BufferApp is basically a button on my browser. It’s a button I press whenever I come across a web page that I think my followers might like. Pressing that button brings up a window in which I compose a tweet with a shortened link. Instead of going out to the twitterverse immediately, the message is added to a “buffer” that BufferApp will send out one of the 9 times that I’ve already chosen in my settings. If BufferApp runs out of tweets to send, it sends me that email to remind me to add more tweets to the queue.

For me, that email might be the key to BufferApp’s success. It really annoys me. It annoys me like my boss annoys me when she bugs me about an overdue project (that polling page is almost done, Terry). It annoys me like I annoy my children when I have to remind them again to do their chores.

I hate that email so much that I work harder than ever to scan my Google Reader in the morning and fill my BufferApp with links. That’s right, that annoying email has basically made me a more consistent tweeter.

If you aren’t too proud to see if being treated like a child can sometimes be an effective time management tool, give BufferApp a try and let me know what you think.

If you manage multiple social network accounts for clients, or if you a have a team of workers who are tasked with being socially active, you’ve probably surveyed various tools to monitor the performance those accounts.

Empire Avenue is not billed as a social metrics tool, but after playing it for a week I became more aware of what some of my friends were doing on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and LinkedIn. That’s exactly what I would need if I managed a team of customer service reps, reporters or social media account managers.

At its most basic level, Empire Ave is a stock market simulator in which you build virtual wealth by investing in social people. From Empire:

Every day, you’re on Twitter, talking to friends on Facebook, uploading videos or photos, and writing blog posts. Just for doing that stuff, you’ll earn Eaves – our virtual currency – and we’ll dish out some more virtual cash to your shareholders.

So you gain wealth when the people you invest in engage in social activities. There’s a whole lot more to the game, but the basics are enough to show how easy this game can be used to evaluate and manage your company’s social activity.

1. Get your whole team to create an Empire account and connect their social accounts.
2. Invest in those team members and no one else. At first, invest in each member equally.
3. Check your portfolio every day. If you gain wealth then you know your team is being social.
4. Sort your portfolio by “gainers” and reward those team members for a job well done.
5. Sort your portfolio by “losers” and coach those colleagues to become more social.

The biggest challenge I see is that Empire Avenue might be too fun. Since beginning, I’ve divested in my friends (sorry) and transferred those funds into accounts with a higher return.

Oh yeah, another challenge is that your share price isn’t determined exclusively by your social activity. Your price also goes up if people buy more shares of you. So … go to http://empireavenue.com/?t=fvcx1nr0 and add (e)KSABLAN to your portfolio!

Here are a couple of links to get you started in the game:

• Empire Avenue 101 – Newbie Guide to the game
• The Quick Flip Versus Daily Dividends — How to Make Eaves in Empire Avenue
• This social media stock market game is building a real-world “value score” about you (with awesome video interview with Empire Avenue founder Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana

@ReallyVirtual: Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event). May 1, 12:58 am

@ReallyVirtual: Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/ May 1, 1:05 am

@ReallyVirtual: A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S May 1, 1:09 am

@ReallyVirtual: @m0hcin all silent after the blast, but a friend heard it 6 km away too… the helicopter is gone too. May 1, 1:44 am

@ReallyVirtual: @m0hcin http://bit.ly/ljB6p6 seems like my giant swatter worked ! May 1, 1:46 am

@ReallyVirtual: @m0hcin the few people online at this time of the night are saying one of the copters was not Pakistani… May 1, 1:48 am

@ReallyVirtual: @raihak I try, man, I try May 1, 1:57 am

@ReallyVirtual: @raihak Funny, moving to Abbottabad was part of the ‘being safe’ strategy May 1, 1:57 am

@ReallyVirtual: Since taliban (probably) don’t have helicpoters, and since they’re saying it was not “ours”, so must be a complicated situation #abbottabad May 1, 2:02 am

@ReallyVirtual: @raihak yep, the mad power cuts have reached abbottabad – 14 hours daily – luckily I have a generator AND a UPS at the coffee shop May 1, 2:03 am

@ReallyVirtual: @tahirakram yea. *hides his giant swatter* May 1, 2:03 am

@ReallyVirtual: @kashaziz technically, it is unidentified until identified, and it is a flying object, so year, why the hell not, we have seen weirder stuff May 1, 2:04 am

@ReallyVirtual: @tahirakram they’re not saying anything May 1, 2:05 am

@ReallyVirtual: The abbottabad helicopter/UFO was shot down near the Bilal Town area, and there’s report of a flash. People saying it could be a drone. May 1, 2:10 am

@ReallyVirtual: @wqs figures, if they have the right to shoot planes flying over the president house, the must have the same instructions for PMA May 1, 2:14 am

@ReallyVirtual: @smedica people are saying it was not a technical fault and it was shot down. I heard it CIRCLE 3-4 times above, sounded purposeful. May 1, 2:15 am

@ReallyVirtual: @tahirakram very likely – but it was too noisy to be a spy craft, or, a very poor spy craft it was. May 1, 2:16 am

@ReallyVirtual: @smedica It must have been more, I started noticing the helicpoter when the noise got irritating – which part of Abbottabd are you in? May 1, 2:20 am

@ReallyVirtual: @smedica I live near Jalal Baba Auditorium May 1, 2:23 am

@ReallyVirtual: @smedica ‘safer’ is a relative term that has lost its meaning in Pakistan May 1, 2:26 am

@ReallyVirtual: Here’s the location of the Abbottabad crash according to some people >>> http://on.fb.me/khjf34 May 1, 2:34 am

@ReallyVirtual: Two helicpoters, one down, could actually be the training accident scenario they’re saying it was >> http://bit.ly/ioGE6O May 1, 2:43 am

@ReallyVirtual: and now I feel I must apologize to the pilot about the swatter tweets :-/ May 1, 3:05 am

@ReallyVirtual: And now, a plane flying over Abbottabad… May 1, 3:39 am

@ReallyVirtual: @raihak The day there is uninterrupted electricity in Lahore for a whole month, I will start packing my bags, until then, Abbottabad is home May 1, 4:14 am

@ReallyVirtual: Interesting rumors in the otherwise uneventful Abbottabad air today May 1, 8:00 am

@ReallyVirtual: Report from a taxi driver: The army has cordoned off the crash area and is conducting door-to-door search in the surrounding May 1, 8:02 am

@ReallyVirtual: @kursed What really happened doesn’t matter if there is an official story behind it that 99.999% of the world would believe May 1, 8:08 am

@ReallyVirtual: @kursed Another rumor: two copters that followed the crashed one were foreign Cobras – and got away May 1, 8:10 am

@ReallyVirtual: @ahmedbilal @kursed Sadly. We should start learning how to spread believable stories and recreate a reality that suits us. May 1, 8:12 am

@ReallyVirtual: @kursed True, but stranger things have happened. I just hope they don’t find my giant helicopter swatter. Must hide it :-/ May 1, 8:15 am

@ReallyVirtual: Report from a sweeper: A family also died in the crash, and one of the helicopter riders got away and is now being searched for. May 1, 8:21 am

@ReallyVirtual: @kursed Well, there were at least two copters last night, I heard one but a friend heard two, for 15-20 minutes. May 1, 8:24 am

@ReallyVirtual: @kursed I think I should take out my big blower to blow the fog of war away and see the clearer picture. May 1, 8:24 am

@ReallyVirtual: I guess Abbottabad is going to get as crowded as the Lahore that I left behind for some peace and quiet. *sigh* May 1, 8:27 am

@ReallyVirtual: Wondering what would be the right music to play in the coffee shop today… May 1, 8:35 am

@ReallyVirtual: @kursed so, not that hard anymore I guess? May 1, 8:35 am

@ReallyVirtual: I guess I should unsubscribe from the #abbottabad search on twitter before it kills my machine. Leave Abbottabad alone, Osama and Obama… May 1, 8:41 am

@ReallyVirtual: @harisn we are both right outside Islamabad :-) May 1, 8:47 am

@ReallyVirtual: I need to sleep, but Osama had to pick this day to die :-/ May 1, 9:03 am

@ReallyVirtual: Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it. May 1, 9:41 am

@ReallyVirtual: and here come the mails from the mainstream media… *sigh* May 1, 9:42 am

With no real research to back up this claim (remember, this is just my personal blog, not a product of journalism), I’m sure the key to the lab’s success is that they do a great job surfacing stories that I, and the people I follow, find helpful, informative and useful.

The sites and humans that I follow frequently share links to Neiman because they consistently provide interesting content that is often news to their audience of journalists. Those links increase the chance that Neiman stories will show up high in search engines, social streams and curated sites.

• @mashable, with a Klout score of 87, is as influential as New York Times, and more influential than any other publication on the list.
• @wikileaks and @techcrunch, with Klout scores of 85 (Wikileaks and TechCrunch),  are more influential than Wall Street Journal.
• @tmz and @gizmodo, with Klout scores of 80 (TMZ and Gizmodo), are more influential than New York Post and USA Today.
• @tbd, with a Klout score of 68, is more influential than Washington Post.
• @thedailybeast, with a Klout score of 78,  is more influential than the Boston Globe and Miami Herald.
• @propublica, with a Klout score of 73,  is more influential than the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune.

If you found this interesting, here are other  pages you might want to read:

• What is the Klout Score? Understanding the Influence Metric
• The Top 25 Newspapers on Twitter — Who’s Up, Who’s Down
• The top newspapers on Twitter? Try this list
• Mashable leads Twitter influence list
• Sites: Mashable, Wikileaks, TechCrunch, TMZ, Gizmodo,TBD, The Daily Beast, ProPublica

After Dylan Stableford (@stableford) published a list of top 25 newspapers on Twitter,  based on print circulation, Mathilde Piard  (@mathildepiard) followed with her own list of top newspapers on Twitter that “goes by number of followers on Twitter, not circulation.” I used the accounts from those posts to create the list below. Make sure to read those posts to learn about the selection process.

Here are the numbers. Click on a Twitter username to visit the account. Click on a Klout score for details about that measurement. Oh, and feel free to see the data in this Google Doc.

Why does this matter? Because news sites are publishing factual inaccuracies in articles that say things like “100 people recommend this” when in fact only 39 people did.

Here are the stories that I looked at this morning:

• CNN: Facebook event: Let’s dump trash at Boehner’s pad
  Claim: 2,071 recommends. Actual: 650 recommends (plus 769 shares and 653 comments)
• GigaOm: Facebook Open Sources Its Servers and Data Centers
  Claim: 593 likes. Actual: 291 (plus 232 shares and 70 comments)
• TechCrunch: Facebook’s “Open Compute Project”: Their Server/Datacenter Expertise Now Open To All
  Claim: 580 likes. Actual: 386 likes (plus 150 share and 44 comments)
• Mashable: Homeland Security to Issue Terror Warnings via Facebook & Twitter
  Claim: 578 likes. Actual: 120 likes (plus 245 shares and 213 comments)
• Politico: Joe Biden’s daughter trashes birther Donald Trump
  Claim: 143 like. Actual: 70 likes (plus 47 share and 26 comments)
• Engadget: LikeLight lights up your likes with Legos, Arduino (video)
  Claim: 143 likes. Actual: 70 likes (plus 54 shares and 19 comments)
• Today: New tool helps clean up your Facebook reputation
  Claim: 106 recommends. Actual: 40 recommends (plus 50 shares and 16 comments)
• WSJ Digits: Facebook Won’t Become E-Commerce Force, Analyst Says
  Claim: 101 likes. Actual: 34 likes (plus 51 shares and 16 comments)
• TIME: Obama Opens 2012 Campaign on Facebook
  Claim: 96 likes. Actual: 34 likes (plus 48 shares and 14 comments)
• USA Today: Facebook plea persuades man to donate a kidney
  Claim: 94 recommends. Actual: 51 recommends (plus 28 shares and 15 comments)
• All things D: Facebook’s Rise Is a Big Deal for Media Sites. For the Rest of the Web, Not So Much.
  Claim: 55 likes. Actual: 22 likes (plus 24 shares and 9 comments)
• Slate: No More Privacy Paranoia
  Claim: 62 likes. Actual: 22 likes (plus 32 shares and 8 comments)

All told, the like buttons claimed that those pages were liked or recommended 4,622 times. In fact, they were liked or recommended only 1,790 times.

In case you didn’t click on the first link in this post, I got the real “like” numbers by using my RealShare tool.

Feel free to take a look at the data in my malformed Google Doc.

Bit.ly can help you track how many times people click on links you’ve shared on social networks, and Klout can measure how much “influence” you have online, but if you’re a journalist here are seven other numbers you might want to consider. Sorry, I don’t know of any advanced system to track these metrics, but an old-fashioned notepad or Google Docs can work.

1. How many story ideas were inspired by messages you read on Twitter or Facebook?
2. How many sourced did you find on social networks?
3. How many questions did you answer for people on social networks?
4. How many experts answered your questions on social networks?
5. How many times did people reshare or retweet your message?
6. How many of the people you follow actively discuss the topic you cover?
7. How many of your followers actively discuss the topic you cover?

If you liked this, you might find these posts on other sites useful.

• How journalists are using metrics to track the success of tweets
• Social Media Assignment: Free Metric and Measurement Tools

Image courtesy of ‘David K K‘ via Flickr.

I used my RealShare tool to find the real Facebook counts.

I apologize if I’m beating a dead horse here, but I thought it would be helpful to just pull out another example to illustrate how misleading Facebook button counts can be.

• No, I won’t assume that the 680 people who shared the link genuinely liked it.
• Yes, I’d be ignorant to believe all 269 comments were made by people who liked the link.
• No, 269 comments do not equal 269 people.
• Yes, Facebook should change the wording or the count so that the statement about how many people like a particular page is correct.

I used to just send out a general morning salutation to no one in particular every morning. It was occasionally met with a reply.

But the Android Twitter client Twicca makes it really easy to mention multiple friends in one tweet, so one morning I decided to look at my main stream and see who was actually awake and tweeting, and I added a handful of them in my morning status update.

If I was a marketing professional, I might say that I am “targeting a social invitation to a currently active audience to increase the likelihood of eliciting a response with the goal of building engagement.”

I’m sure my childhood memories of Romper Room kicked in to inspire this idea. Watch Romper Room’s late “Miss Barbara” Plummer explain why she thinks the magic mirror was so special to the children who watched the show.

For those of you too young to have witnessed that magic mirror for yourself, here is what you missed.