There are so many Twitter applications available it can be extremely difficult to know where to begin, and what to select. I continue to try out new applications at the rate of at least one a week. Some barely last longer than it takes to set them up, because they are clearly not for me. That is not to say there is anything inherently wrong with them, they just don’t improve on what I am already using. Others tend to stay around on my desktop or in my browser for the duration of an evaluation period, while I try to give them a good test.

Some of the tools I use are now almost household names, but some are a little more obscure. I want to share those that make up my current Twitter Desktop, and thus remain active in a browser all day.

SocialBro

I’m starting with a measurement tool. SocialBro trawls through your Twitter account and slices and dices it in every imaginable way. When it is done it provides you with a dashboard, and a series of filters that allow you to analyse most aspects of your followers and friends. The options include time zone, language, account, age, tweeting frequency and whole lot more. There is also a menu item called Insights which presents this information in pie charts and bar charts.

SocialBro also bucks the trend a little and chooses to link to Peer Index to add influence scores. Being somewhat ambivalent about Klout, I see this as a positive move.

Once you have got your head around all of the basic dimensions of your Twitter profile, you can begin to explore an array of additional capabilities. The scope is considerable, but the following bear a mention:

• Best time to tweet - I know other tools do this, but as well as determining when your followers are on-line, it looks at the times when re-tweets have occurred historically, AND then lets you import all of this information into Buffer (see more below).
• Analyse your competitors –  want to know all of the above for any other Twitter account? You can just add the user name and you are away. This also shows you who your common friends and followers are.
• Analyze your lists – check out the broad dimensions of the people on your lists

There is one thing that has puzzled me and that is a number of references to limitations, normally volumetric, associated with the free account. Now that is entirely reasonable, but I can’t find a paid account and what it might offer!

Garious

Garious is great tool for scheduling tweets from multiple sources and to multiple destinations. In my view, Garious has one of the easiest and most intuitive interfaces around. Essentially it has 3 components:

• Lists - these are made of your own twitter lists, your blog feed(s), Google Reader sources and, any other RSS source your care to use.
• Schedules - each schedule you create has a number of really useful components. You can determine the start and finish times, the number of tweets to be sent during the period and, the list or lists from which the tweets are to be selected. The tweets can be selected sequentially or at random, and a schedule can be run indefinitely, repeating tweets over time.
• Social Networks - finally you can target the network or networks that each schedule will deliver tweets to.

I’m not often given to using superlatives, but this application truly is awesome! It is simple, straight-forward and effective.

TweetDeck

Certainly one of the better Twitter clients in its original desktop form, and better yet when used in Chrome. Since I imagine most people will know TweetDeck reasonably well, I won’t elaborate further, save to say that it supports all the basic day to day stuff extremely well.

Buffer

A great means of drip feeding a steady stream of interesting tweets to your followers on Twitter and Facebook. For me this enables me to spend just one or two sessions a day reviewing all of my feeds in Google Reader. Instead of immediately sharing those items I believe to be of interest I just add them to Buffer. Buffer then sends out the tweet or status update complete with a link to the article, at the next time slot I have set for the network in question. (See SocialBro above, which can set the best times for your status updates automatically)

For each Twitter account or Facebook profile you are linked to,  you can define the number of statuses you wish to post each day and at what times. As you add items to Buffer they are allocated the next available slot, overflowing to subsequent days if necessary. It is possible to post the same item to multiple accounts if you wish, and you can also post immediately if you find something that is time critical.

A useful feature allows you to review all items in Buffer and edit them if you wish with your own comments. While I use Buffer predominately with Google Reader, it can also be used as a Browser plugin, enabling you to post from anything of interest from anywhere!

BottleNose

I am still exploring the potential of BottleNose, which provides a combination of insights and suggestions for re-tweeting or mentioning. Essentially it takes your Twitter timeline and allows you to segment this in a number of different ways using ‘Assistants’.   You can add Assistants that will track:

• Popular items that have been shared often
• Suggested items that are aligned to your interests
• Breaking News within your network
• Suggested Reposts of items deemed to be highly relevant or trending

You can also set up specific streams to track your Twitter lists; a wide variety of popular topics; specific individuals; items that are exclusively News, Video or Pictures; or something else that you can customise.

Finally there is a clever graphic capability called Sonar. Within any of the
streams you have defined you can see how you link to other Topics, Hashtags or People. You can also select any Topic, Hashtag or Person to be centred in Sonar to see how the connections form around your selection. The screen grab shows part of an instant snapshot of my stream.

ManageFlitter

ManageFlitter is one of those really useful applications that is easy to use and performs a helpful housekeeping role. It quickly loads the people you Follow and segments them in to a number of different categories, such as:

• Don’t follow back
• No profile image
• Inactive
• Talkative
• Quiet

In turn each of these categories can be sorted by criteria such as ‘follow date’, ‘listed’, ‘last tweet’, ‘username’ etc.

The purpose is to allow you to quickly segment people that you may decide to unfollow because they are inactive, or have no profile image. To aid the process you can select as many as 100 people at a time. There is a Pro version that offers more sophistication.

Conclusion

These applications are among my current favourites, and I see little reason to replace any of them in the immediate future. (Well at least not until something amazing gets launched tomorrow!).

If you want to explore some other interesting applications then do try Strawberry Jam, Commun.it and TwentyFeet, AND then share your findings.

Peter Rees is an independent Internet Business Consultant. He specialises in a metrics based approach to internet marketing, making extensive use of website analytics and website performance auditing tools to best inform and advise his clients. He is a strong advocate of the need for companies to implement a formal Social Media Strategy, supported in turn by Social Media Policies and measurement systems.

There are so many different tools around that help you to measure the efficacy of your social media campaigns, it can be extremely difficult to know where to start and what to use. Before proceeding much further, I want to emphasize that this post considers the requirements of SMBs, and therefore assumes a modest budget.

The many dimensions you can track can be quite bewildering and are described using terms like ‘engagement’, ‘velocity’, ‘influence’, ‘sentiment’ and ‘signal.’ All of which, it seems to me, are pretty meaningless in business terms. Of course there are terms that do convey more meaning, such as ‘followers’, ‘comments’, ‘retweets’, ‘mentions’, and ‘likes’, but the question remains – do these lead to positive business behaviors?

I suggest that starting point has to be to challenge yourself about what you are trying to achieve, and then use the tools that best measure the behaviors you employ to meet your business objectives. Not too helpful perhaps, but unfortunately, while there are many free or moderately priced tools, they all measure different things and are driven, it would seem, by different motives.

I have tried a wide variety of the available tools in an effort to find a basket of products that I can recommend to my clients. My findings are based on my own use of these tools. I won’t pretend any rigorous process has been applied here; my views are pragmatic and reflect my perceived value in each case.

I will start with a couple of the tools that try to set the standards for influence and social capital respectively:

Klout

There are a wide variety of social media tools available for small- to mid-sized businesses. Here is a list of some of the top social media measurement tools you can use to track your campaigns.

Klout is allegedly ‘The Standard for Influence’, but what does that mean? Does a high Klout score mean you have a high level of influence? If so, does this enable you to add value to your bottom line, and is the value you add proportionate to your influence score?

Right now there seems to be much argument about changes to the Klout algorithm and whether or not it measures all of the components it claims to. There is also plenty to suggest that Klout can be ‘gamed’, and I have certainly seen evidence of certain people who seem to spend more time giving and receiving ‘K+’ and tweeting about it than anything else.

It also seems that Bots can gain high Klout scores without ever making any effort to ‘engage’ with their audience. Interestingly those that are most vehement in their detraction of Klout are those whose scores have declined. I wonder if this directly impacted their businesses or just their egos?

In its current form I find it difficult to see what Klout’s measure of influence really is, this is because it seems that the same Klout score can be obtained by people who:

1. Just get on with the stuff they do well – a positive outcome
2. Spend a lot of time gaming the system – a pointless outcome
3. Have no interaction with anyone – a negative outcome

PeerIndex

PeerIndex claims to ‘Understand your social capital’. Again, I am not sure that I yet know how to apply this in a business meaningful way. However if this is an index that measures an individual’s propensity to value social relationships, and to cooperate and collaborate with others within and across networks, then I think this is a reasonable method of indexation.

PeerIndex scores seem less volatile than Klout, and seems not to be driven by the same demand to ‘feed the system’. It also appears that there is less ability to game the system, and I sense that PeerIndex is less likely to attract or reward celebratory.

On balance those that score well on Klout for the ‘right’ reasons, also score well on PeerIndex.

Is it any better or worse than Klout? I think it is simply different, and doubtless still evolving. I guess I am slightly more drawn to it than Klout, but I still find it difficult to translate this to something business meaningful for my clients.

Okay, so in my book at least, I am no further forward. So where else might I get a general perspective on how my social media interactions measure up? Let’s have a look at some of the tools that are designed to make the management of all of our social streams a little easier, and along the way provide some sort of health check on how we are doing.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is certainly one of the more user friendly products out there. It comes in a number of different guises and prices, which define how many profiles you can track and the extent of analytics data you have access to. I am limiting my views to the entry level ‘Pro’ plan costing $9 per month, which has limited measurement tools. However this does include some key data, so you can get basic demographic information, and details such as followers, clicks, retweets etc. shown as trend charts.

You also have a bar chart which tracks ‘influence’ and ‘engagement’. These are both a little easier to understand than perhaps the more pretentious measures used by PeerIndex and Klout. Yes they can be ‘gamed’ by pumping out high volumes, re-tweeting incessantly, and the like, but there is perhaps less motivation to do this because you would only be fooling yourself, rather than trying to impress a wide audience. (Gosh did that sound cynical!).

As you go up the range of plans, so the extent of monitor and measurement tools increases, including in the DeLuxe plan integration with Google Analytics, which is where I believe this all starts to get real.

So a nice tool with good functionality, and some measurement capability, however at the ‘Pro Plan’ level I still don’t see how these measures necessarily fuel my bottom line. Upgrading to DeLuxe at $59 per month, will, I suspect, begin to answer the questions.

CrowdBooster

CrowdBooster is quite an interesting toolset that allows you to manage your Twitter and Facebook accounts, 1 of each in the free account, more in the paid accounts.

The measures provided are relatively basic, but provide a useful gauge of your daily and accumulated activity, including total followers, tweets, mentions and retweets. It also provides a nice graphic representation of the potential reach of your retweets.

Other charts show follower growth, tweets, retweets and mentions over the past week, month, all time or a custom period.

It also shows you who your most influential followers are (that word again, this time influence is measured solely by numbers of followers) and identifies those who retweet you.

Recommendations appear from time to time suggesting you follow or follow back certain people, or respond to someone who mentioned you.

So if you have any conversion metrics that can equate business generated, relative to retweet reach or similar, then maybe this is for you. Otherwise it is one of many tools that provide a dashboard of your overall ‘busy-ness’ but not necessarily business.

Others

There are no shortages of tools in this broad category, most of which will provide some volumetric based measurements reflecting your activity levels. They all have different strengths and weaknesses and which, if any, you choose will be largely based on personal preference. I quite like CoTweet, but I can’t get to grips with MarketMeSuite. Sendible has lots of functionality, but lags behind real time significantly and is rather ‘clunky’ to use. Twaitter soon, allegedly, to become Gremln is potentially useful, but right now seems to be very unreliable.

If you are still reading, I’m grateful, but you must wonder where this is leading. Well I’m going to fast forward over more Twitter products than you can shake a stick at, but do investigate them, oneforty.com is the place to find out about this vast range of tools.

So what can you measure and how? Well I’m a big fan of sticking to the basics, and trying to work out what will prompt a business interaction. Not surprisingly this leads me back to the hub of most marketing campaigns – the website.

Google Analytics

I firmly believe that using Google Analytics will best inform most businesses of the efficacy of their marketing campaigns. The key is to identify the outcomes that are most likely to result in business, and define these as goals within Google Analytics. To understand this in more detail my article “How to measure the success of an internet marketing campaign” might help.

Having determined what website visitor interactions lead to business generation, it is now possible to cast your net wider and look at how social interactions might generate more website visits and, in turn, how these can fuel business growth.

Google Analytics enables you to determine the origin of traffic to your website, so the first step is to look at the traffic that comes from social properties such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc. Are your campaigns and the content you generate through your blog encouraging prospects to visit your site for more information? Are your efforts being rewarded with comments on blog posts, sharing of your content and updates, etc.? If not, it really doesn’t matter what your Klout score is, or how much ‘signal’ you generate.

By starting closest to the point where you turn interested bystanders into supporters, advocates and customers, you can quickly and easily determine which of your social interactions are most likely to fuel this process.

Google Analytics will at some stage integrate Post Rank into the product set to further enhance the ability to track social activity. The inclusion of ‘Share This’ or ‘Add This’ capability along with ‘Like’ and ‘+1′ functions will all help to determine what content is most engaging. Measuring comments, trackbacks and pingbacks by using an enhanced comments tool such as ‘Disqus’, will again show you what impact you are having. At present all of these tools provide analytics which will help you monitor these activities. With PostRank integration into Google Analytics it is likely that much of this information will also become integrated.

So let me, at long last, wrap this up.

All of the social tools will continue to evolve and develop, and as they do will doubtless offer more meaningful measurements. There is increasing evidence of many of them providing an interface into Google Analytics, which suggests to me a growing awareness of the need to set meaningful business measures.

There are plenty of reasons to exploit the rich portfolio of tools available to help you manage the increasing volumes of social activity, but use them for this purpose. If you have determined what social interactions drive business and you can relate those to a measure offered in any of these tools then that is a useful bonus. But please don’t waste effort modifying your social behaviour to influence these scoring systems, modify your social behaviour to support your business.

Peter Rees is an independent Internet Business Consultant. He specializes in a metrics based approach to internet marketing, making extensive use of website analytics and website performance auditing tools to best inform and advise his clients. He is a strong advocate of the need for companies to implement a formal Social Media Strategy, supported in turn by Social Media Policies and measurement

When it comes to a successful social media campaign, the key is to make sure fans, followers and connections aren’t just reading, but engaging in what you have to say. Often, engagement is thought of as being pro-active, but it’s equally as important to use tools that help organize and disseminate information to give you the best chance of getting a good response.

Here are 5 tips to help you market smarter, and one free tool to make it all a piece of cake.

The MarketMeSuite is a cool, free dashboard that can help you market smarter using social media

Tip 1: Organize Your Team

First and foremost you need to organize your social life. If you work as a team, who is managing which accounts? Do you have clients you post on behalf of? Are they posting at the same time as you? These are all questions you need to ask so you never double contact someone. By this, I mean, someone asks a question like “Where do I find info on your return policy?” and 3 different people all reply to that same person. It’s reply inundation and a major turn off. Even if you’re a “one man band” you may wear different social hats. Setting yourself up with different “team” views (even if you’re alone) helps keep you organized and on task.

Tip 2: Geo-Target

Never under-estimate the power of local. Did you know that almost all tweets are now geo-tagged even if not sent from a phone? Use this to your advantage by searching what’s being said about your industry in your location. A restaurant monitoring all tweets about their cafe within 20 miles has a perfect chance to send someone a “thanks for eating with me, mention this tweet code and get 10% off your next meal!”

Tip 3: Stop ignoring Linkedin

Linkedin is still, to some extent, the red haired step child of the “big 3,” behind Twitter and Facebook. But for marketing, there’s a big opportunity. Start Linkedin Groups and start building a following around your brand, and post to it regularly. Get the Linkedin share plugin on your site.

Tip 4: Give Credit

RSS posting is a great way to keep information going out to your followers and fans, but what if the information is not yours? Make sure to marke “RT @ ” the person, or “So and so wrote a great post.”  You do not want your streams to be cluttered with so much information that your following has no idea what’s important. Also, people tend to like being mentioned, and there’s a good chance if you’re posting someone’s feed, they will post yours in return, so let them know!

Tip 5: Be Regular

Granted, you can’t be at your social media dashboard at all hours of the day, but it’s important to have content going out to hit all the time zones you need to interact with. Schedule some posts up for when you’re away (or sleeping) to keep all corners of the world engaged. Just be sure to be ready to respond as soon as you get your computer started the next day.

One Simple, Free Solution to make this all happen for you….

Lucky for you, there is one tool… one FREE tool that helps you do all these things. It’s called MarketMeSuite, and it’s the intuitive social media marketing dashboard.

You can grab it, totally free, here: http://marketmesuite.com/get-app

Posted by Tammy Fennel, CEO of MarketMeSuite. 

If you’ve been playing around on Facebook lately, you may have noticed yet another new button popping up in the top right of people’s profiles. The new button, which is a “subscribe” feature, was introduced on Wednesday in what many are calling an attempt to copy social media rivals Google+ and Twitter.

When you subscribe to someone you have the option to choose how many and what type of updates you see from them.

The new feature allows users to “subscribe” to people’s profiles and see their updates without being their Facebook friend. The updates of people you subscribe to will appear in your news feed along with your friends’ updates, however, you will only be able to see the updates that the poster marks as “public.”

For those who are concerned about the privacy of your posts, note that if you have your settings on “friends only,” subscribers who are not your Facebook friends will still not be able to see your updates. And if this still isn’t satisfactory, you can always disallow the subscribe option altogether so you will not begin accumulating subscribers.

The concept of subscribers who are not not your Facebook friends seems a little odd to most, but for thought leaders, celebrities, and public figures the new feature may become a powerful tool. Now, instead of merely having Facebook pages, public figures can also broadcast directly from their profile to interested followers, much like a Twitter account.  This will be especially important for musicians, journalists, and other small-time public figures that do not currently have a blown-out Facebook presence and will help them get around the 5,000 friend limit that Facebook imposes.

Though the main premise of the subscribe button is to be able to follow people you’re not friends with, you can also subscribe to friends. If you subscribe to a friend, you will be given the option of how many and what type of updates you receive about them in your news feed.

For example, you can block out a friend’s constant Farmville updates and only request updates deemed “important.”  While Facebook has always let you block certain friend’s updates from entering your feed, this new feature allows you to cut out overzealous friends’ random posts without missing out on major news, such as an engagement, that you would want to know about.

However, while the subscribe button has benefits for individual users and public figures, the feature does not bring anything to the table for businesses. You cannot subscribe to a company page, and while Facebook will be rolling out a tool to migrate all of a Fan Page’s fans over to subscribers on a personal account, if you choose to do so you will lose all of your Fan Page content. Additionally, while profiles are prioritized over company pages in search, and are easier to update on the go, they don’t have analytics associated with them and can’t be updated by multiple admins, which poses a problem for companies on Facebook.

So the bottom line? While this tool may be helpful in cleaning up your news feed and may help a select set of moderately popular public figures advance their Facebook presence, the impact of the tool is somewhat limited. Maybe the subscribe button will catch on, but for now, it appears to be an imitation of the much more popular Twitter “follower” model. As such, businesses would be better off keeping their company pages and leaving their public status updates on Twitter.

Posted by Nicole Hall, Account Manager with Mobilize Worldwide. Mobilize Worldwide develops mobile apps, mobile ad campaigns, mobile websites and just about anything else related to mobile marketing for brands interested in growing their sales and revenue using this new and emerging medium.

Twitter, launched in July of 2006, has emerged as one of the top social media platforms enabling users to connect with friends and companies and stay current with constant streams of information. With over 200 millions users generating 190 million tweets a day, Twitter has become a great resource for businesses to engage with consumers.

So, what can you possibly say in 140 characters or less to help your business expand and increase traffic to your website? Well, Blogstrategies.com, Mashable and ChrisBrogan.com have identified a few tactics businesses should keep in mind while Tweeting.

Here are the top 10 you should check out:

1. Hashtags: You should familarize yourself with this symbol (i.e., #) and make it your friend. Put this hashtag in front of a keyword or your company website and Twitter will convert these hashtagged words into searchable keywords. What does this mean for you? Anyone searching for something can find all tweets containing your hashtagged word in a single location, thus making it easier for them to find your tweets even if they’re not one of your followers. Search the database for hashtagged questions pertaining to your business or topics of your expertise and connect with these followers. You’ll find you not only do you have more readers, but possibly more customers as well.

2. Engage with your followers: Simply sending out tweets and not responding to your followers will get you nowhere. It’s important to respond to those that tweet at you and answer any questions they might have. Each time you interact with your followers, make sure it’s a personalized message. No one wants to feel like they’re receiving a mass tweet. If they feel your message is sincere and they like what you have to offer, the chances of them retweeting your information is even greater, thus ultimately exposing your business to more followers.

3. Combine your platforms: Make it easier on yourself by synchronizing your Twitter account with all of your other social platforms. You can do so by associating your Twitter account with the RSS feed of your company website, Facebook page or blog. By doing so, every time you make an update it appears across all of your platforms, meaning you only have to make one update at a time. Sounds efficient, right?

4. Update your profile: Although most of your followers are only reading your tweets and not your bio, it’s important to have a profile in place that’s up-to-date and professional. Think of it as an extension of your brand. Potential new followers and customers will be checking out your profile to see what you’re about before hitting the golden “Follow” button.

5. The power of a list: This Twitter feature has helped companies gain followers and spread their knowledge to a larger audience. A Twitter list is somewhat similar to a Facebook group. Basically a compilation of followers, grouped together for whatever reason you come up with. You can use these lists to your advantage by promoting and rewarding customers. How? Try creating a list comprised of all your valued customers and reward those on the list with a 20% off coupon or free gift with purchase. Lists can also help your business internally. By creating a list of all employees and those that tweet on your behalf, it’s an easy way to manage these tweeters and aggregate accounts. Once you’ve created your list make sure people know about it by adding it to a list directory such as Listorious.

6. Keep track: It’s important to track your followers and identify whose really paying attention to your tweets. You can do so by tracking retweets, clicks, messages and hashtag mentions. This will give you the opportunity to engage with your loyal followers and maintain these relationships.

7. Ask questions: Get feedback from your followers by asking the right questions. Find out what you’re doing right, what you need to work on and what they want more of. This shows not only that you’re listening, but can provide you with valuable insights about your followers and consumers.

8. Tweet about others: You don’t always need to talk about yourself and your company. It’s important to integrate other’s ideas and links into your tweets. Retweet what your followers have tweeted, share their links and let your followers know what you find interesting about a particular tweet. This lets your followers know that you’re human and are interested in what they have to say as well. Not to mention it’s a great way to build and expand your community.

9. Promoted tweets: This is a new feature of Twitter that enables businesses to speak to a larger audience, even those that don’t follow them. How does it work? First, send a tweet to your followers and then promote that tweet. The promoted tweet then appears as content in search results, so those looking for something pertaining to your tag will see it in the search engine. Twitter offers these promoted tweets on a cost-per-engagement basis, meaning you only pay when users retweet, reply or clicks on your tweet.

10. Customer Service: Best Buy is a great example of how to use Twitter to provide real-time customer service. Create an account in which users can tweet questions about products or services to you directly and tag the answers with a hashtag back to your company website. This allows you to interact with your consumers and provide them with something of value. Best Buy is leading the ranks with over 2,900 employees on board to answer questions and have responded to over 38,000 inquiring tweets. You could be next.

What are some of your favorite tips on using Twitter? Did we miss any you think we should add? If so, let us know in the comments section below. While you’re down there, how ’bout Re-Tweeting this post for us!

Posted by Rebecca Wilson, marketing analyst for the 60 Second Marketer.

Buffer, created by Leo Widrich, is a new application designed to help avid Tweeters compile their information and tweet more efficiently.

Buffer allows you to publish tweets without flooding your followers.  It’s simple. Fill Buffer with all your tweets, links and information and Buffer will automatically send your tweets one at a time throughout the day in a spread out time frame.

Just click the Buffer icon when reading a post and automatically post it to your followers.

It’s a great way to keep track of all the things you want to say, while making sure you don’t flood your followers with an overload of information.

Here are some popular features us tweeters love:

Browser Extension: Click on the Buffer icon in any one of your Browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) while reading an article and the link will be automatically added to the queue in your Buffer.

Analytics Feature: Every tweet sent through Buffer allows you to track clicks, re-tweets and the reach your tweets get with your followers. It’s a great way to keep track of who your devoted followers are and what information they love to read.

Retweet Capabilities: Any time you see a tweet on Twitter.com you wish to re-tweet, simply add it to Buffer and it will send it out for you in a timely fashion. No more holding yourself back from re-tweeting. Now  you can do it as much as you want while never overloading you followers with your twitter-happy hands.

The bottom line is that Buffer  allows tweeters to be more efficient and create a more genuine appearance on Twitter. Download this app and you will be able to provide your followers with great information that’s easy for them to keep track of.

Posted by Rebecca Wilson, Marketing Analyst for the 60 Second Marketer.

By Robert Clay, Founder and President, Marketing Wizdom

I don’t write new blog posts every day, as some people do, but this one is a biggie if you own, run or manage a business, and also an important one if you haven’t fully embraced or adapted your marketing approach to today’s vastly changed business landscape.

There's a new paradigm in marketing, according to Robert Clay, one of the U.K.'s most respected marketers. Do you know what the new paragigm involves? Read on to find out.

The end of mass marketing

For 150 years mass marketing was about the ONLY economical way to get your message out there. If you had a better mousetrap and could gather up enough money to tell enough people, you could push it on the world and you’d probably sell enough to build a good business.

But mass marketing is no longer viable for most businesses today, nor is it wanted or trusted by buyers. And I’ll explain why.

An award winning advert from the 1950’s

Let’s start by turning the clock back 60 years to an award winning magazine advert. It featured a veteran buyer sitting solemnly in his chair facing the would-be salesperson and declaring:

I don’t know who you are.

I don’t know your company.

I don’t know your company’s product.

I don’t know what your company stands for.

I don’t know your company’s customers.

I don’t know your company’s record.

I don’t know your company’s reputation.

Now—what was it you wanted to sell me?

The ad concludes:

‘Moral: Sales start before your salesman calls—with business publication advertising.’

That classic advert was created by McGraw-Hill Business Publications, to sell print advertising. The common wisdom at the time was just to get your message out there. But things have now changed. And how.

Print advertising is in steep decline today for reasons I’ll explain. But this award-winning 60-year old advert is still a great ad and it still vividly illustrates the tasks and challenges that you—and everyone in business—face in turning suspects and prospects into loyal customers.

Or does it?

While the barriers to doing business mentioned in that ad are still as relevant today as they were 50-60 years ago, buyer behaviour has changed beyond recognition in recent years, making mass marketing irrelevant for most businesses. Here’s why …

The escalation of commercial clutter

The first big change was the escalation of commercial clutter. That’s when we all started to be bombarded with sales and marketing messages at every turn. Where for years there were only three television channels, suddenly there were hundreds. And a similar proliferation has occurred in just about every area of the media.

In his book Data Smog, Surviving the information glut, David Shenk states that the average American encountered 560 daily marketing messages in 1971. By 1996 it was estimated that the number had increased to over 3,000 messages a day, with each of us seeing more ads in a single year than people of 50 years earlier saw in an entire lifetime. Today the numbers are believed to be somewhat greater still.

This continual assault of advertising and marketing messages has had a pronounced effect on buyers: There are so many messages out there that most people have become extremely adept at blocking them, tuning out all messages that aren’t highly relevant; or those which take extra effort to process. They also remember ads and marketing messages less and less, if at all. And even when buyers DO remember advertising and marketing materials, their retention is scarred by cynicism or, at best, indifference.

Take emails for example. The average email opening rate in early 2010 was 11%, a figure that has been falling for years. That implies that 89% of all mails are never even opened or looked at. Why? because most of them just aren’t important enough to devote any time to. And email, of course, is just one of many message delivery mediums.

In other words billions of dollars, Euros, pounds and other currencies worth of marketing spend just disappears down the plug hole unseen, unwanted and unappreciated every single day.

Because of this deluge of advertising and marketing messages, people are increasingly sceptical and distrustful of what they read or see. They automatically apply a ‘discount factor’ to the sales and marketing messages they see and they’re far more likely to make decisions based on what they hear directly from other people—friends, experts, their own online research, or even salespeople. While mass advertising still has a role, it should be one of the last parts of a marketing strategy today, not the first.

So commercial clutter is out of control, and it is very difficult for you to get noticed in all that clutter. If you sell business to business the people you’re dealing with are not only dealing with all that clutter, they’re probably also dealing with your competitors.

But clutter is only one of several factors that have changed everything in recent years. The rapid development and embrace of the internet has also turned 150 years of mass marketing on it’s head.

Next came the internet. Then Google.

After commercial clutter came the internet. The internet started to go mainstream in the mid 1990’s. Now, barely 15 years later, and boosted by the widespread availability of broadband and wi-fi, it has become an indispensable part of daily life for hundreds of millions of people.

Google’s arrival moved the game on massively again. Founded in September 1998, Google’s online search first appeared on most people’s radar in 2000. Before long the company had single handedly changed the world as we knew it.

While the internet made information available before Google came along, Google made the world’s knowledge accessible — and that’s a big difference. Before Google it was hard to imagine that anyone in the world today, regardless of whether they’re in an emerging or a highly developed economy, could just go online, perform a search, and gather virtually unlimited information on any subject you can think of.

If commercial clutter was a major factor before the internet took off, you now also have to factor in the volume of data we’re all exposed to every day thanks to the internet and Google. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in 2010 that more information is now produced every two days than had been produced in all time before 2003. That’s a staggering statistic.

This ability to search newspapers and magazines the world over for relevant content has had a devastating effect on traditional media. Google’s revolutionary and much more efficient advertising model—where advertisers are only charged when someone clicks on an ad, and where response rates are completely measurable—has decimated the traditional advertising business.

Traditional media want you to pay plenty of money to advertise with them. But they can’t tell you who your ad has reached, unlike Google. Even mediums that dominated their niches until recently, like Yellow Pages, have found that their business has all but vanished, and their very survival is now in doubt.

When people can find just about any information they need in a matter of seconds just by performing a Google search, they simply no longer need to use printed media like Yellow Pages, and even online directories represent an unnecessary extra step and are largely shunned.

If we want to know anything at all, we just Google it. By late 2010 Google had between 65% and 72% share of all US online searches and around 90% in Europe. The rise of Google has created a massive shift in buyer behaviour, resulting in a new age of mass empowerment …

The rise of the social buyer has turned everything on its head. Again.

Then along came social media, and buyer behaviour changed again.

Online bulletin boards, arguably one of the earliest forms of social media, were around long before the internet took off. And instant messaging burst onto the scene in 1996. But social networking as we now know it started in 2002 with the launch of Friendster and MySpace.

Of today’s big players, LinkedIn started in 2003, Facebook and YouTube started in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. By 2009, hundreds of millions of people were enthusiastically embracing social media. It reached a tipping point and became mainstream.

Facebook, initially only available to Harvard students, was launched to the public in 2006. Since then it has accumulated over 500 million users, half of whom log on every single day. By late 2010, Facebook accounted for one in six page views in in the UK (one in four in the US), with some users spending up to 5 hours a day on the site.

As I write this in late 2010, a Hitwise report shows that social networking is now the most popular activity on the web, accounting for 11.5% of all internet visits in the UK. That’s more than the combined visits to Google, Yahoo! And Bing. Facebook is now the web’s largest destination, with 55% of all visits to such sites.

A staggering 4 billion messages are now sent through Facebook EVERY DAY. It’s now a major force in online advertising too, with 23.1% share of the display advertising market, more than doubling its share in a year, according to ComScore. In comparison, Google only has 2.7% of that market.

Google, for now, remains the largest driver of traffic to UK sites. But 1 in 10 such visits now originate from Facebook, making it the second largest driver of traffic as well as the most-visited social network, with YouTube in a distant third place. Twitter, with it’s 175 million subscribers and 100 million tweets a day is also an extremely effective driver of traffic.

Social media has given rise to the social buyer, an increasingly large section of the population who use their social media connections to seek advice and guide their buying decisions. With the growth of traffic from social networking sites increasing at an astonishing rate, everything in marketing has changed yet again. And so has the behaviour of your buyers.

Don’t overlook the role of the smartphone …

Alongside social networking Smartphones have also become ubiquitous. An increasing number of your buyers today are empowered by instant online search, social media and enormously powerful, always-on, easy to use mobile devices that they carry with them 24/7/365.

These powerful pocketable computers are now the norm, not the exception. And they have made a huge difference to what can be shared. Phones, ironically, are now used less and less for phone calls and more and more for emailing, texting, searching, browsing the web, taking and sharing photographs and videos, playing games, taking notes and connecting to one another via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Your buyers can now find whatever information they want in a few seconds, wherever they are, and whenever it suits them. And that has changed their behavior yet again.

We’re now in an age of mass empowerment

Fueled by the internet, broadband, sophisticated online search, social media, wi-fi and smartphones, we’ve now entered an age of mass empowerment, where your buyers (whether you sell to consumers or B2B), are in the driving seat. You can tell them whatever you like, but they no longer accept at face value what you tell them.

They can easily and instantly draw on a variety of sources for their information, balancing what they see, read and hear from multiple sources and making whatever decisions they feel are most appropriate to them.

And they don’t like, welcome or want unsolicited messages from you. Uninvited messages pushed out to the world may have been the norm for 150 years. But now that there are better, more personal, and more effective ways of communicating, uninvited messages are considered to be spam, and tolerance for them has plummeted. What was the norm is now unwelcome and even creates hostility.

Your buyers delete irrelevant emails, block popups, filter or report spam, and surf away from sites they dislike. They just don’t need these things because it’s so easy today to obtain relevant information from multiple trusted sources wherever and whenever it is needed. In other words buyers are no longer at the whim of marketers. And they don’t want to be.

In today’s age of mass empowerment your buyers decide for themselves who they’re willing to listen to; speak to; or believe. They also decide if, what and when they buy. They can easily locate and speak to people who already have experience of your product or service. And if they ever have a bad experience they can tell 10,000 (or 10 million) people in an instant at the push of a button. It’s a game changer of epic proportions.

In a few short years these new dynamics have entirely changed both your buyers’ habits and the way they do business. What works today is very different to what worked only 10 years ago. And with the pace of change accelerating as never before you no longer have the option of doing business the way it used to be done. That’s because with unlimited information at their fingertips wherever they are, your buyers no longer consume information or make decisions the way they did even 10 years ago.

And if that doesn’t already describe your current buyers, it soon will.

The barriers have multiplied

If the McGraw-Hill ad at the start of this article were rewritten today, it could easily be re-stated as follows:

You’re good at what you do

You take good care of your customers

They love and recommend what you do

You just need more of them …

But your prospects don’t know who you are

They don’t know your company

They don’t know your product or service

They don’t know what you stand for

They don’t know your customers

They don’t know your record

They don’t know your reputation

They’re surrounded by sales and marketing messages at every turn

They’re deluged by people who want to part them from their money

They’re cynical or indifferent to your claims

They’re resistant to new purchase opportunities

They’re more and more demanding

They probably already have a relationship with your competitors

They’re working harder than ever but still falling behind

They don’t need another relationship

They don’t have time to listen to you

They don’t read or respond to your emails

They don’t return your calls for months

THEY decide who they’ll speak to, and what and when they’ll buy

Now — what was it you wanted to sell them?

These barriers to doing business are very real today. They also destroy the economics of mass marketing for most people in business. In addition, your best customers and clients are also your competitors’ most sought-after prospects this very minute … and they’re everywhere just waiting for you to slip up.

You can deal with this as long as you embrace a new way of marketing, based on a new way of thinking.

The new marketing paradigm

Marketing used to be defined in terms of 4Ps. Product, Price, Place and Promotion. But with the rise of social media there is now a 5th P, “People.”

Good marketing today is NOT about interrupting people or blasting them with unwanted messages. Instead it is about building relationships, peer influence, trust and engagement with a self-selecting audience.

That entails precise targeting; finding and focusing only on high potential prospects rather than mediocre suspects; positioning your product or service effectively in the minds of your prospects, which includes telling your story; and building sufficient trust for prospects to elect to hear what you have to say; let you into their space; and, in time, share your story with their contacts.

It’s no longer about sending messages to your potential clients where 98% don’t want to know, but instead, as Internet Psychologist Graham Jones says, it’s about encouraging them to send messages to you. Do that and you’ll know precisely what’s on their mind and can respond with a targeted message that’s much more likely to connect … giving you a dramatically greater response rate, and no redundancy.

Instead of wasting time on marketing campaigns that are 98% ineffective, it’s about encouraging your prospects and customers to connect with you and ask you questions so that you can respond with the exact answers they need.

It wasn’t easy or economical to do this on any scale in the past. But today’s social media tools make it both easy and inexpensive. It’s not hard to do. But it does requires a large shift in mindset, which can itself be hard. You also need to know what you’re doing, and where you can combine the old ways with the new, because one slip up in what you say or how you deliver your product or service can cost you dear.

Doing your best may have been enough to keep you in business in the past. But in today’s age of mass empowerment you have to embrace new ways of doing things and adapt the way you do business. Then do your best. And if you don’t, then I’m sorry, but your competitors will eat you alive as industry after industry can already testify.

I am sure you have thoughts you can contribute to this topic. Maybe you can share examples to illustrate some of my points. If so, please share your perspectives below. We’d love to have them.

By Robert Clay, Founder and President of Marketing Wizdom, Milton Keynes, U.K.

by Linda Lindsey, Creative Director, Brightree LLC

One Marketer’s Opinion

I admit it: I tweet because I think I should tweet.

Marketing has changed more in the last 3 years than it has in the past twenty.  With such rapid advances in technology, B2B marketers can no longer sit back and watch B2C marketers succeed and fail for years before making our entrance into new marketing mediums.  

Twitter launched on July 15, 2006, but I didn’t take it seriously until April 15, 2009.  That is the day Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN to a popularity contest in a race to get 1 million followers. Intrigued, I signed up immediately.  Quickly defeated, CNN raised this poignant question, “Does this mark a new peak for the microblogging service? Or the beginning of its demise?”

It appears that, for now, CNN’s prediction was little more than sour grapes.  By June of 2010, 65 million tweets were posted each day — about 750 tweets per second.  When Michael Jackson died, fans flooded twitter, crashing their server, and posting an unprecedented 30% of all tweets on a single topic.

My first “disappoint-tweet” (Disappointment with Twitter) came when I realized that Ashton’s tweets (yes, I followed Ashton, not CNN) would not be delivered to me via email, instead I had to log on to Twitter to see them. The last thing I needed was another avenue to bombard me with irrelevant information – a place I felt compelled to sift and search for meaning.  Ashton Kutcher’s comments didn’t inspire or even moderately entertain me, so I tuned in to the President of the National Business Marketing Association.  I was sure to be inspired with riveting marketing insights, tips, and techniques that I could adopt for my clients.

Here a small selection of the tweets he posted in a 24 hour period:

• “Working with the team of a new PR company….. to run with the big dogs, you have to learn to pee in the tall grass”
• “I was able to switch seats to my fav seat on a PACKED plane. I live a charmed life. I love the little things in life!”
• “Enjoying a little Five Guys — found one near my hotel”
• “Working to catch up on all the stuff from the week…. need to get out of my room for a walk! It is hot in Houston!”

… And I am a better marketer for it …

I read case studies ad nauseum to find out what is working for other marketers so I can incorporate their successes and avoid their mistakes.  In August of 2008, I laughed when I heard that Dell planned to answer questions from reporters and customers in real-time via Twitter during a press conference launching a new line of Latitude laptop computers.  As I predicted, this tactic was riddled with confusion and followers had difficulty following the conversation strings.

But no one is laughing at Dell now … by 2009, Dell reported earning $3 million in revenue as a result of posting coupons and announcing new products on Twitter.  B2C marketers like Dell and Starbucks have found successful ways to be profitable via Twitter in the consumer world and I take my hat off to them.

But where does this leave the B2B marketer?

My next disappoint-tweet came in 2009, when a San Antonio based market research firm analyzed 2,000 tweets and deemed 41%, “pointless babble”.  Last month, Sysomos, a maker of social media analysis tools released their study of what happened to 1.2 billion tweets studied over a two-month period.  Not surprising, here is what they found:

• 71% of all tweets produce no reaction
• Only 6% of all tweets produce a retweet (if you aren’t retweeted within the first hour, there is only a 7.6% chance you’ll be retweeted)
• 85% of tweets that actually receive a reply, receive only one; and
• Only 1.53% of conversations are three levels deep

My next disappoint-tweet came last month when I read an article in Newsweek that questioned whether Twitter was protecting Ashton Kutcher and other celebrities who’s endorsement helped bring Twitter record numbers of new followers.  The reporter reveals his “obsessive suspicion” that Twitter somehow “sanitizes search results.” Jolted, I felt as if I was looking out from inside a fishbowl, a tiny pawn in a huge social experiment.

It has been said that, “It is better to be re-tweeted than to be followed.”  Ashton Kutcher has 6 million followers.  CNN has 3.5 million followers.  Me? I have 47 followers.  My twitter marketing strategy remains unchanged.  To me it is all about focus – I spend my time on the tactics that generate the best return on investment for my money and my time.  For now, I tweet because I think I should, and I’m waiting for CNN’s sour grapes prediction to turn into a fine wine … oh, and I’m trying to figure out how to pee in the tall grass.

By Ann Pruitt

Twitter continues to grow – but what will make it thrive? Like any growing thing, it needs the right combination of nourishment to be strong, and Twitter’s nourishment comes from the various types of people that use Twitter. John Taylor, at Inc.com provides his insights on the types of Tweeters he believes makes Twitter work.  Below we have a summary of Taylor’s post, or read the whole thing here.

Which style describes you? Are we missing any?

___   The Customer Support Rep: This person is focused on watching for and responding to customer service questions, and sometimes will actually help resolve issues.

___   The Publisher: People and companies will often use Twitter as a way to simply feed followers information about their area of influence. A lot of news is now breaking on Twitter before it hits major publications.

___  The Promotion Channel: Both spammers and e-commerce sites fit into this category, but the e-commerce sites use Twitter in interesting ways to do promotion and inform customers about products they are interested in. Contests, Twitter-only discount codes, and free giveaways are all part of the promotion channel arsenal.

___  The Conversationalist: Many of the most popular tweeters are those who actively engage with several posts per day for their followers. It can be very time consuming, but the rewards are high in terms of building a loyal following and truly connecting.

___ The Curious: These people don’t post to Twitter. Instead, they use it as an information resource, watching the Twitter trending topics to crowd source their news or follow people they find interesting or informative.

___  The Personality: This applies both to actual celebrities, and people who are building a brand that can be clearly defined as having a “voice,” people like Oprah Winfrey and Tony Hsieh of Zappos. People follow these feeds for a variety of reasons but mainly because they receive something emotionally satisfying from the postings.

___  The Guide: This is typically a person or people assigned to seek out messages posted by people with questions related to a certain topic, products or services they have expertise in.

___  The Brand Watchdog: This is someone proactively seeking out mentions of their company name or product name and responding personally to each post. Companies can win big brownie points by having very senior staff members respond to customer service questions.

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From 8 Types of People That Belong on Twitter, by John Taylor at Inc.com

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As we learn more about the uses and mis-uses of Twitter, it’s nice to know some folks out there are paving the way for the rest of us. They’re the small guys, and they’ve figured out good ways to use Twitter, which provides a standard for us to follow. Yes, it’s a standard that may change as this particular social medium changes, but at least it’s a good place to start.

Open Forum.com has compiled their list of the top small business Twitterers to follow. If you’re just figuring out Twitter, or if you’re a pro, these are some good folks to follow to see how they’re capturing the energy of the internet in 140 characters or less.

http://bit.ly/SmallBusTwitterers

Not on the list this year? The 60SecondTweets from us here at The 60 Second Marketer. Well…it gives us a goal to reach for….

http://twitter.com/60SecondTweets