In their latest research (view below) it shows that conversationalists are busy changing the marketing landscape. They took data from 13 countries and profiled over a hundred clients in their research and have a look at their findings below.

Read full article here: http://blogs.forrester.com/

They have added a new rung to their research ladder – “Conversationalists”. The “Conversationalists reflects not only Twitter members, but also people who updates their social network statuses to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). They have only included people who update their status at least weekly, since anything less than this isn’t much of a conversation.

As social media interaction keeps on evolving, what will be next?

everyone’s favourite tube – YouTube was the most dominant online video website with 12.7 billion videos watched by residents in the USA in January 2010. An average YouTube viewer watches about 93.4 videos and this statistic shows a steady increase of 50% of over a year ago.

The top online video sites:

1. YouTube 12.8 billion videos
2. Hulu 903 million videos
3. Microsoft 492 million
4. Yahoo 435 million

Google – also everyone’s favourite is the dominant search engine with 65.5% share of the USA core searches. The core searches consist of searches done on the top 5 search engines. Other popular websites such as YouTube, Ebay and Craigslist account for 35% of searches.

Top search engines

1. Google 9.5 billion searches
2. Yahoo 2.4 billion searches
3. Bing / MSN 1.7 billion searches
4. Ask 0.5 billion searches
5. AOL 0.4 billion searches



Search engines will also discover your links found on popular social bookmarking websites as most of these Web 2.0 channels are ranked very high on the search engines. It is a great way to get your pages indexed on the search engines.

Social bookmarking can help you develop a regular flow of unique visitors to your website or blog over a period of time.

How does social bookmarking work?

Social bookmarking is a way of saving your favourite bookmarks to a public website and tagging them with relative keywords found in the content of the page you want to save.

Others can see your bookmarks and tags as you can see theirs. This allows people to organize, search and select bookmarks based on these tags. These can then be accessed from any web enabled computer.

People search social bookmarking sites to find the most popular websites dealing with almost any subject. Some of the popular social bookmarking websites features a ranking system where users can vote for your bookmarks.

To put it in simpler terms, if your site is rank highly by others, your links will become popular and viewed often.

Social bookmarking tips

• Register: This will be the first thing you will do when you find a social bookmarking site that you would like to use.
• Widgets: You can make it easy for other users to bookmark the content of your website and blog by adding social bookmarking buttons such as Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us or similar sites to your content. Visitors will then be able to bookmark your content with just one click.
• Participate: Search and find informative, great content that you can bookmark around the web. You will gain a reputation by only presenting the best content. Be social and social bookmarking will pay off.
• Great content: Always focus on creating content that is informative, unique and that inspire others. If your content doesn’t stand out, bookmarking won’t work. Valuable content is always the key.
• Occasionally bookmark: When you have created an outstanding content article, it is really ok to social bookmark it yourself. It should meet the standard you set for other or it will hurt your own credibility.

It’s a fact that bad news travels faster than the good news. By having a negative online reputation can affect customer relations, sales, employee retention, brand names, families and even friendships. With more than 70 % of the world’s population online today and well over 90% of companies making use of the online world, a good respectable online reputation is crucial for business.

In today’s online driven world, the management of your reputation is important to even the average person. Most companies when they are employing, searches Google or another search engine and social network to research and learn more about the prospective that they hire. This means managing your own digital reputation is becoming more important for those looking for the key position.

The management of your online reputation

The management of your online reputation consists usually of three levels.  Most likely, you won’t need to move beyond the first level.  Hopefully…

Monitor the blogosphere

You can setup tracking systems to notify you as soon as a posting is made anywhere about your company, your brand name and yourself. Google Alerts is an excellent tool to achieve this and it’s one of the most comprehensive monitoring tools available and it is free.

Responding to bad publicity

This is called “damage control”. Once you have detected a problem, it’s necessary to find the best counter back to minimize the reputation damage or perhaps turn around some one who is an enemy into a connection.

Repair your reputation

Once the damage is done, there’s a process you need to follow to repair and restore your online reputation.  Since you won’t be able to remove what was said and written (there’s some ways this can be done), you have to use a campaign of positive PR that only focusses on your targeted keywords to dilute and push the negative comments deeper into the search results.

By having a good, positive reputation online can only mean one thing – respect.

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Business networking becomes easier with online “social networks” like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Online social network sites are web-based services that allows individuals or groups to construct a public or semi public profile within a bounded system, articulate a list of other users and groups with whom they share a connection, and view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature of these connections may vary from site to site.

Back in the day, you used to listen to the radio, watch television or you picked up the newspaper to see what is happening. Social networking has changed this so that anyone can communicate, broadcast and interact about “what is being said” and share it with others.

Social Networking according to Wikipedia

A social network service focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relationships among people, e.g., who share interests and/or activities. A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_service

Business Social Network

A Business Social Network is a variation of the ever so popular social network service but it focuses only towards business networking, business opportunities, etc. It has become a very effective method for both small and big companies wanting to reach specific people internationally and demographically. With the help of a Business Social Network, businesses are given the opportunity to reach more people and have a bigger audience.

Just like networking in real life, the basic rule still applies – it is all about having the same interests. On the Internet, online businesses that shares the same interests would contact each other. If all goes well, they would forge a partnership or an alliance to boost their status.

Why Business Networking is important

The important part of Business Social Networking lies in the smart ways to link to people around you. On Business Social Networks you are not only linking to people but gathering knowledge about their business whereabouts. A professional Business Social Networking service attracts, aggregates and assembles prominent business-focused audiences by creating virtual, interactive and informative meeting places.

Business networking sites also allows you to showcase you or your company’s unique services, position and talents in the most positive way. In the past, your business dress created lasting first impressions. Now, a more realistic picture is formed through the web before any actual face to face meeting takes place. This means height, weight, etc no longer plays as important a role in business success as in the past– and we are all on a more even playing field.

Business Network Marketing

Whether you own your own business or work for a company, there are distinct competitive advantages for better understanding and using Business Social Networks to promote your products or services. There is a lot of information on the topic of Business Network Marketing, that it can be difficult to separate the good from the bad. LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, flickr, YouTube, Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, etc are just a few social networking sites to consider when planning your online marketing campaign.

Business Social Networking can be the answer for promoting your business, through the easy cost-effective marketing it is capable of. Clearly, social networking means are less expensive, more cost – effective, than advertising and other marketing plans although it takes time and dedication.

Business Social Networking provides the exposure every business dreams about. With this kind of exposure, new opportunities are not hard to get. People looking to invest in a business will look for a well reputed person, group or organization, the more your name is repeated, the more chances you get for new opportunities.

A blog is an excellent tool to boost your online brand, increase your website’s rankings on the search engines, reach new potential clients, communicate with current customers and to publicize information about your company.

There’s 3 main factors you need to take into consideration if you want to start influencing people with your blog posts.

Build relationships, selling your ideas and leadership.

Build relationships

• Positive: Always avoid criticizing others and being negative. You can focus on how to do the best with something and by building others up. Give advice, solutions and tips.
• Interested: Always be genuinely interested in your readers and on their perspectives. What do they want to know? What do they find interesting?
• Solutions: Talk about solutions to problems that your interested readers might have. You can encourage the discussion by asking questions.

Selling your ideas

• Motivation: As you write each blog posting you should always consider why your readers would want to do something that you are saying.
• Explain your ideas: Real life examples and effective story telling can help to make your ideas visual and memorable.
• Arguments: Always avoid arguments even when your readers are making negative comments. Stay objective and to the point. Be thankful for new ideas, opinions and be respectful.
• Agreement: You can respond to comments by first identifying all the areas of agreement. Try to view things from your reader’s perspective.

Leadership

• Mistakes: Admit your mistakes and be open on how you solved your problems. This can be a motivating factor to others that are facing the same problems so that they can see what didn’t work and what did.
• Questions: Try suggesting alternatives and ask questions instead of telling people directly what they should and shouldn’t do.
• Benefits: Focus on the benefits that your readers might receive from your ideas.
• Respectful. Be respectful of your readers capabilities and their situations and how you can help them to succeed. You can encourage them to try new ideas and to empower action.

Successful blogging takes time and dedication any way you look at it. Not only can your blogging influence people, but you can build trust and credibility with your blogging as well. Be the expert in your industry and niche and others will return regularly to your blog to see what you are saying.

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If you have decided to add a blog to your website you will have a couple of choices. Which blogging platform will you be using? Do you want your blog on a sub domain of your website adding value to the whole domain or on a dedicated domain?

Which blogging software to use?

There is a couple of options available in regards to choosing a stable blogging platform for your business blog. Find a few below.

Blogger: Blogger is owned by Google and it is free. This is a nice blogging platform for the beginner blogger. The hosting is free and it is done on blogspot.com. The set up of your blog on this platform is quick and easy. The only drawback to this is that it is very limited to customization because it is hosted on a separate location from your website.

WordPress.com: WordPress.com features a similar service as Blogger where you can create a blog on the WordPress.com domain that is hosted for free. You can select any themes that are available on WordPress.com to use on your blog, together with a couple of other options. This is a great tool to start a blog for people with a limited budget.

WordPress.org: WordPress.org offers a free open source blogging platform that you can download and run on your own hosting account. You have complete control and customize blog functionality. You can install any third-party plugins, themes and features on your WordPress blog. This is more difficult to set up than the hosted options explained above, but it offers the best SEO (search engine optimization) results for your website.

My recommendation

I highly recommend using the WordPress.org blogging software because you can host your business blog on the same domain as your website or you can create a dedicated domain for your blog. By adding a blog to your website not only adds keyword rich content regularly to your website but it will attract links from other bloggers as well. Your blog can become a linking magnet.

Your business blog visitors will be attracted as they find your blog posts which are broadcasted to the internet via RSS (Real Simple Syndication) and PubSubHubbub. Search engines will list your blog postings within minutes of publishing the post. Many visitors will come to your blog and then explore your website to see who you are and what you do.