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Making a branded Facebook fan page

Facebook fan pages work. From every movie releasing on the next Friday to Reality Show going on in the television, everyone wants a fan page. As my dear friend Saahil would say, it is all a part of the engagement plan . However, these days fan pages tend to do a lot more than just send out their updates...

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Posted by Nimesh Shah | Posted in Awards and Recognition, Blog Content, Blog Visibility, Blogs | Posted on 22-02-2009

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Windchimes blog recently earned official badge of achievement as ‘Successful and Outstanding Blogger’. Liz Strauss describes in detail the idea behind running the successful and outstanding blogger program in detail and how you can earn it too.

She states on her blog that this badge is awarded to bloggers who “take the conversations to their readers, contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger”.

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Successful and Outstanding Blogger Badge

You can view the directory of all the blogs that have been awarded the badge. As Liz says, “Good Conversation shared can only improve the blogging community”. We couldn’t agree with you more Liz!!

Media lessons in times of terror

Posted by Nimesh Shah | Posted in Blogs, Social Media, Traditional Media | Posted on 29-11-2008

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Manoj ‘Night’ Shyamlan when asked how does he heightens the frightful experience in his films, replied that it was about evoking the basic human emotion – fear of unknown. It’s this fear of unknown which creates panic in terror situations like the one witnessed in Mumbai. And knowledge (information in this case) is the antidote to it. It is important that while on one hand we have National Security Guards planning a detailed and thorough rescue operation, the communications wing (don’t know if anything like this exists currently) of the government provides correct and timely information to common man.

While watching the brutal and cowardly acts of the terrorists on TV and Internet, I strongly felt that social media could have been put to better use by the official agencies. It is as much important to give out news to people as it is to evict those terrorists especially when people from all over the world have been held hostage. Mind you, by giving out news, I am not even for a second hinting at giving out NSG’s operational details!!

Corporate Website 1.0 is dead. Long Live Corporate Website 2.0

Posted by Nimesh Shah | Posted in Blogs, Social Media, Website 1.0 & 2.0 | Posted on 22-11-2008

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The title is borrowed from the traditional proclamation – ‘The King is dead. Long Live the King’. What is basically meant (and I am taking this from Wikipedia) is that in certain monarchies of France and England, the transfer of sovereignty occurred instantaneously upon the moment of death of the previous monarch. In this blog post, I am using it to highlight that how a stand alone non interactive website (basically 1.0) is dead and without fail, its time for websites powered by social media (Websites 2.0) to take over!!

It is very common to see companies scrambling to get their website up. In few cases, some basic essentials of website are missing, but in most the marketers have no clear agenda on why they are building one. It’s not too surprising to see websites being made because it is a standard launch activity to do. It is more like a job in the task list at the time of product launch. The brand manager gets it executed because it was expected out of him or her.

Food for thought – Content for Blog

Posted by Nimesh Shah | Posted in Blog Content, Blog Visibility, Blogs | Posted on 01-11-2008

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Most number of mails that we get revolve around content for blog. It appears that most bloggers start off writing about a certain subject and then slowly lose way. That happens because they feel that there aren’t many readers on the subject they are writing!! Well, maybe that could be the case if you are writing about very specialized subjects. For most of the others there could be other problems plaguing us.

We have listed out few of them. Check out for yourself if your blog is not party to this.

·         Blogs are fairly unregulated in content. But be careful and sensitive to what you write. A lot of impressions are formed about you as a person while reading your posts. I have read many blogs that talk about ‘sex’ or ‘race and caste discrimination’ but treat the subject with so much maturity that it generates healthy debates and comments.

Generate hits for your blog!!

Posted by Nimesh Shah | Posted in Blog Visibility, Blogs | Posted on 27-10-2008

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Universal truth – We all want attention. Be it in the form of spotlight shining on us, people seeking our autographs or merely getting more readers for our blog. The last one is what we will be tackling in this post. Unlike common perception, it is not a difficult task to generate readers for your blog. And this surely is not by spamming inbox of all your friends!! Your blog must have these features before you start promoting it

Go through these suggestions and try them out for yourself for your blog.

·      Registering at directories:

Like any product listing, blogs too have directories where they can be listed. There are Indian blog directories like ‘desiblogs’ and ‘indiblogs‘ among others where you can list your blog under appropriate section. There are also international blog directories like ‘blogcatalog‘ and ‘mybloglog‘ among others which generate high level of leads to your blog. For bloggers who have been blogging for more than 5 months and have more than 50 articles then you can register it with Labnol – started by Amit Agarwal

Essentials of a Blog – Part 2

Posted by Nimesh Shah | Posted in Blog Visibility, Blogs | Posted on 18-10-2008

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This is the second in series of the essentials of a blog. In the first part we spoke about content, layout and subscription features. There are sevral ways to increase visibility for your blog but right now let’s continue with highlighting some of the other features that are a must for your blog before you start promoting it.

1.    Maintain a blog roll

Links of other bloggers
Links of other bloggers

Blog roll is an individual’s favourite list of blog links that you have mentioned in the side bar of your blog. Most of the bloggers exchange links in order to increase their visibility and get more readers. The blogs links could be about subjects related to what you write about or could be on your other interests you pursue.