FieldJournals is currently offering a new way to advertise your business or website on our blog.  FieldJournals will stream each and every one of your tweets on our site.  The only data we need from you is your Twitter name.  Here’s how it works. You’ll notice on the right side of our site we have a plugin named “Follow Us On Twitter”.  Currently, this is delivering all of our tweets on Twitter.  We simply replace our feed with your feed and your tweets will be syndicated to FieldJournals.  No extra work required on your part.

The benefits are endless.  You have the availability to gain more traffic to your site, promote your business/website, gain more Twitter followers, etc.  You virtually have a new advertisement with every new tweet you deliver.

Contact us today to be one of the first to advertise on Twitter Brand Sponsors.  Send an email to info@fieldjournals.com or add a comment below.

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.

It’s no secret that we don’t like the way ESPN handles their Outdoors section of their site.  The site is old, not maintained, and blogs are months old.  So tonight I’m relaxing, drinking a few cold guys, reading my usual hunting sites.  Somehow I land on ESPN Outdoors site, in the Hunting section.  Right off the bat, I am confused at what I see.  I have to double-check that I am indeed on the hunting page of the site.  Under the “Headlines” in the right nav, there are links to 4 fishing stories out of a possible 10 links…40% of the hunting headlines are fishing headlines.  No mistake about it, I love fishing and love reading fishing articles, when I’m on fishing web pages.  Why is there a link to Tournaments?  It’s a known fact that a majority of tournaments are all fishing tournaments.

Your Twitter stream is mostly tweets about your field cam, and you are often re-tweeting you field cam statuses, sometimes even responding to yourself.  Come on guys, you are suppose to be “The Worldwide Leader In Sports.”  You are far from it.

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?

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.

So you are a hardcore hunter who has pictures of your monster buck on Flickr, your own videos posted on YouTube, you’re active on Twitter bragging about your monster buck, you have your own blog where you provided all kinds of details about your hunt, you have a community on Facebook interacting with other hunters, and you bookmark very interesting hunting articles on delicious.  How can one person possibly follow you around the web and keep up to date with all of your hunting material?

Friendfeed is the service that is right for you.  Friendfeed aggregates your personal profiles from around the web into one lifestream.  Now your followers can follow you in one location, but still access all of your cool hunting info from social sites from around the web.

FriendFeed is a service that makes it easy to share with friends online. It offers a fun and interactive way to discover and discuss information among friends.  

It’s fast and easy to start a conversation around shared items, or to show that you like something a friend has shared. You can subscribe to updates from individuals and groups, such as your family or a team of people you work with. On FriendFeed, you and your friends contribute to a shared stream of information — information that you care about, because it’s from the people that you care about.

You don’t need to install anything to use FriendFeed. You can read and share your FriendFeed however you want — from your email, your phone or even from Facebook. If you make your FriendFeed publicly visible, your friends can see what you’re sharing without creating an account, and you can embedyour feed in your home page or blog. FriendFeed also lets you pull in updates from other sites around the web, and even publish your feed to services you already use, like Twitter.

So you have your own Outfitting company with several outfitters (employees) working for you.  You obviously can’t be on Twitter 24 hours a day monitoring and posting, but you can delegate your employees to share your company’s Twitter account. 

With CoTweet, you can manage up to six Twitter accounts through a single CoTweet login. Invite colleagues to join your accounts to work as a team representing your company on the front-line of your Twitter presence. Add your personal Twitter account and manage all your tweeting through one interface.  You can also monitor keywords and trends directly inside CoTweet.  Twitter search is seamlessly integrated within the application. Maintain persistent searches on your product, brand and company names and take immediate action.

If you are an outdoors business, you need to have Community Manager on your staff  in today’s social web.  Large businesses like Cabela’s or BassPro need to have a person in this position to monitor and react to conversations on the web.  Major brands such as these two companies should have a community manager and not just a full-time marketing person who monitors the social stream once or twice a day.  Quick responses/reactions are key in the real-time web.  Here is a high level view of what a community manger will do for you.

The Community Manager oversees a variety of fan communities – including social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc), blogs, band websites, and E-teams – for a diverse roster of outdoors brands.  The community manager is responsible for setting, maintaining, and achieving specific and actionable goals, including revenue, traffic, and engagement. You are the eyes and ears of the company in and among the customers: you know how they think, how they act, and more importantly you are able to measure and analyze these patterns. You must have a firm grasp of client motivation, marketing, and the nuances of the outdoor industry in the digital age.  The community manager is an integral part of determining the strategies, tools, goals, and objectives in the success of the company brand.

Responsibilities include:
- Maintain and run companywebsites, blogs, and social networks with updates and e-mail blasts. Will also be involved in the development of artist websites, including wireframing, user experience design, and feature requisition.
- Determine and Achieve specific goals for community including revenue, traffic, and engagement.
- Work closely with the new media department and marketing department to execute marketing and grassroots campaigns
- Update weekly community activity and demographic reports.
- Heavy research of outdoor communities and word-of-mouth analysis (Reading and analyzing message boards, blogs, other outdoor sites, etc.)
- Internet research of new outdoor communities and trends.
- Contribute to the design and creation of outdoors digital assets.
- Read and react to Tweets, blogs, conversations on the social web.
- Become the social identity for the company on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

The are many Twitter applications on the web today.  If you are looking to build your own hunting community using Twitter as the platform, you should check out Twibes.com.  Twibes.com allows anyone to create their own group and customize their “look and feel”.  Once you join a Twibe, your Tweets will appear in your Twitter stream as well as in your Twibe.  Setup is quick and easy and requires to technical skills. 

From Twibes.com:

A Twibe is a group of Twitter users interested in a common topic. To create a Twibe, just choose a name and Tweet it using the form above. The URL must be included in the tweet. Example: http://twibes.com/hunting

To create a twibe, just tweet a link to it. For example, “I just created the coffee Twibe: http://twibes.com/coffee”. Any people to subsequently tweet “http://twibes.com/coffee” will jointhe Twibe. *Be sure that the full URL is included in the tweet. Please note, some desktop applications through which Twitter users tweet may filter the URL, and thus cause an error.

There are many hunting blogs out there on the web today.  Our opinion is WordPress is the most easy platform to work with and to also customize the aesthetic look and feel.  Entering a hunting blog entry takes no technical skills and requires minimal learning.

There are three essential plugins all WordPress blogs must have.  Now that everyone in the world has an iPhone, the first essential plugin is WPtouch iPhone Theme.  The plugin reformats your site with a mobile theme when viewing with an Apple iPhone, Apple iPod touch, Google Android or Blackberry Stormtouch mobile device.  The plugin site can be found here.

The second essential plugin is Sociable.  Sociable automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.  This allows you users to share your content on their bookmarking sites.  The plugin site can be found here.

The final essential pluging for all WordPress blogs is the TweetMeme Button.  The plugin adds the TweetMeme button into your posts and RSS feed.  A user reading your blog entry can easily click the button in your post and share with all of their Twitter friends.  The plugin site can be found here.

By adding these three plugins, you will keep your viewing audience happy as well as increasing your SEO, your blog traffic, and increasing brand awareness.