Social media works very well to attract attention to your brand, but it is very important to have a tool that tracks and monitors all interactions so that you are updated on any issues and feedback. There are many free and inexpensive social monitoring tools available. There are tools that monitor social campaigns, upcoming events, comments and forums, and Twitter and Facebook.

Some of the various, free social monitoring tools include: Hootsuite, Google Alerts, Wildfire, and SocialMention. Choosing the best tool depends on your business needs and goals. You will want to choose the tool that most accurately fits your business strategy, and the way you would like to interact with clients and prospects.

According to a survey done by KISSmetrics, 48.8% of people would be very disappointed if they could no longer use Twitter; 44.2% said they would be somewhat disappointed. Overall, if people were not able to use social media, Twitter more specifically, they would be fairly upset. Since people will be using social media to interact and discuss brands they like, and those they don’t, then it just makes good sense for businesses to ensure they have a monitoring tool to track social media engagement.

I’ve learned that in most cases, there isn’t much value in discussing costs associated with build-out until I fully understand the anticipated revenue model for their idea. One of the more common concepts is to make profit through advertising and to gain a base of users through a freemium model.

While the freemium model does have some validity and use case, many times the build it and they will come philosophy fails in practicality unless the start-up has very deep pockets. So I wanted to write a blog outlining the pitfalls of a freemium business model. But before I could finish writing the article, Getelastic wrote a much better summary than I could have written. So I’d like to share with you the concepts they outlined in their article below:

It’s tricky to do freemium well. You need a killer product, pricing and marketing strategy — and there are many mistakes you can make. Here are a handful you want to avoid:

1. Weak value proposition

Yes, we talk about value propositions a lot. Because they matter.

Just because a product is free doesn’t mean there is no cost to the user. A potential customer must provide an email address, fill in a nasty form (or use the less nasty social sign on), and invest time in building out a profile, entering data, or otherwise exploring your product. There is also risk in investing this time and energy in your product when she could do this with someone else’s instead.

What if someone rocks as good as you? Or better?

2. Poorly defined business model

There are many flavors of freemium, with different end-games. Is your plan to build a large user base to win market share at any cost, with monetization a secondary goal until that objective is realized? Or is your free version a stepping stone to your paid product? Is the real revenue in add-on “virtual products” or services that both free and paid users can consume?

Evernote, for example, expected to convert 1% of users to premium. Despite it’s success at close to 6%, CEO Phil Libin wants to maintain its paying customer base at 5% or less. “If people start converting en masse, ‘that means our free product isn’t good enough,’ he says. ‘And if our free product isn’t good enough, what’s the point of being freemium?‘”

That’s fine and good if you share Libin’s philosophy. His business has mass appeal, not niche. Evernote’s strategy is to hook free users and upgrade them down the path — immediate paid conversion is not the goal. Other businesses have found it incredibly challenging to convert free users to paid.

Niche companies like CrazyEgg and 37 Signals found profitability after removing their free version. Their apps will never get billions of free users, they need paid users.

Your strategy may change over time, but knowing how important paying customers are to your strategy (vs. large user base) in the near term is key, considering the nature of your products and your target market.

3. Pitting free against paid

It’s important to know whether a large base of free users or more paying customers is your goal. But if your organization has separate teams for “free” and “paid” versions of your offering, you create a divide. The free team will push for marketing and site design that cannibalizes your paid product and vice versa (this is especially challenging for A/B testing). If you must have separate teams, make sure they share the same success metrics, and don’t step on each others’ toes to meet their own numbers.

4. Failure to count the cost of large user base

Mo’ users, mo’ problems. Not just for bandwidth, but also support. Some freemium businesses have found free users to be far more demanding than paid.

5. Making the free version too good

There’s a fine line between a free product that delights and retains users, and one that gives too much milk for free. The free version should be “good enough” to provide core functionality, the premium should have useful features that free users care about (and ideally, can’t live without once they’ve sunk their teeth into the free version).

6. Miscommunicating price changes

Remember Qwikster? Users backlash when something free suddenly goes paid, or pricing otherwise changes. And when users get pissed, they turn to social media.

Any impending price or service change should be over-communicated to users over a period of time (don’t just rely on email and Twitter updates – bake it into the app). Warm up your customers and be as transparent as possible. People will assume you are trying to make more money, they may not understand that your service must go paid to survive (if that’s the case).

7. Charging for premium

Apart from the dangers above, charging for your product can be a mistake if it limits your potential revenue. Shazaam was originally a free app that allowed users to tag unlimited songs. It then moved to freemium (grandfathering existing users to premium), limiting free accounts to 5 tags per month.

But the real money for Shazaam isn’t in one-time download fees, it’s in affiliate revenue for song downloads. Unlimited tagging across all users makes sense, as there’s more opportunity to profit from the large free user base. It also gives more word-of-mouth opportunity as tagging is often done in public with friends.

8. Missing recurring revenue opportunities

Even if you have determined monthly or annual subscriptions can cover your operating costs, there’s a lot of money to be earned from add-ons like virtual goods or affiliate referrals (like the Shazaam example above). Get creative, what are some ways you can squeeze dollars out of free users – even if you’re not a gaming app?

9. Poor roadmap planning

There’s customer acquisition, and there’s retention – for both free and paid users. It’s natural to add features as your product grows, but they must be the features users want. You may not lose users by rolling out unwanted features, but you’ll eat your resources and profits in the process.

(Remember the rules of digital disruption. Find the adjacent possible, or the next thing that users want). Keep your paid customers satisfied and excited about your product, re-engage inactive users, and create reasons to market to your existing free users.

Despite the hype, freemium can be a tough business model to make work. Build a great product, plan your offering carefully. Don’t be afraid to tweak your strategy if you need to.

For those of you unfamiliar, the Minnie Pearl team focuses on removing barriers for people living with cancer diagnosis, provides one-on-one guidance and counseling. We are proud to work along side such philanthropic professionals. Make sure to check out the Minnie Moments site to read the stories of those impacted and share your story. Or keep up with everything on Minnie’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Also don’t forget to join the Minnie Pearl Cancer Foundation at the upcoming Hats Across the Row on April 17th at 3pm on Music Row. The event is a campaign honoring Minnie’s legacy and the connection between Music Row and The Minnie Pearl Cancer Foundation. It is just another celebration of the organization’s 25 years of service.

Some may wonder what Pinterest actually is and why it is so ‘Pinteresting’.  Sorry, I can’t help myself.  Pinterest is a vision board-styled social photo sharing site especially popular among women.  The site and iPhone app allow users to create and manage theme-based image collections.

The site’s mission statement is to ‘connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting.’  So how can, yet another, social media platform help your brand, you ask?  Brands and companies can host contests with competitors for ‘best boards’ while getting their consumers’ involvement.  Got a new product that hasn’t launched?  Post it to Pinterest to see what type of reaction people have.  It’s like a social media focus group.

Another way to use Pinterest is for showcasing brand personality.  In this case, you may be a business that is more focused on services rather than products.  Businesses have a way to connect audiences with its story, mission and/or future plans.  If you haven’t signed up yet, get to www.pinterest.com and do it!  If you need an invite, send me an email at vanessafrye@gmail.com and I’ll be sure to invite you.  Get out there and start pinning!

[iTunes and other subscription links to come shortly]

It’s got amazing social features, too. I follow an astonishing 350 Tumblr blogs personally, which provides me a nice constant feed of content. Tumblr’s great Dashboard provides me the ability to like or reblog (plus several other features) each post, like so:

Tumblr has quickly become a source of amazing rich media content: unique photos, videos and text snippets. It’s fast, fun and simple. In recent months many major news organizations and brands are using it to push out short updates and fascinating visuals. A few of my favorites:

• GE. One of the most ubiquitous consumer and industrial product manufacturers posting INCREDIBLE images of their manufacturing facilities. This sounds boring but it’s beyond fascinating.
• Rolling Stone Magazine. Rolling Stone syndicates content from their magazine, plus general news and cool images/videos throughout the week.
• Life Magazine. Life’s iconic photography translates beautifully to the Tumblr platform, as the staff explores their inexhaustible archive of photos.
• NPR Music. NPR has been killing it lately: instead of resigning their fate as a “dying” medium, this radio giant has embraced the online culture of podcasts, blogs, videos and social interaction.

So this sounds great, but why should your business or brand be using it?

First, the audience: it was announced a while back that Tumblr hosted more blogs than WordPress, the de facto standard in blogging. (Remember this post you’re reading right now? Yeah, brought to you by WordPress)

Just how many blogs is that? Well, here’s the details from Tumblr as of when this post was written:

Thirty. Five. Million. That’s a lot of content, and a LOT of people reading that content. As we discussed, users have incredibly simple access to reblog and share your content and things tend to quickly go viral. (Sigh, I can’t believe I wrote that)

In fact, if you’re really lucky (and creating some amazing content), you might end up on Tumblr’s great Radar feature. This simple image slot is viewed by those millions of Tumblr nerds each day, meaning a TON of traffic and visibility.

So that’s audience. Let’s talk about usability. From a complexity standpoint, Tumblr is easier to understand than IKEA instructions. Posting content couldn’t be simpler, and they have some amazing features baked in. Seriously, just tap one of these options and you have a simple platform to post and customize your content. It’s just as simple on a mobile device:

My feature has to be their Queue. I can’t say enough about it: with just a few button pushes, you can organize and arrange your content to automatically post a certain number of times per day and at certain times. Consistent content posting is key, and this tool can make your life simple: load up a week or two worth of content and let it ride. You can still drop in the odd post here and there if a major news event occurs, but the bulk of your posting is taken care of.

They’ve also got a killer API, which means you can integrate a lot of Tumblr’s great features right into your existing website.  Honestly there’s so much more to discuss regarding Tumblr, but you can learn it as you go. If you’ve casually used the platform in the past, jump in. If you’ve never used it, sign up for an account today! Be sure you follow the Centresource Tumblr for some insight into our little world. Get to Tumbling!

ifttt sounds pretty boring, but it stands for “if this then that.” Programmers out there will recognize this as a phrase that comes up in their code. So what does this have to do with you, and your online activities? What you do on ifttt is pick a trigger, then select an action to happen when the former happens. Some true geeks out there may recognize this as a socially focused version of Yahoo Pipes with a more intuitive user interface.

A few Examples of how I am currently using it are:

• When I post a “Public” post on my Google+ profile, I have a trigger that monitors that RSS feed (using a service called http://plu.sr) to simultaneously post to my Twitter and Facebook profile.
• When I check into a location in Foursquare, I have a trigger that will create a Google Calendar entry of that check in.  Thus, providing me an activity log of where I’ve historically been. Surprisingly useful.
• When the weather calls for rain the next day, I have a trigger send me a push notification on my iPhone using Boxcar so I can pre-plan my ability to ride my motorcycle to the office the next day.

To give some more examples, you could tell it to send you an email every time a stock hits below a certain number. Or, if you want to get out of a bad conversation? Send a text to a certain number, and you’ll get a phone call a few minutes later.

They have a growing list of 35 services that can be used as triggers or actions. Within those services are a number of individual triggers or actions. The combinations are endless.  In fact, they have recently launched a section of the site called “Recipes” where you can browse and use triggers that other people have dreamed up. This has quickly become one of my new favorite internet services.

Please post in the comments if you come up with a fun Recipe you want to share!

A contest is not just a simple giveaway, and legal concerns in this day and age are significant. This excellent post from Sara Hawkins at the Social Media Examiner breaks down the major forms of giveaways online and the differences between them. From Sara’s post:

• Sweepstakes are prize giveaways where the winners are chosen by the luck of the draw. Prizes can be almost anything you can think of, from handmade cards to an all-expense–paid trip.

• Contests choose a winner based on some merit. The winner is chosen based on some criteria such as best photo, most votes on a video, best recipe, etc.

• A lottery is a prize drawing where people must pay money to buy a chance to win. Lotteries are highly regulated and should not be run without consulting legal counsel.

All three need some form of legal coverage, including (but not limited to!) rules, winner release forms, contest indemnity forms, 1099 forms, and more. All of these forms whittle away the winner’s rights to complain about the prize won; specifically, they go into copious detail about the kind of prize and the amount of money the prize is worth. Without this information, you may open yourself up to lawsuits from winners expecting a different prize (and they’d actually have a case). All that to say, it’s far easier (and cheaper) to work with a lawyer on the front end of a contest than on the backend.

Lawyers I’ve dealt with in the past have said you can avoid a “contest” proper by doing limited window giveaways of products, such as:

“For the next hour, anyone who retweets this message gets a free product key for Product X! #productX”

It’s not ideal but it is FAR easier than preparing rules to giveaway something simple online. The problem, of course, is your tweet might take wings, and you end up giving away hundreds or thousands of units of your product. If that’s the goal, though, you may be able to bypass the legal documentation this way. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt to still draft up some simple rules just to cover yourself. This stuff can get messy.

Again, take a look at Sara’s excellent post and make sure you have a great lawyer in your corner. Need a good lawyer? Our pals at Aaron Sanders Law are simply fantastic at IP law here in Nashville.

Remember: being careful up front is better than being sued later on. Always.

Furthermore, a user might use their mobile device to access social media or review apps like Yelp, finding out key details about your product or service. If you don’t have a mobile experience ready to engage that user, it’s going to be frustrating when they come looking for it. Think about this: it’s estimated that by 2015 there will be more mobile web users than traditional desktop web users.^[1] Even more surprising than that, there’s currently more than 5 billion mobile users worldwide.^[2] If you’re not thinking for this user on the web, you’re going to miss a connection with them.

Before you starting building your mobile web interface, it’s necessary to determine what will best suit your needs. Let’s break it down:

Mobile Apps
A mobile app is a native application that lives on your phone. Regardless if it was free or not, the app physically resides on your phone and is not readily available to the public. In order for a user to access the application, they must acquire it from a source like the App Store or the Android Market.

Mobile Sites
A mobile website is a browser-based site that has been specifically developed for a fast and easily accessible experience through a mobile device. Mobile sites automatically detect that you are accessing the site through a mobile device and are then able to deliver the appropriate experience for that device.

Keep in mind, though, that neither solution is perfect. Native apps can take ages to launch due to the red tape that goes into the App Store and Android Market approval processes. Native apps have to be developed individually for each device and submitted separately to each device’s proprietary app store, which makes a native much more expensive. Mobile websites are often limited in their complexity due to 3G speeds and technical capabilities of mobile web browsers. Speaking of, these web browsers often vary wildly in capability, with the potential to deliver a sub-par user experience.

Now that you know the facts, which one is right for you? Before deciding on one or the other, make sure you understand your business goals and set realistic expectations on what the app or site will deliver. It’s also imperative to understand your target audience and how this new development is going to affect them. Your audience may not utilize a particular brand of smartphone, or your product or application may require significant processor power to function. Be sure to weigh all the pros and cons before making your choice, and when you’re ready… call us!

¹ Source: Mobi Thinking

² Source: Digital Buzz Blog