Out of the Fog Marketing

While Facebook may still be the biggest largest social networking site in the business world, Twitter seems to be the favorite among the Fortune 100 companies, with 65% owning a corporate Twitter account.
Check out some beautiful and interesting social media infographics at Mashable.

Labels: facebook, mashable, twitter

If you would like to see who is Tweeting with a backlink to your site, check out Backtweets.com. The advanced option tab lets you set a date range and setup email alerts.

If you would like to see how your company can take advantage of Twitter and other social media sites, check out our social media programs for healthcare and technology companies or give us a call for a free consultation.

Labels: backtweets, twitter, twitter apps

Believe it or not, "Twitter" beat out h1n1, Obama and Michael Jackson as the most popular word in the English language in 2009. While it's not completely fleshed out, online social interaction is here is stay. Read the full story.

If your company doesn't already have a social media strategy, now is the time to get one. In the very least you should do a land grab for vanity name URLs on Facebook and claim your company profile on LinkedIn and corporate/product fan pages on Facebook. And start to play with Twitter. There are tools such as Ping.fm that link all these social sites and your blog together, so in 5 minutes per day, you can provide a status update on each site with just one login.

Labels: interactive marketing, Internet marketing, ping.fm, social media, social networking, twitter, web marketing

Microsoft today announced that it will add live updates from micro-blogging service Twitter to its Bing search engine results. Google also announced plans for live Twitter updates integration in its search engine. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Microsoft announced it has access to the public Twitter feed and released the Bing Twitter search beta for U.S. residents. Google promised to roll out Twitter integration in its search engine "in the coming months". In addition, Microsoft has inked a deal with Facebook and Google is said to be in talks with them.

Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's online services group, said, "We are going to get access to all of the public Twitter information in real time." Bing will also get the Facebook status feed at a later date. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, Facebook, said, "We are giving Bing a feed of data made open to everyone. No money exchanged hands. We are not trying to make money on data."

Bing Twitter search sees the text of a Twitter update and any shortened links tagged with it. Domain names are displayed after the shortened links mentioned in the Twitter update. However, Bing Twitter search only shows Tweets that happened in the past week.

This is the first attempt of the search engine giants to show real-time information in search results. Stay tuned to see how both Google and Microsoft will roll this search functionality out of beta. If you do not have a social media strategy, it's time to get cranking.

Labels: bing, facebook, google, search results, SEO, twitter

Gartner added micro-blogging to its list of technologies that will transform business over the next two to five years, predicting that by 2011, business micro-blogging will be a standard feature of 80% of social software platforms. However, standard micro-blogging platforms, such as Twitter, don't make sense for technology and healthcare companies selling into niche markets.

Media Brains has launched "Business Chatter" which targets their niche directories such as electronic engineering, plastics, and manufacturing. You get one free post a month. However, for unlimited posts you have to pay $995 for a 12-month profile listing. So far, I don't see conversations happening on this platform, just blatant self-promotion. I think these platforms will have a tough time competing with niche discussion forms.

What do you think? Please post a comment if you know if any micro-blogging platforms that are effective for niche B2B marketing.

Labels: b2bmarketing, business chatter, gartner, microblogging, twitter

Want to easily spy on competition, find partners, seek out resellers? Type a phrase into TwitterSearch and see whose tweeting on your topics.

Labels: competitive research, twitter, twittersearch

HootSuite, formerly BrightKit, is an multi-faceted Twitter management tool. I especially like the fact I can manage multiple Twitter accounts from one dashboard. It's great for agencies managing client accounts because you can add multiple editors and pre-schedule tweets. It's our latest awesome free marketing tool.

Labels: dashboard, hootsuite, preschedule tweets, twitter

If you are still a Twitter disbeliever, check out the Twitter Election site. Tweets are coming in at 1-2 per second!

Labels: election day, tweet, twitter

It isn't just a good idea for the environment, recycling is great for marketing your business as well. Recycling ideas that is. Often content such as articles, snippets or topical advice can be reconstructed or updated as an easy way to build more content and, if online, gain valuable back links.
Also if you spend a good deal of time on content such as blog posts, make sure you distribute subsets of the content on sites such as Twitter. You can also put snippets on your email signature.

Labels: backlinks, blog posts, blogging, guerilla marketing, marketing content, twitter

Bloggers and publication editors are now foregoing email pitches and asking for succinct pitches via Twitter and other social media tools. Check out Stowe Boyd's mandate that all pitches are over Twitter in format he calls the Twitpitch. It does make you really hone your message if you only have 140 characters.

Labels: media pitches, press pitches, public relations, social media, stowe boyd, twitpitch, twitter, web 2.0

If you haven’t seen it yet, this useful little mashup shows you what people are tweeting. The interface, which works similarly to Google Trends, lets you compare the popularity of different keywords as they show up in Twitter feeds over the course of weeks or months. Click on the “see what people are saying” link and you’ll get a feed of the most recent tweets containing that keyword or phrase.

twist.flaptor.com

Labels: google trends, keyword research, twitter

Check out Twittearth to see who is tweeting around the world.

While some of you may consider this mindless time wasting, it's fascinating to think of the possibilities. What if everyone in your span of interest shows up on a Twittearth? What if you can see who is subscribing to particular services, which company just signed a deal, which customers are "talking"?

Labels: permission marketing, twittearth, twitter

Cisco and Facebook? Yes, folks they have a relationship. B2B Marketing recently reported on Cisco's use of social networking and Web 2.0 tactics to launch their Aggregation Services Router 1000 series. Usually stoic Cisco even has a Second Life property.

Research firm Universal McCann has a detailed report out with social media statistics. One of the more interesting stats is 36% of survey respondents thought more positively about companies with blogs. It's interesting blogging is becoming part of branding and corporate validation.

So does your company have a Facebook group, Squidoo site or Twitter page? In this new landscape the daring companies which try it will come out ahead I believe. We already see fabulous search engine ranking pages for Squidoo sites on niche topics and Twitter tweet pickup. So dive in...the water's fine.

Labels: b2bmarketing, better marketing presentations, cisco, facebook, Internet marketing, social media, social networking, squidoo, twitter, universal mccann, web 2.0

According to Forrester, 11.2% of online adults in the U.S. publish a blog at least once a month. Of the same group, 24.8% read a blog and 13.7% comment on a blog at least once a month. The numbers are higher for youths. Of online youths, 20.8% publish a blog, 36.6% read a blog, and 26.4% comment on a blog at least once a month.

However the complete Business Week article details why some businesses are shifting from blogs to social media sites. It's an interesting idea now that Twitter posts are being indexed by Google and only takes seconds to write compared to the longer time commitment for a well-written blog post.

Labels: ann arbor business, ann arbor google, blogs, businessweek, corporate blogs, forrester, number of blogs, social media, twitter, young bloggers, youth