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.

I pondered if the should be a Darwin Award winner but quickly decided against it since the business I am referencing has been in business for three decades.  However, with that said, we have recently seen many business like the Rocky Mountain News, one of Denver’s oldest businesses shutter it’s doors 4 months shy of 150 years in business.

Don’t live in the past. If your business is not evolving, you may be one day closer to shutting your doors.

To many of us long for “back in the day”. Human nature is to reflect back with a melancholy view that things were better. Maybe they were, maybe not. One thing for sure, marketing and customer communication has changed.

My almost Darwin winner this week is Papa J’s.

I award them the 1/2 Darwin award for their signage and living in the past. Look at both their website and the signage on the building. The website says they have been in business 32 years, the sign on the front of the building says 31 years in business.  I called to verify and it turns out they have been in business 33 years and nearing their 34th birthday. ( I would never hard code a sign or portion of my website with a date that is expired… marketing 1o1).

Papa J’s has excellent food and good service.  Both of these qualities have weathered the test of time. Yesterday’s success and more than 3 decades is a great achievement but this is no assurance for future success.  Change is here and no longer can we expect to rest on our heals of what worked yesterday.  Dont think for one minute that you will be able to attrack and maintain the attention of your customers for life if you are marketing the way you did just even 12 months ago, let alone, 5, 10 , 20 or 30 years ago (31, 32, 33 or what ever the real number is).

Google and the other also ran search engines, change their algorithms on a regular basis. Twelve months ago, how many in the mainstream had ever heard of Facebook or Twitter? Let’s be honest, not many.

Twitter has been offered over a billion dollars for their company that has been in existence for 3 years.  Why? Because Twitter and the other social medias companies now have the attention of the consumer. This is the method they have chosen to stay connected.

The question for business owners and marketing managers is ” are you keeping up?”

Here are a few recommendations we all should be observing.

1. Be nimble in your approach to marketing. Nothing is constant but change.
2. Stay connected with those who are in the eye of the tornado when it comes to marketing and communications.
3. Get a centralized database and CRM System. – Methods of communication may change, but being able to track your customers and how THEY prefer to communicate is critical. We highly recommend Infusionsoft.
4. Done hard code anything ( check out Papa js’ outdated sign and website).
5. Put yourself out there, be in the streams where the fish are. ( see my posts on grizzlies in the stream.

Everything has changed. Don’t be the next Rocky Mountain News.

To get attention, you must pay attention.

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.

The Social Media/SEO game just keeps changing. Recently Google launched Google Profiles.

I can here you now, another social media profile to manage, ugh. But take a minute and be smart, Google will rank these higher than Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. No one knows the long term viability of social media sites but one thing for certain, Google is not going anywhere soon. I coach all my clients to do social media as a strategy for SEO in Google. The good news is you can post links to all your sites on a Google Profile.

If you don’t have a Google Profile, get one. SEO is SEO.

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.

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.

Until now, most companies have considered their Customer Relationship Management systems  (CRM) as a separate system from their website, Internet marketing, social media and communication with their prospects, customers and partners.

Those days are gone.

Dont have a fence in your organization.

Your CRM strategy and resulting systems should be driving the design of your website, your social media, your Internet marketing and all communications with your stake holders. The overload of information we all receive each day, the result is the attention span of customers is so short these days, your organization needs a database and automated sequences to manage the process of communicating with your customers.

Our world is changing so fast with the tools of communication rapidly evolving (social media,text messaging, lexicon survelance, brand monitoring, etc) that you can not place your bets on any one form of communication medium as “the channel” to reach your clients. You need to segment your clients, refine focus your message and select the tools to delivery that targeted message.

At the heart of all this is your CRM database and the technology exists to integrate every communication into complete customer interaction history that can be tracked. You can drive your sales and marketing blind without the data and facts.

Smart companies who stay ahead of the competition will have their CRM system driving and tracking every communication with your customers.

Some questions to ask your team:

1. Is my website a integrated with my CRM and is this integration two way to both push and pull content?
2. Is my content integrated? Meaning all content is driving customers and partners to a sale, regardless of the medium?
3. Does my current customer database include a field for social media ID’s and addresses? ( Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc)
4. Am I using my CRM system to push communication to and from my social media presence?

If you  are going to attract and maintain the Attention Connection™ of your prospects and make them a customer for life, you will need a CRM system that is driving it all.

Stay connected and have a great weekend! Spring is here.

The ground swell of social media is providing for the first time nearly instant connectivity. We now see the term, hyper connected being used for the first time.

Facebook, Twitter, My Space and a dozen other social platforms now dominate the landscape and it’s clear you must be able to be short, concise and relevant in your communications.

Three tips to help you avoid the super Attention Deficite Disorder (ADD) the world of marketing has now stepped into and will help you remain connected to your network.

1. Be relevant – provide value in your content and communications.

2. Be concise – Because of Twitter and wall posts, we have become quick to scan and bounce away if we don’t grab their attention.

3. Hit a hot button – Write communications that activate the reticular activator. Pull the reader out of the land slide of information.

Yesterday I received over 8,000 Tweets on Twitter. My Twitter network grows by a couple hundred every day. There is no way even the human brain can sort through all of that much information. It’s just overwhelming.

Stay connected by effective communication writing. It could be the most import skill you develop.

Connect with you later.