Vanessa Fox. Nude.

On Tuesday, I gave a webinar on how businesses can use social networking to learn about their customers, deepen their relationships with customers, and provide more effective and responsive customer service.

You can view the archived version of the webinar for free. When you click that link, it looks like it’s for registration of the event that already happened, but if you step through the registration process, it’ll bring you to the archived video.

In the webinar, I talked about how your customers are likely already online talking about your brand and your industry. The web is full of all kinds of community-driven sites where you can listen to what your customers are saying and can get involved. I talked a bit about setting up a social media program in your company, and some things to consider as you get started, as well as getting engaged in the conversation, improving customer relationships, and benefiting from the feedback.

Monitoring the conversation
In the comments to the previous post, someone asked what tools I recommend for tracking conversations about you online. That really depends on your situation. If you have a large brand and time is more valuable than money, you might consider hiring an agency to track and aggregate the conversations for you. A service such as TruCast compiles conversations, scores them, and, and provides workflow management for responses.

You can set up various searches and alerts or use a product like Andy Beal’s new Trackur to aggregate those searches for you.

Aaron Wall recently wrote an article for Search Engine Land about reputation monitoring tools that provides more details about setting up alerts.

Below are some ideas for a free, low-tech way to get started if you want to try setting things up yourself. You can set up all kinds of searches about your brand, your competitors, your industry — just about anything you want to track. Here are some places you might get started.

Google Alerts
Google Alerts tracks web search, Google Groups, Google News, Google Video, and Google Blogsearch.

Unfortunately, Google Alerts can only be sent to your email, and aren’t available via RSS. If you have the alerts sent to a Gmail address and you assign those emails a label using filtering, you should be able to then subscribe to the RSS feed of that label using an RSS aggregator that supports authenticated RSS (using the feed format https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/labelname/), but I haven’t been able to get that to work.

You can also set up separate searches for each of these and with some of them, for instance, Google Blogsearch, you can set the search up as an RSS feed. For Google Blogsearch, just do the search, then click the Subscribe link you want on the left.

Google web search has some interesting advanced options. For instance, to get web search results for a topic that have appeared within the last 24 hours, you can choose Advanced Search from the Google home page, then expand the date options. Set up the parameters you want, then click the Advanced Search button.

Twitter
I normally suggest people track Twitter conversations with Terraminds, but it’s currently down and I’m not sure when it will be back up. You can set up tracking directly in Twitter, but Terraminds is nice because you can subscribe to the RSS feed of the searches and you don’t need a Twitter account. To track a search term on Twitter, simply sign up for Twitter, then send the message “track

At 10am pacific (about 45 minutes from now!), I’ll be giving a webinar on how companies can start having conversations with their customers online to learn more about them, create stronger relationships, and improve both their product offerings and customer loyalty.

Come check it out.

I’m pretty sure that link will also work once the webinar is archived so you can view it later. You probably won’t still be able to ask questions though. Although you can ask them in comments here for a slightly less-than-real time response.

I have been crazy busy with lots of things to write about but no time to write them.

In the meantime, check out this LA Times story on using the internet to broadcast details of our personal lives that we previously reserved for friends and family (specifically, using Twitter to document the Yahoo! layoff). Obviously, this topic hits close to home for me. I’ve been talking to people online for more than 10 years, I’ve blogged about my career changes, and I dug into the question of online identity at Gnomedex last year. I talked with the reporter about how we lose privacy but gain a sense of connecting with the world around us when we post online.

On a completely different topic related to the world continuing to move online, my latest article for Information Today magazine is up and focuses on the recent PEW Internet study that found that 77% of Americans are online and most turn to the internet for answers.

If you’re more into talking and listening than reading, head over to Search Marketing Expo West next week in Santa Clara! I’m moderating seven sessions: four on blended/ universal search, and three “wonder twins” sessions: blogging, social media marketing, and user-generated content. (Speaking of universal search, did you see the SEOmoz whiteboard Friday I did about it not too long ago?)

And if you’re more into listening and not traveling beyond your couch and laptop, check out the webinar I’m doing March 11th on how companies can successfully engage with customers using social networking.

Hope to see you all next week!

For the recent webinar I did on link building, I was researching how use of social networks can help with SEO. Businesses can gain all kinds of value from social networking: build brand recognition, increase customer loyalty, help them be responsive to customer issues and better understand the audience, get more links and exposure… Er, etc.

But one value that is sometimes overlooked is increased opportunity to rank. I wrote about this a bit in the context of reputation management. But it can work for any search query you want to rank for. You can capture more positions in the SERPs if in addition to having content from your site rank, you can get content from social networks that point to your content to rank.

You can easily see this with Flickr.

1. Host images for your content on Flickr.
2. Use keyword-rich titles for the images.
3. In the image descriptions, link to the article using keyword-rich anchor text.
4. Er… profit!

Take, for instance, this article I wrote for Search Engine Land about Hakia’s Meet Others feature. Here’s an image, hosted on Flickr, that I used in the article:

And here’s that image at position #13 (and #14) for a Google search for Hakia Meet Others:

So, sure. Hosting the image on Flickr is great just for storage and organization. It helps me share what I’m doing with anyone who’s interested and who’s added me as a Flickr contact. I can get traffic from the link. But it’s also giving me another opportunity (in addition to the article itself, which is ranked #3 for the query) to rank. Sounds good to me.

Yesterday, Natala Menezes (@natala) from Microsoft adCenter joined me on GoodKarma on Webmaster Radio. You can download the podcast or just click play below.

Webmaster Radio
Twitter for News Vanessa , along with Natala Menezes from Microsoft AdCenter talks about how she has been reading Twitter to find out the news of the day , and she discusses the Best 5 Twitter Services You Might Not Know Show Host: Vanessa Fox Show: GoodKarma Channel: Internet Marketing

We talked about all things Twitter and took questions and comments from both the chatroom and (fittingly) Twitter. Thanks to everyone who chimed in and sent us @ tweets.

What is Twitter?
Twitter is a microblogging platform that Natala describes as “social text messaging”. You send out short messages (via SMS, IM, web, or a third-party app) about what you’re doing, what you’re wondering about, maybe a question that you have, and anyone “following” you gets the updates in any one of a number of ways. (For instance, you can add an app in Facebook that causes your Twitter updates to show up there.) You can also track particular keywords (for instance, you can get twitters from anyone talking about your brand).

For more details about Twitter and how to use it, see Chris Brogan’s Newbie’s Guide to Twitter and Caroline Middlebrook’s Twitter Guide.

In short:

1. Create a Twitter account.
2. Find some people to follow (your friends, bloggers you find interesting, maybe me…). You can find people on Twitter by searching for them, by looking at someone’s profile and skimming their followers list, or by finding profile links on bloggers’ home pages.
3. Decide whether you want to get Twitters to your phone, via IM, or if you want to skim them via the web interface. You can choose this for each person you follow. You may find, for instance, that you want to get Twitters from friends on your phone, but Twitters from those in an industry you’re interested in professionally via the web interface.
4. Start twittering!
5. Make sure people can find you. Add a link to your Twitter profile on your blog, or add the Twitter widget that shows your latest status (see mine in the lower left of my right sidebar).

How is it useful to search marketers?
You can use Twitter for search marketing in several ways. An obvious one is reputation management. There’s a lot on the web about me competing for first page ranking on a search for my name, but somehow, my Twitter profile comes in at number ten. Natala’s Twitter profile ranks number four for her name on Live Search.

Individual Twitter statuses can rank as well. You might write a short blurb about a particularly interesting blog post you wrote or new product page on your ecommerce site for an opportunity to rank in addition to the page itself.

And Twitters can drive traffic. You have to be careful about this. Many people, for instance, have unsubscribed from Guy Kawasaki’s twitters because they feel he simply spams his followers with links all the time. If you use WordPress, you can install a plugin that automatically Twitters links to new blog posts, but be cautious with this. Michael Gray (@graywolf) does this, but that’s not all he Twitters. He also updates with lots of other interesting information and thoughts. Search Engine Land (@sengineland) does this as well, but they are strictly a news site, so the assumption is that anyone following Search Engine Land on Twitter is expecting notifications of new stories. I occasionally Twitter about new blog posts (I’ll likely Twitter this one), but I really only do this when I write something that I think might be of extra interest. Otherwise, I Twitter about needing more coffee.

I have found that when I post a link on Twitter, I get a good amount of referral traffic, so people do click on them.



On the show, Natala pointed out that she gets Twitters on her phone, and it’s often not convenient for her to click links. I only get a few Twitters on my phone. I mostly scan the web interface, where it’s easier to click links, although if I get a link on my phone that seems particularly interesting, I’ll save the text message so I can look it up later.

How is it useful for brands?
Todd Friesen (@oilman) wondered if Twitter could ever become a really useful marketing tool. Brands can use Twitter in a number of ways. If nothing else, you can use it to track conversations about you. Natala, for instance, mentioned that she often Twitters about Alaska Airlines, as she flies a lot (I have no idea what that’s like; heh). Alaska could track mentions of them to see what people are saying - if they’re having good or bad experiences and how discussions about those experiences are impacting brand perception. Rick Klau (@rklau) of Feedburner tracks mentions of his product and Twitters back answers to questions that people have.

You can easily track a keyword by texting or IMing “track + keyword” to Twitter (for instance track feedburner). If you want to track over the web, you can use Terraminds to search Twitter for your keywords, then subscribe to the RSS feed of that search.

Brands like Jet Blue (among others) use Twitter to offer exclusive promotions and sales. Drive, a short-lived TV show, Twittered details about show production during airtime to generate interest.

You can also use Twitter as part of your overall community engagement strategy. Get involved in the conversation. Become part of the community. If it’s true that we can’t actively engage with more than 200 people, then Twitter is a great way to get connected to that 200, who each are connected to another 200, who each are… Well, you know.

Susan Reynold’s recent frozen peas campaign in support of the American Cancer Society is a great example of how Twitter can virally spread a message. As is Greg Boser’s recent Twitter “joke” at Pubcon.

How is it useful for personal social interaction?
Many people use Twitter to stay in touch with their friends. For instance, you might Twitter that you’re thinking of heading out to a local bar for a drink and is anyone around to join you? At the airport last night, Natala Twittered a question about the weather in Seattle (we were about to fly back) and she got at least four responses in around 10 minutes.

How is it useful for current events?
On the show, we talked about the recent death of the ex-Prime Minister in Pakistan (actually, we mispoke and said the Prime Minister and in short order, got a Twitter from Deepak Singh (@mndoci) correcting us!). Natala said she first heard the news via Twitter. Current Buzz talks about how journalists aren’t allowed into the country and have found it difficult to get accurate details, but a dentist inside Pakistan has been Twittering as “teeth” with the latest news.

I learned about the latest earthquake in San Francisco from Twitter. And I often get news I wouldn’t otherwise see from Twitter.

How do you balance personal and professional tweets?
Several people asked this question during the show including @SEMaven. This is a hard question (the same question could be asked of any kind of online interaction, such as blogging and forum participation). I think it really depends on the person and the situation. How separate to you want to keep your personal and professional life? Are you representing a large brand or yourself? If you’re representing a large brand, you want to come across as authentic, but you probably want a separate personal account.

Stuart Maxwell (@stumax) asked “what should I tweet?” Are some updates too personal? If you choose to maintain one account for both professional and personal use, you may seem more genuine, but you also have to be aware of how noisy your Twitters might come across. For instance, if you send a lot of personal replies to friends, those who are following you for industry news might unsubscribe. Michael Gray recommends that no more than 20% of your Twitters be off topic.

What addons exist for Twitter?
An Bui (@anwith1n) wondered what the most useful third party apps for Twitter are. You can use a number of third-party apps for posting and reading Twitters. If you’re a visual person, you might like Twitter blocks, which graphically shows you updates and Twitter “neighborhoods”. In addition to receiving updates via the web, SMS, or IM, you can also Twitter from Outlook, your Blackberry, your iPod, or a standalone client, such as Twitteriffic (for Mac) or Snitter (for either Mac or PC).

You can use Hashtags to tag your Twitters with an event tag, much like people tag pictures of events on Flickr. Twitter Hacks has the latest Twitter tricks.

Tweeterboard shows you the top 100 Twitterers and gives you stats on about 2600 people. How is this useful? If you’re a top Twitter, you become more visible and can gain more followers. And you can use the stats to find out who is most influential for your niche as guidance for who to reach out to. Jeremiah Owyang has some tips on becoming more popular on Twitter. Be interesting and useful. Make your Twitter profile visible on places like Facebook and your blog. Follow others. Ask lots of questions. Reply to people. Basically, get actively involved.

Use Terraminds to set up an RSS feed that alerts you when people are talking about your brand and keywords you’re interested in.

You can use a Twitter widget to display your latest updates on your blog (see mine in the lower right sidebar) and can use a plugin to automatically update Twitter with your latest blog posts. CShel, in the chatroom, recommended Alex King’s WordPress plugins for Twitter.

What’s the best way to manage being connected/not connected? Is it rude to check your twitters during Christmas dinner?
Marc Levin (@dogballs) wanted to know how to check your Twitters at the dinner table without being yelled at. I used to only read Twitter on the web, but I’ve started getting Twitters on my phone lately, and to be honest, I really sort of like it. Here are my tips:

• You don’t have to subscribe to everyone via phone or IM. I set all direct messages to be sent to my phone (direct messages go only to you, rather than to everyone) and all Twitters that are replies to me (I do this by tracking my username). I also have a few friends set to go to my phone. I read everything else on the web.
• You can set Twitters to go to your phone only certain times of day. I, for instance, have them turned off at night, so I can sleep. If you’re on your computer during the day and get Twitters more easily there, you could have the phone option turned off during those hours.

As for Twittering during Christmas dinner? That probably depends on how tolerant your family is of your technology addiction in general. I tend to text and email a lot, but I’ve been trying to cut back lately. I might need a technology patch.

How mainstream is Twitter?
Well, Natala’s mom is on it, but she’s pretty hip. Twitter was a key plot element in a recent episode of CSI, so it’s definitely gaining in popularity. Even though it may not have millions of users yet, enough influencers use it who will see interesting tidbits and blog about them for their readers that you can definitely reach a large audience with it, albeit sometimes indirectly. For instance, going back to the Jet Blue example, only 555 people are following those Twitters, but some of those 555 are likely travel bloggers who post about the more interesting deals.

More questions?

• What’s the difference between a direct message and a reply? A direct message is like email — it goes only to the person you send it to. You can do this by texting or IMing “d” + the person’s username or by accessing that person via the web interface and clicking “message”. You reply to someone by sending a Twitter that includes “@”, followed by the person’s username. This message can be seen by anyone, but shows up on the person’s Replies tab.
• But how can I follow you? Great question! Just go to my profile and click “follow”!
• Do I have to get Scoble’s updates to my phone? It’s true that I don’t follow Robert Scoble, and yet I often randomly get his Twitter updates on my phone. I don’t get all of them, just a sporatic sampling. I have no idea why. No else I’ve talked to has a Twitter account with default Scoble enabled, so you can likely choose whether or not to add him yourself.

Facebook is attempting to reduce the app invite clutter by consolidating all those zombie, vampire, and duck hunting requests into a single link. I never accept any app requests, mostly because I just haven’t had time yet to figure out how being a zombie really adds value to my life, so the requests have just been sitting there, mocking me and my inability to recognize the usefulness of having an entourage.

It’s nice of them to simplify things for me, but I found the request they decided to promote somewhat interesting.

Huh. Three “You’re Hot Requests”. Not three people saying I’m hot, or three people asking if they’re hot, but it seems like Facebook is asking me if I think I’m hot. Three times.

I can expand the requests and see what else I’m being asked to do. Here’s just a snippet:

I also have two “hotness” requests, which are apparently entirely different, as well as all kinds of requests that I have no idea what to do with. I’m totally doing that ink’d one though. We all could use more tattoos.

Important things first! Joss Whedon, who surely you all know of Buffy fame, is gearing up to do a new show with Eliza Dushku on Fox! Eliza, of course, played Faith the kick ass vampire slayer on Buffy and if you’re saying wasn’t Buffy the slayer then yes, it’s confusing. I’ll loan you the DVDs. Or just come over to Buffy night on Tuesdays. It’ll all make sense. Anyway, this is fantastic news for sci fi fans and Buffy fans and really, anyone who’s a fan of good TV. You do like good TV don’t you?

In other news, I’ve teamed up with my twin potato fan, Greg Niland, for what was previously his show (and now is MY show, er, I mean our show, no evil laugh here, nu uh), GoodKarma, on Webmaster Radio. We’ll do the show live at the same time the show has always aired — Thursdays at 1pm Pacific, and we did the first one today. Check it out if you want to hear us ramble, I mean provide insightful commentary, on the recent very tiny (you may not have even heard of it it was so small) Google paid links controversy, the PageRank deductions, and how I feel about going from a PR 7 to a PR 6. (Toolbar PageRank means nothing! No one should even look at it! But why did I have to go down? *SOB!*) On the plus side, it’s hard to even see that diminishing green bar through the tears.

And in even more news, writing at Search Engine Land continues. Despite my mockery of Hakia’s musical efforts (but the mockery was all in good fun! I love that CD actually. How can you get any better than songs about search?), they let me into their offices a couple of weeks ago when I was in NY for SMX Social Media and we talked natural language processing and semantic indexing and social networking through search.

Told you there was something for everyone. What more could you want than Buffy, PageRank rants, and search? Well, maybe a robot butler who brings you coffee in the mornings.

This just in. A lot of user-generated content sucks. As it turns out, not everyone makes a living as a writer, journalist, videographer, or director precisely because most people aren’t very good at it. And those people who are good tend to do it professionally. Ergo, the promise of leveraging the content of the masses to propel your online business is a myth. Or, perhaps it’s not so much that people produce crappy content, it’s that they don’t create content at all. They create profiles perhaps, but not content.

So, let’s forget this whole “user-generated content” fad, stash it with the mood rocks where it belongs, and start spending time on something that’s actually valuable. Like making zombies out of our Facebook friends.

First, this isn’t really a startling revelation. We all know that most content on the internet is blinking text and cat pictures (and not the awesome lol kind). The web itself started as user-generated content and there’s a reason we’re all glad that Google ranks results and doesn’t just assume all sites are equally good and show them in a random order.

Second, most YouTube content may suck, but that’s not really the point. YouTube’s business model wasn’t to get people to upload videos of stellar quality that YouTube could then charge people to view because of the awesomeness. YouTube’s business model was to get a lot of people to upload videos of any quality so it could get lots of users and page views as a means of getting acquired by Google.

Chuqui notes that a small percentage of a community create the content for it, and while that’s absolutely true, that’s missing the point a bit as well. Which is that the larger percentage who never create still show up. And in these days of ad-based monetization, you need people to show up. Profiles may not technically be content, but again, they keep people showing up and interacting with each other (and with the site’s brand). Do you create content when you throw a sheep or write on someone’s wall? Maybe not, but each sheep hurled at someone’s virtual head builds the community just a little more, and to a large extent, that is the point.

Community is perhaps the greatest value in user-generated content, but there’s other worth to be had. We (as a collective whole) may be bad at writing, singing, and videotaping ourselves dancing, but we know what we like. I can’t imagine planning a vacation anymore without checking out reviews online. I may not trust the judgement of one person, but if 400 people hated a hotel, I figure I can trust a least of few of them. If your site draws a community and aggregates this information for me, you’ve got another visitor, even if only 1% of your users contribute and they’re mostly pretty bad at it.

I’m usually really good about keeping up on what’s going in in the world around me through my RSS feeds. Lately though, with all the travel and work and sitting on the balcony watching the seals, I’ve been getting behind in my reading. I seem to be keeping up OK though, just by skimming Sphinn, Techmeme, and my Facebook newsfeed. And surprisingly, I seem to get a lot of news lately from Twitter.

The Twitter-Only View
So, I wondered, what if I only got news through Twitter. How lopsided would my world view be? I suppose this experiment would be very different for everyone, because unlike a similar experiment with something like Sphinn, the news you get depends very heavily on who you’re following.

As I mentioned the other day, I recently started having some Twitters sent to my phone, but I primarily still keep up using the web interface. Twitter by phone is great for random messages from close friends (”we’re having dinner at my house, who wants to come over?”), but the web seems to work much better for following everyone else. For one thing, it’s much easier to click on links people post when I’m not driving in my car at 60mph.

So what does the world look like through Twitter? Actually, pretty comprehensive! Sure, maybe what people are having for dinner and where they’re shopping isn’t exactly news, but here are things I learned in just the last few days:

• Cornel West’s musical attempt is not all that
• The new Firefox update might be a bit buggy
• Radiohead’s experiment in online album distribution appears to be working
• The micro startup is hot in Seattle
• I went to Natala’s for dinner last night — oh wait, I probably would know that without Twitter
• Jason Calcanis feels lonely even on stage and needs people to call him
• There’s great librarian resources I may not know about which should be great for the writing I do for Information Today magazine
• Web 2.0 Summit was attended by a lot of people in suits
• SMX Social Media had lots of great tidbits
• Nashville had a tornado scare
• China started redirecting searches to Baidu
• Email wants to compete with social networks (although I don’t really get Yahoo’s “friend finder” idea that calculates who your real friends are based on your email patterns. Don’t I already know what friends I email a lot?)

All in all, not a bad view of the world. I like that the people I follow aren’t reading the same sites as I am so I get much more variety the types of news than I might if I just read my feeds.

A Facebook Perspective
My Facebook news feed has potential too (particularly if enough people add the new Google News Facebook application). My current feed is:

• telling me about those ridiculous Dallas Cowboys who thought they were paying $275 rather than $275k for cowboy.com and want a refund
• showing me new pics from the DMA conference
• pointing me at this super cool visualization of the Gonzales testimony
• letting me know that a friend of mine is setting up his slingbox (so maybe I can ask him how it went and get help setting up mine!)
• breaking the news that it’s not Christmas
• explaining how I can get site visitors from posting a comment on Reddit
• describing how to measure user engagement
• alerting me that a lot of people want me to be a vampire

Augment all that with Sphinn hot topics and Searchcap to keep me up-to-date on search, with a little Techmeme tossed in for good measure, and I’m set.

In a world of information overload, with everyone jumping on the crowdsourcing bandwagon, why not take advantage of others to do the work of sorting through it all for you!

I’m live blogging the SMX Social Media conference in NY for Search Engine Land. Both days are now covered, except for the last session, which is a Wikipedia clinic (surely some of the other live bloggers will have coverage, but unfortunately I had to run to the airport):

• Social Media Marketing Essentials
• Linkbait: Chumming For Traffic On Social Media Sites
• Social Media News Sites (Barry blogged this one for me; he said that he didn’t know much about the whole live blogging thing, but would give it a try)
• A Marketer’s Guide to Social Networking and Tagging
• Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon

Day two!

• Effectively Leveraging Social Networking
• Evangelist: The Marketer’s Role in Social Media Marketing
• Micro Communities (I had to head out to the airport, so Rebecca covered this session)

Conference is kick ass so far. You are totally missing out.