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Archive for the ‘Social Networks’ Category

Big List of Social Media Sites

posted by Michael Garrity @ 1:00 PM

Friday, December 2, 2011

At this point, even the most inexperienced Web marketer is aware of the vital role that social media plays in promoting a brand on the Internet. Of course, almost everyone has a presence on at least one of the major social destinations, mainly Facebook and Twitter, but what many people seem to overlook are the seemingly endless amounts of smaller, alternative social networks at their disposal.

In addition to the "Big 5" social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Tumblr), there are a wide variety of different places that users can go to be social on the 'Net. Some of these sites are aimed at specific lifestyle markets, some provide specialized services like user reviews or checking in, and some are simply older or smaller takes on the social network platform that we all know and love.

There are obviously many ways for marketers to approach social media. It would certainly behoove everyone to make their presence felt on Facebook and Twitter, because the number of users and levels of engagment on those two sites are so astronomically high compared to their competitors, but beyond that, the sky is really the limit for companies trying to optimized their Web profiles.

This issue becomes more difficult to address when you consider the very broad defintion of "social media." For some, social networks are only those like Facebook or Myspace that are built around the idea of users having their own unique profiles, which are the focus of the site. Others define social much more loosely, referencing any site that gives users a chance to share and interact with content. Because of this, the opportunities for social media marketing are, in a way, limitless.

Local businesses probably want to seek out services like Yelp or Foursquare, which give users a chance to write reviews or check in to local shops, respectively. Companies that operate in more niche markets by offering products or services most useful to a specific group can seek out social networks that serve the interests of these unique customers. Other businesses have the opportunity to market themselves in unique ways, such as in pictures or video, by jumping on board with specialized social networks that focus on these types of content. Here's a list of some of the best social media sites on the Web today that covers all of these areas and more.

"The Big 5"

Athletes

As someone who runs (or, in my case, has befriended runners) will tell you, it is a very social activity. This website takes the communal nature of the sport to the next level, by allowing runners to share their experiences with like-minded athletes around the world.

Athlinks

Education

The first is a great site geared mostly towards college and high school students to work together and seek help in their schoolwork without having to plagiarize or turn to the unreliable Wikipedia for answers. The second provides a network for teachers to share and get ideas.

Cramster

Teachers Recess

Music Lovers

To many users, the Web and music go hand-in-hand. One of the most popular uses of the Internet for many people is to listen to, share and discuss music with others, making it a natural move to create social networks based around the idea of, surprise, listening to, sharing and discussing music with others.

Last.fm

iLike

Finance

Everyone's always seeking financial advice and/or business information, so why not turn to the Web?

Pet Lovers

People love pets, and for those people who really love their pets, these sites offer a place to turn to get advice and share stories about their favorite four-legged creatures.

Dogster

Catster

Gamers

The classic stereotype of "gamers" is that they're all very anti-social, but with the advent of online gaming over the last decade, it has become one of the more social hobbies in which one can particpate. These sites allow users to connect with other gamers while sharing their individual accomplishments online.

Raptr

gamerDNA

Food and Cooking

Yum! This is the digital-age equivalent to your grandma sharing recipe cards with her friends.

FoodPals

BigOven

Bakespace

Artists

This popular art-hosting site has become a haven for those wanting to share their original content with the world.

deviantART

Travel

Social networks based around travel allow users to seek out information about potential destinations based on actual user feedback, which provides practical information for trip planning.

TripIt

Dopplr

TripAdvisor

Avid Readers

Another group that isn't usually seen as the particularly social, readers now have a variety of places to visit online to share with like-minded individuals about what they're reading and what they've read, as well as get recommendations for new books.

GoodReads

Shelfari

Film Buffs

Like music fans and readers, those among us obsessed with movies also love to talk about them and share ideas and recommendations, and this site allows users to do just that.

Flixster

And more!

There are plenty of other great social destinations that offer a variety of options and services for users, as well as great opportunities for marketers to spread their message on the Web.

Tags: social

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Twitter: A Playground for Email Marketers

posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Twitter: A Playground for Email Marketers

A recent post from the official Twitter Blog tells of how much the number of tweets has grown in the past years, minus spam. From 5,000 tweets daily in 2007, to a sudden leap to 300,000 the following year, and a huge 2.5 million messages in 2009. The bottom line today: an average of 600 tweets every second!

While there are no conclusive breakdown of figures to explain that immensity, one is left with a feeling that if the law of statistics and probably do not exclude Twitter, then this social media behemoth is indeed a rich goldmine just waiting to be tapped by savvy e-mail marketers.

With all the world using social media, it’s an easy step for e-mail marketers to integrate their campaigns with Twitter. Despite its 140-character limitation, and the low-key “thin” APIs, the elements are already in place that allows e-mail marketers to wage a successful campaign here.

* Wearing Two Marketing Hats in Twitter

Unlike traditional email campaigns, many marketers may still be in the dark of how to go about integrating email campaigns in the Twitterdom. They may scratch their heads because of the alien nature of the social media service when compared with traditional email systems.

After all, the messaging system here is a far cry from traditional email. There are short tweets instead of multi-paragraphed messages. There are text-based posts rather than graphic-rich communications. Subscriptions here are of the form of followers and following. And most importantly, messages here are sent and received in “real-time”.

The last characteristic is an important difference when conducting the marketing campaign, because it urges e-mail marketers to evolve in order to tap into Twitter’s immense customer base. The nature of communication in Twitterdom is more suited for customer relationship-building — it is active and two-way. Users participate through questions and feedbacks, contrary to emails which simply park the message on inboxes and wait for what happens. As such, marketers must learn to “listen” to customers to deliver the campaign suited for their specific preferences.

* Integrating Twitter with E-mail

E-mail marketers must go the roundabout way in the Twitterdom to conduct their campaigns. It’s all about luring customers with interesting tweets that link to email sign-ups, and emails that link to Twitter. Here are some ways to do this:

1. Create useful tweets with links to the full article’s landing page. In the landing page, there can be an option to sign up to get the full version of the information. If the information is valuable enough, Twitter followers can be made instant email subscribers in this manner.

2. Create Twitter pages for every products or services offered, for fine-grained user segmentation that allows delivery of better-targeted campaigns.

3. Dedicate an account solely for customer support, and man them with qualified personnel to handle customer questions, requests and feedbacks.

4. Promote the Twitter account on other marketing channels, for example, as a signature in e-mail campaigns, a footer in newsletters, or a website link, or by quoting customer tweets in other social media accounts.

This unique nature of real-time social media services like Twitter urges e-mail marketers to re-think their ways and perspectives in order to come up with cross-channel marketing campaigns. Failure to do so is a big loss and a denial to tap into a huge customer base all ripe for the picking.

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Social Networking Is it for you?

posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Social Networking Is it for you?

A question I am frequently asked goes something like this, “With all the different social networking sites out there, how do I know which which is right for me, and how do I find the time to keep up with it?”

Great question! One that I am sure we’ve all asked ourselves at some point or another, right? This much is clear: If you don’t have a purpose for utilizing social media you are going to feel much like a person who has been thrown into the water and can’t swim! You are going to panic, and try to keep your head above water however you can. Not only is this scary, but it is exhausting. I would answer the above question with this question, “What is your primary reason for wanting to use social media?” Please don’t say ‘because everyone is doing it’. That is not a good reason. You need to have a well-defined reason so that you can then determine which site, or sites, you wish to spend your time on.

Here are five questions to ask yourself to help you determine which networking site(s) you want to utilize:

1. What is your *main* purpose for utilizing social media? Be specific with this question. Don’t generalize.

2. Who is your target audience?

3. What specific results will your social media efforts have on your target audience?

4. What is your comfort level with social media? Are you new to social media? Are you an intermediate user? An advanced user?

5. How much time do you want to devote to social media per day? Per week?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you can begin to explore what social networking site(s) are the best fit for you based on the answers you’ve provided.

The big three in Social Media are: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Here’s how I like to think of these:

* LinkedIn is like putting on a suit.

* Facebook is like casual Friday’s.

* Twitter is like an afterwork party or hanging out on the weekend.

Business happens on all three of these sites just as it does in the traditional workplace during the day and after hours. I use this analogy only to provide an idea of how ‘business’ or ‘casual’ the site is. I, personally, am on all three of these social networking sites. They all ‘fit’ for me. The key to finding a fit is that you will then get involved. Don’t just sign up to sign up. You *must* get involved in some fashion. Whether that is joining a group and participating, or answering questions, or tweeting about some useful information, you must be involved. Remember, people need to know, like, and trust you *before* they will consider doing business with you.

As for how much time you need to spend on these networking sites, that will really depend on your purpose and target audience (see questions 1 and 2 above). Plan on at least 30 minutes a day. Block this time off on your calendar, set a timer (here’s a really cool no-cost one: http://www.nestersoft.com/timeleft/index.shtml ) for 30 minutes, and get busy! Once the timer goes off, you are done for the day. Wasn’t that easy? Doesn’t that sound manageable? If you find you really enjoy this, do this exercise again at the end of the day. As with anything, it is all about what you find comfortable, because when it’s comfortable you’ll do it!

Tags: Social Networking Is it for you?, Social Networks

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3 Ways To Alienate Your Peeps a.k.a.

posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM

Saturday, October 8, 2011

3 Ways To Alienate Your Peeps a.k.a.

As I put the final touches on my new report and what it means to businesses of all industries — online and offline — there are several things which have hit my inbox this week as great examples of how NOT to market your business and I want to share a few of them here.

1. I received 3 emails from someone whose list I’ve been on for well over a year and received so few communications that I completely forgot I was on her list (okay, that’s a mistake in itself, but not the one I’m focusing on). The 1st email mentioned that she’s been busy and asked how I was (that’s it…just a few words). I forget what the second was and the 3rd is to sell me a $700 program. Seriously? No contact in “forever” and then sell me a $700 program after asking how I am? There are no words.

2. Another program offer/sales page talking about how “in demand” the coach is and that she isn’t often able to include 1-on-1 time with her clients, but will for a limited time as part of a larger program (limited time and number of people not included in her sales page) and ending with how much she cares about my success and always over-delivers. There’s no doubt that she and I differ on the definition of “over-deliver.”

3. The following is an excerpt from an email sent to me yesterday (name withheld for privacy reasons): “Hi Sandra, I have been in a couple of programs recently. One at a platinum level that I still could not talk directly to my coach unless in a small group 1 hour call once per month… I am currently trying to leave a program that is not delivering what it sold and certainly not giving me the real information I need to move forward to a profitable business model.” The concerns here are obvious: 1) This individual will likely never invest in anything else offered by either of the two program hosts she’s currently involved with, 2) She may have shared her poor experiences with her friends/colleagues who will have less than overwhelming respect for the program hosts and 3) Others in the same programs are likely feeling/experiencing the same lack of happiness/results — all of which have longer term impact for the programs’ hosts.

Marketing our businesses isn’t just the promotion/launching of new programs, products and services. Or posting on social media and our blogs. Or sending out a consistent ezine.

Marketing our businesses takes places every day in every action and interaction — with current clients, former clients and acquaintances. It’s how we show up in everything we do.

In other words. . .”Ordinary things, done consistently, create extraordinary AND consistent results.”

Tags: 3 Ways To Alienate Your Peeps a.k.a., Social Networks

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Top Ten Reasons Your Business Should Utilize Facebook

posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Top Ten Reasons Your Business Should Utilize Facebook

1. There are over 400 million active Facebook users and over 50% of the users login everyday. This means there is a huge, global audience to market your company to.

2. Facebook is a great place to distribute information about your company including events, photographs, videos, articles, blog posts as well as your business hours and contact information.

3. Social networking sites like Facebook allow you to connect with your customers on a personal level.

4. You can use the discussions feature to create surveys, ask questions and gather valuable information from your customers.

5. Having a Facebook page will give you a stronger presence with the search engines, especially with Google’s new social search function.

6. The Facebook Fan Box is a powerful tool that you can place on your blog, website, YouTube page or even your email newsletter that allows visitors to see your company’s Facebook page and even become a fan without ever leaving your site.

7. Facebook Connect allows users from a multitude of sites to access and post information to Facebook without leaving the site they are visiting, such as eBay, Etsy and all the major social bookmarking sites. If someone sees a product they like or reads an interesting article, they can easily post it to their Facebook profiles.

8. 20 million people become fans of Facebook Pages each day and more than 1.5 million local businesses have Facebook Pages. Your competition most likely has a Facebook page and you do not want to fall behind this important way to build your business.

9. As Facebook Mobile grows in popularity, more and more people are spending time on Facebook since they do not have to be at a computer and can access the site from anywhere in the world at anytime.

10. Facebook is growing internationally so you can easily target those in other countries and add international customers to your demographic.

Tags: Social Networks, Top Ten Reasons Your Business Should Utilize Facebook

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Twitter 101: Tips to Get You Started

posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM

Monday, October 3, 2011

Twitter 101: Tips to Get You Started

I have a confession to make: I was not an early adopter of Twitter. To be honest, I didn’t get it. I didn’t get the language. It seemed like a string of links to even more things I had no time to read. It felt overwhelming. LinkedIn and Facebook made sense as a perfect extension of networking I was already doing, but the charm of Twitter eluded me.

Sound familiar? I hear the same thing from many people, but what I discovered when I actually engaged on Twitter has turned me into a devotee. Twitter has been one of the greatest learning tools of my career.

If you are hesitant to join Twitter, you are not alone. However, I want to encourage you to give it a shot. Set up an account, follow some people and learn some things. People on Twitter are very generous with their time and knowledge. Yes, you will spend time on Twitter that you already don’t have, but you will also learn things that will make you more valuable, smarter and “in the know.” I use Twitter instead of Google for information gathering, and it has made me more productive.

Change is all around us, and the only way we can move forward is to change together and collaborate. I am still a newbie, but if I have inspired you to try, here are some tips to get you started:

1) Come up with a goal for trying Twitter. Is your goal to interact with the media or journalists? Is it to gain exposure for personal branding in your area of expertise? Is it to learn from others who are experts in their field? Or is it to increase traffic to your Web site or blog?

2) When you sign up, complete the profile as fully as possible. Add a photo, short bio, user name and real name. People want to know who you are. Your bio should reflect your goal. Make sure you include the URL for your site, blog or Facebook page.

3) There is no need to panic if you don’t have a ton of people following you. If you post good information, people will find you slowly and steadily.

4) You may have multiple goals for Twitter, feel free to have multiple accounts. At our firm we have 11 accounts and each one has a different audience and purpose.

5) Start off by sharing your knowledge. I bet you know a lot about your industry and your business. Think of Twitter as a great way to share that information. If you read something helpful, share the link on Twitter and let others benefit from your find. Generosity is a good business practice.

6) Because we are limited to 140 characters on Twitter, you will need to learn about shortening URLs. I use a site called Bit.ly because it helps me track my shortened URLs. Or you can use a web site called Hootsuite which allows you to shorten URLs, track them and manage multiple accounts. It’s kind of like the Swiss Army Knife of Twitter.

7) Learn the common abbreviations. We created a helpful postcard for our clients. Please feel free to print it for yourself.

If you read something you like on Twitter, remember to retweet it. It’s a great way to give credit to people who are putting out good information. If you want to join the conversation, use reply.

9) Follow people you already follow in other ways: Journalists you admire, comedians who make you laugh, or authors who inspire and teach.

10) Be a good community member. A good rule of thumb is to have a 4 to 1 ratio for self promotion. One self-promotional tweet to 4 that will help others or engaging in the community through reply or retweet.

Tags: Social Networks, Twitter 101: Tips to Get You Started

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7 Reasons To Love HootSuite

posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM

Saturday, October 1, 2011

7 Reasons To Love HootSuite

Twittering has progressed from a social “message burst” to a full-fledged social media tool, and more applications are being developed around its unique appeal. There’s a new player in this scenario, and it’s a hoot to use! The newest in social media, HootSuite, is pegged as a “social media dashboard”, offering a lot of valuable Twitter resources for those of us that like to Tweet a lot or have multiple accounts.

Below are the reasons why we love this great new tool:

#1 Multi-tasking is a breeze

Got two or multiple Twitter accounts? It’s much convenient to maintain these accounts without having to crack your head open. The Multi-Editing feature allows you to access and maintain your tweets in each account with easiness, and still maintain privacy of your own Twitter password. Switch back and forth or post to all of your tweets using the HootSuite dashboard and you no longer need to log in and out again!

#2 Ease in running a business

Social networking has turned in to an income-generating channel, and HootSuite has taken that into a new direction with Multiple editors. You can have a “business” Twitter account with Multiple Editors, and have someone else Tweet information as needed, perhaps have one person tweeting about sales and marketing promos, while another respond to direct messages you may receive! You can even embed your Google Adsense code to your account, and generate additional revenue!

#3 No sweat tweet scheduling

Scheduling an event, and decide on sending out tweets at various times informing people that the event is coming up? This tool makes it pretty easy to schedule using its date and time feature and send it out later. That way, you don’t have to spend all of your time tied up to the screen and tweeting every so now and then.

#4 Link shortening for optimum impact

HootSuite shortens links within the system. This amazing tool also allows you to monitor your mentions, even your RTs (tweets re-tweeted by others). Apparently, it’s like a miniature Google Analytics program for your tweets, where your tweets have metric value!

#5 Light and not hard on your computer’s memory

HootSuite won’t affect the performance and speed of the computer since it’s online based. A very much similar applications like TweetDeck eats up a huge deal of processing time on the hard drive.

#6 Saved keywords

This great tool allows you to save some of those keyword searches and recover them at the click of a button. No more searching or deciding on the keywords to join in a trend or continue one, as you can have them accessed with ease.

#7 Fantastic navigation

The HootSuite dashboard is set up with ease in mind similar to the Twitter homepage and easily tabbed. Tabs like “Home”, “@Replies”, “DM’s”, and the like make it a no brainer to use. The display lets you look at information appropriate for a certain account, including keyword monitoring, direct messages, and Groups.

Tags: 7 Reasons To Love HootSuite, Social Networks

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Free Squidoo Lens For Your Business

posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

5 Important Reasons Why You Should Not Miss Out On A Great, Free Squidoo Lens For Your Business

There are many excellent ways to market your website online but one often overlooked, free facility, is the creation of a Squidoo lens.

A Squidoo lens is for all intents and purposes a free website page hosted on the Squidoo website, enabling you to create and edit content of your choice utilizing various excellent editing modules. This content can be an overview of your business or may be the promotion of a specific product or service.

If you are unsure of the value to your business of creating this type of page or lens, run through the 5 important points below outlining why:

1. Your Squidoo page is permitted to have links pointing back to your business website which as we know can offer huge SEO benefits. These links are dofollow links, in other words they allow the search engine robots to follow the link to your website, as opposed to a nofollow link which doesn’t permit search engine robots to follow the link.

Therefore the dofollow links are of more value.

2. Due to the fact that the Squidoo website is such a highly ranked, large site, quite often you can find that your Squidoo lens can actually rank higher than your own website, especially if your website is new or not very well optimized. And it goes without saying, that the more time your Squidoo lens is online at higher the search engines will rank it.

3. There are some excellent editing tools available when creating your lens and they are extremely easy to use. These editing tools known as modules and you can find a module for pretty much anything you would want to include in your lens, including adding music, graphics, video, links, large text and lots more.

4. The Squidoo site is incredibly easy for even a web novice to create great content and is also visually excellent. You can select a template with colour to suit your company branding.

5. If at a later date you would like to return to your lens to add further content, this is a very easy process. You can also create further lenses on other subjects, which for your marketing campaign can only be great news.

So there you have it, my 5 great reasons why it would be crazy to not take full advantage of this free and excellent marketing service. I really like the Squidoo website as it has a very user friendly feel about it. I think the creators have done a first class job in putting together a very helpful and informative website.

Have a look and make your own decision but remember, this service won’t cost you anything and in this day and age, you can’t grumble about totally free online marketing.

Tags: Free Squidoo Lens For Your Business, Social Networks

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Would Jesus have tweeted?

posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM

Monday, July 25, 2011

Would Jesus have tweeted?

With all this social media around I have asked myself if Jesus would have tweeted: “Performed miracle at Cana wedding. Guests thirsty and restless. Asked mum to fetch more water”, or “Cranking out a few parables after lunch with Stephen Fry”?

Recently, the Pope was in Britain and warned of “aggressive secularism. Meanwhile, the Vatican has launched www.pope2you.net, linked to Facebook and an iPhone App. Recently I have become extremely bored with Mashable and TechCruch stories on iPhone apps and decided to turn my attention to the effects social media, in particular, and the internet in general are having on our lives

One such article suggested that humankind is in the midst of a radical and unprecedented transmutation of its collective society, such as in debilitating disparity between rich and poor, globalised economic insecurity and a species-threatening ecological crisis. Perhaps.

Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry on The Ten Commandments in the televised Intelligence Squared debate asked how “the Galilean carpenter” would feel about the wealth of the church, attacked its hierarchy and the “twisted, neurotic and hysterical way its leaders are chosen”, while Ann Widdecombe led to the familiar story of Moses and how he came to write down the ten basic rules passed to him by God. With social media so dominant in our society, would that have been posted on Facebook, one wonders.

A friend of a friend, Simon Critchley, recounts in his book The Book of Dead Philosophers that Voltaire, after decades of denouncing the Roman Catholic Church, announced on his deathbed that he wanted to die a catholic, while Heraclitus, who believed that everything was in a state of flux, died, according to one account, of drowning in cow dung.

He goes further to suggest that philosopher Francis Bacon, the great champion of empirical method, died of his own philosophy: in an effort to observe the effects of refrigeration on a freezing cold day, he stuffed a chicken with snow and caught pneumonia. Then we have Julien Offray de La Mettrie, atheist and hedonist, who died after eating large amounts of truffled pâté and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who saw life and death as part of the same timelessness, died the day after his birthday after a friend had given him an electric blanket as a present. “Many happy returns,” the friend said. “There will be no returns,” Wittgenstein gaily replied.

Our consciousness seems to have manifested itself, almost exclusively, on the narrowed values of competition, individualism and externalised success, and the West’s collective rationale has now been set on individualism and materialism that has been grossly overemphasised and reinforced.

When you look at the casino culture of our ruthlessly unregulated financial institutions, they remain tied to our paradigms of separation and competition. Politically and economically, these values stretch institutional ambition beyond traditional borders as we are now witnessing with the emergence of China and India.

But back to basics: Copernicus was credited with contributing the first comprehensive cosmology that replaced the Earth with the Sun as the centre of our system of revolving planetary bodies; Galileo furthered the popularity of Copernican astronomy with observable proof via telescopic advances; Kepler began constructing a bridge between astronomy and the laws of physics that was completed by the work of Newton. Their proven assumptions required cultural adaptation of religious ideology.

However, the once mighty Catholic Church shunned and silenced such discoveries; and these days the religious seem to have taken it upon themselves to have a mightier voice than that of Darwinian biology, and other geneticists, at a time when these ideas were instrumental in bridging a material view of the cosmos with a secular view of nature and evolution.

Maybe Jesus’ followers would, beyond doubt, have retweeted the words, “He’s the one who made it possible to have direct contact with God. We don’t need a middle man,” and restricted the last part of the phrase for lack of character space. Well, the bankers may have come out in revolt over that but I’m sure history has shown us that we only reorient institutions and practices that mirror our assumptions and shifting values of the interconnectedness of digital cooperation.

Postmodernism tends to be a loose composite in all this and is influenced by scientific studies and personal observations that seem to suggest experience is subjective. Similarly, deconstructionists point out the fallacies of objectified or rational truth and the limitations of reductionism.

Or, to use Mr Critchley’s account in On Heidegger’s Being and Time, we should see this as a radicalisation of Husserl’s phenomenology, particularly his theories of intentionality, categorial intuition and the phenomenological concept of the a priori, if you get my drift. Philosophers do indeed die in the strangest of circumstances, as the entire idea of searching for “truth” is in itself now an existential.

But to get back to the point, “Would Jesus have tweeted?” I rather suspect he would have or Barack Obama would have been tweeted beforehand: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time.”

Tags: networks, social, Would Jesus have tweeted?

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5 Reasons You Should Use LinkedIn Groups for Business Social Networking

posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM

Monday, December 27, 2010

5 Reasons You Should Use LinkedIn Groups for Business Social Networking

Today, social media networks allow business professionals to network like they never have before. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter allow business professionals to connect with people within their industry from all over the world. Social networking sites not only allow professionals to expand their contacts faster than ever before, but it also lets them share news, tips and tools of the trade in seconds.

LinkedIn currently has over 75 million professionals who are actively participating on the site today. The site includes many features such as allowing users to upload their full resume, updating their status to let the world know what projects they are currently working on and participating in group discussions. Many LinkedIn users take advantage of these features, but there are still some that aren’t sure how to make the most out of them.

LinkedIn groups are a great way to interact with other professionals in your field by sharing information and building contacts in other parts of the world. Although joining many groups can make you look more important and connected, it can also be overwhelming to maintain. Aren’t sure how to use LinkedIn groups?

Here are 5 tips for getting the most out of groups, provided by the LinkedIn blog.

1. Make a commitment to a few groups that focus on your greatest professional interests

LinkedIn allows business professionals to network and collaborate with others that they may have never spoken to otherwise. If you haven’t joined any groups yet, pick a couple that spark your professional interest and jump right into the conversation. According to LinkedIn, many of the most active members find that their participation in the right groups “directly enriches what they do at work.”

2. Post news on group discussions

One of the easiest ways to start participating in groups is to post current news and ask an open-ended question. This will start a conversation and you will be able to see what stance your fellow professionals take on the issue. Expressing your opinion on a certain news piece will give you a chance to show others your professional expertise. This will boost your credibility and increase your chances of making useful professional connections. To find material, subscribe to industry-related newsletters, RSS feeds, Facebook feeds, company blog or Twitter.

3. Take advantage of the “Following” tool

Groups make social networking online easy by giving professionals a great way to keep track of which news stories their colleagues think are interesting and what they have on their minds. To keep up with all the current information, subscribe to the digest emails that summarize the activity of a group. Also use the “Following” tool to watch specific discussions that interest you. This will allow you to sit back and observe then jump in the conversation when you feel you have something provocative to contribute.

4. Get your coworkers involved

Why not create your own LinkedIn group and invite some of your trusted coworkers, clients and/or customers to join? You already discuss your professional interests with them which make them the perfect people to collaborate and network with on LinkedIn. Once other professionals see the intelligent discussions you are having, they’ll want to join the group too and you’ll be able to engage in a broader collaboration than you ever felt possible.

5. Learn more about the professionals on LinkedIn

Make sure to click through the profiles of your fellow group members to spark conversations about what they’re currently working on. As your relationship and conversation grows, you can invite them to become a professional connection. The more connections you make, the more chances you have to expand your business and learn from others in your industry.

LinkedIn groups are a powerful way to reach out to others in your field, get noticed and improve and grow your professional network. Groups also allow you to discuss important issues with others and collaborate with other professionals. Best of all, they are completely free to join, which means you can start online networking with LinkedIn groups today.

Tags: 5 Reasons You Should Use LinkedIn Groups for Business Social Networking, Social Networks, The Web University

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The Most Common Traits Of Social Networking Sites

posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM

Saturday, December 4, 2010

The Most Common Traits Of Social Networking Sites

With the development and frequent use of internet, more and people are keeping in touch with one another. Not just keeping in touch with current friends but making new ones from others with common interests and views. Because of this, social networking sites like Youtube, MySpace, Hello Hello, Friendster and Facebook have increased exponentially.

Within each of those sites, there are different niches. Niches as in online communities with common passion be it business, hobbies, political views, religion, sex just to name a few. Each niche allows you to post blogs, comments, photos and videos. The same goes for your friends and anyone whom you accepted as friends.

Signing up for social networking sites is easy. Simply fill up the eapplication form and answer a few questions. Such as your name, age, gender, profile, user name and password. It is not compulsory but highly recommended that you upload your photo so that people will know they are communicating with the real person rather than someone hiding behind the PC screen.

When you are done, you get opt for your profile visibility. You can choose to let everyone or just your friends to see everything. Most social networking sites will respect your decision whichever that may be.

Once you hit the enter or submit button, your profile will be seen by people from all over the world and your list of contacts will grow. Some are people you already know while others are people you do not know but have the right whether to accept their friend request or no.

However not all social networking sites started that way. One good example is Classmates which is specially set up to help you locate your classmates from secondary school and college.

To outdo one another, each social networking site developer have to come up with new features and benefits quickly. Some of those include blogging, community niches, mobile interactions, RSS feeds, social gaming networks etc.

It is not compulsory for you to join all social networking site available. Just 1 to 3 popular ones will do. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are great examples.

Despite all the hype and popularity, the one thing that most social networking sites cannot totally control is privacy of users. This is especially when they meet people who are not really whom they claimed to be online and ended up as victims in either money scams and rape scandals.

Lottery and Nigerian scams as well as guys luring gals out under the pretext of dating and friendship but ended up raping them are the most common incidents that emerged over the years.

These are the common traits of most social networking sites no matter how established and popular they are. What distinguishes them is their target audience and features that eventually persuaded you to sign up as their member.

Still social networking sites is the easiest and fastest way to make friends in different parts of the world. You no longer can share interesting experiences or things you like with them and they are great places to drive traffic to your sites since their accounts are usually free and more and more people signing up.

You can find out more about social networking sites via Google search and your friends who have been on some of those sites. But whichever your choice, the best way is to join them first which are usually free. That way, it will be much easier to determine which ones work best.

Tags: Social Networks, The Most Common Traits Of Social Networking Sites, The Web University

(2 Comments )

Social Networking: Is it for you?

posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Social Networking: Is it for you?

Here are five questions to ask yourself to help you determine which networking site(s) you want to utilize:

1) What is your “main” purpose for utilizing social media? Be specific with this question. Don’t generalize.

2) Who is your target audience?

3) What specific results will your social media efforts have on your target audience?

4) What is your comfort level with social media? Are you new to social media? Are you an intermediate user? An advanced user?

5) How much time do you want to devote to social media per day? Per week?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you can begin to explore what social networking site(s) are the best fit for you based on the answers you’ve provided.

The big three in Social Media are: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Here’s how I like to think of these:

- LinkedIn is like putting on a suit.

- Facebook is like casual Friday’s.

- Twitter is like an afterwork party or hanging out on the weekend.

Business happens on all three of these sites just as it does in the traditional workplace during the day and after hours. I use this analogy only to provide an idea of how ‘business’ or ‘casual’ the site is. I, personally, am on all three of these social networking sites. They all ‘fit’ for me. The key to finding a fit is that you will then get involved. Don’t just sign up to sign up. You *must* get involved in some fashion. Whether that is joining a group and participating, or answering questions, or tweeting about some useful information, you must be involved. Remember, people need to know, like, and trust you “before” they will consider doing business with you.

Tags: Social Networking Is it for you?, Social Networks, The Web University

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What to Expect from Web 3.0

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM

Saturday, August 28, 2010

What to Expect from Web 3.0

The buzz is growing about Web 3.0, but as usual you have to
filter out all the hype, self-serving PR, old-fashioned
nonsense, newfangled marketing verbiage and other noise. You
will then find a few facts that you can grab onto and try to
figure out what’s going on. The first thing to remember is that,
like “Web 2.0,” the term Web 3.0 is not an official term of any
sort, does not represent any particular protocol or standard,
belongs to no one – and is used, misused and made nearly
meaningless by everyone. It is, quite simply, just an arbitrary
“version number” that, at most, describes how the Internet is
built and how it delivers services, at least as of the
freeze-framed moment in time that represents the end of 2.0 and
the start of 3.0.

Sometimes it is called the “semantic Web,” but perhaps the
less-used term “everyware” is more descriptive. The new scenario
is one of ubiquitous computing, the advent of cloud computing
where a “thin client” (no- or low-powered PC, or even just a
monitor and mouse) runs cloud-based applications using
cloud-based data and services. The Apple iPhone, iPod and iPad
are all examples of formerly standalone devices that were
integrated into the Web, and connect people in a seamless,
real-time and very simple way with – well, with everything, from
libraries and department stores to other people, anywhere in the
world.

From Read-Only to Interactivity

One of the Web’s true “parents” was Tim Berners-Lee, who had his
own notion of how the technology and the Internet developed. The
first phase of the Web had read-only capabilities. It was
essentially a spectator experience until read-write
functionality came along (sure, call it Web 2.0) that included
services to enable contribution, collaboration, content creation
and interactivity. The next step in Berners-Lee’s version
vision, Web 3.0, is heralded as “new territory,” where users can
assemble and run their own applications, create all sorts of
cooperative and collaborative enterprises, and truly put their
ideas in motion rather than simply uploading stuff to this, that
or the other site.

People with money invested in other, still-useful devices -
phones, PDAs, fax machines, etc. – don’t have to worry about Web
3.0 making them obsolete. In addition to letting users create
their own tools, Web 3.0 is another step in the evolution of
usage and interaction in which the Internet holds multiple
databases and content that will be accessible to many
non-browser-based devices and applications. The obvious uses
will be video that streams from a PC to a TV, picture frames
that receive wireless updates from an online or local photo app,
and phones that display items recommended by your trusted
sources – friends, review sites, experts – when you’re shopping.

From Data to Knowledge

In addition to the foregoing characteristics, Web 3.0 is also
said to encompass other important advances. For one thing, all
sorts of inputs are possible, which means all sorts of new
combinations become possible. Content can be made even more
broadly relevant when it’s related to GPS, so that social
networking, for example, can be enhanced by knowing who is
where and doing what.

More importantly, you will get more and better control of your
data and be able to establish a number of personalization
systems to “wrap” your personal information with different
levels and types of protection – so that you can share it
widely, narrowly or not at all. Over time, the accuracy of
recommendations and trustworthiness of ranking systems will help
us determine which data sources to take seriously and which to
avoid.

From Business Faxes to Online Games

With the rise of “linkable web apps” you will be able to use all
of your different desktop, server and mobile devices and
applications – telephones, fax machines and online fax services,
instant messaging, pagers – and control them from a single
browser window on your desktop, smartphone or handheld device.
All of it will take place in an always-on, always-everywhere
environment, with functionality embedded sometimes in hardware,
sometimes in software, sometimes in both – so that when you need
to take care of business without downloading the capability,
you’ll be able to do so.

Along with more of the visual and voice-based services that are
already starting to proliferate, there will be more lifelike
avatar interactions in the growing virtual social networking
world. This will lead to social shopping trips and virtual
reality gaming far beyond anything currently being done.

In mid-2009, the “Wall Street Journal” ran a story on the
development of Web 3.0 capabilities and the promise of
ever-greater interconnectedness among technologies, products,
services and people. The story even gave us a yardstick by which
to measure the success of Web 3.0, if in fact it does succeed.
If, as the WSJ puts it, “computing could become as integrated
and invisible as electricity and just as important” – and we can
attribute it to the new and improved Web – we’ll know that the
promise has lived up to the hype. Here’s hoping!

Tags: Web 3.0, Web 30, Web University

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LinkedIn – Best Practices For You and Your Business

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM

Sunday, August 22, 2010

LinkedIn – Best Practices For You and Your Business

LinkedIn is a professional, business networking tool that is too
easily lumped into the social networking service. Even though
many of the same modes of operation are employed, the focus is
on professionals, professional dialog, professional
opportunities, and companies.

This list of LinkedIn best practices was compiled from my work
with clients, colleagues and friends who are trying to maximize
their professional opportunities. I hope it is also helpful for
you.

Get LinkedIn
If you are working, you need to be LinkedIn. If you are not
working, you really need to be LinkedIn (however, it would have
been better to be LinkedIn when you had a job). If you are a
college student, you need to be LinkedIn. The president of the
United States is LinkedIn… just do it.

Add Your Picture
A photograph not only personalizes your profile, it completes
it. Even though LinkedIn may no longer use a faceless silhouette
like other social sites, as shown here, you must keep in mind
that this profile is about you, put a face on it.

Finish Your Profile
If you are currently using LinkedIn, or at a minimum signed up
for it, finish your profile. Your profile should display 100%
Complete. If not, LinkedIn makes it easy with a profile wizard.
Typically, you can click on anything green and the wizard
recommends ways to increase your profile completeness. It will
suggest things to do like; write a recommendation, request a
recommendation, add more people, add another job, add
educational info, etc. The wizard helps get you to a point of
basic critical mass; displaying your completed profile
(education & job information) and about 20 connections.

Personalize Your LinkedIin URL

Which looks better to you?

Linkedin.com/pub/coco-design/4/74b/8b3

- or -

Linkedin.com/in/CocoDesign

Of course the second one is more marketable, more professional,
and easier to remember. More importantly, you need to get your
personalized LinkedIn URL before someone else, with a similar
name, gets it first.

Now that you have a personalized URL, add it to your business
email signature so that everyone who gets an email from you -

1) knows you are using LinkedIn,
2) can request to connect to you, and
3) learns about your capabilities when they review your profile.

Answer Questions
This is a great way to build credibility and expertise points.
When you answer a question on LinkedIn, the person who asked the
question can mark the best answer. The more “best answers” you
have, the more expertise credit you receive in your profile.
This is also a great way to connect with people of similar
interests or issues.

Asking questions is a good way to receive help from other
industry experts and colleagues. It is also good for informal
polling. Just do not make it a sales promotion. You will chase
people away.

Ask Others if They Use LinkedIn
When you meet someone that you would like to maintain a
professional connection with, ask them if they are using
LinkedIn and if the would mind if you sent a connection request.
This is generally a good question after trading business cards.

Grow Your Connections
Once you have your account to 100% with 20+ connections, you
will have created a little momentum. To help keep that going,
review your connections’ connections. Chances are you will know
a few of those people. Then each time someone connects with you
take a quick look at their connections… you may find one or
two that you have a relationship with as well. Send a link
request.

Important – Do NOT send invites to people you do not truly have
a relationship with. If you receive too many “I don’t know
this person” clicks on your request, you will be required to
know everyone’s email address to request a connection in the
future. Bad juju.

Give and Get Recommendations
LinkedIn is like a living, online professional resume/vita. What
makes LinkedIn better than a resume that says, “References
available upon request”, is that references are displayed for
all to see. These recommendations are written in the words of
the sender, you cannot edit them. If there is a problem with a
recommendation, you can easily request a revision or choose not
to display it. Note: you can only request a recommendation from
someone who is currently using LinkedIn.

Outbound Links
Your profile allows you to have three outbound links with labels
like “My Company”, “My Website”, “My Blog”, etc. I
recommend you change the label to “Other” for all three since
you can add personalized keywords to the label enhancing the SEO
for the target sites. For example, I could link to this article
with the label text “LinkedIn Best Practices Article” to help
with my search engine rankings for that keyword phrase. You can
also use the “Other” label for Facebook & Twitter links.

Join Groups
By joining Industry and interest-related groups you are
connected with a larger group of professionals within that
sector. This makes it easier for you to invite others in the
same group to connect without the need for knowing their email
address. Again, you need to be careful here. Unsolicited
invitations could get you hit with a few “I don’t know this
person” clicks.

Jobs Area
The jobs area is not only for people looking for work. It is
also an excellent place for businesses to list job
opportunities. Our small company does not use Monster, Career
Builder, Ladders, etc.; it would simply be too overwhelming.
When we are looking for someone, we only use LinkedIn Jobs. Not
only can I review the person’s professional profile and
associations, we can get an idea of how closely we are
connected. Job postings can be sent directly to people in your
list of contacts and they usually have good recommendations for
potential candidates.

LinkedIn Company
If you are a business owner add your company to the Company’s
area. If your company is already listed, make sure the
information is accurate and up to date.

Install the Toolbars
LinkedIn has both a browser toolbar and an Outlook toolbar. The
former works well with Gmail, with both IE & Firefox and, of
course, the latter works with Microsoft Outlook. The toolbars add
a LinkedIn icon next to a person’s email addresses in your
mailbox. This enables you to see their profile information and
makes it easier to send an invitation to connect.

Givers Gain
Bottom line, the more you give the more you get back. The more
information you share about yourself, the better the search
feature will return you or your company as a result. The more
recommendations you give, the more likely someone is to give you
one. The more questions you ask or answer the more likely you
are to connect with people of similar interests that you may
never have had the opportunity to meet.

Tags: LinkedIn, social networking, Social Networks, Web University

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Dummies Guide to Facebook Marketing

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Dummies Guide to Facebook Marketing

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 4
years, you know how popular and widely used Facebook
is today.

Just a couple of years ago, you had to relentlessly
encourage your family and friends to join this social
networking website (shortly after others had convinced you
to join). Nowadays, it’s rare to find someone who hasn’t
got a Facebook account.

At last count, there were over 350 million users on
Facebook and this number is continuing to grow. It overtook
MySpace as the number 1 social networking website on the
planet last year and is just behind Google when it comes to
online traffic. You can then understand how important
Facebook marketing has become for websites everywhere.

It’s Not A Pitch Zone

The most important thing to remember about social media is
that it is not a place to blatantly and endlessly pitch
your product or service. If you do this, then you will not
get any favors from social media users, will get
largely ignored and even receive bad reviews.

Social media is actually used for building relationships
with potential clients in the market. There are a number of
ways you can do this:

- you can post helpful information (links) that helps
them solve a problem.

- you can personally chat with them to assist them.

- you can create content addressing the needs of users
and post it.

The bottom line is that you want to be seen as genuine and
helpful. This way, word can get out that you’re the real
deal and before you know it, people will become interested
in what you have to offer in terms of products and services.

Of course, the things you share on social networking sites
such as Facebook shouldn’t be the nitty gritty stuff that
you have to offer. You should share helpful information in
the form of teasers that will interest people enough to ask
and wonder if there’s more. Offering free stuff is great
for getting attention too.

How To Market On Facebook

The great thing about Facebook is that from the outset, it
has encouraged all users to use the website as a means of
sharing information and marketing whatever they please. As
a result, it has developed many ways for users to do this.
You are not obliged to use every single one of them, but a
combination of them can only improve your Facebook
marketing.

Pages

This is probably THE marketing tool out there on Facebook.
On its website Facebook describes Pages as “a public
Profile that enables you to share your business and
products with Facebook users.” It is specifically designed
for promoting a business and everything it has to offer.
People can then become a Fan of your page and when they do
this, they let their friends know that they’ve become a Fan
of your page via their News Feed. The potential for your
Page to gain a lot of popularity in a small period of time
is great.

Of course, it’s all dependent on the content you give out
for people to use. You need to show them a reason to become
a Fan of your Page as well as a reason for staying on.

Events

Create events to be held at a certain date and time.
Depending on your type of business, you can create one for
a local or international audience. It can be any one of the
following:

- seminar: It should be introductory and free but you
could promote a paid one too.

- webinar: A seminar conducted online which anyone in the
world can join.

- product/service launch: If you are about to launch a
product or service, this is a way to gain attention.

The best part about creating an event on Facebook is that
it can go viral, and before you know it, people will be
attending your event in droves.

Advertising

Finally, about a year ago, Facebook introduced an
advertising service where people can put ads promoting
their website or their Facebook Page and they pay per click
(PPC) or impression (CPM). It works in a similar way to
Google Adwords.

You can target your ads to certain geographical locations
but in addition, given the nature of Facebook, you can
attach your ads to social actions. For example, if you were
a wedding photographer and wanted to promote your services,
your ads could be set up to appear only to females between
the ages of 24 and 30 and whose relationship statuses
indicate they are engaged.

It must be noted, however, that Facebook Advertising is
still in beta mode which means that it will only improve
in the near future.

Embrace Facebook

If you want to market your website online, you would be
absolutely nuts not to use Facebook marketing as one of
your key strategies. Just be careful not to get caught up
in it too much because it can become a very time consuming
activity.

Tags: facebook, Social Network, social networking, Web Marketing, Web University

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Building Brand Identity – Marketing With Twitter

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Building Brand Identity – Marketing With Twitter

Twitter, the net’s networking success story, is intriguing and
intimidating because of its message limitations: they can be 140
characters, and no more.

This is to say; each message sent on Twitter can be no larger
than the previous sentence. Not an additional letter, space,
period or dash can be added. These limitations have proven to be
the greatest asset and the greatest challenge for people trying
to use Twitter for any number of purposes.

On the advantageous side, the short messages have created an
entire culture of Twitter-fluent writers. The brevity of the
message stretches creative muscles, making people use every trick
to get the most information into the fewest characters. On the
other hand it creates a severe headache for the marketing minded,
as it doesn’t leave much room to present a case. Thus the vast
majority of Tweets are short little social comments or updates,
and most marketing revolves around calling attention to
particular links.

Of course, there are always ways around limitations, and Twitter
is something that every seriously market-minded organization
needs to embrace in order to see continued success on the web. In
the case of short message services like Twitter, the key lies as
much in the peripheral data that builds up around the message as
in the content itself.

Be SEO Minded

Twitter profiles are now ranked by search engines, Google in
particular. Every SEO technique you’ve learned now has a new,
exciting purpose.

For example, consider the biography you’re able to construct
using Twitter. This is a ripe opportunity to develop some brand
recognition right away. Put the title of the brand you’re
marketing in the bio, and consider including the most relevant
keywords in your profile. As ever, do so in a way that respects
the user’s intelligence, and gives them something worth reading.
Simply stringing together a chain of keywords is not the way to
go.

Include keywords in your Tweets as well, taking care not to be
terribly obvious about it. The first 20-30 characters are the
best place, as later words are of decreased importance in a
Google ranking search.

Identify Your Audience

Each brand rises and falls on the whim of the audience, known in
this case as tweeple.

There are a number of applications available to help you with the
process of identifying the tweeple that you want to cultivate
into an audience. Twitterholic (http://twitaholic.com/) can help
you identify the movers and shakers based on their Twitter
traffic and their location. If you know your field or brand
well, you can use this to locate groups with similar interests
and woo them to your feed. Tweepz (http://www.tweepz.com/) is a
similar tool, focusing on location, and Twitter itself has a
‘near this location’ feature that can be used to identify
tweeple nearby your center of business.

Let’s Give Them Something to Tweet About

Yes, Twitter is an effective way to quickly distribute
information. But its real power is in its ability to create
conversations about something interesting.

In theory you could simply gather up a large user list of tweeple
and start spamming them with links promoting your latest gig.
This is a surefire way to get flagged for abuse or ignored
entirely, and thus is rather counterproductive to good marketing
goals.

Instead, consider using alternative methods to drum up those
conversations that travel like wildfire.

For example, there is the technique of Alternate Reality Gaming.
This is a phenomenon based on the idea of taking ‘real’ events
and building a game out of them. Last Call Poker was an ARG that
intended to drum up sales for an upcoming video game, GUN.

LCP spread out information about gatherings, online incentives,
and other attractions to get people excited about the western
theme of the game. Tokens such as poker chips and other goodies
were given out at these events, and GUN went on to have a very
successful launch. People were invited into the world of the
western, and the chatter eventually included 8 million
participants.

This kind of rogue advertising is tailor-made to work with
Twitter. Locations and dates can easily fall within the 140
character limitation, as can short explanations. Consider
creating an ARG with a short story designed to work within 140
characters, locate an audience with the assorted Twitter tools at
your disposal, and plan some exciting events to promote your
brand. The chance to get involved always gets people talking, and
the more esoteric games can span entire continents.

There are other methods, some more appropriate to each individual
brand. Perhaps a modest bicycling business isn’t suited to
promote a large ARG experience. They could, however, organize a
bicycling flash mob by hopping onto the local bike hobbyist
twitter feed and posting a date and time. The trick is less which
technique you use, and more that you do your best to make it
relevant. As always, strong content and clear presentation will
win out over gimmicks and sales speak.

Also, consider one last thought. The introductory statements of
each section in this article are Twitter compatible, and so is
this one. Good luck and happy Tweeting.

Tags: brand, branding, Social Network, social networking, twitter, Web Marketing, Web University

(0 Comments)

Top 10 Tips for Using Twitter

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Top 10 Tips for Using Twitter

When it comes to social media, no one “gets it” as well
as Twitter. According to Econsultancy, as of Jan 2010,
Twitter has 75 million user accounts, with about 15
million of that total being active users. See
http://tinyurl.com/yetgcru . That’s a lot of people
sending a lot of Tweets. This micro-blogging service
makes it easy for small businesses and entrepreneurs
to stay in touch with those who choose to follow them,
and stay updated on new products, services, special
offers, industry news and more. It’s a win-win for
both the Tweeter, and their followers.

When it comes to using Twitter, there’s a right way and
a wrong way to use it. Your messages must be kept short,
under 140 characters, and they need to be helpful or
informative. Don’t carry on about what you ate for
breakfast, or the fact that you just brushed your teeth.
People will unfollow you faster than they can hit
the button, even if you do have good oral habits.

I’ve been using Twitter for a long time now and here’s
what I’ve found works best when participating in this
close knit community of few words.

1) Regular Postings: Now I’m not saying you need to post
every day, although that would be nice. You do need to
make an appearance on a regular basis. It’s like school -
you need to show up to pass. Be a contributor that your
followers get to really know and look forward to your
Tweets. If you’re the type of person who needs to plan
ahead, you can always use a service that allows you to
schedule tweets in advance, such as

http://www.socialoomph.com/

2) Retweet: If you see Tweets posted by other users that
you think your followers would like, then retweet them. It
only takes one click, and you’ll also be creating goodwill
with other Twitter users at the same time. If you’d like,
you can add a personal thought or comment before sending
it. Also, make it easy for others to retweet your posts
by adding RT buttons to your website or blog. It’s easy
with http://tweetmeme.com/about/retweet_button

3) Be Helpful: Keep in mind Twitter is a form of social
Media, so social interaction is key. It’s not all about
you. Whenever an opportunity arises to answer a question,
participate in a survey, or help solve a problem, do so.
In this way you’re participating in the community. This
also will help your brand and image when others know
they can count on you for support or feedback.

4) Don’t Be A Follow CopyCat: Don’t follow everyone who
follows you. This is probably my biggest pet peeve when
it comes to Twitter. So many people turn this feature on
to auto follow those who follow them. Why would you
want to do this? I’d prefer that those I follow are
people and topics I’ve hand-selected that interest me,
and not a mish-mash of followers who may be ranting
about things I have no interest in. Be selective in
who you follow or your Twitter stream could quickly
fill up with junk or spam. For quality people to
follow, see – http://followontwitterlists.com/

5) What to Tweet: Make sure that the tweets you post
are helpful and/or informative. Late breaking news
pertaining to your industry, as well as any specials or sales
you may have going on are always good topics. If you
find something you think your followers would like,
especially if it’s free or a bargain, share the love.
Plus, if your tweets are good, it will encourage others
to retweet them. For ideas see -

http://www.artbizblog.com/2009/07/what-to-tweet.html

6) Comment: Particpate in the community by commenting
on other people’s tweets. If you can answer a question,
do so. It never hurts and people really will appreciate
it when you take the time to comment on what they have
to say. It lets them know that others are actually
listening to what they have to say in the “Twitterverse”.

7) Say Thank You: When someone takes the time to retweet
one of your tweets, make sure to reply to them with a
“thank you”. Manners rule online as well as off, and
they’ll like the fact that you noticed the retweet
and took the time to show some gratitude. It may even
inspire them to retweet more of your tweets in the
future.

Be Personal: Again, I don’t need to know what you
ate for dinner, but every now and then you should show
your human side with a creative thought, quote, or
other statement. Let people know you’re “real” and
not just a lean mean business machine. You want to
tread lightly in this area. Too personal is overkill,
but a little can help in establishing a connection with
your followers.

9) Post Pictures/Video: Remember, Twitter is not just
for text. It’s easy to post short videos, and pictures
too. It’s nice to mix it up a little and share content
in other formats as well. Here are some resources

http://freenuts.com/video-sharing-websites-for-twitter/

10) Talk About More Than Yourself: It’s not all about
you, so please don’t make all your tweets one big marketing
message, such as only tweeting about your latest press
release, blog posting, or article that was published. No one
will want to follow you if you’re one big commercial. Yes,
some of this is fine in moderation, but you need to walk
a fine line and mix it up with other helpful, interesting
topics.

Now it’s time to start putting these tips into action.
Social media is all about participating and listening
to what others have to say. It’s all about creating and
sharing information and becoming part of the community.
If you approach Twitter in this fashion, you’ll not
only have a lot more fun, but your followers will like
and respect you – and if that doesn’t strengthen your
brand, nothing will.

Tags: Social Network, social networking, Strategies, tips, Tricks, twitter, Web University

(1 Comment )

Twitter: Followers, Niches, and Myths

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Twitter: Followers, Niches, and Myths

Twitter has certainly emerged as one of the most popular
social networking/blogging platforms of the past few years.
There are various reasons why Twitter has become so wildly
popular. It is a simple concept where brief messages can be
sent to loyal followers. This is why Twitter is so helpful
to small businesses. It can aid in promoting a business in
the most cost effective manner. Really, this is one of the
very best systems for promoting updates, info, and deals to
the followers of the Twitter account.

The one problem here is that most entrepreneurs look towards
quantity as opposed to quality in their followers. This can
prove to be a huge mistake since you never want to sacrifice
quality when looking to amass Twitter followers.

How do people make such a mistake? Well, they look at
volume as being the secret to their success. The problem
here is that the process is not going to be a very
successful one. Rather, it can prove to be disastrous more
than anything else because your business ends up promoting
itself to those that are really not interested in the
products or services you are offering.

Yes, some people will sign on to be followers of your
Twitter account with no real interest in being customers.
That is why you need to develop a strong niche following
as opposed to a large following.

The bottom line here is you do NOT want a large list of
followers. You want an EFFECTIVE list of followers.

Some may consider this notion to go against the grain in
which a Twitter account should be approached. After all,
Twitter is wildly popular so why not follow the trends? The
average Twitter account has changed dramatically since
July. The number of followers the average account maintains
has jumped from 70 to 300. This has led many accounts to
increase their number of postings. In July, the number was
in the range of 119. Today, it has jumped significantly to
420.

But, is there a great deal of benefit from such increases?
In all honesty, if the followers are not going to purchase,
the numbers do not really mean much. That means all those
increases in updates have less value as well. Again, you
want your efforts to be effective. Promoting volume in your
approach is not the way to achieve any true level of
success.

One problem with a large number of followers is that your
tweets need to be adjusted to handle larger volumes. That
means your tweets need to be clearly understood by all. As
such, you need to promote a generalized approach to the
tweets. This is not always the best method because you are
not providing detailed and specific information in the
tweets. This means those that are serious potential
customers may lose interest in the tweets or cease taking
them seriously. This is not a good thing if you are
seriously trying to sell a product or service.

It becomes a full time job to sort and respond to the real
people who are interested in you. Twittering without
engagement of your audience defeats the entire process of
marketing. I believe many people are using twitter as
“lets throw it out there and see what sticks”. I can tell
you from testing that this approach does not work. No
wonder people are leaving twitter in droves.

This leads to a more potentially serious side effect. If
more members of Twitter venture towards promoting generic,
uninteresting, and uninspiring tweets so as to boost the
volume of people reading, the health of the social network
site will not stay strong for long.

Basically, why would anyone would want to follow Twitter
when the tweets decline in value? This would certainly not
be a positive in terms of the ability for a small business
to procure new customers that are vital to the health of
the business.

Again, exploring options for expanding a business’ success
should center on niche marketing. This approach needs to be
taken with Twitter or else the value of Twitter will
decline. Based on what we are seeing, the decline will be
difficult to avoid in the future based on current actions.

Does this mean that Twitter is decidedly lacking in value
for those seeking to utilize what it has to offer? No, no
one is making such a statement as it would be a decidedly
inaccurate one.

Twitter, in fact, has taken steps to promote niche
marketing. This is evident in the ability to devise
“Twitter lists.” Twitter lists allow you to take certain
members of your massive group of followers and put them in
a particular category. You can then promote your tweets to
individual members of these various lists. So, you can
present wide, generic tweets as well as individualized
tweets to those that may be considered more serious
potential customers.

For example, you can create a group of people that have
already made purchases in the past. Then, you would be free
to issue tweets directly to such individuals as you wish.
This would be an effective form of niche marketing that
would be far more beneficial than putting forth perpetually
generalized tweets. One of the other problems with having
1,000′s of non-niched followers is seeing through the noise
of twitter.

As such, it is best to look towards growing these
individual lists in order to expand the potential to niche
market. Yet, many will seek to put forth the exact opposite
goal. They will look towards greatly expanding their number
of followers into the thousands while never stopping to
examine whether or not such a massive list truly boosts
their success potential. Such a strategy is a flawed one
that will not lead to the empirical success that is sought.

And, if you are not looking to succeed with your business,
then why even bother being in business? Twitter has
tremendous value and it delivers great benefit to those
looking to expand their small business’ promotional
strategies in a cost effective manner.

In conclusion, try not to become hung up on the notion
of greatly expanding your followers’ list. Seek to promote
effective niche marketing strategies instead.

Tags: Followers, Myths, Niches, social networking, twitter, Web University

(0 Comments)

Can Google Become the Next Facebook?

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Can Google Become the Next Facebook?

Is it just me but didn’t Google recently put everything on its
main homepage except for Google Buzz? What’s up with that? For
heaven’s sake, they even put the PacMan game in their logo for
two days running… you would think some of the brightest minds
on the planet would have figured out by now if Google truly
wants to compete on the new memeyouyou web, they simply have to
fully integrate all their programs into one homepage or at least
place Buzz right there along side the Gmail button.

Google Buzz has all the ingredients to finally make Google your
one-stop center on the web. It can be THE place for sharing not
just your conversations but photos, videos, and everything else.
Will it live up to its full potential and become a true Facebook
killer?

The main reason Facebook is such a threat to Google is not
because of the massive amount of users it has, but the amount of
time those users stay on Facebook. If you just look at the Alexa
comparison alone, Facebook users spend over 30 minutes on the
site, which is triple the time users stay on Google. Facebook
also beats Google in the bounce rate and page views per user.
Could all the recent changes to their SERPs be, not only
Google’s answer to the upcoming Bing/Yahoo marriage, but a
strong way of presenting a real challenge to Facebook’s
overwhelming stats.

Web users are lazy and they want a one-stop solution to meet all
their needs. They want to connect with friends and family, they
want to broadcast to the world, they want to search for
something to buy, they want to be entertained… iGoogle should
be that solution/center but I don’t believe it quite passes the
test because there is still no Google Buzz?

The main problem with Google is that it has no well-defined
center which users could call their own. Perhaps I am reading
this wrong, but have Google users fully bonded with iGoogle?
Putting the privacy issues aside, I don’t think they have
embraced it in the same way web users have embraced their
Facebook. What is missing are all the elements that are present
in Google Buzz, but again we seem to have two disjointed
programs rather than one solid rallying point.

For many web users, Facebook is the starting point of their web
day… in many cases, it is probably the only place they go on
the web religiously each day. Why? Because all their
friends/family are on there and they don’t want to miss out on
any news or gossip. Not checking your Facebook page has become
the ultimate faux pas of this new social media etiquette.

No one is going defeat or compete with Facebook you say?

Not so fast! Even empires come and go; a web site is even more
fickle, especially if something more convenient comes along.
Does anyone remember MySpace which is still a very popular site
but no longer has the numbers it once had. Facebook or even
Google could suffer the same fate if something better comes
along.

Google’s main business is online search. It is its bread and
butter, which may have blinded those in charge from seeing the
bigger picture. The bigger payday.

Google owns so many popular sites within the top 20 including
YouTube and Blogger… if only they could better connect all
their interests into one SuperSite or one SuperDevice for those
thinking within the box. Online search can still be the main
course, but you need to corral all of these different users into
one starting point or center with a couple of Billion users
logging in each morning to start their web day. Just imagine the
ad revenue potential that would generate for the big G.

Impossible you say, but not really, all the ingredients are
there to form this SuperSite but it needs one big bang to get it
going, to create a center of the web universe, which will be
Google.

Whenever I think about Google, I am reminded of a class 5
Hurricane with all these popular sites and programs swirling
around it like mad, but there is no eye to this hurricane, at
least not yet. Google needs a solid center to draw everything
into focus and get everyone at the same starting point. Whether
it is the Google search page, Google Buzz, Google Profiles,
Gmail or iGoogle… but it all needs to be pulled together if
Google wants to truly compete with Facebook for all the marbles.

Tags: facebook, Google, Web University

(0 Comments)

5 Common Facebook Tactics – That Don’t Work!

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

5 Common Facebook Tactics – That Don’t Work!

There are about ten common Facebook marketing tactics. (You
can probably think of more, but most are a derivative of
one of these ten.) It may surprise you to learn that five
of these tactics don’t even work — that’s fully half!
Now, no Fire God will suddenly appear to smite you if you
happen to have done one of the following things. They are
definitely mistakes, but they aren’t irreversible. In fact,
they’re really only mistakes in one sense of the word.

My perception of these as “mistakes” isn’t about breaches
of the unwritten Facebook etiquette either – I dance on
those lines myself from time to time.

Rather, I’m calling them mistakes from a perspective of
effectiveness, versus the alternative behavior. Whether
they’re wrong in terms of just coming across as rude or
politically incorrect is another matter altogether.

Having said that, off we go.

Mistake #1 – Posting Signature Links on Profile Walls with
Your Introduction

I asked someone why they did this once, especially since
I’d already been to their site and purchased the item they
were selling on that page.

She said: “I saw someone else do it.”

“How did it make you feel?” I asked.

“I felt kind of used. But I figured if that’s what it takes
to be successful, that’s what I’ll do, even if it doesn’t
seem quite right.”

Now that’s deep.

I understand though, because once I made the vow to become
successful, I also made a vow to do “whatever it takes”. At
the time I thought it meant hard selling and being pushy. I
later found it meant hard work, and doing what’s right even
if there’s a lazier, easier way.

Even if this was at one time effective in terms of getting
clicks from random profile visits, Facebook is now much
more stream-driven than it is profile-driven.

And that’s a huge part of why this is a mistake in terms of
effectiveness.

Not to mention that people who see these postings as rude
or attempts to spam can remove or hide them. They may even
drop you as a connection, which cuts you off not just from
them, but from their network.

You’re not missing out on anything by omitting that
signature link. Your name, hyperlinked to your profile IS
your signature link. If your profile is set up correctly,
prospects will get to your site from there.

Mistake #2 – Pitching

If you want to pitch people on Facebook, buy an ad on
Facebook.

It doesn’t have to be a Facebook ad – buy one in a popular
Facebook application. No matter how good your elevator
pitch is in real life, it doesn’t translate in online
networking. Let me give you a hypothetical example from the
real world.

Imagine you go to an after-work bar. People go there to
relax with work friends, to meet potential mates, on actual
dates, and to get to know other people in the business.

You’re unwinding with colleagues when someone walks up, and
without forewarning, tries to sell you some steak knives.
When you stare blankly, they shrug, and move on to the next
person.

We all may chuckle to ourselves, and wonder what that
person is thinking… but are you ever the knife salesman
when you’re on Facebook?

Honestly, when I first came here, I was tempted to be.

Thank God my better judgement stopped me. I’m telling you
that to say this – if you’ve been the knife salesman don’t
be ashamed, you didn’t know any better. It’s not like they
issue marketing lessons with your incorporation papers.

Just make a vow, right now, to always check yourself before
you post. Ask yourself “Am I Networking or Pitching?”

Mistake #3 – Artificial Bonding

I’d respect a person more who was upfront with me, and said
they were hoping we could work together, or do some
business, than someone who pretended to care about me in
order to get me to have a conversation that they could then
direct to their pitch.

I wouldn’t buy from them, at least not then. But at least
I’d still respect them, which means I could change my mind
in the future.

Pretending to like people until you get the chance to try
to sell to them is really just pitching with a little bad
foreplay first.

Bad foreplay isn’t better than none at all.

Mistake #4 – Favoring Uphill Marketing Over Downhill
Marketing

Again, this is a mistake in terms of how effective it is.
In my own experience, as well as in case studies of
clients, it always works out better when you create a
fantastic marketplace presence and people are drawn to you
in droves, seeking to do business with you, rathere than the
alternative.

The alternative, of course, is when you go out and pursue
customers and clients one by one.

That’s not to say that you should stop advertising, bidding
on projects, or being a go-getter in any way.

It means that while you’re doing that, also create a
situation where customers are flowing towards you, seeking
you out, asking for help.

It’s much less work to get from interest to sale when they
come to you.

Mistake #5 – Fishing on Dry Land

A long, long time ago, I was in a network marketing
company. Now defunct, the products they have greatly
enhanced, possibly even saved, my life. The products were
targeted to people who cared about being healthier and
eco-friendly.

At first, I was so excited about what had happened to me,
that I told every single person who would listen. I would
try and go product by product and explain how great
everything was.

After failing Very Hard for about three months, I narrowed
my focus.

I bought a bottle of the mineral complex, and some sample
sized containers. Then I gave a sample to every single
person I could think of who had a health problem that might
be related. Orders started pouring in.

Ever since that day, I have remembered two things. First,
the one that’s relevant here – proper targeting greatly
increases sales. Secondly, give a free sample of something
needed to those most starving for it, and they’ll be back
to buy more.

A few well-timed, well-placed interactions with the right
profile are the main things you need to do the equivalent
of offline networking on Facebook. A great profile is just
as important as being appropriately dressed at a networking
function offline.

Tags: Common, facebook, Strategies, tactics, Web University

(0 Comments)

Size Really Does Matter When it Comes to Twitter

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Back in the days when newsletters first hit the Internet, they were usually published in text format because many email clients did not support HTML email just yet. One of the problems many publishers faced was long URL’s being split in half and not being clickable to the reader. To solve this problem, shortening services started to spring up that would take a long URL and cut it down to a reasonable size.

With the popularity of Twitter and the confines of 140 characters, URL (link) shortening services are in high demand once again. When you have such a small amount of space to work with, no one wants a long URL cutting into that precious real estate.

There are a variety of shortening services to choose from, each having their own specific features and benefits. Most of them do work hand in hand with Twitter, allowing you to Tweet the link once it’s been shortened. If you’re an avid Twitter user this is a useful feature to have.

Some only provide a basic shortening service, but many allow you to view stats and metrics on your newly shortened links if you register. If you’re doing any form of social media marketing, it’s nice to be able to see if anyone’s actually clicking on all the links you’re sending out to the “Twitosphere”, or posting on Facebook and other sites. Tracking will give you an indication that you’re being heard and that people are actually paying attention to what you have to say.

Another important thing to look for is whether or not the shortening service uses 301 redirects. This is the most search engine friendly, and forces the search engine to look at the destination URL, not the domain of the shortening service itself. A 301 stands for a permanent move, not temporary. What this means is, you want the links you’re sending out to be given acknowledgment by the search engines, not the shortening service itself. Make sense?

Many allow custom URL’s, which allows you to use your name or company name in the links you create. This is great for branding purposes. Think of it as a vanity license plate. Instead of being just a regular URL it’s your special creation.

Let’s review a few options:

1) http://TweetBurner.com – A bare bones tracking service which allows you to shorten any link and then share it instantly with your Twitter followers or Friendfeed. Basic stat tracking is available so you can see how many people clicked on your link.

2) http://Cli.gs – A shortening service which includes full analytics. You can create links that include your brand in them. Free to use. It’s easy to send your links to Twitter with one click.

3) http://Bit.ly – This is Twitter’s default shortening service and used by Tweetdeck.com. It allows you to track performance of your links in real time. Easy to share generated links on Twitter, Facebook, even Gmail. It also offers many extra tools and plug-ins such as a browser bookmarklet and browser sidebar.

4) http://MyTwitterToolbar.com – Free to download and comes complete with a massive list of URL shorteners as well as over 50 Twitter tools. Also includes 100 Twitter tips.

5) http://www.TwitClicks.com – A fairly simple service that allows you to shorten a URL immediately and tweet it. Can also see complete stats. Detailed stats show percentage of browsers used and locations of those who clicked. Check out a short video on how to use it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1ScPeCd6X4.

6) http://www.ExpandMyUrl.com – This service takes a shortened link and gives you the true URL that it points to. Perfect for the paranoid individual who wants to know where the shortened link will send them.

7) http://www.TwitPwr.com – A short URL service which also includes analytics and stats. Their home page shows the top 25 users with the most TwitPwr and also a “hot URL” list of those URL’s that get the most clicks. Free to use.

http://1link.in – A multiple link shortening service. Simply type in a list of links and get one link back for all. If you click on the newly shortened link it goes to a page showing details of what sites that link points to, and asks if you want to open them all. If you answer yes, multiple windows will open for each site.

9) http://Go2.me – A different type of link shortening and discussion service which creates shorter links which also contain a chat window to exchange comments with your readers. It’s also easy to share on Twitter, Facebook or email with one click.

10) http://Tw.itter.me – You can customize the shortened link with your name or company name. From what I saw no stats are available.

11) http://budurl.com – Another popular service which shows you a real time view of your inbound clicks. This free service allows you to track up to 250 Budurl’s. They provide 3 pay levels of service from $4.00 a month to $49.00 a month. There is a 21 day free tríal on any paid service. You can start out free and upgrade your account at any time.

12) http://Tr.Im – Trim those long URL’s and instantly share them on Twitter. If you want stats, you’ll need to register. Offers many different tools and extensions to make for easier sharing, such as a Firefox extension that allows you to view your tr.im stats and tweet your new links quickly.

13) http://short.ie – Keeps all your shortened links in one place. Tracks clicks and allows you to instantly share your list with friends. It can also be connected to your Twitter account for more features. Customization of URL’s also available.

14) http://hootsuite.com – Not really a URL shortening service, but has the ability built-in. Hootsuite is a “Twitter Toolbox” loaded with features which are all free. They use ow.ly as their built in link shortener.

If you haven’t tried a url shortening service, you’ll want to find one that fits your needs and start to really utilize it in your marketing activities. Finding out who’s clicking on your links, time of day, where they’re from and other information will be very valuable in your ongoing efforts as an Internet Marketer.

Remember, when it comes to social media marketing T.M.I (too much information) is a good thing, unlike when your Aunt Ethel wants you to sit with her and go over every detail of her latest vacatíon [grin]. One is helpful, the other just downright painful.

Tags: Social Media, Social Network, social networking, twitter, Web Marketing, Web University

(0 Comments)

You Aren’t George Clooney – Get Your Social Networking Act In Gear

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM

Thursday, April 1, 2010

When George Clooney was recently asked about his take on Facebook at the Toronto Film Festival, his response was short: “I’d rather have a prostate exam than a Facebook page.”

Now, that’s probably understandable when movie studios (his potential clients) have his number on a speed dial, and pesky paparazzi (freebie seekers and unqualified prospects) chase after his every move.

But unless you already have more prospects and high quality clients than you and your business can handle, your approach to Social Networking should be drastically different.

Frankly, a little over a year ago I considered online networking a total waste of time. Fortunately, I was able to recognize how wrong I was. And I wasn’t the only one that had a change of heart on this.

After Dell revealed they generated a cool million dollars in extra sales in 2008, (ahm, make it a cool $3 million by June’09!), many other companies large and small started paying attention to this social networking “fad”!

Just consider a few of these facts:
• Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks initially considered online hang-out places for kids and teenagers are now attracting a much more demographically diverse crowd.

• Big brand names, like Ford, WholeFoods, Comcast, IBM, Dell, Southwest Airlines, and many, many more are establishing a strong presence on social networking hubs like Twitter and Facebook.

• Facebook membership has just passed the 300 million mark (that’s nearly the population of USA!) and Twitter is marching towards 18 million users by year’s end! That’s a lot of potential customers!

• Although, started with college kids in mind, over 50% of Facebook’s members now are over 25 years old, over 55% are women (the new buying power), 51% have an annual income of $75K, with 33% claiming to bring home $100K or more.

• Finally, Facebook has become one of the most trusted companies in America, and people spend three times more time there than on Google!
Got your attention now?

Good, let me give you just five basic tips on putting this massive connection power to your advantage.

1. Get Started! Open an account on every social media and social networking platform you come across. Even if you are not actively using all of them, (which you won’t) you should reserve your name, the name of your company, your brand, or your key products, because those are like real estate locations – once the prime spots are gone, they are gone! For example, I have the vanity url facebook.com/adamurbanski – but there are at least six other Adam Urbanskis who won’t ever be able to grab that link! I also have twitter.com/adamurbanski, youtube.com/adamurbanski and many more like this – are you getting the point?

2. Get Involved! Just opening the accounts won’t do anything for you. You must be actively involved. Choose the best three platforms for you – where you can find the largest population of your ideal clients and it’s the easiest to connect with them. Each platform provides search tools that enable you to find people you already know, current customers, as well as hubs where most of your ideal potential clients already hang out, so you can become visible to a lot of them very quickly. And start connecting and talking! But first…

3. Listen, Listen, Listen More The most important thing you must remember is that social networking is NOT ABOUT YOU! It’s ABOUT THEM! So don’t listen twice as much as you talk (I mean “post”), listen 10 times as much! Find out what the current topics are. What people are concerned about, what information and solutions they are looking for. Then make your posts relevant to other people’s needs! Here is a hint – nearly all of the social networking services and tools, at least the basic version of them, is free! So don’t go out there pitching your high-priced wares. Give, give, and give some more first! If your focus is on getting and taking, you will get a big fat NADA from your networking efforts. But if you focus on giving, you’ll be abundantly rewarded in return.

4. Get Attention! Following all the rules is for sissies! So don’t be a social networking pansy – have an opinion (in fact, have lots of opinions on everything!) and voice it loud and often! People admire people with opinions – even if they don’t agree with you, they will stick around to watch what will happen next. Social networking experts are quick to dispense all their “must not break” rules (heck, I’m doing it right now!), but the fact is, this is such a new media that most of the effective approaches are still to be discovered. And the only way to do so is by stepping on some toes and breaking some norms.

If you want a “safe” way to practice this, follow my PET formula: polarize, entertain, teach!

- POLARIZE. Whether you piss people off or make them love you, they will pay attention. If they are indifferent, they will leave!

- ENTERTAIN. People will always choose fun over education. If people laugh w/ you, they like you… Plus, when they laugh – they learn!

- TEACH. Gary Veynerchuk says “give good s#!%.” And he gets how PET works, because that phrase rubs some people the wrong way, it entertains, and it teaches! Peeps love good tips they can use right away – so share some!

5. Automate! The purpose of social networking is to CONNECT WITH PEOPLE on a very personal level. Still there are some tools that can help you impress your fans with your “omnipotent online presence” and get more networking done in less time.

RSS blog feeds, FriendFeed.com, Ping.fm, TwitterFeed.com, SocialOomph.com, TweetBeep.com, and TubeMogul.com are just a few of a plethora of tools and services – most of them free – that will kick your online socializing into high gear!

Here is my final take on it. And I really want you to get it! In April of 2008, from a stage at one of my boot camps, I called people who use Twitter “lazy idiots with no life” (yeah, how is that for polarizing, huh?) But at the same boot camp earlier this year I had my Twitter networking activities to thank for clients from Australia, Singapore, Netherlands, Spain, England, Hungary, and a few other countries. Needless to say, I changed my tune. I’ll leave it to your imagination as to what I now call professionals and entrepreneurs who refuse to recognize the client attracting power of social networking. Better yet – stop wondering, and if you aren’t involved yet – get started now!

Tags: Facebook Page, George Clooney, Social Marketing, Social Media, social networking, Web Marketing, Web University

(1 Comment )

12 Ways to Use Twitter for Social Media Marketing

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Twitter is a wildly popular microblogging service. It involves writing Tweets, which are short updates of a maximum of 140 characters that tell your followers what you are up to. Although your Tweets are technically supposed to answer the question, “What are you doing?” Twitter has moved far beyond that. Tweets are used to share stories, link to photos, promote content, break news, and a whole lot more. Twitter has also become an incredibly important tool for social media marketing professionals. Here are 12 ways in which Twitter can be used in your social media marketing campaign.

1. Sharing Links to Items of Interest

As soon as you read something online that you think is interesting, it is easy to share it on Twitter with all of your followers. Twitter is highly effective in this manner because it is such a quick way to be able to reach a large group of people. You can also get a lot of great ideas for blog posts from Twitter since many new ideas and stories are floating around that haven’t even made it to the blogosphere and definitely not to mainstream media.

2. Building Your Network

Using Twitter is a great way to build your network because it allows you to find and follow people with similar interests. You can use Steeple to find people who live in your geographical area. You can also use other tools that help you find new people to follow based upon who your Twitter friends follow.

3. Build Relationships within Your Current Network

People in different networks often use Twitter to connect with their contacts instantly rather than using instant messaging for that purpose. Furthermore, many people use Twitter to connect with their network during events like conferences.

4. Re-Distributing Content from Your Blog or Website

Twitter can be used to redistribute content from your blog or website. However, you should take care to do this thoughtfully since many of your Twitter followers may already read your blog. For that reason, you may want to avoid using a blog plug-in that automatically Tweets your posts. Your best bet is to Tweet your content manually and customize each Tweet so it doesn’t get old.

5. Get Involved in Live Tweeting Events

Twitter launched at SXSW last year, catapulting microblogging conferences to fame. Live Tweeting events are great because they are a form of citizen journalism that allow you to connect with several new people in your niche while making active and valuable contributions to current discussions in your community.

6. Pitching Stories to Journalists on Twitter

You can send a direct message to a journalist who is following you on Twitter to pitch a story idea.

7. Communicating with Your Team

You can use Twitter as a company intranet that connects all of your employees. Twitter can be particularly useful in this regard if you have a virtual business with employees in different geographical locations. You can set your updates to private for security reasons. Anytime you are working on group projects, you can stay in touch with your team members using Twitter.

8. Brand Monitoring

Stay up to date with any mentions of your business on Twitter. If there is anything negative, you will be able to counter it quickly. You can also use Twitter as a way to receive feedback from your customers and improve your business. Just ask your followers to give their opinion on something. For example, if you designed a new website, ask your followers what they think about it and get their constructive criticisms so you can make your site design even better.

9. Acquire More Votes on Social Media Websites

If you have submitted a story to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or any other social voting website, tweet a link to that submission to try to score more votes from your followers. If your followers like what they see, they are sure to vote for your content.

10. Hiring People

Looking for a programmer, designer, or writer? Whatever type of professional you seek, try finding them on Twitter. Simply send your followers a tweet telling them you are looking for someone for a job. They can either recommend someone to you or offer themselves for the job. Using Twitter in this way is ideal for finding qualified freelancers. It is much more convenient than putting out a classified ad.

11. Build Your Personal Brand

When you use Twitter to talk about things as mundane as what you ate for breakfast or how you are going to sleep early tonight, you make your followers feel like you are casual and approachable. Even those running a company that has a cold, corporate brand image could create more appeal and build a unique personal brand using Twitter.

12. Streamline Electronic Communications

When you use Twitter, you’re likely to find yourself using IM, email, and other electronic communication methods less. Twitter not only provides public chatting through Tweets, it also allows you to send direct messages. Twitter will help you streamline your electronic communications, allowing you to scale back online.

Tags: Social Media, Social Network, twitter, Web Marketing, Web University

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Top Ten Ways to Use Twitter for Marketing

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Twitter is a micro-blogging site that asks you a basic question, “What are you doing?” It allows anyone with an account to write up to 140 characters in a text field as a means to update, comment, promote or communicate to others who are “following” you. When people follow you, they see what you’ve recently contributed when they login. They see your “tweets”, which are the messages you leave.

And of course you can follow others who tweet about the things that interest you. As an Internet marketer you may want to follow other Internet marketers, for example.

Like anything, and this is especially true of working with social media, the more you give, the more you get. In other words, the more often you tweet the more activity you’ll generate. Some suggest that you tweet a few times a day, every day. Not every tweet needs to be profound. But they should all be useful.

It’s important that you don’t abuse Twitter for marketing and promoting your products, services or affiliate links. Most of your tweets ought to be about offering your followers useful and valuable information. Only once in a while should you try to use Twitter to promote something. Otherwise you’ll be perceived as a spammer, and no one wants that tag.

Imagine if you had a large number of people following your tweets? Some people have tens of thousands following them. If you had something to promote and you had a large following, you could quickly and efficiently alert a lot of people of your promo. It acts sort of like a mass emailíng blast to your house email list, but it’s a heck of a lot easier and faster. This is the power of Twitter.

One thing that I’ve noticed with Twitter is that it can seem overwhelming at times. The sheer information on Twitter, the ‘how-to’s', tutorials and all the other ubiquitous advice on how to use and take advantage of it can seem hard to understand and implement. So here’s an easy-to-understand list of the top ten ways in which you can use Twitter to market yourself, your business and your website.

The Top 10 Ways To Use Twitter for Marketing:

1. Use it to promote new pieces of content you or your company create to drive traffic to your site. From online articles to blog posts or from videos to webinars, each time you add something to the Web that is of value, tweet about it and include a link. (Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short.)

2. Use it for learning new marketing ideas, strategies and techniques. If you follow the right people, and you have to be picky about who you follow, you’ll get pointed to a good amount of useful tutorials, videos, e-zines and other things that teach you about marketing.

3. Use it to get new customers. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in your product or service. There are many ingenious ways to search for people on Twitter. For example, if you sell red widgets you could go to http://search.twitter.com and find people who have tweeted specifically looking for red widgets. To do this, type the following into the search box: red widgets?

• You’ll notice a lot of the results will be of others selling red widgets. These ones will all obviously have links in them to direct people to the site they’re selling red widgets on. To weed these people/tweets out, use the negative sign like this: -http red widgets?

• Since every link has ‘http’ in it, using the negative sign in front of it will cause your search results to not include any tweets with links in them.

4. Use it to build your email list. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in the monthly newsletter you send out to your house email list. Invite these people to join.

5. Utilize Twitter plugins or add-ons such as TweetMyBlog or The Twitter Updater, which both automatically make tweets of every new blog post you publish. Also check out TwitThis. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the Web page and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their followers on Twitter. Finally, look at TweetLater, a service that allows you to write lots of tweets at once and then schedule them to go out over time.

6. Use it to build buzz about an upcoming product or website launch.

7. Use it to better brand yourself or your business. Remember, when someone wants to learn more about you or your company, they are increasingly using sites like Twitter for research. You could easily use Twitter to establish yourself as an authority in your field.

8. Use it to update followers on breaking news regarding your company. If your company is mentioned in a new article, tweet about it and include a link to the article. Or if you’re at a conference or trade show, you could tweet what you’re doing and invite people to visit you in person.

9. Use it for business networking, master-mind groups (see Napoleon Hill), and getting yourself seen by high-profile people in your industry.

10. Use it as an instant messaging system to keep you and your team on the same page during projects. This is especially useful for those who work with teams spread out in different cities or countries.

You should note that this top 10 list is not in order of importance or in any particular order. I suggest that you give Twitter a try if you haven’t already. See if you can apply a few of these techniques and tactics to help you take advantage of Twitter as a marketing tool.

And one more important thing to remember is that there is no silver bullet in marketing. You should always be trying and implementing numerous tactics when marketing your business. Don’t only rely on Twitter or any other one thing. Instead, use Twitter (or any other Web 2.0 site) as simply one more tool in your entire social media and marketing toolbox.

Tags: Social Media, Social Network, social networking, twitter, Web Marketing, Web University

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Real-Time Search – 5 Reasons Why

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 12:05 PM

Thursday, March 18, 2010

If you don’t understand why the Real Time Web is huge, you will soon.

Thanks to micro-blogging sites like Twitter, a constant stream of human-posted content has infiltrated the Web. This growing infiltration has created a bottoms up approach to content creation that via the progressive support of rapidly developing applications has and will continue to empower every individual to co-create what is deemed as “important” on the Web. The Real Time Web serves as both the database that informs us of what is happening right “Now” and the human touch to the content that will compete with the traditional algorithms for what is deemed as “valuable” content to us all.

Its challenges lie in the filtration and mass integration of both the content and the act of sharing to the Real Time Web. There remain major aspects of the Web that have not yet integrated “searching” and “sharing” of the Real Time Web, including traditional search. But as filtration and integration progress the Web will take the form of a living breathing database.

Here are 5 reasons why Real Time Search will help the Real Time movement change the Web and your experience forever.

1. The “Now” Factor

We saw it with Michael Jackson’s passing. We saw it with the Iran Protests and we see it more and more everyday — the Real Time web provides us with what is happening right “Now” and with vivid detail from around the globe. “We” is driving the “Now” factor.

2. We Become Co-Creators

The Real-Time web offers us the ability to become co-creators in not only content but also in what is deemed important. Why? Because we decide what is worth sharing, discussing and having opinions on. This behavior serves as a natural selection of valuable content. Certainly the current web allows for creation of content, but what is deemed as important/valuable is mostly left up to a few individuals, organizations and a bunch of robots. The Real-Time web, once fully integrated, will change that.

3. Humans vs Machines

Have you ever clicked on blue links that lead you to a piece of content dating back to a year ago? Search results lose relevancy each day due to the amount of new content hitting the internet. Spiders, web crawlers and engines decide what content is relevant via algorithms and those results can be manipulated via intelligently structured content (SEO). Real-time search enables users to receive information via conversations and people instead of machines. Take a look at your web results today. Would you rather receive cold content determined by algorithms or what the crowd and people value as good and bad?

SiteProNews Reader Rewards Program

Later this month SPN will be introducing a Reader Rewards program that will provide loyal readers with quality ebooks, whitepapers, service & product discounts and useful software.

Readers will receive points for each SPN issue and advertorial they open and read. Each giveaway offered in a given month will be assigned a point value and will become immediately available for download when that point value is reached by a reader. The entire program will be automated and readers will simply have to click a link to review their point totals and the downloads available to them. New giveaways will be added each month and some older giveaways carried forward from month-to month.

If you would like to participate in the SPN Reader Rewards Program as a contributor of software, ebooks, whitepapers, etc., contact us at info@sitepronews.com to obtain more information on the program and how your company, service or website can benefit.

4. Facebook Factor

With over 300 million users creating and wrapping themselves around content, once Facebook opens up its search API to the web what do you think will happen? Better yet do you think there is value in being able to search a database of 300 million users’ opinions and experiences? Searching Facebook may be the factor that tips the overall experience of the web into one that is very different than today. Facebook may be the tipping point to where bottoms up (sharing & contributing) will go head to head with tops down (crawling & optimizing).

5. A New Breed of Search Engines

If there existed a search engine that was capable of aggregating and rendering results based on what was shared, peoples opinions and conversations, would you be interested in that search engine? If you knew that there were 6 conversations that provided a fantastic account of a design firm you were considering would that be more valuable to you than the top 3 links on your current search engine results? Would you have more value for SEO based search results or human conversation driven results? How about both? Real-Time search, once developed, will render a new breed of search engines that will capture this new value the New Web has to offer.

At the moment, Real Time Search is only in its infancy, as is the Real Time web. Twitter and the like are simply representations of a big movement that will continue to occur with the creation of more similar services, more adoption of those services and more integration of those services.

What is clear is that our daily use of the Real Time Web’s driving platforms — Twitter, Facebook and the like — is unprecedented. The Internet is no longer simply just a disconnected 3rd party container of tops down aggregation, “We” is now part of its determination. And, search as we know it will soon change to accommodate, thereby delivering a completely different experience of the Web.

Tags: Google, Real, Search, time, Web University

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How a Blog Can Seriously Help Your Business

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

If your business website doesn’t have a blog, get one. A blog, if done right, can act as a direct and indirect mechanism that brings large amounts of qualified visitors to your site, many of whom may become customers.

This is mostly related to the way blogs interact with search engines and the traffic I am speaking of will come from search engines, mostly Google.

Before I explain how you can do this to help your website, let me first give some background on how search engines work, Google in particular.

When it comes to optimizing your website (or blog for that matter) for search engines you must always keep in mind two things: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is the elements of a Web page that better optimize it to be found and ranked well in the search engines. These elements can include on-page content such as the actual sentences and paragraphs on the page, the headlines (or headers or Hx tags), the links, the links’ text, the title tag and much more.

Off-page optimization means the things that are done on sites besides your site, namely link-building. Off-page optimization is the process of creating links (or causing others to create links) on other websites that point to your site. Inbound links as these are often called have a major impact on how well you rank in search engines. Generally speaking, the more inbound links, the better. But the quality of the sites with these inbound links, or the way the search engines perceive the sites, is even more important.

To rank on the first couple of pages on the search engines requires work on both on-page and off-page optimization.

Two additional and important pieces of information that you’ll need to understand are related to site content and internal links.

Search engines also very much love new, original and quality content, and they like to see your website regularly adding this kind of new content. You don’t need to add pages every day, just add pages at the same rate over time. So if you add a page a week to your site, keep it at around that same pace, or increase or decrease gradually.

A website can be considered a living entity in a sense. It certainly shouldn’t be static. It should grow over time. And the fantastic thing about content is that the more of it there is on your site, the more chances you have of getting found in the search engines.

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The idea that inbound links help your search engine rankings that I explained above can be extended to your internal pages as well. In other words, the more links to a particular page coming from other pages within the same site will boost that page’s rank as well.

Think of it this way. If you had a ten page site, including a product page and every page on the site contained a link to your product page and, if all other things were equal, your product page would rank higher than the rest of your site’s pages (besides the home page which is given a little extra weíght).

Now let’s consider what would happen if there were only you and your competitor in your industry (if only that could be true!) and your site still had those ten pages while your competitor’s site contained one hundred pages. Furthermore, your competitor set it up the same way as you where he added a link to every page on his site that pointed to his product page. If all other things were equal, his product page would outrank your product page every time. Why? Because he had 100 internal links pointing to his product page and you only had 10.

If you put all these pieces together now, on-page optimization, off-page optimization or link building, content creation and internal linking, can you begin to see why a blog may be a good thing? A blog helps with all of these.

A blog that is regularly updated is providing a mechanism for adding fresh content on a regular basis. Plus, it’s so easy to use a blog that anyone can use them, so even if you or your employees don’t know a thing about Web pages and HTML, you’ll still be able to add new content to your site.

Consider this. If you add fresh, quality content to your blog on a regular basis by writing posts, something the search engines love, and within each post you link to an important page within your site, let’s say your product page for instance, you’re now building links to help your rankings using your blog. With this additional link your product page gets that much more boost in the search engines.

Remember how I explained that links from within your site help your rankings? Adding links within your blog posts pointing back to your other important pages that you want to rank well is a great way to help your rankings.

And every time you publish a new post, you’re giving the search engines one more entry point into your site. Your site will quickly get bigger, and with each new page your site gets more visible.

Keep in mind that the links you make within your blog posts should be relevant. Only link to your product page from a post that has to do with your products. And also, blog posts ought to be useful to your site visitors. The less you talk about your products and instead offer useful, free information that people can use, the more traffíc and repeat visitors you’ll get.

Remember that people really don’t care about you, your website or your products, they only care about how you can help them. If you sell furniture, a blog post about how to find the best deals on furniture would be far better than a post about how your chairs are the best in the world.

One important thing to remember is that if you plan on creating a new blog for your business as a way to augment your website be sure you put the blog on your actual domain. This means that you would not use a remote service like Blogger.com. Instead, you must have the blog on your business website’s address (or domain). For example, if your website address is http://www.yoursite.com/ then your blog should be located at http://www.yoursite.com/blog or http://blog.yoursite.com/

By adding a blog to your business website you are creating a way to get additional traffic. You’ll get direct traffic from your posts, which get indexed by the search engines and drive traffic to your site from searches. And, you’ll get indirect traffic from your other site’s pages ranking well in the search engines because they have links pointing to them from your blog posts.

You’ll be regularly adding fresh content to your site, which search engines love, thereby creating more ways to be found in the search engines at the same time. And each post provides a new chance to create a link or two to other pages and blog posts on your site, thereby boosting those pages’ rankings.

Like I suggested at the beginning, if your business website doesn’t have a blog, go get one.

Tags: Blog, blogging, Business, Strategies, Strategy, Web University

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Social Networking for Business Guide

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM

Monday, March 15, 2010

It seems like there’s an over-abundance of social sites nowadays. For a newbie, it can be quite intimidating when first joining a network or two and building a community. A handful of questions may run through your head:

• Which networks to join?
• How to participate?
• What’s enough, or too much?
• How will it help my business?

So, to answer some of these, I’d like to present my “Social Media For Dummies” overview. First, a quick recap of my favorite networks and what they’re about.

Facebook – The ultimate platform for keeping up with (stalking) friends. I joined Facebook way back in 2005, you know, when it was just for college students and before you could even share photos (gasp!). I’ve witnessed the evolution of this mega-network over the years, and it has become, not only the 4th largest website in the world, but the best place to find people, keep up with them, and inform them. It is the son of Classmates.com on every possible steroid ever ingested by humans. The ability to share and communicate with friends and colleagues is seamless. Overall, Facebook is a great place to start your social networking endeavors.

LinkedIn – A must-have in every business person’s arsenal of tools. If you are (or hoping to be) in business of any sort, LinkedIn is a great place to set up shop. Very similar to Facebook, minus the annoying applications, plus job postings and resumes. This is where you network with those in your industry, join groups, research companies, and prospect clients. Build your credentials by asking colleagues for recommendations or head to the “Q&A” section to provide advice.

Twitter – Share, Learn, Meet. I wouldn’t be surprised if Webster adds a new definition for “tweet” this year. Within the first half of 2009, Twitter has gone from nearly 5 million users to over 23 million. It is the social media platform of choice at Fortune 100 companies. Easily share links, pictures, videos, articles… Oh, and personal updates… with followers. Twitter is kind of like the cocktail party of social networks. Here, you can easily reach out to strangers by tuning in to their tweets or quickly replying to them. A limited amount of customization keeps annoying advertisements and outlandish profiles at bay, unlike the outdated MySpace.

Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, reddit, etc. – Social Bookmarking to share and store your favorite links. You just read an article over at NYT.com that you loved. Use one or more of these bookmarking sites to share it with the world. Looking for information or articles on a certain subject? Head to one of these sites and search your topic, you’ll be able to peruse a list of articles or sites that others have found useful or interesting. Not only are these great for sharing, but storing sites for later use as well. Say you have a home desktop, a netbook for travel, and a work computer… customize your bookmarks and easily access them on each computer without updating each machine.

FriendFeed – All of your networks in one place. FriendFeed lets you put all of your networks in one big stream. Users can see your Facebook status, latest Tweet, pictures posted on Flickr, blog post, bookmarked article and much more when they follow your feed. Much like Twitter, but a whole lot more.

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These are the networks that I tend to spend most of my time on and are probably some of the key ingredients that should be in the pot. Every person and business is different and may need to change their recipe accordingly, but the key to all of these is to contribute and become a part of the conversation.

Now What?

So, now that we’ve covered some of the major players in the social networking field, it’s time to discover how we can use them. As a person in business, especially an industry with a significant amount of its target market online (which is really all of them now), you’ve got to understand that these networks are an integral part of their lives. Just like in previous decades where television commercials were considered a major part of any advertising/marketing plan because every one watched TV… now, as many are leaving cable in the dust and turning to the Internet for their information and entertainment, it’s more crucial than ever to join the ranks of the digital pioneers.

However, the people using these networks are smart. They don’t fall for blatant advertising traps like they used to. They want to know that there’s something in it for them. If your product isn’t it and that’s all you’re talking about on Twitter, then they’ll ignore you. Social networks aren’t about advertising – they’re about building relationships.

Say you run a small business, maybe you own a restaurant, a clothing boutique, a PR firm or a chiropractic firm… What is in it for you?
• Take a look at your customers or clients when they’re in your office or store. Are they on their iPhone or Blackberry checking email? Did they mention finding you online? Did they hear about you from a friend? If you can answer “yes” to any of those questions, then you’re missing out on connecting with your customers and should probably put on a pot of coffee, cause you’re going to be here for a while.

• Social media is a chance to be at your market’s finger tips when they look at their phone or get online in a friendly and non-obtrusive way.

• You can quickly address customer service issues by communicating directly with the customer.

• Prospect new clients.

• Learn about trends in your industry, stay up-to-date with competition and network with power players in your industry.

• Provide existing customers incentives, coupons or interesting information to keep them tuned in to your brand.
Many people will pay thousands of dollars trying to get these things with traditional techniques. Social media is free… despite, of course, any operating costs like time and possibly design fees to add a professional touch. You need to be on here… Do a Google News search for “small business social media”. BusinessWeek, LA Times, NY Times will be some of the publications insisting you buck up and make it happen.

How to Participate Effectively:
• Do not start a social media campaign if your intention is free advertising. No one will listen and you will waste your time. Period.

• Take a minute and figure out what you want to get out of being involved in social networks. Research how other businesses have been successful. Make a plan. Mashable is a great place to learn about social media.

• Twitter is a great place to find people in your area, geographically or by industry, and interact with them. Start a conversation, always give if you ever want to receive and don’t constantly advertise. No one likes spam… so don’t spam your followers with pleas to go to your website or go into business with you. Provide your followers a coupon or discount if you’re hoping for business from them… Keep them up-to-date on any changes to your menu or services… Share fun pictures from happy customers… Follow-up with an unhappy customer or use your competition’s bad customer service as a great way to introduce you into their lives. Just remember to keep it real, be you, because every one wants to know that there’s a human behind your username.

• Facebook is generally most successful for companies with a large following or customer base. But that doesn’t mean you should skip it… create a personal profile so you can network with friends and family. By being there, you can instantly share things about your business with people who already like you and will probably listen more than the average stranger. By keeping your brand in their mind, they’ll be more likely to spread the word and pass you along to their friends, and so on. Word of mouth, my friends…

• LinkedIn is a must for anyone in business. Very straightforward here, like a virtual resume on steroids. It’s always good to network with past and present colleagues and continue to build relationships, because you don’t know when you may need them or vice versa.
Last Words: Keep your brand consistent among all of the networks you decide to join. Monitor your brand using tracking tools. And remember to Collaborate, Communicate, and Participate.

Tags: Business, Guide, social networking, Strategies, Strategy

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How You Use Social Media Can Kill Your Business

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM

Saturday, March 13, 2010

The social media movement has expanded the number of people we can reach and connect with on a personal level. The new relationships and connections we create with people all over the world can have a profound effect on our personal and business growth. We learn about cultures and nations that we were, perhaps, previously ignorant of. None of this is a new concept, but what may be is how quickly you can destroy your business by using social media incorrectly.

Transparency is a Utopian Concept

Not too long ago, Michael Fortin wrote an article titled Don’t Be Transparent, Be Authentic Instead. That article is an important read for any social media wrangling business blogger and you can search for it online.

That article is the tip of the iceberg in the concept of ‘transparency’ being too Utopian to work within the jaded confines of our society. Of course, true transparency is ideal. Many things about a perfect world are. Unfortunately, as a group, most of the world isn’t ready or willing to accept true transparency without penalty.

When Transparency Fails

Let me give you a couple of examples of transparency failure we’ve seen.

Failure 1: We had a copywriter who was posting on Twitter about the work he was doing. He made several posts within a few hours which were ugly complaints about a client and how ‘stupid’ he felt that client was. We obviously considered this unacceptable and immediately removed him from our list of subcontractors, but think about this: If he was hoping to use Twitter to get more client work – how many potential clients just read that and thought… “I’m not going to risk being badmouthed on here, I’ll find someone else.” Everybody gets frustrated, but what if the client he was working on read that? Put it this way, if you wouldn’t say it to your client directly – don’t post it either.

Failure 2: We had a designer who was a day late returning her design phase work. When we contacted her, she said she had a family emergency the night before and was unable to send in her work because she wasn’t home. A quick check on Facebook showed that she was actually out at a party that night and posted multiple times while drunk talking about how much she was drinking and even hinting at wanting to bring a man she met there home with her. Obviously, we relieved her of the design work, handed it to another designer who caught up on the time schedule, and didn’t again work with her. In this case, people are allowed to have a life, we understand that. But if you cannot get your work done and have to lie about why – it’s a problem. If you do not have enough class to not post details about your ‘wild nights’ to everybody on your social networks — that’s also a problem.

How We Monitor Social Media Conversations

My business has been around for over a decade and is very focused on client satisfaction and excellent treatment of our web design clients. We have a network of hundreds of copywriters, designers, and coders who work with us on projects. However, even with screening of those experts when they come on board with us – you don’t always know someone until you have observed them over a long period of time.

That’s why we monitor what they say online.

How do we do that? Well first we get as many of their social profiles as we can. Usually, we ask for a list of them. We’ve also found that most people won’t provide them all. We then Google search the usernames of the ones they have given us because most people use the same usernames over and over. We also monitor blogs, and check for listings of social networks on those.

We have a system set up to consolidate all their social media comments into one master feed. That master feed can then be browsed directly to see what they’re up to, but that’s a lot of things to read each day. What we do is take the master feed, run it through a filter that creates two sub-feeds based on certain things we think are important to monitor. The first sub-feed is created by running the master list through a keyword & synonym filter that pulls out words related to business – for instance, “client” “business” “work” etc… The second sub-feed has a filter that runs their posts through a check for foul language and words like “sex” “drugs” “drunk” etc… There are hundreds of words in each filter.

Seem a bit ‘big brother’? It probably is – but reputation and client treatment is very important to us.

Here’s the thing: If we can read it and you can lose work with us over it… how many POTENTIAL clients did you lose also?

7 Ways to Edit Yourself

We’re not suggesting you stop having a life and stop making mistakes. You can post about those things and it simply makes you a more interesting person to read about. Just use common sense:
• If you wouldn’t say it to a client or boss – don’t say it where they can read it either.

• If you wouldn’t say it to your grandmother – don’t say it on your public posts.

• If you wouldn’t say it to a police officer – don’t post it on your social networks. For that matter, don’t do it either.

• If you plan to lie to your boss – don’t put the truth where they can see it.

• If you plan to go out and get drunk and know you have a tendency to post while drunk – give your phone to a friend to keep for you.

• Learn how to use privacy settings and understand how visible your posts are on different social networks.

• If you want a place to vent – create a completely different identity for yourself to do that. Name no names in your posts, and make no connection to your other profiles or email addresses.
Consider it all part of Internet Etiquette. Social networks are great to hear more personal things about someone and we encourage people to share a bit of themselves online (using normal cautions etc..). In the long run, full transparency is too Utopian for our modern world to handle well. We’re still at a point in our societal growth that when someone seriously calls a client an idiot – they tend to get a bit upset about it.

Tags: Business, Social Media, social networking, Strategies, Strategy, Web University

(0 Comments)

Social Media and Conan O’Brien

posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM

Monday, March 8, 2010

The way I see it, NBC has little chance of survival in the next ten years. They’ve proven themselves so caught up in the normal TV schedule way of thinking that they fail to understand their audience, what little of it is left.

Their lack of knowledge about social media, how it’s formed and how it can control the conversation is part of their failure in this situation and may very well be part of their failure as an organization.

Conan O’Brien on the other hand was able to harness the internet and social media to make a stand and, in the end, become more famous than he ever was before.

I’m going to explain this slowly, for the folks at NBC, if they are reading this. Let’s think of Conan O’Brien & Jay Leno as a brand, and that the internet is the next big media thing, where there will be millions and millions of Americans making decisions about their life based on what they read on the internet. When people run a search on this website called GOOGLE, they get thousands of pages of choices that they can read about the topic in which they are interested. That perhaps in the future, someday, consumers and people who watch television (aren’t they the same?) will be able to type in “Conan vs Jay” and get real time results that help shape their thinking about the subject, and therefore create brand identification and/or brand alienation depending on what happens.

Now for the rest of us, who understand Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and a bunch of other three word phrases with Affiliate, Marketing, Search and Interactive in them, here is some more high level explaining.

NBC, as a company, is still very much focused on Television being the predominant source of entertainment in the next ten years and hasn’t done much thinking beyond that. Despite paying people like Jay & Conan ridiculous amounts of money, their audience base plummeted each year as more and more people turned to independent internet entertainment. So they did not consided exactly what might happen, if they started to make changes in their schedule, move Jay Leno back to his previous slot and basically kick Conan to the curb.

Jay Leno, as funny as he might have been, isn’t exactly a representative of a modern, fast-paced, growing generation. He might get some people to stay up and watch the news before falling asleep during his monologue – but on the whole, no one can say he has his finger on the pulse of… well… anything.

You say, and perhaps the executives of NBC say, “we need to prop up our affiliates and their news shows, before we lose them.” So what? Television as a medium is on the way out, or at least changing. I don’t know anyone who actually watches the news at 11, let alone cares that Jay or Conan are right after it. The news has no relevance, since most of us have already learned about it 6 hours earlier fr

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