Social Media Wiz

Finally!!! Themes for Google Mail

Posted by Shailesh Ghimire

at November 19, 2008

No more blah with Gmail. You can finally get rid of that boring blue - light blue theme on your Gmail. Until now GMail has oozed engineer all over when it comes to its designs. From the log-in screen to the layout, it screamed “made by engineers for engineers.” Now I have nothing against engineers, I have worked with a lot of them in the past and am a Physics major. My main complaint with Gmail is that it was “Booooooooooring.” Well today we have news that you can now add themes to your GMail layout. Here are samples: I’m looking forward to customizing my eMail as soon as I have time. Google’s blog has the details on how you can get started.

Google

Social Media Quote of the Day

Posted by Shailesh Ghimire

at November 18, 2008

“We now have indisputable proof that online marketing, YouTube and Twitter and all that it encompasses is meaningful and has arrived,” said Gene Grabowski, chair of the crisis and litigation practice at Levick Strategic Communications. “We are seeing real consequences to a mistake. If [social networks] didn’t matter, you wouldn’t see this type of reaction from J&J or consumers.”

Social Media Marketing, Twitter, YouTube

H&R Block on Social Media Marketing

Posted by Shailesh Ghimire

at November 14, 2008

It’s a long video, but well worth watching, especially if you think your business/industry is not “attractive” enough to blog about.

Social Media Marketing, Strategy

Those Persistent Spammers

Posted by Shailesh Ghimire

at November 12, 2008

There is a new study out showing only one spam email out of 12.5 million receives a response. But apparently that is enough to keep them in business and spamming to the rest of us. My question is can we please find who it is that responds to these emails and ask them to stop the insanity? I’m assuming its a handful of people with lots of time on their hands.

A new study details how spammers – the bane of our email inboxes – still make pots of money, despite only receiving a response to one in every 12,500,000 emails they spam out.

Yet even with this apparently abysmal response rate of less than 0.00001 per cent, the researchers still estimate that the controllers of a network the size of Storm are still bringing in about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or $3.5m (£2.21m) over a year.

Help stop spam by just refusing to respond - no matter how tempting it is to you personally!

Direct Marketing

New YouTube Video Competition

Posted by Shailesh Ghimire

at November 12, 2008

Once again The Onion reads our mind with a news magazine segment called “YouTube Contest Challenges Users To Make A ‘Good’ Video”:

YouTube Contest Challenges Users To Make A ‘Good’ Video

Fun and Such, YouTube

Here a Tweet, There a Tweet

Posted by Shailesh Ghimire

at November 10, 2008

The Wall Street Journal recently declared that Twitter has now gone mainstream. The article cites two companies in particular that are using Twitter with great success: Zappos and Comcast. Both are early adopters of the technology and have been very active on the service. Speaking of active, the article states that one of the main downsides of Twitter is the frequent service outages. There have been so many instances when I’ve tried to do something and the little Tweet bird exclaims that the servers are currently over capacity. However, I can personally testify that things have been better recently.

Service problems aside, it is safe to say that Twitter is quickly becoming an important communication technology. With so many people jumping on though, rules of engagement is becoming important as recent adopters butt heads with early adopters and some unsavory characters attempt to take advantage of the open community.

Believe it or not Twitter does have some etiquette rules with some pretty interesting communication standards. To help you with this, Sarah Evans recently wrote a very useful guide to growing a community on Twitter. Here are the basics Sarah mentions to help you get the most of your “tweets”:

Do… Create a user-friendly Twitter ID (@yourname)
Do… Search for people to follow
Do… Learn the lingo. You’ll want to join the crowd. Trust me.
Do… Add your Twitter ID to all of your signatures
Do… Reach out and say something
Do… Read the bio of those who follow you
Do… Promote others and share your best information
Do… Learn the etiquette.
Do… Find out who some of the big players are

Read Sarah’s article for details.

Social Media Marketing, Social Networking, Twitter

PodCampAZ Reflections

Posted by Shailesh Ghimire

at November 3, 2008

I attended my first PodCamp this past weekend, and had a great time. Actually to say it was a great experience is a severe understatement, the experience was very good for me. Unfortunately due to some personal considerations I was not able to be there for the full two days, but I did attend half days each day. The best part of the experience was of course meeting social media enthusiasts from all over (Flickr Pics). The community is so vibrant and the personalities so rich it was a refreshing. It was also very good to see how vibrant the local Phoenix community is when it comes to social technology usages and participation.

Naturally, the two day event was jammed packed with loads of information sessions. It was very difficult trying to figure out which session to attend, since so many were appealing. Given the awesome choices, I attended the following sessions:

“The Audacity of Podcasting: Tips for producing and editing your audio podcast with free software” by Dan Feierabend
“So you want to make money with your podcast? Now what?” by, Nicole and Marc Spagnuolo
“Podtaint: Fame in the New Media World” by, Jack Mangan
“Stranger, Meet Strangers” by, Brian Shaler

One presentation I wish I had the time to attend was by Pamela Slim, “How to strike a balance between sharing information freely and making a living using New Media.” I was really looking forward to hear her speak but things didn’t quite work out that way on my schedule.

On Sunday morning, I had my own presentation on “Integrating Social Media to Traditional Marketing”. In this presentation I discussed how social media needs to be integrated into your overall marketing plan and can not be viewed in isolation anymore. Many companies are struggling to achieve this integration but those that have are seeing a lot of success. The discussion among those who attended was really amazing and to be honest with you I learned from those in the audience in that one hour time frame. The participation was lively enough that some folks continued the conversation afterward in a different room. For those interested here is my PowerPoint presentation:

Integrating Social Media into Traditional Marketing

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: podcampaz 2008)

PodCampAz organizers and volunteers deserve a great round of applause for their hard work in putting this together. Their hard work was evident in the success of the conference.

Social Media Marketing, Social Networking, YouTube

Happy Halloween

Posted by Shailesh Ghimire

at October 31, 2008

Hat/tip: List of the Day (NSFW)

Fun and Such

Print is Dying, Not Newspapers

Posted by Shailesh Ghimire

at October 28, 2008

Image via Wikipedia

Newspapers have been struggling and losing readership for some time now. That is not news. But what is news is that a paper like The Christian Science Monitor will now stop printing on weekdays and mostly an online newspaper with a weekend print edition. From the NYTimes:

After a century of continuous publication, The Christian Science Monitor will abandon its weekday print edition and appear online only, its publisher announced Tuesday. The cost-cutting measure makes The Monitor the first national newspaper to largely give up on print.

The paper is currently published Monday through Friday, and will move to online only in April, although it will also introduce a weekend magazine. John Yemma, The Monitor’s editor, said that moving to the Web only will mean it can keep its eight foreign bureaus open while still lowering costs.

I would think this is the beginning not the end for newspapers and we should hear of more papers following this route. However, I don’t think newspapers should really worry too much, because there is a need for them. It’s just the print medium that is struggling. At the end of the day we still need someone to bring us the news - it just how we will consume it that is changing. To this point here is a report from MarketingCharts, showing that newspapers websites are seeing increasing traffic and engagement is at an all time high.

Newspaper websites each month attracted, on average, more than 68.3 million unique visitors (41.4% of all internet users), during the third quarter of 2008 - a record number, and a 15.8% increase over the year-earlier quarter, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

Moreover, newspaper website visitors generated an average of 3.5 billion pageviews per month throughout the quarter - an increase of 25.2% over the 2.8 billion pageviews a year earlier - and the highest level for any quarter since NAA began tracking the data in 2004.

The third quarter also set records for active reach percentage (the percentage of active internet users that visit newspapers on an average month), pageviews, pages per person, time per person and visits per person, NAA said.

So, things are not all that bleak, I’m more worried for companies in the business of printing newspapers than for newspapers themselves.