Being Smarter

Wikipedia reports Twitter has been used as a “social justice tool” to connect groups of people in critical situations. In April 2008, a graduate journalism student translator, were arrested in Egypt for photographing an anti-government protest. Buck used his mobile phone to send the message “Arrested” to his 48 “followers” on Twitter on his way to the police station.  These followers contacted the US Embassy in Cairo and a number of press organizations on his behalf.

While being detained, Buck was able to send updates about his condition to his “followers”. Allegedly, as a result of the message and the efforts of his Twitter friends he was released the next day from the Mahalla jail after the college hired a lawyer for him!

So – can it be used in business to business marketing? Chris Brogan thinks so… and provides 50 ideas for using Twitter in Business here

Our at Linkedin also have opinions on how it can be used in business too.

Yesterday the Webworker daily team – an excellent blog put out a great Business FAQ article which you can see over here.

Email marketing. I’m thinking it could be turned into a university subject (if it isn’t already). Writing good email copy and putting together coherent marketing campaigns which integrate email effectively is technically simple to do – but isn’t always done well.

The many components of email marketing – timing, targeting, copy, subject lines, click throughs, measurement, spam filter avoidance and look and feel amongst many others are a delicate mix. Get one wrong, and the whole campaign falls flat on its face.

Many people start with copy. I would advocate you start with an idea – an idea which will gain cut through in a busy, if not neglected inbox. Is gaining eyeball share an art or a science? I’m not sure, but what I do know is that experience counts for a lot. Experience of failure, experience of success and plainly, just loads of experience.

These guys have experience in spades. I should know – I used to work for them. This article on their blog really caught my eye – so much so, I wanted to spread the word.

Take a look, download the comprehensive ebook and let me or them know in the comments what you think.

Related articles

• Email Marketing Best Practices
• Email marketing, the right way.
• Recession Got You Down? Give Email Marketing a Try

Great post here from Webworker daily for agencies and consultants who talk social media on a daily basis and promote the power of Web 2.0. Not all clients buy in and Aliza explains some of the ways round these problems…

http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/11/21/the-reluctant-social-media-client/

Business in a Box is still one of the best places to go for the best business letter samples and legal documents. If you’ve not heard of it, take a look at some of the dozens of documents that they offer – you can download the application and view all of the document for free.

They have put in some really clever protection software – as despite the fact that their application integrates beautifully into Word, they’ve disabled the copy / paste / drag functionality – so you have to buy the app to actually use any of the words.

(I wouldn’t recommend rekeying them either!)

Check out what they have to offer here…

Whilst it may not technically be about Being Smarter, something to brighten your coffee break and get the creative juices flowing is the Flickr Interestingness calendar.

They select a new photo every day to inspire you.

You can take a look at it here.

Have you ever tried running your latest piece of copy, technical or otherwise past a bright 13 year old. If they don’t understand it, your customers won’t.

Copybox is still only in Beta at the moment – but you can apply to join their scheme to try out the software. It’s a cool web application which looks and feels like ordinary word processor software, but it is uniquely linked to databases of different variables to make your copy more interesting and dynamic.

I’ve not tried it – but it looks like an excellent marketing tool and will certainly help you to write good copy one day in the future!

Check out the site here.

Multicolr Search Lab helps to bring Flickr in line with some of the other more sophisticated image banks, to allow you to search and select an image by colour or combination of colours.

It’s fast, simple and absolutely works…

So the next time your agency tries to charge you a fortune to search for and then to buy an image, you may want to think twice. Many Flickr pictures are ‘creative commons’ images, which means then can be used within your online real estate, providing you attribute the owner of the image.

If you’d like to know more about how and when you can use Flickr photos, click here.

You can check out the colour picking application here.