What is StumbleUpon?

You may see it listed with other social bookmarking sites but it differs slightly. You use StumbleUpon by signing up and then downloading their toolbar. When you sign up, you will be asked a few questions about your interests – what types of sites and articles you want to see when you search.

Then, plug in keywords that pertain to your site. Your results are targeted to those keywords and the information that you provided when you signed up. Now you can begin viewing content on similar sites and rating it. StumbleUpon is a voting site as well. Positive ratings are represented by a “thumbs up.” Conversely, negative ratings are represented by a “thumbs down.”

How to make it a part of your strategy

As with all marketing strategies, there is a method to the madness. With StumbleUpon, don’t think profit – think networking. In order for this tool to work, you have to follow a process to get to the desired end.

Here is what we are talking about. Now that you have signed up and started using the toolbar, begin reading and rating the articles and sites you find there. If they are within your niche, then you will also be able to see what your potential competition is writing about and how their work is being rated. Leave a review for new sites you discover in your searches.

Join the community. This site is built on the strength of its users. Network with others who are also using StumbleUpon. Create a list of “Friends” who you share favorite sites with. They can point you to theirs and you can do the same. Participate regularly so you are not perceived as only being seen when you want to promote your site content.

You can also increase your list of friends by encouraging friends from other social sites to join StumbleUpon. With the toolbar, you have the option of sending the URL for content you like to your friends to read and rate. The more friends (especially those with similar interests) you have, the more chance you have to see your own work read and rated. Sites that are rated high and often fly to the top of the pile.

Lastly, write good quality content on your website. Just like you, your friends and your potential traffic want to read good stuff, too. What type of content does well on StumbleUpon? List articles (such as “Top 5 Funniest Movies”) are easy to peruse given their format. Also, topics that are hot right now in the niche of your choice fare well, especially those that might contain a controversial opinion or a new angle on an old issue.

You can find ways to incorporate StumbleUpon into your marketing strategy. Best of all, it is free to try. So, you have nothing to lose.

Twitter isn’t just important for interacting with consumers. It’s also crucial for interacting with brands, potential clients and competitors.

Here are a few big ways Twitter can impact your B2B sales.

1. Actively Projecting Your Brand

Your brand doesn’t have to be a passive thing. Twitter is perhaps the only avenue where blasting out your brand regularly is not only accepted, but encouraged.

You can’t email your potential clients every day without repercussions. But you can absolutely tweet every day, keeping your brand in front of potential clients, while actually building rather than burning goodwill.

2. Networking Your Way to New Contacts

If there’s someone in your space that you want to meet, Twitter can be a great way to get around the red tape.

It can be very hard to meet someone in a crowded seminar or to get through their secretary. But if you have their Twitter handle, you can start to build a connection on the social network that can then develop into an offline connection.

Start by following them. Retweet their tweets and @reply to any requests from them with helpful resources. Get on their radar. Eventually, when an opportunity presents itself to introduce yourself, do so and they’ll likely know who you are.

3. Find Their Pain Points

Twitter can be a powerful way of keeping track of exactly what’s going on in an industry. You can use it to figure out what your clients are up to, what your competitors are up to and what your clients’ competitors are up to.

Let’s say a competitor of a big potential client launches a new product. It stands a good chance of taking a big chunk out of your client’s business.

That could be a stellar opportunity to come in and offer to help. It may or may not result in immediate business for you, but that offer for help will definitely turn into goodwill that can later turn into business.

Use Twitter to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry and identify the pain points of potential clients.

4. Tapping into B2B Events

B2B events will often have their own Twitter feeds. That can be a very powerful way to participate with your ideal target market.

For example, let’s say Convention Y is having all their participants tweet to #conventionychat.

By participating actively on #conventionychat, you can build up a brand for yourself among potential leads at an event. Start doing this a few weeks before the event. By the time the actual event rolls around, a lot of people there will already know who you are.

These are a few ways that Twitter can affect your B2B sales. Twitter isn’t just a tool for consumers, but can be a powerful tool for building goodwill and gathering intelligence for making B2B sales.

What sets Google+ apart from other social networks? And how can it be used to build a business?

There are two main features that set Google+ apart from Facebook: Circles and Hangouts.

Circles: What They Are and How to Use Them

Circles are like friends groups. You choose what groups to put people in without them knowing what group you’ve placed them in.

You can then choose to share things with people in certain circles, without other people in other circles seeing it.

Let’s say you run two businesses, one for PPC coaching and one for SEO coaching.

You’ll be able to put all your students and contacts of each group into their respective groups. You’ll then be able to share course updates to one group without the other seeing.

Circles also solves another problem many professionals have had with Facebook. You want to be able to share photos and status updates with your friends, but not necessarily with your professional contacts.

Circles makes this very easy. You can share just about anything with whoever you want and hide it from whoever you want.

Hangouts for Video Conferencing

There are many video conferencing programs online. However, by and large every single one of them is paid and often quite expensive.

Google+ changes all that. Google+ makes video conferences completely free, backed by Google engineered technology.

You can have any number of people join a Google+ hangout. You can invite people one by one, or you can open a hangout to an entire group of people who can join at will.

You can share YouTube videos. You can type text into a chat box. The speed of the service doesn’t slow down no matter how many people you have on it.

In short, the Google+ Hangouts makes it easy to hold video webinars as well as video conferences with co-workers and business partners.

Is Google+ Here to Stay?

Of course, if you’re going to adopt a new social network, you want to use one that other people are actually on and one that’s going to be around for a while.

Will Google+ still be here a year or two down the line? There’s no way to know for sure. The uptake was much faster than any other social network in history, but users’ number one complaint today is still that there’s “nobody else on it.”

If your customers or co-workers are already on Google+, then you probably should get yourself on Google+. However, if nobody you know is on the network yet, you might want to wait for a short time first to see how it plays out.

How can you use smart brand-building techniques to improve your brand with social media? Here’s how.

Define Your Brand First

Before you post anything – before you even sign up for a social network, define your brand.

What does your brand stand for? What’s the “vibe” of your brand? What are your primary spoken and unspoken messages? Who are you targeting?

Answer these questions. Everything else moving forward needs to fall in line with the brand you define. Your profile photos, the color of your pages, the content you post and everything else should all match up to the brand you want to create.

Choosing Your Social Networks

There are dozens of social networks you can join, many of them specific to your industry or topic. Unfortunately, usually it just doesn’t make sense to join them all. Depending on your time and resources, you’ll usually only want to establish a presence in one or two social networks.

Pick the social networks that make the most sense for your audience. If you’re in a corporate setting, you might choose Facebook and LinkedIn. If you’re in a tech-savvy industry, you might choose Twitter and Facebook. If you’re primarily targeting music fans, you might choose just MySpace.

The network you choose depends entirely on where your audience is. Figure out what networks your audience uses the most and be on those networks.

Post Brand Relevant, Value-Added Content Regularly

If you don’t stay in contact with people regularly, they’ll forget you exist pretty quickly. Make sure they’re continually aware of your brand by posting regularly. Build up brand loyalty by posting content that your audience will really love. And what they will love really depends on who your audience is.

If you’re targeting a corporate or professional audience, they might love a daily three-minute video giving powerful tips on public speaking.

If you’re targeting a college-age crowd, they might be more interested in shocking or humorous pictures and/or videos.

If you’re targeting a political audience, they might appreciate links to news stories not covered by American media.

Know your audience. Post the type of content that your specific audience will love. Focus on providing value rather than trying to get people to buy or pass on your profile. Build up real loyalty rather than going for the quick sale.

Building a strong brand using social media involves first clearly defining your brand, then choosing the right social networks to be on and finally posting content that your audience loves. If you do this on a consistent basis while being true to your brand, your brand will become stronger and stronger both in your customer’s mind and in your market in general.

Anyone who uses Facebook has heard of Facebook Apps. Anyone who uses Facebook has been invited by a friend to install a Facebook app. Many of Facebook’s users have taken up that invitation. In fact, very many. So many that an entire small industry popped up that revolved around these applications. Companies were established that did nothing but create Facebook applications. Successful companies by the way.

These companies made millions and millions of dollars off of the successes of their Facebook applications and are still doing very well today. But just as fast as this micro industry was born, it’s more or less all but dead. Well dead at least for new comers.

When Facebook announced that it was going to open up its development platform so that outside developers could write applications that could be installed and used on the Facebook interface, the idea caught on extremely quickly, and if sheer numbers are any indication of success, did very, very well. Facebook application started to pop up all over the place, and like wildfire, many of the applications spread extremely quickly across the entire network.

Some of these applications ended up being installed by millions and millions of users and the companies that specialized in developing them exploded. Companies like RockYou and Slide Inc. (which was backed by the founder of PayPal), did so well that they’re now valued in the millions. RockYou now even has its own ad network that other Facebook developers can use to monetize their new apps.

The monetary potential of some of these applications was mind boggling considering they’re just widgets designed to work in another companies infrastructure. Now though, the money to be made through Facebook applications is all but gone. So what happened? Why did the revenue potential of the might app. go extinct?

Well firstly, there isn’t a lot of room for completion among Facebook applications. It tends to be a real first come, first serve kind of world. In the business world outside of Facebook, competition is always a threat and new entries have the potential to steal market share away from established mainstays.

On Facebook though, people tend to use what their friends use, and the adoption rate is so ridiculously fast, that first entries into any given niche tend to take hold and grow like weeds, choking out any possible competition. If you were the first guy to write a Facebook application that lets people post pictures of their dog’s butts on their friends’ walls, then you’re probably not particularly concerned about the second guy to write a dog’s butt application.

This can be seen by analyzing the most popular and most used applications. Almost none of them are duplicates of another concept among the list. Once one app. takes hold of a niche, it tends to keep hold.

Secondly, and likely most importantly, is that Facebook was initially very liberal on what it considered spam, and those days have changed. If you’re a Facebook user you probably remember the days when you’d log on each day only to find five more “invitations” from friends to install the newest widget that would allow you to send your best buds a digital booger or an e-fart or whatever.

You also might notice that now you receive much, much less of those invites. This is because initially, Facebook let applications be programmed so that users could invite as many people as they wanted to install. Naturally, Betty would install an application that she liked and in turn, with one click, she’d invite every one of the 1000 friends she’s attached to on Facebook.

The view was, it’s not really spam if it’s coming from your friends, and growth of the initial rounds of Facebook apps was lightning fast. Now though, Facebook has realized that people don’t enjoy being flooded with notices and invitations, and have severely limited the number of them that applications can send out. Invitations are now limited to 10, and notices are policed by users.

Too much negative reaction and your application will be labelled “spammy” and taken off the market. What this means for new entrants into the Facebook application arena is that growth is at a snail’s pace compared to the growth seen by the forefathers that paved the way. And that also means that the applications that established their major user bases are now essentially cruising along uncontested because the new limitations make it almost impossible for new competition to touch their massive user bases.

Still though, people flock to the Facebook developer platform in search of their fortune (the author isn’t innocent. I recently had an app. developed with fairly high hopes for its viral potential, only to realize the folly of my ways). It’s like a gold rush continuing on well after all the gold has been excavated. The vast majority will be disappointed, but some may actually do alright.

They won’t bring in millions like Slide and RockYou, but a respectable revenue stream is still not impossible. Just remember that if you are going to try and take on Facebook apps., you need to be prepared for slow growth, and under no circumstances should you try and compete with an established application. Overall though, the Facebook application directory is already super-saturated, and your time, effort and money could be spent much better focused on other projects.

So firstly, not many companies even have the financial means to make a serious bid to purchase a controlling stake in Facebook. And even if those companies that could make a bid decided to, how Facebook’s users would find out before people like, say, the media, would is extremely questionable. Anyways, for the purposes of this article, we’ll take it at Facevalue that Facebook is being wooed by some corporate giant looking to turn it into a paid service. So now the question is, who the F*&k would actually be stupid enough to think that would work?

Firstly, Facebook has been free to all users since inception. Sure, there are very valid situations in which giving something away for free to get people interested and actively participating before charging for the service is a valid strategy. In such situations though, it’s absolutely imperative that the company discloses that he service is a free trial and that payment will eventually be required. Even then, the majority of people who tried it out for free will jump ship as soon as there is a dollar involved, but some will stay, knowing full well what they were getting into. On the other hand, giving something away for free for so long that it’s expected that it will last that way forever, and then suddenly dropping a dollar amount on it, is an amazing way to royally piss off one’s user base.

Secondly, social networks are so easy to build now that the barriers to entry to competitors are absolutely minimal. You can go on any number of message boards or websites and find pre packed, ready to go scripts and software suites that will instantly give the buyer a relatively powerful social network. The difficulty in running a social network like Facebook isn’t in the coding. Many capable web developers are available that can do that work. The difficulty is in managing (and affording) the massive amounts of traffic, and that’s a pretty nice problem to have to deal with! If Facebook went paid, within days there would be a competitor ready to offer the same services free of charge, and that brings us to our third point.

Social networking users are ridiculously fickle. Facebook users bitch for hours about the smallest changes to the interface. Why anyone would ever think they’d look the other way on a change like paid membership is beyond me. If Facebook went paid, the speed with which essentially the entire membership of Facebook would flock to the next big thing would be absolutely mind blowing. Personally, I think it would probably take less than a week for the news to get out about the new coolest site to be on and in turn for Facebook to all but crumble.

So let’s say that Facebook did want to add a new revenue stream to try and backup their massive valuation. What could they do? They could take a page out of the Wikipedia book. Wikipedia is free. Everyone knows that, and in particular, Wikipedia knows that. Rather than try and charge users, Wikipedia adopted a donation system. That donation system has now produces millions of dollars of revenue, all from the hearts of its users. People love Wikipedia, but people may very well love Facebook more. There is no guarantee the user base of Facebook would be as generous, after all, most of them are students, and students are poor. However, if the decision is between taking donations and making some money, or charging a mandatory fee and losing your entire membership and making no money, then I’d say the choice is clear.

Sure, some members would stick around and pay the membership fee to use Facebook…initially. But when the population of Facebook users goes into all but extinction, there won’t be any reason for those few that gladly would pay to stick around, and in time, they too will leave. So charging a fee for use, would be, without a doubt, a guaranteed death sentence for Facebook. Personally, I don’t believe anyone, anywhere who knows their head from their ass would be stupid enough to make that change, let alone a company so well established in business that they could afford to actually buy Facebook and implement it.

So is Facebook being courted by some greedy corporate fat cat? Probably not, but even if they are, I wouldn’t worry about the service becoming paid, so please, stop inviting me to join those stupid protest groups!