Social Media Marketing Institute

With over 800 million users, Facebook has become an integral part of modern society. And with the huge number of daily users, it has also become a prime target for cybercrime, and a real danger for the unwary user.

Below is an infographic produced by Column Five for ZoneAlarm, showing just how these attacks are taking place. With almost one in five links on newsfeeds opening to a virus, and over a half million logins compromised every day, users need to know how to protect themselves and minimize their exposure to risk. With a simple six step program, you can make your Facebook experience a safe and pleasant one.

There are some people who use LinkedIn effectively, but as I travel around the country teaching and speaking, I find that more often , people treat it as a “set it and forget it” network.  They understand the need to have a profile on LinkedIn, perhaps merely as an online resume.  Often too little time is spent in even crafting that profile. And then there are those of us who consider LinkedIn to be more of a business to business network, or a job hunting site – both big mistakes. While there is undeniable value in those sectors, connecting with others in a “professional” or business setting can be beneficial no matter who your end customers are.  LinkedIn, with its 100 million members is a valuable resource that shouldn’t be ignored. Like anything in life however, you need to work at getting proficient so here, from our friends at ColumnFive, is a great infographic to help you put some muscle into your LinkedIn engagement.  Though I don’t believe in “connecting with everyone” – your community should be a meaningful one, developed with objectives and strategy- the process they describe can certainly increase your LinkedIn effectiveness.  Enjoy!

Photo by Mike Biard

A picture is worth a thousand words – even in the world of web 2.0 And because we need pictures so often, finding new and relevant graphic content becomes a challenge for all of us. So here are some resources to find free graphics for your next internet publication.

OK, maybe Free was a little over the top. Even in the suggestions I’m going to make here, you need to at least provide attribution to the creator of the graphic, but that seems to be a small price to pay. Though But with the proliferation of Blogs and is certainly less expensive than buying stock photos (though I would rather see you buying stock photos as I do frequently, than stealing copyright items)

• Google Images  - Google is the “go to” for almost every search and images are no different. You do however need to be sure of the allowed usage. To accomplish that, make sure you are in Basic Version (you switch between basic and standard versions of Google at the very bottom of their search page). A small box entitled “Advanced Search” will appear and when you scroll down the page you will be allowed to choose images that are labeled for reuse. Just below that, you will be allowed to choose images labeled for commercial use or modification.  In the lower right hand corner of that page, you like on “search images” and your new results appear.  You will restrict your search substantially when you do this. For example a Google images search for the word “firetruck” provides you with 1,510,000 results. When you limit it to images labeled for reuse, the field narrows to 2,550 images. Adding the commercial use limiter takes you down to 140 images. If your use is not commercial but requires you to modify the image, you have 183 choices, and only 139 images allow all three restrictions.
• Wikimedia Commons – This site is a repository for content contributed by others. According to the site, “The Wikimedia Foundation owns almost none of the content on Wikimedia sites — it is owned by the individual creators. However, almost all may be freely reused without individual permission according to the terms of the particular license under which it was contributed to the project, but some licenses may require that the original creator be attributed.” As a result, while you may feel free to use these images, but I would certainly provide attribution to the original creator just to be careful. The search experience at wikimedia is slightly different, but has the virtues of allowing the searched to search for documents in a large number of languages.
• Flickr – The Commons – Flickr is possibly my favorite photo sharing community. Many of our readers will be familiar with it for storing and editing their own photos, but they may not be aware of the treasure that can be found in the Commons area of Flickr. here the project is focused on adding descriptions to the public photography collections owned by a variety of well know and respected institutions all over the world from the U.S. and U.K. National Archives to Nasa and the Brooklyn Museum. As the web site proclaims ” It is a requirement for participation in the program that institutions may rightly claim “no known copyright restrictions” on the content they share.” so using the material (again with attribution) is not a problem.  The quantity of older photographs and the amazing variety of subjects leads for great material from here.
• Flickr-Creative Commons This is where the photos uploaded to Flickr are easily searchable through their Creative Commons License. Creative Commons licenses allow you to know, quickly and easily how the creator is willing to share their photographs. By using this link, you can easily review the types of CC licenses, and then search for images with that specific license. For example the photo used in this blog post was taken by Mike Baird and properly attributed to him. This source, as opposed to the commons, contains a lot of current photos taken by photographers who are willing to share their work with the world.
• Creative Commons Search - Creative Commons is not a search engine, but this does allow you to search a number of sites with creative common licensed material to find just the graphic you need. Since they don’t have control over the other sites they search, you should again be sure to check the licensing of the graphics prior to use.

Of course, when possible, asking someone for the right to use their graphics is a really good way to obtain needed material, and to create some real relationships. Photographers and artists often are willing to allow their material to be used, but by asking, even if they don;t allow the use, you stay out of trouble- and that’s a worthy goal in itself!

Graphic Courtesy of GeekandPoke

When Twitter first appeared on the scene, the best way to engage on Twitter was through third party interfaces like Seismic, or Twhirl . Later, Seismic grew up and acquired Twhirl, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite appeared providing greater functionality and scheduling functions. But the need to track Twitter activity became quickly apparent, and as the use of Twitter has grown to over 500,000 tweets a day, users need to not only participate but to monitor the activity on Twitter.

In order for the chaos that is the Twitter stream to make sense, we need to be able to search for people and for topics in an easy and effective manner. There a numerous tools available, but here are five good ones that will help you determine what your community is talking about, what content is relevant to them, and what content you should create or curate;

• Monitter - According to their web site “Monitter is a real time twitter search tool that enables you to monitor a set of keywords on twitter. It also allows you to narrow the search to a particular geographic location, allowing you to find out what’s going onin a particular part of the world.” The keywords here are real time and geographic. This would enable a business to determine who their local potential clients are, engage them promptly, and even see what back channel conversations are going on about relevant events in their marketplace. As soon as you type a search term in the box on their web site a column is created with your topic. A click on the upper right of the column allows you to choose a zipcode, and what distance from that zipcode you want to search. You can pause the flow of information at any time by pressing a pause key next to that, and every tweet allows you to ReTweet or reply with a single click of the mouse.
• Social Mention  - Social Mention, like Montitter is a real time search tool, but does not have the location feature. Instead, it has the ability to create alerts, much like Google alerts that are emailed to you periodically. It also has some basic sentiment measurement tools to allow you to determine if mentions are positive, negative or neutral. LIke most free sentiment monitoring tools, oyu’ll need to review some of the tweets to get a feel for what they really mean, but its a neat set of statistics nonetheless.
• Twitrratr  – Twittrratr emphasizes that sentiment monitoring, and does it more graphically than Social mention. As soon as you type a search term, the results are broken into three columns, showing the positive, neutral, and negative comments so you can easily determine if they are accurately sorted. For me this is a great tool to use for a quick topic review or to see how people are responding to an individual., and event, or any other topic
• Crowdbooster – Crowdbooster will show you how effective your engagement is in terms of the audience you reach. It will analyze the hours when your followers are most active and suggest those times for you to schedule tweets. It will also point out when you might increase your influence by suggesting additional engagement with influencers you have already interacted with.
• LocaFollow  – LocaFollow allows you too search by Bio, Location, Name or Tweets to allow you to search the Twitter stream more specifically. The tool is powered by a Google search, but its flexibility makes it worth a quick look. There is constant conversation about find twitter users in a specific geography, and LocaFollow performs admirably there. Even more interesting is how it might be used to find people in a  specific demographic. Want to find the bowling enthusiasts near you? Fans of your favorite spots team? Single Moms? Single Dads? Empty nesters? Any demographic that might be mentioned in a bio is searchable, and that might help you find members of your target community.

The first time someone commented on one of my blog posts … oh my gosh, oh my gosh, OH MY GOSH!!! Excitement and fear overwhelmed me for a number of reasons. First of all, someone other than my mother actually read my blog. That in itself seemed like a miracle. Then the fear hit. What if the comment isn’t good? What if someone questions what I wrote? I can “what if” all day.

That was about 4 years ago and today I have a few more family members that read my blog posts. I make a concerted effort to reply to each comment with something thoughtful combined with a thank you. When there are multiple comments I address each one individually.

A few things I’ve learned when someone comments on your blog post …

1. Always respond. It’s lovely when a blog comment is simply complimentary, but sometimes the commenter wants to ask a question, share information and/or tell you how they feel.

2. Answer your commenter’s questions, thank them for sharing additional information and address their feelings.

3. When comments are not all rainbows and kittens – stick to the facts and keep your emotions in out of your response. See Chris Beadling’s post on addressing flaming here.

Remember that blogging is social media. Treat it accordingly. Be social with the folks that comment on your blog – especially the ones that are complimentary. I read post a few days ago from Pushing Social called Blog Traffic Secret:  Woo the Groupies (written by Stanford ) that I keep going back to … the author suggested that you engage the commenters whenever possible and across other social media channels. The people that are commenting and tweeting and sharing your posts are “your groupies” and they want to engage with you.  He has a whole section on “Groupie Seduction” that you must read.

For new bloggers, it can seem like forever until you get that first comment (from someone other than mom) so engage the person making the comment right from the start, be gracious and always say thank you.