Social Media Wave- Social Media Marketing Agency

Like many folks in the SM space, I like to try out new tools for making communicating  a leveraged and automated process. I have created any accounts with several of the newer cloud based services to get a feel for how they work.

We like to use a mix of technologies for two reasons- familiarity and when ready- put them into our production environment of several blogs,  many of which we run for clients. There were many tools which came out last year which provided aggregation services for Twitter and Facebook. We looked at Hootsuite and Seesmic after reading reviews and giving them a try. Although they have subtle differences, we still use them both.

I find Seesmic providing more strategic innovations and investment into their platform as evidenced by continuous updates. Although the updates may seem annoying when you have several devices to update, the updates are virtually painless and always are well documented.

This raises an important point - Seesmic is a player in the software services space. This means they have cash and are stable (at least at the moment) with a visionary leader with @loic with a track record in business. I know the product is a free download to us who are using it today but consider the following scenario which can and will happen over time.

About a year ago, I was searching for a RSS feed driver for Twitter from the Twitter dev list and liked the RSS2Twitter service- free to set up an account, load as many RSS feed accounts (blog feeds) and match them with your existing Twitter accounts and you have an automated feed from you blog to Twitter posting complete with Tiny URL. They also provide some stats in the dashboard.

So I proceeded to set up a bunch of accounts including 4 for clients and left them on autopilot for many months now. I just happened to be logged into Twitter proper (a rare event) and clicked on the Tiny URL to my blog post. I found out the hard way that RSS2Twitter is now adding an ad Frame to my blog page which sort of hi-jacks your page to an advertising page. You have to close the frame to get rid of it, which means it is a real annoying divergence of attention to those who dutifully clicked off to read our posts.

As it turns out, RSS2Twitter as a company is looking for capital via donations as many open source development project owners are. I fully back that motion and donate to all projects which I determine are useful enough to use on a production basis. The point is, if they had sent out a tweet or e mail to registered users in their program mentioning that advertising would be added to their destination pages, we would have felt somewhat interested in their story and would have donated early to assist in ongoing devlopment.

I have elected to move off the service as it looks bleak in terms of ever removing the ads or offering a viable, competitive paid version. So I suppose we have to consider the ugly economics of free services in the SM space as due diligence for our blog followers as well as be in the loop with customer services we are offering.

What bets are you making on behalf of your company or clients in terms of tools and services support?