LinkedIn - Promote your business

     LinkedIn provides people with the means to get their name out to the public, whether you're an individual or a large corporation. It is a social network for businesspeople. It allows users to create a professional profile, list their present and past employment, and link up with former and current colleagues. It also allows users to stay in touch with clients, vendors, suppliers and other business contacts.
Many professionals now regard it as a modern-day alternative to business networking by attending actual events.

     LinkedIn provides its users with instance access to a virtual network that spans over 200 countries. Their goal? To connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. How can this be accomplished? By allowing business owners and employees, as well as simple individuals looking to create a name for themselves, fast and free access to LinkedIn's global network. In about 2 minutes, you can be connected to some of the top business owners in America, as well as around the world.

     How helpful can this be for your business? By clicking HERE and signing up for free, you can create connections with other business owners like yourself to promote your products and/or services!
-Jonathan Williquette

What's YOUR Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Using Facebook for my business

     Over 1 billion people log on to Facebook every day. If you have a strong presence on Facebook, your business can be a part of every conversation and has access to the most powerful kind of word-of-mouth marketing on the internet today. Facebook has provided a number of tools that make it a great application not just for individuals, but for businesses as well. It’s no secret that Facebook has many very powerful tools that will help propel your business into the forefront of existing and potential customers’ minds.

     One of the great ways that Facebook can help promote your business is through their Facebook Pages. Pages give your business an identity on Facebook. With a Page, those interested and following your brand can become “fans”, and in doing this, promotes your page to all their friends. This will create an even bigger audience, and so forth. You can store photos and videos, as well as information about your company, and even your own applications on your Page. All activity on Pages gets posted back to your Mini Feed for all your friends to see.

     The most well known and probably the most effective way to using Facebook to promote your business is Facebook Advertising.  Facebook Advertising enables businesses to specify a specific demographic target, see how many people that demographic will hit, and advertise to that demographic. It uses powerful technology to reach the most amount of people around the globe. Facebook has also provided even more customized options for other areas of the site in which big-budget businesses can advertise through. I know from personal experience that Facebook Advertising is a very powerful and effective tool to advertise your business. Plus, you don't have to be a big-budget operation to use the advertising! Facebook allows you to customise your ads to fit your personal budget and fit your business needs.
-Jonathan Williquette

What is social technology and what's the reason for this blog?

     In the past year, a huge number of people have written about (and blogged about, tweeted about…) the mechanics of using Facebook, Twitter, email and YouTube, yet few address how to use the incredible power of new social technology to effectively create social good.

     “What is social good?” Some believe it’s a good or service that benefits the largest number of people in the largest possible way. Classic domains for social goods are often seen in education, environment, health, arts and culture. However, the concept of social good used in social technology is broader to catch the industries you’re familiar with.

     The goal of this blog is simple: to help you in the understanding of social technology in support of creating a clear, single, and focused goal in the use of social media. In the long run, through the use of great applications, software, and quite a lot of internet technology, we will help you to give you that boost of information needed to better your business and even yourself with the use of internet technology. We’ll gain insight from leaders from Facebook, Twitter, and Google, while pulling things down to your level to help you better understand how to use these applications to their fullest capacity.
-Jonathan Williquette

Android to Run on Windows Platform?

     It’s already possible to run Android apps on Windows PCs thanks to a clever little app called BlueStacks. But now a group of Chinese developers are looking to take it a step further by actually allowing you to run the entire Android 4.0.3 “Ice Cream Sandwich” operating system, complete with Google Play support, as a native application on your on Windows Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8 machine.
    
     For now the project is still very much in development and as such it still requires a lot of tweaking to get things working properly. For instance, the Google Play Store needs to be side-loaded separately, and once you get that running most apps will still show up as incompatible since they don’t recognize your computer as a valid Android device. A thread on Reddit offers some guidance on how to get around this problem.
    
     WindowsAndroid provides users with a stock Android user interface and leverages the Dalvik virtual machine to run Android apps. Since there’s no need for emulation apps can reportedly take advantage of your system’s hardware and graphics card for hardware acceleration. The program will support most screen resolutions and those that don’t have a touch screen can use their mouse and keyboard to navigate the interface.
Running Android on a desktop will have little to no practical use for most people, but the project itself seems interesting nonetheless and it’s worth a look if you haven’t had a chance to play with the platform yet. To try it out you’ll need to fill out a form on the developer’s site to get a download link on your inbox.
-By Jose Vilches