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5 Free Ways to Never Miss a Twitter@Reply

There are plenty of Twitter apps and clients offering brand monitoring and keywordalert services, but if you’re only one person, you may want a more lightweight way

of keeping track of what people are saying about you on the micro-blogging service.To this end, we’ve found five free, web-based Twitter services that will let you know

via e-mail each time you are on the receiving end of an @mention, or get an @reply.Have a read through our picks below to see which one might suit your needs, and let

us know your thoughts. If there are any services you’ve used that didn’t make thelist, share them in the comments box.

1. Twitstra

About as lightweight as services come, Twitstra is a study in minimalist app design.

Sign in to the service using OAuth, enter the e-mail address you’d like the alerts togo to, wait for the confirmation link e-mail to come through, then hit the link and

you’re all set up.

Twitstra will then send you an e-mail every time a tweet mentions your Twittername. Pretty much as instantaneous as you could expect, a Twitstra alert e-mail tells

you who has referenced you in the subject line and then provides the full tweet inthe body of the e-mail in plain text.

Twitstra also offers a reply via e-mail service, but this was not functioning at the

time of testing, although the developer says a fix is promised soon.

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2. UgoTwitt

French service UgoTwitt will e-mail you notifications when your handle is tweeted.

Sign up on the site with your Twitter name, password, and e-mail notificationpreference (OAuth is said to be in the pipelines). After you’ve verified your address,

the alerts will start pouring in (this was the third-fastest service we tested).

The alert e-mails will come with a French subject “Vous avez recu x nouvellesreponses de…” adding a bit of charm to your inbox, but are simple to read with a

thumbnail image of the tweeter, the full text of the tweet and the option to reply.Hitting the “send a reply” link loads up your Twitter web page and auto-fills the

person’s Twitter name, readying you for an easy response.

3. TweetAlarm

TweetAlarm is a keyword notification service. Signing up requires the standardOAuth and e-mail, after which you can set up your keywords to watch.

TweetAlarm offers the really nifty trick of adding a list of users to ignore (which it

automatically adds you to, although this can be changed), which is a handy option if

you don’t want to be alerted to a particular user’s @replies. Making this an evenbetter feature, there’s also a shortcut “ignore” link in alert e-mails that comethrough, so if you forget to ignore someone and get alerted to one of their tweets,

you can just hit the “ignore” link and TweetAlerts will add them to the “don’t botherto alert me” list.

You can set up alerts to come through daily, weekly or as often as the service finds

tweets — although this is currently set at two hours due to Twitter’s new API search

limits.

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When e-mails come through, they offer details of all the mentions in the body,

complete with thumbnail images of each Twitter user.

4. Pu.ly

Pu.ly offers a few handy little services for anyone who doesn’t want to be signed intoTwitter all day, but needs to keep abreast of developments.

In addition to telling you via e-mail when you have an @reply or mention, theservice will do the same when you are added to a Twitter list or receive a direct

message.

For the purposes of this post, we tested the mention and reply alerts. Getting set upis easy; just connect via OAuth, enter the e-mail address you’d like the alerts sent

to, and then select “on” or “off” for each of the three functions.

When the alerts messages come through (which is very soon after the @action —matching Twitstra for speed) the subject line states, “mentioned in tweet by user”

and the full tweet is shown in the body copy. A handy part of the service is the abilityto reply in-mail to save loading up Twitter.

To reply in-mail, you simply hit reply as you normally would for an e-mail, make sureyou add the @name of who you’re replying to, and the service will send the first 140characters as a tweet.

5. Twilert

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Twilert is a good-looking web-based Twitter app that actually offers general keywordalerts, and can potentially be used as a simplified monitoring tool. But for our

purposes, we tested it as an @mention notifier.

To get going, sign up and in via OAuth, set your time-zone, enter your e-mail

address and then create your keyword-based Twilert; in this instance “@username.” Twilert lets you specify when you want the alerts to come through, with the

minimum time period a 15 minute check. We set our Twilerts to the minimum, butsaw gaps of two hours between alerts at peak times, suggesting system load was

heavy, although alerts did come through quicker at quieter times.

The e-mails that come through offer a list of who has @mentioned you in the timeframe you’ve set up, with thumbnails of the Twitter users and hyperlink-rich text

offering the ability to “view” or “reply” — both of which direct you to Twitter.

HOW TO: Manage a Sustainable OnlineCommunity

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A 2008 Gartner study on social software noted, “about 70 percent of the communitytypically fails to coalesce.” While the measurement and the statistics behind this

statement raise questions, there is an element of truth.

There are detrimental effects of over-hyping the technology and then committing thethree cardinal sins of running a community:

• If you build it they will come. This is probably the best-known online

community fallacy. The premise is that if I roll out a given technology set(blogs, forums, wikis, etc.), users will automatically appear and congregate,

forming a robust community. This can be attributed to the lure of “socialsoftware” that companies repeatedly bite at, as opposed to seeking to extend

or create value for their customers.

• Once I’ve launched it, I’m done. Many communities launch successfully,only to fade out and disappear. This is due in large part to a failure to assign

ownership of the community and to have a strategy that lasts past “launch.”

•Bigger is better. The assumption here is that the overall size of acommunity is indicative of its success. This is challenging for most community

managers and businesses to understand, as it is contrary to what they’veusually been told.

All three can cause a community to fail, and there are plenty of examples.

Understanding the community life cycle can help you avoid making these mistakes.

Understanding the Community Life Cycle

The image below is representative of the different stages of the community life cycle.

It’s important to recognize that this is a macro-view, and that within and betweenthe stages are smaller life cycles (learning, innovation, etc.).

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A community is constantly in one or more of the following states with the exceptionof the On-Board state:

• On-Board: This is the starting point of any community, characterized bypeople (seekers) looking for value (content), most of which is created by the

community’s founders.

• Established: The community is becoming self-sustaining, with the members

(influencers, originators, etc.) creating and maintaining value within thecommunity, although some reliance on the founders is still necessary. It is the

established phases of the community where analytics can be used tounderstand user behavior and value.

• Mature: The community is self-sustaining, and clear relationships betweenindividuals are being formed. Users are organized into clear types

(influencers, seekers, moderators, originators, etc.) and take full ownershipand responsibility for content. The founders, who become no more than

credible participants, require little to no supervision.

• Mitosis: Core community members become disenfranchised with new

participants who don’t share the same values. These core communitymembers seek more focus as they gravitate towards specific topics and

relationships. Successful communities enable this and allow the community tosplit into smaller nodes, thus returning to an Established phase and repeating

the life cycle process.

How Is Value Perceived?

Most discussions surrounding the topic of community life cycle are based on the workdone by Bruce Tuckman’s stages of group development: Forming, Storming,

Norming and Performing.

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In addition, much of the value proposition for “bigger is better” is based on

Metcalfe’s law, which states that the value of the network increases as the number of connections within the network increases. Hence the common belief is that the size

of the community is a clear indicator of the value of the community.

It is important to note that Metcalfe’s law was created to describe telephone andfacsimile networks. What’s not often considered is that social networks aredependent upon people, and people cannot obtain the same value from network size

due to the “cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain

stable social relationships,” otherwise known as Dunbar’s number. While Dunbarnever proposed a specific number of relationships, most researchers agree that it is

approximately 150.

Community life cycles are often portrayed as simple linear progressions, with thegoal of “maintenance” once maturity is reached. However, I have found that a

community has unique characteristics that conflict with many of the preconceivednotions of success. While the value of the community to its creators increases as

membership increases, the value to individual members may diminish. Disregard for,

or lack of understanding of these behaviors can lead to the failure of a community.

A great case study here is Twitter. There are some people who believe that Twitter

provides value through the size of their network and number of their relationships.Examples would include politicians, media, actors, and so on. They don’t maintain

relationships individually, but with an audience of followers. However, there arepeople who find Twitter’s value diminishes, as the number of relationships they

manage increases, as the initial draw was the ability to manage relationships, not anaudience.

It should be noted that I am not advocating that communities be limited by

membership size. Rather, capabilities should exist within a larger community to

support smaller, internal groups that can form around narrow areas of interest. Thisis validated by both Twitter and Facebook, which have in recent months both

introduced capabilities to narrow the scope of conversations: Lists, privacy controls,and so on.

The transition from “On-Board” to “Established,” and the recognition of the “Mitosis”

phase are the two areas where most organizations struggle. The first comes from the

inability to relinquish some control to the community; the second comes from aninability to recognize the natural evolution of the community as it grows. Mitosis

within the community is very healthy. In fact, a healthy community is thecooperative coordination of many smaller communities acting as a whole.

How Do You Apply the Community Life Cycle?

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Understanding the life cycle is key to building a comprehensive community strategy,

specifically when it comes to moderation and management. A few of the componentsimpacted include: Content creation, group formation, engagement tactics, expert

discovery efforts, knowledge sharing practices, and employee participation. Once thestrategy is clearly defined, goals and objectives can be identified, clear

measurements for success (return on investment) are marked, and the community

life cycle becomes the map or playbook for understanding how to reach those goalsand objectives.The three cardinal sins can be avoided if you understand the life cycle of your

community, and thus where and how to apply resources and strategy to running it.

Google Enables Multiple Account Sign-In

Good news for users of multiple Google accounts (i.e. one for work and one for

personal): now you can sign in to more than one of them from the same browser

window.

The feature has been in testing for several weeks, but now appears to be publicly

available by going to the Google Accounts page and enabling multiple sign-in (it’sturned off by default).

Before you can turn it on, Google wants you to be aware of a few caveats, mostnotably that not all products support multiple sign-in and offline mode for Gmail and

Google Calendar won’t work.

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Still, this is a convenient addition to those of us with multiple Google accounts that

previously had to keep multiple browser windows open (or have multiple systemsrunning) to deal with the problem. Once enabled, you can switch between accounts

via a pull-down menu that appears next to your e-mail address atop the Googleservice that you’re using.

6 Online Tools for Expanding Your VideoStrategy

Online video continues to be an area with huge growth and expansion for smallbusinesses and brands. Video is such a great way to connect with users and to tell a

story in a way that words or static images often can’t.

Thanks to advances in technology, buying equipment and producing video is easierand less expensive than ever before. The harder tasks are getting video online,

serving it across platforms, and integrating it with your existing advertisingstrategies.

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Fortunately, there are some great web services and companies out there dedicatedto helping business owners expand and improve their online video strategies.

1. Encoding.com

Shooting and editing video content is only half of the battle, and we would argue thatthese days, it’s actually the less painful half. Once you have that video shot and

edited, the next step is finding a way to serve it. The problem is, getting online videoto work across web browsers, mobile phones and connected devices isn’t as easy as

it sounds.This is where Encoding.com comes in. Encoding.com is a service that will convert and

serve your video into any formats you wish. That means you can take video youshoot and edit and serve it to users who visit your site on an iPhone, BlackBerry,

desktop computer or even a connected television device like the upcoming GoogleTV.

Rather than having to manually transcode your content into each format you need,Encoding.com does it all on their end and can even serve content using a technology

called HTTP streaming, which is specifically designed for making video look andperform its best on the iPhone or iPad.

Encoding.com also has its own white label service, so if you want to offer video

services to your clients, you can let Encoding.com’s backend do all the hard workand you can just package it together with your other solutions.

2. mDialog

In online video, one of the areas that is seeing the most innovation is the HTML5video space. HTML5 is important because it means that content can play directly on

devices through a web browser, eliminating the need for a plugin or player likeAdobe Flash. That ultimately makes video and by extension, video content, more

accessible.

One of the drawbacks of using a pure HTML5 solution is that many of the existing

advertising platforms for web video are based on Flash. However, companies arequickly filling in the voids in the HTML5 space; one company that is working hard to

make it easy to insert dynamic ads into live or pre-recorded video streams ismDialog.

mDialog offers publishers and content providers an easy way to encode and serve

video in HTML5, while also making it easy to insert ads or b-roll based on factors likegeolocation or the identity of the user. If you want to move to an HTML5 solution so

you can reach more users but are concerned with how to monetize that solution,take a look at mDialog.

3. Brightcove

Brightcove is one of the big players in the video platform space. It makes it easy to

upload, manage and monetize online video. You can customize the look and feel of

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the player and Brightcove supports tons of different platforms, including mobile andset-top boxes.

Brightcove also lets you track and measure your video metrics. Brightcove works

with practically every major ad platform and recently announced a partnership withFreeWheel to offer users the ability to serve HTML5 video that is ad-supported (on

FreeWheel’s end) and trackable. Likewise, advertisers can work with FreeWheel to

get their ads displayed across its network and across web properties regardless of platform.

4. Blip.tv

Blip.tv got into the online video space at a very competitive time, competing against

YouTube and countless other online video hosts. The reason that blip.tv has beenable to survive over the last five years — and in fact even raise additional capital —

is because it has never tried to be YouTube and instead has concentrated oncultivating quality content and signing deals to get wide distribution across platforms

and devices.

To that end, blip.tv has ramped up its own internal sales team and worked hard to

build advertising partnerships so that it can secure quality advertisements for thecontent it hosts on its network. For content creators, this is really great, because

they can just focus on making great content. Blip.tv in turn, focuses on providing itscontent creators with tools for better distribution, ad management and statistical

analysis.

Blip.tv sees the big picture and is focused on bringing content to all screens — not

just the computer monitor.

5. & 6. Thwapr and Mogreet

When we discuss mobile video, it is usually in the context of the iPhone or othersmart devices. That’s overlooking a very large audience of users who have the ability

to receive and watch video on their mobile phones, but may not have a smartphone.Using MMS messages, companies like Mogreet and Thwapr are enabling businesses

and advertisers to send video messages to their users via text message. If you canget an MMS message, you can get video.

For non-profits especially, this can be a great way to reach out and to get a direct

call to action. Mogreet teamed up with the David Lynch Foundation to provideLynch’s fans with MMS messages promoting the Foundation’s causes and putting the

spotlight on emerging artists.Thwapr has had similar success. The NHL team the Phoenix Coyotes teamed up with

the company back in April to offer fans special mobile video updates from games and

press conferences. Fans just needed to text a special number and they got free videoupdates from their favorite team. What makes Thwapr extra cool is that you can

even send video replies back using MMS, which makes it a great way to solicitinteractive feedback and support.

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As the Red Cross campaign after the Haitian earthquake proved, text messaging is agreat way to raise awareness and solicit funds. Pairing that with the power for mobile

video has some really important implications for small business owners or brands.

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