When trying to dream up the next great social website the other day, I was trying to decide on what are some of the most important features to include in a social networking site. I came up with a list of 10 features that I believe would build a great social network and I encourage anyone who is considering to start their own site to at least consider these ten features and rethink the way your site lets users interact with each other. The list isn’t all-inclusive, but its a starting point and I encourage you to submit your thoughts about what you think needs to be added by submitting a comment.
As a founder of the Pligg content management system, nothing frustrates me more than to see everyone and their mothers using Wordpress on their sites when it’s really not called for. I have nothing against using Wordpress for your blogs and other projects, in fact I use Wordpress on this very website, but many people end up using it just because they don’t know of the many other solutions out there that might do a better job accomplishing your goals for your website.
This post is dedicated to those who aren’t familiar with what free scripts are available and I will do my best to describe what each content management system is capable of and what they are best used for. This list is by no means exhaustive, but I try to address many of the more common CMS solutions and demonstrate some of the more interesting ways to use them. I will not cover forum software, since they will be covered in their own post in the near future.
There are two breeds of internet marketers these days: the ethical and unethical. These the two kinds of marketers have made their living side by side in the past without many problems, but the shift to online marketing has made marketing departments more accountable for their marketing methods and as a result unethical marketing has become more transparent to customers. Because of this transparency, marketing departments are beginning to take the high road when trying to acquire new clients and have stopped using methods that are likely to hurt their brand image such as mass email and phone campaigns. Companies fear losing customers, or even worse starting an anti-company movement because of one bad judgment call in the marketing department.
While considering this at the recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, I started to write down some ideas that I would like to share with other online marketers. I have debated with others these three ideals for online marketing and they are only a few of the values that I hold onto when preparing a marketing campaign for a company or product.