There is much to be learned from watching search engines, particularly if you’re interested in selling things online. Personalised search means the focus is shifting away from matching keywords to looking at user intent. Keyword matching hasn’t disappeared off the radar – it’s still important – but information gathered from searchers is another factor to watch.

GSPW

Enter Google Search Plus Your World, which has gotten a lot of attention lately, particularly considering recent privacy debates in the U.S.

If users are signed in to their accounts on GSPW, they can select and share information under different categories. Although officially it’s about sharing information, it’s also a quick and easy way of finding out what peoples’ interests are.

Boost Score

According to a patent entitled “Variable Personalization of Search Results in a Search Engine”, filed on behalf of Google engineers in 2010, Google is looking to deliver queries for logged-in users based on what it calls a boost score. Although initial results will be centred on more familiar relevancy and quality factors, more specific queries can be made according to a user’s personal interests.

Boost Score vs. SEO

Consider: Google builds a directory of websites categorised by human interests, for example, health. If a user selects health as an interest, any site listed in Google’s directory will have an associated boost score determined by relevancy. When the user’s query returns a site about health, that site’s boost score is multiplied by the level of personalisation applied – improving its ranking.

The score is calculated by seeding sites with high relevancy score in the directory, finding a list of sites that are “heavily linked” to by the seed sites, and then finding sites that are linked to by those sites. The weight is the boost score.

What’s important to note is that links are still an important ingredient in Google’s idea of relevancy. Although the boost score is multiplied by the level of personalisation applied to “boost” retrieval of information, it is old-fashioned relevancy and quality that kicks off the process to begin with.

As many of you know, it doesn’t matter whether users are signed into GSPW because “Google’s recent policy change allows them to transfer interests collected from Android,  G+, Chrome,  Gmail, YouTube and other services into a super profile used to personalize search.”

Google is certainly not underestimating the activity happening across social media. It is considering people and peoples’ associations as ranking signals, and using tweets, likes, comments, shares and upvotes to gauge value.

What do you think? Should everyone see the same results when searching for the same keyword or do you support the idea of having results tailored to your personal interests? Do you use GSPW? Let us know.

One of the events was Build Communities Not Campaigns hosted by Comufy. Organised in a lovely restaurant, in-between Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Circus, Build Communities Not Campaigns was a panel event which included top professional speakers from leading PR and social media agencies.  Taking centre stage was Ying Wong, Head of Digital at RLM Finsbury, Blaise Grim Viort, Head of Community & Social Media at EModeration, Neil Hallmark, Head of Digital at Kaizo and Rob Horsfield, Managing Partner at Brass Agency.

As the name suggests, the aim of the panel was to highlight the importance of brand communities over campaigns; how to build communities (with your brand advocates), and how to sustain engagement and interest within a community.  In the hour long event, each speaker took turns to share their social media wisdom and answer questions from the event mediator, as well as the audience. Below are some of the key points from each professional:

Ying Wong

• Part of the preparation is focusing on knowing who the influential people are – make them feel special and they will be your advocates when negative comments are posted
• Seed content and get people talking to one another – talking to community members offline will get them talking more online
• Getting a select number of people who comment and engage within the community is just as important as a million people who ‘like’ a page and bounce off
• Facebook ‘Likes’ don’t always mean a lot
• ROI is not that simple when measuring sentiment – look at share price and how much positive/ negative coverage over a period of time

Blaise Grim Viort

• Focus on people’s sense of belonging and influence, as well as monitoring if their needs are being met. From a community perspective,  engagement is essential, then you should look at engagement between members
• Keep things simple by asking communities for their feedback on products out now, not in the future
• Work with the 3 P’s – People talking about the brand – get a relationship going, make sure they are Passionate and then build a Process around them
• Make it clear to people that certain discussions will not be appropriate – alternatively, run a live social media crisis situation with fake social account, imagine a dispute and go through the steps of how to deal with the problem
• ROI depends on client objectives – is it to build and create engagement or is it to click through and buy

Neil Hallmark

• Communities are a group of people with shared influence (brand advocates) – the community will direct where the conversations go
• Within a community you can drive campaigns, but how can you start a community without a campaign
• Asked Unilever communities about the brands they love to give incentives e.g. designing packaging or giving a sneak peek of a new product – people love the fact that Unilever is listening to them
• Used Facebook for a Unilever campaign as this is where half the UK population is
• It’s all about content – what activities will you be doing with the community once you have them on board

Rob Horsfield

• Use campaigns to produce a readymade community – alternatively, use word of mouth (tell community members to ask their friends), mailing lists, customer database
• Set out expectations with terms and conditions to inform community members,  however, communities do tend to police themselves – don’t underestimate the power communities have to sniff out a disgruntled comment
• It’s not always about creating communities – there are lots of forums that already exist – it’s about finding them, accessing them and extracting the information you’re looking for
• How do we keep members interested – respect, good content and cash incentives
• If communication members fall out, find new member to replace them – sometimes people who join communities aren’t advocates

Key findings

The main conclusion to take away from the event was that the needs of the community members must always be met. Whatever the community, its members should always be respected, listened to and thought of first when planning, implementing and analysing community and campaign strategies. The other major point was that engagement is must successful through great content. For community members to participate and spread a brand name, engaging content has to be seeded to get people responding and talking to one another. This can be achieved by offering good incentives for communication such as sneak peeks, designing upcoming product packaging and cash prices.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss was published in 2003, and it has become somewhat of a cultural touchstone, especially for grammar geeks (surprisingly, there are quite a few of us). The focus of the book is punctuation and readers are taken through the important points with a sure and steady hand – best of all, it is funny. How someone ever turned punctuation into a humorous subject remains thoroughly beyond me, yet this is what Truss has done (the answer to that may be panda jokes). My personal copy also comes with a collection of stickers shaped like commas, allowing me to correct untidy punctuation wherever I wish – I shouldn’t be given such power.

Charlotte: digital content editor and comma head

Strunk and White

If Eats, Shoots & Leaves re-invented the world of grammar and liberated us from the chains of dreary manuals, The Elements of Style by Strunk & White is what put us in captivity. That said, this is a truly invaluable book which concisely lays out crucial rules that may have passed you by; just make sure you don’t let these old chaps (the book was first penned in 1918) break your spirit with their overly prescriptive style. Thankfully they’ve managed to condense all of their wisdom into a scant 105 pages.

Online Resources

The internet is chock full of useful resources for writers of all levels. Getting a word of the day sent to your inbox is a great idea, and the Google “define” search operator is a handy way to find the meaning of arcane words such as….arcane. You can also check out writing topics on Reddit to see the anguish of fellow writers, or even Dummies.com guides to writing and blogging.

These resources should help you solve any specific issues you come across, but becoming a better writer is actually perfectly simple: write all the time, and when you’re not writing, read.

What’s your favourite resource for grammar or writing tips? Let us know in the comments.

The white paper includes insights from our leadership team – Tony Samios, Michael Briggs and Jonny Scott – as well as input from Scott McLay, Danny Denhard, Karine Nasciemento and Ian Humphreys. Touching on social media, content, online PR as well as the brass tacks of SEO, it represents what we expect to see in the coming year.

Here are some of the key insights from the report:
• SEO as an industry needs to grow up and become transparent about what it does and does not do for clients.
• Social had an impact last year, this year it will have a much larger part to play. Social noise will have to be replaced by authoritative signals from trusted social networks.
• To succeed, agencies need to develop on-brand, topical, innovative and visually appealing content. This means moving away from the traditional scrollable infographic towards a whole menu of options including, but not limited to, white papers, blog posts, videos, UGC, games and interactive infographics.

Have questions about the report? Let us know in the comments section and we’ll do our best to answer.

The report was compiled by myself with artistic prettifying courtesy of Jaimie Bell.

Analysing and Improving Your Account 

Measuring and analysing statistics and data from your account can be a key element in the decision making process of your strategy.

As much as you can make your community grow by managing your friends and followers, in order to keep them interested and engaged, you have to take into consideration their expectations of you and the content that you share. To help you do that, I recommend using tools that will analyse your Twitter activity and enhance what is working best (or not working so well) for your community.

Here are some of my favourites.

Follower Wonk

Apart from being an excellent tool for growing your Twitter community (as I mentioned on my previous post), Follower Wonk also provides some great insights and statistical comparisons between Twitter accounts, generating reports with lots of useful data. You can compare, for example, the number of common followers and following between you and your 2 major competitors, the number of unique followers of each, how long you and your competitors have been on Twitter, average new followers per day and so far.

Lastly, you can visualise your social graph, analysing your friends/followers by account age, dormancy, tweet counts, follower counts and location as well as checking out unique visualisations such as bio and word clouds. Considering that, at this point you will probably be as addicted to Follower Wonk’s functions as I am, so you will be happy to know that you are also able to track and measure relationship performance by viewing new friends, followers and lists.

Twitter Counter

This is probably one of the simplest Twitter tools that I use. Twitter Counter provides a clear overview and graph of your Twitter activity in seconds. It tracks statistics from users and displays them in graphs for up to 3 different Twitter users, as long as you authenticate them yourself first. You can see the number of followers, new friends and tweets for up to the past 3 months and compare who had the best performance. It also gives you valuable information about your followers’ tendency to follow or unfollow you based on your account activity, so you can analyse your stream and quickly understand why your influence made people stop or start following you.

TweetStats

This tool brings real-time Twitter statistics in colourful and easy to read graphs helping you understand your behaviour on Twitter.  These basic statistics include tweets per month or per selected day, tweet density and aggregate hourly and daily tweets along with some interesting interface statistics.  You can analyse your clouds to see which words are most frequently mentioned.

Since you don’t have to be logged into Twitter to use TweetStats, you can use it to monitor the status and stats of other Twitter accounts and check your competitor’s strategies and behaviour on the platform even if you are not following them

Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster offers detailed analytics across Facebook and Twitter. You can investigate  the popularity of content shared based on retweets, mentions, replies, follower or fan growth over time, as well as, the most influential and engaged follower. The result is a series of recommendations of when to post for maximum exposure and best engagement levels. Crowdbooster also provides suggestions on influential users, offering the option to follow them back, reply or thank a retweet. Without a shadow of doubt, this is one of the most valuable tools to use when developing a social media strategy for yourself and clients.

Conclusion

Remember that these are free tools, so it will not cost a penny for you to do some experimenting and get some fantastic insights on where and how to improve your accounts.

If you are also interested in comparing yourself to your peers, Klout and PeerIndex are great for measuring how influential your tweets are with others.

I hope you find these tools useful and they help you in Simplifying your Community Management.

Are you using any of these tools? What’s your favourite? Are there any other tools that you highly recommend?

Please let me know your opinion!

On December 8^th, the über popular microblogging site released their first redesign in a staggering five years with 21 global companies. Dubbed the ‘new new Twitter’, the changes were made with the intention of making the social platform more user friendly and a ‘compelling destination’ for brands – an attempt to try and tackle Facebook’s Pages. The changes brought in a new tabbed style layout where all the Twitter functions were spilt into separate island boxes to make everything easily accessible.

Twitter also introduced new brand pages with the intention of providing companies more control over the way they marketed and advertised their promoted products to consumers. With this new-found control, businesses will be able to keep visitors and customers on their accounts for longer with paid for banners (which they can link to their background) and rich media content, thus lengthening the amount of time spent logged into Twitter. That’s one small step for companies, one (hopeful) giant leap for Twitter.

The other new redesign rolled out was  the improved menu option, which includes a new option called ‘Discover’,  as well as four old but improved sections – ‘Home’, ‘Connect’ (formerly Activity), ‘Me’ (formerly Profile) and ‘Tweet’ – that present all your Twitter actions and interests.

As the name suggests, ‘Discover’ lets you discover weird and wonderful information based on your followers, interests and current location.  This unique search will enable individual search results; so what I see, is not what you’ll see and vice versa. The great thing about this new feature is that if you’re interested in a topic, such as fashion for example, but unfortunately have no fashion followers, you will still be able to see fashion related search results. The significance? Now you can tweet your friends while searching all the things you love and enjoy without having to use a search engine.

While ‘Home’, ‘Me’ and ‘Tweet’ remain largely the same as they were previously, there was a slight modification to ‘Connect’, which divided the feature into two options – ‘Mentions’ and ‘ Interactions’. While the former only reveals tweets that mention your @name, the latter allows you to view RTs, new followers, favourite tweets, people added to lists and all conversations related to you. Essentially, the ‘soon to be’ most used feature in our opinion.

Conclusion

Anthony Ngaithe: “With Facebook and Google+ optimising their social platforms recently, it was clear that Twitter had to follow suit or face the risk of slipping behind in 2012. Seeing as this is their first major refurbishment for five years, the new features feel a little overwhelming at first. However, once you spend a little bit of time familiarising yourself with #NewNewTwitter’s redesign and brand focus, you will quickly see that the changes have not only improved the platform, but have also opened a whole new chapter for advertisement and greater engagement through rich media content. Furthermore, the new menu options and tabbed layout improve the site’s functionality and usability. All in all, we’re thrilled with the new design and firmly believe it is a big step forward for the undisputed 140 character champ.”

Amanda Porrelli: “These changes make Twitter less of a microblog and more of a social network. These increased personalisation options for brands and a better sharing experience for users are designed to put Twitter in the running with Facebook as the world’s social network of choice. While the changes for brands and advertising are undeniably good for Twitter from a commercial perspective, they may prove to be a turn off for users. What remains to be seen is whether Twitter can convincingly make the switch from a service purely for broadcasting 140 character snippets of our lives to one that’s as integral to the 2.0 generation as Facebook is.”

Karine Nascimento: “In general I tend to like when social networks change their pages, mostly because it makes me review the way that I use them for professional and personal matters. With Twitter new design it was no different. I loved the fact that twitter still maintaining its timeline simplicity, but it’s now cleaner than ever and giving more impact to individual tweets – especially the ones with rich media – as you can see photos and videos on timeline, and scroll it down ‘forever’!  The mini profile and #Discover feature with trendy content are also great improvements.  Things that I didn’t really like: listing people it’s not so quick anymore and DM’s are hidden somewhere in the profile tab.  Apart from that, thumbs up for New Twitter!”

Danny Denhard: “Firstly I like the changes, the design, it is clean, crisp and easy. It has drawn me away from using Hootsuite and Tweetdeck and back on to the web version – I never thought this would happen. Twitter is now more than a micro blogging network/service; it has evolved in many different forms. Twitter wants to be firstly, a discovery engine and secondly (and commercially minded) a reliable news source which puts people at the centre. The redesign helped this change and essentially furthered the personalised experience.
What Twitter has learnt from many social site redesigns (namely Google+ and the latest Facebook timeline changes) is that people want to see data easily and they have applied a “timeline” to appeal to the four core user requirements: “personalisation, visualisation, findability and shareability” and probably most importantly allows Twitter to become a social business through seamless monetisation.”

The first benefit will be access to more in-depth customer data. By going through a person’s Timeline, brands will be able to conduct virtual market research and gauge consumer behaviour over the course of a few weeks, months and years, or through the life cycle of their product promotion. All of this data can be gathered, assessed and implemented to maximise the effectiveness of marketing strategies and provide companies with solutions on how to better market products to customers.

The second major benefit will be more engaging media posts. With an emphasis on edge rank, the new Timeline will place heavy weighting on photos and videos. This will be a great advantage for businesses, as Timeline will inspire users to upload more weird and wonderful media content; great for photos competitions and brand reputation, as brands can encourage customers to upload videos of products they have purchased and loved.

It’s clear that Timeline was introduced mainly to make Facebook more interactive, fun and addictive. Mark Zuckerberg and co envisioned a way of getting users to stay online for longer and it has definitely worked (or shall we say, will work once the feature is rolled out to everyone any few days). Yet on a deeper level the Timeline was meant for more than just social fun; it was also meant for business.  As a large chunk of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertisements, Facebook encourages brands, both small and large; to use platforms such as their sponsored stories or Facebook adverts to reach customers and fans.  If you look at the Timeline from a business perspective you’ll quickly come to realise it’s more than just fun; it’s another string to Facebook’s bow to try and capture more brands and get them to launch their campaigns on this leading social network.

The objective of this series of posts is to share some of my favourite Twitter tools; the ones I use on a daily basis and that really make a difference when I need to track and analyse account activity, measure sentiment and manage friends and followers to help improve Social Media strategies.

Oh, and the good news is that these are completely free tools – although most offer upgraded plans if you wish to use advanced features. Why not experiment with all of them to decide which you like best and which are most helpful for you and your community management team?

Managing your Twitter Community

Let’s face it, sometimes Twitter accounts need a good clean up! Quite often, people will stop following you, decide not to follow you back, or simply start posting content that is not relevant to you, so you’re left to decide whether it’s worth continuing to follow them.  In order to maintain a healthy community and to help you decide who to follow or unfollow, my favourite tools to use are Tweepi, ManageFlitter and FollowerWonk

Here is a useful breakdown for you to enjoy, use and abuse.

Tweepi

As it auto-describes, it’s a “geekier, faster way to bulk add quality followers”.  The dashboard shows a quick overview of your Twitter account. It allows you to check the people who are not following you back (and “Flush” them if you like) as well as identifying the followers who you’re not following  so you can “Reciprocate”– which is quite good for your network. You can also identify inactive users and analyse their bio and influence (much like Klout) which is helpful during your “Cleanup”. Nevertheless, my favourite thing about Tweepi is the ‘Geeky follow function’(see image bellow), which allows you to follow user’s followers and add people with the same interests as you, or find and follow user’s friends just by entering the username. You can also follow Twitter list members or even copy and paste a list of users that you want to follow. Quite impressive, don’t you think?

ManageFlitter

This account management tool makes unfollowing quick and easy.  ManageFlitter gives you the ability to find out who isn’t following you back as well as allowing you to  identify how inactive, talkative or quiet the users that you follow are (see image bellow).

One advantage that ManageFlitter has over Tweepi is the fact that you can easily check, without having to open a new window, a user’s bio and activity before you decide if you want to stop following them or not.  You can also search inside your Twitter stream for people that mention specific keywords on their bio or latest tweets.

FollowerWonk

At the moment, Follower Wonk is probably on the top of my list of useful Twitter tools. I’ve talked about tools that can help you identify people to unfollow, making your account a bit lighter. The main reason for doing this is so that you can remove all  inactive and non-following users and start following people who interest you more,  without creating a big gap on the my friends/followers ratio.

Follower Wonk helps you find interesting new tweeps to follow like no other tool out there right now. It has a specialised Twitter search allowing you to find individuals based on any profile data – bio, location, name or URL – as well as allowing you to filter this information by relevance, friends, followers and tweets. Finally, all you need to do is define how influential you want your new friends to be and then follow them directly on Follower Wonk’s list of results.  More information on Follower Wonk will be provided in the second part of this series.

These are just 3 of my favourite Twitter tools; the ones that I use frequently and recommend to my social media colleagues to help manage communities and make strategic decisions. The important thing is to keep trying new tools and use the generated data to work to your benefit.

I hope you have enjoyed my first post in the Simplifying Community Management – Social Media Tool Battle series. Watch this space for the next posts with a new selection of helpful social tools and tips.

Now tell us what do you think; do you already use any of these tools? What’s your favourite? Are there any other tools that you highly recommend?

Please feel free to share your opinion!

You may remember my blog about Klout and social influence metrics from a few weeks back. One of my primary talking points was how the way these metrics work can fly in the face of good social media behaviour to the degree that users are actively dissuaded from interacting with anyone besides influencers and are penalised for high levels of engagement.

In my view as a consequence of this these tools don’t always get it right when it comes to how truly influential a social media account actually is. Even though your social influence score can be important, what’s most important is engaging with your audience in a meaningful way. Achieve this and you’ll be on your way to being a top social media influencer in no time, even if your Klout score doesn’t say so.

With that in mind, here are the six main behaviours I think that a true influencer displays:

1. Likeability

Chances are you don’t go door-to-door singing the praises of people you don’t like in real life and the social media world is no different. If people don’t like you they’re not going to feel invested in sharing your content or becoming a fan: you have to prove yourself worthy of their attention. Coming across as a genuine, nice and positive person will give you a much better chance of this.

2. Honesty

Be open and honest with your social graph and you’ll reap the rewards: lie to them and you’ll regret it. Lying is the absolute worst thing you can do as a social media user as it breeds a culture of mistrust and if you’re caught you’ll end up a pariah. This tenet plays into how you portray your online persona too. There’s no point trying to be saccharine if that’s not your style, as you will only come off as disingenuous. Like we’re all taught at school: just be yourself!

3. Authority

If you don’t come across as being a font of knowledge on your area of expertise no one’s going to believe that you are. People rarely endorse sources they don’t feel are watertight, so if you want them to recommend your advice then you have to be certain that it sounds like the word of God – even if you’re only sharing another “God’s” content.

4. Humility

Just because you have authority doesn’t mean to say you’re never wrong: being able to hold your hands up and admit it when you don’t know something will mark your persona not just as trustworthy, but perhaps more importantly as human. There’s nothing social media users like more than feeling as if they’re interacting with real human beings.

5. Remarkability

My meaning here takes the word back to its roots: remarkable, meaning worthy of talking about. If you want to convert fans you need to be more than just your run-of-the-mill user or corporate account. Don’t be afraid of tackling the big issues of the day if you have the authority to make opinions for your organisation and try to share content that’s relevant to your target demographic.

6. Reciprocity

If you catch the attention of another influencer don’t make  the mistake of neglecting this relationship. If you manage to engage with someone enough that they are consistently sharing your content or promoting you then make sure you do the same when it’s appropriate. Being generous and demonstrating appreciation for your community shows authenticity and feeds back into your likeability.

Keeping these six simple tenets in mind during your daily social media activities can help you build influence and increase the reach of your content. Remember that this is only a guide and that each social profile is going to be different: staying true to yourself, your brand and your message is the best way to truly win friends and influence people!