Internet Marketing Blog

Mart came up with a great write up on benefits, values & ethics of conversation on Twitter. I wanted add a creative touch to the subject by presenting 10 beautiful twitter birds that I found over the past few days which you can use on your blogs/websites. The twitter bird images presented here are linked to their source where you can download the High Quality version!

Noticing how Twitter can potentially help to increase followers & readerships, more bloggers are promoting their twitter profiles through blogs & websites. You can use these images on your websites/blogs to promote your profile or business.

So let’s get started and don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-Feed and visit our twitter page if you want to keep track of our next compilation series post.

10 Most Beautiful Twitter Bird Images

1. Productive Dreams / @gopalraju

2. iPotion / @youmago

3.  function / @liammckay

4. The Design Superhero / @aravindajith

5. iampaddy / @paddyonnelly

6. Darkmotion /  @darkmotion

7.  Sigler Design /@michaelsigler

8. Mau Russo Design / @maurizio

9.  Luc Latulippe / @luclatulippe

10.  Smashing Magazine / @smashingmag

Extras:

On a side note, if you are interested in designing your own Twitter Bird (Mascot), Rype Putnam has a wonderful tutorial called “Create a Twitter Bird Mascot” & HongKiat has a couple of Twitter Bird Wallpapers (using iPotion’s twitter bird) to use on your desktop.

Feel free to suggest any beautiful twitter bird images that you come across and don’t forget to follow me on twitter @iVinay

Happy Tweeting!

Unless you have been hibernating for the last 4 months you will invariably be sick to death of the constant references to Twitter in the media. It is infuriating when there is a lot of media hype about a technology without anyone taking the time to explain how it might benefit you.

Firstly, Twitter is a microblogging tool that allows you to send 140 character messages to all those that are following your missives. This may seem rather restrictive when you can post much longer messages including images and multiple links to various references on the company blog. But the beauty of a short message is that it can focus you in to getting the succinct message out to the masses. This is a good thing as it helps us to think a little more creatively about what we are trying to say. But another great aspect to all of this is that it is the start of a two way conversation with your customers or clients, as you can follow them in return.

Do I need to start a conversation with my customers? I hear you ask. And I reply YES! The benefits are amazing as you can hear what is being said about you, your company, your products or your services. However, my favourite benefit is that it can help revolutionise the way companies evolve their products and services. Most of creativity in business is informed by the systems we use everyday to make our day to day work much easier. This can be restrictive as we often rely on these systems and find it hard to break outside of them to innovate. However, our customers and clients are not inside these systems and can easily point out ways to improve our service or product or even new services or products that may complement our existing ones. This is where Twitter is going to help those companies who use it well, by allowing us to converse with the end user in a more direct and instant way. The further benefit being that you can prove to the user that you listen and care about their needs.

I hope this provides some good reasoning to rolling Twitter into your PR and Communications channels for the future. I look forward to your thoughts and comments because I am all about the conversation.

Follow Juretic on Twitter at twitter.com/juretic and see what we have to say.

Little things sometimes make you laugh when you are online all day. In fact I guess that it is a little lunacy which creeps into your subconscious when your brain is not just looking at every webpage you visit, but analyzing everything about it: the way it loads, the information architecture, the use of differing technologies, the design, the social media integration and the search engine optimisation of the page.. and this is just what I am wondering as I log on to Hotmail™.

Well, today I managed to crash Google Chrome properly for the first time. ( Not a good Google day today considering that Gmail™ is down as well ). So, irked slightly with Google I decided to use Safari for a while. I install it on most of my PC’s, though never really use it as it seems rather an affectation.

Safari has Apple.com as its home page and the first thing I was greeted with was the alert box below :

Yes, I am cackling wildly at the prospect of Safari crashing on Apple’s home page…This then reminded me of another, similar anomaly. Chrome, now my default browser is fast and sleek. It opens up quickly and has a great interface.

However, as with most people whose job entails search engine marketing I like to have the Google Toolbar Installed – it generates the PR Bar ( which is an interesting though not accurate representation of a site’s importance on the web in Google’s eyes ) and it has quick links to other useful SEO functions.“It’s free and installs in seconds”, boasts Google on the download page.I am, quite understandably beside myself with mirth when I receive the following alert :

When Google’s Toolbar Installer does not even recognise Google’s browser.

Hmm, I feel I should spend less time looking at the screen…..

Social Media has been amazing at helping global communities form and develop over the last decade and I would include forums and messageboards in social media as it helps build a social community. But what about on a local scale? Could social media help a local, physical, community? We, at Juretic Media, believe that social media can enhance a local community in many ways.

Let us take as an example a typical local community in the form of a church. Churches are a great example as there are churches of one religion or another in virtually every part of the world and they form a central part of the community for many people.

So how can Social Media help build a church community? Well, it might not build the community but it could definitely enhance it. For example a social blog could help facilitate discussion in the community, a shared calendar such as upcoming could help the community plan events and a shared flickr account could allow the community to share photos of those events. This a very inclusive approach to the community and allows the community members to participate in generating the content of the community network.

And, inclusivity could be seen as a watchword for how social media can help communities. For example, many churches have members who may, for one reason or another, be housebound and unable to attend church services. Including these members of the church can be made easier by providing access to podcasts of sermons via huffduffer or video of ceremonies via sites such as vimeo or youtube.

This all outlines a few ways in which a planned social media network can build and facilitate your community.

I had been using Gmail (Google’s web based email service) for a while and had been quite impressed by the speed and functionality of the application. The service allows a quick and intuitive access to all email whilst providing a high degree of spam protection. It was not long before I started having all my work emails forwarded to my Gmail account so that I could search them easily from anywhere and keep up to date with any work developments from a simple and fast interface which was also quite accessible from a PDA or mobile phone browser. Soon I wanted to use this interface for all my emails but when I added an account and sent emails from my work email address Gmail added the (on behalf of Sam, Juretic Media) to the email address field, obviously this was not going to look good for work purposes. It then occurred to me that it would be nice if one were able to somehow use Gmail on your domain. It was a good idea and one which happily occurred to Google before I had thought of it. A quick search found the starting point : Google Apps – Software-as-a-service for business email, information sharing and security.

Investigation

As email is a vital part of daily business for our company I was not going to rush this process so I started out my research with a personal domain. First you have to verify domain ownership by uploading a small HTML file to the root directory. You then change the MX Records (those which govern where emails to your domain are routed) for your domain to those of Google’s servers. This is stage one. You have now pointed all emails sent to your domain to Google. This went quickly and easily and within an hour of verification I was able to send and receive emails from the Gmail interface from my domain.

Implementation

For our work based email we needed a bit more careful planning. We have many email accounts, many of which had aliases associated with them. You can upload all of these via .csv but the manual process was only 30 minutes of work. As ever with a well made application the process was simple and intuitive. All members of our domain were informed of the impending change and we flicked the MX switch, moving away from our traditional route to Googlemail for our domain.

The experience

Luckily it seemed that we had not overlooked any issues before making the leap and it was not long before we all were experimenting with the new interface for our emails. Those of us accustomed to a folder structure as per Outlook© had to master Gmail’s labelling system. There are still those traditionalists is the office who have resolutely kept their grip on their traditional interfaces such as Outlook© or Macmail© but I think that they will see sense soon. For me, the realisation that one is no longer tied to a desk and that being part of the cloud is a real driving force. Setting up the email client on my smartphone via IMAP has also been a lesson in mobility. IMAP synchronises all folders simultaneously, meaning that you can respond to an email on your mobile and next time you login to the Google Apps interface you will see your mobile sent email in your sent items – beautiful.

“Cloud computing is a general concept that incorporates software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and other recent, well-known technology trends, in which the common theme is reliance on the internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users. For example, Google Apps provides common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.” from the Wikipedia Cloud Computing

You see, suddenly you are absolved of the necessity to log on to a particular computer, or even to keep with the same OS (operating system) this is the web / workplace of tomorrow – no dependence on local RAM or Hard Drive space but just logging onto a sophisticated web based application.

The conclusion

It is still early days, the freedom that a perfectly web based email provides is a joy. The other facilities appear to be well featured but to tell the truth we are still getting to grips with them. We share all our calendars and documents now online and can see via sites that we will be able to collaborate more and more online and will reap the benefits of this tool in the long term. My hope is that there are many other companies out there doing the same and that the Google Apps arena will expand to include proper project management tools and time management applications to run through the system.

YouTube is like other social networking sites in that it is completely generated by the users, but in this case we are just talking video content and more to the point, video sharing.

Although figures are pretty scarce it was reported that in January of 2008, 79 million users were watching over 3 billion videos. Not bad for 3 guys who used to work for PayPal and a site that only launched in 2005.

Needless to say, search giants Google spotted the potential and acquired the company in November of 2006 for $1.65 billion in Google stock, just over a year and a half after YouTube’s launch.

According to Alexa, YouTube is the 3rd most popular site on the web with 65,000 videos uploaded everyday and 16% of the internet population visiting the site. Not surprisingly YouTube is no.1 for online video and video sharing, which is incredible when you think about the fact that it has been created entirely by the users.

These days, anyone can be a star and with YouTube just egging you on, everyone can have their 15 minutes. Just look at Corey Delaney. The 16 year old from Brisbane shot to fame after a throwing a ‘near-riot party’ at his home when his parents were on holiday. If you are unaware of his work, then please watch this video, which has (along with his stunt) earned him celebrity status and worldwide support and kudos on every social networking site in the world.

Why do we like YouTube?

YouTube is a great tool to get to know your audience and help them to get to know you. You can create a profile upload videos, watch other people’s videos, start a video blog or ‘vlog’ as they are know, email, comment and rate. You can search for videos by category, watch the most viewed videos, view channels and find your favourite band, enter contests and share it all in the community areas. YouTube will also keep you up to date with what is going on in their blog as well as allow you to test their latest developments and comment on them. Do you feel part of a community? We sure do.

So what can you do with YouTube?

You can use YouTube to tell the world about you. Think of it as self promotion. It could be for your music, movie previews, interviews or adverts, or you can use it as a revenue stream by integrating sponsored advertising from Google Adwords.

If you want to use YouTube then we would recommend creating a group and encouraging people to get involved by uploading their own videos. You could run a competition alongside it and really get the buzz going around your brand. Let us know how you get on, or if you need some more pointers, then why not give us a call on 0845 838 7435 or drop me a line.