15 Best Articles for creating your social media program

by Charles Grimm on August 17, 2011

Creating your own social media program online can be a daunting experience when you first start out. Fortunately the internet is a vast resource that is the perfect information tool to give you all the information you need to get the job done right. There are 1000’s of pages online where you can get all the details. While some of these sites may not necessarily be that accurate, we  have put together a few links of some of the best reads for your research when building your program.

When you first start out you will need to decide on the effectiveness and possible return on investment from managing a social networking program. Essentially you have to figure out whether or not it will be worth your efforts. The Brandbuilder blog will give you a solid understanding of the how and why’s when you are looking at the ROI for social networks.

eMedia Social Media

Using Social Media is for everyone. :)

Getting as much information as possible is a must if you want to find your feet in the social networking environment. This social media program will outline all the details for you in plain English.

Getting into the swing of things might leave you in a bit of a spin. If you do get stuck, then you can always read up on how some of the other players have done it. This site will give you valuable insight as to how Rogue resources started off with their social media program. If you are still not convinced by an unfamiliar company, you can take a look at how NASA implemented their own program in order to substantiate how it got done by a well known company.

Social Media University is a useful site that will give you a lot of detail on social media. They are primarily focused on educated people, creating links to a variety of dedicated articles and videos that will show you exactly what to do. This particular resource gives you a quick rundown in 12 easy steps.

Wikipedia has been disputed as a reliable source of information, the basic principle still allows for useful and in most cases highly accurate information on any given subject. They have a really detailed page on how social media works and you can view it here.

Karen Snyder has put together a nice slideshow for those that don’t really feel like doing a lot of reading. She has posted an actual social media program presentation on slideshare.net .

This particular option is definitely something for the more advanced social media managers. Instead of utilizing the existing infrastructure of facebook and twitter, you have the option to create your very own social networking site. You can download and customize your own site from jcow.net. Boonex.com, socialgo.com and socialengine.net all do the same thing, they just offer different variations with a number of useful choices. You can read up on a couple reviews of these sites and get a detailed view on what they have to offer from e-commercewebdesigners.net. If you are not really interested in creating everything from scratch, you can always integrate social media functions into your existing website – kickapps.com has a number of widgets, apps and templates to create the social user experience you need for your own site.

Once you have made your decision about the medium for your social networking plan, you then have to set out a plan to implement it. Making use of existing infrastructure simply requires a presence online and then you have to begin the process of increasing your contact list. Building your own network requires a complete strategy on every detail so you may want to look at possible strategies for your implementation. If you need additional information on this you can visit socialmediaexaminer.com for a more ideas on how you can get started.

As you can see, there a wide variety of options available to you when you start out with your social network program. You can work with the existing sites that already have all the infrastructure in place and you simply build your contact network, or you can build up the actual network infrastructure itself and create an entirely new niche group that can access your networking.

The options available are very versatile and can offer you the right solution depending on your needs.  Help us bring more resources and education our reader by letting us know your experience, strategy or feedback. If you have already put a social media program in place was it biult on a strategy of using a current social network platform or did you build your own social network site?

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Search Engine Alternatives

by Charles Grimm on June 24, 2011

New Search EnginesThe most recent stat depending on where you look has Google holding about 65% of peoples first choice for search.
However there are few up and coming search alternative that may be making a strong impact on the search business very soon. Why? Because Google even in it’s giantism is not able to effectively develop other areas of search. Maybe as in many large companies, it’s because of it’s sheer size. Even though their buying power is vast it is not always able to easily integrate new ideas and technologies into well established systems. You have to be more careful of breaking things when making changes (thus beta testing) Or sometimes it’s just market expectations and responsibilities that prevent more radical changes, which are so easy to implement in a startup stage company.

Below is a short list of alternative search options. You may be surprised at what is in store for search, just around the corner. It may be coming from something else other than Bing or Yahoo.

Blekko – I talked to these guys during there launch at Pubcon. Free T-shirt…yeh! Pretty cool seo stats. Their mission is to basically get rid of spam and to make search more relevant to the user by using slash tags.

Duckduckgo – This search is very similar to Google Instant where a user can search for relevant information without having to click on search results.

Greplin – is a search engine that can search and index social services and applications such as Gmail, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook and many others.

Wayjam – is a search tool that is also driven by social data. The difference is that Wajam personalizes results by being a browser extension to the major browsers, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari.

Quora – has a mission to answer users questions on just about any topic. Questions are organized by category and like Blekko it is mostly user driven.

For more detailed information, check out website magazine.

While I am still a big Google fan I think it’s good to see these alternatives coming into the market that will eventually help improve our search experience. If you try these let us know what you think and if these new search tools actually add value your search experience.

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The Small List of Online Business Books

by Charles Grimm on June 15, 2011

Or, Resources for Internet Marketing and Building an Internet Business in the New Age.

 

Book List by Chas GrimmIf you are involved in consulting, software development or internet marketing it is worth a read to understand the core concepts behind these best selling new age marketing authors. Marketing they are, because each of these folks are delivering new media and marketing methods themselves trying to convince us of the changing landscape with how we send and receive information today. Check these out. They may help you better understand developing strategies, concepts and methods for doing business online.

Search Engine Marketing Inc.

Driving Search Traffic to Your Companies Website

General all in one broad strokes on Internet Marketing. A good reference book on “How to”. Gets into enough into enough detail to give you a basic handle most aspects of Search Marketing. Mike Moran and Bill Hunt

The (Longer) Long Tail

Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

Explains the details of basically this core theory backed by examples. : “In an era without constraints of physical shelf space and other bottle necks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.” David Meerman Scott

unMarketing

Stop Marketing and Start Engaging

Straight forward information mostly based on Scott Strattens often hilarious experiences in New Media Marketing. There is a heavier emphasis in his strength on Twitter, Facebook and Video marketing.

Drive

The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Personal favorite. If you’re at all a futurist you will enjoy this book. Dan Pink brings to light what, how and why people are motivated today. Drawing comparisons between motivation 2.0 and the new 3.0 model he illustrates quite clearly the prevailing winds of what drives people today, autonomy to direct our own lives with purpose.

The 4 Hour Work Week

Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich

Besides being funny as hell, Tim Ferriss discusses how we can streamline our lives to get more time to do what we want to do. There’s some good resources and takeaways in this book especially of you are self employed.

One of the best things I love about my work is that I am always learning and exploring new material related to the field of online business. The startups alone these days seem to be staggering.

If you have an internet business or you are in the internet marketing field and have read these books let us know your perspective. (Oh..Regarding the picture above; I am not a best selling author but after reading unMarketing about the BS that goes on in getting books published, I thought it would kind of fun to make my own best selling book cover and titles. :)

 

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The Future of Joomla

by Charles Grimm on April 8, 2011

6 Reasons Why the Latest Version
of one of the Most Known CMS’s is the Greatest Yet

The future of Joomla

The Future of Joomla

Since its introduction in the year 2005, Joomla has become one of the most broadly adopted open source Content Management Systems (CMS) on the web, providing web publishers with a series of features at zero cost from the very beginning. Now, six years later, Joomla 1.6 has arrived and it is a vast improvement on its predecessor, which had already been around for almost 3 years.

Here is an overview of the core differences that Joomla 1.6 brings along over its predecessor and why they take the usability of this CMS platform to a whole new level.

1. Better Menu Manager: With Joomla 1.5, many users were left disappointed with the lack of depth of the Menu Manager, which at the time just showed four boxed-shaped options at the moment of creating a menu. However, now with Joomla 1.6, users are presented with a much more flexible and integrated Menu Manager that blends in a far more transparent way with the display of menu links.

2. An Overhauled Interface: The new interface of Joomla has received a much welcome improvement as well, with a far more elegant design, better buttons, much better (and more logical) menu organization and many other time-saving details (like the new different SAVE buttons) that make the user experience much smoother overall.

3. Access Levels and Group Organization: With Joomla 1.6, users can choose from many access levels and can also group other users and can assign those groups to any of the existing access level they want.

4. Add Metadata: Joomla 1.6 brings in the possibility of adding meta descriptions and even keywords for categories. Also, articles can change the page title and names can be added to page titles as well.

5. Access Control List: One of the best features that Joomla 1.6 brings over its 1.5 counterpart, is that almost any element of the system can now be controlled using the new ACL system. Also, each element of the ACL System can be accessed in an easier way and can also be set either individually or in groups. And when set individually, items are now able to inherit the settings from items on higher levels, like a single article automatically inheriting the settings from the category to which it belongs.

5. Better Template Styles/Control: The new version of Joomla allows users to apply a series of different setting and looks to any given template and provides also support for layout overrides. And what makes this new feature even more interesting, is that it applies to front end templates and to administrator templates as well.

In summary, the new version of Joomla is by far a vast improvement over its predecessor in ways that will appeal to both advanced users and novices alike. With these changes this CMS platform instantly becomes far more interesting, which will help it acquire users in greater numbers.

If you want to know more about this new version of Joomla or simply have something to say about it, feel entirely free to post a comment or follow us on Twitter.

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How to use Facebook for Business

by Charles Grimm on February 22, 2011

How to use favebook for business.Facebook is used by millions of users around the world daily.  Ads are displayed on each user’s profile, from different companies, on each side of the home and profile page. There are often about 10 ads on each page containing information about 10 different products/services or organizations.

Since there are many people online looking at these ads at one time, they are likely to interest a user because these ads are displayed only to appeal to the interest of the logged in Facebook user. This is done by monitoring what is being clicked on and viewed by the user. These ads are attracting possibly, thousands of new customers to businesses worldwide.

How can you use Facebook.com for your business? One strategy is to make your page useful. For example testimonials and product/service reviews. You want people to know your business and to get the word out how great you are at what you do. Facebook is like creating word of mouth online.  Making your page useful and not just a sales pitch can help drive users to look at your website Read More

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