HOW TO: Implement a Social Good Campaign on Facebook You want to do good, and you want to use Facebook. Good choice. Facebook has a couple of things going for it. Second, Facebook is an informal place to launch serious things. We've outlined five ways to take advantage of these elements, whether you want to register as a charity or just lend a digital hand without the rigmarole. 1. This should be a no-brainer. Important note: Before you start to donate to any campaign on Facebook, make sure the money or support is going to the right place. These are actually required conditions to sign up, but it's always good to do some research, especially if you're not familiar with the non-profit. [Non-profits and supporters can set-up campaigns directly through Causes.com, who’s popular Facebook platform makes it easy to reach people.] 2. Facebook Pages have a lot of benefits over a website created from scratch. Be cautious about asking for money or donations, especially if you are not a registered non-profit. 3. Too many numbers and conditions? 4.
The Case for the Virtual Classroom Online education is often dismissed as a pipeline for expensive degrees of little value and a sponge for veterans’ tuition payments. But while it’s true that for-profit universities have made a hefty business out of e-learning, it’s becoming apparent that learning online can also benefit almost everyone else. “It’s very clear that five years from now, on the web, for free…you will be able to find the greatest lectures in the world on the web,” Bill Gates recently predicted in an interview at Techonomy 2010. Gates is not the only smart guy pulling for online education to extend the reach, affordability, and even quality of education. Here’s why the virtual classroom counts deans of prestigious universities, entrepreneurs, and people who want to change the world as its advocates. 1. This July, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's business school will enroll the first students of its online MBA program. According to the U.S. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. More Education Resources from Mashable:
HOW TO: Use Social Media to Create Better Customer Experiences Maria Ogneva is the director of social media at Nimble, a social relationship management solution that transforms your entire community into business opportunity by leveraging the best of customer relationship management, social media and communication tools. You can follow her on Twitter at @themaria or @nimble, or find her musings on the company blog and her personal blog. It’s no secret that customer experience is one of the cornerstones of an effective business strategy. In all honesty, it should have been all along, but many companies chose to hide behind corporate walls and only talk to customers when it was convenient for them instead of when the customer needed them. There’s no need to belabor the point that social media has put customers in the driver’s seat. However, companies don’t need to live in fear of the next Kevin Smith or Nestle Fanpage episode. Social CRM Connects Social Customer to Social Business Honeymoon and Teamwork How Does Social Media Enhance Experience? 1.
Open Data: Why the Crowd Can Be Your Best Analytics Tool Sean Gorman is the president and founder of FortiusOne, which brings data and mapping solutions to the mass market through its location analysis software. With FortiusOne’s GeoIQ platform, geo-enabled data is easily shared, visualized and analyzed for more collaborative and better-informed decisions. The web will continue to generate data at an explosive rate. It will generate even more now that mobile devices have created yet another path to reach that data. Out of this bounty of data emerged “data science” and a plethora of new tools to deal with the size and speed of information. When we look at the insight and intelligence that companies like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter have been able to mine about the preferences and behaviors of their users, it is no surprise that data scientists are in high demand. The rapid rise in demand and the shortage of trained experts has led to the emergence of tools to democratize access to big data. The Challenges of Big Data Answers Included
HOW TO: Attract Early Adopters to Your Social Startup Shane Snow is a technology journalist in New York City. Follow him on Twitter at @shanesnow. One of the main challenges for social networks stems from a question ancient philosophers have debated for centuries: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In social media, the dilemma often takes the form of, "We need users for our network to be useful, but users won’t join the network unless it’s useful." A social network’s utility is derived from the people belonging to it. The second great challenge in social networking is spreading to new users at a fast and sustainable pace, i.e. viral growth. This month, a social startup called Hashable (no relation!) How does a new site like Hashable get past the chicken dilemma, when others can’t? How Facebook Did It: Start Small and Exclusive When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in 2004, he positioned his social network as private and exclusive. How Tumblr Did It: Make It Useful Even If You’re Alone How Foursquare Did It: Use Game Psychology
HOW TO: Optimize Your Content for Social Discovery David Sasson is the chief operating officer of Outbrain, a content recommendation platform that is based in New York. You can follow him on Twitter at @davidsasson. Since the rise of search over the past decade, few obsessions have run deeper in the world of online publishing than search engine optimization (SEO). In an attempt to grow their audience and gain exposure for their content, publishers have increasingly focused on keeping Google’s crawlers well fed with tasty morsels of meta data, keyword repetitions, internal linking and more. But designing websites for crawlers often has a downside; namely, it can lead to a poor experience for flesh-and-blood users. Probably never. Luckily, this mentality is beginning to change as the sources of traffic into publisher content diversify. This development is great for publishers. These changes aren’t totally surprising. 1. For example, print publishers like Cosmo have known for years that people love lists. 2. 3. 4.
5 Free and Easy Listening Tools for Social Media Monitoring Do you wonder what your customers are saying about your product or service across the web? Listening effectively to your customers can be a very insightful experience. The better you are at listening; the better you can understand your customer’s wants and needs. With the rise, and seemingly universal adoption, of social media amongst consumers, businesses can now listen in on conversations regarding their products and services if they have the right tools. Here are five free tools to include in your social media listening tool belt: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Once you get your “listening headquarters” all set up you will find it hard to turn off. Listening to what people say can teach you a lot about what you are doing right, and perhaps more importantly, what you are doing wrong. Which tools do you use for your social media listening efforts? Connect: Authored by: Jason Miller
Should Companies Play it Safe in Social Media? What does that mean exactly, to play it safe? Is that creating a Facebook page just to satisfy the critics and the bashers? Is it creating a Twitter profile “in case” someone maybe be talking about you so that you can claim that you and your company are proactively listening to the conversation? Or is it a blog that has 3-4 posts over the span of 6 months? One of the easiest ways to opt out of the social media revolution is to do just enough to satisfy the hacks that may be looking at your social efforts who then may be writing, speaking or commenting about your stuff and trying to poke holes at it. So what’s happening here? Does either strategy ( I use the term lightly) work? You’re in business to make money and you’re in business to compete against others that do what you do and sell what you sell. Playing it safe in sports means playing for ties or not caring whether you win or lose. Connect: Authored by: Marc Meyer See complete profile
HOW TO: Spread Your Business Footprint Around the Web This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. The web, as we know, is a great place to market your business — but only if people can find you. Success in online marketing is contingent upon people being able to locate your web presence. One of the best ways to connect with current and potential customers via the web is to leave your footprint around the Internet and create a trail that leads back to your business. Leaving your business footprint across the web has a number of benefits, including driving traffic back to your site, building brand awareness, establishing trust and boosting your search engine rankings. There are an almost infinite number of places around the web where you can leave your footprint, but here are four rules for getting the most out of your efforts and attracting notice. 1. Social media is a big place. 2. His lesson? 3. 4.
Social Media for Small Businesses: 6 Effective Strategies Nellie Akalp is CEO of CorpNet.com, her second incorporation filing service based on her strong passion to assist small business owners and entrepreneurs in starting and protecting their business. She has formed more than 100,000 corporations and LLCs across the U.S. To learn more about Nellie and see how she can help your business get off the ground quickly and affordably, please visit here. Many small business owners I encounter are either too busy for social media, or they don’t truly understand Facebook, Foursquare, or Twitter. I’m not a social media expert. Over the past few years, I’ve made it a point to explore and understand the social web around me. 1. Social media has little to do with you; it’s all about your audience, customers, or whomever you’re trying to reach. Not sure where your customers are on the social web? 2. Social media is attractive to small businesses because of its perceived price. 3. Starbucks has more than 1.3 million followers on Twitter. 4. 5. 6.
Social Media for Business 85+ Resources: Educator Guide for Integrating Social Media I hope this post will be a handy reference guide, especially for those teachers new to social media technologies and how to integrate them into the classroom. This resource is by no means exhaustive, but it’s a good starting point for finding the information and people that will help you make the transition into a ’21st century learning environment’. I intend for this to be a wikipost (I will update resources as they are shared with me by others), so feel free to bookmark the page and check in periodically for new material. Enjoy. Articles for Understanding the Importance of Social Media in Education Some Basics Videos Explaining the Social Media ‘Revolution’ Social Media RevolutionDid You Know 4.0 The Machine is Us/ing UsA Vision of Students Today Frameworks Tools Blogs to Follow Wikis Tips for Building your Network & Connecting with Teachers Social Networks for Educators Classroom 2.0 (over 34,000 members!) Organizations & Resources Further Linking On Twitter – tech-savvy educators to connect with