Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

Does social networking media help you gain an identity or lose it?

Mar 04, 2008 1 Comment »

While going through this blog post at read/write web this particular portion:

1. Search based on what my friends find relevant
2. Elevate stories tagged by my friends — anywhere (maybe multiple social graphs web 2.0 & shopping)
3. Compare daily portfolio performance to friends
4. In terms of advertising, which of my friends owns a Focus & what do they think of it?

made me wonder, "will my every decision depend on the actions of my friends if I am extremely active on social networking websites?"

Isn’t it too much "trending"? Why do I need to know what my friends are reading in order to purchase a book? This way I am propagating a herd mentality. Maybe my friends on the social networking websites read something totally different than what I would like to read. They might be watching different movies than what I would like to watch. Where is your individuality if your identity depends on the sort of friends and acquaintances you have on the social networking websites?

Does too much interaction on social networking websites stifle your spirit? You are always trying to do what the others are doing and never get the chance to think about what you want to do as a person. I don’t have much experience in social media so it might be the case that my thinking is a bit misdirected. Please do she your thoughts on this.

Should you use social media to boost SEO

Feb 25, 2008 2 Comments »

Steve Rubel of Micro Persuations decries this new trend amidst Internet marketers to use social media for the purpose of search engine optimization and Andy Beal reacts to it by calling it hypocritical. I think they are at the extreme ends of both the opinions.

Nobody can doubt that social media is revolutionary. It empowers people to interact and share ideas and thoughts with each other without any interference from the traditional media tools like television and newspapers and magazines and herein lies its quintessential strength and this is the reason why social media is such a hit among the average net users. And this is the reason why the SEO experts and the Internet marketers want to tap into its reach.

Blogging is a prime example of the power of social media. I don’t have much experience with other social media websites but I have plenty of experience creating and managing blogs so I can comfortably talk from this perspective. Is it wrong to use blogging as an SEO tool? Depends on what you call SEO.

The main purpose of SEO is to generate relevant traffic to your website or blog and I see no harm in it especially when you are generating traffic for genuinely useful content or service. For instance if I maintain a blog on content writing and content publishing what is wrong in it if I try to highlight my content in front of those people who want to read my content but don’t know how to find it?

Similarly using your blog mainly to search engine optimize your business website defeats the very purpose of maintaining a blog because the main purpose of maintaining a blog is setting up a communication channel with your readers so that you can exchange ideas and information with them. If, with various SEO tactics you can get tons of traffic but you don’t have anything important to offer, you are simply wasting people’s time and this is where I begin to agree with Steve.

How does social media marketing affect your business

Feb 22, 2008 1 Comment »

Social media marketing amplifies customer opinion rather than improving it, says Josh at Bokardo.com, and he slightly disagrees with the fact that it helps you generate buzz and consequently generates more business for you.

I think both the things apply: it surely does amplify opinion about your product or service because there are so many people using social media; and it also creates buzz and generates sales for you.

Social media marketing includes blogs, social networking websites and social bookmarking websites. Compared to normal business websites there are more people, hundreds of thousands of times more people visiting and using social media websites. Every kind of information spreads like wildfire in social media websites because people who interact on these websites are generally more communicative than normal people, and they have more means to communicate. They like to spread messages and share information with each other. They visit other blogs, read your opinions and give opinions. So of course even small messages sometimes get large coverage. You can call this buzz. Due to this buzz lots of people come to your website and if they want to do business with you, they do it.

Does lack of a social media marketing strategy adversely affect your business? It is same is asking does not having a website affect your business? This is because there are many businesses that don’t need a website. And there are businesses that need a website. And among those businesses that need a website there is a fierce competition to get more and more exposure on the Internet and for that they use all the tools available in the contemporary world. Social media marketing is one of those tools. If you use only social media marketing and ignore other tools social media marketing is not going to be very effective. On the other hand if you are using other tools and if there is another company that is using social media marketing along with other tools of course that company is going to have an edge over your company.

The Ongoing Microsoft and Yahoo! (or Google?) Merger Things

Feb 05, 2008 No Comments »

Note: According to the latest buzz Google is trying to salvage Yahoo from Microsoft’s hostile overtures by orchestrating a bigger bid than Microsoft’s $44.6 billion. By the time I read this latest update I had already started writing on the previous scenario so I am going ahead and publishing the post.

I have had neutral feelings for Microsoft for many years. Back in the mid-90s I used to admire it for making the PC easier to use. I still remember sitting on my friend’s XT computer and working with DOS, WordStar and dBase. I was doing my computer course and outside of my institute he was the only person who had that big and expensive (Rs. 50,000 plus, in today’s rates more than $1200) computer. Then during the course we were introduced to Windows 3.1 if I remember correctly. As software became easier to use I found more and more people using computers in their day-to-day lives with greater regularity and the credit goes to Microsoft. It followed monopolistic policies but at least the computer moved out of geeky realms  and became a common person’s productivity tool.

But as the new technologies emerged Microsoft became too complacent and got left behind especially by the companies like Google. Now it is just another company. It is able to sell its operating system and other software only because people have gotten too used to  using them and are reluctant — even at the cost of productivity and security — to try out newer, safer and more efficient software. It is just like some companies are still running COBOL applications. Microsoft sat smug on the strength of its operating system being shipped pre-installed with more than 90% PCs. It has hardly ever produced a totally new software; whatever it has produced and marketed so far has either been an improvisation of existing software or various acquisitions. The only aggression it showed towards making forays into the Internet was when it decimated Netscape in order to promote the Internet Explorer and even that now lags behind Firefox in terms of robustness and web compliance.

Easy availability of fast bandwidth is enabling people to access conventional applications like word processors and spreadsheets online. Google’s office applications are already making a dent into Microsoft’s commercial office applications market. There will soon come a time when people will require just a basic operating system — any operating system that can be easily used — and a decently compatible browser to use most of the day-to-day applications. Other than that they won’t need anything. To top it all most of the applications are either going to be available for free (like they are presently) or through very low cost subscription system. So Microsoft will soon have to curtail its dependence on selling desktop applications. It will have to change its business model drastically in order to survive.

Although Yahoo is an old company it changes faster than Microsoft just because by nature it depends on the Internet to survive. Just like Google it depends a lot on advertising revenue sources. With $1.4 billion in advertising revenue Yahoo earned $.20 of every dollar spent on online advertising last year. Compared to this Microsoft’s MSN earned just $423 million (according to OMMA magazine estimates). On top of that with $12.65 per thousand unique visitors Yahoo has the highest  CPM among the top online advertisers.

Hence one can easily make out that for Microsoft the shortest way to securing good, long-term advertising revenues would be acquiring an online company that is already a leader in this field.

In the present state of affairs as far as search is concerned, Microsoft, even when combined with Yahoo, cannot even think of competing with Google. More than 65% of search on the Internet happens on Google. This is more than double even if the searches from both Microsoft and Yahoo added together (according to Hitwise). The online ad exposure of course will get a boost and this is what Microsoft must be aiming for.

How is it going to affect all the services that Yahoo provides to its existing users? For instance what is going to happen to Flickr? Personally I have never used Flickr to host images but I know there are millions of enthusiastic photographers who use Flickr to share their images. I think the accounts will be merged with the existing windows live accounts as discussed on the Read/Write blog.

And what about search? Will you have to change your SEO strategy? I don’t think so unless there is a revolutionary change in the search concepts. My personal experience is that the most significant traffic source for a few years at least is going to be Google. The ranking system at Yahoo at present is quite weird and I prefer MSN results. Basically you should focus upon creating accessible websites with lots of relevant content and your websites and blogs should show up in all major search engines and if they don’t then it’s a problem with the search engines and not with your websites and blogs.

An Example Of A Great Headline

Feb 03, 2008 No Comments »

Online copywriters and content writers are always stressing upon the overwhelming importance of creating great, compelling webpage titles or headlines. You need great webpage titles to draw traffic from the search engine result pages as well as from the various social bookmarking websites you’re planning to target. I remember a few months ago I had written a post on the subject of creating great blog post titles.

Yesterday morning I was sitting in the balcony enjoying the winter sun with my wife and we were both sipping tea and casually browsing through our respective newspapers. Whenever we are sitting together my wife often jokes that I’m more interested in what she is doing and less interested in my own things. This was one of those moments when my eyes were on her newspaper instead of my newspaper. She gets a Hindi newspaper; I noticed this heading on the first page and immediately thought what a great headline it was.

If you look at the image included above I have encircled the headline. It translates to: Aishwarya Rai and Angeline Jolie may have a common ancestor. The news that was associated with the title had nothing to do with the two beauties, it referred to a recent research that has shown that all the blue-eyed people in the world may have a common ancestor. The team that created the front page layout of the newspaper knows that it would be irresistible for most of the people to ignore the title and in fact my wife headed straightaway to page 12 to see how Aishwarya Rai and Angeline Jolie may be related to each other.

Had they used a simple heading, something like, all blue-eyed people have a common ancestor, it wouldn’t have interested many people.

What makes this a catchy headline? The copywriter knows how crazy people are about reading about both the ladies. Although it is a Hindi newspaper and many readers may not be familiar with Angelina Jolie, even the stray dogs in India know Aishwarya Rai. The readers would certainly like to know with which foreign beauty she shares an ancestor. The copywriter has combined the celebrity status of both the names and created a headline that cannot fail to perform even when it doesn’t talk about them.

Would the readers be pissed off after reading the news because they find out that these two beauties are not related in the real sense? I don’t think so because the headline doesn’t mislead; they both have blue eyes after all and the blue-eyed people are supposed to have a common ancestor and hence they should too have a common ancestor.

Later on I discovered that most newspapers, at least in India, used the same sort of headline referring to Aishwarya Rai and Angelina Jolie.