How I use "FACEBOOK"

What comes to your mind, when you think about Facebook. A “Social Networking” site with millions of useful and some not so useful users. Right!
Well I think the some way, and to be honest when first somebody invited me to join Facebook, I was “Why do I need Facebook” or “How is it useful to me”. But today, I want to take back these statements as Facebook had provided me the option to meet some great people, join some great groups and causes, networking, and also help me meet my friends from high school or kindergarten that I had never dreamt about.
Now the question is how I use “Facebook”

Well I use Facebook for both personal and professional purposes.

Personal:
•Communicate with friends: I do seriously want to know what my friends are up to and definitively they want to know what I am up to. So, Facebook provides that platform where you can communicate with your friends on daily basis and know who is doing what, where and when.
•Uploading my photos: I want people to know where I went for vocations or what I did on last Friday night with my friends. Facebook has this nice place where I can share my experience via photos.
•Joining groups and pages: I have joined groups and pages that I am passionate about and what I feel the public needs to know about. For example: Human Rights issue or Animal Cruelty. It is a great way of communicating with the general public, who share the same passion as you do, and you never know you might find some great inspirational people or communities.

Professional:
•Using Facebook groups for networking: One way to professionally benefit from Facebook’s huge user base and to grow your network is to participate in Facebook Groups. Facebook Groups allows Facebook users to connect, discuss and network with people of a common interest.
•Look for old co-workers and current connections: I found lot of contacts on Facebook. People have “Googled” me, and after a few emails to catch up we don’t communicate again. By adding these people to Facebook, I feel more connected to them without having to actively maintain a conversation via email.
•Join Groups related to your business interests: There are lots of irrelevant groups on Facebook, but there are quite a few that can provide useful information. Each group can feature a Wall (like a guestbook…a continuous scroll of messages) and threaded discussion lists. The best strategy is to watch and join the groups that your friends or colleagues are joining rather than trying to search for groups, as they’re share something in common, right?
•Look for events: It’s not all concerts. There are some opportunities for good, face-to-face business networking on Facebook. You can use Facebook’s built-in events application to see what events your friends may be attending and you might get a good source for networking for your business. For example: if you are a nonprofit, than you can attending cause related event.

In my opinion Facebook is a great platform that can help you both in personal and professional connection, and everyone in now adopting social media.

6 Things you should know about Online Marketing

Online Marketing has become an internal part of all the business today, weather it is a product company or a nonprofit. Today every organization needs exposure. In addition with the advancement of technology, where everything is on your fingertips it has become relevant why all organizations need online marketing strategy.

Here are SIX things you should know about Online Marketing:

Set Objectives: It is very important to set objectives for every online marketing effort. An objective enables you to accomplish a goal. Setting right objectives is critical for every effective online marketing involvement, as these objective serve as milestone in achieving the end goals.

Content and Design Investment: Investing in your content is also a very critical aspect for your online presence. The more you differentiate from your competitors; the better it is for your organization. For example: you can use specific keywords in your article or you can use images. This may also lead towards getting ranked higher on search engines and also make sure people can find information easily and quickly.

Marketing Tactics: Using right marketing tactics to get online exposure is very important. Your organization should use best suited marketing tactics, as these tactics will help you achieve your online presence. Some useful tactics can be:

- Partnership with allied organization

- Online paid media – example: Blog ads or Google AdWords

- Online outreach – example: Blogger Outreach (specified)

Follow Trends: It is important to be updated with the latest internet trends as it helps your organization to generate better working marketing tactics. It can also help you to enrich your corporate identity. For example: you can follow Mashable for all upcoming social media trends.


Active in Social Media: Networking is one of the key elements of online marketing. It is like a necessity for your survival. Becoming an active participant of Social media is a powerful strategy as it can help to get attention and also their no other low-cost promotional method to convert online visitors to real time customers. For example: Start a company blog, Create a Facebook page or a Twitter account.

Measurement: Measuring your efforts is equally important as setting online marketing objectives, because through these measurements we understand what is working or what needs different approach to become effective. Google Analytics is a very good to tool to measure your online marketing efforts. Google Analytics is a web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness.

I hope these tips are helpful, and lastly I want to say that everything takes time. So be patient.

Understaning SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO so called Search Engine Optimization is one of the top topics for all the website owners. And their ultimate DREAM is How can their organization result No. 1 on the search engines.

But first we need to understand what SEO (search engine optimization) is. Imagine a person from the 18th century going door to door to get the data behind building a monument. He then collects and organizes the data in the way he thinks’ will work, and then he makes the data available to the general public in an organized way. Google or Yahoo behaves in the same way. These search engines collects information from the site they think is good, popular and saves it. After completing the above mentioned task they makes it available to the general public in a nice and easy to read display. These are called the search engine results. But also remember that we also have to make the website “Optimized” and “Search Engine Friendly”.

Why Optimized: Because the website content has to fulfill the requirements of the search engine's criteria. What do I mean by this? I mean every search engine (Google or Yahoo) have their own set of requirements which leads them to determine which site should result on what page and what rank. It is not what we think is important,good or popular and what should be optimized but the search engines that thinks is important, good or popular.

Why Search Engine Friendly: With Search engine friendly I do not mean that your site entail having an all text because search engines love content? Or you have to stuff your content with keywords. It means that your site has to be constructed in a way that search engine spiders can easily access all the information as Google or Yahoo are not human.

Some Facts:

- 75 – 80% of the people stop on the first page on the search engines
- 5% of the entire count of the website around the world are actually and fully optimized
- One of the main source of getting your site optimized is getting referred from other websites
- Submit your sites to free online directories like GoGuide.
- Typically the earlier a site appears in a search result, the more traffic or visitor it will receive.
- Make you site for end users and not for resulting on the search results.

What Why and How of Social Media ???

Understanding social media marketing is so difficult because it seems to be so different. For decades, most of the rules of communicating with customers stayed the same. You figured out who you were going to sell to. You did your best to create a product or service that would have value for that target audience. And then you blasted out your marketing message in print, on billboards, on radio, and since the 1950s on TV.

But to know how social media marketing can be meaningful, let us first know what social media marketing is?

This is how I describe social media marketing - it is a social ice- cream. You‘ll thinking social media and ice-cream? What is the connection? Because I feel it is something to share and celebrate, it bring people together, and last but not the least , it can not only come from the you but can also come from friend and neighbors. According to Lloyd Salmons, first chairman of the Internet Advertising Bureau "Social media isn't just about big networks like Face book and MySpace; it's about brands/people having conversations

Why Social media?

Future of Advertising: Social media marketing is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic. There is no other low-cost promotional method out there that will easily give you large numbers of visitors, some of whom may come back to your website again and again." And do you know 63% of United States companies plan to increase their social media budget in 2009.

Powerful Tool: Social media marketing is a powerful tool, because you can learn direct from the customers, you get free customer review better than costly advertisement and it is a way to know what exactly the customers need. Social media is become a place where people can talk to each other, speak up his or her voice regardless of their age, sex and color without any interruption. Some powerful social media sites are:

· Face book

· Twitter

· You tube

· Digg

· Friend feed

· Stumble upon

· Readit

· Flickr

4 big secrets of social media marketing:

Be Remarkable: Be a person that people will talk about: Now how you do this: How you look (for example – I saw this person at twitter and he had the most wired picture, but because it was so wired it made me click on his account, how you sound – you should have a unique factor/voice (for example: you use catch phrase in your writing, people after a while would know that it is written by you. Make people identify you (example: they might identify you as an ice-cream maker who makes the best chocolate ice-cream in Los Angeles)

Be Fun – Social media is not about being stuffy, it about hanging out with friend. OK what do you do when you meet friend, you talk about fun stuff and not how boring you day was at school or at work. The whole ideas to make them comfortable, because the much you make them comfortable the more they will open themselves up to you. It’s not necessary that you have to be funny, but you can always pick up things from YouTube and post it.

Be Helpful and Supportive - Make people get over their fears. Be helpful, be supportive tell them it’s ok and prove it to them. People say I am trying but nothing seems to work up...tell them Thomas Edison tried to make light bulb 10000 times and he screwed p by 9999 times he did that... Be really supportive of your community and the people and they will be supportive to you.

Be Controversial - don’t worry about getting people annoyed if you believe in what you are talking about. Find people who agree with you. For example if you find something that is important and nobody is talking about, then you talk about it. It is a good way of being contervertional without too much risk. People might come up to you and say oh...man I wish I would have said that, that’s makes you appreciative for your effort. And if you drive few people crazy...it’s ok....because people will either love you or hate you. There is no money in the middle. So don’t be boring and centralist…it will just not work.

So what did we learn about social media?

Think of the social media as a platform for connection. As something that gives you a chance to be heard or read, even for a brief moment of a few hours. The people who are drawn to your message will visit your site and recommend it to others. In fact the KEY difference is that while many of the 'old' tools such as TV ads, radio spots, and coupons are ONE-WAY communication channels, social media is TWO-WAY. The future of social media is the future of the world.