The Media Cube would hate to see vulnerable people fall victim to such crimes and have therefore compiled some information to take onboard when socialising in such sites as Facebook and Twitter.

Limit details

Your personal information is just that, personal. Any true information, such as full name and address can seriously risk your identity safety. Do not advertise your details and then fraudsters can not advertise themselves as you.

Privacy settings

An obvious thought would be to keep your profile only accessible to your friends. Some people are oblivious to this and do not realise that their profile is public, when in fact they thought it was private. Check now and be confident that you are not giving strangers a financial excuse to get to know you better.

Be cautious

Don’t believe everything you read and see online. People can pretend to be someone they are not, producing misleading information about various topics, in order to gain your trust.

Verify emails

Not all emails are what they initially seem. People obtain personal information via social sites and pursue contacts in order to further progress fraud tactics. Offers of “Please sign into your account to verify your account” or “What is your account password”, will most definitely be fake, with the intention of making you believe it to be genuine.

Hopefully these four tips can help keep users safer online. Unfortunately we have to live in a world where not all is what it seems. We love to socialise with others online, and hope to see you join us too!

Keep safe online and feel free to say hello @themediacube!

As with most new and slightly unknown tools, many companies remain obvious to how social media works or can be beneficial to their business success. The Media Cube are experienced, Kent based social media experts, capable of teaching businesses the trade of social networking and integrating compelling social campaigns into business needs.

Recent reports from econsultancy suggested that more companies will explore the social arena as a business tool this year and that 90% of companies already using social media will increase their investment.

Therefore, to ensure your company is implementing a successful social media campaign or if you just want to learn more about how to grow online in the social world, we are offering a range of social media services in Kent.

Important aspects such as brand awareness and reputation can be controlled using social media. Some businesses can be impossible to reach, however presence on sites such as Twitter and Linkedin, offer an alternative route for interaction.

The south east is a prime location for business networking. With thousands of businesses placed across Kent and with many of them online, social media presences the perfect platform to liaise with current and prospective clients and partners.

Need more information or advice? Why not get in touch with us via email or come and find us on Twitter, @themediacube. We look forward to meeting you!

With a large and varied audience for advertisers to target, companies are discovering an alterative method, or for some, a combined method, for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

PPC requires time and investment. Though social media demands time, it is free. A PPC campaign can take months to trigger and discover what works well towards budget and keywords. Social media provides flexibility and the opportunity to direct messages straight to your followers. However, that is not to say that a social strategy is not required, it definitely is.

The more appealing factor towards using social media this year is the prospect of social activity appearing in search engine results. This significantly opens up the opportunity for exposure to the world-wide-web.

Similar to PPC, a brand can target customers through keywords. Social sites such as Twitter and Youtube both allow a user to target people using #keywords. Facebook currently requires people to have some awareness of the brand in order to be effectively exposed.

Both PPC and social media use the same concept. Instigate initial interest through words or images that include a link to the brand website. Grab desired interest that will take the audience to an effective landing page and hopefully into a conversion.

The increase in popularity of social media means that more companies are discovering that their target audience is firstly online, but more importantly reachable.

Discover the impact of social media and implement a unique strategy for 2010. Get in touch with the Media Cube and explore the various advantages on offer for your brand.

The growth of Facebook has fundamentally progressed through personal interaction. Users associate Facebook as a social platform to communicate with friends and family, with the prospects of following groups and brands.

This provides the foundation to establish a brand online and present growth through presence within the site. Unfortunately for some companies, Facebook can present an uphill challenge to successfully promote themselves via this channel.

Most people search fan pages through brand reputation. Take Coca Cola for example, a know worldwide brand with 4 million fans to boast. The public are already aware of them, therefore know where to search; Coca Cola can easily establish a community due to a fan base already existing.

In order to gain followers, companies have to actively offer persistent incentives to attract attention. Regular updates and competitions are great motives behind achieving support. Fan pages can be exposed by passing a page link through friends and families to reproduce on to others, hoping that word of mouth is enough to gain notification.

Statistics below indicate just how hard Facebook is for companies to become known;
• 95% of pages have more than 10 fans
• 65% of pages have more than 100 fans
• 23% of pages have more than 1,000 fans
• 4% of pages have more than 10,000 fans
• 0.76% of pages have more than 100,000 fans
• 0.047% of pages have more than one million fans (297 in total)

Unlike Twitter, popularity is correlated with how many times you Tweet, Facebook fan pages tend to be updated on average, every 16 days.. On Twitter, you follow someone because you want to hear what they have to say. On Facebook, you become a fan to demonstrate support of affinity.

If your brand is anticipating the next step in the social media world, why not drop us an email and learn extra ideas and incentives on how to achieve marketing success online.

This is an example of one of our services, whereby we produce short video pieces that can be used online as a way of promoting a company through online video sources or on a blog. As I’ve written before, this is incredibly effective due to the huge appetite Google and other search engines have for video content.

These videos can be used as part of your own website blog, a YouTube channel or even advertising online through various other media portals. The key is to have good quality video production that doesn’t just look like someone shot it on their mobile phone. We use proven techniques in both shooting the footage and editing and uploading to the internet.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Croc n Craft also run parties for children as well as various other group events. It’s also very reasonably priced as you only pay about £3 for a session and then whatever pieces of pottery you want to paint. A mug can start from only £6 so you can get your own unique piece of artwork from your child for only a few quid. Plus they love the creative side of things.

Have a look at the video to see what you can do.

I’d love to hear your comments and if you’d like us to do something similar for your business please contact us.

The micro-blogging site is instrumental for reinstating others’ thoughts (tweets) or encouraging followers to reignite your pitch. There are even cases for big news stories breaking on Twitter, as the Hudsen River plane crash proved earlier this year.

Twitter users are extended all over the globe making the potential for growth astronomical when carried out right.

With blogging rapidly growing over the past decade, people have become more dependant on receiving their news updates via blog sources. As a productive resource to direct new visitors to content, Twitter offers an alternative method to expose blog content.

Further applications have created a path for users to pinpoint the relevant information that they care to take interest of. With only 140 characters to express your thoughts, Twitter presents a limited challenge on how to sell your thoughts.

Slowly but surely establishing a community and building up more followers creates a larger newsfeed to promote information. People follow each other for a reason- to learn and find out more about each other. If there is something genuinely interesting to hear, than people with happily spread the word.

Two people shouting the word is naturally louder than one. Social networking isn’t all about forcing a viewpoint across though. Potential relationships are in waiting. More people actively interact within forums and social arenas to gain companionship with associates possessing similar interests.

If you’re on Twitter, why not get in touch and see what interests we share. If you’re still pondering on the first steps into the social world, why not join up and equally get in touch and see how we can help.