Company News

Online T-Shirt Store Surges with Blogging Tips from iePlexus

It’s important for everyone to be able to express themselves in their own way, which is something that rang true for Web entrepreneur David Inman. ‘Nerd’ culture in particular has become popular and Inman wanted to develop a haven for these so-called nerds, where they could find T-shirts and other products to help express themselves through their sense of style.

With plenty of shirts with Star Trek references, math and science jokes, and sarcastic one-liners on them, David Inman already had plenty of excellent products available for purchase on his website, www.NerdKungFu.com; what he was missing was the right avenue to advertise his product lines. He needed a way to find a customer base that was looking for the types of T-shirts and gifts that he sold on his website, which is eventually what led him to the marketing services offered by iePlexus.

“I did all the research, found some other people that were happy with iePlexus, and figured I’d give it a try,” Inman stated.

Partnering with iePlexus led to the launch of Inman’s blog at www.TheNerdBlog.com, where Inman publishes posts reviewing films, discussing Star Trek, and offering additional commentary on nerd culture.

In the first two months that Inman started blogging with the guidance of iePlexus, he noticed a tremendous spike in his customer base. He was able to get even more exposure to his website through social networks like Facebook and Twitter that were also set up with the help of iePlexus.

“Every retailer thinks their customers are smarter than the average customers, but I think mine actually are,” Inman explained. With assistance from iePlexus, Inman has been able to develop a regular customer base and get his intelligent and funny T-shirts out to people who are looking for exactly what he is selling.

“The customer service and tech support with iePlexus are phenomenal,” Inman said. “If I have questions about keyword phrases for my blog, I get feedback within a week. In terms of not having to worry about what the site looks like or maintaining everything, it’s generally been a positive experience.”

Facebook’s “A Look Back” Inspires Sharing, Spoofs, and Sentimental Moments

Facebook launched “A Look Back,” a feature which allows users to see a Facebook generated one minute video of their biggest Facebook moments, in honor of the sites tenth birthday last week. Site members can edit and share these movies with their friend via their Facebook wall. In its first week, over 200 million people chose to view their video and half of these chose to share it with their friends. The videos show most-liked posts and some of the shared photos and statuses from each person’s Facebook page, set to instrumental music.

Since Facebook launched the feature last week, there have been an increasing number of parodies. These have included Facebook ‘Look Back’ videos for TV and movie characters, such as Optimus Prime from the Transformers series and Walter White from the hit TV series, Breaking Bad, which ended last year. Many people have shared these videos in addition to their own.

For some people, receiving a Facebook ‘Look Back’ has been a sentimental experience. For one father, the new Facebook feature allowed for celebration of his son’s short life. He released a video on YouTube asking CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook Team to make a video for his son’s page. Facebook responded by granting his request and promising to try to look into doing more for grieving families in the future.

Facebook created their “A Look Back” feature as a gift to their users. However, not everyone is happy about these videos. There has been a lot of backlash across social media, with people claiming that the videos are annoying. Some individuals were unhappy about their own videos, claiming that they were an invasion of privacy. The edit feature was added in part to remedy these claims. The videos will remain available for viewing until the end of the month, at which point they will disappear if they haven’t been posted to your wall.

Social Media: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Social media is everywhere nowadays. It finds you in the morning during your commute to work, sneaking its way into a promotional radio announcement for concert tickets – learn more about this music spectacular via the station’s Twitter account. It’s embedded in the e-mail we read; Vanessa tagged a photo of you on Facebook and Nathan wrote on your wall. It’s even incorporated into the TV programs we cherish – visit Fox.com/Glee to follow us on MySpace, check out video extras and learn more about the cast.

With each passing day, social media becomes more institutionalized within our culture, and our ability to separate social media from ordinary life becomes opaque and jaded. Such a transformation – social media into the norm of everyday life – also encourages the public to use social media as a gateway for sharing of every kind of information without thinking twice.

Below you’ll find real-life examples of how society has embraced social media to portray the good, the bad and the ugly.

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Privacy-Promoting Social Network Provides Alternative to Cautious Facebook Users

Are you one of many social media addicts who have been disappointed by the seemingly unjust privacy violations implemented by Facebook? Are you exhausted from worry of what might happen to your personal data with the topsy-turvy regulations set to protect your information? Would you like to rest assured that your social interactions on the web won’t come back to haunt you several years down the road?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you’ll want to pay close attention to a new social media platform that’s garnering favorability among social media consumers – and it hasn’t even been launched yet.

Diaspora, which has been coined a Facebook alternative by many, is an interactive online platform designed to grant social media users the privacy they demand matched with the social activity they crave. In fact, the social network’s founders – Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy – say it best in the following video clip.

Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network from daniel grippi on Vimeo.

Set to launch September 15, 2010, Diaspora developed an interim, promotional website to deliver an overview, that’s both creative and concrete, of what social media users can expect along with a platform for the inevitable, frequently asked questions. The website describes the soon-to-be-launched social network in saying:

“We are 140-character ideas. We are the pictures of your cat. We are blog posts about the economy. We are the collective knowledge that is Wikipedia. The internet is a canvas – of which, we paint broad and fine strokes of our lives with. It is a forward extension of our physical lives; a meta-self comprised of ones and zeros. We are all that is digital: If we weren’t, the internet wouldn’t either.”

To stay current with Diaspora news and events in the final days before its launch, visit the social platform’s blog and KickStarter page.

Top 5 Tools for Successful Twitter Marketing

If you’re having trouble deciding which is more important – the quantity of your Twitter following or the depth of your relationships with your followers – rest assured that both are of equal value.

Now that your mind is uncluttered and free of question, it’s best to concentrate on how you can enhance both aspects of your Twitter account to ensure the most oomph for your efforts.

Below you’ll find five indispensible resources to establish successful Twitter marketing, thanks to SocialMediaExaminer.com, which zoom in on the following key areas:

• Generating new followers
• Managing your newly established following surplus
• Transforming shallow relationships into deeper, more connected ones

 1. Blast Follow
A must-have Twitter application, Blast Follow is a remarkable resource for e-commerce entrepreneurs who could use a helping hand in accomplishing the necessary grunt work to locate others in their industry. With just a single click, users can generate a seemingly endless list of followers.

So, how can such a near impossible task become so simplified? Quite easily in fact. The concept is based on a societal norm – the law of reciprocity – which states that it’s in the nature of humans to desire reciprocation (whether a friend or stranger) of actions.

This concept takes on a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ appeal and, in this case, Twitter users seem to adhere to a loyalty to that says ‘you follow me; it’s only fair that I follow you.’

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5 Social Media Trends to Smile About

It’s nearly impossible to turn on the TV, tune in to the radio or surf the web these days without encountering the social media craze that continues to intertwine with all aspects of our daily lives.

The buzz question of a once reluctant, yet curious, populace is no longer ‘Why should I become active in social media?’ Instead, the hot-button issue of inquisition in recent days has become ‘How can social media benefit me?’

Therefore, we’ve comprised a list of five social media trends, thanks to Mashabale.com, that provide consumers with a variety of perks and rewards, in addition to the in-demand essence of social media itself.

1. Social Scanning
The development of the Smartphone has granted users instant access to a magnitude of informational and social resources online. Most recently, these newage applications have yielded the convenience of comparison shopping to Smartphone users through barcode scanning technology.

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Social Media Excellence: Learning from Five Outstanding Corporate Blogs

When it comes to starting up a business blog, most people find themselves overwhelmed from the get-go. There’s much more than posting to account for when strategizing for a striking blog, in fact, the key areas to consider are the theme, topics, audience, design, multimedia and promotion. Plus, if you haven’t already chosen a domain name for your blog, that’s a primary feature you’ll want to carefully develop to represent your brand most effectively.

Today, Mashabale.com published an article to showcase 15 fabulous business blogs; each represents a separate, valuable component of orchestrating a successful corporate blog to captivate the inquisitive nature of web surfers worldwide.

To keep things simple, however, we’ve selected the five most prominent must-haves for any business blog. This should to get you started sans the headache and hassle of sorting through an overwhelming to-do list. 

1. Squarespace: Choose a Suitable Blog Design

Business blogs often lack originality thanks to a corporate misconception that they need to be branded with overpowering images and text or visually underdeveloped and boring.

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Gmail Debuts More User-Friendly Contacts Manager

Today, Google unveiled a brand-new system designed to simplify two key functions for Gmail users: overall contact management and keeping these contacts consistent with the rest of Gmail.

Such a roll out couldn’t have surfaced a minute too soon as animosity among Google’s users has been brewing worldwide in response to multiple disappointing oversights by the social network. Most notably, a formal letter to Google orchestrated by 10 nations to express deep concern about the lack of privacy regulations in the company’s recent debut of Google Buzz.

Now, more than ever, Google fans are craving a little reassurance about why they’ve pledged their cyber loyalty to the enterprise. And now, thanks to Google’s Gmail enhancement, supporters can rest assured – for the meantime – that the network is powering through their obstacles to provide a better overall Google experience.

Gmail members can now look forward to new features that include:

• Keyboard shortcuts that mirror Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts
• Sort by last name filter
• Faster editing options
• Autosaving
• Custom labels

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Students Crave Social Media in Online Education

It’s not uncommon to think ‘geez, what’s next?’ when you consider the thousands of new social media applications that surface daily. As a society, our astonishment with the basic utility of networks like Facebook and Twitter has become feeble and impatient.

Today, excitement is fueled by stellar advancements in emerging technology such as the iPad, while the hype regarding simple applications like BreakkUp and Pandora is usually generated partially by the anticipation for something – anything – new.

Degree of public interest aside, the overarching commonality among all forms of social and emerging technologies is the simple fact that they connect users through an endless span of preferences, thoughts and searches. In fact, this newage trend is garnering public interest Webby-worthy technologies and the possible integration of these elite systems into the online platforms of crucial American industries – specifically education.

As the nation’s second largest enterprise (just behind healthcare), higher education – according to Mashable.com – is “experiencing a similar shift as it struggles to adapt traditional design and delivery models to the demands of modern audiences who are accustomed to digital interactivity.”

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First-Time Web Entrepreneur Delighted by Ease of Business Blogging with iePlexus

The term blogging often sounds awkward and intimidating to newbie web entrepreneurs and emerging small-business owners, however, the concept behind the wording is quite the contrary. In fact, e-commerce go-getter Gloria McQuade insists that blogging is as simple as keeping a pen and paper handy to scribble down creative thoughts and ideas as they come to you.

“It’s important to be a multitasker to succeed in the competitive world of e-commerce,” McQuade said. “As a full-time employee by day, I have to take advantage of every free moment I get to help market my web business.”

Blogging allows business owners to promote their products/services in brief, engaging articles while dually encouraging interaction and discussion among consumers. It also happens to be a key concept behind the professional marketing strategies of iePlexus – the company that helped McQuade formulate a business blog of her very own.

Developed in May 2010, www.PrincessAndTheBlog.com was created to educate readers about the numerous functions and exciting features presented by McQuade’s collection of dollhouses that’s available for individual purchase through her web store. In recent posts, she has discussed important tips for assembling a dollhouse, the similarities of dollhouse doors to life-size doors as well as the dramatic difference dollhouse accessories – such as winding staircases and decorative furniture – make to each miniature home sweet home.

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