Social Media Helps US Government Interact Better with Officials and Citizens

May 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Government social networking Social media is no longer just a platform for friends and associates to interact with one another. Governments are getting into the act real fast, using social media websites for maintaining communications channels between different internal divisions and citizens. Quite recently, the US Government used social networking to interact with citizens and work towards developing better policies in 5 different situations. These are:

  1. Oil Spill – Gulf of Mexico: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) turned to social media to keep citizens informed about the steps undertaken to combat this national disaster. Lisa Jackson, Administrator of EPA, used her Twitter account @LisaPJackson and page on Facebook to share updated news about the incident along with her observations. Even the agency was quick to set up a website, along with a dedicated Twitter account and a Facebook page to keep citizens informed about their latest efforts.
  2. Storm Reporting: Certain emergency management agencies like FEMA and Department of Emergency Management, Virginia (VDEM) have been using Twitter to interact with citizens for quite some time now. The National Weather Service has also gotten into the act now, requesting users from all over the nation to send reports about possible storms. All the users have to do is send a geo-enabled tweet with the hashtag #wxreport to get the information to the NWS.

  3. Joe Soto

    Joe Soto is the CEO of One Social Media. A leading expert in social media marketing, Joe has over 16 years of experience in all aspects of sales, marketing, online lead generation, and Internet marketing.

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What Do Business Leaders Think of Social Media?

May 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

It’s important to know what CEO’s and other business leaders think of social media. Getting to know their concerns about using social media as a part of their online marketing campaign, and understanding what kind of information they are looking forward to can give us a fairly good idea of the social media climate in the business world. A recently conducted survey by SmartBrief revealed interesting results which I’d like to share with you.

Familiarity: On being questioned on how familiar business leaders were with social media, 75% of them said that they had a fairly good idea of social media. Many among this group also admitted that they were actively involved in getting to learn more about social media.

Usage of social media: 51% respondents said that they are using social media and its various tools actively in their business. Around 30% of business leaders said that they were either testing social media platforms or considering using them. However, 27% are still reluctant to use social media for their businesses.

Reliability: 63% people find social media to be genuine and think that it’s here to stay, while the rest feel that it’s just a marketing fad. More than half are of the opinion that it’s not a waste of their company’s time and resources.

While discussing about the implications of business leaders ignoring the social realm, 40% of them felt that they were lagging behind their competitors who are also using social media. A quarter of the respondents admitted that they were oblivious of what their competitors were up to on social media.

We can conclude that businesses are showing a lot of interest in social media marketing and that they do believe in the potential of social networking for their company.

Article to Reference: SmartBrief stats: How business leaders view social media

Joe Soto

Joe Soto is the CEO of One Social Media. A leading expert in social media marketing, Joe has over 16 years of experience in all aspects of sales, marketing, online lead generation, and Internet marketing.

More Posts - Website - Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Pinterest - Google Plus

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Using Social Media Optimization Effectively

April 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been an integral part of the efforts of companies to improve the performance of their websites on organic search listings. Social Media Optimization (SMO) only adds to the value of SEO and if used wisely in collaboration, SEO and SMO can bring your website to the forefront, increase web traffic, and generate sales.

What SMO actually does is that it optimizes your website by making some changes that will increase its visibility in social media searches. This can include addition of social media buttons, share options, and widgets. This eventually drives your site to feature in custom search engines and include it in podcasts, vlogs, and blogs.

Here are some pointers that indicate how social media optimization can be carried out:

Increase Linkability: Websites need to be constantly updated and they should not remain static or used just as a storefront. The linkability of your website’s content needs to be increased – only then it can be optimized for social media. Creation of white papers and including a blog for your website are some of the ways in which linkability of a site can be enhanced.

Bookmarking and Tagging: You can make tagging of your pages easier by adding quick buttons that will tag the page to del.icio.us, dig, or other social bookmarking sites. You need to make sure that your pages have a set of relevant tags and ‘notes’ for a link. Make use of popular social bookmarking sites to tag various pages of your website.

Acknowledge Inbound Links: A rise in overall ranking of a website and in search engine results owes its success to inbound links. You need to encourage and reward more of the linking blogs by listing them on your website. In this way, you will be providing visibility to those who provide you inbound links.

Dispersal of Content: Content such as video files, audio files, PDF’s and articles or blogs on your site need to be made portable. By submitting them in directories and other relevant sites you will give a boost to the outreach of your content. This will largely help in driving links back to your site.

Build Mashup: This can be done through social media channels, RSS syndication, and other means that allow users to make use of your content. This will help drive traffic to your website and other users can create mashups to your benefit. The growth of YouTube, for example, has been fueled since they started providing a code which allows users to cut and paste it to embed videos.

Article to Reference:

5 Rules of Effective (SMO) Social Media Optimization

Joe Soto

Joe Soto is the CEO of One Social Media. A leading expert in social media marketing, Joe has over 16 years of experience in all aspects of sales, marketing, online lead generation, and Internet marketing.

More Posts - Website - Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Pinterest - Google Plus

Filed Under: Social Media for Small Business, social media marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,