Are you Linked In to what’s happening in the Twitterverse today? Let’s face it, communication has never been faster, easier or more affordable. With the click of a mouse or th flick of a finger you are immersed in a constant stream of information. That space that you once had to yourself is now shared with millions, worldwide. People who freely blog about your product or service. Some see this as a scary thing, but you see this as an opportunity to get the word out and turn strangers into FANS and fans into loyal customers.

YourSocialMedia.com is an initiative by Wilson Monnig Creative to help businesses understand the effectiveness of the different social media tools available to them, and integrate them into their marketing plans.

Here are some new interesting facts about Twitter from Mashable and Twitter, including how they’re getting 300k new users daily, and how they’re working to make Twitter more prolific and easier to use, as well as well as expanding on the mobile platform.

Twitter Surpasses 145 Million Registered Users. (Mashable)

The Evolving Ecosystem. (Twitter)

via Mashable, and Twitter.

Let’s face it; if you’re online, and live in today’s world, you’ve heard of, and probably use YouTube. Since Feb. 2005 when it was founded, YouTube has grown by leaps and bounds, adding new features, and more options. If you have an Apple iPhone or an Android-powered smartphone, YouTube can be found in the palm of your hand, 24/7. Aside from being the world’s largest online repository of video, businesses use YouTube to promote their products, run advertising campaigns and post commercials as well.

YouTube self proclaims that “people are watching 2 billion videos a day on YouTube and uploading hundreds of thousands of videos daily. In fact, every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.” To think that your business cannot benefit from the grossly large demographic that YouTube has to offer  is absurd, and a mistake many businesses are making today. YouTube in many ways is saturating the population like color television did when it first came out.

For the business, it is essential that even if you don’t post videos, or don’t post videos regularly, that your business has a YouTube presence. As with any booming social media tool, it has an positive impact on your target demographic simply by having a presence.

Should you want to update and use the site for promotional purposes, make your updates meaningful. In a world where the next video out of billions to be viewed, what’s going to make yours stand out to your audience? Don’t forget to market your YouTube content outside of just YouTube. Herein lies the greatest potential for your business. Informational videos, promotions, and commercials that are uploaded by your company shouldn’t just sit on YouTube waiting for the random viewer. Include your videos in e-blasts, post the videos to your company’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. Doing so will help your channels viewers/subscribers to increase, and will help word about what your business has to offer move quicker in your market.

If you’re a business owner, or you simply work for a business, chances are you use email marketing to get things done almost daily. But what’s to ensure that your emails to clients/subscribers are perused and read, rather than simply deleted without even opening. Is your e-blast a benefit to the receiver, or a nuisance?

Make it Visual

Put some pictures in your email. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, and it certainly shouldn’t cost you any more. It can be as simple as a graph, or some colored diagrams to illustrate what the email is about. Consider a colored header or a footer to make things cleaner and more appealing to the eye. Lines, tables, and simple fonts can also help increase the readability of your email.

Make it Relevant

As with a newspaper, an article in a magazine, or even a Twitter account, the information presented must be relevant enough to the reader for them to continue reading. Relevance takes on a greater importance in the digital world where it is ten times easier to just click onto the next piece of information when one becomes disinterested. Information in your companies e-blast must be interesting enough for recipients to continue reading. Don’t include information that is redundant, or not relevant. Don’t send out an entire e-blast for a few lines of something new. Make your emails to-the-point, while containing relevant and useful information surrounding your topic. Links can and should be used, but they should not generate an entire newsletter.

Consider Your Audience

An e-blast should never go out to a particular audience based just on assuming that they want the information you have to present because they asked for other information about your company or its services. Always allow quick, easy, and visible opt-in and opt-out procedures. If a recipient is expecting an e-blast from your company say, monthly, and on a particular subject, they’ll be happy to receive it and eager to show it to their colleagues in the same field.

Consider Your Technology

Never send e-blasts from your personal email account. Always rely on your e-marketing people to handle your e-blast’s delivery. Sending e-blasts from your personal account looks very unprofessional and can also lead to your account being suspended.Email looks and feels more professional when sent from dedicated email-list software, which will in turn lead to greater readership, and growth of your subscribers.

Email is a powerful tool in the business world to deliver business-related content to your clients.  By following a few simply guidelines and letting the right people handle your email, you can successfully e-market your business. Use a company like Wilson Monnig Creative to handle your email and online marketing needs.

Google mail? Since it’s unveiling as an invite-only service on April 1, 2004, Gmail has done nothing but grow, accelerate, and succeed when it comes to webmail. A free service to anyone who signs up for it, Gmail has become the industry leader in searchable, organizable, easy-to-use email.  Let’s take a look at Gmail’s main features.

1. Threaded emails

Remember when you used to email someone back in, say, 1999? You’d send them a message, they would reply and so on, until your inbox was chock full of individual messages. Sure, they were all quoted in each message so you could keep track, but your inbox was a mess and impossible to keep tabs on. Enter Gmail. When someone replies to your email in Gmail, it takes a nice little slot in your inbox, along with all the other messages in that conversation.

2. Google Search for Email

Remember when Google began to dominate the online search scene? You could search images, documents, and of course, the internet. But until Gmail, searchable email was sketchy and hard to use at best. Gmail allows you to search your email, using that same technology that Google used for their famous search engine. Just like the search engine, you can use all the boolean search terms as well as include/exclude terms.

3. Labels

Gmail allows users to set up labels for different messages, much like folders in Outlook or other email programs. Users can color-code the labels for different items, and apply filters to incoming messages to flag them with a particular label. Labels are particularly useful when using Gmail for more than one email account, and for people receiving massive amounts of email daily. They streamline the email organization process, and when combined with threaded conversations make for a much more organized email inbox.

4. Filters

As already mentioned, filters can be set up to automatically categorize emails. Once a filter is set up, when incoming messages apply to a given filter, the filter will then categorize according to a particular label, or mark the message as read, etc. Filters keep the inbox from becoming one big cluttered mess. They can even delete messages upon arrival if the messages meet given criteria.

Gmail is the all-in-one email solution. It can be set up to check/send email from multiple accounts, and it can also be used via POP access to an email client like Microsoft Outlook.

Copyright law has become more of an issue with the universality of the Internet. Designed to protect the originators of intellectual property, the laws can be restrictive. The Creative Commons license for copyrighted material now offers flexibility for both the originator and the potential user. A non-profit organization founded in 2001 with support from the Center for the Public Domain, Creative Commons offers free licenses designed to bridge the gap between a standard copyright and the public domain.

What if you want to share what you created, but still want to control how your material is used? That’s where a Creative Commons license comes in. This type of protection isn’t a substitute for a copyright, but does allow you to determine use restrictions. Instead of “all rights reserved” it’s “some rights reserved.”

For instance, you can allow your work to be shared, copied and distributed, but under your terms. These licenses include:

• Attribution. With this license, you let others distribute, remix, tweak and build on your work as long as they credit you as the original creator. Attribution Share Alike uses attribution as a basis, but user must credit you and license their new creations under identical terms. Both licenses allow commercial use.
• The Attribution Non-Commercial license allows others to remix, change and build on your work for non-commercial purposes, but again that new work must acknowledge you. The user doesn’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
• Attribution No Derivatives. With this license you allow the user to re-distribute material for commercial and non-commercial use. However, the material may not be changed and must be used as a whole, and credited to you.
• If you choose a Creative Commons license, there are other sub-category licenses available. You have the freedom to decide how generous you wish to be and still get your work out there for recognition.

In addition to individuals, many large companies have a Creative Commons license of some form for selected sharing.  Google allows CC-search capabilities and allows users to CC license their content on Picasa, Google Knol and documentation at Google Code. Flickr also incorporates CC licensing options while the band Nine Inch Nails used CC to release Grammy nominated Ghosts I-IV as an Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike license. The band offered tiered purchases and eventually landed the #1 paid MP3 Amazon download in 2008.

CC licensing has helped to dissuade online illegal and inappropriate use of creative material, but the best avenue is to obtain a copyright from the United States Copyright Office. The standard copyright will help much more in case legal issues arise.

In a nutshell

Foursquare is a rapidly growing social networking phenomenon that involves location-based updates that users can send to their “friends” on the Foursquare and on other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. The service makes use of the recent smartphone growth by letting users use GPS-enabled phones to “check-in” at a location with an application on their phone. These “check-ins” can unlock badges for different achievements, numbers of check-ins, or for checking in more than any other user at a particular “venue.”

Why is it useful?

Foursquare is the biggest location-based social network of its kind, boasting over 725,000 users as of earlier this year, and having exceeded 40 million total check-ins over their short life. Foursquare is useful for a business, because like many social networks, businesses can take advantage of the customer market on Foursquare. Businesses can connect to their target market on a whole new personalized way. Foursquare is a leader in its kind when it comes to location-based social networking.

http://foursquare.com/

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Photo viewing/sharing site Flickr (by Yahoo) got a major update this week; changing and implementing several new features. They added a dark preview mode to dim everything from the background of a picture, as well as faster easier to use controls for photo navigation. According to the site’s blog, they’ve “made it easier to find when a photo was taken, it’s location, camera/exif info and your name in one location to the right of the image.” They have an expanded focus on the story, (who, what, where, etc) of your photos, in an effort to increase the social aspect behind image-sharing as well.

Check out the blog straight from Flickr, and don’t forget to tell us what you think of the new design.

If you’re visiting YourSocialMedia.com, chances are you are already aware of the growing impact that Social Media can have on your business, and its importance as your business grows. Social Media can be a great tool to use when promoting and marketing your business, but it can also be used to keep your finger on the pulse of your business and its influence on your target market, and online in general. Social media monitoring can be used to generate target markets, gather details about how your business is perceived online, and it can help you make important business decisions about where to take your business in the ever-changing online world.

Take a look at this article from Mashable.com about how to successfully monitor social media from a business perspective.

10 Steps for Successful Social Media Monitoring.

Two historic events have made tremendous changes in the way we disseminate information and communicate. Around 1440 German Johannes Gutenberg perfected the printing press and movable type, which made possible the mass production of books that more than just the elite could have. Almost immediately, the issues of intellectual property ownership, censorship, idea exchange and free speech popped up.

Fast forward a few centuries and those same issues affect the second event–the Internet. We are still struggling with the protection of individual works versus mass information, but this time the media is digital instead of paper.

Juggling the creator’s right to protection and the public’s right to know has always been tricky, but even more so now that anyone who has an Internet connection can express an opinion, either original or based on someone else’s work. That’s where the copyright issue comes in.

Keep in mind that even if you do not see the standard copyright wording (Copyright [date] by [author] All rights reserved) that material, whether words, music, film or any other form of expression, is automatically copyrighted on the Internet, via the international Berne Copyright Convention in 1989.

What can and can’t you do with material you find on the Internet? When you see something on the Internet that you would like to reproduce, ask the author for permission. Most likely you’ll receive a positive reply as long as you describe how you want to us the material. However, you must attribute that material to the original source author.

Use material that you like as inspiration for your own words. CAUTION – Doing a re-write is called a derivative and is still under copyright law, but you can modify an IDEA and write about that in your words.

Searching for a picture to illustrate your blog? Doing a Google search for, say, Pomeranians, and downloading a dog picture without the permission of the poster is a violation of the copyright laws.

There is the fair use issue. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a good description of fair use, which allows using a small part of someone else’s work if the excerpt is used for a review, as a parody, a comment or a criticism. The EFF is a non-profit group that encourages digital rights and protection on an international basis.

We like Brad Templeton’s readable explanation of copyright issues. Brad is an EFF board member, Internet expert and software developer who also dabbles in photography. All around, a very interesting guy who explains complex issues in an easy-to-understand way.

In this age of instant gratification and easy access, the temptation, or just ignorance of using someone else’s work and passing it off as your own is very real. On the plus side, by honoring copyrights you can exercise your own imagination and write or produce something that is uniquely your own, and you’ll meet interesting people when you do ask for permission use their work.

In a nutshell

Google is a search engine; so Google Voice is… Searchable voice? In a way, yes. Google takes the traditional method of calling, leaving/checking voicemails, and communication in general and puts it in a whole new light. Google Voice users can sign up for a Google number; one single number to use that will ring any combination of your other numbers. This eliminates confusion of voicemail boxes, and eases the process of getting back to someone. Users can define when certain numbers should be called, and can send particular callers to particular phones as well. In addition, Google has streamlined the voicemail process to include voicemail transcription, as well as sharing voicemails, and the ability to archive voicemails.

Why is it useful?

Users of Google Voice can streamline the way people get a hold of them. For instance, a user can designate a Google Voice number, and get notified of a voicemail via SMS, email, or the mobile application. They can make international calls through Google Voice’s app, or the dialer on some phones at just pennies per minute to most countries. Google Voice makes archiving, searching, and organizing voicemails simple, through its online portal.

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