Digital Marketing Specialist, Social Media Consultant,
and Tech Geek at Heart

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10 Social Media Tools To Help With Your Crowdsourcing Efforts

December 31, 2009

Since we’re about to jump into 2010 (that’s “twenty ten,” everyone), I wanted to ring in the new year with something that will hopefully kick start your collaborative efforts. This is a guest post from Shevonne Polastre, who wrote this article on behalf of TopHost.Gr, a Greek web host that offers shared hosting.

Crowdsourcing has become more and more popular with private companies, non-profit organizations, and even government agencies. It’s a model that is based on many people contributing to an idea, product, or service that would have usually been done by one person. Crowdsourcing has become increasingly more widely used because it helps cultivate creativity and innovation. There are three main reasons why this model works:

  1. Crowdsourcing builds competition – In an environment where one person is the one having the power to build something, mediocrity is usually the final result. When you have a group of people submitting their work, there is an awareness that it isn’t just one idea that will work, so the result is a higher quality of work. As they saying goes, competition breeds excellence.
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What Traits Define a Social Media Marketer?

July 8, 2008

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.

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How FriendFeed Can Teach You About Your Friends

April 10, 2008

FriendFeed Logo

FriendFeed has been out for just a few months and has already established itself as a solid startup with an indefinite amount of potential. Founded by four ex-Googlers, FriendFeed allows you to subscribe to your friends’ updates across 35 social networks and to stay up to date with the content they’re discovering and sharing across the web.

Currently, FriendFeed supports the following social networks and tools:

FriendFeed Services

FriendFeed aggregates social news sites (Digg, Google Reader Shared Items, Mixx, and Reddit), social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, Furl, Google Shared stuff, Ma.gnolia, and StumbleUpon), status updates (Gmail/Google Talk, Jaiku, Pownce, and Twitter), video (Seesmic, Vimeo, and YouTube), photos (from Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, and Zoomr), music (from iLike, Last.fm, and Pandora), books (GoodReads and LibraryThing), other miscellaneous web services (Amazon Wishlists, Disqus, LinkedIn, your Netflix Queue, Netvibes, SlideShare, Upcoming events, and Yelp), and finally, your own blog or Tumblr. For your blog, any URL will do, and if you are writing for a blog with multiple authors, FriendFeed parses through the authors and only features blog posts written by you.

FriendFeed: The Service and What it Offers

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Where Have I Gone? Facebook has Graced My Presence.

June 14, 2007

In the past few months, Facebook has been attracting a plethora of new users, including people who vowed never to jump on that bandwagon. I guess that most people cave into peer pressure after all.

Especially online. Especially when it connects the older generations to the younger generations (like parents to their children and grandparents to their grandchildren). I can’t wait until my grandma signs up for Facebook. Her picture is already posted on it.

A lot of people among me have been overwhelmed by the recent changes at Facebook. On May 24, Facebook launched the F8 Facebook Developer Platform, allowing third-party application developers to integrate new applications and tools into their Facebook account.

For awhile, I feared that this would be MySpace. But as I saw the opportunities, this is hardly a MySpace at all. Facebook still has the clean look, but you can spruce it up a bit and personalize it even further.

And while people are posting preliminary results of their first impressions of Facebook applications, here is what’s driving me to Facebook:

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Will SEO Ever Die?

October 10, 2006

There has been a lot of controversy in terms of SEO lately. First, there’s this scathing article by Daniel Dessinger about the SEO industry, which prompted a lot of questions, many of whom are wondering if Daniel is on the money, or at least close, but others who have tried to invalidate the claim. I give Rand another thumbs up in terms of his excellent refutation, but I can’t help but wonder from the standpoint of a SEO newbie (if I’ve even made it there yet): with more people like me who have the interest in SEO, will the market get oversaturated?

Let me rephrase the question. As more and more people become more educated with what makes a good SEO, we can face two dilemmas:

  1. There will be more Aaron Walls, Barry Schwartzes, Danny Sullivans, and Rand Fishkins in the world. Will the industry be able to handle them all? Better yet, is there even room for newcomers to move up?
  2. Is the current industry too competitive? Will more and more people get better at SEO, forcing it to collapse entirely? Will the exposure of more and more individuals to correct SEO strategies ultimately cause the SEO as we know it to change — possibly to even eliminate it?
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