Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

Search engines like Google are noting our connections and friendships online, not just our content.  If you want to be found it is worth investing in your online connections.

Tools to measure what you are doing online for your blog, twitter and facebook

Measuring a Blog or Website

Website grader from Hubspot

I would recommend this tool – not only does it grade your site (and others) it gives very practical suggestions on how to  improve it and tells you when Google last crawled the site and how many pages are indexed.  It automatically detects if you have a twitter account and grades that too.

It also ties into Alexa which is another tool for looking at the reach and ranking of any website or blog.  This is on top of your Google analytics which should be one of your primary sources for your own web stats.

Another useful statistic is your Google Page Rank – as a rough indication these are the percentages of sites in each category:

However as The Google Webmaster forum says:

We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics

Grading your twitter account

Here are couple of sites you can use to grade your twitter account, each based on different measurements:

• Klout
• Twitter grader

Grading your facebook page

If you have a facebook page it comes with its own facebook stats and you can also use Facebook grader to grade the facebook of accounts that aren’t your own.

How much is your website worth?

And if you want a bit of fun you can also have a look at how much your website is worth. I have calculated the worth of this website on three different sites: Cubestat, MyWebsiteWorth, Website Outlook. The data is somewhat inaccurate variable but you can see what someone might buy your site for.  Apparently this one is going for…. well, take your pick

Update:

July 29th 2010: My Website Worth have informed me (see comments) that my blog is now worth US$23,677. I’m going up in the market!

Now that you have done the first steps of connecting online – you have your information stream (RSS feed, Feedly) and ability to post and connect information (twitter) what’s next? How do you get your site noticed?

Problogger on the ‘Myth of Great Content’ Marketing Itself‘:

• ‘Great content will market itself’
• ‘Write it and they will come’
• ‘Quality Content = Readers’

Good content is not enough.  There are too many sites for people to be able to find you unless you know how to connect with them. Many websites with lots of good content, great ideas don’t get off the ground because they are not found.

Sometimes a great site is found and the word is spread (the site ‘goes viral’) to many networks, but rather than waiting for fate there are steps you can take to connect. Here’s one step.

LinkedIn – the ‘professional version’ of Facebook

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of October 2009, LinkedIn had more than 50 million registered users, spanning more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.

If you have any kind of business online please add yourself to LinkedIn.  Adding a basic profile doesn’t take long and with your information visible people will come and find you.

You can also add your presentations, information about your website, and begin to interact by following groups and participate in areas that are specific to your area (eg Health2.0, Online Publishers network, Medpedia, Physiopedia…).

If you have a blog, make sure you add the RSS feed so that any new posts you write appear there as well.

Then get into the habit of looking people up you’ve met on LinkedIn and connecting.  Very soon you’ll have a big network that is relevant to you and what you do.

Tweeting from different twitter accounts is a complex business, not least because it can easy to post a tweet from the wrong account. Here’s how I do it:

My main ‘me’ account is @dreamingspires (focussed on health, publishing and social media in the main), and I have a neuroscience twitter account of @bodyinmind which is focussed on… neuroscience.   Sometimes health and neuroscience overlap and I want to tweet from both accounts.

It would be regarded as spam if I posted the same tweets from both accounts if you are following both in your twitter stream, but if you are following only @dreamingspires you would expect me to tweet the major neuroscience news as well. What to do?

I put the question out to a medical twitterer @DrVes who manages multiple accounts very well [read tweets bottom up]

In a nutshell different topics can use different accounts, and sometimes you will post from both BUT there is a fine line between occasional duplicate posts and SPAM.

One person who manages this well in the social media sphere: @thewordpressguy (solving the world’s ills of wordpress questions) is also @thelatteguy (organising Sydney twitter coffee mornings) – a good call to separate them as they are different subjects, even though a lot of people who need wordpress advice also are at coffee mornings.

Practicalities to avoid the mistake of answering someone from the wrong account as I have done here

If you do use Tweetdeck be careful of its eversonothelpful new feature of selecting the account you tweet from depending on which column you reply from.

Tracking replies

Tweetdeck won’t register all the replies from different accounts unless I setup several separate columns which my screen isn’t big enough to do – so I use echophon for @bodyinmind to see if there has been any replies, and tweetdeck or seeismic as my mainstay (see previous post on how to use these).

I am going to start using Brizzly more – it is a reader that works with Twitter and facebook and has a nice clear interface

Peoplebrowsr which has a lot of functionality and really does have everything at your fingertips, but it is a fiddly application on a smaller screen.

Whatever you decide to use please note that different accounts are still ’personal’ – in the sense they aren’t just simply information streams – and sometimes it can feel a bit like trying to be part of 2 different busy conversations at the same time.  You need to be consistent, even if you only post once or twice a day.

Conclusion

Tweeting from multiple accounts is good when:

• you have different subject areas
• different audiences
• different blogs that you are using the twitter info from
• or need an alterego to vent from!

Use one main application like Tweetdeck for all your accounts and an additional one like brizzly or echophon that you can quickly check replies that may not appear on tweetdeck.

Comments? Helpful hints?

How do you chose a social media expert (dreadful phrase) from the gazillion stalking the interweb and how do you see past the smoke and mirrors and know if they can deliver? Here are some practical questions and tips.

1. What is your social media track record? How long have you being doing it?

Checking someone’s social media track record is fairly easy to do: social networking is public and if they are good they will be visble on key social networks. Ask them to show you where they are. When you are looking at what they are doing remember that their focus should be specific to your area.

2. What social networking sites are you active on?

There are a few key sites you would expect to be mentioned along with tailored sites. For example in the health/medical area I would expect sites such as medpedia, Scienceblogs, research blogging, journal websites, specific individual blogs to come up (not just the general ‘mashable, boingboing sites). If you are in the health field the  Top Web 2.0 Services in Medicine 2010 is an excellent overview of some key sites – a small snapshot given here:

Twitter – check their twitter bio and website url (if they don’t have a url in their bio, cut your losses and run – it’s a quick way of finding out who someone is and mandatory on twitter if you expect followers), at the very least you would expect a LinkedIn url there.

LinkedIn – The ‘professional facebook’ –  it lists career and education history and what they are currently into.

Facebook – If they prefer to have private facebook profile fair enough, but do they know how to set up a public facebook page for you?

Blog – I would argue that any social media ‘expert’ would have a site they regularly post on, not least because it’s visbile, easy to measure and rate someone.

3. Which social bookmarking sites do you use?

This tests whether they know what social bookmarking is (a way of book marking websites and sharing them with others). Generic ones such as delicious, diigo or industry specific – eg Connotea or CiteULike for medical/research sites.

4. How do you keep up-to-date?

You want to be listening out for mentions of RSS feeds – because this is a way of keeping up-to-date with posts and articles as they come out, google reader, feedly, pageflakes, aggregators like science blogs/research blogging anything that is a daily place that is visited to see what is happening online.

5. How do you measure your success?

Twitter – don’t be taken in by number of followers (you can get hundreds if not thousands in 24 hours, they aren’t real) check the number of tweets (shows how active they are), followers to following ratio – they might be following 1500 people and only have 700 followers. This in itself should tell you something is amiss. Look for quality not quantity. How long have they been tweeting, and what have they been tweeting about – have a look or get them to show you. Also check them out on Twittergrader or similar sites.

Who are they following? Is it related to your area? In health, my twitter page has a mixture of medical, health professional as well as Sydneysiders that I interact with in the social media scene.

Facebook page – How often do they post, how often do they interact?

Here is a page I recently set up.  It’s very early days, and the page stats help me monitor how it’s doing (only administrators of a page can see the stats – but you can ask to see them)

LinkedIn - Check out their groups – are they part of groups specific to your industry. Are they active, have they answered questions, discussions. What aps have they got on their profile (tripit, slideshare, blog rss feed….).

Social bookmarking - Again, easy to see what they have bookmarked, how regularly and which sites.

Blog . Do they have a site – what are the rankings, how do they use it. – They might say they have a world renown following -don’t take their word for it, check them out on alexa.com or sites that are similar:

There are different sites you can use to measure the success of a site (and it is all relative and to be taken with a pinch of salt) – Alexa.com is one, giving you the rankings and reach. The site doesn’t have to be the best in the world, but it does have to rate well against similar well-regarded sites.  Go on have a go, you know there a couple of sites you’ve always wondered about how they rate…

Also, consider is their site interactive, engaging, where are they on the social networks if you google them? If you can’t find them on google rankings how are they going to help promote you in your business?  A social media expert without a blog is questionable. Blogging takes time, consistency, interaction with others, and it’s easy to see if they are connected into different networks. It will also enable you to see how long they have been going.

6. Who are your previous clients and references?

This will probably be listed on their blog/website. Ask them to go through what they did for a specific client and how they measured their success.

Before you start looking – what is your time frame and how will you operate?

• Kick start the social media process for 3 months for you to take over?
• On a retainer to work on the social media for your site over the next year?
• Regular coaching sessions to train you in the use of social media over a fixed term?
• Full time employee focussing on social media and digital strategy?

Decide what would suit you best before you start scouting around, for example:

• I have been hired on a retainer to work on a health site (taken because I am particularly interested in what they do),
• I give weekly coaching sessions to clients overseas on Skype,
• as well as giving one stop shop formal presentations on next steps to take as and when a client is ready.

There is no hard and fast rule as to what suits you and your set up. DO set measurable goals and review times so that you can decide whether to continue or whether you are ready to take on the digital strategy for yourself.

The number one rule in Twitter ettiquette is – Be Genuine. As a rule of thumb, think about what you are about to post and ask if you would say it in person.  For a company this translates to NO MARKETING SPEAK.  Get that?  NO PHONEY MARKETING SPEAK. Use normal language – people can tell a cheesy sales man a mile off (can’t you!?).

Practicalities of Twitter etiquette:

• If you are sharing things from you RSS feed, don’t forget to have some personal interactions well.
• Welcome your network/people/audience.  They’ve found you because they are interested in what you have to say.  Return the favour and follow them if you think they can add to your information or just welcome them, say Hi and thanks if decide not to follow them.
• Be helpful, ask questions – building relationships is the same as in face-to-face engagement.
• Share pictures and videos – but make the videos short unless they are exceptional.  I don’t know about you, but my attention span is under 53 seconds
• Share accomplishments and announcements
• Retweet funny, useful, relevant information.  Give credit where credit is due. There are two camps on retweeting – the first says you shouldn’t alter anything and include everyone who has retweeted before you (or the first ‘tweeter’) – the problem is, you only have a 140 characters.  The other camp, and my own practice is that I give credit but I will also shorten the tweet and add my own comments at the end if I think it’s relevant
• Never be personal in your criticism
• A note on when to follow back – some people will follow hundreds of people – that’s fine as long as you can manage them and they aren’t just auto responds
• Don’t do automatic DM responses.  You’ll notice that some people will send you an automatic direct message if you follow them. It’s tacky and there is nothing genuine about what they are saying.
• If you wouldn’t say it in person, don’t say it on line.

THEN, once you’ve done all that you can promote your stuff.  That’s genuine because you’ve built your relationships, are interested in others and what they have to say and they will return the favour.  Seth Godin says it well when he describes social media groups and networks as tribes:

•    A tribe forms not because you force them to be together but because they want to connect.
•    Find a group that is disconnected but has a yearning
•    It is NOT about persuading them to want something they don’t have yet

If you need a quick reminder on how to get started here’s a quick summary: The Very Basic Twitterisms of Twitter

In summary

If anyone tells you social media is easy they’re obviously not doing it. It does get easier and almost, dare I say it, second nature, but only after you’ve got used to the sites and different ways of doing things that suit you.  And yes, it takes time, to do it properly it can take lots of time, certainly initially.  Is it worth it?  Well, if every day you add 5-10 new followers on different social networking sites in 2 weeks that’s 100 people who have voluntarily subscribed to YOU – most traditional marketing ‘techniques’ may struggle to do that. Why does it work – because you are ALSO following new sites. It’s an ever fluid and ever changing interweb.

Using the right applications for twitter can can give you a powerful tool, save you time and keep you uptodate with your network and what is being said about you.

Tweetdeck

This is one of the most useful social networking tools at the moment. Tweetdeck helps you organize the people you are following on twitter into groups, enables you to set up searches, post to Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace with the additional feature that the Linkedin integration also allows you to view your network updates and change your LinkedIn status.

You can also manage your twitter lists which is useful if you want to follow a particular topic (eg a neuroscience list made by one of the science bloggers) and view the profile of the people in the list. You can also set up twitter searches on topics or to find out what people are saying about you.  Private messages and replies can easily be seen, shortening URLs, retweeting is easy and there is a new feature – location data shows where the tweet was sent from. You can download Tweetdeck here.

Echofon

Previously known as TwitterFox this is a Firefox extension that allows you to quickly see what is going on in your network without having to leave whatever page you are on in your web browser. For example, here I am using Feedly to follow someone and see what they have posted in different parts of the Web whether it be on twitter, blogged, bookmarked or uploaded on YouTube (in each case I clicked on +f to add the feed to my feedly) while following my twitter stream using echofon.

How to use Twitter

You can have a personal as well as corporate twitter account and keep the two separate.  For the corporate account add ‘tweeted by….’ in the bio so there is a face and name to what would otherwise be a faceless entity.  This does mean that people will also click through onto your private account, which is good for your own online visibility but does mean that you need to keep your personal tweets professional.

As an example, I tweet as myself, @dreamingspires, but I also tweet for a clinical research site (BodyInMind.com.au).  In the @bodyinmind twitter bio, it mentions the key researcher but it also says ‘Tweeted by @dreamingspires’.

If you are using twitter for your organisation, remember that Twitter is a search engine and you can use it for research – what are people saying, and why – so set up your Tweetdeck to track comments on subjects.

Some practical tips

• Share twitpics. Even when in a hurry people will click on a photo link (create a twitpic account or upload photos from your computer).  It shows you’re a) real, b) interesting and have a life and c) have something to say.  Things that catch your attention are likely to catch others attention from the serious to funny.
• Please don’t make all your tweets serious and business.  It’s boring.
• Ask questions – but note that not everyone deserves a reply
• Don’t follow everyone back – only those that you feel will add to your twitter stream.  Use Tweetdeck to sort your followers into groups
• Be polite and thankful – just like in real life.
• Highlight what is special.  It’s not as easy as it sounds – recognize what it is that catches your eye and then share that with your network (this is where your RSS feed comes in).
• Don’t tweet old news – make sure your RSS (Feedly) is uptodate, read it daily and share it.
• Share some things about you, your company, your product. Snippets of inside information are interesting too – things you’re preparing for release, people you are talking about/to.

DONT use twitter just to talk about you or your products – it’s will make you very boring and, frankly, makes you look far too self-important to be worth following

If you have signed into Google Reader or Feedly (see my post Developing a Digital Strategy 006 – practicalities what to do) here is some advice on how you can follow Twitter Users In Google Reader by @DrVes to keep up to date.

PeopleBrowsr

Once you have mastered Twitter, and TweetDeck have a look at PeopleBrowsr – it has Lite, Advanced, and Business modes – and really is a ‘control console’

PeopleBrowsr is a data mine and social search engine for real time conversations. We’ve built a set of applications sitting on the data mine to monitor your brand, identify your audience, analyze tweets sentiment, filter the buzz, manage feedback, share accounts, run campaigns, track keywords, build widgets and engage across multiple social networks simultaneously

It is worth watching the videos on how to use it, it is a good tool, but to get the most out of it you will need to spend some time getting to know it and I would recommend mastering TweetDeck first before venturing further to try PeopleBrowsr.