ITster!

Yesterday Twitter CEO Evan Williams gave a keynote interview at South By Southwest Interactive and as expected released a new feature on their already wildly successful platform; Twitter Anywhere. This feature is very similar to Facebook Connect, it allows you to pull info from a Web site to Twitter but also use your Twitter credentials to sign in to various places around the web. Now the connections that we make on Twitter can now be extended to many other online properties.

While it is still early and all the details have not been released there are a number of positives to look forward to:

• For new users the barrier of entry has been lowered; it will become easier to discover people and interests.
• Relationships are strengthened as users find more people and businesses to interact with.
• However there is a lower signal to noise ratio as you only connect with people relevant to your interests.
• Contextual data can be easily added to websites, applications and online services to facilitate these connections.

With this release Twitter is working to position the service as an information network where people can easily share content and learn from each other across a variety of different websites.

Recently events have illustrated Twitter’s ability to easily and safely bring people together; Iranian elections, the Chilean earthquake and conferences around the world. With today’s announcement they have extended this functionality to everyone and both users and businesses of all sizes will benefit.

I had the benefit of being able to attend the e-marketing conference at Fanshawe College last Monday. It was a great day to connect with other Londoners who are all striving to understand social media and apply it to their business.

The day started with the keynote presentation by Mitch Joel of Twist Image in Montreal. He delivered his Six Pixels presentation in which he reiterated the need to understand that we are facing a radical shift in the way we communicate. One of the great things I took away was that with social media, customers still have the same amount of control as they always have. However now there is a greater amplification of their voices. Its easy now for anyone to become a competitor of a traditional business and to succeed.

Mitch delivers a rich and engaging presentation and it was a great way to start the day because it got the attendees all riled up and excited. He provided the groundwork to the day that allowed many people to start on an equal footing.

Following the keynote there were a number of breakout sessions. I attended Brady Murphy of Vortex Mobile’s session on mobile marketing and was able to connect with him about a few interesting things I’d experienced in the space. Brady talked about many of the challenges that mobile developers face when dealing with multiple platforms and service providers. I’ve mentioned before that I believe mobile to be the future of social media and 2010 will be an important year towards that development. This session reiterated that belief, and introduced a lot of new people to the concept.

However, the highlight of the day was the release of PolicyTool. David Canton presented on the legal issues surrounding social media and at the end unveiled the free social media policy generator. David was also asked to present PolicyTool at the final wrap up, so all the attendees were introduced  to it. We’ve written about this already, including the resounding success that it has been.

I enjoyed my time at the conference and was glad to connect with lots of other people over the course of the day. Hopefully this is just the start to many more social media conferences in London.

In the week since we have released our free social media policy generator and the PolicyTool website, we have been blown away by the excitement and interest thousands of people have shown. Since March 5th, over 10,000 people have visited the sites and 1500 different companies have taken the first steps in creating a social media policy.

We never would have gotten the traffic and the interest we did without the help of our social media friends. Mitch Joel sent several tweets out to his network and we are thankful for his interest in the tool and the role he’s played in promoting it. PolicyTool has also been mentioned at numerous conferences including the Great Ideas Conference and the NL Conference in Amsterdam.

From there hundreds of people have re-tweeted messages and shared the tool with their friends and coworkers. In fact as of today our PolicyTool was mentioned every 14 minutes on average. It also looks like people will be continuing to refer back to the site since hundreds of people bookmarked it on delicious.

But it wasn’t limited to Twitter. Lots of people have written blog posts reviewing the tool, sharing their policies, and discussing the overall need for a social media policy within any organization. Simon Fodden wrote a post for the legal blog Slaw.ca reviewing the policy generator.  Beth Kanter used PolicyTool as a springboard for discussion around Not-For-Profits and Aaron Robb for wrote about our incentive for releasing the Social Media policy tool for free.

A big thank-you to everyone who has taken the time to share their thoughts through various social media channels. We’ve heard your comments and are working to make the changes you’ve proposed.

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!