weblog

Google Cheat Sheet

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 16:13:58 +0100

Google Shortcut	Finds Pages That Have...
nokia phone	the words nokia and phone
sailing OR boating	either the word sailing or the word boating
"love me tender"	the exact phrase love me tender
printer -cartridge	the word printer but NOT the word cartridge
Toy Story +2	movie title including the number 2
~auto	looks up the word auto and synonyms
define:serendipity	definitions of the word serendipity
how now * cow	the words how now cow separated by one or more words
+	addition; 978+456
-	subtraction; 978-456
*	multiplication; *978456**
/	division; 978/456
% of	percentage; 50% of 100
^	raise to a power; 4^18 (4 to the eighteenth power)
old in new (conversion)	45 celsius in Fahrenheit
site:(search only one website)	site:websearch.about.com “invisible web”
link:(find linked pages)	link:www.lifehacker.com
#...#(search within a number range)	nokia phone $200...$300
daterange:(search within specific date range)	bosnia daterange:200508-200510
safesearch: (exclude adult content)	safesearch:breast cancer
info: (find info about a page)	info:www.websearch.about.com
related: (related pages)	related:www.websearch.about.com
cache: (view cached page)	cache:google.com
filetype:(restrict search to specific filetype)	zoology filetype:ppt
allintitle: (search for keywords in page title)	allintitle:"nike" running
inurl:(restrict search to page URLs)	inurl:chewbacca
site:.edu (specific domain search)	site:.edu, site:.gov, site:.org, etc.
site:country code (restrict search to country)	site:.br “rio de Janeiro”
intext:(search for keyword in body text)	intext:parlor
allintext: (return pages with all words specified in body text)	allintext:north pole
book(search book text)	book The Lord of the Rings
phonebook:(find a phone number)	phonebook:Google CA
bphonebook: (find business phone numbers)	bphonebook:Intel OR
rphonebook:(find residential phone numbers)	rphonebook:Joe Smith Seattle WA
movie:(search for showtimes)	movie:wallace and gromit 97110
stocks:(get a stock quote)	stocks:ncesa
weather:(get local weather)	weather:97132

via websearch.about.com

Leet Speak 1337 Translation

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:24:56 +0100

Note:
- The commas are added to separate symbols
- The symbol | (Example: B = |3 ) is a "down-slash", or "pipe", and not a lower-case "L" or capital "i"
- The symbol ` (Example: T = 7` ) is not a standard apostrophe, but is a "Grave Accent" and is found on the tilde (~) key
- Also keep in mind that the use of /-/ for H for example, aren't used nearly as often as the normal letter in a quick conversation. To write an entire sentence this way would take three times as long, thus the quicker single symbol or letter substitutions are more often used.

A = 4, /-\, @, ^, /\ , //-\\
B = 8, ]3, ]8, |3, |8, ]]3, 13
C = (, { , [[, <, €
D = ), [}, |), |}, |>, [>, ]]), Ð
E = 3, ii, €
F = |=,(=, ]]=, ph
G = 6, 9, (_>, [[6, &
H = #, |-|, (-), )-(, }{, }-{, {-}, /-/, \-\, |~|, []-[], ]]-[[,╫
I = 1, !, |, ][, []
J = _|, u|, ;_[], ;_[[
K = |<, |{, ][<, ]]<, []<
L = |,1, |_, []_, ][_, £
M = /\/\, |\/|, [\/], (\/), /V\, []V[], \\\, (T), ^^, .\\, //., ][\\//][,
N = /\/, |\|, (\), /|/, [\], {\}, ][\][, []\[], ~
O = 0, (), [], <>, *, [[]]
P = |D, |*, |>, []D, ][D
Q = commas are necessary: (,) or 0, or O, or O\ or []\
R = |2, |?, |-, ]]2 []2 ][2
S = 5,$,š
T = 7, +, ']', 7`, ~|~, -|-, '][', "|", †
U = (_), |_|, \_\, /_/, \_/, []_[], ]_[, µ
V = \/ , \\//,√
W = \/\/, |/\|, [/\], (/\), VV, ///, \^/, \\/\//, 1/\/, \/1/, 1/1/
X = ><, }{, )(, }[
Y = '/, %, `/, \j , ``//, ¥, j, \|/, -/
Z = 2, z, 7_,`/_

via http://www.wikihow.com/Read-and-Write-in-1337

Try translating something from English to Leet Here

How to Invite All Your Facebook Friends

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:16:56 +0100

I thought this script was clever. I rarely want to invite all my friends to anything. But this script works.

I set up a couple of groups on Facebook and wanted to invite all my friends, but it would have taken an eternity because for some strange reason Facebook doesn’t allow you to “select all” friends when sending an invite. I mean, they’ll let you do it… but only if you click one at a time! Uugh.

Well anyway I went on a little search and found that you could cheat the system by inserting a little javascript to make it happen! Here is how to do it:

Go to your Event, Group or page and click “Invite People”.
Once the page has loaded you should see all of your friends, but they are not selected.
At this point, copy and paste the javascript code below into your Web browser’s address bar, then hit “Enter”.
If all goes well, it selects all of your friends!
javascript:elms=document.getElementById('friends').getElementsByTagName('li');for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === 'object'){fs.click(elms[fid]);}}

via onemansblog.com

I tried it on a Fan Page. I selected "Suggest To Friends" - and a popup window appeared and loaded avatars of all my friends. I just dropped this script into the url address window and hit return and it selected everyone. It doesnt actually send the invite - you still have to do that. So I think its safe to try it and back out.

Bing SEO Tips

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:14:20 +0100

Here are the Bing SEO tips:

1. Domain Age is Key
Bing appears to put a lot of stock into how long ago a domain was registered. For marketers, this means that you may look to purchase older domains if you want to get on good position in Bing.

2. Text Rules
On most search engines, the amount of text on the page usually isn’t usually a huge factor. However, Bing appears to really like pages with at least 300 words of text.

3. Link Out
With Google especially, some marketers are scared to link out to other websites because they don’t want their Page Rank to be lowered. On Bing, linking out actually appears to be smiled upon.

4. Bad News for Bloggers
Google seems to appreciate the blogosphere more than Bing. This is especially true when recent news events occur and bloggers battle with major websites for space on the search engine results page.

5. Bing Loves Titles
If you want to make it to the top of Bing, be sure to have a title that correlates to the subject at hand. Without following this SEO tip (or is a DEO tip?), your other efforts may be lost.

via everyjoe.com

Domain Age: Bing is a lot harsher about domain age than Google. The longer your domain has been registered, the more favor it will find with Bing. One may consider acquiring older domains to enhance the chances of being picked up by Bing.

Length of Text: For Bing, size does matter. So, ensure that your webpages have content of at least 300 words. The length of the text is more of a significant factor for Bing than it is for Google.

Link Out: Google alters your page rank based on the relevance of the link out webpages. Often, people are unsure of how a particular link out would impact their webpage and steer clear of this option. However, Bing likes link outs and increases the page ranking of those webpages that have more of them.

Title Tag of your Page: The title tag is of utmost importance for Bing. Without the relevant keyword in this area, your complete SEO efforts could be wasted.

Title Tags of Other Pages: When you link out from your page, ensure that the title tags of the pages you have linked out to have the keyword that is most relevant to your page. Bing simply loves this.

Link Popularity: Google is more fascinated with link popularity than Bing.

via vedainformatics.com

Factors that affect (any) SEO

Regardless of whether you are optimizing for Google, Yahoo or bing, there are these following parameters that finally dictate where your pages rank:

Content quality & uniqueness
The domain age
Backlinks and authority of the page
Neighborhood pages
Title, meta keyword, content relevancy
Prerequisites to get considered by bing

Even before you start optimizing your content check if your blog satisfies the following prerequisites to help the bing bot crawl and index your site.

1. Submit your blog/site to bing: Use the following URL to submit your blog to bing. If you had already submitted your website to MSN earlier, chances are you are automatically indexed by bing as well. Anyhow, it doesn’t harm if you submit again.
Submit your site to bing

2. Verify at bing webmaster central: Use the bing webmaster central to add your blog and its sitemap there in. Do not forget to verify your site using the XML verification process mentioned there in.

3. Upgrade your Google XML Sitemap plugin: If you are using an old Google XML sitemap plugin on your blog, your post updates may not be alerting the bing search bot to crawl your blog. Hence you need to update the plugin and make sure that ‘Notify bing’ option is checked.

4. Robot.txt: Make sure that you are not blocking the bing/MSN bots via any robot.txt entries.

Bing SEO tips

Now, let me summarize the optimization tips that I got to read on the bing official blog.

#1 Construct good HTML

bing seems to give more weightage to the critical HTML parts such as the page title, meta keywords (much more weightage than Google) and H1 tags. It is a must to have relevant keywords in those three areas to get the bing bot understand the importance of your pages.

#2 User’s language in keywords

For bing, it is important to use those key phrases that people actually use to search than the hyped ones such as ‘Make Money Online’.

#3 Create location aware content

Unlike Google, the geo-targeting is not something that can be forced on bing via some settings alone. Bing uses on page information to geographically categorize content. Hence if your business is located in a particular town, make sure to use the name of that town (and address on relevant pages) on your pages and meta keywords tag.

#4 Backlinks from authority sites

Just like Google, the backlinks play a role in deciding the authority of your site. Hence you have to have quality backlinks coming in from authority sites and the relevancy of the anchor text is given more importance than the page rank of the originating sites.

#5 Have good number of outbound links

Due to the monetization models around links, Google degrades pages that have dofollow (ie. without rel=nofollow) outbound links. However, as long as the content linked to are relevant with respect to the anchor text, bing loves pages that are linked to relevant content. No dofollow or nofollow worries in this case! In this particular case it’s a toss up between bing and Google. There is more weightage when you are linking to older and established domains (neighborhood matters).

#6 Simplify your site or blog

If your site or blog is heavy on rich internet application technologies (flash, too much of javascript, silverlight etc), chances are the bing bot is confused. Try to minimize the use of such technologies – not just within your blog content but be choosy on your plugins and extensions as well.

#7 Remove trailing ‘/’ from domain name

While internally linking as well as doing offsite SEO, make sure that you simplify your home URL as much as possible by removing the trailing ‘/’. Sometimes, the url with slash and the one without slash (e..g. http://www.dollarshower.com/ and http://www.dollarshower.com) are considered two entities and hence causing dilution of your backlink equity.

#8 Convert all URLs to lowercase

Due to much the same reason as mentioned above, you may convert all your URLs to lowercase for all reference and link building purposes (e.g. http://mysite.com/About to http://mysite.com/about).

#9 Simple and easy to read URLs

Use your permalink structure to keep all your links as human and bot readable ones. URLs containing too many numbers, port number, non-alphabetical characters are not very readable by bots in order to obtain valuable indexing information and relate to their contents.

Also, absolute linking (http://www.dollarshower.com/about) rather than relative path linking (./about) seems to be of help to the bots.

#10 Domain age and landing page content

Older the domain, the more authority you have in the eyes of bing (also true with Yahoo) where as it is fairly easy to tweak your site to high authority when you are trying to achieve Google SEO. Bing also value unique content on landing pages.

via dollarshower.com

William Arruda's Personal Branding Predictions

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:08:58 +0100

1. Video, Video, Video

Thanks to greater bandwidth, cheaper storage, and a proliferation of products and services that make shooting, storing, viewing, and sharing video easy (Flip video, iPhone 3GS, YouTube, vimeo, blip.tv, vodpod, etc.), video will be king in 2010. Video is ideal because it allows careerists to deliver a complete communication and convey their personality—a critical component of branding.

2. Hiring Process

Companies will be hiring brands rather than employees. They will use social networks and Google to source talent, filter candidates, and validate credentials. "What's your brand?" will become as standard an interview question as "Tell me about yourself."

3. Branded Partners

Often more traditional in their approach to marketing and delivering their services, professional-services firms (accounting, law, consulting, etc.) are going to jump on the "brandwagon" with reckless abandon in 2010. In 2010, personal branding will be integrated into all levels in a firm—from hiring through becoming partner.

4. For-Credit Courses

Personal branding is a critical part of preparing students for successful careers.

5. Unified Search

We are already seeing many new services, such as addictomatic.com, that combine search results from many different search engines.Those who are building their personal brands will need to use various tools to ensure their visibility is positive and pervasive.

6. Video Search

With the huge growth in video on the Web (see prediction No. 1), we will start to see more sophisticated search capabilities within videos. Currently, most search tools use titles and meta-tags to evaluate the video content to include in search results. That will change—making video the most powerful tool for brand-building.

7. Increased Efficiency

New services are available to make the process of maintaining your brand online quicker, more efficient, and more integrated. Tools such as KnowEm, HelloTxt, and png.fm help you build your personal brand on the Web in less time and with less effort.

8. Personal SEO

SEO is just as important to people who are looking to build their brands. Of course, most of us cannot afford to have a full-time SEO expert on staff. That's why companies such as QAlias and PeoplePond have sprung up. Their services are great for career-minded professionals—especially those who have a common name or share their name with a celebrity. More such tools will become available and popular in 2010.

9. Digital Dirt Elimination

As Google results affect more aspects of our lives (getting a job, a loan, a date, etc.), people will engage firms such as ReputationDefender, Defend My Name, and Online Reputation Manager to eliminate digital dirt.

10. Permanent Mindset Shift

The confluence of Web 2.0 technologies and today's economic climate due to the subprime mortgage meltdown has changed the way we think about our careers.As we start to think of ourselves as companies of one, we will be more likely and more comfortable outsourcing activities related to our personal brands—building a management team to help us achieve our professional goals.

via marketingprofs.com

Dont You Love Email Scams?

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:06:11 +0100

I was just cleaning out my spam folder and ran across these two jewels. We have all seen variations of these things where in order to get money the dupe has to send some amount to free up a much larger amount. Not all of us have been educated about scams - and the good ones are always deceptive.

Madam Rita Osborne.
42 Dryden Street,
Leicester, L15,
England.

As you read this,I don't want you to feel sorry for me because I believe
everyone will die someday.Please do not be surprise the way I got your
contact, its obvious that this proposal will come to you as a big
surprise.This is because we have not met you before but I am inspired to send
you this email,my Name is Rita Osborne suffering from cancerous ailment.I am
married to Sir Williams Osborne an Englishman who is dead.My husband was into
private practice all his life before his death.we live together as husband
and wife which lasted for three decades without a child. My husband died
after a protracted illness,My husband and I made a vow to uplift the down-
trodden and the less-privileged individuals as he had passion for persons who
can not help themselves due to physical disability or financial predicament.

I can adduce this to the fact that he needed a Child from this
relationship,which never came,when my late husband was alive he deposited the
sum of Ten Million Pounds(£ 10,000,000.00 Million Great Britain Pound
Sterlings)which were derived from his vast estates and investment in capital
market with his bank here in UK. Presently, this money is still with the
Bank. Recently, my Doctor told me that I have limited days to live due to the
cancerous problems I am suffering from.

Though what bothers me most is the stroke that I have in addition to the
cancer. With this hard reality that has befallen my family, and me I have
decided to donate this fund to you and want you to use this gift which comes
from my husbands effort to fund the upkeep of widows, widowers,orphans,
destitute, the down-trodden, physically challenged children,barren-women and
persons who prove to be genuinely handicapped financially.

I took this decision because I do not have any child that will inherit this
money and my husband relatives are bourgeois and very wealthy persons and I
do not want my husband hard earned money to be misused or invested into ill
perceived ventures. I do not want this money to be misused hence the reason
for taking this bold decision. I am not afraid of death hence I know where I
am going. I do not need any telephone communication in this regard due to my
deteriorating health and because of the presence of my husband relatives
around me,I do not want them to know about this development.

Contact my lawyer with this specified email address

Barrister Teddy Williams (ESQ)

E-mail: barrteddywilliams.esq@discuz.org

Tell him that I have WILLED £10,000,000 to you by quoting my personal
reference number Law/chamber/solicitors/rt/osb/WILL/9834520012 and I have
also notified him that I am WILLING that amount to you for a specific and
good work.

Remain blessed.
Your Sister,
Madam. Rita Osborne

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Jeffrey,

This is to inform you that you have won a prize money of FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND US DOLLARS ($500,000) credited to file KY/W0254674679BQ, for the month of JANUARY 2010 Lottery promotion which is organized by MSWONLINE LOTTERY PROMOTIONS INC.

MSW/YAHOO & MICROSOFT WINDOWS, collects all the email addresses of the people that are active online, among the millions that subscribed to Yahoo and Hotmail and Gmail and other E-MAIL ADDRESSES, we only select five people every Month as our winners through electronic balloting System without the winner applying,we congratulate you for being one of the people selected.

These are your identification numbers:

Batch number......................YM 09102XN
Reff number.......................YM35447XN
Winning number.......YM 11 13 26 34 44 48

Firstly,we would like to give you a brief explanation or information about the MSW/Yahoo Internet Lottery. Due to the fact that you might be confused about how you won or if actually this is true. In fact, many winners have asked such questions and are cleared accordingly.

INFORMATION ABOUT INTERNET LOTTERY.

The MSW/Yahoo Lottery is an independent Internet Lotto organization that has been financially assisting people with it's intention to changing peoples life since 1998, so many people have benefited from it over the years. All Participants were selected randomly through a computer balloting system from over 100,000 unions, associations, and corporate bodies that are listed online from Canada, Australia, United States, Asia, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Oceania.

This Lottery was jointly promoted and co-sponsored by a conglomerate of some multinational companies as part of their social responsibility to the citizens in the communities where they have operational base. Further more your details (e-mail address) falls within our European representative office in England, as indicated in your coupon and your won prize will be released to you from this office.

PAYMENT ADVISE:

You are advised to urgently contact ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND(RBS), on the address below, for your payment.

RBS LONDON
203 WEMBLIN LONDON UK
Email:royalbnkscot@accountant.com
Tel:0044-7031846065
Fax:00 18664382596

All your information has been forwarded to the mentioned bank above, you are advised to forward a copy of your identification along with your winning numbers,to the paying bank.

Yours sincerely

Mrs.Paula Farias
TEL/FAX:0044-7031845269
Email:award2009@consultant.com

REMEMBER TO KEEP YOUR WINNING INFORMATION CONFIDENTIAL TILL YOUR FUND IS REMITTED TO YOU. ANY BREACH OF CONFIDENTIALITY FROM THE PART OF WINNER WILL RESULT IN AUTOMATIC DISQUALIFICATION.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: PLEASE NOTE; That your won prize is not deductible because it was insured with an insurance company and cannot be tampered with in accordance with article 44 sub sections 144 of the yahoo Lotto Commission /Gaming Regulations as adopted on 8 May 1996 and amended on 11 October 1996 by the constitutional assembly. Therefore your won prize must be transfer in full into your bank account. Note:This office does not demand nor request any fee from any of the Yahoo Award lottery Winner, for all the winners documents are done free of charge, from Yahoo Office, only on bank transfer transaction, for all the winners are expected to remit their bank transfer charge fee.

Allen Bonde's 10 Steps To A Practical Social Media Strategy

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:09:48 +0100

1. Create a mission statement -- What are your top-level objectives for applying social media and Web 2.0? And how will you achieve them? Ideally, this can be boiled down to one statement, articulating both the vision and where you aim to focus in terms of specific strategies. Don’t skip – or skimp on – this one; it’s important.

2. Assign owners – Who will take the mission, build the team, secure the budget, identify the tools needed? And who will own each channel, like LinkedIn, Twitter, your blog, etc., as you scale up the program? In about half of the organizations we have looked at, marketing owns social media, but this is mostly because early social business tended to focus on marketing or online commerce first.

3. Outline employee policies -- Do you have a corporate social media handbook, with policies, style guides and guidance for employees looking to participate (on behalf of the company) in public forums and social sites? And as you roll out new social business tools, beyond creating awareness – see below – how will you encourage new behaviors and even innovative uses for these social tools?

4. Identify existing communities -- Where are discussions taking place now? For consumer products, they may take place on Amazon or Facebook, while business topics may originate on LinkedIn or internal forums. But it’s also likely that most discussions will span multiple social (and traditional) channels and involve both user-generated and enterprise content. Your social business strategy will need to address all of these!

5. Create a marketing plan -- How will you promote and roll out your new (or existing) social capabilities? Will word-of-mouth marketing be sufficient? Also, a training plan, incentives and recognition programs for frequent posters to communities and moderators will be needed.

6. Develop individual channel strategies -- Depending on which channels best fit the goals of your social business strategy, it’s important to look at the “role” and “tone” of each, think about cross-links (e.g., Facebook promotion back to your corporate blog) and leverage monitoring and benchmarking tools for tracking discussions, sentiment and your current “influence.” For example, Twitter Grader is a good way to see how you stack up in the world of Twitter.

7. Develop community strategies and programs – How will you support existing communities via new social business tools and encourage the widest number of users to share, publish and comment on information, whether it exists inside or outside the enterprise? In addition, what is needed to measure reputation and enable a trust model that scales across all communities?

8. Develop your platform strategy -- As companies look to integrate social channels with core business processes, a growing number are turning to social business software (SBS) platforms like those from Jive, OutStart or RightNow via its HiveLive acquisition. In evaluating these options, it is important to outline enterprise requirements (built-in expertise location, mobile access, etc.) and dependencies to help you scale from individual communities to enterprise collaboration and social networking.

9. Create a social business dashboard -- What metrics will you use to show the ROI for your programs? In the customer service arena, reduced costs from avoided calls or email and higher customer satisfaction are two proven measures to start with. For enterprise use of Web 2.0 in other areas, improved information sharing and lower communication costs are additional benefits that could be measured and tracked.

10. Publish an action plan -- What tactics are needed to fulfill your social business vision over the next 12 to 18 months? Typically, these plans start with management activities (steps 1, 2, 3 and 9), marketing-oriented tasks (steps 4, 5 and 6), content and community development (steps 4 and 7) and technology rollout (steps 7 and 8). Ideally, for each tactic, you want to articulate specific skills needed, timeframes and dependencies, and field trials to test assumptions and readiness for proceeding with subsequent phases.

via searchcrm.techtarget.com

Link Facebook Wall Entries to Twitter

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 03:13:52 +0100

You might be wondering how you can automatically post your wall entries on Facebook to Twitter. You want anything new happening on your fan page to be shared on Twitter. Its really quite simple. First go to http://www.facebook.com/twitter You will see a simple page that directs you to make the connection. After clicking you will be taken to a page showing all of you fan pages that you have control over. Find your fan page and click the button that says "Link to Twitter".

This takes you to the standard page where you get to "Allow" or "Deny" access to Twitter. You have the option here to login to Twitter or signout and login into a different Twitter account. If you are Twittering for a business - you will want to log out of your personal account and sign into the target business account. Once that is complete you will return to your list of fan pages and you will see some check boxes. If you dont want to share new photos then uncheck that box and save your changes.

I havent found a way to control the format of the tweets going out on Twitter from Facebook. Sometimes you want to customize your tweets by adding hashtags so your followers can find you.

Another issue that I find troublesome is that wall posting is shared on Twitter using bit.ly with the shortened url pointing back to the Facebook page. This is OK some of the time but when you just want to share your new blog from your website you want to be able to post only once to Facebook and then let Facebook autopost to Twitter without your visitors having the intermediate stop on the Facebook page before getting to the blog posting.

Another thing to notice is that when you share a link in Facebook it will include a nice thumbnail and text without you entering anything. However when this gets sent to Twitter - only the link is visible. Meaning that you need to add some text that does show up on Twitter. I would advise playing around with this a bit to get the hang of it and make sure you are happy with the result.

The Four Tenets of the Community Manager

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:10:39 +0100

1) A Community Advocate
As a community advocate, the community managers’ primary role is to represent the customer. This includes listening, which results in monitoring, and being active in understanding what customers are saying in both the corporate community as well as external websites. Secondly, they engage customers by responding to their requests and needs or just conversations, both in private and in public.

2) Brand Evangelist
In this evangelistic role (it goes both ways) the community manager will promote events, products and upgrades to customers by using traditional marketing tactics and conversational discussions. As proven as a trusted member of the community (tenet 1) the individual has a higher degree of trust and will offer good products.

3) Savvy Communication Skills, Shapes Editorial
This tenet, which is both editorial planning and mediation serves the individual well. The community manager should first be very familiar with the tools of communication, from forums, to blogs, to podcasts, to twitter, and then understand the language and jargon that is used in the community. This individual is also responsible for mediating disputes within the community, and will lean on advocates, and embrace detractors –and sometimes removing them completely. Importantly, the role is responsible for the editorial strategy and planning within the community, and will work with many internal stakeholders to identify content, plan, publish, and follow up.

4) Gathers Community Input for Future Product and Services Perhaps the most strategic of all tenets, community managers are responsible for gathering the requirements of the community in a responsible way and presenting it to product teams. This may involve formal product requirements methods from surveys to focus groups, to facilitating the relationships between product teams and customers. The opportunity to build better products and services through this real-time live focus group are ripe, in many cases, customer communities have been waiting for a chance to give feedback.

Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang via web-strategist.com

Still a great synopsis of what a community manager does.

Social Media Marketing Approaches

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 03:25:41 +0100

Web Strategy Matrix: Social Marketing Approaches, Shotgun vs Laser

Shotgun Laser

Description Hiring multiple agencies to conduct social campaigns Building a deeper relationship with a core group of influencers

Similar to Interactive Advertising, “Fishing” Influencer Relations, ‘Friending”

Benefits Efficient way to get started, identify hot spots to pursue. Deeper relationships with core influencers who may spread word of mouth, and become brand evangelists.

Risks Brand burnout on community, risk of appearing disingenuous Spending more resources on a smaller few reduces chances of spread.

Costs Inexpensive. In this case, it was 15k X 8 agencies, for a total of 120k. Costly. Relationship marketing estimated 50-100k in agency costs. Loaning 100 economy cars at 15k each around 1.5 million.

Takeaway Ideal for the company that doesn’t understand social marketing and is willing to test on their own customers. Ideal for company that’s ready to invest time, people and money on relationships.

	Shotgun	Laser
Description	Hiring multiple agencies to conduct social campaigns	Building a deeper relationship with a core group of influencers
Similar to	Interactive Advertising, “Fishing”	Influencer Relations, ‘Friending”
Benefits	Efficient way to get started, identify hot spots to pursue.	Deeper relationships with core influencers who may spread word of mouth, and become brand evangelists.
Risks	Brand burnout on community, risk of appearing disingenuous	Spending more resources on a smaller few reduces chances of spread.
Costs	Inexpensive. In this case, it was 15k X 8 agencies, for a total of 120k.	Costly. Relationship marketing estimated 50-100k in agency costs. Loaning 100 economy cars at 15k each around 1.5 million.
Takeaway	Ideal for the company that doesn’t understand social marketing and is willing to test on their own customers.	Ideal for company that’s ready to invest time, people and money on relationships.

via web-strategist.com