Sigma Web TechnologiesSocial Media

Grandma’s Guide to Video Chat

Larry Levenson — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:34:00 +0000

Use video chat to give a video tour of a new home to friends, introduce a baby to relatives, keep in touch with traveling loved ones… the list goes on. Here is a simple way that any grandmother (or even YOU!) can use to get started with Google video chat on her own.

This video, along with a printable guide, can be accessed at google.com/chat/grandma. Feel free to share this link with your grandma—or grandpa—or, well, anyone who wants to video chat to help get them up and running.

4 Steps to Drive Sales with a Social FAQ

Larry Levenson — Sun, 16 May 2010 22:35:35 +0000

Jay Baer writes the always-interesting Convince and Convert blog. In this article, he devfelops a simple strategy that only take quarterly attention to build a social FAQ for your company.

One of the key benefits of social media that’s not talked about nearly enough is its ability to mitigate doubt and confusion among fence-sitters.

Yes, your prospective customers are confused and uncertain. After all, why would they even be coming to your Web site unless they had questions about your product or service? To be entertained? I think not.

Read Jay’s full post at 4 Steps to Drive Sales with a Social FAQ/

Using Google to Find Twitter People

Larry Levenson — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:11:24 +0000

Mike Merrill has a neat tip on searching for specific folks to follow on Twitter. Now there are applications such as Nearby Tweets and GeoTweet but this seemed much more effective to me. It basically leverages the Google search engine to search Twitter profiles. This tip leverages the google site search.

Here’s how it works:

1. Example: Say I want to search for marketers in the NYC area. This is what I would copy into Google.com

site:twitter.com intitle:”on twitter” “bio* * marketing” “location NYC”

This returned 8 pages of targeted results.

2. Example: If I would like to find recruiters in the Austin area I could use this search

site:twitter.com intitle:”on twitter” “bio* * recruiter” “location austin”

This returned 11 results.

From these examples, you can just play with the words behind bio and location to get different results. For example you could search for “PR” within “dallas”.

Hopefully you found this helpful enough to share with others.

Getting Started on Twitter: a Step by Step Guide

Larry Levenson — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:56:45 +0000

You’re a twitter newbie, you’ve heard about it, so you have decided to do the twitter thing and find out what its all about. Justin Parks has one of the best getting started guides. . . Twitter Newbie: A step by step guide to getting started on Twitter.

This easy-to-read guide includes topics not generally covered, like “Advertise your Twitter Presence”, “Twitter Search with Google”, and “Get Mobile with Twitter”.

Read Getting Started on Twitter now.

Real Time Social Media Searches

Larry Levenson — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:22:21 +0000

Google Caffeine Google’s new search algorithm, will be introducing ‘Real Time’ searches for the various social media networks. Similar to the Google News feature, only it’s like watching an online RSS media feed for Social Media sites like Twitter.

We’re already experimenting with this new feature and studying how you could use it to produce more qualified visitors to your website.

Social media like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr are here to stay. . . if you’re not taking advantage of these opportunities to reach out to your target audience, you should be!