Social Capital

Wiki “Social Capital, referring to connections within and between social networks, is a core concept in business, economics, organizational behavior, political science, public health, sociology and natural resources management”

The way in which i interpreted ‘Social Capital’ was that each of us has various networks of friends that are benificial to us as individuals, we then create levels of trust between these friends to enable us to ask favors. What i mean is that when we make a new friend we not only judge how much we like the, but subconsciously make a decision on how beneficial these friends will be to us in the future.

I assume that some of us have a larger need for a ‘Social Capital’ than others, whether this means they like to have people around them they can reply on, trust, ask favors or advice from.

An example of social capital is say i had a friend that was a plumber and i just happened to have some plumbing work need doing. I would then use my social capital  to ask my friend to either help me with my plumbing work or do the work discounted.

In return i would build him a web site to promote his plumbing business, I now here you ask what this got to do with social media marketing?

Social Media Marketing 

So lets have a little think about what social media marketing? in the previous post to this i talked about the advantage of social bookmarking systems such as digg it, delicious etc. Now when you think about it, becoming a member of such a network requires a level of trust in your fellow members. Meaning that you increase your social capital through a social network.

So we use our social capital to find good sites, get advice, plugins, downloads, latest industry news and more.

Post by online shop design 

Online Shop Design are for ever moving with the times, although most of the time it feels like catching up with the times. Now SMM (Social Media Marketing) is the next step in the development of online marketing and for us e-commerce marketing . So how do i relate this information to the systems that are in place within my company?

SMM has become a form e-marketing which seeks to achieve communications through the participation in social network such as Myspace, Facebook MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, YouTube, Dailymotion, Hi5 and Gather.com.

Along with these social networks are social web applications such as reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon, Flickr, iLike, Wikipedia, Squidoo, Last.fm, Twitter, Eventful and ePinions.

The main aims for Online Shop Design using SMM involve:

• brand awareness - (get a name or product across to a large audience)
• increasing visibility - (the more places a productcan be viewed the better, even friend networks within social networks can be a way for companies to expand the visibility of a site or product)
• encouraging brand feedback - (Online Shop Design offer to set up our customers personal blogs, these can then be related for different categories, i.e FAQ’s, Testimonials, Etc)
• possibly sell a product or service - (SEM + SMM = Product sold)

A good product from the customer is vital, the last thing you would want to happen while using SMM as a e-marketing tool is to get a bad response as the networks could be used to promote a negative point of view.

Comments Welcome

This was great until i came across this SEO blog One of Esteban’s (the guy who writes the blog) posts was about a word press plug-in.

I asked him a question where to get the plug-in and he hooked me up.

The Link is here

for an example of the plug-in working then please use this page as an example - the heading ‘optimal title tag - wordpress plug-in’ is different to the title ‘wordpress seo plug-ins, title tags, e-commerce blog’.

I like it anyhow!

“How much control will i have over the descriptions of products, prices and images? Along with this what access would i have to control the administration sections of the e-commerce software?”

Mr John Keller

Answer:

At Online Shop  Design we take a very open approach to each product and understand that each customer has his / her own requirements including how much they wish to edit the shop themselves. The software that Online Shop Design have developed comes with a extremely user friendly  admin area and provides a training service to those customers who feel they need it.