Social Media on Internet has become too many of ‘me too’ type websites. With the improving bandwidth and technology, it has been easy for companies to get inspired by Facebook and start websites to ‘connect’ people. VCs have been investing the money and the Entrepreneurs have been burning it on crowd-sourcing. No doubt there are various web communities that have added value to the people. I have been really impressed by the likes of Mint, which have helped people in learning from the best practices of others and improve their financial situation.

Twitter have become a place for link building and sourcing more and more traffic to the websites. Every time I login, I find people sharing websites and content that is mostly not developed by them, but is RT or just shared. There are less people who are getting into a conversation, and even if they have conversations, they can always use IM, which is real-time! Why would someone use a service to shout out to the world, ‘what have you been doing’ and then raise all the hue and cry about privacy with Buzz.

Facebook, which started as a place to connect people, has turned into an online gaming site. There are more people who login only to play games than to reconnect with old lost friends. More and more people are getting on to Facebook but probably they do not know what is the purpose of signing up. They are getting on to the Facebook bandwagon because everyone they know is already there, or signing up. Most people on my friend list have not responded to any wall posts or messages because they do not login that often. It is easier to call them!

Social Media has to have a purpose. It is supposed to be an aggregator where people from different walks of life can come together and create, discover, collaborate and contribute. Websites that are only a place for people to signup and forget why they created a login are no good for the internet or for the society. Email has a purpose, IM is for real time conversations, VoIP is cheap telephony, Social Media similarly has to prove its mettle before it can be considered a medium. Social Media should be used as a facilitator to provide the solution to a problem. We have not identified any problem but are creating websites for people to come together and… do nothing!

Social Media is about engaging visitors in something that is productive for them. It is about providing a service, a solution to the visitors’ problem. It is not the ultimate panacea and neither is it the solution itself. It is only a medium for providing solutions.

My point of the post is: If you believe that a particular website or web-app can solve one of your problems, signup. Rest all is noise.

1. Announcing the launch of the website

2. General promotion of the website on the internet

3. Specific promotion of the website at relevant locations for lead generation

4. Specifically targeting the consumer for business generation

5. Business

6. Regular maintenance

Announcing the launch:

This needs to be done to ensure that the website is indexed quickly and is available in search results. It also gives the ‘big business’ feel to the customers who are researching for due diligence. The easiest way of such announcement is via Press Releases. A good strategy for press releases is ‘three’, where a release is issued before the launch, one on the launch day, and the last a week after, to celebrate the ‘fabulous’ launch. It completes the full circle. There are multitudes of free and paid PR sites, which can release the News Article. It is suggested to use a mix of free and paid agencies for the release.

Expected Budget: $350

Frequency: one time

General Promotion of the website on the internet:

This includes Pay per Click campaigns on search engines. It is particularly good for an e-commerce website, to know what the target market is looking for and to analyze the direction of business. The traffic from particular keywords can give an idea of the future of business and the demand. It also helps in designing the strategies for ‘Featured Product’ on the website.

Expected Budget: range from $600 to $3000 per month

Frequency: continuous

It also includes Search Engine Optimization. I consider it to be a general promotion category item as the SEO cannot be specifically targeting your customers. It is a means for generating traffic and optimizing the website for user interaction. The target of any SEO activity should be to ensure that the user can find the website at relevant locations, and not to improve the search engine rankings. For example, one of the newest ways for a user to find the website is via the image search options. It is important the ‘all’ the images in the website have an identifiable name, and they include the right tags (alt, title etc).

Expected Budget: $1200

Frequency: one time, annual suggested

Specific Promotion of the website

It is important that the website is promoted at specific locations like trade directories or online trade magazines. It gives the relevant exposure to the business and is a good way to generate leads. There are various trade websites for the purpose and it helps to get a paid account at the best performing ones. If required, advertising inventories can also be purchased at these websites to stand out among the crowd.

Expected Budget: $800

Frequency: annual

Specifically targeting the consumer

There are various ways of targeting the end customer. The most frequently used is via newsletter and email. There are various email lists available for mass mailings, and if the website has a newsletter, the list can be used. Trade magazines also have a periodic newsletter which should be used for promoting the business. The website should be designed to create a mailing list, which can be used to send promotional material.

Expected budget: $300

Frequency: Monthly

Business

It includes maintaining the website’s ecommerce system, to ensure that the system will respond in time and also tracks the buyer behavior on the website. It helps in learning about the business opportunity in the future and also allows for removing the non-performing items from occupying precious screen space.

Regular Maintenance

This includes blog posts, twitter and Facebook pages, and other social media applications, to crowd-source visitors. It is beta testing changes and also gives an opportunity to business owner to get an opinion on new product releases. It is an ongoing process to keep the visitor engaged and to ensure repeat visits from users, who are looking for new content on the website. It helps in making a fan-following, which results in word of mouth publicity and business generation in long run.

The first rule for any business remains the same. There has to be an inherent value in the proposition and the visitor to the store/website should learn about it in the first 30 seconds. There has to be an activity for visitor engagement (like designing your room in this case), which makes the user come back and ask for more.

Put your mouse on the “Settings” button in the top blue bar, towards the right side.

You do not need to click this button/link, there will be a drop down menu like below. Click the “Application Settings” link.

You will see the most recent applications, and a drop down menu to select more views.

Select “Allowed to Post” from the list. 

You will see a list of applications that are allowed to post updates to your stream, without asking for your permission. Prepare to be surprised, I keep checking this portion and still didn’t know that I had one other application that could post without prompting! Go ahead and click “Edit Settings” for the applications that should not post updates without Prompting.

  You need to change the “Additional Permissions” for the application.

Revoke the “Additional Permissions” and you are good to go.

You can revoke the additional permissions from all the applications that you do not use, or you do not want to allow to post to your streams. I know of people who allowed over 300 applications to post without prompting. This meant that anything that they did on Facebook, or even their desktop in some cases, was available for the entire world to see, without their knowledge.

Protect yourself. Start now!

When you are playing the game, there is a time when the game asks you for special permissions. We do not read the fine print and accept whatever is asked for. This is where the problem starts. With Farmville, the problem begins when one takes a Picture.

Here is a sample of what happens.

When we take a picture, the Farmville asks for special permissions. If you allow Farmville to allow publishing automatically, you will not be asked for permission in future before posting anything in your update stream. For people who spend quite a lot of time on Farmville (or even other games), this could mean filling their streams with updates of ribbons, like below. You may not want everyone to know every time you spend time helping 5 friends, or you are a level up!

What are your options in such a case?

I will tell them to you in the next post, to avoid making this one unnecessarily lengthy.

Internet has made information so accessible that if someone is looking for it, it is readily available at all times. Google has become a verb and life’s so easy with information a couple of clicks away, I wonder why did they have books in the first place! I realized in the past few weeks that it was much easier to find out what’s happening around you, by using twitter! For those who joined us late, Twitter is a website that lets users share 140 character messages with the entire world.

Unlike SMS, twitter is a broadcast service. SMS is meant for an intended list of recipients, while twitter messages are for everyone to see, making it public, and therefore social! It is funny the way the meaning and definition of ‘Social’ has changed. Anything, which is not private, can be considered Social. The more open you are, the more Social you are.

If you can share the dirtiest of your secrets in public, chances are that you will have a good fan following!

Websites like Facebook, MySpace etc have brought everything in the users’ life in public domain, all in the name of Social. It is easy for people to know things about others that otherwise would never be in the public domain.

What makes life worse is the number of companies that use the API of these Web Applications. In user language, these companies are providers of the numerous quizzes, cute quotes, comparison reports, photo tools, games and all that jazz on Facebook and MySpace.

People continuously add these applications, opening up their profiles to the providers, and also allowing the provider to access the information of all their friends.

This means that if I want to protect my profile from potential spammers, ID thieves or just want to keep my private life private, I will have to ask my friends to not use these applications. With the increasing number of people getting on to the Social Networks, it gets all the more difficult to keep a tab on how and where can your information be distributed. Currently, I do not know how many people read the TOS and Privacy Policy and all the other fine print of these applications. I think most people don’t even realize that these parts require any attention.

The next posts will have the details of protecting profiles in Facebook for a start.

Please protect yourself and help others.

About 10 minutes ago, I stumbled upon a great tool – WordMobi . I was directed to this site by an unofficial Nokia E71 blog – E71.wordpress.com. WordMobi is available here . The developer claims that the application will work without any trouble on Nokia E71 and has also been tested on Symbian 5 series . It requires Python to be installed on the phone before WordMobi is installed and there is a very good installation guide here .

I particularly like the insert options. There is no need for you to know HTML anymore. The application has everything set for you, in form of start and stop. So if you want to insert a link, all you need to do is select Insert Link , and type the address. You can continue o write your text after that, and once you are done, again go to Insert Link and select it!

This post has been created using WordMobi!

Posted by Wordmobi

I was trying to look for a nice template for Zen Cart, which I have installed for the new domain, ITShopIndia.com. This site is supposed to be a place where the buyers of Computer parts and Accessories can connect directly with the suppliers and manufacturers and get products at wholesale prices. I reached the site of Kuroi Web Design, which has demos of free Zen-Cart templates. To appreciate the service by Kuroi Web Design, I decided to Tweet the page using Twitthis. I started to browse the top twitted pages and found a nice article by Seth Godin, the marketing guru. Phew!

The article is about personal branding and the Google effect. It talks about three people who applied for a job and how Google revealed the truth behind their claims. It is important to realize that privacy has a new meaning in the Internet era. People may think that they can disconnect their lives by not signing up to FaceBook, Orkut, MySpace and the likes, but it is not true.

Recently, I was seeing my own profile on FaceBook and realized that someone had tagged me in a photo. With over 2 billion photos uploaded, almost everyone in the world who has ever been clicked must have been tagged at least once, or will be tagged soon. It is true that you can restrict people from tagging you in pictures but you need to have a FaceBook profile for that!

You need to be on the network to ensure that you are not on the network!

It is difficult to remain behind closed doors when there is someone on the prowl all the time. The crawling spiders will not let any stone unturned. It is better that you are in control of the situation and manage your Online Profile judiciously. Even if you consider your privacy very important, just ensure that you have a decent public profile available to those who seek it, lest they will have to settle for what is made available to them.

Micro-blogging has been around for a while and has started to catch up recently because of the ease of venting the increasing frustration in the youth. A crashing economy, pink slips, lower pays and higher taxes have led to a situation where the current generation can not think about anything but work. The hectic schedules and omnipresent stress doesn’t allow people to interact with each other and spend quality time with friends and family.

Micro-blogging is the easiest resort for this community to interact, discuss, shout, tell, share – What’s on your mind! When I update my status on Facebook, I know that it may be read by 150 people. These people may sympathize, appraise, help, comment, suggest or just add to my emotions.

It is a nice way to connect to the world and the best part is that you do not have to speak to anyone about it. It is personal, discreet and yet so public! It helps people in getting rid of their emotions, or enjoying them more, and that’s the reason it became so popular in such a small time.

Follow me on twitter @ranaonline or let me know if you like micro-blogging!