Social Media Nation's Blog

How many of you have dreamed of giving up that 9-5 job to try a career on the internet and use it to get yourself out of “cubie” world? I call it “cubie” world because that is where I was at a while back. I actually thought I was going to die in my cubicle. I could feel the stranglehold grip taking its tentacles and wrapping themselves around my throat. I thought, “I have GOT to get out of here before I die!”

A couple of career changes later (and a marriage), and I have finally landed in a wonderful place. It took some self-discovery and a couple thousands of dollars to find my niche. That is half the battle.

When you are going to make a change like this, there really are NO written rules. What you will find is every guru out there who wants to sell you their products and who wants you to build THEIR lists. And trust me when I say this, the list is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. When you build a list of people that you can continually stream good informative content to and they like what you have to say, you have positioned yourself into a great place.

You want to be the person that people turn to and seek information. You want to be that person to have the solutions to their problems. Unfortunately, what I found is that most of the people just want to entice you to buy their products and then become an “affiliate” for life. And, once you become an affiliate you have no idea how to market the product you have signed up to push and sell on the internet.

Some people believe strongly in affiliate marketing…and that is ok. Don’t get me wrong–there is a place for this type of activity. I will go into the details of this in another post.

But, when you want to make a career change to become savvy on the internet, what do you do? Where do you start?

In today’s world, Social Media Marketing and Viral Marketing are the place to be. If you are not aware of how Barack Obama won the last election, do some research to find out how he used the internet to win the election. And this type of strategy/marketing is only going to grow as more people and companies find out that if they do not have an internet presence, they are going nowhere fast.

And I am not talking about just having a website. I will get into this topic in another post as well. But a website these days is just one of the tools that you should have in your marketing strategy. You also need a way to have the “word-of-mouth” (Social Media/Viral Marketing) strategy as well.

The best way to begin your Social Media/Viral Marketing career is to begin reading as many books as you can on the subject. (See my Bookstore for just a few titles) Start doing research on the different mediums out there. There are so many that I continually learn about new strategies all the time.

You need someone that you can ask questions who will share their knowledge with you. You will make your own mistakes along the way but it is important to have a coach who can guide you when you feel like you are getting lost, feeling overwhelmed.

I wish that there had been someone like that for me. The reason being is that this is a HUGE decision to delve into this career. And, if you don’t know where to start or where to turn for help, you will give up too easily.

If I can be of any help, just let me know.

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So who hasn’t heard of MySpace? If you haven’t, you must be from another planet. MySpace, along with Facebook, pretty much cover the planet in users. Both have exponential growth with hundreds of thousands of new users every day.

So what happens when some of the top executives jump ship (Space-ship?) to form their own new company? This leaves MySpace scrambling to replace them and the three execs who departed being ecstatic at the thought of forming their own company and embarking on a new venture.

Where else have people jumped ship and founded incredible companies?

Ross Perot left IBM to start Electronic Data Systems (EDS).

Bill Gates left Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS) after a very short amount of time along with his friend Paul Allen and started Micro-soft (as it was originally called). Microsoft is, well, let’s just say if you haven’t heard of Microsoft, you have not been listening to the news or paying attention to how your computer can do all those neat things.

The new company, whatever it will be called, is founded by Amit Kapur (MySpace COO), Steve Pearman (MySpace SVP Product Strategy) and Jim Benedetto (MySpace VP Technology). The company is now backed by August Capital and Redpoint Ventures, who jointly funded a roughly $10 million venture round. David Hornik from August and Geoff Yang from Redpoint have joined the board of directors.

The company is supposedly targeting the message board/Internet forum space with technology that aggregates content and serves advertising against it. Real time search (bingo! fundable!) may be part of the business plan as well.

These three gentleman are a force to watch in the future. No doubt if they were around to help grow MySpace to become the monster which it has become, their new company will most likely take on the same staggering growth as MySpace, EDS and Microsoft have enjoyed.

Good luck Amit, Steve and Jim!

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If you need unlimited hosting space, file transfer and hosting for an unlimited amount of domains CLICK HERE TO SIGNUP FOR BLUEHOST.COM You will find their c-panel and online chat customer support team a knowledgeable, valuable resource that you will return to again and again as you build your online Internet Marketing business.

By Pete Cashmore/Mashable May 15, 2009

Telltale signs in Facebook’s code suggest it might be testing a video calling feature. Notification messages visible in Facebook’s code include “Waiting for your friend…”, “Video call denied”, “Incoming call” and “Loading video call…”.

The clues, first spotted by AllFacebook, point towards a likely move for the website. We’re open, of course, to the possibility that other developers are able to host their code on the Facebook CDN, but assuming that AllFacebook’s assumption is correct and this is an upcoming product, there’s a strong case to be made for Facebook moving in this direction.

Facebook wants to be the single place for all your online communication – from messaging to photosharing to status updates and instant messaging. Adding video chat, then, would seem like a logical next step. The revelation follows news this week that Facebook was adding Friend lists to chat.

It’s difficult to assess the impact of such a move. When Gtalk added support for video chat within Gmail, it seemed like a blow to video chat leader Skype. Except that the functionality wasn’t entirely web-based – it still required a download – and your email client isn’t a natural place for video chatting, which is more of a social experience than a means of productivity.

Facebook, however, may be able to play on its advantage: the social site is a natural venue for video chat, and if they can make it function without a download, there’s likely a huge market for video chat in schools and colleges that block downloaded software like Skype.

What do you think? Would you use Facebook video chat?

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If you need unlimited hosting space, file transfer and hosting for an unlimited amount of domains CLICK HERE TO SIGNUP FOR BLUEHOST.COM You will find their c-panel and online chat customer support team a knowledgeable, valuable resource that you will return to again and again as you build your online Internet Marketing business.