When you’re searching for something on the internet you’ll notice that a vast majority of the time the first or second entry on Google’s search engine results page will be a Wikipedia link. To date, Wikipedia boasts an impressive 16 million articles, of which 3.3 million are in English. Currently, it is one of the largest and most popular reference sites available on the net. A large network of Wiki editors review all articles that are submitted and use a group approval system to determine if content will be published, or in some cases, banned.

Because Wikipedia is a wiki, anyone with access to a computer and a Wikipedia account can make edits to posted entries. It’s important to remember that jus because you post an article, you don’t own it and updates and changes can be made by others at large.

Although writing a Wikipedia article seems like an utterly simple task you’ll need to know a few basics in order to prevent your content from being deleted. Before you begin make sure that you’re writing from a neutral point of view (NPOV). The best way to approach a NPOV is to make your entry mirror what it would look like if you were to read it in a traditional encyclopedia. The content that you submit should be unbiased, verifiable, noteworthy and not breach copyright.

Wikipedia is a social community and it takes the content that users submit very seriously. If you’re not able to draft an article that follows Wiki’s protocols it will more than likely be deleted. The other thing to keep in mind is that not every brand, service or product can produce an entry that acceptable by Wiki standards for the simple reason that vanity, promotion and opinion are not looked upon favorably.

Before You Begin

If you’re still feeling optimistic enough to craft a Wiki article you’ll want to do the following first:

• Search Wikipedia to confirm that an article doesn’t already exist.
• Use alternate search terms just in case your article is labeled under a different heading.
• Determine if your article is verifiable and noteworthy before you begin writing it.
• Create a user account if you don’t presently have one.
• Aim for an article that is a minimum of 1500 characters, but no more than 4,000 words.
• Practice entering your article with the Wikipedia Sandbox first.

Actual Writing

Building your first Wiki article does take a bit of planning. You’ll want to structure your article so that it reads in chronological order. Next, make sure to gather your references and credible sources that you can cite to support what you’re saying. As you write, reference other Wiki articles by including links to them. This helps to substantiate your article and it cross-promotes other reference material on Wikipedia.

When you’re ready to submit your article to Wikipedia, you might be surprised to discover that you’ll need to use Wiki-style codes to achieve specific text attributes like boldface, italics and bullet points. Check out the cheat sheet so that you have an understanding of what needs to be input to achieve your desired result on the user end.

Even though Wikipedia sounds like a marketing dream come true you’ll learn that it doesn’t quite work the same way that a brochure or brand website does. Wiki entries are not promotional landing pages for businesses or individuals. Entries are informational and neutral and quite the opposite of a marketing tool. Once you make that connection you’ll be able to assemble a solid piece that meets the criteria set forth by Wikipedia.

Word To The Wise

If you submit a Wiki entry and it gets deleted and then you make edits to the same entry and continue to resubmit in an effort to get it published, you run the risk of being permanently banned and blacklisted from Wikipedia. Instead of repeating the same mistakes read over the guidelines and look at current entries to get a better sense and understanding of what an entry should sound, read and look like.

True, Twitter is an amazing social media tool that connects people together, but with 26 million users strong there’s bound to be a few bad apples in the mix. As Twitter’s popularity has increased so has the prevalence of spammers. So, if you’re finding yourself perpetually inundated with direct messages (DM) like “here is something you will like [insert Bit.ly link here]” then we’ve got some simple suggestions to help you cut down the clutter.

1. Follow @Spam

This is the official Twitter spam reporting site and it’s the first step in reporting spammy tweeps. Let them know who’s spam blasting by identifying the person’s Twitter handle. By reporting spammers you’re making it easier for Twitter to put a stop to their unwanted activities.

2. Report Spam Directly

If you’ve set-up auto-following through a service like SocialOomph you’ll need to comb through the list of people that you’re reciprocating follows with and determine whether they’re actual spammers so that you can manually report them. When you use an auto-follow feature and a spammer comes along to follow you, your Twitter account automatically returns the follow. The only way to remove and block the spammer is find them in your follow list, or by searching their Twitter handle and clicking the gear shift icon. This will open a drop down list where you can choose to report the account as spam.

3. Perform Routine Spam Checks

If you have less than 100 followers it should be fairly simple to do a manual check for any spammers and mark them for deletion (don’t forget to report them too). But if you have an account with thousands of followers how do you police it? You do it with a tool called Twitblock. This is a fantastic application and it’s simple to use. Just allow it to access your Twitter account and click the ‘scan for spam’ button. Depending upon how many tweeps are following you the scan can take a few minutes. Absolutely worth waiting for the results.

4. Use SocialOomph

A ton of people use SocialOomph to send out auto-DMs with their auto-follow settings. The nice thing is that as a Twitter tool, SocialOomph recognizes that not everyone wants to receive these unsolicited messages. All you need to do is follow the steps that @optmeout features on their Twitter account:

1. Follow @optmeout
2. Wait for follow back
3. Send them a DM
4. Unfollow @optmeout

Easy as pie.

Helpful Tip

Most people have a ton of DMs in their Twitter accounts. Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t offer a simple way to bulk delete them. Here’s an easy work-around to get old DMs removed at the same time once and for all. Head on over to Damon Cortesi’s Blog and scroll down a smidge until you locate Bookmarklet: DM Whacker.

Next, make sure that you’re logged into your Twitter account. Once you are click the home link and then your direct message link. You must have your direct messages open in order to install and use the bookmarklet. Select the DM Whacker link and drag it to your web browser’s toolbar. Open your Twitter direct messages and click the newly installed DM Whacker and you’ll be presented with the option to delete all DMs or to delete based on who sent them to you.

You can further customize your delete options from this point. Click the delete button and the DM Whacker will work its magic. Instant bulk deletion.

Was this information helpful? Let us know about other Twitter tools you’re using to manage spam. We’d love to hear from you.

From Denmark to Detroit, social media is a worldwide phenomenon that seems to be part addiction and part necessity. With Facebook’s recent announcement that it’s hit 500 million users and Twitter’s move toward advertising with @earlybird it’s becoming more apparent that if you want to get the word out about your business you need to step into the social media arena. However, all the excitement about social media doesn’t mean much if you can’t decipher what it means and what it’s doing. Analytics to social media are like a compass to a navigator – if you don’t understand where you’re at you won’t know where to go.

If the thought of analytics and numbers makes you shudder you’re not alone. There are more people than not who feel intimidated by numerical data. The two toughest aspects of social media analytics are interpreting information and deciding what analytic tools best meet your needs. Fortunately, basic analytics doesn’t require a PhD in statistics and the internet is filled with outstanding free tools and resources to help make metric crunching easy. So, if you can’t afford enterprise-level services like Scout Labs, Radian6 or Sysomos, you’ll want to check out some of the freebies below to help you get a grip on your analytics.

Blogs

Use PostRank to help rank your blog content and news and and to determine what your fans are reading, sharing and organizing. It also identifies what your most popular posts are in your RSS feed.

Think of BlogPulse as a search engine for blogs and their posts. It’s similar to Technorati, but it provides additional views such as trending and conversations so that you can see search competitive topics and how other blogs are ranking.

Comments

Beyond standard search for keywords and brand names you’ll want to penetrate what’s being discussed in blog commenting systems too. That’s where YackTrack comes in. Simply enter your keywords or terms to see a nicely organized list that you can drilldown to get specific mentions from.

Branding

One of the more substantial branding tools available is Social Mention. It aggregates user generated content from across multiple social media platforms and streamlines outcomes into a very simple and easy to interpret web page. The one thing Social Mention doesn’t do is show a report over time. A work around this missing feature is to create an Excel spreadsheet and manually enter daily data that you gather. Otherwise, it’s a great (and free) tool.

Perhaps more of an entertainment tool rather than a true metric evaluator, How Sociable measures your brand’s keywords throughout 32 different social media sites. There’s some confusion around the ‘visibility score’ that How Sociable has developed and not all data appears to be accurate. For example, if you run a search on iPhone it yields a visibility score of 9,453 and a Google PageRank score of zero. Odd to say the least. Looks like brand visibility metrics might have a few glitches, but it’ still worth exploring.

Trends & Topics

Head over to Addict-o-Matic and enter a unique search term, brand or product name or just about anything and it will perform a search that delivers the buzz (or results) broken down by social media platform. It’s a very convenient snapshot that let’s you look at your social reach and the social sites where you have more presence in comparison to others.

Twitter

There are so many Twitter tools available that deciding which one to use can be a daunting task. For the purpose of benchmarking your brand against your competition, Twitalyzer is ideal. It shows you what social media strategies are working and what’s not, which makes it easy to adjust social media campaigns to maximize better results.

The power of influence is a core component in any social media campaign. Knowing who has better reach and strength and engaging with them can help persuade your audience to promote your brand. Klout measures influence as it relates to your brand through Twitter. You can identify which customers and communities are more likely to become brand evangelists and work with them to drive conversations.

Another hand Twitter tool is TweetStats. You can graph how many tweets per hour, day and month, as well as look at your tweet timeline and reply statistics. TweetStats is a fantastic way to track your level of interaction and look at areas that need improvement.

Google

Google Analytics (GA) may leave you feeling unnerved, but it actually does a tremendous job on tracking numbers and data. We’ll save GA how-tos for a future post. In the meantime, use PageRank Checker to see what Google thinks of your site. Using a scale from zero to 10, with 10 holding the most authority, you can run a quick search to find out how you rank.

In order for GA to actually work on your website you need to install tracking code on each page that you want the Google bot spiders to crawl. To make sure that you’ve set-up your code use SiteScan to confirm that you’ve performed a correct installation. Although SiteScan and PageRank Checker aren’t direct analytic tools they are helpful in gauging Google-related tasks and standards.

Competitive

Quarkbase has been touted as the ‘imdb.com for websites’. By entering a website’s URL you are presented with names of people associated with the site, traffic data, social popularity, site description and sites that are similar. This is one of the best free competitive research tools available. Data can be used to help you better position your brand and establish goals and objectives.

There you have it. Granted, there are so many tools, free and paid, that accessible on the web, we hope that this short list gets you moving in the right direction.

What are some of the other free tools that you’re using? How do you make them work for your brand and what do you like best about them? Share with us.

If you’re looking for a Twitter solution that combines both marketing and management then you absolutely must check out Market Me Tweet. Before you roll your eyes at the thought of yet another Twitter tool you’ll be happy to know that Market Me Tweet is a true stand-out from the pack of Twitter apps that have permeated the social media realm. What sets Market Me Tweet apart from the competition is its branding capabilities and that’s good news for businesses small and large.

For the most part, Market Me Tweet is similar in scope to the Hootsuite dashboard and its functionality. Users can integrate multiple Twitter accounts to track and tweet too. It can monitor keywords, schedule tweets in advance, track conversation threads, follow and unfollow users, autotweet RSS feeds and much more. As previously mentioned, the big difference is that it allows users to ‘brand’ their tweets.

For instance, if you’ve ever sent a tweet using a tweet client like TweetDeck, Tweetie or Hootsuite, you’ve probably noticed each tweet is labeled with a backlink to the application used to generate the tweet.

With Market Me Tweet you have the ability to customize your own branded backlink that not only features your business, site or blog name, but let’s you choose the URL to link back to. In essence, you can optimize your brand and drive traffic back to your site.

The benefits of being able to brand, optimize and create backlinks to each of your tweets is a home run for your online social presence. For every single tweet that you send and that someone else retweets you’re creating additional exposure via a customized backlink. Incredible!

Of course all amazing tools come at a price, but the nice thing is that Market Me Tweet is reasonably affordable. There are several monthly price plans available to suit your individual or professional needs. The investment that you make will pay back in spades, especially when you consider how many backlinks your tweets will be generating throughout the Twitter-sphere.

Are you already using this revolutionary tool? What type of success are you seeing? Drop a line and keep us posted.

Not only are Facebook Pages a great way to promote your brand or service to your customers, but they also serve as excellent platforms to interact with your fans. But, how do you know what’s eliciting a fan response and what’s not? As most Facebook Page admins know, the Page Insight provided by Facebook is fairly limited in terms of data. If you want to get down and dirty you need something more powerful. Thankfully, you can integrate Google Analytics into your Facebook Page for more robust metrics and tracking and you don’t need to be a whiz-kid coder to get it done.

Here’s how:

Step 1.

If you haven’t already, sign-up for a free Google Analytics account. Next, you’ll create a profile for your Facebook Page by using your Facebook Page URL. You would enter http://www.facebook.com/yourFacebookPagename. Once you’ve successfully created your profile the Analytic’s dashboard shows your URL and an Analytic’s profile ID that looks like this:  UA-12345678-9.

Step 2.

Look for your UA number and visit Webdigi to generate an “image” for each Facebook Page that you want to track. The online application has some helpful hints to help you complete the form. After you’ve got your information entered, select the “Generate Code” button.

Grab the code and copy it.

Step 3.

The “Generate Code” button creates a chunk of HMTL that you’ll need to copy and paste into your Facebook Page. This piece of code is the “image” that we referred to in Step 1. The code, or image HTML, needs to be placed on the Page by using a wonderfully handy Facebook application known as Static FBML. Install Static FMBL to your Facebook Page by clicking on the “Add to my Page” link.

Step 4.

Head back to your Facebook Page, choose “Edit page” and scroll down your list of applications to the Static FBML app that you just installed. All you need to do is paste the code into the FBML box. Save and your done. You can create as many custom FBML boxes with code as you need and place them on each “tab” within your Facebook Page that you want to track.

For your Facebook Page Wall, just make your FBML application a box and post it to your wall. Just remember that for each tab that you want to track within your Facebook Page, you’ll need to create a new “image HTML” as instructed in Step 2.

The benefits of adding Google Analytics to your Facebook Page are tremendous. You’ll be able to track:

• the number of unique visitors on your Page by day, week, month and more
• new visitors vs. returning visitors
• what tabs are most popular within your Page
• what keywords do people use to find your Page
• overall Page growth (or decline) over a period of time
• how long are people staying on your Page

Google Analytics can give you a major leg up on understanding more about your visitors so that you can adjust and improve your Facebook Page. This will help you continue efforts that work and alter those that don’t.

Do you use Google Analytics on your Facebook Page? Have you found alternative ways to implement other that what’s been shared here? Share your thoughts with us.