I have to write this quick post just to say hello and thank you to the wonderful people at Leeds Ministry of Food in the Kirkgate market. The food they cook is fairly simple and basic in some ways however not many people can actually cook the whole meal without substitutes. When being presented with the fajitas dish I completely forgot that we would have to make the salsa and guacamole from scratch. Its simple foods well done time and time again.

If there is anybody who has been on this course and can share their opinions, please do, I hope that everyone is happy with the recipe’s they provide.

When running your own business you can easily forget that you are human and need plenty of sleep. I often find sleeping gives me a lot more focus and can clarify your short and long term goals. If all else fails then I’m pretty sure you will start dreaming new actions.

It seems that there are a lot of people in the digital world who are finding it tough and are having even more difficulty running a business on its own without the constant itch of modifying social media patterns. The reality is that only reality can bring in money and the digital world is slightly false. If you can get to grips with is all, well done, otherwise its important to understand whats best for you and also for your business.

Having returned to the real world I have found that Reality does not suck. In fact its better than the digital world because I can always bank on getting some form of feedback. Sometimes the blank look and sly distractions that gain their attention first show me what the clients may really think of me. When in (Rome) the digital world I often feel that these parts are missing and have therefore left me unable to understand why communication has broken down.

If like me you are a creative person or are simply self-employed. I would urge you to remember one thing. If all else fails, take a brief moment to see what is actually going on around you. When all else fails, join the real world and work at realising and improving what you have got and then consider knocking on those doors. Its only ever a fail if you choose to give up and move on.

When comparing social media traffic to other forms of traffic, such as search engine, the numbers typically are going to look rather bleak. While you’ll hopefully see a spike in number of visitors and pageviews, that will often be accompanied by higher bounce rates, lower pageviews per visitor, and a lower average time on the site. With stats like this many bloggers wonder if social media traffic is even worth the time and effort.

Despite the tendency of many social media visitors to quickly exit your site and move on to the next one, there are still some very convincing reasons why you should care about social media and why it is worth your time.

1. It’s Free

Unless you’re paying for a consultant or a link bait specialist (both can be good options), marketing your website with social media is free. It will cost you some time, but that pales in comparison to the value of the traffic that you can get in return. There are countless ways to market a website or blog. Just about all of them involve spending money (which isn’t a bad thing), and of the ones that don’t involve money, the vast majority of them are a complete waste of time. I’ve never tried any other type of free marketing that brought even 1% of the results I’ve gotten with social media at my primary blog. Most bloggers are on a tight, or non-existent, budget when it comes to marketing. If this is the case, social media is for you.

2. Quick Results

Building a successful website takes a considerable amount of time and effort. Search engine rankings, for instance, can take years to build in a competitive niche. On the other hand, with social media you can develop content and be seen by thousands of visitors within the same day. For this reason, social media is a great option for getting a new website or blog noticed right away .

3. It’s Flexible

There are so many different social media websites that just about every imaginable niche is covered in one way or another. There are social news sites, bookmarking sites, and general networking sites. Whatever your needs and your audience, there should be an option to use social media for your benefit.

Also, you’re not stuck to using the same social media sites over and over. If you’re not getting results in one place there’s usually other options that you can try out.

4. It Gets Easier with Time

If you’re new to blogging and social media and you feel like everyone else is getting traffic but you, understand that it takes some time and effort, but it will get easier. Once you have established a bit of a reader base and you’ve hopefully attracted some social media users to your blog, it will be much easier for you to get votes and ultimately get more exposure. The more you use social media the more you will understand about how it works and how users will respond.

5. It Will Lead to Other Valuable Sources of Traffic

Although visitors from social media sites may be less responsive than other types of visitors, success with social media will likely increase the number of inbound links you receive. Links will boost your search engine rankings and they’ll also drive click-through traffic your way. Both are generally high quality traffic sources.

6. Building Links with Social Media is Safer than Buying Links

If you plan to cut out the need for social media by purchasing links from other sites, you’re running the risk of being penalized or banned by Google. For some, this is a risk worth taking, but in most cases I would strongly discourage taking this chance. Personally, I focus on building links for my primary blog through the combination of content and social media.

7. Social Media Users are Predictable

The whole concept or link bait or Digg bait wouldn’t even be possible if social media users were unpredictable. But the truth is you can usually have a good idea of what is likely to draw a response and what is not. This will come with time, and of course there is no 100% guarantee. However, once you know a social media audience pretty well, you can cater content to their preferences with a pretty high success rate. What you learn about social media can easily be duplicated to your other blogs or to serving clients.

8. It Doesn’t Require as Much Time as You Might Think

Personally, I use social media every day, but on a very limited basis. If you think that you have to spend all day on Digg or Stumbling pages to get some results of your own, you may be surprised. With the right approach you canget fantastic results with just a few hours per week on social media sites. To be a top Digg user you’ll need more time than that, but being a top Digg user isn’t necessary to draw social media traffic.

9. Branding Through Social Media is Possible

One of the great benefits to the exposure that you can get through social media is the result it has on the branding of your blog. Branding is key to building a success blog in the long-term, and social media is an excellent, free option for helping visitors to see your blog in a particular light. (For more, see my post at ProBlogger A Blogger’s Guide to Branding with Social Media.)

10. Links Can Help Your Search Engine Rankings Rise Quickly

Earlier I mentioned to social media can provide instant results. Well, in addition to sending loads of traffic directly, the links that result from social media success can get your new posts ranking very well with search engines almost immediately. It’s not uncommon for me to see a very respectable number of visitors from Google searches to a brand new post that just drew a lot of links through social media. While it will take a while to build search engine rankings as a whole, it is possible to create specific posts to rank well right away.

11. It Allows You to Leverage Your Existing Traffic

Do you already have a solid blog with a steady flow of traffic? If so, chances are you could leverage that traffic to draw even more visitors with social media. You may want to use voting buttons on your posts or ask some of your readers and friends to give you a vote occasionally.

12. Some Visitors Will Be Targeted

The biggest knock on social media traffic is that it’s not targeted, and that is typically true. However, visitors from niche social media sites can be very highly targeted, and on top of that, a portion of visitors from general news sites will be targeted as well. For example, if you get 25,000 visitors from a post on the Digg front page, maybe only 5,000 of them will have much of an interest in your site. Still, that’s a quick 5,000 visitors that you wouldn’t have had without social media. Just because a smaller percentage of the visitors will stick doesn’t mean that they are irrelevant.

13. The Future of the Internet is Social

Social media and social networking aren’t going away any time soon. The major players and the types of social sites may change of the course of time, but this is a trend that online marketers need to adjust to. Without finding ways to build a website or blog through social media you could be left behind by your competitors.

I do not seem to be too sorry for not writing an update any sooner. This is probably because there are too many gadgets and news items to go through during the build up to the festive holiday. Through the shroud of the Blackberry messaging (BBM) failing alongside the playbook fighting to stay alive and the even greater darkness of the late Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011), it seems we are all ready for a break.

In the latest reveal it seems that the Android platform have released more stats that suggest they could be catching up to Apples 1million App downloads. However somehow Apple are still seen the the cloud with eternal silver lining.

The latest update of Lion IOS combined with the iPhone 4S seems worth a blog of its own. The voice application Siri sounds really impressive but what seems even better is that iCloud is FREE and has the ability to sync up everything smoothly. I do hear those novices screaming wants new about syncing. The new service allows you to have everything synced without any clicks and in zero seconds! This is magically done by Apple uploading all your stuff to their servers at super speed and then allowing it to be transmitted to your devices even faster.

Apple explain to us
“iCloud stores your music, photos, documents and more, and wirelessly pushes them”
but fails to let us know about the security. The company has made something great and also made a greater friend with the local governments as crimes all around the world can now be resolved. It may not be obvious to you but it does seem like this is a digital age we are living in and its ever more becoming part of the George Orwell world where people are being watched. The iPhone allows people to be tracked on its own so the idea that iCloud can give away all of our details, communications and information for storage use, just to access them quickly, is actually quiet silly.

Its yet another step into instant gratification and ironically does suggest Apple is now playing the role of the creature that tempted Adam to eat the Apple that dropped nearby. It sounds really tempting but it equally does have the consequences of loosing many more skills that us humans do need to learn and develop.

In the world of the web and business, people are always buzzing around thinking about what the next big thing could be. The difference between these people is they they talk about it and some others help make the dream a reality. Ever since the dawn of cyber-punk we have managed to create a self-fulfilling prophecy where society gains the new products and designs that we are told are new.

The reality is that there is a lot of technology that is based on peoples ideas of the future. Rather than building new products we are handed the vision from ‘Space Odyssey” or given phones with touch screens that have already been designed and thought through by science fiction. The future supposedly will come to and end and when it does we will have to go back and live amongst the trees.

With this mentality of looking back on our roots and the things that have worked for us in the past, I have a new idea. We as children are taught to play but when we are older we do not recognise that we do still play, its just that we do it in different ways. Whilst we move through the urban cities to and from work, we all interact by moving around the city, and absorb the marketing artwork before us. My suggestion is quiet simple. What if we could now actually be tagged and use the marketing or objects around us to connect to digital media, weather it is social media or event visiting a site.

Once upon a time people complained about the files in their cabinet, and now we have hard drives to condense the space. By using technology we may have answered certain questions that allow us to live in more space and gain access to things more instantly, but why has nobody thought of complaining. Technology seems to have kept its shine despite the physical nature is still the same and the manual labour of the real world and the digital work is the same, only less strenuous.

If we continue to need our bodies for certain things and we increase the use of technology, how on earth do we actually have time to live online and use facebook? The answer for that is really quite simple. Whilst going to your local shop to buy a magazine, in the future, you have the chance to press the ‘like’ button and actually comment if you wish. Cameras could also start to track your eye movement so that marketing companies an talk to you directly each time you look at one of their products. This doesn’t mean up selling, it means that the digital cloud technology behind it will be able to tell you if your choice could be a good or bad one based on your income.

As a red blooded male its typical that I only want to go into a shop to but what I want, but all that can now change. If i see something I need at home, the voice from above may then remind me that I have been in the shop 17 times before and I liked this on facebook so much I tweeted about it and I also need to buy it because ive run out of it and need a top up!

What if we are now living at a point in time where we are actually at the tip of using technology manually and now we just need to find ways to make the cloud part of the real world. In being human, surely the point of living is to live. So when will we be able to live the life we want and share it effortlessly at the same time, seamlessly as part of the real world. My final question about the unknown future is; when will coffee shops get a big blue like button where people can just hit the button to vote, thus avoiding the need to spend time getting their device out, find the site, login, find the online coffee shop, find the like button, and like it !

When delivering a design product of any type we often have to revisit the question about who this is aimed at. What is my audience. Often new businesses or ones that have been initially spontaneous have to come back to a point where they need to consider who their audience is. He greatest difficulty would be to understand that the question requires the viewpoint of the audience, and so begins the stages of hpothesis. Most fully functioned tradititional businesses would have developed a research package to get these answers, therefore making a sound business that should in theory be a reasonable sucess if this is what the research tells us.

The design, or business, process for those of us with less business accumin leaves us to ignore all this hard work. On this fine dreary, rainy, cloudy (i could keep going here) British morning, between my commute, I have Somehow been awoken to another way of thinking about how to understand our audience and how to market to them.

Lets face it, going to work can be boring and even if we love our jobs there is a though that pops into our heads. Why can we just live life with all of its simple things. The simple things are thigs we all go through at some point. We all have family, children, need food and drink and the ability to make our own. There is also the aspect of personal care and looking good to feel good. In all honesty there are many things other than this in our lives and they are onpy important because they relate to our workig lives. People really want to work, and have to work, for their basic survival and to enjoy the ‘finer things’.

Back to business. There are many businesses that sell b2b which is one area I wont cover, but there are many other areas where people either need the finer things or want an easy business life so that they can get an even better personal life. This is where the divide is.

When trying to understand your audience its clear that its no for everyone. I it is, then you are part of the first layer where your product is available to help people have a better quality of living.

The second layer is where you need to run our business and make it run smoothly so that i keeps you happy on a personal level and allows you to live a smooth personal life.

My thoughts on this area are essentially that we are all people, or human bei gs, and have feelings and emotions. If work is integrated in our life then we must take evey opportunity to make each other happy by providin the best we can offer in our personal and business/working lives.

The second layer may outline what seems to be a business to business layer but on looking back at trying to understand who our audience is, you may find that I have made it sound different, and heres how.

If its difficult to set a marketing strategy then its probably because you dont know how important your service is. If you can make someone happy in business then you are quite simply making them happy.

When considering who your audience is, I would suggest that we try our best to send out subliminal messages that imply the giving of a happier life in relation to to both a personal happiness.

This is a slightly stranger post that asks the question, do we need social media or does it need us. I think this is a stranger post than my usual because I have had time to reflect back on my real practises.

In getting busier I have found that I have been a little unhappy. Not because im over worked but instead that I am finding that I am too busy in the real world to tweet and facebook and generally get digitally social. Instead of spending time digitally mixing with people, im doing this in real terms. This is the fun stuff and it does not make me sad. What has made me sad is that as a consequence of me living my life, my klout score has dropped and some twitter folk have stopped following me. At the same time I feel im getting more responses because my less frequent tweets are fully loaded. So now im left bitter about life and how I need to manage digital life.

My reality is, and possibly your reality too, that I am actually good at being social and it does not matter about where or how this happens. In recent years I have had my own choices and feel that I can choose my own path about the things I like ands dislike. So the question then arrives to me at this point. Do I need to be digitally social? Well, it all depends on your field or work and how busy your personal life is. It doesn’t really matter, but it can make a huge difference to someone who needs to engage directly and feel confident.

In my busy period of neglecting some social media it seems that I have also missed adding photo albums of things I have been doing on Facebook. After a week or two my partner then decided to post those pictures on her Facebook albums. All I was left with was a buch photos that I was tagged in. Its almost like the digital world had began to remind me how rubbish I am being at keeping in touch. Having taken a brief look at my partners pictures I found that she had oddly become more social.

Here is the interesting bit. Not only did she seem more interesting and popular than me but she also had a full stream of information about “Big Brother” other TV programmes and was also following bands and festivals like Leeds Festival.

I seem to be happy, and so does she, so I guess social media does have a place in our world. But in all honesty I really believe that I do not need to communicate in that way, I just choose to. Having social media is a digital add on. To answer the second half, does social media need us..? Yes, of course it does. Without us the social media sites would be charging money. So the idea of it being a free social medium is non-elitist. This sits really well with a utopian vision and it also tricks us to into the feeling that we are all together when really we are not. I still have a lot of people to meet.

By engaging in social media I am only continuing my level of instant gratification onto a much more grown up platform. Not only am I becoming dumbed down but social media makes me feel stronger and more powerful about being dumbed down. How odd! To make matters worse, companies like Facebook are making money form me. Okay so thats not a bad thing, but its terrible if you consider that by wasting time in voyeuristic behaviour I am not actually learning in the way that I should be. The right way would be to get my hands dirty and engage with reality.

I hope that you have come to the conclusion, like me, that social media is a dumbing down tool that equals additions like drugs at times and that we do not need it! Social media most certainly needs us.

Some of you may know what Klout is, but for those who dont, its a social media rank website. It basically tells you how good you are using social media.

In the past I have been quite happy with the free service and as a tweeter it seemed like a great tool. With the recent updates it seems clear that Klout could have a big influence on the market. There always will be comments about the differences in how it calculates unique social media scores but there is only one opposition, Peerindex, and they both do a good job in different ways… until now.

Klout use to mainly use twitter and linkedin in however have recently added other social networks like facebook and youtube. So your latest score can now be supported by how many you tube comments you get. My mind cant quiet fathom how far this could go. To add to the madness you can now also link Instagram, the mobile picture taking app, and Foursquare, the geo-tagging app.

To sum up the new Klout experience, you can now get scored on tweeting an image and video whilst its happening and then spread it onto facebook whilst having a conversation through various social media, still be wondering round the city Foursquare geo-tagging away…and get an instant great Klout score.

As with everything great, theres a downside. There are no real features that allow you to control how you see the results and see the results for one social media tool at a time. Its still good times for Klout and should keep us busy for a year or so, unless Peerindex have an update soon!