February 11, 2010 Linky

WEB 2.0 Other Popular Technologies You Must Know About

Are you using these popular technologies?

Today you will become acquainted with other popular technologies that you must know about for you business.

What is Tagging?

A commonly used term with Web 2.0 is tagging. Tagging is a way users can classify or organize and categorize data, and is common on many sites including social bookmarking. How it works is users attach tags to data items like web pages, their blog entries or even photographs they want classified and categorized. When you tag a blog page, you may tag it with terms like, “internet marketing” or “small business marketing”.

Web 2.0 is a client-sided application, meaning end-users, people sitting at their computer, can categorize, tag and store data on the Web and share it with others. For example, let’s say you bookmark 3 of your favorite sites. Usually, when you visit another computer, your bookmarks will not show up when you log in. When you use Web 2.0 technologies however, you bookmark your favorite sites to public forums, so you can access them from anywhere. At the same time, anyone else can access your favorites from any computer anywhere in the world. This is a powerful and intelligent way of sharing data.

What is RSS?

This is another WEB 2.0 technology that rapidly gained popularity. RSS technology, or “Really Simple Syndication” is a tool anyone can use to tell the world at large about new blog entries or web entries. What you do, is set up your site content using RSS tools or content aggregators. What happens is any time you post new information to your page, that information is fed to people that are linked to your feed. For instance, you can subscribe to Virtual Project Consulting RSS feed and choose to read it through Google Reader so that you can follow all your favorite blogs in one place.

Other Applications

Many applications allow readers to interact with the Web pages they browse. These applications are all part of Web 2.0 technology, and include SOAP, XML, and AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript) which allows websites to communicate with the browser behind the scenes and without human interaction. These technologies allow you to interact with a web page that is live in much the same way you would interact with a page from your own computer, a page you created.

In conclusion, even though WEB 2.0 is not new anymore, people are finding new and innovative ways to use it. Strategically, you can use Web 2.0 to market your products and services and promote your business or site to millions of people around the world. Everywhere, people are taking an active interest in becoming members of a global community. You need to do this in a politically correct and decent way.

Thus, Web 2.0 has become a lot more popular than it had been in the past. Sites including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and YouTube are all growing at a rapid pace and are being used by collaborative types interested in linking and information sharing on the Web.

And if you’re convinced by now that you should become part of this exciting WEB 2.0 world full of opportunities, please have a look at Virtual Project Consulting’s Social Media Starter Kit. It will help you become active on the top 4 social media tools in a way that will grow your business exponentially.

Please share with us some of your favorite WEB 2.0 technologies that you use that makes a difference in your business?!? LEAVE A COMMENT

February 10, 2010 Linky

WEB 2.0 – How to utilize Blogs for Business

WEB 2.0 and Blogs

Most Web 2.0 platforms will ask you to contribute to the content contained on the site. By having a business blog, you can encourage visitors to add their insights to a page, through ongoing commentary to blog posts. It is possible to interact with these visitors by replying to each comment made on your site. By allowing visitors to post feedback or comments to your blog entries, the blog can serve as a mini community or forum. This is also a way to find out how visitors (prospects) think and what they want.

Popular blogs receive thousands of visitors every month. There are search engines whose sole purpose involves tracking blogs and related sites, including Technorati.com for example.

Most bloggers now include photos and other graphic elements in their web pages, along with text. You can even use MP3 or videos to enhance the quality of content provided in your blog. Online entrepreneurs and marketers are using blogs in many ways, to announce their passions, beliefs, purpose or to pitch their products and services while providing visitors with valuable content and information.

One of the reasons blogs are popular for marketing is they allow users to provide content that is updated frequently. You can post daily, weekly or monthly. The more frequently you post information to your blog, the more likely you are to maintain your page ranking and attract visitors to your blog. The most successful business blogs have 300 times more content than the average blog.

Blog Strategies

From Denise Wakeman, ‘The Blog Squad’, you can learn many blog strategies. According to Denise, the key to a successful business blog is frequency (at least 2-3 times per week) and quality. Let me share her 4 E’s strategy with you:

Educate: Write “How to” posts, explain concepts, Questions and Answers etc
Entertain: Tell stories, use video etc
Engage: Do polls, ask for comments and feedback etc
Enrich: Make yourself/your business stand out, differentiate yourself.

In conclusion the WEB 2.0 sites are user-friendly sites that promote socialization, collaboration and community building. These sites are also frequently used as a platform for small businesses and entrepreneurs to introduce their products and services to the public without blatantly advertising them. It gives individuals, like entrepreneurs, the opportunity to communicate with a global community.

Please feel free to comment and let us know how you use blogging for your business! Also, if you need help with creating a WEB 2.0 social networking strategy for your business, have a look at the social media strategy template that Virtual Project Consulting is giving away for free!

February 9, 2010February 9, 2010 Linky

WEB 2.0 – Three Things You Must Know

What is Web 2.0 and why you need it?

Have you noticed how the terms collaboration and communication crops up everywhere? They are the buzz words that are part of Web 2.0. The purpose of this article is for you to become crystal clear on what Web 2.0 is, the key features of Web 2.0 and what the implication of Web 2.0 is for your business.

1. Definition of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is a broad term describing many different kinds of websites, websites that provide a platform where end-users have control over the content of sites. Web 2.0 includes social networking sites, wikis, Blogs, RSS Feeds and other sites that emphasize collaboration and sharing among users. Some well-known examples of free Web 2.0 tools are:

Facebook and MySpace (social networking)
Twitter (micro blogging)
Squidoo (community website to create pages, called lenses, for subjects of interest)
LinkedIn (professional networking)
Craiglist (listing site for classified ads and forums)
Skype (PC to PC calls)
del.icio.us (social bookmarking)
Technorati (blogging)
Flickr (photo sharing)

2. Web 2.0 Key Features

Most sites, regardless of their platform, share key features if they are WEB 2.0 sites. Here are some of the key features and benefits associated with this new wave in technology:

Web 2.0 encourages greater collaboration among webmasters and visitors, so that interactive communities are created on the Web.
Web 2.0 approaches the Web as a platform for building conversation and communities.
The “new” Web focuses more on social networking and sharing, through various means including through blogs, wikis and more.
The philosophy behind Web 2.0 is one that promotes an “architecture of participation” where all visitors and users have the opportunity to contribute to a site’s development and progress.

The Web no longer serves as an entity in itself, but rather as a platform individuals can use to connect with others. WEB 2.0 is about people connecting with other people.

3. Business Implication of Web 2.0

Companies can now also share information and collaborate with one another in new and interesting ways. This will require business managers to start thinking more horizontally, moving away from a hierarchical model of communicating to one where knowledge is shared freely among employees, suppliers, vendors and even competitors.

Some companies are even encouraging their customers to take advantage of social networks to help them advertise. A company can also help businesses make working more practical and simpler. Rather than have individuals use stand-alone systems only, company’s can now encourage the joint use of software and computers among multiple users. Data can easily be shared from one person to next, meetings can be held online, and problem solving can take place from a much broader perspective.

Business entrepreneurs need to realize that this technology has existed for some time, but offers an interactive approach to marketing and everyday business operations. If companies haven’t done so already, they should examine how they can integrate Web 2.0 into daily operations while still hedging risks. If you decide to use social networking for marketing your business online, you should create a social networking strategy that integrates with your existing marketing efforts.

And to assist you with the creation of your own social networking strategy, I have developed a social media strategy template. It is easy to use and filled with recommended tactics for different social media platforms. It will also let you put measurement and maintenance in place in order to realize value over the longer term.

For more social media tips and articles, please subscribe to my blog, to the right…

November 30, 2009 Linky

Social Networking Communities

Building Smart Communities Through Social Networking

Let’s first look at what is social networking? Social networking is where people develop networks of friends and associates. It forges and creates links between different people. A social network can form a key element of collaborating and networking.

In sequal to the previous posting on how to measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts and what ROI categories to use, we will now look at what type of social networking communities to create to gain advantages from free social networking.

The common types of communities created are:

Customer Community
Employee Community
Partner Community

The goals for creating these types of communities are:

Customer Community goals:

Better understand customer preferences and profile
Increase awareness of your brand
Facilitate sharing of best practices
Increase adoption of your products and services
Improve customer loyalty and retention
Receive real time feedback from customers regarding wants and needs
Increase persistent traffic to the website
Solicit customer-driven innovation
Empower power users and experts to find and fill job positions

Employee Community Goals:

Create a company culture of sharing and teamwork
Increase intra-company communication and collaboration
Improve employee retention and the bond between company and employee
Discover new ideas and accelerate innovation
Encourage cross-functional inputs to drive better decision making
Bolster minority and special interest group programs

Partner Community Goals:

Enable general communication with partners
Facilitate sharing of best practices & creation of a knowledge base
Encourage co-innovation to better serve joint customers and markets
Increase sales through real-time market intelligence
Provide a central repository for partner communication
Enable opinion sharing and recommendations

This is an extract from my Social Media Marketing Report.

If you’re interested in related social media articles, read here and please feel free to leave any comments.

November 29, 2009 Linky

Measure Your Effectiveness With Social Media

How Do You Measure Effectiveness Of Social Media?

In order to get faster results from an investment in Social Media Marketing you need to measure your Social Networking efforts in terms of Return On Investment (ROI).

Five proven ways to increase your ROI are:

Have a Business Strategy to increase exposure in support of your products and services and to create new business.
Establish presence in your marketplace and reinforce your credibility.
Expand your reach and create buzz for events you’re hosting.
Nurture relationships and create strategic partnerships.
Properly maintain your presence and be an industry leader.

What ROI categories do you use?

Once you have a Social Media Marketing strategy in place in support of your Business Strategy, the following ROI categories can be used to measure return on investment to create branded online community:

Customer Communities:

Increase in customer acquisition
Increase in customer retention
Reduction in customer service costs
Increase in page rank and general site traffic due to additional content on a community
Improved product and service allocation based on real time customer feedback and customer driven innovation

Internal Communities (Employees):

Increase in productivity due to
- General knowledge sharing
- Identification of subject matter experts to shorten ramp up
- Virtual team environments for distributed teams
- Increase in employee retention. People like meeting other employees, face to face and virtually. This produces a more enriching work environment.
- Decreased hiring costs. It’s easier to hire from within. Finding good candidates through internal social networks can provide even more information (both profile based and content creation based) about internal candidates.

This is an extract from my free Social Media Marketing Report.

If you’re interested in related social media articles, read here and please feel free to leave any comments.

November 7, 2009January 5, 2017 Linky

11 Key Social Media Tools To Consider For Marketing

What Are The Key Social Media Tools?

Social Media Marketing takes place through various Social Media platforms when they are used as a marketing tool to market a company’s products and services. Social Media tools can be divided into different categories, each category serving its own purpose.

The above diagram depicts some of the key Social Platforms in use today. Many of the platforms can be targeted as marketing tools to increase exposure to your business and grow your business through more sales and strategic partnerships. Let’s look at each key platform in more detail. For the purposes of this article only one example of each type will be discussed.

1) Blogs

From term “weblog” is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. At beginning of 2008 blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs and this number is growing at a rapid pace.

Currently there are 12,9 million active blogs with more than 5 billion readers.

2) Micro-blogging: Twitter

Micro-Blogging is a Social Media tool that answers to 1 question:

“What Are You Doing?”

Answers question in short sentences of 140 characters or less.
Most users on Twitter are already on Facebook .
Twitter is one of the fastest growing Social Media platforms.
It is referred to as ‘Instant messaging on steroids’.
Demographics shows that it is used by politicians, celebrities, news anchors and individuals.
Total visits in May 2009 were 134 million ; with 32 million unique visitors in April 2009.
The Twitter platform is used by 94% of marketers.

3) Really Simple Syndication: RSS

RSS “feeds” allow people to subscribe to the various websites, blogs or sections of websites that are of interest to them.

4) Social Networking: Facebook

Facebook is a well-known Social Media platform to create, participate in groups, share photos, videos, audios online.

It has an Alexa ranking of 5 (fifth most trafficked website in the world).
Currently 300 million active members, growing with 250 000 new members per day and predicted to be 500 million by 2011.
Demographics: fastest growing age group is 30-35. Women aged 55 is also a big growth area

Facebook presents huge opportunities to set up a group discussing areas of interest relating to your business.

5) Niche Networks: LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a Professional Networking Social Media platform and the largest network of its kind. Currently, it is used by more than 50 million professionals to exchange information, ideas, opportunities and business networking.

6) Chatrooms

Build your own network of contacts who share your interests.

7) Message Boards: Forums

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site were any topic of interest is posted and discussed.

8) Podcasts

A podcast is a series of digital computer files, usually either digital audio or video, that is released periodically and made available for download by means of web syndication.

9) Video sharing: You Tube

YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. You Tube is a video sharing Social Media platform that currently has 75 million videos and 150 000 more videos are added per day. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email. In 2006 YouTube was purchased by Google Inc. Video marketing is used significantly more by men than women.

10) Photo sharing: Flicr

An online photo management and sharing application to show off your favourite photos and videos to the world.

11) Social Bookmarking: Delicious

Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages.

If you enjoyed this summary of social media marketing tools for business, go read my free Social Media Marketing Report which contains more useful information about your most pressing questions about social media as a marketing tool.

Social Media Phenomenon

Social Networking

The rapid emergence of social networking over the past five years is nothing short of a phenomenon. Social networking and blogs are now more popular than e-mail. “Social networking has become a fundamental part of the global online experience.” According to John Burbank, Nielsen Online’s CEO.

Social Media is part of Web 2.0. With Web 2.0 the potential exists to create an interactive, dynamic environment where individuals, consumers and business collaborate, communicate and share. It is viral by nature.

A growing number of news publishers have adapted their strategies from simply having websites to participating in social media through active use of sites like Twitter to drive awareness and conversation around their brands and offerings. CNN and the New York Times have some of the largest following on Twitter. Source: Nielsen Report

According to Michael Stelzner who published the Social Media Marketing Industry Report, the people most likely to use Social Media Marketing, are aged between 30 and 39 years. Certainly, for people new to Social Media, there are many questions that come to mind. These questions are asked by Entrepreneurs, Business Owners/Executives of any size company and Service Professionals.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social Media Marketing can be defined as an engagement with online communities to generate exposure, opportunity and sales. It’s the online conversation among customers, investors, employees, fans and critics. The power is shifting from corporations to individuals and communities.

This is the new model that is part of Web 2.0 where people use the Web’s potential for creating an interactive, dynamic environment where individuals, consumers and businesses can collaborate and communicate in new and simpler ways.

The Social Media model enables a number of things:

informing
persuading
involving
demonstrating
reminding

Above all, Social Media Marketing is free! All it takes, is a time commitment and using Social Media tools according to a predefined strategy. In this day and age it makes sense to use Social Media to promote your business.

To find answers on the 10 most asked questions, read this special report to understand how marketers are using Social Media to grow and promote their businesses.

September 10, 2009October 13, 2013 Linky

5 Social Media Tips

Tips To Optimise Your Use Of Social Media

Since I discovered social media in 2008, I went on a mission to learn how to use it, what it can do for my business, how to use it to drive traffic, which tools to use to automate it, how to connect with others and so on. As most of you know, social media is a powerful tool for increasing the traffic to your blog, and there are many different social media tips. Here I have selected five of the best tips that have worked for me so far.

1. Befriend power users

Power users are the users that exert the most influence on social media sites. These users regularly submit content that gets popular and they have many people that follow them. Check out the popular content in your niche and see who is submitting them. You’ll often find a select group of people who submit the bulk of the popular content.

Some ways to become friends with these power users are to vote for their stuff, send them interesting links, link to their site if they have one, leave comments on their blogs, interview them. Once you’re developed a relationship with them, you can send them your best material or products and ask them to submit it if they like it.

2. Create more comprehensive content

One of the things I have discovered through my own research is that the typical social media users have a great appetite for learning. For this reason the content that does well in social media is pretty comprehensive and often educational. The content is longer than your average post and it covers a subject with depth.

Therefore, it is worthwhile to creating longer posts filled with much value as you will do better on social media sites as a result. Now each of your blog posts doesn’t have to be 1,500 words, but try to regularly publish longer, in-depth posts that stand out and add value.

3. Add images and video to your best content

Another thing that works well, is adding multimedia to content. This is another thing I noticed about viral content. Much of this content is highlighted by images and video. It only takes a little bit of time to go to flickr.com and google images to find relevant images that will improve your content.

Video seems to be the next big thing in blogging. More and more people are making web video a part of their routine. Therefore, if you have any video skills, use them! Also, the cost and learning barrier for producing videos has come down with discount equipment, software, and training courses. I’m definitely planning to add video to my sites soon to test how well it works.

4. Try niche social media sites

Instead of just focusing on the big general subject sites like Facebook and Twitter, there is a lot of opportunity in niche social media sites. Here’s a great list of niche type of sites. These sites won’t send as much traffic as the big general subject social sites, but the quality of their traffic is often much higher. You’ll get a higher percentage of repeat visitors, a lower bounce rate, and more time spent on your site because of the more targeted traffic.

5. Use social media widgets at the end of each post

Widgets are a great way to encourage your visitors to submit your content to social media sites. Visitors may like a post but without the prompting of a submission button, they won’t think to submit your content. I use ‘Share This’ at the end of each post to encourage readers to share content.

PS: Please feel free to add your own tips to this list as the whole point of social networking is to share, participate and learn from one another!

PSS: Related Social Media articles.

For the Top 10 questions that will answer how and why Social Media marketing will grow your business, read this FREE REPORT.

June 16, 2009February 1, 2020 Linky

Build Your Reputation With Social Networking

Five Ways To Build Your Reputation With Social Networking By Bob Jenkins

Are you using social networks to build your reputation online? Whether you already are or you are just getting started with sites like Twitter and Facebook, building your online reputation is your biggest responsibility. Here are five ways to make sure you do it right.

#1: Be Proud Of Being You The first thing is, you have to be yourself. You have to be who you are. Because although you can get away with being fake for a little while, as soon as one person realizes that you’re not who you say you are, your reputation is destroyed almost instantly because of the power of social networking. So be yourself. And don’t be afraid of being yourself. Realize that you have some gifts and some knowledge that people need to know about, and those that want to learn from you are going to gravitate towards you. Those that don’t think you’re worth listening to are basically going to ignore you. And it’s at their peril, so don’t worry about them.

#2: Transparency – Never Hide From Your Audience The second thing about your reputation is you should try to be transparent at all times. This means you keep everything real with your audience. For example, I pulled back the curtain to show what it takes to run a product launch. When I did my last product launch, I was Twittering every day what I was doing to get ready for this site. Most of the gurus out there would keep everything under lock and key, and I was being very clear, saying, “This is what I’m doing to get ready for this launch.” It actually helped me have a better launch, even though I told everybody exactly what I was going to be doing. They didn’t think that they had some surprise or whatever like most people teach; they just were excited to be part of it and part of the story. So be transparent. Let people know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and they’re going to learn how to trust you.

#3: Be Positive For Positive Results The third way to build your reputation is to be positive. There are folks out there who generally can do a good job of being negative. I don’t know about you, but I don’t find that to be a very long-term profitable strategy. It may get you some attention at first and spark some controversy, but that’s not the way to go. Be looking forward to the optimistic of your industry, of your business and what the results are going to be. It would be easy for you to go onto Twitter or onto Facebook and talk about how you’re having a bad day or this product sucks or this week sucks or this relationship sucks. But you’re not really there for a support network, per se. You’ll find some of that. If you have something bad happen in your life, sharing it with your followers will be very therapeutic for you and you will get a lot of support back. But when you’re just blasting negative things out, you’re going to get negative things in return, usually. So try to be positive as much as possible and look for the opportunities that are out there and look at them from that positive perspective.

#4: Build Your Reputation And They Will Come The fourth thing you must do is to be patient. This is because, initially, your reputation is going to be built only by yourself and the first initial people who get to know you. But as time goes on and you get more followers and you build a larger network of friends and peers, your reputation will solidify to allow your business to grow. Once it hits a tipping point, your reputation and business accelerates at a very quick pace. So be patient and let it happen. Don’t try this stuff out for a week and then come back to me next week and say, “Well, it didn’t really work. I didn’t really get any results yet.” You’ve got to let social networking play out over a few weeks and then a couple months and so on. A year from now your business is going to be tremendously different compared to where it is right now.

#5: Contribute To The Conversation – Every Day! The fifth thing about your reputation is you need to be someone that people look to as a contributor, not as a leech, not as a mooch, as a contributor. You have to be willing to be involved in the conversation, and you have to be willing to give as much or even more than what you’re going to get in return. The people who do that are growing so fast it makes my head spin. I feel that I’m a pretty giving person but I see some other folks out there that just keep on giving, giving, giving and they just build up a huge following and that social capital is a real asset to your business. So you need to make sure that you’re contributing as much as possible to the conversation. I don’t mean that as just go around randomly and try to help people. Within your specific task, your specific industry, the things you know well, you need to be at the forefront of letting people know how to do what you know how to do without charging them money at first. They’ll come and find your site and your products and they’ll pay you for that as time goes on and their needs grow. With social networking you need to be building your reputation up first. If somebody has a question, you should be one of the first people who answers and you need to answer without reservation not just, “Oh, I answered that in my eBook; go buy it”. They’re going to find your eBook if you just talk to them and give them solutions to the problem they are struggling with at that moment. Give people your input, your encouragement for them to get better at what they are trying to do. Any little quick free advice you can give, give it.

Actively Build Your Reputation With Social Networking And Reap The Rewards You’ve got to be in this for the reason of having fun and really building that relationship. But first, connect with people and really help them out. Understand that they’ll become loyal followers of what you do and see you for who you are. Follow these 5 steps to building your reputation online and you’ll not only beat your competition, you’ll have more fun doing it!

Bob Jenkins teaches business owners how to use internet marketing strategies effectively to attract more customers and get more sales without spending a fortune on advertising.