A 5 minute video by Olivier Blanchard (The Brand Builder) on ROI Let me throw a little moment of divine clarity your way: If you can’t solve their problem, your value to them and the value of your idea are both precisely zero. So watch this video and see if something clicks: |
Instead of talking about social mention and brand loyalty to a guy who thinks that Marketing falls into the L section of his P&L, maybe you should focus on what matters to them, right? Read more at thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com |
If you have something to express, sharing it is easy with social media, then people with common interest find you and the networking begins. Social Media is gaining popular attention. It might be because of Ashton and Oprah, it could be because of the economy, but more and more companies and non-profits are enquiring about the subject. The same question comes up in each discussion … |
When you have something that you want to spread then social media is not just proven to be effective, I would say it is an essential part of your communication now. |
If you would like to learn more, check out this free mp3 audio class where Mari Smith, Denise Wakeman, Mike Stelzner and I talk through the major things you need to know to be effective. It’s being offered as a thank you for signing up to hear more about the social media summit we are running, and you can opt-out any time. Read more at www.blogherald.com |
Weather to the social media tools is more than welcome Quick Pitch: iMapWeather.com is the first weather news site to incorporate social media in a Google Map display. |
Genius Idea: Typical online weather maps give you an overview of conditions, a five day forecast, and location search functionality. iMapWeather, which can be embedded on any website, takes the mundane out of weather maps and makes the search for climate-related information a social experience with user-generated content and impressive weather-related data all overlaid on a Google Map.
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| The Internet has transformed the nature of shopping and the sales and marketing funnel. In order to remain competitive, your business needs to be found on the web and leverage inbound marketing techniques to reach customers with targeted messages that customers seek out, not ignore. The Inbound Marketing Summit is a marketing conference bringing together experts in the field of new media marketing to share the latest strategies, tools, and best practices to utilize new marketing methods to grow your business. |
Inbound Summit and iRoadTripColin Browning Tue, 31 Mar 2009 Image by jimstorer via Flickr
There were many influences and influencers for the concepts behind the Innovators’ Road Trip. ?One of the best ways to get great ideas is to surround yourself with smart people - the Inbound Marketing Summit is a great way to do just that. ?
In the video below, I talk specifically about [...] 
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Using Social Media to Drive Sales for Small BusinessJustin Levy Tue, 31 Mar 2009 Recently I had the opportunity to speak at Social Media Jungle: Boston hosted by Jeff Pulver.? The topic of my presentation was how brick and mortar businesses can use social media to drive sales.
If you run a small business, how do you use new media for your business?? Has it been successful?? What tools do [...] 
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Whether you’re diving into social media this summer or still looking for the productivity benefit of all these online social apps, there’s a service I’ve been using the last few weeks that is worthy of you attention: SecondBrain. |
What SecondBrain does very, very well is combine the content you create in 20 major social networking apps into searchable, well-organized collections. Everything from Twitter and del.icio.us, WordPress (.com and self-hosted), YouTube and Vimeo and more are grist for this Web 2.0 mill. |
| Further, SecondBrain is also a social network; so as you find people more adroit than you at finding good content - be it photos on Flickr or pdfs on Scribd you can start tracking what they are adding to their online digital lifestreams in realtime.Read more at webworkerdaily.com |
 One of this week’s most widely reported and talked about stories has been the appearance of Susan Boyle, a 47 year-old singer from Scotland, on the show Britain’s Got Talent.
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| video of the performance is approaching levels of some of the biggest viral hits of all-time. Visible Measures, which tracks online video usage, estimates that so far Boyle’s performance has already been seen more than 47 million times in all, taking into account all of the reproductions of the original. |
| While Boyle’s performance has a lot of natural appeal, the conditions have never been riper for a video to go so incredibly viral. Between Twitter, Facebook ( |
| , and other social media sites - not to mention mainstream media - the performance has been impossible to miss this week. Meanwhile, if and when Boyle decides to jump into social media for herself, she’ll have a built in audience of millions of fans hanging on her every word. It’s a fairly incredible, albeit not completely surprising story. |
And just in case you haven’t seen it yet, the video of Susan Boyle performing “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical Les Miserables can be found here (embedding appears to have been disabled, making the video’s viral growth even more impressive). Read more at mashable.com |
This post on Mashable is quite good, I recommend reading the steps on the original post (clicking here) and I do agree (as it says on the conclusion) that:
… But without a strategic approach to social media, it’s difficult to succeed | Social media can be an incredible tool for your business, providing you with more customer insight, direct communication channels and the ability to measure the effectiveness of these conversations very closely. |
But as the proliferation of social media platforms grow, participating can turn into little more than a giant time suck without some sort of structure behind it. With that in mind, we’ve put together a 5 step plan for kickstarting your company’s social media participation: |
The potential payoff for corporate social media participation is enormous. These companies will have a better sense of how they are perceived by their target audiences, they will establish a two way dialog with key stakeholders and they will empower their customers to speak with them, not at them. But without a strategic approach to social media, it’s difficult to succeed. Hopefully this 5 step plan can help your company get started. Read more at mashable.com |
Although I’ve heard of Second Life (an entire virtual community with diferent cities), I don’t have an account, therefore not tried it before. But I had wondered if even on those virtual places there would be space for spirituality and I can see that yes, there is a space for that, as Gavin describes this as:
One of the more unique spiritual communities I have participated in over the last few years … Is community possible…virtually? |
A number of years back there was a collaborative experiment to do a ‘virtual church’ called “the church of fools.” The experiment wanted to know if people could worship and live the spiritual life within a virtual environment. As I mentioned in our first posting, a spiritual life is meant to be done within a community of people. So can a virtual environment provide a community of people? And a community of people to live into faith with? |
A ’safe’ place for worship without judgment |
What is fascinating is that Second Life has enabled individuals who have been hurt or are scared to enter a church building out of fear of the stereotype that Christians are not welcoming, even hostile, to the GBLT community (there is truth to every stereotype) to explore. For many, this is a safe place to come in, be accepted, worship, share stories, and develop relationships. They are faithful attenders ‘teleporting’ in for the start of service then doing meet ups at homes after services or going back to their real world life. A safe place to worship is something I can only say is a good thing, regardless of medium. I do believe that people need a physical element to their spiritual life, being able to touch and be touched with hugs and see the faces of empathy and joy. However, from my experiences, a virtual community can be just as impactful in allowing people to make honest change in their lives. |
Can you live your faith on the web? |
In my experience, a virtual community, whether that be a message-board or an amped up virtual reality world, can happen but it is not a complete community experience. There is a need for that hug or personal acknowledgment which comes with a physical presence. But a virtual community effort will make a place, to those committed to being there, for people to feel a part of community. It becomes a tool to find common ground, dispel fears, and might even provide some skills to help someone enter into a real world community; which I believe is the ultimate desire and need for any individual. Read more at www.lifewithoutpants.com |
I think that if you can’t measure, you can’t improve. Very simple!  Ten years ago the ClueTrain manifesto said that “markets are conversations” but today a more pertinent statement could be that conversations are becoming markets - or that there’s a market for monitoring conversations. A whole class of technologies are emerging to help companies keep track of the conversations exploding online.
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The web moves fast enough that we may as well start looking at what comes next. Easy to use and affordable tools like Radian6 and ScoutLabs that track blog and twitter mentions are a given - but what kinds of crazy innovations can we hope for in the future? |
To be sure some of the future will be frighteningly intrusive and creepy; we’ve argued that the present state of the art in social media monitoring already is. As lovers of technology, though, we’re also excited to see what companies like this enable in the future. If web 2.0 was all about democratizing publishing, then the next stage of the web may well be based on democratizing data mining of all that content that’s getting published. Read more at www.readwriteweb.com |
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