I'm trying to publish a photo collage every day for the next few weeks to brush up on my skills. I thoughts it might make good eye candy:)

1)    Market research is an expensive industry. Social media data mining and trend spotting have become staples for any marketing department that wants to save hundreds of thousands of dollars and get more accurate information. Data mining is done by searching through blogs and Twitter (and others, but these are the most accessible) and collecting user feedback, preferences and industry trends. This involves many hours of diligent research but is much more worth while than surveys (which people don’t like to fill out) or focus groups (that do not usually represent an accurate sample of target markets). In the social media sphere, feedback is volunteered by users who clearly are your target demographic. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be discussing your industry/product. Yes there are potential customers that do not contribute on Twitter or Blogs, but they are usually reading those industry tweets and blogs.

Imagine that a social media site could collect feedback in one place for your business and the industry. Imagine that you did not have to sort through Twitter and the Blogosphere, or pay for a seriously expensive Web Listening tool.  Imagine that tool was created to encourage reviews and also pitted the users against each other to patronize your business – at the same time! Now imagine it was free to register for such a site.  This mythical place exists. Its called Yelp and it takes 2 minutes to register.  According to their website, over 38 Million people visited Yelp just last month. “Yelp it” is a verb used every day just like “Google it”. Not only this, but they offer analytics so you can see how many people read the user feedback.

2)    Now there is a part of this that is a challenge to businesses in the same way that Twitter and the explosive blogosphere are – your product has to be good. The thing is, it doesn’t have to be good right away. One of the most endearing qualities of a company is a visible response to consumer feedback. And the feedback is there. Businesses can be listed and discussed whether they participate or not and the best image management decision is to show you are participating and listening. Show that you care.

When a Dell laptop exploded at a Japanese conference in 2006, the video went viral and everyone was going nuts on the web about it. Realizing that they needed to respond based on the huge social media feedback explosion, Dell  responded  maturely with this blog post entitled Flaming Notebook. They literally explained that they didn’t know what was wrong and were looking into it. But something happened with this acknowledgement. They had heard their customer’s outcry. They were listening to user feedback in real time. The responses were encouraging: “Big kudos for starting the blog. Glad to see you join the conversation(s) that have so frequently revolved around you but have not been able to include you.”, “Great job on joining the conversation!   It’s a great start…”, “I recently purchased the Dell Latitude D820.  This was a personal purchase and love the machine.”

The point is, even though Dell had been embarrassed, their audience loved that they were responding to the public’s buzz. Similarly, the only thing that have to fear on Yelp is getting constructive feedback that will help your business grow – which is the whole point of market research. Consumers like watching the improvement process happen. It makes them feel important.

3)    Speaking of consumers feeling important… why, you wonder, would people contribute so much time and effort to giving feedback on your business for free? Answer: social capital and what Forrester Research calls the Validation-Impulse. Coming out of a decade where everyone needed to be qualified to speak about a subject, the introduction of community forums was enthusiastically embraced by self-taught experts and hobbyists that were never given a space to help people make decisions on these topics before.

Suddenly, anyone could be a critic or a creator if they put the time in to gain the consumer’s trust. So people do put the time in. know you don’t have a degree and judge for themselves who to trust.

Yelp Provides a palatable form of assessing whether to believe a critic’s reviews. On each reviewer’s profile, there is a synopses of their reviewing history, how helpful they have been rated and a discernment graph. These are important because a potential customer hoping to attend your restaurant or use your services does not have to go back and read all of a critic’s past reviews to judge for themselves whether that person is a qualified critic or not. It’s all in the synopsis. In a glance it is visible whether your potential customer can rely on a review. And why would people listen to unqualified reviews? Because consumers are jaded and suspicious of both journalists and advertisements. The critics on Yelp are consumer’s peers.

Another solid qualifying system that Yelp has developed is achieving titles through attendance.  When a regular visits your business they can “check in” on Yelp. This means that all their visits are reported to Yelp and they compete on who can attend the most. Consumers can’t cheat  because the technology is location-based and doesn’t allow a check in if they are too far away from your business to be patronizing. If a consumer attends enough times they get a “regular” badge and if they attend the most they become the “Duke” of your business. Now what other website or marketing tool actually has your customers competing to show up and buy?

1)    Another wonderful business growth tool that Yelp provides is strategic partnerships by recommending other businesses.  By conveniently raising another business’s ratings you become a supporter of their project. This type of compliment is a flattering introduction to further collaboration and partnership.

Here are a few other great articles on the benefits of Yelp for Small Businesses.

Why Yelp Is Awesome For Small Businesses

Yelp For Business Owners – Seven Steps For Yelp Success

Good Idea: How (and Why) to Claim Your Business On Yelp.com

How To Use Yelp For Business Owners

Yelp for business

Official Yelp Page

by Nisha Maxwell

For Ideationsconsulting

I always thought Search Engine Optimization was all about crunching numbers. I was wrong. Not that the numbers are not important, but they should be used as secondary decision-making tools.

The development of a list of keywords should be first and foremost based on gut instinct. What would I type into Google if I wanted to find this page? That is the question. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and just write a list of possible search terms off the top of your head.

Then, check them using numbers. I use Google Adwords External Keyword Tool because its free and I’m just using it to check. I type in the word I thought would be good and then add to my list 5 related search terms that Google offers me, based on the numbers.

Its simple and will help you achieve the specific traffic you’re looking for versus a bunch of random website hits from people outside of your target demographic that won’t buy your product. Its tempting to want a lot of hits even if they don’t reflect potential business, but this gives you or your client a false impression of success.

Be realistic and choose words that will get customers to your site, not just anyone.

We won’t pick sides but it will be interesting to see how the introduction of Facebook usernames plays out.  It’s possible that both Gary and Douglas are right.  As Gary has claimed, this move will clearly open up all kinds of business opportunities on Facebook, yet Douglas could be right as well when he wonders what this will do to Facebook’s original claim to fame–its relative privacy.

There are lots of solutions to these problems, but for now, we’ll just focus on two.  First, let’s address the issue of finding a way to quickly unfollow people that refuse to follow you back.  Of course, there are people you want to follow even though they are not following you back, but we’re not talking about those.  We’re talking about the folks you thought you were networking with until they decided to ditch you.  Or the folks who used you by following you and then quickly unfollowing you once you followed them—Matt Singley has identified this phenomenom as the “pump and dump.”  Anyhow, there is a great solution for your unfollowing problems: Twitter Karma.

Twitter Karma lets you group your followers according to whether or not they are following you back.  You can then select as many of them as you want to “bulk unfollow” them.  Socialtoo is another great tool, which automates a lot of your following/unfollowing business—check it out!

Secondly, we’ll reccomend a more general way to manage all of your twitter activity: TweetDeck.

TweetDeck is an interface that allows you to organize all of your twitter activity.  The most useful feature allows you to group your followers, which lets you separate tweets from your friends, work connections, celebrities, etc…  This way you can pay close attention to the followers you are most interested in while following a whole lot of people.  TweetDeck also lets you track facebook status updates, which is great if you’re on facebook.

These tools can be extremely helpful in managing your Twitter community.  Let us know what you think, or, if you know of other tools, please tell us about them!

Gary Vaynerchuk on Content and Community

And Gary Vaynerchuk, again, on how storytelling is the most underrated thing in business.

Chris Brogan on the Elements of Good Online Content

As youthful intellectuals diving into the world of social media we are often asked to answer the question: “What’s the deal with Twitter?”  Trying to explain this to an older generation is quite a task, especially since Twitter is in many ways the same thing as blogging, facebook, myspace, email, or maybe even using a telephone or sending a letter.  It is, at heart, just another way to communicate.  So what makes it so important?  What is Twitter doing that all the previous mediums couldn’t do?

Skeptics, (and there are many of them,) often characterize Twitter as a way of sharing useless information.  Why do you need to tell people what you are doing all day long? How much substance could you possibly convey in 140 characters? Or, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd put it when she interviewed the founders of twitter: “Do you ever think ‘I don’t care that my friend is having a hamburger?‘”

These are valid arguments, and yes, there is a lot of clutter on Twitter.  But there is also a lot of junk mail in our inboxes (and mailboxes), and we all have those friends who won’t shut up when you’re on the phone with them.  The point being that useless information is hardly a new phenomenon.  So what else does Twitter have to offer?  Here are three of its more interesting qualities.  Who knows… you might not be such a Twitter-hater after all.

Pulse

Twitter lets you feel the pulse of any community.  Where else do you have instant access to what a whole bunch of people are thinking about any given subject?  And, no, I’m not talking about a whole bunch of useless thoughts, but important ones.  How are people reacting to the economic crisis? What do people really think about your product or service? Other than twitter, the closest tool that gives you this kind of information might be polling, but in case you haven’t noticed, polls aren’t exactly reliable these days (think New Hampshire, 2008). Furthermore, the most discussed polls–telephone polls–seem to be extremely dated since they ignore an entire generation (the one that uses cellphones and doesn’t sit at home all day long).  Twitter, especially as it enters the mainstream, has the potential to accurately inform us about what an entire market, audience, community, nation, or world is thinking.  Oh and by the way, it doesn’t cost anything.

Authenticity

Twitter breeds authenticity.  This is arguably the case with all social media, but Twitter, with its blazing speed, only increases the demand for trustworthy communication.  We can all tell when someone is not writing their own tweets (give it a try: obama vs. shaq, it won’t take you long to figure out who’s real and who’s not).  The fact is, the structure of Twitter makes it a lot more difficult to lie, spin, or in any other way alter the truth.  Whether you are a celebrity, politician, corporation, or any other person, you just don’t have time to mask your true self while effectively communicating.  This may sound naive, but compare Twitter to the more traditional mediums with this in mind.  A corporation communicating through newspapers, radio, or television, (with advertising or public relations), spends lots of time shaping its message.  Naturally, they want to control the message to make a purely beneficial one.  In this scenario authenticity is not the primary objective.  When communicating through Twitter, however, there is little time for such deliberation.  Twitter, because of its speed and interconnectedness demands a more authentic conversation, and if you can’t live up to it you won’t get very far.

Democracy

As with other social media, Twitter amplifies the power of “word-of-mouth,” which ultimately strengthens democratic ideals.  Since Twitter connects you to anyone who finds you interesting enough to follow, it explodes your influence as someone who repeats, recommends, shares, and creates content.  If you think Apple makes the most reliable computer in the world, Twitter lets you share that with a ton of people in a short period of time.  Why does this matter?  Because, in our times, “word-of-mouth” rules the day.  We trust eachother more than we trust corporations or politicians.  An advertisement is rarely more effective than what your friend has to say.  Twitter, in ways like never before, is feeding the power of the individual communicator.  It is also changing the game for corporate and political communicators who–more than ever–will have to understand the changing landscape in order to succeed.

• We mediate the reception of your company’s image by speaking with the audience and addressing their specific concerns
• It is important to have a consistent voice on blog and twitter and facebook accounts.
• A complete understanding of the social media sphere and etiquette is necessary for effective marketing.
• Professional word-smiths should be in charge of these small but pungent communications to consumers, not to mention blog entries.
• Informed consideration of the variations in social media and site tracking accuracy has large implications for investment prioritization.

Opening at the Atlantic Works Gallery today is “Double Fantasy,” a show featuring work by Joe Kitsch and Chris Spuglio, who say that like John Lennon and Yoko Ono – who released an album called “Double Fantasy” in 1980 – they’re two artists with different visions that happen to work well together. Kitsch’s pieces play with images of rabbits. Spuglio’s works are about mood and color. It’s unclear who’s the Yoko of this twosome, but you can ask them tonight at a reception for their works. Reception from 6 to 9 p.m. Show up through April 26. Atlantic Works Gallery, 80 Border St., East Boston. 617-877-8249.

social media is necessary for success
Social media marketing is an indispensable tool for a successful marketing strategy. Companies that engage in social networking sites have increased search engine rankings and website traffic. Engaging a specific consumer base provides increased brand loyalty and invaluable product feedback.
The massive influx of social media sites has been and can be overwhelming. It is tricky to know from which angle to approach the endless amount of marketing tools suddenly being offered to companies. Even if you have a handle on the path your company should take, the sheer amount of time it takes to build and upkeep an effective social media marketing campaign is intimidating.
Once you’re in and feel you’ve done all you can with social media, Ideations breathes unexpected life into campaigns. We specialize in sneaky ideas to grab the attention of the masses for your organization based on exciting content.

Ideations will:

demystify the social media sphere
Ideations develops a social media profile and strategy tailored for your specific industry. We research the specific sites that each company should be a part of, and how they should be utilized.

hook your company in
The main point of social media marketing is to actively engage your audience. Implementation of a social media strategy is labor intensive and time consuming.
We offer the procurement and ongoing maintenance of company online social media portfolios. This service includes initial setup, content production based on the company’s weekly activity, image production and reader interaction.

refresh your social media standing with creative campaigns
Beyond the basics, innovative strategy is what we’re best at. We create interesting content that refers to or involves your brand/company to snag attention and make it viral. So if your Twitter account is repetitive, your blog losing its juice or your facebook page not getting quite as many fans as you would prefer, we strategize within these networks and your industry to maximize traffic and intrigue the online community.

other services:
Public Relations, technical efficiency consulting, and website usability testing