Webdesign, CSS, Social Media, Tech News » social media

Twitter – there she blows!

mr-mojo-risin — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:26:38 +0000

Ok, Twitter has had to fight many battles, the hardest one still is the fail whale – and spammers.
I heard about Michael Jackson beeing delivered to the hospital due to twitter.com was off, so my good ol’ TV attracted my attention, there I heard the news…

Nevertheless these troubles are just a sign of the incredible success twitter.com is facing at the moment. Establishing as an important news source, marketing tool or social play ground the service it self has to evolve…

Now they have taken the first step, aplusk beeing the first tweeter to break the 1,000,000 followers barrier, now having 2,530,98, the twitter coders finally smoothed up the user management. You can choose between a list view and a expanded view showing the last Tweet, additionally there is a option menue offering the following activities: mention the twitter user, send a direct message, unfollow and block user.

But it still ain’t a big hit, but think it looks (a little bit) sexier now. There still are no batch operations, which would be an evident feature for the the most people…

There is still a lot to do in the twitland backend – execpt locking up the fail whale securely…

Social Media Sites (an update)

mr-mojo-risin — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:20:38 +0000

Here’s an attempt to build up a little list of the most important social media sites.

As it is far from being complete, it will be expanded from time to time…

Social marketing ebooks (free download)

mr-mojo-risin — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:11:54 +0000

Looking for informations, advices, strategies or hints guiding you on your paths through the social media djungle?
Here you’ll find a composition of free ebooks that might be helpful on your efforts to successfully use social marketing mechanisms for building a brand, attract traffic or gain significance on a certain topic.

So these Links will keep you busy for a while…

Instructions and sum ups

The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media
Brian Solis about new tools and philosophies, how to effectively listen and engage with customers and in turn, cultivate a more significant community, enhance your brand and build relationships.

Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points
Social Media expert Chris Brogan gives you starting points how to inroduce your organization into social media and social networking

What is Social Media?
“a short, sweet summary of the phenomenon called social media”

The Essential Guide to Social Media
A sum up of some essential guidelines, written by Brian Solis

The Art and Science of Social Media and Community Relations
Interesting example of a company entering the realm of social media communities

Social Media Marketing Kit
Tips and tricks for the survival in the social mediasphere, plus a video Webinar

The Zen of Blogging
Really amusing story about a guys efforts to dive into the higher spheres of blogging – with a slight wink of an eye

Learning Web 2.0
Examples of ways in which associations are using new web 2.0 technologies and what possibilities they
may represent for your organization’s professional development

A Primer in Social Media
Advices for approaching social media with their new paradigms and, rules and philosophies

Studies

Blogs & Social Media
This article reports on a three-year-long international survey of public relations
practitioners examining the impact blogs and other social media are having on public
relations practice.

Social Web Analytics
This ebook gives a brief overview of the characteristics of the Social
Web, also known as Social Media.

Research-Based Webdesign & Usabilty Guidelines

Distributed Influence: Quantifying the Impact of Social Media
Attempt to propose a new way of calculating an individuals online influence beyond the “traditional” method of analysing a blog’s inbound links to incorporate other social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO for WordPress blogs
How to use WordPress to ensure success for your weblog in the Organic Search Engine Results.

Google Adwords Secrets
Tips for keyword research, choosing a domain name, placing keywords, link building, effectively using SEO tools

We Have a Website. Now What?
This ebook provides straightforward advice for entrepreneurs new to search engine optimization.

Marketing

Get Viral Get Visitors
Trying to give and understanding of what viral marketing is about and how methods of successful campaigns can be adopted

The New Rules of Viral Marketing
Whatever you call it—viral, buzz, word-of-mouse, or word-of-blog marketing—having other people tell your story drives action. An example how it’s done…

Marketing With Case Studies
How to Sell Your Products or Services Using Story-Telling Techniques

Twitter for Business
A compact and dense round up how to use twitter.com to promote your company successfully

Geeks Guide to Promoting Yourself With Twitter
If you use the site properly you can build up another stream of traffic to your website or blog, not to mention developing a brand for yourself as well.

New_Rules_Of_Business_Blogs
How business owners and managers should act in blogosphere if they want to explore this new communication channel.

Masters of Marketing
Cleaning up some hypes and myths of internet marketing and giveing ideas for using social media mechanisms

Podcast Marketing eBook
This guide is intended only to give you a broad overview of some of the basics of podcast marketing.

Effective Internet Presence
How to build up a significant and productive internet identity

How to Write a Marketing Plan
A marketing plan guides a company step-by-step how to market its product or service to a specific target market and it helps a company remain focused on its marketing objectives.

Free-to-use Social Media Icon set

mr-mojo-risin — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:13:02 +0000

I searched for free to use web 2.0 icons of social media sites, but I did not find anything nice except some stock icons.

So I’ve made my own ones and I like to share them with you!

Feel free to use, modify and integrate them on your blog or website.
There is no need to link back, if you’d like to do so anyway, it is appreciated.

Here’s the download for the .psd containing templates for 256×256 pixel buttons and a 40×40 pixels iconset:

Social Media Icon Set

Social Media Icons (PSD)

Have fun folks!

Social Media Study

mr-mojo-risin — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:54:08 +0000

Interesting study about the usage and the behaviour of social media platform users from over 29 countries from webguild.org:

A new study by Universal McCann called When did we start trusting strangers? found that rather than being passive, consumers have taken not only active, but also creative roles in consumerism. In fact, consumers have become true “consum’actors.” The study was base on 17,000 Internet users from 29 countries.

The study describes a “new influencer landscape” which is characterized by three significant trends: the rise in social media, the importance of digital friends, and the proliferation of influencer channels. The study also mentions the impact of this phenomenon: an influence economy, the democratization of influence, and the new“super influencer.”

Download the whole study as .pdf file here

Arrr! Friendfeed switched their beta version live!

mr-mojo-risin — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:37:31 +0000

Pretty cool! The new features, like application filters, contact categories and und subscription management of the “secret” test version one could try out via beta.friendfeed.com now are implemented on the main stage.

Just see: friendfeed.com/mrmojorisin

This is really neat and definitely will make friendfeed even more informative and addictive!

Nice job!

Social media sites

mr-mojo-risin — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:22:05 +0000

News aggregators:

friendfeed.com
Friendfeed works as a feed of your social community activities, one adds services like flickr, picasa, twitter, google reader, digg, stumbleupon, del.icio.us, youtube, fast.fm and of course own blogs sharing the own post/messages/links with other people and commenting the interesting stuff from others. Seriously good source of hot news right from the streets!

toluu.com
A service to share and tag rss feeds and to find people of the same interest.
Quite new, one still needs an invite code – if you need one drop me a message.

delicious.com
Social bookmarking site, which recently launched a new, fresh layout, for sharing, tagging links, creating networks with friends/users of the same interest.

digg.com
Vote for news links, pictures or videos of your interest and help creating the famous digg effect, a self-made DOS attack on your website, if you’re lucky, you (or your server) must be prepared. Lately rumors said that alpha user take money for pushing news to the frontpage, other users claim to banned from Google Adsense due to the unexpected and sudden traffic created by the digg community.

Create your own community:

Ning.com
This is a platform where one can set up his very own community about any interest, offering video and photo uploads, discussion rooms, messaging, comments, fully editible profiles…
All a fully grown up community needs, so if one already gather a larger group of the same interest, this is a fine service to establish a exchange of thoughts and opinions.

Blog Communities:

Blogcatalog.com
Create groups for your own blogs and gather followers to promote events or interesting posts. Start or join groups for gaining from the strenght of the community. Interact via private messages and so called broadcasts you might send to your follwers. It’s got the social activity componet, too so one is able to see what fellow other bloggers are interested. Providing a widget showing the fans of your blog. A good, thus active and helpful member, might derive traffic from here.

mybloglog.com
Yahoo’s mybloglog is pretty similar to blogcatalog, but offering much more service to integrate, plus detailed statistics for your blog for one week or more is one chooses the paid version.

fuelmyblog.com
Voting site, if a blog gathers enough votes to reach the home page, one should better be prepared for a shitload of traffic.

blogflux.com
Blog Directory offering several paid services, like featured listing in a toplist and stuff.

Photo Communities:

flickr.com
Very large photo community with free restricted accounts and Premium accounts for 25$ a year. Yahoo.com scared off some users by forcing them to quit or to get a Yahoo ID and after that enabling videos for upload. But the community is still alive and kickin! Lately they set up a deal with Getty Images so in the future users might be able to sell their flickr pics via Getty Images, which could be interesting.

Related:
picasa.com
devianart.com

Social Media – get some tailwind out of communities

mr-mojo-risin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:52:51 +0000

Viral Marketing, Social Marketing and digg-effect these buzz words symbolize the wet fantasy of many marketeers, making a product, brand or website the latest hype without spending a multi zillion Dollar budget on advertisement, sponsoring and PR.
The good news: Yes, it’s possible, no doubt. The bad one: It’s hard work combined with sensitiveness, knowledge and a certain dose of luck.
Simply dropping posts in forums, flooding social bookmarking sites with links and lean back, is like waiting for a good fairy granting three wishes, it might probably never happen.

There will never be a manual for the buckshot, but it’s no rocket-science either:

Examine several services and communities for their relevance according your product or the compatibility of their users.
Learn as much as possible about the offered features and tools and how to use them to your advantage, i.e the shout function on digg.com or broadcasts on blogcatalog.com .
Create rooms, groups and further communities dealing with your topics and invite people who could be interested in your affairs. Share your knowledge and consider giving informations about your competitors (in a objective manner) and point out why your service/product is a better choice.
Be honest, avoid vast exaggerations or desperately trying to hide weak points of your product. They be unvealed and this will be a backlash for and won’t increase your credibility.
Use the feedback of the community, like emails, comments or blog reviews, learn from them and improve your product. Don’t forget to give credits back, so the critics might be teased and report in a positive manner about you.
A community is a give and take – or at least it should be – so take part and comment, vote and pay attention to other users postings, they will reward it. Plus you will collect valuable information about your target audience.
Keep your account up to date and fresh, nobody will interact with a nominal member.
Do not act too aggressive, less is more sometimes. If you bother other users too much they will block you, mark you as spammer, kick you out of the community. Be sensitive, treat others like you would like to be treated. Messing it up, your good reputation and credibility will be annihilated and barely can be reestablished. So handle with care!
Additional helping and useful informations that enrich the community related to your topic should be shared, too. This will integrate you as an active and worthy member and draw attention on your concerns. Only repeating marketing slogans like mantras is scaring and boring to people.
Engage your friends, family, coworkers to join, vote for you or recommend your product and giving you an initial aid to start. Mostly a certain critical mass has to be reached after that the community gets aware of you and the rest is surfing the wave !

Good luck on your mission!

Twitter vs Friendfeed

mr-mojo-risin — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:25:00 +0000

The discussion whether the one is killing the other is getting hotter and the opinions are raging high.
First of all these two “opponents” are hard to compare as friendfeed being a information aggregation tool and twitter a hybrid between instant messenger and micro blogging device.

Both serve certainly completely different needs, twitter mainly focuses on spreading rather personal opinons/feelings/emotional states/gossip, only randomly establishing a real conversation.
Friendfeed resembles a honey pot of information gathered by its user acting as honey bees collected from various flowers, like Digg, GoogleReader, del.icio.us, stumbleupon and many more.

Definitely the value of information might be varying, but like on twitter it users can adjust that by choosing their subscriptions.

Looking at the user stats both are steadily growing with twitter being comfortable in in the lead.
One of the reasons for this distance is certainly twitter started in August 2006 and friendfeed in October 2007. Another cause might be twitter is used for communication, friendfeed on the contrary deals in information. This shows why the geek ratio on friendfeed is definitely higher…

As a result both services will mostly not bother each other in the future, with their target audience being to different and having unequal demands.
So Twitter vs Plurk or Friendfeed vs GoogleReader would give much more challenging and interesting fights…

Webdesign, CSS, Social Media, Tech News » social media

Twitter – there she blows!

Social Media Sites (an update)

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