The New Twitter improved user interface for its Web site

Twitter’s new Web functionality is a significant evolution that promises to attract more visits to Twitter.com, improve Twitters’ interactions with content and each other, and ease adoption for Twitter newbie’s.

Twitter is about to make the biggest change to its interface in years when it adds photos and videos in the stream. What will it look like?

• New design: You will now find @mentions, retweets, searches, and lists just above your timeline – creating a single, streamlined view on the left of the screen.
• Videos: This tweet contains a link to an embedded photos and videos directly on Twitter, thanks to partnerships with Daily Booth, Deviant Art, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, Twitpic, Twitvid, USTREAM, Vimeo, Yfrog, and You Tube in the detail pane.
• Maps: Tweet is a check-in via services such as foursquare; the detail pane displays a map. If other services such as Gowalla, Yelp, Loopt etc… would make much better
• Pictures:  If the tweet includes a link to a picture posted using services such as Flickr, Daily Booth, Twitpic and Deviant Art, that image appears in the detail pane. Even Picasa included would be easy to make the updates
• Hashtags:  If you click on a #hashtag within a tweet, the detail pane conveys up-to-the-moment search results.
• Mini profiles: This provides quick access to account information, including bio and recent Tweets.
• Products:  A tweet containing a link to a product on Etsy or other select eCommerce sites will cause a product image to display in the detail pane.
• Replies: A small icon appears in tweets whenever one Twittered responds to another.  Click the arrow and the prior conversation is presented within the detail pane.
• Discover related content: Depending on the Tweet’s content, you may see: @replies, other Tweets by that same user, a map of where a Geo Tagged Tweet was sent from, and more.
• Rollout Timing: You’ll be able to switch back and forth so you have time to grow accustomed to the way things work. Eventually, everyone will have the updated version of Twitter.com.

Besides the Twittering and Social Networking, I also plan to attend the upcoming events in IIMB by passionate members of OMEBang by next week.


Here is the link for the registration: http://omebang.eventbrite.com/

If you are at the event, don’t be shy and come say hello, I look forward to meeting new faces.

Do’s & Don’ts of Social Media Marketing

Do’s & Don’ts of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing (SMM) may appear like child’s play. After all, what is there to it? Create a bunch of profiles, Digg a little, Stumble a bit and you are set, right? Wrong! That is the exact attitude that can kill your social media campaign (and dreams) before it can begin.

I don’t mean to suggest that it is beyond a social media novice to successfully carry out a marketing campaign. Armed with enough knowledge, I am fairly certain, even a novice will be able to pull it off. Nor am I making it out to be more complex than rocket science. However, approaching it with a complacent attitude definitely won’t be helpful. Social media, as much ‘fun’ as it is, is not without rules. And successful social media marketing is possible only if one, pro or novice, follows these rules.

DO’S!

1. Build a strong social network. So, you have a profile on Twitter, so, it has over thousands followers. You pat yourself on your back for building such a strong social network. Boy, are you ever so wrong? Have you taken care to ascertain how many of these thousands of followers are legit? And how often do you interact with your followers, respond to the tweets you receive? Less than positive answers to either of these questions mean that despite the impressive number of followers, your social network is as weak as it can get. Interact with your network, only that can ensure your network is as true to you as you want it to be and that your message is conveyed successfully.
2. Expend your effort building the trust quotient of your site. If yours is not a trusted site, set about working on improving the areas it is found lacking in. When you engage in SMM, you are inviting the entire world to scrutinize your site, if you think it won’t be able to stand up it, wait until you are ready to launch you campaign. You can start by ensuring your site is clean of harmful viruses and spammy links.
3. It’s simple, it may sound a little hackneyed, but it is also true – pretty impossible to drive a social media campaign without a blog. Bloggers pioneered and now sustain social media, without them, there would be nothing to Digg, or Like or Stumble. Social media would be reduced to a couple of social networks and unending streams of status updates. (All right, maybe a little more than that, but you get the picture). Integrate a blog (pretty easy to do with Word press) into your site and update it regularly with ‘good’ content!
4. This is a classic tip, works every time. You may remember a time when ‘List’ posts were all the rage (as a matter of fact, they are still very popular), how they could draw traffic to a blog like nothing else could. Well, now with the immense popularity that video sharing sites seem to enjoy, creating a video in the vein of a List post (for example, a ‘How To’ or an ‘x Best Tips’ video) and uploading it on sites like YouTube and Tubemogul is something that can really benefit your SMM efforts. Sure, you wouldn’t say no to instant exposure and the possibility of reaching millions of viewers. Apart from YouTube, you can promote the links to the videos on sites like Facebook and Twitter, and effortlessly double the exposure your brand stands to receive.
5. Keep your eyes peeled and your ears open, and your finger on the pulse. Bad anatomical idioms aside, being aware of all the changes happening around you on the web is important not just in social media marketing, but any kind of marketing on line. Subscribe to feeds from relevant sites, use an RSS reader (like, Zune or Feedreader) and be among the first to comment on posts you like or find particularly relevant. Commenting on posts is great way to get in to the thick of the social activity on a site, but being the first commenter will give you the opportunity to initiate a discussion and channel it in the direction you wish to.
6. Social media marketing can hardly be possible unless you are willing to be, you know, social. It’s a given that you should make your presence felt on all the major social sites, but what is equally important, but is often overlooked is being part of micro-communities – that are relevant to your business. While your message may get lost in the irrelevant ‘noise’ on established social sites, it has more probability of reaching the intended audience in a smaller, but niche, micro-community. If you have a site about pet grooming, joining a niche community for dog lovers like Dogster will greatly help your business.
7. Stick to your brand philosophy! Just because you are depending on a (relatively) modern approach to marketing doesn’t mean you have to abandon your brand’s basic ideology, which has hitherto guided you. Let your brand philosophy guide your SMM strategy, it will stop you from over-promising and help sustain your brand identity.
8. Be familiar with the social culture of the communities you frequent – very important, lest you commit a social faux pas and the other members banish you from the community. If you have ever participated in a forum discussion, you know what I mean. Like forums, social communities have a certain culture – certain jargons they favor, certain topics that are preferred. If you wish to be accepted as part of a community, be sure you are well-versed with its ways and are prepared to adapt. Though essentially they do the same thing, Digg and Reddit has different and distinct cultures; if you are found to be pro-Reddit on Digg, you’ll be buried even before you can say social!

DON’Ts!

1. Don’t ‘spam’ on social sites. A no-brainer, really. Everyone on the Internet knows that Spam = Evil, so if you are engaging in social spamming, you are clearly prepared to see your SMM campaign die an extremely quick death. But to those of you, who are yet to commit this cardinal of sins, let me say this: DON’T DO IT! Not only you lose your credibility, social or otherwise, but all your efforts will go to naught as well. Social spamming isn’t limited to offering unsolicited irrelevant links on social sites; posting promotional comments (with or without links), Digging or Stumbling posts on popular topics that are in no way related to your site, even sending automated Direct Messages on twitter are considered spammy practices.
2. Avoid blatant marketing tactics, be subtle. I know what you are thinking, “what’s the point of having a ‘subtle’ marketing campaign?” I am afraid that’s the way things work in social media. The ‘social’ element (a.k.a user/follower/fan) in social media apparently has little patience for overtly promotional and gimmicky marketing tactics. Give then fun contests, quizzes and games that don’t ‘corrupt’ the social space too much, and they’ll love you!
3. Don’t forget to keep your social profiles live and updated. One would think, this goes without saying, but there are enough ‘dead’ profiles out there to change one’s thinking. I don’t like following, friending or even ‘fanning’ inactive profiles, I can only imagine it is true of other social media users too. Freshness is of the essence in social media, if all a profile can provide is stale information, it is of little use to anyone.
4. Don’t forget about Online Reputation Management. A significant amount of signals monitored in ORM come from social sites. So, while you are engaged in SMM, it is of vital importance to gauge user reaction to your product and to take appropriate measures to counter any less-than favorable signal. If these negative signals point to an actual problem with your product, take them to heart and address the issue immediately. If they aren’t, work to rectify the wrong perception.
5. Don’t drop search in favor of social. You SMM efforts should complement your SEO efforts. Choosing one over the other will turn out to be nothing so much as a mistake. Continue building links and optimizing your site while you build your presence in social media.
6. Don’t try to do too much too fast. Let your SMM take a natural course. Natural being the keyword here; just because you figured you got into the game a little too late, don’t try to make up for it by working over time. So, tweeting updates every half an hour – bad idea. Your followers want to receive useful tweets from you, even one tweet a day will very likely keep them happy. Try not to flood their streams with less-then-useful, overtly promotional tweets, this holds true for your activity on other social sites as well.
7. You social media activities should be primed to bring exposure to your site. They certainly should not be used to go on the offence and slander your competition. Battling it out with a competition can do more harm than good to your SMM efforts.
8. Don’t engage in social climbing – you can’t have a successful SMM campaign if you have only people with big, established profiles on your network. While seeking to climb the social ladder, arguably in an effort to boost the importance of your profile, you may lose out on many a potential customer.

Consider these rules while you are chalking out your SMM marketing plan and you can stop worrying about your efforts backfiring on you.

Do’s & Don’ts of Social Media Marketing

Is social media backlinks really worth?

Is social media backlinks really worth?

Social networking profiles

One of the fastest ways to build backlinks is to register on social media sites with high PageRank: Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ecademy, Twitter etc. These sites allow you to set up a user profile with information about you and your company, including a link to your website. The only catch is that not all of these sites' links are 'do-follow' - which means your site will not always receive the 'link juice'.

Links in Twitter posts

If you place a link to a web page in your Twitter post, keep in mind that all of Twitter's outbound links are 'no-follow'. Google and Yahoo do not pass the Trust or PageRank power through the 'no-follow' links. Thus Twittering has limited value for your site.

However, such links do have some value. In May 2009, we witnessed the launch of the Topsy site, a technology that transforms Twitter links into a searchable database. Topsy makes it possible for users to search for information (relevancy is determined based on the number of re-tweets). So, any Twitter link now has a chance to be found and followed by Topsy visitors. Remember, increased traffic is the main goal!

Social bookmarks forever?

Is it possible to get permanent links from social bookmarks? Well, yes and no. Most social bookmarking sites will retain your bookmark until it's popular. But as your bookmark loses popularity over time, it will be moved into the archives. Ideally, a permanent link should stay on the same page with approximately the same PR forever, but in reality, most social bookmarking websites remove links after some time.

Nevertheless, social bookmarking sites are valuable for other reasons. If you have a quality article that becomes popular on social bookmarking sites, people will link to that article in their blogs, and post 'do-follow' links on forums.

You can search the Web for the keywords 'do-follow social bookmarking sites' to find the latest lists. Networkers have also created services like socialposter.com or socialmarker.com for automatic submission to bookmarking sites.

The truth about blog comments

Blog commenting is probably the most popular - and in many cases, most irritating (because of spammers) - technique of getting permanent links.

The Google PageRank algorithm implies that the more outbound links there are on a page, the less authority or power this page can pass to each of those links. That's because the page's PR is distributed evenly between the outbound links. If a webmaster wants to add an outbound link, but doesn't want Google to follow that link or for PR power to be passed on to the linked page, then that webmaster has to add the 'nofollow' attribute to the link. Many bloggers do so to prevent their PR from flowing to the pages cited by commenters. However, this practice is no longer encouraged by Google.

A few weeks ago Matt Cutts blogged about a change in the PR algorithm concerning Google's approach to passing PageRank through the links with the 'nofollow' attribute. Although no PageRank and anchor texts are passed through such links, they are also counted when sharing the outgoing 'link juice'. The only difference is that it's neither passed to the linked site nor kept on the page. This means Google disapproves of the practice of using the rel=nofollow attribute for the purpose of not sharing PageRank.

If you own a blog, setting up the 'nofollow' attribute to all comments means conserving your blog's 'link juice' and getting fewer comments. The 'do-follow' principle can lead to more spam, but it's a good way to attract webmasters to your site. On the other hand, if you are a webmaster trying to obtain more links by commenting on blogs, don't rely solely on this method of link popularity improvement. Use a combination of methods, including the time-proven ways of press releases, articles and site submissions to relevant lists and directories, and the newer techniques for site promotion in social media.

Benefits of Social Book marking

There are a lot of similarities and differences between SEO & SMO. Because of this, and the idea that one cannot take over the role for the other, it is important to know when and why to use each optimization technique.

Social bookmarks help you to share your favorite website links with your friends at the entire Internet world. This is the way, you can make other people familiar with your business and this is the way, to bring more traffic to your website. If you are an ambitious internet marketer and businessman, you need traffic, and social bookmarking, sharing with friends and requesting them to vote your story i is a great way to acquire it. Each and every link you submit to the social bookmarking sites for free can drive more visitors to your website.

Social bookmarking tools could be used to submit your web pages of your website within a short period of time. Among free social bookmarking tools I have found socialmarker as useful tool for bloggers. As you will start submitting your web pages or articles to the bookmarking sites, you will see that within a few days, your website will start climbing the results pages in the most popular search engines, such as Google, Altavista and Yahoo

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.

In social bookmarking websites, users create and store bookmarks of their choice. These bookmarks can be viewed by others and that let them know about new services and latest concepts which are making news in the online world.

Benefits of Social Book marking:

• Earn Google indexed back links for your web Sites
• Helpful links can be provided to the readers of libraries through social book marking.
• You can make vast publication in an easy way.
• Can turn heavy traffic toward your web Site.
• Provides good prospect for internet associate marketing. If you make it to build up a wide-ranging personal network of people, probability of improved sale of your product/service increases.
• Social book marking outcome in generating millions of page views on monthly basis. It attracts the visitors from all over the world, thus the internet marketers use this web traffic to get the target customers.
• Assimilation bookmarks from many computers, association of bookmarks, sharing of bookmarks with friends and so on.
• System offers the capability to rank a particular resource on the basis of number of times it has been bookmarked by the users.
• Fast Indexing: Google bot is indexing these community web sites very quickly, for example, digg, stumble and technotary stories are indexed every 20 to 25 minutes, so when you get the web site submitted in these social sites and they remainder on home page or inner category page, they get indexed very fast!

Dos and Don'ts for Social Networking Sites

Dos and Don'ts for Social Networking Sites

DOS

• Do update your profile regularly
  "Keep your profile updated, even when you're not looking for a job," recommends Patrice-Anne Rutledge, author of "The Truth About Profiting from Social Networking." "Recruiters love to find top-notch passive job candidates and having a current profile can help you land your dream job when you least expect it."


• Do join groups...selectively
  One of the fun elements of networking sites is that you can connect with other people who share your same interests and have your quirky sense of humor. Thus you end up with virtual groups like "I Drink More Beer than Water."
  


• Do go on the offensive
  If you want to use your networking profile as a tool, review the pictures you've uploaded, the personal information you've disclosed and any personal blogs or sites you've linked to. Don't wait until you're interviewing to go back and clean up your profile because the hiring manager probably already had a look.

DONT'S

• Don't badmouth your current or previous employer
  You know that griping about your current boss is a grave error during an interview, and it's just as detrimental on your profile. Give hiring managers the idea that eventually you'll be tarnishing their image if you part ways with the company and you'll be crossed of their lists of candidates.
  
  Also, if you're currently employed, don't forget any confidentiality and conduct agreements you've signed, Vergara reminds. You don't want to violate your contract and end up jobless while you hunt for a new position.


• Don't mention your job search if you're still employed
  If your boss knows you're on the lookout for a new job, then by all means let it be known. However, if you're attempting to keep your search below the radar, Vergara recommends restraint. Even if your boss isn't your online friend, somebody can get the information back to him or her.


• Don't forget others can see your friends
  Unless you've opted to keep your friends list private, your friends can see the contacts you've made. So in addition to keeping your friends' risque pictures and comments off of your profile, be cautious about whom you friend and when.
  
  "Connecting to five people at Company XYZ after a day of vacation is a sure sign you are interviewing,"
  
  Ultimately you need to remember that social networking profiles can mean potential bosses are evaluating you before you even apply for the job. You'd make sure to wear your best clothes to an interview, so polish your profile with the same care