Social media seems to on the tip of every marketers’ tongue at the moment; but what are the real benefits to social media, and is it something that we should all be doing?
Well, my English teacher always told me write about what you know, and I know that I am an avid facebook user, I don’t twitter, I have no idea why people do that? Sure it’s fun to see what Stephen Fry had for breakfast, but in all honesty I couldn’t care one iota that:

Jazzys@t76: just bought a loaf of bread to feed to the ducks
Or

Toplady43: can’t wait for lunch with the girlies later

So, I can’t really comment on whether or not twitter is going to enhance your business presence, (although I won’t be reading it, but then I’m probably not your target market anyway, so no loss there!)
Let’s have a think about facebook though, something I use on an almost daily basis, I don’t really know why, it’s become somewhat of an obsession to make sure I know exactly what all of my friends are up to at any one point. I can stare in awe at pictures from a “crazy night out” or perhaps some new photos of another of my friends who has gone travelling. There’s Jimbo on a beach in Bali, he’ll be finding himself no doubt. Sometimes if I’m really lucky I will get invited to a party, BBQ or perhaps a day’s paintballing, which sounds great. I shall tick “attending”. And “oh look!” I have been tagged in some photos of that night out in Guildford, don’t I look stupid? How amusing.
By this point I have probably wasted about 25 minutes of my life and I am losing interest, but at no point have I interacted with any sort of work related material. It has all been “social” interaction. Perhaps that’s why they call it Social Media….hmmmm

So having a look through my facebook page I can find only two corporations that I am a fan of, or have interacted with in anyway. I tell a lie, it’s three. One is Red bull, the other is national geographic, and the third is CommuniGator. Red bull is always putting on interesting events and crazy stunts, with great videos that I want to watch and can’t get elsewhere, and national geographic; just the most amazing photos and articles on world travel and culture, and CommuniGator…..well I work for them!!!!

I think the point I am trying to make (and let’s not forget that it is one man’s opinion), when I am interacting with facebook or any form of social media, it is because I want to interact with my friends, or engage with my own interests. I don’t want to be bothered with updates and quotes from work related stuff, in all honesty I find having a blackberry fairly intrusive and I’m sure that there are others who have felt like launching theirs from the nearest bridge, but that’s the way we work now, so….., sorry it just rang. How intrusive!! Social media, to me, seems to me to be another step towards pushing work life into our spare time. I don’t want it there, I want to occupy myself with something else and forget about work sometimes. I think social media certainly has a place to play in certain industries, such as Red Bull or maybe a night club or restaurant chain, as these are companies selling or promoting products that are “sociable”. For the rest of us though I think we should realise that people are not interested in engaging in their work life 100% of the time, and that social media needs to be left for the few!
So to conclude, yes I think social media is a dead duck, let’s get the fad out of our system and start working on promoting our companies in a professional manner that can return tangible results and core metrics that we can use to deliver proper content to our readership in a manner and time frame that they can interact with…..let’s get email marketing!!
Oh and save your discussion as to where your facebook logo is going to go on the website, I won’t be becoming a fan.

Alastair Lovell.

The majority of web surfers;  around 70 per cent, click the optimised natural listings on the first page of a search engine as opposed to sponsored links.

Natural listings are more trusted than paid ads and, unlike pay-per-click traffic – which typically dries up once you stop spending –SEO is the gift that keeps on giving.

But the basic pitch – put the effort into building your natural listings in the search engines and customers will keep coming – proves a hard sell for marketing departments under pressure to produce fast results.

In a sector still in its infancy and devoid of a dedicated industry body or minimum professional standards lack of expertise among practitioners has also harmed SEO’s reputation.

The increasingly complex nature of SEO has led to a shakeout of inexperienced operators.
Companies have been burnt. A lot of our companies have previously worked with two or three companies before settling with their current providers.

We at SEO-Tips believe a mix of media including SEO and paid search works best.

Key Points

•    Search engine optimisation is a cost-effective marketing strategy
•    Search marketing spend reached $900 million in 2009
•    Many businesses are grasping the potential of this new marketing avenue

Instant messaging was once tipped to replace e-mail, but recent figures suggest that it has lost ground sharply. Why?

OMG. Instant messaging (IM), once the mainstay of teenage gossips, techie know-it-alls and office time-wasters everywhere, looks as though it is in trouble.

Just a few years ago, it was meant to be the future.

More immediate than e-mail, less fiddly than texting, sending an IM was widely expected by many technology pundits to become our preferred mode of online communication, whether socially or in the office – or socially in the office, for that matter.

WHAT IS INSTANT MESSAGING?
Lets users send notes back and forth in real time while online
Displays which friends and contacts are online
Most popular providers include AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger)

But how times change.

In 2007, 14% of Britons’ online time was spent on IM, according to the UK Online Measurement company – but that has fallen to just 5%, the firm says, basing its findings on the habits of a panel of 40,000 computer users.

The study was released shortly after AOL sold its ICQ instant messaging service $187.5m (£124m) – less than half what the company paid for it in 1998.

And in September 2009, a survey of internet use by the New York-based Online Publishers Association found that the amount of time spent by surfers on traditional communications tools, including IM and e-mail, had declined by 8% since 2003.

It is a far cry from the early days of the decade when this very website anticipated that IM would overtake e-mail by 2004 [see internet links].

Cast your mind back to the early noughties – a time when dial-up was still widespread and the Apple G3s looked futuristic – and it becomes easier to recall why IM looked like it was about to conquer the world.

It was, after all, instant. It let users see if their friends and contacts were online and, if so, communicate with them in real time.

Tech-savvy office staff could chase up a query and expect an answer straight away, without having to pick up the phone. Teenagers in their bedrooms could exchange schoolyard tittle-tattle without the encumbrance of having to press “refresh” on the browser screen to their web-based e-mail account.

It also offered workers a handy means of circumventing their employers’ e-mail usage policies.

Chat’s all folks

Chris Green, a technology journalist turned industry analyst, recalls the heady days of IM’s ascendency.

“That was the way it was going,” he remembers. “E-mail had peaked. And IM offered additional value over e-mail.”

There were niggles, however. Initially, IM systems were “proprietary” and non-compatible, so those using Microsoft’s MSN Messenger were unable to reach friends on Aim, ICQ, or Yahoo! Messenger.

The firms would subsequently allow cross-pollenation of their systems, but, says Mr Green, the delay in “finding something that was ubiquitous across all platforms” – in the same way that sending an e-mail from a Yahoo! to a Hotmail account was seamless – cost the format dearly.
Google Talk
Google Talk was supposed to revive IM. It didn’t

Into the vacuum stepped social networking sites.

Paul Armstrong, director of social media with the PR agency Kindred, believes that the rise of the likes of Facebook and Twitter – which allow users to do much more than just send messages – simply had more to offer.

“With instant messaging you have to stay at your computer,” he says. “With social networking, you can use your phone’s web browser or SMS.

“Rather than shifting away from instant messaging, people are using the functions of instant messaging on different platforms.”

Even though Facebook’s own instant messaging system – not covered in the UK Online Measurement habits – was widely-regarded as inferior to those provided by the established IM networks, users were tied into a one-stop shop for sharing thoughts, photos, and being re-introduced to long-forgotten former colleagues and classmates.

Return to sender

The effect on IM, says Chris Green, has been catastrophic.

Windows Live Messenger – formerly MSN Messenger – was no longer “bundled” with Vista and Windows 7, becoming instead an optional extra, he says. Google may be bullish about Google Talk, the search engine’s attempt to blend IM with e-mail, insisting that millions of its users “love the convenience and simplicity” of the service.

But Mr Green says its modest success represents a “flop” when put alongside the company’s dominance elsewhere on the web.
We’ve gone from instant messaging to something that’s more like conference calls
LJ Rich
Technology journalist

“People have moved on,” he says. “The novelty value has worn off. If you look at teenagers today, they are using Twitter on their mobiles.”

But has IM died out altogether? The figures would suggest that although its market share has fallen, its raw numbers have not.

California-based IT research firm The Radicati Group estimates that there are 2.4 billion IM accounts worldwide, rising to 3.5 billion by 2014.

Plenty of browers, it seems, still value the speed and simplicity of IM.

Technology journalist and BBC Click presenter LJ Rich notes that, in many countries where internet use is censored, BlackBerry Messenger is used to bypass state-sponsored snoops.

And she believes that the principles of IM survive – it is just that sites such as Facebook and Twitter let us talk to a wider audience via a wider range of platforms, including mobiles.

“With social networks, we’ve gone from instant messaging to something that’s more like conference calls,” she says.

Maybe IM will have the last laugh after all. Or, rather, the last LOL.

Source: BBC News

Shoppers using Google to look for products will now find star ratings and reviews in their search results to help them to decide whether to buy. The development comes courtesy of a new partnership between social media technology company Bazaarvoice and Google.

It means reviews that previously appeared on companies’ websites, through the Bazaarvoice service will now also be visible when consumers search on Google for products or manufacturers sold through Bazaarvoice client websites.

Retailers will also now be able to insert product star ratings into their Google advertising. Ads will display the number of users to review a products as well as the average star-rating they gave under a 5-star system.

Sameer Samat, Director of Product Management at Google said: “Consumer Reviews have become such a driving force for online purchasing. If we look back five years ago, it was editorial reviews by experts. Now the internet has allowed ordinary people to have a voice, and that voice is very influential. With this program, we are reaching out to retailers and manufacturers and to use more of this content.”

John Rudoe, Head of Retail at Occado, a Bizaarevoice Ratings and Reviews client, welcomed the move. “Google’s decision to integrate such review content is a smart one and highly welcome,” he said. “For us it should mean more people viewing online food shopping with an even greater amount of confidence”.