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When Sysomos acquired Expion a few months back, I was excited for the social media listening and management verticals. Both platforms were really good at what they were built for – Sysomos for social monitoring/listening; Expion for social management, especially from an enterprise/franchise level. I had a sneaking suspicion a marriage would produce some neat […]

You would be hard pressed to produce a social listening report these days that didn’t show Twitter as your top conversation source, regardless of the topic. What’s more frightening is most social listening services only offer 10% of what Twitter has to offer in the first place. The “Decahose” – or a random feed of […]

Marketing software is typically only as good as the user implementing it. Except when it’s better than that. Machine learning and natural language processing can get many marketing tools close to being better. In fact, we’ve seen it with SEO plugins like Scribe. With it, you start writing or copy-paste your article into WordPress and, […]

There are no style guides to social media writing. There are no rules or tips or tricks. Plenty of gurus and software companies have written articles like, “How to write for social media,” that have scintillating tips like, “Keep Tweets short. You only have 140 characters!” But you don’t need rules to write for social […]

Innovation in the social listening space seems almost impossible. What’s possible is done. Or at least that’s the contrarian view. I spent a few days this week with my friends at Zignal Labs, a new-ish entry into the social listening landscape. And by friends, I should disclose that I mean literally, my friends. Tim Hayden (CMO) […]

Most people don’t call me by my name. My wife even calls me, “Jay” or “Jase” as if the extra “on” is burdensome. But it’s not just her. Most people call each other by a single syllable version of their name, unless their name is single itself. Even then, we often go by the first […]

A company I advise is building an advisory board. They asked if it would be smart to announce all the new advisory board members at once or each individually to multiply the opportunities to write about them. They are hoping to make an effective announcement out of this. You could ask the same question about personnel […]

My consistent lament about the social technology space is there are too many people claiming they do everything and too few people doing everything. For every monitoring solution that says they have engagement tools, workflow management and killer analytics, there’s a killer analytics solution that claims to have monitoring, engagement and workflow management. The truth […]

The single biggest complaint I’ve had about the social software game is that most companies offer their software for a somewhat reasonable price until they get venture funding. They’re then told by their investors they must focus on enterprise clients — you know, the ones who will pay ridiculous amounts of money for something that […]

When you think about it quickly, the news from a study from Acquity Group released last week that says Facebook is the most trusted media channel for content created by a brand or company, isn’t all that concerning. Facebook has become the primary consumer channel for finding and communicating with brands. Brand content on Facebook […]

The biggest problem with social software reared its ugly head this week for me. It confuses even the most educated and experienced social marketer, never mind the brand manager who doesn’t have time to dive head first into social marketing and figure it all out for themselves. The problem is how social software is categorized, […]

Chances are you have received a few (or a few dozen) emails before that start off with something like this: “We’ve noticed that your business doesn’t rank well in Google …” It’s the sales pitch from many an SEO firm. Most of them are off-shores developers trying to score a new client and make a […]