Online Marketing Glossary: Social Network
Social Network:
- Online networks of communities who share interests and activities or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others, which necessitates the use of software.
Okay, this seems like an overly technical and complicated definition, so let me throw some commonly known examples at you instead. Facebook. MySpace. LinkedIn. Social Networks and social networking is a great way to connect with friends, family, and colleagues!
It’s probably too late to register for Affiliate Classroom Live, so now you’re officially missing out on my round table discussion about social digital networking for affiliate managers, which will be happening in T-minus 1 hour and 50 minutes in the Waterfront I Ballroom here at the Boston Seaport Hotel.
Don’t worry – I’m sure to post a recap. I’m solid like that 😉
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Social Media Pays Off
Whoever said that hanging around social media platforms never helped anyone is flat out lying. I’d like to think of myself as ahead of the curve in most situations. I try to be an early adopter whenever I can now. So I’ve been eager to jump onto the bandwagon with new social platforms like Social Thing and Britekite, most recently. I’m making a point to be a presence in the social media space for two reasons:
- Fun.
- Traffic.
I am geekier than I care to admit most times, and I’ve always been into instant digital communication like email and instant messenger. Which is why I acclimated to Twitter so easily. Making the jump from LiveJournal to MySpace, then later to Facebook was a piece of cake. So I have a lot of fun hanging around talking to people, exchanging ideas, or just exchanging rather meaningless comments. I’m just an online oriented person. Not that I can’t carry on a phone call or face-to-face conversation, I just enjoy the technical aspects of writing. Blame it on the geek in me.
But as I mentioned, the other more beneficial reason for hanging about on these networks has been traffic to my blog here. I’ve always known that my efforts and time spent on Digg and Stumble Upon would eventually pay off. At the same time, I was never worried about whether they would or not since it was the fun that kept me there. Today I decided to check my Analytics account, something I don’t do nearly as often as I should. I found a wonderful sight.
That’s right… my top 5 traffic sources include three social networks. This makes me totally happy that my addiction to these things is paying off. So listen to all of us social media nerds and register your brand names and participate. It’s just one of the many ways that you can make fun your job 🙂
Read MoreOMG!!! The sky is falling
After working on our bug fix list for a couple months now, the veep and I are finally having a meeting tomorrow to go over the list, prioritize anything that’s still pending, and then present it to the CTO.
How does PsPrint’s assistant marketing manager get put in charge of tracking all the IT problems reported to our tech department? Well, I don’t really know. But I was handed the task nonetheless. My guess it’s because of how disgustingly organized I am. So I have this handy dandy Excel log I update whenever anyone CC’s me on a support item, and I update it when I see the item’s been taken care of. It’s no big deal… takes just a few seconds out of my day a couple days a week. Although, it does make me curious about how other companies track things like this.
My last company was no source for comparison, really. With a staff of 8 people, 1 guy was in charge of all things technical. He maintained our database, he fixed things when they broke (except that one time we wanted to go all Office Space on our dying printer once the boss approved getting a new one). But with a stagnant concept of a company that wasn’t doing much to grow and was run by a glorified con-man, there wasn’t much for IT to work on to improve. So of course he had nothing but time to fix all our inane little networking and Windows Update issues.
Luckily these are all internal requests we have here… this person’s computer is acting weird, this gift code isn’t working, add such and such an email account to x distribution list. It’s not a whole lot of issues that affect our customers too badly. Even if a gift code doesn’t work, we can always apply the discount in the form of a refund. Our IT department focuses most of their energy on making the site better for customers… which leaves most the company to kind of fend for ourselves in terms of updating our computers and regular maintenance things like that. This is where it really is beneficial that we’re an online-based company. 99% of our employees that use computers for work are very computer savvy and self sufficient. I’d wager that about 80% of the office has a personal MySpace page.
Although I hate to admit it, we do get random glitches to our website. What big company doesn’t, right? But that’s part of growing and expanding as a company and business. We introduce new features or new partnerships with other companies and things don’t always work right off the bat. How many Xbox 360’s overheated and broke within a month after the first generation was released? C’mon, these things are rarely perfect from creation forward.
But that’s what makes PsPrint so exciting for me. We’re always changing, morphing, adding. Working on new partnerships with bigger and better companies. First NAR, tomorrow the world!
Read MoreAvoiding Former CoWorkers in San Jose
Sometimes it’s pleasant to see an old coworker… other times, it’s best to avoid them. Which is what I did at Search Engine Strategies last week in San Jose. I’m not necessarily proud of what I did, but I successfully avoided what could have been a rather awkward situation, so it worked out for the best.
I spent the majority of the day in the Social Media track of the conference, learning more about the inner workings of Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Wikipedia than I ever thought I wanted to know. Of course, one of the first things I did when getting back to the office was apply some of this and set up a Digg profile and a Technorati profile and an account on Del.icio.us. Since PsPrint doesn’t sell it’s content, I don’t really see Wikipedia as being that huge of an opportunity for us. But the others… well I’m shocked I wasn’t on them personally for awhile.
Now, my roots in social media lie in the likes of MySpace, message boards, and chat rooms. I’m not the seasoned internet user you’ll hear speaking at trade shows that’s been online since 1997… but that’s mostly because back in ’97 I was still writing history essays and doing math homework in High School. I’ve been online since about the time I got to college, Fall of 1999. Going away to college and having to make all new friends, I immediately found chat rooms as a place to connect with like minded people. A friend introduced me to Live Journal back in ’03 and I’ve been blogging ever since. When MySpace came around big time in ’05 I jumped on that bandwagon and haven’t looked back.
Has it really been 2 years on MySpace? How time flies. But, I digress. SES was a great show for me to attend. Very informative, and my favorite part was how organized all the panelists were. Everyone had a neat & tidy Power Point presentation that will be available online this week, so I barely had to take any notes. I’ve also decided that the next time I go to one of these shows and attend the educational panels I’m going to be bringing a laptop. Since there was really no need for me to take many notes, it would have been great to be able to surf the websites that the panelists talked about while they were talking about them. I’m all about multi-tasking, so getting some work done while learning is my ideal.
This is becoming an exciting time for me. Learning more and more about the field I’m working in and exploring social media marketing is really exciting me to be moving onward here at PsPrint.
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