I participate in a group on Facebook which discusses new tools for curation and whilst we have discussed the power of storify before here is an excellent way to curate content at conferences.

To add to last night’s discussion about curation’s place in the newsroom…

Pic from Shel's Storify story: @MarkRaganCEO and @LeeAase welcome full house of #mayoragan communicators to Mayo Clinic Jacksonville http://twitpic.com/49pxty texasgirl11 March 16, 2011 at 0:42

I attended a one-day healthcare social media conference (hosted by The Mayo Clinic). I was planning to live-tweet the event — there was (of course) a hashtag — but when I started, I found that half the people attending were also live tweeting. So, I switched over to Storify. I’d listen to the speaker and take a look at all the tweets, then select the ones that I thought best represented what the speaker was saying. I was also able to grab some tweets by one guy who was sharing links (either sites referenced by a speaker or ones that supported the speaker’s point or added context to it). There were some Flickr photos, too.

As a result, I was able to produce an overview of the entire conference. You can see it here:

http://storify.com/shelholtz/n?uggets-of-wisdom-from-mayoraga?n

What do you think? Isn’t this a form of reporting that newsrooms could adopt? I know it’s not being written by a journalist, but neither is material captured on video.

How to Use Digital Story Telling to pitch better, sell faster and win more business

Advanced Social Media School

Teleclasses Starting August 15

Whether you are a big business, coach, looking to expand your career horizons, a health activist or an entrepreneur this course is for you.

Why? Storytelling is really the next level of social media. As we become more and more sophisticated with using Web 2.0 technologies we are able go deeper and tell our brand stories using a wide variety of if you like digital embassies (social media) to share our messages.

Imagine being able to mobilise a global sales force for your message using the digital space – that’s the opportunity now with social media as most of us have moved beyond learning the basics of how to use the basic platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

The Digital Storytelling teleseries is designed to take you to that next level using social media. Learn how to put it all together and how to maximize these free tools to win more business.

The next series of digital storytelling classes starts August 15 and runs for 5 weeks. Space is limited so I don’t want you to miss out – reserve your seat here

Go beyond how to use the various platforms and learn advanced social media techniques – how to build your digital campaign. Learn how to tell your brand’s story and the importance of marketing Brand YOU!

Here is what you will learn:

You’ll learn cutting edge techniques to grow your business:

• Identify your unique USP for the digital space and transform how you do business
• Finding your audience and the importance of listening and monitoring
• RSS – No other aspect of your website and blog site will be as beneficial to you as a quality RSS Feed plus we’ll cover how to monetize your feed and syndicate too!
• Maximising your use of google for social media
• Build your brand’s compelling story with the storytiser methodology and tools
• Find your authentic voice online – humanizing it for social media (no one is interested what you had for breakfast, it’s all about the story and how you humanize it)
• The value of Quora as a knowledge market and easy tips for maximizing its integration into your campaign
• Use your ‘story’ to become a thought leader and grow your brand’s influence using new curation tools – Storify, Scoop-it, Storyful, Pearltrees
• How to grow Brand YOU – the story you need to tell on LinkedIN to get noticed – not your resume
• How to create and market your own podcasts – from storyboarding your series through to voice-over and editing. Then we’ll upload to itunes and market
• Putting together a YouTube Channel and series – including building communities around your niche
• The importance of photosharing for engagement and humanization – using the Instagram app –a built in social network which provides a real time feed of photos. If Flickr and Twitter had a love child, it’d be Instagram.
• Personally branded Facebook fan pages for your business – including the importance of squeeze optin  mailing forms using the socialisation benefits of mailchimp and more. How to put together a viral competition, market an app, create buzz around getting ‘liked’ and more
• Livestreaming an event via facebook and how to push and pull audience engagement
• The Social Media Dashboard and how to optimize productivity yet still keep it personal
• Blogging tips – 27 tips and tutorials for blogger – it’s far more than just writing a blog and hoping you get noticed
• E-books – what are the options and how to sell an e-book
• Monetization using Web 2.0 – the 5 phases – generate direct sales, build delayed sales, develop backend sales, establish affiliate networks and put together JV deals
• Posterous – audience not savvy with social media – if they can email you can use posterous – the wonderful way to build community discussion. Great for educating on subjects, Q&A’s, campaign interaction and multi-site posting
• The Social Website – what every business owner MUST know about their website and it’s not what the designer tell you! Must have check list – email squeeze, socialization, content planning and more
• The Social Press Release template, if you aren’t using this and paying expensive marketing fees you are missing out on getting your news quickly indexed by google and distributed to the wire services – it’s easy to use, plugs into wordpress and can be updated with news as it grows –links, multimedia and more
• Traffic school – search engines, directory listings and linking, social engines ( networks, media and bookmarks) Spender engines, viral marketing, ezine marketing, article marketing, the importance of blogging – pinging, rss feeds
• How to set up a teleseminar and market to attendees around the globe – grow your lists and audiences, especially useful for launching apps and new developments, selling in a new product or information product
• New monitoring tools
• How to calculate your ROI
• Build an editorial calendar for your social media campaign – Putting it all together so it is manageable and measurable
• One size doesn’t fit all – unleashing your creativity as the path forward

Find out how teleclasses work here.

Bonus – Plus I share a series of concepts to identify your ‘story’ and how to get others to believe in your story and notice it. You might be looking to expand your career horizons, a change agent inside your organization, someone with a compelling issue to share – for example a health activist, health provider, entrepreneur, cause or, a visionary leader trying to improve society. It really doesn’t matter.

The secret to persuasion, influence and motivation using social media is deeply grounded in storytelling. Read my special report on how stories form a critical role in communicating your cause here. (PDF file opens in new window.)

Why? Anthropologists contend that 70% of everything we learn is through stories. Even as   we grow into adults we fundamentally remains a story telling species. Think for a moment around the coffee machine at work first thing in the morning – what are you each sharing? Usually it is a story about your travels or family and so on.  It is no wonder over 175,000 new blogs are started every day.

The advent of Web 2.0 technology and the Internet revolution ensures that everyone is now a storyteller but how well you do it and put it together is up to you.

Too often we see messages that simple do not resonate with the audience because they simply miss the mark.

Can’t say it much better than this:

Prefer to be coached one on one? – sign up for our customized coaching classes now

Kathie’s team building ‘storytiser’ workshops include:

• Beginner’s storytelling: Breaking down and remaking a story, how to engage an audience, and vocal technique.
• Voice work: Nurturing your voice, breathing, projection, and how to add vocal colour.
• Narrative structure: Plot, story and narrative arc, the use and abuse of archetypes, and what makes a tale interesting.
• Using songs and stories together: Ways of integrating song, music and rhythm into performance, plus useful sources of material.
• Organisational culture stories and the power of the corporate culture book

About Storytelling

Possibly the oldest art form, and  something we’ve done around campfires for tens of thousands of years, storytelling opens windows into other times and cultures. It can draw us into imaginary worlds and shed insight into our shared human condition. In the last 20 years there has been a renaissance of storytelling. Professional storytellers work in business, schools, prisons, museums and art centres, while adult storytelling clubs meet in pubs and cafés around the country.

Mounting evidence suggests that stories and the storytelling process can promote recovery, inspire hope, trigger insight and personal growth — in short, “heal.” And a growing number of storytellers feel challenged to work outside of entertainment venues, in prisons, hospitals, homeless shelters, and with individuals in crisis and/or with special needs.

Storytelling has come to be associated with reading Cinderella from a book to children, but it is much richer than that. For one thing, a storyteller relies on memory and improvisation rather than on the written word. They are always engaged with the audience, making eye contact, taking their listeners on a journey with them. Stories range from gypsy tales, urban legends and African trickster fables, to the Mahabarata, an ancient Indian epic which can take nine days to tell.

The power of the story for business presentations, communication of organisational culture and values and for marketing should not be under estimated. Research is now showing that humans are biologically hardwired to remembers stories over all forms of other communication.

To help you understand the universality of storytelling today consider the seven broad themes that modern storytelling covers:

1. Oral Storytelling – cross cultural, religious and more
2. Arts Storytelling – theatre, film, art, literature etc.
3. Children’s Storytelling – imagination, play, education
4. Business Storytelling – including old media(newspapers) PR, Advertising, Marketing, organisational culture and more
5. Cause – social justice – advocacy and changing the story
6. Personal Biography – our inner story that we tell ourselves (psychology)
7. Healing Storytelling – narrative medicine as a way to diagnosis and indeed heal
8. Social Media Storytelling – Brand YOU (new media -connection and electronic)

Crucial elements of all stories and storytelling include plot, characters and narrative point of view.

Storytelling is a powerful tool for bringing about change as it allows us to share a significant fact wrapped up in emotion and thus commit it to memory along with our own narrative and interpretation of message and significance. Learn how to tell a compelling story at Kathie’s one day workshops. Ideal for staff  kickoffs, marketing brainstorms, company values and more.

See more about what Kathie does, and how you could enjoy the experience of hosting a professional storyteller at your event or workplace.

The cost for your business to host this workshop:  $5000 per day or $2500 per half day.

Register your interest now:

There is growing focus on the power of using stories in business particularly as we learn more and more about how we are all biologically hardwired to remember stories over reams of data presentations that apparently we very soon forget or simply don’t absorb at all.

With the maturation of the web and the rise of Web 2.0 many businesses are now creating great content, however how you tell your story and present your content to users is just as important.

Storify is a great app that allows you to do this easily, and is essentially a new type of content management system that organizations can use internally or externally.

Keeping abreast of emerging social media tools to tell your story is now a must not an option. Storify is one the digital storytelling tools I teach in my teleseminar series on Digital Storytelling. You can register for the series here or join the free first teleclass here.

Storify allows you to create online storyboards of your content with a simple click and drag system that allows you to add the links and content that’s of interest to you. You can embed the storyboards into pretty much any website – blogs etc.

Have a look at how we recently used Storify for communicating World AS Day – a little known disease that affects some 33 million people worldwide. Using Storify we were able to tell the story of patient activists, the role of education physiotherapists and more.

Here are two examples from the World AS Day site showing Storify being used in a blog post, pulling together Facebook posts, Twitter feeds and more:

Storify is a great opportunity for businesses who want to share important content and keep your audience engaged and interested. Check out a demo of Storify below:

Advanced Social Media School

Teleclasses Starting July 15

Whether you are a big business, coach, looking to expand your career horizons, a health activist or an entrepreneur this course is for you.

Why? Storytelling is really the next level of social media. As we become more and more sophisticated with using Web 2.0 technologies we are able go deeper and tell our brand stories using a wide variety of if you like digital embassies (social media) to share our messages.

Imagine being able to mobilise a global sales force for your message using the digital space – that’s the opportunity now with social media as most of us have moved beyond learning the basics of how to use the basic platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

The Digital Storytelling teleseries is designed to take you to that next level using social media. Learn how to put it all together and how to maximize these free tools to win more business.

The next series of digital storytelling classes starts July 15 and runs for 5 weeks. Space is limited so I don’t want you to miss out – reserve your seat here

Go beyond how to use the various platforms and learn advanced social media techniques – how to build your digital campaign. Learn how to tell your brand’s story and the importance of marketing Brand YOU!

Here is what you will learn:

You’ll learn cutting edge techniques to grow your business:

• Identify your unique USP for the digital space and transform how you do business
• Finding your audience and the importance of listening and monitoring
• RSS – No other aspect of your website and blog site will be as beneficial to you as a quality RSS Feed plus we’ll cover how to monetize your feed and syndicate too!
• Maximising your use of google for social media
• Build your brand’s compelling story with the storytiser methodology and tools
• Find your authentic voice online – humanizing it for social media (no one is interested what you had for breakfast, it’s all about the story and how you humanize it)
• The value of Quora as a knowledge market and easy tips for maximizing its integration into your campaign
• Use your ‘story’ to become a thought leader and grow your brand’s influence using new curation tools – Storify, Scoop-it, Storyful, Pearltrees
• How to grow Brand YOU – the story you need to tell on LinkedIN to get noticed – not your resume
• How to create and market your own podcasts – from storyboarding your series through to voice-over and editing. Then we’ll upload to iTunes and market
• Putting together a YouTube Channel and series – including building communities around your niche
• The importance of photosharing for engagement and humanization – using the instangram app –a built in social network which provides a real time feed of photos. If Flickr and Twitter had a love child, it’d be Instagram.
• Personally branded Facebook fan pages for your business – including the importance of squeeze optin  mailing forms using the socialisation benefits of mailchimp and more. How to put together a viral competition, market an app, create buzz around getting ‘liked’ and more
• Livestreaming an event via facebook and how to push and pull audience engagement
• The Social Media Dashboard and how to optimize productivity yet still keep it personal
• Blogging tips – 27 tips and tutorials for blogger – it’s far more than just writing a blog and hoping you get noticed
• E-books – what are the options and how to sell an e-book
• Monetization using Web 2.0 – the 5 phases – generate direct sales, build delayed sales, develop backend sales, establish affiliate networks and put together JV deals
• Posterous – audience not savvy with social media – if they can email you can use posterous – the wonderful way to build community discussion. Great for educating on subjects, Q&A’s, campaign interaction and multi-site posting
• The Social Website – what every business owner MUST know about their website and it’s not what the designer tell you! Must have check list – email squeeze, socialization, content planning and more
• The Social Press Release template, if you aren’t using this and paying expensive marketing fees you are missing out on getting your news quickly indexed by google and distributed to the wire services – it’s easy to use, plugs into wordpress and can be updated with news as it grows –links, multimedia and more
• Traffic school – search engines, directory listings and linking, social engines ( networks, media and bookmarks) Spender engines, viral marketing, ezine marketing, article marketing, the importance of blogging –pinging, rss feeds
• How to set up a teleseminar and market to attendees around the globe – grow your lists and audiences, especially useful for launching apps and new developments, selling in a new product or information product
• New monitoring tools
• How to calculate your ROI
• Build an editorial calendar for your social media campaign – Putting it all together so it is manageable and measurable
• One size doesn’t fit all – unleashing your creativity as the path forward

How do the teleseminars work? Find out more here.

Bonus – Plus I share a series of concepts to identify your ‘story’ and how to get others to believe in your story and notice it. You might be looking to expand your career horizons, a change agent inside your organization, someone with a compelling issue to share – for example a health activist, health provider, entrepreneur, cause or, a visionary leader trying to improve society. It really doesn’t matter.

The secret to persuasion, influence and motivation using social media is deeply grounded in storytelling.

Why? Anthropologists contend that 70% of everything we learn is through stories. Even as   we grow into adults we fundamentally remains a story telling species. Think for a moment around the coffee machine at work first thing in the morning – what are you each sharing? Usually it is a story about your travels or family and so on.  It is no wonder over 175,000 new blogs are started every day.

The advent of Web 2.0 technology and the Internet revolution ensures that everyone is now a storyteller but how well you do it and put it together is up to you.

Too often we see messages that simple do not resonate with the audience because they simply miss the mark.

Can’t say it much better than this:

Prefer to be coached one on one – sign up for our customized coaching classes now

The first step in positioning through social media is to get to know your audience intimately. Commonly referred to as social media monitoring tools, they allow you to sort through the millions of possible blog posts, tweets and videos by honing in on relevant conversations by your target market.

Once this target market has been identified and it’s true needs, wants, communication style, and culture determined, then the conversation begins. It’s not a sales pitch, it’s a series of questions, value-added content and engaging conversations using multiple media.

Over time each of these little interactions forms and tells your positioning story. How you answer questions, share information, and produce content must be consistent with your brand and the positioning story you want to tell.

Human hardwiring for stories comes from our deepest impulses as social creatures who want to build a connection in community. What does this mean in a wired, branded, and globalized world? Understanding narrative power is even more critical in the contemporary cultural context, where advertising and marketing have become central engines of the economy.

Modern branding metaphorically burns emotional and narrative qualities into a thing so as to create in the customer (or target audience) an inseparable recognition. The brand is not merely a logo, colour scheme, or specific flagship product. The brand is the sum total of the stories that are told about the branded entity and encompasses images, impressions, gut feelings  and associations.

Branding is one of the ways that narrative power is experienced, referenced and discussed. But the popular discourse around branding frequently lacks a critical power analysis, i.e. how did these advertising images and stories get inside of our heads? How do some stories spread and saturate popular culture while others are ignored. This is the power of memes which we will discuss at length next blog post.

Today I want to focus on the story foundation for your social media campaign. Over the coming weeks we will look at what are stories, how to tell them across the social ecosphere, including building Brand YOU, tools you can use to illicit great stories, how to change a current story for social change and the power of delivery and passion.

Laying the foundation for your social media storytelling brand campaign

Make honest positioning statements with real-value positioning statements, don’t manipulate your prospects. Appeal to their core needs.

Here are some tips:

• Plot your audience as shown in Figure 1.0 – pay special attention to identifying all the stakeholders who impact your vision
• Look at the lifetime value of a customer. Have a strategy to create repeat purchases.
• Don’t be tied to a desk – optimise your use of ‘what mobile means’ – be able to do business anywhere – 24/7 using social media strategically. Be everywhere your customers hang out with your digital outposts
• Use marketing weapons like Ping.fm, Tweetdeck, Hootsuite as well as RSS aggregators to help you distribute your story to hundreds of different social networks
• Build alliances such as common networks on Digg. Such alliances can work together to get get stories highly ranked.  Tip: Organisations like CNN get a lot of their breaking news from the front page of Digg. YouTube, Facebook and twitter alliances can be very powerful too.
• Work anywhere, anytime – manage your teams, collaborate with customers and work on projects using wikis, VOIP phones, Yammer.com and Google chat
• Use free digital giveaways to add real value and benefit to your customers. Personalise this wherever possible. One size no longer fits all so learn how to effectively use Autoresponders to keep the sales cycle moving
• Build a referral and rewards programme – Promote others who add value to your business, compliment it or offer help. You can blog, organise a testimonial, send links, think creatively.
• Use affiliate software and networks – software allows a marketer to track who has referred business or leads. Once signed anyone can publish a link embedded with a unique identifier code, potentially becoming your marketing partner and can generate income as a commission. Today anyone on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn can market your products or services for you.
• Be likeable – being likeable is like having a giant “open for business” sign above your head – help customers reach personal goals, fulfil needs and improve the lives and businesses around you. Always say thank you and recognise those who help and promote your ideas.
• Respond quickly to public or private questions, comments or concerns. If you want to be liked make others feel liked too!
• Build bridges – don’t argue or respond to criticism – instead inform, educate customers and strengthen your brand
• Have fun – be personable, human. Social media is an engaging eco-sphere
• Observe the nano –niche markets you are engaging within and adjust engagement accordingly. Each niche has subtle cultural, etiquette and values differences.
• Be congruent across the social –eco-sphere
• Seek out testimonials – think of the social eco-sphere just like a referral for a new restaurant to dine at – people share positive feedback and like to ‘try’ something new
• Invest in your reputation long term – mange, monitor and build your reputation – monitor what is being said about your brand online, correct mis-information quickly. Make sure the customer experience is one where they can contact you quickly with a concern and that you are equally responsive quickly. This means everything from twitter replies, website navigation, invoicing and email auto-responders must be produced in a way that creates an ideal customer experience.

Here’s a example of how you might integrate all of the above using the social ecosphere.

• And finally, delight your customers – do more!  Give exceptional service and they will tell others.  Don’t be frightened to similarly fire customers who no matter what you do are never happy. You can’t win here instead focus on those you can delight and continue delighting!

Credit: A great book to read to assist you with growing your online influence is Guerrilla Social Media Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson and Shane Gibson

Everyone wants to know about Return on Investment for time spent on social media sites, is it worth it we ask? The answers can be analyzed many ways but most businesses are looking for some hard statistics.

From an awesome blog post By The Numbers: How Facebook Says Likes & Social Plugins Help Websites by Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand (based on statistics given to him by Facebook). BTW – searchengineland is a must use resource for everything on SEO – keeps you up to date!

Media Statistics

Here’s what Facebook says about media sites using Like buttons and other social plugins:

• The average media site integrated with Facebook has seen a 300% increase in referral traffic.
• People who sign in with Facebook at The Huffington Post view 22% more pages and spend 8 minutes longer than the average reader .
• Users coming to the NHL.com from Facebook spend 85% more time, read 90% more articles and watch 85% more videos than a non-connected user.
• ABCNews.com, Washington Post and The Huffington Post are said to have more than doubled their referral traffic from Facebook since adding social plugins.

Commerce Statistics

About commerce sites and Facebook social plugins, the Facebook reports:

• Levi’s saw a 40 times increase in referral traffic from Facebook after implementing the Like button in April 2010 and has maintained those levels since.
• Outdoor sporting goods retailer Giantnerd.com saw a 100% increase revenue from Facebook within two weeks of adding the Like button.
• American Eagle added the Like button next to every product on their site and found Facebook referred visitors spent an average of 57% more money than non-Facebook referred visitors
• Children’s clothing retailer Tea Collection added the Like button to sale merchandise and saw daily revenues increase 10 times.
• ShoeDazzle added the Like button to all of the products on its site and within the first month had thousands of likes for its top products.
• ShoeDazzle also lets people login to its site using Facebook, and Facebook-connected users were 50% more likely to make repeat purchases every month than average shoppers.
• When a Ticketmaster user posts a specific event they are attending, or may want to attend, to Facebook, it generates $5.30 of direct ticket sales
• Eventbrite reports that a link shared on Facebook is worth $2.52 in ticket sales

Making “Like” More Likeable

Facebook says Like buttons get 3 to 5 times more clicks if:

• Versions that show thumbnails of friends are used.
• They allow people to add comments.
• If they appear at both the top and bottom of articles.
• If they appear near visual content like videos or graphics.

To note: Facebook ‘Like’ Display Type

The Like button is available in three formats. Standard, which shows the name of a visitor’s friend that has liked the page (if any friends have), and the total number of Likes; button count, which only displays the number of Likes in a compact format; and box count, that shows the number of Likes in a large block above the like icon.

Additionally, photos of the visitor’s friends who have also Liked the resource may be displayed.

Metacafe Puts Like Up Top

For example, Facebook says that video site Metacafe placed a Like button above its videos, in addition to being below.

After doing this, use of the Like button and traffic from Facebook increased. Facebook reports that:

• The number of daily likes more than tripled, going from an average of 2,000 likes per day to over 7,000 likes.
• Daily referral traffic from Facebook to Metacafe doubled, going from about 60,00 to 120,000.
• Total Facebook actions (likes, shares, comments) rose to 20,000 per day.

Image from OnlineSchools.org

Follow me on Scoop.it

Scoop.it allows users to gather and display content in an appealing format and publish it on the Web. And the great news it is really easy to use. A fabulous tool for telling your story.
You just follow a series of prompts. Define your keywords with some care since Scoop.it will suggest content based on these. You can add the suggested content to your page, discard the content, or remove the source (if you don’t view it as reliable, for example).

However, you also can add content you find on the internet using the Scoop.it bookmarklet. You can add a description or reflection and post this to your page. You can even use an image already on the Web page or you can add your own.

Content can be shared on a variety of social media sites including:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Tumblr
• WordPress          

Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom of the page to find the link to   “Goodies.” You’ll be able to grab code for widgets to embed a slideshow of your curated content on your Web page.

There are also widgets that allow you to  provide links to your Scoop.it profile.

You can learn more about Scoop.it by watching this video.

Scoop.it is ideal to tell stories in a number of ways:

• By the types of content you share
• By the reflections you post
• By images you share

You can find a few of my Scoop.it pages here:

I spend a lot of time coaching and teaching people how to craft great digital stories to extend their brand’s engagement.  I try to focus my clients on 4 basic rules to start their social media journey.

1. Listening – where is your audience hanging out, what are they discussing, finding your ‘sweet spot’
2. Connect with people (your audience)
3. Engage with your audience – build real relationships and offer real value. SHARE.
4. Amplify your message in a focused manner and with a creatively driven campaign that tells your story.

Where clients often get stuck is understanding that yes, social media is time consuming and can overtake your life if you are not careful but there are some powerful tools to ensure you can run a seamless campaign even with your smart phone when you are on the go.

The reason I share this is, as anyone curating a breaking news social media story knows, that as the story morphs and goes viral the job doesn’t end when you leave your desk for the night.

And most of us simply don’t have time to sit at a computer and monitor social activity.

That is where mobile social management comes into play.

There are a variety of smart phone applications that can help you to stay on top of your brand’s story online and mobile conversations, beyond your 9-to-5 workday.

Here is a toolkit of the most convenient and reliable social engagement and monitoring applications—all accessible from your handheld device. Remember mastering these tools is NOT the focus of your social media campaign. They are tools to assist you but they are not your story. A great social media campaign follows:

1. A clear set of objectives aligned to your business

2. A solid strategy supporting your business objectives

3. A sound social media policy and every business should have one

4. Identified target audiences supporting your business objective

5. A focused clear message again linked to your business objective

6. GREAT creative – I am not talking here about branding, it is about    the creative elements of the campaign that make it unique and then 7.Tactically delivering the campaign using integrated social media platforms and tools. The Execution of the campaign

7.Lastly measure your ROI.

The below handy tools should go some way towards achieving results a lot easier when you operate in a 24/7 social media environment.

1. HootSuite

HootSuite, the incredible desktop Twitter client, also exists for the iPhone and Droid. With mobile HootSuite, you can manage multiple accounts in easy-to-navigate streams, schedule tweets, upload photos, and use ow.ly, the HootSuite link shortener that automatically generates graphs and statistics.

HootSuite enables you to translate tweets, organize your Twitter contacts, see trending topics, or add locations to posts. If you’re mentioning a handle, just type “@” with letters and HootSuite will make it easy for you by providing accounts from which to select. You also have the ability to link Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare accounts for cross-platform management.

2. Seesmic

Another Twitter desktop client, Seesmic supports a variety of platforms on devices including iPhone, Droid, and BlackBerry. Bring together all of your networks in one place, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Evernote, Flickr, Blogger, and more. The management tool also supplies statistics and simple ways to organize followers or engagers.

3. Tweeb

Tweeb is a somewhat in-depth metrics tool for Twitter on the iPhone. The application provides a clean and concise layout for examining tweets that have inspired follows, unfollows, retweets, mentions, and click-throughs.

Tweeb also gives up-to-date information and allows you to browse through data from different time periods.

4. Beluga

If you need to communicate with co-workers quickly while you’re out, group-messaging is perfect for you. Get your co-workers hooked up with Beluga so you can start sending out mass messages, alerts, or instructions for online and offline responsibilities. It is a great tool for managing campaigns.

5. TweetAlarm

TweetAlarm sends email alerts when someone talks about your brand, product, or any specific topic of interest—think of it as Google Alerts for Twitter. You’re immediately alerted if something crucial comes up on the social landscape.

6. Bump

One of my favourites. I no longer have a printed business card and use this tool instead. If you’re at a conference or networking event, Bump is a must-have.  A great tip – share this tool at the beginning of the conference with your audience and watch the networking soar at breaks and post the event. With bump, you can physically click iPhones or Droids together and electronically transfer contact information. It’s basically the mobile version of exchanging business cards.

7. Hashable

Referred to as the “ultimate networking app,” Hashable is similar to Bump in helping people to make in-person introductions, check-ins, and exchanges of contact information for the mobile and online world.

8. Radian6 for Mobile

Though not available just yet, Radian6 recently announced that is releasing a version of the social insights and listening tool for the iPhone. Just like the desktop version, the iPhone app will have real-time results, team assignments, analytics, and engagement alerts.

Thanks to the oneforty blog for sharing information for this post.