If your wife specializes in social media marketing…well, you are a lucky guy for:

  1. All the shelves in your house are completely stuffed with print and carefully leather-bound Wikipedia volumes.
  2. Your children’s names are Ajax and Pandora, your dog’s name is Flickr and personally you are tenderly called Diggy.
  3. Your friends feel panic terror of visiting you because, on greeting, your wife immediately seizes them and makes vote for Digg-news, comment posts and fill out social media profiles.
  4. One of the walls in your apartment is amorously decorated with the framed picture of Gary Vaynerchuk.
  5. When reading morning newspapers your wife rates worthy news as “+1 digg”.
  6. The dinner is allowed only after you have added comments to all the latest posts in your wife’s blog as well as in the blogs of her numerous friends.
  7. All your wages is spent on startups. And each time you invest into “the brain waves and million dollar ideas”.
  8. In the evenings the whole family watches YouTube, and Flickr is used instead of your family album.
  9. You have moved from your separate apartment to a hostel room exclusively for the sake of strengthening social bonds.
  10. And, finally, your own bedroom is equipped with live streaming webcams to make some hot and spicy content available for public.

Today I post the next part of the post “Social Media Wolves”. You can read the first part of the article here.

Social Media Wolves

6. Forum spam
Internet forums are justly considered the first robin of Web 2.0 technology. Being the integral part of traditional Internet, forums correspond to Web 2.0 philosophy in its very essence that is the user generated content. No wonder that the forums have become the first hunting field for social media wolves.

The social media wolves’ forum activities may be represented as either direct spam or veiled forum talks accompanied by putting some links. In the former case, special script spreads through forum base the posts of explicitly advertising nature. However, this technique is rather inefficient as more than 90 per cent of such posts are usually deleted by moderators. In the latter case, wolves place their ads in forums as just the routine users’ discussions. Expertly treated, such allocations are generally perceived as matter-of-course comments.
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They are known as spammers and Black Hats of Social Media Marketing. But in fact they are just wolves, Social Media Wolves being hungry, ruthless and highly aggressive animals.

Social Media Wolves

They are constantly stalking Social Media for more new gains. The pursuit of easy profit develops in different ways: through Internet traffic, batch getting of links with keywords, by selling cheap Rolex imitations or by tricks with sending fee-paying SMS.

They are hated by all cyberspace, but despite all that, social media wolves continue attacking social media and its users.

So below are given top ten “black” techniques allowing wolves to subsist.
Read the rest of this entry »

Much time had passed since the triumphant progress of Web 2.0 all over the world. Common enthusiasm for new advanced capabilities of the technology along with citing examples of case studies like: “The way our company started the corporate blog and earned megabuck,” had faded away. Nobody shouts about social media breakthrough any more as the revolution has already occurred. So today we are witnessing the worldwide prevalence of the leading Web 2.0 technology.

Social media had a far-reaching influence on our daily life. Web 2.0 revolution had dramatically transformed some important spheres of our daily routine. Just have a look at the fascinating list of nine markets that were radically changed by the advanced Web 2.0 technology.

1. Mass Media
With the emergence of social media, things with mass media will never be the same again. The social media has radically transformed the very essence of mass media business, no matter whether we are speaking of online or offline publications. Now the readers want to define the policy of periodicals, select the materials coming to the front page and choose the authors worthy of contributing articles to this or that media by themselves. Otherwise, the readers just change for more socially oriented sites or start creating their own mass media.

A growing number of users choose to get news from sites like DIGG. So the editors of traditional news sites, who as far as yesterday asserted that social news was just another useless yo-yo toy, now consider DIGG to be a strong arch-rival.

Moreover, the reviews of newsworthy blog posts are increasingly published in print media.

For many people video aggregators had replaced TV, movies and DVD long ago. Furthermore, unlike TV, YouTube is watched not only before going to bed but during working ours as well. Individual prime time for everybody has become a reality!

2. Show Business
Tired of searching the proven paths to their fans’ hearts, pop stars start making a beeline for them by means of personal blogs, or a page on Twitter and MySpace.

Even superstars like J Lo do not miss the opportunity to upload their videos to YouTube. Vin Diesel regularly updates his personal page on Facebook adding thousands of friends from among his willing fans. Less sociable MC Hammer keeps his personal blog on Twitter allowing 660,000 users to watch his every move.

vindiesel

Without social Internet technologies we would never know about the so-called “web celebrities”, such as Susan Boyle and Peter Nalitch who won fame by means of social media.
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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rTzIAWI4Ms

Various conflict situations may arise practically in all the communities. This is somewhat rational thing as it is quite common for people to disagree in some questions and to share different opinions firmly sticking to their own point. The main thing about it is to prevent the constructive confrontation from breaking into the hubbub of arguing voices. The prevention of such situations is a basic responsibility of the community administrator.

The reasons for community conflicts may vary form inherent in its nature, such as personal misunderstandings, ill attitude towards administrative actions, dissatisfaction with alterations made to community and alike, to external ones including slanging match between rival communities, or, what is more, competitive fighting between business rivals.

Community Conflicts Prevention Or How to Avoid Coming to Blows

1. The Rules Establishment
Each community must be governed by the well-established rules which cannot exist just as fables rehashed by one user to another. These rules must be well-defined and documentary available to public, thus constituting a sort of a community governing law. All the registered community members should be invariably considered as persons having accepted the community rules.
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bOne of the problems faced when promoting new services using SMM strategy is a lack of informational reasons. You have to do your best to impact social media users as their tastes have become refined due to the great saturation of media market. Ads like: “Welcome a new service comprising such tools like blah-blah-blah – viva Web 2.0!” are hardly of any use now. Today we are witnessing the emergence and collapse of so many services that it is hardly possible to track all of them.

Here you are with the ten informational reasons for the effective impact on social media audience.

  1. Write a story of a successful startup. The success stories are always exciting, so a well developed case study is sure to draw everybody’s attention.
  2. Gain the support of celebrities. A comment – or even better registration – of a well-known person is a highly effective way of attracting public attention to the startup.
  3. Make a review of similar services disclosing their benefits and drawbacks. Just let people know who is who in this market niche. And, of course, you are welcome to underline the advantages of your own service – but still being very careful. It is important to be honest: do not mention non-existent disadvantages of your competitors’ offers or non-existent advantages of your own service. Otherwise, you will be considered a liar.
  4. Use viral campaigns. Startup promotion is exactly the case when a viral campaign can be highly effective. For example, you can spread information about a hidden page with the extended capabilities.
  5. Write a short story as if you were a user. People like reading all those “zzz.com – first impressions” and “real users’ comments – zzz.com”. However, it is worth remembering that somewhat story of praise will not do at all. People want to read real impressions of an independent user.
  6. Read the rest of this entry »

July 1st, 2009Welcome Post

Greetings to all! My name is Damir Khalilov.

Welcome to my blog devoted to the whole range of social media marketing related issues, including:

  1. SMM techniques;
  2. Community management;
  3. Challenging trends analysis;
  4. SMM campaigns analysis (carried out by me and my colleagues);
  5. Efficient blogging techniques.

At some point I realized that I have got something to share with social media marketing specialists. And then I decided to start this blog.

The major task of this blog is to create a truly useful resource. I pursuit the objective of publishing the posts allowing readers to immediately use the information they read in their practical work. This blog is neither a manifest nor a call to action, but a step-by-step guide for marketing specialists.

This blog is intended for a broad audience, including SMM, marketing and PR specialists as well as bloggers and managers of different levels. In a word, it may be useful for all the people interested in social media promotion issues.

Despite the fact that the blog is devoted to Web 2.0 technology, I am not going to write about social media news as I find no sense in competing with Mashable and ReadWriteWeb.

I have been working in the sphere of Internet marketing for more than eight years and everything I write about in my blog is based on my personal expertise and my colleagues’ experience in executing web marketing campaigns.

I am CEO of Green PR marketing agency. In far back 2006 we were the first agency in Russia which started providing professional services on social media promotion. Today we cooperate with first-rate global brands, financial structures, movie factories and Internet-based companies.

I also provide private consulting services for brand representatives, deliver training services and hold training workshops.

I will gladly answer all SMM-related questions. You can choose the most appropriate way of contacting me: through comments, e-mail, Skype, Facebook or Twitter. I am always willing to address your questions.