Some describe noise as irrelevant content in reference to a subject matter when looking at data in a particular channel. Noise can be spam. Noise can be repeat content from the echo-chamber of the world wide web. Either way, filtering the noise should be on everyone’s mind today as we’re evolving from the static web to the conversational web to the real-time in your face web.

As someone who loves technology, gadgets and information, the real-time web is a geeks’ dreamland, but it’s also a huge time waster if you don’t have filters setup. Not only do you need filters to manage information gathering and filtering information online, but you also need self control. There are plenty of tools available, but it’s how well you manage those tools to filter the noise. Below are a few of the tools that I use.

RSS Reader

To manage my RSS feeds, I use Google Reader, just like Jason and Taylor. I’m currently subscribed to over 1600 feeds, each categorized into groups by topic.  Some of my groups include Wordpress, Social Media, business, mac news and mobile. My RSS feeds list continues to grow, therefore having them categorized is very important. Inside of Google Reader I have a personal star rule. I star items that I want to read later and share items that I think others will find interesting. In other words, RSS feeds are not dead, and are very important to the social web.

Social Bookmarks

For social bookmarks, I use Diigo to bookmark blog posts that I may not be subscribed to, and save them to content-based groups. I have set up groups for topics like wordpress plugins and wordpress premium themes for blog posts pertaining to each.

Real-time

Gmail Filters

Netvibes

Every morning the first thing I do is open my Netvibes account. This pulls all the stories from my favorite news sites (BBC, Mashable, Wired, TechCrunch, Telegraph, TheNextWeb). Not only does it pull in these news sites but it also pulls in my Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts. The reason why i choose Netvibes over Google Reader is because of the layout format. It shows me all the sites in mini format, on one page just like a newspaper. It enables me to check all my news without having to leave the site.

Tweetdeck

As more and more people are becoming their own news outlets, Tweetdeck enables me to follow the streams of people i deem bring me important informative news about my industry. For example i follow Mike Butcher, iJusine and Robert Scoble’s Twitter feed to see what they are up to, who they are meeting and any links they share.

Twitter hashtags

Twitter search enables me to search for a topic or subject of interest eg. #iranelection Twitter search produces real time search results for the searched topics which enables me to find out what people are thinking/talking about right now on a topic.

Beth Harte is a marketer, blogger, speaker, communicator, thinker, connector (people & dots), adjunct professor and Community Manager for MarketingProfs. Beth’s blog, The Harte of Marketing is featured in AdAge’s Power 150. Beth also blogs for MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog.

The more you engage in social media, the more you realize that there are a lot of folks out there talking just to talk and that there are some folks that aren’t as well known, but are absolutely brilliant. Of course, brilliant is a highly subjective term. For me brilliance isn’t someone who’s like Einstein. For me a brilliant person is the one who has a unique voice, isn’t a lemming, questions the status quo, always tries to spark a conversation (no matter how small or large) with an insightful post, tweet or comment, and someone I learn something new or different from.

So, how do I cut through the clutter to find these brilliant people?

Tweetdeck

When dealing with Twitter, I like to use Tweetdeck because it allows me to create groups…lots of groups! I create groups of friends, people who tweet on certain topics, keywords – you name it!
The more I can slice and dice (I am a marketer, after all), the more I can find those brilliant people and nuggets of information that they might be sharing.

BackType

BackType is a cool site that allows you to keep track of your comments, people who have commented about you and, more importantly, the comments that people you follow leave for others. BackType also allows you to search on keywords, again, very helpful to a marketer. The best part about BackType is I can see where the people I follow leave comments, which helps me to find blogs or smart folks that I may not have known about.

Google Reader

I’d be lost without my Google Reader. Every time I find a new blog using the tools above, I add it to my Google Reader. You can imagine that over time, I have a TON of blogs bookmarked. Every morning, I change the reader to the “All Items” view and I scroll down all the posts, not by blogger…but by date. Those with the best or intriguing titles win my attention. Again, I also look for posts on topics, people’s names, and information I might not have had access to previously.

These tools might seem basic, and perhaps not so cool, but for a marketer, they relieve a lot of the time burden that social media places on us.

Guest blog post by Taylor Davidson (@tdavidson); innovation, photography, travel and entrepreneurship, in some continually shifting combination and order.

Each one of us makes a very personal decision about how to find, filter and understand information to help us live our lives and succeed in our careers. Our goals, interests and personal styles shape what, why and how we sift through the content and context created by the maze of interactions on the web. Instead of focusing on the strategies and tactics that I use to filter the web, consider my own methods and tools as just the best way that I know how, right now, to achieve what I want; like all of us, I’m always looking for ideas and ways to improve.

Considerations and Creating a General Philosophy

Before you think about tools, think about you and what you want to achieve: how much time do you have to devote to consuming information? How much noise is “too much” for you? What methods have you tried, for how long, and what has been successful for you? What networks do you use to connect to people and information? What do you want to do with the information, insights and (hopefully) knowledge that passes through your filters? For example, do you want to find new sources of information, cut out repetitive sources, reduce the time you spend online, spend more time creating, automate your filters, focus on breaking news or in-depth, timeless analysis?

Think about these questions to create your own strategies and goals, but I’ll start with outlining my general philosophy:

• I devote an hour or two a day to reading news and in-depth analysis, and I like following a range of topics and a wide range of people.
• I’m willing to dig through a fair amount of noise to find great signals.
• I try to use algorithms and people to curate my news; I use a mix of searches and popularity-ranking algorithms to find information, but I depend on people to filter content and add their own analysis and point of view.
• I do not read newspapers or major primary news sources; again, I depend on interesting people to find what I should read.
• I feel no need to read everything that pops through my filters; if it’s important enough, it will find me again eventually.
• I’m not terribly concerned with keeping up with the real-time web; it often takes a bit of time to truly process new information and understand the second-order impacts.
• I love to engage bloggers and comment on posts in order to learn, refine my thoughts, and dig deeper into topics with knowledgeable people.
• I want to structure and pass on the information that I find in a way that goes beyond just passing along information but adds something to the conversation, whether it’s an insight, a connection between bits of information or people, or simple something too interesting not to share with my friends.

Given the philosophy, how do I do it?

Using Feeds to Follow People: Blogs, Backtype, Twitter

Blogs continue to be the focus of my filtering efforts due to my focus on long-form content, but as more and more content and interactions have shifted to micro-interactions I find myself needing to use more platforms to find information, links and people.

I use Backtype to create RSS feeds of searches through comments for terms and topics of interest, but I truly enjoy following the comment streams (using RSS feeds) from individuals as a way to see what is truly important to them.

I use Twitter to find links to information, but I don’t use any special tools or tactics other than dipping into the stream from time to time. I use feeds from Twitter search to follow certain keywords, but I also follow @ replies to certain people to see who is talking to them or sharing information with them.

Organizing the Feeds: Google Reader and PostRank

I know many people have sworn off RSS, but I continue to use RSS and RSS readers (my personal choice: Google Reader) as a way to consolidate the streams of information. I use RSS to bring to me a mix of blogs, searches and Google Alerts to follow the web, and I use categories in Google Reader to attempt to structure the information . I have a “best” category to follow the sources I find to be consistently interesting and a mixture of other categories organized into different topics or goals. This is far from static: I add and remove feeds, blogs, categories constantly to find new sources of information and new ways to organize.

Additionally I use PostRank and AideRSS’s Google Reader Firefox extension to integrate PostRank with Google Reader in an attempt to figure out which posts are “can’t-miss”; but given that I am open to sifting through a lot of noise and that I depend on many people that do not have a huge following, I find Postrank isn’t the best fit for my own filtering strategies. I’ve tested BlogRollr and Filtrbox to find and filter information, but I’m always on the lookout for new algorithms and methods for adding more “relevance” and context to my filtering tactics.

Yes, that’s a simple set of tools, somewhat inefficient and ripe for over-consumption, but the benefits from depending on loose networks and “structuring serendipity” to introduce me to great concepts, insights and people is simply too great to give up … yet.

We all cobble together our own method of sorting and filtering through the noise.

The “How I Filter The Noise” guest blog post series will is meant to be an insight with a few examples of how people find their way through such a wild web of content. Hopefully we can all learn a little bit. Thanks to the half dozen guest bloggers that will be joining me in sharing their filter strategies over the next week or two. Look for their posts soon.

I Stopped Tracking EVERYTHING

My Google Reader, a key to almost all filtering strategies, use to be full of Mashable, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and several other massive tech and social media blogs. Each of these blogs ramp up a dozen or two posts a day. At one point I was trying to skim through hundreds of blog posts and news articles each day. Trying to take in this amount of information was impossible. All I ended up doing is making it more difficult to find the news I cared the most about.

My middle ground was only subscribing to about 6 of the 30-40 bloggers that write for these sites – The ones who I thought touched on the most relevant information for me. This was a large improvement but still did not give me the relevance I was seeking.

I Steal My Reading List from Friends

Within Google Reader, you subscribe to articles that your friends share, as opposed to standard RSS feeds. I have been using this feature more and more recently and find it does wonders for screening quality content. I am more or less stealing the reading lists of my friends.

Not all my friends use this feature and not all of the ones that do share things I care about. But I have focused on about a dozen folks who share great stuff almost daily, but not so much content that it overwhelms me.

I Focus With A Second Twitter Account

Yes I follow somewhere near 30 thousand people on Twitter, and no I do not listen to all of them. I, of course, filter.

My main filter on Twitter is a second personal Twitter account where I follow about 150 people.

The second Twitter account is what I use to listen to the people I most care about. It is comprised of designers, social media thought leaders, friends, and people in my home town of Charlotte. It is my go to pulse for the internet. I use Tweetie on the iPhone and Tweetdeck on my desktop to easily listen from this second account, while still being able to reply from my main, public Twitter account, @jakrose.

I Find The Highlights

For technology I use Techmeme. They rarely miss a big tech story and usually have it hours or days before any other news outlet. Tweetmeme is fast becoming a good solution for this too. For politics I browse Politico. For any other subject I either check Digg’s specific categories or Twitter Search.

That is it. Find valuable friends on Google Reader. Use a focused second Twitter account. And find a way to catch the highlights.

Copywriting and Social Media

Copywriting is one of those careers that most people don’t understand.

That’s ok, most copywriters don’t understand it either. One day we may be tasked with developing a tagline for a national appeal to millions, and the next we’re writing a mission statement for a local mom-and-pop.

In the past, traditional advertising has provided a range of passive media for copywriters to engaging a specific audience. Social Media (SM) changes everything. No longer is it a one-way conversation between brand and constituency. SM is an active conversation.

Whether it’s providing topical content for a corporate blog, or engaging an audience in real-time via Twitter, the need for effective copywriting is more important today than ever.

The problem is that it’s virtually impossible for every company involved in SM to have a skilled copywriter on staff. Thankfully, there are some universal concepts that anyone using Social media can employ.

Be Polite

When’s the last time the guy at the fast food restaurant smiled and thanked you for buying the cheeseburger combo? Believe it or not, there was once a time when being polite was expected of everyone who actively engaged with a brand’s audience. Phrases like, Thank You, Please and Can I Help You were staples of all customer service. And while it may be too late to reformat a whole generation to making eye contact and thanking someone while you hand them their change, SM presents the opportunity to rebuild how brands service customers. Be polite. Smile when you write.

Respect Language

People think in fragments. They just do. And every audience has a certain vernacular from which to engage in dialogue. Thus, respecting the language is less about the rules of grammar, and more about the rules of spelling. If there’s one thing you take from this post it should be that the quickest way to discredit your brand is to routinely misspell words. If you question the spelling of a word, look it up. If you have to guess, change the word. People notice.

One Word: Yes.

The core purpose of all copywriting is to persuade an audience to think or act favorably. One way to ensure that this happens is to use positive language in conversation. And the most positive word known to man is Yes. Use positive language in your dialogue and you’re going to make people happy. Or, as they say at the sales conventions, ‘all the little yeses add up to the big yes.’

Check out @Jetblue and @TraderJoes on Twitter for good examples of these concepts.

The key is not to try and be witty and clever – leave that to the copywriters. Instead, focus on being genuinely polite, helpful and positive and you’ll be well on your way to developing a smart conversation strategy for your Social Media efforts.

SERIES Social Media Skills — Advertising, SEO, PR, Graphic Design, Copywriting, and more…

Social Media and the Designer’s Perspective

What can social media marketers learn from designers? Isn’t social media business primarily for marketing or PR people? Not necessarily. Social media is an indispensable tool for anyone looking to communicate and engage with others, especially designers.

The designer’s ultimate goal is not just to make things look pretty, but to be communicators – to communicate ideas, brands, products, and information creatively, clearly and visually to targeted consumers. So, as a social media strategist, why pay attention to what designers are doing?

1. Designers Connect Emotionally With Their Audience

Effective designers seek to understand the needs and desires of their customers, then meet those needs through conceptual design. Designers don’t just make things look cool in Photoshop; they establish an emotional connection with the audience.

Apple is a great example of a company that utilizes a design-driven approach to connect emotionally with their consumers. Design does matter.

A great book titled Do You Matter: How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company, co-written by Robert Brunner, Apple’s former Director of Industrial Design, explains these emotional connections more thoroughly.

Take these design goals of brand building beyond just visuals. Part of that brand building is the emotional connection you can make through social media.

A great example is using the search function of Twitter for customer service. Whole Foods does a tremendous job of this on Twitter. They utilize Twitter’s search functionality and interact with their consumers or potential customers. Using social media, you can ask your customers questions and respond to them, engage them, or simply listen to them.

2. Designers Realize They Are Not the Only Driving Factor Behind Business

A business with a bad business plan cannot be saved by great design alone. Savvy designers know and understand this. Plenty of companies have invested in great design, but ultimately failed because of the way they ran their business.

The same goes for social media. It is not the only answer, but when pieced together with great design, advertising, SEO, and PR – social media can produce big results in terms of building businesses, brands and niche communities.

What good is a website with great PR if the user cannot navigate it easily? All the pieces must work together. Do not rely on one to replace quality in the others.

Harley-Davidson is an example of a company that uses many of these techniques (HD on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube) and is very involved with their community. Randy Sprenger, Manager of Electronic Advertising and Direct Promotions at Harley-Davidson recently sat down with BrandWeek to discuss some of their marketing and social media strategies.

3. Designers Stay Trendy

In this information age, trends and techniques can advance quickly. Part of a designer’s responsibility is to keep up with it all, to know what is going on in pop culture, the design industry and the technology world.

Most designers are constantly reading, researching, learning and evolving so they can stay ahead of the curve and not fall behind. The design archives of AIGA, the professional association for design, is a good place to spot design and advertising trends of the past or present.

Social media marketers must be constantly learning as well. With the growing number blogs, social networks, and expanding social tools, we need to always explore new ways to use social media effectively.

The bottom line is, design and social media are complementary ways of communicating with consumers, so designers and social media marketers would be foolish not to harness the power of both.

Special thanks to Jason Keath for allowing me to post my thoughts here.

SERIES Social Media Skills — Advertising, SEO, PR, Graphic Design, Copywriting, and more…

What Social Media Marketers Need to Know About Public Relations

With the rise of social media and its use for marketing purposes (some of which haven’t gone so well and others which are really fantastic), there has been increasing demand for a class of professionals who dedicate themselves to communicating brand values through these unique new channels. Traditionally, PR professionals have used a variety of communications methods to reach the public, and the good ones see social media as a wonderful new tool in the PR or marketer’s overall arsenal. This overlap of domain expertise can lead to more success if the two functions understand each other and work together, or it can lead to frustration and friction if relations are allowed to become a turf battle over who owns what.

Understanding and coordinating with PR is a sure way to make sure your client engagements run smoother and produce the best results. PR is about communication and engaging a variety of public audiences and therefore, social media marketers that understand the need for creating messages that resonate with each of those audiences will gain the benefit of this expertise and make sure social media-based conversations feed into and enhance the brand’s overall value.

To learn some basics on PR, read this great article from AdAge. To get a bit more specific on how it relates to social media marketing, here are my thoughts:

1. The difference between social media and PR

Social media is a method of communication. Public relations is focused on reputation awareness and management – the practice of communicating with and influencing a variety of publics that matter to a company or an individual. Social media is one of the tools used to establish, raise and maintain such awareness.

2. Why thoughtful positioning and messaging matter

Social media marketers need to understand the messages that a PR or marketing department want to share with a company’s publics and why. Yes, social media is about transparency and authenticity – – so is good public relations. Dishonesty is bad, regardless of the channel. But “spin” doesn’t always have to mean dishonesty – “spin” is a word largely used by those that don’t understand the value of “positioning.” Everyone positions in one way or another. When you write your social media bio you are positioning. When you pitch a customer you are positioning. Positioning is about wisely choosing the way you communicate when attention is at a premium. Does that sound familiar?

PR executives help companies and individuals to position or deliver messages in a favorable way – one that can, and should be, open and transparent as well. Despite some bad apples, PR teams are not in the business of hiding things. But they are in the business of positioning communications in such a way that is memorable. Social media marketers need to respect the public relations team and their expertise here – taking the time to understand the messages that the PR and marketing team have determined will work best to reach each of a company’s publics – and incorporate these messages into their social media marketing campaigns. Haphazard messages – in the spirit of being “social” – that aren’t well-coordinated will defeat the marketer’s purpose – consistent, persistent messages help publics to remember and recall a brand/individual/company better. Whether the messages are delivered in a social media community or in a written press release, they need to be thoughtful and consistent.

3. PR is much more than media relations

This is perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about PR. I’ve heard more than one “social media expert” tell companies that they can also do the marketing and PR because “they know bloggers.” While blogger and media relationships are an important element to the overall PR campaign, this is just one part of what a PR executive deals with on a daily basis. Because it’s the most visible part of a PR executive’s job, many relate it to the profession as a whole. But in fact, PR executives spend a great deal of time working on the best and most memorable communications methods for a variety of constituents: industry analysts, investors, tradeshow coordinators, customers, prospects, partners, employees, recruits and more. Not all of these constituents are created equal – they don’t have the same wants or needs. Therefore, a one-size-fits-all social media campaign – or one that will get great media coverage because of its innovative digital content will not appropriately impact every audience that a company or individual entrepreneur wants to reach. A fun video that might attract customers to a retail website will not necessarily communicate the more serious messages needed to attract investors, for example. A slick-looking microsite with bad messaging might get good press pick up for the concept, but could confuse prospects, hurt sales or worse, lead to customer attrition.

Overall, social media marketing is a great new method for engaging directly with the public to share a brand or company’s core messages, values, culture and news. Social media marketers often know where to reach key audiences and how to create exciting digital content. But the PR team should have a hand in what messages are in that content for maximum impact and the greatest ROI. Working together, social media marketers and the PR department can create compelling messages and information and deliver them in exciting new ways that let a company’s public audiences interact, engage and most importantly – remember the brand.

SERIES Social Media Skills — Advertising, SEO, PR, Graphic Design, Copywriting, and more…

To start with, thank you to Jason for letting me do a post on his site about Search Engine Marketing (SEM). I appreciate the opportunity and always enjoy our conversations, Jason. I hope everyone will take a moment to read Jason’s post on my site as well.

Below are a few points that I think Social Media professionals need to know about Search Engine Marketing.

1. Search Engines are for finding things

Sounds obvious, right? But it is a huge difference between social media and search engines. The reason we use search is to find. In other words, we are looking for something. People do not want to be on Google. They use Google to get to where they really want to be.

If you are into social media, you need to realize the difference. The attention you attract to a business or website in social is like talking with your friend about a product. Search is more like walking into a store and asking a store clerk about a product. There is a different intent.

2. Search Engines are all about Keyword phrases

If you work with social media, you likely have your own blog. (See the next point.) If you are writing, don’t sabotage yourself. You’re already writing. Why not use the keywords you want to be found for in Google? To be even more specific, do yourself a favor and use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and figure out which phrases get typed into Google. Then use them from time to time, especially in the titles.

3. Search Engine love blogs too

Many of my friends that are into social media will all say that the blog is the center of it all. This doesn’t mean you need a blog to use social media effectively. But most do feel that a good blog is an extremely important and central pivot point to effective use of social media.

You use social media (facebook, twitter, etc) to draw attention to your blog, right? Let Google do the same thing.

How? Use the keyword phrases we talked about above. Use them in the title, and in the copy in a way that makes sense. It does not guarantee rankings, but it does improve your chances dramatically.

PS: Don’t forget to check out Jason’s post about Social Media for SEO professionals on my blog, too!

SERIES Social Media Skills — Advertising, SEO, PR, Graphic Design, Copywriting, and more…

Can social media professionals learn
anything from the world of advertising?

When Jason asked me to answer this question, my first reaction was he had it backwards. Shouldn’t the question be, “What can advertising professionals learn from the world of social media?” I mean consider that the consumer has become the medium, the distribution channel, and in some cases (think Don Draper on Twitter or Coke’s fan page) the content creator. Isn’t it the ad practitioner who needs to learn about social media, to understand how conversation has become the new marketing? What can outdated ad guys possibly teach social media types?

But as I thought about it, it’s obvious that both disciplines (I actually predict they’ll soon be one and the same) can learn from each other. Ad agencies and advertisers can learn new ways to listen, engage and take advantage of emerging tools and platforms for the distribution of their content. At the same time, perhaps social media types can take advantage of what advertising professionals know.

So here are three things that every social media person might want to learn from advertising folks.

1. Good advertising tells you what a product does and why you should buy it. Great advertising expresses what a brand stands for an invites you to share in its beliefs.

The best advertisers and agencies know that consumers buy into a brand’s values as much or maybe even more than the individual products. Nike advertising doesn’t push shoes; it encourages, inspires and promises individual achievement. Monster.com doesn’t tell you how easy it is to explore job options; it reinforces your right to a fulfilling career. Coca Cola doesn’t talk about what’s inside the bottle, it brings to life what’s outside the bottle: joy and happiness. You can see this over and over again in the best advertising.

What’s the lesson for social media? Don’t push a product. Don’t generate content that’s limited to offers or coupons (like some retailers do on Twitter). Instead, demonstrate what you stand for through the content and utility you offer and the community you nurture and inspire. Think Zappos, which stands for customer service and practices it using Twitter. Emulate Whole Foods, which expresses its belief in health, nutrition and the enjoyment of good food, evident on Facebook and Twitter. Model your approach on WalMart, a retailer proving its commitment to value by aggregating and generating useful content through it’s Mom blogger program. These are brands that aren’t saying what they stand for, they’re living it in a way that invites participation.

2. Elevate your creative before you increase your budget

The great agencies and the best advertisers all know this. A big creative idea is the ultimate competitive advantage. You can always buy presence, but you can’t pay for memorable. Think of ideas you’ve seen that you’ll never forget: Absolut Vodka’s bottle art, Budweiser’s Wassup, E-Trade’s Chimp, Monster.com’s When I Grow Up, The Milk Board’s Got Milk? These are all campaigns from years gone by. But chances are if you saw them just once you remember them always.

Or consider more recent efforts. Cadbury’s drum banging gorilla. Or even my own agency’s recent campaign for the Boston Bruins. The latter two had virtually no media dollars behind them at all. But they had the creative power to attract attention, become viral, and worm their way into the current culture.

The fact is it’s only a matter of time before every brand has a Facebook fan page, a presence on Twitter, and a YouTube channel. Simply being there won’t be enough. What will separate one brand from another will be the quality and creativity of the content, the program, and the experience. Consumers will want experiences that aren’t just relevant, but interesting, entertaining and inspirational.

3. Recessions are the best time to make a move

It’s been proven definitively that companies willing to spend on new programs, acquisition and advertising during recessions far outpace companies that make big cuts. Kellogg’s Rice Krispies raced past Post Cereal in the early 1930s by doubling its ad budget. According to McKinsey, companies that took equally aggressive approaches during the slowdowns of 1981-82 and 1990-91 enjoyed similar results. Why? For the simple reason that when advertising is scarcer, the brands that do advertise benefit from a greater share of voice and visibility. Yet despite all the evidence, most brands fail to take advantage of this time-tested approach. Perhaps it’s because it’s hard to think about building an addition when the house is burning down.

But there’s a huge lesson here for social media. This new approach to marketing is still in its infancy. The first ones to get out there will grab a much larger share of attention in relationship to their effort than they will in another two or three years, when the social media environment is far more cluttered and consumers will have even more content to sift through and communities to choose from. It’s a chance to do what Kellogg did. Establish yourself when there’s less competition.

So there you have it. The value of shared beliefs. The power of creativity. An understanding that timing is everything. Maybe there is something you can learn from the world of advertising. Can you think of anything else?

SERIES Social Media Skills — Advertising, SEO, PR, Graphic Design, Copywriting, and more…