Social networking is easy and it is fun. It is a way that you can enhance your online business and have a lot of fun in the process. You can meet some of your very best potential customers on social networking sites. You can make friends and influence people as well.
It has long been a well established fact that more business is actually conducted in social settings than in offices.
More deals are made on golf courses than in board rooms in the real world and more sales are made through the use of social networking sites on the Internet than through all of the paid-for advertising combined.
People HATE commercials but they don’t mind hearing their friends recommend a product or service. Not only do they not mind…they even go to a lot of trouble to seek out that information.
In addition to being a great way to advertise a business social networking sites are also a great research tool and one that should never be overlooked. Rather than having to conduct a lot of expensive and time-consuming surveys for example, you can simply look through a social networking site and find out exactly what people are thinking about.
You can find out what their problems are and what measures they are taking to solve those problems. You can find out what their interests are and how they go about pursuing those interests.
By using social networking sites as research tools, you can likely get more and better information in a single hour and for free than you could get by spending hours on sending out surveys and trying to decipher the results.
One very interesting social networking site is called 43 things. That is the name of the site. On this social networking site people list their goals and then other people with similar goals discuss how to best achieve those goals.
Some goals that have been listed are ‘learn a foreign language, be a good parent, improve my memory, get in shape, lose weight, be a better gardener and the list just goes on and on.
As a research tool it would be hard to beat 43 things to find out what people are interested in and concerned about.
Web 2.0 is great! It is driven by those who actually USE the internet and not by people who are sitting behind desks at large companies and who are out of touch with the real world.
Social networking is simply a group of like-minded people exchanging information that is of mutual interest. That is all it is and all it has ever been.
It is important that when you are using social networking sites that you remember this and conduct yourself accordingly.
If you join a site and start just posting blatant advertisements, you are not going to be doing social networking.
You are simply doing advertising…which people hate. If you establish yourself as part of a group, then you are social networking and you will find that those who are members of your online social circle are the best help you can find anywhere.
Social networking is valuable in and of itself but it can be made doubly valuable by using social networking in conjunction with social bookmarking.
Join a social networking website. Find a group of people who are interested in the topic of your website but don’t start out advertising that.
Make posts to your own blog on the social networking sites as well as to the blogs of others. Add those links to your social bookmarking account. Be certain that you use the appropriate key words in those tags otherwise they are worthless.
Altogether this is an excellent marketing strategy. It is a way to market your website and your products or services and have a lot of fun at the same time. You will meet people that you really do like and even admire and respect.
Friendships are not made for the purpose of profiting from them but they usually are profitable.
If you missed it read the first part of this post here - Social Networking and how its changing the internet - Part 1
]]>They have passwords and secret signals that help one member identify another member. Others may be more open but they are aware of who is and who is not a member in good standing of the social networking group.
The members of any social networking group identify with and help other members of their group. They provide information to one another that is mutually beneficial.
They tell each other when something of interest or something of concern in happening that is interest to or a threat to their particular social network and the members collectively pursue the interest or ward off the threat.
These social networking groups can be either very close knit or very loosely organized or even have no apparent organizational structure at all. The organization is of a great deal less importance to the members than the benefits that each gains from it.
Many times social networking groups are work related.
For example: you have very likely heard of the way that law enforcement personnel stick together and ‘watch each other’s backs’ so to speak.
This social networking group is often referred to as ‘the long blue line’.
Another work related social networking group is long distance truck drivers. By using their CB radios, they stay in contact with one another and warn each other of road hazards. If one of them has a problem, others go to his or her aid.
No, social networking was not invented in the twenty-first century and it didn’t come into being with the advent of the personal computer.
It has been around probably since the beginning of time in some form or another but the advent of the personal computer certainly put a new spin on social networking. Web 2.0 has really kicked social networking up several notiches.
No longer is social networking limited to people who work at the same jobs or who live in the same communities. Social networking is now world wide and easily accessible to everyone who has access to a computer and an internet connection.
It all started with the advent of instant messaging technology but it has grown far beyond that limited ability. With instant messaging it was necessary to let others see your email address and so you lost much of your anonymity.
In today’s Web 2.0 world, social networking and complete anonymity are both possible.
The online dating sites are a very good example of this compatibility. People can register and pay for memberships on online dating sites and conduct an entire relationship for many months without either party knowing the other party’s real name, ISP email address or the name of the city in which they live.
All communication is conducted on the online dating website itself thus affording both social networking and anonymity.
There are Web 2.0 websites that are dedicated to nothing BUT social networking. One of the better known ones among the younger set is MySpace but there are at least a hundred different social networking sites on the internet and probably a lot more that that.
Web 2.0 social networking sites are divided in many different ways.
There are social networking sites that are dedicated to specific ethnicities; BlackPlanet.com is for African Americans, Babbello is for Australian teenagers, FaceBox is for European young adults, Gronco.net is for Poland, iWiW is for Hungary, Migente.com is for Latinos, Mixi is for Japan are just a few examples.
Social networking sites are also divided sometimes by interests. For example you can find such social networking sites as CarDomain for car enthusiasts, Flickr for photo sharing, Gaia for gamers, Gopets for virtual pets, Joga Bonita for football or soccer, or Last.fm for music.
These are only a very few example. There are a great many more.
Most social networking sites, however, are not dedicated to a specific group. They are general membership sites and the members themselves divide themselves into appropriate groups according to interests and compatibility.
Almost all of the social networking sites are free to join. There are just a few that have membership fees. The site owners make their money from advertisers rather than from users. A few sites are only open to those who have been invited to join by other members.
Most of these social networking sites provide you with your own blog when you join the site. You can make posts to your blog and you can invite others to post to your blog. The trick here is to also use the social bookmarking sites and upload links to your blog posts into them with the appropriate tags containing key words.
The blogs on social networking sites are in addition to and not a replacement for blogs on your own website if you are an internet marketer and the social bookmarking sites should be used to upload links to both blogs.
Tags: Social Networking
]]>If there is an up-side, you can bet there is always a down-side for anything and everything and social bookmarking is not the exception to that rule.
The very fact that social bookmarking is user driven is one of the potential down sides of it. Users are not professionals. Users are just people and the ability to use social bookmarking sites for fun as well as for profit does not require a great deal of technical knowledge.
As a matter of fact, it requires almost none. And because users are ‘amateurs’ (for lack of a better word), key words used in tags are not consistent. The information is sometimes scattered and key words that seem logical to amateurs don’t necessarily lead to related topics.
Yet another potential down-side and one that is happening more and more frequently is that users are abusing the system. Since it is a user driven system it is more susceptible to abuse and misuse.
There are spammers out there that are bookmarking the same site multiple times.
The idea, of course, is that the more times the link appears the better the search engine spiders like it and the more apt the link is to be clicked on and the more apt it is that the site will be visited.
More visitors always equal more sales of products and services.
What is The Bottom Line of Social Bookmarking?
The bottom line is that social bookmarking is here and it is here to stay. People are using social bookmarking sites to make social connections as well as to form communities.
From the internet marketing point of view, social bookmarking is a tool that can be used to increase search engine optimization, the number of website visitors and ultimately increase sales but there is also the possibility of the system being abused.
Like everything else…the more social bookmarking is abused, the less effective it will become.
Internet marketers are learning that they can have a lot of fun by using sites like MySpace, FaceBook and Friendster and social bookmarking sites and make a lot of money in the process. It’s what is known as a win/win situation and one that internet marketers are flocking to in droves.
Tags: Bookmarking, Social Bookmarking
]]>The ability to create tags using key words which social bookmarking sites allow is very attractive to internet marketers.
It didn’t take the internet marketing community long to figure out that these links and the backlinks that are created when the links are added to other favorites lists cause search engine spiders to visit websites and that PageRank can be dramatically increased along with the number of visitors to a website.
The more visitors, as any internet marketer worth his salt knows, means more sales of products and services.
So social bookmarking sites provide free advertisement, increase the number of visitors to a website and are a great search engine optimization tool to boot.
Another asset that internet marketers quickly became aware of that social bookmarking sites provide is that they are great research tools in and of themselves.
For example: a website owner might find that a ‘sailing’ tag is also associated with a ‘boat repair’ tag. That information can open doors for business expansion.
]]>The basic concept of Web 2.0 is that it is user-directed and social bookmarking is a part of Web 2.0 so it is, of course, user directed. Social bookmarking is a way of organizing and categorizing information with the use of ‘tags’.
Tags are user generated and are based upon key words that identify the bookmark so this is a true user-directed way that information is organized and categorized.
When a bookmarked site is clicked on, the social bookmarking site identifies the person who created the bookmark and provides access to other sites that the same user has bookmarked.
Now, the person who created the bookmark and the tag is also provided information about how many times the link has been clicked on as well as who clicked on it.
This system makes it very easy for like-minded people to make social connections and to identify others who have the same interests. Over time a community of users develops.
As a community of users develops, they sometimes develop a very unique set of key words that define resources of common interest. These unique sets of keywords have come to be referred to as ‘folksonomy’.
Wikipedia defines the term, folksonomy as:
“Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories.
In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams.”
How will Social Bookmarking Impact the Web?
Actually, it is pretty clear right now that social bookmarking is having a huge impact on the way that information is being classified, categorized, stored and exchanged.
It is impossible to believe that in the future the impact will be even stronger. Web 1.0 was static but Web 2.0 is fluid. The face is ever changing.
The technology that social bookmarking is based upon is really rather simple…there isn’t anything complex about it. It is user friendly. The level of knowledge needed to gain huge benefits from social bookmarking is low.
People do not have to be computer gurus to make use of the technology at all. The technology is so simple and the system is so easy to use that it will continue to grow in popularity into the foreseeable future.
Because of this inevitable growth of social bookmarking and the easily used tagging of such things as multimedia files, it may well be just as inevitable that the design and function of databases themselves will also change drastically.
They may have to change just to be able to accommodate this new way of managing information.
How is Social Bookmarking Affecting Education?
Teaching and learning are the two components of education. The objective of transferring information and knowledge from one person to another person or a group of persons is being greatly affected by social bookmarking.
The exchange of information and the coming together of like-minded individuals into loosely knitted online communities are both impacting education as a whole.
For so many centuries education suffered from slow communication. Today the internet itself has greatly speeded up communication and social bookmarking has doubled that speed in the last few years.
Social bookmarking has created a method whereby bibliographies, papers, etc. can be easily and quickly shared and accessed by multiple people at the same time. These same resources can be altered or edited in real time.
Tags: Folksonomy, Social Bookmarking, Bookmarking, Web 2.0
]]>According to Wikipedia, social bookmarking is defined as:
“Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others.
Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others - a personal knowledge management tool.”
Actually, the idea was first launched back in 1996 as ‘itlist’. Other similar sites quickly followed but that all went belly-up with the dot-com bubble bust in 2001. The idea is new again now with the advent of Web 2.0 and this time around it is thriving.
Who is Using Social Bookmarking?
In a word….everybody! Researchers have found social bookmarking sites to be an invaluable tool as they conduct research and find the need to share information about research with their colleagues.
Professionals like doctors, lawyers and engineers are using social bookmarking services in record numbers.
But social bookmarking is far more than simply a tool for research. People from all walks of like are using social bookmarking.
Users of popular websites like Friendster, FaceBook and MySpace have found that it is very easy to share information about websites that they find to be of mutual interest.
Networks of friends can be set up so that whenever a new posting is made to a social networking site other members of the network are notified immediately by RSS feed.
With all of this instant communication happening, you can see why those who are involved in Internet marketing are very much in touch with social bookmarking sites.
These innovative marketers join such sites as Friendster, FaceBook or MySpace and while they are having a lot of fun, they are also selling their products and services.
They are getting visitors to their websites. They are improving their PageRank. They have found that social bookmarking is one of the very best search engine optimization tools that have come along in a very long time.
Tags: Social Bookmarking, Web 2.0, Bookmarking
]]>However, staying in your comfort zone and refusing to expand your mind and your horizons can cause you and your internet business to fail.
There is an old saying (probably made up by someone who was afraid of trying new things) that says, “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.” Well, ‘it’ doesn’t have to be broken in order to be improved upon whatever ‘it’ is.
Candle light wasn’t broken but we are all glad that electricity was harnessed. Electric light is still light but it is certainly a big improvement over candle light.
New ideas come along every day in the world of internet business. Some of those ideas are even good ones even if they do reside outside of our own personal comfort zone.
In order to continue to invest in yourself, you must be willing to leave your own comfort zone. Just because what has worked is still working it doesn’t mean that there are not newer, better and more efficient ways of doing things.
Nobody is saying that new is always better. New is not always better but sometimes it is and the only way to tell which is which is by investigating new ideas yourself and then adapting the ones that can help you to your business.
Invest in yourself by increasing your knowledge and don’t be afraid of trying new things and new ways of doing things. These things really are the secrets of success and not just in the world of internet business but in life itself.
Tags: Increasing Your Knowledge, Success Mindset Series, Comfort Zone
]]>• Use travel time to invest in yourself. By using your iPod or your MP3 player you can use your travel time to expand your knowledge.
• Set your clock for a half hour earlier and use that time to read and learn.
• After you stop working in the evening, use your computer to search for new information and ideas.
Of course there are some things that are just going to take your time but you can choose wisely.
• Attend webinars and teleseminars that are directly related to your niche or your business.
• Attend real world seminars that are closer to your home and will require less travel time but will provide you with the information that you need.
]]>He generally gets his massive head phones on about half an our before the race begins then takes to the grid to mingle. He always looks like he is trying to do it in the fastest time possible, he always stands too close to the people he is talking to, you can tell he is being given the questions to ask in his big MASSIVE HEADphones as he never seems all that interested when he gets the answers. Yes he has a lot of F1 experience and yes he does add to the commentry while the GP is taking place, but seriously ITV he is not a good interviewer, get someone else to do it please!!!
Tags: Formula One, Martin Brundle, ITV, Numpty
]]>Behind the sleepy South Yorkshire town’s unflattering façade of closed pits, pound shops and warm bitter lies a surprisingly fertile music scene, with SUPERfreak as its brightest proprietors. The local college’s array of music courses bring dozens of aspiring musicians to the town every year, and these educational opportunities were the catalyst that brought SUPERfreak, the Anglo-Finnish federation of funk, together.
The nucleus of the group – singer Baggie, bassist Dave and drummer Bob, all from Bradford – had been chiselling at the coalface of groove in ever-evolving line-ups for a good couple of years, writing and demoing bewildering piles of original material but plagued by a lack of compatible compatriots to complete the ideas into fully fleshed-out songs. When the trio bumped into guitarist Ari, who, being from Helsinki, represents the Baltic region in the band, and keyboardist Chris, both music students with a background of playing in innumerable outfits, in jam sessions and various impromptu projects around the town it soon became obvious that the missing links in the band’s evolution had been located. Baggie remembers the celebratory moment in early 2003 when the band’s sound clicked vividly.
The Neptunes’s nasty funk-rock incarnation N.E.R.D. in particular is an outfit Superfreak feel they share some common musical goals with, although veterans such as diminutive funk-rock dynamo Prince and soul genius Stevie Wonder also get the band’s collective seal of approval. According to Ari, the band’s wide array of influences with variable personal favourites leads to some interesting and unpredictable outcomes during the writing process.
“We all have our individual preferences that come out when we work on stuff. I want dub with marimba, Dave goes for a Beck meets Squarepusher ballad, Chris opts for drum ‘n’ bass polka whilst Baggie wants to dance to it. It’s a mess, basically.”
“We hope that SUPERfreak gets the recognition we deserve. Recognition from everybody: friends, family, wider audience, venues, promoters, management and record labels,” Baggie summarises the band’s attitude and short-term goals, before finishing with a convincing sales pitch: “We are on fire right now. I just hope someone sees that and realises our potential.”
Find out more about SUPERfreak and their new Album on their myspace page… SUPERFreak
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