Have you ever added a comment on somebody's blog, just to find it removed or never pass the authors screening?

Most bloggers want to see comments on their posts, but they want to see related ones. We spend a while each day clearing the deluge of bogus and automated comments in a hope, an almost desperate hope, that one may be serious.

The fact is many Internet Marketers see blogs as being a quick and easy way of growing links to there own blogs and websites. However, most blogs instruct search engines not to follow comment links (see our post on no-follow mechanics). So they are, to a certain extent, wasting their time.

Having said this, adding related and relevant comments helps you build rapport with the author and over time you may be able to leverage the relationship to your advantage. Perhaps the blogger may post some information about you or your company, they may consider you when carrying out other day-to-day business activity. You can look at the comments section of a blog as an opportunity to network.   

So here are some guidelines;

1. Always read the article first!
2. Always read the article first! (No, this is not a mistake, we want to be sure you get what we're saying here.)
3. OK, now that you have read the article, think about what interested you about it and make some notes. Did you agree or disagree with the post? Do you have any thoughts that may extend or improve the information within the post?
4. Now write a sentence or short paragraph about your thoughts. Don't just compliment the author on how great she is, that's just annoying!
5. Use your name in your comment, not your company name or the keywords you want to be known for. This is a sure fore way of getting your comments deleted really quickly.
6. Always use your real email address. Most blogs don’t publish your email address, and using free Gmail and Hotmail email addresses is sure to make the author think very carefully about keeping your post active or not.

Social media is everywhere you look. Not just online but in the papers, yes even the broadsheets, television, radio and mobile phones, it's just everywhere!

The question is how are large national and international businesses engaging in this arena and how are they managing the communication?

Well, there are a few methods, dispersed services and applications available such as KickApps, Sparta, Small World Labs, but move over KickApps, Comment Technologies truly Kicks Ass!

So Comment Technologies is the new kid on the block, but rather than just being a platform, it's a social marketing one stop service.

All of the other platforms are just that, platforms! They are something you need to learn, adapt and manage. This means slow lead times to launch, increased workforce and a very steep executive management learning curve.

Comment removes all of these adoption issues by providing a full end to end service of implementation, data migration and management. Meaning that any company can have there social media solution in place extremely quickly without resource constraints. Furthermore, while executive management and marketing departments are getting up to speed community engagement, growth and moderation can all be managed by the full range of Comment Technologies services.

However, it doesn't stop there! Where other platforms either focus on just building communities and/or selling advertising space, Comment provides a cutting edge back end reporting and analysis service comparable to best of breed Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.

So you want to target a new product launch in the central states of North America, focusing on married women aged 20 to 35, no problem. The information is available at a touch of a button.

Along with such powerful reporting and export features comes enterprise quality slice and dice import facilities. Got your customers in SAP or JDE? Hey no problem, import and synchronisation are a breeze.       

We feel the real value of Comment is not just its top grade, financial services quality, infrastructure but the services that can be bolted on to enable the business to adopt quickly and integrate into its day to day activity gradually.

If you are looking at social media as a marketing strategy and would like to know more, feel free to fire us over an email or connect with us on Linked-In, Twitter or Facebook.

You may have started to find that people you follow on Twitter are appending the hash-tags #in or #li to their tweets.

Basically, what has happened is, Linked-In (www.linkedin.com) has started integration with Twitter allowing its members to make their Twitter feed available to their Linked-In profiles.

Unlike many similar integrations, Linked-In allows you to select all Tweets to display or just the ones with the #in hash-tag appended.

A word of warning, Linked-In say that you can append #in or #li in their newsletter, but in the settings it only mentions #in, so if you want to feed your tweets into Linked-In be safe and stick with #in.

As an example, I just tweeted the following post. You can then see it displayed in our Linked-In status without any copy/paste or other nonsense. Very cool!
Don’t forget, appending the #in hash-tag to your Tweets will save you time as you don’t have to post the same status to Linked-In also.

Feel free to connect with me on Linked-In at http://uk.linkedin.com/in/fasttrackit

So you have created your marketing video and now want to promote it, well, everywhere!

YouTube is an obvious start, perhaps Bebo and the countless other video hosting websites and networks around. Eventually you’ll also add your video to Facebook, but in our view, Facebook should be the first place you go.

Facebook has a powerful tagging feature which allows you to associate your video post with your friends names. When you do this, your video will become visible to those peoples friends also. This means more exposure to people you don’t even know!

However, you can only tag friends of yours, in other words people whom have agreed to share their information with you.

So if video marketing is something your thinking about, try to do the following first;

1. Look for friends that are in a similar profession to you and mix in the circles of your target audience
2. Check out how many friends they have, you’re looking for people whom are active on Facebook and have upwards of 500 friends. 500 friends equates to approximate exposure of around 1,500 other people. This is calculated assuming a minimum of 3 unique friends per connection. (Drop me a comment if you want me to expand on this.)
3. Request to become friends with them, if you don’t know them, you may want to find out something about them first which you can use as an introduction. For example, see if they are on Twitter, mention them in a tweet, follow them there and then send a Facebook friendship request saying that you liked their Twitter page. Compliments get you everywhere!

Now in the production of your video, try to find a way of incorporating these people into the video in some way. If you find it tough, don’t stress, that’s what the credits at the end of the movie are for, simply add a list titled “Thanks to;” to the end of the video.

Don’t abuse it! If someone feels like you are piggybacking too much they may well kick up a stick with Facebook and you could get yourself cut off. Think carefully and strategically, and this system will work well for you.

It seams like everywhere you look online nowadays, all you find are widgets!

So you may well ask "What the hell's a widget?"

Above is dictionary.com interpretation of the word, but in the realm of social media its idea is, well, anything really! Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in and Google all provide widgets of one sort or another.

Most of the time a widget is a small component of a web page. It's a piece of code developed by one company/website which is then run on many other websites in a hope to allow visitors to connect easier. For example, on our blog you’ll find 2 widgets we are using, one of them is a Twitter re-tweet button and the other is a Facebook share button.

These work in much the same way as most social media widgets work, they are small HTML & Javascript snippets of code your web designer can simply drop onto your pages and off you go. You're using a widget!

However, the plethora of widgets available just seams to be a little overwhelming and in many cases completely useless and unnecessary. I can imagine in many companies trying to tap into the social media market, the directors sit around a table together with the designers and developers and they say "We have to make it different and stand out in the crowd, any ideas?" to which some bright spark says, "I know, lets create a widget!"

I may sound a little negative here, but I’m trying not to be, honest. Just create widgets with purpose! So I have listed a few of our favourites below, please feel free to comment and let us know yours also.

Re-Tweet Button: http://tweetmeme.com
Facebook Share: http://facebook.com & http://www.fbshare.me
Social Networking Components by Google Friends Connect http://www.google.com/friendconnect
RSS & ATOM Feeds: http://feedburner.google.com
Gravatars (Used in blog comments etc.) http://en.gravatar.com 

You've probably seen it on the end or beginning of a Twitter tweet, it normally looks something like "#FF @BeginInterMktg", but what does it mean?

Well, #FF stands for Follow Friday and the hashtag (#) is a Twitter search feature which allows users to group information into a category of some kind. Try a search for #FF here. OK, I know that hasn't really answered the question, so what does Follow Friday mean?

People, especially marketers, want to grow their followers. #FF is a way to recommend others to follow them. In doing this, you can also grow your followers because of a kind of mutual gratitude.

Here's how it works:

You identify people you follow and decide to recommend them. You obviously can decide who to recommend yourself, that part's up to you. You may like someone's tweets and find them useful, so you want to share them, they may have previously re-tweeted one of your tweets, or they may have already recommended you, the choice is yours.

Next, pull up Twitter and start an update as follows:

#FF @UserName1 @UserName2

Where you replace @UserName1 and 2 with the users you want to recommend, but don't forget the @ sign in front of their user names.

Hit the 'Update' button and your done. Now make a note of your current follower numbers, you should see it increase over the next few hours.

The reason your followers are likely to increase is because anyone watching the #FF stream may well follow the people your recommending but are also highly likely to follow the people doing the recommending.

It's that simple, so don't delay, get Following on Fridays, and then have a great weekend.

The Google Wave is gathering momentum and the beta testers are having quite a ride. The question is what and how can the Wave be leveraged by business users? Firstly take a look at this superb video which contains strong language but does demonstrate the Waves amazing functionality of the search mega giants embrace of social media.

Wow, the system is a fully integrated media extravaganza, with the ability to pull in images, movies, sound clips, background tracks and multiple format text. The user can start multiple waves (conversations) and select participants by their wave avatar (image or photo) and then start collaborating.

The end result is a single platform which looks like it can be used by business, not only for marketing, but customer support, project management, quick internal and external conversations, the list just goes on.

Many dispersed workforces have been using chat-room technology to connect quickly for quite sometime, but the interactivity is normally limited to some text and a smiley :o). Recently with Facebook and Twitter, some have started to use these slightly richer platforms to perform the same tasks. However, the very real and rich components of The Wave may well be so compelling that business once again migrates to the better platform.

From a marketing perspective, the Wave will need to encourage the same mass buy-in as Facebook and Twitter. Googles Friend Connect hasn't yet hit the big time but we are sure The Wave is going to hit much harder.

On the 16th to 17th October 2009 the Internet saw a new trending topic. Promoted by Social Media Marketing of Atlanta GA. People were told far and wide to post to Twitter, Facebook and on their own blogs the hashtag #beatcancer.

Superb sentiment and with 209,771 recorded posts, a superb result, which is now being proclaimed a world record. Twitters' search of the hashtag reported that eBay/Paypal and MillerCoors would be donating 1 US cent for every recorded hit. Well as far as we can tell, all three companies could afford to bump that up to a nice square dollar, but hey, I'm not one for spending other people's money!

So what now? Although the intention in this case was obviously sincere, what's going to happen next? There's enough SPAM on Twitter as it is, all we need now is a bunch of copycat marketers "Trying to beat the world record". Suddenly you're being asked to tweet #abcelectrics because they want to hit the 300,000 recorded mentions.

I know it's grumpy and perhaps a bit sceptical, but I just hope we don't see an overuse of this strategy, at least, save them for the really important things.

Having said that we got involved with our partner iPhone App iCamWait which donates 10% of pre-tax profits to a number of charities one of which is the World Cancer Research Fund. So at least we can say we did our bit, however #abcelectrics? Well Goodluck if you do try I guess!

On the 15th October we wrote about corporate management of social media. The article was titled "Manage the conversation with Comment" which introduces a new platform for larger organisations to engage their audience through social media.

The article also demonstrates the key issues which face corporate business where social media is concerned. We feel that these issues are extremely compelling and certainly pose a very real challenge.

The key concepts which we are sure are keeping many marketers up at night are the ways social media can be used to promote products/services and brand along with crisis and negative feedback management.

It's the crisis and negative feedback management which poses the real threat. Flare-ups of negative attitude and posts occur within the Twitter time-line stream, as an example, on a daily basis. Just a few weeks ago, a major mobile telephone network had significant outages and their brand name made it to the top of the Trending Topics (TT). That may seam like good news for some in the marketing department, until they actually looked at the posts from disgruntled, upset and downright annoyed customers. So how can such organisations manage such criticism?

Social Media is real-time, business doesn't have a 24 or 48 hour window of opportunity to devise a response and react to negative reports in newspapers, television and radio reports. If it's happening now on social networks, it needs to be addressed now!

The key to tackling this very real and growing problem is to take more control.

Companies can attempt to engage their customers and prospective customers on their own turf and setup networks of their own. In order to do this they need to build solutions which they can integrate into there own Internet Marketing Landscape. This is where we feel Comment Technologies can help greatly. Its platform is sophisticated and feature rich and provides the tools required to setup such an environment. 

However, the corporate companies also require the tools to allow them to keep track of mentions on networks like Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In, Google Wave etc. This is one of the most important parts of the puzzle. So we have started our search for what looks to be the holy grail of social media reporting. We'll keep you updated on what we find. Please feel free to add a comment if you know of any such solution.

Here are a few links you may find of interest;
Hootsuite (http://hootsuite.com) is a Twitter client which allows organisations to manage their Twitter accounts as well as reporting on Brand and statistics.

Comment Technology (http://www.commenttechnologies.com) is a Social Media technology company which provides a feature rich platform for companies' to produce and manage their own networks.

The age of social networking is well and truly here!

Facebook™, Twitter™, Linked-In™ and Flickr™ are just a few of the household names we stumbleupon™ on a daily basis. We may not use them all or even know how they all really work, but you just can't help switching on the TV, radio or even browsing your favourite website and not see or hear about one of these services.

The question is not are you doing it yet? It's have you dugg it with digg™ yet?

Companies large and small are trying to leverage this new form of word-of-mouth marketing to spread their message in a passive, but effective manner. However, there in lies a problem. This problem is especially true for larger organisations where the control of information is paramount. Maybe the word control is a little too strong here, perhaps we should say "Analysis & Response".

What I mean by this is, the larger the company, the more they are in the spotlight and bad news can hit like a tidal wave. Companies need a quick way of responding to trending discussions on such news and leveraging social media is fast becoming the new, and lower cost, way of doing this.

Ok, that is the bleaker side of the commercial use of social media, simply transmitting flight information as Lufthansa's has started with its http://myskystatus.com/ service is a cool use of the medium along with the growing trend to promote movie releases and new products and services are all there too, but it all does come back to control, management and marketing finesse.

There are a few services around that offer social networking solutions for companies, KickApps.com has been on the playing field for quite sometime, but released just recently, at the end of last year, Comment Technologies launched with a new angle on corporate buy-in to social networking.

Their philosophy is to "bring the conversation back home" and the platform appears to do just that. With common tools and services like RSS boxes and content panels (Facebook wall etc.), Member profiles, Member pages, Blogs, Polls, Opinions, Surveys, Forums, Photo Albums, Messaging & Groups to name just a few. They promise the epitome of a dream social networking solution for any wide-eyed and bushy tailed corporate marketer.

The Chococo Community is a featured implementation of the platform and you can take a look through it here http://community.chococo.co.uk/.

As for Comment Technologies? We think this is going to be a very interesting few years for them and I look forward to reporting back to you on their progress.