On September 10, 2009 Twitter changed its terms of service and is now allowing for advertisements on its platform. Twitter has not said what types of available ad units it might offer, but of course this leaves the door wide open for a range of possibilities. Analysts are saying that this development will help twitter monetize its website. But what is more interesting is that analysts generally agree that Twitter can offer advertisers more valuable information on the websites population than the actual advertisements themselves.

Twitter currently offers companies and individuals the ability to just discuss brands, and the marketplace in general, allowing businesses to “listen in” to the running commentary. Text analysis, coupled with CRM will be a very powerful tool set in the future as customized marketing becomes much more prevalent in cyberspace.

While many internet users go online daily in order to make money, many internet users go online just to have fun. Among such people are many children, who go online for many reasons, including the reason to experience the internet phenomenon and also to have fun. Because of the continued increase of young users on sites like Facebook and MySpace, many people are starting to question the idea of such sites monitoring children’s activities in order to protect those children.

Today we ask what may be one of the most personal questions of your or other people’s life: How should the online activities of your children by monitored by social media sites?

Benefits of Social Media monitoring children’s online activities

There are many reasons why parents and other people may want social media sites like Facebook and Flick to monitor the online activities of children. Social media sites can ensure that children are not targeted in any illegal online scams. Social media sites can also try to ensure that children are not lured into danger by kidnappers, pedophiles and other people who wish to harm the children in question. Many times, social media sites can intervene before there are online or offline fights due to online disputes. Also, majority of the law enforcement agencies strongly support the idea that social media sites should observe everyone in order to ensure that no one gets hurt because of the people they meet online.

In such cases, stronger privacy and monitoring rules enforced by Social Media sites can help. Many people are of the view that only through observing everything that a child does online can it be made sure that the online surfing experience of a child remains safe. If a child is not monitored, how can parents know who their child is talking to online? How can people ensure that the children of our society are safe from hurtful people and topics without actually monitoring and finding out about the existence of those children and the people and topics they run into?

Drawbacks of Social Media monitoring children’s online activities

The issue of monitoring anything itself can result in a lot of privacy concerns, and the topic of monitoring children in order to protect them is no exception. For many people, monitoring children’s activities is a form of spying itself, and a very objectionable and unethical activity. Many people believe that regardless of the age of a child, privacy should be entitled to everyone and available to everyone. That is why for the opponents of the trend of monitoring people, the monitoring of users including younger children by social media websites counts as a form of spying in on potential customers in order to come up with better products.

Could companies use the idea of monitoring children’s activities online as a way to further their own marketing research and agenda in order to sell products to such children later on? How can children’s online activities be safe and protected when they are fully available and monitored, and not hidden, from the very websites that they visit?

Poll: How should social media sites monitor children’s activities?

Please let us know what you think of this topic in the comments below. Thanks.

All of us here at SM Notes take these “polls of convenience”  with some seriousness becasue – well you are telling us what is happening out there.  Our very first poll asked the age old question –> “Is Facebook Chat the best instant messaging service?” And wow – the results were very interesting.

First, 45% of the total said “Yes” that Facebook was the best IM chat client… and while this number is significant, the other number is equally as telling.  With 55% saying that something other than Facebook was better – it would seem to the casual reader that Facebook has to do some soul searching if they want to try and own the IM chat arena.  Comments ranged from “MySpace offers more functionality [ouch - that hurts just a little]” to “I don’t use any of these IM clients – that is so yesterday!” suggest that maybe IM chat is in need for a technologicial shot in the arm if it is to stay active as a communication vehicle.

More polls and analysis coming.  Vote – comment – counter-comment… that’s what SM Notes is looking from each of you.

Picture courtesy of gocomics.com (9-24-09)

Do you log onto Facebook everyday? Is Twitter a part of your hourly life? If you are surprised to hear from us that many people check their Facebook and Twitter status and comments every hour of the day, you may be in a medium where the choice of focusing on the offline business that you may have and that of integrating the online world into your offline business may be the most important decision in your business. Would you change your offline business plan to accommodate online social networking?

Whatever your offline business, online social networking may help you.

Whether you sell shoes offline or simply focus on your offline friends more than your online accounts, chances are that at least some of your friends, contacts and co-workers are already online, communicating more online than offline. This may mean that your offline contact with those people is being slowed down, or even reduced, because of the online habits of those people. Can you afford to have your communication with your contacts reduced? Are you comfortable with your friends, co-workers and clients communicating more with online people compared to communicating with you?

If you are not comfortable with your friends and contacts communicating with you less in the offline world in order to communicate with others more in the online world, then you need to change your actual plan, the business plan, to allow for more online social networking in order to not only allow a constant and effective communication level with your contacts, but to also increase and improve such communication levels.

What is your view on this? Would you change your business plan to integrate social networking into it? Please let us know in the comments below, thanks!

For everybody that has a twitter account — obtaining followers in seeking out the people or organizations that you want to follow was a difficult chore up until this year. Twittgeek has come onto the scene and allowed twitter users to help you automatically follow fellow geeks based on keywords that you insert into their database. Twittgeek uses twitter is login information and gives you access each day to seek out as many as 200 followers based on a particular tag or keyword.

I put in the keyword “scholarship” and within five minutes I had a list of 200 people that had matched my keyword and I was now following. It is a simple site, and free for what I described above. They do have a Pro account which lists the “no limits” and give you additional professional functionality. You can upgrade to the Pro account for a single month at seven dollars, three months at $18, six months at $30 and a full year of professional services at $48. Everything is transacted through PayPal.

SMnotes gives Twittgeek 4.5 out of 5 stars

The new age of Social Media and Social Networking is taking millions of businesses in the world by storm. From bakeries, shoe shops and cigarette stalls to movie studios, pizza delivery and making a dentist appointment, the world of social media is allowing everyone to actually interact directly with the supplier of some goods or service. At the same time, the world of social networking allows everyone, including suppliers and buyers, to actually share information among one another. One of the biggest problems that Social Media and Social Networking aim to solve is typical power struggle over information and information. If you incorporate social media of any kind into your actual business activities, you are creating road maps to allow employees and customers to actually feel the need to interact with one another and to share information.

You can integrate Social Media into your business by integrating social media and social networking tools in all of your public communication channels. Such integrated tools can directly allow all users within a company, and any customers interacting with a company, to directly use different options and channels to actually share the information they think may be relevant to others.

Here are four simple ways to start planning an integration of social media and social networking into your existing business.

4 simple ways to integrate social media into your business

1. Integrate social networking into your internal communication. Allowing the staff to communicate freely over a social networking site like Facebook helps. Allow employees to break news through social networking mediums like blogs and Twitter.
2. Integrate social sharing tools into your internal communication. Allowing all the staff to easily post and share via Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and other places any relevant information will greatly enhance the actual level of communication.
3. Promote social networking and sharing of knowledge with non-staff members. Allowing each staff to actual recommend non-staff members to add them via Facebook and other places helps integrate the social media elements into your business.
4. Invite input. The best way to allow social media and social networking to influence your business in a positive manner is to actually invite the social media and social networking users to offer critique on your social media and social sharing plans.

How do you integrate social media into your business?

In your view, what are some of the best ways to integrate social media into a business? What are some of the ways that can allow a business to improve itself using the power of social networking? Please let us know by leaving a comment below.

Thanks!

Facebook Chat allows you to send instant messages to any of your Facebook friends who are online. Every Facebook user has the chat feature enabled by default, resulting in immediate access to all of your Facebook contacts.

Today, SM Notes asks you the elemental question: Do you think Facebook Chat will become the best instant messenger online?

Because of the simplicity and instant available of Facebook Chat, you may find Facebook Chat to be one of the fastest chat services available today. It is fast, and there is no need to log in and out of the chat. Simply going to the Facebook website can start the chat, and simply leaving the Facebook website results in the chat service logging you out. This way, you can do anything on Facebook, go from page to page, and your Facebook chat window maintains a list of all your chats and contacts on each page.

Following are some random benefits and drawbacks of Facebook Chat that affect you directly.

Benefits of Facebook Chat:

1. All within your browser
2. Nothing extra to install
3. All online contacts available to chat with
4. Video chat coming soon
5. Voice chat coming soon
6. Portability. Because of the Facebook API, many external applications, like Pidgin, can integrate Facebook chat, allowing you to skip the browser altogether.
7. Almost no spam from non-contacts. Because only your existing Facebook friends can chat with you, anyone who is not your Facebook contact will not be able to chat with you unless you add them as a friend first.

Drawbacks of Facebook Chat:

1. No ability to transfer files to contacts
2. No direct archival of messages
3. Minimal privacy options.
4. Browser dependent. Depending on the browser means that you cannot chat on devices like the phone easily.
5. Only way to add contacts is to add Facebook users. Non-facebook users cannot be chatted with yet.

Do you think Facebook Chat is going to be the best instant messenger?

Whether or not Facebook Chat starts affecting the specific operating system platformed instant messengers, there is one thing that will remain true for a while: Facebook Chat will allow Facebook users to interact more with each other.

Have you used Facebook Chat? Do you think it has potential?

Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Social media has transformed many aspects of business communications using such tools as podcasting, video casting, online communities, and blogging. Using online distribution services and social media communities like Facebook, BeBo, Hi5, etc., the standard one-page press release of yesterday has become a more powerful tool than ever. Public relations professionals are discovering that simply faxing or emailing a one-page press release to several dozen media outlets is no longer an engaging method of propagating the client’s message.

There are three main reasons why a traditional press release has very little chance of success in the social media arena:

• The more traditional press release usually has a singular focus which is in turn completely focused on the company issuing the release.
• The more traditional press release usually contains marketing language that inherently raises questionable levels of trust in the eyes of the social media audience.
• The more traditional press release also does not, usually, have a specific audience in mind and is written in a very broad and bland way.  The word “boring” comes to mind!

It is important to realize that change happens slower than many of us would like. The traditional press release will remain a staple for two to three more years. But the ever-growing social — web centric business audience that has taken up residence in places like Facebook and Twitter – do not pretend to like overt and aggressive sales and marketing dribble.

It is also important to note that there is a move to put the public back in public relations. Using such social media tools as Twitter, organizations and individuals are learning how to reach a new generation of influencers using these platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The press release to today can and should engage and spark a “conversation” between the company issuing the release and the targeted audience. In addition, press releases can supplement online blogging activities as well as multimedia communications without sacrificing any traditional media tactics. By using a “hub and spoke model”, public relations professionals are using blogs and community websites as a focal point for their product, their service, or a specific event. Coupled with a blog, public relation professionals are tweeting their message from this blog or website focal point, and engaging their targeted public in a much more focused and effective manner. Finally it is important to realize that the foundation of a press release is the actual writing behind the product or service or event. And so we seen a change in writing styles emerging because of social media. Today, public relation professionals must create a press release title or headline for multiple types of readers and not simply a singular focused general headline. There are three basic kinds of readers looking at content today:

Normal-Regular Readers — These types of readers do not need any exciting or strange headlines to read your material. They want to be engaged and treated with a level of respect that is reflected in your writing. They want to make sure that your headline matches the content of your article and that it is relevant to them.

Search Engines-Oriented Readers – When writing a headline for a search engine your goal is to attain a top ranking based on a particular query. Search engine-oriented headlines must not exceed 80 characters. You must also inserts two or three of your articles keywords into the headline since the search engine is not only looking at the headline but looking at your websites keywords or meta-tags. And make sure that your article, assuming that it is longer than a half of a page, has sub headings and follow the rules of writing indicated above.

Social Media/Community-oriented Readers — When writing a headline for social media traffic you must consider that the readers in this category are looking for some sort of incentive to click onto your site and look at your products or service or event. Readers need to be given a reason to read posts your material, if it is engaging and provocative it will be reposted.

In today’s fast-paced world press releases must take on a new persona and transform themselves so that they can become a normal and regular communications vehicle for social media and the web collectively.

Everyone here at Social Media Notes is excited about our new web site and the direction that we are moving in – social media information that you can use and play with all day and night long!  Our goal all along… has been to build a site that collects and properly organizes all of the social media-related material out there.  How many times have you tried to look-up something… only to find that Google or Yahoo brings back to you 1,245,987 [potential] matches for your search – WRONG!

Come back to Social Media Notes often and become a part of this growing and informative hub of activity.  If it deals with social media… we will be writing, playing, manipulating, and having fun with it!