Round-up of Tools from #SMCBoston Panel

I was really humbled that I was asked to speak on a panel about social media tools at yesterday’s Social Media Club of Boston Event, Evaluating Social Technologies: From Chaos to Strategy. I was joined by Kathy O’ Reilly, Director of Social Media Relations for Monster.com, Ben Boardman of Marketwire and Sysomos and Zach Hofer-Shall, an analyst for Forrester Research that specializing in social intelligence.

(Here we are chatting. Don’t mind my sweet accent. I’m from Buffalo. )

We chatted about a variety of social media tools and primarily discussed them within the context of these four categories: Discovery, Measurement, Publishing and Social CRM.

I threw out a bunch of recommendations for tools and I know we were moving pretty fast so I wanted to give a quick breakdown and recap/elaborate on some of my recommendations. Most of these will link to their oneforty item pages where you can see reviews and screenshots of the tools for a little more information.

Discovery – Listening & monitoring tools

Twitter Advanced Search

This is a free way to set up searches for hashtags, keywords or your own brand name. You can even specify per location, sentiment or just search for questions regarding that phrase. You can even hack together a free monitoring dashboard in iGoogle with an RSS of these searches.

MarketMeSuite* – This is an affordable way for small businesses to take the geo-targeting aspect of Twitter searches and view them in an organized interface.

Measurement – Analytics Tools

Tweetreach – I love Tweetreach’s analytics. They break down reach, impression and volume of Tweets as well as show you your most influential community members who ReTweet you and generate the most reach for you. Variety of price ranges as well and great graphs.

Tap 11 – This is a client with FourSquare, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn integration. I love the email digest of metrics that they compile for you, specifically the attention they pay to ReTweets. Tap 11 shows what is being ReTweeted the most and by whom. There’s lots of talk about how ReTweets are indexed by Google and help with SEO, so I think these metrics are increasingly important for brands looking to boost blog (and therefore, site) traffic.

I mentioned a few times that a lot of times people think the price point for tools is at $500/month and up. Tools like Radian6 and Alterian SM2 do start around there and they are appropriate for some companies. However I wanted to re-iterate that there are a lot of lower-cost analytics options. Viralheat* is $99/month and Ubervu is $50/month to $400/month. We gave a round-up of seven low-cost social monitoring options in this blog post.

To the question of social media ROI, I mentioned the availability of tools that let you apply in-page analytics and track conversions (Did this person fill out a form? Register for an event? Make a purchase?) from Twitter and Facebook. Three tools that do this include Performable, HubSpot and Argyle Social*.

Publishing – Content management and Scheduling Tools

Buffer – This helps you load Tweets into your “Buffer” at ideal times for you to Tweet and sends them out for you throughout the day. Instead of individually having to schedule each Tweet, write the Tweets and Buffer will send them out at the pre-selected times. It gives you some basic analytics as well like reach, ReTweets (including who ReTweeted it) and number of clicks.)

Timely – This is similar to Buffer only it doesn’t let you control the times or schedule Tweets days ahead of time. You can load up your Tweets and then Timely sends them out throughout the day at times selected based on performance of past Tweets. Timely also offers some basic analytics like number of clicks and reach.

Garious – another content publishing tool that pushes your content out throughout the day for you and helps you be more efficient.

Crowdbooster and Socialflow are two more tools I mentioned that help you identify the best times to Tweet by analyzing your previous Tweets and when your audience has been most responsive with @replies, ReTweets and click-throughs. I wrote more about this is a guest post for SocialFresh.

Raven Tools – Raven Tools is a great way to compile your SEO and social media efforts by being able to monitor your Twitter and Facebook activity plus view your Google Analytics and do keyword research all from one clean and simple interface. It’s affordable, the team there is super nice, and it pushes you to take a full 360-view of your online marketing efforts. My friend Kristin Dziadul uses this for her marketing efforts at Backupify and chose this over other tools.

A few more content publishing tools to check out: Dlvr.it, Sprinklr and Hootsuite.

Social CRM – (WTF?)

I loved this chat that we had because I think we called into question whether or not social CRM even exists yet. It’s something I’ve wondered about as well.

The space is getting a ton of traction though. All within the past month or so, Sprout Social just raised a $10 million Series B, JitterJam got acquired, as well as Bantam Live. All three are fantastic social CRM options that attempt to collaborate a customer contact database with Twitter and Facebook interactions. Other options to look at are Blue Camroo (specifically check out their Social Network Scout feature) and Nimble.

To just get started in integrating social CRM tactics into your work, using a tool like Gmail plugin Rapportive will help you connect your email contacts to their Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. Gist does this too, in a prettier way.

So there you have it! All the tools I mentioned. I love talking about this stuff as you can tell so feel free to shoot me questions any time.

*oneforty affiliate. (But still a badass tool!)

Are We Iterating When We Should Be Pivoting?

I think the unfortunate thing about caring about your job as more than just a job is exactly that: you care. You emotionally feel something for your idea or project that you are working on. When things change or don’t go well, you feel that too.

To be honest, this social business hub thing is a pivot and this is tough. I enjoyed a refreshing moment of clarity going home last week and spending time with my parents. They ask questions like “when is a startup not a startup anymore?” and just recently understood my job thanks to a news piece they watched on Fox News about Charlie Sheen. Far outside of the Boston startup/social media echochamber that I live in, they loved me when I was a waitress and don’t really care what I do when I grow up. I’m enough for them. I think a point of reference is important.

What is a pivot? I hear that word tossed around a lot and I wanted to make sure I was acurately diagnosing my experience. I researched a little and found this inspiring video. In this video, super angel Mike Maples outlines three different pivots he has advised and defines that pivots are not about product iteration, but business model. We’re not adding a couple new features; we’re re-drawing sales funnels, kids.

Yea, this is a pivot.

What does this feel like? I feel like the B2C, UberTwitter-loving Twitter App Store dumped me on prom night. And I loved that app store. It feels like a breakup. Like a Ben & Jerry’s, vodka and chick flicks breakup. I feel like this:

You fall in love with your original idea. You sweat and toil and commit to it. You’re quoted publically about it. You wear the t-shirt. You spend time away from other things, on the weekends holidays and nights, because you are working on this thing. Your passion for this idea re-prioritizes your life.

But then it’s not getting traction, so you have to breakup and make a change. Quickly. I’m not even a founder but I’m…sad. It’s the best way to describe it. (Don’t get me wrong: I actually love what we’re focusing on even more now. I just invested a lot into that original idea, and other people on my team who’ve been here longer even more so.)

I’m learning more about pivots. I found this post on Fred Wilson’s blog about Hashable. Did you know they used to be a company called Tracked? If you scroll down to their CMO’s fantastic comment, you can learn a little more about their process. It sounds like they considered simply focusing on a few good features of Tracked (iterating) but they ultimately chose to completely relaunch as a new site with mobile applications, Hashable. They pivoted.

They focused on finding product/market fit during the concept, alpha and beta stages and then once they had more confidence in their product, began to build buzz. (Although, they were never in “stealth mode.”) Will they be successful? It’s an interesting concept to me, almost like a “CRM for Twitter” in my mind and people seemed to be warming up to it at SXSW. And they have evangelists already. I know how tough it is to build community. I give them huge credit for that.

What I really give them credit for is making the big pivot. The big switch. Digging through research for this blog post I found a ton of Slideshare presentations on “pivot case studies” that to me weren’t about true pivots. They were about product iteration – which is important! I subscribe to the lean startups ideology and think you should iterate and iterate and iterate based on customer feedback until you find that thing that sticks. It’s about perfecting and not perfection. But what I’m wondering is this: How many startups out there are iterating too much? How much time are we wasting iterating on a concept that isn’t getting traction, when you should really make the big jump and target your business model?

I’m talking about mothballing that site you built while you missed your kid’s soccer game and moving onto something else. I’m talking about alienating half of a community you built because they aren’t in your target audience anymore. This is a difficult but necessary choice. I wonder if some startups don’t do this early enough and are left to wonder about the business model that got away.

This is my first startup and like I said, I’m not a founder. I just wish the Twitter App Store and I broke up at homecoming so I could take another business model to prom.