The coupling of the current “post-web 2.0 era” with the ongoing economic slump would seem to make for a perfect opportunity for a startup like GlassDoor, a job-seeker and career community where you can find and share information about companies, careers and specific jobs, including details like pay and interview questions.
In using the site, it’s clear that there are a lot of potentially valuable tools and resources for job seekers within, but you have to be a little bit focused and savvy in digging them out…qualities that motivated job seekers need to have in any event! Read the rest of this entry »
As respected online publications such as Salon.com, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal removed all or most of their paid subscription models over the course of the decade, conventional wisdom formed that holding print content intended for a mainstream audience behind a pay wall was a noble but failed experiment.
But are paid subscriptions on the Internet poised to make a comeback, albeit in a different form?
There are several standard ways to make money in the highly competitive online publishing space. The dominant one for years has been free content supported by advertising, but the massive amount of supply (even of the high-quality stuff) coupled with a worldwide recession have pushed down rates that advertisers are willing to pay for ad space, squeezing profit margins for most online publishers.
TechCrunch’s MG Siegler points out a not-so-little secret about online display ads: most people couldn’t care less about them:
The web is increasingly filling up with ads. Many sites, including this one, have a bunch of them all around with the hopes that you’ll find one relevant to you, and click on it. Of course, most of you don’t. And if you do, it may be by accident.
While there are a number of other ways to make money at the online content game, such as using content to sell products and services, there are a few factors at play that could pave the way for online paid subscriptions to make major headway over the next few years.
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We recently covered status update services Ping.fm and HelloTxt, competitors in the growing market for tools and services that help social media fans and online marketers manage communication using multiple social media profiles. Now Facebook has made Facebook Pages, the publicly available profiles for businesses, accessible for updating via both Ping.fm and HelloTxt.
HelloTxt, for example, allows you to post text messages, images and videos directly to Facebook Page walls. And while both Ping.fm and HelloTxt support the common hashtag (#) convention used on many microblogging and social media sites these days, HelloTxt has gone further in allowing hashtags to be used as a way to quickly and easily manage outbound status updates. By using the Settings page, HelloTxt members can set hashtags to apply to individual or groups of social media sites, so that when a hashtag is invoked (such as “#dealoftheday,” for example) only those profiles tied to that hashtag will receive the status update. As ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez points out, this should appeal to online marketers and social media workers who are managing multiple Facebook Pages at once.
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Increasingly, social media web sites are becoming much more than places to keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues online. They’re becoming major hubs of information consumption, analysis and distribution as well, so it’s important to understand how this trend is playing out on some of the more popular destinations on the social web.
In fact, social media web sites such as Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook have the potential to take over many of the functions of RSS readers such as Google Reader, Newsgator and Bloglines.
Twitter
Amidst all the hubbub of Ashton Kutcher and CNN and Oprah Winfrey and Save Chuck, Twitter has become a nifty and dynamic way to receive inbound alerts about news stories and information, giving the ability to turn your Twitter stream into an “RSS reader” of sorts.
There are a few different ways to use Twitter as an RSS reader. The first is to simply follow those users who broadcast links to stories and web sites that you find interesting and relevant (Robert Scoble, for example, when it comes to all things tech, Internet and geek). This is a means of crafting your own “smart people network” that sends the best stories and links to you. As David Drager at systemBash writes, “I find it awesome to be able to see what is going on, without having to manage ‘feeds.’”
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Just as services designed to help social media enthusiasts manage multiple online profiles are becoming increasingly popular, services designed to manage posting status updates and communication to multiple online profiles are becoming plentiful as well. Recently, I covered Ping.fm, which has now been joined by Italy-based HelloTxt, a similar product that allows users to update a host of social networking, social media and blogging platforms, all at once.
Like Ping.fm, HelloTxt allows you to update a large number of online profiles and publishing platforms through a single entry field. (They claim to support 45 “social networks” as compared to 30 for Ping.fm.) Upon registering for HelloTxt, you’re given the option to add your active profiles from a wide array of services, such as Twitter, Bebo and Remember The Milk.
The number of characters in the status entry field count “up” so that you can make sure to cut status messages off at the all-important 140 mark, to keep with Twitter’s character limit. A nifty feature included in the status entry area is the ability to “post in the future,” setting the date for a status update ahead of time.
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Inbound marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers. In other words, instead of taking the time and resources to go out and find customers, you set yourself up in such a way that the right kinds of qualified leads find you. Inbound marketing, focused on areas like search engine optimization, content and social media, is cheaper and better targeted than traditional outbound marketing like advertising, cold calling, direct mail and email blasts.
So how do you do it? That’s where inbound marketing companies like Hubspot can help. Hubspot offers free resources and an array of tools (available via a $250 monthly subscription to site owners) to help companies improve search engine rank and influence, increase social media presence, and create content and marketing strategies.
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For many bloggers, RSS subscriber numbers are a fun and useful way to get an approximate read on how many “loyal customers” they have. For others, however, RSS numbers take on a greater significance, impacting such things as advertiser and investor relationships, as well as a web site’s perceived influence.
For example, when you visit TechCrunch and note that it has north of two million RSS subscribers according to its FeedBurner chicklet, it stands to impress and make you give its articles a degree of consideration that you may not lend to web publications with a lower subscriber count.
So this is all to say that RSS subscriber numbers are a pretty big deal on the Internet. But how are RSS subscriber numbers calculated, can they be trusted, and what do they really tell us? And while FeedBurner is certainly the industry leader in “burning” RSS feeds for web publishers and providing subscriber counts, what are the alternatives?
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For web workers, some social networks matter more than others. What I mean by that is while MySpace is still one of the most popular web sites on the planet (Alexa has it ranked No. 9 currently), it’s simply not that important — in relative terms — for connecting with colleagues, potential customers and contacts; obtaining breaking news, links and social media chatter; or getting a sense of what’s happening in social media circles in real time.
As 2009 is shaping up, the most popular and relevant social networks and social media platforms for web workers are Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and LinkedIn. Granted, there’s a vast galaxy of other valuable and interesting social web sites to select from, but it’s important to get a sense of how to get the most out of this particular foursome.
Twitter
Twitter was a phenomenon in 2007, a rising social media star in 2008, and has largely attained mainstream status in 2009 (cable news stations are falling all over themselves these days in attempt to send you to their Twitter profile, for example). It’s simply one of the most important places to be online. It’s also an amazingly simple and flexible product, which befuddles some and delights many.
While Twitter’s flexibility makes it very useful for all kinds of things — from live event reporting to simply staying in touch with friends and colleagues — I’m coming to believe its most important use for web workers is as a “social media marketing tool.” That, of course, can have many meanings, but think of it like this: it’s a tool to engage the now-mainstream Twitter community in a friendly way, putting a human face on your product or service (or the brand called you!). The counterintuitive fact is that the more you use Twitter as a place to help people and talk about your life and the world at large, the more you’re likely to draw people to trust you — and the brand that you represent — more.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
