I’ve been advising my clients to register their names at social media sites for a while. Based on an article in Advertising Age yesterday I see even the big boys are ignoring this most basic advice – claim your name in social media NOW before someone else does.

This is the article that caught my attention: GM, Kellogg, Nestle Beat to the Tweet as Squatters Take Over Twitter Names

Social Media Advice: Claim Your Name

If you have not already done so, register your user name on social media sites. Being able to use your name to build your profile or brand is vital to your success on the web and you need to ensure that you own it and register it. Having a consistent image across all social sites allows your followers or devotees to find you and follow you, plus it has the added benefit that you don’t have to remember hundreds of user names.

Use your brand name or determine a name for your brand and register it at every social media site. If you want to establish a profile for one or more experts, determine the user ID for each person and register that as well.

There are several sites that allow you to check if your desired user name is available.

• http://knowem.com/
  Check username availability for 120 social websites. Also offers a paid service and help you register on all the 120 social media websites after gathering some basic information from you.
• http://www.usernamecheck.com/
  Contains a list of 60+ websites to check usernames
• http://namechk.com/
  Check availability of username in 72 social media websites.
• http://www.checkusernames.com

Some sites will not allow your full name and limit the number of characters that you can have, so create a user name that is consistent and easy to remember.

Register it on every site you can find, you’ll never use most of them, but at least you will own the user names and this will stop others from hi-jacking your name.

In response to overwhelming demand, LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, will return to Washington, DC on December 8 and 9 with a new revised curriculum for their acclaimed workshop, “Getting Ahead with Google Analytics” I attended a version of this program last year and it was terrific.

Sessions, specifically designed for beginners, intermediates and advanced users, will cover all the newest tricks and latest developments, and show you how to leverage one of the world’s most powerful analytics tools to gather more meaningful data, analyze it with greater insight, and use what you find to improve your website’s performance.

You can attend for half a day, a whole day or both days and take advantage of special pricing that starts at just $199 for a half day of deep-dive learning.

Find out more and register today! If you have any questions, contact Robbin Steif or call LunaMetrics at 412-381-5500.

Common Knowledge offers free webinars once a  week all year on social networking and social media.  The schedule for the remainder of the year has just been published. 

Topics include: Building a Big Community on Facebook, High Impact Blogging, Making it Big on Twitter, House Social Networks (Building Social Network on your own site) and Social Networking for Higher Ed.

The webinars are free and 1 hour long.

This latest report based on the findings of Pew Internet & American Life’s daily tracking survey on Americans’ use of the internet released in October 2009 shows 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. This represents a significant increase over previous surveys in December 2008 and April 2009, when 11% of internet users said they use a status-update service.

Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of this activity: social network website users, those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and younger internet users – those under age 44.

In addition, the more devices someone owns, the more likely they are to use Twitter or another service to update their status. Fully 39% of internet users with four or more internet-connected devices (such as a laptop, cell phone, game console, or Kindle) use Twitter, compared to 28% of internet users with three devices, 19% of internet users with two devices, and 10% of internet users with one device.

• The median age of a Twitter user is 31, which has remained stable over the past year.
• The median age for MySpace is now 26, down from 27 in May 2008.
• The median age for LinkedIn is now 39, down from 40.
• The median age for Facebook is now 33, up from 26 in May 2008.

Pew concludes:

It will probably become more difficult to track status updating as an independent activity as social network updates feed into Twitter and vice versa. For now, it is clear that a “social segment” of internet users is flocking to both social network sites and status update services. This segment is likely to grow as ever more internet users adopt mobile devices as a primary means of going online.

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox offers the results of user research related to corporate postings on social networks.  Nielsen finds that users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks.

Te study looked at only business use of social networks and RSS. Some interesting findings for business communicators:

• Businesses that post too often crowd out the user’s real friends and become unpopular (and thus risk being unfollowed). Users listed too-frequent postings as their top annoyance with following companies and organizations on social networks.
• Users prefer a more casual style for business messages on social networks than what’s appropriate for most corporate communications.
• Users expect RSS feeds to be more business-like and to cut the chit-chat.
• RSS updates were viewed as more trustworthy and as more “official” sources than social messages.
• Users were more likely to check RSS feeds at work, whereas they mainly accessed social networks from home.
• Once a message drops off a user’s main page, it might as well not exist. Users who continue browsing messages on the second page are almost unheard of. This makes stream-based media less powerful than email newsletters in terms of maintaining a customer relationship.
• Most users visited Facebook and Twitter at least daily, and MySpace and LinkedIn less frequently.
• The three great motivators are fear, greed, and exclusivity, and social network postings can address the latter two. Users were particularly interested in getting deals (greed). Yet, while users recognize that corporate postings are commercial — rather than friendship-driven — they do resist overly aggressive selling. Finding the proper balance is crucial.
• Users want postings to be current.
• Companies that established a presence that they didn’t bother to update gave users a very negative impression when they were looking into companies’ social features. Even more irksome were cases in which friend requests weren’t promptly answered.
• It’s rare for users to actively seek out companies and organizations on social networking sites. Typically, the impetus to follow a company came via a prompt of some sort — such as a recommendation from a friend, an email (newsletter or confirmation) from the company, or a link from the company’s website.
• The messages that received the highest scores had three things in common: they contained something of substance, were timely, and provided the kind of information that users expected from the source company or organization.

According to The Nielsen Company, web visitors using a mobile device increased 34% year-over-year, from 42.5 million mobile web visitors in July 2008 to 56.9 million in July 2009. Overall, year-over-year growth among the 13-17 and 65+ age groups outpaced the growth of the total mobile web audience, with a youth increase of 45% and seniors surging upwards 67% in July.

Full report at: Women, Teens, and Seniors Help Fuel 34% Mobile Web Spike

Using social media like Twitter and Flickr to drive traffic to your website is a great strategy. But, how effective is it? Use custom campaign URLs to know.

To track the number of clicks that social media efforts generate, use custom URLs in your social media sites. So the URL to a page listed in twitter should be different from the URL to the same page in Facebook. How do you do this?

Two options for generating custom URLs are Google’s URL builder and a URL shortener like bit.ly to keep track of the clicks you generate.

Google URL Builder

The Google tool is especially helpful if you already use Google Analytics to track you site statistics. Google Analytics tracks online campaigns using a combination of five marketing dimensions:

According to a new survey from TargetCast tcm:

• Young adults 18-34 rank the internet as more important than TV
• Those ages 35+ still consider newspaper ads to be more influential in determining their purchase decisions.
• A third of adults 18-64 report that  they are using the Internet more as both a source of information and entertainment.
• Adults ages 18-34 are more likely to have replaced newspapers and magazines with internet content.
• Adults older than 25 are more likely to consider magazines and newspapers as valuable sources of information.
• Adults ages 18-24 are more likely to say radio is not as relevant and that they prefer reading magazines online.
• 40% of Adults 18-64 say that they prefer the experience of reading printed newspapers over online news sources.
• 41% of those surveyed indicate that radio is still relevant in today’s media environment. Respondents overall prefer to listen to music through the radio station vs. Internet stations or on their mp3 player.

Read all the details at: TargetCast tcm Releases Findings of 2009 Consumer Trend Report

I found out about this webmaster tool from a fellow member of the DC Web Women email list. LinkPatch (free for use on one website, fee for service for multiple sites) monitors your website for errors and reports them to you.

To use Linkpatch, you place code on your website 404 error page. You then get an email report as soon as someone reaches your 404 error page. The tracking code records the information needed to find and fix the problem.

Sounds like a nifty tool. Would love to hear from anyone who uses this.

Crowd Science conducted a survey that involved more than 600,000 visitors to multiple websites between August 5-13, 2009. They survey targeted social media users age 12 and up. Among the findings:

• 40% of Twitter users access the service via mobile at least sometimes, compared with 32% for Facebook users
• 8% of Twitter users use mobile all the time vs. 3% for Facebook
• 27% of Twitter users tweet daily, 46% check updates daily
• 24% of Twitters users have never tweeted, or have ceased doing so
•  32% of Twitter users feel they spend too much time using social media
• 22% of Twitter users say they’ve written things on social media that they’ve later regretted
• 16% of Twitter users report that they often neglect important activities to spend time on social media (!)
• 25% of Twitter users say social media is their favorite leisure activity, compared with 14% of non-Twitter social media users
• 41% of Twitter users prefer to contact friends via social media rather than telephone, compared with 25% of non-Twitter social media users
• 14% of Twitter users said they have revealed things about themselves in social media that they wouldn’t under any other circumstances
• Twitter users tend to be older than non-Twitter social media users (54% over 30 years old, vs. 42%),
• Twitter users are more likely to be self-employed or entrepreneurs (18% vs. 9%