As our original ad for the role specified, Paul’s job is to be more Mad Men than IM (and Twitter, Foursquare and the rest). His job is to talk to all of our clients – preferably at a distance of three paces – and to get the Martinis in whenever they’re needed. Oh, and to always have a glowing report to hand.

Paul will also be dedicating a large part of his time facilitating discussions amongst the team here at C&M, to help us work more even more effectively. We’ll be positively sizzling.

You can reach Paul on Twitter via @holdgate. Please say hello.

Paul joins us from Search Marketing leaders iCrossing, where he had a variety of responsibilities as a key Account Manager for big brand clients – from Natural Search (SEO), Paid Search, Creative, Web Design and Usability, to Content and Social Media. Paul was a central figure in the development of Spannerworks/iCrossing as they grew from tens of staff to hundreds over the past four years.

We’re delighted that Paul’s chosen to bring the benefit of his skills and experience to C&M and look forward to discovering what tricks he’s got up his sleeve. For more on Paul and his pre C&M history, check out his LinkedIn profile.

The good news for our clients is that not all of Paul’s project time will be billable, just the ‘production’ elements – plans, strategy docs, reports, training and whatnot. Our clients won’t be billed for general catch ups and internal chit chats – which is our way of ensuring that client relationships are seen as investments rather than pound notes, and that Paul never feels deterred from picking up the phone or meeting for a coffee.

Finally, a big thank you to our client Pure360 (the email marketing software folks) who helped us interview Paul for the role when we decided that our clients would be a better judge of a Head of Accounts than we could ever be. So we ditched the ‘deliver a presentation on the future of Social Go Beans’ approach and had them talk to him for an hour instead.

Which is to say Paul, you’re in a good spot. We have superb client relationships. Now go make them even better.

It could use a transcript, but the pictures are nice. And so are the majority of the statements it makes. Have a read.

For more on the same theme, see here, here and here.

Lots of Social Media projects fail. Here’s my opinion on the subject.

In C&M’s experience, failure to deliver value on Social Media projects is 95.769% down to the lack of an initial plan. (In other words, lots of things don’t succeed just because people haven’t thought ahead to what success ought to (or might) look like.)

Why? Because 95.6579% of the time Social Media is seen as free (as in free beer). Free to implement (on Facebook, Twitter, etc) and ostensibly free to run (Dave in marketing, Stephanie in PR, and John in Customer Services… they’ve all been twiddling for six months now but, heck, we’re struggling to make an ROI statement).

(NB: this is the basis of a common brief for us and one that we love – ‘We’ve been experimenting – with and without agency help, can you please help us fix it with an integrated plan…?’)

Plans usually happen because something costs money. If the boss needs persuading, then a list of objectives (aka a ‘business case’) is probably going to get created early on in the piece. And some research. And a plan. And perhaps some management meetings in-between.

Web sites, PR campaigns and lead generation activities succeed when they are well planned, budgeted and executed. If it cost £50,000 to create a Facebook page, most Facebook campaigns would also succeed …because they would need to come with a plan and a rough idea of cost and returns – and all of these things would be held to close scrutiny and consistent measurement by the right people.

So, create some objectives, produce a budget and then an accompanying brief (or – better – a plan). This way you’ll be 95.87645% more likely to succeed.

(NB: things may be a bit more nuanced than this but, hey, it’s a good start.)

Thoughts?

While Facebook goes all Foursqare with its new Places tool and MySpace launches a revamped user homepage in a desperate attempt to entice some of its users back from the greener grass of Facebook, there have been some exciting developments in the world of Twitter applications. Because only 13.8% of traffic comes directly from the Twitter web interface, third party applications are massively important to the growth and sustainability of the service, so the information in this blog post could prove groundbreaking and invaluable. Or just useful. I don’t mind which.

TweetDeck comes to Android

Being the most popular client for Twitter (with 8.27% market share), you’d expect TweetDeck to have a version for one of the most popular mobile operating systems, Android. However, users of the Big G’s mobile software (like all but one of us here at C&M towers) have had to survive using other apps such as Twidroyd, HootSuite, Seesmic and Touiter. While TweetDeck has excelled with its iPhone version (of which I am a very proud user), it has lagged a bit in providing software to Android users. However, no doubt spurred on by Androids rapid grown in terms of market share, they have recently (12th August) released a beta of the software for Android phones.

Because the beta isn’t entirely straightforward to get (i.e. you can’t just download it from the Android Market, and my particular Android phone doesn’t work with Mac, so installing it is a hassle), I haven’t been able to test it. However, according TechCrunch, the Android version of TweetDeck is building on the massively successful iPhone/iPad version by adding additional features (such as Foursquare and Google Buzz integration), and offering greater functionality than for iOS.

As it’s still in Beta, there are still bugs to be fixed and kinks to ironed out. Personally, I’ll probably wait for the stable release candidate before installing on my LG GW520, but I’m really excited as TweetDeck is one of the best desktop / phone apps for Twitter that money can’t buy (because it’s free).

HootSuite unveils freemium business model

Being a popular Twitter application due to its easily accessible interface and incredibly useful tools, particularly for business users, it was only a matter of time before HootSuite got a business model that supported a tiered price plan for its varying levels of user.

HootSuite Premium, as it’s being called, will range from $5 to $100 per month and will vary in the number of social networks that can be used from the applications, RSS feeds that can be monitored from the software and team members that can be added to each account. For an extra $49.99 per month, Platinum users (who will already be paying a not unsubstantial $99.99 a month) can use custom, branded URL shortening services. This may seem like a lot of money, but considering bit.ly charges $995 per month for the same service as part of its “Enterprise” package, this is actually pretty reasonable.

If you didn’t splutter at that figure of $995, covering your screen in caffeinated liquid, maybe you’d be interested in HootSuite’s own Enterprise Package that offers unlimited social network profiles, RSS feeds, team members, social insights and VIP training and certification at a mere $1499 per month. Bizarrely, to add the custom URL shortening service to this package costs 10 times as much as it does to add to the platinum package, at $499 a month.

Thankfully, HootSuite is well aware of the the free users who have been responsible for its growth in popularity and unlike Ning, will still offer its basic services free of charge. In fact, HootSuite predicts that 95% of its users will stick to the free service, with 5% of its users requiring the paid for packages.

Promoted tweets to be promoted everywhere

Rolling out its Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends advertising platforms in April and June respectively, Twitter was always going to be hampered by the fact that such a small percentage of its users access the service directly through the Twitter website. But in the last fortnight, Twitter has made some changes to its application programming interface (API) that will allow third party app developers to integrate the Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends platform into their applications and clients.

The obvious question is of course why third party developers would want to do this, as it involves extra development work that adds someone else’s advertising platforms to their application. However, it’s been confirmed for some time, even before the API changes were made, that third party developers will get a cut of the revenue that they generate by supporting the ad platforms. This will come as good news to app developers, particularly those behind the more popular apps such as TweetDeck and Seesmic, as these are ultimately free apps, with no stable revenue stream to support them.

Those are my important updates from the last few weeks in the world of third party Twitter applications. Anything you think I’ve missed or should’ve included? Let me know in the comments.

We’re all aware that the use of advanced ‘operators’ can help to transform the results that we get from Google, but did you know that a Twitter search can also be refined to return a more bespoke page of results?

If you haven’t been using Twitter search as a means of getting your daily dose of information, then we recommend you try it NOW. It’s a great real-time resource for sentiment, reactions, fast breaking news and more. It’s kind of addictive.

Below are some examples to help you get more value from Twitter’s search engine.

The Basics: How to Filter Simple Information in Your Twitter Searches

First of all lets get the basic search syntax out of the way.

Twitter uses the same basic operators as most search engines. For example, the “OR” command can be used to display results from more than one search phrase. Using quotes (“ABC”) will enable you to find results for an exact search phrase and using the minus sign (-ABC) will enable you to remove specific terms from your results.


So, if you were interested in looking at tweets about Brighton beach or Brighton Pavilion, but were keen to remove any references about/from Foursquare and O2, then you could use the following search string:

-4sq-“O2“brighton beach OR “brighton pavillion”-4sq -“O2”

The Techy Stuff: Twitter-Specific Search Syntax

As well as supporting all of the standard search syntax describe above, Twitter search also uses a bunch of unique operators to help you to get to the information you need. Here’s a few of our favourite examples…

Discovering Popular Questions (and Answers)

Twitter is an excellent tool for asking your friends and followers questions in a direct fashion (as in “What does everyone feel about the new iPhone?”) and getting extremely quick answers from those good enough to respond.

Another way of getting answers from people – and understanding what kind of related questions the rest of the Twittersphere is asking – is by using the “?” operator. This works on a very simple basis. If you’re interested in what kind of questions the rest of Twitter is asking in relation to the iPhone, then you simply place the “?” in front of the keyword. This search result can then help you to follow the related conversations and answers that are floating around the network.


Hence:

? iphone

Discovering Who’s Talking to Who and What They’re Saying

Twitter search uses a neat group of operators to help you find tweets that are generated in relation to a user (or brand profile). The simple “to:”, ”from:” and ”@” operators are great for conducting research around any given Twitter profile. They’ll help you to find out which users are communicating with it and what they are saying to one another.
For example, to see how people are communicating with Marvel Entertainment (the American comic book media powerhouse), you can simply type:

to:marvel

This query is really useful since the Twitter API will only show the tweets from a user in a standard timeline if you follow them – and you can’t follow everybody, all of the time. (NB: for this one, you need to remember NOT to include a space after the colon otherwise it won’t work.)

Discovering ‘Further Reading’ Around a Specific Subject

Since Twitter content is restricted by the 140 character limit, links are regularly used to deliver further information. (This may seem obvious, but it’s an important phenomenon – most of the real content conveyed by Twitter isn’t conveyed within Twitter.) As such, when looking at a given subject it’s often helpful to know what external sources people are quoting via their links.

You can search for links around a subject by using the “filter:link“ qualifier. For example, let’s say you were a journalist examining Twitter reactions to the recent floods in Pakistan, and were looking for links to related web pages, videos, images, etc. You could use the following syntax:


filter:link pakistan flood

Discovering Tweets Within a Given Timeframe

The amount of content that Twitter generates can be overpowering and obtaining exactly what you need, when you need it can be tricky – especially when working within set reporting periods. This is where “Until“ and “Since” come in handy.

For example, if we were interested in finding out how the Unofficial Social Media Edition impacted Monopoly’s online presence before and after the 5th August this year, we could use the following search string:

until:2010-08-05 monopoly game

As you can see there are a lot of generated tweets from @RSMonopolyStats. To get a more ’public’ set of results, you can add in a subtracting qualifier and throw in a “user/from,” so that your search recognises you wish to filter out a specific profile from your results [-from:rsmonopolystats]:

until:2010-08-05 monopoly game -from:rsmonopolystats

And to illustrate the point, you can change the ‘until’ to ‘since’ to get all tweets from 5th August. Simple.

since:2010-08-05 monopoly game -from:rsmonopolystats

Discovering Tweets From a Given Location

As tweeting from GPS-enabled smartphones becomes more popular and location-based marketing (e.g. via Foursquare) takes hold, the ability to understand where Twitter activity is coming from becomes more and more important. Here’s where the “Near“ and “Within“ syntax comes in handy.


So, if you were interested in gathering Twitter information about the weather in Brighton, you could use the following syntax:

near:“Brighton UK” within:10km rain OR thunder

When using the “Near” operator, it’s best to put the location in quotation marks as the search will only recognise the first word after the colon.

More Twitter Search Goodies

Hopefully you’re now a little more schooled in using advanced search operators in Twitter. But maybe there’s a useful combination that we’ve haven’t mentioned. If so, we’d love to hear about it, so please leave us a comment in the box below.

Other helpful resources

• Twitters List of Search Operators
• Three Important Twitter Conventions – A C&M* Blog Post
• The Mashable Twitter Guidebook
• Google Advanced Search Operators

But it’s not the 1920s and I’m not in Chicago, so I’m writing a blog post about Google instead. Read all about it.

Google Wave is Dead

It truly is a sad, sad day. Wave has only been out of the invite-only phase for a couple of months and now Google has announced that it will no longer be supporting it, saying:

“Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”

So I’ve got a year left to continue not using it. I’m not sure how comfortable I am with my free will being taken away though – I want my not using Wave to be my choice, not Google’s. Damn the Man. It’s also rather jarring to look back on the glassy-eyed optimism displayed in the promotional video embedded in David’s ‘Google Wave First Impressions News Round-up’ post from last year. Wonder what those two think about it?

New Style Google Images

Google Images has had a bit of a makeover this week, as well as the addition of some new functionality. There are now many more images displayed in the same amount of space, which makes it a lot easier to find the image you’re looking for. Here’s the old style results page:

Google has also eliminated the concept of having pages of results. Rather than having to click through to another page, you can simply keep scrolling down and the page will populate itself with images that load on the page as you get closer to them, rather than having to wait for the system to load hundreds of images. It’s a nice addition and it works well.

Net Neutrality Threatened?

Talks are currently being held in the US to discuss the future of net neutrality (where all pages on the Web are treated the same in terms of priority and speed). It has been reported by The Guardian and the New York Times that Google and Verizon were very close to a deal to end net neutrality. From The Guardian piece:

“Such a deal would mean the information superhighway may be about to get a lot faster for those willing to pay. YouTube, owned by Google, for example, would pay a charge to an internet service provider (ISP) in return for its content being fast-tracked to consumers.”

This is a pretty controversial issue, which could potentially give a lot more power to bigger companies and lead to consumers having to pay twice for access to the Internet.

And the story doesn’t stop there. On its Twitter stream yesterday, Google refuted claims by the New York Times that it was in talks with Verizon with this tweet:

Exciting stuff. Clearly this story hasn’t fully played out, so we’ll all have to keep watching.

And that’s it.

…and to top it off we’ll be driving an old banger across Europe in late September!

Yes, team C&M will be competing in Scally Rally 2010 with our good friends (and clients) email marketing software providers Pure360. Our very own Roger Warner, Michael Wilkins and Ben Martin will be driving (probably quite fast) from Calais (France) to Rimini (Italy) in a yet-to-be-purchased car costing less than £100 (cue hilarious tweets about breakdowns, flat tyres and terrifying near-misses).

Putting the inevitable chaos aside for a moment though, the aim of the event is to raise funds for a whole bunch of great charities and we’d really appreciate all the support we can get, preferably in the form of cold hard cash! Please go to Pure360’s Scally Rally Fundraising Page to help us meet our fundraising target and you can also keep updated on our progress via Twitter.

Wish us luck!

@username

@username is the Twitter way of addressing someone in your tweet, and ensures that it will show up in their “Mentions” feed. Originally started by the community, and then embraced officially by Twitter, @username can be used in loads of different ways.

The most common use is direct replying. This is when your tweet starts with the @ symbol, followed directly by the username of the person you are replying to/addressing. Colloquially, it’s known as “@replying”. A tweet starting with this will show up in your own profile feed (as a sent tweet), the “mentions” stream of the person being replied to (and their home feed if they follow you), and in the home feed of anyone who follows you and the person you are talking to.

Confused? Don’t worry, I’ll try and explain using an example. If I (benjmartin) tweet Roger (rogerwarner), Roger will see the tweet in his home feed (because he follows me), as well as his “Mentions” feed (which shows anytime his username has been used in a tweet). As well as showing on my own personal profile as a sent tweet, it will also show in the David’s (transmitdisrupt) home feed, as he follows both Roger and myself. If, however, David was following me (and come on, why wouldn’t he? I’m great) but not following Roger (or indeed vice-versa), the tweet wouldn’t show up in his home feed.

Things get slightly muddier when @username is used anywhere in a tweet that isn’t the start. Basically, this is the Twitter way to “tag” someone in your tweet – these tweets will show up in the home feed of anyone who is following you, regardless if they are following people tagged in your tweets or not. Similarly, these tweets will show up in the “Mentions” stream of the tagged user (and their home feed if they are following you).

Often this tagging method is used when someone is being referred to in a tweet (e.g. “Just had lunch with @benjmartin. He had a sandwich.”) but can also be used within @reply tweets (e.g. “@rogerwarner Me and @benjmartin are going to the shops, do you want anything?”). A new use for this tagging method has been cropping up recently where people are “CCing” other users in their tweets, where they want to draw their attention to something. Taking things too far? Perhaps a little, but it’s a good way of drawing someone’s attention to something they might not otherwise see, particularly if it’s an @reply to someone that they’re not following.

Retweeting (AKA RTing)

Another convention started by the community, embraced by third-party apps (such as HootSuite and TweetDeck) and eventually becoming another standard Twitter function, albeit in a different form.

Before it was embraced by Twitter officially, retweeting meant copying and pasting another user’s tweet (or clicking a button on a third party app that did it for you), adding their username to the front of the tweet and sticking the letters “RT” to the very start. A straight retweet (as I like to call it) is basically a way of sharing someone else’s tweets with your own followers, for whatever reason. Furthermore, a comment could be added to the beginning of the retweet, or end, offering the retweeting user a chance to air their own views about the content being retweeted.

For example, David could retweet me in the following way “RT @benjmartin I am a handsome man. Yessir”, which would be a straight retweet of my original tweet. He could then add his own comment to that tweet by either putting it at the very start of the retweet, or at the very end, using a delimiter (such as a line, dash, brackets etc. – there is no community standard for this) e.g. “I disagree, sir. RT@benjmartin I am a handsome man. Yessir” or “RT @benjmartin I am a handsome man. Yessir << I disagree, sir”.

Once RTing became so popular that it was hard for Twitter to ignore, they introduced their own method of retweeting. Twitter ignored the manual “RT” method and instead introduced functionality wherein hitting the “retweet” button on Twitter would post the tweet in the home feed of people following you, with a little note at the bottom and modified avatar to show that it had been retweeted by you. This official method of retweeting is often referred to as “new-style” retweeting and the “RT” method referred to as “old-style”, “classic” or “traditional” retweeting.

“New-style” is good if you just want to do a straight retweet of someone else’s content, but useless if you want to add a comment or anything to the original tweet, as it does not allow any editing of the content before it is reposted. There were even rumours that Twitter was trying to kill off traditional retweets by filtering them from search results, but this was soon rescinded.

Hashtags

Hashtags are probably the biggest head-scratcher during training sessions as they are often totally driven by the community and can be used completely at random. Before Twitter search and the trending topics engine became as advanced as they are today, hashtags were a good way of adding ‘meta data’ to a tweet, so that people discussing the same subject could find each other easily. However, because they are community-generated, there can be a number of different hashtags surrounding the same topic. For example, the recent World Cup had #worldcup and #wc2010 as the two most popular hashtags for the topic, but other derivatives such as #worldcupsa and #fifaworldcup were also being used.

Brands with events (such as festivals or conferences) will often announce their “official” event hashtag before the event, in the hope that anyone discussing it will use it, but it is not mandatory (of course), and any user could create their own hashtag and use that instead, hoping it will catch on. The hashtag for this year’s Download Festival for example was #DL2010, used and endorsed by the official Download Festival Twitter profile.

Hashtags are also often used in an esoteric or self-referential way, wherein people create them and use them in their tweets, with no real purpose or reason, just for added humour or context. For example, it was unbearably muggy outside earlier this week, and I tweeted using the hashtag #itsabitstuffyoutthere, which noone else used, at all, but I was just being irreverent in getting my point across, so it didn’t matter.

Because both the Twitter search engine the trending topics algorithm have become more advanced, hashtags aren’t as important to Twitter as they once were, but still very much widely embraced by the community at large, so their level of importance when using Twitter is still high.

So those are my three Twitter conventions that I think you should be paying attention to if you want to use Twitter successfully, but I’d be interest to know if there’s anything you think I’ve left out, or if there’s anything you’re confused about. Let me know.

However, Google has only risen to the height that it’s at now by pleasing as broad a search market as possible. Which means that it is, perhaps, a jack of all trades and master of none. If you want to search for something very specific, you might be better off using something else. “An alternative to Google? Do such things exist?”, I hear you cry. Of course they do – so much so that I’ve compiled a top five. Read on.

Twitter Search

You’ll probably already be aware of this one, but it’s a good one to start out with. Twitter Search, you might have guessed, is search for Twitter.

Almost every major news event of the past eighteen months, I have heard about on Twitter first. News spreads like wild-fire on there. It might not be in-depth, it might not even be completely accurate, but lawks-a-lordy, it’s fast. So, if there’s some news that is very, very fresh and you’re looking for a little more information on it, you’d be well served by performing a Twitter search (as well as setting up keyword feeds on Hootsuite and the like).

It’s also pretty useful for tracking sentiment, as it is basically a search feed of people’s thoughts. For instance, if you fancy seeing new film and want to know what the general consensus is, Twitter Search is your man.

Backtweets

Backtweets is a more niche version of Twitter Search. It is basically exactly the same thing, only instead of search terms, it finds instances of URLs on Twitter. If, for instance, I’d written a blog post and wanted to monitor how much it had been shared on Twitter, this is the perfect tool to track exactly that. Just pop the URL in, and it’ll bring back every instance of someone featuring it in a tweet, even if they’ve used a URL shortening service like TinyURL.

Again, like standard Twitter Search, it’s pretty useful for checking sentiment. Chuck in the URL to your own site, and see what people are saying about it.

TinEye

We all know that if you’re looking for an image, Google Image Search is probably a good place to go. But what if you’ve already got an image and want to know where it has come from, or you want a version in a higher resolution, or you want to credit the original photographer? Surely such a place is only theoretical, something that could do all those things must be the result of the blackest of magicks. Traveller; friend, you are mistaken. TinEye is a ‘reverse image search’. You can either upload a photo or input the URL location and it’ll scour the web for images that match it.

Wolfram Alpha

This is perhaps a bit of a cheat, as Wolfram Alpha is technically a ‘computational knowledge engine’. But that’s what makes it different from, and in some ways better than, Google. For instance, search Google for ‘distance to Mars’ and it’ll bring back a list of sites that mention that search term, and you’ll have to hope that one of those sites features the information that you’re looking for. Wolfram Alpha, however, will simply bring back one result – the distance from Earth to Mars. Not only that, but it’ll tell you variations depending on orbit, and in a few different units of measurement, too.

It can do a lot more than that, too, as it is basically an enormous calculator combined with a search engine. So it can bring back results like this:

Pretty good.

Social Mention

Social Mention is a good engine to use for a broad view of something across the social internet. It brings back an aggregated list of mentions of your search term, across the majority of influential social channels. It’s a good way of seeing which channel discusses your particular point of interest the most, or the most positively. It also brings back a good deal of analytics data too.

Special Mentions

Board Reader: A pretty groovy search engine for message boards, with a nice trends feature.
Bing: It’s like Google, but a bit different. Splits different search verticals out quite nicely.
Quarkbase: A search engine for websites. As in, it brings back results about websites, like traffic data and where the domain is registered.
YouTube: Apparently, it’s the second biggest search engine going (in terms of search volume)..

What do you think? Are there any glaring omissions? Tell us in the comments.

Wordle

Wordle is a simple tag cloud generator, where the size of the word is determined by the frequency of the word appearing in the text you supply. It’s simple to use, with lots of functionality including the option of pasting in text, pulling information from a Delicious username or a feed URL in either ATOM or RSS formats.

The level of customisation is what makes Wordle such a great free tool. You can change the font, colour and design, and are even able to remove superfluous words by right-clicking. You also have the option to input words by frequency via the ‘Advanced’ section of the site.

Below is the Wordle visualisation created from Google’s Gmail Blog:

It’s a very simple tool, and does exactly what you want it to.

Microsoft Pivot

Using the power of Silverlight, which was launched as a competitor to Flash, Microsoft Pivot displays data in the form of beautifully presented tables. Designed to help users interact with massive amounts of visual data, Pivot compiles everything into ‘Collections’, combining similar items on the internet. Of these, you can then select sections of data and view the relationships between individual pieces of information.

It looks pretty cool, and is best explained by watching the following video from Microsoft:

The service is not available on OS X, and has specific system requirements for both Windows 7 and Vista so check before you download.

Google Public Data Explorer

Using the Google Chart API and data from a variety of sources including Eurostat and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, the web based Public Data Explorer will display graphs and charts in a variety of forms, with options of colours and comparisons.

We’re hoping the data sets are increased to include UK census information as, like every Google application, it is very easy to use.

Google also has a wide range of charts that are available on its Google Code service, which has a whole range of APIs for integration across many of its services.

The Best of the Rest

Google Insights for Search: here you can compare search terms from across the world, all displayed in a nice graph.

Twitscoop: a tool for monitoring what is happening on Twitter. Contains the most recent trending topics and a graph of tweet volume over time.

Hootsuite: a desktop dashboard for Twitter with a built-in click counter that display your clicks from its URL shorteners, hoot.ly and ow.ly

TweetStats: just put in your Twitter username (no authorisation required) and you get a whole range of graphs showcasing your tweets.

What tools do you use to visualise your data? Do you think we have missed anything out? Add your comments below.

Until then, here’s my list.

Useful Search Operator Combination 1: Get (some) Google link information

Operators to use: intext: site: inurl:

This one’s really useful – if a bit of a makeshift – because Google’s own ‘link:’ command provides only a partial list of sites, as the full selection is reserved exclusively for site owners with Webmaster Tools installed.

I should point out that this is an approximation and only looks at links that use the URL (rather than those that use other anchor text), but It’s still useful as a lot of legitimate links reference URLs rather than using other anchor text.

e.g.To find external links to the main domain of C&M’s recommended provider of ‘Cheap UK Lunch Snacks‘, I’d search:

intext:www.findus.com -site:www.findus.com (to filter out internal links) -inurl:findus (optional; to filter out other Findus affiliated domains)

Finding links this way also affords the added bonus of Google’s sidebar filtering, so you can then sort results by date, region, etc. Very useful. Very moving.

Useful Search Operator Combination 2: Find blogs from a given region, source, or author that have mentioned your website or brand

Operators to use: intext: OR site: inurl: inblogurl inpostauthor: (in Google Blog Search)

e.g. to find mentions of the C&M brand from UK affiliated domains I’d search:

intext:C&M OR “Content & Motion” -site:www.contentandmotion.co.uk inurl:co.uk

And to find the mentions from a given source such as Wired Sussex:

intext:C&M OR “Content & Motion” -site:contentandmotion.co.uk site:wiredsussex.com

And to find mentions by the world’s leading writer of tasteful erotic fiction Jake Doran:

intext:C&M OR “Content and Motion” -site:contentandmotion.co.uk inpostauthor:Jake Doran

Note: as this search is made in Google Blog search, you can also easily obtain an RSS feed of the results to spy on monitor mentions of your brand.

Useful Search Operator Combination 3: Identify how many of your own pages are optimised for the same search terms

Operators to use: allintitle: allinurl: site:

Like death and wild religious visions, some things are absolutely inevitable. For instance, there comes a time when every human being needs to take a second look at their website’s keyword optimisation.

And, if you’ve reached that stage in life, you’re in luck. The handy command outlined below allows you to see how many of your own pages are optimised for the same term – in either page titles or URLs – helping to identify where search term focus needs to be refined and improved.

e.g. if I wanted to look at how many internal pages on the C&M site are optimised around the term ‘Facebook Marketing Strategy’ within page titles, I’d search:

allintitle:Facebook Marketing Strategy site:contentandmotion.co.uk

And to check URL optimisation:

allinurl:Facebook Marketing Strategy site:contentandmotion.co.uk

In the above examples there’s only one page that is optimised – which is fine. However, if the results returned showed a plethora of pages optimised for the same term, then it would be time to sharpen things up.

Useful Search Operator Combination 4: Find out how many competitor sites are targeting the same keywords as you are

Operators to use: allintitle: site:

e.g. to find the number of competitor sites that are optimising around the term ‘Social Media Agency’, I’d search:

allintitle:social media marketing -site:contentandmotion.co.uk

This operator combination is a useful keyword research tool – the fewer competing results that are actively optimising around the term by including it in page titles, then the less competitive the term is and the easier it will be to rank for searches on that term.

Useful Search Operator Combination 5: Get a list of sites that others are linking to and identify influential hubs

Operators to use: linkfromdomain:

Also-ran search engine Bing is needed for this one and the operator ‘linkfromdomain:’ is your man.

e.g. if I wanted to analyse the links from the C&M site, I would type linkfromdomain:contentandmotion.co.uk

This is also useful for identifying useful hubs and communities around given topics that are being linked to from authority domains.

e.g. if I wanted to look at blogs that focus on gourmet food – which are linked to from an eminent newspaper such as The Guardian – I’d search:

linkfromdomain:guardian.co.uk gourmet food blog -site:guardian.co.uk

Note: You can also use ‘linkfromdomain:’ to find expired domains with authority links, by searching for:

‘linkfromdomain:guardian.co.uk domain expired‘ or ‘linkfromdomain:guardian.co.uk domain for sale’

Then acquire these domains and 301 redirect them to your own. Furtive (but rewarding).

Useful Search Operator Combination 6: Find backlinks to competitors from trusted authority domains (then approach the same sites with useful content)

Operators to use: linkdomain: inurl:

Google is perceived to place a higher importance on links from trusted domains, such as those affiliated with governmental organisations or universities.

Identifying links to competitor sites from such domains can be a good way to pinpoint potential linking opportunities. The sites that are revealed can be worth trying to get links from, as authority sites are less likely to host spammy/paid-for links.

To achieve this, it’s best to search for the common URL extensions of so-called authority domains that belong to the likes of Universities or government institutions (like .ac.uk, .gov.uk and .edu) alongside Yahoo’s ‘linkdomain:’ command.

e.g. if I wanted to analyse the links to Econsultancy from educational domains, I’d search (in Yahoo, not Google):

linkdomain:econsultancy.com inurl:”.ac.uk”

To check competitor links I would simply replace the C&M URL with that of a competitor.

Alternatively, you could go the other way around and use the command ‘linkfromdomain:’ (covered above), to arrive at a subset of links from a specific site.

Useful Search Operator Combination 7: Find Twitter mentions over a given time period

Operators to use: linkfromdomain: site: daterange:

Twitter only provides a week’s worth of mentions from its own search engine but sometimes it’s necessary to get figures for a longer time period.

So, if you’ve just got to have the figures, you can search for @contentmotion site:twitter.com , (replacing our twitter account name for your own) then filter using the daterange: operator or – more easily – Google’s advanced search options on the left sidebar.

Note: this is also an approximation as Google’s results aren’t 100% accurate, but it’s a worthwhile system in the absence of more complete information.

Useful Search Operator Combination 8: Launch stark-naked Michael Barrymore into the stratosphere at 6x the speed of sound

Operators to use: Coming soon

This one can only be used on a single occasion and will cause a critical syntax error if someone has already used it. I’ll include it in my next post.

We’re slowly moving towards something glorious.

Bonus resource coming soon.

It may sound obvious, but yes, and here’s why.

Upgrade or Clean Install?

It’s a good idea to keep your CMS installs up-to-date regardless of the platform you use, but especially so with Wordpress. The incremental updates of its previous 2.9.x incarnation all addressed bugfixes, stability issues and plugin woes. It wasn’t all plain sailing, though – there were frequent howls of rage from site admins when an update completely broke an install.

Happily, this didn’t seem to be the case with 3.0 – at least for me. Installing it on my own blog testbed, everything went smoothly, both as a clean install (no surprise there) and as an update to last 2.9.x release. Inevitably though, there will be bugs. Webdesigner Depot has a handy guide on how to minimise the potential carnage of an upgrade if you’re at all worried, although Wordpress does put your site into ‘maintenance mode’ and deactivate your plugins when upgrading anyway.

Installed… Now First Impressions

First of all, the back-end interface looks and feels more-or-less the same. It offers pretty much the same quick-start, basic functionality of previous versions and is just as pleasant to use. All the major elements – Posts, Pages, Plugins, Perfumed Dandies etc. – are present and correct, and accessed via the same tree down the left of the screen. ‘Twenty Ten’, the new default theme that ships with the release, is also pretty neat.

Looking Deeper (From Behind a Bush, Through a Net Curtain)

Custom menu trees now allow users to hand-craft the navigation for their site, enabling greater flexibility and even better SEO benefits by allowing changes to the navigation labels, menus and URLs. This should have untold benefits when it comes to creating complex sites. Better organisation of custom post types now provides users with even more flexibility than before, meaning they are no longer limited to just the standard set of ways to publish.

This is all relatively small beer compared to the biggest reason to upgrade. By far the most important technical improvement with version 3.0 is the ability to run multiple blogs from the same installation of Wordpress. This will no doubt come as music to the ears of those who previously used Wordpress MU (the old way of running multiple instances of WP which has now been subsumed into this release), and the increased integration and power that this new functionality offers will be especially useful to business users.

Installing themes and plugins remains the same and users new to the Wordpress platform will no doubt take to adding them to their blogs like ducks to water (or ducks, drunk on bread, breaking into a bakery to secure another hit of crumbs). If there’s one clear advantage that Wordpress offers over competitors, it is tens of thousands of free ways to radically change the way your blog behaves, with only one or two clicks of a mouse.

From the Horse’s Mouth

But don’t listen to me (wait, actually… do. Please?): rather handily, if I’ve managed to confuse any of you or get any basic facts wrong, Wordpress has thoughtfully produced a video about 3.0 going over the important bits. Enjoy.

(CLICK THE IMAGE – NOT AN EMBED!)

I’ve been stalking him researching his work for some time now. I can highly recommend it. He strikes a lovely balance between the exciting promise of tech and Social Media and its cultural limitations.

Check the highlight version of his presentation for a quick two minute roundup of why Social Media ‘truths’ can be good and bad news… (And think about what this means to your brand – the search for your inner truth, mission, value proposition, etc, bla, bla will never be defined by you, but by everyone else: a random ragtag bunch of customers who discuss your brand online.)

And check the full version for a wonderfully funny account of Social Media, content aggregation, important world events and what it is to be an Indian in America.

(For more of his stuff, see here. He’s brilliant. Tune in.)

As the world’s favourite online video sharing site, YouTube is under constant pressure to keep up with the ever more ambitious demands and needs of its users. The latest major development was announced last Friday at VidCon2010 when YouTube revealed that it would be supporting videos shot in 4k. This is good news for the more serious filmmakers out there, as it means videos hosted on YouTube can be viewed on much larger screens without loss of quality.

This playlist demonstrates the power of 4K (select ‘original’ in the video quality dropdown menu), but beware, you’ll need ultra-fast broadband to watch them at full quality. YouTube’s official blog post on the new announcement was also quick to point out that this development won’t really affect your average YouTube user, due to the cost and size of the equipment needed to film in 4K.

You are the Weakest Ad, Goodbye

In an effort to boost its advertising revenues, YouTube is planning to introduce skippable ads later this year. A recent article in The Telegraph revealed that “the new system will permit users to skip the pre-roll adverts that are embedded in videos. Advertisers will not be charged for any adverts which are skipped.” This move will put pressure on advertisers and creative agencies to come up with more appealing and better quality ads in order survive the screening process, which can only be a good thing.

Potential advertisers may also be interested to know that Google is now offering campaign insights for YouTube, making it easier to track their effectiveness with more powerful data beyond the usual click-through and impressions stats. Here’s a little video explaining how it works:

We’ll Make You a Star

In other news, YouTube has announced a grant programme for its partners, which aims to “act as a catalyst by infusing additional funds into the production budgets of a small group of YouTube partners who are at the forefront of innovation”. This could prove fruitful for companies wanting to use YouTube for creative Social Media campaigns. But you’ll need to already be something of a video whizz to qualify; partners are selected on current video views, subscribers, growth rate, audience engagement and production expertise. 

YouTube in the Palm of Your Hand

Three years after launching YouTube Mobile, the online video giant has risen to the growing demands of the iPhone generation for mobile-friendly Social Media with a series of improvements to its mobile platform. These include increased speed, an enhanced user-interface geared towards touchscreen mobile devices, plus additional interactive features such as creating playlists and favouriting videos direct from your device.

Sing with Susan

And if all that juicy YouTube news hasn’t got you rushing to hit the record button on your Flip, this is guaranteed to do the job. Britain’s Got Talent diva Susan Boyle last week launched a YouTube-based talent search, giving one lucky person the chance to record a duet with her on the next album. All you have to do to enter is hit the ‘Audition Now’ on the dedicated Susan’s Search YouTube page and upload a video of you singing Silent Night. Go on, you know you want to.

In the years leading up to this point, however, we had a quagmire of many similar sites with little to choose between them. Worst of all, your friends were scattered between them, meaning you had to be EVERYWHERE!

So what happened to those ill-fated Social Media sites of old? Why did Facebook and Twitter succeed when others fell by the wayside? In a little fit of nostalgia, we’re going to take a quick look back to three of the sites that inspired Messrs. Zuckerberg, Stone and Hoffman to set up sites that did things a bit differently and rescue us from carbon copy social media monotony.

FriendsReunited

Background:
Launched in 2000 and set up to help people get in touch with old school friends (inspired by Classmates.com), Friends Reunited was once HUGE, relative to the amount of people online in those halcyon days of the World Wide Web. Having a respectable 2.5 million members within a year of launching, Friends Reunited got so popular that media giant ITV sat up and took note, eventually buying the website for a cool £120 million.

What Went Wrong?
It may seem baffling to the Facebook user of today, but rather than choosing to support themselves solely with advertising revenue, Friends Reunited made its money by charging its users to get in touch with old school friends. Sure, £7.50 wasn’t a massive amount for a year’s subscription, but when sites like MySpace and later Facebook came along and made searching for old school friends much friendlier on the pocket (i.e. free), Friends Reunited started to get left behind. It eventually ditched the subscription features in 2007 but it was too little too late, and year-on-year site growth was a pitiful 1.2% in 2007, compared to 2393% for the fledgling Facebook.

Last year, ITV announced it was ditching the site as part of a “restructuring” exercise, and sold it to DC Thomson (publishers of my favourite childhood comic The Beano) for a meagre £25 million, just over a fifth of what they originally forked out for the site.

MySpace

Background:
Not so long ago, the undisputed biggest social network in the world, MySpace was the home of many a band and angsty teenager (me included), who wanted the world to feel their pain. Started by a group of employees from internet marketing company Intermix Media, MySpace was soon bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for a whopping $580 million, leaving everyone’s first friend on the site Tom Anderson free to become the public face of the company (which basically meant hanging out with the likes of Jessica Alba and being a VIP at every high-profile LA party).

What Went Wrong?
Its inclusion in this post could be seen as a little controversial considering the site is still owned by News Corp and currently attempting a comeback as a niche music network, but MySpace does seem to be entering its death throes, at least in terms of its overall popularity. Since Facebook beat MySpace for total global visits back in 2008, the popularity of the site has continued to dwindle. According to a recent report from Tech Crunch, visits to MySpace UK alone have halved in six months from a respectable 10 million to 5 million in the past 6 months.

But why did this happen? It could be that once MySpace got everyone there, it didn’t know what to do with them, except to continue throwing more behaviourally targeted display ads at them. This worked amazingly well at the beginning and Google even struck a $900 million deal with MySpace in return for advertising space (as part of its ad network) and a Google-powered search facility on the site, providing certain traffic targets were met.

But when Facebook showed up with its sleek interface, simple controls and shiny developer platform, MySpace was eventually left eating the dust left by the ambitiously trail blazing Mark Zuckerberg. All of a sudden, the jewel of Murdoch’s online crown was left playing catch up. Realising its potential, the MySpace API was soon opened up for app developers, shortly followed by integration with Twitter. It wasn’t enough though, and since Facebook overtook MySpace in the popularity contest in June 2008, it has yet to recover.

MySpace still has a massive strength in its music platform, which is used by musicians and bands the world over – an advantage it has over Facebook. Indeed, popular artists such as Lily Allen and Kate Nash have often attributed their popularity to the site. This one remaining trump card could soon be deemed useless, though, if the rumours that Murdoch has plans to put it behind a paywall are true. Roger’s (rather sunnier) thoughts on the Murdoch paywall can be found here.

Bebo

Background:
Standing for “Blog Early, Blog Often”, Bebo was launched in July 2005 by Michael and Xochi Birch. Particularly popular in the UK and Ireland, especially with young teenagers, Bebo had 45 million registered users in 2007 (the height of its popularity) and was eventuallysold to AOL for an absolutely breathtaking $850 million (that’s more than what was paid for MySpace and Friends Reunited combined) in 2008.

What Went Wrong?
For me, Bebo is best summed up by this sentence on its Wikipedia entry:

“Bebo is similar to other social networking sites.”

While it was massively popular, Bebo didn’t offer anything that other popular sites like MySpace, Faceparty and Friendster weren’t already offering at the time. Like MySpace, it even had its own music service, but MySpace was attracting the big bands and record label attention, leaving Bebo trailing in popularity.

In my opinion, AOL paid far too much for the site and entered the game far too late. By March 2008 (when the purchase was made), MySpace was already top dog in the social network game, and was soon to be overtaken by Facebook. As such, Bebo users started being assimilated by the Faceborg (resistance providing exceptionally futile) and in April of this year AOL announced that unless they could find a buyer for the site, it would be shut down.

Last month, that buyer was found and shelled out a massive, absolutely eye-watering… er…. $10 million for the site – $840 million less than AOL paid just two years earlier. The internet giant clearly retreated with proverbial egg on its face, evidenced by the fact that the sale has not been publicised at all in the site’s press section.

So there you are. There are a ton of other sites that have slipped into social networking obscurity – remember Faceparty (the biggest party on earth? Really?), Friendster or Faces.com anyone? But these were arguably the biggest casualties, especially in the UK. The above “post mortems” are only my own thoughts on why these former giants failed, so I’d love to hear your opinions on the matter. And if you’re still clinging onto a favourite social network of old, hoping it’ll spring back into life, now’s the time to own up – come on, you know you want to.

Google To Enter the Travel Market

Google has paid $700m for a flight information company called ITA Software which provides software that organises travel information such as fares, flight and journey times. At the moment, this information is provided to businesses like travel agents, airlines, and flight comparison sites.

With this buyout it would appear that Google is looking to develop as an alternative source of direct travel information in the form of a new search tab – along the lines of its existing news, image, maps and shopping searches.

Google’s been increasingly expanding into search verticals over the past couple of months and this development is in line with that trend. There’s already separate support for news, blog, shopping, finance, videos etc and there’s even a recipe search in Google.co.jp.

Bing has beaten Google to the punch with Bing Travel, a service that presumably does exactly what Googe Travel will. And it isn’t just in Travel search that Bing is out performing Google in search verticals.

If you follow this Bing search for the seminal, androgynous rock-pioneer David Bowie, you’ll see a wider array of results displayed. We get standard pages, images and videos – like we would in Google – but scroll down a little and you’ll see song lyrics, album information, tour dates and a lovely little potted biography. In short, Bing is segmenting its results into semantically split search ‘verticals’. Is this a good idea? Only time will tell. It’s certainly useful.

Google News Looks Different Now

The people at Google say that the News redesign is supposed to make it more customisable and shareable. This it may do, but to us it just looks horribly cluttered – a bit like one of those American news channels where they have scrolling information tickers taking up three quarters of the screen – making everything too visually busy to be able to concentrate on any one thing at a time, so you just end up smashing in your TV and throwing it in the neighbour’s Koi pond. Again.

It’s the antithesis of Google’s otherwise ultra-clean design.

Submit Lots of Content Sitemap Types in Just One File

This is really useful information if you’re a webmaster or SEO type and regularly find yourself writing and submitting sitemaps to Google. If you don’t do that very often, you can go and make a sandwich or something.

Before now, if you wanted to flag up a piece of content (e.g. a video) for indexing, you would have to create a sitemap just for that piece of content. Now, however, you can submit a sitemap with multiple types of content included.

And that’s about it.

Thought of the day: The Future. IT IS HERE AND NOW!

Until next time.

In a single hit, everyone’s favourite media baron Rupert has stuck two fingers up at Google and those of us who are too tight to pay for his newspaper content.  Nobody can access his stuff anymore, unless they pay for it.

It’s a big move. The standard web marketing and Social Media handbook tells us to give it all away for free – in the name of better indexing, bookmarking, word of mouth, distribution and other good things.

This approach is proven but deeply troubling for most publishers.  Unlike Tescos, Sainsburys and ASOS – who publish free(ish) ‘value-added’ content (magazines, emails, style guides, recipe cards, wotnot) in order to get us moving with more zeal around their freezer sections and web sites – the only thing that traditional publishers have to sell is (by and large) their content.  The concept of ‘free’ does not sit well with them.

Likewise, ‘free’ is a bane for those traditionally responsible for creating content.  Writers, editors, musicians, games developers, etc.  Where goes the pay check?

Yet we’re stuck in a space race for ‘free’ content.  If you’re not currently doing it then you probably soon will be because your competitors are – right now – offering a variety of free and juicy value-added social networking widgets, reviews services, hints and tips and other content-based merchandise for anyone willing to part with a nano second of their attention on the Interwebs.

This movement and its consequences have been already been described by better people than me.  See here for Jaron Lanier on Digital Maoism.  And our good pal Ian Delaney on Valuing Content.

I’m torn.  At heart, C&M is a content marketing outfit.  We know that the best way to generate a righteous storm of fans, followings, and traffic is to create great content – and then to give it all away for free.  Most of our clients are, however, more than a little hesitant when we begin this discussion.  Content is, after all, their IP – whether they’re a content business or not.  It takes time to plan and produce.

So why give it away if it’s good?

The Times – and News Corp – has the answer.

Free content in the context of an iPhone > iPad > iSofa scenario isn’t ‘free’ as we might know it.  Our relationship with content is changing fast, and – subsequently – so is content’s relationship with our wallets.

News is now free.  This is old news.  Check the classic Clay Shirky for this one (The price of information has fallen…). Other forms of content, however, don’t need to be all free, all of the time.  Here’s how the Times Online’s strategy is unfolding….

Firstly, they’re part of a network. News Corp does (Sky) sports, Caitlin Moran (on Saturdays), and lots of other bits and pieces.  News Corp describes the Times Online brand proposition as follows:

Essentially, this is a (customised) chocolate box approach.  I love lots of News Corp ‘properties’: Ms Moran, Mike Atheton and Soccer AM; but I find the Times Weekend glossy magazines kind of obnoxious.  In other words, I have a relationship with bits and pieces, but I’m not a big fan of the mothership brand and I won’t pay for it.  But, hey, I’ll happily pick and mix if Rupert is kind enough to carve it up for me.  I’ll also pay for some parts of it – so long as I can avoid paying a ‘one size fits all’ bill and the coconut creams at the back.

If you subscribe to the new Times Online, this is what you see on the other side of the wall…

A variety of subscriptions, apps and services ready for use.  Access to some will depend on your subscription level – e.g. I can (soon) get the Sunday Times on my iPad if I go for the super-sized rate.  Some will be free ‘value-adds,’ others will be one-off paid for events and activities.

My hope is that I’ll soon be able to subscribe to Soccer AM (perhaps paid-for).  And a widget for the Soccer AM YouTube channel and Boston Goals (free).  Or a podcast from just one of the Boston Goals commentary team (free, probably).  This kind of thing is happening now.

When News Corp starts to understand my content patterns and usage preferences (and when they start to cut up their content assets accordingly), they have my attention and my wallet.  Call it narrowcasting, personalisation or whatever you like, the progression is logical.  New content channels and consumption experiences are here to stay – iPad > YouTube > Twitter > TEN SNEAKY MINUTES ON THE SOFA WATCHING EASTENDERS BUT HECK THE WIFE ISN’T WATCHING > WOW FREEEEEBEEEES > SOME PAID BITS > UH, WELL, OK > BAM! ……so let’s divvy up our content catalogue (and our brand assets) to match.  Some free, some paid for, but all mixed up into different versions, formats and channels.

The same is happening in TV and broadcasting.  Anyone for a spot of Project Canvas?

The value of content is shifting

In both TV and newsprint, the value of content – and our relationship with it – is shifting from the network provider to the individual asset (the Caitlin Moran column is more appealing to me than the Times on Saturday / the News Corp brand) or the author / producer (Caitlin Moran)… and prices are moving around in step.  Smaller payments for smaller slices.  This I like.  And I’ll probably end up spending more.

The challenge for publishers (and other brands that now publish) is to figure out where the most valuable pieces are in their catalogues and how to make money from them.  Bits need to be distributed for free (in the name of Google, ‘findability’ and great (Social) marketing) and bits need to be kept closer to hand and charged for (in the shape of £ pound notes and/or email addresses).

This I also like. It’s my business to help brands figure out what content goes where and how. In fact C&M has been doing a rather good job of this for brands such as Hackett for some time now.  Same challenge (get me noticed, get me distribution, drive traffic / revenue, but don’t give away the crown jewels), only with different content collateral (branded content, not ‘media’ content).

Beyond content serving, the challenge for the Times Online is, of course, acquisition.  They now have a catalogue and a set of services that speak to the Google generation (iPad in hand on sofa).  But fully appeasing Google will be hard because they are hiding a lot of their stash.  Social Media represents an opportunity to do acquisition and awareness effectively – but they don’t seem to be really embracing it right now.  (See here for a list of Times columnists that they’re hawking on Twitter.  A step in the right direction, I feel – get me access to the bits that I like best, and quickly.)

Having mentioned her a few times, I’ll let Caitlin Moran sign off.  She summed things up quite nicely in her column last week (yes, behind the paywall!):

“I don’t think journalism should be free, because, tbh, bitch got to make rent. I’ve spent 20 years clawing my way out of a council house in Wolverhampton to reach a point where I can now afford a Nigella Lawson breadbin. If I have to start blogging everything for free, I am simply going to have to fall back on Plan B, and go and hang about in a red-light district somewhere. Meanwhile, the only journalists left will be posh people who can afford to do it as a hobby, in between skiing or renovating a folly. This column would be written by Lady Helen “Melons” Windsor or George Osborne [….] As a society, we now charge for essential dental work, but somehow found a way to throw in HD spit-roasts for free. What does that say about us? And when someone works out what that says about us, will they get paid for explaining it?”

(She likes paywalls, by the way. She also has a huge Twitter following for lots of mini slices of Caitlin Moran content …every day, for FREE.)

Further Reading

Check out Chris Applegate’s review of the new Times Online service.  Soup to nuts good stuff – including a great commentary on design and user experience.

Check out this book – Information Rules – by Carl Shapiro. He called all of this before the last Interweb bubble popped in 1998. (And I’ll be forever grateful to my mate Doug Kessler for making me read it.)

Be Timely

How many times have you said to someone “I tried calling them but was kept on hold for ages so I just gave up”, or something to that effect? I’m willing to bet that you thought negatively of that brand after that experience and told other people about it. The same thing happens in Social Media, only faster. People need to think very little before firing off a 140-character tirade about a bad customer service experience, so make sure you attend to them quickly, and concisely. Even if it is initially just an acknowledgement of their request for help, before seeking the information you need to answer their enquiry in full, this initial engagement will see you right, as it placates the customer and will offer a much more positive experience overall.

Be Personal

This is something American Express does very well on its Ask Amex and Ask Amex UK Twitter accounts. The profile bio for these accounts include the names of the people who deal with the enquiries to that account and where space is available, each tweet is signed off with the name or initial of the person responsible. This is great because, as well as making the account more human and less Mr Roboto, the customer knows who is dealing with their enquiry, should they need to follow up with any information or indeed congratulate the company on a good customer service experience.

Be Positive

Sometimes it is hard to be positive and friendly with people who are relentless in their tirade of abuse but it is imperative that you do, or risk being further chastised and talked about in a very negative light. One of the many benefits that Social Media has over telephone customer service is the ability to take a step back, have a breather, gather your thoughts and respond pragmatically. There are of course some people who will just complain continually for the sake of being awkward, but just continue to offer as much advice and help as you can and they will eventually move on.

Be Aware

You shouldn’t expect your customers to necessarily be seeking you out in the first instance when they need help or assistance with a particular problem. They’re more likely to fire off a general tweet or status message, aimed at nobody in particular, hoping that someone sees their cries for help and jumps in with assistance. It would reflect well if your brand is the one that answers that distress call, without the customer having to approach you first. There are plenty of free tools (such as Hootsuite and Netvibes) that let you monitor what is being said about your brand on Social Media channels, so set up the relevant filters and engage (quickly and responsibly) with customers who need your help!

Be In The Right Place

It is absolutely pointless offering a dedicated customer service channel through Twitter if it turns out that the majority of your customers don’t use it and are on another channel instead. Combine your own market research with readily available stats and reports on Social Media demographics (and there is plenty around) to determine where your customers (existing or potential) spend their time online and where they are likely to talk about your brand. That’s not to say you shouldn’t invest in a multi-channel approach, because there will always be some of your customers on any particular channel, but take the time in finding out where your time is best spent.

I think it wise to say that although Social Media does offer fantastic opportunities for customer service, you should keep your existing channels open as well (e.g. email or phone), because Social Media, like these other channels, is not a fully comprehensive solution. This is a point made by PR consultant Danny Whatmough on his blog regarding his recent experience with Vodafone.

There’s plenty more I could say on the subject, but hopefully these tips will start you off on the road to offering good customer service through social channels. Do let me know if you have any thoughts on the subject, or have had any negative or positive experiences of customer service via Social Media.

While there will always be a place for traditional customer service (telephone lines, in-store help desks, snail mail etc), social tools such as Twitter and Facebook are fast becoming a vital part of the customer service mix. This doesn’t just apply on an ad hoc basis (e.g. a small business answering the occasional inquisitive tweet) as several multi-national corporations are investing heavily in dedicated teams whose job it is to offer customer service through social and other online channels.

Take Dell for example, whose use of Twitter as a customer service tool is well documented across the web. Several dedicated channels on Twitter allow customers to tweet their problems or requests for help. These accounts are monitored using Dell’s CRM system (Salesforce) and each tweet is then given its own case or ticket. The support rep then searches the Dell knowledge base and provides the customer with a link to the article and the case closed (unless of course the customer needs more help).

As well as the customer approaching the brand directly (using @replies or a post on a Facebook page’s wall), a lot of brands are also monitoring conversations on social networks, jumping in and helping out any disgruntled customers in distress, before the customer has the chance to contact the brand themselves. In theory, and mostly in practice, this is a great idea as it puts the fire out before it has time to spread. But it has the potential to backfire, with certain (possibly paranoid) parties declaring such actions to be an invasion of privacy.

Interestingly, it seems that Dell has changed tactic somewhat. Instead of the easy method of using the @askdell channel (which seems to have been scrapped altogether), the company has since segregated its Twitter presence into a staggering 30+ profiles. Although they have broken it down into categories, it’s still not clear (to me anyway) where I’d go if my PC was playing up. It seems Dell’s priority for social media is now sales, rather than customer service. Annoying for the customer, but a logical move after they claimed that Twitter and Facebook generated sales of $9 million in 2009. Dell is clearly acting on the mantra of “go hard or go home”.

It would be a great shame if this sales-focus becomes the norm. Getting straight to the point and giving the customer what they need is crucial, especially as budgets are being slashed all over the place. This doesn’t only apply to B2C, its B2B as well, as Roger pointed out in his latest blog post.

If you’re a business, you have to remember, customers are no longer content with waiting in a hold queue until their call is answered. Social has such a huge potential for customer satisfaction because it cuts the crap and puts the customer back in control of a relationship in which they haven’t worn the trousers since the telephone helpline became standard practice. You can bet if your competitors are offering more direct ways to get in touch with them across multiple channels and you aren’t, you’ll get left behind. I am customer, hear me roar!

The first is from Antony Mayfield‘s Me and My Web Shadow (buy here now). The second is from Brian Solis’ Engage (buy here now). Both extracts describe aspects of Twitter (the ability to answer to ‘What’s the point of Twitter?’ being a common requirement for most digital folks nowadays).

Here’s Antony:

Here’s Brian:

There’s plenty to admire in Antony’s book. It’s pithy. It states the real, obvious and tangible. It’s written for the guy on the street, but – word for word – it’s a super primer for any brand manager. What applies to the individual applies to the corporate as well. And, most importantly for me, it passes Einstein’s good old ‘explain it to a six year old‘ maxim. There’s enough information to get to grips with the subject and move forward.

Meantime, Brian appears to have been up on a Pro Plus all-nighter to finish his manuscript. And his editor has clearly gone AWOL.

We’re all guilty of this kind of prose. The Social Media generation – thirty something, greying slightly, inclined to wear Camper shoes – grew up feeding on some very abstract ideas on campus: various kinds of post-isms and futurologies. That’s you, me and all the others.

In an age of austerity – when budgets are being cut, mixed around and passed on to others – this style of thinking, writing and talking looks increasingly out of place. And I have to say it irks me because the more time we spend filling people’s heads with hot air, the harder it is to get down to earth and do some proper work. (And, yes, hard as I try, I’m also sometimes guilty as charged.)

So I think, in a meeting situation sat opposite a brand manager, we should make like Mayfield. Save the philosophy for the pub, be more pragmatic and just move things forward.

Or maybe I’m just being a grumpy old pedant? You tell me.