MindComet

Future of measurement

I had the pleasure of meeting (and whooping up on in Golden Tee) Jason Peck of E-Way Direct at Social Fresh Tampa.

He pulled me aside that day and asked for my input on the future of measurement. Here’s the interview:

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 12, 2010

After conference TODOs

Hats off to Jason Keath for putting together one hell of a day at Social Fresh Tampa. It truly lived up to it’s promise of big conference speakers with a small conference feel.

It’s back to work time and I thought I’d share a few things I like to do after right after a conference.

Enter my contacts into my contact database

Managing my own business contact database is very new to me. I’ve been adding contacts into the MindComet database for years, but had never really pursued building my own. Chris Brogan really drives this point home in Trust Agents and I listened.

Add people I met along the way to my “conference people” Twitter list.

Social Fresh was chocked full of great people all interested in social media, many of whom I was able to lay the foundation of a social media relationship with. To keep the relationships warm, I maintain a Twitter list specifically for these folks and pay special attention to interacting them on a regular basis.

If I was a speaker, update my bio on MindComet.com and Linked-in

I was originally slated to just be a panel speaker at Social Fresh Tampa, but at the last minute Jason invited me to moderate the “Real Facebook and Twitter Results” panel. It’s definitely an honor for me and something that I’m attaching to my professional credentials. Plus, iteratively building your resume is MUCH easier than an en masse update when you need it.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 10, 2010

Leveraging Twitter as a voting engine + FREE SOCKS!

Why is Twitter such a powerful medium?

It’s no secret that Twitter’s year-over-year growth is consistently in the 1000+% range. That’s a staggering and very impressive metric for this relatively new medium. But why?

I attribute this growth to Twitter’s flexibility as a tool. While it started out as a way to post what you are doing, it’s grown to be so much more. I still contend that the power of Twitter is in your imagination. People are leveraging Twitter in a variety of ways, whether it be personal or professional, that suits their needs. Some examples are: Market research, making new friends/connections, company announcements, and event updates. Hell, R. Alexander Spoerer wrote a science fiction novel on Twitter! Can you believe that, he wrote a novel on Twitter, 140 characters at a time.

In addition to an application design that allows for flexibility, the architects of Twitter were very smart about rolling out a very full featured API that allows you to pull and update Twitter data through your own applications. There must be thousands, if not tens of thousands, of developers all building experience/utility apps on top of the Twitter platform… MindComet included.

We’re really fond of using the API to leverage Twitter as a voting engine for promotions. This has a few HUGE benefits that I’ll explain later.

How it works is rather simple -

Let’s suppose there is a local retailer that wants to allow consumers to vote for their favorite argyle sock design. We’ll call the campaign, “Sock The Vote”. There are a total of three sock designs - sock one, sock two and sock three. As part of the campaign, the retailer setup a Twitter account called @sockthevote and created a landing page that shows the three socks, the number of votes cast for each sock and instructions on how to vote. Each sock also is assigned a unique hashtag which corresponds to it’s name. For example, sock one’s hastag would be #sock1, sock two’s is #sock2 and so on.

Users are instructed to vote by telling their friends which sock they like and why, and including @sockthevote, the hashtag of the sock they’re voting for (#sock1) and the shortened URL of the landing page (http://bit.ly/sockthevote). We like to provide a tool to pre-populate a Twitter message. The order of elements is VERY important. You don’t want the @sockthevote address at the front of the message, which is what users are accustomed to doing when creating @ messages. @ messages can only be seen by the user and their followers.

An example tweet for our tweet builder might look like this:

My feet threatened 2 go numb if I didn’t vote 4 sock1. Viva La Green Argyle! http://bit.ly/sockthevote @sockthevote #sock1

The users have done their part, now your site needs to be setup to collect votes. This is done using the Twitter search API.

So for the Sock The Vote campaign, we setup a search that runs every five minutes which looks for messages that contain @sockthevote and the shortened URL (http://bit.ly/sockthevote) of the promotion. Results that are pulled in are put through a number of filters:

Which sock’s Twitter vote is this? - this is done by parsing out the hashtag that the user was instructed to include and matching it to the recognized hashtags (#sock1,#sock2,#sock3)

Can this user vote? - we verify this in a couple of ways:

1. How old is this Twitter account? - You can lookup various bits of information about a Twitter account, including the account creation date. We typically limit votes to accounts that we’re created before the promotion was launched. This prevents users from creating thousands of fake accounts and spamming the vote.
2. Has the user voted already? - This is entirely up to you. We typically limit it to one or two votes or limit the frequency (e.g. one vote every 48 hours)
3. Have we seen this vote already? - In other words, was this Twitter vote pulled in a previous search. All tweets are incrementally assigned IDs. To accomplish this you can record the largest ID number from previous search and disregard tweets that are less than or equal to that ID. Or better yet, Twitter provides a search parameter since_id which allows you to pass in the largest ID number from the previous search and the API will exclude older results.
Once the vote has been validated it can be assigned to a sock. So why use Twitter as the voting engine instead of building your own?
1. The footprint of your voting campaign extends beyond your URL. Users are promoting your campaign in exchange for casting a vote… viral baby.
2. No user registration required on your site. Twitter handles that.
3. Enhanced fraud protection versus traditional methods. Cookies and IP-based voting enforcement mechanisms are too easy to conquer.
4. Plus, It looks f’in cool to allow voting through Twitter.

BTW, just kidding about the free socks…

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 01, 2010

Wait…you don’t allow comments on your blog?

The word “community” is inextricably tied to social media. Facebook is a community of intertwined communities, as is Twitter. One of the most common social media related job functions is the “community manager”. Blogs too are considered communities, but in my opinion, only if they allow comments.

What is this you say Jeremy?

Yes, it’s my opinion that a blog that doesn’t allow comments is not a community. It might be a journal, perhaps a scholarly, professional or hobbyist one. It could be an online diary or maybe a magazine of sorts. It could be considered alot of things, but without comments, I don’t see it as a community.

Sense of Community

SOC is considered by many an essential component of any virtual community. Without SOC, a property is often called a virtual settlement.

SOC consists of the following four characteristics

Membership - Belonging to and identifying with the community
Influence - Feelings of having influence on and being influenced by the community
Integration and fulfillment of needs - Feelings of being supported in the community and being able to support others
Shared emotional connection - Feelings of relationships, shared experiences, and history

Comments are the glue that bind blog readers

Content is great; it’s the primary reason why we’re reading a blog. But that content is through the lense of the author. It’s their point-of-view. However without comments are some key questions/functions that can’t be accomplished to establish SOC.

• If don’t share the author’s point-of-view, how do I know if others share my feelings?
• If don’t share the author’s point-of-view, how do I make my argument in an attempt influence the author to accept my point-of-view?
• If I don’t understand a concept or their point-of-view, what am I to do? Who do I reach out to for help?
• How do I build relationships with other readers?

Do you agree or disagree with me? Can a blog with comments be considered a community?

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jan. 25, 2010

Social Media is not a Panacea

Here’s what social media probably will not accomplish:

- Quadruple your web traffic in 2 months
- Be a sure fire way of owning the SERPs
- Make your brand a household name overnight
- Effectively eliminate your marketing budget by allowing you to ditch your other marketing channels

While social media is great, it requires a fair amount of planning, work, committment and support from other marketing channels to be successful.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jan. 20, 2010

What is trust worth to a business?

It’s not a secret that MindComet uses Radian6 for social media monitoring. And being in the position that I’m in, Radian6’s competitors frequently solicit me in hope of winning MindComet’s business. Historically, I’ve obliged when offered to sit through a demo. I mean, what if I find a product that I like better than Radian6? What if there’s something that can do the same thing, but at a fraction of the cost?

I recently turned down a solicitation from a Radian6 competitor after coming to a realization about our social media monitoring tool vendor—I trust them.

While I don’t typically share emails on my blog, but I wanted to share this one (BTW, names have been changed to protect the innocent)

Dear FRED,

As far as cost, I get that your product is offered at 1/3 the price of Radian6, however, I refuse sacrifice trust in order to save a few dollars.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jan. 05, 2010

Schmaps’ smooth Twitter marketing tactic

This post is not an endorsement of Schmaps nor was I paid to write about Schmaps

Schmaps is a new service (at least this is the first I’ve heard of it) that allows you easily attach a map to your Tweets. Their value statement is “Share places and events on Twitter”. All in all, it seems like a pretty neat service. But this post isn’t a critique of the service. This post is about what I think is a clever and very unobtrusive tactic they’re using for raising awareness about Schmaps through Twitter.

I’ve been promoting an upcoming tweetup through the Social Media Club Orlando Twitter account and recently found this @ response to me from @MeaganLeader

@SMCOrlando here’s a ‘schmap’ for the tweetup: http://schmap.it/qyEoYI?a (made at http://www.schmap.it = share places and events on Twitter)

If you read Chris Brogan on a regular basis, you’ll know of his disdain for social media marketing tactics that involve pushing your product on someone without first taking the time to build a relationship. To use Chris’ analogy, it’s like trying to stick your tongue in their mouth when you should be shaking their hand. For the most part, I agree with his thoughts on this - build the relationship first. However, I think that Schmaps was able to combine the tongue kiss and the handshake in one smooth move that didn’t feel awkward.

It comes down to value

So how did she do it? It’s simple. Value. Her initial contact with me contained value in the form of a tool, in this case a Schmap link, that I could use to promote an event that I care about. When I saw that tweet and realized there was something in it for me, any barriers that I had, came down.

Through focusing on what is important to me, Schmaps effectively delivered a message about them. Nicely done.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Dec. 10, 2009