Irfan Siddiqui

Digital Media Junkie!!

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"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."

Winston Churchill

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"Never, never, never give up."

Winston Churchill

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Interesting!

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What’s your reputation, James bond or Gold finger?

  In pre-history, before Google and Social media it was a very different scenario when it came to managing a person’s reputation. For this blog however, I will only focus on “Importance of reputation management for students”.

As a student, we all think we are very interesting, unique, charming, aspiring, individualistic, and all in all James bond from our life’s 007 flicks. We are sure that we are the best prospect for the employer who will hire us to do the job. But wait! Are we sure that our reputation on social media makes us James Bond and not Gold finger?

I would like to mention a proverb here; “A man is known by the company he keeps” and with advent of Google and Social Media this proverb has taken an interesting turn as these platforms not only provide the details of the man but details of the company he keeps as well with only a few words through a keyboard.

In general it has become a common practice for employers to check a prospect’s online presence before even calling them for an interview; however it is even more in practice to search about the students who have freshly graduated and applied. The reason being students mostly do not have any fulltime job experiences or references in the industry, so it is very important for an employer to find answers to a few important questions, such as; “whether they will bring  hangover to work on Monday or not?”

No, I am not asking you to stop having a good time but to manage your social accounts properly, organizing your professional platforms such as “linkedin” with content related to your career goals, aspirations, information and professional picture or pictures.  Similarly your personal platforms such as “Facebook” should have proper privacy settings so no person other than your friends could see your content.

The type of content you share on your professional sites and personal sites should be totally different and the only exception is your twitter account where you should be a little more care full about the content as this platform serve’s both personal and professional purposes.

Reputation management is very important especially for students and it is important to find out what your reputation is by searching yourself on search engines and try to see what people see when they search you.

Mr. Bond or Gold finger?

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Do you know who mentioned you?

  Google Alerts

Google Alert is a unique tool that allows you to receive content change detection/notification based on the queries you have made. These alerts are generated from six categories; everything (default), news, blogs, discussions, videos and books. These alerts are sent to your Google account (Gmail). It allows individuals as well as businesses to keep up to date and monitor specific topics of interest. The frequency and time of the result (notifications) can be set by a user for instance; real-time, once a day or once a week.

Some key uses of Google Alerts include:

monitoring a developing news story

keeping current on a competitor or industry

getting the latest on a celebrity or event

keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

Google Alerts also allows you to limit your search to specific sites or exclude them based on your needs.

Pricing Plans:

Free

  Sprout Social

Engage, Publish and Analyze

Sprout Social was founded in 2010. It is a platform that is used for active measurement and monitoring of social media platforms for generating and collecting information about a business or any company. It measures and tracks content from different blogs, news sites, twitter, facebook, message boards and other social media platforms to determine the volume and sentiment of conversation about a business, brand or discussion topic.

 It creates a brand experience that ensures smarter, faster and efficient communication.  Sprout social provides features such as engagement through single stream inbox ensuring conversations from customers to be always answered, publishing scheduled messages through its dashboard to social media platforms such as facebook, twitter and linkedin, Analytics to measure the performance of different media platforms, Monitoring conversations about a brand or topic through use of different keywords, CRM to manage relationships and to keep a record, Collaborations to help a team work as a unit to respond immediately, Help Desk to ensure adequate customer service and Mobility to provide a unilateral correspondence between team members irrespective of device they are using to access.

Sprout social provides a distinctive response rate metric that shows impact of responses in real time and show insight on the performance of your messages giving a brand/company the ability to A-B testing for its communication messages.

  Pricing Plans:

Standard Plan: $39 / Month

Delux Plan: $59 / Month

Premium Plan: $99 / Month

Free trial for 30 days available

Mention:

Be in the know, anywhere, anytime! Mention allows you to create alerts for your brand, your industry, your competition and your own name. It keeps a business or brand informed about any mentions of the selected names on the web and social web in real time. Mention provides features like social mentioning, live alerts, team work, Anti-noise technology, smart actions, priority mentions, statistics and data exporting tools.

Mention is designed to be used for personal, professional and team use. It allows content to be monitored from 42 language sources and allows prioritizing of feed from any where in the world and is optimized to be used as web app, chrome app, desktop (PC, Mac or Linux ) and mobile version for android and iphone app.

Pricing Plans:

Free Plan

Pro Plan: $19.99

Team Plan: $99.95

Free trial for 30 days available

Social Mention:

Social Mention is a social media analysis and search platform that aggregates content generated by users from around the social universe into a single stream of information. Social mention monitors mentions of specific names, brands or keywords from 100+ social media properties including Twitter, Facebook, You tube and etc. Social mention allows search of different keywords and mentions in twelve search categories with an option to select the source (media platform) for the search results.

A business, brand or individual can create alerts of interest similar as Google Alerts as well as embed a real-time buzz widget to display feeds on the professional or personal website and blog.

 Price: Free

  Viralheat 

Viralheat came into being in 2009. Viralheat initially provided viral video analytics but as social media expanded, more platform coverage and monitoring capabilities were introduced to Viralheat. Today more than 12,000 clients in 72 countries around the globe use Viralheat services.

 Viralheat provides mainly provides nine types of solutions for its clients:

 1).Monitoring:

Viralheat offers the ability to monitor social media platforms such as twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest, Websites and Blogs. Viralheat monitors and tracks mentions by keywords or phrase, hashtags mention of specific brand on FB pages, Boards created on Pinterest or trending topics related to your brand - making it easy to monitor social media activity taking place on social web, listening and taping into real-time conversations about a brand.

 2). Social Media Management:

Viralheat allows management of all social media platforms from one unified management suit including; Facebook pages, twitter account, linkedin, google plus pages. It also provides an ability to manage conversations, filter streams and work flow with in a company. Using these systems you can be on the top of social activity related to your brand and also inform your clients about the hot trends.

 3). Social Publishing:

Viralheat gives you the ability to publish content across all your social media platforms from one dashboard giving you the ability to schedule posts, shorten URLs, publishing rich media and managing publishing history.

 4). Social Media Analysis:

Viralheat gives you the ability to track true ROI of the social media, it measures social media based on 600 media points to allow us increase your reach and increase management. It allows you to understand traffic sources and the content your target audience is most interested in so you can optimize your strategy to create buzz. Viralheat also combines the data from analytics tools from different social media platforms to drive a combined data analysis to better understand trends and insights.

 5). Social Engagement:

Viralheat gives you the ability to engage with target audience and develop strong relationships with existing and potential customers.

 6). Sentiment Analysis

Viralheat's sentiment analysis tool allows a business, brand to understand and judge the online sentiment though mentions of it in social space.

 7). Social Media Influencers

Public has the power on social media – A brand can benefit from a voice of an influence and can suffer from a voice of detractor. Viralheat gives your brand to identify your brand influencers as well as detractor, so if you target the right message to these influencers there is a possibility they might become you brand ambassadors that share your brand’s message with a positive word of mouth. Influencers can be found across all the social media platforms and will give you an increased ROI.

 8). Social CRM:

Lead generation is one of the most important aspects for any business and Viralheat gives you the opportunity to identify high-potential leads based on their purchase intent using its human intent technology. Viralheat also generate leads based on customers which have an interest in your competitor’s products so that you can reach them before they make a buying decision.

 9). Social Media Reporting:

Viralheat provides great reporting options in Excel and CSV that can be integrated with other programs. This helps archiving important data from different social platforms into one data file that can be saved for use at a later time.

 Pricing Plans:

Personal: Free

Pro: $9.99/ month

Premium: $99.9/ month

Free trial for 30 days available

  Trackur

Trakur has been operating since 2007 and has more than 60,000+ registered users and monitors 10+million media mentions in a day across 100+ million news sites, blogs, forums, twitter, Google+ and Facebook. The main features of Trakur include: Executive insights, Data, Clear results, Influence and Sentiment analysis, white label branding and outstanding coverage.

 A brand’s reputation doesn’t have time for a steep learning curve and using Trackur means that using its power tools a brand/company will be up and running in 60- seconds. Trackur monitors media / social media platforms such as News, Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google+. Trackur has a unique feature which is not being offered by other monitoring platforms that is; white label dashboard which is customize able and clients can update their own logo and track results.

Pricing Plans:

Basic: $27 / month

Plus: $97 / month

Premium: $197 / month

Ultimate: $447 / month

Free trial for 10 days available

   Radian 6 / Sales Force

The main features for radian6 are social listening, social content management, engagement, social ads, workflow and automation and measurement.

Pricing Plans:

Contact Manager: $5 / month

Group: $25 / month

Professional: $65 / month

   Sysomos

Sysomos is differentiated in to two main products Heartbeat and MAP and works on 4 key functions: data collection, information processing, data analysis and the user.It offers solutions for social media monitoring, insights and analytics, engagement and management of social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Linkedin.

Pricing Plans:

The price plans range from $9 to $450 / month depending upon the solutions and services being offered.

   What can the business use?

 It depends on the size and use of the company that it should base its decision to go with the tools mentioned above. Tools like Google Alerts and Social mention are free and effective at the same time. All sizes of businesses can take advantage of these tools to find out about their own and their competition’s mentions. However, if a business can afford then my choice will be Viralheat and Radian6 based on their features such as in depth monitoring, customization, analysis, management and detailed reporting. These Platforms are also easily manageable as well as cost effective. In addition to the prices per month the businesses also have to keep in mind that these tools will require a dedicated team or at least an individual to monitor and manage these platforms even if free platforms are being used. I highly recommend the use of these platforms as they can generate very useful insights about your brand/ company or businesses reputation (negative or positive) in the social and web space.

   Sources:

http://www.google.ca/alerts

http://sproutsocial.com/

https://en.mention.net/

http://socialmention.com/

https://www.viralheat.com/

http://www.trackur.com/

http://www.salesforcemarketingcloud.com/

http://www.sysomos.com

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For Rewards & Perks, Use your Influence!!!

  Klout, Peerindex and Kred all are a means of calculating an individual’s/company’s social media foot print in order to see how effective, active and receptive they are in the social media landscape.  All these platforms allocate a social influence number which represents your social activity, influence and authority.

Klout:

Klout measures a person’s influence score out of 100 points and you can use Klout as an Individual influencer or a Brand Influencer. It currently runs algorithms on primarily seven social media platforms to calculate a person’s score (Klout). Many factors are contributed towards calculating its score such as how selective the people are who share a person’s content as the system values the unique engagement driven from unique sources along with factors such as number of tweets, Re-tweets and size of a person’s network. Klout groups a person’s score in three main matrices: True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score (Young). Klout also has a Perks program which offers its users different incentives based on their Klout score. Klout is currently in the process of opening a “Klout for business” section as well.

Kred:

Kred is a free tool for measuring social media foot print and is a little different from Klout as it measures social influence based on two factors: Trust and Generosity referred to as Influence and Outreach respectively. Kred scores out of 1000 for Influence and out of 12 for Outreach. Kred scores are generated by observing social network user's content, the two primary social media platforms used by kred to calculate influence and outreach are Twitter and Facebook(Kred). Kred also offers rewards to users based on the products/services they interact with the most.

PeerIndex:

PeerIndex also measures a person’s social influence score out of 100. Peer index measures influence by measuring Activity, Audience and Authority. The PeerIndex algorithms measure the speed and quantity by which users’ spot, share content on any specific topic. Content recommendation mechanism measure’s a person’s knowledge and authority in a specific subject area (PeerIndex). Peerindex also offers Peerperks to users based on their authority and influence. 

What do I say?

I think there is no question that these tools are very effective and broaden the meaning of matrices that can be applied to calculate social media foot prints of people that are influential and can be used to elevate different activities they do through their influence numbers. With advent of so many social media platforms keeping track of all social media platforms was becoming a loose ball but these tools have filled a major gap and have laid the foundation stone for a superior measurement of ROI (both investment & influence).  

Although, there has been a lot of back lash on how Klout, peerindex and kred calculate their score using algorithms that can be easily manipulated and can produce influential score superficially by just increasing the amount of social activities using spam and automated accounts. There definitely are a few cracks in calculation of the influence scores and algorithms that govern these tools but in my personal opinion these tools are fairly legitimate tools for measuring social influences as these companies (Klout, Kred and PeerIndex) are improving their algorithms on a very fast pace.

There has been a huge discussion going on about authenticity of these social scores as in one incidence a blogger, Robert Scoble, was being mentioned to be more influential then President Obama based on his Klout score of 87. Now, there is huge disconnect here, no doubt President Obama is the most influential in the world however, the Klout Score is based on Robert’s social media activities and simply means that Mr. Scoble is using social media more effectively as compared to the President. Mr. Scoble received 730k comments and 730k re-shares in a given period; Barack Obama only received 530k and 470k re-tweets and Mentions (Alyson).

Lets talk about my influence:

My Klout score is 41, and yes this doesn't mean I should be heartbroken that I score very less as compared to my peers. It only means I have to start putting in more towards different social media platforms which are analyzed by Klout to give me a score.

Following are a few easy steps that will help me increase my Klout score:

Create and connect all the possible social accounts to my Klout such as Google+, Instagram, Foursquare, Blooger, wordpress and etc. This is fairly simple and will definitely increase my Klout score.

Second, by continuously following, tweeting, re-tweeting, publishing, sharing, commenting and blogging meaning full content, I can increase my Klout score. It is also important to maintain the steady stream of my social publishing.

Third, by using proper, tags, hashtags and keywords in all my communication.

I seriously do not consider this as “gaming the system”, in my point of view this is social networking in itself.

How will influencer meet business? 

Through these tools it is very easy to locate and identify social influencers in particular fields and areas of expertise. Influencers are the people who have a great following because of their command on specific subjects. If a business is able to develop a good and healthy relationship with an influencer in their category of business and offers them incentives than it is for sure that the business will be able to have a positive word of influence from these people.

The brilliance in these influence relationships is that these people are not Film or TV stars but certainly have a star status in their own fields. The risk however, is that these are not paid actors/endorsers and can anytime whip a business for its lack of service. Another, point to be considered is the selection of the right kind of influencers for your business. For instance, a business in beer category cannot select a non-drinker influencer (for sure his tweets and posts might be very much related to beer, but they might actually be to stop the use of it).

All these tools (Klout, Kred and PeerIndex) have evolved and are evolving very rapidly with continuous improvement in their functions/analytics/algorithms as well as they have dedicated teams to provide assistance and enterprise solutions to businesses. I see a great potential in future for their use for businesses as many main stream brands have already started the journey such as Pepsi, Sony, Disney and etc. 

Risks and Limitations: 

The primary risk to base major business decisions on social influence is the newness of the tools used to calculate these influences. The processes and tools both are going through evolution and there certainly are a more then few loop holes that can be exploited. The issue of bots and spam accounts being used is still in debate and effectively of these systems has yet to be fully explored. As a business it is a good time to start testing the influence waters but certainly not the right time to invest major dollars.

From HR prospective it is also not a wise thing to hire people or make hiring decisions based on a candidate’s influential scores as these scores might not be the real potential these candidates possess (Levy) 

Using these tools is free in most of the cases but it will require a good amount of work hours/human resource to manage and monitor these influence tools. It is also very important to evaluate the opportunity cost and the effort that can be utilized elsewhere.

Sources:

Klout, Score. N.p.. Web. 26 Mar 2013. <http://klout.com/

http://klout.com/#/corp/klout_score

Young, Elijah . "Is Klout a Good Judge of Your Social Media Influence?." Social Media Examiner. N.p.. Web. 26 Mar 2013. <http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/is-klout-a-good-judge-of-your-social-media-influence/>.

Kred, . N.p.. Web. 26 Mar 2013. <http://kred.com/rules>

PeerIndex, . N.p.. Web. 27 Mar 2013. <http://help.peerindex.com/>

Alyson , Shontell. "Klout Finally Explains Why Obama Is Ranked Lower Than Robert Scoble Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/klout-finally-explains-why-obama-is-ranked-lower-than-robert-scoble-2011-12

Levy, Scott. "Klout Vs. Kred: Which, If Any, Is Better For Your Business?." Forbes. N.p.. Web. 27 Mar 2013. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottlevy/2013/03/04/klout-vs-kred-which-if-any-is-better-for-your-business/>.

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Columbia River Gorge | Oregon (by Miles Morgan)

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In search of heaven?

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Pin-up your game, business!!!

Research at 3M Corporation concluded that we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text (Parkinson).

This research clearly shows the power of visuals over any other medium of verbal or non- verbal communication. To capitalize this power about two years ago a social network was launched and it grew to about 10 million users’ milestone faster than many other sites in history (Moritz).It offered users/brands to tell their story in a very unique way by sharing photos and videos with all the social media provisions such as like, comment, following, keywords, hash tagging and a very unique feature called Pin/re-pin.

We call it Pinterest!!

Because of its visually rich environment Pinterest is set to attract your customer base regardless of you being a small or a big business. Pinterest gives your followers the visual liberty to share their content with you or your content on their own Pinterest boards which creates a bond between your company and the follower as well as gives a visual reference of your company to the peers of your followers. The better visual image you project the more users will want to be a part of your brand/ company.

How to help people discover your business on Pinterest?

Opening up a business account on Pinterest is fairly simple and has three basic steps:

Create a business account

Verify your business/company website

Add the Pin it button to your website

Now, that you are on Pinterest, what to do next?

Add the photo which represents your business the best and write an introduction about your business.

Create a board and start adding pictures of your brand/company (In my point of view create specific boards for specific themes, for example create a board “Our Ads”, this board should contain all the advertisements your company or brand has ever published on TV or print). Create other boards such as “Our work day” and have pictures of your in store activities with users in this board. Always create a different board for a different activity. Similarly for your menus if you are a food company.

Now that your boards are content rich start following different users, and Pin their photos to start generating interactivity, Re-pin their photos and videos so that they start doing the same in response, be sure of targeting the right users that have similar interests to what your brand offers.

Finally don’t forget to add relevant keywords and #tags to all your communication and activities.

Once you start your activity you can also measure and analyze the activity of your Brand/company page using Pinterest analytics to give you a better understanding of what your followers like the most and what is their least favorite about your page.

Constraints and Limitations:

Although the platform is free to use but your Pinterest presence will require sufficient amount of work hours to keep it active and happening. It is very important to evaluate the opportunity cost and human resource cost before you start Pinteresting.

 Now, that you know about Pinterest what are you waiting for? Stop reading and start telling your stories visually.

“Millions of people use Pinterest to discover and share things that inspire them” Pinterest for Business

  Sources:

Parkinson, Mike. "The Power of Visual Communication."Million dollar graphics. n.d. n. page. Web. 19 Mar. 2013. <http://www.billiondollargraphics.com/infographics.html>

Moritz , Donna . "The 10 Commandments of Using Pinterest for Business." AMY PORTERFIELD. 5 June 2012: n. page. Web. 19 Mar. 2013. <http://www.amyporterfield.com/2012/06/the-10-commandments-of-using-pinterest-for-business/>

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Stop Mumbling, Start Tumblring!!!

Getting lost in the labyrinth of digital information is not an uncommon phenomenon for both individuals and brands when it comes to striking a presence in the digital media. Every nano-second tons and tons of content is being generated and being floated in through an infinite number of digital platforms creating a virtual mist and taking a toll on the visibility of an individual or a brand that doesn't reciprocate to the amount of effort, time and money being invested to stand out. To cut through this digital clutter it is very important to use the right tools from your social/digital platforms tool kit. One of the finest tools from this tool kit is Tumblr which is also ranked as one of the top 20 websites in United States in terms of traffic.

Why Tumblr?

Tumblr is a very unique blog writing platform that allows many social media connection features such as likes, re-blogging and sharing along with other blog creation features. Following are a few facts about Tumblr as a social media platform:

Tumblr has 19 billion monthly page views.

Tumblr has about 75 million plus blogs. There are about 165 million plus monthly unique page views.

Tumblr has a very active mobile app presence with about 43 million plus visits

Tumblr reaches almost all the demographic segments age and gender wise with ages 18-34 holding a 44% share of presence.

Tumblr has two very unique features which will help leverage your individual or corporate brand (The Radar post and spot light) these features are managed by editorial curators from Tumblr to highlight unique blog posts and blogs. The radar post generates about 120+million daily impressions.

The engagement time of per user on Tumblr is about 14.5 minutes.

There are two main ways of how data is consumed on Tumblr; one by blog post appearing on dashboards of users and second through users who you are following.

Tumblr offers a wide variety of features to create a unique experience for the users such as embedding of visuals (images and videos), having customized themes, embedding audio to your post.

Tumblr allows the users to measure digital engagements by allowing the use of third party analytic such as Google analytic and Disqus.

Tumblr also has sponsor pricing model which brands can utilize in order to stand out of the clutter with features that showcase a brand in Radar posts and Spot light. This model is moderated and managed by Tumblr’s team.

Who is Tumblr for?

Tumblr can be used by individuals to showcase their work and develop their personal brand which will allow them distinction in the digital space.

Tumblr can also be used to create engagement for businesses and brands such as Nike, Adidas, Pen ready, Coca cola and etc which are already creating a digital buzz for their brands through Tumblr.

Stop reading now and save your brand from the clutter in the digital sphere!!!

 CREATE, SHARE & FOLLOW = TUMBLR

    Sources:

Levine, Ari. “How the Best Brands Tell Stories Using Tumblr.” HootSuite University. 2013.

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