Compared to perfect

Seth Godin on why large numbers may not matter. Impact may matter more.

Which do you want? Five thousand anonymous facebook friends or five meaningful friendships?

Five people who would put you up for the night if they knew three days in advance you were going to be in town?
Or five thousand people who would click "like" as you checked into the Marriott, and had dinner alone?

Five influential bloggers who would read your book and spread your ideas?
Or five thousand people who would click "like" but never read the book?

If your goal is to have meaningful relationships with five people, you do certain things.
If your goal is to have meaningless relationships with five thousand people, you do other things.

You can't have both.

Sick dog

Sometimes marketing stuff has to take a back seat. Our dog got suddenly sick today, and we had a hectic hour caring for him until the emergency was over. There are things more important than facebook, twitter, metrics, platforms and audience demographics.

Cisco Fatty, or Nothing Is Private

Connor Riley, a.k.a. "Cisco Fatty" is a lady, and in fact, not even remotely fat. (h/t Helen Popkin)

On the way home from a job interview Riley tweeted,

"Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work."

...and got a tweet in return,

"Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web."

The tweets went viral.
Things got 'internet-ugly' quickly.
Cisco responded with a calm and measured explanation of their social media policy.
Riley didn't take the job.
She was interviewed about the whole dustup later, here.

Where will you engage your audience

Saul Colt said:
"I always tell people to engage with your customers where ever they may be. Twitter, FaceBook, Linkedin are all great places to start conversations and share information but if your audience isnt already there then it will be a lot of work with not lot of return.

"Best way to tackle this is to devote some time (3-4 weeks) to spend everywhere and scale back on the platforms that are not working. You may find that Twitter is a gold mine or you may find that the best platform for you is a small niche industry message board.

"Ideally you want to bring your audience to you in the form of a community site (forums etc) so you can own the experience. Facebook changes rule and such often and one day may make it difficult to own your community so try to plan ahead a think "If I am going to put all my eggs into one basket, I should probably own the basket."

Saul Colt in the MediaBistro Social Media Marketing Boot Camp.

Tools for Social Media Marketing

A list of tools for social media marketing. If I don't put them here, I'm going to forget them.

Analytics
http://compete.com
http://alexa.com
http://quantcast.com
Viralheat.com – Real-time social media analytics

Search tools
http://google.com
http://blogsearch.google.com
http://yahoo.com
http://www.bing.com
http://www.bing.com/blogs
kurrently.com – Real time search engine for Facebook and Twitter

Alert tools:
http://www.google.com/alerts
http://alerts.yahoo.com/
http://toolbar.discoverbing.com/toolbar/en-GB.html

Twitter tools:
Twitter search
Twitalyzer
Klout
TwitterGrader
twitrratr
FriendFeed
Hootsuite.com – Free social media management tool (create
keyword streams and schedule tweets/posts)
Seesmic
Tweetdeck
WeFollow
Mashable directories for finding people on twitter

Social Media Policy tool
PolicyTool

SMM listening posts
Cymphony Maestro
Google Alerts
Bing Alerts
Yahoo Alerts
Fairshare
Trackur.com – Social media monitoring tool
Radian6.com – Web-based social media monitoring and engagement platform
Socialmention.com – Real-time social media search and analysis


Feeding a blog to social media outlet
dlvr.it – Automatically feed a blog to social media outlets

Link shrinker and trackers
bit.Ly
j.np

Contact Manager
Highrise
Flowtown
Nimble

What are these?
Visible Technologies
Shoutlet
Hubspot
Roost

Social media marketing class continues

Week two of the social media marketing class...

I now know enough about this stuff to really get in trouble. Learning social media marketing is like having someone hand you the keys to a new car, before you know how to drive.

You can start the car, weave onto the road, swerve into the oncoming traffic and have a horrible accident. (See The Aflac Incident.) Or you can floor it and get to Cleveland really fast. Or get a traffic ticket. You get the idea.

Why blog? ...to make friends.

"...blogging when boiled down to its essence is…to make friends. Blog about your passions and people will gather at your blog to have community and to feel as if they contribute. Blogging, in a sense, is a club.

"What kind of club do you desire to create?"

Kristen Lamb