A good news blog post…

After a successful 18 months using social media to develop a community and change driving behaviour in West Sussex, the initiative has now been widened to cover the whole of Sussex.

Needless to say, we’re chuffed our social marketing baby is growing up and spreading its wings.

A big thank you to everyone involved, especially the team at West Sussex for being a great client. I also want to say a big thank you to our in-house team of social media analysts and outreach specialists.

Now stop reading this and get on with some work.

If the only advertising you do is banner ads and PPC then how will the 84% find you? The 84% highlighted in Seth Godin’s recent blog that will not be clicking any banner advertising.

It may surprise you that I suggest social media as an alternative (ok maybe it wont), but I genuinely believe it is the best way to reach these people. The reason they are not clicking your ads is because they are bored of them or blind to them. What they want is something engaging, something interesting and probably something not shoved in their faces from YOU. You reach the 84% by making something worth talking about, something that people will want to tell their friends about. Whether it is making a great video, writing an interesting blog or running a funny twitter account do something worthwhile!

So what are you waiting for, go, now! Go make something interesting. I would say tell me what you did, but if it is interesting enough it will get to me.

Here are Qube’s favourite tweets from the last week.

@Glennw’s favourite tweets

@jen_bolton another great Halloween costume from this year, woman pixelated herself and went as “Low Resolution” http://bit.ly/41mko6

@Nijay’s favourite tweets

@euzie: Oh David Cameron. Do you not realise that the way for England to become relevant again is as part of a powerful & insynch Europe?

@Danacea *Chortle!!!* Venn Diagram of the Undead… http://tinyurl.com/yjzrshm

@Liberatelloyd Data on Twitter and Social Media Useage http://bit.ly/1wQvgl

@eggboxrobin: Wondering how I came to be on a ‘business mums’ list. Don’t recall every giving birth.

@Seelpod’s favourite tweet

@digitaloutlook Family members afraid of flying? Virgin Atlantic launches Flying Without Fear app for iPhone http://bit.ly/ULDFR ^JB

@dstradewell: Anti gay marriage ad (it’s real) – http://bit.ly/RwPM , and a funny parody – http://bit.ly/UOybt

@MrTomasz’s favourite tweets

@nonlinearDog I love playing Wii Baseball. Dad gets mad because I never swing at the ball. I just like catching it. LOVE catching it.

@abigvictory FINAL ACHEIVEMENT UNLOCKED #sadepitaph

@abigvictory I brought shaving cream and eggs to work today just in case anyone tries to dump their leftover Milk Duds and Mounds on us.

Hopefully you know what kind of communities you are looking for and the language your audience use, but how do you use this to best find the communities you want? Well there are plenty of tools out there and here are some of the most commonly used tools here in the Qube office.

Google search

Obviously Google is a good place to start! Typing in the kind of community you are looking for will get you some results but check out the filter options for a more refined search (see below). You can then see just results from forums or blogs and change how recently they were updated. This is always my first port of call and its flexibility should cover a large amount of your communities, especially those that fall outside the big social networking sites.

Twitter search

Searching Twitter is a great place to find up to the minute thoughts and feelings on a topic. Twitter has two ways of searching, Twitter search and Find People. Find people will get you names based around the terms you have searched for but the real power of Twitter is its search tool which will find everyone that has mentioned your term in the last fortnight. Remember you can refine your results with the advanced search options like below. Twitter is a great way for finding influencers around your target audience.

Facebook search

Facebook has had a recent overhaul to allow more Twitter like search results. You can filter your results into people, pages, groups and updates. Make sure you look across a range of these to find the best communities and influencers.

Social Seek

A desktop app that will search across a variety of popular social networks and blogs and pull in the results. The nice thing about this app is it will also give you charts and visualisations as well as allowing you to export the data, this can be really useful when trying to analyse a community or term.

Brandwatch

The only paid for service on this list but if you want continued and extensive community finding it is a great tool. Especially recommended for high end users just make sure you have a clear set of defined terms you want to find communities around.

Tools are just the start of any community mapping and they still require a high level of care and attention. The communities you find will only be as good as the words you put in so make sure you thoroughly semantically map your audience. A combination of these tools should get you to the majority of places your audience is talking but just incase you want to try a few more tools to really maximise your coverage here a few more: IceRocket, BlogPulse, Omgili, Delicious and Blinkx.

Let me know if you have any other preferred tools or why you use these tools in the comments

Everyone has got list fever at the moment. There’s frenzied chat all over the twitter sphere about lists. Search for “Twitter Lists” in Google and you get 107,000,000 results. That’s a fair few considering how long they have been about.

So, what we’re going to do with them? What strategies can we employ with them? How are they going to help us?

Lists are a really useful way of organising your followers, and finding useful people to follow. For instance, I could make a list of all the people I follow who live in Brighton. If you follow me and you want to find more people on Twitter who live in Brighton, you can go to this list and see a feed of all my Brighton buddies.

It is a fairly labour intensive process at the moment, but it is well worth the effort once you have created one, both for yourself and others.

Some interesting experiments have been started, most notably by Simply Zesty who are attempting to list the whole of the UK, Ireland and USA’s Twitter population, and in the process create an incredibly useful free tool that allows people to find local twitter users. You can find out how they are going about it here.

We can’t offer you anything nearly as comprehensive as that, but we are creating a Qube social media people list. You can see the list here. It is by no means exhaustive, and if you think of anyone we have missed, please leave a comment, an @reply or an email and we can add them.

Our list skews towards the UK and mainly focuses on people who work in the industry but also has a few agencies, new feeds and even some *gasps* gurus. Some of them may be funny, some of them may be interesting, and some of them may bore you to death, but they are all there because Qube Staff think they deserve to be there.

Have fun playing around with lists, and I hope you find ours useful and interesting.

p.s Sorry if I missed you off, it was in no way personal.

5 of the best

State of the Blogosphere 2009

As 2009 draws to a close what is the state of the Blogosphere and what have this years hot topics been?

Twitter needs to step up to the mark to protect children

How can Twitter do a better job to protect children from some of the dangers of online media?

Foursquare

This idea fascinates me, on its surface it is a way of finding where your friends are or getting people out for a meet up. Beneath this is a social game of reward points for doing certain activities (Going out to a club multiple nights of the week earns you a “Bender” achievement) and if you visit a place enough you become the “Mayor”. Slightly scared by the slant towards alcoholic venues…but the idea sounds really interesting. Online social networks are merging with where we are in the real world.

30+ Twitter Lists and 5000+ Twitter accounts worth following

Twitter lists are here! You can now group people together into a twitter list to share with everyone.. ok so its not that exciting but it could be really useful Here are a bunch of lists that might be worth following.

There is now a mobile device dedicated to Twitter. Why?

I guess this might be useful to someone? I do like that there are online enabled devices popping up that dont tie you in to a data plan (such as the Kindle). Although in this case it seems slightly over priced.

5 of the rest

Football Hero Looks Difficult, Totally Awesome

Sometimes….”Viral” videos are really clever Like this one.

Nathan Barley AKA Trashbat Soundboard

Not really for anyone who isn’t an Chris Morris fan….you might also want to look at the Alan Partridge soundboard, AHA!

PicTranslator: Snap and Understand

Turning a picture into words is clever, but even more clever when it translates the words! When I next go on holiday I will be asking for the local menu….to be smug and show off.

Site review: BBC Democracy Live

Seems like every week we are getting closer to gov2.0! A really well put together website from the BBC (It should be for £1m!!)

File-sharers are big spenders too

Perhaps the online piracy debate isn’t as black and white as some would have you believe?

Here are Qubes favourite tweets from the last week. Sorry my name isn’t here, I have just been busy working and not playing on Twitter I promise I will do less work and more tweeting next week

@MrTomasz’s favourite tweets

@rossbreadmore Triple awesome Pulp Fiction take on Google Wave – more fun than watching the hour long video http://bit.ly/4hJL7j

@aegirthor Apparently the Queen likes the simpler things in life. Jolly good. Maybe she can send me her spare cash as I’m partial to the finer things.

@itsDarkDaze why you so chipper buddy? ah Chelsea smile. raggo.

@Nijay’s favourite tweets

@maxwellinever: Cassetteboy FTW! Nick Griffin – let’s look at what he should have said: http://bit.ly/18w406

@raxlakhani: Cute picture alert: Orangutan mum holds baby http://bit.ly/4E3vSw

@stevepurkiss http://isitfriday.org/

@charltonbrooker: If you haven’t seen this yet, it’s well worth a look: http://bit.ly/460qi8

@Seelpod’s favourite tweets

@GordonMacMillan Great piece – Maximize Twitter’s potential around agency’s new business objectives http://tinyurl.com/yjpj8ks

@andrewgerrard “The basics of Social Media ROI” pres. (long version) from @thebrandbuilder is on Slideshare: http://bit.ly/x8YYc #smib09

Our 5 favourite Social Media stories from the past week and  5 other random things that may or may not be interesting.

5 of the best

Twitter search deal: five things you need to know

Get the low down on why Twitter appearing on Google and Bing is a big deal.

Social media: the best and worst of 2009

The end of the year is approaching so it seems about time for some year reviews. What are the best and worst uses of social media this year?

Google social search

Google is adding in search results from your friends and online connections. Will be interesting to see how this feature develops over time. Are you prepared to share your friendship groups with Google? Do you think they already have enough information on you?

Social Seek

A handy desktop tool for finding mentions across social networks. It also gives you location specific mentions, lovely

Media140: How Twitter has affected brands

Twitter has been in the news a lot recently (again!) but how is all of this affecting our brands and businesses?

5 of the rest

The World of Tomorrow (If The Internet Disappeared Today)

What would our world look like if the Internet went away?

Google Chrome Themes

Not that exciting a video at face value, but let the video finish playing and it has a very nice surprise . Really interesting use of Youtube to show a new feature but also to see it in action before you install it!

Google Power Meter comes to the UK

Now you can track your energy usage and work out where you can save money thanks Google. I would also recommend checking out Wattson for a similar service.

Satellite tracking the postal strike

What happens when there is a postal strike? The Guardian attempts to find out.

Flutebox and Beardyman

This might be quite old to some of you but for those that haven’t seen it go now! So awesome…I wish I had mad skills

Here are some of the Qubites favourite tweets from the past week.

@Seelpod’s favourite tweets

@krishgm: Big discussion on tonight’s prog on Jan Moir, BNP & freedom of speech with Peter Hain, John Kampfner & a senior BBC mgr

@MarkJones: Chancellor will take questions from social media Wednesday lunchtime: http://link.reuters.com/saz74f #askdarling

@Nijay’s favourite tweets

@Pure360: We are proud to announce that our new Pure360 website is now live! Check it out www.pure360.com (like it

@LeifKendall: Freelancers! Lacking motivation? Think about dying! Yay: http://icanhaz.com/die

@MariSmith: Yay! #beatcancer tag reached a world record at #bwe09 for largest social media push in in a 24 hour period!!

@Kerb: The world if the internet disappeared tomorrow http://bit.ly/PBVLr

@Glennw’s favourite tweets

@media_molecule LittleBigPlanet Mini Fan Meet ‘09 – Meet some of us, some of Sony, plus the PSP devs, at the EG Expo http://bit.ly/1kZPE0

@MrTomasz’s favourite tweets

@StigOfTheDumpUK If u want it bad enuf anythings possible right? WRONG, Kanye still aint been shot & im yet 2 wake up in a bed made of meat

@laura_milkteeth EastEnders:E20,described as “a naughty little brother or sister to the main show” sounds revolting.If lesbians aren’t skydiving i don’t care

Our 5 favourite Social Media stories from the past week and  5 other random things that may or may not be interesting.

5 of the best

LikeMinds Conference: Social Media is Not Free

A recent event on social media that addresses the common myth that “Social Media is free”

Q&A: First direct’s Lisa Wood on their social media campaign

I have always felt that bank have kept the Internet at arms length, they have slowly moved towards web based platforms and interactions. First Direct have taken a brave step into the world of online conversations. Showing positive and negative comments about their services and brand is something most businesses would be far to afraid to do, so kudos to First Direct.

Roll your own shortlinks server

I am not that technically gifted but this looks pretty straightforward. Once installed you can have your own url shortener like tiny url shame qu.be doesn’t seem to be available

Editors street view mashup

The music group Editors have launched an online campaign for their new album. Internet mash ups can be really interesting and it is cool to see how they have added their own secret routes to street maps while also streaming the music to you.

App combines maps & reviews to find meeting points

An iPhone app to help you and your friends arrive at the same meeting point. It can even help picking a meeting point that is suitable between you and the other person.

5 of the rest

Surfing the Net May Improve Brain Function

I knew all these years in front of my screen hadn’t been wasted! It’s making me smarterer!

10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates

Some of the most extraordinary twitter updates, it is amazing to see what the Internet has allowed us to do from saving lives to finding love.

Tampon Crafts for Christmas

The Internet has something for everyone I guess..

Mystery t-shirts are handpicked for customers

I am terrible at picking out clothes. Fortunately for me my girlfriend is my personal stylist..but for those of you less fortunate perhaps this will yield you a t-shirt that is “so you”.

World Of Goo Sale Offers Fascinating Results

I mentioned this game being on sale last week (it still it is you are interested). The results from their “pay what you like” sale are really interesting, yes some people got the game for essentially free but others paid way over the odds. It also boosted sales of the game on sites that didn’t even have the sale! Even more interesting is some of the responses from the survey 2D boy conducted on the sale. Fascinating stuff with some interesting lessons to learn.