Content Marketing

Facebook Changes & Facebook Timeline: Successful Social Media Disaster [OPINION]

September 22, 2011 by Basil Puglisi 2 Comments

Often the missing element in successful social media is emotion. Why do millions flock to social media every hour, but only a few engage?

Traditional businesses have missed the mark, and Facebook’s recent changes are an example of how important it is to hit the mark, even if it seems contrary to your brand.

Facebook’s changes in September 2011 should mark the most “Successful Social Media Disaster” of the Social Media Revolution. At every turn the top topic inside of Facebook is Facebook’s changes. While the overwhelming majority are quick to criticize, most have failed to realize that the change is creating the most talked about event in social media history, well in social media anyway.

How did Facebook create a “Successful Social Media Disaster”

Anger! The keystone to successful social media is emotion. While thousands of would be social media experts flood our networks with useless posts every day, the small group that manages to actually capture our attention are the ones that are unconventional and tap into our emotions.

Facebook did not make its changes slowly, it didn’t even transition people into the new features. Facebook’s policy was a flat out “here you go, deal with it”. This change and introduction captured one of the key emotional states in social media. While others lay claim to Google+ being the big winner having opened their G+ network to everyone in the same week, all the talk or buzz is Facebook!

Opening the Google+ network to everyone should have been an event that created buzz for Google. This G+ buzz should have lasted over the course of at least a few weeks, allowing it to capture articles and feedback from both followers and critiques, but Facebook’s move cut that off cold. G+ might get a mention here and there among the articles, but Zuckenburg has stolen G+’s thunder and managed to evolve his social network in one swoop.

The purpose of this article is not to support or criticize the changes to Facebook, but to highlight the importance of emotion in social media, and how Facebook has used it to trample Googles G+ public launch. How Facebook uses this to their brands advantage is another story. Most politicians claim there’s no such thing as bad PR, only bad PR managers and brand storytellers who fail to capitalize on the spotlight. This would seem to be the case with Social Media, most are better having something being said then nothing at all, then you can direct and capitalize on being talked about in one fashion or another.

Enter Facebook Timeline:

This new feature looks to be the family, tree and life story publication of YOU! No Publisher needed!

Get Timeline NOW! Click Here!

***Your timeline is now live — Developer Release****

****Please note: During the developer release, only other developers will be able to see your new timeline. Everyone else will see your old profile.***

PS: Looks like there’ll be no way to hide who you are ever again!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CYATYjk5N4&feature=player_embedded]

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6 of the Best Guest Posting Tips

September 21, 2011 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

Guest posting can be a very lucrative venture for all parties involved. The owner of the blog is provided with free content, and the writer of the content is given acknowledgement of their wisdom on the chosen topic. In this aspect, guest posting seems to benefit both parties equally. However, it can be just as difficult to find high-quality blog owners who will allow guest posting, as it is to find high-quality writers to make guest appearances on your blog.

Keeping in mind a few helpful guest-posting tips can be beneficial for all involved and will help to produce the highest quality content that will reflect well on both the blog owner and the content creator.

Posting Tips for Guest Bloggers

Aim High – Look for highly traveled blogs or those with impressive page rankings. These links will also be highly valuable portfolio material.
Research the Blog – In order to create what is fresh content for the blog, you will need to know what content has already been created. If the blog is a lengthy one, check for tag clouds or keywords on the topics that are the same as your posting idea.
Catchy Title – Catchier content. Be sure that you supply an eye catching title for your content, and make just as certain that the content lives up to the title. A good blogger knows that even the most boring topic can be made interesting with the right language.
Give Your Best Stuff Away – This may be a hard concept to swallow for some bloggers but you want your guest posts on any blogs to be the most shining examples of your work. Not only will this garner the blog owner increased traffic or interest in their site, but it may also cause others to take notice, and perhaps even offer you paying gigs.
Interact – Reply to commenters and pay attention to your re-tweeters. Get involved and make sure that you are available to ponder any issues about your blog posts with others who may be doing the same. Building a rapport with readers is valuable regardless of the blog posted on. Thanks to social media, people with similar interest or interest in you, can find you with a simple click once you have engaged them on site.
Promote Your Posts – Promoting your own post is never more important than it is when posting on someone else’s site. Show them that their effort to give you a great link in exchange for great content has not gone unnoticed. Tweet, share, Digg, and do all you can to make sure the posts receives all of the coverage that is in your power to create.

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Turn Your Social Media Content into Something Incredible with FeedFabrik

September 13, 2011 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

By now most folks who use the internet for work, play, or both, are likely to have generated a bit of personal or business content on their social media sites. Blogs, videos, articles, tweets, and more have their own special place online for quick and easy access when you need to reference them, share them, or simply enjoy viewing them.

What if you could take your already available content and give it a shiny new cover? What if you could avoid the inevitable process that most all content suffers from as it gets old, left behind, and falls into Internet Purgatory, likely never to be seen (easily) again.

FeedFabrik to the Rescue

FeedFabrik offers the ability to capture your own digital life and turn it into a proud display in a couple of different ways.

Create Your FriendPoster

Users can integrate with their Facebook account to quickly create a FriendPoster. This poster displays all of your social network friends by listing them on the date of their birth with their current profile picture. Users can choose from five different display theme styles as well as selecting different options for saving the creation. FriendPoster comes in:

PDF
Poster
Desktop Wallpaper

It will also be available with gift voucher options very soon.

Make a BlogBook

Turning your blog into a book may have endless possibilities. However, doing so has long proven to be a process usually full of bugs and issues and, in general, difficult to manage while retaining an aesthetically pleasing document. FeedFabrik’s blog book creator can smoothly turn your current blog into a well-designed book. FeedFabrik has full integration options on:

Blogger
WordPress.com
Self-Hosted WordPress Blogs
Typepad
Tumblr

Your book is prepared for you automatically and is ready in just a few moments. Users are free to take advantage of the customization options to tweak the book’s originality.

FeedFabrik has much to offer those who utilize social media on a regular basis and has several shining selling points when it comes to those who work in the publishing industry.

Alexa shows a 1500% increase in traffic views over the last three months and is currently ranked at #486,284 in the world with most users spending an average of three minutes on site.

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Develop Your Brand with Daylife

September 6, 2011 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

Providing consumers with cloud features including on-demand media options, DayLife is supplying their users with more features, functionality, and faster cycling. A comprehensive solution that is designed for digital publishers who may require the freedom to focus on creative experiences instead of constant publication input.

How Does DayLife Work?

DayLife provides a Publisher’s Suite that supplies the patented engine that helps users to analyze, ingest, and process digital media from the cloud. Uploading your media to the cloud begins a long process of collation, normalization, and data parsing. After the parsing process rich layers of intelligence and meta tagging data are incorporated into your content which will allow it to then become searchable.

Regardless of the type of content, DayLife dev’s assure users that their content will be processed and returned to them with added value. DayLife actually crawls the web like Googlebot, while retaining a direct focus on sites and content that provides high-value, frequently updated content.

Smooth Delivery

After DayLife’s system parses and analyzes the content, they will then deliver all of the power of media and intelligence straight to the user. Users can utilize their DayLife Dashboard, or APIs. The dashboard will provide a single user-interface to enable accessibility of the cross-referenced media. In turn, this enables further functionality allowing the creation, customization, and management of app deployment.

DayLife users also get full access to Publisher Suite APIs. These widely varied and well-tested APIs are customizable and best yet, have no hidden integration costs. However, Publisher Suite is not a CMS. It is designed to smoothly integrate with the setup you are already using.

Supply a Robust Source of Reliable Information

DayLife provides their users with a source of management, analysis, and content composition that will enable them to present their current content in more highly viewable and frequently utilized manners. DayLife also has a variety of WYSWIG tools for specific platform accessibility.

DayLife technologies allows content creators, bloggers, publishers, and developers to try their own hand at helping to develop new user-end experiences by helping to leverage news-based content.

Who Can Use DayLife?

DayLife is an element of a business that may need to be handled by an IT department simply due to the programming languages utilized in creating the APIs. Those who have knowledge of languages such as:

RUBY
PHP
Cold Fusion
Perl
.Net

Although these languages are a bit more intensive than common HTML, users need not be IT specialist to learn how to manage them. Those with a general idea of what it takes to manage the above languages may be able to handle this element of their sites content aggregation campaign on their own.

What are the Benefits of DayLife?

Users can easily enhance their news content by applying proactive and supportive measures such as relating links or headliners, on any created topic.
DayLife can help users to generate new content, provide helpful and relating links, quotes, photos, headlines, and timelines.
Enable the recirculation of content from available affiliate publications or other relevant content around the web.
Help to create and nurture the end-users experience.

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Twitter Teams Up with the Weather Channel Social

August 26, 2011 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

On August 11^th, The Weather Channel integrated weather forecast and news with the social media realm. Those who frequent The Weather Channel website for news on local weather can now sign into the site via their Twitter account to catch and share tweets from those in their area. Users can also spread tweets across TWC’s mobile, web, and television platforms.

Tweets gathered on the site can range from those provided by local news channel Twitter accounts, to individual residents reporting conditions in their areas. Although non-weather related information can also be aggregated by this system when weather related wording is used, the value in providing up-to-the-minute weather forecast for specific areas may even be lifesaving.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bg55iKtwxw]

Twitter Proves to Be a Powerful Tool for News on Natural Events

The East Coast has already been the recipient of Natures unpredictable temperament this week, and it seems they are to face it once again with Hurricane Irene bearing down. Along with Nature’s wrath, the deluge of tweets sent out within the initial moments during the quake proves that at least in 2011, US Twitter users quickly flock to the social media network in times of uncertainty.

Animated Map of Tweets from Eathquake

Weather-related events can certainly inspire tweet frenzies, TWC reports that:

Significant weather events can generate over 2 million tweets per day
Active weather events can initiate somewhere between 300 and 500 tweets per minute that are weather related
On average days, users in the United States send out around 200 weather related tweets each minute

Weather may be the ultimate social content, as it is always guaranteed to trigger conversation.

The Mobile World

In the mobile world, TWC has an iPhone app that features tweets on local forecast pages with feeds of real-time Twitter post from The Weather Social page. Users can participate in Twitter conversation directly from the app.

The Weather Channel TV Programming

During live dedicated programming segments, weather-related tweets will also show up before, during, and after broadcasted weather reports. During significant weather events, TWC Social will supply users with a powerful tool that will provide The Weather Channel with the ability to tell the full story on how weather events are unfolding in their local areas.

WiredSet

Powered by technology from WiredSet, the Weather Channel Social can analyze Twitter conversations using a platform that designates refined algorithms to help recognize social conversations about weather events in real time.

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