Social media can be extremely profitable for businesses or individuals, and while it is easy to think so, it is not the solution to all your problems. Social media is highly ineffective if you don’t work first on the core aspect of your business: your products. More and more, I have to explain the benefits of a social media strategy and a strong presence on the Web, but it can sometimes be hard as I think a web strategy can be highly ineffective if the products or the services a business have to offer aren’t worth talking about. The good news is that your products don’t necessarily need to be uniques for people to talk about them: sometimes, a unique offering just does the trick. (more…)

There’s a new trend on twitter right now, mainly popularized by this article from twitip, that consist in “starting over” with your twitter account. It was once very well seen (in fact it still is from my point of view…) to follow back people who were following you, but as the article points out, it’s hard to follow conversations when you follow 10K people. I totally agree with this point (even though it’s still possible with the right tools), but I totally disagree with the way people are “using” this article.

The article mainly says you should follow only the people you find interesting and that there’s nothing wrong with unfollowing people because you don’t care about what they have to say. While I agree, here’s the side effect I find ridiculous. (more…)

It’s crazy how easy it is to forget about the word “social” in social networks. You might not really care about twitter or your number of followers and it’s totally fine with me, but for a lot of people it’s actually pretty important. We could spend a lot of time discussing about what is really important on twitter (the number of followers or the strength of your network), but no matter what your strategy or vision is, finding followers is important. You can probably find a thousand posts online on “how to get more followers on twitter”, but to be honest I feel that unless you are already “popular”, here’s the one step process that work best: (more…)

I recently tested IntenseDebate on my other blog because I have a crazy post with over 900 comments that needed a decent comment system. I had the choice of course to go with WP 2.7 threaded comments or with a third party plugin, but honestly I didn’t want to spend a day tweaking the CSS and all that to make it work properly. Also, I wanted to introduce “reputation”, so that people could rate comments. On top of that, I had the problem that I couldn’t possibily fit 900 comments on one single page, they had to be splitted on different pages. All of that my friends, is IntenseDebate. (more…)

Personal branding is going to be huge in a couple of years as everyone is at least very good at one thing and also because it is going to be even easier than today to start a blog, run your own TV show and things like that. This post is going to be more a discussion and some thoughts about whether or not businesses and companies will have to deal with personal branding and if it will be an issue for them.

The impact of social media and personal branding

With social medias and personal branding, each and everyone of us is an “expert” in a field. If not an expert, you’re talking/blogging about something you feel comfortable with. Some are extremely lucky, have a day job they really enjoy and blog and tweet just for fun. On the opposite, some have a boring day job or a job they hate and this personal branding/blog stuff is what keeps them alive during the evening and at night. It is for some, just like a double life: working as a regular receptionist during the day and running a popular show on the web at night. (more…)

I want to share with you what makes me follow someone on twitter and I also want to know what makes YOU follow other people. I see people following 1,000 persons and only getting followed by 30 persons and I also see the complete opposite, so there must be different priorities for different persons. While I agree that reputation and popularity plays a big role in the “follow ratio”, there must be something. (more…)

Here it is, the new method from Danny Cooper to get backlinks: offer a review copy of an e-book to get backlinks from a couple of selected bloggers. There you go Danny, you got your backlink and here’s one more for your Blog Comment Blueprint. Now that we’ve done the dirty stuff for that link hungry Danny, let’s get to the content. (more…)

I’m noticing a trend in the twitter world and I must admit I don’t really like it. Before going any further, I just want to say that I love twitter so much and it really is a revelation to me as I bashed on it for such a long time! I guess it is because I didn’t really understood its power or just simply didn’t take the time to fully appreciate the platform. Anyway, this is not about whether or not twitter is a nice platform, it’s more about the dirty little trick I keep noticing all around. (more…)

I just hit the “feed details” link on my Google Reader to find out about a nice little feature Google just added. It’s no big deal and won’t change your life (well maybe, so continue reading!), but it’s fairly interesting and I simply want to let you know about it. (more…)

I’ve been thinking about this for over a week now and it really obsesses me. Do you sometimes have the feeling your online journey won’t bring anything good to this world? I am not talking about blogging or running a website for a purpose or to give tips and tricks on a specific subject, I’m talking about building websites or blogs on a subject you have absolutely no clue about just to get money through AdSense or whatever affiliate program? (more…)