Thursday, November 6, 2008

Social Marketing Goodness

In my family of origin, if you really admire someone, you almost never say it to their face. For some reason, this is considered over-familiar and manipulative. If you really want to make someone feel good about themselves, you talk about them behind their backs. Loudly, so they can eavesdrop. If you’re the shy sort, you might confide in their “closest person” (parent/child/spouse). And if your appreciation is too embarrassingly gushy, just choose whichever relative has the biggest mouth. That way, your filthy praise will pass through many hands before reaching the intended recipient and be legitimized through hearsay.

I did at some point learn that normal people do not act this way, but this knowing has never translated itself into habit. Thank god for the internet where anything goes so long as you’re funny. I figure I might as well get this all out on the table now, in the third post.

Anyhow, tonight I went to this awesome presentation on social marketing by web geniuses Anna Billstrom and Janet Fouts who I know from my SFWOW days way back when I was skinny. (I think I’m supposed to introduce SFWOW at this point but you hosers should just go see for yourselves because if I stop to do that I’m never gonna finish this.) There were about 16 people there and they had beer. Then Anna and Janet told us about all kinds of useful things, like:
  • Pingfm – lets you post content to multiple networks at once
  • Friendfeed - aggregates all your shit in one place so you don't have to go clicking all over tarnation
  • Socializr - which is like evite, only better, and does mashups which may or may not be fictional*
  • Social Mention - mines Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Flickr, Digg, etc. to see if anyone is talking about you.
  • Twitterpacks help you find interesting people to follow
  • Qwitter – lets you know when someone stops following you
Also, interesting tidbits, like:
  • Facebook has software that actually recognizes faces
  • Google indexes tweets in 15 minutes
  • Twitphone and Twinkle are good for iPhone but Twittlator is not
  • Your website's Bounce Rate should be under 40%
I have probably got some of this wrong, because it is late and I was transcribing from voice by hand without spellcheck or Google. So if you want to know more, you should check out the handout, or Anna's page because she was on the 'net since before there were pictures and knows more about email marketing than God. Or possibly Janet because she is famous and finds out about all the cool new web gadgets before Anna does.


*Actually this wasn't in the presentation, I found it on Anna's website when I was stalking her.

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