The biggest challenge most people have with social media is sorting through all the online tools that can help you run, launch and manage your campaigns.

After all, there are literally hundreds of different tools that can help you track and optimize your social media program. The problem is, you don’t have the time to hunt down all the different options.

Click here to download your free copy of "99 Tools to Help You Make Money with Social Media."

Well, good news. We’ve created an e-book that has done some of the hard work for you.

The free e-book is called “99 Tools to Help You Make Money with Social Media.” We spent hours and hours tracking down and analyzing nearly 100 different tools you can use to optimize your program.

If you’d like to download the free e-book, just click the image to the right or click here.

If you want to see samples of what’s included in the free e-book, read on:

Tools to Help You with Content Creation and Integration

1. Context Optional:  Best for marketers with multiple team members, brands or geographies, this platform helps develop applications for Facebook and Twitter communities and monitor and analyze the conversations taking place on these platforms.
2. Crowd Factory’s Social Campaign: Think social networking is confined to Facebook and Twitter? Think again. Crowd Factory lets you embed social elements into any marketing experience including videos, emails, ads and more.
3. KickApps: This self-service site allows you to develop and manage social content such as branded communities, widgets, 3^rd party plug-ins and social applications.
4. North Social: Enhance your Facebook page by creating custom applications that allow your brand to do things such as integrate with Google Maps or Yelp,  post HD videos, run sweepstakes, and more.
5. Involver Applications: The creator of the popular “Get Satisfaction” facebook app, Involver provides applications that allow you to easily add polls, RSS feeds, quizzes, music, contests and more to your Facebook or Twitter pages.
6. Sprout: Not to be confused with Sprout Social, this cloud based software company creates interactive ads and applications perfect for bringing social content to the web and mobile devices.
7. Lithium Community Platform: This software as a service company creates a social community right on your website that provides a place for your brand advocates to converse, tools to spread the word about your product through social channels and even generate ideas for innovation.

Click here to download the complete list of 99 tools.

Tools to Help You Monitor Brand Sentiment:

1. Alterian SM2: More in-depth than some other social media monitoring services, Alterian provides advanced user behavior statistics, demographics, location, positive or negative tone, and trending topics for your brand as seen across a host of social media outlets and websites.
2. PeopleBrowsr: Research.ly, and Analytic.ly  are PeopleBrowsr’s main products, and offer sentiment monitoring, trend reporting and audience profiling. Their main claim to fame at the moment is their recent announcement that they provide 1000 days of Twitter history.
3. Social Mention: This free web-based application lets you search popular channels such as blogs and microblogs to find brand mentions and analyzes the sentiment towards your brand. You can also set up alerts so that you will be told any time someone mentions your brand.
4. BrandsEye: A slightly different type of social media listening tool, BrandsEye helps you manage your online reputation by finding all of your brand mentions, the reputation of their source, the sentiment and even flags mentions that you may require immediate attention.

Click here to download the complete list of 99 tools.

Tools to Help You with Tracking and Analytics:

1. Argyle Social: If you’re interested in monitoring trends and sentiment, this management tool may not be for you. In addition to aggregating your social media accounts, Argyle Social analyzes only hard numbers and direct outcomes of your campaigns.
2. Trendrr: This site peruses blogs, microblogs, search engines, social networks and even video to see what people are saying about your brand and provides numerical analysis to help you understand what it all means
3. Involver Audience Management Platform: In addition to providing a host of apps, Involver offers a dashboard that manages all of your social media applications, monitors communication, and provides analytics based on actionable measures so you can see the true ROI of your actions.
4. MediaVantage: Designed for PR gurus, this tool gives you instant access to TV, print, online and social media content that is relevant to your brand’s reputation, your industry, or your competition.
5. Objective Marketer: This site allows you to create the content and strategy and just steps in to objectively analyze how people have interacted with the content you have posted. By measuring clicks, views, likes and more, the Objective Marketer discovers trends and finds out what is working for your brand… and what’s not.

Click here to download the complete list of 99 tools.

Here’s the table of contents from this free e-book:

• The Social Media ROI Cycle explained
• Tools to Help You Manage Your Twitter Account
• Tools to Help you Manage Facebook
• Tools to Help you Manage Your Websites and Blogs
• Tools to Help You Manage Multiple Social Channels
• Content Creation and Integration Tools
• Qualitative Social Media Monitoring Tools
• Quantitative Social Media Monitoring Tools
• Comprehensive Social Media Monitoring Tools
• Tools to Help You Reverse Append Email Addresses to Find Out More About the Contacts in Your Database

We’ve put a lot of time and energy into this free e-book, so you can spend your time doing more important things. Download it today and, before long, you’ll be super-charging your social media campaigns.

P.S. If you’re interested in receiving more tools and tips like the ones above, you can have the 60 Second Marketer blog delivered to your in box each morning by clicking here. Or, you can sign up for our free weekly e-newsletter by clicking here.

Posted by Jamie Turner, Chief Content Officer of the 60 Second Marketer, the online magazine of BKV Digital and Direct Response. Jamie is also the co-author of How to Make Money with Social Media.

Some of us learn by reading. Others of us learn by seeing. And still others learn by listening.

Click here to listen to the recent social media podcast from the American Marketing Association.

If you’re someone who retains and processes information best when you hear it, then you might be interested in a recent podcast I did with the American Marketing Association. The podcast was hosted by David Kinard, a marketing expert who really knows his stuff. (You can tell just by listening to the questions he asked.)

David and I discussed many of the cool tips and techniques that are outlined in How to Make Money with Social Media, the book I co-authored with Dr. Reshma Shah. In the interview, we discuss why social media is over-hyped and what you can do to avoid falling into some of the traps involved in believing the hype.

(It may seem odd to hear someone who has written a book on social media say it’s over-hyped, but it is. If you’d like to know why I say that, check out the AMA’s podcast.)

Enjoy!

Posted by Jamie Turner, Chief Content Officer at the 60 Second Marketer, the online magazine for BKV Digital and Direct Response.

This excerpt is just a short sample of some of the content in “How to Make Money with Social Media,” by Jamie Turner and Dr. Reshma Shah. To download a free chapter, click Free Chapter. Or, better still, buy a copy right now on Amazon (affiliate link).

You were probably pretty fired-up when social media first started came along. It was an exciting new approach, there was a lot of buzz about it and everybody was eager to see if social media was going to be like paid search. You remember paid search — in the early years, it was so successful that it was the equivalent of printing money. Today, it’s a solid, viable medium, but in those early years, it was super hot.

And that’s what social media is today. Super hot. But somewhere along the way, there have been a lot of people who have stumbled. They’ve launched a campaign, sometimes with great fanfare, and failed miserably.

Our point is this – if you’re a company that sells paper or pet supplies or, God forbid, industrial widgets (apologies to the industrial widget makers out there), you’re going to have to reach out to the consumer and get them engaged with your social media campaign.

How can you do this? By creating a campaign that gives the consumer something of value that they don’t currently have. This can be give-aways and other special promotions that are relatively traditional. Or, it can be information that the visitor finds useful. Better still, it could be a tool that keeps the visitor coming back for more.

One of the best and smartest versions of these tools is what a company out of Boston called Hubspot has created. They realized that one of the best ways to create inbound traffic to their website was to create a tool people couldn’t do without. So they created an SEO analysis tool called WebsiteGrader and put it up on their website.

How to Make Money with Social Media is available at fine bookstores around the globe. Click the image above to order on Amazon.

What’s an SEO analysis tool? It’s a sophisticated program that analyzes how Google, Yahoo or Bing see your site. The real stroke of genius was that the folks at Hubspot decided to include WebsiteGrader on their website. By sharing their tool with other people, they created inbound traffic, which ultimately converts to customers.

“A great way to get more customers using social media is not just to engage, but educate,” says Hubspot Chief Technology Officer and Founder Dharmesh Shah.  “We believe in this passionately at HubSpot and it has worked miracles for us.  We’ve learned that more people you make smarter by educating them, the more leads and customers you get.”

How successful has Hubspot’s WebsiteGrader been? So far, it’s generated grades on more than 2 million URLs. So on more than 2 million occasions, potential customers for Hubspot have visited, engaged and interacted with one of the tools it has on their site. That kind of traffic is mind-boggling, especially if you’re a company with only a few hundred employees.

Check out MyStarbucksIdea.com or WebsiteGrader.com next time you’re at a computer. You’ll get a clear sense of what they’re doing to engage people – and keep them engaged – with their companies.

Which brings us back to one of the key things a lot of folks are asking themselves right now, “If social media is such a powerful tool, then how come my first campaign failed?”

It’s a great question. So we did an analysis of the most common mistakes people make when they run a social media campaign and came up with the list below. Take a spin through it and put a check by the ones that apply to you. Don’t be surprised if you have more than one checkmark – the idea is to figure out where you’re coming up short so you can focus on fixing the problem areas:

___ You didn’t measure the results of your campaign: Interestingly, this is an all-too-common problem. We’ll discuss ways you can measure the results of your next campaign in an upcoming chapter.

___ You didn’t set clear objectives: Some companies create a Facebook page or a YouTube channel before thinking through their objectives. Is it to build awareness? To drive traffic to a landing page on your site? To give people a channel to make comments and record their frustrations?

___ You thought social media was only about Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube: Of course, social media is about having many conversations across as many platforms as you can manage. The more opportunities you provide customers to engage with you, the more successful your campaign.

___ You didn’t know how to set up a landing page: One of basic models of social media success look like this: prospect à social media channel à landing page on website à new customer. If you don’t have a landing page on your website designed to convert prospects to customers, then you won’t be able to track your ROI. No ROI, no social media campaign. (Or, rather, no effective social media campaign.)

___ You didn’t re-market to customer prospects: Most prospects who visit your landing page won’t become customers. In fact, the vast majority won’t. But that doesn’t mean they’re never going to buy. It just means they weren’t going to buy at that time. Keep ‘em in your pipeline – you’ll get them someday, if you re-market to them.

___ You didn’t know how to turn a social media campaign into a sales and marketing campaign: Social media isn’t just about building awareness. It’s about turning prospects into customers. Don’t be shy about nudging prospects along the sales funnel. They expect it, to a certain degree.

___ You sat on the sidelines: True story – we were in contact with a creative director at a major advertising agency a while back who said, “this whole internet thing is just a flash in the pan and I can’t wait for it to blow over.” We’re serious. He said that. Our point? You don’t want to be that guy.

___ You downplayed the importance of social media: Some people don’t sit on the sidelines as much as they participate without passion. That’s almost as bad as sitting on the sidelines. You don’t want to be that guy, either.

___ You thought you could do social media in 10 minutes a day: Social media is a little like a marriage – you won’t have a successful marriage if you plan on spending just 10 minutes a day having a dialog with your spouse. The same holds true for a successful social media campaign.

___ You thought social media was like traditional marketing: There are a lot of similarities between social media and traditional media. But there are a lot of differences, too. Your job is to embrace those differences. Don’t be scared. Social media won’t hurt you.

We could go on and on about some of the ways your social media campaign might have failed in the past, but we won’t. Our job here is to show you ways to succeed with social media, not how to fail.

This excerpt is just a short sample of some of the content in “How to Make Money with Social Media,” by Jamie Turner and Dr. Reshma Shah. To download a free chapter, click Free Chapter. Or, better still, buy a copy right now on Amazon (affiliate link).

As you might imagine, I spend a good amount of time on social media networks. It’s part of my job. Not only am I trying to build awareness for the 60 Second Marketer community, but I’m also trying to connect with client prospects for BKV Digital and Direct Response.

(Okay, to be honest, there is a third reason I spend a lot of time on social media networks – I’m trying to build early demand for my book, “How to Make Money with Social Media” which, oh by the way, will be published by the Financial Times Press this fall.)

NutshellMail is a social media aggregator that makes staying in touch with your social relationships easy.

The problem I face — and I bet you face the same problem, too — is that I can’t spend an inordinate amount of time flip-flopping between Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook and YouTube and the blog. Trying to manage that many different outlets can be time-consuming and confusing all at once.

My Social Media Secret Weapon: NutshellMail

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Constant Contact. Those of you who receive our free weekly eNewsletter are familiar with Constant Contact because it’s the platform we use to send out free tips, tools and techniques to our community. (What? You’re not a subscriber to our free eNewsletter? C’mon, get with the program!)

Anyway, the email from Constant Contact introduced me to a new tool they offer called NutshellMail. NutshellMail aggregates all the activity from your social networks and drops them into a single email delivered to your in-box. To be honest, my initial reaction was, “Oh, gosh. One more broadcast email. Enough already!”

Despite my reservations, I decided to give NutshellMail a try. I was reluctant, mind you. What’s more, the first few emails I got I kind of ignored.

But then, for some reason, I took a deep dive into one of the emails. My thought process went something like this: “Oh, look. Nutshell Mail is letting me know that Davis Tucker just got a promotion and updated his LinkedIn profile to let everyone else know. I’ll have to congratulate him via email, given that he’s a potential client. And look at this – 7 people re-tweeted my blog post yesterday. I’ll have to send them a direct message thanking them. And look here – someone asked a question on my Facebook fan page that I should respond to. And what’s this? Here’s another…”

Imagine being able to have all your social media connections dropped into your email inbox every morning and not having to switch applications and poke around different websites to find out what’s going on.

Marvelous.

Does NutshellMail Replace Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook?

NutshellMail isn’t a replacement for your social media channels – it’s really an aggregator that saves you time and improves your ability to connect with others. Oh, sure, I still use Twitter and I still go to LinkedIn and other social media platforms to check in on things. But if you’re looking for a great way to catch-up with people and stay current on what’s happening in your social media-sphere, then Nutshell Mail is what you’re looking for.

Check it out for yourself. You can visit their page on the Constant Contact website by clicking Nutshellmail.

Posted by Jamie Turner, Chief Content Officer, the 60 Second Marketer, the online magazine of BKV Digital and Direct Response. You can download a free chapter from Jamie’s soon-to-be-published book by clicking, “How to Make Money with Social Media.”

Walmart has learned a lot about social media in the last year. Walmart’s John Andrews, senior manager of emerging media, said in early 2009, “With social media is it about a true authentic connection with an audience,” he said. “It’s a way to engage people and it’s an augment for your product. ”

What has Walmart learned about social media? Find out in this post.

1. Use the right writers: After having a false start at using blogs written by a public relations firm (a little distanced from Walmart’s consumers), Walmart turned to its customers for its current success in social media. They hired 11 moms to write blogs about saving money. And moms know how to engage the audience Walmart wants to reach.

2. Welcome feedback: Walmart uses social media with a ratings and review section on its web site. This made Walmart officials a little nervous at first. After all, negative ratings affect business. Said Andrews, “Well, it’s better that you know about it. If you are willing to help solve the problem it becomes an asset in your favor. ”

3. Use mobile technology: Users who sign up for it can get information on sales from text messages.

4. Read the results accurately: Then an interesting thing happened this November. Seems Walmart announced they were starting to sell caskets. (http://bit.ly/WalMartCasket if you’re in the market.) Now, problem was, the idea of Walmart selling such a macabre item as a casket gave the funny guys out there on the web something funny to write about, and seeing an opportunity, they began using social media sites to give reviews of said caskets. These entertaining reviews caught on, and pretty soon, lots of funny people were writing funny reviews.

Can you imagine the analyst looking at the rise in social media numbers, but not looking at the comments themselves? At first glance, the numbers look pretty good. Increases in comments, lots of interest, lots of buzz. But once you delve a little further into it, the good buzz was based on good, clean fun, NOT on good, clean caskets.

What’s a marketing professional to do?

Here’s what the blog at Advertising Age had to say about it:

The example, funny as it is, serves as a reminder that your approach to social media monitoring should follow a similar approach to what SEM/SEO experts do. Use filtering to your advantage. Leverage tag clouds to determine what words are the strongest within a web page of content. If something looks fishy, dive deeper in your analysis. Also, if positive reviews don’t match the number of sales, that too should raise a red flag.

So take a hint from Walmart and there’ll be no grave mistakes.

In case you are still skeptical whether social networking sites are really catching on or not, check out the top search terms from the month ending 11/28/09, provided by Experian Hitwise. Note that these are the top terms from All Categories, including the Shopping and Classified category during the holiday shopping rush during Thanksgiving week.  Seven of the top 10 are social networking sites. That’s amazing. Only two are classified ads sites, and one is a search engine. Craigslist, which ranked number 4 in the Overall Search Terms, was the top search in the Shopping and Classifieds category. This tells us social networking sites were searched more than retailers in the last month.

What does it mean?

1. Social networking is hot: Even when shoppers in the US are going hog-wild looking for “Black Friday” shopping deals on the internet, social networking site searches still outranked searches for “black Friday,” “Amazon,” and the ubiquitous “Wal-Mart.”

2. Is there a place for your products on eBay? It would appear the internet savvy shopper is doing their business on-line with craigslist and eBay.

3. Your business better be using social networking: If you’re not on Facebook or MySpace, you might be missing opportunities to market.

It will be interesting to see how this season’s searches change by the end of December, especially in light of “Black Monday,” when American shoppers took to the internet following Thanksgiving week. We’ll keep you informed.

++++++

Thanks to Experian Hitwise for permission to reprint their statistics.

Yes, you can be a whiz at using social media successfully.

Here’s the secret: You wouldn’t start a new billboard campaign without careful planning, would you? Of course not. Yet many companies seem to jump right in to a social media campaign without giving this type of marketing the careful consideration that other types get. Why? It is a new medium to many, and we’re still learning the ropes. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others can be very effective – if done with a little planning.

Here’s a 10 point road map to help you plan to make the most effective use of a social media campaign, taken from a recent webinar presented by Jamie Turner, Chief Content Officer of the 60 Second Marketer. Already using social media? Review to see if there’s a new idea for you.

1. Competitive Assessment: What are your competitors doing in this space already? What can you borrow from them?

2. Internal Situation Analysis: How much awareness is there of social media within your company? Is there an understanding that it can be measured and create a positive ROI?

3. Major Objectives: What are you trying to accomplish with your social media campaign?

4. Consumer Thought Process: What is the typical sales cycle for your product? How much trust do you need to build before you can make a sale? (Hint: The more expensive the product, the more trust needs to be built.)

5. Key Strategies: What approach are you going to take in order to have a successful program?

6. Brand Essence: What is your brand essence and how are you going to communicate that using social media?

7. Positioning: How is your brand currently positioned in the marketplace? Where do you want it to be positioned as a result of your social media campaign?

8. Essential Message: What is the essential take-away you want consumers and prospects to have after engaging with your brand via social media?

9. Tactical Plan Overview: Which social media platforms are you going to use for your program? Which tools are you going to use to measure the success of your program?

10. Executional Roadmap: What are your SMART Goals for this plan? How are you going to be held accountable for them?

Careful planning will make the time spent well worth it, and make you look like the whiz that you are. Just don’t forget to have fun and be creative with your campaign. You may be the next trend setter, with competitors following your example!

There’s no dispute that Facebook is growing into a huge social network. As of November, 2009, there are 316,402,840 people worldwide using Facebook. Here are some interesting statistics on the users by country from an interactive map at Check Facebook.com.

10 Countries with the Largest Facebook Usage:

1. United States  94,748,820

2. United Kingdom  22,261,080

3. Turkey  14,215,880

4. France  13,396,760

5. Canada   13,228,380

6. Italy  12,581,060

7. Indonesia   11,759,980

8. Spain  7,313,160

9. Australia 7,176,640

10. Philippines 6,991,040

In the US, 43.04% of online users are on Facebook. And in the United Kingdom, 51% of online users are using Facebook.

What does that mean for marketers? Get on board! Facebook is a huge global opportunity! And it’s free!

Visit our Facebook page, 60 Second Marketer Fan Page, to get an idea of what it looks like.

Windows 7, the new operating system for Windows-based PCs, is being released this Thursday, October 22. The world is getting excited, given the good reviews and buzz circulating about the upgrade, especially given the poor performance of Windows Vista, the prior release.

How does Microsoft launch a product this important? CNET news posted an interview with Tami Reller, head of Microsoft Windows 7 Marketing. Let’s examine some of the key marketing strategies she shared. Your company may not have the resources available to you that MS has, but that doesn’t mean you can’t glean an idea or two and apply them to your business.

1) Think Global

• Worldwide Launch Events: In Japan, Britain and New York.
• “Lots of Coverage”: Without giving specifics, Reller stated that there will be TV interviews, and perhaps late-night TV appearances. “You’ll certainly see a lot of coverage from us that day, but no commitments on the exact venue.”

2) Think Local

• Local Launch parties: Even you can host a launch party at your house, just like Microsoft’s employees do. You can set up your PC’s, or see the new features, give out prizes, or whatever theme you like.  http://houseparty.com/windows7usa

3) Find Symbolic Things to Do to Promote Your Launch

• Open the Market: Microsoft will ring the opening bell on Nasdaq on Thursday.
• Close the Market: Microsoft will join with its computer maker partners to end the day’s trading.

4) Employ Social Marketing

• Facebook Windows 7 page: Microsoft is leveraging its Facebook page by including several interesting features, such as a “Windows 7 Personality quiz.” I was “highly defined.” http://www.facebook.com/Microsoft.Windows.7
• Twitter “Windows 7 Sweepstakes”: Prizes for answering challenges from this Twitter page, plus the latest news on Windows 7. http://twitter.com/mswindows

5) Have a Spokesperson

• A cute spokeswoman girl: Kylie the young’un demonstrates Windows 7. See her on TV, or on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssOq02DTTMU&feature=channel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6adgIJE8YQ&feature=channel

6) Make an Offer They Can’t Refuse

• Worldwide Discounts: “Part of October 22 is going to be all about some screaming deals,” says Reller.

7) Create Strong Product Enthusiasm

• Leverage Early Product Reviews: With early releases and trials, Microsoft has found “end-user acceptance and enthusiasm for a product matter. And that’s why we’ve put so much emphasis on the last year, in making sure that we had strong, strong engagement from users broadly across many demographics.” In fact, a senior IT administrator I know speaks well of Windows 7. He supports it, saying it is more stable, has a quicker install, runs everything that Vista will run, and provides a windows XP mode, among other features.

8) Start Something Unexpected

• 1^st retail store, ever, to open: The opening of the very first Microsoft retail store in Arizona coincides with the Windows 7 release.

Granted, Microsoft is a huge company with huge dollars to spend on marketing. But that doesn’t mean you can’t think huge within the budget you have. By using these techniques, even a small budget can get big results.

Website Magazine recently featured their pick of the Top 50 Websites, based on “popularity among Web professionals, the business community and consumers.”* It’s an interesting mix of sites, including search engines, professional publishing support, social networking, and sites for content and article publishing, among others. Whether you need to increase brand engagement or visibility, or improve traffic to your website, there’s an eclectic mix on the list of sites to choose from. Here are the top 25, or visit the full article to get all 50. Be sure to check out the sites you haven’t visited yet.

1. Google.com
2. Yahoo.com
3. Facebook.com
4. YouTube.com
5. MySpace.com
6. eBay.com
7. Bing.com
8. AOL.com
9. WordPress.com
10. Ask.com
11. Blogger.com
12. Twitter.com
13. Adobe.com
14. Photobucket.com
15. Answers.com
16. LinkedIn.com
17. Digg.com
18. EzineArticles.com
19. Metacafe.com
20. Ning.com
21. Yelp.com
22. Tagged.com
23. Alibaba.com
24. Scribd.com
25. PayPal.com

*”Website Magazine’sTop 50 rankings are a measure of a website’s popularity. Ranks are calculated using a proprietary method that focuses on average daily unique visitors and page views over a specified period of time as reported by multiple data sources.”