CorpTweets

OfferPop offers “smart social media marketing campaigns for Twitter and Facebook” and is a good option for those companies that don’t have time or internal resources to code on these platforms on their own. Their white label solution is easy to use for SM gurus and newbies alike. They have a variety of campaign starter apps that run contests, promotions, polls, exclusive discounts, and new user sign ups – just to name a few, allowing a company or individual that wants to create buzz or gather more fans to do so in a variety of unique ways.

I tried the “offer app” for Twitter as they allow you to launch a free campaign to try it out. It was easy to login and you simply press the “create new campaign” button to get started. You have to include the custom link from OfferPop and other information such as what the give away is, how long it is going, etc. in order to use it. I will add that I would have liked a bit more explanation here – the image automatically loaded wasn’t large enough to tell what it was and when I clicked on it, up popped a warning about changing it without explaining clearly showing how it would influence the campaign. Regardless, there are other nice additions to OfferPop such as they offer both branded landing pages for your campaign as well as real time reports which tracks a particular campaign’s success.

There are quite a few interesting campaign apps that I would be interested in exploring – notably the “tug of war” app for Facebook which allows fans to choose which of two things they like best and why. OfferPop has two pricing plans – unlimited use or pay per campaign, depending on how many followers or fans a company has, they can choose which offering works best for them. If you want to learn more, you can review their pricing info here.

Hellotxt has launched a social media dashboard that lets you communicate and digest all of your social information in one convenient social place. Hellotxt makes it very easy to post one status update and have it automatically appear on multiple social networks, publishing platforms, and micro-communication services — can we say timesaver! They also let you read your friends’ updates from Facebook and Twitter on one screen.

Hellotxt is currently supported by over 50+ social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, and Ning. Hellotxt is available on the iPad, iPhone and Android — making it easy to update your status on their website or by using email from you mobile phone.  You can also embed photos and video, as well as share your location in your updates. Another cool feature is the automatic URL shortening.

One Hellotxt feature that stood out to me was the capability to read and merge your friend feeds.  You can set your feed as a single consolidated view of multiple friends posts on different networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This gives me the ability to follow my favorite conversations without having to log on to each network to read their updates.

For companies looking to minimize time on social networks, but maximize impact, Hellotxt is a useful tool to accomplish that. It is also great for companies who have multiple accounts on the same social network (e.g. two Twitter pages). They let you add all your accounts onto a simple email gateway that gets fed your updates.

To learn more and sign up visit – http://hellotxt.com

The other day I met Luca Filigheddu, CEO of Twimbow, who told me all about the product and got me really interested in trying it out… What caught my attention is that when we met and I asked him how his Twitter dashboard is different from the many others I already use, he said “this is the Apple of Twitter clients,” meaning they’re focusing on design and user interface more than anything else.

Twimbow is a web-based social media platform (it’s currently only for Twitter but they’re planning on adding Facebook soon) with a focus on content. What makes Twimbow different is it enables you to “color code” tweets and users, making it easier to quickly sort, filter, and digest content.

The dashboard has three columns:

1. Personal Buzz (@replies, inbound and outbound RTs and DMs, favorites) – here different color codes let you quickly scan the tweets and decide to hide or show them with a click.
2. Home Buzz (timeline and lists you’re following) – you can select what lists you want to visualize and if you have assigned color codes to different users you can filter your timeline by hiding some or seeing some others only.
3. Searches – this includes both keyword and people searches. You can save multiple searches and easily switch from one to the other but always look at one search at a time.

While the main view is limited to three column, they added an additional tool, the “Monitor,” which is a toolbar at the bottom of the dashboard that lets you monitor keywords or people and be notified when there’s anything new about them.

On top of this, inside the client you can:

• Open one or more user profiles, and switch among profiles in the profile window
• Open links and play videos
• See additional content (songs, etc) related to your tweets, that Twimbow automatically pulls from the Web

So the whole idea here is that you have unlimited possibilities to search, open windows, discover, share, etc, but the data never becomes overwhelming because Twimbow lets you categorize, prioritize, and easily switch among many different things while the interface never becomes too crowded!

Some recent new features include the ability to “color code” users from the Profile Viewer, the ability to open previews of photos posted to Flickr and shared on Twitter, follow buttons for results of the users’ search, and the ability to share a tweet.

Multi Twitter account and Facebook support are coming soon, and color codes will soon be substituted with labels (just like Gmail’s).

Also, CEO Luca Filigheddu was interviewed yesterday on The Next Web so you’d like to hear more about Twimbow you can watch the interview here.

Twimbow is now in private Beta so you need an invite in order to use it. Simply follow @Twimbow and ask for one. Let us know what you think!

Listorious by Sawhorse Media is a Twitter search service that ranks Twitter users in a variety of useful ways. Not only does it crawl user created Twitter lists finding the most listed people on Twitter, it tracks the most followed, the longest users of Twitter (no surprise that one of Twitter’s founders @jack is the first user) and users by a variety of tags and themes. Something that makes Listorious a bit different is that it gives users the unique opportunity to ask questions via Twitter of the influential people listed on the site and publicly publishes their responses. You can go to a user’s page – let’s say the WSJ for instance – and you can see recent tweets, pending questions and a nifty little box where you can tweet your questions to your hearts desire. Listorious easily accesses the Twitter API like many Twitter tools these days, allowing you to tweet directly from the site and has an inbox function so if anyone asks questions about you, you can easily respond.

As a user of Twitter, you may ask yourself, what differentiates Listorious from WeFollow?

• The aforementioned opportunity to ask questions via Twitter (and actually get answers…)
• WeFollow is more focused on a user’s follower count and site ranking though I do like their new addition (well to me at least) of listing popular users by location
• For a particular topic, Listorious not only includes the top Twitter users tagged under a certain subject but a bunch of other interesting content on one centralized page

Focusing on the last point – in the case of the technology tag – Listorious includes the most popular shared trends (tends to be articles), user created lists tagged technology and terms of interest. It is all organized on one page which makes it easy for a reader to scan through and see what is interesting to them. My only question is how often does it update – I couldn’t find that info on the site. Though overall – with a tagline of “find experts on Twitter” I think the folks at Listorious are pretty right on.

Little known fact – the folks at Sawhorse Media are also the creators of the Shorty Awards. To learn more – check them out at @listorious

Trendrr is a business intelligence web service for digital and social media.  It enables businesses to listen, measure and intelligently respond to your marketplace. Using Trendrr, businesses can understand who are the most influential users in their market, female to male ratio of their market, and much more.

Trendrr lets you track keywords like your brand, your competitors, specific products, or general related products. To get an even deeper analysis, you can have multiple keywords with different spellings or nicknames of the same query. Here is a helpful video which explains their services:

To get a better perspective on ways that Trendrr can benefit a variety of businesses/industries, they’ve listed some out on their website:

• Advertising Agencies can use Trendrr to determine if ad buys are turning into sales.
• Marketing / PR Agencies can use Trendrr to identify the reaction, awareness, and conversion of messaging.
• Brand Managers can use Trendrr to manage and track a brand’s perception
• Media Companies can use Trendrr to identify where, why, and how media is consumed and perceived.
• Research Groups can use Trendrr to compile unique, high-quality data and information for a research publication.
• Political Campaigns can use Trendrr to manage the perception of a candidate and campaign.
• CRM and consumer communication platforms can use Trendrr to manage your community and identify key topics.

Take a look at the business logic incorporated into Trendrr’s work-flow process: 

If you want to try Trendrr out, they are currently offering a free trial for 14 days. After your free trial, rates range from $499 to $2,499 per month, depending on which type of account you need.

I have not signed up for a free account, so I can’t write on how effective and easy this tool is. But, I would love to hear your thoughts if you try it out. Leave us a comment!

As marketers get more and more comfortable with social media, they need solutions to manage, maintain and conduct reporting on their efforts across multiple social channels from one location. As a result, Social Media Management Systems (SMMS) are emerging.

Jeremiah Owyang has published a list of Social Media Management Systems with 22 total vendors. His definition of Social Media Management Systems is:

Collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a disparate social media environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based and enable the manager to listen, aggregate, publish, and manage multiple social media channels from one tool.

The basic features these tools offer are:

• Connection with social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, and others)
• Ability to publish from one location to each of those channels, and in some cases customize to each channel
• Access to an aggregated view of social data, analytics and conversion metrics.

The advantages of using these tools vary from increasing integration among departments (if, for example, a customer has a product idea or suggestion, these platforms can help get this information quickly into the right hands), to better time management and consistent messaging (customizable social content makes branding and look and feel across multiple social media outlets a lot simpler).

Last but not least, Social Media Management Platforms help social businesses take a “human touch.” Getting personal with your customers is key to building meaningful conversations, as these tools give you the insight to know your customers and the tools to communicate with them in an authentic way.

ObjectiveMarketer is one of the many tools in this space. I had the pleasure to meet Amita Paul, the company CEO and Founder a few months ago, and I remember being overwhelmed with all the interesting features offered by ObjectiveMarketer.

This is how it works:

• Step 1: Define the Campaign Strategy

The campaign definition lays the foundation of your user engagement and interaction strategy, as also it defines the key metrics for performance reporting. Within ObjectiveMarketer, you can create a campaign and specify campaign goals, and web analytics integration.

• Step 2: Identify the Channels

Within each campaign initiative is a channel strategy. Depending on your campaign strategy, you identify the channels to communicate your message. ObjectiveMarketer supports Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Image Hosting, SlideShare, Blogs and Ping.fm.

• Step 3: Create your Contents
  

Create the right content for the right channel. This content can be Text, Images, Videos, Slide Shows, Polls, or Facebook Applications like Contests, Email Acquisition Forms, Surveys etc. This content can be staged to always represent your brand.

TweetStats by @dacort (Damon Cortesi) is a great little app that allows you to view a broad range of statistics on your twitter usage. It features your Tweet Timeline which initially shows the number of tweets you have done per month since you joined Twitter, your tweet density (as in the times of day that you tend to tweet) as well as your aggregated hourly or daily tweets so you can see if there is a particular time or day that you tweeted more than others. In my case – I discovered right away that I tend to tweet most in the afternoon at 4pm GMT – which makes sense because that is 8am PT when most of my contacts are up and sharing info so I login to see what is happening. It also shows who you reply to the most, who you retweet the most and as well as which interface you use the most to tweet. Here you can also see the percentage of your tweets which were retweets (5.28% for me) and replies to friends (in my case a whopping 29.63%) which shows to me that I use Twitter very socially. I will add that seven of the top ten people I reply to most are either current or previous colleagues. You can also click on an individual month in your initial timeline in order to see those stats. In my case I was at an event in July of 2009 and thus tweeted a lot that month. Similar to your main page it breaks down your tweets via timing, density, and platform used. One nice addition is it does a scatter plot like graph comparing replies, total tweets and retweets by individual day throughout the month.

TweetStats also features an area where you can check out stats on twitter itself such as who is getting the most @s today (@iamdiddy is today’s winner) and which apps are being used to share. According to the site, next to the web, Tweetdeck is by far the most popular app. Similarly for me as you can see in the graph on the right, it is the most popular app in terms of my own personal usage. The trends area features today’s top trends, what’s currently trending at that given moment as well as a great “trend-cloud” which shows today’s trends in cloud format.

Speaking of trend or tweet clouds, you can also check out your own stats in cloud format, which I found amusing as well as interesting. I am clearly more a positive Twitter user than anything else with “happy” mentioned 79 times, “yay” 40 times and “love” a delightful 91 times. You can review this both including or excluding your replies in case you don’t want to see the users you tweet at most. In my case you can see my most popular words here:

The site also gives you the option to share your stats on almost every page which is a nice addition. Long story short – TweetStats is a great app to give you insight into your own Twitter patterns which you may have not even realized.

On Tuesday, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam announced that starting February, customers will be able to purchase the Verizon iPhone 4 (16GB) for $199 (finally!). Current Verizon wireless customers can pre-order the phone on a “first come, first serve basis” now on www.verizonwireless.com; While other carrier customers will be able to purchase the phone on February 10th.

Features of the Verizon iPhone include, FaceTime video calling, 5-megapixel camera, and Retina Display.  The new phone can also be used as a mobile hotspot, a feature that AT&T doesn’t have.  You can learn about all the new features and catch up on the FAQs about the phone here.

Rumors have been swirling on Twitter for months about this announcement, but with the official news hitting the media-waves, tweeters went crazy.  Reactions ranged from overwhelming excitement to downright skepticism.  Many folks tweeted about their uncertainty that Verizon’s 3G network will be able to handle the new traffic. Something that I fear too……

According to this FastCompany article, a recent study suggests that there was 78,000 tweets related to the news, from AT&T and Verizon subscribers to iPhone and Droid users.

For AT&T:

• 24% of opinion analyzed remained positive about AT&T
• Only 7% of tweets indicated users were choosing to stay with AT&T, but an additional 5% believed the network would improve because the Verizon iPhone might free up data bandwidth

For Verizon:

• Around 40% of public opinion was positive for Verizon
• 20% of tweets indicating users that have already decided to buy the iPhone, and 5% specifically indicating they plan to switch carriers for the iPhone on Verizon

When I tweeted my excitement about the announcement it wasn’t for *Verizon* per-se, but it was the idea that I finally have a choice … and in the end the customer usually wins when we have options.

While the Tweets are fun to read and Twitter chatter has already started about the iPhone 5 hitting stores in June, our team is still giggling over this video clip about the Verizon iPhone from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

*Twitter numbers were courtesy of http://bit.ly/fxEvyh, **Photo from www.verizonwireless.com

2011 has started only 7 days ago and so many things have happened already!

In conjunction with the new Mac App Store, which went live on Wednesday, Twitter has launched Twitter for Mac, a desktop application for Apple computers. “This app gives Twitter users another fast and convenient way to stay connected to what they care about most,” Twitter’s Carolyn Penner wrote. “Tweets appear in real-time (using our streaming API), and the app auto-shortens URLs and has lots of useful keyboard shortcuts.”

Twitter search and advertising startup PostUp has bought on January 5th Echofon, the Twitter application developer we reviewed a few days ago.

Twileshare, a free service that lets you upload and share files on Twitter, launched just before Christmas. After logging in via Twitter you can upload and share images, PDFs, Word and Excel files up to 20MB in size. PDFs and Word documents are also placed in the page via Scribe’s API so that you can simply view the document on a page rather than downloading it. You can also see how many times your file has been viewed and tweeted, comment on uploaded files. You can request a beta invite at http://twileshare.com.

We’ll have more reviews and updates for you next week…

Echofon is a family of (free) Twitter apps for iPhone, iPad, Firefox and Mac. I am checking out the Firefox app.

I downloaded Echofon and a tiny blue icon appeared in my status bar. Now I can use it to be notified when my friends post tweets, to post my own updates and to even share a link to a website I am visiting.

* By clicking on the icon, I can open a small side window where I see all of my friends’ updates, mentions and direct messages with the familiar timeline view – and an option to reply and favorite tweets. This is great if you need to check Twitter frequently but don’t want to continuously visit Twitter.com – or if you click a lot of links in tweets. Clicked links open in new tabs and if you close the window you’ll still see the number of unread tweets in your status bar.

* If you want to get instant updates when someone updates their status, you can set Echofon so that a pop up window opens up (with the frequency you prefer). These popups show up at the bottom of the browser window right by the Echofon icon.

* When you want to update your status, all you have to do is click on the small icon and type in your message. If you need to share the link of a website you’re currently viewing, simply click the link button and its URL will automatically be inserted into your tweet.

* And (listen to this!) if you enter “@username” into the Firefox bar, Echofon will open the user’s timeline on twitter.com.

I’ve also tried to add two other accounts to see how that works and how easy it is to switch from one account to the other. A right click on the icon opens a window where you can choose to change what account you’re being notified for, or what updates you’re looking at.

What I wish I could do is set up a search – so that I don’t get popup notifications for anything but only for the keywords I am interested in. It’d be also cool if I could decide to be notified only for @mentions and direct messages to me.

But this is still a great tool if you are an avid “clicker” of links in others’ tweets or if you like to browse the web and share links yourself.

I am now exploring Echofon for iPhone. I am going to review it and some other Twitter apps for iPhone sometime in the next few weeks.