Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter make it easy for people to come together and share opinions, experiences and thoughts on a number of topics. Smart companies understand this and are using the power of social media to connect and inform their customers, and prospects. Referred to as “Social Media Marketing“, it’s a smart way to open the lines of communication between you and your customers/prospects.

Social media activities run the gamut from Blogging, micro blogging sites such as Twitter, social networking communities such as LinkedIn and Facebook, video and music uploading sites, discussion forums, photo sharing and more. With so many different sites and ways to participate, it can be difficult to keep track of all your efforts.

Participating in social media doesn’t take a lot of money, but it is very time consuming and businesses want to know that all of this investment in time is paying off. Before launching a campaign, you should have a firm grasp on what it is you’re trying to accomplish. Is it increasing website traffic? Getting more ezine subscribers? Having more people download your free ebook or whitepaper? Or maybe you just want to work on your company’s brand image. Whatever it is, you need to have a plan. As the old saying goes, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there”. Have your game plan intact before getting started in marketing yourself, or your company with social media.

There are many different forms of social media, so it’s impossible to use them all. Pick three or four, and funnel the majority of your efforts there. Even if you won’t be working them all, at the very least you should claim your name or company name on as many social services as possible. You don’t want to find out later that someone has the user name that you want. If you need to see if your chosen user name is available try Namechk.com which checks dozens of social media networking and bookmarking sites all at once to see if it’s available. Claim your name now so you won’t end up being sorry later.

How do you monitor all the buzz?

How do you monitor your brand and protect your hard earned reputation? I thought you’d never ask. There isn’t one fool-proof method but there are many services and tools out there that will make it easy to see who’s talking about you online. Some are free and others will make you pull out your wallet.

These “online reputation management” tools, as they’re often referred to, will help you to define keywords, or phrases you wish to track and then watches for any mention of your company name, products, or services. It’s important to defend and monitor your online reputation.

Let’s take a look at some of the measuring and tracking tools at your disposal:

1. http://BackTweets.com
   A search engine for Twitter. See who’s tweeting your links and more. Can also sign up for email alerts of new findings.
2. http://Addictomatic.com **
   A little different than the others , you type in a keyword, topic or phrase and out it goes searching the top blogs, news sites, Google, Technorati, Ask, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Topix and more. You’ll be given a personalized results page to bookmark with everything it finds related to your topic.
3. http://Surchur.com
   Search for the latest and greatest on topics that are popular right now. Type in a keyphrase and it searches blogs, social news sites, photo and video sites for your chosen topic.
4. http://AlertRank.com
   A better way to organize and sort Google alerts. Get a daily report emailed to you in a spreadsheet format of what it finds.
5. http://www.google.com/alerts **
   I’ve been using this “secret weapon” for years. Simply type in your name or company name and receive daily emails of results found. They do the work, you receive the links. Free and nice.
6. http://BrandsEye.com
   An online reputation management tool with a real-time, concise overview of your online reputation. Multiple levels of services and pricing available. Starting at $1.00.
7. http://Twazzup.com
   Another Twitter only search engine.
8. http://SocialMention.com/alerts
   Just like Google Alerts but for social media. Enter your keyword phrase and email address to be notified of any new findings. Searches blogs, microblogs like Twitter, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, videos and more.
9. http://BlogPulse.com
   A search engine that searches only for data posted to blogs. Enter your keyword, hit submit and off it goes to gather results.
10. http://Topsy.com
    Topsy will track your tweets that have been retweeted so you can find out who’s been sending you all that “link love”. Type in your Twitter user name and you’ll be amazed at what you find.

If you’d like to track incoming traffic from your various social media profiles, an easy way to do it using Google Analytics can be found here http://Tinyurl.com/kuc9rL **.

Just as there are many ways to market your company using social media, as you can see, there’s a multitude of tools and services at your disposal to track and see if all of that hard work is paying off. Smart companies realize the importance of social media in their marketing efforts and are utilizing it on some level. How smart are you?

This year will see a tidal wave of e-readers arrive, and as soon as they arrive they’ll be instantly commodified. Here’s a look at how the battle lines are now shaping up in the display and hardware corners of the e-book market.

The emerging e-book market is in a full-blown melee—a free-for-all where everyone along the chain from content producer to reader is trying to be the first to figure it all out. Over the next few days, we’ll talk about how the battle lines are shaping up in the following areas: displays, chips, storefronts, and publishers. Many of the combatants are involved in more than one of these areas—Qualcomm is in displays and chips; newcomer Copia is pushing hardware and a storefront; Sprint, Hearst, Skiff, and LG are all allied across displays, storefronts, and publishers under the Skiff banner; and so on.

the Skiff vs. the QUE

Most of the e-readers coming out in the next few months are based on E-Ink, but that doesn’t mean that the displays will be identical. Reading devices will compete with each other on size, thickness, resolution, contrast, and price. The screens will also compete to offer color as quickly as possible.

The Skiff has the edge on size so far with an 11.5″ diagonal screen. Plastic Logic comes in a close second. Both are easily large enough to view a full A4 page without doing any scaling, and both have solid industrial design.

Both the Skiff and the Plastic Logic QUE are incredibly thin. This thinness is made possible in part by the fact that both have flexible display substrates—Skiff’s uses a foil substrate developed by LG, while Plastic Logic’s uses a plastic substrate developed in-house. Both of these make for flexible displays, but of the two only the Skiff itself is physically flexible.

On the resolution front, the Skiff wins at 174dpi to Plastic Logic’s slightly lower 150dpi.

Tweeting via Fax Machine

Dorothy Miller has hopped on the Twitter bandwagon, but the 80-year-old grandmother doesn’t use a computer or mobile device to update her status. Nope, Dorothy tweets away with the help of a fax machine and a New York-based service called Celery.

Celery allows users, many of them computer-phobic senior citizens, to submit tweets, blog entries, Facebook updates or emails via fax machine and then posts the content online for more tech-savvy friends and family to see.

Dorothy loves the service, commenting to a local news station: “I don’t usually write to my daughter that much because she talks too much. And that takes up too much of my time, but she can read my twitterings here and she can see what her mother’s doing and know that her mother’s okay.”

This Emailing (HTML Email) Guide contains tips and tools on how to create compatible HTML email which will display correctly on most webmail and email clients. HTML email or HTML newsletters have advantages and disadvantages. But your clients (recipients) decide if you will send them a HTML email or a plain text email. For example if they specifically sign up for a HTML newsletter.

The following have been tested on both Mac (OS X) and PC (Windows XP)

• Webmail
  • Hotmail
  • Gmail
• Email clients
  • Outlook 2007
  • Mail
  • Entourage
• Browsers
  • Internet Explorer 6
  • Mozilla Firefox 3.5.5

I invite you to have a look at the Email Standards Project for extensive and thorough tests for popular email clients.

Get several webmail accounts for testing

Testing, testing and testing. Before sending out your HTML email, you have to make sure it looks good on several webmail clients. Get yourself several webmail accounts:

• Gmail
• Hotmail
• Yahoo! Mail

Besides webmail accounts you also need to have email clients to test your HTML email:

• Mozilla Thunderbird (PC, Mac)
• Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007 (PC)
• Entourage (Mac)
• Apple Mail (Mac)

Create an effective layout

The layout of the HTML email and the writing style are very important. You want people to read your newsletter, not to scan it. You want to draw their attention to headlines, etc.

Remove unnecessary HTML tags

The following HTML tags should be removed from your HTML email, because several webmail applications and email clients are removing or ignoring these tags.

• DOCTYPE
• HTML tag <HTML></HTML>
• BODY tag <BODY></BODY>
• All Meta tags <META>
• Head tag <HEAD></HEAD>
• Base tag <BASE>
• Link tag <LINK>
• Script tag <SCRIPT></SCRIPT>
• Title tag <TITLE></TITLE>
• Applet tag <APPLET></APPLET>
• Frameset tag <FRAMESET></FRAMESET>
• Frame tag <FRAME>
• IFrame tag <IFRAME></IFRAME>
• Comments <!– comments –>

Use tables for layout

Because of the very limited support of style sheets in webmail clients, the best and safe way to layout your HTML email is to use tables.

Put all images online

In your HTML email you can use embedded images or remote images. Embedded images are attached with the email itself and are shown immediately.

Remote images are images which are located on a remote website, but are not displayed at first. In today’s webmail and email clients you have to click on a link to display the remote images. If the email address of the sender is in the address book of the recipient, then the images in the HTML email will be shown.

Images from an unknown sender aren’t displayed at first because they are considered unsafe because of several security issues (e.g. spammers can validate your email address, hijack your email account, etc.). The HTML email should be as small as possible in size (KB’s). Using remote images results in very few KB’s and therefore less bandwidth when sending it.

Use absolute urls

Use absolute urls for all your images and links, for example:

Use short urls

When using long urls you risk getting broken links or broken images. Your email program or the email program of your recipient could wrap the long URL along several lines. This can cause part of the url to be clickable instead of the whole url:

Webmail clients can also add a space (%20) when a url is too long:

Use simple inline style sheets

Use simple style sheets, that means not to use absolute or relative positioning. This is bad supported by most webmail. Don’t use external or embedded style sheets, because email programs are removing or ignoring everything between the <HEAD></HEAD>. That means the <LINK> tag won’t work if you want to define external style sheets.

Use inline stylesheets for fonts, font colors, links, background colors, etc. For example:

If you have a HTML Email design with embedded stylesheets, you can use Premailer to make them inline.

All text and links must have a style

You have to specify the font, font color and the font size for all the text and links in every table cell. If you don’t specify a style, then most webmail clients will use their own style sheets. This could result in displaying different fonts, font colors and sizes and could also mess up your design.

Hotmail and Yahoo display Arial as the default font if you don’t specify a font. Gmail uses Verdana. Hotmail uses a 11px as the default font size, Yahoo uses 12px and Gmail uses 16px.

Below is an example. This is the minimum of style sheets required to style text and links.

I always use text-decoration: underline to make it clear to the reader that it’s a link:

Email addresses and URLs as text

In most cases when using an email address or an URL as text it will be given a default style. For example:

• Send all your questions to contact@example.com
• Go to http://www.example.com for more information
• Go to www.example.com for more information
• Go to sub.example.com for more information

Gmail and Yahoo give all the above text a default style even though they aren’t links. Hotmail and Windows Live Hotmail don’t give default styles to URLs without http://.

Use the title and alt attribute

Use the alt attribute to describe your images except spacers. The alt text is displayed when images aren’t being displayed. Images aren’t displayed by default by most webmail and email clients.

The title attribute can be just for almost any element (links, images, tables, etc.). Use the title attribute if you want to display a tooltip to describe the element. It is recommended to use it for links and images. For example:

Don’t use forms

Hotmail ignores forms in HTML email to ensure that messages do not contain malicious scripts. Other webmail services (Gmail and Yahoo) and email clients support the use of forms.

If you intend on sending HTML emails with a form and amongst your recipients are also people with a Hotmail email address, than I would recommend not using a form. Instead use a link to refer to a form on a HTML page.

Don’t use JavaScript

JavaScript in HTML email is never a good idea because of all the dangerous scripting (for example XSS attacks) that can be executed. For this reason most webmail and email clients disable JavaScript by removing or ignoring it.

For example, this code:

would be rewritten to:

The solution is to refer to the promotion without JavaScript.

Provide an unsubscribe link

At the bottom of every HTML email you should provide an unsubscribe link.

Provide a link for an online version

Although you test your HTML email with different webmail and email clients, you never can be sure how it will display in your recipients email program. In case it doens’t display correctly provide a link at the top of every HTML email to view your HTML email in the browser for an online version.

Last year I was introduced to the unusual concept of QR Codes at a Global Marketing Meeting of a Car Manufacturer. As this opened a whole new world to me I started looking for more information on the use and success of these mysterious codes. No matter how much information I find, there are still many questions left unanswered … but we decided to do something with this squary little thing .

QR Codes

QR Codes allow everyday items to become a website (print-to-mobile-to-web messaging) where everything can become a hyperlink, or “physical world hyperlinking”. The “QR” stands for “Quick Response”. These smart codes are similar to the price barcodes found on the packaging of supermarket items, however, QR Codes hold much more information (including website addresses, text and phone numbers). A price barcode can hold only about 20 digits (one direction only) but QR Codes can hold up to 7,000 digits (both vertical and horizontal directions).

How do QR Codes work?

Have you ever had a lot to say and not enough room to say it? You may not be unhappy for too much longer because these QR images can encode up to 7,000 alphanumeric characters.

QR images consolidate data down into a graphic which can be viewed at any size readable by a digital camera. When a QR reader is installed on a mobile phone, the consumer simply points their camera phone at your barcode, and the phone links them directly to your web page in seconds.

How are QR Codes used?

So far, QR Codes are being slapped up on just about everything in Asia and Brazil. Here are just a few examples of where you can find them:

Business cards

Posters

Fashion

Lendorff Kaywa produced only 500 high-end limited edition Space Invaders QR Code scarves. Meanwhile, QRCode Commando Nerd p8tch offers a slightly more affordable “p8tch” to sew to bags and clothing.

Anyone with a smartphone can scan and read QR Codes with the click of a camera, and anyone with access to a computer can generate QR Codes themselves. Kaywa’s QR-Code offers a QR barcode generator a link to download their reader.

By scanning the codes, you can access images, websites, place phone calls, play a video and send text messages. By creating the codes, you can produce your own messages. It is pretty exciting if you think of the marketing possibilities of actually living it this type of “web” world.

Where can we See them?

QR Codes are massive in Japan, appearing in magazines, billboards, business cards, shop windows, T-shirts, and more. McDonalds in Japan are also using this on the side of burgers which directs you to a web page displaying the nutritional information.

So far in the US, Google will be taking another stab at QR Codes by calling its program Favorite Places. They will be providing restaurants and other retailers with stickers for their windows. The UK and Australia are also starting to use QR Codes more in advertising.

Pros of using QR Codes

With QR barcodes, in one click you’ll be directed to your mobile website. This saves time and avoids the frustrations of typing complicated URLs into a web-browser.

Go Green
The codes are also meant to increase efficiency and reduce waste. For example, paperless air travel, electronic tickets for a concert or registering for an event. This type of registration will likely become more popular as camera and scanner technology improves.

These codes are great for advertisers, publishers and brands because they are connecting the physical world to the interactive world and driving traffic to their ‘mobile’ internet site. This is an effective way to add interactivity to any print media and the possibilities are endless!

Cons of using QR Codes

Despite being created back in 1994 QR Codes are rarely seen in Europe, because our phones don’t come equipped with the QR Code readers. This is the reason for very slow marketing and advertising progress. I do believe that QR Codes will start to pick up soon because smart phones with cameras are becoming more and more common (Android or iPhone). Recently, Blackberry messenger 5.0 was released and this included a barcode reader. Once these readers are pre-installed on cell phones and a major brand brings more attention to the technology (Google), QR barcodes will be the new media wave.

It’s true that you don’t need a built in barcode reader, but you do need to download a free barcode reader app.

If you publish a lot of YouTube videos on specific topics, this post will be very useful.

With annotated links, you can edit your videos and add text links that will link to:

• Other videos on YouTube
• Playlists on Youtube
• YouTube Channels
• Searches on YouTube
• Groups on YouTube

Creating awareness is one thing but engaging people is another. Brands are getting more involved with making sure that they also speak with their consumers, not just create ads. One good example is the IKEA Facebook Application. The strategy here is quiet simple yet powerful. What better place to engage consumers? Do it where they are already involved and are a captive audience.

What they did was to create a profile page for “Gordon Gustavsson”, the Store Manager. Then they uploaded 12 pictures of the showrooms and invited the people to tag the pictures with their names. The person who tags an item first wins the furniture. Very cool. So many participated and the demand for more items grew. Ikea’s brand was seen all over facebook, via links, newsfeed and people just sharing.

The promotion worked, because the idea was simply brilliant. It was a win – win situation for both consumers and the brand.

This video describes the campaign in detail: