Popular paid virtual whiteboards include Microsoft Live Meeting, WebEx, and GoToMeeting. But did you know you can share desktops for free with Skype?
Skype includes a desktop sharing (A.K.A. screen sharing) feature for use between two users (no more). It is simple and easy to use. Note: If you would like to screen share with a small team, you might benefit from a more advanced client. However, Skype is free and easy to use, plus many people already are familiar with it for its free video calls anywhere in the world.
Need more information/options? Loyal Mealer at svprojectmanagement.com wrote a helpful guide with links (E.g., Microsoft Shared View, Vyew, Mikogo) to other desktop sharing clients.
Emily Binder
is a social media enthusiast, marketer, part-time web developer, and Etsy baker 
living in Atlanta, GA. She hails from the Midwest and loves chess and rollerblading.
@emilybinder: 
@adoreajarbakery:
This post is mainly geared toward Twitter but includes tips for all social media.
Twitter Lists: As you follow more tweeps, organizing them into lists and groups is helpful. For example, I have a list of Atlanta-related tweeps I follow, E.g. local newspapers or venues. I use TweetDeck on my desktop and iPhone, so when I want to view a column about what’s going on this weekend in Atlanta, I can do so easily using by filtering my ATL list. I also have a tech list of tweeps who provide helpful content and news.
But, when I want to search any topic or keyword and see its popularity or stats on Twitter and/or other social media sites or blogs, I branch out:
1. Social Mention aggregates user-generated content from 80 social media sites. You can search a term, name, brand, etc. and filter which sites you wish to display. If someone has tweeted about Carol Bartz (CEO of Yahoo.com), or a blog was written about Steve Jobs, you will see the tweet or blog title and time of post. Tell SM to only show results from, say, Digg, Reddit, Google News, and WordPress= one stream of point-in-time customized social media search and analysis. (Thanks to @wisdeo.)
Salvador Dali- The Persistence of Memory. 1931.
2. Tweet O’Clock is useful if you have an important tweet you hope will grab the attention of a specific user or certain types of users. In the same vein as Social Mention, Tweet O’Clock is focused solely on tracking Twitter users’ (A.K.A. tweeps’) habits. It allows you to pinpoint the best time to DM a tweep by calculating their average most active time on Twitter in a given week. Before tweeting @ someone important, remember this:
<—-Timing is everything: Don’t waste good content on a Wednesday at 3AM. Remember: Monday-Friday, 9A-5P is the most heavily trafficked time on Twitter. And Mondays are the most popular day of the week.
3. Podcasts are amazing. You can make better use of idle time (standing in line, stuck in traffic, riding public transportation, walking your dog) by listening to something educational (or fun). The following are all available for free on iTunes. Two good tech/Internet podcasts to which I subscribe:
- MacBreak Weekly. MacBreak is chock full of the latest tech trends, with a focus on Apple. The podcast is a reliable source for iPad, iPhone, and corporate technology developments.
- 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing. Canadian marketing expert Jay Berkowitz aims to “explain and demystify internet marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, banners and landing pages.” He gives advice on social media etiquette, with great Twitter tips. His blog is here.
If you enjoyed reading Stephen J. Dubner and University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics, check out their podcast. Human behavior and psychology are highly related to social media. (I was a psych major.) The podcast is bite-size fun.
Pray tell! What is your favorite podcast and how does it enhance your social media arsenal?
Emily Binderis a social media enthusiast, marketer, part-time web developer, and Etsy baker living in Atlanta, GA. She hails from the Midwest and loves chess and rollerblading.
@emilybinder:
@adoreajarbakery:
Regardless of how much you use social media to promote your brand or to communicate with anyone, email is arguably the most direct online method of messaging someone.
Analogy time: Put yourself back in 1994. You would like to converse with your friend Brenda, who lives down the street. You could:
Today, as impersonal as communication can be, directly emailing someone usually takes more effort than a tweet or quick text message. Social media is at best likened to Choice B (with Twitter DMs) or C (with a Facebook Poke, at worst). In the realm of rapid global online communication, a personal email is analogous to Choice A. While tweeting or posting a Facebook or LinkedIn status is quick, easy, and instantly available to hoards of people, email remains more intimate (caveat: namely when emailing a single person, not forwarding messages to groups).
With this in mind, consider how many emails you send each day. Your signature can serve as another promotion tool. While cute quotes and swirly fonts may be appropriate for people looking to personalize email to friends and family, business-related emails can be a powerful method to unobtrusively promote your web presence. I.e., instead of blatantly linking someone to your blog or Twitter page, a small icon at the end of your signature is less abrasive and serves the same purpose. Readers will appreciate how optional and undirected clicking said icon seems: As far as email etiquette goes, you could manually insert links like this: “P.S. Check out my blog here! And follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook here, here, and here…” or you could use WiseStamp, with customizable signatures insertable anywhere in the email.
As Robin Good writes in his blog post on Social Media vs. Email, “My proposition is to look with new and open eyes at the marketing potential that email could offer, as blinded by negative past experiences and models and distracted by the huge momentum that social media is having, we may just be overlooking what is right away, simple, powerful and effective, if only utilized in a more appropriate way.”
Takeaway point: Social media is powerful, but aim to brand yourself with a well-rounded toolbox- use a customized email signature, because Brenda might ignore your page but she has to answer the door.
is a social media enthusiast, marketer, part-time web developer, and Etsy baker living in Atlanta, GA. She hails from the Midwest and loves chess and rollerblading.
@emilybinder:
@adoreajarbakery:
The March 2010 edition of Harvard Business Review, includes the results of a study on the effectiveness of Facebook as a Marketing tool for Businesses, One Café Chain’s Facebook Experiment.
The experiment was based on the effectiveness of a Facebook page for a Houston based cafe and bakery chain, Dessert Gallery.
As with every successful Facebook business page, Dessert Gallery did a few key things right:
Sustainable Fan base
- Dessert Gallery had a large email contact list of 13,270 customers. When they launched the Facebook page, they invited everyone on the contact list to become a fan of the business. That gave them a large fan base from day one. A good guideline for launching a sustainable business page is to have at least 130 fans.
Keep your customers engaged
- Dessert Gallery regularly updates their facebook page with pictures of goodies, news about contests and promotions, links to favorable reviews, and introductions to employees. Social media may be cheap but it’s not always easy. You have to work it to make it work for you.
Put your fans to work
- Dessert Gallery uses their fans to become ambassadors for their brand. Don’t be afraid to ask your Facebook fans to post personal photos of your product and to invite their friends to join your group.
The HRR study concludes:
Cautious optimism seems wise at this point. Companies should see what Facebook can do for them but use it as just one niche tool.
Before you begin a Social Media Marketing campaign, you need to define your goal(s). It’s like going on a business trip. You don’t just show up at the airport without knowing where you are going.
The three most common Social Media campaign goals are:
- Increasing awareness / build goodwill about your brand
- Generate website traffic
- Increase Sales
Increasing awareness / build goodwill about your brand
The Pepsi Refresh Project campaign is a great example of a Social Media campaign designed to increase goodwill. This year, instead of spending big bucks on Super Bowl advertising, Pepsi decided to launch the Refresh Project. There is nothing about this campaign to generate direct sales. Instead, the Pepsi Refresh Project is all about building goodwill for the soft drink manufacturer.
Pepsi kicked off the campaign with a competition between New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez, Dallas Cowboys linebacker DeMarcus Ware and New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees. Each player campaigned for fans to vote for their project by texting to the Pepsi Refresh campaign or voting online at an NFL landing page created for the competition. The NFL page announced and linked visitors to the Pepsi Refresh campaign.
The Pepsi Refresh campaign features a website, refresheverything.com, which is connected to Facebook and Twitter. Visitors go to the website to submit ideas and vote on their favorite projects. Each project has it’s own page complete with stories, videos and social networking links.
Every month, Pepsi will offer up to 32 grants to worthy projects in six categories: health, arts and culture, food and shelter, the planet, neighborhoods and education. Over the course of the year, Pepsi will award a total of $20 million in grants – about the same amount they would have spent on Superbowl advertising.
The Pepsi Refresh site which launched just over a month ago on Jan 12, 2010, already has 575,000 Facebook fans. The campaign is generating lots of press including features in NY Times, Mashable, ESPN and Time.
Viral content is a primary component of Social Media Marketing. Viral is like word of mouth advertising. Viral works by creating an online message that’s entertaining enough to prompt consumers to pass it on to others.
The Coca Cola Facebook fan page is a great example of viral content. The page was originally created, not by Coca Cola employees, but by two regular guys on the West Coast who happened to love Coca Cola. The site grew and grew organically until it became the largest fan page on Facebook.
When Coca Cola found out about it, they decided to keep site going. They brought the guys to Coke World Headquarters and let them make this great video about the experience:
The Coca Cola Facebook page now has over 4 million fans.
Being viral is only half of the job, the marketing bit is the harder part. With Social Media Marketing, you have to create a viral message that motivates people to buy your product.
This is the second in a series of articles on Social Media.
