Eight Ways Microblogging Will Transform Your Company

When Network World selected 9 technologies IT pros should master in 2009, two of them were microblogging platforms: Twitter and Yammer. While most people are familiar with Twitter, relatively few are acquainted with Yammer.

Yammer is an enterprise Twitter that allows co-workers to share what they are working on. Privacy to each company’s Yammer network is assured by limiting access to those with a company email address.

While it isn’t as sexy as Twitter, Yammer will fundamentally improve your company in the following 8 ways.

1. Enhance your corporate culture

Nurturing a culture that motivates and empowers employees can greatly improve organizational productivity.

2. Create user-generated knowledge base and decrease internal emails by 60%

People are constantly emailing each other questions and solutions.

3. Increase productivity

Writing down what you are supposed to be doing helps focus attention on the task at hand

4. Yammer as therapy

It is very satisfying for teams to microblog their daily triumphs.

5. Replace wasted time with team bonding

Your employees are going to spend a certain amount of time socializing at work no matter what you do.

6. Have conversations without meetings

Yammer offers a lot more flexibility. Instead of limiting the discussion to half-hour meetings where you’re locked up in a lifeless conference room, Yammer allows you to have an ongoing conversation you can have with anyone in your company anywhere, anytime.

7. Latest industry news you’ll actually read

Not only get the news from people you trust, it is also a good way to keep track of who are the thought leaders in the company.

8. Amplify the influence of positive role models

Your entire organization can follow and benefit from the wisdom of your best performers.

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Top Social Media for Marketers: Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook

An overwhelming majority (88%) of marketers say they are using some form of social media to market their business, though 72% of those using it say they have only been at it a few months or less, according to a social media study by Michael Stelzner, sponsored by the upcoming Social Media Success Summit 2009.

The study found that Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook – in that order – are the top four social media tools used by marketers, writes Marketing Charts.

The research also included an analysis of nearly 700 open-ended responses, which revealed the top-three questions marketers are asking about social media:

• What are the best tactics to use?
• How to do I measure the effectiveness of social media?
• Where do I start?

When asked if they used social media for marketing purposes, 88% said they are employing some form of it. Business owners are more likely to use social media marketing (90+%) than employees working for a company that is not their own (81%), and respondents ages 30-39 are most likely to use social media marketing (92.8%), the study found. 72% say they have either just started or have been using social media for a few months.

The survey found that there  is a direct relationship between how long marketers have been using social media and their weekly time commitment. For people just beginning, the median weekly time commitment is two hours per week. For those who have been at it for months, the median jumps to 10 hours per week. For those who report social media marketing use for years, the median is 20+ hours each week.

Respondents report that the #1 benefit of social media marketing is gaining attention for the business, and 81% say their social media efforts have generated exposure for their businesses.

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10 Ways Twitter Will Change Blog Design in 2009

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.

1. Tweetbacks

2. Tweetstats

3. TweetThis

4. Tweets move out of the sidebar

5. Tweet comments

6. BlogTweet feeds

7. Blog comment form changes

8. New sidebar widgets

9. TwitterRolls

10. Blog design influenced by Twitter themes

While many bloggers change their Twitter theme to match their blog’s themes as closely as possible, this will also work in reverse. Influenced by Twitter’s design, bloggers will use more background images on their blogs and use the limitations of theming their Twitter page to influence how they design their blog. Expect to see more blog headers rotated ninety degrees anti-clockwise and more blog sidebars on the right hand side.

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7 Tips of How to Write Good Blog Titles

Every blog post has a title. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad you are creating the title of your article in the end you’ll end up with something. What I’m trying to stress out in this article is the importance of a well written title and it’s big role in obtaining better Google ranking and also being the main element that could make the readers click on your article. That’s right : the title is the most important element of an article. Learn how to create a good one and you solved the biggest part of the equation and that is getting people to click on your content.

Why the title of an article plays such a big role
Now days many blog readers don’t even go to the blogs they like : they simply have RSS readers and receive the titles and a snippet from the latest articles on every blog they are tracking.

What is the purpose of the title
Simply put, a title should determine the reader to click on the article and read the first paragraph. This first paragraph is also called the introductory paragraph in which you basically create a small summary of the entire article. So in essence what you express in the title should be also found in your first paragraph.

7 Rules of thumb for great titles

You can create the most extraordinary article in the world containing the secret of the holly grail. If you can’t create a proper title for your article that would rise people’s curiosity your article will just be one of the millions that appear every day.

1. Promise some kind of benefit( State clearly what you offer)

2. If possible begin with a number : starting with a number will transmit a clear thing about how many things you can learn if you read the article.

3.Your titles should transmit something different : in some way you’ll have to create an interesting title

4. A call to action title : if you ask people to take an action , to do something and you also promise a benefit

5. Use the words that get readers click : there are certain words that will increase your chances of getting your title to be clicked.

6. If possible use the name of a well known person that is in some way related to the theme of the article: that is something that can get your article to be read.

7. How to or How not to articles : using both the positive as well the negative form of this type of articles can let you explore different angles and sometimes a how not to … could be more interesting.

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79% of blogs are scanned, not read

Blog writing must address short interest spans and writing machine readable copy to scale.

Nielsen Norman Group ’s research found that 79 percent of their test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.

For your website to be effective your text must be scannable. Jacob Nielsen offers this advice:

• highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
• meaningful sub-headings (not “clever” ones)
• bulleted lists
• one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
• the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
• half the word count (or less) than conventional writing

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Promote Your Blog Posts to Twitter Followers

Someone just asked me this week about how to do this … thought I would share …

If you have a blog, you can provide a Twitter feed for it . . . Twitterfeed.com is a service that will automatically twitter any post that you publish on your blog.

Go to Twitterfeed Click on the Create New Feed link. Enter your Twitter ID, your blog’s RSS feed and how you want your post titles to appear in Twitter.

Make sure to provide “subscribe to twitter” link on your blog.

Check out other posts about Twitter on this blog >

Seven Words That Will Make Your Web Site Worth Viewing

Web site design is about more than layout, markup language, and technical wizardry. Web site design is about communication; it’s about turning advertising into content, and content into an experience that viewers will remember.

Seven Words to Remember

1. Communication

If your Web site isn’t communicating on both a rational and an emotional level, if it doesn’t provide the psychological and emotional context of your marketing message, then exactly what is it doing?

2. Audience

Instead of treating customers like customers, try treating them like an audience. Audiences want to be engaged, enlightened, and entertained. And that is the most effective way to make a sales impact.

3. Focus

Focus your message on the most important elements of what you have to say.

4. Language

The words used, and how they are put together, provide meaning; they inform personality; they provide mental sound bites; and they turn whatever you are saying into something worth remembering.

5. Performance

Creating a memorable impression is about managing the viewer experience and providing the right verbal and non-verbal cues that make what is being said memorable.

6. Personality

A company without a personality is a company without an image, and that makes you instantly forgettable.

7. Psychology

The most important feature you can offer your audience is psychological fulfillment, not deep discounts, fast service, or more bells and whistles.

Web sites are not just marketing collateral; they are not just digital brochures. They are a new presentation medium that requires specialized communication skills, and knowledge of how best to use the medium.

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GENERATION G

GENERATION G captures the growing importance of ‘generosity’ as a leading societal and business mindset. As consumers are disgusted with greed and its current dire consequences for the economy—and while that same upheaval has them longing more than ever for institutions that care—the need for more generosity beautifully coincides with the ongoing (and pre-recession) emergence of an online-fueled culture of individuals who share, give, engage, create and collaborate in large numbers. ~ TrendWatching.com

How do you reach these people ? The key is to continue providing value, while allowing for more personal interactions that lead to trust.

With social networking, you can expand your generosity by:

• Sharing relevant content from other sources, not just your own.
• Finding stuff to share that gets people jazzed up or makes their day.
• Confiding in those who follow you, thereby building a stronger bond.

You’ve got to be a real person when networking online. Put a human face on the “expert” and you’ll enjoy more success. But don’t forget value though, because even when revealing more about yourself, it’s still about them at some level.

Sharing via social networking can certainly help you achieve the status of generous. It’s a lot of work to find interesting stuff to share multiple times a day. The downside is without your own authoritative content, you’ve only demonstrated expertise in finding and sharing cool stuff.

Read Generation G report >

63% of consumers turn to the Internet first when looking for local products and services

Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Web? A lot of small businesses, that’s who. For the most part, that fear appears to be grounded in a lack of information about the actual costs and benefits of operating a Web site and engaging in some strategic e-marketing efforts.

Web marketing, in large part, is the province of companies with enough money to plaster their messages, goods and services all over the Internet. Missing from this equation is the traditional engine of American commerce: the small business.

A recent study showed that there is a major disconnect between the way most consumers look for goods and services on the Internet and the way small businesses use the Web to advertise.

The study, which surveyed nearly 4,000 U.S. Internet users on the tools they use to find local businesses, was conducted last November by Nielsen and WebVisible. Participants in the survey included 261 small business owners.

Here’s what Nielsen and WebVisible discovered: Search is the No. 1 choice of consumers and small business owners alike when looking for a local product or service on the Internet. Yet, half of all small businesses spent less than 10 percent of their marketing budgets on Internet ads.

In essence, most small businesses are missing out on a huge segment of the consumer population that turns to Internet search engines.

The biggest problem small businesses face when it comes to Web marketing is an attachment to an old way of doing business. It’s clear in many cases that small businesses simply don’t understand the inherent power of the Internet as a way to reach their customers

In fact, 63 percent of consumers turn to the Internet first when looking for local products and services, according to the Nielsen/WebVisible survey.

At the same time, only 44 percent of small businesses surveyed said they had a Web site.

To learn how you can use your website to attract new customers, contact us >

20 Usability Tips for Your Blog

1. Pick a topic for your blog - Pick a general topic you are passionate about, and stick with that focus as you post.
2. Encourage comments – Allow comments, and respond to comments.
3. Make it easy to subscribe - Make it easy to subscribe to your feed by placing an orange RSS button in a highly visible location.
4. Include an About page - Include an about page to let people know more about you.
5. Present your ideas visually - In this culture of scanning and clicking, long blocks of text aren’t read.
6. Keep posts short and to the point - Keep the text in bite-sized chunks that readers can quickly consume
7. Use subheadings for long posts - If you do post long, use subheadings to break up the text.
8. Link abundantly - Links increase readership and let others know you’re writing about them.
9. Make headlines descriptive - Avoid vagueness and ambiguity in headlines.
10. Archive by topic – Archive your posts by topic rather than date.
11. Include a list of related posts beneath each post - Many users find your site by searching for specific information.
12. Allow users to contact you offline - Readers may want to contact you offline with a question or comment.
13. Present your real viewpoint - Readers enjoy the personal aspects of a blog.
14. Write for your future employer - A blog can be a dangerous tool, and you should know that your future employer, and possibly your current employer, will read it.
15. Include a Top Posts section – Once your classic posts leave the home page, they’re often buried in your site.
16. Provide an index - Much of your site’s traffic comes from search engines.
17. Get your own URL and match it to your blog’s title - If your blog title doesn’t match the URL, it will be harder for users to remember the location of your site.
18. Include a Recent Posts section in your sidebar - A recent posts section in your sidebar provides an at-a-glance index for your latest posts.
19. Reward commenters for commenting - This is a simple way to create your own community of readers with similar interests.
20. Post often - Posting regularly to your blog, such as daily, every few days, or every week, will change your experience of blogging.

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