Archives for 2012

A Special @JugnooMe Invite to @Seesmic Users #Seesmic

Dear Seesmic User,

As the news of Seesmic being acquired by Hootsuite settles and you look to decide what you wish to do next, we’d love to offer you another option to moving to Seesmic’s new home.

As someone who used Seesmic back when it was a simple video-sharing tool, and seeing how it progressed to a full social dashboard, it was kinda bittersweet to see it lose its independence.

Ryan Holmes, the CEO of Hootsuite, has already stated:

If someone is a casual user of Seesmic, go this way [e.g. to Twitter]. We’ve always been very focused on the Enterprise.

While this is great for Enterprise-level users, it’s probably not so great for solo entrepreneurs, smaller or mid-sized businesses, or even casual users of Seesmic.

This is where Jugnoo would like to help and offer another option for you.

More Than Just a Social Dashboard

As a Seesmic user, you already know how to manage your social accounts across multiple networks, as well as uploading rich media and creating search streams, etc.

However, social media – whether you’re a casual user or a business user – is much more than just being able to have multiple streams and team members.

You also need context of your social media activity; your most influential conversations; multimedia promotional tools; analytics and much, much more. This is where Jugnoo and our Social CRM solution takes your Seesmic experience to the next level.

Here are just some features, some you’ll already know, others you’ll want to know:

Social Dashboard

Much like Seesmic, the Jugnoo social dashboard allows you to consolidate several social accounts under the one roof.

Currently supported platforms include Twitter, Facebook (Profiles and Pages), LinkedIn, YouTube, Buffer, Posterous, Tumblr and Google, with more being added regularly.

This allows you to post updates to more than one network, and our Buffer partnership ensures you can schedule these updates at a time when the majority of your audience is online.

Multiple Search Streams

Jugnoo saved searches — Multiple saved search streams (click to expand)

As well as being able to update your networks, you can also set up various streams just for search purposes. This is perfect for brand monitoring; customer service; keywords; reputation management; competitive analysis; and much, much more.

You can then just choose which streams you have open in your browser, and our responsive design ensures the optimum amount of information is on display at any given time.

Oh, and if you’re a regular Twitter chat attendee, and use a stream dedicated to the hashtag, we automagically populate your tweet with the chat hashtag when you reply to someone – bonus!

Social Monitoring

While being able to manage multiple accounts is all well and good, if you’re not measuring then you’re not using social media to the full potential for your business.

With Jugnoo’s social monitoring solution, we help you understand the impact of your online actions. Who’s talking about you; where are they; who are they; how are they describing you; and more.

Better still, not only does our social monitoring show you at a glance how your business is doing on social media, we also have the tools that partner with monitoring seamlessly to take your understanding of your audience to the next level.

Social Analytics

Understanding your followers and fans is key to helping you create the kind of content they want to consume. Create that kind of content, and the likelihood of your audience sharing your product or service increases, and this then helps you improve your offering as feedback comes in.

With Jugnoo’s social analytics, you can begin to learn more about your Facebook, Twitter and YouTube audience.

While the information primarily looks at peg counts, reach and views in the current version, our imminent update will dive deeper into the make-up of your audience, including purchase intent history and more.

Tweet Visualyzer?

Jugnoo Buzz Visualized (click to expand)

Currently for Twitter only, but with more platforms to be added soon, Jugnoo’s Tweet Visualyzer? takes your monitoring and keyword searches to a visually attractive and easy-to-manage playground.

Not only does the Tweet Visualyzer? show you who’s saying what and when they’re saying it, it groups conversations and participants of these conversations together based on the context of the conversation itself.

What does this mean for your business? Simple – now you can truly see who drives the most buzz around your business, enabling you to initiate contact with them on a possible ambassador program, where they become your voice to their audience.

It’s taking social influence to its natural next stage.

Social Hub

The great thing about the social web is there’s so much choice for the consumer. The bad thing about the social web is there’s so much choice for the consumer – at least, as far as trying to keep their attention on your core products and services.

While some social users may prefer twitter, others love Facebook, while others look to blogs for recommendations, purchases, etc. This is where Jugnoo’s Social Hub comes in.

For brands, you can collate all your main social feeds and rich media – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, RSS, Pinterest and Instagram, etc – and display them on a hub that’s the equivalent of Pinterest on steroids.

Visitors can then browse, share, save and recommend. Not only that, with Social Hub 2.0 due imminently, you’ll be able to offer e-commerce solutions directly from the hub – if your visitor sees something they like, they can buy it there and then.

For consumers, they can collate their favourite brands into one area and only receive the offers they’re interested in, increasing the likelihood of a sale from the hub.

It’s a win-win all round.

Social Teams

For most businesses, it’s no longer just a one-man job when it comes to your social media strategy and community management.

Instead, it’s more likely to be social teams that run a campaign and account – sales, marketing, customer service, community management, content curators and more.

This is where the Jugnoo social teams solution helps. You can allocate team members to different teams; define user roles (from full admin to content sharer only and everything in-between); choose which social networks are used in the team; and more.

Add in our Workflow solution – released next month – and you have a fully-fledged social workroom with tasks, reports and more across your business.

Video Marketing

People, by nature, are visual creatures, and it’s why images and videos are the most popular items when it comes to sharing across social networks. With that in mind, enter Jugnoo’s Social Video Marketing suite.

With our video marketing software, you can both create and distribute powerful marketing messages to your audience. Or educational videos. Or fun videos – the choices are only limited by your needs.

We provide you with a library of templates, with more added regularly, as well as images and soundtracks to use in your videos.

You can also upload your own, and the editing suite allows you to crop, cut, focus and much more to create a truly engaging and professionally-edited video.

It’s no surprise that this is one of the most popular features of Jugnoo’s userbase.

How Does $20 per Month Sound For All This and More?

As you can see, Jugnoo offers a host of features and solutions that take it beyond being “just a social media dashboard.” As Jure Klepic of The Huffington Post writes:

Jugnoo is far more powerful than Hootsuite.

As kind as Jure’s words are, we’re not resting on our laurels. While the features here are in-depth and cohesive, they’re just part of the bigger picture.

Coming in the next couple of weeks you’ll see more social networks, RSS feeds, customs streams (multiple networks in a single stream) and more. There’s also our lead generation solution that will identify and delegate sales opportunities based on language, keywords and sentiment tracking.

Add to that our mobile app – release date the next eight weeks – and, as you can see, it’s quite the package – and one you can have it all for just $20 per month.

Yes, you read that correctly:

$20 per month for all the above features and the upcoming ones.

This is to both celebrate us coming out of our beta mode in October, and to show that – as a loyal Seesmic user – you don’t have to be limited to either moving to a new owner or using the basic Twitter and Facebook features.

Not only that, but when you transfer from Seesmic to Jugnoo, we’ll lock you in at our special $20 per month offer for life, even when we add new features and solutions.

As a quick comparison, Jugnoo offers 5 team members for $20 per month. To get the same team numbers on Hootsuite, you’d have to pay $50 per month:

Hootsuite pricing plans (click to enlarge)

We know how much you need a social dashboard – but we also know that you need more than that to truly be effective with your time and success.

We’re sorry to see Seesmic disappear, too – as fans of both the product and of Loic and his team. With this offer, we’d like to try and make your next decision a little less hard.

If you’re ready to check us out free for 30 days, click here or on the Pricing Plan details below to get started.

We look forward to giving you a warm welcome aboard the Jugnoo experience.

Note – Social Teams will be available on September 14. Social Monitoring and Social Hub will be available to all users on September 21.

Quit Treating Your Blog Readers Like Second Class Chumps

Bloggers are a breed apart from many other online outlets. That?s not meant in a grand or condescending way ? just that it takes a very different mindset to be a blogger, and one that stays the course.

Of course, a large part of this success comes from the readers a blogger attracts. These readers turn into subscribers, turn into loyal members of your community, turn into ?brand advocates? for your blog.

Essentially, your readers dictate much of how your blog is viewed by the interactions both on your domain and on their own networks. So why would you want to treat them like chumps?

You?re not treating your readers like chumps? You?re looking after them? Are you sure? Let?s take a quick check.

You?re Killing Their Eyes

Content is King. It?s the rallying cry of many bloggers ? and, for the most part, it can be true. After all, without content, you have no readers, right? But what good is content when it?s surrounded by a craptastic design?

For those of you that were born before 1990, I have one thing to say to you ? GeoCities! Yeah, you know what I?m talking about. For the benefit of our readers who?re not as ancient as me, GeoCities was Yahoo?s website building platform. It was meant to offer an easy option for non-technical people to be able to build their own sites.

The problem was, once you give a non-technical person the key to tech tools, chaos ensues. Cue some of the ugliest pieces of crud ever seen online!

Jump forward to today. With tools like WordPress and Genesis (affiliate link), it?s never been easier to get a professional-looking website or blog up-and-running quickly and without too much hard work.

If you want to encourage readers to enjoy your site and stick around for more, then make your place welcoming. After all, would you go back to a dayglo pink website with yellow font and dancing pixel people? Exactly.

Takeaway. You want to encourage readers to come back? Make your offering an attractive one.

You?re Acting Like a Cheapskate

One of the big trends in blog reader behaviour is the rise of mobile browsing. With the popularity of iPhone, Android and tablets, web browsing behaviour has shifted dramatically in the last 12 months and will continue to move towards mobile.

So why aren?t you looking after your mobile visitors?

If you?re using WordPress, for example, there are a host of themes that are built with a responsive design.

This means no matter what browser display your visitor comes in on, the site will adapt (check For Bloggers By Bloggers out on a tablet or smartphone, and then compare it to the web version). Again, Genesis offers several themes in this area ? check out their Theme Chooser tool and select Mobile Responsive.

If you?re happy with your existing theme, you might be using something like WPtouch to offer a mobile version of your site. But here?s the thing ? why are you using the free version?

As useful as it is, it?s actually very limited ? it doesn?t even support threaded conversations on the comments, for example. Which, if your blog has a lot of comments, can soon lead to an unholy mess where replies to comments aren?t in context, and the conversation can soon become messy and convoluted.

For as little as $49, you can add a whole host of features by upgrading to WPtouch Pro. Dedicated iPad styling, retina support, theme styling, threaded comments and much, much more. That?s got to be worth $49, no?

Takeaway. Your readers add value to your blog. Are you treating them as valuable?

You?ve Joined the Mail Service

Remember when you first started blogging, and your passion was burning to be the best blogger out there? You were going to write the most amazing posts, start the most intense conversations around them, and attract the coolest audience.

And, you kinda achieved that. So you got lazy, and started posting any old stuff. You?d take a picture and write some nonsense about the hidden meaning behind it for small business owners.

Or you?d write a Top 10 list that offered absolutely nothing new to the topic of that list, or the people/services on it.

Or you?d write a post about how awful it is to be you, and that you should be able to write what you want because it?s your blog and your readers should be grateful you?re still churning out content.

Stop this. STOP THIS NOW.

No one cares about bloggers that feel they?ve conquered the market and can do what they want. Readers came to you for a reason ? they don?t want a diluted version of that, because you want to get fat off your affiliate ads and crappy ebooks.

You want to be an awesome blogger that everyone wants to read? Then write epic shit ? every time!

Sure, share your ebooks and premium courses and affiliate ads ? but make sure they offer value to your readers just as much as they offer dollars to your pocket.

Don?t sacrifice what made you great by attaching it to the mundane. Be great the way you aspired to be great.

Takeaway ? the minute you start mailing your content in, stop blogging. It benefits no-one.

These are just three of the ways you?re short-changing your readers. You might not like being told this, especially if you?re guilty of any of the points above.

Then again, doing the right thing doesn?t always come easy. But the results are more than worth the effort.

This post originally appeared on For Bloggers By Bloggers.

How to Use @JugnooMe to Make Social Monitoring Fun and Help Find and Build Brand Advocates

Over at Jugnoo, we’ve been tinkering away on a few updates to our solutions.

Between now and the end of September, there are even more cool updates being dropped in, and these will turn our dashboard into the fully-fledged offering that’s going to answer a lot of questions around social media, especially that all-important ROI question.

In the meantime, however, there are some pretty funky features and complementary tools that you can use right now. Case in point – social monitoring.

We all know how important social monitoring (or listening) is when it comes to your business or clients. Brand reputation, lead generation, customer service and more can all be optimized through a smart monitoring strategy.

The problem is, sometimes this can be very mundane and uninspiring. So, to counter that and make social monitoring a little more fun (while still helping get effective and actionable results), here are a few ways Jugnoo can help make things more fun.

Start Your Engines, Please

The first place to start is via our social search option. When you set up keywords in our platform, the most popular results are shown alongside your social analytics (for this example I’m just using Twitter – we also support Facebook and YouTube, with more platforms to come in the next release).

When you’re logged in the Jugnoo dashboard, click onto your social analytics icon and select your Twitter account. As long as you’ve set up a social search, you’ll see the keywords underneath your Most Popular Tweets (click to expand).

Click on the keyword, and you’ll be taking to the first fun part of the monitoring – our Tweet Visualyzer? (again, this will be expanded to feature more platforms in future iterations).

Once you’ve opened up the Visualyzer, the fun can begin.

The Simple (and Fun!) Way to Measure Buzz

One of the reasons we built our Tweet Visualyzer? was to make sense of the conversations on Twitter that can get noisy and confusing fast.

By separating the tweets into a simple and very visual solution, you can see what conversations are more popular, who’s having them and how they’re connected.

So, when you click your chosen keyword from the social analytics screen on the Jugnoo dashboard, you’ll see the same one on our Visualyzer. You can change views by using the top navigation, to switch from words to bubbles to usernames and more.

Now, let’s say you want to see who your biggest advocates are, so you can surprise and reward them with unique offers, or invite them to be official partners with your brand.

By clicking on the Who icon (the little head and shoulders guy), you can immediately see who’s talking about you the most:

In our example, you can see @FeastInc, @AtlasSymposium and @JeremyDeMello are three people who are talking about Jugnoo a lot. Hovering over their usernames, you can then see what exactly they’re saying about your brand.

This allows you to identify a potential approach to partnership, or see what kind of stuff they like. This can help you find what would be a cool surprise and delight package to send them.

By knowing what they like and other preferences, it enables you to be smarter about your approach when reaching out to them.

Once you have that information, then you can really add to the fun yet effective monitoring options, and continue to build the fledgling relationship.

Hub, Hub and Away!

This is where the third part of the puzzle comes into play – the Jugnoo Social Hub?.

Kinda like a Pinterest board on steroids, our Social Hub? allows you to grab RSS feeds from various social networks and create a living, breathing hub where the most recent news around your choices can be displayed.

Now, let’s say you want to connect more with the people talking about you from the Visualyzer results. You could set up a hub with feeds from their blogs, or Twitter account, or YouTube channel, etc, and use that to keep up-to-date with their latest updates or posts.

You can then reshare from the hub, send it as an email recommendation, tweet directly to the person, and more.

Let’s say @FeastInc, for example, tweeted that it was their pet’s birthday and you were a pet retailer. You could reply to them and wish them a Happy Pet Birthday, and then use the email function to send to your sales team and ask them to get in touch with @FeastInc to send them a goodie bag for their pet.

Or, you could see the URL for their most recent blog post, drop on over to leave a comment and mention the pet’s birthday in that comment too.

You’re building rapport; you’re showing you want to get to know them; and you’re rewarding for their support of you too.Who doesn’t like that?

These are just basic ideas using some cool tools that don’t even fall within the traditional social monitoring mix. When you partner them with the actual full social monitoring solution in the Jugnoo dashboard (released in the next 2-3 weeks) – well, the options become even more powerful.

And you still keep the fun factor of visuals, images and emotion, while making the connections that really count.

Works for me – you?

Sorry, Content Dudes, But It’s Just Plain Old Marketing

If you search “content marketing” on Google, you get about 560 million results.

There are events dedicated to content marketing, and folks like Brian Clark, Joe Pulizzi, Marcus Sheridan and others are huge proponents of the term.

So, big business then. And yet…

Is there really such a thing as content marketing? Or is it just marketing, plain and simple, and a facet of a bigger picture?

According to Wikipedia:

…content is information and experiences that may provide value for an end-user/audience in specific contexts.

So, by definition, content is information that may help in the decision-making process.

Marketing, on the other hand, is a different beast altogether. The core reason for marketing to exist, in no uncertain terms, is to make a buyer fall in love with something enough to purchase it.

This “something” can usually be categorized into three clear sections: product, service, expertise.

The Product and Service Angle

Product and service is straightforward. You make something, or provide something, and charge people for that. This could be footwear, a meal, cleaning services, or a million other things.

But it’s still the product or service that’s being marketed.

Sure, you might write a blog post about your industry and why your offering is better than anyone else’s.

Or you might create a video to showcase a design and embed on your website.

But that creation of content is simply a tactic in the bigger picture of marketing. The content is created to market the end product – you’re not marketing the actual content.

If you were, the message would be something like “See how cool this video / blog post is – buy the content now!”. Which wouldn’t make any kind of sense.

Switch to a marketing message, though – “The X1Z Thingymajig – Order Yours Today!” – and it’s back to using the content to drive sales of the product or service.

The Expertise Angle

One area where content marketing could be seen as a standalone solution is that of expertise (particularly on business blogs).

To show you’re someone a potential customer should do business with, you share your expertise and knowledge with your audience. You might provide white papers, or ebooks, or webinars, to help propagate that expertise and separate you as a thought leader (if that’s your goal).

The thinking here is, if the audience sees you know your stuff, they’re more likely to do business with you than your competitor.

But then, there’s that “do business with” phrase again. Because, as much as a business or consultant can say they’re offering expertise for the good of their readers, there’s always another end goal in sight – attracting business for your offering.

Sure, you’re offering free content as opposed to charging for it – but it’s with the goal of marketing your businesses through less in-your-face means. The end goal is still dollars in the cash register for whatever it is you’re selling (product, service, consultancy expertise).

Content is Still a Key Tactic

Now, I don’t want this post to come across as dismissing the importance of content when it comes to marketing your business. As someone who’s consulted clients over the years on the benefits of content, I know the value content brings to the table.

A successful blogger outreach, for example, can reap rewards at a far reduced cost to a business than traditional print or media ad buy can offer. A timely video can capture the hearts of your customers more than a radio ad ever could. And all the other pieces of content that get discussed when talking about content marketing all offer value too.

The thing is, though, it’s still just another tactic. The content is part of the overall strategy to get a customer to buy into your offering, and a solid part at that. But a standalone? I can’t see it.

Besides, when was the last time you ever saw a major news release and promotion for your latest blog post..? 😉