Improve Email Marketing for Social Media

Amplify’d from mashable.com

Marketers plan to increase spending on e-mail and social media marketing more than any other tactics in 2011, according to a recent survey.

As marketers find opportunities to build audiences, conversation and conversions with clever cross-promotion between the two mediums, e-mail and social media tactics are becoming increasingly popular and intertwined.

Incentives Drive Clicks and Conversions

Dingo, a pet food company in Ohio, used Constant Contact to create a promotion that rewarded customers with a $20 coupon if they signed up for the company’s newsletter and “Liked” its Facebook Page, with the catch being that the page needed to get to 5,000 fans (from a base of around 300) for the promotion to kick in. Mike Halloran, the owner of Dingo, says it reached its goal within three days, as pet owners found out about in the Dingo newsletter and forwarded it to their friends and “liked” Dingo on Facebook.

Mark Schmulen, general manager for social media at Constant Contact, says that Dingo’s campaign illustrates a growing trend among customers. “Of all channels, e-mail marketing and social media go hand in hand better than any other,” he said. “Getting your customers to share your message with friends is the most effective way to grow your business.”

See more at mashable.com

 

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Tips for Effective Offshoring

Amplify’d from www.startupnation.com

When we were first building our business, we really, really hated the idea of outsourcing. Why? because we had so many failed projects. We were trying to get away with murder by hiring offshore programmers at incredibly low rates, as part of a 100- or 200-hour project, to build our first fully functioning website with an exciting ecommerce application integrated and shopping cart functionality so we could start generating some revenue and testing with real users who would actually be purchasing real product.

Several failed projects later, and with thousands of dollars (quite a bit of money for us as students who were still in college) down the drain, we finally brought on our first remote partner, Zeeshan Muhammad, who would become our CTO and would play THE integral part in launching Blank Label. Zee came on with equity, and worked as everyone else did - for free. It was the best deal we could have possibly had, realizing that our equity wasn’t worth much, and that our funds were limited, so we were more than happy to bring Zee on as a partner, which still undervalues his contributions to our business, but luckily, he loves us and the business so much that the money’s not important to him.

See more at www.startupnation.com

 

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Gmail Introducing More Smart Labels!

Amplify’d from www.makeuseof.com

Another day, another Google announcement and whilst not as exciting as yesterday’s Chrome 10 launch the new Smart Labels feature in Gmail Labs promises to help organise incoming mail so you don’t have to.

At the moment it is an optional extra, which must be enabled in Gmail Settings under the Labs tab.

After turning it on, your inbox will be automatically labelled according to whether Gmail thinks it fits under Notifications, Bulk or Forums. What’s more the new smart labels feature operates nicely alongside your existing labels setup, so all you have to do is enable and go.

“Bulk” mail includes any kind of mass mailing (such as newsletters and promotional email) and gets filtered out of your inbox by default (where you can easily read it later), “Notifications” are messages sent to you directly (like account statements and receipts), and email from group mailing lists gets labeled as “Forums.”

On the Gmail Blog, software engineer Stanley Chen explains: Read more at www.makeuseof.com

 

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New App Connects To Facebook Strangers!

But only the ones living nearby.

Amplify’d from mashable.com

Domo, a mobile application launching Wednesday for iPhone and Android, takes the “talking to strangers via mobile” concept — think Yobongo — to a quirky new place just in time for SXSW.

The Domo application attempts to engineer new person-to-person relationships through shared Facebook interests. Users log in with Facebook and select the interests they’d like to share. Then, they can exchange informal “domos” (say hello), send longer messages or share photos with nearby Domo users.

The crux of the application is the home screen, where nearby people and popular interests are highlighted. There’s also an inbox section that holds sent and received messages. The app ultimately aims to encourage each user to reach out and connect with Facebook strangers in close proximity.

If the stranger-stalking aspect of the application doesn’t turn you off, then Domo’s only downfall is that it connects application users with each other based on location — a difficult task for a new app with no users. With SXSW starting soon in Austin, Texas, the event could help Domo attract a nice crowd by giving attendees a fun (and hopefully a not too creepy) way to virtually bump into new people at the festival. Read more at mashable.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bto2w

5 Amazing Products for Screencasting

Amplify’d from mashable.com

Showing people what a product does is a better way to catch their attention than telling them about it. Car salesmen encourage test drives, ice cream stores give out free samples, and I’d be willing to bet that few people purchase a Hanger Cascader without watching the infomercial first.

Your digital product is also more appealing when demonstrated. And the most affordable way to show people what your software does, even if you’re also offering a free trial, is often to produce a short screencast. These five free tools can help you get started.

1. Screenr

Screenr helps share your screencast videos over Twitter. After you make up to a five-minute-long screencast using the simple web tool, a shortened link to the video is automatically provided. You can add a message and post the video link to your feed with the push of a button. There are also options to post to YouTube or embed the video in your site.

While other screencast tools, like Jing (see below), have Twitter sharing options, Screenr distinguishes itself by also creating a YouTube-like profile for each user. All of your videos are saved on your profile, and a public feed of other users’ videos makes for interesting browsing. If you like an idea that you see, you can click the maker’s profile photo to see other videos they’ve uploaded.

2. Overstream

Basic, free screencapture software programs, like Wink, do a pretty decent job at creating videos, but few of them include features that allow you to add text easily. Overstream allows you to pull a video from a supported site like YouTube or Google Video and add your own subtitles to it.

CaptionTube is another free captioning web app that you can use your Google account to log into. Read more at mashable.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/btlvy

Avoid Becoming a Social Media Failure!

Amplify’d from www.copyblogger.com

So … you work in social media, you’re passionate about social media, you live and breathe social media, your life revolves around social media, helping your clients with social media, turning the world on to social media, etc. etc….

To keep this whole social media thing on the road, you find yourself spending 18 hours a day on the computer, working that online buzz, working those relationships, for both you and your clients — Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr. It’s never-ending. Relentless.

And guess what? There are thousands of others just like you, mining that social media mountain for any gold they can find.

Like everybody else in your space, you’re burnt out. You’re over-extended. You’re exhausted.

Enough already

Some time ago I found out the hard way that keeping up with social media, keeping ahead of the curve, was impossible. You might as well try emptying the Atlantic Ocean with a bucket.

I found that the “helping clients with their social media” schtick wasn’t sustainable. It just takes too much time and there are too many other people doing it — most far younger and charging far less than me. Read more at www.copyblogger.com

 

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How Are Semantics Defining Social Media?

Amplify’d from mashable.com

Semantics, the study of meaning, is playing an increasingly important role in the development of knowledge management tools across a variety of industries, and some of the most interesting developments are coming from the media world.

Semantic search is one broad area within the higher realm of semantic technologies, which also includes knowledge storage, information extraction and reasoning, among other topics. The goal of semantic search is to improve search result accuracy by understanding the searcher’s intent and the contextual relationships between the terms used in the search.

We spoke with Evan Sandhaus, lead architect of semantic platforms at The New York Times Company, and Jeff Catlin, CEO of text analytics company Lexalytics, to better understand how semantic search is affecting news and social media.

“All websites are in the business of capturing people’s attention,” said Sandhaus, recalling a recent presentation he had attended. This is especially true for news organizations and blogs, which push out piles upon piles of online articles each day. In the end, the news isn’t exactly useful if no one reads it. So, the goal is to make content as findable as possible.

The fundamentally challenging structure of the web, Sandhaus says, isn’t exactly helping the cause, though. The web is predominantly written in HTML, a markup language that focuses on expressing how information on a webpage should look, not what it means. As a result, important pieces of information within webpages, such as headlines, bylines and publish dates in news articles, are formatted within HTML, but aren’t explicitly labeled as “headline, “byline” and “publish date.” “As a consequence,” Sandhaus explains, “it makes it difficult for a wider web ecosystem to have an idea of the structured nature of content.” That is, while webpages are formatted for humans to easily read them, machines can’t easily determine the underlying meaning of content on a page if it doesn’t follow a consistent structure. Thus, devaluing the utility of data. Read more at mashable.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bsvzx