As content on the Web grows exponentially, our ability to make sense of it is inversely proportional. In other words, we are fast sinking under the sheer amount of content pouring onto the Web every day. The Social Web hasn’t made life any easier on managing content production either – in fact its lowered the barrier to entry. Read more – ‘Tools to Help You Manage Your Websites and Blogs’.
The demand for timely, relevant content that is specific to our unique interests and perspectives has given rise to a new generation of tools that aim to help individuals and companies create content and deliver it in a meaningful way. Read more – ‘Content Creation and Integration Tools’.
Social media is much more than a way to stay connected and to have fun: it’s a way to market yourself, your business and your products and services. By establishing a presence on the social Web, you can gain virtually unlimited exposure to your target audience without incurring the higher costs associated with traditional marketing campaigns. Read more – ‘Comprehensive Social Media Monitoring Tools (Quantitative and Qualitative)’.
With more than 400m registered users globally, Facebook is the world’s largest social network. If you’ve identified Facebook as the area of focus of your social media efforts, you should select a monitoring tool that’s strong in Facebook. Read more – ‘Tools to Help You Manage Your Facebook Account’.
You, like many people, aren’t stupid, but it’s an unfortunate fact of life that you can be fooled. Since the dawn of time, the best salespeople, rightly or wrongly, have been known to exploit vulnerabilities and weaknesses of the human mind to their own gain. Read more – ‘You’re Being Gamed’.
Social media monitoring helps with branding and marketing and can help identify quality control or customer care problems that may have gone unnoticed. Monitoring is only one piece of the puzzle, however. It’s important to find out who is saying what, and where the conversation is happening so you can respond appropriately. Read more – ‘Tools to Help You Manage Multiple Social Channels’.
In behavioural economics, gamification is the use of game dynamics for non-game applications, particularly consumer-oriented web and mobile sites, in order to encourage people to adopt the applications. It also strives to encourage users to engage in desired behaviours in connection with the applications. Gamification works by making technology more engaging, encouraging desired behaviours and by taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping or reading web sites. Read more – ‘Game Dynamics, or Gamification to You and Me’.
Social media marketing has three important aspects. The first revolves around creating buzz or newsworthy events, videos, tweets, or blog entries that attract attention, and become viral in nature. Buzz is what makes social media marketing work. It replicates a message through user to user contact, rather than the traditional method of purchasing via an advert or promoting a press release. The message does not necessarily have to be about the product. Many successful viral campaigns have gathered steam through an amusing or compelling message, with the company logo or tagline included incidentally. Read more – ‘Thoughts on a Social Media Marketing Strategy’.
Whether you’re keeping up with family members or growing your company’s brand, social media has become integral to many aspects of our lives. And it’s getting harder to keep up. Here are some ebooks that can get you started on your path towards social media success or help you kick things up a notch if you’re already active on the social Web. Read more – ‘15 Free eBooks about Social Media’.
Friends are an extremely important part of most people’s lives. The question Who are your friends?, is continually asked across The Web through applications that form part of the social media phenomenon. If you join Twitter or Facebook, one of the actions you are almost immediately asked is to identify your friends. But relationships in a digital world are not so absolute. Read more – ‘The Spectrum of Online Friendship’.
