Social Networking-The journey from toys to tools
“Follow me on Twitter!”
“I’ll add you on Facebook!”
“Hey, we are Orkut friends!”
“I’ll subscribe to your RSS feed right away!”
You will agree, these are some of the most touted phrases that we use when we “network”. However, this is not the way the journey had begun. The transformation from toys to tools was a revolution that brought out a whole new “Social Economy” in “Social Networks”.
In the two previous parts of this post, I discussed mostly about the general factors that help in getting a site optimized to the highest order of ranking on the Google search pages. In this last part, I will concentrate more on some of the technical factors. Images used in a site should have separate “alt” ...
You have recently set up your business organization and deciding on a proper marketing strategy to add brand value to your organization. However, your resources are limited and this is restricting you form any sort of capital investment in this regard. Amidst a highly competitive market, how would you advertise and add proper brand value to your products? The answer in this fast-paced technology aware world is quite simple and intriguing: Social Networks.
For those of you new to this philosophy or rather a concept, a Social Network is a social structure which links individuals and organizations on common grounds of interdependency and areas of interest. These interests may include friendship, kinship, values and visions, or even financial exchange and trade; just to mention a few. There are a plethora of websites that offer you services that allow you to Social Network. However, the question is, How do you utilize this offering?
The other day I had a conversation with some nice people from the market research company Coleman Parkes Research. They wanted to tell me about a study they have recently concluded about social networking. I have to say it was pretty interesting stuff. I will leave it to you to search for them and to download their full report. What was interesting to me is the evidence they turn up about adoption and how the adoption of social media to date by companies follows an early adopter pattern.
The other day I had a conversation with some nice people from the market research company Coleman Parkes Research. They wanted to tell me about a study they have recently concluded about social networking. I have to say it was pretty interesting stuff.
The emergence of social media has been a game-changer for newspapers and magazines. On the one hand, they have seen their print numbers continue to drop as more and more people turn to the internet to get their news and information. On the other hand, they (the smart ones) have seen that by embracing social media and leveraging the different opportunities it offers, they can drive more traffic to their sites, engage in open dialogues and react quicker. So what does this mean for you? More opportunities than ever for you to build relationships and get publicity. Here are a few things to keep in mind when trying to leverage social media for PR purposes -- and that's PR as in public relations, not PageRank!
Start Small
Many times when people think about getting publicity for their business, their wishlist goes something like this:
LiveWorld is a publicly traded company that's been around since 1996 and is best known for its white labeled social networks. These are online communities that LiveWorld helps clients build up around their existing brands, and they often take a good deal more time and effort to set up than communities created on top of self-service platforms like Ning or KickApps. However, LiveWorld is making a significant foray into "out-of-the-box" communities with the release of LiveBar, a widget-like site addition that brings community features to any website using only one line of JavaScript.
The social media bookmarklet has become a de-facto element in most new website designs. And while I love social media and think it can have some huge benefits for websites; I think including social bookmarklets like AddThis to a new web build default is at best lazy-ness and at worse symptomatic of a complete miss-understanding ...
No, I am definitely not going to write about the lucky number! I’ll talk about the most anticipated operating system of the year, yet to be released from the stables of Microsoft. Welcome to the new Windows 7.
I already have 7 questions on my mind. What shall be the minimum hardware requirements for this OS? Will the support for drivers be better than the previous releases of Microsoft? Will the new OS beat Vista and rival operating systems on performance issues? What about security? Phew!