Social Media Catalyst

Blogs, forums and wikis are all tools that can help companies reach out to customers and boost business.

Social-networking tools aren’t just for Facebook fanatics anymore. These days, consumers are demanding a higher degree of interactivity from customer-service departments. As a result, companies are being challenged to add online capabilities to their CRM systems.

Take, for example, today’s social-networking technologies. By building a product-centric social network that encourages visitors to swap information and connect with other like-minded individuals, a company can gather crucial customer contact information and build a virtual community.

Then there is the blogging phenomenon. For marketing, blogs work great to build brand equity and familiarity. Whether introduced as part of an existing product site or as a dedicated minisite for a particular product, a blog can serve as a casual and conversational approach to addressing consumer concerns and building product loyalty.

Companies can also use wikis to enhance customer relations. A wiki is a Web site that allows users to freely create and edit content using any Web browser — without requiring HTML or other technical skills. “Wikis can be a cheap way to maintain a product Web site for both marketing and for service,” said Hickernell. Not to mention the value-add capabilities of wiki technology. For example, a food manufacturer can easily create a wiki-based Web site that allows customers to contribute to a recipe database.

DISCUSS AMONGST YOURSELVES
Discussion forums“are good for building customer communities around products and brands. More than simply a destination for consumers to swap product information and tips, a discussion forum can be used to generate buzz around a product or service without a multimillion-dollar advertising budget. The right discussion forum can even increase sales revenue. Consumers are willing to pay 20 percent more for a service that received an “excellent” rating from fellow consumers than they are for the same service that received a “good” rating. And respondents said that reviews generated by consumers had a greater influence than those written by professionals.

But while online tools can engender a sense of community and brand loyalty among consumers, there is also a downside. For starters, you do need to have strong moderation when you offer user-support forums to make sure bad discussion threads are removed immediately. After all, foul language, racist comments and unflattering product reviews can “be very detrimental” to a company’s customer relations, sales and image.

When asked this question, many people cite identity theft, social isolation, pornography and infidelity. In order to determine if these are valid points, each of these issues must be considered.
Why Parents Think Social Networking Sites should be banned

Many parents dislike social networking because they believe that sites such as MySpace and Facebook attract child predators. Others believe that cyber-bullying takes place on these sites. Still others feel that social networks distract a child from his or her school work. Will a child not be distracted in the playground? Are there no predators on the streets? These do not seem to be good reasons to ban social networking for everyone. It’s best to talk with your child about the dangers of online social networking.

The book titled Snow Crash was published in 1992 describes a futuristic society where most social interaction takes place on something known as the Metaverse. They make use of avatars, which are essentially the equivalent of today’s Internet “user names.” The avatars interact with each other in a space that is a three-dimensional representation of the real world.

Many people see Snow Crash as a book that accurately predicted the modern Internet or social network. While some see this as a good thing, others do not. In Snow Crash, the characters only had minimal face to face interaction. Most of their communication occurred in the Metaverse.

Social Networking and Social Isolation

Pros and cons of social networking involve the lack of integration with society was one of the major causes of suicide. Spending too much time on the Internet can create a dangerous sense of isolation.

Some psychologists believe that the damage goes beyond mere isolation. Apparently, some people become very addicted to online gambling, and still others to Internet pornography. However, might that same person become addicted to gambling or pornography in the so called “real world” anyway?

The more hours a person spent in cyberspace, the less time he spends in phone conversations, spending time with family and enjoying other essential social events.

Can you trust a cyber friend?

Perhaps it’s the sense of isolation that causes people to believe that social networking sites should be banned. On the other hand, people may be objecting to the false sense of being connected, which characterizes memberships to some social network sites. After all, do you really have friends if they are only in cyberspace? On the other hand, who is to judge whether or not a cyber-friend is a “real friend.
On the Internet, nobody knows who you are unless you have met them atleast once. It is one of the most common reasons why some people started believing that social networking sites should be banned. True, it’s quite easy to impersonate someone else on the web. Nonetheless, one need not be online in order to have an identity stolen, and there have been plenty of incidents involving people giving false or exaggerated identities in meetings at bars and clubs.

So what is the final conclusion? To be banned or not?

Banning social network sites would be the equivalent of burning books. Social networks may have their problems, but none are so bad that they warrant banning.

Looking Glass, the social media aggregator from Microsoft was opened up for beta testing in January 2009. The Windows team and put in place a load-balancing plan, meant to control the number of downloads that could happen at a time so the system wouldn’t crash, and opened up the beta-testing download period on a Friday at 9 a.m. By 9:30 a.m. a popular tech blogger had posted a way to bypass the load-balancing system and the operating system crashed under the weight.

Tweeting to the angst-ridden:

By monitoring the conversation we realized because we said there would be limited downloads, it created this angst said a Microsoft member working on the same. Microsoft reached out to the angst-ridden beta testers, asking them to watch its Twitter feed, and by Saturday morning it had alerted them the system was back up. Within 30 minutes it got another tweet — that that downloads wasn’t compatible with a certain browser. From Looking Glass team used the tweet to file a high-priority bug and it was fixed within the hour.

While the tool is meant to be open and work with a variety for third-party social-media vendors and platforms, it’s still meant to tie into and drive sales for Microsoft’s Enterprise Group, meaning that its use could be limited for companies that don’t use a suite of Microsoft products. It purposely built something that requires multiple Microsoft teams — ad sales and enterprise sales — to do. It seems the only way for Microsoft to win this youthful battle.

It also gives Microsoft ad sales reps something more to talk about than banner and search ads.

Microsoft wants to change the expectation advertisers have of Microsoft. Microsoft can do more than sell you advertising. It can help your business problems – it is a bunch of geeks, let’s see what the geeks can do.

Microsoft wants marketers to see it in a different light — not only as an ad seller but as a smart company full of geeks who can help it solve business problems. And the tech giant is using social media to prove it can do so.

Today Microsoft is taking the wraps off a new platform called Looking Glass, a social-media aggregator and monitoring tool that’s still in “proof of concept” stage, meaning it’s not yet in the market and will be open to a very small group of testers next month.

The idea is to connect social-media-monitoring tools to the rest of a marketer’s organization — customer databases, work orders, customer-service centers and sales data. Looking Glass will pull in a variety of feeds from platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr and work with third-party data sources as well. All of the data collected will connect into Microsoft’s enterprise platforms, such as Outlook and Sharepoint.

Making social media actionable:

What this also means for marketers is how all that social-media information they’re drowning in becomes more actionable.

Here’s how: A marketing manager can get an e-mail alert when there’s a sudden surge of chatter about his or her brand on Twitter or Facebook, along with the sentiment of that chatter and the influence level of those blogging. That information can then be connected to a customer-relationship-management system to decide whether customer service or PR should respond. Or a cable operator’s customer service rep could monitor Twitter for outage reports and send off a repair request straight from the tool. And Looking Glass will hook up to existing customer databases, so a pharmaceutical brand manager would be able to figure out if a person throwing a hissy fit on his blog is an influential doctor or current customer.

Social isn’t a web destination, it’s an attribute and an application on some level. They describe the product as a “bridge between IT and the marketing organization.”

It also logs all activity within the tool so, for example, companies can keep track of who posts to their own Twitter feeds.

A matrix-like character which does bombastic dance moves in a viral video is actually an advertisement for a car company. A laugh-out-loud funny clip of a baby making funny noises is a marketing technique for a new infant foods manufacturing company.

These are just a couple of examples of how search engine optimization or SEO marketing techniques work through video marketing.

With the popularity of Youtube and social networking sites, it is no wonder why both old and new companies are switching tactics when it comes to how they perform search engine optimization and SEO marketing. Both of these SEO marketing techniques are done with the help of video website promotion, video marketing, SEO video marketing and video optimization.

SEO Video Marketing: The Basics
To have a deeper understanding of how SEO video marketing can be your primary means of search engine optimization, here are a few points that you need to keep in mind:

Instead of link building, traditional bookmarking and other techniques offered by companies offering SEO services, video marketing is slowly taking over the Internet. Online users have a much more positive response towards videos, so video website promotion is the best way to reach out to your core audience.

If you want to apply video website promotion for your website/ blog, you need to learn about the techniques of video optimization. You can perform the video optimization yourself or you can hire a company offering SEO services to do it for you. To have a head start in your SEO video marketing, what you can do is upload videos in popular sites like YouTube, and repost the links on blogs, forums and your website.

Bookmarking a video and having a press release are the other techniques that you can use when using videos to optimize your site for the search engines. In this way you can start promotion work for your website and can derive more & more traffics towards the site.

Building a social media presence is much more a marathon than a sprint. There’s plenty of content to develop, place and promote, and there are lots of relationships to build. The social media marathon requires commitment, persistence and lots of patience, the type of mental endurance needed to complete a 42 km race.
Commit to do whatever is necessary to succeed, and pace you, so that you don’t injure yourself or get burned out during the process. This principle is behind most great achievements.

“Start off slow and taper down.” Bob’s mantra counters our natural tendency to come “out of the gate” at full speed and keep running — our human egos at work. How does all this translate into long-term social media success?

Here are seven ideas to help you develop the mindset of a marathoner:

1. Make a serious commitment to do whatever is required to attain your social media or web marketing goals. This is an absolute prerequisite.

2. Get yourself a mentor. As I now like to say, “The ultimate shortcut is doing it right the first time.”

3. Don’t wait until the conditions are perfect for launching your campaign. I’ll always remember what some one said, “You don’t have to get it right. You just have to get it going”.

4. Join one business networking site at a time and take the time to master it. Social networking sites can be intimidating at first. Learn a new feature, practice it, and go on to the next.

5. Start out blogging once a week. It’s hard to begin, especially if, like me, you’re not a professional writer. You can increase your posting frequency later.

6. Realize that there’s a steep social media learning curve. Do not quit. So many people join Twitter or Facebook or begin blogging and quit shortly thereafter.

7. Don’t forget about the “social” in social media. Get to know a lot of people and have a blast!

1. Engage the reader. Ask him questions about his business. Show interest in them, and they will show interest in you.

2. be gracious. Thank them for being a follower. Thank them for friend-requesting you. Always say thank you.

3. Reciprocate. Return the tweet by commenting on one of their tweets or blog posts. Tell them you like their site, their profile picture, etc. Say it and mean it.

4. Create Passion. Write and link to content that not only will interest the readers, but will also interest you. Readers can tell when you’re writing about something that you’re mildly interested in and something that you have a passion for.

Being a part of a social site needn’t be about who ate lunch where or an outline of your daily habits because that is what is happening with twitter. Add value to your pages and keep the readers coming back for more by giving them that value. Write about interesting topics. Write about unusual practices. Blog about changes in your company’s industry. Blog about blogging and how it has helped you online.

Whatever you find that adds value to your online presence, use it to its maximum and your readers will fill in the rest of the puzzle. Build it and they will come

By providing just a taste of how social technologies have altered the architecture of public life, it is critical for educators to understand how mediated publics are shifting the lives of youth. There are very good reasons why youth use them and encouraging them to return to traditional socialisation structures is simply not feasible. Let us look at offering some concrete advice to educators about how to think about the new media and how to engage with youth directly.

1. We should recognize that youth want to hang out with their friends in youth space.

Although most adults wish that formal education was the number one priority of youth, this is rarely the case. Most youth are far more concerned with connecting with friends. Their activities are very much driven by their friend group and there is immense informal
learning taking place outside of school. Learning social norms, status structures, and how to negotiate relationships of all types is crucial to teens. While most adults take these skills for granted, they are heavily developed during the teen years. In contemporary society, this process primarily takes place amongst peer groups.

2. The Internet mirrors and magnifies all aspects of social life.

When a teen is engaged in risky behaviour online, that is typically a sign that they’re engaged in risky behaviour offline. Troubled teens reveal their troubles online both explicitly and implicitly. It is not the online world that is making them troubled, but it is a fantastic opportunity for intervention. What would it mean to have digital street outreach where people started reaching out to troubled teens, not to punish them, but to be able to help? We already do street outreach in cities – why not treat the networked world as one large city? Imagine having college students troll the profiles of teens in their area in order to help troubled kids, just as they wander the physical streets. Too often we blame technology for what it reveals, but destroying or regulating the technology will not solve
the underlying problems that are made visible through mediated publics like social network sites.

It’s also important to realise that the technology makes it easier to find those who are seeking attention than those who are not. The vast majority of teens using these sites are engaged in relatively mundane activities, but the ‘at risk’ ones are made visible through mainstream media. In this way, both the technology and the press coverage magnify the most troublesome aspects of everyday life because they are inherently more interesting.

3. Questions abound. There are no truths, only conversations.

Over the last year, dozens of parenting guides have emerged to provide black and white rules about how youth should interact with social network sites. These rules though fail to protect youth. Rules motivate submissive youth, but they do little to get youth to think through the major issues. Conversation (not lecturing) is a key and it needs to be clear that there is no correct answer; it’s all a matter of choices and pros and cons.

Social networking websites like MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo are all over the internet and today’s youth are spending a lot of time using these sites to make friends and does time pass.
How is public life changed by social technology? How the properties of meddled
publics like social network sites different from unmeddled publics? We have to explore the social dynamics of meddled public life in order to help marketers understand their role in socializing.

The difficulty:
It is difficult to define what is public and what is private. Especially in technology circles, these terms are seen as two sides of same coin. A more liberal definition suggests allowing the two terms to sit at opposite ends of a pole, giving us the ability to judge just how public or private a particular event or place is. Unfortunately this too seems ill equipped to handle the disruption of meddling technology. What it means to be public or private is quickly changing every moment.

Today’s youth are being socialized into a society complicated by shifts in the public and private. New social technologies have altered the underlying structure of social interaction and information dispersal. They are embracing this change. Meanwhile, most adults are frightened. They do not understand the cultural shifts that are taking place and as is always the case, they don’t like or understand the happenings.

This leaves educationists in a peculiar dilemma. More conservative educationists view social technologies as a product of the evil, which corrupts and destroys youth.

Their turn a blind eye to the happenings and hope that the moral panics and chaos that surround the social technologies will just disappear. A third group of educationists are emerging – those who believe that it is essential to understand and embrace the new social technologies so as to guide youth through the difficult situation prevalent at present. This path is tricky because it requires educationists to let go of their pre-existing assumptions about how the world works. Furthermore, as youth are far more flexible at adapting to newer technologies through which these changes are taking place, educationists must learn from their students in order to help them work through the challenges that they face.

Educationists have a very powerful role to play in helping smooth the cultural transition that is taking place. We just hope that they take on the issue with all force.

Sites focused on shared interests allow advertisers to better target their messages.

HIGHER COSTS

According to itLinkz figures, advertisers are paying more each time their ads are viewed on his site than on more general social networks. Advertisers are paying double-digit figures for every 1,000 times their ad is viewed. MySpace‘s average charge per 1,000 views is considerably less than $1, according to an August eMarketer study citing press reports. The only question is: How can I get more ad inventory and can I lock that rate in for a year?
The other aspect fueling targeted sites is privacy. Some users are wary of posting on the larger sites because they don’t want their boss, a college admissions officer, or relative finding pictures or posts they would rather keep for friends’ eyes only. Because they reach smaller audiences, targeted sites have less exposure than a major online destination such as MySpace.

PRIVACY TOOLS

Social networks are also satisfying this need by providing tools that allow users to select who sees content. The big networks, such as MySpace, have adopted limited privacy controls. (MySpace, for example, allows users to keep their entire profile private.) However, the newer social networking tools and platforms such as Vox have more targeted controls, allowing users to choose who in their vast network sees particular information.

Adesso Systems, which creates business and consumer Web applications, has built a “Tubes” networking and document sharing platform. The downloadable software allows users to segment their social network into as many groups as they want and then send information or files only to that group. For example, a user could have a Tubes toolbar on their computer with a folder for family, a folder for friends, a folder for a specific group of close co-workers, and then another folder for view by everyone in the office. When someone wants to share a photo, document, e-mail or other file with the group, he or she just drags it into the respective tube.