The inaugural #smmeasure weekly Twitter chat took place on Thursday, July 29 and it was a blazing success!  There were almost 400 tweets, over 80 unique contributors and #smmeasure made it to the top of the trending list in Toronto according to trendsmap.com.  I want to thank everyone who participated and helped spread the word.  A big thanks to Sysomos’ Community Manager Sheldon Levine @sysomos for co-hosting the chat.

#smmeasure chat #1 recap

We introduced this chat with high-level questions that spurred lots of debate.  Below is just a small taste of the great conversation we had. A full transcript is also available.

Q1: What are the most important elements to measure in social media?

• @AlexConde: “brand mentions trump bulk followers. Better to have a small number of people actively talking than no one talking”
• @iMediaMichelle: “Social Measurement should ultimately help you make a business decision that provides value back to cust, cmty and ur biz”
• @NehalKazim: “it starts with followers and mentions but it goes deeper than that. Our objective is driving people to our content”
• @Marketwire : “Lots say that # of followers/fans don’t count. But it does. It makes the conversation MUCH more interesting.”
• @smmeasure: “Goals come from strategy! RT @theelusivefish: most important elements will stem from your goals ie: there is no one number to rule them all”
• @GetPushing: “search & site metrics/traffic generation, list & follower growth, # of interactions, RTs & favs, link stats via tiny or Bit.ly”

@iMediaMichelle asked a great question about Twitter lists and their relevancy.  We may revisit this topic in the future, but we touched on it, as described in the transcript.

Q2:  What tools do you use to measure social media?

• @ellerich:  “The new %-age format of weekly page updates from facebook is a good topline measurement tool for Official Pages”
• @iMediaMichelle: “scaling measurement requires focused investment. But some of the “freeish” tools can add unique color.”
• @smitty1996:  “Large orgs will likely need and enterprise tool that reaches out. They dont favor open cloud with their metrics”
• @EvolveTom: “use Google Analytics to track referrals, simply monitor activity via search. And our site. Nice to have metrics.”

Interesting articles that were brought up during the chat:

• Brian Solis wrote a fantastic piece on how to measure engagement
• Collin Douma wrote a piece on how to definitively measure social media in rainbows

Check back here every week for #smmeasure announcements and weekly questions.  If you have any questions or specific topics that you would like us to discuss in the future, please tweet @smmeasure or @marketwire.

Join the Social Media Corner LinkedIn Group and Marketwire Facebook page and let’s continue the conversation again next Thursday, 9:00 am PST, 11:00 am CST, 12:00 pm EST.

Until next time,

Nick

I’m excited to announce a new weekly Twitter chat, co-hosted by @marketwire and @sysomos. Inaugural chat starts this Thursday, July 29th.

The details:

Who:

• Nick Shin, social media specialist, Marketwire
• Sheldon Levine, community manager, Sysomos

What:

Social media measurement Twitter chat focusing on social media and analytics.

When:

Weekly one-hour chats every Thursday at 9:00 am PST, 11:00 am CST, 12:00 pm EST

Why:

To initiate ongoing discussions about social media and analytics surrounding it. Hopefully, we’ll all learn a thing or two.

Hashtag:

#smmeasure

This week’s topic:

1. Most important elements to measure in social media
2. Tools to measure social media

How to participate:

• Use hashtag #smmeasure.  I recommend using Tweetchat or Tweetgrid.
• Tweet @smmeasure for topics or questions you’d like discussed or answered.  We’ll take these into consideration for our next chat session!
• Please tell a friend to tell a friend.

I hope to see you there!

It’s been two weeks since Marketwire acquired Sysomos, and we are off to an amazing start.  The integration of Sysomos’ people and products into the Marketwire mix has caused a major buzz:  Our clients are excited to learn more about social media monitoring and analytics, and are eagerly anticipating one-on-one demos of the MAP and Heartbeat tools.  And our news has made news — take a read:

• Deirdre Breakenridge’s Marketwire Acquired Sysomos: A Discussion with Key Executives
• The Wall Street Journal’s Private Equity Beat blog post Press Releases Aren’t The Only Game In Town For Marketwire
• TechCrunch’s Marketwire Acquires Social Media Monitoring And Analytics Startup Sysomos

We’ve been meeting and greeting our new colleagues offline and online (hello, @40deuce), sharing ideas and laying the groundwork for some truly amazing things to come (don’t worry, we’ll keep you posted).   Speaking of sharing, we’d like to share with our readers a terrific video courtesy of Mark Evans, Can you say Sysomos.  Sysomos is a Greek term meaning “everything together,” and we highly recommend you take a few minutes to watch this video.

As always, stay tuned to the Marketwire blog for more about how Sysomos is bringing true business intelligence to social media, and giving communicators the insight they need to drive their business forward.

One of the trends outlined in Mashable’s “5 Social Media Trends to Watch Right Now” is the increasing surge of companies adopting official social media policies, which run the gamut from short guidelines to jargon-y legal documentation.  As more and more companies embrace the ways in which social media can endear them to their consumers, official documentation just makes sense.

Inc.com lays out some guidelines in “How to Write a Social Media Policy,” which includes the following important tips:

1. A social media policy is crucial for any size business in order to “outline for employees the corporate guidelines or principles of communicating in the online world.”
2. There are two approaches to writing a policy:
   a.    Writing one complete policy that applies across all current social media or
   b.    Writing separate policies on an application by application basis as they become relevant (such as having separate policies for LinkedIn, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, etc).
3. A policy covers both crisis management (maintaining the company’s image and protecting its confidential information) and brand opportunity (becoming another important arm of the marketing campaign).
4. Identify your company’s “social media evangelists,” those most active within the framework of social media, to collaborate on the policy.
5. Focus on what your employees can do rather than what they can’t or shouldn’t do.

Returning briefly to point #3, it’s important to remember (both from an employee and an employer perspective) that social media consumers often don’t distinguish between a personal and a professional message. So if you’re writing about your company in any social media forum, be sure to add a disclaimer to any message that you post. For example: “The views expressed here are mine alone and not necessarily the views of [insert company name here].”

Additionally, use good judgment and discretion when posting on your personal pages or you might get dooced (fired for posting objectionable content on a personal web page, like the Brixx pizza employee who was let go for insulting a customer on her Facebook wall).

For employers, it is important to note that your employees are a great resource for promoting your business via social networks. Utilize their social media expertise and their reach to maximize your company’s message.

Looking for some examples of other companies’ SM policies?  Check here.  What’s your take on social media policies? Does your company have one?

There’s been some confusion as to what real-time content really is, so let me help clarify: Real-time content happens when there is no delay between the time you type/write and the time you publish. It’s an immediate response to a comment or question. Think Twitter. What is not real-time content are blogs.  A blogger usually ponders, writes, then posts; therefore, the response time is not as immediate or instantaneous.

That said, how is real-time content optimized for search engines? Because of it’s instantaneous nature, is it even possible? Definitely! Here are a few tips to make sure your real-time content is SEO-friendly and searchable:

1. Add keywords to your tweets and updates.  As search engines continue to tweak their algorithms to incorporate real-time content, it’s important to support your updates with keywords.
2. Keep the content relevant.  Nothing beats posting content that is relevant to your audience and chances are, this content will stick around much longer than if you were to just focus on the trending topics.
3. Republish the content.  Take note of how popular or how well received a particular update is and then repurpose it to create a blog post.  Expand the content and republish.
4. Collect your content and post on your blog.  Similar to “republishing content,” take note of the popularity for a group of tweets, then incorporate your collected tweets into your blog.
5. Use hashtags strategically.  If you are going to use hashtags (#) on Twitter, don’t spam your followers by adding a trending topic hashtag at the end of every tweet.  The purpose of a hashtag is to organize your tweets into groups.  If you are posting a link about SEO or involved in a conversation about SEO, then use the hashtag #seo.

Whatever content you publish — whether it’s through Twitter or your blog — you want people to find it, in which case, it should always be SEO-friendly, or searchable on search engines.  It’s safe to presume that posts on your blog will be indexed in search engines as most content management system platforms like Wordpress are built to do just that.

How has real-time content affected the way your company markets?  What are your thoughts on real-time SEO?

We are living and communicating in a world that is seeing the rapid convergence of traditional and social media.  The velocity of this shift has often left communication professionals feeling confused, uncomfortable, and unsure of what to do: scrambling to figure out how social media fits in overall communication strategies, how to utilize it to our advantage, and how to measure its impact.  With so much and so fast, there’s a worry, too, of missing something big.

At Marketwire, we’ve been successful as the innovative leader in distributing our customers’ news, and now we are applying that innovative spirit to the social media sector and social media monitoring.

As such, I am very excited to announce Marketwire’s acquisition of Sysomos.

What does this mean for Marketwire and our clients?  It means unparalleled access to:

• Powerful tools that let you measure, monitor, understand and engage with the social media landscape in real time;
• Billions of social media conversations so you can see what’s happening, why it’s happening, and who’s driving the discussions about your organization, your brand and your competitors;
• All discussions within blogs, social networks, micro-blogging services, forums, video sites and  online media sources;
• The tone of the conversations and ability to identify sentiment by gender, age and location.

This move is aligned with Marketwire’s core values of driving intelligent innovation in anticipation of client needs, and always making it simple and easy for our customers to communicate.  We are proud of what we stand for and the positive impact it has on our customers, staff, suppliers, and others with whom we have come in contact. These are not just words that sound good on paper or a blog post. They are at the center of how we operate and what drives us forward. They are our promise to the market place.

For any company with a history of growth and success like Marketwire’s, the foundation must be solid.  We have built that foundation and have embarked on a course that reinforces our position as market leader in the communication industry with this strategic move. The Sysomos acquisition is but one strategy to continue our tradition of innovation and to deliver on our promise to advance the way the world communicates.

This is an exciting time to be at Marketwire, our future is bright, and you ain’t seen nothing yet!

Welcome to the family, Sysomos!

To maximize your 140-word limit, Nick Shin, our resident social media guru, came up with a brilliant dictionary of Twitter terms and abbreviations on his own blog, Marketing Shindig. Here’s a few of them:

AFAIK = As far as I know

bc or b/c = Because

BG = Background (referring to their Twitter background)

BFN = Bye for now

BRB = Be right back

BTW = By the way

CT = Cutweet= It’s a shortened retweet that had to be shortened to include all of the information.  Usually happens when there are a lot of RT’ed users.

EM = Email

FB = Facebook

F2F or FTF = Face to face

FWIW = For what it’s worth

Gr8 = Great

HTH = Hope that helps

IDK = I don’t know

IMO = In my opinion

IMHO = In my honest/humble opinion

IRL = In real life

JSYK = Just so you know

LI = LinkedIn

LMK = Let me know

LMBO = Laughing my butt off

LOL = Laughing out loud (I’ve also seen people use LOL to mean “lots of love”.)

NP = No problem

OH = Overheard

OOT = Out of touch

PLZ = Please

PPL = People

RE = Regarding

ROFL = Rolling on the floor laughing

RT = Retweet

RTHX/TQRT = Thanks for the retweet

TMB = Tweet me back

TMI = Too much information

TTYS = Talk to you soon

TTYL = Talk to you later

TY = Thank you

Via @ = Crediting a user for their tweet, but not copying it verbatim

W/E = Whatever or weekend

YT = YouTube

<3 = Text version of a heart.  (I would argue that it’s a kiss too.)

Visit Marketing Shindig for a complete list of Twitter terms that will help build your Twitter vocabulary, and might even inspire you to create a few “words” of your own.

Congratulations to the winners of our haiku contest!  I received entries from a wide range of backgrounds — from the casual writer to haiku fanatics. But, the results — your poems –  are creative proof that  all of you have embraced social media.  As a contest that was promoted through social media  about social media, it was amazing to see it in action because of its widespread reach and the amount of participation we received.

Without further ado, the seven winners:

SM10X30 Category

Grand Prize Winner = @wesyee (Tweeting, Facebooking / A minute to learn and yet / Ten days to master)

• One (1) free Marketwire Social Media 2.0 release
• $50 Amazon gift card (valid for the Canadian and US stores)
• SM10X30 T-shirt and titanium water bottle
• Paul Gillin’s book, The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media
• Haiku posted on the Marketwire blog, Twitter and Facebook

Runner Up = @bobbleheadguru (1/2 Hour per day / Just 10 days? Rocket Science? No… SM Fitness!)

• $50 Amazon gift card (valid for the Canadian and US stores)
• SM10X30 T-shirt and titanium water bottle
• Paul Gillin’s book, The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media
• Haiku posted on the Marketwire blog, Twitter and Facebook

Social Media Category

Grand Prize Winner = @allanschoenberg (One forty only / That is all you are allowed / Share, ask, and respond.)

• $50 Amazon gift card (valid for the Canadian and US stores)
• SM10X30 T-shirt and titanium water bottle
• Paul Gillin’s book, The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media
• Haiku posted on the Marketwire blog, Twitter and Facebook

Runner-Up #1 = @gizamike (Social is not new / The media is flowing / The power is yours)

Runner-Up #2 = @terimorris (The joy of Twitter / Twitter this or twitter that / What are you doing?)

• SM10X30 T-shirt and titanium water bottle
• Paul Gillin’s The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media
• The selected haiku posted on the Marketwire blog, Twitter and Facebook

Contest Finalists = @Zalicious and @Smith_km

• Paul Gillin’s Secrets of Social Media Marketing

Again, congratulations to all the winners and thanks to those who participated in our haiku contest.  I hope you had as much fun creating the haikus as we had reading them.

Recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s new “Open Graph” platform – a move that is guaranteed to change how 400 million (and counting) Facebook subscribers interact with the internet. As the No. 2 site in the world (as of May 6, 2010), Facebook is giving its users the ability to personalize their own web experience through this social-bookmarking-on-steroids approach. 

To wrap your head around this in more “everyday” terms, Read Write Web contributor Alex Iskold provides a great analogy, “If both Pandora and Last.fm annotate a page about The Beatles using Facebook’s markup, then users will be able to see their friends, who like the Beatles across different sites… now, the information about a friend’s likes of movies, music, books, recording artists, events, sports team, etc. will be permanent on Facebook profiles and readily available in context around the Web.”

This sounds cool right?  Users get to see everything their Facebook friends are interested in all over the web, but what if there were other parties involved with a vested interest?

This is where the trade off between personalization and privacy in the online space has never been so evident.  Facebook will give marketers (for large sums of money) the ability to target hundreds of millions of consumers unlike ever before.  The precision to which online marketers will be able to identify and target potential buyers based on their interests and what they “like” around the web is truly unprecedented.

What seems to be most troubling is the questionable way in which the company might force its users to make their information public.  For example, Facebook’s new “Connected Profile” tool that most users will unsuspectingly sync to their profile without much thought will, in reality, grant marketers open-season on their personal details.

It will be interesting to see how Facebook subscribers react to the changes ahead, particularly with regards to privacy and business.

What do you think about Facebook’s Open Graph platform? Have you already adopted it on your Facebook page? What do you predict the impact will be?

One of the best lines I’ve heard regarding social media was, “Who is that spaceman” from a colleague at Marketwire (we won’t name any names).  What “spaceman” was the colleague referring to?  This one:

I thought this was hilarious.  Many of you reading this will immediately recognize the logos of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter because these social media sites get the most attention.  However, don’t limit yourself to just these three, there are other networking sites that you should consider visiting. 

One of the main reasons why a business should use social media is to engage with customers and to better develop your business.  Social media networking for businesses is about knowing where those customers are.  In my opinion, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn belong in the “must join” category. However, there are lots of other social media sites (maybe too many) that pertain to one’s interests, beliefs or industry.  To help you determine which social media sites to consider joining, here’s a list of my recommended social media sites that represent  a very small percentage of all networking sites:

“The Big 3″

• Facebook – Our Facebook page
• LinkedIn – Social media corner
• Twitter – Our Twitter page

Popular networks

Bookmarking/News/Blogging – These sites will keep you up to date on the most popular news stories.  You can also share your own stories or websites with potential clients and partners by commenting on stories, uploading and ranking different articles.  These sites are also a great way to generate traffic to your website.

• Bebo – http://www.bebo.com
• Delicious – http://www.delicious.com
• Digg – http://www.digg.com
• Reddit – http://www.reddit.com
• StumbleUpon – http://www.stumbleupon.com
• Technorati – http://www.technorati.com
• Yahoo Buzz – http://www.buzz.yahoo.com

Business Related – These sites are great for businesses that have a specific niche like online marketing or finance.  If your business creates any helpful tip sheets or presents at conferences, Scribd and Slideshare are great options to spread your message even further.

• Scribd – Document upload – http://www.scribd.com
• Slideshare – Presentation upload – http://www.slideshare.net
• Sphinn – Online marketing – http://www.sphinn.com
• Tip’d – Finance – http://www.tipd.com

Photo – Upload and share your photos to give viewers an opportunity to look “inside” your company.

• Flickr – http://www.flickr.com
• Photobucket – http://www.photobucket.com

Sports – If you’re in the sports industry, Ballhype is one of the top all sports related social media sites.

• Ballhype – http://www.ballhype.com

Video – Videos provide opportunities for businesses to promote special events  and feature knowledgeable people in your industry.  Videos are an excellent way of ranking on the first page of search engines.  Multimedia especially photos and videos are great for SEO because of little competition.

• Metacafe – http://www.metacafe.com
• Vimeo – http://www.vimeo.com
• YouTube – http://www.youtube.com

If you are new to social media, I highly recommend signing up for our free social media fitness program. It takes 10 days, 30 minutes a day to get social media fit.

Have you joined any of the niche social media sites?  What do you think of it?  Do you have any other social media networking sites to recommend?  Let me know!