Using the power of social networking tools Facebook and Twitter, Jon and Tracy Morter started a campaign just over a week ago to steal the #1 away from the X-factor winner. And they won!

Figures show “Killing in the name” by Rage Against The Machine at over 500,000 and Joe McElderry’s “The Climb” at just over 450,000 sales. Considering that Rage Against The Machine is little known today and that the X factor final had over 10 million phone votes cast, more than two-thirds for Joe McElderry, this is no small victory. And let’s not forget that “Killing in the name” was only available as a download.

Reasons aside about why this campaign was run, this is a great example about the power of social media marketing and what can be achieved when a message, carefully crafted, resonates with a group of people. The search term #ratm appeared a number of times this past week in Twitter’s trending top-10 list and the campaign’s facebook fan page got thousands of comments to posts, not to mention a following of almost half-a-million facebook users.

If anyone still thinks social media marketing isn’t serious business, think again.

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Consumers have never before had such power to reach literally thousands of like-minded individuals with their opinions of a product or service. Where before a bad experience would have been told of to a handful of people, usually family and friends, today those same family and friends too will have hundreds of connections that they can pass the news on to instantly.

Even worse for businesses, anyone can now create a concerted campaign using a cheap video camera and the power of services like YouTube. Ann Minch started a ‘Debtors Revolt’ in exactly this way against the Bank of America when they raised the interest on her credit card. She created a short, 5 minute video stating her case to Bank of America and made the video publicly available to view. The campaign took off rapidly as the link to the video started appearing on blogs, social networks and Twitter. The video, below, has had over 240,000 views since September.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The bank reacted the only way it could without the publicity getting worse – it reversed the hike after attempting to negotiate another rate – Ann Minch refused and made the bank reinstate the original interest rate.

Such stories are going to become mainstream as more and more consumers realise the power they have at their fingertips.  Businesses have only ever had to worry about a small percentage of customers coming back to them with returns and complaints, A small customer service department would suffice in dealing with the low rate of complaints. Feedback involved polling the customer base where typically only a small percentage would respond, never providing a true picture of what customers felt.

Now, a business needs to be more on the ball with how their customers perceive the service or product. They need to feel  the real-time pulse of the marketplace in order to prevent a small number of customers from negatively influencing a larger number of potential customers.

Customer service departments need to become more involved in the marketplace by becoming part of the conversations their customers are having. This will not only enable gathering of real, emotional feedback but allow the business to gauge the direction the marketplace is moving in to give them an advantage over competitors who are not involved in the social media space. If a business engages with it’s customer base where they are most active they have the ability to influence perception in a positive way and increase business as a result.

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Check out the announcement video from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman -

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

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A web designer betting his friend that he could use social networking to make a ‘million of anything’ led to the creation of the website www.OneMillionGiraffes.com, which called for users to send the creator one million giraffes that they’ve made, either as models or drawings.

Although he didn’t really think he’d get much of a response, within hours he’d got over 60 and by the end of the first day he had 134! In just over 2 months he’s received 134,277 and is well on the way to win the bet by the end of next year.

However, all Ola Helland did was to advertise the site and what he was doing on his Facebook page and on his twitter account and he got this overwhelming response; proof that if you have an interesting concept to market it can spread like wildfire using simple social networking tools.

Check out the site here…

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Setting up your own system e.g. using something like PHPList is often tedious and  takes some technical knowledge to set up properly and working just right.

MailChimp, SurveyMonkey’s little brother (or sister, who knows?!), offers a Pay As You Go plan so that you can budget how much you spend on your email marketing campaign. The price plan goes from $15 for 500 credits to $2,500 for 500,000 credits.
This kind of plan is especially suitable for businesses that don’t have a periodic mail-out as credits can be rolled over and the there are no standing fees e.g. monthly charges.

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Most of these are from one site, the brilliantly named “ILoveJackDaniels” by UK web developer Dave Child:

1. Ruby on Rails Cheat Sheet
2. PHP Cheat Sheet
3. MySQL Cheat Sheet
4. CSS Cheat Sheet and more from the same site…
5. The Web Developers SEO Cheat Sheet by Danny Dover of SEOmoz.org 
6. Conversion table for em, px, pt & % in CSS by Suresh Jain

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Founded in 2000, Threadless is set to hit $5million is sales this year selling, wait for it, t-shirts! Yep, and they’ve never had a single design that hasn’t  sold out!

So how has Threadless managed to sell out every design? By asking their market what designs they’d buy! Simple!

Using a social network, Threadless runs design competitions and whichever designs are most popular make it onto a t-shirt. The t-shirts are then sold through the same social network to the very people who voted for the designs. This way Threadless supply the market with exactly what they demanded in the first place!

The power of social networking is only now becoming apparent and businesses are beginning to understand just how well ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing, the best and cheapest kind of marketing, works within the semi-porous walls of a social network.

Most think of social networks as the domain of bored teenagers but considering that Facebook, a social network that targets the 25 to 35 demographic, outpaced MySpace, a social network that does target teenagers, in May with the most number of unique visits many will need to re-assess their opinions of the importance of social networking to business.

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With billions of web sites populating the Internet it’s really no wonder ICANN are doing this – I can’t remember the last time I registered the exact domain that I or a client wanted. Practically every good top level domain has been snapped up, a lot of these by cyber-squatterswho register a domain early on and sell it to the highest bidder.

The new rules will allow the registration of ‘anything’ as a TLD e.g. .ny for New York or .ldn for London. I could register .chandeshparekh as long as I had a good enough ‘business’ reason for doing so.

As the TechRadar.com article notes, it’s hard to know whether this will improve the Internet or hinder it; consider the number of yet to come ‘dead’ websites that will litter the Internet landscape as a result of the new rules.

Read more about this on the ICANN site…

Read the TechRadar.com article…

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Gartner research found that UK retailers are missing a trick by not using Social Networking as a marketing tool. With social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo getting so much traffic retailers can advertise and market their products in innovative ways like Amazon US has done through the use of a Facebook application.

Read more about the Gartner report here and more about Amazon’s Social Networking strategy here…

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Written so a lay-person can easily understand it, with some help from their webmasters, the online documentation consists of the following main sections to help you optimize your site for Google:

1. My site’s ranking in Google Search Results
2. How Google crawls my site
3. Creating a Google friendly site
4. Preventing content from appearing in Google search results
5. My mobile site in the Google  Index
6. Information for Public Sector webmasters

and more can be found here…

This is vital information if you want your site to be ranked as highly as possible in Google’s search engine results pages (serps).

Happy reading!

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What’s interesting and very useful for web entrepreneurs is that there are a lot of categories covered, each with 1st, 2nd and 3rd places, and a grading system for Usability, Usefulness, Social Aspects, User Interface & Design, and Content Quality.

The breakdown of 174 sites in 41 categories helps to drill down to sites that are similar to yours making it easy to compare and pinpoint what you should improve for your web site.

Check out the awards site at http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0

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I’m always on the look-out for interesting ‘happening-now’ topics that I can use to drive traffic and one such successful topic was when Leon Jackson won the reality singing competition X-Factor in the UK in 2007. On the final televised show it was announced that Leon Jackson’s single would be available immediately as a download from his website leonjacksonmusic.com, as opposed to previous years where fans had to wait for the CDs to hit the shops a few days later.

This final show was on a Saturday night and it struck me the next morning, on Sunday, that this was the first time downloads were being sold to take advantage of the excitement generated by the finals show i.e. instant gratification for fans of Leon Jackson.

Anyway, I quickly wrote an article about that on this site on that Sunday morning (view it here) and because of the expediency with which I had got something related to what could arguably be called the UK’s hottest topic of the moment, this article page was viewed 211 times on that Sunday and went on to rack up a total of 858 page views of which 719 were unique page views!

The reason this one page saw so much traffic is that I was quick to get a hot topic on the site and because of that cynergise.com was listed number one on Google for the following 4 days for the search term ‘leonjacksonmusic.com’, beating the official site as well as the official X-factor web site and forums.

Timing is everything!

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As any business person will tell you, “you need to know your market!” Common sense, no doubt, but how exactly does one go about gathering market information without paying oodles of cash to a research company?

Enter SurveyMonkey!

It says on the home page:

Intelligent survey software for primates of all species. SurveyMonkey has a single purpose: to enable anyone to create professional online surveys quickly and easily.

And this totally true – their easy-to-use system makes it possible to get your survey together in just a few minutes! The hard part is who to target and what to ask them!

Their pricing plan is 3 tiered starting at ‘free’ to $19.95 per month and lastly $200 for a year. Although the ‘free’ plan only allows up to 100 responses, it’s suitable for small surveys and a good way to get acquainted with the online software.

Try it out now at www.surveymonkey.com

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