Wish you could have someone sift through brilliant tweets related to social media on Twitter without having to lift your finger? Look no further my friend. My fingers just got a good work out.
Congrats to my followers and thank you for your great tweets. Keep them coming!
1. Free social media monitoring tools http://su.pr/2jcPTQ #socialmedia @GlenGilmore
2. 6 Effective Techniques to Start Getting More Comments http://bit.ly/cINMTk #Blogging: @DanielSharkov
3. Spending on advertising on social media networks is set to surge by as much as 55 per cent this year.. http://bit.ly/exbf1u @hiddenground
5. What does a community manager do? http://bit.ly/fsw90f @CindyKing – to get the most out of the post, take a peak at the comments, and pay special attention to Rachel Happe’s comments. In addition, Lee makes a reference about Yammer – “an internal messaging system” which I found useful.
6. Check this out: “Tweepi – the first and only Twitter Follow Management tool with stats.” http://tweepi.com/?2 @jonathanmast
7. Businesses invest a lot of money into the development of their logos. http://ow.ly/3G0kU Did you notice the subliminal messages of these? @theadliber
8. RT @MobileAmerica iPhone Apps That Will Really Make A Difference http://bit.ly/g2zRuQ #smartphone #apps @thinktu
9. Hoot! New Blog post: Finding Signal in the Noise of Social Media ~ As Seen at TalentZoo http://ow.ly/1b3myc @HootSuite
10. Which Social Media Sites Are Most Beneficial? http://bit.ly/fze8D9 @JenniferZilla
Thank you for introducing me to hundreds of different valuable links / articles.
What are some brilliant tweets have your followers tweeted this month? I absolutely love hearing from my readers. Please leave a message and I promise I will get back to you.
The 45th World Communications Day on June 5, 2011 has got Pope Benedict XVI thinking. Hey, Al Qaeda has an extensive video network, the Church of Satan has their own Facebook page, and tweets come from users like “Godless Atheist” and “I Am Godless”… so why shouldn’t Christians get into this newfangled social network thing?
The Pope is concerned that you might become a little too obsessed with the virtual world and live a “parallel existence.” He understands there will be temptation to be inauthentic and to “give in to the illusion of constructing an artificial public profile” for yourself. He’s also worried that there are risks involved in not really knowing your “neighbor in this new world.” You might spend a lot of your time online, but fail to create deep and meaningful relationships all the same.
Yet, social media is too big a world to ignore. Pope Benedict realizes that “there exists a Christian way of being present in the digital world.” He urges Christians to be “honest and open, responsible and respectful of others.” It’s not an obligation for Christians to post “expressly religious content” on different media platforms, but rather, to “witness consistently” by the word choice, judgments and tones used with others. Christians must be careful not to dilute the message of Christ by seeking popularity, attention and acceptance.
If you’ve ever held off getting a Facebook or Twitter account because you weren’t sure what The Pope thought of it or you weren’t sure if it would be very “Christian-like” of you to have a profile, then hold off no more! “I invite young people above all to make good use of their presence in the digital world,” Pope Benedict says, giving his apostolic blessing. Network away!
What do you think about the Pope’s view concerning social media?
In certain circles I mingle in, having an Etsy boutique (or two or three) is as common as having a Facebook or LinkedIn page. And in many ways, the Etsy community shares a more common thread amongst its users than many of its competitors. Why? Because the Etsy culture is one of buyers and sellers who share an affinity for arts and crafts. When you deal directly with artists and artisans, you are sure to experience something more intimate than your average impersonal purchase of wares on the internet or at least that’s what one expects while perusing the pages of Etsy filled with eye-fetching images of handmade goods, from one-of-a-kind clothing and accessories, to cutting edge home décor and objects d’art, to home-baked goods, to delicate handmade papers, to fine art photography—each lovingly presented by its creator.
And while eBay, for many years, appeared to be the most perfect union of buyers and sellers in an online marketplace, since the advent of Etsy, more and more creative online venues are cropping up everyday, which not only amuse the masses, but more importantly, provide a source of revenue for artists and crafts-persons who might otherwise have no such audience or benefactors.
Threadless.com, for example, is an online t-shirt design company which hosts an ongoing open-call for tee shirt design submissions, which, if selected by the Threadless community, will be produced and sold by Threadless, and the t-shirt designer receives $2,500 in cash and gift certificates for their design.
99designs.com is another popular marketplace that’s sweeping the internet by connecting small businesses seeking quick and cutting edge design work with thousands of graphic designers worldwide who compete for the prize money of a given project by presenting their design ideas for the small business’ review and ultimate selection. According to their website, as of today there are 90, 573 designers on 99designs.com, 6,615,291 designs have been submitted, and $16,569,515 has been awarded in prize money.
With the unstable nature of economies worldwide, one can only expect that these excellent online marketplaces will continue to provide easy and efficient places of commerce, while also keeping its users connected in their respective communities around the globe.
Dear reader, what are some additional creative online marketplaces?
At this point in time, after the Wikileaks story came up, it would be disingenuous not to recognize the sheer importance that social media has swiftly gained in a matter of just a couple of years when it comes to the spread of news. Since it may strike some as obvious, not many are knowledgeable about the facts behind this phenomenon.
At least eight percent of Americans tweet on a daily basis. Among other things they share links to news, being the sharing of information the third activity by volume of twits on Twitter. A whole 12% of Twitterers share news links on a daily basis, with 55% distributing news links on occasion. This data comes from results of the latest survey by the Pew Internet, covering a wide sample and reflecting a growing trend: media and journalism are now open to the audience and participate actively in the social flow of information.
The debate on the impact of Twitter and Facebook on information is useless. The reality is that this impact increases every day, but not only does it increase, but it mutates in quality as well.
The impact of social media makes those journalists who participate more in the social flow, organically more notorious. In the midst of the mainstream media within which I happen to work, Facebook ranges between 4 and 8% of the income traffic. Twitter is still between 1 and 3%. The difference of users is huge and the effect of the “Like” button in Facebook is now dominant.
In conclusion, if you are a journalist and looking forward to expand your notoriety and influence in media, participation in the social media flow of information will be essential. For agencies and newspapers, the flow of their news into social media should be your number one priority, since the sheer volume of links shared is a game you can’t risk not to play.
Dear reader, how do you think the role of journalists have changed because of the social media revolution?
I remember back in the day when phones were only meant for calling, texting and taking photos. Times are a changin. Now there are new ways to physically interact with your phone. Sure you can use your phone as a bar code scanner, flashlight and compass, but I’m talking more hands on here.
1. Shake your phone. There are many apps that involve shaking your phone. Urban Spoon is an app that lets you choose a restaurant to visit in your area by shaking your phone. This triggers a wheel that spins to your suggested restaurant. The Shake Them All! Live Wallpaper inspires users to interact with Androids. The Androids respond to gravity, light, sounds and yes, touching and shaking your phone. Why? Because it can.
2. Put your finger on your camera. There are even more reasons to get up close and personal with your phone. Instant Heart Rate is a heart rate monitor. After 10 seconds of touching your camera, your current heart rate is displayed.
3. Gently caress your phone. The Talking Tom Cat purrs when you pet it. As an aside, the cat also repeats what you say in a funny voice and you can poke and punch him.
4. Wave your phone back and forth.Lightsword Lite allows you to simulate using a light saber via relevant sounds, colours and vibration.
5. Bump phones together.Bump lets you share contacts, apps and photos by bumping two phone together.
6. Make your phone vibrate courtesy of Good Vibrations. Enough said.
What stands out for me is how advanced phones can be and the calibre and possibilities of what phones and apps can do in the future.
Now, I turn to you dear reader. What are some unusual ways people can interact with their phone?
There are many different aspects to running a successful blog. The most vital of all is getting backlinks. A backlink is a link on a web log pointing it back to the main owner’s URL. These backlinks have become a point of source to getting targeted traffic and more importantly in getting popularity to the target site.
The following six efficient measures can be adopted to create backlinks to your blog:
1. Blog Commenting One of the best possible tactics you can go about growing back links is to seek out blogs inside your niche and put quality comments and at the same time you can embed your blog URL linked with your name you use at the comment.
2.Guest Posts Guest Posts create backlinks and you don’t simply need to stay up for a website to allow you with the chance to post, rather you can offer them a unique post for their blog. The theme is that, while you write a guest post for a blog, somewhere on that post you may obtain a backlink to your blog, which again ultimately helps you in getting traffic.
Guest posts, if put on a very popular site, increases the chances of Google evaluating your Backlinks and giving your web URL a boost in terms of page rank.
3. Article Writing Article writing is very effective in backlink creation. The main benefit of writing articles for article directories is that you can come with backlinks on your article to your website, so the more articles you post on other sites the more backlinks you will create.
4. Forums One other wonderful means of producing backlinks is to become an energetic member within your niche communities. Generally, for every area of interest there’s at the least one forum and also you can often put-up your blog URL in along with your signature when you submit on a forum. When posting threads on forums, take it for granted, the more attention-grabbing your web log remark or forum post is the more probability is that you will get attention and get individuals who will click on and reach to your site.
5. Social Bookmarking and Social Networking Probably the very best ways one can generate backlinks is that whenever you post a new post in your blog, announce it by means of social medium. This is where social bookmarking comes into existence. That may imply submitting it to digg, or stumblupon or tweeting it on twitter. However it is very simple to publish to a social networking website too. You need to create a presence through talking constructively about your website and throwing one post after another.
6. RSS Another nice and quite simple way of generating backlinks links is to make use of your RSS feed. There are a few websites which allow you to post your RSS feed to them like feedage, feedbite, feedbase and Technorati to name just a few. These websites are continuously being updated via this kind of RSS feeds method and as a result they get a lot of attention from the search engines.
Dear reader, what are some additional ways of creating backlinks to your blog?
A friend recently sent me this very funny video of a pair of elderly gentlemen who get rather confused about technology. Not long after this I spoke to an elderly (107) lady on the telephone who was complaining how slow her 30mbs (very fast) cable internet connection was and she wanted it faster. I then proceeded to have a very interesting conversation with this lovely lady about the modern world and her experience. I also told her about this video, which she thought was hilarious. Lets call this lady Beryl to protect the innocent.
This discussion with Beryl started with how she was using her internet. She explained that as she didn’t get out much anymore because of her failing health (at 107 she’s had a pretty good innings as the saying goes) she used it to stay in touch with the world and explore the world as she could no longer do it on her own two feet. She was on Facebook, Twitted with her grandchildren, and used Google Earth a lot. I told her I was very impressed that she knew what all of these things were let alone the depth of her involvement in the internet and the modern fandangled social media world.
She advised me that if you didn’t keep up with the modern world and the changes in it then you would whither and die, she wasn’t ready to do that yet. I then asked her what she thought of the changes in the way people communicate in this new world. I asked her if she was worried that everyone was communicating via text which didn’t convey all of the subtle parts of communication like tone of voice and body language. I told her I have had problems with communicating with people due to this fact, where the meaning behind words and sentences are not clear. She agreed with me but then said, “Humans will always be humans. You will find people that will misunderstand you no matter what you say and how you say it. Most people believe good in other people and take things the right way”.
I also asked her what she thought of people communicating in such short bursts (sms messages being up to 160 characters, twitter tweets being 140) how can you have a real conversation with someone where you build on the connection and relationship you have with them? Beryl had a very interesting insight on this, she said that because she is on the internet a lot of the day she sees the trends in the communication that people are having on the internet. She said the discussions people are having are not necessarily big ones or important ones, but the focus of the quick chats is often organising a longer get together at a later time.
By this time she had watched the video and had stopped laughing and I asked her what she thought of it and how it portrayed the changes in language and the meaning of words. This leads to a much longer discussion about the changes over history of the meaning of different words, but that is a post for another day.
What did you think of the video? What do you think about the way people communicate through social media and the way it has changed?
“The hangover stage is necessary and healthy if social media is to achieve realistic potential for change,” writes Paul Gillin, a contributor for Business 2 Community Insider. This quote struck me as rather profound, given that most media is singing the praises of social networking on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Deep down, I knew he was right, though. I’ve seen it again and again. Business executives begin their endeavors with that sparkle in their eye — laughing, smiling, and talking a mile a minute about everything they’d like to accomplish. Yet, a few months later, they’re feeling uncertain about the value of social media. Is it converting? Why aren’t people interacting? Are their brand messages even being read at all? Is social media worth the time, money and effort?
If you have a social media hangover, don’t worry: you’re not alone. Going forward, keep in mind the following 3 tips for curing your queasiness toward social media…
As you know from nights of excessive drinking, time and patience are the best cures for hangovers. You won’t have a huge presence overnight. You can’t be everything to everyone. But you can put forth your best effort, using trained and talented professionals, for six months to see what happens. Just as it’s better to drink in the company of trusted friends, it’s better to do your social media networking with trusted professionals who eat, sleep and breathe this stuff.
Treat the symptoms. Just like Advil, Tums or vitamins might make you feel a little better the next day, so will daily updates, hiring a professional writer, and enlisting the help of a web design expert. These little cures will attack some of the basic problems you may have – a boring webpage, updates that don’t inspire dialogue, or a lack of incentives bringing repeat visitors to your media efforts.
Treat the cause by planning ahead. After ten drinks, Irish Carbombs sound like a great idea. (They’re not.) So the best way to ensure you don’t get a hangover is to begin the night with a game plan in mind. Get it ingrained in your mind that you won’t go over X amount of drinks and you won’t mix different types of alcohol. In other words, look at the bigger picture. The same rings true for social media. If you’re not aligning your offline marketing strategies with your online strategies in a meaningful way, your willy-nilly approach won’t be impressing anyone.
An average person is exposed to 3,000 ads per day. Advertisers continue to look for more and varied ways to promote their products or services.
I remember the first time I saw an advertisement in a restroom stall, inside a taxi and more recently on my monthly bus pass, but arguably the most unique or memorable place I’ve seen an advertisement was in Slovakia and appeared on each sheet of the paper towels in a restaurant’s restroom. The ad appeared to be low in ink since it did not bleed onto my hands when I dried them off.
I now turn to you dear reader, where is the most unique or memorable places you’ve seen an ad?
20 Jan
Six Efficient Ways to Create Backlinks to Your Blog
Posted by lauraleewalker in blogging, business, social media. Tagged: article writing, backlinks, blog, blog comments, blog directories, blog subscription, business blog, business blogging, forums, guest posts, lauralee walker, rss, socia media, social bookmarking, social networking. 8 Comments
Courtesy of my talented guest blogger: Tracy Tay
There are many different aspects to running a successful blog. The most vital of all is getting backlinks. A backlink is a link on a web log pointing it back to the main owner’s URL. These backlinks have become a point of source to getting targeted traffic and more importantly in getting popularity to the target site.
The following six efficient measures can be adopted to create backlinks to your blog:
1. Blog Commenting
One of the best possible tactics you can go about growing back links is to seek out blogs inside your niche and put quality comments and at the same time you can embed your blog URL linked with your name you use at the comment.
2. Guest Posts
Guest Posts create backlinks and you don’t simply need to stay up for a website to allow you with the chance to post, rather you can offer them a unique post for their blog. The theme is that, while you write a guest post for a blog, somewhere on that post you may obtain a backlink to your blog, which again ultimately helps you in getting traffic.
Guest posts, if put on a very popular site, increases the chances of Google evaluating your Backlinks and giving your web URL a boost in terms of page rank.
3. Article Writing
Article writing is very effective in backlink creation. The main benefit of writing articles for article directories is that you can come with backlinks on your article to your website, so the more articles you post on other sites the more backlinks you will create.
4. Forums
One other wonderful means of producing backlinks is to become an energetic member within your niche communities. Generally, for every area of interest there’s at the least one forum and also you can often put-up your blog URL in along with your signature when you submit on a forum. When posting threads on forums, take it for granted, the more attention-grabbing your web log remark or forum post is the more probability is that you will get attention and get individuals who will click on and reach to your site.
5. Social Bookmarking and Social Networking
Probably the very best ways one can generate backlinks is that whenever you post a new post in your blog, announce it by means of social medium. This is where social bookmarking comes into existence. That may imply submitting it to digg, or stumblupon or tweeting it on twitter. However it is very simple to publish to a social networking website too. You need to create a presence through talking constructively about your website and throwing one post after another.
6. RSS
Another nice and quite simple way of generating backlinks links is to make use of your RSS feed. There are a few websites which allow you to post your RSS feed to them like feedage, feedbite, feedbase and Technorati to name just a few. These websites are continuously being updated via this kind of RSS feeds method and as a result they get a lot of attention from the search engines.