You may or may not have heard, but there is a new social media site called Pinterest. Unlike other social media sites where the main focus is to build a profile, with Pinterest, the emphasis is on “pinning” pictures that interest you to your various pin boards (hence the name Pinterest). From there, you can vote up pinned pictures, or make comments. Getting started with Pinterest is easy, but getting in is not quite as simple.

First off, the only way to get on Pinterest is through an invite from someone already on Pinterest. Once you get your invite, you can use either your Facebook, or Twitter account to set up a new Pinterest account. Once you have logged in, you can upload a picture to serve as the avatar for your profile. From there you are taken to a listing of default “pin boards” where you can start pinning up pictures immediately to get you going (ex. Pictures of Me, Things I Love, etc.). You can even make up your own pin boards, and pin pictures to them as well. There are several categories to choose from, such as Art, Fitness, and Sports. There’s even an Other category if you still can’t find a category that would fit your picture. Surprisingly enough, Pinterest is not limited to just pinning pictures. You can also pin videos as well. So if you have a favorite video that you would like to share with others, just go ahead, and pin it up.

Here’s where it gets interesting for those who are doing marketing, and looking for a new avenue to market your products (for those who haven’t figured out some ideas already). Pinterest also has a Gifts category that is sectioned off according to price. Therefore, if you are looking to market a low, or high dollar item, then doing so on Pinterest is a possibility. Please keep in mind that spamming the site will get this feature shut down eventually, so please utilize this feature with wisdom, and some degree of moderation.

Here are some ideas of how you can use Pinterest to market your products:

– Write an article about various products that you offer under a particular price point (ex: Great Gift Ideas Under $20). Pin the pictures in the article to a pin board in your Pinterest account, and share them with others.
– Create a video teaching someone how to do something, and share the video on Pinterest. To make this idea even more powerful, you could write an article, or blog post, and include the video on the blog post, and then pin the video from the blog post to your Pinterest account.
– Take some funny pictures in your area, or neighborhood, and put the URL to your website at the bottom of the picture, and then share the picture on one of your pin boards.

While Pinterest is definitely a marketer’s dream, in order to help keep it that way, there are still a few things to ask yourself before posting a product picture, or video to Pinterest:

– Does the picture that you’re sharing provide value? Is it one that people would be willing to share? If the picture appeared in a regular magazine, would people pause to look at it, or would they skip right over it?
– Does the information in the video that you are sharing solve a problem? Does it highlight something unusual, or different? If its a video that you wouldn’t mind writing an article about, then there is a good chance it would do well on Pinterest.
– Have I “Liked”, or commented on other media shared on Pinterest that is not my own? If you show that you are interested in other people’s work, this will persuade people to be more accepting of your marketing efforts.

Pinterest definitely has some great possibilities in regards to marketing. Since the majority of people who use Pinterest are interested in finding interesting things on the internet, and also sharing those little known gems with others, Pinterest is a great place to share your articles, pictures, and videos with a growing population of people who engage with others via social media. Also, due to the fact that person wishing to join Pinterest must first get an invite from someone already on Pinterest, you won’t have to worry about having only “spam bots” view your shared media. But again, all of this must be taken with a grain of salt. If Pinterest is used wisely, then it can continue to be a profitable marketing avenue for many years to come. But if it is abused, then soon restrictions will be put in place making it difficult to market successfully on Pinterest. Keep that in mind when you formulate your marketing plans for Pinterest.

Do you need a Pinterest Invite? Feel free to get in touch with me. And don’t forget to follow me, you can follow me on Pinterest as Bhartzer.

I’d like to start by sharing a quick story about an experience I had a week ago with my smart phone.

Friday night, my wife and I were looking for some dinner, sick of the normal chain restaurants that plague our area we were hoping to find something new and reasonably priced. There are many smart phone options to find local restaurants, bars, theaters, and activities but my go-to app currently is Yelp. If you haven’t tried it before, Yelp is a review and rating app that lets users share experiences they have at a business, generally used for restaurants. The app also lists a businesses website, picture, and other relevant information when available.

For any new restaurant my standard approach is to check out the star ratings, read 3-4 quick reviews and then click on the website link to find the menu.

I decided on a new restaurant that had recently opened and had good reviews. Next step was to check their menu to make sure the prices were reasonable and we liked the dinner options. Yelp did have the restaurants website link but clicking it brought me to a page completely unusable by my iPhone because it was completely created with Flash.

I don’t necessarily have anything against Flash, the website likely looks beautiful on a computer but that doesn’t help me while out shopping and hunger strikes. We then found the next intriguing restaurant on the list, checked reviews, read the menu and had a great dinner. Unfortunately the first restaurant lost one customer that night and potentially a lot more in the future. Thanks for sticking with me to the point I’m trying to make – Be Mobile Friendly!

Although Yelp was the example I used there are many other ways a mobile user will find a business. TripAdvisor, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and more can all connect possible customers to your business from a mobile device on the go. In most cases, the user will be directed to your website and it is extremely important to anticipate what they will be looking for. In my example, the restaurant needed to have a menu accessible on the home page, even with flash they could have used an html link to a PDF file which would be mobile friendly.

My advice to any business from restaurant to roller skate rink is do your own ‘smart phone web audit’. Take your iPhone, Blackberry, Android or other and go to your businesses website right now, what do you see? Most smart phone browsers can now render full websites and just require zooming in to navigate, your main focus should be whether or not the important content is easy to find and read. If you think content is hard to find or access yourself, chances are so will your customers – change it. Another option is to create a complete mobile friendly version of your website; this can be done from scratch or by using services such as Mobify or for WordPress sites WPTouch and WPTap.

I hope you take the two minutes to test your site out and then make any necessary changes, every small competitive advantage helps.

Matt is a Social Media Consultant at Near Coast Media.
Follow Matt on Twitter: @mattjham.

Imagine visiting your Facebook account, viewing your Facebook Timeline, making a few posts on your Facebook wall, updating your status. Then you leave Facebook.com, without logging out of Facebook, and go to a few other websites. You know, the usual daily routine. For many, it’s easier to just leave Facebook.com and go to other websites without logging out of your Facebook account. When you go back to Facebook.com, you’re already logged in–you don’t to type your Facebook user Id and password again. You can go right to your Facebook timeline, to see all of the updates from your Facebook friends.

That is where this Facebook security flaw comes into play. Devious web site owners (some technically call them “Black Hat” webmasters) are taking advantage of Facebook users. By installing simple JavaScript code on their web site, webmasters are able to “fake” a click on a hidden Facebook “Like” button on their site. And then they post on your Facebook Wall about it, which promotes their URL or web site to all of YOUR Facebook Friends. And you never see the click or the Facebook “Like”, and you most likely will not see that you posted about their web site on your Facebook Status unless you go to Facebook.com and view your Facebook Wall. Most Facebook users will never know that they are promoting web sites that they recently visited unless someone tells them about it–because Facebook is designed in a way for us to see all of our friends’ updates on our timeline. It takes a separate click on the Facebook site to view your own Facebook Status updates.

Security Flaw Effects 31 Percent of Web Site Visitors
In a recent test during a two week period, I installed a version of some “Auto Like” and “Auto Post on Facebook Wall” JavaScript code on a web site that I own. After running the test on the web site for two weeks (the code has now been removed from the site), the results were impressive but disturbing. The average web site visitors to this web site are what I would call “very tech savvy” people. On this particular test web site where I ran the script, the Average Bounce Rate is 52.41 percent. The Average Time on Site is 7:04 minutes. 54.62 percent were New Visits. Here are some statistics about the users to this particular test web site:

52.41% Bounce Rate
7:04 minutes Avg. Time on Site
54.62% New visits
45.64% Firefox Users
34.20% Chrome Users
9.36% Internet Explorer Users

Referring Web Sites:
38.24% New Visits Direct to Site
71.27% New Visits from Google
61.90% New Visits from Facebook.com
83.33% New visits from m.Facebook.com
——————————
30.8% Users who Auto Liked and Auto Posted on their Facebook Wall

Nearly 31 Percent of these tech-savvy users who visited the test web site were still logged into Facebook–and the script caused them to automatically “Like” the page and automatically posted on their Facebook Wall that they liked the web site–promoting the web site to all of their Facebook Friends. And although the about half of the new visits were direct visits to the test web site, the 3rd and 4th most popular referring site was Facebook (I am assuming that they came because someone had promoted the web site on their Facebook status). 62 percent were from Facebook.com and a whopping 83 percent were new visits from the mobile version of Facebook.com.

What is disturbing here is the fact that when you visit a website. Not only will you “Like” a URL of the web site owner’s choosing, the web site will also automatically post on your Facebook Wall without you even knowing it. If you are logged into your Facebook account, even though you are NOT on Facebook.com, any website can automatically post on your Facebook Wall without your knowledge. This is a serious Facebook security flaw that Facebook needs to address right away.

How You can Stop Facebook Account Security Flaw
At this point, there is really only one way that you personally can stop web sites from automatically posting and auto “Liking” when you visit their web site. When you visit Facebook.com you should log in–and when you leave Facebook.com, you should log out. As long at you are technically logged out of Facebook.com, there is no way that a devious web site owner can force you to automatically “like” their web site–and they cannot automatically post to your Facebook Wall.

Facebook absolutely needs to take action right away so that this cannot continue to happen. Facebook must protect the integrity of the Facebook “Like” system, or a Facebook “Like” will be meaningless in the future. A good start would be for Facebook to implement some sort of Captcha Code as a part of the Facebook “Likes”, which would be a good step in the right direction here.

First, after logging into your Google Plus account, look in the column on the far right hand side of the page. At the bottom, you’ll see an icon that you can click on in order to create a new Google Plus page. Once you click on the link, you’ll be taken to another page where you can choose the category of your page – local business or place, product or brand, company or organization, arts / entertainment or sports, and other (in case your page doesn’t fall into any of the previous categories).

After picking your category, you will be taken to another page where you choose the name of your page, and can add a website url if you wish. You can also choose with whom you wish to share your page. After completing the final steps of agreeing to the TOS, and confirming that you are authorized to create this page, you will be taken to another page where you can setup your page’s appearance, title, and description. Note – if you choose the category ‘local business or place’, Google Plus will use the telephone number attached to your account to verify the address on Google maps.

After completing the first part of your Google Plus page setup, you will be taken to another page where you put in a few words about what the page will be about, and put in a profile photo for your page. Once that is done, you can then let people in your circles know all about the page that you’ve created. This is a very nice touch in that its great for marketing just about any Google Plus page. Another note: any comments or posts that you make while within the back office of your page will be sent on behalf of your page.

Overall, Google Plus pages looks like a great way for businesses to better connect with their customers. Businesses, and various organizations would be able to better connect with their customers by offering, not only various offers to people that visit the Google Plus pages site, but also to share pictures, and different tidbits of news about the company. You could also use the Google Plus page to run contests, and conduct surveys to find out about what your customers are thinking – in general, and about your brand. The Google Plus page can be a great tool for promoting your business without spending a lot of money – but there’s a catch…

There are two main marketing areas you can focus on when using your Google Plus page to promote a business, or organization – promotions / advertising, and SEO. Currently, it is much easier to use a Google Plus page for Search Engine Optimization purposes over just regular promotions, and advertising unless most of your customers are already using Google Plus, which would probably be true if your business is in the tech industry. Fortunately, Google treats the Google Plus pages like any other website (as long as you have your privacy settings set so that your Google Plus page can be viewed by everyone) which means that your customers should be able to easily find your page from an online search, or your page’s url. As far as the effectiveness of having a Google Plus page would be for getting more customers, or visitors to your website, it is too soon to tell, but it is better to go ahead, and set up a page now, and nothing happens than not setting up a page, and have Google Plus suddenly become popular.

Virtual Contact takes all the functionalities one would expect from the Twitter platform and takes them a step further.

With Virtual Contact, Twitter is literally pushed beyond its limits and turns into the tool of choice for those who are active on multiple networks.

Here are some of the perks it offers:

– Manage multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously
– Manage automatic tweets (automatic-messages)
– Shorten your URLs
– Publish images and videos
– Send direct messages through Twitter’s internal messenger service
– Available on 4 different platforms for your convenience:
– Blackberry PLAYBOOK
– Apple iPad
– ANDROID TABLETS
– WINDOWS.

As Virtual Contact is new on the market, twitter is the first client we’ve decided to take above and beyond in this fashion but as the world of social media grows, other platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and others are in the works.

BlackBerry App World ™ gave Virtual Contact a top rating of 4.5/5 stars and thousands have since become satisfied users of our application.

Here are some reviews from satisfied customers:

– “I have tried a few of the others, but this one is powerful yet really easy to use.”
– “Very nice twitter client with good features and multi-account support.”
– “about time we got a decent twitter client.”
– “Can’t complain about a free twitter app that gives you all this functionality Twitter as well as managing multiple accounts at the same time. Also has auto messaging which is good for business! I’m happy with it so far. Thanks for making it free too…”

How did we come up with this idea? Our initial goal was to design tools to help make life easier for active Internet users such as the self-starting Web entrepreneurs, bloggers and journalists.

Through our research, the conclusion reached was a simple one: the users of our software are in the best position to convey us their needs and expectations as to what our software should be.

So, we’ve listened and we’re inviting you to take part in a very interesting experiment: we’re developing a Web 2.0-style program and we’re inviting you to give us your suggestions, comments and critics through Twitter and Facebook.

As we improve the software, your feedback will guide us and help us adjust and develop its functionalities for future updates. You’ll have front row seats to see our work taking place.

This is a golden opportunity for you to have your voice heard and get customized solutions to your problems…And it’s as easy as following us on Facebook or Twitter.

You can also find reviews of virtual contact in crackberry.com at:
http://crackberry.com/virtual-contact-twitter-your-blackberry-playbook

You can also look us up at

twitter: virtual_contact
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/virtualcontact
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/vrtlcntct

So if you need your twitter to work as fast and efficiently as you do, give us a try, you get all the advantages mentioned above, you’ll play a role in improving the overall program for all of us and best of all, it’s free !

You don’t have to tell Kevin Reilly, entertainment president of Fox Broadcasting Company, that social media is a good way to market new shows. He already knows.

At the MIPCOM show, a TV and entertainment conference and market held in Cannes, France every year, Reilly said the network is using social media to build awareness of new shows with tremendous success. Reilly gushed over how social media has made shows hits like Glee and New Girl, almost before they even hit the airwaves.

“In a connected world in which individuals have the ability to choose from the best of TV past and present, more and more the audience will rely on filtering mechanisms and social networks to navigate and inform their choices,” he told the crowd in his keynote:

“There is a reason that Facebook just kicked social TV into high gear. As one blogger said: ‘When people start consuming content through Facebook, it enables a new world of friend-to-friend discovery that is potentially worth more than any promo campaign on the planet.’ In other words, better than any network today can provide.”

I read his speech on deadline.com; by the way, it’s a great site to keep track of what is going on in the film, TV and media businesses. Their coverage of the social media explosion, which has included several similar speeches about social media (from the announcement of Yahoo! doing a Web-only TV series and the expansion of Facebook’s strategic deals with, well, just about everyone), is another demonstration of social media no longer being a trend. It’s now clearly part of the foundation of the media. Don’t look now, but TV, radio, print and online just moved one chair down to make room for social media at the grown-ups table.

Think about just what Fox has just done. For their new hit comedy New Girl, Fox pre-released an episode on iTunes and VOD, before the pilot was even aired on TV – and they scored 2-million downloads. Reilly also said that another one of their hit shows, Glee, was the guinea pig for social media. First, they streamed the show on HULU.com before they aired it and all of the songs from the show’s musical numbers were released on iTunes, to provide fodder for social media followers.

But this is the real telling quote from the speech: “The series premiered as a bona fide hit, which I am certain would not have been the case had we marketed it in a more traditional way.”

My point? Simple. If you’re using social media for your business today, that’s good. My advice would be to make sure you are doing everything you can within reason to capitalize on the marketing opportunities it provides.

And if you’re not using social media, you need to start now. It’s where everyone is conversing, sharing information, referring favorite books, products and services, and researching their next purchase. It’s where you need to be.

Marsha Friedman is a 21-year veteran of the public relations industry and a sought after national public speaker on the power of publicity. She is the founder and CEO of EMSI Public Relations (www.GuaranteedNationalPR.com), a national firm that provides PR strategy, promotion and publicity services to corporations, entertainers, authors and professional firms. Marsha is also the author of the book, Celebritize Yourself: The 3-Step Method to Increase Your Visibility and Explode Your Business. When she is not running her business, she has Cherish the Children, a non-profit foundation that helps under-privileged local foster children.

Marketers, bloggers, brands and businesses worldwide are always looking for engaging new ways to connect with their audiences, and social media platforms seem to be the latest way of doing so. Wealthy corporates will swear on making use of advertising space on such sites to boost conversion rates and improve website traffic, but what good is that to the little guys?

The following article tackles how businesses, brands and bloggers of all sizes and niches can utilise social media platforms to market their Internet content for absolutely free. Whether you’re trying to market Internet video, photos, products, podcasts or written articles, this post will provide you with the real social media 101 marketing approach.

Facebook
Facebook is certainly becoming the talk of the town of late. Controversial changes on the site are definitely putting the platform back into the limelight after Google+’s popular implementation on to the World Wide Web just a few months ago.

Interestingly, despite the new changes unfolding on Facebook the most successful marketing strategies still remain the same. Posting links to your content in your status, sharing it with your Friends and posting it in Groups and Pages that are on brand with your content are always the essential places to start. Although you must always be careful you’re not spamming users uninterested in your niche. Try to stir up interaction with your content with users and pages relevant to your subject, topic or niche as such users will be the most interested and responsive to the content your marketing.

One of the new features Facebook has brought out that benefits social media marketing is their new ‘Subscribe’ feature. This new function is a fantastic way to keep the ‘Friends’ interested in your online activity up to date with your latest content at all times.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn may seem like a very ‘business’ social media, but it is full of great marketing avenues. There are thousands of Groups and Discussions cropping up across the site that could be very relevant to the content you’re trying to market. Be sure to reach out to these specific Groups and get involved in these Discussions using your content. Whip up conversation and debate through the content you are marketing, the more engagement you can create, the better.

The most social aspect of LinkedIn, and the area where you can get the most ‘quick wins’ is through your Profile’s status. Statuses are where users tend to operate in a very ‘Facebook’ mentality. Your LinkedIn Connections are always far more likely to interact with your content through ‘Likes’ and ‘Comments’ on your status than any other post you submit to the site. The reason for this is that your status updates will appear in the newsfeeds of your Connections on their home screens without them having to actively find it in Groups or Discussions.

Twitter
Twitter is a social media where marketers make a lot of mistakes. Stale ReTweeting and auto-posting articles is never a good way of engaging with your Followers, yet many marketers always do. There’s nothing more unappealing than a bland Tweet with a generic hyperlink.

The secret to marketing on Twitter is to become an engaging and useful Twitter user. This is sadly not something that happens overnight. Building a following and creating a community on any social media site takes effort and hard work to reap its rewards. Creating good relationships through personalized @’s and Direct Messages to Followers helps to create a solid connection with your Followers, which will benefit you a great deal in the long run. Once you’ve become a user Followers want to look out for in their news feeds, your content will start getting those sought after shares and ReTweets.

If you’re a solo-preneur or just a very busy individual, you might not have an awful lot of time to build a strong Twitter community. If that’s the case, a slight substitute is to make the Tweets that occompany your hyperlinks as engaging and inviting as possible. Doing so will help to boost your click through rate and improve the interaction Followers have with your Profile.

Google+
The geeks of the world may get a bit furious at the following statement, but Google+ really is a lot like Facebook, especially when it comes to marketing approaches. You’ve got the ability to use your status updates, private messaging, like-ing (+1), friend-ing, sharing and so forth. However, Google+ does have one very exciting marketing addition, which I like to call ‘sector specific marketing opportunities’.

In Google+ these sector specific marketing opportunities are called Circles, but if you take an Internet marketing approach to Google+, what Google has created (whether directly or indirectly) is the ability to target specific sectors of individuals for you to market towards. This means that you can steer your marketing approaches towards any specific group. Whether your Circles are made up of future clients, users interested in your niche, past customers, business peers or even fellow marketers, you can market your content to each of these Circles in the most beneficial way possible to that particular Circle. This is a new kind of marketing freedom that is seldom seen on other social media platforms ,and should be picked up by Internet marketers especially asap.

Summary
By using and utilising social media platforms you can give your content the fantastic power of ‘word of mouth’ promotion. Creating ‘word of mouth’ promotion through your content is a well and truly priceless marketing attribute, yet it can be exceptionally prosperous for any brand, business or blog. Social media platforms are incredibly powerful, and their tools and features give you the opportunity to market your content successfully, efficiently and effectively.

So, what did I do to set up and prove my theory that social media likes contributes to search engine rankings? I registered a brand new domain name, put up a very simple web page on it, and used a few social media websites to “like” the site. The results? Within 2 hours the domain name was crawled, indexed, and ranks in the top 5 for its main keyword phrase.

These results just goes to show you that it is “worth it” to pay attention to social media and include social media in your overall website marketing plan. Not only is social media marketing good for marketing your products and services, it can help your search engine optimization, as well. So, let’s take a look at the experiment and some specifics.

The Experiment
This morning, I registered a brand new keyword rich domain name, www.DoYouLikeThisDomain.com. Using Notepad, a simple text editor, I used my html coding skills to put together a very simple web page. As you can see on the website, it literally is as simple as you can get. And yes, I am using some pretty basic Search Engine Optimization Best Practices. A keyword rich domain name, a keyword phase in the title tag, as well as a keyword phrase in the H1 tag on the page. I added one simple phrase of content on the page.

I then added three different “social sharing” options: the Google+ button, a Facebook “Like” button, and the Tweet button. Nothing else.

Once I added the code, I then added a footer link back to the home page on the site.

After logging into Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, I returned to the site and “liked” the page using the buttons on the page. I also used a few other social bookmarking websites (about five of them) and social bookmarked the site using a title, description, and tags. No other “manual” or “traditional-style” links were used other than these social sharing and social bookmarks.

The Results
I monitored the results, watching to see how long it would take Google and Bing.com to crawl and index the site. I am happy to report that Google has the site indexed within 2 hours, and the site ranks in the top 5 for its main keyword phrase, “Do you like this domain”. Granted, there are a few factors at play here, including the social bookmarks. But the social sharing (Google Plus and Facebook) is new.

From what I can tell, it appears that social media really DOES help your search engine rankings. And not only can it help you get a top ranking at Google, it can do it fairly quickly.

I have been using the Facebook Blackberry app ‘Chit Chat’ on my Blackberry Curve 8520 for a while now and thought it was about time to write a full review of it. I am quite a heavy Facebook user, and the main reason I decided to install the Chit Chat application on my Blackberry was because I wanted to be able to chat to all my Facebook contacts that are signed in to Facebook chat, but during times when I wasn’t using a computer – such as when I am out in the park walking my dog, on the bus into town, or if I am ever stuck in a boring waiting room and there are no interesting magazines to read.

Before I go on too much further, I should mention here that I am also a somewhat experienced user of the Windows Facebook desktop version of Chit Chat – I have had that version installed on my laptop now for a good few months before I using Chit Chat for Blackberry for the first time, so I was surprised at how different it looked from the Windows PC version. Unlike Chit Chat for Windows, which is a pale blue colour and looks very similar to MSN chat in its appearance, the Facebook Chat Blackberry version is a very nice bright green colour.

I am not saying this like it’s a bad thing, though. In fact, in some ways I would say that the Blackberry version of Chit Chat is even easier to use and better-looking than the PC version.

The first thing that will happen when you install and run Chit Chat on your Blackberry is that it will ask you for your Facebook username and password – this can be confusing, and if you haven’t already set up a Facebook username (not to be confused with your email address login!) then you will need to do so before you can use Chit Chat. It is not hard to do, and if you haven’t already done it there will be instructions provided to help you get set up. In fact the only thing that I found really hard at this point was reading the absolutely tiny text when you log in! From there on in though it’s all pretty straightforward.

Once logged in, Chit Chat will take you to a simple green screen which displays a list of all your signed in Facebook buddies. I am on Facebook quite a lot so my list is rather big (!) but it was easy to scroll up and down it using the trackball on my Blackberry to see who was online. I noticed that it added new contacts at the bottom of the list, not by alphabetised surname or anything, but I suppose this makes more sense because this way you can easily check if anyone new has signed in.

As I work irregular hours compared to a lot of my friends (who are in 9-5 office jobs) it was good to be able to chat to them from out and about on my blackberry (while they’re stuck indoors!). The chat window was very easy and straightforward to use, and if you want, a notification noise will play for each new message you receive. I prefer to have my phone silent but it is not difficult to set this up, you just go into the preferences.

I have tried Chit Chat both outdoors and at home and found that it is as quick to use as on a PC. There doesn’t seem to be any noticeable lag between messages and some of my friends were even surprised when I told them I was outdoors. I also found it was easy and straightforward to have more than one chat running at the same time.

When you are done using Chit Chat, it’s also very easy to close down (unlike some other Blackberry apps I could mention!). To log out, you simply press the button next to the central trackball and it will give you the option to log out, or to run Chit Chat quietly in the background, which I also like to do sometimes so I can be surprised by a chat message later on when I’m bored.

Chit Chat does run down your Blackberry life a little, however it’s got no more impact really than most games I’ve played on my Blackberry. In summary, if you would like to be able to chat to all your Facebook chat buddies, but are not always able to access a computer then I would totally recommend Chit Chat for Facebook Blackberry as a cheap and easy way of keeping in touch with them.

To start off with, Google+ frowns upon using a name other than a person’s name for your Google+ page (this action may even get your account suspended which in turn may affect other Google products associated with your Gmail address). Therefore, the best businesses to market on Google+ are those where YOU are the product, or you are branding yourself as the lead of the business. Here are some businesses that would do well with marketing on Google+:

– Consultants
– Realtors
– Doctors
– Lawyers
– Dentists
– Authors
– Publishers
– Gurus / Experts
– Businesses Where YOU Are The Product Or Brand

Essentially, any business where you are branding yourself, or ones where you want people to think about your business whenever they see you would be just right. It should also be noted that Google+ works extremely well for those who wish to market themselves as an expert in a field (such as internet marketing, construction, health and fitness, etc.). With Google+ being a social network, it would only be logical that you talk about or discuss your business on your profile page. As long as your marketing efforts appear to be a natural extension of what you would do in real life everything should work out just fine. For an excellent example of “marketing without the appearance of marketing” check out Chris Pirillo’s Google+ profile page. There are many topics that could be covered when talking about marketing on Google+. In order to avoid information overload, this blog post will focus on using pictures in your profile, and in your photo gallery.

Whenever someone checks out your profile picture on your Google+ profile page, there should be two things they should be able to get from looking at it – what kind of image you project in real life, and how you want to position yourself, and your business in society. In regards to image, you want your picture to convey the kind of person people would meet when they stop by to visit you at your business. For example, lets imagine that we have three different consultants: a marketing consultant, an internet marketing consultant, and an investment advisor. For the marketing consultant, the picture that they would use should show that the consultant is sincere about their business without appearing too serious or dogmatic. However, since a marketing consultant has to work to stay on the cutting edge of the marketing industry, the profile picture should also reflect a spirit of innovation. In order to show an innovative side, the consultant could hold up an unusual marketing product that people would want to know more about. The overall look would be something that catches the eye without going overboard.

The internet marketing consultant, on the other hand, would take a slightly different approach in regards to choosing their profile picture. The overall message their profile picture needs to convey would be “I can help you make your business a huge success on the internet”. An unusual background image might work well, or a thought provoking background setting showing where a potential client could end up if they followed the advice of the internet marketing consultant. Some profile pictue ideas for the internet marketing consultant would be: the consultant shown sitting in a lawn chair on the beach at a lavish resort, or behind the wheel of an expensive automobile, or perhaps standing on the patio of an exquisite mansion, and so forth.

For the investment advisor, the picture should convey trust. The words on the profile page will help to describe what the consultant can do for their clients, but the picture, at a glance, should instill a feeling of honesty, integrity, and trustworthiness without being boring. The profile picture is definitely important, but what is also almost equally important are the pictures in your photo gallery.

Even though you’ll mostly be using your Google+ profile to promote your business, you will still need pictures in your photo gallery to help give people a REASON to visit your profile (unless they already know you). With Google+ you can choose which pictures are displayed at the top of your profile, which will be helpful in giving you something that people can make comments on. In regards to what type of pictures to use in your photo gallery, let’s look back at our three fictious examples. For the marketing consultant, it would probably be best to use pictures of ads that the marketing consultant either created, or ads that have been very successful regardless of who put them together. In the description, the marketing consultant can describe what makes that particular ad effective or not effective, or perhaps a funny caption or annecdote.

The internet marketing consultant would want to add some interesting and / or funny pictures to their Google+ photo gallery, but this would also be a great time to put in some useful diagrams. For instance, a chart explaining the latest evolution of the online marketing sales funnel which shows how consumers use the internet to research, and ultimately choose which businesses they do business with would be a great picture to add to the internet marketing consultant’s photo gallery.

The investment consultant could put up charts, and graphs to show where the stock market will be within the next 10 years, return rates for basic investments, or even a simple graph showing how much money someone could have made if they had made a $10,000 investment at 20, 30, or 60 years old. Also, since the investment consultant is wanting to convey a feeling of trust, integrity, and stability, it might be wise to put up a few family photos as well. Professionally done group family photos tend to create an aura of stability – even if that is not actually true in real life.

Once the pictures have been uploaded to the Google+ photo gallery, you can start posting links to your pictures as status updates using headings to make it all look natural. For example, using the “$10,000 investment over time” picture as an example, a link to the picture could be posted in the investment consultant’s status bar with a headline that reads “If only people realized how much money they could have saved up if they started saving earlier…”. Also, creating status updates will make it much easier for others to know what kind of content you have available on your profile, and hopefully entice them to make comments on your pictures. The comments made by those people will be available for viewing by the people in their circles, who will also make comments. All of these comments will eventually lead to driving more traffic to your profile. As illustrated in the above scenario, a very strong domino effect can easily be created by simply posting pictures, and making mentions of those pictures in your status updates.

You can also post links to pictures from other websites in your status box to accomplish the same thing. They do not have to be pictures directly related to what you do. If you can find something thought provoking or controversial, that will work as well. Just be sure it is something that you wouldn’t mind being associated with (remember: Google+ may be a social network, but its still a social network run by Google – the world’s largest search engine at the present time).

The general idea with pictures on your profile is that they should get your point across without having to spend a lot of time explaining them, even on the pictures that are in your gallery. People should be able to understand why you have that picture there with or without the short summary. With that being said, controversial pictures should be mainly used to draw attention to your profile, and therefore should just be picture links shared in your status updates. Use other less provocative pictures within your photo gallery to build and support your branding. This, of course, does not apply to you if the business image that you want to project is a controversial one. Either way, use your photo gallery to house pictures that directly reflect your business. Remember: the cute puppy in the window gets the people into your store, but what actual things your store has to offer should be the main topic of conversation.

If done right, you can drive tons of highly targeted traffic to your profile with just a few simple pictures, and status updates. Just keep in mind – a picture is worth a thousand words, so make sure that the pictures that you choose to utilize in your marketing efforts say the right things about you, and your business.

Disclaimer: Please note: If your Google+ account is suspended for ANY reason, it may adversely affect your other Google related products (ex: your corresponding Youtube account could also get suspended).