The amount of great social media resources online is staggering. Everything from monitoring tools, how-to guides, and stats, to the focal point of this post; the top list. Like the top 10 ways to become a real social media expert , top 5 social bookmarking sites and top 10 blogs – you get the gist of it.
In one of my latest attempts to stay current in an ever-changing space, I searched for SM resources to see if anything had been flying under my radar, or if something has emerged recently that I’m crazy to ignore. What I found was a long list of lists. I started with 22 Essential Social Media Resources and my journey soon spiralled out of control when it became apparent that everyone was putting together some kind of SM whats what. Pick any number between 1 and 100 and chances are there is some kind of top SM resource list for that figure. You get top 5s, plenty of top 10s, this top 50, a top 220+ and even a mammoth 1001 !
I thought about trying to condense each of these into my definitive top 11 list (because I like the number 11); but then I figured, that’s all ready been done plenty of times way better than I ever could. So instead I’m just going to pick out a few gems from the lists that I read.
Infographics
Everyone likes pretty images, so handily these nice infographics combine visuals with good information. They are a nice way to depict new trends without looking at some obscure high school throwback line graph. The one on display (from 97th floor) would be great to give to businesses exploring new social media options. Print it out and stick it on the office wall.
Download the PDF by clicking here
Social Brand Management
This article is a great reminder of what is important when managing a brand through SM. The differing perspectives of some seasoned pros tells me there is no magic formula that will help you co-ordinate you branding efforts entirely. From transparency to revenue, relationships to the future; each “guru” points to something quite different as the key driver. Each perspective is worth considering, although the one you choose will ultimately depend on what you’re trying to achieve.
Don’t let your Blog be a Loser
No-one wants to be the unpopular kid in class. This witty and informative guide points out ways your blog might be kinda lame and what to do about it. Avoid the perils of being a loner, looking funny, or acting like a spaz.
So there you have it, possibly the least comprehensive social media top list ever complied. Maybe someday this post will feature in a list of marginally informative social media resources. I hope so. Have you seen anything lately that you thnk would make the next SM top list?
Last night I was checking out the site stats for iThnk.com. I went through the keywords that were searched for on Google resulting in a click for our site, an exercise I found to be quite entertaining.
The most prolific search term for getting clicks is “balance”. True story. In fact, it is more than double that of any other term used to find us. I’m not even going to start to speculate what the searchers were looking for when they chucked this into the Google machine, but I doubt they always got what they wanted by finding us. There have been plenty of relevant search terms that relate to what we write about on here which is encouraging. Stuff like:
- “how to write a blog”
- “cool facebook brands”
- “fbml resources and guides” Continue Reading »
Measuring the success of any social media venture is definitely something businesses should be doing. That’s no surprise; well at least I hope it isn’t!
Keeping sight of what constitutes success along the may be another story. What I’m getting at is there are so many ways to succeed in your social media campaigns, it is important to select what matters most at the outset. Here are a few of the ways you could measure success:
- # of comments on posts, updates or uploads.
- # of likes, diggs, retweets and shares (of the above).
- # of fans.
- # of page views (of your blog or social network site).
- Click through to your website.
- Offline media coverage (publicity).
- RSS subscriptions.
AND the list goes on. I see a problem emerging when the temptation to dominate every imaginable metric arises. I’ll try to explain why this could get you into trouble… Continue Reading »
Recently, Sam wrote a post about the usefulness of Twitter. Some of the inspiration for his post came from this article by Dan Schawbel. Dan reckons Twitter’s power 
as a marketing platform is declining, essentially because too many people are broadcasting and it’s too cluttered for new messages to be seen.
This made me think about how I use Twitter. I broadcast occasionally and listen frequently. I search Twitter to find up-to-date social media news, reviews of new tech products, and to get solutions from people currently dealing with a problem I’m faced with.
Continue Reading »
There is a strange conflict between getting things done and getting more things to do… to translate that, the plethora of ingenious new
marketing strategies (well, pretty good ones at least) we have up the iThnk sleeve are currently getting pushed aside by the day-to-day business activities. We are putting heaps of effort into current tasks at the expense of implementing the strategies we know can help the business grow.
Personally I’d like to blog a lot more, I’m trying to read and comment on more blogs, I’m playing with more social media tools, and I’m giving things a crack I previously would’ve put in the too-hard basket. Why? Four reasons:
1) To practice what we preach to others.
2) To upskill and have more in-house capabilities.
3) To get some Google love.
4) To add value to clients by saying “yea sure” and having a willingness to give anything a crack. There isn’t anything that can’t be done, just people that can’t be bothered. Continue Reading »
I talk to people a lot of people that don’t really understand exactly what iThnk.com is, and what exactly our team (Sam and I) do. To be honest, I sort of like it that way. To me it adds a little mystery to the whole operation. From a marketing stand-point though, it’s a terrible situation to be in!
The real reason it may seem unclear as to what it is we do is that we don’t really know ourselves. Ok that’s not true. We know exactly what we do – we just don’t want to tell anyone! Ok that’s not true either. So here it is: iThnk.com provides a range of marketing solutions centred around (but not exclusively with) social media. Basically we devise wicked marketing strategies that take advantage of powerful social media tools to work harmoniously with the rest of the marketing mix. Sounds pretty awesome ah? Um that’s because it is! Well at least we thnk so.
Part of our service is to update this blog and give you our take on social mediary stuff (btw that is a word I just made up). We like sharing any insight we have so right now I’m going to give you an example of how we work: Continue Reading »
