Archive for November, 2009

5 Ways To Make Your Brand go Viral

November 19th, 2009

Just launched a brand online? Worried about its Promotion? Here are 5 great ways to make your brand go viral.

Contests & Surveys

If you have a sound marketing budget, it’s a great idea to launch a survey or contest (relevant to your business and target audience) with some attractive rewards attached to it. survey_contestsBut remember to advertise this contest as you can not expect large number of participants from nowhere.  Keep a separate budget aside to promote it as well. Your brand will  get good visibility in short span plus you also have a prequalified data of your target audience and some reports to analyze and shape your product.

Alliance and Partnership

Look for the complementary services related to your businesses. Form alliances with these complementary services, be visible to their target audience . This will help you reach to the best of your prospects, who will gradually be acting as your brand ambassadors.

Blog Networks

There is nothing better than being reviewed by an influential bloggers when it comes to creating a viral effect.  If your brands gets picked by one influential blogger of your industry a few other will definitely write for you.

Be on Social Media

This is almost prerequisite today for launching and promoting a brand. This is because others are doing so you also needs to be on social media. This is because social networking sites can actually make your brand go viral overnight. But mind it once you are out on social media, you will  have to be there always. There is no looking back.

Affiliation Program

If you can have an affiliation program in place, nothing better than this to make your products sold  and spread word of mouth viral.

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The Lime Flavor Continues to Spread Across Online Market

November 12th, 2009

Lime Labs today announced the launch of its new hosting and domain registration service, LimeDomains. An ICANN accredited domain registrar, LimeDomains offers a wide range of hosting solutions, ranging from completely free full-featured websites, to competitively priced premium hosting plans that include more space, bandwidth and the ability to manage several domains and websites from a single account.

webhosting

“LimeDomains makes it easy for people to get powerful websites running quickly and easily,” said Mark Gorton, Founder of Lime Labs. “LimeDomains offers free hosting and free application installation, and we are finding that many people appreciate the great value we are offering.”

All LimeDomains accounts come with access to an extensive catalog of open source web applications ranging from popular blogs such as WordPress, to full-featured content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla. Users can also upload their own files or transfer their existing websites – such as their Geocities pages – to LimeDomains via a built-in file manager, or any popular FTP client. Most popular web design applications, such as Adobe Dreamweaver, are also supported.

Unlike other free hosting services, there are no strings attached to the free hosting offer on LimeDomains. Users do not have to sign-up for any third party services, or submit themselves to a barrage of solicitations (e-mail, or otherwise), or place mandatory ads on their website. Most importantly, the free accounts are not crippled in any way – and receive the same quality of service, performance and reliability that most other hosting services charge a premium for.

“We’re excited to be first to market with a credible, full-featured free website solution,” said John Enright, VP Marketing & Business Development at Lime Labs. “Our feature set and customer experience is already well ahead of any other hosting service – free or otherwise – and this is just the beginning.”

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Posted in Marketing, Technology |

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The Real Time Web Continues To Be Hot

November 5th, 2009

There is a new way to search the web, and boatloads of users who have experienced the real time web have been impressed with the results. Traditional search engines rank sites based on relevancy. Because of this, the results don’t change a lot; a search today will reveal most of the same sites and information that were there last month. However, with companies like Twitter and Facebook having millions of users continue to post content and status updates – there is now real time content on the web which updates each second. Search engines and startups have leveraged this information to offer internet users instant access to what is happening right now.

So, when breaking news happens, a real time search will instantly give you the public’s thoughts, opinions, and experiences in relation to the breaking news. A search on Google news would give you links to articles written by people in the media, a real time search will allow you to sift through all internet users comments and thoughts. There have been several startups which have launched search engines and tools to try and offer users a good experience in searching and navigating through the real time web:
Here is a list of three startups along with a quick overview of what makes each of them stand out:

Topsy

What makes Topsy’s real time search engine stand out is that it is focused on real time links as opposed to real time content. So, when you perform a search at Topsy, instead of seeing what people are talking about on the real time web, you are going to see what the most popular and prominent links are being shared on the real time web. You can ever sort to see the most shared links over the past hour, day, week, or month.

OneRiot

Rumors have been swirling all over the web in regards to a partnership Yahoo is discussing with OneRiot. OneRiot offers users a real time search engine which can be sorted based on web results and video results. OneRiot also announced in early October that it will be rolling out a platform for advertisers to pay for listings to featured content on their results pages. While most real time web companies have been focused on technology and traffic, OneRiot seems to be an early leader in the monetization of the real time web.

Sency*

Sency has built a free feed for websites and blogs (http://sency.com/feed.php). The feed brings in real time content which updates automatically on the site or blog it is published on. The site and blog owners are able to select which keyword they want the feed to scroll for. So, a blog about sports, can for example, have automatically updating real time content anytime someone uses the word baseball or football shows up on the real time web

*this article is written by Evan Britton, founder of Sency

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Posted in Technology |

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What is the objective of Your Social Media Presence, Branding or Advertising?

November 3rd, 2009

With a definite objective or just to follow the bandwagon, every individual, SMBs, large corporation and big daddy today is on social media. Discussions on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other social media platform have a definite space today at least amongst the marketing department across the industries

Some companies and brands are doing it successfully, some have made their presence but failed to capitalize it and some are still confused how to go about it? The larger percentage of marketers fall under the third category, who either doubts the strength of this much talked about marketing channel or have no clue how to go about it?

My advice to all who are still sitting on the bank, confused on how to sail across this marketing stream is ‘BE CLEAR OF YOUR OBJECTIVE’.
socialmediabranding

Though there can be hundreds of objectives for your social media presence, I am restricting my post to two broader categories, i.e. Branding and Advertising as I feel the rest all objectives can be classified under these two broader terms.

Though these two terms are interrelated yet the differences lies in the fact that the impact of Advertising can be seen in short term and can be measured in terms of ROI precisely, while branding has long term impact and may or may not be immediately measured. Branding gives an image and sustainability to your brand increasing its perceived value while advertising gives spikes to your sales.

Before launching yourself on Social Media, make sure what you or your management wants to achieve with the social media presence. Spike in sales or increasing the perceived value of your brand. Spike in sales can be easily measured but to measure the perceived value, you need to monitor the buzz, how and what people are talking about your brand. Is your brand now started finding a positive place in blog posts, tweets, discussions and forums? If yes then, you are going the right way.

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Posted in Social Media Optimization |

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