IN SOMEONE ELSES WORDS..

"Christopher Mills is a highly experienced SEO and Web Development guru. With an impressive track record in blogging, web design, development, and web optimization, not to mention experience in hardware, operating systems, programming and networking makes him a Dalai Llama of computers."

Welcome to my online portfolio website

Nice of you to drop by, friend.

Each of my services has been broken down into exactly what they involve, so please take your time having a look. If you’re interested in previous work that I’ve done, you can see the projects I’ve been involved in on the far right hand side of the page. My clients testimonials page showcases some feedback from clients I’ve worked with.

If you know what you want, please contact me or even if you just have a question, pop me an email. Don’t forget to have a read about what my clients are saying about my work.

Hope to hear from you soon,
Christopher

Twitter, Facebook, Social Networking, help!

I don’t blame you if you’re a little lost when it comes to knowing what all these catchy names mean. We live in an incredibly fast moving world where something can be cutting edge the one day and old news the next. Staying up to date with all the in tools is difficult, and knowing how they can help your business is even more difficult.

Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn amongst others fall under the topics of Social Networking, Social Media and Social Bookmarking.

Social Networking – A social network service focuses on building and reflecting social network or social relationship among people, e.g., who share interests and/or activities. A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web based and provide various ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.

Social Media – Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.

Social Bookmarking – Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

Now that we have a better understanding, let’s look at how these services work and how they could integrate with your business. Please bare in mind that I am only scrapping the tip of the iceberg here.

Twitter

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service itself costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

In its simplest form, Twitter allows users to send short, 140 character, messages to each other. The special part about Twitter is that it allows you to follow other users, if you are following another user, any 140 character message they send out, you will receive. In a real life scenario – A company such as Woolworths might like to announce specials that they are having, any user that follows Woolworths will see these specials when they are announced. In other words, if you can build up a strong following, you have a very direct target audience to communicate with. Sticking with the example, Woolworths might want to announce a new special and when they do, they could put a link through to more details on their website, thus encouraging more people to visit their site, which potentially leads to greater brand awareness or more sales.

Facebook

Facebook is a global social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. The website’s name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students get to know each other better.

Facebook does not only offer people the ability to create profiles and update them with photographs and other nonsense, it features two powerful marketing tools know as groups and pages. Groups and Pages work in a very similiar fashion, allowing a business/brand to create a group and communicate information to people who join the group. In much the same way as Woolworths can use Twitter to send out messages to its followers, Woolworths could use a Facebook group or page to gather strong following and market their specials.

Conclusion

You might be thinking to yourself that these things all sound the same, and to be honest, they are quite similiar in terms of person to person communication, the best way to look at it is to compare it to normal marketing ways – By this I mean, take traditional marketing for instance, a business could choose a myriad of different channels to market itself, such as TV, radio, newspaper, etc. At the end of the day, the purpose of using a channel is to sell a good or service, but each channel has a different audience and Social Networks can be seen in the same light.

If you’re interested in these topics, you’re welcome to click the links below and see first hand what these social networks look like: