With few exceptions, most studies about the intersection of rural America and the internet concentrate exclusively on broadband accessibility. However, what is rarely addressed is the fact that – as usual – rural America is already getting by with what tools they have at their disposal. Why? Because their livelihoods are inextricably intertwined with their ability to get their opinions out onto the interwebz.

Take the recent case of the #YellowFail grassroots campaign. Michele Payn-Knoper over at CauseMatters did an excellent job in cataloging the furor unleashed by America’s farmers when Yellowtail Wine recently donated a hefty sum to the HSUS. In short, America’s farmers consider HSUS’ lobbying efforts to be harmful to America’s farmers, and they clearly have no qualms about protesting fellow farmers’ association with the animal rights’ group. And once they started the ball rolling online, there was no stopping them. In fact, Yellowtail eventually responded with outreach to the Animal Agriculture Alliance – working with them to repair the damage to their online reputation.

Did their outreach efforts work? It’s unclear at the moment, as there are still some bruised feelings surrounding the gaffe.

What I personally find interesting here is that this seems to signal a massive shift in online demographics and share of voice. As someone who has watched online communities evolve since the late ’80s, I can assure you that farmers never before held a significant share of voice online. Yet with significantly decreased cost of entry as of late (thank you twitter!), they have (pardon the pun) stormed the barn and made their presence known.

So what do you think? Are we seeing rural America come into its own when it comes to grassroots campaigns? If so, what do you think the impact will be?

It’s become clear that “twitter followers” is the new “circulation number” for many companies out there. Unfortunately, that’s rarely the whole story, and rarely should a twitter account be evaluated according to this one metric. After all, you can easily bump up your numbers by the thousands with a $10 investment online, but these followers are usually spammers and rarely will show any interest in your content. And there’s the rub… how exactly do you measure whether people are interacting with your content and your twitter presence? Welcome to Klout.com…

What it is: Klout.com gives you a single, simple destination for measuring your campaign’s twitter engagement and reach.

What it does: Evaluate your twitter campaign’s reach; Compare different tweeple’s engagement ratings; Identify key conversation hubs (both lists and tweeple); Follow the rate and volume of other tweeple passing on your content; Drill down into what content works; and discover your influencers/influence by geographic area. And here’s what all that means…

Evaluate your twitter campaign’s reach: Klout gives every twitter account a numerical score based on their influence and reach – further breaking down your score into one of four main “types”. While the methodology behind calculating this number is up for discussion, it does take into account a wide array of factors that lead to a successful twitter account.

Compare different tweeple’s engagement ratings: Say, for example, that your campaign involves multiple twitter accounts. Which of these is actually working to get traction? Which of the accounts serves your goals best, and which should be rethought? Klout allows you to do side-by-side comparisons, giving you the ability to change tactics adeptly within a campaign.

Follow the rate and volume of other tweeple passing on your content: When evaluating your twitter account’s efficacy, a single score will rarely get you the answers you need. Klout digs a little deeper, and shows you to see the strengths and weaknesses of a given twitter account, breaking their overall “klout number” into more the more digestible categories of: Reach; Engagement; Demand; and Velocity.

Drill down into what content works: While it’s good to know that your twitter account is performing well, what is making that happen? What are your followers reading? What are they passing along? Klout gives you a list of your top performers to help you narrow down your priorities and messaging.

Discover your influencers/influence by geographic area: For some campaigns – as in real estate – it’s all about location, location, location. If your campaign’s success relies on a specific geographic area, this Klout stuff is absolutely for you.

What it is good for: Klout offers a deeper plunge into your twitter numbers – giving you the insight needed to grow your relevant followers in an organic way. While many companies choose to examine only the number of followers as a benchmark of success, this tool provides a much more accurate benchmark of your success.

As a quick example, 200 devoted followers who frequently retweet your content are a much more impressive accomplishment than 3,000 spam account followers who provide no value to your client’s online reputation. Klout’s staff gets this – and built safeguards into its measurement to reflect your actual influence in the twittersphere.

Moving Forward: Overall, Klout is a must-have reference for anyone working within the twittersphere… and given that it’s free, that makes it all the more attractive. Once again, the methodology ranking the importance of certain factors is still up for discussion, but as is often the case with social media properties, the proprietors of Klout.com crowdsource their formulaic improvements… and unlike Technorati, Klout’s algorithm is displayed for public view. There are still some “glitchy” areas of the tool, but – again – they are always looking for outside suggestions on improving the site. Our first one would be to ask that historical data be stored for future reference.

Final thought: If you are tweeting regularly for a client and want to start tracking numbers that are much more meaningful than simple follower numbers, check out Klout.com.

Good morning all you social media fanatics! Today we’ll be taking a closer look at Flaptor’s Trendistic, a neat little tool that’s quickly winning the hearts of our strategic planning and research team.

What it is: In a nut shell, Trendistic is a tracking tool that charts Twitter trends for users.   It literally lets you see the hottest discussion topics on Twitter.

What it does: Trendistic gathers tweets in real-time and compiles them into one-hour intervals. You can then view the hottest trending topics of every hour, or even input your own topic.

Trend Graph: Once you input your search term(s), the first thing that comes up is the trend graph. This interactive line graph displays the latest percentage of tweets for your search topic in the past hour and up until 180 days. You can even isolate your own specific time frame by a simple click-and-drag.

Recent Tweets: Below the line graph, you can see the most recent tweets compiled by Trendistic containing your search term. If multiple search terms were used, recent tweets from all terms will be displayed, including time and date.

Recent Trending Topics: This running list of the top trending topics can be found on the right side of Trendistic’s main page. Looks like the Cowboys vs. Eagles game generated a lot of buzz this past weekend.

What it is good for: Trendistic is one of the many tools that allow you to identify and track the coverage a person, event, product, or company has generated on Twitter.  You can even input a URL into Trendistic and count how many times it has been shared.

This tool is extremely helpful for comparing the coverage of competing brands and identifying trends in the ever-changing online conversation.

A search for At&t and Verizon saw a spike in Twitter discussions for Verizon on January 5, 2010. Much of the buzz was due to Google’s Nexus One and its anticipated availability to Verizon wireless customers.

Final Thought: Trendistic is quite possibly the best free Twitter archive and trend tracker currently available. The simple user interface makes it easy to see exactly what people are talking about and when they are saying it.

Welcome to the first Brodeur Social Media Monday (ahem… Tuesday) post of the new decade!  This week’s spotlight is on a great little tool called TrendsMap.

What it is: TrendsMap tracks real-time, location-specific topics online – utilizing twitter, twitpic and news sites to aggregate all the information into a refreshingly well-executed user interface.

What it does: Track relevant or hot topics in your geographic area of interest, see how extensively your topic of interest has spread geographically, or track the history of a given topic both locally and globally. In short, this tool gives you insight into the intersection between location and social media:

Track relevant/hot topics in your geographic area of interest: While the net has made the world a smaller place, it has also empowered local communities to organize around topics of interest. One has only to look at the success of FourSquare and Yelp to see how friendly competition and local insider scoops drive successful brick-and-mortar business models as well as the success of platforms catering to them. If your business (or your client) needs local coverage, Trendsmap is a good way to filter out all the unnecessary information you couldn’t care less about. In other words, your wifi coffee shop in Wichita shouldn’t be too concerned that it’s not making the global twitter trends list… but a successful campaign would show movement in the Wichita area. TrendsMap helps you track this.

See how extensively your topic of interest has spread geographically: Let’s say your client opens up the coffers for a swanky Times Square event, invites the Twitterati and hopes to see buzz spreading throughout the land. TrendsMap lets you track this.

Track the history of a given topic both locally and globally: In both of the pictures above, there is a small, but interesting graph associated with volume of mentions. It may not be exportable or in color, but it does give you a sense of your campaign’s progress… or the lack thereof.

What it is good for: TrendsMap is a great way to get a helpful snapshot of the progress of a social media campaign, with a fun and simple interface to boot. (Take note other twitter-related tools… UI *is* important!)

Final thought: TrendsMap does not rise to the level of “must-have”, but it does rise to the level of “useful”.  While the data on this platform is not really exportable (for client presentations and reports), it does give you real-time insight into your campaign and can help you make the tweaks necessary to turn it around now. The folks at TrendsMap are always looking for users’ input on bugs to fix, but it’s not entirely clear whether they’re looking to expand the services offered here.  Stay tuned on that front. We certainly will.

Hello all you social media fanatics! So far, ‘Social Media Monday’ has covered the world of blogs, social networks and Twitter. Today, we’re going to take a look at forums with BoardTracker.com.

What it is: BoardTracker.com is a search engine designed exclusively for online discussion forums or message boards, hence boardtracker.

What it does: Boardtracker has a very simple interface and yields very simple results. All you need to do is input a keyword and press enter. Boardtracker returns all the forum threads that contain that keyword. You can get more specific by inputting a date range or a particular website or choosing from one of 20 categories.

In addition to being a search engine, once you complete your free registration, you can start to personalize the service. The ‘My Threads” tab is place where you can bookmark your favorite threads or forums so you can have easy access to them once you log in. Boardtracker also has a “My Alerts” feature where you have the option to send specific search results directly to your email.

What it is good for: Boardtracker is one of the many tools that allow you to navigate the ever-changing online conversation. People don’t hold back their opinions when posting their thoughts onto forums so they’re a great place to determine the overall sentiment about a certain company, product, person or industry. So when new business comes in, you can use Boardtracker to see what people are saying about that company online.

Moving Forward: Yes, Boardtracker does offer a general idea of what is being said online about a certain topic, but in order to grasp this general idea, you would need to manually go through every result and determine the overall sentiment. There are no “Top 10 keywords” or “Top 10 forums” associated with each search topic. However, there is an option to sort the search results by relevancy, indicating which posts are most important.

The site claims that they are currently tracking 69,511,291 threads in 37,284 forums, and are constantly adding more. You can even add your own board if it is not already in their database, so all in all it is pretty comprehensive. Additionally, all the information in Boardtracker’s database is from forum threads only, all extraneous text on a page is excluded by default which allows for more relevant results.

Final Thought: All in all, Boardtracker is a great tool to determine a general sentiment of an online conversation but should definitely be used in concurrence with other social media measurement tools to really grasp the big picture.

UPDATE - 12/15/09 – BoardTracker.com has a 2.0 Beta version in the works that addresses most of the issues above. Be forewarned, it is currently full of “Slowness, bugs and cats”. So keep an eye out for a review of BoardTracker 2.0 in a future ‘Social Media Monday’ post!

In today’s interview we talk with the founder of Brodeur Partners, John Brodeur. Over twenty years ago John parlayed a career as a journalist and congressional staffer into the development of a small boutique firm that focused on technology. This, of course, was well before anyone was focused on technology. In this short interview which took place in the summer of 2009 we catch up with John and his comings and goings.

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Today’s conversation turns inward and is with Steve Marchant, head of Brodeur Partner’s business-to-business practice. Steve talks about the perspective of the hard-edged business executive in developing and assessing the success of brand communications. Steve, based in Boston, manages many of Brodeur Partners’ largest and most profitable accounts.

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In this week’s installment of Social Media Monday, we take a look at one of our favorite Twitter search tools, Twellow.

What it is: Twellow is a people search tool for Twitter, allowing you to connect with people of experience and expertise in your areas of interest.

What it does: Twellow collects publicly available tweets, analyzes them, and categorizes each of the users responsible for those tweets into various categories—art, food, travel, politics, etc. Think of Twellow as an online phone book directory for Twitter, which connects users “with people who matter.”

Get listed: Registering for Twellow is easy; all you need is a Twitter account. Just visit their new user page, enter your Twitter username and voila! Once registered you can modify your categorization on Twellow and create an extended bio.

Categories: With over 1 billion followers and 11 million Twitter profiles, Twellow has literally hundreds of categories, and search features, which make it easy for Twitter users to “cut through the clutter.”

Search Toolbar: By default, search results are sorted by number of followers, but can be filtered by utilizing Twellow’s advance search tips—allowing you to connect with Twitter’s true influencers.

Twellow Suggestions: Makes is easy for users to see other tweeple that are tweeting about similar areas of interest.

TwellowHood: This nifty feature allows you to locate tweeple in your neighborhood who you can connect with. Simply click on any state to zoom in for a list of people that are tweeting in your city.

What it is good for: Twellow serves as a one stop-shop for industry folks interested in identifying Twitter’s most influential tweeple–in any category.

An instant search lets you see the number of people tweeting about a certain topic (in our example, biotechnology), their last tweet, and how many followers they have.

At Brodeur, we regularly use Twellow to identify ‘who’s who’ among tweeple, particularly in recruiting ‘followers’ that share our clients’ views and would benefit from our messaging.

Moving Forward: What makes Twellow unique is the number of indexes and search categories it provides—it really is the ‘Twitter Yellow Pages.’ By providing a comprehensive directory of Twitter users, Twellow makes it easy for anyone to study a certain aspect of any market.

While Twellow does a good job at eliminating the clutter and spam found on Twitter, there is still room for improvement. For instance, new users are initially categorized by their Twitter bio, and not by the message conveyed in their tweets. You can always go back and change your bio on Twitter, or update your Twellow profile, but a categorization by tweet relevance would be helpful.

Also, similar search terms produce dissimilar results. For example, there are currently over 1,200 user profiles under the Biotechnology category, but only 228 matches for the search term “biotechnology” and 598 matches for “biotech.” A ranking algorithm in Twellow’s directory could help solve this issue and make it easier to identify relevant tweeple.

Interested in finding out the latest and greatest on Twellow? Or how this search tool can help drive your clients’ social media campaign? Then visit Twellow’s blog to remain up to date on new site developments.

Final thought: In an industry rapidly becoming synonymous with social media, Twellow is a must have for keeping track of industry influencers on Twitter. If you don’t have it, get it, and if you do have it, love it.

In this week’s Brodeur Open Blog Podcast we talk with Cleve Langton, author of “New Business Lessons from Madison Avenue” and head of Brodeur Partners new business development. Cleve talks about trends in business communications, the rising importance of social media, and the key to new business presentations. There’s also some interesting commentary on the ubiquity of PowerPoint in pitching creative concepts.

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In this week’s edition of Social Media Monday, we take a look at why Bit.ly keeps growing in popularity among tweeple and bloggers alike.

What it is: Bit.ly is one of many free URL shorteners online – allowing you to turn a 15+ character URL into a more manageable one for sharing among your social network.

What it does: Bit.ly gives you much-needed room in the twittersphere where we are all constrained by the limit of what 140 characters we can fit into a message. By shortening the URL, we the tweeple (I love that word) can pack more information and commentary into the tweet, and less room for the link itself. Though there are many competitors to Bit.ly, here’s a run-down of bit.ly’s most basic offerings:

Track click-thru’s: Bit.ly gives your URL a unique identifier, and lists it on your account page. By accessing this account page, you can see how many people have clicked on which links. This works in your favor when testing out which language works best to garner attention, or which topics are of little interest to your followers.

Easy user interface: Hootsuite, Tweetie and navigation bar interface capabilities have made posting to bit.ly almost the default choice. If you are tied to a laptop or stationary computer, for example, clicking on the single navigation bar button while on a specific page will set everything up for you to post. This will also show you if other people have already used bit.ly to link to this page, and what the CTR has been on their posted link(s).

Track trends for your links: Bit.ly allows you to track very basic trends, such as how many people have clicked on your links, when they clicked on them, and where they clicked from. As I’ll mention soon below, this offering will be expanded greatly in the coming months…

What it is good for: Bit.ly is an excellent way to track real-time progress of your marketing tactics and goals. Are certain messages working? Does your intended audience have no interest in what you’re tweeting? Are you reaching your desired target audience, in terms of geography? Bit.ly gives you the chance to turn on a dime and adjust your campaign accordingly.

In a real-life example, we regularly use this to track what is working for clients. We may have three potential messaging sets for a given event, but only when we put them out there can we really see what is valuable, and what just is not catching on. By concentrating our ongoing efforts on the messages and stories that people are clicking on, we save our clients valuable time instead of continuing down an ineffective route.

Moving Forward: Bit.ly’s blog says it best… there is a lot more coming. Seeing the success of twitter’s trending topics, bit.ly is moving in that direction – giving us the opportunity to slice and dice the data a bit more. One of their main competitors (Digg’s Tr.im service) is also trying to adjust its service in a similar manner. In truth, all of their most serious competitors are moving in this direction, and we should see some interesting innovations in this space over the next few months.

However, when looking at the bevy of bit.ly competitors, the one big differentiator which stands out is its stability. There have been multiple times when bit.ly’s competitors have gone dark, or switched their “terms of service” – redirecting all your past links to their own homepage. Bit.ly however has kept your links moving to the right page the whole time… and there’s something to be said for that level of consistency.

Final thought: If you’re not already using a URL shortener for your tweets, Facebook fan pages, etc., it’s time to start. Bit.ly is a great starting point, thanks to ease of use. It also happens to be growing in a very useful direction for online marketing folks like us. If your client is asking about ROI and real-world click-thru numbers, familiarize yourself with bit.ly now and impress the pants off them with solid numbers – which can often be so elusive in online campaigns.

What’s your final thought on bit.ly? Do you have any gripes about the service? Do you use it in an innovative way we haven’t covered here? Let us know in the comments below!