Social Follow has been featured on www.Go2Web20.net. This websites lists quality social websites and is the best directory of these sites I have seen. Check out the Social Follow profile page at:
http://www.go2web20.net/app/?a=SocialFollow
Have a great day!
Rafferty Pendery
Internet Marketing Consultant
Social Follow has been featured on KillerStartups.com at this link:
http://www.killerstartups.com/Social-Networking/socialfollow-com-all-social-networks-in-one-button
This is great for Social Follow, which is the free tool we developed for people to be able to easily link to the social profiles they want to from their website. When y’all get chance, read that post and if you like Social Follow, vote on the link I gave give. Of course you can retweet and comment if you want.
Thanks for the Support!
Rafferty Pendery
Internet Marketing Consultant
Last night Facebook confirmed recent rumors and opened the doors for Facebook users to claim their very own vanity URLs (www.facebook.com/raffertypendery). Originally reserved for for businesses and Facebook partners with more than 1000 fans, as of midnight, the regular folks of the Facebook world can claim a username that will become the exclusive URL for their Facebook profile.
In their continuing effort to listen to its users, Facebook heard the high demand for the vanity URL request. Vanity URLs will make connecting on Facebook easier for individuals and businesses. Instead of having to search hundreds of possible name matches or distribute the current random numerical id used by Facebook, users can simply distribute their personal URL for their profile. Usernames are being distributed on a first come, first serve basis and must be a minimum of five characters including letters, numbers and periods.
There are some rules to keep in mind when you are figuring out your username. For starters, you should pick your username carefully, because you will not be allowed to change it later. If you do change your mind about your username selection, your only option will be to start a new account and Facebook is currently not letting new accounts select specific usernames. Choose carefully and if you are selecting for your business choose relevancy.
Generic usernames, like pizza or paste, will not be available. Facebook is encouraging individuals and businesses to select a username that is specific and relevant to their own identity or business. Businesses should definitely choose a relevant username if they want their vanity URL from Facebook to add value to their Internet marketing campaign. There is a form available to prevent trademark infringement.
With over 2 million profiles on Facebook, usernames are filling up fast and if you want to be part of the “Username Land Rush” or add more value to your Facebook identity. Log on today and claim your name.
Rafferty Pendery
Internet Marketing Consultant
Millions of people use a variety of social websites everyday. Whether for professional forums or family sharing, social networking has started connecting people from every corner of the world for both business and pleasure. If you are setting up profiles for personal use, self-promotion or for building the brand and reputation of your business, the sheer number of social media platforms can make generating a following a difficult, but worth-while task.
How do you let people know where to find you in the social media world without completely coating your website in small and large badges, each with a different link? Enter the SocialFollow button, a social media gathering button introduced by the marketers here at Studio98, tested by their trusted friends and colleagues. The Social Follow button allows you to list all your social accounts from one location or button, making it easy for your website or blog visitors to find you on any or all social platforms without the bombardment of a million buttons and badges.
For those of you who still haven’t decided to hop into the social pool because you just don’t see the benefits, lets take a quick review of the value of social media marketing. There are two aspects of a social approach to marketing that remain true whether you are involved in B2B or B2C relationships: increasing inbound links to your website and improving or maintaining your brand and reputation. Additional benefits include generating targeted traffic and improving your overall community popularity. The greatest value in social media marketing however, is in the word of mouth and viral qualities of the platform and how this can improve your reputation and brand to generate more visitors and loyal customers.
Word of Mouth advertising has been the best form of marketing available since the dawn of promotion strategies. Today, word of mouth still provides the strongest branding and reputation building strategy for most industries and businesses, but the words are usually flying around the Internet instead of the neighborhood. It is the power of social networking that drives this electronic word of mouth force and the SocialFollow button is making it easier for your already loyal customer base to follow you where ever you are on the net and share your business with their network as well.
Rafferty Pendery
Internet Marketing Consultant
(Creator of the Social Follow button)
A $5 cup of coffee in 2007? Of course! A $5 cup of coffee in 2009? I don’t think so…
Starbucks saw a rise in stock prices starting in Oct 2001, hitting it’s peak in Oct 2006. Starbucks’ key contribution to the coffee and marketing world was the value of creating a customer experience vs. the traditional pay for a cup of coffee now leave and go to work.
What was this customer experience worth? $5 for a cup of coffee at least…until over-saturation hit. This is a problem Krispy Kreme is all too familiar with. Notice the trend between Starbucks’ 10 year stock trend:
and Krispy Kreme’s:
With more than 12,000 stores Starbucks faces an over-saturation problem and brand loss. For the correlation in over-saturation read my post, Krispy Kreme: The Sugar High Aftermath. I’ve seen Starbucks now selling their coffee pre-packaged through other stores. In doing this they could be trying to “capture more of the market without having to increase overhead accordingly”. This is the wrong solution. Starbucks made it’s mark on the coffee industry by creating a unique customer experience, not strictly “selling coffee”.
If Starbucks wants to recover their stock prices and value of the company, they need to start with figuring out in present time what makes them a unique company. Having more outlets for their coffee isn’t the only or best solution and one that has been proven unsuccessful by Krispy Kreme following the same trend a few years earlier.
I bring this up because this is a marketing problem at this point more than anything. With an effective marketing strategy, Starbucks could reclaim more of the market, but they have a lot to do to catch up to strong competitors Dunkin Donuts, and McDonalds.
Rafferty Pendery
Internet Marketing Consultant
Technorati Tags: starbucks internet marketing, starbuck marketing, starbucks and krispy kreme trends
Recently there has been an upheaval of “professionals” giving information on their “new business which is recession proof”. That’s not to say there isn’t good information out there on recession-proof business, it’s just about as easy to find as one red grain of rice in a barrel of brown rice with chop sticks.
I only have one comment about anyone talking about their “new, simple, home based project that is recession-proof”, you should be doing what you WANT to be doing and making money doing as well as not having to change industries just to get something more secure.
The concept is multiple streams of income.
I recently had a good friend bring an opportunity to my attention that requires NO MONEY from you (and hardly any time). The opportunity is called Get the Bar. It is still in Beta (testing) mode, but users are encouraged to start using at and will be paid to use it so they can get any bugs worked out of it. My affiliate link is www.WatchtoEarn.com if you want to skip my description of this. If you want to stay for the fun, it works like this:
1. Sign up for a FREE account.
2. Download the Get the Bar toolbar to your browser.
3. Click on the ads and send your link to your friends to sign up.
When you sign up you give a little demographic information about yourself (less than a Myspace page) and when you are ready to look at the ads you click a button and there is a list of ads you can click on. You are sent targeted ads from advertisors for your demographic. This concept is far more valuable in the eyes of the advertisors, versus the traditional “shotgun” approach where most of the people don’t care about their ads because they are not anyone interested in that type of product or service.
You get paid 4/10 of a cent for each ad you click on and watch for at least 5 seconds. Right now there is a maximum of clicking on 10 ads per day, but when the major release occurs this will move up to 50 ads/day. This doesn’t sound like much money, but this starts to add up when you invite people you know. You get paid 7 levels down on this, meaning you get paid 4/10 of a cent for each ad watched by people you talk to and sign up and then people they get signed up and people they get signed up, etc. etc. for 7 levels down.
The numbers work like this:
If you sign up 5 people who sign up 5 people who each sign up 5 people, etc. 7 levels down you would be making $40,000/month! Each person would only need to be looking at 5 ads per day totaling 25 seconds of work from each person.
This opportunity really has the ability to grow and fast. There are already 600,000 people involved and in the next few months, when the major press releases are done, this will boom. I highly suggest people get involved now. This is not something that requires any upfront cost, its FREE and is not something that you have to dedicate your life doing or change careers.
Moral of the story to building recession-proof life…multiple sources of income.
Check out my affiliate link at: www.WatchtoEarn.com.
Rafferty Pendery
Internet Marketing Consultant
Most people in the US saw the Doritos Super Bowl Commercial which sparked internet from bloggers and critics alike. This is a very funny ad appealing to the “everything went the way I wanted it to because I’m eating a specific chip” ad.
Out of all the commercials at the Super Bowl this Doritos commercial stands out in my head most clearly. I will be publishing a post on my top 10 Super Bowl commercials. Keep an eye out for that shortly.
Rafferty Pendery
Internet Marketing Consultant
I previously wrote a post on speeding up your social bookmarking with SocialMaker.com. There is another player in the automated social bookmarking game. I wanted to share my comparison from personally using both:
SocialMarker.com
This was a great find when we started using this a while ago. This reduced a lot of the work for us in submitting to our social bookmarking sites manually but there was still manual work to be done. It’s free though, so who can really complain?
Then we found:
OnlyWire.com
OnlyWire has a fully automated service which I much prefer with a high submission rate. The majority of sites I set up accounts for got my bookmark and they were listed on the site fast.
OnlyWire has 2 options:
1. Signing up for a free account and providing a link back to them on your blog in exchange for using it. That sounds like a fair exchange.
2. Signing up for a paid account where you pay $2.99/month or $24.99/year and you get ad free, fully automated service.
Summary
I chose to use Onlywire’s paid service and it has worked really well for me.
Rafferty Pendery
Internet Marketing Consultant
social marker
There is a tool that I have been using for some time to social bookmark sites that I like, SocialMarker.com. This tool helps automate some of the process of social bookmarking with all major social websites.
The Pros:
Normally when you social bookmark sites you have to go to the website, login and then bookmark the site I want to. If you want to social bookmark multiple sites this can definitely take some time. Social Marker takes most of the work out of it
The Cons:
The service is not completely automated so there is some work that you will have to do by hand, but I think The Pros outweigh this considerably.
If anyone has seen a service that is better, feel free to comment about it and I would love to take a look.
Rafferty Pendery
Internet Marketing Consultant
Do you Twitter, Tweet and Twit? As one of the newest social networks, many people are having difficulty determining if they should join the Twitter revolution or if it will simply be another time vacuum that steals them away from business and family. The truth is, Twitter is a little bit of both, but, in the end, it can be a useful medium for building your business, establishing your brand and making valuable connections.
Twitter has put a new twist on the “old” Web 2.0 theme. Twitter is a cross between blogging and instant messaging, popularly referred to as micro-blogging. You have 140 characters to convey what you are doing to your fellow twitter peeps. Although the message is short and sweet, there is something to be said for the 140 characters Twitter provides. This essentially eliminates the long-winded messages that make readers and recipients (or clients) yawn. Your 140 characters, used wisely, can pique another’s interest, evoke emotion and potentially have them contacting you to learn more or visiting your link to get the full low-down.
The transparency of Twitter is quite divine and is an excellent way to build trust. Twitter is personal which is why many businesses seem to shy away from the forum, but imagine that all of your clients are viewing you as a person, not an industry or business. You are real to them and that is an essential element in establishing quality and long-term relationships with customers. Consider it a way of adding a human voice to your brand.
Another valuable asset of Twitter in the social media arena is that it updates in real time. This gets your message to your audience immediately. When you engage in two-way conversations, and please don’t be a spammer, you have an opportunity to interact with your audience on the spot. You can ask and answer questions and really open dialogue with your following.
Twitter also offers an opportunity to follow your competition and possibly join them, if you are so inclined. Joining the competition may not seem like a good part of your marketing plan, but by connecting with others in your niche you are opening yourself to new opportunities should they need assistance with a project or if for some reason they need to suggest another company to their client. You can also stay on top of trends in your market as a lot of news hits Twitter way before it hits the local news.
You want to know the very best part? Twitter is free. This is a powerful return on investment if you consider the number of tweet peeps you can follow and be followed by. The sheer number of Twits is a great motivational factor for becoming one your self. Like most social media, Twitter offers the opportunity to connect with literally thousands of potential clients looking for information about your business or services.
We do have one warning. As with most social networks, Twitter can be addictive. Don’t let it take you away to Twitterland. Keep your tweets simple and use Twitter wisely. Posting too much can take things overboard. Using Twitter moderately can make it a powerful marketing tool expanding blog exposure, with the Twitter Widget, and gaining valuable readers.
Check me out on twitter: Rafferty Pendery’s Twitter.
Rafferty Pendery
Internet Marketing Consultant
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