So… Ask me what I think of Sprout social

I like it…

Ask me again what I think of it.

I reaaally like it

Okay ask me what i reaaally think of it.

Okay, if you insist.. here are my unbiased review of what i REALLY think of Sprout Social.

Follow the link for an overwhelmingly delightful review of Sprout Social.

For a student on a budget, look no further—Sprout Social is for you.

New feature by Foursquare allows you to “share the places you love” with Foursquare lists.

Sounds similar to Twitter lists, but is it?

What do you think?

Will this attract new and old users to Foursquare? Will it be a top feature? Will it only be used by everyone, or just anyone on vacation?

What do you think the intent is of Foursquare by releasing this feature?

Is it, perhaps, to compete with Twitter or Google+?

Cooling the deals has led Old Spice body wash to a 24% sales decline in the four weeks ended July 10 and a 9% decline for the 12-weeks period vs. a year ago, according to SymphonyIRI data. Yet it’s still ahead of Axe for each of those periods and, by a smaller margin, for the 52 weeks. And any way you cut it, Old Spice is the leading men’s brand now — though that data doesn’t cover Walmart, club and dollar stores. And Beiersdorf’s Nivea and Henkel’s Right Guard are gaining more ground than either of late.

One of the most fascinating aspects about the launch of Google+ is the way it reframes how we, as individuals, interact with our communities. As Brian Solis so rightly points out, the initial Facebook model of creating a single social graph of up to 5000 friends must now be compared to a series of what Google+ calls ‘circles’ that expand and contract as we pass through various life stages, jobs, relationships and experiences in our lives.

This contrast is very instructive as to the future, and is particularly important for brands trying to engage with their customer communities. By now, most brands have overcome their reticence to participate in social media, and exhausted their knee-jerk reaction to buy their way to a sizable social footprint that is at least comparable to their competitors. But the challenges continue to arise.

This new reframing, just as Twitter emerged after Facebook, and Google+ after Twitter, we will see more social platforms emerge that will become increasingly sophisticated and nuanjced in their expression of how individiuals prefer to relate to each other.  Ultimately, it’s possible that these platforms themselves will be designed as templates that the users themselves can customize in terms of the best way to express their community and experience of life.

What this means for brands is significant. It is already challenging to engage and maintain the interest of your customers in real time across multiple platforms, especially as many brands are still fighting the inertia that inevitably comes with hierarchical structures designed with control in mind. But now, as the social business marketplace becomes increasingly fragmented and more and more micro-communities, specific to a variety of media (Path, Instagram) start to emerge, brands face the prospect of reaching an increasing number of specific audiences, conversations and communities all in real time.

Topsy is a dedicated site for searching Twitter. It’s better, it turns out, than Twitter’s own search functions.

If you’ve tried to search for tweets on Twitter’s built-in search box, you know it can be frustrating.

For a currently popular topic, you’ll get dozens of recent tweets. For an older topic, you may get no results at all. Twitter has an advanced search page, but a better alternative is Topsy, a dedicated Twitter search engine. It’s so good that even Twitter’s official guide for journalists suggests using Topsy to research news topics.

Topsy’s advanced search, linked from its home page, lets you search for specific Web domains or Twitter users, tweets posted during a specific period of time in the past, and for all tweets with the word “lady” but not “gaga.” You can also specify only tweets that include photo links, video links or Web links.

Social Networks

The way people connect digitally.

Topsy has indexed tweets back to mid-2008. It does not keep them all, but it does keep the ones that were retweeted a lot, or that came from people whom Topsy deems influential because they are often retweeted or cited in other people’s tweets. That same influence algorithm lets you sort search results by relevance rather than in chronological order.

Topsy is also a good way to check in on what’s hot on Twitter right now. The site’s home page features a frequently updated list of trending links, again sorted by relevance. For example, if a few celebrities tweet a video, it will rank higher than one tweeted by a larger group of little people. And there’s a special page devoted to trending videos. Click the video thumbnail, and Topsy pops up a video player rather than sending you to YouTube or another site. Right now the top video is a bunny playing with a ball of string. The people have spoken.

Finally, we have solid answers to many of our Google+ invite questions!

The post sheds light on the fact that the sending of invites must also be received and then accepted within the same limited time frame from when invites become available and when they are turned off a short time after.

So apparently, if you are sharing Google+ invites with your friends, only those who are ready to receive it on the other end and then click the link to sign up will actually find themselves with a Google+ account before Google flips off the switch, as we’ve seen so far.

Knowing this fact has helped to ease my own frustration and false assumptions surrounding the whole invite process.

A majority of marketers are engaging in social media as a marketing channel, and a large number of those consider the professional networking site LinkedIn as offering the best ROI.

The “BMA Project Case Study,” a survey of Business Marketing Association members by online research company Itracks Online Data Collection, found that 89% of respondents are using social media as part of their marketing mix. LinkedIn was favored as providing the greatest ROI by 49% of respondents, followed by Twitter (20%), Facebook (15%), blogs and videos (11%) and YouTube (6%).

Interesting survey of Business Marketing Association members found LinkedIn to be the most favored social media platform among marketers, with greater return on investment (ROI) than Twitter, Facebook, or blogs/videos.

The study begs the question as to whether these results apply to public relations practitioners.

Cheers to @sharilee for the link.

13% of online adults use the status update service Twitter, which represents a significant increase from the 8% of online adults who identified themselves as Twitter users in November 2010. 95% of Twitter users own a mobile phone, and half of these users access the service on their handheld device.

Check out the link for full details, to read the full report, and to view Pew’s survey questions used for operationalizing and measuring the concepts examined. One great aspect of their study was to sample the population in such a way to include both English- and Spanish-speaking populations.