What areas of life will be affected? Here are just a few examples:
* Music: Controlled right now by corporate production companies and distributors, and fed to us by radio stations and music television (MTV, et. al.), music is already becoming freer through peer-to-peer networks. Though the legal battles will continue for years, because of the huge amount of money involved, it is impossible to catch and prosecute every person who downloads music. The business structure of the music industry is already changing, and will eventually change completely. But who will decide what music is popular? The masses, through a Digg-like social interface. And it will be open to all musicians, not just ones with record deals.
* Movies: Also controlled by corporate production and distribution systems, movies are already becoming socialized through sites like You Tube. Soon DVDs will become obsolete as entire movies become distributed through You Tube-like sites, and the popularity of movies becomes Digg-like. And as more filmmakers turn to self-publishing on the Internet, just as writers do on blogs, it will no longer require a production and distribution company will millions of dollars to make a successful film.
* TV shows: Same as movies.
* Politics: But our government is already democratized, right? Sure. We elect officials every two or four years, but who votes on each individual proposal? The gatekeepers. A Digg.gov site will allow the masses to decide on issues, rather than having politicians do it for us. And those who are afraid of the masses deciding on issues are not truly in favor of a democratic government.
* Marketplace: Who controls what clothes are available to us? Clothing companies and department stores. Social media can change that — imagine a digital marketplace where you can go to see what clothes are hot. What about cars? Restaurants? Gadgets? Books? As you can probably tell, these things are already starting to happen with sites like Amazon and eBay.
* Work: Who controls what work we do and how we get paid? Traditionally, the corporations and managers — the gatekeepers of decisions and money and information. But what if your work was run by a Digg-like site? Where business decisions, project decisions, pay and benefits and workplace environment decisions, were all made by the masses of the company? That’s hard to imagine in traditional companies. But consider that these days, many people are working remotely, as free-lancers or consultant or telecommuters. If work becomes less centralized, and more spread out and free (as in free-lance, not free beer), why does a central person or group of people need to control all decisions? If a group of free-lancers begins to democratize their work, this idea could have much more appeal than the traditional corporate structure … and once people have their work under their own control, they are less likely to want to go back under the control of the gatekeepers.
These changes, again, won’t happen overnight
. But the winds of change are already obviously blowing in this direction, and once people get a taste of freedom, they aren’t likely to want to stay under the control of a few.
social media strategy HEELLLLP!!!
efore you begin, commit to worrying about social media tools last, not first. Why? Because tools will change. They always do. There was a time when Netscape seemed invincible. Yahoo, too. Myspace also. If you fall in love with tools, you’ll constantly be changing directions, with no real plan to guide your way.
TWITTER or FACEBOOK
People you know who suddenly turn into link sharing, status updating, friend connecting, farmville freaks. Very annoying.
Twitter is a whole different animal. There are no page invitations to ignore, events to opt-out off or people tagging you in photos. Basically Twitter is built on the whole idea of serendipitous finds; you are bombarded with tweets, but only if you choose to, and pick what is good, and ignore the rest.
Facebook makes it a lot harder to ignore stuff. And being able to ignore the stuff that annoys you is the basis of any good relationship.
social media timeline
What is Social media about??? It’s a good question. Each time my friend ask me what course are you studying about for your master degree? After I answered I’m studying MA in social media in Salford University. And then another question is coming, that is what Social media is, even though they were studied Journalism or media management when they were in university. Seems that there are a lot of people have no any basic impression about social media in their minds. So now I am willing to write about what social media is about also can improve me.
Social media is designed to be spread through social interaction, and created publishing techniques which can be used accessible and scalable. The characteristic of Social media is it can excite others to repeat. And everyone will use it and talk about it in our daily life, such as Facebook. Also with ‘sharing’, syndication, or search algorithm technologies (includes internet and mobile devices) they’re the main parts in the Social media.
When the social media is beginning? Its beginning is following by the development of the technology. And in July of 2006, the use of the term “social media” has risen steadily. And also these kinds of media are not published by the reporters, editors or other media organisations. It’s published by everyone in the world. You can see these happen after the blog is came to our daily life.
10 Cures for Your Social Media Pains
#1: I can’t keep track of what’s going on!
Between answering questions on LinkedIn Answers and updating your Ning profile, you missed the fact that one of your customers just wrote a scathing comment on your Facebook page.
Cure: Start a social dashboard.
Social media management platforms allow you to consolidate multiple social media accounts into one place, so you can manage them all more efficiently. You get an overview of what is happening in different channels, all on one screen. The benefits extend far beyond that, but that’s enough of a reason to look into these solutions. Some solid choices include Hootsuite and Awareness. But different platforms work better for different needs.
#2: I’m talking to a bunch of nobodies!
You exchange 40 tweets with someone who is knowledgeable about your industry. Great! A real prospect! Then you find out that she is a 20-year-old college student (with 15 Twitter followers) writing a paper – and she has absolutely no ability to make a purchasing decision.
Cure: Understand social influence.
You should spend time engaging with people who can move your business forward. That means you need to identify the most influential social media people in your niche. Klout is a tool that tracks influence on Twitter and Facebook. Use it to see if that person is a thought leader, a connector, or a decision-maker.
#3: My customers are out there – but where?
gist
Tools like Gist put your customers’ email addresses together with their social media identities.
You just know that your current customers are on social media. But your Facebook page only has 40 fans. Where are your customers, and how do you connect with them?
Cure: Check out your customers’ social profiles.
Flowtown and Gist both unify multiple social media presences based on your existing customer email database. This gives you a quick way to find out which of your customers are using different social media platforms, and which customers are influential.
#4: I share a lot of content – but it doesn’t drive visits to my site.
You’ve seen the recommendations from experts to keep your self-promotion to a minimum. Social media is about sharing. But you’re also accountable for your own metrics. How can you share, and still get people to check you out?
Cure: Create social media landing pages.
By giving you control of the frame of your link, ObjectiveMarketer gives you the chance to message and brand all of your social media links with customized content. You get all of the benefits of sharing great content with your followers, plus you can show them the interesting things that you’re up to at the same time.
#5: I can’t justify all the time it takes to do social right!
Your team spends hours each week retweeting, sharing links and joining the conversation. But now it’s the end of the year, and you need to make a budget for next year. You know you can’t go on with such a long to-do list, but you don’t have the metrics to show the impact.
Cure: Use your existing metrics – just show the social benefit.
Argyle Social tracks the response from your social media updates and maps them back to the conversion metrics you set up on your website. And it looks back up to 90 days in order to account for a longer consideration cycle – showing how a bunch of tweets adds up to an eventual sale.
Argyle Social tracks the social media links you share and maps that activity back to your website conversions.
#6: I don’t know what my followers are doing online!
You see what happens to your own status updates and blog posts – visitors come to your site, readers leave comments, etc. But you have no idea what they’re doing on the rest of the web.
Cure: Tell people what you like to find out what they like.
This is one place where the biggest names in social media can help you. Twitter and Facebook offer login credentials that any website can adopt (there are open source alternatives as well). Whenever possible, you should connect to other sites using one of these login protocols and “Like” content across the web liberally. Often, you can see who else in your network is also interested in that website. In this way, you’ve created a new opportunity for engagement.
Facebook “Likes” are a great way to find out what your fans are interested in from across the web. “Like” the content you find as you browse, and you’ll see what your fans like in return.
#7: I can’t filter out the noise from the important stuff.
Every time you login to Twitter, you see that there are thousands of unread tweets. Your Facebook page is overrun with comments from people you’ve never heard from before. And there are 1,575 blog posts that are ready for a comment from you.
Cure: Get information fast – when you need it.
Cadmus can definitely help in this arena. It’s designed to show you the most important tweets from your network. If you’re looking for information from your network on a specific topic, Nsyght searches across your social network. It’s like Google but only for the people in your social network.
#8: All this engagement isn’t leading to anything!
You get retweeted by the same people over and over. You have the same conversation with multiple followers. You’re running in a hamster wheel, not moving your marketing forward.
Cure: Get yourself some game mechanics.
Game mechanics means linking your marketing efforts together, so that one interaction naturally leads to the next. You have to create a series of social media events that encourage your followers to engage more deeply – and game mechanics provide a solid framework for planning.
#9: There are not enough hours in the day!
As soon as you feel like your Facebook presence is strong, you know you need to create a SlideShare presence. There’s always one more tweet to write, one more blog post to comment on and new marketing campaign to support.
Cure: Make the case for dedicated resources.
Your marketing program needs to evolve, or it will die. That means your team needs new skills, and a more sophisticated understanding of social media. Work internally to make the case, based on your current success, to shift marketing dollars into social media. And make sure you find the people, whether internal or external, who can hit the ground running.
#10: I have all this content, but I don’t know what to do with it.
You’re doing a great job of engaging with your audience. They’re responding and you have some great quotes. But you’re not getting the full marketing benefit from this engagement.
Cure: Create a space on your site to feature the best social content.
Assuming that marketing involves bringing people to your site so they can take some action, you should feature some social content from your community on your site. This gives your best followers a pat on the back, and allows others to brag about you so you don’t have to. Testimonial pages are a great way to do just that.
What are your biggest social media pains? The community just might be able to cure them for you. If you’ve figured out how to cure them already, be sure to share your solutions in the comments box below.
Three Quick Tips To Get Started With SEO
1. Evaluate the SEO Strength of your site
There are many more factors that influence your SEO score, and learning all of them requires precious time which you probably don't have. You can use our company’s free online SEO evaluation tool to get a pretty good idea what the SEO health of your site is. With This information you get can easily spot common SEO issues like problems with your metatags or sitemap, and fix them yourself.
2. Fill in the Title Bar
Take a peek at your Title Bar (the blue space at the very top left of your screen, or found on the Window menu of Macs). If you see a generic default that says “Home” or “Company Name,” you can be sure that your site is definitely suffering from a lack of SEO. The Title Bar may mean nothing to you, but it is one of the most important pieces of information that search engines use to determine the relevance of your company’s website to the searcher’s query. In other words, it provides search engines with the key terms they use to determine what your site is all about.
3. Keyword Selection
Selecting the right keywords is easier than you think. If you sign up for Google Adwords, you will be able to see at no charge not only what people are searching for, but also exactly how many people do a particular search each month. This allows you to determine the big keywords everyone is looking for such as “green energy,” but also smaller more targeted ones that your direct audience will be looking for. These keywords are known as long-tail, and though often ignored, they can sometimes be the most vital.
Our firm, Expansion Media, specializes in cleantech PR and SEO, and I’d like to give you an example from the work we recently did with one of our clients, GreenRay Solar. After doing extensive keyword research for this firm, we decided that one of the primary keywords should be “home solar panels.” Simply by using this as a primary focus in the content, their firm started appearing in the top ten Google search results for this phrase, while it had previously appeared on page seven.
If you look at their homepage now, you will see the exact phrase a few times, and if you look at the title bar I spoke of earlier, you will see “solar panels for your home.” Though it is not the exact phrase, those words are close enough together for Google to still assume they are highly relevelent to people searching for “home solar panels.” Choosing the correct keywords or keyword phrases can be a painstaking process, but if successfully carries out and implemented, it can mean a dramatic increase in the number of visitors to your site.
4. Meta Descriptions Matter
Often when building their website, companies ignore the “meta description” area, seen only in the HTML but not by visitors to the site. Search engines often insert this text below a website’s name in the search results. By leaving this section blank, you let the search engine’s robot to decide what is important about your site, rather than providing that information yourself. To use GreenRay as an example again, their meta description is very concise and includes our selected keyword. As a result, when users look for “home solar panels,” they will see a blurb that speaks directly to them and motivates them to click on the link.
There are many more factors that influence your SEO score, and learning all of them requires precious time which you probably don't have. You can use our company’s free online SEO evaluation tool to get a pretty good idea what the SEO health of your site is. With This information you get can easily spot common SEO issues like problems with your metatags or sitemap, and fix them yourself.
2. Fill in the Title Bar
Take a peek at your Title Bar (the blue space at the very top left of your screen, or found on the Window menu of Macs). If you see a generic default that says “Home” or “Company Name,” you can be sure that your site is definitely suffering from a lack of SEO. The Title Bar may mean nothing to you, but it is one of the most important pieces of information that search engines use to determine the relevance of your company’s website to the searcher’s query. In other words, it provides search engines with the key terms they use to determine what your site is all about.
3. Keyword Selection
Selecting the right keywords is easier than you think. If you sign up for Google Adwords, you will be able to see at no charge not only what people are searching for, but also exactly how many people do a particular search each month. This allows you to determine the big keywords everyone is looking for such as “green energy,” but also smaller more targeted ones that your direct audience will be looking for. These keywords are known as long-tail, and though often ignored, they can sometimes be the most vital.
Our firm, Expansion Media, specializes in cleantech PR and SEO, and I’d like to give you an example from the work we recently did with one of our clients, GreenRay Solar. After doing extensive keyword research for this firm, we decided that one of the primary keywords should be “home solar panels.” Simply by using this as a primary focus in the content, their firm started appearing in the top ten Google search results for this phrase, while it had previously appeared on page seven.
If you look at their homepage now, you will see the exact phrase a few times, and if you look at the title bar I spoke of earlier, you will see “solar panels for your home.” Though it is not the exact phrase, those words are close enough together for Google to still assume they are highly relevelent to people searching for “home solar panels.” Choosing the correct keywords or keyword phrases can be a painstaking process, but if successfully carries out and implemented, it can mean a dramatic increase in the number of visitors to your site.
4. Meta Descriptions Matter
Often when building their website, companies ignore the “meta description” area, seen only in the HTML but not by visitors to the site. Search engines often insert this text below a website’s name in the search results. By leaving this section blank, you let the search engine’s robot to decide what is important about your site, rather than providing that information yourself. To use GreenRay as an example again, their meta description is very concise and includes our selected keyword. As a result, when users look for “home solar panels,” they will see a blurb that speaks directly to them and motivates them to click on the link.
off page optimization
Off-page optimization (off-page SEO) is what can be done off the pages of a website to maximise its performance in the search engines for target keywords related to the on-page content and keywords in off-page direct-links.
Some of the factors considered by the major search engines in evaluating the off-page optimization of your web site include:
* Which web sites are linking to your site? It's critical that the web sites linking to your site are relevant to the content on your site and the linking site is considered an authority in its field by the search engine.
* How many web sites are linking to your site? The number of relevant sites that link to you is a significant plus for your site.
* What is the Google page rank (1-10) of each web site that links to your site? This is a major factor because a high page rank relevant site linking to your site is much better than a low page rank site. A site's voting power increases as the page rank of the site increases.
* What is the anchor text of each link to your site? The anchor text indicates the area of relevance the linking site places on your site. This anchor text should include your primary keywords. The text in the linking anchor text should not be the same in every site linking to your site. This is not seen as natural linking by the search engines. You need to get variability in the anchor text.
* What is the page title of the web page that is linking to your site? It is better if the title page of the linking web page is relevant to your site and contains one of your keywords in its title. If it just says "link directory" then that is not good.
* Is the link to your site a reciprocal link or a one-way link? A reciprocal link means you have linked back to the web site that linked to you. This can be a negative to your site because you lose some of your site's page rank to the other site. If you do resort to reciprocal links, make certain the page rank of the other site is the same or higher that the page rank of your linking page. The one- way link to your site is a much better deal because you do not lose any of your site's page rank.
* How many inbound and outbound links are on the web page linking to your site? The page rank of the site linking to you is influenced by the inbound and outbound links. The linking site will pass you more of its rank as it decreases the number of outbound links.
* How important is the web site that is linking to your site in its area of relevance? You will get more bang for your buck if the site linking to you is considered an authority in its area.
Some of the factors considered by the major search engines in evaluating the off-page optimization of your web site include:
* Which web sites are linking to your site? It's critical that the web sites linking to your site are relevant to the content on your site and the linking site is considered an authority in its field by the search engine.
* How many web sites are linking to your site? The number of relevant sites that link to you is a significant plus for your site.
* What is the Google page rank (1-10) of each web site that links to your site? This is a major factor because a high page rank relevant site linking to your site is much better than a low page rank site. A site's voting power increases as the page rank of the site increases.
* What is the anchor text of each link to your site? The anchor text indicates the area of relevance the linking site places on your site. This anchor text should include your primary keywords. The text in the linking anchor text should not be the same in every site linking to your site. This is not seen as natural linking by the search engines. You need to get variability in the anchor text.
* What is the page title of the web page that is linking to your site? It is better if the title page of the linking web page is relevant to your site and contains one of your keywords in its title. If it just says "link directory" then that is not good.
* Is the link to your site a reciprocal link or a one-way link? A reciprocal link means you have linked back to the web site that linked to you. This can be a negative to your site because you lose some of your site's page rank to the other site. If you do resort to reciprocal links, make certain the page rank of the other site is the same or higher that the page rank of your linking page. The one- way link to your site is a much better deal because you do not lose any of your site's page rank.
* How many inbound and outbound links are on the web page linking to your site? The page rank of the site linking to you is influenced by the inbound and outbound links. The linking site will pass you more of its rank as it decreases the number of outbound links.
* How important is the web site that is linking to your site in its area of relevance? You will get more bang for your buck if the site linking to you is considered an authority in its area.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)