Empowered by social media tools, Internet users are now more interested in using your content than ever before. You’re limiting your potential online success if you do not allow people to easily share, use, engage with and become part of your content. The key to enabling people to share is to offer them your content in small, targeted chunks. People are less likely to share your entire website, but much more likely to share a link to a specific piece of your content. Think about it, you wouldn’t suggest to a friend to simply go to the theatre, you’d more likely suggest a particular movie playing at that theatre. It’s the same on the web, so give people that option and make it as simple for them as possible.

It’s important to remember though that you would only suggest a good movie, in other words, content is still king. So no change there – without amazing, valuable content, nobody will care and nothing will happen. What has changed is the ideal location where this content should live. Because of the shift in user mentality, it’s important to realize that people are less likely to come looking for you. Therefore it no longer make much sense to keep all your content on your own site. Move your content away from your website, to places where the conversations are already taking place. Your website will merely function as a hub — like a Google Reader, just pulling in all your different feeds and collecting them all in one place – showing everything you do and where you do it.

So where should you move your content to? The trick is to come up with the content first. Don’t try to fit your content to a channel, but rather pick the channel based on your content. If all you want to share are short updates, use Twitter. If you need to physically show people how to do something use videos on YouTube. De-centralizing your network in this way will spread your reach. The days were most of your referring traffic came from Google are (almost) over. Because trampoline is actively engaged in social media, over half of our referred traffic now comes from social media sites (mostly Facebook and Twitter). We’ve seen even bigger shifts with some of our clients.

So, if you’re not part of the social web yet, you should really get on board in 2010. You want to be part of people’s “social streams”, engage with them in continuous interaction and become part of their every day lives. If that sounds like a lot of work, it is, but the rewards can be enormous, too. In this day and age, only truly unique and renewing ads make a lasting impact, the rest we barely even see, let alone remember. But social media allows you to share things instantly with people who already care about your brand. This means you don’t have to actively advertise to them, because they are already more likely to listen and spread the word for you if they like what you have to say. It’s an old concept called word-of-mouth advertising, except this time it’s on steroids. And word-of-mouth advertising has remained as the only “advertising” that pokes right through our anti-advertising shield every single time.

It’s crucial you understand that these networks often form an integral part of people’s lives. Traditional advertising doesn’t work on these networks because that’s not what people are there for. Social media users tend to ignore direct advertising. Social media networks are about building and maintaining personal connections, relationships and trust, not advertising. It allows you to become immersed in the conversation that is already taking place about your product or service. You get to approach it from a unique inside angle that allows you to learn about trends, address issues directly, network, prospect new clients, and offer existing customers incentives, coupons and other useful information to keep them interested in your brand.

Social media is a lot of things, but a common misconception is that it’s cheap and takes little time. Keep in mind that in order to receive you need to give. You need to provide some of your content and/or products for free (that’s right, free) and encourage users to use and share those. Also, if you want to be heard, you need to learn how to listen first — always talk with your audience, not at them. You have to show they are interacting with another human and not a corporation — be real, and do not SPAM or advertise. If you want to make the most out of your participation you need to go in with a plan and you need to be patient, it can take months to build any type of following. But in the end it all boils down to content — high quality and frequency. If you’re serious about getting involved in social media you should create a position or better yet, hire a professional copywriter who understands social media.

The letter ‘S’ in the logo/word mark is composed of the two Arabic letters, D and J. The artist’s name is DJ Salman which, when pronounced, has emphasis on the M and N. The traditional Arabic dots are on these letters to reinforce that, as well as emphasize the artist’s cultural background. The logo part features a typical Trance DJ pose in front of a large sound wave.

The website design was kept very clean and modern while again maintaining a certain sense of his cultural background. DJ Salman is all about sharing his passion & music with the community. It therefore seemed natural to have a strong focus on social media. The website also features a blog and a music player. Because the entire website was build on a Wordpress platform, Salman is able to perform all updates himself (even when on the road).

The website is designed to fit that same overall feel by using metal & glass textures throughout. The site is build on the Wordpress platform using a custom template built from scratch. The client is able to administer every part of the site. The site incorporates event information, race results, a live video feed, blogs from the organizers & international athletes, a live twitter feed and a photo gallery. The photo gallery is also accessible through a custom flash app built into the main banner. A custom flash countdown timer was also built and prominently featured on the website.

1. Bookmark the following link so you can run it from any site: Enable Decode Button
2. Now goto the packer site and click the bookmark you just created. The “copy” textarea should now be writeable and the decode button activated. Now copy in your packed and obfuscated code and hit decode.
3. At this point you pretty much have what you need, but for better legibility head over here, paste your decoded code in and hit beautify.

After you’re done making changes it’s probably best to pack the code again, because it does have its advantages (a much smaller file size).

Happy coding!

Designed and constructed website in conjunction with the restaurant logo. The site has a clean look, emphasizing the food visuals to wet the appetite. The warm yellow and red colour scheme has been carefully chosen, because these colours stimulate the appetite. The website runs on an ASP.Net backend and makes use of a masterpage to get a consistent look throughout the website. The menu is constructed by combining Spry with an ASP.Net sitemap file. Strict form validation occurs on the server side using ASP.Net validators.