Today’s guest post is by Kevin Troy Darling, Social Media Program Manager at iLinc Web Conferencing, who has been writing all his life, but only marketing pays. To paraphrase Tina Turner, we don’t need another acronym. The debate on Social CRM (sCRM) could easily become a distraction. We have many good tools at our disposal [...]
Is Social Conversation a Myth?
Mitch Joel, whose blog and work I greatly admire, wrote a very interesting blog post recently that bemoaned the lack of conversation in social media. As coined by Joseph Jaffe (another good guy who was incidentally the very first guest on my series of live Twitter interviews), businesses have been trying to Join the Conversation [...]
Social Listening and Analysis for the DIY Inclined
If you are conducting any level of online reputation management or campaign tracking using social media data sources, you have to get beyond the obvious. The point of tracking software isn’t to determine how many tweets were sent mentioning a company, it’s to figure out what those tweets say, and what the business ramifications are. [...]
Is Twitter for Business Even Worth the Trouble?
We built our own Frankenstein. We are spending countless employee hours tweeting, retweeting, responding to tweets, figuring out whom to follow, secretly following celebs and athletes, and designing custom Twitter backgrounds. Nobody forced companies to get involved with their customers in this way. There was no law, edict, or pitchfork-wielding band of angry citizens. We [...]
Why Influence Mining is the Next Gold Rush
Inherently, we understand influence. It’s in our DNA. We know that a grizzly bear has a marked impact on its surroundings, and can change behavior in ways that even the fiercest badger cannot. The tsunami of data being created, collected and parsed every second of every day now makes influence identification instantaneous, and possible from [...]
You’re Pissed Off at the Wrong Guy
Of course it’s upsetting when a customer slams you via tweet, status message, blog comment or humorous video. But it’s not like social media created negativity, it just puts a magnifying glass to it. Do you know why you don’t get angry when customers call customer service and say all kinds of crazy, depressing stuff [...]
Kurrently Revolutionizes Real-Time Search With Twitter + Facebook Results
The future of real-time data didn’t come from Google. Or Microsoft. Or IBM. It came from a Canadian computer sciences student who uses his free time pretty damn wisely. Kurrently is a new, free real-time search engine that combines results from Twitter and Facebook in a simple, blazing fast format. “I built Kurrently in the [...]
4 Steps to Drive Sales with a Social FAQ
One of the key benefits of social media that’s not talked about nearly enough is its ability to mitigate doubt and confusion among fence-sitters. Yes, your prospective customers are confused and uncertain. After all, why would they even be coming to your Web site unless they had questions about your product or service? To be [...]
Is Social Media Too Big For Its Britches?
Maybe what we need is a little deconstruction. At Monday’s Social Fresh conference in St. Louis, I was delighted to join Sarah Evans, Jason Falls, Amber Naslund, and Zena Weist on the closing panel discussion. During the session, an audience question got me fired up (no surprise, as the Social Fresh attendees were a very [...]
Ignore Foursquare at Your Peril – An Analysis of Potential
Are you too dismissive of Foursquare (as well as Gowalla and the other geo-location apps)? I’m starting to hear a lot of smart people scoff at these services, primarily along these lines “Why do I care where someone is eating for lunch?” The last time I heard that line of reasoning en mass was when [...]
