With the introduction of Web 2.0 and social media, we have entered an age where the old methods traditionally used to define and place consumers in the appropriate demographic is increasingly becoming obsolete.The introduction of newer technologies has seen the well known ‘tick-a- box consumer’ of old evolve into a more sophisticated, computer savvy demanding breed .

Other statistics were as follows: (H:M:S)

Australia – (6:52:28)
United States -(6:09:13)
United Kingdom – (6:07:54)
Italy – (6:00:07)
Spain – (5:30:55)
Brazil – (4:33:10)
Germany – (4:11:45)
France – (4:04:39)
Switzerland – (3:54:34)
Japan – (2:50:21)

So, why exactly are Australians slightly more atuned to social media than us? Ross Dawson gives us a fantastic insight. He introduces us to famous Australian culture, known as ‘tall poppy’ syndrome, where one’s opinions are dying to unleash, stand tall and be shouted out.

With the emergence and growth of social media, these stand out opinions are allowed to blend in with the soul purpose of social media in the first place; getting your voice out and heard. Twitter has also been most favoured by Australians since reports have shown that Sydney is one of the lead twittering cities.
With further explanation in his report, Dawson’s report is definately worth a peek.
Source: blur-marketing.com

Social media framework aids comprehension of workflow experiences by describing their components, it also optimizes social media workflow in an easier way since a framework may include components that are applicable to them all.

Why is it crucial that we care about this? Simply because badly designed processes lead to the slow and inefficient response of your audience, ineffective communication, wasted time, disappointing experiences and poor degree of engagement. (Not to mention driving yourself to nowhere) Here is how I do it:

Word Sharing: Share news resources, tools, best practices, tips and guides through social bookmarking platforms.
Twitter: Use it heavily for different purposes such as, RT useful links, WOM, spread the news, share insights with professionals, learn what is hot now, real-time conversations, gain more affluence and traffic in your social networking platforms, support interesting initiatives, building an outstanding reputation being taken into account in the field I work on, promote your blog, look for trends topics, getting ideas and enlightening tips from brilliant people.
Your effort and sacrifice deserves being showed and shared for the benefit of others: Posting papers, concepts, frameworks, reports, projects, strategies, marketing plans or campaigns I’ve developed, so the job people can get insights from them.
Knowledge don’t belongs to you nor me, but to the universe: Spread what you know, share what others shared with you, teach what you’re good at, learn from everybody, write about how you put in practice these campaigns or explain how you reached that conclusion, which made you successful, but above all, quote your resources!
LinkedIn: Use it insistently for giving and receiving feedback, reading interesting posts, and comment on them. Find your key connections and engage with them, share ideas in the groups discussions, also participating in Q&A (either giving advice or receiving it). This should increase your visibility and it will improve the chances of being contacted.
Facebook: Aim it to talk and engage with your friends. Create lists, giving a different degree of permission to your crowd and segmenting the information according to the content you usually share with them.
The Wave: Use Google Wave for collaborative tasks, developing projects, exchanging ideas, brainstorming, conceptualizing campaigns and seeing how others can enhance your work.
Timing: Your blog, Do you love it? No? You must, because it’s the place where all your efforts, time, money and even romantic relationships are going to end up. All you do on Social Media has being meaningful to your blog. If not, I suggest you may want to reconsider your strategy. Give him a personality, a sense of humor, a purpose, a regularity, a bottle of Möet if he wants it and you’ll have your reason to give the very best of yourself in this URL.
Managing and optimizing: It is essential to define your strategy, set your goals and to monitor your results but, it is vital not to be overwhelmed by its magnitude. Hence, write down every procedure, pattern or system you follow to implement your social media workflow and start developing a schedule with all the tasks you performs every day, together with the time spent, the activities, the allowance, restrictions, and of course, deviations.
Plan for failure: If it doesn’t work, try changing and adjusting things to your needs. I know how it works to me, for you instead it can be slightly different. Be aware that you need to have hundred of bad ideas to have 1 or 2 great ideas. Do you get the idea?
Guest post @Israel Garcia blur-marketing.com

A Facebook page will not only help you gain more traffic for your website, blog or both but will also gain more credibility for you and the brand you represent.

Basically, this social network has more that 400 million users and in average, everyone of them spends 55 per day connected. Also the average user has 130 friends and fans 2 pages per month. Also the Fan Box is becoming more pervasive. If you feel that the page you built to promote something like a product or an idea using this social network doesn’t perform, don’t delete it because there are ways to make it better!

A recent study by Sysomos conducted on 600,000 pages showed that 4% have more than 10,000 fans and 0.76% more than 100,000 fans. Also the study revealed a small correlation between how frequently the admin of the page updates the contant and total number of fans. This doesn’t mean that an empty page will attract fans, so you have to do some work anyway. Besides Wall posts you have to add photos, videos, links and other content. Also be as informative as possible.

Such a page can be a very good asset for your online business if you do it and promote it properly.
Where can you promote it?

1. A link or badge on your website
2. Fan Box
3. Resource Box on articles/blog
4. Email newsletters
5. Include a link in your profile from other social networks
6. Google Buzz profile
7. Include it in your business card
8. Signage
9. Email Signatures
10. Adverstisements
11. Forum posts signature

Also please pay attention of your Facebook analytics and stats. Also observe the best pages in your domain and inspire yourself. But also be creative, don’t just copy.

- Participate and make it routine
- Ask questions
- Host events on your page
- Highlight contributions from others
- Go beyond just text
- Integrate your other online presences
- Take it easy with apps, boxes, etc.
- Run offline events, if you can

One thing you want to do is pay attention to your Facebook analytics. Pay attention to stats. Pay attention to changes Facebook makes in this area. For example, recently it was discovered that some admins were starting to see impression counts for each post, as well as the number of likes and comments for each impression. Like Baer says, test content types to see what works best.

Social Networkig is the biggest wave in the history of internet. If you have an online business you have to leverage the power of Free Traffic from Social Networks.

Tissa Godavitarne is an internet entrepreneur who exploited in the last years the “people search” market niche and has more than 60,000 partners in his programme. Enjoy the video. More info can be found here. You will probably not believe that 30% of All Searches on Google and Yahoo are People Search Related –and growing.

Most video blogs use some form of web syndication in order to upload and spread the videos online and at the basis of every transmission lies the RSS technology or format. Presently, vlogs, may even be accessed on mobile devices such as pods and mobile phones. Though, the very vlog phenomenon started as a collective attempt, there are many individual video logs that are authored by people who make a hobby out of it. It is a good thing to know that content contributors can get to be paid for their share in the process: on the sole condition that they upload viable material.

Let’s take the case of the Google video blogs that enjoy massive success all around the world, it is a collective effort of keeping in touch with people that are thousands of kilometers away from you. Uploading and sharing videos is an instant procedure on http://googlevideo.blogspot.com/, not to mention that Google also provides a directory of vlogs where you may find whatever you’re looking for. A similar example of a vlog collection that is also administered by Google is the very popular YouTube, which has attracted thousands of users ever since its beginnings in 2005.

The vlog working principles are less complex than those specific to a regular blog, though the basics are alike. For instance, if you join a video blog community, you’ll need your own channel, and signing up is usually required in order to be able to follow the rest of the necessary steps. Once you have a channel, you can simply organize the favorite shows, videos or podcasts from everywhere in the world or simply load and send them across the web. Ipods, iPhones and iTunes are perfectly compatible with vlogs, so that you can pretty much take the web with you everywhere you go.

Let’s take a look at the way some tools can help you post entries on the blog with the help of the platforms. Due to the wide variety of available software, format may vary, nevertheless the working principle is the same: type the title and the text you want to accompany it in the platform. Not all tools provide italics, bold and large font sizes, and you may have to get this by using HTML in order to achieve the desired results. In case you have to copy-paste Microsoft Word text, you need to check whether the blogging platform allows it without interference with RSS feeds.

In order to upload videos and pictures on the blog we have to mention Adobe Photoshop as one of the best tools here; yet, you may have to resize the images in order to make them easy to download by visitors. Furthermore, such tools enable you to align the photos in the way that matches your entry best. Embed multimedia files are also widely used by bloggers, mainly with the help of third-hand utilities like those offered by YouTube. All you have to do is include a JavaScript in the posts in order to allow the blog users to access the photo or video files you upload.

The RSS support may also prove crucial for the success of a blog, particularly since most Internet users are mainly concerned with accessing blog content via RSS feeds. You can find a variety of RSS formats available, not to mention that most tools include some sort of RSS help. To make sure you really get what you want, and the blog looks professional to the targeted audience, it is advisable that you should check the RSS formats a special software offers before actually purchasing or installing it.

Blogging is trendy: no comment to that! Not only is it popular with people of all ages but it also makes one feel like blending in. You get an idea of what people appreciate in your writing, you get to comment and actually live some events of public interest, and you have the chance to speak up your mind. Everything you post on the blog, every piece of original material is achieved and easily accessible when you need it; many would-be writers actually take blogging very seriously since they are offered the opportunity of getting things into print without the intermediary of another publication.

Many blogs offer the advantage of a debate area where you’ll find all sorts of opinions: don’t get angry if the feed-back is not always the one you’ve hoped for, points of view are personal and they should not hurt feelings. It’s within your power to take things like that. Then, we should also mention the popularity and promotion advantages that are specific to a blog; just like niches, small business blogs create the proper environment for the easy reach of targeted Internet users.

Many business owners have discovered that blogs are the perfect way to regularly keep in touch with customers and even employees, since these web pages function as online journals that are very frequently updated. The advantage that blogs clearly have above other sites is that they express something peculiar in the most active or dynamic of ways whereas the other “classic” web sites are definitely static. Without any shade of a doubt the voice of the writer is the element that makes a blog unique and interesting at the same time!

To give you a further glimpse into the utility of the tool, we should mention that the abbreviation RSS stands for Rich Site Summary. Therefore, besides the advantage of delivering fresh web content, RSS allows many Internet users who need to stay informed; thus you can easily retrieve whatever item of information you are interested in from a specific site. From this perspective, RSS comes as a great alternative to subscribing for email newsletters since it doesn’t require your giving away the email address. Presently, RSS has become the choice of many sites that need to keep a permanent contact with their visitors.

If you decide to use an RSS, you won’t need anything else except a special feed reader, and even here there is a wide variety to choose from: Newsgator and FeedReader made by Windows or Amphetadesk that works for a variety of platforms including Mac and Linux. Moreover, there is also a large number of RSS feed readers that are totally web-based, they include Bloglines, Google Reader and My Yahoo. Once you install the reader on the computer, all you have to do is actually find the sites that summarize content and add the RSS feed on the page to your feed reader.

Presently, you can find many RSS blogs and sites that provide information on the best means to use this tool; nevertheless, we should mention that the information is constantly updated since there is more to say on RSS as it spreads out more every day. Thanks to the content synthesis, work on the web has become a lot easier, particularly since sites that have available RSS feeds use special signs to let you know about the facility. In a nutshell, on the long run, you’ll see how much time you save by the use of a software such as RSS.

Widely accessible all over the web, photo blogs are managed with the help of specific software systems that enable content control. Thus, photo bloggers are able to upload materials and manage all posts without any restriction; the same unrestricted form is maintained for the access to photo blogs, since all that is required is a browser and direct online access. There are cases when the transition from text to photo blogs is made with the use of plugins and even code rewriting; thus a combination of text and image is possible when a blogger selects a daily entry option.

Usually photo blogs have a single author, nevertheless it is not uncommon that two or three people contribute to the same web page. The posts display depends on chronology, with the main page showing the most recent entries, but you may go back to the archives any time you want. Photo blogs are highly interactive too since users may leave any comments they want for a special entry. The presence of friendly links is also important in the photo blogging community, given the fact that creators come to move freely between sites.

It is totally incorrect to take pictures galleries for photo blogs; while the former is a simple collection images, the latter is a chronological log that uses categories allowing the user to navigate among them from older to newer materials and vice versa. It is not uncommon to also have photo blogs and moblogs as one and the same unit; though they may also function separately as well. A photo blog that can be updated from a mobile location such as camera phones could be labeled as mob logs. Nevertheless this latter concept could well function without pictures as well. In a nut shell, the composite character of the Internet allows the happy existence of hybrid blog types that enrich the puzzle even more.