Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

• A part of my job is to  find ways to increase my clients online visibility and part of the service I provide is thinking outside the box.  One afternoon while I sat preparing content for one of my client’s Twitter accounts, it dawned on me.  Let’s use Twitter to not only promote the teleseminar but also to feed content about the teleseminar to the audience while the teleseminar event was taking place.  So this is what I did: I scheduled tweets to promote the teleseminar on Twitter.  Generally it would be tweets getting people to sign up to the teleseminar.




• On the day of the teleseminar, schedule more tweets promoting the teleseminar but don’t overdo it, you don’t want to spam your audience.




• Reminder tweets of the teleseminar taking place in 1 hr, 30 mins, 15 mins, then about to start.  Also do one after the teleseminar has started, saying listening to…., come and join.

This is all done on Hootsuite, so we don’t have to worry about it.  Lovely tool Hootsuite.

When the teleseminar starts, have your team, in my case, my clients would use my team who would sit in and listen to the teleseminar and tweet updates on what is being talked about in the teleseminar with a direct link for people to join in on the teleseminar.

Tips:

Use a hashtag to define your teleseminar and track it.  E.g. #teleseminar.

When it comes to the questions and answers, announce via twitter, “it’s questions and answer time” and again make use of hashtags.

#Qtopic: What is the best way to use this product?
#Atopic: The best way to use this product is….

This way you are adding more useful content to your Twitter account, and you are generating activity and conversation on your site.  After the teleseminar, if the tweets are related to what you do, take those feeds and feed them into your twitter sheet for future use.

If you want to find out more about getting your teleseminars updated via Twitter, tweet @romanythresher

It is definitely time to make sure that your site is ready to go mobile.  All the top dogs are making sure that there sites are stipped down to text only.  What does this mean really?  It means stripping a website from all images and making it text only and viewable for mobile phones.

Well in all truth its not rocket science to get your site to be mobile.  If you run your website or blog on a WordPress platform, guess what, WordPress are already a step ahead of you and has a plugin called Mobile Press which you just install and activate.

BBC News – Facebook launches “Zero”

Just when you get familiar with on application it is time to learn a new application.  For most it will probably be second nature because everyone these days has a Google account.  You need a Google account if you want to use any of Googles cool tools such as Analytics, Google Adwords, Google Wave, Feedburner, and….

Hearing that there is a new buzz in town of course I must go and check it out.  Well on first impression it looks and feels almost like a Twitter knock off.  Not sure at this stage whether it will catch on.  What is in Google Buzz’s favour is that everyone almost has a Google Account for one reason or another which other applications like Twitter do not.  But it is not Twitter and if you like me who loves Twitter, you just cannot compare.  I’ll have to keep my eyes on Buzz to see if it Buzz’s and start adding contacts to my very dorment Google Account to see what happens.

PS.  All you need to get buzzing is a gmail account.

What are your thoughts?

When I first thought of launching a blog of my own, I decided to research into available scripts and tools and see if anything surpassed WordPress in quality. I’d encountered a few subtle bugs in WordPress while working for my clients, so I wanted an alternative.

One of my friends sent me his commercial script for testing. He talked a lot about its benefits, but after a few hours of struggling with simple tasks (which take 5 minutes to solve in WP) I said no, thanks. Even the best product built by a solitary programmer can never beat something created by a team, so I looked into a directory of free scripts and soon found a couple of leading blog scripts built by teams. One of them seemed popular and had on its website a list of blogs powered by it. I visited those links one by one – only to discover that some of those blogs no longer existed, and the rest of them had been moved to WordPress.

I have set up a blog using Drupal – but Drupal is too heavy for a single blog, and lacks certain features. For example, its default comment form doesn’t allow your visitors to insert their website URLs. Unregistered visitors can’t enter their names either. And besides, setting up a blog takes more time than with WordPress.

So I gave up. My blog is powered by WordPress – as is this one. I’ve customised the theme, of course – modified it greatly, so nobody will ever recognise the original theme downloaded by me for free. I’ve also installed a few plugins – the necessary minimum: one for SEO, one for captcha and one for social bookmarking. WP’s subtle bugs have spared my blog so far (fingers crossed), but I’ve had more than one opportunity to appreciate the benefits of this particular script: flexibility, availability of good plugins for nearly every purpose, relatively small size of the script itself and intuitive admin interface. It also generates valid HTML code, which is an important consideration for a web perfectionist like me.