The Next Web

Learn from Muhammad Saleem: it’s all about love

Written on April 22, 2008 – 7:40 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Here at the “Free Traffic, Search Engine & Social Media Optimization” Web 2.0 Expo session, social media expert and famous guest blogger at several influential blogs Muhammad Saleem talks about social media optimization. Most of what he tells is pretty basic and informative - start a campaign on Sunday night -, but I like his overall message the most: it’s about love and appreciation people! Here’s my interpretation of what he said.

Everybody on the web seems to be eager for some attention, but the best way to get some is to grant other people attention. For starters, write an evergreen post about your specialism. For example a Howto ebook about your hobby or profession that will remain interesting for a couple of years. As soon as people link to this quality content, show that you appreciate this and link back to them by saying: this blog picked up my news, read here what the blogger has to say about it. Or allow trackbacks. Other visitors will notice that it pays off to link to you, and start linking as well. Before you know it, you’ve started one big attention love chain.

One remark that goes hand in hand with the love-thought is that you have to be genuine. Of course you can act like you dig the social media revolution and that you’re oh-so open and honest. Yet if you don’t mean it, the savvy users will be able to look beyond your facade. Also, writing beautiful and spectacular headlines on social bookmarking sites is ok and truly effective, yet you have to deliver on the promise.

So if you haven’t yet: change your mindset before you enter the world of social media. Put some effort in relationships, reward active visitors and content-creating colleagues and participate in conversations and enjoy the attention.

I hope you like that post!

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free traffic, love, muhammad saleem, social media, social media optimization, web20expo

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How Deep Is Your Love?

Written on February 14, 2008 – 12:49 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,

Today is Valentines day and it shows. Do you have a Twitter account? Twitter the universal internet symbol for a heart at someone you like and they will receive a custom Valentines heart “@username <3″ at someone and they will see a nice red heart (see illustration) with a button to say you love that person too. If you do you will get a message saying “TessaS loves you! And you love TessaS in return. Aww!”.

Want to see how it works but don’t have any friends? Feel free to follow me. I will love you long time.

Also check out Google.com today to see what Chief Google Doodler Dennis Hwang came up with today.

And if you have a Google Docs account make sure you login to it today. You will feel like to accidently flipped open some 12 years old girls diary.

No pink stuff at Flickr today. Flickr, after all, ALWAYS loves you. Recently they added “Loves You” in small grey type to their logo. They did post a nice collection of photos that will make your heart melt.

Microsoft screwed up Valentines day for some people by failing to get them their special Valentine Zune on time. But they sorta make it up by refunding all the money and delivering the Zunes later, for free.

Aha, found another one; Youtube has changed their logo slightly and their front page is featuring mainly love & valentine videos.

As we find more appropriately Valentined websites we will update this post.

google, love, twitter, valentine

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