Tag : business

Facebook Friending Made Simple: Just Shake Your iPhone

Posted by Christian Ramsey at 9:09 am

Ever wanted to Facebook friend someone you just met right on the spot? Until today, that wasn’t easy. But now, if you have an iPhone, all it takes is a single bump, courtesy of the Bump iPhone app.

For those of you unfamiliar with the app, Bump allows you to share contact information with friends simply by bumping your phone once with another friend’s phone (note: they much touch to work, you can’t just shake it in the air). The app then connects your iPhones and transfer contact information like phone numbers and addresses (for more, read our original review).

Now a new update to the app has brought it a couple of new features, but the one people will be talking about though is the Facebook integration. If you link your Facebook account to Bump and swap contact information with another person who has done the same, you can choose right then and there to initiate a friend request. Once done, a prompt will appear where the other party can accept or deny the friend request.

Jake Mintz, Co-Founder of Bump Technologies, told me that he and his team worked closely with Facebook to make this happen. He’s “pretty sure” that Bump’s the first app that can initiate and accept friend requests; we can’t think of any mobile apps off the top of our heads that do, so we think it’s likely Bump is the first.

Along with the Facebook integration, Bump now boasts custom profiles, which gives users more control over the contact information they share when “bumping” or create frequently-used share settings such as “work,” “personal,” or “fake” (just in case you can’t shake off that persistent and annoying guy/girl at the bar).

Jake says that this is the first of many social media integrations that will come to Bump. So yes, you can expect the ability to follow the people you meet via Twitter just by bumping iPhones in the near future.

Google Buzz: 5 Opportunities for Small Businesses

Posted by Christian Ramsey at 9:06 am

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Just when you thought you had social media figured out,Google has shaken things up with a new entrant into the market: Google Buzz. It’s integrated into Gmail, which means right out of the gate it potentially has an audience of tens of millions of people. As such, it could eventually prove as important to your business as the other services we’ve seen prosper in the past few years.

If you’ve spent much time on social media sites, many of the features will look familiar, as Buzz combines elements of Twitter, Facebook, and the quickly rising Foursquare. But there are some subtleties that make Buzz unique, and in turn create opportunities that you should familiarize yourself with –- if not start to take advantage of –- as soon as possible.

1. Gathering Customer Feedback

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Like Twitter, Buzz lets you post a message to a group of “followers” that subscribe to your updates. However, there are a few differences, namely that messages can be longer than 140 characters (and include supporting images and links) and that replies are all grouped under the original message. This makes conversations easier to track and follow up on. There are also built-in features to reply in a one-on-one way, via either e-mail or Google Talk.

2. Engaging With Others

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If you use Gmail, there’s a good chance you already have a built-in network on Google Buzz. The service helps you get started by letting you connect with those you e-mail or chat with frequently. Once you’re following some people, clicking the “Buzz” link from Gmail’s main navigation will let you see their most recent updates. You can comment on them, “like” them, or follow up personally with an e-mail or chat message.

3. Collaboration

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Buzz can be used both for broadcasting a message to all of your followers and to select groups of them. If you’ve already set up Groups in Gmail, they’re already available in Buzz. If not, you can create new ones on-the-fly. Posting a private message on Buzz works exactly the same as posting a public one – you just select the Group you want to be able to see it, and then only those people will be able to view and comment on it. It’s instant, private collaboration.

4. Marketing

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It’s too soon to tell whether Buzz will have the type of impact for brick-and-mortar businesses that services like Yelp and increasingly Foursquare have had, but it has a very similar feature set. Users can “check in” at business locations, in turn notifying their followers of their whereabouts. Thus, encouraging your customers to check in on Buzz (and other location-based services) can be a way to drive free word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

5. Sharing Content

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Just like Twitter and Facebook, Buzz has the potential to be a powerful medium for sharing content. You can use it to share blog posts, special deals, or interesting links related to your niche. Just like other social media services, you shouldn’t overdo it though – you want to mix promotional messages with a balance of other useful information and conversation for your followers.

So is it time to jump head first into Buzz? At this point, the right answer is probably “not so fast.” While Buzz clearly has some promising use cases, it’s also not yet ideally designed for businesses. There are no business accounts, no multi-user support, and a host of privacy issues that nearly derailed the service in its first couple weeks (though Google has been quick to address them).

Buzz will likely become more viable for businesses when a Google Apps version is offered, as well as a standalone service that can be accessed by anyone outside of Gmail – both of which are reportedly in the works. Nonetheless, familiarizing yourself with Buzz’s features and opportunities now could be immensely valuable in the future, while at the present, it can provide some useful additional functionality for Gmail users and their contacts.

We are thinking about iPads for Presentations at MTC.

Posted by Christian Ramsey at 3:57 pm

Reel to Real: Why YouTube Is Now Essential for Your Business

Posted by Christian Ramsey at 9:32 am

YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley shared some staggering figures last month at the MIPCOM conference in France.

Hundreds of millions of people come to YouTube every month to search, discover and share this content with their friends.
Around 10 billion videos are viewed monthly online in the U.S. alone.
On YouTube 13 hours of content are uploaded every minute.
In France over 120 million hours of video content is watched per month.
The full transcripts are available on TechCrunch. Okay, so there’s a reason Google purchased YouTube for $1.76 billion. In Alexa’s world ranking, YouTube is number three behind Google and Yahoo. The point here is that video is effective, people want more, and the growing expectation for online delivery includes multimedia.

You can increase sales, traffic, loyalty, retention, satisfaction, creativity, innovation, brand awareness—and you can have fun doing it. This is all possible with thoughtfully produced online videos. They are effective across the board for all aspects of your business: for marketing and sales to showcase products or introducing the team, for training and tutorials, for human resources, community development, online tours, and more.

We launched my intro to this blog with a video post and we’ll be adding many video tutorials outlining tips and tricks to use our software. Why did we bother with video? Let’s take a look some basic reasons why video works so well and how you can implement video into your business development and marketing mix.

Your customers want to watch videos

All the figures on YouTube’s popularity notwithstanding, the Pew Internet Survey team shared some interesting figures earlier this year on the increased usage of video sharing sites.
48% of internet users have been to video-sharing sites such as YouTube and the daily traffic to such sites on a typical day has doubled in the past year
Use of video sharing sites among women has increased by 120% since 2006
76% of Internet users ages 18-29 watch or download videos online
15% of respondents said they had used a video-sharing site “yesterday”– the day before they were contacted for our survey.
What does this mean for us? In short: your customers are hungry for videos. In a world that’s moving at increasing business speeds, videos can help make things easy to view and more memorable than trying to slog through printed pages.

Some of the reasons people love video is obvious. Here are a few:
By and large, most of us live in a video culture, surrounded by TV and movies. Video keeps viewers interested and highly engaged. Videos with interesting or funny spokespeople or ones with higher production value are captivating to watch.
For tutorials and training, people usually learn faster watching video clips. You can see the motions, in action, which increases awareness and the ability to stay engaged.
The viewer can be in control, to stop, pause, start and to watch the video anytime from home or any other computer, 24/7.
With the ease of with sites like YouTube, you don’t have to worry about maintaining huge video files on your server.
And of course, the ease to share with others.

You have an opportunity to be viral

People are sharing videos. And they are doing it en masse. There are hundreds of superb examples. The recent U.S. presidential candidates in their bid for the top seat come to mind. Traditionally portrayed as the stodgiest of marketing campaigns—looked to viral online videos to increase voter turnout. According to one New York Times article: “YouTube videos mentioning either Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain have been viewed 2.3 billion times.”

There are so many examples of viral videos that just exploded off the charts. According to some reports, SNL’s Tina Fey’s impression of VP candidate Sarah Palin were viewed more than 50 million times on YouTube. This is especially impressive, to consider that this clip was viewed more online than on TV, and the online version was probably more influential.

Maybe you won’t hit this jackpot. But according to that same PEW survey, “57% of online video viewers share video links with others.” Here are their results for viewers’ actions that can affect the viral status of a video.

There are companies online spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a viral aspect of their brand that will be noticed by millions of potential customers. OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself and CareerBuilder’s Monk-e-Mail are examples of the more successful bids using Flash and other technologies. Now you can make the same bid for viral attention—with some simple videos. Even if you never hit the highly acclaimed and watched YouTube homepage favorites, you can still reach hundreds or even thousands of additional viewers.

Videos are cost effective to produce

Playing around with audio-visual toys and producing high-end videos is not an inexpensive proposition for a person starting out. But for a business it’s really a nominal expense for the value it provides over time. You certainly don’t need a huge broadcast production ad budget to get started. A few grand $U.S. on equipment and knowledge would put you into an elite league on YouTube.

The basics: camera, sound, lighting, someone who knows how to use them, and some software for post-production work. I’m making online videos with a combination of a small handheld video camera, the built in iSight on my Mac, and iMovie. I wing it with lighting and find quiet, less echoey spots for recording. To record screen-shot tutorial videos, to see where my cursor is going, you might consider Camtasia Studio for PCs ($300) or ScreenFlow for a Mac ($100). These are essential if your selling software or other technical products that require a manual and some small training. The videos are useful for the sales team, customer service, and to increase traffic to your site for your products.

Obviously we’re not doing anything that’s going to show up on the Academy Awards. Keep it simple and direct and go for the community development aspects—that is, just be honest and helpful and barring that, find a personality to help out.

There are plenty of considerations, and as with most things, you can fall into the Rabbit Hole of niche expertise, to explore a single microphone that’s many thousands of dollars. So too, YouTube experts have emerged with tips and tricks for uploading videos to improve quality or to determine which screen grab from the clip will become the lead picture.

My goal here is to just recommend the power and effectiveness of video and I hope you take an interest, iron out the learning curve, and get started. Surely not all topics lend themselves to easy videos (like this post about using video). You can break things down into tasks for preproduction (script, location, gear) production (lighting, sound, angles) and post-production (adding music, editing scenes, including titles).

Video in Email

Advertisers and teachers have known for centuries that some people learn best with words, others with pictures. Nowadays of course we can include radio, TV, the Web, and a bevy of technologies and devices to the mix. Leading the charge as we march into the 21st century: video. The technology for emailing video is available and it’s pretty cool, but attaching or embedding videos into your emails doesn’t really work:
• Red flag servers and spam filters
• Email clients don’t play correctly

Instead use multiple links in your email to a video on your landing page. In your HTML email, use a picture snapshot that looks like a video clip, like a screen shot from YouTube. This can improve click-through and conversion rates. And through the video, you’ll appear innovative, accessible, trustworthy, and credible.

Keep the content simple, fun, informative, and about 2 minutes long. Try an interview, a video tour, or a behind-the-scenes look at your new product.

Final Thoughts

Here’s a final thought from Chad Hurley: “You gain unprecedented reach and scope to touch new audiences around the world, anywhere and anytime. If you embrace this opportunity, you will evolve your business model and find new channels and opportunities to deepen engagement, discover new viewers and find new, substantial revenue opportunities.”

My New Business Cards

Posted by Christian Ramsey at 9:22 am