It’s been a few weeks since I posted here and for good reason. But this really isn’t the time or place to talk about it. (If you’re my Facebook friend and you know me personally, you already know why I haven’t posted.)

I’ve written here before about the need to post frequently and maintain a  constant presence. Consistently creating high-quality content is the best way to build influence in the social media sphere and to increase the chances that  posts be featured high in search results.

What if you’re not up to creating high-quality content? Jim Rome the popular sports DJ jokes that he has to go “down in the basement and recharge the batteries” every now and then to keep the quality of his program up to  his standards. This is a human and normal thing to do – yet professionals still feel the need to tweet their vacations away. Stop it.

If you’re in a corporate environment you need a plan for your personal time. For the agency blog, we keep a couple generic articles in reserve that can be posted when people are on vacation – we advise clients to do the same. If you’re a personal blogger you can do something similar, posting before your vacation but not have the posts go live  till you’re far away from responsibility – WordPress makes this really easy. Or you can just give yourself a break. I did and I don’t feel guilty.

Too many marketing departments spend countless hours navel gazing, trying to find a omniscient inner-voice. This oracle is supposed to communicate who they are as a company and what they need to tell their customers so that they will finally understand the value they offer the world. It never works.

Sorry, navel gazers, your belly button can’t help you. Finding yourself might have been the mantra of 70s-self-help gurus but you’ll need to listen to your customers first if you want to make your marketing relevant to them.

Even worse, this feel good approach most often leads to corporate chest pounding. “Your number one source for widgets.” “The market leader in top-quality widgets.” Messaging no one gives a damn about outside the company and most customers will even find off putting. After all, who wants to listen to someone who only talks about themselves.

This approach totally ignores what the customer cares about. If you’re spending all your time discovering yourself, you’re not discovering the hopes and desires of your customers. Just your own.

The saddest part is there’s never been an easier time to really get to know what your customer wants and what they care about. Just fire up your internet browser and get to know them better. They’re putting everything on record for you through social media. Heck, you don’t even have to actually talk to them to get to know what makes them tick.

To be clear, this isn’t to say who you are as a company isn’t important – as long as it’s focused with the perspective of the customer. An easy to understand example of this is — UPS. What can brown do for you?

I haven’t watched much of American Idol. I’m really not a fan of the signing but I am a fan of using social media to predict popularity contests. So lets give it a go.

First lets look at sentiment. Seems my taste for indie rock (and not pop ballads) isn’t shared by everyone. Sentiment for these folks is pretty darn positive. And positive in almost the exact same numbers. Bowersox get’ one percentage point on DeWyze. And negative sentiment is exactly the same.

But the story doesn’t end there. Since this is a popularity contest, the winner is going to need more buzz about them.

And it looks like over time DeWyze has had an advantage over Bowersox. And last week DeWyze was able make significant gains.

Looking at the percentage of posts ratio, in combination with a tie on sentiment, I think this is pretty safe call for DeWyze. So I’m going on record here for DeWyze.

What I found to be a rather disappointing finale to ABC’s Lost is perfect time for a little sentiment analysis fun using the social media monitoring tool Social Radar. What do I expect to see after the end a show that was much loved show?

I’m expecting to see a real dive in some pretty positive sentiment overall. Maybe not a wholesale hate fest but some definite disappointment. So what does a quick analysis tell us?

First there are a lot of positive things being said about Lost in general. Not surprising. But there are still more people “disappointed” than “satisfied.” Seems I’m not alone but not everyone agrees with me either.

So now lets look at the content of posts. Here the vast majority of references to “Lost” have positive sentiment. That makes it appear that most people have some pretty good things to say about Lost over our allotted time period of  30 days.  Maybe I’m wrong. People may have been pretty happy about the way the show was ending.

But then when we look the actual posts about Lost things start to get a little more mixed. So maybe I’m on to something — people aren’t entirely happy with the way the show is winding down.

OK. So now for the true test. How has the sentiment changed day to day. This shows a huge spike in negativity on the day the second to last show aired and then a more mixed but also more positive take on the very last show.

This tells us there are more people happy about the ending of the show than feeling let down, like me. So way to go Lost writers, you made most of blogoshpere happy, just not me.

Deciding what to fill the screen with can be challenging. And it’s also the subject of my latest post over at the agency blog.

I know people who are bright, energetic and engaged in person but don’t come off that way online. They have Facebook profiles that are never updated and Twitter accounts they haven’t posted to in weeks. Or worse, a blog that has gone entirely dark for months.

Sure it’s hard to keep up with but with a little planning it is completely possible to keep it real online 24/7. Here are a few things you can do to plan for it:

1. Post to your blog at least weekly. Try to Tweet everyday. If you’re using Facebook for business try and do something there daily. You don’t have to post everyday – commenting on other people’s posts goes a long way.
2. Exploit auto-posting features. Most blogging platforms, like WordPress allow you to set a later publication date. If you know you’re going have a busy week, you can set it and forget it.
3. Put time on your calender for social media activities. Most people put other important things on their calendar but don’t bother to for social media.
4. Use mobile apps. Take a few minutes on the train or waiting for a meeting to hammer out a post or send a couple tweets.
5. Write non-time-sensitive material and leave it on the back burner. Then pull the material out when things get busy.
6. If you’re maintaining a business profile don’t be shy about delegating all or a portion of the responsibility.  You may find one of your employees is more comfortable in the space than you are. It can be better when someone higher in the food chain takes responsibility for social media activities but if you can’t maintain an active presence, it’s better to go ahead and delegate.

Sure, your offline existence is more important than your online one – no doubt. But the two are increasingly intertwined – so it makes sense to be your best both off and online.

I’m writing this from “video village” on the set of a video and print production in LA. I’ve been really, really busy with this campaign so I haven’t had time to blog as much this last week. So what better time to address blogging frequency – which is exactly what I write about this week at the agency blog.

I had two conversations with talented ad creatives yesterday that reminded me of how far maintaining this blog and my other sites have taken me in the last year. The first was about SEO and the second was about proficiency with development. Neither one of them had been expected to have any technical expertise until they were laid off last year and started job hunting. Improving my skill set is something I’ve been passionate about on in the last couple years — obviously I have good reason.

Working with the Web began for me professionally in 1996 while writing the first website and banners ads for a car company. I’ve continued to work on digital assignments since. Writing possibly hundreds of sites, thousands of banner ads, and various web components to advertising campaigns since. I even had a blogger blog and a WordPress.com blog for awhile. But I never had a reason to get too involved in the technical side of things till I began this self-hosted blog.

It was having this blog that caused me to start thinking about all of the things that I took for granted when someone else was doing them. SEO, CSS, analytics and just getting things to function the way you want them too. It’s also allowed to be experiment with tools, like those neat buttons at the top and bottom of this post.

Where am I going with this? Reading blogs is a great way to gain useful information, be exposed to different things, and have a good laugh. But actively maintaining a blog will build a deeper understanding of how things actually work. And may also help you develop some marketable skills before you really, really need them.

A community is a place where people come to gather, do things for each other and organize around common ideals and goals. In communities, people build trust and create relationships that hopefully last lifetimes and maybe even generations. Does this sound like your business? Maybe or maybe not. But it can and probably should.

My grandparents drove GM cars and passed that on to my parents. Well, until the 70s gas crisis but that’s another story. They also shopped at Sears for Kenmore appliances and craftsman tools. Now my whole family uses Apple products (although it took my wife awhile to warm up to Office for Mac.) We often discuss how we feel about the products we use with each other and our friends – I’m sure your family is similar.

In the old days these discussion only happened in homes, stores, barbershops and the break room. Now they extend to the internet onto corporate websites and to social networks.

This extension provides the opportunity for a national brand to create the kind of community that used to only happen in barbershops and bar rooms. This community won’t always discusses personal things but it can have  honest and open discussions about people’s lives and the products they use.

You’ll find these online communities like this on the Ford websites, Ebay and organic communities like Lugnet, a Lego users group.

But community can also be built around something as simple as a pair of scissors.

Why would you want your brand to be a community?

People will share their experience with your brand.

People will give you direct feedback on your products and services.

People will solve each others user issues (important for complex product.)

People will build interest for your brand on their own.

Creating community online or offline won’t make or break a brand or company. Besides having a community strategy, you also have to have a business strategy that can live beyond an economic crisis. Just look at all those community banks that went under. And what about Saturn? Clearly somethings are bigger than a community strategy. But community can sure help a business weather the storm. And soon, building community may be required as a cost of doing business.

If you’re still using Twitter from Twitter.com, I have to say you’re making it hard on yourself and you’re not getting all you can out of it. Desktop apps are one way to make it easier to track followers, respond, organize and monitor your profile or brand.

I usually make an effort to try out Twitter clients as I learn about them. I won’t be reviewing everyone in this post but I will review most of the major ones.

Tweetdeck

I really like Tweetdeck’s large and easy on the eyes user interface. It’s great for watching and posting to multiple accounts. For six months, I’d say it was my favorite app for both mobile and desktop hands down.

Tweetdeck features support for Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Linkedin. This makes it easy to keep up-to-date with these social networks and post to them without logging in to multiple Web pages.

From Tweetdeck, you can post regular tweets, pictures, or even video, via 12seconds.

It also incorporates bit.ly and other popular link shortening services and can integrate with your account. If you’re a freak about metrics this is super handy.

Many people use Tweetdeck just for it’s search function which streams in your search into a handy dandy column. For example, you can enter your brand name and watch it aggregate results right in the column. It’s like having a social media dashboard rather than just a Twitter tool.

Seesmic Desktop

Seesmic Desktop offers similar functionality to Tweetdeck. Choosing between these two is mainly a decision about what interface you are most comfortable with. However, Seesmic appears to be moving to improve their desktop app. They recently bought Ping.fm a tool which allows you to basically post anywhere you want to at once. This technology will most likely find its way into Seesmic Desktop soon and make it even more powerful.

If you’re a Windows user, Seesmic for Windows is a native application which should provide better performance for you over the Adobe air application Mac and Linux users get.

Destroy Twitter

Has a very nice UI and includes the option to use themes to customize it’s look. I really like using this app and it currently incorporates groups. Destroy 2.0 will also feature lists in the future which will make it a really nice option. However right now without multiple accounts and no Twitter lists, I wouldn’t recommended it for a power user.

Tweetie

A very nice functioning Mac twitter desktop app with a great user interface brought to you by the people who make one of the most popular iPhone apps. Unfortunately it doesn’t offer lists or groups in the desktop version. This makes it more or less useless for me. But if you have a much smaller lists of friends and followers maybe you it will work for you.

Skimmer

Skimmer was created by ad agency Fallon. Like the marketing coming out of the Minneapolis agency, it’s a slick and cleaver. I really dig the look and feel. It renders photos and YouTube video beautifully. I’m a little less stoked with it’s Twitter feature set. But then again it’s hard to do everything perfectly.

Twitteriffic, Twinja and Mac Lounge

A few more Mac apps. None of these appear to have been updated lately and don’t support lists. Twitterific makes a popular iPhone app but their desktop app feels neglected compared with the constant updates and rich features of Tweetdeck.  Mac Lounge and Twinja both are are fine basic apps but offer little in the way of features compared to the more popular

Thwirl

A minimalist but very functional desktop Twitter app. If you like to post to lots of different networks this may be the application for you. It’s the opposite of Tweetdeck in that it occupies very little of your screen yet does a lot with that space. You can post to Twitter, laconi.ca, Friendfeed and Seesmic Video accounts and integrate several url shortners. Thwirl was bought by Seesmic and updates have slowed, none in the last several months. So while it’s currently a pretty neat tool, I wouldn’t bet on it being around forever.

Sobees and DigiTweet

Sobees and DigiTweet are Twitter desktop application to consider if you’re a Windows user — I’m not so I haven’t tried them. Sobees does support Facebook, Myspace and Linkedin as well and looks to have the richer feature set. Both are native .Net applications.

A word about Adobe Air

Most of these programs function within Adobe Air, an amazing platform that allows programmers the ability to create desktop applications that function much like mobile apps. Adobe Air is more or less a desktop version of Flash — I’m not a tech guy so excuse me if I’m over simplifying. This provides robust functionality but not always the best performance to weight ratio. Should a Twitter client really be using 264 mb of my real memory? Maybe. And if you’ve got a high performance machine with tons of ram and disk space, no worries. But if you’re running an older machine maybe a browser based client is more to your liking.

Browser Apps

Browser based twitter clients are pretty darn robust these days too. And you should consider them as well. I’ll be posting soon on some major ones shortly. As well as mobile apps.