Toluu : Blog by Jon Bishop

Blog by Jon Bishop

Social Media and Communication

Social Media Monitoring and Measurement ToolsJuly 2

It’s extremely important to monitor and measure your influence in social media however some of the premium tools out there might be a little beyond your financial reach. Good thing there are plenty of free tools you can mix and match to meet your own personal goals.

First off, check the availability of your brand name, user name or vanity URL on 120 popular Social Media sites with http://knowem.com. This is just an easy way to see if anyone has squatted on your brand name.

Now some of these tools are better at monitoring while others are better at measurement. I leave it up to you.

Social Media

SocialMention.com allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

KeoTag.com searches some of the most popular social

Are “Social Mentions” And “Twitter Trackbacks” Just Taking Up Space?June 29

You may have seen some of the following solutions installed on some of your favorite blogs:

The idea is to bring all comments about your posts into the posts themselves in an effort to centralize the conversation. This seems like a great idea until you put it into practice.

The main problem with most, if not all, of these solutions is that Twitter tends to overpower the rest. What we need is an effective means of filtering Twitter for quality comments, otherwise they should not be pulled into the post at all.

Are people seriously going through the “Social Media Comments” of the comments section and scanning through them for quality input? Good luck finding any

Do We Even Need FeedBurner Anymore?June 25

I’ve been thinking a lot about FeedBurner’s new changes where it includes FriendFeed subscribers in its total subscriber count. Unless FeedBurner removes this new feature, subscriber stats may be flawed forever. I don’t want to bore you with all the reasons why this is a bad idea, so instead I’m just going to say I agree with David Spinks, Rob Diana, and Dave Fleet.

This is just the icing on the cake as ProBlogger had already pointed out a few issues with FeedBurner prior to this new change. He brings up some valid points that ultimately led to me writing this post.

So now the question becomes, why do we even need FeedBurner anymore?

FeedBurner was originally created as a means of resyndicating your content in multiple

27 Excellent Free Social Media Icons SetsJune 18

In a previous post I talked about how to increase the viral potential of your content with more actionable bookmarking and sharing buttons. Now here is a list of cool custom bookmarking and sharing buttons you can use on your blog that are sure to attract more bookmarks and shares.

Social Icons hand drawned

Polaroid icon set

Page Peel – A Free Social Media Iconset

IconTexto Web 2.0 User

Increase Viral Potential With Actionable Bookmarking and Sharing ButtonsJune 17

One of the first things most people do with their new blogs is install some sort of plugin to help facilitate the sharing of their posts. Thoughts of Twitter obsessively retweeting your content begin to float through your mind and let’s not forget the ridiculous amount of traffic you’re gonna be getting from Digg.

The truth is you will probably get little to no activity on your posts regardless of what plugins you are using, especially if you are the new blog on the block.

So How Do I Go Viral?

Well, you don’t just “go viral” as there are a bunch of factors that go into the viral potential of content. However, there are certain things you can do to your blog that can help encourage the sharing of your content. I personally made these changes to my blog about 2 months ago and watched my number of Diggs, Stumbles and ReTweets double if not triple.

They key is to create actionable social bookmarking and sharing buttons.