Rikhav Infotech

People express their distaste in Facebook!!

Even a day hasn’t passed when LinkedIn’s success story of reaching 100 million was broadcasted, and news about Facebook has shaken us all. People seem to have grown disgust about Facebook. There is nothing to sit at the edge of your seat as it is not about any specific feature of Facebook. Rather it is about the way of promoting company brands in Facebook. People have expressed their negative feelings about the brand promotion in Facebook. Almost 43% of the users of Facebook, in a survey, have reported their Facebook Wall getting crowded by company promotional messages.

There are links posted by companies also. People need to follow them and place their vote in objective reply of either liking or disliking. This is a special place fro interest among the brands. When a person votes a link as “like it”, does it really mean that the company branding is improving. There is a need that companies need to learn from this recent news.

A mere vote of liking or disliking is not the end of discussion about company branding. There is a need to make the content of a company page attractive enough to let people engage in it. A vote for liking cannot be a metrics for a company’s popularity. When the offline metrics of a company is to make more customers and sales then the online plat form should also be built on this basis. This calls for the need to develop the content of company pages in Facebook. The pages must have a matter that will make the visitors clear about the purpose of the company. Moreover, the consent in it must be consistently changed as net savvy people always look for updates.

 This can be a good way to increase online popularity which will probably get translated into sales.

View More INformation : RIKHAV INFOTECH.

Employee blogging is a great way to handle communications

One of the best ways to go about handling communicating either with clients or with employees is to use employee blogging. Of course, as with all things it be prudent to have a policy in place that properly controls your employees and what they can blog about. And that holds as true for employees using the company blog as it does for employees using their personal blogs. This is important since the blogosphere is growing at the rate of knots and crosses and any issues to do with employee blogging should be nipped in the bud before it grows out of control.

The biggest problem is that of confidentiality, since there is always the worry that an employee could reveal critical business information to competitors. There are also other downsides such as talking poorly of other employees or even bosses or the company itself. All of this will obviously be directly in contrast with business policies, and while your employee has the right to free speech, using it to slander or say something damaging or libelous is just plain wrong if it hurts your business interests. This is why there is the need to put an employee blogging policy in place.

Monitoring blogs that are put up on the company’s intranet or on the company blog is easier than most other types of “patrolling”, but things can get particularly tricky when it comes to personal blogs. Just how do you control something meant for an external audience? While your employees have the right to say whatever they want, you should put a policy in place that shuts down the spread of any information that is confidential. There’s no reason that an employees attempt at blogging should damage the bottom line of the company. Both business and blogging can co-exist at the same time, and it is up to the employer and the employee to make sure that this is exactly what happens.

Employee blogging is hard to control, especially when it is personal blogging, but it should be controlled before it damages the business’ interests.

More Informetion: RIKHAV INFOTECH.

Social media crowd source makes us all lazy as heck

Human beings, by their very nature, are very clever people but they can also be very lazy people. And the internet in its own way is aiding and abetting that, making us lazier than ever and not as smart as we used to be. Our attempts to use social media crowd source mediums have left us a pale shadow the savvy person we used to be, and it is only now that we are waking up and smelling the coffee, asking questions as to how we have been dumbed down.

It’s a combination of Social media crowd source that has made us very lazy. Take Yahoo! Answers for example. I think it’s quite rubbish, but the ability to ask the most inane questions has made us intellectual weaklings and laggards. By asking the crowd for help or for an answer, we are shirking doing the legwork to find out the answers ourselves. Need an opinion on which new restaurant to visit in your vicinity? Why bother walking around the neighborhood or searching for the answers yourself online when you can simply pop the question to the Twitterati (or ‘Tweeps’) and get an answer that way…see what I mean by social media and crowdsourcing making us lazy.

Similarly, when I needed help finding out if Manoj Nigh Shyamalan’s Avatar was a dodo (it was a real stinker, for what it’s worth), I simply asked friends on Facebook about the movie. Who needed to read a review or check out opinions? That’s just too time-consuming. All of the information I’ll ever need is available just a few clicks away, and I don’t even need to click to get there! This is digital laziness at its finest, and good old fashioned is now…well, old fashioned. I remember having to use proper hard-bound encyclopedias first and then Encarta on a CD to do my research for school assignments. I can now picture my kids Googling their homework to get the results easily. Don’t laugh, you know it can happen!

Try not to crowd source next time; Google it and do the research for yourself, it pays not to be lazy.

 It’s a combination of Social media crowd source that has made us very lazy when it comes to seeking out information in this new digital world of ours.

For more Information: Rikhav Infotech Services .

Brand and Facebook Questions

Facebook Questions is the new product to hit the social media. It is already available in many parts of the US. It might be some time before the product hits other countries. It can be transformed into a perfect tool which can be used by marketers and brands for their advantage.

Asking Questions and answering them is what conversations are all about. And the social media is fast learning this secret to its user’s curiosity. Yahoo Answers has been around for some years now. And there are many such Q & A platforms which are spinning their tale of success in the webosphere. Formspring a similar platform with the integration of the social media reached the milestone of a billion questions answered recently.

The Facebook Questions can be used by the Facebook Page of the brand to reply to questions posed by the customers. The brands can also directly post the questions to their pages. The questions will also appear in the updates stream of the Brand page’s fans. A ‘soft sell’ approach should be followed by brands. Explicitly selling the brand’s products through Questions can tend to garner no replies.

By the means of Facebook Questions a brand can demonstrate expertise, post questions which strike a chord with the audience and develop connections with the fans.

Social Media and the employee

Employees through the social network and medium can help enhance and build audience for the company’s brand. This has been a definitive trend which has been observed in the past couple of years. There has been a shift from the prohibitive stance of the internal conduct code to include educational and encouraging practices.

The businesses are telling their staff to be more communicative and open about their brand while using the social medium. Employees do not like to be told to tweet or post about their company more than being told what they shouldn’t do when online. According to many it would be awkward, strange and not very nice.

The employees of today do have a good idea of how to and how not to behave online. Whatever you do online is your digital foot print in cyber space. It can be easily traced back to you. And in the work environment some sort of web monitoring software is always omnipresent. Employees nowadays have the understanding of the boundary between the allowed and the unacceptable.

The best policy however is letting the employees know that tweeting and posting about the company in a positive light is encouraged while allowing them to make their own choices and decisions. That is unless it is part of their job to write, tweet and blog about the company!

‘Twitter Lists’ for CMOs

Twitter lists means you get to follow a list of individuals and listen in to the tweets of everyone on it. The tweets from the list do not appear in your main stream of people you are following, there is a different page for every twitter list. You can create a private as well as a public list and follow what your favorite celebrities are saying or keep a tab on your rivals.

There are some great lists for everyone to be found in the twittersphere. And with corporate bigwigs and the intellectual joining in there are sure to be some interesting lists. One can keep abreast of the latest in advertising and marketing news and trends by the means of the following lists. We give you some Tlists which CMOs should follow.

Advertising-Marketing: everything on marketing and advertising can be found in this list. This is a Super List that pulls tweets from over a thousand and five hundred twitter lists to enlist tweets from 250 of the most listed tweeters. The twitter stream can keep you more than updated about the on goings in the SEO, advertising campaigns, marketing, branding, digital marketing front amongst many others. This stream of tweets is quite comprehensive as it lays out four thousand tweets a day average.

CMO: this list has more than two hundred CMOs and marketing exes on its (tweet) rolls. Follow the list to check on what other CMOs are reading and working on.

Marketing: This list is sure to over satisfy your thirst for anything and everything on marketing as it brings you tweets from more than four hundred experts on networking, social media, promotion and advertising. Peter Urbanski a web designer and developer from Ohio manages this expansive list.

Advertising: about five hundred tweeting contributors from backgrounds of creative agencies, marketers and media planners comprise this amazing twitter list. It is one of the largest lists which is maintained by FutureClaw Magazine which is a publication on art, culture and fashion.

Youtube is perfect for SEO

Companies around the globe still focus on varied search engine optimization tactics to increase the presence and audience of their brands online. The ways to increase the search engine rankings is plenty with every kind of content being indexed by the search engines. The content found by the means of the search engines includes images, videos, business listings, maps, facebook status, likes, fan pages and even twitter tweets.

A good way to give your SEO efforts a shot in the arm is by making a Youtube channel. Each and every video that you upload to the channel will be indexed and tagged. This increases the chances of your brand appearing in natural searches. Creating a YouTube channel is quite simple and after you are done with uploading videos you can share them with friends on Twitter and Facebook.

Replying to a video

One way of increasing the chances of your video being seen is by using your content to reply to another video. This way Youtube understands what your video is about (context) and a good flow of user traffic begins to your video page. Search for the precise keyword for which you want your video to rank. And the video results that come up for the keyword, post your video as a reply.

Interlinking

Building links to your video is also a good tactic. The more the websites that have a link back to the video, the video will appear more relevant in the search listings. Find out which website is linking back to the popular videos in your field of interest.

Search for the URL (address) of the popular videos in Google and see which websites list it. Reach out to these websites and request to add a link to your YouTube video. It does not take long for a video to get a minimum of a hundred views. Once there your video will appear in the Google search listings for the chosen keyword.

Popular and not so popular blogging communities

Xanga started as a networking site in 1999 and was frequented by teenagers. Xanga was quite similar to MySpace. A year on it added the popular growing trend then, blogging in its line of features. And then there was no looking back.

The website although not the most popular boasts of an estimated forty million users. It is ranked at 1,438 as one of the most visited websites. The homepage of this blogging community is simplistic and elegant very unlike its logo (which needs a redesign). It features some of the top blog son the network. And there’s a section on the day’s top blogs. The blogs are an insight into people’s lives. It is like meeting a new person. One of the top blogs was the seed sower and its post on apple orchard after rains was simply stunning. This blogging platform allows its user to send “eProps” to others to show their like for a specific post.

 

Blogger is one of the popular platforms used today. It came into being in 1999 and was created by Pyra Labs in San Francisco. According to the web site it was started on a whim. The site got a shot in the arm after being picked up in 2003 by Google. It also was integrated with Hello and Picasa.

Dead Journal has the similar source code as that of Live Journal. However its dark theme and sentiment is not for the faint hearted. In the year 2001 this community came into being thanks to its creator Frank Precissi. It soon became a site for emo kids and Goths to pour out their angsty and dark thoughts. According to the site they just love pissed off individuals and play hosts to journals who nobody else wants. The site has to its credit 500,000 sign ups.

Twittips: Basic Twittering Tips

So everyone’s on twitter and you feel left out. No more, here’s some advice after you have created an account on this social media site. Everything can seem confusing at the beginning. Let’s see how one can reply to another person on twitter. 

Replying to a friend 

To reply to a person on twitter use the ‘@’ sign before the username of the person. This way one can refer to a particular person and also send out a message to an individual. So for example the following tweet “@john checkout @Jill” tells John to see Jill. The @replies here at twitter is also known as ‘mentions’. 

On the home page once you sign in to twitter click on the link @yourusername to see all the tweets which have been sent to you. The above displayed tweet would be seen as a mention for both John and Jill. 

What is a retweet? 

Retweet is sharing someone else’s message with your group of followers. As a matter of fact it will be violation of the service terms of twitter if you use someone else’s words. Thus using the right keywords is necessary. The syntax followed in twitter is to use the letters RT at the beginning of a retweet followed by the username of the person whose message you’re retweeting. 

For example “RT @George here’s my play list…” is retweeting the tweet by George about his play list. These are the ways in which you can converse in the twittersphere and contribute to the buzz!

Web 2.0: the philosophy of change

The concept of Web 2.0 is as big as the web itself. There can be many different solutions and answers to the question “what is Web 2.0?” There is no clear definition of this concept. What is very clear though is that Web 2.0 is a major change in the way in which we will be using the internet. 

By the changes that we can already see the internet seems to be evolving into a more responsive, interactive, social and collaborative experience. It can also be seen as a change in the philosophy and working of web developers and the web company. Web 2.0 also depicts a change in the philosophy and thinking of the society at large. 

While in the early days of the internet we used it as a tool but today we are an important part of it. Web 2.0 is a game changer for sure as it involves us like never before. It is like putting us straight into the web. It stands for an easier internet and for connecting people with one another. 

We at Rikhav Infotech are moving with the times and are thinking ahead of our times. Web 2.0 revolves around technologies such as AJAX which make for a more interactive experience. Our expertise in such technologies makes us the market leader that we are today. We all understand the power of the social media as all our blogs are centered and networked around popular social networking mediums. Our growing network of facebook fans and twitteritas will tell you the same. Come experience the power of Web 2.0 with us!