Are you looking to have a rich well designed email signature?

For a while now I have been using the Firefox addon (now for Chrome extension called WiseStamp.

WiseStamp is an addon that lets you have rich email signatures like the one you see below:

It supports Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Aol, Hotmail, Google Apps… plus much more.

Wisestamp allows you  to create a very good looking signature and supports the following features:

• Customize your signature with font, size, color
• Easy image placement
• RSS Feed pull to show your latest blog post (great for getting traffic when you least expect it)
• Social connectors that link right to your profile on places such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube
• Use multiple signatures

I highly suggest you check it out, especially if you use Firefox (they just added support for Chrome Extensions).

New Media Tools for Social Media Marketer (image from Flattop341)

I wanted to share with you some tools that I use and find extremely useful as a new media marketer. Hopefully you are aware of some of these already, if not I’d jump right in and get to testing the ones you think could help you.

I didn’t go in depth with each tool I just gave what I find to be the biggest features useful from each tool. Also I summarized my thoughts then scrapped how each tool defines itself on their website.

If I missed a tool that you would recommend please include it in the comments below:

1. Flowtown – Social Data and Connections

Flowtown is only half of what I dream of in a new media marketing application– but that half is great. This tool will pull in email addresses and show you which social network someone is on. But it goes deeper with metrics, response campaigns, and demographics. I suggest this tool to anybody serious about new media marketing.

When all you have is an email address, Flowtown can give you a name, age, gender, occupation, location and all the social networks that person is on. Go here to check out FlowTown.com >>

2. Etacts – Email Reminders

Etacts tracks who and how many times you communicate with someone. You can also set some reminders and rules so you never forget to send out a message to someone that you should be keeping in touch with.

How often do you communicate with the people you should? etacts tracks that for you (for free). Visit Etacts >>

3. Swix – Social Analytics

ROI and social media, one of the 7 wonders of the world. Not quite anymore with SWiX. This tool goes a long way to easily display engagement metrics. You can also then tie in dollars spent and campaigns to specific time lines and specific social actions.

SWIX is like Google Analytics for social media. You wouldn’t run an important web-site without tracking your traffic patterns, nor should you invest in social media without understanding how it’s working for you. Visit swix >>

4. Gist – Focusing Your Connections

Ever wondered who the most influential people are that you interact with? How about waking up everyday and knowing based on a rating you set who you should contact first? Gist pulls in your data and allows you to change a scale of influence to see who and where you need to contact someone.

Gist helps you build stronger relationships by connecting the inbox to the web to provide buisiness-critical information about the people and companies that matter most. Visit gist >>

5. Threadsy – One Social Inbox (yeah)

Isn’t it annoying that you don’t have one inbox? Let’s just take the big three of multiple email accounts, twitter direct messages, and facebook messages. Wouldn’t it be great to have one inbound inbox?

Threadsy pulls together your email and social accounts into a simple, enjoyable experience. Visit threadsy >>

6. BuzzStream – Tag Team Influencer CRM

I’ve been a paying member for a few months and I have to say this is one tool that I go back to time and time again. Visit a webpage, click a button and it will scrap all the pertinent contact info for a blogger or the site owner. Awesome.

How do you build credibility online? You do it with lots of hard work, cultivating quality relationships with the press, bloggers, thought leaders, webmasters, microbloggers, and other influencers. But until now, that process has been time-consuming and resource-intensive. BuzzStream is a new platform for building more effective and more human relationships online, without all the overhead and bandwidth. BuzzStream will help you. Visit Buzzstream.com >>

Thoughts Overall

Each one of these tools has it’s own strengths and weaknesses but overall these are some of the best new media engagement tools out there. If you have a tool or application that you use that is not on this list I’d love to hear about it. Share below:

I found a great resource for adding the Google Buzz button to your blog. Keep in mind that this plugin is not yet approved by WordPress.

http://www.clickonf5.org/google-buzz-button-wordpress

Works great, I have it installed on 4 blogs and haven’t had any problems.

We just found a great new tool that allows you to brand your Tweets on Twitter. Yes, every tweet you do can include a link that is branded to you and links to wherever you want!

[pro-player width='480' height="385' type='video' image='http://media.youbrandinc.com/blueprint/tweet-brand/FirstFrame.png']http://media.youbrandinc.com/blueprint/tweet-brand/tweet-brand.mp4[/pro-player]

Essentially it allows you to create your own application and communication with Twitter. This allows you to create a branded link for how you interact with Twitter.

If you didn’t watch the video above this tool essentially makes it easy for you to create your own branded link in the line below your Tweet. The example below you see that I sent the tweet below from YouBrandInc. When you click that link it goes to our website.

You can set this application to be any name that is not already registered with Twitter and link to anywhere you want.

It’s rather simple to set up and includes AIR application to connect to Twitter.

To get this tool visit this website here.

They include good walk throughs on setting up both their application and creating the authentication on Twitter.

4 Tips to reaching the finish line in social engagement. (image by Rykerstribe)

We had a social media marketing presentation yesterday to a group of entrepreneurs, business owners, and people responsible for marketing. I had a good time and when we give these presentations we hand out a feedback sheet. I appreciate every piece of feedback good or bad as it gives me an tremendous insight about what people feel and think about social media.

One of the most common questions was something along the lines of:

…Now I understand social media now but how do I get all this done?

Here are my brief thoughts on this…

Just as everything else in business if it is something that is worthwhile and something that you believe will bring you benefit you will find the time. If for instance a few of your accounts are 30 days late in paying you might take the time to put in a few phone calls to see what the issue is. Social media engagement is the same way.

I do want to give an in-depth post on this here in the near future so now I’ll just list out my thoughts:

1. Schedule

Put it in your schedule. Even if it’s 30 minutes a day. For most people if something is in thier schedule they make it happen. Treat this appointment like a very important meeting in your business– because it is. Also schedule in time weekly to do a analysis on your efforts. This is one of the biggest things you can do to start implementing a social engagement plan.

2. Focus

Focus on learning one to two networks first. Facebook and Twitter probably are the first ones I would suggest. Then move onto others that are relevant or niche networks inside your industry. Also don’t sign up for every tool under the sun. For Twitter I would suggest either Tweetdeck or Hootsuite and for Facebook I would suggest SocialOomph. Although all those tools allow you to manage both so it’s not as big as a choice as it used to be. As you get more comfortable start adding tools to your tool belt that make sense for you and your business.

3. Analyze

Do a self analysis. This concept was crystallized for me when I spoke to Tiffany Odutoye in our latest interview. Analyze yourself or your team to see if your way of working or your personality will fit well within social engagement. Some people are not overtly social, if this is the case for you it might take a little more work and effort.

4. Retain

Retain and put into practice what you learn. Today there are tons of resources for learning how to engage social media. You could spend the next few hours going from post to post just on Facebook fanpages. Here is the key. Yes do your research but take key items that make sense to you and put them into practice right away. At a minimum create a action item list of things to do based on your research. I see this happen many times– someone does tons of research, they understand what they should be doing but they are either overwhelmed or unsure because of way too much information. You really do learn more by doing.

Getting it Done

Oftentimes I find that the technology and the tools create a barrier of understanding. Start with what makes the most sense to you and move on as you get more exposure and experience. That really is the key even with a space like social media that tends to change every few months.

I’ve been testing and using what I consider to be a great application for tracking my social media activity.

SWIX is like Google Analytics for social media. You wouldn’t run an important web-site without tracking your traffic patterns, nor should you invest in social media without understanding how it’s working for you.

Here is what I like about Swix:

• It allows you to have a dashboard of all your important numbers, such as total visits to your website, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, Facebook friends, Youtube subscribers, page rank, RSS subscribers, and much more.

Finally a social media dashboard

• It’s easy to use and set up, you essentially add a new pod (network) and it’s then part of your dashboard.

Swix allows you to set up Pods (accounts and networks) to track your social media activities.

• Ability to track ROI on a rudimentary level. (this isn’t a limitation on SWix it’s more of a limitation on how you need to track ROI and social media.)

Track ROI and social media. Also track campaigns and events.

• It allows you to run campaigns, such as messaging, or track traffic spikes around a particular event.
• Team setup, so if you have a team you can give access to reports and tracking.

These are the main features that I like but overall the ease of use and the ability to see all relevant information is what I like most about this analytic tool.

What I Wish It Had

• Tracking of interactions across social networks. Yes I know this is almost the holy grail of social tracking.
• Tracking of twitter mentions, this wouldn’t be that hard and is actually in a few applications I’m testing now.
• Ability to add your own manual updated tracking metric. For instance, I do a podcast, I’d like to be able to track subscriber numbers in this application, even it I have to enter it manually once a week.

Check It Out

This is a great application and if your looking for a good way to track progress of your social media outreach I would suggest you check out Swix, I can only seeing it getting better.

These days one of the biggest challenges I hear from people is how to get all this stuff done?

From content marketing, social media, networking, sales, and all the other things that take up time… Really, how do you get all this stuff done when you have a job, clients, a business to run, or live a busy life with family and friends?

While there’s no magic formula that works for everybody I’ve had success by following 3 steps I outline below:

Step 1 – Decide What You Are Trying to Accomplish

This is critical, here you need to decide why you are doing these daily activities. Are they increasing  your business?

Are you getting results for you efforts or do you expect results? If you expect results, how do you know this– did someone tell you or are you mimicking what others are doing?

Just a few questions to make sure your focused on results. Here are some specific examples:

If you’re a small business with regional or local based customers is the content your creating and engagement of social media driving sales or retaining customers?

If you are a real estate agent, is creating local content for your city going to get you more listings, more leads, and more buyers?

If you’re in a home based business, is this going to provide more prospects, more people purchasing your funded proposal, and more opportunities?

Step 2 – Document Your Steps

Yes, I know more work. I hate this step. In fact, I hate it so much it used to be the last thing I did. I’ve since turned the corner on this and learned that this is the key to building successful business and the key to the next step.

When you document your process you immediately start seeing ways to improve. When I documented how I create free training for instance, I figured out the true order I should be creating things. This made me much more proficient when I sat down and actually created our free training. See the process below:

Description

The procedures for releasing free training on You Brand.

Resources Required

• Finished TRAINING CONTENT (video, text, or documents)
• S3 Account
• Domain.com
• Base Training post Template
• Base Email Template
• Aweber

Directions

1. Upload TRAINING CONTENT to S3, under FREE.
   1. Create or choose the appropriate bucket for training to be located (example: if the training is on facebook, put the training in FREE/TRAINING-SUBNAME/NEW BUCKET NAME)
2. Edit ACL, to Everyone, READ, apply to subfolders
3. Open up Base Post template, CREATE and RELEASE post on DOMAIN.
   1. Category (Free-Training)
   2. Tag (items supplied)
   3. Test VIDEO and any supporting LINKS and DOCUMENTS for TRAINING CONTENT
4. Open up base email template, create email message
5. Proof read email message
6. Go to Aweber 1, schedule Email in appropriate campaigns for TRAINING
7. Put in CONTENT Re-Purpose Schedule
8. Notify Creator of Content

Another tip here, document everything you do. This will help you decide what is critical that you take do and what you can move to Step 3.

Step 3 – Give to Someone Else

Yes, I’m talking about outsourcing. You are the one with the vision, your time is valuable.

Your end goal is here. You want to create an effective process and document it so someone can begin doing these things for you.

You’re goal should be to get to this step as fast as possible. When you get here the things you can accomplish become greater.

Without Step 1 and Step 2 you cannot outsource, otherwise you will waste money, time, and become frustrated.

I’ve been outsourcing for a number of years and I am looking to expand even more.

Here are places I’ve had success finding good people for outsourcing:

• http://www.taskseveryday.com/
• http://www.getafreelancer.com
• http://www.Odesk.com

Even if you hire someone local without documentation you end up creating another job for yourself when you hire.

This post could easily go on and on about how to outsource but I’ll leave you with these tips:

• Start slow (if I didn’t have experience in outsourcing I’d start with JUST the above procedure)
• Focus on results
• If it doesn’t feel right with the person you are outsourcing too, stop immediately, figure out why you aren’t comfortable and find someone else based on what you’ve learned.
• As a good start get the book 4 Hour Work Week from Tim Ferris (this changed my thoughts years ago)

Feel free to contact me if you have questions about outsourcing.

If You ARE or Aren’t Outsourcing Leave a COMMENT below on WHY…

Image by koalazymonkey