Hosted Social Commerce Apps For Facebook

Just as e-commerce has become an established and accepted channel for business and shopping, the next wave of technology washes ashore. This is social commerce, an adjunct to and potentially more popular way to conduct business online. Social commerce is an outgrowth of social media, especially using the two most popular platforms, Facebook and Twitter. If social media is where people want to spend their time online, then social media is where you have to go to find customers.

The big challenge is how to you leverage the power of social media? You can flail around trying different approaches. Perhaps you can build a website, launch an e-mail campaign or write a blog. All of these do-it-yourself approaches are now old school as far as the Web is concerned. You won’t be need to be learning new software on your PC or deploying more of your own servers. What you need to be working with are hosted solutions. Facebook itself is a hosted solution, although it should be considered just the basic platform for your social commerce efforts. To get the social performance you are after, you’ll want to add some advanced apps to your Facebook page.

What sort of apps are we talking about? How about apps that give you the ability to create deal shares, fan offers, fund raising donations, viral messaging, photo showcases, RSS feeds, add Twitter feeds, recruit volunteers and so on. Can you build these apps yourself and have them work flawlessly on your Facebook page? Can you even find these functions here and there around the Web? Even if you could, they’ll never have a consistent look and feel.

What you need is an “app buffet” from North Social. The apps are part of a large collection that you choose from to power your Facebook page. Each app has its own content management system. You set preferences, upload images, links and text. No need to learn or write any code.

What kind of results can you get with the North Social app collection power your Facebook page? Here’s an example to give you an idea what’s possible:



Anxious to give this a try? You should know that every account comes with a 14 day free trial. Accounts range from starter to enterprise level. All of the apps are unlocked and ready to use for every account? What differentiates the account levels? It’s based on the number of fans you have. The starter account has a limit of 1,000 fans. The professional account moves that limit up to 50,000. The Enterprise account has unlimited fans and up to 5 Facebook pages. All other accounts are for a single page only, although you can always sign up for more accounts if you need them.

The future of social commerce is already here. Learn more, watch demo videos on each of the apps, and then pick the account appropriate for the size (and social popularity) of your business and start your 14 day free trial.

Free E-Books to Get More Sales Leads

Most businesses are challenged for customers in this business environment. Customer retention is critical. So is prospecting to bring in new customers. Without a steady inflow of new blood, business slowly dries up. Eventually, less successful companies are replaced with savvier operators or new companies with business models more finely tuned to current conditions.

How about some free help in this regard? Here’s a list of free ebooks that you can download and read quickly to get new ideas on how to improve your sales and marketing in this era of increasing social media:

How to Monitor Your Social Media Presence in 10 Minutes a Day! - About the most important elements you should be monitoring across relevant social media networks. Listen to this book read aloud by the author, Rebecca Corliss. Or, read the 20 pages yourself to learn how to best spend your time monitoring social media, how other marketers are spending time on social media, what tools consolidate your social media information and what you should be monitoring on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc.

The Ultimate How-To Marketing Guide! - New opportunities in online marketing are literally around every corner. How do you get a comprehensive view of the important ones and prioritize accordingly? Author of this 34 page e-book, David Meerman Scott, says, "identify nuggets of inspiration to drive success at your business." Sections include how to get found online as a local business, how to use your email list effectively, how to optimize your press release, how to keep up with the competition, how to make the most of web ads, and how to write an eBook and how to use the web to optimize your offline events

How to Use Twitter for Business – An Introductory Guide - Learn how to start using Twitter to achieve your business goals. Maintaining an effective Twitter presence can be a powerful part of your business' social media marketing strategy. This comprehensive, 40-page eBook will teach you how to get started. Learn how to sign up for Twitter and optimize your profile, find the right people to follow and attract new followers, engage with your network, use Twitter for business, marketing, lead generation, PR, and customer service, and understand Twitter's role in social search, track and analyze your campaigns.

101 Awesome Marketing Quotes - We all need a little inspiration from time to time. These 101 quotes have been collected from interviews, articles, best-selling books and conferences. Enjoy them and share them with co-workers and friends who are also in need of some inspiration! Thoughts included from bestselling author Chris Brogan, keynote marketing speaker Seth Godin, marketing author & editor Ann Handley, former chief evangelist of Apple, Guy Kawasaki, and video blogger Steve Garfield.

99 Tools to Help You Generate Leads with Social Media - More and more businesses are using social media marketing to get leads and turn those leads into sales. All it takes is a good strategy, excellent implementation and tools to help you manage and monitor your campaigns. In the new eBook 99 Tools to Help You Generate Leads with Social Media, Jamie Turner and 60 Second Marketer have collected those tools that can help you manage, create and monitor your social marketing efforts. Whether you are just launching your social marketing or are at the stage where you are optimizing your efforts, this ebook will give you tools to help you manage multiple social media channels, create and integrate content, monitor qualitative social media (sentiment monitoring), monitor quantitative social media (tracking and analytics). With 99 tools to choose from there’s bound to be at least a few that can help you better manage and monitor your social marketing.

How to Use Facebook for Business - Your prospects are on Facebook and you should be too! Learn how to optimize your Facebook presence for maximum results, promote your business page to attract and grow fans, generate leads with marketing best practices, measure and analyze your Facebook presence and much more!

Backing Down In The Face of Twitter

The end of 2011 saw big reversals by major corporations in the face of public outcry. First was GoDaddy, who came out in favor of SOPA and was quickly persuaded by online outrage into switching positions. The second was an even faster about-face by Verizon Wireless. Verizon thought they’d quietly slip-in a $2 bill payment fee, only to find the public reaction so seething that they cancelled that bright idea before potential shaming by the FCC. Two up. Two down. Is there something to be learned here?

It might be possible to dismiss either or both of these incidents as the obvious corporate toe stubbing that occurs from time to time. But when you add them to a stack of other news stories this past year that fall into the same category, there’s a pretty obvious pattern that emerges.

What other stories? How about the “Arab Spring” demonstrations that swept many countries in the Middle East and prompted regime changes in Tunisia, Egypt & Libya and ongoing protests in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen and Jordan? How about the “Occupy” movements that have been dubbed an “American Autumn” by some? How about 100,000 demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin that included tractor parades and farmers dressed as cows circling the Capitol last February? By this summer, it may culminate in recall of the state’s Governor.

How does all this disparate activity tie together? The common thread is the Internet. We are living in a new age of the empowered individual that is different from anything we’ve seen before in one important aspect. Thanks to technology, that empowerment is nearly instantaneous.

Time was, if you didn’t like something you always had the option to write your Congressman or the editor of your local paper. You could call or write a company to voice your disapproval. If the results weren’t satisfactory, you always could discuss matters with your friends, even escalating your group efforts into a demonstration or protest march. The civil rights movement and student protests of the 1960’s can certainly be said to have changed the course of American society over a period of turbulent years.

For those of us old enough to remember 1968, there is a certain resemblance to Zucotti Park and UC Davis. One difference is the way we hear about these things and see the images. In the 60’s, you tuned in Walter Cronkite from 5:30 to 6 PM or you went without video. There were always AP wirephotos in the Sunday newspaper or color pictures in next week’s Time magazine.

Compare that with watching the live feed from Tim Pool's cell phone as he walked through the crowd in New York City, interviewing people involved in the Occupy Wall Street protests as he went. What’s it take to be such a citizen journalist with your own audio and video remote broadcast facility? In this case, a Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone and an unlimited 4G broadband account from Sprint feeding into a Ustream account called “The Other 99.” Would you like to broadcast live video to a dozen friends or tens of thousands of interested onlookers worldwide? The Ustream.tv channels are free. You can feed them from your desktop, laptop or smartphone with wired or wireless broadband connection.

Social media is said to be a major theme for business in 2012. The social media revolution has already become mainstream activity for individuals everywhere. In WWII, desperate messages came out of countries under siege via Morse Code sent from hidden short wave transmitters. In 2012, that’s text messages and tweets from some of the billions of cell phones in service worldwide. Think this can be stopped? Just who is going to round up all those billions of phones or cut off the Internet or texting for very long? There are so many interconnections that if you need to send a message anywhere on Earth, you can probably find a path in short order.

It’s more than the power of motivated individuals. Social media and the readily available tools that feed it allow those motivated individuals to quickly, almost instantly, join forces with others of the same mind. In hours, minutes, perhaps seconds, group efforts can be mounted to address nearly any issue. This is what doomed the ill-fated initiatives from GoDaddy and Verizon before they ever got solidified. One disgruntled customer on the toll-free service line can be placated or ignored. Ten thousand or a hundred thousand in concert bashing your business on Facebook, Twitter, text messages, YouTube, blogs and email are a force to be reckoned with. Once they get the attention of the mainstream media who monitor those social channels looking for newsworthy material, the game is over ... even if it only started a few hours or days ago.

Integrating Social Media And Reality

We live in two separate worlds, with one foot in each. There’s the virtual world of texting, email, online shopping, Internet search, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIN. Then there’s the real world of food, shelter, family, friends, and work. The two intersect, but they’re not tied together in any robust way. Well, at least until now.

It only makes sense that someone would come up with a solution to link the virtual and physical worlds we live in. That solution is something called Poken. As you might suspect, it has both physical and virtual components.

The physical component is called a Poken. It’s an electronic gadget packaged to look like an avatar or a flash memory device. The business end of the device is encapsulated in a white four fingered hand that has a button in the palm and lights that glow from within. What you can’t see is a coil antenna, microprocessor, USB drivers and a watch style battery.

The way you use Poken is to carry the device on a lanyard around your neck or clipped to your jacket, backpack, or bag. When you encounter someone else with a Poken you can request an exchange of contact data, much the same as requesting or offering a business card. Touch the hands of the Poken together and they’ll sense each other’s presence. After a wireless exchange of links, both hands will pulsate with a green glow to announce their success in the encounter.

Now for the virtual component. You plug the USB connector of your Poken into your computer and automatically upload the day’s contacts to your Poken Hub, a personalized online portal. After entering your ID and password, you can see your contacts organized in lists or displayed as virtual business cards along a timeline. Unlike paper cards or scraps of paper that you’ve used to jot down names and phone numbers, the Poken Cards show a photo of your contact.

Being able to see pictures of the people you’ve met displayed along a timeline makes it easy to remember where you met someone and who else you met at the same time. But that’s just the half of it. Those Poken Cards, the virtual representation of a business card or address book entry, have names, phone numbers, addresses and website links. It’s whatever information you and those you meet have chosen to share. The popular social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIN have familiar link icons on the card. There’s also room for hyperlinks to other sites, such as your blog or business website.

This is how Poken tightly integrates the process of meeting people in person with meeting them again online at the familiar social networking sites. You don’t have to think about who goes with what site, because it’s all tied together on the Poken cards you’ve collected.