Google Alerts
These are an absolute basic minimum, that everyone should be doing. Set up a Google account and set up some Alerts, for you, your brand, your company or any keywords you want to track. As soon as it is mentioned on the web Google will tell you about it with an email to your inbox!
Tweetdeck
If you are a Twitter user, then this is an absolute must. The ability to track real-time what is being said about whatever you choose, is very powerful indeed. It is easy to use and set up, and it will even play you a sound when someone has mentioned you!
Addictomatic
This is just superb, and also fun to use. Put in a simple search, and it will show the results in a page full of widget type boxes across a whole range of platforms - video, blogs, networks, search networks etc. Love this!!
BoardReader
Now this is a novel site. It lets you monitor discussion groups and forums. This is great for knowing when a new group or discussion begins about you, your company or your brand.
Backtype
This is a real time conversational search.They index and connect online conversations from across the web in real-time, so you can see what people are saying about topics that interest you.
BackTweet
Brilliant at monitoring when your tweets (on Twitter) have been shared - or re-tweeted.
Filtrbox
See what others are saying about your company in real-time on Twitter, social networks, blogs and thousands of online news outlets. There is a cost attached here, but they will give you 15 days free as a starter which is worthing doing just for starters.
SocialMention
Nice! Just like Google alerts, but for social media instead. It does produce different results as well!
IceRocket
Like some of the others here, it searches across anumber of different social media platforms across the web
Twittersearch
The superb search engine of real time info on Twitter. Search your topic, and set up the RSS feed for the results to flood into your RSS Reader. It only searches Twitter, but that is where the real time conversations are happening!!
Friday, 2 April 2010
Saturday, 27 March 2010
Did you know that you can Post by email?
Checkout the settings section in the Control Panel
Best regards,
Peter Rees DipM FCIM MCIPR,
Chartered Marketer
Managing Director,
PR Strategic Marketing Ltd.
www.prstrategic.com
www.prstrategic.blogspot.com
+44 (0) 7929 193 330
Best regards,
Peter Rees DipM FCIM MCIPR,
Chartered Marketer
Managing Director,
PR Strategic Marketing Ltd.
www.prstrategic.com
www.prstrategic.blogspot.com
+44 (0) 7929 193 330
Saturday, 20 March 2010
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
Sunday, 14 March 2010
11 Steps towards an online content strategy
Posted 10 March 2010 17:54pm by Rebecca Lieb
IBM recently published research showing that about 80 percent of those who begin a corporate blog never post more than five entries. And that's just blogging. The Internet is littered with near-tweetless Twitter accounts, expressionless Facebook pages, no-one-home YouTube channels. In the rush to adopt social media as a tactic, too many marketers leave strategy in the dust.
Increasingly, marketing isn't about buying media, the advertising model. Media is cheap -- or often even free. But rolling your own media brings with it a new set of challenges: coming up with enough content to fill all those blank pages, blog posts, profiles and such....and doing so on a regular basis, not just in a one-off burst of Week 1 enthusiam.
In short, brands are media. Marketers are editors, or at least need to start thinking like editors and producers if they don't want to come up short-handed. So herewith, 12 steps toward editor-think to help marketers get beyond that accusatory Blank White Page and start thinking like an editor.
1. Know your audience
Couldn't be simpler or more self-evident, but the importance of knowing who you're producing content for cannot be overstated. Customers? Prospects? Fans? Industry peers? Colleagues? The media? Some or all of the above? Selecting topics and tailoring messaging is a whole lot easier when you know who's on the receiving end.
2. Define key themes and messages
Now that you know who you're addressing, what is it, broadly speaking, you want to communicate to them? Don't just focus on your product, service or business here, but do some thinking as to how it relates to an audience's real-world concerns. If you're a local business, you may want to weave broader local themes into your content. If you're hawking something with a high consideration curve, education and learning may be part of your messaging. Use your knowledge of your audience, your tone-of-voice, and the broader informational environment in which you reside to inform themes and messaging.
3. Establish a frequency framework
Half the journalists I know say the write for periodicals because they need deadlines in order to produce. In the trade, it's called feeding the beast. You may not need to blog, or write, or tweet, or status-update every day, but once per month is probably not enough...and you risk the whole endeavor tipping off the cliff. Create a schedule for content updates and adhere to it. Map out potential stories, features, or other content in advance so that when the deadline looms, you'll have a sense of what's due. Falling into a rythm beats falling out of visibility altogether.
4. Create an editorial calendar
An editorial calendar plugs directly into the frequency framework. Just as your local newspaper has a fod and dining feature on Wednesdays, an expanded entertainment section on Friday, and home and gardening on Thursdays, mapping a type of content to your frequency framework is a great step forward in terms of making relevant content happen on a reasonably frequent schedule.
5. Develop regular features and rubrics
Creating a few regularly-appearing content elements is one of the oldest editorial tricks in the book. Comics, horoscopes, weather and film listings all help round off a newspaper's offerings and keep readers coming back for more. Moreover, once you've got these regular features, they're all but auto-populating. Highlights of the week, links out to other relevant content, a quote of the day are just a few down-and-dirty ideas to keep the flow of content coming.
6. Interview
Interviews probably belong up in item #5, but are notable enough to warrant discussion on their own. Are your own ideas drying up? Talk to someone else! Experts in your field, enthusiatic users, people in your company. Make a list of potential interview subjects, and consider making interviews a regular content feature.
7. Go multimedia
Content isn't limited to text alone, of course. Images, photos, video and audio all expand and enhance your content offerings. Blogging? Posts accompanied by a graphic image draw attention to themselves. Don't take my word for it, give it a shot -- web metrics bear this one out.
8. Enlist contributors and provide them with guidelines
You don't have to go it alone. Look around at your coworkers, colleagues, professional network. There are lots of potential content contributors out there. Often, all you have to do is ask, either for one-off contributions or regular features. User-generated content is, of course, a whole new route to ensuring content is created for you, be it comments, ratings and reviews, or contests. With clearly defined guidelines and expectations, and a little bit of polite asking, you may be surprised at how much content is created for you rather than by you.
9. Opine and editorialize
A frequent stumbling block to content creation is when the creators think they're obligated to be first to break a piece of news. It's a big internet out there and news is traveling at the speed of fiber optic cable. This is a losing game. Leave it to the pros. Divest yourself of the notion that you're a reporter and instead become an expert observer and interpreter of what news means to your audience. Establish youself, your company or your brand as a thought leader, not a deadline reporter.
10 Turn on comments and feedback
Whatever digital platform you're creating content for, ensure comments and feedback mechanisms are in place, easy to use, and monitored. This not only creates a platform for participation, it's a gauge of how well you're doing, what excites and interests your audience, and will doubtless feed in ideas for shaping and improving future content.
11 Listen
Listen to what others in your space are saying, and do so outside the parameters of your own comments section. Set up topic alerts for your relevant themes. Get out there and participate in what others are saying within your arena of expertise. It's the social media equivalent of leaving the house.
IBM recently published research showing that about 80 percent of those who begin a corporate blog never post more than five entries. And that's just blogging. The Internet is littered with near-tweetless Twitter accounts, expressionless Facebook pages, no-one-home YouTube channels. In the rush to adopt social media as a tactic, too many marketers leave strategy in the dust.
Increasingly, marketing isn't about buying media, the advertising model. Media is cheap -- or often even free. But rolling your own media brings with it a new set of challenges: coming up with enough content to fill all those blank pages, blog posts, profiles and such....and doing so on a regular basis, not just in a one-off burst of Week 1 enthusiam.
In short, brands are media. Marketers are editors, or at least need to start thinking like editors and producers if they don't want to come up short-handed. So herewith, 12 steps toward editor-think to help marketers get beyond that accusatory Blank White Page and start thinking like an editor.
1. Know your audience
Couldn't be simpler or more self-evident, but the importance of knowing who you're producing content for cannot be overstated. Customers? Prospects? Fans? Industry peers? Colleagues? The media? Some or all of the above? Selecting topics and tailoring messaging is a whole lot easier when you know who's on the receiving end.
2. Define key themes and messages
Now that you know who you're addressing, what is it, broadly speaking, you want to communicate to them? Don't just focus on your product, service or business here, but do some thinking as to how it relates to an audience's real-world concerns. If you're a local business, you may want to weave broader local themes into your content. If you're hawking something with a high consideration curve, education and learning may be part of your messaging. Use your knowledge of your audience, your tone-of-voice, and the broader informational environment in which you reside to inform themes and messaging.
3. Establish a frequency framework
Half the journalists I know say the write for periodicals because they need deadlines in order to produce. In the trade, it's called feeding the beast. You may not need to blog, or write, or tweet, or status-update every day, but once per month is probably not enough...and you risk the whole endeavor tipping off the cliff. Create a schedule for content updates and adhere to it. Map out potential stories, features, or other content in advance so that when the deadline looms, you'll have a sense of what's due. Falling into a rythm beats falling out of visibility altogether.
4. Create an editorial calendar
An editorial calendar plugs directly into the frequency framework. Just as your local newspaper has a fod and dining feature on Wednesdays, an expanded entertainment section on Friday, and home and gardening on Thursdays, mapping a type of content to your frequency framework is a great step forward in terms of making relevant content happen on a reasonably frequent schedule.
5. Develop regular features and rubrics
Creating a few regularly-appearing content elements is one of the oldest editorial tricks in the book. Comics, horoscopes, weather and film listings all help round off a newspaper's offerings and keep readers coming back for more. Moreover, once you've got these regular features, they're all but auto-populating. Highlights of the week, links out to other relevant content, a quote of the day are just a few down-and-dirty ideas to keep the flow of content coming.
6. Interview
Interviews probably belong up in item #5, but are notable enough to warrant discussion on their own. Are your own ideas drying up? Talk to someone else! Experts in your field, enthusiatic users, people in your company. Make a list of potential interview subjects, and consider making interviews a regular content feature.
7. Go multimedia
Content isn't limited to text alone, of course. Images, photos, video and audio all expand and enhance your content offerings. Blogging? Posts accompanied by a graphic image draw attention to themselves. Don't take my word for it, give it a shot -- web metrics bear this one out.
8. Enlist contributors and provide them with guidelines
You don't have to go it alone. Look around at your coworkers, colleagues, professional network. There are lots of potential content contributors out there. Often, all you have to do is ask, either for one-off contributions or regular features. User-generated content is, of course, a whole new route to ensuring content is created for you, be it comments, ratings and reviews, or contests. With clearly defined guidelines and expectations, and a little bit of polite asking, you may be surprised at how much content is created for you rather than by you.
9. Opine and editorialize
A frequent stumbling block to content creation is when the creators think they're obligated to be first to break a piece of news. It's a big internet out there and news is traveling at the speed of fiber optic cable. This is a losing game. Leave it to the pros. Divest yourself of the notion that you're a reporter and instead become an expert observer and interpreter of what news means to your audience. Establish youself, your company or your brand as a thought leader, not a deadline reporter.
10 Turn on comments and feedback
Whatever digital platform you're creating content for, ensure comments and feedback mechanisms are in place, easy to use, and monitored. This not only creates a platform for participation, it's a gauge of how well you're doing, what excites and interests your audience, and will doubtless feed in ideas for shaping and improving future content.
11 Listen
Listen to what others in your space are saying, and do so outside the parameters of your own comments section. Set up topic alerts for your relevant themes. Get out there and participate in what others are saying within your arena of expertise. It's the social media equivalent of leaving the house.
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
Excellent article from McKinsey & Co - Behavioural Economics
If you haven't yet registered for articles from McKinsey , then I recommend that you do... a regular source of thought provoking FREE marketing and business updates.
Like this one...
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/A_marketers_guide_to_behavioral_economics_2536
Like this one...
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/A_marketers_guide_to_behavioral_economics_2536
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