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Who is Douglas Idugboe?

Douglas Idugboe, known as @douglasi on Twitter, is the Founder and Executive Editor of smedio. He is a Canadian bestselling author who has been profiled by many media houses. Douglas is also the Chief Strategist at Quick Success Marketing, a New Media and Social Web marketing consultancy that advises businesses, organizations, and individuals on how to use New Media and the Social Web to surpass their marketing objectives.

Douglas founded smedio about a year ago out of his living room. This New Media and Social Web Online Magazine has grown rapidly. Today smedio serves around 28.000 subscribers. In this interview Douglas looks back on smedio and shares how to convert quality leads into paying customers.

Q: Every great organization or business has a Why. This is the cause, purpose or belief that expresses the driving motivation for action. So, Why did you start with smedio?

Douglas: I founded smedio as the one stop new media and social web guide for businesses and marketers. I didn’t’ want it to be just another social media blog and the objective was to create a site that continuously defines the business value of new media and the social web by equipping readers with the needed insight and innovative ideas to help their business grow even more, using technology, new media, and the social web by bringing useful breaking news, latest trends and techniques that readers can use immediately.

Q: When you started with smedio, did you have a clear blueprint or has the website developed organically over the year?

Douglas: though the core values still remain the same, I’d say the blueprint has evolved significantly from when I started smedio. I’ve received a lot of valuable feedback from my readers as well as fellow social media experts and marketers. While smedio started with posts, I’ve since then expanded the offerings to webinars, trainings and excerpts from my upcoming book.

Q: If you look back at the past year of smedio, is there anything you would do differently? And if so, what?

Douglas: I strongly believe there’s always scope for improvement. If you stop changing, you stop innovating. Though I believe I did most things the way I wanted, I now realize I should have put in additional focus on training readers on the blueprint with which smedio was founded. I’m now starting off with regular webinars and training sessions and my only regret is not to have done so earlier.

Q: Many people, who lose their jobs, think about starting a home based online company. What is your main advice for these start-ups?

Douglas: I’d say – Believe in yourself, come up with a blueprint of what you want to do and leave no stone unturned in realizing your dreams. I strongly believe we are fortunate to be living in the age of social media – we’ve seen it evolve over the last few years, it’s a well established paradigm now and the best is yet to come.

Q: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are three major socio-economic systems to build a social network. How does a (home) business owner decide which of these three is relevant for his/her business?

Douglas: I often say that Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn aren’t mutually exclusive to each other. Each of them has their own appeal and it’s not advisable to substitute one for the other. For example, Facebook is a great place to launch B2C campaigns. Twitter provides an innovative customer service platform while LinkedIn is the perfect service to engage in B2B campaigns and develop new partners/ resellers for your business.

Q: This week -Thursday May 19th 2011- you’re hosting a special webinar. Who should attend this webinar?

Douglas: If you are an existing small business owner or you aspire to start your own online startup, conversion of your fans, followers, readers, and friends into paying customers is essential to your business success. You can’t afford to miss this webinar. If you love social media and plan to leverage it for your business, there’s a lot in there that would be useful for you. Make sure you attend it – it’s worth the time and money!

Q: Can you share 3 takeaways for people participating in the webinar?

Douglas: The webinar is targeted on how a business can turn its social graph into paying customers and clients. I believe the following three key takeaways would be:

1. How can you convert your digital assets into cash
2. Dos and Don’ts on how you should evolve your business social graph
3. Exclusive tips on time tested business strategies that set you apart from your competition.

Final Q: Where can people find out more about the webinar and how can they participate?

Watch this intro or send me an email at editor@smedio.com

Thanks a lot Douglas for your valuable time and looking forward to your webinar.

Social media management tools can help your business in many ways.

Which tool should you use for your business?

Before we answer that question, let’s be clear on how social media management tools can help your business. It basically comes down to efficiency and effectiveness (saving money and earning money).

7 criteria to review HootSuite and SproutSocial:

1. save valuable time: social media management tools are good for day-to-day scheduling  of posts and monitoring multiple social streams.
2. target your perfect audience: with keyword research you’re able to laser target your prospects and clients.
3. monitor your competitiveness: features like people search and business comparisons give you a clear picture of your competitive position.
4. track your engagement results: graphical reports present you with daily results of your influence and engagement scores.
5. know the desires of your audience: with follower demographics you’ll know the composition of your audience in terms of age and gender. Frequency analyzers teach you at what times and days your audience is ready for your message.
6. choose suitable package: choose a plan that matches the seize of your business (team). Providers offer basic plans, pro plans, business plans or enterprise plans.
7. ease of use: management tool providers who understand the power of simplicity, build dashboards with very easy navigation.

Now, let’s look at the HootSuite and SproutSocial‘s scores on these seven key criteria:

#1 save valuable time:

Both social media management tools let you update your status on multiple social networks with a single post to save your valuable time.

HootSuite’s basic plan (free) lets you manage five social profiles. You can choose between Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Foursquare, WordPress blog or Mixi (Japan’s biggest social network). With HootSuite Pro you can manage an unlimited amount of social profiles.

SproutSocial has a slant towards Twitter and Facebook. The pro plan lets you add five different twitter accounts (identities). For each identity, you can attach multiple networks like LinkedIn, Facebook Personal Page and Facebook Fan Pages. At the time of writing, you have to upgrade to SproutSocial’s business plan to gain access to Foursquare and Gowalla.

HootSuite versus SproutSocial: 1 to 1

#2 targeting perfect audience

Hootsuite uses a keyword research tool to enable its users keyword search on twitter. The keyword search generates a list of twitter usernames. By clicking on a twitter username you can view tweets mentioning them, check their basic profile info, their Klout Score, tweets they have sent, tweets they favored and other networks they are connected to. For those who are not familiar with Klout. This is a measurement tool that gives you an idea of people’s online influence.

SproutSocial presents a feature with the label Discovery. This offers the same keyword search functionality as HootSuite, but without the Klout Score. What makes SproutSocial stand out here is the feature “People Search”. This feature let’s you search for people based on their twitter profile. A lot of twitter users mention their job in their profiles. With discovery you can search for people on twitter with a job description like “social media consultants”.

HootSuite versus SproutSocial: 0 to 1

#3 monitor your competitiveness

SproutSocial lets you execute Business Searches. Compare your business to a competitor or neighboring business. This feature gathers data from twitter to give you insight on your daily mentions, followers, SproutSocial scores and follower demographics compared with your competitor. The results are presented in clear graphs.

HootSuite versus SproutSocial: 0 to 1

#4 track your engagement results

HootSuite Pro users can choose between Quick Analytics or Custom Analytics.

With quick analytics you can monitor web traffic to your website (based on Google Analytics), engagement scores for your Facebook Pages (based on Facebook Insights) and number of clicks for your shared links (Ow.ly). The web traffic stats offer some great filters like date range, twitter overlay (traffic from tweets) and source of your traffic.

As HootSuite Pro user you have 50 credits per month to create your customized report. This comes down to one report per month. For additional reports you have to pay $50 per report. For some users this is a downer, while others clearly understand they have to pay for extras.

SproutSocial presents basic stats to monitor twitter account and Facebook pages. Track your clicks, mentions, retweets, replies and followers versus following growth.

SproutSocial announced that Google Analytics is coming soon.

HootSuite versus SproutSocial: 1 to 0

#5 know the desires of your audience

SproutSocial clearly has an advantage with follower demographics like age and gender. If your company is very active on twitter, you can now specifically respond to the demands of segments within your followers.

HootSuite versus SproutSocial: 0 to 1

#6 choose a suitable package

HootSuite offers a basic plan for free. With this basic plan you can manage 5 social profiles and 2 RSS feeds. Basic lets you use some basic free social analytics.

To upgrade to pro, you’ll pay $5.99 per month. The upgrade offers you enhanced social analytics, unlimited social profiles, access for one additional team member and 1 free report.

HootSuite’s higher segment, big corporations, can use the Enterprise plan for $1499 per month. This plan gives your company access to 30 team members who can manage your social accounts, create 10 free customized reports and reserve 10 seats for an ongoing HootSuite training program.

SproutSocial has two packages. With the Pro Plan you can manage five social accounts (identities) for $9 per month. Coming up for the Pro Plan are Foursquare Integration, Gowalla Integration, Geo Targeting and Daily Specials.

The Business Plan ($49 p/month) lets you manage ten social accounts, create custom branded reports, engage and track Foursquare and Gowalla Check-Ins and use location targeting to find new local customers. Coming soon are interesting features like Assigments & Tasks, Fan Page Creation and Advanced Reporting.

HootSuite versus SproutSocial:  1 to 0

#7 Ease of Use

SproutSocial is incredibly easy to navigate and looks absolutely great. The homepage gives you access to seven excellent features. The graphical reports are easy to use and offer all necessary insights.

SproutSocial’s inbox is one of the features that is particularly attractive. With this inbox users gain access to multiple social streams to monitor and flag messages for follow-up. Compared with HootSuite streams, SproutSocial’s inbox looks very sexy and is super easy to use.

HootSuite versus SproutSocial: 0 to 1

Conclusion

If you are looking for an easy to use, complete, sexy and affordable tool, I would recommend SproutSocial. SproutSocial scores better than HootSuite on four of the seven criteria. Although HootSuite has a strong market position, I expect SproutSocial definitely to gain market share for the years to come.

The announced new features make SproutSocial a very complete and attractive alternative for HootSuite users.

If you have experience with social media management tools, don’t agree with my criteria or rating, or want to comment or ask a question, simply use the comment box below.