Archive for web 2.0

The 12 Most Useful Social Bookmarking & Autoposting Tools for Your Blog

Flickr preview of sharethisAs bloggers, we’re always trying to encourage our readers to post our blogs to one of the many social bookmarking services… be it digg, delicious, mixx, reddit, stumbleupon or one of the myriad others. There are many different wordpress plugins for different social sites. The problem is that your blog ends up cluttered with all of those buttons, and it really gets annoying.

The solution has been the plugins that allow you to post to any or many of the social networks. Here’s an overview of all of the ones that I’ve found (with some of my lovely comments to boot). One of the most popular players - sharethis, has received $15 million dollars in funding!

Online Video for Small Businesses - Can I afford it?

Rovion Talking Spokesperson It all started with Youtube and Viral marketing. It spread to personal multimedia on websites. It continued with Rovion… For $3,000 you could have a professional nudge on your site bugging all your repeat visitors (but it looks cool). Microsoft’s bought it, and servicemagic has as well. The problem is that it’s really expensive. But, we’re nice people, and we want small business owners to benefit as well.

Want to put video on your site? Here’s a couple of resources:

USA Today’s Steve Strauss Encourages Small Business Owners to have Blogs

John Janstch alerted me to an article in the USA Today online that adresses whether business owners should have blogs.

Steve Strauss gives 5 reasons a small business owner should have a blog:

  1. You help build a sense of community - in other words, you build a relationship with the customer, so they see you as a real person… not just a webpage
  2.  They allow you to plug products
  3. They help with SEO - I use the blog here solely for SEO (as well as to get new clients - I’ll get to the plug at the end :wink: )

Facebook (Stupidly) Takes the Heat from Moveon, while Yahoo and Ebay laugh to the bank!

So we all know about the Facebook Debacle with Beacon - and the horrible mistakes stupid 24 year olds make (We really do love you Mark Zuckerburg) it’s just that young kids shouldn’t be running $15 billion dollar businesses.

Moveon.org and the EFF have been decrying the privacy issues. As I’ve stated in a previous post, I think that behavioral targeting is inevitable and coming soon. In fact, I wasn’t happy that Mike Morgan from Tacoda was being apologetic about it.

Should an Ecommerce Website Have a Blog?

(Disclaimer: I am extremely biased towards blogs. I have already come to the conclusion that blogs are always beneficial. Consider yourself warned!)

Here are the issues:

  1. What are the pro’s and con’s of having a blog on your ecommerce site (The Theory)
  2. What are the other experts in the field saying about having blogs on your ecommerce site
  3. What are the big guys doing?

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What are the Pro’s and Con’s of having a Blog on your Ecommerce site?