I have a new social media friend and no, I’m not talking about the tons of random friends requests you get on a daily basis. I’m talking about a piece of social networking software that can help you get your arms around the online social scene. I’m talking about Flock, the web browser that’s based off the Mozilla project.

I know what your thinking. Who needs ANOTHER browser when FireFox 3.0 has just been released? I think FireFox has made some great improvements, but they are improvements to an old model of consuming the Internet. Browsers like FireFox and Internet Explorer have come to power as part of the Internet land rush where the primary goal of the online website visitor was to “browse” sites looking for things to consume like text and images. But the online landscape has grown to include audio, video, and social networks. So it makes sense to have a browser that understands how to handle these additional part of the online experience.

According to the Flock website, “When using Flock, people can easily discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites.”

As a social browser Flock helps you pull together most of the more popular social networks into one common dashboard.

For example, using Flock I can see all my friends from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter all in one sidebar. Different networks are listed under their own tabs and all the networks can be crunched down into one tab that create a single activity stream or view.

The icon of each person in my people stream has a network badge to tell me what network they are on.

A great feature of Flock is the media stream. As I select a friend in my people sidebar, I can see all the available media for that person. I instantly see their pictures, videos, and other media options. From there I can leave comments on that piece of content.

The benefit here is speed. I am just a few clicks from the networks I use and I can move between social networks and still maintain one common user experience.

Flock also helps you extract content on a page that might overlook. For example, if you load a page in Flock that has an RSS feed, Flock will ask if you want to add it to your feed sidebar.

Again, the important point here is speed. You are not wasting time looking for feed addresses when subscribing to content. You can even add additional social networks and useful links to your favorites which can show up as a sidebar to give you one click access to your most common online resources. I use mine to get to Picasa, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Gmail.

Even though Firefox has a ton of addons that I use, I still find myself using Flock all the time now. It’s obvious to me that this is the next generation browser. Social media is here to stay and Flock offers a real solution managing the social networks.

Months ago I overlooked Flock as just another me-too browser in a noisy browser market, but today I understand that it’s a social networking tool that should be in the social toolbox of every online marketer and social butterfly. It’s the best kept secret that wont stay that way for long.

Enjoy,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Today’s Microtween is about an Internet Marketing toolbar I’ve developed to help people get started with their online business ventures.

One of the things that I hear over and over is that people don’t understand the process for marketing online. They get confused or distracted and they’re not sure what order they should be doing things in.

So, I decided to take my own bookmarks from my Firefox bookmarks toolbar and turn them into an organized set of resources that anyone can use to do Internet Marketing.

The toolbar is organized from left to right and each set of resources are limited to just a few essential to cut down on distractions. I plan to add more to the toolbar over time, but I will continue to keep in mind the principle that more is not better in this case.

The toolbar is available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox (both Mac and Windows). In fact, I’m using it to supplement my own Firefox bookmarks toolbar so that I can download it and use it when I am away from my laptop.

Download the toolbar and let me know what you think is missing. Or let me know what you use the most. I’ll be adding a Getting Started button to it soon to help everyone get the most out of using it.

Idea seeking,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Would anyone visit your website if they could see it first? There are widgets today that will let you see a site before you visit them. But, they don’t easily let you compare sites side by side in full view.

Well, there is a new visual search engine on the horizon that lets you pick through thousands of websites without actually visiting any of them and it does it in an iTunes album over sort of way. I came across the search engine a few days ago and I signed up for their beta program.

They just opened up the beta program tonight to the public and accounts are going fast. As I type this 100 accounts have already been claimed. If you’re interested in trying it out you should go there now before all the accounts are gone.

I have mine and I plan to do a series of videos on the service in the coming days. It’s totally awesome and I already have a few ideas of how you can use it in beta. I’m off to WordCamp for the weekend so it will be next week before I can create them.

In the meantime you can play with the tool.

Have fun,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

P.S. I’m going to WordCamp in Frisco Texas this weekend and I’ll be posting updates
to the Open Source Marketer Community, so be sure to look for those.

- C

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Today I got an email update from Twitter and some of the featured links they provided highlighted Twitter profiles for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

The 2008 presidential contest has been probably the most interactive political event in history with videos being posted on YouTube, debates being held on CNN/YouTube, bloggers speaking out, and new forms of social media growing like crazy. So it only seems appropriate for these candidates to have Twitter pages and that those pages would say something from a marketing perspective.

I like following politics like some sort of whacked out Nascar fan so I ran over to check them out and here is what I found from a purely Internet Marketing perspective. These are only the things I noticed and not my political views so try to hang with me as I point things out. Remember, we can learn things from what others are doing and then apply what we learn to our own marketing projects.

Barack Obama’s Twitter Page

The first thing I noticed about Obama’a Twitter page is that he has over 6,700 followers and that he is following over 6,000 other Twitters. At first I was focused on the number of followers and then I realized, “Wait a minute, he’s not keeping up with 6,000+ people and running for president.”

This was the first thing I noticed, but not the last thing. More on that in a minute.

I decided to follow his Twitter and see what type of messages I would get, how often they would come in, and other little bits of information that might be interesting. What I got, almost immediately, was a message letting me know that Barak Obama was following me.

At first I didn’t understand what was going on. Why would I get a message letting me know that he was following me when I just signed up to follow him. I have my email open all the time so I know it happened immediately, or at least in under a minute.

Hillary Clinton’s Twitter Page

Next, I decided to visit Hillary Clinton’s Twitter page to see what she was up to. This time I noticed that she had just over 1,200+ followers and she was following no one.

I signed up to get Twitter updates from her and this time I didn’t receive an email telling me she was following me as I did with Obama. I even waited for a few minutes and no email message.

I can only guess that Obama’s campaign is running a Twitter script to automatically follow anyone who follows him and Hillary’s campaign is not.

Even though an automated script would not seem very sincere, there is a powerful psychological trigger going on here. By following you Obama’s campaign is trying to send the message that they understand how things work, they want to communicate, and they want to hear from you. They also have the added bonus of acquiring all the tiny twitter thumbnail faces along the side of the page which carries an element of social proof. We might think if all these people are following him then there must be something to it. There is almost a sense of community which is another psychological trigger.

On the other hand, if you look at Hillary’s Twitter page she has no faces, she is not connected to anyone (other than the one way communication with the followers she has acquired so far). We might think that she is interested in pushing information to us, but not getting information back from us. No community, no trigger.

More Triggers

The other element I noticed is that at the bottom of each Twitter sidebar is the ability to block a user or view all their followers. Because Obama has a list of people he is following on his side bar, the words “View all” appears before the words “block BarakObama”. As for Hillary, she only has the words “block HillaryClinton”. This is another trigger that is subtle but important.

Now, look at the other differences between Barack Obama’s Twitter page and Hillary Clinton’s Twitter page. He has a bright campaign background and she has a flat dark blue background. He has a campaign icon as his form of branding, she has her face. He has a light green sidebar, she has a heavy yellowish sidebar. These are all things that add up to quiet triggers that communicate a message. The message might appeal to some. It might not appeal to others, but there is a message being transfered in all of these things.

Choosing 140 Characters

Another thing I noticed is the language of the Twitter posts. Barack Obama’s posts are filled with words like encourage and friends. Most sentences start with an action word and include a place, date, and time. Every post has a clear call to action.

But on Hillary’s, most posts start out with “I” or “I’m” and while upcoming events are mentioned, there is no clear statment of place, time, or date. There is very little call to action being communicated.

As I am writing this I am thinking about how odd it is that we can be measured by as little as 140 characters. If you don’t think so, read both their Twitter pages and see what you think.

John McCain’s Twitter Page

You might be wondering what John McCain’s Twitter page looks like. Well so did I so I searched him out by name in the Twitter search bar. Honestly I don’t know if this is his official Twitter page. It could be a Twitter squatter for all I know. But since, John McCain’s campaign website doesn’t have any social media references on it, apart from his closed McCainSpace online community, I couldn’t confirm it.

But, if this is his Twitter page then he’s making no effort to even appear connected to the online crowd. This might be a good thing, it might be a bad thing. I guess it depends if the online crowd is the same crowd that shows up at the polls.

I know I’ll be looking at Twitter in a new way from now on. It’s these types of real world examples that help to highlight how an online tool can be used and how proven psychological triggers can be applied to get a message across.

What does your Twitter page say about you?

Watching and waiting,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Another Interesting Site: Politweets.com/

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If you have been wondering how to best use FaceBook for your Internet marketing efforts, then check out the recent FaceBook article on InsideCRM. They offer 100 tips and tools for getting the most out of FaceBook marketing.

The article covers a lot of topics under the categories of

• Why Facebook?
• Advertising
• Free Marketing Opportunities
• Tools and Applications
• Targeting the Right Demographic
• How-to Guides
• Small Business Strategies
• The Danger of Facebook
• Miscellaneous Resources

It’s worth saying that there is a lot of information covered here and I haven’t been through all of it, but I do like the coverage that I’ve seen so far and I am interested in hearing what you have to say about what’s covered. So, after you give the article a read, come back here and leave your comments.

If there is any value at all in the using FaceBook and other social networks to come in the future, which I think there is, then we need to have the important conversations now to uncover the answers to these real questions.

Thinking quietly,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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