The FREE Tools list for social media on the web.

Guest blogger: Serena Carpenter agreed that I may share some  info from her social media classes that she teaches at Arizona State. She used this hand out for an American Marketing Association meeting that she was a panelist on.  I found her to be a breath of fresh air, really gets the space and is teaching students leading edge info, as it is happening.

She has so much great info that she uses with her students and is giving us access via her blog, which also has some other great info that you can read and learn from.

 FREE Tools by Serena Carpenter /Arizona State University, – used with her permission.

MONITOR YOUR REACH (Twitter Tools Featured Lower)

• YouTube “Insight” (Video)
• View detailed statistics about uploaded videos including views, popularity peaks, demographics
• SiteMeter (Traffic analyzer)
• Tracks location, key words used, referrals, site visit length average, average visits per day, etc. for your Web site.
• Google Analytics (Traffic Analyzer)
• Tracks how people get to your site, the content clicked on, average pages per visit, etc. for your Web site.
• Google Feedburner (Subscribers)
• Tracks the number of people who subscribe to your RSS feeds.  Submit your site also to Feed-Squirrel and OctoFinder Web sites.
• Google Alerts (Monitor Brand and Conversations)
• Provides email message when someone writes about you.
• Site Valuation and Other Stats Sites
• Website Outlook (http://www.websiteoutlook.com/www.problogger.net)
• Enter your URL to determine how much your site is worth.  It includes other stats.  Other similar sites include QuarkBase, urlfan, StatBrain, CubeStat, WebTrafficAgents, and AboutTheDomain.
• Social Media Monitoring Sites
• SM2 http://sm2.techrigy.com/main/ offers tools to help businesses to find out what people are talking about.  You can measure your page’s popularity using Social Meter http://www.socialmeter.com/
• Analytics Toolbox from Mashable – 50 ways to monitor site traffic
• http://mashable.com/2009/01/12/track-online-traffic/

SHARING

• YouTube (Video)
• Share your video postings on Facebook, Twitter or Google Reader.
• Vimeo Widget (Video)
• Embed a visual montage of your latest videos widget to your site.  You can cross-post video to YouTube and Vimeo.
• Slideshare (Presentations)
• Add the Blog Sidebar Widget to highlight your latest presentations.
• FriendFeed (Share numerous social media sites) use Socialthing or OpenID
• Share all of your social media activity with your Facebook friends or embed a widget for your site.
• Delicious (bookmarking site)
• Share your linkroll or a badge on other sites by embedding code.
• MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki)
• Create a wiki for your FAQ or Customer Service knowledge base.  Let your consumers enter the problems they’ve had via a public forum (the wiki), and provide your responses publicly as well.

GET YOUR SITE INDEXED ON SEARCH ENGINES

• Add blog to community portals and search engines
• Try adding your site to BlogCatalog, Blogged, Technorati, BlogPulse, Google Blogs, or NetworkedBlogs(Facebook).
• Update different search engines that your blog has updated
• Sign up for http://pingomatic.com/ and http://blogsearch.google.com/ping.
• Squidoo
• Community website that allows people to create pages (called “lenses”) on various topics.  Creating a topic related to your blog and include your feed in that page would help your blog get indexed.

 TWITTER TOOLS

1. TweetStats.  Provides the average per day (http://tweetstats.com)
2. WeFollow.  Add yourself to the Twitter search http://wefollow.com/
3. Favstar.  http://favstar.fm/.  Favstar shows you who favorites your tweets.
4. Twinfluence ranking.  Expect it to be low.  http://twinfluence.com/
   1. If you have a grade of 75%, it means that you have a higher reach than 75% of the other twitterers analyzed.
   2. If your rank is #400, that means there are 399 other twitterers in the system who have higher reach scores.
5. TwitterGrader http://twitter.grader.com/

Both sites grade you on the number of followers you have and your influence on these followers.  Grader also measures the pace of your updates, while Influence measures the informational value of your followers.

6.      Twitalyzer http://www.twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/index.asp.  Measures your impact and success in social media

7.      Retweet http://www.retweetist.com/ lets you know what posts have been RTed.

8.      Twazzup http://www.twazzup.com/ and inView

http://myinview.com/login.php tracks mentions of you on Twitter

9.      Link shorteners capture traffic to twitter feed.  For example, use trim and bit.ly to shorten urls, then later add a + to see how many people clicked!  Example: http://bit.ly/JTkk+

10.  Search Twitter  http://search.twitter.com/

270 Tools for Running Business Online  http://mashable.com/2008/09/21/270-online-business-tools/

FixYa Social Tech Support  http://www.fixya.com

Top 5 Business Blogging Mistakes and How to Fix Them  http://mashable.com/2009/09/21/business-blogging-mistakes/

Adding video to your social media efforts.

Yes, you should be adding video to all of your social media efforts.  You need to have your various teams from marketing, corporate communications, sales, training and operations be gathering up all those old videos and b roll and repurposing them for the digital age. Thus creating a digital dam of video from which to repurpose.

If you do not have the inhouse expertise,  there are many video companies who do that very economically.  I like Mantis Media for my video shoots and edit repurposing.  I also like Burst Marketing for podcasting.  There are hundreds of companies doing this work, so just ask your team who they use. If they tell you it is going to be expensive, then call my guys and get a bid.  The cost is very affordable, so don’t let your teams lack of excitement about harvesting the old stuff give way to the rush of doing all new stuff, but be sure that either way it includes digital use rights.  Review your talent/model release forms and your video contracts to be sure that you have the rights on past work and even more important that it is included for any new shoots.

Buy a HD flip camera for fast video capture which is under $200. It has a USB plug in and is so easy to use and capture…store openings, customer testimonials.  You can also record YouTube style videos with a web cam.  If it does not come on your lap top, for under $100 you can get a HD web cam with a USB.

This should not wait to be part of the 2010 plans, this needs to be done now!… so get video shot, edited and most important uploaded to website, blogs, twitters, Facebook and other sites that will take your video like Flickr, Vimeo, Vodpod and others.

The best way of measuring ROI for Social Media.

I posted a question on the best way to measure ROI for Social Media on my Linkedin, as I am doing research on ROI methods for Social Media for an upcoming Marketing Technology Summit, at which I will be speaking.

 The Question posted was:

How are you measuring your ROI on your social media?  What’s working for you?  Researching examples for an upcoming talk.

This topic is top of mind for CMO’s. What is really working in social media?  How do you know if it is working?  How do you measure it and how do you plan and report out on a realistic ROI on social media?

I will add replies below as comments come in. Please feel free to add your own.

TwittURLy top twitter links real time is a good find.

TwittURLy.com which shows top twitters in real time is another good find and point of data that any CMO will want to access. It says : “We track and rank what URLs people are talking about on Twitter”.
I also like that it breaks it into : Everything, news only, pics only, and video only.  It has a top 100 that they show and you can make your own top 100 to follow those you are interested in.  I also like that you can look up a profile on someone on twitter about whom you are reading.

The news tab  has a lot of interesting tweets on whats going on in social media land, which is very interesting to read.

Meebo solves cross platform issues with instant messaging.

If you are into marketing via instant messaging or are targeting a youth audience who does not understand why you would still email them when you can IM, then this is a platform foryou.  Look at Meebo at  www.meebo.com. It connects all instant messaging via AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook and myspace messaging into one tool.

Here’s the details: Meebo is web based instant messaging. It works with any computer, any IM network . Meebo.com allows them  to chat with their buddies on most  IM network in a single buddylist.  It allows them to login with the IM account  they already have. There’s nothing to download or install, and it’s free.

 

This is a good tool for your social media team to look at if they are in the instant messaging space.