Internet Marketing Solutions

by Steve Raabe | The Denver Post | April 30th, 2009

DENVER – Web designer Bill Nab was fed up. His Qwest DSL Internet service was, on good days, slow; on bad days, nonexistent. So the Pueblo West resident turned to his Twitter account to vent.

“I sent a tweet, out of pure frustration,” expressing his dissatisfaction, Nab said.

Three minutes later, Qwest answered the tweet.

A customer-service representative had been alerted to Nabs beefing tweet, contacted him and quickly diagnosed his DSL problem.

“It really caught me off-guard,” Nab said. “This kind of changes things. I didnt have to call and wait on hold for 20 minutes.”

Social media such as Twitter have taken on a new realm in a not-so-social context: helping companies connect quickly with tech-savvy customers.

Read the complete article: 9NEWS.com | Colorados Online News Leader | Twitter links businesses to customers.

Travis Scott External Content social media, Twitter

by Jennifer Van Grove | Mashable.com | April 29th, 2009FriendFeed’s once optional beta, which we think looks a lot like Twitter, is no longer a choice.

Starting today, all users of the feed aggregation and comment-rich social network will by greeted by the completely overhauled, real-time content chasing, FriendFeed.

Keeping pace with the real-time Web, FriendFeed’s scraped their previous design, thrown in a bunch of useful new site features, and added FriendFeed by Email.

Read the complete article: The New FriendFeed: Keeping Pace With the Real-Time Web.

Travis Scott External Content FriendFeed, Twitter

by Micah Baldwin | March 2nd, 2009 | Mashable.com

Obsessed with the idea that Google doesn’t have the one right answer, in late 2008 Micah Baldwin joined Lijit Networks–his sixth startup–which believes each blogger has a right answer.

Influence is difficult to ascertain online. What about that guy on Twitter with 25,000 followers? Isn’t he influential? What about that woman who has 5,000 RSS subscribers? She has to be influential, correct?

People who are truly influential become conduits for human based filtering and content discovery within their communities, as members of the community look to the person of influence to connect them to people and content they should trust, and fuel positive community growth.

Understanding influence

Influence is defined as “implicit or explicit effect of one thing (or person) on another,” which online can be further simplified to “can someone’s words (and/or video) make you think or do something?” While this certainly can be negative (think of Jim Jones or David Koresh), let’s focus on the positive.

It becomes easier to understand influence when it’s broken down into its core components: Brand, Expertise and Trust. While there is much debate around online branding, it is clear that personal branding is important to online influence.

Interestingly, Google does not provide a definition for personal branding but provides 48 million results on the topic. What is personal branding? Corporate branding is the messaging effort by a company to make people feel positive about their products. Personal branding is the sum of your online activities and sets an expectation about who you are.

Personal brand is truly an aggregated representation of online activity. Can you build a personal brand by interacting on only one social service? Sort of, but it’s incomplete. It’s impossible to gain a true picture of who you are simply by looking at your photos on Flickr, or just reading your blog. Trust grows by being able to view a person’s social content in aggregate. This is why life streaming applications like FriendFeed have grown so rapidly.

In terms of measuring online influence, the stronger the personal brand, the more influence one wields online. The most important component of online influence is trust. Trust is defined as creating a consistent expectation that a person will always act in your best interest when given information.

Expertise is another core component of influence. One can gain knowledge on a specific topic, but expertise is a title that can only be given.

Read the complete article:  HOW TO: Measure Online Influence.

Travis Scott External Content influence, Mashable, online influence

by Todd Bishop | TechFlash | April 21st , 2009

Yahoo’’s quarterly results today confirmed the conventional wisdom that search advertising will fare better than display ads in the downturn, as advertisers seek more immediately measurable results. Display advertising revenue on Yahoo sites fell 13 percent for the quarter, compared with a 3 percent decline in search ad revenue, the company said as it reported a 78 percent plunge in Q109 profits.

Google, which makes money primarily from search ads, saw its Q109 advertising revenue increase by 5 percent, to more than $5.3 billion, compared to the same period the previous year. Still, that compared to a 40 percent increase in Google ad revenues from Q107 to Q108, so its clear that the search ad business isnt immune to the effects of the economy.

Read complete article: TechFlash: Seattles Technology News Source.

Travis External Content advertising, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo

Here’s a New Lexicon to Help You Think Clearly

Posted on Adage.com|DigitalNext by Josh Bernoff on 04.16.09 @ 10:10 AM

As I speak with companies that want to engage with their customers in the online social world, I continually find people confused as soon as they begin talking about “social media.” The reason is the baggage that comes along with the word “media.”

Media is something that media companies control, and media is overwhelmingly one-way. The online social world is about as two-way, multi-way, any-way as it can be. Nobody controls it, not even Facebook, which found it can’t even change its own terms of service.

Media is something people spend time with. So are online social interactions. That’s a pretty tenuous reason to call it media. And while, as in media, you can advertise in social network sites, that is the least interesting use for them.

Here are some words you can use to think more clearly.

If you want to refer to the whole world of people connecting and drawing strength from each other online, you can call it the “social web” or the “social internet” (or you can call it the “groundswell,” if you wish). It includes huge sites such as MySpace, communities, YouTube, the blogosphere and so on. (You could call the whole thing “Web 2.0,” but people often use that term to refer to a set of technologies — not the best way for advertisers to focus — and it doesn’t get directly at the people-to-people aspects.)

If you want to build an environment where consumers or other customers connect with you and each other, call it a “social application.” It could be a community, a user-generated-content site, or even adding ratings and reviews to your site. By calling these applications, you remind yourself that 1) it’s going to take some effort to build it right, and 2) people will interact with it. And you may even remind yourself that 3) it could last a long time, rather than coming and going quickly as advertising campaigns and media do.

If you’re going to participate in a big social site (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube), call it a “social-network site” (or just a “social network,” for short). And you’re often better off with a channel or a profile or an identity than an ad in such an environment.

But no matter what you do, the sooner you stop thinking of the social web as media, the better off you are.

~ ~ ~

Josh Bernoff is the co-author of “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies,” a comprehensive analysis of corporate strategy for dealing with social technologies like blogs, social networks and wikis, and is a VP-principal analyst at Forrester Research. He blogs at blogs.forrester.com/groundswell.

via Terminology Matters: Why ‘Social Media’ Sucks – Advertising Age – DigitalNext.

Travis External Content media, social media

[Edited by Amy W. Kelly from the original by Michael Martine of Remarkablogger]

The Throwaway Blog

Think you want to blog? Do it. Just start a blog at Blogger or Tumblr. But do it knowing that it’s to throw away – a starter/throwaway blog. You will make mistakes and learn tons but with little to no permanent, negative consequences because it’s an experiment.

Get In, Learn Lessons, Get Out

The objective of a starter blog is to prepare for a “real” blog. To ensure you don’t get too entrenched in a starter:

• Forget about niches
• Disregard traffic
• Get email addresses from people with whom you make contact
• Be fearless
• Give yourself a month – after that, end it if you feel ready to graduate to a real blog (think WordPress.org). If you don’t, give yourself another month.

Learn about Successful Blogging

While playing with your starter blog, learn everything you can about blogging:

• Keyword research and how it applies to niches
• Domains and hosting
• Social media networks
• Compelling headlines and posts
• Online research
• Basic HTML and CSS
• Using images and video
• Blog monetizing

Failure is the Only Option

Don’t regret how you started a blog. Unless you fail fast enough, you won’t succeed fast enough. A starter blog is practiced, condoned failure. In fact, a starter blog isn’t a success unless you fail at many things while doing it.

Is a Starter Blog for You?

Not everyone should begin this way, but many people should. People are really good at thinking they’re better at stuff than they really are, and there’s no way you could go wrong with a starter blog.

amyk External Content blogs

by Travis Scott | RainierDigital | April 19th, 2009

A few weeks ago I espoused Digg’s URL shortening tool- DiggBar. It is extremely convenient and I began using it fairly consistently to not only link to various articles I would post on Twitter or send via email, but to also promote new content on my blog via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to name a few. After a day or so of doing this I noticed something strange when analyzing the Google Analytics for my website. I was generating a lot of traffic from Digg.com but next to nothing from the other sources that had consistently sent readers in the past. I realized that, regardless of the website my users were visiting when they clicked on my link, it would always show them being delivered by Digg.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t help me when I am trying to fine tune the marketing of my blog because I obviously am not getting an accurate picture of where my traffic is coming from and any trends that may be associated with this.

With that said, its a great tool for general use and I am still using the it to shorten the URLs of other pages I link to via Twitter or email, but have ceased using it to promote links on my own website. In the meantime, its back to using tinyurl and bit.ly.

Travis Scott RainierDigital Original Digg, DiggBar, URL shorteners

The brains behind the Web’s hottest networking tool.

By MICHAEL S. MALONE | WSJ.com | April 17th, 2009

San Francisco

“Twitter is the side project that took,” says company co-founder Biz Stone, 35. “Now it’s our chance to do something transformative.”

Biz Stone (left) and Evan Williams. (Ismael Roldan)

When I arrive at Twitter’s headquarters on a recent morning, Jerry Brown is waiting in the lobby — just another day at the world’s hottest high-tech company. “It’s pretty bizarre,” says co-founder Evan Williams, 37. “At least once per day we look at each and say, ‘What the hell?’ It’s like we’re living out the script of the ultimate start-up company story.”

But other than the familiar face of California’s attorney general standing near the steel front door, you would hardly know that this little company of about 30 employees is the epicenter of the Web, used by an estimated 20 million Americans on a daily — even minute-by-minute — basis. Just how fast Twitter is growing is a company secret, but its traffic appears to be more than doubling every month.

The company itself seems calm and casual. The employees drift in, grab some free food and eventually make their way to their desks. It’s located in an anonymous warehouse just a couple blocks from South Park, the once-frenzied environs of the dot-com companies of the first Internet boom. In his sports shirt and slacks, sipping a bottle of apple juice, Mr. Williams exhibits indifference to the trappings of success. So does Mr. Stone, who last year won an Oxford Union debate wearing a borrowed bow tie and a pair of black sneakers.

The company is hiring like crazy — it expects to double its size in the next month or two — and is also adding a senior management, notably new vice-president of global operations Santosh Jayaram, hired away from Google. “We’ve never had a company that grew past 15 to 20 people,” says Mr. Stone, “We’re kind of excited about that.”

Even faster than Google, Amazon and eBay in their days, the three-year-old Twitter has become deeply embedded in the culture. President Barack Obama twittered the words, “We just made history,” on the night of his election. It was a twittered image that first captured the forced landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. Scores of people trapped in the Mumbai terrorist attack twittered desperately for help. And in a much discussed event, a San Francisco technology writer twittered his surprise to discover his home was being broken into.

Strictly speaking, Twitter is a social networking application that enables users to post short text messages — called “tweets” — of no more than 140 characters on their personal feed. These real-time diary entries can then be read by other users, called “followers,” who have subscribed to that page.

But Twitter is much more than a novel way to share updates of one’s daily life with friends. It’s now evolved into a powerful new marketing and communications tool. Regional emergency preparedness organizations are looking at Twitter as a way to reach millions of people during a disaster. NASA is using it to regularly update interested parties about the status of space shuttle flights. And one journalist solicited help from fellow Twitterers to get himself out of an Egyptian jail. (It worked.)

Read the complete article:   Williams and Stone: The Twitter Revolution – WSJ.com.

Travis Scott External Content Twitter

from the original on inkfoundry.com | Carin Galletta | April 8th, 2009

1. In-person etiquette rules apply even in the virtual world.
2. Use proper grammar and punctuation, and always spell check.
3. Don’t post anonymous comments on blogs.
4. Social media = collaboration; get in the game.
5. True collaboration is key; be a peer.
6. Be conscientious, but don’t fear mistakes. Just write!
7. “Talk” as if you’re conversing over coffee.
8. Be personal and personable.
9. Be honest and transparent.
10. Research, read, listen…and then engage.
11. Organize your thoughts before posting.
12. Be concise – 220 words at most if no preset limit is given.
13. Break posts into small paragraphs.
14. Cross-link when appropriate.
15. Always give content credit where it is due.
16. Comment on blogs often and thoughtfully.
17. Comment back on comments received.
18. Let your personality and “voice” shine through.
19. Be helpful; let people benefit from your experience and expertise.
20. When someone asks a question, answer it first. You can build trust and respect by posting relevant, on-topic replies.
21. Be the best resource you can be, but go easy on overt self-promotion.
22. Contact someone directly, not publicly, if you think there is real business to be done.

amyk External Content rules, social media

by Stan Schroeder | Mashable.com | April 17th, 2009

2009 is the year of social media. Once, Twitter (Twitter reviews) was a place where you could read about someone else’s cat. Now, it’s the first place you go to when there’s breaking news. Sites like Digg (Digg reviews), Reddit (reddit.com reviews), and Facebook (Facebook reviews) can now leave a huge impact on the real world; lives are changed, important questions are asked (and answered) there. Many milestones have been reached; the growth of nearly every aspect of social media has and continues to be enormous. We’ve dug up some amazing statistics and numbers from this realm.

YouTube, Hulu and Google

In March, YouTube (YouTube reviews) reached 100 million monthly viewers in the US. 6.3 billion videos were viewed on the site. Its competitor, Hulu (Hulu reviews), is also growing fast, but not nearly as fast as YouTube. In March alone, YouTube has grown almost two Hulus in size. According to some calculations, YouTube will serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors in 2009.

Is Google getting any money out of it? Hardly. Some reports claim that the video sharing service is costing them $1.65 million dollars per day. Is this money-bleeding causing Google (Google reviews) much grief? Not really. According to their latest financial report, its revenue in the first quarter was $5.51 billion, a 3% decrease from last quarter, but still a 6% increase from the same period last year.

Facebook & MySpace

Facebook has grown from 100 million to 200 million users in less than 8 months. If it were a country, it would be bigger than Brazil. Its traffic has grown immensely in one year’s period, especially in Europe where it grew 314%. According to comScore, it has grown a staggering 2,721% in Italy from February 2008 to February 2009. In other European countries, its growth was also immense: 999% in Spain, 607% in Belgium, 518% in France, 499% in Switzerland.

MySpace (MySpace reviews), the social network that used to break records like these, is now lagging behind Facebook; according to latest calculations, Facebook now has a total of 65.7 million unique visitors versus MySpace’s 54.1 million. MySpace was sold to News Corp. for $580 million in 2005. Facebook’s valuation? Depending who you believe, it could be anywhere from 2 to 15 billion dollars. Not bad, considering the economic situation.

Finally, here’s another sign of the times: Nielsen Online’s latest research shows that social networking is now more popular than email. According to their study, 66.8% of Internet users have used social networks, while only 65.1% have used email.

Twitter & the rest

Remember the time when Robert Scoble had a couple thousand Twitter followers, and it was a big deal? Now there’s a guy with one million Twitter followers. If you type “Ashton Kutcher” into Google, his Twitter account will be the third result.

Twitter itself is growing at a crazy rate; although it already has a very large audience, it grew 76.8 percent just from February to March. Its yearly growth rate? 1,382 percent. According to Nielsen, Twitter currently has 7 million unique monthly visitors. If it keeps growing at this rate, it’ll have nearly 100 million visitors same time next year.

As far as social news sites go, Digg’s recently launched DiggBar has increased the site’s traffic by 20%, or so they claim. And, according to Compete, Digg is at 36 million uniques and growing fast again, despite a dip in traffic in February. Frequently cited as Digg’s main competitors, Reddit and StumbleUpon (StumbleUpon reviews) are also growing, but they have a long way to go before they come anywhere close to Digg. Not everyone is doing this well, though. Another social news site, Propeller.com, is unfortunately dying, having fallen to around 1 million monthly uniques, compared to 1.89 million in September 2008.

Finally, the most recent numbers I’ve had the misfortune to write about: The Pirate Bay four has been sentenced to 1 year of prison each, and they must pay 3.6 million dollars in damages.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Dalaj; DNY59

via The Web In Numbers: The Rise Of Social Media.

Travis Scott External Content Digg, Facebook, reddit, social media, statistics, Twitter