When marketing on Facebook we need to remember that Facebook is all about making the world more open and connected. This has a profound impact on the way people communicate and interact. Facebook is continuously developing ways for people to connect with one another as well as with the businesses, institutions and brands they care about.

Marketing on Facebook allows marketers to to stay connected with people throughout the day whether they are on their computers or mobile devices, or at home or at work. Marketing on Facebook allows marketers to create rich social experiences and build lasting relationships using the most powerful type of marketing – word of mouth.

Connecting with people is just the beginning, in this article you’ll find best practices for reaching your marketing on Facebook objectives.

Marketing on Facebook – The Basics

Step 1 – Build your presence with a Facebook page. A page allows you to create an identity for your business. Use social plugins, Graph API and Apps on Facebook to create social experiences.

Step 2 – Engage. Create these touch points to start building a fan base.

• Facebook Like Ads is the quickest way to start getting fans
• Engage in conversations with your fans. This allows you to build relationships with your fans and gain insights to their wants and needs.

Step 3 – Amplify – Every time someone interacts with your business that interaction gets published into the news feed, creating word of mouth. These conversations are extremely active in getting others to engage and take action. You can also use Facebook ads and Sponsored stories to share these conversations with a much larger audience of potential customers.

The Five Guiding Principals of Marketing on Facebook

Build a Marketing on Facebook Strategy That is Social by Design

Social should be build into everything that you do, and not be added on afterwards as an afterthought. Integrate your marketing on Facebook with your other marketing efforts, like your blog or website.

Create an Authentic Brand Voice

Facebook is all about being clear and open about who you are, be the same by providing straightforward info about your business.

Make Your Marketing on Facebook Interactive

Facebook is social and people spend time on Facebook communicating and sharing ideas with one another. Always engage in a two way conversation. Create content around your brand that people will be excited to pass on to their friends.

Nurture Your Relationships

As it is in the real world building relationships on Facebook takes time and long term effort. Keep content fresh and easy to take in. Use ads to stay in touch with people and reward them for their loyalty with something of value i.e. content, a give-away, coupons or access to info reserved only for people who like your page.

Keep Learning to be Successful at Marketing on Facebook

You can get feedback from people on Facebook in real time. Use this feedback to tweak your marketing on Facebook

Marketing on Facebook by Objectives

Let’s look at marketing on Facebook by concentrating on the following objectives:

• Foster product development and innovation
• Generate awareness
• Drive preference and differentiation
• Increase traffic and sales
• Build loyalty and deepen relationships
• Amplify recommendation and word of mouth
• Gain insights

Foster Product Development and Innovation

Facebook allows you to learn about your target audience and get to know their interests and friends. With this in mind Facebook can be used to generate ideas for new products and services. You can for example build new product experiences like an online store that only displays to your friends.

Generate Awareness

Once you have a page, it’s time to generate awareness of your page and brand. Do this by using Facebook’s targeting capabilities with Facebook Ads and Sponsored Stories. These ads and stories are shown with stories about friends who have already engaged with you on Facebook. This word of mouth is hugely effective at driving awareness.

Drive Preference and Differentiation

Facebook is a great platform for driving preference and differentiation of your brand over your competitors. Marketing on Facebook allows people to discover your brand through referrals from trusted friends. Drive preference by interacting with and rewarding your fans.

Increase Traffic and Sales

Facebook turns purchasing into a social decision because it enables people to show their friends what they like and have purchased. Marketing on Facebook allows you to create viral promotional events, publicize offers or run deals for your fans. The powerful thing is that every time someone RSVPs, clicks or checks-in, that action gets shared with all of their friends. This is extremely powerful at driving traffic and sales.

Build Loyalty and Deepen Relationships

Marketing on Facebook is all about relationships. People who like your page are saying they want a relationship with you. These connections allow you to build relationships with loyal customers who in turn spread the word about you and your brand.

Amplify Recommendation and Word of Mouth

Everything you do on Facebook is viral because all your actions are posted to the news feed. People rely on their friends to allow them to discover new things. Therefor sharing should be build into all of your marketing on Facebook activities. Some Facebook tools to help you amplify word of mouth and recommendations are:

• encourage people to like your page
• create great content that encourages sharing and keep it fresh
• integrate social plugins, “Like” button for example, with all of your online places
• use Facebook ads and Sponsored stories to create word of mouth
• Learn and improve

Gain Insights

You can learn about your customers by observing them and by engaging with them directly. Learn who your customers are and what they think about you. When used properly these insights can help you improve your business.

If you found this useful you will definitely benefit from this FREE Facebook Marketing Gone Wild presentation a “Fully Loaded Facebook Training” that will take you Step-by-Step and Teach You EVERYTHING You Need to Know to Make Money on Facebook. Watch the FREE Facebook Marketing Gone Wild training now!

You may also like to read How To Get More Likes on Facebook and How To Increase Facebook Fans on Your Fanpage

Ray Greyling

Follow Me On Twitter – Ray Greyling on twitter
Follow Me On Facebook At – Ray Greyling on Facebook Remember to click the “Like” button.
You can also “Like” my Page from this site by clicking “Like” in the Facebook Box on the right of this page. Do it Now!

PS: You can get updates like this and others by entering your name and email in the box at the top right hand side of my site.

PSS: If You Want To Learn How To Succeed Online, Check This Out (Unless You Already Have Too Many Leads) – Click My Lead Generation System For Instant Access

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As an online marketer, you probably already know that you need to Increase Facebook Fans to raise your Facebook awareness, and ultimately awareness of your company or brand. Facebook has more than 800 million active users, and more than 50% log on to Facebook in any given day. This presents businesses and marketers with a huge opportunity to use Facebook to drive traffic, build relationships with users and ultimately convert new customers.

If you’re an online marketer building your business online, implementing Facebook marketing strategies can really drive tons of traffic to your blog. Your blog in turn can help you increase Facebook fans as well. It works both ways and by working to actively increase Facebook fans you are connecting with people and building relationships. These relationships generate leads and ultimately customers. Are you are looking for ways to increase Facebook fans to raise awareness of your company or brand, if so here is a great tip to get you started:

How To Increase Facebook Fans

Increase Facebook Fans With a Call To Action

Just having a Facebook Like button or Facebook fan page box on your blog is not enough. You need to build your fan base and one of the most powerful strategies is having a call to action at the end of your blog posts.

A call to action is a way to get your blog visitor to take a specific action (do something). When you get a visitor on your blog or Facebook page your goal is to direct them towards your email list where you can continue to build a relationship with them. If you don’t tell them to subscribe to your email or “Like” your page they will leave and you may never see them again. you’ve then lost the opportunity to generate a lead or buying customer.

By giving them a call to action you give them a way to continue receiving valuable information from you, information that will help them solve their problems. You can then move them to your email list when they opt-in and become a fan.

To increase Facebook fans fast try making the irresistible offer. Basically your getting their name and email in exchange for access to additional information.

When working to increase Facebook fans, remember that your goal is to drive traffic to your blog as well as drive traffic to you Facebook page. This in turn drives more traffic to your blog. It becomes a continuous cycle that helps you build a perpetual fan base that connects with you daily, helps promote your brand, your content and creates a social buzz. This helps build you as a person of interest in your niche.

This is only one strategy you can use to increase Facebook fans. If you found this useful you will definitely benefit from this FREE Facebook Marketing Gone Wild presentation a “Fully Loaded Facebook Training” that will take you Step-by-Step and Teach You EVERYTHING You Need to Know to Make Money on Facebook. Watch the FREE Facebook Marketing Gone Wild training now!

You may also like to read How To Get More Likes on Facebook and Facebook Prospecting Tips – How To Generate Quality Leads

Ray Greyling

Follow Me On Twitter – Ray Greyling on twitter
Follow Me On Facebook At – Ray Greyling on Facebook Remember to click the “Like” button. See what I just did! A call to action.
You can also “Like” my Page from this site by clicking “Like” in the Facebook Box on the right of this page. Do it Now! There I did it again, another call to action.

PS: You can get updates like this and others by entering your name and email in the box at the top right hand side of my site.

PSS: If You Want To Learn How To Succeed Online, Check This Out (Unless You Already Have Too Many Leads) – Click My Lead Generation System For Instant Access

Image: Kittikun Atsawintarangkul / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Facebook marketing depends on increasing your presence by getting “liked”, but how do you get more likes on Facebook? Integrating Facebook into your marketing strategy will allow you to potentially reach millions of people from all over the world. I say “potentially reach” because if you don’t do it properly all your effort and hard work won’t do much to help build your brand.

Here are a two strategies you can use to get more likes on Facebook. Follow the guidelines in this post and future posts to start increasing your presence and likes to your page.

Strategies To Get More Likes On Facebook

1. Increase Your Presence to Get More Likes on Facebook

The first thing you need to do is to increase the exposure of your status updates among your friends. Don’t think that Facebook shows your status updates to all your friends. In actual fact Facebook only shows your status updates to a limited number of your friends. This limits the number of likes you could get because not everyone is seeing your status updates.

You’ll get more likes on Facebook just by making sure that ALL your friends see your status updates.

Facebook shows your status updates to the people you interact with the most. To put it another way, if you want people to see your status updates, they should be interacting with you.

How do you get your friends to interact with you?

Take the initiative and start by giving. Start following, liking and commenting on  the status updates of those friends that you haven’t interacted with in a long time.  In this way you invite your friends to start interacting with you and you’re status updates will be seen by more people. This will ultimately lead you to get more likes on Facebook.

2. Get More Likes on Facebook by Offering Rewards

Add an incentive to your page and reward people that like your page with an immediate reward. This could be:

• a 30 day trial to the service you offer
• valuable content only available for your Facebook fans
• a discount code to your products or services.
• you could also do a give away which is again only open to people who like your page.

You are allowed to require a user to “Like” your Facebook page so long as it is through the app you are running your promotion on. Facebook says that you may not give users an incentive to Like any page “other than your own site or application“. Additionally any incentive you provide must be available to new and existing users who Like your page.

Market your Rewards

If you have a give away as an incentive to get more likes on Facebook, however, remember that you still need to get people to your page before they can “Like” you. Marketing your page is still vital to get people to it over and above those that just stumble upon it.

Invoke The Power of Word of Mouth to Get More Leads on Facebook.

This is social media! Ensure you make the incentive or give away shareable so that those who “Like” it can share it with their friends. Allow your someone to share it on other sites (twitter for example) as well as on Facebook.

Choose Your Prize Wisely

The ideal incentive or give away is one that is tightly aligned with your brand identity. Don’t give away an iPad if it doesn’t lead people to engage with your brand or click through to your website.

If you want more information on how to get more likes on Facebook, check out my post Get “Famous On Facebook” in 60 Days! and watch the Get “Famous On Facebook” in 60 Days! webinar.

Ray Greyling

Follow Me On Twitter – Ray Greyling on twitter
Check Out My FB Fan Page – Ray Greyling on Facebook

PS: You can get updates like this and others by entering your name and email in the box at the top right hand side of my site.

PSS: If You Want To Learn How To Succeed Online, Check This Out (Unless You Already Have Too Many Leads) – Click My Lead Generation System For Instant Access

Image: tungphoto / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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With the amount of traffic it gets, Facebook can be an excellent source of quality prospects. Keep in mind though that Facebook prospecting is a medium to long term strategy so don’t expect results on day one.

The SECRET to finding quality prospects on Facebook as with any other lead generation technique is consistency. Keep at it day in and day out and in a few months you WILL get results.

This is something you can do and then train your team on as it duplicates very well and anyone can do it.

Facebook Prospecting – What You Will Learn

• How to find the perfect prospect
• How to make a true connection
• How to approach with your business and how to get them to approach you
• How to get them on the phone
• How to turn someone around when they’re approaching you

Facebook Prospecting – The Perfect Prospect

Start the Facebook prospecting process by looking at Facebook groups. Find groups around people that are looking for or who are interested in your type of business. Examples may be groups focused around

• Network Marketing
• Working from home
• Work from home moms/dads
• Local Realtors
• Business networking groups and so on.

You then look at the members of these groups. Read their comments and link to people you feel you can connect with.

Facebook Prospecting – Characteristics of The Perfect Prospect

You’re looking for people that:

• Are Positive – These people usually are open to new ideas and opportunities. They are pro-active and take charge of their lives
• Don’t leave Extremely Long Comments – Usually these people have too much time on their hands and go on and on about things that have little relevance
• Are Non-Argumentative – You don’t want to get into arguments and mud slinging with people online. If they post nasty comments or are always trying to prove they know better, just leave them along. It’s not worth your time and effort.
• Show an Indication of Openness – It shows that they are serious, real and are not trying to hide something. I’m always weary of people who don’t have a profile picture for example or who haven’t bothered to provide at least some information about themselves on their profile page.
• Are Professional – Not only those that conduct themselves in a professional manner but also professionals in various fields.

Facebook Prospecting – How To Make a Connection

• Once you’ve identified your “Perfect Prospect” send them an individual message (no copying and pasting). Take the time to read there profile and write the message accordingly
• Ask a lot of questions. A good question is “What do you do?” Your goal is to make people curious and have them want to find out more about you.
• You may also ask them “How will I know when I’m talking to someone, that they’re a good client /prospect for you?”
• NEVER send links unless asked
• Your profile is very important. This is how people get to know you. When I message someone I don’t know I always send them a friend request. This allows them to see my profile and find out more about me.
• Post exciting things about your business but not overly excessively. Mix it up with personal stuff as well.
• Attract people to you with posts. Hint: If you add someone to your team post this ” Welcome [John] a dentist from [Jersey] to the [Your Business Name] team”

Facebook Prospecting – Approaching With Your Business

Only start approaching them about your business AFTER you have built a relationship with them. Build relationships by connecting with people and send out 5-10 messages per day. The key here is to:

• Find out what they struggle with
• Get them to ask you more about what you do

Facebook Prospecting – Get them on the phone

This is Network Marketing after all. You need to talk to your prospects!

There is not just one way to do this  but make sure your connection is ready for this step.

A great line to use is something like this…

“My number is 862 812 0424 call me if you have any questions, what’s yours. I’d like to have it so that I know who’s calling me.”

This gives them the opportunity of calling you and asks for their number in a non-threatening way.

Facebook Prospecting – Diverting the “Pitchman”

Doing Facebook prospecting is going to lead to having people contact you to try to pitch your their company, why it’s the best and why their products are the greatest. Deflect this by asking what they’re doing to generate leads and how it’s working for them. Creating doubt in their minds is going to get them to start asking questions about what you do.

Facebook Prospecting – What You Learned

• How to find the perfect prospect
• How to make a true connection
• How to approach with your business and how to get them to approach you
• How to get them on the phone
• How to turn someone around when they’re pitching to you.

Final Thoughts

• Send out 5 – 10 messages and friend requests per day. You should only be spending 1/2 to 1 hour per day on this
• Pace yourself, take it slow, you don’t want to be branded as a spammer
• Be CONSISTENT. Don’t try Facebook prospecting if you’re only going to do it for a few days.
• You will get critics and negative people. Don’t let it bother you, just keep at it.

You may also be interested in reading my post Get “Famous On Facebook” in 60 Days!

Facebook has grown like no other website in the history of the Internet, and it is the center of the Social Media arena at the moment. There are millions of people connecting on Facebook on a daily basis.

If you’re not making money on Facebook you’re doing something wrong.

Last night I watched a fantastic webinar about how two broke musicians quietly tip-toed around Facebook, created their profiles, built a few fan pages, started a handful of groups, and within months were master marketers on Facebook generating 100′s of leads each day for their Network Marketing business.

I’m providing you with a recording of this webinar here as Free Facebook Training to prove to you that absolutely anybody can implement this simple marketing approach. What’s more these strategies are completely free, all you need to do is invest so time wisely on building your profile.

What you’ll learn about marketing on Facebook

In this webinar our two Facebook marketing “Rockstars” reveal…

• Where Facebook keeps their coveted “Facebook Phone book“, and how you can get instant access to HUNDREDS of leads you already generated, but didn’t even know you had!
• A crazy slick Google Chrome plug-in for Facebook that will save you HOURS of time.
• How they leveraged Facebook to get a blog ranked in the top .1% of the websites in the world!
• Why they get well over 1 000 unique visitors to their site for free per day thanks to Facebook.
• They use “No-Technical” approach to Facebook and made more money because of it.

This Has Nothing to Do With Facebook PPC!

The best part is that anyone can implement this 100% free marketing approach!

I have already started implementing some of the things I learned on this webinar to boost my Facebook page.

Watch The Webinar you’ll be happy you did.

Be sure to check out 6 Online Lead Generation Techniques.

Twitter

Micro-blogging is a Social Media tool that combines elements of blogging with instant messaging.

The clear leader in the micro-blogging field is Twitter with over 1 million users.

There are other notable micro-blogging players include Pownce and Jaiku, which offer various different features, but for the purposes of this post I’ll focus on the Twitter format.

Twitter has grown into a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices.

In countries all around the world, people follow the sources most relevant to them and access information via Twitter as it happens—from breaking world news to updates from friends.

Simplicity has played an important role in Twitter’s success. People are eager to connect with other people and Twitter makes that simple. Twitter asks one question, “What are you doing?” Answers must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the web.

The result of using Twitter to stay connected with friends, relatives, and coworkers is that you have a sense of what folks are up to but you are not expected to respond to any updates unless you want to. This means you can step in and out of the flow of information as it suits you and it never queues up with increasing demand of your attention.

Additionally, users are very much in control of whose updates they receive, when they receive them, and on what device. For example, Twitter provide settings for scheduling it to automatically turn off at dinnertime and users can switch off Twitter updates at any point.

Simply put, Twitter is what you make of it–receive a lot of information about your friends, or just a tiny bit. It’s up to you.

And what that means for the way we communicate

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

Getty Images (4 on the left); Google Wave
Services like Twitter, Facebook and Google Wave create a constant stream of interaction among users—for better or worse.

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.

Journal Community

“I’ll stick with e-mail — write when I want, as often (or not ) as I want, to whom I want privately. No interest in letting the world know that I overcooked the spaghetti.”

—–Don Brazier
We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don’t need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public “status” on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

Digits

•    How Many Emails Did You Send Yesterday?
Little wonder that while email continues to grow, other types of communication services are growing far faster. In August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people.

“The whole idea of this email service isn’t really quite as significant anymore when you can have many, many different types of messages and files and when you have this all on the same type of networks,” says Alex Bochannek, curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

So, how will these new tools change the way we communicate? Let’s start with the most obvious: They make our interactions that much faster.

Into the River

Years ago, we were frustrated if it took a few days for a letter to arrive. A couple of years ago, we’d complain about a half-hour delay in getting an email. Today, we gripe about it taking an extra few seconds for a text message to go through. In a few months, we may be complaining that our cellphones aren’t automatically able to send messages to friends within a certain distance, letting them know we’re nearby. (A number of services already do this.)

The Journal Report

These new services also make communicating more frequent and informal—more like a blog comment or a throwaway aside, rather than a crafted email sent to one person. No need to spend time writing a long email to your half-dozen closest friends about how your vacation went. Now those friends, if they’re interested, can watch it unfold in real time online. Instead of sending a few emails a week to a handful of friends, you can send dozens of messages a day to hundreds of people who know you, or just barely do.

Consider Twitter. The service allows users to send 140-character messages to people who have subscribed to see them, called followers. So instead of sending an email to friends announcing that you just got a new job, you can just tweet it for all the people who have chosen to “follow” you to see. You can create links to particular users in messages by entering @ followed by their user name or send private “direct messages” through the system by typing d and the user name.

Facebook is part of the trend, too. Users post status updates that show up in their friends’ “streams.” They can also post links to content and comment on it. No in-box required.
Dozens of other companies, from AOL and Yahoo Inc. to start-ups like Yammer Inc., are building products based on the same theme.

David Liu, an executive at AOL, calls it replacing the in-box with “a river that continues to flow as you dip into it.”

But the speed and ease of communication cut both ways. While making communication more frequent, they can also make it less personal and intimate. Communicating is becoming so easy that the recipient knows how little time and thought was required of the sender. Yes, your half-dozen closest friends can read your vacation updates. But so can your 500 other “friends.” And if you know all these people are reading your updates, you might say a lot less than you would otherwise.

Too Much Information

Another obvious downside to the constant stream: It’s a constant stream.

That can make it harder to determine the importance of various messages. When people can more easily fire off all sorts of messages—from updates about their breakfast to questions about the evening’s plans—being able to figure out which messages are truly important, or even which warrant a response, can be difficult. Information overload can lead some people to tune out messages altogether.

Such noise makes us even more dependent on technology to help us communicate. Without software to help filter and organize based on factors we deem relevant, we’d drown in the deluge.

Enter filtering. In email land, consumers can often get by with a few folders, if that. But in the land of the stream, some sort of more sophisticated filtering is a must.

On Facebook, you can choose to see updates only from certain people you add to certain lists. Twitter users have adopted the trend of “tagging” their tweets by topic. So people tweeting about a company may follow their tweet with the # symbol and the company name. A number of software programs filter Tweets by these tags, making it easier to follow a topic.

The combination of more public messages and tagging has cool search and discovery implications. In the old days, people shared photos over email. Now, they post them to Flickr and tag them with their location. That means users can, with little effort, search for an area, down to a street corner, and see photos of the place.

Tagging also is creating the potential for new social movements. Instead of trying to organize people over email, protesters can tweet their messages, tag them with the topic and have them discovered by others interested in the cause. Iranians used that technique to galvanize public opinion during their election protests earlier this year. It was a powerful example of what can happen when messages get unleashed.

Who Are You?

Perhaps the biggest change that these email successors bring is more of a public profile for users. In the email world, you are your name followed by a “dot-com.” That’s it. In the new messaging world, you have a higher profile, packed with data you want to share and possibly some you don’t.

Such a public profile has its pluses and minuses. It can draw the people communicating closer, allowing them to exchange not only text but also all sorts of personal information, even facial cues. You know a lot about the person you are talking to, even before you’ve ever exchanged a single word.

Take, for example, Facebook. Message someone over the site and, depending on your privacy settings, he may be a click away from your photos and your entire profile, including news articles you have shared and pictures of that party you were at last night. The extra details can help you cut to the chase. If you see that I am in London, you don’t need to ask me where I am. They can also make communication feel more personal, restoring some of the intimacy that social-network sites—and email, for that matter—have stripped away. If I have posted to the world that I am in a bad mood, you might try to cheer me up, or at least think twice about bothering me.

Email is trying to compete by helping users roll in more signals about themselves. Yahoo and Google Inc. have launched new profile services that connect to mail accounts. That means just by clicking on a contact, one can see whatever information she has chosen to share through her profile, from her hobbies to her high school.

But a dump of personal data can also turn off the people you are trying to communicate with. If I really just want to know what time the meeting is, I may not care that you have updated your status message to point people to photos of your kids.

Having your identity pegged to communication creates more data to manage and some blurry lines. What’s fine for one sort of recipient to know about you may not be acceptable for another. While our growing digital footprints have made it easier for anyone to find personal information about anyone online if they go search for it, new communications tools are marrying that trail of information with the message, making it easier than ever for the recipient to uncover more details.

A Question of Time

Meanwhile, one more big question remains: Will the new services save time, or eat up even more of it?

Many of the companies pitching the services insist they will free up people.

Jeff Teper, vice president of Microsoft Corp.’s SharePoint division, which makes software that businesses use to collaborate, says in the past, employees received an email every time the status changed on a project they were working on, which led to hundreds of unnecessary emails a day. Now, thanks to SharePoint and other software that allows companies to direct those updates to flow through centralized sites that employees can check when they need to, those unnecessary emails are out of users’ in-boxes.

“People were very dependent on email. They overused it,” he says. “Now, people can use the right tool for the right task.”

Perhaps. But there’s another way to think about all this. You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn’t meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to somebody in person.

—Ms. Vascellaro is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau. She can be reached at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com

Social Media Marketing is an excellent strategy that can make your business more profitable even if you don’t have a website.

As an Internet Marketing Consultant I often get asked ‘What is Social Media?’ and ‘How can I use Social Media in my business’.
I order to answer these questions and to provide a source of information I’ve written ‘How To Use Social Media To Build Your Brand – A Guide For Business Owners And Marketers’.

It’s aimed at owners and marketers of small to medium size businesses who are interested in exploring ways to leverage the power of the Internet to build awareness for their products and services.

I’ve just come accross an excellent post on Johnson & Johnson’s blog on how people suffering from MS are using Second Life to form a community of MS patients where they can share information, experiences and generally support each other.

Check out the full article “Getting Healthy Online“

For those that are doubtfull of the influence Social Media can have on our lives consider this as reported by CNN

Second Life affair ends in divorce