Do you remember going to dance clubs? Hanging out at the corner or in the schoolyard with your friends? I mean, your real friends. These days you may never even meet your friends in-person. Times have changed. It is time to change with the times.

We rely on Social Media to help us connect with friends, grow business relationships big and small, and reach customers locally and globally. Social Media is your oyster.

There are many common forms of Social Media including:

• Concepts, slogans, and statements with a high memory retention quotient, that excites others to repeat.
• Grass-Roots direct action information dissemination such as public speaking, installations, performance, and demonstrations.
• Electronic media with ’sharing’, syndication, or search algorithm technologies (includes internet and mobile devices).
• Print media, designed to be re-distributed.

Doing your Social Media homework can be lots of fun. It may be as simple as going to your local library and signing up for free courses. You are likely already enjoying the benefits of Social Media on websites that have podcasts, videos via YouTube, sharing photographs via Flickr or Picasa, reading or writing blogs, checking in on events or reading social news via Digg or NowPublic. It is your turn to learn more about it. Check out this video Social Media in Plain English !

How do YOU like to socialize?

• Social Networking is widely known as Web 2.0. Connect you with your friends, people with similar interests, potential employers, and find more connections.
• Social Bookmarking sites allow you to organize your favorite sites, tag them for keywords, and keep them all in one place. However, what makes these sites social is the ability for you to share them with others.
• Social Recommendation sites create user generated recommendation sites. Sites like Digg, Netscape and StumbleUpon encourage users to submit items they like and then give others the opportunity to vote on them.
• Social Content sites are where users create and manage the content from photos to videos, information on a topic, and everything in between.

Got Social Media? Make the most of it.

Web Design & SEO Training

Do You…

* Want to learn step by step instructions on how to build a free website online with no design experience?
* Want to learn step by step instructions on how to attract more traffic to your website via SEO?
* Want to learn step by step instructions on how to create a successful facebook fan page to attract more business?

Who should attend?

* Start up business owners who can not afford the height prices of a custom web site design.
* Small business owners who have web site and want to attract more customers to their site.
* Unemployed or underemployed people who want to build a web presence to help them find a job.

What will I gain from this seminar?

* Step 1: Step by step instructions on how to build a free web site on line.
* Step 2: Step by step instructions on how to optimize your web site for maximum search engine results.
* Step 3: Step by Step instruction on how to set up a facebook fan page and promote your business to your customers.

Class Details

Date: May 26, 2010
Time: 9:00 AM – 4:00 PM
Location: Hilton Garden Inn, 420 Totten Pond Road, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA 02451

Cost: $199.00 (early booking special booked by Sunday April 25, 2010) April 25 – May 25 $249.00

Interesting news hit the web today as Google released “Google Goggles”, a brand-new addition to Google Labs. It is an experimental application for Android devices that supports visual search.

How does it work? Just open the application and snap a photo. Google (Google Wave) will process the image and return search results. The photo search functionality eliminates the need to type or say anything on your mobile device. It also adds context to your real-world surroundings.

While the technology is pretty amazing, they admit that it is still the beginning. Selected image searches work seamless. For example : photos of books, business cards, artwork, places, logos and landmarks. Image searches for food, animals, plants and cars are still in the works.

Watch the video below for a demonstration of Google Goggles.

Often I hear from my customers how do I back up my content on my blog. So I did some snooping today and I found the below tutorial on the wordpress.org site. You will need access to your ftp information and some knowledge of how the blog is set up to do this by your self. Please if you are not comfortable leave it to the professionals.

Create a Regular Database Backup

Every post and page you write in WordPress is stored in a MySQL database. There aren’t separate files for each page or post. It’s important to regularly back up your database in case something goes wrong (such as with a rogue plugin or a misguided upgrade attempt). You can manually back up your database by using a tool like phpmyadmin, but it’s much easier to simply use the WordPress Database Backup plugin.

To create a regular database backup schedule:

• 1. Download and install the WordPress Database Backup plugin.
• 2. In your blog’s admin panel, go to Manage > Backup.
• 3. In the Backup Options section, select Email backup to and then enter your email address.
• 4. In the Scheduled Backup section, select Once Weekly.
• 5. Select any tables you want to include. These tables refer to data from any plugins you’ve added, not to your posts and comments.
• 6. Click the Submit button at the bottom.

Each week, you’ll receive an email with your database. The database is light and won’t take up much space in your email program. If your site ever crashes, you can restore your entire site’s posts, pages, categories, and tags (but not images) through the database file. Images are stored in wp-content/uploads folder

Often our customers ask us how to install a YouTube video on their blog. Here is a step by step way to embed the video onto your Wordpress blog. This tutorial is for wordpress version 2.7.1 Embedding a YouTube video onto your wordpress blog. Step 1. On the left hand side nav under post  click “Add New”. Step 2 – In WISYWIG editor click to change setting to HTML. Step 3- Open YouTube and find video you want to embed. Step 4- On Right hand side of screen copy Embed Text of the video. Step 5 – Paste copied code into your WYSIWIG editor in Wordpress. Step 6- Preview Post. Good luck.