Vlingo - another example of convergence

While it may not yet be freely available this speech to text and mapping package has much to commend it.  There is not doubt that the future is mobile and the use of personal devices are the major channel for digital delivery.

Twitter Use in the USA - Edison Research

Tom Webster of Edison Research highlights the findings.




Twitter Usage in America 2010 from Tom Webster 

Twitter Usage In America: 2010 is a new report derived from the Edison Research/Arbitron Internet and Multimedia Series. 

This study presents three years of tracking data from a nationally representative telephone survey (via landline and mobile phone) of 1,753 Americans, and was conducted in February 2010.

This report details new data on the awareness and usage of Twitter, along with user demographics, status updating behaviors, brand following activity and even an early look at location-based social networking. The study was originally presented on Thursday, April 29th, in an online presentation.
Learn More

Buzz Me Up Scotty - Earned, Paid and Owned Media

Forrester Interactive's Sean Corcoran defines earned, paid and owned media in his latest blog post.  The definition for paid media is the easy one but not many people have come to grips with the concept of "owned media".

This is arguably the most exciting, as it is where your customers become your channel.  Word of mouth maybe the most credible but it is also an approach that requires the most monitoring, as it is outside the direct control of the company or organisation

Monitoring the Buzz need to be built into any digital strategy and while there are many online tools that can assist, there needs to be an equal investment in staff resource.  Listening to the conservations is not enough;  people with the right skills need to be trained to sense opportunities as they emerge and feed these immediately to the business owners.

I would advise caution about jumping straight in to a paid media strategy.  Many of the agency promises simply don't translate into business growth and response rates are declining.

Ask yourself this question, when was the last time you clicked through on a Facebook or Google Ad.word?  I suspect the answer will reinforce the above observation.

Sean recommends treating paid media as a catalyst to drive increased engagement over a specified campaign period.  Don't hang your digital hat on it as a long term solution though.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Connecting Direct Marketing Strategy in Social Media (slideshare.net)
• Evolving the Social Media Marketing Ecosystem (davefleet.com)
• Top 5 social media marketing mistakes clients most often make (but can be avoided) (socialmediatoday.com)

Fantastic Searchtastic?

Here's another great tool  http://www.searchtastic.com/.

This is the company's claim is that their engine:

• Beats the major search engines in this Twitter search comparison.
• Searches "historical" tweets from months ago. This is significant because Twitter's own search only includes recent tweets from roughly the last seven days.
  
• Exports search results to Excel.
• Expands shortened URLs.
• Allows searches for a particular user and the people that user follows.¹
• Shows popular topics during the last 24 hours in a hash tag cloud.
• Features an innovative "click search" interface. Click on any word in the results to add it to the search. Or remove search terms by clicking on words under the search box.
• Provides instant access to the Top 400 users ranked by the number of followers.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Searchtastic is Solid, Definitely Solid (twitterrati.com)