techipedia | tamar weinberg

This is a guest post by search engine optimization expert Gab Goldenberg, who actually spends a good chunk of his time in a classroom: he’s a law student!

I’m taking two seminar courses at school this term, and they each resemble a particular form of social media. A seminar is different from a regular course in that it necessarily involves interaction with the students — a seminar is to a regular lecture course as web 2.0 is to web 1.0. What is interesting about these two seminars I’m taking is the difference in the teaching styles and the relationships that result.

Professor Daniel Jutras’ classes begin with him and/or students covering some current events relating to the seminar’s topic. Then, Professor Jutras lectures for about an hour, covering the principal ideas in the week’s readings. We pause for 10 minutes, and when we return, the class asks questions or makes comments, to which Professor Jutras responds.

I see this seminar as a blog. The blogger (Professor Jutras) posts his ideas, occasionally throws in some editorial and takes some light, widget-fed microblogging (the current events some students share). As an aside, Professor Jutras makes it obvious when he’s editorializing, which makes it easy to take it for what it’s worth: an informed opinion, but not necessarily fact.

While I prepare to relocate (I’m moving next week!), I was fortunate to have the help of James Duthie, a serial guest blogger from Online Marketing Banter, a blog on social media, marketing, and more.? You can subscribe to more of his ramblings here.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post over at SEO Scoop comparing the quality of search engine traffic against social media traffic. The aim of my little experiment was to test the assumption that search traffic was of a higher quality than social media traffic. And as most would have guessed, the mighty engines prevailed as the superior source of traffic. Many people found the research interesting, but a number of people commented that the social networks probably shouldn’t be grouped together. Some are built for the masses whereas others have tightly defined niche audiences. So the question arose - was social media traffic misrepresented by grouping traffic from all networks together? Is traffic from highly targeted niche networks better than traffic from generic networks? (Hat tip to Gab for posing that question to me.) Let’s find out.

If you haven’t yet seen the Language Trainers Accent Game, it has won the “best viral marketing strategy of 2008″ (in my eyes). The idea behind this game is to listen to videos of individuals from all over the world speaking a sentence or reciting the lines of a poem, and you need to guess where the accent is from. You even get bonus points for guessing exactly where (regionally) the individual is from, which gives this game added appeal. Let me put it this way — it’s hard!

I was able to interview Dave, one of the brilliant minds behind the company and the game, and he has given some really great information about the viral marketing piece, including the costs and the execution. Sit back and enjoy, and then play the accent game to see how an excellently-crafted viral marketing campaign can really help get people talking about you and your products.

Tamar: What does your company do?
Dave: Basically we’re a language training company. We organise language courses worldwide for businesses, one-to-one students, and small groups. You contact us and tell us what language you want to learn and where you live or work, and we’ll find a qualified native teacher of that language and arrange a customised course for you to take place at your home or workplace. The whole thing is centred on personal tuition and the student’s convenience.

This is a guest post from kd kelly. kd kelly, aka dotlizard, who has learned a harsh lesson or two in her time on the internets, and wants to warn us about the dangers of social media as it relates to trusting relationships that end in lies, deception, and hurt. She’s a very social creature and is known as “dotlizard” pretty much everywhere.

Smile, I’m sending you some sunshine. Did your room just light up?

What can you say about a beautiful girl who died? In the words of noted internet hedonist Halcyon Styn, from a Flash animation he created in her honor: “I want to introduce you to the bravest person I know / She is a warrior of the finest sort / She shoots sunbeams from her fingertips / makes rainbows shine on sunny days / and leaves a wake of smiles in her path / Kaycee, warrior supreme”. Kaycee Nicole Swenson brought her sparkly brand of wholesome, flirtatious courage to a wide audience on the internet from 1999 through May 14, 2001, when her mother Debbie announced that Kaycee had passed away suddenly. At a family gathering in celebration of her remission from leukemia, sometime around sunset, a blood vessel burst in Kaycee’s chemotherapy-weakened body; she died peacefully in the arms of her loved ones.

With many individuals finding great success with social media (and as an aside, a basic understanding of search engine optimization), they immediately consider themselves social media marketers and consultants (as well as seasoned SEOs) and offer to sell their promotional services. What skills, though, do successful social media marketers have that put these individuals above the average (or addicted) social media user, and better yet, above the traditional marketer? I asked several social media consultants, bloggers, marketers, search engine optimizers, and social media addicts about what they considered to be essential skills and characteristics of the most efficient and results-driven social media consultants. In the many paragraphs that follow, learn from many of the experts and hear what they consider success when using social media to engage with consumers about products and services.

Maki, Internet Marketing and Social Media Blogger: The main characteristic [social media marketers] need to have is a genuine curiosity/interest in social media, particularly on how it influences human relationships and business practices. This is not just standard required job skills but rather a deep interest that pervades one’s day to day life. One needs to constantly be informed of the latest technologies while striving always to learn and improve one’s knowledge levels. In order to do well when marketing, one should have tactical knowledge and ideally, first-hand experience of the specific social media platform. This will help a great deal in planning and managing successful marketing campaigns.