Using the power of social networking tools Facebook and Twitter, Jon and Tracy Morter started a campaign just over a week ago to steal the #1 away from the X-factor winner. And they won!

Figures show “Killing in the name” by Rage Against The Machine at over 500,000 and Joe McElderry’s “The Climb” at just over 450,000 sales. Considering that Rage Against The Machine is little known today and that the X factor final had over 10 million phone votes cast, more than two-thirds for Joe McElderry, this is no small victory. And let’s not forget that “Killing in the name” was only available as a download.

Reasons aside about why this campaign was run, this is a great example about the power of social media marketing and what can be achieved when a message, carefully crafted, resonates with a group of people. The search term #ratm appeared a number of times this past week in Twitter’s trending top-10 list and the campaign’s facebook fan page got thousands of comments to posts, not to mention a following of almost half-a-million facebook users.

If anyone still thinks social media marketing isn’t serious business, think again.

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Consumers have never before had such power to reach literally thousands of like-minded individuals with their opinions of a product or service. Where before a bad experience would have been told of to a handful of people, usually family and friends, today those same family and friends too will have hundreds of connections that they can pass the news on to instantly.

Even worse for businesses, anyone can now create a concerted campaign using a cheap video camera and the power of services like YouTube. Ann Minch started a ‘Debtors Revolt’ in exactly this way against the Bank of America when they raised the interest on her credit card. She created a short, 5 minute video stating her case to Bank of America and made the video publicly available to view. The campaign took off rapidly as the link to the video started appearing on blogs, social networks and Twitter. The video, below, has had over 240,000 views since September.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The bank reacted the only way it could without the publicity getting worse – it reversed the hike after attempting to negotiate another rate – Ann Minch refused and made the bank reinstate the original interest rate.

Such stories are going to become mainstream as more and more consumers realise the power they have at their fingertips.  Businesses have only ever had to worry about a small percentage of customers coming back to them with returns and complaints, A small customer service department would suffice in dealing with the low rate of complaints. Feedback involved polling the customer base where typically only a small percentage would respond, never providing a true picture of what customers felt.

Now, a business needs to be more on the ball with how their customers perceive the service or product. They need to feel  the real-time pulse of the marketplace in order to prevent a small number of customers from negatively influencing a larger number of potential customers.

Customer service departments need to become more involved in the marketplace by becoming part of the conversations their customers are having. This will not only enable gathering of real, emotional feedback but allow the business to gauge the direction the marketplace is moving in to give them an advantage over competitors who are not involved in the social media space. If a business engages with it’s customer base where they are most active they have the ability to influence perception in a positive way and increase business as a result.

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Check out the announcement video from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman -

Click here to view the embedded video.

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In this ever-connected world, everyone is a brand, and this gives each of us great power and opportunity to really sell ourselves. If you use social networks or blog or participate in online forums then you are already in the public eye to some degree. Anyone can Google you and find out all kinds of information by reading your tweets, your blog posts and the conversations you’re involved in anywhere on the ‘net. 
Of course, the flip side of this is that if you’re not active in the digital realm then your personal brand profile is going to be pretty small and in today’s world that’s probably going to work against you in the long run. The Internet has enabled transparency and the less transparent you are the less desirable you become, especially as other personal brands around you become more prominent.

The question is, is your personal brand Positive or Negative?

Today, practically anyone who is likely to interact with you at almost any level of your life is going to Google you and find out everything they can. Employers already do this, as do recruitment agents when checking on potential matches for jobs. If you want someone to collaborate or partner up on a project they’re going to check out the ‘digital’ you first for suitability. 

What many people don’t realize is that almost anything they put out on the Internet is likely to remain available to view for all posterity. This includes Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, comments on blogs, personal videos on Youtube and Vimeo – anything and everything, and if even some of that stuff is ‘bad’ it’s going to work against you to some degree. As Gary Vaynerchuk likes to say, “your grandkids are going to be able to check out everything you’ve ever done”! A good example of how negative content can come back to bite is when a few Virgin Atlantic staff were laid off last year for making derogatory comments about their employer on their Facebook pages.
So you want to make sure everything you do in this digital landscape is positive. Anything that can be found out about your interactions need to show you in the best possible light.

Do that and you’re already on your way to building a strong personal brand.

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Norman Kosmal has a nice post on how to do this here and the Zend folk have a nice quick-start guide here

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However, as with all software, WordPress does have bugs that are exploited to wreak havoc on your site.

This blog article talks about upgrading your WordPress installation to ensure the latest security patches have been applied and of the latest WordPress vulnerability.

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A screen mockup in under a minute with Pencil

Prototyping is the method by which a designer/developer mocks up pages/screens for a web site or some piece of software, to help the design and development team visualize the product. Sketching out on a piece of paper is generally best as at this stage of development there are likely to be many changes and sketching on paper is quick and cheap.

However, if you need to create sketches that are a little more professional, e.g. for a presentation to the Board, then it helps to use a tool like Pencil, a plugin for Firefox, which allows you to build a prototype using actual screen elements e.g. buttons, text fields etc. Using it is dead simple and very quick – just drag and drop elements onto a canvas and edit the properties to suit. I made the one on the right in under a minute.

Get Pencil for Firefox here

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This logo here and this one are two of my favorites…

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A web designer betting his friend that he could use social networking to make a ‘million of anything’ led to the creation of the website www.OneMillionGiraffes.com, which called for users to send the creator one million giraffes that they’ve made, either as models or drawings.

Although he didn’t really think he’d get much of a response, within hours he’d got over 60 and by the end of the first day he had 134! In just over 2 months he’s received 134,277 and is well on the way to win the bet by the end of next year.

However, all Ola Helland did was to advertise the site and what he was doing on his Facebook page and on his twitter account and he got this overwhelming response; proof that if you have an interesting concept to market it can spread like wildfire using simple social networking tools.

Check out the site here…

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Hacking core files, however, is problematic as the hacks are overwritten whenever you upgrade to a newer version, something that you need to do fairly often due to security holes being found and plugged and new features being introduced.

To overcome this problem, read this Smashing Magazine article on ‘hooks’ and how they can be used to provide you with powerful tools to customize your WordPress site.

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• Stream
• Posts
• Your Photos
• Birthday Invitations

As always, when using social networking sites watch out what apps you use and ask yourself if you absolutely have to use every app that comes your way!

Read the story here

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This doesn’t mean cynergise.com will die a slow, lonely death however; I’ll probably still update with relevant content though if you really want to keep up with me come along to www.ChandeshParekh.com.

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One component I came across just last week is RokDownloads. This is a file-download management component for Joomla 1.5 and as the name suggests it rocks! Developed by the same team that create the brilliant templates for Joomla, RocketWerx (RocketTheme) I guess it’s not that much of a surprise what a quality component this is.

I was using a popular component called DOCman however when it came to customising, it proved pretty difficult mostly due to the fact that it had first been developed for Joomla 1.0x and the team that created it only ported it to work in Joomla 1.5 Legacy Mode; meaning basically that they hadn’t really used the MVC (Model, View, Controller) protocol the way it’s used for Joomla 1.5 Native components.

RokDownloads is proving much easier to customise and even if you don’t need any customisation it just works really well.

So, if you’re looking for a great, free file-download manager hit up RokDownloads.

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