A few smaller ones worth a mention

Google+

Google plus Facebook plus Twitter

The most interesting development of 2011 has definitely got a lot to offer. After inviting only a select group of people (10,000,000!), Google+ has become the fastest growing network of all time (however that growth was definitely aided by Facebook and Twitter).

But what is Google+, where is it going, and how can it help your business, if at all?

Google+ has cleverly combined the two most popular social networks, Twitter and Facebook into a tool that brings sharing, following and discussing content together seamlessly. Unlike Facebook, you can follow other users without needing to be friends. And unlike Twitter you can share content without getting lost in the abyss (thanks to a sophisticated filtering system).

If you are blogging (which you should be after this!), Google+ is a great tool to add weight to your search results. For all the posts that you write, you can display your profile alongside your search result. This increases the likelihood of click throughs but more importantly, your face will pop up whenever your search result does – a great way to strengthen your online reputation in the industry!

These new areas are just the beginning of a very exciting development. Google+ is likely to impact social, search and just about everything else that you do on the web in a way that only Google can.

FourSquare

Not for squares

FourSquare is one of the newest and most exciting forms of social media - Location Based Social Networking. Don’t worry, it’s less confusing than it sounds. Basically it’s a network through which users “check in” to physical locations (restaurants, shops, museums, cinemas) in order to let their friends know where they are. They can also be eligible for a Foursquare promotion from the venue. So if I’m popping into a Nick’s Massage Parlour and I “check in” using Foursquare then I may be eligible for 20% off his world famous “Nude Massage” (I never understood why he insists on taking his clothes off).

So what’s in it for the businesses? Well every time someone “checks in” to Nick’s parlour, all their friends on foursquare are given an update. That’ gives Nick some great exposure, so to speak, and by offering his special deals at specific times he can ensure his quiet hours pick up some decent trade!

Groupon

Proudly mugging grateful business owners since 2010

Groupon, funkily derived from the term Group Coupon, is all about collective buying power. They advertise a small number of daily deals in every city, often up to 60%-70% discount. The deals are so good that they tend to go like really cheap hot cakes, guaranteeing high sales for the retailer and Groupon take about half the money paid for the coupon.

It’s a great way for businesses to gain a bit of extra business and some exposure. The trouble is that once they allowed for the huge discount and then given half of the amount paid to Groupon, they are left with almost nothing! For new businesses just keen for trade at any cost, this is a price well worth paying. But for established businesses the sums don’t tend to stack up.

Recently Google Offers has come into the market and hopefully this new competition will help retailers get a better deal.

MySpace

You’re welcome to it!

Back in 2006 MySpace was what Facebook is now – no, not managed by stinking rich, power-hungry toddler. I mean it was the biggest, most dominant player in the social media market. Then, as the aforementioned ankle biter gained momentum, the once omnipresent monster shrunk into an ever more targeted niche, until now, when it is little more than a place for emerging bands to gain exposure.

After another failed re-brand at the end of 2010 then you can safely assume your time is better spent elsewhere (unless you work in music of course!).

Facebook

I’m kind of a big deal...
Facebook is the worlds’ largest social network where friends hang out, share images and videos,
discuss their interests and organise their social lives.
Facebook is a funny one. It’s the first thing people think of when they hear the words “social media”, and yet for business it’s the last thing I usually recommend. Here’s why:

• Most businesses exploring social media tend to be B2B (business to business) rather than B2C (business to consumer). Facebook is full of consumers but not many businesses.
  
• Facebook is where people go to be entertained and socialise. Fail to fit into either of these categories and you won’t fit in at all!
  
• Even if you are able to engage with people successfully on Facebook by being both social and entertaining, how do you then turn them into customers? After all, they’re not there to shop!
  

But, in the interest of presenting a balanced argument, here are a few reasons why you DEFINITELY shouldn’t dismiss it:

• There are about 750 million active Facebook users, 50% of whom log onto Facebook on any given day.
  
• Through their targeted PPC* advertising, you are able to home in on your perfect demographic in incredible detail. If your target audience is single women between 25-30 that live in Hull and harbour an interest in medieval jousting, Facebook PPC was made for you!
  
• If you are B2C and able to entertain and socialise whilst building commercial relationships with new clients, then you have probably found your most powerful route to market EVER! Seriously, we’ve worked with several lucky companies that fall into this category, and it soon becomes absolutely integral to their business (one even abandoned their website!).
  

For who
Facebook is a big deal for those organisations that tick the right boxes. The trouble is that these box tickers are few and very far between. Here are a few examples:

• Large B2C brands with strong consumer loyalty – companies like Coke, Red Bull, MTV, Disney, Starbucks and many other large B2C brands that have traditionally benefitted from strong relationships with their clients. These represent the largest fan bases on Facebook.
  
• Charities – People connect emotionally with charitable organisations and are often very keen to broadcast their belief in a particular cause. The Breast Cancer Awareness and The Breast Cancer Site fan pages, for example, have over 4 million fans between them.
  
• Small B2C companies with a strong front-man/woman – sure, they may not have the deep pockets of the big brands, but what they do have is remarkably close personal relationships with their Facebook network. As long as the individual representing the brand is able to approach it with a commercial mindset whilst maintaining these personal relationships, then it’s a dynamite formula.
  

So if you feel you could fall into one of the above then read on....

Personal Profiles, Groups or Fan Pages?

• Personal profile – the page dedicated to you, the individual. This is where 95% of activity takes place.
  
• Group – an area for members to share ideas and thoughts on a particular topic/interest.
  
• Fan Page – a page dedicated to the fans of a particular cause/organisation/brand.
  

So which should you choose? Well they each have their pros and cons but in almost all circumstances I would suggest a Fan Page. It is the only one actually designed with marketing in mind. The others are for more personal, intimate purposes, which does offer the advantage of being able to message people directly into their inboxes, but this is quite a spammy technique and far outweighed (in my opinion) by the superior functionality offered by a Fan Page - videos, email capture, music, games - even shops!

Tip top tips for Facebook Fan Pages

This is the important bit. You’ve decided you need a Fan Page, but just having one isn’t going to help your business. You need a clear strategy for both engagement with fans and then turning that engagement into cash. Here are some tips:
Incentivise likes – by hiding content to non-fans you can twist peoples’ arms into hitting the “like” button. This could be a discount voucher, entry into a prize-draw or practical/instructional content of some sort.

• Be creative - If you do offer prizes or discounts then why not request that people claim these via the wall? It will encourage conversation and expose the wall to their friends. On a landing page that we recently created for a fashion company, they advertised a competition but you had to click “like” before you could enter. After that they would announce the winner via the wall giving people a reason to come back time and time again to see if they were the lucky winner. Worked a treat!
  
• Use status updates sparingly – unlike the world of Twitter where it often seems the more inane and frequent your comments the more powerful you become, Facebook fans will not be so tolerant. Every time you update your status you are invading their personal space. Pointless, boring updates will soon result in “unlikes”. The best updates are short, interesting (funny, emotional or a bit controversial) and encourage user participation. Spread the like button far and wide – the more exposure your “like” button gets, the more fans you will attract. Blog pages are particularly effective.
  
• Learn from the stats – Facebook Insights is like a watered down version of Google Analytics. It will tell you the number of views, new fans, unlikes, etc. When you get up to decent numbers this information is fascinating. We started a fan page for Christmas Carols in December and hit 20,000 in three weeks. Every time we posted an update the activity would surge. We would see lots of comments, new likes and even images posted (particularly when we started “the best Christmas tree” competition!).Then Christmas passed and the fan base more or less plateaued out. At Easter Nick, being the friendly chap that he is, posted a “Happy Easter” message in five different languages. It bombed - 200 “unlikes” in 30 minutes! Painful but valuable data.
  

Facebook Actions

• B2C or B2B? - Decide if it is appropriate for your business.
  
• Choose your weapon – Select a Fan Page, group or personal profile depending on your objectives. 90% of the time a fan page is best.
  
• Customise - Design a bespoke tab for your fan page that offers something unique and incentivises people to become fans through hidden content.
  
• Quality not quantity – you need a steady flow of updates (at least one a week) but the message has to be spot on. You won’t get second chances.
  

Flickr

Helping you look good online
A free image hosting service owned by Yahoo.
Flickr is a bit like YouTube but for photos. Happy snappers everywhere use it to store their images before sharing them with the world.
Benefits

• While Flickr links are no-follow* you can ask that people who use your images credit you with a link. Okay, it’s going to be impossible to enforce, but generally people are pretty happy to give credit where it’s due so if you put images up frequently it could end up having a really nice impact on your search engine optimisation!
  
• Arguably even the no-follow links can have a positive search engine optimisation benefit as they act as a social signal to Google that your site is busy offering great content to the web.
  
• There are so many images floating around online that it can be tempting to just copy and paste without a moments’ thought for the legal implications. In the long term it is worth erring on the side of caution and acquiring images from legitimate sources, of which Flickr is probably the biggest!
  

Flickr Action

• Social - If you have a very photo heavy web presence then you can definitely make use of Flickr as an additional arm to your social media activity.
  
• Free images - If, like the vast majority, you are more concerned with finding great photos than supplying them, use it for adding a bit of colour to your blog and website – just remember to give credit!
  

“Too many tweets make a twat” - David Cameron
Twitter is a microblogging service through which users can chat to any other user with short, SMS
style messages
Twitter is probably the most social of the social networks. You are not limited to friends or connections; you can tweet to anyone. And good etiquette - helping others out and thanking those that help you - is the very foundation of Twitter.
It is little surprise, therefore, that as a couple of social halfwits, we’re bloody hopeless at it!
Oh it isn’t through lack of trying, but social media is as much about finding the right platform for your personality as it is about finding the right platform for your business, and in the real world we’re that awkward bastard that walks into a networking event, heads straight for the food table and then stands in the corner staring at his blackberry pretending to send emails. So we keep up appearances (a bit) and have impressive looking backgrounds, but between you and me, we’re a waste of Twitter space.
HOWEVER, “do as I say not as I do” as the saying goes. Twitter, honestly, is brilliant. We know more businesses, particularly SME’s, that successfully drive business through Twitter than ANY other social media platform, and if you have even an ounce of social ability, then you can too!
For
Those that enjoy a good virtual chinwag with anyone and everyone
Benefits

• Develop new relationships
  
• Increase traffic to the website
  
• Gain brand exposure amongst your target audience (Twitter is the second most populated social network after Facebook)
  

Twitter Tip Top Tips
Okay, following my intro we’re probably the last people you feel you should be taking Twitter advice from, but we do understand this stuff and work with loads of people who live their lives (both personal and professional) through Twitter. Here are a few of the things that they do to make the most of it:

• Keep it personal – people want to connect with real people with real faces, so unless you’re a charity or popular brand with an extremely loyal following then personalise your Twitter and deal with people authentically.
  
• Branding – I’m doing a very slight U-turn here. Do keep it personal but ultimately this is about you representing your business, so brand your background (including your other contact and social media details/icons) and make sure it looks professional.
  
• Create a targeted following – have a strategy. Who is your target audience within Twitter and are they following you? If they are then are you making an effort to forge a relationship with them?
  
• Metrics – Use bit.ly.com to measure the number of times links on your tweets are clicked. You also need a basic system for recording those relationships that started/developed on Twitter and went on to lead to cold, hard cash. Even a simple Excel spreadsheet will do it. Your time is a cost and you need some way of tracking the return.
  
• Don’t miss a day – in the early stages it’s all about building momentum. Don’t slack.
  

• Third party applications - Experiment with Tweetdeck and other apps. Believe me, they will make your Twitter life soooo much easier. For example, I have around 1000 followers (god knows how) and I’m following about the same. There is absolutely no way I can listen to all that noise, but by using Tweetdeck I can check it once a day and immediately see what my “primary tweeters” (in other words those people I actually know and care about) have been tweeting.
  
• Tweet on the move! – All smart phones have great applications now that make social media management more efficient than ever. Download a Twitter app and, as much as possible, try to restrict your tweeting to those occasions where you’ve nothing else to be getting on with.
  
• Combine with your blog – the next time you find yourself about to send out a tweet with a link to an interesting article somewhere on the web, stop! For the 10 minutes it would take you to write a 100 word summary of the topic with your spin on things, wouldn’t you rather your website got the traffic instead?
  

Twitter Action

Twitter has the potential to benefit just about any business. It really just boils down to personality. So give it a go for a month (without missing a day!) and if you don’t enjoy it then you never will, so stop. You’re time will be better spent elsewhere.

LinkedIn

Facebook for Business

LinkedIn is a networking platform through which professionals can connect and collaborate.

Despite being the most obviously business orientated of all the social media platforms, LinkedIn is actually the least powerful in terms of its ability to nurture business relationships. Why? Because for the most part business isn’t conducted in a board room. It’s conducted down the pub over a beer or in the cafe over a latte. By pandering to the formal stereotypes of business, LinkedIn misses out on the true social dimension of business. In short, LinkedIn is social media at its least social.

Now I don’t want you thinking I’m getting negative about LinkedIn. In fact I bloody love it, because let’s be honest for a second – all this being social can get a bit much can’t it? Endless status updates and tweeting and blog commenting and pretending to care..... I mean genuinely caring about what the other person has to say – being that nice is exhausting!

And this is where, for me, LinkedIn is a bit special. While it’s a full web 2.0 experience and almost entirely user generated, you don’t feel like you constantly have to keep up appearances. You can simply set and forget. You spend a few hours populating it with content, get your numbers up past 100 so you feel all connected and important, add a few videos to stand out from the masses and then let it passively work its magic.

LinkedIn is a sleeper. I used to answer questions and be a bit of an all round try-hard but now I just let it be, and yet when I check my Google Analytics it is always up there as one of the top sources for referral traffic.

For who

• Business to Business professionals (so lawyers, accountants, marketing companies, HR, web developers, etc).

LinkedIn Personal Profiles

Your LinkedIn personal profile is the page dedicated to you, the professional.

Tip Top Tips for your personal profile

• Less is more - The less you write, the more it will be read. Think of your strongest points and leave it there.
• Stand out from the crowd - Very few people bother to use slideshows or video, despite the fact it’ll make your profile sooooo much more interesting. The Behance video application is very easy to use and it really brings the page to life - http://learn.linkedin.com/apps/behance/
  
• Let others do your selling for you – As in the offline world, there is nothing more powerful than a strong recommendation from an objective third party. Recommend those you are connected to that you feel deserve it and more often than not they will return the favour.
• Get your numbers up – how aggressive you want to be is your call but ultimately the more contacts you have the more exposure you will gain. If you want to limit it to those that you know well offline that is fine (and personally my preference) but be sure to import your email contacts as well as add your details to both your email signature and your business cards. If you want to take it a step further, why not become a LION ( LinkedIn Open Networker) and connect with other members of the pride.

LinkedIn Company Profiles

Admittedly the benefits from a sales and marketing perspective are currently very modest, but the CEO of LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, has suggested that this will be changing in the near future, so it’s worth being one of the early adopters now and getting ahead of the game.
Tip Top Tips for your company profile

• First things first - ensure you and your team all have fully completed personal profiles.
• Calls to action –It’s no use just having people idly browse your company profile – you need them to take action! Ensure there are strong CTA’s throughout the services section.
• Video and images – the functionality is limited so make sure you use the small amount available. You can embed video in the services section (customer testimonials are generally best) and ensure each service has a nice unique image.

Look, let’s be honest, this isn’t about to make or break your business. The functionality is kinda lame but for that very reason there’s really no excuse not to spend the 20 minutes required getting it right.

LinkedIn Groups

Much like traditional forums, LinkedIn groups are areas where people with similar interests can come together and discuss/share ideas. These are mini communities saturated with industry experts, so there are lots of valuable lessons to be learned and connections to be made!

Tip Top Tips for groups

• Get help – if there is a particular topic you would like expert opinion on, then why not start a new topic? You’ll be amazed at just how keen other people are to show off their expertise and knowledge (and it’s a lot cheaper than paying for it!).
• Promote your blog – if you write a blog you can actually promote it as a new topic via your group as a nice source of additional and very targeted traffic!
• Network – if you chat with someone via a group and think they could be a useful contact then connect up your personal profiles.
• Post job vacancies – if you have a job vacancy then why not post it up on the job board within your groups. It’s likely to be the ideal target audience in terms of skill-set.
• Start a group of your own – not only is ownership of a vibrant group a nice accolade but you can also email group members directly, which as the group expands can become an enormously valuable marketing tool! However, if you do start a group of your own just don’t make the mistake of naming it after your company! It needs to be something neutral and descriptive.

LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn Answers is a forum for asking questions on anything business related. The answers are provided by other members of LinkedIn that have expertise within the subject in question. There are two sides:

• Help – By answering questions you can make new connections and if you impress then you can be awarded with the “Best Answer” badge that’ll show on your profile.
• Be helped –Just ask a question and watch eager experts battle it out trying to get the best answer badge. Why wouldn’t you use this?!
  

LinkedIn Actions

• Set and forget - If you are a traditional B2B organisation then you definitely belong on LinkedIn, even if it is just a question of setting up a decent profile and letting others connect. It will take you about an hour to do a solid job.
• Additional source of leads - To take full advantage of LinkedIn as a lead generator you’ll need to be a bit more proactive, connecting with anyone whose business card you collect through offline networking and adding slideshows and video to your profile so that you really stand out.

YouTube and online video

The camera really is your friend YouTube is the worlds’ largest online video platform, through which users can view, upload and share video content, free of charge. It is owned by Google.

Whilst technically a search engine (the second largest after Google for that matter!), YouTube is usually referred to as part of the social spectrum, and yet it’s most common benefit to business is the way it can breathe life into a website. In short, it just makes everything that little bit better.

For who

• Everyone

Benefits

Authenticity - YouTube is all about real content from real people. This authenticity is critical to your social presence and these online videos will do a better job of communicating your personality than any written word or image.

Spread it far and wide - When you’ve published the video on YouTube, why not incorporate it into your Facebook Fan Page, LinkedIn profile and blog? Embedding a YouTube video onto your website or blog is just a simple copy and paste.

Video to enhance the website - You will notice that often when you make searches on Google they show videos at the top of the results. The only reason Google and the other search engines give the videos such prominence is because they believe users value video content highly. They are not wrong. If you present someone with a block of text and a video, both with essentially the same content, the vast majority of users will opt for the video every time!

Tip Top Tips for creating video

• Camera – If you really want to keep costs down then you can begin with your webcam, but for just ВЈ100 you can pick up a Flip HD and for another ВЈ20 you can have a tripod. The other thing you may want to consider is screen capture. This allows you to record what is on your screen, similar to how ‘print screen’ takes a picture snapshot, screen capture takes a video! Camtasia is good but pricey. I’d suggest starting with a free trial on Jing at http://www.techsmith.com/download/jing/

• Editing software - There is a lot of great editing software out there but if you’re counting the pennies I’d suggest starting with Windows Movie Maker.

• Hosting – We already mentioned the Search engine optimisation benefits of hosting on your site. It can also look more professional than having a third party logo. The downside is that it takes up valuable space, can greatly increase the load time of the page (the time it takes for all the content to appear) and can be a little awkward depending on the structure of your website coding. Embedding from YouTube on the other hand is easy peasy, the load time of your web page is not affected and it won’t cost you a penny!

YouTube Actions

Embedding – learn how to embed video from YouTube. This is going to be really important for your blog. Just click on the “Share” button under the video, then click the “embed” button and you’ll see the embed code appear. Copy and paste this into the html box of your blog and you’ve just successfully published your first online video!

Get kitted out – Buy a Flip HD and a tripod, and download Windows Movie Maker. The first shoot may take half a day’s messing about but you might just surprise yourself with the end result!

Blogging

Where it all begins
Blog is derived from the term “web log”.
It is an online journal with a series of posts written in the style appropriate to the target audience.
According to Blogpulse.com, there are now over 166 million active blogs online. Many of these are authored by nutcases that feel compelled to share their every inane and disturbing thought with the world, but increasingly organisations (both profit and non-profit) are capitalising on blogs as a route to market.
For who
• Everyone
Benefits
Blogging , for me, is where your social media activity should begin. It is the most universally beneficial of all forms of social media, will provide you with a crash course in the fundamentals of internet marketing and impact the way you do just about everything else online. More specifically:
Content is king – You’ve already learnt all about the importance of this in the Content Marketing and SEO sections. Well this all applies to the blog just as it does to the rest of the website. In fact, about 70% of our website traffic comes through our blogs!
Link bait – Blogs are very linkable – they provide regularly updated content and combine information with personality. A cracking combo for attracting links.
Personality – A blog is the perfect vehicle for conveying not only the personality of the business but also the personalities of the individuals that make up that business. If you check out
www.smemarketing.com/blogs you will see how we’ve taken this to the extreme. Each blog has a design, style and tone that is unique to the person behind it.
Expertise – this is kinda boring but soooo important! The process of sitting down, putting finger to keyboard and producing content that you are happy to have the world to see will force you to become more informed, more interesting, more expert!
Other social media platforms – there is an awful lot of empty noise on Twitter, Facebook, etc. If you consistently blog about the exciting, groundbreaking or just plain ridiculous things that are happening in your industry, you will become part of the minority that actually have something to say worth hearing!

WordPress blogs

WordPress is the most popular blogging software online (in addition to also accounting for 14% of all websites!) and for good reason. If you are getting started with your first WordPress blog then visit http://wordpress.org/download/ where you can find a full installation guide that will walk you through the process. Have a crack in order to familiarise yourself with the basics but at some point you’ll probably have to pass it over to your web developer/designer to give it a polished and professional look.

Tip top tips for blogging

Sorry, there are far too many pointers here, I know. We just really love our blogging!
Ensure your blog lives on your site – By incorporating your blog into your site rather than using an external platform like tumblr, blogger or WordPress.com, you will not only benefit from the direct traffic but also any links pointing to the blog. To clarify, this means having your blog on mysite.com/blog rather than mysiteblog.com.
Unique – When you blog about top stories, be aware that you are just one of thousands. You need to make yours stand out. Decide on a USP and play to it! If you check out mine
(http://www.smemarketing.com/author/dan) you’ll see mine is a traditional business take on internet marketing as I embrace my technical inadequacies.
Guest blogging – If there is someone in your industry that is considered a bit of a guru, why not ask if they would like to post of your blog? It will flatter their ego, help develop a relationship and make your blog more interesting. Likewise ask other prominent bloggers in your market if they would like you to guest blog on theirs. Just make sure they agree to you sticking a link on the post back to yours for that magic link juice!
Use images and videos – blogs are great for conveying personality but only if they have personality to convey! You need lots of stuff going on - links to external resources, funny images, thought provoking videos, strong Calls To Action*. There are tons of great images and videos (think Flickr and YouTube) in the public domain, so make full use of it!
Keep it real – talk using language the reader can understand and never over-sell yourself. Real experts don’t have to.
Learn very basic HTML – you don’t need to understand HTML to blog but by getting to grips with the 10-20 most basic commands you will be able to really bring your posts to life. Seriously, it’s well worth doing and easier than you think. Have a play with it here - http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_primary.asp
Speed – When something big is going on in your industry, you need to get your piece of the action while it’s hot. The days where our blogs have hit peak traffic has been when we’ve spotted an exciting development in internet marketing and thrown a blog post up within minutes to cater for the thousands of people that will be making related searches that day.
Internal linking –when you blog you want to ensure there are links in your post that encourage people to navigate to other pages on your site so they don’t just bounce back to the SERPs!
Measure, measure, measure – as with your website, you need to keep an eye on your Google Analytics. How many new visitors are you getting each day? Which posts are attracting the most traffic? Why might that be and can you write more information around the subject? What is the bounce rate and what can you do to reduce it?
Comments – when you first start it is probably best to disable the comments functionality, as blogs with comment boxes but without comments look a little sad. However, once your traffic is more respectable then definitely allow them. Just make sure you always respond. For quiet patches why not encourage friends and family to read your blog and comment. People hate being the first so this can really help build momentum.
Write title tags with searchers in mind – the single most important factor in determining the ability of your post to generate traffic from the Search Engines will be its title, so think about what your target audience is likely to be searching!
Each post you write may only get an average of 10 visitors a month, but if you write one a week then in one year your blog content will be bringing an additional (thinks for a moment) 520 unique visitors every month! Get a couple of colleagues on the case too and within a couple of years you’re going to have more traffic than you know what to do with!!
Blogging Actions

• Set up a WordPress blog and incorporate it into your website. You can either have a blog specific style or keep it consistent with the rest of the site.
  
• Use the great instructional videos at WordPress TV to help you get to grips with the basics - http://wordpress.tv/category/how-to/
  
• Be realistic with how often you think you will blog because this is all about momentum. If you go crazy for two months and then slow right down (as most do) it will look like you’ve lost interest. And if you’re not interested then why should anyone else be?! If you think you can do it once a week, commit to once a fortnight and then never miss a date.
  

Social Bookmarking Sites

Share the love
Social Bookmarking is the act of storing and organising online resources, such as web pages, blogs
and videos, so they can be shared amongst an online community.

Examples

There are literally hundreds but here are a few of the biggies:
• Digg – popular web pages are “dugg” by approving viewers to increasing their rating and exposure in Digg.com. Those with the most diggs rank at the top for the category in question.
• Delicious – people store and share their tastiest web bookmarks.
• Alltop – headlines from the most popular blogs and websites on the net are sectioned into categories for easy retrieval by busy browsers.
• Stumbleupon – a “discovery engine” that allows you to stumble upon popular web content based on your search preferences.
For who
• Everyone
Benefits
If you’re going to publish great information online, then you need to know where to find the great information that already exists. Social bookmarking sites are designed for exactly that.
Once your blogging wheels are turning you may decide to use these social bookmarking sites as a powerful source of global viral traffic. However, don’t try it every time. This needs to be saved for that extra special post – the one that contains that piece of information you know the web will go crazy for! Then encourage your colleagues and friends to get bookmarking, digging, stumbling, etc...

Social Bookmarking Action

Spend five to ten minutes at the start of each day running through a couple of social bookmarking sites. Enter your preferences and see what exciting developments are happening in your industry. It will give you loads of great ammo for publishing later that day via Twitter and your blog.

Social Media

Those websites that are full of user generated content, be it text, image, audio or video.
Social Media is one of the biggest things to hit business in the last ten years. Strictly speaking it had been around a lot longer than that, with non-technical users being able to contribute to all sorts of online forums in the 90’s. However, it wasn’t until web 2.0 enabled users to publish more exciting material, such as images, music and video, that it really took off with the masses. And boy did it take off with the masses!
It took businesses a little while to respond (and many still haven’t) but in the last few years it has opened up a whole new area of marketing. Businesses of all shapes and sizes are using both these social platforms to engage with their audience in a totally different way to they ever did in the 20th century.
However, as with most new developments there is a down side. Social media is a GIANT black hole for time if managed carelessly. This chapter is designed to help you benefit from the many opportunities available in a targeted and strategic way so that you don’t starve your business of resources in the process.
For each platform we will identify the benefits to be achieved, kind of business that should give it a go and the necessary steps to put the wheels in motion...