Use Promotions — Contests and Drawings are huge draws to social media participation.

Involve Users — Calls to action or posted questions are great tools of interaction.

Update Frequently — Even if it takes volunteers to update daily, updates should be happening more than once a week.

Do you have any other best practices for social media that have proven to work for you? Please share them in the comments.

Jayesh Khagram
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www.bwsipl.com

With expansion comes the evolution as well and the analysts believe that the year 2010 will see some changes of monumental proportions in the way social media platform is used and then it will be the capability, rather than the technology which will be innovated.

The trends can be surmised as follows:

1. Whatever you will do on the internet, watch movies, videos, shop, chat, download- social media will be an active and integrated component of it all. There will be no escape from the pervasive presence of social media components and it will be a single cohesive force that will bind and channelize the things together.

2. Till last year the developers were innovative and upgrading technology to make room for open end APIs and cross platform functionability. But this year, it would be the way the existing technology is used would be innovated and improvised upon. Content will play a very important role and creativity will be at its Pinnacle.

3. The growing number of mobile web users and the launch of iPhone 4 are a very positive indication that it would be the highly conspicuous mobile phone that will be in limelight and specialized content in all forms will be created for this immensely popular medium.

4. Perhaps its adieu to the search result monopoly of Google and other big search engine services. The WWW is already flooded with content on virtually anything and this year will see the focus shift from quality to quantity and there are chances that now the companies, who were at the mercy of Google SERP will now voluntarily want to de-index their site. Content ownership will be a major trend and this means the web marketers have to get ready formulating the new strategies for SEO.

5. Enterprises which had taken to social media techniques and features in order to increase their sales will be the driving force behind the shaping of next generation of social media. The most casual form of interaction between the customers and the employees will be looked upon as a source of information for further brand improvement and improvisation to the services.

6. Given the colossal amount of funds that are being channeled into internet marketing through social media, the marketers and the management would want to see a healthy Return on Investment and this will be the strategic force behind any change in their approach or technique. They are no more happy in just ideally pursuing the strategies or getting increased clicks or traffic in return. They want the money coming in now, through these marketing investments.

7. An interesting offline-online integration approach will be seen in the times to come which will facilitate things such as browsing the products offline on virtual shelves and processing the sales online.

8. The PR experts and media marketers will back to their battling grounds as companies will realize the importance of their knowledge of consumer psyche and amazing marketing strategies

9. It is universal knowledge that women are experts at communicating, relationship building and multi-channel interaction and the fact that 50% of the members on social media sites are women is a clear indication that theirs will be a force to reckon with in shaping the future of social media.

10. Till now, only the enterprises dealing in FMCG, electronics and other tangible products used Social Media for marketing purposes. But this year will see the convergence of educational, non profit and other varied types of organizations on popular social media sites.

Jayesh Khagram
CEO
Binary

Brands promotion is an important part of any marketing or advertising campaign. A company or an organisation applies innumerable tactics to promote its brand in the market because ultimately, the brand becomes the symbol of the organisation.

Brands promotion is integral to increasing the sales of a particular product and also maintaining customer loyalty. And reaching out to millions of consumers at a time is an example of effective brands promotion strategy but how will it be accomplished? Traditional ways of doing this involve Television commercials and outdoor advertising and marketers the world over have mastered these means of brands promotion.

The pursuit for more innovative means of brands promotion led them to capitalizing heavily on techniques of internet marketing, namely Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click, Social Media Marketing etc. With the exception of Pay Per Click (PPC), the other techniques of internet marketing do not lead to any investment, unless until the process is outsourced to media agencies.

The internet marketing techniques have opened new avenues into brands promotion, for example, organisations are developing groups and applications related to their brands and products and promoting them extensively on social media sites. An example of this is an application by the name of “Soft Touch” which has been developed by the media mangers of the Dove, the leading brand for cosmetic products.

Similarly, the marketers are coming up with new ways to increase the rank of their client organisations on the Search Engine listings of the major search engines. The world of SEO is free for everybody and it all depends on the marketing acumen of the marketers as to how soon they manage to achieve their set targets.

Online marketing and brands promotion offers a lot of advantages in comparison to the traditional means of marketing. It is very easy to keep track of the various statistics involved and the campaign can be updated or transformed with relative ease.

To make it big in the digital medium and to reap the benefits of brands promotion through online marketing techniques, all one needs is a good, user friendly and graphics rich website and basic knowledge about how and what of the World Wide Web.

The online marketing also involves email marketing and blog marketing which are being extensively used to promote a company or a brand in the digital medium. The marketers all over the world have realized the true potential of the Internet as more and more governments are aiming at increasing the digital penetration within their respective geographical territories.

Regards,

Ameya Tare

As in any other marketing domain, there is a cut throat competition between organisations as well as marketers in the field of internet marketing as well and there is absolutely no rule book or guide by which you can abide and create effective internet marketing skills. So, it is not a science but very much an art and skill and it won’t be an exaggeration to term it as ‘Black magic” because it is no child’s play to win favours from the search engine giant Google.

But it can get really easy and possible too if one follows a proper mix of various internet marketing strategies and techniques. It never pays off to only pursue search engine optimisation of get instant results with Pay Per Click Management. The former can take a very long time to deliver the results and the latter can adversely affect the Return on Investment.

Online marketers need to device a marketing campaign that has an element of right internet marketing techniques. Some of the techniques that have been paying off really well are:

On site Search Engine Optimisation: this means that the changes related to optimisation process are incorporated within the website itself. For example the content can be made keyword rich, and various relevant tags can be introduced in the meta-tags of the website so that it is easily and quickly indexed by the major search engine providers. These on site optimization techniques very briefly describe as to what your site is all about and brief, to the point thing is what major search engines look at.

Pay Per Click
How often we look at certain search results put up in a different section on Google page, on the amber background, those green links that look like the answer to all our searches and queries. These are the sponsored links which come under the category of Pay Per Click. Almost all the major search engine providers have their Pay Per Click programs and you have to pay a fee to get registered on these programs.

Social Networking
This is where the future of internet marketing truly lies as these social media sites have transformed the community of internet users from passive content readers to active content creators. The interactivity has gone up by more than 45% and the search marketers are trying their best to capitalise on the new wave of viral marketing through social media optimisation techniques.

Blog Marketing
Major companies have a blog section on their company’s website as a part of their internet marketing strategy as these blog posts help increase the visibility of the site on various search engines and also provide information to the clients and customers about various products and services of the company, the latest industry trends and much more, so that they visit the site again and again.

Jayesh Khagram

binary
www.bwsipl.com

What I like about nexus one is its feature of Voice recognition and With Android, I feel like users have more control. Contacts, calendar and email can be synced with Google, which lets user easily export the data. A user can put folders or whatever they want on phone’s home screen. It’s pretty easy to write your own programs for free.

Overall, I would still rate the iPhone higher on finish, and the iPhone is simpler for a non-tech-savvy person to understand. But polish and simplicity aren’t the most important things to me as a phone user. I want maximum functionality. In year I expect a lot of new things will show up in Android.

To wrap up I think both are really are great phones in different ways

Jayesh Khagram
Binary

The concept was then applied on the other activities of business and now is widely used to measure the efficiency of the efforts of the website developers and internet marketers. More and more businesses now want the Return on their investment in developing, maintaining a website and undertaking online marketing activities. They want their funds to be channelized in a way so as to produce maximum results.

Does that pose a threat to the web industry? On the contrary! The services of web developers and internet marketers have finally come of age and now they have got a clear, distinct goal just as any other business organisation has. The recognition of targets and the timeframe in which they have to be achieved lends a character of purpose and utility to their services which were once concerned auxiliary to the mainstream businesses.

Though this poses the challenge of generating metrics and measuring the return on investment. In case of e-commerce websites, it is easy as the ROI is directly proportional to the increase in the sales and the online transactions. But when it comes to non-commerce websites, the task becomes a little difficult. Add to it the complexity of tracking pervasive social media marketing and exchanges and the interaction and exposure metrics collection seems to be a Herculean task. But, it be done with ease and expertise if one is able to track where the response and interest is coming from and combine the response reports from various sources. SERP rankings are also an effective measure to accomplish the same.

So here we see a trend evolving and the web developers and marketers rising up to meet the challenges and satisfy the requirements. Moreover, advanced technology for reliable, quick and accurate collection and analysis of data will be in place soon because necessity is ultimately the mother of all invention!

Jayesh Khagram
Binary

So what actually is the reason behind this unprecedented surge? Facebook and Bebo addiction for one! These sites have become the ultimate rage amongst the netizens and so much so that internet marketers look upon these as an effective advertising and campaigning medium. This very addiction prompts the users to socially connect with their friends even when they are on the move, that is through their mobile phones. Driven by this urge and empowered by the mobile technology and low internet tariffs, the mobile users are consistently logging on to these networking sites.

Major mobile companies concentrated their internet related research activities to look for ways to enhance email and download applications because apparently that’s what the majority users did through their internet mobile. Keeping a track of the social media activities or creating a pool of applications for them wasn’t even considered a feasible option. It was only when networking page views and activities surpassed the figure of say 5million in some countries that the mobile operators and manufacturers arose to meet up the challenges and exploit the benefits presented by the emerging trend.

On their part the mobile manufacturers are making phones with built-in social media applications. iPhone’s one touch Facebook and LinkedIn access has prompted other phones to enhance their phone technology to make necessary adaptation with regard to resolution and graphics so as to facilitate clear viewing of these sites. The social networking sites are working on the ways and means of enabling the mobile users to get a clear view and use the applications on these sites in pretty much the same comfortable way as they would on their desktops and laptops.

Binary

What exactly is the objective of an e-marketing strategy or for that matter any marketing or advertising strategy?? The answer is obviously an increase in the sales value, revenue and profit margin. Other factors such as ‘time on site’ or ‘click through rate’ are just means to the ultimate end of achieving higher Return on Investment. But somewhere down the line, the senior marketers in the business organizations seem to be drifting away from the main aim and this does not forebode well for the organization.

The Internet Marketing has enormous potential. With such tools as Mobile Marketing, Social media Marketing Search Engine Optimization ,Email Marketing, conversion rate optimization and page land testing, marketers can collect terabytes of information about the users, and design their marketing strategies and advertising ad campaigns, so that ultimately a product stands sold. No company is interested in just giving a demo of its products and services. The conversion from potential to customer is desired by each and every business, whether in the world of physical advertising or virtual advertising, and marketers need to understand that. Now that, a higher proportion of ad budget will be spent on advertising on the internet, the marketers need to focus more on increasing the return on investment of the organizations.

Moreover, the cost per click needs to be streamlined as there is no limit to the number of viewers of an ad and this may mean higher ad expenditure for the business. An efficient way of curtailing the cost per click, rather cost per ‘irrelevant’ click is to Geo-target the ads so that they are displayed only to the people residing in a specific country or region, who have the higher propensity of buying the product being advertised. Till today, the most used technique for targeted ad placement used by major search engines cum advertisers is through tracking the search history of a particular group of users and then analyzing the same for a more generic view.

The beauty of the web lies in its capability to provide a common platform for the advertisers to access and present their products to a trillion denizens according to their choice and preferences but it would all be in vain if the real motive of earning profits is sidelined.

by Jayesh Khagram
www.bwsipl.com

Now what makes Facebook such an enticing and attractive marketing media?? Well, consider the statistics: it has over 30 million registered members throughout the world and almost 15 billion visits in a month. Which other platform could grant more visibility and higher potential for your ads??

And how do you go about exploiting the immense potential at your disposal?? Before you embark on any marketing strategy, just make sure you or your company or your brand is registered with the Facebook as the entry here is by permission only. And once you are there, there is no end to the experiments you can do with various application tools, features and facilities of the social networking site. Create a community of your brand or allied ad and invite people to join it. Even if one person joins it, your community ad will be displayed in his News feed, and lo!, the viral marketing has set in. News feed is one of the most popular features that viral marketing marketers vouch by.

Facebook Applications: Facebook has loads of funny, entertaining as well as interesting applications and it also gives its users a chance to design their own applications. Marketers and advertisers can use this platform for creating customized applications focusing subtly or directly on their client’s products or services. Moreover, users have to invite another set of members from their friends list to use this application before they can see the generated results or add the application to their profile. An application can be as simple as one that enables the users to send virtual gifts or it can be as complex as Farmville or FishVille.

Referral Marketing: lots of applications encourage the users to market or enhance the popularity of the application by posting a link to it on their personal blogs, websites, forums, Facebook Wall or their friend’s post. The idea is simple. You have done your part, let the users do the rest for you. Affiliate of referral marketing is an integral part of internet marketing and the e-marketing experts are now trying to use the concept within the domain of Facebook as well.

The charm of Facebook lies in its ability to connect millions of people at a time and that’s what makes it an ideal viral marketing medium. Hardly ever you will come across customized or one-on-one applications that target a single user or community, though there are some marketers who do that and Facebook disappoints no one. When pursued strategically, even this technique can work wonders.

Binary – Webmaster

Build your team (existing or new)

List all the people who are part of the project team
Factor all the skills that are required
Talk to each member about his/her skill set
Match people to the skills & tasks required

Once this is ready, it is important to list down:

Steps to schedule Management

1) Know which deadlines are sacrosanct (hard and fast) and which have some flexibility
2) No task should last longer than 4-6 weeks
3) Don’t schedule more detail than you can yourself oversee
4) Develop schedules according to what is logistically possible
5) Record all time segments in the same increments such as in days or weeks
6) Have some flexibility in project schedule for handling problems that might occur later

Believe me this works wonders for execution. If you feel something more can be added, please comment & I will update the post.

Jayesh Khagram