Boutique Wedding Events presents. Wedding Fayre in Essex March 2012
In association with Wedding Directory-Essex.
LIST OF STALL HOLDERS:
Aaron simply loves to sing and entertain people and that’s why he has chosen to be a full time entertainer, in his act he will show not only an…
Boutique Wedding Events presents. Wedding Fayre in Essex March 2012
In association with Wedding Directory-Essex.
LIST OF STALL HOLDERS:
Yours Occasionally is a small personal, friendly service, offering you the ultimate experience in beautiful handmade bespoke greeting cards. We are…
Boutique Wedding Events presents. Wedding Fayre in Essex March 2012
In association with Wedding Directory-Essex.
LIST OF STALL HOLDERS:
Yves Fernandez, James Parker, Joseph Perry, Tim Pettingale, Jonathan Rowland, Clare Smith, Cal-I Muirhead
Just Groove Live are one of London’s…
Reputation is the opinion (more technically, a social evaluation) of the group of entities toward a person, a group of people, or an organization on a certain criterion. It is an important factor in many fields, such as education, business, online communities or social status.
Reputation can be considered as a component of the identity as defined by others.
Reputation is quite an important component of our identity. It is arguably the biggest part of our social identity. Perceptions commonly held by others, the opinions of respected community members. A burgeoning public relations industry exists to manage these perceptions for corporate entities. Reputation can make or break an individual or company’s chances of survival and happiness.
As our lives moves online, our real life social norms still apply. The only difference being that rather than fleeting perceptions and gossip, everything done and said online is accessible to everyone forever. Every photo, every status update and every tweet live on forever whereas something said in real life is fleeting and it’s reach is localised. Everything we do online is archived and indexed by search engines and can be accessed globally. This gives our online actions bigger importance in terms of our reputations.
It is important for companies, large and small, to be aware of what is being said about them online. There is a growing trend for people to vent online. They will say things in a global platform like Twitter rather than to your face. Rather than crawling under a rock and ignoring social media, companies need to actively monitor the conversation about their brand and take part in it.
When the worst comes to the worst, and someone posts something negative on your brand’s Facebook page, you should view this as a golden opportunity to turn that person into an engaged and enthusiastic fan. It is important to acknowledge their gripe and to own your actions that led to it. You will be amazed at how quickly and dramatically you can run a bad situation into a good opportunity by offering to remedy the situation or a discount on future purchases.
As an example two ladies complained on Katrina-Chocolate Wrappers that they sent email enquiries that never got answered. Katrina quickly apologised and explained that we’ve been having email problems and offered both discounts on future orders. They highly appreciated that a brand that they respected took the time and effort to acknowledge how important they are as customers. This resulted in orders from both ladies and a very public display of the quality of customer service offered by the brand.
Google alerts and Twilert are examples of simple tools you can use to monitor the general web and Twitter respectively for keywords that your customers would use in conversations about your brand. Give them a whirl and share with us your stories of disgruntled customers or customer service that delighted you.
A common complaint from Facebook users is that they keep getting invited to Events that are completely unrelated to them, sometimes they are not even on the same continent!
We’ve all experienced this and it is getting to a point where people are starting to avoid even looking at notifications about events. This problem is described in great clarity in the Unmarketing Blog’s How we are killing Facebook post. We are going to show you how to make it easier to get events right and to target people properly. If we all start doing this, people will stop ignoring Facebook Events and they might actually become useful to invitees.
The most helpful Facebook feature for this is Facebook Friend Lists. You can use Friend Lists as a reusable filter when you create the guest list for an event.
Start off by Clicking Account > Edit Friends.
Next you want to click on “+Create a List” Button at the top of the page. This will give you the option to name a list and to choose friends to add to that list. You could create a list called “UK” for example and start adding people to that list.
Once this is done it can be reused everytime you create an event. This means you only have to go through the selection process once, rather than everytime you create an event.
To use your list while creating an event, the “Select Guests” window allows you to filter by Location or by Lists by clicking on the little disclosure arrow next to “Search by Name”
This will reveal a list of Locations, then Lists followed by Groups.
Choosing one of these should limit your guest choice to people fulfilling the filter criteria.
Now you can filter the Friends that you can select for your event, rather than blast everyone in your contact list!
Did you find this useful? Do you create events? Do you want more tips on creating Facebook Events?
Something that is apparent about having the ability to “Google Like” results from the search results is that it is an unrealistic use case. Most users would not recommend a web page until they have actually looked at it, and is unlikely to navigate back to their search results to then click +1.
Google introduced the +1 button a few days ago for web site owners to add to their pages. This allows users to +1 a page while they are on it, similar to the Facebook Like button.
I have added this button to the posts on this blog as well as the Wedding Directory blog posts. It has been a bit buggy with the button appearing and disappearing. Some webmasters have said that logging out of google and clearing cache and cookies solves this. I foudn that after about a day, it sorted itself out. Could this initial instability be the reason why it’s called experimental rather than the traditional Google beta? Anyway it all seems to work fine for now ( Please let me know if you can’t see/use the button on top of this post). It should look similar to this:
You still need to enable the experimental +1 feature on google.com (country specific sites can’t use it, yet) to see +1’ed links in your search results.
Here’s Google’s officail instructions for those that want to add this to their sites:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/index.html
and Google’s announcement of the facility on 1 June 2011:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/1-button-for-websites-recommend-content.html
As you probably know eBooks are outselling print books according to a recent Amazon.com press release. This trend is also reflected in Amazon.co.uk sales figures with eBooks now outselling hardcovers, similar to the US sales figures last year. The UK seems to be about a year behind the US in this regard.
eBooks are priced at a premium, considering how much cheaper they are to produce and distribute. At first they were priced the same as paperbacks, which always seemed ridiculous to me. With sales of Kindles increasing and more and more people using them over paper books, the price of paper books are coming down significantly on Amazon. This is also due to the fact that independent booksellers can sell paper books through Amazon while they can’t sell eBooks. Competition is always better for the consumer and this is a case in point.
For these reasons we have now reached a point I never could have imagined, a significant amount of print books available on Amazon are now cheaper than their eBook equivalents! This is great news, and is a fact that I am increasingly exploiting.
Here is an example of what I’m talking about:
Personally I would opt for the used paperback at £0.01 over the eBook for £5.53. Sure I have to pay shipping of £2.80 but it’s still cheaper than buying it on a Kindle, not to mention paying £100 for a Kindle to start with!
The Kindle itself is a bit of a one-trick pony and the only way I can see myself actually buying it is if the price of eBooks come down to about £1 per book.
I love the Kindle for making print books cheaper for me to buy. I can’t see myself ever buying one as I will always opt for the print book over the eBook though.
Google is working hard to get social. Their most recent attempt +1 is an extension of their social search effort and is designed to integrate word-of-mouth recommendation into their Search results. The basic idea is that search results will be displayed with annotations based on what people that you have connected with through Google products like Gmail have +1’ed as well as Twitter, Facebook(Google never mentions them in this context as they are having a huge spat at the moment) and blog content by your connections.
Introducing the +1 ButtonThe +1 button is a shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out.” Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1’s can help friends, contacts and others find …
+1 is currently available as an experimental extension to Google Search, only on google.com. If you use google.co.uk or another country specific version of Google, you will need to switch to google.com to be able to use it for now.I decided last week to test-drive it to see how it would work and to see how well it worked. I tried two scenario’s:1) Two google accounts with corresponding Twitter accounts. Twitter account A follows account B. The accounts are connected to the Google accounts. You do this by going to “My Account” and choosing “View and manage your accounts from other services”
I connected the Twitter account:
This was done for both accounts and on Twitter I had the one account follow the other account to link them.I did a search from the Google account for some text that occurs in tweets in the followed Twitter account. Unfortunately this failed to appear. I waited a few days hoping that Google’s indexing might need to fully crawl The Twitter link before it will connect the two accounts. This did not happen and I raised this in the Google +1 mailing list. I will follow up this blog post once it is sorted out
I decided to try something a little easier (for Google):2) Two Google accounts, connected through Google Contacts. I added the followed Google account to the other’s contact list from GMail. I then did a search as before and +1’ed it in one account. I then did the same search on the other account and…………it did not work :’(…I waited a few days (till today in fact) to rerun the search and it found the +1 !
Have you played around with Google +1? It should be available as part of the main search and in other countries once it is all ironed out. It will be interesting to see how this influences SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). I guess Social Media will become even more important than it is now in this area.Let us know your experiences with Google Social Search and +1. Or if you have anything else social media related that you want to see in action, feel free to comment below and we will run an experiment for you!
Myspace in 2006 was at the top of the world. Every band in the world had a MySpace profile. Flash-forward to 2011 and Myspace is haemorhaging badly on its last legs. What happened?
Myspace was the most important site for music lovers. You could find small unsigned bands, in fact, MySpace spawned the whole “unsigned” movement and you could see what other people thought of them. People like you. Musicians could put their material online and get access to audiences without having to mortgage their future earnings to big record companies. Everyone was friends with Tila Tequila! Tom looked out over what he created and posted that it was good. Everyone was happy!
Then things started going a bit overboard. You know what I’m talking about: Page customisations. This started off innocently to compensate for Myspace horrendously bland layout and soon led to ridiculous amounts of bling. Two or three video’s that would auto-play simultaneously at page load time! An entire industry sprung up to provide myspace users with stuff to put on their profiles. Then Facebook opened it’s doors to the unwashed masses and it was a breath of fresh air with it’s clean, standard yet tasteful layout. Myspace responded by streamlining and cleaning up. Unfortunately it threw the baby out with the glitter water.
Nowadays location-based social media is all the rage. Everyone forgot that Myspace was there first. I’m talking about the ability to find people of the opposite sex in your town that also liked chiptune metal. And something very important for independent musicians: Curious music lovers could find bands based on their location! Find local bands anywhere! Go to a city for the weekend and find gigs that even seasoned locals did not know about. Talk about a killer app, Except…
Myspace completely dropped location-based search support. Katrina and I would not have found each other without this feature. I bet there are loads of bands out there that can’t make ends meet just because this feature has been taken away. Myspace bring back (some of) your former glory! Restore location-based search NOW!
Do you agree? Yes? No? Let us know in the comment section below.
“Get Back MySpace!” - The Beatles
Beatles - Get Back (Rooftop)Beatles famous rooftop performance of Get Back. The Beatles performed “Get Back” (along with other songs from the album) as part of the “Beatles Rooftop Performance” which took place on the roof of A…
paper.li is an online service that allows you to take links posted on twitter and transform it into a web page, laid out like a newspaper, containing the link contents. This includes articles, pictures and video. This allows you to view your twitter content in a more user-friendly way as well as sharing content with others created by twitter users that interest you. It allows you to become a content curator and automate the publishing process.
I have come across forum threads on the 4N network that touches on this (here and here)and decided to address some issues raised. A lot of people when they first find out about it, get really excited and create their own paper and after a while problems with content-quality sets in. A lot of tweeps follow users that constantly spew sales and marketing tweets and this ‘spam’ makes it onto the paper which eventually cause people to give up on the idea of their paper. This article gives you a way to avoid this from happening, without having to unfollow people and interfere with your normal twitter usage.
Twitter introduced the concept of lists in late 2009 to help users organise and easily categorise other twitter users and the content of their tweets. paper.li allows you to use twitter lists as source for your paper. I am going to show you how to produce a paper with consistently high quality content by using Twitter lists as sources.
Follow the following steps:1) Create a Twitter list. Name it after the type of content that you want to obtain from it. This helps you to easily evaluate Twitter users for inclusion against this name. Make sure to make the list public so paper.li can see it.
2) Go to paper.li, login using your Twitter account and create a paper using your twitter list as source.
3) Set name and publishing settings for the paper and preview it.
4) Monitor your paper for content as it comes out and remove and add people to your list accordingly.
As a side-effect of this, you will end up with a public list that will be useful to other users too!The is process was used to build the Music newspaper for the Huntingdon & Bar Hill branches of Clive’s Music School. The Twitter list that acts as source contain famous musicians and musical publications and consistently delivers interesting and high-quality news content from the music scene.
Follow the steps above and post links to your paper in a comment below. I look forward to looking at and discussing your results!
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