Leveraging Social Media in Your Business

February 22, 2010 in Business, Marketing, Social media

In my last post I explained that before you embark on using social media for your business, you need to first determine your objectives and define your strategy. And this strategic planning does not and probably should not involve any specific social media channel at the outset.

A good article for the planning and strategic upfront work is “10 steps to a practical social media business strategy” by Allen Bonde, where he describes the basic but necessary steps such as creating a mission statement and a marketing plan, assigning ownership and defining policies, all before getting to specific social media channels.
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Using Social Media in Your Business: Strategic or Tactical?

February 8, 2010 in Business, Marketing, Social media

A while ago I read a blog post from a marketing executive who wrote that he had prohibited the use of certain words in his strategy and planning meetings. Among those words there where many popular social networking and media words such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Though that might seem odd at first, it makes a lot of sense. The point is that while social media may serve as an effective method of promoting your business, it is only a set of tools and channels that you may use to execute against your business plan and strategy. It is part of the tactical stuff that you do after you have figured out your strategy.
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How do I tweet? Let me count the ways …

January 16, 2010 in Social media

One of the great and unique things about Twitter is that it is a fairly simple and easy service to use. From an end-user perspective, setting up an account at twitter.com and starting to tweet, is a couple of minutes of work. I can describe the concept of Twitter and its features to any internet-savvy person in 5 minutes. The basic functions on twitter.com can be summarized as follows:

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Enabling social bookmarking and link sharing for your web content

October 14, 2009 in Social media

In a previous post “Shall we bookmark?” I discussed social bookmarking and covered several of the social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon. In this post I briefly describe how you can easily add social bookmarking buttons to your web pages or blog posts so that a reader or visitor to your blog can use any of such sites to bookmark your blog post or page.
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Leveraging LinkedIn for business networking and career development

September 28, 2009 in Business, Marketing, Social media

The economy is supposedly improving but people still continue to lose jobs. The unemployment rate being a lagging economic indicator is predicted to increase through the rest of the year and beyond even though it is decelerating. California with one of the highest unemployment rates (12.1%) as of the end of July 2009 among the US states, and higher than the average national unemployment rate, will probably continue to bleed more, longer. In certain counties in California the unemployment rate is even higher than the state average. For example, as of the end of July 2009, LA County is at 12.5% and there are counties where the rate is as high as 30%!
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On Etiquette and Math of Follow in Twitter

September 5, 2009 in Social media

TwitterWatchdog.com in a post recently had some advice on who to follow and not to follow on Twitter. See this. However among them there were the following guidelines:

  • “I follow everyone who follows me because I think that’s the cordial way to use Twitter.
  • If I’m following someone and they won’t follow me, then I’ll give them a few days but then I’ve got to unfollow them.”

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Shall We Bookmark?

July 11, 2009 in Social media

So I am reading an article on ZDNet.com and on top of the article I come across a set of icons. See the image below. A couple of them are obvious. I can print the article or email it to someone. A more interesting one is the little rectangle with up/down thumbs along with a few numbers. This enables me to rate the article by giving it a thumbs up or down, which provides a metric on its worthiness. As you can see, this particular article has 71 votes with an overall score of +45.
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Hashtags in Twitter World

June 29, 2009 in Social media

I briefly mentioned hashtags in my previous post as a special application of tagging in Twitter and numerous other Twitter-related sites. In this write-up I cover hashtags in more detail.

Hashtags are special tags defined as #<tag> that one can use as part of a 140 character string to define a topic for a tweet. Content-oriented people may think of a hashtag as a virtual “folder”, while journalists may think of it as a “channel” that one can tune to or listen in on.
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Metadata and Tagging

June 18, 2009 in Social media

Metadata or data about data has been an important topic in software and the web all along. In the old days we used metadata on a HTML page source to increase its searchability. That is by adding metadata or tags to a page we would tell the search engines what the page is about so that if someone searched for one of the tags, they would return the page in their search result. So a page on a given product or service (e.g. camera) could contain a list of relevant terms (e.g. photography). This is still relevant even in HTML 5 with the tag <meta>. (See: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/html5_meta.asp).
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