I was recently approached by an individual (who I can’t name) that had to present “Social Networking Tactics” for their manager…in 15 hours from now! This is our interaction:

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Question – I have a meeting with my manager in the AM.  I want to have joined the top 10 social networking sites.  I wanted your opinion on that

Answer – I understand your AM timeline with the manager and I’m going to give you 2 articles that will make you sound like the expert.

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Both are great articles I would highly suggest, but the point I am trying to get at is that for every question you may have, somebody out there has already answered it. The hard part is knowing which sites are trustworthy and when to stop researching. That is an entirely different discussion, but for now I’ll leave you with this. If you want to truly harness the power of social networking, make sure not to neglect the marketing basics like SEO, E-Mail and other campaigns.

Now I’m going to work on my next article: “How to manage social networking for your company without losing your mind?” That should be a fun one! Until then, good luck trying to figure it all out.

Posted under Social Networks

If for some odd reason you’re unable to access a TV today…If you’re boss feels that President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th president isn’t as important as a sales call, then here’s a solution:

According to Alley Insider, “NBC Universal (GE)  and News Corp (GE) joint venture Hulu will stream President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration live Tuesday.” You can watch it on Hulu.com/inauguration, or feel free to watch it below on this blog.

If you’re not at work, then I suggest the official “Barack Obama Drinking Game”. The SF Weekly’s blog – The Snitch perfectly detailed out the history and rules, which are as follows:

Take a small sip of whatever you’ve got if:

• Obama mentions his wife or family by first name;
• He mentions Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, or Harry Reid;
• He mentions Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, or his own numerous Kenyan relatives;
• “Hope” or “Change” is uttered;
• He talks about puppies.

Take a moderate sip, if:

• He mentions John McCain or Sarah Palin (or winks);
• He mentions some random American from a swing state who’s up shit creek health- and economics-wise;
• He uses the terms “crisis,” “meltdown,” “Depression,” or “Ponzi”;

Drink liberally, if:

• He connects the departure of George W. Bush with the most well-known term from his home state: “Aloha”;
• “Allow me to express my feelings with this brief interlude of interpretive dance”;
• He quotes Dick Cheney;
• He quotes Cheney and follows it up by clutching his heart and shouting “Here I come, ‘Lizbeth! It’s the big one!“

Go on a rampage, if:

• Profanity is uttered;
• Obama has the Rev. Rick Warren finish the speech for him in an act of bipartisanship;
• He mentions that betting a dollar in Vegas that a black man would be sworn in as president in the same year the Arizona Cardinals went to the Super Bowl would make you a millionaire many times over.

Is it a lame game? yes. Will it render you useless for the rest of the day, yeah probably.

(*Remember to stop at 3pm or you pass out whichever comes first.)

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Hulu Presents: Barack Obama’s Inauguration

Posted under Events, Viral Marketing

Is there really a need to build small business sites from scratch anymore? As internet standards develop, there are “tools” that are becoming the basis of almost every site built. If you are a small business owner with a “limited” budget or simply a blogger, there are technologies out there that are both cheap and easy, yet 100% effective in creating a strong online presence.

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WordPress – The Ultimate Content Management System (CMS)

I was recently approached by HP to write about “Using WordPress to Grow Small Businesses” for their Logoworks: Inside Small Business blog . This is a loaded topic, which makes it all the more fun to write about! For those of you who don’t know, WordPress is  a very powerful Content Management Systems (aka: CMS – “a computer application used to create, edit, manage, search and publish various kinds of digital media and electronic text.“)

WordPress was originally designed as blogging platform, but WordPress’s community continued to expand and its uses continued to evolve. If you wanted to setup a portfolio, news/magazine, or e-commerce site – WordPress could handle the job. And best part? It’s Free!!  Steve Bruner, of Slipfire.com, built his entire business on creating WordPress websites.  “WordPress lets us get a full-featured website up and running in a fraction of the time it would take to build one from scratch” says Steve.  “The benefits of content management, built in SEO, easy feature expansion via plugins, a short learning curve for the user and one of the largest, most supportive communities on the web makes choosing WordPress a no-brainer”. An example of a few major sites that use WordPress:

• TechCrunch
• Mashable
• ZDNet Technology News
• CNN – Anderson Cooper 360
• All Things Digital
• Ford’s Auto Show Website

For a complete list, check out the WordPress Showcase.  WordPress is a popular CMS for a broad range of businesses, meeting and exceeding their needs.

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Top 5 Reasons To Use WordPress for Your Small Business

Just to give you a better idea of the demand for WordPress, last week oDesk (an online staffing marketplace and management platform) published What’s Hot? Skills with Fastest Growing Demand in 2008, and  based on job/project listings WordPress came out on top with a 427% increase since last year.

Don Campbell, founder of Expand2Web, says “WordPress is an ideal choice for small business websites.” With a background largely involved in Silicon Valley,  he started his company to help Small Business Owners build efficient and strong website and get a steady stream of new customers from Google/Yahoo searches. He  are his Top 5 Reasons To Use WordPress for Your Small Business Website:

1. SEO – WordPress provides good search engine optimization (SEO) right out of the box. There are a few tweaks you need to make, but there are many seo benefits that WordPress provides for free. In fact Google’s own Matt Cutts says WordPress is “made to do SEO well” in this video: Matt Cutts gives tips to small business owners.
2. Content – it is easy to update content on your website without knowing HTML.  Do you hate the idea of having to learn to use a complex HTML editor tool like Dreamweaver? Do you have to “ask” your webmaster every time you want to make a small change to your website? Well no longer – once WordPress is set up for you, you can easily create new pages or edit existing pages using a simple rich text editor.
3. Extensions – There is a thriving ecosystem of developers creating themes and plug-ins – imagine free design themes, or the ability to extend your website with polls, contact forms, ratings or hundreds of other cool features without having to hire a web developer.
4. Support – If you do have problems, or want to add very custom features, it is easy to find support and developers who can help you. There are literally thousands of WordPress developers out there. And there are so many people writing about WordPress that help is only a Google search away!
5. One-click-installation – Quick installs are provided by many hosting providers, including Bluehost, 1and1 and GoDaddy.

Don Campbell and Steve Bruner use Worpdress for all of their clients because of these 5 reasons and more. The list goes on, but the point is simple: It’s Efficient and Effective!

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Best WordPress Plugins

It’s important to elaborate on just how strong and vast WordPress Extensions are. Kieran Hawe, Sr. Director of Online Marketing at Folica Inc., (previously Director of SEO at MTV Networks) said it best: “The real value of using WordPress are the enormous amounts of plugins available to help you manage, promote and do just about anything else with your blog.”  He published a list of the Best WordPress Plugins covering anything and everything. I suggest you check it out. A few of my favorites include:

• All in One SEO Pack: Optimizes your WordPress website for Search Engines. Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines, generates META tags automatically, avoids the typical duplicate content found on site. Override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want. You can fine-tune everything, Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.
• Lighter Menus: Lighter Menus creates drop-down menus instead of the regular admin menus of the WordPress interface, so that you can browse items with one click and work on your website in a much more usable environment.
• Enhanced WP-ContactForm: WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. In the message it sends to you it gives the page the user visited before the contact page, as well as the original outside referrer. It can be implemented on a page or a post.
• Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your website which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade: Usually you have to go to your hosting company in order to upgrade your site – not with this plugin which takes care of the upgrade automatically.

For more information on WordPress plugins and development visit Yoast.com.

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Deciding if WordPress is Right For Your Business? Other CMS’s?

I recently attended an Ultra Light Startup group that put together a panel on Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS).  Experts representing different CMS’s, including WordPress, went head-to-head discussing the pro’s and con’s for small business using their services. I caught the panel on tape and if you need help deciding on a CMS, watch the video on YouTube. Even more noteworthy, the article I wrote about that event was picked up by the well know online publisher SmashingMagazine (<–They’re website is built on WordPress).

If you’re serious about WordPress for your Small Business needs, check out Don Campbells “WordPress for Small Business Websites” where he explores WordPress as a content management system for small business websites, including video tutorials on how to set up WordPress for yourself quickly to manage your small business website. You can also sign up for his free newsletter. Steve Bruner of Slipfire.com is another great person to contact if you’re considering WordPress. In terms of reading I suggest the blog of WordPress’s founding developer, Matt Mullenweg and also the WordPress Blog itself. By the time you’re done with all this reading, you’ll be a “WP-Pro”.

Feel free to contact me with any questions and I’ll be happy to point you in the right direction. You can contact me from my blog MarketingBlog.NET (also built on WordPress). Now go, sign up for WordPress and create an online presence for your company!

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Article Posted by Joshua ‘The Red’ Russak on HP Logoworks – Inside Small Business Blog:

• Using WordPress To Grow Your Business – Part 1

• Using WordPress To Grow Your Business – Part 2

• Using WordPress To Grow Your Business – Part 3
  

Posted under Blogs, Online Marketing, Ultra Light Startups

I recently attended my 6th Ultra Light Startup, where the mission is simple: “Tech entrepreneurs sharing techniques to launch faster and cheaper!”  I’ve covered their recent events including Monetization via Ads,  Outsourcing, SEO/SEM, and last months most popular Open Source CMS. (I made a video of that event and the article itself was picked up by the well know online publisher SmashingMagazine.)

This months meetup tested a completely new format – the Revenue Model Workshop. At this event, 5 startups were selected to give brief presentations of their business, focusing on their revenue models. It was held at For Your Imagination (special thanks to Kathryn Velvel Jones) in order to support , without a doubt, one of the largest Ultra Light crowds to date.

As usual, the night kicked off with 1 minute elevator pitches by the Ultra Light Audience. This ran pretty smoothly, particularly thanks to Ronald Bradford’s “Entreprenuer Pitch Instructions”. Some of the more impressive and eyecatching companies included:

• Groupable.com by Nate Brochin: Group Sponsorship Exchange
• BabyNameWizard by Jennie Baird: Baby Naming Expert Wizard
• ProperCloth by Seph Skerritt: Custom Dress Shirts via Online

Following the quick pitch session, guest speaker Derek Lee wowed the audience with his  “Immodest Proposal”…STOP CREATING AD INVENTORY (write up by Sanford Dickert)

• The long tail is dead.
• You will not feed your family or pay the mortgage with google Ad Words
• Figure out your economic value per customer instead of ad impressions
• Remember the difference between branded advertising and direct response – note that Lawn Doctor was on the prime time CNN show
• Sell something – unlimited ad inventory is nothing
• West Coast Model is what everyone is chasing – build a big community of 4M members and then monetize it. The darlings of the current economic world will disappear.
• East Coast Model is making money – figure out your revenue model – $ for one customer, $$ for more than one, then $$$$ for lots. Pick a revenue model and build it.
• Don’t get a job now – we are in a recession. In 20 years from now, look at the Fortune 100 then and see how many got started in 2009.

It was a lot to take in for the audience and left people hungry for more answers. Good timing, because the pizza arrived shortly after and the networking frenzy began. After 15 minutes of handshakes, business card exchanges and hardcore networking, the panel was seated and ready to go.

As planned, five entrepreneurs had 5 minutes each to pitch their product and revenue models ($$Cha-Ching$$). The panel would then provide helpful alternatives for the entrepreneur to consider as methods to generate more revenue from their business more efficiently. The presenters were as follows…

• John Murch, SEO Drop
• Joshua Russak & Gerrit Hall, RezRedo, LLC. [*video below]
  
• Mor Sela, ProCompare
• Laurent Kretz, CabEasy
• Hermann Mazard, Home Shop and The “Yes We” Can

The panelists included:

• Maisha Walker, President, MessageMedium & Columnist w/ Inc. magazine
• Jay Levy, founding Principal of Zelkova Ventures
• Martin Breslin, Managing Partner, The Hatchery and founder of Fiscvl Corp.
• David Schnurman, President of Lawline.com and CEO of TrueNYC.com
• Steven Adler, CEO of Financial Summit Ventures

Overall the feedback was helpful for the presenters. Each panelist seemed to have their own perspective and advice, but there were times where they were simply “confused” by the ideas presented.  But overall, the event was successful and the presenters walked away with what they needed to improve their business.

I highly suggest you attend next months meetup, Ultra Light Web Analytics, February 5th at For Your Imagination. The panel lined up is strong and based on the growing numbers, this will be a large/networking worthy venue.

**In order to give you an idea of what it was like to present, I have decided to sacrifice my video for the sake for your viewing pleasure:

Posted under Events, Ultra Light Startups

Laptop Keyboards are so 2008! Thanks to an e-mail from my good friend Mitch Goldford, I caught a glimpse of the new innovations associated with 2009: The “MacBook Wheel”

• Keyboards will be replaced with large iPod scroll wheels
• Lithium Ion will be replaced with Hummingbird Battery’s which last for a whole 20 minutes.
• And I quote “Every file is just a few 100 clicks away”

…of course by now you understand that I’m joking, right? This “future prediction” was the result of an entertaining viral video released by TheOnion and later covered by TechCrunch. I’m not sure if apple had anything to do with this video, but I have a feeling they’re not going to take this one down.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Posted under Blogs, Viral Marketing