Alberta Business Marketing

LinkedIn, Facebook and many other Social Networking sites have been suggesting friends and followers for a while now.  Do you follow these people just because the service recommends them to you.   Deep down inside where many Facebookers or LinkedIn users never get a chance to visit there is some formula or algorithm that figures out who you should know and offers suggestions based on your friends, there friends and a number of other criteria.

Twitter is now jumping of the “suggest a friend” campaign with their own “suggestions for you” program.

The Twitter blog has more information on how this will work inside Twitter.  Read the Twitter blog.

Are you the type to follow whomever is suggested to you?

What do you think about the automated suggestions?

In the LinkedIn world, I have used the suggestions to my advantage.  When I see a name pop up from someone I haven’t heard of in a while or a long-lost colleague, LinkedIn can be a great way to get back in touch with people.

But what do you think?

Tags: Blog hosting services, Facebook, Facebook Inc, Human Interest, linkedin, LinkedIn Ltd, Online social networking, Social information processing, Social Landscape, social media, Social network service, Technology/Internet, Twitter, Twitter Inc, web 2.0, World Wide Web
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Everyday I get asked by someone who is wanting the “quick win” with their marketing.  What do I have to do today to enable the phone to ring tomorrow?  Well, that is a very good question.  I am one hundred percent sure there is some marketing guru out there who can give you some quick win success formula that will enable this happen.  A couple a tweets here, a Facebook status update there and you are off to the races.  You need to simply spend two minutes on Google and you can easily find them, there are lots of gurus and ninjas and self-proclaimed experts who can help you.  Sure get the quick win, lots of promise but they all lack real substance.

Success in marketing doesn’t come overnight, I know…I haven’t been marketing for several years and it takes blood, sweat and tears.  It takes works and it takes time.  It takes patience and most importantly, it takes commitment.  The only thing overnight about marketing is your blunders that knock you down.  Those for some reason they seem to occur overnight, but success doesn’t.

I was reading on the side of my cereal box this morning about healthy eating.  Same thing, healthy lifestyles isn’t a race it is a journey and the same thing can be said about your marketing and especially your social media activities.

Success with social media is definitely not a race.  It is a journey and a tough uphill journey at the best of times.   It takes commitment from you and your entire team.  It takes more than just opening a Twitter account, Facebook Page and throwing up a free WordPress or blogger site.  Social Media takes planning, preparation and it requires everyone in the company to play a role.  I don’t care if you have three employees, thirty-three or three thousand and three.  Everyone must play a part.

This is what we do at Ulistic, everyone plays a role in our social media activities.  David, Frank and myself (soon Melanie) all play our parts and we all have the same goal just different paths that are strategically laid out in our marketing plan.  We all blog regularly and we participate in blog commenting almost daily, we are active on Facebook, Twitter and others and most importantly, we are active in our communities and this includes online and face-to-face.  I mentioned this in my podcast with Daniel Gutierrez and Bob Burg the other night…nothing will replace a face-to-face meeting, your social media fills these gaps and helps you get to face-to-face.

Are you expecting that quick win?  You may be a tad bit disappointed with this mindset.  For those who are out there consistently adding value and enriching the lives of others you will have success and it will take time.  Success with your social media marketing is helping others but also getting paid to help these people.  Bob says’ “Give more in value than you take in payment”.  You need to provide value but don’t do it for free.  Never lose site that you are in business and you must convert visitors, fans and followers to clients.  If you don’t you have a big network.  That’s it.

Need help figuring all this out, give me a call 403.775.2205.

Tags: 403.775.2205, Behavior, Blog hosting services, blogger site, Bob Bur, Business Success, Daniel Gutierrez, Facebook, Facebook Inc, Google Inc., Learning, media activities, media marketing, Online social networking, Play, social media, social media marketing, Twitter, Twitter Inc, web 2.0, World Wide Web
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LinkedIn is one of the industry leading social networks and online communities in use today across multiple businesses and industries. LinkedIn’s focus on business-to-business networking and facilitating the sharing of ideas and strategies has won the trust of business professionals globally. Not unlike many of their counterparts, LinkedIn does have privacy challenges according to many CEO level executives. Many organizations are now reviewing their policies related to LinkedIn and how information propagates through this business social network.

More and more business professionals are turning to LinkedIn because of its overall effectiveness in the marketplace. However, many are unaware of the apparent risks to corporate contacts when setting up their LinkedIn accounts. There are many settings that are on automatically allowing for browsing of contacts and also leaving a trace of who visited another profile. Many organizations as part of their social media acceptable use policy are now requiring specific changes to LinkedIn privacy settings be made ensuring business contacts and information are kept confidential.

LinkedIn is build on a community and like many other online networks; they embrace the sharing of information and contacts. How do businesses balance the foundations of LinkedIn with the compliance and confidentiality measures of business today?

Read my white paper on the two required LinkedIn security settings.

Tags: business networking, business social network, Business/Finance, CEO, collaboration, Community websites, linkedin, LinkedIn Ltd, online communities, online networks, Online social networking, Social information processing, social media, social media acceptable use policy, social networks, Technology/Internet, web 2.0, World Wide Web
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Probably not…but I think I took a good step forward on Saturday.

I have been a huge supporter of the blogging platform WordPress for many years.  Like many of you, I cut my teeth on the free versions of WordPress and Blogger.  However, when I started to take blogging seriously, I stumbled on a company called Siteground.com and the rest is history.  Blogging is now part of my daily routine and this blog reaches thousands of folks each day.

WordPress offers one of the most reliable and easy to use blogging platforms available today.  Over the course of my regular business day, I work with many Calgary and global companies on how they can leverage blogs in their business.  Ulistic offers a wide range of blogging consulting services for business.  From blog consulting to coaching.  Contact me if I can help you with your business blogs at anytime.

WordPress is evolving to a fully functional web development platform.

For many years WordPress has strictly been used as a blogging platform.  For a while, some of the leading web developers started developing great looking websites on WordPress.  However over the past little while WordPress has become more acceptable in the mainstream web development world.   WordPress is now making serious moves towards offering a full-featured and rich content management system and web development platform.

On Friday, I met up with a good friend of mine and fellow WordPress blogger in Calgary and we immediately jumped into sharing tips and tricks on how we can make our WordPress blogs really sing.  I shared a few great plugins that I have found and started to use every day.  Many of our Ulistic clients are also leveraging these great additional functions on their WordPress blog.  Some of the plugins allow you to scroll testimonials, perform grammar/spelling checking and a wealth of other great added features.  You can even send a thank you note to those folks who leave a comment on your blog.

Then my friend shared with me a service he has been using and having some great success with, headwaythemes.com.  Headway is a blog development platform for WordPress.  You can see it on this blog, this weekend I changed the layout of my blog to a headway designed blog.  It took a bit of playing around at first, but after you learn how it really works and read the manual  or watch the YouTube videos it is quite awesome.  Headway takes all the confusion of CSS and HTML  and offers a powerful interface for you to develop your own professional business blog.  Upload your own header, change colours and really take ownership of your blog.

Don’t kiss your web developer goodbye just yet, but here is another web tool you can take advantage of for your blogs.  Your web developer combined with Headway can really make your blog rock n’roll.  I am not a developer, but as an avid blogger and marketing professional…I get this and the power a great locking blog can do for business.

Headway only works on your hosted WordPress blog.

Sorry folks…you need to have your own hosted version of WordPress to make this work.  If you have your blog hosted on the free WordPress servers, you can’t take advantage of the power headway offers.  However, don’t worry I have a solution for you.  Get a hosted version of WordPress with your own domain name for only $9.95 for the first year.  Click Here – Cheap WordPress Hosting.  After the first year, your hosting is only $120 for the year.  Great deal to get started.

Headway is about $90 for a personal version which allows you to run it on 2 of your websites, upgrade to the developers version for about $160.00 and use it on unlimited sites.  This is an awesome tool for WordPress, if you are serious about your blogging – this service if for you.

Tags: Akismet, awesome tool, blog, Blog hosting services, Blog software, Blogger, BuddyPress, Business/Finance, Calgary, Computing, content management system, Content management systems, functional web development platform, HTML, mainstream web development world, PHP programming language, Siteground, Technology/Internet, ulistic, USD, web developer, web developer goodbye, web developers, web development platform, web tool, wordpress, World Wide Web, YouTube Inc
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Our team at Ulistic coaches many small business folks and marketing teams across North America each day.  This is the part of the job that I truly enjoy, openly sharing concepts, tips and tricks and practical use of social media.    It is always such a delight when the light bulb goes off during a consulting session with one of our clients.  Business in my opinion are done with the fluff around social media, they want the hard facts, return on investment justifications, what are the opportunities and most importantly what do need to do.  Interested in learning more, just click here, drop me an email or phone call.

One Product that rocks my world – Hootsuite

One of the products we discuss at length during our Social Media Consulting engagements is Hootsuite.  Hootsuite is the cornerstone of our social media modules and it rightly deserves it place in the pecking order of must have social media management tools for any size of business or hobbyist.

I have personally tried a number of social media services out there (Tweetdeck is one).  Hootsuite is really the only true social media dashboard product out there that is easy to use and does almost anything you can imagine.  One the biggest stress factors with social media is managing the time to engage properly online and make important connections, Hootsuite solves this.  With Hootsuite, you can manage multiple Twitter accounts, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook pages, Foursquare accounts and so much more.  You can even invite members of your team and share certain online social media accounts.

It is a must have for any serious social media professional out there and it is also Canadian.

Hootsuite is based in Vancouver, BC.

Hootsuite runs online, it is a true cloud solution.  Leveraging the power of HTML5, Hootsuite requires no software to install and no widgets or browser add-ons, simply point your browser to http://www.hootsuite.com, create your account and you are off to the races.

Karim at Techvibes shared some recent news on Hootsuite the other day.  Hootsuite is cranking it up another step.  I love the fact that I can segment my Twitter account into lists, searches and much more but now I can filter these columns on keywords or Klout.  My Klout score sits at 29, it has taken a hit over the past little while since I haven’t been that active in the Twitter Universe lately.

Go and check out Hootsuite, it is awesome web-based solution that rocks!

Tags: awesome web-based solution, british columbia, cloud solution, Facebook Inc, foursquare, Hootsuite, LinkedIn Ltd, media accounts, media dashboard product, media management tools, media modules, media services, North America, Online social networking, Real-time web, social media, social media consulting, Technology/Internet, Tweetdeck Inc., Twitter, Twitter Inc, Vancouver, web 2.0, World Wide Web
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