Twestival India 2011 - Ways for Giving

Twestival 2011 is going to happen worldwide on 24th March 2011. Twestival is the short form of Twitter Festival and I am really happy that I could associate with cochin twestival as a volunteer for the event. I am glad that I have been a volunteer of the first ever twestival in Cochin on march 25th, 2010. Twestival is aimed at funding charting organisations that work for a social cause using the power and reach of social media. The first Twestival Global was held on 8 January 2009. The event is going to be a Twestival Local this time as all the cities participating in Twestival 2011 is going to support a local NGO. This blog is to support Cochin Twestival. Cochin Twestival is supporting Adarsh Chartiable Trust. Twestival is the best oppurtunity to use the power of social media for social good. It is the responsibility of each human being to help the needy ones. We have got a chance to live a better life with the “grace of God”, that doesn’t mean that we should just enjoy our and should worry about the society. We as responsible human beings should shape a happy living and should also help the needy people. A small donation can bring smile to faces of the childeren you require your hand as support. Donate for a good cause 

Cochin Twestival 2011 Details

Venue: Gymkhana Club, Cochin
Time: 5:30 pm onwards!
Highlights: Music show by a local well-known band, Informal events and games
NGO Supported: Adarsh Charitable Trust
Website: http://cochin.twestival.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/cochintwestival

Agenda for the day(There might be slight changes)

17.30 - 17.35 - Welcome Note

17.35 - 17.45 - Twitter Introduction and Video Presentation

17.45 - 18.00 -  Small Talk on Make A Difference (MAD)

18.00 - 18.10 -  Presentation of Chairty Funds To Adarsh Chartiable Trust

18.10 - 18.15  - Session about Adarsh Chartiable Trust

18.15 - 18.20 - Session on Twitter Malayalam

18:20 - 18. 30 - Malayalam Blog Scene - A session by famous malayalam blogger

18:30 - 18. 50 - Networking with celebrity

18.50 -19.00  - Other Sessions

19.00 - 19.05 - Vote Of Thanks

19.05 - 19.30 - Networking 

19.30 - 20.00 -  Performance by Kaav and Other Rock  Bands

This post is written as an entry for Twestival Blog Contest organised by Twestival India. 

How can you help this intiative ?

1) You can spread the message

2) You can blog about the cause

3) You can be a sponser

4) You can donate using Give India Page

Naughty Nuri’s Batubelig - Is Google Search Broken ?

The Google search for “Naughty Nuri’s Batubelig” is displaying almost 6 results in the 1st search engine result pages and the 3rd page is displaying 7 more results. Hope this is a temporary glitch in the search result and hope Google search quality team will fix this issue. 

Below is the screenshot from Google search result for Naughty Nuri’s Batubelig

Check results for Naughty Nuri’s Batubelig

Love & Hate - Two Shades of Life

Do opposite emotions attract eah other ? In my experience they do attract each other. Below is a blogpost based on a true situation I went through in my life. I have written this post as a letter to the ex-lover.

Dear ex,

You have made me pass through shades of life. The pretty good shade of love and the pretty bad shade of hate. There was a situation in my life when I couldn’t know which direction should I go. Do I need to take a step forward or do I take a step backward?. You have put me in suh a difficult situation that it took long time for me to figure out that in life I should always walk forward rather than looking backward. We might loose lot of things during our journey but we will always have things we should necessarily posses to continue our life’s journey.

I hope that you do still remember how it all happened. I do feel that a misunderstanding have broken our relationship. I always wanted to know the reason why you left me. I still don’t know was the exact reason but I have tried my level best to make you understand. Trust eventhough a very small word has a very deep meaning in it. I learned from my past that there is no point in believing someone blindly. People say “Love is blind” but I do say never “Love blindly” because if you do love blindly then you are always going to feel the pain of that. In some point of time or another everyone is going to hurt you but you just need to find the one for whom the suffering is worth. The love between us happened so suddenly and I do never know if it was true love or not. It might have just been a deep friendship for you but that too can’t be true as friendship will stay forever. We often say “friends forever”, so that option is ruled out. You unlocked all my secrets and left me suddenly. I couldn’t even realize what happened to our relationship. You didn’t hurt me physcially but you hurt my mind. I couldn’t believe that we have parted. I thought everything was  a dream. I was still had some care for you when you started to hate me. I was caught inbetween hate and love. It took a long time for me to realize that we share both love and hate and now I know that everything that happened was true. I do believe that everything happens for a reason. It might all have been decide by the almighty. I would like to thank you for what you did to me in the past for the betrayal has given me an urge to prove to the world that who I am. I am now pretty happy now. I don’t ever want to think about what happened in the past. Past is past and I do have miles to go before I sleep. I am sure that I will find the one who truely loves me knowing what I am.

Sincerely,

The one you might miss throughout your life

Note: I am not disclosing the name as it might affect the online reputation of that person.

This is an entry to ”Close Up “Fire-Freeze” contest organised by Close Up

Will Link Bait Change to Trust Bait ?

There has been lot of changes in the search industry during 2010. The key term we heard during 2010 was “Social Media Optimization/Social Media Marketing”. We are now onto 2011 and social media marketing is to grow much more as search engines have started to give importance to social media links. The social media links needs trustbait rather than linkbait.

So what is trustbait?

A sophisticated link building strategy in which trust plays a major role. For a effective and successful social media strategy it is highly important to create strong relationships. To build strong relationship it is highly important to gain the trust of your followers. To gain trust you need to provide useful information that is useful and that can be easily shared. You should  make your followers feel that you are the first person that can be contacted to gain expert advice on specific topics.

Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are going to be used more and more in the coming year. It will be important to find out the  right content as well as the most discussed topics. Social Media Signal Monitoring is going to be much more important to build a right strategy.  Below are some important questions for which you need to find out the appropriate answers:

Who talks about your brand?
Who talks about your competitor brands?
What all positive things are being said about you and your competitors?
What all negative things are being said about you and your competitors?
Who follow your brand advocates?
Who follow your competitors and their promoters?
Which all communities your brand advocates are actively participating?
Which all communities your competitors and their promoters are actively participating?
How does your social graph and your competitors social graph look like?
What kind of content do your competitors share?

When you have the answers to the above questions you are in a better situation to start your own social media campaign. Now the biggest challenge is to decide whether to recruit a social media person or try out a current employee. Initially it is better to try out a customer focused employee in your organization who can present the headlines in a better way to the right audience. The employee should be social media savy and should have a keen interest in interacting with online customers.

A present employee can easily share the best reasons why a customer should purchase from you rather than your competitor. You can also have  a social media expert who can help the employee with social media trends and updates. The social media expert can help the employee technically and the employee can help the social media person to learn about the product and services your company offers. There should be certain “rules of engagement” and it should be strictly followed by the social media team. The company should have its own social media guidelines and policies which each and every employee of the organisation should follow.

If your company has a good social media team they can easily share and make your company social in social media. This will make your company gain trustbait from the social communities where your company has a presence. Make your brand advocates feel that your are seriously looking into their contributions and rewarding them with special discounts and incentives. Everyone needs to be motivated and there should reason for everyone to promote your company or brand. Provide everyone what they are looking for and this will help in increasing the trustbait as well as to build a stronger online presence.

 The orginal post is available on Sexy Social Media . 

Future of SEO | SEO Prediction From SEO Experts

Search engines are the best way to find information on the internet. Will search engines become unimportant in the near future? Have you ever thought about telling a computer what we needed and the computer providing best response to the query that was asked? The tedious task of visiting a web page, navigating through ads and waiting for browsers to load will all be old things.

 “Watson”, natural language processing (NLP) super computer might just create a radical shift in information retrieval (IR). IBM has developed natural language processing. It is not too far from reality. Google has already revealed that it is using some form of NLP for sentiment analysis. It is not clear how much they use it and how strong the ranking factor is.

The above information is extremely important for marketers to know how information is exchanged throughout Internet. Many marketers said that Social Media was important to SEO, while most business owners weren’t ready to accept it; it has now become a reality.