muhammad saleem - social media maven

Tip’d Turns 2.0 - A community for financial news, ideas, and tips

muhammad saleem — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:37:22 +0000

Hey everyone, wanted to announce that Tip’d, our socially driven community for financial news, ideas, and tips has turned 2.0. Please drop by the blog to check out all the changes.

Also, read more coverage: Mashable, Read/WriteWeb, The Huffington Post, Soshable, The Lost Jacket and Tropical SEO.

Guest Post at Mashable - Is DiggBar Twitter’s New Power Tool?

muhammad saleem — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 02:15:26 +0000

I’ve written a guest post at Mashable taking a look at Digg’s latest and arguably best update offering to date.

All in all, while the DiggBar is certainly an improvement for the end-user, with one release, Digg is positioning themselves in the center of some of the hottest growth markets at the moment and at the same time protecting their core function of content sharing by taking a little focus off the destination site. As usage of the DiggBar increases, they’ll piggyback on content sharing via social networks and microblogging sites as well as corner a very nice chunk of the url-shortner market while increasing the engagement on Digg, without even having people visit the destination site.

read the article.

Technorati Tags: digg, twitter, diggbar, social media, social news, microblogging

Guest Post at Mashable - Why Do We Love YouTube But Hate Eric Bauman?

muhammad saleem — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 02:23:58 +0000

I’ve written a guest post at Mashable taking a look at the blogosphere’s reaction to Eric Bauman and his team being ousted from eBaum’s and comparing the site’s position to to larger video sites

Ultimately do we hate one because a smaller group of people is infringing on the copyright of small, independent content creators while the other is a platform that enables hundreds of thousands of users to infringe on the copyrights of large corporations?

read the article. (and don’t forget to digg and stumble the original link)

Technorati Tags: ebaum’s world, youtube, mashable, social media, social news, online video

Senior ‘Social Media’ Editor for SEMJ

muhammad saleem — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:57:05 +0000

I have accepted a position of Senior Editor for Social Media with Search Engine Marketing Journal and am thrilled to be working alongside Brent Csutoras.

The goal of the journal is to help professionals in the industry share and demonstrate their expertise. We are different from a magazine in that we encourage the submission of articles and research papers by experts in the industry. Similar to a scientific journal, we review articles submitted by industry professionals and our editors decide if the article will be published in our journal.

If you would like to have your paper considered by the journal please review the requirements and submit it for review.

Technorati Tags: social media, social news, semj

Guest Post at Mashable - HOW TO: Survive a Social Media Revolt

muhammad saleem — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:40:59 +0000

I’ve written a guest post at Mashable disecting the anatomy of a revolt and analyzing Hulu CEO’s response to the community and the lessons learned from the response.

However, the lessons to be learned here are immensely important and it would be a severe injustice to yourself as an entrepreneur, your community, and your investors, if you don’t learn from Hulu’s mistake and Kilar’s response memo.

read the article. (and don’t forget to digg and stumble the original link)

Technorati Tags: mashable, social media, revolt, social news, social networking, microblogging, digg, facebook, twitter, hulu

Guest Post at Kissmetrics: The 8 Most Important Conversion Metrics You Should Be Tracking

muhammad saleem — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 21:17:26 +0000

I’ve written a guest post at the Kissmetrics blog discussing some of the most important conversion metrics you should be monitoring.

There are hundreds of different ways you can increase retention and conversions, but before you do that, you have to figure out what metrics you should be trying to improve.

To that end, here’s a cheat sheet that will help you determine the most important metrics to track.

Head over to the Kissmetrics blog to check it out.

Technorati Tags: blogging, make money online, e-commerce, conversion, optimization

Seobook Interview - Interview of Muhammad Saleem, Social Media Expert

muhammad saleem — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:05:14 +0000

After seeing the rapid rise of Tip’d, I figured it would be a good idea to interview Muhammad Saleem, a social media addict who knows social media both from site manager and site participant perspectives. You can follow him on Twitter.

Please check out the rest of my interview with Aaron Wall (and don’t forget to stumble the original post!).

Technorati Tags: muhammad saleem, interview, aaron wall, seobook, social media, financial news, tip’d

Guest Post at Mashable: Where Digg Fails, A Success for StumbleUpon

muhammad saleem — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:05:02 +0000

I’ve written a guest post at Mashable discussing how StumbleUpon has managed to succeed where Digg is currently failing.

StumbleUpon bans users that are seen to artificially inflate votes on content because of the terms of use violation, but then offers a viable alternative to those who want to legitimately use the service to cash in.

read the article. (and don’t forget to digg and stumble the original link)

Technorati Tags: mashable, social media, social news, digg, stumbleupon

Check out My Checkout Icon

muhammad saleem — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:44:15 +0000

Google Blogoscoped found some interesting advice from Google’s Checkout blog today. According the blog,

…users click on ads 10% more when the ad displays the Checkout badge.

This is great advice for anyone using Google Checkout and wanting to increase conversions. For more advice checkout Brian’s article: Does Telling Someone to“Click Here” Work?

Technorati Tags: marketing, conversions, roi, google checkout, copyblogger

Guest Post at Kissmetrics: Increasing Value in a Declining Ad Market

muhammad saleem — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:29:01 +0000

I’ve written a guest post at the Kissmetrics blog explaining how you can increase blog value even as your blog’s total revenue decreases.

To help you keep your sanity around the economic downturn and the spending cuts in the ad market, this guide will help you understand and increase value even as your revenues decrease.

Head over to the Kissmetrics blog to check it out.

Technorati Tags: blogging, make money online, revenue, optimization

Conversations About Social Media - January 2-4, 2009

muhammad saleem — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 23:47:40 +0000

Here’s a recap of the most active conversations from The Social Media Room.

As always, everyone is welcome to join the room and start or join conversations as long as they are relevant to social media.

Technorati Tags: social media, facebook connect, friendfeed, twitter, digg, music, tools

Conversations About Social Media - December 31-January 1

muhammad saleem — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:07:39 +0000

Here’s a recap of the most active conversations from The Social Media Room.

As always, everyone is welcome to join the room and start or join conversations as long as they are relevant to social media.

Technorati Tags: yahoo, social news, social media, relationships, influencers

Conversations About Social Media - December 29-30

muhammad saleem — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:12:41 +0000

Here’s a recap of the most active conversations from The Social Media Room.

As always, everyone is welcome to join the room and start or join conversations as long as they are relevant to social media.

Technorati Tags: online, internet, 2009, outlook, social networking, social media

Practical Personal Development Podcast - Interviewing Muhammad Saleem

muhammad saleem — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 22:11:45 +0000

Let’s grind up Muhammad Saleem into powder, sift through his life, and extract the wonderful personality and success principles and see how we can apply them to our own success.

Please check out the rest of my interview with Alex Shalman (and don’t forget to stumble the original post!).

Technorati Tags: social media, social news, tip’d, personal development

Conversations About Social Media - December 26-28

muhammad saleem — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 00:23:09 +0000

Here’s a recap of the most active conversations from The Social Media Room.

As always, everyone is welcome to join the room and start or join conversations as long as they are relevant to social media.

Technorati Tags: techcrunch, digg, stumbleupon, community, news, verizon, cybersquatting

Conversations About Social Media - December 24-25

muhammad saleem — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 01:20:52 +0000

Here’s a recap of the most active conversations from The Social Media Room.

As always, everyone is welcome to join the room and start or join conversations as long as they are relevant to social media.

Technorati Tags: christmas, logos, 2008, social media, google, scam, affiliate, hydra

Conversations About Social Media - December 22-23

muhammad saleem — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 01:30:39 +0000

Here’s a recap of the most active conversations from The Social Media Room.

As always, everyone is welcome to join the room and start or join conversations as long as they are relevant to social media.

Technorati Tags: facebook, online community, virtual community, social media, seo, debt, social media

Obama-Biden: Open Government, Now Open For Questions

muhammad saleem — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 06:00:15 +0000

It’s something that I have been anxiously waiting for to happen ever since I first got involved with socially driven sites - and began to understand their true power - and it has finally become a reality. Imagine my surprise when I saw that Obama’s change.gov site had introduced a mechanism for suggesting questions and voting on those suggested by others in a system similar to the one used by many social news sites to determine the relative importance of all stories submitted by community members. The system runs on Google’s Moderator platform, which allows a group of people to ask questions (or make suggestions) and list them in order of importance. Practically this works just as a social news site running on Pligg or SocialWebCMS would function.

The Obama-Biden Transition Team invites all of America to use their ‘Open for Questions‘ feature to ask them any questions regarding the issues that are important to you. Furthermore, you can browse already submitted questions and vote positively or negatively on them (or flag them as inappropriate) to determine overall popularity for the questions. Simply register on the site or log in and you will automatically be redirected to the list of questions in order of vote popularity.

As you vote or skip the top question, it is replaced with the next most popular, and so on, while the sidebar on the left keeps track of how many votes you have cast and the number of questions you have asked. Clicking on either of those shows you more details on that particular option.

Asking a question is just as simple. All you need is to log in, type in your question, location, and a nickname, and press submit.

If you’re thinking that the implementation is rudimentary at best, you’re right, and therein lies the genius. The feature allows you to do only three things: submit questions to the team, vote on questions (or mark them inappropriate), and track your participation on the site. But that all makes sense if you keep in mind that the site isn’t built just for the tech elite (the Mashable audience) that would want a plethora of more social networking, filtering, and recommendation features, and has to cater to the average American who is significantly less technologically adept or web-savvy.

As such, the site is simple, doesn’t stray away from a small core focus, and does the job well, not to mention is quite popular already. Almost 6,000 people have joined as of this writing, asking approximately 4,000 questions and casting 320,000 votes. And all this has been accomplished in under 12 hours.

There are some clarifications to be made, however, and some concerns regarding the implementation. First of all, it’s not exactly clear how many of these questions will be addressed, by whom, when, and on what basis (i.e. votes are important but how about categories - by foreign policy, national policy, economy, etc.). Furthermore, one problem that plagues all such sites is heavy vote manipulation and audience homogeneity. How does the team plan on making sure that a diverse group of people are asking questions in a diverse number of topics, that accurately represent the concerns of the average American? The site could very easily become infested with most popular questions from the liberal-tech-elite audience, overshadowing other smaller but important groups.

That said, bravo to the Obama-Biden Transition Team for making what is certainly a bold move in the right direction. Now we just have to hope that this change is permanent and that they will follow through with the promise of open and transparent government.

Technorati Tags: open government, social media, social news, digg, politics

How to build and launch a social news site in 3 weeks

muhammad saleem — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:43:57 +0000

Check out this interview that Webjackalope conducted with the Tip’d team. The team explains exactly how they managed to build and launch the social news site for financial news, ideas, and tips, in just 21 days!

Tip’d turns 1.0 - A community for financial news, ideas, and tips

muhammad saleem — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:29:18 +0000

Hey everyone, wanted to announce that Tip’d, our socially driven community for financial news, ideas, and tips has turned 1.0. Please drop by the blog to check out all the changes.