What is Social Media Marketing

on Friday, March 20, 2009
You must have heard about Social Media Marketing or marketing using Web 2.0 tools and would have definitely wondered what is this all about?? When was the first version of the web launched after all??

Well, to explain you Social Media Marketing, let me first explain you, what is Web 2.0! The following video will be very helpful in explaining this:


This video is one of my favorites and is very informational as you can see for yourself. Coming back to the main topic, every thing that you see around on the net today is Web 2.0 or Social Media (As these are very social)- Blogs, Social Networking, RSS, Social Bookmarking, Photo Sharing etc, they all form part of Web 2.0.

Since all these platforms are user friendly, they are very popular among those on the internet, mainly the younger audience and they love to spend a lot of time on it. Thus, by promoting your site through these mediums, you can tap into a large - highly active set of internet users. However, you need to be really careful in putting yourself in front of this audience cause if they dont like what you say, you may end up getting a real bashing!!

Popular Social Media Marketing tools are:

1. Blogs - WordPress, Blogger, Typad
2. Social Bookmarking - Digg, Delicious, Furl, StumbleUpon and many others
3. Social Networking - FaceBook, MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, Ecademy
4. RSS Feed Distribution
5. Posdcasting
6. Video Distribution - YouTube, MetaCafe
7. Micro Blogging - Twitter (The next big thing on the internet!)

I will discuss in my future posts how you can best formulate your strategy for each one of the above to get the maximum out your Social Media Campaign!

In the meantime, you can read more about Social Media Marketing from SEOMoz.org.

How to know whether your site has been penalized by the Search Engines

on Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Since most of us dont really know about Search Engines and SEO, we do end up being on the receiving end of our SEO vendors' wrong doings. Taking advantage of our "lack of knowledge", SEO Companies (Not all, but few bad ones), will do things that might get you results in the short run, but are undesirable in the longer run. They adopt "Black Hat" or "Spammy" techniques to get your site in Top 10 for your desired keyword, earn your praise, collect the money and then start looking for another prey. But once they are gone, you will not even realise when your site is penalized and you start loosing out on your business.

Hence, it is very important that you have proper "Alarming" system in place, which will alert you whenever your site is penalized and how you can get it removed! You also need to know the various Black Hat or Spam techniques which might get you in trouble in the future.

Read this very interesting and very useful blog post by Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMoz. Although the post if very lengthy and is very technical, it will be good learning experience :) (I really like the flow chart!).

So, read on and hope you like it info. Do post me if you need any clarifications on any of the posts!