Web Design Development Articles

LinkedIn is the perfect place to feature your group. It’s easy to set up and manage a group. You can create a specialized community of like-minded folks who can interact and create even stronger networks among themselves. Not only can you invite folks from your own network, but you can reach out and find others within the larger LinkedIn network who might enjoy being a part of your group.

Here are a few helpful tips and tricks for your LinkedIn group:

Groups are designed for interaction - for the benefit of all. As a member of a LinkedIn group you can change your settings so that you can allow fellow group members to contact you without using a referral. Go to your homepage to modify your settings.

When you create a group on LinkedIn, any and all communications within the group are your responsibility. LinkedIn will never send any communications to your group.

If you’ve got a large group to manage or if you just need some extra help, now you can easily add a manager to your group. After logging in to LinkedIn, go to your group and click Manage. Then click on My Groups. Select Managers. You’ll be able to quickly add or delete managers. If you want to add a manager, he or she must already be a member of the group. The person you add will also be able to manage the group from their own LinkedIn homepage.

If you manage a group and you were wondering how many members you can have, the default group size is 1,000 members. As with most things, there are exceptions. If you want to request an increase in your group size, you can put in a request by contacting customer service.

You can pre-approve members to join your group - even if they aren’t currently members of LinkedIn. When they do join LinkedIn, they’ll automatically be invited to join your group.

If you have put together a list of pre-approved folks for a new group you’ve created (in .csv format!), be sure to keep it to 100 rows or less. LinkedIn will automatically check the people on your “request to join” list against your pre-approved list. You can still manually approve folks who are pending.

LinkedIn groups are a great way to keep in touch and share information with your group members. Use these tips to help get the most out of your group!

There’ s no question that Twitter has become the next big thing in internet social networking. Yet to this day, less than 10% of North American internet users actually “Twitter.” But unique visitors the Twitter website has grown over 1300 % in one year.

So what exactly is Twitter?

Twitter is an automated service for sharing of short 140 character communications. Why 140? So that you can send “tweets,” or communications from your cell phone as well as your computer. Most celebrities have a twitter channel as part of their marketing and promotion. And now businesses are seeing Twitter as a business tool.

Some feel that Twitter is just a vehicle to kill time, filing any moment with useless drivel. But does it serve a deeper need?  Moses Ma, writing in Psychology Today believes it does. He says that we are living in a culture starved for real community, which is a message that Robert Putnam gave us in Bowling Alone. Our brains have been biologically hard-wired to operate within a social community, but the industrial age and its extension, free market capitalism has weakened those bonds. People are compelled to tweet, facebook, and to email as well as meet face to face, because they crave social connection.

The critics of Twitter would argue that it is a near perfect example of an intermittent variable reward, a key addictive element of slot machines, and Twitter can trick the brain into thinking its having a meaningful social interaction when you actually aren’t, and finally, Twitter can add to the already recognized problem of overwhelm through multi-tasking, reducing your ability to perform.

The proponents of  Twitter would argue that Twitter, like all social networking, aims primarily at social needs, like those for belonging, love and friendship. At  higher level, Ma suggests, Twitter is related to self-esteem and social recognition. Twitter allows normal people to feel like celebrities. You get a following, and people “like you.” Dr. David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist at the University of Sussex argues that Twitter helps people feel less insecure.

So do people use Twitter to self-actualize, the highest human need according to Maslow? Deepak Chopra and Tony Robbins and scores of other personal growth and spiritual gurus have twitters. Or are they just exercising a new form of smart marketing and promotion of their products?

One way to look at Twitters is what is the impact if you participate. Are you just adding to the crushing weight of spam and useless garbage already out there in cyberspace, or are you participating in  great planetary social experiment that will help us all evolve into better human beings?

Ma would argue that being in the “twitterverse” is like a rive of human awareness, composed of billions of 140 character molecules, each a snapshot of life or thought or reflection, and that river of pure information equals energy in the quantum universe.  And therefore it is a good thing.

Given that as a background, will Twitter go the direction that Facebook is now heading, and become a new vehicle for business marketing and promotion, and the distribution of unedited news and information?

World Wide Web, the word which does not amaze many! In fact, it is like a pair of shoes, everyone’s wearing it. Everyone’s having a website nowadays! From the time, when the hyperlink was an invention and Tim Berners Lee’s notebook program contained such links in 1980s till today, we had countless advancement in the way we use web. From text to pictures, the experience was enchanting throughout. Just before a few years, we were still feeling excited with the multi-colour images loading in pieces on the website. Web world has gone far in a short period.

As it is called, Web 2.0 is a second generation of web design and development and the idea behind is security of shared information, interoperability, smooth communication and the synchronized WWW. We have been viewing pictures, videos and also interacting with applications on web. Web 2.0 is taking us to the next level, with web-based communities, applications, social networking, video-sharing and streaming, blogs, encyclopaedia and what not!

Bringing uniqueness and sophisticated web experience to the users, is the main advantage of Web 2.0. Although, simplicity has always been attractive and that is also an added feature of Web 2.0 Functionally, it is highly interrelated and interactive amongst the web contents. Users are closer to the application and more involved where users can literally own the data and they do have significant control. Adding values to the design and flow, content modification, and running the application from the browser itself are the main benefits you could derive from Web 2.0. Along with that, Web 2.0 is a technical innovation which allows, thorough searching, link management, tags, extensions and feeds to utilize the web capacities.

Be it the most popular blog roll - Wordpress, the most efficient photo engine - Flickr, the coolest video site - YouTube, or the hottest community - Facebook, Web 2.0 is almost a synonym to success and popularity. What it gives is a prolonged experience for anything you are doing online. Faster registration, non-reloading activities, integration of external modules and creating your own modules with a push button - endless things are being innovated by exploring this technology. But let us take a look at the other side too, as the internal concerns are not less important.

There are a few concerns related to Web 2.0 library service and the professionals see them as the barriers to implementation of Web 2.0. Saleability, support issues, longevity and commercialization are some of those issues which really need to be considered. But at the end professionals have to take risks and try their hands on. As you use it more, you derive the do’s and don’ts from it. All you can do is look for the users’ review, feedbacks and everything which can provide the way to choose correct approach which works for Web 2.0. Although it will be a bit early to conclude whether Web 2.0 has established more success than failure, let us keep our eyes on the changing technologies! We might be discussing something more important in a short time, who knows!

There has been a lot in the news lately about social networking and the popularity of social sites online, such as Facebook and MySpace, Ning, Twitter, and more. How is a small business owner, overwhelmed with the various hats they are required to wear supposed to know which site is best for their business, or even if it’s necessary to even be on a social site? The choices facing small business owners can almost seem overwhelming, and different networks pop up almost on a monthly basis. It’s easy to get lost in the crowd, or worse, to lose control of how you’re presented in this new social media. Plus should employees be allowed to broadcast their affiliation with your company to their social network?

The very first thing to do is relax. Social networking is a lot like networking at an after hours business function. It can be more, but until you develop a plan, just visit with people and find out about them. A social network can be a great place to develop business connections, but it can also be used to create a forum for your customers to comment on your business, on your service and be used to promote other buying opportunities. Managing your social network doesn’t have to be a chore, but it is one more duty that should be taken very seriously.

Take Facebook for example. What started as a way for college students to interact with each other in an online environment has evolved into a forum where you can reunite with high school buddies, discover like minded individuals who read what you read, watch the shows you watch, shop where you shop and listen to the same kind of music. Think of it as a way of finding peers in your niche group. Now how can you apply that to your business? Easy, just find people interested in your product, and then educate them on it. Don’t sell. Never sell. But there are ways to educate your audience to predispose them to thinking about you the next time they want to buy a product like yours.

Social networking is a great way to find evangelists for your product. These are customers who go out and “preach” about the virtues of what you offer. They don’t do it for pay, they do it out of love for the product. It’s your job to give them something remarkable to talk about, even down to their experience on your social site. Allowing customers to connect to each other and exchange stories about your business may seem scary, but they are doing it already. By giving them a place to do it online, you can stay tapped into the conversation, perhaps even participate in the conversation, and if necessary, solve problems. There are dozens of applications for social networking you can use every day, including Twitter. Twitter is the latest “what are you doing?” feed that keeps you in the loop on what your friends or network is doing. You can twitter coupons, twitter specials, and even more via that particular social network. Just remember not to abuse the privilege of communicating with your customers.

Social networking is tough. It can be a landmine of etiquette and what’s right or wrong, plus how the interaction will work for your business may be different from your business neighbor. A smart business owner will use the services of a professional online marketing company experienced in social networking and the in’s and out’s of marketing to reach the market in the best way possible. If you want to save time, money and not waste effort, then use a professional to develop your social network presence.

Social networking is the new black. It’s huge, and it’s not too surprising that it has already been exploited by commercial interests. This is a shame. It seems that every time someone comes up with a new site to “make friends and chat” it gets taken over by commercial interests keen on finding a new way to make a buck.

A whole new raft of “Social Networking Marketing Consultants” has sprung up like the little fleas on the bigger fleas to help businesses sell more though this medium, whilst at the same time developing their own careers.   There is no doubt that a great deal of business will be done through this route. At its simplest level the premise is that customers will make buying decisions based on recommendations offered by the social networking community. The idea is that a “personal” recommendation is more persuasive than the conventional sources of information from advertising and promotions alone.

This new fad has not escaped the providers of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software who are now rushing to see how they can integrate the social networking sites into their business sales and marketing software.   Can I be the only person on the planet who sees this as a largely pointless exercise in the Business to Business world?   If I look at my own customer database less than 5% of the contacts are Jo Public, the rest are Businesses.

The reality is that I can now go to a named contact in my database and have it automatically pull related information from social networking and other web sites. Now updating my contact records with qualified, meaningful data such as stock market price, business news, or such-like can undoubtedly add value, but linking social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter is unlikely to bring much to the table.I may be fascinated to know that Tania of Manchester is having cornflakes for breakfast, or that Stephen Fry is currently walking through Horse Guards Parade (he actually is, apparently) but unless I’m planning to sell Tania cornflakes or Stephen Fry an A-Z map of London the information is of no value to my business and frankly I want it nowhere near by carefully developed and lovingly maintained CRM database. Let’s face it, most of what is written on social networking sites is banal twaddle.   I’m sure there is money to be made out of exploiting the social networking sites, but for those of us in the B2B environment they are of little more than a distraction to the real work in hand.

Attending live events can be an important way for you to excel in your field. But did you know that you can actually make quite a bit of money by doing so? I went to a number of seminars and conferences before learning how to turn them into profitable events.

Once I learned exactly what to do, I began to make money and find prospects before the event ever began. Now that Twitter and Facebook are used daily by hundreds of thousands of people, you can use someone else’s event to promote what you do online even more easily.

You will want to start creating a buzz about the seminar or conference you will be attending about one week before it is scheduled to begin. I like to tweet about it, using the hash tag that the event coordinator has assigned to it. A hash tag is simply some letters and numbers that are assigned to your event so that people can follow the conversation and get to know each other before they arrive.

You will want to arrive the afternoon before the seminar starts. This will give you a chance to relax and change clothes before you go down to the restaurant or lounge to look for other attendees. If you already know what they look like, because you have heard them speak before or seen them online, go up to them and introduce yourself.

The following morning I like to register as early as possible. This gives me the opportunity to walk around and meet the other attendees as they are registering. I then choose a seat near the back of the room. I have learned that this is advantageous if I want to be perceived as a professional who is there to both learn and to network with others.

You will also want to have separate business cards made for each event. Once I started doing this I connected with more prospects and prospective clients than ever before. It is amazing to me how much money I was leaving on the table before I learned all of this and put it into action.

I now attend about six to ten seminars or conferences each year, and make more money from the people I connect with than I could possibly make by simply marketing on the internet. I encourage you to make a direct effort to learn how to set up your own strategy for profiting from live events you attend.

Many of us are getting addicted with social networks. It is an addiction, which will one day become as bad as alcoholism. Lives will be destroyed because of this disease and families will break up. Am I joking or what? No, I am very serious about this issue that will soon takeover as the main cause of lifestyle issues.

Are you one who will get affected by social networking? Let us find out.

Time - How much of your time is spent on social networks?

How much of your time is devoted to useful work that of quality and gives you material results? How much is your total work time? How much time do you spend with your friends and family? Make a estimate and write it down. Now find out how much of your time is spent on social networks every week? At what percentage lever should you get worried? This exercise will tell you about your time spending habits and may also give clue about relationship strength, work achievement and other such issues.

Quantity - How many social networks have you joined?

There are about fifty social network sites that have substantial membership. Are you a member of only one site that you had joined when you began or do you join every new network that pops up? Do you keep a track of which network is doing well and shift there immediately or keep your faith in your old network? There are people who join networks because somebody said that it was most popular? Some join a network because a friend joined. Some join a network because it is a subject specific? All of us have our own reasons to join a network. Before changing networks or adding more ask one simple question- what do I wish to achieve on this network? Is it to connect with friends? Is it to develop business? Or is it only for some fun? And ask another question- does my goal help improve my lifestyle?

In the second part we will look closer at the goals we hope to achieve by joining social networks.

There are tons of web 2.0 websites, but the one that really stands out is Squidoo. Squidoo is basically a web 2.0 site, where you can create multiple lenses, about almost anything. The great thing about Squidoo is that it’s really loved by Google. By this I mean that if you use Squidoo in the right way, you could end up high in the search engines and get tons of visitors to your lens. More visitors, means more money!

Here are 5 tips, that will help you make money from Squidoo:

1. Before you create a lens you must search for low competition keywords, this will increase the chance of your lens ranking high in the search engines. Less competition means more money for you.

2. Always optimize your lens with a lot of relevant tags. This will help you get noticed by Google and it will give you higher rankings.

3. Make your lens look nice. The first impression is always important, if you make a nice clean lens, you’ll increase the chance of converting your visitors in sales.

4. Try to build a lot of back links to your Squidoo lens. You can use other web 2.0 properties like Blogger, Weebly, … This will make your lens stronger and your lens could possibly rank higher than all the rest.

5. This is the most important tip! Always try to update your lens, just update your lens once a week and you’ll be alright. When you update your lens it will not disappear from the first pages of Google. Google loves new content, so be sure to update your lens with new modules every week.

So what’s all the talk about Twitter?

This site has been featured in a lots of places and is now pretty high profile but a lot of people still don’t know what “microblogging” is . Well I can tell you it’s great for start up business and freelance consultants.

So why is it worth giving this some thought?

Well, here are three reasons:

• It’s a useful way to share your messages and you interests
• It’s a good way to communicate with potential customers and partners
• It’s also a really useful place to go to research your market

It works by people posting ‘microblogs’ (up to 140 characters only) called ‘tweets”. But to maximize the usefulness of Twitter for your business, you should to understand how to find people to “follow” you and how to get “followed”.

Here are three ways to connect with people:

1. Go to Twitter Search, and enter the words related to your product or business into the search area. Twitter Search will show you the “tweets” that include all those words, as well as the people who use them. Then click to their profiles, and check if they are people you’d like to “follow”!

2. Check through the “Follows” and “Following” lists of the profiles of anyone you follow to see if you spot anyone you want to follow!

3. Check the conversations in your Twitter stream You can see who people are talking to from the “@NameHere” in each tweet. If you see people having an interesting exchange, follow them, or get yourself involved in the conversation by using the @ function yourself! If you see an interesting tweet, you can reply automatically by clicking the little arrow within the tweet box.

Once you have followed some people, you can make your Twitter experience more enjoyable - and to connect more effectively with other users!

1. Don’t request that people to follow you: People who do this others don’t usually succeed at getting ANYONE to follow them. Try to be interesting and informative and be responsive to others… people will follow you if they value how you use Twitter

2. Sharing information - Do not make pitches for your products and services: As with any social media platform, as in business, you want to build credibility and good relationships - instead of always asking people to buy from you

3. If you see someone post a link you like, “re-tweet” it: - just copy their message paste it into a new tweet, and add ‘ RT’ at the beginning. This is a good way to show someone you value what they have to say … by sharing it with your community.

4. Watch how other people use Twitter: A useful way to figure out your place in a community is to follow those people you admire.

That should be enough to get you started! Make sure to follow me.

How I got Banned from Facebook

When I was booted, I received no email, no msg, no confirmation. Just a generic link to the Facebook Terms of Service. For 3 weeks, I received no responses to any of the Facebook email addresses for disabled accounts. And then 3 weeks later, I get 1 email (see below), and my account is turned back on.

Since Facebook is a we-learned-from-myspace’s-mistakes kind of site, they are super, super, super paranoid about Spam. So the have a few strict published rules like:

1. No non-person profiles (you have to make a “fan page”).
2. No porn.

And then, they have serveral internal rules, which will cause you a lot of frustration if you don’t know about them.Those internal rules are:

1. No repeat messaging.
2. No over-inviting.
3. No scraping (copy/pasting emails from facebook).

Overall, I agree with these policies. Here’s the problem: They can’t manage 6 billion people’s behavior. No freaking way. So they have all these little internal Facebook Robots that are set to attack upon certain conditions.There’s no robot that can tell a business profile page from a personal profile page, which is why businesses still have profile pages. They can’t write a robot smart enough to figure out real person names from busines names. But for all their internal rules, here are the Bots!

The Facebook Robots

After researching other Facebook bans, here’s the robots I know about:

1. The Inbox Protector Robot: If you send messages to too many people using the compose tool within a 24 hour period, this robot boots you from facebook after you send to certain magic number of people. He causes problems when you are communicating the same information to a large number of people who really want the information.

2. The Friend Protector Robot: If you click the “Add a Friend” button on too many people within a 24 hour period, this robot boots you from facebook. She causes problems when you really do need to connect to a large number of people in a short period of time.

3. The Scraper Robot: If you copy (Cntl-C) information from too many friends’ profile pages within a 24 period, this robot boots you from facebook. He causes problems when you are not a spammer, but need key information from your friends’ pages.

4. The Anti-Porn Robot: If you post inappropriate material that gets flagged, this robot boots you from Facebook. She causes problems when you have a profile set to Adults only and someone still flags you, or if you are flagged by a jerk.

How Long Till You Get Back on Facebook

The best part is that the robots are set on timers. So after exactly 3 weeks, your profile is automatically turned back on. The email is signed from someone in Support, like “Bob.” I’m sure that for each bot, you receive a different kind of message. This is a generic email programmed to be sent out when they automatically turn your profile back on.

How to Avoid the Robots

You will get a Warning message as you approach the limit on the number of messages or friend invites. Heed that Warning! That Warning is also a cue to the timer in the robot to start watching you. If you proceed to hit okay, everything will seem fine for a little while, then suddenly, your login ability will be taken away. And you will have gotten banned.

How to Play with the Robots

You can safely test the waters by continuing to add friends (maybe 50 or so) until you get the Warning message. When the Warning appears, hit Cancel, do not hit Okay. Then, do not add any more friends for 24 hours. This will successfully navigate you away from the robots, and allow you to continue with normal profile activity. If you try to add a friend later and you see the warning, you’ll know that it hasn’t been 24 hours.

I suspect the Robots will continue to get smarter, and eventually control your every thought. In the meantime, you can enjoy playing with them on Facebook.

For more business coaching, contact Mark Berry at mark@littlelovecoach.com