Social Media Topics

Social Brand Visibility: Mister Wong

October 26, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Why call a service Mister Wong? It comes from the term “Wong the Web!” a reference to the practice of wonging, card counting strategy in Blackjack.

Mister Wong is a creation of a German company that initially wanted to take on Google. Started in 2006 the website allows customers to bookmark their favorite sites and use that list as a basic search engine. To find a site that is not on your list, you can search the bookmarks of other people. It is a peer recommended search engine that is meant to weed out the less interesting ones.

With their services users can:

Search and find the best website of a certain category.
Save and manage their sites.
Access the bookmarks from any computer.
Connect with Twitter and import links.

Management of the bookmarks can be done by accessing the website or by downloading a toolbar that allows you to bookmark without leaving the current page.

A relative newcomer, the service is available in German, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese and English, and is the leading social bookmarking service in Europe with over 50 million users in 2009. They claim to be the second largest bookmarking service in the world.

Mister Wong has a different approach than Del.icio.us for example. Mister Wong’s variation is more to the point with users creating groups on top of the groups created by tags. Here, just like in Reddit, users can vote with thumbs up or thumbs down, and the recommended site will rise or fall from the top of the list. You can also make friends through the site, create user profiles and show your latest stream of bookmarks and links.

Mister Wong is another website that uses human recommendations to get a site ranked. Unlike Google for example, where new information is scanned and placed by machines, Mister Wong and other bookmarking sites concentrate on allowing you to search less cluttered result pages in an attempt to save you time and compete with the big search engines.

Their dream, to be an alternative search engine, is not yet fulfilled. With more users, and more recommendations they eventually might be able to do just that. Another great visibility opportunity.

Issues and Concerns from Long Island Non-profits : Social Media Day of Giving

October 22, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

On October 19, 2010 a group of 22 agency representatives from nonprofits on Long Island came to Touro Law Center in search of support to better understand social media and how the digital age has changed the way the nonprofits service their organizations.

A few days later we’ve taken a few minutes to review just a few of the questions, concerns, and issues that the representatives from the nonprofit organizations brought with them to the “Social Media Day of Giving”

Are agencies risking bad comments when they create exposure on facebook and twitter?

The general consensus is that nonprofits just like businesses and individuals lost the ability to control their message without interruption a decade ago. While some have viewed social media platforms like Facebook and twitter as a potential risk, others have capitalized on the opportunity that it represents. While the legal position might caution the nonprofits from engaging in social media, business professionals, community leaders, and social media professionals urge nonprofits to engage in the opportunity that social media provides.

One of the concerns seems to rest with the ability of others to say things or post comments that the organization or nonprofit may not endorse or support. The concern goes as far as, to fear liability from participation or posting by others. While every professional can relate to the concern of what others may say, the new world of social media is about how you capitalize on those opportunities, and is what will make the difference in organizations for years to come. Participation provides the opportunity for viral exposure, which even when led by negative or unsupported posts, comments, ideas or issues, it still represents an opportunity for the nonprofit to display how they support and respond.

Are we liable for what others say?

Unfortunately there is no easy answer to this question. Like anything else, the ultimate interpretation is left in the hands of skilled lawyers and the courts.

Social media professionals would argue that we create an opportunity to open a dialogue and share ideas and emotions and events, what others do with that information we cannot be responsible for, nor can we control. Social media platforms like Facebook, twitter, and even service listings like Merchant Circle and Yelp are platforms that offer us opportunities to engage the general public as well as our members. When someone else takes it upon themselves to provide information they do so candidly without endorsement or support from those that have created the social media platform for which to discuss or topic was engaged.

Now it would just seem good practice that if you create this platform you would be responsible to manage it and monitor it to seize opportunities created by those that would produce information content which your organization does not endorse or support.

How Do we monitor what is said about us?

Ultimately within social media itself and monitoring of your brand and organization is done through everyday participation in social media. This means as you participate in platforms like Facebook and twitter your staff or organizers should be participating in such a rate that monitoring what is said and how it is said is a natural part of the social media interaction.

The hardest part of monitoring your organizational or brand comes from the fact that there is an infinite number of places, platforms and possibilities for others to post a comment or distribute information that may be in support or in contradiction of your organization’s mission or goals. There are lots of resources available to monitor your brand, organization, staff, or keywords throughout the Internet. Two such platforms that offer this opportunity are Google, using Google Alerts (free) you can set up e-mail alerts that will notify you when keywords you have selected have been used anywhere throughout the internet, when Google has crawled it. The second and far more robust option is Giga alerts and Copyscape. Giga Alerts offers a wide variety of monitoring tools for keywords, subject matter and content throughout the entire Internet and while it requires a monthly fee, it provides a priceless service to alert you to any activity taking place on the web in regards to any subject or content you wish to monitor. The other platform copyscape can provide support to organizations in regards to any original press releases blogs or other information in an effort to deter others from reproducing your content.

Online Donations, are they working?

Nonprofits and other organizations often point to their websites as a failure or disappointment in fundraising results. I have found this to be most true during political campaigns and large-scale social movements. While it may be possible that your website is not converting the online donations as you intend it to, it is also possible that your website is raising far more than you give it credit for.

Websites have been a constant evolution from their first introduction and will continue to evolve in purpose, function and monetization as time goes on. The initial purpose of the website was to be a professional extension of an individual that would represent any business organization or another candidate. As such the presence of a website alone may be contributing to fundraising indirectly. An example I often use is a political candidate’s website may offer the opportunity for you to donate to their cause, however the average donor for personal and political reasons would much rather contribute in person than over the Internet. While the website may not have captured the donation through digital means, it is reasonable to assume the existence of the website provided individuals the opportunity to learn an associate with the candidates cause and platform. This extension of the candidate through a website provided the opportunity to capture donations and raise funds that might not have been possible had the website not existed.

While there is no one way to prove that a website or social media campaign has produced fundraising results there are ways to draw plausible conclusions. In the case of a website using Google analytics, a free tool, an organization can monitor the amount of traffic that their website receives daily, weekly, monthly and compare their fund raising success with traffic generated by the website. Google analytics will also provide data that will allow you to track what sources created the traffic for your website. A simple example is direct traffic was likely done via word-of-mouth, whereas references from Facebook would clearly be an indication that something on this social media platform interested people enough to visit the website. While it is hard to prove the success of the website or social media in fundraising, it is a reasonable assumption that if fundraising efforts were more successful during a specific time, when traffic was increased to the website, that there is a correlation between the existence of social media and the website and the fundraising success.

What is the best platform for helping increase fundraising efforts?

There are many social media platforms that offer different opportunities that tailored to different groups of people, as such there is no magic bullet, no one way or platform that will provide fundraising success. Social media platforms are tools that can only be successful when you have chosen a successful message or niche which can be used to capture interest from people that utilize social media.

We cover a lot of information and services how do we cover it all on social media?

The purpose of the website is to be your broad information source. While others will argue that websites should be concise and target your specific mission, others believe the website is meant to be a source of information for everything and anything related to what you do. Social media on the other hand is most successful when you take specific issues and develop a campaign around that specific issue or cause allowing you to create a higher conversion rate from less of an effort.

When do you commit a full time person to Social Media?

It would seem to be the general consensus of social media professionals that successful social media campaigns never come from just one individual. There are many reasons why organizations want to embrace social media on many levels. The earlier concerns regarding monitoring what’s said and how it is said is one of the biggest reasons why no one person should be responsible for social media content. Much like call centers and phone banks, social media requires many individuals to participate and support one another in order to be successful.

What did I take away from this event?

Jeff Namnum explained that Social Media Professionals each bring something different to the table, “one of the great things about Social Media is we can disagree” in a way that is productive.

Special Thanks to my fellow volunteers at this event, as with every interaction I am confident that their input and support at the event helped influence how this blog article was developed.

Dafna Adler, Jaci Clement, Alan Z. Fromm, Farida Harianawala, David Neuman, Ilene Schuss, Sueanne Shirzay, Andrzej Sienko, George Torres, Marilyn Zayfert,Mo Krochmal and Jeff Namnum.
Touro Law Center provided the support, facilities and overall hospitality for the event. Thank You.

Promoting a Small Business Without Breaking The Bank

October 21, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

How do you promote your small business while staying afloat? All you need is a little ingenuity!

The classic promotions options are print, television media and direct campaign. You might think that all these options will cost money, and that you need a large budget to get your message across. Without spending an incredible amount of money, you can attract customers, and have ready to use custom recorded video content for future use, as follows:

Cut costs by using your own employees in place of models for print and television Ads. It’s more believable and you stand a better chance of being noticed and remembered.
Obtain a database of email address and send your company’s information with links to your site via emails for direct campaign.
Put up your promotional videos on your website, with additional content and offers that people can read and watch. Always make sure that your website loads fast, and don’t use too many graphics and heavy content that might slow down the experience for your customers.
Spend a little to ensure more traffic to your website. With more traffic you can usually expect more sales.
Use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to advertise your products and services. Even though too many companies are doing this nowadays, you can still garner eyeballs if you package your company’s identity realistically.

What you need to do is to combine guerrilla marketing with traditional advertising strategies to gain exposure and get paying customers by letting the current technology work for you instead of against you. Create interesting and entertaining under 3 minute videos and post them on your site; while you’re at it, you may as well upload them on video sites such as YouTube. Most video sites are free; by posting your videos online, you can create exposure for your company. Make sure that your video titles contain keywords that are commonly searched by people.

Focus on your demographic; who do you want to target? If you know this already, well and good. If not, consult a good advertising agency to help you define your correct demographic. When you’re on a budget, focusing on your exact target audience will get you more paying customers.

Optimize on television broadcasting by purchasing media time in any locality on any cable network. By doing this, you can run a local cable television advertising campaign in many different cities at the same time. For example, if you know that most of your customers live in large cities, focus only on them. By doing this you can bring down your advertising budget. A national television campaign is way more expensive than a cable TV campaign, and is not as effective either.

Social Brand Visibility: BibSonomy

October 20, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Many sites are actively advertising in search engines for the most valuable search queries. This high level of competition tends to result in high advertising costs which make it difficult to find attractive advertising opportunities. Resource sharing provides new ways of organizing and sharing information on the web and provides advertisers with another way for Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

BibSonomy is a social bookmarking system that allows users to bookmark and share their favorite sites and publication in a collaborative manner.

The bookmarking is easy, just as it is done on the regular browser, but it saves all the bookmarks to the BibSonomy site, which enables accessed from any computer. Users tag their ‘finds’ and can look at what others have tagged and viewed, in a social networking manner.

The uniqueness of BibSonomy is that it goes further than just being a social bookmarking system. It allows for publication sharing. It is what they call ”A team oriented publication management”.

It offers users the ability to store and organize their publications and supports exchange and integration of different people by offering a social platform for literature exchange.

Both bookmarks and publication can be tagged to help find information. A description can be freely chosen. The assignment of tags from different users creates a new vocabulary called ‘folksonomy’. It evolves from the participants of research groups, individual users and learning communities organizing their information needs. Folksonomies became popular on the web in 2004 as part of social software applications. The word is a mix of the words “taxonomy” and “folk” and allows an intuitive structure for navigating the data.

Developed by a team of students and scientists at the “Institute of Knowledge and Data Engineering” and is hosted by the University of Kassel in Germany.

While about 55% of visitors to the site come from India, it is also popular in the Philippines. The use of this site in the United States is at about 8% only, but is growing rapidly.

Social Brand Visibility: Mixx

October 18, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Mixx is a user-driven social media site that combines social networking and bookmarking with web content, blogging and personalization tools.

There is so much information of the web these days that we don’t have the time to find the good stuff that interests us or is important to our business. Who knows better than you what informs you, what makes you think, what makes you laugh?

With Mixx you can be in charge. Using YourMixx you can tailor the content categories, specific users and groups and see the top-rated content as chosen by you and people who share your passions. It is like whipping up your own version of the web. Just tell the site how you like it and they’ll deliver the best the web has to offer—whenever you want it. You can create a personalized blend of web content that includes text-based articles, images and videos, using either free-form or pre-determined meta tags to define items by subject matter or geography.

The content on Mixx comes from various online sources. Mixx is in partnerships with a growing list of online publishing outlets that include CNN.com, USA Today, Reuters, The Los Angeles Times and The Weather Channel.

Mixx users can also follow other users with whom they share common interests, as well as create, join and invite other Mixx users to private groups to further share and discuss relevant items among peers.

There are a few methods you can use Mixx: –

Mixx Channels – Publishers of content must fight to be noticed. Mixx Channels enable companies to gather topical chatter and shared stories, photos, and videos into one place, an experience that cuts through the noise and delivers relevant content and information.

Mixx Sitebox – Promotes increased engagement and recirculation. It allows users to get a box of their favorite news channel and see what others have chosen and how much interested the news bit has generated.

Mixx Sifter – The Mixx community gives direct feedback on advertising. The better ads will get impressions – not based on how much is paid, but on how positive the feedback is from users.

An advertiser uploads five different ads, in virtually any format. Mixx then invites its frequent users to review those ads, rate them and provide direct private feedback. The most popular ad is then run on the site. Mixx is highlighting the value of direct feedback to advertisers.

Social Bookmarking Sites – Blinklist

October 13, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Using the big search engines; Google, Yahoo, and Bing has become a way of life for us. Google became a verb in the English language. The problem with the search engines is the amount of information they present. If you want something specific it is sometimes like searching for a needle in a hay stack.

The main reason, apart from the wealth of information, is the indexing system which is done by machines. What will happen if all those pages were vetted by humans, not machines?

Social Bookmarking provides that vetting.

Social bookmarking sites allow the users to choose the website they like, bookmark them, tag them, categorize them and share them with others. Other users can pass them on to their groups of friends, and the word spreads. It is a way for like-minded users to rank and store websites, articles, blogs and videos.

Blinklist is one of those sites that proved to be very affective.

With an extremely simple and free registration, Blinklist installs a button on your toolbar. In a few quick steps you export all your existing bookmarks to their site.

You have entered a world of human interaction. You can see what others have bookmarked, you can check what is the most bookmarked page in a certain topic, you can see what your friends found interesting and you can rate their finds.

And by going to their site, you can access your bookmarks from any computer. That is a great feature when you want to show your friends, your coworkers or your boss something interesting you have found.

Blinklist enables you to save a copy of the web page on your computer. If the website disappears or is blocked you still have a copy. You can bookmark articles you are interested in reading later, a copy is saved on your computer and you can read it even when you are offline.

Social Bookmarking has become a great way to increase the visibility of your website, articles, blogs or product and is increasingly incorporated in an effective marketing campaign. It provides an instant statistics tool that enables you to measure, assess and learn what is working and what does not.

To use social bookmarking to your advantage you need to know which sites cater to your target audience, especially if you are dealing with affiliate marketing programs, or specific blogs. Birds of feather flock together, they say, and so do internet users.

Reddit- News Before it Happens

October 12, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Another way of finding what’s new and interesting on the World Wide Web, is call Reddit.

Launched in 2005 by two 22 year old graduates from the University of Virginia, Reddit is a social network news website, for, as they call it “News before it happens”. Users can post news that is happening right now in their area, before it gets to the big news organizations. They can post links to content they like on the internet and comment on what others have found. They can also comment on the comments and rank them. With a simple response of like or dislike users mark their interest in the story posted. Every positive reaction gets a +1, every negative reaction -1. The more positive reactions a comment or link gets, the higher up the link goes. The front page is constantly in motion as new stories are uploaded and voted on.

Since 2008, Reddit is an open source community of more than 370,000 where postings get indexed not by crawlers as is the case with search engines, but by users, based on interests, not keywords.

Reddit content is divided into sub-categories; pics, funny, politics, WTF, gaming, science, world news and more and is a good place to find popular articles or have a discussion. It is a place where you can market your own blog and get instant reactions.

The effectiveness of Reddit has been tested after the earthquake in Haiti. The community of Reddit users raised $185,000 for the victims of the earthquake.

Another example is about to happen. In September 2010 a Reddit poster started a campaign to persuade Stephen Colbert to have a rally in Washington DC. The idea was described in a post talking about a dream the poster had.

The idea resonated with the community and webpages and Facebook groups have been created. Social networking machine started spreading the idea. Colbert acknowledged the momentum and the followers, to prove that they are serious about it, managed to raise $100,000 in 24 hours to support a charity where Colbert sits on the board of directors.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are heading rallies in Washington DC on October 30, 2010 – a direct result of a campaign that started on Reddit.

Colbert challenged the community even more. He wanted to help teachers around the country get supplies for their classrooms, something that used to come out of the teacher’s pockets. Within 3 days the community raised $250,000.

The power of social networking sites has become a force to be reckoned with. Reddit in particular leverages its own network to rank and recognize the validity of what’s being shared. This gives Reddit added value to those looking for information that is relevant based on real user reviews and not spam.

Do You Bebo?

October 6, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Bebo is a social network that is very popular in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand and is said to be the 3^rd social network in the US.

In existence since 2005, Bebo enables users to create profiles, watch videos, listen to music and connect with their friends. In 2008 Bebo had over 34 million users and 7 billion page views per month.

The company was bought by AOL in 2008 for $850 million and was sold to Criterion Capital Partners in 2010 for a fraction of that amount.

Bebo aims to be the next generation High School and College social network. Users can blog, listen to music, share information, photos and videos. Their unique feature is called Bebo Bands and it enables bands and artists to upload their music or videos on the site and reach their fans immediately. A band profile, for example, includes the names of the band members, list of fans, and has an area for announcements such as tour dates, special appearances on TV etc. A blog for the band to write their comments and a list of songs they have uploaded for free. When fans want to have other tracks, Bebo will connect them directly to the iTune store.

Members can see the updates their friends made to this site or to other social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Flicker when those friends linked their accounts to Bebo.

Bebo can create groups as well, people that graduated from a certain school for example, and the group is accessible only to the group members, similar to what Yahoo has.

In 2008 Bebo added a mobile application that can be accessed from any mobile phone on any network. Up until then, it could have been reached only by O2 Ireland and Orange UK.(Hence the popularity of the site in those countries)

This year, Bebo was ranked at number 11 out of the most popular social networking websites by eBizmba.com, with 7 million unique monthly visitors. A big decline from 34 million they had in 2008. It seems their purchase by AOL did not work out as well as most thought, but now, it might rise again.

AOL Lifestream Aims to Stream your Social Life

October 5, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

These days of information overload, a new class of ideas and companies have come into being. Those are the information aggregators, those who want to save you time by doing what they think you want to be doing.

Take AOL Lifestream for example; there are many social networks and sometime we have different friends in different networks. The more isolated we become, the more connected we want to be. It takes time to check and update them all. AOL Lifestream enables you to put all your social networks in one place for a quick check and update. It provides full visibility to your Social Brand!!!

AOL Lifestream was first introduced as part of the IM (Instant Message) system, but was re-launched later as a standalone application. It is available through a website, an AIR application, iPhones and Android phones.

This is how it works: – Let’s say you have friends on Facebook, you follow people on Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flicker etc. Lifestream will put all those connections in one place and you can see alerts from different friends and posts about your various interests without going to the individual site, logging in and waiting for the page to load. It allows you, of course, to publish back on those social sites as well.

Another advantage of the Lifestream is that it can be accessed through smartphones, making you continuously connected to your friends. You can take pictures with your phone and upload them immediately to all your social networks.

Another application allows you to follow your friends and see where they are at the moment. Using GPS and the status updates, you can see, on one screen, where your friends physically are at the moment. Are you around the corner from each other? Near by? Have time for coffee?

Their new feature and what makes Lifestream unique is the ability to follow places not just people. Let’s say you have a place you like to visit frequently like a corner bar or ice cream parlor. You can see, at any time which of your friends is currently there, if he chooses to post it.

Lifestream is simple to use, mobile, intuitive and useful. It’s a social network all on its own and an integrating system that lets you have all your friends in one place.