Jon Samsel

It’s that time of year again when we American’s reflect on our past and make optimistic (if not unrealistic)  goals for our future. 2009 was full of new-found interests, change, as well as ups and downs. The frequency of my Twitter posts surpassed my blog posts. I used LinkedIn in bold new ways to enhance my professional network–which led to many unexpected and engaging experiences such as speaking engagements, reconnecting with many old friends, interesting business propositions, a Twitterview with a European blogger, inquiries from executive recruiters, participation with charity organizations, and connecting like-minded people together.

In reviewing my year-end Google Analytics reports for JonSamsel.com, I was surprised to see which of my blog posts rose to the top of my ‘page view top 10 list.’ I share with you my top ten posts for 2009 in order of popularity.

1. 5 Ways to Take Advantage of a LinkedIn BETA Tool: Company Profiles - I had no idea when I published this post that it would be my most popular post (by far) for 2009. I think it was simply the right post at the right time, helping people figure out how to use LinkedIn in a new way. Nearly everyone I know uses LinkedIn and I love the service. So I guess when you write about a subject you are passionate about, it comes out in the final piece and people pick up on that vibe.
2. 7 Ways to Leverage LinkedIn to Expand Your Social Network -Similar in scope and tone as my number one post for 2009, this post zeroed in on the social networking capabilities of LinkedIn.
3. The Best Social Media Monitoring Tools Used by Today’s Top Creative Agencies & Brands - I had fun writing this post because it was my chance to share some of the tool I use on a daily basis with all of my readers. They responded by reading this post in droves. The other aspect about this post that I love is how it profiles several new start-up firms. It’s always nice to be able to talk about small companies before they hit it big.
4. The Twitter Effect: How 140 Character Micro-Blogging Can BeneTweet Your Company - I write this post just as I was getting up to speed on how companies could benefit from using Twitter. Obviously, many of my readers found value in the the article as well. Note to readers: I have seen the word ‘BeneTweet’ used several times since my original post, a combination of the words Benefit and Tweet. Nice to know it’s still possible to coin a term now and then. Note to self: Not 100% sure I was the first person to use the term BeneTweet, but at the time, I did think I was being somewhat unique.
5. 15 Ways to Promote Your Book -When I first started my blog back in Oct 2008, I focused more on writing and design topics than I do today, since so much of my early career was spent working as a writer and editor. I am always happy when I can assist other writers publish and promote their work. This article was my way of providing some helpful utility to scribes everywhere.
6. Retweet: Harnessing the Word of Mouth Marketing Power of Twitter - Another post about a Twitter topic, when I was fast discovering the in’s and out’s of the platform. So much has changed since then — it feels like this article is very dated even though it’s only 10 month’s old!
7. 10 Step Process for Designing a Landing Page that Delivers Results - This is another post I enjoyed sharing with my readers. Landing page optimization is such a special skill set that very few marketers have mastered, yet it’s a critical component for any online marketing campaign looking to achieve ROI success.
8. Hope Springs Eternal: An Interview with Amy Neumann - In 2009 I had the pleasure of interviewing Amy Neumann, a member of the Capital Campaign Committee for Hope Gardens, a charitable ministry of Union Rescue Mission. It was an uplifting piece, a bit out of the ordinary for my blog, but I was determined to help Union Rescue Mission in some way. I can recall telling Amy about the possible benefits of using Twitter — and recently I saw Amy had amassed a following of over 11,000! Go, Amy, go!
9. Social is the New Search - One of my favorite blog posts of 2009 made it into the illustrious top 10 list. I wrote the post after seeing first hand the impact that social media conversations were having on the SEO efforts of major brands. Unfortunately, most brands still don’t seem to have headed the message. But there is always 2010 for a time of awakening!
10. 30 Ad Agencies Ranked By Heardable Score - I really enjoyed creating this post as well. I had been turned on to a new start-up called Heardable a few weeks prior and I really wanted to put their brand scoring tool to the test. What amazed me was how poorly the top creative firms were doing in the area of online marketing. They were preaching to others but failed to practice what they advocated. The stats in the article were shocking — and I received several alarming emails from concerned agency staff who tried to refute the article. I stick by my every word.

Each morning I start my day reviewing the brands I monitor on a regular basis. I won’t tell you which brands I monitor but I will tell you that I use five tools to monitor them so that I can make the most of my day as a busy online marketer:

1. Google Reader
2. Social Mention Alerts / Google Alerts
3. Google News
4. Twitter
5. Heardable

Were you surprised that my list didn’t contain any of the popular social media monitoring tools such as Radian6, eCairn, Sysomos or Techrigy SM2? There is nothing wrong with utilizing any of these tools as long as you are willing to put the time and effort into learning how to use them. By doing so, you can probably automate 80% of your online brand research effort that is required when trying to monitor a brand.

Frankly, that’s what we have staff for — to be experts at utilizing these types of robust tools. But as a busy executive, I often don’t have the time not patience to learn yet another cool tool to help me do my job. Call me old school, by I am perfectly happy using a handful of simple, smart, user-friendly tools that give me the information that I need, when I need it (without much hassle). My five tools fit the bill quite nicely — and I marry my findings with those on my expert teams to compile a holistic view on brand performance.

Why do I monitor certain brands? It’s my job to measure, monitor and improve brand effectiveness because in the business world I live and breath in– winning is everything. Big companies don’t pay the money they do to come in second place. Management wants to achieve all of its goals. Employees want to advance their careers. Shareholders want to see a fair return on their investment.

Business is a full-contact sport. It’s about beating your competitors before they beat you.

When I am knee-deep in the data, what am I looking for? What jewels am I unearthing? What actionable takeaways to I gain from the work that I do? Glad you asked!

My Tools Help Me

• Understand what communities are buzzing about
• Identify key trends
• Perform competitive analysis
• Optimize brand performance
• Improve the customer experience
• Grow market share / Boost sales

Using The Tools In My E-Toolbox

Let me explain how I utilize each to start by day as a busy online marketer.

Google Reader:  This is what I use to aggregate all my RSS feeds into one comprehensive list that I can scan in less than a minute to see if there are any articles or blog posts from those I trust that I should be aware of. When I find something I want to read, I mark it so I can read the post later in the day over lunch.

By scanning the headlines I collect in Google Reader, I get a feel for what’s being discussed on a deeper level in the blogosphere, and provides the ‘expert’ POV on what communities are buzzing about.

Social Mention Alerts / Google Alerts:  I lump these two together because they essentially do the same thing, but I find neither one is strong enough on it’s own for me to forgo using the other. Basically, I use these tools to seek out and flag certain keywords on a daily basis and serve them up to me in a consolidated list I can quickly scan. Google is fairly comprehensive on its own, but I distrust using a single keyword monitoring service to sift through the entire deep web of data on a daily basis. I like SocialMention.com’s alerts because they tend to provide me with a wider variety of results.

To be honest, there is a lot of dreg one has to comb through to find the gold, but you would be surprised to learn that I find all kinds of quirky, useful and unexpected nuggets of data in these simple, automated data feeds. Set up your keywords one time, then check you email for daily results. Easy as pie.

Google News:  To me, Google News is the one and only daily news aggregator I need to tap into. Sure, I occasionally monitor PRWeb and BusinessWire, or go to Alltop or TMZ (for entertainment), but for news (eg: press releases and breaking stories) Google News has replaced my daily newspaper and my online portals.

I search for certain brand keywords and can sort through countless stories that inform me about strategy, website redesigns, staff changes, and the like.

Twitter:  For real-time breaking information, nothing beats Twitter. It really has become my social search engine of choice. Not because it functions so much as a search engine but as a pulse of what’s happening. I can easily see what’s trending hot right now and I can perform a little bit of competitive analysis by studying how savvy certain brands are by looking to see if they are on Twitter (many still are not, and when they are, you cannot find them because often times their brand name has been hyjacked by someone else). You can also watch how certain brands are participating on Twitter (so many pilot tests, so little authenticity — such as having one’s CEO actively tweeting).

Heardable:  I’ve been a fan of Heardable.com since I was first invited to test their beta site in late 2009. It is quite simply one of the most underrated digital marketing gems out there (although this will be changing fast as their first press release came out today).

So what is the Heardable platform and how do I use it?  Heardable allows anyone to type in a domain name and within seconds, get a comprehensive assessment of that brand’s online effectiveness in six critical areas. I have a free account with Heardable which allows me to scan multiple brands at the same time, store groups of scans that I may need to revisit daily, track how multiple brands perform against each other over time, and determine what specifically one brand is doing to score higher than another.

I love to ‘look under the hood’ at the top brands in the world that are profiled in The Heardable 100 list of companies. At a glance, you can see common threads of what leading brands are doing better than everyone else, such as:

• Who is optimizing their website for mobile browsers — and which browsers?
• What analytic tools are certain brands using?
• Which brands are excelling at SEO and which are not?
• Is brand x sociable and/or sharing data — living up to the spirit of the giving web, the foundation of which all of web 2.0 and now web 3.0 is based on?

Heardable is brilliant. And from what I hear from the company’s founders, their growth strategy is very exciting. Keep an eye on Heardable.

In summary, I perform my daily ritual not because I yearn to to better than I did the day before. It’s my job to help brands win by increasing sales and growing market share. This can only be done of you know what’s happening in your market, you’re being the best steward of your brand as possible, you’re learning though trial and error and testing, you’re listening to crowds and trying your best to please, and you are optimizing everything you do as often as possible — from landing pages to the language you use to talk about your brand to the way you engage your constituents.

Online brand optimization ain’t easy. But with the right (free) tools and a little hard work come great rewards.

1. Apple’s design process revealed!
2. Hilarious video about ‘Death By Committee’ group decision making processes. Love the logo designs!
3. Naming tools to help get your creative juices flowing.
4. The Components of a Writing Business Plan.
5. Website up-time tool.
6. What every web designer needs: A handy Lorem Ipsum generator!
7. An online font tester!
8. 100 things on the Internet that might be of interest to you.
9. Type in a word to find rhymes, synonyms, definitions, and more.
10. Life of Pi - Interactive promo. The mood that this creates is almost like a movie. Awesome.
11. The website is down: Sales guy vs. web dude. Funny!
12. ZeFrank’s song about social networking
13. Good site for hiring freelancers to work on social media gigs or web dev projects.
14. Quantcast - Free, competitive website analytics.
15. See every mouse movement and every click on your website. Record & more.
16. Fun brain teasers and exercises.
17. Need to quickly translate text into another foreign language?
18. Nice gift idea - give a personalized book to your child or relative.
19. SEO tool. How many desired .edu or .gov links does your site have?
20. Over 1,500 stories about coffee’s impact on real lives. Very cleaver marketing.
21. Social search engine. Pretty cool.
22. Where’s WaldObama? 1,474 mega-pixel picture of the Inauguration. Wow.
23. Mint or Rudder - which is best online tool to manage your money?
24. Runners. Track your distance, pace, progress & calories with this cool NIKE tool.
25. Looking for the perfect Web 2.0 domain name? Try Dot-o-mator.
26. Download free Web 2.0 logo designs!
27. UGC traffic to triple by 2012, according to Cisco.
28. UGC / user reviews are critical. See latest Nielsen findings.
29. “The Crying Game” of viral marketing. So well done. Click till you see the surprise ending!
30. U.S. real estate prices from 1980-present plotted to a roller coaster ride!
31. I just love Howcast - learn about almost anything!
32. Creepy girl. Watch as her eyes follow your cursor.
33. Amazing interactive simulation by Motorola.
34. Heatmap simulation for any image you upload. Sweet.
35. Design for Emotion and Flow.
36. Website User Journeys, Needs, and Trust: A Volkswagen Case Study.
37. Very helpful usability blog site by Craig Tomlin.
38. Net Promoter Score: Pro’s? Con’s? Full of bologna?
39. Get Elastic’s landing page optimization webinar recap.
40. Consumer purchase preferences by zip code.
41. Free version of the Word of Mouth Manual Volume II.
42. Social media marketing case study: Will It Blend.
43. Free 34 page ebook - The New Rules of Viral Marketing.
44. Social Web Analytics eBook 2008.
45. Introduction to Good Usability - Free PDF Ebook.
46. How to think virally w/ Jeff Benjamin, the creator of  Subservient Chicken.
47. Customer Feedback Usability Insights.
48. 5 new skills for the future of marketing.
49. Bring Holistic Awareness to Your Design.
50. Long live the Cluetrain Manifesto! 95 theses ahead of their time.

Source: http://twitter.com/jonsamsel

I’d like to answer my own question by first making two cautionary statements: 1) Ghostwriters are hired hands, 2) A brand is a terrible thing to waste.

That said, I think a company runs a huge risk outsourcing their social media activities to an outside microblogging service unless that ‘ghost-brander’ has some skin in the game. As hired hands, a ghostwriter can make a mistake, be fired, and move on to her next gig while the brand must suffer through the blunder, repair the damage inflicted, and then control the negative impact of the snafu’s aftermath.

If you are a marketer at the helm of a large brand, I would urge you to think twice about the quality of the ghostblogger (is this an individual, a social media agency, etc.) and what type of training and recourse you may have in the event an unforeseen error occurs, or word gets out that your brand may not be as ‘authentic’ online as the corporate brand promise pontificates.

In the book, “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding,” the authors state that the most important aspect of a brand is its single-mindedness. They tell how most great brands possess a singularity of focus, a clarity of message. Playskool has done it with safety; Armani with class; Apple with “hipness.” The authors caution that the easiest way to destroy a brand is to put its name on everything. Diversification, they argue, can lead to a weakening of a brand’s quality, a drop in top-of-mind awareness, and more.

The gold rush of brands to quickly embrace social media–either to begin listening, to engage and solve, or to get heard–can lead to some pretty poor decisions that could cost your brand dearly in the long run.

Many firms are experimenting with social media by looking at it as an extension of their internal marketing department’s duties. Some have already found great success by promoting social advocacy as an extension of an employee’s job function–training and empowering certain staff to become the living, breathing, extension of their brand’s value proposition (the face of the brand). Ford’s social media advocate, Scott Monty, comes to mind. Another is Tom Dickson the CEO of Blendtec–who can ignore his “Will It Blend” series on YouTube? Then there is Frank Eliason, the man behind @comcastcares on Twitter. Consumers seem to value the sincerity of the brand voice and in most instances, press accolades confirm what everyone feels–this activity makes sense and is good for both the consumer and the brand.

Alternative social media outreach initiatives that many companies opt for instead resemble classic outsourcing models which utilize external creative agencies, social microblogging, and even ongoing monitoring services to represent brands on sites like Twitter, Posterous, Squidoo, Facebook, YouTube, and the like. With the ‘right’ brand partner, extensive training, a tight service level agreement, and close oversight and direction by internal marketing staff, brands can have success embracing ‘ghostbranding.’

The rub comes when a consumer asks questions such as: “With whom am I speaking to? Are you a company employee or a hired hand?” How this questions is answered is critical. An honest answer clarifying that no, this is not an actual brand employee may turn off a portion of your followers and perhaps generate some bad press. A dishonest answer could cause much greater harm if the truth ever gets out, which will surely have a negative impact on your followers and your brand image–likely resulting in a press feeding frenzy to shame your brand into an apology.

I don’t believe most consumers care whether they are having conversations with a ghostwriter or a company employee as long as the dialog with the brand is honest, timely, helpful, useful, consistent, straightforward, and as transparent as possible.

I don’t advise brands to utilize ghostwriters for social services such as Twitter, especially if you are a popular, well-established brand with the wherewithal to develop an internal social media outreach strategy involving real, authentic employees. If, on the other hand, you have tried to launch an internal social outreach program to no avail, or if you are a small, emerging brand with less to risk, partnering with a capable third-party to properly represent your brand on social networks is entirely feasible.

Suffice it to say that the risk of not participating in the social web at all far outweighs the risk that something may go wrong in your attempts to engage in meaningful social conversations.

Unless you’ve had your head buried in a hole for the past few months you have probably stumbled upon a blog post or two touting Google’s interest in purchasing Twitter as a way to leapfrog forward (and dominate) the real-time search market. Whether or not Google is actually interested in acquiring Twitter is not as important as what is says about the prospect of social search as the next big thing. Move over SEO, SEM and social media. Social search (as its own channel) has arrived!

Social search is an emerging new marketing channel. It’s not paid search, nor organic search, and it’s not social media either. It may be a close cousin to each but it’s a channel in its own right–and it is growing at a fantastic clip.

Trust is the Linchpin

As many of you have already heard in popular search marketing presentations, Google currently functions as every company’s home page. Seventy-two percent of all U.S. searches are done using Google, and people tend to type in branded URL’s even though they could just type it into the address bar to get to the site directly.

Most people trust Google but if you asked these same users if they trust Google’s results, you might elicit a difference response.  For many, trusting Google’s results depends on what they’re searching for compared to what’s presented on the results page.

A recent search for the branded term, Allstate Insurance, for example, yielded 3,210,00 results. Something tells me the majority of these results are bogus, spam, or at least, somewhat insignificant on the relevance scale. So does a Google user trust only the results that appear on page one or should all 3 million+ results be trusted as well?

Compare Google with your own person social network. Most people trust their social network. And this trust seems to be manifesting into actions.

Take a look at these recent statistics that showcase social media’s impact on the retail purchase decision and consumption process:

“60% of consumers are actively involved in generating and sharing buzz.”
- Forrester Research

“80% of consumers say recommendations are the best sources of information.”
- Universal McCann

“Over 90% of consumers say WOM influenced their purchases”
- DoubleClick

Social Search Is Not Paid Search *

• Community is at the heart of the web experience, hence the rise of social media
• Hundreds of these communities are emerging
• And there are thousands of services that help connect these communities and share data amongst these communities
• Brands haven’t been invited into these communities, it’s about individuals
• Brands are trying to figure out how to become part of these communities because they know that effective listening is critical to business success
• Social media advertising is an oxymoron. You can’t buy your way into this club
• Social is not about advertising at all

Social Search Is Not Natural Search

• The big search engines are already playing a role in social search
• Most engines are morphing their algorithms and business models to account social content (Microsoft’s Bing comes to mind)
• Some social networks, like Twitter, have built in search (and user love it)
• New vertical search engines and social listening services are emerging to help people tap into this mountain of real-time, word-of-mouth content that can appear in many formats
• But is social search similar to natural search optimization?
• It’s not about tweaking a web site’s content & code
• It’s not about adding localized content pages to a website
• It’s not link building
• Social is not really about optimization at all

Social Search Is Not Social Media

• Social media is more about testing, influencing and monitoring
• It’s about user-centric conversations
• For companies, activities inlcude actively monitoring brand, reputation, and threats
• It’s also about tracking sentiment and buzz volume over time
• And its also about customer service outreach
• For some companies it’s about sales & promotions too
• But social media is not social search

The Social Web (of Opportunity) Is Huge

From a size & scope standpoint, the social web is already huge (and it’s growing!). It’s made up of content that lives as DATA, which does not necessarily reside on a single, traditional website. Consumers are publishing unprecedented quantities of data across all types of networks, sites, services, and feeds.

And the scary part is that the social web is already impacting opinions, brand perceptions, purchase decisions, along with the public psyche.

Social search can be thought of as the mechanisms used to tap into this emerging mass of trusted knowledge. These mechanisms are a combination of popular search technologies we already know and use today (Google, Bing, etc), new platforms (Hunch, Collecta, Cha Cha, etc.) and intra-search tools that help users navigate the popular social platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc).

New types of search engines are entering the fray, allowing users to:

• Conduct real-time searches
• Review conversations, reviews, comments, ratings & tags
• Helps find multimedia content, RSS feeds, blogs, and other web 2.0 content

The big takeaway around social search is the enormous opportunity–and challenge–it presents to companies around the globe. To be successful in social search, businesses must formulate a proactive strategy that directly influences and impacts who, what, where and why certain results are FOUND whenever, wherever, and however a social search is performed.

That’s no easy task. The good news is that nobody has mastered it yet and it will be years before the rules of engagement and optimization best practices are etched into stone.

* Several of the bullet points in the ‘Social Search Is Not Paid Search’ section of this post can be attributed to Rob Key, a panelist at SES NY, March 2008.

Ken Moss is a very smart guy. He led the search engineering team at Microsoft for five years. So why did he, of all people, launch a Twitter search engine known as CrowdEye? Yes, there is a huge demand for identifying, cataloging, monitoring, and just plain making sense of the deep web of conversations and content accessible today online. But a social search engine? Looks like Ken recognized that the social web has reached a tipping point–it’s huge, it’s still growing, and it’s impacting the way people acquire knowledge and make decisions. Social search needs tools to help people find what others are saying.

So what is Social Search anyway? Social search is all about uncovering nuggets of information from real people (like me and you) in multiple formats such as text, video, blog posts, reviews, comments, tags, tweets, pictures, audio, bookmarks, and events. These word-of-mouth exchanges are the new content that is now dominating the web. Try it yourself. Google a major brand and count how many results are company-generated versus consumer generated. One out of eight results, on average, across engines, can usually be attributed to someone other than the firm who controls the brand. This is simply amazing.

Social content tends to be deemed more authentic than prepackaged corporate propaganda–and, thanks to a plethora of easy-to-use web tools and conversation hubs such as Twitter, social participation is booming. The social web is having a MEASURABLE impact on how search works and how consumer behave.

Social content is having so much impact that it’s spawning the next generation of search tools.

Take WhosTalkin? for example. It’s a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations around topics of interest.

Pipl is a people search engine. AT it’s core, social is about personal conversations–so it makes sense for a social engine to search through public records, social sites, and the web to uncover information about individuals.

Collecta is a real-time search engine. Instead of searching ‘old stuff’ like standard web sites, they monitor the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media, and Flickr, so they can show you results as they happen.

Then there is Socialmention, a site that allows visitors to search terms around specific categories of the social web such as blogs, comments, etc.

Caterina Fake recently launched Hunch, a tool for finding answers to a wide variety of questions. What makes this tool unique is that it makes decisions based on a database of responses provided by real people–and the results get better the more people use it.

OneRiot is a service that uses a person’s own social network and takes into consideration what’s currently popular within someone’s network when providing search results.

ChaCha has answered 150 million text inquiries/conversational Q&A’s over the past 18 months. ChaCha uses expert guides (in-house staff trained to use their proprietary search tools) to provide answers to any question–mostly via cellular phones.

These new social search engines approach ‘finding results’ in a way that standard search engines don’t offer. From a marketing standpoint, these new generation of social search tools are helpful, but ’social’ is not yet a fully baked channel that can be targeted and optimized. Social is evolving. There are some standards and many variations–making indexing results a real challenge.

Social search is an emerging topic. Many of the tools to find, sort and serve up results are primitive–and the various types of social conversations they do find are not easily placed into context. However, social search is hat our doorstep and it’s evolving very quickly.

So why should social search be at the forefront of of every company’s online marketing strategy?

1. Paid search can only grow and be optimized so far. At some point you reach the point of poor returns (long tail search terms are one example) and paid search cannot be expanded in a way that makes profitable business sense.
2. Natural search tends to be inward-focused, concentrating 80% of its effort and output around website optimization. Companies tend to take a web development approach to SEO by identifying a small cluster of valuable keywords and then optimize the content and code around them. This in and of itself is not a bad thing, but SEO can be so much more. Search engine optimization is about producing relevant, engaging content in multiple formats. It’s about empowering employees and customers to participate in content publishing and syndication. SEO is about about link building. It’s about harnessing feedback. But when SEO is controlled and bottlenecked by an overzealous technology department, marketers are often left with few ways to innovate, expand, and improve organic search results.
3. Social search, on the other hand, is about tapping into the deep web of conversational data exchanges to uncover jewels of knowledge in which to monitor, influence, or act upon. This hidden web presents an enormous challenge and opportunity to marketers because it’s an emerging channel, research are scattered and not easily aggregated and accessible, metrics are emerging and evolving (they are different than traditional search), and how best to join in the social dialog is a hot topic for debate within some companies due to the legal and regulatory risks some belief social media poses.

Like it or not…ready or not…social search is already here. Yes, the onus is on smart marketers to monitor and make sense of it all. But analytical search tools are arriving every day to help makes things easier.

Companies have a choice–they can dive in now and start monitoring their brand reputation, conducting competitive research, identifying opportunistic content marketing through social keyword trends, resolving problems, and even selling by providing unique offers and incentives. Or they can choose to bury their head in the sand and wait for social search to ripen as channel…sitting still as their brands are talked about, hijacked, or even transformed by consumers who are hungry for authentic opinions, insights, news or feedback.

The social web is happening with or without listening to the marketer’s side of the story. The business stage is now set. It’s your move.

As many of you already know, Twitter is many things to many people. There seem to be two broad categories of Twitter users: 1) Casual friend & family communicators, 2) Hard core social networkers. Twitter is useful to both groups because it’s real-time, it facilitates connections from unexpected users, it quickly enables the transfer of news & knowledge, it allows people to access a worldwide network for personal expression (the me channel), it’s a mechanism for meeting people (no more excuses for being lonely), and it’s a free exchange for leveraging the wisdom of crowds (research, popular opinion, career advice, etc).

So I was on Twitter a few months ago, just a few weeks after joining, when I noticed some of my followers communicating in a strange two-letter code: RT.

Hmm, I thought to myself. What’s an RT? Run time? Roaming tiger? Right turn?

Retweet Defined
According to several Google search results, RT stands for retweet. Retweeting is simply the act of reposting someone else’s tweet and giving them credit. The person making the retweet is a retweeter. Mystery solved. Or was it? There must be more to this RT thing, I thought. So I set off to RT for myself.

Getting Started
Before you can retweet, there are two things you need to do first: 1) Sign up for your free Twitter account, 2) Identify a tweet you like.

The Twitter sign up process is one of the easiest of all the social networking services. If you are not already on Twitter, take a few minutes to get on board.

Finding a tweet worthy of retweeting is another matter. The organic way to do this is to first start tweeting yourself. After a while, people will start to follow you. You will find their tweets in the main content well on your Twitter home page, post log in. Browse through the conversations. When something sparks your interest, this post is a good candidate for retweeting.

Another method of discovering new tweets is by using the search tool at: http://search.twitter.com/. Type in a topic of interest, such as Academy Awards, and a long list of tweets will suddenly fill your screen.

How to Post a RT
A little more research revealed just what to do next. Apparently, the syntax of your retweet needs to start with the abbreviation, RT. Alternatively, you can spell out the entire word, Retweet, followed by a space, then the user name of the person who first made the tweet, and then finish with the content of the actual tweet (or as much of the content as you can squeeze into the 140 characters allotted).

What Does a Retweet Look Like?
RT @jonsamsel Free PDF book: Writing For Interactive Media. Click the green ‘Read It Now’ button http://www.jonsamsel.com/books

Why Are So Many Retweeting?
I asked three of my Twitter followers about retweeting. Why were they using this odd code in their tweets?

@joerawlinson told me that he started seeing RT in people’s tweets so he Googled to see what it meant. Joe said he retweets when others make a great comment that stands out or when someone shares a link to an interesting article. “My RT usage is really based on what I come across as I see others messages. Maybe once every couple of days. I don’t want my tweets to be all RT’s.”

The one thing Joe dislikes about retweeting is the 140 character limit, which forces him to have to edit other’s messages since their username takes up characters their original tweet didn’t.

@ctomlin said he retweets to: a) Let his network know about something, b) Give credit to the original tweet.

Craig did mention he’d like to see one Twitter one improvement to the RT process: “It would be nice if it could be done via a single click.”

@heatherhuhman explains how and why she retweets. “My first tweet was on November 3, 2008, and my first RT was on November 26, 2008. I RT as often as necessary. It’s not about quantity—it’s about quality. I RT information I truly believe my followers will find interesting and/or beneficial. Most of my followers are internship and entry-level job seekers, many of whom are thinking about careers in public relations, so I RT information relevant to them. I enjoy being able to bring my followers information from sources other than me. I certainly don’t have all the answers, and it’s great to bring other people’s perspectives to the table.

Recently I RTed a blog post by @dmullen about the importance of building relationships with the media in order to place stories. That RT caused a flurry of activity on his blog, as well as prompted people to write about the issue on their own blogs, because it was such a controversial issue. It started an excellent dialog among public relations professionals, and I think we all learned a lot from each other.”

What It Means to Be a Retweeter
The act of retweeting is a lot like adding footnotes to a term paper, or publicly recognizing a helpful co-worker on a large team project. It’s good karma, proper manors, goodwill. Your social capital is enhanced on Twitter every time you retweet because your network sees you as someone who recognizes and acknowledges others—someone who is selfless, willing to take the spotlight off of themselves for the betterment of the community. Retweeting does have many upsides.

The Power of RT’s
In previous blog posts I have written about the Twitter Effect and the huge impact that social networking is having on WOM marketing. Retweets are a fun part of this phenomenon because they’re more powerful than your average tweet. A retweet means someone’s tweet has received a stamp of approval from another person, and that person was willing to share this with their followers. A portion of these followers will, in turn, retweet again to members of their community. And so on, and so on. As you can see, retweets have the potential of spreading fast, far and wide—to the nth degree.

Monitoring Retweets
Wonder how many folks are retweeting your tweets? It’s nice to keep tabs on who’s retweeting you and the topics that are of interest to them. Not only is this a good way to learn more about your followers, but it can help you identify the key influencers in your network.

There are several ways to monitor your retweets. First, try using the Twitter search tool again:

http://search.twitter.com

Only this time, your query should be: RT @yourtwitterusername. You can also try: RT yourtwitterusername. This result may include a wider net of retweeters infamiliar witht he proper way to RT, plus ot will inlude all the retweets you have posted for others.

Emerging RT monitoring tools include retweet radar, which helps users discover trends in the mountains of information ‘retweet’ed on Twitter, Retweetist, a service that ranks the hottest links being retweeted as well as the most retweeted people on Twitter, and re.twitd.com, a service that track the most retweeted tweets.

Baa baa TwitterSheep, have you any wool, er, tag clouds?

Ever wonder what your Twitter network of followers would look like as tag cloud? Well now you can transform your Twitter friends into visual cluster tags in a folksonomy, using the free social indexing tool, TwitterSheep.

Twittersheep takes your Twitter username, pulls your follower list, then analyzes each of your follower’s bios to generate a unique tag cloud displaying commonalities. The most common words/interests are displayed in large type.

What’s the value here? Bragging rights, of course! Compare your TwitterSheep flock to those of your friends and colleagues to see who is more of an authority on any given subject. The clouds are also just fun to look at (social eye candy).

But there could be other uses. Imagine if some upstart dating website integrated TwitterSheeps into their user profile database. Members could search according to tag cloud compatibility, or they could hyperlink to people they were interested in dating based on unforseen commonalities.

Twittersheeps could add a feature to their website that automatically generated a new tag cloud on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, then allow users to compile a time-lapse montage of their evolving social history. Of course, Twittersheep could be expanded to other social platforms so that users could generate a broader and more accurate view of their true social sphere. Start with Facesheep, then expand to LinkedSheep and then launch MySpaceSheep. Or just roll them all up into a single unified service and call it SocialSheep.

The possbilities are endless. Perhaps that’s part of reason why so many of us are entranced by everything social media—there are so many exciting possibilities all around us.

Thanks to @runnrgrl via Twitter who turned me on to this handy Twitter tool.

Here is what my flock of 477 Twitter followers @jonsamsel looks like:

The Company Profiles feature on LinkedIn is a cool research and networking tool (in BETA) that helps users gain some keen insights into what companies are all about, what’s happening within those firms, and who within these companies you should consider connecting to. Since LinkedIn tracks so many types of inter-related pieces of information on their system, they are in a unique position to find trends in the work history of users and identifying connections between companies. According to LinkedIn, “[Company Profiles] information was aggregated from non-personally identifiable data of LinkedIn users who are currently employed by this company. This data only reflects estimates about this company’s employees and is not endorsed or provided by the company.”

Getting to the tool is easy. In the top navigation bar on LinkedIn, click on the ‘Companies’ tab. You can locate companies by keyword, country, zip code, by name or browse by industry. Once you’ve located a company you are interested in (in my case, eBay) you are ready to start spelunking all that Company Profiles has to offer.

So what’s so great about Company Profiles? LinkedIn quickly calls out the social movers and shakers within any given firm, how far away these people are from you—2nd degree, 3rd degree, and who they are likely to be employed by next (aka their extended career path). Company Profiles shows you the names of people who recently joined a company, what type of positions are most common with that company, and the gender mix of employees at that firm. LinkedIn’s Company Profiles feature can be leveraged to locate these data sets, and more.

It is true that some data in Company Profiles is not 100% accurate from a research point of view (the feature relies on members and partners for some of its data). But as a social networking tool, the interconnected data trends that LinkedIn provides are robust in and of themselves. Plus, the information is free for you to leverage as you see fit.

Company Profiles Can Help You Network in Five Easy Ways

Company Profiles helps you better leverage your most valuable LinkedIn asset: your personal connections. Through Company Profiles, your former, current, and potential colleagues and their connections can become valuable access points for you to capitalize on. Company Profiles can help you:

1. Find a new job
2. Secure new clients or assignments
3. Conduct competitive research
4. Identify business partnership opportunities
5. Spot the most socially connected employees at any given firm (the influencers)

Find a New Job

Company Profiles provides a list of all the LinkedIn users in your network (up to 3 degrees away from you) who currently work at a given company. LinkedIn users who have recently joined a given company are also displayed. Recent promotions or changes to positions are listed, along with the most popular positions held across the company. If you are a job hunter, what a great resource this is tap into!

For example, let’s say you are seeking a project manager position at eBay. By using the Company Profiles feature on LinkedIn, today you would discover:

• 2% of eBay’s 10,000+ employees have jobs relating to project management (so this company does need your services)
• Most people at eBay work out of San Francisco (if you live in the Bay Area, this would be a good company to consider working for)
• The number of current eBay employees you know or are connected to (they may know eBay managers who are hiring, and perhaps they can even recommend you for a job)
• There are 7 divisions within eBay that might also be hiring project managers (PayPal, Shopping.com, Half.com, StubHub, mobile.de & eBay Motors GmbH, ProStores and Skype).

Landing a new job is never easy—and it helps if you are searching while still gainfully employed. LinkedIn should be considered as one of your first job hunting resources. It’s not a job search and resume submission site per se, but by utilizing its social networking tools, you can read about new positions being offered and who you might know that can open a door or two for you. The rest is up to you.

Secure New Clients or Assignments

Okay, so you are a graphic designer, freelance writer, salesperson or perhaps you’re a technology consultant trolling LinkedIn looking to drum up new business. Where do you start? How can you harness Company Profiles to secure an assignment or a new client without being perceived as a networking marketing leech?

Two words: Research wisely. The one thing Company Profiles does well is help users sort and search for relevant data, quickly and easily.

Here are a few suggested next steps:

• Use Company Profiles to search the industries you’re most interested in working with
• Locate the employers, experts and customers you most want to talk to
• See who you know at your target companies, or who in your network can introduce you to them
• Ask questions or exchange ideas with like-minded people (join a group and participate in a discussion). By tapping into a broad network on what you can offer and what you are looking for, you may be impressed by the number and quality of replies/referrals

Conduct Competitive Research

The company descriptions within Company Profiles are provided to LinkedIn by Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor’s, a company that provides financial research and analytical solutions to over 2,400 investment banks, fund managers, and corporations. Besides a company overview section, key statistics such as headquarter locations, industry type, type of company, size, revenue, year founded and a link to their website is also included.

The above-mentioned fields of information are valuable in their own right, but combined with some of the related social networking information provided, the context of this research data can be exploited to achieve your desired goals.

Identify Business Partnership Opportunities

LinkedIn is a business person’s best friend. It takes your personal business network online, giving you access to people, jobs and opportunities like never before. It’s your 24/7 electronic rolodex!

LinkedIn’s motto is clear: Connect the world’s professionals to accelerate their success. Built upon trusted connections and relationships, LinkedIn has established the world’s largest and most powerful business network. Currently, over 34 million professionals are on LinkedIn, representing all five hundred of the Fortune 500 companies, as well as a wide range of brands across dozens of industries.

So how does one go about leveraging Company Profiles to partner and do business with other firms? The key is to be proactive, but smart about approaching potential business partners. One of the big misconceptions about LinkedIn is that it takes too much time to master and that it’s ineffective. Wrong! LinkedIn really works. The key is not waiting around for others to come to you—you need to reach out to others in a classy, respectful and compelling way. Don’t be a business wallflower. Introduce yourself to those you don’t already know, or ask people to introduce you to contacts of theirs that can assist you. You’ll be glad you did, as most LinkedIn users are members for the same reason—to accelerate their business careers.

Let’s take my profile for example. As of January 27, 2009, I had 437 connections linking me to 4,577,100+ professionals on LinkedIn. That’s a pretty large pool of potential business partners to reach out to. I might start my prospecting efforts by searching Company Profiles for companies in need of my products and services, then look to see how many current and ex employees are in my connected network. I would start with those I know directly (1st), then move on to those I know indirectly (2nd, 3rd, etc). I would have my hands full with prospective partner contacts in no time. Then it would be up to me own pitch and follow through as a means to secure new business.

Spot the Influencers

Popular profiles can be found in the Company Profiles section of LinkedIn. These are users who are spotlighted because they are actively updating their profile, being referenced in Q&A’s, getting email solicitations, participating in industry groups, using embedded tools, and/or frequently the result of searches and other activities within the LinkedIn network. According to LinkedIn, “users who appear on this list have the most profile views at their company.”

Why is important to identify and communicate with the key influencers related to your line of work or interest? Influencers can create buzz around your product or service, and they can open up unforeseen opportunities for you. By tapping into their social equity and by engaging in word of mouth marketing on your behalf, social influencers can boost awareness and transfer some of their social capital to you.

Brand advocacy fuels business growth—and it can be more important and effective than brand awareness or satisfaction. Influencers can help influence the business decisions, and the purchase decisions of others because what influencers have to say is generally trusted more than other sources.

Some assertive social influencers such as TopLinked LIONs (LinkedIn Open Networkers) have figured out how to harness The Hawthorne Effect, which involves getting others to participate in trialing, testing, reviewing and suggesting improvements to whatever they are working on—a product, business concept, website design, media plan, start-up venture, and the like. The theory goes that collaborative participation inevitably makes everyone positively disposed to the subject at hand, and those with whom you engage end up among its biggest champions. LIONs and other social media influencers have figured out how to tap into, exploit and share this new form of network marketing—hypertext magnetism so to speak.

Now that you can start to see the benefit of following, communicating and befriending the most socially connected employees at any given firm—it’s time to network with them. Keep in mind that first impressions are everything. Don’t contact an influencer until you are sure you have something worthy to talk about—and to offer. Poor first impressions could have a lasting negative impact…so be careful.

Twitter is often described as a free micro-blogging and social networking service that you can use to send quick text messages or ‘tweets’ to friends and followers, no more than 140 characters long. While this may be a factually correct description, it only scratches the surface of how Twitter is being utilized as a revolutionary communications platform.

Since Twitter is hardware agnostic, you can access Twitter using hundreds of different devices. This flexibility is just one of the reasons the use of Twitter is spreading so fast. Anytime, anywhere accessibility means that users can tweet from anywhere–and they are! From the front lines of war zones, to sporting events, family vacations, the local conference event–anywhere you can see or do you can tweet about.

Recently a colleague of mine asked me about Twitter. He heard I was using it to conduct research, promote my blog, and provide assistance to others. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why would anyone use Twitter? Especially a Fortune 100 company? I just don’t see how it’s useful or effective.”

I could relate to her. You see, I felt the same way only a month or so ago when I first joined Twitter. I posted a few comments, followed a few people, conducted a couple of advanced searches on topics of interest. Yawn. You mean to tell me people are tweeting about taking their children to soccer practice? Tweeting about what they are eating? Posting on topics such as gastronomical pains? Here are three sample tweets (actual Twitter posts):

• I ate donuts all weekend
• last day of skiing. I went crazy and shredded some mogul
• Lunch with the new employee. I’m officially The Man now

Why on earth would I spend my valuable time sorting through thousands of comments like these concerning the mundane happenings of so many ordinary lives?

Then I started noticing other tweets like these:

• FREE widget creation tool. http://tinyurl.com/8jplw4
• New report shows Flash is poor choice for navigation design: http://tinyurl.com/7bp2je PS: Real world testing shows search engines can’t see the keyword buckets
• Nice viral marketing campaign. Click through the site till you see the surprise ending! http://tinyurl.com/3bp1ju

Hmmm. Links to resources, collaborative research findings, online marketing case studies. I searched deeper and found tweets like these:

• Wholefoods So far, we have not identified any products that contain the implicated peanut butter. We will post more details in The Whole Story shortly
• LanceArmstrong Kicked off the LS Global Campaign today at Royal Adelaide Hospital with Premier Rann, Federal Treasurer Swann and many others. Here we go
• DellOutlet Coupons coming for select Dell Outlet laptops & desktops! Not combinable w/ other coupons. Online only. Limit 2 PCs/customer. Expire 1/19/ 09
• Zappos CES attendees: Intel party. For non-VIP entry say passwd “goat” at door
• JetBlue Winter weather in the Northeast may cause delays or cancellations. Check your flight’s status at http://www.jetblue.com/flig…

Wow! Official tweets from companies, celebrities, CEO’s and even politicians. Tweets on a wide range of topics such as crisis management, news & event coverage, product discounts, networking opportunities, and even proactive customer service! With my online marketing noggin now fully engaged, I started thinking about Twitter as a strategy for a businesses or individuals looking to build their brand, increase sales, and/or create awareness. The possibilities are endless (and exciting).

As an outreach strategy, I identified eight obvious areas of focus that any person or organization could capitalize on by using Twitter:

1. Sales & marketing
2. Reputation management
3. Social advocacy
4. Crisis management
5. Customer care / help
6. News & event coverage
7. Networking / employment
8. Research & development

And how to utilize Twitter in each of the above eight areas? Here are four simple ways to engage with the Twitter.com site:

1. Search - Use Twitter to find people, topics of interest, companies to follow, etc.
2. Follow - Use Twitter to track all those you deem worthy of following (anytime they post, it’s added to your Twitter home page
3. Post - Try contributing content (give advice, insights, tips, special offers, research links, event coverage, rebuttal to negative news, etc.) by either posting one tweet at a time, or better yet, tie in your blog posts and your other online contributions to Twitter automatically using FriendFeed or any number of feed services available online
4. Interact - Customize the design of your Twitter profile, send direct messages to people and form new relationships, interact with the official Twitter blog, connect all your devices (like your Blackberry, iPhone, etc), and more!

So what are you waiting for? The best way to see for yourself how Twitter can ‘benetweet’ your company, website, blog, product or service is to dive right in and start tweeting today.