For years now, it has been a commonality for social media sites to rate content and commentary on a sliding scale. Sites like YouTube and Yelp allow users to rate and review content on a five-point scale, while sites like StumbleUpon and BuzzFeed want to just know if you like it or not.

Scaled ratings

Historically, stars have represented a scale of ratings on popular sites such as YouTube. People give five stars to videos they love and a single star to videos they dislike. YouTube has now revealed how rare it is to receive feedback from anything in the middle. In a recent blog post, they shared recent studies that display the skewed findings. Below is a graph of which star ratings are the most popular:

As you can see, it is very rare for anyone to provide feedback in the middle. Apple’s App Store also faces a similar conundrum.

The five-point scale seems to be too restrictive and allows for little nuance while a percentage scaled, based out of 100, seems to be too large. Usually, scores almost never fall below 50%, because most people innately think of education scoring and its 90 = A, 80 = B scheme when using 100 percentage scales.

The the 10 point scale seems most ideal. It provides enough room to make important distinctions, but not so much room it throws off the accuracy of the scale. However, let’s explore boolean ratings a bit.

Boolean Ratings

A boolean rating is defined by a simple “yes/no” standard. Most social voting sites follow this standard. If you don’t like the content, you vote it down or bury it while thumbing up or voting content you do like. StumbleUpon and Digg.com have taken this a step further by trying to understand why you are voting down the content. They allow you to select if you are burying or thumbing down the content because it is spam, content you dislike, duplicate content, etc. This additional information gives their algorithms a better feel for why it wasn’t well received.

Judging by the behavior of most users on the five-point rating system, the natural conclusion would be to rid any scaled rating systems with boolean voting. This creates a problem for people not wanting to give a full thumbs up or vote for some minuscule reason. So maybe adding a way to vote in the middle, with a sideways thumb, half-vote, or something similar should solve all the world’s problems at that point, right?

Feedback What do you, as social media users, feel is a good metric for rating content?

To successfully promote a business through social media means walking the finest of fine lines. To market without intruding, to advertise without offending; these things are not easily done. This week, I was thinking about online marketing opportunities using Facebook. And nowhere is the line finer than on Facebook. On that platform, you need to entice your audience to become fans, use your apps and share your content.

You need to achieve this on a platform that is all about friends and family—people are not on Facebook to blog, to chat to strangers or to publicize themselves—they’re there to keep in touch. Tricky.

So, I thought I’d list five Facebook campaigns that have really interested me, by the different ways they have achieved support—or not, in the case of one of my examples.

Aleksandr Orlov – 605,602 fans

Even if that damn meerkat is starting to grate on you (and now he’s launched a soft toy and there are rumors of a Christmas single, get ready for him to begin grating!), his Facebook presence is genius.

His updates are written in exactly the way he talks: they’re sporadic and they’re really very funny. For example: “Today Jacuzzi have finally been fix by Sergei and plunger. Next time he enjoy bubbles I make him wear fur net.”

So why is he so successful on Facebook? Well, it’s partly down to the genius of the initial campaign—it’s really captured the public’s imagination.

However, since then, his success is down to a well-written online persona and Aleksandr’s distance from the brand he’s marketing. Because he isn’t closely associated with the official compare the Meerkat website, it’s okay to become a fan on Facebook—you don’t feel you’re aligning yourself with a commercial brand.

Armed Forces Day – 183,754 fans

Some types of organization can garner hundreds of thousands of fans without marketing brilliance simply by the value of what they stand for—and in the UK, Armed Forces Day is one of those.

With the nation desperate to find ways to support our troops while they fight overseas, there are thousands of online groups dedicated to showing our soldiers some support. The MoD simply relies on this outpouring of public enthusiasm.

So, if you’re a charity or worthwhile cause, your Facebook marketing will be easy as people willingly strive to associate with you. Social media will do you a lot of good for very little investment.

Dunkin’ Donuts—947,414 fans

Okay, hop over the pond to the US (at least for me anyway) and Dunkin’ Donuts is doin’ well on Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of fans are happy to associate themselves with a brand of cake.

How? How come DD has managed to entice so many people to tell their friends and family that they like to eat doughnuts?

Well, as far as I can see, the success of this brand on Facebook is all down to how it involves its fans. During the summer, it ran a campaign where Facebook users could post pictures of themselves on the fan wall with any Coolatta drink. Each day, one of these people would be randomly picked and win prizes.

Now, it invites fans to upload their pictures to its wall and once a week it picks a picture and uses it as the profile image. People like to be involved.

Directgov—11 fans

Now, I’m making an assumption that the Directgov fan page is the actual, official, UK government-endorsed Facebook presence of the public sector website.

So why is it not working? Why only eleven fans when Directgov is such an important, relevant and enormous brand. You’d think there’d be at least some Directgov employees willing to associate themselves.

What’s the reason for its failure then? Well, mainly the page has only been updated once (and that was with the campaign against drug driving where the teenagers all have Dobby the House Elf’s eyes). There has been no initial investment, which is a shame when Directgov normally does such a good job of marketing itself.

Wispa—800,138 fans

People really love Wispas and Cadbury knows how to make this work. Facebook has been an incredible marketing tool for the chocolate bar.

It was relaunced following a Facebook petition that was, apparently, genuinely a public response to the lack of Wispa in their lives. The press coverage alone was immense and Cadbury’s declared this was the first time “the power of the internet played such an intrinsic role in the return of a Cadbury brand.”

Now the brand is giving back—and helping itself to hundreds of thousands more fans. It has promised to give its advertising space to Facebook fans “as a thank you for all the love you’ve shown us.” It’s bought space on more than 1,000 billboards in the UK and Ireland and invited brand fans to submit messages to be put on them—you can read more at the dedicated Wispa Gold website.

That is very clever marketing.

How have you successfully marketed on Facebook? Do you have examples of what doesn’t work? Please share your ideas in the comments below.

A Citibank/GFK Roper survey of 500 U.S. businesses with fewer than 100 employees has found very few small businesses in the U.S. have adopted social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter for business uses. The findings include:

• Three-quarters of the small business owners surveyed say they have not found sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn helpful for generating business leads or expanding business in the past year
• 86% said they have not used social networking sites for information or business advice
• 25% said they’re using more online advertising to generate business leads and sales
• 10% said they have sought business advice and information on expert blogs

Here’s a link to the full press release for more info.

It’s hard to justify the time spent on social media account management. But there are ways to measure the real value (monetary or otherwise) of fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter. These top two social media websites offer free advertising, an open customer service and communication platform and a demographics database all wrapped up in one, so knowing the value of fans and followers can be a big help when deciding how much time should be allotted to social media efforts. Here are some of the ways to measure how much Facebook and Twitter users are really worth.

Number of quality fans

Many beginning social media marketers believe that the total number of followers or fans is what matters when it comes to having a great presence online, but that simply isn’t the case. Websites that offer programs to garner “1000 followers in 24 hours” or the like absolutely cannot guarantee that these followers are actual real people who are interested in your product and what you have to say. Buying followers is like running a search engine campaign with few or irrelevant keywords—your message is not targeted to the correct demographic. Think of gaining quality followers and fans as building up organic search engine rankings.

Remember, getting a high-quality audience goes both ways. Do not follow someone on Twitter solely because they have followed you. This is how many spammers gain followers so they can litter twitter feeds with their own links. When a person becomes a follower, visit his or her account to see if they are in the same industry or would be interested in your products or services. If either of these is true, follow them back. This is the same for a person that becomes a fan of your page on Facebook—add them as a friend if they are an industry colleague or potential customer (if you have a company profile). Periodically updating and evaluating fans and followers is a great way to measure the value of Twitter and Facebook accounts. High quality accounts will have followers that are specifically targeted to their product or service—this makes the social media relationship mutually beneficial.

Advertising & promotion value

In terms of actual monetary value, fans and followers can be measured and analyzed from two different angles: from a CPM standpoint and from a website analytics point of view.

CPM value. When users become a fan of someone/something on Facebook and Twitter, that action is front page news on their friends’ front pages, as well as appearing on the right side column under “Suggestions” while they are surfing around Facebook. Because most people are friends with others who are in their demographic or share similar interests, they are much more likely to also become a fan (or visit the page). Therefore, it’s easy to think of Facebook fans as “free” CPM campaigns. Adam Goldberg does a great job of explaining this in his article entitled What Is The Value Of A Facebook Fan? by comparing Lamborghini’s fan base against Toyota’s. By estimating CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) and average number of friends a fan may have, you can get a reasonable estimate of what it would have cost to run an actual online ad campaign of the same reach.

As for Twitter, it’s a little more difficult to have the same level of natural impressions that occur on Facebook. Including hashtags (#keyword) makes it easy for those searching for that keyword to find your tweet. Additionally, the phrase “please retweet” is a call-to-action that can help spread your tweet quickly.

To track how many visitors viewed a website from Twitter or Facebook, use Google Analytics or free URL shortening services like bit.ly and cli.gs that include analytics within user accounts. High levels of spam or inactive accounts make Twitter impression value harder to calculate. Mashable’s Pete Cashmore reported that 24% of all tweets are from automated bots, whereas 5% of all Twitter accounts create 75% of all tweets, meaning most Twitter accounts are inactive or have little significance.

Measuring conversions with goals and funnels. Besides tracking traffic and visitor sources with Google Analytics, its goals and funnels feature can also be used to track the actual monetary value that social media sites have brought to an e-commerce website or as a generated lead. Google’s definitions of goals and funnels:

Goals. A goal is a website page that serve as conversions for your site (with some extra code, they can even be file downloads or on-page actions). Some examples of good conversion goals are:

• A “thank you” page after a user has submitted information through a form. This can track newsletter signups, email list subscriptions, job application forms, or contact forms.
• A purchase confirmation page or receipt page
• An “About us” page
• A particular news article

Funnels. A funnel represents the path that you expect visitors to take on their way to converting to the goal. Defining these pages allows you to see how frequently visitors abandon goals, and where they go. For example, funnels in an e-commerce goal may include the first page of your checkout process, then the shipping address info page, and finally the credit card information page. The only report that shows the funnel path is the Funnel Visualization report.

Google Analytics Help offers a short tutorial on setting up goals and funnels, including a case study of how the Chicago music festival Lollapalooza Tracked Social Media Campaigns with Google Analytics.

Finally, for measuring offline reach (e.g. if a customer comes into a company’s bricks and mortar store), asking customers how they were referred is a good way to see if Facebook or Twitter influenced their decision.

Direct communication. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter allow organizations and websites to have a direct line of open communication between themselves and their customers or users. This is also a great way to build up a free, but closely-targeted, demographic database or sample group. Asking for feedback on new policies, products or website layouts via Twitter and Facebook is a great way to get free feedback from people invested in what you have to say and offer. Additionally, answering customer questions and comments through Twitter or Facebook is a great way to both communicate individually with customers while also sharing those answers in a public forum for others who may have had the same question or comment, especially if it is negative or causing dissatisfaction.

While social media sites will (almost) surely never replace customer service phone lines, they are an affordable companion and occasional alternative. What’s most important in social media is ensuring that a company continues to show appreciation and respect for their fans and followers—whether they are customers, industry colleagues or potential leads by supplying high-quality information and service.

One of the most interesting aspects of social media is the fact that there really aren’t any rules, anyone can use the platform however they want. When it comes to Twitter, a lot of organizations that aren’t associated with cutting edge marketing tactics are using some creative, outside of the box thinking. In fact, some of them are acting like animals … literally.

First up is the Whale in the Natural History Museum of New York. If you’ve never been to the Natural History Museum, there actually is a large whale hanging from the ceiling there.

The whale tweets about a lot of things from children underneath, things going on at the museum, whale facts, even having a little fun with the night watchman. The Natural History Museum isn’t the only famous whale on twitter, you can also find Shamu the mascot of Seaworld. Killer whales aren’t as docile, and looking at this account, you can see it’s quite a bit more snarky in tone.

This account tweets lots of pictures, such as rescue efforts, funny animal pictures, contests, and a bit of killer whale humor. Museums, aquariums and zoos aren’t traditionally organizations that embrace this type of bleeding edge marketing efforts, but there are lots of other zoos and aquariums who using Twitter effectively:

Fictional characters on Twitter aren’t limited just to animals, the Mars Rover and Mars Phoenix landers gave personalities to robots in 2008. You can also find Darth Vader and The Joker on Twitter as well.

While smaller and mid-sized business may not have the luxury of well known characters or mascots, they can replicate and adapt some of the tactics and strategies used by these accounts. Here are a few suggestions to help you put your plan into action:

1. Be transparent. If you are going to pretend to be an animal, people can figure out there is a human behind the keyboard without you telling them. The closer you come to pretending to be an actual person, the clearer you need to be about who you really are.
2. Role Accounts. Use role accounts like “HardwareHelper” or “MrAccounting” instead of accounts with actual names in them.
3. Be an Actor. Portraying a fictional character like “TechLepruchaun” you’ll be able to get away with a little bit more than “BobFromTech”.
4. Multiple Authors. Using multiple authors is a smart strategy for many companies, it keeps any single employee or subcontractor from feeling they own the account.
5. Keep a Consistent Voice. If you do use multiple people, try to use the same voice or tone as much as possible.
6. Engage Your Audience. Don’t use Twitter strictly as a broadcast medium, find ways to interact with the people who follow you.
7. Use Humor and Current Events. Look for opportunities to inject a bit of humor into the account whenever possible. Current events are another opportunity, for example: the Natural History Whale used Sarah Palin’s stance on whale hunting to promote whale conservation links.

As the web evolves, marketers must find creative solutions to engage customers with their websites and brands. Today, customers are no longer satisfied with consumption; they increasingly expect to be involved in the production of what they buy (or watch), turning them into “prosumers.” As Tapscott and Williams described in their enlightening book, Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything, we have entered the era of prosumption. So how can marketers best take advantage of the voice of the customers, often referred to as user-generated content (UGC)?

UGC is not a passing fad, nor is it only for kids. Take a look at these stats from eMarketer:

What follows are some examples on how UGC can be used to improve both organic search results and conversion rates of a website (see other examples in this previous conversion-driven SEO post).

The benefits of user generated content

UGC can benefit a company in several ways. It enriches websites with precious (and free) content that feeds search crawlers. It is a source of information for newcomers, a place where they can understand products and read about how real people (not marketers!) are taking advantage of them. UGC is a forum for marketers to get feedback and ideas from customers and answer their questions. And finally, UGC is a mechanism that helps create a sense of community, a place where customers feel like stakeholders, a piece of website where they rule.

Amazon pioneered UGC, one of the earliest sites to introduce ratings, reviews, lists, customer images, tags, discussion forums, author blogs, and the list goes on and on. A very interesting UGC effort that Amazon recently launched lately is the Vine program. Since reviewers have been “donating” their time for years (and it looks like it helps selling products), which offers an additional incentive to write reviews for “trusted” users. Vine reviewers receive a monthly newsletter with merchandise to be launched in the next few weeks. Participants can choose a few items and get them for free! The Vine project shows how much Amazon values UGC.

UGC Challenges

Whenever a website launches with UGC areas, it runs the risk of being attacked by competitors or unscrupulous people. It also loses the power to control every single word published on the site. The best approach to handling this challenge is to provide robust usage guidelines to contributors, and to actively moderate UGC. An excellent example of UGC guidelines is offered by the BBC, which provides very comprehensive UGC guidelines for all their web properties.

Measuring the impact of UGC

You can apply similar metrics to UGC that you might use when evaluating your SEO efforts. There are four main areas in which to focus.

• Content quantity. How many pieces of content have users contributed? Are there many people contributing to the website? Or does the UGC area of your site look like an abandoned castle?
• Content linkability. Is UGC helping me to interlink my content? Good examples are tags, which help linking similar content and provide an excellent way for customers and crawlers to navigate the website.
• Content strength. Are visitors using the keywords I am targeting? If so, where? How can I promote these areas?
• Brand awareness or conversation with marketplace. What are visitors saying about your products or site? Are they happy? If not, why? This can become very clear when analyzing product ratings and reviews or website feedback.

You can analyze all the metrics proposed above by using a very interesting and powerful text analysis tool: Leximancer. It also provides some very neat graphs!

Leximancer makes it possible to analyze how often specific keywords are mentioned in any text. In addition, it is possible to find the linkability between keywords used in the text. Using this type of information it is possible to analyze, for example, if specific brands/products are linked to positive or negative terms. It is also possible to analyze the relationship between content and how visitors think.

In the screenshot below (see interactive version here) we can see the interface and the kind of info Leximancer provides. The example analyzes all US presidents’ inauguration speeches into meaningful “themes” (circles), “concepts” (colors) and their associated relationships.

As an example of how Leximancer can provide meaningful metrics on UGC, I analyzed analytics guru Avinash Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor. We looked at all the comments on his blog (without scanning personally identifiable data apart from Avinash’s own posts). The first number I saw was astonishing: Avinash had written 187K out 398K words on the blog, less than 50%!

We analyzed the blog comments using Leximancer’s conceptual map and drew several interesting conclusions. In comments, visitors are using very positive terms like “great post” or “interesting read.” Meaning that Avinash is doing a good job engaging his community. We can also see industry terms such as “conversion rate,” “vendor experience” and “understand site.” This means that users are enriching the pages with targeted content.

In the short analysis above we saw how to measure all four metrics for UGC effectiveness proposed here: Content quantity, content linkability, content strength, and brand awareness.

However, one aspect not discussed above is how to use text mining to moderate your UGC. In conceptual maps, I have seen more than once (though not on Avinash’s blog), themes that relate to adult content. The tool helped me find, in a site with several million pages, where I was being attacked by abusers. This method is very helpful to keep an overall and drill-down view of the UGC being published on a website when you have minimal resources for moderation.

Concluding, leveraging user generated content is an advanced technique to improve a website conversion rate and, in parallel, its SEO efforts. And as we can see below, the UGC market is rapidly increasing both in number of users and in revenue to websites making use of it.

Full slides for this presentation below:

Note: This article was based on a presentation given recently at the Emetrics Summit. Full slides for this presentation are available here: UGC – Measuring The Voice Of The Customer

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Most firms now recognize the importance of developing a powerful online brand. Now, an increasing number of professionals have started to recognize the benefits of developing a personal brand.

Many people recognize that a personal online brand could be as important (possibly more so) than a company brand when looking to win a new client, get a conference speaking pitch approved or be asked for expert opinions from the media. Online reputation management has also become a very important aspect of recruiting.

When investigating a person, the first place most people will go is Google. Rather than having a results page full of information about your unrelated namesakes, or neutral—or even worse, negative—listings about yourself, why not try to portray yourself in a positive light?

It’s not as difficult as you might think to influence Google search results for your own name, although the task will be far more difficult for some than others. If you are an SEO named Barack Obama then I’d recommend changing your name!

There are clearly certain types of results that professionals want to appear for a vanity search. It’s obviously great if you can control as many of the top ten listings as possible, and ideally you want this to consist of company profile pages, media mentions and so on.

Below, some examples of how you can use social media to help ensure ranking as highly as possible in Google for your “personal brand.”

Image credit: Gary Hayes and Laurel Papworth

Blogging. Blogging is an excellent method of building a strong reputation within an industry. If hundreds or even thousands of people are subscribing to read your content and expert opinions, then this is clearly something you want searchers to find when they come looking for you online.

Most blogs are likely to be hosted on either a company or personal domain and the natural links generated should help to ensure this has a strong reputation in the search engines.

Quick tip: Make sure you have an author profile page which is linked to from each of your posts as this helps to build the strength and relevancy of your profile page to increase search rankings for queries on your name. It also means that users will find a useful landing page, displaying an overview of latest posts and articles.

Guest blogging. If you work hard on your own blog and keep it fresh with useful content, you can normally expect to rank for two of the top ten listings in Google at best. However, in addition to this you may have opportunities to guest blog at similar related websites.

There are many advantages (and disadvantages) to consider when guest blogging, but in many cases you can reach a wider audience of readers and enhancing your online reputation by adding another valuable source of content into your listings for a Google vanity search.

Quick tip: Offer to write guest posts for some of the top blogs which you admire within your industry but also make yourself available for interviews or blogger profiles.

Twitter. Similar to blogging, Twitter is an excellent method of building a strong online reputation within an industry. If you can build a following of relevant users by providing valuable tweets, you’ll probably find that your profile page will be highly regarded in the search engines too.

If potential clients are looking for more information about you, then a Twitter profile containing expert advice and related conversations is going to help strengthen your reputation in the eyes of the searcher.

Quick tip: Interact within the community by adding value to online conversations and building a trusted profile. This may require a large amount of effort but it’s very easy to spot a disinterested user and building a well-connected profile can prove to be a very powerful networking tool, plus it acts as a great landing page for users visiting via the search engines.

Business social media networking. Many people have profiles on business networking sites such as LinkedIn and Plaxo. These are great sites to show a professional profile containing your career history to browsing users, letting them know straight away the company you are currently working for, if people are looking to contact or reconnect with you.

Quick tip: LinkedIn profiles are reasonably easy to optimize, make full use of the editable URL’s, make a large amount of your profile public visible (so that this is cached by search engines.) Whenever possible, try to promote your business profiles by linking to them directly from sites where this is relevant.

Online presentations. If you’ve spoken at a conference, seminar or workshop, upload your presentation to SlideShare and Scribd. This will allow people to view and download your presentations, plus it’s another chance to optimize for your name (or company name) and show that you are a highly respected speaker.

Quick tip: Optimize your profile by editing your details and strengthen the number of internal links to your profile page by connecting with relevant users.

Online video. Similar to online presentations, if you have any video recordings of conference or seminar speaking events then upload the ones you find appropriate to online video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo.

If someone is searching for more information about you and can find an online video presentation, this could go a long way towards enhancing your reputation to the searcher.

Quick tip: Try using a headline in the style of [Presentation Name by "Author Name"]. this will be used as the title tag and on-page heading and will help to optimize for your name as important keywords.

Social media networking. Once you have targeted the main positive listings you want to appear in the search engines, why not try controlling even more real estate with some more neutral listings? The obvious ones are profile pages on sites such as Facebook (grab that vanity URL!), Flickr, Digg and StumbleUpon.

Quick tip: Try to actively contribute in niche social media communities (such as Sphinn for the search industry), showing that you are keeping up-to-date with latest news and trends.

So there you have it: follow these tips and you should be dominating a Google query for your personal in next to no time!

Recently, Greg Finn at 10e20.com covered Will Digg Be a Better Place Without Shouts? In the post, Greg announces the news of Digg dropping their shout system, which allowed Digg users to share content with each other, in lieu of a feature that allows users to share content via email, Facebook, and Twitter. So, the main concern now is how Digg content will infiltrate (and pollute) Twitter from this point forward.

Image courtesy of ReadWriteWeb.com

There is already so much noise on Twitter that it becomes difficult to monitor the majority of the conversation without integrated segmentation tools. Twitter can be a great place to find resourceful content and to share links with friends but when does it become too much? The previous shout feature on Digg was already very noisy for users which irritated many Diggers. Many predict those complaints will now become those of Twitter users.

“I’m not big on how they’re [Digg] bringing all the noise to Twitter. I think that’s gonna backfire on Digg and people are going to get so tired of all the people shouting stuff around on Twitter. Many users will unfollow everybody doing it similar to how people reacted negatively to the shouts when those first started.” – Jeff Flowers a.k.a. Bukowsky

Of course there’s always the option of not refusing to pollute Twitter and Facebook with links, or doing so only in moderation. And there’s always the option of unfollowing frequent Digg shouters on Twitter.

“I don’t plan on using Twitter to promote my Digg stories anytime soon. It was easier to monitor shouts because they were coming from mutual friends who I knew submitted good content. On Twitter, I could easily see it just becoming a tidal wave of incoming Digg links that I’d have no way of sifting through.” – Henry Hill a.k.a. BadwithComputer

Digg claims that they removed the shout system because the Digg team “listened to your feedback, crunched some user data, and decided to remove shouts. As some of you know, shouts have been a controversial feature since their inception and considering the ever-changing landscape of the social web, we’ve elected to remove them in favor of more popular options.” Now the question is: will they listen to the community again? This time the community is much larger because it includes Twitter and Facebook users.

“I think what Digg is doing is not only unfair to the community but also unfair to the Twitter community. Not only is there no way for Digg users to communicate with each other on the site (i.e. sitemail) but now all the spam and junk people were pushing on Digg is going to be pushed via Twitter. You can already see dozens and dozens of stories being “shouted” on Twitter. Similarly now I’m getting dozens of requests a day from people asking to retweet their stories (rather than shout). Same problem, different platform.”  – Muhammad Saleem

However, there are others who had different feelings on the situation.

“I think people were already Twittering Digg links well before the removal of shouts. The good thing about Twitter is that it is a choice who you follow and who you ignore, so each person will learn how much they can flood their stream with crap before they lose followers.

I was actually present when they introduced shouts in testing and told them I thought it was a bad idea as most users would use it to spam their submits. I am happy they removed it as Twitter and Facebook shares do not effect the actual volume of voting on Digg as much as shouts did.” – Brent Csutoras

“For me personally – I don’t really use the shouts that much. It is on a rare occasion and I find that they actually make it harder to get something on the front page. So in that respects – I don’t care too much. I tend to share stuff on Twitter anyways – so that is cool. In the end, I think the shift won’t change much. There will still be diggers who make up the majority of the content and there will still be other folks who are angry about it.”  – David Cohn

With any new change to a social media platform comes complaints. Some social media users will revolt, others will remain indifferent, and the complainers will eventually learn to adapt to the change. But if the majority of people are upset, change can and will modify the current situation.

Power to the people!  Sites like Digg, Reddit, Propeller and Mixx have become popular social news sites due to the community driven aspect that fuels them.  Traditionally these news sites offer “digital democracy” that entices users because they themselves are able to determine what is (and isn’t) news.  However, a different form of social news not only exists, but flourishes: “editorial social news.”

Editorially driven social news allows users to submit articles for consideration, but content is chosen by editors who handpick it from a wide selection of submissions.  While this may not sound “social,” users generally can comment and rate the content, as well as submit links.  These sites are continually popular and can send large amounts of traffic and massive amounts of visibility to a story.  Some of the most prominent editorial social news sites are Fark, Slashdot, I-Am-Bored and Ebaumsworld.  Many users prefer these sites because they contain less spam and the content found on the homepage is fairly stable and doesn’t vary a great deal.

The largest site in particular, Fark, actually bucks the trend of making it more challenging for power users and is actually grateful for them.  In a recent interview, founder Drew Curtis stated:

“Almost all of the stuff that makes the main page is from those 20 guys—not exclusively, and it’s not like we’ve got a quota or anything like that, but that’s how it works out. Because those guys are writing it properly.”

These sites should not be overlooked due to the ease of submission and the traffic that can be obtained.  One title and description can be used across all sites, and no time-consuming promotion or vote getting is needed, as administrators eventually select what is popular.

Best practices for submitting to editorial social news sites

Create compelling titles. An enticing and creative title is the most important factor when submitting your links to these sites.  Administrators are looking for a submission that just needs approval, with little or no editing or tweaking needed.  Getting noticed is half the battle on these sites and a great title can help you stand out above the rest of the crowd.  There are some great resources out there for constructing superb titles to get you noticed.

Don’t look spammy. When submitting to a social editorial news site, standard Internet courtesies apply.  It’s a good idea to submit suggestions from a variety of sites and only submit on-target content.  Having an account that is fully self-promotional won’t help editors and will more likely annoy them and they will avoid your content down the road.  Also, if your content doesn’t match the genre of the site, avoid submitting it altogether and look for a more niche social news site.

Submit attractive, quality content. Not only should your content be relevant, it should be quality content and, more importantly, it should give a good first impression.  Sites that are plastered in ads or have content broken up across 10 pages don’t leave a good taste in a reader’s mouth.  If you work hard to make a killer title and the editor can’t stomach the appearance of your site, all will be for naught.

Successfully submitting to these these editorially driven social sites may send you massive traffic, loads of links, and a good deal of visibility.  Take the extra time to construct a creative title and cross your fingers and hope that your link is promoted!

Twitter has reached critical mass.  Oprah’s recent announcement that she’d joined Twitter, and her near-instantaneous recruitment of over 1,000,000 followers, has signaled a tipping point—tweeting is no longer a pastime exclusively for the technorati and uber-geeks.  In fact, it seems like elitist spinsters are the only demographic not to embrace it yet at some level (anticipating protests from Maureen Dowd devotees—no, this is not her actual Twitter account).

Unsurprisingly, the Brits are way ahead of us in terms of Twitter adoption, having been much faster to incorporate mobile phones and SMS into everyday life in the 90’s and early 00’s as well.  But the numbers cited by The Telegraph (6,000 new businesses a day on Twitter!) are impressive indeed.  Back Stateside, you can be sure that if companies like the online yellow pages are starting to catch Twitter fever, now is the time to catch it yourself.  

If you’re a small business owner, more and more of your peers, competitors and (most importantly) customers will create Twitter accounts in the coming weeks and months.  In the major cities on the West Coast, there’s a good chance they already have.

Twitiquette. You’ll absolutely want to claim your username, if only to prevent someone else from squatting or even maliciously taking it from you.  But just joining doesn’t mean you’ll automatically have success with Twitter. 

The Yellow Pages’ recent Twitter article (same as linked above) implies that they do understand how to engage their audience properly on Twitter, as a conversation, requiring dialogue: “people taking turns talking and listening.”  To wit, the preposition used in that piece’s title would be more useful as “talk with” rather than “talk to your customers.”

I’ve been on for almost 400 days now.  And the single-most important tip I could give for success on Twitter is to listen and converse more than you simply “tweet.” You don’t have to follow or engage in conversation with everyone who follows you, but dialogue, not monologue, is going to be the strategy that pays long-term dividends.

Applying Twitter to your business

There are literally hundreds of small businesses (and large ones, for that matter) already doing amazing, creative things with this new platform.  Follow them, listen to them, perhaps even engage them in a little conversation.  And then, when you’re comfortable, start promoting your Twitter account in your place of business and dive into a deeper relationship with your customers!  Below are just a few ideas to get you started thinking about how your business can use Twitter.

Networking. Twitter is a simply a fabulous way to meet people in your industry, and in your community.  Some of my long-time Twitter friends are people whom I have never met, or only just met recently.  Aaron, Michael and Kristy, respectively, have been generous with their feedback or recommendations when I have asked them about specific business projects.  I already know that in Aaron’s & Michael’s cases we’ll get along famously whenever we actually do meet in person.  I don’t doubt that I’ll refer business to all three of them, or receive some in return, somewhere down the road.

And it’s so easy to network on Twitter.  Just use their search function to find topics you’re interested in, or people in your general geographic area, and start following them.  If you’re actively engaged, you’ll read re-tweets that you find interesting, and you can spread your network even further by following the original tweeter.

Market research & lead generation. You can use search.twitter.com’s advanced features and subscribe to an RSS feed of keywords and locations where you want to eavesdrop.  Or take a more direct route. Social Media Marketer Kyle Lacy suggests: “ask your clients and prospective clients what they would like to see, hear, taste, and experience” at your business. 

John Jantsch of the excellent blog Duct Tape Marketing even theorizes that if you hone your searches and subscriptions finely enough, or monitor them closely enough, you could pick up actual leads just from listening to others’ conversations. 

Improving your local search rankings. Steve Espinosa reported at SMX West that he’d seen Twitter profiles showing up as Local business listing citations. 

But Twitter can lead to citations and links for your business indirectly as well.  Consider the following real-life example: Blue Lemon Bistro in American Fork, UT has a very active Twitter strategy.  One customer who found them via Twitter was so impressed with their restaurant, he blogged about them, linked to their website, included their business name and city in his title tag, and even embedded a Google Map in his blog post!  If that’s not a clear indication to Google and Yahoo of a quality experience with a business in American Fork, Utah, I’m not sure what would qualify on that score.

Just as more and more people are getting on Twitter, they’re also starting their own blogs, creating accounts on local/social platforms like Yelp and leaving reviews, and just generally spreading goodwill (or perhaps badwill-it’s a double-edged sword) about your business around the Internet.

Customer service & reputation management. Speaking of badwill, if that’s even a word, Comcast is a company that’s got a lot of that going around.  But they’re also one of the great examples of a company using Twitter to improve their customer service offerings.  @Comcastcares lets customers (or anyone) get in touch with Comcast on their own schedule, without having to wait on hold or deal with someone who has trouble speaking English.  They respond promptly and can usually solve your problem or direct you right to the specific FAQ page on the Comcast website that will answer it.

And don’t be afraid to stroke the egos of your followers.  Give props to your favorite customers.  Blue Lemon, whom I mentioned earlier, noticed their blogging customer’s review and tweeted it to their 2,000+ followers.  Not only does this reinforce the positive experience that the blogger had with Blue Lemon, but it encourages more followers to do the same.  You could even take things one step further and encourage followers to leave reviews (with direct, shortened URLs) on their favorite search platforms.

Take orders via twitter. It’s not so far-fetched.  Here’s a terrific anecdote from Mr. Tweet about a coffee shop owner who responded in real-time to one of his followers for a to-go order, leading to tons of buzz and a selection as the venue for a Houston area Tweet-up.  Wow!  Very cool.

Even if you don’t have the resources or desire to tweet in real-time, you can tweet your followers whenever a fresh product arrives in your store or use Twitter for special insider sales or pre-releases.

Fill last-minute inventory. Taking sales one step further, Twitter represents a phenomenal opportunity to fill unused inventory and track sales at the same time.  Here’s one example of a San Francisco restaurant who “gets it” via Matt McGee; I saw a similar feature on a San Francisco massage parlor (yes, a real one) in the New York Times as well.  In the case of True Massage, they tweet openings in their schedule just a few hours in advance, along with a special tracking code that allows followers to book and save, all at the same time.

Eric Ward and I tweeted back and forth last week about the fantastic opportunity for golf courses to do the same thing with open tee times.  Hotels, ski resorts, hair salons, restaurants… any business that relies on walk-in traffic to fill empty slots would do fantastically well with this strategy.

Engage in community activism. Just within the last three months, fellow Portlander (and my friend) Kerry Finsand has gotten over 3,350 people to sign a petition protesting the proposed Oregon beer tax largely using Twitter, and the Northern California Golf Association used Twitter to help raise awareness and defeat a proposed golf tax in their state.

Here are two fantastic round-up posts on possible Twitter strategies: Five Technology’s 100 Reasons to Be on Twitter, and Buzz Marketing Daily’s 25 Innovative Ways Companies Are Using Twitter.

Twitter as an extension of local search

Gib Olander likes to say that “other” is the third-largest local search engine. Right now, Twitter is part of that “other”… but by the end of 2010, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Twitter jump up to #3 or even #2.  The ability to search by zip code and radius, the open nature of its API, and its intrinsic social component make it the ideal local recommendation engine, as Sebastian Provencher and Mike Boland pointed out last week.  Sebastian is already incorporating Twitter feeds and the like over at Praized Questions.

Even if search.twitter.com isn’t all that popular among the masses as a destination, its results are going to get pulled in more and more places.  Yet one more reason you’ll want to be talking about your business and your products or services in the Twittersphere ASAP.  Or ideally, develop such a bond with your followers that other people talk about them and recommend them for you.

Remember, as with most forms of social media, you get back only what you put into it.  If all you’re doing is tweeting about your own promotions, instead of listening to what your followers are talking about and helping them spread their own messages, you’re probably not going to get very far.  You want to converse with people to get them to converse about you in a positive light.

It doesn’t really matter which of these strategies you employ for your own business—if any; blazing your own trail might be the best strategy for your company.

Just do me one favor: ignore Maureen, and follow Oprah instead.  At the very least, it’ll be way more fun.