We did not put up a landing page while we were re-building the website.

So, if you had visited the site in the midst of a truly heavy overhaul, you might have noticed a strange assortment of logos and pages everywhere, with links that didn’t work and a completely disarrayed alignment. No, it’s not a bad thing. Let me explain why.

Too many times, we’ve visited a website just to find the “Site Under Construction” page glaring at us. Sometimes they redirect us to a sister-concern’s page or, as it happens more often, just remain static. You be the judge and tell me if this is a credible ploy on the company’s part or just leave the site as is, and start tweaking it. I suggest the latter route.

We’ve had people inquiring what was up with us, and we told them that the site’s being re-built, and this seemed to excite a lot of them. We’ve had a surge in the number of site visits during this past two weeks, astonishingly.

Don’t agree? Let’s hear your views in the comment form below. 

Let me put all the fears to rest – no, we’re not under attack. Our website is going through some transformations and since we believe in an open, transparant environment, we did not even have the usual “Page Under Construction” landing page while we did it. Was supposed to give visitors a step-by-step insight into how we transformed from the old look to the new one.

It still is happening. If you stay on the site long enough, you might just watch a page disappear and another one appear.

Social press releases are particularly important for all the online public relations experts, firms and online marketers. We don’t call SMPR a trend but rather, a tool. It is not there to replace or kill the traditional press release but it is there to improve upon it. It’s not an process to a traditional press release layout, but includes parts of the traditional press release formatted in a more simpler,  comprehensive and ready-to-use manner.

SMPR includes the traditional press release format but also includes something beyond. The main difference is how it uses the burgeoning social media networks and applications. Compared to a “static” press release, a social media one offers:

• Video
• Audio
• Weblogs
• Comment areas
• Discussion Forums
• RSS feeds
• Uploaded multimedia files
• Embedded Links
• Direct interaction with social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Technorati and many more…

Because of these features, Social Media Press Releases offer a much easier way for news to be digested through online feeds. This mainly includes professional bloggers, who are becoming an ever more important source of “breaking” news.

Making use of Social Media News Releases Effectively

Here’s how you can make use of the the Social Media News Release effectively as discussed on Hubspot

1) Build a cool SMNR.

This news release can have as many features of the template as you want. Videos, links, images, sound, threaded discussions, voting, rating, throwing sheep, whatever you want. Bring it on.

2) Post on your website. Only.

Take that really cool version of the news release and post that version on your own company website.  After all, don’t you want the coolest stuff on the web to be on your website?  It’s also a good idea to use a blog software to post your news releases, it is simple and easy and produces an RSS feed automatically. Copy the URL where your cool SMNR lives, you’ll need it later.

3) Build a simple (text) version of the release.

Build another, simple version of the release for the wire service(s).  This version should be all text, maybe 250 words as a summary to get people’s interest, it should also have 2-4 optimized links, including a prominent link back to the full, original release on your company website.  The goal of this version is (a) to get people to click through to your website and interact there, and (b) build links for SEO purposes.

4) Use Press Release Grader.

Take that short version of the release you are going to send out over the wire and run it through the free press release analysis tool.  This will make sure you don’t use any Gobbeldygook and your links are set up correctly, as well as some other basic checks.  Fix all the big errors, and also check the word cloud to make sure the search engines will look at the release the way you want.

5) Use the wire service.

Send that simple, text based news release over the wire.  No pictures, no videos, just text and links (using keywords with anchor text).  Using only text will save you some money, and you will be sending people back to your own website to interact with each other to have a much richer experience.  They get to leave comments (and see all the other comments from everyone else), view multimedia (posted under your own account) and vote for and promote (in other forms of social media) the one main version of the news release.

Other important reads:

Tips to Writing a Successful Press Release for Google NEWS & Social Media Sites

10 of the Best Social Media Tools for PR Professionals and Journalists

[Image Courtesy: rushprnews.com]

This article was posted in Mashable on June 1, 2009.

In 2019, when you look back at the social media landscape ten years earlier, you might laugh at how hard you had to work. You had to type things into forms (ha! remember those?), type URLs in the address bar (how archaic!), and put up with irritating communications about irrelevant products. Social media in the future will be effortless and everywhere. Here’s a look at some of the new technologies in store for us over the next 10 years that will make our social (media) lives easier.

1. The Arduino – One Tough Little Italian

Arduino is a small circuit board commonly used to prototype electronics. Its low cost and ease of implementation has meant that this little device is now leading a hobbyist revolution in connecting real life objects to social networks, like Twitter (). It has allowed one man to create a device attached to a chair that tweets at the presence of noxious natural gasses (ahem), another uses Arduino to monitor when his cats are inside the house or out, and a small bakery and cafe in East London is now able to tweet what’s fresh from their oven. This may all seem like pretty pointless stuff, but the pointlessness is the point.

The revolution of objects notifying human beings of their state (e.g., The Internet of Things) isn’t happening in the R&D labs of large multinational conglomerates, it’s happening in the spare rooms, garages and bedrooms of developers. The printing press, possibly one of the first inventions to aid information sharing, was invented by Johannes Gutenberg with investment intended for an altogether different enterprise: polished metal mirrors intended to capture holy light from religious relics, presumably to sell to hapless tourists. In other words, what might seem like silly tinkering today, might be a key contributor to our future world.

2. RFID Tags & Transponders

For a number of years RFID tags have been used in passports, ID cards, travel cards and credit cards as a means to identify us when scanned, and they are used commercially for inventory tracking. Brands including Abercrombie & Fitch, Levis and Kleenex have experimented with RFID tags to track their inventory at an item-level. Transponders can be made as small as a grain of sand and can be produced very cheaply. So it is widely thought that they may one day be installed in everything from a packet of biscuits to a pair of underpants.

But RFID tags have potentially valuable real-world applications. It may be possible, for example, to create a very cheap device which sits in your trash can or recycling box and monitors the contents by scanning RFID tags as stuff is thrown in. You might ask why anyone would want to do this with their garbage, but there is a lot of valuable data to be had in what is, in essence, scrobbling for your trash. Your trash is a goldmine of consumption data in the same way that your search data or browsing history is, and could be used to track brand loyalty and consumption habits.

And mobile phone manufacturers, particularly Nokia, are currently experimenting with consumer devices that act as readers and scanners, meaning that your mobile device might be able to do things like exchange information with other phones by bringing them near to one another, or gather information directly from products and find out instantly if anyone in your network has purchased the item in the past. Within the context of mobile phones, this technology is generally referred to as NFC (Near-Field Communication).

Of course, just because we could do this, doesn’t necessarily mean we would, or should. There are clear privacy implications involved that might make the idea of monitoring consumption via your trash or tracking your underpants dead on arrival. Privacy advocates such as CASPIAN are highly motivated to prevent this from happening — the notion that RFIDs could be on our person without us knowing is akin to web sites sharing knowledge about us without our consent. The anti-RFID site spychips.org has more information about the privacy concerns of the technology.

3. Geomagnetic Sensors in Mobile Devices

Some older phones used to come equipped with these compasses, and though they have been phased out in recent years, they’re starting to make a comeback. Apple Insider suggests that the next generation of iPhone hardware will contain a “Magnetometer,” the feature already exists in the HTC Dream (the T-Mobile G1), though it is currently used for very little.

But the real world applications are many. For example, let’s say that you’ve just come out of a subway at a roundabout, and the first thing you do is take out your GPS-enabled phone’s mapping application to see where you need to walk to get to your friends waiting for you at a bar. In order to orientate yourself correctly, you’ll need to find street names. But if you happen to be in London, where I live, you know that street names are rarely in convenient places, they’re usually hidden behind trees and other signs (where’s the fun otherwise?). So a compass heading is a perfect way to let you know which direction you roughly need to walk in. Likewise, if you want to scan an area at a certain location for a great place to eat, your device is going to need a heading in order to overlay information over the top of your screen.

4. Optical Pattern Recognition & Augmented Reality

Imagine you’re on your way to a conference and you have a couple of hours to kill so you park yourself in the corner of a local bar to catch up on Mashable (). You’ve barely begun reading when an attractive girl or guy catches your eye. You’re transfixed, your heart starts to race — you’re in love. But being the shy type you can’t just go over and introduce yourself, so instead you do a quick scan of the room with your cell phone to pick up any latent metadata. Unfortunately, a social network profile pops up informing you that the object of your affection is in a relationship. Your initial excitement rapidly dissipates and you get on with your reading.

That scenario is pretty far-fetched, but it’s one potential promise of Biometric Face Recognition technology that is already used by police and security services to help identify known criminals. 3 years ago Google acquired Neven Vision, a company that provides such technology. Google reported that it is using this technology in its Picasa product to help keep your personal photos organized without you needing to do any of the actual organizing. I have literally thousands of pictures of my children and family on my computer at home. It would take me days to go through and tag each one so that I could search them more easily in the future. But at some point, Picasa might be able to tag everything for me automatically by recognizing faces and objects in my photos.

That’s still not quite to the level of our hypothetical, but Tochindot’s Sekai Camera and Wikitude are making in-roads into rich and immersive ambient metadata, too. Their current goals revolve around tagging inanimate objects, but someday biometric face recognition could be used to attach metadata to real people.

5. OpenID, OAuth, and the Identity Graph

OpenID is an open authentication protocol that lets users use a single set of login credentials for every site they visit. It’s already in use at hundreds of smaller websites and large sites like Facebook () are starting to accept OpenID accounts. Once you’ve authenticated, a second open protocol called OAuth will help you share data about yourself with other sites you use. OAuth lets your grant authorization to sites to collect data from other places you participate online, which ultimately could eliminate the need to fill in redundant information about your profile and who your friends are at each new site you use. And companies like Cliqset and DandyID are creating platforms that will allow you to share your entire identity graph information from your profile to your contacts to your lifestream.

Together, these technologies could essentially eliminate the need to fill out forms and register for sites all together.

6. Mind Reading

But the idea of being able to control an interface without the use of your fine motor skills has massive implications for human computer interaction. Consider the ability to tweet what you’re thinking without having to pull your phone out of your pocket, type your message and hit send. Imagine being able to think ‘Facebook’ and your screen presents you with an overview of your friend’s activity stream. This method of interaction is at a very experimental stage but there are proofs-of-concept that exist. Most of this kind of innovation is currently intended to help people with limited motor skills, and not lazy social media addicts, however.

7. Natural Language Processing

Firefox’s Ubiquity is one project that’s attempting to change the way we interact with the web by allowing people to use natural language commands. Further, in the future, applications might exist that could analyze your tweets or comments with NLP, and suggest people or brands for you to follow.

The Future

Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at UK Integrated Agency JPMH where he helps brands such as BlackBerry, Nestlé, Johnson & Johnson, and Hasbro get the most from digital media. You can follow Mike on Twitter.

Social media is the in thing these days. The success of Obama and our very own Pink Chaddi campaign is fresh in our memories and spoken to death in social media conferences and seminars.

On the other side, every other day, witness a new venture or foray into the space. If one adds up all the hype, then social media should have already arrived from a brand communication and marketing perspective. Well, not really. Here is my take on what it will take to get social media, which I agree, is hot and presents profound new ways of touch, communication and engagement, can get there.

Yes, it is the most democratic medium or platform. Yes, the young are more comfortable with the Orkuts, Twitters and Facebooks than the old and yes there is no geographical constraint as internet is universal. But let us not forget that brands or the process of branding (except for a few categories) is not something special or separate for social media. Social media needs new ways of adoption and customization to suit its unique ecosystem and ways. But it is not that the branding process itself, is in for a radical change. This means that successful social media initiatives can be executed consistently over a period of time only with firms or players who have an understanding of how brands and the branding process works and then combine this understanding with social media expertise. While social media is powerful, combined offline and online campaigns will create higher impact.

I am not sure how many know this. Software or tools that are meant for listening in social media are growing in abundance and at last count had 18 such URLs or names in my database. I am talking only of players who are visible and this number by itself seems to be growing at a brisk pace. While it is useful, let us understand that it is only the first step in a formal process a brand needs to undergo in social media.

There is an urgent need to look beyond blogs, though blogs show a lot of promise. I am saying this more from the perspective that there are evolved tools such as Twitter, Maplib, social bookmarking sites, besides Facebook, that truly offer immense potential. For example, a friend of mine had done a campaign for a movie using twitter and Maplib that was both creative and engaging. I also saw a website, which is a wiki with the feeds on YouTube linked. A great idea, simply because these two tools have combined reach that is smartly being used. Heard someone recently tell me that Dell extensively uses Twitter for its global customer support.

Social media is not as techie or geekish or complex as many think or make it out to be. There are couple of thumb rules, which work fairly well for starters. For instance, just focus on starting a blog and then use all the social media tools available to promote it. Also social media is not about just getting in but using it smartly to be heard and be visible.

Let us be clear that all that is happening in social media is experiments and there are bound to be successful and bad experiments. The best is to learn from it and move on, as the space itself is exploding fast and learning is the most precious commodity around in the space. Much like a battle scarred veteran who wears his scars on his sleeve.

Not all brands and companies are suited for social media since it is a different world out there. While it is exciting and great for some, it will be out of bounds for many. A company and its entire organization needs to be ready and be prepared for what social media entails and can assure of a surefire disaster if one is not prepared and goes around thinking it is like advertising that one can control. Even firms who play in the space would be well advised to do the diligence as too many failures or bad starts is bound to speed derailing enthusiasm, to adopt the media.

There are many more need to do lists and hope what I have said and listed makes for a good start and gets us cracking into a cracker of a space called social media.

Xavier Prabhu
Director
PRHUB

What was primarily an ‘online diary’ became a ‘virtual space’ for me to network. I’ve found many a client and business online, including my PR agent (who technically, found me online). Though my blog was a space for my personal rants, it has grown over the years, as have I.

Undoubtedly, it provides an insight into business, and this digital age, I trust blogs more than websites. The platform serves as a platform to update, maintain and display creativity, all at one time, and in fact, very simply, in just one click.

Strategies to market are umpteen, and believe me, I’ve tried them all – from telemarketing to paper adverts, from digital marketing through my earlier website to the current website through word press, you can quiz me on it.

Of all the options, I’ve personally found the blog to be the most powerful, and in fact, at times, superseding social networking sites. A networking site can only get you this far, but your blog can seal the deal.

The blog has provided me a base to connect directly with my customers and clients across the globe. It is implicit of course that, to use the blog effectively, one must also network extensively, but the benefits are certainly visible within a month or so.

How exactly has it helped me?

• Mine is a service oriented business, and my blog gives a basic understanding of our services, which works as a preliminary short listing of customers. On any given day, I get 20 inquiries, of which 5 are relevant to my business; since blogging has happened, I get only relevant inquiries, and thus cutting down on my time & energy spent.
• It is a one stop option for me to display creativity, networks, past experience, tariff rates, what not – again, a time and energy saving benefit.
• It is an easy point of reference, if you do become an accomplished blogger. Any marketing novice will tell you how important ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing is. The blog is just that – a huge ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing device.

Benefits are limitless – it will depend on the business and the business person. Like most other things in life, business is a two way process of demand and supply, service provider and service receiver, in layman terms, between you and me.

Aparna Gonibeed
CEO
Integrated Systems

Ask a thousand people on the streets what they think is a bigger name – Google or General Motors. I bet my life almost everyone will say Google. Yet, would you believe it, GM spends close to 3 billion dollars a year on advertising? I choked on my morning coffee when I read this, and I don’t think I see the point. Public Relations has evolved from being a glorified courier service organizing press conferences to a mainstream brand-building tool.

There have been scores of experts talking about how advertising is a must-have for businesses and frankly, that kind of talk is outdated. No one wants to spend a million dollars and put up hoardings all over the city and not get the RoI they want.

Businesses nowadays should take heed, particularly when weighing an ad push versus a targeted PR campaign.  There are three simple reasons why.

1.  Credibility - Advertising, no matter how clever, funny, dramatic, or aesthetically pleasing, is self-serving.  It is a pitch, and, no matter how cleverly disguised, we all recognize advertising as a pitch.  PR, on the other hand, has gone through a filtering process.  That is, an editor or reporter has deemed the information credible and newsworthy.  While we may not love the media, we recognize that they do filter pap from news in most instances.  What PR lacks in control, it gains in credibility.

2.  Clarity – Advertising uses subtleties, claims, and comparisons and borrows from the arts and psychology to try to influence decisions.  PR usually translates into simple messages.  A problem has been solved. New conclusions have been reached.  Someone or something has created a new approach.  The more straightforward and relevant the information, the greater the possibility of it becoming news.  PR is based on information, not seduction.

3.  Cost - There is no company on the planet spending a billion dollars a year on PR.  In advertising, there are more than twenty-five.  There is no comparison in costs.  Or, many would argue, in effectiveness.

PR is better than any marketing tool at your disposal, including advertising – something the stewards of the best brands in the world already know.

At Darkwater Digital, we take the whole concept of PR to a new level and guarantee your brand’s presence online. We build and maintain the brand’s online reputation and try our best to make sure that the most common mistakes that businesses make are not repeated for your brand.

We don’t want you to spend a million dollars. We don’t want your message to be lost in a bottle, out at sea.

Parts of this article have been sourced from the Camino Media website.

You could probably get in touch with us if you liked our SEO services

There have been numerous articles on how Twitter and the likes have been better at providing news than news channels. No one can deny the convenience of having services like GPS integrated with one’s car.Software developers are one of the few species of people who believe that they can change the world – sometimes they really can!

In this age of the internet time, which is faster than fast – practically instantaneous (considering one is still not on dial-up), companies must adapt quickly. Traditional strategies would fail in these days of internet time no matter what the business is. They must keep up with every whim of the customers they cater to.

So, what does internet enable us to do? Primarily, it helps companies cope with competition by allowing them to manage huge databases of employees, products and customers. Through virtual marketing, the technology helps businesses cut traditional business costs and provides 24×7 communication tools like email and web chat to name a few.

All this said, what would the cost be for getting the best software product out there with all the support required?

The answer to that question is SaaS or Software as a Service model. Herein, the developer licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. The application could be hosted on the developer’s own web servers or could be downloaded to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires.

On-demand licensing and use alleviates the customer’s burden of equipping a device with every conceivable application. It enables software to become a variable expense, rather than a fixed cost at the time of purchase. It also enables licensing only the amount of software needed versus traditional licenses per device. SaaS also enables the buyer to share licenses across their organization and between organizations.

Using SaaS can also conceivably reduce the up-front expense of software purchases, through less costly, on-demand pricing from hosting service providers. SaaS lets software vendors control and limit use, prohibits copies and distribution, and facilitates the control of all derivative versions of their software.

The sharing of end-user licenses and on-demand use may also reduce investment in server hardware. SaaS is generally associated by software professionals and business associates with business software and is typically thought of as a low-cost way for businesses to obtain rights to use software as needed versus licensing all devices with all applications.

Having listed the advantages of SaaS, a mention of certain drawbacks – Data transfers happen at Internet speeds (so advisable to subscribe to better speeds) Widespread implementation of SaaS requires well defined services as well. Availability of open source applications, inexpensive hardware, low-cost bandwidth push customers to operate their own software.

In conclusion, one can say that communication is key between the software developers and the business personnel. The motto must be “We are listening!” and we definitely are.

Web 2.0 – one of the strongest drivers today—is creating new forms of communication, causing drastic market shifts, seeing massive innovation and opening up endless opportunities for entrepreneurs to both develop and take advantage of the technology. There are various arguments about what exactly Web 2.0 encompasses. In general, it refers to a maturing of the internet, the next version of the web. Some of the Web 2.0 trends, such as user participation, are occurring across many media channels. The increase in the number of reality TV shows is one major example of this. Hit shows like American Idol and Dancing with the Stars extend user participation to the audience by allowing them to vote for contestants at the end of the shows.

The entry points of the web have also contributed to these trends. The door to information is mostly managed through major search engines and portals, such as Yahoo!, Google and MSN. These three entry points now rank search results mostly on the popularity of a website, which is affected by the number of links to the website from other websites. When people post content, they also promote it; the links back to their content begin to increase search engine rankings for sites with such user-generated content.

The popularity of YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia further validates the importance of user-generated content. These sites either didn’t exist five years ago or were much smaller. All of these sites are predominantly tools for users to post content at no cost. These three sites in particular have come online and taken the internet by storm. YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia currently rank fourth, fifth and 10th, respectively, in terms of traffic.

For entrepreneurs, Web 2.0 means more opportunities and better tools for running your business. No matter what type of business you own, you need to be using technology to your advantage. If you don’t, your competition will most likely crush you. As the web audience continues to increase and the use of other traditional media and advertising vehicles such as TV, newspapers and yellow-page directories continue to decline, the web becomes increasingly important for even non-technology businesses. For those of you with businesses that target younger audiences, this becomes even more important. Advertising via Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter is becoming essential for most businesses.

If you’re in any type of business where processes and procedures are important, you can use Web 2.0 technologies like wikis and service portals for collaboration. Web 2.0-based project and task management services can help make your employees much more efficient. Web 2.0 tools for collaboration also make it easier for smaller businesses to collaborate with customers and partners.

Customer relationship management tools are probably the best known Web 2.0 software that’s used as a service. Salesforce.com was one of the earliest innovators in using CRM software as a service. Meanwhile, Google Docs and Spreadsheets provide word processor and spreadsheet applications at no cost as part of Google Apps. Web 2.0 entrepreneurs continue to build out software services for functionality that only existed as packaged software before.

Web apps are hot. But what does this really mean for entrepreneurs? Three things:

1. Lots of room for start-ups: The barriers to entry are low, but the way to stand out is by solving a real customer problem. If a web app solves the user’s problem, he or she won’t hesitate to use it over traditional software.
2. Existing software companies beware: Because web apps replace the functions of traditional software programs sans occupied disk space, many PC users may decide to switch.
3. New tools for growing businesses: The myriad business tools in web app form, such as video, accounting, CRM and so on, can help businesses be more efficient, saving them money and making information accessible anytime, anywhere.
   As more and more people rely on their mobile phones and the web moves to wireless, the mobile apps industry is growing by epic proportions.

And the exciting part for entrepreneurs wanting to dial into this hot industry would be the millions in investment money flying around. Apple and Google have launched third-party mobile app markets already, and Microsoft is scheduled to release its version next year. The technology is only going to get better.

Parts of this article have been sourced from Michael Crichton’s State of Fear and Gary Reid’s articles on Mashable.