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The Squared Root
3 Posts tagged with the facebook tag
Some of the hottest topics of the business world these days are centered on social media. One of the main issues is around Facebook as a business networking tool. To really begin this discussion, let’s look at business in general. One of the key elements in growing your business is increasing sales. Coming from a sales background, I have attended many different sales classes and seminars and they have all said the same thing. Building strong relationships closes sales and increases profitability. We were taught to look around a prospect’s office and find a nick-knack, a photograph, a trophy; anything that would give us a glimpse into their personal life. Maybe you see a picture of a sailboat on their wall, so you ask them how long they have been a sailor and to what destinations have they sailed. Immediately a conversation has begun. Finding these little connections helps sales people build a small trust between them and the prospect. Applications like Facebook, can help you accomplish this before you even walk in your potential client’s door. You can see that they have two kids and that they love the Red Sox. You have a glimpse into their personal life before you even meet them. Basically, if you are in business, you have been “social networking” your entire career. You just haven’t been able to network on this large of a scale. According to Facebook, there are more than 70 million users with more than half of them college graduates. In fact, the 25 years and older demographic is the largest growing group on Facebook today. That’s a whole lot of business prospects to get to know.
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Social commerce, the use of social media in business, is putting companies on an even playing field; and the companies that aren't getting on board are going to find themselves falling behind the competition. Think about it - social media is everywhere! Wiki-ing, blogging, podcasting, twittering, FaceBooking, and MySpacing - this is how the world is communicating now. And if your company isn't playing along, your message is less likely to reach your target audience. For this reason, major corporations, like Austin-based Dell, Intel and AMD are integrating social networking and other social media into their marketing plans. 
To help companies get to where they need to be, interactive professionals in Austin that understand the power of social media in today's world have converged to create Interactive Austin 2008. This forum which takes place on June 19th, is an event dedicated to educating companies on the advantages of Social Commerce, the importance of it in the rapidly changing corporate environment, and how to harness its power for profitability. The event will feature two prominent keynote speakers. Brian Magierski, Co-Founder and Chief Development Officer of nGenera Corporation, will speak on "Social Commerce and It's Impact on Business." While the Vice President of Corporate Marketing & Communications for AMD, Pete Hayes, will speak on "Get into the Click Stream: An Alternative to Driving Traffic to Your Site." Aside from the keynote speakers, this will be a day full of educational and informative panel discussions and case study presentations from Austin's social media experts. If you have a company, it would be a wise decision to attend Interactive Austin 2008. For more information about it, check it out online at http://www.interactiveaustin2008.com. We will see you there!
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Who owns the information you create on the social sites you are a part of? That is the question being asked by many right now in the social media space, and the answer for the most part is a resounding "It belongs to us!". This is apparent by looking at the growth of such groups as Open Social and DataPortability. And now, there are some practical solutions starting to appear that address at least a part of the problem. Namely, how do we gather our content and take it somewhere else? This is what is currently being called lifestreaming, and it is something you should be aware of. Lifestreaming is about content aggregation. YOUR content. No matter where you create it. And then sharing that content where you want to share it. Sounds pretty nice doesn't it? Well, there are quite a few services out there now providing the tools to accomplish this. Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, socialthing!, and now Facebook are a few of the top names in the space. As John McCrea of Plaxo says, this is a natural evolution of the Social Web with the user at the center. The recent announcement that Facebook has opened up the mini-feed to allow importing of other services is potentially huge. While others in the space still need to get users to sign up for a new service, Facebook has already got the users. This could mean trouble for the others like FriendFeed, but so far Facebook doesn't have a very comprehensive list of services they'll import. FriendFeed actually has a Facebook application that can accomplish much the same thing, but is more complicated and involves signing up for an account. In my book, FriendFeed is still a step ahead by being much more open and now having an API that allows developers to extend the service (there is already Alert Thingy, an AIR based desktop app for following your FriendFeed stream). Facebook currently allows access to some content such as status updates, but still doesn't allow easy access to feeds like the users News feed. This should be an interesting space to follow in the emerging data portability solutions of the social web. For now, you can follow FG SQUARED's involvement by watching our FriendFeed at http://www.friendfeed.com/fgsquared.
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