I hope everyone had a fun and safe New Year’s Eve. Are you ready to take it up a notch in 2012? I sure am. January is always an exciting time–fresh beginnings and new challenges. On the flip side it can be a little scary. It’s kind of like an artist staring down a blank [...]

Success rarely begins with innovation. Ironically, if you peel back the layers on most online hits you will rarely find an innovator. The (usually) quiet money-makers on the Internet are not inventors. Make no mistake, they’re creative. However, they’re not skunk works, patent-filing creative. Quite the contrary, they’re creative masters of iterating or combining proven, [...]

Do you want to know what the number one killer of sales leads is? Simple. THEY DON’T GET CALLED! That’s right. You’re spending hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of dollars to generate leads for your sales people and 60% to 70% of those leads never get a call. I told you were going to be [...]

When was the last time you read an email or web page and got emotional? Too few and far between. Ridiculous, huh? After all we’re in marketing. Every time you review the subject line on your email or scroll down a page on your website you should feel the urge to check for your wallet [...]

Start a conversation with someone in online marketing. More than likely you will quickly drift off into a conversation about websites and design. Depending on how much it’s going to cost you to talk to them some more you will probably also hear about brand image. Internet Marketing, All Glamor and No Sales Hopefully the [...]

I recently wrote a blog post about the "Bob Dylan Twitter Pulse Monitor" which I created – check that post for the details. Anyway, I framed my project around "Bob Dylan" as the test subject because I’m a huge fan of his and it was fun for me to see the results come in. So, after working for a week or so trying to promote my widget, another awesome use case dawned on me:

With this one, simple widget you can monitor your Twitter Marketing campaigns.

Let’s say you’re trying to drive traffic to a specific URL on twitter. You’ve got your URL tracking link all set up (see: bit.ly.) You’ve hopefully got some followers retweeting you. You’re going after a pretty strong keyword (how about, socialmedia.)

How do you know if your campaign is trending at the moment on twitter? Well, you can use the widget I created. Just plug your keyword in, check the results, and see where you fall in the hierarchy. If you’re near the top of the list, you know that your URL is being retweeted heavily across the Twitterverse in association with your keyword. You can check the widget daily to check on its progress (the widget tracks a 24-hour time period.)

This is, in my opinion, social media monitoring broken down to its most basical level:

• You’ve identified a keyword you’re going after
• You have some subject matter related to this keyword you’re trying to promote (a URL)
• You have the ability to quickly, easily, and monitor if your URL is trending for your keyword FOR FREE.
• You don’t even need to embed the widget on a website. Save the Source Code to an HTML file on your desktop, open with your browser – presto!

Useful, or am I just crazy? Let me know!

(As a final note, props to Bill Rice here at Kaleidico for encouraging the "No More Jobs At Kaleidico" project, which inspired all of this out of the box thinking!) 

Oh yeah – you should also check out our Eavesdropper Competitive Intelligence package. If you like what we do for free, you’re gonna love what we charge for

This is the time of year when the sporting world is at it’s best. First we have the NBA and NHL seasons winding down with playoffs around the corner, then we have March Madness which just has the whole country going crazy, and last our past time of watching our favorite MLB team is starting up! How could you not get excited right now? 

Almost all of us would like to take the next month off and let’s be serious once you start filling out those brackets and March Madness starts your production is going way down! That’s not even counting the time you fantasy freaks like myself are spending managing your teams in the playoff runs and drafting for baseball. This year I’m putting my lifeline of winning my fantasy baseball to the RSS feed and my social media monitoring tool! In the fantasy sports world most drop out after football because of the long dreaded season of making roster changes, checking injuries, pitching statuses, and the everyday switches in the batting lineup. 

My plan is simply to cut out the research time! Easier said then done, Right? By setting up my social media monitoring tool with keyword filters, folders to keep me organized, a river of RSS feeds I’ll have stored up from ESPN to team blogs. That’s what I would call a competitive advantage! The days of me looking at my bench player who had 2 home runs and 5 rbi’s could be over or greatly improved. Yes, I’m going to have to come out the "dugout" of tweeting and my google reader once in awhile to make some switches but my strategy of staying on top of all the fantasy buzz and staying efficient in the long season will have my competition trying to catch me…Now I just need some draft luck! 

A short while ago, Kaleidico launched an ‘Entrepreneur of the Month’ contest to spark our imaginations, and win some cold hard cash (OK, so it will be a check – you get the picture).

I began to strategize on the quickest way to spike web traffic – create a false controversy around a polarizing topic (Beck and Limbaugh have that sewn up), make a widget appealing to some base instinct (lots of farting and pooping apps out there do well), glom on to some hot social media meme (SMROI, SM Sales, SM yadda, yadda – yawn), or spit out a widget based on Twitter or Facebook (geez, seems all the good ideas are taken). So in the end I brought out the big guns – my kids.

What my girls came up with made me realize that chasing the web stats and the money were not really the point. The idea was to whip up some passion and creativity, learn something along the way, and most of all have fun. So my girls and I came up with ‘Where the Threatened Things Are’, a little app that locates endangered species on Google Maps and links to some details about them. It’s still in it’s infancy and has some know issues, but I think it’s kind of cool. Hopefully you will too – or at least your kids will. Please Enjoy!

 "It’s Wedding Season!" Yes, its the kind of excitement and passion you need in your social media marketing. The kind that has Vince Vaughan screaming in his office in the classic movie Wedding Crashers. It may be juvenile, but it’s his passion and he’s dedicated to being the best. Building and clever, but most importantly winning strategy. 

That’s the kind of attitude you need to pull off BIG results in the Social Mediasphere! The kind of attitude, Social Media Rockstar Gary Vee demonstrated every minute of his very public days. If you haven’t seen him attack social media to build his empire you need to read his book Crush It! or to really see his energy pop and feel inspired get it on Vook. 

Whether its feeling compelled to pull off the ultimate crash or improving Social Media strategy it all comes down to having a winning formula. 

Since there have been "No More Jobs at Kaleidico" I’ve been tossing around a few ideas. Today I present to you a simple, customizable, embedable Twitter Widget: The ‘Bob Dylan’ Pulse Monitor (URLs open in new window – feel free to click:)

 This widget is searching for the term "bobdylan" (twitter friendly style)

This widget is searching for the term "happyincle" – because that’s what I am!

This widget is monitoring twitter for the term "Bob Dylan" (of whom I’m a big fan – if you are too be sure to check out The Never Ending Pool and Expecting Rain!) It’s taking a look at the past 24 hours and is paying strict attention to drowning out irrelevent "twitter noise" – that is, comments about Bob Dylan that are "one offs" and can be found using a simple Twitter Search. Rather, this widget looks for the most referenced URLs on Twitter within a 24-hour time frame.

Reusable, Customizable

Even if you’re not a Bob Dylan fan, the great thing about this widget is how easy it can be made to monitor any term you want. For example, there’s a twitter movement for Cleveland folks known as happyinCLE. If I were blogging about Cleveland regularly, I would embed this widget and change the search term to ‘happyinCLE.’ Again, because the widget is drowing out the noise your results will be what most users are talking about (ie, RT a URL about an article.)

All you need is one line of code pasted onto your website:

<div style="background-color:#f7f7f7; border-top:1px solid #6AB6DD; margin:0; padding:2px 10px; font:9px Arial, sans-serif; width:300px; height:600px;">
<iframe src=’http://revision.icosales.com/TodaysTwitterTrend/twitterMentionCount.php?term="happyinCLE"’ width=100% height=100% frameborder=0 scrolling=auto></iframe>
<a style="text-decoration:none; color:#333;" href="http://www.kaleidico.com/">Social Media Software &copy; Kaleidico</a></div>

You can use this iFrame anywhere, anysize you want. You can also easily adjust the search term just by changing the "term" variable at the end of the URL: creating a very easy and flexible widget for all of your webspaces. (My PHP script handles all character encoding.) This widget auto-updates every 5 minutes, scanning for any new references and reprioritizing items.

Future Iterations

This is just my first interation and there are a few things I’d like to change: mostly focusing on improved performance and layout. Ideally, I’d like to create a simple page allowing users to "skin" the widget and auto-generate the code to copy/past onto their website. I’m open to style suggestions - I’m not much of a graphics guy, heh.

However, I am pleased with this iteration because of the quality of the data. Looking only at the past 24 hours and picking out and prioritizing only the most referenced URLs on Twitter for your search term, I think this widget can show some pretty cool and ultimately more relevent information than a simple twitter search.

For example, you may notice at the time of this blog post my term is pulling in a good number of Japanese links: this is because Bob Dylan is currently in Japan on tour. So, rather than pulling in the latest mention of "Bob Dylan," the widget is prioritizing the Japanese links because those are being referenced most. Personally, I think it’s interesting to see what his Japanese fans are sharing about him on Twitter before/after they attend his (amazing) concerts.

What do you think?

So – tell me what you think! Am I on an interesting path? Is this something you might add to a sidebar in your blog – or maybe this is something you’d like to see as a Google Gadget? What features would you want to get you using it today? I’d love to hear your thoughts!