Suppose you want to know where you brand is being mentioned online across different channels (who doesn’t?), you go to Social Mention and type in your brand name and hit search. For example I did a search for hot-shot location based service Foursquare, in the results page you get mentions for  ‘foursquare’ across different categories such as blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, video, audio, Q&A and networks.

You can also search for keywords related to your business such as ‘________’ and it will give results where that appears across social channels, you can then go that individual channel and engage in that conversation.

Another bonus is that similar to Google Alerts, Social Mention also has “social media alerts” which will provide daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, a developing news story, a competitor, or the latest about you.

There are other tools just like this one that give you more specific data but come at a cost, for example Radian6, but with Social Mention you can get started right away at no cost.

A quick way to monitor your brand across social channels is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

One website on the Internet that has one of the most unique stand out personalities is The Art of Manliness, and they recently put exclusivity and participation to work. The brainchild of Brett & Kate McKay, The Art of Manliness is a blog dedicated to uncovering the lost art of being a man with the goal of helping men be better husbands, better fathers, and better men.

Participation stimulates engagement

The Art of Manliness has a tight, large community of fans who helped them create a Lessons in Manliness ebook. The community submitted essays on the lessons they’ve learned from a man in their life and to encourage people to submit something to the project, they offered a Box of Manliness as a prize.

We received 46 submissions from men who shared stories about the grandfathers, friends, and mentors who have lived lives that showcase the very best in being an honorable man. I’ve finally put all the submissions into a nicely formatted eBook so that everyone can enjoy and hopefully learn from the lives of ordinary men who have helped pass the art of manliness on to others. At over 100 pages long, it’s pretty substantial for an eBook. And it’s completely free.

Exclusivity creates uniqueness

You see Hollywood do it with the Special Edition Movie Box sets where you get some insider information in a fancy looking package, The Box of Manliness works the same way. First of all it’s a very cool looking box indeed and it comes with some branded manliness arsenal that will make people go ‘what’s that?’:

• Merkur Safety Razor
• Taylor of Old Bond Street Sandalwood Shaving Cream
• Badger Hair Shaving Brush
• Mustache Handkerchief
• Case Pocket Knife
• An Art of Manliness t-shirt of your choosing
• A signed copy of the Art of Manliness book

Key takeaway:

As you can see exclusivity and participation are powerful word of mouth tools, they can turn your community into rabid fans. When you engage people in a product and make them feel as though it is their product, it translates directly into a desire to talk about it.

Engage your community and empower them to talk about you.

Two ways to get your community to talk about you is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Talk about awesome marketing. Zappos prides itself of being a happy place to work at, now you can include a ‘place where people come to get happily married!’.

Even Elvis was there!

Elvis gets couple hitched at Zappos is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

This is post is written for people and businesses who are just getting introduced to Twitter and are looking for a more powerful Twitter app to satisfy their real-time needs!

This is a question we get asked all the time and an important one when defining what tools to use to support your social media strategy.

For me it’s Tweetdeck.

I used to use Twhirl and then Seesmic Desktop for about a year or so but Tweetdeck won me over with it’s ability to let you create groups of people to follow. If I had to pick a few things that make me use Tweetdeck everyday here they are:

1. Multiple account management. I have two accounts, @jorgebarba and @blumaya so I see both of them on Tweetdeck without having to go to each one’s Twitter account. This really comes in handy when monitoring various Twitter accounts if your company has them.

2. Easily filter down to the information you want to see. Tweetdeck also let’s you add columns for individual searches. For example a topic I follow is innovation so I added a column that shows tweets of people who us #innovation hashtag in their tweet. 

So once you’ve determined what topics you’ll be monitoring for your social media strategy, you can plug them into Tweetdeck and voila’ you a real-time dashboard! This makes it really easy to filter through information and makes it a little less overwhelming.

3. All in one Twitter functionality. With Tweetdeck you can easily Reply, ReTweet, DM, favorite, email, translate, follow, unfollow, add to list, view profiles directly from the user interface.

4. Ability to view videos and pictures on Tweetdeck. You can also view YouTube videos, Twitpic photos directly on Tweetdeck without having to browse to YouTube or Twitpic which is a big time saver!

5. Ease of use. Seesmic has most of the functionalities that Tweetdeck does but I consider it to be less easy to use than Tweetdeck.

One caveat about Tweetdeck is that it’s a memory hog, over 100 MB and sometimes goes over 200 MB on a Windows 7 machine. So if you don’t have a fast computer with a lot of memory (at least 4 GB of RAM) I recommend you try Seesmic Web which is a web based version of Seesmic Desktop and a great alternative to Tweetdeck.

So there you go, let me know if you get too overwhelmed

What’s the best Twitter desktop client to support a social media strategy? is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Here a presentation Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur gave at Ad Tech a few weeks ago. Key takeaway is to invest in building a long term web presence instead of the traditional campaign.

How to promote your brand on social networks is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

The basic recipe for marketing your business with social media tools goes a little something like this:

1. Setup a blog.

2. Open a Twitter account.

3. Setup a Facebook Fan Page.

4. Publish content on your blog (A lot of it!).

5. Tweet interesting stuff (including your blog content).

6. Engage in conversation with people on Twitter.

7. Retweet stuff posted by other people so that they in turn might RT you back.

8. Comment on blogs

9. …

10…

I’m all for simplicity and these ideas are worthy of being in a Social Media Marketing for Dummies book but you don’t really need that because there loads of blogs out there spreading this gospel. Problem is they’re all best practices now, so how do you differentiate?

By starting to uncover some insights into your audience’s online behavior like where they hang out, what they do there, how much time they spend there, who they talk to, what they talk about, where will they jump to next and then asking ‘WHY’.

So what’s the first step in social media marketing then? Listening.

Listen and then talk

Listening is not the same as hearing. We all like the sound of our own voice and it often stands in the way of understanding the person we’re talking to (your customers). If we really want to understand people we have to pay attention to what they say and do and once we do that we’ll stand a better chance of influencing their behavior. Nothing new with this statement, repeated often but rarely practiced as I repeat again we like the sound of our own voice.

You need to give a damn about what people have to say to do social media properly and only deep empathy translates into insight.

You need social monitoring tools

If you aren’t familiar with social monitoring tools, here are 26 social listening tools to add to your arsenal, here’s a full presentation. There are both free and paid tools but most of what you need to get started is already on your website in the form of comments, analytic stats, RT’s, Twitter trackbacks, newsletter stats. These will provide you with some good data and information before you move on to the external tools.

I like to say that every business should strive to know their customers better than they know themselves, this takes a lot more effort and goes way beyond the ‘I want them to buy my product and shut up’ mindset most traditional businesses have. Luckily social media tools let us have a 1 to 1 conversation with customers and enables us to get under their skin to uncover those hidden insights that might just give us a new idea for a new service or product.

The first step in social media marketing is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Google pulled out all the stops with this video to promote the speed of it Chrome browser. Google tested the speed of its Chrome browser against lightning, sound and a potato cannon all in slow motion. Just watch this!

As they say, actions speak louder than words!

Want to see great marketing in action? is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

How do I make it so my blog posts don’t get lost in a sea of Tweets?

Do you know how scientists put an electronic tag on an animal they wish to study to keep track of it? Well something similar happens on Twitter but here the electronic tag is a hashtag (#) and people use them to track/search for information tagged under a specific hashtag.

An elegant solution but with an inherent problem.

The problem is most people on Twitter will research hashtags (#) for tweets that interest them instead of individual people. Why? Because it’s a lot more easier to scan a category as opposed to looking through everything you’ve tweeted including stuff they don’t care about. So unless you’re an established source of information (like Mashable) for a specific category (#socialmedia) then you won’t have this problem but if you’re not you’ll have to accept it and counter it to make sure people see your tweets long after you’ve publish them.

One way to counter this human problem, is to just add a categorical hashtag at the end of your tweet. For example if you have a blog about cooking recipes, add the hashtag #recipes or #cooking at the end of your tweet and voila! your blog post will appear with all other posts tagged with those hashtags.

Nice!

Another option that works if you’re more experimental and publish posts directly to Twitter from your blog (which I’ve been experimenting with here), is to add the hashtag directly to your blog post title like I did with this post: Unconventional #blogging advice.

I haven’t seen anybody else try this and haven’t really noticed a negative response to doing it this way. Finally, you should also publish your posts maybe 3 times at different intervals during the day (with the hashtag!) so that people who where not online at a certain hour can see your post when they are.

Closing thoughts…

Hashtags were born out of the necessity to filter information and have grown to have many more uses which makes them very valuable. Add them to your blog posts and experiment with different types of hashtags as well as putting them directly in your blog post.

Help people find your posts!

Put a tail on your blog posts to help them be found is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Well this past weekend I was across the border in Tijuana to visit a prospect and afterwards I went to visit an old stopping ground from my college days: Chabelas.

Chabelas is a little store in a corner of a street that prepares a combination of Michelada with clamato + tabasco sauce + a dash soy sauce and a piece of salted dehydrated plum to-go. This drink is called a Chabela.

Chabela’s always has people coming for a drink, it doesn’t matter what time of day it is and most of these people come from long distances. What Chabelas’s gets right is that they focus on doing one thing only: Serving the best Red Michelada out there, it’s that simple!

This little store was the first of it’s kind in Tijuana and soon other others just like it started sprouting all over the city, they’re no restaurant and no bar, they make Red Micheladas to-go. Others have tried different strategies to unseat them but have failed in doing so because Chabela’s has won a permanent place in people’s minds by maintaining that focus on just serving Micheladas.

The point I want to make is that they’ve conquered their market by being the most at preparing the best Red Micheladas.

What are you doing to be the most at something?

What are you the most at? is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Remember, ideas not content? If you don’t, click the link and then come back over here.

Great to have you back! I spotted a couple of tweets from Jane McGonigal (@AvantGame) that reflect this simple principle:

Applied towards your online brand experience the point is: Your content marketing strategy should be focused on ideas with a purpose for action not for consumption.

So if you’re planning on starting a blog about cooking, think about ‘why?’ you’re doing it (purpose of your blog) before you decide ‘what?’ content you’re going to publish on it. You stand a better chance of your content being shared and therefore being talked about if you create content for action not consumption. This simply means that, as Jane so clearly puts it, your content should help people achieve some goal that makes their life a lot more interesting.

Here’s a BIG idea again: It’s not what and how much you publish, it’s what people do with it that counts.

P.S. If you don’t know who Jane McGonigal is I recommend you watch her TED video below, I guarantee it’s well worth your time!

Does this resonate with you? What’s the BIG IDEA behind your content?

Content with a purpose is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency