"I have a question!"

How many times have you signed up for one thing on a site, only to receive messaging in response that quickly devolves into information unrelated to your original request? I know I have. Jeanniey Mullen, CMO for Zinio posted a terrific article on this subject on ClickZ today entitled:
What if People Don’t Know What to Do With Your E-mails?

Mullen constructed a makeshift survey that revealed:

“…only 41 percent of people who have opted in to a company’s list for one reason or another felt they knew why the company was sending e-mail to them, and what the expected response was. That means 59 percent of the responders were unsure of why they received the e-mail they got, or what they were supposed to do with it.”

How can you avoid this email grayzone?

Mullen posits these three tests:

1. If you printed out one of your e-mails and gave it to someone on the street to read, would they be able to understand what the value prop is, without any explanation?

2. If someone signs up on your Web site, on a certain page, is the first e-mail they receive about that topic?

3. Do you segment responsiveness by topic if your company offers more than one? If not, you should.

Read the full article here.

So where do you start? To get you going, I’ve listed below a group of policies from (mostly) brand-name companies. As you’ll soon see, even some of the largest global companies have kept their policies very simple. Even if you already have a set of guidelines in-place, spend a few minutes reviewing some of these polcies; you might have missed something.

Whose policy do I like the best? Each one has its merits…there’s no right or wrong answer when putting together this type of manual. They’re also living, breathing documents, meant to be edited as needed. But two that really cover most of the bases of social media are Australia’s telecom giant Telstra - for their very interactive comic book style guide (and not just because one of their characters is named Serge…but that didn’t hurt) - and Kodak, who gives some good insight into the how’s and why’s of their social media marketing program.

Finally, if by chance, you’ve run into some roadblocks at the executive level in your company, take a look at Olivier Blanchard’s PowerPoint presentation on Social Media ROI.  It’s powerful stuff, as well as good ammo to help tip the conversation in your favor.

Here’s the list:

• Cisco
• ESPN
• GM
• Greteman Group
• Intel
• IBM
• Kodak
• Social Media Business Council
• Telstra
• Wells Fargo

Timely post, since my wife hasn’t been thrilled by her Motoral Droid - purchased just three weeks ago.
Right off the bat the poor intergration with Yahoo Mail annoyed her, but when her ringer and spearkerphone died this past weekend…well…all was not well. The Verizon folks seemed to fix the issue on Saturday, but the ringer went dead about two hours later. We switched out the unit yesterday and are crossing fingers.

So, did Google rush the Android operating system and Droid to market? Is it rushing the Nexus One to market too?

At the 40,000 foot view, is the smartphone market harder to conquer than Google thought?

Interesting discussion by Erik Sherman of BNET (with some real-life business cases included) about Chris Anderson’s book Freemium. Anderson has created major buzz in recent months with his “give freebies of your product to drive adoption” thesis. Anderson explores how advancements in computer technology, specifically the low-low price of computerized data storage, has changed the flow of information and data, ultimately changing the rules of data-based business.

Take a few minutes and do a search on the topic, and you can easily get sucked into the discussion. While the topic really only applies to Internet-based business, and not brick and mortar (imagine giving away say, a single donut to any taker, with the hope of making real money by charging for orders of a dozen or more), it remains a fascinating idea, that ultimately will always be in flux. Why flux? Well, every business model and goal is just that different from another. Add to the equation the  fact that the Internet and data-driven business is in a constant state of evolution (not to mention competitive pressure), and you realize that a freemium campaign that’s effective in 2009 may not be so in 2010. Bottom lining it: Anderson’s theories cannot be ignored, especially in the recessionary landscape of ‘09, where business is looking for ways to squeeze every last cent out of their operating expenses.

• • Beating Stage Fright and
• • Correct Body Language

Download the PDF here.

Happy interviewing.

Google has recently addressed this issue by adding time-based search results (past 24 hours, past week, past year, and custom date range) under the “options” menu at the top left of any search. While this tweak to their search parameter is helpful, it seems very much like a stop-gap measure while Google figures out how to combat the much more robust real-time search providers discussed here.

While traditional search engines usually offer up more authoritative data, there are those who want to know the latest greatest news, be it from the person-in-the-street, movie review, a product review that hasn’t yet been crawled by the likes of Google, or invaluable brand feedback. Most of these engines zero in on Twitter activity.

A word about Twitter

Public opinion about Twitter is all over the map, ranging from “huge time waste” to “the best ‘free’ sales and marketing tool invented since the yellow pages.”

Obviously it’s still too early to come to a defining sentence on the usefulness of Twitter, but as a pure sales and marketing tool, I think the “secret” is to combine Twitter activities with other sales processes. If one adheres to the old buying steps of Attention, Interest, Conviction, Desire, and Close, you may see tweeting as “Attention” only, or if you’re really lucky (or smart) you may get the reader to the “Interest” step in the process.

Also, as a marketing tool - customer service, competitive/market monitoring - I think it has great value currently and more potential than many of us can imagine.

New real-time search engines are being launched daily, but for sanity’s-sake, I’m going to limit my review to just ten. I’ll add some updates in future posts.

Some ground rules:

I’ve chosen the search term “22 inch luggage” to compare and contrast each engine (yes, I’m in the market for a new suitcase!). Each site will be reviewed by their “pros” and “cons” and a final letter grade will be given.

The ten engines, in alphabetical order are:

• Collecta.com
  Crowdeye.com
  Itpints.com
  Oneriot.com
  Scoopler.com
  Socialmention.com
  Surchur.com
  Topsy.com
  TweetMeme.com
  Yauba.com

http://www.collecta.com/

Overall score: C+

Description:

“Collecta is not like other search engines. The web is alive with real-time information. So why search a stale archive? Collecta monitors the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media, so we can show you results as they happen. Give it a try.”

Layout:

Very simple three column layout. Left hand column contains search box and search options. Middle column displays first ten query returns, and right column gives you more information on clicked on result.

Pro: Simple design
Con: Not very robust compared to other engines

22″ luggage search yielded: More than 30 responses, but I had to read virtually each post in its entirety to find mention of 22″ luggage.

http://www.crowdeye.com

Overall score: C+

Description:

“Real-time … Social … Search. Find out what all the twitter is about.”

CrowdEye is a new generation of search engine which looks at the worldwide web in a new way. By tracking discussions on Twitter, we can help our users find out what’s important to them right now in real time.

Layout:

Main query return page is laid out in four simple areas.

Query responses are displayed in 12 hour, 1 day, 2 day, and 3 day tabbed areas.

1) Graphical representation of number of tweets by the hour.

2) Popular links. Right side of screen provides links to more traditional postings, ie.cnn.com.
3) Bottom left of screen shows you a tag cloud.
4) Bottom right gives you a popular tweets section

Pro: Simple design
Con: Not very robust compared to other engines

22″ luggage search yielded: Zero responses. How can that be?

http://www.itpints.com/

Overall score: B-

Description:

Itpints is the new real-time web search engine. Know what is being published right now.

Layout:

One column - more of a straightforward, google-like query return.
Links to tweets, as well as traditional links mixed together.

Pro: Fast response, clean design, no advertising
Con: Not very robust. Very simple.

22″ luggage search yielded: Mix of blog posts, tweets, and luggage sites.

http://www.oneriot.com/

Overall score: B-

Description:
Search the realtime web.

OneRiot crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services, then indexes the content on those pages in seconds. The end result is a search experience that allows users to find the freshest, most socially-relevant content from across the realtime web.

Layout:

Nice GUI. Large search window text. Able to tweet, fb, or digg each result, mix of social media and traditional links.

Pro: Link in the footer to add oneriot search to your browser’s toolbar.
Con: See 22″ luggage search result below.

22″ luggage search yielded: Two query returns. That’s it? Two?

http://www.scoopler.com/

Overall score: B+

Description:

Scoopler is a real-time search engine. We aggregate and organize content being shared on the internet as it happens, like eye-witness reports of breaking news, photos and videos from big events, and links to the hottest memes of the day. We do this by constantly indexing live updates from services including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more.

When you search for a topic on Scoopler, we give you the most relevant results, updated in real-time.

Layout:

Return page: Three columns: Left=hot topics (general at that moment), middle = tweets, right=”popular” at the moment, which is more from traditional sites. Very average layout.

Pro: Simple layout/very basic home page. Real time update is a nice feature - posts new data dynamically while you’re reading search results.

Pro: “Peek” button on each result gives you an inline preview.

Con: Can’t find any really.

22″ luggage search: Average results listing.

http://www.socialmention.com/

Overall score: A

Description:

Social Mention is a social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

Layout:

Clean, inviting.

Two columns: left = stats on strength, passion, reach, and sentiment of your brand.

What is “strength”? Strength is the likelihood that your brand is being discussed in social media. A very simple calculation is used: phrase mentions within the last 24 hours divided by total possible mentions.

What is “sentiment”? Sentiment is the ratio of mentions that are generally positive to those that are generally negative.

What is “passion”? Passion is a measure of the likelihood that individuals talking about your brand will do so repeatedly. For example, if you have a small group of very passionate advocates who talk about your products or brand all the time you will have a higher Passion score. Conversely if every mention is written by a different author you will have a lower score. Most frequently used keywords and number of times mentioned. Number of mentions by sentiment.

What is “reach”? Reach is a measure of the range of influence. It is the number of unique authors referencing your brand divided by the total number of mentions.

Other basic measurement stats are included: Right column=basic Google-like returns.

Pro:

Ability to filter search from start:

* Blogs
* Microblogs
* Bookmarks
* Comments
* Events
* Images
* News
* Videos
* Audio
* Q&A
* All

Pro: Can create a Social Mention Alerts, like Google

Pro: Realtime Buzz Widget - you can put on your site to show all the social mentions about you or your brand. Pretty cool. But would you? Could be rolling the dice.

Pro: You can export your search result as a csv file. Not just the first page of results, but the entirety of what the query return. As a marketer, that’s just awesome.

Con: See 22″ luggage search below.

22″ luggage search: Search took 21+ seconds. Very long time. Same user experience as when you do a query on a travel or airline site.

http://surchur.com/

Overall Score: B+

Description:

“the dashboard to right now”

Note: Top two faq topics:

Why does it take so long to load my surch?

Surchur.com caches the most popular surches to our site on a regular basis. This means that you should get a pretty quick response to your specific surch if it is popular. However, if you pick an out of the ordinary surch that is seldom seen or are the first to surch a new hot topic it could take several seconds for your results to fully load. If that term becomes popular, you’ll soon have them cached and your page will load lickety split!

What are the best topics to use Surchur.com for?

Surchur is a great source for the latest and the greatest on topics that are in the now. For example, want to learn the latest about your favorite pop star. Type their name into Surchur and you’ll be amazed at all of the nitty gritty you’ll find. Surchur.com isn’t so good for that narrow, topical Surch that you might make on one of those big leviathan search engines. For example, type in “toby’s cinnamon spice peach cobbler” into Surchur.com and we’re pretty sure you’ll be disappointed.

Layout:

Above average home page. Page is entitled “The Real Time Board” and is divided into two columns: hottopics (most popular keywords on the Internet) and catchingfire (fastest growing topics on the Internet).

Pro: 22″ luggage search: Nice return: very robust - broken down in sections, by site, also pictures, and actual products section. Nice graphical rollover on each search result.

Con: Results page is very long. Also, video results are returned, most with no luggage image in the static graphic. How useful is this?

22″ luggage search: Very robust results page. Almost too much information!

http://topsy.com/

Overall Score: B

Description:
“a search engine powered by tweets”

Layout:

Awfully simple..sparse design.

Pro: Three columns: Left=number of tweets within the last hour, day, week, month, and alltime. Middle= tweets, Right= top authors w/name, latest tweet, and number of tweets on the subject.

Pro: Not just tweets as responses, but direct links to actual product page. Not annoying “check out this great deal,” just link to the product. That’s helpful. Search results on Topsy provided the most consumer oriented results of any of the ten engines - helpful if you’re looking to purchase something.

Con: Not very robust.

22″ luggage search: Decent results pages. Well organized. Seemed to be more commercially-oriented.

http://tweetmeme.com/

Overall Score: B-

Description:
“Hottest links on Twitter”

TweetMeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on twitter to determine which links are popular. TweetMeme is able to categorize these links into categories and subcategories, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what your interested in. We make it easy for you to subscribe to each category and the most popular through aur RSS feeds and Twitter accounts, you can find out more about theses through our help.

Layout:

Home page menu structure - broken down by eight main categories, ie.. sports, technology, entertainment, gaming, etc..

Pro: Very robust home page, but has text ads (google) in top fold

Con: Not sure if this is a pro or con, but so many category search items on the home page could be seen as cluttered or too robust. Actual “search” box on home page is almost hidden.

22″ luggage search: Returned only three links. Hmmm….

Note: You can advertise on tweetmeme, either search results or on their channels.

Note: Partners with DediPower (hosting) and Sun’s Startup Essentials)

http://www.yauba.com/

Overall Score: B+

Description:

The World’s First Privacy Safe, Real-Time Search Engine TM. Yauba is a new, experimental, Indian search engine that seeks to transform the way people find information online, while providing maximum protection for their safety, security and privacy. Launched in “early beta/late alpha” mode on March 2009 after stealth development in Bangalore, Delhi, and London, Yauba is based on over 25 years of cutting edge research from the Indian Institutes of Technology, the University of Delhi, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the University of California at Berkeley.

As a result, Yauba offers some of the most advanced Internet technologies, features, and innovations in the world.

1. Truly Incognito. Most search engines try to gather and record as much information about their users as possible. They (or their parent companies) operate massive server farms with even more massive databases that secretly record your entire search history, your private contacts, the identity of your family and friends, your personal emails, your conversations and chats, your browsing habits, your physical location, details on the software you use on your computer, your IP address, and much much more. This is no exaggeration. Indeed, if you ever saw exactly how much most search engines actually know about your private details, you would be completely shocked.

At Yauba, we completely reject the view that search engines somehow need to keep mountains of data on their own users. Instead, we take the exact opposite approach. We do everything we can to protect the privacy of our users.

- This is why we do not keep any record of any of your search terms, browsing habits or any other personally identifiable information. - This is why we automatically delete any and every piece of personally identifiable information from our servers on a continuous basis.

- This is why we can have the shortest privacy policy (9 words) of any major Internet service in the world. - This is why you can visit almost every Internet site through the main Yauba service on a completely anonymous basis (with the only exception of file types that use other external third party software or plug-ins for downloading or playing).

Layout:

Very simple home page. Basically you’re given a search box.
Results page: Clean, but very long. Very robust results, even includes a pdf section.

Pro: Very clean design and organization.

Con: A lot of advertising.

22″ luggage search: Extremely detailed and robust results page. Again, almost too much information. Even got hits within LinkedIn.

Wanted the link to live a bit longer than as a Tweet. Happy reading.

Download the 56 page pdf here.

As every marketer is figuring out how to leverage, read: monetize social media, at a macro level, every business out there - small, medium, or large - like it or not - has to face social media head on and figure out how this new force of communication will fit inside and outside their corporate walls. Company blogs are fairly easy to monitor and control, but what about corporate Facebook pages or Twitter accounts? How can you control your company’s reputation now that there are so many ways to possibly disrupt it? A little social networking background first.

Do you remember during the Internet’s boom and bust a site called fuckedcompany.com? If not, a little refresher: if you had any inside (the worse, the better) information on a particular company, you could post said dirt on the site [cached title tag: "Offering bad news about dot.com companies and betting on the demise of companies."]. The site was an extremely snarky way to poke holes into the business plans of the myriad web-based businesses trying to cash in on the Internet gold rush. Note, the site is no longer in full operation, and Phil Kaplan, its creator is about to launch a new venture called http://www.kaplanindex.com/.

How many corporate officers, not to mention employees, checked Fuckedcompany on a daily/weekly basis to see if their company had made it to the site? My friend Todd can attest to this.

Flash forward to 2009 and there are now many ways for employees to communicate what they’re working on, opinions, as well as what’s going on with their employer - be it good or bad news. And this is the potentially sticky part. Common sense dictates that most of what employees post on social networking sites about their work or employer is either benign or positive in nature. But, and this is a big but, what if it’s not? How easy could it be to damage a company’s carefully crafted reputation with just a couple of tweets? Case in point, look no further than the hellstorm two Domino’s Pizza employees caused a couple of months ago with their two minute self-made video.

In an attempt to help guide businesses through the nascent maze of social media marketing, Deloitte recently ran an ethics and workplace survey (2,000 participants in April 2009) called “Social networking and reputational risk in the workplace.” A copy of the findings can be found here.

Some interesting numbers to consider:

- 74% of employees surveyed said it’s easy to damage a company’s reputation on social media.
- 58% of executives agreed that reputational risk and social networking should be a board room issue, but only 15% say it actually is.
- 53% of employee respondents said their social networking pages are none of their employers’ business.
- 61% of employees say that even if employers are monitoring their social networking profiles or activities, they won’t change what they’re doing online — they know it’s not private, and have already made significant adjustments to their online profiles.

How often do you visit social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter,YouTube, Flickr, etc?

- 22% - Five or more times per week
- 23% - One to four times per week
- 10% - Once a week
- 44% - Never

One very interesting question asked was:
“In the past six months, at least one of your colleagues was let go because of inappropriate behavior online.”
Seven percent answered “true” to this question.

Are there programs in place?

55% of executives said their companies don’t have an official use of social networks, and 22% said their companies would like to use social networking tools, but haven’t yet figured out how.

How you can protect your company’s reputation

Building a strong corporate brand is crucial to a company’s success and the Internet has become the end-all be-all for connecting with customers, friends and co-workers. Every posting - text, video, podcast, image - to a company blog, Facebook page, Twitter feed, etc. in this world of instant communication can help or hurt your brand. But there are measures you can take to protect your reputation:

- Create a social media handbook for your employees. This doesn’t have to be a 50 page exhaustive manual - just a simple set of common sense guidelines that lay out the company’s mindset regarding social media.

- Set up scans via such sites/tools as Twitscoop , RSS feeds, and Technorati to track your company’s name as it flows throughout the Internet.

- Put together a “crisis management” social networking strategy team to manage any negative or false information. Do this before any trouble comes your way. This team can be put into action on short notice to protect a company’s reputation.

The social media networking train has left the station - conversations about your company are taking place right now like it our not. But this flow of information is a terrific opportunity to keep an open and truthful conversation going regarding your company and its reputation. With some planning and consideration, you can embrace the transparency that social networking presents and align your company’s goals and brand with your employees, customers, prospects, analysts, and reporters.

What’s your take? If you’re running a company or in charge of corporate communications, how are you embracing social networking?

Will you entrust your employees - armed with a set of guidelines - to push your company’s brand out into the web-o-sphere? Will you turn a blind eye and let things progress organically? Potential landmines pock the social media landscape, but the genie is out of the bottle, and must be taken seriously.

Most marketers will tell you it’s Tuesday through Thursday.
Others will tell you that they see the best clickthrough rates on Saturday and Sunday (though, with lower open rates than midweek).

I just got off a Silverpop webinar this morning featuring their brand-new “Send Time Optimizaton” feature. This tool (algorithm) has been in the making for more than two years, and strives to take the guesswork/heavy lifting out of figuring out what the best day and time of the week to send emails to your prospects or customers.
Note, I’m not a customer or employee of Silverpop.

The tool has only been in GA since May 5, so it’ll be a while to see how powerful it is, but the early returns so far are encouraging. Silverpop claims across the board increases of:

• 20% - 50% in open rates
• 30% - 50% in click rates
• 52% - 75% in revenue
• 35% - 50% in average order size

Those are pretty impressive numbers. And the ease of putting the tool in action seems to be very, very simple: choose either a 24 hour or 7 day send period and the algorithm will do the rest.

Now, if you’ve ever been involved with email marketing, there are manual ways of figuring out when your recipients are opening your emails (log records of “last opened”), but that’s a very big hassle…and then take into account multitudes of time zones, and well, you know that private hell.

Hopefully Silverpop (and invariably other vendors) have finally come up with the answer to the “when is the best time to send emails” question.

The study finds that today’s youth are let’s say, more pragmatic than you’d think. For the study, Internet users ages 12 to 24 in five countries—Germany, India, Japan, the UK and the US—were surveyed.

According to respondents ages 18 to 24, the most popular features of a brand were good quality, trustworthiness and workability—three traits not usually associated with the stereotypical image of free-wheeling youth. What’s even more interesting is the idea that seeing a brand on television equated to quality. Click here for the full synopsis.