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With social media, you need to do more than forage ~ By Chris Abraham

Passivity & lack of focus won’t get the deal done

This is the first of a three-part series.
Target audience: Marketing professionals, SEO specialists, businesses, nonprofits, Facebook administrators, anyone with a Facebook page.
When you put lots of energy, time, and passion — but no plan — into your social media marketing and PR campaigns, you’re a forager. And you surely won’t starve foraging. You’ll always be fed. Social media foraging does get protein in the pot, though that protein is generally more in the form of grubs than it is prime grade lean steak. As they say, “look under enough rocks and you’ll eventually find a snake” (to eat). And, growing your followership, engaging heartily and consistently, and building up your Klout and reputation means that you’ll increase your snake-finding opportunities. But what you’re really doing is setting up a system where you know where to look and under which rocks.
While this is an excellent first step, it’s very passive and generates relatively little meat for your family, while also easily being depleted as you evolve from being a lone wolf to joining a tribe, evolving into a village, a town, and a city.

There is nothing at all wrong with foraging, especially if your needs are modest and you’re only providing for yourself or your nuclear family; however, it doesn’t scale well, especially if you’re part of a larger agency or if you’re the social media marketing rep for even a small business. If your company has a sales force or a business development department, you probably should evolve past foraging.
Practically speaking, social media foraging includes sharing content and links from content and news sites that are not your own as well as engaging in conversations that aren’t linked at all but rather share your experience, your smarts, your mastery, and your currency on a subject, be it professionally, personally, or on behalf of your brand, employer, or client.
Mind you, I guess it depends on how much your time is worth — what you’re foraging for. You can surely live very handsomely from foraging for truffles; indeed, it all comes down to the value of what you’re able to piece together and how valuable or nutritious your collected grub is.
A lot of people get stuck here because they are afraid of being perceived as selfish if they spend too much time actually promoting their own products, services, case-studies, staff, or brand — it’s a very WASPy thing to do (just say no to gauche, improper topics such as Sex, Money, Religion, Health Issues, Politics, or Family — no, no, no!) and while it can, indeed, build your reputation and probably gets you lots of retweets, likes, and attention (especially if you’re witty, funny, clever, or share witty, funny, and clever content from elsewhere), you probably won’t get anyone to “click through” to your content on your site or blog (because the only link to your site, your content, or your services are on your Twitter bio, your Facebook about page, or the professional information on your LinkedIn profile).
Foragers rarely hijack hashtags or trend-surf — those things are just not done. The messaging is all about being compelling, interesting, attractive, entertaining, and informative — one’s charm and engagement should be enough. Being present, observant, and persistent should be enough to both build one’s reputation both on social media as well as in real life.

To scale, you’ll need to drive interest toward a business’s bottom line

In a perfect world, I guess most passionate social media users are foragers by nature — especially if their goal is to become popular or to really become part of an online community. In a perfect world, online engagement wouldn’t have such a strong “what’s in it for me” agenda; however, there’s a difference between being a social media maven, a social media passion-player, or a social media celebrity and being a social media marketer.

Social media marketing demands a strategy that ultimately results in an outcome that means something to a business’s bottom line, be it your own, your boss’, or your client’s — whether that’s more subscriptions to your blog or newsletter, more traffic to your corporate or product site, or channel leads and sales, being a social media marketer is not simply a popularity contest, it’s a contest for market share, for revenue, for brand recognition, or for leads.
And while the best foragers do, indeed, have a plan, it’s generally not a plan that includes much beyond itself.
Surely, a forager in the wild indeed knows what’s under every rock, what’s in every rotten stump, and what fungi are edible, poisonous, or even a truffle!
However, to scale, you’re going to have to drive interest beyond yourself, beyond just making ends meet.
Do you want to scale? Do you need to? Do you need to feed more than yourself and your family? Are you responsible for an entire tribe, a village, or even a town?
In that case, you’ll need to evolve into a social media trapper or even a social media hunter, which we’ll talk about in my next two posts.Chris Abraham is a partner in Socialmedia.biz. Contact Chris via email, follow him on Twitter and Google Plus or leave a comment below.



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How To Connect Your Business Objectives To An Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy~By John Brhel

What do The Walt Disney Company and the WWE have in common (other than lucrative merchandising revenue and a cast of memorable characters?
If you followed the Dachis Group’s Social Business Index, which “analyzes the effectiveness of strategies and tactics organizations employ to engage the market through social channels,” you’d know that Disney and the WWE are two of the most socially savvy brands out there. Apparently, people are still gaga for staged fighting and Donald Duck.
Did these corporate giants reach such great social heights by pursuing the exact same social media goals? Of course not. Disney and the WWE are vastly different companies with vastly different business objectives. You don’t market sweaty, hulking wrestlers the same way you do talking mice.
These two very different companies achieved social media success by applying specific social media tactics to achieve specific business objectives.
You may not be a multibillion dollar business with a killer mascot (at least not yet), but you can still do social like the best of them, so long as you connect your business objectives to an effective social media marketing strategy.
No Strategy, No Way!
According to the 2012 Small and Medium Social Business Study conducted by the SMB Group, just 24% of small businesses use social media “strategically, in a planned way.” Let’s hope for your sake you’re not part of that other 76%.
You could tweet a hundred times a day and have the fanciest looking Facebook page known to man, and none of it would matter if you didn’t have a social media strategy in line with your business objectives.
Don’t believe me? Just ask digital analyst and social media guru Brian Solis. “At the root of the problem, today’s social media programs start with the technology in mind and not the solution in mind,” said Solis in a September 2012 blog post. “Many businesses jump into Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, et al, without thinking through opportunities or customer expectations and experiences.”
Are you one of those companies using social media “just because”? It’s not enough to post randomly on Facebook and throw whatever videos you have laying around on YouTube. You’ve got to be strategic.
It’s Time to Align
Before you dive headfirst into social media oblivion, take a cue from Mr. Solis and start with a solution in mind.
Follow these steps and you’ll be more likely to pursue a social media strategy that makes sense for your brand.

1. Define Your Business Objectives

Before you can pursue applicable social media goals, you need to make your business objectives perfectly clear. This is essential to running a business in general, let alone integrating a social media campaign that isn’t totally aimless.
Ask yourself this: What do you hope to achieve in the short- and long-term? Be specific. Do you want to improve overall customer satisfaction? Do you hope to increase profits by 10% over the next year? Do you want to be known as the coolest little ice cream shop in Austin, Texas?
Whatever they may be, your objectives are unique and require an in-depth, meaningful analysis of your business.
If you’re not sure how to set good business objectives, this article from Inc.com might come in handy.

2. Choose Relevant Social Media Goals

According to an Awareness Inc. survey of 469 marketers titled “The State of Social Marketing Report,” the top goals for social media are:

• better customer engagement (78%)
• revenue generation (51%)
• better customer experience (47%)
• increased thought leadership (41%)

These are all fantastic social media goals, but they may or may not be goals that pertain to your specific business objectives. You’ve got to pursue social media goals that relate to your unique objectives.
Are you launching a new product and hoping to get people interested enough to make a purchase? Do you want to direct people to your landing page, educate consumers, enable e-commerce, or deliver better customer service?
If you’re at a loss for good social media goals to pursue, this list by Web Ad.vantage founder Hollis Thomases sums up some of the most common ones.

3. Pursue an Appropriate Social Media Marketing Strategy

Just as your social media goals need to correspond to your business objectives, your social media strategy needs to directly relate to your designated goals.
Imagine you sell designer clothing and one of your business objectives is to increase sales of little black dresses. If your social media goals were to 1) increase revenue generation and 2) increase customer engagement, how would you get there? You’d have to figure out tactics that suited your social media goals. In this case one of your tactics might be posting articles about fashion shows, style tips, and other content that appeals to the dress-buying demographic.
Whatever strategy you decide to pursue, bear in mind that the best social media tactics are those that correlate directly to the social media goals you have in place.

4. Monitor Your Audience/Track Results

All that time you spend brainstorming objectives and tying it all together to your social media strategy won’t mean jack unless you’re monitoring your audience and tracking the results of your actions.
Be sure to keep tabs on what your customers are saying and measure the effectiveness of your social media strategy via analytics. There are tons of tools out there that let you do social monitoring and analytics, so you should have no problem measuring the efficacy of your social media tactics.
Make the Connection!
You don’t need to be a gigantic corporation like Disney or the WWE to establish a winning social media strategy.
All you’ve got to do to align your business objectives with an effective social media strategy is:

1. Define your business objectives
2. Choose relevant social media goals
3. Pursue an appropriate social media marketing strategy
4. Monitor your audience/track results

Be smart and strategic about your social media marketing strategy and you’ll have a much better shot at achieving your business objectives. It might not hurt, however, to have somebody like The Rock or Mickey Mouse on your side.
Is your social media marketing strategy in line with your business objectives? Let us know whether you’re ready to outdo Disney and the WWE by posting in the comment section below. 


 SOURCE:  

Author: John Brhel John Brhel on the Web John Brhel on Facebook John Brhel on Twitter John Brhel on Pinterest John Brhel RSS Feed

John Brhel is Content Manager at Social Eddy, a social media management and content curation platform. Social Eddy helps brands create, curate, and share engaging web content on multiple social accounts from one easy-to-use dashboard. Read more of John's nifty posts at Social Eddy's official blog, The Bow... View full profile

Hike at Utah’s Buckskin Gulch~by: Kelly Bastone

Hike at Utah’s Buckskin Gulch

America’s 10 Most Dangerous Hikes – Buckskin Gulch, UT by: Kelly Bastone Hike No one’s died here–yet. But the odds mount every time a dark cloud crosses the sky. This tortuously twisting sandstone bottleneck is the longest, deepest slot canyon in the Southwest (and probably the world). Its narrow walls carve a 12-mile gash through the southern Utah desert, although most hikers bypass the first of those pinched miles by starting at Wire Pass, a tributary that enters Buckskin from the south and plunges them right into its tightest squeeze. The extended exposure to flash flood danger makes Buckskin one of the country’s most dangerous slots: Rarely more than 10 feet wide, the eerie corridor is 400 feet deep at its junction with the Paria River. Most chilling: The entire length of sandstone wall is virtually insurmountable–except for a single escape hatch at the Middle Route, about 8 miles in from Wire Pass. Should thunderstorm-bloated flood waters come charging down the tunnel, you’re no better than a bug in a fire hose. Exhibit A Not only is it long, but Buckskin also drains a big watershed. Streams all across the Paria Plateau funnel into this slot, where the smooth rock walls support little vegetation that would slow the onslaught of water. The combination of big flows and polished passage results in floods with massive force, and Buckskin’s narrow dimensions allow the torrent nowhere to go but up: Waters here can swell from zero to 20 feet deep in mere minutes. “We’ve never lost anybody,” says ranger Michael Salamacha–but they’ve come close. A few hikers have gotten trapped but miraculously managed to climb above the water. “They were lucky to be near one of the few ledges,” Salamacha says. Survival Plan It’s impossible to know for sure where or when storms may strike, but hedge your bets by checking weather updates; noaa.gov issues the region’s most accurate flood forecasts. Avoid Buckskin from July through mid-September, when afternoon storms shower water through the slots. Should you hear water thundering upon you, “Try to scramble up or out,” advises Rich Carlson of the American Canonizing Association. “It’s surprising how many little ledges and ripples you can climb when your life depends on it.” Failing that, secure yourself to something: Hikers in other canyons have survived by clinging to debris wedged between the walls. Should the current take you, ride the flood like whitewater, feet downstream and elbows in. Says Carlson, “Hopefully, you’re wearing a helmet, because you’re going to be a pinball.”

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10 Best URL Shorteners and why they are good~by Dustin Betonio

URL shortening services are used by millions of people on daily basis as they a serve very important purposes in areas like social networking and internet marketing and are extremely useful in Internet conversations on services like twitter when someone want to share a link. With only 140 characters available to deliver the message a normal link can take up most of the space. Besides shrinking URLs some of the services provide features that can be more useful than you may think. If you are not aware of the possibilities keep reading.

What is a URL shortener

A URL shortener is an online application that allows the user to enter a full URL for any specific web page, click on a button, and automatically shortens a long wordy URL to a short domain name and uses a 5 or 6 character code. When users are clicking on that short links they are redirected to the original URLs just as if they had entered or clicked on that.

Where URL Shorteners are useful

First, it’s very useful for micro bloggers, such as Twitter users, who like to share URLs in their posts. However, with a 140-character limit on sites like Twitter, it’s often difficult to include a lengthy URL along with an explanation of why you’re sharing it. Second, URL shorteners are useful because they can preserve a link to a specific web page even if the URL to that page changes in the future. Third, some URL shorteners allow you to track the number of clicks your shortened link gets allowing you to analyze the type of traffic you’re generating to your website, blog, etc. from your links on Twitter, Facebook, and so on. This allows you to understand in greater detail where your promotional efforts are having the biggest impact.
This is also certainly true for marketers using social media channels to reach out. shorteners are useful in internet, email and mobile marketing. In email marketing marketing you may have text wrapping on long URLs in text e-mails and also benefit from tracking clicks. On mobile the little space available simply calls for short URLs. In the area of affiliate marketing the short URLs also have turned out to be handy for hiding the affiliate links that for some people affect trust negatively – for a reason.

List of useful URL Shorteners to try out

1. http://su.pr/

Features:

• Real time analytics showing how many people click through your links, how many came via StumbleUpon in particular and who the most prolific “reTweeters” have been.
• Easy publishing to Twitter and Facebook, including the ability to schedule those links and messages to be pushed out at a particular time.
• “Suggested posting time” metrics, based on historical data concerning when people are most likely to click through your links.
• A handy bookmarklet that makes submission of links quick and easy.
• Good to build traffic

2. http://ow.ly/url/shorten-url

What the Ow.ly link shortening offers:

• Sharing functionality remains the focal point of the Ow.ly social bar. This feature will keep your eyes on prize content and allow you to share easily and frequently.
• Slimmer and non-obtrusive.
• Bookmarking of links that you have retweeted.

3. http://bit.ly/

Features:

• Sharing functionality.
• History Viewer.
• Advance Tools, side bar bookmarklet, developer tools.
• Good to build traffic

4. http://is.gd/

Features:

• Shorten web addresses for emails, forum posts, blogs etc. which cannot handle long URLs and might wrap them, making them unclickable
• Lower the character count when texting web addresses to a mobile phone
• Hide the real URLs of affiliate links from visitors to your site
• Obscure your real email address from bots which harvest them to spam.
• Circumvent protections on sites which don’t allow direct links to a competitor’s site (if you are violating a site’s terms you do so at your own risk)
• Clean up bookmarks for social bookmarking sites or sites with low character limits like Twitter
• If you dislike a website and have to mention it (e.g. when complaining about it), link via is.gd so that your link does not help the site’s search engine positioning

5. http://cli.gs/cligs/new

Features:

• Statistics
• Permanent redirects

6. http://www.adjix.com/WebObjects/Adjix.woa/

Features:

• Earn revenue sharing your links
• Link data available
• White Label – Use your own domain name for shortened links

7. http://budurl.com/

Features:

• Shrink any URL into a short BudURL
• Inbound links redirect with a 307 for maximum SEO performance
• Organize all of your BudURLs into a single account
• Add notes to each BudURL to keep track of where you place it (ex: Twitter profile link, LinkedIn comment, Email signature, banner advertisement, etc.)
• Watch your Click Stream to see real-time click activity including the referrer, IP Address, Network, etc.
• Create custom BudURL vanity aliases like budurl.com/mylink
• Edit destination URL
• Reset click values
• Delete BudURLs
• Unique Visits per click
• Download click traffic
• See the keywords used to find your BudURL

8. http://tinyurl.com/

Features:

• Browser toolbar
• Control your alias by providing a custom one
• URL Redirection
• Hide Affiliate URLs
• Preview Feature

9. http://www.snipurl.com/

Features:

• Nip many URLs at once
• Attach a private key for protection
• Has an API to create shortened URL’s in your browser.

10. http://blinky.me/

Features:

• Segmentation functionality with every link shared.
• Get piles of additional data about the people who click the links.

There are many URL shorteners, but i wanted to keep the review to include my 10 favorites. They all have features that are beneficial and they tend to be user friendly also. I hope you will try some of the services and maybe you will find a favorite.

SOURCE:

Author : Dustin Betonio

Dustin Betonio is a Translation Management graduate at University of Mindanao. His earlier career was devoted on customer service outside the information highway. Currently studying Law in the same University

Energy from the Sea: Closer Than You Think~By Rod Fujita

The ocean absorbs energy from the sun, stores it, and then releases it slowly. Sounds like a prescription for meeting the world’s energy needs, since the ocean is the largest feature of our planet. But can ocean energy be tapped in a way that doesn't create more problems than it solves?
That’s the promise behind a recently announced deal between Lockheed Martin and Reignwood Group, a resort developer based in Beijing. The two companies will develop a 10-megawatt power plant using ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) technology in waters off southern China's Hainan Island. Construction is expected to be completed in 2017.

The process

Scientists have long been interested in the potential for generating energy from the difference in temperature between warm surface waters and deep water. When this difference is large – for example, in tropical locations with narrow continental shelves – the warm water can be used to convert a liquid (like ammonia) into steam. The steam drives a turbine, producing electricity, and then is condensed into a liquid using cold water pumped up from the deep ocean so that the cycle can be repeated.

Benefits

The OTEC process can produce a number of benefits in addition to clean electricity. The large volumes of cold water pumped through the system can be used to cool buildings, saving on air conditioning (and associated greenhouse gas emissions from this major energy consumer). Lots of freshwater condenses on the cold water pipes, especially in humid tropical environments – so much that it can become a viable supplement to local water supplies or even the major water source for local communities.
Because the deep ocean water pumped up to the OTEC facility is rich in nutrients and free of pathogens, it can be used to raise fish or to grow marine organisms like, microalgae for nutritional supplements. Doing this could actually reduce the environmental impact of OTEC, since the cold water is allowed to warm up and the nutrients and carbon dioxide can be removed by the farmed organisms.
Another nice thing about OTEC is that, unlike other kinds of renewable energy, power production is steady and peaks in the summer months when demand is typically highest (due to air-conditioning and refrigeration needs). Some analysts estimate that a single 100-megawatt commercial scale OTEC plant would prevent about 500,000 tons of carbon from being emitted into the atmosphere and save about $130 million per year in oil costs. Although there are environmental concerns associated with OTEC, which my co-authors and I outlined in a recent paper, the potential for clean energy, drinking water and food seem quite large.

Why the delay?

If OTEC is so great, why has it been in development since the late 1800’s but never commercialized? One reason is that there are only so many suitable sites – conventional OTEC plants need to be onshore yet close to deep water, and the surface water must be quite warm. Another reason is that the capital costs are high while the energy yield is low – the process isn't very efficient. And yet another reason is that it is technologically challenging to lay a pipe long enough to reach deep water – and keep it there.
Despite these challenges, scientists and engineers have remained intrigued enough with OTEC’s possibilities to keep working on it for all of these decades. The potential sites have been expanded by using floating platforms, as with the plant Lockheed Martin is building, minimizing pipe length. Other innovations allow OTEC to extract energy from smaller temperature differentials. Efficiency has been increased through the use of better heat exchangers and advanced materials. Pipe manufacturing, laying methods and maintenance have all vastly improved. And while OTEC remains quite costly, the rising price of oil has made OTEC and other forms of renewable energy much more competitive in recent years, as our paper outlines. These factors make me think that OTEC may be on the verge of commercialization.
In fact, in our paper we concluded that the project in southern China was the missing link in commercializing OTEC. Several small OTEC plants have been built already, so we know that the concept produces net energy and all of the other benefits described above. But the costs associated with scaling OTEC up have been very uncertain, perhaps scaring off potential investors and customers up till now.

Proceed with caution

OTEC is definitely not a panacea. Using large amounts of cold, nutrient rich water from the deep ocean in order to produce energy could have some very negative impacts, like killing sea life by sucking it into the intake pipe or creating algal blooms by discharging nutrient rich sea water into warm, nutrient-poor surface water. But these and other impacts can be prevented or mitigated. This new industry should be carefully regulated to ensure that the costs of safe operation are internalized by beneficiaries and not borne by all of us, on behalf of the ocean.

Source:

Rod Fujita

Rod, director of research and development for Environmental Defense Fund's Oceans program, is a leader in the theory and practice of sustainable fisheries that align conservation with the business of fishing.