HootSuite, my favourite social media client, just announced new premium packages designed for business and organizations. Fortunately, they also continu to provide a free version for most customers. But is that free version sufficient for us?

When following us for a longer time you won’t be surprised we at Goyello love coffee, good code, geek tools and social media. Especially in Europe we are still facing an intensive debate about the (non-)sense of social media. Honestly, it feels similar to discussions we had just some years ago about the Internet and e-mail. For a long period of time companies tried to ban this from the workfloor. Without real success as we know today. Today social media seem to be the new victim. Companies try again to ban them from the workfloor. It seems we didn’t learn from the past. In this post I present three movies that show what’s going on. These movies are mainly based on US data, but they show a trend that is coming to Europe quickly, if it didn’t arrive yet.

More and more companies understand the need to be present at social media but not many of them do social media properly and effectively. Why? Because in order to succeed in social media we can no longer treat it as yet another communication channel. It can’t be a random activity. It should be aligned with the overall strategy. Many companies take up SM but have no idea what for and what they will do there. Then it’s like “teen sex” - Everyone wants to do it. No one actually knows how. When finally done, there is surprise it’s not better.”

Two weeks ago Facebook launched a new social plugin (”like” button) that works with the Open Graph protocol as part of the strategy to make the Web more social and personalized. The button spreads across the internet and it’s clear that websites’ owners quickly embraced the new social plugin.

There is already a lot of controversy around the plugin. Some people wonder how it will influence the privacy on the net? Many people feel Facebook will soon dominate most of our online experience. Some don’t like that FB is selling user’s private information to marketing companies. Will it affect Twitter or Digg? How will it change advertising and marketing strategies? Time will tell.

When you open your LinkedIn page to update your status, you will notice a new feature. From today LinkedIn enabled easy sharing of news and links. A nice new feature which enables you to share what’s hot in your domain. It’s easy to share the news with your network. LinkedIn is step by step becoming more social.

YouTube was among the first big brands which decided to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6 and today Google joined the IE6 ban. Like many others Google is using more and more Javascript technology to realize Rich Internet Applications (RIA). The main issue is that JavaScript is not supported in the same way by different browsers and especially preparing a working Internet application for IE6 is a time consuming trial and error challenge.

Last week Dell announced they earned over $6.5 million through Twitter alone. This message gained a lot of (social) media attention. But I doubt the credits of the success should go to Twitter alone. Dell is putting a lot of effort in social media like their blog, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and multiple Twitter accounts. Their social media effort generated this additional turnover not Twitter. Unfortunately till now Dell is the only good example of a successful social media strategy.

The adoption of social media is increasing at high speed. You only have to watch the impressive increase of Twitter and Facebook accounts. They offer both new opportunities and challenges to stand above the crowd. If you listen to all the advice there is hardly any way to escape from it. On the other hand the group of users is still rather small. Besides many accounts are hardly used and there is a big group of very passive users. Depending on your type of business this means you have to analyze carefully where you can meet your potential clients. Because there is still a big chance you have to meet them offline! The social media area might still be a geek domain.

This week we were unpleasantly surprised when we noticed the appearance of one of our clients in the Google search results had dramatically changed.

Soon the surprise changed into curiosity. It appeared we missed some Google news. Google recently announced showing the site hierarchy within the search results for some sites which offer hierarchical breadcrumbs in their navigation. And it looks like this:

To be honest it is still not clear if this is really what users are looking for. I think most users in general just click the clickable title. Besides not every website user will like that Google lets the user browse away.

Imagine you have an appointment. It’s a blind date. Can you remember such a moment?

You arrive at the agreed time at the agreed place. You look for that folded news paper or red flower.

Then you notice your date. What is the first thing you check?

Be honest what do you do when he or she is not what you were looking for? I know some friends who told me they just walked a way. Some of them fortunately sent an sms message that they wouldn’t manage.

photo credit: eflon

We are facing the same issue when people are visiting our website. Within a split second, to be honest about 4 up to 10 seconds, most people decide what they do, stay or go. But if they go in general they don’t send an sms.

The burning question is of course how to make them stay? The answer is easy: seduce them!