Sumolabs

Announcing TweetTop.com - Who to Follow on Twitter

I got bored over the past two nights and created TweetTop.com. It took me 6 hours (which is why it looks like crap -- I'm not a designer).

Tweet Top is the latest and greatest from Twitter people on popular topics. We update the latest thinking from topic experts every 20-30 seconds. Pick a Topic below and we'll deliver it to you 24 x 7. All the top "Tweets", All the Time.

Currently it has 18 topics and we'll add more based on user suggestions. Got any?

So -- if you are struggling with figuring out who to follow on Twitter, or just don't want to bother with creating your own account at all, then TweetTop.com is for you.

Current Topics

Yes. I added myself to the Social Media page. Deal with it ;)

How Not to React to Negative Customer Feedback...

I recently assisted a friend of mine who works at a large corporation in the US. He is in the marketing department, and I helped him setup some basic monitoring tools using Netvibes.

Often times, I would peak at the brand monitor to see what was being said or whether I could improve the monitoring for him.

One day, I stumbled upon a particularly bad post, where a number of disgruntled customers were being very vocal about how dissatisfied they were with a recent product decision.

I notified my friend, and indicated that his marketing department should be aware of the conversation and authentically join it to resolve the issue.

What happened, baffled me. When I visited the next day, there were 5 or so posts, all written in the same tone (but allegedly by different people) defending the product decision and stating how it was the right decision to make and "everyone should be happy". This was not the response I expected from such a large company.

I was a bit shocked: It was all clearly written by one person, and it made the company appear ever more negatively in the eyes of their customers.

Rule for Social Media: Be Authentic. Be Honest.

My Definition of Social Media:

Let's beat a dead horse.

What exactly is social media? Here is how I define it:

Social media is the ecosystem of conversations and interactions around traditional content AND user generated content.

These conversations and interactions are enabled by various technologies, including, but not limited to, blogs, wikis, podcasts, microblogging (i.e. twitter), social networks (i.e. facebook), RSS, forums, rating sites and UGC websites (i.e. YouTube). Anything that facilitates these conversations and interactions can be seen as being part of social media.

Simple. Factual. I don't try to scare people with the whole "the media world has been completely turned upside down". Baby steps, People, Baby Steps.

Consumer Influencers 2009 Trends

Targeting Influencers in Social Media Campaigns

Many people in social media are following one variation or another of the Forrester POST method.

In a nutshell:

• People - Understand how your customers are using social technologies
• Objectives - Define your objectives
• Strategy - Define your strategy for social media
• Technology - Select the technologies that you want to use (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, or whatever startup has their current 6 months of fame)

This is great. Social media is chaos and this gives us a pragmatic approach to developing social media strategies to coalesce the mess.

However, I sometimes feel like we spend too much time simply thinking about how the target demographic interact with social technologies. My colleague, Lorraine, and I, spent lots of time talking last week about how targeting the influencers of a target demographic is almost as important as the primary.

For example, consider trying to raise awareness for a particularly embarrassing medical exam, the prostate exam. The target demographic here is men over 40+, but several other demographic have influence over our primary: Fathers, Wives, Kids, etc. A social media campaign can engage any of these groups, educate them, and drive them to inform the primary demographic on the facts and importance about the exam (and ultimately get them into the Doctor's office).

Obviously, different campaigns would be needed for influencers vs. the target demographic, each with their own set of key performance indicators. As such, we need to look at how these influences utilize social technologies as well (if we are to target them with a separate campaign)