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

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

Setting up an account on Twitter doesn’t mean you have a strategy, it means Twitter is part of your strategy because you think it suits you.

Remember the very first mobile phones? Remember when you first got one? Did you actually believe that was going to solve all your business issues back then? Probably not. Leap forward to when you got a smart phone say the iPhone, did you get one because everyone else got one and you didn’t want to be left out or because it’s capabilities opened up opportunities for your business?

And here then is the point: the capability a technology enables you to do is what you should look at and then ask yourself what does this tool’s capability let me do for my business?

It’s imperative that in order to know how to use these tools as part of your overall strategy, first ask yourself ‘why’ are you are using these tools and how does they fit in our overall business strategy?

Once you know why you can then figure out the activities that take advantage of the tool’s capabilities and then you can get to work!

Twitter is NOT a social media strategy is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

And that feature for him and for most successful bloggers is their posts have some simple and actionable lesson. This ability comes from experience but also from curiosity and looking beyond the obvious…the little details that make the difference.

Why am I writing this? Because we get a lot of questions on simple ways to be able to stand out.

Check this out:

Our brains can’t handle a hundred facts. We need one big reason why something is good.

Answer: just keep it simple by giving people one great message to repeat.

The power of this principle is further explained by another great blogger who practices what he preaches, he calls it: The importance of the ‘One thought’.

We hope this helps!

For #WOM give people one great message to repeat is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Answer: the ‘favorite’ function in Twitter.

This is essentially a bookmarking mechanism just for Twitter and it’s invaluable. I would write a long post about how to use it but popular blogger Mari Smith already did just that (and fantastic I might add!) and wrote a great article on how to creatively use the favorite function on Twitter and is a very helpful guide to getting some level of attention back.

I’m amazed that many people don’t use the ‘favorite’ option on Twitter. I find it invaluable to keep up with stuff I find from other people as well as things I RT from tweeps, with so much stuff going on it’s a ‘must use’ option.

I hope this helps!

Use the invaluable favorite function to keep track of things on Twitter is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

To help you answer the ‘Why’ we recommend you read Jay Bear’s 7 step process on how to develop a social media strategy and then come back here.

Thanks for coming back, now on to the ‘How’.

Framing the challenge

Since we’re always in the ‘let’s shake things up’ mood we’re testing a new approach to develop strategy, here are some questions to help you ideate a social media strategy around the most important things:

• In what ways might we spread the word about our product or service?
• In what ways might we create a following on Facebook and/or Twitter?
• In what ways might we create content?
• In what ways might we publish content?
• In what ways might we create engagement?
• In what ways might we help people subscribe to our newsletter?
• In what ways might we help people share our content?
• In what ways might we help people take useful action from our content?
• In what ways might we show people the benefit of doing business with us?
• In what ways might we prove to people the benefit of doing business with us?
• In what ways might we make our product or service be talked about?
• In what ways might we convince our customers come back?
• In what ways might we convince our customers to tell their friends about us?

These questions are meant to open your mind and create a list of possible options. The next thing you have to do is get a group together of no more than 5 key people and brainstorm around these questions and stop once you have enough answers for each question. At this point you have all sorts of ideas and now it’s time to start making choices depending on your strategic goals.

*For another approach check out Steve Koss’s comments below and clickthrough to his website for more depth.

Strategy should be unique to you

Next, to get really creative instead of going out and seeing how other businesses within your industry would answer these questions, think about how businesses in other industries would answer them. Why? Because all the good ideas in your industry are already taken and they’re called best practices.

The whole idea of strategy is not to replicate what your competitors do but to create a strategy that’s unique to you. 

We’d love to know what you think? What’s your approach to developing a social media strategy? What questions would you add?

13 Questions to help shape your social media strategy is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

This is a question I get asked a lot and it usually comes accompanied by an Alexa ranking remark: My Alexa ranking says I’m at 1,890,898 and last week I was at 2,589,723 but nothing is happening…Correct!

Link Building, the part of SEO that gets valuable inbound links to your website, is very time intensive. Most of the top websites have complete dominance over certain keywords because they’ve been linked to hundreds of thousands of times with those keywords. You would have to replicate that same output to try to rank in the top 3 results in Google, there are many ways to do this but it’s incredibly time intensive and the results are not immediate.

SEO is quite relevant still but the game has changed and:

As most things, SEO doesn’t work in a vacuum. It’s important to understand that following each and every single point here will only get you so far as other factors come into play such as competition for your keywords and the amount of competition your up against.

With the rise of social media it’s not surprising to see most websites get the most of their traffic from social networks such as Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook where factors such as immediacy and freshness play a bigger role.

SEO has matured, the game has shifted to social media and the benefits are superior.

Alexa is just a measurement tool that compares you with the rest of the web based on it’s criteria, but it’s not something you should use to measure success. It’s really easy to lead most people to think that Alexa is what you should monitors as opposed to looking at your search results, twitter mentions, blog comments, etc…I’m not saying Alexa is wrong it’s just not that relevant anymore as a yardstick.

Unless you have a big search advertising budget to pay for keywords, what really matters is the social media engagement metrics I mentioned above.

Again:

Your best bet is to optimize your website with these factors in mind but focus most of your marketing efforts in creating relationships, bonding with your audience and giving the best possible brand experience, social media makes this possible in ways SEO can’t.

One last thing, the basic formula to follow for SEO is: Publishing more = organic traffic from search results.

But:

It’s not what and how much you publish, it’s what people do with it that counts.

Are you link building or relationship building?

Why we don’t do link building is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

So how do we go beyond attracting attention to building trust?

By changing from a consumption mindset to a take action mindset. We want people to consume our content (attention) but do we really care if they take action on it (share/implement it)?  To build trust we have to care what they do with our ideas, I think that’s the key. This takes time but then again Rome wasn’t built in a day and real relationships take months to build.

With some much content getting pushed out there we have to be mindful of people’s time, so the question is: are we doing enough to help them solve their problems?

Ask yourself: Would I trust myself?

What say you, are you out there to grab attention or build trust? Which comes first?

On building trust is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency