cool is that? Newbies and blogger.com enthusiast will certainly welcome this addition.

Watch this quick video that the blogger team prepared:

And some of it’s great features:

* 15 new, highly-customizable templates from our design team, split into four families: Simple, Picture Window, Awesome Inc, and Watermark
* One-, two-, and three-column layouts for each template, with complete control over the size and arrangement of the columns
* Hundreds of background images and patterns from iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace

With the various combination that are now at your disposal, figure the math and see how many different templates you can create. Be creative, tailor your background in accordance to your topic or simply your taste. Or you can really design some good templates and have it available for the world. The blogger template designer allows you to include the attribution gadget (added to the footer by all new templates) which is there to give credit not just to the designer and artist of the background image, but to you as well. great way to get backlinks, don’t you think? Just edit its settings by clicking “Edit” on Layout > Page Elements to add your own authorship or copyright information. This is all now more reason to consider using blogger.com as your free hosting platform of choice. You can read the official release on The Blogger Template Designer.

So, what do you think of this new addition to blogger? For those interested, I have written a post that provides some tips on how to become a better blogger.com user. Happy blogging!

View full post on Online Business Resources by DiTesco

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I am trying to compile a list of Japan’s most interesting people in Social Media. Please add your name or others in the comments.

The list has begun based on those who turned up at a Twitter gathering I initiated at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. I learned so much on that evening and afterwards Steve Nagata generously took me on a great tour of Akihabara.

Add your name (or others) in the comments and I will be sure to invite you to the next gathering! (I am interested in interesting people, not companies, by the way. I enjoy hanging out with people, not companies!)

UPDATE: Shortly after I saved an early edit of this posting both Gen and Steve Nagata tweeted about the lack of Japanese names below. Be particularly great to get more names on that front!

Here’s the details of those in the video who attended that evening:

Rafik Dammak, a recovering blogger from Tunisia who now only Twitters. He is also a Non Commercial Stakeholder Group Board Appointee to the Generic Names Supporting Organization of ICANN (who manages the Internet.)

Alistair Townsend, founder of Bakoko Design Development, Tokyo who is on
Linkedin, Posterous, Twitter and has a company site.

Gen Kanai, the business director of business development at Mozilla has a personal blog, Mozilla blog and Tweets.

Robb Satterwhite, publisher of Bento.com, the best and biggest Japanese restaurant guide is also on Flickr and has a book. He also has FB fan page and a Facebook app “My Favorite Sushi”.

Rick Martin’s personal blog, CNET blog and Twitter.

Steve Nagata, Akihabara fan and tech consultant who blogs, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Kyle Hasegawa on Blog, Twitter

Michael Q. Todd on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter

Martyn Williams, Tokyo Bureau Chief for IDG News Service, on Facebook Twitter

Orlando Camargo, the President of Ogilvy PR, Japan has a great photo feed on Flickr, is on LinkedIn and Tweets.

A list of more from Steve Nagata:

A list of more from Steve Nagata:

Fumi Yamazaki, @fumi – Author and journalist.  Well known and highly respected in both Japanese and English speaking communities. recently published a book on twitter marketing.
Nobuyuki Hayashi, @nobi – Author and journalist.  EVERYONE knows Nobi. Following Apple since it landed in Japan.
Andrew Shuttleworth, @@ashuttleworth – Social Networks.  One of the biggest names in social media in Tokyo.  One of the founders of Tokyo 2.0
Paul Papadimitriou, @papadimitriou – Technology evangelist.  Technically not in Japan anymore, he continues to support Web2.0 ventures in Japan from across the globe.  Honorary virtual member.
Toshiaki Kanda, @@knnkanda – Author, journalist, television personality. A Japanese techno-celebrity.
Satoka Fujita, @lhuga – Social media enthusiast.  Heavy web2.0 user and founder of Tokyo Geek Girls
Danny Choo, @dannychoo – Blogger, Entrepreneur. Tokyo’s Dancing Stormtrooper. YouTube star and Otaku blogger.
Oliver Reichenstein, @Ia – Information Architect.  Creator of Tokyo Web Trend Map.
Dr. Serkan Toto, @serkantoto – Consultant, Blogger. Writer for Techcrunch.  Little happens in Tokyo tech he does not know about.
Hideki Francis Onda, @onebeat – Blogger, Entrepreneur.  First marketing director for Apple Computer in Japan. Now CEO of Focal Point Computers and Tunewear.
Shinya Ichinohe, @shinyai – Professor, photographer.  Technology and media enthusiast. Now living in Niigata
Dean Fuji, @docmacpro – Consultant, networking mogul.  Social media consultant and power networker.
Taro Matsumura, @taromatsumura – Journalist, Researcher. Always on top of what’s tech and geek in Tokyo.
Takuya Kawai, @himanainu_kawai – Social Media Entrepreneur. One of Japan’s first Social Media specialists. Still in the center of new trends and technology.

From Gordon Kanki Knight:
I suggest myself, @kankiknight (2,712 followers) and my website here, Craig Mod (2,744), Oliver Reichenstein (over 10,000 followers), the staff at Japan Times (including many Japanese), Tomoko Hosaka, Tomo Akiyama (@tomoakiyama), Jean Snow and Roland Kelts (if he qualifies as being in Japan).

Technorati Tags: Alistair Townsend, Gen Kanai, Kyle Hasegawa, Martyn Williams, Michael Q Todd, Orlando Camargo, Rafik Dammak, Robb Satterwhite, Steve Nagata

View full post on Thomas Crampton

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All the buzz lately on Chat Roulette has a lot of people talking… and viewing! Over 20,000 users are accessing the peer to peer video site daily. If you’ve never been to the site before, think Instant Messaging, but with live video… and who you will meet next is completely random. For anyone who has used the site, it’s easy to get turned off, scared, paranoid or completely addicted. Like everything else… once something grabs hold, goes viral like crazy and has the whole world talking… the entrepreneur mindset says “How can I make money with this?“.

First there was MySpace… early monetization was by users who could create image resource sites, mass message users and eventually MySpaceAds came along. Then there was Facebook. Facebook was very professional in the beginning and limited users on customization, which also lacked revenue generating monetization efforts. It wasn’t til Facebook enabled their own apps, which sell virtual currently, reward users or simply allow advertising. Just like MySpace, Facebook came out with their own ad management system. Now there is Chat Roulette!

Just like MySpace and Facebook, Chat Roulette went from a small project created by a kid and exploded over night. You can read the full story on how Andrey Ternovskiy,  17-year-old high school student in Moscow created Chat Roulette and where it’s potentially going.

More importantly… how can such a site be monetized. Right now the site is completely bare bones, and just shows two videos and a chat screen. If you look at the bottom of the site, you will see a link for “Dating Service”, which rotates affiliate links to various dating sites. This may be a test and pave the way for more on site advertising???

I came across an excellent video from guy named Casey Neistat. Casey did a quick case study (but complex video) on what demographics are using Chat Roulette and how who they see popping up on the video screen, greatly effects if you will be “nexted“, or have a long/short conversion.

Here are some take aways from Casey Neistat’s video.

Demographic Users: (from rotation of 90 users)
Guys 71%
Girls 15%
Perverts: 14%

83%  Young People
17%  Older People
(Perverts!?… wonder why this is here? Just watch the video or try Chat Roulette and you will understand)

Yes, it’s a small case study… but the video does stir up some other user responses and can get ideas flowing. It will be interesting to see how the Chat Roulette site changes with time as it will cost more to keep running, investors get involved and the possibilities of someone acquiring the site.

Watch the video below and let me know what you think.

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

Don’t forget to visit www.ZacJohnson.com and comment on new posts! Top Commenters are rewarded with fun prizes every month!
View full post on Inside the Secret Life of a Super Affiliate – Zac Johnson dot Com

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So you’ve finally decided to get your business a blog. That’s good. You have a nice layout ready for you blog, as well as a concept for the niche blog you’re going to have, but then again you stumble upon a really big hurdle.

You’re finding it hard to manage the business and provide content for the blog at the same time. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. For that, the answer is to get you a dedicated blogger.

Why get yourself one when you can write well enough yourself? Here are some thoughts you might want to ponder on:

1. Keeping a good blog is no walk in the park. You’re probably spending so much time trying to run the business already, let alone try to maintain a blog. You’ll probably end up burnt out if you try to do it at the same time.

2. You want to focus your energy on the other aspects of business. Like what I said in #1, you may end up mentally exhausted if you try to do everything yourself. Remember that you want to keep your mind in good shape so that you can be productive in other areas of the business.

What will a designated blogger do?

Aside the fact that he’ll be blogging in behalf of your brand, the designated blogger will also act as communications manager because he’ll be responsible for posting information about the company on the social web.

Aside from that, he’ll also be tasked with the job to answer comments, queries, and researching for information your potential customers may need from your site.

How would you know who to hire?

You’d want to have someone who’s a good conversationalist to talk to people who’ll reply to your blog, a creative storyteller/writer to create compelling yet interesting content for the blog, a professional who knows how to properly deal with different kinds of people, and a multitasker to handle the task of researching, writing, and interacting with people all rolled into one.

Finding someone with an innate sense of humor would be a nice addition to the mix, though.

Finding a corporate blogger to help you with the company blog isn’t so hard. Social networking sites are teeming with pro bloggers waiting to be employed by a company in need.
LinkedIn is a great example because it is a professional social networking site, after all. You can also try posting job ads on different places like Craigslist or any similar directory service. You can also try to search Twitter for professionals who are looking for a job.

If you’re still worried about whether or not you’re supposed to hire or designate a dedicated blogger, think of it as an investment for your business. With a corporate blogger under your employ, you won’t have to divide your attention to keep up with the demands of blogging. The more time you have to concentrate on the actual business, the more chances of you improving the business altogether.

What do you think, does that sound sensible to you?

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• How to Create a Killer Company Blog (socialmediatoday.com)
• Social Media For Small Business (slideshare.net)
• Web 2 0 & Social Media Trends Focus On Blogging (Tin180 Com) (slideshare.net)

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Pain: Social Media Teams Are Challenged To Respond To the Distributed Conversations
I’m starting to get a few briefings and client requests about new technologies that enable social marketers to quickly manage, maintain, and conduct reporting on multiple channels. The issue of lack of scale is resonating with social strategists –as a result, the market is developing new tools that will help them manage them. This is one component of Social CRM, which if you haven’t heard about, please read the report on the 18 use cases of Social CRM.

Solution: As a Result, Social Media Management Systems are Emerging
Like CMS and WMS for centralized website management, Social Media Management Systems (SMMS) empower social media teams to manage multiple distributed social channels from one location –enabling the opportunity to build deeper relationships by being in more places at once.

Definition: Social Media Management Systems are collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a disparate social media environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based and enable the manager to listen, aggregate, publish, and manage, multiple social media channels from one tool.

How it works: Three simple features In the most basic sense, these management tools do the following: 1) connect with social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. 2) Allow the manager to quickly publish from one location to each of those channels, some provide ability to customize to each channel 3) Aggregate and Manage. The system allows the manager to see an aggregated view of what’s happening (from views to comments) and may offer some form of analytics and conversion metrics.

• Awareness Networks, an enterprise class community platform has launched their own tool called Social Marketing Hub has Facebook, youtube, flickr, Twitter, and of course connect with their own community features. In particular, this is an existing enterprise class vendor (previously I’ve published thorough research report on them) which bodes well to their level of potential levels of service, support, and market viability. (they’ve briefed me)
• MediaFunnel offers integration with Facebook and Twitter. They have several permission based workflows that include a variety of roles such as a contributor, administrators, publishers.  This is not unlike traditional editorial processes used in CMS systems.
• SpredFast is an up and comer who recently briefed me, this Austin based company offers the core features and claims to have a 40% enterprise customer base. They have partners with Convio, Radian6, Crimson Hexagon, Sysomos, Trackkr, IBM, Porter Novelli, Sierra Club, HomeAway. They position their product as collaborative campaign management and offer features such as scheduling content, features that integrate with events and social stream like features similar to Friendfeed. (they’ve briefed me)
• Sprinklr offers social media management tools, it’s interesting their website has a strong focus on listening first, before the publication.
• Vitrue: Offers social media management systems, that has integration with Facebook and Twitter, they offer scheduling features, and the ability to link multiple Facebook pages together.

• Social media spewing: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Spewing corporate content to every known social channel may make your life easier as a marketer, but could cause serious ramifications to the trust of your community. Remember that like fraternity row, each frat and sorority house has a different set of relationships, language, and interests –don’t think one type of content will fit all.
• It’s the people stupid, not carpet bombing: One of the promises of social is to build meaningful relationships with customers –not apply traditional spray and pray marketing tactics. By using these tools, you could be missing out on true relationships that could be deeper, with more loyalty, and the benefits of advocacy.
• Peanut butter deficit means spread too thin: Being in all places at all times can mean you’re nowhere all the time. Pick your battles and remember that the needs of the LinkedIn community are far different than those of MySpace, be selective by first knowing your socialgraphics of your customer base.

Industry Insights: A Commodity Feature, With Bandwagon Appeal
Expect nearly every community platform (there are over 100) to launch these types of features, quickly followed by host of startups that specialize in this, then also the CoTweets of the world and other Twitter platforms like Seesmic to quickly get into the enterprise game. In a few quarters, expect the traditional CMS and WMS players to finally wake up and get relevant, followed by app developers in Salesforce appexchange to launch their own iterations. In the long run, this will be commodity set of features, just a check off in the overall suite of social business software but an important component of Social CRM.

If you know a vendor that offers these features, please leave a comment, I’ll take a closer look, and plan to take some briefings with some of these vendors.

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Late Sunday night I got back from my first-ever trip to the much-discussed South by Southwest (SXSW) conference for Film, Music, and Interactive in Austin, Texas. After seeing many friends and other folks in the business rave and tweet about this event for a few years, I felt compelled to add yet another conference badge to my collection. Overall I found it to be one of the best conferences for digital marketing that I have attended in some time. That means something, because I think I’ve been to more than a dozen different digital shows in the past 24 months alone. Over the course of the next few blog posts I plan to share some of my biggest takeaways and examples of Marketing with Meaning.

First up is an example of a start-up digital service that used meaningful marketing to make the conference better for nearly everyone involved: Foursquare. For those who haven’t heard, Foursquare is a mobile tool that allows you to “check in” at locations where you physically appear—essentially a way of broadcasting to friends that you are, say, having a coffee at Starbucks, or waiting in line at the DMV. This is the leading brand in a new category of “geo-location” services. You might call it “Geo-Twitter”—in fact, you can update your Twitter and Facebook accounts with Foursquare when you check in around town.

SXSW is a very big event for the folks at Foursquare for many reasons. It is the place where partners and customers gather to see what’s new. Investors are lurking everywhere to spy the next hot winner. And some of the earliest early adopters and trendsetters (including a few celebrities) share their latest findings with their friends at SXSW.

So it is a clear business objective to own this event in every way possible. For most companies, this means paying sponsorship dollars to put your name everywhere, employing booth babes to walk around with branded snacks, and maybe hosting a giant beer-for-all for everyone at the event. But not Foursquare. Instead, Foursquare stuck with what makes its service special, and spent most of its time and money making it more so.

Foursquare is already a killer app for conferences. It is most effective when a large group of people who know each other and want to get together are located in a pretty close environment. This is exactly what conferences are all about. So instead of calling or texting to find out where your friends and contacts are, you simply see where they have recently checked in and walk over to the conference room, bar, or restaurant where they happen to be. This even makes it easy to “run into” people who you might unable to reach via email or telephone.

This is why Foursquare became so popular at SXSW in 2009. So the business decided to do more with this hyper-engaged, ultra-important audience in 2010. When we got off the plane in Austin and checked into the airport, we noticed that Foursquare had created special new features for SXSW participants. The main add was a set of special “badges” that you could unlock by performing various check-ins during the six-day event. Badges are a key element of the basic Foursquare service—providing you a fun way to show that you have, say, checked in at 50 different total places or from five airports or from a boat. They are fun for the user, and cleverly (and cheaply) train people to make Foursquare check-ins a habit. Some of the special SXSW badges include the “Austin Explorer” for hitting five locations in the city, and the “Hookup” for checking in at two different hotels. For me and our team, we found that these badges turned Foursquare into a living game that made some of the boring moments between sessions and meetings much more tolerable.

Foursquare did more than virtual badges, though. The firm partnered with specific locations such as the Pepsi Refresh Cafe and SXSW Web Awards to give people temporary tattoos to match their unlocked badges. And it partnered with PayPal to donate $.25 for every check-in to Haitian relief efforts. Foursquare even reported a running total of how much you had earned for Haiti. (I believe I hit more than $8.)

Only the folks at Foursquare know how much this modest expense in programming time delivered for its business at this big event. One key data point reported on its site shows that there were more than 15,000 badges awarded, including 6,025 versions of the Austin Explorer. That is a pretty significant percentage of the total number of people at the Interactive conference, and a huge sign of successful engagement. This might have even helped the nascent company establish a business model; TechCrunch made the case that Foursquare could create a business around building similar special apps for other conferences.

So many thanks to Foursquare for helping me get a more out of my company’s significant time and money investment in sending me to SXSW. I will certainly repay the favor by giving this new service major attention in the months ahead.
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