The participants were from multiple industries in senior positions. Their aim was to learn new age digital marketing concepts and apply the same in their companies. Some of them came up with interesting examples from their industries on how social media marketing can be used in an organization.

As most of you might expect, this boot camp covered all the basics of social media and networking: right from how and why to write a social media plan for a business to how to use the most popular social media tools, and the best methods for developing your network and growing your business on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Kapil started the first day of the event on the right foot, informing us that social media is just another tool for reaching business goals and then, continued with the explanation on social media marketing framework. As there were many first-time users, the session was really basic – starting with how to tweet, retweet, what is a mention, how to create a Facebook page etc. which was actually needed, since few of the participants had just created their Twitter accounts for the boot camp.

The case studies shared in the next session were really useful. The success stories of the brands like Dell, Ching’s secret etc. showed the way on how social media can be made to work.

In the afternoon session on Demystifying Community Building on Social Media, the trainer tried to explain on the importance of the VCR concept – Visibility, Content and Relevance concept. He stressed on why understanding the needs of the community and acting accordingly is crucial to social media success.

The ultimate aim of the camp was to explain the basics of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the rest of what’s out there.

Day Two included the follow-up of the first day’s session and a Twitter session which explained tweets, mentions, retweets, followers and so on. A large number of statistics was exposed to the participants to illustrate Twitter’s game-changing role. That part actually worked as the session was more interactive, and the participants received information available on the slides.

The highlight of the training for me was the social media planning chart. The last session was focused on how to use LinkedIn to drive more business to the company.

Kapil gave a whole new perspective to ROI in the social media – as not “Return on Investment” but as, “Return on Engagement.” The Trainer added, engagement is the most important factor in community building. This is what he called as engagement without an exact measurable ROI.

Some parts of the Boot Camp weren’t relevant to me, but I’m sure it was to others. Not only did the training help participants understand the reach and role of social media, it also helped them to get familiar with social media platforms and gain insights on creating a working social media strategy.

Dot Com Infoway helps clients market their products/services through cost-effective Internet Marketing and Social Media Marketing solutions. To get a free quote for these services, contact us.

Most of the buyers today are search and social savvy. Experts admit that Facebook is becoming a search engine. Bing integration with Facebook adds fuel to search becoming more social. The media is also turning to be search and social savvy. More press and news agencies are using Facebook and Twitter.

Nowadays social media is influencing us a lot. More than 80% of the journalists are bloggers and more than 65% use social media. Google is used by almost every journalist. So, getting your content in Google matters most.

Optimizing online Press Releases, Videos, Posts, Tweets, Images, Blogs with the right keywords targeting your customers will help your target group to find you in the huge crowd. Content strategy can be broken into daily, weekly and monthly updates.
There are many ways to develop brand loyalty and turn customers into fans. Using social media has provided many firms with a simple way to build brand loyalty without having to invest significant time and resources.

How to create social buzz about your brand?

• Links to all the social media profiles should be included in all the press releases

• News about products before launch can be sent to select bloggers to get a pre-buzz

• Do a press release about an upcoming product targeting popular bloggers in your industry to get more exposure

• Use all the social bookmarking sites to bookmark blog posts and press releases about the product.

• Use the power of twitter to tweet about news on your brand through multiple accounts

Tips for having successful Public Relations using social media:

• Establish relationships with customers or potential customers online.

• Create conversations through online channels

• Send content across all social media platforms and make use of traditional media outlets as well

• Learn how people get information and stories online and communicate/share messages with audiences accordingly

• Find out key online influencers and opinion leaders for supporting your service/product

Public Relations is all about building mutual relationships between people and your company. It touches almost every part of the business including marketing, sales, customer support etc. In the recent days most of the businesses use social media in a lot of ways to either supplement or add on to existing PR strategies. Every person involved in social media on behalf of the business should be well trained. For most of the bigger businesses, following the code of conduct and social media policy is enough to attain business goals.

Dot Com Infoway helps clients market their products/services through cost-effective Internet Marketing and Social Media Marketing solutions. To get a free quote for these services, contact us.

1. Creating ads on Facebook:
In Facebook, we have two major options to advertise

• Advertise something that is already on Facebook – you can advertise your fan pages, groups or applications on Facebook through advertisements. This can increase the visibility of what already exists.
• Advertise a web page – In this option, you can advertise your web pages to reach your target audience on Facebook.

In the below screenshot, you will see the highlighted portion with the text ‘I want to advertise something I have on Facebook’ which gives you the option to choose from Facebook groups, pages and applications.

Let’s see the advertisement part in a single Facebook ad

• Title: You can create a title within 25 characters. It is better if you include your company or product’s name, a question or a strong call to action, or target an interest.
• Destination URL: Always provide the working URL that is related to the ad. If you advertise Facebook pages, groups and apps, then just select from the list.
• Image: Image is the most attractive part of the ad. So include an attractive image, Facebook system automatically adjusts your image to 110×80 pixels
• Body Text: Describe the ad up to 135 characters with clear explanation related to your title and image.

2. Types of ads available on Facebook:
Below are the ads available on Facebook

• Promote website – This ad requires a valid and exact landing page. If you are promoting a specific product or offer, your destination URL should drive people to the product or offer page on your website. However, the URL is not displayed in the advertisement anywhere directly.
• Promote Facebook Page – Select the page which you want to advertise through your Facebook account and then create the ad to increase the Facebook fan page visibility.
• Promote Facebook Group – Select the Facebook group which you want to advertise through your account. Then, direct users to your Group when it is clicked on. This is a great way to promote your Group and prompt others to join.
• Promote Facebook Event – If you conduct an event and want to invite people those who are related to your event, then this Facebook ad will yield you the greatest response.
• Promote Facebook App – Select your application from your Facebook account and reach your target audience faster.

3. Select Reach and Target on Facebook:

First you need to select your targeted audience for a specific Facebook ad. For this, you have options such as Location, Demographics, Likes, Interests and also, Advance Demographics. If you select your options, you will see how many people meet your selection. The below screenshot will give you an idea of the options available on Facebook:

4. Facebook Cost and Budgeting:
You have two major options to select your budgeting and costs on Facebook:

• Pay for impressions (CPM): In this model, you pay for every thousand impressions of your ad.
• Pay for Click (CPC): In this model, you are charged only if your ad gets clicked.
• Daily Budget: You can set your daily budget for each ad on Facebook and monitor/control costs on your ad campaigns.

5. Scheduling Option:
You have the option to select a specific date to run your ads on Facebook. You can see the below screenshot to select the exact date and then, run your ads.

6. Delivery Options:
For any given ad unit, Facebook auction selects and delivers the best ad to run based on the ads with the below criteria.

• Maximum bid – You can set the maximum bid above the suggested bid from Facebook but the final CPC will be calculated only as per your competitor bid value
• Quality - In addition to an ad’s maximum bid, quality is a factor considered for ad delivery. The quality of an ad is calculated based on a variety of factors including the positive (Like) and negative feedback (X) that an ad has received from users.
• Performance – Facebook ranks ads based on past performance history (estimated CPM) where eCPM=CPC bid multiplied by click-thru rate (CTR).

With this new introduction of Google, faster results get streamed in search results as the user types. Many of them in the search industry believe that some websites may face a drop in their traffic. And there is cause to worry also.

During the demonstration of Google Instant event, Googlers typed a single letter ‘W”, Google instantly predicted and showed the results related to weather before they hit search box. When we look on other alphabets from A to Z it would be definitely big brands like Amazon to Zappos. It would be fantastic if you bring your brands into one letter list. And this would now be the holy grail of SEO!

Obviously this is not the first time that brands are one of the main influences of Google search results. The “Vince” brand-influenced update (Mar. 2009) which allowed branded rankings based on anchor text links, is an another instance where brands took the center stage in manipulating search results.

When we look at Google ads with this innovative instant search, there is no change in the way of ads being served. But the impact will be on the ads based on predicted search. Now the question which pops up is this – how will Google count the impression for ads, based on each refresh or based on change of the search engine results pages? Here is an answer from the Google team “With Google Instant, an impression is counted if a user takes an action to choose a query (for example, presses the Enter key or clicks the Search button), clicks a link on the results page, or stops typing for three or more seconds”

One more question arises: Can advertisers bid for partial words that might have low CPC? For example, instead of the query “Personal Loans” you will get the instant results related to personal loans for a query “Personal Lo”. This is because, there is no value for long tail search queries here with this new innovation.

As Google has updated Ajax based URL structure only with the advanced filter set up, keywords can be tracked through Google Analytics. The team Semetrical has done a marvelous job explaining the step by step procedure to the Google Instant results.

The future of Google Instant is Google Instant on mobile devices. It will happen in upcoming months, hopefully, during this Fall.

Location based social networking isn’t a new concept. Foursquare has more than 3 million users since its launch five years back while, Google Maps has location-based mobile networking for more than 100 million users. Still, Facebook Places throws open location-based networking to its user base of 500 million, the most important fact here is, 150 million of Facebook users sign into the site via their mobile phones.

You have the option to share your location by “checking in” to that place and letting friends know where you are. You can easily see if any of your friends have also chosen to check in nearby. Places is only available in the United States right now. But Facebook is planning to make it available in many countries and also, on other mobile platforms shortly.

When you check in, you will have options to tag friends who are with you in that location. You can post a status update along with your check-in, similar to how you share a link, picture or a video. In the “People Here Now” section, you will be seeing others who are checked in with you at that place.

Facebook is yet to confirm how Facebook Places will integrate with Facebook business pages. But this will certainly happen in the near future and companies will have a great opportunity to market and promote their products and services using Facebook Places.

Claim Your Place: Get started with Facebook Places by claiming your place so that you can observe the behavior of the initial curious people who tempt to check in to your place and update their friends. You can quickly create it by clicking on “Add” or the “+” sign depending on whether or not you are using Facebook for touch devices or Facebook for iPhone. This is another outpost for your business that can provide some search value for people looking for your products and services.

Getting Users Engaged: You can certainly get users who check-in engaged along with their friends to help spread your Places among their network. You can conduct contests to get people to visit your place. You can also ask your customers to give a review for your place. Once they start sharing their stories about your place you will have more exposure.

Getting ahead of competitors: Stay tuned to the promotions of your competitors who are using Places and be ready to give counter-offers to those who are visiting the places of your competition.
Places on Facebook is new so not many people have started playing with them, so you can have the advantage of the leader and reap the benefits. But the results depend on how you can use Facebook Places to promote business.

Dot Com Infoway helps clients market their products/services through cost-effective Internet Marketing and Social Media Marketing solutions. To get a free quote for these services, contact us.

To better understand the local SERP changes, I have provided the screenshots for your reference

You can realize the below changes from the screenshot

• Map is pushed down the sponsored listings and placed at the right side.
• The Google place listings are seems like an organic listings and the only difference is they have map in point.
• Google place listings shows the meta description as like organic results
• Organic listing starts displaying at the bottom of 2nd scroll down. Also when you scroll down the page the map will also scrolls down on the right side.
• Another noticeable thing is reviews that are more obvious. Under reviews, its showing direct links to Google place instead of “More info”

Further Elaine Filadelfo Google’s Global Communications & Public Affairs mentioned as follows:

Yes, this is an experiment with a small number of users that aims to make it faster and easier for people to find businesses and places of interest near them.

So from this we can understand that the local business owners can concentrate much more on Google’s local business listing rather than organic results (SEO). As soon Google may deploy this change to live in all datacenters, it is now important to think of the essential ranking factors to consider in to account. I have listed some factors which will be useful for the small business owners below:

Google with this move have shown that, it started giving importance to the local cal listing. So local business owners should consider creating a prominent Google Places Page in order to get listed in the Google SERPs. Also incomplete profiles can be completed to add considerable value to the listings and unclaimed businesses can be claimed.

As reviews become an important ranking factor, positive reviews from prominent clients would bring more value for the places listing. So now reviews plays an vital role in bringing potential customers through the local listing.

As local results may overtake the organic results, descriptions can be considered as the another important ranking factor.

If we follow the above things then we can enjoy this Google’s local search result enhancement by dominating the search engine result pages. Please keep an eye on your SERPs do share your comments below if you see the changes in your SERPs.

Content Theft is definitely a big problem in the world of world wide web. More and more websites/blogs are becoming victims to content thefts and the problem is looming large over almost every other webmaster in the world. But, if there is a problem, there ought to be a solution or an option to prevent it. This blog post is about finding the way out of content thefts.

Ways to Find Content Thefts

“Prevention is always better then cure”. There are numerous ways through which we can find content theft before it runs out of our hand.

Google Alert: Google Alert can be not only used for reputation management but also for effectively finding copied content. Register your post title in Google Alert and you will receive the alert as on when new content is published and included in Google’s index.

Trackback: Trackbacks from other articles can also be used to cite the articles if they have used your content in their blog. If enough credit is provided and references are cited, then it cannot be considered as content theft because, in the blogosphere, it is a common practice to give references between bloggers / blog links. If the whole article is copied, then action needs to be taken.

Online Tools: You can add your website into online tools like Copyscape and they will let you know on a daily basics after detailed scanning of the web for content similar to yours. Copyscape is a pretty good plagiarism protection service available. If you wanted to use this for an unlimited number of time, you have to choose the PRO version as the free version offers only limited search. There are several other tools like Copyscape through you can find if there has been content theft of your website/blog.

Types of Content Theft:

• Image Theft
• RSS Theft
• Content Theft (Portion of your website content)

Image Theft

A picture is definitely worth a thousand words. Bloggers would love adding more images in the post to attract their viewers and readers. For instance, you can’t search on Google Image search and use whichever image you like to use in your website / blog. If you want to use any image from the Internet, look for their copyright or reprint permission and then go ahead.

How to Find Image Theft: Use Google / Yahoo (Search Engines) Image search and check for your images and look who else has used it. Also make sure to check your server report if any scraper is hotlinking to your images which highly wastes your bandwidth.

Image Hotlinking (also known as leeching, or inline linking) is the practice of stealing bandwidth from other websites, by linking to an image stored on another server.

How to Stop Image Theft: The below mentioned code need to be added in the .htaccess file which should be in your website’s root directory.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png|jpg)$ /images/sampleimage.jpg [L]

Make sure to replace the mysite with your domain and replace your own image / banner in the place of sampleimage.jpg

RSS / Blog Content Theft:

Many spammers scrap the original contents from RSS feed and replace it in their blogs by adding more ads. They think that having more new content would help them get better ranking and get them more visitors, thus, invariably generate more revenue through ads. Thanks to search engines, new era content duplication filters work pretty well to filter out scraped sites.

How to Stop RSS Theft: We can add only extracts in the RSS Feeds rather than provide entire blog content. When readers find the snippet interesting they will surely click through the website in which the article is hosted and read the entire article.

As many scrappers use online scrapper tools to scrap quality content, they will obviously scrap the entire content including the post title. They will not manually change / edit the post title. By having post title linking to post URL, each of the scrapped post will automatically link to the original post.

To do so in WordPress, simply open your single.php file and locate where the title is displayed. Then, replace the code by the following:

<h1>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?>
</h1>

Content Theft (Portion of your website content):

Each and every business works hard to explain to its clients / customers what it offers through its website content. But content scrappers easily copy-paste the content (sometimes even design) in business websites, making life miserable for the original businesses and easy for themselves (at least they think so).

We have covered this topic in an earlier blog post. There are ways in which we can file DMCA against such content thieves. We can contact Google and file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act against the copied website. After due analysis, Google will remove the copied website from their index and in addition, we can also file a SPAM report against them. This again works for blogs as well.

Some of the other ways you can report SPAM / copyright violation against the scraped websites.

• Report SPAM Form to Google via Google Webmaster Tool
• Google DMCA Copyright Policy
• Email to adsense-abuse@google.com (For Adsense violation)
• WordPress Support
• Yahoo Copyright
• Bing Web SPAM Report

Every developer is now hunting for ideas to build an iPad app that sells. There is no single formula for developing a successful iPad app. The secret formula is indeed a blend of a number of things and this post will detail on those very things.

There are a lots of good apps in the App Store that are not sold as well as they should have. This is because not much marketing has been done for those particular apps, inspite of their stunning concepts. Marketing is a continuous process of aligning your message with the buyer until he acts on it, with revenue as the end result. I have listed a few points to be noted while developing your iPad app.

1. iPad Compatible App

The first and foremost thing is to develop an app that uses the entire 1024 x 728 pixel screen of the device. The size and capabilities of iPad mean that it is possible to create a new class of applications for the multi-touch interface and support for physical keyboards enable diverse modes of interactions as well. Make use of all the available features to develop a great app.

2. Develop a Unique Concept

You can come up with a unique app idea from your personal experience or identify the need for an app that might be in great demand. The base line is that you need to think how you can improve people’s lives with a new technology solution. You can try and get some ideas by answering some of the questions below,

• What are your daily activities that consume most of your time? Can your app help people speed up their day to day activities?
• What is your industry? Is there something in your niche that can be improved by the use of your iPad app?
• What are your favorite hobbies? Can your hobbies like gardening, fishing, etc. be improved by your app?
• What are the childhood games you enjoyed playing? Can you recreate the game with some variation as a great app?

3. Trendy and News-worthy apps

Trends are always happening around the globe. Get inline with the latest trends and news to get a sparkling idea for your app. The trend might be Going Green, Eating Healthy, Fashion trends, Home decor and design etc.. There are tons of ideas to develop apps that can help someone get organized with the trends. There is a “green app” that helps drivers save fuel and money by driving more efficiently and an app that helps you design your home’s interiors with photo samples of fabrics and flooring to include in the design.

4. App Design

The design should fit the tone of the app’s purpose. If you are offering an app that will make someone’s professional lives easier, the interface of the app should be clean and streamlined. If the app is an extension of good old video games, you can go with more pixilated or old school type graphics and designs. The app’s design, no matter its style or look, should be something that can be clearly seen on the iPad.

5. Become Social with your app

The most popular category in the App Store are the social networking apps. All the well-known social networks like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn etc. have an iPad app of their own. You have an opportunity to create an ancillary app for these social networks. You can add value to these applications, and here comes your blockbuster app, which people will purchase to be social 24/7.

Summary

Coming up with a completely unique idea for an app is difficult but not impossible. If you can’t come up with a great new idea, you can always improve an existing app out there. Download some apps in the niche in which you would like to develop your app and see what features they offer and what they lack. Come up with a new app that you think will be having unique features than your competitors. The most important part is to market your iPad app in a way that reaches your target customers. That’s the secret formula behind every iPad app’s success!

Dot Com Infoway is an iPad application developer with many popular apps to its credit. To know more about our iPad services, visit our  iPad app development page

If you are a business owner you should know how to represent your business on Flickr efficiently. If you are a marketer, you should know how to use Flickr effectively as an online marketing tool. After all, Flickr is tremendously easy to use, and when used with colleagues, friends or even associates it can be excellent medium for sharing.

Flickr – Evolution:

Flickr is a photo sharing community which was started in the beginning of 2004 by two game designers who needed a tool to share their photos easily online for their gaming project. In the process of creation of that tool, they suddenly stumbled upon something new and innovative – Flickr. On seeing the attention Flickr has been receiving from users, Yahoo! acquired Flickr for $35 million in 2005. The rest, as they say, is history.

Flickr – Online Social Platform:

Flickr is becoming one of the hottest online social tools as it facilitates creative organizations to market their products and their services through an innovative medium. So it is not only considered as a photo and video sharing tool but as a platform for businesses with a very strong and active user base, which could be exceptionally useful for businesses.

Flickr – Business Marketing Tool:

Flickr is one of the most valuable social media websites for photo and video sharing which acts as a business marketing tool for local business owners. Businesses can improve their brand equity and gain search engine visibility by featuring their images on Flickr.
Over last year, Google has started showing images, videos, maps, news etc,. in SERP. So whenever the photo page you create on Flickr gets indexed by the search engines, it may rank highly in SERP, thereby improving local visibility to push traffic to your sites. Businesses that run travel sites, hotels, restaurants, gifts, photography related sites etc, can gain benefit more by using images.

How To Use Flickr For Your Business:

• Create a free Flickr account and start using it. If you want to enjoy more advantages from Flickr, become a Pro member. Make sure that your photos are viewable publicly.
• Upload quality and original images to Flickr – like logos, travel scenery, and product images etc.
• Make creative, attractive, keyword-specific quality titles for each photo you upload on Flickr. This will increase your online visibility. Your description for images should be compelling enough to convince users to connect to you. Your description should be hyperlinked to related pages on your site.
• As tagging is essential for all social media sites, don’t forget to tag your photos with searchable keywords and also ensure that the place name should be included for valuable searches.
• Your profile should be optimized. Make sure that your photos are organized into sets with attractive titles, searchable tags, valuable information and relevant links. It would be great if your profile name can be your business name.
• Join relevant groups and be social to get more exposure for your photos that will provide you the opportunity to connect users directly. Contribute to relevant groups instead of just adding the photos alone. You can even start an own group and make others to participate actively.
• Increase your contacts by inviting your friends and clients to join you with.
• When you find interesting photos don’t forget to make a comment on their photos and write testimonial for their profile.
• Share your Flickr images to all your other social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon etc, to increase the exposure of your Flickr profile.

How Not to Use Flickr:

• Flickr is not implied to be misused for commercial purposes like other social media platforms.
• Don’t ever try to spam your Flickr account by selling your products and services which will result in banning of your profile from the Flickr community.
• Don’t use URL in all the photos that you have added to your profile.

Be creative and always keep in mind that your focus should be toward using Flickr to establish your identity and not hardcore selling of products to the Flickr audience. As all social media is implied to be fun and friendly, you have scope to think creatively too. Always think wisely and explore new prospects for your business on Flickr.

In this blog post, we will see how we can create custom reports to find out the total number of goals for each landing page with dimentions of day and time of the goal.

Step 1: Create Custom Report

Click the ‘Custom Reporting’ tab in the left navigation bar and then click ‘Create New Custom Report’ tab to create report for landing page goal completion.

Step 2: Metrics and Dimentions:

Select the below metrics and dimentions:

Metrics:

• Total Goal Completion
• Total Goal Value

Dimentions:

• Landing Page
• Day
• Hour of day

Search for Goal in the list view which has been mentioned in the red box in the below image. Then drag and drop the metrics of Total Goal conversion and Total Goal Value in the metric box.

After working with Metrics, place the Dimension as in the below image. Search landing page on the list view and add it in Dimention. In the same way, search day in list view to add Day and Hour of the Day dimensions.

Step 3: Create the Report

Once you finish Metrics and Dimension selection, you can create the report. After creating we will get the below results. You can find which landing page generates high goal conversions. You can also find out goal conversion rate, total value of the goal, cost per goal conversion etc.

Once you click the landing page, you can drill down to the day dimension as shown in the below image.

After the day dimension you can find out the Hour of the day for a particular goal.

Thus you can use the above metrics and dimensions to generate specific data about goals, including the date and time in which a goal has been achieved. For more Custom Report solutions on Google Analytics Contacts us