Social media has become an essential part of any digital marketing initiative. Companies are discovering the importance of having a vital reputation and social presence online.

As more and more social outlets appear online, it is of imperative importance to have a well-designed social media plan that includes a follow-up phase. Part of that plan is to put in place a tracking mechanism to measure your social media effectiveness and success.

Here are five tools for measuring and and tracking your company’s social impact.

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.1.Socialmention – Social Media Analytics  Tool

Social Mention is a real-time social media search and analysis tool. The system displays information where your name has been mentioned in variety of social outlets. It provides graphical information about the strength ratio of mentions of specific brand being discussed in the social media sphere, the sentiment rating of positive or negative mentions, the passion of individuals repeatedly talking about your brand, and the reach, which measures the range of influence authors mentioning your brand. Along with very in-depth information of the more often used keywords, top users, top Hashtags, and the sources.

HOW IT WORKS: Just enter your name and switch between blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news or all of them at once. Slower than Serph, but occasionally offers different results. An RSS feed is available.

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2. Backtype.com – Social Impact Monitoring Tool

Other good Social analytics tool is backtype.com. A platform that helps companies understand their social impact.

HOW IT WORKS: Type the  URL, or blog site, and the system will display  a graph similar to Google analytics with monthly engagement statistics of comments done on blogs, dig, friendfeed, reddit  and tweets related to the domain name, audience analysis and conversion analysis. Additionally, it provides competitor comparison against any other website like yours.

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3. Radian6 – Social Media Monitoring Tool

Ridian6 is a popular social media monitoring tool that helps you track quite a lot of signals and get insights into your brands performance on various social media channels. They cover almost all the social media channels like blogs, twitter and facebook. It provides detailed analytics reports and charts, perfect for that presentation you want to pull off.

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4. Alterian Social Media Monitoring

Alterian’s SM2 social media monitoring tool is one that gives advanced user behavior statistics, measures and analyze daily volume, demographics, location, positive or negative content tone, themes, and trending topics for your brand/product. A little too much details but a good tool nevertheless. This one too, covers a range of social media channels like digg/linkedin/facebook/twitter/delicious etc.

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5. ScoutLabs Web based Social Media Monitoring Tool

An eye candy this one. Scout Labs social media monitoring tool is web based, and with an interface like Google Analytics it tracks almost all the online social media channels. It measures all the negative/positive signals and gives you reports based on the overall performaces.

Go try it out, and have fun!

                          

By Mary,

Recently, Google explained to digital marketers that links coming from social media like macroblogging, digg, youtube, facebook, etc., count as an important factor for website ranking.

Google describes how links that come naturally from viral word of mouth, on the basis of the merit (people linking to a website because they genuinely like it), are more valuable, opposed to inbound links coming from “link building marketing” efforts which build links in a none organic way.

Google explains they’ve been monitoring this closely and is taking in consideration those links that have been attracted on their on…on the basics of the interestingness of a website. Of course, this comes as surprised to many SEO professionals, specially link builders, but this is part of the new algorithms changes Google implemented recently.

Links that are editorially base and come naturally are better than those typical link-building tactics because you won’t have to work for them nearly as hard. Plus, Google will consider these vital links as high valuable traffic, leaving the none organic ones below value rate.

Does this mean link building is going to disappear?

It looks to me more like link building is evolving towards a more natural way, where the online user has the upper hand, and not the link builder guy. Google recently explained they consider inbound links coming from pages to be only one out of their 200 factors, so they have asked people to relax with the link building frenzy and concentrate more on generating interesting and unique content for their users. Of course, they do not discard adding those on-page keyword elements to make sense of what a website is about.

Some example of vital linking:

• Links from video sites, and microbiologist sites
• Links from different social networks and profiles like Facebook, Mysepsace, hi5, friendster, twitter, etc.
  

• VERY IMPORTANT FOR RANKING:
• Social channels like youtube or facebook need to generate comments and attract views and generate quality of followers and quantity of      followers ratio.
• Need to reply to people on youtube for example, as well facebook (constant activity)
• Generate User Authority
• High youtube presence and user activity makes videos more visible. Google does not prefer youtube, and you sholud post videos on other places like. photobucket.com
• Among many other factors… which requires lots of time and work (even more than SEO). SMO is another type of digital ad marketing campaign all together.
  
  
  
• MICRO BLOGGING Tips for ranking factors:
• The ration of followers to the number of people following  counts.
• Freshness of and the number of time people people take to retweet what you tweet.

Yes! times are changing. Many of those Google changes happened at the end of last year, including Personalized Search, and most recently last May. Google is moving towards semantic web technology and real-time SEO, and common SEO practices are becoming obsolete. One of them is Link building practices who a lot of companies still use as their main SEO strategy. SEO professionals need to keep in mind that it is not about jumping into social media as the only new best way to link/rank a site– it is more about gearing the focus towards Semantic Web as a whole. Read more about Semantic web.

                          

Having a video showing up on Google organic is not the result of  the usual application of SEO strategies. This is because a video on Google organic comes from a well coordinated plan of  SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING (vital marketing) strategies.

This is call SMM (Social Media Marketing), Not SEO. Video Marketing is a whole different ball game. Very often, Search optimization can’t  rank a video on Google organic as well as it  does with other regular content pages. This is because Google’s video ranking factors come mostly from social activities.

Some example of factors:

• Linking video from other socia/video sites.
• Link video from different social networks and profiles like Facebook, Mysepsace, hi5, friendster, twitter, etc.
• authority and constant activity.

VERY IMPORTANT FOR RANKING:

• First and most important, you need to create a video site map. Creating a video site map is easy. Here are the five things you need to include in the site map:
  x
  1) Title
  2) Description
  3) Play page URL
  4) Thumbnail image URL

  Once you’ve collected this information, sign into Google webmaster tool and submit your video site map.x
  

• If the video is hosted in your site, make sure you include keyword information about it, in your page title, name of the video, or text around the video.
  One tip: I would recommend introducing a place for people to leave comments. This will generate more natural keywords from users commenting about the video.
  x
• Those videos need to generate comments and attract views and generate quiality of followers and quantity of followers.
  x
• Need to reply to people on youtube for example, as well facebook (constant activity).
  x
  Generate User Authority
• High youtube presence and user activity makes videos more visible. Google does not preffer youtube, and you sholud post videos on other places.

• Free places to distribute online videos:
  • YouTube.com
  • twitvid.com (for twitter)
  • bubbletweet.com (cool vid for twitter like and websites)
  • Vimeo.com
  • 12seconds.tv
  • Zipvo.com
  • Homeumentary.com
  • Tweetube.com
  • Twitvid.com
  • TwitCam
  • Twiddeo.com
  • RealeFlix.com
  • Realestateshot.com
  • TweetReel (for iPhone)
  • Blip.tv
  • Facebook.com
  • Myspace.com

• MICROBLOGGING Tips for ranking factors:
• Again, introducing functionalities where viewers can leave comments about your videos will generate natural keywords and relevant content from users, which Google semantic search is now ranking as important factor.
• The ration of followers to the number of people following  counts.
• Freshness and the number of time people people take to retweet what you tweet–with video links.

KEYWORD FACTORS

These are the key parts where you should focus:

• Include keywords in your video name, titles & description.
• Build a video library to make your channel more relevant
• Activate comments, rates, favorites through your channel
• Add a link to your website within the description

Among many other factors… which requires lots of time and effort (even more than SEO). SMO is another type of digital marketing campaign all together, but should be part of your overall online marketing plan.

Create a channel with multiple videos

NOTE TO KEEP IN MIND: Even though youtube or Google doesn’t look at video quality to rank videos, a good produced  and interesting video is required to generate the social media traffic that subsequently will help your video rank high.  I have studied video production in the past, and I will soon write a post about how to produce a good quality video for the web. In the mid-time, you can check out Media Trust Blog post  Crash Course in Creating Compelling Product Videos as an starting point.

Related news and articles:

• Small Business Social Media Marketing eBook (slideshare.net)
• Using Facebook for SEO and Driving Traffic (shawndrewry.com)
• Social Media Optimization: SMO is the New SEO – Part 2 (briansolis.com)
• Can You Keep Ignoring Social Media? 10 Reasons Why You Just Can’t (blonde2dot0.com)
• What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)? (antonrsa.co.za)

                          

By Mary,
Twitter is a great microbloging platform, but what they’ve neglected in focusing on is that by producing things in real time there are stuff that gets left behind with volumes of information you cannot make heads of tails out of it.

Each tweets has relevance in a the longer term fashion, and it has even more relevance if it could be assembled into an organized by topic durable content. Fortunately, there is new plataform that allow us to do just that. It’s called Twylah.

Twylah organizes your Twitter stream (lists and all) into neatly organized topical folders, and crates your very own blog out of your tweets, creating a durable contextual SEO-optimized pages. You can even tweet from within your blog.

A blog more sustainable with more durable stratigic valuable goods, turning flow into stock, boosting productivity, and organizing your tweets as long-term ranking influencers.

HOW TO GET IT

All you  need to do is go to Twylah.com. It will ask you to join by using your tweeter account login. Give a minute, and voila! you have a blog organized with tabs pert topic.

Check out my new Twylah page

Have fun creating your own!

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Phrase of the day: HIGH QUALITY INFLUENCERS.

                          

Google released their “permanent” personalization of results just at the end of last year, and Bing released their own the following week. Check SearchEngineLand’s coverage, though one big question remains in my mind:

What metrics impact personalization?

Is it merely clickthroughs from the organic results? Does visit history play a role? Or clicks from other vertical search services Google offers? What about clicks from paid search ads – either in the SERPs or from AdSense/DoubleClick?

I’d love to see experimentation done on this front so marketers have a better idea what they’re dealing with. If it’s proven that you can get organic benefits by attracting PPC clickthrough, this may be the new “paid inclusion” for 2010, and could drive bid prices up massively as companies compete not only for paid listing clicks, but for the chance to earn “organic” positioning as well.

Personalization means a few things for SEOs, but it doesn’t fundamentally change the game, IMO:

• The Rich Get Richer - It’s now truer than ever. If you rank well, and earn solid traffic, you’re going to be even harder to unseat. Startups and upstarts are going to have an even greater uphill battle to climb than before.
• Branding is More Important - you want your loyal visitors and fans scouring the SERPs for your listings, and clicking them more so than anything else. I expect some clever spammers are going to be manipulating this with everything from Mechanical Turk to virus infections that make their browser search for their brand and click those results. We’ll see if Google has good protections in place to defend against this.
• There is No Normal Ranking - Or, at least, there’s no “normal” ranking that’s “average” in a personalized SERPs world. Rank tracking may still carry some value to understand how non-personalized searchers see your pages, but that data is going to be less useful in comparison to what your analytics report about search traffic and the trends. Win the “personalization” battle, and you may start to care less about the classic “rankings” battle.

SIDE NOTE: Here is instructions about turning off personalization

http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54048hl=en&answer=54048

I tested out, and quite honestly, the search results still seem affected and not as good as before. It gathers random results– all related to a theme of words–but not much related to my query in particular.

                          

Google’s adding an excellent new feature to its Twitter search options, in which online marketers could tap into quickly.

Google recently explained on their blog that this new feature could be used to “explore any topic” that people have discussed on Twitter. Want to know how the news broke about health care reform in Congress, what people were saying about the library of congress’ interest to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive (lol) or what people were tweeting during your own company’s product launch.

I tested out today. I first checked what the tweeter trend was (Obama), and then I tweet something about it. Then i waited to see if my tweet appeared on Google search and how long would it take. It took one minute to show. I most say, this is is very cool. On my tweet comment I added a link. So if you are a savvy marketer, you can adjust your tweet comments to include a relevant link to your blog. Another thing you could do, is to find a trend topic that closely matches your market of intrest, and write a quick blog post about it. Then tweet.

I checked my Google analytics and hootsuit analytics, and I got quite some clicks and few following.

As for the new search feature Google is adding to Google’s existing real-time search, It’ll go live for English users within the next few days, but you can already test it here.

                          

Watch movie for free. Click image

Was General Motors being hunted by the revenge of the Electric car? (movie: who killed the electric card?). In 1996, electric cars began to appear on roads all over California. They were quite and fast, produced no exhaust, and ran without gasoline. Ten years latter, these futuristic cars were almost entirely gone. What happened? Why should we be haunted by the ghost of the eclectic car? And, who killed the eclectic car?

Who Killed the Electric Car? Was a 2006 documentary film that explored the creation, limited commercialization, and subsequent destruction of the battery electric vehicle in the United States, specifically the General Motors EV1 of the 1990s. The film explores the roles of automobile manufacturers, the oil industry, the US government, the Californian government, batteries, hydrogen vehicles, and consumers in limiting the development and adoption of this technology.

Who knew then that the revenge of the electric car will come back hunting  General Motors– just three years after this documentary disclosed the true of this atrocious and selfish act which deprived all of us from clean energy cars.

The documentary Who Killed the electric car? [watch free movie] was released on DVD to the home video market on November 14, 2006 by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

The movie deals with the history of the electric car, its development and commercialization, mostly focusing on the General Motors EV1, which was made available for lease in Southern California, after the California Air Resources Board passed the ZEV mandate in 1990, as well as the implications of the events depicted for air pollution, environmentalism, Middle East politics, and global warming.

The film details the California Air Resources Board’s reversal of the mandate after suits from automobile manufacturers, the oil industry, and the George W. Bush administration. It points out that Bush’s chief influences, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Andrew Card, are all former executives and board members of oil and auto companies. They were eliminated from the GM Line in 1999.

A large part of the film accounts for GM’s efforts to demonstrate to California that there was no demand for their product, and then to take back every EV1 and dispose of them.

A few were disabled and given to museums and universities, but almost all were found to have been crushed; GM never responded to the EV drivers’ offer to pay the residual lease value ($1.8 million was offered for the remaining 78 cars in Burbank before they were crushed). Several activists are shown being arrested in the protest that attempted to block the GM car carriers taking the remaining EV1s off to be crushed.

The film explores some of the reasons that the auto and oil industries worked to kill off the electric car. Wally Rippel is shown explaining that the oil companies were afraid of losing out on trillions in potential profit from their transportation fuel monopoly over the coming decades, while the auto companies were afraid of losses over the next six months of EV production. Others explained the killing differently. GM spokesman Dave Barthmuss argued it was lack of consumer interest due to the maximum range of 80–100 miles per charge, and the relatively high price.

The film also showed the failed attempts by electric car enthusiasts trying to combat the cancellation of EV1 and the surviving vehicles. Towards the end of the film, a deactivated EV1 car #99 was found in the garage of Petersen Automotive Museum, with its former owner invited for a visit.

The film also explores the future of automobile technologies including a deeply critical look at hydrogen vehicles and an upbeat discussion of plug-in hybrid electric vehicle technologies, with examples such as Tesla Roadster. The end of the film mentioned the upcoming sequel titled Revenge of the Electric Car.

Celebrities protested about the destruction of the electric car.

The film features interviews with celebrities who drove the electric car, such as Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, Alexandra Paul, Peter Horton, Ed Begley, Jr., a bi-partisan selection of prominent political figures including Ralph Nader, Frank Gaffney, Alan Lloyd, Jim Boyd, Alan Lowenthal, S. David Freeman, and ex-CIA head James Woolsey, as well as news footage from the development, launch and marketing of EVs.

The film also features interviews with some of the engineers and technicians who led the development of modern electric vehicles and related technologies, such as Wally Rippel, Chelsea Sexton, Alec Brooks, Alan Cocconi and Stan and Iris M. Ovshinsky and other experts, such as Joseph J. Romm (author of Hell and High Water and The Hype about Hydrogen). Romm gives a presentation intended to show that the government’s “hydrogen car initiative” is a bad policy choice and a distraction that is delaying the exploitation of more promising technologies, like electric and hybrid cars that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase America’s energy security. Also featured in the film are spokesmen for the automakers, such as GM’s Dave Barthmuss, a vocal opponent of the film and the EV1, and Bill Reinert from Toyota.

Today, General Motors Corp. bankruptcy filing seemed inevitable after a rebellion by its bondholders forced it to withdraw on Wednesday a plan to swap bond debt for company stock.

“Its pay back baby,” said the eclectic car

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PHOTOS EV1 GM CARS

See a photo gallery EV1 cars protest against General motors for crashing and killing the eclectic cars, which were taken from the people who drove and loved them.

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Using a few Google Analytics advance filters, it’s very easy to create a handy Twitter-specific profile which groups together twitter sources such as web clients and short URL services.

If you’ve read my earlier post 2 easy ways to track social networks in Google Analytics, you should be quite familiar with using advance filters in Google Analytics. A large percentage of Twitters traffic is coming from phone or desktop based clients, in which case they’ll appear as direct traffic so be sure to place extra attention to filter three.

1. Create a new Google Analytics profile and name it ‘Twitter Traffic’:

I also find it very useful to add a date next to the new profile so I’ll know when it went live and what sort of reporting data I should expect. Remember to always keep your original profile intact.
2. Click on ‘edit’ next to the new profile and add the following filters under ‘add filters’ option

READ MORE>

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Video online has been one of the most popular and emerging social media phenomenon of the last few years. With a notable increase of sites offering all sort of video embedded in them, one prominent problem is also emerging–commercials.

Why is this a problem? Many marketers discovered how effective video was for the promotion of any product or service on the internet. It has been well documented that a user who visits a site is more inclined to view a video online than read the content of the site, in that, it takes him or her less time and afford. Video has been a great tool for publishers and marketers because the user finds video online easy to use- just click and watch. But there are new videos emerging which contain at least one commercial in them. In other words, the user is not longer able just to click and play some of these videos any more; now the user has to sit and wait till the commercial/advertisement runs first–and most of the ones I have seen dont have an option to pause or mute the video commercial.

The feature of video on the internet:

I project that in the near feature, people wont find video online as appealing as it is right now. This will cost a decline on usage. Video will become nothing alse but another SPAM online vehicle–just as to what happened to emial advertising back in 2000. It’s already happening. For example, people who go to yahoo news, would rather read the news than click a video and have to watch its commercials of 15 seconds for a 40 second video. I do this myself. Lets think about this for a moment. If a user were to watch 4 videos on any given site, and each video contains a 20 or 30 seconds commercial, we are talking about a stimated time of 2 minutes of commercial per site. Now, if this same user is like me–very active in internet–he or she could be watching a minimum of 20 videos a day. This could sums up to a stimated time of 10 minutes a day dedicated only to watch commercials online. And this estimate does not include long video watch, such as the ones you find on abc.com (free episodes which run for 28 min with commercial interruptions of about 7 brakes of 30 seconds each).

Lets project into the feature of video online–parting form the present:

According to data provided by Nielsen Online, viewers of Internet videos in the United States now watch an average of three hours of the material each month. Online video viewing hasn’t ceased expanding, with the average time spent viewing the videos in U.S. being 169 minutes in February, then rising to 191 minutes in March, an increase of 13 percent.

The total number of video streams being viewed grew by 9 percent to 9.7 billion, from 8.9 billion, and the total number of videos per user rose 7 percent to 74, from 70.

The sharper rise in the minutes spent viewing video than the number of videos being viewed tells Nielsen that more users are switching to longer videos, with the average growing from 2.4 minutes in February to 2.7 minutes in March.

There’s almost no need to say it – but YouTube remained the number 1 video site with 5.5 billion videos and over 89 million people using the site in the United States. Hulu came in second with 384 million videos and 9 million users.

The last example is good. Lets say Youtube decides to follow this trend and includes 15 seconds commercials before displaying any given video. With 89 million people using the site, you do the math. Thre is no doubt, by checking these statistics,  the incredible amount of profit these commercials can generate for companies. Resaon why this commercial-on video trend is inevitable to happen. But, lets not forget about the end user, us. Do we really want to sit around watching video after video and saturate ourselves with endless hours of commercials?

I know what you are thinking, “don’t we already doing this with television?” The point of this article is to project into the feature of video online. We very well know how Television is evolving, we have TiVO, pay-per view, and commercial free subscriptions now. Then why we would want to go back to the stone age of television–online?