A blog that chronicles my journey on online marketing, blogging, social media, technology and life.
Networking with people that I don’t know isn’t necessarily my cup of tea however I’d be lying if I tell you I don’t enjoy going to these blogging events. I meet some people that I know, talk to few that I don’t know but primarily I enjoy these events for what it is which is learning new things in the world of blogging and marketing.
[Read more…] about Attending Blogging Events and Conferences
Uber entered the country early in 2014 and the first time I heard and tried it was around September of the same year. I already know what Uber was but I never thought it would be possible for it to be available in the Philippines due to the country being poor (no pun-intended). Now that it’s here for more than a year, I figured that considering doing an Uber business is not too insane to consider.
Long time readers of this blog know that I got started blogging with the topic that I love the most, basketball. I’ve been a complete basketball junkie since I was 5 years old and that easily translated into me writing my thoughts about the game mostly with NBA games and sometimes the local league here in the Philippines.
We knew it was only a matter of time before Google finally (completely) kills the ever famous toolbar pagerank and it seems to have been validated by a Google employee.
The toolbar PageRank is basically the “Google PageRank” of a page that appears when you have a toolbar or use a tool that shows it. Ranging from 0-10, this metric demonstrates how powerful a page is search-wise. Most websites have a pagerank of 0 to 2 while the big ones like Adobe, Yahoo and Google themselves have a PR of 7 to 9.
Mark Zuckerburg announced in F8 Conference that the profile page in Facebook will change dramatically and the change will be known as Facebook Timeline. Little later after that, Techcrunch posted a trick that will make you enable your Facebook Timeline even though its not released yet. The limitation though is that only your ‘fellow’ testers will see that effect on your profile. But even still, lots of people rushed into it just so they could try. Obviously I was one of those many people.
Facebook Timeline has received a bunch of chatter over the past few days. Some people think its heading towards Myspace wherein its starting to clutter itself more and more while some others plainly just like the new timeline.
Aside from this, let’s also not forget that Facebook implemented some new designs on their homepage that drew ire from lots of its users. The biggest concern regarding the new design is the fact that it gives little importance to privacy and that it seems it would benefit stalkers a lot. Also its very easy to get lost in the process considering there’s too much to look at the same time.
Considering all those things, truth is Facebook has been successful in forcing us to adjust to ALL of their changes. People who are currently complaining will only do that for about 2 and a half weeks up until Facebook rolls out new changes again. I guess its a cycle.
I first saw the Timeline from a beautiful woman named Lisa Bettany who happens to be a contact of mine in Facebook. When I first saw it I was like ‘are you kidding me’. I researched for it and like many of you, I was able to do so successfully.
I view the timeline profile positively. To be honest, it instantly made me melancholic and emotional. I joined Facebook in mid-2008 and for me to see my old posts so easily, that’s so appealing to me. I laughed a bunch of times when I saw some of my ‘retarded’ posts in those old days, when I was just getting started with this blog and spam promoting the hell of my friends, when I was bullying some college friend of mine, there’s just a lot to look back.
I know there’s a lot of people on the hate bandwagon of this new Facebook Timeline thing but for me I view this new feature entirely positive. Sure there’s a bunch of bugs and flaws for now, but that’s fixable. Also, it made Facebook much more cluttered but I’m sure people will adjust, just like forever. It’s not like its really like MySpace where you can put a bunch of widgets and glittered images right?
Lastly, productivity issues will always count. I wasted like 1.5 hours just by scanning my entire timeline and while we’re not gonna look at it everyday, we’re still going to use Facebook as how we’re trained to use it. Nothing’s changing as far as Facebook being a big distraction.
That’s my view on the Facebook Timeline. How about you?
I know its too late now to post about what Google Plus is and what I think about it but screw it, I’m gonna post about Google Plus anyway. 🙂
Google Plus was launched last June 28 although it was just like a week after before i got aware of it. Truth is it was just this Saturday that I got an account with it thanks to a very very beautiful lady named Pao (she gave me an invite). So I started using it and exploring it and quite frankly, its confusing. I mean just imagine how its so different coming from a platform like Facebook and then moving on to Google Plus and then thinking it just works like Facebook.
Anyway here’s my Google Plus account and you’re free to add me up if you think I deserve it. 😉 As of writing this blog entry, its already my fourth day using Google+ and I can definitely see its potential and how its so different from Facebook and Twitter as far as usability and worthiness are concern, yet they’re on the same plate when talking about ease of use. I see it as a combination of Facebook and Twitter plus LinkedIn. You can pretty much imagine it as something like Facebook yet with a professional ‘semi-corporate’ touch. With that, I don’t really see myself posting as often as I do on Twitter/Facebook as with Google Plus.
Well a lot of marketers and bloggers have already expressed their thoughts on how they can use Google Plus to market more and tap into a more “confined” audience. I would say I can’t agree no more.
Google Plus made it a lot easier to connect to the right people/demographics with the use of circles w/c is basically just like groups. The idea is that when you add people, you are allowed to place them inside these circles. So if 10 of these people are family members, then obviously I would place them inside the family circle and so on for the other groups.
With this you can ‘segment’ people that you are following and are following you and then share to them accordingly. Let’s say I’m voicing in something about internet marketing or a make money online tip, then what I will do is simply just allow people in that ‘circle’ to see it. The same way when you go personal and you don’t want your customers to see what you’re violent ramblings are. Now bare in mind that this is possible to when using Facebook, only that Google Plus has done a good job making this feature much more intuitive.
With that in mind, I’m seeing this tool as something that could potentially be in the same level as emails as far as marketing is concern. Because I feel that right now we’re getting into this point that a lot of people are getting more and more tired of the ‘usual’ marketing stuff and that they’re slowly tuning it out.
So does that mean Google Plus will be a good way to tap into a slightly different way to reach out and market to people? Absolutely! What’s remains unseen is how effective and worthy it could be since right now Google themselves are limiting people who can join and obviously they’re not gonna let marketers take over Google Plus. Google’s definitely not the easiest company to game with.
That’s my take with Google Plus and how it could impact us overall. How about you, what do you think of it? Perhaps, it might be a better idea to add me to Google Plus so I can test it out thoroughly and then let you know my findings. 🙂
Image credit goes to Dream Grow
The MelvinBlog Best Blog Marketing Tip Contest has finally come to a close and I can really really see it as a major success. Just with the fact that all entries are superb entries that it exceeded my expectations is a reason good enough to call this contest a success. And add to that, the massive interaction between the community of those blogs who participated in the contest. So again I’d like to thank the sponsors by presenting this uber big banner.
As I’ve said, that’s the goal of this contest. Sure it gave me a lot of traction for the entire 1 month of holding this one but it’s just all about the other intrinsic benefits I guess. So right now, I’m going to announce the winners.
Congratulations to… uh oh! not so fast.. Actually as for the request of some of the contestant and as mainstream as it may sound, I am going to extend this contest. Yes, extend this!
I’m sorry if I spoiled you as I know you’re really excited to hear if you’re one of the winners but after much discussion with some of the sponsors, the contest will be extended up to July 25, meaning you still have 9 more days to either get as much people to read your contest entry or write another killer blog marketing tip to increase your chances of winning.
Another reason for that is the mini side-in contests. Do you remember that when I opened this contest I announced that there will be a lot of side-in type of contest? The reason Im extending this is because I still have some really nice exciting small contest for you in the coming days, so stay tuned!
If you haven’t joined yet, what are you waiting for, enter the contest and get a chance to win over $2000 of REAL prizes at stake.
I don’t really want to do this but I have to since I’m still trying to figure out managing my time for work and for business. I’m now officially accepting guest post entries for this blog again. All you have to do is register for an account and then wait for me to upgrade your account. After all is done, you can now write your articles inside my wp-dashboard. That’s it.
I don’t want to put “what to post” and “what not to” here but obviously in order to land a guest post here in this blog, you have to submit a high-quality and unique guest article. Of course, I reserve the right to accept or reject articles if I feel they don’t meet my taste but rest assure, I’ll let you know about it.
So I guess that’s it for now. I made 2 announcements in this post and I’m sure there will be a lot of clarifications so just let me know through the comment form.
