Mint.com – Personal Finance Online Software

By far my biggest find of 2010. Mint brings all your financial accounts together online, automatically categorizes your transactions, lets you set budgets & helps you achieve your savings goals.

Because the music is available for free, it does not mean that it’s the end of the business model.

Connect with fans (CwF) + Reason to buy (RtB) = Monitization ($$$)

The key with social media measurement, I think, is to stand back and take a widescreen approach to measurement. Rather than focusing on the smaller, campaign-specific metrics, such as traffic from Twitter or the number of fans on Facebook, wouldn’t it be better to look at how it helps to shift the most important business KPIs, such as sales, profits, as well as customer retention and satisfaction rates?

• Driving engagement and interaction.
• The goal of any social optimisation strategy is to provide the right tools so that people can engage with your brand / people / products / services onsite and offsite.
• You want people to make a noise.
• You want people to store and share things.
• You want people to love your website.
• You want people to visit more frequently.
• You want people to refer your company to their friends.
• You want people to buy into your brand.
• You want people to buy your products.

A list of social interaction metrics / KPIs

1. Alerts (register and response rates / by channel / CTR / post click activity)
2. Bookmarks (onsite, offsite)
3. Comments
4. Downloads
5. Email subscriptions
6. Fans (become a fan of something / someone)
7. Favourites (add an item to favourites)
8. Feedback (via the site)
9. Followers (follow something / someone)
10. Forward to a friend
11. Groups (create / join / total number of groups / group activity)
12. Install widget (on a blog page, Facebook, etc)
13. Invite / Refer (a friend)
14. Key page activity (post-activity)
15. Love / Like this (a simpler form of rating something)
16. Messaging (onsite)
17. Personalisation (pages, display, theme)
18. Posts
19. Profile (e.g. update avatar, bio, links, email, customisation, etc)
20. Print page
21. Ratings
22. Registered users (new / total / active / dormant / churn)
23. Report spam / abuse
24. Reviews
25. Settings
26. Social media sharing / participation (activity on key social media sites)
27. Tagging (user-generated metadata)
28. Testimonials
29. Time spent on key pages
30. Time spent on site (by source / by entry page)
31. Total contributors (and % active contributors)
32. Uploads (add an item, e.g. articles, links, images, videos)
33. Views (videos, ads, rich images)
34. Widgets (number of new widgets users / embedded widgets)
35. Wishlists (save an item to wishlist)

Each company may have some specific requirements, but here are ten important social media metrics to measure:

1. Social media leads. Track web traffic breakdowns from all social media sources, and chart the top few sources over time. If members of your social media networks are sending referrals, consider measuring this data as well.

2. Engagement duration. For some companies, engagement duration is more important than page views. For example, if you have a Facebook application, how much time are social network members spending using it? Is per-member usage increasing over time? Alternately, if people visit your your company websites from SM (Social Media) sites, how long are they spending? (Also consider tracking which pages they visit.)

3. Bounce rate. Are visitors coming to your site from SM sites but quickly leaving? Maybe your landing page needs better, more relevant copy. Maybe the information they’re seeking isn’t easily found.

4. Membership increase and active network size. This is the portion of your company’s social networks (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) that actively engages with your social media content (e.g., Twitter, Facebook Pages, etc.) Is your collective members, followers, fans network growing, and is there interaction with your content?

5. Activity ratio. How active is your company’s collective social network? Compare the ratio of active members vs total members, and chart this over time. There’ll always be some social network members who are inactive, but if you initiate a campaign to increase interaction, you should also measure the resulting data. Activity can be measured in a variety of ways, including usage of social applications.

6. Conversions. You want social network members to convert: into subscriptions, sales (direct or through affiliates), Facebook application use, or whatever other offerings you have in your overall sales funnel and that can somehow be directly or indirectly monetized. (E.g., subscription to a weekly e-newsletter can be monetized by giving other companies access to your list in the form of advertising.) Measure all types of conversions and chart them over time.

7. Brand mentions in social media. So, you have a highly active social network and members are talking about your company or the company’s brands. Measure and track both positive and negative mentions, and their quantities.

8. Loyalty. Are social members interacting in the network repeatedly, sharing content and links, mentioning your brands, evangelizing? How many members reshare? How often do they reshare?

9. Virality. Social members might be sharing Twitter tweets and Facebook updates relevant to your company, but is this info being reshared by their networks? How soon afterwards are they resharing? How many FoaFs (Friends of Friends) are resharing your links and content?

10. Blog interaction. This is actually more than one metric lumped together. Blogs ARE part of an SMM (Social Media Marketing) toolkit, but only if you allow comments and interact with readers by responding. If you’re doing this, encourage responses either directly in the comments section of blog posts, or via Twitter. (Use a blog widget that allows this.) If your blog’s content is suitable for social voting (Digg, Propeller, Mixx, etc.) or social bookmarking (Delicious, Stumbleupon) sites, install a blog plugin that displays the necessary sharing “buttons”, then track referrals back from those sites.

Back in July, Twitter released “Twitter 101 for Business”, a guide for businesses to get started with using the Twitter service. It covers the basics of Twitter, how to get started, the lingo, and includes case studies. Here’s how Twitter describes its value to businesses on its new Twitter 101 website:

Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with others. Now, people are turning to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to businesses, too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter.

Check it out at: business.twitter.com/twitter101/. You may also want to check out “The Twitter Guide Book” at Mashable.

What is Google Wave?

Google Wave: 15 Features

Here’s a 30 minute video of his presentation, check it out:

With over 3 million views and 14,000 comments in just 10 days, UNITED has a real nightmare on their hands and is feeling the wrath of citizen journalism and the social web. The story has been featured on CNN, FOX NEWS, MSNBC and more…

Even Bob Taylor of Taylor Guitars got in on the action. Check it out.

Su.pr is the first URL-shortener designed to provide both syndication and discovery in one tool! With Su.pr you can post interesting content to Facebook and Twitter.

• Submit my content to StumbleUpon’s 7.9 million users with each post
• Have my best content showcased in a right-hand sidebar for each page linked to
• Get suggestions for optimal posting times: get more traffic per post
• Schedule as many tweets or posts as I want, for any time
• See my click-throughs in real-time
• See retweets for each post, including the biggest influencers
• Post to Twitter and Facebook at the same time, with more platforms in the pipeline
• Use my own short URL instead of someone else’s branding

Here’s quick demo video from Tim Ferris

Su.pr is currently in Beta and can be accessed by invite code only. To obtain your own access code, visit the Su.pr homepage.