What is Social Media IQ?

Social Media IQ quickly takes a look at several aspects of social marketing – such as how you manage, publish and engage using social media – to determine where your social marketing efforts fall with respect to others.

There is a simple 12 question process that provides you with very relevant information about social media. It may get your approach to social media in a new perspective, as it did for some of the participants in yesterdays workshop.

Get your SMIQ measured here: Awareness Networks

An interesting infographic takes a look at the practice of crowdsourcing projects: what it means, where the term originated, and how it works. The pros and cons of the technique are also lightly discussed.

Crowdsourcing is all around us, used by brands we use everyday. But what is crowdsourcing and how are companies taking advantage of the powerful collaborative abilities of the internet?

Questions:

• Crowdsourcing = crowd + outsourcing?
• What companies use crowdsourcing?
• How is crowdsourcing used?
• How big is crowdsourcing?
• What are the benefits?
• What are the downsides?

Download infographic: dailyinfographic.com

Creating a Facebook page for your company can be useful, but limited in terms of reach and connectivity. Here’s how to optimize your personal profile for business.

If you’ve already tried suggesting your company page to all of your friends and sharing its content on your wall, here are a few tips on customizing your personal account to share personally and directly with your friends.


Tips:

• Be selective with your profile
• Organize your friends
• Post a professional looking photo
• Make a custom URL
• Incorporate your URL
• Share business updates and useful articles
• Review your default settings
• Reorganize your friends
• Strenghten your connections

Read full article: All Facebook

Ever feel like you’re posting the same old stuff on your Facebook page?  Here are some hints on creating popular wall posts that friends will want to read, like and comment on.

Maybe the best way to approach this subject is to first understand that as Facebook ages, it’s becoming challenging for users to attract attention at all.

So, how do you hook friends or fans into reading, liking and commenting on your posts - making you the popular one on Facebook?


Tips:

• Foster conversations
• Be original
• Know your friends' interests
• Be positive
• Use familiar language
• You - not I nor Me
• Ask your friends for input

Read full post: All Facebook

Hugh Pickens writes: Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page.

'I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for' - says Russell, who has studied thousands of people on how they search for stuff. 'At the end I'll say to them, "Let me show one little trick here," and very often people will say, "I can't believe I've been wasting my life!"

'Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing' - says Alexis Madrigal. 'I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all' - writes Madrigal.

'We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.'

Read post and more than 560 comments: Slashdot

Social media is now a big part of everyone’s life – both professionally as well as personally. Most of the time people tend to use social media to discuss every aspect of their life, which also includes their workplace and what it stands for.

As far as businesses are concerned, they are now looking to leverage this tendency of their employees and encourage them to use social media at work.

Now organisations are designing social media policies to spread word of mouth through their employees and also to have a structure to regulate the social media behaviour of employees at workplace.


To tweet or not to tweet?

Are companies allowing employees to use social media in the workplace? What companies are doing and saying about social media in the workplace?


Download infographic: mindjumpers.com

An optimized B2B landing page is one of the most critical elements of any Internet marketing campaign. Effective landing pages excel at attracting prospects, keeping their attention and converting them with a call to action.

With 93% of B2B buyers using search to begin their buying process, it’s key to optimize the landing page for search as well as for relevancy, consumption and conversion.

Developing a high-converting landing page requires testing to understand the right mix of features and content to achieve the intended results. No marketer can ensure optimal performance from a landing page without proper testing.

To this point, let’s consider the following reasons and areas to test when creating effective B2B landing pages:

1. Proof
2. Give customers a vote
3. Elements to test:

Headlines
Content
Graphics
Layout/Templates
Bullet Points
Call to Action
Fulfillment
Thank you page

More details: blog.marketo.com

When it comes to online marketing strategies and SEO campaigns, there are still a number of misconceptions that are made in regards to how these strategies work, how much time is needed, what skills are needed and even what to do once you start seeing results.

All too often, people assume that online marketing is something that anyone can do, and by failing to understand exactly how much work, skill and experience goes in to every project, you run the risk of missing out on excellent results that can be enjoyed when an effective online marketing strategy is implemented properly.

Here are some of the most common misconceptions surrounding the world of online marketing:


1. All you need for success is a good product
2. Online marketing is quick and easy
3. You don't need to spend money on online marketing
4. Anyone can do online marketing
5. Your site is ranking at last and now you can relax


Read full article: Networth Media

American composer Stephen Sondheim once said, "Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.” That said, the true art of an infographic is in finding a way to tell the real story behind the numbers. There are a number of things that should be taken into consideration when creating an infographic. Here are nine key characteristics to keep in mind:


1. Visual Interest
2. Theme
3. Detail
4. Meaning
5. Action
6. Color
7. Typhography
8. Distribution
9. Social platforms


Read full article: blog.marketo.com

1. Keep the same out-dated pages on the website for months or even years
2. Not using unique title tags for every page
3. Keyword stuffing your content
4. Using too much Flash in your website design
5. Using too many images and not optimising any of them
6. Not using keywords correctly
7. Strange characters in your URLs
8. Black Hat SEO tactics
9. Link to questionable websites
10. Excessively linking to other websites


Learn more: Networth Media