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:

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

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

This post contains a list of codes that can be entered in the home-screen of your Nokia Series60 device.

Before you start using any of these codes, a WARNING: Some of these codes can make permanent changes to your phone. Please make sure you know what you’re doing – or atleast read the description before trying it out.

• *#06#
  Displays the serial number of your phone (IMEI)
• *#0000#
  Displays the firmware and its date alongwith the type and the name of your phone
• *#92702689#
  Displays the ‘warranty-menu’ of your phone It also shows the time you’ve spent on calls so far
• *#2820#
  Displays the Bluetooth address of your device
• *#62209526#
  Displays the MAC-address of your phone
• *#7780#
  Does a soft-reset to your phone
• *#7370#
  Does a hard-reset to your phone

PS:

• Pressing 0 (zero) for 3 seconds on the home-screen opens your web browser
• Pressing the Menu/Home key for 3 seconds opens the task manager, which shows all opened applications
• Holding # for 3 seconds on the home screen changes the active profile to silent or back

Do you know of any more codes or tips? Do comment and let us know!

This site allows you to generate a little colored widget (barely a few lines of code) which you can add to your blog/website. This widget basically displays the number of viewers on your blog/website at any point of time.

You can get started from here by first selecting the colors and then copy-pasting the code in the striped-section at the bottom of the page to your blog/website.

And the best part is, you need not register to start using this service. It starts working its magic as soon as you paste the code on your page!

Additional services under the Amung.Us umbrella include Maps.Amung.Us which allows you to see exactly where your readers are from and Graphs.Amung.Us which provides real time graphical stats on your blog.

Death by PowerPoint is a 61 Slide presentation which gives you all the methods that you should follow to create a good and intriguing presentation as well as common mistakes that can be easily avoided.

To name a few, this online deck covers slide attributes like bullets, using images for greater effect, etc.

PS: SlideShare.net is worth a look if you need content for your upcoming presentation

And no, I don’t support plagarism

All you need is the PSP Ebook Creator and the text document that you want to move to your PSP.

The PSP Ebook Creator converts the text file into images that fit the screen dimensions of your PSP. There are a slew of options that you can configure via this software, like:

• Landscape/ Portrait page formats
• Adding background images
• User defined fonts, ink color and page color
• Navigation bar (including page numbers and custom title)
• JPG compression settings
• 1:1 page previewing
• Chapter breaks

Once you convert the text document to images, you need to copy the folder containing these images onto your PSP memory card under the PSP >> Images directory.

You can now view your text document from Images tab on your PSP interface. It shows up as normal images would. And you can scroll through adjacent images by clicking on the shoulder buttons.

Click here to download the PSP Ebook Creator.

You can get free ebooks at Project Gutenberg and Truly-Free.org

Storing backups of important data in the “cloud” seems to be the new industry norm. And there’s sufficient justification for its popularity too! No matter how good your pc configuration is, you know it will eventually crash someday. This might result in lots of important data being lost. To prevent this, you could either backup the data on another storage device or you could simply use services like Dropbox and backup your data online.

The best feature of Dropbox is that its hassle-free. All you need to do is download and run the install on your machine. This creates a “My Dropbox” folder on your local machine. Anything you put in this folder gets added to your Dropbox. And if you set the program to run every-time you start your pc, it synchronizes itself with your Dropbox account once your OS loads. Complete peace of mind

You get 2gb of space on the server for free and every friend that you invite to the service allots 250mb of extra space against your account. They’ve got paid models too.

Features:

• You can share files with your other Dropbox contacts
• This service syncs your files online and across your computers – a very helpful thing if you use more than 2 computers regularly.
• Dropbox also keeps a record of previous versions of the same files.
• The interface is simple and easy-to-use

Website: http://www.dropbox.com

By default, Blogger adds its standard navigation bar to all blogs. This might look good with your default set of themes that blogger provides, but if you’ve got a custom theme for your blog (like this or this), you might want to remove this bar to maintain the aesthetics of your blog template.

How can you remove it?

From your Dashboard, click on the Settings >> Edit HTML and add the following code in the CSS section of the theme.


#navbar-iframe {
height: 0px;
visibility: hidden;
display: none;
}


Note:
The above code simply hides the navigation bar. It doesn’t delete it.

This site – MagMyPic.com allows you to upload your photos and create Magazine Cover Pages with them. You can also set the colors, change the title of your mag, add headlines to it, and customize it completely. A fun site to play with when you’re really bored.

And yeah, have a look at their sample covers displayed on their site. Some of them are really funny!

This site allows you to upload a photo that you want to use as your wallpaper and add a calendar image to it.

Pretty nifty if you hate highlighting the time section of your Taskbar and then waiting for the pop-up to display time. Now, the day/date today is just a “Ctrl+D” away

Obviously, if you are a master at Photoshop, this little web-tool will seem really stupid to you

Click here to download this plugin.

(PS: After I’ve started using this plugin, I’ve realized some songs have utter nonsensical lyrics!)

Favicon = Favorite(s) Icon

A favicon is an icon associated with a particular website or web page. Nowadays, most web browsers make use of them. These browsers display them in the URL bar (Firefox), next to the site’s name in lists of bookmarks (IE), and next to the page’s title in a tabbed page interface (Firefox again). Additionally, Windows uses the favicon for internet shortcuts to sites that you save on your local machine.

Favicons help you to create a more customized appearance within your visitor’s browser. Often, it reflects the look and feel of your web site or your brand/logo.

You can use the ICO, PNG and (animated) GIF formats to create your favicon. However, the latter two aren’t supported by ALL browsers.

Ideally, the favicon image should be placed in the root directory of your website so that all sub-directories and files have access to it.

In order to add a favicon to your website or blog, you would need to add the following two lines of code between the <head> & </head> tags of your header/index file:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

<link rel="icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

Here’s a few links from where you can create your very own favicons:

• Image Generation: Favicons
• Favicon.ico Generator
• FavIcon from Pics (my personal favorite)

Brilliant Video to understand web 2.0; the music is just amazing…Love it.

Overall 5/5!!

Don’t forget to read the terms before your start downloading!

Google’s recently been on this trend of finding fault with every service that internet users frequently use. They then go ahead and create a faster, better, stronger version of the service and make things even more simpler for users like us. For example; Chrome OS, Chrome browser, Google Reader, etc.

Their latest foray is a new experimental news reader called Fast Flip.

According to Google’s Blog:

Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. At the same time, we provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community. Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.

Fast Flip comes with additional features like the ability to share stories via email, story liking, dynamic content based on your viewing experience, and mobile-friendly versions.

This site allows you to check the availability of a specific username across more than 80 social networking sites.

A very useful tool if you’ve just started creating your online presence and want to capture your brand-name on all the popular social networking sites.

Photosynth allows you to take a set of photos of the same scene or object and automatically stitch them all together into one big interactive 3D viewing experience that you can share with your friends.

It consists of a desktop application for creating your own synths and a browser plugin for viewing them online. You can upload your own creations or see those of other users as well. And I’d recommend you have a look at a few user photosynths before you get down and dirty with your own; saves a lotta time

As quoted on Mashable:

The shortest way to sum up Photosynth, though, is this: if you haven’t tried it, you should. No description can do it justice. Its usefulness might be questionable, but well created synths look truly astonishing. Once you see it, next time you have a camera on you you’ll probably be taking photos with 3D positioning in mind; a synth from your last summer vacation will make your friends who’ve only taken “regular” photos drool with envy.

(lyrics ahead)

Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of ’99

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience…I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; oh nevermind; you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked….You’re not as fat as you imagine.

Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing everyday that scares you

Sing

Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts, don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss

Don’t waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind…the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself.

Remember the compliments you receive, forget the insults; if you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life…the most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t.

Get plenty of calcium.

Be kind to your knees, you’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary…what ever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either – your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s. Enjoy your body, use it every way you can…don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own..

Dance…even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room.

Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them.

Do NOT read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents, you never know when they’ll be gone for good.

Be nice to your siblings; they are the best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go,but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard; live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.

Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths, prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will get old, and when you do you’ll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund, maybe you have a wealthy spouse; but you never know when either one might run out.

Don’t mess too much with your hair, or by the time you’re 40, it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen…

- – - -

Click here to read more about how this song came into being.

Also, you can find the Original video of this song here

This site displays global statistics that are updated in real time. These statistics range from world population and enviromental summations to data on resources like food, water, energy.

The site claims to accumulate accurate statistics taken from various reputable organisations and statistical offices in the world. So, even if it isn’t a 100% accurate, it still is really closer to a 100% than other stats found online.

Worldometers.info is not directly or indirectly owned or managed by any governmental organization, United Nations organization, public charity, non-profit, or private foundation. Worldometers.info is owned by a private company and managed by an international team of independent developers, researchers, and volunteers with the goal of making world statistics available in a thought-provoking and time relevant format to a wide audience around the world.

Even though its an insignificant and stupid thing, I’ve added it here simply for its sheer creativity!

Feeling creative but don’t want to open that resource hungry image editor of yours?

Head over to SketchSwap, a site which allows you to create doodles instantaneously. You can draw, sketch or doodle something on this website. And once you’re done, you simpy click on the “Submit Drawing” button and you receive a random image made by someone else. And it gets better, this new doodle gets recreated right before your eyes!

I’ve spent close to an hour on this site at a stretch just drawing weird stuff. And once you get bored, there’s always the art made by other people to drool over. Worth bookmarking, I must say.

PS: Some of the doodles created via this site are really very creative and detailed.

Why would I want to invest my money into social media when you can’t even identify what the ROI is from my investment? I have several marketing programs going on that I’m investing in. Each one of those programs has a specific dollar amount that is put in and a specific dollar amount that is generated aka ROI. In order to invest in social media I’m going to have to take money out of some of the programs that have already shown me a clear ROI and put it into something that you apparently can’t calculate the ROI from. Why do I want to do this?

There are various metrics that you can use to measure ROI on social media. Brand visibility, authority, number of mentions, etc. are some of the criteria with which you can measure ROI. The simpler ways to do this would be to use Google alerts, Google search, Twitter search, Analytics and so on. More complex and in-depth methods of measuring ROI can be implemented by using paid third-party software which are readily available on the internet.

The problem here is that most companies think social media is expensive. Even investing a dedicated person on SMM activities is a big thing for them. What they don’t understand is that you don’t really need to spend thousands of dollars to get “out there”. And you don’t really need a dedicated resource working on SMM activities day-in and day-out. That resource could be time-sharing his SMM activities with his other responsibilities and he would still be adding a certain value to your online presence and the company in general.

My company is already making money and has been profitable for the past 10 years without ever using social media, why should I start now?

Dabbling in Social Media won’t really result in a direct and immediate boost in sales numbers. If you’re looking at that end result, SMM is not for you. Also, in the past 10 years, you might have performed a lot of client profiling activities to gauge the importance of your products/features. SMM brings a personalized touch to this aspect.

Earlier, your clients were interacting with a company. Now, with the advent of social networks, they have the opportunity to speak to You – the marketing head of the company, or even the CEO! They also have the ability to get in touch with you instantaneously to resolve their queries and concerns.

The end result of Social Media is that your brand is brought to the forefront and is visible to everyone – even people who don’t fit into your client base. Ubiquity can really help in the long run. Somebody might not require your product right now, but that doesn’t mean that they might not need it in the future. And if that happens, they’ll obviously know that You provide it!

The average lifespan of a CMO is 2 years, by the time we build and internal social media structure, benchmark/create metrics, research, and then execute; I won’t be here anymore. Why do I want to approve a budget for something that I won’t be around for?

Just imagine if Einstein, Da Vinci, Aristotle or any of the other great people of the past thought the way you did

Social media is really just a guessing game. Things are changing so quickly in the space that it’s impossible to know what’s going to work and what isn’t. I can’t take the risk of investing in something that has the potential to blow up in my face. It’s just not reliable.

We can’t measure any real bottom line value from conversations that are taking place online. So what if the social media efforts are driving more eyeballs, clicks, or conversations. I need to invest in something that can actually make me money.

Firstly, social media isn’t a guessing game. Its an art form in itself. The caveat here is that certain elephants can paint as well as humans And again, if you’re idea of SMM is to invest a small amount and start making huge profits instantly, I’d suggest you invest in other forms of traditional marketing.

The tools, metrics, and methods in the social media space are not consistent. I hear consultants talking about all sorts of things like “risk of ignoring” or the “social influence index,” what the hell does that mean? The industry can’t even agree with itself and I’m supposed to get involved? Maybe I’ll wait another year or 2.

Social Media Marketing by its very nature is dynamic. Things you’re doing today, might become obsolete a few months from now. And things you might do a few months from now, might become useless a year from now. If you look at the bigger picture, all the things that you’ve do in each time-band is what leads to the final outcome. And there’s multiple schools of thought for SMM – if you approach 3 different SMM companies for help, there’s a high probability that all 3 would give you different strategic plans with varying fee structures.

Who do you go with?
Yourself. You and your employees know your company better than anyone else. Delegate a small set of resources on SMM activities, tell them what you want to achieve (brand visibility, interaction with customers, etc.) and you’re ready to roll.

We’re a large international company and more of our audience probably exists offline then online, why should I be spending my money on online activities?

Its 2009. Everybody’s online. Do you think it makes sense for Nike or McDonalds or Victoria’s Secret to be online? Well, they already have really awesome social marketing strategies in place.

Your customers are getting web-savvy too. When they go online and find your company on various social networks; when they find that you’re available online for instantaneous support, they’re going to be happy about it. They will talk to you.

There’s a very high probability that they will NOT buy your products right away. But they know that they don’t have to drive down to the store to buy your Product – they could just order it online!

With the advent of Social Media, your Customers get added to the communication chain as well. They are not only reading your content but more importantly, they’re also expressing their views on everything under the sun.

Let’s take an example: Jimmy just spent an exciting weekend at the beach. He gets home and blogs about the awesome time that he had with his family, uploads videos and photos on Facebook, Youtube, Picasa, etc. so that his relatives can see them too. He then tweets about these links to get more publicity within his friend circles.

Now assume you’re Jimmy and instead of visiting the beach, you’re going to tell everyone about this swanky new product that your company has launched recently. You could (as usual) send a PR mail with the standard structure OR you could send out a Press Release that contains:

• Photos of your new product
• A video demonstration of how it works
• Links to its Facebook fan-page or or your company’s fan-page (whichever you deem fit)
• Links to your website and your corporate blog

This is what you call a Social Media Press Release. It not only allows you to share information with your Customers, but also lets you generate opportunities to engage your Customers in a conversation. This would help you get genuine reviews and/or feedback from your Customers for your Products.

You can either create your own Social Media Press Release or you could use the ones made by the Social Media Group and the Shift Group.

PS: Ford is as an example of a company that uses Social Media Press Releases quite effectively!

2. Avoid Clutter. Does your customer really need to know all that irrelevant information about your Product? Don’t you think he’d still make the same choices without that content? Brevity is one aspect that needs to be incorporated into EVERY website.

3. Avoid using a lot of fonts. (unless you’re making a magazine-style website ). It can get very hard to read with multiple different fonts staring at you.

4. Mention your USPs more than once on your site to drive home the point.

5. Use Headings. Most people skim through content. Use Headings to divert their attention to what they want to read. Bold, italics, highlights, etc. can also be used to this effect.