Social media is such a vast game that if you do not track it, you do not know what is the impact of your campaigns. Recently I came across two resources for tracking when you are mentioned in social media and how is your social media influence.

After all, it is the influence in the social media that is going to bring ultimate gains.

Social Mention

Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.

You can easily track and measure what people say about you, your company, a new product, or any topic you choose

Social Mention monitors more than 100 social media sites like  Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

You can choose to have a search plugin where you can conduct search or subscribe to daily alerts or have a widget that displays real time mentions.

Klout

Klout is different.  Klout analyses more parameters and is more detailed in reporting. It tells you following values

Klout Score

Measurement of your overall online influence.

Amplification

Likelihood that your content will be acted upon

Network

Influence level of your engaged audience

True Reach

Size of your engaged audience

Do you use any of these services or any other service for measuring social influence.

What are your views on social measurements. Please discuss.

In world of internet making connections is damn easy but building relations takes time just as in real life. A relation is always built on mutual respect and trust and business relations are no exception.

One of the daunting tasks that a newbie faces is how to stand along with veteran imers without feeling intimidated and without being ignored.

Look! If you want to get connectd to someone, first thing you need is to get noticed. That means you need to be a face in the crowd because there are lot of people who wish to do the same.

If you yell to get someone’s attention, he might look for a moment but then that is all. You did not leave an impression that could carry relation building further.

If you remain in a “I am newbie, please help me, guide me” plead mode, you again come as someone who is pleading for help. Not good enough to build a relation. In fact your repeated such pleading may cause annoyance.

Other and more effective approach is stand where you are, be confident, accept your newbieness without whining or feeling guilty about it and still contribute.

Participate in discussions, raise good queries and answer with knowledge in the forum. Come across as confident, helpful and knowledge seeking.

Leave comments on the people’s blog you want to build with and leave good constructive comments. Good comments create a face in the crowd. You do get noticed.

In social media, promote the good stuff without making it blatant and meaningless promotion.

Consider all this like building your brand.. You may not get anything in the beginning but in the long run your name would enthuse familiarity and trust.

Doing this requires knowledge. You cannot participate in discussions for long wthout having an idea about things. That is where reading on the topic becomes an essential

Remember giving comes back in a big way.

In social media, we often get influenced by numbers. We tend to get influenced by someone who has higher number of followers or fans.

SEOAware has an article that would make you think otherwise.

In the blog, Yahoo has posted information on fate of Delicious. The article titled What is next for Delicious dated 17 Dec 2010,  Yahoo says it has no plans to shut Delicious down. Rather, it is looking for a company which can manage it better.

The post says

No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.

We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users. We’re in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now. And we’ll share our plans with you as soon as we can.

So the Delicious stays!

Let us see what is in future.

This news has an update: Yahoo To Sell, Not Shut Delicious

Once everybody’s favorite for its service and unique URL, Delicious is about to go. Techcrunch has reported confirmation of lingering rumors.

Delicious was acquired by Yahoo in 2005 and since then has suffered in terms of webshare and traffic.

Yahoo has finally decided to sunset, as they call it.

Its a sad ending.

We would miss you Delicious.

Bing has added a new feature to its search results. In a collaboration with Facebook , Bing has made the search more social.

If your search results show something that happens to be liked by someone in your network, the link will be highlighted as ‘Liked’ within Bing.

This speaks volumes about influence social media is gaining over the search. It seems a good option too. If I find that someone likes the thing I am searching for, naturally, I am influenced to check that out.

So if you have not started your journey, its the time.

Get more of your content liked by people and you get more weightage in searcher’s mind.

[I see an industry developing on that]

Facebook has announced changes in design profile pages.

Following are major changes that have been added.

• An introduction at the top of the page that lets your viewers know about you by mentioning things like where you’re from, where you went to school, and where you work etc.
• Photos are available as infinite scroll, so that you do not have to click for each photo to see in your photo view.
• A row of recently tagged photos
• You can list projects you’ve worked on, classes you’ve taken, your favorite musicians, sports, teams, etc.
• The Friends page now allows you to quickly find the people you’re looking for

The profiles are being rolled out gradually and are expected to be available by next year.

Lee Odden at Top Rank Blog has come up with a massive list of 22 marketing management tools that you can use for marketing management in social media.

Here is the list.

Eric Groves, senior Vice President of Worldwide Development for Constant Contact shares steps to formulate the social media marketing plan.

Read 5 Steps to Building Your Social Media Marketing Plan

Social media provides the best opportunity to internet marketers for best possible interaction  with the customers or prospects. Twitter is one of the largest social site and it is highly probable that you aer already using it.

If you are a Twitter user, you might want to track your tweets and conversations as it is quite natural to get lost  among other tweets and comments.

There are applications available to track your Twitter activity. These are quite handful but  would serve the purpose for a while. I expect more in the coming times as the user demand calls for more features.\
Twitstra

Twitstra is a Twitter app by @jaapvee and @yesmore. The sign-up is through Twitter.  When you log into Twitter through Twistra, it automatically knows your @usename [Your Twittter user name]. All you need is an email address for the notifications to be sent to.

Pu.ly

Pu.ly monitors any mention of  @username, any @reply or direct messages  to you and would email them. You can reply via your email to the messages, and Pu.ly will transfer the first 140 characters to a tweet for you.

Tweet Alarm

This application monitors keyword. With Tweet Alarm, after signing up, you select the keywords that you would like to monitor. After this, whenever a word is used, you would receive an email with the tweet and a thumbnail image of the tweeter.

Twilert

Twilert offers a service similar offers the same but you can schedule so that you receive email with information about keyword usage  by others at your scheduled time.

I hope you would find them useful. Feel free to share what you use for better Twitter activity.