Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category

Fast Pitch! is a business networking website that has been in existence since 2006. The corporate offices are located in Sarasota, Florida. Unlike Facebook and MySpace, Fast Pitch! is geared toward business owners and professionals, encouraging the networking and marketing of businesses. Business owners and professionals setup profiles in order to expand their network of contacts. You can list everything about your company including what you do, what you sell, photos, videos, location, education and professional affiliations. It’s a great place to highlight your company and sell yourself! It should be noted, however, that some of the services offered are fee-based.

Features include:

• Newsfeed
• Classifieds
• Blog
• Video Uploads
• Live Chat
• Podcasts
• Ability to link to Facebook, Blogger and Twitter

According to statistics from Hitwise, Facebook was the most visited site in the U.S. on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I wonder why? Well, as I always tell people, you’re not a mind reader, so you’ll never actually know why website visitors do things, but we can use some deductive reasoning and from this reasoning we can come to some conclusions.

My deductive reasoning skills (along with additional statistics that state that Facebook was the most popular social media website on the Internet in 2009) tell me that most people were on Facebook Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in order to communicate and share with friends, family members and colleagues worldwide. I’m sure many chats were being held, emails were being sent, pictures and videos were being uploaded and folks were being poked.

Based on these reasons, I think that Facebook is definitely a viable marketing option depending on what you are selling. Anything that assists in bringing families and friends together, anything that nurtures relationships and anything that speaks directly to a specific holiday would be perfect to advertise on Facebook. But, it should be interesting to see if Facebook will remain the king of all social media; remember way back in 2008 when MySpace was on the throne?

Adding a blog to your company website is a fantastic way to add content to your site and position yourself (and your company) as an expert in your particular industry. But there are rules to hosting a blog and below are 5 key components to hosting a useful blog.

1. Provide useful information – the information that you blog about should be useful to your readers and your readers will probably be your customers. Offer information that is based around your industry, company, products or services. You want to provide information that gives information visitors didn’t previously have, your opinions about topics, solutions to frequent issues, etc.
2. Allow commenting – you must give your visitors a medium to comment on your posts, don’t you want to know what your customers are thinking? Visitor comments can also give you ideas for future posts.
3. Allow social bookmarking – you want visitors to bookmark your posts using social bookmarking services, this allows them to share their bookmarks with their friends, colleagues and clients, be sure to offer this capability at the end of each blog post
4. Search – provide a search box so that visitors can search for exactly what they are looking for
5. Organization – it’s important that you categorize your posts for visitors, often visitors will come to your site looking for specific information and categories gives them a way to find all of the posts you’ve written around a certain subject