Well done!  You have acted really brave and joined the amazing sphere of social media. Now that recently you have created accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg and/or Reddit, you must have logged in and made sure everyone gets to know your presence there. You are probably ready for the entire social media community to grab on to your understanding of this world. But wait, it’s a disaster, even though these confident sales people and finest businessmen very often portray social media as the newest and enormous marketing wonder. Following are a few common drawbacks to keep away from:

1. Always supplying readers with self-centred posts. You may possibly find yourself charming and interesting, but the reality is that if you aren’t the President of the United State or the Pope, you are most definitely just another person on this planet. Connecting with other people and being selfless is a good way to make your presence felt. Know your audience, offer content they would like. Offer your reader useful stuff to read, give suggestion, guidelines, links and comments, to build and grow your social media circle. Share your understanding and information and ask others about your queries. Reply, comment, and give feedback!

2. Creating an account and logging in once in a while. You don’t have to be a fanatic about Facebook or Twitter that you log in every few minutes otherwise you get withdrawal symptoms. Your life doesn’t have to be all about social networking but in order to maintain followers you should post something on rational and regular basis. This keeps them interested in your profile. Always remember to update your profile.

3. Posting unnecessary and outdated material. You have to be up to date with news. You should have a good understanding of matters so that you can provide readers with new viewpoints. You need to provide your followers originality, if not, they will look for some other material.

4. Using bad language. No one approves of profanity, it is frowned upon.

5. Verbosity. People like to read simple, short and relevant posts. Write carefully thought posts, keeping in mind your central idea and anticipated readers. Your followers will abandon you if you write lengthy posts all the time. Give your readers quality not quantity.

6. Anticipating to be profoundly followed all of a sudden. Creating a huge fan base takes time and determination. You need to plan to give time every day and post something useful for your intended audience. Get involved and contribute to your social media network to be followed.

7. Assuming that your followers are guaranteed. Social media is like a society where you need to have conversations and discussions to fabricate connections and maintain relationships. You need to give help, support and guidance.

Social media is all about making friends and building relationships and is not a marketing platform. Be humble and tolerant and show good behaviour.

Remember these instructions and you will have a good and easy time growing your social media circle. Good luck!

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2. Using Social Media In Tandem With Your Web Site
3. How to Improve Your Business Using Social Media ?

Original: 7 Lethal Social Media Crimes

Social influence is a fairly new term in the world of ecommerce. In the past, social influence was important for bragging rights only. In 2010, this term held a more professional role. Social influence is the impact your website has among social networks. Given the rise in social networking over the past ten years, high social influence typically equates to an increase in traffic.

There are four primary tools used to measure the social influence a website projects to other users. These include:

• PeerIndex
• Twitalyzer
• HubSpot
• Klout

PeerIndex is a tool that helps users understand the social capital of a website. This is measured through data from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter which focus on resonance, authority, activity, audience and realness. Spammers are penalized and content farms calculate a much lower value. A nice feature of PeerIndex is it provides an overall score out of 100. Additionally, there is an analytics dashboard that outlines user’s authority on the Internet.

Twitalyzer is another analytics tool designed for social businesses that utilize Twitter as a communication tool. The results of the Twitalyzer reveal an impact type and score as well as an overall rank compared to all other Twitter users within your network. Other features include, email support, automatic daily updates, daily granularity, custom date range reporting and data exporting. This software integrates directly with Google analytics and link tracking services.

HubSpot tracks influence on specific platforms using a suite of tools for website measurement and social media. A few of these tools include a Foursquare grader, Twitter grader and Facebook grader. Unfortunately the score can easily be change by allowing many bots to follow you.

The final tool is Klout which was the tool to beat in 2010. Klout analyzes a large amount of data including, friendship networks, comments and likes to rank online influence. The program then spits out a Klout score. This tool emphasizes a value proposition to those that are highly influential within specific industries.

These tools continue to improve each year by adding more data to calculate. As social networking expands with new software and trends, these tools will draw and combine information from these sites to calculate an overall score. In the ecommerce industry, these scores could be an excellent method of inviting social networking users to a specific site. An increase in traffic typically equates a great number of sales.

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1. How to Use Twitter And Social Media Marketing To Explode Your Online Profits
2. Combining CRM and Social Networking
3. Online Collaboration With Google Wave

Original: How to Measure Online Social Influence

Twitter at times takes so much of people’s time but only for the few irresponsible individuals. Remember that your real life is necessary no matter what you do in life. Make good use of both and thrive in networking without compromising the real life situations.

Using Twitter is great in social networking. You get the best chance to meet thousands of friends. You also get people from everywhere in all corners. The process of making friends is also simpler than doing it physically. So much is possible through this social network. However, there is a bit of challenge to many people because of imbalance brought about by Twitter. You need to balance twitting and other routines in four simple approaches.

• Make a program
• Take it as leisure activity
• Switch routines
• Combine routines

Making a program of your daily activities has always been a solution in ensuring the fulfillment of the daily activities. Twitter ought to be like other activities and need not to be given special attention. Remember that you must program and come up with a great plan highlighting how long you can use the social network and when to quit. Being strict and responsible in this case if the best thing you can give to the success of that program.

Taking Twitter as a leisure activity is also an ideal way of dealing with proper and responsible twitting. The reason why you develop an addiction in twitter is taking it too serious. This is just a socializing network and there is nothing unique about that. Just as you do not spend all day in public places socializing, Twitter should also be a part of when relaxing. Preferable, let it be after a day’s routine when taking sometime off the day’s hustles. Treating the social network as leisure has worked for many individuals because it cools and refreshes the mind as they rest in the evening.

Switching routines also works diligently in maintaining a balance between Twitter and real life. You are in the social network because you are in pursuit of widening your reach of friends. In the same way, you also need to make friends physically because they are near you. You need to switch your social activities and practice both routines. Let not Twitter take all the responsibilities of making friends. You can also join a club where you meet face-to-face with friends and enjoy a good time together. It is thorough the switching process that you ascertain successful friends networking.

Combining routines relatively works in developing good progress in friendship building. Using Twitter as you take on some duties could be the best approach of avoiding failure in completing tasks. Many people have the addiction in such a way that they do away with other duties just to be active in the social network. Especially when in the midst of a conversation of following another person, it becomes like an obsession and blinds you from doing anything else. That is what calls for a good plan in the routines. You can cook as you twit, eat as you twit and many more activities a perfect combination with Twitter.

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Original: Time Balancing: Twitter and the Real Life

The open source groupware, Open-Xchange, recently released improvements on the software that allows for easier aggregation of e-mail and contact information all while incorporating the use of social networking tools.  This all-in-one piece of software is a boon to those business web site owners who happen to be just about everywhere when it comes to social media outlets.

Background

With offices in New York and Germany, Open-Xchange has been in the business of creating collaboration software tools for quite some time.  The company works with technology partners such as Novell, Red Hat and Parallels to enable it to bring SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions to providers from around the globe.

Beginning in 2001, Open-Xchange combined forces with SUSE Linux (now a Novell business) to create the Openexchange server – one of the top selling Linux-based groupware solutions around.  Over 3,500 businesses in 65 countries now run Open-Xchange solutions.

Dealing with 1&1 Internet, Network Solutions, Dotster and Hostpoint has brought Open-Xchange over 15 million paid mailboxes this year alone.  This is a quadrupled increase from the company’s previous year.  Open-Xchange shows no signs of stopping now.

Solutions

Because no two businesses are exactly alike, Open-Xchange offers several solutions to fit one’s particular business requirements.  Each offering allows for a free testing period prior to purchasing – the perfect way to figure which solution is the right one.

The Appliance solution offered is perfect for small and medium-sized businesses who require a document and e-mail server without the need for an internet expert on hand.

The Server edition is geared more toward mid-sized businesses and is available in two versions – the standard server edition and the edition built for the Univention Corporate Server (UCS).  The later is perfect for those businesses wishing to combine the CRM tool with an entire IT infrastructure or those already running the UCS server.

For those not wanting to completely overhaul and start with an entirely new solution, Open-Xchange offers the Hosting edition of their software.  This solution allows users to keep their existing e-mail setup without the need to completely migrate over to a new system.

The Open-Xchange Server 5 steps things up from mere e-mail solution to a full-blown collaboration tool – e-mail, documents, calendars, tasks, and contacts.  This CRM offering allows businesses to grow from webmail to complete groupware.

The company also offers mobility solutions and migration services.  Open-Xchange completes the fullness of its software by also including a Mac OS version of its collaboration tool.

What is unique about all the company’s offerings is that a wizard has been incorporated into the software that searches and gathers information from several online sources, including social media sites.  Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn as well as many others are thoroughly scoured and the pertinent data is fed back into the groupware solution chosen.  A great way to gather all one’s social media contacts into one neat package.

Final Thoughts

A good business will not only rely on its standard CRM tools but also social media outlets.  Open-Xchange offers some fabulous open source CRM solutions that combines both of these items into one very powerful and useful groupware solution.

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1. Joomla, Social Networking and Your Web Site
2. Open-Xchange and Dotster Partner to Provide Users with E-Mail and Groupware
3. Open-Xchange Announces Agreement with Nexen – Alter Way Hosting Groupware is Offered

Original: Combining CRM and Social Networking

One of the more popular CMS (content management system) programs available on the web is Joomla.  Thousands of web sites viewable on the internet are powered by this extremely versatile and easy to use CMS program. The software has a rather extensive list of extensions available to add onto the product and one of the more popular types downloaded by many businesses is those that pertain to social networking and social media.

About Joomla

With its original creation back in 2000, Joomla has grown as an open source content management solution to encompass an ever-growing list of extensions, themes and a community of over 200,000 users and contributors all helping make it one of the best bits of programming available.

Joomla is the perfect solution for many different styles of web sites.  Whether commercial, media-specific, government, educational or as an intranet solution, Joomla can easily tackle the task at hand.

The program is very simple to setup and Joomla’s site is crammed with information with regard to how to setup the program and getting started using the program.  Additionally, the company’s web site includes an online demonstration to try out in case of uncertainty.

Social media for business

The latest and greatest medium available for businesses to interact with their customers and clients is social media.  Social media comes in various forms and each form caters to a specific kind of media (graphic, text, video, audio, etc.).  Businesses are quickly finding out that utilizing different types of social media is the key to garnering new customers, keeping old customers and getting feedback from customers.

Two of the more popular types of social media are micro-blogging and blogging.  Sites such as Twitter and Identi.ca are examples of micro-blogging – communication mediums that only allow for small amounts of text to be published.  On the other end of this spectrum is blogging.  Blogging allows for much longer bits of text and allows for incorporation of other social media types such as YouTube video inclusion.

Social networking related Joomla extensions

Among the hundreds upon hundreds of extensions available to add onto Joomla, there are a number of great social networking specific modules to be found.  For those businesses who have Facebook and Gmail that they would like integrated into their web site, Jbolo is a perfect addition.  Users adding this module onto their Joomla site will enable the two sites to integrate easily.  If wanting to embed videos but maybe not wanting to embed those from YouTube, hwdVideoShare is a great little module that is getting quite a lot of reviews and positive feedback.

The list of social media modules and extensions available can be found simply by going to the Joomla site Extensions area and typing in “social network” within the search bar.  At last check, there were 38 different social media extensions available for downloading.

Final Assessment

When it comes to easy web site administration and content management, Joomla has got businesses covered.  Once ready to take the social media plunge, it’s nice to know that Joomla also has businesses covered with its array of social media add-ons available to the public.  Make your business web site social networking savvy and check out Joomla today.

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Original: Joomla, Social Networking and Your Web Site

Open source technology has been around for quite some time and has struggled over the years to place itself in the higher echelons of business and government.  The United States’ current President, Barack Obama, has been a vocal proponent of an open and transparent administration.  To further emphasize this, the President recently approved the use of the open source CMS (content management system) Drupal for the WhiteHouse.gov web site.

About Drupal

Drupal is a free open source CMS that allows easy publishing and managing of web sites.  There are tens of thousands of web sites online now that utilize the program and include site types such as community web portals, corporate web sites, resource directories and even social networking sites.

The program is designed to allow quick additions of modules that enable a web site to expand its functionality.  Some of these modules allow for newsletter publication, picture galleries, e-commerce and much more.

As Drupal is open source software, it is constantly being checked, debugged and new updates are constantly being released.  The advantage of this is ensuring that the safest and most secure edition is available to its users.

The word from Dries Buytaert

According to Dries Buytaert, creator and founder of Drupal, his software is well matched and up to the task of helping further the platform of an open and transparent government.  He goes on further to state “Drupal’s flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems.”  Dries feels this move to use open source technology and software indicates that governments are realizing that open source does not present any added risks when compared to propriety software.

One important point Dries brings up is the ability for the Drupal-run WhiteHouse.gov web site to allow for open communication and participation.  This, by itself, is worth seeing the new site and checking out what one can accomplish with respect to open participation.

Not the only government site

Surprisingly, the WhiteHouse.gov is just the pinnacle of government offices using Drupal to publish their web sites.  The Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, the General Service Administration and the Department of Education have all been using the Drupal CMS for some time.

Other large business, company and entity web sites currently running on Drupal include the New York Observer, Yahoo! Research, Christian Assemblies International and Sony Music.  The list of Drupal-run web sites continues to grow at a rapid pace.

Future looking open

Going on into the future, the hope is that with Drupal’s latest coup of the White House web site, other government agencies, big businesses and even government entities world-wide will see the awesome potential of open source software and technology.  Further, this may also show the world that open source technology is a huge step in the right direction – especially in the area of cutting costs.  Perhaps this recent Presidential approval will start a web site trend and we’ll begin to see more and more “big guys” realize the advantages of open source.

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Original: WhiteHouse.gov To Use Drupal

It is a constant struggle trying to bring more customers to a web site.  Many of the options available to site owners that can effectively bring in more business are often things they have no control over (search engines, for instance).  One very effective and much more personalized way to help facilitate raising awareness of one’s business is by using social media.  With the large number and types of social media on the web, knowing which one will work the best for one’s business is the hardest part.

Forms and style of social media

There are quite a few forms of social media and within those forms there are several technologies involved.  Reviews and opinions, collaboration, communication and multimedia are some of the core styles of social media.  Communication is one of the more popular styles – blogs, micro-blogging, events, and social networking can be listed among this style type.  As the purpose is to “get the word out” about one’s business, the social media style type of choice is communication.

Micro-blogging and Twitter

Micro-blogging is the sending of short text updates, sometimes including a photo or short audio/video clip.  This is an extremely effective way to communicate to a large audience without losing their interest.  It can be used to disseminate news regarding a company, announce the company’s latest products, or even inform the general public of upcoming sales.  By far one of the most popular micro-blogging sites on the web is Twitter.

Signing up with Twitter is an extremely easy process.  The registration requires a full name (a company name would work as well here), a username (this should also reflect the company or business name), a password, and an email address.  Once these are entered, a new Twitter account is created on the fly.  After an account has been created, the next step is to use one of the available “widgets” that can be found at Twitter’s Goodies page.  There is a widget in place that can be used on a web site and the instructions are very easy to follow.

There are quite a few companies on the web that use Twitter and use it very well.  Comcast, Southwest Airlines, and H&R Block are just a few.  Checking out how these companies have used Twitter to inform and excite the public will enable one to figure out the best Twitter “strategy” for their own business.

Events and Eventful

If the business in question is more geared toward events, performers or avenues, a good choice for a social media outlet would be Eventful.  This service allows people and businesses to share information to the public in regards to upcoming events.  Private and public calendars can be created, events can be searched for and tracked and users can even declare which events they would most like to see in their area.

Much like Twitter, the sign up process for Eventful is simple and instantaneous.  Once the account is created, the user can choose from some popular events, favorite performers and event categories.  After all preferences have been filled out, the user is presented with their main screen.  It is here that a new event can be created.  While Eventful doesn’t present a widget that you can quickly use, they do offer a web services API.  An alternative to this is to simply place a link within the business website, pointing to the Eventful calendar created by the business.

Conclusion

There are dozens upon dozens of more social media applications available that could be used in conjunction with a business web site.  The best way to determine which will work the best for one’s own business is by figuring out exactly what information needs to be presented to the public and which social media venue will get that job done in the best manner.  Check out what other companies and businesses have done with social media and put your business on the social media track.

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Original: Using Social Media In Tandem With Your Web Site

Back in July of 2009 developers were given a sneak peak of one of the newest product offerings by Google, Google Wave.  This new tool combines email, social networking, IMs (instant messages) and wikis into one real-time collaboration tool.  The end result and how it will be utilized in the future depends upon how easy the tool is to use and what practical applications it can apply to.

The basics

Once you log into your Google Wave account, you are presented with four neatly layed out panels – Navigation (similar to an email account navigation box), Contacts (emails of your contacts who also have a Google Wave account), Inbox and the Wave box.  To create a new Wave you simply click on the “New Wave” link and you’re off and running.  The first thing to do upon creating your new Wave is to add contacts.  When you’ve added the contacts you wish to be part of your Wave, you can then begin adding text, links, files, searches and gadgets.

One of the best parts of working with Google Wave is the ability to add gadgets.  There are a list of pre-set gadgets that include a Google Map add-in, a video chat and a  conferencing tool.  You can opt to add in some more gadgets by searching for what is available at Google’s Gadget Gallery.  The gallery includes games, more mapping capabilities and even an RSVP gadget.

You can also work with robots.  These are basically email addresses you can add to your contact list and then add them to your wave to perform specific actions.  One particularly handy robot is the Bloggy robot.  This robot will publish your Wave into an online blog.

Usage

The main purpose of the Google Wave tool is collaboration.  As such, the largest practical usage of this tool would be for business intrawebs and the like.  The ability to conference real-time with the gadgets available makes for an excellent way to brainstorm and conduct “live” meetings with co-workers.  Using the video chat gadget, text, links and file attachment capabilities, you have a great way to conglomerate tools that would normally require several different pieces of online technology.

Another great way to use this new product is for event planning.  You can create a Wave with potential event participants while gathering feedback and responses on the fly.  With the “Yes/No/Maybe” gadget you can have a live record of what the participants may want to bring to the event, dates and times that work for all and much more.

More uses for Google Wave can be determined by simply playing around with the tool.  Co-operative blogging, real-time brainstorming, on the fly conferencing are just a few of the many usages of this new product.

Conclusion

As Google Wave is still in its beta testing stage, there has been a limit placed on the number of current participants (at last check 100,000).  This makes it difficult to check out and test the product unless you know one of the other beta testers on board.  To get around this for the time being, using one of the Wave robots could be a temporary solution.  Once past the beta testing stage, it then becomes a matter of how many people will adopt this new piece of technology.

Google’s success rate has been rather high when introducing new tools – Google Maps, Gmail, Google Voice all well-received and highly used.  The company’s past performances may be a good indicator on the future success of Google Wave.

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Original: Online Collaboration With Google Wave

1. Research Tool –
One thing that I have learnt to enjoy with Twitter is the options that it offers you when it comes to researching posts. Have you reached a dead end with an idea of yours? Twitter it and see what other people have to say about it. Are you looking for examples for points that you are trying to make? Twitter your idea and you may be able to find yourself some decent examples. Do you have a question for which you are not being able to find an answer? Ask other Twitter members if they can help you. Do you want to check out a hypothesis? Conduct a poll on Twitter and see what other people think.

The wonderful thing about Twitter is that it is fast and is used by a large number of people that are from different backgrounds and the 140 character limit that each message has ensures that conversations are precise and productive.

2. Reinforce your personal brand -
I have earlier written how interacting on various different mediums is very important when you are trying to build a personal brand for yourself. Irrespective of whether it is real life interactions, bookmarking, blogging or social networking, all of them can help you a lot in building yourself a brand of your own. Twitter is just another ‘straw’ to add into your personal brand.
There have been many messages that I have got from people via Twitter saying things like:-
a) ” I followed your blog posts on ProBlogger and then lost track of you until I was able to find you on Twitter.”
b) “I have subscribed to the RSS feed on your blog but seeing you on Twitter makes me remember to read it more.”
c) “I was going through Twitter when I say your face. i recognized you from facebook so I checked you out.”

3. Promote content –
The first question that I am asked when I say that I am on Twitter is, “What is the traffic that Twitter helps your blogs get?” I haven’t mentioned Twitter as a tool for driving traffic till now as I do not think that this is the main use of this application. This application can promote your content and drive traffic to your sites very well.
There is a tool called TwitterFeed that I have been using for four or so weeks to publish URLs and headlines from all of my blog feeds onto my Twitter account.

4. Find yourself new readers -
A very big challenge for many bloggers that have been blogging a particular niche for a while is that after a while you reach saturation point. They feel that everyone already knows everything about them and that they have reached a stagnant level in their stats from where they can only go downhill. Usually this happens after six to twelve months of opening a blog. In these cases, it is best that they search for potential readers which they have not yet tapped into. Twitter helps a lot with this. The above mentioned section on branding helps you understand how this works and there are many people who discover your blogs through Twitter. This could give you a lot more new readers and keep your blog running for years to come.

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Original: 4 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers