I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about Social Media and the importance of having a home base which is fully in your control and all your own.

Sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Linkedin are all great and have amazing value. They shouldn’t be ignored, but they also shouldn’t be the only place where you cultivate content and audience.

Your Website and blog should be your main spot for posting content and growing a following, a readership and a reputation as a thought leader.

The idea of having a home base is rather simple. You have no control over Social Media sites. They can take your profile and content down when ever they want. They own the platform and have all the control. If you first post on your blog and link to it from your Social Media outposts you remain in control of that content.

Darren Rowse of Problogger has a great video explaining how he uses Social Media. It is very similar to how I use it as well.

So what do you think? Do you have a blog where your putting all of your original content before sending out to the outposts? If not, you might want to think about setting one up. If you would like to learn more about how Goldstein Media can help you with your Social Media plan, including setting up a home base for all your content, give us a call today at (215) 352-5216.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject. Post them below in the comments.

This is often the scenario for many business owners. They are so relieved that their site is online that they don’t consider what would happen if it mysteriously went offline or needed updating.

Things happen on the Internet. Servers go down, protocols get mangled and hackers break code. This is only a few examples of what happens on the Web and often times your site will be affected. It will inevitably happen at some point.

So what can you do to be ready? At Goldstein Media we take the guesswork out of maintaining your Website. If anything should happen to your site our experience team of Web experts can fix the issue for you for as little as $75 a month.* Our team of developers will deal directly with the hosting company to figure out what the problems are and get them resolved as fast as possible.

Need to make revisions to the site to add a new product or service? You do not need to be worried about messing up the code and breaking the site. Our team can help you update your site as part of your maintenance contract and get the changes up quickly.

Want more information call us today at (215) 352-5216.

There are the traditional methods:

• Put the Web address on your stationery, business cards, flyers, advertisements.
• Put an advertisement in the local or regional Newspaper.
• Put an ad in industry or general purpose magazines.
• Develop a TV or Radio campaign to get the word out about your site.

These are all viable ideas and you should probably look into doing some if not all of them. However, there are also more innovative methods:

• Optimize your site for the search engines and target keywords and phrases that your clientele use to find you online.
• Build an online advertising campaign, including banner advertisements and pay-per-click advertising.
• Build a blog and communicate with your clientele on a regular basis. Engagement online can be the key factor in the success of a company’s online presence.
• Develop an online marketing plan, including social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) and outreach to bloggers.

All of these methods will help get the word out about your new Website and will likely drive traffic to your site.

At Goldstein Media we employ the latest techniques and apply them to an overall strategy to promote your Website and your brand.

Call us today for a free consultation on how we can get you found online:  (215) 352-5216

These are my links for January 4th through January 6th:

• Keep All Those Resolutions You Just Made: Try mySomeday – So, this year, you've resolved to lose weight, take a class, learn a new language and buy a better mobile device. Good for you – but we all know how well most new year's resolutions go.
• Facebook’s 1st CTO Launches His Next Company (Screen Shots) – Adam D'Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company's first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora. Built by D'Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself "A continually improving collection of questions and answers." In our very early testing it's a pleasure to use, but we're going to share screen shots with you tonight and write about it in depth after more extensive use tomorrow.
• Social Media Today | 8 Ways To Use Twitter Lists – We talked recently about the Twitter lists set up by My Creative Team. Are you using Twitter lists? Tell us about it.
• Social Media Today | 3 Helpful Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2010 – I read a lot of 2010 predictions to end up with 3 that I felt were truly helpful to a seasoned marketer from a major business. There are a lot of common clams out there from "this is the year of mobile marketing" to the many ways people guess that location-based marketing will take off (this ranges form the 'augmented reality' fans to the predictions that Four Square is a harbinger of major innovation).
• Social Media Today | 7 Tips for Writing Engaging Content –
• How Data Will Impact the Way We Do Business – Outliers like Factual, WolframAlpha, Daytum (Daytum), FlowingData, and InfoChimps have proven that painting our world in data (and metadata) is a rather valuable endeavor for any business.
• Facebook for iPhone 3.1 Adds Push Notifications, Address Book Syncing – Up until now, the Facebook iPhone app [iTunes link] had everything but push notifications. The launch of version 3.1, however, remedies that ill. The other 3.1 biggie is the ability to sync your Facebook friends with your phone’s address book contacts — photos and all.
• 28 Days Later: Say Goodbye to the Netflix New Release Rental – Today is sad day for Netflix customers. The online video rental supplier has just announced an agreement with Warner Bros. that will forever alter your online rental experience. Now should you wish to rent a Warner Bros. flick you’ll have to wait out a 28-day holding period after the film’s initial DVD release date.
• Analysis: Yawn, Google Introduces iPhone Clone | Epicenter | Wired.com – Congratulations, Google. You’ve spent untold millions of dollars to produce another iPhone — two years late. That about sums up the company’s Nexus One phone launch today.
• Exclusive: Apple to Buy Quattro Wireless for $275 Million | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD – Apple is set to announce that it has acquired Quattro Wireless for $275 million, several sources confirmed.

This is the Link Report for September 29th through September 30th:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• Twitter Blog: Soon to Launch: Lists – Lists are public by default (but can be made private) and the lists you've created are linked from your profile. Other Twitter users can then subscribe to your lists. This means lists have the potential to be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.
• Copy Path Puts a File’s Location in Your Clipboard – Timesavers – Lifehacker – Free utility Copy Path adds a new entry to your right-click context menu that lets you quickly copy the full path to any file with two clicks of your mouse.
• Tweetalarm Keeps an Eye on Twitter Keywords for You – Alerts – Lifehacker – If you're fond of using Google Alerts to keep an eye on web searches and wished there was an equivalent for Twitter, you're in luck. Tweetalarm tracks keywords and updates you via email.
• New Malware Re-Writes Online Bank Statements to Cover Fraud | Threat Level | Wired.com – New malware being used by cybercrooks does more than let hackers loot a bank account; it hides evidence of a victim’s dwindling balance by rewriting online bank statements on the fly, according to a new report.
• Geek to Live: Map your time – Downloads – Lifehacker – A great way to see what your spending your time on.
• A Dozen Social Media Applications – Social media gets lots of attention these days. The NFL banned players from using Twitter. Bing integrated Twitter results into its search engine results pages (SERPs). When Michael Jackson died the site handled an estimated 5,000 tweets per minute and, proving Twitter's global reach, a state department official asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance due to the critical role the site played in the recent Iran elections.
• Software Polices Employees’ Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Posts by Wall Street & Technology – How to let traders, salespeople, customer service reps and investment bankers use social networking in a beneficial way (to attract customers, fix problems, share tips, collaborate, etc.) and be certain that confidential information about the firm will not be leaked, that no employee will ever post an inappropriate comment on a social network, and that no rule will ever be broken (for instance, FINRA's rule requiring customer communications to be monitored and archived) — is a challenge to compliance and risk managers on Wall Street.
• Social Networking Entrepreneur Taking It To The ‘Next Level’ – Venture Capital Dispatch – WSJ – Steve Ressler, a former IT auditor with the Department of Homeland Security, spent a lot of time studying the world’s terrorist networks. He later developed a keen interest in different kinds of networks, and founded Young Government Leaders, Washington, D.C.’s premier professional organization for government employees. Ressler also started GovLoop, an online social network for government workers that numbers about 20,000 members.
• BBC to relaunch websites with focus on social media | Media | guardian.co.uk – The BBC is planning a radical relaunch of its website to include more social media.
• 3 New Facebook Strategies for Building Your Personal Brand – With over 300 million users, no one can deny the power of FacebookFacebookFacebook. In fact, 50% of users log in every single day and spend over 6 billion minutes on the platform. What are they doing on it? Depending on the intent of the user, they’re sharing personal stories and updates, staying connected to friends and colleagues, and even building businesses. Many people only use their profile to keep in touch with friends and family, and form a brick wall so no one else can come inside. This strategy won’t help your career, but if you choose, you can also leverage Facebook to build your personal brand.

This is the Link Report for September 14th through September 15th:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• Redesigning Your Web Site? Don’t Neglect SEO – Search Engine Watch (SEW) – Usability and SEO go hand-in-hand. Search engines want to rank Web sites that provide a quality user experience for the searcher. How that's defined can be somewhat subjective (every Web site is unique and its target audience will also be unique).
• SEOmoz | Google Quietly Pushing More Links + Data in Snippets – The last 3 months have heralded a bevy of new tests and features from Google's search results, and it's worth taking a review of the most frequent of these and examining what it potentially holds for optimization of the future.
• SEOmoz | A Link Building Rule to Cut Out and Keep – Link Building Explained
• ReadTwit: All the Links From Your Twitter Stream in A Filtered RSS Feed – ReadWriteStart – In these hard times, it takes something pretty nifty to get us to write about a Twitter app; our eyebrows rose an inch or two when we were told about ReadTwit, an RSS application that makes Twitter smaller, faster, and better for those who need to find and consume interesting links.
• Personal Relationship Manager Gist Launches to Public – Gist is not a system for the casual email user whose main communications involve sending email forwards to friends and pictures of the kids to mom and dad. Instead, Gist is designed to help the professional email user who often opens up their inbox only to feel like it's helplessly out of control. How do you know what the most important communications are? How can you stay up on what your email contacts are doing? Gist aims to solve these problems.
• Brier Dudley’s blog | Microsoft launches Zune, clarifies what’s up apps, raps iPod | Seattle Times Newspaper – The HD Zune is here chock full of features.
• Zune HD to get Twitter, Facebook as Microsoft abandons ‘squirting’ – Microsoft will support the two major players in the social media space.
• New Facebook Application Creating Massive Volumes Of Photo Spam – The photo tagging phenomenon has officially jumped the shark on Facebook with the All my Friends! application which lets you instantly tag your friends in pre-made images. It’s not exactly a new concept but for some reason this iteration of the application has been extremely successful having attracted over 5 million users so far and growing daily.
• Make Google Search Real-Time With This URL Hack – Google web search results can be limited by timeframe using the "search options" link on every page, but one startup company CEO discovered today that searches can also be limited to results indexed minutes or seconds ago by making a simple change to the search results page URL.
• Ask.com Powers Breast Cancer Cause-Search Campaign – According to Ask.com spokesperson Nicholas Graham, while companies are expected to help community organizations, it's not unheard of for these cause-related partnerships to also benefit the companies. After donating $25,000 to Autism Speaks through a targeted awareness campaign, 80,000 visitors changed their Ask home pages to Autism Speaks-related skins and 63% of campaign visitors became permanent users. Despite the fact that the promotion lasted only a few days, Ask saw a 10% increase over other holiday and non-cause related skinning promotions. In anticipation of October and Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Ask is building upon its community successes and teaming up with Susan G. Komen for the Cure in "Search for the Cure".

This is the Daily Link Report for August 20th

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• The Top Twitter Client Is Still the Web – Despite what many of us Twitter-holics think most people still use the Web interface for Twitter more than any other means of access. Why? I don't know.
• 15 savage mistakes commonly made by PR folks | Blog | Econsultancy – In PR? Don't make these 15 savage mistakes.
• Measuring Success — How Deep Do You Go? – Search Engine Watch (SEW) –
• How to Use Twitter in Your Web 2.0 Marketing Strategy – The economy has significantly changed customer and vendor behavior. Spending marketing dollars in the wrong place limits the information available to your prospective customers. Making sure you are connecting well with your customers is the ROI that will truly fuel your company's growth. Before you allocate your reduced marketing budget, make sure you are connecting with your prospective customers online. Here, Knowledge Center contributor Mary Van Zandt explains how to use online communities and social media sites such as Twitter to maximize your company's marketing strategy.
• Low-Hanging Fruit for Content Promotion & Links – Search Engine Watch (SEW) – Are you frustrated that your remarkable content (a.k.a. link bait) isn't acquiring high-quality links? The problem might be that your focus is too broad and competitive. These days, it's easier to focus on minor topics to obtain high-quality links.
• Palm’s Colligan Said to Reject Jobs’s Offer to Stop Recruiting – Bloomberg.com – Former Palm Inc. Chief Executive Officer Ed Colligan rejected a proposal from Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs to refrain from hiring each other’s employees two years ago, calling it wrong and “likely illegal,” according to their communications.
• The Bridge Between “Evolve” or “Die” | Altitude Branding | Brand Elevation through Social Media –
• URL Shortener for PHP & MySQL | Z.ips.ME – Z.ips.ME is a free program that allows you to use your website as your very own URL shortening service.
• You Don’t Need Bit.ly, Tr.im & Co.: Just Host Your Own URL Shortener – All the recent talk about the future of tr.im and giving up control over our links on Twitter to third parties made us look into alternative solutions for shortening our links over the last few weeks. While there aren't too many alternatives to using hosted services for short links, we did come across two self-hosted solutions that you can install on your own hosting account: z.ips.me and Shorty. Both have some pros and cons, but they do give you total control over your short links.