WordPress has recently released its 13th major update since it was first developed, and this is a significant. I’ve been using WordPress for 5 years now, and It’s definitely the best open-source blogging platform in the world. You cannot find a better blogging platform with more plugins, free themes, and premium themes than WordPress. It’s now evolved into more of a comprehensive content management system. Here’s a video put together by WordPress to highlight some of the highlights of the 3.0 release:

Key New Features:

1. WordPress and WordPress MU have merged, allowing the management of multiple sites (called Multisite) from one WordPress installation. I’ve got to look more into this. I am not sure how it will work, but this could really help someone like me who manages about 5 different WordPress sites.
2. New default theme “Twenty Ten” takes full advantage of the current features of WordPress. Thank god, they’ve finally retired the default “Kubrick” theme.
3. Bulk updating of themes with an automatic maintenance mode during the process and bulk plugin-in upgrading. I hated going through plug-ins individually and updating them. This is a nice feature that was long overdue.
4. New custom menu management feature, allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets.

So if you’re wondering if you should upgrade to version 3.0, my opinion is “yes”. I know that the new installs can be buggy sometimes, but since this is such a big roll-out, I think it will be generally bug-free. Of course, there always seem to be conflicts with third-party plug-ins, so make sure you back up your database and upgrade your plug-ins before you make the new install. You can either do the automatic upgrade in your WordPress install’s dashboard or click here to download it.

It’s official, I’m upgrading to the new iPhone 4. If you tried pre-ordering one yesterday, it was freakin’ frustrating. There were so many people trying to pre-order, it crashed AT&T and Apple’s servers. You’d think that multibillion dollar companies would account for the amount of bandwidth they’d be eating up, but apparently not. I got a hot tip from a Cult of Mac reader to download the Apple Store app and reserve one through that. I was able to do it, before that secret little tip went viral on Facebook and Twitter, and I’ll be picking it up sometime on June 24th. Hopefully, I don’t have to wait too long in line. Did I mention that I hate waiting in line? Plus, the little Mac genius/nerds are gonna try to sell me a bunch of crappy accessories that I don’t want or need. But anyway, I was successful, and here’s my confirmation!

I sat through the entire live blogging on Engadget of the iPhone 4 unveiling at WWDC for Cult of Mac, because I run their Facebook and Twitter profiles. Even though the iPhone 4 was leaked months ago with the whole Gizmodo and lost phone debacle, there were still a TON of features that I was floored by. Here’s just a short list:

• 720p HD video capture, nice!
• Multi-tasking in the OS. ‘Bout time!
• LED camera flash.
• Gyro-scope. Not sure how to explain it, but it’ll make gaming even MORE fun
• A beautiful HD display. It’s going to be gorgeous.

I know there’s other smart phones out there with similar specs, and I know that AT&T is horrible, but the one trump card with the iPhone is its app store. It will ALWAYS have the best apps, because the best developers focus on the iPhone. Why? Because they’ll make the most money in iTunes. Without being too dramatic, the iPhone has changed the way I approach my life and my business. I can literally run my business from my phone, get all of the information I need throughout the day, and I can always stimulate my mind while waiting in line!

I hear all the time that people are still skeptical about investing time and money in social media marketing campaigns. I mean, seriously? What more evidence do you need? Stop throwing out the “But, how do we measure ROI with social media?”. Just ask Vitamin Water, JetBlue, Dell, and Southwest how their investment in social media has worked out for them. Increased SALES is how you measure the ROI, and just ask the local restaurant or retail store that’s running an effective social media marketing campaign how it’s working out for them. It’ll still take a couple of years for the dissenters who hold onto old-fashioned marketing methods, so for those of you who still need to be convinced, here are 50 ways why social media marketing is here to stay: (in no particular order)

1. It’s two-way marketing
2. It’s a great customer service tool
3. It gives the customer a voice
4. It eliminates the need to spend a ton of money on focus groups.  Your following IS your focus group
5. Ask a marketing research question, and you get instant data.
6. The only cost to produce it is hiring great talent
7. Complaint resolutions are documented for other customers to see
8. The viral nature of it is closely related to the viral nature of word-of-mouth marketing
9. It IS word-of-mouth marketing, but in a digital sense.
10. You can make mistakes and explain why you made it
11. Intimate contact with your loyal customers and target market
12. You can focus on a very specific target market
13. It sends traffic back to your website
14. It builds inbound links to your website
15. It’s great for search engine optimization
16. Facebook pages can be used like a forum
17. Ability to create multiple Twitter profiles for multiple uses
18. Allows you to respond to what’s being said about your brand/business
19. It’s more natural than traditional marketing channels
20. You control the message
21. Endless creative promotion possibilities
22. Allows customers to participate in product development
23. It has the ability to reach a large amount of consumers on a perpetual time line.
24. It can reach a large amount of customers and fans in real-time.
25. Customers can respond and react to new business information and products in real-time.
26. It has the ability to increase sales
27. It has to ability to attract new clients
28. It can help you establish yourself as an expert or authority in your industry
29. Allows you to respond to complaints before negative word-of-mouth takes place.
30. Allows employees to be brand evangelizers.
31. The technology is free and open source
32. Social media is now adopted by most age groups.
33. Allows a competitive advantage over your competitors that aren’t using it
34. Allows a competitive advantage over your competitors that are abusing it or not using it correctly
35. Gives the ability to update customers about promotions and specials in real-time.
36. It has more than just a monetary return on investment.
37. We are social creatures.
38. It helps you build trust with the consumer
39. Experimenting won’t cost you a lot of money
40. It’s not as time consuming as you might think
41. Your customer’s opinion counts
42. Did we mention the technology is free?
43. It spans across all media, including photos, videos, audio, and text
44. It’s SO MUCH LESS annoying than text/SMS marketing
45. Its effectiveness BLOWS text/SMS marketing out of the water
46. Did I mention text/SMS marketing sucks?
47. You’re building an army of loyal customers we affectionately call “regulars”.
48. Builds team/employee morale
49. It can be used as a recruiting tool
50. Facebook has over 400 million active users worldwide.  Twitter has over 75 million users.  YouTube and Facebook are the #2 and #3 most visited websites in the world. Every second a new blog is created. Need I say more?

If you haven’t embraced social media for your business yet, then you’ve been living under a rock.  It’s here, and it’s here to stay.  It has a real return on investment, it WILL grow your sales if done right, and it DOES require someone who knows what they’re doing to run a successful campaign.  Are you convinced yet?  If so, check out my company’s website at Presence Media, and give us a call or contact us to discuss starting a social media marketing campaign for your small business.

Starbucks announced yesterday that they’ll be offering a mayor special to nationwide all mayors of their individual stores. The special is a $1 off to the mayor for one of their however-you-want-it Frappuccinos. That’s a pretty good discount considering it’s about $4 for a tall Frappuccino. The offer lasts until 6/28, but the people over at FourSquare think that Starbucks will continue to experiment with more mayor specials, and maybe other loyalty-based promotions through FourSquare.

After reading this, I now know that FourSquare and location-based gaming and marketing services are here to stay. I have been touting the importance and significance of customers competing over arbitrary titles and gaining points for visiting their favorite stores and restaurants, but few people listen to me when I tell them that it will catch on and marketers will start paying attention to these location-based applications. Well, is Starbucks big enough for you? Starbucks is not the first major brand to partner up with FourSquare, but it is DEFINITELY the most significant, because think of how many times you visit your favorite Starbucks per week? It’s hard to get competitive over being the mayor of your favorite fine-dining restaurant, because you may only eat there once a month. But with Starbucks, we visit their cafes almost every day, so this is a genius move by Starbucks to offer a mayor special. A lot of Starbucks customers are also very tech savvy, because many of them sit in Starbucks and work on their computer or mobile devices. Starbucks obviously knows this, so I really think they’ll see the statistics of the amount of people “checking in” to their stores skyrocket.

Will this be the catalyst for large and small businesses using location-based marketing strategies like mayor specials on FourSquare? I think it will be, and if you own a small business or work in a company that thinks this might be a fun marketing experiment for your company, visit FourSquare and click on their link “Businesses: Use Foursquare to reward your customers“.

(img credits: Thomas_Hawk)

In celebration of YouTube’s 5th anniversary as a website, Conan O’Brien was asked to pick his top five favorite YouTube videos from over the past few years. YouTube is the 3rd largest website in the world, and its search engine is the second biggest in the world, behind Google. It only took five years for that kind of growth, because video has the BEST potential for viral growth. If you’re a small business owner or someone looking to brand yourself, think about that for a minute. You probably aren’t creating good video content, but you should be, because it can be GOLD on the Internet.

I posted 3 of the 5 top videos. The other two are HILARIOUS, but not safe for work, and I just didn’t feel good about posting them on this site. You can watch all five on Mashable’s post about it.

Pinky The Cat

The guy’s scream at the end is priceless.

Trololo Song

This guy just freaks me out!

CSI: Miami – Endless Caruso One Liners

I’ve never liked CSI: Miami and I love this montage, because it shows just how cheese-ball this show is

I shake my head every time I see some moron post something on Facebook for EVERYONE to see, including their parents, professors, co-workers, bosses, and potential employers.  It’s unbelievable how careless and reckless people are with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.  Recently, Facebook announced that status updates will start getting indexed by Google. Images and the profiles themselves have been indexed by Google and other search engines for a long time now.  Let’s say you’re interviewing for jobs and you just posted a photo album of last night with great pictures of you doing keg stands and making out with random people.  That’ll be just perfect when a potential employer Googles your name and checks your Facebook profile.  But, you can still be an idiot on Facebook and not get caught.  You just need to spend some time customizing your privacy settings.

I’ve prepared a short screen cast to show you how to customize your Facebook privacy settings.  In the screen cast, you’ll learn how to stop search engines like Google and Yahoo from indexing your Facebook profile information and images, so they don’t show up in search engine search results.  I’ll also show you how to stop allowing Facebook from selling your personal information to third parties for advertising purposes.

You can thank me later on this one. I might have saved your job or helped you actually GET a job.

I pretty much live on Facebook, and it’s not because I”m just screwing around.  I am usually managing pages for my clients or reading up on the new stuff going on with Facebook.  One big rookie mistake I see with a lot of Facebook pages is they don’t have a vanity URL or also called a “username”.  When you first create a Facebook page it is assigned a pretty nasty looking URL link that looks something like this:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Erik-Is-The-Man/1003930342/

But with a Facebook page username, it could look like this:

http://www.facebook.com/ErikIsTheMan

Pretty big difference, eh?  Here are the steps to create a username for your Facebook page.

1.  Log in to your Facebook account, and go to http://www.facebook.com/username

2. Click on “Set a Username For Your Pages”

3.  Select the page that you want to set a username for

4.  Choose a name for your page that will be easy to remember for your customers.  For example, if your company’s name is: Erin’s gift shop.  Try getting the username: /Erinsgifts

5.  Verify that you want to change the username.  This is permanent, so make sure you choose a username that you’re confident about.

That’s it.  The benefits of doing this are obvious.  If you want to promote your Facebook page on print materials or just tell someone about it through word of mouth, settin the username and having a cleaner link is much nicer and easier to distribute through traditional marketing channels.

With the dawning of Google Buzz, Gmail is becoming more than just an email client for its users.  It’s becoming a social networking hub.  There are too many things that I do on Facebook and Twitter to simply use it for status updates through Gmail, but for those of you that do light social networking activities like updating your Twitter status and surfing aimlessly on Facebook, then check out this little hack for integrating them into your Gmail account so you don’t need three websites open at the same time.

1. Click on the Gmail Labs link in the upper right corner of Gmail.
2. Scroll to the bottom and click to activate “Add any Gadget by URL”.
3. Now go to Settings –> Gadgets.  Here you’ll find a place to add gadgets by URL.

To Add A Twitter Gadget

There are a bunch of Twitter gadgets for Gmail, but this one, TwitterGadget, is simple and won’t crash Gmail. 

To add it, copy and paste this URL into Gmail’s Gadget settings: “https://twittergadget.appspot.com/gadget-gmail.xml”

To Add A Facebook Gadget

In the same way you added TwitterGadget, you can add Facebook to your Gmail.  The Facebook Gadget by iBruno will work nicely with Gmail and won’t take away from your email experience. It will also expand into the rest of your Gmail for easy Facebook management.

To add it, copy and paste this URL into Gmail’s Gadget settings: “http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/104971404861070329537/facebook.xml”

That’s it.  Enjoy!

There are several different schools of thought when it comes to Twitter.  Some people believe you should follow as many “targeted” Twitter users as possible, because there’s a good chance they’ll follow you back.  But, even though that user looks like someone with similar interests, they might be a horrible Twitter user.  My philosophy for building a following is to let your content do the work.  If you consistently engage in conversation, post relevant links, and Re-tweet relevant information about what interests you most, people will follow you.  But, what about the people you follow?

It’s very tough to start conversations, re-tweet meaningful information, and participate in what other people are talking about if your Twitter stream is filled with a bunch of garbage.  There are two ways to solve this issue.

Set Up A Group

If you want to follow anyone and everyone in hopes of building a bigger following for yourself, you could always set up a group in a third-party Twitter client such as HootSuite or Seesmic.  Simply start a group called “Most Important” or something similar and specifically pick out the people that you want to follow closely.  This will give you a separate column to see their tweets separate from your regular Twitter stream filled with spammers and other annoying people.

Use TwitCleaner

I just used TwitCleaner for my personal Twitter account and a couple of corporate accounts that I manage.  Visit the site, and log in with the Twitter ID that you want to clean out.  The TwitCleaner will run a report and DM you a link to your account.  Go to the DM and click on the link.  You’ll then see a break down of all potentially annoying and spamming Tweeters that you follow.  It breaks it down into categories such as people who only tweet links, only tweet the same links, have been dormant for over a month, and so on.  You can uncheck all of the Twitter accounts that you want to keep, and the rest get mass unfollowed.  The beauty with this application is that they don’t just do a mass unfollow right away.  They spread out the unfollow over a period of time so it doesn’t trigger a warning flag with Twitter about your account.  You’re going to lose some followers of your own when you do this, but it’s worth it.  You’ll have a much cleaner Twitter stream, and it’ll make it easier to bring quality back to your account.

My advice for small business owners looking to get into the world of Twitter and start doing some marketing on Twitter is to be careful with who you follow.  If you don’t keep guidelines on who you follow, your account will become less about quality, and you’ll end up only pushing out promotions instead of participating in the conversation going on by your customers.  Only follow customers and other industry related Twitter accounts, and this will allow you to post more quality content over the long-term.

I can’t remember who tipped me off to Hoot Suite when it first started up, but I am glad they did. It really has been a lifesaver web app for me. I manage about 20 different Twitter profiles right now, and there is no way that I’d be able to keep up with them if I didn’t have a good Twitter client to manage them. There are dozens of other Twitter clients out there that will manage multiple accounts at one time, but many of them are desktop applications that eat up a lot of memory and slow down my computer when I have 10 different web pages open, iTunes, FTP client, and instant messengers.

So, what’s so great about Hoot Suite?

• Allows you to add multiple social media accounts
• Supports Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages, Ping.fm and WordPress.com Blogs
• Twitter stats for all URL’s shortened using their ow.ly service
• Keyword tracking with separate columns
• Saved searches
• Twitter lists function (which can be used as a group type setting)
• Option to schedule tweets for a later date/time
• Browser bookmarklet allows you to tweet instantly, schedule a tweet and shorten links – all with the click of a button
• HootSuite provides desktop apps to compliment the web app too: Mac and PC programs, Chrome and Firefox extensions, even Greasemonkey scripts

Three Features That Make My Life Easier

The ability to schedule Tweets for later is so great. I am a purist when it comes to social media, so when I am at the computer, I use that time to interact with people, Re-tweet, and reply to people. But when you manage small business Twitter accounts, there are promotional tweets you need to get out there, so instead of spamming people with them all in one cluster, I schedule them for later and space out the tweets. Another great feature is the statistics that Hootsuite keeps for you. Any link you tweet using their personal link shortener, ow.ly, will track how many people click on that link. This is great, because small business owners usually want an idea of how many people are interacting with their Twitter content. You can also import RSS feeds to whatever Twitter account you want all within the Hootsuite interface.

HootSuite is Cloud Computing

There’s no importing or exporting required like when you have a desktop client. It saves all of your settings, because it’s a web application. I love this, some people reject it, but I want my entire digital life to be at my finger tips as long as I have internet access. This is why I am a huge fan of Google Apps for small business owners as well.

The HootSuite iPhone App

I recently downloaded this, it’s only $.99, but it still has some issues. I got rid of Tweetie 2, because it would only access like the last 30 minutes to an hour of tweets, and I like scrolling further back than that, and the HootSuite app has the same issue. It also didn’t show all of my accounts to be able to send one tweet to multiple accounts. So, it’s not perfect, but I am sure they will update soon. Here’s a short video about the app: