• 28% of small businesses said they used a corporate Facebook page
• 18% own a LinkedIn Profile
• 8% have a company blog
• 6% use YouTube or similar video-streaming service
• 2% own a corporate Twitter account

With over 2 million enterprises in the UK alone (according to the governments ‘Office for National Statistics’) that’s over 1.4 million businesses which don’t utilize Facebook, the world’s largest social media / networking website (with over 750 million users!).

Seems crazy, given the focus and publicity of these potential market avenues! Sure some businesses wouldn’t find all of the options necessary, but with such a high volume of service based business in the UK I can’t help but think some of the 1,000,000 businesses with no social media avenues are missing out.

Case Study: Ultimate Hairdressing, Wolverhampton.

To give an example of how Social Media can be applied to a range of industries iv’e used a case-study of my local hairdressers. ‘Ultimate Hairdressing Wolverhampton‘ (UHW) have recently re-branded after a number of years as a franchise. The newly devised business requires a number of Social Media avenues to keep them engaged with users in as many ways as possible.

Facebook

Facebook, as aforementioned, boasts over 500,000 users. That’s a lot of potential you could be missing out on without a company page. Facebook is a great platform to display photos, communicate with customers and market special events/offers. Using a Facebook Page (rather than a group) UHW can demonstrate not only model hairstyles but also produce albums of consumer’s haircuts.

‘Tagging’ users in an album such as this would allow friends of the newly trimmed customer to see the end product, spreading the word to a much wider audience than just those who get updates from the UHW page. This wildfire style of social marketing removes the boundaries of subscriptions; If each customer has on average 300 friends, and Ultimate Hairdressing takes 20 haircut photographs a week, that’s a potential of 6,000 Facebook users being recommended to UHW.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a reputation for being IT Industry specific. However, a huge variety of companies use the ‘Professional Networking Site’ to, well, network! Perfect for starting ventures, LinkedIn provides the ability to manage a professional identity and engage with similar professionals (not to mention consumers and colleagues, too!).

Whilst less of a marketing tool than Facebook, LinkedIn is a business tool which can be utilized by companies such as UHW to access knowledge, industry specific information and produce new professional orientated opportunities.

Corporate Website & Blog

Ok, so a website isn’t really a form of Social Media (not saying that every company shouldn’t have one!). However, a constantly updating blog (or online journal) can keep users informed of ‘behind the scenes’ on-goings. UHW don’t currently have this platform available, but articles could include their success in the ‘Trend Vision 2011′ and other stories which consumers may not necessarily know about.

Other articles could include featured haircuts, ‘A day in the life of’, new looks and salon updates. These articles could be shared via other social media sites too, further spreading the news. Competitions and special offers could also be detailed via a blog. Best of all, it’s free if you have some computer knowledge and an existing website.

YouTube

YouTube isn’t overly useful for everyone. Personally, it’s my least favorite of the social medias (in a marketing context). That said, videos do tend to have much higher click-through rates (I looked into it during my Mobile Marketing application development).

UHW could (and do) already use YouTube to show events (namely the Trend Vision 2011 finals build-up). With specific, rich media content such as this, users are much more likely to take an interest in the company as an organic, dynamic entity. Furthermore, videos can be embedded into other social media (Facebook, LinkedIn) as well as on Websites or Blogs.

However, bare in mind that a poorly developed, inappropriate or out of context video can have a negative effect on consumers. Make sure you only show customers highly tuned, relevant videos.

Twitter

According to the survey I read, only 2% of companies have a Twitter account. This, at first, surprised me. But come to think of it, there is a lot of confusion behind Twitter; What it does, and how to approach customer feedback.

Personally, I like to think of Twitter as a two-way communication tool, where as Facebook is more one-directional (outwardly). Each business should have a specific set of guidelines regarding feedback, and any responses should always be professional and with the company’s principles at the center of comments. That said, replying to ‘Followers’ is a brilliant way to engage your consumer base, and give an element of transparency to an organisation.

There is other ways to utilize Twitter too; Follow relevant companies also on Twitter (networking), Detail promotions and offers (advertising) and supply links to articles, blogs and Facebook albums (self-linking).

Twitter is an area that UHW are just getting into, and there are still questions to be answered and a clear route to be established. However, it’s definitely (in my opinion) worth persevering with; It’s much more than just for celebrities!

Conclusion

To conclude, there are a number of Social Media options available, each with their own advantages and marketing strategies to hand. These strategies are no longer specific to the technological industry, with something suitable for almost every organisation imaginable.

If your company or business doesn’t already have social media integrated into it’s website and business plan; Why not? Business plans are constantly evolving, and more recently ‘web strategies’ have become common headings amongst almost all of them!

Just a quick one folks; Need a beautiful word based tag cloud? Want to customise the colours, direction, font and make your personal cloud look gorgeous? Want to generate the contents of the cloud via website content or entering custom values? Give ‘Wordle‘ a go!

I rang up O2 this morning (2302 from an iPhone) to discuss the tethering options. A very friendly lady (Ruth!) pointed out that they have a new set of iPhone tariffs released. These tariffs are slightly better priced, however don’t include ANY cellular data (internet / 3G). For £6 a month, a data bolt-on can be added to the tariff. The best bit? The entire 500Mb are able to be used when tethering! Whoo!

So, let’s put this in context. I pay(ed) £40 per month for 600 minutes, unlimited texts and 500Mb of iPhone only data. With this new tariff set-up, I pay £42 per month (£2 more – I’ll come to that!) for the same number of minutes, texts and data. The difference is that the data can be used as I like! Also thrown into the package is 20 picture messages per month, free of charge as well as the ability to connect to cloud and BT OpenZone hot spots!

Ok, so it’s not quite free, but it’s less (and a much better deal) than paying an extra £7.50 per month! Ok, paying £7.50 would get you an additional 500Mb, rather than the ability to use the same 500Mb, but there is a second bolt-on (£10 per month) which gives you 1Gb of data. So, £36 + £10, still better than the £40 + £7.50 I could have paid. It’s also a better deal than paying up to £15 per month for data directly to your iPad.

Take a look for yourself here. O2 (and Mobile companies in general) have a tendency to release new tariffs and not tell existing customers about them! They may suit your needs better, they may not. Let me know!

Iv’e had debates time and time again. More often than not, these seem to conclude with facts, figures, claims and so-called evidence based on “something [someone] read online”. The fact is, however, that almost any argument can be justified by something found on the internet. As a higher-education academic on a computer science orientated degree for four years, I have heard countless times the strategy of “only citing respectable sources”. This, it seems, is often focused on NOT citing Wikipedia. That said, Wiki pages do appear to becoming more and more creditable by academic institutions, backed up by a number of interesting reports regarding said credibility. (I wonder if those journals cited Wiki?).

Either way, it’s frustrating to come to dead-end debates based on something found online, with quotes usually being either out of context, cited in the wrong scope, or in some cases completely fictional. You’d (probably) take articles from weekly magazines with a pinch of salt, so why do we so regularly cite online content?

Take for example the Fukushima Nuclear Incident; One of my peers commented that the exact reason was known for the meltdown very quickly after the incident. Now, without going into too much detail, I had reliable sources that told me this wasn’t the case. News papers, online journals and other media was claiming to know the full story, quoting extracts of Japanese interviews, but this, for the most part, wasn’t the full story.

Basically, it’s just a case of summing up how likely something is to be true, and taking things with a pinch of salt. If the source is more reliable, reduce to a few grains of salt. Unfortunately, due to some content/rubbish posted on the internet (no comments on this website, please!) it is often necessary to use a full spoon of salt!

P.s. I took down the PlayStation Network, single handedly, using my sonic screwdriver.

It’s not a bad effort. It’s really more of a set of advanced plug-ins for Chrome, rather than a whole new browser. I just have one major gripe with it. Simplicity! Google Chrome is simple and it works brilliantly, especially because most modern websites are designed to optimise the whole browser, usually in fullscreen. RockMelt uses a lot of this valuable screen space to incorperate it’s ‘features’. It’s really annoying having the search window pop up all the time. In my opinion, a better option would have been to incorporate an entire screen within the browser based on the Google homepage.

Never the less, it’s a pretty decent piece of software, I suppose. I won’t be switching over from Chrome though, and I expect very few people will. Facebook chat belongs on Facebook.com. Google searches belong on Google.com. Call me old-fashioned, that’s just what I think, any way.

An Orange spokesperson said today “We are aware that our mobile customers are currently having issues accessing Facebook via their handsets. We are working with Facebook to fix this as a matter of priority and would like to apologise to our customers for the inconvenience this may cause them.”

Update: I think this is now fixed, according to the other half, although some users may continue to experience problems until the early hours.

After a while, searching for the solution on my iPhone, I decided to flush the IP using CMD. To do this, I opened CMD with administrator privileges, and entered the following:

> ipconfig /all
> [results returned]
> ipconfig /release
> [action completed]
> ipconfig /renew
> [action completed]

However, this didn’t work. After that, and a few other tests (changed the PPPoA to Dynamic/Static, changed subnet masks and updated firmware etc) I decided to restore the router to factory settings. SAME PROBLEM! The flashing orange icon continued to annoyingly wink at me.

This led me to believe that it was an issue before the router/modem, and an issue with the ISP. I rang them (excellent support team – Virgin Media!) and told them the issue. Although they couldn’t tell me why it had occurred in the first place, they did inform me that restoring the ADSL modem would require me to re-enter the PPPoA username and password, which he gave me.

Hay presto! It worked!

The orange blinking internet light was because the connection to the exchange servers were active, but not connected. This could be told as the ADSL light was a solid blue (showing a connection) but not logged in (orange blinking internet light!)

In Germany the government has urged Internet users to find alternatives to Internet Explorer. In the same article (taken form BBC News) Sophos (an Internet security firm) told readers that the warning should be adhered to IE6, IE7 and even IE8 as the exploits had not only been proven to work on all these browsers but also the details of how to do so posted publicly on the Internet. Google has come under even more criticism as of late, with an open letter from security firms and lawyers asking why the security settings to enable HTTPS 100% of the time when accessing Gmail, Docs and other Google applications is so hard to find.

Google is reportedly considering it’s options regarding their operations in china. It may be that the years of strict censorship over the Chinese Internet has finally built to a head, and the recent attacks have broke the camels back. Either way, Google pulling out of China would be a devastating event for Chinese companies and civilians alike.

Not according to one company; ‘Baidu’, Chinese search engine giants recently posted the following on their blog:

“Google claims it will quit China. What it’s proved is not what the Google fans have claimed, that Google is a ‘Human Rights fighter’. Just the contrary. It’s proved that Google is a hypocrite.”

It’s a bit of a legal battle at the moment – let’s hope Google and China manage to come to some sort of agreement soon.

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Images can’t be .PNG
Padding is calculated differently

IE in general is a nuisance; things in Firefox just work! I’m currently designing a new menu for a website i’m working on, using :hover in the CSS and some onmouseover JavaScript. In Firefox everything works perfectly. However in IE (even the latest 8.0b) the onmouseover flickers. Getting around this requires extensive work – which wouldn’t be required if the browser worked like Firefox!

I realise this is a bit of a rant, but it has hit me time and time again – designing websites and previewing in Firefox, occasionally checking in IE7+ and then realising i’m going to have to re-work the site in order to make it IE6 compatible!

Merry Christmas!

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Thanks guys, and a merry Christmas.