http://mashable.com/2010/02/22/build-facebook-landing-page/
Google Buzz: 5 Opportunities for Small Businesses This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Just when you thought you had social media figured out, Google has shaken things up with a new entrant into the market: Google Buzz. It’s integrated into Gmail, which means right out of the gate it potentially has an audience of tens of millions of people. HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook Dan Schawbel is the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, April 09), and owner of the award winning Personal Branding Blog. With over 200 million active users, Facebook has become a personal, product and corporate branding hub. Every brand that exists on Facebook has the same core features and benefits, such as the ability to create a page, share resources, add multimedia and much more. You have a unique opportunity to leverage this platform for career success or as a playground for you and your closest friends. The social graph is filled with CEOs, celebrities, entrepreneurs and people just like you who can be reached through Facebook’s messaging system without any boundaries or restrictions. Facebook is also a talent search engine and part of the college admission and corporate recruiting criteria.
HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Your Business Facebook Page Susan Payton is the President of Egg Marketing & Public Relations, an Internet marketing firm. She blogs at The Marketing Eggspert Blog. Follow her on Twitter @eggmarketing. 5 Fantastic Facebook Fan Page Ideas to Learn From This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. So your business is on Facebook, and brand engagement is up thanks to some savvy social media strategy. You may even be interested in further distinguishing your brand by building a custom landing page for your account. But what kind of value does a custom Facebook Fan Page offer? What are your fans looking for on a social network that they can't get from your business website?
Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed. Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family and maybe play a few stupid games that let you pretend you were a mafia don or a homesteader. It became a very useful way to connect with your friends, long-lost friends and family members. Even if you didn’t really want to keep up with them.
Facebook Privacy: 6 Years of Controversy [INFOGRAPHIC] Alexander Hotz is a freelance multimedia journalist and public radio junkie based in New York City. Currently he teaches digital media at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Follow Alex on Twitter at @hotzington. The release of Facebook Places raised serious privacy concerns for users of the social network. Places allows users to alert their friends to where they are by checking-in to a nearby location, often via mobile phone. Users can also view the location of nearby friends and the information they’ve posted about locations.
How 5 Top Companies Win With Twitter Last week at Socia Media Breakfast, I learned that AT&T has 15 Customer service reps and a full-time analyst dedicated to Twitter. This got me thinking about how businesses organize, scale and manage a large Twitter presence. I looked at 5 case studies for 5 different approaches: Altimeter Report: The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing Report Snapshot (full report embedded below)Altimeter Group conducted research, and gleaned input from 34 vendors, agencies, and experts, to determine success criteria and develop a roadmap for Facebook page best practices. We found Eight Success Criteria for Facebook page marketing, and then tested the maturity of 30 top brands across six industries. Our heuristic evaluation revealed that brands fell short – nearly half of the brands we reviewed (14 out of 30) did not fully leveraged social features to activate word of mouth, the hallmark behavior of social networks. Within this immature landscape, a few brands were on the right track to successfully harnessing Facebook page marketing.
Facebook now 3rd most popular video site - Technology & science - Tech and gadgets Facebook is now the third most popular video source on the Web, after Google and Yahoo. The social network surpassed all other media sites and video services, according to a monthly video study by comScore. Yahoo, in second place, saw the biggest month-to-month jump, from 44.9 million unique viewers in June to 55.1 million uniques in July, reports comScore. Microsoft sites (including msnbc.com) were up to 45.5 million in July from 38.9 million a month prior. Fox Interactive sites had the most significant drop, falling from 41.5 million to 38.1 million in one month.
How the Resort Industry is Using Social Media A growing number of resort and spa destinations are spreading their wings and reaching a wider customer base via social media. With the help of social networking platforms and niche bloggers, vacation spots are broadening their branding efforts from the sand to the slopes, and connecting with potential patrons they may not have reached through traditional advertising. Here's a look at some of the social strategies these getaway companies are employing and what we can learn from their success. Online Dedication Ski resorts in particular are taking advantage of online opportunities to communicate with their communities and reach beyond their usual demographic. World-famous mountain resort company Vail Resorts is so dedicated to new outreach methods that it has shifted 80% of its marketing budget to digital production and social media strategy.
Optimizing Facebook Status Updates For Local Marketing Many small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) are awakening to the marketing potential found in Facebook’s massive audience, and have begun developing their Facebook pages to promote their companies. While posting status updates is a great way to engage with your customers, there are some ways to kick them up a notch to expand your promotional potential, and a few tips for optimizing your Facebook status updates. A large component of Facebooking is “preaching to the choir”—most of the people who will “like” you and follow you on Facebook are those who already know your company exists. Existing customers will search for you by name, and people might discover your Facebook link on your website. Marketing to this audience which already likes you and knows about you is certainly worthwhile for the sake of increasing sales and for retaining existing customers.
The Science of Building Trust With Social Media The Internet-era has made establishing trust an increasingly complicated issue. Our finely tuned ability to read facial expressions does not apply to e-mail, and emoticons are, at best, an imperfect substitute for sarcastic inflection (raise your hand if you’ve ever gotten into trouble for typing something that was meant to be a joke). So, how can we establish trust when our online identities are often little more than an avatar and few lines of text?