Read the complete and original post at www.soshable.com

For the last four years there has been passionate debate over quantity versus quality on Twitter. Should we follow everyone who follows us? Do we play the “churn” game of following people, then unfollowing those who do not follow us back in an effort to inflate our following? Should we buy followers? For individuals, it’s an ego thing and is totally up to them, but for businesses and organizations there’s a clear cut answer.

Don’t go bulk. It’s no longer becoming and people see right through it. If anything, it’s a turnoff. Here’s why:

The Discerning Palate

Twitter is absolutely loaded with spammers and bots. Despite every attempt by the company to eliminate as much as possible, they can only do so much when there’s such a high price being paid for social media spamming. Whatever Twitter does, there is no way to eliminate even half of the spammers without major casualties amongst non-spammers who post the wrong thing or follow the wrong people.

Thankfully, it takes under 10 seconds to look at an account and determine if they are real, valuable Twitter users or if they’re just here to annoy others for a quick buck. Are they talking @people, replying to conversations? Are they simply a feed with nobody manning the ship? Are they talking about Forex or teeth whitening?

What’s just as entertaining as following the L.A. Kings, the eighth-seeded Cinderellas of the Western Conference who have advanced all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals? Following the team’s punchy Twitter feed.

The official Twitter accounts of most sports franchises are usually as bland as a 0-0 game. But @LAKings, which has added some 57,000 new followers since the playoffs began – bringing it to nearly 128,000 followers as of Tuesday afternoon – breaks that convention, as well as the notion that L.A. is a laid-back sports town.

@LAKings started getting notice in the first round of the playoffs, after the Kings took a 1-0 series lead over the top-seeded Vancouver Canucks. “To everyone outside of BC you’re welcome,” the account tweeted. Predictably, the sardonic statement caused a backlash among Vancouver fans. Among the responses: “seriously, show some class. That’s rude. If you win I will congratulate you. If you lose I will cheer my team but not mock you,” wrote @canadakate123. “What a classy organization you have there. There are Canucks fans world wide. Try not to be sore winners please,” wrote another Twitter user. The Kings apologized, but did not delete the Tweet…

Read the complete and original post at www.time.com

Read the complete and original post at www.chicagotribune.com

Not so long ago, a man on an airplane was served a sandwich he didn’t like. He used Twitter — the real-time personal news feed, if you didn’t know — to alert the world to his displeasure. An airline employee on the ground saw the tweet, relayed the message to a flight attendant who minutes later asked the man what could be done to assuage his disappointment.

Welcome to travel 2012 style, if you’re doing it right.

Once seemingly impenetrable behemoths, airlines have become remarkably accessible thanks to social media, especially in the real-time world of Twitter. Most, if not all, airlines have Twitter feeds that allow customers to converse and, more important, solve problems in real time, whether for a large issue (stranded in an airport) or small (a lousy sandwich).

Stuart Greif, vice president of global travel for J.D. Power and Associates, said the sandwich story, which he said he discussed with an executive of the airline involved, shows social media’s benefits for the travelers who are savvy enough to use them.

“If a customer has a problem, the fastest way to address it has become social media,” Greif said. “Younger generations might never call into a call center. They might always go online and address these things in real time.”

Another platform could one day overtake Twitter, but for now it is the primary tool for real-time reaction from an industry that triggers anxiety and frustration like few others. Go to any of the major airlines’ Twitter feeds, and you will see (often entertaining) exchanges with frustrated passengers.

“We consider Twitter the canary in the coal mine,” said Morgan Johnston, JetBlue’s social media strategist. “It’s not always fun to be called out publicly, but if there’s something really wrong with our operation, it shows up a lot faster, and we’re able to fix it.”

This video was found on www.openforum.com

Read the complete and original post at www.dreamgrow.com

Blogging for me has always been fun. This makes my job very enjoyable, because everyday I get to do what I love. Mark Twain once said, ‘a person who holds a cat by its tail learns something that he cannot know in any other way.’ With time I have become an expert in using the WordPress Platform.

During my journey, I took a pretty big hit when someone once hacked my accounts-and, well, lets just say, did a makeover on my websites. This incidence happened when I had tens of thousands of visitors on one of my sites. It’s pretty safe to say that it has not been the smoothest sail for me. There have been ups and downs, but I have always managed to land on my feet.

If you are starting out on WordPress, and have been checking out DIY Thesis Theme Reviews, then you will probably be noticing that there are ways in which you can increase traffic to your site. By the use of WordPress Plugins, you can easily increase social media traffic to your website. When you implement some of the best social media plugins, you will be sure to find the same rise in traffic that I did when I started using them. These are my top 7 selections for 2012:

1. Digg Digg

This is a great plugin, which is basically an all in one sharing plugin. It has sharing buttons for twitter, Facebook, digg, LinkedIn, yahoo, dZone, Buzz, StumbleUpon, Reddit, TweetMeme, Serpd, Weblend, Sphinn, Design bump, and so on. Digg digg shows the count for each button. As a result you can know how many people have read your post.

2. Socialize

This is another great social media plugin that is designed to help increase traffic to your site. It does this in an easy way; by adding bookmarking buttons to the content on your website.

Social media marketing is something that everyone is adopting. Be it an established business or a small- local business. Everyone wants to jump onto the bandwagon of making their brand presence felt on social networks. The simple reason being – that’s where the crowd is. However, there are some common mistakes visibly noticed.

• Why are all endeavors not successful?
• Why are all Facebook and Google Plus pages as popular?
• Why are your competitors doing better on SMM?
• What promises are you making and not catering to?

There are various such questions that need to be answered. Hence, here are the top 10 mistakes that you mustn’t make with your social media marketing:

1. Don’t Jump Into SMM Without A Plan – Big Fall!

Most companies might have experienced this and you could be one of them. The story goes like this: you decide to join the social network, make your profiles, load it with info, put great stuff out there to attract attention and then disappear. Within weeks of your ‘super’ launch your page is converted into a barren land with followers wondering what they are doing there and some people seeking answers and getting no replies. Your social media presence soon becomes a flop show!

Image Credit: Intersection Consulting

So the first step is to have a social media marketing plan.

The plan should be such that it should build on your presence and not let it dwindle. Any plan would need:

• Time investment
• Strategy and goals
• Team for interaction

You need to keep your resources in place to have the game progressing.

2. Spamming

The other mistake people make is to throw links on the internet on all the social networks. Why post irrelevant links? They never work

3. Multiple Profiles On Social Sites

This is another trend where a company has more than one profiles on sites like Facebook and twitter – all of which link to the main website. For one thing, having more than one profile is not legally right. For another, it’s a waste! Put in efforts in one direction and get people, real people, to your company. There’s no point building loads of followers who really aren’t interested in your work and are simply connecting to build ‘following’… Read the complete and original post at www.dreamgrow.com

The complete and original post at www.convinceandconvert.com

What are the defining characteristics of a community? It’s a topic I’ve been pondering more and more lately. Is it about geography, common interests, socio-economic similarities, or similar viewpoints? The list goes on and on.

To get to this point, it becomes necessary to define what a community is. According to dictionary.com, a community is

a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived itself as distinct insome respect from the larger society within which it exists.

As community managers, it’s our job to manage a brand’s online (and offline) presence. It’s a daunting task that requires us to assume a leadership role, channel the company’s voice, create buzz and drive engagement on and offline to achieve specific goals/outcomes. It’s fairly natural to assume that as the leader, you are building and growing a “community.” After all, there’s X amount of likers, followers, subscribers, doers’, doubters, troublemakers and everything in between, who are communicating in the group. However with most brand pages, this environment is actually fostering a false sense of community.

Most Facebook brand pages aren’t actually online communities. They are just glorified marketing channels. Some are done very well, others not so much. Here’s five reasons to explain this seemingly subtle distinction.

Most Facebook fans didn’t decide to “like” a brand’s page because they wanted to be part of an online community. In fact, the two most common reasons to like a brand are if you are a current customer or to receive discounts and/or freebies, according to a study by research firm, Chadwick Martin Bailey. The next most popular reasons are to show support for a brand, to learn more information and to get exclusive content. Couple that with the fact, that more than 75% of Facebook users who like a brand, like fewer than 10 brands total, and you wind up with stiff competition for eyeballs and page “likes.”