Social Media Business Results

It’s out in the open now, I’m admitting it, I am an information junkie.  I love information, always searching, always listening, bombarded by media, advertising, news, social media, new people, new ideas, it goes on and on.  I soak it up, share it, save it, reference it, one big storehouse of information.

About a year ago I discovered Google Alerts – http://www.google.com/alerts  This is one of the services provided by Google, and it’s free to use.  You don’t have to get the free gmail account to use as a Google-ID, but it’s worth doing, since that ID can be used for many of Google’s services.  By setting up an alert by name, topic, industry or other search term, Google keeps tabs on its information sources (Google Blogs, Google News, etc.) and returns entries to you about your search terms, what you want to be alerted about.  Google sends you an email by alert, or daily alerts, to let you know that something has been found.  Having that Google-ID helps, because you can keep a running list of which alerts you have, and the frequency that each alert get delivered to you.

Today I found out about Posterous – http://www.posterous.com  which is an aggregator service.  You can post to Posterous and propagate that post throughout the Social Media world, to other blogs and social networks. I’ve set up Google Alerts to follow several people in the Social Media Community which keeps me abreast of the latest trends, services, and observations,  My friend and Internet Marketing champion, Erin Blaskie – http://www.lifestreamincolor.com and owner of BSETC (Business Services, Etc.) – http://www.bsetc.ca is using Posterous to subscribe to several blogs and delivers those posts in a central way at her lifestreamincolor site. 

One important take-away for you to use is to set up a Google Alert on your name and your company’s name.  This way you can see how your name is “turning up” over the Internet, who’s talking about you, and who’s referencing your company.  Great for market research and seeing how your message is coming across to your community.

Some example alerts I have set up are people:  Michael Port, Mari Smith, MaryPat Kavanagh, Erin Blaskie in the Marketing and Social Media area.  Some of the topics I look for are: Think Big Revolution, Social Media, Social Media and Coaching, Marketing to Marketers, and Small Business Marketing.  I manage my alerts in one big list (having that Google-ID give me this), and have all the alerts scheduled once a day to cut down on email.  You can have a maximum of 100 Alerts set up this way.

My advice – start using Google Alerts as soon as possible to assist with your research, and have a Posterous – http://www.posterous.com day!

Posted via web from Steve Ulrich’s Posterous Collection

I just found out about a new service called Vyew. It allows you to share your desktop and show presentations like Go to Meeting, but it’s free. Check it out at www.view.com.

Twitter, the micro-blogging platform, is all about relationship building. Yes, you can promote the kind of doughnut that you’re eating (and ask everyone else which kind they like), share the movie you saw last night (without revealing the ending), or you can build (or add-to) communities by using “Hash Tags”

Hash Tags (characters or numbers preceded by the # sign – like #HSTG) are placed somewhere in you message, usually at the end, that literally tag that message among a group of similarly tagged messages. Guess what – you have a group, a tribe, or some common way of communicating among a group of people who know about the Hash Tag, and use it to mark that message to be read by the people who know the tag. I’ll get to how to use it in a teleconference in a bit.

Let’s say you’re part of a community – people who live in New York City (where I grew up). I found out that there is a Hash Tag in use named #NYC. People who are twittering on topics pertaining to New York City, and want their tweets to be seen by people who are following tweets about New York City (aside from their own followers), might say something like this: “If you’re traveling to NYC and want to really see the harbor, take the Staten Island Ferry #NYC” (95 characters total). If I was a follower of that person I would see the tweet in my list of tweets from those I follow. If I was not following that person I could do a twitter search (“search” option at the bottom of your Twitter screen, the same as going to http://search.twtter.com) and searching on “#NYC,” and that post would be a part of my search results, with many others with that Hash Tag.

Teleseminar Use: If hosting a teleseminar, you can define a Hash Tag that represents your seminar topic. For example Leesa Barnes of Marketing Fit, who hosted the 2009 Social Media Telesummit used the Hash Tag #SMT09 on all of her promotional posts, letters to presenters and teleseminar participants, and used the Hash Tag during the teleseminar calls. To do this make sure that you tell your participants the Hash Tag to use and those who want to be on Twitter during the call, can tweet with each other, guests and hosts, as long as the Hash Tag is part of the message. These posts can always be viewed later on by those who could not make the live call.

This gets better. There is an applicaton called TweetChat www.tweetchat.com which lets you filter out only the tweets which contain the Hash Tag for the call. Encourage your hosts and particpants to use TweetChat. Here’s a step-by-step method: