I recently received an email from Becky, a Chicago web designer that reached out to us for advise on a social media strategy for one of her clients. The topic of how to manage social media correctly has been a hot topic lately and I thought I would share this email. What are your thoughts on the “voice of social media?” Chris, I have one client in particular who needs a ton of hand holding, is technophobic, yet wants to make a living off info products etc. online. (sigh) I sent it to her and she’s convinced that she should be doing more, but wants to hire an Indian company to “manage” her social media. My gut says that having someone else do it for you destroys your voice and people will be able to tell, but maybe I’m wrong here. Thoughts? Becky Davis 773-875-1792 www.beckydavisdesign.com Becky, The short answer is you are 100% right, the saying you get what – Read the full article
“Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and recutting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipendia and ganging up on you on social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon- the groundswell- that has created a permanent shift in the way the world works.” This is written on the book jacket of the book Groundswell, a national bestseller. The social media revolutions is upon us. Several experts claim for it to be the biggest shift in business since the industrial revolution. The change in how we communicate with the public, potential and existing customers is evolving at a pace that has not been seen before with adoption of other technologies. Its a social media revolution. It used to take years to build new media platforms, for radio it was 38 years, television 13 years, the internet 4 years, and the iPod 3 years- each respectively to reach 50 million – Read the full article
Reputation management is becoming a big part of our small startup. Many of our Chicago clients are finding that monitoring their online reputation is more important than ever. Reviews are viewed as a trusted source of information, in fact 70 percent said they trusted consumer opinions posted online. This ranks above newspaper editorials, tv and radio- according to Nelson Research. Recently an old friend reached out to me to let me know that their company, Alterian, recently acquired Techrigy. Techrigy is a social media monitoring tool that complies links, mentions, information about particular keywords or companies. I know that there are several social media monitoring tools out there, but for some reason this one caught my attention. The team here knows that it takes a lot to impress me, but I was pleasantly surprised with this web based tool. Within the first few minutes I began to see the depth and capabilities of the reporting and I am only in – Read the full article
FriendFeed is a utility tool that that collects all the updates from your favorite social media websites. It doesn’t send your info to your social media websites, but it gives you updates on all the sites your friends are using and creates a master feed of all your online activity. It takes feeds from Facebook, Twitter, your blog, Flickr, Yelp to name a few of the accounts your can tie to this social site. FriendFeed also acts as a stand alone social site, with options for posting notes, photos and links, as well as commenting on others’ contributions. You can check out our client GreenWerks and our social media expert Brandon Zeman on FriendFeed.
On 28 January 2011, Twitter published a monumental blog post which detailed their censorship plan (or rather, lack thereof). The logic that representatives of Twitter utilized was both practical and easy to understand: the company simply lacked the manpower to review one hundred million tweets per day, and furthermore, they believed in the free flow of information and thus would only remove from Twitter illegal tweets and spam. In fact, Twitter in 2011 believed that discussion of topics in geopolitics made Twitter “fun” and “important”. Country-Based Censorship Needless to say, the alterations to this open-information policy just one year later came as a shock to Twitter users. On 26 January 2012, Twitter published a post on the same blog which explains their alleged need for selective, country-based censorship. This approach to sharing information is, according to Twitter, informed by certain countries’ views on free information. Content Control Specifically, Twitter will not be preventing content from being published. They will simply remove content retroactively, – Read the full article
Quality backlinks play a very important role in the search engine optimization of any site. Backlinks refer to links on other websites pointing to yours. So how do you go about getting them? The Natural Way If your web content is good, people are likely to begin linking to it. The more backlinks your site has, the better. However, it does not always follow that if you have great content, people will always want to link to you. This means that you might not be able to promote your website successfully through the natural way of building backlinks. You will then have to figure out alternative ways of getting quality backlinks. And even if you get many backlinks through the natural way, you could always use additional backlinks. Some of the acceptable methods of building links are through posting in forums, article directories, and blogs. The unacceptable methods (at least to Google’s eyes) include linking to link farms, buying links – Read the full article
This is important — Congress is considering two bills (“Protect IP” and “SOPA”) that would let the government or any corporation censor the internet, using the same DNS-blocking techniques as Iran or China. PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo. The bills are ostensibly to stop copyright and trademark infringement, but they won’t. Instead– they’ll let the government shut down almost any social media website, since any site can be shut down just for audio, video, text, or even *links* posted by its users. Any corporations will have the power to bankrupt any website or organization by cutting it off from payments, advertising and donations– without so much as a court order. The law is being pushed by some of the strongest lobbies in Washington, it has broad bipartisan support, and it’s likely to pass in some form. As a company we have been active against it: this week we will be participating in – Read the full article
Businesses have come to accept the fact that social media plays a big role in the Internet marketing campaign of a company. Promoting through the various social networking sites is usually free, and it provides a good platform for communicating with and building positive relationships with a business’s existing clients and prospective customers. This is the reason why most, if not all, companies have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, LinkedIn, etc. – and they use these extensively to promote their business. But let us admit it. Managing these different social networking accounts can be time-consuming and can be a real headache. For any business, every minute is important: one should therefore find an effective way of properly managing all social media marketing efforts. Here are a few tips: As you begin to create accounts in these different social networking sites, it will be beneficial to create a file with all your information on your various social networking accounts: usernames, – Read the full article
