Here is a Killer job opening for somone who wants to be a social media director.

Good Luck.. if you get it let me know.

by Mary Killelea, September 14, 2009

You can now tag friends & Pages in status updates on Facebook Ex: tag your friend in your post. To tag Mary, start the post with @Mary (a drop down menu will appear so you can select which Mary - This is nice because if you use twitter you have to hope you remembered thier name correctly this feature helps you by providing choices.)

 Here’s how it works: when writing a status update in the publisher, users can tag connections by using the “@” symbol, just like on Twitter. Facebook pops up a dropdown menu that allows users to select any friend, Page, group, or event. When a friend, Page, etc, is tagged, that shows up on their wall. When you’re tagged, a notification is sent to you as well, and you can remove tags of yourself in others’ posts.

 What is great is that Facebook is enabling status tagging for all of a user’s Facebook connections – not just friends, but Pages, groups, and events as well. This means Page managers will now have a great new resource for tracking comments and feedback about their brand or business. Up until now, brands have been able to track posts and comments made on their Facebook Page directly by fans, as well as search public comments made by Facebook users through Facebook’s new real time search.

As of today, all @ tags will appear on the wall of the Page as well, even though users never visited the Page. The same applies to event and group administrators as well. That’s a big deal for Page administrators hoping to gain more insight into how they’re being talked about inside Facebook.

By Mary Killelea August 13, 2009 

My new internet marketing tool is  Hootsuite ( http://hootsuite.com ) The great thing about Hootsuite is it allows you to streamline your internet marketing efforts. It allows you to still be broad in your reach but saves you precious time!  And it’s FREE.  We are truly living in amazing times with the amount of new technology we are seeing every day and it’s amazing the rate of new technology and services being offered and developed.  It certainly  can be overwhelming if you don’t use tools like this to help you stay on top of your field.  Here is a list of the what Hootiesuite offers as part of it’s service:

Multiple Accounts - Save your time and save your sanity. Continue managing all of your Twitter profiles through one client: HootSuite

Team Workflow - Have a company or organization with more than one contributor? HootSuite is still making it easy to manage multiple users over various Twitter accounts.

Track Statistics - Impress your friends, your boss or just yourself with our improved visualizations link statistics. Graphs show not only a summary but also individual tweet statistics!

Multi-Column View (like tweetdeck) - Never miss a tweet with HootSuite 2.0 multiple columns feature. Organize your Twitter stream into friends, news, search terms, keyword tracking - whatever you like! Our drag and drop feature allows you to easily move individuals into group columns.

Tabbed Layout - The new tabbed layout takes Twitter categories to new heights. Organize and customize your Tweeting experience. Within each tab, you are able to create up to 6 columns. Drag and drop your tabs for easy organizing.

Create Groups - Now you can create customizable columns for your friends, groups or topics of interest! Add users through their @username or drag and drop them from other columns! Hoot

Embed Columns - Want to feed the chatter from a customized Twitter column somewhere else? Now you can grab code from HootSuite to easily embed Twitter search columns in your blog or website.

Feed Your RSS  -Like to feed your blog or website through Twitter? Tis easy! Automatically feed your RSS to your Twitter stream with HootSuite!

Ping.fm Integration - Update all of your social networks with a single update! HootSuite with Ping.FM allows you to update your Facebook, Wordpress, MySpace, LinkedIn and more.  What’s Ping.fm? Think of it as your social network glue.  A Ping.fm account lets you send a single update to multiple networks simultaneously: Facebook, Wordpress, MySpace, LinkedIn, and more. And now you’re able to send those updates through HootSuite to take advantage of scheduling, clickthrough stats, and all the other cool features HootSuite has to offer. 

Schedule Tweets - Provide rich, nourishing content to your followers at any time of day using the HootSuite tweet scheduler. Pre-schedule anything you like, from radio programming to birthday well-wishes. Or, tweet live!

Quick Search - Located directly on the dashboard, click the search bar to see current trending topics, to search keywords, or monitor your brand. Like what you see? Save the search as a column!

View User Info - Easily view users’ details without being taken to a separate window! Click on their username or avatar to view an in-screen popup to view their detailed bio, follow them, or add them to one of your groups

And a host of other standard features like notifications and alerts etc. 

By Mary Killelea August 13, 2009 

Facebook’s U.S. users grew by 14% in July ALONE! - While metrics from other analytics firms say Facebook’s US growth slowed in July, new data just in from comScore actually tells the opposite story. According to comScore, Facebook’s traffic to its main site grew by nearly 14% month over month in July to over 87.7 million US uniques – the highest monthly growth rate Facebook has experienced in the last year

With Facebook hitting an all-time high growth rate in the US, according to comScore. It now seems that the redesign earlier this year hasn’t been “disastrous” as some people had claimed it would be – while Facebook is still working on improving the “highlights” section of the home page and  re-integrating it with the real time stream, Facebook’s American audience has continued to expand across the demographic board.

As Facebook continues its experiments to make sharing more efficient, the company is now testing a “faster, simpler version of Facebook” called Facebook Lite. Facebook Lite is now live at lite.facebook.com for those users included in the beta test.  Facebook says it is running the test primarily in countries “where we are seeing lots of new users coming to Facebook for the first time and are looking to start off with a more simple experience.”

Users who are part of the beta test are seeing what could be described as a more FriendFeed-like version of Facebook. The stream appears to be reduced to just status updates, likes, and comments – no activity stories, application stories, or embedded content appear. In addition, profile page tabs have been moved to the left side of the page, all basic info and small profile boxes have been removed, and the publisher is not open by default. 

If you ask me they want to compete with Twitter they can say it’s for efficency purposes but we’ll see how similiar the user experience is to Twitter when it’s all said and done.

by Mary Killelea on August 9, 2009

This week Twitter servers were down for a bit due to a server attack. Then those that were freaking out went to facebook and caused their server to go down for  a bit too.

Even though it doesn’t seem like a big deal for twitter to be down for a bit or for facebook to go down for a few minutes it is a HUGE deal if all of your marketing efforts are only utilizing one social media channel.  So let’s say you only use Twitter as your means of marketing. How vulnerable and frustrated were you when Twitter was down?

This is a valuable lesson that goes to show you, you should never, ever rely on one service to get your message out.

Twitter is great and is a fun platform for engaging people, and if you’re doing it correctly and adding content of value to Twitter most likely you are seeing some good traffic benefits from participating on Twittere.  But you shouldn’t be using JUST Twitter (or any other service) to communicate with your customers, readers or clients.

It is so important to also get a Facebook fan page. One easy way is to do what I have done. I have added a facebook widget on my blog .. check out the one on this page where you can easily become a fan.  Also another important thing to do as a business owner/marketer is to start collecting email subscribers so you can communicate with them directly and encourage RSS subscriptions and make it easy for RSS readers to also have the ability to get your feeds via email as well.

By offering these variety of ways to get your message out you can reach your fans, friends and subscribers through a variety of channels eliminating your frustration if Twitter or Facebook goes down. You still have other avenues of marketing tactics to get your message out and continue on with your daily business goals.

Why should you be on Twitter or Facebook.. here is some quick stats:

Twitter.com is a top 50 site that reaches over 27 million U.S. monthly people. The site attracts a slightly more female than male group

Facebook.com is a top 10 site that reaches over 91 million U.S. monthly people. The site attracts a more affluent, teen and young adult, very slightly female biased following.

 Whether you have a huge number of followers or a huge number of fans an important thing to recognize is the  goal with social media isn’t just to gain a  large numbers of subscribers or followers. (If they’re un-targeted subscribers, perhaps people who are just following you so that you follow them back, they’re pretty much worthless). What you want and need to do with social media is attract people interested in you, in your niche and then funnel them into other channels, other places, where you can reach them.

Keep in mind too that people prefer different methods of communication. Again another reason to make sure your marketing message is utlizing the various social media channels. One person might love email and hate Facebook, have a Twitter account but never use it and be a casual RSS reader.  Another person might never check their email, RSS feeds or Twitter but be live on Facebook.

Your job as a successful business marketer is to be in contact with your audience, potential customers, clients, reader, subscribers in whatever medium or platform they choose and are comfortable with.  You need to be where they are.  You need to be right there in front of them whenever they open up their favorite app or web address to see what’s happening.

In closing here are the take aways fromt this article.  You must diversify your Social media mix.  Good luck!

By Mary Killelea August 6, 2009

If you have a business page and want to take a look at it’s effectiveness in your engagements with your fans or recent ads check out the new stats. (Insights Page)

This is directly from the Insights page from Face book fan page it’s located on the left side of your page. Click on it and you’ll receive this message and see the graphs of info.

“Welcome to your new Insights Page.
Facebook allows you to engage with your fans in more ways than ever before - and Insights now allows you to dive into the context of those interactions with deep analytics. We now show you how users are interacting with your page, broken down by Wall posts, likes and comments. Your Post Quality shows you how engaging your posts are to your fans, and your star rating compares your Post Quality to other pages of similar size. Your Fans Over Time graph now lets you track when users decide to unsubscribe from your posts in their News Feed. And we now provide statistics on where your fan base is located and which languages they speak. If you would like to export your reports, please click “Switch to the Old Insights” in the menu above and follow the Export link. Check back frequently, as we will be adding new metrics in the coming weeks and months!”

A question commonly asked is do I have to have a facebook page or is a group good enough. Well when Facebook first launched Facebook Pages, many businesses and brands who had built up substantial audiences in their Facebook Groups asked Facebook to move their Group members over to their Facebook Page. For example, last year, Facebook converted the Apple Students Sponsored Group to a Facebook Page. (Facebook promoted “Sponsored Groups” back in the day.)

Now that Facebook Pages have been live for a long time, Facebook has stopped converting Groups to Pages in recent months. Instead, Facebook is offering Group owners the following recommendation:

You’re welcome to create a Page and notify your Group members that you’ll be using the Page instead of the Group going forward. If your Group has too many members to send them a message, we unfortunately aren’t able to provide you with any other solutions for how you might contact them about this change.

So what it come down to is  if you’re a business or brand, you shouldn’t be driving users to a Facebook Group any more. You should be creating and promoting  Facebook Pages over Groups because

1. Pages Allow Marketers to Publish to the Stream
2. Pages Allow Marketers to Engage Fans with Rich Media
3. Pages Let Marketers Analyze How Fans are Interacting with the Insights Dashboard
4. Pages Let Marketers Increase SEO

I am always trying to find ways to enhance my fan pages and have found these 8 GREAT Facebook Apps to check out.

Video, Polls, Notes, Static FMB, Social Fly, Slide Share (post pdf and power points), Reviews, Involver

Okay so you have a twitter account and you tweet often and have people you follow and others who follow you.  Really, whether you are a marketer or not, the idea of finding others who tweet about the same stuff you like is of interest.  Now if you are a marketer you definately want to get in on this!

As defined on www.hashmarks.org  Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. 

Twitter Fan Wiki explains, “Hashtags were developed as a means to create ”groupings” on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels, and later from Jaiku’s channels. ”

hashtags.org provides real-time tracking of Twitter hashtags. Opt-in by following @hashtags to have your hashtags tracked.  Similarly, Twemes offers real-time tracking without the necessity of following a specific Twitter account.  Also, with their purchase of Summize, Twitter itself now offers some support of hashtags at their search engine: http://search.twitter.com

How To Use Hashtags

First, follow @hashtags on Twitter. They will follow you back automatically, and your hashtags will be tracked.

Next, start using hashtags in your tweets, preceding key words. It can be helpful to do a little research first, to find out if the subject you’re tweeting already has an established hashtag. Also, check Suggestions and Tips and Example Uses below for ettiquette and general usage.

Finally, track other tweets on the subjects you’re interested in (ie: those containing the appropriate hashtags) by browsing/searching at Hashtags.org or TwitterGroups. You can set it up with RSS feeds as well.

Origin and interesting fact: Hashtags were popularized during the San Diego forest fires in 2007 when Nate Ritter used the hashtag “#sandiegofire” to identify his updates related to the disaster. 

Fantastic resource and origin of most of this content came from http://twitter.pbworks.com/Hashtags  Essential for any avid user of twitter.   Now beware there are some who frown on adding Hashtags but I personally don’t think they see the true value of the idea and the over all benefits as a user and as a person sharing truly something of value.  Only time will tell.

So I was not totally surprised at this list except for #10 come on.. seriously Jimmy Fallon?? I guess I need to watch his show more to get him.  Another one that was a bit of a surprise was #6 - John Mayer.  I’d rather see Connen or David Lettermen on there instead of him. We all know Ashton has it going on so that’s no surprise he’s number 1 and I love Ellen! 

Who do you think should have been in the top ten?  I’m working on my list and will post it soon. 

#1

1,825,141

followers

+15,239

new

aplusk

I make stuff, actually I make up stuff, stories mostly, collaborations of thoughts, dreams, and actions. Thats me.

Full Name:ashton kutcher

Website: http://blahgirls.com  Tags: web, entrepreneur, socialmedia

#2

1,561,920

followers

+15,248

new

TheEllenShow

Find Ellen’s monologue, celebrity photos and videos, games, giveaways, how to get tickets and more on The Ellen Show website.

Full Name:Ellen DeGeneres

Website: http://www.ellentv.comTags: celebrity, tv

#3

1,521,335

followers

+8,241

new

cnnbrk

CNN.com is among the world’s leaders in online news and information delivery.

Full Name:CNN Breaking News

Website: http://cnn.com/Tags: news

#4

1,502,626

followers

+7,868

new

britneyspears

Yes! This is the real Britney Spears! We’ve got updates from her team, her website and yes, even Britney herself!

Full Name:Britney Spears

Website: http://www.britneyspears.comTags: celebrity

#5

1,197,821

followers

+52,062

new

BarackObama

Full Name:Barack Obama

Website: http://www.barackobama.comTags: politics

#6

1,096,604

followers

+9,751

new

johncmayer

Recording/Sandwich Artist

Full Name:John Mayer

Website: http://www.johnmayer.comTags: music

#7

1,034,249

followers

+9,286

new

RyanSeacrest

Get official tweets from Ryan and his producers about the radio shows, American Idol and breaking news from Hollywood!

Full Name:Ryan Seacrest

Website: http://www.ryanseacrest.comTags: radio, celebrity, tv

#8

1,019,428

followers

+4,786

new

THE_REAL_SHAQ

VERY QUOTATIOUS, I PERFORM RANDOM ACTS OF SHAQNESS

Full Name:THE_REAL_SHAQ

Website: Tags: sports, nba, celebrity

#9

1,019,191

followers

+81,899

new

Oprah

Live Your Best Life

Full Name:Oprah Winfrey

Website: http://www.oprah.comTags: tv, celebrity

#10

1,016,593

followers

+7,647

new

jimmyfallon

The Portland chapter of Social Media Club, SEMpdx and Software Association of Oregon had the first annual SoMē Awards to recognize outstanding Social Media projects and the people who created them.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the Awards that night but I heard from Ericka, Andrea and others that it turned out great. The top winner was Eric T. Peterson from http://www.twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/index.asp

Twitalyzer is a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media. 

Eric Peterson who is from Portland (which I thought was pretty cool) and is Chief Executive officer, and Principal consultant for Web Anayltics Demystified, Inc., gave a great presentation as well.  He is an inovator and a numbers guy for sure. His presentation was on Attribution, Influence and Engagement. The Digital Marketer’s New Nightmare.  He discussed the need for accountablity in today’s digital market and provided a tool that helps respond to companies ceo’s cfo, cio and the other c’s  with actual numbers and tracking reports that they are used to from traditional marketing.  The cry for this type of reports was echoed from many of the antendees.  This topic of how do we track or justify our Social networking efforts and - or  digital marketing efforts to our bosses to get their support and buy off ~ was consistently discussed from every presentor throughout the two day event at InnoTech.   THIS IS A HOT TOPIC and I commend Eric for his development of  Twitalizer and know there will be many other tools like this since the need to justify expenses on SEM is so great.

Okay as I mentioned Twitter is catching on like wild fire people are outsourcing people now to ghost twitter for them. Now what the fun is that. Here is a great article on Ghost Twittering.

35 twitter tips from those that tweet  

Want to dress up your twitter space check out www.mytweetspace.com

Get your news alerts from Twitter 

Learn what Twitter Tracking is.

Here is some Common list of Twitter commands from Everything you ever need to know about Twitter
Written By: Koka Sexton

• @username + message
  directs a twitter at another person, and causes your twitter to save in their “replies” tab.
  Example: @ijustine I love that song too!
• D username + messagesends a person a private message that goes to their device, and saves in their web archive.
  Example: d krissy want to pick a Jamba Juice for me while you’re there?
• WHOIS usernameretrieves the profile information for any public user on Twitter.
  Example: whois jack
• GET usernameretrieves the latest Twitter update posted by the person.
  Example: get goldman
• NUDGE usernamereminds a friend to update by asking what they’re doing on your behalf.
  Example: nudge biz
• FAV usernamemarks a person’s last twitter as a favorite. (hint: reply to any update with FAV to mark it as a favorite if you’re receiving it in real time)
  Example: fav al3x

• STATSthis command returns your number of followers, how many people you’re following, and which words you’re tracking.