It’s time to catchup on some missed out reading and enjoy the break. So here is a collection of 10 of the best Social Media resources that you love to read.

So I’m not going to second guess these related posts – I’m sure there will be stuff about Twitter, Facebook, Email Marketing and Foursquare.

Damien Saunders

So what do you think of the new look for Twitter? It’s feeling cleaner and the style change adds some freshness.

But is this the first step in the wrong direction for brand pages? Will we all end-up with old-skool MySpace style pages?

Damien Saunders

Are you using Foursquare? Do you want your retail stores or promotions staff to start to use Foursquare too? If you already use social media marketing, then approx 15% of business are already using Foursquare

Here’s 5 easy ways to start using Foursquare today.

Claim your business

Foursquare is a free business directory with all entries submitted by your customers. You need to claim your business.

Integrate Foursquare Checkin with traditional advertising

Feature the Foursquare checkin in your next print or email campaign and get customers to checkin. Also promote the Foursquare checkin on your  website, Twitter account and Facebook fanpage.

Followup via Twitter or Facebook

Send a reply to any messages on Twitter or Facebook for people who shout out that they just checkedin at one of your stores … even better monitor for message about people being the Mayor of your store.

Run a Foursquare competition

Start with an introductory offer of a free coffee for anyone that checks in at one of your stores. As this starts to grow you can try a number of other competitions like:

• Run a Foursquare treasure hunt
• Run a Foursquare scavenger hunt
• Run a random checkin competition
• Offers for Mayors

And remember to check that staff of the stores are correctly flagged as staff so their checkins don’t count for competition purposes.

Track the stats

Use tools like FoursquareX or CheckinMania to find out how many people visit your business.

‘

Damien Saunders

Mobile marketing and Foursquare are two words that are just right for each other. Foursquare has an impressive base of users and is extremely popular in big cities like London – which means it’s ideal for any business or brand to get started with mobile marketing and hyper-local search.

Focus your marketing on mobile – integrate offline with online

Now that mobile marketing is becoming the focus of all your online marketing activities (if not, why not?) all your offline marketing needs to be integrated with this mobile, online world.

Foursquare has the tools for loyalty, promotions and analytics

Foursquare is facing tough competition from Facebook, Google and any of those voucher / deal-of-the day services. Yet the range of loyalty tools, promotion options and improvements in analytics means Foursquare has plenty to offer. Before starting out with paid mobile search campaigns or investing in vouchers – have you done everything you can with Foursquare?

What do you think? Have you had success using Foursquare for mobile marketing or local search?

Damien Saunders

The Definitive Guide to Foursquare has been updated for 2011

Have you been looking to use social media for marketing? Trying to think of creative ideas to get more people to visit your shops? Foursquare has a number of options for retailers to come up with engaging experiences to get more people in your shops.

This guide contains all you need to get started with marketing using Foursquare. It covers:

• Statistics you need to know
• Ideas for making your business marketing with Foursquare better
• What key incentives you should have to reward Mayors
• Tips for tracking and monitoring
• much much more …

Damien Saunders

If you’re getting started with Social Media marketing then you need at least 1 web based tool to help you.

For most businesses and individuals, social media marketing starts and ends with Tweetdeck. Which provides an all-in-one solution for pushing content direct from your machine. You need better tools for planning and managing your social media marketing.

However browser based tools for social media marketing are better suited for team or office environs – or if you’re like me, someone on the road in different offices who can’t have Tweetdeck open all the time.

Klout

Keep track of your social media status and influence, albeit using Klout’s own scoring. If you’re score was 0 today, then with Klout you can keep a baseline and only watch your sphere of influence grow.

Damien’s Klout score of 50 is an ambitious goal for most. Track your Klout in a diary and review the score each quarter (or monthly if you’re that curious).

GoSquared

Real-time website visitor monitoring with GoSquared is achievable with their WordPress plugin. GoSquared, previously featured in a list of must have WordPress plugins. It is arguably on the best new tools in CRM – allowing you to look at customer intent and potential turn-off factors.

CoTweet

CoTweet has been praised before on my blog. I think CoTweet is the best free tool for managing Twitter in a team / office environment.. There are now paid-for services with more features, however HootSuite is not one.

CoTweet’s best feature is its calendaring tool for scheduling tweets when you’re sleep – and it works with a custom Bit.ly Pro URL shortener.

Postrank

Postrank has now been aquired by Google. That doesn’t mean its all bad news for getting a look at your rankings and general importance. Postrank is very good at monitoring Twitter, re-sharing content on Facebook for you and tracking engagement to your web pages.

Bit.ly Pro

The other tool I have to mention is Bit.ly pro now that this is free … why not get your own domain name so you too can share links like I do with http://damiens.ws. But that’s not all that Bit.ly Pro can do.

To find out more about starting your own social media marketing read on.

Damien Saunders

The second release candidate for the next version of WordPress 3.2 is here. If you haven’t started testing 3.2, now is the time. Previous experience would make this the final RC before the real deal.

Should I update to this release candidate?

As this is a release candidate you shouldn’t use this on a really important live site – but it does mean it’s pretty stable and useful. You should find that most popular plugins and themes have no issues as developers have been working since RC1.

WordPress 3.2 what you can expect

WordPress 3.2 has already had 2 beta releases – so this RC is getting close to the finished product. The key features you can find in the next release are:

Improved look n feel / user experience to the Admin pages (finally)

Integrated the admin homepage header (with the WordPress Logo) with the left hand menu

Admin bar has changed for single install and network admins

Admin left hand menu has changed with big text to collapse / hide

The 3.2RC release note talks about 350+ bugs / tracs closed

Damien Saunders

It’s time to catchup on some missed out reading and get out in the sun. So here is a collection of 10 of the best social media resources for you to read.

So I’m not going to second guess these related posts – I’m sure there will be stuff about Emailvision, Facebook, brand reputation and cross channel marketing.

- SPECIAL PROMO ALERT -

Ever feel that social media & online marketing is too difficult for you?

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Coming Soon: Exclusive members only report
A definitive new report for anyone wanting to get started with integrated marketing and social media.

Damien Saunders

The team at Emailvision have contacted me a lot in the past 3 days … since I wrote a short article on cross channel campaign problems and a lack of testing.

I will say that Emailvision team that I have spoken to have all been great – it’s good to know they switched on people who are passionate about their company and what they do.

The problem with integrated cross-channel marketing is …

James from Emailvision resolved / pointed out a few things -

1. If you use an HTTPS connection to Facebook there was an issue (now fixed)

2. there was an issue with replicating data to the Akamai CDN (now fixed)

3. Facebook use another party to identify spammers which is part based on domain name (not in their control).

4. The link to contact Emailvision from Facebook was now going to an error page (today)

Campaign Testing is import for your brand & domain name reputation

As I wrote this week … on email and brand reputation, it is very very very very important to get your campaign tested end to end to be sure its all going to work.

It’s also important, unfortunately to change things if someone else breaks something. Your customer / potential customer doesn’t know anything about Akamai or CDN or HTTPS connection issues.

So in the next couple of weeks I hope to go meet a London based rep from Emailvision and get a good demo of their tool.

Damien Saunders

What could we do to make this site more useful? That’s a good question … and thanks to Kiss Insights its really easy to ask this of your website visitors.

It’s only one answer & takes one second

Web surveys should not be a bore and they should not be too long. We’re all so busy now and being asked to spend 15 mins on a survey is pointless.

I guess that’s what makes the KISS approach so powerful – keep it short and simple. With one question surveys, you get a broad number of responses and you avoid deep-dive surveys which can lead to focusing on just 1 customer’s personal experience.

Combine Kiss insights with website analytics

Using the results from Kiss insights you can check your web traffic logs / Google Analytics and start to look at what are turn-offs.

Take a deep dive into your analytics – like your 404 error pages and maybe you’ll end up with more actionable insights.

Damien Saunders

Digital marketing has its benefits mainly that it’s easy to launch a social media campaign without any prior relationship with the victim.

I’m more annoyed at the damage young companies do to their brand, reputation and domain-name … at wasted opportunities from legitimate startups who just spam any contacts in one e-mail blast.

Last week, I got an email sent to me with someone elses info – yet it was an invite to join their London business network. The business owner even replied to me. What a wasted opportunity to get it right at the first step.

WTF – you don’t know me so don’t spam from legitimate e-mail marketing services

It’s nice to know that companies like Mailchimp and Aweber make it so easy to send out an e-mail blast – but really, if you didn’t read the terms of service, if you bulk upload to Mailchimp, you have to CONFIRM that you legitimately know me.

So why is it companies insist on sending spam and then violate their agreement with Mailchimp or Aweber?

And why would you wast that first contact for your new business by being ignorant and spamming all those potentials?

Really – you only damage your company domain & reputation

Think again … if you’re a new business never use cold email lists because:

1. Google Mail, Yahoo & Hotmail along with other email service providers will automatically send all your email to SPAM folders and you’ll never recover from that

2. Service providers like Mailchimp will cancel your account forever

3. You’ll never get anywhere with SEO, Adwords, etc if Google decides your domain is bad.

First Launch E-mail Strategy

To get going with first launch and early email marketing campaigns, use all the contacts you personally know. 70% of them will open the email if they know its from you and none of them are likely to unsubscribe are they.

I don’t claim to be an expert at digital marketing – but I know customer experience is majorly important. You’ve got to get your first contact right.

Damien Saunders

Tweet Tweet — bang bang

WordTwit Pro is here … this could be the best new tool for Twitter & WordPress

If you want to find out how to enable WordPress and Twitter then get in contact.

Damien Saunders

Delicious, that’s delicious.com or del.icio.us for those old enough -  has finally updated its Firefox extension – though it is still a beta version, the updated extension is available in the Mozilla Add-ons applet-store

If you gave up on Delicious for syncing bookmarks cause browsers added their own tools like Google Bookmarks or Firefox Sync then maybe this isn’t for you.

If you’re still in love with the idea of social bookmarking – tagging and sharing your bookmarks … then this is something for you.

Damien Saunders

Delicious, that’s delicious.com or del.icio.us for those who can remember it – is one of the original web 2.0 social media services that specialised in social-bookmarking. We should learn to love Delicious again now that they’ve got new owners.

Delicious is the original web 2.0 service we still love

A few years back when something called web 2.0 was really a fluffy concept, Del.icio.us was the easy to understand social-bookmarking website. Delicious made web 2.0 easy to understand for social media virgins.

It was easy to tell people 2 key benefits of Delicious such as  - sync your bookmarks online so you never lose them and sync your bookmarks between home and work.

Curated Search Results – Tagging & Sharing

I still use Delicious for research, that’s because adding a bookmark to Delicious includes the ‘original’ concept of tagging – which makes it easy to find bookmarks again – and then you can search for what others have saved to Delicious.

One of the best uses of Delicious is the curated search results – Looking at Tag Result pages on Delicious gives you an idea as to what links are most bookmarked making it easy to reduce a SERP (search engine result page) down to the most important results (think about what Google is doing with social search).

Here’s a link to things tagged web design … so go to it … start doing research using Delicious.

Can I flick through you bookmarks? Social Bookmarking

Delicious’ best feature as far as I’m concerned is social bookmarking. This basically means that Damien’s bookmarks on Delicious are shared publicly and tagged for easy cross referencing.

In a way social bookmarking is exposing my interests (and myself) and there is an almost voyeuristic pleasure to be gained from flicking through someone else’s bookmarked sites and articles. Just like being caught up flicking through someone’s photos on Flickr – flicking through someones bookmarks can be just as interesting – or not.

What are you using Delicious for?

Damien Saunders

Just wondering if this works — I’m trying to make MarsEdit work with a plugin that I love called TwitterTools

If you know about this plugin and using external editors then let me know.

Damien Saunders

I’m not one to always login to Facebook … It’s a good week if I don’t log in at all. But for about 500 million people Facebook is pretty important.

As if Facebook really needed to tell you to bookmark their site if you already go there – but this bookmarket / on-site advertising is a fresh change to the usual page prompting you to login from your mobile.

Damien Saunders

Damien Saunders

Startup Valuations got you feeling low? Maybe its time to buy into the dotcom bubble before it bursts. So ride the social media marketing wave …

via Guardian.co.uk

Damien Saunders

Australians spend 1 in 5 minutes using social media sites. Social Networking usage was about 22% in December 2010 says comScore.

The statistics reveal that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn are some of the most popular destinations. If you add into this instant messaging then the total rises to 35% – which is probably a more realistic definition of social networking.

There is a presentation you can download with really good insights on internet usage across Australia.

Damien Saunders

As more people become aware of HTML5 it’s time to review how tagging written content will impact search engine optimisation. Tags like <b > and <i > are redundant – instead <strong > and <em > have been in use for a few years by many blogging and web developer tools. Now the HTML5 standard recognises that <b> and <i> should only be used for visual style.

You can do more with CSS styles

If you remember writing HTML back in the 90′s you might be more comfortable using <b > and <i > .. I still prefer to use <br> too. It’s just age, I think.

But seriously – and I’m learning this myself … it’s easier to setup a CSS stylesheet to do the same and more. Perhaps the most obvious reason is that tags like <B> can be plastered all throughout at blog post and end up looking alot LIKE IM SHOUTING WITHOUT ANY MEANING.

The point here is that using CSS you can set the look and feel of text – I like this highlighter effect. I like how I can update the style at anytime and know that this style will be applied across the site.

WordPress and other tools support <strong> & <em>

Somewhere along the way, most web blogs switched to using <strong> and <em> instead. WordPress made this switch a few years back. You probably don’t notice, you probably didn’t care. You’re missing out then.

<strong> & <em> are critical thanks to HTML5

The careful use of <strong> and <em> need to be included in your SEO optimisation strategy. That’s because the HTML5 standard has recognised these tags as being important to the text but that <b> and <i> are for markup and not for indicating importance.

To be clear <b> is styling your text to make it look bold but <strong> tell any reader or search engine that the text is important. So it makes good sense to highlight a few keywords with <strong>. It also makes sense to not highlight everything as <strong> instead use <b> or another CSS style to achieve the same thing!.

Good luck with tagging your content

Ok I had a lot of fun writing this particular blog post – browsers like HTML and tags, so it became quite a task to write a post using <em> and <strong> .. remember careful tagging of your content is good. Careless tagging of content is just noise

Damien Saunders