All of us want our sites to rank high in search results and have spent hours searching for ways to help us do just that. But when we find a tip or trick, the question is always the same......will this really work?? This post
Social media has become one of the greatest forces in business today. People are more connected and discuss their experiences now on a daily basis no matter where they live.
Just a few years ago we were limited to writing letters or placing phone calls to keep in touch with people. That was maybe a once a month to a few times a year that this occurred. Come on, admit it, you did not call grandma or your hometown friends nearly as often as you should have. Then came email. That invention enabled people to easily send communications to others anywhere in the world quickly and cheaply. But as with letters and phone calls, this is a one to one communication. You send the letter / email or phone call to single person. That still does not allow for keeping in touch with many people very easy. Then came social media. It has broken that one to one communication relationship and allows you to connect and communicate with many people (hundreds and even thousands in some cases) as easily and quickly as you can communicate with a single person.
This ease of communication impacts business in several ways. People can say something good or bad about a company or product and the number of people that could potentially receive that information is exponential. People tend to trust the things said by people they know. So this communication can be very good for a company or very bad depending on what was said. Also, companies can communicate and interact with their customers more than ever. This enables companies to better judge what their customers want and listen for problems they are having.
In my research of social media for my graduate studies, I read the book Socialnomics. It is a wonderful discussion of how social media has evolved and what that means for business. It illustrates how it can be positive for companies that embrace and learn to use it. But also how the companies that ignore it or do not learn to use it properly could find their demise as a result. It was an entertaining and very informative read. I highly recommend it to anyone that is interested in social media, but it is a must read for people in business or thinking of going into business. You can find out more about the book here http://socialnomics.net/the-book/.
Those of us looking to get into social media for personal use, building support for a cause, or building a brand, all ask the same question: Where do I start and what media is the right one. Drew McLellan has a blog entry on this very topic. His post was based on a post by Gavin Heaton.
CMO.Com has created a matix sheet that categorizes what social media services are best for what types of activity.
In a recent ASP.Net project, I needed to display images within a specific height and width boundary. Those that have worked with image resizing know that to keep the image looking the way it is supposed to, it has to be scaled. In that I mean the height and width must be changed in the correct amounts to prevent skewing the image and causing it to not look right. Scaling images one at a time is very time consuming and not practical. This is also a problem when the images are supplied by users and there is little to no control over the image sizes.
One way to address this problem is to use an image handler to dynamically scale the image and return it for display in the image control. This is accomplished by using an ASHX file and passing the needed information to locate the image and what height and width to scale it to. An ASHX file is a special ASP.Net file that executes code but does not have a GUI display. So it is like an ASPX file without the GUI, just the codebehind.
You can see a sample of this solution here.
The source code can be downloaded here. The main file to reuse in other projects is image.ashx. Feel free to use it as is or to make your own modifications.
Please comment on any improvements and changes you make so everyone can benefit from them.
Everyone that dreams of starting their own business can benefit from hearing the stories of those that have "been there and done that". The radio show From Scratch
Have you ever wondered if a potential link from another site would be good for your site? When you are tying to increase traffic to your site, this is an important thing to consider. Is the potential linking site well positioned to help drive traffic to you? Joel Carlson has a cool tool on his blog Dexign.net that helps you "grade" the link potential for other sites.
Check out the tool here and his other posts are worth reading.
Startups and small businesses have tight budgets and often do not spend the needed resources on advertizing to position themselves properly. There are many free and cheap options out there for them to use if you know how to use them wisely.
In the September 2009 issue of Entrepreneur magazine article “The Twittering class”, Mikal Belicove has an introductory discussion about using Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter to get the message out for startups and small businesses. It is a high level discussion but gives some very good points on getting started using social media to promote your business.
How do you use social media to promote your businesses?
I am starting this blog for a graduate class at UAB, but I plan to continue it beyond the duration of the class program.
Here I plan to discuss topics about software, technology, and anything else that peaks my interest.