Star Alerts Partnership with Steve Clarkson Dream Maker

Star Alerts is excited to announce a new partnership with the legendary Steve Clarkson & QB Dream Maker.

Social Media Helps Small Companies Win Big

One of the biggest misconceptions with online marketing is that social media is only for large brands. Truthfully, a small business that invests its time wisely can improve customer (or client) loyalty and traditional word of mouth marketing efforts.

Social media is useful for almost every type of business. Cafes, retail stores, and even professional services can build their online reputation and increase trust. By taking advantage of social media, businesses can make themselves more accessible, more personable, and maintain long term connections. For a small business looking to increase referrals, social media can be a powerful tool.

Here are five ways small businesses can capitalize on this new form of marketing.

Why use social media?

Now, that mentality has changed. Consumers are once again reverting to a need for personalization from businesses large and small. The need has been rekindled by the Internet and our ability to find anything we want, as well as a mistrust of advertising (think used cars salesmen).

We’ve reached a point where the consumer wants to know the store owner’s name and that he can be trusted. Small businesses must look beyond their want to grow into corporations, and instead focus on their core customers. Thanks to social media, we’re able to foster these relationships easily and quickly.

Think Google Rank Matters?

Back in July, we reported that Facebook had become the Internet’s ultimate time waster, with users spending an average of 4 hours, 39 minutes on it per month, more than any other site on the Web.

Since then, however, that number has only gone up. According to numbers from Nielsen Online, users spent an average of 5 hours, 46 minutes on Facebook in the month of August. To put that in perspective, that’s triple the amount of time they spent on Google!

The App Gold Rush

It’s easy to shrug off the kooky world of apps. The bite-size software programs people load onto their mobile phones or tap into on the Web seem mostly to be silly games and pointless novelties. But look past the beer-drinking apps and flatulence programs and you’ll see something significant taking shape: a bustling app economy that’s creating new fortunes for entrepreneurs and changing the way business gets done.

It’s happening with dizzying speed. Just two years ago, almost none of this existed. Apple’s (AAPL) App Store, the most popular destination for mobile-phone programs, was launched last summer. Now there are more than a dozen rival stores, and at least 100,000 apps have been created. Some startups that staked their claim in the app economy have become large, lucrative businesses in just a few months. Two-year-old Zynga, which makes popular game apps, is already profitable, with more than $100 million in revenues. By comparison, Google (GOOG) didn’t start making money until its third year—and still had less revenue.

What your Social Media Profile Says About Your Income

Earlier today, we reported that Americans now spend 17% of all of their online time on social networks. This makes a lot of sense and many readers commented that Facebook or Twitter are the first things they pull up on the web every single day.

But what types of individuals are the the heaviest users of social networks and social media? According to a new study put out by Nielsen Claritas, if you live in the U.S. and use Facebook , LinkedIn or MySpace, you are likely to be more affluent — and more urban (that is, live in a larger city) than the average American.

Demographic Differences Between Facebook and MySpace

Facebook usage has skyrocketed and the types of users that flock to both services has changed (and are, on average, much older than they were in 2007). These changes seem to have created a disparity in wealth between users of the world’s two largest social networks.

Which Social Media Site do you Use?

As we reported yesterday, growth for some of the world’s biggest social networks — like Twitter and Facebook — appear to be flattening. One site bucking that trend though is LinkedIn, which saw a 5.68% growth in traffic for the month of September, according to Compete.

It’s not just traffic that’s growing, users are increasing too. In a blog entry today, LinkedIn reports that it now has over 50 million users worldwide.

As the company’s announcement points out, it took nearly sixteen months for LinkedIn to reach its first million users. The last million took only 12 days.

LinkedIn Growth Chart

LinkedIn says that while 50% of its users are based in the US, 50% are international. This is an impressive stat that speaks highly to LinkedIn’s continued growth.

As more and more social networks start to expand their focus and go after more types of users, we like that LinkedIn has continued to reinforce its mission of connecting professionals to each other. Sometimes having a solid target and niche can be more effective and lead to greater consistent growth than trying to be all things to all people.

What do you think about LinkedIn? Do you use the service more than you did a year ago? Let us know in the comments!

Reprinted from Mashable.com ” LinkedIn Surpasses 50 Million Users” by Christina Warren

Some Big Names are Doing It, Is Your Company?

Social media is helping to forge a new era in business transparency and engagement, creating both new challenges and opportunities. Gone are the days when companies could rely on carefully crafted press releases or flashy ad campaigns to communicate with their customers, often in an attempt to convince people that their products are the best in the field. In the age of social media, the rules have changed radically, and people today demand a more honest and direct relationship with the companies with which they do business.

Companies now face a clear choice: wall themselves in and become increasingly controlled and hidden, or use social media and other means to reveal their human side, welcome transparency, and forge new relationships with their customers. The old game is undoubtedly over, and the question now is, “what can businesses do to transition and succeed in this new era?”

Below are the top four broad shifts that social media is causing in business. Please feel free to share any others you have observed in the comments.

How do you connect? How Social Media is Changing Our Lives

It is hard to know sometimes how our life has changed until we stop for a moment and look at how different it is from ten or even five years ago. In recent years social media, likely more than anything else, has significantly impacted most of our daily lives. Envisioning the global conversation that has developed over the past few years because of tools like Facebook and Twitter might have been unimaginable for most people at the beginning of this decade.

But social media communication tools have profoundly changed our lives and how we interact with one another and the world around us. Here are the top areas that social media has affected in our daily lives.

What do you YouTube?

YouTube routinely serves up more than 1 billion video views per day around the world, far surpassing its next-closest rival Microsoft and helping the site continue its strong growth, especially since being acquired by Google three years ago, according to a blog post by Chad Hurley, YouTube’s co-founder and CEO.

In August, comScore reported numbers for YouTube’s US market to be in the neighborhood of 10 million videos watched per month. Google represented 40% of all videos viewed online, while YouTube.com accounted for 99% of all Google videos viewed.

comScore also said that Microsoft Sites ranked a very distant #2, with 547 million (2.2%), followed by Viacom Digital with 539 million videos viewed (2.1%) and Hulu with 488 million (1.9%).

However, the latest figures from YouTube, which include global estimates, reveal that comScore’s numbers may be a significant underestimation, writes MarketingVOX.

The milestone has spurred YouTube to create a special “1 BN” logo to highlight occasion.

Trends for online video viewing show that both the number of viewers and the numbers of videos viwed continues to rise. According to a recent study by Ipos MediaCT, more than two-thirds (67%) of online Americans now report that they have streamed or downloaded digital video content from the internet, and most feel it’s reasonable to watch embedded ads in online TV and movies if the desired video content remains free-of-charge.

Nielsen also found that the the audience for mobile video viewing grew 70% in Q209.

Reprinted from marketingcharts.com “Y,000,000,000uTube’ Serves 1B Videos Daily”

Professional Profile Pictures, Estee Lauder Wants to Help Woman Look Their Best Online.

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — The venerable Estee Lauder cosmetics brand has found a seemingly natural way to connect with social media: offering free makeovers and photo shoots at its department-store cosmetics counters coast-to-coast to produce shots women can use for their online profiles.

The promotion, which kicks off Oct. 16 at Bloomingdale’s in New York and will extend initially to Macy’s, Saks and other Bloomingdale’s stores in Southern California, Miami and Chicago, also includes a giveaway of a 10-day supply of foundation.

Defying convention in a prestige cosmetics industry that has buried consumers under piles of makeup totes and other “gifts with purchase” for decades, no purchase is required for these gifts. The gift that the brand hopes will keep on giving is that the profile photos include the Estee Lauder logo in the background, which, assuming they aren’t Photoshopped into oblivion, could give the brand lasting presence on Facebook beyond its own 27,000-member plus fan page. The promotion is being plugged on that page, as well as on Estee Lauder’s website, and the company is also using PR to spread the word.

With a target age of 35 to 55, Estee Lauder consumers aren’t necessarily prototypical social-media mavens. But the promotion has a dual strategy, said spokeswoman Tara Eisenberg: helping contemporize the brand for younger women while recognizing that somewhat older women have rapidly embraced social media, too.

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