• Hubspot - Although Hubspot isn’t free, it’s one of the better Social Media Marketing tools. It’s easy to create and manage a website or blog without having much technical prowess or IT specialist. Your content is garnered for the greatest SEO and link rankings. Lastly, and probably most importantly, is Hubspot’s analytic monitoring. It’s able to collect data across multiple channels and generates great visual reports, which are also excellent for research.
• Dynamic Tweets - This program is for scheduling tweets. One of the greatest aspects of Dynamic Tweets is that it’s very basic and easy to use. There’s a free option, which is reasonably sized for small to mid-size businesses, as well as larger paid options. You can program all your scheduled tweets to follow predefined conditions or rules.
• Hootsuite - One of my favorite programs, Hootsuite does it all. You can manage several Social Media channels from one dashboard. You can follow trends, lists, and/or hashtags, as well as your home stream, all at the same time. You’re able to set up email notifications for any action (i.e. new followers, re-tweets, direct messages). Hootsuite also provides analytic tools that graph your engagement – more in depth measurement resources are available for a fee. One of my favorite aspects, however, is the ability to add team members to an account. You can see what your team members have responded to and when.
• Storify - Storify is great tool for saving and aggregating information on Social Media. You can search for terms, tweets, YouTube videos, RSS feeds, Google, other Storify articles, Flickr, Facebook, etc. Then you create your own Storify “article” where you compile your search results. You can personalize the title and add sound, too.
• Google+ Hangouts - I just started playing with this relatively new tool. A Hangout is basically a group video chat (for free). Whomever starts the Hangout can set the title, which is great for adapting to different audiences and topics. There is a chat sidebar where anyone can share links, questions, comments, etc. Google has already integrated YouTube videos into Hangouts so you can share a video with the members. Up to 9 people can join a hangout, making it a great option for pitches, internal meetings, telecommuting, promotions, and the list goes on. Since it’s still young, I expect a lot more to come from this new, creative tool.

Related articles

• Storify Makes Its Move: A Social Web News Site Starring You (readwriteweb.com)
• #Hub140 – @HubSpot Acquires Social Media Marketing Company @oneforty – http://bit.ly/Hub140 (hubspot.com)
• Twitter Curation Grows Up: Storify Becomes Blog & SEO Friendly (readwriteweb.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Social media is no longer a new subject. While there may still be some skeptics, social media has been embraced as an important business tool. There are dozens of platforms available and just as many reasons to utilize one or multiple platform.

Each platform is unique. Some are great in some areas but fall short in others, and vice-versa. Let’s take a look at the most popular social media and their strengths and weaknesses. Which platforms help customer communication, brand exposure, boost site traffic, and search engine optimization (SEO).

Facebook:

• Facebook is an excellent tool for customer communication. It creates a central, open hub that companies can use to drive their social interaction with customers. Companies can send their message and respond to the positive and negative feedback.
• By using sharing buttons, linked icons, and a company page makes it easy to expose your brand on other relevant sites.
• Facebook is a powerful tool for driving traffic to posts and messages. However, it doesn’t have the same effect with driving traffic to a company’s website.
• Adding Facebook to your arsenal has little effect on SEO with the major search engines. Although, if well done, it won’t hurt your SEO either.

Twitter:

• Twitter is, probably, the best tool for customer communication. Outbound messages can have an enormous reach and do so quickly. Inbound messages are brief and to-the-point, allowing easy monitoring and responding.
• As a metaphorical “Cocktail Party”, by interacting with customers and other Twitter users, the opportunity arises for others to spread exposure of your brand creating real impact.
• One issue with Twitter is that there is a ton of chatter, making it difficult to ensure you’re reaching your target to drive traffic to your site. However, it generates traffic from other sites (i.e. Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon).
• Twitter is not the ideal tool for improving your SEO. Although, the potential reach of your brand or message has a positive effect on your visibility.

Flickr:

• As an image and video hosting site, customers can comment on and share images or videos here. While Flickr creates a rather professional, organized hub for media, it’s only useful in certain areas at certain times.
• Combining its search ranking and integration with other social media platforms, Flickr is perfect for high-quality image posting.
• Unfortunately, Flickr is abysmal for boosting site traffic – end of story.
• While there may be some short-comings, Flickr is great for SEO. Everything is indexed in search engines and this platform is a major player in Google’s and Bing’s social search component.

LinkedIn:

• This platform isn’t optimal for communicating with customers. While you can create polls on industry-related issues, LinkedIn shouldn’t be your communication hub.
• LinkedIn flies under the radar but is a very useful, and powerful, tool to promote your brand. It highlights your professionalism and allows employees to create profiles, shedding light on the high quality of your team.
• Don’t count on boosting site traffic through this platform – period.
• Your LinkedIn profile will help with your SEO rankings, usually showing up on the first page of a search. However, it’s not where you want traffic.

YouTube:

• YouTube is an excellent channel to inform and entertain customers. It shows you’re tech-saavy and allows quick responses to customers.
• As long as you update your channel steadily, YouTube is an imperative tool for promoting your brand. Combine this with Facebook and you have a brutal one-two punch.
• New additions to YouTube’s toolbox, such as in-video messaging, are starting to improve driving traffic back to your site.
• Videos have an enormous impact on SEO rankings. Generating brand exposure through building links back to your site, which rank well on every search engine.

Digg:

• Any actual communication with customers is non-existant.
• The opportunity for mass exposure of your brand is available. If a story about, or from, you does well on Digg, it will definitely garner great exposure. However, there’s no guarantee.
• Digg is the most consistant viral-traffic generation site.
• Regardless of the popularity of your posts or stories, they will be indexed quickly and creates visibility among bloggers in your field.

Tumblr:

• Tumblr is a rapidly growing platform. Communication with customers is easy and effective. Tumblr is growing so rapidly that, if it continues to grow at this rate, it will rival Twitter.
• The platform is simple and makes content-sharing easy creating a viable branding tool.
• At the moment, what happens on Tumblr stays on Tumblr. There is virtually no traffic potential.
• Tumblr sites rank well and is compounded by the blogging style it uses to be a useful SEO tool.

Related articles

• Which Social Sites Are Best for Which Marketing Outcomes? [INFOGRAPHIC] (mashable.com)
• Social media tools for startups (globalthoughtz.com)
• Traffic Source Diversity is Essential for Successful SEO (seomoz.org)
• Social Media and your team (essexbrandadvertising.wordpress.com)

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1. Netvibes – Netvibes is the first personalized dashboard publishing platform for the Web. You create customizable dashboards of any trend or topic, make widgets to draw traffic, and publish as many dashboards as you want.

2. Amplify – Not all conversations can be had in fewer than 140 characters, so while Twitter is an amazing place for keeping up with what’s going on in the world, Amplify is the place to talk about it. Everything you share here can also be auto-posted to a number of social networking platforms.

3. Paper.li – This amazing tool organizes links shared on Twitter into an easy to read newspaper-style format. Newspapers can be created for any Twitter user, list or #tag. The result is a professional, multimedia daily report that is easily distributed and easily customized.

4. Twoolr – Twoolr tells you all the statistics on your Twitter profile. How you use your account, how active your profile is, what you tweet and which links you share the most. This tool tells you who you communicate with and how i.e. @ replies, RT’s and #FF’s. Not to mention, your influence – or lack of influence.

5. MentionMap – This tool also provides an analysis of what a particular person is talking about on Twitter and who they are talking to. MentionMap is especially useful to follow what bloggers or journalists are discussing. It saves time and effort that would have been spent skimming through tons of articles and posts.

6. StatPlanet – StatPlanet is a browser-based interactive data visualization and mapping application. It easily and rapidly creates basic interactive Flash maps, as well as feature-rich infographics.The best explanation is via the demo video and these examples.

Related articles

• 11 Twitter & Social Media Tools To Try In 2011 (commscorner.com)
• Cool Websites and Tools [September 21st] (makeuseof.com)
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Recently, the idea of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become popular. So popular, in fact, that CSR is now almost standard protocol for most companies. For those unfamiliar with CSR, the gist is businesses would embrace responsibility for the impact of its activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, and stakeholders. CSR-focused businesses proactively promote the public interest by encouraging community growth and development, and voluntarily eliminating practices that harm the public. Essentially, CSR is a triple bottom line: People, Planet, Profit.

Unlike foundations, companies aren’t legally required to disclose detailed information about their charitable giving. However, failing to maintain a good corporate image may not negatively impact a corporation’s bottom line in the long run, but it will certainly damage the firm’s reputation. The question at hand is: Why is CSR really becoming so popular?

1. Customers Are Fed Up – Large corporations have taken advantage of customers time and time again. Stories of greed, such as Bernie Madoff, are too common yet, in most instances, there are few consequences. The only way customers could be heard was to take their business away from morally corrupt companies and focus on socially responsible businesses. In an attempt to stay afloat, corporations had to listen to their customer’s sentiments or risk being ostracized. The Internet has provided customers with a window into the inner-workings, a voice, and more control. By using social media, the general public is essentially in charge of dictating a company’s giving.
2. The Domino Effect – If you can’t beat them, join them. As more companies adopt a CSR strategy, a company’s reputation could be damaged if they don’t have a similar strategy. In a peer-pressure-style environment, companies are backed into a corner and have no choice. However, it’s important to recognize that aren’t truly “victims” in this situation. There are plenty of benefits, financially and reputation-wise, that make CSR mutually beneficial for the company and the public.
3. It’s An Ethical Obligation – It’s possible that things have gotten so bad, genuine empathy is driving the CSR trend. Such a wide spectrum of people have been effected by an economic depression, natural disaster, or another event equally devastating. It’s possible the trend isn’t corporate, but personal. The senior executives see the despair and the lack of relief – or are experiencing it themselves – and decided to step up to plate. Of course, this probably isn’t the case but as younger generations become senior executives, it may not be that outrageous.

What do you think is creating this influx in corporate philanthropy?

Do you think it will last?

What’s next?

Related articles

• Making the Case for Corporate Social Human Resources: Are You Prepared for HR 3.0? (blogs.forbes.com)
• Corporate Altruism: The Blurring of the Lines Between CSR and Cause Marketing (bethkanter.org)
• Business approach to CSR: An interview with PwC’s Jeff Senne (triplepundit.com)