WP Google-buzz: Add Google Buzz To Wordpress
Google Buzz generated quite a buzz in the past week as it was Google’s latest effort to take on Facebook and Twitter. The service sits on the top of your Gmail account and lets you connect with friends and others. It’s not as polished as Twitter and Facebook by any means, but it does give you a chance to connect to more people and let your content go viral. In fact, if you have a Wordpress blog, you can easily add your blog posts to Google Buzz. Thanks to WP Google-Buzz, you won’t even have to write a line of code.
How To Get More Out of Your Community with Wibiya
So you want to build your very own super community? One of the best ways to do that is by creating your own blog and adding only top notch content to it. That’s simplifying the matter. If you are passionate about blogging and take the time to engage your community and provide them more value, there is no reason you can’t grow your community and move your blog to the next level.
One of the best ways to get people more involved on your blog is by giving them a way to communicate and connect with your other online presences. Let’s say you have a fan page or a Twitter account for your blog. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get your blog visitors to connect with you on Twitter and Facebook as well? That’s where Wibiya comes in. It’s a cool toolbar system that you can install on your blog to communicate with your visitors more effectively. It comes with all kinds of apps that you can add to your toolbar to bring your online presences to your toolbar without too much trouble.
Wibiya is one flexible service. It not only allows you to add all kinds of widgets to your toolbar, it also makes it possible to run these apps from your website, hence keeping the visitors’ attention on your blog and your content.
Build a Social Media Bar with Skysa
In case you have been surfing the Web a lot lately, you may have seen those sites that take advantage of footer bar to promote social media profiles and related RSS feeds. Thanks to services such as Skysa, you can build your own social media bar and give your visitors more ways to interact with your website and connect with you on social networking websites.
Skysa footer bars essentially add a task-bar to your website. So your users can open up different windows on your website and even join your chat-room. Designing your own Skysa is not that difficult. All you have to do is provide your information and pick the design you feel fit your website’s layout the best.
FollowBase: Customer Support Via Twitter
Being involved on Twitter is more than posting philosophical quotes or retweeting what others have to say. Twitter is an extremely powerful tool for businesses who know how to use it. There are plenty of ways that businesses can get value out of Twitter. They can listen to what people have to say about their niche and pick up ideas for future ideas. They can also track their reputation on Twitter. Best of all, they can provide real-time support to customers via Twitter. That’s where Followbase comes in. It’s an interesting service that lets you get in touch with other companies’ support teams and get help via Twitter.
FollowBase is pretty simple to work with. It’s essentially designed to help people get the support they need via Twitter. If you happen to be a business owner, you can just add your company by entering the Twitter account for your business. The fun part starts when you claim your forum on FollowBase. That will allow you to communicate with your customers more effectively and keep the spammers out as well. (more…)
Social Media: Knowing It vs. Doing It
The number of social media experts is on the rise. In fact, that number may be growing as fast as the number of new blogs. There are a lot of people who are looking for new ways to market themselves to employers and their clients. Being a social media expert (or claiming it) is certainly one way to gain some extra attention. But social media is not about what you claim you know. It’s not even about what you do know. It’s more about what you can do with the knowledge you have.
You can be an expert in Google Wave or Twitter. You may know all the commands and even spend hours everyday playing with these services. But if you don’t know how you can provide value to your company through these services, you are not really an expert. There are too many people who spend their time going to conferences, picking up industry jargon, and claiming things that are not necessarily true. These won’t really make you an expert in the field of social media nor does the fact that you can set up a blog by yourself.
Blippy: Share What You Buy
We have seen a lot of social networking websites emerge out of nowhere in the past few months. They all you to share all kinds of information with the world. You can get to share your favorite books, lists, videos, and more with the world. With Blippy, you get to share what you are buying and where you are buying it from with the world. I know. Why would you want to share what you are buying online with others. Maybe it is to get feedback or show others what stores you are supporting. Whatever the case, the idea can be certainly interesting.
3 Ways to Add Your Blog Feed To Your Facebook Pages
There are a lot of small businesses that are starting the realize the power of communities such as Facebook and Twitter. It’s true that a lot of them don’t have time to get down to the nitty gritty and be fully involved in these communities. But having a presence on these websites is a good start. Facebook is one of the top dogs among social networking services, and it’s got a great potential to help small businesses take their business to the next level. But as good as Facebook is, it comes with one of the most unintuitive interfaces that I have seen. Whether the company is keeping complicated and hard to figure out on purpose is beside the point. But there are a lot of simple tasks that are not so simple to get done on Facebook.
Feeding your blog to your Facebook pages could be a hassle. You certainly want to share your blog posts with the world, but you may not want your posts to show up on your personal profile. So you need to be careful before adding your blogs to Facebook. There are plenty of apps that help you get the word out about your blog posts, and Facebook also has built-in features to help you do that. Here are 3 ways that I would go about adding my blog RSS to a Facebook page:
1. Facebook notes: this is a pretty straight forward way to import your blog on to you Facebook page. What you want to do here is log on to your page and click on the edit page button at the top left of your screen. From there, you want to choose your note’s setting option and edit your import settings on the very next page. Not very straight forward, but it gets the job done.
Sponsored Tweets: Getting Paid for Tweets?
You know it was bound to happen. Twitter has been looking at multiple ways to generate revenue and take its business to the next level. So are tweeters. Sponsored Tweets is a cool service that brings advertisers and Twitter publishers together and let tweeters make money from their sponsored tweets while enabling advertisers to reach out to influential users in the community to push their message out. Here is how the service works. Advertisers create opportunities and tweeters take advantage of these opportunities to make money on Twitter. You will need to disclose that you are being sponsored by someone so the transparency is there. Here is a demonstration of how this service works:
When I first heard about this service, I was very skeptical about it. I am by no means a big fan of advertising on Twitter with my own tweets. Twitter is not a direct revenue channel for me or my business, but it is a great traffic driver for our products and the content our company produces. I have to say I was surprised by the number of celebrity and popular twitterers who are taking advantage of this service to make a few bucks online. If you happen to be into advertising on Twitter, this service can certainly come in handy.
Think about it. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get the message out about your product to thousands of folks on Twitter by partnering up with a Twitter user who has 200,000 followers? Maybe you want to work with someone who has millions of followers. Those sponsored tweets will cost you but just think about the number of people who will instantly check your product and may even give you feedback on your work. (more…)
Twitter Retweet Feature Draws Praise, Criticism
Those of you who have been on Twitter for a while have probably realized the need for a retweet button under each tweet. It’s not too inconvenient to copy and past tweets and add RT information to them. But it’d be much fun if you had that ability on Twitter. In truth, you are going to get that ability on Twitter soon. The company has been testing the “retweet” feature for a while now, and if you happen to be one of the lucky ones to have the feature activated on your account, you can test the feature by yourself.
So here is how the feature works. You see a story that you want to retweet, you click on the retweet button, and Twitter asks you whether you want to retweet the story. Twitter does the rest for you.
The Retweet feature is certainly convenient and fun to play with. Keep in mind that it’s a new feature so it will take some time for Twitter to get everything right. But while many are excited about the introduction of the new feature, there are people who are upset about the way Twitter has implemented the feature and for a good reason. Twitter does not allow you to add your own take on these stories when you retweet a post. So essentially, you post a piece of article with all the attributions but without your take on it. It’s also regrettable that you can only see RTs from the people you follow. So if you are not following the top dogs in your niche, you are not going to see the stories that they like.
The first issue is not something that can’t be fixed. The way Twitter has implemented it can certainly make things get done faster. I do believe that Twitter needs to add another option to the above pop-up to allow us to add our own take to stories. Maybe we will see that when the feature is released to everyone. The 2nd feature and the way it’s been implemented are actually something I do agree with. If you are not following someone on Twitter, you probably don’t want to hear from them. Besides, you don’t have to be following everyone to get those top stories on your timeline. If you are following people who truly provide value in your niche, there is a good chance they’ll catch the top stories and tweets from other top people around the world. So you don’t have to follow everyone in the world to see those top retweets. If those who you follow catch them, you will as well. That’s why you should only follow people who provide real value. There are just too many folks who follow a lot of people in hope of getting followed back. That’s not what Twitter was designed for. So I wouldn’t put any blame on Twitter for how it has implemented the second feature.
The good news is that we are finally going to get the retweet button on Twitter. It may need some work and not everyone is going to agree with everything, but it’s a nice step forward.
What’s your take: do you have an issue with how Twitter has implemented the retweet feature?
Gelato: a new kind of dating
I have to admit. I have never tried dating, and I am not so tempted by services such as eHarmony and Chemistry. But there are people who have used these services to find a date and even start a serious, long-term relationship. But when I first hear of gelato, I thought it’d be interesting to see what it’s all about. gelato is not your everyday dating site. It’s a social-media based dating service that lets you find people based on their information on Twitter and Facebook. So unlike eHarmony and other top dating sites, gealto lets you figure out what people really talk about. The system can probably be gamed but that is the case with other dating sites as well.
In order to get gelato to work, you will need fill out a short information sheet. You basically let others know what you are interested in and what you want gelato to pull from your social networking accounts.
