Blogs | Social Signal

Asked on LinkedIn: Launching a Facebook application?

Consider running a contest -- something with genuine value, ideally a bit witty -- that you advertise on Facebook using smartly-chosen keywords to control where your ad appears. Make sure it's clear this contest is associated with a new recommendation tool. That will bring your target users to you, already primed for positive engagement with your application, without engendering the ill-will that comes from anything that feels spammy.

Asked on LinkedIn: Why do you send a Direct Message on Twitter?

Here are five reasons to send a direct message on Twitter:

Asked on LinkedIn: Has anyone had success using social media to market B2B?

The business-to-business versus business-to-consumer dichotomy can be a bit of a trap when thinking about social media. To achieve a critical mass of participation on a social media site, you need to be drawing on a potential audience of tens of thousands, ideally at least hundreds of thousands; this will be rapidly narrowed by the relatively small percentage who are interested in checking out any social media presence, let alone actively contributing to one. There are very few business niches in which you have a large enough, or techie enough, audience to achieve that necessary critical mass.

Asked on LinkedIn: What are the first 3 steps every company needs to take to get involved in social media?

1. Listen.

No matter what industry you're in or how sensitive your organization, you need to be doing social media monitoring. At a minimum, set up an iGoogle page and add feeds from Technorati (to search for blog posts about your organization), Twitter search (for tweets) and delicious (to see what people think is worth bookmarking on your site or news coverage). Track the reputation of your company, brands/products, key leadership and industry, and discover where your strengths and weaknesses lie online. (Hint: no news isn't necessarily good news!)

In 2005, fresh out of the Online Deliberation 2005 conference, Social Signal CEO Alexandra Samuel wrote about 10 tools that tap the power of blogs. As we were working on relaunching our website, we had a chance to take a second look at this post and thought it'd be fun to do a bit of a retrospective: what's happened to these 10 tools in the past 4 years, as blogging has become more popular and mainstream?

Tired of drowning in e-mail? After many efforts and declarations of e-mail bankruptcy, I've finally found a system that lets me get my inbox to zero every single business day. It accommodates my desire to send and respond to e-mail throughout the day -- I've never been able to stick to a "only hit receive if you have time to process" rule -- and keeps my total incoming messages to about 20-30 (down from 200+). Most crucially, it allows me to respond to all key client and prospect inquiries within 24 hours.

I've aspired to inbox zero for years, but it took a new member of the Social Signal team to help bring that aspiration into focus -- a team member who has utterly transformed my personal productivity. As our operations manager and my executive assistant, Morgan Brayton has reorganized our financial record-keeping, moved us into our swanky new digs, taken over our invoicing, and booked me within an inch of my life.

A quick note for speakers, event organizers and - most of all - folks who attend presentations: SpeakerRate, the presentation-reviewing site I mentioned a week or two ago, isn't the only game in town.

The folks at joind.in dropped me a line to let me know about their site. Here's how they describe it:

Online security and privacy can matter a lot, both to individuals and to organizations. A lapse can mean anything from embarrassment to financial loss... and even physical danger.

But we're living in the social media age, with all sorts of opportunities - and incentives - to disclose even intimate aspects of our personal and professional lives. And when that information gets aggregated, the result can be a surprisingly comprehensive dossier - one far more extensive than we'd ever intended to reveal to the world.