CYBER bullying, a worldwide big problem

CYBER bullying has become more widespread among people today, especially with the emergence of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter (“Vengeance via the Net” – The Star, March 21).

Social networking sites offer people the chance to jot down the happenings in their daily lives, express opinions and share ideas, besides venting their frustrations.



However, cyber bullies take it a step too far when posting nasty and derogatory comments about others. The reason for their action is that they are prejudiced towards others.

Their prejudice stems from the fact that they think that the other person is not sociable and less outspoken. Due to jealousy, cyber bullies also target those who are popular.

Their methods of bullying include stealing other’s pictures or writing unpleasant remarks in order to attract attention.

Some work in groups so that they seem powerful, and the victims have no chance to turn the tables on them.

Cyber bullies will even use electronic means to superimpose the targeted victim’s face on a nude photo to destroy that person’s reputation.

The main motive is to hurt the other party, and cyber bullies are aware of their actions.

Cyber bullies are actually craving for attention. They lack confidence and they boost their pride and ego by destroying other people’s image. They enjoy the thrill of publicly shaming others in the mistaken idea that it will make them look good.

In actual fact, they are cowards hiding behind technology and using it as a weapon to humiliate others. They do not realise that their actions can have serious consequences.

The person they hurt may be harmed emotionally and psychologically. The victims suffer in silence because they do not know where to turn to for help. It will affect their daily routine.

It is advisable that victims of cyber bullying do not retaliate but instead inform their parents or the authorities.

Cyber bullies may say they are doing it for fun, but their actions will backfire should they be caught.

They are actually the ones who are in need of help. They may even take their bullying ways to the extreme, such as physical violence, if they are not stopped.
Counselling is the proper way to handle cyber bullies. Social networking sites are good outlets to voice opinions but one should not abuse the privilege. Use it right and one can eventually lead a fulfilling life.

By YANG CHIEN FEI, -Use social media right
Ampang, Selangor.

Tech companies 'control the future of news'

Jon Dube, Forbes Contributor Digital Media Executive & Advisor 

Technology companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple “now control the future of news.”

That’s one of the take-aways from the 2012 State of the News Media report, released today by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The news industry, the report says, “finds itself more a follower than leader shaping its business.”

But I think there’s hope. The report touches on a number of opportunities for traditional media in the digital space – areas that are growing rapidly and still up for grabs. Those include targeted advertising, the mobile/tablet space, and digital video.

Winning in these areas will be tough, given the traditional media’s historical inability to rapidly evolve and the head start other companies have on them.

TARGETED ADVERTISING

A good example is the fast-growing opportunity of targeted advertising, where Google and Facebook dominate and news organizations lag far behind.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) report points out that even though targeted advertising is one of the forms of online advertising expected to grow most rapidly, only a few of the top news sites use it.  Meanwhile, the report says, tech companies like Facebook and Google “are using personal data collected over the internet to direct ads to specific consumers to a far greater degree than ever before – and to a far greater degree than most news organizations are capable of.”

While Facebook and Google have taken the lead, news organizations could catch up, if they try. Most have the ability, and at least some data, that would enable them to engage in targeting. A PEJ study of digital advertising at 22 top news sites found that few of them do, however. Of the 22 sites, most did not contain any ads targeted to consumers based on their online behavior, according to the January study. Only three – CNN, The New York Times and Yahoo! News – employed high levels of targeting based on a user’s recent online activity. A handful of others employed limited targeting. (For more, see “Who Advertises on News Sites and How Much Those Ads Are Targeted.”)

While targeted display ads account for just 10% of local online ads, or $1.5 billion, right now, by 2016, they are expected to grow to $14.6 billion and make up more than half the market, according to Borrell Associates.

MOBILE

One of the bright spots in the PEJ report is the research on mobile and tablet usage. Readers spend far more time with news apps on the smartphone and tablet, visit more pages at a time, and return more frequently than they do on conventional computers, according to data from Localytics, a client-based mobile analytics firm. And most importantly, there are signs that mobile news consumption is actually increasing total news consumption – one report from comScore indicates mobile devices increase news site traffic by between 7 and 11 percent.

The good news is mobile and tablet usage are expected to continue skyrocketing. And the ad dollars will shift there as well. Mobile ad spending grew 89% in 2011, to $1.45 billion – and is expected to grow to $10.83 billion by 2016.

News organizations know this is an opportunity, and are investing resources in developing mobile and tablet apps and sites. Still, it’s not clear whether news organizations can capture these dollars. Google already earns more than half of mobile ad dollars in the U.S. and Facebook is expected to move aggressively into the mobile ad market after its IPO.

“Our analysis suggests that news is becoming a more important and pervasive part of people’s lives,” PEJ Director Tom Rosenstiel said, referring to the findings about mobile and tablet usage in particular. “But it remains unclear who will benefit economically from this growing appetite for news.”

RELATED: Mobile, tablet devices increase news consumption

DIGITAL VIDEO

Another big opportunity for news organizations is digital video, because video advertising earns much higher rates – and digital video viewing and advertising is expected to skyrocket in the next few years. While video advertising spend is only $2.02 billion now, it is projected to grow to $7.11 billion by 2015 — which would make it the most lucrative type of online ad after search and banner ads, according to eMarketer.

Despite that, video news and advertising still represents a small fraction of the content on most news sites, aside from those of major broadcasters. In a February PEJ study, none of the top stories on major news sites were in a video format — even on the sites of broadcast news organizations. Stand-alone video ads were also rare, making up only 1.3% of ads on the news websites studied.

The good news is we are starting to see increasing signs of life in digital news video. A few months ago Reuters launched a YouTube channel, dubbed Reuters TV, featuring 10 news shows. The Wall Street Journal has been one of the most aggressive newspapers in the video space, and is now producing more than four hours of video a day.  (Check out WSJ’s fantastic video app for the iPhone and iPad)

One of the more interesting experiments to watch will be The Huffington Post Streaming Network, an online news channel AOL plans to launch later this year that will live-stream news video 12 hours a day. (Disclaimer: I used to be the SVP/GM of News & Information at AOL but left last year).

THE FUTURE

As the digital world becomes more mobile, social and targeted, media companies still have plenty of opportunity. They will have the chance to to attract new audiences and dollars. The question is whether news organizations can move nimbly enough to survive, and thrive.

RELATED: How Facebook, Twitter differ for news consumption

For the latest news from SXSW and general insights on digital media, please follow me on Twitter at @cyberjournalist and visit CyberJournalist.net for the latest digital media headlines.

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5 social network predictions for 2012; Google+ surpasses 62 million users, May Top 400 million Members by End-2012

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5 social network predictions for 2012

by Rafe Needleman

Facebook is the power hitter in social networking today, and is likely to drive the most activity and a fair share of the innovation in social networking in 2012. But it's not the only company driving things forward.

That puppy is about to get very, very rich.(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Here's are five ways social networking is likely to play out in the coming year.

1. Mobile social networking means good news for new social startups
In the U.S., the majority of consumers will soon have smartphones (Neilsen puts the figure at 44% today). Smartphones are about the most import

Smartphones know where you are, who your friends are, who's nearby, and soon thanks to NFC, they'll know what you're buying and where. They are the key element of the next, mobile phase is social networking.

Facebook is serious about mobile social networking, but it is not the leader in this space in terms of design or technology. Smaller companies, like Path and Milk (with its first app, Oink) are coming out with new takes on mobile interaction. Square could play in this economy as well. All these services will likely use Facebook's network to put people or businesses or in touch with each other in new ways. More specialized mobile networks (really riders on top of Facebook) will appear next year.

2. Twitter makes big impact with brand marketers
While Twitter's new brand pages won't eat into big advertising or marketing budgets in 2012, the new business-friendly features will make an impact. Twitter is a highly effective platform for spreading brand messages via consumer/fans, and it doesn't take much to create an effective Twitter-based campaign.

While Facebook is still the most important and best social vehicle for marketing, Twitter will matter a lot in 2012 due to its simplicity and effectiveness.

You won't see a Super Bowl ad in 2012 without a Twitter tag on it.



3. Social Networking will tell the tale for the 2012 presidential election
We have seen how social feedback and link-sharing can bomb a presidential campaign: the YouTube and Web reaction to Rick Perry's "Strong" ad. And in 2008 the MoveOn group might have made the critical difference in the Obama campaign.

In 2012, the major political campaigns will be even more dependent on social networks, possibly to the extent that effective social campaigns will be more important than broad-stroke and increasingly expensive TV ads. Certainly, no candidate will be able to succeed without a strong following on each of the major social networks.

4. Google+ remains a critical success but a consumer flop
Google+ has a lot of good features, but it needs much more than that to take on Facebook and Twitter. Even Google's tacit promotion of Google+ on its other services and toolbars won't be enough to make it part of the daily diet of social networks for the hundreds of millions of users that Facebook has in its thrall.

Google+ also doesn't have enough muscle to be a big player as a branding tool, compared to Facebook and Twitter.

Even inside Google, we hear, employees don't use it very much.

So, the prediction? Google won't kill Google+, not after its failures with Orkut, Buzz, and Wave. The company will continue to blend Google+ into its other offerings, in particular GMail, Picasa Web, and its search result pages. But few people in the real world, if any, will switch over from Facebook to Google+.
The smart thing for Google? Buy Pinterest. But this is a predictions story, not an advice column.

5. Facebook and Yelp: Social network IPOs do well
For all the bad-mouthing of the Zynga IPO, it's not doing all that badly. As of this writing, it's down 5% from its offering price, and the stock has only be trading since December 16.

In other words, the stock wasn't priced crazy-high nor crazy-low, and if it doesn't drop much further, its middling out-of-the-gate performance will be unlikely to cool the ardor for social network stock offerings in 2012. Facebook and Zynga are two sides of a coin in the social network business. The one's success fortifies the other.

2012 will be a watershed year for startup IPOs. Facebook is set to go public in 2012, as is Yelp.

Interest in Facebook stock will be high as the company nears its IPO. The fire for this one will be stoked by the press, by politicians holding it up as an example of American technological and economic prowess, and of course by underwriters. From a financial perspective, it's far too early to tell if the IPO itself will be aptly priced. But Facebook's influence is growing, the company is making a lot of money, and a successful IPO will be good news for every social company out there. The forces are lining up to make sure this IPO is incredibly well-orchestrated, and successful in the right ways: that is, it pops when it goes public, but not too much.

Rafe Needleman

Rafe reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business. Feeling lucky? Send pitches to rafe@cnet.com. And watch Rafe's tech issues podcast, Reporters' Roundtable, every Friday.

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Google+ May Top 400 million Members by End-2012

'Google+ is for finding, and talking with, the people who are interested in the same thing you are,' says tech blogger Robert Scoble, and as such may represent a refreshing break from Facebook for some. (JG Image)

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Google is adding 625,000 new users a day to the Google+ social-networking service, which may total 400 million members by the end of next year, according to independent analysis of its growth. 

The site’s popularity has accelerated in recent weeks, with almost a quarter of its total user base joining in December alone, said Paul B. Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com, who tracks the numbers as Google+’s “unofficial statistician.”

Google, the world’s largest Internet-search company, aims to challenge the social-networking supremacy of Facebook, a site with more than 800 million members. Google+, which lets users organize their friends in circles, was introduced earlier this year as a test project and then opened up to the general public in September.

Google+ may be benefiting from the popularity of Google’s Android mobile operating system, which makes it easy to sign up. As the service gains traction, more people will invite family and friends to join, further accelerating its growth, Allen said in a Google+ posting. He works at FamilyLink.com, a company he helped start in 2006.

Katie Watson, a Google spokeswoman, declined to discuss the current user numbers. The company last gave an update during its October earnings conference call, when Google+ had more than 40 million users. 

Bloomberg

Google+ surpasses 62 million users

by Lance Whitney

Google+ has captured more than 62 million users, at least according to one "unofficial" count.

Chiming in with his own Google+ post yesterday, Ancestry.com co-founder and Google+ unofficial statistician Paul Allen reported the latest numbers as of December 27.

Running queries on different surnames to gauge the number of total users, Allen and his team found a surge in daily signups over the past several weeks. Around 625,000 new users have been hopping aboard the social network each day, which means almost a quarter of all Google+ users joined in December alone.

Assuming that rate continues, Allen's crystal ball sees Google+ hitting 100 million users on February 25, 200 million on August 3, and 293 million by the end of 2012. But can Google maintain and even increase that growth rate? Allen believes so.

Related stories

• Google+ users up 30 percent since going public?
• Google adds Google+ brand pages to search results
• New Google+ features: Customize your streams, and more
• Ads show how Google+ is desperate for real people

"I expect the growth to continue to accelerate," Allen said. "Google can continue to integrate Google+ into its other products and word of mouth will continue to build. Most importantly, 700,000 Android devices are activated daily and this will become a very significant source of new users for Google+. That number will also grow next year."

Google has been busy the past few months integrating Google+ into more of its products, such as its core search engine. The company has also been fine-tuning its social network by adding more features and sanding over some of the rough spots. It also unveiled its Google+ Pages in early November in an attempt to reach out to the business world.

Still, Allen's numbers alone don't paint the full picture. His team records how many people Google+ is signing up. But they don't factor in how frequently those people actually use their accounts. Data from ComScore and Experian Hitwise released this past summer showed a decline in the number of weekly visits.

More recent data from ComScore found Google+ with 65 million global visitors in November but with no clear indication how often those visitors return to the site.

And rather than just relying on word of mouth, Google realizes that it also now has to tap into the world of advertising, using such celebrities as the Muppets to promote its social network to the average user.

Lance Whitney

Lance Whitney wears a few different technology hats--journalist, Web developer, and software trainer. He's a contributing editor for Microsoft TechNet Magazine and writes for other computer publications and Web sites. Lance is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and he is not an employee of CNET.

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Financial Advisors Get Social

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 Raymond James Financial Advisors Get Social

Tom Groenfeldt, Forbes Contributor

Financial advisors at Raymond James are now able to use social media tools including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter through the Actiance compliance tool, Socialite. Advisors also have optional access to a library or pre-approved content and tools to measure engagement.

Mike White, marketing director at the Florida-based financial services firm, said the Actiance alliance fulfills a commitment made early in the year to provide social media tools for advisors.

Financial firms have been slow to adopt social media, he said, and they have watched to see how regulators would interpret social media communications.

“In addition to incorporating the technology and archiving platform with Actiance, we have developed guidelines, training sessions and marketing and communications support to help advisors leverage social media in their client engagement and new prospecting activities,”  added White.

In the two months since the Actiance rollout, 1,200 of the firm’s 5,000 advisors have signed up. The company offers interactive video training to show advisors how social media can be used properly.

“We know there have been a lot to mis-steps [with social media] by public figures and we want out advisors and our brand to be protected in the process.”



Early adopters at Raymond James spread across all ages; the fastest to move to social media are the advisors who are most marketing oriented, White said. As the technology becomes easier to use, the age skew is not as pronounced as it once was, he added. Grandparents are among the most active users of Raymond James online services.

White thinks advisors will use social media both to stay in communication with existing clients and to prospect for new ones.

Raymond James has several people in its 200-strong compliance group who review all social media content before it goes out, with the result that approvals can usually be done the same day content is submitted. Tweets and posts go through a workflow process to provide the firm compliance oversight while allowing advisors to offer a personal touch.

“Our understanding [of the regulations] is that we do not have to review communications ahead of time, but we are being conservative.”

White said that in addition to approved canned content the company offers Tweets and posts from its economist or stock strategist.

“One great thing about Actiance is they were relatively early to the game of social media so they understand the importance of providing flexibility and insight to the communications.” The company also reviews blogs by its advisors before they are posted, a process which White said is now at the point social media was a few years ago.

“We treat blogs as ads that have to be pre-approved.”

The Aite Group, a financial research firm, entitled a recent report on social media for financial advisors “The Bloom is off the Rose.” Roughly 7 in 10 financial advisors use social media for personal purposes and half use it for business, figures which have increased since 2009, said Ron Shevlin, senior analyst with Aite Group and co-author of this report.

Use of LinkedIn has increased for business purposes and the time spent on Facebook, Twitter and blogs has declined among financial advisors. Advisors don’t spend much time on leading social media finance sites such as Stockpickr or Wikinvest; only a third of the advisors surveyed were even familiar with them.

Advisors are seeing diminishing returns from social media, according to Aite. Reaching new prospects was cited by only 19 percent, half the percentage in 2009 while increasing revenue or fees linked to social media declined from 16 percent to 6 percent.

Just six percent of advisors who don’t already use social media plan to do so over the next year. Thirty-eight percent said it wasn’t worth their time and 34 percent just don’t like to communicate with customers that way. Nearly three-quarters said their firms have policies that limit or ban the use of social media.

Vendors had some suggestions for the best ways to use social media. Actiance told Aite Group that responding to clients’ postings, such as a new child or a new job, with an appropriate messages is effective.  Echoing what White said about early adopters eMoney Advisor noted that advisors who are good at marketing are good at using social media. Financial Social Media’s recommendations suggest why some advisors are losing interest — they recommended Tweeting three to five times per day and updating LinkedIn and Facebook at least twice a day. That suggests a substantial time commitment. Other vendors of social media tools including SocialVolt, Socialware, SocMediaFin, SunGard, ThomsonReuters and Wired Advisor had a variety of suggestions about defining an approach to marketing, listening to the market and building out social networks.

Aite concluded that many financial advisors have decided that social media is not living up to its hype.

“The absence of tangible benefits from social media is muting advisors’ perception of its potential importance,” said Shevlin. Financial firms should expand their focus beyond compliance to look at effectiveness, added Aite, offering several specific suggestions for defining messages, choosing the proper platform and improving marketing skills.

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• The Top 10 Most Popular Blog Posts of 2011 for Financial Advisors (financialsocialmedia.com)
• Financial Advisor Usage of Social Media in 2011: Network Usage, Results & Future Obstacles (financialsocialmedia.com)
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Startup Lets You Save and Share Parts of Web Pages

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No need to copy and paste—Clipboard employs advanced Web technology to let users save the part of a page they want.

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The Web may make it easy to communicate with people thousands of miles away and put libraries full of knowledge at our fingertips, but plenty of simple things are still surprisingly hard to do online. Take saving a piece of a Web page. That specific task is trickier than it sounds. A startup called Clipboard is building a simple solution using some rather sophisticated Web technologies.

Clipboard allows users to select and store pieces of Web pages in a cloud-based account. Users can comment on items, tag them, and search them. The site allows people to keep clippings private, share them with specific people, or offer them to the public. The new site has been in stealth mode until today, but it's now opening up for a private beta test (readers of Technology Review are invited to participate and can sign up here).

The site's founder is Gary Flake, who previously founded Microsoft's Live Labs, Yahoo Research, and Overture Research. Flake says that Clipboard grew out of his own needs. He couldn't find a satisfying way to save and share information he found while searching the Web. In fact, he describes a laborious process that will sound familiar to many Internet users: After finding something interesting online, he says, he would highlight it, hit control-C, open a word processor or e-mail program, paste the content in, and save or send it. "That's the state of the art for saving things on the Web," Flake says. "For me, there was a huge void waiting to be filled."



Of course, plenty of existing services let people save and share things they find online. People often post links to social networks such as Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, or to dedicated bookmark sites such as the newly revived Delicious. Services such as Evernote allow people to build up a digital memory cache loaded with notes, photos, and saved information from websites.

But when he went through what's already out there, Flake says, he couldn't find anything that met all of his requirements. He wanted to save items from the Web in a form that preserves the way they look, so that he can benefit from his visual memory of the page. He wanted the clips to continue to work—links should function and video should play. Finally, he wanted the things he saved to be portable, stored in the cloud, and easy to put there from a browser on any computer.

Flake describes Clipboard as a Web service that sits on top of the Web pages open in the browser. To use it, a person installs a bookmarklet in the browser. However, clicking the button doesn't take the user to a new Web page—it launches Clipboard's lightweight JavaScript application. When running, the application lets a user select portions of an open Web page. It then runs an extraction algorithm that analyzes the page and figures out how to write HTML and CSS that will re-create what the user selected.

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How To Use Social Media To Promote Your Small Business

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Kym McNicholas, Forbes Staff

Image via CrunchBase

You have a small business and you haven’t bought into the social media craze? Guess what? Silence is no longer an option. People are online talking about your company as you read this, whether you like or not.  If you don’t engage in the conversation, you risk losing your customers. But maybe you don’t have a choice as many small airports do in the State of California and across the United States. Many are owned by cities who don’t give them a dime and yet take money whenever they please. Those city managers force their airport managers to jump through hoops and political red tape to be able to promote their facilities. These airport managers have their hands tied in dealing with counties which just recently decided to launch a website, let alone a social media marketing strategy. So, I was asked by Michael McCarron, Public Information Office for San Francisco International Airport, to speak to the managers of small airports through California about the benefits of having a social media presence, so that they can convince their ‘bosses’ to allow them to open Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts, as well as to create blogs.

Here’s part of my presentation. I hope it helps you with your online social media strategy. If You have more ideas, please share them in the comments section at the bottom of the post. The more ideas, the better.

1. ASSESS YOUR ASSETS: The first action you should take before engaging in online marketing or social media marketing and engagement is to look at what are you’re trying to promote. What are your assets? Who are your target customers? It may seem obvious. But, A Bay Area airport had small planes for rent. But business was slow because they were simply targeting pilots trying to rack-up hours. Turns out there was a larger audience they could target through social media, tourists looking for aerial Bay Area tours. Business took-off.

SIGN-UP FOR SOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn. Facebook allows you to create a business page.  Make sure you read the rules for businesses first. You can even ‘create a page’ through your personal account, if your business allows you to do so. That makes it easy for small business owners to manage it. On LinkedIn, every employee becomes your best advocate.



FIND A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER: Managing multiple social networks is daunting. So, before you start posting content, requesting friends and adding followers, sign-up for a social media manager such as Ping.fm and HootSuite. It allows you to manage all of your accounts on one site and schedule your messages to deploy so you don’t have to sit over it all day. It also allows you to review the success of the tweets real-time with click-through statistics. And you can gather all the mentions of your brand, industry or search terms on Twitter through it as well. That’s for the free version. I suggest trying that first. As you get more involved in social media, I prefer SproutSocial.com. You have a choice on plans for nine-dollars to $49. There’s a 30-day free trial to make sure it works for you. What I like is that it allows you to take all of those you follow and the followers and create contacts out of them which you can manage in the system and track engagement. It also has one inbox for all of your messages from all the networks. Plus, it allows you to track check-ins at FourSquare and Gowalla.

POST UPDATES: It’s important to have content on your social media pages before you start adding friends and followers. When you try to find friends, they’re going to look at the page to see if they want to follow you. So you need to give them a reason to follow you first. Provide valuable information about the industry. Post pictures of your business or people enjoying your business. On YouTube, post videos of your business, customer experiences, and encourage customers to make their own. You can also ‘favorite’ other YouTube users’ videos and they will end up on your page. If you’re a small airport, posting cool aerobatic videos of the Patriots’ Jet Team is a possibility that would add value to those who ‘subscribe’ to your page. Also, share those videos on your other accounts such as Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn.

FIND FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS: Twitter and Google+ are easiest. Search keywords to find followers. On Twitter,  If you’re a small airport, for example, search ‘pilot. You can also search ‘flying.’ Searching your town and surrounding areas as well to find key influencers, news outlets, bloggers and city officials. Also, search for large players in your market. For airports, try Boeing, Virgin America, United Airlines and Southwest Airlines. If they share your posts, you have the potential to reach thousands.  I suggest adding just a few people at a time.  On Google+, comment on one of their posts immediately. On Twitter, mention them in a post immediately. You can also comment on one of their posts or simply say that you look forward to following their great content.  If it’s a reporter or blogger, give them story ideas and leads that have nothing to do with your business. Get them to trust you. To find fans on Facebook, it’s best to start with real friends and family. You can also pay as little as $100 to have an ad for your Facebook page syndicate across the network for a designated period of time.

7. ENGAGE FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS:
Cory Colligan who used to be head of marketing for California Bouquet friended me on Facebook. When she asked to be my friend, she typed a personal message, saying how impressed she was with my work and how she’s enjoyed watching my work evolve. I couldn’t remember where I knew her from. Was it a television station, radio station, or was it from school? I wasn’t sure. I was too embarrassed to ask. And she seemed harmless. So, I confirmed her friend request and wrote her a note back thanking her for her feedback and saying that I look forward to connecting. She proceeded over the next few months to follow my videos and stories. She engaged in great debates and conversation with me as well as my friends. I knew just days after I added her that I didn’t know her personally. But I was so impressed with her and the relationship we’d developed over the months, that when I was traveling to her town, Fresno, I suggested we have lunch. When I arrived she had a full basket of goodies from her shop, including the best dark chocolate covered strawberries I’ve ever tasted, waiting for me. Since then, I have been a regular customer and am quick to share her products on my page.

So, your first priority should be building that relationship with people, not pitching your service or product.

Give them story ideas and leads that have nothing to do with your business.

On Facebook:
Share their links on your wall and/or comment on them. Wish them a Happy Birthday. Birthdays are big on Facebook. Always acknowledge them. Maybe even offer them a discount coupon for a birthday treat via Facebook.

On Twitter:
Retweet their stories and comment on them! Reply to each and every message. Keep the conversation going. Get them to trust you. For example, one of my favorite Twitter followers is @heykim. She is an amazing example of how to do it right. She has thousands of followers. But she has even more friends. She friended thousands of people little by little and engaged with them, retweeting their tweets, commenting on their tweets, checking in on topics those folks had tweeted on days before. Now, she’s constantly in conversation with folks like Morgan Fairchild, Alyssa Milano and Kathy Ireland. Alyssa Milano even just shared a linked @heykim posted tonight about how Twitter has transformed over the last five years. Who would’ve thought? She’s not famous. The key is she knows how to engage. And she never misses a #FF (Follow Friday). On Friday’s many people share with their friends, their favorite people to follow, encouraging others to follow them as well.

Google+: It’s a cross between Facebook and Twitter. It’s great because you can create circles of certain people you want to target for different reasons. It makes it easier to post certain promotions to one group vs. another.LinkedIn: The best way to engage with potential customers is by joining industry groups and starting group discussions.

Very important: Do not ask for help/favors from people until you’re friends or at least warm acquaintances with them. And the #1 way to become friends is to offer tons of help/favors without expecting anything in return. In the words of Michael Ellsberg, Forbes Contributor and Author of “Self-Educated Millionaires: The Seven Skills You’ll Never Learn in College, “Networking is a *long term* activity – it CANNOT be done for short-term results. Follow these basic concepts, and you’ll be ahead of 99.99% of the knuckleheads out there who are botching their networking attempts online!” Also, a great book to read is by Brian Solis, Principal at Altimeter Group, “Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web.”

8. STAY CURRENT: Get alerts sent to your phone when folks engage with you via your social networking sites – at least in the beginning – that way you respond quickly.

Please share your tips and tricks that will help small businesses sign-up and use social media. This certainly just scratches the surface. Please share the most creative marketing campaigns via social media in the comment section below.