How do you ensure your online community is a success? Online community programs take a lot of thought, planning and work to get them off the ground, but if done correctly can bring so much value for members and brands. Read more – ‘6 Key Insights for Building a Successful Community’.
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)’.
Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of using social media can be tricky. The inability to measure its impact can be a huge barrier for companies wishing to employ social media. And for those who do use social media in their business, it’s difficult to see how well, or indeed, how badly, a campaign is going. Read more – ‘Quantitative Social Media Monitoring Tools (Tracking and Analytics)’.
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’.
If you identified Twitter as the area of focus of your social media efforts, you should select a monitoring tool that’s strong in Twitter. If you want to track conversations in multiple languages, look for that capability. Read more – ‘Tools to Help You Manage Your Twitter Account’.
Do you want to get serious about using Twitter to market your services? Do you need to measure how much impact a topic has on Twitter? Or are you just just curious about your Twitter “performance” or perhaps someone elses? Well, here’s the good news: there are lots of analytics tools you can use to measure topics, followers, retweets and more. Some of them even provide you with free useful tools and widgets to integrate into your website or blog. Read more – ‘Twitter Monitoring and Analytics Tools’.
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’.
Qualitative social media monitoring is all about sentiment analysis or opinion mining. Sentiment analysis refers to the application of natural language processing (NLP), computational linguistics and text analytics to identify and extract subjective information in source material. Read more – ‘Qualitative Social Media Monitoring Tools (Sentiment Monitoring)’.
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’.
We’ve all played games as children. Today, millions of people ‘lose’ themselves in massively multiplayer games (MMPG) like World of Warcraft, strategy games like League of Legends and social media games like FarmVille. Games satisfy our need to interact, compete, and exercise our imagination. And they’re fun. Read more – ‘43 Things That Customers Think Are Fun’.
It’s vital to understand if and how your audience uses social media so you can make it a foundation of any ensuing social strategy. Read more – ‘The 9 Cs of Social Media’.
In early April, Twitter launched Promoted Tweets, combining paid and organic media. Brands can now advertise promoted tweets on search pages, however the community has power over which Tweets will appear measured by Twitter’s new metric called “resonance”, which factors in behaviours like the retweets, @mentions, #hashtags and avatar clicks. Brands can now purchase CPM based adverts to promote these popular tweets at the top of a Twitter search term — even in categories they aren’t well known in, influencing awareness. Read more – ‘What Twitter’s Promoted Tweets Business Model Means to the Ecosystem’.
If you belong to a medium or large company, there are some real advantages for segmenting your Twitter strategy. Delphine Remy-Boutang, Social Media Marketing Manager at IBM, offers some insights. Read more – ‘Segmenting Your Social Media Strategy’.
Over time Twitter, or more accurately, Tweets have acquired a unique lexicon of their own. Some of the volcabulary has been around since the dawn of Twitter — like @username at the beginning of a Tweet — whilst others are relatively recent — such as lists — but all of them make the language of Tweets unique. Read more – ‘Tweet-specific Language’.
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’.
The Cluetrain Manifesto – written in 1999 by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger – is a set of 95 theses organised and put forward as a manifesto, or call to action, for all businesses operating within what was suggested to be a newly-connected marketplace. Read more – ‘The Ninety-Five Theses of Conversation’.
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’.
Social media has become the new buzzword of the web. As businesses wake up to realise the power of social media and the way it can accelerate the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) process, more and more companies are venturing towards Social Media Optimisation (SMO). Read more – ‘How to Optimise Your Social Media Profile’.
If you’ve ever wondered how to go about the whole social media thing, Lon Safko, author of the Social Media Bible suggests 10 commandments that go a long way to embracing the phenomenon. Read more – ‘The Ten Commandments of Social Media’.
A web community is a web site (or group of web sites) that is a virtual community. Web communities in recent times commonly take the form of a social network service, such as Facebook, Upcoming and Last.fm, an Internet forum, a group of blogs such as WordPress.com and Blogger, or another kind of social software web application. Read more – ‘The Four C's of Community’.
Social network portability is one of several user-interface ideas and suggestions in the area of data-portability. As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors. When you join a new site, you should be able to import or preferably subscribe to your profile information and your social network from any existing profile of yours. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together. This problem is solved by a number existing technologies and initiatives: Microformats, OpenID, OAuth, RDF, RSS, OPML and APML. Read more – ‘Data Portability for Social Networks’.
In the late 1990s, a large multi-national technology corporation, hoping to become a major force in online advertising, bought a small start-up in a sector that was believed to be the "next big thing". That corporation was Microsoft and the start-up was Hotmail. Hotmail and Microsoft established web-based email as a must-have application for personal use. The addition of Hotmail to the Microsoft inventory promised to increase the companies online revenues that were being dominated by Yahoo!, Google and AOL amongst a host of others. Read more – ‘Online Social Networks: Everywhere, Yet Nowhere’.
Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “matz†Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming. Read more – ‘UK Ruby User Group on LinkedIn’.
Whether you love it or you hate it, LinkledIn for Groups now has the UK Adobe User Groups for ColdFusion, Flex and Flash. To join the groups, simply click the appropriate link and start networking. Read more – ‘UK Adobe User Groups on LinkedIn’.
The development of the internet and the web, and of search engines, has led to users doing their own searching. In the Web 2.0 environment users are now also doing their own content creation and information management. Because folksonomies develop in Internet-mediated social environments, users can discover who created a given folksonomy tag, and see the other tags that this person created. In this way, folksonomy users often discover the tag sets of another user who tends to interpret and tag content in a way that makes sense to them. The result is often an immediate and rewarding gain in the user's capacity to find related content. Read more – ‘Taxonomy of Folksonomies’.
Social bookmarking is a popular way to store, classify, share and search links through the practice of tagging them with informal assigned, user-defined keywords that describe their content, and saving these bookmarks to a public website. This is in contrast to the classic idea of bookmarking, which is the practice of saving the website address to your web browser. Read more – ‘Social Bookmarking a Zeitgeist’.
A new breed of Web-based data integration applications is emerging across the Internet. Colloquially known as mashups, their popularity stems from the emphasis on interactive user participation and the manner in which they aggregate third-party data. A mashup is a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. Mashups are an exciting genre of interactive Web applications that are characterised by, and draw upon, content and functionality retrieved from external data sources to create entirely new and innovative services. They are a hallmark of the second generation of Web applications widely known as Web 2.0. Read more – ‘Wise Up to Mashups’.
During the 1990s business leaders and venture capitalists grappled with how they would make money from the web. This was tipified by the two VCs, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, investing $25 million in Google in the late 1990s; they new the search engine created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page was a winning formula, even though the pair had not yet monetised search. Bricks and mortar compaines were deemed "old hat" as the dotcom bubble was expanding. Companies such as eBay, Amazon and Yahoo! were at the forefront of every investors' chequebook. Every company needed a 21st Century "Blue Sky" web strategy; every company needed to do e-commerce. However, the bubble burst and everyone was brought down with a bang. Boo.com is a classic example of the fallout from the over speculation. Read more – ‘Drive Business Change with Web 2.0’.
Not quite Alex Tew's dollar-per-pixel advertising page that raised over a million dollars in just a few months, the Million Dollar Homepage, but Beggr brings internet money making scams to a new level! Read more – ‘Scrounging Web 2.0 Stylee’.
