Archive - More Social Media RSS Feed

Web 2.0 – A Shift in Perspective and Architecture

September 24, 2011 in More Social Media, Web 2.0 with Comments Off

Sharetwitter Web 2.0 A Shift in Perspective and ArchitectureBufferPinExt Web 2.0 A Shift in Perspective and Architecturestumbleupon Web 2.0 A Shift in Perspective and Architecturedelicious Web 2.0 A Shift in Perspective and Architecture

Web designers, developers, bloggers and even major media businesses have all been surrounded by the “Web 2.0″ buzz recently. The philosophy behind the second generation of World Wide Web is that the people who access the internet and use the web shouldn’t passively absorb what’s available – rather, they should contribute, share, collaborate and customize technology for their own purpose or for the communities. The technologies covered by Web 2.0 include (by no means limited to just these) blogs, tags, social bookmarking and AJAX.

The philosophy behind Web 2.0 differs sharply from the old “Web 1.0″ method in which a small number of writers/designers created web pages for a large number of readers. Web pages were static and rarely updated, and only the tech-savvy could update or contribute to the development of the web. For example; people would visit Microsoft.com for Windows issues, Adobe.com for graphic design issues, CNN.com for news and so on. But over time, more and more people started writing content rather than just reading it. Everyone had something to say or contribute which resulted to information overload. There was a high need of organizing the data/information contributed by everyone as personal publishing went mainstream. It became increasingly evident that the Web 1.0 paradigm had to change.

Enter the Web 2.0 world, a revelation of the web in which information can be contributed by everyone and distributed over dozens of domains. The web of documents has shaped into a web of data. The Web 2.0 is here to stay and the tools, interfaces associated with it will become the frontier of design innovation. And the evidence is already here with portals, search engines, RSS aggregators, web services and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). With a change in perspective of the web, there has also been a change in the way websites are being designed.

Following are the main themes covering design in Web 2.0:

1. Providing ‘Web Services’

The early years of the web witnessed sites which were nothing more than a mere collection of web pages. Sites were more like a company ‘brochure’ designed in HTML with some flash content. But in the late 90s (especially towards the 21st century) with the advent of XML technologies and web services, web designing concepts started changing. Web 2.0 is all about sharing, and these technologies facilitated content sharing and transferring between different systems. Visual design was no more an interface to the content but web services became programmatic interfaces to the same content instead.

2. Content is ‘King’

Content was never more important. With the advent of next phase of the web various apps such as RSS, search, videos, and social media (just to name a few) can unlock content from ANY corner of the web. Design in the ‘Web 1.0′ era was all about creating a visually attractive and compelling website on the web. But since content can no longer be restricted in a single place (unless you try escape from the social web which trust me is very harmful), it’s important to concentrate on the content itself. So instead of just building a website, create useful and informative content. Web designers should think beyond sites and figure out how to brand the content instead.

3. Emergence of distributive navigation

With the rise of the social web, it is highly likely that content will be first encountered away from the domain to which it originally belongs. So navigation to reach a specific item is not only limited to the navigation on the site but a user can navigate throughout the web to reach to your content. Navigation/users can come in a form of a feed reader (RSS), searches, and links on blogs etc. Visitors/users might even read content without ever visiting the domain it comes from. Navigation schemes (as we know them) will be used less. The most used navigation paths will emerge solely from user behavior and not from sites or navigations specially designed for it.

4. Importance of Programming

In the Web 2.0 world, words and semantics are more important than presentation and layout. Content which is extremely important (as mentioned above) moves around the web freely and is accessible by programming means. Designers need to be comfortable with various web services and think beyond presentation. Web 2.0 is a world of thin front ends but powerful back ends. Branding of content as well as sites is important to survive. Knowledge of programming hence becomes very important to design sites in this phase of the web.

The effects of the shift towards Web 2.0 are far reaching, and designers and developers are one of the many groups affected by this. Two points to keep in mind when designing a web 2.0 website is that, firstly a bit of technical knowledge is indispensable and secondly treating content as a unified part of website design.

Cynthia ~Social Cowgirl
www.SocialCowgirl.com

Sharetwitter Web 2.0 A Shift in Perspective and ArchitectureBufferPinExt Web 2.0 A Shift in Perspective and Architecturestumbleupon Web 2.0 A Shift in Perspective and Architecturedelicious Web 2.0 A Shift in Perspective and Architecture

Can Twitter Be Used For Orthodontic Marketing?

September 23, 2011 in Affiliate Marketing, Blog Marketing, More Social Media, Twitter with Comments Off

Sharetwitter Can Twitter Be Used For Orthodontic Marketing?BufferPinExt Can Twitter Be Used For Orthodontic Marketing?stumbleupon Can Twitter Be Used For Orthodontic Marketing?delicious Can Twitter Be Used For Orthodontic Marketing?

Question number nine is one of my favorite questions and it’s about Twitter. Hopefully you’ve at least heard of twitter. The question that I get is, “Isn’t Twitter just for kids?” I mean, can you possibly use Twitter to grow your practice? It’s a very interesting subject because quite honestly I am not a fan of Twitter. I don’t like it, I think it’s just such a strange concept. It really doesn’t matter what I like, it doesn’t matter what I think, it only matters what is happening in the marketplace, and what is working today.

So with that in mind, Yes, you need to use Twitter. Twitter can be extremely powerful in building your practice. The question is how do you do that? Well, that’s the conversation that will probably take hours.
But let’s just break it down to the core of what Twitter is, what Twitter really does, and how it can build your practice. We’re just going to skim over things here because again, it’s a very long conversation. But I just want you to consider here. Twitter is a way for you to contact many people at one time. So think of it as a text message that instead of sending it to one person at a time, it’s a text message that is sent to as many people that have decided to follow you on Twitter.

And follow you means that whenever they go to their account on Twitter they’re going to see what you’ve said. And you can put links in there. So again, we’re talking about off page search engine optimization. Those links as far as their back link values not nearly as valuable as some other things but it’s still worth putting a link in there once in a while.

So how do you start to use Twitter to build an orthodontic practice. It’s an interesting situation because it really can be done. What I want you to think about is, when you do any type of marketing, especially if you do postcard marketing which we talked about in question Number 7, is you’re going to buy a list and you have to pay a pretty fair amount of money to get that list. And hopefully it’s a qualified list that’s going to turn into some new patients for you.

Well, with Twitter all of the lists that are available, meaning people that are following other people is what’s called open source. So, you go to a website, like – Invisalign. Let’s say Invisalign has a Twitter account and they’ve got a following of 10,000 people or any other website (Ormco has about 250 followers now). I don’t see Invisalign with an account on Twitter as of today, but let’s say they’ve got 10, 000 people following them. That list of people is available to you so you can go to their website and invite all 10,000 to be your friend of Twitter, basically follow you on Twitter. How do you do that? Well, the easy way is to follow them and see who follows you back.

And right now, statistically it’s about 30% of the time people will follow you back for no reason other than, “Hey he followed me, I should follow him.” They are going to actually follow you back. So if there’s a list of 10,000 on a website, people who you know are good targets for you then you know you just got 3,000 people on your list.

So, that’s one of the things that’s powerful about Twitter. Now let’s go in a different direction and this is really interesting. I think people are forgetting about this piece of the marketplace when it comes to Twitter.

When you put something on your website, put something on your Blog. And let’s say it’s a video and it’s compelling or it’s interesting, it’s fun whatever it is. If you put a little button above it or below it, next to something on there that says, “retweet this.” It gives anybody who is on Twitter the ability to click that button, sign in onto their account and say, hey, look at this video I found. It’s called a retweet, and it allows you to now have access, not only to the people who came to your website to see the video, but every person that is following the person who came to your website.

I know, it gets a little bit overwhelming when you start thinking about just how powerful this can be. So I want you to consider how that can work for you. Being on Twitter doesn’t mean you are on it 10 times a day and telling people that you’re eating lunch and that you’re taking a quick little break. No, there is no real value there.

What you want is for you or somebody on your team to update Twitter every once in awhile and say, “here’s what going on in the practice” or “we are running this great event or contest.” And that can be very powerful. You can even say, “hey, I just read this article. I thought this was interesting.” But remember you’ve got 140 characters to say whatever it is you want to say. And that’s including any links you might put in there.

That gives you a little bit of information and background on Twitter and why you do want to get a Twitter account and figure out how to make it work for you.

Affiliate Marketing

Sharetwitter Can Twitter Be Used For Orthodontic Marketing?BufferPinExt Can Twitter Be Used For Orthodontic Marketing?stumbleupon Can Twitter Be Used For Orthodontic Marketing?delicious Can Twitter Be Used For Orthodontic Marketing?

Facebook Business Applications and Marketing Tools – Even Create Your Own

September 19, 2011 in Facebook, More Social Media with Comments Off

Sharetwitter Facebook Business Applications and Marketing Tools Even Create Your OwnBufferPinExt Facebook Business Applications and Marketing Tools Even Create Your Ownstumbleupon Facebook Business Applications and Marketing Tools Even Create Your Owndelicious Facebook Business Applications and Marketing Tools Even Create Your Own

The idea behind using Facebook as a venue for doing business is building a user base in the form of a community who respond to you as a person or to your product. If you just turn your page into one big advertisement, you are not going to get much in the way of a response. You need to educate people about the product without coming across as a hard sell.

You want to create the impression that you are here for socializing, not business. People will come to trust you and be more likely to buy your product or service if you can do this.

Facebook has built in tools which can be used to build your business. These include:

- Social Ads

- Pages

- Beacon

- Insights

- Platform

- Polls

These tools can help you to build awareness of your brand through Facebook and bring in potential clients. Needless to say, you are going to have to learn to use them effectively. Read on to find out how to harness these tools to build your business using Facebook.

You can learn how to take further advantage of these features by visiting the facebook website business section.

SOCIAL ADS

Social ads have a lot of promise for building your business since they can go directly to the news feeds of your Facebook friends. Anyone who is on your friends list will be able to get the word about your business right on their profile page.

This is also a very easy way of target marketing. You can control exactly who sees your ads – and target marketing is the way to get sales.

FACEBOOK PAGES

You can make a Face book page for a business, just as you would for yourself. This allows people to interact with and even become friends with your business. It is a great way to make a lot of people aware of your product and your brand who would not otherwise.

You know when someone becomes friends with your business on Facebook that you have a potential client; at the very least, they have shown some interest. People can interact with your business as they would with any of their other Facebook friends – they can leave comments and generally enhance the experience of a visit to your page.

You can use Facebook to your best advantage by adding features that will appeal to your target market and fit in with the brand image you are aiming to create. Quizzes, games, a Facebook group and so on.

FACEBOOK BEACON

Like social ads, Facebook Beacon gives you the ability to build your business by promoting yourself via your Facebook friends news feeds. You can set Beacon to notify all of your Facebook friends whenever you have a new product available, or any other sort of news or information you would like to disseminate amongst your Facebook friends. All you need to do is to add a little code to your Facebook page (this can be done by copy and paste, so no need to panic).

This encourages more interaction with your page, the website of your business and your company in general. This also helps get the word out about your businesses product or service.

Do not fret that you will be mercilessly spamming your Facebook friends and invading their privacy – they can opt out of these updates at any time they choose. You of course have the same ability for Facebook Beacon updates from others.

FACEBOOK INSIGHTS

If you are using facebook as a method of promoting your business you will of course want to know just who is checking out your Facebook page, clicking on your ads and joining your friends list. Facebook Insights is a tool which can give you a lot more detail on these sorts of statistics, which can help you to evaluate the efficacy of your campaign.

Armed with this information you can make the call as to whether viral marketing is working in your favor. Word of mouth is one of the best means of advertising and Facebook can facilitate it on a large scale. Facebook Insights lets you figure out what parts of your campaign are working and which are not as well as giving you valuable demographic information which will help you refine your campaign further.

FACEBOOK PLATFORM

Facebook Platform is an exciting tool for business indeed. Programmers can use this tool to build programs which will work with Facebook and add to the usefulness and fun of your Facebook page. If people like what you have on your page, they will spread the word and this build your client base.

You can add all manner of different applications to your site using this platform. Many opt for games, quizzes and other interactive features. You can have a look at the Applications page on the Facebook site to get an idea what sort of things others are using the platform for. These kinds of features can really help you build your brand image; take advantage of them.

FACEBOOK POLLS

Facebook polls can be a great way to gather demographic information from people using the site. Since you can make the poll interactive and fun to use, you’ll have no trouble gathering data. Best of all, you can target your polling.

You can make sure your polls are targeted just where you want them to be since you already have access to some data such as marital status and age of your Facebook friends. This helps you keep your polling relevant.

Do not forget about these valuable tools – they can really help out your business.

Anyone who is willing to put in just a little bit of effort can make their own applications for Facebook. You just need to learn Facebook Markup Language – there are plenty of tutorials online which can help you learn the ropes of this quickly.

Remember to have a look through what is already out there in terms of Facebook applications before you develop your own. If everyone is already using a very similar application, not too many of your fellow facebook users will be enticed by it. Do something a little different if you want to grab the attentionof people.

CREATING APPLICATIONS FOR BUSINESS

With just a little bit of programming know how, anybody can make and distribute their own applications. You’ll be doing this to build your business and it can make a big difference. Applications can really draw in people and keep them on your site. Games are especially popular and can build your brand while keeping users engaged and entertained.

You would be unwise to neglect the use of these applications available to you through Facebook. They can help get the word out about your business – and that is why you made a Facebook page for your business in the first place, no?

You will also be building a sense of community amongst all of these potential customers which will help you get sales.

Here are a few tips for getting the best results from your applications:

1) Make it relevant
In marketing, relevancy is everything. If your potential customers can not get into it, or if it is unclear how the application ties into your product or service, rethink your application.

2) Privacy policy
Even if they are on facebook to socialize, people still want their privacy to be respected. This is why there are friend lists and groups, to which one must be invited. Privacy is a natural human desire and Facebook facilitates this while still allowing for socialization. Remember to respect the privacy of users and retain that trust you have worked so hard to build with them.

3) Free distribution

Once your application is finished and ready to go, you will distribute it. You can do this by listing it on the site along with all of the other Facebook applications and then invite others to install it. If your facebook friends like your application, they will spread the word.

Beach Money

Sharetwitter Facebook Business Applications and Marketing Tools Even Create Your OwnBufferPinExt Facebook Business Applications and Marketing Tools Even Create Your Ownstumbleupon Facebook Business Applications and Marketing Tools Even Create Your Owndelicious Facebook Business Applications and Marketing Tools Even Create Your Own

Viral Marketing Through Twitter

September 16, 2011 in Blog Marketing, Facebook, Twitter, Viral Marketing with Comments Off

Sharetwitter Viral Marketing Through TwitterBufferPinExt Viral Marketing Through Twitterstumbleupon Viral Marketing Through Twitterdelicious Viral Marketing Through Twitter

Viral marketing leverages the existing social media applications to market products and brands. Twitter has been instrumental in taking viral marketing initiatives to the next level. And why is that so? It is primarily because of the fact that it is simple and easy to use. Unlike social applications like Facebook and MySpace, it tries to condense the content through micro blogging platform in 140 characters only. This makes it ideal for business users who can always reply to the generic question, Twitter asks “What are you doing?”

The essence of a viral marketing campaign is to share the information piece with followers and friends. On a broad scale it could do couple of things for you. Firstly, it can enable you to gain new customers and secondly, you can get a fair feedback about your marketing campaign and its success. You should act smartly and ensure that you share information about your product on twitter as per a devised plan. Too much of similar type of information will not sustain interest in your followers. Eventually they might un-follow you and start exploring newer trade avenues in no time.

Be sure as to why you are even doing viral marketing for that matter? In order to taste sweet success, your aim should be to inform people around of the services you can offer and how your services are differentiated from the rest of the service providers. If you can answer these questions and make it reflect in your tweets trust me you will be making good business model online.

Design a viral marketing campaign keeping in mind the interest of customers and also keep an eye over the competition. How are they are doing it? Can you do it better by offering more for less? And if not how will you draw the attention of the end consumer? You should follow a proactive and reactive marketing strategy than a stand alone or monotonic marketing pitch. Your campaign should be compelling and the service should be portrayed as best in class. Trust me, most of the products available online are successful over their competition only because their presentation is good. Therefore market your products in a presentable manner. It will draw maximum interest and attention of your followers. And you never know if they might become your future customers too! So what are you waiting for? Start exploring the viral marketing avenues through twitter.

Cynthia ~Social Cowgirl
www.SocialCowgirl.com

Sharetwitter Viral Marketing Through TwitterBufferPinExt Viral Marketing Through Twitterstumbleupon Viral Marketing Through Twitterdelicious Viral Marketing Through Twitter

Starting a Social Marketing Campaign

September 12, 2011 in Blog Marketing, Blog Network, Blog Traffic, Business Opportunities, More Social Media with Comments Off

Sharetwitter Starting a Social Marketing CampaignBufferPinExt Starting a Social Marketing Campaignstumbleupon Starting a Social Marketing Campaigndelicious Starting a Social Marketing Campaign
Socail Media21 Starting a Social Marketing Campaign
Social marketing is an often misunderstood form of marketing that is reaping huge rewards for website owners who use it. Most webmasters who understand it, even while being very new to social marketing, are seeing results like:1. Higher search engine rankings for their top keywords

2. More rankings of additional keywords or “long tail” keyword phrases

3. More link popularity from sites linking on their own accord

4. More link popularity from social media sites

5. More activity on their blogs, such as more commenting and interaction

6. Direct traffic from incoming links on social media sites (One good StumbleUpon.com submission can net thousands of visitors alone.)

7. Fast traffic increases and steady growth in unique visitors month after month

8. An increase in subscribers and sales. Social traffic, properly acquired, is very warm to your message and products.

The problem for most people when thinking about social marketing, after getting a taste of all the hundreds of sites there are to interact with, is becoming overwhelmed and paralyzed into inaction.

They assume established social marketers gained their “social authority” in a short period of time. This is simply not true. Although the opportunities for driving serious traffic and rankings from hundreds of social sites exists, it is an embarrassment of riches.

And it cannot be conquered over night. It is a gradual process you manage with all your other responsibilities and grow as time allows.

What I encourage my clients to do is set aside enough time each day to get one more link, participate in one more conversation, or sign up for one more account on a social site.

A little goes a long way and social marketing is not an “all or nothing” situation. After some time you will become established on the social sites you need to have a presence on. And you will have a schedule that allows you to keep up with your other work while adding this extremely powerful marketing method to the mix.

10 Steps For Starting a Social Marketing Campaign

1. Schedule a bit of time each day to do some new things. Don’t just say you are going to do them. Write the time into your day and follow through.

2. Sign up for the major social news sites: Digg.com, Propeller.com, Mixx.com. Fill out your profile page completely and hold back on submitting your own stuff until you’ve really done a good job submitting, voting, and commenting on stories not directly related to your site.

In fact, BE a real presence and don’t try to push your own content onto the networks you belong to. It should feel and be natural and you will know what “natural is on each network by participating, commenting, voting and getting a general sense of what members think is good and bad content. Watch their comments and votes and you will know how to proceed with your own site’s content from there.

3. If you don’t have a blog, you must install one immediately. This is not an option. It is an absolute necessity on today’s web. Our company uses WordPress and recommends it over any other blogging platform, and it can be installed easily by you or your webmaster. WordPress download: http://wordpress.org/download/

Option #2: Check with your web host to see if they have Fantastico available to you and, if so, that it installs the latest version of WordPress. If so you are very lucky because the software can be installed by you very easily in just a few steps with Fantastico.

4. Once you have your blog set up, join the following networks. (These are blog communities that will help you generate visitors, authority, and links and most bloggers belong to them.) MyBlogLog.com (install the widget on your WordPress blog), and BlogCatalog.com. (they also have a widget to install)

5. Join groups, interact with other publishers, and make friends with the easy networking tools these sites provide. Especially the people who would be most likely to link to your blog and send you traffic who write about similar things or have an audience similar to yours who’d benefit by knowing you. You can even start your own group, promote it in the network, and send “shouts” to the group when you have announcements or need attention to a new post.

6. As soon as you establish yourself on the sites mentioned above, move on to other sites like them that might be more targeted directly to your niche and the market you work in. There are a lot of new “vertical” social sites popping up that focus on much more narrow markets and their membership is far warmer to your kind of information than on the bigger, more general networks above.

Add a new site to the mix as often as you can and repeat the steps for becoming established there as mentioned in Step 2 above.

7. Join a group dedicated to social marketing to pick up tips from other social marketers and find new places you can sign up with to continue building your social authority. New sites pop up every single day. Follow places like Go2Web20.net to find new opportunities to connect with your market.

8. Remote blog. Join blogger.com and put content there that is good, just not good enough to go on your main blog. This serves two purposes: 1) you get to use more of the great content you find as you travel through all the social news sites and 2) it gives you another place to link back to your main site and pass on traffic and link popularity over time.

9. Track your progress diligently. If something you are trying on a social network isn’t working, you need to know that in order to save time and move on to something more fruitful. MyBlogLog.com (above) has a tracking system which will show you where your traffic is coming from so you can avoid time wasting efforts and focus more on the sites that are really pulling in good traffic for you.

10. Don’t freak out! This is only overwhelming if you act like someone at an all-you-can-eat buffet with no self control. You have other things to do and this needs to fit into, not dominate, your current business and marketing.

Social marketing can partially or completely replace other methods you are using to promote your site including paid advertising. Many people completely drop their paid advertising or PPC campaigns once they see the organic, natural traffic and search engine rankings pile up from social marketing.

Until then, just take it one step at a time and do some social marketing. A little goes a long way and before you know it, you will reach a point where a lot of traffic and lots of search engine rankings are piling up because you simply started doing something each day.

There’s a lot you can learn about social marketing. And not all of it can be found on free blogs.

Cynthia ~Social Cowgirl
www.SocialCowgirl.com

Sharetwitter Starting a Social Marketing CampaignBufferPinExt Starting a Social Marketing Campaignstumbleupon Starting a Social Marketing Campaigndelicious Starting a Social Marketing Campaign

Page 10 of 22« First...«89101112»20...Last »