@BasilPuglisi

Content & Strategy, Powered by Factics & AI, Since 2009

Social Media Social Brand Visibility

Using Social Bookmarking To Rise Your Small Business Through The Ranks

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We all know that there are quite a few different ways to promote your company using all of the amazing resources that we have available to us now with the internet. One of the best ways for you to get your company noticed is through social bookmarking which allows you to get your social blog or personal business website ranked. This ranking system lets you and your business partners get noticed quickly and build the popularity of your small business.

Digg & StumbleUpon

There are two very popular social bookmarking websites that have millions of users search for things that interest them each and every day. Digg is probably the most popular these days because it allows users to interact with each other and share tips on how to get their own blog or website looked at more often. StumbleUpon is another very popular website that does similar things to Digg, but also has some audio and video options to compliment the chat style that Digg has. These websites have really led some companies to turn the corner and head toward years of prosperity.

Be Aware of Spammers

Like is the case with many other social and open sourced websites, you will have to pay close attention to and watch out for spam web links. There are always going to be those people out there that want to infiltrate your website and even cause it to shut down. Whether it is competitive businesses or just a few hackers trying to get their kicks, you must to aware at all times as to what type of activity is going on on your website. It is not always the easiest thing to monitor, so you should also try looking into hiring yourself a WebMaster if at all possible.

Find Some Assistance

There are a few things that you should know in regards to getting your website and company noticed. These things are very simple and, in many cases, deal with common sense problem solutions. First, make sure to have some of your friends and family members help you out with raising the awareness amongst the community about your website. Maybe not everyone will be interested in what you have to sell, but at least they will know that your small business exists. Secondly, do a little bit of research as to how you can get your website affiliated with other more popular ones on the internet. This will drastically increase the chances of you getting yourself noticed.

Social bookmarking is making a huge difference in how people network their businesses around the world and will continue to assist in building these smaller companies into huge conglomerates. There will be more of these websites popping up all over the internet, so keep your eyes peeled for them to open up and jump on board.

Interlude.fm – Interactive Video

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Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could interact with music videos? If you could decide which of the musicians in the band you would like to follow?  If you could choose which version of the song you’d like to hear?

And if you could do that, where will the road lead in brand recognition and advertising?

Yoni Bloch thought it could be great. The young Israeli musician, who happens to be a computer geek, gathered his computer savvy friends and posed these questions to them.

A year and a half later, Interlude.fm came into being. It was first presented at the Techonomy convention in May 2010, and is now gathering more and more interest.

What Interlude does is allow you to choose your adventure and influence what you see. While watching a music video, you are asked, from time to time, to make a choice who you would like to follow.  When you do, you will see a different version of the video than you’ve seen the first time. The beginning and end always stay the same, and the music continues seamlessly without interruptions.

To understand what it means, let’s assume the video takes place at a party. Like in the demo shown at the convention, you can see what happens at this party from different angels, by choosing to follow different band member each time. At times you are being asked you if want to hear the music in a different style, a cappella as opposed to instrumental, for example.

You make your own version of the video, following band member A, then switching to see what band member B is doing, than to a girl dancing in the middle of the room. You can review your version of the music video, download it to your computer and share it with friends on other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or your blog. There could be hundreds of versions of the same song, the same video, constructed by different people, who share it with one another.

What does it do? From publicity, advertising and brand recognition point of view doing all that prolongs the time a person interacts with the product. When videos are concerned, it triples, on average, the viewing time. The song itself is played many times as the viewer chooses a version of the video he likes best. The product is displayed longer and by being able to influence events, a feeling of familiarity is created.

Interlude.fm took it a step further. Another application of the program targets commercials; If you are looking at a car advertisement, for example, which shows a silver car driving down a road between high rises in an urban setting, you can opt to change the color of the car and you can choose to change the setting in which the car is driving. Now a red car is shown driving by the ocean or in a rural area. You can interact with it; change it over and over again with a simple click of the mouse.

Another feature of the program is the ability to instantly compare versions of the same song, and navigate from song to song to see how different artist performed the same song. Again, the move from one video to the other is done seamlessly without losing a beat.

The best part? Interlude.fm technology can be embedded on any corporate or designed website. The customer can provide the video footage and keep complete creative vision of his product, or he can take advantage of the production services of Interlude.fm to create new footage.

Intelude.fm allows users to create unique versions of a video, using pre-recorded video/audio, and share it quickly and easily with their friends. Users can compare versions and decide which one they like best. The end result will always be greater use, greater play and greater interaction with your product.

Google bookmarks

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Google Bookmarks allows its users to bookmark their favorite pages and save them remotely so they can be accessed from any computer with a use of a password.

Why is this service important? You do not have to have your computer with you when you want to show something interesting you have bookmarked.

If your computer crashes, you have a place to go to and retrieve all the bookmarked pages you had.

Lists are private by default, but once you’ve created one you can share it with specific friends or even publish it. Google allows the users to post their bookmarks and share them with others.

Sharing lists can help you collaborate with your friends on common interests or activities.

With Bookmarks, you can also organize your content using labels and/or lists. Like labels, lists let you organize your bookmarks into categories for easier retrival.

Social Brand Visibility: Tumblr at Your Service

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A different kind of social media can be found in a site called Tumblr. They declare themselves as being the easiest way to express yourself. How can you do it? By quick and easy blogging.

Tumblr was co-founded by David Karp and Marco Arment in 2007. It emphasizes its customization and ease of use, with a simple sing up and log on. No need for knowledge in the world of coding and computer language. Each user gets his own tumblelog where he can post his thoughts and feeling.

Posting can be done either by text, quote, picture, video, link, audio or chat. Participants follow other members’ tumblelog, just like it’s done on Twitter, for example.  Updates of the people you follow appear on the dashboard in one stream.

Users can “like” a post to let other users know what they found interesting and reblog it on their own tumblelog. They can comment on posts and start a conversation.

When it was launched, 75,000 bloggers left their previous platforms and converted to Tumblr almost immediately. Since then, more than 3 million users joined in. Tumblr has mobile apps that let bloggers blog from wherever they are.

As of the beginning of 2010, the site averages 2 million posts a day. With 15,000 new users joining every 24 hours, it is still growing rapidly.  What’s more, it has a retention rate of 85%, compares with Twitter’s 40%.

Tumblr is amazingly fast and processes 10,000 posts an hour. It lets you update post to your Twitter and Facebook accounts as well. All their services are clearly offered on the front page and are, as they promised, easy to use.

Social Brand Visibility: Do You Digg It?

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“A place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web.” This is how Digg calls itself.

A user driven social network site, everything on Digg has been submitted by members. Other users can vote on the submission and the most popular stories go up to the top and are displayed on the front page. In its initial version, in 2004, you could also bury a story by digging it down. In later versions this feature has been deleted. Of course viewers can leave comments about what they saw.

If you want to know the hottest news and what people are talking about at the moment, Digg will provide that. “The power of breaking stories before anyone else”, is how one of the founders, Kevin Ross, calls it.

The front page of Digg contains the title of a story others have found interesting, a short description and a link. One click will get you to read the whole story. You can customize your home page by deciding which major news media you would like to follow and your areas of interest. The categories include business, entertainment, gaming, lifestyle, offbeat, politics, science, sports, technology and world news. A story that has wide interest and posted on Digg has been known to crash a site or two.

As of November 2010, Digg is ranked 125th in website traffic, with unique monthly visitors standing on 15.1 million. It is estimates that 34% of the site users are from the United States, where it ranks # 74 and it is even more popular in Pakistan where it ranks #18.

Visitors to Digg.com view on average 4.4 unique pages per visit.

Word of Mouth Goes a Long Way

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What is social media, really? It is a way for people to connect without taking into consideration physical distances and limitations. It is a way for people to ‘hang out’ together without leaving their homes.

It is also a way to broadcast to the world, in 140 characters or less, how you think and feel at the moment and what are doing or about to do.

Social media can be also used to wade through all the sea of information that is at our fingertips. Peer recommendation narrows the playing fields. People can share things they have discovered, create lists which can be exchanged and used as a specialized search engine. Social media enables people talk about the events of the day, news or gossip, and share their expertise with other people.

That is where social media and small business interact. A good word of mouth can go a long way.

To be affective in a social media campaign there are few things you should know before jumping in:

Be relevant to your audience. If you are creating campaigns that are meant to be seen around the world, make sure it will be understood by the market you aim to engage. Look at the twitter campaign of a company like Dell, for example.

Build credibility and trust. Let people know you on those social circles, forums, blogs and groups in your niche before you jump into selling. Establish yourself as an expert in your field. Be consistent and answer questions in a timely manner.

Listen to what people have to say, adjust and improve. That is one of the great benefits of social media. You can hear loud and clear what your target audience wants and talks about. Whole Foods has a Twitter account that is very active and used to post actionable advice. (i.e. “Bring it back to the store and we will…”)

Be visual and fun on your social media pages, if it fits your brand.  Look at what McDonald did on their Facebook pages or what Carl Jr. does on their YouTube channel.

Show your customers you care about them and about your product. Convince them you are there to improve their lives. Provide tips, Q&A and advice. Look what Nike does on their blog as an example.

Transparency. Show people that you take their advice seriously. There might be ideas in those posts you haven’t thought of. Starbucks, for example, has a website for ideas and they show where this idea is at the moment; under review, reviewed, coming soon etc. People know they are not wasting their time posting. This is a way to build a community.

Consistency.  You have to keep the brand alive and create familiarity. You’ll have to be active and update regularly.

There are many examples of successful social media campaigns done by big companies. American express, for example, did a short campaign to win a few VIP Glee Experience Tour tickets and got 250,000 requests. Papa Jones is working with Facebook, creating competition for creating a new pizza that will eventually be sold at it stores. Pepsi Co. created a campaign to name their new Mountain Dew drink through Facebook. Virgin America offers promotions through their Twitter account (They offered 50% off tickets to the 500 first clickers). It sold out within 3 hours.

Easy for them, you say. They have PR departments and people devotes solely to social media. How can I, the small business owner do all this and still run a business?

Even though those campaigns are called “free”, you still need to invest in them – your time. There are ways to make it easier:

  • Your campaign is not as big as theirs. You will not have that amazing response the first time you try.
  • Delegate, if you can. Don’t try to do it all by yourself. Create a separate account for every employee, and share in the responsibility.
  • If you do not have employees, you can hire an off-site specialist who can help you set it up and update it, with your personal collaboration of course. A couple of hours a day should be enough.
  • There are programs which allow you to get all your social media alerts on one page, for easier navigation.
  • The next step can be to have software that will alert you every time your niche is mentioned in social media sites. It is a way to get early leads and establish yourself as an expert.

It is not all-or-nothing proposition. You have to put your toes in the water if you want to learn to swim. A good word of mouth can go a very long way.

Social Brand Visibility: Newsvine

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Newsvine is a mix of news gathering agency and social media. It allows its members to see the latest news from the Associated Press and ESPN, post comments on them, share and discus items, and interact with other members.

The content is updated continuously and the site gives a reflection of what people are talking about at that moment. This side of their service is called “The Wire”.

Their user generated stream, called “The Vine”, allows members of the community to post links to interesting stories they found on the web, called “seeds”. It takes some time for any users “seeds” to be accepted. There is a period of germination in what they call ‘the Greenhouse’ before a posting source is considered reliable. That is done to ward off self-promotion.

Newsvine allows its members to post original articles as well, and even shares in the revenue when those articles are read.

Members can create private groups to share the news and discussions between them or public group where all the members can see what the group members are saying.

Newsvine says its members will receive 90% of revenue from advertisements that appears on their personal pages. These earnings are based on traffic to the articles and seeds, and have a complicated formula which is calculated based on 1000 page views. Getting rich off publishing articles on the site is not guaranteed by any means. The writer usually gets a few dollars a month for his/her most popular articles. Users who invest time in writing many articles can see as much as a few tens of dollars per month.

In the US, Newsvine has 1.2 million registered members.

Since 2007, Newsvine is now owned by MSNBC.com, but operates independently.

Facebook Places- Where Are you?

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For years, since the beginning of the World Wide Web, its mission has been to globalize, to connect, to turn us into a global village. Geography did not matter much anymore.

These days the trend seems to turn inward, to localization. Google places shows businesses listings first when the query includes a specific place. Different mobile Social Media tools like Foursquare and Gowalla appeared, aiming to help friends tell other friends where they and connect with them physically.

There is no one bigger than Facebook in the Social Media world. With over 500,000,000 users and growing, it is the king supreme of virtual friendship. How ironic it is that now they are trying to help you connect locally and physically.

In August 2010, Facebook started operating its Facebook Places, an application that with the help of GPS, lets users check in on their mobile phones and show their location, in hope that if you are close, you might swing by and spend time together. That put businesses in the middle of the social game.

You can leave comments on Facebook about the places you’ve frequented. Cheers and jeers alike. You can recommend a certain dish, complain about the service or by leaving a recommendation you can introduce people to a new place.

About a week ago, on November 3, 2010,   Facebook’s Mark Zuckerman unveiled new features on their mobile app for iPhones and Androids, and this addition makes it much more interesting to business owners.

The new applications are called “Deals” and “Single Sign-On” and they aims to change the way customers and businesses interact.

Deals – this app allows business owners deliver information about specials and discounts to their customers, which are redeemable when the user ‘checks in’ at the place. It also allows customers to posts deals they have found, and when friends use the establishment they also get a discount.

Business owners can turn their customers into an extended sale force by peer recommendation on Facebook.

Businesses can also offer deeper discounts to friends who bring friends with them, or friends who heard about the deal through the first source. Each customer becomes a potential sales agent.

‘Deals’ has three different types of rewards a business can offer. It can be based on “loyalty,” on being “friends” or for “charity.”

The app tracks each time a specific person visits a store and takes advantage of a deal. This way, businesses can offer incentives to their most loyal customers.

The “Single Sign-On” app brings benefits to users and business owners and provides more connectivity. This feature allows Facebook users to log in and access other social media sites like Groupon and Yelp without having to log in separately. Those companies have now a new marketing tool and the ability to get to thousands of new customers.

Location-based technology has become an essential part of building solid, lasting relationships with the customers, say representatives of Facebook. If before business owners did not know why they have to be on the social network sites, now they have a definite reason to do so.

And it might be a game changers when it comes to e commerce and business advertising.

Social Brand Visibility: Are You LinkedIn?

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LinkedIn is a business based social networking site which connects you to your business contacts and helps you exchange knowledge, ideas, and opportunities. It helps you expend the network of professionals in your field.

The site allows users to maintain a list of contacts with people related to their business. It connects users to friends of professional friends and increases their professional circle.

Through LinkedIn you can develop a professional profile which is posted on the web so you can establish an authoritative resource that allows people to find you.

Employers searching for workers can use their LinkedIn network to get first hand recommendation. It also allows job seekers to see if anyone needs their expertise.

Being free, open and friendly, it encourages people to approach you. When your contacts change jobs or change their e mail address you are still connected to them through LinkedIn.

This familiarity and wider circle of business ‘friends’ enables you to reach out to members of your group for direct introductions and recommendations.

You can upload your address book, develop relationships and maintain them. You can join a group and see experts talk about a common issue and solve problems.

You can share tweets and use their mobile application to stay connected on the road. It keeps you in touch with people that might matter to your career.

LinkedIn offers users the ability to research companies with which they are interested in working. When searching a specific company what is shown as a result are different statistics about the company; the ratio of female to male employees, what are the most common titles given by the company to their workers, the location of the company’s headquarters and a list of present and former employees.

LinkedIn has more than 80 million registered users in over 200 countries worldwide. It operates in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. LinkedIn has 21.4 million monthly unique U.S. visitors and 47.6 million visitors globally.

Since 2008 LinkedIn launched DirectAds as a form of sponsored advertising.

In November, 2010, LinkedIn started allowing businesses to list products and services on company profile pages. It allows members recommend certain products they liked and write reviews about their finds.

If you are interested in expending your circle of business connections, talk to like-minded people, help and be helped in solving professional problems, LinkedIn is a site which will allow you do all that for free.

So You Want to Start a Business Blog….

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A paradigm shift (shift in habits) has been happening in the last year as far as blogging is concerned. It was not surprising to find that according to a research done by Hubspot, blogs are the most critical platform for businesses, more than social media.

75% of the respondents said they consider blogs ‘useful’ and 31% said it is ‘critical’ to their business.

According to the survey businesses with corporate blog generate more leads than businesses which don’t have one. And it is true not only for business to customer relations but also for business to business.

As long as you post quality content which addresses your specific target audience, business leads are almost guaranteed.

The quality of the content, posting frequency and having an interesting and easy to read design, have to be consistent to ensure effectiveness.

Before you embark on a blogging adventure you have to ask yourself several questions:

–          What are your strategies? Experts have found 4 different kinds of blogs that are used for businesses advantage:

 Building brand awareness through leadership. It requires businesses to share their thoughts and opinions regarding their industry. The aim is to be a trusted source, to be considered an expert in the field and come up with blogs about new developments, opinions about old ones and guidelines. (For example: http://edelmandigital.com/page/1/)

Another kind of blog deals with the corporate culture – helping others understand the company and what motivates it. (http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/inside-zappos)

Connecting with leaders – is another kind of blog written by the CEO or another head of company. It helps connect the leaders of the company with its employees and the customers. It creates familiarity that has disappeared from the corporate culture as companies grow bigger. (http://www.blogs.marriott.com/)

Branding – a blog that establishes a brand image. (http://www.openforum.com/)

The content must reflect the reason for the blog.

–          Set Goals – Think what you want to achieve with the blog and how are you going to be able to see if you accomplished that goal.

–          Management – Someone in the company has to be responsible for the blog. If you don’t have an IT to build the blog for you, you can go to hosted blogging services such as WordPress. That is for the look of the blog and the ability to upload it quickly, but managing the content is another issue. Have an “editor” designated to working on the blog and generating and evaluating the information that comes in. Have more than one person post blogs especially if you want to publish on a daily basis.

–          Post interesting blogs. Make them easy to read and informative. You’d want people to spread the word through Tweets and the readers own social networks.