Earlier this week, we wrote a post on how hunting businesses should be using Google Alerts.  In addition to using Google Alerts, hunting businesses should also be using a product called Social Mention.  Social Mention tracks the real-time web for mentions of your brand (ie Twitter, Facebook statuses, FriendFeed, Digg, etc).   Visit their homepage and conduct a search on your brand and you might be surprised by what you see.

Social Mention also provides alerts in the same manner Google Alerts works.  Social Mention Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant social media results (blog, microblog, etc.) based on your choice of search phrase.  Social Mention should be another tool your marketing toolbox.

We recently came across a poll of how much involvement hunters have with social media.  Are hunters using sites like Twitter and Facebook?  According to the new poll completed by HunterSurvey.com and AnglerSurvey.com, the answer in “No”.  As a hunter and strong social media advocate, I would agree with the poll. 

Here are some numbers:

• 64 percent of hunters and anglers report they are not using social networking sites to obtain outdoor information
• 24 percent report using Facebook
• 10.7 percent said they visit YouTube
• MySpace is popular with 9.6 percent
• 3.2 percent of hunters use CamoSpace,
• 2.5 percent visit LinkedIn and
• 2.4 percent favor Twitter

So what are some of the reasons are not using social media.  Our opinion is that hunters are an older demographic.  They are not tech savvy to begin with.  Hunters still prefer to communicate with other hunter through forums on sites they have been a member of for years.  Outfitters is the audience that can benefit from using social media.  Most, if not all, social media sites are free and offer free marketing.  Our opinion is that hunters will catch-on to social media.  The first social networking site to take off with hunters will be YouTube.  Twitter will follow next with communication amongst hunters and eventually Facebook.

If you are a large hunting organization such as Cabela’s, BassPro, Thompson, Remington, etc, you may want to look at outsourcing your social media efforts.  No offense, but none of you are knocking the ball out of the park with your Twitter updates or your Facebook pages or any other social media activity.  There are many folks out there today that consider themselves a Social Media Consultant.  First, if anyone says they are an expert, do not hire them.  The fact is no one is an expert and no one can be an expert.  Social media changes on a daily basis, maybe an hourly basis. 

I helped create this RFP (Request For Pricing) template that will help large organizations create a scope of services and define what is exactly needed from a social media vendor.  I don’t think small shops would be interested in utilizing a document like this, but feel free to customize anything you need here.  Let me know if you have any questions when it comes to outsourcing your social media strategy and services.

Free Social Media RFP

Mashable.com is reporting that Facebook is about to release a new service around location features.  Today, there are many hunters on Facebook.  With the integration of a location based service, I’m sure we’ll be seeing many hunters posting their locations in the fields and woods on Facebook. 

Not to mention, we’re beginning to see the trend of hunters moving from old PHP based forums over to hunting communities on Facebook, known as Facebook pages.  Members will now be able to discuss their hunting topics coupled with the locations.  Right from Facebook, I’ll be able to tell when folks are at Cabela’s or BassPro Shops.

I’ll e expecting to see hunting stores such as Cabela’s and BassPro include Facebook location services in their marketing strategy.  One example could be for every person who “checks-in” to a certain store, is able to receive a 10% discount via email.  Or a person with the most visits to a store in a month is eligible to become the “Mayor” and is able to receive discounts.  As I mentioned previously, location based services are going to hit the hunting industry quickly, are you ready?

Today was my first post over at www.huntingnet.com.  No worries, I will still be maintaining and contributing to FieldJournals.com on a full-time basis.  My first article discussed the impact of social media and the hunting industry.  Other than my family, hunting and social media are my passion.

You may see me guest post on other hunting sites around the web; you may also see other bloggers posting on FieldJournals.  I am a strong advocate for knowledge sharing.  We should all be sharing our passions with other outdoors folks to continue this great sport.  Tip and tricks, breaking news, articles, blogs, etc., should all be shared across the web.  That is ultimately the beauty of the internet and social media — sharing.

For all of you outfitters out there, you should be providing your service on a new social media site called Groupon.com.  

Launched in November 2008, Groupon features a daily deal on the best stuff to do, see, eat, and buy in a variety of cities across the United States.   Can you imagine offering the hunt of a lifetime on this site at a reduced price, to millions of people.  You can stipulate the discount you would like to offer, in exchange for 25 people booking a hunt for the discount to be enabled.  As the owner of the special, you decide on the amount of the discount and the number of participants required for the discount to be established.  Groupon.com is a great way to start your booking season.

Yesterday Meebo launched a set of nifty tools to website and blog owners.  The toolbar allows users to share content across different social media sites, chat with other visitors, and a custom analytics dashboard.

If you host your own website or have a blog on Blogger.com, TypePad, Movable Type, or self-hosted hosted WordPress blogs, you should be good to go. Unfortunately, blogs hosted at WordPress.com are not supported at the moment.

• Real-time sharing. Your users can easily share your website with their friends through IM, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and email. The Meebo Bar engages your existing users and brings in new users.
• Custom buttons for your bar. Choose from a host of buttons to add to your bar. Right now we have buttons for Facebook Fan pages, Twitter, RSS, Youtube, Flickr, and a bunch more. If you don’t see a button you want, just let us know.
• Personal stats dashboard. See statistics about pageviews, sharing from your site, and which of your Meebo Bar buttons are being clicked, all from your own secure site. You can even give other users their own personal login to access the dashboard.
• Instant messaging from your site. Meebo knows web-based IM better than anyone, and your site visitors will be able to chat and share with their IM friends from AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Facebook, and a ton of other networks.

For those of you that don’t know, Google is about to revolutionize the way we collaborate with co-workers, friends, and family.  Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

There are very limited amount of invites that are being issued by Google.  I was lucky enough to receive my invite in the mail yesterday and will be awarding two invites to two lucky people.  The first will be a random drawing from the people that follow me on Twitter.  I will draw 1 lucky winner from my followers.  If you don’t already follow me on Twitter, you can follow me @FieldTweets.

For the second drawing, you must comment on this post with “Why you deserve a Google Wave invite?”  I will go through all comments and select the best response, be creative as possible.  The drawing will be in a few days.

Embedding a document into your website or blog is very easy.  Two services that allow you to embed a doc into your site are DocStoc.com and Scribd.com.  Both services are free.  After you signup for a free account, you can upload a file to the site.  You can simply copy and paste generated code (ie YouTube) and embed the code directly into your site.

Some of the advantages of embedding documents onto your site include additional SEO support, professional formatting of documents are your site, sharing documents across the web, downloading the document from your site, and marketing promotional material like an outfitter’s flyer, etc.  Here’s an example of an embedded document on my blog.

Hunting –

Sharing photos of your trophy buck on Twitter is easy and will not take you much time.  Two services that we really like to use is Twitpic.com and Tweetphoto.com.  Both services are free and only require you have a previously created Twitter profile.

You can post pictures to TwitPic from your phone, their API, or through the site itself.  There are also popular twitter clients that have built-in support for TwitPic.  Twitpic could be used independently of Twitter, in a way similar to Flickr. However several characteristics make this site a companion for Twitter. Twitpic usernames and passwords are the same as the ones in Twitter. Comments to photographs are sent as a reply tweet. Twitpic URLs are already short, making it unnecessary to use URL shortening. Anyone with a Twitter account can post pictures to the site. This has the disadvantage of anyone being able to post pornographic, obscene or objectionable material. Although the site administrator attempts to keep the site family friendly by removing such pictures, the sheer number of uses makes this very difficult.

TweetPhoto is a photo sharing platform for the real-time web. This free service allows you to share photos on Twitter, Facebook and through your favorite desktop and mobile clients. The service focuses on creating the best possible user-experience among the applications developed around the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API).

This personalized experience is the evolution and convergence of real-time mobile and web-based social photo sharing. It allows Twitter users to quickly and easily publish and consume photos.