Using Social Media To Drive Traffic

Question: What is viral adevrtising?
Answer: When consumers like what they see, they pass it on ...like a virus.

SMO, or Social Media Optimization, helps build website traffic by using social media based websites. The dawning of web 2.0 has seen many different social media websites crop up in an equally large number of different guises. Content sharing, social bookmarking, and collaborative websites form the basis of this initiative and it is these types of website that you need to use in order to leverage the power of the social web.

SMO As Guerrilla Marketing

The nature of Social Media Optimization is such that it could be considered form of guerrilla marketing. Website owners and blog owners have the choice of either investing money or their own skills and time in order to generate traffic from social sites. As long as your efforts are directed appropriately, the more work you put in the more reward you will reap.

SMO As A Link Building Technique

Social optimization also has a happy side effect - it helps to build your link profile so you will usually gain search engine traffic in the long term. Becoming a part of an online community is essential to your social optimization and this, in turn, will naturally provide links to your website. The links will usually be from relevant pages based on a similar topic to that of your own page. The more popular social sites are also given a lot of weight by certain search engines.

Optimize Your Existing Site

Create genuinely interesting, intriguing, or informative pages. Includes images, links, video, and collaborative tools so that visitors really get involved when they do visit your site. SMO is basically digital word-of-mouth and if your website doesn't offer some kind of appealing experience to your visitors, then it simply won't attract the positive word-of-mouth that you want.

Add new pages, if necessary, so that you can include more information. However, don't just add pages for the sake of it - ensure that each page really does have something unique to offer. A website still needs to be well structured.

Get A Blog

Add a blog. Every website has potential blog posts in it so find yours and start blogging regularly. Blog posts tend to attract links from other blog posts and those in turn will spread the word of your website. The more popular your blog becomes, the more value it is perceived to offer and the more visitors you will continue to get.

Be active in those blogs that are within your industry and use your link where permitted and relevant. Don't spam because that will lose you more friends than it will make but if you offer relevant information and a forum or blog allows you to link to it, then offer an insightful comment and provide a link.

Be Active

Being active is a vital part to your whole SMO campaign. Simply registering with social bookmarking sites and content sharing sites is not enough. You need to be involved, post regularly, and generally become a part of the community. If you don't have the time or the inclination to do this then find somebody else to do it instead.

Some Social Sites To Join

You really do reap what you sow in terms of SMO. Determine the sites that are most suitable to your website, join them, and become an active member. Choose some broad topic sites as well as some that are specific to those interested in the industry in which you operate or topic that you cover. Look at social news submission sites, content sharing sites, bookmarking, and networking sites and try to get a broad coverage of all of them. Here are just a few of the sites you should seriously consider using:

Social News/Media Sharing Websites

* Reddit - Reddit is a very popular social news website that boasts a lot of subscribers and covers a wide range of topics.
* Digg - Initially, Digg was reserved to technology and related topics but is now a broad topic news site that again has a lot of subscribers and regular readers.
* Newsvine - Not as popular as the two above but offering a slightly more formal tone to its content. Again, a good range of topics are covered.

Social Networking Sites

* MySpace - It may be largely riddled with spam but there are still too many genuine users for you to ignore MySpace. You don't have to be an unsigned band to take advantage either.
* Facebook - Has caused quite a stir and offers users the chance to create and distribute their own applications as well as content. Another very popular site.
* LinkedIn - LinkedIn is a social networking site dedicated to professionals and businesses. It can really help to build a huge network of partners, customers, and other useful contacts in a business network.

Social Bookmarking Websites

* del.icio.us - Register, store bookmarks that you find useful, and include a bookmark to your own website and use a public profile.
* Stumble Upon - Same again. Alternatively you can add a Stumble icon to each of your pages, blog posts, and other media and let your readers do the walking for you.

Buttons For Your Pages

Many social websites offer a button that your readers or visitors can use to automatically add a page. Bookmarking and content sharing sites, in particular, have these buttons and if you've ever read a website or an article site then you will have seen the Digg This and Stumble buttons at the bottom of each entry. Users registered with these sites can click the button and quickly add your page. The most popular websites are usually displayed on the high traffic home pages delivering yet more visitors to your site.

Offering Quality

The Social Internet has opened up a whole new avenue for promoting your business, but it needs to be done properly and carefully. Simply tagging, bookmarking, and sharing every page you have regardless of its quality will not bring you the desired results. You may find that it does you more harm than good in the long run.

Google Android Phone is here with T-Mobile

This week, Google unveiled the fruits of its partnership with T-Mobile and its fledgling operating system Android with the G1, a new handset from manufacturer HTC.


The 3G smartphone with sliding keyboard and a limited touch interface integrates multiple Google products like Maps and Mail in ways no phone has before, incorporating things like Street View in Maps and a linked phone-web calendar to allow simple synching of on-the-go tasks with master planners. For the hardcore Google fiend in your life, it seems like the perfect fit, but will it take on the iPhone? The answer may be in the development of Android, a fairly open platform based on Linux. Richard Ting, VP & ECD, mobile and emerging platforms at R/GA, thinks the Android system could be "very disruptive," especially contrasted with the control exerted by Apple on iPhone applications. "Developers like to create for open platforms," Ting says. "The openness of Android may force Apple to loosen its policies around its somewhat random application approval process for its App Store." Pre-ordered G1s shipped October 22nd, and cost $179 with a two-year T-Mobile contract.

Android's evolution may also send waves up the tree to the carrier network-level, Ting says, laying out a scenario where a massive amount of Android applications flood the market and saturate carrier networks, corrupting connections to others on the network. "Carriers are also worried about their networks being used mainly as a pipe to get content back and forth between corporate content creators and their consumers," Ting says. "I believe that the carriers want to support the evolution of better content for mobile, but they are going to want their piece of the pie as well."

Ting cites the five-row QWERTY keyboard and mapping (the G1 has a compass that shifts based on where you're facing in Google Maps) as well as a higher-resolution camera G1's advantages over the iPhone, and says he can't wait to test out the newcomer's DRM-free Amazon music store integration. "I'm also looking forward to the new deal that Android signed with Visa, especially the application that will allow Visa consumers to make mobile payments in retail stores from their Android device," Ting says the G1, which will also be able to read barcodes, may spur retailers into investing in solutions to make mobile payments a reality in the U.S

GOOGLE Analytics adds enterprise version

Google on Wednesday unveiled several new business-oriented capabilities for its Web analytics service, Google Analytics.

The new features include Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reports, a data export application programming interface (private beta), integrated reporting for AdSense publishers (private beta), multidimensional data visualizations called "Motion Charts," and interface improvements.
Google has posted several videos on YouTube that explain the function of these new features.

Advanced Segmentation provides a way to analyze subsets of online traffic data. These subsets can be predefined, like "Paid Traffic," or defined by custom criteria.

Custom Reporting allows Google Analytics users to build reports using only the data they want, in a format determined by the user.

Jeff Campbell, co-founder and VP of product development for search marketing agency Resolution Media, said in a statement that Google Analytics manages to meet enterprise requirements while still being easy to use.

Motion Charts provide a way to visualize Web traffic data over time using motion, colors, and positional representation.

A limited number of Google Analytics users are testing the Google Analytics application programming interface. The API allows companies to have programmatic access to Google Analytics data, so that Web traffic data can be used in conjunction with other applications or data sources.

Google also is integrating Google Analytics with AdSense, its advertising network for Web publishers. "By integrating your AdSense account with a new or existing Analytics account, you'll have access to in-depth reports about user activity on your site," explains Vineesha Malkani, part of Google's AdSense publisher support group, in a blog post. "In addition to the wealth of metrics already available in Analytics such as unique visitors and visitor language, you'll now have access to granular reports that break down AdSense performance both by page and by referring site."

Google is rolling out this feature gradually. The invitation, when it is enabled, will appear to AdSense publishers at the top of their "Overview" and "Advanced Reports" pages.

Flash CS4 from FLASH DEN

In their first full-cycle release since acquiring Macromedia you don’t have to be a detective on CSI Miami to see Adobe’s fingerprints all over Flash CS4. In a live product demonstration broadcast on Adobe TV this morning we got to see a preview of the direction Adobe will be going with Flash and it’s all about seamless integration.

check out the new features from ADOBE here

One of the first things I noticed is how similar the new features compare to AfterEffects. The Motion Editor in AfterEffects is excellent and you’ll see it’s basically identical. Object based animation is also very similar to that in AfterEffects in essence giving each symbol it’s own timeline. Another useful feature straight from AfterEffects will show you a series of dots, each representing frames of your path giving you precise control of your animations.

They lifted a couple pieces from Illustrator as well. Most notably what is known as an object sprayer, a tool used to paint symbols to the stage with varying dimensions and the Deco feature with the ability to quicly create kaleidoscope-like effects and fills. The Spray Brush and Deco should open up new possibilities and produce some cool effects.

Can you believe I’ve waited four paragraphs to mention the Bone Tool? The Bone Tool applies inverse kinematics to any 2D image or shape. This could extremely cool if it means Flash will auto-cut an image where you place the skeleton but I can’t find any information on it so we’ll have to wait and see. Either way, seeing the Bone Tool in action is an absolute treat. Who wants to develop flash communities with life-like movable avatars? Everyone!

Pixel Bender is an amazing way to create custom filters and effects and deserves it’s own article. We’ll spend more time examining uses for it later on.

Motion presets give you the ability to apply a set motion to any object. There are some canned effects such as ‘fly in left’ that you can choose from or you can create your own.


And finally! You can search the Library!!! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked for a search field in the library only to inflame my sad realization that there was no such field. Thank you Adobe! Thank you!!

ADOBE ships Flash Player 10

Adobe Systems Inc. began shipping its Adobe Flash Player 10 browser plug-in Wednesday with new features aimed at helping designers and developers build interactive content and online videos.

This version of Flash, which Adobe launched in a beta version in May, includes support for custom filters and special effects, native 3-D transformation and animation, advanced audio processing and GPU hardware acceleration, Adobe said. It also includes a new text engine aimed at providing designers and developers with more text layout options.

"A lot of the features in [Flash Player] 10 are all about providing interactive designers and developers unprecedented creative control," said Tom Barclay, senior product marketing manager in Adobe's platform business unit. "Designers and developers ... can transform and animate 2-D content into the 3-D space. That functionality is now exposed in the form of tooling in Flash Creative Suite 4 (CS4) to allow designers to do 3-D transformation animation without having to write code."

That support for 3-D transformation is one way Flash Player 10 extends the capabilities of the Adobe CS4 (also shipping today) with new levels of Flash integration, he added.

For example, with the new Adobe Pixel Bender, users can create custom filters to animate effects or change the effects on rich media context at runtime, Adobe noted. Pixel Bender is the same technology used in Adobe's After Effects CS4, which creates motion graphics and visual effects for film and broadcast.

The new player also has new application-level audio processing using a calibration engine and advanced sound APIs that allow developers to dynamically generate audio and create new audio applications like music sequences, Barclay added. For example, users can extract data from an MP3 file and use that data to create an audio visualizer to show audio waves.

Barclay noted that a third-party software vendor called NoteFlight has created a software application that will use this feature to allow people to create their own musical scores by dragging and dropping musical notes onto a staff; the application can then play back the notes.

Adobe is available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, with support for Solaris expected later this year. All of the new features and performance improvements introduced in Adobe Flash Player 10 will be available in Adobe Air later this year for designers and developers to build applications that run outside a browser.