10e20 Blog

Over the holidays I spoke to lots of different people who told me that they want to get more involved in social media in 2008. My first question to them was always: Why? Do you want to get involved because it seems like it’s THE hot thing right now? Or do you want to help your company or clients grow? You need to have goals in mind and focus on the end result in order to be successful.

Social media can be very complex and involved but it can also be broken down into very simple and actionable steps. These steps can have an immediate impact on your businesses bottom line. And that’s what it’s all about.

The Ins and Outs of Forum Marketing

Yesterday Jake took us through Social Media Marketing and why it is so important to incorporate into your overall marketing strategy. Most of the time when Social Media Marketing is mentioned, we talk about large sites like Digg, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc. Today I want to discuss the benefits and strategies in using forums to your advantage.

Participating in forums can provide valuable insight to business owners. Not only for sales, but for some good perspectives from others in your industry as well as potential clients. Forum marketing is not always going to provide you with instant gratification though. It takes time to build a credible profile, and when participating in a forum you can wind up giving more information than you gain. I’m going to outline a few of the benefits of participating in forums as well as give you some basic tips for building a strong profile and using them to help your business.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Optimization (SMO) is an important - perhaps even critical - Internet marketing strategy. Time and time again marketers are unsure of how to approach marketing in the social networks or even if they should at all. Almost daily I’m asked by Marketing Managers and CMOs about how to get into the networks and what the benefits are. I’m amazed that they are not sure if they should do this. At some point, one must seriously investigate and take the plunge. The benefits of marketing in this arena are far too numerous to sit on the sidelines. So today I just wanted to go through a few of the up front benefits we see all the time.

Are you looking for the next Facebook or YouTube? Chances are you may find it on this site before it blows up, cause that is what they are doing over at KillerStartups.com.

Came across this little gem the other day after receiving one of my many Google Alerts. The alert was for ‘Polaroid‘ and led me to a review of a site that is striving to be the largest online community of Polaroids called Polanoid. Then I started looking deeper and found some great sites and ideas! They claim to review 30 plus startups per day.

Who are these talented content foragers? Well, it could be you, me or your co-worker in the next desk. It is all member based submissions and reviews.

KillerStartups.com is a user driven internet startups community. Entrepreneurs, investors, and bloggers are staying informed on up-and-coming internet startups using our blog platform, where internet entrepreneurs submit their startup to see what others think about it.

Digg recently added a new section to their site called “Digg The Candidates.” What this section basically lets you do is digg which U.S. presidential candidate you think should win the 2008 elections.

You have the ability to support as many candidates as you want but friending someone from both parties makes really no sense at all (you can un-friend them too.) While this page might not be as accurate as some of the polls, it does give a good sense of what candidates diggers support and which they think should lead our country.

The candidates are divided into two lists based on the party they are running for. They are ranked on the amount of people who have added them as friends. And under their names it shows the last story they have made a favorite.

Sexy start-ups seem to love Microsoft lately. At least that’s the way it seems on the heels of the latest report that Microsoft has signed an agreement to sell advertisements from outside the U.S. on Facebook and will acquire a minority stake in the company. Seemingly as important as actually inking the deal is the fact they beat Google in this closely watched contest.

Here’s the terms of the deal:

* Microsoft will invest up to $250 million for a minority stake in Facebook (people are saying that the valuations being discussed for Facebook are as high as $15 BILLION)

* This deal now expands on their previous advertising agreement (which was solely for the US) and focuses on international versions of the Facebook service. Microsoft will be able to run ads on those sites.

Here is a list of tips and tricks that can help you become more successful (and get your stories on the homepage) on social news website.


Submit frequently
Submitting stories on a regular basis can only be a good thing when you’re submitting quality submissions. There is obviously a better chance of your stories making the homepage when you have submitted over five or six a day (rather than maybe one or two.)

Network of friends
When first getting started on a social network you will need to add friends (and lots of them.) First, make sure you like and enjoy what the person is submitting. Second, take a look at how many friends they have. If they don’t have any friends, chances are they won’t add you (meaning he/she won’t be able to see the stories you post.) Find someone who already has a network of friends (make sure that person votes for his/her friends submissions.)

Back in July, I reported about Digg choosing Microsoft over Google to supply their contextual ads and then talked to the AP about this decision. Since that time I have still only seen Google ads on Digg. Well for the first time today I saw noticed that Digg is showing contextual ads from Microsoft and not Google. The strange thing is that I can only see the ads when I am not logged in and if I am using Internet Explorer. Here’s what I see in IE:

The ads aren’t labeled as Ads by Microsoft but if you mouse over the hyperlinks all the urls begin with something like this http:// r.msn.com which shows you that they are running through Microsoft.

The strange thing is that if I am in FireFox (logged in or not) I still only see Google Ads like this:

Inc’edIn? Not exactly but it looks like Inc will be launching their new business social network shortly called IncBizNet. Details seem pretty scarce so far but it looks like they are looking to jump in and take on LinkedIn. So the question begs to be asked: is there really room for another one of these? Aren’t LinkedIn and Facebook enough?

It looks like Inc is initially going to be focusing on their built in customer base of the Inc 5000 list. Pretty smart move because which one of these companies wouldn’t join and/or encourage their employees to join. From there they will then likely open up to all private companies and then out to everyone. Could get interesting….

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via PaidContent and screenshot via sdk @ flickr

Reddit is known best for its wide variety of links submitted to the main site, which allow you to directly click to a new story or picture. Well, there is more to reddit than just thousands of links covering numerous different points of interest. Once you dig deeper down into what reddit has to offer, you will find 8 different communities (also know as a subreddits). Each of these communities consist of a different topic (Politics and Programming are two of the more popular ones) and are there for people who would prefer to only see content that matches those topics. Understanding the subcultures within reddit is an important part of understanding how to be successful on reddit as a whole.

These different subreddits are located on the top right-hand side of reddit.

Clicking on a community will bring up its own reddit page with only links consisting of that topic (each having their own unique alien logo ;)).