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The old Twitter joke about people saying what they had for breakfast in their tweets has a little truth to it, but failing to grasp the more powerful side of that platform is easy to do.

People who use the platform to broadcast self-referential tweets and automated random crap see almost no return on their time investment, and leave saying what a colossal waste Twitter is for their business. Without exception those who have told me about their Twitter failure story have all lacked a cogent strategy or clear goals from their Twitter plan.

Mark Schaefer has used Twitter effectively to build his business and grow a very successful blog. If there is such a thing as a Twitter expert, Mark is it. It’s not hard for anyone to apply his strategy for their personal or business success, but it takes a focused approach. In this video he shares his insights that you can start using today.

Mark recently released his new book The Tao Of Twitter. His book has been getting a boatload of 5 star reviews by readers on Amazon. You can buy it here.

Watch The Video Here

 
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By Steve Farnsworth | Business 2 Community

For your pictures to look their best, you need to set up your display to reproduce colours accurately. Find out how in our step-by-step guide.

When you process and print digital photographs, you want the colours and shades in your prints to come out looking exactly the same as the image you see on the screen. As many of us know to our cost, this isn’t something you can take for granted. Monitors and printers create colour in entirely different ways. A monitor illuminates red, blue and green pixels with a white backlight; a printer creates colour by mixing different inks or pigments on paper.

Problems arise when your monitor settings don’t reflect the way your printer produces colours. For instance, a monitor with the wrong white balance will add a colour cast to your images when they’re printed – and you won’t spot that anything is wrong until it’s too late. Your monitor’s colour settings can trip you up even if you don’t print out your images: things that look perfect on the screen aren’t guaranteed to look right on someone else’s.

It isn’t only a question of colour fidelity. Modern monitors typically leave the factory with their brightness turned up to maximum. However, prints rely entirely on subtle reflected light. When you process an image to look bright and vivacious on your screen it might still result in a dull, flat print.

The solution is to calibrate your monitor so that it displays colours as accurately as possible.

Calibration explained

There are two approaches to calibration. The most accurate is hardware calibration, in which you attach a colorimeter to your monitor while a series of tests is run. The colorimeter measures the colours your monitor is displaying, and produces a monitor profile that gives the best colour accuracy the hardware’s capable of.

The second approach is to use software to measure your screen’s performance. This isn’t as accurate, but it’s still an effective approach – and if you have a modern PC it needn’t cost a penny, as Windows 7 includes a reasonably advanced calibration tool as standard. It relies on good visual acuity, but it’s better than nothing (see walkthrough on Page 3).

No matter how you calibrate your monitor, it will never perfectly represent the printed product. Some high-end printers can produce a greater range of colours than a monitor, so it’s possible to end up working with colours that can’t be distinguished on your monitor and only become visible when you hit “Print”. However, calibration will keep unpleasant and potentially expensive surprises to a minimum.

No monitor is perfect

You wouldn’t expect a cheap LCD panel to be perfect, but if you spend a packet on the latest premium monitor – precisely because you plan to use it for photography – you might expect to gain only a marginal improvement in accuracy through calibration.

This isn’t the case. Monitors leave the factory with a number of default settings; we mentioned brightness above, but contrast and colour saturation can also be pumped up to the maximum. These settings are chosen to grab your attention on the shop floor, but they’re enemies to colour accuracy (and, in some cases, taste). If you’re viewing an image on a monitor with too much contrast, you’ll have to reduce the “punch” in your image to get it to look right on the screen. The printed version will come out looking drab.

If you invest any serious time and effort in your photography, calibrating your screen is a must. If you’ve also invested serious money in your monitor, setting it up properly will ensure that the cash hasn’t gone to waste (for more on why you should calibrate your monitor, click here).

Setting up your monitor

Before you begin delving into calibration software or hardware, it’s important to understand the idea of the “white point”. This is normally described as a temperature, measured in Kelvin, and is a setting you can adjust on your monitor to set the overall tint of your display. A high Kelvin measurement (some monitors are set to around 9300K) means your monitor will display whites with a slight blue tint, but you’ll probably never have noticed it: the human eye is very good at ignoring colour casts.

A screen calibrator can provide an accurate picture of your monitor’s performance. Here it compares a monitor’s colour reproduction to the sRGB gamut.

The onscreen appearance of your images doesn’t depend solely on your monitor settings; the environment in which you edit your photos is just as critical. Incandescent household bulbs emit a very warm light, which affects your perception of colour and explains why monitors compensate with a bluish colour temperature.

A bigger concern is the quantity of ambient light around your monitor. If your computer is in a room with lots of light, it’s likely your monitor’s brightness will be turned up to keep things legible. That’s good for visibility, but it means you’ll be processing your images on a monitor that’s excessively bright. The result? Prints that are too dark. The ideal photo-editing environment is one with neutral lighting, closed windows and closed blinds. At the very least, this is the environment in which you should set up your monitor. A hardware calibrator will also be handy here, since it can detect both the luminance (brightness) and colour temperature of ambient light: a useful guide as to whether you’re on the right track.

When to calibrate

When you come to calibrate your monitor, don’t do it immediately after turning on the display. An LCD’s brightness comes from its backlight – a series of bulbs that light the red, green and blue pixels that form the image on screen. Most monitors are lit by cold cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) tubes, and these can take a while to warm up to their full brightness. For this reason, before calibrating your monitor or doing colour-sensitive work you should allow your screen to warm up for around 30 minutes. Attempting to calibrate a cold monitor is an exercise in futility. The exception to this is monitors lit by LED bulbs, which reach full brightness as soon as they’re turned on.

CCFLs also start to lose their brightness as they get older. This means that, over time, your monitor will become dimmer and the colour temperature will slowly rise, ultimately producing images that appear warmer than they should be. This means calibrating your monitor isn’t a one-off operation. Monitor manufacturer Eizo recommends recalibrating a screen once every 300 hours of use. On monitors used during normal working hours, this equates to roughly once every two months; monitors used at home and recreationally will need less attention.

Software calibration

If you’re using Windows 7, the built-in colour calibration tool can be a big help in getting your monitor set up correctly (see walkthrough, p3). Those on older operating systems – and without the inclination to splash out on dedicated hardware – needn’t despair, though. It’s still possible to make an educated guess as to how your monitor needs to be corrected, and you can normally do it for free using tools included in your graphics card drivers. These typically let you choose your own settings for brightness, contrast and gamma, the latter of which controls the lightness or darkness of mid-tones. It’s best to make these alterations here rather than using your monitor’s onscreen display (OSD). Most LCDs don’t offer the ability to set gamma, and some prevent you from changing contrast.

When you adjust these settings, the driver usually displays a reference image so you can see the effect of your changes. If you prefer, you can use a reference image of your own. A simple way to do this is to print out a photograph with a reputable professional printer (www.photobox. com remains a firm favourite at PC&TA), hold it next to your monitor, and look closely for differences. It’s best to use images of people: the eye can be tolerant of variations in abstract colours, but you’ll be able to spot an incorrect skin tone from a mile away.

It’s then simply a matter of making the required adjustments. For example, if the final print looks fine on screen but too dark when it’s printed, turning down your monitor’s brightness will help images look the way you want.

Understanding colour spaces

Adjusting your monitor according to a single printed image will bring its colours into line with that particular printer, but it doesn’t guarantee that your images will appear on other people’s screens in the same way as they do on your system, nor that they’ll look identical on all printers. To achieve this, you need to be aware of colour spaces.

A colour space represents all the shades of colour available to a device. The two colour spaces you’re most likely to come across are sRGB (standard red, green, blue) and Adobe RGB. Of the two, Adobe RGB offers a wider gamut, which is to say it can represent a wider range of shades. When you shoot JPEG images on a DSLR camera, you’ll normally have the option of using either the sRGB or Adobe RGB colour spaces. Depending on which you choose, the colours seen by the sensor will be encoded in slightly different ways. (If you shoot in RAW mode, the camera uses its own, far larger colour space, and leaves you to perform your own conversion when you process the image.)

Mid-range monitors lit by CCFL tubes rarely display the full range of colours in the Adobe RGB space (high-end LCDs, especially those with LED backlights, can produce a wider gamut). However, if your monitor is correctly calibrated and your editing software understands which colour space was used to encode an image, you should see a reasonable onscreen approximation of the appropriate colour. Mid-range and high-end printers are also normally designed to support a wide gamut, so it makes sense to use Adobe RGB for images you want to print.

If you want to share your images online, it’s a different story. Most web browsers ignore colour-space data and assume your images should be shown as sRGB. This can cause them to look subtly wrong: for example, the Adobe RGB space offers a smoother transition from yellow to green than sRGB. If you view an Adobe RGB image using the sRGB colour space, the contrast between these colours will appear exaggerated.

To add to the confusion, most mid-range and high-end printers can produce colours not covered by either the Adobe RGB or sRGB colour spaces. It’s therefore possible that your images will contain shades of colours that are indistinguishable on your monitor, especially if you work in the ultra-wide ProPhoto RGB colour space favoured by Adobe’s photographic software. In most cases this won’t produce unpleasant surprises when you print, but if you’re concerned about the detail it’s worth producing colour proofs before committing to expensive, large-format prints.

A final word to those looking to produce books or other unusual formats: print services will sometimes expect you to provide images in CMYK format, in which colours are produced by combining cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink. CMYK represents a much smaller colour space than sRGB and Adobe RGB, so colours from your original image may need to be “clipped” to match those within CMYK’s gamut. Applications such as Photoshop allow you to soft-proof your images using different colour spaces, and can warn you if large areas of your images contain out-of-gamut colours.

What are ICM profiles?

After calibrating your display, your settings will be saved as a “profile” – an ICC (International Color Consortium) or in Windows an ICM (Image Color Management) profile. The two are largely cross-compatible. Windows Vista and 7 also support a proprietary Microsoft format called WCS (Windows Color System).

A monitor profile specifies how the colours and shades described in an image file should be sent to your monitor to ensure they look correct when displayed. For example, if your monitor produces unusually weak-blue shades, a suitable profile would tell the operating system to compensate by boosting the blue content of the picture it sends to the display.

Calibrators measure ambient light as well as your monitor’s colours, so you can see whether your environment is too bright or warmly lit.

Printers also have profiles, althoughmodels aimed at home users don’tnormally come with tools to calibratethem. Just like monitor profiles, theseprofiles tell the software how toproduce colours that look as intended.

With the right monitor and printerprofiles, colour hues should lookidentical whether you’re viewing themon screen or on a physical print-out. Ifyou use an inaccurate ICM profile – oryou don’t create one at all – coloursmay be lost or mistranslated, resultingin wonky prints.

Correctly setting up your monitor istherefore essential if you don’t wantto waste time and money on sub-parprints. And getting your screen onthe right track is quick and easy. Evenprofiling your monitor using dedicatedhardware is reasonably cheap (seeHardware calibration, above). If youwant to get the best from your digitalphotos, there’s no reason not to do it.

Walthrough: Profiling your monitor with Windows 7

Step 1:

Make sure there are no light sources shining on your monitor and give your screen30 minutes to warm up. Ensure it’s set to its native resolution. When you’re ready,you can reach Windows’ colour management settings through the Display option inthe Control Panel: look for “Calibrate Color” in the bar on the left-hand side. [Click on pic to enlarge]

Step 2:

The next step is to set your monitor’s gamma. Too high and images will be washedout; too low and you’ll lose detail in the shadows. It should normally be set to 2.2, butWindows’ calibration tool doesn’t give a numeric measurement. You can get close byadjusting the slider until the dots on the screen blend in with the surrounding area. [Click on pic to enlarge]

Step 4:

Windows makes finding the right brightness and contrast settings simple. Using the sample images, adjust the settings until you’ve produced a good facsimile of the reference image. Some monitors don’t let you adjust the contrast if the screen is hooked up to your PC via a digital connector such as DVI or HDMI. [Click on pic to enlarge]

 

Step 5:

Next you need to find a neutral white point for your monitor by adjusting the levels of red, green and blue. Juggling the bars can take some time, not least because moving one often means you’ll have to move another to compensate. This step is very important, as it will ensure you’ll see an accurate display of colour on your screen, so it’s worth the effort. [Click on pic to enlarge] 

Step 6:

The final screen shows you the before and after versions of your monitor profile – and the Color Management panel provides more options. You can view all the colour profiles associated with your monitor, as well as profiles for printers etc. The All Profiles tab shows all the profiles installed, useful if you need to add a profile for an external printer. [Click on pic to enlarge] 

Hardware calibration

Although Windows 7’s calibration tool is free and easy to use, dedicated hardware will do a better job. When you use calibration software, you’re relying on your eyes to make decisions about contrast and brightness. There are two problems with this. First, different people perceive colour and brightness differently, introducing a significant margin of error. Second, the apparent brightness of your monitor will depend to some extent on the lighting in the room – which in turn is affected by the age of the bulbs, the amount of light coming through the window, and a host of other factors.

 

LaCie blue eye pro Proof Edition

Hardware calibration devices are inherently more accurate, and because they attach, limpet-like, to your monitor screen, ambient light isn’t a factor. However, some calibration software, such as GretagMacbeth’s i1Match software (www. xrite.com), can also measure the colour temperature of ambient light, which will give you another significant accuracy advantage when it comes to your editing environment.

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by Dave Stevenson | PC Authority

If you’ve decided to outsource your SEO to a consultant or firm, your new SEO company is going to need three things from you in order to create, launch and maintain a successful SEO campaign. Without these three things, your SEO will never get up to full-throttle and won’t reach its full potential by any of the great SEO companies out there:

1. Trust
Remember that your SEO partner is on your side! They are pulling for your website to succeed as much as you are and are going to do everything in their power to help your site and brand reach their full potential online. However, in order to maximize their efforts you as the SEO client have to be willing to trust your SEO company to do the work you hired them to do!

Case in point, I was working with a client that didn’t feel comfortable letting us handle their blog commenting (part of their link building campaign). So we just researched the blogs they should be commenting on every month and passed it back to them; they were supposed to leave the comments. Guess what happened? They never left the comments! The hardest part of blog commenting is finding good, relevant blogs to comment on. Leaving the actual comment takes hardly any time compared to the amount of time spent researching. If the client had just trusted us a little bit more to leave well-written, quality comments on their behalf, their link building would have been much more effective and well-rounded.

2. Content
In my opinion, the worst thing a company can do is launch a blog and then NOT routinely write in it. I will spend all day arguing the benefits of a business blog, but I would rather a client not even launch one than create it and not write for it. Just about every component of SEO and inbound marketing relies on the consistent creation of content. Social networks consume billions upon billions of pieces of content every day, the search engines weigh content to determine a site’s importance, great content helps you connect with your target audience, builds your online reputation and so much more. Without content, your SEO is essentially flat lined. Content is what propels you forward and takes your site to the next level.

Not every business or website owner is a great writer and that’s ok! If you don’t feel comfortable writing content for your blog, than let your SEO partner handle it. They know how to create good content that is both search engine AND user friendly, that works to build your brand and encourages your target audience to share it with their social networks. Again, it comes back to trust. If you don’t trust your SEO partner to write content (say you work in a highly specialized field and your SEO partner just doesn’t have the knowledge) than it becomes your responsibility to supply your SEO partner with the content. You write it up and they will leverage it for your website.

3. Involvement
Handing your SEO campaign off to a consultant or agency does not mean you get to wash your hands of SEO completely! Your SEO partner is going to do everything they can to help your site succeed, but they need direction from you to know what “success” means. What are your online goals? Who is your target audience? Have you done any serious link building before? What are your assets and weaknesses? No one knows your brand better than you and your SEO company needs access to the information you have if you want them to do their job properly! You provide the direction and your SEO partner will provide the experience.

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By Nick Stamoulis | Business 2 Community

Everyone uses a search engine! And yet, not everyone in marketing understands the difference between SEO, PPC, metatags and keywords. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click. I know it can be confusing but…

To be a successful marketer today, you need to understand how to show up in the search results of your buyers’ search engine activity. To do this you must understand keywords and content and how they interact with each other to gain that coveted top spot in the search engine results.

This is not just about being a successful marketer. This is about driving real business results in the form of traffic to your website, getting more consumers of your content and ultimately to obtaining more paying customers…

Keyword Research Is Important To The Whole Business!

Last week, the folks at OpenView Venture Partners launched A Business Guide To Keyword Research: Better Keywords, Better Customers.” I was honored to have a quote included in the guide because of the passion I hold for this topic.

I truly believe that understanding the elements of search engine marketing and keyword research goes beyond just good marketing, and even successful digital marketing – all the way to being a dependency on running a successful business.

The quote they used:

“I often talk about the importance of putting our audience at the center of everything we do and creating customer-focused marketing plans. Keyword research is fundamental to that process because it allows marketers to get inside the minds of our buyers – not just in understanding what they are looking for, but the  actual words they are using. Magic happens when businesses create content that maps directly to their needs and uses our buyers’ own language.”

And what I’m talking about is the fact that keyword strategy and keyword research start with the fundamental belief that our businesses exist at their most basic level to simply fulfill a customer need.

They own the need. And they decide when and how to go find a solution.

The Right Keywords = The Right Content

Knowing how people search for solutions is just the first step. You have to then build that knowledge of your customers into an effective Content Strategy.  If Search Engine Marketing is knowing how your buyers search, then Content Strategy involves having the content they are looking for.

And of course these go hand-in-hand. Having the right content isn’t enough. Your content needs to include those keywords so that it can be effectively indexed by the search engines.

Getting indexed for the right keywords means getting found by your buyers.

Search Engine Marketing is Really Hard!

While this all sounds so simple, the fact is that search engine marketing is really hard. The reason for this starts with the fact that buyers don’t always search for the terms we think they do.

Additionally, you cannot buy your way to the top of the list (like with most traditional marketing.) You have to earn your way there (with both paid and organic search) due to a little something called the “quality score.” The quality score is calculated by the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo in the US) and requires that you have the content your buyers want and that this content includes the keywords your buyers are searching for.

You also need to be a credible source. Credibility is often determine by the number of other people who link to you, the relative size and credibility of those sites and a whole bunch of search engine “secret sauce” that only the brilliant minds at Google and the other search engine giants know.

Last but certainly not least, in order to master the art of search engine marketing, you need to understand SEO concepts like tagging, url composition and anchor text. My advice: outsource this piece to the experts.

Better Keywords, Better Customers

The Keyword Research Guide from Openview includes:

• An Introduction to Keyword Research
• The Benefits of Keyword Research
• How to Customize Your Approach to Keyword Research
• Top Challenges
• Getting Started
• Keyword Research Checklist for the Project Sponsor
• Checklist for the Keyword Researcher
• Keyword Research Checklist for the Online Content Marketer and Social Media Marketing Manager

It also includes a foreward by freelance blogger and marketing consultant Kristi Hines (@kikolani) and some extra quick start guides, sample frameworks and more…

Another Great Example of Content Marketing

If you’ve read this far, you must be interested in Search Engine Marketing, Content Marketing and, well, running successful marketing campaigns.

The Search Engine Marketing and Keyword Research guide that OpenView produced is on a topic that I am really passionate about because I think it is fundamentally important to being successful in finding new customers for our businesses. But it is also a great example of content marketing!

It seeks to answer the important questions on the minds of their target audience in the form of Thought Leadership, it curates content from multiple sources, it validates the fact that traditional marketingpush tactics can be supplemented with a content strategy that ultimately puts customers first.

So congratulations to OpenView Partners for producing such an excellent guide on an important topic. And a huge “thanks!” to OpenView Labs‘ Amanda Maksymiw and their team for the offer to participate.

But now it’s your turn. What do you think: right topic, right approach to content or both?

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By Bill Treloar | B2B Marketing

Almost every time we speak with a new potential client we find they’ve been told something about SEO that’s either an exaggeration or downright false.In a recent issue of .Net Magazine, Mark Buckingham, owner of an SEO company in south-west London called NetSeek, wrote about his top ten favorite SEO myths. Have you heard any of these? Let us know in comments, below.

1. Satisfaction guaranteed

There is no such thing as guaranteed organic rankings. Distrust anyone who promises otherwise. There are about 200 factors in the Google ranking algorithm, and no one can control all of them. Most people who “guarantee” top rankings only do so for long-tail searches that get very little search traffic — phrases like “podiatry malpractice lawyer on Main Street in Chatham”.

2. High Google PageRank = high rankings

Google PageRank is one of the 200 or so ranking factors in Google. It’s at best a fair indicator of a page’s link popularity, and it may be weighted more heavily than many of the other factors, but it’s not uncommon for a web page with a lower PageRank to rank higher in search results than a page with a higher PageRank. It’s a visible indicator of what Google thinks of your page, but again it’s only one of many ranking factors.

3. Endorsed by Google

Any company that says they’re “endorsed”, “approved” or “certified” by Google is probably a fraud. Google has a certification for Google Analytics and Google AdWords (the PPC ads), but Google has no stamp of approval for any SEO company .

4. The meta keyword tag matters

I heard this one as recently as last week. Mark quotes Google’s Matt Cutts to totally debunk that one. Google considers the meta keyword tag to be a waste of time. We typically use it, only because it may be used by some smaller search engines, and because it’s so quick and easy to do. But we never agonize over what to put in there — as Matt says, that’s just a waste of time.

5. You can cheat your way to the top

This reminds me of an old database client of mine who once asked if I would help him send out spam. (It should go without saying that I strongly declined.) Cheating (considered “black hat SEO”) is always a bad idea. Even if it works once in awhile, as soon as the search engines find you out (or when a competitor rats you out) you risk being banned from the search engine results with disastrous bottom line results. This happened to JC Penneyrecently and to both Ricoh and BMW before that.

6. Cram those keywords in

There’s no magic number of keywords needed to get a high ranking. You need to use the keywords, of course, but using them too often creates what we call “overredundancy”. Forcing your keywords into a web page almost always destroys the page’s power to influence the person reading it and encourage them to want to buy what you’re selling. Pay attention to your keywords, and use them on the page, but make sure you’re always writing for your visitor, not for the search engines.

7. Spending on Google AdWords boosts your rankings

Google has repeatedly denied any connection  between participating in AdWords and organic rankings. SEO experts agree. There is some research showing that if you show up in both the PPC ads and in the organic results, that boosts the likelihood of the searcher clicking on one of your listings. The organic listing super-validates your PPC ad, increasing the likelihood of a click on one or the other. But having a PPC ad has no impact on where you rank in the organic results.

8. Landing pages

The concept of a “landing page” is relevant only to PPC. Almost any page on your website can show up in the organic listings. Don’t assume that people will always enter your site through the front door, for example. In SEO, any page on your site can be a “landing page”.

9. Set it and forget it

It’s true that once your pages are well-optimized there’s little or no need to constantly tweak, change, or “freshen” them up. However you can’t just forget your SEO as soon as you get great rankings. An ongoing stream of inbound links may be important to maintain your rankings, and if those links aren’t happening by themselves it may require some level of continued effort. A blog is a great way to add new content on a regular basis. But you also need to monitor your rankings. There’s no guarantee your great rankings will be permanent, especially if your website undergoes even a minor redesign or your competitors become more aggressive in their social presence and link building. At least keep an eye on your rankings so you can respond if they begin to fall.

10. Rankings aren’t everything

High rankings are great, but you’re not in business to get high rankings. The bottom line needs to be your bottom line. Do those rankings result in visitors? Do those visitors convert into paying customers? SEO can get more people to your website, but it’s the job of your website to convince them they want to do business with you and with no one else. You need great content that’s effective in closing the sale. All the rankings in the world can’t make up for a poor user experience on your website.

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By Bill Treloar | Business 2 Community

It’s Saturday morning. You wake up out of the fog. You manage to open one eye and reach for the iPhone. You push the little round button so you can say good morning to your friends. Since the rest of the family is still asleep you think “hmmm… I’ll just go into my office and send a few tweets, see what’s circlin’ on Google+ and upload the photos from the seminarthis week to Facebook.”

Well, that was at 7:00 am. It’s now 11:00 and you are still in your jammies with messy hair. Your significant other has made breakfast. The kids are watching cartoons & fighting and the house is a mess. The big plans of mowing the lawn, cleaning the garage and hittin’ the gym all before noon are history. You would much prefer to stay in the safety and quiet of your little tweet heaven just for one more hour.

You have experienced this situation before. You have friends who do the same thing. You have wondered if you might have a slight addiction problem to the twitter bird and all his friends. Below are a few (50 of them) signs that you might want to seek professional help.

Disclaimer: I am a marketing nut and by no means should you take the advice written in this post to determine if you need professional help. Only you can figure out if you have the will power to put your tweet weapon of choice away this weekend!

I wrote a similar post “60 Signs You’re Addicted to Social Media & Twitter” earlier this year. Figured it was time for an update. I’m pretty certain there are no duplicates.

50 Signs of Social Media & Twitter Addiction & Need for Professional Help

1. You have a tweet station installed next to your toilet inclusive of a few mags,  extra toilet paper & a special iPhone charger extension cord.

2. Your kids were jealous, so with a little Jerry riggin’ the toilet tweet station now doubles as a Nintendo potty station.

3. Your cute little twitter bird dreams  have unfortunately turned into nightmares of entire bird families.

4. The grocery store clerks are all trained on twitter & know your Twitter handle by heart. Too bad they don’t tweet.

5. If you had to choose between one whole day without eating or one  day without tweeting you would toss the eats & keep the tweets.

6. Granny officially knows what twitter is. By the time I write my next list granny will probably be tweeting.

7. If necessary you could type a tweet on your iPhone or Android with eyes closed.

8. You knew Google+ wouldn’t kill Twitter no matter what they say.

9. Even the most unsocial savvy guy at most unsocial savvy client now tweets and love it.

10. Your kids can better explain social media than most of your clients.

11. Your kids have twitter handles of their nick names.

12. Your kids tell other kids their parents should really learn how to tweet.

13. Your dog has a twitter account and barks in 140.

14. You know the Klout score of your dogs twitter account.

15. According to Klout your dog has influence on YOU.

16. 140 x 1000 =  number of days since you had a life.

17. Thanks to Foursquare you now know all of the other social media addicts in the area.

18. You have at least one social media stalker.

19. You have been proposed to at least 5 times on Twitter.

20. You at one time were mayor of your church.

21. When you go out to eat your 5 yr old always says “mom don’t forget to check in.”

22. Your kids try to sell you on going to Chili’s as they know they can get free chips and salsa for checking in

23. Your kids don’t understand why you haven’t put any of your own deals on Foursquare

24. Your kids are a top source for leads.

25. Kids at school know you by videos their parents have watched on YouTube.

26. You are no longer bothered by bullies & trolls. You laugh and also feel sorry for them.

27. Even if you don’t frequent Empire Avenue often you still know your stock price within a few bucks.

28. You have a Google+ account but don’t consider yourself addicted yet.

29. You know who @TwitJailWarden @TwitChiefJudge are.

30. You have been or know someone who has been in twitter jail.

31. You know the secret ninja api’s & tools to avoid Twitter jail.

32. You already have the words in your head for almost every 80′s tune that would be perfect for a viral video

33. You are glad not all of your neighbors and family are on Twitter or Google+

34. You can write an entire blog post on your iPhone while on the elliptical at the gym.

35. Your family has given up trying to understand what you do for work.

36. At least 80% of your family has de-friended you on Facebook.

37. You want to pull a big chunk of hair out of your head when you see people begging for Facebook likes.

38. You could place bets (and win) on the local small businesses in your area who will be out of business within 2 yrs who still think Internet is a fad.

39. You have fired a client (or 2) for refusing to acknowledge social media is about the people.

40. You wish you could quit your day job.

41. You may not have a day job if you don’t get this social media addiction thing figured out.

42. You are thinking how you could implement #1 on this list to save time & keep your day job.

43. You can already think of at least 5 people to share this list with who are worse than you.

44. You are now questioning if you are more addicted or if your friends are.

45. You are now thankful you thought of at least one friend who is more addicted than you.

46. You are wondering if you are the only one of your friends who is seriously thinking about doing #1 on this list.

47. You read this entire post on a smart phone.

48. You will retweet this post via a smart phone.

49. You just now realized what an addiction you have. You wasted 2 min reading something that confirmed what you already know.

50. You are mad about #49 and know you better get back to work (your day job).

51. You read all the way to the bottom of this list. Need I say more?

Bonus: you are wondering why there are 51 signs and not 50. Don’t recount them. Get a life!

 
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By Pam Moore, | Business 2 Community

Wondering how to SEO?

If you’re feeling dazed and confused by SEO, you’re not alone. In a recent consultation, one entrepreneur told me that (despite having a solid grasp of SEO basics) she felt like she and her small business just couldn’t keep up.

SEO is complicated and ever changing. Google endlessly updates its search algorithms and sometimes rolls out initiatives, like Panda or Google +1, that shake up the industry entirely.

It can be overwhelming. And most small businesses don’t have the time (or inclination) to become SEO experts. (Even I don’t claim to be an SEO “guru”, just someone who’s learned the trade and can help you wade your way though it.)

But certain SEO best practices are tried and true, and if you abide by these you’ll be ahead of most do-it-yourself websites.

How to SEO your webpages

Let’s assume you know enough about search engine optimization to know what your keywords are. Do you know what do do with them? Or, where to put them on your website?

Here’s a quick checklist of places you should be using your keywords:

• Your URL – A keyword relevant domain is best, but you can also set up subdomains and individual webpage URLs using your keywords.

• Title tags – Replace “home,” “about,” and “services” with more descriptive, keyword-rich titles. (Remember these page titles show up in search results, so you’ll want them to encourage people to click.)

• Description tags – Here you’ll use keywords in full sentences to describe the content of each individual page on your site.

• Image alt tags – When you insert images into your website make sure to format them with alternate text that uses keywords to describes the purpose (not necessarily the content) of the photo.

• Headings – Use keywords in headlines and subheadings, and format them using a “headings” font (in code these are indicated by <h> tags).

• Links – When linking from one page on your website to another make sure to use keywords for the anchor text.

• Footer – Include keywords in the footer content. This is a particularly good place to include your location based keywords.

• Content – Quality SEO copywriting is essential to your SEO efforts. Keywords should be thoughtfully sprinkled throughout your website content.

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By Alexa Steele | Business 2 Community

Are you new to social media and unclear on how to set up your profile? Do you want to avoid the mistakes of people who did not get a job because of information that existed about them online? Do you want to use social media to extend your brand online but are not sure how?

If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, read on.

Having a personal brand has never been more important than in this age of information overload.

How you position yourself online will impact your success in reaching your objectives. People will judge you based on your picture, your profile description, your content, the messages you retweet and more.  And don’t forget that everything you say online is “forever”.

Hence, it is important to take charge of your online persona, devise a clear strategy and manage it with discipline and continuity.

So who do you want to be online?

Well, first of all, you are who you are and you know what you know. So, that’s a good start to define yourself – as long as you are not planning to create a fake alter ego online. For most people, their brand online is an extension of who they are off-line.  The most important question to ask yourself is:

Why am I participating in social media in the first place? What are my objectives?

In my case, I am a social media and yoga professional.  My personal objectives are:

• Stay-up-to-date
• Network
• Be perceived as a thought leader
• Recruit students for my yoga classes

STEP 1: Choose a focus area

As social media and yoga don’t go together well, I had to make a decision up front: Do I want to be known as a yogi or a social media thought leader?  If I chose social media, I’d need to keep yoga-related messages to a minimum, as I’d otherwise run the risk to lose my social media audience that is not interested in yoga. The reverse was true for my yoga target audience.

Lesson:  Once you decide on your brand, you need to stay on message. If you have divergent businesses, it is usually best to create respective online identities for each business. Note that this will require extra time and resources on an ongoing basis.

STEP 2: Make a name for yourself = build your brand

Now that I know that my focus area is social media, and my goal is thought leadership, I can start building relationships, and by association my brand, online.

To get started:

• Find experts on your focus area
• Share information on your topic area
• Engage in topic-related discussions

Examples: On Twitter and Facebook, I consume information from social media experts. On Twitter and LinkedIn, I share social media know how, as well as engage in social media-related discussions.

When you first get started on social media, it’s a good strategy to follow your target audience and thought leaders; on Twitter, it’s very likely they will follow you back, and you’ll create a snowball effect that will amplify your brand/influence in your topic area. On LinkedIn, join topic-relevant groups and start to answer questions to broadcast your expertise and establish yourself.

If I wanted to build a yoga business, I would make talking about yoga, meditation and health the focus of my online existence. I’d also follow other yogis, experts and influencers, and try to figure out where else on social media they go so that I could join the discussions.  A popular option is to start your own or contribute to a blog.

STEP 3: Be consistent

Many people you will engage with online participate in a multitude of social media channels, e.g. Twitter, FB, LI,YouTube. Make sure that your brand is consistent across all of these channels, or you can create confusion.   As mentioned before, if you have different objectives that don’t converge, you might need to create different personas or operate in closed communities. For example, I keep my FB circle limited to closer friends and business conversations to a minimum.

STEP 4: Be yourself

Does having a brand mean I cannot be “myself”?  Yes and no. It’s very important to have a personality on social media as you don’t want to come across as a robot that sends out automated messages. But where you draw this line depends a lot on who you are “in the real world” and what your objectives are.

In my case, I am an extrovert and optimist in the real world and that comes across in many of my conversations on Twitter. I like making jokes or occasionally sharing a personal high-light, e.g. my yoga teacher certification.  However, I would take a more professional approach in most LinkedIn groups and share less personal information.

I do believe in taking excessive chit-chat into private messages or direct Tweets (see my blog: The Does and Don’ts for Tweeters). But some of my social media connections have made it their trade mark to be brutally honest (including hurtful) online, thereby gaining the reputation of being very credible.  Only you know what you are personally comfortable with, and what your values are.

STEP 5: Monitor

There are two main reasons why you will want to monitor your social media presence:

1. To find out what people are saying about you (to be able to respond and possibly take corrective action)
2. To optimize your online brand/engagement

Here is a short list of tools to get you started. There are hundreds of them, so don’t be shy to use Google to find more:

• Google your name or set up Google Alerts
• Search for your name on Socialmention.com (in addition to a list of search results, you get stats on sentiment, top keywords, top users and hashtags)
• Put your Twitter handle into TweetReach.com and get metrics on your reach/impressions, retweets, mentions, top followers etc.
• Klout.com provides your influencer score. Take this with a grain of salt as it’s not a perfect science. It covers Twitter, FB and LinkedIn.  Twitalyzer is a similar tool for Twitter only.
• Mr. Unfollowr tells you who has recently unfollowed you on Twitter (PS: There is also Mr. Follow, to find out who you should be following).

CONCLUSION

To create a successful brand online, you need to have clear objectives, execute in a consistent fashion, keep it real and monitor the results.   Of course, high-quality content, subject-matter expertise and a solid off-line reputation will be key contributors to your - success.

An overview of some key social media sites and their profile options:

LinkedIn:  On LI, your brand is defined by your resume (=your profile) and your participation in groups. There are many options to spruce up your resume with apps, blog links and recommendations. It’s worth looking into them.

Twitter:  It is paramount that you complete your profile. Otherwise you are an unknown quantity and very few people will follow you. Not having a picture can signal that you are not a serious user. More tips in my blog: How to get started on Twitter in 1o simple steps.

Facebook: For a professional page, the purpose has to be clear; you will be judged by the quality and frequency of conversations on your page amongst other factors.

Google+: State your purpose and complete your profile with the desired brand attributes.

Any other channels like your own blog, SAP Community Network, Spiceworks, YouTube, or Flickr: create a profile that demonstrates your intention and expertise to the other community members; a picture usually makes you seem more committed and helps people recognize you.
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By Natascha Thomson | Business 2 Community

You might think that the only way to build your brand image online and increase your exposure to potential consumers is through spending beau-coup bucks on an award-winning web designer, a top level domain, and a high-priced ad agency.  But while all of these tactics will certainly cost you money, there’s no guarantee that they’ll deliver the exposure (and return) you’re seeking.

Further, it can be difficult to quantify the success of these methods.  Luckily, there are plenty of free (or relatively inexpensive) means of getting your name to potential customers and expanding your web presence.  Here are a few easy techniques you may want to try.

1.Cultivate brand ambassador –  Okay, so this might not sound very easy.  After all, how can you convince your customers to do your advertising for you?  Actually, it’s not as difficult as you might imagine.  All you really have to do is make your business the best it can be.

This means delivering superior products and customer service and taking the time to answer consumer comments and queries in a timely manner.  Providing the personal touch is a great way to encourage customers to pass your name around.

2. Host events –  One great way to spread your name around is to host events like contests, sales, and giveaways.  By utilizing both your website and social networking outlets, you can let members know about these special events and then encourage then to spread the word to friends and family, offering further discounts or incentives for referrals.  There’s no better way to get people interested than by giving them the opportunity to get something for nothing.

3.Join forums - Your online peers at industry forums can not only provide a wealth of useful information and advice to help you find your way around the web, they may also offer opportunities for networking and growth.

If you play your cards right, forums can be a conduit for increasing the scope of your business online, especially if you befriend people who are willing to help you out by spreading your name around or throwing their overflow business your way.  Networking is an excellent way to increase your awareness of venues for expansion as well as create new business opportunities.

4.Create viral campaigns – Viral video campaigns that catch on can quickly spread like wildfire, and you don’t have to hire a Coppola to make a video that catches the public’s attention.  Simply get creative and work on producing a buzz that centers on your product or service.

Humorous offerings are likely to get passed around the most and enjoy a certain level of longevity (meaning they could go through several cycles of popularity over time).

5.Guest post -  Writing for related industry blogs might be a slow way of infiltrating a targeted demographic, but you can reach potential customers that already have an interest in your product or service, making them worth far more than the average visitor that might stumble onto your site.

And eventually, you might even start your own on-site blog in order to engineer repeat visits.

 
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By Sarah Harris | Business 2 Community

The newest addition in the world of Android Tablet marketing is the trusted and reputed Acer brand.  Acer has recently launched a series of high functioning multiple Tablets with impressive features, practical and stylish designs, and compact size which are convenient to hold and carry without having to compromise on its functional aspects. A Wi-Fi only Iconia A500 model and a 3G enabled Iconia A501 are two models that have recently hit the market with tablet-specific Android™ operating system and the latest version of Google’s Android Honeycomb. These models are 25.65 cm in length, 1.33cm thick, and 17.7cm in width and powered with a dual-core 1GHz processor, a LCD capacity screen resolution of 1280×800, multi ports, and 1080 HDMI output.

The Iconia Tab A series has a metallic look enclosed with black bezel and a classic shiny aluminum chassis. The tablets have multi touch-screen supports, are extremely lightweight, and portable with powerful functions. They are much cheaper as compared to the expensive tablets of Samsung or Apple’s iPad and readily available for mass consumption.

These tablets are capable of performing majority of the functions performed by laptops with features including the provision of USB port and microSD card slot, application organizations with custom home widgets, Dolby Mobile audio support, Google Music, Google Movies, games and high speed Wi-Fi and social networking functions. A detail analysis of the various functions of the iconic Acer Iconia Tab is given below:

Stylish Design

The design of the Acer Tabs is what stands out among all the Android Tabs. Sleek, elegant and enclosed with a black bezel, a glossy aluminum chassis and silver edges gives the Tabs a shiny metallic look. A smart volume rocker with alternating up/down volume keys self adjusted when placed in a Portrait/landscape mode, and a rotation lock keys are conveniently placed on the edge of the Tab with sturdy looks and distinct contours for easy location. In the same way, microSD slots, USB ports, SIM card slot, and the LED-lighted power/sleep button are logically situated.

Performance:

Powered by 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 250 dual-core processor with 1GB RAM, the Iconia Tab has an internal storage capacity of 16GB and an expandable additional storage of up to 32 GB. The LCD screens have a bright and colorful display with 80% angle view. These Tabs are endowed with 16:10 aspect ratio for a rich video and photo viewing experience. Some of the other prominent functional features include voice activated search, a gyroscope for gaming purposes, GPS, compass, accelerometer, a 5Mp rear camera with a flash, and a built-in 2 MP front HD and a full multi-touch support webcam for video chatting and conferencing, Bluetooth 2.1 and a fast Wi-Fi connectivity.

Multimedia Functions:

A pair of stereo speakers at the base of the Iconia Tab with a built-in Dolby Mobile audio output provides an ample big sound. The device plays a 720p HD video and a bigger 1080p video files with amazing clarity and color balance from micro-HDMI port. Apps like Acer Zone, Photo Browser 3D, NemoPlayer, Clear.fi enabling media organizing and sharing with other devices, YouTube, Social Jogger, Facebook, Twitter,  and several Game Zone links provide entertaining multimedia functions.

Battery Life:

Acer Tablets are powered by two 3260mAh Li-polymer batteries with a strong battery life lasting more than 8 hours for games and multimedia functions and above 10 hours for web browsing.

Summary: Acer, with this launch of cost-effective, multi-functional and stylish Iconia Tab A Series, has produced a Tablet to reckon with.

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