Methodical Madness

The essential Twitter toolkit

All the apps you need to successfully use and maintain your Twitter profile

Using Twitter is easy. Using Twitter successfully is much more difficult. You need a collection of tools to help you monitor, analyze, automate and share content. After reviewing Twitter apps and sites for the past seven months, we decided to put together one definitive toolkit that covers all your needs.

Desktop/mobile client

TweetDeck is our go to tool for Twitter monitoring and mobile access. It is an all-in-one tool that greatly simplifies using Twitter. Not only limited to Twitter, TweetDeck allows you to follow and update Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, as well as monitor keywords around your brand or industry. You can even view pictures and YouTube videos within TweetDeck and it auto-shortens urls. Best of all, you can access your account from multiple computers, which is great if you use separate computers at work and home.

Networking

When looking for new people to follow, We Follow is the best place to start. This straightforward site allows you to label your account with the keywords that best define your Twitter stream. Then you can search We Follow’s keyword database to find the most relevant and interesting people to follow. This is always the first place we start when helping a client identify key people of interest.

Media Sharing

Odds are you’re going to want to share photos from your smartphone, and there is no better way to do that than with Twitpic. Setup and use are a snap. It doesn’t even require you to create a new account – after logging in with your Twitter account you’re ready to start sharing pics from wherever you are.

Tweet Scheduler

You can’t tweet 24 hours a day (if you can, seek help), but you can schedule tweets to go out around the clock. The best way we found to do this is through Twaitter. Odds are, your Twitter audience isn’t just in your time zone, so it’s important to reach people when they are most likely to be online. Twaitter allows you to schedule tweets so when you’re asleep, you can still send your links out. They’ve recently added recurring tweets and the ability to add your RSS feed, so now your Twitter feed doesn’t have to miss a beat.

Analytics

After you’ve got a hoard of followers and have your stream going strong and steady, you need to be able to judge how effective your campaign is. Twitter analyzer does just that. This one site allows you to see how quickly your Twitter account is growing, how far your reach extends, who is following you and lots more.  

There are more tools you can use to enhance your account, but if you master these five, you’ll be a Twitter God before you know it. What's in your toolkit?

Attack of the disgruntled employee: Nation1 vs. Ramsey MacFarlane

What happens when you don’t practice good business policies.

From Motrin Moms to Vermonster, social media is a great way to lash out against perceived wrong doing. This time former Nation1 employee Ramsey MacFarlane has chosen to air his displeasure with his former employer by launching a microsite and using Twitter. 

Nation1 is a music publicity and marketing company that has just expanded into London from Glasgow. The complaint site appeared on March 2nd and has garnered national attention within Scotland, even becoming the #1 trending topic for the country. A newspaper called The Drum has written two stories about the situation and the drama has struck a cord within the advertising and marketing community in the country.

Nation1 owner Andrew Grant responded through a blog post on March 5th. In his response, Grant raises some valid points, but misses the point altogether in other areas. Grant is very impressed at how quickly the microsite gained a following and how quickly Twitter spread the word. He’s right in his views about monitoring conversations, knowing your legal rights as a business and changing your passwords when employees leave if they have access to sensitive information.  

Sadly, he misses the core point of the issue at hand. He fails to propose how to address the complaint via social media. Instead, he uses an example in the post where a person complains that a home builder hasn’t completed his house on time and how Nation1 actively worked to bury the blog so it wouldn’t rank high on Google. He also recommends adding Non-disparagement clauses to employment contracts. These are all methods to silence and condemn open conversation. Not once does Grant suggest addressing the problem and making a change if necessary.

Instead of trying to hide a blog, it would create a more positive position for the home builder if they opened a conversation with the complaining parties and worked to solve their problem. Then when someone searched for their company and saw the blog post, they would see how the problem was rectified rather than just one person’s complaint of terrible service. 

In the case of the Motrin Moms and Vermonster, both Motrin and Monster Energy drinks opened a dialogue with their attackers and became heroes in the social media marketing world for addressing the problem. Andrew Grant’s strategy appears to be to circle the wagon’s and shut down any complaint as soon as possible, as though the act of finding fault with his company is blasphemy.

If you own a business, at some point you’re going to rub people the wrong way. It happens to the best of companies. It’s how you deal with complaints that makes all the difference. I have no way of knowing if Ramsey MacFarlane is telling the truth. He has 23 comments so far and many people have echoed his complaint. Grant has said he plans to sue MacFarlane and others in order to recoup losses. At the end of the day, Andrew Grant is impressed with social media’s power, but fails to grasp how to use it. As it stands now, Nation1 is a cautionary tale of how not to handle a situation.

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.

How to get the most out of SXSW

 What started as a small music event showcasing unsigned musical artists is now a mega event that encompasses music, technology and film. For ten days in March each year, all eyes turn to the capital of Texas to find out what bands we should be on the lookout for, which films are truly groundbreaking and what’s on the forefront of web technology and video games. Past bombshells have included the breaking out of Twitter and Foursquare, the US debut of The Hurt Locker, and performances from the likes of Vampire Weekend, Yo La Tengo and Dolly Parton. With over 2,000 bands, 250 films and AOL, Chevy, Pepsi, and SoBe presenting the latest in technology in social media, how do you make sense of it all and keep track of what’s happening?

Fortunately, there are many ways to keep up to date on events, news and schedules. 

My.SXSW.com is the festival’s official planning tool. It lets you create a schedule and join groups. It’s a great way to keep track of what you’re doing. It also has an iPhone app that provides additional features like maps, news, and the ability to share information with other attendees.

After the success of last year’s Zeitgeist, PepsiCo re-enters the fray with SXSW Play. It allows you to listen to the MP3s of featured artists, watch trailers, listen to podcasts, navigate through the SXSW lineup, follow the buzz through the “Zeitgeist” button and more. This appears to be the one iPhone app to rule them all while attending SXSW. This is a great way to follow what's going on without being there.

AOL is working hard to become relevant again with their Lifestream app. Lifestream allows you to bring your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and AIM accounts together to better stay in touch with others attending the festival. While My.SXSW and SXSW Play keep you up to date with what’s happening, this app allows you to get in touch with people on the ground and to follow along if you can't attend.

Eventbrite has 51 events listed and lets you RSVP to events. This is a great way to connect to people before SXSW kicks off and can help you find events that you might miss otherwise.

Mashable has teamed up with Sony and Cliqset to bring you Austin Real Time. This is a database of people attending SXSW with links to their social media accounts. It’s easy to sign up and get connected with people via your Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Foursqare, Gowala, YouTube, Vimeo and Plancast accounts.

Don’t get lost in the shuffle of SXSW. With a little planning and forethought, you can be sure to not miss a hot event or fail to make important new connections. 

Ten social media experts worth your follow

Yes, we know, everyone and their sister is calling themselves a social media guru these days. And yes, we know, most of them are full of it. But when you do fight your way through the white noise, you’ll find that some of them are well worth following to get a direct feed from thought leaders who supply you with new social media marketing ideas and breaking news and trends. 

To help you find those worthwhile few without having to pull your hair out, we’ve compiled a list of our ten favorites who deliver about all the social media info you can handle. We whittled our way down to ten based on the usefulness of each tweeter’s social media marketing advice, the originality of their tweets and the ratio of links and relevant info to personal chatter. @SocialMedia411
Their Twitter bio speaks for itself: Highly recommended by people who like things that don't suck. We keep a high signal-to-noise ratio and stimulate gray matter in the minds of doers and thinkers.

@timoreilly
Founder and CEO of O’Reily media, Tim is truly one of the thought leaders in social media. 

@Mashable
A prolific source of social media news, trends and advice. If you only follow one Twitter user to keep up with the latest in social media, Mashable is the one to go with. 

@Scobleizer
If you have any interest in social media you’ve probably heard of Robert Scoble. There’s hardly anyone on Twitter more enthusiastic about social media.

@Problogger
The problogger focuses on giving you helpful advice on using Twitter, writing blogs and generally having success in your social media efforts. 

@GuyKawasaki
The co-founder of Alltop, Guy is a social media pioneer. His self-proclaimed goal is to uncover the most interesting stuff on and about the internet.

@y2vonne
Yvonne focuses on marketing to women online. Worth checking out if you’re doing any work dealing with female-focused social networks.

@jdlasica
JD provides an interesting perspective on the latest social media happenings and delivers advice through his tweets and his blog.

@TobyDiva
Dubbing herself a social media marketing diva, Toby shares her passion for finding new ways to use social media with the tweeple of the world. 

@joelcomm
Joel is an interesting follow as he lets more of his personality pour into his tweets than most of the others, while still giving you useful social media advice and links.

That’s our top ten. Feel free to add your favorites in the comments section.

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.

Don't be afraid. It's only SEO.

SEO vs PPC: Why you're wasting money

In 2008, $12 billion was spent on PayPerClick advertising compared to $1.4 billion spent on SEO. People still don’t understand SEO. Adwords, on the other hand, is very easy to understand. If someone clicks a banner to visit your site, you have to pay a fee but you know that someone has seen your message. You know what you get and you know what you pay for. It’s like paying the guy who mows your lawn. It is very easy to see the work he did. He spends 2 hours, you can see the guy working through your kitchen window, and you pay him for the work afterwards for doing a good job.

SEO is very different. It's more like hiring an electrician to fix a problem. You know something isn't working right, you can't figure out what, and you have to take their word that everything is wired correctly. An SEO expert can help you optimize your site for Google and just like an electrician, you hand him a pile of money and he will do "something" with your site. He disappears and returns saying everything is fixed. He’s added some “inlinks”, changed some “on page keywords” and updates your “meta tags.” He tells you that everything is fixed and you’ll get great results from organic Google searches. Outwardly, you can’t tell anything has changed.

This is the problem of the SEO expert. It's difficult to explain what needs to be done in a simple manner without sounding like you’re speaking a foreign language, and it can take a lot of time to do SEO correctly, which means it often costs more. After they have finished optimizing a site, the results aren’t instantaneous. They can’t prove that their work had any effect on Google in an immediate fashion, so people prefer using Adwords. SEO isn’t a one time fix. It’s a long process of sitting and waiting. Over the course of three to six months, you’ll see the return on your investment with a stronger return on organic research for your entire site (not just one page) and more traffic to your website.

Done correctly, SEO can have a huge impact on your website and on your entire business. For example, by taking just one relevant keyword on a website and optimizing the site for it, it’s possible to advance from the 19th search result on Google to first or second place. For a keyword with 10,000 monthly searches, it means you will get about 2,000 visitors instead of 10.

Roughly 89% of search engine marketing is spent on PayPerClick advertising. In 2008, $11.9 billion was spent on PPC ads compared to $1.4 billion that was spent on Search Engine Optimization. When you look at the reach that PPC has compared to SEO, the results are the complete opposite; 90% of the people that do a search click on a link compared to only 10% that click on the paid ad. 

Considering 90% of Google users find websites through the organic search, proper SEO makes it possible for them to find your site over and over again long after the Adwords campaign has ended and brings in the people that don’t trust paid search results. So why are we spending 90% of our online marketing budgets to attract the 10% of online traffic generated by search engines?

Why settle for just a small piece of the pie when you can have 100% of it using Google's organic search? Start focusing more on SEO, either by hiring someone to help you out or by learning about it yourself. 

5 ways to create your own iPhone app

With the explosion of smart phones over the past year, more and more companies are moving beyond websites and social media to embrace the mobile revolution. This year looks to finally be the year of the mobile phone that people have been predicting for the past five years. Last year, if you didn’t have a Twitter account and a Facebook Fan Page, you weren’t in the game. This year’s must have property is an iPhone app.

iPhone apps are a great way to enable brand/consumer interaction and building brand equity. Most businesses think an iPhone app is financially and technically beyond their means. The good news is both of those issues are no longer true. I looked around the web and noticed there are several sites that allow you to create your own iPhone app and publish it either for free or for a small fee.

I set out to discover what options non-developers have for creating iPhone apps without spending too much. I sat down with my co-workers and created a wish-list of qualities that businesses might want in an iPhone app-creating-tool. We wanted:

•        an easy-to-use interface for both creating and updating apps
•        to get the hang of it quickly
•        the software to be web based
•        to integrate Twitter (in-app)
•        to link in YouTube (in-app)
•        to link in Flickr (in-app)
•        Facebook groups (in-app)
•        to enable RSS-feeds (blogs)
•        a high level of customization (interface and design)
•        unlimited updates
•        analytics
•        the ability to make an Android version

The evaluation method was simple. I visited each site and registered. I took a screenshot of a relevant part of the interface and then spent some time playing around with it. A decent site should be able to explain itself in that time. After using the application, I rated each site against my wish list.

  

Buildanapp is a pretty barebones app-creating tool. It allows you to classify the app from 17 different categories, such as Professional Service, Government Organization or Business Directory. The customization is limited to being able to upload your own graphics, such as background and app icons as jpg files or by direct input. At the moment, RSS-feeds are not supported, but according to Buildanapp this function, along with Twitter integration, will be added later this month. Linking URL’s is supposedly supported, but I couldn’t get it to work.

 

Pros: Multiple platforms (iPhone, Blackberry and Windows based), easy to use

Cons: Too basic, no RSS, no natural way of integrating social media

Price: $7.99/update, $19.99 to post to Apple app store

Rating:
 

  

Kanchoo is rich in content management and text formatting tools, making the app well suited for news distribution. Graphics like button icons, backgrounds and splash pages are pretty much the only things you can customize, which is a shame since it’s an excellent way for a company to present themselves. Kanchoo takes some time to get the hang of and the interface is overly complex. To preview your app before you submit it, you need to download software.

 

Pros: Very useful if you’re working in the news industry

Cons: Takes time to learn, expensive

Price: Initial submission fee 88$. Hosting is 28$/month.

Rating: 

MobileRoadie creates apps for the iPhone and Android phones. The tool is highly customizable, allowing the creator to integrate the most popular social media assets, a store, RSS, a wall for user/brand interaction, geo segmentation and stats on number of downloads and what excerpts are most popular. A fun and easy app well worth checking out – if you’ve got a chunk of change to burn.

 

Pros: Easy-to-use, social media friendly, rich features

Cons: Too expensive

Price: setup fee $499. Hosting is $29/month.

Rating: 

 

 

Mobbase is an app positioned for musicians and their fans, but this web-based service includes many features applicable for brand promotion as well. The app is extremely customizable, allowing you to define all the graphics including individual backgrounds on every page, the design and layout of the buttons, splash pages, bottom bars, etc. The service integrates most of the desirable social media tools such as Twitter (sorting by username, @mentions and #hashtags), videos (YouTube: entire channel, specific video or tags), photos (“sets” if you’re using Flickr or Albums with Picasa), blogs and RSS (two streams) in a natural way, along with a few other interesting features.

 

Pros: Highly customizable, easy-to-use, social media friendly
 
Cons: Can’t change name of buttons, analytics only tracks number of downloads

Price: $20 activation fee + $5/month for first 500 downloads, $1/month for every 1000 downloads after that.

Rating:
 

 

Swebapps is a rich app-creating tool intended for companies. Choose whether you want 4, 6 or 8 buttons and select among more than 30 features, including Facebook, a portfolio, Twitter and podcasts. There is an extra analytics feature called app-tracker that measures not only the numbers of downloads, but what buttons are used the most. The service is very intuitive and simple while still offering a lot. 

 
Pros: Intuitive and easy-to-use, good analytics, client signup, many RSS feeds

Cons: Rather expensive, can only add one Twitter account

Price: $50/button, $10 app tracker, hosting fee $25/month

Rating:

 

Conclusion:

All the app creating apps tested were useful, but it comes down to what your ambition level is, how much you’re willing to spend and who your target is. The most social media friendly were Mobbase and Mobile Roadie. These were also my personal favorites, as they enable a great deal of customization and have loads of interesting features to get my creative juices flowing. The other apps had some great features – especially the analytics with Swebapps. But Mobbase takes home the gold as Mobile Roadie and Swebapps are priced much higher without offering a whole lot more. 

Google forgets to not be evil with Buzz

Google Buzz has dug itself a deep hole, but it can still climb back out

I’m not a Google Buzz hater. As a Gmail user, I was excited to try it out. I certainly wasn’t opposed to the idea of having all my feeds linked into my inbox and being able to respond to, share and otherwise interact with them. Also, I love how images and video are integrated into conversations without leaving the page and that my friends and contacts can jump in and add their own content in real time – it’s like Twitter but with more freedom to elaborate and share on the fly.

But oh how the presentation of Buzz was botched and huge missteps were made that seem so obvious in hindsight, making us wonder what Google, with their “don’t be evil” motto, were thinking.

I’m skeptical of Google’s chances of turning Buzz into a cornerstone social media tool, but there’s a lot of potential there. Here’s how Buzz failed mightily in its first few days of existence, and some thoughts about how they can turn it around.

Buzz invaded your inbox and picked your friends for you
In this increasingly open landscape of social media, the email inbox is one of the last sanctuaries. So it was no surprise that when Buzz took info from our inboxes and made it public there was an outcry of protest, inspiring many people to switch Buzz off immediately. The info Buzz shared wasn’t anything too intrusive, mainly it made plain who you’re talking to most via Gmail, but the gaul of doing so automatically left many feeling violated. One of the reasons Google did this was so Buzz could auto follow these contacts and create a huge user base overnight – another thing people resented, as many of us ended up auto following our ex’s or people we’ve fallen out with. Google has changed this so it merely suggests who you should follow, but many had already shut Buzz down and won’t be coming back.
 
No Facebook and Twitter integration
Twitter is only involved in a meagre way (you can’t update Twitter from Buzz) and Facebook is nowhere to be found. For a social media tool that had potential to be a one-stop hub, those are huge absences that will keep it from actually being a social media hub. We still have to go elsewhere to maintain our Twitter and Facebook accounts, which makes Buzz just one more social network to spend time on, and we’ve all got about as much as we can handle as it is. True integration with the sites people use most has the potential to make Buzz the primary social media stop for millions of users. But if they intend to try and directly compete with Facebook and its 400 million user strong base, well, good luck Google. I don’t see how Buzz offers up close to enough incentive to get many people to switch.

Buzzes get dominated by white noise
Following big names, like Mashable and Scoble, will deliver great content into your Buzz account. But it comes in a flood relative to the activity of your personal contacts, who are probably the ones you’re most interested in. You can mute conversations (with varying degrees of success as some people have noticed muted conversations reappear a short time later), but there needs to be better filtering options (like FriendFeed successfully implemented) so you aren’t forced to wade through conversations you have no interest in while the stuff you want gets lost. Buzz is supposed to be extremely convenient and easy to use. Right now, it’s not.

Non-Gmail users not allowed
Having Buzz pop up in Gmail users’ accounts overnight was a brilliant idea for jump starting the service, tapping into the 150 million Gmail user base. Not having a standalone desktop app for everyone else was not a brilliant idea. This is probably coming soon, and if it’s not it should be. A lot of people don’t want to link their social media life with their email, and a whole lot of other people simply don’t want to use Gmail. And how many of your most interesting contacts are regularly on Gmail, anyway? The mobile version doesn’t require Gmail and has been pretty successful thus far, with a reported 200 posts per minute from phones. Do us a favor and give us a desktop app too.

Excessive hype + mediocrity = backlash
Google took this bun out of the oven while it was still doughy in the middle. Instead of taking the time to iron out all the kinks, or doing a limited beta launch, they went all out and stirred up huge hype for something that wasn’t ready for users to integrate into their daily lives. Then they went and boasted of 9 million posts in two days, which isn’t much of a claim given that 150 million Gmail users had the Buzz tab suddenly appear in their inbox. Moreover, checking it out and making a post or two does not mean users liked it or will continue using it. The general sentiment seems to be: “Yeah, I checked it out – no, I’m not interested.” The number of tweets referring to Buzz with the hashtag #fail came in a tidal wave (pun intended). If you go out of your way to attract massive attention, social media will give you a piece of its mind when you deliver mediocrity.

If the Facebook/Twitter integration happens, the privacy issues are satisfactorily resolved and a whole lot more people create Buzz accounts, it has potential to streamline our social media experience. But there’s a lot of ifs to take care of, and then Google has to hope they haven’t created too much bad mojo among users to win them back. Six months from now, do you see Buzz riding high, or already forgotten?

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.

5 tips for creating a Twitter profile that screams “follow me!”

Creating a compelling Twitter profile is a subtle art

Making your Twitter profile seems simple enough, considering you don’t have a lot of options to work with. But the little you do have speaks volumes about who you are and whether or not you’re worth following. In fact, it has to tell viewers within a few seconds why they should care about what you have to say. A less-than-stellar profile may actually be why you aren’t amassing all the new followers you think you should be.

Whether you’re just getting started or have a few thousand tweets under your belt, these 5 tips can help you make a better impression with your Twitter profile.

One of the more memorable profiles I've seen
from a graphic designer/robot

Tell us (honestly) what you tweet about
Too many profiles waste their precious few bio characters listing useless information. And others mislead us by talking about their interests, and even professions, that have nothing to do with their Twitter use. Your bio is the first place we look to see what you tweet about, so do us a favor and tell us what we can expect from following you. This doesn’t mean you have to be plain and boring, e.g. if you use a lot of humor, write a funny bio, but being direct and honest is much appreciated. Just avoid calling yourself an expert or guru, we’re all tired of hearing it.

Create a custom background
This takes the most effort, but also has the most impact. Your background will make the first and biggest impression on visitors to your page. It’s a great way to express your personality and give a better sense of what you do. If you didn’t have enough space to say everything you wanted about yourself in the bio, you can also include text in your background pic, for example a url or witty quote. To learn how to make your own background and see some great examples, check out Mashable’s how-to guide and the Twitter Backgrounds Gallery.  

Use the one link wisely
This is your chance to tell visitors more about yourself. If you have a website or blog, link it here so anyone who thinks you’re interesting can find out more about what you do. If not, link to a profile page you have on another site. Really, you can link to whatever you feel helps establish your personality and interests, whether it be a presence of your own, or a favorite quirky site. So don’t leave it blank.

Create a universal avatar
Having the same avatar across all social media sites, whether it be Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or any other, will help establish you as a personality in social media. It lets others recognize you at a glance when they see you getting involved elsewhere online. Your avatar doesn’t necessarily have to be a picture of you, but it makes for better engagement and intimacy if people can see the face of the person they’re talking to. If you insist on not using your own face, make sure your avatar is instantly recognizable and distinct so people still know it’s you at a glance.

Be mindful of your profile while you tweet
The biggest influencer of whether or not someone will follow you are those few most recent tweets they see in your stream. If people see an endless stream of @ messages, RTs or posted links, they’ll probably give you a pass, regardless of what the rest of your profile looks like. Stay as consistent as you can in posting interesting, unique content on Twitter. The other stuff is important too, especially talking with other tweeple, but if people see that you aren’t adding your own thoughts and ideas, they won’t see much reason to follow you.

Given how small a window you have to hook your viewers, don’t waste any of the tools you have by leaving things blank or going with default images. The small details make a big difference in your success on Twitter, so take 20 minutes and go through them again. The tweeple of the world will thank you for it.

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.

Why the Oscars will fail at social media

 

A few years ago, there were two televised events that were guaranteed to be huge audience draws. One was the Super Bowl and the other was the Academy Awards. While the Super Bowl posted record numbers this year, the Academy Awards is having an identity crisis. In 2008, they saw an all-time ratings low and in 2009 there was only a 13% increase in viewership. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences can feel their social relevancy slipping and the threat of the Oscars becoming the next Tony Awards scares the hell out of them. 

In an effort to stay more relevant, the Academy increased the Best Picture category from 5 nominees to 10 so that fan favorites like “Avatar,” “District 9,” “Up” and “The Blind Side” could get a best picture nod. The theory is that if you play to a wider audience, you’ll attract a younger, hipper crowd instead of the current median age of 49. 

The Academy launched their Facebook FanPage last week and it’s a good start connecting to the fans. They did a livestream of the Oscar Nominations there, as well as on various news sites. This is the first time they’ve ever allowed the nominations to be broadcast online. There are photos from past events, behind-the-scenes videos from this year’s ceremony and interviews with celebrities. Overall, it’s a good start for the Oscars attempt at using social media. 


To see how the Academy really feels about social media, take a look at the YouTube tab in their Facebook page. The tab links videos on YouTube to appear on Facebook, or it would if embedding of the videos was enabled. This is really where we see the chink in the Academy armor when it comes to social media. They want to appear to be social, but at the same time maintain control of everything. They want to keep tight reigns on all of their assets and, for a traditionally conservative organization, having a YouTube channel and a Facebook account must seem like cutting edge participation. 

When the big day hits, social media will be lacking in their plans. You won’t see a Twitter page where tweets about the presentation will stream, giving fans a chance to talk to each other. You won’t see a sponsored chat room where fans can gather to talk about the presentation. You won’t see the presentation live on their Facebook page. You won’t see an instant poll where the audience can vote before the award is announced, or a million other ideas that would tie in perfectly with the event.  

The Academy does more than just an annual broadcast. They have an education & outreach program, events and exhibitions throughout the year, as well as research and preservation programs. All of these are ripe for social media extensions to increase public outreach. 

People love movies – record breaking box office numbers are a testament to that. If the Academy took themselves a little less seriously and embraced the masses they so desperately desire, the Oscars could once again become the mega event it used to be and gain the popular respect it so dearly wants. 

Do you think they’ll be able to evolve and survive, or will they stagnate and sink? 

5 Twitter Bookmarking Apps

If you’re like me, you find lots of great content online every day that ends up being fodder for Twitter. It can be hard to keep track of what you tweet much less the links you send out. Favoriting a link makes it easy to find later, but if you favorite a lot of links, it can be hard to find older links. If you want to tag your favorites, well forget that. Or how about searching other people’s favorites? Impossible at the moment. These frustrations sent me on a search for the best bookmarking Twitter tool. It turns out there are many more with a wider variety of features than I imagined.

I sat down with my co-workers and created a wish-list of qualities that we as marketing people want in a Twitter bookmarking tool. As usual, all the tools have to be free and not require a download. Beyond that, we wanted to be able to:

• have an easy-to-use interface
• get the hang of it quickly
• send updates to Twitter and other sites
• easily configure it
• shorten URLs, preferably with the ability to choose the URL shortening tool
• use analytics
• save links
• tag or categorize links
• link to other social media sites
• search through the collection of bookmarks


The evaluation method was simple. I visited each site and registered. After my profile loaded, I took a screenshot of the interface and then spent about ten minutes looking around the site. A decent site should be able to explain itself in that time. After using the application, I rated each site against my wish list.


 

 
 

Twitthat is a basic bookmarking site. It allows you to install a button on your browser’s toolbar and post any link from any website. It’s as base as you can get. It does store your links, but doesn’t allow you to search or tag them for easier retrieval. There is also a public timeline which allows you to see what’s being updated using the site and most read. It also displays the most popular tweets from the site.

 

PROS: Easy to use toolbar app that allows you to bookmark Twitter links.

CONS: Doesn’t do anything else. It could be much more functional if they added one or two abilities.

RATING: 

 


Yourversion is a mix between Delicious and a bookmarking tool. This has it all. After creating an account, you add five interests and then select from a pre-determined list of words. From there, you have the ability to add or delete other interests. The site is divided into six sections: discover, bookmarks, thumbed, shared, friends and profile. Discover brings you content based on your interests and you can view all of them or just view news, blogs, webpages, Twitter, videos and products. After you bookmark something, you can view the links and share them on Twitter, Facebook or email. It also lets you thumb up or thumb down content which allows the algorithm to learn your taste and deliver more focused content to you. You can tag bookmarks, browse tags and import your bookmarks from Delicious. It does a lot  more, like giving you a public profile, the ability to import contacts from Gmail and Yahoo and provides a mobile interface. 

 

PROS: It covers all of our requirements and fills some we didn’t even know we had.

CONS: No analytics so you can’t see your influence.

RATING: 

Sharein is similar to Yourverision with two notable exceptions: it doesn’t bring new content to you and it has impressive analytics. Both sites have the same basic features and interaction and ability, but with Sharein, you can’t tag bookmarks as you save them, which adds another step. The real reason to choose this over Yourversion is the analytics. There is a very useful dashboard that shows retweets, user comments and reshares. By hovering over a link, you can see when it was shared, how many views it had, the reach of the tweet and number of times it was reshared. You can view activity in time intervals of 6 hours, 24 hours, month or a year. It’s the best way I’ve seen to measure your impact and influence.

 

PROS: Most of the features of Yourversion plus amazing analytics make this a great tool.

CONS: If they added the feature where they bring you information and the ability to tag bookmarks as you save them, it would be unstoppable.

RATING: 

 

   


Tweetmarks is a great idea. Why create a new website when you can modify an existing one. Get all the benefits of del.icio.us with a few extra additions. Tweetmarks will bookmark the links you use in your tweets to Delicious.com. There is no toolbar button or extra step. You can have the site add all links you tweet or just tweets with certain hashtags. 

 

PROS: Simple to use and works with a site on which you probably already have an account 

CONS: You’re limited to the features of Delicious which doesn’t allow you to post to Facebook or email and doesn’t have any analytics.

RATING:

 

Mister Wong is a bookmarking site that has released a Twitter app. All you have to do is attach your Twitter profile to your Mister Wong account and it brings in any tweet with a URL attached. The Mister Wong site allows you to make a comment on your bookmarks, tag them, decide to make the link private or public and share it on Twitter. 

 

PROS: Easy to share and save links. It lets you tag bookmarks, has a searchable database and gives you a public profile.

CONS: I tweeted several links and they never appeared in my profile. From what I can tell, the bookmarking feature through Twitter doesn’t work.

RAITING:

 

 CONCLUSION: This was a tough one to pick. Tweetmarks is great because if you already have a Delicious account, you don’t have to open another bookmarking account. However, Delicious lacks any way to share your bookmarks beyond its service. Sharein is also great. The analytics are beyond anything else I’ve seen but it doesn’t bring new content to you. My pick for this week’s winner is Yourversion. It imports your existing Delicious account (making Delicious redundant), serves up content to you that might be of interest and has a mobile interface. It’s got some great tools that other sites should add to their list of features.

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media and won't shut up about Twitter.

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