Making Sense of Twitter with Topsy

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Twitter is big. Millions of people, companies and other organizations share tons of information through the service every day. A few years ago, several “real-time” search engines (eg: Collecta, OneRiot, Crowdeye, etc.) appeared to help people sort through the mountains of content. Now, only one of them is left standing – Topsy – and it recently achieved quite the milestone.

Topsy now claims to have indexed every single tweet from Twitter’s inception in 2006, totalling over 540 billion tweets according to the company. Topsy is getting a lot of attention now, including a recent piece on the New York Times’ website, as well as coverage from other industry observers.

What does this mean for you? Well, while it’s not perfect, Topsy will let you search Twitter for subjects that are important to you. Twitter’s search function is nice, but it’s algorithm sorts and filters results in a way that may not meet your needs. In fact, Twitter itself has used some of Topsy’s tools when publicly tracking major events on it’s service.

Here are a few things you can do with Topsy:

  1. Use search terms to track individual tweets or topics that may not be hashtagged.
  2. Get simple analytics around terms or keywords on Twitter.
  3. Refine Twitter searches to focus on certain types of media or particularly influential personalities.

Bottom line: you may not need an expensive social tracking solution to see what’s going on with Twitter. If your needs are simple, so is Topsy.

 

Three signs that your plan is not really a strategy

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Last week we asked a question on our Facebook page to see if anyone was curious about how we do things at Capra and now we’re going to start answering these really good questions.

What’s the difference between a plan and a strategy?

Here’s my two cents: All true strategies are plans.  But not all plans are strategic.  What does that even mean?

When you’re working a plan that lacks strategy you’ll know it because….

  1. You don’t know WHY you’re working the plan.  Sure, you know what the end goal is.  Maybe it’s to build a new website.  But you don’t know WHY you needed that new website.  You don’t know what’s going to make that new website WORK for your business.

    When you’re working a plan to build a new website and you know that your strategy is to make this a revenue generating machine for you then you know that you need to build a store – that you need to have ad placements – that you need to consider alignment for potential sponsorships.

  2. You want to stop.  You’ll hit a road block and you’ll think things like “This isn’t working – I’m going to stop this now.” When you have a strategy your ability to persevere extends itself because it’s clear that you must in order to reach your BIG goal. If your strategy is really not working you’ll look for detours instead of throwing in the towel.

  3. You don’t know WHERE this plan is going to leave you.  When you finish a plan you’ve moved from Point A to Point B.  When you have a strategy you know what happens next – you know what your Point C is.  It’s good to know what you want next and that’s what a strategy gives you.  A plan tells you how to get there. A strategy guides you forward.

So the next time you lay out the plan think about the strategy – think about the reason – and clue people in to that reason.

CAPRA Behind the curtain: I think strategically but I’m not always the best at communicating that strategy with my own team. We’ve been starting an effort to bring on some craft breweries as clients. I think everyone @CapraStrategy was excited to hear about that effort because beer is fun.

What I don’t know that they knew is that strategically it’s really important to me that I have an excited and engaged team that wants to tell people about the kind of work that we do.  Every single one of our clients have either been a referral from a past client or someone that heard directly from one of us on the team.  I want this business to grow so that the amazing people that are a part of Capra can provide for their families and that we can give this kind of job to other people.  And the best way for that to happen is to do work that we love and we’re proud to talk about.

Talking about beer is something that two of our Capra team members do really really well.  So it’s not just that I want everyone to have fun and do great work for some craft breweries – it’s that I want Capra to grow and that means giving our team something to talk about.  Cheers!

What it Means to Work With Strategists

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There are a lot of choices in the marketing vendor space – what makes one vendor preferred over another is something that always intrigues me.  One of the things that I believe differentiates Capra is the emphasis on strategy – it’s not just a part of our logo, it’s the foundation for how we deliver work.

What does it mean to be strategic?  Good question.  Here’s our four cents:
When you’re talking about your marketing plan you are looking at your business objectives.

  1. More than a few times we’ve been asked to bid on a project – lets call it a new website. We ask what the business objectives are and we’re met with a very blank stare. Whatever effort you are expending should be at least in line with your business objectives. So if your objective is to grow so that you can open a physical location then your website needs to be focused and thoughtful to deliver to that objective and should not be focused on creating a rousing mail-order based business, because that’s not what you want. That leads us directly to…
  2. You know what you want OR you at least know that you SHOULD know what you want.
    A lot of time our customers don’t know what they want – they haven’t really thought about it and those are great customers because we get to be really curious about them (something Cass is particularly invested in) and help figure out what it is they want. If you don’t know what you want there’s one thing I can promise you: you’ll never know even if you get it.
  3. You want actual goals.
    People and businesses pick Capra because we give actual goals – we don’t say things like “we want this to be a big success for you” because what does that even mean? We say things like we want to get your per day impressions from 50 to 500 in the next 12 weeks. And here’s how…
  4. You’re committed to getting that desired result.
    Part of the benefit of working with a strategist is we’re thinking tactically about delivering to your goals and we’ve got a whole lot of tools in the tool box. We’re going to use what you need and when you need it. Also: We’re nimble and assessing our collective progress and if a change in tactics is needed to deliver the results that’s what we’re going to do.

 

That’s why its different to work with strategists.

A Peek into my Work Bag

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I’m starting a new category on the blog talking about stuff that I want to talk about which is How We Work – I find this type of stuff really interesting and because we like to attract people, clients and work that we love I figure that if I talk about stuff that I love that might just do it.

So today you’re getting a peek into my work bag.  And yes, I realize that I am an organized junkie – if you saw how much I actually do on a daily basis you would recognize that the ONLY (that’s no exaggeration – that’s legit) way I get everything done is by being this level of organized.  Was I always this way?  Not to this extent but I have no time to be hunting for my keys anymore so they needed a home.
Detail-Whatsinmybag

  • I use a Mac Book Air – I love this thing – I have it backed up on a weekly basis and that is redundant on a physical hard drive and on the cloud.  It’s fast – it’s light – it fits in all of my favorite purses which makes it perfection. I use a laptop sleeve from Acme Made.
  • iPad Mini – it’s the device I use when I’m waiting – I use Feedly to read blogs and that happens a lot on the iPad – I also have the Kindle app for books (looking for a good read check out Twin Turbulence from the hilarious and candid Kristin Myers) and I use it for testing resolution on mobile devices.  When I need to decompress I play this game called Forty Theives and it’s addictive and you will lose 98% of the time but when you win that is a sweet sweet victory.
  • Bose Noise Canceling Headphones.  They have a microphone which makes it the perfect thing to use when taking conference calls in busy airports or in shared spaces – I’m not distracted by the background and people can hear me clearly.
  • Note Cards (made by the crazy talented Amy Rau) I love them and they’re perfect for to-do lists like my Wegmans shopping trip (sorry – I hate apps for lists).
  • My hot pink clutch (from Banana Republic) is the perfect size for my wallet, iPhone and keys.  I can’t tell you how many times I was hunting for my keys or my phone. Now it’s easy and if I’m running out and I don’t need my huge bag I have everything at the ready.  This is the thing that I resisted most and now three weeks later I feel foolish.
  • Business cards – we use Moo Cards for our business cards – the quality is fantastic, the turn around is great and I just plain like how they do business.
  • Pens & Highlighters – I tried really hard to get on board with the LightScribe so that my notes could be uploaded easily but I am the most finicky person about pens you will ever meet (I make no apologies for my love of office supplies).  The pen that you MUST have right now: The Zebra pen with stylus – it writes like a dream. I do not joke about these things.
  • Chargers.  The thing that you should know about me is that my phone is almost always nearly dead. Do I hate apple and what they’ve done to me with their 15 minutes battery life? Yes. Will I ever change? No.  Why? Because Siri now understands me.  Because of this I have two iDevice chargers – a little guy that will give me one full re-juice that fits in my clutch and the grand daddy charger that will do 3 iPhone charges and an iPad mini charge.
  • Then you’ve got the containment system which is honestly a game changer for wrangling all of that stuff which is called a Grid-It and I saw it for the first time at CES a few years ago. This thing is now a necessity.  And under the Grid-It is my notebook – I always have a notebook with me where I capture the full to do list and I’ve been using this system lately which is basically a more organized version of what I had been doing for the past decade.


So there you have it.  Any questions?  What would you like to know about How We Work?

 

LiveFyre Comments At Capra

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If you’ve ever managed comments on a post as an author – or commented on a post as a reader – you’ve discovered the multiple options there are available for content managers. The popularity of WordPress as a comment management system means that you often find yourself using the native WordPress commenting interface. However, with the rise in popularity of Facebook, many news websites started using an integrated Facebook commenting system to manage their comments. The problem with these two choices is that some people don’t want to comment using their Facebook identity, but they do want to comment using some other social tool and not just the native WordPress system.

With this dilemma, two popular third-party comment systems have risen in the ranks of community managers: Disqus and LiveFyre. And while Disqus seems to be – at this point – the more widely used tool, Capra decided to use LiveFyre.

Now, the main similarity is that they both require that commenters either comment through a social identity (like Twitter or Facebook) or that they register through the comment system itself. As a site manager, this is a huge step in combating spam on a website. Both of the systems allow nested comment responses and backend management for blocking spammers or trolls on a website. The moderating power alone makes these two very viable options for a content manager.

But the differences are what brought Capra to LiveFyre.

livefyre

1. The first thing we noticed when implementing LiveFyre is that there’s a live “Listener Count” that tells a reader how many people may be keeping an eye on the comment section in that moment. This is motivating to someone who wants to add to the conversation, as it gives them a quantifiable audience.

2. Real-time comment updates. This is another perk along the lines of the listener count. Not only can you see who is paying attention to what you write, but you can see their responses immediately.

3. Typical tagging conventions apply, even with Facebook. If you connect your Facebook account, then you can tag your contacts within a comment as you would inside Facebook itself. Then, you can choose to allow LiveFyre to notify that contact that you mentioned them.

4. One-click following. LiveFyre offers a VERY simple option for readers to follow conversations. One-click and then the reader will be notified of any other comments in the thread they have chosen to follow. Conversation can only be encouraged if everyone knows when someone contributes.

5.linkbackThe coveted linkback. CommentLuv is a popular WordPress commenting plugin mainly because it allows the people commenting on your content to link back to their own. This is a generous gesture to your community, allowing your site as a platform for them to promote their own content. It encourages comments and builds potential connections between your readers. With LiveFyre, a user can just click the box on their profile and LiveFyre will leave a link to their latest entry when they comment on your site.

So far we’ve been really pleased with LiveFyre at Capra. We really feel like it’s a user-friendly experience that encourages discourse and community, which is what every web manager wants with their readers.