I got another excellent email in my inbox today. (I reported on this regarding Sephora and the “Insider’s Club” last week.)

This email from Virgin America lets me one click Tweet their low airfares. Good job, VA! What a clever idea. Kudos to whomever is responsible for coming up with that clever addition. Virgin America is a brand that’s proud to believe they have fans willing to promote them via Twitter. Confidence builds on confidence.

Virgin America Email

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I spoke on a panel at the University of Cambrigdge as part of my Traveling Geeks blogger junket earlier this month.

The panel was entitled: “Energizing your Business through Social Networks” plus Show & Tell How businesses should be using social media/ social influencing marketing
An interactive event led by Omobono and created by East of England
TG Panel:Robert Scoble, Susan Bratton, Renee Blodgett & JD Lasica

Here’s a clip taken by Jim “Sky” Schuyler of me talking about how companies can get involved in social media. Thanks go to @ShivSingh of Razorfish for coining the term Social Influence Marketing and to Lorrie Thomas of Web Marketing Therapy for bringing to my attention the importance of Give to Get in the social sphere. Both are recent DishyMix show guests and the links to their excellent interviews are below.

Here is the clip Sky took and and his blog post about it.

Image of Shiv Singh

Shiv Singh, Razorfish on the Social Influence Marketing, the Portable Social Graph and Friendsters

Image of Lorrie Thomas

Lorrie Thomas, Web Marketing Therapy on Chill Pills, Give to Gain and the Four Agreements

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Whether I’m keynoting or participating on a panel or even at a party, socializing and talking business, I get the same basic question over and over.

“How do you manage to be everywhere at once?”

They are not talking about my physical body, which is mostly planted in my Aeron chair moving Personal Life Media forward. What they are talking about is the level of conversation I keep up online via Twitter, on Facebook, in my LinkedIn page, on my blog, with my weekly podcast. And everyone wants specifics. Exactly what do I use and how do I connect all the disparate services together?

I use a couple of really good meta-tools that lay on top of the various social nets, allowing me to write once-post many with my written content and my photos/videos/images. This syndication is at the core of my work and simplifies and radiates my work to my friends and followers across multiple networks.

My constellation of tools includes:

1. MobyPicture for syndicating my photos from my iPhone and Mac across ALL my socnets simultaneously (kicks TwitPic’s booty) Read my Post Once Appear Everywhere review of MobyPicture here.
2. TweetLater Professional (there’s a free version) for pre-scheduling Tweets to come out over time about my DishyMix podcast episodes, other shows on Personal Life Media and some of my better blog posts, of which I hope this is one
3. Trackur for online reputation management and social listening. It’s superior to Google Alerts
4. I’m also testing uberVU in their private beta as it’s a threaded listening/commenting system, because once you syndicate your content across multiple networks, you get comments coming in from all those places and you need a single UI in which to manage the conversations
5. and a Twitter Custom Search bookmark on my Firefox browser toolbar that @DaveTaylor taught me how to do: “dishymix” OR “susan bratton” OR “@susanbratton” OR “personal life media” OR “talk show tips” (learn how from Dave here)

Note: MobyPicture is a Dutch company, founded by Mathys van Abbe. More about MobyPicture here. TweetLater Professional is a Canadian company, founded by Dewald Pretorius. Trackur is a US company, founded by Andy Beal. uberVu is a Romanian company, founded by Vladimir Oane and Dragos Ilinca. We met an amazing number of social media start ups on our Traveling Geeks tour which you should check out.

This post will focus on how I use Tweetlater Pro to schedule and use “spinnable text” so that I’m promoting my work over time across Twitter. I do link my Tweets to Facebook, so they appear there as well.

This is an excerpt from my elearning system, Talk Show Tips: 72 Secret Master Host Techniques in which I teach you how to prepare for a conduct interviews but also exactly how I use social influence marketing to promote my shows. TweetLater Professional is a mainstay in my strategy.

Using TweetLater Professional to Manage Your Twitter Schedule
I am so glad Dewald Pretorius (love that name!) had the organizational foresight to invent TweetLater Professional. I follow him on Twitter @dewaldp. I want to be in the Twitterverse on a consistent basis, but I have a business to run and a life to lead. TweetLater Professional “TLP,” for which I pay $29.97, a month is completely worth the price for its time-saving features.

I have a lot I want to Twitter about. I blog, I have my podcast, we do 39 other interesting shows on the network, I find other blog posts and articles I want to share, I like to post about where I’m speaking, I want to “crowd source” answers to my questions…I love to interact on Twitter.  I take a proactive approach to much of what I Twitter. I like to write a whole series of Tweets and then schedule them to appear at times when I know my East and West Coast friends are most likely to see them. Then I supplement those pre-planned Twitters with all of the spur of the moment things about which I want to communicate by Twittering on the fly.

I also know that any one follower may not likely be watching their Twitter stream when I’m Twittering about a specific subject. For important things, like my weekly show, I want to be able to Twitter about it more than one time.  I will write 4-8 different versions of a Twitter about a single episode and schedule them to appear over a 1-3 week period. That way, if one post doesn’t catch your attention or your fancy, another one about the same show just might.

Here is what the basic TweetLater data entry screen looks like.

TweetLater Main Entry Screen

Here are examples of four Twitter posts I scheduled through TweetLater Professional (using Spinnable Tweet Text – more below)  to come out in one month about one single episode of DishyMix:

Pivotal Veracity. I don’t know what it is, but I want it. McClosky recommends cool email tools. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/
The Jazz Club Dolphin on Text Vs. HTML http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/
40,000 Email Marketing Campaigns Later, The #1 Piece of Advice Emerges http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/
Shy? An incredibly convoluted but elegant solution to networking from Bill McClosky. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/

Notice that they all have the same TwitPWR url?  That way, which ever ones get RT’d, give more power to that single url and reinforce my standing at TwitPWR. I also save draft tweets that include text and a TwitPWR url in it if it’s a really good episode and I’ll want to promote it for weeks afterward.

Spinnable Tweet Text

My very favorite feature of TweetLater Professional is not just scheduling tweets that will be published every X number of hours, days, or weeks. The “Spinnable Text” feature is BRILLIANT. To avoid having the tweet say exactly the same thing every time it is published, you can provide alternate tweet text options (multi-level spinnable tweet text) from which the final tweet text is compiled every time a recur is published.

My Spinnable Text post for the above four Tweets about Bill McClosky’s interview on DishyMix looked like this in the entry box:

{Pivotal Veracity. I don’t know what it is, but I want it. McClosky recommends cool email tools. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/|The Jazz Club Dolphin on Text Vs. HTML http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/|40,000 Email Marketing Campaigns Later, The #1 Piece of Advice Emerges http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/|Shy? An incredibly convoluted but elegant solution to networking from Bill McClosky. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/}

Note: You can always cancel or pause these kinds of recurring Tweets if they become noxious or are no longer viable. Also, the directions for how to do Spinnable Text are very well done on the TweetLater console.

In addition to the advanced scheduling, another feature I like in TLP is the ability to schedule for multiple accounts. I manage my own Twitter account @SusanBratton, I also manage the Twitter stream for @PersonalLIfe and I contribute to the Association for Downloadable Media’s Twitter feed, @ADMTweets. I can write any Twitter and decide to post it to one, two or all three of my accounts using TLP.

TweetLater Pro Accounts

Note: I also own @TalkShowTips and @DishyMix and send potential followers to @SusanBratton to follow me there.

Track Your Keywords on Twitter with TweetLater Professional
I have set up alerts and track a list of keywords using TweetLater Professional too. I use it like I do with Trackur, which I view about once a week. I like getting the Twitter digest every day in email so I can discover new people to follow or who I can tell about TalkShowTips. You can also use this feature to track your @replies, though I keep up with them through TweetDeck when I’m at my desk and Twitterific on my iPhone. It feels more timely to me to get them at those places, than TweetLater Professional.

I am actively looking for Twitterers who are posting about their latest show, so I can ping them about this book or respond to them in general. Here are my current list of keywords and phrases I track:

“latest podcast”, “my podcast”, “my show”, “new episode” ,”new podcast”, “new show”, “personal life media”, @susanbratton, #adtech, #TG2009, dishymix, podcast advertising, show host, susan bratton, susanbratton, talk show, talk show host, talkshow, talk show tips, talkshowtips, plm

This is how the email digest of results from your Keyword Tracking in Tweetlater Professional looks. These are a few Twitters, mostly from others, about DishyMix:

TweetLaterPro Keyword Digest

The Big Brouhaha About Twitter Automation
I must warn you. There are some features of TweetLater Professional that are unpopular with the “Twitterati*.”

You can set Tweetlater Professional to automatically follow anyone who follows you, even with a 72 hour window to manually review your new followers before you confirm them. Turn about is fair play. You can also autmatically unfollow anyone who unfollows you. Fair enough. You can also automatically send a message to anyone who follows you. I like to thank my new followers, but a LOT of big name Twitters do not agree with me. They feel it’s spammy. They hate what are callled “Auto DM’s.” It’s a personal choice. If someone is really going to unfollow me because I thanked them for following me, then OK. I can live with that.

I am a mannerly woman and I like to say thanks. You should choose what feels best to you. Here’s a post I did on a dozen things to know about managing your online reputation. Always go with your gut. Here’s my SXSW interview with Guy Kawasaki where he says if he’s not pissing somone off, then he’s doing something wrong. With 150,000 followers, he can afford a few unfollows.

Twitter is a big social experiment and you have to have the confidence to feel your way through, apologize for mistakes and try new things! I find an apology is all it takes if you cross someone’s boundary.

Now you know the set of tools I use to “be everywhere” and a bit more detail about how I leverage TweetLater Professsional. Let me know what additional questions you have and tools you like for managing across social nets.

* Twitterati means the celebrity people on Twitter who have a large share of voice. Like the Glitterati or the Digerati… They can wield a big stick with their opinions.

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Andy McLoughlin (@bandrew @huddle) and Alastair Mitchell asked this simple question:

What happens when the MySpace gen goes to work?

If Andy and Alastair have the answer, it’s “use Huddle,” their collaboration service that succinctly integrates file management, file sharing, permissions, whiteboards, task management, and online meeting tools into a clean interface that comes to you, in your social environment.

Huddle Workspace

One of the first companies invited to integrated into LinkedIn, Huddle is next launching within Ning – to bring group collaboration tools to groups, where than hang out.

I’ve used Basecamp and Lighthouse among other collaboration tools and Huddle looks like a definite improvement for a few reasons. First, the buddy list brings humanity into an experience that’s previously been “document” or “project-focused” rather than people-focused. Secondly, there’s web conferencing built right in. Third, you can live edit documents together, which I find I do often. And you can manage tasks for multiple projects in your account.

At Personal Life Media, though our experts are mostly in NY and SF, our production group is in Florida, we have developers in Chicago, New York and Chennai. All businesses are moving to global collaboration and Huddle is the next generation of collaboration tools. And there’s a Freemium business model, so you can try out a free account.

Replace Basecamp, GoToMeeting, Google Docs and your Chat ap with Huddle.

Andy McLoughlin, co-founder, Huddle

These co-founders have a great personal interaction - a good sign for success.

Andy and Alasdair Speed Dating with Howard Rheingold

From the Seedcamp Profile:

Andy McLoughlin     Alastair Mitchell

Twitter: huddle

Email: hello@huddle.net

Website: http://www.huddle.net

Contact Phone: +44 (0)7811 103 540

Company Description
Established by Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin in November 2006, Huddle.net is a multi award-winning network of secure online workspaces where users can share files, collaborate on ideas, manage projects and organise virtual meetings.
Its customers include P&G, Pearson, Nokia and UNICEF, hundreds of thousands of small businesses and a number of UK and US government departments. Huddle’s API enables developers to integrate their applications and build new services on top of the Huddle platform.
In October 2008, Huddle.net launched on the LinkedIn application platform as the only non-US company, alongside Amazon and Google. In February 2009, the company partnered with InterCall, the world’s largest conferencing provider, to provide services to theit 1M+ customers. In June 2009 BusinessWeek called Huddle.net one of their ‘50 most promising startups’ globally.
Huddle.net’s 30 staff are headquartered in London with sales offices in Chicago. A San Francisco office will open in September 2009.

I recently interviewed both Clark Kokich, the Chairman  and Shiv Singh, Vice President & Global Social Media Lead of Razorfish on DishyMix.

Image of Shiv Singh

Shiv Singh, Razorfish on the Social Influence Marketing, the Portable Social Graph and Friendsters

Image of Clark Kokich

Clark Kokich, Razorfish on Social Influence Marketing and the 2009 Digital Outlook

Today Razorfish unveiled “Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report.”

Based on how much I enjoyed their Digital Outlook 2009 report, I can’t wait to sink my teeth into this too. I find Razorfish’s reports to be very high quality and they always give me a better perspective on what I’m seeing in the market. I’ve taken to calling Social Media Marketing, Social Influence Marketing now that Clark and Shiv have gotten ahold of me.

David Deal, VP Marketing at Razorfish says, “we believe Fluent dispels some common myths about social media and influencers, such as:

·         Myth 1: Companies are finally figuring out how to build their brands through social media and influencers.  In fact, consumers surveyed by Razorfish reveal widespread indifference to brands in the social world.  Six out of 10 consumers don’t bother to seek out opinions of brands via social media.  We believe the problem is that marketers still treat social like any other channel for spreading their messages when in fact they should be taking advantage of its participatory nature.

·         Myth 2: Television is dead.  Our survey shows that consumers view TV ads as more trustworthy than ads on social networks when purchasing decisions are made.  Our take: Social Influence Marketing complements, but does not replace, television.   Moreover, marketers can increase levels of trust in social by developing a credible social voice and engaging with consumers instead of treating social like a one-way broadcast mechanism.

·         Myth 3: you cannot correlate consumer perceptions of your brand in the online and offline worlds.  With the help of TNS Cymfony and The Keller Group, Razorfish has created a mechanism – the SIM Score – that can help brands understand the relationship between what consumers say about you across the online and offline social worlds.   The SIM Score (introduced in Fluent) measures how much consumers talk about your brand and how positive or negative those discussions are.  In Fluent, Razorfish applies the SIM Score to companies ranging from GM to Capital One.  Although the SIM Score focuses on the online world, in two industries we correlate SIM Score to the offline world.  We’ve found that a brand’s online share of voice corresponds closely to offline.  The correlation is important because offline friends remain the single most trustworthy sources that influence consumer purchasing decisions.”

Let me know your thoughts on this report and I’ll be posting mine as well.

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Two of the things I’m tracking right now are social media meta tools and social media data mining for marketers.

uberVU, a European start up from Romania has created a clever social media meta tool that solves a real problem for content creators in the social sphere.  With uberVU, you can track conversations that happen anywhere on the web and see the responses in a single interface.

For example, this blog post is posted to my DishyMix blog, but will also automatically be Twittered and will get syndicated to my Facebook page. Anyone can reply to the blog post, reply to me @SusanBratton or comment on Facebook. uberVU lets me see all the comments in a single location and then allows me to comment from that UI.

Vladimir Oane and Dragos Ilinca of uberVU are in private beta now and public beta soon on their comment tracking and reply system.

Vladimir Oane, co-founder, uberVu

Here are some screen shots I got while meeting them at the Seedcamp US/UK Speed Dating event last week in London at part of my Traveling Geeks trip.

UberVu Single Conversation

You can track your own work or track stories from other sources. Select a blog post or Tweet for example and uberVU compiles the reactions to the story from where ever that story appears – blogs, Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed, Disqus, YouTube and many more.

You can see all the responses to a story as a threaded conversation. And you can respond from the uberVU interface to any or all of the comments across myriad sites.

In my interview with @DaveTaylor at SXSW, he says the often overlooked but most important activity he recommends is posting blog comments around your key areas of expertise to stay active in the blogosphere. With uberVU, you can see what’s being said AND COMMENT ON IT from a single interface.

Susan Bratton & Dave Taylor on Social Media Commenting Strategies

uberVu is a web app that uses the ContextVoice API to track what’s being said across social graphs, using sentiment analysis, search and filtering, giving you near real time results.

UberVu Conversation Tracker

As a Traveling Geek in London, I participated in a Round Table Discussion event with some of Econsultancy’s clients.

See the TG2009 Econsultancy Flickr Set Here

As a follow up to the event, I was given a copy of their very well done Innovation Report.

Econsultancy Innovation Report for Digital Marketing

If you want a high level overview of some of the hottest technology companies in the digital media and marketing space, this report does a great job with highlighting best practices in the following disciplines:

• Affiliate marketing
• Email marketing
• Online advertising
• Multichannel marketing
• Online customer service
• Online PR
• Social media and communities
• Search marketing
• Usability and user experience
• Web analytics and optimization

One of the most interesting sections to me was on using video to drive affiliate traffic, written by Shawn Collins of Affiliate Summit. (Most of the companies featured are European, but this example of a “best practice” was from Shawn, a US affiliate champion.)

For more free and in-depth coverage on video, I interview Bruce Clay about Video SEO on DishyMix airing today:

Bruce Clay on Video SEO, Page Rank Sculpting and Search Siloing Strategies

From Econsultancy’s Innovation Report

Video as a channel to drive direct traffic to affiliate links
Category: Affiliate Marketing
Company: http://blog.affiliatetip.com/
Many affiliates use video as a channel to drive traffic, but one innovative tactic to drive through higher volumes is to include the URL of the affiliate site and embed it within the video itself.  According to Shawn Collins, few affiliates are making use of video to either drive traffic to their
own sites or to affiliate links directly. Shawn Collins tested various online video engagement strategies, trialling videos through a number of popular sites, including YouTube, MySpace, Revver and Yahoo Video.
Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkX7xHvTIe0

http://blog.affiliatetip.com/

Per Shawn Collins, co-founder, Affiliate Summit

―I have tested various methods over the past year… and found that the following format works best:
http://www.affiliatesite.com/product-name – I then create a redirect via an .htaccess file, so that /product-name
points to the affiliate link. The URL is featured for the duration of the video uploaded to the video sites.

―Conventional wisdom may be that people do not type in URLs in videos – I‘d like to share a secret that the
conventional wisdom is incorrect!

I recently met Neil Dodd of Skype in London and go the low down on Skype’s new 4.1 release. Neil says Skype now supports the following contact mangement and email systems and address books so you can easily grow your Skype address book.

Here’s the list of supported services:

Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, 163.com, Daum, FastMail, Indiatimes, Interia, Libero, mail.com, mail.ru, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, mynet, Rambler, rediff, SINA, Wirtualna Polska and Yandex.

We started off the day today with a fun event created by Reshma Sohoni and Alasdair Ball of SeedCamp.  SeedCamp is an early stage fund that also provides exacting business support and grooming for UK and European start ups who are socially-oriented. Typical investments are up to 50 thousand Euros for about 10% of the business.

By the caliber of the entrepreneurs and the quality of the business ideas I witnessed today, Reshma and her team are making smart investments and providing wise and plished council for the entrepreneurs they back.

Every single one of the thirteen companies was, in my estimation, a great idea combined with a terrific leader or team. The most successful to date include Spotify, the European version of Rhapsody’s “all-you-can-eat for one monthly fee” celestial jukebox; Huddle, which bills itself as the collaboration tool for the MySpace generation (I will do a separate post on Huddle for you as I know you will want to try it) and Moo.com, the on-demand printing company with a smart solution for mass-customized printed products like business cards, stickers and “moo cards” which are their own smaller, clever creation that’s become a standard with the social set.

Other companies that stood out for me were SkimLinks not only because Alicia Navarro was the only female CEO, but also because she’s in a very hot category – website monetization infrastructure. More on SkimLinks arresting start up story and how it works in a very smart way in another post.

The one person with whom I didn’t get to meet but still was very impressed with their initial presentation was Stupeflix. Perhaps the name doesn’t translate well in the US – why would someone want to start the beginning of their company name with a word that sounds like stupid? Nonetheless, this is beyond a cute video creation tool like Animoto, Stupeflix allows you to use XML to slightly change the assets within any video to create multiple unique versions of a video. Best explained by example, they showed a weather video where the location and temperature were automatically changed for various locations on the fly. You could master one video and then have unlimited versions automatically customized by city.

Andraz Tori of Zemanta gave me a quick and helpful demo of his blog writing suggestion tool. This authoring suggestion tool provides related links, images, related stories and more which make every blog post have more robust content and links. I’ve been using it so far this week and can tell you I would not give this tool up now that I’ve used it.

Another tool I have not yet tried but know will be addictive is UberVu. This is one of a new breed of social meta tools, like MobyPicture (recent post about MobyPicture) that aggregates comments from across one’s social sites into a single interface where you can see comments from your followers to your posts, all threaded together in a single application. You can reply to those threads within UberVu and it will place your replies back out in context without requiring you to do so much webpage traveling.  UberVu’s idea of providing reporting for rollup data will significantly help the social media managers and social listening companies keep track of all their conversations in a single UI. There’s a business model in this one, though it may take a few attempts to right-size the offering and prices.

I have to run off to The Guardian – we’re doing a podcast round table there. It’s pouring rain like hell and I wish I could just keep telling you about the companies we met today. I promise to write more to you about some of the individual companies, many of whom are in early or private beta.