ITster!

As more and more companies have started to build their online presence using social media tools, it has become important to have a policy to guide employees on what they can and cannot do online.

So in order to fill this need rtraction and technology lawyer David Canton are pleased to announce the release of our first PolicyTool, a free social media policy generator.

After answering a few short questions about your business and your employees roles online, you are provided with a full social media policy. We have worked with David Canton to review other social media policies, and relied on his legal perspective to build a strong and reliable tool that we are excited to share with the community.

This is being released as a free resource because we hope that it will encourage businesses of all sizes to start engaging in online conversations and feel safe doing so.

If you would like to see other policy tool modules, or have suggestions for improvements to the Social Media Policy Generator, then please submit them to our feedback form.

To learn more about social media, and how your company can take advantage of the many different technologies available, please check out services or contact us with specific questions.

The team at Tweetdeck just released an update to their social media monitoring application. If you’re not familiar with Tweetdeck I urge you to check it out now. It allows you to engage with a number of  platforms, and update you status across services like Twitter and Facebook and to monitor online conversations easily.

With this most recent update, the Tweetdeck has added YouTube and Flickr to their list of supported sites. You can now watch YouTube clips and view Flickr photos all within Tweetdeck. Now if one of your friend links to one of these site, you don’t have to leave the application.

One very neat update is column navigation. Now you can quickly jump to any column by hovering over a link a the bottom of the window. You no longer have to scroll horizontally across a screen.

There are also a couple of back end improvements. The Twitter API rate limit was increased and Tweetdeck now makes 350 calls per hour. This is great for anyone managing multiple accounts, or interacting with a high number of followers. We have also been given the option to edit search terms without having to delete the query and start over.

Its great to see the group at Tweetdeck constantly improving their application. Tweetdeck is quickly becoming the one program to easily manage your social media activities.

While it is still early, 2010 is definitely shaping up to be the year of the mobile device.

There are a number of applications that allow you to share your location with your friends. Gowalla, Foursquare are two that have made this into a game, allowing users to collect points and “dropped items“.

Metro’s recent announcement that they have partnered with Foursquare has taken these applications from permissible non creepy stalking to useful tools.

Metro newspaper is a free daily that is handed out at transit stations in major Canadian cities. They have also been active participants in new media, with numerous Twitter accounts and casually written blogs. They claim a circulation of over 800,000.

When a user checks into a location near a site that Metro has a reviewed, a Foursquare tip will be displayed on their phone with the option to read a full review.

There are other applications like AroundMe or CanPages that use you GPS location to return search results related to your location. However Foursquare has the benefit over these application of being crowd sourced and therefore updated more frequently.

While this announcement only speaks about reviews, there is also the potential for breaking news to be shared in the same way, a featuring lacking in other proximity applications.

While augmented reality could arguably be considered more interesting, there is still a barrier of entry (for example the need to install applications to your device). Foursquare and similar services are web based and are easy to use, therefore encouraging more users.

What Is Your Business Doing?

Social media gives businesses of all types the ability connect with their customers. And potential clients are asking to be connected with you. So what are you doing to converse with them? The tools are available and just waiting to be used in news and interesting ways.

The seminar is a beginner-level primer on the tools and techniques of social media, but is open to everyone, regardless of knowledge level. The what, the why and the how of social media will be answered in this 90 minute session, with specifics on how your business can start engaging clients in new ways.

A substantial portion of the time will be devoted to answering your questions. By the end of the session you will understand:

1. What social media is and how it helps you to build a relationship with your customers.
2. Why social media is relevant for your business or industry.
3. Some of the tools you should use – Twitter, Facebook, RSS Feeds etc

Course is currently offered on January 27th and February 24th at 9 AM and both sessions are limited to 25 participants. For more information and to book your spot:

I spent the last week at a ski resort in Vermont and while there I was surprised to see a large number of stickers for various ski and snowboard brands all over the ski lift posts.

The riders who stuck these all over the poles were creating free advertising, and at a fraction of the potential cost to officially brand the whole post. They risked having their lift ticket revoked to plaster stickers everywhere (and essentially vandalize the resort).

How does this relate to your business?

These riders were excited enough about a brand to reach out of a moving chair lift to place a sicker on a post 40 feet in the air. All it cost the company was a bunch of vinyl stickers. In return, I visited the stores I saw “advertised” and explored the brands I’d seen while riding up the mountain.

What are you doing to empower your customers to talk about you? Are they willing to take risks to promote your brand?

At rtraction we don’t like the concept of a ’social media expert” and have offered recommendations on how  to check up on your social media consultant’s credentials before engaging with them.

Recently a number of prominent social media blogs have also come out against the idea of a social media expert. Chris Brogan wrote a post explaining how New Marketing Labs measures social media marketing and David Armano compared the current social media professional scene to the early days of the internet, when people with little expertise flocked to that new field.

The “mainstream” press has even gotten in on the action. Business Week published a cautionary article titled “Beware the Social Media Snake Oil”, in which Stephen Baker does a great job explaining what social media is, the potential pitfalls, but also the huge rewards.

Social media has definitely become a  bandwagon phenomenon that a lot of people are jumping on to in the hopes of making a quick dollar.

The key takeaway from all of these articles is make sure you don’t fall into the “buzz trap” that a lot of so called “social media experts” promote. It is easy to get caught up in the data; number of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or YouTube views. Ultimately though, social media should been seen as another tool to drive revenue, but in new and exciting ways.

Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of a social media campaign can be tough, but is not altogether impossible. Assessing the data is the first step, but equating the numbers to real world sales is when you see the ROI benefits. An honest social media team should be able to relate your efforts online to an actual benefit.

Case studies and practical examples will separate the doers from the talkers. As Mitch Joel has explained “It’s easy to tell a Social Media Snake Oil Salesman from the real deal: just track and see how much of their work day is spent self-promoting on Twitter, Facebook, Blogs etc… versus doing the actual work for clients”

At rtraction we don’t focus on how social media has helped our brand, but how it has been used to promote and expand our client’s message. We can cite examples like the 1000 Acts of Kindness campaign, and how we used Facebook and Twitter with resounding success. We have many more examples so feel free to contact us.

The Business Week article concludes with ‘[t]he best way to avoid a similar backlash today is for social media’s practitioners, including thousands of consultants, to shift the focus from promises to results. It may be the only way to convert the skeptics—and flush out the snake oil.”

Will a shift like that be enough to weed out the snake oil salesmen, and ultimately help grow social media?

We’ve set an ambitious goal for our involvement with the 2009 Business Cares Food drive. The need is so great this year, we’re aiming to collect 500 lbs of food and you can help.

For every pound of non-perishable food items collected here at the office, rtraction will also contribute $2.00 in cash to the London and Area Food Bank.

Items can be dropped off at the rtraction offices, 148 Fullarton St. Suite 1508 in the Talbot Centre. We will be accepting donations until the end of business on December 23rd.

The London and Area Food Bank really needs help this year. Please feel free to drop in, say hello, and make your contribution go even further.

Update: When the rtraction team got to the office on Monday morning we found this:

We’re still not sure who the charitable person was, but thanks for the great show of support!

Further update: After many good-natured accusations and denials, the masterminds were revealed to be Gavin and Zoe Blair. Awesome donation, you two!

The release of Google Street View for London Ontario has got me thinking about how businesses and industry can take advantage of user generated maps to promote their businesses and connect with their clients, customers or partners.

Business Listings

Adding your business location and description to a map is a simple technique that does not require any further active involvement. Google Local Business Center and Bing’s Local Listing Center make adding your business to a map as easy as filling out a form. Google also provides data and metrics about your listing so you can see how people are finding you online. The Google maps listing for rtraction shows what type of information can be included.

Photos and Videos

Google and Bing maps both have the ability to add your own information to them; such as photos or video or links to articles about landmarks or features. You can add rich content about your business that is included on the map when someone searches for your business or industry.

Geo-location

This technology allows any kind of post or update to indicate the specific location of the upload. One of the biggest benefits is with Twitter. Tweets can be placed on a map to show exactly where they were sent from.

Another feature, only available on Bing, is to identify points of interests along a planned route. So when I input my starting and ending points, I can find out what businesses are along my route.

There are a number of applications being rolled out to Bing in the coming weeks.

Don’t Neglect the Maps

User generated maps are the Yellow Pages of the 21st century but are often forgotten as a strategy. Incorporating them into your social media campaign doesn’t require a lot of effort and will increase your online presence organically.

When social media became a mainstream concept, a profusion of self-proclaimed experts quickly appeared; people with little or no experience who wanted to capitalize on a new industry. Along with them came a flood of books on the topic and unfortunately Socialnomics is an unremarkable book perched on top of that big pile.

I must start by saying that Erik Qualman writes with a very personal style that is easy to follow and to understand. I was able to quickly read through and grasp the essence of his book. However, he often loses track of his main point and rambles on for paragraphs before eventually returning. Between this and some dubious facts and statistics, I think the book could have greatly benefited from heavier editing.

Worse, the author doesn’t seem to have a firm understanding of the industries or businesses he uses for examples. While I agree that big brands can definitely benefit from social media, they often face further challenges than “just not getting it”. Qualman could have made his case stronger if he had used new and interesting case studies instead of the typical Dell, JetBlue and Obama campaign stories.

It’s not all bad, though. Qualman does spend some time explaining potential revenue models that could be derived from social media campaigns. Its just regrettable that he doesn’t develop these further.

I could not recommend Socialnomics to someone who doesn’t yet understand the power of the social internet. I believe there are a number of other books that do a much better job explaining that. Titles like Six Pixels of Separation, or the amazing Groundswell and Here Comes Everybody. However, if you want a quick read that provides a basic overview of the concepts behind social media, you might want to flip through Socialnomics.

This promotional video does a great job diving into the statistics behind social media

If you are struggling to understand how to use social networks for your business be sure to check out the training options that we offer.

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