blogging
World Cup 2010 Prediction – A Social Media Explosion
By Ken Arp
This year’s World Cup in South Africa will be the first of the “social media age” and with the passion of soccer fans around the world you can expect to see record levels of global interactivity. It’s a sign of how fast technology moves today when you consider that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were in their infancy during the last World Cup in Germany in 2006. Today 50,000,000 Tweets are sent daily, there are more than 400,000,000 Facebook users and the number of videos viewed in a month has peaked at more than 33,000,000,000. Staggering numbers considering how new these modes of communication are.
Social Media has the power to bring people together and this summer’s 
World Cup will see this reach new levels. FIFA has its own social-networking service on FIFA.com called “The Club” which itself has 1.6 million members. FIFA also plans to have upper echelon FIFA executives tweeting during the tournament. It’s being predicted that the World Cup will eclipse everything we have seen so far on Twitter including the U.S. election, the Oscars or the Super Bowl, simply because it is so international. Already many fans are using the Twitter hash tag#WC2010 when they tweet about the World Cup.
Video sites will also see a surge in World Cup activity with thousands and thousands of uploads about the World Cup as soon as the games begin. You can also look forward to other more creative videos including parodies and mashups which are growing in popularity. You’ll even find videos where fans have put their camera on the TV and captured their own reaction to goals and other events of games. That last one sounds a bit pointless, but then again so did many Social Media innovations when they first started.
Why You Should Have a Company Blog
By Ken Arp
Blogs are one of the original forms of Social Media, and there are literally millions of blogs online today. So why should you have a company blog? There are many reasons why companies should blog, below I’ve listed 5 primary reasons so in no particular order here they are.
1) The Ultimate Humanizer
Blogging for Business
Writing a blog allows you to express the personality behind your company and brand. Your customers ultimately need to feel comfortable with you and your company if they are going to give you their business. Blogging allows you to showcase that you are knowledgeable in your industry and you are more than just a corporate brand; you are real people.
2) Easy Distribution
At its very core, a blog is a website. As such, the content contained within them is easily distributed, easily shared and easily reference by others. If you provide great content and promote your company blog well, your blog will likely be picked up by others and mentioned on other blogs as well. This all contributes to building your company brand.
3) Better Than Your Email Newsletter
Blogs are essentially more easily edited versions of a newsletter. You can update your company blog on the fly, any time you need to and virtually anywhere you have a connection to the Internet (computer or mobile device).
With a newsletter you are limited in your updating capabilities once you have distributed that newsletter to your database. So if you are looking to have an easy way to give your audience information in a frequent manner, blogging is the ideal solution.
4) Great Place for Comments
Like all of the other social media tools referenced in this kit, blogs have the room for comments and feedback. It is another great way to find out how your company is doing and connect with your audience / customers.
5) SEO Benefits
When written strategically blogs can drive your organic rankings on search engines, and in today’s world, we all know how important it is to be visible online. If you are going to use a blog platform external of your company website, be sure your posts provides links back to your site, so it can also benefit from an SEO perspective. Ideally it is best to have the blog as part of your website to maximize the SEO benefits for the whole website.
The Best Kept Oakville Business Resource Secret
By Ken Arp
I have rediscovered an Oakville business resource that I always knew existed, I just didn’t realize that it had evolved the way it has. That business resource is the Public Library. I was totally unaware that the Oakville Public Library has put so much emphasis on helping businesses by providing all sorts of free online services that you can access from whereever you like. The truth is they aren’t actually free, we pay for them with your tax dollars. The library subscribes to about 90 different databases and makes them available for free to those with an Oakville Public Library card. Some of these databases are business oriented resources such as the directory of Canadian businesses that provides you everything you’d expect to get with a Scott’s Directory in electronic format for easy manipulation and formatting. Others offer complete, searchable collections of countless magazines and newspapers. You can even check out eBooks and read them on your computer or portable device.
Recent Comments