This is another infographic I developed whilst considering tactics in Social Media Marketing. Where my previous graphic showed a social media campaign timeline from conception, delivery and beyond, this aims to display relationship development, attempting to take a complete non-engager to a brand user. I know that this could be taken as quite a simplified view, but this should be understood to be part of a wider strategy.

A picture says a thousand words as they say, so I'll let the jpg do the talking.

One of the main issues with Social Media campaigns is tracking. If you post an unmodified link to your site from any of the popular channels, such as, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr etc, it is going to show up in Google Analytics as traffic from that site, with nothing else about the post it came from, i.e, under traffic sources you will see facebook.com / referral.

There is however a way around this, which is very very sneaky and very very clever. The answer is the URL Builder for Google Analytics. Using this tool you can create a campaign name or reference (as you can see below) so that all visits generated through this link will be bagged and tagged by you Google Analytics software.

I have so far refrained from referencing other people's work but this is so good I really had to share. Plus, it does have a link with my last post, where my post was aimed at carrying through a social media campaign, Solis' work looks at the stages required to integrated Social Media with business.

The article can be found on Brian Solis' blog and takes a holistic approach to the affect and requirements of social media in 2010, from observing to organisation transformation to ROI. Certain elements have been said before, but the post complies lots of ideas and thoughts relating to social media in one place.

It's well worth a read and I would advise anyone with an interest in social media to do so. Kudos to Mr.Solis.

For an image to accompany this post please feast your eyes upon the very pretty and functional conversation prism:

Here's something that I came up with whilst thinking through a time line for a client and reviewing some of my notes for STRASM. It's a process to follow or at least a base to start with.

The thing that I like about this time line is that it gives a nod to the prep required before launching a campaign, including an analysis of the target audience, where they currently hang out on the web and how they talk to each other.

In the hectic real world, unfortunately, sometimes these kind of finer details can be missed out as organisations adopt an SOS strategy (sending out stuff), before properly plotting out their audience and their engagement plan. This can be dangerous, in this day and age web users are more savvy and cynical than ever, rushing in like a bull in a china shop before thinking can, and most likely will, get you and your brand burned.

Let me know your thoughts, I'm open to suggestion, everyday is a school day :)

Quite a simple one and I'm sure you know this already, but again, its one of those things that, if you're like me you frequently forget the finer details of.

In order to create a link like > my blog! > which will take you to http://www.alliwantiscakeandlove.com

You need to enter in the code below:

And just so you can copy it easily:

< a href="http://www.alliwantiscakeandlove.com" >my blog! </a>

but delete the space after the first <

Et Voilá!

That's what I do, feel free to chuck in your two cents if you know a better way :) Everyday is a school day!

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you, Brocalli Kitteh. A.K.A Captain Pugwash.

I can practically hear my heart melting.

It seems like a simple question and I'm sure you may know or at least think you know the answer. But when conducting a piece of work recently, that required me to weigh up the pros and cons of each of these Facebook formats for use with a company, I realised that perhaps I didn't know as much as I thought I did about Facebook.

So I gave it some thought, did a bit of research online (including setting up a fake account and having a bit of a play) and put it all in an easy to digest table format. Which I have decided to share with you good people. Don't say I never give you anything!

P.S: Personal profiles are not for company use according to Facebook's use policy and they can close down your profiles if they feel that they are being misused. So you may want to bear this in mind when making your social media strategy. You have been warned!

When using Basecamp the other day, I realised that I didn't know how to format the text. Just to break it up a bit and generally make it a bit more interesting to look at (not the easiest thing to do!)

However, after doing a little bit of internet searching I found that Basecamp uses Textile formatting. There's a great Wikipedia page on it that you can use as a point of reference, you can find that Wikipedia page here

Regardless of what/who you are setting it up for, if you need to create a DIY social media listening post on a shoe string budget, there are a couple of sites you should know about.

1. Pageflakes

A good site to collate a lot of different RSS feeds. This can include google alerts for your name, your competitors or other information that will help you generate content.
The great thing about Pageflakes is that once you create your account, you can make tabs at the top, which you can use to organise your feeds.

2. Rollyo

Essentially allows you to create a custom search engine, very useful if you know whereabouts you want to be looking online. Probably best described by the BBC,

"Rollyo offers the ability to search the content of a list of specified websites, allowing you to narrow down the results to pages from websites that you already know and trust."

-- BBC World

3. Addictomatic

Probably one of my favourites purely for its slogan "inhale the web" and the cute robot mascot (I want one!). Essentially allows you to search loads of different places simultaneously to give you an overview of the buzz for any topic, whilst displaying you the results on one custom page which you can bookmark for future use. Awesome.

4. HowSociable

Gives you a (slightly rough and ready) online brand visibility overview. Searching numerous social channels simultaneously to give you a number of mentions for each all on one page. You can then choose to track this scoring through monthly updates sent to your e-mail address.

So there you go, I know the descriptions are brief, but as with most things the best way to find your way around something is to go and use it. So go and play!

If you know of any other awesome free buzz monitoring tools, let me know, I'd love to hear from you!