Pressitt the Social Media News Release service is searching for a talented web developer to learn the Pressitt system and help develop the platform further.

If the first project goes well there is plenty more updates/concepts/user feedback to be integrated into the current platform.

The Role: freelance/short term

To develop and improve Pressitt.com on a freelance basis or short term contract, as and when required.

Working closely with our lead developer and front end coder, you’ll be responsible for coding various parts of the site, including bespoke and custom newsrooms from basic php functions within Code Igniter down to in-depth classes.

Built on Codeigniter, Pressitt is a fully featured site with combined client-side and server-side technologies allowing users to create rich and detailed news releases.

Required Skills

• Object Orientated Programming
• Model View Controller/Frameworks
• Linux Systems Administration
• Content Management Systems
• Social Networking (Web)
• Internet usability
• Accessibility (Web)
• Front end coding and javascript

Required Products

• Codeigniter
• PHP
• MySQL
• jQuery
• XHTML/HTML
• CSS
• LAMP
• Wordpress (not essential)
• Zend Eclipse (not essential)

So, if you can deliver on the above, live preferably near London/the South East, are hard working and able to work to strict schedules, please get in touch via email at andy@pressitt.com

We look forward to hearing from you.

When you think of social networks there’s one that often gets overlooked: Linkedin is a business network that allows users to set up profiles, add pictures, talk to each other, link to like minded and similar business people and then network with them. So is Linkedin a social network like Facebook or MySpace? Yes, sort of. The main difference is the demographics and the fact that looking at Linkedin at work may be considered good but playing with Facebook isn’t something you want your boss to see!

At a very simple level you can think of Linkedin as “six degrees of seperation” for business people.

With over 50m users worldwide Linkedin isn’t as big as Facebook yet but the demographics of its users makes for quite interesting reading:

Average Age: 41
Household Income: $109,703
Male: 64%
Household Income $100k+ 53.5%
Own Smartphone/PDA: 34%
College Grad/Post Grad: 80.1%
Business Decision Maker: 49%
EVP/SVP/VP: 6.5%
24% Have a Portfolio Value of $250k+
Job Titles:

• C-Level Executives 7.8%
• EVP/SVP 6.5%
• Senior Management 16%
• Middle Management 18%

50% Are Business Decision Makers in Their Companies

Why should you be on Linkedin?

There are a lot of companies and business executives on Linkedin, it’s a good way to keep your finger on the pulse of your industry and you can join groups to talk about your business interests and what might be affecting your current and future work plans.

If you’re a freelancer or contractor you can use Linkedin to promote your services. Spend a little time talking to people in your area of expertise they might want to hire you.

By using your profile and contacts wisely you can use Linkedin to find a new job and talk to prospective clients – wherever they are in the world. You can also find out about companies and talk to existing employees to check out what your next job might be like…

LinkedIn allows you to:

• Get online recommendations for your professional abilities and your character
• Get introductions to potential employers or colleagues in your field
• Search available job postings placed on the LinkedIn website by members. While you can also search the web for jobs through LinkedIn, the big benefit is that many job posts are exclusive to LinkedIn: They aren’t advertised elsewhere. Those postings often have a requirement that you have one or more LinkedIn recommendations. Additionally, there is a chance that someone within your LinkedIn network already works there or knows someone who does, giving you a big foot in the door for an interview.
• Join various groups that align with your interests and participate in discussions. Having a group in common with another LinkedIn user is one way you can invite others into your network. Each group discussion contains its own job listings.
• Create an online resume that can work for you all the time. LinkedIn allows hiring companies and recruiters to search for professionals who might fit their criteria.

We have a company profile on Linkedin: Best Served Cold on Linkedin

Creating a fan page on Facebook sounds like a quick and easy way to generate traffic to your site and gain new customers for your business. With the explosion in social networking traffic over the last few years there’s a buzz around Facebook almost like the buzz surrounding the internet in 1999! But creating a successful fan page and making social media work for your business takes more than just throwing up a page and expecting new visitors to flood in.

I’m sure most people reading this will already have a profile page on Facebook – there are over 400 million users on Facebook now, it’s the largest social network in the world and one of the most used websites. Most users check their profiles at least once a week with a large number checking several times a day.

Most marketing people have a profile on Facebook and try to use that to promote their businesses and network with likeminded individuals around the world but to keep your private life a bit separate from work we’d usually suggest setting up a Fan Page for your company. It works just like a profile but allows you to provide a public page for your business without getting your personal profile mixed up.

From Facebook:

A Facebook Page is a public Profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users.

When your fans interact with your Facebook Page, stories linking to your Page can go to their friends via News Feed. As these friends interact with your Page, News Feed keeps driving word-of-mouth to a wider circle of friends.

View our Best Served Cold Fan Page

Recently we’ve been involved with setting up a couple of Facebook fan pages with bespoke applications for high profile campaigns – please contact us for more information.

To get the most out of your fan page you need to remember that Facebook works best as a two-way conversation. As with all social networks the idea is that you can talk directly to your customers but they can also talk directly to you – don’t ignore them. Make sure you respond, join in and give your visitors a reason to recommend you to their friends. By giving something back you can increase your fan page visitor numbers and in turn increase your customer base.

If you’d like to know more about how Facebook and other social network sites can help improve your business please contact us. We’re always happy to talk through ideas and discuss potential benefits of social media with all types of business.

Do you have a requirement for an app? Do you want your services to be available on an iPhone or Android phone? Or perhaps want something developed for the new iPad?

Apps Jobs is a brand new site where you can advertise your development needs for any type of mobile or web based application.

Advertise your app job here!

That’s right, we’ve been busy over the last week or so building another 101 site! This time we decided to follow the hype and set up 101 Best iPad Apps. There’s been so much discussion and media interest surrounding the release of the iPad that sometimes it’s hard to follow what it means and what it’s for… Is it really a defining moment in modern computing? Or is it just another gadget that makes a big splash but sinks fairly rapidly?

I was fairly cynical about the iPad when I first read about it last year and agreed with the dismissive comments:

“It’s just a big iPhone”

“Why do I need a computer without a keyboard?”

“The resolution isn’t good enough for media but it’s too much like a netbook for reading books”

But now it’s been launched and the reviews have started to come in from people who are actually using it and maybe I was wrong in my initial assesment. Yes, it is a big iPhone (sort of) and at the moment the resolution isn’t the greatest but remember the first iPod? A black and white screen and 4 hours battery life (if you were lucky). This first iteration of the iPad might just open the door to a new way of using the internet for everyone – a pick up and browse gadget that doesn’t need any computer knowledge or skill to find what you want.

According to a recent survey found that 59% of Americans use the internet while watching TV which is an increase of 35% in the last year. Products like the iPad make that even easier, there’s no logging on, finding somewhere to rest a laptop and using a fiddly keyboard on a netbook. It’s like using the internet on your smartphone, straight onto your wifi network, click through to your favourites and off you go – except you actually have a decent sized screen to read from.

Now, I don’t want to sound like an Apple fanboy but there’s a lot to be said for the concept – but there are potential problems. Will enough people actually want to read books on the iPad? Anything with a backlit screen makes it difficult to read for long periods of time – and you certainly won’t be able to see it properly in bright sunlight while sunbathing on holiday! Is it something that most people need regularly? Using a laptop isn’t reallt THAT tricky… and for any serious business user there will always be a need for something with a bit more flexibility and power.

Overall, it’s an interesting concept and I’d love to have a go but I think we’ll need to wait for version 2 to really see the potential and what we can do with it.

Check out 101 Best iPad Apps to see what’s available already!

Social Media is an often used term and it covers a broad range of different websites – almost all new
websites include some form of social media: in comments, embedded media or links to social tools. I like
to think of Social Media as an umbrella term that as a basic rule covers three main types of website:

Social Media

Sites such as YouTube, SoundCloud and Flickr are all Social Media website. Literally speaking they are
used to display Media in the context of a Social community. In this sense media is used with the
traditional meaning of an act of communication – via film, art, photography, music etc.

Social Networking

Since the arrival of MySpace and Facebook the importance of social networking sites has increased
dramatically over the last 3 or 4 years. These are now the most used and most active type of website in
the world. The basic function of a Social Networking site is to allow users to chat, view and interact with
each other via a simple interface.

Social Bookmarking

This is the most difficult type of social website to describe and understand. The idea behind Social
Bookmarking sites is to easily store and distribute useful information and links to websites. Rather than
storing favourite sites on your personal computer you are allowing anyone to view your links and rate
the web pages based on the relevance to topic, how interesting they found it or some other criteria.

So that’s a brief overview of Social Media but how do you use it to your advantage when marketing a new website, prodcut or service? That’s where the work starts!

There are lots of blogs that will help with talking about social media and marketing and how to optimise your Facebook pages and Twitter tweets but one of the easiest to understand I’ve read recently is this:

16 Rules For Social Media Optimization Revisited

Here at Best Served Cold we can help you get started with Social Media and guide you on the best sites to register with, who your audience might be and how you can utilise the social internet to promote your brand or website.

Getting Started with Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels
and it is a powerful strategy that can get you links, attention and large amounts of traffic. Sometimes the
work involved can be quite time intensive but it is always low cost.

The two main benefits of developing a good social media marketing strategy are:

1. High numbers of new visitors
2. Quality links from external websites

Both of these translate directly and indirectly to a higher search engine ranking and increased traffic to
your website:

1. New visitors from social bookmarks or networking sites may find your site or article, read it, and then leave the site. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in the content. Online success is, at the most basic, a numbers game. The more visitors you can attract to your site, the more people will read your content and the more people will register with your site or bookmark you for future reference.
2. A well written article, marketed across social networks will encourage other bloggers, journalists and network members to write about and link to your site. These links get picked up by search engines such as Google and this in turn increases the value / ranking of your site within search engine results.

If you already have a Social Media online marketing campaign in place we can still help you further by talking you through Social Media News Releases or SMNRs. We have helped to create Pressitt.com which is a frree service that allows you to publish online press releases across your favourite Social Networking and Social Media platforms. From Pressitt:

The Pressitt SMNR template offers all of the core information found in a traditional press release, but additionally takes advantage of linking, multimedia and Web 2.0 shareable features. It allows users to host downloadable hi-res images within their releases, along with PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs – YouTube videos can also be embedded. Each brand using the service is assigned its own RSS feed, and press contacts can be reached via LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, up-to-date bookmarking and sharing icons are presented including Posterous, Yammer and Sphinn.

Once created your SMNR can be published to the Pressitt platform and shared to social networks or via an email link to your contacts and colleages.

With a Pressitt newsroom you can collate all your Social Network links in one place giving your customers an easy way to find you and your products. More importantly it gives you a high profile online presence to talk about your brand directly to your customers. If you’d like to find out more about Pressitt and Social Media News Releases why not contact one of the Pressitt team?

Over the last couple of months we’ve been working hard on the new version of Pressitt. If you haven’t heard of Pressitt it’s a site dedicated to the creation and release of social media news releases. We’ve been involved in the design and development of the Pressitt platform and the latest version has several updates and improvements.

http://pressitt.com

So, what is Pressitt?

Pressitt allows you to create your own social media news release (SMNR) – also known as a social media press release (SMPR) or social media release (SMR), and publish it to an online community of journalists, the blogosphere and the general public.

Many journalists use the Internet as their primary research source when compiling a story. Pressitt SMNRs are designed with journalists and bloggers in mind. A Pressitt SMNR encapsulates all the information, multimedia and images needed to prepare a story, while offering contact details for more information, all without the usual PR fluff.

The Pressitt SMNR template offers all of the core information found in a traditional press release, but additionally takes advantage of linking, multimedia and Web 2.0 shareable features. It allows users to host downloadable hi-res images within their releases, along with PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs – YouTube videos can also be embedded. Each brand using the service is assigned its own RSS feed, and press contacts can be reached via LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, up-to-date bookmarking and sharing icons are presented including Posterous, Yammer and Sphinn.

Once created your SMNR can be published to the Pressitt platform and shared to social networks or via an email link to your contacts and colleages.

You can also view and talk to Pressitt on Facebook – why not become a fan!?

That’s right, we’ve been working on a new Facebook page. Getting to grips with how to use the fan pages to showcase our work and allow our friends and clients to talk about us and show everyone what we’re working on at the moment.

Best Served Cold on Facebook

If you’d like to find out more about setting up a Facebook page for your company or would like to know how getting involved with social networking could improve your business website, please contact us.

We’ve launched another 101 site! This time it’s not for mobile apps but a showcase site for the best HTML5 sites we can find on the internet. We’ve already added quite a few and you can check it out here:

101 Best HTML5 Sites

HTML5 is the latest standard for all HTML websites. It’s been in development since 2004 and is just now being added to browsers.

HTML 5 introduces a whole set of new elements that make it much easier to structure pages. For a complete overview and introduction to what HTML5 can offer to designers and coders, I recommend taking a look at this article over at A List Apart.

We’re currently in the process of converting the site to use HTML5 but haven’t quite finished it yet!

Over the last year there has been a lot of discussion in the news about Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and Myspace and other social networking sites. In the wake of this there has been an influx of new businesses calling themselves Social Media Consultants. Is Social Media the new SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)? Should you be paying someone to tell you how to promote your site on social media?

At Best Served Cold we like to keep up with new trends and ideas – over the years we have signed up to hundreds of new sites – and we’ve been using sites like Digg, Reddit and Mixx for a number of years to help promote our new releases. Recently we’ve been experimenting with Twitter and Plurk and have a couple of clients who are trying YouTube as a way to gain traffic and interest.

SEO vs. Social Media

Well, that’s a bit of a leading title. It’s not a case of versus, it’s more a case of what to use and when best to use it. There is still and will probably always be a need for good SEO on a website. Along with Accessibility (the two go hand in hand) it’s one of the building blocks of a good website and needed to ensure your site gets indexed and found on search engines for the topic you want.

Social media is a broad term for a lot of different sites. It started with social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and social rating sites like Technorati. Closely followed by social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace the term has finally come to include all sites that allow communal interaction around a topic, personal accounts or news.

Modern websites are often built around a Content Management System (CMS) and as such will often have some from of social media built in – usually comments or a rating system – but to get the best results you need to look at other websites to see what they can offer you.

To take full advantage of the social media revolution a company has to consider how to get people talking about their products and services on other websites, do they write a blog, set up a YouTube account, do they Twitter, create Social Media News Releases or need a FaceBook page? There are a lot of options and it’s not always easy to understand the advantages one site has over another.

That’s where Social Media Consultants come in, they can advise about what’s best for your company and which sites you need to be joining. It’s not rocket science and with a bit of time most people would be able to figure it out themselves but, like SEO, it’s much easier to get someone else to do it!

Best Served Cold have been working with social media for a number of years and have a wide knowledge of what works and doesn’t work on various websites. If you’d like an introduction to social media and SEO for your site why not contact us. We can review your site and business and work with you to improve and build a social network of your own and, if needed, give advice on how to improve your SEO while you’re at it.