Microsoft Outlook 2010 Will Make Social Media Mainstream

Microsoft Outlook 2010 Will Make Social Media Mainstream

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

For many readers of this blog social media is mainstream, but I travel the highways and byways of this country and experience first hand in my workshops and presentations the amount of folks that “just don’t get” social media. I think they’ve heard the hype and know they should get it, but it still feels a bit foreign and geeky at best and downright silly at worst.

Microsoft Office 2010, in beta release now, may change the game on social media and turn participation into email plumbing. The MS Outlook 2010 blog reveals the new features that led me to this conclusion. (Although in stunningly Microsoft fashion the first bit of info on the page deals with a crash report update.)

Here’s the deal – depending upon who you ask, Microsoft Outlook, including Exchange, powers somewhere around 65% of enterprise email and probably more than that when it comes to the small business desktop. GMail and other SaaS tools have begun to eat away at this margin, but many a computer user sees the Internet through the eyes of MS Outlook. This post isn’t a plug for MS Office, I haven’t downloaded or tested the new version yet, it’s simply an explanation of the impact I see this new release ultimately having.

In November 2009, Microsoft announced both the beta of Microsoft Office 2010 as well as the Outlook Social Connector. The Outlook Social Connector brings together communications history, contact information, and professional and social networking information into the Outlook experience.

As of today, the beta release includes connection plans that give users the ability to add LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace interaction, giving every Outlook user the ability to enjoy the benefits of social media without any effort. This will get millions hooked and participating as simply a form of enhanced email – social media participation will become email plumbing and that will make it ubiquitous.

Here’s a list of activities, from MS site, that you can do inside Outlook 2010 when it comes to LinkedIn for Outlook

• Connect to your LinkedIn account to view your colleagues’ status updates and photos next to an e-mail message they sent you.


• Your colleagues’ latest contact information from LinkedIn automatically updates his or her Outlook contact. Whenever someone changes a phone number, e-mail address, or other contact details, it’s automatically updated in Outlook — you are always up to date.


• Synchronize your mobile phone with Outlook to stay up-to-date — you don’t have to worry about keeping track of new phone numbers and contact info — contacts’ information from the Web is synchronized to your mobile phone.


• Grow your professional network directly from within your Inbox — add colleagues with one click.

I’ve been preaching the merits of hacking together this kind of integration in your social media system for some time, but now anyone, whether they want to or not, will almost automatically have is handed to them. Combine this with Office 2010 Web Services version in the cloud and Office for Mac 2011 to include Outlook and you may see Microsoft regain some footing.

To recap, here is what you can do today to get started with the Outlook Social Connector.

1. Download the Office 2010 Beta at www.Office.com/beta


2. Update to the latest version of the Outlook Social Connector using the instructions on the Microsoft Download Center.


3. Get the LinkedIn download for the Outlook Social Connector at www.LinkedIn.com/outlook.

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• Designing HTML Email for Webmail Apps
• Give Zoho Credit for Being Aggressive
• The Businesscardless Office
• The Crowd Spoke and Was Heard
• Office Live Will Turn Some Heads
• Powered by Contextual Related Posts

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5 Steps to Successful Facebook Advertising

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5 Steps to Successful Facebook Advertising

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Currently Facebook boasts somewhere in excess of 400 million users and growing. You’ve probably heard this line by now, but If it were a country it would be the third largest in the world behind China and India only. There’s a pretty good bet that some members of your ideal target customer reside in and visit Facebook land, but the trick is to find them.

Facebook’s advertising platform is a vehicle worth exploring. The tool allows you to place small display type ads in the right sidebar of Facebook pages and profiles. At this point it’s not as effective in pure response as well targeted Google AdWords campaigns, but it’s not really the same kind of vehicle and you won’t find AdWords in Facebook, at least for now.

Like many things Facebook, setting up and running successful campaigns isn’t as straightforward as it could be. Below is a description of five steps to consider as you explore Facebook advertising. (Bookmark the Facebook Ad Help Center and return to get answers to the Facebook Ads process)

Target

One of the best things about Facebook advertising is the ability select who sees your ad using a number of variables, including keywords. You can target by geography, age, gender, education, relationship status, workplace and keywords. (I know someone who wanted to send a birthday message to his wife and targeted so narrowly that she was the only who would see the ad.) Demographics are pretty straightforward, the real trick is expanding your keywords to the point where you have a large enough audience to get the job done. Facebook used to have a tool that let you search for the hottest topics being discussed but they shelved it as they build a more robust analytics package. Check out all of your targeting options here

Attract and Engage

The first thing you must do is decide whether you want people to be directed to your own web page or something on Facebook like a Page, Application, Group or Event. If you are already the administrator of your Facebook Page, Group, Event, or Application, you can select it from the drop down option. The thing that’s nice about using ads to promote your pages and events is that Facebook puts a “Become a fan” or “RSVP to this event” button right in the ad. People don’t even have to visit your page to take action. There are some pros to sending them to a link on your web site (better tracking options) but by sending them to assets on Facebook you have the ability to multiply their actions through the natural social wall activity that occurs when someone RSVPs to an event. (All their followers automatically see that action.)

Some users find Facebook ads a good tool to promote events or get new fans to the pages. From an engagement standpoint think in terms of using the ads to promote content and value and not so much to sell something. The most successful use of ads on social networks is to create deeper engagement so you have the ability to sell once trust is built. Think about putting white papers on your Fan Pages and promoting that content or creating a free event, like a webinar, and advertising that event. In both of these cases you’ll have the opportunity to sell a bit once you’ve proven you know your stuff. (One quirk of note – when you promote an event created with the Facebook event app the title of the ad will automatically default to the title of the event, so name your event wisely )

You don’t get much space in these ads so use it wisely. Your headline (25 characters) should grab attention immediately with a benefit. You’ll get another 135 characters to describe and entice in the body of the ad. You also have the option to upload an image. Take this option. It may be the most important aspect of your ad so choose wisely. Facebook users are very image driven (it’s the largest photo sharing site in the world) and the visual graphic you choose will make or break an ad. This is an element you must plan on testing (see below)

Budget

Facebook advertising works a bit like AdWords in that you bid for keywords and compete to get your ads shown. How effective you are at this depends upon the competitiveness of your keywords. You can choose between a cost per click (CPC) model where you pay only for clicks or a cost per thousand (CPM) model where you pay per 1000 ad views. Most research I’ve read suggests that the CPC model is slightly more effective in terms of ROI. (Here’s a nice Glossary of Facebook Ads terminology in case this is starting sound buzz wordy.)

To start your campaign you must determine a bid per click and daily budget. You can set both of these numbers very low, but don’t expect much. Initially you are just testing so you’ll want to set your click bid somewhere around the Facebook suggested amount and a daily budget you can live with, something like $50 or more to start. You can always adjust these. Learn about the Facebook Ads Manager here.

Test

No matter where or what you should always test your advertising. Online applications like this make it pretty darn simple. You can and should create multiple ad versions. Once you create an ad you will have the ability to create similar ads and run those as well. You’ll be able to easily view which ad is performing the best based on clicks. Facebook does need to approve your ads so make sure you are familiar with their guidelines.

The simplest thing to test is your image. I’ve seen ads go from no response to mega response with a better picture. Mind you I had no idea it was a better picture or I would have used it in the first place, but testing told me so. Here are some suggestions from Facebook on improving your ads.

Analyze

Once you create and launch your campaigns you need to start tracking and tweaking. Facebook has a tool that gives you some information on actions taken inside the Facebook platform. So, if you are running an ad for an event or Facebook page you can use the Facebook Insights tool to monitor interaction.

Facebook Insights is a nice reporting tool as it can give you information about the actual, not targeted demographics and interests of the people clicking on your ads and keywords that drew that interest. This will help you narrow or broaden your targeting. Page admins can access Insights by logging in and viewing the box titled Insights in the left sidebar. This is only visible to Page admins. If you click on See All you will get full reporting. More information on Insights here and from the very useful blog Inside Facebook.

Facebook does allow you to run ads that point people links outside of Facebook and in order to track these ads you simply and monitor them using your own analytics tool such as Google Analytics. If you are using Google Analytics simply use the URL builder tool in Analytics to create a link to your page that contains tracking parameters and place that in your Facebook Ad as the destination link.

Related Posts:

• Using Facebook Ads for Content Awareness
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• Facebook Pages Get More Business Friendly
• 3 Ways for Businesses to Take Full Advantage of Facebook
• Facebook Adds Twitterlike Tagging Feature
• Powered by Contextual Related Posts

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Which Social Network Is Right For You? [Lifehacker Explains]

Between Twitter, Facebook, and Google's new social networking tool, Buzz, it's hard to turn a corner without running into another social network. But how do you know which networking tool fits you best? We're here—with big charts and all—to help.

Last week Google Buzz made us ask ourselves what we wanted out of social networking. To answer that question, we charted what we liked and disliked about setup, privacy, usability, and other aspects of Buzz, Twitter, and Facebook. Here's the result.

This chart doesn't cover everything about every network out there. MySpace is (seemingly) on the decline or, at best, re-purposing itself. LinkedIn is really a business contact pool, FourSquare a geo-location game, and other networks generally too niche to be compared in the same aspects and categories.

For the simple read, here's the full chart of our Buzz, Twitter, and Facebook comparison. We color-coded each answer to give a context of where it stood, in comparison to what we know is possible and what a smart user would like to see. Red means that you can't rely on this network for this feature. Yellow indicates that the network offers it or makes due, but could definitely be better. Green means something works, and can be considered a selling point.

Click on the chart for a bigger view, or right-click to download the full-resolution file.

There's a lot of text there already to parse through, but it's obviously segmented and specific to each function. Having dug into the settings of each network and debated it with my fellow editors, I'll try to offer up a concise take on how I'd explain each network to someone completely new to any of them. I hope it might spur some thought about which network you're using now, too, and why.

Facebook

Facebook's strongest feature, as it stands now, is that it's relatively easy to figure out who your 'friends' are. You can pull them from your webmail address book, sure, but you have to check off those you want to be a friend with, and they have to reciprocate. After that, you start seeing their status updates, photos, and other activities on Facebook.com, right when you log in. Simple enough, right? Not exactly.

You can't, or at least shouldn't, create two separate Facebook accounts for personal friends and work contacts/co-workers/casual acquaintances, all of whom are likely to hit you up on Facebook sooner or later. So it's up to the user to create groups of friends, set what those different friends can see. Also, your Facebook identity is tied to certain "networks"—an employer, a school, a location—that you have to remember to set controls for, too. Dig around and you'll almost certainly find the very fine-grain controls you might need. But then, every few months, Facebook changes up their offerings, for better or worse, and it's up to the user to notice and re-learn how to decide what's private, to whom, and, in a much more worrisome way, what's being made public and search-able on the web.

Facebook does have a pretty great iPhone app, and offers a good amount of access to third-party clients like Brizzly and TweetDeck. But they're still limited in some ways meant to drive you to the web site, and their non-iPhone mobile apps and sites are tough to love.

Twitter

What's easy to like about Twitter is the simplicity. You get an account, you see a suggested list of famous users that you can feel free to ignore, and then you're asked to write 140 characters about something, anything. It will be made public, search-able, and able to be re-broadcast by other users, unless you've decided to lock your entire account and require your permission to view it. You can follow other people, block the occasional jerk from following you, reply to others' posts, message other users privately (if you both follow each other), and, over time, you'll learn about third-party apps and context tricks that make the service make more sense. I started using Twitter one day into my first SXSW, and I had it mostly figured within one or two over-eager days.

That simplicity, and reliance on third-party sites and apps for picture posting, link shortening, and the like can be confusing to newcomers that aren't into digging around, for sure. And the speed and volume of the main stream can be overwhelming and off-putting. But Twitter has grown slowly into a network that adapts to users' needs, whether by force or through user innovation. If you don't like how noisy and fast your main feed is, creating a list of high-priority friends and thinkers will do the trick. As you figure out what you like and don't like about Twitter, you'll be able to find third-party apps and interfaces that cater to those interests. We'd love to see expanded features here or there (for discovering who's following you, and perhaps hiding certain posts from all but a few close followers, for example), but Twitter is a pretty novel solution for those who like to share short updates with the web at large.

Buzz

Whatever we write about Buzz will be slightly inaccurate in a week's time, most likely. Buzz is brand new, and already it announced an apology and upcoming 'fixes.' From what we've seen, though, it seems like it wants to be the solution that FriendFeed never was to tracking your friends and contacts' multi-varied interests. Some friends change their IM status to say what's up, while others post on Flickr, Twitter, their own blog, and other places. Rather than making you head to each site, or make those friends become endless self-promoters, Buzz aims to connect you to everything your friends are doing from a place you're already familiar with—your Gmail and Google contacts.

And that, of course, is where the uproar started. Buzz showed up, suddenly, inside Gmail, and when asking users to sign up, assumed too much that they'd like to turn their email contacts into people they 'follow,' and maybe make that following status public. If Google could reassure Buzz users that what they did on the network was only among their followers they've individually approved, it would be more appealing. The service also needs a dedicated home, instead of being spread across mobile sites, Gmail, Google Maps, and elsewhere, and gain better controls for how much 'buzz' flies at you. But it's promising, still, because it's not a public-type Twitter, or a walled-off Facebook, but something else entirely.

---

Now that we've run down the three biggies above, give us your take:

Which Social Network Fits You Best?(survey software)

How would you revamp our chart of social network strengths and weaknesses? What did we get right, wrong, and miss entirely? We're open to your ideas, suggestions, and links, in the comments.

Ollie the bluebird/Twitterrific © The Iconfactory, used with permission.

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The Economic Consequences of America’s Morality Police

The Economic Consequences of America’s Morality Police: "

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There is a price to be paid for morality. Laws prohibiting alcohol, marijuana, same-sex marriages and gambling which promote community morals and standards also have another effect — a major loss of revenue from sales and taxes.

Click to Enlarge

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How Niche Search Engines Can Help Your Business

How Niche Search Engines Can Help Your Business: "

In recent years, several promising applications have begun to redefine Web search. One hot niche, if you will, is niche search. Although niche search engines like Technorati have been around for some time, a deluge of new search sites continue to refine the field.

From purses to podcasts, developers have built an engine to cover almost every category of product and service available. When you conduct a search on a niche search engine, you can find exactly what you’re looking for in a matter of seconds. Many such engines verify the quality of their results and pull from a variety of different sources, offering a one-stop shop for the niche you’re interested in. Sure beats sifting through hundreds of irrelevant or bogus results to find what you need.

Consumers clearly stand to gain from specialized results. But how can these smaller, targeted search engines benefit your business? In several ways:

They help people see your product or service.

If you have a website selling a product or service, a high rank on the right niche search engine can generate a lot of traffic. This is especially if the niche search engine in question is indexed by Google. For example, say you’re selling New Orleans Saints T-shirts. If you google the term, result #3 is a T-shirt from a niche search engines (Teenormous). If you have a high ranking on Teenormous, a T-shirt search engine, you have a vicarious high ranking on Google.

If you’ve ever tried fruitlessly to land on the first page of Google, or tried to advertise on a big search engine to make up for those low rankings, focusing on your niche presence could be much easier.

They make your ads more powerful.

Niche search engines target a predefined audience. If you advertise online, think of the benefit this may have for your conversions. Niche search engines target a predefined audience. You know who that audience is, so you can target your ads more effectively. If you’re a purse boutique, for example, running a Google AdWords ad on “purse” might land you a page 5 spot. If you target your ad to a niche search engine like the Trendy Purse, however, you’ll be more visible and more relevant.

They help you define your market’s competitive landscape.

A niche search engine can help you find who you’re competing against, and fast. Say you own a cafe in LA’s San Fernando Valley. A niche search engine like Goby will help you see exactly who else is out there, as well as what events they’re hosting today or this week. Niche search engines help take the guesswork out of your market.

If you haven’t incorporated niche search engines as a part of your overall marketing strategy, it might be time to start. Compilations like this one offer a good launching point.

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Palestinian Na'vi Protest Separation Barrier

Palestinian Na'vi Protest Separation Barrier: "

This is a group of Palestinian Na'vi protesting a separation barrier Israel has in place. I actually have no idea what a separation barrier is. Unless it's anything like a restraining order, in which case DAMNIT JULIE YOU KNOW I WALK MY DOG ON THAT STREET.

The demonstrators also donned long hair and loincloths Friday for the weekly protest against the barrier near the village of Bilin.


They equated their struggle to the intergalactic one portrayed in the film.

Israel says the barrier is needed for its security. Palestinians consider it a land grab.

The 'Avatar' protest comes a day after the Israeli government began rerouting the enclosure to eat up less of the Palestinian village.

Did you know one time I dressed as a Smurf to protest my neighbor calling the cops every time he caught me stealing his electricity? I did. It wasn't very effective, but I did break a window and flood his basement with a garden hose when he was on vacation. Don't f*** with me, Gargamel!

Palestinian protesters pose as Na'vi from 'Avatar' [thedailyitem]
and
Palestinians dressed as the Na'vi from the film Avatar stage a protest against Israel's separation barrier [telegraph]

Thanks to Victor, CRIME, Grace and Shawn34, who protest the old fashioned way: dressed as Klingons. Nanu-nanu."

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Hobart Brown

Hobart Brown: "'Money doesn't always bring happiness. People with ten million dollars are no happier than people with nine million dollars.'"

Mick Jagger

Mick Jagger: "'It's all right letting yourself go as long as you can let yourself back.'"

Trust in Your Decision-Making Skills

FEBRUARY 5, 2010

Trust in Your Decision-Making Skills

Yes, knowledge is power, but too much knowledge can take away your power. When solving problems, many leaders gather an abundance of information and conduct in-depth analyses to give them what they hope are the right answers. This can lead to analysis paralysis or to data-driven, but illogical, answers. Often the best answers are educated guesses informed by your past experiences coupled with new information and insight. Don't put too much faith in information analysis alone, and don't disregard your decision-making skills. Remember to always check answers with your gut before acting. Harvard Business Review more info here