Paper.li allows you to sign in with your twitter account and gives you three options to produce a daily newspaper based on the information you want to read. You can:

• Add you name and create a newspaper about you and your social network (like this one: The Justin Parks Daily)
• Add in a #hashtag that you monitor or wish to keep a good eye on and you read about alot.
• Add a Twitter list of specific people you want to read about daily.

*Word of warning, paper.li is still in Alpha testing, you can only do this with 5 different names, lists or #hashtags!  So DON’T waste them!

The end product is split into different sections for Business, Media, Technoloy and such and includes your own tweets in there (if you created a paper on your own twitter account name) and the thing I like about this is definitely the format as its familiar and similar to reading a newspaper.  the newspaper updates everyday andso once you create it then you just have to return to that URL and you can read the updates anew.

It will probably change some more as it moves through the testing stages but as far as I am concerned its already looking good. Nice job!

The final aim = To convert visitors to consumers.

If they do not become consumers then they should be converted to one of three things if possible beginning with the most important.

Primary Goal

• Purchase and item or order

Secondary Goal

• Email subscribers on the blog
• Facebook Fan page members
• Twitter followers

The Company Blog

With the inclusion of the blog we must look at it as the hub of the social media efforts.  It is the content provider that is used to compliment current promotional campaign efforts and as such is the focal point where visitors are sent.

Currently we are discussing sport as the next marketing effort.

To begin with, content about sport should be created in the generic form.  Rules about the sport or competitions and some history of the sport and its development are good areas to cover. Then, content should be aimed towards more up to date news about the current leagues, teams or individuals and their standings and form. Eventually and if possible, interviews are an excellent form of content from players or teams as human interest pieces are the most “sticky” and also it is the easiest content to produce as the players themselves fill in the blanks.

While being exposed to the content then visitors should also be exposed to the opportunity to choose one of the three options listed above AFTER they have been offered the possibility to purchase and item or make an order on the company site.

This is achieved by the placement of text or attractive graphics at the end of content articles linking to the necessary product order pages on the main commerce site. Should this option not bear fruit then the secondary options should be available for consideration at little to no effort for the visitor via floating sidebars or unmistakable icons placed on the page and linking to the relevant profile.

The FaceBook Fan Page

Once this drive of content is in place we must begin the social media effort of talking about sport on the FaceBook Fan Page (not exclusively but enough for it to be a major subject).  This can be achieved by adding in the content form the blog automatically to the Facebook page and asking the current fans if they are involved in a sport or know anyone that is.

Of course, much more of a response is forth coming the more fans the page has, so I would strongly recommend that the mail shot to the current client base be completed at the earliest opportunity in order to establish a base and solid foundation to work on in the FaceBook ecosystem.  Having this available allows more depth and feedback to be gathered and more reaction to different promotions and campaigns assessed quickly and honestly from the user base. Indeed, it can be an excellent way of helping to generate sales as old clients are reminded of the excellent service and quality provided by the company though simple conversation.

In regards the administration of the page one person will responsible for this at the initial stages.  By administration we mean that conversations will be monitored and keep in the realms of decency and on point and of course, members that single themselves out to be particularly abusive or have little or now positive input can be removed.  allow this may sound ominous, due to the members on FaceBook carrying their own names and faces, this rarely happens as it did in the past on anonymous forums whereby users posted on fake or unidentifiable names.

Other FaceBook Groups and Fan Pages.

In conjunction to this the company then need to source and join some sport or sporting related groups and engage these groups in conversation about the sport.  the engagement should not be overbearing or pushy at this stage.  It should be a process of listening, engaging and assessing the groups nature and context by reading the information already available on the wall then asking a series of questions such as:

“How are the team doing this year?”

“Who has the best average score per game?”

“When is the next match?”

“Are any matches local to my area (put the specific area)”

Gradually this may lead onto things about the team and its events commenting on the team strip and mentioning how the company have supplied other sports teams and showing the results of this service via photos or links to the product itself on the company website or blog.

This whole process can take seconds and be done in a single burst if the group and users are active or it can happen over several days as comments and replays are made and the company react to them. Several groups can be run at once of course and by several it can be two or hundreds depending on time and resource and if those groups are exist.

The group sourcing aspect can be facilitated by searching or asking your direct network for advice but the actually conversational process must be completed and maintained by the company are it is the company that are most familiar with the product, service and price.

Beginning with Twitter

At this early stage twitter must be considered a fall back option.  It is an excellent tool for networking and locating individuals to connect with so it should be available and maintained to some extent at this stage in order to gather and increase its natural follower count.

The account can be maintained via the blog as the content created there, much like Facebook, can be automatically feed into the Twitter profile updating the status and increasing the visible content.  Twitter should be monitored on occasion for information requests (all of this will arrive via email regardless) until such times as the the company account can be run effectively and in a more hands on manner.

No big deal really but a nice touch that allows the more creative types out there to make the sidebar much more interesting with a well placed graphic or indeed to simply let more of the background show through.

Best you follow these steps in Firefox or Internet Explorer as Chrome doesn’t like it much!

I tested this out and here is how you can do it to:

Step One – Login to twitter and select “edit your profile” then select the “Design” section on to this link http://twitter.com/settings/design

Step Two – Grab the code below:

javascript:d=document;c=d.createElement('script');d.body.appendChild(c);c.src='http%3A%2F%2Fwww.justinparks.com%2Ftwitter%2Ftwitter-sidebar.js';void(0);

**Big thanks to João Pedro Carvalho Motta for the original code.

Step Three – Go to the address bar on your browser (where it says http://twitter.com/settings/design) and select the URL. Copy over it with the code from above. Just like this.

Now you  just need to hit Enter or line break or return (the big key that makes you take a new line) to make the change take effect.

Final Step – Hit the save button at the bottom of the Design page and your done!

And you can see that the sidebar is now transparent if you go and view your own page profile. For example check: http://twitter.com/#!/justinparks

**Please make sure you check this with a background that is obviously see through as many people dont then they think it doesnt work!

Now what if you want to change back to a normal sidebar with a coloured background. No probs. Just login into the design page again and select “Change Design Background” and hit save and your all sorted.

Nothing major, just thought you might like this little touch!

Sometimes though, I see information about social media and I just don’t get it.  At all. Typically this information is the type of thing that involves numbers, fancy looking graphs, pie charts and some scientific looking pile of claptrap that aims to prove a point or justify a technique of one from or another and the end result usually has me shaking my head and wondering where these people get their drugs.

Maybe I’m just stupid

Yep, sometimes I think I’m just stupid, especially when I see stuff that just doesn’t make sense.  I find myself saying, “It must be me” when really in my heart of hearts I want to say “What a load of bollocks” because I know, if that’s the way I see it, then there will be a good proportion of people who agree, because simply put, life’s too damn complicated already, so why complicate something any more than it needs to be by adding mind numbing graphs and charts to it…

Having said that…

I then decided that I would do my own version of a graph and base it on the theory of increasing opportunities to get a ReTweet in Twitter.  It includes some very important factors that need to be accounted for when you aim to have your information ReTweeted as much as possible, but before you panic, no, it will not include some long winded and brain destroying algorithmic formula that takes 3 hours to apply your calculation to, but rather it all begins with some bacon and eggs…

So, for your enjoyment, here is:

And that’s that!

OK, so I jest.  Or do I?

Really, getting an RT will include some science, like being smart enough not to expect a ReTweet if all your followers are in bed, but that may just be common sense,  but at the end of the day, there are a whole world of factors that will be beyond any influence you can possibly exert.

The only way you can increase the likelihood of getting an RT is to have some good friends, some passionate followers or some damn interesting information for folks to enjoy, then let them decide if its worthy of the ReTweet, otherwise… well…your just kidding yourself really.

The range of buttons and icons in social media available for twitter is simply astounding. Here are a few twitter icons, badges and follow me buttons.

Click any of the images to enlarge it then right click and select “save as” to download he icon to your computer.

Check out more Social Media Icons Badges and Buttons.

Source: credits for the sites and artists who made these cool icons badges and buttons.

The people in question are Alex Leavitt with Evan Burchard, David Fisher, & Sam Gilbert who created a report on the Web Ecology Project website titled:

Researching Quantized Social Interaction

The Influentials

Sounds complicated right?  Well to be truthful, it is complicated, at least to perfrom the research but its not hard to understand.  What the researchers did was:

Using a new methodology based on the content and responses of 12 popular users, we determined measurements of relative influence on Twitter.

We examined an ecosystem of 134,654 tweets, 15,866,629 followers, and 899,773 followees, and in response to the 2,143 tweets generated by these 12 users over a 10-day period, we collected 90,130 responses published by other users.

Basically they took 12 popular twitter users, looked at all their “tweets” gauged how many people reacted and either responded and /or corresponded that information over the 10 day period and produced an influence scale. (Grats to @chrisbrogan for hitting so high on the list, even though MC Hammer made it higher :P).

The report goes into greater depth (stop reading this summary and go read the report already) about the meaning of influence and offers some insight into the methods and actions involved in creating or gaining influence based on the twitter accounts studied.  Some insightful stuff.

Being an inquisitive kinda guy (or a right nosey bugger) I checked it out as it seemed interesting.

What a beautifully simple idea. Tweettabs allows you to monitor live tweets based on any given keyword you choose as and when it happens with the advantage of letting you focus in on relevant subject matter and information in a constant stream.  I began by using the typical words I would find useful, things such as, wordpress, blogging, social media and the like and these flash past incredibly quickly on such popular subject matter.

It was only after a little thought that I decided, on a whim, to add in my own name, Justin Parks, as a term to track and that’s when the possibilities opened up for me. I began to see my name being mentioned by people who I didnt know and in a variety of contexts and on different subjects, all positive thank goodness!

I thought about this a little more and it occurred to me that a business or individual could use Tweettabs effectively to monitor your brand on a range of terms including the company name, staff names, products and services with specific titles and of course, the competition.

Following on I added in justinparks, www.justinparks.com and justin parks to see if there was a different set of results, and sure enough their is!

All this information is constantly updated and will feed you what you need to see where tweeple are saying about you and your company or brand. The value is extreme to say the least!

Nip over to Tweettabs and check it out, signup is free and once logged in the words you add remain against your account so you can open and close the site with having to repeatedly enter your terms.

In order to check your pages against keywords go to www.google.com and in the search bar add this search query:

KEYWORDS site:(Yourwebsite address)

so for example if I wanted to see what my most important page is for “twitter” I would do a search for:

twitter site:www.justinparks.com

I get this  results page with all the pages on my site that use the word twitter and their order of relevancy. (Dont forget keywords are not necessarily singular, they can be terms and phrases as well).

What do these results mean?

The results allow me to see what google considers to be my most important page on my blog for the specific keyword on a single page. The great thing about this is that it allows me analyse these pages to understand the reasons why they are more important than the pages below them.

But theres more.

Compare the competition.

What this also allows is a powerful way to compare pages across different sites and specifically the competition pages for the same keyword to understand where I am and what needs to be done to aim for target rankings.

Here’s an example with the keyword “twitter” on Mashable.com:

twitter site:mashable.com

(** you will note that in the search above mashable.com has no www. This is because the root of the site is http://mashable.com/ NOT www.mashable.com, so thats worth bearing in mind if you get a strange set of results back)

And the results page shows they have 92k pages listed with the word twitter and the most important page is an article called Twares: United Airlines Offers Special Fares to Twitter Users .

Out of interest, if I jump into Google and search for the keyword twitter as normal, this very same article appears in the SERPs at number 7. (At least it does for me, I wouldn’t count on it being the same for everyone!) This reinforces the information for me that this is the most important twitter related page on their site, is ranking highly and is meeting certain requirements to be in that position, figuring out what those requirements are though, is the fun part!

This is a pretty extreme example, but at least I now know I will have to work pretty damn hard to knock Mashable of the top spot for that particular keyword! (yeah right, dream on Justin).

* Thanks to Conor O’Conor for pointing that little titbit out on twitter today.

This is a case study to illustrate, in real numbers, exactly what can happen when an item or post on your site is of interest to the community and network you have created on Twitter showing just what can happen when social media is put into practice and becomes an effective traffic source.

Basically when a post or piece of information goes viral in social media it is viewed by the community to be valuable enough in itself or from a trusted source that they make the decision to send broadcast this information via a ReTweet or RT to their own followers essentially creating a snowball effect as it is retransmitted again and again.

The “My Favourite Tweet” Case Study.

On Thursday the 14th of May I was on twitter and working on a client project (late in the evening). Innocent enough day as it went.  While scanning the tweets coming in I happened across one by @mattuk saying:

“Want to find out who has your Tweets as their favourites? http://tinyurl.com/rcgyea – Replace my name with yours

10:30 PM May 14th from web”

I was curious.

I tested it out myself and sure enough saw that a few of my tweets had been made favourites by people. I added this tweet to my favourites as well and decided it was interesting enough to write a post about on my blog, for the record, giving @Mattuk full credit for the discovery.

Nothing happened until the morning of Sunday the 16th. I was finishing of some work and making plans for the rest of my Sunday afternoon and chatting on Twitter with some folks when @mayhemstudios made this tweet.

“FYI: If you missed any of my Tweets. Look on my Twitter profile Favourites. All bookmarked there. :)

about 10 hours ago from TweetDeck” (approximately 12 noon GMT+1 time)

This immediately made me think of the post I had wrote about displaying all the tweets people have added to favourites on my blog so I sent this tweet to @mayhemstudios (real name Calvin Lee – check out his blog Mayhem Studios!):

“@mayhemstudios Or get the tweets most people have added to favourites by trying this: http://bit.ly/PaI2Z

about 10 hours ago from TweetDeck in reply to mayhemstudios” (just a few minutes after @mayhemstudios post).

I only sent Calvin the information as it was relevant to the subject he was talking about and afforded him another way of displaying his tweets that others have made their favourites as a search result and a favourite in the familiar Google SERPs, but specifically because it allowed Calvin to see the favourites that other people had decided where of importance to them and thus retained them for future reference.

Calvin decided that this tip on my post was worth a ReTweet and sent it out to his network of 23,724 followers. From that point on the tweet with the link to my blog spread rapidly as more and more people found value in it and retweeted the information to their own networks. The tweet went viral.

Helping the tweet go viral I noticed two important twitters who where quick to retweet the message, these where @smashingmag and @mr_gadget, both of whom have  35,957k followers and 52,811k followers respectively.

I realised that others where Retweeting Calvins message as my name was still embedded within, @justinparks, and that every time it was being rebroadcast I saw my @reply column in TweetDeck add a new face I decided to track what was going on and measure the effect with Woopra, a live statistics application I have installed on my blog.

Over the next few hours my traffic rocketed in comparison to previous numbers. On any typical day I will usually get an average of 80 visitors to a variety of different posts but today this happened.

Social Media & Twitter- Viral RT Effect

From the Graphic overview above it is quite evident where the traffic spike occurred. As you can see the hours previous are a quite static and in the low numbers.  These are live stats so they represent the time around 6AM until 11 AM on a Sunday morning, no big surprise really. But around noon you can see the massive surge in traffic spiking at around the 500 visitor mark. As the day progressed the traffic began to yield and fall causing much smaller spikes to continue during the gradual decline leaving the total number of visits for this single post at 1446 for Sunday alone.

Not bad for a day off.

Other stats which may be of interest are included below:

Number of Visits for Sunday 17th

The Landing page of these visits:

The Bounce rate of Visitors that day:

And finally, the country of origin of the visitors.

Other information which is of interest is this URL detailing the number of ReTweets of this particular item: http://retweetist.com/urls/2570630

Ok so now you can see all the stats and yes the numbers look all fancy but what’s your point you may be asking…

Heres the Point…

I have read hundreds and hundreds of post glorifying social media and how great it is, how it is so effective and how it will make us rethink the way we communicate and do business, but NONE of these posts backed up what they where saying with real evidence. Not one. It was all based on hearsay.  That really pisses me off, for me the proof is in the results.

So I thought I might take the time to show how social media can work (Yes I am a believer) with some real time experimentation, application and most importantly the process and evidence of results.

I didn’t monetise the post while it spiked in traffic, I didn’t add in an affiliate scheme, or try and move visitors to any financial benefit for myself. But I could have. I benefited from this.

Over the course of the last few days I have DOUBLED the number of RSS subscribers on my site. I have also gained 92 new followers on twitter out of a possible 125, I choose who to follow back carefully, always have done and will continue to do so (I hate bots) and I got excellent exposure to people who where every interested in the information meaning that the quality of people coming to the post was high and relevant. This overall effect is still continuing and more subscribers are appearing on my feed and more followers on twitter abit at a slower rate than before but a higher rate than previous to the traffic surge.

Had I been an business with a specific product, service or aim I would have been benefiting from the increased targeted traffic without a shadow of a doubt and I would have loads more pictures to show you, but I don’t.

In Conclusion…

Quite possibly, this small case study will help somone out there understand just want social media can do and what it can achieve if implemented correctly with a specific aim or focus in mind. Also it might also help illustrate that, much as in life: Its not always what you know, its who you know that counts but do remember this, the post went viral because the people that decided to ReTweet saw value in the information. The  reason  it started of in the first place was because of a strong realtionship I had already established and a solid following of twitter users who also saw value in the information and me. Thats the most important fact to remember.