Got Twitter?

Twitter is a new social networking site.

I agree with others that say it has the potential to get hundreds if not thousands of hits to your site if you have the ability to post interesting “updates”.

Sign up at Twitter now and let’s keep in touch.
Here’s how wikipedia describes the service:

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, the Twitter website or an application such as Twitterrific. These updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and also instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to members of his (sic) circle of friends, or allow delivery to everybody (which is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, or through an application. For SMS, currently two gateway numbers are available: one for the USA and a UK number for international use. While the twitter service itself is free, posting and receiving updates via SMS typically incurs a charge from the wireless carrier.

How to Build a Network on Twitter

I’m spending so much time on Twitter because I feel it’s such an important tool for Network Weavers.

Someone asked me how to get started on Twitter. Some thoughts:

1. Figure out what you want: learning, marketing yourself or something, getting to know new people, just mucking around?

2. If you know other people on Twitter, start following them. Then check out who they follow (we call this getting to know your friends’ friends). If their posts look interesting, follow them. Many of them will turn around and start following you. In the first ten days, I started following 38 people and now 31 are following me.

3. Check out twitterlocal.net and see who in your town or neighborhood is on. Follow the ones you know or find interesting.

4. Use search.twitter.com and put in key words to find people interested in the same things you are. I tried civic engagement, transition cities and self-organizing. Then I used TweetBeep.com to keep me posted when anyone says anything about those topics.

5. Think of people you have little connection with: people from different ethnic or racial backgrounds, people with different political views, urban people if your rural (and vice versa), etc.

6. Watch other people’s retweets or RTs (they put @person’s name) then if you like what that person says, click on their name, read some of their posts and start following them.

7. When someone starts following you, send them a nice note.

8. After awhile, stop following people who never post or who’s posts aren’t up your alley, and try some new names.

What ideas do you have? For those of you with Twitter experience, what have you found works?

Let us know your experience in getting on Twitter!

Courtesy:networkweaving.com

Social Networks Drive 30% Of Online Video Viewing

If you’re marketing through online video, you really need to be hitting the social networks like Digg, etc. Search engines provide lots of traffic, but the social networks EQUAL them! It’s a way for the small fry to compete.

They’re sending 30% of the traffic to videos! Wow! According to the report, in April 2007, search engines were responsible for just over 20% of videos served while social networks were responsible for more than 35%. However, by April of 2008, those percentages were nearly equal. The report finds that search engines are now responsible for about 28.4% of upstream traffic to video sites while social networks are responsible for 28.8% of the traffic. This is very interesting because most advertisers assume that social networks are how consumers find their videos. This report indicates that the video marketplace is continuing to gain popularity and that consumers aren’t only looking to favorite social networks like MySpace or YouTube to find television or movie clips and user generated content.

Social Networking

There has been a virtual explosion of social networking sites in the past couple of years. Even the big players like Google, Yahoo and MSN are getting into it.With so much interest in how social networks work, one begins to wonder if there is marketing potential within these social networks? I’ve been watching social networking for some time now. In fact I’m a member of various social networking sites including MySpace and LinkedIn just to name two. I joined partly because I wanted to see what they were, but more importantly to see what impact social networking would have on SEM in the coming years. I’ve been a member of various services for some time and the reach these sites have is incredible. For example, from my LinkedIn network of seven people I have an expanded network of over 12,600 people. Imagine that – I’m only a click or two away from close to 13,000 other people who share my similar interests ranging from what I like to watch on TV to work I could provide to them. Through my connections and their connections, I’m connected to people ranging from the American Cancer Society, to Sun Microsystems to the University of Texas to Google.

Recruiters Using Social Media

Check out these stats from a personal contact in the recruiting field.

What social networks do recruiters use to source candidates?

1,022 use LinkedIn (a whopping 97%)
391 use Facebook (37%)
228 use MySpace (22%)
28 use Friendster (2%)
17 Use Hi5 (1%)
13 use Bebo (1%)

You had better upgrade your social network pages so you present yourself in a business like fashion!

Is MySpace a Social Network?

MySpace is the largest social network in the world, with more than 122 million members. However, the company does not necessarily want to be known as king of the social networks.

As some industry observers— including some at eMarketer—have questioned social media’s financial prospects, it is enlightening to note that even the top company in the space sees the term as potentially confining.

In a briefing with eMarketer, MySpace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe put it this way: “From the very beginning, we’ve always said that we were a next-generation portal and that MySpace was all about people connecting over shared interests.”

Jeff Berman, the company’s president of sales and marketing, added, “The classic portal model is content-driven, and it’s top-down with a separate communications platform.

“We sit in a hybrid space. If you think about how others in the space are trying to define what they want to be, you hear more people talking about wanting to be the starting point on the Internet. Well, that’s what we are,” Mr. Berman continued.

This is not just a matter of semantics: Ad spending on social networks still represents a small fraction of total online ad spending—much less than the search and display ads of the largest portals.

courtesy: www.emarketer.com

Social Network Marketing – Great, but Not for Everyone?

MySpace, Bebo, Facebook– these channels are becoming a part of the marketing mix (at least in thought, if not in action yet), and considering the size of these communities and the traffic they attract, it comes as no surprise. While Google pipped Microsoft to the post by clinching a deal with MySpace, Microsoft is certainly not letting go of what will inevitably grow to be a good marketing channel. It has signed an agreement for the exclusive distribution of banner ads on Facebook, which has a registered user base of over 9 million.

Like affiliate marketing, social network marketing is becoming a separate powerful marketing channel; and again, like affiliate marketing, leveraging these networks may be closely tied to search marketing (though it doesn’t have to be that way). From what we know of the demographics, this avenue is not for all kinds of companies and all kinds of products. For example, music, DVDs, iPODs, student loans – most likely yes; mortgages, grocery– most likely, not.

I think venues such as MySpace and Facebook provide a nice platform for individual affiliate publishers to drive traffic/ sales. However, as things are today, these may not be as effective a channel for the larger affiliate publishers (companies) — in terms of scale and costs. But it is certainly something we cannot be completely detached from, because I suspect a sustainable and scalable model for large affiliates to emerge sooner rather than later.

courtesy: trafficjunction.co.uk

Dueling Social Marketing Definitions

On the heels of Jay Bernhardt’s explanation of why the CDC uses the term “health marketing” instead of “social marketing” and Craig Lefebvre’s take on the term (“What the heck is health marketing?”), comes a new offensive on the definition of social marketing from the other direction.

Jupiter Research has just launched a new Social Marketing research service that will “provide marketers and site owners with recommendations on how to profit from the use of consumer generated content, blogs, podcasts and other emerging media tools.” Apparently they didn’t get the memo that there is already a long-established field called social marketing that uses marketing to bring about health and social change.

The burgeoning use of the term “social marketing” to refer to social media has already created confusion among techie types I know who have misunderstood what type of work I do. This leads to people talking past each other, thinking that the other knows what they mean when they are not on the same page at all. It’s as if one group of people suddenly started calling a new kind of dog a “cat;” they are very similar in general — four legs, furry, domesticated — but in the details they are quite different.

As a result of my initial discussion of this issue in March, the folks at Forrester Research decided to change the name of their “Social Marketing Bootcamp” to “Social Computing Bootcamp,” and they no longer use the term “social marketing” to avoid exactly this type of confusion. While I agree that “social marketing” would have been a great term to adopt if it did not already mean something else, it’s about 35 years too late for that.

I hope that, like Forrester, Jupiter will take another look at their erroneous terminology and take another stab at coming up with a term that is clear and accurate. Social network marketing, social media, consumer generated media, digital marketing — whatever they want to call it is fine. It would help potential clients find them instead of the many firms who offer social marketing services (using the real definition). And people won’t assume that Jupiter does health & social change research when they mention their social marketing research services. Do a google search for “social marketing” and you’ll see that for pages and pages of results there is nothing but links for companies and organizations working toward social change.

So if you are a social marketer, please join me in leaving a comment for Emily Riley, the lead analyst on the Social Marketing Service at Jupiter Research to let her know why they should consider changing the name, as well as letting other companies know when they use the term incorrectly.

It’s not just a matter of semantics. It’s about all of us doing the work we do best and making sure that the right people know about it. Everyone wins when clarity reigns.

courtesy: www.social-marketing.com

Social Network Marketing

Social Network Marketing uses already established social networks to infiltrate the marketing message. Another way is to establish a social network around a brand or product.

Using social networks as promotional tools is a pretty smart idea. The whole network is already set up. As friends are connected with friends of friends of friends, viral marketing is just a click away. People freely give away all kinds of information, starting with name, age and email-address, to hobbies, interests and almost everything else which is necessary to dig into the right target group. The challenge is not to interfere too clumsily, because that might scare away the users. Not many solutions are out so far, but marketers are starting to get the idea!

courtesy:www.business-opportunities.biz

Social Networks Are Niche Marketing Gold Mines

Social Networking sites can be much more than fun distractions and a way to keep track of your friends. Used correctly they can be very powerful List building tools. Websites like Twitter, Stumbleupon, Hubpages, Squidoo and Facebook are excellent tools for networking with and marketing to others in your niche. They are also great ways to drive traffic to your websites. If you want to build a niche list they are an invaluable resource.

The Micro-blogging site Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to follow one another through posts of 140 characters or less. It is a great place for posting small bits of information and for directing people to blogs or squeeze pages.

Stumbleupon is a social bookmarking site that works from a tool bar downloaded to your browser. It allows users to discover and rate web pages and ultimately functions to give social validity to some sites over others. The more your site is liked the higher value it is given by search engines. Stumbleupon is also a great tool for finding others in your niche.

Social Networking sites are extremely valuable tools for building niche lists. You don’t want to send spam or blatant advertising through these sites, but you can drive prospects to your squeeze page or your website where you can give them an incentive to share their contact information with you through an opt-in box.

The goal with using any of these sites is to build up your list. If you can attract people in your niche market, drive them to your site and have them sign up for your mailings, suddenly you have a growing list of people who are interested in the products you are offering.

courtesy:www.business-opportunities.biz