Online Marketing Blog

Earlier this summer I gave a presentation in Minneapolis at a ClickZ OMS event on building a social media roadmap with tips on blog marketing and using Twitter. It’s all very introductory if you work in the social media space, but if not, serves as a useful baseline for making a case for corporate social media participation.

Many companies are without confidence in how to use communication tools like blogs or Twitter and this presentation can serve as a good starting point for those tactics as well as for creating a social media strategy. There was good feedback at the event and I’ll do my best to turn it into a slidecast in the future.

Like many others, I scoffed at Twitter when I first heard of it. What use could sending short messages to people I don’t know be?  The mental leap from IM and Facebook status updates to Twitter makes it easier, but business use seemed pointless at first.  As I noticed more of my Search, Social and PR industry peers using Twitter, it seemed a good idea to test out.

While I don’t have a million followers, or even 100,000, I’ve found out that for my purposes, quality is the key and the 13k or so followers I am lucky to be associated with are appreciated a lot more. Being strategically useful and helpful builds trust, attracts influential followers (vs bots and spammers) and results in a new channel for social networking.  Individual tweets may or may not be useful, but when you add them up over time, a bigger picture emerges.

A big question for marketers that want to connect with businesses on Twitter is that they often don’t know where to look.  Part of the rub is that Twitter is predominantly a service used by individuals, not companies.   While you can use search.twitter.com advanced features to find individuals using specific criteria, it can be more productive for finding companies or commercial users of Twitter via a managed list.

Here are a few resources for finding Twitter accounts for brands, companies, executives, analysts and journalists via directories and lists. Update: We’ve added the WeFollow Directory recently launched by Kevin Rose:

WeFollow – Kevin Rose from Digg started this user powered directory of Twitter users organized into categories with rankings based on the number of users. Inclusion is based purely on users submitting themselves by Tweeting an @wefollow and hashtags describing what 3 categories to associate that user with.

There are so many Tweets and so little time. What’s a “Tweeple” to do? Twitter aggregator and trend websites use a variety of tactics to filter out what’s up and coming and of interest to the Twittersphere in contrast to the mass of mundane Tweets.  Twitter stream aggregators are useful for a variety of reasons ranging from discovery of news to competitive research. (Follow me on Twitter here @leeodden):

As a Twitter user, you can discover what kinds of Tweets are most often passed along (a “retweet” or “RT”) and use that insight for your own Twitter use. The same learning opportunity exists for companies using Twitter.

Update! We have a winner. Cli.gs received 26% (88) votes with budurl.com coming in a close second. Congratulations!

URL shortening services were initially popular because web addresses started to get long and links would break when sent in an email.   However, as microblogging services like Twitter have become popular, an increasing number of services and applications, including tracking & metrics, have been added to the basic URL shortening features.

Recently I polled followers of @leeodden on Twitter about favorite URL shortening services and received a great response. Thank you to all who responded! So many people replied that the following mini-review was created of 11 different URL shortening services showing which offer customization options, statistics, 301 redirect and some of the other unique services like export to CSV, bulk shortening and displaying ads to monetize the traffic to links that are shortened. Enjoy!

Social media marketing is fast emerging as a must-have in search strategies. In this session, industry experts Vanina Delobelle, Global Product Director for Monster, Erik Qualman from Search Engine Watch and Global VP of EF Education, along with Brnet Csutoras, Online Marketing Consultant offered some tips to successfully integrate social media into your search marketing mix.

Vanina kicked off the session this morning discussing what social media is and how, when used correctly, it can benefit your business.

So, what is social media?
- Social networks like MySpace, Facebook and Xing
- Forums such as Phorum and phpBB
- Microblogging with twitter or pounce
- Multimedia sharing sites like YouTube, Flicker and Slideshare
- Diggs with Wikio and digg
- Blogs and live casts
- Virtual Universes like Second Life

At the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto, I’ll be presenting along with David Snyder and Chris Winfield a hotly anticipated session called “Twitter: Ultimate Time Waster, or Great Tool?”. With the fast growth and uptime growing pains, debates about Twitter are plentiful so let’s settle it once and for all with a Twitter poll:

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I’ll be sharing the results at SES Tornoto, so be sure to pass along this post and see if we can break our poll response record.

Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter here: @leeodden

Right along with Facebook, YouTube and blogging, Twitter is one of the most often written about social media communication tools. (Follow me @leeodden) We’ve run polls about how people use Twitter as well as aggregated tips from the Twitter community on how to get the most productivity out of it. This post shares a few new Twitter tools you may find useful.

TweetWheel – You may have a 100 or even 1000 followers. Which of your followers know each other? Tweet Wheel helps you find out visually. Note, if you have a LOT of followers, this will take a while.

The account I searched on has around 1,400 followers and it looks like Tweet Wheel limits the display to 100 or so. There’s only so much room on the screen.