So how do you build a group of engaged followers?  If your’re building your Twitter network, there simply is no better tool than Refollow.

Once you’ve logged into refollow.com your Twitter account info, you will see a variety of options you can use to manage your followers.  While all are valuable, I would like to point you to the option that lets you identify all of the followers of another Twitter user. Once you have identified these people, simply click on ‘Select All’ and then ‘Follow’.

It is important to note that most people on Twitter will reciprocate when you follow them – also something that refollow makes extremely easy for you to do.

When I was building the Shared Interest Twitter network I identified all of the active followers of the Fairtrade Federation and followed them – I assumed that anyone who had chosen to follow the Fairtrade Federation would also be interested in following Shared Interest, the world’s only 100% fair trade lender.

A great website to use to identify who the top Twitters are in your area is wefollow.com. Simply enter the tag (e.g. fairtrade) and wefollow will show you the top 25 most influential people in that sphere.   As an aside, at the time of this post, Shared Interest was the most influential Twitterer for the Fairtrade tag, but only 5th  in terms of total users, which shows that Seth is right – quality over quantity.

Tip: Only follow active users – those that have tweeted in the past 30 days.  Try as you might, your messages wont resonate with inactive users. You can use the filters on refollow.com to weed out the deadwood.

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Social media is not about the tools – Facebook or MySpace or Flickr or Twitter or blogs or YouTube. It’s about having a strategy for identifying and communicating with customers and prospects online. To barrow a concept from Cluetrain Manifesto, ‘Markets are conversations’ and these conversations are taking place online. Businesses simply cant afford not to be participating in these conversations.

Whilst social media tools will come and go, your strategy shouldnt stray much. Moreover, once you’ve defined your strategy, choosing which tools you will use will become much more obvious.

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• We had thousands of photos that had been taken by staff during customer visits
• Management of the image library was tedious due to the lack of search-ability
• Photos were not publicly accessible and sharing them with stakeholders was next to impossible
• Many of the photos offered an incredible window into the work that Shared Interest does (social lender) that would, if publicly accessible, create a tighter bond with current stakeholders and help to acquire new members.

With this in mind I chose Flickr, the online community and photo sharing site to host and manage our photo library.  Not only is Flickr a great way to manage your photos by creating sets, using descriptor tags and and creating titles for your photos, but you can also add text descriptions that give the viewer more insight into the photo and can even contain a specific call to action.  This photo is a great example of a very detailed description – basically a mini case study – with a call to action (link back to company website).

Being an online community, you can also find groups (or start your own) related to your photos.  Once you join a group then you can share some or all of your photos with that group.  Because Shared Interest is the only 100% fair trade lender, I joined and shared our photos with several fair trade related groups.

Using Flickr continues to give Shared Interest much more online visibility, providing easy access to stakeholders and offering a much more efficient way to manage its extensive image library.

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A tag cloud (more traditionally known as a weighted list in the field of visual design) is a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.

First things first. The tag cloud generated by the ZoomCloud widget is not a traditional tag cloud. In fact, it really isn’t a tag cloud at all. In Flickr and Technorati, two sites that have brought tag clouds to the masses, users create their own tags (‘design’, ‘cats’, ‘California’). When enough people have used the same tag, it begins to show up in the cloud. Once a lot of people have used it, it becomes a visually dominant element, encouraging others to click it ?Äî and subtly discouraging them from creating their own tags. (Source: Zeldman.com). ZoomCloud, on the other hand generates a “tag cloud” by mining your blog and creating tags for the most popular terms. So while a ZoomCloud cloud tag may be a useful navigational tool, it should not be associated with a true tag cloud that develops organically through user contribution and participation.

Even though the ZoomCloud cloud tag is not a true cloud tag, I believe that it is a useful tool that has the following advantages:

• It gives a great visual representation of what your blog is all about to people who come to your blog for the first time.
• It is a great way for your readers to navigate your site. It’s similar to a reader clicking on one of your blog’s categories to see all of the related blog posts, but using a tag cloud for navigation provides a bit more definition and breadth because a tag from a tag cloud usually transcends multiple categories.
• It helps to keep the blog owner on topic. If your blog’s focus is on high-tech marketing, but the term “ex wife” makes it into your tag cloud, this may be a sign that your blog is drifting off topic.

Am I going to add the ZoomCloud script to my blog? I don’t know. The problem is that I only have one sidebar and it’s already looking a bit cluttered. Adding ZoomCloud would just be over the top clutter. If I had another sidebar, I would definitely give it a try.

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I read about an interesting new service this morning from an RSS feed of one of my favorite tech blogs. The service is called WhoLinked. The idea behind WhoLinked is straight forward; it’s a service that publishes a list of sites that link to your site on your site. Installing WhoLinked is EXTREMELY easy – I had it installed in under 5 minutes.

WhoLinked adds value to your blog because it provides your readers a roadmap to conversations that revolve around the same topics found in your blog. Being able to show a list of sites that link to you also adds a bit of credibility to your blog. It doesn’t replace your blog roll, but it does compliment it.

More from the Technology Evangelist

Real World Experience

I installed WhoLinked on Technology Evangelist around two weeks ago. What have I learned so far? I haven’t determined what effect it has on credibility, although our RSS subscriber base seems to be growing a bit faster than usual. More importantly, it has generated a measurable bump in traffic from sites you link to who have WhoLinked.com installed on their site, including WhoLinked.com, where we’re currently displayed in their #1 WhoLinked position after linking to them back on April 20th:

What’s the Catch?

Clicking on the “WHAT’S THIS?” link at the bottom of the report reveals an ad served by WhoLinked. Currently, it looks like their serving a link to Ebay, but that could change at any time. It’s unobtrusive, so not a major negative. You do share some web stats with WhoLinked since they could track how many times their script is served on your site. If you’re protective of that sort of this, this script probably isn’t for you.

Marketing Application

Should you seek out sites publishing their WhoLinked stats, then link to them to gain a backlink? Why not, right? Keep in mind that appearing in a WhoLinked report won’t improve your PageRank or search engine rankings since it uses JavaScript. But click throughs are nothing to shake a stick at.

He even comes up with a great promotional campaign centered on the WhoLinked app.

Let’s Have Some Fun

I published our current WhoLinked stats above. If you can bump any of the current sites off the list in the next 30 days, I’ll send you $50* (or $50 to the charity of you choice). Wait! Let’s make it easier. I’ve increased our wholinked.com report from 5 to 10 sites, so there is as much as $500 on the line (yeah, it’s not a ton of cash, but really, could it be any easier to win?):

If you manage to move into the top-10 by June 10th, you’re in the money. Sites currently on the list are not eligible. I have to have some rules, right? 

How to enter: Link to www.technologyevangelist.com It’s that easy. How to win? According to WhoLinked.com’s FAQ, here is how they determine rankings:
We show the highest-quality links first, as determined by the search engines. This includes Google PageRank. If you have more links than there is room for, they won’t show up.

So link away. Give it your best shot. Link from as many sites as you can. It doesn’t hurt to try, and it’s easy money if you win. By the way, your site doesn’t have to be a blog to be eligible. Any old website will do.

Bonus: I’m interested in finding out if WhoLinked.com’s system can be gamed by a creative marketer. If you can somehow sweep our WhoLinked.com top-10, there’s $1000 in this for you. Good luck!

*We don’t want to break any laws so we’ll figure out how to do legal awards at the end of the contest. Post questions to the comments, or send me an email to the address listed on my profile page.

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These are my thoughts on Pinko Marketing:

I truly believe that this is an important message that needs to be heard. Unfortunately, I believe the majority of people will tune out the message because of the negative connotations most people have to the word “pinko”. What a shame that would be!

More importantly, all that she has done thus far is provided a very glossed over utopian view of how the masses will control the marketing message. Don?Äôt get me wrong, this is a good start, but unless she backs it up with methodology, practical applications and real world examples I don?Äôt think her idea will gain much traction. When I read the Pinko manifesto I recently thought of two recent blog posts I had read on “agile marketing” – here and here. IMHO I think the ideal scenario would be to develop an agile marketing methodology designed to engage and empower the market.

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