But you? You’re more cautious about putting yourself out there online. Perhaps you think Google+ is no different from that other time suck, Facebook. Or perhaps you’re too weirded out by Facebook “poking” to care about learning the difference between a Google+ “huddle” and “hangout”.

Read the rest of the article at PC mag

As a result, I tried to focus on books that would retain their usefulness to readers over time. The following list was researched from the stack of books on my desk, from the good Tweeple I follow on Twitter and a few private recommendations. Enjoy!

• Cluetrain Manifesto – Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searles, Dave Weinberger
• New Rules of Marketing and PR – David Meerman Scott
• Do It Wrong Quickly – Mike Moran
• Join the Conversation – Joseph Jaffe
• Groundswell – Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff
• Personality Not Included – Rohit Bhargava
• Tribes – Seth Godin
• Here Comes Everybody – Clay Shirky
• Age of Conversation – Gavin Heaton, Drew McLellan
• Social Media Marketing An Hour A Day – Dave Evans
• Secrets of Social Media Marketing – Paul Gillin
• Naked Conversations – Shel Israel & Robert Scoble
• Freakonomics – Stephen Dubner & Steven Levitt
• Buzz Marketing – Mark Hughes
• Radically Transparent – Andy Beal & Judy Strauss
• Web 2.0: New Tools, New School - Gwen Solomon & Lynne Schrum
• The Long Tail – Chris Anderson
• The Wisdom of Crowds – James Surowieki
• Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business – Larry Weber
• Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking – Andy Sernovitz, Afterward by Guy Kawasaki
• Social Media is a Cocktail Party: Why You Already Know the Rules of Social Media Marketing – Jim Tobin, Lisa Braziel (TopRank is quoted on back cover)
• Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations – Amy Shuen
• Now Is Gone: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs – Brian Solis, Geoff Livingston
• SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate (Voices That Matter) – Joel Postman

I hope you find these useful, if you have any favourite feel free to add them to the comments.

We wanted to link to a great rundown of no-no’s in social media etiquette you want to avoid on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites. From the Interactive Insight group

If you or your client want to learn from a series of case studies. Head on over to the article here.

The study of 1,500 consumers found that 60 percent of Facebook fans and 79 percent of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands since becoming a fan or follower.

The most popular reason people follow brands in social media is to receive discounts, but there were also many people who responded that they follow as a customer of the brand and to show their support of it.

Read the posts at WebProNews and Econsultancy.

Why is link building important?

By getting carefully targeted traffic from related sites can lead to a natural, long-term increase in page impressions, with this comes increased conversions – where users either make a purchase or making contact with the company through the web site.

The result being increased awareness, visibility and credibility of your site. As well as link popularity and PageRank.

Extra links pointing to your site also obtains wider search engine exposure and helps the website get indexed by search engines.

Link building along with on site optimisation are the two factors which are vital to a
successful SEO campaign.

Tools for measuring the back links to your site

You will want to know how well your link building campaign is going, and how many links have been successful that you have submitted to other sites, and if your content is great other people would have blogged or posted links to your site as well.

With the tools below you can measure and adapt your link building campaign to work more successfully for you. Especially if you are paying for directory listings, you may find the low traffic you are getting from one site may be a complete waste of money.

• Google Analytics
• Google Link Operator – Where you type “link: www.yourwebsitename.com” to find out the number of links Google has found that are pointing to your site
• Yahoo Site Explorer Similar to Google Operator search, uses Yahoo’s cache instead – more comprehensive

Link building principles

• More inbound links (backlinks) to a page will increase your PageRank
• Link quality is important – one link from a high quality website may be better than 100 links from low quality ones
• Sites with on-page optimisation for a particular keyphrase are favoured by SEs

Use only ‘ethical’ search engine methods

When choosing a company to link building services make sure they use ethical techniques. As any ‘black hat’ or devious methods could violate Google’s Guidelines, Yahoo Guidelines or MSN’s Guidelines for search engine optimisation practices.

Link building Mind Map

The map below shows the methods you can use to build links to your site, as well as measure the success of them.

Instructions: Click and drag the map like a Google Map. You can expand or collapse the ‘nodes’ by clicking on the + or -, and also zoom in or out with the buttons at the bottom of the map.

Learn about our website promotion services.

Download this information a client eguide.

Where did the idea for this site come from?

With an idea and a sketch by Founder and Chairman of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. He explains:

One night in July of that year I had an idea to make a more “live” LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it. For the next 5 years, I thought about this concept and tried to silently introduce it into my various projects.

Photo of wireframe that was to become the basis for the design of Twitter

In 2006 Twitter launched, and immediately the service rapidly gained popularity: In March 2007, it won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category. Dorsey gave the following playful acceptance speech at SXSW: “We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!”.

Early adopters we mainly web type people and various geek collectives sending their thoughts to other connected friends.

For us, it has been excellent for gaining instant insight into new products, people views on various web services and keeping in touch with colleagues, friends and peers without having to email or call them!

Brand and reputation management

However, it didn’t take long for forward thinking companies to identify that they could directly converse with their customers on this rapidly growing social media platform.

Never before has one been able to track and measure what is being said about your brand and product online. View the results for the keyword ‘cornflakes‘ using Twitter Search. This surely has to be the quickest and most cost effective way to communicate with your customers, increase coverage of your brand, and increase the strength of your company reputation, online.

Today, Twitter is one of the most visited websites in the UK

UK Internet traffic to the site has increased 10-fold over past last 12 months. For the week ending 17/01/09 Twitter ranked as the 291st most visited website in the UK, up from a ranking of 2,953 for the week ending 19/01/08. UK Internet traffic to the website has increased by 974% over this period.

Source: Hitwise

The most popular website visited after Twitter is Facebook. Britain’s most popular social network continues to pick up users and is now the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK. As we reported a few weeks ago, on Christmas Day Facebook received 1 in every 22 UK Internet visits.

Prominent Users on Twitter

A number of politicians, celebrities use twitter to communicate with their followers/fans.

• Barack Obama with over 144,000 followers
• Jonathan Ross
• Alan Carr
• Stephen Fry
• Richard Branson
• 10 Downing Street

Twitter first for breaking news

Using Twitter search to monitor the ‘buzz’ over last years US elections was a fantastic way to get into the voters minds, as well as getting their opinions, gut reactions and feelings on what was happening at a very detailed street level with all the events and coverage.

Earlier this month, US Airways Flight 1549 experienced multiple bird strikes and had to be ditched in the Hudson River after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport in New York City. Janis Krum, a passenger on one of the ferries that rushed to help, took a picture of the downed plane as passengers were still evacuating and tweeted it via TwitPic before traditional media arrived at the scene.

Twitter featured on BBC homepage

Perhaps the strongest sign that Twitter has reached the mainstream is being featured on the homepage of one of the worlds busiest websites.

Questions on the future of Twitter

There is no doubt Twitter is here to stay.

The question I have is the problem of friends on other social networks. How soon will they realise they have to start a new friends list on this site as well? Something we have been aware of for all too long, effectively a ‘Walled Gardens for each social network’. Perhaps mass demand will increase the adoption of OpenID. Although, single source sign-on was dropped from Twitters features during a company restructure in 2008 so is not currently supported.

Also with our current friends on Twitter are a bit more low-fi than some of the techy conversations we may have currently with colleagues on Twitter, this is leading to multiple profiles for the same person. For example, a business and personal (private) profile.

Another problem is that all the Facebook friends you’re currently avoiding will track you down on Twitter – so what then?

You can follow me on Twitter @JimCallender, where I continue to enjoy the service and would gladly pay for some additional features. I find the short method of communicating in 140 characters or less and ‘from one-to-many’ to fit my style and enjoy ‘following’ and updating my friends.

Further Reading

• Look out Twitter, the masses are coming!
• How Twitter was born