I’ve been involved in  a research project based on  web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise.  I recently came across an interesting interactive tool by McKinsey Quarterly that gives an interactive comparison of trends.

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Business_and_Web_20_An_interactive_feature_2431?pagenum=1#interactive

There are a number of forums that are easy to implement within WordPress. I have installed WordPress Forum Server, which is easy to implement. The process is simple:

1. Download the plugin
2. Activate
3. Configure the settings with categories and groups.
4. Create a page to display the forum on your site
5. Add the following code to the top of the page in the html code:

Guest
Welcome Guest, posting in this forum requires registration. Username: Password: Remember

Forum

SEM talk

general discussion
	Social Media Talk Moderators: monique	Topics: 1 Posts: 1	Last post by monique in only a test on July 13, 2010, 05:59

New posts No new posts

Info Center
	1 Posts in 1 Topics Made by 8 Members. Latest Member: Papabaze Latest Post by monique on July 13, 2010, 05:59

WP Forum Server by VastHTML | LucidCrew
Version: 1.4 ; Page loaded in: 0.027 seconds.

Guest
Welcome Guest, posting in this forum requires registration. Username: Password: Remember

Forum

SEM talk

general discussion
	Social Media Talk Moderators: monique	Topics: 1 Posts: 1	Last post by monique in only a test on July 13, 2010, 05:59

New posts No new posts

Info Center
	1 Posts in 1 Topics Made by 8 Members. Latest Member: Papabaze Latest Post by monique on July 13, 2010, 05:59

WP Forum Server by VastHTML | LucidCrew
Version: 1.4 ; Page loaded in: 0.007 seconds.

You can add a widget to the sidebar for the forum. When you go to the page that was set up for the forums, you have a tool that allows you to click on the category and add new posts. I always find how technology has evolved, amazing.pl

Learning, researching, and developing useful references are high in my list of activities that I am passionate about.  I’ve been writing articles about Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ), Social Media, Social Media Optimization ( SMO), among other business related topics that can be found in the Stable Solution Chronicles. I have not written a lot about Search Engine Marketing ( SEM) , but it is also a service that I offer as part of my business. To start with, it is important to understand some basic terminology.

Search Engine Marketing is using paid listings to market and promote a website.

When it comes to search engines there are two types of listings:

Paid listings are exactly that. Sites are listed based on keywords and on the price paid to display the listing. There are also various factors that search engines use to rank and display their paid listing results.

Natural or Organic listing are free listings, which are determined by each search engines’ algorithms. Google for instance uses over 200 measures to determine page ranking. Sites built for page ranking based on organic methods use Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) to make the site friendlier for search engines to determine the relevance of the material related to specifice key words.

Benefits of using paid advertising is that as a site owner, you have more control over how, when and where your site is found than using organic methods. Both methods have validity for different reasons.

Paid listings on search engines either  charge on a Pay-Per-Click basis ( PPC ) or a Cost-Per-Thousand-Impressions ( CPM).  With PPC,  ads are only paid for when they are clicked on versus CPM which tracks every time your ad is displayed for billing purposes.

When you decide to use paid advertising you are either trying to get an action from viewers in the form of a direct response, which may be clicking through to your website, making an online purchase, requesting information, or signing up for a newsletter. The goal is to have the user complete the desired action. This is called conversion. Sometimes, the goal is to build recognition for your product or company. This is called branding.

Before spending money on SEO or SEM, I feel very strongly about defining the goals, so that money spent on marketing is money well spent. Don’t rush and jump in without taking time to develop goals. I often see businesses do this, which can be very expensive and does not necessarily deliver the desired results.

For the past year, I have been a staff writer for CoastViews Magazine, writing about technology and social media.  The original article can be found on the CoastViews Magazine website, published in September 2009.

Approximately 24% of the world’s population is now online; that is nearly 1.6 billion users, who have signed on to The Internet. Accessibility, globalization, and the development of user friendly web technologies have made it possible for online businesses to boom, with more than 183 million domain name registrations to date. This is great news for consumes, because the exponential increase in online businesses makes it possible to find almost anything that you are looking for at very competitive prices.

For the small business, it means that having a website is not enough to ensure traffic and online sales. Online success requires a solid e-marketing strategy and a lot of effort. The first step in developing your e-marketing strategy is to evaluate the following:

What type of site do you have?

Do you have an e-commerce site, an informational site, a networking site?

Who are your customers?

How much do you know about your customers? What motivates them to buy online or visit various websites? Do you know what other sites they might be likely to visit? The more you know about your target audience, the better you can optimize your site’s content and your marketing efforts to reach them.

What are your goals for the site?

The reasons that visitors come to each type of site varies. While you may want a lot of visitors to an informational or networking site, you want visitors that value and purchase your products on an e-commerce site.

Are there similar sites or services to yours? What makes your site unique from competitors’ sites?

You can get ideas from sites that offer similar services, and do market research. Knowing what the competition is doing allows you to assess your strengths and weaknesses and further define opportunities for your business.

Are you presenting yourself professionally?

Most Internet users have become fairly sophisticated within a short amount of time. If your website is not easy to navigate, is poorly written, or has poor design most users will leave the site quickly. Provide enough information about your products/services to inform consumers, but not so much that it becomes overwhelming.

Is your content static or dynamic?

Most websites have static information that doesn’t change very often. The web has evolved to include tools that allow more relationship building and sharing of ideas such as individual blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and a wide assortment of other social networks. These new online tools are dynamic, with content that changes frequently. What I like about dynamic content is that it provides a reason for viewers to come back to receive new information from your site.

After you have completed the preliminary analysis of your site, you will have a better idea of the strategy you would like to employ. There are now a wide variety of tools available which are helpful to marketing your online presence. Options range from more traditional forms of advertising such as banner ads and paid searches to social media optimization (SMO), which leverages social networking as a promotional vehicle. SMO is a very powerful way to reach many people that have common interests. Be careful not to spread yourself too thin. Using a few tools for marketing consistently is much more effective than using a lot of tools occassionally. As you develop your e-marketing strategy, keep in mind that time commitments vary from tool to tool. No matter which tools you choose, it is extremely important that you set aside time each week for online marketing.

WordPress has so many plugins available to extend the basic software package that no two installations need to be the same.  I have been using a variety of plugins on sites that I manage. With thousands of Plugins, I’ve decided that I would like to review plugins that are available and share my findings within this blog.

I just received an email that is titled, “Thank you for buying iTunes Gift Certificate!”.  It has a winzip attachment. 

DO NOT OPEN IT!

Some malicious buggers have created a piece of malware that opens up a backdoor onto your system, so that they can exploit your computer. The email looks tempting.  I had to think about it for a moment, being that I just got a gift card in the mail as a cell phone rebate.  But I quickly realized that I haven’t bought anything that mentioned anything about iTunes.  Clever miscreants.  They know an iTunes gift certificate is very tempting.  The body of the email says:

“Hello!

You have received an iTunes Gift Certificate in the amount of $50.00 You can find your certificate code in attachment  below. Then you need to open iTunes. Once you verify your account, $50.00 will be credited to your account, so you can start buying music, games, video  right away.

iTunes Store.”

Sophos detects the malware, contained inside a ZIP file, as Troj/BredoZp-AM and Mal/FakeAV-BW.

Again, DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENT!

I’ve been following the various controversies surrounding Facebook lately. While Facebook is a giant with over 400 million users world wide, sometimes these controversies make way for smaller companies.  This past weekend, I heard Leo Laporte’s show on XM radio. Leo was talking about KNOI’s Facebook page being disabled because of statements that they made about the privacy issue controversies that always seem to plague Facebook. Leo Laporte has deleted his Facebook page as a result of the controversy, and was actively promoting May 31st as Quit Facebook Day.

To his credit, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook had a timely response to the flap that was going on. According to Zuckerberg, “Facebook missed the mark”, and has vowed to make the controls stronger and easier to use.  Will everybody get this message?  Probably not. Will we see Facebook make more privacy policy changes that agitate their user base?  I’m guessing that we will continue to see these type of blunders from Facebook. Will users forgive Facebook? Some will, some won’t.

Personally, I find Facebook to be an excellent tool for keeping in touch with friends and associates. Do the issues that are popping up bother me? Not too much. Not enough for me to quit using the tool.  In light of the fact that some people may quit or may look for other tools to use, I believe that there will be opportunities for start-ups and companies that have a smaller market share to capture some of Facebook’s constituency.  One such company is Diaspora, who is certainly taking advantage of the bad press that Facebook has received.

Diaspora’s software will be an open source project that allows users to customize it and host it on their own servers, revealing as much or as little information as they choose. The four young programmers that have been building Diaspora have a dream: To get Diaspora in the hands of every man, woman, and child at summer’s end. September 2010 will signify the release of the project in its first iteration, fully open-sourced under the AGPL.

As a proponent of open-source software, I will be checking out Diaspora’s software to see what it can do. I will also be paying careful attention to the privacy policies of social networks that I use.  I’d like to add that companies come and go. I’ve worked for Fortune 500 companies in the tech sector that seemed like they would reach the stars, but due to management mistakes, complacency, and a host of other issues they eventually failed, being sold for pennies on the dollar. Although, when these companies fail, they often make room for new companies and a spurt of innovation, keeping the tech world interesting.

Monique

There are many plugins that support Digg. The one that I have chosen for this site is Digg Integrate. It is quick to install. When you want to include the button, it is simple to specify the button with the following code: <!–digg–>  You can add a rule to your stylesheet to specify where the button should sit, and you are ready to go.  The Digg button will appear on each individual post, rather than the main page that contains the posts.

I’m testing out the WordPress LightBox plugin. Click on the link below and the image displays in a Lightbox type of window. When you are using jQuery and adding Lighbox 2 code to the website, you can display a slideshow. I am planning on modifying this code to include a slideshow. Stay tuned…

image #1
image #2
image #3

If  you really want to improve your site’s ranking, it is important to understand the behavior visitors to your site follow. A perfect tool for this is Google Analytics. Simple to use, you create a unique code for the site that you are adding the analytics to. Add the script into the end of your html file, or into a plugin tool if your site is built on WordPress, and you will start seeing information usually within  2 days.

Once you install Google Analytics, it is fairly easy to allow access to others. I do this all the time for my clients, so that I can manage the technical aspects, but they can still see the results.  The breadth of the information goes fairly deep and gives many views, geolocation information, an more.

Check it out:   http://google.com/analytics