“We added quick-switch multi-profile management and unlimited analytics reporting to Statf.ly Pro to meet the growing demands of time-strapped agencies and brand managers overseeing content distribution and communications for multiple social client profiles,” says Statf.ly CEO, Bryan Crick. “Statf.ly will continue to grow its suite of management and analytics features with a usability-first philosophy that is both economical and efficient.”

Statf.ly enables users to store Twitter and Facebook history, keywords, and report annotations for up to one year, which is valuable for generating more compelling long term analysis, in depth quarterly reports and annual strategy reviews.

The Statf.ly platform provides users the ability to efficiently:

• Manage and distribute content on multiple social profiles
• Monitor keywords and conversations on Facebook and Twitter (Google analytics coming soon)
• Perform live searches on Twitter and Facebook
• Measure the results of interactions through a filtered set of data points
• Create and monitor campaigns via Bitly
• Generate unlimited one-click analytics reporting (for Statf.ly Pro)
• Collaborate with team members on data analysis with data point annotation, sharability and PDF export
• Store social data such as Twitter and Facebook history, keywords, and report annotations for up to 1 year

The StatFly platform makes the management, interactivity and analysis of social engagement strategies as effective and efficient as possible for business. For more information, visit http://statf.ly.

What is the value of being approachable?

If you ask Scott Ginsberg, the answer is, “priceless.

Scott knows more than a thing or two about being approachable. For the last eleven years, he’s worn a name tag EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. He’s even taken it one step further — he’s had his name tag tattooed on his chest.

This high energy marketing student turned entrepreneur and author of thirteen books is now walking talking life changing expert on approachability and the good fortune it brings.

His newest book, The Nametag Principle captures over an entire decades worth of rock candy solid, hard earned lessons learned on how to attract people and get more opportunities in your life.

The pages are filled with a years’ worth of crisp, hard-hitting actions, organized by month, with each days’ reading containing a daily dose of brain candy, all designed to galvanize you into taking action and making daily strides to become more engaging, more joinable, more human and more approachable.

Here’s an excerpt from the month of February:

A friend of mine recently purchased an online sales training course for his employees. When I asked why his salespeople liked the program so much, his answer surprised me:  “Because it’s fun. We can get good content anywhere. But the personality of this program is what makes it so cool.”

JUST AS I SUSPECTED: Nobody buys boring, nobody notices normal and nobody pays for average.

As my friend Rohit so eloquently suggested in his must-read book, Personality Not Included, “People don’t sue doctors they like.”

Your challenge is to figure out which unique attribute of your personality, life experience and expertise you can leverage in a remarkable way. Put values before vocation, individuality before industry and personality before profession.

After all, people buy people first.

How are you leading with your person and following with your profession?

Business people in corporations, governments and organizations all over the world are well advised to take his lessons learned and incorporate them into their culture if they are to survive and thrive in a world

Ginsberg is on a global mission to teach people all about how being approachable can produce dramatic improvements in work environments, cultures, relationships between people and their customers, and in profits.

“When you wear a name tag, people know that you want them to be free to engage you in conversation.  It’s an invitation that tells people ‘Approach me, introduce your self. It’s OK!’ says Scott. That’s they way you want to be seen as a manager and that’s the way you want your people to be seen.”

“When people see you as approachable all sorts of opportunities open up.”

Through a VERY generous offer from Scott, ESB Journal is able to offer his awesome new book for FREE! No strings, no opt-in necessary. You can download your copy by clicking this link.

You know what would be REALLY GREAT?

If you’d take a moment and SHARE this link with your friends and colleagues — help us get the word out about Scott’s book, and help him spread the message of approachability, and it’s value to your overall business success. Use the links at the bottom of this article. Thanks!

About the Author
Scott Ginsberg is a fun, lively, energetic and experienced media guest who has been interviewed and featured in USA Today, CNN, NBC, 20/20, Fast Company, Redbook, the Wall St. Journal and dozens of radio and tv talk shows across the nation. Scott is a regular contributor to the St. Louis Small Business Monthly, INSTORE Magazine, PR Canada and Expert Village. His conversational, content-rich articles have appeared in hundreds of online and offline publications worldwide. Also, his work has been reprinted in dozens of textbooks and resource guides.

His other books include Stick Yourself Out There, The Approachable Salesperson, The Approachable Manager, The Approachable Frontline, The Power of Approachability, How to Be That Guy, Hello, My Name is Scott, and Make a Name for Yourself. Visit him online at http://www.hellomynameisscott.com.

Networking
Facebook and Twitter aren’t just for Fans, they are also a great way for you to find others in the business and connect with them. Look for press members or reviewers who would be interested in your type of business and then follow them. If you remain active online, they will eventually take notice of you and possibly give you a few write ups in the local paper or magazine to help get your name out there.

Establishing Your Authority
Another part of social media is blogging, and through a blog you can help establish yourself as an authority over your industry. People like to buy from those who know their business and do it well so having a highly informative and trustworthy blog will make people more inclined to shop with you.

Creating Hype
In addition to using your social networking accounts to network with press and industry related individuals, you should also be using them to keep your prospective customers interested and engaged. Keep them waiting and wanting. Post updates about your opening, the new products or services you are adding to your line, and what you are doing to bring it all together. By keeping everyone involved you will have them eager to support you, and dying to get in when you open your doors.

Businesses today won’t survive if they don’t start incorporating social media sites into their every day operations. Shoppers today no longer simply want to buy their goods from an unknown business; they want an experience and want to feel as though they are connecting with a community when they offer a business their patronage. Give them what they want and create a strong following by signing up and staying active on social media sites and on your blog.

The ability to survey your online network is a strategic way to collect opinions and insights. Recognizing that today’s consumers are social beings, Zoomerang has released a new Facebook application that makes it easy for users to quickly get feedback from their online communities. The free and simple application allows you to post a survey or poll on your Facebook page and then quickly and effectively draw together feedback from the breadth of your social ecosystem. You can even include photos or videos in the question and answer options to make the choices more descriptive.

With Zoomerang’s Surveys & Polls for Facebook, you can ask your friends to help you decide on a myriad of topics—personal and professional. Ask your network to:

• Rank the Halloween costume most likely to help you win the “most frightening”;
• Identify trends and conduct business planning accordingly;
• Solicit votes for the next ice cream “flavor of the month” for your business;
• Determine what products or services your customers are most interested in

“Feedback is priceless in this day and age,” said Alex Terry, general manager of Zoomerang. “Consumers trust their inner circle of friends and family and, at the end of the day, their opinion is heavily valued.”

Effectively engaging with your network on social media allows you to get more insights and input from those that you already trust. Using Zoomerang’s Surveys & Polls for Facebook is one way to effectively gather and share these insights. Now is the time for you to make better decisions with others’ input-your Facebook friends are listening.

For more information on this free application, check out Zoomerang’s Surveys & Polls for Facebook at https://apps.facebook.com/zoomerangsurveys.

Where to Go
One such site is Tagged; it has over 100 million people already registered in over 200 countries and can help you find your special someone or a bunch of new friends who share your interests. It makes it easy to meet new people through social games, friend suggestions, browsing profiles, group interests and much more.

What to Do
Common interests are a foundation for many friendships, so you can use the site Tagged to meet people who have interests similar to yours. You can do so by looking for pages on the site that have people who have joined with that interest. People from all over the world use the site, so there’s almost bound to be someone out there who cares about the same things you do.

Another way to find new friends is through connections to your current ones. You may be able to find new people whom your friends are friends with, simply with a click of a button.

While friendship, dating and flirting can all be a part of this new approach to social networking, there’s much more to it. For instance, engaging social games can also be the secret sauce when it comes to social discovery. The popular Pets game, for example, garners over 5 million unique interactions a day. If you are looking for a romantic connection, a recent survey found 38 percent of respondents made a romantic connection through a Tagged social game.

One of the other favorite features of the Tagged site is a news feed with a difference. The “What’s New” feed cleverly lets you choose which member updates you see by filtering them according to location, gender and age. This makes finding new friends to meet around the block or around the world easy, while still maintaining tight privacy controls by following your account’s privacy settings.

When on the Go
For fun and friendship when you’re far away from home, the site Tagged has apps for the Android, iPhone and BlackBerry, and it recently launched a new mobile website for all other handsets.

Learn More
For more information about finding new friends in the social networking space, visit http://www.tagged.com.

The problem is, social networking comes with, well, problems. Users encounter lots of spam e-mail and phishing schemes. They’re also bombarded with copious-not to mention sometimes inappropriate-advertising. Researchers say many people are so concerned about security that they enter false information because they fear their real information could be used to steal their identities.

Perhaps most tellingly, an editor of technology site CNET wonders, as do many others, what she can actually do once she’s joined a site.

What’s the solution for people who like the links with other people that social networking offers but want more? It’s the logical, yet infinitely more useful, next step in the evolution of online connection: knowledge networking. Instead of networking for networking’s sake, knowledge networking’s goal is sharing knowledge and growing your expertise on subjects you’re passionate about-fly-fishing, politics, swing music, vegetarianism, you name it.

An easy-to-use online tool that already offers a great opportunity for knowledge networking is TrueThinker. Here’s how it works:

Let’s say you’ve got a passion for gardening. With TrueThinker.com, you can form a community about gardening and invite anyone anywhere who’s interested in gardening to join. In your community, you and other members share what you know about new varieties, planting schedules, garden design, pest control, etc. You can organize garden walks, send notices of horticultural events, chat using the messaging feature and more.

You can also build a “KnowledgeBank” on gardening. Here, community members save and share relevant information like helpful or thought-provoking articles, Web site links, photos, journals and much more.

Ultimately, you can use the site not just to connect with others but, most importantly, to grow what you and others know about nearly any topic. If you visit http://www.TrueThinker.com, you can sign up for a free, seven-day trial to take the site for a test-drive.

At the center sits Millennials, controlling their world via cell phones, laptops, iPods, and iPads. But, what are these elusive and complex creatures thinking? What do they care about? How strong is their purchasing power? And who will actually earn their discerning dollars, and why?

Whether you’re a business professional trying to decode the $43 billion youth market, a marketer looking for a message that connects, or an entrepreneur trying to develop youth-oriented products, Chasing Youth Culture and Getting It Right gives readers an unparalleled field guide to the newest wave of millennials and their mindsets.

Inside this unique book, you’ll meet four major tribes: the Wired Techie, The Conformist But Somewhat Paradoxical Preppy, The Always-Mellow Alternative, and The Cutting-Edge Independent, and understand their key traits, likes and dislikes, and what kind of adult they will likely become. The book includes many examples of companies, brands, and organizations who chased the youth demographic and got it right, or who failed to nail their audience. It also explains such concepts as Warholism, Tweenabees, Hand-me-ups, Massclusivity, The Facebook Effect, and Instantity.

Author and “teen whisperer” Tina Wells explains that millennials are “more wired, interconnected and aware than any generation before them, Millennials hold great power to launch and sustain brands that impact America’s cultural landscape – and the economy at large.”

Recent studies into the attitudes and spending habits of millennials yielded surprising facts, including:

• Tweens spend $43 billion annually, which translates to about $2,047 per tween
• Young people in droves are using the Internet for shopping: a whopping 84% of respondents in our survey claim to shop online regularly
• 61% of teens hear about new products online, while 15% still hear about them from friends
• 99% percent of teens have a Facebook page
• 36% of high school students claim that they would delay or forego college due to costs

Wells’ new book, Chasing Youth Culture and Getting it Right: How Your Business Can Profit by Tapping Today’s Most Powerful Trendsetters and Tastemakers, shares insights that can help businesses adjust their marketing efforts in order to take full advantage of these trends.

Among the topics covered in the book include:

• Traits of this generation’s four main tribes – the Wired Techies, the Conformist but Somewhat Paradoxical Preppies, the Always Mellow Alternatives, and the Cutting Edge Independents

• How technology is rewiring the New Millennial

• What Millennials buy and why

• The coming of the Global Mobile: How the New Millennials will shape the future

• Why Millennials don’t like the U.S. two party political system, very likely to pass away

• Importance and impact of concepts like Warholism, Tweenabees, Hand-me-ups, Massclusivity, The Facebook Effect, and Instantity

• Organizations who chased the youth demographic and got it right …and those who failed to nail this attention-challenged audience

• The top brands millennial deem as “luxury” – and those surprisingly not on their radar, and why

• Why some brands will be around when Millennials have kids of their own

About Tina Wells:
As the founder and CEO of Buzz Marketing Group, Tina Wells has spent the last decade keeping her finger on the pulse of what’s hot for tweens and teens – what makes them tick and their economic influence. Prior to becoming America’s youth expert, she earned a B.A. in Communication Arts from Hood College, and she’s currently a student at Wharton School of Business.

It’s a safe bet that this number will only increase; however, it will become increasingly more important to find ways to better manage the time we spend on the social networks.

If you want to be able to get anything else done, you’ve got to find a way to maximize the time you spend on sites like Twitter – and the good news is that there are a great many resources available out there that can help you do that.

In this short video (under 5 minutes), Traci shares some of her favorite Twitter-inspired resources. You’ll discover ways to leverage Twitter to increase local business, add audio to your website, showcase testimonials from your Twitter following, and much more.

“I am so excited about this tool. I have never seen an online merchant provide immediate monetary incentive to customers to Facebook Like their products. With our new Facebook Like & Save Feature, all of our clients have a new tool to take their online sales viral. If you think about the concept, it just makes sense. I suspect that one day this will be a standard feature in the ecommerce industry. For now, I pleased that we are the only ecommerce provider offering it because if gives our clients a competitive advantage,” explains Craig Ross, VP of Sales at Nexternal.

The tool is easy to use for both customers and merchants alike. When a customer visits a product in the merchant’s online store they will see the Facebook Like button and the sharing discount they receive for simply liking the product. Once they select the Like button they will instantly see their discount in the shopping cart. At this same point, the Like notification will instantly appear on their Facebook News Feed with a direct link back to the merchant’s online store. With a simple click the customer has posted product info on their Facebook News Feed because the savvy merchant provided the incentive for them to do so.

For Nexternal merchants, simply select the checkbox for Facebook sharing and in the preferences specify the Sharing Amount. Turning on Facebook Like & Save is that simple. Not only does this tool provide an instant source of links into a merchant’s store it also makes a merchant’s products more attractive to the search engines now that social signals are a factor they use in their rankings.

Napa Valley’s Goosecross Cellars was an early adopter of this marketing technology with the intent of enhancing communication and enriching the overall customer experience. Owner and President of Goosecross Cellars, David Topper, states, “We have been using the Facebook Like button in our Nexternal powered store for quite some time to successfully increase brand awareness. Now that we can provide added value for our fans with an immediate incentive, I think our Facebook Likes will grow exponentially. We love the fact that we can now reward our customers automatically for posting links about their favorite Goosecross wines and sharing their experience with others. This is a clever concept and is just another reason why we continue to partner with Nexternal.”

About Nexternal
Nexternal is a leading provider of web based ecommerce software. Founded in 1999, the company’s unique ecommerce system is used by hundreds of clients in many diverse industries. Nexternal’s software features an always-on screen shopping cart with integrated marketing and fulfillment tools allowing merchants to maximize revenue while minimizing operating costs.

Nexternal’s software was rated five out of five stars by Internet.com and is a three time SIIA Codie awards finalist for Best E-Commerce Software. Clients include Weyerhaeuser, USA Today, Ste Michelle Wine Estates, Taser International and Hershey. With locations in Carlsbad, CA, and New Canaan, CT, Nexternal provides industry leading customer service. For more information, contact Nexternal via phone at 800.914.6161 or visit them online at http://www.nexternal.com.

For small businesses and organizations that wonder how to grow both their number of Facebook fans and their e-mail list, a pet food manufacturer that’s passionate about making dog food and treats that are healthy and fun can be a great example.

The company, Dingo, offered customers a coupon if they both liked the Dingo Facebook page and joined the company’s mailing list. To make it easy for fans to sign up without having to leave Facebook, Dingo added Constant Contact’s Join My Mailing List application to its Facebook page.

The company took it a step further by making the deal contingent on its Facebook page getting 5,000 “likes.” By adding the goal, the dog food company encouraged coupon seekers to tell their friends and share the deal with their own social connections. Once the 5,000 number was reached, the coupon would be e-mailed to customers.

The program worked fantastically. The Facebook Page went from a mere 330 “Likes” to well over 5,000 in just three days, with roughly half of that number attributed to new customers.

People are visiting the Facebook Page for more than the one coupon. The company offers other coupons and deals on both Facebook and in e-mails, a tactic that keeps fans checking in and making purchases regularly.

Other steps Constant Contact recommends for social media include:

In all your e-mails, add links to each of your social media profiles.

On Twitter, promote your list by teasing your pending campaign and adding a link to your e-mail sign-up form.

Link to an archived copy of your newsletter.

For more information on how you may be able to better leverage social media and e-mail marketing in your business, visit http://www.constantcontact.com/socialmedia.