The landscape of social media monitoring solutions has always had about four tiers. There’s the mostly manual but free, the entry-level business pricing (around $100 per month), the standard (about $500 per month to start) and the expensive (“research” approaches that go into the thousands per month.) While Scout Labs made a big splash a year ago with their $99 per month price point while still offering much of the same features and functionality of the more expensive options, there has still been a gap in the market.

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Corporate Blog Success Starts And Ends With Business Metrics

February 8, 2010

The social media purists will tell you that a corporate blog serves as a community hub for your brand. They say it gives your customers a connection point to your company and engenders a sense of community. In some cases that’s true, but you’re going to see me exploring corporate blogging a lot more this [...]

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What Every Company Should Know About Social Media Policy

February 3, 2010

A social media policy is a company’s first line of defense against risk in social media marketing. Shockingly, only one in three companies has a social media policy in place. While I’m sure that the majority of marketing managers and decision-makers who read Social Media Explorer are ahead of the curve, there’s a good chance [...]

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What Inbound Marketing Is And Why You Should Have It

February 1, 2010

I spend zero dollars marketing my business. “Marketing” in its traditional sense includes advertising, baiting media outlets with press releases and, to paraphrase David Meerman Scott, buy, beg and borrow for leads and attention. The way people find out about my business is through two primary mechanisms: Word-of-Mouth recommendations and finding me through search engine [...]

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Who Is Watching Our Waggle?

January 29, 2010

Karl von Frisch spent years studying honey bees. He was fascinated with how bees found sources of pollen and communicated that back to their fellow hive mates. As he studied, he discovered the bees that actually find the pollen do not return to lead others to it. Instead, they perform intricate dances within the hive [...]

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How Well Do You Know Your Audience?

January 27, 2010

I worked with a major consumer product goods company once that insisted that a particular product it offered was to be marketed to men. New to the fold and not afraid to ask the obvious question, I said, “Why not women?”
All the market research in the world told them women didn’t like their product. All [...]

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BuzzVoice Makes Blogs Accessible, Portable

January 23, 2010

I sat in the audience at SOBCon last May astonished at the presentation given by Glenda Watson Hyatt on accessibility and social media. Glenda, who has cerebral palsy — and I say “has” instead of “suffers from” because if you’ve ever met her, you know damn well she doesn’t suffer from anything — is probably [...]

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The Personal Power Of Social Media

January 22, 2010

Monday was my birthday. I normally ignore it. After 25, there’s not much to look forward to. A few years ago, my parents would call, a few other relatives would send emails and maybe a co-worker or two would remember and wish me happy birthday. The world of social media changes all that.
From Sunday through [...]

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Apparently, It Was All About The Conversation

January 20, 2010

Forrester Research’s Social Technographics Ladder has been the cornerstone of many social media marketing efforts constructed in the last few years. The inactives-to-creators rating of how people use social media essentially shows that most people are either inactive or watch the social web; a few join networks; some collect content; a few (about the same [...]

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