Author Archives: bcaiwa

TOP 5 SOCIAL MEDIA TRENDS OF 2010

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Location Based Social Networking

Check out “checking in.” With the advent of smart mobile devices that are GPS-enabled (“location aware”), a whole new class of social networking tools have arose.

Social Gaming and Virtual Goods
Zynga, the maker of the popular Farmville and Mafia Wars software games, is expected to surpass $400 million in revenues in 2010 — up from an estimated $200 million in 2009.

Group Buying
Three years ago, Groupon did not exist. Today, it is a 3,000-person organization with a presence in more than 50 cities around the globe that Google is slated to buy for as much as $6 billion and spawned over 100 competitors.

Facebook domination
In 2010, Facebook users topped 500 million, greater than the population of the many countries combined. Their 2010 release of the Open Graph that allowed users to “like” products, Web pages, and blog posts across the Internet solidified their omnipresence.

Mobile First
According to the Pew Research Center, use of mobile phones for “non-voice” purposes has “grown dramatically” over the last year and more than half (55 percent) of mobile phone users go online from their mobile phone on a daily basis.

source: http://www.kctv5.com/news/26188278/detail.html

SOCIAL MEDIA Related Articles:

Stanford Professor Uses Social Media To Draw Marrow Donors
“When you learn about something from your friends or people you trust through email or Facebook, it’s much more persuasive than a message coming from a corporation or someone you don’t know,” said Aaker, who teaches at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Aaker is now working with students from Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service, using social media to get 100,000 people signed up with the national bone marrow registry.

Aaker got the idea from her former student Robert Chatwani, who used social media to find a bone marrow match for his friend, Sameer Bhatia. Bhatia had a 1 in 20,000 chance of finding a donor.

source: http://paloalto.patch.com/articles/stanford-professor-uses-social-media-to-draw-marrow-donors

How Travelers Use Social Media
A survey conducted by StudyLogic for Sheraton Hotels & Resorts examined attitudes toward social media for business and travel use and found that 72.7% of US social network users accessed the sites at least daily while they were traveling. Young adults ages 25 to 34 checked social sites most often, with nearly a third using them multiple times an hour.

Social media use should mirror face-to-face patient dealings
o help walk that fine line, the American Medical Association recently enacted policy that provides physicians with guidance on social media conduct. The recommendations were approved during the AMA House of Delegates Interim Meeting in November.

…

With 500 million users worldwide on Facebook, for example, social media can be a great way to meet your patients and colleagues where they already are, and to spread messages about yourself, your practice and the health issues you care about.

source: http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2010/12/20/edsa1220.htm

Report: FBI Talks To Google, Facebook About Wiretapping

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Law enforcement officials want the 1994 law to also cover Internet companies because people increasingly communicate online. An interagency task force of Obama administration officials is trying to develop legislation for the plan, and submit it to Congress early next year.

The Times says the US government is looking to expand a 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, to include online communications. The law currently requires network access providers, like phone and cable companies, to be able to respond immediately to court-ordered wiretapping.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discusses the new messaging system

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Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg launches ‘next generation of email’

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discusses the new messaging system:

Zuckerberg stressed that the new system, which will combine Facebook’s instant messaging system, SMS, Facebook messages and email in one place, would allow people to reply seamlessly across multiple devices to different types of messages.

For instance, when somebody emails a Facebook friend using their Facebook email account, that person can reply in the same window using either the system’s instant messaging system, or by email, or by SMS. The aim is to combine all types of messaging in one place, allowing people to reply in real-time.

read more.

Googlebot! Even better indexing of SWF content

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Google Can Index “Almost Any Text” In A Flash (SWF) File

The Google Webmaster Central Blog posted an update on their Flash indexing capabilities: Last month we expanded our SWF indexing capabilities thanks to our continued collaboration with Adobe and a new library that is more robust and compatible with features supported by Flash Player 10.1. Additionally, thanks to improvements in the way we handle JavaScript, we are also now significantly better at recognizing and indexing sites that use JavaScript to embed SWF content. Finally, we have made improvements in our video indexing technology, resulting in better detection of when a page has a video and better extraction of metadata such as alternate thumbnails from Flash technology based videos. All in all, our SWF indexing technology now allows us to see content from SWF files on hundreds of millions of pages across the web.

Popular messaging service shut down as fight between China’s Internet firms escalates

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China’s Internet firm Tencent on Wednesday said it is shutting down its popular instant messaging service QQ on computers installed with anti-virus software run by the company’s rival Qihoo 360, as a war between the two software giants escalated over the course of the past two months.

“A new tag-on service run by 360 Safe has affected the normal functioning of QQ. With 360 Safe installed, we can not guarantee the safety of our service,” Tencent said in a statement popping out on screens of millions of QQ and 360 Safe users. “To avoid our clients’ computer desktops being turned into a battlefield, we have made this ‘hard’ decision.”

A Tencent official told Xinhua that the company felt “sorry” for the inconvenience brought to QQ users, but the decision will not be changed unless Qihoo 360 removes the tag-on service and stops its “malicious slander” against Tencent.

Qi Xiangdong, president of Qihoo 360, said Tencent’s retaliatory move was disastrous for China’s Internet users, as it might lead to an unprecedented outbreak of viruses.

“Our 360 Safe services are eliminating about 60 million Trojan horses daily for Chinese Internet users. If they uninstall 360 Safe, the scale of these virus attacks will be beyond imagination,” Qi said.

According to the companies’ websites, the number of active QQ users in China has reached 1 billion, while Qihoo 360 also claims to have had at least 300 million users prior to June 2010.

The war between Tencent and Qihoo 360 started in late September when Qihoo 360 alleged QQ was leaking users’ private data and offered a new service on 360 Safe to prevent privacy leaks. Tencent has since accused Qihoo 360 of slander and business foul play.

Qi said the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Ministry of Public Security have joined in consulting regarding the dispute.

The escalated business war has also triggered a public outcry. Over 78.1 percent of Internet users participating in an on-line survey conducted by the country’s most popular portal, Sina.com, said Tencent and Qihoo 360 fought for their own interests but both forgot the interests of their clients.

“At this stage, when the populace is angry, neither company wins the war,” said Liu Xingliang, an Internet commentator.

source: news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2010-11/04/c_13589831.htm

7 Ways to Use Social Media to Generate Qualified Leads

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1. If Twitter is your social media drug of choice, be everywhere all the time by using hashtags and schedulers

Hashtags: If your event budget has taken a nosedive like many others, use the advanced search feature on Twitter to research what events your competitors and/or prospects will be attending. Be careful not to blast the conference hashtag with commercials but instead post insightful responses and informative resources for the hashtag followers. The idea here is to put yourself in front of a captive audience and drive qualified traffic by sharing thought leadership and educational assets.

Schedulers: In the “How to grow your Twitter following” post, research shows that a vibrant Twitter account updates more than 20 times a day. As a B2B marketer, be direct (use @ replies) and establish yourself as the subject-matter expert in your field (i.e., share educational articles and links in between your branded tweets). To update your timeline about once every hour, try using a free scheduler like Twuffer, SocialOomph, HootSuite, or TweetDeck.

Also monitor Twitter for customer care inquiries and negative sentiment directed towards your competition. If someone is having an issue with your competitor’s product, this is a good time to step in and showcase your differentiators.

Participate in industry Tweetchats. This is a great way to directly engage with prospects, potential partners, and other thought leaders by asking and answering questions related to a certain topic. For a Tweetchat directory listing, start at Twitdom.com. One of its Twitter application directories—“What the Hashtag?”—is a user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter.

2. Use the advanced search feature on LinkedIn to find prospects that fit your buyer persona.

First research the connects and then outreach in a non-aggressive manner, offering your expertise around a specific business challenge of theirs you may have uncovered.

While on LinkedIn, establish yourself as a thought leader by answering user questions. If prospects know you are willing to answer inquiries from the general public, they may be willing to ask you questions directly—which may open up a selling opportunity.

Join a few LinkedIn Groups specific to your industry. These groups help you keep your pulse on the marketplace and in touch with people who share your interests (i.e., who could also benefit from your solution).

3. Use Facebook to establish the culture of your brand

4. Mobile: Use SMS short codes (EX: Text “ELAvate” to 247365) to give prospects a green way to opt-in for additional content. Use it as another touch point and reason to push out differentiators about your brand.

5. YouTube: Increase your search engine ranking + brand awareness online by tagging your videos appropriately. Try connecting your corporate videos to topic-specific landing pages, especially since YouTube is the #2 search engine.

6. Leverage the WOM value on social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious

7. Online Community and Chat

Source: http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2010/10/26/how-to-use-social-media-to-generate-b2b-leads/

List Your Business Product Of Company Free

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The word B2B stands for the business to business. In which, it involves two companies for exchange. The two companies attach for the intension of business. Like from manufacturers to its global buyers or from manufacturers to its suppliers for the products. So, such kind of exchange between two companies is called as b2b portal.

The B2B portal is a one kind of platform which has members who are manufacturers, suppliers & exporter. The B2B portal provides the platform to its member for fulfill their needs & requirement. By using these online sources retailers are very easier to wear business-to-business, and thus the promise of many benefits to buyers and sellers worldwide.

B2B is on kind of place where all the manufacturers, suppliers and exporters has come to do the business online to meet their global buyers by leads. Especially if we seen Indian B2B portal, it has the Indian market comes as an important marketing tool that is used to provide benefits to each distributor, manufacturer, exporters and supplier. This advanced method of negotiation has helped operators to generate revenue to add to the productivity of their business.

The main advantage of this type of trade is based on its negotiation skills quickly. It can be connected directly to a manufacturer in India, which eliminates the need to employ an intermediary, which ultimately reduces costs involved in each case.

B2B social media is no longer a “nice to know”, it’s a “need to know”.

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A thoughtful, well-executed B2B social media strategy can deliver a number of benefits, such as social proof — extracting external measures of your firm’s, or industry’s, image or success from social network platforms. It can provide significant exposure, engaging you and your audience with the credible transparency of millions of grass roots conversations. Meanwhile, paid and sponsored advertising on these sites can be highly targeted to your consumers. And the functions that drive inbound marketing results, such as search engine optimization or SEO, are distinctly accelerated by the professional use of social media.

To get started, make sure your business clearly outlines its social media goals. These may include revenue, membership, reputation, market share, or other objectives. Once identified,

* Content is always king, especially online; determine how relevant, engaging information will be consistently acquired and generated by your team.

* It’s not expensive to do right but it’s also not free; dedicate the adequate resources and appropriate people to maintain your site and manage your social network interactions at a high standard.

* Decide which online channels will most effectively reach your audience.

* Technology is the gateway; ensure that you have a robust, effective and well-written Web site that supports and enhances your social media strategy.

* Make return on investment a key metric; fully integrate your social media efforts into your sales, growth, and customer relationship management initiatives.

For B2B marketing, social media is no longer a “nice to know,” it’s a “need to know.” Properly designed, well managed, and creatively applied, social media can make a discernible impact on your business goals. It can also serve as a fast and effective tool in responding to diverse crises, handling employee or labor issues, addressing fast-moving investor issues, and quickly adapting to sudden changes in buyer and stakeholder demographics.

Carefully evaluate the potential for B2B social media as an essential element of your company’s strategic marketing program. It will prove to be a seductive, but sustainable, strategy that will keep you from drifting aimlessly in a sea of competition.

Kevin Stickney is a founder of Calypso Communications. He can be reached at KStickney@Calypsocom.com and 431-0816.

How to Become a Link Magnet

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Moderator:

Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder, SEO-PR

Speakers:
Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz.org
Jennifer Slegg, CEO, JenSense.com
Aaron Kahlow, chairman and founder, Online Marketing Summit

How is a link magnet different than link bait?

Link bait: Content built to bring links in
Link magnet: Create a fundamental incentive to link; either emotionally or physically reward the linker to create an incentive.

The Web has become jaded. Think back to a few years ago. A great blog post would get 50,000 links from blogs in days. Now that same post would get about a dozen blog links, but a lot more people were linking in their social networks. Bloggers and journalists, or the “linkerati,” are smelling link bait and are suspicious.

The good news: people still link when it benefits them.

Thus, savvy marketers are rewarding linkers in non-financial ways. Yelp gave businesses an online Yelp badge that has great anchor text and links to that businesses profile. This earned them hundreds of thousands of super relevant links.

Ingredients in Link Magnet Soup

There’s an idea that great content gains links. He says this is a myth. It’s about branding and marketing and the ability to sell a concept, to nudge psychologically. That’s why content that rewards is so important.

Take Flickr for example. When you upload photos, you can license them for public use. People on the Web get their photos out there and used by others, and Flickr gets the links.

An Emotional & Obvious Hook

Twitter wasn’t on SEOmoz’s most linked to domains list two years ago. Now they are. People have an incentive to link to their own profile because they want followers. If you can play to the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (self-fulfillment, satisfaction, efficiency, effectiveness, utility, safety), people will link.

Targeted Links & Anchor Text

A lot of the time when you create embeddable badges or link opportunities, you have full control of the anchor text and ALT text.

Strategy for Promotion & Spread

Unless you have a distribution mechanism, your great content won’t get links. Here are examples:

Vimeo: The video player looks really good. They’ve worked hard on upload speed. They allow for longer video embeds. When you try embed the video, you get an overlay that grays out the screen behind. That’s all good for users. What Vimeo gets out of embedded videos is three optimized links.
okcupid: They release lots of trends about what their users think of other users’ attractiveness and how often users message others. These trends are picked up by bloggers and media all the time. Virtually every company has statistical data in their niche that they can use to this effect.
Techmeme Leaderboard: A few hours after Techmeme released their Leaderboard of blogs, most of those blogs had linked to Techmeme to point out their accomplishment.
Next Aaron, @AaronKahlow, is going to wing his presentation because Rand went over time. He’s going to make this interactive.

He says first and foremost is having good content that’s informative or engaging. If you don’t have the content, there’s nothing worth linking to.

Next consider persona. Who are you and who do you want to be? Stick with it and be consistent, and be comfortable with who you are.

Then, think about how the content can be shared. Is this something that one of my colleagues would want to share on Facebook? Is it tweetable? Ask these questions every time and match your expectations with that.

Finally, consider who your friends are. Keep good company, in terms of who you’re linking to, and copy them. Then do better than they because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Suggestions:

Decide who your target market is and address them. You can’t geek out if your audience is not the geek. Think about who you’re tasking with the responsibility and make sure their content will match your audience interests.
Share and make it easy. Retweet buttons should be front and center. Leverage things like Facebook Connect and put these tools to good use. The blog is usually the most linkable content on a site. You don’t necessarily have to create the content if it’s a supporting strategy. It can be an RSS feed of other blogs and you’ll get the link back.
Decide what kind of magnet you want to be. SEO, marketing, PR, chick magnet… oh wait, maybe that last one isn’t covered in this session.

more: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2010/03/how-to-become-a-link-magnet-2/