Here is some of social media marketing notes, well, micro-blog only. I am doing this in a popular Chinese micro-blog called “sina micro-blog“. In order to make it friendly for overseas visitors, I used some terms from twitter rather than sina itself.

1. Brand character matters.
If you are going to do social media marketing, make sure your ID is a kinda real person rather than a robot. So the character of your ID is important. Generally it comes from your company’s brand. It might be serious, humorous, lovely or whatever. I take IDP as a professional, official, kind, easy-going and sometimes a little bit lovely.

2. Plan of the publish of your content.
Don’t rush into the publish of your tweets. I made a plan of the content, including the frequency, category of my tweets, focus of your tweets.
Frequency: 5-10 tweets per day.
Category: #news, #staffs, #specialoffer, #reviews, #onlineevents, #retweets of excellent tweet.

3. Decoration of your account.

1.Make sure you have filled all the blanks of your profile;
2.Choose a official avatar for your account, this will make your account alive. Don’t forget to write your bio, keep it simple & accurate.
3.Tag yourself. I tagged IDP “education, AUS, USA, study abroad” etc. The tags will help 4.your fans to identify the content of your ID.

4.Target your audience.
How to find your audience?

1, search your brand. People who mentioned your brand may interested in your brand & business;
2, Search the keywords of your business, People who mentioned your business might be your potential customers;
3, Search your competitors. People who mentioned your competitor might be your potential customers, too.

5. Interaction of your audience.

1, Follow your audience;
2, Conversation with your audience;
3, Retweet your aduience’s tweet.
4, DM your aduience.

Google China becomes my concern in these two month. And I’ve never been so obsessive about google.

Mar 22, 2010, Google official blog updated a new approach to China to stop censoring its search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Google.cn is redirected to Google.com.hk.

There are two voices in China now.

1. Support google’s decision.
However, it’s only a small part of people in mainland China. They have their onw ways to visit the websites which are blocked in China. I belive that they are indeed well informed with different opinions in home and abroad. This group of people are more familiar with internet so they are able to learn some technics and find a way out to approach a different world outside.

2. Follow the national media in China.
Google China is a banned topic in China mainland now. No news and discussion are allowed, especially the supportive articles. Google China is described as a evil company in China by the natinal media news reports. I’ve been talking to some friends, they belived that google’s pull-out would not affect their life, google obviously made the worst choice in this matter.

For my company, we have our potential market overseas. Without google and its service we are using, our business will greatly affected. Anyway, I really appreciate the suggestion from google for using VPN and proxies. If your business is in the same circumstance, read it here.

I am a Chinese, I love my country and my people. But sometimes I wish I could live in a place without a wall or restriction. Well, things make me frustrated and disappointed.

“Information overload” is a term popularized by Alvin Toffler that refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information. The term itself is mentioned in a 1964 book by Bertram Gross, The Managing of Organizations. See more about Information overload in wikipedia.

I’ve spent lots of time on the internet without thinking too much and too deep. I find it become a really anxiety. Because I just let all information flow into my mind; however it’s seems a little bit hard to think them clearly. I’d like to take it as a downside.

How to avoid information overload? I figure out some tips here:

1. Filter according to profession & hobbies.
I have to know, my profession and my hobbies may decide what kind of information I would like to flow into my mind. So I set up a filter according to my profession & hobbies.

2. One hour per day for all headlines.
Before I apply my filter, I’d like to read all kinds of information to know what is happening around this world. Since there are too many good information, I cannot take them all. I decide to spend one hour perday for the browsing of the headlines generally, and mark some of the best.

3. One or two hours to think and analyze the most useful information for me.
Of course, the best way is taking some notes here, I think. Learn from the source information and be critical, what is right, what is wrong. After reorganizing my ideas, I’ll write a outline here.

Since SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is emphasized for attracting traffic and promoting the website, I have to learning something about SEO. I’ll keep some of my notes here. This time comes with two articles from randfish:

#No.1 Pagination: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience
Sure, we have to make clear the reasons:

Why is Pagination an SEO Issue?
Pagination, the practice of segmenting links to content on multiple pages, affects two critical elements of search engine accessibility.

* Crawl Depth: Best practices demand that the search engine spiders reach content-rich pages in as few “clicks” as possible (turns out, users like this, too). This also impacts calculations like Google’s PageRank (or Bing’s StaticRank), which determine the raw popularity of a URL and are an element of the overall algorithmic ranking system.
* Duplicate Content: Search engines take duplication very seriously and attempt to show only a single URL that contains any given piece of content. When pagination is implemented improperly, it can cause duplicate content problems, both for individual articles and the landing pages that allow browsing access to them.

And, I do noticed the dos & donts
Do:

* Try to link to as many pages of the pagination structure as possible without breaking the 100(ish) links per page limit
* Show newer content at the top of the results list when possible, as this means the most link juice will flow to newer articles that need it (and are temporally relevant)
* Use and link to relevant/related categories & subcategories to help keep link juice flowing throughout the site
* Link back to the top results from each of the paginated URLs

Don’t:

* Show only a few surrounding paginated links from paginated URLs – you want the engines to be able to crawl deeper from inside the structure
* Link to only the pages at the front and end of the paginated listings; this will flow all the juice to the start and end of results, ingoring the middle
* Try to randomize the paginated results shown in an effort to distribute link juice; you want a static site architecture the engines can crawl
* Try to use AJAX to get deeper in the results sets – engines follow small snippets of Javascript (sometimes), but they’re not at a point where this is an SEO best practice
* Go over the top trying to get every paginated result linked-to, as this can appear both spammy and unusably ugly

Last, you have to pay attention to Nofollows. Rel=Canonicals and Conditional Redirects.

Some notes on Online Marketing Strategies fo China Holidays.

• Crucial element of the traffic source. – 70% above now
• Learning & practice is the first thing at present stage.
• Key words analysis & optimization.
• With analyzing tools, to improve the performance of the website.

• Email lists collecting.
• Tools to send our clients Emails.

• Integration. Sync updates between your twitter, facebook, digg, Google accounts etc.
• Useful & helpful updates. Don’t be taken as a spammer, try to make your messages helpful and friendly to others.
• Selective reading. Well-informed but not over-informed, select the most appealing news and updates.
• Choose your Social Media Base. Choose 1-3 social media tools as your marketing base, do don’t waste too much time.
• Interaction. Trying to communicate with your followers, emphasizing their suggestions.

• Use existing resource. Choose the outbound links of another site, contact them to building links.
• Comments or post in blogs & forums.
• Creative writings. Attract more links to your high quality articles.

Online Marketing Resource:
#SEO

1. http://designm.ag/resources/free-page-analysis-tools/
2. http://searchenginewatch.com/3626600
3. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
4. http://www.seomoz.org/
5. http://yoast.com/
6. http://mattcutts.com/

#Email Tools

1. http://www.constantcontact.com/
2. http://www.icontact.com/
3. http://www.myemma.com
4. http://www.verticalresponse.com/
5. http://www.benchmarkemail.com/

#Email Lists

1. http://www.infousa.com/
2. http://www.email-point.com/
3. http://www.thedatasupplier.com/
4. http://route72.com/
5. http://www.americaint.com/targeted-email-lists/targeted-email-lists.html
6. http://www.copywriter.com/lists/

#Social Media
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#Links Tools

1. https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
2. http://rapid.searchmetrics.com/en/seo-tools/
3. http://www.wintzell.net/seo-tools/domain-outbound-links-check.php
4. http://www.rightscripts.com/outboundlinkchecker/