Social networks that are hosted on a good reliable web hosting service are bound to produce good results. There are lots of advantages associated with reliable web hosting services. One of the remarkable advantages with web hosting service is that it gives you a strong platform for your business to grow big.
A social network when hosted on a reliable web hosting service will help you get a secure and safe hosting service. Your network can’t be easily hacked by others. Hacking can be dangerous for your social network, and reliable web hosting service can provide you with secure hosting.
Once your social network goes live on a web hosting service, you automatically get a virtual server, and apart from that you also get associated internet domain, along with reliable web hosting service, which enables each user of your network to use it.
A good web hosting service provides you with a platform for advertising. You can choose to promote your newly laid ideas on internet. One major advantage associated with reliable web hosting is that social networks are fully secured. There are security patches built in the system, to help your social network function properly.
Social networks also gain immensely with reliable web hosting service offering a site specific search engine. Social networks won’t get jammed on the high web traffic with reliable web hosting, and that can help social networking sites to gain viewership. There are plenty of benefits which a social network can gain out of reliable web hosting facilities.
If you thought that social platforms are solely for marketing purposes that where you’re so wrong. Social computing technologies are emerging that will help businesses not just in the marketing world but also in product development. In the embedded YouTube video below Robin Saitz, Senior Vice President for Solutions Marketing & Communications of the Product Development Company (PTC) discusses the use of social computing in product development.
According to Saitz their latest product, called Windchill, was developed as a solution to difficulties encountered by companies developing products that have teams that are globally distributed. She also says that, “Product development has always been about collaboration and these technologies can take product development to a much higher level,” and that, “The combination of social computing with product development is the emergence of an initiative that we call social product development.”
If social product development seems very revolutionary right now Rob Gremly, executive vice-president of PTC, says that it is actually how the status quo of the work environment in the future. Gremly said, “Social product development is the next step in the evolution of how people work together. The idea that social product development was ever considered to be a new and revolutionary model will seem inconceivable to the next generation of engineers who have grown up with social networking as a normal vehicle for information sharing. Organizations that are able to harness the power of social computing in their product development strategy will quickly outpace their competitors with greater operational efficiency and ultimately better products.”
So make sure you aren’t left behind and start harnessing the power of social product development in your own business.
Scott Monty, Ford Motor’s social media head, recently wrote an article that reminded me how easy it is to get tunnel vision. Admittedly, I focus all my energies on the “most popular” social media sites namely: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Bebo. I dabble with other social media sites (who doesn’t watch YouTube?) but lately these three have been the only ones I have been really putting significant effort at least when it comes to business. My excuse for this one is that at least these four are the ones that are really popular among my target market. However, as Mr. Monty reminds us, “Facebook does not rule the world. At least not yet.”
Anyway here’s a quick guide on the other social media sites you should be paying attention to and pouring some effort in based on the country/region your business operates in. Please note that both the map and the table is from Scott Monty’s blog. Visit the blog for the interactive map.
I ask you–Is there no end to the social platforms that are floating around? It seems like as soon as I think I’ve got a handle on the major ones, I find out one of my friends is already submerged into another one.
That’s what happened today when I was reading the new posts on David Krug’s Twitter account. I followed a link he shared, and was taken to his Pownce account, which basically does the same thing as Twitter as far as I can tell.
We all know about TweetDeck and its derivatives, right? It seems that right now, the only options that you have for a desktop Twitter client would be TweetDeck and another Adobe Air-based client. Here’s the thing: I kind of hate Adobe Air. Sure, it’s a great way to build amazing desktop applications, but the runtime produces a lot of massively bloated applications. It’s not exactly the sort of product you’d want to add to your portfolio, right? You’d want only the best products for your computer.
- Echofon - back when it was known as Twitterfox, Echofon was actually a pretty solid client. However, when Firefox started to become slow and buggy, I stopped using Echofon. I haven’t found anything as good as this on Chrome.
- Hootsuite – this web-based Twitter client was one I actually used for the longest time. It was pretty nice, but I missed the toaster pop-ups on the bottom of my screen.
- Seesmic Desktop – this is a really great client. It has amazing Ping.FM inegration, and all sorts of plugins lets me use this client for a number of web services. However, it runs on Silverlight, and since Microsoft is pulling the plug on it soon, I don’t know if Seesmic has a future.
Hootsuite’s my favorite web-based Twitter client, while Seesmic Desktop runs a very close second place. I love Seesmic Desktop’s way to expand shortened domain names, by the way. What about you, what do you use? Do you have any suggestions?
Facebook is perhaps the best site to place ads right now since it is a hot place to which has grown out of proportion. Catering towards social networking and offering exposure for programmers and of course advertisers, businesses that are looking for good traffic would be wise to place their money on Facebook for now.
But for how long? That is perhaps something that many would be checking out. Basing it on data gathered on Facebook’s performance, it is here to stay for a couple of years. Friendster was once in the same vote, but once the other social networks started to take shape, everyone will agree that Friendster is slowly dying and has been relegated to catch-up.
What made Facebook different? Well similar to any successful company in the initial stages, establishing and following your ideal setup and purpose is the key towards success. Mark Zuckerberg made this clear that he wants to focus first on idealism before profits.
Such is a formula for success and apparently it is paying off. A change in philosophy may be a gamble but for now, Zuckerberg should consider, why change a winning formula if it works?
“For us that’s helping people connect with people and things that they care about. You are better off focusing on those things and helping to build an eco-system around you for all the other stuff. No one can do everything.”
I have written about not depending solely on social media platforms for your business. That is not to say that you should not jump into the bandwagon. I was merely pointing out that it is not wise to simply rely on one venue. Experts still see social media as one big way to reach the countless masses and I agree with that. So here are some tips that you should bear in mind when working with the various social media platforms for your business.
Decide on which platforms you want to be seen at.
There are countless platforms which you can use. You have Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Plurk, and so on. The idea is to focus on a few and channel your energy into those platforms. While it may make sense to use as many as you can, you might find yourself spread out too thinly if you have too many social platforms to manage.
Be active.
This is actually the main reason for narrowing down your social networking “homes.” You have to be quite active in whatever social platform you decide to be part of. Otherwise, you might as well be defeating the purpose of social networking platforms. If you do not update, you do not reply to messages, and the like, you’re as good as dead.
Remember to make giving value your top priority.
PR and marketing campaigns are all over the place. Customers are looking for more than selling points. They are looking for something that they will actually find useful. Bear this in mind and create content that will be found valuable. It may be as simple as a blog post or a short note but as long as customers will find it valuable, you are doing yourself a favor.
During my short time of working with Drupal I learned to love and hate it. I’m sure in my limited time of working with Krug, he’d say he just hates it. Thus this site runs on WordPress but I really enjoy it. I run a few of my local client sites on Drupal and there’s never been a single complaint. It has an amazing backend that is really intuitive.
Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including”: Read more »
Aside from the usual advice of making sure you have very interesting and viral content and of course the title to capture people’s attention (your content might be great but with a boring title no one will even give it a shot) here are some tips I’ve rehashed from Dave Naffziger post “Maximizing the Likelihood of Getting Dugg”. It may be more than a year old but his advice is really sound. So here’s what he said you should do.
Submit your story during the weekend. Tuesdays and Wednesdays get the most number of story submissions but Saturday and Sunday are the best days to submit a story. If possible submit Sunday afternoon to night because that is when most stories are Dugg. Note though that this only works for timeless pieces, which means stories that will be interesting regardless of when you post them. For news stories you really have to be fast and be the first to post it on Digg. So disregard the time/day tip for such stories.
Submit tech and geek stories. Apparently Digg is populated with people interested in tech stuff so between a movie story and tech news choose to post the tech news. Of course you can always post both. Since Naffziger’s post is more than a year old I don’t think the data is the right one to use now especially when it comes to the economy and finance stories. I’m pretty sure more people are paying attention to and Digging such stories. What this tip simply means is that you should follow trends so that you can post more of the kind of stories that are popular.
There’s bad news for businesses counting on their ads on social media sites to DIRECTLY affect their sales. Mark Dolliver of Adweek says that a recent study by Knowledge Networks has shown that “just 16 percent of the social-media users surveyed said they’re more inclined to buy brands that advertise on social sites.” The good news though is that majority of social media users agree that seeing the ads is ok with them and even consider it a “fair price” to pay for their being able to use the social media sites for free. The even better news is that more and more users are using social media sites more frequently, which means more exposure for advertisers.
So what does this mean for advertisers? It simply means that you shouldn’t really count on social media site ads to get much direct sales. Instead the goal should be more focused on increasing brand awareness. Furthermore it would be a good idea to dabble on other ways to make use of social media to help your business aside from paid ads. Make use of the social aspect and actually create an account for your business that you can use to interact with your clients. Remember the major benefit of social media is because it is SOCIAL, which means relationships. It’s not about how many people look at your ads but how many people end up customers but how many customers end up having a greater appreciation for your brand and how many of them start talking about your business to their friends.
During my short time of working with Drupal I learned to love and hate it. I’m sure in my limited time of working with Krug, he’d say he just hates it. Thus this site runs on WordPress but I really enjoy it. I run a few of my local client sites on Drupal and there’s never been a single complaint. It has an amazing backend that is really intuitive.
Want to get to get Dugg in Digg? 
