So is Corporate America really ready for real social media?  What do I mean by that?

I don't mean, do they have a Twitter account, or maybe even a Facebook page.  What I mean is are big brands ready for the scrutiny that social media and commentary of all types that result from social media.  These companies invest millions upon millions or even billions on brand building and social media can have a large negative impact on one of these billion dollar brands fairly quickly.

I say they have no choice, social media is here, so embrace it and learn how to deal with the feedback as a positive thing.  You find out customer feedback immediately without having to pry information out of users through canned surveys and focus groups, or worse, a huge drop in sales with no explanation.

The reason I bring this up is I chatted with one of these multi-billion dollar brands the other day (whose name I shall not reveal given this comment) that actually said "we would never participate in a ratings & review site because we want to protect our brand".  This was in reference to Comparz, which ranks business software according to user reviews.  I can see Hyatt or one of those large travel brands saying this about TripAdvisor 10 years ago, but can you imagine now TripAdvisor not having Hyatt hotels in its listings?

The even crazier part of this story is that this company actually sells social media software.  Hmmm.  This just really made me wonder if large brands aren't practising what they preach? Will their brand get erroded by the swift and nimble players that will use social media to help them build their brand, communicate with their users and take in feedback, whether positive or negative, to better their products and services?

I say use social media as an opportunity for market research and customer engagement.  What could be better?

Comparz provides in-depth user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to see Comparz's user reviews for a wide range of software solutions.

I started wondering the other day if Twitter is ruining LinkedIn.

Twitter has changed the behavior of how people connect. Sheer numbers of followers seems to be valued in the Twitter world and there is no assumption that you need to personally know your followers. In fact, I would guess that 99% of the time you aren’t going to know the person you’ve followed on Twitter and that’s ok --that’s the point of Twitter. I must admit that the best thing Twitter has enabled me to do is meet people and build actual relationships with people that I would never have met through other means.

But, as Twitter gets more popular, I notice that people who I don’t know have started to invite me to connect on LinkedIn in huge volumes. The original point of LinkedIn was to be linked to people you know and trust. Then, the LinkedIn platform enables you to request an introduction from one of your contacts if you would like to meet one of your contacts’ contacts (in fact I just happened to receive one of these requests as I was writing this blog).

But now with Twitter (and other forms of social media), people have much less hesitation to try to connect with those they don’t know. Number of followers or connections is seen as valuable. I’m amazed by the number of LinkedIn invites I receive daily from complete strangers who give no reason why I should connect with them.

There are no doubt two camps of LinkedIn types. The traditional camp that will ignore those requests from unknowns and limit their LinkedIn contacts to those that they have actual relationships. And the there’s the social media set that will likely accept more invitations via LinkedIn to follow the trend that more social contacts is better.

It’s not just a numbers game. The more LinkedIn connections you have, the more people can read your updates—meaning the more you can market to your audience. Google is also starting to take into account social media status, which is of course related to number of connections on the top social networks. What this means is now there is a lot of motivation for people to abandon the traditional camp of LinkedIn members and move to the new camp. Then the question remains, will that ruin Linkedin?

Please share your thoughts below!

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software rankings.

I frequently find that social media is best explained and conceptualized through analogies.

As I stood outside this morning, I heard the sound of a lawn mower begin to roar alive and start hacking its way through someone’s jungle of lush green grass. My mind flooded with pictures and connections to social media marketing.  The connection between these semingly very different things is far closer than I think you realize and will hopefully help you understand better the keys to successful social media marketing:

Effort: Have you noticed that the guy that owns the "prize" yard on the street, also invests the most amount of time and resources to making it look the way it does?

THAT's social media marketing!

Sowing: Whether it's grass, flowers or bushes, it always must start with a seed. You sow the seeds into good ground. You water them and are patient for them to grow and bear the fruit that they were intended to. 

Social media marketing is not different. You need to ensure that you are paying attention to not only what seeds you are planting, but they are in the proper ground. ---> Be sure you are creating your social media presence on the right social networks where your target market is.

Sow your seed into that ground at the proper depth. ---> Build a community through targeted, relevant content that lead to conversations and relationships.

Maintenance: Any yard that is left unattended for any period of time, especially in spring and summer, is going to degrade in apperance. You must maintain the yard daily and weekly to ensure it is kept up.

The same exact thing goes for social media marketing. It's spring and summer RIGHT NOW. Your yard will grow and flurish if you put the effort in to keep it up. You have to mow and edge by way of time and attention.

Weeding: If your lawn and flower beds are full of weeds, not only does it look horrible, it will continue to impead on all aspects of the yard.

Strategy, targeting and even removal of aspects of your social media is required. Unfollowing appropriate contacts and modifying aspects of the strategy is important to keep a targeted, engaged community and program.

Consistency: If you do not take the time to consistently weed, maintain and fertilize your yard properly, it will never be anything beyond a yard. Doing so on a consistent basis not only makes it easier to maintain, it keeps it looking great and in a healthy condition.

If there is one thing that social media requires, it is consistency. Content, engagement and time are all extremely important parts of managing a social media program that gets results. Doing these things consistently day in and day is the difference between having a social presence and an effective social media marketing program.

Fertilizing: Properly feeding plants, your lawn and flowers ensures that they have the nutrients required to grow.

Investing into relationships with your target audience, pouring into them with authentic care and interest is what builds relationships. People typically do business with people. Fertilizing relationships makes you real and someone your community wants to do business with.

Landscapers: Some homeowners are too busy, inexperienced or incapable of handling their landscaping. For them, it is important to find and hire the right company to do this for them. 

Social media marketing is well beyond the expertise requirement of pushing a mower or pulling a few weeds every weekend. Professional social media management firms exist that have the knowledge, experience and resources to make your program effective. A social media agency is always an option.

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' Social Media Management software rankings.

For a while, my company was using the freemium version of CoTweet.  Way back in the day, when I was evaluating tools, I narrowed it down to CoTweet and HootSuite.  And at that time, CoTweet won out.  It served us pretty well for a while: multiple people tweeting out on one account, one person getting access to multiple accounts, no need to share username and password, schedule tweets, and the like.  Essentially, all the things that are now standard in enterprise-level Twitter tools.

CoTweet was acquired by ExactTarget, and soon after, ExactTarget sunsetted the fremium option of CoTweet.  They gave users some time to preview their paid offering, Social Engage (which was formerly CoTweet Enterprise).  Knowing that we needed a tool to continue doing what we were doing, my colleague (Heidii Evriviades) and I set out to review a handful of tools, including Social Engage.

Heidii pulled together a spreadsheet (‘matrix’ if you’re in the kind of environment that calls every kind of row-and-column data as such) to help us compare and contrast the results.  I’ve embedded it below for your review and download, if you are faced with a similar task.  And, a few caveats…

We conducted this review around mid-/late-February 2012.  These vendors are evolving quickly.  If you’re reading this significantly after that date, then you might want to revisit some of the sites to check functionality.  Ditto for pricing.

Our baseline/benchmark for review was the free version of CoTweet.  This is why it’s listed at the top of the spreadsheet.  The remainder of the spreadsheet is in no particular order.  I’m not endorsing any specific product here.

Our situation is a B2B software/tech environment with a global presence.  Yours may be different.  Accordingly, what we cite as advantages or disadvantages pertain to our view of it.  Again, yours may be different.

When we used CoTweet, we were limiting ourselves to Twitter.  Over time, our presences grew on other networks, so the ability for a tool to address and work with multiple networks was not initially a concern or requirement, but it is now.  And if we found a tool that ‘won out’ only on Twitter, but fit all of our other criteria, we would consider going with that, and a different tool for other networks.

Major areas of concern included ease of use (transitioning a group of marketers from one tool to another), price, contract terms (could we get out after x months if we didn’t like it?), training, support, scheduling of updates (the horror!), the ability to work across multiple networks, and some baseline reporting/meta-information display.

So, with that, below is our comparison.

The original source of this post is: http://www.subjectivelyspeaking.net/2012/04/05/a-comparison-of-enterprise-twitter-tools/

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' Social Media Management software rankings.

On Twitter, when you find a number of people who are good sources of news or who post interesting and valuable information on specific topics, you can group them together in a “list.”

This allows you to isolate individual members’ posts from the general mass of tweets, which makes it easier to follow posts on subjects you care about—such as online marketing, social media, SEO, developments in your field, and what your competitors are doing and saying.

However, like many things on Twitter, how to create a list is neither apparent nor intuitive.

To create a list, locate your "List" tab on either your Home or Profile view. On your Profile view, it is on a menu line that includes Favorites, Following, Followers, and Lists. On your Home view, it is on a menu line that includes your Twitter name, Activities, Searches, and Lists.

To create a list, click on the List tab, which brings up a menu that contains three items: Create a List, Lists You Follow, and Lists Following You.

Click on Create a List to bring up a form that allows you to enter a list name, list description, and the option to make the list public or private.

To add a person to your list, click on that member's generic person icon with the downward pointing black triangle (Twitter calls it a “shadowy figure”), which is located just to the right of the Following or Not Following tab. A menu pops up that allows you to “Add to list.”

Click on “Add to list” and a “Your lists” menu appears. A list of your lists appears, and you can add a person to an existing list by checking it off.

You also have the option of creating a new list for that person. Click on “Create a list” and the menu appears to fill in a name, description, and public or private setting.

Your Lists tab will now contain all the lists you have created under “Lists by you.”

To remove a person from a list, click on the list, bring up that person, click on his or her profile picture, and the full profile will appear at the right. Click on the generic person icon, and when the menu appears, click on “Add to list.” In the box that appears for that list’s name, uncheck the person and he or she is removed.

Once you’ve created a list, you can edit its settings or delete the list by clicking the Edit and Delete icons. You can mention and link to a list in a tweet by preceding the name of the list with a forward slash (/).

Also be aware that Twitter has placed the following limitations on lists:

• 20 lists permitted per user
• 500 users permitted per list
• List names cannot exceed 25 characters
• List names cannot begin with a numerical character

As Twitter informs us, it is currently not possible to add yourself to a list. Also, there is no feature that enables users or list owners to send a message to every user on a list.

Facebook’s sponsored News Feed ads have gone live. These ads (now called "Featured") enable you to link an advertisement to what a Facebook member has indicated he or she likes. If you are interested in buying a Facebook sponsored ad for your business, the process is fairly simple.

Begin by accessing the Facebook Ads page. 

Click on the “Create an Ad” button in the upper right and a form appears that allows you to choose the type and design of your ad via menu options. You can select either “Sponsored Stories” or normal “Facebook Ads.”

When you choose Sponsored Stories, a screen appears that enables you to select targeting information—the location of where your ad will appear and demographic data, including age, sex, relationship status, education, interests, etc.

You can input any specific interests of your target audience or choose from a "Broad Category Targeting" menu. Clicking a broad category on the left column—such as Music, Movie/film, or Family Status—gives you a number of finer-grain options on the right for that category.

You also select who will see the ad among fans and the general public.

Another portion of the form enables you to choose your ad scheduling and spending options—including your currency, time zone, and your ad’s start time. You can select the default “Run my campaign continuously starting today” or click on the calendar options and choose dates and times.

Lower down, you select your campaign budget and input a dollar amount to spend per day or over the lifetime of the ad.

You also select a bid amount. The form provides a field for you to input your maximum bid, and the tool offers a suggested bid. You are given the option of clicking on “Use Suggested Bid,” which inputs the bid amount the tool suggests.

Here's an example of a suggested bid: 

"Based on your targeting options, Facebook suggests a bid of $0.99 per click. You may pay up to this much per click, but you will likely pay less.

Note: Tax is not included in the bids, budgets and other amounts shown."

Clicking on “Set a Different Bid (Advanced Mode)” allows you to specify a different bid amount and gives you the option of paying per number of impressions (CPM), which is the cost per thousands of times the ad loads, or paying per click (CPC).

Facebook also gives you an Estimated Reach for your ad, which appears in the upper right corner of your screen, based on the demographics you have chosen.

Finally, a ”Review Ad” button at the bottom brings up a screen summarizing your order. You can hit “Edit” to change the parameters or “Place Order” to set the ad in motion.

For help, a button in the form of an envelope appears at the bottom of the

page labeled “Questions about your ad?” This link brings up a form you can fill in and send to the Facebook Help Center.

A “Design Your Ad” FAQ provides answers and details about the process. For example, your ad must include an image and must include a title and body, and is limited to 25 characters for the title and 135 characters for the body.

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.

No doubt there are people online who can make or break a product or service with a review or comment.  Conversely, a chorus of tiny screams might not even get noticed.  Yet they are all important to some degree.  After all, these are your customers. 

The reality is that all the opinions matter.  But they matter to varying degrees.  And what confounds that is the employees of a brand have a fairly fixed bandwidth.  The looming question for many brand managers and business owners is this: How can I pay the right amount of attention, the right kind of attention, to the right audience, to have the best (not necessarily the largest) impact on my business?

Enter the notion of influencer identification.  In a nutshell, these tools do what we’ve all been trying to do manually for a long time: find the people who matter and who people seem to seek.  Many of these tools are digital and track some form of social footprint to see where these people are online, who pays attention, who shares their content, what they talk about, how much juice they have, and the like.  Each of these tools computes these scores a bit differently, and that’s frankly what sets apart one tool from another.

I won’t review them all here. David Strom of ReadWriteWeb did a nice job of this back in October 2011 in "17 Alternatives to Klout."  If you include Klout, you have 18 options.  And I can’t stress enough what David emphasizes in item 1 of his issues list: “There is no single number that can really be universally useful.“

That is, use these tools with a shaker of salt. Which is not to say that they are not to be trusted. But PR and communications professionals performed the task of influencer management long before these tools were around. That type of sleuthing work doesn’t stop because there are some new digital kids on the block. 

Instead, look for ways to take the output of these tools and augment what you, as a PR pro, communications pro, or business owner are already doing: listening, reading, identifying, reaching out, forging relationships, long before the ask and long before any sale.

A tool I like to use is called FollowerWonk. See tip #5 here from Christopher Penn on how (and why) to use FollowerWonk. It’s a bit manual, but the mathematics behind it are transparent. As in, there’s no guessing why so and so ranks higher in influence for such and such than someone else.

Another powerful Twitter search tool is Topsy (not 100 percent squarely focused on influencer management, but it flags influencers). Topsy is just Twitter search on steroids, but if you squint a little, you can use the results in a different way to help you uncover some insights. It just takes a little work.

So, if you have money, go with one of the paid tools. If you have time (instead of money), use some of the free tools.  In addition, comment here, or find a discussion group on LinkedIn for others who are using free tools and techniques to identify and dissect influencers. 

And if you have both time and money, I suggest you do both. Digging in manually and then comparing what you find to what the tools discover will be immensely valuable.

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.

In the process of researching and reviewing Twitter unfollower tracking tools, I discovered that being unfollowed arouses a good deal of passion, reflection, and conflict. I’m sure the issue would make a fascinating psychological study.

To a sensitive soul, a Twitter unfollow can be a devastating blow.

As Jamie Hahn writes, “Getting unfollowed on Twitter hurts. Even after almost a year in the Twitterverse, I still feel the sharp sting of rejection each time my follower count drops.”

Similarly, Jeannie Moon writes, “It is like middle school with all the cliques and royalty and the unexplained dumpings. I like to think I’m past it, but I do wonder what I did wrong when I’m unfollowed. Still insecure after all these years.”

As Girl on the Contrary notes, “There is something so inherently hostile about unfriending or unfollowing someone that people tend to react extremely.” 

Some see the reaction to being unfollowed as a new form of hypersensitivity ushered in by social media. Stacey Nerdin in “How I Feel about Being

Unfriended or Unfollowed," writes:

“Unfriended. Unfollowed. Unsubscribed. Do these words strike sadness, insecurity, or offense in your heart? My feeling: THEY SHOULDN’T. I think social media has really skewed our ideas of friendships, relationships, and our feelings of self worth.”

Also contemplating what she sees as uncomfortable new complexities brought on by social media, Girl on the Contrary describes her love/hate relationship with social media and laments, “I long for a simpler time when it was easy to stop being someone’s friend. You just ignored their calls and texts. Done. It was swell. But now, on top of ignoring their calls and texts, you have to unfollow or defriend them."

Some people simply shrug off being unfollowed. Says Glen, “I do not take it personally if someone chooses to not follow or like me on social media platforms.”

Similarly, says John Bolyard, “If someone unfollows me it just means they are looking for information not related to my tweets. Nothing personal.”

Very adult and reasonable attitudes. (Are they in denial?)

Others are not so sanguine, however, and for those who see being unfollowed as an affront, how to deal with unfollowers is a charged issue. Eye-for-an-eye retaliation often is deemed an appropriate response.

Among those who see it this way is Loralee Choate, who writes, “I have a policy…if you don’t follow me, I don’t follow you. Plain and simple.”

Scary Mommy Jill Smokler in her Twitter etiquette guide also takes a hard-line, tit-for-tat view on unfollowers: “Have you ever been followed by someone only to follow them back to be unfollowed? How rude is that? Two can play that game, so consider yourself dumped.”

Moving beyond feelings of inadequacy, shame, and retribution is another common theme. Under the guise of coming out of the unfollowed closet, Liz Strauss explores her feelings and ultimately looks to transcend them, writing that:

"I don’t ‘get’ all the reasons people have for why they follow and unfollow folks. I suspect that some are as irrational as the reasons we buy things, sell things, and marry the people we do. Contrary to urban legend I don’t know anyone who’s died of ‘unfollow embarrassment.’ ”

A very mature perspective.

How about you? Been unfollowed? (Does a woodchuck chuck wood?) How do you feel about it?

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.

Eric Schmidt of Google, at the Washington Ideas Forum last October, in a widely reported comment said, “There is what I call the creepy line. The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

Has Facebook crossed the creepy line?

Commenting on the amount of personal data that Facebook presents in its new Timeline, Lakatoo CTO Ben Werdmuller said that “it's undeniably, pervasively creepy, to a level we've hitherto been unprepared for in human society.”

Similarly, Mashable founder Pete Cashmore, discussing Facebook's new frictionless sharing feature that divulges more information about members publicly, said, “There's a big problem, however: Users may be 'creeped out' by all this automated sharing of their Web activity and grow suspicious of the apps using it.”

Even more disturbing to many critics is Facebook’s selling its members’ data to third parties without the members’ knowledge or consent.

As The Wall Street Journal reported last October, “Many of the most popular applications, or ‘apps,’ on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people's names and, in some cases, their friends' names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies,”

As Robert X. Cringely and others describe it, selling members’ data, denying it, promising to stop when caught red handed, and then doing it again is Facebook’s modus operandi.

Repeatedly changing members’ privacy settings is part of the process, according to critics and privacy advocates.

As Valerie Helmbreck reported in "How Facebook sells your personal info—and gets away with it," the message from Joan Goodchild, senior editor of CSO (Chief Security Officer) Online, is that "each time Facebook touts a re-design or a new format, you can bet your last nickel that it’s being done as an excuse to re-set your privacy controls to a Facebook-designated default that lets the site’s owners peddle your info and activities far and wide.”

Helmbreck notes that more than a dozen privacy and consumer protection organizations have filed a complaint with the FCC claiming Facebook plays with privacy settings intentionally to make users’ personal info fair game for commercial use.

Facebook, meanwhile, continues to be caught tracking its members’ activities off the Facebook site, while continually denying that it is intentionally tracking them.

Said Bill Snyder in “Why Facebook is selling you out — and won't stop,” “Facebook has fooled us not just once, but over and over again, blithely exposing users' private information to any advertiser or creep who happens to get interested. It's a tired drama.”

In February 2011, Bianca Bosker reported that Facebook was moving forward with a plan to give third-party developers and external websites access to users' home addresses and cell phone numbers. 

The problem, as Bosker explained, was “Facebook's willingness to change the rules of play—first encouraging people to share personal information with a more limited group of friends, then allowing that data to be accessed in new, unexpected ways.”

Dan Fletcher in Time Magazine wrote that Facebook was on the path to become “the Web’s sketchy Big Brother, sucking up our identities into a massive Borg brain to slice, dice and categorize for advertisers.”

Fletcher noted that Facebook was not a philanthropic organization, rather, “It's a business, and there's a tremendous business opportunity around Facebook's member data. The more updates Facebook gets you to share and the more preferences it entreats you to make public, the more data it's able to pool for advertisers.” 

This behavior does not sit well with privacy advocates, however. As Brad Stone wrote in “How Facebook sells your friends,” the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) was among those who filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. Stone quotes Marc Rotenberg, EPIC’s executive director, as saying that people join Facebook to share their lives with friends, yet the information they reveal "is being used by strangers for completely unrelated commercial purposes." That, he said, “is a little unsettling."

Many critics believe Facebook has gone too far, and has gone about its business in too deceptive a manner.

Said ZephyrP on Hacker News. “Facebook consistently disregards user privacy issues and doesn't work in a fashion many people believe to be ethical in any sense.”

Wrote Bill Snyder, “My buddy Robert X. Cringely wonders if Facebook is evil or merely incompetent. That's an easy one: both — not to mention arrogant and greedy.”

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.

It is a common and vexing issue for Twitter users: You notice that your follower count has declined, but you can’t tell who has unfollowed you. Twitter itself offers no tool to detect unfollowers. 

The desire to identify unfollowers is keen enough among Twitterers, however, that a good number of tools have been created that promise to uncover the treacherous souls who have abandoned you. 

While the promise is tantalizing, many of the tools deliver disappointing results.  In fact, some of the tools delivered no results, some only partial results, and none of the tools I tried was able to provide a complete historical record of those who had unfollowed me.

The tool that provided the purest and most direct unfollower hunting experience was who.unfollowed.me. It has a clean, simple interface and produces results quickly, but only shows you the most recent unfollowers—the past seven days. I was able to find and terminate 11 unfollowers in my first foray. Hasta la vista, baby! And two more unfollowers were delivered up later.

SocialBro also delivered up recent unfollowers in a satisfying manner, although the process was more involved and SocialBro's findings differed from who.unfollowed me's results.

SocialBro, a multifaceted twitter intelligence tool with a nice console, provides a lot of views and information, and "Recent Unfollows" is just one item on the "Your account" tab. You must press a synchronize button to sync your Twitter account with SocialBro, and a message tells you that unfollower tracking only works after your second synchronization. 

But voila! There they were, ferreted out and served up piping hot—nine fresh unfollowers. And SocialBro found six deserters who were different than those presented by who.unfollowed.me.  SocialBro also allows you to whack them back—check off each unfollower, hit an unfollow button, and SocialBro performs a mass automated unfollowing. Sweet. A yellow triangle with an exclamation point declares them unfollowed. Toast.

Like Friend or Follow, SocialBro also will show you who among those you follow is not reciprocating, and allow you to easily select multiple members and purge them en mass.

Other than who.unfollowed.me and SocialBro, nothing else came close to smoking out unfollowers.

Friend or Follow is a good-looking tool with a clean interface that delivers results quickly. However, it only shows you those who you follow and who are not following you back. It does not show you explicitly who has unfollowed you, or when. The functionality you get for free is limited, and a higher-level membership is $9.99 per month.

Your Tweeter Karma is similar to Friend or Follow but less slick. It delivers data fast and shows you those who you are following and who are not following you back, and gives you an easy way to unfollow them. But it does not show explicitly who unfollowed you. It’s free and offers a button for donations.

Goodbye, Buddy! bills itself as an unfollower detector, and it looks promising, but it came up empty. To use it, you simply go to the @goodbyebuddy Twitter page, hit follow, then visit the website. Goodbye, Buddy! presented a graph and stats, but produced zero unfollowers. Although it invited me to come back later, Goodbye, Buddy! gave me nothing, nada.

Twunfollow, a free e-mail alert unfollower service, was another disappointment. You sign up on the site, it verifies your e-mail address, and you select your alert options. However, it had no unfollower data initially for my account and provided no unfollower history. It later delivered an e-mail reporting that I had one unfollower, but did not identify the unfollower. Not an impressive showing.

Qwitter also failed to deliver a single unfollower, although it flashed a message on the screen that said, “We'll track your qwitters automatically from this moment on. In a week you can expect your first qwitter email notification.” I’ll be waiting.

All in all, the tools proved a motley collection that fell short in their ability to serve up unfollowers. Several of the tools will generate a complete list of who is not following you back, and the unfollowers will likely be among them. But for pinpointing unfollowers, a combination of who.unfollowed.me and SocialBro seems the best you can do.

Comparz has user reviews and ranking of social media management tools.  Click here to view Comparz' social media management software rankings.

I examined the controversial topic of social media ROI in depth in a series of articles in 2009. (See “Social Media’s Elusive ROI”). Two years later, social media ROI is still a nagging and hotly contested issue.

Olivier Blanchard has noticed this too, and is extremely frustrated, writing in a recent post:

“As annoying and curious as it was, back in 2009, when so many so-called ‘experts’ and ‘gurus’ couldn’t figure out how to explain, much less determine the ROI of anything relating to social media, it is inexcusable today, less than a month from 2012. We’ve talked about this topic how many times?” 

What’s the problem?

One key difficulty lies in the inability to trace or correlate, with any certainty, conversations that take place in social media networks about products with the eventual sale of products that may occur. 

Another impediment is that many marketers do not believe that social media’s aim should be to sell anything, or should be measured at all.

The argument basically pits two camps against one another—the moneybaggers and aura builders. The aura builders believe social media has obvious value to a business, like PR, but the value is not quantifiable and need not be quantified or justified.  

The moneybaggers believe no marketing should be undertaken without the goal of selling and making money and that all social media efforts should have a clear and justifiable ROI case. (See “ROI Is The Thing, The ONLY THING When It Comes to Social” by  Tim O’Connor.)

As Rick Curtis of Amaze said of this problem, “Social practitioners favor soft metrics, such as reputation, engagement and participation, whilst senior management prefer metrics that are very much at the hard end of the scale.”

Pressured to produce ROI figures for social media, a number of analysts and marketers in the moneybagger camp have put forward formulas and methodologies they say solve the problem—among them Olivier Blanchard.

That his formula has not been widely recognized and adopted is the root of Blanchard’s indignation. “At the very least,” he says, “they should have heard a rumor that the ‘question’ had been answered. Right?”

Curtis, meanwhile, cites an Altimeter Group report that showed that 74% of the corporate social strategists surveyed said their primary duty was to measure and report on return on investment of social media, with almost one-half saying the creation of ROI measurements was their top internal objective for the forthcoming year.

“But,” Curtis says, “developing a commonly agreed set of key performance indicators (KPIs) for social media is notoriously difficult.” 

Curtis and the corporate social media strategists he cites obviously don’t consider the ROI matter settled.

But Blanchard has no patience for them. “What will it take for the asshats pretending to be experts to stop talking about ROI as if it were some arcane mythical metric?” he asks.

Meanwhile, there are many marketers and metrics specialists who continue to scratch their heads while pronouncing social media ROI unclear, unanswered, and too difficult to formulate.  Among them is Nick Robinson, who in "Social Media ROI: Why the Status Quo Is Broken" wrote: 

“One of the hottest topics within the social media space is ROI or return on investment. The problem with the formula is that marketers don’t have the ability to connect 10 interactions on 10 different social networks to bottom line revenue or cost reduction.”

Santorini Simon is another puzzled marketer, writing in “Social Media ROI and being realistic” that social media ROI is not clear to him, and musing that "Leads generated via social media oriented destinations convert (sometimes, generally) to trackable website traffic which you then funnel to a sales transaction = Measurable ROI…It’s not that simple, though…" 

Among those who see ROI as irrelevant is Sherilynn Macale, who in "Social media ROI: It's not about immediate results" wrote:

“To borrow a phrase from Gary Vaynerchuk, the author of The New York Times and Wall Street Journal Best Seller, Crush It!, measuring immediate return on investment in social media is like measuring the ROI of your mom and everything she’s done for you." 

Blanchard, however, is apoplectic over what he sees as the blindness of these marketers. "Seriously," he says, "you have to be either completely disconnected from the channels you claim to be an expert participant in, or purposely avoiding this stuff to still get it wrong." 

What's the resolution? There is none. Both camps are right, and both ways of looking at ROI are valid—for different aspects of social media. Some social media initiatives and gains are measurable and some are not. Some benefits are hard and some are soft. There is no single, simple, general formula for measuring ROI across all forms, and forums, of social media.

The answer, as it often is, is “It depends.”

For marketers, bloggers, PR practitioners, and others who want to track the reach and impact of their tweets, there are many tools out there that are freely available online, but only a few that are really useful.

Tweetreach is one of the best, a great tool that allows you to enter keywords and then presents in a clear and nicely organized format an analysis of the tweets that incorporate those keywords.  Type in a topic, title, or name, and Tweetreach will tell you who tweeted and retweeted the phrase and how many people it reached. 

The only downside to Tweetreach is that its results are ephemeral, lasting only for a few days and then disappearing, so you have to use it immediately to track results.  

A more permanent record is available through Topsy, an excellent tool that allows you to search for topics by keyword and gives you the source and a full trail of tweets for the topic, flagging those members it deems influential.

Another good way to track the reach of your tweets is to use Twitter’s own search feature. Enter keywords, and it provides a good record of the Twitter members who have tweeted those words and phrases.

Some people also like Monitter for real-time tracking, but its dark screen is difficult to read and navigate.

Collectively, these tools can give you a good idea of how well your topics are resonating.

In a different vein are tools such as Tweet Grader and Tweetlevel that give you a profile of your influence on Twitter, a personal snapshot with stats and scores that are amusing but fairly superficial.  

Tools like SocialBro and Twitalyzer also give you insights into your influence and the makeup and influence of other Twitter members and followers, and you may find the data they provide useful.

There are many more free Twitter tools available for dedicated and general purposes that you can discover on lists like The Ultimate Collection of Free Twitter Tools, Twenty-Six Twitter Tools to Track Tweets, 100 Top Twitter Tools, The 18 Best Tools to Analyze Your Twitter Hotness, and The Only Twitter Applications List You'll Ever Need.

Sample them and see which ones work best for you.

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.

Nimble, which has been a free social CRM tool, is about to begin charging $15 per month for business users. Said Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara in an e-mail: “It would be wonderful if we could offer Nimble for free for everyone forever; however, I know you can understand that to continue to grow and meet the needs of our users, and to continue providing super cool new technologies, it is necessary to monetize our platform.”

This is the reality of business of course.  Most companies cannot do business for free.

If the movie “The Social Network” is an accurate illustration, the driving force behind Mark Zuckerberg and his cohorts in creating Facebook was not to delight their users, but to make a billion dollars.

Ditto for companies like Microsoft, whose many trials, fines, and sanctions showed how the company was more obsessed with controlling the market and killing competitors than delighting customers. In the process, Microsoft often was taken to task for bundling, tying, undermining standards, and putting out immature, insecure, and buggy products to gain an edge or establish a foothold in a market sector. Microsoft's marketing, meanwhile, had a very cheery, friendly, "where do want to go today" demeanor.

Money and control continue to be the main concern of Facebook, Twitter, and Google as they engage in an escalating race to out-monetize one another, embedding more and more advertising in their services and exploiting user data, often at the expense of pleasing their users.

The commotion engulfing Klout also centers on this theme—Klout’s seeming indifference to its users and the willingness to exploit their data.

While companies may talk about delighting their customers, this is usually recognized as a means to an end, rather than the end itself. 

Consultants like Peppers & Rogers, meanwhile, have made an entire career out of telling companies that the way to succeed is to care about your customers—which shows that this is something companies need to learn.

The saccharine façade that pervades many organizations and their “About Us” and mission statements is another story.

To truly please their customers would require many companies to scrap or completely overhaul their products, services, and cultures. This is rarely done. More often the modus operandi is to “perfume the pig” and “sell what’s on the truck.” Ever heard of cloud washing?

This same mentality is seen in the treatment of workers in today’s economy. Recall IBM CEO Sam Palmisano in the news with President Obama, smiling and pledging to support Obama’s effort to act responsibly to help stimulate jobs and end the recession, while the next day IBM secretly laid off thousands of workers and denied it to the media, while raking in billions in profits that quarter.

In the movie “Assassination of a High School President” the voice on the phone says, “Let me give you a freebie, kid. Money's got something to do with everything.”

Current movies like “Inside Job,” Margin Call,” and “The Ides of March” offer an accurate reflection of where we are.

The joke here is that “transparency” is the wisdom so often prescribed for succeeding in social media.

Along these lines, Olivier Blanchard wrote an excellent blog in which he says, “You already know what’s right. And by ‘right,’ I don’t just mean ‘ethical’ or what you can get away with. I mean ‘right.’ Do that.” 

Great advice.

There are, of course, companies that care about their customers, employees, and society at large (and Nimble may be one of them). But so many seem not to be.

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.

For SMBs and social media, it seems the spirit is willing but the flesh unable.

A new survey by Social Strategy1 and OfficeArrow found that 67% of small business owners are not engaging in social media because of fear and a sense of inadequacy in their social media skills, resources, and ability to handle social media.

The findings show that while 60% of small business owners say they want to engage in social media, they just don’t know how to proceed.

What’s holding them back, said the study, “is a sense of overload, in particular fear of the resources required to meet the expectations of social media users.” The survey found that 51% of small businesses fear sharing sensitive information; 50% say there is too much social media to manage; and 44% fear “information overload.”

Small business owners find the prospect of social media market overwhelming and need more guidance, said Steve Ennen, President of Social Strategy1, adding that they need a "playbook" to proceed.

The study found that most small businesses do not plan to invest in social media until they understand the practices and payoffs. They also need to acquire more experienced staffing and expertise. “The prospect of building it is daunting, Few have hired anyone who knows social media to do it for them,” said Mike Lewis, Chairman of Social Strategy1.

Ennen advises small businesses to start by just listening rather than talking. “The most important resource is a specialist in monitoring social media,” said Ennen, who sees social media monitoring and analysis as a way to learn what customers like and dislike about your business and competitors.  Then, based on that information, you can automate tasks to address their needs and serve them better, and communicate with them about the issues in meaningful ways.

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.

Adding insult to injury for many users, Facebook has introduced a new form of sponsored advertising to its already besieged news ticker feature.

As Peter Pachal wrote on mashable.com: “If you’re annoyed by the Facebook news ticker already, just you wait. Facebook confirmed that it has introduced sponsored stories, or ads, to the ticker.”

Facebook is allowing sponsored ads to be placed by advertisers via a self-service form.  The ads appear within the Ticker’s news feed of events posted by friends, and although they are labeled “Sponsored,” the ads have the appearance of regular user content. 

The Ticker appears to have been planted with the aim of introducing a more covert and subtle form of advertising.  As Lauren Fisher reported on TheNextWeb.com, “This is the first time that we have seen Facebook integrate advertising so seamless into the organically created content on the site.”

The move, said Fisher, “is clearly an attempt to get more people clicking on ads, by ‘disguising’ them.”

A report on dailydot.com called the approach "sneaky," while Emil Protalinski on ZDnet.com wrote that, “while Facebook will undoubtedly argue that the Sponsored label is there, the placement is still questionable.”

Many users already had a strong dislike for the news ticker, which was introduced in August. As Mashable’s Pachal wrote: “The new approach, and the ticker specifically, received tepid reviews from Facebook users, and some reacted with outright anger.”

Likewise, David Pogue in The New York Times wrote that the Facebook changes “have done more than ruffle a few feathers; they’ve practically plucked the chickens.”

Surveys by Mashable, Sodahead, and others showed that a large majority of Facebook’s user base, as high as 75% to 86%, strongly disliked the news ticker and other new features.

By introducing ads disguised as content to the news ticker, Facebook may be pouring gasoline on the fire. As Emil Protalinski remarked on ZDnet.com, “Facebook is playing a dangerous game. It could start to lose the trust of its users as its ads are increasingly integrated into the service.”

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.

It’s looking more and more like local mobile search will be the next major trend for SMBs.

Based on survey findings and key indicators, the local mobile advertising and search market is exploding, and analysts and experts are advising SMBs to gear up for mobile local search—including mobile advertising networks and mobile search engine optimization (SEO)—so that prospects searching for goods and services on their smartphones will find their stores, visit them, and purchase their wares. 

ComScore’s most recent State of Local Search study showed mobile search skyrocketing, with 77.1 million mobile subscribers accessing local content on a mobile device, up 34% from last year. Local content users accounted for 33% of mobile subscribers, with 87% owning a GPS-capable handset.

As the mobile advertising arena heats up, new companies are announcing mobile advertising and search services. Facebook recently entered the arena, announcing a new mobile ad network and joining a bevy of vendors that includes Google, Apple, AT&T, RIM, T-Mobile, Yahoo!, AOL, and numerous others.  

Also joining the fray was Bing, which launched a new mobile search service to challenge Google, which has about a 99% share of the mobile search market. 

Google, meanwhile, announced that it was on course to take in $2.5 billion from mobile advertising, compared with $1 billion a year ago. Google continues to expand and enhance its mobile ad service with new ad formats and capabilities.

BIA/Kelsey, which specializes in local media and advertising, sees local mobile advertising as a huge burgeoning opportunity for SMBs.  At the DMS 11 Summit for Small-Business Advertising Solutions, Mike Boland, Senior Analyst and Program Director at BIA/Kelsey, described his firm's research that showed on-the-go users as highly motivated buyers, with 89% searching because they have an immediate need. Of these mobile searchers, he said, 7 out of 10 contact the business, 61% call, 59% visit the store, and more than 50% make a purchase.

For SMBs, the message is clear: Position your business to pop up on those mobile users’ smartphone screens. 

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.

The general feeling has been that social media marketing is beneficial for SMBs. And indeed, marketing gurus have been prescribing social media engagement to SMBs as an obvious no-brainer.

Nielsen’s recent Social Media Report, however, has some marketers questioning the value of social media marketing for SMBs.

Nielsen's survey found that, besides connecting with family and friends, 68% of social media users go to social networking sites to read product reviews, and more than 50% use the sites to provide product feedback.  Other top purposes were entertainment (67%), as a creative outlet (64%), to learn about products (58%), and to get coupons or promotions (54%).

These findings caused Greg Sterling to ask whether SMBs were wasting their time on social media. As Sterling wrote, “The rush by SMBs into Facebook and, to a lesser degree, other social media sites (e.g., Twitter) is well documented by me and others. But is it misplaced?”

The Nielsen data, Sterling argued, shows that creating a showcase of customer reviews/responses and offering deals are things most aligned with consumer usage of social media sites. Everything else, he said, “may be misplaced effort.”  The survey data, he said, casts doubt on the efficacy of social media for lead-generation and customer acquisition for local merchants.

Erin Iwata supports Sterling’s view, arguing that social media may not be appropriate for many SMBs. Although the Facebook “Like” button is ubiquitous, she says, “it doesn’t necessarily follow that Faceboook is right for your business.” The decision factors should include your audience, budget, and business objectives.  

Nielsen's findings may indicate a need to overturn our thinking, said Sterling. “I believe that social media can be effectively used as a CRM tool; however the current expectations may be too great vs. what it can deliver — especially for SMBs.”

Many marketing gurus have been encouraging SMBs to engage in social media marketing, touting social media as cheap and easy.

Spencer Belkofer, for example, writes on dreamgrow.com that more and more small businesses are engaging in social media marketing. Why, he asks? “Because it’s cheap and easy to use.” 

However, an increasing numbers of critics are attacking this idea, pointing out that social media requires an investment of time and money that many small businesses do not have.  

For example, the author of the SMEBS blog writes that “It’s not all unicorns and rainbows like the industry likes to portray,” adding that, “The cold hard facts are that social media takes time and money despite the industry push to present it as free and easy.”

Similarly, Erin Iwata on the Heinrich Report blog writes that while opening a Facebook or Twitter account may be free, “maintaining these accounts requires a huge investment of time and resources…”

Coming up with compelling tweets and posts is time-consuming and requires creativity. Read Larry Carlat’s “Confessions of a Tweeter” in The New York Times in which he tells how he became burnt out in his effort to stay continually brilliant on Twitter.

A good number of midsize and larger companies employ PR and communications agencies to groom and tend their Facebook and Twitter pages. They also hire professional writers to write blogs, tweets, articles, and other social media content. Many small businesses cannot afford these types of services.

What about all the surveys portraying SMBs as enamored with social media? Just because surveys may show that SMBs like the idea of social media marketing, or recognize its potential, does not mean that SMBs will actually engage in social media marketing, or have the ability to do so successfully.

As the SMEBS blogger observes, SMBs “love to talk about stuff but when it gets to doing it the walk rarely lives up to the talk.”

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.

Comparz vistors are continually looking for advice and ideas about products that could help manage their social marketing and trying to stay on top of the latest news.  Last week we published a brief post about the problem with Klout.  The online discussion of Klout has heated up this week, and now there is a movement asking users to delete their Klout accounts.

The “Delete Klout” movement stems in part from a recent article that portrayed the company in a negative fashion and in part from some of the negative publicity from a recent change in the Klout product.  In an article in Social Media Today, Rohn Jay Miller argues that Klout provides very little benefit to the users that they measure, and that Klout the company gets a very large benefit by being able to sell access to Klout scores of their users.  Miller says:

The fundamental evil of Klout is that it’s a venture capital-backed company looking to leverage into a big IPO payday and the only value proposition they offer is their ability to identify, train and exploit people they can sell to advertisers as “key influencers,” in a taxonomy of business interests.

What do these “key influencers” get for their efforts?  Pennies.  Swag. Chocolate bars. Little discounts.  These people are the entire sum of the Klout value proposition.  Klout exists for the benefit of advertisers, not for the people Klout measures and then chooses to engage.

Miller is not the only one to complain about Klout.  As we mentioned last week, Pam Moore critiqued Klout, by pointing out that Klout is just one single metric that can’t really track real influence and credibility – it can only estimate your influence by tracking online activity.  This doesn’t count any panel visits you may have been on, the startups you have advised, or the quality of your advice.

Unfortunately, this is not the only front where Klout is fighting a PR battle (in fact, they are getting PR about their bad PR).  There is outrage about their recent algorithm change, and concerns about privacy.

Ultimately, the stated reasons for the Klout hate are:

• The Klout business model is unfair
• The recent algorithm change was unfair
• What Klout measures isn’t really influence
• Klout is invading privacy by tracking Klout of users who never opted in (which Klout changed on Friday)

In Defense of Klout

The anti-Klout movement already has traversed the social world, and I don’t think the Klout defenders have yet to have their voices heard.  Klout responded to the privacy concerns with a policy change on Friday.  The greatest defense of Klout right now is that it is so heavily used, that so many people have adopted the product and have worked hard to get their Klout scores so high. 

Influencers are important, and a service that can help marketers home in on the key influencers of their market has a real value. The tools to manage social media will continue to proliferate.  We will keep you up to date on the changes and continue to provide you with user reviews.

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.

Frank Reed on Marketing Pilgrim, in a report entitled “Are SMBs Just Confused About WOM and Social?” points out that the Hiscox study shows that only 24% of respondents said they get involved with social media, while 64% said they “either don’t use it for their business, don’t know enough about it, or don’t give a rip at all!”

A report by Machus Corporation also tells us that “Small Businesses Not Using Social Media Tools.” The report cites a widely reported Zoomerang Online Surveys and Polls study that found that about one-half of surveyed SMBs said they use social media marketing to reach customers, but that social media was “underused” by SMBs.  The study found that SMBs “are not using these tools to the fullest potential to capture their customers' attention.”

A study reported on gaebler.com offers even more startling results, informing us that “A Quarter Of Small Businesses Hate Social Media.” The report cites a recent survey from iContact that revealed that “one in four small businesses hate social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Groupon.”