Find me on the social web!

http://www.linkedin.com/in/sjmorris
http://www.facebook.com/sarahjanemorris
http://blog.iperceptions.com/sarah_jane_morris/
http://twitter.com/SarahJaneMorris
http://www.last.fm/user/SarahJMorris
http://blip.fm/SJSJSJ
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/13466597122795943916
http://friendfeed.com/sarahjanemorris
http://sarah-jane.yelp.ca
http://community.4qsurvey.com/profile/SarahJaneMorris

And just for fun:

http://www.mypersonality.info/sarahjanemorris/

Getting Started with Social Media

Here’s a briefing I recently prepared for a friend I’m doing a little marketing consulting (on the side) for. Applicable to just about any brand/business getting their feet wet in the social media space. Feedback please! 🙂

1- Tune in to what people are saying about your brand in social media environments. To do this, I suggest referencing the following tools on a weekly basis.

Social Media Firehose: RSS feed (made by Yahoo Pipes) that aggregates results from Flickr , Digg , YouTube , FriendFeed and other social media sites.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/update_maker/social_media_fire_hose

• Remove the “salesforce” terms that are entered by default
• Enter “YourBrandName” as they keyword for search
• Enter “YourWebsite.com” as the URL fragment to ignore (prevents bringing up content from your own site)
• Click on “List” in the results interface. Enjoy the results!

Latest Blog Mentions: This is another Yahoo Pipe that will aggregate brand references across several major blog search engines, including Technorati, Icerocket and Google Blog Search.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=bFH0.Di32xGnPkr_qu5lkA

• Enter “YourBrandName” as they keyword for search
• Click on “List” in the results interface. Enjoy the results!

Twitter Search: See if anyone is Tweeting about your brand, in real time!

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=FillinYourBrandNameHere

2- Develop your social media brand presence. Create and populate a blog and create a presence on twitter, facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc. Actively engage with these tools.

3- Target Potential Evangelists. Find influential people who will appreciate your brand and want to tell their followers about it. Alltop.com is a great place to start tracking down who these influencers may be.

4- Develop Relationships. Interact directly with your existing and potential online evangelists using the platforms that they use. This can take time, but it’s worth it.

a. Found a new blog/twitter post/digg entry/etc with a post about you? Email/tweet or blog about the poster and take the time to thank her/him. Send her/him a branded gift. Begin a dialogue. Exchange exposure.

b. Target a high profile blogger that you think would be a good evangelist for your brand. Blog about them. Find and follow them on twitter. Don’t pitch them – reach out with the genuine intention of exchanging ideas/building a relationship, and let the rest happen naturally.

5- Measure results. Set goals and track success. Let social media work like any other campaign – to drive traffic, memberships and overall value of YourWebsite.com. Watch for which social media outlets appear as referrers in Google Analytics, ask your members how they found you when they signup and watch your overall brand growth in social media outlets. Some tools to allow you to do this:

· Addictomatic A cool search engine that aggregates rss feeds into a nice visual dashboard

· Blogpulse Blog search engine with conversation tracker tool

· Boardreader Search forums and message boards

· Boardtracker Forum search engine offering instant alerts

· Buzzmonitor Embeddable widget showing recent instances of your search term

· Compete.com Comparable site metrics for any website

· Del.ici.ous Social bookmarking engine. Search by tags and subscribe to feed results

· Facebook lexicon Searches facebook walls for words and phrases

· Google alerts Email updates of key search terms

· Google insights Compare search volume over time

· Google trends Compare search term trends

· Howsociable Gives a social media score for your brand, with email updates of your score.

· Ice rocket Blog search engine with results rss feed

· Newsflashr News search engine, presenting results in nice dashboard

· Sphere Related content widget

· Technorati Blog and social media search engine

· Twing Discussion board and forum search engine

· Twingly Spam free blog search engine

· Twitturly Track what urls people are talking about on twitter

· Xinu Shows how well your site is performing across different metrics. Also gives a site diagnosis

6- Ask your visitors. Ensure that this socially-driven traffic is getting what they came for when they come to your site. The best way to do this is to ask them if they got what they came for, using 4Q.

I realize I’ve skimmed some pretty big concepts (blogging, relationship building, building a social media presence), but I was casting a wide starting net. Did I miss anything? What would you add?

Born to share useless facts with the world – a brief history of my “social” life

September 4th 2008: I just re-read this and felt it important to note the following: I wrote this, originally, with the intention of posting it on the corporate blog of the company I work for. As I wrote, I realized it has no relevance whatsoever to that blog (although, naturally, I do work for a Web 2.0-focused company), but I finished it up anyways and made it my introductory post here. This also explains the excess use of links. I felt I needed to say this to explain what I consider to be a weird, confused tone in my writing. I promise to be more chillaxed from here on in.

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve felt compelled to let a larger audience in on the most random tidbits going on in my brain. When I was 7, I typed up a series of lists on my precious new Epson Typewriter and placed them proudly around my house – once such list being my Top 10 favorite foods. Numero uno was Kraft Dinner of course (a.k.a Kraft Macaroni and Cheese for you Yankees). I also distinctly remember including pomegranates somewhere in the top 5 in an effort to be seen as “varied” and “cultured,” even at that young age.

The careful thought given to preparing these lists was a clear early indicator that I was very interested in being directly and knowingly involved in shaping how others perceived me. As I’ve progressed in age and had audiences larger than my mom, dad and two older brothers to answer to, I’ve had to find different ways to keep people up-to-date on useless facts about me.

In my early teens, I developed weekly newsletters on our Apple IIe (using Print Shop of course… have you figured out my age yet?) detailing dentist appointments, trips to summer camp, and more. High school turned into higher-profile forms of self-expression, in the form of abstract poetry featured in my yearbook and through a variety of public speaking competitions (my speech about meeting Michael J. Fox awarded me a 2nd place finish!).

All this lead up to the mid-nineties… the dawn of the internet age, and the humble beginnings of what we now call Social Networking. As soon as I had a modem, I was hooked. In a sort of premonition to the online profiles featured on social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, my first online project was a webpage hosted by Geocities with my picture on the top left, and a blurb or two about myself. I used this as a rudimentary profile to send to all my forum/newsgroup/discussion board “cyberfriends” (and yes, I’ve dug around for it at the Wayback Machine, to no avail).

Eventually, I was invited to join my first established social network, Orkut.com. I became addicted to the concept of finding like-minded people through groups and keywords. However, as orkut began be inundated by Portuguese-speaking Brazilian members, I began to look elsewhere to satiate my social needs.

Enter MySpace. MySpace was my first experience with being able to not only network with like-minded people around the globe, but with my actual “real life” friends and family, as they progressively started establishing profiles of their own. Myspace was also a key catalyst in the new era of people as individual brands. MySpace gives users the ability to endlessly brand their individual profiles, and gives the same ease of use to a 14-year old girl in the midwest as it does to a celebrity or multi-million dollar organization. That kind of equal opportunity platform really appealed to me.

Around the same time as I became addicted to MySpace, I established my profile on LinkedIn.com. Now, social networking was not only keeping me connected to friends and family and introducing me to new people, but it was also allowing me to network with peers and make business contacts. Social networking was touching every part of my social life.

As we move towards todays date of August 28, 2008, Facebook takes center stage. Towards the end of 2006, there was a mass exodus in my circle from MySpace over to Facebook. I still can’t quite figure out why,,, perhaps it was due to our age and lifestyle requirements; MySpace meets the needs of a younger generation looking for a less-structured approach to self-expression, and Facebook keeps things a little neater, more compartmentalized. Facebook also allows for a hybrid approach to social networking – I’ve used Facebook for friends and family, but have also used it to network with contacts.

Finally, we’ve arrived to today. My latest social venture has been twitter. I can’t get enough. I am meeting fascinating people and exposing myself to amazing ideas and finds, all from people I admire on the digital world. It’s incredible how twitter has allowed me to reach out and touch them so easily – and, meet amazing new people along the way.

I wonder what’s next?