You can’t nuke obnoxious people from your family, but you should make it a habit on Twitter. The wrong followers drag down the rep of your entire feed, and make it difficult to engage those that matter. It’s easy to decide who stays or goes once you have a strategy in place that defines your objectives and criteria for following or purging. Follow your strategy, and you’ll attract the right followers.

Find out how influential your feed is at Klout.com. This free service analyzes your Twitter interactions and followers and assigns a score similar to Page Rank for websites.

By now, it’s well known that social media content is important for optimizing your company’s rank on search results. Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines incorporate social media content as an important factor in their algorithms. We see the social media effect everyday through web analytics. It really hit us when we did a search for the term “Ideopia.” (I think we do that every 20 minutes!)

Note that 8 out of top 10 results are from social media – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. And these results are being incorporated fast, e.g. the Twitter post on phobias was posted just 28 minutes ago. Food for thought!

Check out the screen capture of this search. Need some help incorporating social media into your marketing? Let’s talk about it.

Ideopia just helped the Ronald McDonald House Charities of Cincinnati launch a Twitter presence. They’ll use it to promote their important fundraisers and share the uplifting moments from their work, too.

Each year, RMHC provides food, accommodations, and sanity for 100s of families whose critically ill children are cared for at Children’s Hospital Medical Center. That’s where their budget goes. Not marketing. So help us out by clicking the follow button @RMHCincinnati. The good Twitter karma will come back to you soon.

By now, it’s probably been pounded into your head that social media content is important for optimizing your company’s rank on search results. Google, Bing and other search engines now incorporate  social media participation as an important factor in their alogrithms. But, have you seen this effect in action?

The screen capture shows Google results for the term “Ideopia.” Note that 8 out of 10 results are from social media – Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook. And these results are being incorporated fast, e.g. the Twitter post on phobias was posted just 28 minutes ago. Food for thought!

An analytics truism we’ve noticed with the sites we manage is that visitors from social media stay longer and look at more pages. Hmmm. So if followers are valuable web visitors and potential customers, does it make sense to advertise for followers? We’ll let you know. We’re running tests for several clients and Ideopia on super targeted sites and blogs. Following is similar to opting into an email list, but with less risk. Look for a follow-up on our experiment, and see an example of one of our Twitter Banners.

Listen up, you lollygagging bunch of Googlephobes. There’s been enough analyzing, sniffling, webinaring and number crunching on this new media thing. What’s wrong little pretty print person? Fraid a little widget might tear a piece out of your superdog  boxers? Think some Tweety Bird’s gonna bring you down? Fraid something will, and you’ll have to take credit for it, and find ways to spend your big fat raise. You think that’s hard. I know hard. See that scar on my dome. Got that from an art director who went that PTSD on me from cutting type I melted iron and formed letters out of it. I stuffed envelopes, and I killed more trees than you’ve ever seen in your whole pathetic lives. So cinch up or sack up, and get your hinnies out there and take down some new media. I want you to taste it, feel it, own it. Get in the mud and put something real embarrassing about your coach on Twitter. Post a really bad quality video. Start a blog and only post once. Who cares? Daddy’s not going to spank you. Are you new media warriors, or total wimps. Now get out there and do something. Body slam an idea and go for it. No committees, no research, no internal polling or buy in. Just glory. Go grab it, team.

Seriously, you cannot put this off another day. Go to Twitter.com and signup. Create an account name, send out a tweet that says “Hi, Mom,” and start exploring. I know, you may think Twitter’s stupid, until you discover…

1. What people are saying about your brand and your competitor’s products online.
2. How you can gather intelligence from your competition better by following their tweets.
3. What’s really happening the lives of your customers, the context in which they use your product, how they talk, and how you can turn that into better products.
4. How to discover unmet needs, e.g. I wish my toaster held 12 pieces of bread.
5. Learn what makes customers happy and angry about other products and services they use, e.g. we found someone last week who was thrilled to use WiFi at their hairdresser’s.

Get Crackin’! Need help? Give us a call.

Depending on your company’s industry sector, the economy is either recovering or getting worse at a slower rate. As budgets are finalizing for 2010, we’re staying true to the advice we offered our clients a year ago. Here are a few main points:

1. Invest to increase brand awareness and surpass larger competitors. Reap the rewards during the real recovery!
2. Improve your website and web marketing operations to achieve higher conversion rates. If you need to re-design, do it now before the market heats up.
3. Social media is not a fad. It’s a cost-effective way of building customer relationships and bypassing some of the expense of traditional media. Get involved.
4. Introduce new products and innovations now while market noise is lower.
5. Negotiate hard for lower media rates. The market is soft, and unsold inventory is just gathering dust.
6. Think niche. Social media, blogs and Twitter allow you to build customized channels and target pockets of highly profitable customers.

For additional information, download Ideopia’s white paper on“Marketing in the Recession”.

I stumbled on this conversation today. Social media and Twitter in particular is chock full of surprises. Social media relationships are driven by the types of relationships people want to have with brands, not simplistic demographics. Don’t assume your customers aren’t using social media until you look for them!

Now that Twitter has 15 gazillion users and the major news magazines have deemed to cover it in a major way, every Andy Rooney style crank is criticizing it.  Listen, pals, it’s a new way of communicating. You may not like it. You may not use it. But it’s here to stay.

Yes, there are certainly millions of dumb tweets about people shaving, getting ready for meetings, and wanting to buy your gold filings. But there’s a valuable idea here – micro communication. And it’s important, because it means you don’t have to get married on a social level to garner important rewards from an off- and on- again relationship with a fellow tweeter. Small bits of information, a url here or there, a connection, a new idea can make a big difference. If you approach Twitter with a “Friends for Life” expectation, you will most likely be sorely disappointed. Twitter isn’t a conversation, but it can be the most gratifying form of digital eavesdropping. About those gold fillings, the Ideopia Tweet Team can hook you up.

See symos.com for a great overview of Twitter stats.

http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/