WebWitches – SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing Mysteries

Five steps to becoming highly infectious on Twitter

2010-03-09T18:06:00.001-08:00

You’re tweeting mad if you’ve missed the short-term and long-term benefits that a social media platform like Twitter can create for your business and personal brands.

Some may even call you a tweethead. Those people aren’t very nice but here’s what is nice: generating new clients with minimal consistent output.

If you’re tired of utilising haphazard techniques to marketing virally through this monstrous medium, fear not! Help is at hand.

Here are my five steps to becoming highly infectious on Twitter and how to benefit from WofM (word of mouth marketing).

1. Select your poison

Your poison is the message you decide to deliver, it is your angle on a particular topic, your personality, your comedic relief, your professionalism, your enthusiasm and the quality of your content.

What do you want to be known for? Be very clear. Think of yourself as a celebrity or a musician that becomes known for a specific type of genre. Why would people want to follow you? Is it because you have something interesting to say? Or is it because of your sharp wit teamed up with educational information that your consumers can actually use?

Share content with your follower’s that is practical in nature and engages their emotions. Never underestimate the power of chemistry to spark WofM. People will talk about you if you pleasantly surprise them, make them angry or get them to feel excited or even sad. Move them emotionally and they’ll move your message virally.

2. Choose your apps

Out of the thousands of apps you can team up with your Twitter account, I keep coming back to a couple of key ones. They are TweetDeck and Social Oomph. TweetDeck allows me to track what is being re-tweeted and who is spreading my message across the web, whereas Social Oomph allows me to schedule my tweets in advance and manage my output to a few short hours per month with maximum results.

Choose your apps carefully. It will be greatly dictated by your working style and your main objectives.

3. Get Re-Tweeted

Dan Zarrella, a social media and viral marketing scientist, studied The Science of ReTweets. Out of 84,000 re-tweets, here’s what he discovered:

The term “RT” was utilised in 86.79 percent of the ReTweets and the term “ReTweet” was only utilised 13.21% of the time.
The word ‘please’ occurred in over 5 percent of the ReTweets.
69.05 percent of the ReTweets contained links to an external site whereas 30.95 percent of them contained no link at all.

As you can see from the data, it is not only important to say “please RT” but to also add relevant links where possible. Write articles and post them up on your website’s blog and then proceed to promote the blog article via Twitter posts. Shorten your urls so you can fit your article headline in the post. TweetDeck has an application for this. This can be a substantial driver of traffic to your website. My own Twitter account can drive over one hundred hits to my website within five minutes when applied in this way. Don’t dismiss Twitter as another fad. It has the power to move the masses.

4. Consistency. Are you a Cher, Madonna, Tina Turner or a Richard Branson type — or do you give up like Sarah Palin?

How consistent are you? Like any marketing campaign, you must be consistent in your message to gain traction and engagement. If you plan to use Twitter as a tool then it needs to be used consistently to gain visibility.

Have you ever read Madonna’s bio? That woman doesn’t give up and neither should you. If you aren’t getting results, wear a cone bra! Or, alternatively, you could take a different approach and test your Twitter campaign. Testing and measuring is important. You can’t fix what you don’t know is going wrong. Something Sarah Palin should probably learn.

“Oh, no you didn’t!” Oh, yes I did!

5. Don’t be a Wallflower

Take a lesson in public relations from Lady Gaga. She works the media like no one else and like Gaga you need to learn how to work your Twitter followers. Adding a dose of controversy to your Twitter posts results in immediate reactions, sometimes positive and sometimes negative.

The trick with controversy is to put it into context. If you do plan to comment on something highly sensitive, do your research and be prepared to back it up with statistical evidence or an inarguable debate. Nothing gets people speaking more than a topic close to their heart and there is nothing more mentally stimulating than a healthy debate. Debate creates change and, in your case, could convert clients.

Write an article that is controversial within your profession and post it on your website, promote it via twitter and get individuals to have the debate on your platform and on your turf. Who knows, they may just agree with your point of view and defend you against other critics. Now there’s a diehard fan worth taking to the bank.

Ben Angel is the author of the brand new controversial book, ‘Sleeping Your Way to The Top in Business – The Ultimate Guide to Attracting & Seducing More Customers.’ Grab your copy today by visiting www.benangel.com.au

via anthillonline.com

From the Team at WebWitches

5 Ways to Improve Your Website

2010-03-03T16:44:00.001-08:00

Websites are almost like business cards, everyone has one and they aren’t afraid to hand out the URL at every available opportunity. But unlike business cards, websites need ongoing attention and care.

A poor online experience from a potential client can equal a loss in sales, which means a loss in dollars. Luckily there are five simple things you can do to ensure your website is up to scratch.

1. Have a content style guide for people to refer to

How are your authors (or you!) going to keep your content consistent if there is no central point of truth for preferred spelling, punctuation or referencing.
Writing for the web is not like writing for traditional communication collateral like brochures, fact sheets and publications. Even if you are a professional communicator, make sure you learn or brush up on your web writing skills before tackling a big web project.

3. Don’t underestimate the resources required to run a website

Websites are not a set and forget communication tool. They require tweaking, testing and reviewing on a regular basis. Content does go stale, and search engines like maintained pages.

And don’t for a minute think that social media is the easy way to have an online presence. Social media is great – but it can be really, really, really (get the picture) time intensive. If you are going to start a Twitter account for your business, have a plan and set aside some time each day to connect.

4. Don’t start a blog if you’re not going to write posts

Blogs are really easy to start, not so easy to keep going. If it’s unlikely you can stick to a regular post schedule, think about other ways you can improve your content instead.

If you do start a blog, you have to commit to maintaining it. Mind map out a few months of posts so that you are not staring at blank page a month in. This also helps prevent you using up all your good ideas in your first few posts.

5. Be easy to contact

If you have a contact form or email address, make sure it’s monitored! People expect a fast turn-around on the web, and while you shouldn’t have to check your messages 24/7, make sure you are easy to contact. Also, make sure you reply to all the emails you receive (spam not included of course), not just the ones that look interesting. Even if you can’t help the person, a short, polite email thanking them for taking the time to contact you is important.

Remember, the web can be simple and cost effective, but that doesn’t mean it should be cheap. Invest in some time and resources to make the most of the medium, and you’ll reap the benefits.

From the Team at WebWitches

Tags: Increase traffic site Internet seo Online internet marketing Online ranking Online seo Learn SEO online SEO Course SEO for Beginners

www.webwitches.com.au

How One Man Used Social Media to Raise $91,000 for Charity

2010-03-02T18:14:00.001-08:00

How One Man Used Social Media to Raise $91,000 for Charity

By Casey Hibbard
Published March 2, 2010

The Big 4-0. For most, turning 40 inspires something big.

For Danny Brown, it wasn’t a sports car, Vegas trip or marathon run. He was inspired to set a different challenge for himself—to bring people together and raise money for worthy causes. And the response was very unexpected…

To celebrate his 40^th, Brown and his wife spent a few days at Niagara Falls. Taking a break at a local café, they noticed an elderly woman come in by herself and order ice cream.

Brown wondered about her story.

After he and his wife headed home, Brown couldn’t stop thinking about the lonely-looking woman in the café—and regretted not talking with her.

“Everyone in social media talks about how we need to connect and open up,” Brown says. “I couldn’t make that connection to the lady we saw in the restaurant. We forget human connections offline. I wanted to make sure that if someone needs help or just a little bit of company, that people are reaching out to them.”

That a-ha moment kicked off a project that has since raised nearly $100,000 to date—reaching countless people.

Organization:

12for12k

Social Media Stats:

Twitter: 3,600 followers @12for12k

Blog: 3,000 subscribers

Facebook group: 700 fans

Ning network: 200 members

YouTube.com

Viddler

Results:

A 12-hour Tweet-a-Thon raised $15,500 for Share Our Strength.

Traffic at 12for12k.org increased by 4000% during the Tweet-a-Thon.

A Twitter avatar “frame” helped bring in 3,600 followers.

12for12k.org raised $91,275 for charities in 2009—all with volunteers.

One Man, No Budget

Brown launched the 12for12k Challenge, an initiative to bring social media communities together to help people offline in 2009. For years, Brown has worked in corporate communications and social media for companies like British Telecom. Currently, he’s the social media strategist for Maritz Canada.

Brown’s challenge takes the power of social media to the nonprofit world. “I know quite a few people offline who do charity work and the struggle is administrative costs,” he says. “I knew social media could offer a wider audience for far less investment.”

The 12for12k Challenge set an ambitious goal: raise $12,000 monthly for 12 months for 12 different charities—with no budget (the only costs were the website and hosting, which Brown paid for out of pocket).

His vision: Solely rely on social media to spread the word and raise donations for a featured charity each month. Then, 100% of donations go to the charity.

When word spread of Brown’s plans, his contacts and their contacts lined up to help. There may not be funds, but ideas, persistence and passion are the currency of social media anyway. In that regard, more than a dozen core 12for12k volunteers made it a “rich” initiative.

Four Cornerstones of the Campaign

Danny Brown launched the 12for12k.org site after an experience left him wondering “just how social we are.”

First, they set ground rules. Each supported nonprofit must operate with no more than 10% administrative costs, be a registered charity, and accept donations via PayPal or credit card.

Social media activity drives people directly to the 12for12k.org website to learn more and donate via ChipIn, a Flash widget that shows a running total of donations. Donations go directly to each nonprofit’s bank account.

About half a dozen volunteers joined Brown in generating updates on 12for12k’s four social media cornerstones of the campaign: blogging, video, a Facebook group and Twitter. More recently, they started a Ning community.

Updates on the Facebook group focus on featured charities, events and fundraising progress. The organization posts videos on YouTube and Viddler to kick off monthly campaigns and highlight related causes, such as homelessness.

Additionally, about 30 blog partners take Brown’s messages to their audiences.

Danny Brown prepares to kick off the 12 Days of Christmas Homeless Push in December.

One Cause Nets $15,500 Via a Tweet-a-Thon

Taking advantage of Twitter’s viral capabilities, the organization created a Twitter avatar “frame” for followers to include on their profile pictures, which encourages their followers to ask about 12for12k.

Last March, 12for12k featured Share our Strength, a national organization working to make sure no child in America grows up hungry. The organization’s “Pledge to End Hunger” campaign, led by MediaSauce and Kompolt, sought pledges online in response to a challenge from Tyson Foods. For each pledge, Tyson would donate 35 pounds of food or 140 servings.

Scott Stratton of Un-Marketing.com volunteered to help 12for12k host a Tweet-a-Thon for Pledge to End Hunger. For each $12 entry, donors were entered into a drawing to win one of about 20 prizes, such as an iPod Touch, Amazon Kindle 2, Flip video camera, gift cards, Nintendo Wii Fit and jewelry. A purchase of 10 entries automatically earned donors a free website review.

With entry fees and raffle prizes, the effort hoped to raise $12,000 in just 12 hours.

Scott Stratton of Un-Marketing.com donated his time and ideas for 12for12k.org’s Tweet-a-Thon for Pledge to End Hunger.

Supporters of 12for12k and Share our Strength, and hundreds of other friends and supporters, Tweeted away all day, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

The resulting response exceeded Brown’s and Pledge to End Hunger’s expectations. They hit their goal of $12,000 much faster than 12 hours – in just five-and-a-half hours.

Online Strategies for Offline Benefit

1. Share your vision
Don’t go it alone. Take your big idea to your current friends, fans and followers.

2. Set a time limit
People often don’t act unless there are limits or a specific goal. Set a short timeframe or hard numbers to reach.

3. Understand your audience
Brown analyzes site traffic for geography, income levels, ethnicity and gender to make future plans.

4. Keep it credible
People can be leery about contributing online. Set guidelines for nonprofits to feature and funnel funds directly to them.

“Honestly, I was shocked,” said Jeff Wiedner, director of community engagement at Share Our Strength. “I had a feeling that the timing was right for our mission and, since Scott knew so many people, that we’d do pretty well, but I never expected how quickly we reached that $12,000 target.”

When all was said and done, the total reached $15,549 for Share Our Strength, which pushed donations beyond monthly averages for the nonprofit. But the impact extends well beyond the actual donations.

“We got attention from folks like Mashable, Chronicle of Philanthropy and other media,” Wiedner said. “That led to more folks knowing about SOS and our mission, which led to a bump in our online community, which led to greater interactions with our community and building out of other campaigns later with other bloggers. There were some additional corporations that learned about us, too, as our reach grew.”

A total of 477 contributors raised $15,549 for Share Our Strength during a 12-hour Tweet-a-Thon.

4000% Traffic Increase

Brown turns to analytics tools Woopra and Quantcast for detailed measurement of traffic on the 12for12k.org site. With those, he not only knows traffic numbers but where they live, their income level, average spending, ethnicity and gender—letting him tailor content and events to his audience.

In March, the site was “hammered” with a 4000% increase in traffic in a 12-hour period because of the Pledge to End Hunger Tweet-a-Thon.

Yet the most important metrics for 12for12k don’t require fancy measurement tools. In 2009, the initiative fell short of its goal of $12,000 every month. But it still raised $91,275 that all went directly to charities and the people they help.

More importantly, Brown did so without any organizational budget, on the side of his day job.

Well into 2010, he still hasn’t stopped. In fact, the momentum of last year has inspired him to do more. Plus, he’s intent on continuing to support the charities of 2009 as he can with exposure and social media help, if needed.

Year two began by featuring Hope for Haiti, bringing in $8,000 so far from 140 contributors.

Brown wants to expand by enlisting sponsors, hosting more events and focusing on three charities each quarter, rather than one each separate month. This year’s theme, “connect globally, help locally” will encourage people to do more in their own communities.

“A lot of people don’t do anything because they’re just one person,” Brown said. “If you think you can’t help financially, help a local charity in your city understand how to use social media to tell their story. Ask a charity what you can offer them.”

What do you think about this story? Have you seen any great examples of social media impacting nonprofits in your community? What are they doing well?

From the Team at WebWitches

Tags: Increase traffic site Internet seo Online internet marketing Online ranking Online seo Learn SEO online SEO Course SEO for Beginners

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Think carefully about the content you publish

2010-03-02T18:05:00.001-08:00

If your company depends on the business generated from your website – and let’s face it, most do to some extent nowadays – then the content you publish should be of paramount importance to you, as it is representative of all you stand for, in relaying your message and brand to your customers (and potential customers). Therefore, it is crucial that you don’t overlook this when spending a substantial amount of time and money creating the best-looking and most interactive website in your industry.

Your web content is the main reason users will visit your site and so your level of success can rise or fall depending on what is on your pages. If you want to remain in business and generate your fair share of site traffic, you need to remember that content is important and therefore should be considered very carefully.

To do this you may wish to provide interesting information about your products/services through a blog, becoming a strong resource for the latest news and happenings in your industry sector. You can also generate discussion on your blog and provide advice and guidance to your site’s users.

Think carefully about the quality (and quantity) of content on your site and you should start to notice a positive change in site traffic volumes, with users encouraged to visit your site on a regular basis.

Daniel Higginbotham
Content Writer

From the Team at WebWitches

Tags: Increase traffic site Internet seo Online internet marketing Online ranking Online seo Learn SEO online SEO Course SEO for Beginners

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How to Better Engage Facebook Fan Page ‘Fans’

2010-01-26T17:19:00.001-08:00

How to Better Engage Facebook Fan Page ‘Fans’

By Mari Smith
Published January 26, 2010

A compelling, active Facebook fan page should be an integral part of your marketing plans. With its 350 million users and average daily session time of 25 minutes, Facebook provides an exceptional opportunity for visibility, Google indexing, live search ability, and fan engagement—whether you’re a solopreneur, a large brand or anywhere in between.

But, if you build it, will they come? And if they come, will they stay and engage?

There are two primary components to Facebook fan page engagement: 1) Sharing quality, relevant content and 2) inciting comments. In this article I’ll tell you how to best engage with Facebook fans.

Of course, there are many other components of effective Facebook fan pages and Facebook marketing in general. However, for the purposes of this two-part post, we’ll focus on content and comments. The more comments you have, the more viral visibility and free marketing you’ll create. But your fans have to have something to comment on!

Share Quality, Relevant Content – Daily

TechCrunch recently posted a Facebook fan page study by Sysomos that revealed 77 percent of fan pages have fewer than 1,000 fans. What stood out for me in that post was this fact: “Facebook fan pages tend to be updated only once every 16 days.”

TechCrunch goes on to say, “On Twitter, you follow someone because you want to hear what they have to say. On Facebook, you fan them just to show your support or affinity. Too often, it’s a throwaway gesture.”

While this may be true for many Facebook members and fan pages, I see a lively fan page as an extension of your blog and business – a place where you can generate real community and further solidify your brand.

1) How Often Should You Post?

For most fan pages, there is a direct correlation between frequency of posts and number of fans. Frequency is king, but there’s a fine balance – you don’t want to overwhelm your fans.

If you’re just starting out with your fan page, I would suggest a minimum of one update per day and increase from there to several times a day (mixing up the types of posts – see below) if you’re getting a good response from your fans.

Daily posting (at least Monday through Saturday) should yield daily comments and engagement.

You’ll find the right rhythm with your fans. Better to start with once a day than several times a day and have your wall filled with only your own posts.

Also, keep in mind “high traffic windows.” Depending on your time zone and the time zone of the majority of your fans, you’ll probably want to post sometime between 8:15am PST and 2:00pm PST.

2) What to Post

I recommend a mix of your own thoughts, breaking news, useful tips, tools, resources and links from other sites in your industry and related industries. Stay on topic, stay focused.

You could create an editorial calendar for your fan page just like many bloggers do.

If you’re not sure what content your fans want, ask them – in a poll or status update.

If your fan base is small and still growing, ask your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, email list, and blog subscribers. They are all potential fans. (See related post: 5 Ways to Promote Your Facebook Fan Page).

In this screen shot of Volkswagen’s Facebook Fan Page, photos from a recent auto show yielded 363 likes and 68 comments and a video trailer got 121 likes and 25 comments. These are great results, as every one of the fan actions created a post on their respective walls and out into their friends’ news feeds. Free visibility, and every line item has a link back to VW’s fan page.

3) Sourcing Quality Content

Your own blog: Import using the Notes app or, ideally, the Networked Blogs app.

Create your own Alltop page and review each morning for fresh content to share.

And/or subscribe to the top 15 to 25 blogs in your industry and related industries in your Google reader and review daily.

Create Twitter lists and scan daily for new, relevant information to share (see also 5 Creative Ways to Use Your Twitter Favorites).

Your Twitter Favorites RSS feed imported via the Notes app.

Your YouTube videos and/or other relevant videos.

4) Cultivating Your Style

Most people will come back to your fan page if there’s a real sense of community.

It’s important to be open, inviting, warm, friendly and personable. Even if you’re a large brand.

Starbucks leads the way with engagement – you might observe their style for ideas. Though they use their globally recognized logo, you’ll occasionally see posts in first person. I think this is commendable, as it really creates that personal feel so important to social networks.

5) Mix Up the Types of Posts

Text

This is your standard status update. You get 420 characters in the publisher to say what you want. As long as you don’t have a link in the update, the post automatically changes your latest Status Update at the top.

I highly recommend using the Facebook fan page to Twitter app at http://facebook.com/twitter. You simply link your fan page to your Twitter account, then choose which posts to share as tweets (Status Updates, Photos, Links, Notes, Events). You may need to experiment to get this just right.

Your posts will automatically truncate at around 120 characters and include a bit.ly link back to your fan page. Regardless of the number of characters, the tweet always contains the bit.ly link. Here’s an example of an update I posted for this blog post:

To track stats on any bit.ly link, just paste it into your browser and add a “+” sign at the end. As of the time of this writing, this post/link had 109 clicks and the post had 23 comments, plus replies on Twitter.

Video

Video is the next best thing to meeting your fans in person. There are many choices for video updates: You talking into the camera, photo montages (try Animoto), screencasts (using software like Camtasia Studio for PC or Mac, or ScreenFlow for Mac).

When you talk into the camera, always make good eye contact with the camera lens – just as if you were chatting to one good friend. You could do a video tip per day or per week. Make sure to keep the length short and the content concise. The ideal length for videos is up to 1 minute and 40 seconds.

You can record directly on Facebook or load a file onto your fan page – see screenshots below:

Here’s a video upload example from Dell Computer’s Facebook Fan Page – a 41-second ad for their nifty new customizable range of laptops, with 179 likes and 57 comments.

Or, you could pull in the video from YouTube as a link (click the Links icon on the publisher) – and this pulls in the live video player just as if you’d loaded the video file as in the example above:

Photos

Upload relevant pictures periodically and be sure to encourage your fans to upload photos anytime they wish. Each time your fans upload a photo, the thumbnail goes onto their profile wall and out into the news feeds of their friends.

Make sure your settings allow fans to post content. Just to the right under the publisher, click Options, then Settings:

In the screenshot below, there’s a photo on the Coca-Cola Facebook Fan Page – what’s neat about this photo is it was actually a fan-loaded image that Coca-Cola then reposted using the Share button (a great illustration of how Coca-Cola partnered with their raving fans who created the page).

Links

Anytime you post a link in the publisher, Facebook displays a preview with a choice of thumbnails. (If you’re publishing content from a third-party app like Ping.fm, the thumbnail will be a default view.)

You may at times wish to create an actual status update with a link in it, instead of a link with the preview on the wall. Here’s what to do: Before clicking the Share button, simply click the “x” to delete the link preview:

The post goes out as a status update with a clickable link:

Events

You can quickly create Event listings right from the publisher for any virtual or live event you have coming up. Fans can easily RSVP, as a regular Event page is created when you publish the event.

@ tags

This is a relatively new feature on Facebook. You can tag any friend, any fan page you’ve joined, any group you’re a member of and any event you’ve RSVPed to attend. You can include up to six @ tags in any update. Use the @ tagging strategically and your post will show up on your friends’ walls and other fan pages’ walls per the tag. (Just type the @ symbol in the publisher and the first letter or two of who/what you want to tag and a list drops down for you to select from.)

Notes app

This app is typically used to import your blog. However, I like the Networked Blogs app, so I actually import the RSS feed of my Twitter Favorites via the Notes app, which makes it easy to push relevant, regular content onto my fan page wall (and into the news feeds of my fans).

Incite Comments

Now that you have a wide variety of regular, quality, relevant content posting on your fan page, here are some points about inciting comments:

For status updates, try ending with a question.

Add your own comments as needed to get the ball rolling.

Come back and reply often to your fans’ comments – Facebook currently doesn’t have threaded commenting, so I suggest addressing specific fans in your comments as @name.

Do your best to respond to fan questions as promptly as possible. If you find you can’t keep up with the volume of questions, offer a free teleseminar or webinar in which you answer your fans’ top questions.

Vin Diesel has the second most popular Facebook fan page with well over seven million fans. Vin doesn’t post all that often, but when he does, each post yields tens of thousands of comments and likes. Just like Starbucks, there’s something to learn from Vin’s style – he talks to his fans in a very warm, caring and authentic manner.

In part two of this Facebook Fan Page Engagement post, I’ll cover:

How to encourage fans to keep coming back to add their own content and comments and ask questions, etc.

Monitoring insights – what do they mean, how to analyze the numbers and adjust your posts accordingly.

Should you also use the “Send an Update to Fans” feature? Do fans read their updates?

How to spark ongoing engagement via the Discussions tab.

Setting up systems for monitoring and responding to your fan engagement, given that there are currently no notifications of activity or RSS feeds to subscribe to on fan pages.

Integrating your Twitter followers and activity into your fan page engagement.

From the Team at WebWitches

Tags: Increase traffic site Internet seo Online internet marketing Online ranking Online seo Learn SEO online SEO Course SEO for Beginners

www.webwitches.com.au

Five Facebook-Only Strategies For Business Success

2010-01-20T19:33:00.001-08:00

Five Facebook-Only Strategies For Business Success

By Jason Falls
Published December 29, 2009
It’s hard to find a business participating in social media that isn’t doing something on Facebook. In fact, “I want a Facebook fan page,” has replaced, “I want a company blog,” as the single most heard request from clients in the social media world these days. With 350 million accounts and growing, it’s no wonder.
Facebook is one of my favorite places to recommend for businesses for a lot of reasons. The primary one is that Facebook offers almost of all the various social media tools that companies can apply to their brand.

Facebook allows you to participate without having to spend time or money on your own website. Still, few companies are using Facebook well. One example of a business doing it right is Ernst & Young Human Resources effort (brilliant). But for every good Facebook presence there’s a brand page we like to call a “campground.” Not because lots of people hang out there, but because all you hear when you visit is crickets.

To give you a leg up on getting smart with Facebook, here are five facebook-only strategies for business success.

1. Drive Off-Line Engagement With Event Postings

Facebook event postings are not just whimsical little calendar items. If you use them correctly, you can drive a veritable viral wave around what your business is doing because people who RSVP, comment or add to the event conversation have their activity posted publicly to their friends.

Here’s an example of an event page on Facebook

The catch is making your events irresistible, making the headline, description and invitation irresistible, then delivering on the off-line experience.

2. Give People Virtual Keepsakes With Photo Tagging

Speaking of events, when you have them, take pictures to post on your fan page. Then create some post-event buzz by inviting attendees to tag themselves in the photos. You won’t be able to tag most people (unless they are Facebook friends with the brand page administrator) but encouraging your attendees to tag themselves and their friends gives you a fun reason to reach out to them after an event.

This serves as a long tail effect of your event, driving your fans back to your fan page or event posting to see their images and further engage with your brand. And as a courtesy, put signage up at the event informing people their pictures may appear on your Facebook page or website.

3. Turn Customer Service Up a Notch With Facebook Discussion Forums

This tip works wonders for companies that don’t have some sort of support forum on their own website. Drive customers to your Facebook forums (called “Discussions” on the brand page tabs) by letting them know they can get support there.

Here’s an example of Jeep’s discussion forum on Facebook

Open up a forum topic for customer support and have someone on your staff check the forum for new issues every hour or so (or more depending upon volume). You’ll immediately give confused or frustrated customers a direct connection to solutions without having to spend a lot of money on complex issue tracking software.

4. Promote Your Page With Super Targeting

While I do not have access to specific data, almost every company I’ve talked to that has placed ads on Facebook has been thrilled with the outcome. The click-through rates have been higher than normal display ads and have had immediate impacts on page traffic.

The great thing about Facebook ads is that when you set them up, you can hyper-target them to the exact audience you’re trying to reach. Age, location, interest… filter your targeting to the specific profile of your target consumer and let Facebook do the rest. Because the ads are served on Facebook pages only, Facebook knows the age, location and interests of the people they serve the ad to. It’s probably the most effective ad targeting system in the world. Take advantage of it. Here’s 5 more ways to promote your Facebook fan page.

5. Collect Fan Photos and Videos at No Cost

Want your fans to take their picture with your product at various landmarks while traveling? Throw out a cool video contest or activity idea to engage your customers in some fun creativity. No need to hire a developer to pull together fancy code or pay YouTube thousands of dollars for a branded video contest.

Just ask your Facebook fans to upload their entries. Using the commenting tools provided, you can work up some guidelines for judging or just highlight and post the best stuff on your wall to promote the video makers. Even better, by posting appropriate policies and guidelines, you can get permission to use anything uploaded for company advertisements, projects and more. However, you should beware that Facebook has recently implemented some strict promotional rules. See this post for more on that.

There are lots of other strategies you can use on Facebook to engage your customers and even drive them to your website or other calls to action. These will at least give you some Facebook-exclusive ideas for starters. But these are just my ideas. Please share what you’re doing or your ideas to drive your business on Facebook in the comments.

From the Team at WebWitches

Tags: Increase traffic site Internet seo Online internet marketing Online ranking Online seo Learn SEO online SEO Course SEO for Beginners

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New Study Reveals Facebook Better Than Twitter for Marketers

2010-01-19T16:57:00.001-08:00

New Study Reveals Facebook Better Than Twitter for Marketers

By Amy Porterfield
Published January 18, 2010
The team at Social Media Examiner recently received a real gold mine of social media insight. It’s a mega report recently released by MarketingProfs called, “The State of Social Media Marketing.” This massive report highlights social media usage, strategy and predictions for 2010. And this article will bring you a small look at some of the findings from this content-rich report.
By the way, MarketingProfs used a three-tiered approach to craft this study, including consulting with a panel of social media experts, surveying more than 5,000 MarketingProfs readers and asking comScore to mine its panel data. This approach adds greater integrity and scope to the overall results.

#1: What’s “Normal” in Social Media Usage?

How often are marketers posting on some of the most popular social sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn? Here’s a snapshot of the frequency of posts:

Twitter: Half of the marketers surveyed reported updating at least once per day. Of those, 20.6% actually update several times per day.

Facebook: The largest group (33.4%) of marketers are updating “weekly.” However, nearly 30% are updating at least once per day.

LinkedIn: Only 11.5% update daily with the overall consensus being weekly updates at 25.4%.

What’s hype and what’s fact?

Many of the findings in this report touched on some of the frequent hype-versus-fact dialogue taking place in the social media arena. “Is Twitter more popular than Facebook?” “Do companies with no money use ‘earned’ media the most?” and “Do a lot of followers mean social media success?” are some of the questions addressed in the results.

Who has higher usage stats, Facebook or Twitter?

If you look at the overall number of users, both corporate and consumer (with the exception of certain industries), Facebook comes out ahead of Twitter.

Here are some facts:

The average minutes per visitor on Facebook in 2009 was 182.8 versus only 25.6 on Twitter. According to MarketingProfs, “Part of why time spent on Twitter is so much less than time spent on Facebook has much to do with the design of these sites. Facebook encourages users to aggregate external content on Facebook to be viewed within the network, while Twitter encourages users to link externally, viewing content outside of the network.”

Also, about half of all marketers report that their employers or clients actively maintain a corporate Facebook account, while 42.8% reported their employers or clients maintain a Twitter site.

Who’s using “free” media? Based on the results of the study, “free” media, also known as “earned” media, is not just for small businesses with no money to spend. The data shows that “it takes money to build and staff earned media marketing materials. The word ‘free’ belongs in quotations for a reason,” says MarketingProfs.

This compares “earned media” usage against annual corporate revenue. Surprisingly it shows a steady usage amount across many of the “earned media” tactics, showing that annual corporate revenues are not necessarily a driving factor for “earned media” usage.

“Comparing earned media use against annual corporate revenue, we ﬁnd a remarkably steady usage amount across many of these tactics. Private communities, share tools, SEO and email have nearly identical amounts of usage across all these levels of annual revenue. Those taking in less than $10 million do tend to rely more heavily on public online communities and blogs, while companies with lots of cash are more likely to invest in PR and viral videos. However, it is surprising how consistent usage is across all these categories.”

Do follower counts really matter?

According to the stats, there are three types of Twitter users, the two primary types being “those that value massive follower counts and those that want a very specific set of people to follow them.” And MarketingProfs points out that a third type of Twitter users might be those that want a lot of followers but have no clue how to get them.

This shows how the number of followers reported by corporate Twitter users is distributed. The steep curves shows that some users care about the quantity of followers while others care more about the quality of followers.

Although the report did not touch on the number of fans on corporate Facebook fan pages, it did report on corporate Facebook accounts and the number of friends associated with them. Based on the results, only 6% of Facebook fan pages had 2,000 friends or more.

This shows the number of Facebook friends reported by corporate users. Similar to the Twitter graph above, there is a steep curve. This curve shows that very few marketers (only 6%) have been able to reach the 2,000 friend mark, meaning most marketers fall well below this mark.

#2: Social Media Strategies: The Good, Bad & Ugly

On Twitter, the two tactics tried the most were 1) driving sales by linking to promotional web pages (72.1% tried it) and 2) driving traffic by linking to marketing web pages (54.2% tried it).

On Facebook, the two tactics tried the most were 1) driving traffic to corporate materials with status updates (55.3%) and 2) “friending” recent customers with corporate Facebook profiles (39.2%).

Here’s what you really need to know from the report: The least-tried tactics often seem to work the best (something to consider next time you plan a social media campaign!).

Here are some interesting factoids revealed when marketers were asked the following:

Monitoring Twitter for PR problems in real time? While only 50.8% actually tried it, 74.8% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”

Inviting Twitter users with positive brand tweets to do something? 33.2% tried it, 72.1% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”

Contacting Twitter users tweeting negatively about the brand? 22.4% tried it, 72.3% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”

Creating an in-person event using only Twitter invites? 13.5% tried it, 71.8% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”

Using Facebook user data to profile your customers’ demos or interests? 25% tried it, 73.1% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”

Creating a Facebook application around a brand? 24.6% tried it, 73.3% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”

Counterproductive Social Media Tactics

MarketingProfs’ expert panel weighed in on the counterproductive tactics many marketers are using today. Below is a list of a few from the report. Check them out and see if you or your company fell into any of these social media tactic traps:

Pushing data: Companies that only push out their own messages and continually dump links to their promotions are missing out on the responses of their followers and fans. When they do this, they are missing the opportunity to engage and build valuable relationships. This is a sure-fire way to lose followers quickly.

Treating social media as a short-term campaign: It is easy to spot the companies that are not in it for the long haul and not interested in long-term relationships—just like the previous point, they are the ones pushing data and ignoring their followers.

Thinking Twitter revolves around you: Two great examples of this are Twitter auto-responders triggered by a follow and not following most people following you on Twitter. These actions speak volumes and tell your followers you are in it for you… not them.

#3: 2010 Social Media Predictions from the Expert Panel

When MarketingProfs asked their panel of experts how social media and social media usage will change in 2010 and how these changes will affect marketers, their predictions touched on the surge of Google Wave, the onset of social media integration and growing skepticism overall. Here’s a snapshot of their predictions:

The Surge of Google Wave

One expert predicts Google Wave will “rock the universe” and thus blur the lines of online communication such as blogging and IM. “Efforts to make it easy for people to ‘take their network with them’ across sites will play an important role in the disruption of user loyalty to various sites and services.”

Social Media Integration

According to Jason Baer, president of Convince & Convert, we’ll begin to see more case studies showing the integration of social media with other prominent marketing initiatives. For example, we’ll see more examples of how social media integrates with email, banner ads, direct mail and customer service.

Social Media Growth and Skepticism

Heidi Cool, an Internet marketing strategist, predicts that social media will continue to grow and more consumers and marketers will get in the game. And with this continued growth will come social media newbies who will introduce more “missteps along the way” (e.g., increase in Twitter spamming) that could negatively affect how we choose to use the platforms. She notes how thought leader Robert Scoble changed the way he uses Twitter due to the spamming issues and many may follow his lead as more missteps surface. Cool points out that if “too many new marketers abuse the systems by using auto-following services, only pushing content without listening, etc., it will make users more skeptical of business usage.”

More Opportunity to Capture Market Share

David Alston, vice president of marketing & community for Radian6, predicts that more people will continue to use social media platforms to express their needs and challenges with companies (instead of calling or writing in their grievances). Alston notes that businesses that embrace this form of communication will have the opportunity to capture market share from those who don’t. Marketers that make listening and engaging the core of how they market will begin to grow in numbers because it is how word of mouth is powered and it is much more effective.

The report goes into much more detail and is definitely worth a read. To check it out, go here.

So now it’s your turn. What do you think of the findings? Have you or your company been victim to the “counterproductive” social media tactics mentioned above?

From the Team at WebWitches

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5 Tips to help you manage your time on the social web

2010-01-18T14:32:00.001-08:00

Here are some tips on managing your time on the social web:

Schedule Everything and stick to the schedule
I use the Entourage calendar to schedule EVERYTHING…meetings, responding to email, social network presence, day-to day tasks. But it’s not enough to schedule things..you have to stick to the schedule!
Schedule your most important tasks when you feel like you are most productive
The most productive time is different for each person…some people are sharpest in the morning, some are later in the day. Figure out what your magic time slot is and schedule your most important task during that time. Sprinkle your social interactions & email management throughout the day but make sure it’s not during your most productive time.
Use a timer
Using a timer will allow you to set an alarm to notify you when your current scheduled task/activity is supposed to end. Let’s say you are alotting 20 minutes for social media interaction at 1pm…before you begin the task at 1pm, set your alarm to let you know when the 20 minutes has passed.
Close down the applications that you are not using
Human nature is to respond to stimuli…so if you hear a notice that you have a new email or a new response from a friend, you have to go see what it is. That is why if it’s not time to check and respond to email, I close down the email application…if it’s not time to interact on Twitter, I close down the Twitter application…the point is…only have the application that you are currently working in open.
Set and manage expectations
Managing everyone’s expectations is the key to time management. I think a lot of the time, the immediacy to respond is in our own head. Training your clients, colleagues, friends, and online connections that you are not available 24×7 will allow you to respond on your own time. And because we are all going through this information and task overload…they will more than undertand!

via webgrrls.com

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Facebook's bra colours for breast cancer campaign - Third Sector Magazine

2010-01-14T15:59:00.001-08:00

Female uses were sent private messages to update their Facebook status with the colour of their bra, in a message that read, “Some fun is going on…just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of breast cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before people wonder why all the girls have a color in their status Haha.”

The message was un-attributable to a specific organsiation, which is part of its appeal as a viral marketing tool. Viral campaigns are based on word of mouth distribution amongst fans. Part of their appeal is that they are not branded, nor do they have an obvert or often clunky marketing message. Instead, they aim to engage fans through their quirkiness or their unique manner of telling a story. In addition, this campaign could be said to be particularly successful because it asked for a call to action from fans.

“Generally for a viral campaign to be successful it needs to be very subtly branded, as the online community are pretty wary of being marketed to, so from a brand recognition point of view you don’t really get the visibility through this type of activity,” said Nicole Lovelock from the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF), in response to the viral campaign.

At NBCF, however, they have no idea as to where the campaign came from, or as to who started it. “No we haven’t heard where it started, but it doesn’t seem linked back to any particular organisation – it may have just started as a fun thing and because of the bra mention, been linked back to breast cancer.”

Without being directly attributed to breast cancer, it could be asked what the benefits of such a campaign are. Is it really nothing more than a crass attempt to get attention, or one of the latest quizzes or applications sprouted by Facebook?

Lovelock says anything that gets a dialogue about breast cancer research and awareness going is worthwhile.

“It gets people talking and puts it on the agenda for a short time.

“At NBCF we definitely see the benefits of harnessing social media to promote our research message and fundraising campaigns, with over 10,000 Facebook fans and close to 1,000 Twitter followers, and we use these mediums regularly to communicate with our supporters.”

But does it get people to donate or volunteer?

“That would be the preferred outcome as opposed to ‘awareness’ – most people are aware of breast cancer – our goal is to generate sustained engagement with the community to continue funding for research which will ultimately help to save women’s lives.”

Lovelock reports, however, that since 7 January, when the campaign first started, they have attracted an extra 230 Facebook fans. Of particular note was the spike in web traffic on 8 January, with 170 additional click throughs from the NBCF Facebook page to their website.

While there were no donations made via the Facebook page during that period, Lovelock comments, “I would have to say yes, it has had a flow on effect.”

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30 Tips for Using Social Media in Your Business

2010-01-13T00:57:00.001-08:00

30 Tips for Using Social Media in Your Business

Wading into the fast-moving flow of social media can be daunting to a small business owner with very little time on his hands. So Inc. has boiled down 30 tips — from using social networks to generate leads to what not to say in your blog — for the time-strapped but socially curious CEO.

By April Joyner | Jan 18, 2010

1. Offer a peek behind the scenes. Offering a sneak preview of new products, services, or features online can help build demand and provide critical feedback to help smooth the launch. For instance, John Doyle, founder of chocolate company John and Kira's in Philadelphia, posts photos of new products on Flickr and invites comments from customers.

2. Harness your expertise. Chances are your company's white paper won't go viral. But sharing knowledge you've gathered through your trade can go a long way toward boosting your brand. Ford Models, for instance, became a YouTube sensation through a series of videos that featured its models giving beauty and fashion tips.

3. Demonstrate what your company does. Because multimedia is so integral to social media, getting connected allows you to express your company's value proposition beyond words. To show just how powerful his company's blenders were, Blendtec's head of marketing, George Wright, created a series of videos showing the appliances churning up such diverse items as a rotisserie chicken, a Rubik's Cube, and an iPhone. The series' 100 million combined views helped boost Blendtec's sales by 700 percent.

4. Put your website's content to work. Want to draw more traffic to your website? Help spread the word by encouraging visitors to share content they enjoy. GotCast, a website that connects television casting directors with aspiring actors, draws new visitors by posting audition videos on Digg and allowing others to share video links on the site. One way to promote the sharing of your site's content is to install a widget, such as AddThis, that automates linking to popular sites.

5. Be candid. In unsure economic times, transparency goes a long way toward retaining and attracting customers. Giving readers the scoop on your company blog is an easy way to keep the lines of communication open. Giacomo Guilizzoni, the founder of San Francisco software company Balsamiq, even posts sales and profit figures to show that his company is on solid financial footing.

6. But be careful what you say about others. When Leslie Richard, owner of a North Carolina clothing company, described Vision Media Television as a "scam," she was slapped with a $20 million lawsuit. While recounting negative experiences with others won't necessarily lead to a court battle, it's best to steer clear of name-calling.

7. Interact with visitors—really. Just putting up a blog or a Facebook fan page won't do much good if visitors sense the flow of conversation only goes one way. In fact, Matt Mullenweg, founder of blogging platform Wordpress, lists not participating in comments as a surefire way to kill a community. Mullenweg and his team field the many suggestions users have for Wordpress through his blog.

8. Don't try to create a stand-in for yourself. With all the other tasks required within your company, it's tempting to outsource managing your social media or even to try automating the process. That can easily backfire, as Joe Pulizzi, founder of Cleveland marketing firm Junta42, learned when he tried sending automated welcome messages to new followers on Twitter. His online contacts quickly called him out for sending out what they perceived to be spam.

9. Don't pretend to be someone else. Thanks to IP address tracking, observers can also quickly tell when company figureheads adopt fake identities for the sake of fluffing up their reputation. Not only can the practice hurt your company's reputation, it could also land you in legal trouble. The plastic surgery Lifestyle Lift had to pay $300,000 in settlement costs to the state of New York for having its employees post flattering reviews of the company without disclosing their affiliation.

10. Help employees bond. Corporations such as IBM have built in-house networks—even virtual worlds reminiscent of Second Life—to link employees working in different locations. Small and medium-sized businesses can take advantage of readily available tools to facilitate collaboration. The Hoffman Agency, a public relations firm, uses Ning, which enables users to build custom social networks, to connect its U.S. staff with employees in Europe and Asia.

11. Reward customer loyalty. Through social media, companies can not only run promotions more frequently than coupons in the mail will permit but also devise more whimsical and engaging campaigns. Sprinkles Cupcakes, a bakery chain based in Beverly Hills, California, uses Twitter to send out daily promotional offers. The tweets, which ask customers to whisper a "password" to receive a free treat, have helped the company draw more than 17,000 followers.

12. See what people are saying about you. A quick search for mentions of your company on Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp can yield a goldmine of information concerning your reputation. Several users on Yelp, for instance, suggested that employees at Quimby's Bookstore in Chicago were less than welcoming. After reading the comments, owner Eric Kirsammer focused on improving customer service. Applications such as monitter and Trackur can help you keep track of the conversation across the Web.

13. Make amends with dissatisfied customers, quickly. Andy Carlson, owner of an Ace Hardware store in Denver, once came across an angry Twitter update from a customer who had bought a tool that broke after one use. He resolved the issue in a matter of minutes by referring the customer to an area store and notified him of Ace's lifetime guarantee. Best of all, he was able to catch the complaint after store hours—and prevent negative word of mouth.

14. Don't go on the defensive. A harsh rebuke of your business on sites like Yelp can not only bruise your ego but also hurt your livelihood. But resist the temptation to lash out in public. Sarah Dunbar, owner of Oakland vintage boutique Pretty Penny, privately responds to less-than-flattering reviewers and encourages them to visit her in person. And keep in mind that you can't please everyone. After Dunbar wrote to one dissatisfied customer, the reviewer accused her of conducting "shady business" by trying to sway opinions.

15. Keep customers in the loop. Frequently on the go? Twitter can help your customers keep track of your latest destination. Kogi Korean BBQ, which operates a food cart in Los Angeles, keeps its Twitter followers constantly informed of its location on the street. The real-time updates help Kogi keep up demand, as customers line up in advance at the broadcasted locations.

16. Find potential customers. A quick keyword search can help you find prospective customers who may not be aware of your company but could nonetheless benefit from your product or service. Bob Scaglion, a senior managing director at New York real-estate management company Rose Associates, generates 100 leads per month on Twitter for his company simply by replying to users whose tweets include phrases such as "moving to New York City" and "no-fee rentals."

17. Reach more markets. Social media can help your company reach multiple markets at a time. Restaurant chain Boloco focuses most of its advertising on Boston, which houses 13 out of its 16 locations. But as an experiment, CEO John Pepper decided to post a copy of a coupon from a local newspaper on Twitter in order to reach customers in Vermont and New Hampshire. Coupon redemptions increased by more than 150 percent as a result.

18. Target your online advertising. Both Facebook and MySpace allow businesses to run ads that attract specific groups of users based on what information they include in their profiles. By running Facebook ads targeted at students at specific colleges, StorQuest Self Storage, which has locations in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Hawaii, increased its number of rentals by more than half.

19. See where your customers are. A growing number of social networks are designed specifically for users on the go, and some, such as the mobile application Foursquare, offer tools specifically for businesses. Frozen dessert chain Tasti D-Lite, for instance, uses Foursquare to gather data on how many people visit its locations and send promotional offers to frequent customers.

20. Let customers help each other out. Including a customer forum on your website or social network profile can help enhance your customer service while building a sense of community. At Poolcenter.com, a swimming pool equipment retailer based in Arlington, Virginia, customers often field each other's inquiries on swimming pool equipment before they reach customer service reps. Get Satisfaction and Fixya are two sites that offer dedicated spaces for customer service forums.

21. Build a community beyond your business. Photo hosting site SmugMug has established itself as a resource for skilled photographers in part by operating a forum, Digital Grin, where members trade advice on topics such as the best techniques for taking photos at night and capturing wedding scenes. With the exception of a support section at the very bottom, the forum is devoted to photography at large, rather than the company's own services.

22. Let customers contribute. FrontPoint Security, a home security provider in McLean, Virginia, began collecting video testimonials from its customers, who filmed themselves with Flip cameras. The videos are posted on FrontPoint's site and on YouTube, and even some customers' personal blogs. FrontPoint's video efforts have helped the company more than triple its sales leads.

23. Help others promote you. Social media can help you find passionate customers who are more than willing to spread the word about your company. Crafts supplies manufacturer Fiskars reached out to scrapbookers by inviting four avid users to blog. Its crafts community, called Fiskateers, has since attracted 5,000 users who serve as brand evangelists.

24. Cultivate relationships that lead to sales. Soon after he joined Twitter, J.R. Cohen, manager of The Coffee Groundz, a Houston coffee shop, began encouraging his followers to visit him in his shop. He began getting to know customers so well that they not only initiated conversations with him through Twitter—they began tweeting orders through the site as well. Now Cohen periodically fields menu requests through Twitter, though he doesn't use the page primarily for that purpose.

25. But don't promote too aggressively. While social network users have proven to be open to marketing—especially if it involves a discount—they're not flocking to Facebook or MySpace to hear sales pitches. If your profile or blog reads like an ad, it will turn visitors away. Kent Lewis, founder of Portland online marketing firm Anvil Media, encourages Twitter users, for instance, to pass along industry news and retweet interesting items from others along with their own promotions.

26. Find ways to engage visitors offline. In March, Cinda Baxter, a retail consultant in Minneapolis, ended a blog post on local business with one simple idea: choose three businesses to support, and spend a combined amount of $50 per month. The post spurred hundreds of inquiries—enough for Baxter to build a standalone website, which has since attracted the support of more than 12,000 businesses. Baxter has used the publicity to bolster her consulting business: she now travels nationwide to advise retailers on building support within their communities.

27. Find influential people in your industry. In addition to maintaining your blog, make sure to keep your eyes open to what others in the industry are buzzing about online. Reading independent blogs and joining industry groups on Facebook and LinkedIn is a good way to join the larger conversation. Spoonflower, a fabric design site based in Mebane, North Carolina, has built its community of more than 40,000 users primarily through word of mouth on crafts blogs.

28. Boost your credibility by helping others. For service providers, establishing yourself as an expert in the field can bring in a steady stream of business. LinkedIn's Answers feature enables business owners to do just that. Heidi Cool, a Web design consultant in Cleveland, browses LinkedIn Answers for inquiries related to her industry and spends one to two hours per week answering them. In one month, she generated 29 leads for her services directly from her responses.

29. Look for talent off the beaten path. While LinkedIn is specifically geared toward professional use, some companies have found other social networks to be effective recruiting tools as well. Jason Averbrook, CEO of the management-consulting firm Knowledge Infusion, found 19 candidates in two days for an open position simply by writing about his search in status updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Plaxo, which aggregates contact information from social networks.

30. Connect with potential partners. Because LinkedIn is designed specifically for professional networking, businesses can find a host of valuable contacts there. Josh Steinitz, CEO of NileGuide, a trip planning website based in San Francisco, used LinkedIn to find business partners by identifying companies of interest and then asking his existing contacts to provide introductions. A third of the company's inquiries resulted in eventual partnerships.

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30 Tips for Using Social Media in Your Business

2010-01-13T00:56:00.001-08:00

30 Tips for Using Social Media in Your Business

By April Joyner | Jan 18, 2010

From the Team at WebWitches

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10 News Media Content Trends to Watch in 2010

2009-12-27T01:51:00.001-08:00

The news media is experiencing a renaissance. As we end the year, its state in 2009 can be summarized as a year of turmoil, layoffs and cutbacks in an industry desperately seeking to reinvent its business model and content. But despite the thousands of journalism jobs lost, the future has much hope and opportunity for those that are willing to adapt to a changing industry.

Much of that change is happening now. And in the coming year, news organizations will look to approach monetization and content experimentation that is focused on looking at the web in a new way. Newsnews
in 2010 will blur the lines between audience and creator more than ever in an era of social media. Below is a look at several trends in content distribution and presentation that we will likely see more of in 2010.

1. Living Stories

One of the difficulties of the web is being able to really track a story as it develops and creating engaging formats for long-form articles. The article page is often the only thing that a reader sees and not the story in its full context. In 2010, news organizations will design stories that are more suited to the way readers consume online content.

One early sign of this is the recent collaboration between GoogleGoogle
, The New York Times, and The Washington Post on the Living Stories project, an experiment that presents coverage of a specific story or topic in one place, making it easy to navigate the topic and see the timeline of coverage on the story. It also allows you to get a summary of the story and track the conversations taking place. This format contextualizes and personalizes the news.

2. Real-Time News Streams

Our news consumption has morphed into a collection of streams. Whether it’s from our TwitterTwitter
homepage or an RSS reader or a FacebookFacebook
feed, we get bites of information that sometimes satisfy us or direct us to places where we can get more information.

The move toward real-time news is increasingly important, and media critics and professors like Jeff Jarvis predict these streams will replace web sites. That change may not come in 2010, but streaming news elements will become a an integral part of traditional news sources. We’re already seeing Twitter streams and other visualizations incorporated into news home pages with updated financial and market information from new sources like Google Finance.

The challenge however, is that journalists need to accept that news breaks through real-time social media platforms like Twitter, said Alfred Hermida, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia School of Journalism.

3. Blogozines

Another format that takes effort, but can be an engaging alternative to the traditional blog post is the blogozine. This could be great to keep a reader engaged in a long-form story. Though I don’t think we will see the death of simple blog posts, a rich-media and rich-layout approach from blogozines will gain momentum in 2010.

4. Distributed Social News

This year the social news trend gained momentum with the explosion of Twitter. Moving into 2010, news organizations will further distribute their content across social platforms that allow its users to create a personalized and socialized news stream. Personalized search has emerged in 2009, and 2010 will see more sites integrating applications that allow users to create personalized news streams.

More news organizations are beginning to establish a presence across multiple platforms and social sites, and it’s not just the popular sites like Twitter and Facebook anymore. Newsweek, for example, started a Tumblog because the “format is adapted especially well to magazine journalism, since it encourages a deeper engagement.”

Robert Quigley, social media editor at the Austin American-Statesman, said he thinks news sites will continue to exist for a while, but the “smart news sites will extend their tentacles into the spaces where people are communicating, and talking about news.”

5. News Goes Mobile

In general, 2010 will see a distinct transformation in the way people consume news as smart phones become ubiquitous. And as more startups enter the market of mobile transactions, news organizations could develop strategies or provide services for transactions to take place on mobile apps.

News companies should be prepared with a mobile-first strategy. Instead of just selling ads to business customers, news organizations can help small businesses develop applications that help them do business in the mobile marketplace, said Steve Buttry, C3 coach at Gazette Communications.

Mathew Ingram, communities editor at The Globe and Mail, said mobile also has great potential to increase the number of content consumers, especially if it is done in a geo-targeted way to reach a local audience. Something that news organizations should also be prepared for is e-readers gaining a larger market and the emergence of the Apple Tablet, which publishers like Wired Magazine are already getting ready for. Meanwhile, Time Inc. and other magazine publishers are looking to create a Hulu for magazines where consumers can purchase and manage digital subscriptions.

6. The Year of Geo-Location

Geo-location services will be the buzz of 2010, though it’s difficult to predict which services will rise to the top. Geo-tweets could take this space, but companies like FoursquareFoursquare
and GowallaGowalla
, which combine geo-location with social gaming, are highly addictive and have a lot of potential, especially with an advertising format that serves its users.

Mathilde Piard, social media manager at Cox Newspapers, said there is a lot of potential for news sites to get into the market of events and venue listings. “There are event listings and business directory listings out there but none that are good enough yet,” Piard said, and “Geo-tagging goes hand-in-hand with this stuff.”

Also, imagine the opportunity for news companies to work with advertisers to make ads more relevant to location. Imagine an iPhone app that buzzes when you walk by a bar telling you the daily drink special, Quigley from the Statesman said.

7. Story-Streaming

New storytellers means new ways of telling stories. We will see more story-streaming with the growing popularity of simple blogging platforms like PosterousPosterous
and TumblrTumblr
.

An example of this is a project from Daniel Honigman and Len Kendall called the3six5, which aims to get 365 people – one for each day of the year – to write about something that is happening in the world that day and how it relates to them. Though neither Honigman or Kendall are journalists, the storytelling format of life streaming is what attracted the two to start the project. Honigman said it is an experiment in crowdsourced storytelling.

8. Social TV Online

2010 will see some big improvements in online video and even greater shifts of viewers moving away from their TVs to watch online as companies like Hulu and others reinvent the space. The coming year could see sites like HuluHulu
becoming profitable, and even extending to international markets to increase viewership.

We’ve seen TV shows like PBS’s News Hour moving to YouTube, and 2010 will see an increased push for TV to reinvent itself online. One way of doing this is through “social TV.” Hulu, for example, lets Facebook friends watch shows together, and has account, rating, and sharing elements akin to social giant YouTubeYouTube
. We’ll see social TV take center stage in 2010.

9. Marketers as Producers

Marketers are also beginning to skip the journalist as a middleman to produce their message and are instead producing it themselves. Mike Sprouse, chief marketing officer at Epic Advertising, started a 28-page monthly (printed) magazine called Winning the Web. The magazine includes commentary and content on emerging trends in online marketing, and is produced by just two people working full-time. It’s distributed to about 3,000 people and is completely free.

Sprouse sees more marketers and other professionals in general moving into the direction of producing content themselves. He said most companies have a blog or a Facebook page, and going into the coming year, more companies will shift to produce content themselves in a “thought leadership” approach.

10. Social News Gaming

With social gaming sites growing in popularity (Facebook’s Farmville is bigger than Twitter), news media companies will surely experiment with creating their own social news gaming applications. Social gaming is highly addictive and if a news organization were to effectively execute their own game, it could serve as a way to keep news consumers coming back and a way to present stories or information in new ways.

NBC introduced a social media game for its series “Chuck” called Chuck Me Out that lets users gain points for spreading news about the show or getting friends to watch it. The person with the most points by March 8 will have their photo appear on the show or win one of another several prizes. Perhaps a similar concept could be applied to news content in 2010.

More journalism resources from Mashable:

- 8 Must-Have Traits of Tomorrow’s Journalist
- 10 Ways Journalism Schools Are Teaching Social Media
- The Journalist’s Guide to Twitter
- Why NPR is the Future of Mainstream Media
- Social Journalism: Past, Present, and Future
- Everything I Need to Know About Twitter I learned in J School
- 10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy

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Google Caffeine Real Time Search Increases Value of Social Media - Online PR News (press release)

2009-12-27T01:24:00.001-08:00

SEO Internet Market research firm witnesses Google Caffeine Real Time search update and expects big surge in Social Media marketing.

Online PR News – 26-December-2009 – SEO Internet Marketing firm Irbtrax observes preview of Google Caffeine 'Real Time' search results and the increased emphasis on Social Media Marketing that will result when Caffeine is fully launched after the holidays. Caffeine is the most comprehensive Google Search Engine application since 2006, and clearly places a greater emphasis on Social Media sites like Twitter, as well as newsworthy Blogs.

According to Irbtrax founder Scott Moir-

"There is no doubt we'll see a new surge in the use of Social Media Marketing once Caffeine is fully launched. I expect many online businesses to quickly turn their focus toward becoming Social Media savvy, creating a great opportunity for Social Media experts to ply their trade."
“There is no doubt we'll see a new surge in the use of Social Media Marketing once Caffeine is fully launched. I expect many online businesses to quickly turn their focus toward becoming Social Media savvy, creating a great opportunity for Social Media experts to ply their trade.”

For a detailed outline of important changes Caffeine is expected to have on websites and their related Internet Marketing efforts visit:

http://jazzou.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=211&Itemid=40

Irbtrax is currently negotiating with several Social Media marketing firms to develop a mutually beneficial business relationship, because SEO Internet Marketing and SoMed can play a combined role in enhancing user/client experience and results.

For a glimpse of how SEO Internet Marketing can benefit Social Media visit:

http://www.onlineprnews.com/news/15684-1261676122-test-shows-websites-not-optimized-to-benefit-from-google-caffeine.html

About: Irbtrax.com provides specialized Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and Market Research Solutions for business's seeking a competitive advantage. Including optimizing your Web Marketing efforts for Google Caffeine. After all, being cutting edge is good, but being leading edge is far better.

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Top ten most memorable social media moments of the past year - Sun-Sentinel

2009-12-27T01:10:00.001-08:00

Social media caught fire with mainstream audiences this year. Despite the economic recession, sites like Twitter and Facebook saw tremendous growth. There were lots of mistakes and successes along the way.

My top ten most memorable social media moments for the past year are:

The Hudson plane crash update was the tweet heard across the country. Sarasota resident Janis Krums snapped and tweeted a photo of the miracle landing of a plane into the Hudson River: "There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy."

The Iran election protests organized on Twitter showed people the power of citizen reporting. Citizens of Iran used the medium to organize and report on Iran's presidential election protests, and U.S. residents used social media sites to successfully lobby for increased news coverage of the protests. The U.S. State Department even stepped in to ask Twitter to delay a planned upgrade to allow Iranians to continue reporting what was happening.

The dumbest Tweet of the year, a communications flub, ironically came from an executive of a slick New York City public relations firm. A vice president of Ketchum dumped on Memphis, the hometown of a major client, Federal Express, before meeting with the company, BNET reported. He tweeted, "True confession but I'm in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say 'I would die if I had to live here!'" He and his company later apologized..

The most damaging Facebook post came from a girl who complained about her boss, whom she had friended. He fired her in a reply to her comment, according to the message exchange posted at nextweb.com. Come on, people. Think twice before posting.

An amateur singer got more than 100 million views on YouTube, landing her a top-selling album. YouTube helped thrust Susan Boyle, an unemployed church volunteer, into the limelight with a video of her singing on Britain's Got Talent. Jill and Kevin Heinz found YouTube fame as well when their walk down the aisle in a St. Paul Minn. church turned into a dance led by their enthusiastic wedding party.

The movie "Paranormal Activity" became the first film to get a national release after people demanded the movie through Twitter and Facebook. The horror movie, produced for $15,000, grossed more than $62 million as of October.

Google includes real-time search results that pick up social media posts. As more people turn to social media sites for breaking news, Google announced on YouTube this month that it will include them in their search results.

Zynga, maker of social media games " Mafia Wars" and "FarmVille," was valued at $1 billion, according to Bloomberg.

After a highly publicized race with CNN, Actor Ashton Kutcher became the first Tweeter to collect 1 million followers. Kutcher crossed the 1 million mark on April 17 narrowly beating CNN's breaking-news feed, which had 998,239 followers at the time. He later told Larry King, "We now live in an age in media that a single voice can have as much power and relevance on the Web, that is, as an entire media network."

What's number 10, you ask? A Facebook friend request from my cyber phobic mother was the most memorable social media moment to me.

Seth Liss is SunSentinel.com's News Community Manager. You may reach him at sliss@sun-sentinel.com.

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17 victories for social media in 2009 - OCRegister

2009-12-20T23:15:00.001-08:00

It was quite a year for the revolution that is Twitter, Facebook & Co., so sOCial sunday asked some of our pals what they thought was their social media highlight of 2009 …

“Watching Google and Bing scramble over how to get and implement social media tweets and updates into search. They’ve really jumped to try and figure things out.” – Danny Sullivan, SearchEngineLand.com

“Use of social media in recent popular protests in Iran. It showed the power and resilience of social media to organize and to resist central control. It is both powerful and dangerous — depending on which side you end up on.” – Don Patterson, quub.com

“Twitter as a news ticker. Some of the biggest news stories — accurate and inaccurate — broke on Twitter. That mainstreamed it and made other services like Facebook emulate it.” – Marisa O’Neil, OC Parks

“The rise of Twitter from plaything of the uber-nerd to the biggest story in American media. It shows the influence the technology/web world has on the culture now.” – Jim McCarthy, Goldstar

“The amazing engagement that we have seen with each of our social campaigns. There hasn’t been one flop to-date and every campaign has generated a lot of buzz, some industry attention and tons of engagement.” – Tracy Marks, Souplantation

“San Diego ReBar (social media training) camp. We strictly marketed it using Twitter, Facebook and a blog. It sold out in 60 days. Let me know that Sociall Media had hit the mainstream.” – Jim Marks, Virtual Results

“New rules on disclosure from the FTC. This will help trustworthy and ethical social-marketers and will help to eliminate the unethical who are out to trick and scam people.” – Mirna Bard, NuReach Global

“Little Facebook app called FBML which lets you add and create customizable pages to your Facebook Fan page.” – Jen Dwyer, thecutekid.com

“How Twitter and Facebook, while still far from perfect, became useful business tools for the social media-savvy.” – Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia U.

“Hosting enthusiastically received Gov 2.0 series with participation of 200 people in Orange County and reach of more than 400,000 impressions nationally — and even worldwide.” – Ted Nguyen, Orange County Transportation Authority

“Hands down, the death of Michael Jackson. While traditional media outlets were scrambling to confirm the news, it had already spread like wild fire through the Twittersphere.” – Rochelle Veturis, LPA architects

“For Twitter to become the media darling of the year. It swept mainstream media, Hollywood.” – Charles Harris, Coast2Coast Experts

“Finding ways to use Twitter effectively. Mall of America giving parking updates; stores giving limited time discounts via Twitter, “contests” via Twitter.” – Chip Ahlswede, RegalStrategies.com

“Dave Carroll’s United Breaks Guitars demonstrated how (1) power has shifted from those who can afford to pay for media distribution to those whom can create it and (2) that corporations lost control of their brands.” – Ron Ploof, ronamok.com

“140 conference in LA, OC Twestival. Both allowed me to meet a tremendous amount of new, great connections.” – Justin Moore-Brown, Mobo Media

“Twitter revolutionized my world. I connected with many new friends on Twitter around the world. My friends are from every conceivable walk of life, from CEO’s to nurses, college professors to artists.” – Carol Lee, Surterre Properties

“Google’s product releases as a whole. Voice; the Droid phone — Android OS, Verizon’s network, Motorola hardware; Chrome browser; Chrome OS; Wave; etc. And lots of little improvements to existing products.” – Mark Davidson, Shift+One

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10 Best Geek Movies for a Cozy Night In

2009-12-20T23:08:00.001-08:00

Chances are you’re going to find yourself with some down-time over the holidays. Sure, you could go for a jog/swim/insert other energetic activity but let’s face it, after all that turkey and egg nog what you’ll really fancy is a semi-snooze on the sofa as you strain to watch some TV over your bloated belly.

Ever at your service, we’ve pulled together a list of what we consider are ten great geek films. We’ve left out anything adapted from a video game (they are almost all universally rubbish anyhow) and anything featuring robots, Vulcans, Jedis, and Keanu Reeves as too obvious to waste space on the list, focusing instead on computer-related flicks.

So, without further preamble, here are 10 great movies to geek out to over the holidays – so grab your popcorn and enjoy.

1. Pirates of Silicon Valley

Tom and Jerry, Popeye and Pluto, Steve and Bill. The duo that changed the computer industry forever are pitched against each other here in a made-for-TV movie following their intertwined early years. Enjoy Woz and be sure to look out for a young Steve Ballmer.

2. The Net

Gibson-gulping, pizza-eating Sandra Bullock wishes she never hit control and shift in this cinematic outing that sees her identity stolen by the evil digital elite as she uncovers a plot as improbable as her casting.

3. Hackers

“Their only crime was curiosity.” Well, that and really bad hair. Offering up a rad baddie that rides a skateboard despite being middle-aged, the prevalence of floppy disks in the film alone will make you nostalgic for the days of dial-up.

4. Wargames

Lovable nerd Matthew Broderick nearly starts World War III in this geek classic that sees his teenage hacker taking on WOPR, NORAD’s supercomputer, in a “game” involving nuclear missiles and the potential annihilation of the planet.

5. MacHeads

“I’ve never knowingly slept with a Windows user.” For some an operating system is a tool, for others it’s a way of life. This documentary follows the latter. Compelling, whether or not you subscribe to the cult of Mac.

6. Sneakers

Geek cinema goes all-star with this hacker slash conspiracy flick that features, among others Robert Redford, River Pheonix and Dan Akroyd as just a few of the stars discovering secrets about a “black box” they think the NSA has hired them to retrieve. Needless to say, all is not as it seems.

7. Antitrust

Tim Robbins takes a thinly-veiled turn as a sinister Gates figure heading up the NURV corporation where idealistic programmer Ryan Phillipe gets hired after college. If you like your geeks glossy and your plots full of holes, then this one’s for you.

8. Electric Dreams

So Eighties it’s almost painful to watch at times, Electric Dreams offers a plethora of gadgets from the decade as well as a self-aware “Pinecone” PC that forms one point of a love triangle. Will the geek get the girl? You’ll have to watch it to find out…

9. The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes

We’re taking you back a ways with this 1969 movie that sees a very young Kurt Russell get an electrifying experience that gives him the brain of a computer, hence the tennis shoes reference of the clumsy title. The tech is sooo dated, it’s a little like a history lesson too.

10. Office Space

We’ve saved the best for last. A cult classic, Office Space’s geek credentials come from the plot line that sees disenfranchised cubicle-dwellers create a virus-like snippet of software to rip off the company for a bunch of money, but the whole show is stolen beautifully by Milton and his attachment to his red stapler.

BONUS: Primer

Impressive for its measly $7,000 budget, this recent cult classic follows a mind-bending story about a group of hackers who accidentally build a time machine. It’s so confusing it’s sure to make you wish you could go back in time yourself and ask Santa for the foresight never to try to understand how the plot of this head scratcher works.

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The eight scams peddled by SEO consultants

2009-11-05T02:34:00.001-08:00

The eight scams peddled by SEO consultants

7 Leave a Comment

November 5, 2009 | By Lucio Ribeiro

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In the earlier years of internet marketing, the most common question I heard about search engine optimisation was, “SEO? What’s that?” Today I am more likely to hear, “SEO? We tried that and it didn’t’ work.”

The biggest challenge I now face with new SEO clients is cleaning up the mess left by their previous search engine optimisation company or individuals.

It’s not unusual to begin a project removing link farms, taking down doorway pages, stripping away clumsy optimisation tactics, cleaning stuffed keywords, rewriting titles and descriptions that barely make sense for search engines and re-writing content that doesn’t make sense to the users!

Most SEOers define SEO as the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines via “natural” or unpaid (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

I see it differently. SEO is about:

improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web page (not a web site) from search engines via natural resources, and

maximising your outcomes and ROI on investment from the process.

One more point: SEO is not free. It can certainly bring great percentage ROI, but it requires investment, time and planning.

Optimisation needs to be understood differently to maximisation. Every single page on your website is a potential point of conversion. Every single word and every single part of your whole web exercise should be crafted with this in mind. SEO should not drive traffic to your website generally but to the individual pages that are closely aligned to your prospects’ interests.

Remember, search engines crawl, index and present web pages, not websites. And while some people think of SEO as the Holy Grail, it is, in fact, just a means to a business end.

The main ‘end’ purpose of SEO is to generate commercial benefit to a business. It’s not to generate traffic, although that might be one of the ways of execute the strategy.

Traffic is the primary ‘How’. Conversions, sign-ups, donations are the ‘Why’.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of SEOers out there taking advantage of the unknowing site owner, selling snake oil and giving SEO a bad name.

Here are eight warning signs that an SEO “expert” is trying to rip you off.

Scam warning sign #1: Asking you to invest all your budget in SEO.

While SEO can deliver a fantastic ROI, the reality is that Search Engines can change, your reality can change and SEO might not be the best option for your business in the future. So think twice before you invest a large chunk of your marketing budget in SEO. Think about alternatives to reach your clients. Consider pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, online coupons and starting a social media campaign.

Scam warning sign #2: “All search engine optimisation is about your home page.”

Every page of your site is a potential doorway. Users navigate via search, so map out keywords and selling propositions against URLs and try to offer the most relevant user experience in and out your website at all times.

Have every page of your website optimised for the particular subject you are describing. Having different meta tags for each page helps both users and search engines, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain.

Every single page offers a chance to convert customers. Why list your telephone number just on the contact page if you have buyers coming and landing on every single page?

Scam warning sign #3: “We will submit your site to 2,000 search engines!”

Google, Yahoo and Bing (let’s leave YouTube for the moment) are enough. Medium-smaller size search engines are usually powered by the big search engines, meaning if you are listed on the big three you will be automatically on the smaller ones.

In fact, the major search engines have been in this business for years, and they’ve gotten pretty good at finding sites themselves.

No need to submit, no need to pay someone to do so.

Scam warning sign #4: “Have your site optimised and promoted for only $29.95 a month!”

It’s simply unrealistic to expect good work from a professional SEO for such a small fee.

SEO is a long-term exercise base primarily on strategy. You need to build a base, go out, make good connections and relationships to your website, learn, improve, etc. This is simply not a free exercise. SEO is not a commodity as some companies might wish.

Does that mean that small companies with limited budget can’t do it?

No. It means that small companies with limited budgets need to understand the timeframes involved and question whether optimisation is the best answer for their needs.

Think about making incremental improvement to your web business using testimonials, new products, promotions, partnerships, constant updates in content, etc. That will help your rankings.

Or, if you’re insistent on optimisation, put extra effort into the start of the process, finding keywords with less competition but still with high value.

Scam warning sign #5. “We can’t tell you what we are doing — it’s a trade secret.”

Other than a few tid bits you uncover over years doing this kind of work, there really isn’t a whole lot of “secret” information. SEOers aren’t paid because they have some incredible secret wrapped up. They are paid because of the experience they have in dealing with the search engines, and the success they can bring to a site. They are being paid to offer the best solution in the context of your needs and reality.

If they can’t (or won’t) tell you what they’re doing, it’s probably because they don’t know and are trying to conceal this fact with smokes and mirrors.

Scam warning sign #6: “We know a guy at Google.”

I love this one, mostly because I know a guy at Google. I also know a guy at my local pub, but I still pay for beer. I know a guy at Telstra, and I still pay a monthly phone bill.

Trust me, Google is not going to risk the integrity of its search results just because someone knows someone. How naive!

Scam warning sign #7: Messing with keywords

Keywords are the soul of SEO.

Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it.

Knowing how to use your industry jargon, important keywords and most searched keywords is important.

But here’s the key: understanding the difference between popular keywords and keywords that are close to the end of a buying decision can make all the difference to your ROI.

Example: When performing SEO for a travel agency in Australia, we were researching keywords and trying to decide the leading word. It came down to decision between “Travel” and “Tour”.

Although there were four times more people looking for the keyword “travel”, we opted for “tour” because using pay-per-click for testing, searchers typing “Tour” were 70 percent more inclined to convert.

For every person searching for “seo” or “sem”, there are probably 10 people searching for more obscure queries like, “How do I promote my business on Google?” You can see how our page about link building ranks for hundreds of related keywords.

Try to pick a market position you feel you can dominate. The #20 result for “insurance” produces traffic worth $0. The #2 or #3 results for “pet insurance” yields far more.

Scam warning sign #8: “We guarantee page 1 rankings!”

Nobody can do this. Nobody. Check out what Google says.

In SEO, there are no guarantees on rankings, traffic or any other measure. Think of SEO like advertising (that’s really all it is, just online). The best marketing guys don’t guarantee anything, either. Neither do doctors or lawyers. You hire these professionals based on the questions you’ve asked them, their past successes, experience, etc. SEO is no different.

Good SEOers are good because they have spent years learning and testing, and know the measures most often needed to produce results. So if anyone guarantees anything, they are only guaranteeing that you will be wasting your hard-earned money.

Lucio Ribeiro is Partner/Founder at The Online Circle Interactive a full-service interactive agency that applies technical savvy, creativity and business accountability to internet marketing and effective cutting-edge solutions for the digital age. He was recently elected one of top 10 most trusted SEO/SEM professionals in the world by Marketing Today. Follow him on Twitter: @lucio_ribeiro.

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Google AdWords Ad Sitelinks, Now Official

2009-11-04T18:53:00.001-08:00

Google Celebrates Anniversaries For Sesame Street, Wallace & Gromit & Many Others | Main | MSN Home Page Gets a Major Face Lift

November 4, 2009
Google AdWords Ad Sitelinks, Now Official

Back in August, Google began testing Sitelinks for AdWords, now it is official. The Google AdWords blog announced it last night, telling us this is a feature specifically designed to provide "users with more options, you can create richer, more relevant ads that improve the value of your brand terms and other targeted keywords." The feature will show up to four additional links under the main ad for ads that "meet a certain high quality threshold."

Of course, this is a lot like Google Sitelinks, the ones you see in the organic listings.

Again, not all advertisers get this option. To see if you have it, go to Campaign Settings tab -- it would appear as "Show additional links to my site" under the "Ad extensions" section. For more details, see the FAQs on Ad Sitelinks.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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BUG: Gmail Messages Being Marked as Read

2009-11-04T18:49:00.001-08:00

If you found when you checked your email this morning that you had new messages already marked read, you’re not alone. A bug appears to affecting at least a subset of Gmail users and causing unread emails to be erroneously marked as read.

There are multiple threads on the GmailGmail
support forums, as well as a good deal of Twitter chatter, but so far no response from GoogleGoogle
.

Every indication is that this appears to be a bug and not an exploit, as many people initially feared (so your Gmail account was likely not compromised, and no one is reading your emails). Speculation is that the bug is a result of a change in the way Gmail handles IMAP support. The issue is also reportedly affecting Gmail on AndroidAndroid
and iPhone phones.

This has been a rough couple of months for Gmail’s reliability, as it experienced a couple of major bouts of downtime in early and late September.

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Social Media Minute: MSN Gets A Makeover, Twitter's Heavy Cost To Businesses - CMSWire

2009-11-04T18:46:00.001-08:00

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

MSN Gets Redesigned, Adds Twitter/Facebook

Twitter's Cost to Businesses: £1.4 Billion?

Yammer Powers 50,000 Enterprise Micro-Blogging Networks

Run Your Own Google Wave Server

MSN Gets Redesigned, Adds Twitter/Facebook

Microsoft unveiled a new version of MSN.com recently, making changes to the existing design and adding some new bits as well. What is new and exciting over at MSN? At first glance of the new preview, you'll see that the design of the site has been simplified dramatically. Also, the ties to Bing.com search are much more prevalent, with the Bing logo prominently placed at the top center of the page.
In an effort to be a more connected, social networking friendly web portal, MSN.com has integrated Twitter and Facebook status message updates on the right hand side of the new MSN home page. Additionally, by entering your location, MSN.com can pull in local news for your area.
While these changes might seem minute and unimportant, MSN.com attracts a lot of traffic (in upwards of 80-100 million US Visitors per month), so many web users will take note of the new changes. This is a good move for MSN.com, as the service needed a refresh in order to stay relevant in today's web portal marketplace.

Twitter's Cost to Businesses: £1.4 Billion?

According to an IT services group based in the UK, Twitter and other social networking costs British businesses £1.38 Billion in lost productivity each year. Of those workers interviewed, more than half reported that they use social networking sites for personal use during the working hours. On average, workers reported an average of 40 minutes per week spent perusing social networking sites.
It seems that businesses and enterprises are mixed as to how to approach social networking use at work. While some companies in the United States have banned social networking altogether, three quarters of the respondents in the Morse poll reported that they had not been approached with specific policies or guidelines with regards to Twitter.
Even though Twitter and other social networks might be seen as a time drain, such tools are no different than other office distractions such as office chit-chat, the employee lounge and the coffee machine. It's important for companies to evaluate their policies, but keep in mind that Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are just another distraction to add to an already well-populated list.

Yammer Powers 50,000 Enterprise Micro-Blogging Networks

Micro-blogging services have gone from niche product to mainstream in the last few years. Twitter gets the most press, but Yammer, the enterprise focused micro-blogging service is continuing to chug away and win over users and fans.

Yammer recently announced that 50,000 networks have taken off on their service, with about 25-50 people on each of the networks. When asked by ReadWriteWeb, Yammer officials declined to say how many of these networks are paying customers, keeping us in the dark about revenue and the long-term viability of the company.

While other companies focused on enterprise web 2.0 tools have added micro-blogging tools to their suites, Yammer has stayed true to concentrating on their core service, improving it over time.

We at CMSWire use Yammer to communicate amongst our staff here and find the tool to be quite useful.

Run Your Own Google Wave Server

Google Wave is a new technology that promises to enhance communication amongst team members on the Web. It's been described as a functional mix of instant messaging, image sharing and collaborative document sharing. Wave is also easy to mashup with other services because of its development model.

Another feature that makes Wave useful is the idea of federation. That is, you can run a Wave server on your worksite for use amongst your co-workers, and then allow for use with other Wave servers across the web. Much like the way email servers run now, federated Wave servers allow their users to swap messages and media back and forth.

If you have the technical ability to, Google has opened up the Wave Federation protocol and made it possible for you to run a Wave server at your organization. The Wave system is written in Java and can thereby be run on a Mac, Windows or Linux-based computer.

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enterprise 2.0, facebook, google wave, msn, social media, social networking, twitter, yammer

Daily Search Forum Recap: November 4, 2009

2009-11-04T18:43:00.001-08:00

PubCon 2009 In Vegas Live Blogging Schedule | Main

November 4, 2009
Daily Search Forum Recap: November 4, 2009

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

November 2009 Google Webmaster Report
Every month we give you a Google specific update on what webmasters are talking about at WebmasterWorld, complied with the past month of changes we reported, specifically at Google. To see last month's report, see the October 2009 Google Webmaster report. This month, via the WebmasterWorld, people are chatting about the following topics: Crawling deeper, discovering more pages and more linksUniversal results adding to, not subtracting to, the number of results on a pageIncrease in

Google Finally Tries Page Previews
A long, long, long time coming, Google is finally testing a page preview feature that shows snapshots of the pages on the search results before you click through. Yes, many search engines have had this feature for a while and yes, there are plugins that added this feature to Google - but Google never really had such a feature, until now. As I reported yesterday on Search Engine Land via Google Operating System blog, the

More Google Base Data Feeds FTP Upload Issues
Ronald from the Google Merchant Center (Base) team reported in a Google Merchant Center Help thread that there is a known issue with FTP uploads. Specifically, if you are uploading new data feeds via FTP, the data won't show up in the dashboard. If your feeds are less than 20MB, then upload manually, otherwise, you are out of luck. Ronald said: We've noticed that a few users have reported that data feeds uploaded via FTP

MSN Home Page Gets a Major Face Lift
The buzz of the day is that Microsoft unveiled a new home page design for MSN. You can see the new design at preview.msn.com. Let's compare the current and the preview: Current: Preview: So much more refreshing! As Greg Sterling noted, the MSN portal drives nearly 50% of Bing queries - that is significant. The MSN Blog takes us back through the years, starting from 1995 through today - looking at the various MSN designs.

Google AdWords Ad Sitelinks, Now Official
Back in August, Google began testing Sitelinks for AdWords, now it is official. The Google AdWords blog announced it last night, telling us this is a feature specifically designed to provide "users with more options, you can create richer, more relevant ads that improve the value of your brand terms and other targeted keywords." The feature will show up to four additional links under the main ad for ads that "meet a certain high quality

Google Celebrates Anniversaries For Sesame Street, Wallace & Gromit & Many Others
So when I visited Google.com, I saw Big Bird's legs. It is the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street and Google made a Doodle for it. But then I noticed other Google properties not only sporting Sesame Street but also Doodles for other learning programs that are popular in those regions. We have Google logos for the 20th birthday of Wallace & Gromit, and these other regional characters: Abigal, Boombah Chamki, Ieniemienie, Abelardo Montoya and Kami.

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

301 for whole site. How long for old links to drop off Google?, WebmasterWorld

Microsoft Teams with OpenX to Compete with AdSense, WebmasterWorld

Outsourcing SEO – Yes or No?, Sphinn

Small & Nimble Trumps Big & Slow In SEO, Sphinn

What is the best way to structure URLs?, Search Engine Watch Forums

No Data in Webmaster Tools, Bing Community

Paginating A Dynamic Page & It's Seo Implications, HighRankings Forums

Practical Guide to 404 Error Pages: What WordPress is Missing, Sphinn

Like The Story? Vote For It On Yahoo Buzz! Or On Sphinn!

rustybrick in Search Forum Recap at November 4, 2009 4:00 PM Comments (0)

From the Team at WebWitches

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Top money-making websites - Moneywise Magazine

2009-11-03T22:14:00.001-08:00

By Hannah Ricci Last Update: Fri, 30/10/2009 - 12:28

The internet offers endless ways to make some extra cash. Hannah Ricci looks at some of her favourite money-making sites.

The internet has revolutionised how we manage our money. We can keep our bank accounts in check at the click of a mouse; save money by shopping around for everything from holidays to DVDs, and compare the best deals on a whole host of financial products – all during our lunch hour or while sitting at home in our PJs.

It makes you wonder how we ever managed before the worldwide web came along.

The internet is not only useful for saving money; it’s great for earning some extra cash too. Here’s my pick of some of the best ways to make money on the web.

If you can take a good photo…

Sign up to a stock photography website and you could get paid for your pictures.

Stock photography websites are used to source photos in the media by other websites, blogs, articles and advertisers. Lots of sites accept good amateur photographs in addition to professional shots, and pay on a per-download or a per-sale basis.

Popular, well-established sites include Fotolia, 123RF, iStockPhoto and Alamy.

Commission rates and copyright issues vary from site to site, so be sure to research each site thoroughly before signing up. Each site looks for a different type and style of photography so don’t get disheartened if your shots aren’t accepted by one - it’s worth trying them all.

How much money you make will depend on how often your photos are viewed and purchased, so it’s important to carefully consider the type of photos you take and the keywords you use that will lead buyers to your shots.

If you’re crafty…

Etsy has taken the craft world by storm. It’s like an online craft fair where you can sell anything handmade – think jewellery, art, ceramics, knitting, furniture - the list is pretty much endless. You can also sell vintage items, which need to be more than 20 years old, and have 'vintage appeal’.

Etsy is the biggest player in this market, but it is based in the US. So the downside for UK crafters is that the site operates in dollars and you’ll need to factor in the extra cost of shipping to American buyers.

The UK alternatives are Folksy and Coriandr. Both are smaller than Etsy, as they’re pretty new and still in development stage. But this could work to your advantage because you’ll face less competition in your chosen craft. Misi (Make it Sell it) not only offers an online community for craft-lovers, but also an opportunity to make some money from your pastime.

Once registered, you can build a profile and ‘shop window’ with your products, and you get your own web address. Both are free to join, but charge 20p to list an item, plus commission of 5% on Folksy and 2.5% on Corinadr on any sale you make.

If you shop online…

Signing up to a cashback website is one of the easiest ways to make some extra cash if you already buy goods and services online.

Cashback websites like Quidco, GiveOrTake, RPoints, GreasyPalm and MrsCashback are essentially advertising sites that link through to hundreds of popular retailers. When you click through to a retailer’s website to purchase something, it pays the cashback site a lead fee for generating your business.

You’ll get a portion of this fee, so you’re effectively being paid to shop.

The amount of cashback you can earn depends on how much you spend, and it varies between each site and retailer. Read the small print before you sign up as each sites works a little differently.

Some, like Quidco, are free to join and pay you 100% cashback, while others, such as MrsCashback charge £29.95 to receive 100% of cashback, and require you to build up £30 before you can actually get your hands on the money.

If you can write…

If you’re a budding writer or perhaps just want to share your views on life or a particular topic, you can earn money through blogging. It won’t make you rich, but you could build up some extra pocket money from writing about your interests.

Writing a blog in itself doesn’t pay - you’ll need to introduce advertising in order to earn money. Google’s AdSense is one of the most popular programs. It allows you to run relevant ads alongside your blog, which will generate revenue on a per-click or per-impression basis, The more traffic your blog gets, the more money you’ll make – so when you start a blog you’ll have to work hard to publicise it to attract regular readers and followers.

You can also invite 'sponsors' to advertise on your blog. So for example, if you write a food blog, you could try approaching supermarkets or popular food brands.

If you’ve got junk…

eBay is nothing new but it really is a handy way to turn your clutter and junk into a money-spinner without the hassle of organising a carboot sale or going to an auction.

Even if you think no one will be interested in your ancient, bulky TV or that slow cooker you’ve never got around to using, try it out – you’d be surprised what people want. eBay estimates the average British house has about £450 worth of unwanted items that could be sold on the site.

If you’ve never used eBay before, it may take a little time to familiarise yourself with the site but it is pretty straightforward. You’ll need to open a seller account and create a separate listing for each item you want to sell, with a description and photo, and information such as postage costs, or whether it’s collection only.

You’ll pay a listing fee of between 15p and £1.30 depending on the starting or ‘reserve ‘ price of your item, and commission of 10% of the final selling price.

If it seems like hard work and you’d rather not pay to sell your stuff – you can advertise and sell for free on Gumtree.com.
More on:
money-making tips

Financial Fightback

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HOW TO: Use Twitter Lists

2009-11-03T22:11:00.001-08:00

UPDATE: you can get started with Twitter Lists by following the Mashable Team Twitter List at Twitter.com/mashable/mashable

The just-launched Twitter Lists feature is a new way to organize the people you’re following on Twitter, or find new people. In actuality, though, Twitter Lists are Twitter’s long awaited “groups” feature. They offer a way for you to bunch together other users on Twitter into groups so that you can get an overview of what they’re up to. That’s because Lists aren’t just static listings of users, but rather curated TwitterTwitter
streams of the latest tweets from a specified set of users.

In other words, you can create a list that groups together people for whatever reason (the members of your family, for example), and then you can get a snapshot of the things those users are saying by viewing that list’s page, which includes a complete tweet stream for everyone on the list. Lists allow you to organize the people you’re following into groups, and they even allow you to include people you’re not following.

Why Would You Use Lists?

There are many reasons for creating lists, but here are a handful of ways that you could use the Twitter Lists feature. What other ways are you using Twitter Lists? Let us know in the comments.

Create a Group – Because Twitter Lists create grouped tweet streams of the people that are on them, you can use Lists to organize your tweeps into groups based on anything you want. For example, we’ve created a list of everyone at Mashable. By viewing or following this list, you easily see what all of Mashable’sMashable
employees are tweeting about. You could do the same thing with your co-workers, family, or friends, or just group Twitter users based on location, subject, or anything else you can think of.

Recommend Cool Tweeps – One of the other intended purposes of Twitter Lists is to allow people to recommend other users to follow. You can create a public list of people you think other Twitter users should follow, then anyone else can visit that list and follow the people on it (or follow the list).

Follow People You Aren’t Following – When you follow a Twitter List, you’re not actually following every user on the list, but following the entire list — those users’ tweets aren’t added to your main stream. You can then visit that list and view its tweet stream. That’s why you can also use Lists to follow people without really following them. For example, if there are users whose tweets you’d like to follow, but whom you don’t necessarily want in your main Twitter stream (perhaps they tweet too often for your liking), you can add them to a list and then check up on their latest tweets every once in a while by viewing your list.

Creating a List

Creating a new Twitter List is a simple process. When logged into Twitter you’ll see a new “Lists” section right below the search box in the right side navigation, simply click on the “New list” link to begin creating a new list. After you click on that link, a window will pop up asking you two questions.

First, you’ll be asked to provide a name for your list (i.e., Family, Web Tech Tweeple, etc.). The name is also used for your list’s URL, which will be “twitter.com/username/list-name.” You’ll also be asked if you want your list to be public or private.

Public Lists – These lists can be seen by anyone, and anyone can follow them. Public lists are ideal for lists of recommended follows.

Private Lists – When Twitter says private, they mean private. Only the creator of private lists will be able to see or subscribe to them — not even those on the list can see private lists. That means, for example, you could create a list of your competitors and keep an eye on them without them being any the wiser.

Once you’ve clicked the “Create list” button, you’re ready to add users. After you create a new list, you’ll be prompted to search for people to add to your list, but there are really two ways to add users to lists. First, you can add users from their profile page, by clicking the lists button and checking off the lists you want to add them to from the drop down menu. You can add a single user to multiple lists.

The other way to add people, is from any “following” page (i.e., by clicking on either the “Followers” or “Following” links from any profile). You’ll also see the lists button next to users that appear on these pages, and can add anyone to your lists by clicking on it.

You can add yourself to your lists by visiting your profile page. Keep in mind that each list is currently limited to 500 people, and users may create a maximum of 20 lists. These limitations could change in the future.

Managing Lists

Both the lists you’ve created and the lists you’re following will appear in the “Lists” section in the right-hand navigation of Twitter. Private lists will be denoted by a small “closed lock” icon. When you click on you a list, Twitter will load up the tweet stream of those on the list in the main body of the Twitter page — this is similar to how Twitter displays search results.

You’ll also see a link to “View list page.” Clicking on that link will bring you to your list’s dedicated page. This is what other people will see when they visit the page if your list is public, with one major exception: in the top right corner you’ll see links to “Edit” or “Delete” your list. The delete link is self explanatory, while the edit link allows you to change the title of your list, or change its public/private status.

To remove users from your list, follow the same procedure you used to add them, but this time uncheck the box next to the list you want to remove that user from.

Finding & Following Lists

When you follow a list, it will show up in the “Lists” section in the right-hand navigation of Twitter. Following lists is a great way to keep tabs on tweets from a large group of people without needing to add those people’s tweets to your main stream. Here are some of the ways you can find lists to follow.

People You Follow – When you visit the profile page of anyone on Twitter, you’ll be able to see any of the public lists they have created, or any of the lists they follow. (NOTE: you may have to click “View all” to see every list if the person has created or is following a large number of lists.) You can also see any of the lists that person appears on. Checking out the lists that your friends have created, follow, or appear on, is a great way to locate lists you might be interested in.

Listorious – Listorious is a third-party site that maintains a categorized directory of Twitter lists. You can search or browse through lists by category, and find the most popular lists.

TweetMeme Lists – Readers of Mashable will be familiar with TweetMemeTweetmeme
, which exposes the most tweeted links on Twitter and powers the “retweet” buttons on all of our articles. Just like it does for links, TweetMeme also finds the most tweeted about Twitter Lists.

Once you find a list you want to follow, click the “Follow this list” button to follow the list. You can unfollow a list from the same page by clicking on the “Unfollow” link.

Lists You’re On & Blocking Lists

Twitter shows you how many public lists you appear on. Clicking on the “Listed” link on your profile, which appears next to your follower and following numbers, will bring you to a page that shows you every list on which you appear. Your lists page has two tabs: one that shows the lists that are following you, and one that shows the lists you’re following/have made.

If you find yourself on any lists you don’t particularly want to be on (like a list titled, “Jerks,” for example), you can remove yourself from that list by blocking its creator. Just be aware that blocking a person on Twitter means that person can also no longer follow you. Blocking is not permanent, however, and can be undone.

You can block someone directly from the list page, by clicking on the “Block [username]” link, which is located on the right navigation menu in the “Actions” section.

How are you using lists? Let us know in the comments.

More Twitter resources from Mashable:

- 6 Incredible Twitter Powered Art Projects
- HOW TO: Do Good on Twitter
- 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates
- 6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations
- 10 Ways to Find People on Twitter

From the Team at WebWitches

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Tweetrad.io: Listen to Twitter Search Results

2009-11-03T21:37:00.001-08:00

Here’s something fun and amusing. We just happened upon Tweetrad.io, a site that treats tweets from your Twitter searches like tunes on an old school radio channel, so tweets are read aloud by an automated Twitter DJ as they roll in.

The site is self-explanatory, as you can search for tweets, or select from the pre-programmed channels or trending topics, and listen to the tweets instead of having to waste the effort of actually reading them. It may sound a little a dry in theory, but in practice, it’s absolutely hilarious.

Curious about how this funky new TwitterTwitter
service works? The developer posted a description of it on Hacker NewsHacker News
earlier today, saying:

“We use a distributed network of converter bots to handle the work queue. Jobs are placed on the queue via api calls from the javascript client that interacts with twitter’s search api directly in order to avoid rate limiting of a centralized search server. Our app server is a lightweight Sinatra service that handles job queueing. We stream the audio directly from our nginx web server as they become available via the conversion process.

We are trying to decide if this app has a real use case or if it’s just a fun thing. One of the ideas we are thinking about is an iphone app for keeping up with your tweet stream on the go. We would love to hear your feedback.”

We think it’s both fun and potentially practical, though we don’t have an amazing use case or business model to serve up just yet. We do know, however, that if they release an iPhone app, they’ll have to compete with existing apps like Twuner.

Just in case you’re not ready to take our word on how awesome it is, we made a short screencast of Tweetrad.io in action. Check it out below.

Image from Ian Hayhurst on FlickrFlickr

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10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs

2009-10-27T03:31:00.001-07:00

This series is supported by Grasshopper, the Virtual Phone System designed for entrepreneurs. Learn more about Grasshopper at Grasshopper.com.

Whether your company is just starting out, just starting to turn a profit or already on the verge of an acquisition, as an entrepreneur you’ll be constantly evaluating the tools that will help get your business to the next stage.

Even if the ink on the business plan isn’t dry yet, you want to be armed with the social media tools that will play an important role in company communication, product and brand promotions, and business development for your startup. Some of the tools in this list will be familiar, but it’s worth taking a moment to reframe how they might become power tools in a business context.

10. Monitter

As an entrepreneur, you need to know what people are saying about your company as well as your competitors. Enter Monitter, a service that monitors Twitter mentions in real-time in a multi-column interface reminiscent of TweetDeck. Simply input a search term into a column, add or remove columns as desired, and get an automatically-refreshing picture of what people are saying about your brand or competing brands in your space.

Pro Tip: By default, the Monitter interface is gray on black, which can be hard on the eyes. You can switch to a more typical color scheme by selecting the “light” theme in the menu at the upper right.

9. YouTube

You already know about YouTube, but have you thought about how it could help your business? Could your product benefit from an awesome video walkthrough? Could your marketing strategy include a viral video strategy that gets you lots of exposure at relatively low cost?

And now with Promoted Videos getting placement in AdSense units around the web, there’s even more incentive to think about leveraging social video as a brand exposure tool. If you can create interesting content that’s relevant to your brand or products, a positive visual association with your company can attract new interest, build company culture, turn inquiries into sales, and give back significant brand dividends over time.

Pro Tip: The most obvious and frequent business use of YouTube is for marketing and advertising, but don’t overlook other ways in which your company can leverage YouTube. Visual walkthroughs and FAQs can be a great boon to customer service. Videos of you and your team giving public presentations, speaking at conferences or engaging with the media can establish and enhance your company’s reputation as a thought leader. And don’t forget the utility of private videos for use in executive and new employee trainings and recording company events; access can be shared with only the people who should be able to see each item.

8. UserVoice

As a small business, it’s hard to juggle building and improving your products with supporting what’s already out there. That’s where UserVoice can help.

From bug reports to feature requests, UserVoice can help track and manage the feedback of your users and customers. Not only does it assure your userbase that you care about what they have to say, but it can potentially leverage the best suggestions from the people who are actually using your tool or service. Since users can vote on the ideas of other users, you can start to get a picture of the most-requested features and fixes for your app or service to feed back into your products’ lifecycles.

Pro Tip: You can also use UserVoice to get feedback on a limited release or beta version of a product by setting up a private forum or forums. You can send invites to specific email addresses, or limit your feedback to company-wide participants by restricting access by email domain.

7. MailChimp

Most reports and punditry on the death of email are a bit premature. The good old fashioned mailing list is still a good way to maintain relationships with customers, especially when done well.

The web-based mailing list manager MailChimp offers list management, tracking and analysis, and custom HTML templates for up to 500 subscribers and 3000 emails a month for free. Paid plans kick in at larger subscriber numbers. Featuring integration with WordPress, Twitter, Salesforce and more, MailChimp is the list manager of choice for an impressive list of heavyweights including Mozilla, Intel, Canon, Fujitsu, Staples and more.

Pro Tip: MailChimp has a well-documented API that allows you to integrate the service with your own existing applications, tools, content management system or CRM solution. There’s a growing list of plug-ins already created for a number of platforms.

[Disclosure: Mailchimp is a sponsor of Mashable]

6. Get Satisfaction

Great customer support is important, but it can also be time-consuming and costly. Get Satisfaction aims to help by leveraging the strength of your user community and cutting down on repetitive support costs.

Get Satisfaction provides a forum where your customers can get answers to questions, solutions to problems, and submit feature and new product requests. Those answers and solutions are stored and searchable over time, cutting down on support costs and building trust with your userbase.

Used by small businesses and large popular brands alike, Get Satisfaction gets rave reviews for human customer service and helping to build communities around brands and products.

Pro Tip: Embeddable widgets allow you to bring the conversation back to your own company’s site or even within your products themselves. Drop a searchable FAQ or a feedback tab or page right into your website or service to integrate the customer service experience right where your users need it.

5. Twitter

What would this list be without our favorite microblogging service? From best practices for brands to tips for executives to using Twitter for customer service, there’s no shortage of creative ideas for leveraging Twitter for your business.

Even if you’re not in a technically-oriented industry, you’ll want to know which influencers in your domain are on Twitter and which of your potential clients and customers are there (hint: probably a bunch). You’ll want to wrap your head around hashtags for business, and more certainly check out Twitter’s own guidebook for businesses (as well as our own guidebook, of course!).

Pro Tip: Try not to use Twitter as a purely broadcast medium; whether one person or several posts to your official account, make sure your company is listening and interacting as well as simply posting. Strive for authenticity in your company’s tweets and try to think of it as taking part in a conversation, not just another soapbox platform.

4. Facebook

Facebook is the other social networking giant you’ll want to be sure your business has a presence on. It’s another powerful tool for building relationships, raising visibility for your brand, and targeting your customer niche.

With a robust and relatively low-cost advertising platform, you can connect directly to the potential customers or clients who might want to know about you. Optimization tools help you fine-tune and target your ads more intelligently, and get detailed insight into who is responding to your ads.

Pro Tip: Authenticity is key here too for maximum impact. With changes that made Facebook Pages more like personal pages, your brand’s home on Facebook is no longer relegated to fairly static profile information. Since the Wall Feed is usually the main point of entry for your fans and visitors, think of it as an opportunity to provide some sort of utility to your visitors, whether it be information, entertainment, or relevant expressions of your company’s culture and mission.

3. Basecamp

If you’re like most startups, you’ve got a heck of a lot going on. You need to keep on top of your projects and open loops, not just internally but with your clients, partners, and customers as well. That’s where a good project management tool comes in.

Basecamp from 37signals is a great and cost-effective web-based tool for project management and collaboration. Featuring to-do lists, milestones for important due-dates, file sharing, blog-style messaging, wiki-style writeboards, time tracking, and integration with the excellent group chat product Campfire, basic plans for small businesses start at $24 a month.

Pro Tip: Add extra functionality to your Basecamp environment or integrate it with your existing systems in the extras and add-ons department. For example if you use Freshbooks, you can even invoice your Basecamp projects via Freshbooks.

2. LinkedIn

From hiring to networking with cohorts and potential clients to participating in groups and question threads, LinkedIn is a powerful social network for entrepreneurs and business professionals of all stripes. It’s a great place to both discover and research potential job candidates (with a reported 75% of hiring managers using it over Facebook and Twitter), as well as both keeping up with and extending your network.

Pro Tip: Although it’s not an overnight success solution, positioning yourself as an expert in the LinkedIn Answers domain(s) relevant to your business can be a great way to increase your authority and drive new interest to your business. Don’t underestimate the power of asking for advice here as well.

1. Google Apps for Domains

Startup costs for outfitting an office with networking and computing equipment are staggering enough as it is without even taking into account the software and maintenance components. One area for adventurous entrepreneurs to cut costs in the latter department lies in the realm of typical office staples: email, calendaring and the office suites businesses typically need to use to prepare documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Instead of paying an IT staff to set up, host and maintain your own mail servers, Google Apps for Domains can handle custom email addresses at your own company’s URL. As an alternative to Microsoft Outlook worth considering, Gmail also integrates nicely with Google Calendar for your group calendaring needs.

And whereas once Microsoft Office was one of your only choices in the office suites department, Google Documents now handles document, spreadsheet and presentation preparation with aplomb — all the while making it easy to share and collaborate with colleagues without having to email documents around or check items out of a central repository.

Pro Tip: For the truly frugal, you can even opt for the totally free Standard Edition which includes basic Gmail, calendaring, Google Docs and Google Sites. Premier Edition will run you $50 per user per year, but increases user email storage to 25GB, adds more security features and guarantees you uptime and support.
Series supported by Grasshopper

Sound more professional and stay connected with Grasshopper, the Virtual Phone System designed for entrepreneurs. Grasshopper works just like a traditional phone system, but requires no hardware to purchase – it’s all managed online or by phone. Callers reach you whether you’re in the office, on your cell, or at home.

Get a toll free or local number, create extensions for employees, forward calls, get voicemails via email, and more – starting at only $9.95 a month.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, cmcderm1

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Facebook Launches Share Buttons for Publishers

2009-10-27T03:27:00.001-07:00

Sharing content on Facebook hasn’t generally been as easy as it has been on Twitter. Part of Twitter’s advantage is just how easy it is to share from blogs and other websites.

A lot of this has to do with the TweetmemeTweetmeme
buttons, which are those TwitterTwitter
buttons you see on MashableMashable
and elsewhere that count up how many retweets a webpage experiences. Facebook’sFacebook
never really had an equivalent. Until now.

Quietly the world’s largest social network has been working on a new version of Facebook Share, one that includes buttons that can count the amount of shares a specific article gets across Facebook’s vast platform. Today, they launch officially at 10:00 AM PT, though you’ve probably already seen them being tested on a few websites, including Mashable, during the last week or so.

Installing the new Facebook Share buttons just involves adding a few lines of code – it’s actually one of the simplest implementations of Facebook Connect around. Once active, the live counter will check for the number of times your URL has been shared on Facebook. Facebook is also providing analytics for the Facebook Share buttons, including the number of shares, the number of “likes” for a story, the number of comments, and the number of clickbacks. The analytics are available via an API call

It’s easy to see why publishers would add the official Facebook button – it can count shares that aren’t part of the public Facebook stream and it has advanced analytics (we love knowing how many comments we receive on our stories). For Facebook, it helps foster a community of sharing on its platform – something that Twitter has been taking in recent months.

Now, if you want to try out the new Facebook Share buttons, all you have to do is click “share” on the Facebook button on the top left of this article. Tell us what you think in the comments.

the response before it is sent.

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Google Launches Google Social Search Amid Social-Media Battle

2009-10-27T03:12:00.001-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO -(Dow Jones)- In a move underscoring the escalating battle among Internet companies over what is known as social media, Google Inc. (GOOG) on Monday launched a tool that allows users to find postings from their friends as part of a Web search.

Google Social Search, which is available starting Monday, includes relevant postings by colleagues, friends and selected media sources on feeds from Twitter Inc. and on blogs, as well as in broader Internet searches on its search engine. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company posted details of the new product on a blog.

A search for a restaurant could generate not only official sites and mainstream media reviews, but also comments from friends or colleagues on a range of different blogs or social sites, if they had set up a profile that allowed their data to be searched.

Social Search is being launched days after both Google and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Google's main rival in Internet search, announced separate deals with start-up micro-blogging site Twitter Inc. Microsoft also announced a similar deal with Facebook Inc. to get access to its user information. Microsoft owns approximately 1.6% of Facebook, following a 2007 investment.

San Francisco-based start-up Twitter, which lets users blast short messages from computers and mobile phones which are then displayed on their pages, has seen explosive growth until recently. Marketers are increasingly looking for ways to tap social media such as Twitter and Facebook for ways to better track trend-making topics and reach younger users.

It wasn't immediately clear how Social Search relates to the deal Google announced with Twitter. Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

-By Jessica Hodgson, Dow Jones Newswires; 415-439-6455; jessica.hodgson@dowjones.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 26, 2009 17:41 ET (21:41 GMT)

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Google Reader Tips

2009-10-25T16:02:00.001-07:00

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October 23, 2009
Google Reader Adds Magic Sort & Explore Popular

I am a huge Google Reader, in fact, I might be one of the most active Google Reader users on the planet. So when they add features, I get a bit giddy. Yesterday, they added two features; an explore section and magic sorting.

The explore section loops in "recommended" sources, which is an old feature, but also adds "popular." Popular basically shows you what Google deems to be important RSS items on the web but personalized based on my reader and web history. So it shows me items I may have missed that are popular and likely to be on interest to me. I can tell you that most of the items in my popular section were not exactly of interest to me. But if I am ever bored (not likely) I may browse that section in the future. This feature does get better as you "like" and "share" items in Google Reader.

The magic sorting is pretty neat, it basically sorts all your unread items in order of what they think would be most important to you. Like the previous feature, the magic sort gets better as you "like" and "share" items in Google Reader. I can see this feature being useful for many Google Reader users, but for me, I don't mind going through the feeds in old-school chronological order - being that I have to go through every feed anyway.

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New Keyword Ideas

2009-10-25T15:49:00.001-07:00

Adding additional keywords to your campaign on a regular basis is very important to keep your campaign fresh and in motion with the market place. This sounds easier than it looks and after many months of optimising a PPC campaign, you can quickly run out of steam and find yourself duplicating keywords. Also, it is important that you stay focused on the products and services that you offer. You can sometimes find yourself going off on a tangent that once seemed relevant to your site.

Below are some tips on generating new keywords:

Google Keyword Suggestion tool:

This tool is provided by Google and can be found in your AdWords Tool section or at: http://www.google.com/sktool

These results are based on data generated from previous Google Searches. Remember that these are only suggestions; remember to keep your site, the products and services that you are advertising in mind and you don’t need to include them. Attracting a large volume of traffic to your site is all well and good, but only if it converts.

AdWords Search Query Reports:

These reports show most of the searches that resulted into at least one click on your advert. They’re very useful if you have a lot of broad matching in your campaign. You should aim to have the top main keywords on exact matching, this will also improve your Quality Score and reduce your CPC. You can also see what irrelevant traffic you pick up, increasing the size of your negative keywords, while reducing the number of irrelevant impressions.

Google Insights:

This is a very good tool for analysing the trends and patterns of your main keywords, but it also supplies you with addition information on breakout keywords and the percentage increase in searches over a period of a month.

“Search related to: SEO”:

If you search using Google’s home search page, at the bottom should be displayed any related searches.

Site Search Analytics tracking:

If your site has a site search box, enable the site search box tracking and insert the search parameter which can be found in the URL once you have searched for something. For example, if I searched for “My Search Term,” the URL produced on the Just Search site would be:

http://www.justsearching.co.uk/search/search.php?query=My+Search+Term&submit.x=0&submit.y=0&submit=GO

So the parameter to enter into Google Analytics would be “query”.

The data produced from this will help you see what product are being searched for, helping you increase your keyword list and also helping in directing traffic to certain parts of your site. If many people are searching for a particular keyword, for example “PPC,” then you can come to the conclusion that the PPC section is difficult to find and that traffic coming to your site is PPC related.

Philip Pollock
PPC Account Manager

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SME - What is Social Media Optimization?

2009-10-25T15:37:00.001-07:00

Filed under: Social Media Optimisation by Nick on October 23rd, 2009 @ 2:53 pm

You may have seen the acronym ‘SMO’ floating around the net recently, often without any explanation of what it stands for. Social media optimisation, or SMO, has taken a couple of years to take off as a concept, but is now a term that is increasingly being mentioned in connection with SEO. This is because of the increasing awareness of most businesses of the need to branch out into social media networks as a part of their participation on the net.

The term was coined in around 2006, and is commonly attributed to marketing writer Rohit Bhargava. It describes the methods in which social media networking can be used to promote your business. This usually, although not always, is a part of your general search engine optimisation campaign.

The social media we’re talking about here is sites like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and Twitter, as well as the various blogs and forums around the net. The idea is for a business to solidify its image on the net and build up a community. The term covers a broad swathe of online communications. You can now promote your business through RSS feeds, images and videos, news buttons, blogs, podcasts, forums and just about anything you can think of. The concept of viral marketing is closely linked to social media networking.

Unlike traditional search engine marketing, social media optimisation has a dual focus. Not only does it aim to drive traffic to a site through the social media networks themselves, it also aims to boost a site’s ranking by garnering mentions all over the web. This is why social media optimisation is currently considered a smart way to optimise.

Social media optimisation is important not just for your SEO strategy, but also for your business to manage its online reputation. As more people come to rely on the net for social interaction as well as a source for information, no business can guarantee that it can avoid bad reviews. Social media can be used to manage an online reputation by direct interaction with consumers. Participation in social media also allows a business to answer any bad reports directly, sending the message that it cares about consumer opinions and wants to build relationships.

The downsides? Social media networking can take up a lot of time. Constant updates are the key to success, both with search engine attention and with the participants in your network. Some sites, such as Twitter, require daily or even hourly participation to really catch people’s attention. Furthermore, if you want to optimise your social media campaign properly, it’s a good idea to get the experts on board, which can also take time.

You can pursue social media on your own, but it is important that your social media optimisation campaign meshes well with your search engine optimisation strategy. The idea is to create a single brand image that solidifies your company’s role in the social world of the net. Talk to our consultants at SEO Consult for advice on how to integrate social media optimisation into your strategy, and how to best pursue social media networking.

Tags: Social Media Optimization

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 2:53 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed.

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Awesome Twitter Article - Must read!

2009-10-25T15:35:00.001-07:00

In the span of one up-and-down week, Twitter lost one of their most influential teen Twitterers in Miley Cyrus, and then almost immediately found new life in the tween market with the launch of the Twilight Twitter account. It may sound silly, but these 140 character pop culture dramas do matter to Twitter, because their US traffic is flat, and that’s a problem.

At the Web 2.0 Summit earlier this week Twitter’s Co-Founder and CEO, Evan Williams, openly admitted that traffic has stalled in the US. He then went on to say that new features should help solve the problem. Likely not coincidentally, the very next day Twitter announced search deals with both Bing and Google. Those deals, coupled with the new Twitter Lists, and the roll out of location-aware tweets, make up what we deem to be Twitter’s trifecta traffic strategy. And we think it will work; here’s why.

1. Search

Both Bing and Google have tapped Twitter to serve up real-time tweets as a part of search results pages. Bing’s product is already live, and while it’s a separate web page from the Bing.com homepage, it’s a really impressive web and Twitter search mashup, with constantly refreshing tweets.

Soon Google too will include tweets as a part of the search experience, but their plan is to include tweets within the standard Google search experience. According to their blog post on the news, “the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

Twitter’s inclusion in search results is likely to be the biggest driver of new and repeat traffic, period. Right now Twitter search tools are incredibly valuable, but they don’t expose mainstream audiences to Twitter. Google is the epitome of mainstream. It’s the first place most online users go when they want to find something on the web, it’s where they go to find products and breaking news stories, and now this mainstream audience will be exposed to real-time tweets matching their queries, which means a likely flood of new traffic and users for Twitter.

2. Lists

Twitter is not your average social network. One study shows that the average Twitter user is a female in her late teens. She follows 20 – 50 people, with the same number of Twitterers following her back. Another study found that 10% of active users account for 90% of all tweets. And yet another study concluded that 24% of tweets are created by bots. Clearly, Twitter has an engagement and identity crisis on their hands.

Thus far, Twitter would encourage new user participation via a hand picked list of recommended Twitterers (often referred to as the Suggested User List or SUL). Now, however, Twitter is ready to kill the SUL and provide something of even greater value: user-curated Twitter Lists.

As we’ve detailed before, Twitter Lists, which are live for some users, enable users to create and name their own curated lists of Twitterers. Your lists are public by default, which means that anyone can check out who you’ve added to your topical lists, and the feature also makes it easy to see which lists you’ve been added to by other Twitter users. As our Editor in Chief, Adam Ostrow wrote, “This is essentially taking the whole concept of “Follow Friday” and building a killer feature around it.”

As any addicted Twitterer knows, the key to Twitter becoming an integral part of your online life is reaching a threshold where you’re consuming interesting tweets and getting responses from others who read your 140 character opinions. Without that push and pull exchange, Twitter is absolutely meaningless.

That’s why Twitter Lists will prove to be the key engagement tool. Lists will ensure that new users can immediately find other Twitterers who appeal to their tastes. Right now, seasoned Twitter users can create communities of their own, so engagement isn’t a problem, but Lists will brings the crafted community element to new users who may be initially trepidatious or confused about the point of Twitter.

3. Location Aware Tweets

Twitter has already started the application implementation process for attaching latitude and longitude to tweets, and has deployed the feature internally for testing. Ultimately, when it’s rolled out to the entire Twittersphere, all tweets from those who have opted-in will be location-aware. This could be huge for Twitter’s user retention issues, and also help with tackling traffic plateaus.

If you’re using a GPS-enabled phone or browser-plugin, you can already send and receive location-aware tweets through third-party apps and leverage an around-me function to see who’s tweeting nearby. Once the lat/long features become ubiquitous, however, the value of location-aware tweets increases exponentially. The next time you’re in a new city and you launch Twitter, you could potentially see tweets from people in the same building, on the same block, or dining at the same restaurant, let alone just in the same city.

With the right application or filter, location-aware tweets could be the secret sauce that helps brand new users really understand what Twitter is about and make it relevant to their offline lives. Just knowing there are thousands of Twitterers within a few mile radius of your present location may not mean anything, but being able to have a conversation on Twitter with someone who’s at the same movie as you could mean the difference between being a Twitter lover or a Twitter quitter.

More Twitter resources from Mashable:

- 6 Incredible Twitter Powered Art Projects
- HOW TO: Do Good on Twitter
- Top 5 Twitter Trends to Watch Right Now
- 6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations
- 10 Ways to Find People on Twitter

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Zemdega.

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How Social Media Can Actually Work

2009-10-23T01:44:00.001-07:00

How Social Media Can Actually Work

Posted by: on October 23

William Faulkner once said that writing a novel is like trying to build a henhouse in a hurricane. Navigating the burgeoning nebula of social media—and actually leveraging it in your company’s favor—can feel the same way. Twitter, Facebook, and blogs are powerful channels, and some great new companies will emerge by making the most of these opportunities.

The key to using them effectively is to remember that these channels are not strictly marketing tools; they are communication tools. Communication is an exchange, a two-way street that requires listening skills as much as it does sharing. Effective communication will help you unlock a more honest, more enthusiastic, and ultimately more loyal customer base. The question is: to use social media successfully to help your brand grow, will you step outside your communication comfort zone and really listen to what your customers say?

Here are a few tips to help you get started:
1. Ask provocative questions. There is a lot of noise out in the social media space. If you want to have an impact in these channels, you have to be relevant. Do this by asking provocative questions. For example, ask your Twitter followers about all the things that you do poorly. Customers enjoy the desire to hear tough, honest feedback.

2. Spend as much time listening and responding as you do talking. Be a good date! Many companies use social media a lot like traditional "interruption-advertising." Customers don’t like it, and it’s not particularly effective. Show your appreciation for your customers by listening to what they tell you through social media and then by responding to their comments. In terms of product development, listen to their suggestions and feedback, aggregate the opinions, and then make more informed decisions about strategy.

3. Complement self-promoting with promoting others. Read an interesting tweet by someone else? Re-tweet from your corporate Twitter page. It will help propagate an interesting idea, and you’ll pop up on the original tweeter’s radar. Same goes for blogs. Take a moment on your own blog to introduce a peer’s post, then link back to his or her work. Paying it forward builds authenticity with your listeners and followers.

4. Blend the personal and the professional. Most of your customers use social media for personal reasons, so it’s inaccurate to think that businesses are always totally welcome players in the social media world. Consumers are savvy; they want a well-balanced mix of salesmanship and personality. Find a happy medium between promoting your product and bringing variety to your social media efforts. The more interesting it is for you, the more likely it will be interesting to your customers.

Andy Dunn
CEO and Co-Founder
Bonobos
New York
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Drive Hoards of Traffic to you Website With TWITTER

2009-10-22T13:10:00.001-07:00

(I-Newswire) October 20, 2009 - “Twitter” is everywhere and it appears that almost everyone is at it. Pop-stars, Movie Stars and even Politicians are taking advantage of this free media. Why? Simply because, it gets a message across to vast numbers of people, instantly. A real gift to advertisers you would think. So why aren’t more businesses taking advantage of this phenomena? A new e-book “Twitter, Dynamic Traffic Strategies” produced by John Johnson of Stepping Stones Publications, completely de-mystifies the “technical” stuff allowing anyone to tap into the treasures of Twitter, enticing flocks of new visitors to your website.
Traditionally businesses invest vast amounts of time and precious resources in cultivating a good reputation within their market, building an atmosphere of dependability and trust. An excellent marketing strategy, but it can take a long time to establish. The tremendous power of Twitter provides a dramatic shortcut in this process purely by its informality; allowing customers to quickly build a rapport with your brand. When your customers are happy they like to tell their friends about it and they use Twitter to pass on the message. At the same time they, your customers, are inadvertently cultivating “back Links” or “followings” to your site. Your customers are now “spreading the word” for you and the process starts to snowball.
Twitter can drive traffic to your website and increase sales whether you are a major online retailer or a start up business selling simple products on your website.
In minutes you can create and submit news releases to promote new products, announce a sale, respond to complaints, attract recruits, encourage feedback and exchange ideas with your customers. In short it has become the place to burnish your businesses reputation.
Part of John’s philosophy is to “keep it simple”. He understands that, the jargon and technical lingo are not readily understood by everyone, as many publications assume. So he has produced this guide, Twitter Dynamic Traffic Strategies” with the novice in mind, enabling anyone to take advantage of Twitter as a marketing media. Additionally, for those who have yet to venture into the world of Twitter. John has included a FREE guide “Twitter for Fledglings” with this package.
For further information go directly to www.haveinfo.co.uk.

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Loop PR: When the Going Gets Tough, Women Get Online - Reuters

2009-10-22T13:06:00.001-07:00

LONDON--(Business Wire) Women are twice as likely to share their feelings online at times of stress, than burden their partner, according to new findings. The poll, carried out by the new women`s online community, www.powderroomgraffiti.com, suggests that women are increasingly turning to the blogosphere to relieve stress. 58 per cent of respondents said that at difficult times, such as Christmas, they wrote more online, either by blogging, commenting or taking part in social networks. This compared with only 23 per cent who said they turned to their partners when things got on top of them. 18 per cent said they had even found themselves substituting writing for the more traditional stress relievers such as alcohol and comfort-eating. "Our research would certainly indicate that the blogosphere has a real psychological benefit for some women and appears more effective than the more obvious stress relievers of alcohol or face-to-face exchanges with a close confidant." said Diane Hayman, editor of Powder Room Graffiti. She added: "Being encouraged to speak honestly is clearly very liberating for women. Since we launched Powder Room Graffiti, whose main aim is to give women a chance to tell it how it is, we`ve seen people share and debate the full gamut of subjects, many of which would be off-limits in a coffee morning setting or on the pages of a glossy magazine." Mel, who blogs as `PigInTheKitchen` and is a regular contributor to PRG, said: "I get such a sense of release from writing my thoughts down and, the more stressed I get, the more I turn to my laptop. It's helpful that there are other women out there who also share their trials and tribulations and this drives a very strong sense of community. Blogging and writing is very therapeutic - it is my voice, in my space and it gives me back a sense of self where I am not just 'a mum' and 'a wife'." The website is at www.powderroomgraffiti.com. About www.powderroomgraffiti.com PRGraffiti, which launched over the summer, is currently experiencing a rise up the Alexa ranking (from 847,795 to 301,475 since July 2009). Rejecting the glossy tradition of celebrity gossip and beauty tips, the site is already gaining a reputation for enabling more mature women to express, share and debate their views with honesty. Paying its selected contributors and guaranteeing quality writing, the site represents a new breed of online editorial which carves out a unique path between magazine journalism and unstructured user-generated content. About John O. Morisano John O. Morisano has spent the last 20 years helping to build and run entertainment and media companies. From his first job forward, John has always found himself at the heart of a company's operations. A CPA and graduate of Pace University in New York City, Morisano started his career at the Vista Organization, Ltd., a publicly-traded indie film company, and aided in its sale in 1989. He then joined the accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers in its entertainment and media practice. In 1993, he moved to Paris to take over the European operations of Activision, the World`s leading video game publisher. He subsequently moved back to the States and co-founded that company's business development group. John left Activision in 1995 and returned to NYC from LA where he served as interim CEO of UK based Dewynters NA. In 1996, he joined forces with Tim Nye at the SunshineCompanies where they focused on angel investing in start ups and offering management expertise to take companies through the early stages of their growth.. While at Sunshine and through its investments which include the Sunshine Theater, Pickerel Pie Entertainment, Sunshine Direct and SaysMe.TV, John has overseen the production of dozens of hours of television, numerous feature films, hundreds of hours of Internet content and a wide variety of other types of branded intellectual property. PowderRoomGraffiti represents the meeting point of many of the skills he has developed in content, technology and management. About Diane Hayman Diane studied Psychology at Durham University, where she also rowed for the Great Britain U23 squad, and worked as Women's Sports editor of the student newspaper. After University, she went to work for Andersen's Consulting (now Accenture) as a management consultant for 2 years, 6 months of which were spent in Chicago. For the next 9 years, Diane worked in the City for BZW, Barclays Capital, and WestLB, mostly as an interest rate trader, but also in Treasury Sales, and in Marketing. During this period she travelled extensively, including a year in Paris (which is where she first met John Morisano) and a year in New York. Having given up work to have 3 children in quick succession (now aged 11, 10 and 8), Diane wrote a blog -'Drunk Mummy'- which gave her her first insight into the quality and humour of online writing, and she made numerous contacts in the online writing industry. The whole experience inspired Diane to launch PowderRoomGraffiti. Copyright Business Wire 2009
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Loop PR: When the Going Gets Tough, Women Get Online - Reuters

2009-10-22T13:03:00.001-07:00

LONDON--(Business Wire)-- Women are twice as likely to share their feelings online at times of stress, than burden their partner, according to new findings. The poll, carried out by the new women`s online community, www.powderroomgraffiti.com, suggests that women are increasingly turning to the blogosphere to relieve stress. 58 per cent of respondents said that at difficult times, such as Christmas, they wrote more online, either by blogging, commenting or taking part in social networks. This compared with only 23 per cent who said they turned to their partners when things got on top of them. 18 per cent said they had even found themselves substituting writing for the more traditional stress relievers such as alcohol and comfort-eating. "Our research would certainly indicate that the blogosphere has a real psychological benefit for some women and appears more effective than the more obvious stress relievers of alcohol or face-to-face exchanges with a close confidant." said Diane Hayman, editor of Powder Room Graffiti. She added: "Being encouraged to speak honestly is clearly very liberating for women. Since we launched Powder Room Graffiti, whose main aim is to give women a chance to tell it how it is, we`ve seen people share and debate the full gamut of subjects, many of which would be off-limits in a coffee morning setting or on the pages of a glossy magazine." Mel, who blogs as `PigInTheKitchen` and is a regular contributor to PRG, said: "I get such a sense of release from writing my thoughts down and, the more stressed I get, the more I turn to my laptop. It's helpful that there are other women out there who also share their trials and tribulations and this drives a very strong sense of community. Blogging and writing is very therapeutic - it is my voice, in my space and it gives me back a sense of self where I am not just 'a mum' and 'a wife'." The website is at www.powderroomgraffiti.com. About www.powderroomgraffiti.com PRGraffiti, which launched over the summer, is currently experiencing a rise up the Alexa ranking (from 847,795 to 301,475 since July 2009). Rejecting the glossy tradition of celebrity gossip and beauty tips, the site is already gaining a reputation for enabling more mature women to express, share and debate their views with honesty. Paying its selected contributors and guaranteeing quality writing, the site represents a new breed of online editorial which carves out a unique path between magazine journalism and unstructured user-generated content. About John O. Morisano John O. Morisano has spent the last 20 years helping to build and run entertainment and media companies. From his first job forward, John has always found himself at the heart of a company's operations. A CPA and graduate of Pace University in New York City, Morisano started his career at the Vista Organization, Ltd., a publicly-traded indie film company, and aided in its sale in 1989. He then joined the accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers in its entertainment and media practice. In 1993, he moved to Paris to take over the European operations of Activision, the World`s leading video game publisher. He subsequently moved back to the States and co-founded that company's business development group. John left Activision in 1995 and returned to NYC from LA where he served as interim CEO of UK based Dewynters NA. In 1996, he joined forces with Tim Nye at the SunshineCompanies where they focused on angel investing in start ups and offering management expertise to take companies through the early stages of their growth.. While at Sunshine and through its investments which include the Sunshine Theater, Pickerel Pie Entertainment, Sunshine Direct and SaysMe.TV, John has overseen the production of dozens of hours of television, numerous feature films, hundreds of hours of Internet content and a wide variety of other types of branded intellectual property. PowderRoomGraffiti represents the meeting point of many of the skills he has developed in content, technology and management. About Diane Hayman Diane studied Psychology at Durham University, where she also rowed for the Great Britain U23 squad, and worked as Women's Sports editor of the student newspaper. After University, she went to work for Andersen's Consulting (now Accenture) as a management consultant for 2 years, 6 months of which were spent in Chicago. For the next 9 years, Diane worked in the City for BZW, Barclays Capital, and WestLB, mostly as an interest rate trader, but also in Treasury Sales, and in Marketing. During this period she travelled extensively, including a year in Paris (which is where she first met John Morisano) and a year in New York. Having given up work to have 3 children in quick succession (now aged 11, 10 and 8), Diane wrote a blog -'Drunk Mummy'- which gave her her first insight into the quality and humour of online writing, and she made numerous contacts in the online writing industry. The whole experience inspired Diane to launch PowderRoomGraffiti. Copyright Business Wire 2009

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Why doesn't anyone care about my new website?

2009-10-21T22:07:00.001-07:00

When a business launches a new website there is typically some fanfare. Congratulatory emails abound. Executives make laudatory announcements. Website analytics are carefully watched for improved performance.

Yet the results that follow are often disappointing. Traffic stays steady. Bounce rates don't move. Average time on site doesn't change. It seems that no one cares that you've launched a new site.

If you find yourself in this position then your team needs to honestly evaluate how they got there. In my experience it's much more likely that they got the website strategy wrong than the execution. No matter how good your website looks or how compelling your content is or how clever the technology behind it is, if your strategy is wrong then nothing else matters.

Following is a quick rundown on the top 10 mistakes that cause people to get their web strategies wrong. I've already reached my quota of offended people this week so I'm not going to give specific examples here (tempting as it is).

1) Uselessness
This is a killer problem for businesses of all sizes. Your site should aim to solve problems for your users by being genuinely useful. The concept of ‘Branded utility' is not new, but today it is more relevant and important than ever.

2) Egocentricity
Far too many corporate websites seem to be designed around their organisational structure rather than their customers' needs. This makes for a frustrating experience for customers, who don't care how your organisation is structured and just want to achieve what they came to do as quickly as possible.

3) Diffuse identity
What is your site's value proposition? Do you know? Is it clearly communicated to users as soon as they arrive on your site? There are billions of websites out there. You need to tell your users straight away why they should spend their time on your site rather than somewhere else.

4) Lost in translation
Taking analogue ideas and applying them to the digital world is a recipe for failure. Many websites are literally an online representation of a brochure. Is this really the most effective use of the medium? Does your site do things that would never be possible offline? Does it do them in ways that would never be possible offline? If not then you're probably missing out on big opportunities.

5) Selfishness
The best websites are generous to their users. They don't try and lock up their content on their site - they provide ways for users to share it. They don't hide their best ideas behind registration forms and paywalls - they give it away for free. If you're not being generous with your users, then why should they waste their time on your site?

6) Listening to tech people
Tech people have a frustrating tendency to solve every problem by focusing on technology before worrying about what the business or its customers need. To avoid this, Forrester proposes the POST model, which outlines the order in which you should think when establishing web strategies: People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology. Understand what your customers need first, what your business is trying to achieve second, and your strategy for meeting both their needs third. Then figure out the best technology solution.

7) Disrespectful irrelevance
Creating a site that isn't truly relevant to your users is disrespectful and a solid waste of everyone's time. This seems strikingly obvious but if you spend some time browsing the average corporate website you will be amazed at the irrelevant crap you'll find. Do your customers really care about your Occupational Health & Safety policy? Or the lengthy bio of your marketing director? Or are these just getting in the way?

8) Same same
You can't expect to attract a significant audience by creating something that is similar to your competitors. Users have endless distractions and short attention spans. Unless you offer them something unique that they can't get anywhere else, you'll be invisible.

9) Complexity
Creating overly complex websites can be an extremely costly error. You should aim to create the simplest thing possible that achieves both your needs and your customers needs. Ask yourself what Apple would do, not what Microsoft would do. Ask yourself "What can we take out?" not "What can we add?".

10) If you build it, they probably won't come
Finally, one of the worst mistakes of all: putting all your time, budget and energy into making the website absolutely perfect rather than figuring out how to promote it and make it successful. You can build the best website in the world but if no one ever finds out about it then you've wasted your time.

If I've made getting your web strategy sound difficult, that's because it is. It requires a deep understanding of your customers, a clear idea of your business objectives, and a relentless focus on creating something simple, relevant and useful. If you do these things right then you can't really fail.

The good news is that the execution part of building great websites is getting easier every day. Services like 99designs and SquareSpace make it easier than ever for small businesses to cost-effectively create excellent websites. This gives you more time to focus on getting the strategy right!

Alex Campbell is a strategy and planning consultant at digital agency, DTDigital.

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Becoming a Social Media Socialite

2009-10-07T00:51:00.001-07:00

Online social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Twitter are among the most popular social web networks for modern day socialites. Social media memberships continue to grow in popularity in all demographics, especially among teens and young adults. Whether you are one of the millions of users that use a social media site to keep in touch with friends and relatives, or a professional looking for work, there are numerous advantages of becoming a member of a social media outlet.

Facebook and Bebo rank first and third, respectively, among teenagers 13 years old and up. MySpace, ranking second, requires members to be 14 and older to become a member. Perhaps these social media sites are so popular among teens because it’s free fun and entertainment! With access to a computer and Internet access, members are just a mouse click away from connecting with friends, sharing favorite pictures and web links, playing games, and of course, engaging in exciting online conversations. Teens can also display their artistic skills by creating a unique personal profile to express personalities and add favorite photos to profile albums.

Although parents should be aware of their child’s online activity, social media sites provide a safe and secure environment for teens. The three networking sites mentioned above are considered to be among the safest. Facebook and MySpace also offer help and support features for newbies just learning to navigate the world of online social media outlets.

Parents also take advantage of free social media sites to stay connected with family members. Whether you have a child away at college or your siblings live in a different state, it’s easy to stay in touch by leaving a quick message on your loved one’s profile. Social media websites also allow you to conduct searches for family members that you may have lost contact with, or even a long-lost high school friend or old flame by simply searching by name, school or zip code. For those enjoying a retirement hobby and looking for someone to share particular interests, members have access to thousands of discussion groups to discuss a wide variety of topics.

Although many active members are under the age of 18, unemployed professionals and other career-minded individuals looking for advancement, utilize social networking sites to seek help. With unemployment rates approaching double digits in many states, posting resumes, digital portfolios or videos on Facebook is a practical and proven effective method to land a job! Most social media sites allow members to upload documents, video clips, personalized Website addresses, blogs, journals, forums, and classifieds to individual profiles. The popularity of online blogs and journals among professionals, politicians, and advocates continues to soar as the blogosphere caters to millions of online readers.

Others use networking sites for exactly what the name implies: networking. Social media users are notified of new friend requests, and the request may be accepted or rejected. Features such as a personalized friend’s list and events calendar helps to organize contact information and keep track of scheduled business meetings and other important dates.

Business owners also use social media sites for promotional and marketing purposes. Many non-profits also use sites such to provide “friends” and “fans” to keep up-to-date on announcements and current happenings. Social media sites serve as a free public relations tool for businesses and non-profits to reach target markets and population segments. Another great marketing feature of Facebook for example, allows users to create and publish advertisements. Customized ads attract thousands of potential customers for stagnate businesses or generous donors for non-profits.

Finally, Twitter is another very popular social media site. The simple and basic features of Twitter attract million of users. Unlike sites such as MySpace and Facebook, Twitter is a social network site that allows members to answer the question: “What are you doing?” Text answers are required to be fewer than 140 characters. Texts may be sent by logging into your Twitter account, accessible by the Internet, instant messages or mobile texting. Perhaps Twitter is best known for comments posted by celebrities in reaction to news-worthy, as well as popular entertaining current events.

There are numerous online social media websites in addition to Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, and Twitter. It depends upon what you expect from online networking when deciding which social media outlet is best for you. Whether you’re a celebrity or not, you can join the millions of other online socialites sharing everyday life with the world without leaving home!

To Your Success
Cody Moya

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Cody Moya writes about Internet Marketing Tips in his
Free Internet Marketing Courses. You can sign up for his free
Tips and get additional information at his
website: http://FreeInternetMarketingCourses.com

From the Team at WebWitches

Tags: Increase traffic site Internet seo Online internet marketing Online ranking Online seo

How to Boost Sales of Your Niche Product or Service

2009-10-06T15:21:00.001-07:00

When somebody visits the sales page of your niche website, they are looking for a solution to one of their problems, they have an itch and they’re looking for a way to scratch it. They are not there to buy your product… That is the last thing on their mind. Your website has got their interest and they’re checking it out, no more, no less.

Now it could be that they are in a bad mood and on that particular day they don’t like your writing style, or they might be late for another appointment and don’t have the time to fully read your sales page, what ever the reason they won’t be buying your product today… and then they’re gone. In fact most sales pages are lucky to convert 4 out of 100 website visitors into customers. That means 24 out of 25 visitors will leave your sales page without buying.

You’ve no doubt heard many times that the way to get around this problem is to get your website visitors to join your opt-in list so you can pitch them over and over again with your sales message. This is quite true, it’s the way to go, but just how do you get your website visitors to join your opt-in list?

It’s not that difficult, there are many ways to get your website visitors to join your opt-in list, and here are a few examples you can implement on your website today:

1) Place an opt-in form on your sales page. You need to place your opt-in form a few times on your sales page, you also need to make sure readers understand that you are providing some free information related to your niche product and they only way they can get it is by subscribing to your list, and the reasons people will opt-in can include:

i) Those visitors who are in a hurry and don’t have time to read your entire sales page will be inclined to join your opt-in list as a reminder to themselves to carry on checking out what you have to offer.

ii) Those people who can’t afford your product will sign up for more information from your free information series.

iii) Those people can’t decide on any course of action will sign up hoping you will help them make up their mind.

In all cases, if you had not provided an opt-in form on your webpage they would have left without subscribing, and you already know how difficult it is to get visitors to your website in the first place.

2) Place your opt-in form on a popup which displays either as soon as the webpage opens, or when it closes. Popups might be the cause of much controversy, but no matter what people think, they are effective. The new generation of popups and popunders are not easily blocked and in some cases cannot be blocked at all if the person is using Internet Explorer.

Fortunately the majority of internet users still use Internet Explorer, so these unblockable popups are the way to go. Just don’t make your popups a nuisance… Use them with cookie controls so they are only activated once per day or once per hour, and don’t use them on every page of your website. Some of the newer popups will only activate if the website visitor exits the sales page by closing the browser window or clicking the back button. If they go through to the sales process and purchase your product, they will never see the popup.

3) One of the most effective ways of getting people to subscribe to your opt-in list is to send them to a special opt-in form first. In other words nobody gets to your sales page unless they have subscribed to your list. These special opt-in pages are known, amongst other things, as “squeeze pages” or “name squeeze pages”.

These pages are the most effective at converting website visitors to subscribers and they don’t seem to affect a sales page’s conversion rate at all. If a sales page was converting 1 in 25 visitors to a customer, the introduction of a name squeeze page doesn’t seem to change that… For every 25 visitors to the name squeeze page 1 still becomes a customer. The difference is the number of people who subscribe is substantially higher than for any other opt-in method.

The point to bear in mind is that many of the subscribers to your list will buy your niche product from links in the autoresponder emails sent to them. If you had not been using an opt-in form you would never have had the opportunity to make these extra sales.

From the Team at WebWitches
www.webwitches.com.au

Tags: Increase traffic site Internet seo Online internet marketing Online ranking Online seo

Affiliate Marketing: Tips On How To Spot A Scam

2009-10-06T02:22:00.001-07:00

Many of us want new jobs with new opportunities. We are either bored with what we are doing at the moment and desire new challenges, or dislike the place we are currently working and desperately want a change. Many of us would love to run our own businesses. The freedom and independence that this brings, answering only to you and working when you want is an incredibly desirable thing. However, the reality of this materializing is slim to none in most people’s cases. Most of us don’t have the capital required to start a small business. Others are frightened off by the risk factor involved. Your steady income will be gone as well as the fact that nearly 90 % of all new businesses fail within the first year.

Affiliate marketing is a way around the risk and start up costs. Affiliate marketing costs nothing to join and the risk is minimal. You paid according to what you produce and not according to how the company is performing. There are many wonderful affiliate programs for you to get involved with, however as with anything one needs to be cautious.

Unfortunately, today we live in an age of internet and business fraud. Countless people loose large sums of money on these home business scams. Unfortunately, the world of affiliate marketing is not immune to this. While it is impossible to list every precaution a person should take, there are some signs that people can look for. These don’t always mean that the company is fraudulent but they should be looked into carefully.

Many lull themselves into a false sense of security when it comes to affiliate marketing programs. They feel that, there is no cost to them money wise so they have nothing to loose. However, this isn’t true. You may get away with no money being lost but you could lose loads of your next most precious commodity, that being time. You’re going to have to work very hard to build up your affiliate marketing business so you will want to be legitimate.

You should definitely ask the company for testimonials. Don’t rely on the ones that they post on their website. Anyone could have written these. Ask for names and addresses of people that you can contact to find out how the program worked for them. You can also try searching on your favorite search engine. By looking under scams or the company name, you’ll have a good chance of digging up any dirt that is there.

Read the testimonials carefully. If you find a few bad reviews, this shouldn’t put you off. Sometimes people just are not cut out for certain programs. If there is more good than bad then things are likely okay. You can also use these testimonials for advice on what to do and what not to do.

If you have problems finding information then this should be a warning. Good affiliate programs will have been around for a while and will have a track record. Resist the temptation to join up while the offer is still hot. If it is a good program it will still be there in 6 months time. If the product or service is worth having, there will still be plenty of profit to make out of it.

The lure of running our own businesses attracts many. However, the reality of what is involved stops most of us before we get started. Affiliate marketing is a way to work for you without the financial risk. There are many great affiliate marketing programs in existence today. However, there are also many companies that are fraudulent. When deciding who to go with, check for testimonials. Use the internet to dig up the dirt. Check the company’s track record. No track record at all can be as bad as a negative record. Beware of new companies. If they are worth it they will still be there in a few months time.

From the Team at WebWitches

Tags: Increase traffic site Internet seo Online internet marketing Online ranking Online seo

Hints and Tips for those new to SEO

2009-10-05T23:49:00.001-07:00

As you know, SEO refers to Search Engine Optimisation. It is the process of attracting traffic to your website to ultimately gain you profit. The process can seem a little daunting to newcomers, especially those who don’t come from a technical background.

Before you contact an SEO firm, you can do a bit of research into what your company would like to optimise, including:

• The keywords you want to appear in the search results for, 4-6 are generally focused on.
• Get a good indication of the traffic each word can achieve, this can be done using Google’s keyword tool and will help you pick the best keywords for your campaign. It will also give you an indication of how difficult top rankings will be to attain.
• Look at the trends of your keywords to gauge how they will grow over time. Google Trends and other services can give you an accurate indication of how your keywords have performed over the past few years, and a prediction of how they may fare in the future.

Now you have a good indication of what you want optimising, you can begin to look into other packages which all help with the overall effect of your campaign.

Blogs are one such service that can provide a great way of creating content for your website. This content allows your website to grow and provides useful information to the potential visitors you will gain.

A website redesign is another consideration to keep visitors on your website after the search engines have brought attention to your business. Converting these new visitors you gain through SEO to actual sales is an important factor towards increasing your profits.

From the Team at WebWitches

Tags: Increase traffic site Internet seo Online internet marketing Online ranking Online seo

www.webwitches.com.au

Google’s Experimental Homepage Fades To A Single Word

2009-10-05T20:29:00.001-07:00

We all know that Google is a big fan of minimalism, especially when it comes to its famous homepage, where it tries to keep its ‘word count‘ down to 28 words (actually, it looks like it might be up to around 30). Tonight, Google is apparently experimenting with taking that concept to a whole new level: the site is bucket testing a new effect that hides everything on the Google homepage aside from the search box and Google’s logo, only revealing the rest of the navigation elements with a nifty fade effect when you move your mouse.

There are a few notable omissions from the ‘fade-in’ homepage though — you’ll notice that the site’s “Google Search” and the famous “I’m Feeling Lucky” button are both missing. Update: We’ve gotten another screenshot where these two buttons do appear, so it looks like Google is testing multiple versions.

Don’t feel bad if you don’t have the new, highly streamlined page — this is apparently part of a Google bucket test, which means only a small subset of users have access to it. It’s entirely possible that the new design will never be released broadly too, so don’t get alarmed if you hate it.

Thanks to Elchanan Heller for the tip.

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Build a social networking site with Ning, socialgo

2009-10-05T19:41:00.001-07:00

There is good news of sorts on the economic front. If you believe Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, the recessionis likely over and the nation's economy is on the road to recovery. But for the small business owner who has had to weather the economic storm with diminished resources, the outlook isn't so rosy yet.
Cash-strapped small business owners are still scrambling to do more with less, including promote their product or service to the masses. One of the most effective ways you can do this is by building your own social networking site.
This might sound like a daunting task, but there are free online platforms that make it easy. Here are two that give you the power to market your product or service with a professional social networking site.

NING
There are more than 1.5 million social networking sites on Ning, making it a popular platform for struggling small business owners looking for ways to stretch their marketing budgets. Ning allows users to create sites in minutes. With a few clicks of a mouse, Ning users can create sites and push their products and services to thousands of people at once.
Locally, the University of Miami uses an invitation-only Ning network to welcome recently admitted Canes to campus. TravelSisters.com connects women from around the world who want to travel with each other on their Ning social networking site. And Illinois-based DoggieVogue.com sells branded products for dogs using Ning.
``We chose Ning because it's free, and as a small business owner in this economy, that was what really appealed to us,'' said Diana Picchi, owner of DoggieVogue.com. ``We created our Ning site this year, and it has allowed us to connect with a lot of potential customers. We've had a great experience with it.''
Created in 2004, Ning is easy to use and offers step-by-step instructions on how to create social-networking sites. The standard package is free, but if you can spare a little cash, Ning lets you do things like white-label your site for as little as $19.95 a month. This allows you to remove all Ning branding from your site and customize its layout. You also can mask the Ning URL you're given when you sign up and earn additional revenue by running your own ads on your Ning site.
SOCIALGO
Created in 2008, SocialGO is smaller than Ning with slightly more than 100,000 sites on its network. But it's easy to use, and you can still find thousands of potential customers on SocialGO from around the world.
``Small business owners can use SocialGO quickly and affordably to build a community around their product or business,'' said CEO Alex Halliday. ``We have a number of small networks owners who have successfully built up a community on our platform. Many have gone one step further and made it a profitable business in its own right.''
SocialGO has other features that are useful to small business owners who are not tech savvy.
``We offer billing technology that allows you to charge your members for access to premium content,'' said Halliday. ``There's also our Concierge Plan where, if you want us to, we build can the site for you and you just answer a few simple questions.''
Both SocialGO and Ning allow you to integrate social media into your site by syncing it to your Twitter feed or Facebook profile. You can also integrate video, blogs and community forums into your site.
So what are you waiting for? Even if you already have a website for your small business, create a social network and use it to drive traffic your site.
In the BizBytes 101 column, I will offer advice to AlmostFamous.com, a Miami-based startup company that connects aspiring recording artists and actors with record companies and studios.
Tasha Cunningham is principal of the Cunningham Group.

From the Team at WebWitches

Tags: Increase traffic site Internet seo Online internet marketing Online ranking Online seo

www.webwitches.com.au

Squidoo Now In Business To Help With Brand Management?

2009-09-25T19:47:00.001-07:00

Squidoo Now In Business To Help With Brand Management?

by Anissa Wardell on Sep 24

Fast Company has an article out about Seth Godin’s recent post entitled “Launching Brands In Public”. We recently posted about Squidoo thanks to Erin, but this new piece of the puzzle, makes it an even more interesting subject, especially if you are the Brand.

You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time.

But how?

Over the last few months, we’ve seen big brands (like Amazon and Maytag) get caught in a twitterstorm. An idea (one that’s negative to the brand) starts and spreads, and absent a response, it just spirals. Of course, Amazon can’t respond on their home page (they’re busy running a store) and they don’t have an active corporate blog that I could find, so where? How?

Enter Brands In Public. (To see the whole post visit Seth Godin’s Blog at the link above.)

Chris Dannen who wrote the article for Fast Company had these parting thoughts:

But by moving the “conversation” to a static website, the energy a company might put into a personal response instead goes into a PR campaign. That brings us full circle, to backward-looking company-customer relationships. The ultimate loser? The customer.

From the Team at WebWitches

Tags: Increase traffic site Internet seo Online internet marketing Online ranking Online seo

www.webwitches.com.au

21 Must-Follow Tips For Optimizing Time Spent In Social Media

2009-09-18T03:17:00.001-07:00

Several weeks ago, I revisited the 16 rules for social media optimization. Switching things up, today I thought it would be useful to approach this slightly differently and look at how to optimize time spent in social media.

These tips aren’t necessarily just for brands or companies to follow, rather they may prove even more useful for digital marketing professionals themselves. In the spirit of optimizing your time reading this, I’m going to keep the tips brief and to the point.

1. Aggregate social content about your company, brand or even yourself into a real-time feed using one of the many tools available to do this. Bring the relevant mentions to you instead of always searching for them.

2. Unfollow those who don’t add value or aren’t important to your network. This tip isn’t for a brand or company seeking to make themselves accessible to the world at large, but for you as a marketer personally. How many times have you logged into Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed – even just after a few hours of being away – and felt totally lost in the conversation. Unless you’re going to devote your life to watching the stream, make sure that who you’re following is actually worth your time.

3. Unsubscribe to all RSS feeds that aren’t unmissable. RSS is the perfect, simple way to keep track of relevant feeds, but over time your reader can become bloated. We’ve all logged into reader and seen Google display the euphemistic “1,000+ unread items” before. This isn’t very fun – so be sure to keep your subscription signal-to-noise ratio positive.

4. Learn to skim. As marketers, there just isn’t time to read everything fully. Learn to skim past the noise and recognize when there are conversations and content worth your time to read carefully. On the flip side, make your own content scanable to entice readers to skim. Done properly, this should increase engagement and draw people in deeper.

5. Establish a set of trusted sites to read frequently. No matter what niche you’re interested in, you absolutely must identify the trusted, valuable sites in that area. Read their content carefully, as in many cases, those at the top are the conversation starters for those in the tail. In other words: Following the leaders can keep you at the forefront of the greater conversation.

6. Audit your time. Calculate how much time you spend daily in different areas of the social web. It adds up, and no one is immune to losing time. Carefully audit just where your time is going and realign efforts to the areas that make a different in achieving objectives.

7. Automate where it makes sense, but do so carefully. Setting up feeds to auto-tweet when you add new content to your blog or share something in Google Reader may make sense. But careful not to automate things like direct messages, something that may irk those on the receiving end.

8. Analyze how people react to the content you create or share. Look at what content archetypes your community reacts to, learn from them, adjust and sharpen as you go forward.

9. Realize there is no information overload. Learn to navigate the unstoppable river of real-time and become a chief signal officer.

10. Become a search ninja. Search really matters to be ultra-successful in social, and knowing all the specific Google operators can help you get to what you need for your marketing efforts fast (such as content creation that requires research).

11. Consolidate your network presence, AKA the Seth Godin strategy. You don’t see him on Twitter. You don’t see him on Facebook. You see him on his blog, and he’s trained us all to go there and subscribe to get content. A diversified presence is not necessarily a better play if your ideas are remarkable.

12. Learn the ebbs and flows of content in a niche and what networks, sites and users matter. Get an understanding of how your corner of the web works, and in time you’ll develop an understanding for how it functions at the macro level.

13. Develop an efficient routine for your time spent in the social web. This will allow you to know how much time each set of tasks and updates take and allow you to become more efficient each day. With that said, as marketers it is also important to understand that we all use the web differently. So if you’re going to do this for efficiency’s sake, continue to explore other tools, trends and options. You can be efficient with your core functions but still experiment.

14. Make your processes simple. No one is going to argue against copy/paste being the best social media tool. There’s a reason for that: It’s dead simple. Make your time spent on social media as a participant and contributor as simple as the idea of copy-pasting content.

15. Use only the essential tools. With a constant slew of new apps being developed, it’s easy for marketers to get shiny new object syndrome. And while you should be trying new things out, you should get to the point you’re only using the tools daily that are essential to your core purposes in the social web.

16. Don’t multitask. If you want to do things like develop killer blog content, you have to turn off Twitter, walk away from email and focus. Social media makes it all too easy to multitask, but the results of your efforts will be sub-par compared to those who focus.

17. Cross-pollinate content sharing. Do things like sharing StumbleUpon or Digg links in Twitter – encourage users from one network to share content in another. Get creative with how you do this and make it subtle or even invisible.

18. Embrace imperfection. Part of social media means, well, being social. And our social interactions are by their very nature imperfect. Some of the best blogs on the planet are hardly perfect, but that’s not what makes them compelling.

19. Eliminate busy work. Identify where the valuable, creative opportunities are that resonate with your key audiences. Now focus there – the rest may be busy work that can be trimmed.

20. Qualitity over quantity – more participation does not trump higher-quality participation. As the social web continues to grow, this will only become more important.

21. Limit distractions. No one is going to deny that social media itself can be a distraction if you aren’t careful with your time. But limiting distractions by following the other tips listed and staying focused can make all the difference at optimizing time spent in the social web.

From the Team at WebWitches

Tags: Increase traffic site Internet seo Online internet marketing Online ranking Online seo

www.webwitches.com.au