From:AmplicateInfo. Why Start a Blog and 25 Tips to Make it Work. Today I'm presenting at a local association for small business owners about blogging for your business with Chris Krewson, Executive Editor for Online News, Philly.com, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Daily News (Chris on Twitter, me on Twitter, just in case you're there). I like the idea of being paired with a journalist, it will keep me on my best writing behavior, verbally. To me the first question that needs answering about starting any social media or network activity is that of why - why start a blog?
In my post how a blog is born I shared a graphic on the emergence and rise of mass social media. It described in visual form the shift to consumer control, pull, and its network effect. For businesses especially, people have come to expect that you have a Web presence. But, when they research you or your type of business, they prefer to read what others are saying about you, or they want to see you in action - read how you solve problems, what kind of expertise you have, etc. Hipmunk: One Site to Search and Sort All Flights.
This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Hipmunk Quick Pitch: Hipmunk helps you find the right flight. It hides the bad flights and sorts the good ones. Genius Idea: What do you hate most about air travel? Is it the costs? Whatever you hate most, Hipmunk will help you filter out so you can quickly see, select and purchase the best flights. It's refreshing to find a web app that solves a legitimate, common consumer problem. Hipmunk effectively solves the problem of sorting through half a dozen slow and painful discount travel user interfaces to find the one flight you need.
Once you tell Hipmunk when and where you'd like to go and on which airline, if any, you prefer to fly, the app sorts out available flights and filters them by multiple factors. Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark. 10 Twitter 'words' I hope never end up in the Oxford Dictionary of English - Adam Vincenzini's Share-house. Foursquare Notes Record New Signups, The Day After Facebook Places Launches. A record number of new users signed up for Foursquare today, company co-founder Dennis Crowley wrote in a tweet tonight. That likely means upwards of 18,000 people signed up for the location-based social network, probably buoyed by a glowing article in today's New York Times and the press generated from yesterday's announcement of Facebook Places. All eyes are on Foursquare and other services like it in the wake of yesterday's announcement of Facebook Places, which lets users add a location element to their status updates.
Will startups like Foursquare survive? If they don't, it won't be without a fight. CEO Dennis Crowley has already indicated that Foursquare is still in the game and aims to be more than just an app on top of Facebook Places, which lets developers use that information in third party applications and was rolled out to its 500 million users today. "Look what happened when Facebook got into Twitter's space. LATE UPDATE: Foursquare sent us this comment: Newspaper industry news - Media UK. Identifying Your Brand’s Ambassadors. Is there something you are so passionate about that you relish the opportunity to talk about it and tell other people? And next thing you know, those people share your same interest and sentiment for it too?
Maybe it was your new hybrid car, a brand of jeans, a restaurant or a new band you discovered. Word of mouth is nothing new and it’s still the most powerful form of marketing in our opinion. However, when brands identify and listen to their natural, self-made evangelists to empower their passion, it becomes an epic force. This is exactly what Digital Royalty has been helping author Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO, do with his Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion & Purpose #1 New York Times Bestseller.
As part of the Delivering Happiness book team we have helped organize a Very Happy Person (VHP) program to harness the power of our most active, vocal, and passionate supporters in order to fuel an overall happiness movement that lives beyond the successful launch of the book. 30 Social Media Business Case Studies | Penn Olson. With social media on the rise, many businesses are adopting social platforms like Facebook and Twitter as part of their marketing and communication channels. Some did well and some weren’t as good. Social media is a double edge sword and the last thing that a business would want is to end up in a disaster.
There are many social media business case studies (both good and bad) on the web and we have written a few over the year as well. Here, we have consolidated 30 interesting social media business case studies, which provide actual implementation insights and ideas. #1 How @EmersonSalon Uses Social Media Successfully @emersonsalon, a boutique salon in Seattle, connects with existing and potential customers through social media. 75% of their customers are from Facebook, Twitter and their blog. #2 How A Restaurant Uses Foursquare To Gather 161 Users #3 @HumphrySlocombe: The Ice Cream Champion Of Twitter The ice cream with an attitude. . #4 Wildfire Interactive Rides The Social Media Wave. The Most ReTweetable Words Finder Tool. I’ve done a bunch of research about The Most ReTweetable Words and people seem to like it, but the overall top 20 is a bit too generic for many niches. So I made a tool that will allow you to find the most ReTweetable words about your specific topic.
This tool will show you the 20 most ReTweetable words about any given topic. Simply enter a keyword (like “marketing”) and click analyze. The tool will return a list of words that were found to be related to that word and highly ReTweetable. It will also display the number of Tweets and ReTweets analyzed to generate the list. Each word is recalculated after 24 hours, and the tool analyzes up to 1500 Tweets and 1500 ReTweets per word. The tool works by comparing words found in ReTweets against how commonly they appeared in non-ReTweet Tweets, and identifies those words that appear in ReTweets more than they do in non-ReTweets. It does take a few moments to analyze a new word for the first time, so please be patient. 2eq6_ThQA6A from mashable.com. Facebook has just announced Places, the long-awaited feature that brings location-based functionality to the most popular social network in the world.
Whether you're a developer with a great app idea, a business with an interesting location marketing plan or just a regular Facebook user who wants to get involved with Places, there are a few details to note before you start using Places. The feature is fascinating, but it still has its limitations. And our guide isn't without caveats, especially for users. If you're ready to start playing, here's what you'll need to know about Places. How to Use Places First of all, you or a Facebook friend in your group will need a smartphone. The company does plan to roll out Android and BlackBerry versions of Places, but they haven't released any specific dates for those releases yet. To use Places, go to the Places tab on the iPhone application or touch.facebook.com. You'll also need to live in the U.S. Other Services That Will Use Places Other Tips. Top 5 Social Media Posts From Last Week — August 16, 2010 « Digital Marketing Mercenary. What the launch of Facebook Places really means...
Wearable Computing: Check-In Here on Foursquare (via Nike+) | MobileBehavior. Does sharing links to other blogs on Twitter boost traffic to your blog? I haven’t done a post here in a while analyzing my stats, so I wanted to share with you something interesting I’ve found over the past two weeks. Going back a month, and not counting this post, I’ve published 10 posts here since July the 20th. The posts have been a bit infrequent, until last week and this week. Last week I published 4 posts here, and this post will mark the 3rd post so far here this week.
Here is how my daily traffic has been for the last month: Note that the days with the red X above them are the days when a new post was published. Also notice that traffic was down a bit from July 21st through the 8th of this month. Then it about doubled last week when I published 4 posts, and it’s spiked this week. Now at first glance, you might assume that since I posted more last week, that it helped boost this week’s traffic as I was actively posting this week as well. But I’ve done something different this week. I’ll keep watching this to see if sharing really is driving traffic. In search of...an education in search engine optimization... The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Wine Sisterhood Benchmark Survey. The 8 Wrong Questions PR Firms Are Asking About Social Media | PR 2.0 | Social Media Consulting - Convince & Convert. 10 travel blogs you should bookmark in 2010. The Social Media Cycle.
7 Steps to Measuring Your Brand's Social Media Health. Maria Ogneva is the Director of Social Media at Attensity, a social media engagement and voice-of-customer platform that helps the social enterprise serve and collaborate with the social customer. You can follow her on Twitter at @themaria or @attensity360, or find her musings on her personal blog and her company's blog. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should measure everything. Social media is very easily measured with various indicators like share of voice, reach, retweets, and comments. However, measuring without a clear objective in mind won’t bring you closer to success.Nowadays, its not enough to have and execute a social media policy. You need to be able to gauge its success, measure it, and see that it remains healthy and vibrant.
Having already written about the differences between "monitoring" and "measuring" and how to properly conduct the former. Read on for the seven steps to getting the most out of your social media measurements. 1. 2. Social media is not a silo. 3. 122 Must See Guerilla Marketing Examples | Creative Guerrilla Marketing Examples.
48.5K SharesTwitter1.4KFacebook3.4KGoogle+188Pin It Share6.9KLinkedIn452StumbleUpon36.2K48.5K Flares× As creative thinkers we have to think of new and exciting ways to grab people’s attention every day. Sometimes it is by going bigger. Perhaps it’s by coming up with a better social media marketing strategy. In order to find some creative advertising inspiration, I decided to search the web for the best examples of guerrilla marketing I could find. Below you’ll find 122 examples of creative marketing campaigns. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, guerrilla marketing, you can find a detailed explanation on our ‘What is Guerrilla Marketing‘ page. Here are some other great compilation articles we think you might enjoy! Here’s a showcase of some amazing examples of Guerilla marketing.
Nikon Guerilla Marketing Campaign Swiss Skydive Guerilla Marketing Campaign Fitness First Guerilla Marketing Campaign Sharpie Guerilla Marketing Campaign Wii Guerilla Marketing Campaign Toyota Ambient Ad. 7 Great Places to Register Your Blog RSS Feed. Do you have an RSS feed on your blog? My web and graphic designer, Ryan Briggs, insisted I put an RSS feed on both my news items and my blog. I didn’t think I needed one in either place but I took his advice. Or I should say, I didn’t make a noise about it and he implemented his own recommendation. I’m really glad he did. It took me awhile to figure out the power behind the feed. PerthWIND has news and opinion from all sources in the digest. In recent months, I’ve really come to understand how to exploit my feed. Wot News www.wotnews.com.au – A news aggregator for the Australian media, when I found out about Wot News at the Media140 conference, I immediately registered both my feeds.
I’m on the lookout for new places all the time. Where have you registered your RSS feed? Subscribe here to have new posts from the Global Copywriting Blog delivered by email. *Image courtesy of Stylianos Mystakidis at www.flickr.net Connect: Authored by: Sarah Mitchell See complete profile. 5 Ways to put more cowbell in your blog posts. “We need more cowbell” has become a cultural idiom from SNL that seems to represent an excitement, originality, and hilarity that we all find so appealing. As a blogger, it’s important to recognize the basics of what creates viral humor, sharing, and enjoyment online.
The following five tips are good recommendations for blogging, and for those situations where you find yourself holding a cowbell. Be anything but boring. Some people probably hate the cowbell skit. Some people probably hate Will Ferrell. But I bet nobody thinks he is boring. Be ridiculous and memorable. It’s OK to stand out. Keep it staccato; short, loud and crisp. You never know what people will love, so just keep trying. Connect: Authored by: Eric Fulwiler Digital marketing/media professional/entrepreneur, Account Executive @VaynerMedia. See complete profile. Competitors on Twitter: Evaluate With Your Eyes Wide Open. If you’ve done your listening exercises (monitoring the social landscape through keyword searches) you may have discovered your competition is on Twitter.
As a part of your own social media strategy and planning audit, it’s important to evaluate what your competition is doing, how they are connecting with influencers and how quickly they’re advancing on this network. Working through a competitive intelligence exercise means getting past the obvious and digging into an audit with your eyes wide open. Of course, you’ll immediately check out how many followers your competitors have and the lists where they appear. And, yes, you should review their tweet stream to figure out their approach. You can also scour through their followers to see the influencers they’ve connected with and the level of engagement.
Do they have a standard Twitter profile or a customized background? How to Identify Where Your Audience is Participating Online. Competitors on Twitter: Evaluate With Your Eyes Wide Open. 25 Of the most useful social media resources that you may not be aware of. I wanted to compile a list of some of the best websites, blogs, services and resources on social media that you may not know. We all spend so much time on the same sites online that sometimes it can feel like we have blinkers on and that we miss all the good stuff.
I spend lots of my time researching posts for this blog and find some of the resources below invaluable for that task. You may know some or even many of the names on this list but hopefully you'll find a couple of gems in there that you can bookmark and use for future use... Fflick I only just discovered this myself but for movie buffs among you the site will be a real revelation. All Facebook Who would have thought there would ever be dedicated blogs targeting a social network? Quora This is a fairly new question and answer site that was set up by some former Facebook engineers. Facebook Username Ranker Facebook Directory Inside Facebook Twitip and features guest blog posts from avid Twitter users every day.
Facebook Blog Weeplaces. Vodafone Mobile Wi-Fi - Buy Mobile Wi-Fi on Vodafone. Want to use WiFi on the London Underground? Well if you're a Vodafone customer you can. To start with, WiFi on the London Underground will work in over 100 stations. You'll be able to connect to our Wi-Fi portal in many ticket halls, walkways and platforms - with access to everything from your emails to London listings and travel updates. As you move through the underground, your phone will automatically reconnect when in range of the Wi-Fi service. Who's eligible for WiFi on the London Underground? Pay as you go customers with internet as part of their plan. How do you get access to WiFi on the London Underground? It's simple - just register for My Vodafone and pop in your details the first time you connect. How much does it cost? There's no extra charge, as long as you're eligible. How do you connect? It takes seconds.
Got a question? You can find out more, including a full list of stations which already have WiFi, from Virgin Media. Terms apply. Rejoice! US newspaper sales down by only 7% Why you must keep track of your online profile. Gap Offers 25% Discount for Foursquare Checkins. Facebook, YouTube, Skype and Twitter go retro! - trevoryoung's posterous. Can you read this? 7 Tips To Improve Your Blog Post's Readability. - BusinessCasualBlog.com. Google Chrome Beta: Speedy and Simple to Use. YouSwear Teaches You to Swear in Any Language. 5 great Twitter mapping tools.
5 Tips for Dealing with Complaints on Twitter. Designed Sneaker Collection by Daniel Reese.