If you’re receiving this blog post, that means you are one of the last remaining survivors.  You are the future now.  You are the last hope for humanity.  Only you can help rebuild our fallen world.  Round up as many Facebook friends and Twitter followers that you can!  Re-tweet dammitt!  For god’s sake Re-Tweet!!!!!! (and don’t forget to @mention yourself in the Re-Tweet).

You would literally think it was a zombie outbreak the way people are responding to the latest Klout score changes.  Hordes of people emotionally breaking down claiming all sorts of negative backlash that will fall upon their professional lives now that the majority of users scores have decreased.  Actually, it’s more likely that it’s even, we’re just not hearing as much from those whose scores were unaffected or went up.

Well, nobody is perfect.  Was unfollowing everyone and starting over a good idea?  Probably remains to be seen. Looking back, I probably would have been better off not announcing it on my blog, but I’ve always been transparent with my actions, and simply thought it would be useful to others to document what I would be experiencing.  But in my particular case, I do believe it was the right thing to do regarding my wants/needs when it came to managing my social media efforts on a personal basis.  Needless to say, quite a few folks didn’t quite agree with my tactics.  And that’s OK.  Everyone is entitled to their opinion.

The time has finally come.  I think I always knew that I’d have to do some sort of Twitter house cleaning, but based on my last blog post, and some folks like Michael Hyatt and the mighty Chris Brogan who have pioneered by braving the backlash, I think I’m ready for a purge myself.  So starting today, I begin unfollowing everyone on Twitter with the help of SocialOomph.

Up to this point, I’ve subscribed to the reciprocal follow approach.  You follow me?  Well then I follow you.  Why not?  I’ve always used lists to curate my Twitter information, so the size of my following wasn’t all that much of a concern of mine.  Over the years it’s allowed me to grow a sizeable Twitter audience.  But at what expense?

I want to be able to use DMs in Twitter, but really it’s such a vast wasteland of spam that it’s practically impossible to do.  While I have a column for my DMs setup in Hootsuite, it’s really just for the rare chance that I may actually catch a legitimate message here and there.  And even that is highly unlikely.

What I fail to understand is that after years of being in existence, how is it that Twitter has failed to deliver absolutely nothing in the form of spam control or filtering for DMs.  It can’t possibly be that difficult. 

Some suggested features:

• Give me some filter options to weed out DMs with links.  That would eliminate at least half of of the spam.
• How’s about filter options that let me dictate what types of Twitter users can DM me.  Such as # of tweets made, followers, etc.  At least that way I can increase the likelihood of real users DM’ing me.  Not perfect, but a start.
• Give me the option of only allowing those I follow to DM me.  Of course, this one probably doesn’t help those with large followers/following, but still could be helpful to many.
• An option to block Auto DMs. Please, this one is a no brainer.  In fact, above all, I’d take this as it would probably get rid of 90% of what I don’t want to see.

If Twitter isn’t going to pull the trigger, how’s about Hootsuite or Tweetdeck offering these features?  I’m no technical expert, but I’ve got to believe something could be done.  Anyone out there using any tools that provide any of the features above that I’ve missed?

I had signed up for Crowdbooster a few months ago, but never really got around to giving it a close look until the past week or so and I’ve become a fan.  While there are quite a few social media tools out there that provide similar services, Crowdbooster has it’s share of unique features that I could definitely see myself using fairly regularly.

What’s The Same?

You get access to usual stats around followers, tweets, mentions and retweets for Twitter as well as fans, comments, mentions and likes for your Facebook page.  You can switch between both accounts easily, and create charts and tables pivoting off of dates.

What’s Different?

Some really cool features that differentiate Crowdbooster include their recommendation engine which I’m finding very useful.  Based on your account activity, Crowdbooster leads with some action items you can choose to take advantage of.  For example, Crowdbooster created a pre-formatted tweet for me to schedule that thanked a few of my followers who re-tweeted one of my tweets.  I found this to be extremely useful saving me the time of having to track this down myself.  This is a tremendous feature that saves me time in engaging with my audience, and makes it much more likely that I will be able to do so more in the future.  In addition, Crowdbooster also was able to comb through my following and identify a group of high influencers based on their Klout score that recommended me connecting with as well.

I can also quickly and easily identify my top retweeters, and which tweets I made that resonated the most with my audience.  Collectively, it’s a great tool that saves me time in maximizing my social media usage personally, and best of all, the bulk of Crowdbooster’s service is completely free.  The premium version adds the ability to export reports out.

Sadly my Facebook Page has been lacking as I haven’t spent much time with it, so I haven’t been able to get the full benefit of Crowdbooster in that respect but I would imagine this would be a useful tool in that respect as well.  The free account allows you to manage 3 accounts, so that version is really meant more for personal use.

If you’re looking for an easy tool to manage your social media efforts for yourself or a small to medium sized business, Crowdbooster is a great site to consider adding to your social media toolkit.

I’m about 9 months into my role at Strategies 360 running their social media outfit, and we’ve just about hit critical mass where we are exploring and upgrading our social media tools around monitoring and engagement.  Up to this point, we’ve been able to manage without the enterprise level offerings such as Radian 6 and Sysomos, but times are a changin.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been demo’ing and researching a few different options, and it’s fairly overwhelming trying to make heads or tails on which solution might be our best fit.  One thing has definitely become certain however is that no matter what we choose, no solution currently exists that can provide the right value and set of tools that fit every client we manage.

Offerings like Radian6 and Sysomos are great, but they are overkill for smaller clients that do not have thousands of mentions per month.  To pay for those services for small to medium sized clients would be a waste of dollars.  My hope was that either of these services would have had more flexible pricing structures that would allow us to use one tool for all our clients, but it’s become pretty clear we’re going to have to use a variety of tools based on client needs and budgets.

This certainly makes it more challenging to have to manage from a logistical point of view, but it may be unavoidable with where these tools are at in their lifecycles.  I would imagine it requires a fairly substantial investment in infrastructure to mine that much data and be able to provide it in real time.

More to come as our team grows and we experience a variety of learnings along the way.  Would love to hear from any of you around what solutions you have found successful.