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What is Social Media?

9th March 2010 Marketing, Social Media, Web & PC stuff , , , , by

The phrase ‘social media’ is a broad concept, incorporating many different formats; including tools and services such as: social networking sites, blogs and micro-blogs, podcasts, professional networking sites, and online video. Collectively, they’re often referred to as Web 2.0 technologies.

This phrase “Web 2.0” is closely associated with Tim O’Reilly, after he used it in a 2004 conference. It broadly relates to the second generation of Internet-based services.

The 1st phase or generation of sites, were typically static sites or web pages that had minimal interaction between the visitor, other visitors and the site. This second generation of web sites are much more dynamic, allowing for individual content generation, sharing information, participation in online discussions and conversations, and web sites that can generate new pages and content automatically, on the fly.

I plan on expanding on this initial explanation of Social Media in my subsequent posts, building up a small knowledgebase and publishing guides about what services are out there and how they can best be utilised.

How much should a web site cost?

5th March 2010 Design, General, Marketing, Web & PC stuff by

This question seems to be asked all the time, often by people that don’t necessarily understand what’s involved with setting a web site up, or who have been bamboozled by agencies, developers or designers trying to charge them excessive fees.

The basics

It really depends on what level of technical competency you have personally. Purchasing a domain name and hosting it are the two major up front costs that you need to consider, because after that, everything else can be carried using Open Source software. In the UK, if you’re doing it all yourself – you can get decent hosting and a domain name, all for about £30 a year – as long as you’re willing to the design and promotion work yourself.

The intermediate options

Off the shelf scripts, are where you can really supplement existing Open Source web offerings – but these are only really beneficial if you’re trying to achieve something non-standard. General prices for functional scripts that can often be bolted on to existing open source web site structures range from about £20 to £100, although increasingly some authors are pursuing subscription models (for updates and support primarily), or are asking for donations if you use and benefit from their hard work.

The advanced options

Really, unless you have tons of cash or are producing a web site for a company – the advanced option of paying for a web team or designer to put a web site together for you will be beyond the means of most people.  Prices can range from a reasonable £100-ish, to thousands and tens of thousands…

But with so many free options available, why would many people want to look at these expensive options. A little bit of hard work and systematic research and anyone can begin creating their own web site, whatever their requirements.

Free printing / artwork templates

4th March 2010 Marketing , , , , by

I’ve found a good resource that I use regularly to source artwork  or printing templates for some design work that I carry out.

The site is affiliated with one of the low cost printing companies I use – Stress Free Print – and you can get to it HERE.

The site, Tom the Printer, includes various templates and sizes for the following generic designs:

  • Flat Leaflets / Flyers
  • Folded Leaflets / Flyers
  • Presentation Folders
  • Stationery
  • Business Cards
  • Greetings Cards
  • Tent Cards

Paying for online content

4th March 2010 General, Marketing, News, Web & PC stuff , , , , , by

There’s a really interesting discussion going on right now about whether newspapers can actually start charging for the digital distribution of their content. There’s an article on the BBC web site that I read today (link HERE) – and it includes an ongoing discussion about whether people really believe it’s achievable. 

As a marketer and someone interested in developing an online (hopefully profitable) presence, I have to believe it’s possible to monetize the web in some form – but I believe it’s unrealistic in this age of distributed reporting, aggregated news and instant updates that can be shared with the world, to expect someone to pay for content that is available in almost identical format elsewhere on or offline.  

The reason I think it’s not going to be enforceable universally is that there’s never going to be agreement between the media organisations. It’s the old prisoner’s dilemma, everyone saying that they’re going to be charging a fee to access the news, but then one breaks from the ranks to steal a competitive advantage – resulting in an endless circle of competitive retaliation.

What I do think is more achievable, is another service I read about recently that encourages micro payments. In the same way that organisations such as Amazon have benefited from targeting a huge population with an incredibly diverse product range – addressing the long tail of retailing – then micro payments that could be distributed to providers from a shared pot of funds could be exactly the solution that everyone is looking for. The site’s currently in beta (sign up for more info HERE) and is being developed by one of the Pirate Bay’s co-founders, Peter Sunde.

Mass marketing: email marketing

1st March 2010 Marketing, Web & PC stuff , , , by

Email marketing or emailshots are an easy way of contacting a large number of people quickly, easily and generally low cost.

However, there are pitfalls to watch out for so as to avoid being classed as a spammer. First of all, there’s varying legislation governing what you can send and to whom, depending on your country of operation. I plan on writing follow up articles about opting in or out and how to manage subscriber lists at a later date. This post is more concerned about the do-ing element of email marketing.

Yes, you can use your own email software such as Outlook Express, Outlook or Thunderbird… or even directly from your web mail accounts, if you decide to run things via web based services. The danger of doing this though, is that if you’re running a business – the last thing you really want or need is for your domain to be blacklisted because of email abuse. So, think very carefully about how you’re going to go about this.

A handy way to add a degree of safety to your mailshot activities is to use a third-party mailing application.

A couple of the better known ones are:

Not only can these manage varying subscription lists for you, but can safely send hundreds or even thousands of emails on your behalf and give you full statistical analysis of the success of your campaigns. Mail Chimp even offers a free package for low volume lists – allowing for up to 500 subcribers and 3,000 emails per month before requiring you to upgrade and start paying; whereas Campaigner, offers unlimited packages from just $10.

Does it matter that they’re not UK based?

The simple answer is, no. Support may not be as quick due to the time zones, but the prices are certainly worth the trade off.

Job Aggregators

26th February 2010 Careers, General, Marketing, Web & PC stuff , , , by

There is an updated version of this article available here.

What are job aggregators?

They’re online services that trawl through the Internet, locating and indexing jobs from job boards and employers according to the niches or geographies in which they operate. They’ve been around for a while – and almost all of them make the claim of having the most jobs, being the largest job board, or the most visited. The simple truth is that they’re quite similar to each other.

Despite this, they should still play a role in both a candidate’s job seeking arsenal and in a recruiters or employers advertising portfolio.

For advertisers (recruiters and employers):

The best thing is that most of these job aggregators are free. Most of them operate without requiring any direct intervention and they’ll silently come and trawl your site, finding your jobs and advertising them on your behalf. Because they’re mostly doing this in real-time, you also don’t have to worry about ensuring positions are removed when they’re filled, or expired. Just remove them from your own listings and the aggregators will reflect this when they next re-index or aggregate your job feeds.

Some of the aggregators will come to your site automatically and start aggregating your jobs, especially if you readily make available RSS or Atom based feeds of your jobs. Others, you have to specifically register with them and provide the direct links to where they can pick up the feeds. It’s still limited input, for what can often be access to quite a large potential market of jobseekers.

For jobseekers:

The job aggregators represent a quick, easy and accessible route to the latest jobs. They can save time by reducing the number of sites that you have to visit to find the jobs that are relevant to you and as they’re typically presenting job search results in real-time, you can be assured you’re accessing the latest vacancies. The bad news is that there can be serious problems with duplication; and some sites will try and bundle additional (sometimes chargeable) services with the job searching process.

For web developers:

Some of the aggregators have started offering APIs now too, so that you can directly integrate a fully functioning job search element in to your web site. The benefit to this is that can be another added facet for the services you provide to your users. The main downsides are that you’re effectively directing traffic away from your web site and you never hold the jobs yourself on your site, therefore there are no SEO benefits here. You also have little control over what’s displayed or how it appears. But they’re low effort, zero cost options that certainly can be a part of some sites.

Alternatively, you could consider developing your own aggregator using off the shelf php scripts, or considering plugins for blogs or CMS systems that can mostly do the job for you.

List of job aggregators:

This list is going to be forever changing, so right now, these are the main job aggregators (primarily UK based) that seem to have the highest profiles

Simply Hired – http://www.simplyhired.co.uk/

Indeed – http://www.indeed.co.uk/

Workhound – http://www.workhound.co.uk/

Work Circle – http://www.workcircle.co.uk/

Job Applications –http://www.jobapplications.co.uk/

Career Jet – http://www.careerjet.com/

Job Safari – http://www.jobsafari.co.uk/

Marketing, business and web skills

24th February 2010 Careers, General, Marketing, News, Web & PC stuff, Wordpress , , , , , , , , by

So this web site is now a handy place for me to keep everything that I do online ordered and accessible, as well as test various online technologies and functionality.

My skills and experience includes:

  • Marketing – strategic & tactical marketing plans, advertising, etc.
  • Business & organisational health checks
  • Web design – HTML, PHP, Joomla, WordPress, others…
  • Graphic design – predominantly Photoshop – covering print and advertising design, business graphics, logos, invitiations, anything really…
  • Research – predominantly secondary, desk-based research – but also including advice and consultancy on alternative options and sources of information
  • Recruitment – how to recruit, services available, routes to market, CV writing advice, careers management and consultancy work, recruitment web sites, etc.
  • Social media marketing – just starting here (late, I know), but, watch this space…
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