Social Media Marketing

Top Online (Technology & Marketing ) Updates for 2010:

Techdivine Creative Services

We are in for a brand new beginning very soon with 2011 just around the corner. So we thought we would bring together some of the most important updates, wonderful freebies, free tools for Marketing online, Brand management guides, ideas & more with design trends with some power strategies using some of the most influencing websites of 2010 (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, WordPress, foursquare)

Power Tools of Social Media

Social Media Marketing

This was probably the biggest entry into the online media space in the last three to five years. In the year 2010 Social Media Marketing services have seen a fabulous response owing to the measurable rate of returns, process of marketing brand & monitoring them at the same time with great control and making the most needed aspect of online media space possible ie.

Connecting with the user & engaging them to interact with the brand.

Social Media Marketing made possible the entry of Social Media Quotient as a power packed marketing research and management tool for Brands & Organizations today for the Company Board & Management to take this tool more seriously than ever. The power of blogs using applications like WordPress has been wonderful for brands using the platform with the right set of technique and skills too.

Why:

Simple reasons: Its more measurable than your regular emailer campaigns, web banner ads, online reviews & a routine ad words campaign as it brings together all those metrics to measure consumer interaction, customer feedback & insights and gives you the ability to constantly improvise at a very affordable online marketing campaign cost.

Most importantly, customized social media marketing campaigns today make it possible to deliver realistic goals to clients for their brand, products and services and at the same time blend in traditional media with new age media tools across various platforms.

Massive developments in 2010:

Mobile Integrated Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing & Monitoring tools gifted the power to combine traditional media with new power tools for online marketing research and management and at the same time gave the power to combine mobile integrated social media marketing campaigns to further leverage the power of todays growing mobile internet users across platforms.

Android Powering Technology today Socially

Also the impact of Android based applications into the mobile space made it a fun experience for users to leverage the connect and for the Organizations, more reasons to make their presence online much more powerful and essential.

Power of Blogs with wonderful plugins from WordPress related application websites made using Blogs more than just a place to voice out opinions but also to get wonderful and sincere customer feedback and loyal readers for life for brands leveraging the power of rich content with them through this medium.

With more and more applications from mobile related tools like from the iPhone, Blackberry, Amazons Kindle, iPad & Android going SOCIAL the availability of these online marketing tools is only going to see massive boost in the year 2011.

How to Leverage:

Humanize Your Brand

Connect with Your consumers by Humanizing your brand. Social Media Marketing is a well planned process that can be customized across industries to also adapt to cross cultural environments across countries if well planned, designed, implemented and measured. So its very important to use the right set of tools to not only increase market penetration but also to monitor and safeguard your brand online constantly and improvise for best results.

Brand Monitoring

Brand You Monitoring

This has been one of the most important part of a Social Media Marketing campaign this year as the more one talks about your brand, care needs to be taken with the quality of conversations too. Its always better to have a 1,000 loyal quality followers than a million discussing or posting content that is harmful for your brand in the long run if left uncontrolled as part of the online conversations.

So make sure you have powerful ways to leverage your Online CRM to converse with your brand and customer connect across multiple platforms with great quality and damage control.

Creative Design styles

The year 2010 saw a very unique side of design styles appreciated by consumers. The stress from Brands and customers online this year was much less on “just design” and much higher on usability and ease of sharing content using that design style. For eg. HTML emerged victorious compared to any other web design application and platforms for the ease to leverage powerful SEO campaigns and flexibility to connect much larger suite of applications as part of the web design and style process. The year 2011 would be thus much largely about:

Layout style: Simple and user friendly

Design style: In tune with Users needs to share content easily

Design technique: Users seem to be much less demanding in terms of core design as before and seem to be stressing originality in layouts with simplicity to converse in todays online marketing conversation prism. So the design technique has to be definitely the one in 2011 that can let each user be a real-time Brand Ambassador for any product, services or Organization and at the same time be rewarded in a way or the other. (For some FREE Tutorials & Step by Step Guide for creating Creatives using Adobe Photoshop – Connect here)

• Free Marketing Tools from GOOGLE that every developer, designer should be aware of today: Here is a link to the set of power packed marketing tools from Google that’s free and is a must for integration across as part of your Social Media Marketing & Brand Monitoring campaigns.

google

IMPORTANT Guides & Tips for a Powerful Connect across Industries Online Using the Power of Social Media:

Simple Ideas, Guides to do more with Your Brand today:

FOR:

• Retail Industry:

Fashion, style statement, pictures, latest trends & designs, users votes on new arrivals, customer feedback and Brand mentions about your line of design accessories: If all of these make sense to you as a Retail brand then what you need are simple engaging conversations customized & controlled as part of creative marketing ideas for your online customer today.

• Banking Industry:

More than a conversation online, more than a social media influence, what you need is a control of your brand mentions negative influences about your services, industry and products from your customers grieving & irate online. They can make or break your brand as we are talking about Your products and services that are directly dealing with your customers hard earned money. So make sure you have a strong Social Media connect online and at the same time have conversations that can “generate”  comments and interactions from your customers especially in case of new product launches for Small and medium scale business, Youth and the high investing clients. You need your Social Media campaigns to reach beyond your average conversations and metrics to be completely planned and customized to meet your needs across various demographics and it needs to be well executed too.

• Hospitality Industry:

That’s a rush, literally. The fast paced hospitality industry has customers across every possible age group and its never too late to get someone love your cuisine irrespective of your culture, history and style of food. All people need are flavors with a great dining experience that takes them away from their homes for that hour or so. The experience needs to be “connecting” while the food, something that would make your customer feel, I am getting value for every single dime that I have spent here. For this, not only do you need continuous feedback from your customers, but you need them to mention about your product online across platforms of twitter, review sites, food dining experience, location based target marketing spaces where people searching for good food can be connected with and their attention drawn towards your food experience. They need to be aware of and constantly rewarded for their brand mention and sharing experiences when they talk well about your products online and at the same time catered to and not tried to be pushed into talking well about your brands. Its food, they need to feel the flavors and the love while dining at your restaurant. That’s exactly what an online Social Media Marketing experience should help you gather for them.

Some simple & yet powerful sites where we have leveraged wonderful responses for Our Clients Products & Services & Brands:

Facebook (Make sure you Use FBML, Facebook Applications, HTML too with your creative marketing techniques – For Queries email us: teamsmm@techdivine.com )

Facebook

Linkedin: Purely for a Corporate Connect and reaching across Industries to leverage more than just a simple product / brand connection

Linkedin

Twitter: Brand Reach, Brand Monitoring, Product Market Penetration and More. This is undoubtedly one of the most essential powerhouses of Online Conversation prism today. Interested in a Customized Twitter Tool Updates & Techniques for Your Brand to have a larger reach – email us at: teamsmm@techdivine.com

twitter

Foursquare: The most impactful location based target marketing application which can do wonders for Your Brand, Product And services if used optimally. For a customized Location based target marketing campaign write to us at: teamsmm@techdivine.com

foursquare

For a Completely Integrated & Customized Social Media Marketing & Brand Monitoring Campaign with Creatives & a powerful blogging platform for your Products & services – Write to us at: socialmedia@techdivine.com

If you would like to hear more from us about connecting with customers across Industries for various other industries for whom we have tried, tested and succeeded in generating positive SMM impact and the desired goals as put forth from our clients , feel free to tweet with us at: Techdivine on Twitter & OR Connect with Us On Our Facebook Group: TD studios: Social Media Marketing Services Group & or write to us at: socialmedia@techdivine.com

We are connecting and have catered for the following industries so far:

FMCG, Banking, Industrial, Infrastructure, Hospitality, Trading & Broking, MLM, Educational, IT, Retail, Advertising Agencies, Art Galleries & NGO’s.

Hope you have a wonderful 2011 filled with millions of quality connect and growth with the power of Marketing using new age and traditional media to leverage and connect with each and every user of yours, both ONLINE and OFFLINE.

Happy connecting. Have a wonderful year ahead.

Thanks & Regards

Ananthanarayanan V

Founder & CEO

Techdivine Creative Services

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Related Posts:

Integrating Technology with marketing

Latest Customized Social Media Marketing OFFERS For Corporates

Fire Text Effect Part 2

We have seen in the previous tutorials FIRE how to create fire on text, but in this tutorial, we will be using Adobe Photoshop and create the Text Effect to be precisely in flames.

In this tutorial you will need a resource file for fire. Well, You can either search the net or just save the image of fire which is in the later part in this tutorial. (Titled FLAMES) numbered as Fig 8. below.

You Can click On Most of the Images for an ENLARGED Zoomed View

First of all take a new document with 300 resolution and black background.

Type a text you wish to, here again I am using the “TD”. Select a good smooth font you prefer with size 200pts and color white.

fig1

Fig 1. Photoshop Tutorial

Step1

Go to blending option for the text you typed and in there select Outer Glow and set the values as shown under

fig2
(Color code #f70603)

Fig 2

Step2
Now select Color Overlay and set the values as below in the image.

fig3
(color code #cd8f2f)

Fig 3

Step3
Select Satin now and do the changes as shown below in the image.

fig4
(color code #883f19)

Fig 4.

Step4
Now select Inner Glow with the settings shown below.

fig5
(color code #f0c41b)

Fig 5.

Step5
Now we will Rasterize the text layer since the blending part is done.
Right Click on the text layer and select Rasterize Type.
Now select Eraser tool and set the brush size to 450px and make it softer. Set the flow value to 95 and erase off the top portion of the text. See below for example.

fig6

Fig 6.

Step6

We will now distort the shape of our text.
Go to menu Filter>Liquify, select the Forward Wrap tool and set the settings as below and make the shape some what like shown under.

fig7

Fig 7.

Now is the time to use the resources file as I mentioned in the very beginning. Below is the file which I am using. You can save it for working further in this tutorial or search through net for a different image.

fig8

Flames

Step7
Open the fire file in Adobe Photoshop and go to the channels tab and select only the green layer.
Now pressing Ctrl click on the green layer to get a selection of green colors.

fig9

Fig 9.

With the selection still active select the RGB layer, go back to the layers tab and make a copy of the selection and paste it in the document we are working with.

fig10

Fig 10.

Step8
Take Eraser tool  of 45px and Flow of 60% erase out the excessive flames leaving those covering the text.
fig11

Fig 11.

Duplicate the flame layers, set Opacity to 30% and the blend mode to Overlay

Step9
Repeat the step7 and step8 until you get a nice flame of your choice. You can select the red channel from the flame file and repeat the same.

Final output of this tutorial

fig12

Fig 12. "On Fire" with Adobe Photoshop

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Related Posts:

How to Create Rain Effect with Photoshop

Creating Special Effects with Photoshop

Creating ICE Effect using Adobe Photoshop

In this tutorial we will learn how to make ray effects coming from behind a text. Take a new file with white background.

New File

Type any word you like, I have typed “TEXT”, select a font with bold nature, I have selected “Impact” font. To start with, try this tutorial with the same font.

Now, make a copy of the layer “TEXT”

Go to layers panel, right click on the layer “TEXT”, select Duplicate Layer and hide the new layer which u just duplicated.

Now rasterize the layer “TEXT” and merge down with the background layer.

Now, we start up with the main part of our work. With the layer background still selected, give the solarize effect.

Go to menu Filter>Stylize>Solarize.

Then Go to Image – Adjustments – Auto Levels. Click on Auto Levels that will give your Text a white coloured outline.

Your image should now look somewhat like this.

Now we will apply Polar Coordinates to this

Go to menu Filter>Distort>Polar Coordinates

Select the option Polar to Rectangular

Your image will be stretched and distorted, but don’t worry, we will come back to the original shape in our further steps, but first we have to rotate our canvas 90° anti clock wise.

Go to menu Images>Rotate Canvas>90° CCW

Now, we will apply some wind effects to our image.

Go to menu Filter>Stylize>Wind

Select ‘Wind’ option from Methods and from the Directions select the option ‘From the Left’

Repeat the same step so as to get the rays like effect look more. I have repeated three times to get that perfect rays like effect. This is how the image is now looking.

Go to menu Image>Rotate Canvas>90° CW

Now we have to make our image look like it was earlier. So go to menu Filter>Distort>Polar Coordinates and select the option ‘Rectangular to Polar’

Now we are back with our original shape with rays coming out
The image should now look like this

We will now give some color effect to the rays.
Go to menu  Layer>New Fill Layer>Solid Color.

Just select ok in the New Layer option and select any color from the color palette, i have chosen orange shade #f06f21.

Change the blending mode to whatever you feel good with the effect, here i have selected Overlay.

Now,  our work is almost over. Now, make the duplicated Text layer visible.

Change the font color of the text that suites you best,I have chosen white.
And that’s the final output

You can Add Multiple repeats of Wind and then brighten your Text with richer and more radiant colour / fill / pattern or even Gradients to create Your very own Stylized Text Effect. Note, this can be applied even to shapes for different effects.

Sample Tutorial Effect on a Shape:Circle – Sun Blast / Eclipse Rays image attached below:

Rays Effect

Hope you liked this tutorial.

More coming soon…. Keep reading.

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Thank You.

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Yasir A

Designer

Techdivine Creative Services

Now, we will apply some wind effects to our image.

Go to menu Filter>Stylize>Wind

Select ‘Wind’ option from Methods and from the Directions select the option ‘From the Left’