This is an embarrassing case for Dell. Tara Fitzgerald, a Sacramento based woman trusted the Dell technician in India, when she called up the customer support – that’s the mistake she did.

When some pictures was missing in her computer, she called up the Dell technician in Mumbai, India for help and granted him remote access to her PC. And while he was trying to help her, she claims that she saw him find the pictures, and download them.

The problem is that the pictures were personal and only meant for her boyfriend. Things got worse, when the pictures got posted on an adult website.

The technician Tara says called himself Riyaz Shaikh and had interesting stories to offer since then. Riyaz Shaikh later offered her help to take down the adult website, and even offered her new Dell gear that he promised to ship her. Later, Riyaz called Tara to reveal that he had fallen in love with another woman from the US and that he had used her credit card details to buy her several other Dell devices !

Now, this is like the weirdest WTF story I’ve heard recently. One question that pops up is what is Dell doing with such situations ? Are they enforcing strict laws and guidelines for technicians in customer support ?  I mean, we’ve heard about the credit card story time and again, but aren’t they doing nothing about it ?

Source

I wouldn’t expect Twitter employees to spend a lot of time on Twitter, of course they’re busy with the servers and codes. But if someone ever asks me how not to use Twitter, I’ll point them to my Twitter employees list, without any doubt.

Okay, if you thought that was lame, you might be on the wrong side here. Before making such criticisms, one should understand that Twitter is very personal for people, they have the luxury of doing whatever they want with their tweets..so get over it.

Social Media is going places and today as we speak, your government is probably thinking about incorporating Social Media into its governance policies and execution. When I first heard this topic, it sounded a bit awkward to me. Because Social Media always resonated with fun, while Government as obviously, quite the opposite. So, the question was, would Social Media and Government turn about to be a Oil in Water exercise ? Looks like its not.

Alex Howard, of O’Reilly Media did a talk recently on “Open Government”, and has shared some interesting facts & analysis about it on his blog.

He says that “Open Government” is a mindset. And cites examples of how the Federal Government of USA have successfully employed the top-down approach with social media services in their campaigns.

According to Wikipedia,

Open government is the governing doctrine which holds that the business of government and state administration should be opened at all levels to effective public scrutiny and oversight. In its broadest construction it opposes reason of state and national security considerations, which have tended to legitimize extensive state secrecy.

The US Government have had several projects opened in the Open Government initiative, meanwhile and is adopting more initiatives as we speak.

Alex, through his presentation goes through the history of Social Media and how things have evolved from the 90′s to the present, which is interesting to see (nice pics there). Also, he talks about how the recent Gulf Oil spill and such examples have been discussed on social media by members of the Government. I wish there were more insights on the risks involved, the potential and possibilities of open-government however, the 49 slides in itself are very informative on a birds eye perspective, with examples of open-government and notable quotes.

Check out presentation here.

Bloggers are the most loved and the most hated group on social media. People love them for their valuable information, while companies (some uncool one’s obviously!) look at them with raised eye brows. However, bloggers are the most powerful community out there that can make or break a product.

We’ve seen lot of successful examples recently where bloggers have contributed to the success of brands. With that in mind, here are the top 30 bloggers on Twitter I found interesting. In no particular order, that is.

1. Ryan Penagos

2. Stephen Fry

3. Kevin Rose

4. Garry Vee

5. Kogure – Influential blogger in Japan

6. Duane Patterson

7. Rob McNealy

8. Bruce Attridge

9. Robert Scoble

10. Gary Arndt

11. Sean Malarkey

12. Pramit J Nathan

13. Gerard Weber

14. Orrin Woodward

15. Wolfgang Niederhausen

16. Jeremy Schoemaker

17. Joel Mackey

18. Enrique Dans

19. Renee Blodgett

20. Arnold Aranez

21. Dan Schawbel

22. Michael Hyatt

23. Peter Robert Casey

24. Warren Whitlock

25. Will Francis

26. Anita Nelson

27. Stephanie Quilao

28. Ben Parr

29. Fabio Sasso

30. Gina Tripani

OK, before we start, let’s take a look from a bird’s eye perspective. Social Media is still considered as an experiment – by many. Its not glorious as we might think it is from a sales perspective. Sometimes, people push it off as a fad because they don’t see the value in it. Not everyone thinks that social media can be sold. And what I’d like study is that, what if they are right ? Is social media really a sellable commodity ? Or is it just a fun thing we all love to do ?

While some folks think that social media is what we see today, I’d like to believe that we’ve only seen the tip of the ice berg, while not pushing away the fact that not everyone can sell it.

Let’s take a deeper look at things.

What might be the reasons for companies not being able to sell social media ?

1. Social Media is not for everyone – Deal with it !

What most people do is believe the hearsay. “Everybody is talking about social media and the coolness factor, so let me jump in too !” – is what many people think. And that’s where the problem is. Social Media can work for everyone, but it has to be customized for each industry to work closer to it. When you go for the hearsay, you ape what someone else did, and that might not be the right way for you. So at one point, there is a risk involved. You have to figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. You also might have to do experiments to find how to reach out to your target audience. So, all this involves certain level of risk, and even then a lot depends on how the whole strategy is planned. For every product, there is an alternate way out, for instance a restaurant’s social media strategy can revolve around foursquare and facebook while a web-design agency have to go full fledged with as many channels as possible. So even when the efforts are the same, the strategy and channels are essentially different. If companies don’t understand this, we have a problem.

2. Social Media probably should not be seen as a “Fishing strategy” !

Another major problem is when we see a social media strategy like search engine marketing. You put in your budget and wait for the results the next day. Two problems here.

i) Results on social media differs for each strategy. It necessarily isn’t tangible in all cases. Social media measurement metrics needs to be clearly defined and tracked for real results.

ii) Time required for social media results can also differ for each strategy/plan. If its a website for which the hits are tracked, the results are immediate but if its a brand, then the scale and scope of results differ and expectations have to be tweaked accordingly.

So what is right way to sell social media ?

Wish if there was a book on this. Oh ! Wait, there are some noteworthy ones – The only 6 books on social media you need to read.

So, is there a right way to sell social media ? Unfortunately no. There is no single fool proof way to read social media. Is that good ? Well, yes and no !

Before jumping into social media one needs to –

1 – Figure out who your target audience is.
2 – Find out if they’re actually on social media. If yes, where ?
3 – What are your USPs? Is there something that differentiates you from the rest ?
4 – How can you be entertaining ? Or can, you actually be ?
5 – Understand if your management understand what social media means ? Do they see it as a value addition or an investment ?
6 – Does your product have the potential to go social ?
7 – Clearly define what your expectations are from social media.

Once these questions are defined, its easier to create a social media strategy around it. The idea is to clearly define what goes in, what it takes and what you get out of it. Blindly jumping in without knowing these is probably the wrong way to go.

So, how to sell Social Media to clients ?

1. Find out what the expectation is

As I said, for each product the strategy differs. So, lets say you have a small company with limited local audience. Find out what the expectation is. Is it brand identity or something more tangible and immediate, like referrals and sales ? Ask as many questions as possible and figure out what exactly the expectation is. Believe me, most of the time, the expectations are vague, which you need to bring more clarity in, otherwise it will result in failure later.

2. Clearly give an idea of what’s possible and what’s not

Social media isn’t magic. The fact that one doesn’t know it properly, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work. So clearly, give clients an idea of what actually is possible, what the ROI is and what’s not possible. Clarity on all levels will help convince the client in more than one way.

3. Know your audience, know your tools

Whom are you going to talk to on social media – this is a very important question. Sometimes, clients ignore or hide the fact that there aren’t sure of whom to talk to. They just know blindly that they got to be on social media, so they approach you. But it is your job as an agency or social media professional to figure out if there is a target audience, and if they are accessible via social media. If yes, give clients a detailed idea on how you will connect to them, with what tools and what you can expect in return.

4. Give time-cost estimates

When it comes to business, everyone has things ending at a three letter word – ROI. When you put money into something you expect returns, same with social media. When you have clarity on the deliverables, chalk it out on a timeline, with tasks and costs involved. Strategies and tools required. Because clients always wants to measure things and compare it to the money they put in, so give them a chance to do it. Many social media professionals and agencies fail in this area because they don’t have clarity on what needs to be done and what’s actually required. Putting down everything to numbers actually help.

5. Show how you can track analytics on social media

Stop the talking, stop those overly promising videos. Those things are only good enough to excite the client. When it comes to results, you need to show people how things are measured and how the ROI works.  There are several tools to measure social media available today, use one of those, or create your manual spreadsheets and show an example of how things are measured, how the analytics are. Believe me, this is a crucial point. If its good enough, you don’t need to talk any more. Closed deal !

Okay, so with that let me wrap up. The idea of the whole thing is that selling social media isn’t difficult. Its that either you’re not clear on what’s required, or you’re note taking the risk and clearing your own way out. Keep in mind, there is no one single way of doing things, there are more than one way of doing it, but you have to come down to results and numbers and not get stuck with the hype alone. Why ? Because everybody else is doing just that – talk about the hype.

Well, the founders think that others might like the tool too, and it will go popular beyond SEOs. But from what we’ve seen, advanced users like SEO’s are going to love this search engine ! Which one you ask – Blekko, the new kid on the block !

I don’t think Blekko is the best name they could find but that’s okay, if the search tool does the thing neatly, then I’m happy.

TechCrunch reports that they’ve done an impressive job at simplifying advanced search. Like advanced search on Google with operators now become easy and more insightful with this tool.

From the screenshot, it looks like Blekko will be able to give you insightful data like SEO stats, and then visualize them on charts right in the search. How accurate the data is, will decide how accepted the tool will be. As for now, I’m pretty excited about it.

Viral videos are the craze. Recently, there’s been a lot of them popping up, and quite honestly not all are impressive. Some are clearly promotional in nature, while some are purely accidental – truly viral in nature. Interestingly many of them are promoted by brands that are interested in social media. I’d like to see them as great examples of social media strategies executed well for brand identity.

Here are the top 10 viral videos of the season worth mentioning.

1. Hardchorus – Puma

2. Hamster Black Sheep Video – KIA Motors

3. Swagger Wagon – Toyota

4. Seat Belt Safety – Embrace Life

5. Freedom – Dodge Challenger

6. Lewis & Jenson, One car, No team – Vodafone

7. Extraordinary – Pantene Shampoo

8. Funny Ad – Heineken

9. History of Celebration – Coke

10. Extreme LED Art – Samsung

One of the most popular tools used by SEO’s in Keyword Rsearch is undoubtedly the Google AdWords tool. There are many other tools available, like WordTracker, Yahoo’s KW research tool etc, but Google’s is most reliable as SEO’s consider Google’s data more accurate.

Oh! Wait, if you don’t know what Keyword Research is, its the process of finding out the most popular and searched phrases on the search engines so that one can optimize their website around those phrases increasing the chances of getting search engine hits from them.

Let’s see how to make the best of Google’s Keyword Research Tool.

1. Filter out gems from the data – don’t just believe it blindly

One grave mistake what many people do, is just blindly believe the tool. Let’s take an example. If you search for “red apples” this is the result the tool shows.

Filtering out what’s of interest to you is very important. As a first step I would sort the keywords in descending order of “Global Monthly Searches” (unless yours is a regional website), so that I get the most searched keyword on top with the ones that follow beneath it.

2. Find keywords that are related to your website content

Now, Google doesn’t know if your website is about the company apple, or a fruit shop. It is for you to figure out. For this, we have the categories tab on the left hand side. Google shows you a set of categories in each of which you’ll get suggestions for the selected keyword. If you’re interested in the fruit apple, then select “Food” if its the company Apple, then go for “Technology” or something similar. This is where your thinking comes into play.

3. Don’t go for the numbers, they could be deceptive.

The problem with this data is that the numbers could be very deceptive. Google might have wanted to make this as simple as possible, hence you’ll find every broad match data that you can find from the search engine data. To nullify this, what I’d suggest is you take a look at the numbers (search volume) and match it with an actual google search (if not obvious from the keyword itself).

In the above example, the top keyword suggested is “dried fruit”. While many of us can actually figure out if this is a broad match or not, others can take do a Google search and figure out how difficult the competition is.

“Dried Fruit” has a competition of 3,780,000 websites already, so you might want something more specific and meaningful (unless you have a PR 7/8 page).

“Organic Apples” has lesser competition of 599,000 pages and the keyword is more sensible.

4. This isn’t the most accurate data about search number, use your judgment

The AdWords tool is primarily built for SEM campaigns helping folks figure out what keywords to bid for and what to avoid. Its not actually intended for SEO. What it can do is basically give you clues about what keywords might be useful for your campaigns.

So bottom line is while using the tool, don’t just blindly go for the data. Use your judgment and figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. And also, don’t stick to just one tool, use multiple tools to figure out what are the interesting keywords, and see if it matches your content. If yes, go ahead with the rest of SEO processes.

Just love this theme, absolutely… what a beauty !

Elegant Themes have released yet another WordPress theme that’s just supremely gorgeous to any other iPhone related theme I’ve seen lately. Well, this one’s a WordPress theme for those who’d like to sell their iPhone apps via their website. Kind of like a sales page but built entirely on WordPress and fully customizable !

The buttons are super sleek, with gradients and sharp curves, with features that are very iPhone centric (check out the platforms supported graphic) and customizable PSD for every slice of the theme is available too.

If you have an iPhone app/ affiliate to sell, just grab this theme, customize it and go live ! There’s absolutely nothing that goes waste here.

Available for $19 with the rest of 20+ gorgeous themes on Elegant Themes.

Picasa marries Picnik. Though most of us are on Flickr, Picasa still remains the preferred image sharing tool for most of the Google lovers. And now, Picasa lets you edit pictures right from your web albums via Picnik – the popular online image editing tool.

There are no feature improvements, its more like an integration between Picasa and Picnik. There is a small Edit button on right top, that appears on single photo pages and clicking which will open a Picnik window right inside the browser.

Its probably not the best thing to have, as I’d expect the Picnik features to be integrated with Picasa rather than opening a new window inside it. However, this is fair enough.

Thanks Google, but we love Flickr !