Social media marketing is a term that describes use of social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any other online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service. Common social media marketing tools include Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, Orkut and YouTube.

Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and huge amounts of traffic.

SMM conceptually differs from traditional marketing based on the fact that in SMM, you’re not actually trying to sell your product directly to your customers. Instead, engergies are focussed on creating brand awareness and creating better and bigger channels of communication between a company and its customers. In other words, hardcore selling takes a backseat.

The underlying logic behind this is that when someone logs into a social network, they’re there to socialize and catch up on friends and not to buy products and services. However, if people see that a huge chunk of their friends are buying a particular product and have nothing but good words to say about it, these people might get ‘influenced’ into buying their products.

Social Media Marketing is based around online conversations. It is not controlled by the organization. Instead it encourages user participation and dialogue. A badly designed social media marketing campaign can potentially backfire on the organization that created it. To be successful, SMM campaigns must fully engage and respect the users.

Any company that caters to a mass market can implement a SMM strategy to create more brand awareness. ROI on every startegy can be calcuated using the various online tools (such as Google Analytics) so profitability is ensured.

The hindrances in implementing strategy is the old-world school of thought that does not see the internet as the next big frontier in Marketing. Take for example Facebook: It has 222 million registered users. If Facebook was a country, it would be the fourth largest country in the world today.

Now, imagine if you placed an ad on Facebook. You would instantly be reaching out to 222 million leads!
Major corporations like Coca-Cola, Nike, Adidas, etc. have already created strong and staunch SMM marketing strategies that allow them to interact with their customers on a grander scale.

Using social netowrks as a communication platform also allows companies to save on resources spent on marketing, sales, pr, and support activities. Leads can directly contact the company to find out its products. Customers can give feedback, resolve issues, etc. using social networks.

Social media marketing is not difficult at all. It is something every one can do with some effort and knowledge. It isn’t some secret art form that only experts can master. Unlike other skills, social media has a remarkably low barrier of entry. Everyone is invited to the party. No one is excluded.

If you thought the screen in the above image (from Minority Report) was a few generations away from inception, think again!

Oblong Industries, an American Company, is the developer of the g-speak spatial operating environment – an interface that lets you to do just about everything that Tom Cruise did with his monitors in Minority Report.

This video gives you more details on what can be done with g-speak:

Charlie Brooker, a British journalist and broadcaster explains how News is reported:

This list contains a comprehensive set of tools that allows web designers to automate design processes. This not only helps reduce the amount of time spent on repetitive processes, but also creates an modernistic feel for you in your customer’s eyes.

glasscubes

URL: http://www.glasscubes.com
Description: Glasscubes was created following a frustrated search for an online tool that was suitably priced for a small company but offered intranet and simple CRM functionality. Unable to find something that specifically suited, Glasscubes was born! Simplicity is the key to Glasscubes success, offering small to medium sized companies collaboration with colleagues and clients anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Glasscubes can become the central hub of any business, large or small.
Tour: http://www.glasscubes.com/

present.ly

URL: http://presentlyapp.com/
Description: Present.ly is an award-winning microblogging platform that keeps your company connected in real-time. Increase your team’s productivity by posting updates, sharing files, exchanging ideas, and more.
Tour: http://presentlyapp.com/videos

Ronin

URL: http://www.roninapp.com/
Description: Simple online invoicing and time tracking. Perfect for creative teams and solo freelancers. Designed to make you look professional.
Tour: http://www.roninapp.com/site/tour

Box.net

URL: http://www.box.net/
Description: Organize all of your content online in a familiar file and folder structure. Share content with direct links to files and folders, turn any folder into a public webpage in one click and create widgets to share files on a company web page or blog. With the Box Business edition, get additional security with 256-bit SSL encryption and set passwords and expiration dates for file and folder access.
Tour: http://www.box.net/features

MinuteBase

URL: http://minutebase.com/
Description: MinuteBase is an online application for writing meeting minutes. It provides you with easy-to-use tools to create meeting agendas, format minutes, assign actions, and share documents with your colleagues and partners. MinuteBase marries a clean and clear minutes template with the flexibility to cover a wide range of scenarios – team and board meetings, Council and AGMs, or interview transcripts, MinuteBase provides superb, professional results.
Tour: http://minutebase.com/tour

Basecamp

URL: http://basecamphq.com/
Description: For years project management software was about charts, graphs, and stats. And you know what? It didn’t work. Pictures and numbers don’t get projects done. Basecamp tackles project management from an entirely different angle: A focus on communication and collaboration. Basecamp brings people together.
Tour: http://basecamphq.com/tour

Copper

URL: http://www.copperproject.com/
Description: Copper is the web’s best project and task management software, centralising your projects, clients, contacts, and documents in a single location. Copper becomes an indispensable tool for you and your team.
Tour: http://www.copperproject.com/tour/

Ta-Da List

URL: http://tadalist.com/
Description: Ta-da List is the web’s easiest to-do list tool. Make lists for yourself or share them with others. It couldn’t be simpler.
Tour: http://tadalist.com/

LooseStitch

URL: http://loosestitch.com/
Description: LooseStitch has grown from a simple shareable online outlining tool, to a more powerful collaborative workflow environment.
Tour: http://www.copperproject.com/tour/

Project Pier

URL: http://www.projectpier.org/
Description: ProjectPier is a free, open source, self-hosted PHP application for managing tasks, projects and teams through an intuitive web interface. ProjectPier will help your organization communicate, collaborate and get things done. It functions similar to commercial groupware/project management products, but allows for the freedom and scalability of self-hosting. Even better, it will always be free. I have this installed on my server and it’s very similar to Basecamp, which is one of the most popular project management apps out there.
Tour: http://www.projectpier.org/manual/tour

Feng Office

URL: http://fengoffice.com/web/index.php
Description: Manage your projects and business services. Collaborate with your team and your customers. Organize and share documents and files
Tour: http://fengoffice.com/web/index.php

PBWorks

URL: http://pbworks.com/
Description: Shared workspaces from PBworks make teams and businesses more productive. You can manage projects, share information, and bring your team closer together. And because it’s web-based, you can share your work with anyone including vendors, partners, and customers outside the firewall.
Tour: http://pbworks.com/content/biz+overview

Stixy

URL: http://www.stixy.com
Description: Stixy is a flexible, online “bulletin board”/drawing board. There’s little structure and it’s up to you how you want to use it, so it’s a great whiteboarding application. One of the useful ways to use Stixy is mocking up or wireframing web pages – your team member or clients can then go in and modify the design or post notes on particular aspects of the design.
Tour: http://www.stixy.com/welcome

And last but not the least;

Google Docs

URL: http://docs.google.com/
Description: Google Docs is an amazing online office suite packed with features. It has a feature which you can use to collaborate with multiple users. It only takes a minute to get all of your users editing the same document in real-time.
Tour: http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour1.html

1. Access the video that you want to download and highlight all the text the right of the ‘y’ in youtube.com



Step 2: type 3 + enter



Step 3: This will lead you to another page where the download windows will pop up. You can download the YouTube video in either .mp4 or .flv format from this page.

Its always a good thing to make backups. Some people even go to the extent of making backups of backups in case their computers crash. I don’t really recommend this; instead, you can simply backup your data online (in the cloud) to avoid hassles.

Its the same case with the data on your mobile phone – you never know when you might lose your phone or the data might get corrupted and you might lose important information like contacts, messages, etc.

This post will show you the exact steps you need to follow to merge the contacts on your Nokia phone (Series 60 3rd Edition) with your Google Account.

• Open your Contacts application
• Select ‘Synchronization > Settings’ from the ‘Options’ menu. This will open the Sync application.
• From the Options menu select ‘New sync profile’
• Choose any name you like for ‘Sync profile name’
• Select and click ‘Applications’

Note: You will see a list of all content types that your phone can synchronize; however, currently Google Sync only supports Contacts.

• Select and click ‘Contacts’
• Make sure the ‘Include in Sync’ option is set to ‘Yes’
• Define the ‘Remote Database’ option as ‘contacts’. It needs to be spelled in lower case completely or Google Sync will not work.
• Click ‘Back’ to exit this screen and save your settings
• Ensure that only Contacts have ‘Settings defined’ and all other content types say ‘Sett. not defined’
• Click ‘Back’ to exit this screen and save your settings
• Select and click ‘Connection Settings’. Enter the following values:
• Server version: 1.2
• Server ID: Google (capital ‘G’ is important)
• Data bearer: Internet
• Access point: the Internet access point for your carrier.
• Host address: https://m.google.com/syncml (make sure you enter https for a secure connection)
• Port: 443
• User name: your Google Account username, e.g. yourname@gmail.com
• Password: your Google password
• Leave other values unchanged
• Click ‘Back’ to exit this screen and save your settings
• Click ‘Back’ again to exit the Sync profile settings

Highlight the your Sync profile and select ‘Synchronize’ from the ‘Options’ menu to synchronize your contacts with Google. You’re done!

The full interactive version is available here.

As shown on Permuto Discoveries