Social Media (network, technology, blog, community, virtual reality, etc...)

Personal Branding With Social Media Infographic via Chris Voss

Why having the right social media tools matter:

"Social media tools have the tremendous power to put you in contact with thousands of people in order to build your online brand you need to know all of the possibilities, as well as how all of your activities are working together.

It's important to be consistent so that each part of your social media network is contributing positively to the brand you are trying to build.

Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Busines and Beyond"

See full infographic here: [http://bit.ly/JMXlS0]

The redesign that Twitter has undergone this time around is a marked shift from the past. Up until now, Twitter had stuck to its design elements and at most had tweaked them for better usability. This time though, the changes are significant and going by the number of changes that we see, brands as well as users are in for a big surprise and could radically change the way the micro-blogging site is used on an everyday basis.

With over 100 million users and the competition heating up, the change was imminent and perhaps arrives at the time when advertisers are warming up to the idea of advertising on Twitter. The site has grown 25% since October and has in fact become a featured application on both the iPad and the iPhone...

Expert Labs has released version 1.0 of ThinkUp, a program that lets people archive, search, and analyze their activity on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

And if you ask me, this is a big deal.

ThinkUp, the free, open-source brainchild of programmer and Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani, keeps track of what you've done online. It extracts the data from the walled gardens that house more and more of people's digital lives then replants it in your own garden.

The app isn't simple to install, unfortunately. You need some server administration skills so you can host ThinkUp on your own Web server or run it on an instance of Amazon's EC2 cloud-computing service. (More on that point later.)...

Maybe you want create your own infographic, here 10 tools to support you to do it. [note mg]

Information graphics, visual representations of data known as infographics, keep the web going these days. Web users, with their diminishing attention spans, are inexorably drawn to these shiny, brightly coloured messages with small, relevant, clearly-displayed nuggets of information. They’re straight to the point, usually factually interesting and often give you a wake-up call as to what those statistics really mean.

Who can resist a colourful, thoughtful venn diagram anyway? In terms of blogging success, infographics are far more likely to be shared than your average blog post. This means more eyeballs on your important information, more people rallying for your cause, more backlinks and more visits to your blog. In short, a quality infographic done well could be what your blog needs right now.

Read more: http://bit.ly/K0s4LL

What do we mean when talking about reader engagement? Well, in terms of blogging the first things that come to mind are comments, sharing, questions, conversion rates. To sum up we could compare reader engagement with building a community. A community where readers care about each other, where action doesn’t stop after reading the final paragraph and where exciting discussions are born. Unfortunately, good content and neat design aren’t the only factors which affect reader engagement. You need to learn to focus readers attention and start a conversation. Developing an engagement is a win-win situation. Your visitors will want to explore more and join the conversation but you, as the publisher, will be looking at higher conversion rates.

Gamification is a whole branch in reader engagement which brings together game mechanics and marketing to create engagement and solve problems. What do we understand with game mechanics from a web standpoint? Well, that doesn’t necessarily has to be the traditional online games as we are used to seeing them...

Quick Pitch: Proliphiq filters social media clutter and focuses on what’s important to you.

Genius Idea: Social media search tool that lets people see who is credible in the areas that interest them.

“Who should I follow?” You may have asked yourself this question after logging onto social media websites like Twitter and Facebook, only to be overwhelmed with millions of profile options to follow or subscribe to.

Proliphiq helps you find the answer to that question.

Proliphiq is a social media discovery tool that helps you find the most credible contributors within the topics that interest you. The search tool filters social media clutter by aggregating profiles that are most relevant to your search topics and finding the best contributors based on personality, level of engagement and credibility.