What drives people to tweet? Self promotion? Because it’s the thing to do? Because everyone else is? Bored? Unemployed? Day dreaming of self importance?

The smart ones are doing it for Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Let’s look at the numbers.

According to the “Consumer Internet Barometer” from TNS and The Conference Board, 41.6% percent of Internet users who used Twitter did so to keep in touch with their friends. Yet how many of you have 2,000 friends who have time or care when you get a cup of coffee or watch a movie?

In addition, 29.1% used it to update their status, 25.8% to find news and stay updated, 21.7% for work purposes and 9.4% for research.

Women and men both used Twitter primarily to keep in touch with friends. Secondarily, men were interested in finding news and women in updating their status.

Users under age 35 were more interested in broadcasting their status than their senior counterparts. Older users were more likely to use the service for work-related purposes.

The average Twitter user interacted primarily with friends and family.

Next-most-popular were celebrities, bloggers, TV shows, co-workers, brands and journalists.

More women interacted with friends, family and celebrities than men, but men were more likely to follow bloggers.

Older users trailed younger ones in interaction with every Twitter user type except journalists and brands.

While all of this is interesting data, no one really should be using Twitter except for SEM purposes. I am mean come on, anyone with a real job and a normal self esteem with a balanced self perception really has time to play around in Twitter.

I don’t use Twitter for research as some would argue. If you want to do real research, set up a Google Alert and review the content of the things you are interested in once every few days.

Social media can be the biggest time waster for those who don’t perceive themselves as a micro celebrity or are living in small fantasy worlds.   I meet many people who use Twitter  who are living in a small parallel universe having a conversation with a small set of groupies. It’s almost like watching adults who attended the ComicCon in San Diego this past week, all dressed up like a comic book hero, living in a parallel fantasy universe.  Get a life, get a job, get kids, or start a business and you wont have time to be a celebrity figure in your own private Idaho.

I coach my clients to use Twitter and the other social media tools out there as free  web pages to help their business gain SEM rankings in the search engines, be found by users of the social media world and to stay in touch with a small set of peers.( You may want a profile for each of those purposes). Google and Yahoo search engines are scanning Twitter, Facebook, Google Profiles  and Linked in and your firm should have strong keyword based presences in all the social media streams.

If you spend more than 15 minutes a day on Twitter, you may be one of the following:

1. Unemployed
2. Soon to be unemployed ounce your boss figures out how much time you are wasting
3. Living in your own Harry Potter parallel universe
4. Dying to be a micro celebrity
5. All of the above

Micro blogging at 140 characters at a time is just not space to convey a real message. For that, it’s probably better to blog.

Stay connected.

As our digital and physical lives blur further, the internet has become the information hub where people spend a majority of their time learning, playing and communicating with others globally. Staying connected is more important than ever. If you are not participating in Social Media, you really need to rethink your strategy.

Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of just how staggering the numbers are of people collaborating, researching, and interacting on the web.

I thought it might be fun to take a step back and look at some interesting/amazing social media, Web 2.0, crowdsourcing and internet statistics.  I tried to find stats that are the most up-to-date as possible at the time of publishing this post.

The numbers presented below should be a close representation of today’s numbers (please correct me in the comments if you find more recent numbers somewhere and I’ll update).

Let’s break them down by section:

Google search stats:

1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) - approximate number of unique URLs in Google’s index (source)

2,000,000,000 (two billion) – very rough number of Google searches daily (source)

$110,000,000 – approximately amount of money lost by Google annually due to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button (source)

24,400 – number of people employed by Google (December, 2008)

68,000,000 – the average number of times people Googled the word Google each month for the last year (source:  keyword tool)

$39.96 - the average cost per click for the phrase “consolidation of school loans” in AdWords (source:  keyword tool)

1,430,000 - the number of Google results for “Robert Scoble”

136,000 - the number of Google results for “Admiral Ackbar”

Wikipedia stats

2,695,205 - the number of articles in English on Wikipedia

684,000,000 – the number of visitors to Wikipedia in the last year

75,000 - the number of active contributors to Wikipedia

10,000,000 – the number of total articles in Wikipedia in all languages

260 – the number of languages articles have been written in on Wikipedia

(source)

YouTube stats

70,000,000 – number of total videos on YouTube  (March 2008)

200,000 – number of video publishers on YouTube (March 2008)

100,000,000 – number of YouTube videos viewed per day (this stat from 2006 is the most recent I could locate)

112,486,327 – number of views the most viewed video on YouTube has (January, 2009)

2 minutes 46.17 seconds – average length of video

412.3 years – length in time it would take to view all content on YouTube (March 2008)

26.57 - average age of uploader

13 hours – amount of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute

US $1.65 billion in Google stock – amount Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for in October 2006

$1,000,000 – YouTube’s estimated bandwidth costs per day

(sources here, here and here)

Blogosphere stats

133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002

346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs (comScore March 2008)

900,000 – average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period

1,750,000 – number of RSS subscribers to TechCrunch, the most popular Technology blog (January 2009)

77% - percentage of active Internet users who read blogs

55% – percentage of the blogosphere that drinks more than 2 cups of coffee per day (source)

81 - number of languages represented in the blogosphere

59% – percentage of bloggers who have been blogging for at least 2 years

source

Twitter stats

1,111,991,000 – number of Tweets to date (see an up to the minute count here)

9,000,000 – number of Tweets/day(March 2000) (from TechCrunch)

86,078 – number of followers of the most active Twitter user (@kevinrose)

63% – percentage of Twitter users that are male (from Time)

Facebook stats

200,000,000 – number of active users

100,000,000 - number of users who log on to Facebook at least once each day

170 - number of countries/territories that use Facebook

35 - number of different languages used on Facebook

2,600,000,000 – number of minutes global users in aggregate spend on Facebook daily

100 – number of friends the average user has

700,000,000 – number of photos added to Facebook monthly

52,000 – number of applications currently available on Facebook

140 - number of new applications added per day

source

Digg stats

236,000,000 – number of visitors attracted annually by 2008 (according to a Compete survey)

56% - percentage of Digg’s frontpage content allegedly controlled by top 100 users

124,340 - number of stories MrBabyMan, the number one user, has Dugg (see updated number here)

612 - number of stories from Cracked.com that have made page 1 of Digg (see all 41 pages of them here)

36,925 – number of Diggs the most popular story in the last 365 days has received (see story here)

We all need to stay connected.  The numbers are staggering. Maybe now you can see why social media is important for you to be working in.

This post is a reposted from http://thefuturebuzz.com. Used with permission.

Dogs are pack animals and very social. People are not much different and that is why people and dogs get along so well. Everyone loves a loyal companion.

Our family has a Bassett hound, Tootsie, who just loves attention. With seven people in our home, Toosie has a large pack in her mind. Bassett hounds are great family dogs because they are so gentle, good natured and great with kids.Tootsie is a funny dog and very playful. She will seek you out and either nuzzle up to you for some love or she will  drop at your feet, roll onto her back, with her feet in the air so you can rub her belly.

A lesson  we can learn from the Bassett hound is that if we pay attention to our customers, they will come back to you like Tootsie does to our family members. Even at times when you don’t want love and affection, here comes Tootsie with her sad eyes, big ears and her wagging tail. Ready to love you and get some love in return.

If we don’t pay attention to our customers, they will find another pack. Its that simple. We see this all the time, organization which have gotten so busy finding and winning new customers, that they don’t pay attention to their customer base.  There tools like Infusionsoft marketing automation that make customer contact automatic.  By implementing these systems, you can stay top of mind with your clients without having to remember to do it. Remember, if you are not paying attention to your pack, your customers, someone else will.

Get connected, pay attention.

To get attention, you must pay attention.

The newspapers and media companies forgot what business they were in a long time ago and that is why they are struggling so hard today.

While it’s important to report the news, have great content, blah, blah, blah…, the real business the newspapers and broadcast media are in is the “make the phone ring” or results business.  No business owner buys an ad in the paper because they want to support the paper, they buy ads to make their phone ring and sales grow. Trust me, I have purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of advertising in my local media market, I undertstand fully the love hate realtionship.

The same holds true now for online versions of the media. If the phone is not ringing, no advertiser wants to write the check for the ads.Its a love hate realtionship  with the newspaper or any other media company.

However, the check every business owner is willing to write is a commission check. Commissions means sales took place. This is why affiliate marketing is growing so fast. Bring me buying customers and I will gladly write you a check.

The technology exists today in automated marketing solutions like Infusionsoft, to track your affiliates and the resulting sales. If you examine the math, affiliate marketing is far more profitable than advertising.

Let’s say you have a Internet site that is struggling to monetize through advertising or memberships. Switch to an affiliate marketing model and the world changes. Let’s take a look.

In the advertising model, you sell space. Let’s say for example that a banner ad on your site is $1,500.00.  Nice, you might be able to sell a few banners in a rotation but your space is limited because there is only one banner slot per page. Let’s say you sell 4 of them in a rotation and end up with $6,000.

Now take on the affiliate model and watch the revenue grow.  You still run the banners at a much reduced rate or even free. ( I can hear newspaper or website CEO’s the world over choking on this comment.)

Let’s say your site has a million page views per month. A good conversion rate of 2-3% can be expected off the click through. We will use 2.5% for our math. That results in 25,000 click throughs and lets’ say for example sake that 5% of these click throughs buy or 1250. For our example sake, we will use the Full Strength affiliate model where there is a $5 affiliate fee per sale. The resulting revenue is $6,250.00 for month one.  Full strength is a performance nutrition meal replacement food that helps you lose weight, gain muscle and increase energy. the product is sold as a subscription that the average user stays on the product for 9 months. Now my banner revenue went from $1,500.00 to $56,250.00.  We are not done yet. Hang on to your hat my marketing friends.

Implement a drip system with trip wire or action based marketing and the 25,000 click throughs now result in a much bigger number. Truth is, people buy when they want to buy, not when you want to sell them. So maybe the other 23,750  click throughs just were not ready to buy, they did not have all the information they needed to buy on the spot. Say for example sake that just another 5% buy over a six month process because they were placed in a automated marketing drip systems. In a six month period with 24 touches, they were taught enough to buy. (The automated touches cost 1/5th of  cent per touch so the cost to market to them would be just under 5 cents.)

Now my $1,500.00 banner space results in a $112,500.00 Almost 100 times the revenue of the banner ad. My client Full Strength is elated because of the sales and they did not pay for a banner ad that did not perform.

Results over advertising. It’s now a reality because of technology. If the media companies follow this model, there is no crisis in their industry. There advertisers become partners and everyone wins.

By the way, this does not have to be a media company, social media site or other online property. I can show your organization how to do this with just referral networks of any kind.

Need to know more? Need to know how? Connect with me.

The Attention Connection – “to get attention you must pay attention.”

People use Social media platforms for many reasons. Based on reading posts and being an active social media participant for two plus years, I think some people use social media because it’s “the thing to do”, others are making connections with friends and family, while others are using the technologies for business development.There is also a crowd of folks who feel through social media that they can become micro celebrities or simply to attract attention to themselves.

I use social media for all the above reasons except the last one. My main use of social media id for business development and moving influence on the Internet. If you are in this crowd with me, this is the audience I want to speak to about the use of key words in your social media strategy.

All effective Internet marketing is based on key words, the words and word strings the general public will search on to find your website in the search engines.  If your organization is not using your key words in social media, you are missing out on traffic and valuable SEO.

It was only recently that Google and the other search engines made the decision to crawl the social media sites. If you are a Twitter or Facebook user, run a search on Google on your name. You will now find some of the organic results to be references to your social media profiles. Ah ha, now the message of the day.

Use key words you want you or your company to be found on the Internet in your social profiles and in your stream posts of tweets or wall posts.

Since the search engines are scanning the social media sites, be smart and drive traffic with key words. So many users of social media don’t have a strategy around their posts and it’s evident by reading their streams.

Stay ahead of the pack by using key words to your advantage. Here are a few recommendations:

1. Develop a lexicon of key words – get your SEO expert to help you do a key word analysis on your products and services. Find out what key words are important to traffic, who owns that traffic and then write all your content, including stream posts, using your own lexicon of words.
2. Tweet in the language of your customers – if you sell supplements to treat inflammation of the joints, then you better tweet about sore joints and not the clinical name for the condition. Tweeting in 12 dollar clinical names does not do you any good when you want to reach people with sore joints and all they want is relief.
3. Tweets and wall posts favor the 140 character limit, so always use key words and reference your product name. This takes creativity but you are really working on SEO and traffic.

Social media is fun, engaging and can be a great benefit to your sales if you have a plan and execute on it by leveraging key words.

As always, stay connected by paying attention.

I spend 100% of my professional time working with clients to help them automate their sales and marketing processes. Yesterday I had an “ah ha” moment that I have to admit is an oversight, especially when you consider workflow automation has been a part of my life since 1992.

The internal customer.

For small and medium sized businesses our firm loves Infusionsoft, a great CRM/Sales Automation/Marketing Automation tool.  My firm and our consultants get myopically focused on the sales and marketing processes and over look automating processes for the internal customer.

A great example of this would be to use the workflow automation tools to manage any process in the company which requires reminders, follow up, accountability and automated sign off.

Example #1 – Benefits enrollment – Each year most of us are required to re-enroll in our employer’s benefits programs. Without automation, this requires the HR representative to send out countless emails, chase you down at your desk all to make sure you get enrolled.

Why not automate these “internal customers” in a workflow follow up sequence to enroll them? Let the software chase the employees down! Set up an enrollment page, follow up sequences, then set it and forget it.

Example #2 – Training Certifications – Most all of companies require some sort of training for their employees. Again, a manager or HR person ends up being some sort of hunter tracking down people, partners, franchisee partners to enroll and complete these vital processes. Again, this can be tackled with a set of web forms and follow up sequences.

Reminds me of this great clip from a few years back, “Terry Tate the Office Linebacker”. This is a must view, spend a few minutes, you wont regret it, especially if you have a sense of humor.

Maybe you need a Terry Tate office linebacker in your firm but my guess is you will be better off letting the software increase your productivity.

You can leverage your CRM tools to automate your communications and processes for your internal customers.

An Attention Connection™ has no boundaries and for small business, workflow automation can be a life saver on so many fronts.

Stay connected.

Connect with you later.

When it comes to Internet and social media marketing, I am always reminded of an old joke about two guys out hunting grizzly bears.  The joke goes like this:

There were two hunters in Alaska out hunting grizzly bears. The first hunter was a sage old hunter who was a professional hunting guide and had seen his share of bear hunts. Along with him was a second hunter, a very inexperienced hunter who was on his first hunt with the guide.

After a few hours out in the brush, the inexperienced hunter kept hearing rustling noises and began to fear that he had probably put himself in harms way by hunting bears. The rustling grew louder and finally the fear got the best of him and he asked the sage old guide “don’t you ever worry about being able to out run the grizzly?”

The guide looked at his fear filled companion and in a dead pan voice replied, “nah, I don’t ever worry about out running the grizzly, I just have to outrun you!”

Can you outrun your competition when it comes to Internet and Social media marketing?

It’s just as important to know what your competition is doing as to what you are doing. Your organization not only needs to pay attention to your own social media, SEO and PPC but your closest competitors.

There are great tools available today to monitor brand and social buzz, along with compare your keywords, tags and SEO with with the keywords of those you compete with.

I highly recommend competitive analysis as a vital first step in social media and your internet presence.

Here is another great video that is worth the 45 seconds. Can you out do the competition?

Funny…

Stay connected.

Most everyone walking the planet over 16 years old has seen the popular late night talk shows.  In nearly every country, people flock to these late night shows. The format is the same and very popular. The shows start with a monologue from the host, normally laced with social commentary laced with humor and wit. After the opening monologue, the show flips to a interview format where a dialogue takes place between the host and guests.

Marketing types should learn from this successful format now that internet and mobile communications now facilitate dialogue better than ever.

The days of monologue marketing, media and communication are gone. We see evidence of this with the global struggle of the newspaper industry and various medias that used to primarily were monologue delivery systems. The papers and media created the content, controlled it’s distribution and basically had control.  There was no two way communication, it was all monologue.

Democratization of content and influence is here. Anyone person or organization can create a groundswell using social media. Now that mobile communications have become affordable for the masses and social media platforms are all the rage, you must provide your prospects access to you in formats that support a dialogue.

Questions to ask your organization:

1. Does your marketing message invite people to be taught, not told?
2. Do you deliver the education to your customers need to buy from you in a manner which can be consumed and not feel like a sales pitch? Does your communication delivery include automated drip systems?
3. Does your website invite communication, not just a a digital brochure? Have you integrated video and chat into your online presence?
4. Are you actively using social media? If so, how effectively?
5. Are you monitoring your brand in social media and responding to what is being said?
6. Do customers, partners and prospects have access to your firm 24/7 in a self service format? Remember, customers buy when they are ready to buy and not when you are ready to sell.

If you are truly going to gain and maintain an Attention Connection with your desired stake holders, you must be relevant and connected. You can not be a stand up talk show host that just delivers a  monologue. You must seek to have dialogue.

What do you think? How do you grade your organization in the delivery and sustaining in a dialogue?

As always, connect with you later.

Most everyone who has a TV has seen video showing grizzly bears fishing for salmon in the streams of Alaska and the wild.

You can be like a grizzly catching salmon with social media. I just witnessed one.

Bryan Bennett is a Regional Developer and franchise owner for DNA Services of America. As a client of mine, I have been pushing their firm to social media as part of extending their reach on the Internet.

Bryan is a hunter and has even hunted bears in Alaska but this past week, he began hunting even bigger trophy animals; customers, by extending his marketing reach with Twitter.

Bryan jumped right into the stream of Twitter and started fishing. He began  building his network of followers and people he follows . Thursday of this  past week he was Tweeting about the franchise opportunities at DNA Services of America. Right after he posted his tweet, a person who was following Bryan contacted him about franchise opportunities in southern California.

Fish on!

Thousands of years ago the grizzly bears learned that to catch the salmon, they had to get into the stream with the fish. It’s hard to catch a fish standing on the shoreline. Watch this grizzly bear standing in the stream catching the fish right out of mid air. Amazing, the fish had no chance.

Learn from the grizzly bear and Bryan, get into the streams of socail media and catch the fish.  Yes, you might get wet, yes it might be uncomfortalble at first, but that is where the fish are swimming now!

Connect with you later, it’s time for me to get wet myself.

I  stay very close to what is happening in technology/marketing/sales automation as it’s my business and profession.

Several industry analysts are now looking past the Social Media platforms of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and others as if they were dead already. I am not sure how they can look past these tremendous successes for the next big thing when Twitter does not even have 5 million active users.  hmmm.

There are more than 250,000 social media sites on the Internet. Social media and Internet marketing changes week to week and the only advice I give my clients now is be prepared to possibly never arrive at a final destination. This entire space is changing so rapidly that I dont think there is a person roaming the earth who know where this is going.

With that said, here are a few recommendations:

1. Be prepared to be nimble.
2. Pick nimble technology;a database platform, websites  CRM, marketing automation that does not care what the latest craze is for traffic. Make sure you can change content and approach on a dime.
3. Hire, either in house or maintain a relationship with experts that are doing “it”. What ever the “it” is. You will make yourself crazy trying to keep up
4. Join the community. Pick user groups and peer groups who are dealing with the same challenges. You cant do it alone.
5. Take action. Don’t wait until everyone else is doing it or the right systems are in place. You will get left behind.

We are living in exciting times for change in attention connections with our customers, partners and prospects.   I have a client that I told last fall, “action over perfection”. Don’t wait for the one hub to come where you can maintain control, it does not exist anymore.

Connect with you later.