Social Marketing is an indirect and somewhat subtle method of reaching potential customers with your "offers of interest". Please note the quote. Spamming a social site is a deliberate attempt to blatantly advertise your product or service and is most commonly associated with affiliate opportunity-type programs. The latter is an excellent way to get yourself "Ban-Hammered" or even "IP Ban-Hammered"; either one is bad for your business health. The former involves a variety of long-term, low-key marketing concepts embedded in a genuine attempt at providing a social service to any given community. Which would you rather be known as: A social marketer (Perhaps a Maven), or a social spammer (Pain-in-the-PC)?
Proper social bookmarking can be a most valuable tool; by providing short, positive commentary on each post which helps people decide if they want to know more. Many of my own comments are derived initially from the bookmarked website; edited for both clarity and grammar it is often enough. Sometimes there is simply nothing available for a cut/paste/edit operation; other times your own review is best and will give a personalized feel to your post.
Another important consideration is effective, non-redundant tagging. I review my own tag cloud following a post looking for inappropriate use of tags. It is very easy to see in a tag cloud due to the alphabetical listing. right now I have multiple "online..." tags which were taken originally from the suggested list. These will have to be reduced to my personal "root tagging" method.
This reduction to roots assumes that I care little whether or not I am found in the public search list. Why? It's similar to the keyword SEO issues involved when considering the submission of a website. The competition is HUGE on the most common, or logical, keywords. Redundancy is rampant due to the number of different words and phrases people will use in a search. Therefore, to obtain the greatest number of unique tags in my cloud, I will combine multiple possibilities into one main tag which I hope people will understand. These tags will NOT contain a lot of keyword phrases; however, in some cases (as in "photo") there seems no easy way to list a lot of different bookmarks with similar but distinct subcategories. There are also instances wherein a two word phrase (such as "social networking") gives me just the right and proper tag. There instances in which multiple tags can be useful and not appear redundant; when this repeated word is prefixed by another descriptive word (adjective) such as: desktop publishing, publishing, and web publishing. These three tags will not appear one right after the other in your tag cloud therefore you should not be seen as "stacking keywords" for SEO purposes.
How then, do I expect to be found? Look to the main header of this blog which refers readers to my Blinklist tag cloud. Next check out the V-O-I-D Network header; each of those sites contains a text link back to my Blinklist as well as to this blog. That is networking within your own sites. It becomes social networking when you begin to become part of a community. It becomes social marketing when you have found your first customers through your expanded network.
A subtle, and highly effective method of social marketing involves your participation in forums. There is generally no need to be blatant here, especially since to be so invites a spamming report and a take-down of your post. Simply include a home page text link in your signature (sig)! When you have written an informative and grammatically correct post a certain percentage of people will want to know more about you. Be absolutely certain to READ THE RULES for posting on any boards/forums BEFORE you hyper-link back to your page! As I think up, test, and evaluate more ideas you'll find them here somewhere...
Monday, April 14, 2008
Social Marketing vs Spamming
Why Do They Need My Email Address?
Squeeze Pages are everywhere. I have squeeze page generators installed on my PC. What purpose do they serve? Only one thing; the capture of your Email for marketing purposes. Yes, that is correct. They want to sell you something. Regardless of the offer; there WILL BE a marketing campaign attached to it. I'll offer no specifics in this post but, I have archived a great number of solicitous emails from multiple "Gurus" of the opportunity genre. Furthermore, I have unsubscribed to them all in an effort to clear out my inbox and sort through the barrage.
At first it seems beneficial, the information something I want to learn. Gradually they get off the point, with many of them simply spamming me with offer after offer while providing no useful information what-so-ever.
At first I was inundated and began to suffer from information overload; then I noticed the repetitive nature of the data itself. Frustration and disgust soon came into play as, one-by-one the emails devolved into spam. From now on, I will be using a special account set up at a place like Trashmail.com; there a user defined period of email forwarding will be established. Should the subscription warrant further consideration for review, I simply go to my subscribed account and change my email address to a "reader" account and they'll never even notice.
Those who continue to offer a genuine service will continue to have my blessing and are welcome to add an endorsement or email advertisement should they so desire. Certainly they shall, after all that IS the ultimate reason for the contact. They have something to sell which may be of interest to me. I too have advertising, here and elsewhere, which I hope will find a few interested parties.
There is no genuine need for me to request your contact information. You may find you would like to return to see what I have to say; discover what I have found or learned. You may bookmark this page; you may also subscribe to the RSS feed. I do recommend an aggregator which will help with potential information overload. The Flock browser has one built (they call it "baked-in") right into it. I also have "My Blog Navigator" on trials. Both services will need to be reset as they have default feeds to get you started. Blog Navigator in particular had so much defaulted that I simply cleared everything and started over from scratch. TMI hurts my head.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Total Privacy 5 - Software Review
Background from the download site:
"Total Privacy provides the most advanced information removal solution for protection against today’s malicious online and offline threats. Total Privacy 5 makes use of the most advanced washing and shredding methods available today to make sure that your own private business and computer use remains exactly that - private.
Securely clean Internet tracks, system activities and program history information stored on your computer with this safe and easy-to-use Windows privacy protection tool. Also Wipes the free space to make sure that previously delete files cannot be recovered. Supports all major browsers in addition to over 450 popular third-party applications.
My initial summary for the GOTD site:
Get this program installed NOW! I am a supporter of multiple security
products and Total Privacy 5 just hit the top of today’s list of MUST
HAVE security applications. All issues are clearly explained in a
separate description box on mouse-over so you know exactly what it
intends to clear. I strongly encourage, no I insist, that you do NOT
check any box you don’t understand! Has several “exclude” functions
such as the cookies list. Take the time to set this one up properly. My
PC runs CCleaner on start-up; the only thing I’ve run is Flock >
GOTD > TP5. This is the summary from my test run; Total Items: 43;
Custom Items: 14; Total Recovered: 3MB disk space, 29 Files, 7 Registry
Entries. Be careful with index.dat and registry streams - these
erasures WILL affect certain performance and display properties. The
full report will be available shortly on my blog, “V-O-I-D: What’s
REALLY out there?”.
The Full Report:
All of the following items were listed after CCleaner and the download; some files are there because of the TP5 download, others were not listed at all by CCleaner. I use my cleaner at least once a day on start-up, mostly to clear the useless files and registry entries that accumulate throughout my workday. As an Internet Investigator of many genres, there are also instances wherein I encounter files which I do not want in my possession, nor bugging my machine. Set-up of Total Privacy will take a little time, especially when preserving certain settings such as cookies.
In the case of cookies and dat files it is best to make a written note of those for which you are uncertain prior to erasing them. When next you encounter an item from this list you will recognize it as being from either: a friendly program with a funny named cookie, or an executable you got AGAIN from an unknown source. The latter case goes beyond the scope of this post to explain.
This is what Total Privacy 5 found and erased:
Document History 1 file; Start Menu Clicks 5 files; index.dat 3 categories/files 39 items and 96KB; Favorites Order History 1 item; Downloaded Components (DO NOT check box unless you want to eliminate your plug-ins!) 8 items and 4MB; Messaging detected ALL installed IM clients and offered 3 items for clean-up on each; Custom Plug-in Cleaners, checked "show only detected programs" and found 16 (Again, read what each does as you may want to keep certain items - my quarantine list from SpyBot being one of them.); Warning: Windows Direct Input will erase all user generated data files; Windows Temp 3 files and 270KB; Sys Temp 4 files and 3MB; DO NOT CHECK Registry Streams or Registry Streams MRU as this will adversely affect the PC you have set up as you want it! It also detects MS Office .doc files accessed even when opened with OpenOffice.org
Read the description box for everything you ever wanted to know about what you are about to obliterate. Most people can safely use one of the 3-pass options, mine took less time than a single intake of breath! It also has start-up and security management tools. Altogether, I am impressed enough to give this one a 10/10 rating for PC cleaners and highly recommend you get to the GOTD site and get this one installed while it's free.
A quick trip back to GOTD revealed this post direct from the application provider:
Regarding the question about how Total Privacy affects the registry, many privacy items are stored inside the registry (MRUs, Registry streams, history information for many programs, IE AutoComplete data and much more) and so, if you select to clean any of those items, Total Privacy will obviously have to access the registry to remove selected values.
Accessing the registry to remove any of those items is completely safe and Total Privacy is smart enough to only remove items that do exist (as opposed to some other similar applications we encountered before that just try to remove anything and everything without any safely checks first).
Total Privacy was tested on Windows Vista, XP, 2003 and 2000 and so it targets the correct registry locations depending on the operating system you are running.
I hope I was able to shed some more light regarding this question. If anyone have any questions or comments (good or bad) that wish to discuss with us feel free to contact us directly at http://www.pointstone.com/support/support.asp
Mr Martin
I just downloaded the program and started reading the comments, as they sometimes influence my decision to install the program. This is the first time I have seen anyone associated with the program present and fixing problems as they occur — not to say it has never happened — it is just a first for me.
Don’t know about anyone else but this REALLY impressed me. Want you to know Mr Martin that because of your interest in helping us with bugs and gliches, even though you will show no profit from our download, that I will be buying the product directly from the site as opposed to taking it free. It is rare and refreshing in todays product market to see integrity in ones work and creation. It gives me the impression that questions and problems would be addressed by your software support system quickly and efficiently.
Thanks GAODT for the numerous free and useful products and games you have given me.
Comment by MamaBunny — April 1st, 2008 at 9:04 am
Creative writing demands better word selection; interactive word mapping expands your choices.
ABOUT: The conception and birth of V.O.I.D.
- w2wScribe
- V.O.I.D. evolved in my sleep; becoming a waking dream which was then compounded by intuitive leaps. Formerly known as "w2w_Webfly's World" this site became the centerpiece of my socio-economic network. As such, the webfly persona no longer served as an iconoclastic representation of what I do here in CyberVille. I am still w2w_Webfly on many sites and will stay such for a while; perhaps gradually shifting screen names to w2wScribe. An attempt to establish an AIM profile registered the name but, not the profile. Ready, fire AIM.
