What is Social Media?
Social Media is a vehicle to share information with a broad audience twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In addition to being any form of online publication or presence that allows users to engage in multi-directional conversations, it is a way to build relationships with the public. Online tools allow businesses to keep in touch with customers and easily update them on what’s new, whether it is products, services, events, an interesting insight or a new hire to the team. Basically, Social Media is the “wave of the now.”
What to know about Social Media
Social Media …

Well, we finally made it to Facebook. Just like any other small business, we struggled with the decision of whether or not to have a presence in Facebook. It’s free to start; it’s simple to use… but the reality is that it’s an investment of internal resources, mostly time. But given the staggering statistics of how much Facebook is used, we decided to give it a shot. Here’s how we did it.
1. We decided on content
We took this as an opportunity to have a balance of work-related posts and fun/personal ones with the goal of showing the world who we …

Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, LinkedIn, Flikr, Photobucket, Ning, Xanga, WordPress, …. The list of social media platforms goes on and on.  Some overlap with each other, others have no channels of compatibility, and most of the services that would allow you to synchronize the content of multiple services are annoyingly piecemeal.

Enter Ping.fm.

Ping.fm has compiled a list of 40 blogging sites, social networks, online status recorders, social bookmarking services, and photo sharing sites - each and every one of which can be updated individually or in groups from within the Ping.fm interface.

See a service you don’t yet use?  Ping.fm will …

Link building is one of the key elements to Search Engine Optimization.  The more reputable sites you can get to refer people to your site, the better your search engine results will be.  You will usually need a well known and positive reputation in order to garner such links, but there are some small steps you can take on your own to get the ball rolling.
There You Are!
I don’t know about you, but when I first decide where I want to go shopping, one of the first questions I ask myself is, “what’s near me?”  I’d be willing to bet …

We have been writing about business blogs lately. We are focusing on using WordPress to produce branded business blogs or blog-sites, leveraging the inherit search engine optimization advantages WordPress provides.

I gave a presentation at the Partners In Success chapter of BNI on 3/17/10 on why blog for business and what MB/I brings to the table. Here’s the narrated version.

MB/I Presentation on Business Blogs
(9-minutes)

Are you already using a blog to market your business? Let us know how it’s working for you.

Are you interested on starting one? Attend our FREE webinar.

Purpose

At their heart Facebook, Forums, and Blogs are all about communication and community, but each focuses on a different area of where those to concepts intersect.

Forums: The main purpose of a forum is to create a sense of community.  Most forums require participants to become members.  Members are then allowed to participate in ongoing conversations and create new conversations of their own  In addition, most forums include some means of direct, private, unmonitored communication to foster direct communication among the members (and to company representatives).

Blogs: The main purpose of a blog is to serve as a …

One week ago a new four-colored dialog box appeared in my Gmail account.  And I don’t mean some clunky square computer dialog box that we’ve all grown accustomed to, I mean an honest to goodness comic book style dialog box.

Clearly this was some new sort of chat functionality, which surprised me, as I already had a GTalk session open.

Apparently Google was launching it’s answer to Facebook and Twitter, and you know what, I couldn’t be bothered.  I already have all the personal social media tools I need.  In fact, I have more social media tools at my disposal than I …

A little over a decade ago comedian Eddie Izzard joked that Britain built its empire by stealing countries through the cunning use of flags.

• I claim India for Britain.
• You can’t claim us, we live here?  500-million of us.
• (Smug) Do you have a flag?
• (Flabbergasted) We don’t need a bloody flag.  It’s our country.
• No flag, no country.  You can’t have one.  That’s the rules…

Staying on the cutting edge of the technology curve works much the same way.  You may think you have your market cornered - then someone you’ve never heard of comes along and plants their “flag” …

The start of a new year is a time to think about the past, but also an opportunity to look to the future.  Such endeavors are never certain, but here are five of my predictions for the coming year.

Smart Phone Bandwidth will become more expensive.

As more and more consumers switch to smart phones, their carriers will run out of signal carrying capacity.  In order to pay for additional infrastructure and research, these companies will monetize bandwidth access.  While some consumers will still be able to pay for full speed connectivity, most will have to accept inferior connectivity.

With less bandwidth available, …

As Twitter continues its meteoric rise towards becoming the largest, easiest vehicle for mass personal communication, advertisers and marketers continue to experiment with how the social media tool can be monetized and/or integrated into their campaigns.

Three concerns in particular have driven these experiments: Cost, Impact, and Disclosure.

Cost

As anyone with a Twitter account can tell you, Twitter is a free service.  It costs you nothing to set up an account, and there is no charge for posting to Twitter.

However, there is another price associated with marketing through Twitter, and its coin is time.

If you wish to grow a successful Twitter presence …