posted17/04/10
Businesses both large and small are fighting to get involved in social media, the craze is spreading like wildfire. But just how much do you know about it? Social media is a new phenomenon known by many names - geeks call it web 2.0, marketers call it social marketing, and yet others may call it social communication. Social media is a broad term, the best way to understand it is by narrowing it down. Hopefully this post will help businesses to understand the concept of social media and the best social media sites for your business. Delicious, Digg, Facebook and Wikipedia are just some examples, but today there are literally hundreds of other social media sites that your business can leverage to improve your website traffic. Today we’ll share some of the services we’ve come to rely on and see how each one of these have helped us increase traffic and engagement with with our customers.
Social News Sites
Social News Sites are great for finding useful resources, articles, and information on the web. We submit our blog posts and any other news relating to Creately to many news sites. Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Reddit and Propeller are a few of the best news sites which bring in the highest number of visitors. These sites offer the ability to actively participate in the discussion by leaving comments on popular news items. Once you submit links, you can vote up people’s submissions, as well as vote down stories that you don’t like. Interacting and connecting with people with similar interests cannot be any easier!
Social Bookmarking Sites
Social Bookmarking sites allow users to save their favorite sites with tags/keywords to manage and organize them easily for later use. Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon are always the highest referring sites at creately.com. We save our blog posts, landing pages and other relevant articles. Bookmarking sites not only allow you to save and share your favorite websites, but you can also look at what other people have found interesting enough to tag. Thanks to Charan, I’ve gained immensely through Charan’s Del.icio.us bookmarks. Just type in any web or marketing keyword and I bet you’ll find loads of interesting and useful resources! 
Social Networking Site
Social Networking sites have become increasingly popular these days. Twitter is a great networking platform we engage in for interacting with our customer, well-wishers and prospective users. Tweetdeck is a Twitter application that helps us organize, update and handle all your tweets and followers. The best part of this is the ease of managing conversations which interests you. Hootsuite is another web-based Twitter application we love. It’s best feature is the ability to schedule tweets for later delivery and it lets your whole team manage your Twitter presence. You can now sit back and relax while all your tweets are sent out at the scheduled times. Twitter has undoubtedly helped us gain users and so has Facebook. We continuously post our articles on our Creately’s Facebook profile – we have 200 fans currently and it’s still growing. We love it when our articles are re-posted, liked and commented by our fans from all over the world.
Photo and Video Sharing
Social Photo, Video and Multimedia Sharing Sites are great tools for sharing photos, videos and presentations. At Creately we don’t do a lot of photo sharing, but all our screencasts, demo videos and tutorial videos are broadcast via YouTube and numerous other video sharing services. YouTube has been a great medium to help us reach out to users to demonstrate Creately’s ease of use and great diagramming capabilities. In fact, we’re working on a new video for our homepage at the moment - so watch this space! We also make presentations and upload them on Slideshare. Our users have always liked our attempt in presenting our landing page contents in simple slides. We’re hoping to do at least one slidehsare presentation a month. Fingers crossed!
Wikis
Wikis are sites which allow people to freely create and edit any number of hyper linked web pages. These help people know about the Creately as online diagramming software, its use, benefits and features. Besides Wikipedia, there are a host of other niche wikis that may be useful to your business like - WikiHow, WikiSpaces & WikiAnswers. Social media plays a vital role in the marketing of Creately.com. These sites have contributed well in building traffic and will help any marketer promote his/her business. I’ve put together a quick diagram illustrating the 20 best social news sites that we engage in - so save it somewhere close and get working on your social media strategy!
@induja
posted08/06/09
First we brought you URL shortening for your published diagrams, and now we’ve introduced a 1-Click button that makes it easy to share your published diagrams and designs on Twitter.
We Love Twitter
We love Twitter, and we know you do too. So the next time you create a beautiful Mockup you want to share with your other designers, or are working on an open-source project and want to share your UML and DB designs with the community, Twitter provides a great way to reach out instantly to like minded people.
Easy to Use
Visual Collaboration is more than just the diagrams your draw. Here at Creately,we make the whole process of visual collaboration and sharing easy. You’ll find our new Twitter button neatly tucked away in the right-hand Share panel. Simply, select the check box to enable a public short-URL for your diagram and click the “Share on Twitter” button to publish your diagram directly to Twitter.
And if Twitter is not quite your cup of tea, remember you can always invite your friends and co-workers to share and collaborate on your diagrams securely within Creately.
Give it a try, and watch this space… we’re only days away from a spanking new release that we hope will answer some of the feature requests we’ve been getting on our User Support Community. Check it out for a sneak preview of what’s coming your way this week.
Thanks for all the great feedback and for helping us get one step closer to public.
@creately
posted11/05/09
History
URL shortening has been around for ages. For example tinyurl.com has been around since 2002, which while not that long is ages on Internet. With the recent popularity of Twitter and its artificial limit of 140 characters for the tweets has really moved URL shortening from a specialty to a mainstream activity with a very useful purpose.
Traditionally URL shortening services have generated a random and unique code which is placed after their own short domain name to create the short URL. Recently they have started to allow users to add their own unique code although this is a little used feature because of the need to maintain a short URL. Take a look at bit.ly to see this in action.
Advantages & Disadvantages
URL shortening has its distinct advantages and disadvantages. For the Internet user, URL shortening provides a mechanism to easily include short yet useful links in a message without using up all the available characters. For the website provider URL shortening can remove or even damage their beautifully laid SEO plans. It removes the easily readable and meaningful URLs that make search better and help users understand what they are going to be viewing.
So we have two forces here pulling in different directions. Well this got me thinking about what we should be providing at Creately to really enable our users to publish their diagrams for the public to view in a manner that makes sense and allows the most flexibility.
Our Solution
It should be stated at this point that basic URL shortening is not technically difficult, a point proven by the explosion of URL shortening services that have sprung up. You can do basic URL shortening - which is really URL redirection using the HTTP header - in about 10 lines of code in PHP (I’m sure it can be done in less if your really smart :-))
After much internal discussion we’ve decided to keep our new short URL service short and sweet with a new short domain
See are some sample URLs we’ve published from Creately:
http://create.ly/fub9l2671
http://create.ly/fuk35unh1
Our URL shortening has been achieved with a mixture of Apache configuration changes and PHP code to enable the URL shortening. The flexibility and function that this provides to our users is huge. Any Creately user can now simply copy and paste this link into their email, IM, or Twitter post to share their diagram or design with the world at large.
In the future we have plans to allow Creately users to specify their own custom URL for published diagrams. This means that each diagram can have an SEO friendly link and it lets the links to be more descriptive.
If you have any ideas for improvements to our published diagram service please head over to our Community Support Site or email support@creately.com
@nick_foster
posted26/03/09
Just went thru 10 Steps to Terrific Twittering - basically a boiled down version of all of @guykawasaki’s tips for Power twittering. As a young startup, we already practice many of these tips, but there were some that I had not truly appreciated the value of, until reading this post.
1) Follow your Followers
This is one of Guy’s commandments for Twitter. At Creately I wasn’t sure it that’s the way it should work for us. I had envisaged the @creately account to be used as a way to keep our beta users and interested parties up to date with new product features and updates. I wanted to let people find us online and follow us on Twitter, if they saw what they liked at creately.com. I very quickly found this approach works well with people who’ve heard about Creately and found us online, but did not allow us to reach out to the millions of technology early adopters who live in the TwitterSphere - which is really what Guy believes it can do for your brand. I felt I had made an implicit social contract with my @creately followers not to bombard them with the slew of twits or twitter activity that it takes to build a Follower base. But I needed to do more on Twitter.
It became clear that Creately needed more than one account to manage our conversations and marketing efforts on Twitter (more on our Twitter experience here) which leads nicely to my next point.
Tip - We use SocialToo and TweetLater to keep track of our followers, unfollowers and set-up auto-follows.
2) Use the right tools
There’s a lot you can do these days with the vast number of services and tools that have sprouted around the Twitter API. For us, managing multiple accounts and keeping track of user interest in our market (read ‘keywords’) was an important issue. I tried a slew of tools - TwitterFox, TweetDeck, Twirl, Destroy Twitter and services - Twitter Search (love the RSS), Twitscoop, TweetSuite, Splitweet, Social Mention (just to name a few)- gaining experience along the way and moving to more sophisticated tools as required. Start experimenting small to understand what Twitter can offer then decide what you want your Twitter presence to deliver and select the right tools based on your strategy.
Check this great list of all Twitter apps and tools on the Twitter Fan page on pbwiki.
3) Squeeze the Trigger
As Guy puts its - and I concur, how long do we want to wait before we decide its acceptable to direct market on Twitter. I think its time - as long as its done in a personable way and is not spam. Even if you think its Ok to engage with potential customers in this way, how do you go about doing it? Should I engage with Twitters who are discussing diagrams and mockups? Should I monitor conversations on competitors and try to reel new users in? These are issues of business ethics that will finally reflect on your company’s values and need serious consideration.
Personally I would take a cautious approach to direct marketing and definitely not use the @creately account for fear of alienating my current followers. Perhaps @diagramHelper would be a good moniker.
4) Make it easy to share.
This is a very important enabler if you want to see results on Twitter- remember the power that is inherent in the crowd. I won’t discuss this much here for fear of letting too much slip out - but watch this space.
Let me know what works for your startup. Back to Twitter!
@charanjit
