I was tuning in to my email and twitter for the latest news the other morning when all of a sudden all hell broke lose. Everyone seemed to be talking about this Internet startup that claims to measure ones influence in social media. You would plug in your social networks and it would calculate your score between 1 and 100 based on your activity and reach. Only Klout users weren’t happy that morning: How dare they mess with people’s rankings and how is the scoring system working anyways? No one seemed to care much before, but now everyone was up in arms. What happened?

Well, it looks like Klout changed it’s algorithm and many of it’s active users saw a drop in their score (more than 100 Million people have Klout score). Not like Klout score had much value at the time other than for bragging rights and an occasional promotion from a sponsor, so this made me think.

You kind of get into that state of mind and get comfortable thinking of yourself as an “influencer” and it hurts a little when you are demoted to “explorer”, but is a universe wide ripple of outrage that ensued called for? Obviously they have struck a cord.

It has happened before

What this reminded me of is a similar incident that occurred in the ancient history by Internet terms, circa 1998. That year two young researchers from Stamford started fielding a flurry of angry complaints from webmasters and site owners that weren’t happy with how their websites were indexed and ranked by an early crawler called BackRub and ranking service called PageRank in what was the very infancy of today’s most popular search engine. How dare they unleash this bloodless algorithm onto the unassuming websites that were worth much more in their owner’s opinions! Not only did they not rank as high, but also some seemingly inferior websites ranked much higher. Many were outraged.

Now, I am not trying to compare Klout to Google in any way, but there is a similar underlying theme here and people took notice in both cases.

As we know today this early ranking system based on academic publishing principle of bibliometrics created a whole new ecosystem where everyone had to adhere to it if they wanted to have their website rank better. “…The process of citing others confers their rank and authority upon you – the key concept that informs the way Google works… (Academic) Papers are judged not only on their original thinking and the rigor of their citations, but also by the number of papers they cite, the number of papers that subsequently cite them back and the perceived importance of each citation.” (John Battelle, The Search, Penguin Books Ltd. 2005). In other words, articles are ranked based on inbound and outbound links and their quality.

This basic principle used to determine ranking in academic publishing is at the core of today’s search. There is much more to it of course, but the point is that this was the idea that was novel, disruptive and angered a few, however it brought order and a common formula to website ranking on the Internet.

Why is this important?

So in my humble opinion Klouts of today (Peer Rank, Kred, etc.) are on to something. As we approach a point when marketing becomes tailor made for each individual and social media becomes omnipresent in our lives there is an unmet need to have a service in place that will identify individual interests and influences across networks and platforms. Today in it’s very infancy this service is limited to finding the “hand raisers”, but the future that I foresee for it is to be an aggregator of ones interests, wishes, hopes and fears accumulated by sifting through all online conversations.

Because accurate targeting is the key in marketing your profile created this way is every marketers dream. Is it a little scary? Maybe, but boring, interruptive marketing is not going away soon and I would personally rather have relevant, timely advertising that I am in control of than disruptive Sham-wow style commercials on my Internet or television.

What is a better example of valuable and exclusive content than your band’s concert, tutorial session or soccer game streamed within your Facebook page. So let’s begin.

Ingredients:

What you will need for this tutorial is an account with UStream (online video streaming service) and ShortStack (Facebook tab building service) and a Facebook Page to display the tab on. Also, download UStream iphone app to be able to stream from your phone. You could really use any other combination of a streaming service like LiveStream and Facebook page/tab building service like Involver or Pagemodo.

Step 1 – Prepare your channel for embedding

Log in to your UStream account and navigate to your channel. Below your stream window you will notice this dashboard. Select EMBED tab and choose video size 480 x 296px. Note how your iframe code changes below and copy it. You can click on these thumbnails throughout this tutorial to enlarge them.

Leave this window open and start a new tab in your browser.

Step 2 – Choose the page template

Log in to your ShortStack account and click on templates. We are going to use and customize an existing template to save time. Enter “YouTube” in the search box and click Search. Choose “My Youtube Channel” template. Select: Make Tab button

It is pretty straightforward to edit a template in Shortstack. All available modules are on the left, ones you are using in the middle and a preview is on the right. The modules you are using will look something like this. To enable Fan-gating you will have to select the ones that are seen only by fans or non-fans or everyone. For now select that the top two modules be seen by non-fans only and bottom two by fans ONLY.

Step 3 – Customize the template

Now, let’s start editing the existing modules and adding more. First, select the “Welcome text” module and select edit (little pencil icon). Change the copy to Welcome to my live ___________ (enter your stream name) and add – Please LIKE this page to enter! – and click save.

Add three more modules from the collection on the left by clicking on them – one Counter and two [Code] modules. Slide the counter to the third position bellow welcome text and slide the other two under it.

The Counter should display the time left to your live feed, you can set it up days in advance, it’s super easy. Now, make the counter visible to everyone – fans and non-fans and you should end up with something like this. This is what your non-fans will see when they come to your page (and like it to enter).

Step 4 – Stream window

Tab back to your UShare account. Select the iFrame code from step one and copy it. Click edit on the first module under the counter and paste this code in. This will be your streaming window, make sure – fans only icon is checked, this is your gravy, you don’t want it to be displayed to everyone.

Video Module could be modified to display other videos you have previously recorded like from your YouTube channel (or it could be removed).

Step 5 - Set up LIVE CHAT

Go to your second [code] module below and click edit. Switch to your UStream again and this time select SOCIAL STREAM. Copy the iFrame code and paste it in to the second module.

NOTE: Edit the height in the code to 300 pixels or so, so it doesn't take too much space on your page.

Use live preview window on the right to switch from fan to non-fan view and when you are done editing chose - INSTALL TAB button on the top. 

Choose - QUICK PUBLISH and you will be prompted to log in to your Facebook account and choose page to add this tab to. 

Chose page and hit INSTALL next to it. You are almost done!

If you want this page to be your DEFAULT LANDING PAGE on your account you can change that above. Or just link to it from another page on FB or outside.

And that's it! At scheduled time start your iPhone app and your live stream will show up on your Facebook page. Easy!

NOTE: I chose Ustream because it has an iphone app that allows streaming straight from your mobile phone to your Facebook page. If you want to get a little bit more serious than that, download the Producer app to your computer and use an external camera for broadcast. 

All mentioned services have free options, but if you want to skip pre-rolls and commercials you can always upgrade to paid.

This is just a bare, basic setup to get you familiar with these services, you can always add background graphics or other modules. The limit is only your imagination!

Why do I need update scheduling? – you may ask… Well, few reasons. Sometimes you may want to post a targeted update at a given time of day, but you won’t be at your computer or mobile device. Or you just want to spread them out so your followers don’t think you are spammy. The best and smartest feature that surfaced recently is the ability of these services to analyze the reach and response to your updates and schedule future ones accordingly.

Features you should be looking for when selecting a scheduler:

1. Update stream performance analytics (best if coupled with smart future post scheduling) 

2. Team update management (great for larger accounts with multiple users)

3. Your fave shortener linking (e.g. bit.ly, gives another channel for analysis)

4. Bookmarklet (easy to add interesting content to stream with one click (and some copy editing))

5. Update suggestion (sometimes useful, when you run out of juice and just need to fill in with a trivial tweet)

Timely is the most sophisticated updater I use. What sets it apart are options to select how many updates per day (1,3,5 or 9) you want and if you wish to tweet on the weekend as well. Allows for Bit.ly linkage and team management.

The very smart thing about Timely is that it analyzes your last 199 updates to determine which times of day are linked to best performance. FREE

Buffer App is a very versatile scheduling tool. The thing that is unique about it is plethora of it’s own browser and other app extensions (Goodies). It Also has Bit.ly linkage and easy to use team invitation and management console. Free for one account to $30/month for unlimited

Later Bro – is the simplest of the three. It has a very easy to use interface that let’s you quickly choose date and time of day for your updates and a straight forward bookmarklet to drop in to your browser bar. Easy.

A hidden gem feature is behind the “Your Friends” link at the bottom and will show you all the people you are following that didn’t return the love. This way you can target them politely and reduce your Following/Followers ratio. Free

It is much harder nowadays to get your audiences’ attention and engage them with your brand because there is just too much going on.

Data is flooding the social media arena and it is becoming increasingly harder to get meaningful insights and act on them. To cut through the clutter advertising companies are looking for creative talent with hard-core quantitative, mathematical and technical skills that poses strong business acumen. Just how realistic is that? Luckily there is more and more sophisticated software being developed to track the conversations, process and visualize data.

If you plan to engage in Social Marketing you need to make sure there are right tools in place for effective listening, analysis and communication. I want to share a few of these that I came across. It is by no means a comprehensive overview of every technology out there, but a list of few that are in my opinion driving innovation in this field.

For sake of clarity, I divided them into (1) all-encompassing large enterprise tier (Radian6, Sysmos, Crimson Hexagon) and (2) platform specific (shoutlet, conversocial, socialbakers).

1 Top tier – Wide coverage of Social Media Landscape

Enable in-depth reporting and analysis of many channels and properties on the internet for conversations surrounding brand or industry. Monitoring of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogs, Forums and News.

Radian6: Tracks over 100 million social sites, provides in depth analytics and sentiment tracking. Integrated engagement console for responding to activity and blog, Twitter and Facebook updates. Pricing: Monthly subscription service, dashboard starts at $600 a month. Clients: Red Cross, Adobe, AAA, Cirque du Soleil, H&R Block, March of Dimes, Microsoft, Pepsi, Southwest Airlines — a wide range of clients.

Sysomos (Heartbeat): Realtime monitoring and measurement displayed visually in user-friendly graphical interface. Provides a platform to engage with key influencers. It does not restrict number of users per account - task delegation to team members. Pricing: Entry-level price of $500/month. Clients: IBM, HSBC, Roche, Ketchum, Sony Ericsson, Philips, ConAgra, Edelman, Shell Oil, Nokia, Sapient, Citi, Interbrand.

Crimson Hexagon (ForSight): Accesses billions of conversations and turns them into actionable data. Based on technology licensed from Harvard it claims to be able to determine quantitative proportion of opinion. Pricing: Based on number of seats or number of searches. Clients: CNN, Hanes, AT&T, HP, Johnson & Johnson, Mashable, Microsoft, Monster, AdWeek, Thomson Reuters, Rubbermaid, Sybase, the Huffington Post, A&E, the Wall Street Journal.

2 Platform specific – few most relevant Social Websites

Shoutlet: Facebook, Twitter and Youtube

Even though in these three platforms for your social media management and publishing it is a very versatile service that covers a number of other websites and touch points. It is best described as a cross between listening, analytics, publishing, advertising and customer care platforms.

Its features include buffering of content publishing, custom page creation, promotion and ad design and powerful analytics. It is truly unique service worth investigating. Pricing: Unknown Clients: American Family Insurance, Truck International, Perry Ellis, Norwegian Cruise Line, Scotts, Fiskars.

Conversocial: Facebook and Twitter

Integrated social customer service, scalable customer care. Allows for discovering customer service issues and delegating agents to respond. Tracking responses. Pricing: Free starter account up to $299 for enterprise. Customers: Groupon, Mediacom, La Redoute, River Island, ITV, Tempero, Net-A-Porter.com

Social Bakers: Facebook

Get information on your key influencers and track engagement over time. Find best performing content. Monitor competition track non-owned pages. Manage newsfeed through calendar. Pricing: Starts at $50 for 1 FB page up to $1000 for 100 FB pages (monthly) Customers: Leo Burnett, Nokia, Ogilvy, Vodafone, Nike, Kraft Foods, Unilever.

TwentyFeet: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Bit.ly, My Space (?)

And lastly I have to mention my fave “egotracking” service Twenty Feet. It will organize and display your stats from above mentioned social websites, but you can also plug-in your Google Analytics and get statistics in the email on regular basis. Maybe best feature is that you can see who are your new followers, but also “un-followed” you and take appropriate action. Pricing:  One account free forever and you buy credits as much as you need. Customers: Unknown

This time it’s all about collecting leads, tracking customers and direct communication with them.

Google’s Business App Marketplace has leveled the field by providing access to hundreds of services and applications made by third party vendors that can tremendously benefit your business.

I will focus on two: Insightly and Mail Chimp, I used them extensively to collect contacts, keep track of projects and conversations and send out newsletters / analyze response.

NOTE:

Before I jump into explaining what these two apps do, I would like to share with you a tip that I found very useful: For best integration of these services switch your e-mail servers to Google and you won’t regret it. You still keep your same email addresses, the only difference is – they will now run on one of the the most robust email services currently in existence. Here is a step by step tutorial on how to do it.

To be able to access Google Business Apps you need to open an account with your domain name (@your_company.com). Here is more on How to Set Up Gmail as Your E-mail Business Client. Not only will you get an always accessible, secure business email, but you will gain access to an entire Apps Marketplace.

1. Insightly – CRM and Project Mangement

Like any application from Google Marketplace, Insightly can be activated in minutes. There are features of it that require subscription, but I found even free version to be incredibly versatile. Here is a list of my favorite features:

- Full integration with your Google account (this is where e-mail server switch comes in handy)

- Links related items, people and documents

- File sharing (keeps all your docs, emails, proposals etc. in one place)

- Just forward the email to it and it creates an entry (very useful when you want to automate an online lead acquisition via web contact form)

- Simple and intuitive user interface

2. Mail Chimp – Email Newsletter Platform

Step one - establish your lead database with Insightly – step two – communicate! I found Mail Chimp to be the best, easiest to setup, most intuitive newsletter platform in Google Marketplace. You will get a ton of automated features and newsletter templates that are really easy to customize.

Export the list of contacts from Insightly in Excel or .csv format and import it into Mail Chimp (I wish there was a way for these two to talk to each other directly, but this isn’t too hard for now). Slice your contacts to taste and create different groups if needed and create targeted newsletters for every segment.

You will get to choose your type of campaign – regular, text only, A/B campaign or RSS driven. The last option is a real gem, it takes your blog updates via your RSS and sends them to your subscribers “automagically”. Sweet…

Newsletters are easy to craft, just select a template or create your own from scratch. There is a large number of templates and layouts to chose from that are fully customizable.

DON’T FORGET to stay relevant to your audience, no amount of technology can save you from loosing followers because you are sending uninteresting and irrelevant newsletters. Make sure they are of VALUE to your readers.

Analytics, reports, social share

If you tab over to REPORTS you can start looking at data pouring in within minutes of sending out the newsletter. On a well timed launch I have seen half of my “openings” happen in the first hour. Here are some of the subcategories in the reports area:

Subscriber Activity – opens and clicks over time. See who clicked first and who kept going back to your letter to gauge interest.

Social Stats – add your Twitter and Facebook accounts and see who shared your campaign and what is your reach.

Click Performance – what links were clicked the most, what areas of the letter were acted on. Very interesting data especially when you’re comparing an A/B campaign.

“Analytics 360 is a MailChimp module that allows you to “pull” stats from your web site traffic tools right into your MailChimp campaign reports page. You can see not only how many people might have opened your message and clicked on links, but you can also see see instant ROI results for every email campaign you send.”

Mobile version for your smartphone is also available, so you can stay updated with the most important stats on the go!

Insightly and Mail Chimp are some of my favorite Google Business Apps that I have used a lot in the past, but there are hundreds of other apps there for every type of business.

Best thing about these applications and services is that they are in the cloud, always accessible and always updated with latest features.

(Links: www.insight.ly, www.mailchimp.com)

So to avoid astronomic bounce rates you better have optimized experience for those viewers. This is especially important if you have rich media on your pages – there is no way to predict what will that look like on a mounting number of mobile devices. Fortunately it is becoming increasingly easy to turn your existing website page to mobile or build a mobile site without knowing any coding whatsoever. Whether you are a company or individual using QR to promote your brand here is how you can do it with minimum hustle.

Mobile Page Architect

My service of preference is Wapple as I use WordPress for my website and it is very easy to use with ton of customizing features (www.wapple.net). You can mobilize your existing website or page by installing a simple WP plugin or easily build it from ground up using their intuitive Canvas application.

Strategy

First order of business however – think about your goal. What do you want to achieve or what message do you want to transmit? Chances are again, your audience is also mobile, they are accessing your site on the run and have limited attention span or want to achieve specific results.

Your mobile layout needs to make these results immediately accessible. Single column layout works best on mobile devices and it needs to be fast and lean. However keep your brand identity and make the mobile version recognizable by sticking to your brand elements (logos, color schemes, fonts).  Just Ask these questions:

•  - What is the most essential information about me, my service or product?
•  - What do I want my visitor to do when she/he loads that page? (call-to-action, contact, links, media)
•  - What else would they need/want to see? (clear navigation)

Lastly – do not forget to include a link to full version of the website!

 Go The Extra Mile

Screen sizes on mobile devices vary widely. If you really want to put your best foot forward regardless of the device you can make different mobile versions (your mobile site may not do you justice on a 8″ screen).

You can leave the device recognition to plugins available for different CMS platforms that automatically forward your visitor to the proper iteration of your mobile website.

The name is a spin on P&G’s First Moment Of Truth (FMOT) that refers to the seven seconds after a shopper first sees store shelf with products from different brands.

It reveals how much power there is in the ability to capture customers attention even before they get to the store. This happens online, via any connected device imaginable, millions of times every minute. Brands that can position themselves to be in the right place at the time consumers are making purchase decisions can benefit tremendously from ZMOT.

The book is very well documented with everything from graphs to heat maps and research data just like you would expect something coming from Google to be. My favorite chapter is the one talking about the rise of importance of video in brand value communication.

I recommend it as a fun and easy read for the summer to any digital marketer and/or strategist.

You can download it for FREE here – http://www.zeromomentoftruth.com/

If you happen to have your red/blue glasses handy check out the anaglyph version below:

When I enrolled into graduate business school in 2009 I heard about Microsoft Advertising Digital Challenge competition and decided to take my chances.

Create a marketing plan for a Microsoft product called Office Live and present it to the jury consisting of Microsoft executives. Budget: $3MM, required sign-ups: 5 milion users 

My team of five was assembled at the first briefing at Microsoft offices on sixth avenue.  We barely knew each other, but shared a passion for digital marketing (and brownies in the back of the room). I took initiative to be a team leader and organizer and it was a great challenge since I personally haven’t known any of the team. Everyone turned out to be very professional, smart and on-the-ball, it was a pleasure working with such driven team.

We worked hard and stayed late, deadline for the first round was 2 weeks. There was 3 rounds and 137 teams from all over the country. We we were going to be judged on our ability to identify the opportunity, execute strategy, teamwork, creativity and understanding of Microsoft’s business objectives. Our plan showed the best utilization of social networking,  search marketing, display, mobile, in game advertising and more. We even filmed a short movie to bring our point home. We rehearsed our presentation until it was flawless.

In the end it came down to two teams – us and a team from the University of  Oregon and the jury had a difficult time deciding. They deliberated for a long time and in the end decided to give the grand prize to the visiting team.

And this was our video produced for YouTube channel with Adrian and Jonathan!

On top of all this I am dealing with a 3D Beamsplitter rig and not just a single camera that is about 4 times heavier.

Key to shooting a decent video from a moving vehicle is gyro-stabilized head. I was getting a great deal on a Scorpio Head – proven, reliable, stabilized head – so that was a no-brainer.  Now, where does it all sit?

One approach was a process trailer. Dump everything on a low hanging process trailer and pretend you’re driving, easy. However, the shots that the director wanted included some very low angles and a shot from behind the car which would reveal the truck that is pulling the whole trailer, so that was out.

Another approach was to rig everything on the car chassis and do one angle at a time. It would have been a pain to re-rig everything especially because we only had one day to shoot, but what really killed that idea was the owner of the Oldsmobile in question said (HELL)NO! to that idea.

A really good solution would have been a Russian Arm on a pursuit car, but there was none of these on the east coast and bringing one over from LA would be grossly over budget. We were doing this for a public television, hence a shoestring budget.

What I was able to hustle together in the end was a brilliant solution involving a pursuit car with a solid arm and a Scorpio head with remote pan and tilt.

This allowed us to get multiple different shots in one run over the bridge and stabilize the entire rig so all those bridge seams come out as smooth as possible. It took a lot of preparation and testing before going to location, but it provided us with some beautiful shots that were impossible to get otherwise with so little money.

I filmed the whole adventure and cut it together, including shots from the actual footage. My video ended up on the official 3D DVD that Maryland Public Television put out as BTS footage. Enjoy!