Web Worker Daily

Listening has always been important, but now in the world of social media where conversations are amplified, repeated and spread at a much faster rate than ever before, listening has become even more critical. Many of us, particularly freelancers, don’t have teams of people responsible for customer service and support to help make sure that we are listening to our customers, potential customers and industry experts. We have to find the time to listen to what people are saying about us and react appropriately.

Photo by Flickr User Orange_Beard under Creative Commons

Josh Bernoff wrote about the modern listening problem and compares it to those speaker phones where you can’t talk and listen at the same time. On those not-full-duplex speaker phones, you are either talking or listening, but not doing both at the same time. In the social media age, we need to be both listening and talking, but many people are only doing one or the other. On Twitter and other social web sites, we talk about what we are doing and listen to other people talk, and we do it simultaneously. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Darrell Etherington wrote about how hard it is to measure the value of Twitter. One way to measure the impact that you’re having on the Twitter-sphere would be to see how many people link to your service, product or blog. Unfortunately, due to Twitter’s 140-character limit, most URLs are shortened using a service like TinyURL, is.gd or bit.ly, so if you search for a URL using Twitter Search, you’ll miss out on many of the links. This is where new service BackTweets can help. It works similarly to the standard Twitter Search –  including Ajax notification of new results, so you can track mentions of your product or service in real-time — but, crucially, it dereferences shortened URLs so you won’t miss out on any mentions of your URL.

As an example, let’s try searching for “http://webworkerdaily.com” on Twitter Search and BackTweets. Twitter Search produces a rather paltry single page of results, with only one tweet from the last day.

Twitter Search for "http://webworkerdaily.com"

BackTweets, on the other hand, returns many more results, with two pages of tweets from the last day alone. It’s a much better tool for tracking mentions of a site on Twitter.

BackTweets search for "http://webworkerdaily.com"

What tools do you use for measuring impact in social media?

(via Daring Fireball)