CyberCoded » Social Media

New Social Networking Site miio

David Cooley — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:05:45 +0000

If you like Social Networking, or fun new places, or great customer service, or getting somewhere before the big crowd, or….you get the picture, go to miio.com now.

While doing my morning reading on Saturday, Brad McCarty’s post at TNW grabbed my attention. Before I knew it I had spent several hours on miio. Yes I tend to be an early adopter, but I think miio will quickly move to the masses.

Read Brad’s post for a more in depth review, but take my advice and stop by miio and give it a test drive.

Pronounced meee oh, according to Richard Lusk CEO of miio

Location, Location, Location…

David Cooley — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:44:17 +0000

This has always been the mantra for brick and mortar businesses. Well, guess what, it’s the same for your business on the Internet. If you are in front of the right audience, you get traffic, and the opportunity for new business.

The difference on the Internet, Geo Location, Geo Location, Geo Location. And it is a lot easier to make this happen than with actual real estate. This is why I am still surprised at small businesses not jumping on these systems

Two recommendations. Put your business on Google Places and Foursquare. Both are free and simple. Now how does it get any easier than that?

If you are in Google Places, when anyone uses Google Maps to locate a business, and you match the search criteria, your listing will appear. I can not tell you how many times I have found a great restaurant, coffee shop or other business using this technique. Whenever I travel I use Google Maps, and I have found some great places to stop such as The Horse’s Mouth Bookstore and Coffee Shop in Buffalo, Texas (link is example of Google Map listing). I just wanted a good cup of coffee, and thanks to THM being listed on Google Places I found this great little coffee shop.

Foursquare is a little different, and it is catching on fast. Foursquare mixes Geo Location, Social Media and a gaming element to make it one of the most popular new applications available. If you don’t add your business someone else will. While this is not a bad thing, I would rather be ahead of the curve. As a business owner you can all add incentives for people to visit your business by offering specials to frequent visits. You can also offer tips, like specials and selected recommended items.

Examples :

With these systems being free, and really simple to join, what are you waiting for?

Social Media…The Other Word of Mouth

David Cooley — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 12:06:01 +0000

While watching movie trailers at the theater I was amazed at how many large companies put their Facebook and Twitter addresses ahead of their own website. And some of these websites are amazing works of art.

These businesses realize that social media is as close to word of mouth advertising as it gets. And pretty much everyone agrees that there is no better marketing than word of mouth.

Even if they have a website, there is absolutely no reason not to take advantage of social media.

The social media playing field is probably as level as it gets for businesses of all sizes to reach and connect with their current and potential customers.

So why are so many small businesses hesitating getting on social media?

Facebook Page Admin Privileges

David Cooley — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:22:25 +0000

I shared a link earlier to The Next Web post about Facebook now allowing Admins to be removed, and this is a good thing. However, it appears Facebook still needs to put a little more thought into their Business Page setup.

Any Admin can now delete another Admin and any Admin can delete the entire page. Wow, this could get ugly.

I have been in situations where a customer has hired me to manage their Facebook page, and we had no way to remove the previous Admin, so this change is good in that aspect. It also helps in cases where 3rd parties can create the page and hand it off to the business owner with the security that they can add or delete Admins as needed.

However, there should be some form of verification needed to delete an admin or page.

For all the wonderful things about Facebook, they do seem to lack an understanding of security and how it affects businesses in the real world.

Using Twitter to Follow a Topic

David Cooley — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:26:01 +0000

I seem to be using Twitter more these days, and Google Reader less. The trend is easy to understand from a useability standpoint.

Using an RSS reader almost feels like old school technology now. Yes it is still necessary, and it is certainly one of best ways to follow someone, but Twitter is now letting me follow the topics I want in real time a lot easier.

Years ago I was part of several Forums. I would go to forums to get, and give, help on different topics, but it took more effort than I thought it should.

Now, just like having my news fed to me instead of having to go to my favorite news sites and see what has changed, I can sit back, watch the conversations on the topics I am interested in, and get involved at my choosing.

Here is one of my favorite pages to watch, using Twitter search, I search for the words “WordPress OR Cybercoder” and remove any occurence of wordpress.com. The reason for the removal is that I do not want to see Tweets just because someone has a link with wordpress.com in it, what I am really after is seeing all the conversations and help request for WordPress. And by adding my Twitter name, I will see any replies or comments directed at or about me.

Using Twitter Search in this manner is a lot more functional than just trying to watch the stream of conversations from everyone I am following, you should give it try!

And you can follow me on Twitter at Twitter / CyberCoder

Social Media in the Workplace

David Cooley — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 13:20:17 +0000

While doing research recently I kept coming across job postings for different Social Media positions with larger companies. In between the lines a couple things got my attention.

Why does a Social Media person need to be in a Corporate office?
Are we already painting ourselves into a corner with the term Social Media?
When will Social Media intersect with the local presence of a company?

Possible answers:

I guess this could go both ways. Being in the office the person would know what was going on and have access to more information. On the other hand, if this is a large company with lots of locations, the corporate information might not be in tune with the local store (see #3 below).
Social Media seems to already bring to mind certain Internet locations, such as FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter etc… Some companies are using the term Emerging Media and that seems to elicite a broader and continually growing area.
Not sure exactly what I am thinking here, but I know what I read, see and hear online does not always match up very well in my local store. And the locals seem to be almost unaware that there is even an online presence that represents them.

And none of this even starts to scratch the surface of how smaller companies could take advantage of Social Emerging Media to help themselves.

Emerging Media Specialist

David Cooley — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 03:06:45 +0000

Inspired by an ad I saw on Twitter for a Emerging Media Specialist I created a simple little web site that demonstrates how to show different media searches on one page seamlessly without having to reload any pages. With one search you get results for Video, Web, Twitter, News, Books and Images. The videos are presented by thumbnails on the page, and clicking on the thumbnails will launch a floating player on the page.

The site utilizes the Google AJAX Search API to put it all together and is a total of 2 pages, the index pages and a CSS stylesheet.

This is very similar to the CyberSearch located on this site, a matter of fact after I setup the Emerging Media Specialist site, I used the new CSS to enhance the CyberSearch page here.