Below is the video I played.

Below are links to the various tools we discussed – these are just a few of the many hundreds available.

You can download the Sensis Social Media Report.

Blogs

WordPress and Blogger

Tips for blogging here.

Microblogging

Twitter, Plurk, Yammer (Enterprise microblogging)

Tips for using Twitter here.

Wikis

PBWiki, Wikispaces, Wetpaint

Social Networking

Public sites: MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, LinkedIn

Closed/private networks: Ning, Big Tent, Wall.fm, Oxwall (open source)

Social Sharing

Delicious, Diigo, Scribd, Flickr, Slideshare, YouTube, Quora

Online Survey

Survey Monkey

Manage

Manage your social media accounts at Hootsuite.

I wrote a post about tracking your social media mentions with links to the tools.

Campaigns

We looked at the Old Spice video, Twitter and Facebook and the Attune Facebook and Twitter.

Social Mention allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

A search will give you all of the mentions of your brand over any period of time you want to specify as well as a series of measures such as strength, sentiment, passion and reach – as below:

Here are a few more tools that will monitor keywords/brands for you.

Samepoint is a conversation search engine that lets you see what people are talking about. Type in your brand and you get the following data. (I searched on the word Qantas.)

You can refine the search to certain applications by clicking on the links in the ‘Social Mentions’ tab ie Real-Time, Discussion Points, Bookmarks etc.

A few others you might like to look at are Spy, IceRocket, BackType.

There are also some good Twitter analysis tools:

Twitter Search will allow you to run a simple word search or you can use ‘Advanced Search‘ to define certain criteria eg words, people, places, dates etc. You can also analyse sentiment in a simple way by checking for the smiley or frowny emoticons.

Twitter Sentiment is a graduate school project from Stanford University which allows you to research the sentiment for a brand, product or topic. Type in your band name and it will bring you the following data:

1. A simple pie chart of mentions – positive and negative a bar chart showing numbers.

2. A graph of mentions over any period you want to define:

3. The actual tweets over any period of time you want to specify.

Twitrratr searches for negative and positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic. It gives you the following data – with every tweet listed under the respective column. (I ran this search on Qantas.)

Twendz highlights conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in. As the conversation changes, so does the twendz application by evaluating up to 70 tweets at a time. When new tweets are posted, they are dynamically updated, minute by minute. The following is how it looks. (Again – searched on Qantas.)

And by the time I’ve finished writing this there are probably more tools! Please share your favourites in the comments section.

In August I have the pleasure of presenting a series of breakfasts and workshops for International Customer Service Professionals (ICSP) in Brisbane (10th), Sydney (11th) & Melbourne (12th).

The breakfast presentation will address the topic : How can Social Media benefit our business?

A recent Nielsen report found that 70% of all Australian businesses intend to use social media in the coming year. Is your business one of them? Although 26.5% of Australian businesses now have a Facebook presence (17% on Twitter, 10% on YouTube and 5% on MySpace), the Nielsen study revealed a high level of concern about ownership and control issues around these social media platforms and their impact on customer relationships. Should you be concerned?

This presentation will address social media in terms that you can easily understand and apply to your business. It will cover:

• What social media tools you could be using to boost your business.
• How you can use social media to your advantage.
• How some businesses are using social media.
• How you design a social media strategy.

Panel members will also share their enormous breadth of experience in deploying social media within their business – warts and all….

Click here for more information and registration.

This Event will also be followed by a 2 hr Workshop: Designing a Social Media Strategy

You’ll learn about a variety of social media tools including how to design a social media strategy using the most appropriate tools for YOUR business. This workshop will focus on the use of social media to build brand awareness, communicate with customers and market your products/services. At the completion of the workshop you will have:

• an overview of the most popular social media tools
• understand how to use social media to engage with your customers
• know how to build trust and reputation for your brand
• have a 5-step planning process for HOW to use social media in your business
• begin planning your social media strategy

Click here for more information and registration.

Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to post text messages of up to 140 characters in answer to the question “What are you doing?” These messages are known as tweets and can be read by people who ‘follow’ you. You can make your tweets private or allow anyone who clicks on your profile to read them.

This video explains Twitter – in plain English!

Some people do actually tweet about what they are doing, but the business savvy are using Twitter to share ideas, gain a profile and drive business their way. Here are a few tips on getting started and using Twitter to boost your business.

Getting Started

Start a free  account by going to Twitter and clicking on the ‘Sign up now’ button. Follow the prompts to fill in your details and you’ll be tweeting within minutes. Say hello to the world from your new Twitter account (not that anyone will probably read it just yet!)

Finding Followers

Now you need someone to read your words of wisdom. The best way to find followers is to start following other people. If you know someone who tweets, go to their profile page and click the ‘Follow’ button just under their name. They’ll receive a message that you’re following them and they can choose whether to accept your follow or not. Often people you follow will follow you back – but only if you’re tweeting something of interest.

If you don’t know anyone on Twitter, there are a few ways of finding interesting people. You can use the search function on your Home page for words of interest to you and your business. This will return anyone who has tweeted those words recently. However this can return an overwhelming number of results, so I recommend one of the following.

Twellow and Just Tweet It are directories of public Twitter accounts, with hundreds of categories and search features to help you find people. Type a word of interest into the search and they’ll give you a list with the most prolific tweeters at the top. Click through to their profile and see if they are worth following.

Once you’ve found a couple of people to follow, go to their profiles and see who they follow – you’ll probably want to add some of these people to your list. Within no time you’ll be building up your network.

What to Tweet

Unless you’re a celebrity, no-one will really be interested in what you’re doing at any point in time. Use your tweets to share resources and ideas to become a person others see as knowledgeable and generous. Do NOT start tweeting by immediately trying to sell or promote your own products or services – this will turn most people off and they won’t follow you. Try to get a balance of sharing other resources and ideas along with promoting your own stuff.

Check Twitter daily if you can and try to get a balance between tweeting too much and too little. Once a week is definitely too little and once a minute is too much! Happy tweeting.

10 Tips

Here are 10 tips for using Twitter effectively:

1. Fill out your profile and add a link to your website before you start tweeting and following other people.
2. Add a photo or logo before you go live – people want to know who you are.
3. Choose some keywords that describe your business and put them in your profile – this will get you a higher ranking in the search engines.
4. Don’t follow anyone until you’ve posted a few interesting tweets.
5. Check who is following you – if you don’t like the look of them (or their tweets) block them.
6. Try to respond to people who follow you with a ‘nice to be in your network’ type message.
7. Don’t just push your own products or services – be generous and share resources and ideas you find.
8. Share a little personal information in your tweets so people see your human side.
9. Comment on other’s tweets and retweet what other’s have posted (with acknowledgement).
10. You don’t have to read every tweet made by people you follow.

This article was recently published in Working Women.

Being retweeted by BIG players

There’s a convention amongst Twitter users that if you ‘retweet’ something someone else in your network has tweeted, you post it with RT attached. For example if I shared something, you thought it was good & wanted to share it further, you’d write ‘RT @caroldaunt’ followed by the message.

Last week one of my blog posts was picked up by a couple of big players in my industry & retweeted. (My blog posts are automatically sent to Twitter – easy to set up.) One of these players has 607 followers & the other has 1,161 followers. So suddenly my blog post was promoted to 1768 extra people. Did I see an upsurge of over 1000 readers? No – but there was small spike in reads of that post. And I believe being promoted to 1768 people can’t be a bad thing.

Driving people to read your articles

The second interesting thing happened this morning. I decided to upload a couple of recent articles to Scribd. Naturally I tweeted that they were available to read online. Within minutes one of them had 24 reads ! Also – an email just arrived – see below.

Being promoted to 50 million users can’t be a bad thing either! Here I am on the front page of Scribd – and in the time it’s taken to post this picture, the number of readers has increased to 67  (Why not go check how many reads it’s had now? Click here.)

So….. no quantifiable sales – but an example of the power of social networking & the new age of promoting yourself & your business.

You can join the on-going discussion by clicking the ‘Reply to topic’ button on the WNA Facebook page.

My videoconference blog that I referred to is here. I’ve included links below to my online presences so you can see what these spaces look like.

Set up your own Facebook profile and link to others as well as join groups and start your own groups. My Facebook page is here.

LinkedIn is similar to Facebook – but a little more business oriented. My LinkedIn profile is here.

If you want to reach the teen/early twenties market then go to MySpace and Bebo (I don’t play in these spaces).

Why not set up your own social networking site using Ning? Here’s a Ning site I set up for Web 2 tools in business.

With Twitter you have 140 characters to speak to the world. See my tweets here.

Slideshare is a free website where you can upload your slide presentations. My Slideshare space is here.

You can upload your own videos to YouTube and also use it to collect good videos about your industry and share with others. My YouTube channel is here.

Ustream allows you to broadcast your own TV show via the Internet.

At Flickr you can upload & store photos. You can refer people to your photo stream and/or link to the photos from other websites. Here’s a flickr page I set up for conference photos.

Store your favourite websites at delicious and share them with the world – or keep them private. Here’s my delicious links – you’ll see a lot in the tag eLearning.

Scribd is a place to share your articles. You can see mine here.

Netvibes will organise your life for you. Use it to go and check all the blogs & websites you want to keep track of. Here’s a tour of Netvibes that explains how it all works.

Google provides many great free tools. We use Google Docs to work on shared documents. See the whole range of Google tools here.

I’ve written about Blogs in a previous post. If you want a simple blog use Blogger – or WordPress for more sophistication. This blog operates on WordPress.

I’ve written about Wikis in a previous post. My favourite wiki tool is PBWorks but also good are Wikispaces, Wetpaint and Google Sites.

Enjoy!

Thanks to its open-ended design and a thriving user community, Twitter is fast outgrowing its roots as a simple, easy-to-use messaging service. Enterprising hackers are creating apps for sharing music and videos, to help you quit smoking and lose weight — spontaneously extending the text-based service into one of the web’s most fertile (and least likely) application platforms.

Hardware hackers have set up household appliances to send status alerts over Twitter, like a washing machine that tweets when the spin cycle is through, or a home security system that tweets whenever it senses movement inside the house. Others have incorporated Twitter into their DIY home automation systems. Forgot to turn off the lights? Send a tweet to flip the switch by remote control.

Read the article.

And along the same lines, Search Engine Marketing Group lists 10 Examples of Creative Twitter Uses. These range from checking your laundry to wine tasting!

You can join the on-going discussion by clicking the ‘Reply to topic’ button on the WNA Facebook page.

My videoconference blog that I referred to is here. I’ve included links below to my online presences so you can see what these spaces look like.

Set up your own Facebook profile and link to others as well as join groups and start your own groups. My Facebook page is here.

LinkedIn is similar to Facebook – but a little more business oriented. My LinkedIn profile is here.

If you want to reach the teen/early twenties market then go to MySpace and Bebo (I don’t play in these spaces).

Why not set up your own social networking site using Ning? Here’s a Ning site I set up for Web 2 tools in business.

With Twitter you have 140 characters to speak to the world. See my tweets here.

Slideshare is a free website where you can upload your slide presentations. My Slideshare space is here.

You can upload your own videos to YouTube and also use it to collect good videos about your industry and share with others. My YouTube channel is here.

Ustream allows you to broadcast your own TV show via the Internet.

At Flickr you can upload & store photos. You can refer people to your photo stream and/or link to the photos from other websites. Here’s a flickr page I set up for conference photos.

Store your favourite websites at delicious and share them with the world – or keep them private. Here’s my delicious links – you’ll see a lot in the tag eLearning.

Scribd is a place to share your articles. You can see mine here.

Netvibes will organise your life for you. Use it to go and check all the blogs & websites you want to keep track of. Here’s a tour of Netvibes that explains how it all works.

Skype allows you to make free voice calls, videoconferencing or instant messages over the Internet. You can also make very cheap calls to regular phones – great for overseas calls.

Google provides many great free tools. We use Google Docs to work on shared documents. See the whole range of Google tools here.

I’ve written about Blogs in a previous post. If you want a simple blog use Blogger – or WordPress for more sophistication. This blog operates on WordPress.

I’ve written about Wikis in a previous post. My favourite wiki tool is PBWorks but also good are Wikispaces, Wetpaint and Google Sites.

Enjoy!