EasyJet is going to sell flights on Facebook – Paypal integrates into Facebook, it seems companies are discovering the potential of of-site social commerce. Beyond doubt the chances for e-tailers to fish where the fish seem promising big time. A mind-blowing more than 20 million people become fans of fan pages each day – proving there’s no reservation by consumers to communicate and interact with brands on Facebook. The step to actually purchasing items on the social media brand pages and outside their ecommerce stores is a small one and e-tailers and customers will adapt social shopping on Facebook very soon.

The times for e-tailers are good since current growth rate for ecommerce sales is predicted to be almost 13% for 2010 – I’ve got the feeling lots of e-tailers will jump on the bandwagon and sell their stuff on social media platform storefronts. There’s room to grow here. And the growth will come from using interactive, portable storefronts embedded into not just social media but also mobile channels and interactive TV.

But also besides the incredible growth of social networks and corresponding off-site social commerce activities mentioned above there are some noteworthy on-site social commerce as well. Obviously there are richer by functional nature and leave more room for an enhanced user shopping experience.

Social Commerce in general can be very positively defined as the solving of people’s problems and making profit by doing so. More accurately ATG’s Bill Zujewski defines Social Commerce as Social Commerce is about customers having the means to interact with one another in order to make better buying decisions”. However these interactions don’t have to be direct but can come from algorithm driven recommendation engines to (I have put one together myself and I think social commerce should be the umbrella term for describing ecommerce recommendations rather than the ambiguous term Personalisation. In fact recommendations are based on rather social principles namely to look at your peers’ shopping behaviour and compare it with yours).

According to InternetRetailer e-tailers are ready to buy and they have long shopping lists, hence let’s have a look what’s out there.

• Social Shopping: people share the act of online shopping together (synchronous shopping). Besides Facebook and Facebook Connect you find sites like Kaboodle where one can shop multiple stores together. One neat tool I found is a little toolbar which can make a big difference called ShopTogether by DecisionStep. Amongst other things shoppers can co-browse in real time with friends can interact with each other in a live chat. I like it!
• Ratings & Reviews are around for years and are rather established with a huge impact on sales. Including sponsored reviews from Bloggers by sites like PayPerPost.
• Recommendations & Referrals (mentioned above)
• Forums & Communities: still the ideal case of social commerce. People produce (long tail) content for SEO purposes, connect with each other and share the love for you. Can be reviews, photos, videos anything really.

All of these solution claim to have a very high ROI, it would be interesting what social commerce approach works best for different industries. Ideas?

Happy Easter from London!

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Social Media has a stronger impact to books than the movable type had, launched six centuries ago. Social Media makes information producible, accessible and spreads it easily, quickly and without barriers of entry. Is Social Media the paradigm shift which will the publishing industry alive? In any case changes will come. Big changes.

The Publishing industry provides the creative with resources not available to them, namely: production of books, the distribution, the pricing, marketing and sales.

Book Production

Looking at the emerging landscape of online publishing all of the mentioned contribution is available to authors online and seems much more economic by nature than the capital-intense publishing industry – it seems digital content makes production a commodity. Making use of online collaboration and web 2.0 technology lots of crowd-sourced book sites like FastPencil allow authors to skip the traditional publishing route entirely (and control their own promotion) to self-publish their eBooks. FastPencil claims this allows authors to have access to the broadest distribution possible as well as the promise that the digital files will be able to adapt to any eReader that is introduced in the future. Another company called Blio is intending to offer publishers/authors the opportunity to create digital files at no cost that can preserve the format of previously tough-to-digitize tomes such as cookbooks. On top of that as a author you can:

• Embedded multimedia – inserts web pages, videos, and other interactive content into selected areas of text toenhance meaning.
• 3D book view which includes realistic page turning
• Reading out loud: TTS (text-to-speech) or a synchronized audio track
• Translate to or from English in an imbedded translation window

This is all pretty impressive stuff and can create a user experience much more enhanced and engaging than paper books. Presumably this in the next years to come this will put some traditional offline publisher under pressure.

As part of the digital publishing revolution the way a story of a book is told even is about to change; transmedia is the buzzword here. Readers and writers engage and connect with each other to create the stories which are delivered then in systematically dispersed junks across multiple delivery channels. You can choose between chunks of text, watch a video story update or even, as in Girl Number 9, catch up on Twitter, where you can interact with characters and receive clues and updates. This means basically books are changing from being content sandwiched between two covers and organized by chapter to a many-to-many interactive storytelling. I like that.

Book Distribution

A trend noticeable is distributors or retailers are becoming book producers the same time. AmazonEncore for instance is not just a huge book store and recommendation engine to unearth exceptional books but they also partner with authors through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon.com Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers. So if you can produce you eBook for free and get marketing and distribution support by your retailer, who needs publishers?

Having mentioned the Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, obviously the upcoming launch of the new iPad (any future mobile device really will turn into an eReader) and the trend to eBook distribution/consumption in general (in Dec 09 the number of digital books sold on Amazon surpassed the paper editions) shines a brand new light on the traditional publishing industry. New technological capabilities enable companies like Wired Magazine (see the video of the iPad version of the magazine below) to raise the bar of publishing (multimedia) content to a new unmatched form.

This will certainly provide the users with a new level of experience of information consumption and will make the switch from print to digital media consumption easier, more tantalizing and much more readers will use it. Especially if you compare this approach to the content you get by using some clunky black and white eReader.

Book Sales and Marketing

No doubt publishers are facing are tough time with pressure coming from authors, distributer/retailers as well as readers. To me it seems the current value chain for publishers is breaking. The landscape of content/books will get a lot more crowded and there’ll be a lot more competition for eyeballs. Authors can self-publish books and utilise social media  and word of mouth marketing to sell their books. Distributors are beginning to dictate pricing and thread the availability of books on their platforms as seen in the case of Amazon vs. Apple vs. Macmillan (see Apple vs. Amazon: The Great E-book War Has Already Begun). Also they have a huge information head start when it comes to customer needs or buying behaviour (they collect and utilise all the buying behaviour data online). Not to mention the ever demanding hunger of readers for  new authors, different formats and sophisticated multimedia content. This is true especially for next generation of book buyers won’t understand why they can’t access any information they want in a digital format.

Social Media and Book Publishers

Book publishers are at an enormous advantage to corporate or consumer brands. They have a vast amount of content, they have an existing, passionate community who want and love their products. On top of that, book fans are author/brand loyal groups of people. Books raise discussions and bring people together…and online can help augment the book experience by bringing the readers into the inner workings of the publishers and authors on a daily basis.

So what to do here are some simple social media ideas to think about if you’re a book publisher:

Become a social brand

Set up social monitoring systems around the places your customers (readers, authors) hang out. Listen what they talk about, find topics which would make a good book and find emerging authors.

Using social media channels effectively

Engage with communities and leverage the influencers. Books are an emotional topic and readers trust the recommendation of peers much more than ay advertising. When it comes to book there are countless vibrant online communities, forums and bloggers consisting of deeply engaged readers and authors. So for new books for example find the bloggers opinion leaders and reach out to them. Do the same thing on Twitter and LinkedIn to create buzz and word of mouth campaigns. Make use of facebook fanpages for each author and create facebook groups around topics and feed them with your content arsenal. Leverage live streaming – now within facebook – and provide weekly live readings of new books/authors. Have your authors interviewed on a regular basis and publish the content on internet radios or video portals.

Create platforms  and a social media hub

The re-thinking of becoming a social brand as well as providing the authors with resources requires undoubtedly social media platforms. The publishers website needs to become a social hub where the authors will be promoted and can execute their own social media marketing. Obviously the authors can use their expertise in their field to produce excellent content for their publisher site inherent blogs for any kind of inbound marketing and/or SEO strategy. Create forums covering topics or authors – readers are very much interested in authors, they want to interact with them and authors have much more to say then what is published in their books. Enable the offline interaction – let your fans know where your authors are, where to speak to meet them in flesh!

Involve the reader into book development process

Monitor the social web to find hot topics for books. Enable authors to produce transmedia content or ask your community what to publish next to help developing ideas.

Create new formats and test them

Utilise technology to empower production of books in different formats and for different channels. Paper books, eBooks, mobile apps, multimedia, etc. and test what works best for which topic or audience. Not all will work the same way but publishers must have the flexibility to quickly produce and disseminate content/books to emerging upcoming distribution channels.

Define the niche

You’ll need for the different content/book topics of your authors different social media strategies. Since you’ll have completely different audiences with corresponding different user/reader behaviour you’ll need to adjust the strategy accordingly.

And then?

When you got your head around that, you can begin engaging in the communities in earnest. Invite your authors into the discussions. Invite other passionate folks at the company. Stay friendly, and stay passionate and you can be sure your audience and community will grow over time.

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Let’s look at some definitions first:

Thought Leadership: “exploiting a company’s unique position in its market to generate valuable insight and advice on issues your customers and prospects care most about” and Brand Awareness: “measures consumers’ knowledge of a brand’s existence. At the aggregate (brand) level, it refers to the proportion of consumers who know of the brand”.

B2B sales cycles though are by nature longer and more complex. As customers move through the funnel there are 4 phases: awareness, interest, desire, action. All of these phases can be support and optimised by social media marketing. For brand (or awareness) building and thought leadership B2B companies need to help buyers research early in the sales cycle (awareness and interest), demonstrating that they are trusted advisers who understand the prospect’s problems. By using thought leadership to engage prospects early, one can build awareness and increase chances to get on the radar screens of the people who matter (including editors, analysts, investors and prospects, buyers). In social media thought leadership can be seen as a preliminary stage of brand building and is earned by constant and active social media content contribution and sharing of visions.

Thought Leadership / Brand Awareness and Inbound Marketing

How can Social Media or Inbound Marketing help to bring a company’s visions (or its products or services offerings) to the attention of consumers? The answer is “’content marketing” (marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases). Here B2B marketers use the sharing of content as a means of persuading decision-makers to turn their once-proprietary informational assets into available to selected audiences (the selections would be a result of social media monitoring where one can determine where the communications take place, the key discussion points and the most influential participants).

Generate Awareness

How it works? - go to where your prospects hang out online and have an active and engaging presence there. Of course, and this is preached on a daily basis in social media circles, create valuable content. Without delivering value to your audience you jeopardise your marketing activities by turning into a marketer attempting to sell another “high ROI” “cost-efficient” business tool and you will get in return the inevitable “so what”? And content is by no means publishing a slick press release once a month but can be a simple video (I like the “plain English” ones) showing the benefits of your product or interviewing the key stakeholders (staff or existing customers) can become an invaluable resource to any visitor in awareness or interest phase of the sales funnel. Also remember not to tweet about what you had for lunch.

Content Dissemination

The next important step in creating consumers’ knowledge of your brand existence is disseminate the content through all possible social media platforms / channels. There are many mechanisms to do so: each has its benefits and efforts required:

Source: Marketing Sherpa

Get a Blog?

So, your average Social Media Guru normally tells you to “get a blog”? Obviously a classic inbound marketing tool, however a good way to find out what works best for your industry/purposes you might want to try Foresters’ social technographics profiling tool. Combined with the results of the social media monitoring you’ll get a pretty clear pictures which platforms to use to gain the most of your social media efforts.

As a rule of thumb atomized, distributed content on different platforms work much better than siloed, “big” content like white papers. And if your content is good and valuable as well as properly disseminated you will be found.

Become a Thought Leader

How do you position yourself as Thought Leader? Social media is about people, not logos. That’s why the most powerful form of social capital is personal, not corporate. Hence this democratisation of content allows every tiny start-up to become thought leader or a rock star in its particular area. Bearing in mind the definition “…to generate valuable insight and advice on issues your customers and prospects care most about” its clear that one of the big benefits of social media in B2B is the ability to establish and foster expertise within a given industry or niche. The same tools and services that social marketers use to generate awareness are also available to anyone with wisdom and vision to share. As eMarketer points out, establishing and conveying thought leadership is a valid and promising opportunity in social media.

However to become a thought leader in social media you have to be on. At the end of the day content is king and you earn the business and relationships you deserve.  Obviously as a marekter you want to sell your stuff so the temptation is there to become overly promotional in your inbound marketing activities. My advice would be find a meaningful mixture of: promotional – educational – informational and entertaining content. Use an independent tone of voice, support the content/story with data and articles and make use of existing customers or influential third parties. It’s that easy…

Another interesting approach I found is one coming from the socialmediatoday blog. I agree on what they say about the four P’s of marketing: Product / Price / Placement / Promotion are made for B2C and don’t really work for online B2B marketing.

Instead the 4 C’s of B2B Marketing are:

• Content – the creation of a steady stream of engaging content
• Connection – connecting with the audience you wish to attract
• Communication – communicating with them in an ongoing conversation
• Conversion – and then converting them at the illusive moment of need

“Since B2B Marketing is arguably more of a marathon than a sprint in marketing – you need to always have your 4 C’s engine going – creating the best content, finding the connecting with your target audience, sustaining the communications pattern until they are ready to convert – this way you have a fighting chance at making all your marketing efforts count toward one goal – Sales!”

Two last words: Don’t forget the huge positive Social SEO impact your brand building efforts and social media activities have resulting in highly targeted traffic back to your site/blog and don’t forget to measure!

Thanks for reading this article.

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Buzz is one of Google’s most viable and aggressive pushes into social networking yet. It lets people follow status updates and posts from their closest friends in a service that rests inside Gmail. Gmail’s massive installed user base, with 176 million unique visitors in December according to Comscore, gives Buzz a running start on building a social network.

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Traditionally the financial sector leads technology innovation and used to invest huge sums in systems and software. Looking at the engagement rate of social media and the adoption of multichannel approaches it seems this industry is not yet embracing social media marketing (see graphic below)  - was it hit too hard by the credit crunch? Obviously there’s room to improve when it comes to engaging socially with customers or community building since many participants in that market are perceived rather monolithic and imposing as opposed to caring and engaging. Caused by the economic crisis in particular Banks also deal with trust issues which probably accelerate a change towards an opening to social media in the  future.

Social media engagement by industry

Nevertheless there are some success stories of how regulated industries like the financial industry can gain from social media and below are great example of sites in or about the industry from the world wide web.

Tracking social media participation

For some great insights and to get an overview of the adoption have a look at Visible Banking. It’s not very pleasing on the eye but is bursting with articles, interviews and a directory about social media initiatives of the financial services business. An example of its Twitter watch is here:

Visible Banking Twitter Watch #15 – November 2009: 877 Accounts / 46 Countries / 331,351+ Followers / 9,960 Lists – Top 10s Financial Institutions / Credit Unions / Insurance

Communities / Networks

HSBC appears to be the most innovative player with its HSBC Business Network and the “Little Black Book” microsite for First Direct customers to exchange recommendations. The HSBC Business Network is an online community for both customers and non-customers, allowing businesses and entrepreneurs to share information with and gain information from their peers. It is a good example of brands using online communities to provide a service that compliments and enhances their existing product portfolio.

The Little Black Book an affiliate of HSBC is a community where users exchange information not related to financials. But in in particular the page live.firstdirect is a remarkable progression towards social media openness and authenticity. It monitors and visualises live customer and non customer feelings about the brand. This is a brave step in a sector where balancing customer satisfaction against profitable customer management has proved challenging to say the least. It currently says 74% of all live words are positive; hope remains that this is unfiltered information ….

Compliance and regulatory issues are amongst the major reasons the financial services industry is shying away from the openness and accountability of social media marketing. ComplianceOnline is a regulatory compliance solutions provider operating in the B2B arena. Operating in a highly fragmented and hyper-competitive marketplace the website has more than 2 million unique visitors per year and 500,000 registered users. By actively engaging users in a two-way dialogue the company behind the community MetricStream uses social media to ultimately create awareness and generate qualified leads which make up 30% of their total sales leads.

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Mobile

Another financial services company namely Nationwide Insurance provides a free, company-branded “Accident Toolkit” iPhone application for advising what to do after an accident. The app can call emergency services, collect and exchange accident information (even using the iPhone’s camera and GPS), connect with a towing service, and (for Nationwide customers) initiate the claims process, among other things. That is indeed social media.

Crowd-sourcing and Peer-to-Peer

Peer-to-Peer lending makes perfectly sense where there are enough people needing to borrow money and those wanting to lend. They are better off dealing directly with each other rather than using banks or other middle-men. Each, for a fee of course. Have a look at Prosper.com and Zopa.com to find out more about that great idea.

If you still have unfulfilled dreams make us of the social saving approach of smartypig. Its a bit of a crowd-sourced social network where, if you share your saving goal (dreams), friends and family can provide financial support. You can also add your personalized SmartyPig widget to your Facebook or MySpace page, blog or Website. Not to mention, you can start your own SmartyPig Friends Network. Cute.

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Twitter

Often quoted the Bank of America Twitter account is a good example how Twitter can be used to help, listen and learn from customers, even in a sensitive environment like sharing financial information over social media.

Other twitter based applications worth mentioning are StockTwits and AdviserTweets. More geared towards financial professionals rather than customers, they are innovative approaches of how social media can be utilised by asset managers or financial advisors.

Not so good examples

Just two examples I came across today. These are Deutsche Bank’s and UBS’ facebook fanpages. I am asking myself why and how they managed to get 1,700 users (by the time of the writing). There must be a reason why they don’t put any content on their pages. Is it regulatory reasons? Maybe someone can shine a light on this.

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Social media has taken the world by storm – no doubt about that, everyone is using it and it’s now the easiest way to reach people online. This is because people spend a considerable amount of time doing their social media stuff. For personal and for business matters.

A widespread opinion I hear is that social media can be used more or even only for B2C marketing campaigns. This leads me to the conclusion that B2B marketers seem to be schizophrenic about social media. They have been using social media for years just like the buyers in the business-to-business sector. Maybe I am a little biased here because I work in that space but the sheer pace of adoption and the enormous buzz created around social media seems overwhelming. The difference in approach might also give reasons to more traditional marketers to hesitate to fully engage. In social media there are no clearly defined metrics (mind you there are 100 tweets every day about the latest top lists of measuring social media) and there are only a handful meaningful ROI studies. User generated content inviting comparison or discussion around the brand which leads to losing control of the message? Yuk. Not to mention the engagement effort which seems cumbersome and laborious. No more shouting the message, but listening? It’s admittedly easier to buy keywords on Google and wait for the clicks. But remember, there were companies who had to be convinced that a website is good for them, then came along search and so on – you get the point.

For B2B communications e-mail is still the main digital application – a somewhat pushy approach. In a B2B marketing campaign you’re talking a sophisticated audience. The typical B2B buyer has a high interest in – and understanding of – your product (or at least of the problem it solves). Therefore, wouldn’t it be good to engage this kind of persona in an ongoing rational conversation with your brand and other targeted like-minded business buyers with the same needs to decrease complexity? This would help determine the value of your product and service through the power of engagement marketing, testimonials, and other social media activities that build credibility. Also B2B deals are often negotiated from networking. Social media is a platform for communication and networking.

But! There are changes in B2B and social media on the horizon. A recent Forrester report found that the vast majority (91%) of those who make B2B buying decisions in the technology sector read blogs and watch user-generated video – they are “spectators”. Almost half of the them create their own blogs, upload videos or articles, etc. I personally don’t know anybody working in the technology sector who’s not making business use of LinkedIn or the continental European version Xing. The level of participation is also high among B2B decision makers who react to social media content, with 58% doing so. Called “critics” these individuals answer questions, post solutions or seek clarification on blogs and social networking websites.

Another report unveils that 60% of B2B marketers will increase their spending in 2010. Good news for social media consultants here…

However for success in social media it is essential to figure out what you want to accomplish and how to measure it. So what are the goals of B2B marketers wanting to achieve in social media? According to  emarketer thought leadership is the main purpose and about one-half intend to generate leads through social media (of course, it is still marketing!).

The top 4 metrics used to measure social media success in 2010 will be:

• Web traffic / response rates
• Qualified leads
• Customer loyalty / retention
• Brand awareness

Generally spoken as social media marketing grows in popularity for B2B at a rapid rate, one fact cannot be ignored: if used well, it can generate impressive amounts of traffic and increase engagement around your brand – which will lead to increased sales. It’s a cost-effective and generic way to reach millions of customers and potential customers directly without spending big money to run TV, radio, or print ads. Find out what your B2B customers need by listening to them, learn from that and amend your products/services correspondingly as well as engage with them long term to retain them.

If you accept the conclusion that social media can help your business grow, immerse in it now – the rewards can be plentiful for companies of all sizes.

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SEOmoz’s recently launched it’s biennial search engine ranking factors survey for 2009.

This report reflects the collective wisdom of experts and if you’re in the SEO area it is certainly one of the most useful resources, providing transparency into what matters for best white hat practices in search engine optimization.

Before proceeding to the results, all it basically says is:

• Write unique, compelling content
• Get a blog
• Write descriptive titles

In a more technically elaborative way this translates to:

The Top 5 most important factors were:

1. Keyword focus in anchor text of external links
2. External link popularity
3. Diversity of link sources
4. Keyword usage in title tags
5. Trustworthiness of the Domain based on Link distance from Trusted domain.

The top 5 Black hat SEO tactics to avoid are:

1. Cloaking with Malicious/Manipulative intent
2. Link acquisition from known link brokers
3. Outbound links to web spam sites/pages
4. Cloaking by User Agent
5. Frequent Server Downtime & Site Inaccessibility

In SEO some factors can sit in the grey area, and here’s the Top 5 contentious factors:

1. Cloaking by cookie detection
2. Cloaking by javascript/rich media support detection
3. Hiding text with same/similar colored text to background
4. Cloaking by IP address
5. Cloaking by user agent.

Find here the full SEOmoz’s Biennial Ranking Factors 2009 report.

If you’re interested in search engine ranking of your own site or search engine optimisation marketing as part of you internet marketing strategy feel free to have a look at my seo services offered.

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The video is from the socialnomics blog and tells the story, social media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.  Now the video is at the date of publishing her already dated and the numbers grew even more. Facebook for instance is currently adding 500k users each and every day. Another good presentation about the shift and social media is “What is social media“.

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According to emarketer in 2009, there will be 18 million US adults who access Twitter on any platform at least monthly – a 200% increase over 2008. Usage will reach 26 million US adults in 2010, a further 44.4% climb.

That is the huge opportunity to connect with a ton of people you normally wouldn’t have access to. These ‘Twitterers’ represent your customers and competitors so if they are on Twitter, you need to be too. However the thing is that in today’s day and age, people want to see immediate results, and think Twitter will deliver them. Unfortunately this is not true. For social media marketing on Twitter and other social sites, it will take time and effort. However the return on investment is very likely to be higher than other online marketing tools.

Anyway Twitter is a great and free tool and needs to be part of any small business marketing plan. So how do you get started using Twitter for small business? Signing up for an account is self-explanatory and free (btw. for a professional twitter background try twitbacks).

The question is how to gain real value from Twitter and in a first step who to follow and why?

Find your competitors and follow them

Find the major competitors in the industry you’re interested in by checking the twitter directories like Twellow or Wefollow. Or use Twitter search for any trending topic related to your business and follow the corresponding twitterer. Following your competitors allows you to see how they use Twitter and track their promotions, sales and strategies. You may even find ways to partner with competitors once you develop a connection on Twitter.

Find your customers and follow them

Well, you can ask your customers of course if they use Twitter or check their websites for links to Twitter. You can also use Google searches for your customers: just search on their personal names, company names, product names or brand names and include the word “Twitter” in the search. For example, typing: +twitter +”richard buettner” in Google produces these results that start with my Twitter page.

Take some time and do some Twitter research. Find out if people are Tweeting about your company. If they are, you need to know about it. Again Twitter Search will show you all past mentions of your company or brand name. But to be completely in the know you need to constantly monitor Twitter for conversations about your company. To do this, you can use various Twitter tools. The two that seem most popular (and easy to setup) are peoplebrowsr and TweetBeep. They will email you alerts when someone has Tweeted about your company, product, brand or whatever keywords you want to monitor.

Also make sure you have your own Twitter handle prominently displayed on your own site so visitors can follow you — and consider following back anyone who follows you. For an automated follow back use socialoomph (You might automatically follow back some spammers this way, but i would not worry too much at an early stage in your twitter life).

If you’re a brick and mortar business and you depend more on local business try the twitter search option “Near this place”. This search, for example, reveals all the tweets coming from anyone within 5 miles of London Clapham. There are also a ton of Twitter applications on the iPhone, and some of them have built in features for locating nearby Twitter users. Each of them basically functions the same, allowing you to search for Twitterers nearby to your exact location, as determined by the geo-location feature of your iPhone.

Find industry thought leaders

If you’re following the major players in your industry, you can forward their best tweets to your followers, through re-tweeting. As your followers come to rely on you as a useful source of ideas and information, you’ll build credibility and they’ll become more loyal to your brand generally. Research the twitter directories for thought leaders – or just follow me .

Make use of recommendations

These Twitter apps use algorithms to find you friends based on your Twitter history – some are good others not so, give them a try:

Twubble – recommends people to follow by spidering the people you’re already following and recommending users that they’re following. The idea is that the people you’re following are interesting to you, so if more than one of them are also following another person, that person might also be interesting.

Twitterel – finds people you might be interested in following by doing keyword searches of tweets. The service can update you by email, direct message, or @reply when it finds new people it thinks you might be interested in following. It’s kind of handy.

Who Should i Follow? – results can be filtered by how popular the people are, and how close they are to a specific location (never worked for me though). You can get sponsored in the listings as well!

Mr. Tweet – provides more helpful statistics about users, such as tweets per day or the percentage of tweets containing links. No keywords search tough.

For the more analytical minded

You have to keep in mind that not all people are equal. When I first joined Twitter, I started following people right out of the gate in order to get some utility out of the site — after all, the only way to join the conversation is to start following it. You’ll soon find out that some of the people you’re following are not necessarily people that you need to follow. Still the majority of Twitterers is pretty inactive so that 75% of all tweets only come from 5% of the Twitter users. One important goal in twitter obviously is to get twitter followers – keep that in mind when you choose followers. So, for instance if you choose people to follow with a high reach and social capital (twitterer has a lot of followers himself) a potential re-tweet by one of these people brings much more additional followers. Also a twitterer with lots of followers and and very little followers is more unlikely to follow you back (simple reason these guys often don’t use “auto-follow”).

Some tools to help you investigate your tweets and make an informed decision about whether to follow or keep following them are

• Twinfluence – scientific approach to measuring the influence of Twitter users. It’s another set of metrics you can use to help you figure out who you want to follow
• Twitter Grader – assigns every users you run through its system a grade from 1-100. Using this tool you can investigate how engaged the people you’re following are
• Tweetcloud – One of the most important factors when deciding whether you want to follow a Twitter user is what sort of content they tweet about. If someone tweets mostly about topics you don’t care about, they might not be the best person for you to follow. Tweetcloud creates a tag cloud of a person’s tweets to give you a bird’s eye view of the type of things they tweet about.

Obviously to find followers is important and a first step to enter social media marketing for small businesses – however Twitter is completely useless if you do not have a serious following. How to get more followers I will discuss in a later post.

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See also here

We offer components or the whole Personalisation package:

Planning and management consulting for personalisation strategies

• An evaluation of the business/marketing together with Personalisation models of your site
• Building a solid foundation for budget and spending on personalisation and information technology
• Development of a privacy and security policy

Personalisation implementation planning and execution

• Data requirements planning (existing and gathering of additional data)
• Product catalogue/assortment planning
• ROI assessment + monitoring/reporting system: scorecard, KPI and metric planning
• Audience planning including personalisation messaging and positioning
• Application integration planning (CRM etc.)
• Navigation optimisation
• Resource planning

[intlink id="130" type="page" anchor="Personalisation technology"]Vendor [/intlink]selection

• Vendor capitalisation
• Sophistication of the technology
• Pricing structure
• Flexibility of the technology to support your business model
• Vertical industry support of vendor
• Integration capabilities

For a complete and comprehensive discussion in terms of strategy, technology, implementation and vendor selection please fill out this form for a free consultation or just give me a call.

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