Gartner: Social Media Leads Business. Mobile computing is forcing the biggest change to the way people live since the automobile, says Gartner. Mass adoption forces new infrastructure, it spawns new businesses, and it threatens the status quo. Gartner believes sharing comments, links and recommendations with friends, drives enterprise IT practices. Social technologies both drive and depend on the other three Nexus forces: Social provides an important need for mobility: Accessing social networks is one of the primary uses of mobile devices and social interactions have much more value when they are possible wherever the user is located. Social depends on cloud for scale and access: Social networks benefit from scale, the kind of scale that is really only practical through cloud deployment. Social feeds and depends on deep analysis: Social interactions provide a rich source of information about connections, preferences and intentions.
Everything You Need to Know About Foursquare's New Merchant Tools. This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Last week, Foursquare announced a slew of new merchant tools that give business owners more power than ever before to communicate with their customers through the location-based platform. Before, business owners could claim their venues, set up a special and let the platform take it from there — it was more of a passive marketing tool.
The new additions make Foursquare's local updates far more dynamic, and they leverage location-based marketing in a more targeted way than Facebook and Twitter. The revamp has several parts: Below, we give you skinny on what you need to know and how to take advantage of the platform. Creating an Update Local updates let business owners who've claimed their venues send updates about their business to their "best customers" when they’re nearby. So, here's how you send an update.
Step 1. How Your Favorite Sites Are Using Your Data. All of the different sites you frequent on a daily basis are actively gathering facts about you. With the rise of social sharing sites like Facebook, Pinterest, Google, Pandora, and Twitter — information is also being gathered with every share, pin, tweet, or “like.” We are showing brands and marketers what we like, and bringing about an interesting change in how our data is being used. Social networks are betting on a future built on a personalized web, an Internet playground filled with items the virtual you will be more apt to share, pin, tweet, or “like.”
With each of those actions you complete, advertisements based off of your preferences are being diverted your way. The value of this change will bring more of the products and services we actually enjoy and want to look at, instead of all the junk we aren’t interested in, or even remotely care about. Why Optimizing Your Website Is of Value to a Small Business Owner. SEO… SEM… Search Queries… Organic Results… PPC… Once upon a time there was an easy way (or so a small business owner might have thought) to get customers and increase business. ’Yellow pages’ Yellow Books’, ‘Little Yellow Books’ and the like were full of advertisements in varying sizes and prospective advertisers were bombarded with offers to be #1. Competition was fierce to be in the first page position and/or on the right side of the page.
Business owners couldn’t get enough of it, and every month, year after year, that’s where the majority of advertising money went. At least for our company. Then came the web Over a number of years, websites became increasingly popular, and the good news was, you didn’t have to be a Fortune 500 company or a country-wide chain to have a website. And so, ‘back in the day’ we had a website designed for our company. And so begins the Odyssey And… why not? But… as with anything good…there’s an expiration date. Author: Bonnie Bornstein Fertel. Tweet-driven London Eye Lightshow. Twitter’s Olympics hub, part of a partnership with NBCUniversal, will serve as an official narrator for a live event, reports the Wall St Journal. The 2012 Olympic Games will start next week with a social-media driven light show illuminating the London Eye. The landmark will be lit up each night in relation to positive or negative London 2012 comments on the social networking site.
EDF Energy, has rigged the city’s landmark ferris wheel with bulbs that will shine each night of the Games in relation to Twitter feedback. Based on an “intuitive algorithm,” real-time tracking of the Twitter hashtag #Energy2012 will split comments into positive and negative categories according to words, phrases, and emoticons, then filter them into the light show. Sentiments could include thoughts like “best,” “amazing,” “shivers,” or “tears,” which are given scores to boost or reduce the energy count. U.K. The light show will begin at 9 p.m. each night of the Olympics and Paralympics. Georama’s Map-Based Travel Search Service Goes Live. Chicago-based Georama is now launching what it calls a “map-based travel platform.” In layman’s terms, that’s a travel search service that’s entirely based on top of a map.
It can either suggest places for you to go based on your interests or other factors (e.g. time of year), or, if you already have a few places in mind, you can use Georama to explore things like local attractions and activities, restaurants, nightlife, weather, news, deals and more. The company has bootstrapped itself to $250,000 and raised another $250,000 from undisclosed New York angels a couple of months ago. Georama was founded by Nihal Advani, an ex-Microsoftie who previously worked in Search (Bing) and Display (Microsoft Media Network). So, what’s the big idea with a “map-based” platform, I wanted to know.”We believe in providing an experience for travelers, something that hasn’t been done that well in the online travel industry so far,” Advani tells me. How To Put Marketing Theory Into Practice. Popular Today in Business: All Popular Articles I wrote a post about What is Marketing and the 7 Ps earlier this month. It is important to know about marketing and the different elements, but how can you actually put it all into practice?
Studying and reading all about marketing can be difficult to translate into marketing a real business in real life. Here I look at the 7Ps and how I implemented them with a business. Product One of The Melville Jewellers’ Window Display As I mentioned before, this is one of the most crucial elements of the mix. Price The Australian market is different to that of the UK market and therefore I could not keep comparing and contrasting the prices of the two. Related Resources from B2C» Free Webcast: Build Better Products by Identifying and Validating Your Riskiest Assumptions Place The shop had just moved to a new location, which was in a busier shopping centre than before. Jewellery on Promotion Promotion Physical evidence People Process.
Google takes Nexus 7 camping for its first ad, can afford to pack light (video) Get Better Local Directions When You're Lost. Online Radio Service TuneIn Comes To Tesla’s Model S, Now Available On 200 Platforms. TuneIn‘s online radio service that lets people listen to music, sports and news on their smartphones and on the web, just announced that it is now available on 200 different distribution platforms.
The platforms include everything from smartphones, home entertainment systems, connected TV and – most recently – connected cars. Indeed, the 200th platform the company announced today is Tesla’s new Model S premium sedan, which our own Colleen Taylor took for a spin last week. While it doesn’t get a lot of hype and generally flies under the radar of the Silicon Valley press, TuneIn recently told me that it is growing rapidly thanks, in no small part, to the popularity of its smartphone apps. The service, which raised funding from Sequoia Capital in 2010 (and is rumored to have raised a very large undisclosed round earlier this year) currently offers its users the ability to listen to 70,000 stations and 2 million on-demand programs.
Five Ways People Are Doing Business Differently Online In 2012. Popular Today in Business: All Popular Articles The way consumers respond to information on the Internet is changing the way B2B and B2C transactions are being handled online. Consumers are shopping differently and businesses must respond to these changes with new approaches if they want to stay ahead of their competition. The top trends in 2012 address these changes in an attempt to attract more consumers. Social Media Marketing Social Media Marketing is the most important trend in online B2B and B2C transactions. Businesses that spend more advertising dollars on social media sites such as blogs and reviews are increasing their presence to consumers. Social media has given them a chance to communicate with their clients and customers about new ideas and build better relationships. This new line of communication has increased business sales based on real-time user opinions.
Mobile Devices The average consumer is also changing the way they access the Internet to find information.