Five Business Uses For Social Media

Are you using social networking sites to full potential for your business? How many of these 5 different applications do you currently take advantage of?

1) To get breaking industry news. Since social media is real-time, you can often get advance notice or inside information about events, announcements, regulations, innovations, and more. Staying in touch with a community of customers, competitors, suppliers, distributors, consultants, regulators, and others can help keep you on the leading edge in your industry. Note: the quality of what you can learn will depend on the quality of people you follow and interact with.

2) To research your competitors. To observe what competitors are doing, what they are saying, what they are offering, how they may be expanding, and what consumers think of them.

3) To research your prospects. To observe what consumers are saying to each other, what they are wishing for, where there might be opportunities for new products or services, where needs aren't being met in the marketplace. (Killer bonus: learn exact words and phrases to use in keyword targeting for your advertising and website!)

4) To connect with prospects. Be careful how you approach this. Most people on social media networks are there to be social, and may lash out at people who are obviously trying to sell them something. Answer? Leave the sales pitch at the door. If you offer good advice consistently, people will learn to trust you and will come to you when they need to buy what you sell. Just link to your website and carry on.

5) To connect with other businesses. You can promote your products or services by interacting with your retailers and resellers. Or you can put yourself in front of thousands of new consumers by connecting with complimentary businesses. Or you can help promote your industry by working with your competitors. (For example, if you have a local business (landscaping, painting, computer installation, hair salon, clothing store, etc.), you can chat and share tips with identical businesses and consumers in other cities without risk. This makes you both look great.)

Give some thought to this list, as it may help add depth or scope to your social media activities, or it may help you focus on the primary reason that you're on there. Remember, the benefits of using social media will be different for a dentist, car dealer, musician, manufacturer, retailer, etc. And remember to be social before anything else!

2010 Year-End Look At Email

First, here's my all-time favorite spam email of the year, from early December 2010...


Hotmail
Hotmail is now one big Microsoft Silverlight object, like their Webmaster Tools. Silverlight is a Flash-like plugin used on some sites for playing videos. Some browsers handle it better than others, to put it nicely. Sad. There was a massive Hotmail account hijacking over a few weeks in November, which sent spam to all contacts, with links to malware sites. There may have been password theft from elsewhere. My account wasn't hacked. Hotmail works fine if you are gentle.

Gmail
Google continues to merge every product they have into one. No longer can you just have a Gmail account, you now have a "Google Account" that instantly sets cookies to log you into everything Google owns, from Blogger to YouTube, whether you like it or not. They thrust Buzz right into the mail interface, and insist you create a public "Google Profile" so they can continue brutal attempts at building a "social network" for some reason. Gmail itself is decent, I wish they'd leave it alone. Google already reads the actual content of your emails in order to show you ads. And while they may not directly "rent, sell or share" that data, they don't seem to care about the theft of it. I'll have no problem dropping Gmail in 2011 if it gets any more intrusive.

Yahoo
Yahoo has a simple and fast email system. When Hotmail was redesigned into the current Silverlight interface it basically stole the clean look of Yahoo Mail. Not much to say, other than Yahoo is struggling financially. There are rumors Yahoo may sell Flickr and/or other businesses it owns, but it's unlikely anything will change with their email. It's not like an email platform is worth money in itself.

Excite
I've been using Excite email for many years. It's been through overhauls, outsourcing, and some scary interface changes, but has come through it intact. (Parent company IAC Media also owns Ask, Dictionary.com, Vimeo, and a ton of others.) A bit slow to load, but an acceptable free email service.

Other
Will Facebook messages kill email? Nope.

Stats: Browsers Used By Visitors To Our Sites

Here's a current look at the browsers being used by visitors to the heaviest traffic sites that we operate. No big surprises with Internet Explorer leading the pack, followed by Firefox.


Without saying too much about our clients, trust me when I say this traffic is very broad in scope. These statistics reflect traffic to sites in many unrelated industries, with very different target audiences and user demographics (from highly educated specialists to random consumers, and from world-wide to Peterborough-specific).

An Inevitable Look At Google Wave

Google seems convinced that real-time communication will change the world. As opposed to the current, and absolutely intolerable, 3-second delay in uploading blog posts, emails, or tweets.

(Some of my friends have actually discovered something called the "telephone", which is truly brilliant for "real-time" communication. I've even heard tales of multiple people using this device to chat at the same time! Don't look up "Skype" or "iChat" unless you are prepared to be amazed.)

- OMG, they're having a live chat!? That's MAGIC!
- Build your own blog... you mean like Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, and a dozen others? Amazing!
- Embed stuff like videos, pictures, links, and feeds into your blog? Uh... you mean like Facebook, and Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, and a dozen others? Incredible!
- Share photos? Sure, I'll believe that when I see it! Wow, you people must be on drugs!
- Real-time collaboration tools? You mean like the business software that has been around for years, that only a tiny fraction of the market ever has, or ever will, use? Genius!

Sites like Plaxo and Friendfeed already aggregate your content from multiple other sites. Almost all of the blog and social sites I've joined have asked for a dozen other logins during the signup process, so I could do everything from that site without logging into the others. All my blogs, messages, pictures, video, audio, and friend updates from all over the web can all be organized by any of these sites. Kind of like Wave, except they really exist.

Pretty soon Google will "develop" something that is simply Skype, but they'll have a big press release, call it Google SpeakBonanza, and tell everyone it's groundbreaking for some reason.

Here's why I think Wave will suck by trying to cram everything you could ever do into one window:

1) If your browser crashes, everything you are doing crashes all at once. How dumb is that?
2) It takes away the freedom of being able to move any window anywhere on your desktop (two desktops in my case).

It won't make anything faster, or easier, or safer, or cheaper, or more fun. I honestly don't understand what they're thinking. It's lame, limiting, and a step backwards compared to what already exists.

Or maybe there's something I'm not understanding. We'll see what happens over the coming months.

Quick Update of Big News

Here's some of the biggest news of the past couple of weeks:

Facebook is implementing real-time search, and also just acquired FriendFeed.

Yahoo & Microsoft have formally announced plans to merge their Bing and Yahoo search services somehow. Everyone has seen this coming, but they've finally confirmed it.

Google's Webmaster Central team says of the "Caffeine" update: "It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions." As with every algorithm update, confusion and bizarre assumptions abound. Now Matt will spend a few weeks answering dopey questions as usual.

Facebook, Firefox, Opera, Google...

Facebook movie closer to reality? Lots of info hitting the airwaves right now. This isn't exactly a breaking story, since Aaron Sorkin's official Facebook Movie group went up in August of 2008. For some of the latest gossip, check this CNET article

The new Firefox 3.5 is due out sometime around the start of July 2009. Watch the video overview on the Firefox YouTube channel

The new Opera 10 will incorporated some built-in applications, plus the concept of "client-based serving" right inside the browser, a very ambitious feature. There's a video overview of the Opera 10 beta on the CNET Blog

Google has begun a series of tips to help online business webmasters stay on top of their site analytics, and maximize traffic, revenue, and AdSense income in these poor economic times. Go to the Google AdSense Blog

Facebook, E-Commerce, Twitter ads...

Grady Burnett has now joined Sheryl Sandberg working at Facebook. They both had been senior employees in the Adwords/AdSense units at Google. This is big news as Facebook continues to work on more targeted ways to nail members with advertising. These two people will likely be valuable in helping develop a better interface for the advertisers as well.

Here's a good, concise interview about e-commerce and conversion rates from Web Pro News.

I get the feeling that Microsoft may begin serving ads on Twitter soon. They've been testing for some time in markets outside North America. There's also a company called Federated Media that runs a site called www.exectweets.com, which extracts the tweets of business executives from Twitter. This is just one of the many "powered by Twitter" sites, but is noteworthy due to a partnership with Microsoft, which runs ads on the site.