Furthere - the Twitter Powered Blog

I happened to notice an article about this new site Furthere on my RSS feed this morning and decided to check it out. Furthere aggregates your tweets into a live-updating blog, which at first seems entirely useless to me. After checking it out, it has a few cool features which have the potential to really make it something new if the owners play their cards right. Here is my review:


First, I don't think the Furthere home page sets up the experience in a way that really lets me know what its about. Reading the information provided leaves me feeling like the blog is just going to be my tweets lined up, with nothing special going on. The features are not really elaborated on; if my curiosity / boredom hadn't gotten the best of me I probably would never have tried the service out.


After setting up my account, this is what my 'blog' looks like: 

It looks like my Twitter feed, but with only my tweets... pretty boring huh? So, what now?


It turns out there is a little button under each tweet that says 'Enrich Tweet' that allows you to expound on what you've written. It even lets you write more than 140 characters! I enrich my 'Trying out http://furthere.com/ to see whats up with it #sm' tweet and it gives me a few options: Title, Tags (it auto-includes your hash tags), and Blog Post. I put in my post (copied from Marketing By the Numbers) and get this:

The last set of nifty features comes from Furthere's ability to aggregate either only certain #hastags into the blog, and the ability to allow friends to contribute: 

I can see this last part being used pretty handily; I may care what my Twitter friends and followers have to say about social media or web analytics, but have no interest in what they are doing for lunch... Furthere would allow me to pull this all together and end up with a pretty great reference resource we can all collaborate on without sharing information on what my roommate did to my glasses last night.

All in all, Furthere could turn into a pretty great tool both for those who don't have a blog (it really does make setting one up rather easy) and for those who want to collaborate with others. The blogging feature really is great, especially when 140 characters is not enough.

Note: when you invite people to your blog Furtherebot sends out '@Name, @PeterBretton invited you to join the weblog at http://peterbretton.furthere.com' to each person which is wicked annoying.

Integrating Social Media with Email

There is a lot of talk right now about integrating social media into emails. According to eMarketer just over 50% of respondents have implemented, or at least formulated, a strategy to connect the two power marketing channels. With only half of the executives surveyed on the bandwagon, this is a great time to get a jump on your competition.

There are quite a few reasons why adding social functionality to an email template is a great idea.

• First, it takes little-to-no effort to manage directly after you have set it up, especially if you are already monitoring the and interacting on the social media sites you send users too. 
• Secondly, there is not necessarily a lot of user overlap between the two marketing channels; those individuals you reach by email who tweet about your content may not be following you. By using two channels congruently you can expand your social media base while getting some free word of mouth. 
• Thirdly, you can compare your email service provider's analytics with your own to see which content is being shared and clicked to; any content that sticks out might just be a gem you need to replicate to create truly engaging content.

Implementation

There is at least one simple way to integrate social media into email that requires little to no knowledge of social media - AddThis is a link sharing and bookmark service that automates the process of allowing users to post information from a blog, email, or whatever to their favorite social media sites. When the user clicks the Facebook icon, for instance, they are forwarded to Facebook's link sharing page with relevant information filled in and the link ready; similar actions take place for other social sites. One great thing about AddThis is its analytics feature which allows you to track which sites your users post to as well as demographics, clicks, and top content. AddThis's integration in the email provider I use, SubscriberMail, is a little spotty as it allows little-to-no customization, but I'm sure they will work out any problems over time.

If you are trying to be either a little more creative, or a little more controlling, you can build your own tool. Create your own icons for whichever services your target audience is most likely to use, then use the following URLs for links (documentation is linked, for those I could find):

• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=&t=
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/home?status=
• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=&title=
  &source=
• Digg: http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&;url=
• Email: mailto:?subject=&body=

There are a lot more out there but these probably cover the majority of people, especially those just starting out. For any others you may want, you can generally find the documentation on the company's site.

Calculating Community Equity

So I have been thinking about David Allston's idea of community equity, and have worked out what I think is a good approach to the problem. The above equation would return the added community equity.

ACE (added community equity) is simply community equity generated during the current time period minus the community equity generated during the previous time period. This shows the net benefit of actions taken by the company during the current time period (whatever that may be).

For comparison purposes community equity is equal to total community equity divided by the number of followers. I have framed it this way so that two users with widely different follower bases can compare the value of their actions during a similar time period. Community equity, then, is the sum of each follower's followers times a given weight for each follower, plus the number of clicks per thousand followers (for the account) plus the number of new users.

The weights are defined as the ratio of positive tweets over negative tweets if there are more positive than negative tweets, or the ratio of negative tweets over positive tweets if there are more negative tweets than positive. Weight is calculated for each individual follower.

Actions taken into account in this equation:

• Actions taken by followers that increase awareness of brand, either positively or negatively, will have the most affect on community equity. People talking about your brand and retweeting your tweets are worth the most.
• Clicks per thousand followers is a measure of interactivity and attractiveness of content. I use clicks per thousand followers as clicks per followers would have to little affect. This may need to be changed straight clicks - any opinions on this?
• New followers - it is reasonable to assume, in my opinion, that new followers are in some way engaged in your content and information, or they wouldn't have followed you. This is a major assumption many followers may just be looking for you to follow them.

What is not included:

• The number of followers you have: This is not added to your community equity score directly as non-interactive followers add little to you community. While you are having an impression on them, the people that go to bat for you are really having the most affect on your brand and your community.
• Number of tweets can have either a positive or a negative affect on trust building - if you are spamming tweets with marketing material and little value-added, you would be negatively affecting your brand. I would like to include something about this in the equation, but it may not be readily available information. 

Added community equity would have to be compared to prior periods to determine what numbers are a good range, what is average, and what is below,

There is a lot more that could probably go into this, but for a starting model it sounds good. Let me know what you think could be added to make it more reflective of community equity.

Does Social Media Make You a Creative Communicator - or A Horrible Writer?

I just read these two articles (link, link) from the New York Times; the two have the common theme of strong communication abilities as key to executive success. While these two articles are about a year old, they were still published during the rise of social media both as a prominent business tool, and as a social tool for individuals, and yet neither mention the platform. What I want to know is, does using social media help, or hinder, someone's chance of become a c-suite or other top-level executive, does it hurt your communication skills because of bad grammar, or does it make you more creative?


If you look at instant messaging and texting, you can tell it has had anything but a positive effect on people. I'll admit that I write terribly, in barely intelligible segments (I refuse to call them sentences) when I do either. Along with this, Twitter definitely does nothing positive for grammar and sentence structure.


On the other hand, Twitter seems to help make us creative writers... I have never worker harder making and keeping content short and to the point then when I was trying to get a stubbornly long sentence into 140 characters. Blogging, while informal, also seems like it could have positive benefits, especially for those people who have not written a lot. The great thing about blogging is that it actually gets you writing, and writing (hopefully) often. Brandon Sanderson made a comment about the fact that it took him a long time to really settle his writing style, which is something I hope blogging will do for me... give me a medium where I can find and perfect my own writing style (I cannot find his blog post on it, if I find it, I will link it).


So what do you think... does social media content writing help, or hurt, your communications ability?

You Can't Buy Lists for Social Media

I think one of the best things about social media is that you cannot buy marketing lists. I personally don't like the idea of buying direct mailing lists at all, but I understand that there is a time and place for it. With social media though, it is just not possible to purchase a list, content truly is king.

Unless you are famous and have that going for you social media makes you start at the bottom and build your way up by having value-adding content and intriguing posts (I can say this with confidence because I'm to new to actively participating in social media to know where this actually applies to me). Adding value is the one theme you see in almost all PR blogs about successful social media strategies which makes me think that all the other tips and tricks are icing on the cake. Sure, writing a social media article with an eye towards SEO will increase your searchability and using hash tags on twitter will allow your tweets to be seen by more users, but this doesn't matter unless you have a solid and strong base of content that matters.

What does this mean for companies whose content cannot be generated by marketing? In higher education high-value content comes from faculty, most of whom will have little direct contact with marketing. In this case, what is marketing supposed to do? Piggy-back faculty whitepapers and articles? rewrite this information in a more marketing-friendly manner?

So what do you think? Can a company be competitive and truly benefit from social media without all the extras?

Community Equity (from PR-Squared)

I just read this article on the PR² blog, and I think David Alston makes some great points. Specifically in social media, there are a lot of movements out there to decide what really qualifies as meaningful metrics. Avinash Kaushik at Occam's Razor talks about overall influence and community involvement as the two metrics he watches most, and I think from a measurement standpoint he may be right.

Community equity, though, might just be the background idea needed to really push companies towards what is important in social media - building and maintaining reputation through value-adding content and community involvement. It is obvious when talking with some people that they do not see social media as what it is, but as just another marketing channel to reach more viewers. While the end goal of a marketing department may be just that, it will not work unless there is give and take, back and forth... you must add value to get value on social media platforms. Followers can tell when you're not actively engaged in the discussion at hand; if you tout your brand, spit out marketing material, and don't participate in the discussions going on, your followers will notice and not see your content as sincere.

One of the best lines in Alston's article, in my opinion, is 'It becomes evident that community building goes in the investment column while buying media buy goes in the expense side.' Customer loyalty is a big issue for marketing and sales, especially when what you selling is seen as a commodity... by building a following that feels like a community both sides benefit - the company with increased loyalty, and the consumer with a better, more fulfilling customer experience.

I have to say, community equity seems like a great idea that I am going to continue to follow... Is it a quantifiable metric? I would want to tie this in some way to organic social media growth; for example, if I am using a lead-capture page from twitter, I would ask the question 'Was Twitter your first interaction with the brand?' While you would be enhancing brand through interacting with customers, interaction with potential customers is really a sign of building community equity as it shows that word of mouth is having a positive effect on the brand.

Who is Peter Rabbit, er Bretton?

I am. A Maine-grown man who attends Emmanuel College, I am a senior Business Management major with a minor in Mathematics. I have worked in marketing for about one year, with Harvard School of Public Health Center for Continuing Professional Education (CCPE) since January '09, and with 451 Marketing since January 2010.

My experience at CCPE has given me exposure to online marketing in most forms including cost-per-click marketing through Google Adwords, Email creation, list segmenting and optimizing, copy writing and research for listservs, and website creation. We recently released a social media campaign which I designed and lead which includes Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

My offline marketing experience has been almost entirely with copy editing.

The greatest part of my time has gone to tracking and analyzing marketing initiatives including media channel effectiveness, email content and subject line effectiveness, program rating, and website traffic. Although I have not yet worked with search engine optimization, SEO is an interest of mine that I should have exposure to within the next six months.

So, why did I start this blog? This will serve partly as my online portfolio, showing my copy writing skills, and hosting information I find which I feel is relevant to the marketing community. Simple enough, right?