TOP 6 Social Media Measurement Tools #SocialMedia

Source: http://hosting.ber-art.nl/social-media-measurement-trustcloud/

Social media measurement is quite immature, just as Web analytics was back in the mid-1990s. It will evolve quickly as marketers attempt different approaches and hold enterprise measurement firms accountable to help make sense of all the activity data generated by social media interactions. In turn, social media can seem very challenging, and at times even impossible, to measure with regard to its effects.

1. TrustCloud (Facebook Group)
TrustCloud measures your virtuous online behaviors and transactions online then turns it into portable TrustScore you can use anywhere within the Sharing Economy. TrustCloud helps you leverage the good behavior you’ve built online – and gauge the trustworthiness of others offering products and services online. Like a credit score,TrustScore boosts confidence and smoothes Sharing Economy transactions. TrustCloud collects your publicly-available data from networks like Facebook, Google and LinkedIn, then analyzes it to assign your trustworthiness a ranking between 1 and 1000. We don’t share your private data or email address with third parties, and never access private communication like Twitter DMs or messaging services.

2. Empire Avenue
A game platform where you earn virtual currency for being social. Empire Avenue is a stock market simulation social network game that allows users to buy and sell shares of people and websites. Expand: Empire Avenue’s comprehensive social media suite is powered by the Social Stock Market, where you use your virtual currency to expand your social media audience. Your virtual investors will share in your success as they earn valuable currency through your online activity and engagement. Engage: Use Empire Avenue’s powerful Missions to drive traffic and engagement to your online content and social profiles, and to gain relevant new fans, followers and subscribers on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and other networks. Evaluate: Finally, use the built-in Network Scores and other metrics to gauge the effectiveness and progress of your social media efforts, to pinpoint areas of improvement and to keep an eye on your network growth. With all of these tools in one place, Empire Avenue is the social media rocket fuel you’ve been looking for.

3. Xeeme
XeeMe is the fastest growing Social Presence Management software company. A Social Presence is the sum of all social profiles and accounts of an individual or brand. Since all social media activities are initiated from, or pointing back to that social presence, it is an individual’s or brand’s most important asset. A “XeeMe” lets users or brands organize their entire social presence, discover new networks and people and grow their presence and influence. XeeMe has the most comprehensive social presence analytics and the largest number of supported networks. XeeGraph provides a unique way to benchmark presence value and network relevance. XeeMe is free and will remain to be free. Additional business features or applications are provided as subscription service. The XeeMe team and its trained and authorized business partners are providing professional social presence building and customization consulting services.

4. Klout
Measure influence and style Klout is a visual, logical way to quickly see the main thing most organizations want to know about Twitter: where you stand against the competition. Klout digs deep into social media to understand how people influence each other, so that everyone can discover and be recognized for how they influence the world. Influence is the ability to drive action, such as sharing a picture that triggers comments and likes, or tweeting about a great restaurant and causing your followers to go try it for themselves.

5. Kred
We all have Kred somewhere. Kred, created by PeopleBrowsr, measures influence in online communities connected by affinities.Kred Story creates a visual stream from a person’s most popular content and what people are saying to and about them. Simply enter any Twitter @name to get an overview of their social media interactions. Also try entering @names of brands, companies and media to get a full view of their most influential content.

6. PeerIndex
Assess your online social capital. Where Klout was accessible and easy to decipher, I found PeerIndex a bit better. PeerIndex measures interactions across the web to help you understand your impact in social media. We want you to learn about the people you influence and see who influences you. We believe that everything you do is valuable. You make the videos, you write the reviews and you form the connections. YOU are the contributor – you are the content – you are the link. In short, without you the Internet would suck. We recognize this and aim to make your experiences in social media more rewarding.

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Here are some others that are also Social Media Measurement Tools

• Twitalyzer: A subscription-model tool Twitalyzer operates mainly on a subscription model, but gives away some basic features for free.
• TweetStats: Graph your stats! Tweetstats remains true to its name, as it compiles a bar graph for quick viewing of your monthly stats.
• Pinreach: PinReach, LLC (Formerly PinClout) is a fresh new startup created by Chris Fay (Chris Fay Consulting, LLC) and Daniel Schimpfoessl (PureField, LLC), focusing on bringing insight and analytics to Pinterest. We both felt that beneath the fun of Pinterest lay a powerful platform, one that if leveraged well could prove quite the upper hand for people and brands. We set off to create a new service offering valued insight into the activity on the site, launching initially with the PinReach score, a numeric representation of a member’s Pinterest influence based on a series of social attributes.
• Crowdbooster: Schedule and analyze. Of all the applications I used, Crowdbooster was my personal favorite.
• TweetGrader: Score your profile. Part of a suite of free online marketing tools powered by HubSpot, Tweet Grader is a straightforward tool that measures the power of your Twitter profile.
• TweetReach: Insight into your tweets. Ever wondered about the value of a tweet? With Tweet Reach, you can get analytics that measure the impact of social media conversations.
• Postrank: Intelligence from the social web The social web connects people where they share, critique and interact with content and each other. PostRank is the largest aggregator of social engagement data in the industry.
• Pinpuff : influence is measure of your popularity, influence and reach on Pinterest. It also decides monetary value of your pins & traffic your pins generate.
• We are doing some really cool stuff around Pinterest and first 1000 beta users will get exclusive invite to try out our experiments with Pinterest well before it is opened for all.
• Twentyfeet: Check your track. TwentyFeet is an “egotracking” service that will help you keep track of your own social media activities and monitor your results. We aggregate metrics from different services, thus giving you the full picture of what happens around you on the web – all in one place.
• SproutSocial: Super-charge your company’s social media efforts. Sprout Social builds powerful, intuitive social media management tools used by thousands of businesses across the globe. We help businesses delight their audience and get real value from their social efforts.
• Twylah: Get a custom brand page for your tweets. Twylah exists to drive deeper engagement with your Twitter followers.
• MyWebCareer: Discover, Evaluate, and Monitor Your Professional Online Brand. Enables you to uncover and evaluate your digital footprint. It’s a great networking tool and is useful when exploring the way your social profiles connect across the Web to create an overall picture of yourself or your business.

 

Steve Jobs on Failure

How to Create a Great PowerPoint Presentation

By Eric Markowitz
Source: http://www.inc.com/guides/201102/how-to-create-a-great-powerpoint-presentation.html

Are you guilty of information overload? Do you abuse Clip Art? Here, the experts weigh in on how to create a pitch-perfect PowerPoint presentation.

Getty: Steve Jobs speaking at a Press Conference On Apples iPhone 4

“There’s something in the air.” With these five words, Steve Jobs opened the 2008 Macworld conference.  Jobs is often cited as one of corporate America’s greatest presenters, and that’s simply because he understands one thing: how to tell a story. Like any great sales pitch, an effective PowerPoint offers a compelling narrative; it elicits an emotional response from the audience, even if the subject is, say, debt consolidation, or finance derivatives. The trick is to understand how to engage your listeners, keep them focused, and use the right visual imagery to convey your message. So whether you’re pitching an idea to investors, introducing a new product to your clients, or simply reviewing your company’s quarterly results, a great PowerPoint presentation will leave your audience feeling inspired.

Creating a great PowerPoint is simpler than you might think. More often than not, you don’t need to be a great designer, writer or orator to come up with an attention-grabbing presentation. What you do need, however, is an understanding of how to capture an audience’s focus—and perhaps a bit of their imagination.  Here are a few tips on how to create a PowerPoint that your audience won’t forget.

Dig Deeper: 10 Ways to Make a PowerPoint Presentations Powerful

Creating a Great PowerPoint: Create a narrative.

“One thing I like to do is make sure there’s a logical story,” says Janet Bornemann, the creative director of PowerPoint Studio, based in Acton, Massachusetts. Bornemann, who designs PowerPoint presentations for corporate clients, says that just like any piece of good writing, there needs to be a beginning, middle, and an end to your presentation. Traditionally, in the beginning of the presentation you tell the audience what you plan to cover, in the middle of the presentation you tell them, and in the end, you tell them what you’ve told them.  One clever tip Bornemann recommends is to use five words per line, and five lines per slide.

Guy Kawasaki, a venture capitalist and Inc. contributor, has his own technique for creating a storyline for an entrepreneur’s PowerPoint presentation to investors. His method, which he calls the 10/20/30 rule, is a great way to structure your presentation’s story. “It’s quite simple,” Kawasaki wrote on his blog, How to Change the World. “A PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.”

Kawasaki’s recommended structure for any entrepreneurial presentation is as follows:

1.    Problem
2.    Your solution
3.    Business model
4.    Underlying magic/technology
5.    Marketing and sales
6.    Competition
7.    Team
8.    Projections and milestones
9.    Status and timeline
10.   Summary and call to action

Regardless of a specific structure you choose for your presentation, your story needs to accomplish three goals: frame the issue, present the challenge, and explain how you will solve the problem.

Dig Deeper: Pump Up Your PowerPoint Presentations

Creating a Great PowerPoint: Less is more.

At some point or another, we’ve all sat through a PowerPoint presentation flooded with an endless stream of bullet points, sentences, or even full paragraphs. It may seem obvious, but according to Bornemann, this is one of the biggest—and most common—mistakes made by presenters. And when the presenter lists too much detail on the slides, few people will be able to retain any of it.

A great presentation “should really just give the highlights,” says Bornemann. Steve Jobs, for example, is famous for using virtually no text at all— an icon of a new product or two or three “big picture” words will suffice. “People are afraid to use a slide with one word, but it has merit, because we have to process information before we go on to the next idea,” Bornemann says. It’s also good to segment presentations in places where your audience’s mind can sum up—and process—the information, so that they’re actually able to think about what you’re telling them.

“It’s very important for the mind to be able to rest on an idea or a thought, so if it’s a constant flow of words, people will grow tired,” she adds.

Jim Confalone, the founder and creative director of ProPoint Graphics, a graphic design studio based in New York City, says that people simply stop paying attention to slides with too much text on them. “It becomes like wallpaper,” he says. In other words, it becomes easy to tune out.

Your audience needs to digest information. Don’t be afraid to linger on a slide or create a slide with just one picture and nothing else. Taking risks like these will help sell your presentation to your audience, and keep them from getting that “glazed over” look of boredom.

Dig Deeper: 4 Great PowerPoint Tools

Creating a Great PowerPoint: Branding is key.

Clip Art: the enemy of any great PowerPoint presentation. When assembling slides for a presentation, Clip Art, slide transitions, and other tacky animations are an easy way to pollute your brand’s message. While they’re easy to use, they make your brand seem generic and outdated. After all, anyone with Microsoft has access to the same catalogue of images, and more than likely has seen it all before.

“You don’t want to have a circus of effects,” says Bornemann. “Be consistent with colors and fonts. Focus on the message—everything has to have a reason.” And, she adds, “effects ‘on steroids’ don’t have a reason.”

It’s also easy to fall into the trap of overusing charts and graphs to illustrate a point. However, if the graphic doesn’t support the information or push the presentation forward, it’s not necessary to the ‘story.’ “As soon as it turns into an arbitrary thing, we throw it out,” says Confalone. “If the content is not there, nothing you do is going to work. “

Dig Deeper: Making Your (Power) Point

Creating a Great PowerPoint: Rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse once more.

The presentation on the screen is just as important as the speaker’s presentation off the screen. When giving the PowerPoint Presentation, it’s essential to add a little flavor to the speech.

“Most speakers get into presentation mode and feel as though they have to strip the talk of any fun,” Carmine Gallo, a communication coach, wrote in his Business Week column recently. “If you are not enthusiastic about your own products or services, how do you expect your audience to be?”

According to Confalone, there are two ways a speaker can fail in his or her presentation: a lack confidence, or a misconception about what the audience will retain from the speech.

The only real way to boost confidence is to practice. If you spend 15 hours putting together the presentation, spend another 15 practicing it. Don’t rely too much on notes, since the audience will be looking at you to engage with them—not your script.

Confalone also stresses to his clients that most viewers will walk away from a presentation with only the very key points. Therefore, it’s essential not to confuse your audience with the minutia or details that are best left for a handout.

All PowerPoint presentations are trying to sell you something, even if it’s just an idea, product, or the presenter himself. A “boring” topic is no excuse for a “boring” presentation. “Sexy or not, you need to distill the key points in the conversation,” Confalone says. “That element of persuasion is the key to it.”

Dig Deeper: Grist: More Power Than Point

Read more:

• The 60-Second Sales Pitch
• How to Maintain Brand Consistency Across Product Lines
• How to Manage Client Expectations After You Close a Sale
• Liven Up PowerPoint with Interactivity, Touchscreens, and an iPad
• A Great Tool for Making Presentations

Eric Markowitz reports on start-ups, entrepreneurs, and issues that affect small businesses. Previously, he worked at Vanity Fair. He lives in New York City. @EricMarkowitz

50 Most Social Media Savvy Professors in America

By Jasmine Hall

Every day, a new article or alleged joke about how social media pervades daily life crops up. Don’t argue. It’s science. Anyway, like most people with something to say, professors enjoy blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and other social media sites major and minor. Many throw themselves into the digital milieu, excelling at networking and spreading ideas and insights with fellow academics, professionals, students and interested readers alike. Even though visitors won’t always agree with what they have to say — some may grow downright offended — few can deny their generous grasp of all things social media.

Business and Education

1. Christopher S. Penn

   Although a marketing expert (and, of course, professor and author) skilled in social media’s business applications, the delightful Christopher S. Penn shares some other fun bits of nerdery, from cooking to World of Warcraft.

2. Glen D. Gilmore

   This Rutgers professor and attorney excels so well at social media, he even runs his own consulting company illustrating the best marketing and promotions strategies.

3. Natalie M. Houston

   Natalie M. Houston is actually an English professor, but her newsletter, Twitter, blog and writings focus mostly on time management, productivity and work/life balance — essential for any career and any educational path.

4. Christine Greenhow

   When it comes to social media’s massive impact on education, Christine Greenhow stands at the research’s forefront. With plenty of studies, grants and projects to her name, she’s savvy in both the technology’s use and overarching influence.

5. David Albrecht

   Along with participating in an accounting-and-technology listserv, David Albrecht loves dishing out relevant advice to students, professionals and fellow professors through his popular blog — though he also uses Twitter and LinkedIn.

6. Niklas Myhr

   Despite his lax blog schedule, this University of Virginia marketing professor keeps an active Facebook brimming with advice on using social media in the business classroom and world alike.

7. Allen H. Kupetz

   This globetrotter concerns himself with business solutions regarding both social media and technology, particularly as they relate to communication between American and Asian companies.

8. Amanda Krauss

   OK. So Amanda Krauss is really a former classics professor, but her social media prowess controversially (and amusingly!) dissects America’s serious higher problems.

9. George H. Williams and Jason B. Jones

   Both English instructors, these gentlemen are responsible for the Profhacker blog, offered through The Chronicle of Higher Education. Here, multiple contributors weigh in on a bevy of education and technology topics.

10. Bruce Freeman

    Bruce Freeman teaches adjunct in his spare time, but devotes most of his social media acumen to assisting small businesses boost their online and offline profiles.

E-mail Marketing Drip Campaigns

Drip marketing campaigns require a number of mail messages which are delivered or ‘dripped’ in a determined, prearranged order for a specific predefined action.  Drip campaigns are most effective when wanting to promote leads.  They frequently use instruction, customer feedback along with other strategies to move prospective customers through the early part of the sales cycle as they continue to increase their interest, step by step. Drip marketing campaigns are a resourceful and efficient way to nurture and reach a large targeted market.

Every campaign must have a clearly defined goal.  You cannot plan a campaign if your do not know who your target market is and what you are trying to achieve.

1.    Identify your Target Prospect

To send the right message you need to the demographics and buying behaviors of your prospective customers.   Your offer, message, tone, and imagery need to appeal to your audience.  Conveying the wrong message will turn off your prospective customers quickly. Unless you appeal to their needs and communicate in their language, your email campaigns can easily be discarded.

2.    Know the Best Approach

Many people today are overwhelmed with email and prefer to go to a Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Sometimes a phone call is the best strategy.  Take the time to send out customer surveys, asking how they wish to be contacted. Creating and modifying your campaigns to fit the needs and requests of your prospects and clients assures that they will anticipate your messages and read them.  One size does not fit all.

3.    High Value Content

There is nothing worse than receiving boring, sales pitches.  Drip campaigns should be nurturing, helping your prospects with their problems, giving them information and best practices in their industries.  In short, your content should be valuable and useful to them.  Sharing information does not necessarily have to be authored by you or your company.  Forwarding industry studies such as MarketingSherpa and eMarketer, sends authoritative studies, showing them you are on top of your field, sharing helpful facts they can use.

Drip marketing can be likened to watering your garden.  You study the need of each plant and can regulate the irrigation to target the flowers with the right amount of water at the right time.  It is the perfect image of a drip email marketing campaign.

4.    In Email Marketing – Appearance Matters

• Design Strategically: In drip campaigns, design and imagery need to support but not overshadow your content.
• When you purchase email campaign software, you receive hundreds of beautifully designed HTML templates.  Why not start out as a winner?
• Don’t overpower with too many graphics.  Graphics can obscure an important message.  Many people have their graphics turned off in their email programs.  Test your campaigns before sending.
• How to Use your Drip Email Marketing Campaigns
• Promote a new product or event – give a webinar – sell a new product on YouTube.
• Use your campaign to inform, share, and teach.  Sending some time and money-saving tips will always be appreciated.  Created a series of ‘how to’ articles can convert prospects into clients.
• Send a survey.  Get the temperature of your product and service.  Honest responses can help modify your future campaigns and objectives.
• Don’t forget to integrate social media into your campaigns.  Make it easy for your recipients to forward and share your drip campaigns with their friends, family, and business colleagues.

Test your Campaign’s Overall Campaign Performance

You cannot modify what you cannot measure.  Tracking your email marketing drip campaigns is crucial to your business success.  After you hit that send button, tracking your campaigns in real-time is invaluable.  You need to know:

• Your deliverability rates
• Your click-through rates
• Your subscribe rates
• Your unsubscribe rates
• Your bounce rates
• Your conversion rates

With email campaign software, you will receive real-time tracking reports and analytics, enabling you to plan and focus on an email campaign strategy that not only engages, but satisfies the subscriber, as well.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/email-articles/email-marketing-drip-campaigns-3918295.html