Let’s take a look at some of these findings:

Trend: oDesk
Popularity: Google Trends # 1

oDesk is a site that allows you to “Hire, Manage, and Pay remote contractors as if they were in your office.” Although oDesk’s hot trend rank is more than economy based, with the current mass layoffs it’s easy assume how a site like this would become very popular during a recession. Virtual employees do not require commuting (gas and auto costs) and can operate anywhere. All while saving employers money on costs like health coverage, on utilities that a normal office would consume, and since it’s hourly based pay only, there’s no worry that employers may be paying for employee downtime which would normally be the case with salary-based pay.

Trend: Etsy art
Popularity: Google Trends # 11

Etsy is a popular craft site that allows artists to display and sell their wares. Most often you can find great deals on handmade jewelry, scarves, art, etc. Basically anything that could be handmade can be found here. With the holiday season right around the corner, I anticipate Etsy will be riding high.

Trend: waste management jobs
Popularity: Google Trends # 20

When Benjamin Franklin said “In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes” he forgot to mention trash. Waste management is a high paying yet low demand job that doesn’t require a college degree. It’s also not a municipal service that would likely fall victim to budget cuts like police and fire departments.

Article: Wal-Mart posts higher 3Q profit
Popularity: Addict-o-matic > Yahoo News

Unfortunately many American’s love Wal-Mart and I’m not going to get into why Wal-Mart is bad for the U.S. economy but I will say the common perception of Wal-Mart is that it’s the cheapest and easiest place to get just about everything. Penny pinchers think shopping here will save them money when in actuality middle-America might still have some coin if Wal-Mart never existed.

Article: Apple may launch most aggressive Black Friday sale yet
Popularity: Addic-o-matic > Digg

Retailers are going to have a hell of a time selling much of anything in Q4. Luckily the consumer comes out on top when retailers compete. Even though the holiday season is near and consumers will benefit from heavily discounted sales, it still may be very difficult for retailers to make their investors happy.

So what can we piece together from the above? Well, besides needing a drink or anti-depressant (invest in pharma now), we know that hiring through oDesk may be a good option for small to medium-sized business owners, we know that Etsy may be a smart place to get some good deals on quality holiday gifts, we know that jobless claims are up and people are looking for work in not-so-desirable places, we know that people are in the money-saving mindset, and consumers are going to get some great deals this holiday season.

Buckle-up folks, we know it’s going to be a bumpy ride…oftentimes social media will tell us just HOW bumpy the ride will be.

Brendan Picha is the President of Squareoak Media, specializing in Social Media, Search Marketing, and Viral Content

Contact Brendan

I was playing with some toys earlier and thought; why don’t we look a little deeper into the world of Buzz Monitoring. And I don’t mean for tracking buzz altogether either. What about utilizing it when crafting new content or blog posts? Buzz monitoring need not be a glorified vanity search endeavour when it can unlock a genie of information to bring life to your content generation efforts.

While you can certainly use a buzz monitoring program to track activity relating to ones blog or company metrics, it can be also used to track/research just about anything. You can use it to track news on markets for projects and can suggest the latest trends and/or buzz for content creation programs and general business intelligence.

Information is the currency of content

What is most certainly a great way to leverage them is when used for researching your next blog post. It is not only a good way to find nuggets of varied perspectives, but also shows you the latest discussions that are going on in a given topic area.

This can be important as you can continue existing discussions in either a supportive or converse perspective and hopefully catch any existing momentum that already exists in the marketplace. You may even find the research into the most recent activity begins to craft your post in directions you may not have started off on in the fist place.

Some tools to play with

As it has been said by the ever fascinating Johnny Long; Google is your friend – so let’s start there.

(Johnny Long… Not related.. but entertaining)

Anyway, let’s continue on… Often freshness matters as much as quality and other times aged, respected feed sources are the call of the day. In the former, where freshness plays a roll, try a quick run though various searches on Google;

Google Blog Search; which can be set to various time frames – you can also grab a widget for your iGoogle or set up alerts for desired topics.

Google Search (regular); using time delineated results (1 week here) – a variety of Google search hacks are always handy for researching anything. But that’s another story.

Other useful blog stops include;

Now this method works on a larger scale but also tend to have a higher noise-to signal ratio than one may want when creating content. Timely content isn’t always the best content. One of the next options is to do a little Google personalization in the form of known, respected sources….

PostRank (consolidate with Aiderss) – another handy buzz monitor tool is PostRank which will scan a feed and give you a 1-10 scale of each post. This can be handy when analyzing a given post or topic type to ensure you have the best possible chance of creating a popular post of your own.

Do-it-yourself

The Google Custom Search Engine; a service that allows you to search only the sites you wish and even segment them. I like creating GCSEs centric to areas of study. In my case that would be search engines, search marketing and social media marketing. To that end I created a couple engines to study what I felt were some of the more authoritative barometers of the genre

The SEO Search Engine – which we can search ‘buzz monitor’ to get results on the topic from top SEO blogs.

The SMM Search – which contains many of the top social media marketing blogs and we’d get this for ‘buzz monitor’

What is advantageous to making a custom search engine is controlling the source material. Even if you are writing for a niche you’re not familiar with, once populating with known entities in the space it is your crystal ball to mining content ideas and opinions.

Should we be tasked with creating content for a fishing store/blog you would not only mine the client and his suppliers for leads (on influencer sites/blogs) but head off to locales such as Technorati , Alltop or MBL – to get a good cross section and identify influencers.

Add them into your custom search engine and away you go…

Regardless of how you populate them, utilizing a Google Custom Search Engine can make for a great signal to noise tool for ongoing project needs. Segmentation helps to narrow the focus where that is often needed to catch the influencers in a market segment.

Segmenting the social world

Next we want to be able to JUST search the social world for activity. Once more utilizing the GCSE we can segment the various social sites not only choosing which to include, but also segment by basic type (social media, networking, bookmarking etc…). To that end;

Social Activity Search – which enables searching of the various major social sites like so..

Twitter/FriendFeed/Plurk Search – for watching the world of micro-bloggers - our search

The main point being to load them up with sites you feel you are targeting or interested in for a given campaign. It takes very little time but gives you a tool at your control that makes getting the feel for a buzz in a given niche easy and accessible.

If you’re looking for a good list of sites to mine for data, I just happen to keep a list here which might come in handy. You can even go old school and make one to search the forums in a given niche – you’re limited by your imagination and uses for qualitative as well as quantitative data.

Also, if you want to track buzz on Twitter, use the real-time search - which we can use with topic markers (#seo for example) or use the advanced search goodies which are here - of interest is the ‘sentiment’ search which can help if you’re after a positive or negative spin on your post.

What to make of it all?

Now that you have all this information it is a matter of mining it for data.

Start by making note of;

1. Common topics; old staples that are the everyday
2. Popular topics; ones that are hot on social sites
3. Controversial Topics; those that raise the emotions
4. Timely items; news that is bandwagon friendly
5. Resource lists; topically relevant tools and resources.
6. Popular sites; top influencers often cited (show some link love)
7. Chronological anomalies (is more content published on a certain day?)

This can be a scientific excursion utilizing a spreadsheet or other application or a more informal process of making notes of the areas that stand out to you. What is more important is that you get a feel for the target audience and the market itself before even setting about the content creation itself. You may already have a topic in mind, you may not; the goal is to understand the space.

Then Target your approach; using traditional hooks;

1. The News hook
2. Resource angle
3. Freebies and give-a-ways
4. The passion poker
5. The Ego baiter

Armed with your research it should be easy to find topics, resources and influencers to match up with more traditional link bait approaches to make a compelling page/blog post. Once more we are merely looking to get the creative juices flowing through this process. Beyond buzz monitoring there are other factors such as past analytics and openly available trend data from locales such as Google Trends and Compete from which we can draw from. Utilizing buzz monitoring is merely another tool in deciding on the ultimate direction of any content creation plan.

 
Just links in the chain

There are many other considerations to be had when putting together a content creation plan – but buzz monitoring is certainly a tool with many uses. Hopefully turning to these tools for more than mere engagement metrics and benchmarks will enhance your own imagination to how these tools can be used. If you approach them as a blank canvass awaiting the first stroke, you will find much value to be had beyond traditional uses. Next time your writing or seeking inspiration why not give it a try ;0)

And because we’ve merely opened a new door into Buzz Monitoring; What else can they do? Research and Development? Business intelligence? Qualitative data?

There is more here than a mere vanity search nor fickle engagement metrics – get creative

Here are some goodies that came out of this expedition for more of your creative endeavours;

Finding were your customers are talking about you. – Vanessa Fox
13 Tools for Tracking discussions in the Blog-o-sphere - Mashable
26 Free Social Media Tracking Tools – Marketing Pilgrim
Reputation Management made easy, and Free! – Search Engine Land
Tools to monitor your brand effectively – Social Media Trader
Top 10 reasons to monitor your brand online – TopRank Blog

Other toys for tracking

Megite - social news aggregrator for uncovering the most relevant items from auto-discovered news sites and weblogs. Here’s an example using Lee Odden’s Big list of marketing blogs.

Zemanta - Any user-created text (a blog post, article or web page) is directly “read” by Zemanta; it then combs the web for the most relevant images, smart links, keywords and text, instantly serving these results. Zemanta can be deployed on all major content publishing platforms and web browsers through a simple plug-in.

Paid Services – I haven’t had the opportunity to review these, use at own risk.

Trackur
SentiMetrics
CyberAlert - NetPinions
Umbria
Buzz Logic
Nielsen Buzz Metrics
ScoutLabs

Open Web Awards is the only multilingual international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology. Nominate your favorites in a ton of categories ranging from Social News to Niche interests! The first Open Web Awards achieved over 250,000 votes combined between Mashable and 50 international blog partners including Collective Thoughts!

Rules for Voting and Nominations
Mashable and PollDaddy reserves the right to analyze any of the nominations or votes before determining an official nominee or winner. Due to the nature of online submissions, the following are the rules for voting and nominations:

Nominations:
1. Any site or application can be nominated in as many categories as seen fit
2. Nominations is one Site per Category per person (validated through PollDaddy)
3. Nominees with the most submissions and/or determined by Mashable will move to the voting round

Voting:
1. Voting is one vote per Category per person (validated through PollDaddy)
2. IP tracking and e-mail confirmation will remain in place
3. E-mails will only be used in regards to alerts about the Open Web Awards
4. Winners will be determined after voting round is closed and data is verified

Winners:
1. “People’s Choice” Winners will be validated by Mashable and PollDaddy before any announcements are made
2. “Blogger’s Choice will be validated by Mashable and compiled from our Blog Partners

Presented by:

Mashable

What triggers do you use to put yourself into a highly creative state of mind?

For this to have its greatest impact I would really like you to stop whatever mindless activity you are thinking of and follow a few simple steps. First stand up and take three deep breaths. Holding each breath for a few seconds will calm your mind. Go ahead and do it now! No one is watching! I would enjoy having your positive attention for a few minutes before you develop your own creative triggers.

Moving on, please start with a fresh beverage of choice. I often find a rich chocolate coffee helps to slow things down, other times cracking open an ice cold coke “in a can” grasps my full attention to the task I have before me. But we’re near the end of 2008, more than likely your beverage of choice happens to be a clear, but simple bottle of water. As long as you begin to relax and focus your mind, you will learn what triggers are best for you. Find your mental escape!

I also like to start my creative process with the use of a location trigger to place myself in to a specific state of mind. You may find that a location may offer you more of a targeted trigger, more so than an object trigger, depending on what you want to convey in your message. Parks are a great source of inspiration that creative people have used for ages. Close your eyes and think of sitting on a deadfall at the edge of a meadow.

What are the sounds you hear as birds sing, the leaves rustle as squirrels fight over the last of your popcorn? What smells trigger your senses? Is it autumn and you sense the first hint of someone’s fireplace? Or is it spring and the musky smell of fresh turned flower beds hover in the air? Do not limit yourself to one location.

Another place I like to go to is my “second office.” It is a picnic bench located at the top of a dune overlooking a public beach. In fact this post was first written on a notepad while the smell of suntan lotion drifts up off the beach below. Take another deep breath and you will also smell the soft smell of coconuts. How long will the smell of suntan lotion now linger in your mind? Use the location triggers as a starting place then let them take you forward.

How does this creative trigger post make sense on a social media blog? Collective-Thoughts have a very broad selection of readers. Many are seasoned content developers creating amazing content on their own, but some are just in the beginning stages of their careers. By looking into how you select your inspiration, it will help to heighten your senses to expand your talents over all of the various aspects of social media. Some triggers will help you to brainstorm for video; while others are better suited to help you facilitate your writing. Some make Stumbling more fun. Anyone play drinking games while Digging?

Now on to the question of the day. Do I add a shot of Patrón XO Cafe into my coffee before I start my next post?

With us today is the Daniel Honigman, part of the social media team that’s responsible for Colonel Tribune, a persona formed for the Chicago Tribune. Thanks for joining us.

1- Give us some background about yourself.

My background is in reporting and traditional journalism. Right now, I work as a social media strategist for Tribune Interactive (Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, etc.), where I work on ways to build local and national communities around our content. I also help evangelize the use of Web 2.0 tools in the newsroom.

2 - What was the aha moment at Tribune that lead to the establishment of the Colonel? Is the team full-time dedicated to social media, or is it incorporated with other duties?

When I started with the Chicago Tribune, I looked at people’s touchpoints with the digital brand, and I saw that while there were some traditional ways people could reach the paper, including via e-mail, there was nothing to inspire the local digerati, really.

I thought about Facebook pages, YouTube pages and Twitter, and seeing that someone had already reserved @ChicagoTribune on there — it was an RSS feed — Bill Adee and I decided to create something, and we settled on Robert McCormick, an historic figure in Tribune lore. We built out a persona for the ChicagoTribune.com and, all of a sudden, we had our Colonel.

3 - Is this a fad? Surely there’s a beginning and end to things, but as web ambassadors, does social media seem like a worthy investment for the Chicago Tribune with long-term benefits?

From what we’ve seen, just from a traffic perspective, social media is worth the effort. But I believe that for local news organizations, it’s essential to create one-on-one connections with people in your market. But social media is something that all mainstream media should embrace, because it’s only going to get tougher and more cluttered out there.

4 - How does The Tribune use social media, and do you see it as a threat to your business? Many fear that blogging killed the journalist. Your thoughts?

It’s not a threat to the business. Traditional media has sold on a CPM model, but for mainstream media to survive, it has to think outside the box. As an industry, look for more aggregation.

But for newspapers to survive, they need to ratchet things down for a bit. If anything, blogging has been a shock to the journalism system. But journalists still have skills that many bloggers just don’t have: access and accuracy. They just need to embrace the 24-hour news cycle and, I believe, be format-agnostic.

5 - You’ve had some successes through social media, such as being able to report a bomb threat. Care to elaborate on the experience or share some others?

Just having a line to the social space can bring you all sorts of information that you may not have had before through traditional channels. As reporters cultivate their beats in real life, social media can help them tap into sources and audiences they never knew existed for their work.

The reason the Colonel got the tip, however, is that he has the reputation of a man who knows what’s going on. And if he doesn’t, he can try to find out. Not many people have that sort of connection with their hometown newspapers.

6 - What has the Chicago Tribune’s social media team found to be the best ROI sites for it’s efforts? What sort of strategies seem to work the best/least?

When we find them, we’ll tell you. The great thing about social media is that there’s no one right way to do it. Everyone’s feeling their way around the space right now, and it’ll probably continue to be that way for a while.

7 - Do you use any tools to monitor people submitting their articles to social media? How do you attempt to monitor your brand in social media?

Metrics are the Holy Grail of social media. Right now, I look at referrals, number of friends in different networks, number of brand mentions in different spaces, some direct feedback and the amount of conversation going on — both about the Chicago Tribune and about Colonel Tribune.

8 - Have you had any negative backlash from the self promotion? Example - when looking at the Colonel on Digg, 9 of the last 10 submissions were Chicago Tribune articles. We’ve seen in many cases that if a Digg user only submitted stories from a single source to which they are clearly connected, they would be flagged as a spammer, even if it was Techcrunch, Cracked or Ars Technica. In fact about the only person who can get away with submitting all his own content is Kevin Rose. Comments?

The thing about anything in social bookmarking sites is that if your content is good, it has a good chance get popular. Period.

But it’s not just about the content; you have to find other ways to contribute to these online communities, whether it’s submitting outside content, commenting on other stories or sharing other stories. It’s important to bring something else to the table and to show you’re willing to be a part of the group.

9  - Ok, so who would win in a fight - Colonel Tribune or Colonel Sanders?

Funny story: My girlfriend Mollie’s grandfather opened the first KFCs here in Chicago, so he and Colonel Sanders were good friends, actually. But I still think Colonel Tribune would win.  Colonel Tribune has a pretty big posse, you see.

Thanks again for speaking with us, Daniel!

Shouldn’t a blog be more? I sure think so.

Sure, sure…content is king. But shouldn’t it be original content? As we are nearing the 1 year anniversary of Collective Thoughts, I wanted to share with you a peek into very selective process in finding great bloggers to head it up.  The single most important factor was that each contributor was totally original and the real thing.  You know it when you see it.  That said, here are the aha moment that I had in when reading the work of my esteemed colleagues:

Andy Beard - For me, Andy has had more thought provoking posts than any of the contributors here, so it was really special for me that he’s part of the team. If I had to pick one post there, it would be the Wordpress Masterclass post.  An oldie but goodie, and may show many of you how little you know about Wordpress after all

Brendan Picha - Brendan is also a newcomer, and showed his stuff with a Digg submission that made it to Diggnation!

Dave Harry - While Dave is a relative newcomer to Collective Thoughts, I’ve been a fan of his writing for quite some time.  The Sphinn awards got my attention - great way to get a community buzzing!

Mark Laymon - Mark is quite a character.  For those of you that don’t know him, you probably know of him as the guy that relentlessly throws sheep and pokes you in Facebook.  This post on getting a PDF to the front page will live on forever in my memory.  I’ll bet every commenter on Digg had their jaw to the floor when it happened

Shana Albert - As we all know, everyone loves Shana.  Shana is a rare talent that has an outstanding writing ability to capture the human spirit.  She actually started writing on Collective Thoughts prior to the almost immediate debut of Social Desire.  Would have to say that my favorite post of hers has been how social media is like high school.

Tim Nash - I believe that his name will forever be associated with StumbleUpon. Who can forget the Stumbleupon Algorithm post? No doubt that this was a different thought than the crowd.

What post has been the aha moment for you? We’d love to hear from you.

The new features have been slowly being coming along for beta users for a while, these include:

• Expanded use of ratings via the 5 star system
• Revamped Friends system, no more 200 user limit but limitations on friends per day
• 
  New profiling system to identify likely friends

Along with the obvious cosmetic changes, pundits expecting to see new toolbars for Safari and Google Chrome will be disappointed. Few people are suggesting see changes to the amount of stumblers coming to their site most reporting lower numbers but with no official comment it is more likely these come from a decreasing userbase.

Mutual Friends

One of the things not immediate obvious is the way friends are added has changed, you may notice your fans are now called subscribers, and when they subscribe they send a friends request (it appears in your inbox) it is unclear how StumbleUpon plans on handling the thousands of existing fan relationships but at a guess they will simply leave them as they are. However the move has put the site more in line with other social media sites.

Enough to stop Stumbles rot?

So are the new changes enough to stop the rot within StumbleUpon? Over the last six months they have been plagued with bugs in the toolbar, slow site and a significant drop in users are the cosmetic changes enough? Or will StumbleUpon slide perhaps the new “web toolbar” will be the answer? Or perhaps maybe it will take a new buyer?

Empathy is the ability to understand the depth of another person’s feelings. Empathy comes through conversation and building relationships. Empathy is something that our parents and grandparents showed us how to feel, relate, respect and love others. It is very important for any business to have Empathy, but it should not be absent from the Online Business.

Absence of Empathy in an Online Business could cause Failure. That statement might seem ridiculous to you, but it is a strong possibility. And, do you know why? Because empathy earns a potential customer’s trust. Without trust you have no customers. Without Customers…. you have no orders.

Of course, there are other reasons why a customer purchases online. Such as…

• Convenience - not having to leave the house
• Ease - Product is shipped right to your door or to someone
  else’s door if it a gift.
• Out of the ordinary products - Find products that you couldn’t
  easily find locally

But even if an Online Store has the ability to do all three of the above things…. without trust the customer will go elsewhere.

Empathy Builds Trust

Remember, Empathy is the ability to understand the depth of another person’s feelings. Our Local Businesses have been doing this for years…. with Salespeople. The really great salespeople will let you know that he or she cares about what you are going through, the problem that has brought you to their store today, and how they will make sure they make your life easier before you leave their store. If at any point you felt that the store or sales person was untrustworthy or not sincere you would leave. So, his sincerity is extremely important.

The same applies to eCommerce and Online Businesses. But, How do we add empathy into an eCommerce or Online Business? After all, unlike an actual physical place of business an eCommerce business has no face-face contact. How the heck can you hold conversations…. let alone earn their trust through Empathy? How, as an Online Business, do we get customers to realize that we understand them…. that we can relate with what they are going through?

Build a Relationship through Social Media

Social Media is basically online Conversations. These conversations might happen on different mediums, but they happen online. As an Online Business you need to start participating in Social Media activities so that you can build relationships with your potential customers….. so you can build trust.

Let me give you an example of how Social Media can aid in offering Empathy Online…

I’m going to use an example of a desperate mom looking for a colic remedy for her child. If you ever had an infant that suffers from Colic you will know that not only is the baby very uncomfortable, but the baby will express their pain in the form of screaming… screaming that lasts hours. These parents are usually super tired and extremely desperate to find safe and effective help…. quickly!!

Photo by bbaunach

Now, let’s say that this Mom checks online and finds a static website that sells Baby Colic Remedies. If you ever had a baby with colic you know the desperation parents feel to find something that will work…. something that will offer relief to the baby and peace to the parents. But, they also need to trust the vendor to provide a product that they can trust not only to work, but also be safe for their baby. This particular static eCommerce site has very nice pictures of the product, very informative descriptions of what the product does, and a “easy to use” secure online shopping cart. But, the customer still feels unsure whether this particular product is the right one for her baby. She is tired, nervous and she needs to be reassured that this is what she should purchase. She searches for testimonials and she finds them easily on the site, but how does she know these are real testimonials and not false made up ones. She wishes she could speak to a real customer or another mother who went through what she was going through right now…. Someone that could empathize with her.

She remembers that she belongs to a Parent Support Group Online and decides to touch base with them and ask them their thoughts. They point her in the direction of a blog where a “real life mom” writes about her battles with Colic herself. She explains what works and what doesn’t. The Mom blogger shows pictures of her happy baby and tells tales of how horrible it can be to have an uncomfortable and colicky baby. Even though this Mom wasn’t trying to sell anything she earned this desperate woman’s trust. Almost as if they were at a “play group” sharing colic stories and the mom told her to go out and buy “gripe water”. But, they have never met. Instead through Social Media the desperate mommy felt the blogging mommy’s empathy towards what she was going through. And, the desperate mommy went out on a mission to purchase “gripe water” for her baby.

This blogger earns her trust. How? By communicating using Empathy. By being real and with sharing she earned the readers trust.

Now since the original colic website sells “gripe water” that the blogger raved about, I suppose it is possible that the Mom will go back to the original website to make that purchase. But, because the original website couldn’t build the Mom’s trust with empathy it is extremely possible the the first site lost this Mom’s order forever.

If Only the Static Website had a Blog

But, imagine if that original website had a blog. This blog could be written by mothers…. Mothers who have a baby battling colic. Or perhaps a mom that survived the months of her baby having colic and lived to tell her heroic story online. The desperate mom might not have ever left the first website in search of trust… she could have found it right there.

The thing that got the customer was not only “The Word of Mouth” from friends online, but it was the empathy. It was the feeling in the blog post she read… she felt the mom’s desperation from another “human being”. She could relate, she blelieved… She trusted!! It was the human conversation that got her. The relationship. The blogger earned her trust.

Things you can do to add Empathy to your Business

• Add a Blog - First things first… add a blog. Make sure
  to write with Emotion. Be passionate with your writing. If your readers feel your passion, your care, your concern they might become customers and probably will pass around your blog to other people with the same concerns.
• Comment on Blogs in your Niche - Offer advice, tips and answer questions.
• Knowledge-Sharing Communities - (like Yahoo Answers) By participating in these types of communities and answering questions and giving people helpful advice you could eventually come an known expert in your field.
• Forums and Message Boards - Answer people’s questions and offer advice…. this too can lead to becoming a known expert in your field.
• Set up a Twitter Account - Microblogging is a great way to communicate with others in your niche. Again, offer advice and tips. Twitter is also a great way to notify others of new blog posts.
• Set up Instant Messaging on your Website - This way customers can contact you if needed. This is a great way to build trust with potential customers. They can ask you questions and even if they don’t have any for you it lets the customers know that they could contact you if need be.
• Images - Images are great for products, but how about using them to show emotion. Do you sell swimming pool toys? Well instead of only using product pictures…. take pictures of children using the toys…. of laughing and playing with the toys. Create a Flickr account with your business name and post your pictures on there.
• Videos - This is an awesome way to show your readers/clients/customers that you care… that you are real…. that you empathize. Make video of your products being used. Or, produce how to videos on your website. You can even make a weekly video show where you perform a 15 how-to class on your products. The things you can do with video to aid with empathy for a Online Business is almost endless.

I feel that there is no beautiful advertisement in the World that will be as trustworthy as a family member, friend or passionate person who has lived through it. In my opinion Word-of-Mouth trumps regular advertising. If someone real and trustworthy says to me, “Try this Product… It Rocks!!”. Well, then I will probably will be trying that product. However, if an advertisement says, “Try this Product…. it Rocks!!” (this being a different product than what the “word of mouth” suggested) it’s only a possibility I might try the advertised product first.

Empathy is natural…. we’ve been doing it for as long as we realized that other people had emotions just like we do. And, as a business person you need to master this skill. To aid in this ask yourself a few questions:

• If I was the customer how would I be feeling?
• If I was the person arriving at my site… what would I be hoping to see?
• What kind of proof would I want to see to prove that the product I’m selling is the one I need?

Basically, you need to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How would they be feeling when they come to you. You need to understand that before being able to offer empathy to them.

Bottom line as a Business Owner you need business. You want more business?? Be empathetic…… do you want a platform to be empathetic and add conversation to your business plan?? Add Social Media. And, most importantly…

Share your experiences, be real and honest, add emotion, be empathetic….. Make a Difference!!

Empathy & Social Media together…. This Combo could be an Online Business Secret Weapon.

When you could buy Netscape Navigator in a box at a store! For those of you that missed that whole era, you might consider reading The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, a great tale of Netscape and Jim Clark, its co-founder. Just to catch you up - Netscape totally dominated the market, that is, until Microsoft came along and started bundling Internet Explorer with windows.

If you go back to 1996, you’ll find Netscape at over 80% domination, with IE not even with 10% of the market (remainder was mostly Mosaic, but that’s a whole other story).

Then came Internet Explorer’s rise to power. (ok, I’m skipping Mosaic, Opera and the like). We see the 90% IE / 10% Netscape mark strike in October 2001.

5 Years. 5 years for the browser war to declare its next victor.

And it sure ain’t over yet, we’ve still got 7 years of history to account for.

Along came something we all now know as Firefox - and going by statistics from TheCounter.com, it took Firefox about 2 years to capture 1% of the browswer market. And we’re talking about 2000-2002, back when there were far fewer people on the web as there are today.

Fast forward to today - Firefox is closing in on 19% of the market share. Mostly Mac (and don’t forget iPhone) based Safari is starting to grow at a nice clip too - over 6%.

Enter Google Chrome. Google is doing a lot of things right with this super secret project that’s now been blogged all over the place. Don’t believe me? Try installing it on your Mac Linux Windows XP / Vista box and going to a site you like. You’ll find that Chrome will load faster than just about anything out there. Granted, my Firefox browser would be faster without all my awesome plugins weighing it down, but Google is really pulling out all the stops.

There are plenty of issues with Chrome - flash issues, bugs, security vulnerabilities, major concerns in its EULA (that are supposedly being addressed).

But here’s the thing.

TGDaily reports that Google Chrome has captured an incredible 1% of the browser market in just nine hours. Ok, let’s consider that the number may be nonsense, non-sustainable, people use multiple browswers,and all other distractors. But remember what we just said. It took Firefox 2 years to get 1%, and that’s when the web population was much smaller in 6 years back.

And it’s got a kickass comic book telling it’s story (must read, by the way).

So what’s different this time? If you read this blog, you know what I’m going to say: social media! The forefront of tech adopters abuzz about the latest and greatest. Chrome came along and gave Opera a wedgie and stole Flock’s lunch money - all before bedtime after it’s first day of school. Not a bad Labor Day. I’m very interested to hear your thoughts about your web browser journey, and if your journey will include Chrome.

Enjoy your weekend!!

Brian’s picks

• Brazilian hackers stalk Twitter, try to wax the unwary - Arstechnica - yikes!
  
• Upcoming Friends & Fans Changes - elaboration on lifting the 200 friend limit, straight from the StumbleUpon horse’s mouth

Thought for the week; there is a lot of noise in social media. It’s also tough to stay abreast in the latest and greatest sites while keeping up in the ones you already know and enjoy. How do you keep up? More to come in a future post..

Andy’s pick

• Alexa Now Discounts Almost All Social Media Traffic - Is This A Good Thing?
• Is Perfectionism Keeping You From Success?

Thought for the week; Do you go to a party, social gathering or business event with a specific plan that gets implemented to perfection and has amazing results? If you do, you are the rare exception. Sure you might have an idea who you want to meet, but ultimately the best results come from being there, right place at the right time, and casual meetings at the drinks cabinet, food bar or outside the WC.

Tim’s picks

• Google Stopwords Patent
• Tracking YoutTube Videos with Google Analytics

Thought for the week: For every action there is a reaction, it doesn’t matter if its asking for a thumbs up on StumbleUpon or a car hitting the wall it’s how we cope with reaction that determines where the chain ends

Shana’s picks

• 
• The Plight of the Social Media Eskimo
• Upcoming Friends and Fans Changes
• Marketing by Color: Don’t Try To Sell Blue Potatoes

Thought for the week; Just like in a community in reality your success in a social networking community relies heavily on an even amount of give or take. Do too much of one or the other and I can guarantee that you won’t get the full effect of community.

Dave’s picks

• coming soon?

Thought for the week; Is coming soon to a browser near you!

Brendan’s picks

• 
• Keep your eyes OFF the search engine rankings
• The Viral Video Guy Gets $1 Million In Funding
• Alexa Now Discounts Almost All Social Media Traffic - Is This A Good Thing?
• Populism to Kill the US Economy?
• The Possible Google Penalties Associated With Bad 301 Redirects

Thought for the week; There’s a good chance that the search industry will be much different five, three, even one year from now. Be sure to make some investments on your future by learning new software, methods, joining new social sites, playing with apps, and reading your feed reader daily. If you find your peers throwing tech slang and mentioning apps that you don’t recognize, chances are you’ve missed the boat or at least a kayak. Stay on top of your game you’ll find it can be leveraged to your benefit and that of your client’s.

Mark’s Picks

• The Rise and Fall of Twitter
• Social Media Stepping Up As Source For Connecting B2B Networks
• Intel to provide Facebook with hardware, Jedi secrets
• 5 Ways to Plugin to Your Identity
• Facebook to let employees sell some stock — at internal $4 billion valuation
• Delicious finally upgrades bookmarks site, now cupcake-powered

Thought for the week; It was great meeting those of you that attended Social Media Camp and the SummerMash in Miami. Wish I could have spent more time with you while there.

This week my thoughts are on introducing your real world peers to your social graph online. Look at how you are incorporating your offline friends into your online world and how it could benefit everyone. When introducing both peer groups, you may also be enriching their view of who you are, so everyone you know can enjoy parts of what you do. But you don’t really want to go this deep into thought do you, so let’s go find some friends to poke on Facebook!

Earlier this year Alexa shook things up a little, applying some kind of penalty or reduced modifier to websites with a traditionally higher percentage of Alexa toolbar users than average, predominately technology and webmaster focused sites who found the Alexa data useful, or who actively evangelised Alexa toolbar use as it is often a major factor in gauging traffic for advertising.
Some of the 3rd party tools offering Alexa data also provide other useful features, especially for webmasters with toolbars such as Search Status for Firefox.

Some level of rebalance was probably fair, to try to address the concerns of sites with high traffic but with a much lower frequency of Alexa toolbar users, who often felt they were at a disadvantage, especially in advertising sales.

During the last month Alexa has introduced another round of filtering or penalties, reducing or wiping out the effect of traffic from Social Media and Social News sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon, but potentially other sites such as Twitter or popular feed readers.
I haven’t done enough granular research to come up with a final list of likely candidates.

This is something potentially valuable to advertisers, as huge traffic spikes are possible from the largest social sites that can lead to an imbalance in their trend data, especially for the most recent 3 month period that appears in their toolbar by default.

I actually welcome this change, although I would much prefer to have both sets of data available, thus allowing Alexa to also provide a 3rd, possibly unique measure of the most “socially influenced” sites.

Unfortunately they seem to have made an error in their calculations, reported by both Performancing and more recently Daily Blog Tips (lots of head to head comparrisons), which is interesting to explore in more detail.

Double Dipping Penalties

If there was a 75% penalty for webmasters, or their toolbar multiplication factor was 75% less you currently have something like this:-

Traffic=((Toolbar*10)/4)-SM

Say there were 60 visitors to a site using the toolbar (maybe from 500 -1000 total visitors), and 100 visitors were from social media (10-20%)

((60*10)/4)-100 = 50 visitors being counted

Note: It would only take 25% of traffic to come from social media for the resulting traffic to equal to zero

What it should be is something more like:-

Traffic=((Toolbar*10)-SM)/3

/3 rather than 4 because webmasters might more frequent social media users as well, though penetration of both toolbars might be even higher.

((60 *10)-100)/4 = 125 visitors being counted

These are only examples of how the math might work and are not real world figures - I am sure Alexa are using much more complex calculations, but I am equally sure they are making some serious mistakes that can make a site receiving 500+ unique visitors per day appear to have way less than 100, or a site receiving 10,000 appear to have the equivalent of 1000 visitors or less.
This is something that affects all sites, but disproportionately affects sites (technology and webmaster) with a higher percentage of Alexa toolbar users, that had them rebalanced earlier this year.

Here are some examples of popular webmaster related sites that this double-dipping penalty have had a drastic effect on

Shoemoney.com currently with a 1 week average of over 174K
Doshdosh.com currently with a 1 week average of over 200K
ReadWriteWeb for 5th August one day stats was an Alexa rating of 90,000
Search Engine Land for 5th August one day stats was 83,000 with a one week average of 86K

The double-dipping penalty also hasn’t left the social sites themselves unscathed, with Digg and Reddit for some strange reason showing noticable declines, but Mixx continuing to gain. Maybe internal referrals from subdomains offer a benefit.

Then there is Tech industry favorite Techmeme, which is quite capable of sending 1000s of visitors to other sites on a daily basis, real referral traffic, but for some reason has a weekly average of 137,000 itself.

Daniel on DBT went into a lot more examples as mentioned earlier, including comparing traffic where he knows the real stats.

It is hard to tell how this might have affected larger sites, as relative traffic levels might be looked on as seasonal averages, and a drop from 2K Alexa to 4K Alexa might be just par for the course.

So far there is no official mention of any changes on the Alexa blog.

Whether my equation is correct doesn’t actually matter, it is clear that many sites (but not all) within the technology and webmaster niches were hit.
The most infuriating part isn’t the penalties and calculation mistakes themselves, however they are done, but how Alexa, owned by Amazon, could make such as huge and obvious mistake.

Could this be deliberate, and if so why?

Enjoy your weekend!!

Brian’s picks

• I liked this interesting new real time social browsing
• Still on the fence about the new facebook
• Top underground sneezers

Thought for the week; It’s always amusing to see the criticism of social media. Funny thing is, it usually comes from people that proudly display a few flashy badges that link to their social accounts. Upon further inspection, the critics are barely using social media.

Tim’s picks

• BBC Sematic Site experiment
• Funny Link request
• How to optimise for Cuil
• On the Danger of twitter

Thought for the week: Social Media is much like my leaky roofer, great when it’s sunny but totally useless in the rain…

Shana’s picks

• The Key to Effective Viral Marketing is Emotional Engagement
• Are Your Stumbled Pages Sticky?
• Social Networking: Online Tridimensional Conversation
• Why Reputation Management Matters for Small Business

Thought for the week; Social Media can be very confusing and even intimidating for the Webmaster or Small Business Owner new to Web 2.0. My suggestion would be to start with one Social Networking site/activity and start to know the community. Once you have done that you will be amazed how helpful the Community will be.

Dave’s picks

• New York Times Wants to Censor and Influence Bloggers?
• Hyperconnectivity shakes up six degrees of separation
• The Use of Fake Avatars In Social Media
• Sentiment analysis in social media
• The 10 Commandments of the Social Web

Thought for the week; I wanted to pass on the words of Chuang Tzu -

The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish, and when the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten.
The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch rabbits. When the rabbits are caught, the snare is forgotten.
The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten.
Where can I find a man who has forgotten words? He is the one I would like to talk to.

Brendan’s picks

• Montauk Monster - Viral Content Get’s Scary
• Google SERP Flux Cycling
• 5 Simple Rules for Comment Seeding
• Diminishing values on outbound links

Thought for the week; It’s really, really easy to get caught-up in routine. Many end-up reading the same blogs, talking with the same people, watching the same news channels. From a creative and educational standpoint it’s very important to make breaking your routine a routine in and of itself. Try making unusual connections like how understanding the dynamics of an ant colony can help you understand social voting or if economic trends augment social behavior online. Inspiration for such thinking can come from reading a book you’d never pick up, watching a documentary you wouldn’t normally watch, or attending a lecture you’d never attend. Routine can have the ability to suck the life right out of you so make sure you get out there and embrace the unknown!

Mark’s Picks

• Social Media Camp Miami
• Mashable Summer Smash Miami

Thought for the week; Expanding your social graph to include peers you would not normally meet in an offline world may offer pleasant results. I have expanded my networking from social connections made online to solidifying offline at various MeetUps and conferences. If you are in the Miami area this weekend I will be attending both Social Media Camp and the Mashable party.

Recently the masochists here at Collective Thoughts tasked me with writing the odd tidbit of social goodiness I was certainly bemused at the prospect of doing so. You see, in the end analysis I am a business consultant that almost exclusively moves from the mindset of what is best for the SMB (small to medium sized business) – which is not always to favour Social Media Marketing. Actually, for some time there was every reason to question where it fits inside the marketing toolbox at all when success already existed without it.

(inspired by Web Pages that Suck!)

And what is the secret to social media marketing success anyways? That will all depend on what you’re looking to get out of it. Some common benefits include;

1. Branding and brand management
2. Customer service/relations
3. SEO implications (rankings/SERP management)
4. Sales (advertising, product or service)
5. Leads (primary and secondary)
6. Qualitative market research

While in most cases you will have multiple goals and benchmarks for measuring success, there is one simple concept that you should consider to ultimately ease the strain on your marketing load; quality.

The quality connection

Ultimately with any type of offering one of the primary factors that truly needs addressing is quality. Your efforts in marketing will always be best served and budgets eased by putting the effort into quality control throughout the business lifecycle. Should future plans include strong web support from SEO, SMM or even Branding and Qualitative Research aspects, quality is your friend and can do much of the work for you. You should put an effort into each aspect as this will ultimately help you maximize your marketing efforts.

Some examples include;

1. Quality products and services
2. Quality information/resources
3. Quality conversations and interactions
4. Quality presentation (website and packaging)
5. Quality content (websites/blogs)
6. Quality infrastructure and usability (online and off)

By making all efforts possible in attaining the highest possible levels of quality, your efforts in not only social media marketing, but all areas of your marketing plan shall be eased. It is no longer the world of hard sell and the viral wonderment of cumulative efforts shall bear its sweetest fruit.

Do your self a favour and don’t be swayed into thinking that shortcomings in your approach can be made up with marketing budgets. While reach can be improved, ultimately the social world fumbling could do more harm than good to your cause.

Understanding the value of quality we can also look to the actual traffic generated from your SMM campaigns.

Quality traffic over quantity

No matter what the goals of your SMM campaign may be, targeted traffic will always be the call of the day. By running generalized campaigns one ultimately attracts generalized traffic which is usually not effective in the end analysis.

• Would you rather have a momentous wave of mindless Diggers or lesser set of targeted TechCrunchers for that latest service offering?
• Would you rather a sea of Stumblers or a trickle from Kaboodle with that new camera line your pimping?
• How about market influencers?

A single positive experience from a market influencer can be worth more than a Digg and Stumble rush combined. It is often the quality of the visitors that we desire over sheer numbers.

One must certainly try and decide early on what your goals, qualifiers and associated values will be for a social media marketing campaign as mere mass of traffic to the website is usually not going to get the job done. In most cases you should be more focussed on the qualities of the visitors generated. Are they your target market? How can they further your course to the ultimate goals of the campaign? Is the traffic generation method sustainable?

Once more, quality is an important aspect that must be considered.

Word of mouth travels at the speed of sound

And so, you should at all times remember that one’s efforts from the goal setting, systems and planning to the development and analysis processes; quality is a word to respect. You should not cut corners nor try and fool a wary public into believing you are more than you are. This attention to quality will surely be noted in the greater sphere and pay the ultimate dividends to be reaped from a successfully social media marketing campaign and beyond.

The next time you hear ‘quality over quantity’ remember to look in the metaphorical mirror to ensure your mindset seeks out the qualities of success.

Enjoy your weekend!!

Brian’s picks

• Essential Skills of a community manager - Chris Brogan
• Web networking photos come back to bite defendants - Yahoo News
• If your blog’s ranking is falling, is that really your fault, or Technorati’s? - The Viral Garden

Dave’s picks

• Socialititis strikes social media users - SEO Mentor
• New communication theory and roles - Brian Solis
• Twitter is not a micro-blogging tool - Mashable
• For a web analyst; what is social media? - Web Metrics Guru

Mark’s picks

• Open web foundation officially launches - TechCrunch
• No more software patents - Mashable
• Myspace to join OpenId - TechCrunch
• World’s first mainstream semantic web - Primal Fusion
• iPhone apps as marketing tools - Start up hustle
• MySpace/Facebook ignore location on iPhone at their peril -TechCrunch

Shana’s picks

• Create an Effective Strategy for Managing Your Online Profiles - Search Engine People
• 21 Ways to Make Your Blog or Website Sticky - ProBlogger

Brian also wanted to pass along his wishes in light of the passing of Randy Pausch; Achieving your childhood dreams

]]> http://collective-thoughts.com/2008/07/25/collective-wanderings-take-3/feed/ http://collective-thoughts.com/2008/07/25/collective-wanderings-take-3/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CollectiveThoughts/~3/341817520/ http://collective-thoughts.com/2008/07/21/business-social-networking/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:25:48 +0000 Brian Wallace http://collective-thoughts.com/2008/07/21/business-social-networking/

(Image credit:allspice1)

IBM was well known for having golf course privileges for its employees. Quite a perk, right? Well it paid off for IBM, as it kept employees going on talking shop on the golf course.

Enter social media. Corporations and draconian IT departments out there often block many or all social media sites from employee consumption. Question is, is this really the right way to approach this? Or rather, should companies embrace their employees natural want for social media.

Zappos is one such company that comes to mind for me when thinking about someone doing it right. Twitter.zappos.com shows over 400 of their employees and what they are doing. I’m a big fan of this approach:

Does it make sense to turn off social media on your employees? Perhaps its a trust factor. My opinion: if you trust them enough to run your business, they should be able to have a social media outlet. And if you are proactive and support it as part of your business culture, then viola! - you now have a social media team in house (at least part of the way there).

Infoworld just had a great perspective on this issue:

The primary value of a social network is the aggregation of people on it. Block your employees from getting on a network, and you block their access to developing a far-flung group of people who can act as free advisers, leads for new businesses, or prospective new hires.

“If you’re isolated, you’re of no value to a manager,” says Tom Hayes, author of “Jump Point: How Network Culture Is Revolutionizing Business.” He adds, “And if you’re management, ask yourself: What walled garden has ever prospered over time?”

Hayes says that social networks effectively disseminate information about industry trends, product announcements, and new talents. He adds, “Your best employees are the ones who are the most connected and most current.”

Block says that social networks’ real value rests in making an added connection that previously was not present, especially if those connections lead to offline partnerships.

Other companies are starting to embrace what would have previously been considered unconventional freedoms. Take Google’s 20-percent time, for example:

We offer our engineers “20-percent time” so that they’re free to work on what they’re really passionate about. Google Suggest, AdSense for Content and Orkut are among the many products of this perk.

Last but not least, I had a chance to reach out to Melanie Nathan from Canada Internet Video company, Statusfirm:

“Although I work for an organization that not only understands, but fully supports Social Media participation among its employees, there are still some challenges to overcome. Finding a good balance between daily duties while still being attentive to social media profiles is often difficult. Proper time management skills and an ability to focus are therefore essential. Without them, your employer may consider it all a waste of time.”

So, my friends - of course there are legal and HR implications, but if you are going to give your employees access to the Internet, you’ve got to be prepared of the consequences, and welcome them!

Enjoy your weekend!!

Brian’s picks

• Bill and Kimberly get engaged - congrats from the CT gang!
• Flash SEO indexing revisited – Tim Nash
• Summize acquired and integrated by Twitter - Twitter Search

Andy’s pick

• Using KW research to diversify your link profiles - that FireHorse guy

Tim’s picks

• Google Analytics Help: Questions, Answers, Tips, Ideas, Suggestions - Avinash Kuashik
• the Ultimate guide to decoding Digg speak - 10e20

Dave’s picks

• They made us hyper-connected; now what? - Social Times
• Social Media 101; how to get business involved - Mashable
• How to Create Digg-Friendly Content: Cracked.com’s Template - DoshDosh

Mark’s picks

• How Many Veins Have You Tapped Into? - Neil Patel
• World’s oldest blogger dies - Smarter then your average blog
• Comment spamming do-follow blogs 101 - A list SEO

Shana’s picks

• Online SEO Tools - the Ultimate Collection - Search Engine Journal
• Sex, permission marketing and social media - The ultimate Ménage à trois - OnReact

Tad’s picks

• Social media time waster - Chris G
• Real time social browsing - Browzmi
• Google plays with social search again - TechCrunch

…until next week remember;

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. - Oliver Wendell Holmes