The Web 2.0 revolution is reaching the financial sector. It’s not only forums and chat rooms, and not another Twitter application for stocks. This time it’s about revealing trades in real time. One sector is standing out: forex. Trading currencies has been around for a few decades, but it was limited to big financial institutions. The internet, among other things, brought this niche of financial investment (or speculation if you wish) to the masses.

“Show me the money”

There’s lots of innovation around forex trading platforms, so this served as good ground for networking sites as well. In 2009 and 2010, these networking sites went deeper – deep into the pockets of investors. Similar to applications such as Google Latitude that expose your geographical location, these sites expose data. But it’s not only forex. Let’s see some examples:

1. MT4Pips: These are lots of weird names in Web 2.0, and this name is not only Web 2.0-ish, but uses the forex jargon. MT is MetaTrader, the leading software in this field. Using this site, traders that use this specific software can share their real live trades between each other. This site comes from a company that already made a Digg-like site for forex, has a forums site and more social sites in this field.  The options are somewhat basic, and are limited to this specific platform, but are a great and neat start. Here’s a deeper review of this site.
2. Currensee: Focusing only on the forex sector, this site enables sharing of real time trades and has tools for aggregating the numbers and showing the big picture. While this isn’t limited to a specific software, not all the brokers in the industry are available there. They are adding more and more brokers, and improving the design, so this will probably emerge as the leading tool for social networking in forex. But we guess that most of you aren’t investing in this specific niche but rather in stocks. The last options supports more sectors.
3. PT Multistation: This is a software that enables traders to use multiple brokers at once. They recently added social features that allow traders (in foreign exchange, stocks and others) to chat and also to share real trades. This tool already allows multiple brokers and goes beyond the niche of forex, but the social features still require improvement, according to this review. Also here, a good direction that still needs polishing.

All in all, we have nice starts here with each one taking a different direction. We hope that this trend of transparency will reach stock sites as well. Do you know of any sites like these? We’d love to hear.

Further reading: Is showing all your cards always the right choice?

Pepsi is a huge American advertiser. As a producer of beverages, it must spend vast amounts of money to maintain the awareness of their brand. They have strong presence in every form of media and sponsor sports and music events.

The Super Bowl is a major sports event that draws millions of viewers to the TV screens. Advertisers work hard to bring new and original ads to this specific game. Some viewers admit that they watch the game only to see what creative clips the advertisers come up with.

Leaving the scene to Coca Cola?

Pepsi was there for 23 years. And suddenly they’re gone, leaving the scene to Coca Cola. The immediate benefit is clear – everybody’s talking about their absence from the game. I’m no different.

The money saved on ads goes to an initiative that talks to the customers: they’re asked to submit philanthropic ideas on Pepsi’s site, and winning ideas will receive grants. Many say they are hypocrites – ruining children’s teeth and pretending to help them afterwards.

But the move got attention on many social networks. The tag #pepsirefresh is very hot on Twitter. They got their buzz not only from missing out on the Super Bowl, but also with their new campaign.

Is this the beginning of something new?

The Super Bowl is over, but it’s still too early to say if their campaign will continue to be hype. This is a first and interesting test. The bigger question is whether other companies will follow Pepsi. Will the balance of budgets move from television to the web? Will directly communicating with the customers and “listening to them” become a wide phenomenon?

I’m optimistic. I draw my hope from Obama’s micro donations campaign. Until Barrck Obama’s primaries campaign, politicians leaned on rich and influential people or corporations for donations. Small donations from supporters existed, but they were in small scale.

Obama’s team changed the way of thinking. Donations from corporations are still dominant in the American political scene. It’ll take ages until politicians distance themselves from them. It might never happen. But the concept of micro donations did gain ground in the US, and is also being mimicked elsewhere.

So, I believe that Pepsi’s move is just the beginning.

Further reading: Facebook as a customer relationship management tool.

The first advantage of widgets is that they are easy to install and use. You don’t have to be a software designer in order to install a text widget on your site or blog. The second advantage is that most widgets can be customized in size, color and style to fit your blog in an elegant way. In this post I”ll recommend a few content-related widgets, that add relevant content to your readers in addition to your own original content:

Twitter Search Widget – There is no doubt about the impact tweets have on the web. over 50M users tweet daily billions of tweets, why not share the relevant ones for you with your readers? Instead of adding a twitter widget of your own tweets, add the search widget and cutomise it to your blog topic.This example is a search widget on ‘Ipad’

The widget can be adjusted with theme, color, size and number of tweets shown. I would recommend using this widget with a search related to the topic of your blog, or a topic concerning current events related to your blog, and maybe even changing the topic of search on the widget from time to time, giving your readers a glimpse at the most relevant tweets.

TimesWidget – The New-York Times also has a great widget for your blog. NYTimes, the leading print and online newspaper lets you enjoy its RSS feed through a great widget(still beta).

This widget enables you to add the NYTimes feed customized to your topic. Pick the subject relevant(can pick more than one), sports, business, technology or others from the list and add it to your site, letting your readers have online access to fresh and relevant content right out of the NYTimes.

Google AJAX Search API for youtube- Not exactly a widget, but I found this cool API that could be suited for a few blogs. I can’t say every blog should have this, but blogs more on the fun side, or writing about media, can use this youtube API as a widget on their blog.

It can be placed in a horizontal or vertical layouts to suite your site. In this example I placed the AJAX with Monty Python’s Youtube Channel. As mentioned about the twitter search widget, here also recommended to change the channels every now and then.

There are many more widgets, these are just a few examples I found useful, and even eye catchers for readers. Don’t add too much to your site, but try to find a few widgets that could give value to your readers.

HootSuite is a web application that can be used for managing multiple accounts in multiple social networks. The most obvious is Twitter. You can manage many Twitter accounts, which makes it useful if you’re promoting many businesses in separate accounts.

I’m certain you aren’t impressed. There are loads of web applications, such as Brizzly, which enable multiple accounts, and lots of desktop applications such as Tweetdeck. The main advantage of HootSuite regarding Twitter is the ability to schedule tweets.

Scheduling of tweets is enabled for manual tweets as well as for automatic ones. Instead of instantly tweeting about all your blog posts, you can set HootSuite to have a minimal period of time between tweets. This is good for not coming too strong – a concept we’ve discussed over and over again, such as this post about befriending too soon in Facebook.

This way, your followers will see sporadic tweets even if they are automated. Yes, there’s an auto-tweeting plugin for Wordpress, but HootSuite can schedule, spread the tweets and also append different words to the links. This makes it much more friendly to your followers, giving also the automated tweets a personal touch, which is so needed in a world of too many Twitter Autopilots.

LinkedIn, Facebook and more

HootSuite isn’t only about Twitter. You can use it to control status updates in your Facebook profile, your Facebook pages and LinkedIn, the leading tool for business networking. I wonder if they’ll support Naymz in addition to LinkedIn.

Another feature that is available is an option to link it to Ping.fm which opens up more social networks, such as Yammer, MySpace, FriendFeed and more. I find this unnecessary, as you can easily lose control and lose the personal touch.

Does Twitter bring traffic?

That’s a good question that receives long discussion all over the web. While you can separately measure the traffic in your websites, HootSuite takes a different approach of measuring the clicks on the tweets themselves. You can see clicks by tweets, web pages and more.

I found that repeating the intro “New blog post” for automated tweets from blog posts tend to receive less clicks over time. Playing with different intros seemed to gain more traction. More click mean a better connection with the people who follow you, and a better chance of enlarging the network via retweets.

As aforementioned, HootSuite doesn’t have anything revolutionary, but it has a nice package of features. An excellent example for a trivial but useful feature is the “Hootlet” – it enables instantly tweeting about a webpage you like. Trivial? Sure. Exists elsewhere? Sure. Useful? Yes.

No big flaws

When preparing this review, I ran into this review on Twitip. Apart from the interesting review, many commented with criticism about the ow.ly shortening tool. This is the tool that HootSuite uses for shortening and for the useful stats. During my research, ow.ly worked flawlessly. So there;s no significant downside in HootSuite.

All in all, it’s a useful tool for networking, free to try and free to use.

The first and not recommended option for Twitter users when promoting content is manually tweeting every time you post a blogpost, video, podcast. This is not recommended, especialy when most bloggers post more than once a week at their blog, FaceBook, LinkedIn,etc. and upload a video to YouTube every now and then. You would usually like to tweet on most of that. Luckly, today you can add your Twitter account to most of the existing platforms.

Some of the more simple examples are:

1.Wordpress Twitter plugin – There are many plugins for WordPress that tweet automatically every post you publish. The one I am using currently is Easy retweet.
2.Linkedin – A short time ago LinkedIn added the option to synchronize your LinkedIn status and tweets(th anks guys!) . This is how it will appear

3. Youtube Channel – You can add your twitter account to your YouTube channel, and post automatic tweets with every new video you upload.

4. Tweetdeck - One of the more popular applications for the web and mobile devices. The latest version supports multiple users on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.

However, although I recommend all these tools and methods, it is also recommended to keep a balance with your tweets and status updates on Facebook and Linkedin. Most people want and need the personal touch –  people would like to hear more than just your last published posts. Try to balance your tweets with a few personal thoughts, link to others and combine tweets about your activity. That part of it could be your last post or video. Another option is setting up a different Twitter user for your business – this way you’ll post only business related tweets and links.

After all that said and done, you can also follow this blog on Twitter here, or follow us personally – Yohay or Doron

About a decade ago, a friend bragged about a new phone he just bought, that can hold up to 300 contacts in his address book. This sounds funny when thinking about it in 2009. He then showed me that except for name and phone number you can type in additional details such as city, birthday and mail. To demonstrate the abilities of the new gadget (I remind the readers this is 1999 we are talking about) he showed me a memo the phone just made about one of his customers. The customer’s daughter just turned 16, and my friend called to congratulate his customer for the sweet sixteen birthday party they are holding. We can learn 2 things from this ‘ancient’ story:

1. Know your customers – they will return a favor by doing business with you again.
2. In 2009 there is no need to input your phone manually, we have technology for that!

Before reviewing the possibilities with advanced mobile devices such as Iphone and Blackberry, lets take a closer look at Facebook and LinkedIn and their immediate business added value. Befriending online with business associates and customers, but not too soon, can let you take part in their lives. Choose to use it wisely, and you will enjoy a constant and fruitful relationship with your clients. Instead of relating to your business alone, you can connect to your clients about their personal interests, hobbies and important events such as birthdays, anniversaries and other social gatherings.

In the past, you would keep logs or lists of customers, birthday details and addresses that would consume a lot of time to manage. Today, Facebook has an application for almost every smartphone: Blackberry,Iphone, HTC, etc. that will notify you with important dates related to your connections. The new Facebook app for Blackberry, can connect automatically to your calendar and address book.  Twitter has also hundreds of applications for almost every existing phone. LinkedIn can also be used from most phones.

We are not always near a desktop, or a notebook, but if we can see what our business connections are up to, or what they are celebrating, we can choose to use it. We can make a call to congratulate an associate on receiving an award, text a client on his birthday and send an email with an article that would interest a customer that just tweeted on the subject. All these options are easy to use today, and were not available 3-4 years ago. All the examples I’ve mentioned can be available using notifications on Facebook mobile applications, and any Twitter app such as the popular Tweetdeck (on Iphone also). The Tweetdeck, by the way, has a new version that includes feeds not only from twitter as before, but also facebook, myspace and linkedin, which means you can enjoy your feeds and text from all those applications in one place. An advantage for all those having a hard time following Facebook, Twitter and linkedin togather.

Even if social media doesn’t interest you that much, you should still consider it as a working tool for you. LinkedIn can be your professional database, Facebook can be your clients’ event notifier and Twitter even just for short and immediate direct messaging to clients.

For a kick start:

facebook latest app for Blackberry

Tweetdeck for Iphone

Linkedin on mobile

Picture credit: Chris Brogan

I sat with my laptop at Tazza D’Oro, a nice cafe-restaurant in Tel Aviv, best know for its excellent breakfasts. As I was waiting for a meeting, I sent out a tweet about sitting in this cafe. Reporting from everyday life is common amongst geeks, and I’m no different.

I was surprised to see a reply from Yotam, the owner of the place, that asked me to ask for him, since he couldn’t recognize me from my picture. Well, the waiter called him and we had a nice chat.

He told me that he’s looking for creative ways to get more people to his place. The method that he chose wasn’t advertising or special offers. He chose networking.

Why should I come to his cafe rather than the one next door? The reason. as Yotam explained to me was the people. Now, when I sip a cup of coffee or have lunch at Tazza D’Oro, it’s not just sitting at the place, it’s sitting at Yotam’s place.

The personal touch is what will make customers return. This is an ancient method. The technology is new Twitter. By monitoring mentions of his place on Twitter, he can see what people are saying, respond to them, and also approach them physically if they’re there.

This is a great example of using the networking technology to network in real life. The place also hosted a tweetup recently. This might have been the trigger for him to start using Twitter.

Twitter isn’t the only tool around, and it might not always be suitable for everyone. We’ll later review another place that uses Facebook to keep in touch with customers. Bon appetite!

Advantages:

1. Search Engine Strength: Naymz does very well in search engines. This is very important for reputation management. When someone looks you up on Google or Yahoo and finds content that you control, this helps your personal branding. Naymz content also helps push down web mentions of yourself that you’d prefer not be seen or emphasized. This is definitely the No. 1 reason to sign up for Naymz.
2. Free introductions: Introductions to people that you have no connection to are limited in LinkedIn, and aren’t totally free. In Naymz, it’s all free.
3. Reputation Monitor: Naymz supplies a tool for reputation monitoring across the web, scanning social networks and blogs. This is both interesting and useful.
4. Microblogging: Naymz offers status messages similar to Facebook and fast growing Twitter. This way, Naymz is somewhere between chaotic Twitter and intra-corporation Yammer. It can be quite useful.

Disadvantages:

1. Size: Naymz boasts that it has over one million users. This is enough for signing up, but LinkedIn is much bigger (over 45 million people) and is a synonym with Professional Networking site.
2. Anonymous recommendations: While being anonymous is necessary in some spooky cases, when you’re building your reputation, an identified recommendation is better than an anonymous. Would you trust a faceless person when networking or when hiring someone?
3. Premium Services: While also LinkedIn has premium services, one of these services is disturbing – the detailed visitor tracking. It means that only users that paid Naymz will get to see who visited their profile. This privacy issue doesn’t make me feel so comfortable – I don’t want the user to see that I’ve visited his profile. Also MyBlogLog has the same disadvantage that disturbs many bloggers.
4. No Groups: LinkedIn groups are an excellent and useful feature, that draws me to the site again and again. Naymz doesn’t have this feature, and I find it to be a big disadvantage.

I hope that Naymz will grow and get better. In the meantime, having a profile there is great for reputation management, but still not the best tool for networking.

Read more on how to use LinkedIn.

Twitter is young: it aired only in 2006, when other social networks were already strong in the market. In the last year or so, it’s popularity leaped worldwide.

The short 140 format makes it easy to use and easy to follow. Naturally, you follow and get followed by people you know. Later you become exposed to more people that share a common interest.

After reaching a critical mass, communities began evolving around the “Twittersphere”. This critical mass means that not only geeks use it, but the general public. So, people that get to know each other via very short messages want to get together in real life. So, tweetups were born.

A Tweetup is a Networking Event

Tweetups are usually held once a month during the evening at a bar. This allows for a relaxed and not to formal atmosphere. But the attendants of this event didn’t solely to drink a beer before going home.

Attendants of tweetups are usually people who want to connect. They come also for meeting their virtual friends in real life, but they usually come with an agenda. The name tags with the @TwitterUser mean that a tweetup is a networking event, not a geek get-together.

Many times, the audience of tweetups has a tendency towards the internet sector, and internet marketing in particular, but it’s not a bunch of programmers…

So, tweetups are significant networking events, and especially important for those of you who want to connect to people in the internet sector.

How can I find out about upcoming Tweetups?

Naturally, the first place to look for them is on Twitter. There’s a good chance that they’ll be mentioned among the people you’re following. Didn’t see anything about an upcoming tweetup? Pop a question on Twitter. Someone will @reply.

If you still don’t find one there, Facebook would be a good place to search for a tweetup group in your vicinity.

Another valuable internet resource for tweetups is a rather new service called Twitvite. This site offers an option to arrange events where Twitter users can RVSP their attendance. They also offer to help you out with organizing tweetups…And if you’re organizing the tweetup, here’s a list of dos and don’ts.

Happy tweeting and networking!