What are the Requirements for a Well-Anchored Web Presence?

wunruh — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:01:51 +0000

I’ve written before about social profiles, both the benefits they provide, and the problematic nature of relying on a third-party for your internet presence. Social networking can provide you with valuable market research. It can also become a series of unconnected, forgotten, and abandoned profiles generating no real value but cluttering up your online reputation. I always suggest that social networks be evaluated closely before you invest the time it takes to join a network, and that you should never rely on a singe social network for all of your online promotional efforts.

Social profiles need to be attached to a space, a central hub you can update from the back end. Not only does this mean you shouldn’t rely on Myspace to be the only place where you promote your band, it also means you shouldn’t rely only on Ebay or Etsy to be the online shopping cart that powers your small business.

Social media is at its best when it is an open, not a closed system that provides measurable and real-time results across a decentralized network. While it is game-changing, it can also be corrosive to traditional marketing strategies. Having a web site you can update completely, archive, and restore from a back-up is a guarantee your presence won’t be washed away by the changing relationships people have with internet technology.

Your central hub also needs to be built on a framework where you can at edit and modify the content as you see fit.

Social media is a real-time space, and your online presence benefits tremendously by real-time responses. We structure your site in such a way that you can easily adapt your schedule to a few light online touches that draw ongoing attention from social networking hooked into your own content management system. And if you’re in the ‘Tech Valley’ here in the capitol district around Albany, Latham, Colonie, Troy, or Amsterdam, you know your website hosting questions can be answered in person, and we can show you how to anchor your existing social network profiles to your promotional efforts.

These anchor points need to be on your own domain name, and you should have email addresses tied to that domain name. We can help you do this easily, and show you how updating your approach to social networking increases your efficiency and productivity over time. Feel free to email us today if you’d like to learn more:

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67 Social Media Networking Sites Other than Google #Buzz

wunruh — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:08:22 +0000

Usually when I bring up social networking, people respond with ‘oh yeah, I think I have a facebook’ or ‘I’ve got a myspace but I never check it.’ More and more people have Twitter accounts, maintain a blog, or track bookmarks with delicious, digg, or stumbleupon, but that seems to be about it. When I show them the vast array of services available, they are often overwhelmed. How do you know which ones to use? Is there a way to target only the relevant ones? The answer is – well, sorta. This isn’t rocket science, but it is always evolving. Right now there are four ‘meta’ social networking sites that I want to introduce you to – you might think of this as a library of web 2.0 services.

The only way to know what works best is to try them all, and evaluate the results. Social media is its own language, a language of keywords, visuals, profiles, and feeds. There are a number of sites that attempt to consolidate the vast array of social networking into a few easily used dashboards, but even those have their issues – all of these third-party sites work independently of each other, and sometimes sites go down, or change their interface, or rebrand themselves, creating gaps and voids. Even the sites that seem stable and backed by a large corporation have bugs, or lose data, or alter their links in such a way as to make interfaces less useful for online social optimization purposes.

Don’t get me wrong, I love using interfaces to work with large numbers of these sites at once, and today I want to highlight four sites. Those four sites are Knowem.com, Onlywire.com, Ping.fm, and Go2Web20.net – and today I’m going to focus on the sites that Onlywire and Ping can update for you.

Bear in mind that Knowem lists over 300 social sites, and provides a very slick interface to help you discover social spaces where you can create your own profile. I’ve been working with it for the last few days, and have found a whole host of sites that I’ve never seen before, each with their own unique spin on the social networking concept. From ‘lifestream sites’ that integrate other sites, to multimedia portfolio sites, to niche video sharing – the list truly goes on and on. If that’s not enough to overwhelm you, Go2Web20 certainly is – featuring well over 3,000 web 2.0 sites, Orli Yakuel has created one of the most comprehensive indexes of social networking and online software services this side of Google itself.

So where does one start? Well, I’ve evaluated a number of auto-updating sites, and what follows is a list of the sites that can be easily updated through both Onlywire and Ping. Some of these are more relevant than others, and ultimately we will advise on which have relevance to your specific situation, but I wanted to provide a glimpse into the staggering array of social media services available.

Remember, you don’t have to sign up for every single social network to have an effective web presence. Collaboration across a number of social sites with others in your field becomes easier when you can focus on a few well-established sites. However, having your presence established, even in across just twenty or thirty of these sites can be incredibly time-consuming. We specialize in finding the best possible online ‘fit’ for your specific needs. We can also advise on existing social networks, and explore ways for you to maximize the effectiveness of your daily online routines.

If you’d like to learn more, feel free to contact us using the form below:

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What are the Requirements for a Well-Anchored Web Presence?

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67 Social Media Networking Sites Other than Google #Buzz

Further Reading