So now you know that every marketing campaign labeled as viral is not really viral until it has all the above mentioned essential components of a viral marketing campaign.

If want to design a viral campaign for your brand, stay RSSed and I will be throwing some ideas on that in coming days. We will be doing a blog post series shortly where we will walk you through making of a viral campaign step by step.

So the question as a restaurant owner is: How you go about marketing on Internet?
Here are a few steps to get you started:
1. Get a website if you don’t have one already. People like knowing about you before spending a family function at your restaurant. Try updating it regularly with what is going on and events/specials to come.
2. Setup a Google places page and optimize it for your speciality keywords like cuisine names or some famous dishes that you serve.
3. Go social! Start a Facebook and twitter page and connect your website with these so that anything you post on your website is pushed automatically to your followers. People like to follow their favorite restaurants.
4. Reward your followers regularly. Give out deals and discount coupons on social channels and your website so people have an incentive to follow you. As a general rule, higher the engagement, higher the chances that they choose you the next time they are planning a school reunion etc.
5. Give great information for free. Many people love to know more about the secrets of your craft so sharing some recipes will really encourage them to follow you and also know more about what they might be eating next time they come to you.
These are some starting points. Do let me know via comments if It helps.

Many Tweet on Twitter like the one “I was going to wish you a happy birthday but Facebook was down.” Shows that social networking geeks had have to turn their faces to Twitter or other Social Networking sites during this undesirable situation.  Another user on Twitter said, “On Valentine’s Day, I want to let my dear ones know that I love them if Facebook will not go on holiday again.”

The outage causes problems in many ways to users. Some of the users could not reach the Facebook at all and some reported slow loading pages. Some of the users even contacted the websites that monitor the status of web services like Downrightnow.com to confirm whether the problem is with their account only or occurring worldwide.

Some posted Joke on the situation saying, “Signs of an IPO party hangover? #Facebook down!”. Some took it as an opportunity to spread rumors that a hackers group called Anonymous attacked Facebook.

A spokesperson issued a statement on Daily News saying, “Earlier today, some users briefly experienced issues loading the site. The issues have now been resolved, and we are back to 100%.”

Facebook has not announced the number of shares  offered and the price of each share. However, the company hopes to raise an amount of $5 billion through the initial public offering. According to the filing details, the net profit of Facebook in 2011 was $1 billion on sales of $3.7 billion. An estimate shows that Facebook has a stock worth $100 billion. The complete IPO filing details are available on official website of Securities and Exchange Commission.

Comparing to the other Giants of this trade like Google, many specialist are directing questions like, “Can Facebook meet the inflated expectations?” & “Can it prosper as a public company when every quarter’s progress will be monitored?”

Why is it Going Public?

For providing the security to public investments, a company having more than 500 investors has to made available or disclose its financial records to the Securities and Exchange Commission. When a company sells its stock or share for the first time to raise funds is called Initial Public Offering.

Who Founded Facebook:

Mark Zuckerberg, now 27, founded Facebook at Harvard University in Feb 2004. Since then it has been growing rapidly with 845 million active users today.

Zuckerberg published a statement in the form of a letter while company is filing IPO saying, “There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future.” Click here to read full text of the letter on published in The Guardian

1. Pay per Action

2. Pay per Performance

3. Cost per click (CPC) Advertisement

4. Clik to Call Advertisement

Advantages /Benefits of PPC

Widen your reach: PPC marketing delivers very specific traffic to your web page, apart from the natural or “organic” search engines like Google.

Quick launch and testing of new products/services online: Every company goes for a new launch or sells a new product with certain basic features attached to it. The customers are eager for free trials would like to try it out. If the company puts this plan in a proper frame then it surely is able to complete is half task of achieving success. It is a good way to boost your awareness and reach during your launch.
Monitor your expense: PPC marketing can make use of a monitoring computer which can determine exactly who arrives to the website and what they do soon after they arrive – the length of their stay on the website and the exact actions they perform. These are important instruments in pinpointing figures similar to (ROI), acquisition cost-per-visitorand Cost per sale.
Pay per Click Advertising can be a good boost for every season or special occasion. PPC Advertising will enable you to target the season for higher income. You can even particularly adjust your Pay per Click Advertisement per season.
The results of PPC campaign implementation are immediately visible, within minutes – as opposed to a greater time lag in traditional search engine optimization campaign. Here the results are guaranteed.
PPC can be more expensive than SEO in the long run though. Nothing comes close to returns from organic traffic that properly crafted SEO campaigns can bring.
Another great way to use PPC is to use it as a complement to SEO and other marketing means. If some keywords are particularly difficult to get organic traffic, PPC is a great bet there.

1. First, signing-up! If you don’t have an existing Google account, you will need an ‘Invite’ from someone you know who already has an active Google+ account. You can then click on the link from their email & sign up.

If you have an active Google account, you’re almost there. Look at the black strip along the top of the page, where it will allow you to sign up for Google+

2. Once signed in, you need to update a Google+ profile picture. First, get rid of that default profile image (who looks like that anyway!?!) & add one of your own photos.

Try to upload multiple photos for your profile image. Google+ has a cool feature, which allows you to flip through the different photos, just by clicking on the profile image.

3. Next, fill up your bio & your links on the new account. On the “About” page, update as much interesting information about yourself as you want. This will help you connect with other similar people on Google+.

On the “Other Profiles” section, update all links to business websites, other social media sites or any interesting links.

4. The next thing you do is build up your contact-list & create “Circles”. Google will automatically scan your contact-list on Gmail or from your phone, and suggest people you may want to add. You can also find interesting people by pulling up a search of people by name, in the same profession/business, with similar hobbies or likes, in the same city or community, and even famous celebrities.

Now, you add your contacts through a simple Drop-&-Drag interface into separate ‘Circles’, which helps you identify different people on separate networks.

These circles are only visible to you. You can create as many circles, and add people to one or multiple circles, if needed.

5. Finally, spend some time & play around with Google+ as it’s the best way to learn when you get started with something new. You can share posts, comment, chat, check notifications, play games, go through life-streams, visit famous hangouts, etc.

Written By Ryan D’souza

We know it’s not always possible to carry your laptop, let alone your office computer, along with you everywhere you go. Also, wireless internet connections are not reliable everywhere, even though we hope & pray that they are! But always at your beck and call, no matter where you are, is your very own mobile phone. It helps you always stay in touch with others through calls, messages or internet.So now-a-days, most business people are using their phones to complete their business tasks while travelling.

One of the most popularly used phones today is the Blackberry. It’s smart, convenient and has many apps that are used for work while on the move. The most used free App is the ‘Blackberry Messenger’ (i.e. BBM), which is used to keep in touch with others for work & personal relations. It can also be used to broadcast messages & tasks to multiple contacts at a time, and that gets work done. Another app that’s being used is ‘Nice Office LITE’ to manage emails, contacts, calendar appointments, store documents & get reports. The best part – this app allows the user toback up all of your work data on its website, just in case anything unfortunate happens to your Blackberry. Now that’s what I call “NICE!!” Another app that I have heard about is ‘Scoop’, which is similar to a Google doc. You can use it to make & share text, picture or audio files with you office staff or your clients. They in turn can edit, comment or make notes to the file and send it back. For more on free Blackberry apps, just check out here

For iPhone users, there are plenty offree apps on Apple Store, if only you search. One of the most common & easy to use free apps is ‘Box.net’, which gives you a 1GB account. It can be used to view, edit & share files, like spreadsheets, presentations & other documents while on the go. Next is the ‘IM+ Lite’ app, which is the best instant messenger among the other messenger options available for iPhone users. It allows you access to several services like Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, MySpace IM, Jabber, Yahoo! & MSN Messenger Live. Another cool free app is ‘BeamMe’, which allows users to send across your business cards via text o email, since most of us forget to carry our traditional business cards everywhere we go. Other common free iPhone apps are ‘Fring’ which is a free VOIP, and ‘Bloomberg’ which a free stock market app. Also see details about more iPhone apps here

Most other business people out there are using an Android or Smartphone, and there are plenty of free apps being used there too. The most common is ‘Evernote’– a mobile notepad that can save text as notes, record voice-clips for reminders, capture photos & create to-do lists. Another useful app on the go is ‘Dropbox’, which lets you transfer & access files from your computer to your phone. It has a total of 2GB file storage. To view files in MS Word, Excel or Powerpoint, you can use ‘Documents to Go’ free app. If you want to make changes to the files however, you will have to buy the full chargeable version. Almost all Google apps are free on android & smartphones, like Google Maps, Google Search, Google Reader, Google Translate, Google Voice, Google Buzz & more. To learn more about these apps, like I always say, “Just google it!!” This & much more available here

And of course, there will be many more free apps that will be available to all those who need to keep working on the go. So stay connected& busy!!

Written By Ryan D’souza

As Matt Cuts explains in a post here this is to ensure that the user experience for people clicking through via Google Search is not deteriorated because of the clutter of ads that some websites show. I can think of a prime example- Mashable. While I love the websites’ content and read through every post via my favorite RSS reader, I still feel that their website is just cluttered.

This Google Search Algorithm change means that we need to go to our drawing boards again, tweak our workflows and start emphasizing even more on the design of the websites. Since some time Google is giving higher emphasis to design and visual aspects of a website. It not only improves user experience but rather is also a measure of content quality in an indirect way while being difficult to fake via content spinners et al.

Do keep an eye on your search rankings and if you feel your search rankings dropped recently, comment below and I will have a look at it for you.

Timeline, the latest product from the social networking giant will provide a whole new look to the users profile by allowing them to upload photos and videos on the main profile page and sharing the best moments and posts without having to navigate to the other page. Timeline will not only allow users to share but to also let others know about themselves through a number of social applications.

The social networking giant first needs to show the employees and investors from outside the clear command it has over development of the new products. The company has confirmed the product development process and reorganizing of the technical teams into product groups that would directly report to the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.