Recently in Social Networking Category

It may not be a Wii game but I found myself intrigued by an MP3 player novelty called “Live Jam Band” where 3 little aliens with instruments play to the music coming from your iPod (obviously, I’m easily amused). I clicked on the ad to view a pop up window with the information about the product.   The price, the button to add to your cart, the button to buy now online – all normal items that have been on the online shopping scene for years now.  

 

In Facebook, I was automatically taken to a page where it posts the link and I can put a comment…

 

I hit post and went to my profile and voila! Listed on my profile for everyone to see was a link to the product that I’m interested in buying and my comment that “I might buy this”.

For those who doubt the strength and length of social networking, this tool just goes to show you how powerful it can be.  Standard marketing techniques (ie newspaper flyers) may still be around for years to come, however, with tools like this in the making, viral marketing may very well completely overtake traditional ways of advertising.  Learning to harness social networks for sales and advertising will be key to catch the eye of the of the mobile and Internet-savvy generation.

 For the record, while I did share the project with others in my social networks, I decided not to get the product.  Perhaps someone who follows me on Twitter or is friends with me on Facebook will!

The number of new articles on these topics per day is at least 50... 50 good ones.  How do you keep up?  How do you know which ones to read?  How can you filter the god from the bad?

You don't have to.  We do that for you.

Josh Williams, Shannon Sell, and I (Brian Carter) post the best of the best SEO, PPC, social media, and online marketing articles in a special FriendFeed "SEM, SEO, PPC, social media, media placement links, articles" room.  (If you don't use FriendFeed, check that out too- it's a way to aggregate all your most important social networking feeds in one place.)

Get most useful, most relevant-to-the-real-business-world info there.  Check it out!

Last week, Fuel Interactive's CEO Will McIntosh and I spoke to a small group of association executives at the South Carolina Society of Association Executives' 3rd Annual Conference about how they can use social networking to bring their communications with their membership into the 2.0 era.

Listen to the Social Networking and Web 2.0 for Professional Associations presentation mp3 (which is funny and fun with lots of laughs and learning too- and way better than this description of it) and view the PowerPoint while you listen.

I wasn't too aware of the whole "professional associations" world (also called professional bodies) before we were asked to speak at this conference, but every profession from lawyers to doctors to asphalt industry professionals has an association, they all have memberships, and they're perfect to make use of web 2.0- they already have people, they just need to connect them.

Here are some of the things we discussed:

• Web 2.0, Blogging, bunches of web 2.0 tools
• Blogs vs. forums vs. listservs

Sites and Services:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Ning- Overview and Features
• Examples of Ning networks, some of which are associations
• Blogger, Wordpress

Social Networking and Web 2.0

• The best 2.0 sites for associations with limited resources
• Matching your social networking platform and your membership demographics
• Age and demographics issues with usage of 2.0 networks
• Quantcast demographic data on social networking sites

Making Your Association More 2.0

• Incentivizing members members to use 2.0 sites and services
• Using your existing email list to get people involved
• Leveraging membership to do the work for you!

Issues Associations May Have with Web 2.0

• Privacy Issues with blogs, Ning, and LinkedIn
• Comment moderation, spam filtering
• Professional discussions, discussion of legislation

Listen to the Social Networking and Web 2.0 for Professional Associations mp3 (which is funny and fun with lots of laughs and learning too- and way better than this description of it) and view the PowerPoint while you listen.