Thursday, January 22, 2009

Scrapplet

PR 2.0 technologies will continue to advance in 2009. PR 2.0 will be more important than ever in navigating, creating and maintaining the Social Web. The Social Web will remain an important tool in creating and managing personal and professional brands as well as guide content produced, discovered and distributed.

One of the newest members of the Social Web is Scrapplet: an emerging slate for combining and mobilizing distributed Web profiles, brand and content. Scrapplet is a customizable pallet for aggregating social profiles as well as a showcase for ideas, experiences, and expertise.

Scrapplet was originally created as an application for Facebook. It quickly evolved to provide integration with other social networking sites, such as MySpace, Twitter and YouTube. Scrapplet is now its own Web service, which allows users to instantly add their friends, pictures, videos, music, widgets, and entire web sites to their Scrapplets. Scrapplets are used as a central place for sharing, updating, and communicating with friends. Each microsite is portable. It can be placed within individual social media profiles, blogs, wikis and websites.

Scrapplets provide for customization and creativity. Each canvas offers tools and objects to add and create news feeds, flash objects, animation, custom menus, special effects, and more. Users can embed websites and third-party widgets directly on a page.

The Scrapplet creators thought of everything – Scrapplet supports logins from Facebook, Google, Yahoo, AOL, OpenID, Blogger, Flickr, WordPress, LiveJournal, Verisign, MyOpenId and others, so you don’t need to create yet another username and password.

What do you think of Scrapplet? What effects will it have it on PR 2.0?

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

A Quick Note About Websites Today

I was recently searching a Boston area restaurant’s website for its address. It took me a couple of minutes to find it, and so I found myself thinking about how much easier it was to find an address on a website just two years ago.

With the new media technology and Web 2.0 era, came websites that operate as so much more than online business cards. Even the most simple of businesses have transformed their websites into Web 2.0 universes. The restaurant’s website I looked at had two different blogs, an interactive map, a creatively designed menu and a section for making reservations.

An interactive and creative website is one of the best advertisements for a business. An attractive website screams positive things about the business and draws customer attention.

Businesses in any industry can benefit from an innovative, artistic, interactive and user friendly web design. This kind of website layout allows for communication and information exchange. An effective website can enhance company exposure and gain customer awareness. Just make sure the address is easily accessible!

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Go Green!

I just came across a great blog hosted by an eco-friendly car company called PlanetTran. There is some great advice on there about going green, check it out!

www.planettran.wordpress.com

Friday, November 14, 2008

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a tool Boston Marketing Firms are using to enhance search engine rankings for client’s websites. It is a technique that search engine optimization professionals employ to increase traffic to websites. So what is it?

Social bookmarking is a way for Internet and Boston Interactive Agencies users to store, categorize, search, and control web page bookmarks on the Internet. The saved bookmarks are generally made public, but can also be shared with particular people. Whether they’re made public or private, the audience can view the bookmarks chronologically, by category, by tags, or through a search engine.

Social bookmarking is effective for Boston SEO Agencies because if a client’s website is on the homepage of one of the social bookmarking sites, such as Reddit or Digg, there will be an almost automatic increase in traffic to the website. This increased traffic results in a greater amount of inbound links, which ultimately increases a website’s page rank.

Social bookmarking is a free promotional tool that marketing professionals use because it works favorably for search engine optimization. Try it out!

Friday, November 7, 2008

451 Marketing Launches New Blog

451 Marketing launched their blog 451Heat this week. Check it out: http://451heat.wordpress.com/

Friday, October 31, 2008

How Social Media is Impacting the Election

In light of the election this coming Tuesday, I thought I would take a few minutes today and look into how new media has been affecting the election.

We all know how intense this years Presidential Election has been, with both Democratic and Republican parties vying for votes by any means possible. Over the past months both parties have been on the campaign trail promoting themselves in traditional ways: town hall meetings, rallies, television and radio ads, debates, and the list goes on. While this year’s election season has been full of these more traditional approaches, there has been a heavy shift towards using social media to woo voters as well.

The Democratic campaign has been reaching out to voters through social media tools and mobile marketing techniques thus giving it the nickname the “Social Media Election”. Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have brought the campaign to new heights in promoting the candidates and engaging voters, especially among younger demographics.

MySpace has been a hot spot for members to communicate about the election, who they’re voting for, and what they believe it. In addition to this, one of the best things MySpace has done for the election is allowing users to watch and participate in the debates as volunteers.

Twitter has also been a great place for people to get information, as it keeps followers updated minute by minute about what is going on in with the candidates. Facebook has been a great place to get involved, as it has created pages, groups, and even various applications which remind people to vote.

The Obama campaign has really taken the use of social media to the next level, having created an application for the overwhelmingly popular iphone that allows you to organize the contacts in your phone by key battleground states, receive updates about what is going on in those states, and helps you find/contact the nearest Obama headquarters to get your friends involved and voting.

The fact that both parties have been using social media so much in their campaigns is a testament to how fast the world of Social Media Marketing is growing and impacting our everyday lives. These social media applications being used by the candidates have no doubt allowed for a much more interesting election, and have also engaged voters in new ways than ever before.

Don’t forget to voice your opinion through the various social media outlets and to vote on Tuesday!

Monday, October 20, 2008

How DVR is changing Advertising

While catching up on my DVR last night, I started to think about how much this great commercial-skipping device has changed the entire advertising industry as we know it.

Commercial advertising was once considered one of the most effective ways of pitching a product to consumers with creative, eye catching and visually inviting advertisements. However, although commercial are still an extremely popular means of advertising, advertisers are beginning to realize that there are millions of dollars being invested into TV commercials that for the most part are going unwatched.

This new television era of DVR has caused a shift of power from Advertising Agency to viewer, and is affecting commercials of all kinds, including infomercials. Since more viewers are using DVR services fewer commercials are being watched from beginning to end. In fact, there have been studies done which have calculated that no more than four seconds of a commercial are being watched now; a direct result of digital television recording.

With the millions (and rising) of existing DVR users, Boston Advertising Agencies are now being challenged to create new ways to reach to viewers. One of the best examples of this is the increased use of product placements in TV shows and movies. It will be very interesting to see how Boston Advertising Agencies, Boston Public Relations Firms, and also Boston Marketing Agencies are going to adapt to this major industry wide shift, and try to stay ahead of the technological curve.