Posts Tagged ‘find’

Posted on November 9, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

You Lie! Numbers do matter: How brands look for influencers on the social web

A few years ago showing your RSS subscribers numbers was a big deal for validating your blog success and/or readership. Fast forward to 2009 you’ll see banner ads not saying how to get more blog readers but how to get more Twitter followers. I know you have heard the saying, “It’s not about the numbers“, I have said it before and I’m sure you have heard plenty of “social media speakers” say it before too. But when I talk to businesses and they ask me, how many followers I have and ask how can they reach my audience and gain the same amount of followers and more, it’s tough to say, it’s not about the numbers. Even with Twitter’s new list feature people are already trying to create a social algorithm measuring the amount of followers you have to how many Twitter list you are in and the name of those list compared to your tweet content for validation. Sounds crazy right….

To my point when I say it’s not about numbers, I do mean it. My usual response is it’s about the relationships you have with your connections no matter which social network. It could be a Linkedin or Facebook Fan pages, you could have thousands of connections or fans but without any true relationship with your community, the numbers are just that, numbers.

But what about brands who are now looking to Twitter, Facebook, blogs and “influencers” to create “viral” content to market their product or service? How do brands select who they should reach out to? What are brands going to look at to see if you have an audiences or not? You guessed it, they’re going to look at your Twitter followers, now list count, RSS subscribers and any public analytics number they can find online. So, to completely say it’s not about the numbers? You lie.

Here are 11ways brands look for influencers on the social web

1. Compete.com

2. Technorati blog rankings – http://technorati.com

3. Tweet Grader:

4. AdAge Power 150 Rankings

5. Blog Postrank via http://www.postrank.com

6. Twitalyzer Twitter influence rankings

7. Your Twitter list count
8. RSS Subscribers via Feedburner – http://feedburner.google.com
9. Alexa rankings – http://www.alexa.com
10.  Linkedin Connections

11. Facebook fans

12. BackType comment engagement numbers

Still this isn’t a green light to gain as many fans, friends, connections or followers as possible but evaluate your goals for establishing true meaningful relationships on the social web.

Posted on September 15, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

5 new ways to filter, find and read blog content. Blogs are back!

It seems like innovation has hit the technology community again especially in the RSS / blogging / content aggregation sector. Just a few months ago everyone was talking about or how micro-blogging sites such as Twitter would kill blogs. People were saying RSS was too slow and everyone would be using people aggregation to find information in the terms of if something was important, people through social networks such as Facebook & Twitter would tell find information that way instead of reading blogs.

While that may stay true for some, new ways of filtering, finding and reading content have emerged helping users find relevant content to their interest. Let’s take a look.

1. YourVersion – http://www.yourversion.com

YourVersion continuously discovers new and personally relevant web content based on your interests, and lets you easily bookmark and share your discoveries with friends.
YourVersion was recently named DemoPit peoples’ choice winner at TechCrunch50

2. Google Fast Flip – http://fastflip.googlelabs.com

Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to “flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.

3. LazyFeed – http://www.lazyfeed.com

Lazyfeed is a web service that allows you to subscribe to any topics and get live updates. Just save any topic you are interested in, and forget about it. Lazyfeed will remember and let you know when there’s new content on that topic, just like an instant messenger. Lazyfeed allows you to stay on top of everything you care about, effortlessly.

4. Feedly (Firefox plug-in) – http://www.feedly.com

feedly organizes your favorite sites into a fun, magazine-like start page.

5. Alltop – http://Alltop.com

The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you.

While Feedly and Alltop have been online a lot longer than LazyFeed, Google Fast Flip and YourVersion, I thought they could be useful to the non-tech readers of SocialWayne.com.

Google Reader is still my preferred choice to read blogs but with features like auto discovery of new content LazyFeed and YourVersion are good tools for bloggers looking to find content or just to keep up with the latest news from the social web / blogosphere.

Out of the five tools which one do you use? What do you use to read blogs?