ImpactWatch Blog

I am always passively on the prowl for better interfaces when it comes to getting things done and interacting with social media in an efficient way. Announced over the last few days at Google I/O, Google Wave purports to combine e-mail, IM, Twitter, Facebook, etc. – all in semi-real time. This is definitely Google’s response to Twitter (and the transition to real-time internet in general).

Wave steps real time up to a whole new level – as you type an instant message, for example, it broadcasts the message character by character as it is typed. This is of course a toggle, as in many cases you’ll want to carefully craft a response that might be held against you. However, for everyday communication (like between co-workers), it allows for more efficient communication – I can begin crafting my response before the sender is done authoring their instant message.

I skipped around the conference video introducing Google Wave (it is an hour and twenty minutes in length), but it has definitely hooked my interests. My previous prediction about all of these messaging services coming together into one gooey mess of communication, one feed, is finally becoming a reality.

For those users who struggle to keep up with their social networking initiatives or goals, Google Wave might make it easier to handle everything – e-mail to Twitter – in one attractive interface. I’d definitely give the conference video a gander; when Google does things on a large implementive scale, masses tend to adopt.

TwitScoop is a website that shows recent spikes on Twitter and links to users’ postings. In addition, the trends are supplemented with visual data representing mentions over the past few hours. Another cool feature is an animated word cloud, shrinking/enlarging words gradually as they fade in and out of popularity.

I know most people are probably tired of reading about Twitter remixes, but this one is particularly well designed. It’s simple and functional, providing me with informatoin that very well may be relevant to my interests (the now).

In addition, there is a search tool and more information available for trends directly from the home page. Your Twitter credentials will suffice as an account login for TwitScoop. If only their API supported exporting these visualizations, or creating animated word clouds with terms of your choosing — there’d be some real value in that. So far it appears to restrict the API for hot trends (from their home page) only.

This is going to get messy.

Tomorrow, Facebook will radically shift its gatekeeping policies and allow for Twitter-like access to its data stream. The immediate effects: Facebook support in Twitter apps, a social networking giant declaring the need for connectivity, and a flood of Facebook apps, remixes, mashups, thawed and reheated in the morning.

The huge implications for Twitter aside, it’s also a significant step towards real-time interconnectivity. What’s in the right now — the derivative — definitely seems to be the way things are progressing. A good indicator could be the largest player in social networking blatantly declaring through action, “I will give you all of my data. Right now.”

I am quite sure that other services and networks will morph towards this trend (many already have), and soon the different “genres” of services will all congeal into desktop or mobile based mega apps, supporting dozens of communications services, from e-mail to messaging to Facebook to the next big thing. You can quote me on that. It’s coming.

This is of course a logical move for Facebook, and analysts have seen it coming — avoid the costs of developing various interfaces, but still grow out the user base garnered by third-party developers.

Will Facebook be able to get past its reputation as a more personal experience and dip into Twitter’s celebrity, news, debate, and networking share of the market? Nobody can say for sure, but I suspect it has more than a fighting chance to become a huge participant. Considering the figures for Facebook’s growth demographics, Zuckerberg and his associates have surveyed a nice set of trends by which to gauge their investment.

Over the coming weeks, more details and trends will materialize and the races will commence — I’ve already got my tickets.

If you’re looking to capitalize on Oprah’s show last week as well as the publicity generated by Kutcher’s million user showdown with CNN, then you’re probably interested in getting involved with Twitter — a great place to increase your exposure to the social media savvy.

The trick to Twitter is to keep things targeted, and only Tweet with real “value” — snippets or links that people will actually find insightful or useful. Let’s face it, Kutcher and Oprah have an overwhelming advantage when it comes to Twitter — their own celebrity — and making the platform work for your organization is going to take some strategy, patience, and a bit of luck.

While is is nice to achieve a following of epic proportions, Twitter really won’t do anything for you unless the relationships you make on the site add value to your organization. The first step here is to identify influential Twitterers within our target niche (your organization’s target market) and begin conversing with them. Use Twitter’s search features to find content that relates to your niche or industry. While these people will certainly appreciate a ReTweet, adding insight to their postings and pointing them to relevant, undiscovered slices of the web will be the most direct way to get noticed.

How much  should one Tweet? There’s no straightforward way to answer this, and there are multiple correct responses. An account that has dozens of Tweets a day will annoy users and come off as “spammy”, but an inactive account won’t do you much good either. I would let quality be the barometer for what you should or shouldn’t Tweet; quotas might encourage lackluster Tweeting, or conversely curb quality conversation. As a general rule, if a Tweet doesn’t contain original insight, perspective, or content, I tend to pass on posting it.

Twitter is all about conversation. Responding to direct messages, Tweets, and mentions should become a daily occurrence.  Using a Twitter App might streamline your Twitter-related workflow.

Facebook is a completely different game. While they’ve recently been making efforts towards joining the real-time conversation, Facebook is more about a static presence and providing a reference for addicted users rather than the “here and now” of Twitter. Provide real contact details, and make sure your organization’s page looks friendly and professional. If you prefer, you can integrate Facebook to distribute your Twitter announcements — more on this in part 5, when we orchestrate our social media to work together as a well-oiled machine.

At this point, we’ve begun creating our own original social media with an overall strategy in mind, keeping good etiquette practices in mind. The next step will consist of expanding readership and exposure through news sharing services such as Digg and Delicious, and finally we’ll wrap things up in an involved, step-by-step example of integrating all of these web layers into our home URL.

Last week, we took a look at creating a home URL and covered good starting practices for a bit of internet marketing. This would have been adequate as recently as 2006, but the internet has become more modular and intricate since then. Social media portals have become mini networks themselves — this guide was written to help readers use these mini networks to drive traffic to their home URL, thereby increasing revenue and message spread. Let’s get started.

A good starting place for any organization is Check Usernames. At this website, you will be able to check for user name availability at a plethora of social media websites. This will aid us in choosing an appropriate username for professional use. Your username should be the name of your organization or a recognizable variation. I find Check Usernames to be a very convenient tool, because I prefer usernames to be more or less consistent from site to site in attempts to create a consistent online presence. Make sure to use your top level domain e-mail contact (the e-mail service provided by your home page URL) or create one in Gmail.

First, let’s create a shortlist of social media sites that are appropriate for your organization. Twitter is currently universal, and a Facebook page is easy to make. Unless you’re a twenty year old DJ or in a local alt rock band, it would be advisable to steer clear of MySpace, which lacks proper quality control suitable for a professional organization. Social news sharing sites like Digg and del.icio.us (now just delicious.com) can be used to promote home URL blog posts. These four websites will be a good starting point for our purposes:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Digg
• Delicious

With just registering for these four networks, we’ve already begun our process of using social media traffic to increase our exposure. Make sure to use strong passwords, as company or organizational social media accounts are valuable to hackers. After you’ve registered, take a moment to read through the website FAQ to get an idea about how each functions.

We’ll begin our strategic use of these social media profiles next week, but it could be useful to blog about your newly registered accounts. For a complete newcomer to the social media scene, take a while (more than a day) to peruse the various networks to see how other individuals and organizations are using them. Take notice of any differences you see between professional organizations and individual internet users, especially on Twitter and Facebook.

In the next round of our guide, the raw content will commence. I will take you through Twitter and Facebook etiquette, strategies, and optimization tips. Part four will focus on blog and website promotion through social news sharing websites (mainly Digg and Delicious, though much of the information will apply to others as well). In the last installment of the series, we’ll bring it all full circle and tie our social media accounts back into our home URL using plug-ins and blogging strategies.

Whether you’re a new organization or an established one looking to benefit from social media traffic, I’ve written this guide to make sure you’ve got some basics covered, as well as optimization tips and resources for further reading. Over the coming weeks, this five-installment guide will allow people with only basic internet knowledge to create and manage a social media presence. The pace might frustrate more advanced users, so feel free to skim.

Home URL: You need a website. Period.

These days, the professional standard is a website hosted at a top level domain (such as yourcompanyname.com or .net). There are many ways to go about this, and your needs will dictate what direction I would recommend you pursue. For inexperienced users seeking the best results, paying for a professional web design firm is the way to go. Do research, and shop around. Some things to consider would be how long they’ve been in business, your impressions of their portfolio, pricing, etc. This can be a costly route, but often times you get what you pay for.

Ideally, you’ll opt for a website powered by a content management system (CMS) – this is a system that will make your life a whole lot easier, allowing you to quickly post things to your website, change its settings, etc. without having much coding knowledge. Some examples of content management systems would include Drupal, Wordpress, Xoomla, and Typo. There are lots. I’d recommend going with a popular CMS with a historical following – Drupal and Wordpress are my favorites.

If you’re on a very limited budget, some web hosting companies offer automatic installs of content management systems; but there are several disadvantages to this. Many times, the installed CMS will not be the current version, and is vulnerable to security holes or other exploits fixed in a more recent release. This approach is also not beginner-friendly; fleshing out a bare content management system into a budding web portal takes time, skill, and knowledge. If you’re completely unfamiliar with these skill sets, I urge you to support your local web design firm.

Use your website to provide your contact information, mission statements, etc. Release company news and announcements on your web portal, and make sure it is up-to-date. Nobody likes getting to websites that haven’t been touched since 2004, and in 2013 they won’t like yours last updated in 2009. If appropriate, blog on your website, but do so cautiously and strategically. Take time to draft and revise posts, and familiarize yourself with good blog authorship practices by reading through tips from seasoned veterans. A Google search is a good place to start.

The quality of your posts will largely determine the return on investment your website shows you. In my experience, the most direct way to increase revenue is to optimize for specific keyword searches, and then post quality, original content that relates to those keywords. Nothing increases consistent, high-quality traffic more than ranking high on search engines and giving people what they are searching for. Depending on your market, this may be relatively easy or extremely expensive. A web firm that offers search optimization services should be able to determine the competition for your strategic keywords.

Next week we’ll take a look at our first round of social media, and begin working with these websites as well as integrating them back into a CMS-based web portal.

Image courtesy of Guoquan.

In the process of leafing through my RSS reader seeking inspiration for a blog post, I came across some outstanding links relating to things we do here at ImpactWatch. If you haven’t checked out these articles, they are definitely worth a look.

Some URL’s relevant to your interests:

• Social media expert Mark Evans details his thoughts on the long-term effects of social media.
• A TechCrunch report on internet advertising and how its growth is outpacing television.
• Snippet on determining browser market share.
• Tips for spotting users with fake Twitter followings.

Just a quick look at Monday’s web offerings.

After this post, I pledge not to speak of Facebook at least until May.

With that out of the way, Facebook conducted a poll over the last week or so in an attempt to gauge user feedback to the new design changes.

Predictably so, the response has been overwhelmingly negative. 94% of about 800,000 respondents disliked the changes, leaving fans of the revisions (such as myself) outnumbered.

It leaves me wondering whether or not they should have even conducted a poll to begin with. They are well aware of historic negative feedback following redesign deployments; would it be easier to just let things settle? Or am I in the wrong, and is the new Facebook actually worse than it was before?

Facebook Poll, Screen capture courtesy of TechCrunch

If you haven’t logged into Facebook recently, go ahead and take a nice gander. Things have changed quite a bit with their most recent design. Drawing quite a bit off of Twitter, the site is now truly up-to-the-second with updates, wall posts, messages — all of it merging into your homepage in a glob of real time conversation.

There are a lot of non-Twitter users on Facebook — and redesigns of Zuckerberg’s web portal are often met with passive aggressive resistance, such as the formation of anti-Facebook Design Team groups and status updates ridden with complaints against the change. Alas, once the masses use the new format for long enough, they accept that it won’t change back and even the late adopters hop on board.

This set of changes will challenge some users to think outside of their user experience comfort zone, in a way that is more drastic than previous redesigns. It changes the dynamic a lot.

That said, the changes are pretty logical and in the opinion of this daily user, a long time coming. This is the kind of change that will inform millions and millions off people on the ways of socially driven media, forcing them to become part of the real-time conversation.

Facebook's Original Homepage

How do you know what you know? It’s a question worth asking that seldom crosses people’s minds. When it comes to media literacy, few people stop to critically analyze the sources from which their news originates. After all the prestige and organization is stripped from it, mass media boils down to a story written by a biased individual.

One of the widely recognized normative goals of journalistic media is to remain “objective” and “unbiased”, a lofty and impossible goal. Unavoidable forces such as deadlines, ownership, the author’s personal worldview, editorial influence, and story selection all contribute to media bias. What I’m trying to get at is that news isn’t always fair, and anyone with a vested interest in their publicity should be wary of their perception in the media.

Take, for example, someone recently familiar with media coverage: Sarah Palin. Without speaking to my personal favorability, what comes to mind at the mention of her name? Does the term Malibu Barbie, the popular appearances of Tina Fey, or opinions about wardrobe selection come to mind? In reality, many people were turned off by Sarah Palin. Over her campaign for vice presidency, the media chose to zoom in on certain aspects of her personal life, imagery, and political history (as is the media’s responsibility for anybody vying for a spot as prestigious as she was). Whether you felt Sarah Palin was treated fairly or unfairly is irrelevant to my point: the picture you saw was painted entirely by the media.

Some wisdom can be drawn from this. If revenue is driven by consumers, and consumers are informed by an inherently biased media, it is necessary to “maintain” public image with the public. This is nothing new. Public relations firms have been around since the days of Edward Bernays, and before that in other forms. Building relationships with the public, networking with relevant (and influential) members of the media, and responding to negative criticisms are all key qualitative elements to maintaining desired public perception.

Somewhere along the way, a little thing called the internet came along. It took some time to catch on, but it is unstoppable; a TV-killer. Please take advice from this youngster: Do not underestimate its influence. While traditional media personalities have come to terms and accepted the internet as part of their toolbox (see our newspaper study), nobody could predict the overall influence social media would have on media relations. Tweets and blogs and spaces of all varieties have popped up anywhere and everywhere I seem to be looking. For the first real time in history, a medium with virtually instantaneous feedback has become the norm. Opinions from virtually anybody have the potential to go viral.

That’s where we come in. At IW, we take care of that for you. There is simply too much noise out there to maintain relations the way one could in the golden days. Harnessing the vast scanning capabilities of machines and the sentiment of living, breathing people, we deliver information about brands to people who get it. If you think I’m wrong, you’re probably missing something.