One of the benefits of Buzz is you can link your account to your Picasa, Twitter and Flickr account showing all your updates in Buzz. There is also the option to set individual posts to public or private or even to specific groups you have set up in Buzz so if you wanted to let a certain customer base know about the latest product release or sale you could easily share this information to all your followers. One of my current favorites is that you can associate pictures with Buzz in Google Maps and conversations will appear on Google Maps, allowing you to see what other people are saying nearby.

Although Buzz has got off to a slightly shaky start as some users were automatically connected to those they emailed frequently on Gmail and then those connections were showed publicly to everyone. The problem with this for some users which include doctors and solicitors is that it publicly showed their patients / clients to their other contacts which could lead to clients and patients to feel exposed. On a personal level one Buzz users abusive ex boyfriend was added so he was then able to see all her current contacts. These security issues have lead to a privacy review and Google have been in talks with Federal and Provincial Privacy Officials in Canada and other countries. Google will need to address these as quickly as they can to satisfy users and keep them hooked.

I am undecided about Google Buzz at the minute but I have been using it a little this week and will continue to use it, I will keep you up dated.

If you are running a company wordpress blog you can add the Google Buzz bookmark button here.

Don’t be deceived by their article appearance – some of these tutorials are pretty good and are a great refresher if you haven’t written for a particular niche for a while. Plus, most of them are free.

I recently subscribed to one – completely free – and I received daily tutorials through my inbox which covered the benefits of SEO, how to generate massive traffic, internet marketing, blogging, keyword article marketing. It was a great read.

If you are interested, the tutorial was by a well know online marketer Titus Hoskins who has established himself in the online marketing arena as a comprehensive copywriter as well as a successful affiliate marketer.

And the information I acquired through reading these emails was incredible. Alongside his tips on how to implement the best marketing tools, he also offered a pool of resources that you could freely download from his site: including SEOElite.

His resources alone are a good reason to subscribe – he has covered every possible problem you could come across when creating a website from scratch, plus shows you how to write powerful copy.

Now the one tip I do suggest you follow when subscribing to these tutorials, is to first check out the author of these courses and also the quality of the course themselves.

I once went on one which basically repeated all the best known tips – essentially tips you can find in any article, anywhere on the web.

Now if you are new to online marketing, reading these tutorials is okay, but if you want to take your online marketing strategy to the next level, it is best to keep searching for higher quality articles.

The key is to focus on one aspect at a time, and progress from there.

Rowena

PS. Here are some decent ones that I have found:

http://www.marketingtoolguide.com/Resources/netwriting_masters_course.htm

http://www.adcopywriting.com

http://www.pandecta.com/copy.html

There have been numerous examples of digital identity fraud in recent months e.g. Phil Spector was allegedly Tweeting from his jail cell; Tony La Russa, manager of baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals, successfully sued Twitter for an unauthorized page using his name damaged his reputation; Kanye West wrote an amusingly irate blog entry about being misrepresented on Twitter.

Brandjacking is prevalent in social media because it’s easy to set up accounts and find an audience. Couple this with the social media boom and downturn in the economy and people have both the resources and the increased motivation to participate in such practices. The sheer reach of online marketing is enough of a lure. Last year’s BrandJacking Index from MarkMonitor.com illustrated that not only is cybersquatting continuing to dominate methods used by online fraudsters but it also rose by 18% over the year with the outlook for 2009 being even worse.

You can read the report in full here.

So what can an online marketer do about brandjacking?

1) Run an online audit of your brand :: Use a site such as knowem.com to see if your username is taken across a multitude of sites, who by and what they are using it for. If you have only one brand which is also your company name then this should be a fairly simple task – if you have a multitude of brands then it may be a bit more lengthy.

2) Prioritize your Username :: Think about your clients – what do they call you? What would they search for if they were looking for you on their social network? Then grab that username – If your brand has already been registered then look at who has it and what they are doing with it. All of the major social networks such as Myspace, Facebook and more recently Twitter have a good track record at returning banded domains to their rightful owners, so don’t be afraid to contact them if your brand is being misrepresented.

3) Prioritize Your Network Selection :: Although it is a good thing to have brand presence on each social network, especially to hinder brandjackers, having an incomplete or unused profile on an active comunity can be almost as detrimental as having a fake one or none at all. Using a tool such as Quantcast can help you find the most relevant sites for you based on user demographics. Whatever you do ALWAYS leave a link back to your homepage on every profile you create. This will not only help visitors who find you get to your main site, but will also help with search engine rankings by providing high page rank backlinks to your site.

4) Stalk Your Competitors :: Choose a few competitors who’s success you want to emulate and find out where their online presence is. What sites are they active on? What sort of content are they posting? Then consider weather or not it’s worth you joining them on that community if you aren’t already a member.

5) Don’t Overthink It :: It may seem an obvious thing to say, but social media and social networks are first and foremost – Social. If what you’re saying isn’t interesting or useful to the end user/’follower’/'buddy’ then you will simply be ignored/unfollowed.

Finally a little note about the power of social networks – @StephenFry may be able to drive 1000′s visitors to a site just by sending a tweet out, but that’s because he’s Stephen Fry – Don’t base your whole marketing strategy around setting up a Twitter profile and sending out one tweet. Social networking is just another string to the online marketing bow – not a substitute.