There is little doubt that social media is truly revolutionary, the 400 million users of Facebook, the glitterati-twitterati and the numerous bloggers who found celebrity by dint of their blogs, they will attest to that. Hence, as a small business, you will want to take advantage of this concept and try to get as much benefit out of it as possible, which in this case is marketing. While trying to do so, you would want to also ensure that you don’t come across as a desperate company that is bent upon hooking customers every possible way. The trick is to maintain a fine balance between marketing and creating brand awareness, without overwhelming them.

Here is a checklist that will help you work out a social media plan relevant to your business and also guide you in your efforts to execute it.

Know What You Want From Social Media: On social media, brand awareness can go in either direction. If your social media plans don’t pan out, you can end up with a lot of unwelcome negative publicity on your hand. So, be clear about what you want to use the platform for, and how you intent to achieve it. Do you want to use it as an instrument to gauge customer reaction, or would you rather use it as a forum your customers can use to air their views and grievances? Unless you are clear about your expectations, your social media plan in all likelihood will remain a haphazard exercise that will leave you with zero ROI.

Test The Waters: if you are one of those people, still mildly bewildered by the very idea of Social Media (really, there is no shame in admitting it), my advice to you will be to take things slow. Pushing too much promotional information into their followers’ signal stream is a mistake that most businesses new to the space end up doing. You can start by building a blog or creating profiles in the more prominent social sites to touch base with your customers, then slowly ease into your interaction model. The goal is to lure in potential customers and familiarize them with the product, try not to go trigger happy (or more specifically in some cases, tweet happy), and inundate your followers with messages they’ll be forced to label ‘junk’. Read the rest of this entry »

The other shoe has dropped. Google has officially made a foray into the realm of social networks. (No, now is not a good time to bring up Wave, which Sergey insists is a success – yeah, whatever you say, Sergey.) On 9 February 2010, they unveiled Google Buzz – “a Google approach to sharing”. And apparently, the only solution for the problem of ‘oversharing’ of social expressions on the web. It is but the natural course of events, considering Google’s we-need-to-have-a-finger-in-every-pie attitude. And web domination is not (quite) web domination without a social networking tool.

Coming back to the topic at hand, what exactly is Buzz? From what I can see, it is a robust, not to mention ambitious, email application masquerading as a social networking platform, which also doubles as an aggregator – of status updates, images, videos and links – all in the name of social curation.

Now, how does it work? In a clever move that almost makes up for the mess that is Wave, Google has released Buzz directly into Gmail. So, the next time you log in to your account (this is when I interrupt myself  to say that only Gmail users get to use Buzz), you may just find yourself with a spanking new Google Buzz account. No need to sign up anew, no installation of any kind required. Just click on the Buzz tab beneath the Inbox tab and you can get Buzzing. As Google reports on their official Buzz page, they are still in the process of rolling out this service, and it may take a couple of more days before it is active in all Gmail accounts.

When Buzz is active in your account, you’ll be taken to such a page when you log in.

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Social media had a smashing year in 2009. No one can dispute that. The web-wide popularity of social networks and social media sites reached a never-before high, and set the ball rolling for several revolutionary changes on the Internet. It is expected to do even greater things and touch greater heights in 2010. Let’s take a look at what social media experts think this year has in store for social media.

1. Social Media Will Get Real – The web is already beset by the real-time craziness, and I am so not overstating things. When real-time search debuted (on social media) last year, it was received so well that all the traditional search folks jumped to get a piece of all the real action. This year social media will take the real-time aspect on web one step further and work as a veritable web trend forecaster.

2. Social Media Marketing and Businesses – This year social media marketing will gather momentum as more and more businesses turn to this revolutionary method of internet marketing to promote their wares on the internet.

3. Social Media Vs. Email – The days when marketers almost exclusively depend on email marketing for all their promotional activities on the Internet will soon be over. This year will see online marketers choosing the very versatile social media with multimedia elements and nifty sharing options over emails.

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Over the past few months, some important changes have been underway at Facebook. Some are already noticeable when one visits the site, but there are others yet to become apparent. If you have no idea what I am talking about, come a little closer, I’ll tell you, “Facebook’s ditching its regional networks!” (I know, it’s no scoop, but did you really see that coming? If you subscribe to the Facebook blog, you probably did.)

My reaction to this revelation, though, is largely that of indifference, it doesn’t affect me one way or another. Probably because my activities on Facebook have never been network based, I have always taken care to set my privacy settings at ‘Only Friends’, which ensures that only the people on my friend list have access to my profile and the contents. And to be honest, except for the fact that it could possibly indicate the geographical location of a user, I’ve found the concept of regional network rather useless. In my defense, even Facebook admits (sort of) that these networks turned out to be pretty useless, apparently only 50 percent of the users ever joined regional networks.

Facebook first mentioned of a change in status quo in their 03 June post on their blog:

“…To make the site easier to understand, we’re taking the first step towards removing these regional networks…since they did not adequately reflect a world where people choose exactly the audience with whom they wish to share…made sense for those who wanted to be more open when Facebook was small, but they lost their utility as the site became global…”

In addition to frequently publishing posts regarding the matter on their blog, over the months, they have also maintained an active discussion thread for users to comment, air views and give suggestions.

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Some cool and interesting facts about Facebook:

1. 60+% of people online use Facebook to stalk their ex! Now are you one of them?

2. Close to a billion photos uploaded on Facebook every month! I’m sure many of these pictures are taken just to post on Facebook.

3. More than 300 million active users on Facebook! You’re not alone!

4. 30+ million profiles have their status messages updated at least once every day. Here’s a link to some funny facebook status messages.

5. 70% of college students on Facebook log in every single day, that’s no surprise now, is it?

6. Facebook deletes accounts of mothers or anyone who posts pictures of breastfeeding. So you want to be careful now about the pics you think of putting up!

7. Facebook deletes accounts with strange sounding names like “Leboe”, “Allien”, etc. Guess it’s do with their policy of not allowing fake accounts and them thinking these are not valid names?

8. There’s something known as a Facebook Addiction Disorder (FAD)! Wonder how many of you suffer from that?

9. Founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, is the world’s youngest billionaire! Mark’s surely made money off all of us.

10. Syria has banned Facebook (it’s a country [for those that don't know]), apparently to prevent an uprising of sorts by people getting together.

11. Facebook has ruined the careers of many a politician. More details about the political facebook scandals can be found here.

Credit to all these points must go to the original “Weird Facebook Facts” blog post, which covers each of these points in more detail. Facebook themselves have a page dedicated to some of their stats: Official Facebook Statistics

So how many of you identify with any of these? Your comments please!

5th November ’08 was a historical day for the U.S & the world for more than one reason.

First, it was the election of the first ever African-American President, Barack Hussain Obama.

Second, and perhaps a bigger change over the long term was the crowning of the Internet as the king of all political media. It marked the end of an era of television that started with John F. Kennedy & the beginning of the Internet Presidency.

Obama & his team did a commendable job in coming up with an optimum mix of offline & online mode of election campaigns. The telling difference between him and the other was that he made his presence felt not only on television but also on the Internet.

Here are the 3 amazing tactics that Obama so effectively used to get himself to the White House:

1. Online Fund raising: With the great number of people online, there was a huge opportunity for funds to be raised on the net. The Obama team recognized this and realized that it would be easier for people to make donations online and with a sum of money they would be comfortable with. This strategy appealed to many and resulted in 94% of the funds coming in sums of $200 & less. A million little donors became the way forward.

This way, the Obama campaign was not dependent on a few rich people who would donate only to get some influence in the government. But instead, successfully reached out to the common man through the Internet, which helped them raise a little over a whopping $600 million in contributions, which poured in from over 3 million donors.

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After releasing the Spanish, French and German versions of their site earlier this year, Facebook is has now introduced Russian, simple Chinese and traditional Chinese language versions of their site as part of its goal to unite different people together on a common online social platform, regardless of their location or the language they speak.

Still lagging behind MySpace, the world’s leading social networking site, and with this move to expand its services specifically targeting China – the world’s largest online market, Facebook will be hoping to match, if not exceed the popularity of its closest rival. Recent studies reveal that Facebook is growing at a faster rate and has in the past 2 months surged ahead of MySpace in terms of unique visitors.

Although a launch in the Chinese language has been on the cards for a while, Facebook also picked the right moment to capitalize on the immense amount of positive publicity generated in China following Premier Wen Jiabao’s debut on Facebook. In May 2008, Facebook users voted Jiabao as the 10th most popular politician.

Users accessing Facebook from China are taken to zh-cn.facebook.com. Now debuting in China, Facebook has plenty of challenges ahead, not least among them being the competition from local networks and China’s leading instant messaging service, Tencent.

With this Chinese launch, it becomes easier for online advertisers and internet marketers looking to make their mark in the Chinese market, to get directly in touch with their target audience. Facebook offers regional-specific ads that can even target a particular demographic. Previously this scope was limited as advertisers could only cater to the English speaking users of Facebook in China; however the market is now thrown wide open with the introduction of not one, but two Chinese languages.

It is estimated that over two-thirds of Facebook users come from outside the US. Facebook is using this knowledge to tap the potential for growth beyond the shores of its home country. As the latest studies indicate, it is only a matter of time before Facebook overtakes MySpace as the world’s top social networking site and this Chinese launch should only speed up that process.

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Social networking site Facebook is in for a complete makeover. Come July, all user profiles will undergo a change. Currently, the page layout is such that each profile opens on a single page, often looking excessively messy and cramped due to the large number of applications added. The more the applications a user has added to his account, the more difficult it becomes to navigate and manage the page. Besides this, pages with many added applications take a longer time to load.

It was mainly to combat these two issues – a cluttered, unmanageable page and the slow loading time – that Facebook designers decided to completely revamp the profile page. The new profile page will be sub-divided into 4 tabs, one for ‘Feeds’ or recent activity of the user like uploads and wall posts, one for ‘Info’, i.e., basic, personal, education and work info, another tab for ‘Photos’ including tagged photos and uploaded albums and a fourth ‘Applications’ tab for external or third-party applications.

Facebook also plans on shifting the navigation for Applications to the top of the profile. A drop-down menu is also provided from which to select the application of choice. However this design is still under construction and might change by the time the site is re-launched.

Initially scheduled for an April launch, the new-look Facebook will now be launched in July, giving designers enough time to go through the feedback received from users as well as developers. “Launching in July gives us more time to make sure we release the best possible profile design to our users and developers” states Pete Bratach of Facebook in the company blog.

We can’t help wondering if these new changes will be wholly accepted by developers of external applications. Since  a separate tab entirely devoted to applications is being planned, this could perhaps hinder their use. Currently, applications added by users, are displayed on their profile pages itself, making them clearly visible to visitors. This visibility increases the chances for an application to be added to a friend’s profile. However, when the redesign takes place and applications are relegated to a separate tab, chances are that this tab may be entirely ignored. This may not go down too well with internet marketers that develop specific applications for Facebook users to help promote their products and services.

With this major change on the cards, Facebook will be hoping that the new design makes it a cleaner, user-friendly, easily navigable website.  However what’s left to be seen is whether the companies marketing themselves through this popular social networking site will continue to profit from it, even after the proposed revamp.

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