Social media marketing and the businesses that utilize it have become more sophisticated. More small businesses are beginning to understand how to best leverage online tools to build a community and recognize that engagement and interaction are the foundations of social marketing, but most don’t know what’s next. What follows are five advanced strategies for small businesses that may already have small online communities and understand how to create an online presence, but don’t know what to do next.

Social media marketing and the businesses that utilize it have become more sophisticated. More small businesses are beginning to understand how to best leverage online tools to build a community and recognize that engagement and interaction are the foundations of social marketing, but most don’t know what’s next.
What follows are five advanced strategies for small businesses that may already have small online communities and understand how to create an online presence, but don’t know what to do next.

Read on: http://ping.fm/z1JK9

More intro:

• Web designers are currently limited to using only those fonts in their designs that are installed on the end user’s machine. Since we can only rely on those fonts that are pre-installed on user’s machine being available to the UA, most designers have limited themselves to using one of the 11 Core Web Fonts that they know will be installed on all Windows and Macs.

• This list of Web safe fonts takes into account the most likely Roman Fonts that will be installed on computers. It lists the font name usable by CSS, weights and styles available, the likelihood the font will be installed (based on install source), and a sample of the font as an image. This list is based on hours of research and cross referencing, but is still being vetted. If you find any errors, please contact Jason at speakinginstlyes dot com.

See full list here: http://www.speaking-in-styles.com/web-typography/Web-Safe-Fonts/
Tip: click on rank in the top and you get them listed after their web safetiness.

Find the full article here

• TouchGraph reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google’s database of related sites

• You can pull and squeeze it to explore relationships between groups

• This is even interesting from a semantic SEO point of view
Go to the site and fill in any words that you want to explore.

See it and touch it here: http://touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

Find the full article here

The trick is as follows:
• First we write a script that detects if every new visitor is a person or a search engine, and then presents either HTML or Flash content depending on who is visiting
• Then we produce a simple HTML version of the site content and put it on the web server – that is only visible to search engines, which don’t understand the Flash
• While we do the HTML file, we can actually add meta tags to that file, to make it extra searchable
• We can also make sure that this HMTL file is using HTML header and other HTML structures correctly so that search engines read the content correct
• All we would need is FTP access to your flash site
Contact us to get Flash SEO service: info@webdialogue.eu

Find the full article here
Source:

Millions of workers are embracing freelancing as an alternative to full-time employment or because they cannot find salaried jobs. According to IDC, a market-research firm, there were around 12m full-time, home-based freelancers and independent contractors in America alone at the end of last year and there will be 14m by 2015. Experts reckon this number will keep rising for several reasons, including a sluggish jobs market and workers’ growing desire for the flexibility to be able to look after parents or children.

Read more on The Economist.

Find the full article here

• The old way of doing business where managers look after the media in a given market will become redundant. How people make decisions or are impacted by influence will become more personalised than ever. The information people receive will be more about their past interactions, others they engage with online and the products they purchase and less about where they live.

• The prioritisation of media will become more difficult than ever. In a world where information will be delivered in a niche manner on demand, the old PR economies of reach and influence matter considerably less.

• PR and customer service will move closer together. As the importance of mass media declines and the importance of the individual rises, the separation between journalist and everyday individual will become pointless.

• Everybody will become a company spokesperson. Building on the point above it will be impossible for traditional spokespeople to devote time to the growing number of on the record statements required. Rather corporate affairs and PR departments will need to train the entire organisation for influencer engagements.

• The tools for monitoring sentiment will be dizzyingly complicated. Monitoring your PR reputation simply by looking at the major news outlets outlets will seem archaic (if it isn’t already). Instead, PR departments will employ specially trained analysers to make sense of the wealth of data required to understand the public sentiment towards an organisation.

• PR will be even more important to an organisation. When everybody’s opinion matters, PR will be a paramount consideration in every decision a business makes.

Find the full article here