Posts Tagged social media
20 Ways SOPA Can Affect The Internet
Posted by dean in Guest Posts, Technology, Tips & Advice on December 30, 2011
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is now before the American Congress, waiting to be passed or not. With online piracy at an all time high, the US feels that it’s become almost impossible to manage traffic across borders. While the Congress ponders over this, the internet population is concerned as to how SOPA will affect the internet.
- Death Penalty For Online Businesses: SOPA authorizes sites that are reported for copyright infringement to be cut off from their domain name. ISPs can force advertisers and payment processors to suspend their services to the site.
- Sites Blocked And Sued For User Content: Sites which host copyright content uploaded by users can be blacklisted and blocked via ISPs, search engines and payment processors. This can be done without the benefit of a court hearing.
- Copyright Holders Can Sue Sites: Sites hosting copyrighted material uploaded unknowingly by users can be sued now and held accountable. Such sites have to comply within 5 days or risk total loss.
- Social Media Held Accountable: Social Media sites such as FaceBook will be held accountable for every copyright violation that their users commit. These sites will now be forced to proactively censor user content.
- Small Tech Companies To Suffer: Recently started tech startup companies may not have the resources to comply with SOPA standards and may have to close down as a result.
- Free Speech Rights Will Be Censored: Online businesses, user-generated content sites and social media sites will try to play it safe and start heavily censoring user content. This can stifle users’ free speech rights, making the internet a risky place to say anything at all.
- Downloading Free Content Will Become Risky: Users may not know which materials are still under copyright. This makes it risky to download content that is actually free or perceived to be free, as the site will be penalized.
- Legitimate Business Will Be Held Liable: The radical restructuring of internet laws may expose legitimate innovators and businesses to liability. This will only give rise to lawsuits, fewer jobs and lesser venture capital investment.
- Open Source Sites May Shut Down: Sites that operate open source software such as browsers may be shut down under SOPA. This is because several websites use the open source code for their copyrighted businesses, which in turn targets sites providing the same technology as open source.
- DNS System Will Be Undermined: SOPA requires internet service providers to filter DNS queries for websites that contain copyright infringed content. This act will undermine the DNS system integrity and also heavily tax websites that may unknowingly contain copyrighted material.
- Internet Speeds May Slow Down: SOPA would impose DNS filtering and also force ISPs to prevent access to certain sites. This means each ISP has to inspect the entire Internet traffic of its user base, which will consume additional resources and slow down ISP service.
- Downgrade Attacks Will Increase: A user running a secure application such as banking won’t know if a resolution failure is because of a court order or because of a hacked nameserver. This may cause an increase in downgrade attacks and hacking.
- Use Of Illegal Web Proxies Will Increase: Illegal web proxies that select non-US servers will be developed to circumvent DNS redirection. This will only cause havoc with the internet security protocol, Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC).
- Emergency Proxy Servers May Be Made Illegal: During emergencies such as the recent Hurricane Katrina, several proxy servers were legally set up to enable ad-hoc networks. However, such proxies can be used to thwart copyright enforcement and made illegal by SOPA.
- Streaming Sites Will Be Penalized: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and similar sites that host user content can be criminalized, because SOPA fails to distinguish between commercial and non-commercial conduct. Due to the lack of concrete definitions, SOPA can criminalize conduct that is actually permissible under current law.
- Online Album Sites Will Shut Down: SOPA may force album sites such as Etsy, Flickr and Vimeo to shut down. These sites have no way of knowing at this point which albums or photos are copyrighted.
- Browsers Will Be Penalized: Any website that links to copyright infringed material will be penalized or sued and this includes browsers that throw up search results linking to copyrighted material.
- ISPs Will Infringe On Privacy: The intense monitoring and censorship authorized to ISPs will give rise to deep packet inspection, which means minute inspection of user data and communication.
- Legitimate Links Can Be Deleted: In their effort to clean up links to copyright infringed material, legitimate links to the same content can also be deleted, since SOPA does not provide concrete directions in this matter.
- Browser Ability To Generate Fair Links Will Be Impacted: This means that users will not be able to search for the content they want.
Five Ways to Use Social Media to Grow Your Blog
Blogging is easy. Getting people to read your blog isn’t. Thankfully, you don’t just have to sit, wait and hope people stumble across your work – the vast social sphere that is social media offers a number of ways to drive more prying eyes to your blog.
Promote It
Yes, this is the obvious one – no-one’s going to read your blog if you don’t get out there and tell people about it. Use bookmarking sites, Twitter and any other social media network you might be affiliated with to tell people about each new article you submit.
Monitor It
Social media monitoring tools such as Klout and Social Mention can not only help you to monitor how popular your blog is, who’s talking about it and what they’re saying about it – but it can also help you to learn what works. Social media monitoring tools can allow you to track what people are reading and what they aren’t. When you know what your most popular topics are, you know what you need to write more of.
Link to It
Linking to your blog helps in two ways – it helps you to move up the search engine rankings so that (all being well) at some point, readers will find you naturally. It also drives people to your site. As well as the classic social media networks and bookmarking sites, you can also utilise other blogs, forums and free article marketing sites. Read blogs on similar topics to your own and contribute to the comments. If for example, someone has written an article on how they don’t believe global warming exists and you’ve written an article on how you think it does – comment that you think it’s a really interesting article but you’ve written about your differing views and would love to hear what the blogger thinks (needless to say, use this to link to your article).
Learn from It
Social media can teach you a lot. Find out who the most successful bloggers are in your field of interest and research what they’re doing differently to you. Note down what they Tweet about and how they promote their articles. Look at the topics they write about, the stance they take on certain issues and their style of writing. However, this doesn’t mean you should just copy exactly what they do – remember that some of the most successful bloggers are the most original.
Socialise with It
At its core, social media is about socialising. So use it to socialise. Those ‘successful bloggers’ we were just talking about – communicate with them. If you say something interesting, they will probably say something back. Build a relationship with them and not only will you learn even more about what successful blogging entails but you might also find they promote your best articles for you (thus reaching all of their readership with your blog).
They might even offer you a guest blogging opportunity – a fantastic way to link build and drive more readers to your blog. However, liaising with celebrity bloggers isn’t the only way to secure guest blogging opportunities – try using sites like My Blog Guest to find high quality blogs that are looking for writers just like you to contribute.
Outsource It
If you simply haven’t got the time or inclination to promote your blog yourself, you could always seek the help of an online marketing company or social media agency to do it for you.
Social media Apps for the serious blogger – 5 of the best
Posted by broadbandblogger in Blogging on December 8, 2011
With more of use choosing to set up and run a blog there a subsequently lots of tools for allowing us to do the job just that little bit better. From building the pages themselves through to keeping an eye on how much traffic our posts are getting, there’s never been a better time to start a blog. What’s more, some people are having so much success with their creation that a few are even starting to make some money from them. Although it’s a competitive marketplace with thousands of blogs out there, if you use the right software you may stand a better chance of getting yours seen.
Of course, building the blog in the first place is the main hurdle so it’s little wonder that so many people decide to use WordPress. This is dedicated blogging software that enables the user to not only produce new pages but also edit and amend them as needed. It can be expanded to suit your needs and there are numerous predesigned templates that you can use to create a blog or tweak settings in order to produce a completely bespoke
offering.
Using digital images has also become an integral part of producing a blog so an app that can cover those requirements is also an essential. Try the likes of Adobe Photoshop Express, or Instagram, both of which will allow you to edit and manage your images prior to putting them on your live pages. Keeping image sizes to a minimum is one of the key parts of this process, but something like Instagram will also allow you to apply cool filters
and other effects to your shots for an extra touch of visual appeal.
If your blog is already getting a reasonable amount of traffic then it’s also essential to keep tabs in your stats. So, try out the Google Analytics app that offers a comprehensive way of finding out everything about visitors to your site. You can easily monitor and track which of your posts a most popular and tweak what you put on your blog as a result. This is a really great way of shaping your content in the future, and using statistical analysis in this way
might also point you in the direction of ideas for making money from some of your content too.
Keeping tabs on what others are doing in the world of blogging and social media is also crucial, so try an app like Social Media Trends for getting a complete overview of what is hot, and what is not, from locations all around the globe. The great thing about this is that it allows you to monitor not only text content but images and video footage too, providing one of the most complete ways of keeping tabs on what’s going on the in the world of
social media.
Finally, package up all of your social media interests into one visual feast using Flipboard, which lets you amalgamate all content into a funky magazine style format. It looks great, is easy to use and also helps organise things into one convenient package, which is essential if you’ve got all manner of social networking things going on.
How to approach different cultures via Social Media
Posted by Christian Arno in social media on September 8, 2011
The phenomenon of social media is constantly growing, and any digital marketer worth their salt knows that it’s a valuable medium for promoting brands, services, and products. Another well-established fact is that social media is now almost completely globalized – every country with internet access now has significant audiences on one social network or another.
A Global Social Strategy
So with these two facts in mind, what does that mean for companies who want to market across all borders? Well, it means that a global social strategy should be mapped out, with the onus being on tailoring different messages to different cultures on their preferred platforms.
Different approaches for different cultures
The most common marketing communications via social media are simply news updates or product information, for which Twitter is ideal. However, to stand out from the crowd, you really need to entice your target markets into an interactive online experience.
This is where a bit of research into what customers want from social media comes in handy. The British, for example, love a good freebie (or giveaway). In Japan, anything that shows off knowledge – especially technical knowledge – will get people talking about your brand, so competitions or quizzes would suit nicely. Anything creative is bound to reach out to mainland Europeans. Humour, caption competitions, or creative photography all subtly linked to and promoting your brand are just some ways to move a campaign forward in a truly inventive way.
The different platforms
While Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn are the largest western social networks, in other countries there are different social networks which are dominant, and if you’re planning to establish a market presence in these countries, you’ll need to also establish a presence on their major social media platforms.
For instance, although Facebook is available in Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese (as well as more than 30 other languages, including ‘Pirate’ and ‘Upside Down English), it is not in fact the popular social networking platform in those countries. If you only establish a presence on Facebook in Japanese or Brazilian Portuguese to market to those countries, you’ll not find any followers – they’re all on Mixi and Orkut, respectively.
Similarly, Qzone and Renren are the most popular social networks in China and without a presence there, you are potentially missing out on hundreds of millions of target audience members.
Xing has around 10 million users, covering mostly Northern European countries. It operates as a business directory much like LinkedIn, and while not as large, is the best way to build business contacts in countries like Germany.
Viadeo is another professional and business networking site which is popular in Europe, particularly France, and also in China. The site can link and relay information, share documents and generally be a great platform on which to network and meet customers or clients.
This is just a selection – there are many more platforms out there, and while you don’t need to be present on all of them, if you spend a bit of time researching the main players and getting a feel for the characteristics of their respective communities, then you can adapt any future social media marketing campaigns accordingly.
The different languages
Just because English is one of the most widely spoken languages across social networking sites doesn’t mean that your message will automatically ‘speak to’ everyone who understands English as a first, second or third language. Different countries use English for different things, and in most instances you’ll need to engage with overseas customers in their native language.
For instance, in Russian and many Eastern European countries, English is used for business communications, while the native language is used more for personal communications.
So while you could well get away with English for many of your B2B social media marketing efforts, if you really want to engage on a personal level (especially for B2C marketing) then you need to have your content translated and localized, taking great care to ensure that your creative collateral and branding has an equivalent linguistic and cultural meaning when translated. Don’t forget the old tale about Pepsi’s ad campaign – ‘Come Alive With Pepsi’ – which was allegedly mistranslated into Chinese as ‘Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Dead’!
How Does Spam Worm It’s Way Into The Social Media Web?
Posted by Lee in Guest Posts, social media on October 5, 2010
Social media web sites have proven to be the thing that has gotten normal people to use the web in a more social manner than they ever had before. Sure, these same people had used email and other technologies to communicate with people but they were usually in the form of quick messages; they did not use email as a way to communicate their everyday activities. If they wanted to know that information they would just use the telephone and contact the person directly. And when it came to instant messaging; only the people who were computer savvy used it on a regular basis. No, social media web sites have really brought the everyday person into the world of the social net and it is only getting bigger.
But of course, when you start to get a large number of people congregating in the same place, you start to attract the wrong kind of attention. You will get people on there that are only on the web site to mess up everyoneelse’s good time. This can come in the form of a troll which is a person that likes to say outlandish things on the internet just to get attention. Or it can come in the form of a black hat hacker. These are people who are trying to trick people into doing an activity that will bring them to a web site that will provide them with monetary gains. One of the tricks that is going around the social media web sites now is called a spam worm. In this article, I will take a look at what a spam worm is and I will hopefully show you how to avoid them when you are on one of these sites.
What is a spam worm?
There are different kinds of malware that affect the internet. Some are benign and some are very dangerous to your system. There is some malware that will try to steal your information and there is some malware that will try to get your online accounts to perform actions that you do not want it to do. A spam worm is the latter and it is more annoying than dangerous in most cases. This is the case for now but that can change at any time. A spam worm’s main job is to send spam to other people by tricking the user into sending it. An example is the twitter version of a spam worm that happened not too long ago. It would prompt the user to click a link – if the person did, they would then send the users that were following them a private DM (direct message) that had a link that led to spam. For the most part, the links that were sent in the twitter attack were not harmful but a problem like this can lead to a worse attack happening.
The technologies behind most spam worms are pretty impressive and they mostly involve the manipulation of JavaScript on the web sites. JavaScript was once a technology that was put to the side and not considered a powerful language. Now it is used all of the time and it’s power is now being shown by attacks such as these. Just because the technology is client-side does not mean that it cannot do any damage.
Now I will take a look at how you can avoid an attack like this from happening to you if you use a social media web site.
Avoid a spam attack from happening to you
When you use the web at anytime, there are certain things that you must do to make sure that you have a safe web surfing session. Most of these prevention methods will allow you to avoid the effects of a spam worm attack. This means that if you are careful about which links that you click on and you vet (pre-approve) the people that are allowed to send you messages on the social media web sites that you are a member of then you should be fine. You will have to remember that even people that you trust can become affected by a worm like this. You have to make sure that even when someone you trust sends you a link that you are skeptical of it. The reason why most of these attacks work is because the links are sent by people that the person trusts (read more on “social engineering“).
A spam worm these days is usually a nuisance and are not really that dangerous but that can change very quickly. There are a lot of attacks that this technique can work with and some of the attacks are very dangerous indeed.
So, before you fall victim to a worse attack, make sure that you take the precautions now.
The Best (and worst) Social Networks for Bloggers
Posted by Daniel Snyder in Blogging, Facebook, social media, Social Networks, Twitter on October 2, 2010
Soon after I started blogging I realized that in order to successfully promote my blog I was going to have to start being active and participating in some social networks. The question was (and sometimes still is) which ones? I have accounts on literally dozens of social networks but I am only active on a handful of them. It’s important to realize as a blogger you can’t make it alone! Search out a Blogger Community, and start spending time building your network. Successful bloggers all have one thing in common: experience. There is no overnight blogging sensations, they have all spent a lot of time and energy getting themselves to that place of success. These successful bloggers no longer need to self-promote since their readers do it for them. Eventually your readers also will submit your content to social networks and tweet your posts for you. Right now however reality for the rest of us is that the road to success is dependent upon the relationships we develop within social networks.
Blogging is a hard road, and it would sure be boring if I was going at it alone! Thankfully I have developed a great network on a number of excellent online social communities, some which directly serve bloggers and others which are more generalized. I recently took advantage of the network I’ve developed and asked some blogging friends whom I respect their thoughts on the Best and Worst Social Networks for Bloggers. There are a lot of networks to choose from, and there is no way I could discuss them all in one post (can you feel a series coming on?) I haven’t and probably never will try out every social network that exists, and new ones are springing up all the time so let’s find out what the general thought is towards the Best and Worst Social networks for bloggers.
The Best Social Networks for Bloggers
Hesham at famousbloggers.net recently wrote an article where he says “Twitter became the most enjoyable social media platform for me, it’s the best place I can share my articles so far with less effort, it’s the most active work station for ideas on the internet planet, and the simplest and most fast way of communication on earth as we all know.” Four out of the Five bloggers I spoke with about this question all said Twitter is by far the best social network for a blogger. Here are a few of the reasons why. Jillian from the 5kmission says “It’s a real-time search engine, if you write about trendy topics. Hashtags put you in front of new groups of people constantly, unlike most social networks where you have to already be “friends” with someone to see what they’re saying. It’s a good way to spread published content, conduct quick surveys, ask for help, and lots of other useful things.” John Paul from JohnPaulAguiar.com agrees “I think once you learn some basics to using Twitter, it can be the best social network for bloggers to get free targeted traffic back to their blogs..Period!” Michele the newbizblogger declares “I actually get more visits from Twitter than any other SN tool I use.“
I have to agree, Twitter is my favorite platform for actually engaging and interacting with people. It makes it simple to share your posts and links, and you can expand your connections in a scope that is virtually unlimited. Twitter also drives more traffic to my blog than any other referral source. If you’re doing well on twitter than you can also use it to monetize, Dragon Blogger and I are both fans of Sponsored Tweets and we are using it successfully to generate an income with twitter, find out more about Sponsored Tweets here.
Blog Engage
Blog Engage is also one of my favorites, and probably right now the one I use second most to twitter. It got mentioned as the favorite network for bloggers by Kiesha from weblogbetter.com who tells us “I like it because it allows bloggers, whether they be beginners or experts, to share their posts in a friendly environment. It’s a great place to discover new bloggers and make new friends. Whenever I’m looking for great content to inspire my writing, I just log in and take a look at the upcoming posts. It also allows you gauge how well you’re writing. If a post receives a lot of votes, that let’s you know how well your doing. There’s also a forum and a blog that members can submit guest posts for. Overall, it’s a great place to gain some good exposure for your blog.“
I agree here as well. Blog Engage is a super friendly network, you can meet people, and engage with twitter friends outside of twitter. Right now Blog Engage is running a blogging contest with a prize of $1000 USD! So well worth spending some time there if you are a blogger looking to expand your sphere of influence. One great thing about the Blog Engage members is that they are all bloggers who realize the importance of supporting other blogs, they comment, retweet and participate in the community more than any other network I’m familiar with. I have previously written a post about the Blog Engage community and you can read my thoughts here.
The final network I’ll mention here today that can be considered one of the best social networks for bloggers if of course, facebook. John Aguiar the author of TwitterDummy also acknowledges facebook as being a valuable network for bloggers, “even though I think FB takes more time and energy to get real results for bloggers. But if you have a fan page for your blog and work it each day bringing new readers daily, then I think bloggers can do well.”
I personally have not had much success with facebook, but as John mentions it takes time and energy and I simply haven’t given it the investment. I primarily keep facebook as my ‘private’ place on the net for direct friends and family. I haven’t expanded my facebook network beyond this, and I don’t really put any effort into my fan page other than it being a glorified RSS feed for my tweets.
The Worst Social Networks for Bloggers
It’s hard to classify a social network as being flat out bad for bloggers. The general response among the bloggers I asked can be summed up in the words of Kiesha Easley from WeBlogBetter (Blog tips and tricks to help you build a better blog.) who tells us “…there are potential benefits in just about every popular social networking site. It’s what you make it. You get what you put into it and I think you can do well on any site if you put your heart into it and actually make it a point to be sociable.”
Most people I asked didn’t want to single out a network and declare it as ‘the worst’. And I understand that, after all we do have to be positive. And every network offers something different. But one network does stand out as perhaps being the worst for bloggers. MySpace. MySpace is a mess, saturated with multi level marketers most bloggers would be wasting their time there.
Reddit I think also deserves a mention for being one of the worst networks for bloggers. Reddit has a lot of good things going for it as a news aggregator, but the community is somewhat elitist and snobbish, they can’t stand people who want to promote their blogs, and you’ll find yourself banned pretty quickly if you submit links to your own blog. I’ve had several accounts, and have even attempted to participate in the community – but it never felt like a friendly place.
Other Valuable Networks for Bloggers
As I mentioned above there are a lot of other networks, which I may dedicate another post to. Here are three worth mentioning and that you should take time to look at Bloggers Base, Bloggers, and BloggerLuv. The bloggers that participated in this article are all excellent inspirations, great writers, and awesome people. I hope you take a moment to take a look at their blogs. Almost every one of the bloggers I talked with acknowledged that it’s not so much about the best and worst but rather as Dragon Blogger tells us “I think the social media network you have the most followers and friends who interact with you on is the most important for your blog. For myself that would be Twitter with over 6,000 friends, but for some this could be Plurk, Friendfeed, Facebook, Google Buzz…etc“
What’s your opinion, did we hit the mark or miss it by far? What are your favorite networks for bloggers? What do you think is the worst. Let us know with a comment!
Coca Cola takes facebook from virtual to reality seamlessly
Posted by Daniel Snyder in Facebook, social media on August 22, 2010
Technology, it’s an amazing thing. But when you combine incredible technology with amazing creativity and the bold world of social media the possibilities are limitless. With the boom of social networking over the past few years it is no surprise that the push is on to come up with creative ways of linking the social world online with the real world. Coca Cola Village in Israel partnered with facebook to seamlessly allow the teens enjoying themselves at Coca Cola Village to share their experience online. The now famous facebook “like” button became a real life reality as vacationing teenagers were given RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) bracelets which were encoded with their facebook user name and password. When the wristband was ‘swiped’ over top of the real life thumbs up box their facebook status was instantly updated with what they were doing at the village. In addition if photographed by one of the official village photographers, the RFID bracelet would tag everyone in the photo and upload it to facebook automatically.
The video below tells the story. But what’s accomplished by this? Ultimately this is Coke partnering with a company called Promarket and Publicis E Dologic to utilize social networking successfully and to the utmost extreme. The Coca Cola village holds 650 teens at one time, and in each cycle facebook was seeing about 35,000 posts! That means every teen was posting Coca Cola branded content just under 54 times on their facebook profile, to be seen and liked by all their friends and family.
The CEO of Edologic, Enon Landenberg, is quoted as saying, “We are continuously looking for ways to connect the physical world with the virtual world. The idea behind “The Like machine” is an ultimate solution. It is an innovative and pioneering method, and through it the possibility to involve your Facebook friends in events and experiences that are happening to you around the world becomes a very true reality.”
What are your thoughts? For me, it makes me wonder where this is headed next. I can see this technology (which isn’t too complex at all) being integrated into a lot of other aspects of our daily lives. Do you think that’s a good idea? Or, perhaps like the few people I discussed this with, that idea sounds scary. Share your thoughts!
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