Here’s the best from last week.

1. Social commerce what’s fueling it’s growth

How we shop on the web is radically changing and this has huge implications for anyone that sells products or services online.  Interesting article which outlines why this is big business, well worth a read.

2. The role of the Social Strategist

Organisations have realised that social media is very important not only for selling and marketing their products and services but also for changing how they work internally as a business.  Check out Jeremiah Owyang in this very interesting post.

3. 10 ways to find info on the web without using Google

The title explains it all, do I need to say more…

4.  Hunch – Personal recommendations

A fun one, answer 20 questions and hunch will come up with some personal recommendations on magazines to read, tv shows to watch etc etc.

5. 7 principles of building a great social product

If you’re delivering any application for the web there needs to be a social element.  This interesting article will give you some tips.

That’s all for this week..  If I was to give one tip for next week it’s to really consider how social media is going to effect your business going forward because any business with any online component will be seriously effected by it and the companies that take advantage will do really well.

Hi All,

Google Zeithgeist

Very interesting summary from Google on what was most searched for in 2010,  it has the fastest rising queries in sport, food and much more.  Well worth a look.

Facebooks’s grand plans for the future

An interesting article which shows how the founder of Facebook thinks that Facebook will be responsible for completely changing how industries operate.  I believe that this major change will happen and many many businesses will not cope with the change required, however, I don’t believe it will only be Facebook that will dominate the online social world.

Zugara’s augmented reality shopping app

Take a look into the future of social shopping on the internet…

Useful Products & Services

The following list was provided this week by Dan Feaheny.  A top notch business consultant who I’m meeting next week to go through strategy for RazorCoast for 2011.

Keepstream – Did you ever come across a tweet that was really interesting and you wanted to store it…

Buddypress – Build a social network based around WordPress (the blogging platform)

1. LinkedIn Share button

LinkedIn have released new share buttons which you can put on your website and let visitors share out content on LinkedIn.  Very useful if you want to promote your content through LinkedIn.

2. 3 Pillars of Social Media readiness

The majority of organisations are beginning to realise that engaging in conversation with their customers is important but what they haven’t realised is that internal conversation with their employees is just as important.  This article outlines the changes required within the organisation to benefit from this rapidly changing business world we’re operating in.

3. Optimising your website for scent

If your website is a good source for business you should really go beyond the basics of analytics and do in depth analysis of your traffic.  This article talks about setting up custom reporting in Google Analytics to perform scent analysis.  Scent is the keywords or concepts someone is looking for when the arrive on your landing page.  You want people to arrive and think that the page is actually about what they were looking for.  If it’s not then they will disappear off the page.  Once they have decided to give your page a little bit of attention then you need to provide them with relevant information to keep them engaged.

Tips

1. Put information information on your website above the fold.

Above the fold is what web users see before they start to scroll but what most people don’t realise is that most people don’t scroll and if they do they are less likely to read the content below the fold in detail.  The following chart (from Jakob Nielsen) should make you reconsider how the information is laid out in your site.  The summary is that 80% of users read content above the fold.

2. A tip from the guys over at Channelship to use Zopim on your website.  This allows your website visitors initiate realtime chats with you.  I like this, I think we’ll add it to our website.

Events

Ingage are running a 1 day conference about marketing your business online, I’m doing the LinkedIn Session.  Check it out.

Optimum results are running their second free seminar around the topic of 30 actions to improve their business.  This is on to-morrow in Dundalk.

Here’s the top articles this week:

YouTube Cheat Sheet

An interesting article on how you can optimise your content on Youtube to appear on searches.  As YouTube is the 3rd biggest search engine in the world, it’s well worth taking a bit of time to optimise your content on it.

Using Youtube Analytics for B2B Marketing

Sticking to our YouTube theme did you know that a significant percentage of  YouTube videos are not watched on Youtube.  Using analytics you can find out where people are watching your videos and lots more juicy stuff.   Check it out.

50 ways of increasing fans on your facebook page

Read this article if you have a fan page and you want more fans.

The things people will do for a fiver

Interesting site where you’ll see lots of useful things that people will do for a fiver, for example, create a logo for your business, create a tag line etc.  Social media opens up a whole new world of opportunity for your business, take advantage of it!

Social media facts of 2010

Some interesting facts of 2010.  One I found interesting was that people are members of enough social networks and can’t handle any more.  It will be interesting to see how this takes shape overt the next couple of years.  People don’t want to have separate profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc.  You want to login into your desktop/mobile and be socially connected for personal and business.

Google Launches Hotpot – Local business recommendation engine

Google places is becoming increasingly important where you register your local business with Google and it gets displayed on location specific searches (e.g. Restaurant Dublin), as an extension to this Google Launched Hotpot which allows you and your friends to rate local businesses and this will influence search results.

A social network for beer lovers!

There’s a social network for everything, check out this one for sharing the beers you like with your family and friends

That’s all for this week.  Send an e-mail to info@razorcoast.com if you want to register.

Have a great week!

1. LinkedIn expand company pages

We see how popular business pages are in Facebook and LinkedIn were always going to follow suit.  At the moment their business page functionality is very basic, however, they have just made changes which allow you to start displaying your products, services and recommendations as part of your business page.  When will you be able to sell your products and services through LinkedIn?  Of course that is not too far away.  When you get so many people spending so much time on these type of social network platforms it makes absolute sense that you enable shopping on them.  People are not visiting your corporate site as much and this will continue to decline so you need to get them to shop wherever they are spending time.

2. Facebook to Launch e-mail client

The rumour going around is that Facebook will launch an e-mail client in direct competition to yahoo and gmail.  They are due to launch it to-day and they have been pilot testing on www.fb.com.  More and more people are using Facebook to exchange information as opposed to e-mail but Facebook would still like to own e-mail communication as well because a lot of conversations are still initiated through e-mail.   Watch out for the announcement later to-day.

3. The value of a Facebook ‘Liker’

As Facebook spreads throughout the web you will see the ‘Like’ button appearing all over the place.  It allows a person to share with their friends that they Like and/or are interested in a piece of content you display to them.  The big advantage of providing this capability is that their profile gets updated with this information and then their friends see it in their Facebook newsfeed.  This article talks about what type of people click the ‘Like’ button.  These guys on average are more active users and typically have 2.4 times the average number of friends.  So even if you are not on Facebook it can still be useful to provide the ‘Like’ button to allow other people to share information about your products/services to their friends.

4. 50 Social media tactics for non profits

Social media can be very effective for promoting non profits.  This presentation gives 50 ideas, please share with any non profits you know.

5. Google rich snippets for shopping sites

Google is constantly changing search results and one interesting one is that now for shopping sites when you do a search you’ll start to see information such as reviews, product pricing etc directly within the search.

Tips

1. Drop Box –  Handy tool for online backup and free for up to 2 Gigs of storage.  Upload files on one machine and then move to another machine and keep working!

2.Twitalyzer – Useful stats tool if you’re a twitter user.

I hope your week gets off to a flying start.  Here’s some articles/tips to kick it off:

Amazon Offers gift cards through facebook.

Social gifting is going to be big.  If you now link your Amazon and Facebook account you can purchase a gift for a friend on Facebook and then schedule when this gift card appears on their wall.  Gift scheduling, that’s a handy feature!

How facebook decides what to put on your newsfeed

Facebook has a complicated algorithm in place to work out what items it shares, which ones get priority, what status updates are more important that others etc.  This article gives you some clues to what happens and how you take advantage of it.  The algorithm is a guarded secret but this will give you some ideas.

SEO Report Card

Check how your site rates from an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) point of view against other competitors.  Free tool, worth checking out!

Universal McCann – Wave 5

An interesting report from Universal McCann which is an update from Wave 4.  Some very interesting information about how Social media is evolving.  One interesting graph in this report is showing a rapid decline in the number of people that visited a company/brand website over the last 6 months.   There are still far too many companies with brochure websites.  Why visit a website if it’s just an advertisement?

10 Intent triggers for digital media

This articles talks about how technology is increasingly driving marketing and how you can create intent to purchase and drive sales.  For example, if you offer incentives this is more likely to trigger intent to purchase.  Interesting article and well worth a read.

Some tips and other Information

1. Buy a book called Words that sell. It will help you convince your web visitors to buy!

2. Make sure your business is registered with Google places.  It is becoming increasingly important.

3. If you are advertising on Facebook and paying on a cost per click basis change over to cost per impression if your conversion rate is .1 or greater.  This will save you a significant amount of money.  That can’t be bad in this environment.

Picture this week thanks to Addicted eyes

Have a great week. I’m working with a very large Global Insurance company this week.  Great to see the big boys considering Social Media.  Ciao!

Ian

So what’s of interest this week?

1. Optimising your social media strategy

A lot of you have come across AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) as part of the sales process well you have another 2 – Advocacy and Loyalty!

2. Convince and Convert – 33 social media hot tips

There’s a few good ones on this list, skim through it and pick out the ones relevant to you.

3. Why do people fan Facebook pages?

A recent study in the US – over 40% of people fan facebook pages to show their public support for the brand.

4. Useful blog marketing tactics

A list of useful blog marketing tactics.

5. The future of television and the digital living room

We have Social Media, Social Commerce, Social Magazines… what about Social TV.

Tips

1. Google places allows you to register the location and other details of your business for free and this gives you a good chance of appearing on a Google map listing when someone is searching for your type of business.  The tip is to also include testimonials as part of this entry as this is taken into account when Google is figuring out who should appear on the list.

2. Check out Google insight to see traffic trends.  One of Google’s many excellent tools.

3. Check out wefollow.com.  It’s a twitter directory, see what activity is going on in your area of business.

Here’s the most interesting articles and tips that I have come across this week.

1. 10 Apps for monitoring social media

Social Media can be very time consuming.  This article includes 10 good applications you can use to monitor/manage your social media activity.  One of my preferred tools is Hootsuite, you can’t go too far wrong with this.

2. Bing and Facebook Just made search social

When Google indexes results on a search page it uses machines to work out what appears first but that is not really a good way of indexing content.  Bing are Microsoft’s search engine and they have just announced a partnership with Facebook for their search results.  Soon when you start searching on Bing it will give some weight to the fact that some of your friends/followers have ‘liked’ certain content.  For example, if I was searching for a movie it would be better to show me some movies in the search results that my friends liked.  Social search is going to become increasingly important and you will see lots of changes happening in this area.

3. 6 Ways to optimise your blog for search engine ranking

An interesting article about how you can really focus your blog posting on search engine ranking and ensure any articles get maximum exposure.  Without quality content there’s no point in optimising!

Tips

1. Did you know that most users don’t scroll to see information so you hear people talking about ‘above the fold’.  This is the area you see without scrolling and it’s more important than below the fold because most people don’t scroll.  So place your important information up top.  If you want see what other people generally see without scrolling have a look at Google’s Browser sizing tool.

2. Go to Google and type in site:’your home page’.  If you see duplicate titles/descriptions that is not good for Google when it tries to index your content.  The title displayed is very important.  Imagine naming all your books the same in a library!

3. Google assigns a ‘Page Rank’ to your website and to each page on your website.  This ranges from 0 to 10.  Typically if you want to get a link back from a website if their Page rank is high then it’s more likely that the link is more valuable (there are tons are combinations but this can be used as a guide).  Check out PRChecker to check out your page rank.

Tips were weighted towards SEO this week as I had to write a guide to SEO!

Events Coming Up…

1.  The Dublin Web Summit is starting on Thursday.  It’s the best technology event in Ireland and over 600 people booked in.  All tickets are gone.  I’ll be keeping notes and will pass on the best information.

2. Horizon Speakers have brought over Kerwin Rae for a masterclass on Marketing.  It’s highly recommended by Ian Lawlor so it must be good!

Here’s a summary of the most interesting stuff that I came across this week:

1.  Facebook and Skype announced their new integration

So going forward within Skype you will be able to see your Facebook newsfeed and call your friends.  You can see where this is going, over time you’ll be chatting to your friends on line then you’ll have phone or video calls with them through skype.  Maybe eventually we’ll get rid of phone numbers? They are too hard to remember, usernames are much easier….sound far fetched?

2.Discover Digital Life – Great stats online.

Some great stats and information about the online world brought to you on the discover digital life website.  Social networking where it goes next, a guide to consumers online activities etc.

3.Sharing stats online

Some very interesting trends and reports on sharing online from Socialtwist (they sell a product for sharing information online).   Through this you will see that from their stats that sharing something online by e-mail is still more popular than social networks but has declined 15% since last year (and will continue to decline).  What’s also interesting is that if you share through your social network the click through rate is much higher than e-mail.  This makes perfect sense.  In the future the majority of sharing will be done through your social networks.  Anyway, check out the report online.

4.Check your name availability across hundreds of social networks

Check to see if your username/company name is available across hundreds of social networks.  You may not want to join them all yet but you may want to reserve your name on a few of them.

5. The rise of social networking ad spending

An infographic which shows how ad spending on social network is increasing rapidly.  Facebook are currently making a lot of money out of ads but they are going to make a fortune out of it!

Here are a couple of tips this week…

Tip 1 – Google indexes your web pages based on relevance and importance. Relevant is how the content on your page is relevant to the user searching and importance is what other sites think about you. If you get good links back from very relevant sites that will help your ranking. See the following five tips to help you build quality links.  So start building up high quality links to your website!

Tip 2 –  Landing pages

When somebody arrives on your site the page they arrive on is a landing page.  The design of your landing page has a very significant impact on what users do when they arrive.  So if you want to convert more visitors study landing pages.

Other….

Have you gone to the see the movie social network yet, the reviews are actually really good.  I haven’t seen it yet but tempted to go.  Here’s a movie trailor.

Pictures – thanks to Kennymatic

Make sure to send me some feedback and especially items you want to share with everyone else!

So What’s really interesting this week….

1.  LinkedIn will be rolling out LinkedIn Signal in the next few weeks.  On LinkedIn you get to see status updates from people but with Signal you can start filtering out the updates that are of interest to you.  For example, you can perform a search so you only see updates with certain words in them that are of interest to your business.   If you want to try it out enter your details here.

2.  10 Blog marketing tactics from Future Buzz.

3. Last week Facebook launched a completely new version of their Facebook Groups features.  On Facebook you have a personal profile for you, a business page for your business and a group for friends, associations etc.   Within e-mail you create a group of people that you e-mail regularly.  Within Facebook groups you can  now create a similar group and when you update this group they see the updates in their newsfeed.  There’s lots of cool new features as part of the group including an online chat.

4. Some interesting insights about twitter.  In the article it claims that from research out of 2,000 tweets 41% were categorised as pointless babble.  Although you’d want to research a lot more than 2,000 tweets I don’t think that statistic is too far wrong. I would actually say it’s higher.  There is value to be obtained from twitter but most people are completely wasting their time sending useless information.

5.  5 Game changing social media campaigns.

6. Google last week launched a web address shortener (web addresses are too long for the likes of twitter).    The big benefit of using this is you get good traffic analytics showing you how often the link was clicked.  Thanks to Piaras McDonnell for sharing this.

8. A very interesting video from Kevin Rose the founder of Digg, the social news sharing site, which talks about bringing your site from 1 to 1 million users.

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Tips

1. If you are running advertisements using Google Adwords and you don’t know the quality score of your ad then it is very likely that you are wasting a lot of money.  Look up quality score and check it out!

2. If you have a Facebook business page and you have more than 25 fans you can apply for a shorter web address.  For example, our facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/razorcoast.  So if it’s a really long name and you want to shorten it log in to Facebook and go to www.facebook.com/username.  This name is also indexed on Google so it’s another place for people to find

3. e-mail your LinkedIn contacts once a month.  Let them know you’re still in business and offer them something of benefit.

4. Make sure you have a license to use pictures in your blog, website etc.  I pick out pictures in flickr (photo sharing site) that have creative commons licensing which  means I can share them out as long as I reference the person.  So thanks to Jamelah for this week’s picture.  If you want to find pictures that have ‘creative commons’ rights do an advanced search on flickr.

Have a fantastic week. If you want to share anything send it on or put it in the comments below.