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Guest post: Who is leading our social media craze? The CEOs behind the top social media tools
The following is a guest post by Jaime. Her bio is at the end of the article.
With the rise of social networking, several iconic social media tools have achieved epic success. Considering the brilliant minds behind these platforms, there are some similarities among these Chief Executive Officers. From some generation trends to the awards received as they developed their million-dollar platforms, these men share many common successes.
Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook
The controversial genius behind arguably the world’s largest social network, Mark Zuckerberg broke onto the tech scene with Facebook when he was only 19 years old. Mark started programming software when he was in middle school after learning BASIC programming language from his father.
Continuing into high school, he built a software package called Synapse Media Player. Credited as an early Pandora, Synapse used artificial intelligence to “learn” the listening habits of users. Mark posted Synapse to Slashdot, where it was ranked 3 out of 5 by PC Magazine.
After leaving Harvard University in his sophomore year to devote his time to Facebook, Mark became the youngest billionaire in history in 2011 when his personal net worth was estimated at $17.5 billion.
Pete Cashmore – Mashable
Much like Facebook’s founder, Pete Cashmore launched Mashable in 2005 at the young age of 19. Pete’s goal with Mashable was to create a platform that made technology news accessible and understandable for the mainstream reader. By the end of the first six years, Mashable has drawn over 12.5 million unique visitors monthly.
In 2011, he received an honor from the World Economic Forum when they named him as one of their Young Global Leaders for the year. This honor is reserved for young adults under 40 who have a strong commitment and dedication to helping shape society thorough a strong leadership conviction.
David Karp – Tumblr
Continuing the trend of young social media entrepreneurs, David Karp launched Tumblr in 2007 when he was 20 years old. David’s interest in technology and graphics started young, and he interned with Fred Siebert, the animation producer, when he was 14 years old. He worked for UrbanBaby as a software consultant before leaving in 2006 to pursue the development of Tumblr.
In 2010, David received the honor of being named one of the top 35 innovators in the world under age 35 by the MIT Technology Review TR35.
Garret Camp – StumbleUpon
Garret Camp was one of the founding four behind the StumbleUpon platform. Garret graduated from the University of Calgary with a Masters in software engineering. In 2007, he received the MIT Technology Review TR35 award as one of the top 35 innovators worldwide under the age of 35.
Launched in 2001, eBay purchased StumbleUpon in 2007, holding control of the company until Garret and several investors bought it back, taking control of their company once again in early 2009. As of 2011, StumbleUpon had recorded over 20 million registered users.
Dick Costolo – Twitter
Dick Costolo took the reigns as CEO of Twitter in October 2010 when then-CEO Evan Williams went on paternity leave. Originally intended to be a temporary fill while Evan was away, Dick became the permanent CEO shortly thereafter.
Dick graduated from University of Michigan, gaining a bachelor’s degree in computer science. Despite his technology studies, the theater bug bit him when he was rounding out the needed credits for his degree, leading him to pursue improvisational comedy routines in Chicago after graduation despite offers of employment from the technology industry.
One of the co-founders of FeedBurner in 2004, Dick worked for Google after the internet search icon purchased the company in 2007. In 2009, he left Google to fill the role of Chief Operating Officer at Twitter. Dick is also credited as a member of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, as appointed by President Obama.
Jeff Weiner – LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the social network for business connections. Jeff Weiner is the current CEO of the company he joined in December of 2008. Weiner has a strong background in executive-level positions, with a resume that includes positions as a Vice President with Warner Bros., Executive Vice President at Yahoo! for over seven years, and several Board of Directors seats.
No stranger to the board rooms, Jeff brought LinkedIn to its IPO in May, 2011. He has been quoted as saying that while Facebook is a great platform for your friends, you simply don’t want your prospective employers seeing the images of that keg party. LinkedIn is different, and is a business-centric platform.
Conclusion
One of the key things illustrated here as we explore each CEO is that with a diverse background found across the board, it is possible for virtually anyone to be where they are. Each of these men had a vision of what they wanted to create and brought it to life, though in different ways. Ultimately, each has served to shape our world as we know it today, an environment of instant information and 140-character communications.
Jaime is an avid hiker and skier who loves to write in her spare time for CenturyLinkQuote.com– home of Century Link.
Guest post: The social butterfly: Branding
The following is a guest post by SeanTR. His bio is at the end of the article.
Establishing your brand and sharing it is rapidly becoming a mantra for success in today’s connected world. Building your brand is telling the story of you in a way that makes you easily recognizable and sets you apart from the crowd. Provide useful and interesting content on your website, blog and in the forums you visit. What this can do is establish your site’s authority in your field of expertise and gain the following of others with interest in the same industry.
Check out our three social media tools to use to effectively build your brand online.
First and foremost: Have a blog or website
A good place to start building your brand is with a blog or website that tells your story. Describe yourself on your site and list credentials, skills and awards to reinforce the idea that you are the go-to person in your field.
Post useful and helpful articles designed to answer some of the commonly asked questions related to your field. Do research to get the most relevant keyword phrases and the most searched topics for your articles. A good rule of thumb is to offer more than just the minimum; make each post authoritative and provide answers your readers can use.
Do this on your blog and offer to write useful posts as a guest blogger on similar sites. You can reciprocate and help a fellow blogger by letting them submit guest posts to your site. A simple text link back to your blog drives traffic and helps establish a credible online presence.
Add social networking tools to your site
Make your blog interactive by adding a Facebook Share or Like button combined with a text blurb encouraging readers to share the page with their friends helps establish your online presence.
You can encourage readers to share your page on other social sites. They can Tweet about your great article or product and ask friends to Digg you. It takes time to build but soon your brand will become established and well recognized.
Post insightful and helpful videos
Another easy way to build some online credibility is to create and post useful videos to sites like YouTube, Google Videos and MetaCafe. Build a branded YouTube Channel with a selection of videos designed to answer questions and offer solutions to problems. This establishes your credibility as an authority and creates quality backlinks to the content on your site or blog.
Use the comments section as an interactive social media tool to reply to viewer questions and comments and further build brand recognition. It is important to remember to employ usernames that mirror or draw attention to your brand name; avoid humorous or nonsensical handles. You want everything you post online to push the brand and reflect positively upon it.
Conclusion
Sit down and devise a strategy the will promote “you.” It is your marketing campaign to sell yourself just like other online campaigns sell soap or a genie bra. Promoting your brand with video, interactive social networking tools, guest blogging and forum posts will get your brand seen and remembered.
Going viral takes time, but the results are worth the effort.
SeanTR is a writer that loves exploring new territories and their social dynamics. When he’s not traveling or reading you can find him contributing to ATTSavings.com or @SeanTR
Guest post: Guide to promoting your event with social media
The following is a guest post by John Lewis. His bio is at the end of the article.
Social media websites allow user participation and content and to create an online community of shared knowledge. Examples of popular social media sites include Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, although blogs and forums can also be considered social media.
While social media started out as a fun way for people to get together online, it has transformed into a powerful marketing tool. It’s now easy to take advantage of many popular sites and services to promote a number of events, like seminars and product launches. This guide will explain how social media can be used in a number of ways.
Using existing management software
One way to promote your event is through your existing management software. A lot of software today includes an integrated ability to link content to social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, which can save time and make the process much easier.
Social media is often the first step to planning, setting up and promoting an event for business. Skype, for example, allows businesses and people to make free voice calls and video conferences while sending text messages and sharing files quickly and easily. Skype can be used to stay in touch with other event planners, while the video conferencing makes face-to-face meetings unnecessary.
Google Documents
Google Documents can also be used during the planning stage to create collaborative documents that anyone with login details can read and change. This allows everyone to stay up-to-date with a calendar or event plan.
After this initial planning stage it’s time to begin promoting the actual event to people who will attend.
Promoting the event
Because social media is about communication and sharing, using every available medium to promote the event is the key to success.
The event manager should create a profile with every major social media site. If the event is small, it’s fine to use an existing company profile. For large events, create a new profile. With Facebook, create a page (not group) and fill in information about the event. This will add it to the “event” tab on the profile and let fans comment.
With a Twitter account, create a unique tag for the event, like #ourevent, and use this tag in every tweet regarding the event or conference. You can also create a LinkedIn event that others can join.
Creating an event blog
For large events, creating a blog that discusses plans is also a good way to get followers and fill in potential attendees. This concept is often overlooked by event organizers but it’s actually one of the easiest ways to keep information up-to-date. Blogs also give the organizer a way to demonstrate exactly why people should attend and what makes the event so important.
Slideshare account
A Slideshare account is yet another way to take advantage of social media to promote an event. It’s easy to make a Slideshare account using a Facebook login. This website makes it easy to share presentations to generate buzz.
One of the best aspects of Slideshare is the ability of viewers to comment on presentations, follow users and share presentations they enjoy.
Make a promotional video
A simple promotional video can also work wonders to generate buzz for a large event, like a product launch. The video does not need to be complicated and there is no need to spend much money. Even just a video filmed with a webcam discussing the upcoming event and its importance can be enough to generate buzz. The video can be easily uploaded to Youtube, where other members may comment.
Conclusion
All of these steps are easy to implement and can quickly generate a lot of buzz about a business event. They all take advantage of different social media websites in unique ways to capture the attention of the public.
Every business with an event, whether it’s real-life or virtual, should take some of these steps to make sure the public is aware.
John Lewis works at PriceCollate. You can checkout the website’s blog here.
CalTweet: Share your events online
Looking for a great way to spread the word about your events online? Look no further. CalTweet is the application for you.
What is CalTweet
CalTweet, also known as Calendar Tweet, is a free service that lets you share and promote your events on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, StumbleUpon and Digg.
Guest post: The argument for social media as an educational tool
The following is a guest post by Ella Davidson. Her bio is at the end of the article.
Social Media has allowed for an unprecedented availability of communication among individuals. Creating a diverse spectrum of available information and connection, the education system can tap into this invaluable resource in order to offer students a greater ability to learn.
With the rapid progression of social media, students, across the board, have grasped onto outlets such as blogging websites, Twitter, and Facebook. Generating an influx of users from all ages, young, education bound students, have largely developed into the main frequenters. Using these websites primarily for social construction purposes, students have grown increasingly committed to networking websites and as of 2010, “74%” of students, 7th-12th graders, “say they have a profile on a social networking site” (Henry).
As students grow more comfortable and willing to dedicate time to social media sites, it is reasonable to consider expanding the realm of communication to education purposes as well.
While not directly intended for education, Facebook contains many elements that may benefit the educational process. In many classrooms, individual student-to-teacher attention is hard to come by. However, through Facebook, students can connect with their teachers and engage in a directed and comfortable dialogue.
Unlike the traditional lecture style, Facebook’s utilities allow for a collaboration of information outside of the classroom. Take for example the “group” application. A teacher could simply create a group for the classroom which would let students post questions from class, view due dates on homework assignments, share links, and even work on group projects more efficiently.
By assuming a method of teaching comfortable with those learning, the information learned would be more organic and endorse a dialogue between student and teacher. Facebook has its educational advantages with groups and easily posted information, but other social media sites offer other resources that are equally valuable.
Just as Facebook leads to a more direct student engagement, Twitter similarly creates an atmosphere that is both informally relaxed and also creates access to a constant stream of online discussion. Distinctively a Twitter function, although Facebook has more recently switched, is the mobile function. Although Twitter consists of an online site, one of its most predominant features is its ability to produce a stream of mobile material.
Allowing users to post information from anywhere, this could become an educational tool through its capability to birth an online discussion in addition to classroom dialogue. With the simple accessibility students less willing to add to the discussion in the traditional educational setting may be more willing to ask questions and generate ideas. Furthermore, due to the extensive range of people using Twitter and user’s access to following profiles, it could become an interesting and insightful resource for expert research.
WordPress and other blogging websites offer their own unique opportunities for education. From developing out-of-class discussions on specific subjects to making group projects, blogs are useful in an out-of-class context. At Duke University, Professor Michael Munger, suggests that “the blog form, which has evolved naturally, is the best way of having a conversation [online]” (Liu).
As such an effective communicational tool, blogs can be implemented in a variety of manners. One unique way to enhance student learning is through a class blog. With a blog entirely devoted to a class, teachers could individualize student learning by responding to direct questions and comments online. Additionally, creative assignments could be established in which students would post articles to the blog themselves.
Social media has become an integral part of children’s, to young adult’s way of communicating. As a reliable and comfortable means of communication, the connection between education and these sites like Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress is inevitable. Offering a wide array of benefits such as individual attention, increased engagement in and out of class, and a dialogue rather than lecture between students and their teachers, social media is a progressive method of enhancing education.
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“Daily Media Use Among Children and Teens Up Dramatically From Five Years Ago, Big Increase in Mobile Media Helps Drive Increased Consumption .” The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The Kaiser Family Foundation , 20 Jan 2010. Web. 3 Feb 2012.
Duerden , Daniel. “Social media as a tool in educating.” 360 education solutions. N.p., 14 OCT 2011. Web. 3 Feb 2012.
Fleerackers, Tom. “Social media as an educational tool.” Flat World Business. WordPress, 30 May 2011. Web. 3 Feb. 2012.
Liu, Mingyang. “Professors introduce blogs in class assignments.” Chronicle, The Independent Daily of Duke University. 02 May 2005: n. page. Web. 4 Feb. 2012.
Ella Davidson is part of Coupons.org, a consumer savings site that offers coupons and deals for a wide-range of retailers.
