Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

In case you’ve been living under a rock during 2009,  it was the year of Twitter. Twitter and “tweets” were all over the place. Many marketers were just trying to get their feet wet, while others jumped in wholeheartedly and even created national campaigns around it. At least until the next hot thing, it appears that Twitter is it for now. For many B2C, as well as B2B, marketers it was easy to setup a Twitter account and post a few things here and there, but after a few weeks or months they began to wonder:

• Am I reaching the right audience?
• How do I extend my audience?
• What are some quick ways, aside from giving away “the farm”, to grow my audience?

This post is specifically around those questions. Here are three quick ideas you can use to grow your Twitter following quickly and relevantly.

Media Publications
The first place to look is to existing trade publications who have migrated to Twitter. Over the last several years, traditional and offline media has really been taking it on the chin due to the rise of online. As a result, many of them have taken to social media and online venues as a way to stoke the fires of their online publications. Whether you are looking to reach teens and tweens (i.e. TigerBeat), yacht enthusiasts (i.e. Sailing Magazine) or professional contractors (i.e. Contractor Magazine), there are offline or newly created online publications on Twitter. All you have to do is click on their “Followers” link and presto, you have a captive audience for your products or services. If they are interested in what these publications have to say, they are probably also interested in what your company has to say. So what publications are important to your industry? Even if they don’t have a Twitter account setup, you might find people who are regularly readers, just talking about it too. See for yourself.

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Recently, I’ve been asked to help out a few friends do some PR on the side. Just some basic stuff, but it amazes me how much PR professionals could benefit from just a little search marketing training. Hence, I’ve put together 5 things every PR professional should know in order to better serve their clients, as well as get them a little more search savvy.

1. Use “quotes” or exact phrasing in your queries
   Now this one is pretty basic and I think most PR professionals already know this one.  If you’re trying to find where your press release was quoted, listed, or mentioned, you need to use quotes around your phrase. So if your press release is “Tommy won the big race at Sunday’s fair”, then you would use that phrase exactly, as I’ve shown here.
2. Use the “link:” syntax in your queries.
   Now most search engines support this syntax, however, I’ve found Yahoo to always have the best results for this. The “link:” syntax tells you what sites are linking to your press release. I think this syntax is actually more important than the one above, as it will show you all sites that are linking to your press release, regardless of whether they quote your press release, reuse part of the content, or just put in a random link. In any case, it shows you which sites have “staying power” and which ones are just fly-by-night press release zombies who simply regurgitate whatever the PR wires give them. You can learn more about the “link:” and see an example here.

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Following up on my last post concerning Social Media Emergency Plans, I decided to provide a little more detail into the legal section I outlined. As I said in my last post, I would make sure to contact your legal counsel to ensure you know what to do in scenarios where social media (or any other media) gets out of hand. It’s probably a good idea to do some sort of risk assessment prior to starting any of these campaigns. Part of that process though is to know who to contact once you decide legal action is required. Below is a list of the “who’s who” on the web and each of their copyright and/or DMCA pages.

• Twitter’s Copyright Page
• Youtube’s Copyright Page
• Vimeo’s Copyright Page
• Facebook’s Copyright Page
• Myspace’s Copyright Page
• LinkedIn’s Copyright Page

And in case it gets indexed before you can remove it:

• Google’s Copyright Page
• Yahoo’s Copyright Page
• MSN’s Copyright Page

As I couldn’t find any document to really show how to do a social media risk assessment, part 3 of this series will be an outline for a document on how to do just such an assessment. Let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like to see and I’ll make sure to include it.

And for any law firms or lawyers reading this, here’s a trio of twitter tips for you. Enjoy.

So recently I’ve been really getting into microblogging (aka lifestreaming or twittering). I briefly tried out Twitter a few months ago, but didn’t really get into it. I didn’t see the value aside from letting people know I was going to grocery store or reading a book. Since then though, I’ve seen the light. Now granted, it has a lot of uses, but be forewarned, once you put your toe into the twitter pond, it can quickly become a deluge of data, a inundation of information, a massive amount of media, a…well, you get the point.

These tools are great ways to stay on top of those conversations and still maintain some sanity and keep your job. Let’s go through some of the tools that I use every day:

Ping.fm:
First, Ping is fantastic! If you don’t already have an account, sign up today. There have been a few other status updating services, but this one is by far the best. It allows you to update as many statuses as you want, at once. The one caveat to this though is that it’s really good for saving time, but if you tailor your message to each individual community, it’s still probably best to visit each site individually. (i.e. I post stuff to Twitter and Friendfeed that I would not necessarily post to LinkedIn.)

Friendfeed
Friendfeed, if you’re not already familiar, is a social media aggregator. You supply feeds from your social media universe (Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Netflix, Vimeo, YouTube, etc. etc. etc.) and it pulls in all of your activity, as well as anyone else who you want to follow on Friendfeed (ala Twitter functionality). Beyond just following, Friendfeed also has intelligent suggestions built in, whereby if I am following say Jeremiah Owyang or Adam Ostrow, it will also show me what their friends are doing as well. I’m assuming this is done based on these people I’m following, interacting with their friends in some manner, which tells Friendfeed to also suggest this content. If someone has a better idea, I’d love to know. Maybe Bret knows.

Plurk:
Plurk is another Twitter clone and there’s been much back and forth as to whether Twitter is better or whether Plurk is better. At the end of the day, Twitter is better because of two factors. First to market and lack of “karma”. Karma is a fun idea that Plurk tried to implement, but which has a divisive effect.  You either love it and stick around, or hate it and leave quickly. I was of the latter camp and didn’t bother to come back. Now, I still update Plurk as part of Ping.fm settings, but it doesn’t go beyond that. It’s again, mostly a content redistribution channel with some Friendfeed functionality. The one thing I will give them credit for is an interesting take of the time stream interface. I also like their quirky graphic design sense and built in user incentive chotchkies.

Adobe Air
Ok, so maybe this isn’t an official twitter application, but since it’s launch, I’ve seen some fantastic implementations of the Adobe Air platform which enable applications to make the jump from the web to the desktop. I’m currently running Pandora Desktop, Tweet Deck, Twhirl, and a few others currently.

Twhirl
I actually installed Tweet Deck first and then Twhirl, but I wanted to feature this one first, as it’s become my default Twitter and Friendfeed status monitors. The only thing I would like to see next is a Ping.fm feature incorporated into Twhirl, so I can update each site at once directly from the Twhirl interface. If anyone knows if or when this is coming, let me know.

Tweet Deck
I installed Tweet Deck to see if it was any better/worse than Twhirl. Well, it’s pretty much the same, but without the Friendfeed feature. So I still have it, but don’t use it that often.

Summize:
Summize is great in that it provides better filtering and search functionality than Twitter itself. Actually, scratch that, as those are now one in the same. Guess Twitter caught on to what was needed.

So what’s been my experience and how does it translate into professional/business use?
Well, so far, I can’t say enough good things about it. I’ve seen my attention stream steadily dwindling from email, to blogs, and now microblogging. It provides quick informational segments, which I can digest quickly and easily, while still maintaining my productivity. By installing Twhirl, Twitter and Friendfeed updates come directly to my desktop, instead of having to go back to each respective website and refresh, refresh, refresh. Now, what does that mean for a monetization model for each of these companies? Well, it’s going to come down to either subscription models or some kind of advertising either integrated into the platform itself or each feed.

Granted, there is a lot of noise that occurs on a daily basis, so you have to be cognizant of that. However, it also offers a pulse about the industry and where people’s foci’s are for any given day. Take the last few days for example, when you couldn’t take two breaths before someone was talking about 3G or iPhone apps.

If you’re looking to network with industry leaders, find additional informational resources, learn about industry opinions, or get some quick feedback – these are fantastic tools. But as always, remember to respect the community you are interacting with and interact often. Even if you are not a rockstar today, everyone has to start somewhere.

I’ve signed up for a number of beta invitations lately for reputation monitoring websites. These are web utilities which aggregate mentions of your favorite keywords: “chicago marketing”, “chicago seo”, “lindsey lohan”, whatever. The one feature that some of the newer sites have over previous iterations are historic records. Let’s review some of the oldies, but goodies first:

Google Alerts

Any savvy marketer should already have Google alerts set up and running on a daily basis. Google alerts is nice in that it’s first and foremost, free. It’s also reliable and very easy to set up and turn off. In case you’re not already familiar, Google alerts allows you to enter a key phrase or set of keywords and create daily, “as it happens”, and weekly alerts. The as-it-happens alerts can be both very useful, but also very overwhelming if you are in a volatile field. It’s good for product launches or PR campaigns, where instant feedback from customers/users is vital for the success of the launch For example, Company A launches a website. 100,000 people sign up instantly. The website crashes. The blogosphere goes crazy. Google alerts in a great way to head off these issues. The only issue with Google alerts is that if you have a broad keyword or huge brand (i.e. Honda), you’re going to get everything under the sun in terms of references, so make sure to be super specific when creating these alerts.

Google Trends

Similar to the volume of email you receive from Google alerts, Google trends allows you to see patterns of mentions over time. In this example of Honda versus Toyota, you can see the mentions associated with each brand over time. This is a good utility to use to see if your PR efforts have paid off over time. Google trends will even show major spikes in traffic and pull in related news materials for the time scale you select (i.e last 30 days, last 12 months, etc.). This is an excellent tool to use in conjunction with Google alerts.

Ok now to the new fun stuff…

Trackur

Trackur bills themselves as “Google alerts on steroids”, which is a pretty bold claim, as Google alerts already does a pretty good job. So what does Trackur do that alerts doesn’t? Well, first off I have to say, I’ve never actually used Trackur, so I’m only relating what their websites says. Anyone who has actually used it, let me know if it’s worth $18/month to start. Trackur says that it searches all media, not just Google (which is what Google alerts searches – but on a sidenote, Google seems to have a pretty good handle on the world’s information, so what else is Trackur searching?). Trackur also allows for more in depth filtering than Google alerts along with saving mentions of your keywords for later review and sharing them with colleagues. Overall, I’m still a bit skeptical without being able to a direct comparison to Google alerts. They do have a free 14 day trial, so if you sign up and find it’s a good fit, let me know in the comments.

Addict-o-Matic

Addict-o-matic is egosurfing on steroids. You can quote me on that, addict-o-matic marketing department. Addict-o-matic is nice in that it pulls in search queries from many different websites in one easy-to-view search interface. Looking up a popular brand, Facebook, yields some pretty fun results from numerous sites without actually having to run out to those sites. This tool can be useful as a daily checkup on any brand doing social media optimization for videos images, blog posts, twitter, etc. A great future feature would be to provide updates to users if anything changes on these pages, so I don’t have to continually come back. Ah well, it’s free and it works.

FiltrBox

I’ve been using Filtrbox for the last few days to monitor some of my clients mentions on the web. It’s got a really slick interface, and again, it’s free. Like Google alerts, you enter search criteria and it sends you daily alerts as to the status of the keyword mentions it finds. You can also chart mentions over time, similar to Google Trends. You can also add direct plugins for source material from mainstream media, the blogosphere, Twitter, and Twitter’s nemesis, Friendfeed. It also provides some really nice login structuring to allow for deep filtering. So I can create a filter that says “honda AND (toyota OR chrysler) AND EXCLUDE hybrid AND SUV”. It also allows for direct importing from Google alerts, which is the mark of someone who knows who their competitors are and embraces it. Nicely done Filtrbox!