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Step 3 - Social Web in a Nutshell
An increasingly popular and highly effective way of boosting your site's visibility on the Web is through social media sites; however, it can be quite overwhelming to undertake and challenging to manage unless you have the know-how and tools to do so.
Making your business profitable on the Social Web has everything to do with...
(1) Researching and participating in a community
(2) Gaining trust from others through your commentary and contributions
(3) Being transparent in your efforts
(4) Tracking and measuring your progress
 The New Face of the Web
Web 2.0, you may have heard of it or not, essentially describes this new social Web. The concept arose in the year 2004 and it explains the new version of the Web and how people interact, navigate, and communicate.
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Web 2.0 places a premium on technology that facilitates open dialogue, embraces creativity and imagination, media sharing, and broad-scale collaboration as seen at a site like Wikipedia. |
Naturally, along with this new Internet world comes the advent of a jargon which includes terms such as wikis, gadgets, podcasts, Atom or RSS formatted web feeds, blogs, vlogs, blogcasts, widgets, and the ridiculously popular social media sites like StumbleUpon, Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. Web 2.0 has also ushered in the era of video sharing sites like YouTube, Blinkx, Blip.tv, and Flickr.
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Social media sites will give your site lots of quality inlinks and multiple streams of traffic NONSTOP. |
If you’re not convinced at how huge these sites and communities are becoming, let’s take a more recent site called Hulu.com as our quick case study. Hulu was founded in March ‘07 by NBC Universal and News Corp and closed a $100 million investment from a private equity firm in October ’07 to see this project through to its completion.
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Have a peek at Hulu.com if you get a chance. Clearly, it’s very interactive, sleek, intuitive, and the polished product was born out of a Web 2.0 concept. |
Even Google tried to get in the social networking mix with their very own Orkut, which never really took off in the U.S. as they had hoped it would. Instead, what we're now seeing with Google is the very nature and mechanism of search itself becoming more social.
| With Google's SearchWiki feature, you can rank, delete, and make notes about search engine results, customizing Google to your liking. While you can see how other users have attuned their searches, remember that they can also read the notes that you share. |
And Google continues to release more free software, tools, and apps at a blistering pace as they trudge onward in their quest to organize the world's information. Meanwhile, the Twitter phenomenon is a micro-blogging platform that allows people and businesses to keep their followers posted with mini-messages - leading to a realm of unprecedented access and transparency.
The trend in search is indeed moving towards real-time interactions and dialogue. Don't be surprised if you see Google acquire Twitter in the near future. More...
 "All of this sounds interesting but WHEN do I begin?"
Dive into social media sites (1) ONLY after you've researched different communities and decided on where to participate and (2) ONLY when you have the resources to do so.
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Many companies are designating substantial time and human resources exclusively to improve their online visibility, reputation, and even customer service through social media sites. More... |
 Search for the right fit
This is the time that you'll set aside to scan the different communities out there to see which ones work for you. Social media sites have great potential to promote your content. The operative term here is potential and so you MUST NOT jump right in and start promoting your business. This could only tarnish your reputation if you don't tread these unfamiliar waters carefully at the outset.
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There are hundreds of social media sites out there with different flavors and each with a particular type of crowd. More...
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 What do you share?
- Tutorials or presentations (on a site like slideshare.net)
In your quest to disseminate socially-oriented content, you should always be thinking of ways to create new and interesting material. More...
 What is Social Bookmarking?
It's a Web-based system that allows individuals users to publicly or privately save links to web pages that they want to share or save for future reference. Users of a given social bookmarking site can view these bookmarks by tags, categories, chronology, or via search.
How does this differ from my bookmarking a page from my browser?
When you bookmark a page with your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, etc.) from your own computer, the purpose is to keep it in your own little place for future reference. A list of browser bookmarks can easily become unwieldy, disorganized, and very difficult to manage. More...
 Subscribe to feeds to automatically stay in the loop
Social bookmarking sites also offer feeds so that subscribers get automatically updated with the latest on each organized list of bookmarks. It tells them things like recently saved, tagged, and shared bookmarks and some services have added new functionality like comments, ratings, and the ability to import/export bookmarks from their own browsers. More...
 Invite users to bookmark your content
You can achieve this through text, icon, both, pop up or drop down. Also, you can grab and insert the code for the free AddThis Bookmark to your site. Take a look at Endo SEO's Top 5 Social Bookmarking Sites and how to use them. More...
 What are Social News sites?
Social news sites provide a similar system for the community to organize the wealth of content flowing into them. Users are able to vote and comment on stories that fall within a variety of categories. You must see Endo SEO's Top 5 Social News Sites and learn what not to do when using these sites. More...
 Widgets and Gadgets
Widgets are embeddable stretches of code that help you propagate your marketing messages in a lot of different places VERY effectively. These super popular widgets are also referred to as gadgets, plug-ins, snippets, or modules because it's something portable that can be inserted within the HTML of any web page. You can easily find them on home page sites like iGoogle or Netvibes. More...
Download the Opera browser and look at the separate tab for "Widgets."
 How do you create and distribute a widget?
Widgetbox is a site where you can create and host widgets and Gigya is one option for distributing them. Generally, widgets are third party originated; however, they can be made in-house.
For instance, it's totally free to create a Google gadget for your business and have users put your gadget on their sites. Alternatively, you may consider letting Endo SEO develop widgets for your company to boost brand awareness and track their effectiveness with widget analytics. More...
 Micro-blogging with Twitter
Twitter, an interactive search tool, is a rapidly growing phenomenon that allows you to address your targets in mini-messages (called "tweets"), each with a 140-character limit.
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One of the key precepts in marketing is to deliver your persuasive messages to prospective customers before your competitors get to them. |
Twitter expedites this process - it actually makes it instantaneous! Here are the pros and cons of using Twitter for your business. More...
Your experience with the social Web is about systematically making progress by participating in your selected communities, through testing and measuring the results from your efforts, and learning and adapting to new and exciting trends along the way.
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Unlock the full version of Step 3: The Social Web in a Nutshell to tap into a deep knowledge base of useful social marketing strategies. |
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