As we battle a global recession, corporations are looking for new ways to sell their products and engage their consumers. Many have turned to the Internet, with Social Media in particular, to market their goods. Let’s take a look at 5 companies that have done a phenomenal job of taking advantage of social media platforms.
In 2008, Twitter really started to hit the mainstream and bloggers began adding widgets to their sidebars to display their latest tweets.
In 2009, Twitter will become much more tightly integrated with the rest of the blog in a variety of ways – watch out for tweetbacks and tweetstats to make their debut, and tweet comments to TwitterRolls to start appearing on blogs. Here are 10 ways Twitter will impact blogs this year.
This is pretty cool. It not only tracks how many people follow you on Twitter, but also show a graph for people that have followed you over the week. It gives predictions for the following day and the next month. I don’t know… think I can hit 312 by the end of January?! That’s about 300% increase, right? Let’s do it. Follow me!
Tomorrow I’m attending my first Lifework2.0 conference being held here in Franklin. I’m pretty excited about it. Randy Elrod & Spence Smith will be teaching on the following topics:
Blogging 101
Where do you start?
Why Blog?
Why Should CEO’s, companies, churches, and artists blog?
Maximizing your brand through blogging.
Blogging Content
Advanced Blogging
The technical side and how to manage it.
Driving readers to your blog
How to keep readers coming back to your blog
Using You Tube and other video outlets
SEO – How to maximize Search Engine Optimization without paying monthly for it.
Why Search Engine Optimization is a must
Using Twitter and FaceBook to build an online community
Social Networking as a marketing tool
Customized social networks
Creating an easy path for your readers to keep up with your daily life.
When: Dec 4, 2008 9am – 5pm / Where: Building 8, The Factory 230 Franklin Road Franklin, TN 37064 / What To Bring: Your Laptop / Cost: $250.00 / Seating is limited! Register HERE
A while back I synced Twitter to Facebook so my tweets would update my Facebook status. Seemed pretty nice.
Well, today I took it two steps FURTHER! (I know, right?) I added a Twitter widget to my website (See right) AND synced my website to Facebook. So now the good people of the world can ready my blog on Facebook and read my Twitter updates on my website AND Facebook.
The circle is complete!
About two years ago I decided to start a blog. It was called Utobia and it was home to rambleings and creative findings. It’s where creativity came out to play. I started it on Blogger as it was free at the time. I then changed over to WordPress and launched Utobia2.0. Same blog, different look and back end mechanics. Shortly after that, I launched tobysturgill.com, a sad little portfolio website that housed my previous work and contact information.
I was never truly happy with my professional site. It was static, uninteresting and boring. Not a true reflection of me at all. Plus, I had no way of tracking traffic or seeing who was coming and going. Meanwhile, Utobia2.0 kept getting all the attention and momentum. In just a few short months, I had already gotten 1,000+ hits. Then it hit me… why not blend the two into one website. Far greater reach with the same amount of frequency. Imagine what that kind of exposure can do for business!
Enter the new tobysturgill.com. Staying with WordPress as the back end, I snagged up a template from a third party designer, made some minor tweaks, called tech support three times in two hours (because I barely knew what I was doing) and by the end of the weekend I had this site up and running. Now my business is exposed to the daily traffic of my blog.
Professionally, there’s nothing wrong with using a blog-based platform for a website. It’s easy to update and virtually free. Stuffy, static web pages are a thing of the past. Sites that haven’t been updated for a few months run the risk of being out of date and irrelevant. If there’s something I’ve written that they like, then they post it on THEIR blog or site with (hopefully) a link back to me. New people then come to see my site and learn that they can hire me. Plus, WordPress plugins make tracking and trafficing very easy.
It’s the same reason why Twitter is so important. Constant contact and communication. Micro-blogging, if you will.
I want to be an early adopter, but better yet, I want to be influencer. So that means not standing around and waiting for a majority to catch onto things. Is a blog-based website unconventional? Sure. Are a lot of people/businesses doing it? Not yet. Does that make it bad or any less professional? Absolutely not.
It’s official. I’ve jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. Follow me at @tobysturgill.
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.
Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. For SMS, four gateway numbers are currently available: short codes for the United States, Canada, and India, as well as a United Kingdom number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email.
As of July 2008, over 2,200,000 accounts were registered.
Twitter began as a research and development project inside San Francisco start-up company Obvious in March 2006. It was initially used internally by the company’s employees, and officially launched in October 2006.
The service rapidly gained popularity: In March 2007, it won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category. Jack Dorsey, widely acknowledged as the man behind the concept of Twitter, gave the following playful acceptance speech at SXSW: “We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!”
In April 2007, Obvious spun off the service as a separate entity under the name Twitter, Inc., with Jack Dorsey as its CEO.
HT: Wikipedia
My dream is to be part of something bigger than myself and to influence culture for the greater good.
