After recently announcing the improvements and changes to Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the Facebook team have been picking up on a lot of slack regarding user privacy issues. It has gotten to the point where talk of boycotting Facebook altogether is being considered.

While a total boycott seems a tad extreme, there are some new precautions every Facebook user should take to ensure their personal safety and privacy.

Read this article, posted by Mashable and written by Adam Rosenberg of Salsa Labs and keep yourself protected!

Chatter can be obnoxious. Typically, chatter is incessant noise back and forth about mindless topics that interrupts daily tasks.

But now, following suit to millions of others, chatter has embraced the world of technology and transformed into a useful method of communication for marketing.

Chatter is currently taking place through social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter and in the form of blogs and e-mail blasts. These “interruptions” are now viewed more positively and emphasis is placed higher on who is actually doing the interrupting and how efficient they are in doing so. The way they engage their audience, the relevance of their interruption, how well they reciprocate, and the level of thoughtfulness are all factors in judging chatter through the internet.

Most importantly, marketers need to converse with their audience in a way that connects one to the other in a personal manner. Chatter should not be based solely upon selling products or advertising; it should strive for a thoughtful, back-and-forth exchange that lets the audience know they are appreciated and not simply a potential dollar sign.

Constant chatter through the internet has some issues like any other means of using the internet involving privacy. Most activities performed on the internet can in some way be tracked, analyzed, recorded, and distributed anywhere. This isn’t entirely a negative thing, however. Marketers can use this information and chat with an audience about what specifically interests them. This eliminates some of the mass quantity of irrelevant information that is available to you on the Internet.

There are millions of conversations going on through the Internet now at any given time. Is this the new meaning of chatter?

Chatter Marketing

Little known Facebook facts with everything you could ever want to know…and more!

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Are you LinkedIn? This social media site has served as an extremely valuable asset for networking. It connects people internationally, providing them with countless opportunities that would not have been possible without the Internet.

With that said, LinkedIn is not currently one of the top social media sites. In attempts to change this, they recently introduced a handful of new attributes for LinkedIn, resembling some of the features used by Facebook. The mindset is that by attempting to replicate the personal social media networks, this business social network will engage users better and make its use more efficient.

Much like there is a divide between anything personal and business in the workforce, a divide between the personal and business social networks remains.

Jolie O’Dell from Mashable provides us with some helpful insights on how to maximize LinkedIn and make it work to your benefit.

1. Stay Top-of-Mind

Posting once a day, and syndicating that post to your business’ Twitter and Facebook accounts, can help you remain fresh in the minds of your connections and customers. As long as the content is relevant and valuable, it will be appreciated and re-shared. Just remember to not overshare; users will be quickly turned off if their timelines on every network are flooded with updates from you. Space out your LinkedIn shares to maximize their value for your network.

2. Finding New Talent

If you’re expanding your team, LinkedIn is one of the largest and fastest-growing resources for finding the perfect candidate. Particularly in this economy, letting the world know that you’re hiring is some of the most valuable information you can send out on the wire! Write a brand-appropriate blog post giving very specific details on the kind of person you’re looking for. Give your post a simple, sharable headline that contains the company name and position available… and try to avoid use of the term “ninja” if at all possible. When you’re sharing this link, be absolutely sure to include a call to action for every connection to pass this information on to others. For more tips on using LinkedIn to find rockstar employees, check out this article.

3. Crowdsourcing Solutions and Getting Feedback

If you’ve got ideas you want to run by your peers or a nagging business problem that needs a solution, LinkedIn groups and Q&A are popular and effective ways to get feedback. But sharing allows you to cross-post your query across multiple networks and add supporting data such as a picture or Web site link. One of the best aspects of using LinkedIn for soliciting feedback is that the comments from your professional network will all be collected in a single thread in your LinkedIn profile.

4. Promoting Special Events You Host or Attend

Whether you’re going to a charity dinner or hosting a meet-up for your clients, a string of well-timed LinkedIn shares can be great for raising community awareness, driving participation or soliciting volunteers or donations. This is another circumstance where it’s completely acceptable to ask others to re-share the content across their own networks, particularly if it’s a local event geared toward your own community.

Leading Local and Industry Thought

If you’ve got an article in an online publication or a blog post you’re particularly proud of, LinkedIn sharing can be a great way to broadcast that content to your network – again, both on LinkedIn and elsewhere on the web. Be sure to include a personal comment on why you’re sharing the link, and tailor the excerpt section to include something descriptive and appealing, such as a quotation. Shares on LinkedIn are also a great way to spread news items that are relevant to your peers, vendors and customers.

5 Ways Small Business Can Leverage LinkedIn’s New Features

Viral Marketing can be defined as the practice of transferring a marketing message through numerous social networks in order to increase web presence and in turn promote brand awareness and product sales.

Another definition of viral marketing can be simplified down into just one word – Twitter.

Twitter’s capabilities seem as if they were created for the sole purpose of viral marketing; any tweet can reach a massive amount of people with minimal effort, expanding the awareness of a brand or name to numbers that were not possible before the introduction of Twitter.

The New Media & Social Web Guide for Business & Marketers website, www.smedio.com, posts an article by Douglas Idugboe discussing seven tips suggesting how to optimize Twitter as a viral marketing tool.

1) Follow Like-Minded People – As in any other viral marketing campaign, it makes no sense to sell oranges to a customer who’s in the market to buy apples. Twitter adds millions of users every day. Let’s face it, not all of them are going to be your customers. Therefore, it is important to get connected with people who are like-minded and who would be interested in your product.

A large number of users have the tendency to follow a person back from whom they’ve received a follower request. Cash in on this opportunity and build an interested audience for your brand.

2) Initiate Interesting Conversations – Do not forget that Twitter is after all a social media site and not just an online shop to sell your stuff. Get customers engaged. Initiate lively and interesting conversations about your products. Do not adopt an aggressive sales pitch; it just doesn’t work on Twitter.

Mind your manners; be polite and courteous with your tweets.

3) Tweet often – Tweets have a very short attention span. If you do not tweet, you’ll be out of sight and do not forget that ‘Out of sight, Out of mind’ rule works with most customers.

Tweeting regularly is a great habit which lets customers know that your brand is alive and kicking. As a rule, make sure to tweet at least once every day. Less than 10% Twitter followers have a tendency to look at tweets from yesterday, so if you are not regular, you’ll be missing these users attention.

4) Get Retweeted – Retweeting is one of my favorite Twitter features for viral marketing. Add value to an ongoing conversation and get access to thousands of new prospect customers.

Retweets are the best way to get in contact with new users on Twitter and opens up endless possibilities for launching viral marketing campaigns.

5) Initiate Polls – Conduct polls on Twitter and offer some cool goodies as prizes for people who participate in your polls. Polls bring in great traffic and attention to your Twitter page so make the most out of it

Be it Twitter or any other website, people love free gifts and prizes. Ask your followers to retweet your poll messages to their followers. The larger the number of people participating in your polls, the larger is your prospect customer base.

6) Link-Up – Link-up all your social networking accounts e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Myspace with Twitter. With multiple social networking sites, the power of your Twitter viral marketing campaign gets an exponential boost.

Make it a point to post your tweets on all your social network accounts.

7) Learn from others – There are thousands of viral marketing success stories on Twitter. All you need to do is learn from others – be it your competitors, your allies or even brands which are not associated with you.

Full article.