It was great evening at the SME 2.0 ‘tagtribe’ event last night. The room was split between experienced Linkedin users and some fairly new to it…

There were a few questions on certain how tos which I said that I would blog about today – but rather than write it all out – I’ve done them as vids… which I hope will be easier to understand – but let me know if they’re not.

How to alter what is publicly visible on Linkedin

How to make all your LinkedIn connections details private

How to change the default anchor text for your LinkedIn website links

How to export your Linkedin contacts to CSV file

How to create a Personal URL on Linkedin

And finally…

If there are any others that you’d like to know about just post a comment below and I’ll add them to this post…

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I get a lot of questions asking about how to communicate with people online, which may seem simple to some but it appears to cause hours of sleepless nights to others…

• What if should I do if no-one replies?
• What should I do if someone replies?
• What tone of voice should I reply in?
• etc etc etc

Communicating online, especially with brand advocates, isn’t as difficult as might be first perceived: if people are talking positively about you – simply thanking them is quite often enough to get them talking even more positively about you.

For example: I recommended Vodafone’s mobile network to someone on twitter:

RT @shelleyfishel @leesmallwood thinks u have best deal for iPad. Just got 1 & am @vodafoneuk Customer. How do I get a sim? #orangefail 10:37 PM Sep 21st via Twitterrific

@shelleyfishel … and definitely best network coverage – 3G all the way from Bath to London & back again cc @vodafoneuk #OrangeO2Fail
10:48 PM Sep 21st via Twitter for iPhone

and Vodafone replied:

Makes you feel all warm and fluffy inside doesn’t it…!

Now, the next time I’m in a position to recommend a mobile network who do you think I’ll recommend? Not rocket science is it!

And this is a global company taking the time out just to say ‘thanks’. They didn’t try and sell me anything – just a warm felt ‘thanks’.

Online Adocates and Influencers

click to enlarge

For any company or organisation, identifying who your advocates and influencers are is vitally important – see it like an extension of customer service.

These people may continue to speak highly of you without any engagement from you… but are definitely more likely to continue to do so if you acknowledge them publically.

What’s even more important though is that their networt of friends, family colleagues are also seeing the ‘conversation’ you’re having with them – and the positive experience they’re having with you, which they might not be experiencing with their own supplier, provider etc…

The Power of Reach

Conversion paths are fulled by ‘reach’ (how far will a message travel) and generally follow a simple route (see image on the left):

• a message goes out
• it’s picked up by an influencer
• an advocate amplifies the message
• and it finally lands in front of the people that you’re trying to reach

And finally…

When a message moves this way WoM or WoW (word of mouth / word of web) it has a far greater impact than if you were trying to broadcast the message your self. And as James Poulter wrote in his blog post “The DNA of a Recommendation“:

This new culture’s currency, the recommendation, when automated, facilitated and propagated efficiently can become a very powerful tool – one that can move financial markets as well as social ones.

So… don’t be complex or cryptic… be yourself and let others see what the people that already use your products or services see…

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When you write a post – whether it’s a tweet, blog or comment etc – and people read it, repeat it and they like it – this can at times lead us to feeling ‘I’ve done it. I’m finally reaching people’

But in point of fact, this is only the beginning. Because even though tracking what people think about what you write is good and establishing whether their feelings towards you and your content are great or not so great is important, measuring the results of your communication efforts is actually key.

In an offline world, and to quote Guro John Popolini (the world leader in ‘sucksess’ coaching) “When you are in a room full of people it’s important you get as many business cards as you can. The more you have… the more money you will make”

This of course is BS and just ‘more’ online ‘whatevers’ are not a measurement that we should focus purely one.

Yes, more can be good, but simply having more friends, more followers, more likes etc than your competitor is not a metric to measure the success of how well you, your company or your brand are successfully engaging with people that are interested in what you do.

From a deeper perspective, more isn’t an end unto itself… it’s only a means to an end…

Just counting the number of people who follow you on twitter and or subscribe to your blog/newsletter is easy … What you should be measuring is how many of them are actually engaged!

Engagement for me is when someone cares enough about what you have written to such an extent that they felt compelled to do something about it. E.g. This blog post came about after reading @SuButcher ‘s post from yesterday http://www.justprofessionals.net/2010/09/how-to-work-out-the-size-of-your-audience-on-twitter-in-4-steps/

Seeing a level of active participation from the people that follow you etc is a much more rational metric than the number of bums on seats that registered – but missed what you were saying because they were in the loo, blinked or at the bar when you said it…

Metrics I like to use to understand the effectiveness of online communications are based upon the number of people that:

- read it (easy to measure)
- saved/embedded/downloaded it
- rated it
- repeated/quoted/retweeted it
- commented on it
- recommended it (challenging to achieve)

And finally…

So over my next few posts I’d like to explore different ways you can use to encourage people to move from just reading it…to recommending it. And as this is an evolving medium it would be great if you share what is working for you too and or what isn’t.

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The cost of collecting the data contained within this blog is sponsored by 6Consulting

The figures don’t lie

Reviewing the online conversations that took place during that debate, Nick Clegg looks to have won that round! From 7k + plus before the debate there are now 16,997 posts, with LibDems taking 51.6% of those, Labour 29.8% and Conservatives 18.6%

But the devils in the detail so…:

Labour Sentiment

And without Neutral Sentiment:

And where those positive, neutral and negative sentiment conversations happened:

Conservative Sentiment

And without Neutral Sentiment:

And where those positive, neutral and negative sentiment conversations happened:

Liberal Democrat Sentiment

And without Neutral Sentiment:

And where those positive, neutral and negative sentiment conversations happened:

… And finally

I think this post and the the previous published just before the debate shows that there still is everything to play for in this General Election. What will be interesting is to monitor the effect it’s had on the polls tomorrow…

I’ve published all of the positive and negative conversations in the following links for the 3 parties – just in case you want to have a bit of bedtime reading.

Labour

Positive sentiment conversations

Negative sentiment conversations

Conservative

Positive sentiment conversations

Negative sentiment conversations

Liberal Democrat

Positive sentiment conversations

Negative sentiment conversations

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The mobile phone is becoming less of a phone and more of a ‘all in one place’ communication tool. Developers of mobile applications are pushing the boundaries by producing mobile apps that enable people to engage, communicate and share experiences/moments that we would never before dreamed possible by such a small device. One of these applications is Qik

What is Qik?

Qik is a mobile phone application (see this complete list of compatible phones) that lets you record, stream in real-time (approx 2 second delay) and automatically publishes your videos to social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc or even send a link to your video to everyone in your address book!

Qik ‘in-touch’

The chaps and chapettes over at Qik have developed an Adobe Air solution called Qik-in-Touch that lets you share your experience and view what your friends and family are doing from wherever you are http://qik.com/leesmallwood/qik_in_touch

Apps for the iPhone

I have 3 Qik apps on my iPhone:

• Qik – Free
• Qik 3GS – 59p
• Qik Videocamera – not currently available but worth seeing if it comes back…

This video shows some possible uses (and is quite funny too):

The bigger picture

Qik is a fantastic application that can be used to allow people who can’t get to events (or have want to take a peak before going to one) to take part via the Qik Chat facility – thereby increasing participation and creating further awareness.

…And finally

Streaming video or ‘Livecasting’ is becoming very popular, and the ability to do it just from your mobile phone will only help increase its popularity as the need for ‘additional’ hardware’ and equipment becomes obsolete especially with mobile technology advances…

My Qik page is http://www.qik.com/leesmallwood let me know what yours is in the comments section below

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I love my job because I get to find out what people are talking about online, communicate, engage using social media everyday. But what has always been ‘challenging’ was monitoring and measuring. That was until I started using Radian6.

So what is Radian6?

Well, there is a sentence on the Radian6 website that sums it up very nicely:

Radian6 gives you a complete platform to listen, measure and engage with your customers across the entire social web

And it does exactly what it says on the tin!

As I said, one of my main challenges was setting up a dashboard that would monitor and provide me with exactly the information I needed. But since I started using it I now log into my dashboard everyday without any concerns that I might have missed something. I’ve tried several other monitoring tools – some paid, some free and in my honest opinion Radian6 wipes the floor with them…

Radian6 is intuitive, well designed and easy to create up to 8 ‘unique’ dashboards for what you want to specifically monitor – your’re really not bound by any constraints, unlike some other monitoring tools. And rather being supplied with 1000′s of posts that just contain certain keywords and phrases – e.g. sales type posts etc – you can filter out all that noise and monitor/engage with conversations that you need to be aware of that have been posted on:

• blogs
• images
• videos
• forums
• micro-media
• comments
• forum replies
• facebook
• mainstream news

Radian6 Features

Dashboard

People say a picture paints a thousand words so here’s one I made earlier

The above is how I like to set up my dashboard. These are the dashboard widgits and there are 44 different widigts to choose, from 6 different categories, and these are all worth mentioning:

1. Basic Widgits

   River of News
   Topic Conversation Cloud
   Topic Analysis by Media Type
   Topic Trends
   Influencers

2. Social Media Metrics and Analysis

   Trend Topic by Media Type
   Topic by Language
   Topic by Region
   Top Viewed Videos and Images
   Topic Sentiment Trends
   Metrics: Volume Comparison
   Metrics: Total Comment Comparison
   Metrics: Video Views Comparison
   Metrics: Total Vote Count Comparison
   Metrics: Follower Reach Comparison
   Metrics: Total Inbound Links Comparison
   Metrics: Total Unique Sources Comparison

3. Twitter Analysis

   Top Tweeters
   Tweet Volume Trend
   Tweet Volume by Region
   Tweet Volume by Language
   Share of Twitter Follower Reach
   Twitter Share of Unique Voices

4. Brand Analysis

   My Brand River of News
   Brand Cloud
   Brand Mention Count by Media Type
   Unique Source Count by Media Type
   Brand Trends by Sentiment
   Positive Sentiment Brand Cloud
   Negative Sentiment Brand Cloud

5. Competitive & Industry Intelligence & Analysis

   My Competitors River of News
   Competitor Cloud
   Competitive Trends
   Share of Voice
   My Industry River of News
   Industry Cloud
   Share of Conversation
   Industry Trends
   Share of Conversation by Comments
   Share of Unique Voices

6. Workflow & Engagement

   My Tasks
   Assignment Breakdown
   Engagement Status Breakdown
   Content Classifications

With this amount of possibilities you’d be hard pushed not to be able to listen/monitor and engage and it’s difficult to point out what I like best… But other than what you’d expect me to say: metrics etc etc etc, I think the Workflow & Engagement Widgits are fantastic. The ability to assign conversations to specific team members and then review the audit trail is an amazing tool that will not only enable organisations to train team members on different scenarios using real information but it will ensure that social media policies and procedures are being followed – proactively.

Sneak Peak of Radian6 Engagement Console

And the exciting news is that Radian6 are very soon going to release an Engagement Console that is a complete real-time social web client, will help you coordinate team social media engagement across the business, shows topic profiles right alongside personal or business Twitter and Facebook streams, lets you set one-click workflow for frequently used post routing, assignment, and classification and feeds all this data back to your Radian6 dashboard for reporting and analysis. Amazing…!

…And finally

Having a fantastic product is one thing… but what convinced me to ‘sign up’ to Radian6 was their customer service. And I want to thank Tom List, Rhiannon Cassin, Paul Taylor (6Consulting website – 6consulting on twitter) and Mike Huggard (Radian6) for making it the easiest decision I’ve ever had to make.

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At first glance you might be fooled into thinking that Disqus (pronounced ‘Discuss’) was just another commenting system – but… you’d be mistaken. I thought the same, 9 months ago. Actually, if I’m being honest I originally installed it because it looked better, asthetically speaking, than any of the other options. But now I wouldn’t use anything else… why?

Simply put, it joins the dots between your original blog post and the online conversation that continues within the comments you and your readers leave; posting a link back to the comment left to your social networks when a new comment has been made. Now some might say that this is and has been achieved by RSS for a long time – which would be correct but nothing wrong in increasing you’re visibility

Disqus Benefits & Advantages

Social Network Integration.

Anyone can leave a comment in the traditional way:

• Fill out their name & email
• Website (optional)
• Post their comment

BUT they can also login to Disqus using their Facebook, Twitter, OpenID details and in doing so will not only show links to their profiles, but also include their profile photo

If you register with Disqus as a commenter, then you can have links to your blog AND social networks show up on your comment.

Individual Comment Features

Your readers can ‘like’ other comments that people leave, find the social networks of a commenter, report inappropriate comments and easily repost comments.

Another great user function is that your readers can see other comments left by anyone, subscribe to them across ALL the blogs they post on.

Also, if you want to delete a comment (not recommended – better to post a retraction than to delete IMHO) you can from Disqus or edit/moderate them.

How to Use/Setup Disqus

• Register for an account with Disqus (free)
• Download the Disqus Comment System plugin
• Install it from your WordPress dashboard
• Finally, from the Settings link in your WordPress dashboardDisqus:
  - choose your display options and rules
  - make simple styling modifications,
  - and import your other comments.
• When you’re done, Disqus will remove your existing commentplugin and replace it with Disqus. ‘Simples’ – thank you Alexandr

And finally…

It’s very easy to miss setting up of one of the best features of Disqus: linking your comment posts to your existing social networks. To find this little golden nugget do the following:

1. Go to http://disqus.com
2. Click on your user name at the top right of the page next to your Avatar picture, if you’re logged into Disqus this link will take you there

Click on your user name at the top right

3. You’ll see a list of networks that you want to post to your comments to – select the ones you want

4. Now when you write a comment, before you post, roll your mouse over ‘Share on…’ and check the social networks you want to post a link back to your comment post

Roll your mouse over the 'Share on...' to get a list of social networks to post a link of your comment to

And if you want to try it on my Disqus comments below then that’s cool with me

Some quick links to Disqus plugins and don’t forget to follow @disqus on Twitter

• Disqus for WordPress
• Disqus for Joomla
• Disqus for Movable Type

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