What is Online Social Networking?

clock June 11, 2009 18:57 by author Rajeev Ratra

Lets face it, the Internet has forever changed the way we live and it has become an integral part of our lives. Instant Messaging, Voice over IP and Portals have become critical to life & business – a whole lot of us would have a hard time surviving without the Internet and a whole more could not imagine life without online social networking.

Today’s society is abound with phrases such as “Hey, check out my Facebook”, or, “Connect with me on LinkedIn” or “I will tweet you”. I can understand Facebook, Linkedin and the others, but I must admit that I am intrigued by “Tweet” and “Twitter”.

Online social networking is based on the use of specialized websites, aptly called social networking websites that allow you to directly or indirectly connect with individuals of your choice for various purposes. The purpose is to build online communities of people that share common interests or activities, or people that are interested in learning about the interests and activities of others.

The sheer beauty of online social networking is that it allows you to keep in touch with your contacts across the entire world – there are no limits to the number of friends you can have and they can be located anywhere as long as they have access to the Internet.

The concept is simple. You are either are invited to join a social network website or you join it on your own and you then search for your contacts and then invite them to become part of your network or you get invited to join your contacts' networks. You interact with your contacts and continually grow your network by adding more and more contacts. The main purpose is to share all sorts of information within the network and keep each other informed about your activities, events and in general, life. You can share photos and videos, messages, updates, events and scores of other things.

One word of advice - be careful of who you connect with and how much information you share with them - protect your identity at all times and be sensible about your activity.



10 Valuable Internet Marketing Tips

clock June 8, 2009 17:36 by author Rajeev Ratra

You can attract more visitors to your website, increase your sales and boost your company brand. Here are 10 tips to get you rolling:

1. Start with effective web presence – if you don’t have a website, find a company that fully understands web presence requirements, and not just website design and development and work with them to establish your presence on the Internet

2. Work with your web presence company to create a solid web marketing strategy that fits in with your overall marketing strategy. Understand your products or services and your competition and then work to make your brand stand out

3. Work on getting ranked – naturally (organically) – on major search engines using proper and ethical Search Engine Optimization. Remember, a natural rank is a strong indicator of credibility. Always follow proper and ethical SEO techniques. Stay well away from nefarious SEO practitioners

4. Paid Advertising – jump start your Internet marketing using paid advertising (pay-per-click and such) via major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing. Paid advertising gets you in front of your prospects in short order.

5. Email marketing rocks – build an opt-in email list that you can use for targeted email marketing by sending special offers, newsletters and other material. Guard this list with your life and use it often and use it effectively

6. Become a dominating player in your industry and your niche by leveraging affiliate, reseller and associate marketing programs and work on building partnerships with complementary and supplementary providers to enhance your marketing channels

7. Relevant articles, case studies and white papers are an effective way to boost your credibility on the Internet – they help you become established as a SME (Subject Matter Expert) over time and that positively impacts your web presence

8. Create and publish targeted and relevant press releases about your business to spread the word about your services or products via various news and PR channels/publishers on the Internet and make sure to provide an RSS feed so syndication websites can pick up your press releases

9. Create and maintain a blog to interact with your website visitors. A blog is one of the most effective ways to continually communicate with your visitors and keep them informed and educated about your services, products and important details about your company

10. Understand and leverage Social Media by using Content Sharing, Content Publishing and Social Networking. An effective Social Media Marketing Strategy is sure to augment your Internet marketing strategy. We will be posting more details about Social Media Marketing in the near future



What is Twitter?

clock June 3, 2009 18:10 by author Rajeev Ratra

There’s no doubt about it: Twitter has created quite a stir and currently it's one of the fastest growing social platforms with a huge increase in the number of visitors per day.

But what exactly is Twitter?

Well, simply put it, Twitter is a social networking website that allows you to follow the people you’re interested in and find out what they’re doing. When you follow people, your homepage will display updates about what they’re up to, reading, creating...you name it.

Twitter is starting to be used by marketers worldwide as a way to easily send updates to their prospects & customers, as eventually users spend more time checking updates than they do reading their e-mails.

The cool thing about Twitter is that all posts must be 140 characters or less. This is an attempt to come close to normal human conversation - less useless details but straight to the point.

As a social media Web 2.0 micro blogging platform, Twitter offers the business enterprise an array of interesting potential usage. Whether or not the future of corporate micro blogging will be based on Twitter or another company that replaces Twitter as the prevailing platform (remember WordPerfect?), remains to be seen. Other micro blogging companies currently available include Jaiku and FriendFeed.

So, how do you Twitter?