Now comes the part of my broken promise to myself. As i was about to shift to another shopping AD, i could not help but notice the word Facebook at the bottom of the page – A Facebook profile link of  Woodland ….. www.facebook.com/woodlandadventure. Nothing wrong with utilizing the extra space on your AD when you have bought it, but it did pulled me into mulling over the change in the equation – Print media boosting the digital media for a major brand.

The next thing i know was that i was searching for my elusive scissors to get this AD ready for a scan  – another one hour in blasting off the post. As usual, my dream of a  day out was postponed….

No newspapers from next Sunday….time to Go Green..

But, whoever is a part of human society knows one fact for sure – “There is nothing called a Free lunch”. May be Karl Marx cannot detect it, but the pennies are slipping through the cracks somewhere. Somebody is paying for the hyper-involvement in the social networks.

(Image Credit: www.cartoonstock.com)

Who is at the receiving end?

It’s time for the big bosses to raise a brow….

The UK social media office engagement figures look like this -

2 millions x 1 hour / day = Social involvement during the office hours [Sample size = 1000 British workers]. = $23 billion dollars

Its is estimated that the US social engagement index during the office hours will be higher the British figure and China might be catching up fast – It’s a different reason china decided to ban Google, when in fact Facebook might be making a dent in its productivity as well as communist ideology on an hourly basis.

Well, let’s for a moment jump to the other side of the fence, where the employees are perched – The intelligence that you get out of the chorus is that the social networking is cost-free, global, knowledge-sharing university where years are saved every day – as employees, trouble-shooters and academia share the latest data, theories and algorithm – thus making every desktop a vibrant R&D hub – well, can you beat that?

Well, I agree with this cross-pollination potential of social and professional networks….

Once again, going back to the original spot. Looking from here, the corporate honchos would be in serious doubt whether millisecond is spent in knowledge dissemination and not personal frivolities…leaving it here for the moment….

As expected, it’s a spiraling debate  with too many angles and intangibles….

Adios…

A couple of things went right for Facebook at the same time – First it got a much needed facelift – Second it was splashed all across the TV channels that it was banned Pakistan and Bangladesh for hurting the national sentiments – Now that’s called the perfect recipe for a ‘Top kill’ PR campaign. Google would pay billions to be in FB’s shoes at this time…

Remember Starbucks – the maverick marketing team that changed the way cappuccino cups can be used as billboards… Lets get a glimpse of Starbuck-facebook tango –

So, now you know why the book has a new face…Its the new billboard. If Coffee can be sold here, then why not Ski rentals? Take a look for yourself…That’s economics for you and we know that it works, no matter how many people are after your ass…

Adopting means other than conferences has many disadvantages like messages getting lost in transition, distortions in understanding motives, failure in direct feedback collection, etc. Above all, establishing contact individually with widely spread team members can become a cumbersome process. Conferences overcome all these disadvantages and saves time and energy by allowance of addressing concentrated congregation at one time.

Though business houses are preferring webinars and online conferences, the utility and importance of traditional conferences is not yet ruled out. However, with environmental awareness and corporate social responsibility coming to a mainstay, adoption of green conferences that are a saver on carbon footprint is the need of the hour and earth.

How to design a green conference?

• Paperless invitations: Gone are the days of printed invitations. Printouts are finding their place in the pages of history. Lightening fast emails, newsletters and SMS are a norm. They save paper, consume less energy and utilize already existing mediums to travel across, thereby leaving no carbon footprints of their own.
• Grouped gatherings: Instead of arranging a big conference at a place that demands delegates to travel all across; regrouping and arranging three to four regional conferences will save on carbon footprint in terms of fossil fuel consumption per head.
• On site accommodation: If the conference period is long enough to require delegates to stay overnight or for a couple of days; then arrange accommodation as close as possible to the conference venue to avoid travelling by gas guzzling vehicles. Otherwise, arrange for mass transports like buses to covey to the venue.
• Open venue: Conferences held outdoors in a daytime will do away with artificial illumination and ventilation, and incur minimal electricity consumption. In case indoors are a must, look out for a venue that has plenty of windows or glass panels to allow for natural light and ventilation.
• Electronic material: Kill your urge to distribute printed booklets, leaflets, brochures, etc. Send them via email in advance or after the event. Do not distribute CDs either. They contribute to e-waste after loading onto PCs.
• Platter matter: How about offering altogether vegan menu with organic ingredients cooked with bio-fuels? It may not please your guests but certainly will please our planet.
• Don’t stick to plastic: Your conference should be a no plastic zone. Don’t supply water in plastic bottles, eatables wrapped in plastic or use-and-throw plastic plates. If you must, then ensure that these land up in recycle bin.

It’s the matter of getting started with the first conference. Initiate delegates to propose green ideas and soon it will be a norm greener than expected.

Corporate social responsibilities should not be limited only to social contributions that encompass education, better living, health and cultural exchanges. As major contributors to the planet’s well being, and more appropriately ill being, corporate are realizing their accountability towards restricting further damage to the ecology.

This has, in fact, put many corporate in quandary. It is an imperative for the corporate to adopt advanced technologies to maximize their efficiency. At the same time they are forced to convert to non-conventional methodologies that may not be equally efficient, to preserve the environs.

Advanced technologies, most of which were introduced towards the last quarter of 20th century, are effective in maximizing the utilization of available resources without paying much heed to its impact on the ecology. These technologies were mainly concerned with garnering maximum revenues for the entrepreneurs.

The beginning of 21st century has thrown a spanner in the wheel by inputting the ideology of the corporate with eco-guilty consciousness. Most of the corporate were used as a scapegoat to pass on the blame of endangered ecology and imbalanced growth. Individual contributions towards ecological problems like global warming, pollution, etc, and misplaced government policies were swept under the corporate rags.

The important point that was sidelined was that the corporate are here to make profits. Most of them do it within the legal and ethical framework. They should not be held outright responsible for the damaged caused to the environments.
If the corporate spend their efforts on ecological sustenance, they may have to compromise with a major chunk of their profits. Though the advent of green technology is taking certain strides, it is in nascent stage that still is a far shot from its total acceptance and adaptability.

Corporate may be sitting on a fence as far as changing their designing and manufacturing processes are concerned. However, it looks imperative that they will have to forgo their short term profits in order to gain long term benefits for the planet.

Marketers talking to CEO’s about brand awareness, search ranking and keywords hardly help, and end up as unable to break ice. Bang clear on target, and let him know and understand, if money isn’t spent here, there will be lesser products to sell and sales will eventually drop. Explain how search marketing brings in revenue at low costs, and how what you are doing will coincide with the growth of his business prospects. CEO’s are least interested in any kind of jingo, apart from the money if this can make. They need to see that searches are able to increase share holder value and help them make money.

Marketers having a direct marketing background effectively understand the relationship with sales. Search marketers will do better and help people understand and admit that the Web is the biggest direct-marketing opportunity of all time, where every move is traceable and constantly measured so that they can be improvised and optimized. This is e-commerce, you know the value of every new visitor, the conversion rates and revisit.

Most companies look at marketing as printing a brochure or going for a trade show. Make sure to help them understand that the virtual world has a concrete and a solid base, and you can look on how every person interacts on your web-site. Furthermore, make them see where they went next and how they bought from you. Let them have a direct view of this virtual exercise, and you have a perfect tool to justify every cent of the proposed marketing expenditure plan.

What every executive really wants to see is sales, leads and leads expecting to close. He is hoping to catch on the projected revenue targets at any costs, and any talk on brand awareness, positive sentiment, site traffic or ranking on search results will only put him off. If marketers can focus on relating touches that they have made to customers and sales will be the only way to persuade people to allocate funds. Set the map right so they are able to see clearly which route is more economical and valuable as well. After all, your budget level also requires sensible justification.

Web metrics systems, like the free Google Analytics to the expensive ones that help you understand the need to be passionately made use of. Search Marketing would come to be more useful if it were, eighty percent marketing and twenty percent search. If you don’t understand the marketing basis in SEM, it would be very difficult for you to show how effective your campaign would be.

The mind reading technology is one such technology that will make our lives (social media lives) very easy. Controlling an interface without using your fine motor skills will have huge implications for human computer communication. Imagine being able to tweet what you are thinking without having to pick up your phone, key in your message and hit send. Also, by just thinking ‘Facebook’ your screen will show a summary of your friend’s action stream.

How the system works?

The new mind-reading system works by displaying letters on the computer screen that flickers one at a time. When a person thinks of a letter, and then that letter flickers on the screen, brain waves propel a signal to the computer that it identifies. While this form of communication is at a very experimental phase and is also quite slow, it does work for sending short messages such as tweets for Twitter. Twitter messages are restricted to only 140 character limits, and you really have to think hard about what you want to say. However, with mind reading technology thinking is all that you would require.

This new form of communication is currently meant to help people who have restricted motor skills, and not lazy social media fanatics! There is also a scope of applying this technology to senses other than vision. In the future, this technology can also help read feelings and complex emotional states. And one day people who cannot otherwise communicate will eventually interact with the outside world.

Whoever said mind reading was impossible are in for a pleasant surprise!

The first successful communication on the internet was implemented on 25 December 1990. In 1992 internet access was made available to the common public and its use exploded. Until recently, websites were a great advertising platform. However, with the introducing of the first social networking site in 1995, and its widespread use today, websites have started to become invisible on the internet.

If you come up with a new website on the internet, then you would probably have to spend a lot of your time and resources to bring your website on the first page of the goggle search engine. However, a simpler way to let people know about your website or your company is through social media.

Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace.com, Twitter, LinkedIn.com, etc. are very popular and so are great sources of promoting your website and products.

Gone are the days of “have a website and advertise”

Today, it is too costly to be noticed on an internet that is already full. Social media is the only way for new websites to get traction. If Darren Rowse, the guy behind ProBlogger, or Brian Clark, the guy who founded Copyblogger, talks about your website, then it’s visible. If your website comes up on the front page of Digg, then it’s visible. Once your website starts getting incoming links and lots of regular traffic, then you can use traditional SEO practices for staying visible.

Some of the companies that benefited from social media are:

Rubbermaid: A survey conducted by BazaarVoice reported that when the company Rubbermaid added customer reviews to their website, their sales increased and returns of their products decreased.

Fog Creek software: This company has achieved great success with no advertising because its founder has built an amazingly popular blog about writing software.

Nike: This company allowed customers to build and order custom shoes on their website. This move was a great hit with people and generated a lot of profit for Nike.

Will social media survive in the long run? Not sure. But today and for the near future, you can’t do without it. You have to jump in even if you do not fully understand it, or you will go the way of print media.

You got it right, Yahoo has struck a twitter deal. These two have decided to face the Buzz challenge by coming together. Yahoo and Twitter have come to an agreement to share data between their properties. Hope this is no knee jerk reaction to the Google Buzz. This was hardly called for, as Bing is about to take the data aspect for Yahoo, and, which will very likely include the Twitter data as well. Moreover, Yahoo’s front end elements already include Twitter integration including Flickr. How far will it work? This is a million dollar question?

Even if this is all the rest against Google, it would in no way be an easy proposition. Buzz, although is new, has a very strong backing of Gmail, which just cannot be ignored. With a solid Gmail presence on the internet, it is unlikely that no matter how you set the table, Buzz will only get to be a very strong word.

Why read, when you can witness? Last year surely has been the year for video marketing. What with more You Tube views than Google’s searches, video marketing is a more lucrative assignment. Finding ways and means to ensure that your video will not be lost in the crowd is what SEO would now be looking for. You do not expect to put together a video and hope it would generate business for you. You sure can add on a welcome video, a virtual tour, or a helpful tutorial video to your website, and use this as a riveting factor to compliment your content and your attractive web design. Expecting your videos to open up vistas all by themselves will require some innovative, creative and fresh approaches, which will now have to be accepted as a new challenge.

How You Make the Most from Your Video Presentation

There are some things to be kept in mind, and, which will come helpful for optimizing your video content to its’ full potential online. You can always be the first, and that definitely amounts to a very good start. Your competitors may just like to follow.

• Embed your videos and share – You will definitely benefit by sharing your videos with an embeddable feature. Whether you are having viral videos, trailers, or informative video clips, embedded videos is an advanced feature, and will come useful in time.
• Make sure to use the best format – There are a number of video formats available for you to choose from.  You can have FLV, MP4, AVI, and others if you want; but, make sure to use the most popular, as this will help you make it easier while editing and viewing.
• Make use of all available accurate tracking tools – What use are these videos if you cannot find out how they help you? Moreover, how would you be able to effectively optimize without understanding an angle that needs to improve upon? You would only be able to better your access and progress by measuring your performance and the impact each video can  create on your online presence.
• Video SEO will come useful – Your video is 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of a search result in comparison to your text pages. Make sure to utilize tags and keywords because these help you make your videos all the more visible.
• Consistency eventually pays – If you are planning on integrating plenty of videos onto your website, see that when put together, they are able to give a very reliable image. Never confuse the visitors or promise them a moon that is not there.

Multi-media content will enhance your capacity to make some deep impact. As it is, we have been using images since a long time to assist our textual content make more sense, so also videos can integrate into design and generate a better sense if and when properly applied.

On-site mobile SEO
• Using 100% valid XHTML 1.0 code is the best practice as mobile search engines may however have more trouble digesting invalid code.
• It is likely that WML will be phased out in the near future, so play wise and safe. If you validate, the mobile search engines will not have any trouble with you.
• Follow accessibility best practices as they will ensure that your content is accessible to anyone regardless of their platform. This would include mobile users as well as the mobile search engines.
• Follow the traditional on-site SEO best practices, and which by now you know by heart. Major keywords for the title tag, H1’s and body text, keyword rich anchor text for internal links, and allow the link wheels to spin around.
Getting Spidery and Indexed by Mobile Search Engines
If you are wanting, your site to be indexed by the mobile search engines, they must come to know about it first. Make sure to submit your sites to major mobile search engines for some swift recognition. It would be a wise idea to see that each of your pages is having at least one incoming link.
List of mobile search engines
The following search engines are the major players in mobile search at this point of time.
• Google XHTML Mobile Search from Google Mobile
• Yahoo! Mobile
• MSN Mobile Search
• AOL Mobile Search
• Nokia Mobile Search
• Technocratic Mobile
• 4INFO Mobile Search

My sincere suggestion is, do not wait for the “year of the mobile” to arrive. Google has left us with a hint as early as the beginning of this New Year, 2010, when they decided to launch Nexus One. Get onto it and start creating some meaningful and genuine mobile related content. Apart from the adult stuff, we are having today, there is more that we can now do to make mobile SEO more relevant and effective in the days to come.

To begin with Vine is still in beta phase  and is available by invitation only at vine.net. At first glance, Vine looks like a personal alert system where your group of friends and families get to know about your whereabouts and anything that might warrants an alert.

Vine will get you your personal dashboard and you can receive about important alerts and vital information including articles from 20,000 news and public safety sources. You can send and receive alerts as you wish – from anybody in your group or from any of the sources mentioned above. The good part is that the Vine personal alert system is connected to your mobile. So if you are in an alien land and there are no phones – and you need to contact your friends and family immediately, Vine comes in here – You can send a mobile alert to your family and friends from your computer.

Sending an alert is also location and device agnostic – you can send an alert from your mobile phone or even e-mail or other applications.

The Yahoo factor!

Those of us who keep a tab on the search engines have a fair idea about the Bingoo! , but it is still a blackbox stuff as far as Vinoo! is concerned. But, considering the social spread and Web DNA of  Yahoo, Vine should be getting a jump-start by utilizing Yahoo’s existing podium. It remains to be seen as to how far hand goes in the glove with Vine and Yahoo. The radar must be working overtime in the cellars of Facebook & MySpace.

Pricing & Availability

• The basic service is free
• If you want to receive alerts on your mobile phone standard messaging charges apply
• Vine is currently available only in US.

Microsoft Vine in the news

• ***”It’s been awhile since Microsoft introduced a game-changing social Web application, but Vine — a service that’s debuting today with a beta test in Seattle — could be a contender.”   Seattle Times
• *** Microsoft debuts Vine in Seattle: Twitter+Facebook on steroids — Seattle Times
• * **Microsoft announces Vine, a location-based service for emergencies — VentureBeat
• * **Microsoft Vine To Connect Family, Friends When Crisis Hits — TechCrunch
• * **Meet Vine, Microsoft’s superhero software — CNET
• * **Microsoft’s Vine: Emergency Social Networking — PCWorld
• * **Microsoft throws a Vine to disaster victims — The Wall Street Journal
• * **Microsoft’s deep-rooted Vine isn’t just another social network — Tech Blog Plus

System Requirements for Microsoft Vine Beta

• Operating system: Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (32-bit edition only), Windows Vista (32-bit
• or 64-bit editions)
• Processor: 1 GHz or higher
• Memory: 1 GB of RAM or higher for Windows Vista, 512 MB for Windows XP.
• Hard disk space: 100 MB for Vine and 500 MB for the Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.5
• with Service Pack 1
• Resolution: Minimum 1024×768
• Internet connection: Broadband Internet access is required (provided separately); charges may
• apply
• Browser: Internet Explorer 6 or later, Firefox 3.0 or later
• Graphics or video card: A graphic card with Microsoft DirectX 9 and 128 MB of graphic memory
• is recommended

None other than IBM is trying to get a patent on a Remote – which will enable you to post a blog about the program you are watching. So, while you are with ‘Friends’ , you are connected to a blogging server and simultaneously in touch with other bloggers – all in real time.

The neat part according to IBM folks – You can send a snapshot of the program you are watching – Are there Copyright crusaders listening?

Its a long way before it becomes a reality but this flick is sure to tickle a lot of TV addicts who wished they had more time for something creative.

Is this going to be a dud or a new blogging Industry ? I don’t have the remotest idea. Do you?

So long from CB Corridor…Look out for more Internet spice in the coming days!