22 Social Media Marketing Management Tools
With every online marketing channel and discipline, there must be tools to make the task of marketing more efficient and effective. Social Media Marketing is no different. Over the past 6-9 months, I’ve been researching and reviewing a variety of social media management tools that help with everything from source network connections to campaign & social content management to monitoring & measurement. While there numerous tools that manage single platforms (like Twitter) this list includes services that manage multiple social network accounts, content and measurement.
At some point we’ll do more with individual reviews, but in the meantime, here is a list of 22 different social media marketing management tools, platforms and services to help manage and scale your online marketing efforts on the social web:
Shoutlet – Manages social media marketing communications with one platform for building, engaging and measuring social media. Includes multiple account and platform support, social CRM and ecommerce for Facebook, email marketing and mobile features.
Direct Message Lab – Provides consulting, implementation and a platform (REACH) for centralized management of social media promotions & contests, advertising and measurement.
Objective Marketer - Offers social media marketing and analytics with integrated campaign management (Twitter, Blogs, Facebook, YouTube), multi-channel execution, engagement reports and user management.
Wildfire Interactive - Platform for easy creation, implementation and management of branded interactive campaigns including: sweepstakes, contests and give-aways.
StrongMail Social Studio – Comprehensive social media marketing platform with a referral marketing platform, social sharing tool and campaign management application. (Disclosure: StrongMail is a TopRank client)
Sprout - Cloud-based visual authoring software used to build interactive Engage Ads and Engage Apps that deliver rich, interactive, and social content across the web and mobile devices.
Spredfast - Enterprise social media management system that allows an organization to manage, monitor, and measure its voices across multiple social media channels. Also offers a white label option for agencies.
socialTALK – allows brands to create (text, photos, videos), manage (customize workflow & approval process), publish (single source, scheduled publishing to multiple platforms) and measure (aggregated analytics dashboard) their content strategy and posting schedule.
Crowd Factory – Suite of social media marketing tools include Social Campaign, that enables marketers to acquire new customers through simple social gestures and custom social marketing campaigns while easily tracking ROI.
Awareness - Social marketing hub that centralizes social media content publishing, management, measurement and engagement. Also includes access to 7 white-labeled, best practice social networking applications.
@this moment – Built on the @this moment platform, DEC is a system for managing a brand’s presence across multiple online environments combining multimedia UGC, and a variety of real-time inputs which are distributed across social platforms including YouTube Brand Channels, Facebook Fan Pages, MySpace Brand Communities & the iPhone.
MediaFunnel – Offers a Business Social Media platform for Facebook and Twitter supporting multiple users per profile and editorial review. Includes monitoring and integrates with Salesforce.com.
Virtue – Works with clients and agencies through a Social Relationship Management (SEM) platform offering Facebook tabs & applications, a publishing feature for Facebook & Twitter and mobile solutions.
Sprinklr – Social media marketing platform and consulting services for consumer & B2B marketers as well as agencies. Provides social media audience research, acquisition, content promotion and measurement tools.
Janrain – Web based platform of tools including: Engage to make it easy for users to connect a site with their social networks, Federate to facilitate navigation across multiple web properties & partner sites with a single log-in (currently supports 16 networks), Capture to leverage user data for personalized experiences.
Sprout Social – Affordable social media dashboard, monitoring, team workflow, influencer and contact management, performance metrics and daily or weekly email summaries. Supports Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp and Foursquare.
Sendible – Social media marketing platform that supports 30+ networks & services offering management of: accounts/profiles, messages & content, social contacts, content discovery, engagement, blog content & promotion, monitoring and analytics. Also offers a white label version for agencies.
KickApps – Self service social media web site authoring and social content management system system supporting video, social networking, social graph & activity streams, apps & analytics. Enables web publishers and marketers to develop branded communities, social applications and interactive widgets on their websites and across the social web. Solutions for small and large business.
Postling – Local business social media marketing platform to create content, stay organized and reach customers. Currently free for small business or personal use.
pop.to Social Marketing – A social marketing suite, including feed-enabled social gestures and widgets, social dashboard, segmentation tools, influencer identification, conversion tracking and built-in friend casting.
HootSuite - Social media dashboard for managing social content and engagement on multiple networks with team workflow and statistics.
Seesmic – Web and desktop tools to manage social marketing activity on Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Google Buzz and Linkedin plus a plug-in marketplace for more social management options.
This list of social media marketing platforms & services “ad hoc” was compiled by bookmarking various services as they were discovered or pitched to us (we don’t reply to pitches). Here’s another useful list of SMMS was compiled in March 2010 by Jeremiah Owyang.
What social media marketing dashboards, software and management tools from the list above have you tested or use? Reviews, observations, insights and questions are greatly appreciated!
Obviously, tools are only as good as the expertise of the people using them, so TopRank Marketing is always interested in helping companies develop their social media roadmap and recommend the right supporting software for implementation.
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22 Social Media Marketing Management Tools | http://www.toprankblog.com
I Am Calling Out ShoeMoney
If you saw ShoeMoney’s latest behind the scenes video featuring HasOffers, at around the 9 minute 40 second mark Shoe and his host walked into a room and there is what appears to be a naked girl getting spray tanned.
I am calling shenanigans! I don’t think she was naked. I think she has a bikini on. Why would they have a naked girl only to cover her up?
Judge for yourself. That is a pretty big cover. What do you think? Naked or a bikini?
This reminds me. I need to pay a visit to HasOffers. After all, their office is in the same city as me. And no, I’m not expecting to see any naked chicks.
Video SEO Basics – Whiteboard Friday
Posted by Aaron Wheeler
Video SEO isn’t something we always think about when optimizing, but we really should. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Danny Dover reviews some of the video SEO basics that every SEO should know about. After all, it’s a largely untapped market, unlike the Canadian maple tree market. Which is very tapped. (The Canadian maple tree video market, however, is quite untapped, but based on my scientific and extremely boring research in YouTube, I don’t recommend you pursue that market at all).
Anyways, we have a very special visitor this week, what with all of Danny’s meta discussions this month. Great Scott! That’s what happens when you get all meta and self-referential on us, Danny.
Video Transcription
Hello, everybody. My name is Danny Dover. I work here at SEOmoz doing SEO. For today’s Whiteboard Friday we’re going to be talking about video SEO. Now, last week I mentioned that was the most meta video we’d ever done. It was optimizing SEO resources, right? Now, this one is a video on video SEO. So this one, this one is the new champion of the most meta video that we have ever done here, and possibly the most meta video that you have ever seen. If there is some kind of disruption in the space-time continuum, totally my fault. I apologize.
–1.21 Gigawatts!?!–
That was unexpected. That was Doc from Back to the Future. A poor impression of it. Totally derailing my Whiteboard Friday. You’re killing me.
All right. Now, video SEO, huge opportunity here. This is more of a serious thing. Video SEO has low competition. You see in the universal results that video thumbnails show up about a third of the way from the top, right. You’re seeing little thumbnails. A lot of times it’s YouTube, but you also see Vimeo and lots of other video providers showing up. You are seeing those in lots and lots of SERPs, and increasing so actually. There is a huge demand from people because, you know, Google is doing A/B testing or multivariate testing. They’re seeing people are clicking on those. But, at the same time, you’ll have low competition. You’ll see a lot of times for very high competition keywords that have video results that the video results will just be kind of mediocre. They just kind of showed up there. Part of that is because it is new. Not a lot of people are optimizing for video, which is becoming extremely important. So, a lot of opportunity there.
The other part of this, I guess I can only talk for the United States, where I live, but the way that people are starting to consume media is changing drastically. We’ve all seen YouTube. We’ve all seen Vimeo. Now the devices people are using and the places they are watching video are different. You have things like the iPhone, the iPad, and the iPayWayTooMuchForGadgets and I am an Apple fanboy, kind of thing. You’re seeing these all over the place. There is the Android model, the operating system that is running lots and lots of things. system. You’re seeing the way that people are consuming media very differently. The market is growing. Based on that, the demand is high but the competition is really low. Lots of opportunity. This smells like money to me. This is huge. This is a big deal.
How do you take advantage of this? Well, there are different metrics the search engines use to look at video content. When the search engines crawl normal content, they can get some kind of idea of what text is trying to say by using their natural language processing algorithms. They can get some idea of what this text says just simply because they put so much time and so much energy into developing these algorithms to get some kind of semantic feeling for what text means. Now, this doesn’t translate directly into video because, part of the reason at least, is video is much bigger files. It takes a lot more processing to get an understanding of it. It is a lot more zeros and ones. With these Google and the search engines have provided Meta information that you can do about a video.
The two most important ones here are the title of the video — what do you title your video. That’s probably what people are going to search for, right. If it is the shoes video on YouTube or whatever it may be on YouTube. Those are a lot of times what people are searching for. That information turns out to be very important for video SEO.
Likewise, the description is also very important because it gives you more than whatever may be the character limit, probably around 140, I would guess for the title. But it gives you more text to describe it in more depth. This helps the search engines understand the video without having to go through all the intensive video processing.
Now, as video SEO is maturing, we’re starting to see more and more metrics start to affect the algorithm. So, let me be totally straightforward with this. This is just my speculation. I have not done tests on these ones. But they seem very likely to be impacting the video search results. My guess would be that they’ll be more impactful going forward. So, they are something to start paying attention to now.
The first one I see here is engagement stats. The most obvious one here is views. How many times is a video viewed? I know that when I go to YouTube and I search for something, after I look at the text, the title and the description, I then look at the views. Has this been watched 30 times or has it been watched 10 million times? It seems very, very likely to me that click-through rates are going to correlate with high view rates also. So, I think views are becoming increasingly important and are something that you should keep an eye on.
Number two is ratings. So, on YouTube they offer a five-point scale. On things like Vimeo and other things, they use a thumb up and a thumb down. That’s more similar to the Reddit system. These are actual humans who are giving their opinions and their expertise on video content. This is very helpful because search engines are designed to provide results for humans. Any imput you can get from humans is helpful for getting output for humans. This is something that Google figured out very early and is something that is very important.
Number three, comments. What could be more human than commenting on videos? In YouTube’s case, it is some of the lowest thresholds of intelligence we’ve ever seen on the Internet, which is really saying something. You have floor chant, below that you have YouTube comments. It is kind of rough, right. But this is a metric of actual human beings engaging with content and with the author or producer of the video. This seems like a very important metric to me. I don’t think it is the content of the comments, because they are awful. But I think it is the volume of it and the kind of themes that people are talking about. Are they saying, "this is awesome" or "this sucks?" I think that does have some kind of impact on it.
The last one is social metrics. Really, I think this is universal. It is not just the video vertical; I think it is the other verticals as well. By social metrics, I mean things like the amount of tweets or what people are saying in tweets, Delicious popular saves, or submissions to Reddit or Digg or any of those other things. How are people talking about this with their friends? So, you have things like the QDF algorithm, which is Google’s Query Deserves Freshness algorithm. What this does is it will artificially inflate the ability for something to rank based on temporal metrics. So, if lots and lots of people are linking to something or tweeting about it, then it can artificially rank higher than things that normally wouldn’t just because it is very important. You see this a lot of times with natural disasters. Things will just rise to the top when normally they wouldn’t. Michael Jackson stuff. We saw lots and lots of QDF stuff really blowing, making things rank when normally there was no way they would. This is something to keep in mind also. These social metrics.
Now, duration. I think is the last one. This one is more about the extremes, finding the outlier. If a video is three seconds long, it is probably not something that Google, Bing, or Yahoo will want to rank highly. At the same time, if it is something that is multiple hours long, they might want to rank it, but it is probably not what people are going to look for when they are doing video. One of the things about video and content on the Internet in general is that people want to consume it quickly. They like bulleted lists. They like quick pictures, inforgraphic types of things, and they like short videos. I should probably take my own advice and get to the end here. So, I’ll try to do that.
The last one we have for you is tactics. I have expressed that there is a huge opportunity here. I have talked about some of the metrics that are important. Now, tactics, the search engines have given you several tools on how to do this. Video sitemaps is, not new, because video sitemaps have existed for a while, but the protocol was recently revamped by the major search engines and the people who are involved with that protocol. They’ve added a couple of things that are interested. They’ve added the location of the thumbnail of the video. They’ve added things like if it is family friendly or not. They’ve added the URL of where the video is embedded. So, from an SEO perspective, this is really interesting. We don’t want links going to YouTube anymore because YouTube has plenty of links. Instead, with the new video sitemap, you can provide the URL of where it is embedded and then when the search engines index that content they’ll link back to you. So, it’s not so much that you get a link from it per se, but you get the click-through. So, someone clicking on the SERP, clicking that thumbnail, is going to go to your blog, where you embedded the video, rather than to the hosting provider. This is a big win for us SEOs and for us content producers.
The other one is transcriptions. So, what could be easier than just going back and using the old tactics you already have for creating content? With transcriptions, you take video, you take the audio from the video, and you turn it into plain text. This is something that the search engines can then use and interpret just like they do a normal web page. This is important for search engines, but it is also important for human beings as well. People with hearing impairments who can’t hear this video right now can then go through and read it. They can understand it that way. International people who are speaking different languages can then go through the content and read at their own pace. They can do whatever tools they need to translate it. It helps spread it more. It is both good for humans and for users, which is a win-win and that’s always the situation I try to get when I do SEO.
I recommend that you always try to go for those win-wins, because ultimately what the search engines are doing is chasing after the idea of getting the best information to human beings. I think that’s what it really comes down to, crafting your content for human beings. It is harder to do with video SEO, but it is becoming more and more possible to do it.
I appreciate your time today. I will see you next week.
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
Follow Danny on Twitter! Even more to your benefit, follow SEOmoz! Alternatively, you can always follow me, Aaron.
If you have any tips or advice that you’ve learned along the way, or if you came back from the future, we’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!
Please Welcome Georgina – ProBlogger’s New Content Manager
I’m really excited today to announce that I’ve just hired Georgina Laidlaw to help with content development and strategy here at ProBlogger. Her official title is Content Manager.
The backstory
Over the last year, I’ve become increasingly aware that I need to begin to expand my team to cope with the load of running my business.
ProBlogger itself can be a handful to run at times, but add into the mix my biggest blog — Digital Photography School — and other projects (TwiTIp, ProBlogger.com, Third Tribe, a Book), plus the other bits and pieces that I do, and I’m increasingly finding myself up against it to get everything done to the level of quality that I wanted.
As a result I’ve begun to look at making a couple of strategic hires to enable me to increase the quality of what I do and also to free up some time for other projects that are coming.
I’d already moved some way down the path of hiring people to help carry the load previously (although I haven’t really written much about it):
- Lara Kulpa will be familiar to some of you as she’s helped with some of the admin tasks here on ProBlogger (comment moderation and other admin), and has managed the ProBlogger.com forums and edited Twitip.
- I also have Simon Pollock (my brother-in-law) managing the community at dPS.
Both are part-time and work remotely (Lara’s in the US and Simon in the UK).
Why a hire a Content Manager?
As mentioned in yesterday’s video, content is of primary importance to me and it’s something that I obsess over. It has been central in whatever success I’ve had, and I see it as extremely important going forward.
For the first four years of ProBlogger’s existence, I wrote almost every post. The only times I really handed over posting to others was when I took vacations. However, in time I began to accept guest posts and have even hired semi-regular writers.
I did this partly to lighten the load a little (to allow me to focus upon other aspects of the business), but also because I found that by including the voices, views, skills and experiences of others, the site became more useful to more people. I can take one approach to blogging and have certain skills, but I lack other areas of expertise.
As a result of this increased featuring of others on ProBlogger, a number of things happened:
- I started getting more submissions for guest posts. When you feature one guest, post you can open a floodgate for others to approach you about writing. There have been weeks when I’ve fielded 20-30 guest post submissions (and I usually only feature two or three).
- I found myself working more on editing than writing. This shift has happened on all of my blogs. While having others write for you takes a load off your writing work, it means you spend more time editing their work, talking to authors about topics, liaising with authors about post formatting, and so on.
All in all, I’ve increasingly felt sidetracked by these tasks. They’ve taken me away from my own writing, but also from more strategic tasks (such as developing a more thought-through editorial calendar, building my community, and developing other projects).
Managing writers is important, but editing and managing writers isn’t my strength and it has become increasingly apparent that it would be logical to get some help in this area.
Hiring Georgina
Georgina Laidlaw has come recommended to me from a number of people that I respect. She’s worked for some great sites such as Melbourne’s SitePoint (who I’m increasingly working with) and WebWorkerDaily.
As part of the process of this hire, Georgina has also written a number of posts here on ProBlogger. Her work received a lot of positive feedback and it demonstrated to me that she “gets” what I’m on about here, and has the ability to connect with the ProBlogger audience. She’s also fast, efficient, and just in the process of sorting out this position has given me some great ideas.
Georgina is also local to me. While I’ve worked with remote workers before there’s something that appeals to me about hiring someone local. Georgina and I won’t spend a lot of time in person, but having the ability to get together and knowing she’s in my timezone will be great.
What does a Content Manager do?
To be honest we’ve ummmed and aaahed about the title Content Manager quite a bit. I’m not sure it is completely accurate, but for now, it’ll do.
Georgina will be taking on a number of rolls here at ProBlogger including overseeing, editing and managing writers (guest posters and regular writers), writing some posts of her own, editing my posts (I know that will please some of my more spelling-obsessed readers), and working on some other projects (for example ebooks, newsletters, and others).
One of the goals that we also have with this new position is to widen the topics that we write about. There are some categories and topics that haven’t been touched on a lot lately here on ProBlogger. Having Georgina on the team will enable us reengage with some of those topics. This will also mean a slight increase in the number of posts each week (don’t worry we’re not going to go over the top).
What about Darren?
A number of people on Twitter yesterday asked me whether this means I won’t be blogging as much on ProBlogger. The answer to that is I’ll still be here as normal. This is my blog and you’ll continue to get regular posts from me.
You might see a slight increase in posts by others, but I intend to maintain my own posting levels (currently around four or five posts a week).
All in all I’m really excited about this development and hope you’ll join me in welcoming Georgina into the ProBlogger family.
This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.
Please Welcome Georgina – ProBlogger’s New Content Manager
Behind The Scenes at HasOffers
A little while back we took a trip to Seattle and filmed behind the scenes at one of affiliate marketing’s fastest growing companies – HasOffers.
If you are unfamiliar with HasOffers they provide a affiliate platform that allows anyone to start their own affiliate network.
They currently have a special offer to ShoeMoney readers where you can get the first month free to try it out.
Go here to take advantage of this special offer.
If you would like us to come to your company and film behind the scenes shoot us a note today.
Interested in advertising on Facebook? Check out my latest post on Facebook Advertising
A Very Special Dot Com Pho Public Service Announcement
I’ll be back in Vancouver this weekend for Dot Com Pho. It will be at the usual Happy Pho restaurant at 4136 Main Street at 12:30. Please reply to me on Twitter if you can make it and I’ll save you a seat.
Just because I’ve been away from Vancouver doesn’t mean Dot Com Pho ends. In fact, the weekly meetup continues no matter where I am. However, getting the word out about the Happy Pho meetup seems to be a problem. With that in mind, I like to bring you this very special Dot Com Pho public service announcement.
Dot Com Pho still happened this week, but many of the regulars were busy doing other things. Yes, there is life outside of pho. Even so, Michael Kwan takes a moment to provide a brief Dot Com Pho public service announcement. Follow @DotComPho on Twitter for the latest updates!
See you at Dot Com Pho this Saturday!
Interesting Interview with Michael Arrington
People either love or hate him, but we can’t deny Michael Arrington is one of the most successful and influential bloggers around. He founded TechCrunch back in 2005, and now the Web 2.0 and startups blog is one of the most popular tech sites on the planet, with almost 5 million subscribers and 30 million monthly page views.
Yesyerday I came across an interesting interview with him, titled The Way I Work: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. If I am not wrong the “The Way I Work” is a recurring interview theme on Inc.com, where they feature important entrepreneurs and businessmen.
On Arrington’s interview you’ll get to know more about his work habits, about the evolution of TechCrunch over the years, about why he is obsessed with breaking news stories, and how he actually manages to do that. Here is a quotation:
I usually spend about half my day talking to sources, either on the phone or on IM. There are very few people in Silicon Valley—or in tech, in general—whom I don’t know pretty well. Chasing down stories is my favorite part of my job. My style is to bust the door down and clean the mess up later. That works pretty well for me. I’ve known a lot of my sources for five years now. When I call them, there’s no salutation—it’s just right to the point. I expect them to tell me what I want to know very quickly.
Worth a read, so check it out.
Original Post: Interesting Interview with Michael Arrington
The Responsible Blogger’s Guide to Dealing with Big Brother
“What should I be doing better with my blog?”
That’s one helluva question, isn’t it? As someone who blogs to support a thriving business, I think about that question every day.
There are a lot of answers, many of which involve sexy topics like traffic, subscribers, and getting one zillion followers on Twitter.
But when’s the last time you sat down and answered the question above with:
“I should be paying more attention to blogging ethics.”
Not so sexy.
But as bloggers, we have to face facts about the world we live in. It feels like an anonymous platform where we can do and say whatever we want. But 2010 has a lot in common with 1984, and Big Brother comes in some forms that George Orwell never dreamed of.
You need to be aware of one very important fact that many seem to forget:
You can’t unGoogle anything
When you launch your words into the blogosphere and social media universe, you’re laying a digital footprint in concrete. That concrete is the Internet Elephant, and it never forgets.
Old versions of your site are cached. Facebook privacy blunders have ugly real-world consequences. And the Library of Congress is even planning on archiving our tweets. It feels like you can’t be held accountable for your rash words, but you can.
Here are some tips on blogging ethics that will help keep your reputation clean. Especially if you’re going to make blogging a part of your business, you need to protect your interests.
Your comments policy
The bottom line is, it’s your blog and you have ultimate control over what gets posted in your comments section and what doesn’t make the cut.
Please realize that whatever policy you decide on, not everyone is going to agree with you. I personally have a “post all comments” policy, except in instances of spam or blatant self-promoting garbage that adds nothing to the conversation. I also hold all comments that include links from first-time commenters for moderation (legitimate commenters are then white-listed).
Some blogs allow trash talk, some don’t. Some allow profanity, some don’t. Every blogger needs to figure out what to do with the trolls. It’s your blog and your call.
It’s always smart to make your comments policy clear. My developer is working right now on coding my site so my comments policy shows up in a cool style below each post.
If you become known for deleting comments just because the reader isn’t a fawning yes-man, your credibility and authority will suffer. On the other hand, letting the trolls run free or allowing spam to trash up your comments won’t do your reputation any favors either.
Proper accreditation
If you use photos in your blog posts, use legitimate sources for images. (Assuming, of course, you’re not using your own images or photos.)
Photos purchased from stock photo houses usually don’t require photo credit, although a few do. On the other hand, images you get under a Creative Commons license do have various requirements, usually at minimum a credit to the image owner.
This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: Don’t steal other people’s images or words and put them on your blog. That content doesn’t belong to you. It’s unethical and scummy.
When you love a blog post so much that you want to send it to your readers, it is not okay to copy the post and paste it into your own blog or newsletter (even with accreditation) unless you get permission from the blogger.
A better way to show your adoration is to select a handful of quotes (I prefer to stick with no more than 50-100 words) from the post and then provide a link back to the original post, with credit to the author.
Understanding libel
Ohhhhh — legalese! (The recovering attorney in Brian Clark will love this one.)
Some bloggers make a hobby of calling people out for what they consider to be inappropriate practices, stupid decisions, or the like. Other bloggers are just plain malicious.
If you’re going to go down this road, get your ducks in a row first. Read up on what constitutes libel. You owe it to yourself. What you might consider “free speech” could get you into trouble, as the line between opinion and malicious intent can be a very fine one.
Make sure you have a liability insurance policy in place (this is a must). If you’re a member of The Author’s Guild, they offer Media Liability Insurance. You can also contact your insurance agent for a general business policy, but make sure it also covers libel and slander.
You are not invisible
Some people imagine that the internet lets them don a Cloak of Invisibility that bestows permission to do whatever the hell they want.
It’s simply not true. You are responsible for your words on the web (and in life) no matter where you leave them or how anonymous you think you’re being.
I don’t accept anonymous comments on my blog (including commenters who give fake email addresses) and here’s why: it shows me you’re not willing to be held accountable for your words.
If you’re running a blog, there are some pretty cool tools you can use to verify identity or lend at least some level of “real world” status to a commenter you might hold in question.
- Email address verification tools: Did you know you can check any email address to see if it’s valid? Yep. And it’s free and easy. I use this one on a regular basis, but a simple web search for “verify email address” can point you towards others.
- IP address verification: Most comment systems (Disqus, InstenseDebate, and WordPress’s built-in system) display the IP address of every commenter to the moderator. I use WhoIs to verify IP addresses (I had to do this just last week for an unfortunate situation). If you continuously receive spam comments or inappropriate comments from a particular commenter, you can block an entire IP address from your blog. If you need help with this, just ping your comments system or hit up the WordPress Codex for tips on combating spam and unwanted comments. Disqus and IntenseDebate have built-in blacklist features.
The best thing I can do here is to put just a bit of healthy fear into you.
You’re not invincible, you’re not invisible, and you have a responsibility to both yourself and your audience.
While you might have been looking for a more entertaining post on ethics (given my propensity for, ahem, colorful language), putting your thoughts out there on the web is serious stuff.
As I said, nothing can be unGoogled. It’s not like a late-night TP-ing of your least favorite junior high school science teacher’s house. Drive-bys don’t work online.
Strong ethical guidelines can keep your brand and keep your blog shop clean. If there are other best practices I’ve missed, lob them into the comments section below. While we don’t want to go all George Orwell, you have to remember that 1984 still applies in 2010 … and beyond (and it’s not such a bad thing).
About the Author: Erika Napoletano is the Head Redhead at RedheadWriting LLC, a Denver-based online strategies consultancy. Her blog, RedheadWriting, is a bastion for “unpopular thoughts and blunt advice — delivered” and consistently strives to say what others won’t (but should) about marketing, social media, business integrity, and life in general.
How we got 75,000 visitors from Twitter in 2 days
Our twitition.com site has been very busy for some time now and always gets more than 10,000 visitors per day. Lots of people are big fans of the site and use it every day.
Last week the site got a pretty big spike and ended up getting 89,847 visits in a 48 hour period after both Lady Gaga (6.5 million followers) and Justin Bieber (5.4 million followers) tweeted out links to the site.
As you can see from the chart below Twitter traffic was pretty huge and if you include direct traffic (people using Twitter via apps) then it adds up to around 75,000 visits.
Interestingly if you drill down into the referral paths for Twitter you can see that a lot of traffic comes from the stars pages rather than the homepage. Justin seems to have more engagement with his page than Gaga according to this data.
Over the last few months we have put a huge amount of resources into improving twitition.com and the site now has a new front end design, easier to use interface, optimised back end code & database as well as a shiny new dedicated server. Handling lots of Twitter traffic is pretty hard because it comes in big surges, much like the Digg effect but worse.
Pretty interesting study of the power that Twitter now has.
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How we got 75,000 visitors from Twitter in 2 days
Facebook Makes It Easier to Stop Fan Spam
Has a spammer crashed your Facebook Page? Spam links and comments are a major problem facing marketers who use Facebook to interact with their community. As you build your Facebook Fan following, spammers seem to become more and more of an issue. Thankfully, Facebook has made an update to Fan Pages that now gives page administrators more power against spammers.
Now, Facebook Business Page administrators can report spammers and ban people who have made abusive comments.
Marketing Takeaway
Spam comments and links destroy the credibility of an online community. One of the responsibilities of an online marketer is dedicating time to managing a community, which means promoting meaningful conversation and removing spam to keep communication flowing. A great way to do this is by establishing set time(s) to do moderation, depending on the activity of your community. Another way is to assign each team member a day of moderation, if your team is large enough.
Have you seen this new feature available on your page yet?
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