Social Bookmarking: Give and Receive

Delicious is an easy way to save articles that have interest to you. The service walks you through how to add a button to your browser’s task bar so you can bookmark sites easily (A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization, p. 181).

You can also search for a bookmark by typing in certain tags. Tags are great ways to promote your blog and Website for bookmarking sites. The three main bookmarking sites include Delicious.com, Technorati, and StumbleUpon. These sites give individuals a great resource for saving documented articles and research.

The social web is about interacting, sharing, and collaboration not just self promotion. The ability to share useful information and interact with other social networkers will build the credibility that will help you in the long run. 

Facebook Pages

Creating and designing an effective Facebook Group Page is a great opportunity to bring numerous individuals together. Once you have created a your own custom Facebook profile you may create a page for A. local business B. Brand or C. Product.

Choosing the name of your Facebook page is very important (A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization, p. 149). The name of the page will determine how successful your page appears in the search engines.

One of the crucial sections on the page is the “Add information” which you must type in a detailed description about your business or product. This will allow individuals to review your page and determine the credibility of the page. 

Facebook Group Pages allow administrators to review feedback from fans and other Facebook users. These pages will allow fans to comment on the Page’s wall giving positive and negative feedback about the business or product.

Navigate Your Way

Many new users of Social Media and Web 2.0 struggle with creating new social networking sites. Reading different social media books such as A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization are great ways to learning the social media process.

Another great way to help your social media knowledge is to read blogs and other posts on social media sites. Navigating on WordPress.com and Blogger.com are successful ways to learn about social media and the ways it can help promote your business or brand.

Another great way to learn the social media process is watching different YouTube videos which many give you a step by step tutorial about certain sites. An example is this tutorial,  “The anatomy of a blog post” 

Spending quality time on different social networking sites is one of the best ways to learn and gain valuable experience. Sharing your knowledge with others and asking questions will help you gain credible support which can help lead you down right path for marketing your business or brand.

Measurement Options

Social media marketing has several benefits especially that the majority of sites are free to use. However, several marketing experts don’t understand that effective social media strategies take time and effort to learn. If individuals are more interested in how their website traffic has improved, a great tool of measurement is Google Analytics.

One of the first steps in measuring your social media presence is knowing what you want your social media strategy to accomplish. A few different goals might include:

*Increasing Website traffic, Driving Sales or new business, Monitoring brand awareness and Improving customer relations.

Quantitative and Qualitative measurements are the two ways to base the success off your strategy. A qualitative framework can include attention, participation, authority, and influence. A quantitative framework can include site traffic and sales. 

Widgets & Badges

Creating Widgets and Badges are great ways to to integrate different social media sites. Widgets are snippets of code, usually displayed graphically, that can be used to syndicate content, for example RSS feeds, or to add interactive features that user can drop onto their own blogs or Websites (A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 optimization, p. 222).

The two terms (widgets & badges) are used interchangeably in the social media world. However, Badges are typically look like a logo or icon while widgets are more complex and come in different styles.

WordPress.com sites are great ways to implement different widgets. Customizing widgets to display specific images along with color and size options and then copying the code and saving the widget is an easy way to add some creative widgets to your website.

Widgets are great assets to websites and blogs. Not only do they have valuable information but also effective ways to promote a product, service, or individual.

Digg It

There is no better social networking site to use for deciding the quality of an article, blog entry or Website than Digg.com. “This crowd-sourced news site allows its users to determine the popularity of a news story, blog entry, or Website through various types of voting or rating systems” (A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization, p. 185).

Digg.com allows people to see how many “diggs” a story has received. The amount of “diggs” usually has a direct correlation of how good the story is. The stories with the most “diggs” will appear closer to the front page of Digg.com. When researching particular topics, revert to Digg.com and look at the number of “diggs” a story has obtained. Those with numerous diggs will probably be the best stories to start with.

Digg can also be a great resource for bookmarking. Every story, article, blog , or Website that you digg will be stored into the My News section of your Digg account. I wish I would have known about Digg when I was looking for 20 websites for my annotative bibliography last semester. This would have been a wonderful resource to store my research.

You can also add your own content to Digg. When you get to Digg.com, click on the “Submit New” buttom at the top right of the page. This is a great way to create buzz for a story or article that you have found or even created. For all you research students and professional, Digg is a great tool and resource to add to your bookmarking strategies.

It’s not just a TWEET

In the last few weeks I have come to the conclusion that Twitter is not just a bunch of playful status updates. These updates known as “Tweets” have become a great way to connect with your followers and people you follow.

“The basic premise of Twitter is for people to stay in touch through quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” (A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization, p. 162)

Another great tool that applies with Twitter is Hash Tags. Hash Tags allow tweeters to hash tag words that are then linked to other users who have hash tagged the same word. Here is a great way to learn how to use this awesome feature on Twitter:

I have gained an additional 10 followers since I started inserting hash tags in my tweets. I have also received valuable information when researching certain hash tags such as #acl and #knee which I am having surgery in a few weeks. What a valuable tool!!!

Facebook: A unique source of news

It was the day that Michael Jackson passed away that I realized that Facebook was a great resource for breaking news. With the implementation of the newsfeed on Facebook, individuals can see other people in their network status updates. “Often called a mini-feed, this is where you can view lists of posts that others in your network have added to their profiles (and where they view yours)” (A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization, p. 138).

On June 25th 2009, I was scrolling through my newsfeed on Facebook and came across a status update that read, “The king of pop has passed away”. Others read, “I can’t believe it”, “RIP MJ”. I soon turned to the television and other Internet sites to realize that it was true, the kid of pop was dead.

Facebook is a great site to obtain national or breaking news. Another case was Hurricane Katrina. I saw several status updates that mentioned the Hurricane in some way. The Millennial generation has the potential to become social media literate and revert to sites like Facebook, Twitter, & WordPress as a main news source.

Evolution of Social Media

Social Media has come a long way when it comes to marketing a business, brand or individual. Sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Slideshare, Delicious, Digg and blogging all share some of the same characteristics and purposes but also provide unique services of their own for individuals. Social networking sites started as ways for individuals to connect on an interpersonal basis. Now individuals can connect in a whole new way by sharing information using, videos, hash-tags and links. “These networking sties are effective outlets for finding new customers and readers, but it is easy to find your message spread thin if you don’t choose the right strategy (p. 137). This phenomenon is evolving at a rapid pace as many marketers are discovering efficient social media strategies that will have a successful ROI. Measuring ROI for can be difficult but will determine the next step for businesses and the direction they take toward social media marketing.