If you’re a ‘destination’, you’ll want to follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’re interested in learning more…
4 Ways to Get More From Your Google Place Page
10 Reasons Not To Ignore Your Blog For Facebook
- Image via CrunchBase
Brace yourself: Facebook is trying to take over the world. Or, if not the world, at least the entire Internet. With Facebook partnering up with popular sites like Yelp, many SMB owners may feel as if their load got lighter. I mean, why waste time worrying about your building your blog or your own site when you can grow your Facebook presence instead? If Facebook’s opening up the doors so that people can take you with them, you don’t have to worry about anything else anymore, right?
Wrong!
It doesn’t matter how hot Facebook or any of the other social media sites are looking right now. You still need to be focused on using your blog to create your own authority and brand. Want to know why?
Here are ten reasons.
You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go directly to the source to get the whole story if you’d like to get the 10 reasons. #1? You don’t own Facebook…
Five Key Ingredients for a Successful Corporate Blog
- Image via Wikipedia
So what are the keys to a successful corporate blog? Here are five tips:
1. Content that provides insight, perspective and information. At its core, a corporate blog has to give its readers information they can use to increase their knowledge, learn new things or receive insight.
2. It has need to be well written. A blog with spelling and grammatical mistakes reflects badly on the person writing it and their employer. As well, a blog posts need to have good flow and provide an engaging narrative that makes it easy to read.
This is particularly important given many people scan content online as opposed to reading it. This is why a good headline so important to capture someone’s attention.
3. Posts have to happen on a regular basis. It could be one, two or five posts/week. Whatever the editorial plan, it needs to be consistent to establish expectations within the company and among the blog’s readers.
The worse thing a company can do is post four or five times a week for a few weeks, and then once a week or not at all afterward. When the audience doesn’t know what to expect, they start to drift away.
4. It can’t operate as a standalone entity. There are two angles to this advice. One, a blog needs to be supported and nurtured within a company. It needs to be actively promoted within communications, marketing and sales collateral, business cards, letterhead and email signatures.
It should also be promoted on social media services such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. A blog needs to be seen as an integral part of a company’s brand and identity as opposed to be left alone to its own devices.
Second, a corporate blog needs to be integrated into the blogosphere and the blogging community. The people writing a blog need to be reading and commenting on other blogs. You can’t write a blog in isolation otherwise there are no connections with the “outside” world.
5. It needs to look good and have a user-friendly design. As much as a company will spend time and money to create a good Web site, its blog also need to be functional and attractive. In many senses, it is a public marketing vehicle that reflects a company’s brand, culture and approach to business.
A good blog should follow best practices by including things such as an RSS feed (both through an RSS reader and via e-mail), information about the writers, the ability to leave comments, links to social media services, and links to other corporate resources.
This quote is a little longer than the content I normally curate, but it’s such good stuff, I grabbed almost the whole post for you…
Related articles
- 10 Tips for Corporate Blogging (mashable.com)
- 5 corporate blogging trends for 2011 (commetrics.com)
- Corporate Blogs In The Fortune 500 (socialmediatoday.com)
- How and Why Corporate Blogging Can Help Your Site (verticalmeasures.com)
- How to Make an Awesome Corporate Blog (entrepreneur.com)
Fish where the fish are
Reasons your organization can’t afford not to measure its Facebook presence:
- 500. Million.
There are over 500 million people on Facebook. They’re connecting with friends, sharing information, even segmenting themselves into like-minded groups. It’s a gold mine of measurable, actionable information.- It’s where users spend their time online.
Social media, and especially Facebook is where users spend most of their time online today. Yet marketers are spending disproportionately more money on email and search. Shouldn’t you be fishing where the fish are instead of trying to lure them away to your corporate website?- Your friend has 130 friends.
The average Facebook user has 130 friends. In other words, for every person you engage with on Facebook, you have the potential to amplify your message 130-fold. Did someone say golden opportunity?- Your competitors are doing it.
Your competition is on Facebook, measuring their presence, maybe even optimizing it. If you aren’t doing any of those things, you’re already behind.
Graph Your Inbox
Graph Your Inbox is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to graph Gmail activity over time. You can use it to visualize your communication with friends, your Facebook activity, when you purchased items on Amazon or how often you use certain words or phrases. We provide the same search functionality used by Gmail, but instead of a list of messages we show you a graph of your email trends over time.
Note: We take your privacy extremely seriously. This extension does not save any personal information and does not send any personal information to any server. It does not request or record your email password. This extension does not modify the Gmail website or your email in any way.
How Do I Use It?
Download and install the extension by clicking the link above. Once it’s installed, an icon will appear in the Chrome address bar (to the right). Click this icon to open the extension and start graphing your email. (If you have problems, make sure you’re logged into Gmail.)What Does It Look Like?
Does It Work With Google Apps?
Google Apps allows Gmail to be used with custom domains. Graph Your Inbox will work if the Google Apps account has been migrated to the new account infrastructure. Otherwise, it will not work. You can ask the adminstrator of your Google Apps domain about the status of the transition.What Motivated This?
Our inboxes contain a tremendous amount of information. Nearly every substantive action we take online generates email, from buying goods to booking flights to social network activity. Despite this large amount of data, extracting and graphing this information can be extremely difficult. Graph Your Inbox is an attempt to solve this problem. It was created by Bill Zeller, a PhD Candidate at Princeton University.Questions or comments? Email me at bill@graphyourinbox.com.
Note: Graph Your Inbox is in no way associated with Gmail. Gmail is a registered trademark of Google, Inc.
The Value of a Liker
As our team has been meeting with media organizations across the globe (including at events hosted by groups such as Hacks/Hackers and the Online Publishers Association) we’ve heard a clear request for more information about the types of people who click the Like button. We’re excited to release a new set of statistics to help publishers better understand the value of the Like button, and the people who click it.
Who are “likers”?
People who click the Facebook Like button are more engaged, active and connected than the average Facebook user. The average “liker” has 2.4x the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user. They are also more interested in exploring content they discover on Facebook — they click on 5.3x more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user.
As publishers work to identify the best ways to reach a younger, “always on” audience, we’ve found that the average “liker” on a news site is 34, compared to the median age of a newspaper subscriber which is approximately 54 years old, as reported by the aNewspaper Association of America.
via facebook.com
No doubt in my mind that there is value to a ‘liker’ but could the terminology be more awkward? I do doubt that…
11 Trends in Web Logo Design: The Good, the Bad and the Overused
via mashable.com
You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’re interested in learning more…
10 Ways to Use Mobile Devices to Run Your Business
You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’re interested in learning the ’10 ways’…
Ashton Kutcher Has Little Twitter Influence
- Image via Wikipedia
A study conducted at Northwestern University determined that celebrities like Ashton Kutcher with millions of Twitter followers are mostly ignored on the social media site, resulting in very little if any influence.
When the researchers applied their mathematical algorithm to the countless tweets that appear on Twitter each day, they found that experts in certain fields were much more likely to cause topics of discussion to become trends. That might come as a relief to social media enthusiasts who crave discussions of substance, and a surprise to critics who argue that social media is prone to inanity.
These findings hit the wire a few months after social media analytics company Sysomos claimed that celebrities’ followers don’t have any influence, either.
via mashable.com
You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper…
What do the latest social media stats mean for your business?
- Image by the tartanpodcast via Flickr
A global business I’m working with is run by a very successful woman who is rarely in her office–or in her home state, for that matter. She spends a large percentage of her time developing relationships with her clients in other parts of the world and making them wildly successful.
She’s right where she needs to be. And because she is, she trusts her online media presence to others like me who can launch timely social feeds that generate buzz.
Most of my clients dabble in social media, but don’t have the time to stop running their businesses to manage their online marketing and media presence.
But the latest trends show us that someone at your company absolutely must be keeping an eye on what your customers are seeing, hearing and feeling from your brand.
You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper. Favorite quote from this post? “Imagine not tapping into that enormous potential! Gone are the days when we can dismiss social media as a fad or something that only the younger generation is into.”…
Related articles by Zemanta
- Social Media Use in the Workplace on the Rise [STATS] (mashable.com)
- Simplifying Social Media to Grow Your Business and Make More Money – A Free Call n September 30th (prweb.com)
- Retailers Seeing Social Media Value (marketingpilgrim.com)
Has Twitter Has Killed RSS Readers? Traffic To Google Reader Down 27% Since Last Year
RSS readers, the wave of the future a few years ago, are now basically toast, thanks largely (we think) to Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of social media (especially Twitter).
RSS readers were unlikely to go truly mainstream anyway, because they’re too complicated for mass-market consumers. And now much of the early adopter market that was addicted to them a few years ago has since moved on to Twitter, et al.
Some folks report that they use their RSS readers even MORE in the age of Twitter, because the jumbled 140 character thing is just too shallow and chaotic. Others actually read Twitter via RSS readers.
But, personally, I never use RSS readers anymore–in part because of Twitter and in part because we’ve built a more convenient way to follow the news right into the site.
And based on the traffic trends to the leading RSS readers, it appears many folks are doing the same. As Joseph Tartakoff of paidcontent notes, Bloglines was shut down this week, and traffic to the grand-daddy of RSS readers, Google Reader, is down 27% year over year.
via jamesandrews.tv
I conclude the answer is a resounding NO and that Google Reader is the best way to manage Twitter but most people haven’t gone beyond the surface yet. Comment, call or use the contact form to discuss how this applies to your business…
Tailored communities give Intel a social-media boost
Why has Intel made such a point to engage across various social-media platforms?
You go where your customers are. We have a pretty robust presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. On those platforms we are reaching consumers of all varieties (enthusiasts, gamers, media experts, etc.) We have consistent presence on LinkedIn where we are reaching our business audiences. Our forums and communities on Intel.com are where our developers and IT audiences are highly engaged. And we are always monitoring to see where our audiences are using listening tools and monitoring conversations. Listening helps us know where our presence will have the most value-add to our customers and allow for a true two-way dialog. We are also consistently paying close attention to new trends and exploring the potential of other platforms.
via smartblogs.com
You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’re interested…
Google Reader: my new best friend
I can’t believe it took me so long to figure out Reader. I’m one of those computer-obsessed people who is game to experiment with any decent looking software, online time-saving programs or social networking sites. I try to stay updated on the latest trends in the computing business, not because I want to write about it, but because I want to play with it.
I have a blind spot for Google related stuff, though. Mainly because I have this idea that G has no respect for privacy. I don’t feel safe with the Big G. Gmail compounds the situation because you can’t delete emails. Why does Google want us to hold on to old stuff? Haven’t they heard of purging?
Anyway. I’ve been working on deleting emails from my other email account. With over 7,000 unread emails piled up over the last year (gulp), it was time for drastic action. Granted that a lot (ok, most) of those emails didn’t need any action from me. Blog announcements, yahoo group notifications, RSS feeds that I just didn’t have time to scroll through, leave alone delete.
So, in a recent fit of cleaning up, I turned to Reader. Shifted a few subscriptions from email to RSS, added a whole lot of new feeds and spent some time putting those shiny new items into shiny new folders.
Boy, do I have a lot more free time now! (Just kidding. You do know that a mum of an 18 month old can’t really have above said free time.)
Reader has simplified my life, though. I can take a quick glance at new items that have come in without having to open and read each one. You have no idea how liberating this is! I am able to stay in touch with the outside world so much quicker now. Not only that, I’m constantly adding new blogs and feeds in my area of interest. It’s so easy. Why didn’t I do this before?! (Oh, yes. See second para…)
Another smart Google Reader user! What’s holding you back?
Bright, shiny objects! 
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