Tuesday, May 24, 2011

ICONZ Case Study

Just noticed this week that the case study ICONZ did on our hosting has been published. See http://www.iconz.net/casestudies

21 Social Media Terms

  1. Blog – A tool used by writers around the globe to connect with readers. The most popular blogging platforms include WordPress, Typepad and Blogger.
  2. Delicious – A free online bookmarking service. When someone tags an article, video or blog post with a Delicious bookmark, it’s the equivalent of getting a “vote.”
  3. Digg – Similar to Delicious in that people vote for articles, videos and blog posts. If your content gets enough Diggs, it’s promoted to the front page for millions of visitors to see.
  4. Facebook – A social network that connects people with friends, family and business associates. Facebook is the largest social network in the world with more than 500 million users.
  5. Flickr – A social network that allows users to store photos online and then share them with others through profiles, groups, sets and other methods.
  6. Foursquare — Foursquare is a mobile check-in service that allows people to get points every time they visit their favorite restaurant, bar, coffee shop or whatever. The more points you get, the more likely you’ll be the recipient of special offers from that establishment.
  7. HootSuite – HootSuite allows you to manage multiple social media profiles, pre-schedule tweets or posts and view metrics.
  8. Like – Instead of writing a comment for a message or a status update, a Facebook user can click the “Like” button as a quick way to show approval and share the message.
  9. LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site that is mainly used for professional networking.
  10. Reddit – Reddit is similar to Digg and Delicious. It is a social news site that is built upon a community of users who share and comment on stories.
  11. Skype – A free program that allows for text, audio and video chats between users.
  12. StumbleUpon – A platform that’s similar to Digg, Delicious and Reddit. When you rate a website that you like using StumbleUpon, you automatically share it with like-minded people around the globe.
  13. Technorati – Real-time search for user-generated media (including blogs) by tag or keyword. Also provides popularity indexes.
  14. TweetDeck – An application that connects users with contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and more.
  15. Tweetup – A Tweetup is an organized or impromptu gathering of people who use Twitter.
  16. Twitter – Twitter is a platform that allows users to share 140-character-long messages publicly. User can “follow” each other as a way of subscribing to each others’ messages. Additionally, users can use the @username command to direct a message towards another Twitter user.
  17. Twitter Search – Twitter Search is a search engine operated by Twitter to search for Twitter messages and users in real-time.
  18. Vimeo – Vimeo is a video sharing service in which users can upload videos to be hosted online and shared and watched by others.  
  19. Webinar – A webinar is a live video event such as a meeting, training, or presentation that takes place via the Internet.
  20. WordPress – WordPress is a content management system and contains blog publishing tools that allow users to host and publish blogs.
  21. YouTube – A video sharing service where people can upload videos to be hosted online.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Email list growth tactics - level of effectiveness

In March this year Marketing Sherpa published the results from a survey on the most effective email list growth tactics. This survey was conducted amongst 1,100 marketers, to gauge how important a variety of tactics were considered to be, from the point of view of their respective organizations. Here's what they found:
Getting people to sign up to your newsletter is about building trust and offering value - such as offering a download - not simply throwing up a form and hoping that people will stumble upon it.

Facebook just got better for non-profits

Establishing new relationships and growing supporters are huge undertakings for non-profits. Social media tools, such as Facebook, are becoming critical in ensuring non-profits efforts are successful. This month Facebook announced its launch of a new resource centre designed to support not-for-profit organisations. The page, "Non-Profits on Facebook" offers tutorials, open discussions and educational material to specifically help not-for-profits.

Some of the resources published and available through the Non-profits on Facebook page include:


The Guide for Non-profits includes set-up instructions in addition to best practices for using the network and connecting with online communities.


The new resource center already has more than 425,000 Likes.