Social Media

Search for the post you did on Digg and you would spend the rest of the day figuring out where the *@ll it went. End of the day you would assume that your post never got posted. Well, the fact is that your news or article did get posted. But Digg’s search engine was unable to relevantly sort it out. I am not the one to claim that Digg’s search was all screwed up. Daniel Burka of Digg recently accepted this fact. Read the full story

PALO ALTO, Calif., Facebook today announced that Donald E. Graham, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of The Washington Post Company , has agreed to join its board of directors next month. Read the full story

If you were a twitter IM addict, I have some bad news for you. After a long struggle to fix bugs and issues with Instant Messaging, twitter has finally accepted their short comings and have removed twitter messaging.

During recent months, twitter has been seeing huge traffic and popularity which its basic architecture was never prepared. Even after the development team trying out various fixes, the issues and bugs never seemed to fade out. It just increased!

And guess what twitter did? It removed IM functionality completely stating that it does not want to deliver a flawed product. Twitter would further work on improving the code, which is now open source and provide a flawless product.

Twitter is also encouraging third-party applications built using Twitter API to be used by Twitter IM users. However, except Excla.im, there are not much third-parties who have impressive applications created based on Twitter.

Following political criticism, YouTube has banned Videos related to weapons, guns and ammunitions for viewers from UK. The move is due to raising knife and gun crime among young UK residents.The Google owned YouTube is the most popular online video sharing website. Back in July, UK parliament members raised concerns over videos on weapons and intimidation. A committee was also formed to deal with protection of children against harmful internet content. The company requested sites hosting user-generated content to review all materials proactively as a standard practice before publishing on their websites.Home Secretary Jacqui Smith welcomed the move by YouTube and requested other internet sites to follow similar strategy. The rule on weapons and intimidation is the first policy change for a specific region by YouTube.Jacqui also added, “This is a real step forward. I would like to see other internet service providers follow suit to reinforce our message that violence will not be tolerated either on the internet or in the real world.”

The most famous application on Facebook is disappearing in many countries. A search for Scrabulous results in a message stating that “We’re sorry, but this application is not available to you. Please visit the Application Directory to find other applications.

Scrabulous, developed by the Agarwalla brothers had good popularity among the gaming community. However, it has created issues with Mattel who own the rights for Scrabble a similar game outside North America.

The Agarwalla developers commented in Facebook stating:

“Sometime on 22nd August, Facebook took the unfortunate decision to restrict most users from accessing Scrabulous. This was in response to Mattel sending them a “take down notice” on 14th August.

Mattel itself had approached the Indian Courts in February 2008, seeking an order for taking down Scrabulous from Facebook and other servers. The Hon’ble High Court has reserved judgment in this matter after hearing both parties. It surprises us that Mattel chose to direct Facebook to take down Scrabulous without waiting for the Hon’ble High Court’s decision. Mattel’s action speaks volumes about their business practices and respect for the judiciary.

It is even more astonishing that Facebook, which claims to be a fair and neutral party, took this step even though they were fully aware of the circumstances under which the Mattel letter was sent to them.

We now await the decision of the Hon’ble High Court and shall accordingly decide our future course of action with regard to Scrabulous.

We wish to thank our fans for their continued support and hope to give them the best results sooner than later.”

It looks like Facebook is removing the game one country after another.

Sphinn must have had too much spam submitters. Sphinn has made its new links on the site to have a nofollow attribute.

Spammers have been posting their links on the upcoming topics where voters can bring in traffic to their site. This Resulted in passing the page rank of Sphinn to its linked destination sites.

Sphinn came up with this idea in its Third Door Media meeting held in June. During the discussion, the issue with spammers and nofollow was discussed. This topic was brought to the moderators who then decided to have nofollow attributes for the site.

Experts feel though Sphinn has taken the right step to stop spam, this step can even kill the social media site. Sphinn would loose a huge amount of members who regularly post on the website. Some submitters would post good articles and also wish to have a link to the article for mutual benefits. These kind of submitters would be irritated and would no longer use Sphinn and might move to another social media site now that there are hundereds of other Social Media sites now available.

Social media is a powerful marketing tool to drive in traffic and revenue. Your marketing strategy should be based on your goals.

Finding out Your Community:

Once you finalize on a social marketing medium, try to find out the community were your targeted customers are located. Interact, inform and share your product features with them in a productive manner. Do not try to be too sales oriented. Instead, try to help the customer with his needs even if they are not interested in purchasing your product.

Increase Brand Visibility

Updates and features should be constantly informed to your customers. Provide as much information they would need and all the support they need. Make them write a feedback or review about your product. More positive reviews or feedbacks can get your brand great visibility and conversions.

Social Media Link Building

Update the news and articles that you post on your website to the top social media websites. This can bring in bloggers and also increase your external link strength. However, do not keep posting your articles on a single social media website. Instead, submit your articles to a number of social media websites on a circular basis.

Promote Your Product

The customer should be aware that your product is what exactly he/she wants and that you would provide them with all the support possible. This can be easily exhibited with your product descriptions, promotions and support given to your customers on social media websites. When a prospective customer finds out that the buyers are being assisted instantly they would be lured to buy your product if they are in need.

Though there is a lot of scope for direct marketing and interacting with the targeted customers, companies still hesitate and are unable to decide whether social media marketing would be a right strategy.

Facebook has announced that it would launch the new profile design to Facebook users by July 14th. The new design would be a beta launch and users would be able to view the entire site including the home page news feeds, application invites and notifications.

Facebook has requested its developer community to involve in the new profile design and to submit screen shots of the new profile boxes, tabs and publisher add-ons developed.

Some of the changes the new profile design would include are below:

• Wall: This is a new tab exclusively for wall posts and is simple to use.
• Feed: The Wall tab has been changed to include Mini-Feed stories as well as wall posts.
• Info: This tab was previously called ‘About” tab which can be used for static content like your personal information or the “About Me” section.

While search engine optimization has become a mainstream practice for any website, Social Media Optimization is considered a fairly new and unknown optimization field. Social Media Optimization can help hugely in search engine rankings and has a wider scope for fetching traffic and quality external links.

Create Tagging Option

The basics for fetching SMO popularity is to add bookmark plugins on your website, blog or forum so that visitors can easily tag your article onto their favorite search engines. There are a dozen plugins available if you have created your site on Wordpress, Blogspot or any familiar open source blog.

Create Opportunity to Link

The next important step is to create a platform which is interactive and interesting. A visitor should be impressed or drawn towards the page topic such that he or she wishes to bookmark the page. If your site is static and the content never changes for months, you should seriously consider an option to add a Blog to your website.

Promote Your Site Content

It is recommended to self promote your site during early stages. How are people going to know about your content unless your site ranks well for the specific keyword? Try promoting your site by submitting your feeds, pdf, videos and articles onto other related websites ultimately driving traffic back to your website.

Allow Syndication

Provide options for third-party websites to use your feeds. For this feature, you should have RSS feeds enabled on your website.

After working on tags, RSS feeds and external submissions check the number of bookmarks or tags for your website in popular social media websites like Technorati, Del.ici.ous and Digg. This can provide a clear picture on the popularity of your website on Social Media websites.

You can soon find the rankings increase when the tagging increases in these websites.

Social Media Bookmarks are becoming largely popular amoung blog users. A lot of simple customizable plugins are available on the Internet.

I did a research on some of the SMO plugins available. A review of the top social bookmarking plugins I found are listed here. I request you to read the descriptions carefully. Choice is solely yours. Read the full story