It is essential to keep social media personal. Folks typically like to talk to a person and not a robot or a brand. But just how personal is personal. The 'rules of engagement' have not changed from traditional marketing to digital or social media marketing. It is good practice to tend to avoid engaging in politics or religion in business settings, for example, and this is not different in social media.

Love it or hate it the Internet is a 'permanent record' of sorts. Knowing this, here are...

Ever found yourself going back to reference an article you bookmarked a year ago and come to find out it is no longer available? Worst yet, try to find it in the first place after you've changed the way you manage your bookmarking for the 21st time. Wouldn't it be nice if you had an article indexing system that allowed you to annotate, tag, and convert to something more permanent like PDF's?

Diigo.com, a powerful research tool, allows you...

The main driver behind thought leadership is content development. Generating engaging and useful content requires a lot of research, preparation, and writing skills. An excellent approach to organizing your ideas is to use mind maps.

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in writing — Wikipedia

Bubbl.us,...

While there really is no practical means to quantify social media Return on Investment, this clip should give you an idea on how thousands of organizations are measuring the effectiveness of their social media campaigns.

 



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An important part of a balanced social media diet is having a Facebook fan page. Fan pages are separate from your personal profile and are designed to promote an idea, product, service or an organization. Think about fan pages as your business profile versus your personal profile.

Here are some resources I hope you'll find...

With all of these geo-based services out there and the constant updating on social media networks, it was bound to come up. PleaseRobMe.com, a site dedicated to find what homes crooks can break into, accentuates the self-imposed threats of social media. The service tracks comments and updates made by users as to their current location making themselves excellent targets.

Finding useful tips or resources for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is incredibly frustrating. Here is a great resource straight from the horse's mouth: Google Webmaster Central Channel at YouTube. One of the many great tips: Google does not use the keywords meta tag AT ALL ...

There are primarily two approaches to optimizing your site for search engines. One of them concentrates on optimizing on-page issues with your site: proper titles, descriptions, keywords, etc. The second one deals with techniques targeting off-page such as how many links point to your site sometimes called back-links. A technique called reciprocal linking, where you and another site link to one another, has been documented to have a significant negative impact on ranking. But even one-way links to...

One of the difficulties about social media is the time it takes to publish to so many different social networks. There seems to be a whole new sector developing to address just that. These are 5 of the most popular social media presence management applications:

http://om.shaayad.com/ http://hootsuite.com/ http://ping.fm/...

Reality is catching up with science fiction rather quickly these days. Augmented Reality (AR) gives a whole new meaning to integration. AR involves using existing sources of data to super impose information and images on top of our view of the world. Whether it is viewing a street and finding houses for sale to matching and finding someone's contact info via social networking via face recognition, this technology promises to change the way we view the world. For some killer examples, check out http://bit.ly/uEg5C...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has imposed new guidelines for bloggers who offer opinion on products or services in their blog. Specifically, the FTC requires bloggers to disclose any "material connections" with endorsements of a product or service. The new rules took effect on December 1, 2009. cmp.ly is a site that provides you with an easy way to facilitate disclosure and provides a simple and easy method to disclose material connections in the content that you publish. Visit http://cmp.ly/ for...

One of the challenges in social media is managing and posting content to multiple accounts in multiple formats (full posts, micro-blogging, etc.). Spredfast.com, a new social media campaign manager, provides a campaign approach similar to email campaigns for distributing content. The application provides a way to schedule content to be delivered to your various social media accounts including your own blog (supports XML RPC) One of the most interesting features is their social media monitoring tool....

Recently came across a vulnerability that apparently has recently surfaced and could potentially be capturing your picture, video, or audio. The vulnerability involves hidden elements on a page that follow your mouse and hijacks your clicks in a way that gives the offending website access to your microphone or camera. They can transmit this capture to the offending website. Moreover, this hack can actually allow the offending site to manipulate your clicks for other reasons like redirects to other...

One of the hardest tasks related to search engine optimization is finding easy to use tools to analyze the most simple of problems including generating sitemaps for search engine submittals, identifying broken links, the use of uppercase vs. lowercase links, identifying duplicate titles or descriptions on pages, page redirections, etc. The Microsoft Search Engine Optimization Toolkit offers a free, incredibly powerful, and easy extension to Internet Information Service (IIS) This extension provides...

It is fascinating to see some of the ingenuity produced by mashup technology. The basic concept of mashup is to take tools or applications designed with a particular utility or audience in mind and repurpose them to solve another need. An example of this approach is the SAP PowerPoint Twitter tools. SAP has developed a free Flash object control that integrates with Twitter and can be inserted into your MS PowerPoint presentation. The control allows you to enter a search term and displays a Twitter...

Suppliers doing business with buyers offering this feature would be remiss not to implement the technology. Buyers' job is simply much easier and faster using this approach for their procurement. This translates into revenue loss for Suppliers who choose not to partake on this opportunity. Developed by SAP, the Open Catalog Interface (OCI) helps connect Supplier-Hosted Catalogs to buyers using SAP systems. OCI is based on connections via HTTP protocol over the Internet, allowing product data to...

Found an excellent article on the art of retweeting. The Twitter community has developed many conventions to continue a conversation within the framework of the 140 characters in Twitter. Some of these have become so popular that Twitter has implemented them as part of their platform. One such convention is the concept of retweeting. Retweeting consists of someone taking a tweet they received and reposting it to a new set of followers. The convention is to using RT at the beginning of the message...

Logging to a DotNetNuke (DNN) site with either username or email is not supported out of the box. Here is a simple way to do this. First, make sure the membership provider in your Web.config is set to require unique emails when creating accounts. You'll find this on this section of your Web.config: add name="AspNetSqlMembershipProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider" connectionStringName="SiteSqlServer" enablePasswordRetrieval="true" enablePasswordReset="true" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false"...

One of the worst documented features in DotNetNuke is the native role subscription and the integration to PayPal. After hours of Googling and trying several things, this is what worked for us. You'll still need to make sure to set the payment settings in the 'Site Settings' > 'Advanced Settings' > 'Payment Settings' (the processor userid is the email for the PayPal account you are using and the password can be left blank) The DNN page that redirects to PayPal located under WebsiteAdmin/Sales/PayPalSubscription.aspx...

One way of increasing your online sales and increase your level of customer service is to provide a way for customers to get answers quickly and easily. While there are a number of online chat and support applications, one interesting way of providing live support is using IM on any page on your site. For instructions on how to get started go to http://bit.ly/6Aowuf.