Post by Andrew Lisa

I‘ve talked with people who are juggling as many as 25 business profiles for Twitter alone — and these are legitimate accounts. If the nature of their business demands that they’re also wrapped up in multiple profiles on other social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, there are simply not enough hours in the day to keep up.

Here are the five social media management tools that I hear positive reviews about most frequently (and isn’t word of mouth the best barometer?):

SproutSocial: Collaboration & keyboard monitoring

1SproutSocial has a clean, sleek interface and powerful features that come standard with every plan. It has an easy, single-stream inbox feed and tasking tools that make it nearly impossible to miss a customer’s question or comment. You can also post – and schedule postings – for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn simultaneously. Keyword monitoring lets you keep tabs on what people are saying about you and its collaboration feature allows you to split up tasks between team members.

Postling: Manage multiple accounts — and your blog

2With one single inbox at Postling, you can manage not just Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but also YouTube and even your blog. Even more, Postling lets you monitor reviews on sites like Yelp, CitySearch and TripAdvisor. Publish everything in one place and choose to respond either from your social media account or via email. Postling also has one of the best mobile apps in the industry.

Spredfast: Famed for its analytics program

3Spredfast is big-time social marketing for big-time operations. Its renowned analytics program is provided in readable graphs and charts, perfect for presenting to clients or customers regarding their own outreach programs. It’s not for the little guys, however – fees range from $12,000 to $1 million a year, on top of whatever you pay for high-speed business Internet.

Expion: Analytics + content marketing

4Expion steps it up by providing not just social marketing, but analytics and content marketing as well. It has a customizable interface that allow users to manage and govern personalized accounts. There is a whole world of social media management tools, and it can be big and confusing. The proliferation of social media, of course, resulted in the parallel rise of countless supporting applications. The first thing you should do is narrow down potential sites by clearly identifying clearly what size business each site is geared toward. From there, you can get into price and functionality.

Social Engage: Buff up your online profile

5Aimed at small businesses, Social Engage (formerly CoTweet) does everything you’d expect from a social marketing app, but it has a feature that makes it unique. Its +Engage feature frequently changes the design of your profile to follow the latest Internet trends.

The post Choosing the right social media management system appeared first on Inside Social Media.

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How to stay on top of what your customers are saying about your business

Target audience: Marketing professionals, SEO specialists, PR pros, analytics managers, brand managers, businesses, nonprofits, educators, Web publishers, journalists.

Guest post by Megan Totka
ChamberofCommerce.com

If you’re going to use social media effectively for your small business, it’s important to stay on top of what’s being said about your business, your brand, and your industry. This roundup of social media monitoring tools can help you do just that.

One quick note: We’re not including HootSuite on this list, because most businesses already know about this one (and we’ve written about it many times in the past). However, if you haven’t heard of it, you should check it out: HootSuite is available in both free and paid versions and includes social media monitoring, automation, and analytics for multiple channels.

Our list contains five Twitter-specific tools, and five general tracking and analytics services that cover multiple social media platforms.

Did we miss any? What are your favorite social media monitoring tools — paid or free? Let us know in the comments!

Twitonomy: Measure mentions, reach & conversions

1Offering analytics and more, Twitonomy is a monitoring and analytics tool that lets you measure mentions, reach, and even conversions. You can track follower growth, click-throughs on your tweeted links, mentions, retweets, favorites, and more. The service is free to use — just sign in with your Twitter account and get started.

Twitter Counter: Get email updates on your stats

2Simple and straightforward: Plug in your Twitter handle on Twitter Counter and sign up to receive weekly emails containing your stats. You can also receive an email or Twitter notifications whenever your account reaches a milestone, such as a certain number of followers or tweets. The site offers paid versions with more detailed stats and analytics, starting at $17 per month.

Twazzup: Real-time updates

3A basic yet effective tool, Twazzup gives you real-time updates for your searches, including top retweeted images and links, most active top influencers, and the top 10 keywords relating to your search. You can search by company name, keyword, or hashtag.

TweetDeck: Track & search across accounts

4This multi-purpose tool lets you customize your Twitter feed as well as track and search. TweetDeck has features for monitoring multiple Twitter accounts, creating and managing custom timelines, automated searches for keywords and hashtags, sending out scheduled tweets, and more.

TweetReach: How far do your tweets travel?

5Discover the impact and implications of your brand’s social media discussions with TweetReach. This free monitoring tool shows you how far tweets travel. You can search by Twitter name, URL, hashtag, or keyword phrase and view reports that show the reach and exposure data for relevant tweets.

TwentyFeet: Set up alerts for your data

6This social tracking tool, recently acquired by online analytics firm SumAll, gives you monitoring tools and analytics for social networks, as well as other services your business uses, such as link shortener tracking. TwentyFeet aggregates your data and lets you set up email alerts, so you don’t have to keep checking your individual services.

Social Mention: Power & ease of use

7Easy to use with in-depth results, Social Mention is a social search engine that monitors and tracks more than 100 social media sites. This tool provides detailed analytics and shows your social influence across four categories: strength, sentiment, passion, and reach.

Addictomatic: Custom-track a brand or keyword

8This tool covers Twitter and more, letting you create custom pages to track mentions of any brand or keyword you’d like to follow. Addictomatic shows you “the latest buzz” on your chosen topic from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Google, WordPress, Bing News, and more.

HowSociable: Track brands across social platforms

9A free account with HowSociable, another multi-platform tool, lets you track brand and business mentions on 12 different social sites, such as WordPress and Tumblr. If you want the big platforms like Facebook and Twitter, you’ll need the paid version with plans starting at $9 per month. One of the unique aspects of HowSociable is the analytics — you get a breakdown of scores for individual platforms, showing you which social media sites are working out best for you.

IceRocket: Prioritize your blog

10A free social media-specific search engine, Meltwater IceRocket gives you options for searching Facebook, Twitter, blogs, or all tracked platforms for your chosen keywords. If you run a blog for your business, you can also sign up to have IceRocket prioritize your blog when other people search for relevant keywords on the site. Finally, there’s a paid social media monitoring service called Meltwater Buzz that offers free trials, with pricing for premium versions available upon request.

Related

• Top 20 social media monitoring vendors for business (Socialmedia.biz)

• 7 tools to monitor your competitors’ traffic (Socialmedia.biz)

The post Top 10 monitoring tools for Twitter & other social media platforms appeared first on Inside Social Media.

How to manage the multiple online conversations for your business

By Kim Bale and J.D. Lasica

With the torrent of social media conversations coming at us today, how do you manage the flow?

The answer used to be: Painstakingly and one conversation at a time. But a new crop of social media tools aims to tamp down the social media gusher by letting you update, manage and maintain several communication outlets at once. (While it’s sometimes hard to know what counts as a social media dashboard, we’re not including a wide range of customer relationship management (CRM) or social media monitoring tools here.)

When selecting a dashboard for personal or professional use, you should consider such items as cost, analytics and which social networks they support, among other things. Our list is meant to feature some of the breakout social media dashboards in the space and highlight their distinguishing features to make the selection process a bit easier.

Threadsy: Unify your email, social networks

1Threadsy is an intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard that allows organizations to connect through multiple email accounts as well as Facebook and Twitter. Free to use, Threadsy is great for managing your brand from one clean dashboard across the big names in social media platforms. With no fees and no downloads, this service should make a splash in the space for both personal use and use by your business or organization.

Myweboo: Organize your information streams

2Haven’t heard of Myweboo? That’s OK. This upstart startup invites users to discover, browse and read popular streams and share them with friends and followers. You or your organization can choose from a wide variety of “applications” to connect to and stream to a dashboard from categories like news, social, fashion, photo and video. These streams can be viewed together of filtered from “My Dashboard” and then easily shared via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Delicious and other networks. You’re in complete control of which sites will make up your dashboard. Free to use, Myweboo is run by an appealing brother-and-sister pair of young tech stars.

Hootsuite: Integrate all your platforms

3Our personal favorite is Hootsuite because of the depth of its products and services. You can update multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook and more) from a computer or iPhone, Android or Blackberry. A team of users can track results of their interactions and create a dashboard that will work efficiently with their preferred social streams. Hootsuite offers two versions. One is free and aggregates up to five social network and two RSS feeds; it stores stat history for 30 days and is ad supported. For $5.99 a month, your organization can enjoy unlimited capabilities for a single user, with each additional user costing $10 per month.

Spredfast: For teams of social marketers

4Spredfast allows an organization not only to manage its social media presence but also to monitor and measure its voice across multiple social media channels from one easy-to-use dashboard. A great choice for organizations with multiple hands in social media marketing efforts, Spredfast offers superb organizational tools that help identify and assign tasks to multiple users across multiple social media sites ranging from Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn and blogging platforms. It also lets you publish video to many video sites at once, similar to TubeMogul. Free for 30 days, Spredfast has pricing tiers that start around $250 per month for businesses. See our recent writeup on Spredfast.

MediaFunnel: Collaborative, permission-based system

5Coordinate and manage your business’s social media presence with MediaFunnel, a collaboration platform that lets you navigate and moderate online conversations about your brand. One interesting feature: You can use MediaFunnel to manage your team member’s social media updates — say, by holding your intern’s tweets in a queue until approved by a supervisor (roles include admins, publishers and contributors). Chiefly geared to businesses, MediaFunnel makes it easy to combine several social media accounts and to offer solutions for presenting a brand’s presence through multiple voices. Scheduled tweets, brand alerts and tweets via email or SMS are supported.

CoTweet: Advanced features for Enterprise users

6CoTweet is used by thousands of individuals and employees at enterprises around the world. The free Standard edition is limited to a few Twitter accounts and geared to a couple of team members. The paid Enterprise edition supports Facebook, too, and is geared to brands more deeply engaged in social marketing, brand building and customer support. It supports an unlimited number of users, advanced workflow, more analytics, third-party integrations — including Salesforce.com — productivity tools, unlimited conversation history for deeper customer relationships, a mobile app, rich profiles of fans and followers and more.

Seesmic: Free, clean & credible

7Seesmic allows users to manage unlimited Twitter accounts as well as Facebook, Google Buzz, LinkedIn and Foursquare accounts. Another free service, this dashboard is well-organized and can be sorted into a variety of timelines detailing tweets, retweets, @mentions, direct messages and lists. Seesmic also publishes trending topics, making it easy to join already popular conversations. This dashboard — created by Loic Le Meur, founder of LeWeb, and his San Francisco-based team — is clean, simple and affords the ability to update several statuses, send direct messages and check in to locations from one easily navigated page.

Netvibes: Share your widgets with the world

8Netvibes lets organizations keep track of the news and trends that matter, create unique personal and public dashboards and share these public dashboards or sites with anyone, anywhere, at any time. You can easily create fun and personalized widgets — detailing the weather, to-do lists, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts or Flickr updates, among many others — and post them to both personal and public dashboards. Businesses can choose a theme, name their pages and organize them with tabs and share them with the world.

TweetDeck: Connect with your contacts

9If you’re a Twitter aficionado, you may already use TweetDeck, which works on the Mac, PC, Linux, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android. It connects organizations with contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and many more. Free of charge, TweetDeck allows users to schedule future posts, manage multiple accounts and update several social media sites at once to maintain consistency. One unique feature allows users to send tweets longer than 140 characters through smart cross-posting to both a Buzz and Twitter account. Twitter is a desktop app and not Web-based, so one thing we don’t like is the inability to manage the app’s font size on different screens.

Brizzly: Simplify your updating

10Brizzly simplifies your social media browsing and updating experience while taking some of the work out of keeping up to date with trends and followers. It lets you update on Twitter and Facebook. Its Brizzly Guide helps explain trending topics on Twitter. Brizzly is free.

Also, don’t forget other tools that can integrate your social networks:

• You might want to try using a browser as your social media dashboard. Flock has been the most social of the social browsers for the past five years. Others say Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox will get you a social media dashboard with the right add-ons/extensions. And Marc Andreessen’s upcoming RockMelt (Mashable review) will take it a step further, requiring you to log into Facebook before using it.

• Unilyzer has a social media dashboard to unify yourTwitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts.

• We’re impressed by the private beta of Nimble and will report back when we’ve used it more extensively.

• TwitterFeed lets you feed your blog to Twitter, Facebook and more.

• Ping.fm is a free service that makes it easy to update your social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and Delicious.

• RowFeeder is a tool to cross-post, to track conversations on Twitter and Facebook and to create analytical reports.

What’s your favorite social media dashboard? Please add a comment.

Cross-posted to Socialbrite.org.

The post 10 ways to create a social media dashboard appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Millions of downloadable app fans can’t be wrong

Since the explosion of Web 2.0, there’s been a sense in the industry that downloadable applications for PCs and Macs are dead. Web 2.0 programming languages turned static web pages into web applications. The advantage of this now-dubbed “webware” was that you didn’t have to go through the process of downloading and installing an application, often cited as a major hurdle for usage. Web 2.0 applications could work in everyone’s browser (PC or Mac), no matter the configuration (usually).

If it’s true that “people won’t download and install applications,” how come all of us have downloaded and installed applications running on our computers right now? And how come millions of people still download and install applications?

I wrote about the downloadable application issue (hot or not?) on my blog, Spark Minute. I looked at the three most successful categories of downloadable applications (communications, multimedia, and malware protection) and how they drive revenue.

I’m asking this question of myself and Socialmedia.biz readers because my company, Spark Media Solutions, has a client that’s producing and distributing a downloadable application, and I’m trying to understand what does and doesn’t work in the world of downloadable apps.

The application is itiBiti, a white-labeled communications and content application. Think of it like a mashup between Skype and Hulu that can be branded by any company. For example, NBC distributes NBC Communicator, which is their own branded version of itiBiti.

What makes certain downloadable applications successful?

Looking at the most successful downloaded applications I realize they all fall into two very general categories. One category consists of utilities that enhance a function of an existing application or your computer desktop. Only hardcore geeks spend the time to download install, and configure these applications.

The second category of successful downloaded applications is more widely used, and those are programs that solve a major issue that can’t be handled well with a web application.

Here’s a list of those successful downloadable applications, and the problem they solve that web applications can’t solve.

Where can future downloadable applications be successful?

It appears that there’s an opportunity for the merger of these different types of applications (communications, content, and malware protection). We’ve already seen it happen between VoIP and instant messaging applications. At the beginning, Skype was for voice communications and AOL Instant Messenger for text communications. Soon AOL began incorporating voice. Today, almost all the instant messenger applications allow for text, voice, and video.

The merger options are to combine

• A communications application with a content application
• A content application and a malware protection application
• A communications application and a malware protection application

Trying to merge a communications or content application with a malware protection application reminds me of the Saturday Night Live sketch “Shimmer Floor Wax” where a couple argues if Shimmer is a floor wax or a dessert topping.

Chevy Chase: “It’s durable, and it’s scuff resistant.”

Dan Aykroyd: “And it’s delicious.”

Because of the odd connection, a malware protection application mashup with a communications or content application is off the table for a mashup. The only merger option left is a communications application with a content application, which is what itiBiti does. But so much of what can make itiBiti successful is up to its partners, who distribute the product.

Don’t just merge communications and content, mash it up

The merger of communications and content is essentially “social media.” But when you bring communications to the desktop with a terminate and stay resident (TSR) program it becomes omnipresent and continuous allowing for ongoing conversation throughout the piece of content. Once again, we’ve already seen this happening as people tweet during a live event using hashtags and including links to photos, articles and videos. This is the goal of Tweetshare (a former client of Spark Media Solutions), which allows people to maintain Twitter conversations around a piece of content.

We’re running into a situation where we need another filter to manage the combination of communications and content. Traditionally, the two filters we rely on are the wisdom of the crowd and trusted editors. The problem is the majority of content exists on the web and the majority of the conversation is happening off the web, on the desktop using the aforementioned communications tools and email.

People rely on their conversation happening off the web. The question is can content come outside the web? We’ve already seen a little of this with photo and video viewing utilities within TweetDeck.

That’s just the nascent stages, though. The web is fantastic at delivering content on demand, but it’s really poor at omnipresent communications. That’s been proven by the incredible success of TSR downloadable communications applications. If we’re going to have content and omnipresent communications work together more efficiently, the content is going to have to come out of the web and integrate more closely with communications apps on the desktop.

What do you think?

Creative Commons photo attributions CC Chapman and -jre-.

The post Why do people still download & install applications? appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Back in the earlier days of 3rd party Twitter apps (just a few months ago, actually), a few very effective web-based services got my attention: SocialToo, TweetLater, and HootSuite. Sad thing was, while they were all very powerful services, they were all poorly designed, very hacked together, and fugly.  Enter the elegant, sexy, feature-rich HootSuite 2.0 (no matter what you think about all the controversy and extortion — see below).

Everyone’s talking about HootSuite 2.0

Today, while I was monitoring my stream-o-tweets, I noticed that every third person of the 2,587 I currently follow were tweeting that they “upgraded to #HootSuite 2.0 because it works http://hootsuite.com/upgrade.” HootSuite — pronounced like it sounds (HOOT-sweet) and a play on the French phrase tout de suite — was the first online player to offer multi-Twitter-account management and Twittering, an essential tool to any business application of Twitter that required the management of more than one Twitter account, such as @marcon, @abrahamharrison, @chrisabraham, etc.

HootSuite 1.0 was ugly

I used HootSuite to manage multiple accounts, in spite of very basic, very Web 1.0 forms-based interface. HootSuite allowed me to simply pop tweets to one or more account and to manage as many as I wanted. I used it as I expanded into new accounts. And then there was Seesmic Desktop, by Loic Le Meur, and now there is TweetDeck, both AIR apps that are multi-platform clients that I personally really love: their ease of use, their look and feel, and their modern design.

HootSuite 2.0 is a hottie

Today, as I alluded to earlier, HootSuite got a lot of work done. In fact, I feel like I am in some sort of before and after makeover scene in morning TV.  HootSuite 2.0 is a hottie: gorgeous, stunning, modern and Ajaxy, integrating new levels of innovation that leaves every Twitter-inspired web services in its technological wake — even Twitter!

Looking good even on my small-screen laptop

I run a Lenovo x61 ThinkPad, which only has a 12.1-inch screen, which doesn’t work very well with TweetDeck (it just isn’t wide enough). Seesmic Desktop does a little better with a pretty cool “shuffling” innovation. However, HootSuite does it the best, using a regular browser to display lots and lots of information by means of scrollers and tabs, allowing everything to be contained simply and quickly using even my pathetically small “executive” laptop and might even work swimmingly in a netbook with a 10-inch screen.

All of the other stuff is crap compared to what’s really cool

I have been saving the best for last: HootSuite allows you to create columns with persistent search, meaning you can keep your eyes on what is going on around your brand, your name, your competitors, and your industry. Psych!  That’s not the big deal! The big deal is that “you can now take your column with you,” meaning you can create a search for something like #Socialmedia.biz. This is really cool and so innovative!  You can set up your own dashboard, you can shoehorn the stream into your blog’s or site’s nav bar — lots of stuff. Nobody else offers this, as far as I can tell, and this is a winner! The reason why we all use and worship YouTube is partially because it was one of the first video hosting sites that allowed one to embed content. You might not know it now, but this is a big deal!

Embeddable columns widget

Apparently, Twitter embeddable search, too

Update: Right after I posted this article, I popped the link to the lovely and brilliant Adele McAlear, who popped me the note via Google Talk, “I think someone else does the widget… I’ll find it…one sec. Yeah…its Twitter themselves. Customizable. Announced this week based on search.twitter. I’ve already embedded one on my blog (which explains why I’ve seen it, smacks head). Yes, the link works in my left sidebar. Custom search terms, sizes, colours, mouse over “join the conversation” in the widget to see the search terms used.”  Well, there you have it!  Here’s the link to the Twitter Widget Search.

Controversy

Now, the controversy: remember that “I upgraded to #HootSuite 2.0 because it works http://hootsuite.com/upgrade” tweet I have been seeing all over the Twittosphere?  Well, here’s the controversy and the genius: if you want to upgrade to HootSuite version 2 — if you really want to upgrade — then you have to be willing to tweet “I upgraded to #HootSuite 2.0 because it works http://hootsuite.com/upgrade” or there’s no moving forward. Coercion! Blackmail! Extortion! Brilliant! Worth it! Shameless! Arrogant! How dare you!

Well, I think it worked.  Just today, there were at least 2,133 mentions of the Twitter hashtag #hootsuite, roughly equivalent to a minor earthquake or coup d’état insurrection. I mean, it works and it got my attention, it got JD’s attention, and the messaging — my messaging — wasn’t even the result of a direct mail. And, when I repeated the message to my 10k+ followers, it was willingly. I mean, what price tweeting to get a glimpse of what everyone is on about.

What do you think?

Update: Blake Samic commented that there are parts of HootSuite that I hadn’t yet explored, “I’m interested to see how their analytics engine stacks up to something like ‘su.pr‘ (another great scheduled-tweet app). The other interesting feature I noticed in Hootsuite was the ability to have multiple people managing a Twitter account (kind of like Co-Tweet).”

The post I upgraded to HootSuite 2.0 because it works appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Here’s the comments through to today:

By jason_miletsky | totowa, NJ June 26, 2009 05:32:15 pm:

I’m not a fan of Second life by any means – I’ve written plenty of scathing blog posts on its demise myself (http://bit.ly/Qat0k), and I am absolutely a fan of Twitter. But I don’t think Second Life vs. Twitter is a fair comparison. Far from the cliched apples and oranges, this is more like apples and marshmallows.Twitter exists as a source of information, news, gossip, updates, conversation – it’s a platform for communication between friends, families or even brands and their consumers. But all it takes is a little effort to follow people who share your interest, and all of sudden every column of TweetDeck is filled with life – the empty room we’re all tweeting in at the start can get pretty crowded pretty quickly. Same with Facebook – maybe it’s a walled in environment, but anybody who makes the slightest effort to connect with people can log in and see some activity.None of that is true with Second Life, which would have benefited from a few more boundaries (vitutally geographically speaking). Second Life offers so much space there simply aren’t enough people to occupy it, so it becomes very lonely very quickly. Really, there’s nothing more depressing than wandering around an enormous Second Life mall and being the only one there. It’s right about them when you look up and realize, huh…maybe my first life isn’t so bad after all. So once the joy of flying is over (usually after the first 5 minutes), there’s just not a lot more to do there.

However, I think both Facebook and Twitter face some of the same dangers that Second Life ultimately succumbed to, and that the increasingly visible presence of spammers, get-rich-quick schemes and sex pushers. More and more often I find myself unfollowing someone on Twitter who wants to show me how they made $5,000 posting Tweets, or how I can get thousands of new followers. Facebook is no different – I’m sure by now everyone on there has gotten a few suspicious e-mails from crooks trying to steal their name and password. If it happens enough, people will eventually stay away from these networks and look elsewhere for their networking. They’ll still be around, but they’ll be a shadow of their former selves – Second Life still exists, but it’s little more than a virtual Red Light District in some seedy part of town.

I’m sorry – did I say that there was nothing more depressing than wandering around an empty Second Life mall? That was wrong – watching a Second Life stripper grind against a virtual pole goes well beyond depressing, and border on simply pathetic.

Jason Miletsky
CEO, PFS Marketwyse
Author, ‘Perspectives on Marketing’ and ‘Perspectives on Branding’

http://www.pfsmarketwyse.com

http://twitter.com/jason_miletsky

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By chrisabraham | Berlin June 26, 2009 07:08:19 pm:

I agree with you. I don’t think you can compare them either, which is why I wrote this. People keep on saying, “Twitter hype is just like what happened with Second Life. Nope.

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By jason_miletsky | totowa, NJ June 26, 2009 07:24:17 pm:

Ah – Sorry, Chris, if I misunderstood your point there. Thanks for clarifying, and for bringing the topic to attention. Good piece.Jason

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By chrisabraham | Berlin June 26, 2009 08:39:58 pm:

Well, I am glad we’re on the same page. Actually, I am glad that you commented here — thanks!

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By valencio | Dubai June 27, 2009 03:26:38 am:

I will recommend using Email Charger for all bulk email marketing needs. Its the best bulk email marketing software I have used so far.

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By MarcoP123 | Philadelphia, PA June 27, 2009 09:26:48 am:

There’s really no comparison between Second Life and Twitter. Second Life is a vehicle for people to escape reality and create new ones. Twitter is a vehicle for people to share reality quickly and succinctly. I do strategic consulting work for a Philadelphia based full-service marketing communications agency (http://www.domusinc.com). I also have some musings on the Domus blog site (http://domusinc.blogspot.com). In those two capacities, I see and work with customers who immediately understand and want to be part of the Twitter community – a much faster adoption rate than so many previous technologies.

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By ASantiago23 | Lakeland, FL June 27, 2009 12:44:45 pm:

Thank you for this great article. I find it so interesting how Ad Age writing are so pro or against “social media.” Twitter is phenomenal. It has given me and my projects more real readers and followers than MySpace, Facebook, Live Journal, and Pure Volume together.I am really intrigued with what will come next from them. And yes, the Iran explosion via Twitter, I think, is the separating factor between Twitter and the rest.But ultimately, I think that Google Wave will CRUSH everyone!

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By chrisabraham | Berlin June 27, 2009 12:54:58 pm:

“But ultimately, I think that Google Wave will CRUSH everyone!”I will believe it when I see it — and I sort of believe it already — however, Twitter has an amazing lead and might very well benefit from making itself more of a need than a want.Seeing the State Department preempt a scheduled Twitter maintenance because of what was going on in Iran was huge. I don’t think any of us have realized how much of a change agent Twitter must really be if State is doing interventions.

I wonder if there may very well be Government and Homeland Security interest in the wellness and prosperity and success.

However, don’t even quote me as saying that Twitter is too big to fail, but I have never seen anything with this level of ubiquity.

Sure, Twitter could very well — surely — fly high and then crash. Who knows. I don’t think so. Thousands of companies have invested big bucks, big resources, and a lot of “face” into Twitter — and I have invested over 18,000 tweets into Twitter.

I personally have a lot invested in Twitter. How about you?

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By Spartanic | london, NY June 27, 2009 01:24:49 pm:

This is a short sighted and ill informed article. So you are saying twitter is a sucess? How on – what basis, that lots of people use it?Whats the usual measure of success? – the bottom line… How much money does twitter make? $0 – Second life is a monetised and profitable product.

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By chrisabraham | Berlin June 27, 2009 06:36:03 pm:

@Spartanic I would say that obsessing about “bottom line” is the kind of short-sightedness that got us (all — even the Brits) into this financial mess. Twitter is dominating a space that is actually a mad land-grab rush (you might not aware of it because Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are so far about everyone else) and it is essential not to spook anyone off… especially the earlier adopters who are looking to diss anything that “sells out” — and, when it hearty competition with Facebook, it is essential to make certain that this “new” — 2007? — tool wins the race.

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By Spartanic | london, NY June 28, 2009 01:46:25 pm:

I’m a big fan of Twitter don’t get me wrong. I just think its a bit wrong to take pop shots at ‘unfashionable’ platforms such as SL because they are not the flavour of the month.The end of the day these services are a business model – and so far twitter only exists because someone is paying its bills (i’d hate to think about their hosting costs). If its trying to “win the race” as you say – when is the payout day for the investor? Twitter seems very reluctant to find a way to monetise – Either because they think it might put people off – or they cant think of an effective way to get people to pay.“This financial mess” as you put it, I fear comes from the whole attitude of throwing money at something in the hope that some bigger fish will buy them off – rather than building a strategy that will profit enough to pay the running costs (at minimum). The bottom line isn’t short sightedness – its a reality.

If Twitter does have a strategy and is holding back – all well and good. But I wouldn’t start throwing around claims its a success over an already profitable company just yet.

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By chrisabraham | Berlin June 28, 2009 02:45:28 pm:

I don’t think I come across as anti-SL, I just wanted to explain why I believe Second Life failed (did it fail? I don’t hear much about it at all) — my only reason for writing this article is to say that Twitter will continue expanding because it is permanent and not ephemeral, it is free and not cost-dependent (you stop paying in SL, you lose your dream house), it is open system and not a proprietary walled village (Google is not allowed into Second Life and even if it were, there is really no there there to index), and finally, Twitter has gone a lot further down the road towards making Twitter into a household name — even if it doesn’t actually have as much registration penetration as does Facebook.Twitter knows — and their investors know — that the Twitterati will bail to FriendFeed, to Plurk, and to Laconi.ca the moment that Twitter start heavily monetization. Good timing is essential here and I think Twitter will focus, at first, on making money through B2B licensing, through Twitter PRO services (which might charge users money for extra API calls since we are only allotted 100 calls per/hour, which is a serious impairment when you follow tens of thousands of people — hell I would pay for more API calls — Twitter, hello?).Anyway, I am coming from the assumption that Second Life is a wasteland, the only people who are really participating are academics who are researching and sharing and educating using Second Life’s virtual world and a small cadre of faithfuls. I am assuming that most brands have abandoned SecondLife, though I may be mistaken.

I may be wrong, please enlighten me.

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By Spartanic | london, NY June 28, 2009 07:19:16 pm:

Well this is where you contradict yourself. In your opening statement you are saying “ascent and crash of Second Life”An then in your previous comment you say “did it fail? & “I am coming from the assumption that Second Life is a wasteland” & I don’t hear much about it at all” – I suggest when making sweeping and provocative statements you do some research, otherwise someone might come along and challenge it ;)You article talks of “Outlive[ing] the Hype Cycle” – Well second Life seems to be surviving without the hype cycle doesn’t it? Believe me I don’t think its perfect by any means. But its standing on its own two feet which a lot of web companies cannot claim.

You say that Twitter is open, free and you cant lose your content on it? really? Is this so? – Again – someone else is bankrolling your content here – if Twitter would fold over night – so would all of its content (unless you’ve read it into an external db of course, have you done that?).

In regard to Google, yes Google does index Second Life – Google is used for its search engine and also its mapping system. that content is just not shown on web search.

I think you are right to say that people will jump ship if Twitter were to start to heavily charge for its services. That’s why I think they may just be waiting for someone like Google to buy them out. Their competitors have much more functionality, all they don’t have is the brand recognition. That’s hardly a recipe for outlasting the Hype Cycle either is it? Twitter has trouble meeting the load as it is, let alone with more functionality.

I agree that the nature of Twitter would make it easier to survive in theory. Text messages are a lot simpler to deal with than a complex persistent 3d environment. But, like I was saying – if it can’t sustain itself then it its not really going to live much past the free lunch.

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By ProkofyNeva | Second Life, NY June 28, 2009 08:16:20 pm:

Chris, your over-exaggeration of Twitter and banging on Second Life is typical of what I would call a technocommunist world view that abhors free enterprise — except for yourself and your ideologically approved cronies of the left. You betray your hand by praising IRC. Twitter is proprietary software just as much as Second Life is — Twitter is a “walled garden” too. The presence of APIs have made it useful for power usages and automatic following and searching, but SL is a freemium service with very low barriers to entrepreneurism — and that’s a good thing (not just for you). Your strange belief that SL is marred by “greedyness and avarice” (I guess that’s what you call “capitalism” and “commerce” practiced by people other than the heads of new digital social media ad firms lol) while Twitter is sanctified by its APIness is just plain ridiculous.Most Twitter APIs are used by SEO and new media gurus in all kinds of money-making schemes of what many see as the most shoddy and greedy kind (just look on Twitter and who uses it for God’s sake), and the really major power usage of Twitter is by firms that want to scrape the data to sell ads or sell commercial information about users for commercial purposes. *And that’s ok*. Isn’t that what YOU do?Why would somebody putting up a commercial island for a campaign or a long-time customer relations presence in SL be “greedy” and someone scraping all the data of tracking trends for commercial purposes be blessed as “cool”? Makes no sense. Different tools for different purposes and outcomes.

Trying to compare Twitter with its massive numbers of users and Second Life with its small number of users is like complaining that CNN has a lot of users and the New Yorker only has a small number of subscribers. They are different forms of media, used differently and one need not cancel out the other.

Your take on SL seems to have evolved mainly through its hyping by a few of the very ad agencies that prop up this very site here storming on the scene in 2007 and deciding, at a time when they were hugely nervous and scared over huge amounts of loss of ad revenue from dying newspapers, that perhaps virtual worlds and games were the “next big thing”. They were too early and too clueless with this, but that’s a function of their expectations. These same ad companies have gotten no more ROI from Twitter than they’ve gotten out of SL (Skittles, anyone?)SL is good for a deeper, more intensive purpose, for meetings and raising of awareness and support — really building communities; and also for small business inworld.

SL offers you that more intensive interaction that is essentially a replacement for f2f meetings because you are in an immersive environment and able to reach people at an intellectual and emotional level, with real-time interactive 3-D communication, that you just can’t reach with a 140 tweet. Serendipity rules in SL

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By ProkofyNeva | Second Life, NY June 28, 2009 08:24:29 pm:

The lease persuasive of your arguments is that there is something “ephemeral” about Second Life and not about Twitter. What, you save somewhere *inside* the service of Twitter which is, er, “eternal” all the thousands of updates you’ve made. I have 15,000 updates in two years of tweeting and some 1300 followers whose updates I follow — like…I access this somewhere? lol Please. I use search for *real-time* needs, not research as I would Google. In the same way, in five years of SL, I have 25,000 pieces of inventory, many of them notecards from meetings, tutorials, discussions, etc. all of which save within that system (unlike anything twitter offers). Even if SL were to go down tomorrow, I could still cut and paste out of that application — I’d be lucky to successfully page through all the Twitter updates past a few months given its lag and error messages.But the point of social media is not to keep communications in some big file — both SL and Twitter are on Google, and there are applications such as those your digital PR new media firm uses for clients.Twitter is not a place where you can build relationships and collaborat — it’s a signal pusher with a lot of noise pushing against it, for life-casting or mind-casting, but little means of taking it beyond the cursory clipped expression except by going into Friendfeed or on Skype or into Second Life or Metaplace or some other venue for voice or text chat without Twitter restrictions.

You don’t need to defend Twitter by bashing on Second Life. Your assessment of SL’s hype cycle is based on superficial media reports and not research of the sort you wouldn’t accept as true if they were about Twitter. Twitter is overhyped and will undergo a crash in old media coverage, too, just like Second Life. You’re oblivious to the role that dying old media played in touting both Twitter and SL, and tone deaf to the possibilities for both Twitter and SL *after* the old media hype is over. In fact the two services are complementary and not contradictory.

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By ProkofyNeva | Second Life, NY June 28, 2009 08:43:29 pm:

Jason, how is it that you came to view SL through this cynical keyhole? Did you type “sex” or “mall” or “stripper” or “shopping” into a search engine? Is that how you use the Internet at large?Or are you saying you didn’t even bother to search that one time you came to Second Life, and just made a lazy click on the old “Popular Places”? By popular outcry, that list was removed because it was all gamed by bots and camping (SEO tricks) — there is a more curated and meaningful list of suggestions now under Showcase and at many resident-made infohubs like mine in Ross.While SL can have a steep learning curve, the very basics — search on topics to go to events and places — are just like Google and just as easy to use. Talking to other people is as easy as it is on Twitter.

If you typed in words like Obama, Iran, non-profit, government, science, history, literature, etc. you might have a very different experience than visiting clubs with AFK dancers on sex poles — something that in fact really does make up a small portion of Second Life even if it gets inflated traffic from bots like the SEO gurus on Twitter now get seemingly enormous numbers of followers using automatic scripts).

You *do* put filters on your email to get rid of the Viagra ads, right? You can do the same in SL.

In the last few weeks, here are some of the things I’ve done in Second Life:

o hosted an event to talk to people around the world who came through serendipity — educators, journalists, human rights activists, etc. to talk about Iran and the “Twitter Revolution” and talk about ways to be supportive to democracy in Iran.

o followed a lecture by a U.S. government official about Obama’s technology programs and social media strategies

o visited the MacArthur Foundation’s island to learn about their programs funding all kinds of interesting projects around the world

o visited three amazing art installations and discussed with fellow visitors

o attended 3 live music concerts by artists with original music

o wrote a 3-D interactive science fiction story and interacted with other people in the story to discuss what new technology will bring to us — and take away from us in the future

o made US $200 from my rentals and content business above costs to use on real-life bills

What did I do on Twitter? I *talked* about the Iranian revolution but didn’t *do* anything about it. I spent an hour trying to weed out all the SEO goofs following me to get follow-backs using scripts. I learned about a few interesting articles — but often the same articles I get pasted to me in numerous groups and chats in SL on all different subjects.

I’m an early adapter of Twitter and it’s all good, but a time suck.

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By jason_miletsky | totowa, NJ June 29, 2009 12:02:15 am:

ProkofyNeva You asked me the following question: “How is it that you came to view SL through this cynical keyhole?…Are you saying you didn’t even bother to search that one time you came to Second Life, and just made a lazy click on the old “Popular Places”?Actually, I came to my conclusions based on pretty extensive research I did for the college textbook I’ve recently had published, “Principles of Internet Marketing” (http://bit.ly/63dB5). In the book, I dedicate a good part of one chapter to virtual worlds, with a specific focus on SL, including an interview with an organization that runs a fairly significant island there. While I didn’t editorialize in the book, I was able to come to some pretty sound conclusions. If I had any preconceived notions at all before I first went on SL, they were positive – I wanted to like it.But neither my comment nor Chris’ original post were about whether or not we like SL. Like has nothing to do with it. It’s about SL’s place in the online universe as a widely used tool for social networking and/or marketing.

I always find it amusing, however, how people who are so crazed and passionate about Second Life are so incapable of seeing the reality behind the business of the Internet. I’m sure you generated $200 last week, and have had plenty of conversations with other people there. But the fact of the matter is that if it ever reached critical mass in terms of a being a viable marketing or social networking vehicle, it did so awhile ago and shows little chance of recapturing any former glory. If you’d like, I’d be more than happy to spend a few minutes finding links to charts showing the significant loss of media attention and brand usage over the past year or more.

Fanatics, whether their obsessions be for Star Wars, Star Trek, Second Life or something else, are welcomed to have their passion. But don’t let your love of something cloud your ability to see the reality behind it.

Jason Miletsky
CEO, PFS Marketwyse
Author, ‘Perspectives on Marketing’ and ‘Perspectives on Branding’

http://www.pfsmarketwyse.com

http://twitter.com/jason_miletsky

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By chrisabraham | Berlin June 30, 2009 08:45:38 am:

Wow, this is an awesome comment string! This is 100% why I blog. @ProkofyNeva — this article is 100% about the Hype surrounding Second Life back in 2006/2007 and the Hype surrounding Twitter in 2009 — and why *I* believe Twitter is more sustainable in its Hype than Second Life. That said, thank you Second Life denizens for making this true social media — I might download Second Life again if you’re willing, maybe, to give me a proper tour of Second Life.

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By GwynethLlewelyn | Lisbon June 30, 2009 06:20:17 pm:

Chris, I hardly understand why you bother to mention Second Life on your description of Twitter then — unless, of course, the whole point is to gather the attention of Second Life users, who are quite keen in following *all* news, bad or good, that mention it ;) (A very interesting effect known by so-called SEO experts who have noticed that anything Second Life-related will gather WAY more attention than… almost anything else).I totally agree with your description of Twitter vs. Facebook/Plurk/others, about the openness of Twitter and its myriad applications, about how it resembles IRC, about how people use it as an “intelligent RSS feed” (I’m certainly one of them!). There is nothing to disagree with :)However, I completely fail to understand the relationship with Second Life. Twitter is owned by a company of geeks that just raised venture capital and burn it like crazy keeping the servers up, without a business plan, without a revenue model, and thriving on — numbers and hype. That, in itself, is nothing wrong — after all, all the others are *exactly like that* (when Facebook burned out all their money in 2007, they invented a fake number for their value and sold a share to Microsoft, which should be enough to keep them going on for a few years more — until they sell another share, and so on). Twitter is a cool idea which is simply impossible to monetise; like, unfortunately, almost all Web 2.0 applications out there. One day we’ll look back to them all, after the Web 2.0 bubble bursts, and think how we could have done the same mistake *twice*. But we did :)

Second Life has nothing to do with that. It’s probably one of the rarest cases where not only it turns a healthy profit but has already paid its return on investment. Since the “hype years” of 2006/7, Second Life has grown in all areas — number of users; stickiness (number of hours users spend in-world); and other metrics which are only relevant to Second Life users (landmass; internal economy; etc.) — up to three to four times *after* the “hype days”, it never grew so fast *after* the media lost interest in it. And it still grows — 12-15,000 new users every day. It’s not only a “playground for universities and research labs” — like the Internet overall, and the World-Wide Web, isn’t seen as a “playground for academics” any more. That doesn’t mean that universities aren’t doing incredible things with Second Life — but that’s just a very small chunk of what’s being done. Prokofy Neva above gave a lot of good examples. There are more. Far more. And most interestingly, more and more projects in Second Life are starting *now* with a development time of 2-3 years…

Too closed? Weird that you mention that. The Second Life client is *open source* and there is an open source server solution (think Apache vs. MS IIS). Second Life can fully communicate with the outside world using HTTP/XML-RPC and SMTP…

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By chrisabraham | Berlin June 30, 2009 09:05:51 pm:

@GwynethLlewelyn Unless you have not been following the news — or have not read my article at all — I am comparing hypes: the world was going nuts over Second Life 2-3-years ago and there are many people who have been comparing the fickle hype surrounding Second Life with what they’re anticipating is the writing on the wall for Twitter, too: how the mighty will have fallen. So, I wasn’t doing a “compare and contrast: Second Life and Twitter: a study,” I was just saying why Twitter’s ascension will not be as transient as Second Life’s. Does that make sense? Either way, I appreciate these comments something awful!

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How awesome is that? What a beautiful thing. I love blogging! I heart social media!

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The post People with passion fuel social media appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Although I have become accustomed (addicted?) to the Tweetdeck model of multiple panels for various sorts of streams, I really like the way that Tweetie handles DMs. First, there is something that looks like a buddy list, showing friends that have been DMing you, or vice versa, recently. After you click on one of those contacts, you see something like this:

Tweetie DM Chat display, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I have often said that the dumbest design mistake in Twitter was the segregation of ‘sent’ and ‘inbox’ tabs under Direct Messages. Tweetie heals this fundamental mistake in a simple and elegant way.

This post originally appeared on Stowe Boyd’s blog.

Stowe Boyd is an internationally recognized authority on social tools and their impact on media, business and society. Contact Stowe or leave a comment below.

The post Tweetie threads the DMs nicely appeared first on Inside Social Media.

I was a guest at Seesmic‘s launch of a new desktop clients for Twitter (and other streaming social tools) last night. There is a lot to like about the new Seesmic Desktop (the old Twhirl name is being deadended along with that product), but the most lasting impression is that the new mode of use is largely based on the very successful competitor, Tweetdeck.

The application is based on Adobe Air, as are most other competitors in this space, nowadays.

The multicolumn user experience of Tweetdeck has been replayed in the new Seesmic offering, and much of what made Twhirl tick has been dropped.

Columns can be manipulated individually, and moved from side to side, in the now-standard Tweetdeck fashion.

I haven’t used the client for any length of time, and many of its projected features — like Facebook support, Seesmic video support, and so on — are not yet implemented, so in essence what we have to evaluate is a minimal feature set of what is planned, which boils down to being a multicolumn Twitter client with URL shortening (from bit.ly, is.gd, and digg), “userlists” (or groups), and Twitpic integration.

Seesmic has dedicated some real estate on the left margin to navigation, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to close this or convert to smaller icons.

So in conclusion: Seesmic has taken its cue for the new Desktop from Tweetdeck, aside from a few stylistic tweaks. It seems to be a sleek and usable Twitter client, but is no breakthrough. Looks like a horse race, though.

(Full disclosure: I am an advisor to Betaworks, an investor in Tweetdeck.)

Stowe Boyd is an internationally recognized authority on social tools and their impact on media, business and society. Contact Stowe or leave a comment below.

The post Seesmic Desktop takes its cues from Tweetdeck appeared first on Inside Social Media.