I haven’t blogged here for a while, but every few months I use this blog as my own public notebook for specific topics, that I’ve picked over some time.  I’ve listed 25 content discovery, content analytics and content distribution platforms  that can rapidly boost all content marketing efforts. These tools all work in different ways to aid in efforts of maintaining a professional social media presence. Some might be already known to you, others are fairly new and not really public yet:

1. Wildfire

Recently acquired by Google, this app is a Swiss army knife for most of your social media news. You can monitor, post, generate reports and compare the effectiveness of multiple campaigns using a simple interface for every channel.

2. Percolate

The premise behind percolate is to allow CMOs and brand managers to sample different ideas before tweeting or posting them to their online followers. Most of the social media tools allow you to monitor and post messages, but only a handful help in the content creation process. Percolate eliminates the need for a creative social media agency and lets the brand managers take charge of their social media again.

3. Outbbrain is a discovery platform that aids in promoting your website by driving engagement and acquiring traffic organically. The platform delivers personalized links for every user and distributes your content in thousands of websites from around the Web.

4. Stumbleupon

Stumbleupon is an established tool that’s noted as being a powerful platform for new brands. They introduce visitors to your site that enjoy browsing and who wish to continually discover new online properties in precise categories. Your site enters a raffle and, if selected, is introduced to the targeted visitor. Stumbleupon has some of the lowest CPCs in the industry, and you only pay per visitor. In most cases, the cost is lower than say, placing Facebook ads.

5. Zemanta

A pioneer in social content promotions, Zemanta is known for their powerful algorithms that help bloggers generate content for their pages and increase conversions and stickiness. After helping you generate this content, Zemanta also recommends you content to audiences from around the Web.

6. Linkwihtin

Promote your old posts with this widget that boosts your page views an exposes relevant articles form the past. The program appends beautiful thumbnails to each related post and is highly customizable.

7. nRelate
nRelate is a powerful platform that joins publishers and marketers to match qualified readers with content. After uploading your content to nRelate’s platform, it will be featured in relevant pages as “suggested content” and drive targeted visitors to your site.

8. ContentDJ

ContentDJ is like magic. Your role is to type in relevant hashtags and select a handful of options for your content, and the tool keeps your stream updated and maintains the contentment of users with quality content. ContentDJ is a great tool for those who wish for a more automated way to manage their social media accounts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Owning a great domain has never been as important as of today. Having a similar name to another online business is just asking for trouble. Also all the search engines, the various browsers, the ISPs & even mobile companies have made it harder and harder to find a good domain.

Having a domain name offers a unique identify, but it can be difficult to figure out which ones are available for purchase. If you do not want to pay too much for your identify, then you will need to get creative and think of names that are unique and are available. Buying domains that are owned often means having to pay more. These 14 tools can get you started on finding a great domain:

1. DomainTools.com:
With a novice account, users can look up domains, whois, screenshot histories and check for typos in their chosen domain with limited use, but a professional account removes the cap and offers alerts for reverse IP, hosting history, name servers and registrants.

2. Domain Typer:
This website offers a very simple interface; all you need to do is visit the website and start typing the domain you’re interested in. In real time, it informs you whether the .com, .net and .org versions are available and offers alternatives and aesthetically appealing variations.

3. Name Spinning: Just as the name suggests, you can spin one or two English words together to create a relevant domain name to register. This is best for defining a brand through SEO, such as spinning “auto repair” into “autorepairkits.com.” The words must be recognizable English, however.

4. Archive.org:
This is a permanent archive of Internet history, and it serves as a good means of looking up what type of website once was housed by a particular domain. For example, it works best in your favor not to pick a domain that has an unscrupulous history to it.

5. Name Bio: Similar to the previous, Name Bio is designed to provide a history on a domain but focuses more on the sales that domain has undergone. This works well when you are interested in an owned domain and want to know some more about its value.

6. Google Hot Trends: If you do not have a particular website idea in mind but want to bank on the latest trends, Google Hot Trends is the best place to go to know what those subjects are. This provides insight on popular search terms that you can use to decide on a domain name.

7. Domain Groovy:
With this groovy tool, you can quickly insert a domain you are interested in checking and see whether it is available with up to four domain registrars. It will also suggest alternatives whether the one you suggest is available or not.

8. Acronym Finder:
For a twist on your domain, consider using an acronym instead. For example, CINO stands for Coastal Is Number One. A similar approach can make your domain and website easier to remember and identify by readers.

9. Bust a Name:
This website lets you bust out a name by entering a few keywords so it can generate an available domain. You can save suggestions for review as you generate more using different keywords as you wish, and then you can buy them all if desired.

10. Lean Domain Search:
Using Lean Domain Search, users can enter a single keyword they want in their domain and generate available suggestions that are related to that keyword. For example, “Boston” generates 869 available domains waiting to be purchased, such as “brainboston.com” and “bostonly.com.”

11. Premium Drops:
This is more for those looking to invest in a dropped domain and who need to do research on its worthiness. It will provide the Alexa rank and Google Pageranks for expired domains, as well as offering a host of different metrics that suggest whether the offered value is worth it or not.

12. Drop Day:
Another useful website for premium investors, Drop Day lets you know which expiring domains are a wise investment and why.

13. Sedo:
Sedo offers a marketplace that hosts various tools to help both buyers and sellers of domain names connect with one another, such as domain appraisals, domain parking, promotion, brokerage services and much more. As a testament to its success, Sedo has seen over six million domains transferred in its lifetime. Also competitor Moniker.com should be mentioned here

14. Domains Bot:

With Domains Bot, you can enter either a domain idea or a keyword related to the website you want to build, and it will automatically start building domains that are relevant to what you typed in. If available, you will have the option to buy the domains.

As the use of social media grows, so does the need to track and analyze its use. Social media marketers need to understand where their efforts are best utilized on social media platforms. Other analysts and researchers need to understand the overall impact of social media. For this reason, social media analysis tools are emerging. Most tools gather and analyze text data from various social media platforms. Some are platform-centric, while others gather data from a variety of sources. Thirteen of the most awesome tools for social media analysts include:

1. Author Crawler:

http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/tools/author-crawler/

Author Crawler is an interesting tool that examines a site’s backlinks and searches for author identification for each link. Reports for the tool list the backlinks, along with the author, their social media membership, their circles and number of followers. This tool utilizes the SEOmoz API and generates easy-to-understand reports. The tool is very useful for understanding the value of each backlink and for follow-up with selected authors. Author Crawler is the only tool that tracks backlinks to author for an analysis of the author’s social media participation.

2. Datasift.com

Datasift is a Twitter analysis tool that examines tweet data in real-time. Datasift also utilizes MySpace and Klout data to create profiles of social media users. Datasift filters and organizes massive amounts of raw social media data and provides output in an understandable form.

3. Openamplify.com

Openamplify is an Natural Language Processing (NLP) analytic engine that processes text to extract valuable knowledge from social media conversations. Openamplify operates within the Insights dashboard. This tool analyzes social media conversations for intent, such as intent to buy, to choose, to sell or to go. The tool picks up social conversations about a particular brand and tracks users discussing their intent with regards to the brand.

4. Opencalais.com

OpenCalais enables authors to submit content and have tags and metadata automatically generated by the tool. The data is then used to enhance SEO for the content. The user may build maps or networks, connecting content with people based on the data. OpenCalais analyzes HTML, XML and text documents.

5. Peekanalytics.com

PeekAnalytics is a Twitter analysis tool. PeakAnalytics identifies the other social media platforms in which Twitter users interact, providing psychographic and demographic insights from Twitter aggregate data.

6. Venuelabs.com

Venulabs distributes software for “storefront listening” for many major brands, including McDonalds, Chevron, Mercedes Benz, Domino’s Pizza and many others. Venulabs tools monitor social media sites, mobile sites and local listings for brand reputation management and analysis.

7. Clarabridge.com

Clarabridge is another company with a host of major brands as clients. These brands include Dell, Marriott, Best Buy, Nissan, and H&R; Block, among others. Clarabridge provides “sentiment and text” analysis to capture the tone of social media interactions about specified brands. Clarabridge integrates data from other sources into the analysis, such as data from call centers, email and surveys. Three versions of Clarabridge analysis tools are available for purchase: Enterprise, Professional and Technology/Service Providers.

8. Solariat.com

Solariat finds and filters posts on several social media platform enabling quick response for brand and reputation management. Solariat monitors Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social media platforms to enable analysts to quickly identify positive, negative and neutral posts, tweets and comments.

9. Measure.ly

Measurely monitors social media platforms, as well as content marketing initiatives, for social conversations about brands. Results are compiled into an easy-to-read dashboard format with key performance indicators and intuitive graphs. Measurely provides analyses of channels, content and community members to identify where social media marketing efforts are best implemented.

10. Appstats.eu

Appstats is a Facebook-centric tool that is utilized to analyze games and apps on the social media platform. Because many social media marketing campaigns employ the use of Facebook apps and games, this tool is a great way to monitor the popularity of these marketing strategies.

11. Honestly.de

Honestly provides a platform for users to send instant feedback to companies. This interesting tool manages customer contact for companies after the sale of their product or service. The tool is marketed to restaurants, retail, hotels, educational and public institutions, beauty services, event and exhibitions, and healthcare providers.

12. Cageapp.com

Cage App is a collaboration tool that is used by developers and creative content generators, but also works for social media analysts. The tool allows sharing of creative product and provides workflow for the approval process. The tool utilizes Twitter for collecting feedback about a creative work. Interestingly, the app allows the user to instantly create a task from the Twitter feed interface.

13. Fliptop.com

Fliptop markets their tool as a way to turn a social media ID into a complete digital ID with a usable profile. The tool gathers data from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media platforms. Fliptop serves major brands, including Cigna, Land Rover, Toyota, Volvo and many others.

As a web analyst, your job is incredibly important: Without you, how do developers, designers, marketers, and website owners know who their visitors really are, let alone what they enjoy? Well, they might have a hunch, but your job is to give them exact information. While the field was once a combination of guesswork and vague data, web analytics is slightly less “foggy” nowadays: With easier data tracking and a wide array of comprehensive tools, getting to know a website’s visitors is becoming easier with each passing day. The following list highlights our 15 favorite analytics tools that range from visitor analyzers to email trackers.

1. UserTesting.com | www.usertesting.com

Usability testing is one of the most beneficial things you can do for your website: There’s really no better way to see how effective a website’s design is than looking over the user’s shoulder! Doing this, however, tends to be both time consuming and expensive. Thanks to UserTesting.com, however, it doesn’t have to be. Their software not only helps you keep track of who visits your website, but also tells you what exactly they’re doing! With prices starting at around $39 per participant, UserTesting.com is one of the web’s most affordable usability programs.

2. Follower Wonk | www.followerwonk.com

When it comes to tracking Twitter users, Follower Wonk is an analyst’s best friend. Comparable to an in-browser plugin, Follower Wonk allows its user to log into Twitter through their website so that they can access a wide array of analytics tools. These tools include specialized profile searches and user comparisons, as well as follower sorting, analytics, and tracking.

3. Nielsen Prizm | www.claritas.com

There’s a reason this is near the top of our list: Nielsen is the world’s leading consumer tracking company that’s most commonly seen telling us what different demographics watch on television. Web analysts can harness the power of Nielsen by using their Prizm tool, which tracks visitors and breaks them down into 66 different demographic segments. The tool also features information about lifestyle segmentation, urbanization classes, social groups, lifestyle classes, and lifestyle groups, ensuring that you receive the most accurate and comprehensive data possible.

4. Rapportive | www.rapportive.com

With so many different forms of social media nowadays, it can be difficult to keep track of everyone’s profiles, statuses, and information. To help make everything a little easier, Rapportive provides you with all you need to know about your contacts inside of your inbox. Best of all, they don’t even need to be your contacts: If a new person e-mails you, you’ll not only be able to see all of their profiles and information, but a picture of them as well!

Read the rest of this entry »

Radian 6 is social media monitoring software that allows companies and social media marketers to track and analyze their brand’s marketing efforts on popular social networks. Radian 6 provides the user with measurements and metrics of social media marketing campaigns. In addition, the software offers guidelines and best practices for utilizing social networks for business marketing campaigns.

Image via CrunchBase

What is Radian 6?

Radian 6 aggregates data from conversations surrounding a brand. The software provides analyses in real time to enable marketers to adjust their message and target a particular audience within minutes. Radian 6 is a product of Salesforce.com, the well-known cloud-based CRM platform.

The makers of Radian 6 note on the website that the software enables marketers to develop and effective social media strategy that allows the brand to engage with current customers as well as expose the brand to potential customers through making new connections.

Radian 6 is not just one software application. It is a suite of programs that work together to help the social media marketer understand the impact of their marketing efforts on social networks. Radian 6 includes:

* Insights

Insights allows the user to track new posts that relate to their brand, but it does not stop with mere tracking of new posts. Insights considers the author, sources and the actual content in the analysis.

* Engagement Console

The Radian 6 Engagement Console is the tool that tracks how the brand engages with users on social networks. The Engagement Console is equipped with a workflow module that enables users to route and assign posts to different teams or individuals. Macros may be created to automate workflow within the tool.

The Engagement Console tracks posts across several social networks including Twitter, Facebook, blogs, video sharing sites and more. Radian 6 also allows the assignment of an administrator, or SuperUser, that may enable the console for other users, and/or change permission levels for users. Users may collaborate across teams or departments using the Engagement Console.

The Engagement Console also provides users with the ability to see a snapshot of profile activity. Perform analyses at a glance with an easy to understand graph display that shows post volumes in real time.

* Summary Dashboard

The Summary Dashboard provides an easy to read summary of the health of your brand across social media networks. The Dashboard analyzes of post volumes, overall brand sentiment, influencers and demographics of those who are posting about your brand. The Dashboard allows users to perform similar analyses for their competitors, too.

The Summary Dashboard pulls data from other Radian 6 components, such as Insights, to provide a compact view of a brand’s social media performance. The Dashboard is a useful tool for determining the effectiveness of a campaign, as well as developing new strategies for brand exposure.

* The Salesforce Social Hub

The Salesforce Social Hub is an automation engine for the Social Enterprise component of Radian 6. The Social Hub features allows users of Radian 6 to track comments and posts in real time. The Salesforce Social Hub provides the user with extensive reporting functionality, historical data and data cleansing. Users may create communities and find brand advocates on the Social Hub, as well.

* Integration with Salesforce Apps

Radian 6 seamlessly integrates with other Salesforce applications, such as the Salesforce CRM platform and Jigsaw.

Radian 6 Training

The makers of Radian 6 provide many opportunities for training to best utilize the software. Demos and training materials are available on the Radian6.com website. The makers of Radian 6 will also provide private demonstrations of the software upon request. Ebooks, webinars and classes are also available for training users of Radian 6.

Radian 6 Mobile App

Radian 6 also provides a mobile app so users may access the Radian 6 platform and tools while on the road. Utilize any mobile device with an Internet browser to access components of Radian 6.

Radian 6 is an all-inclusive social media marketing platform that enables marketers to track and analyze the impact of their brand campaigns across popular social networks. In addition, because Radian 6 is sold as Software as a Service, the price is as scalable as the platform. Depending on the size of account you need Radian 6 can be as cheap as $600/month

Enterprise data integration is incredibly beneficial and it presents many advantages, but few enterprises ever do it the right way. According to many studies, only about 10% of all enterprises have ever performed data integration, or actively support that integration. This is mostly because data integration takes a lot of time and money, and the short-term benefits are not quite as great as the long-term ones.However, once the integration is complete, this can help enterprises better survey data and decrease costs by need less people and making it easier for workers to go through the enterprise’s information.

This comes especially important in a time where social, search, web analytics and other online and offline harvested  data is available.  Here a few interesting concepts and benefits of integration your enterprise data:

I usually don’t post about SEO anymore, but if I hear all this paid, owned, earned social stuff out there I just feel like I have to defend SEO and especially the value of links a bit. SEO is currently and will be in the near future the online marketing techniques that drives the highest ROI (if done properly).

Social engagement or whatever you want to call it is still in the early days and until Facebook, Google Plus and Co. are gamed like below…I just don’t see a chance that the simplicity of the “link system” will be taken over by a social graph.

Nowadays it is way easier and especially much cheaper to acquire social likes, shares, tweets from real users than getting  a valuable link from an authoritative website! The example  below is just one sample of how you can game the social graph. There are plenty of other “tricks”, such as contests or third party software products like Tweetthis.com, Buytweets.com, Fiverr.com or Tweetfordownload.com.

Long story short (No…I don’t write a 20 page post to pretent thought leadership): We are far far away from having the social graph taking over the SERPs in Google & Co.. Social is an imoportant part of  marketing, but it is not a replacement and rather a supplement to SEO.  Especially at a time where Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook accounts can be sold, traded and gamed way worse than anyone ever could imagined.

updated:  2/6/2012 19:38

A few years ago I was really impressed by everything Google did and it remained like that for years. However,  recently I really have to wonder were their ethics went. It’s been reported all over the web that the Google+ integration is “a bit” too much and the Google privacy rules might turn into a Spy world. I guess it sucks, but they will probably get away with it.

Today I noticed another fun little feature, that should make the Groupons of this world a bit upset:

Google started pushing the Google Offers product into the SERPS (top right above all Adwords). The banner and ad appears not only when you are logged in, but also at times when you are logged out of Google.

In other words: Google is giving their own deal products a premier paid spot with image in the SERPs. Now did they ask all the 2000 Groupon clones and all e-commerce sites with deals  to get the same treatment? Or are we back to the old transparency tactics?

Logged in view:

Logged out view:

No wonder the NYC subways are plastered with Google banners promoting the new Google good to know campaign. Personally I am just glad to see that we are back to the 2004  paid inclusion days

When it comes to project management usually users have strong opinions.  Not only the big shops like SAP got a fair share of criticism, but also small companies such as Basecamp usually get tossed after a while since user adaption just goes to hell.

The project management field is one of the hardest things to pack into software sind needs are different and can be quite complex while users are used to very simple UIs.

A new approach apparently  was launched by  the company 6 Wunderkinder: Wunderkit, a software that tries to be Google Wave on steroids. A project management software that not only solves work projects, but also helps solve real life problems:

Using FB or Twitter to sign into Wunderkit is something that’s really awesome. It’s not only going to help people to use it, but also makes it usable across someone’s entire life. An approach a lot of enterprise solutions should take.

Tenrox enterprise software is another company, who is however more focused on enterprise project management software. Tenrox provides a set of tools to handle the workflow that comes with planning out a product and launching it. In the same breath, the software allows organizations to handle the eventual distribution of the product.

That being said, it can essentially be run anywhere. The workflow management suite is web-based, so that any computer with an Internet connection and a modern browser can interface with the software. While this certainly cuts down on installation time, it also means that the software can be extremely portable. Members of the development team could theoretically check the project from home, or perform work from a remote location. This is also a positive boon for those that contract out with other organizations. In a pinch, other computers could be used if machines assigned to a project end up going down.

That being said, the Tenrox solutions can do plenty for those that do all of their work in house as well. Many organizations act as though they are made up of many smaller groups that aren’t related to one another. The management software can help each of these teams work together. Risk and issue tracking keeps everyone updated on what problems might arise, but no one should think that project teams should always have to focus on the negative aspects of development. Project tracking software helps to keep everyone on task, and project dashboards clearly spell out everything that still needs to be done. With scheduling and skill availability resource software, capacity planning can even be accomplished without any tears.

Accountants will be pleased with the earned value tools. These can work to calculate how much work is actually being done, and how long a project will genuinely take. Anyone that finds that the teams are often going over budget will be amazed at how useful this sort of solution really is. Since it may also be used to estimate the project’s completion date, it might also serve those that have trouble budgeting time more than financial resources.

When it comes time for someone to take a vacation, the web based project time tracking software can take the pain out of travel. It can also be used to make notes of overtime and leave time. Whenever the time data is validated it is sent to a compatible payroll system that easily processes the payroll data.

Human capital management involves not only strategic capacity planning, but also a strict adherence to quality practices and government labor laws. The enterprise project management software offered by Tenrox combines the aspects of project and resource management. In addition, project accounting and resource management solutions are also included. This streamlines the process while making sure that the organization always sticks with quality standards, and does not violate any government legislation.

Naturally, collaboration between team members and the project heads are of paramount importance. With this sort of a system in place, problems can be brought out into the open before they explode. This means that a respectful discussion can begin before a project gets stuck in the mire. Tenrox enterprise project management software is the perfect package to get any development organized.

Since people like, share, tweet more than they traditionally link, the influence of social mentions in SEO is currently a hot industry topic. Some SEO experts consider them essential for improving rankings. Other professionals give them a very low influence value . And several SEOs could care less about them one way or the other. Then there’s Google and Bing. The two search engines are desperate to understand social metrics in order to improve their algorithms, so much so that they are trying to coax Facebook and Twitter into sharing more data. This should be a signal to those in SEO that a unique opportunity exists to successfully leverage the knowledge gap and aggressively build out their social mentions. Of course, this is easier said than done. In addition to the technical issues that both search engines face, Google’s Webmaster guidelines do not cover any third party services, freeing spammy Facebook accounts and Twitter shares of any violations. Welcome back to the pre-Florida update days! But there are ways to effectively build your social links; some you may already be doing and others you probably should start doing.

Facebook Likes
When Facebook Likes came on the scene in 2010, few could anticipate their search significance. The fact is obtaining likes is a necessary component of any SEO strategy. Though integrating a Facebook social plugin or comment feature is the standard method of attracting likes, there are many approaches to increasing this metric. White hats swear that great content will attract more likes. SEOs employing more grayish practices buy likes via Fiverr.com, Ebay or other services. The really dark forces goes as far as faking like buttons. Marketers with deep pockets will create contests, full-fledged Facebook campaigns or run traditional advertisting campaigns to build a great like-base. The value of a like is as dependent on the competitive landscape as it is the number of accumulated thumbs-up. Take the like temperature of brands in your industry to determine how aggressive you want to become. Same rules and assumptions apply for Facebook shares, which should carry more influence on search since they are harder to get.

Tweets and Re-tweets
Generating an impressive amount of natural looking, quality tweets and re-tweets is something that only larger Twitter accounts can accomplish. Utilizing paid tweet services is certainly an option, but efficiency might be limited due to the fact that most of them are marked as disclosed ads. A more interesting option is Paywithatweet.com or Tweetfordownload.com These services allow users to generate Tweet plugins, which then enable users to download a file for a tweet or share. This could obviously be used for any downloads or for simply replacing long form fields, which usually come with a high drop-off rate.

Another important part of building followership and increasing re-tweets is keeping an informative and constantly updating Twitter news stream. Bufferapp.com is great for developing steady tweet velocity. Sharing content by scheduling relevant tweets helps keep your followers engaged. It also allows an easy way of collecting quality tweets while surfing the web.

Google +1

With Google’s recent move into the social space Google+1 is shaping up to be the equivalent of a Facebook Like. The average user tends to share a link only once or twice, mostly via Facebook and Twitter). The +1 browser extension , developed by Ashkan Soltani and Brian Kennish, allows users to do both with one click.

If you plan to increase your social backlinks with Google+1, share the browser plugin on your site. This step is similar to the one you took to share the Alexa toolbar way back when to boost your Alexa ranking.

Google + 1 can also be leveraged to drive paid search traffic via sites like Stumbleupon or Plentyoffish.com.  But in order to truly gage your social traffic performance, you need the tools. When it comes to Google, it’s best to keep tracking in the family. Google Analytics, as do a host of other web analytics vendors, now supports social plugin tracking. Before setting up your campaign, be sure to measure the best converting Google+ page on your website and track accordingly.

For Social Backlinks, it’s Value over Volume

Just as there is a right way and a wrong way to drive SEO results, there are definite social metrics building strategies to follow; use creative approaches to attract new social mentions ; utilize new software to support and track your social efforts just like you track your backlinks.  Understanding SMO best practices and the constantly changing search engine guidelines  ranking factors can give your campaign a competitive edge.  Simply stated, it’s not a matter of how many social mentions you have. It’s about maximizing and recognizing their value.