Domozych Media » FriendFeed

Online Persona Management and Internet Marketing

wunruh — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:42:38 +0000

With Facebook, FriendFeed, and Twitter we are seeing the beginnings of a real time web strategy for constant celebrity contact with their fan base. Serena Williams may be the perfect new media star, with Neil Gaiman a close second. Both use new media for constant contact, both talk back through media to their fans and respond in real time, and both are genuine, sincere folk who do what they love best and have integrated their use of new media with their lifestyle.

There are many others – obviously we provide a shout-out on our podcasts to the genius behind Nine Inch Nails, a musical act which brought Alternate Reality Gaming to a whole new level, now effectively crowdsourcing the fan base to create ongoing media presence from thousands of different points online at once. There are others out there who get it, and are able to manipulate their layers of involvement with media to present themselves in the best possible light.

Others work tirelessly to patrol their own reputation – an SEO firm going through internal shake-up splinters off in rumors and half-told tales online briefly. Internet marketers are rarely outed as scammers, or abusers of the ongoing opt-in charges applied to credit card holders in continuity models, mainly because they’re better at playing the game than their accusers.

But they’re not the winners in social media – it’s the people who are open, honest, and accessible – because social media is a space for vetting, and reputation is an acquisition. Page rank is less important than ‘trust’ in the eyes of the search engines, but also in the social structures that are embedded within the larger superstructure. Neil didn’t end up on first-name basis with the internet because of a brilliant SEO campaign, he got there because people felt like they were on a first-name basis with him and acted as such by linking to his site by his first name.

There’s a lesson there, and we hope that if you’d like to know more about our approach to social media and internet marketing, you’ll drop us a line.

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Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and You

wunruh — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:59:30 +0000

Yesterday we introduced the very first Domozych Media podcast. Today we wanted to talk a little bit about Really Simple Syndication, or ‘RSS’, and how it can help your site not only maintain an audience, but actually grow your web presence. Here’s a link to our feed validation results which show our podcast feed is easily readable across any RSS reader. And here’s a link to our actual RSS feed. When we build a fully functional site for you, there’s a number of feeds which will be accessible and we will be able to repurpose those feeds across a number of other third-party sites, some of which I highlighted in an earlier post.

For today’s example I want to focus on the site FriendFeed, #18 on that list of 67 social media networking sites, a site which was recently acquired by the larger social network Facebook. Here you can see the FriendFeed site for the book The Art of Memetics, which incorporates a number of different RSS feeds from several different sources. Being able to combine RSS feeds from your dynamic pages, such as those produced through the blog’s content management structure, or those pages created as you add new products to your shopping cart, creates an additional RSS feed which can then be folded into the front page of your site, or republished on a dedicated Twitter profile, or reused across any one of those other ‘lifestream’ style social networks that are listed on that previous post.

RSS began over a decade ago as RDF, but within a few months was renamed. It remained a somewhat obscure use of XML until blogging became a widespread approach to content management, at which point RSS adoption grew and the competitor Atom also drove developer’s interest in designing cross-compatible readers that regular people (i.e., non-techies) could easily configure to keep up to date with news and information from their favorite sites. Take a moment to review the history of RSS on wikipedia if you’d like to learn more.

Today, every major browser incorporates an RSS reader, and there are a number of stand-alone RSS readers as well. Sites like Yahoo and Google incorporate RSS readers on their home pages, and software, such as iTunes, relies on RSS to keep up to date with podcasts. Updating your static site to incorporate RSS feeds can help you to maintain an audience over time, as well as provide an avenue for you to announce specials or updates to your products or services.

If you have questions, or would like to contact us to remodel or design your web site, you should send us an email using the form below.

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Watch Sesame Street – Mad Men – Youtube Clip

wunruh — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:42:57 +0000

Above is a wonderful and ‘viral’ video from SesameStreet and their youtube channel. It illustrates some basic truths about marketing, both in content and in the form in which that content is distributed. As a media object, as hypertext, it is flexible – even plasticized. It can be copied, forwarded, resized, and updated from behind with new overlays. Layers upon layers of code can be added to it, and it have a specific address where it can be thought to exist – yet it also exists on countless other sites that have also embedded it on their pages as well – and with over four hundred thousand hits it can be said to be a successful video for the profile SesameStreet which uploaded it to youtube.

Domozych Media understands the nature of new media, and can help you integrate audio and video components within a greater structure. When you embed a video into your site, you may want it available on youtube… or vimeo, or viddler, or revver, or one of a number of other third-party sites depending on your audience… or you may want the video itself to be private and accessed only by customers who’ve paid for the video – as is the case with some online training products. Either way, we can build you that scaffolding for your online vision.

Building a web presence means modularity, focus, and preparation. A small business owner who knows precisely where they’re putting advertising and marketing energy can make a pretty good assessment of any given strategy.

By focusing on simplicity and compatibility, and building for the user (not the client! – read this report to learn why!) a web designer can take advantage of the existing social networks more efficiently, and can adapt to changing technology more readily. Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed now make up the primary focus of trends, and help one to think in terms of clouds and presence rather than sites and indexing traffic. While it says web design, graphic designers, hosting, Flash, database development, and marketing based in New York on the domain when you search us out online, we also have the critical approach to media that is necessary in our transmedia world.

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Online Social Optimization and Lifestream Toolsets

wunruh — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:15:38 +0000

I’ve written about when I started using Twitter, and my current list of Twitter profiles may seem excessive, but that’s only the start of my digital footprint. The purpose behind the different profiles becomes more evident as you see the way it is tied into my FriendFeed and Tumblr profiles, and I’ve even developed a wordpress site designed to capture and recombine all these feeds into an auto-posting system so anyone who wants can track my personal shadow as my attention moves through this digital space. I’ve done this for a number of other clients as well, and I’ve found that this background layer of constant updates has helped sculpt their online presence over time, organically generating a significant body of associated data around their online identities.

Tac Anderson calls this ‘Being a Social Media Ninja’ and his blog post explains how he set up this very same approach for Microsoft Store, although he relies on Posterous as the primary lifestream hub for Microsoft rather than a private wordpress install. What’s most important, though, is that you find a way to approach a lifestream that is best for you and that incorporates the keyword phrases, the social media, and the organic reputation structure you want to associate yourself, your company, and your brand with over time.

Online social optimization is something I’ve been studying for years, beginning with a grounding in early social issues that arose from email and chat rooms and progressing into a life-long study of memetics and belief patterns in social bodies that form both online and off. Socially optimized behaviors manifest in many, many different ways. Today’s digitally enhanced social body can perform intricate social action with a remarkably low-level entry point into the group’s organizing network. The implications of this are far-reaching, and over time the transformation this has had on social issues and a philosophy of governance will become more apparent.

My focus has been on understanding the reasons why one tool is chosen over another, and what trends can be anticipated over time. Working closely with Andrew here at Domozych Media has allowed me to find ways to maximize this knowledge base and adapt it to real world branding concerns. Social media is easily the most powerful direct response mechanism ever conceived, and properly used it will invigorate companies, political campaigns, even the entertainment industry. I began by working closely with musicians, artists, theatre troupes, and independent film producers, and that ongoing collaboration led Edward Wilson and I to write ‘The Art of Memetics,’ a DIY guide to effective word of mouth marketing using social networks both online and off.

The experience of self-publishing and distributing this book led to the formulation of an approach to marketing I labeled ‘OSO’ – or ‘Online Social Optimization’ – which encompasses three interrelated fields, online reputation management or ORM, search engine optimization or SEO, and social media optimization or SMO. The principle is simple – each of these three fields overlaps the next, and by approaching each situation through a holistic, top-down view rather than the more narrow adherence to one methodology over another, a more successful organic structure can be built for longer-lasting results and greater communicative reach throughout society.

Using lifestream technologies online is one of the trends I predicted early on, and the development of these mashups of social networks, social media, and status update trackers has exploded over the last few months. Friendfeed, Posterous, and Tumblr are three great examples of this kind of lifestream application, although we’re now seeing more and more social networks incorporating lifestreams into their own networking features. We are skilled at web development which incorporates this kind of technology to best position you in your respective field.

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

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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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Domozych Media » FriendFeed

Online Persona Management and Internet Marketing

Further Reading

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and You

Further Reading

Watch Sesame Street – Mad Men – Youtube Clip

Further Reading

Online Social Optimization and Lifestream Toolsets

Further Reading

67 Social Media Networking Sites Other than Google #Buzz

Further Reading