Recent surveys by Forrester and ComScore can teach us interesting things about the usage and worldwide distribution of social media. Forrester has mapped age, country and gender across seven types of social media users they’ve defined. ComScore has mapped social media penetration in world wide markets. Find out more: what social media user type are you? What types are dominant in your market or demographic?
Want to get serious about using Twitter to market your services? Need to measure how much impact a topic has on Twitter? Or just curious about your Twitter “performance” or someone elses? Good news: there are lots of analytics tool you can use to measure topics, followers, retweets and more. Some of them even provide you with free useful tools and widgets to integrate into your site or blog.
Are social media revolutionary engines? Are the Egyptian protests a Facebook Revolution? Is this why the internet was shut down in Egypt? I decided to investigate this claim by the mass media and gather some statistics on social media usage by Egyptians on the topic of the protests from within Egypt in the last week.
Why limit your use of Skype to the time you spend behind your PC? With these simple steps you can enjoy access to your contactlists, calls and chat on your desktop phone and mobile with your PC turned off. If you use Skype for business networking, you’ll find some suggestions as well. Learn more…
The new technologies emerging everyday from the world of web 2.0 markets are placing new demands on governments, businesses and individuals. Great opportunities and potential threats require new skills to deal with the constantly increasing “Openness”. Freedoms and responsibilities closely associated with an ever increasing transparency force people from all walks of life including business to come to grips with a new ethos as the accomplishments of the winner and runner up of Time Magazine’s Person Of The Year in 2010 illustrate.Are you ready for the new “Openness”?
Developing a website or service that enables web 2.0 social interactions and caters to mobile devices and other preferences of your audience can be either difficult or easy. Before you start off on a development rampage it is probably smart to make a few strategic choices that can save you time and money in the long run. These are some of them.
Professionals create a lot of specialized information that is locked within the organization and inaccesible to others. This could be much more of an asset then is currently the case for many organizations. Some suggestions and practical guidelines on unlocking the power of this knowledge for commercial purposes.
Android is a popular and fast-growing platform for web 2.0 enabled smartphones. Surprisingly: different smartphones and devices have different versions of Android pre-installed.Want to know which version is on your smartphone or want to install Android on your old Windows Mobile 6 phone? Learn more…
Is Mark Zuckerberg an evil genius? Is Facebook the defining entity of our times? There has been much talk about “The Facebook Generation” and the evil mastermind behind it. If the movie “The Social Network” is a true story then we can all rest easy: Facebook was just a mediocre idea executed to perfection and backed by the right people at the right time and initiated by a driven perfectionist.
Skype 5.0 is out of Beta and offers some great new functionality to manage your contacts, make (video) conference calls, group chats and keep abreast of your friend’s activity on Facebook. Where the Beta seemed somewhat unstable, the full version works like a charm. Learn more…
New Digg keeps annoying. Where we earlier reported they deleted your content with the transition to new Digg, we now find them auto-posting in your name. Determining for you which stories you Digg.
Five awesome social media plugins for your WordPress blog. If you have a WordPress.Org blog you have a choice of hundreds of thousands of plugins. Some of them work, some of them don’t, some are great, others are…crap. Read the reviews for some great Social Media Plugins or list your own favorites in the comment section.
Microsoft seems to be opening up to third party Social Media in a big way. With Outlook 2010 you can integrate Social Media account information for your contacts in new and exciting ways. When you open an email for example social media account info associated with the sender is displayed and you can befriend them straight from Outlook.This functionality is even backwards compatible with Outlook 2003 and 2007.
In order to activate this functionality for your Outlook installation you have to do 2 things…
One of the more innovative new features at Xing is called “The Mobile Handshake”. They also added powerful search and sort functionality, outlook integration, more (advanced) mobile features, share buttons and a toolbar. It is a thorough overhaul and offers great value for money if compared to some of the other larger social networks. But apart from the “Mobile Handshake” it seems Xing is not taking any big risks as in trying to be on the forefront of technology.
You probably have a Skype subscription or use some other VoiP (Voice Over IP) service. Now you have another alternative:Google Voice For GMail and Google Chat!It may very well be that this step by Google is a sign that the VoiP market for consumers is now maturing and will replace the landline and mobile infrastructures in the next few years. More cheap VoiP devices will be developed and cost of usage may be lowered even more dramatically. This will give home users and small businesses similar opportunities as have been around in the corporate market for years.Is it time to ditch your landline? Maybe (not). Learn more…
The problem with Google Wave is not so much on the technological side as it is in the distribution model.This month Google said it will drop the experimental service Google Wave.”Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” said Google senior vice president Urs Holzle in a blog post.Clearly Google Wave offers a promising combination of technologies, allowing you to chat, share, bookmark and collaborate in all kinds of other ways in a single stream of activity.Had Google taken a more open approach to the product’s introduction with many more third party plugins and options, more along the lines of Twitter’s business model, I think the product might have been a success.
Googling the term you’re after is just not enough. If you want to know where you stand in terms of brand awareness compared to the competition, you’d better have some tools to make it easier for you.Find some in depth search tools in this article. Multi-site trackers, tools to measure Twitter and Facebook activity as well as tools for bloggers. Learn more about them and try them yourself: they’re all free.
Yoono offers some great tools to stay upto date and know what your friends are upto on several social sites and IM’s. It also gives you a powerful capability to multi-post updates to these platforms. There is a desktop app, a browser addon and an IPhone app available. It’s a free service so give it a try.
Digg have recently updated their site with some great new functionality, making it a more complete platform. All of this is great ofcourse but unfortunately it seems they have discontinued the Diggs/History of Digg members.
With so many Social Media out there: create accounts for the right reasons. These twelve ultra short reviews give you the main capabilities and drawbacks of each site in a few sentences each and links to an instant network and relevant tools.Part III in a series.
With so many Social Media out there: create accounts for the right reasons. These twelve ultra short reviews give you the main capabilities and drawbacks of each site in a few sentences each and links to an instant network and relevant tools.
In this post you’ll find a dozen very short reviews of Social Media networks and tools: their advantages over other networks and capabilities that you may be looking for. You can immediately see an example of this by following the links in each review. If you are looking for an instant network on each site: feel free to join our groups on each of them to find other Social Media Explorers.
Widgets can be an excellent way to create some attention online for yourself, your site, your products or your services. Even if you’re not a skilled programmer or otherwise gifted nerd or guru of the web, widgets can help you get your message across because they are spread by others creating a viral distribution. But where can you find easy and effective tools to create and distribute them? Here are some examples we made with a great service that could have you create effective widgets in no time at all. Not inspired? Check out the hundreds of widgets on our free network…
Internet in general and Social Media in particular hold the promise of a sense of frictionless and effortless movement through a world without obstacles between you and your success: but are they? Here are some easy shortcuts to avoid financial, social and technological obstacles and turn them to your advantage.
Every sales person could tell you that a client gives of signals and that those who know how to play into them could sell a refrigerator to an eskimo. But: do you really want to sell fridges to eskimos? Wouldn’t you rather control which precise audiences you target? A well defined target audience could be the solid basis of your organization’s success. But it doesn’t stop there…What about Social Media?
What are decisive factors in the success or failure of an unknown brand? All of us have had to make the decision wether or not to buy a service by an unknown brand: what are our motives in doing so or not? What causes the sudden rise of an unknown brand such as easyjet? If you’re wondering how to successfully launch an unknown brand yourself or want to look more explicitly at your own buying behaviour as a consumer of services: read the Unknown Brand Poll. Our small panel of highly trained professionals might give you some insight in your own (sub)conscious decisionmaking and in the ever changing commercial landscape around us.
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