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How To Improve Your Marketing Campaign Using Mobile Marketing

mobile marketing

Mobile marketing is used by companies to advertise across mobile devices such as cell phones and portable media players. Methods of mobile marketing that companies use can be something simple like a visual ad or something a bit more complex such as a QR codes. (QR stands for Quick Response).To decide which mobile marketing method is best for your company, use the following tips.

Compared with online campaigns that include social networking sites, homepages, and email lists, many companies neglect to actively promote and develop their mobile marketing platforms.

The mobile marketing aspect should be given equal emphasis and weight as other approaches. After all, users carry their phones within arm's reach during practically all waking hours. Computers? Not so much.

To make sure every customer can get the most out of your ads, test them on a variety of devices. What looks good on one kind of phone might not look good on a different kind of device. Ask friends and your co-workers to test out your ads for you so that you can confirm they look great on every device.

Try using QR codes in your mobile marketing. QR stands for 'quick response', and the codes themselves are similar to bar codes. They can be scanned by most mobile devices on the market to reveal a message. QR codes are an excellent way to build interactive and engaging mobile campaigns with your targeted audience. Link the code to a special offer, discount or giveaway message to create real buzz for your brand!

The old rules of telephone marketing also apply to mobile marketing. A telephone call from a sales person during dinner time is one of the quickest ways to lose a sale and a customer. Time your marketing messages for mid-morning to early-afternoon. Do not send messages in the middle of the night or at dinner time.

Make your website easily navigable on your mobile devices. While you may know your site works for larger computers and tablets, you need to be sure it will work for mobile phones as well. Test it using your own mobile device to see how it handles, and make any necessary changes.

Be very aware of the market conditions around you when mobile marketing. If anything changes that you're not absolutely prepared for, you can easily be left behind and lose a lot of business. The internet is constantly changing. Always stay prepared for change.

If you have multiple people working in your business on mobile marketing, it is important for each person to understand the plans and goals behind your company, so that everyone is working on the same page. Your team should be knowledgeable enough not to put your business in a bind, should a customer ask a question.

Ida Mae Boyd
MarketHive Alpha Founder
Skype me at imboyd681
please include in the Skype Contact message "Market Hive"

David

Building Links, Will Increase Your Page Rank and Increase Traffic

building links

Search Engines in the last couple of years are giving more weight to one way links with a similar theme, these links are a vote of trust and confidence for your website, they are so important that they help your site in the rankings of search engines. One search engine in particular uses link popularity, that search engine is Google. When you improve your link popularity it will eventually move your site up in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), this is the goals of every webmaster.

Incoming links are votes to your website; more links does not mean you are the most popular, a combination of links and quality links are considered very important. Think of it this way, if you have 1000 poor links pointing to your site compared to 100 quality links the 100 links are more important to have.

Search Engines are changing their algorithms all the time and they are becoming very advanced, now they are able to detect natural and purchased links. Link popularity is very important to most major search engines, so when conducting your link marketing campaign try to concentrate 95% of your time on this.

Before you start your link campaign make sure your site is a quality site with good content. A Link Exchange is a great way to market your website in a very cost effective manner.

Inbound links are important because search engines see them as being indicative to quality. To build links for you website it is important to list your site with directories, and write articles, by using these methods you will increase link popularity to your site.

Getting one way links to point to your site is gold, but you need to make sure that the links that point to your site are quality links. If you can get one way links and quality links pointing to your site this will help your link popularity and move your site up in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).

However, filling your website with content may not be enough to increase your web traffic. Furthermore, as your content grows, you will be viewed as the expert in your field. Having lots of useful content on your web site such as informative articles, online tool facts and just good content will make other webmasters want to link up to your site by linking to your site this will create more traffic plus help you link popularity.

Valuable one way links back to your site Targeted traffic to your website from the directory in most cases you choose the anchor text for your link human edited directories are great place to place your link, these directories have some editorial standards and are great for advertising.

If you are have link on website with high PageRank (PR4+), you will benefit from it and your ranking will boost. You can get the page rank of your site by going to sites online that look it up for you or by downloading the Google toolbar. The Google toolbar is used to show you page rank of websites, the page rank is calculated by many factors but one of the most important factors is inbound one way links.

Surprisingly, writing articles on your topic can lead you to a wealth of link popularity. The more webmasters that write articles the more links you will have pointing to your website.

Ida Mae Boyd
MarketHive Alpha Founder
Skype me at imboyd681
please include in the Skype Contact message "Market Hive"

David

Andrew Carnegie – Visionary Businesman and Philanthropist

Embed from Getty Images

Andrew Carnegie was one of the most famous and wealthy industrialists of his day. His Carnegie Steel Company was one of the businesses that formed US Steel. Carnegie sold is company to US Steel which was formed as a partnership on March 2, 1901 (incorporated on February 25) between Elbert Henry Gary's Federal Steel Company and William Henry "Judge" Moore's National Steel Company. J.P. Morgan and Charles M. Schwab were also members of this ownership group.

US Steel went on to become the world's first billion dollar per year corporation. He sold Carnegie Steel for 500 million dollars, and he was nearly a 50% owner of the company. It is the money from this sale that he used to fund a vast array of philanthropic efforts for the remainder of his life. By the time he died in 1919, it is estimated that he had given away more than 350 million dollars.

Andrew Carnegie: The Early Years

Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland and emigrated to the United States with his parents in the year 1848. He got his start as a telegrapher and by the middle of the 1860's, he had a variety of investments in railroad sleeping cars, railroads, bridges, and oil derricks.

His parents were extremely poor, although his uncle, a Scottish political leader by the name of George Lauder, Sr., influenced him as a young boy, introducing him to a variety of authors, and Scottish heroes. His uncle George had a son also by the name of George, and he grew up with Andrew. Later, they would become business partners.

Growing up, his father was a weaver and when his father grew ill his mother had to become the main breadwinner. Trying to make ends meet, the family decided to move to Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Money was borrowed from the Lauders to help with the migration.

Andrew Carnegie's first job was working as a “bobbin boy” in a cotton mill for a weekly salary of $1.20.
It was his uncle that recommended he become a telegrapher. It wasn’t long before he was promoted to operator, and his education and passion for reading helped him to become a self-made man.

His passion for reading was boosted by Col. James Anderson, who owned a personal library of 400 volumes, which he opened to working boys every Saturday night. Carnegie made the promise that if he were ever to become a wealthy man, he wanted to provide a similar opportunity to poor boys. This led to a significant amount of perseverance and hard work. This effort brought about a great number of opportunities. Within five years’ time, he had more than tripled his weekly salary. He took a job working for Thomas A Scott in 1853 at the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, and became a manager there.

Young Andrew made a variety of connections by working with various railroad related businesses.Scott was the one that helped him with his investments. Later his investments began to accumulate, and broaden. Through the multiplication of these investments Andrew Carnegie began to grow his wealth.

Accomplishments

Andrew Carnegie has had a number of significant accomplishments in his lifetime. Much of this had to do with the relationships he formed, as well as his ability to keep a clear and level-headed perspective about his investments. During the Civil War, Scott was promoted to Assistant Secretary of War, and he named Carnegie the Superintendent of the Military Railways.

After the war, Keystone Bridge Company was developed, which included an investment of $40,000 in Story Farm. Carnegie left the railroads as a way of devoting his energy to the Ironworks trade. He formed the Keystone Bridge Company and used his connections to acquire a variety of contracts. He also provided stock to both Scott and Thomson (the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company). He was able to learn a great deal from both men. Pennsylvania Railroad ultimately became one of his best customers.

By 1892 Andrew Carnegie had launched the Carnegie Steel Company, and this later helped the US output more steel than that of the UK – and Carnegie is greatly thanked for his contribution in this effort. Carnegie’s fortune came as a result of his ownership of the most extensive iron and steel operations any single individual in the U.S. has ever owned. He was responsible for several important innovations, including the mass production of steel using the Bessemer process. The second innovation was the vertical integration of raw material suppliers.

Challenges and Victories

Andrew Carnegie faced many challenges as well as victories throughout his lifetime. He can truly be identified as one of the rags to riches stories because he was challenged by not having parents from a high social status upon arriving in America. However, with the urging of his uncle, he took to becoming a telegrapher and used those relationships as a way of boosting his own social status.

He was smart, and he was known for being charming in social situations. His literary knowledge also helped him to be invited to a variety of important social functions, which Carnegie often exploited for his own benefit.

There were significant victories along the way as well. At the age of 66, in 1901, Andrew Carnegie was considering retirement. It is at this time that he decided to reform his enterprises. John Pierpont Morgan was a critical financial dealmaker, and he wanted to buy out not only Carnegie, but several other companies. This would help to cut costs and lower consumer prices as well as allow steel to be produced in greater quantities. Various negotiations took place, and the United States Steel Corporation was formed, becoming the first Corporation across the entire globe with a market capitalization totaling more than $1 billion.

He let his political views be known as well, including opposing American colonies. In one work, he also went as far as criticizing the British monarchy and explaining how the American Republic system was far superior.

Carnegie was a scholar throughout his entire life. He also used a significant amount of his money and investments to become an activist. Commodious swimming baths were constructed in his hometown in Scotland. He gave money to a library in his hometown as well. He contributed to the Bellevue Hospital Medical College and various others as well.

He paid for over 7,500 organs that were donated to churches around the world. He wisely agreed to construct over 3,000 libraries across the United States and Europe, but wisely, only after having received a commitment from the local community to buy books and provide an administrative staff.

In 1904, he founded the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, now known as Carnegie-Mellon University in 1904. In 1905 he created the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1910.

Lessons learned

One of Andrew Carnegie's famous quotes reads,

"To try to make the world in some way better than you found it is to have a noble motive in life.”
Andrew Carnegie – The Empire of Business

I actually admire Andrew Carnegie more for his philanthropy than his business acumen. He has inspired successful entrepreneurs for more than a generation to support educational and humanitarian causes to help build a world of peace and prosperity for all. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet can be included in a long list of successful entrepreneurs that have learned from the standard of philanthropy that Andrew Carnegie set.

I aspire to become a small Andrew Carnegie. I don't ever expect to accumulate the kind of wealth that Andrew Carngie amassed in his lifetime, but I do want to become a millionaire. I would also like to fund a school in perpetuity, so that children of all nations, races, and religious backgrounds could study in peace.

David

Profile Pages: Online Branding and Building Authority

Profile Pages: “Online Branding and Building Authority”

What is the difference between online branding and building authority? Some would consider it the same thing, but in reality it can be two completely different processes. Online branding is a way to get more exposure for your brand on all levels of online marketing, especially search and social.

Building authority takes online branding to the next level by making each online presence for a brand authoritative. It goes beyond just about creating a blog or social media account. The following are ways you can build your online brand as well as your authority.

Everyone wants to be an authority. READ: How to be an authority (Know Your Why First)
https://markethive.com/group/marketingdept/blog/how-to-be-an-authority

Start a Blog with Awesome Content

Blogs are beneficial for brands for three reasons. First of all, blogs help you rank well in search engines – Google loves fresh, unique content on websites that are constantly updated. If you’re looking to meet this goal, be sure to use Markethive’s blog platform and build a blog team in a Markethive group to assist in greater content and curation.

RE: WordPress Markethive’s technology super charges WordPress campaigns.

Next, blogs provide for great content to share on social media networks. It’s hard to get traction if your just sharing product and sales pages. But if you’re sharing informative blog posts about your industry, you’re likely to get a lot of traffic and social shares.

Markethive provides plugins and widgets and tech that allows visitors to subscribe to your blog from their Social Networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, thereby allowing your new Markethive posts to publish to their news feed automatically.

Finally, great blogs can help your brand build authority in your niche. This is where you go above and beyond cookie cutter posts that talk about your product to creating awesome content in the form of:

Tutorials
Infographics
Videos
Industry Interviews

Awesome content will show fans of your industry that you know your stuff and therefore are the brand to go with for their business needs. A great example of this is the blog you are reading right now – Markethive has Inbound Marketing technologies, the go to Social Network and infographics that have been tweeted and liked over 10,000 times and posts that have been viewed on Facebook, LinkedIn and Stumbleupon over 100,000 times.

There are two great fears that brands have when it comes to blogging. One is that they won’t have anything to blog about, and this is a complete myth. Everyone can find something to blog about. You just have to expand your definition of the target audience. Imagine you had a body shop. You probably won’t get a lot of attention if you’re writing about paint booths and sanding tools all the time, but you will if you think about broader topics that would interest the people likely to visit an auto body shop. You can blog about the latest coolest Hot Rods at the coming Hot Rod Nationals show or the latest NASCAR winner to grab fans of those programs. Or you can blog about environmental issues and the Prious to grab environmentalists. Just think bigger!

The other fear is that they will be giving away “trade secrets” and lose their business. This one is especially common within industries like SEO, where a brand might feel like giving out ten steps to link building will give their customers the info they need to just do it themselves. But this just isn’t true. I have found that most of the time, if you give a complex, in-depth tutorial, a potential customer will see that your brand has the knowledge to do the service, but they won’t have the time or resources to do it for themselves. Hence, they’ll go with you because they feel confident that your brand has the expertise demonstrated in the content provided on the blog.

The key with your brand’s blog is to make sure that it is apparent who is behind the content. Whether you have your blog on your domain (yourbrand.com/blog), as a subdomain (blog.yourbrand.com), or as a separate site (yourbrandblog.com), be sure that it is matched to your brand. Check out Markethive’s site, blog, and subscribers profile pages, logged in dashboard and display variances on hand held devices. All are unique yet all are well branded and follow a conventional identity protocol (all on separate domains and different devices) as an example of great branding.

Guest Blog for Others (This is a major component in Markethive)

When it comes to blogging, you don’t want to keep the good stuff all to yourself. Guest blogging (join a Markethive Group to share content is that easy) is a great way to build your online brand presence and authority. The basic goal is to find a (GROUP) blog whose audience will be interested in your brand, and create a great piece of content for that blog.

Notice I said great piece of content. I would go so far as to say that the content you create for another (GROUP) site’s blog should be even better than the content you create for your own site. You want the content you create for another blog (GROUP) to rock. You want that content to generate additional social shares, comments, and traffic for the blog owner.

As you create GROUP posts for others, be sure to save the links to those guest posts for future reference. As you approach new GROUPs that you would like to guest post upon, you will want to include those links as examples of your successful guest posts in other Markethive GROUPS. If you can convince the GROUP owner that your post will be a perfect fit for their audience and will drive significant traffic and response, the GROUP blog owner will have a hard time resisting.

My main tips for GROUP blogging for your brand include:

1. Find the best GROUPs to guest post on.

When it comes to blogs you want to get a guest post on, your goal is to find those whose audience would be interested in your brand. The blog should get a significant amount of traffic and social shares as well – there’s no reason to post on a blog that has no visitors just because it has high PageRank or any other criteria – you want to get some brand exposure out of this! Use the Markethive GROUPs directory to start your search for blogs in your niche or industry.

2. Find the GROUPs blogging policy.

If you see that a GROUP allows guest bloggers or outside contributors, the GROUP should have some page or post posted that describes their post policy. If they do have a policy page or post, then be sure to note any and all criteria.

3. Start building a relationship with the GROUP owner first. (Markethive Groups is excellent for this)

Now that you’ve found the blog you want to pitch an idea to, don’t just jump in and pitch them yet. Start by getting to know the GROUP owner first by following their Markethive blog posts, their Twitter and their Facebook fan page. Comment on some of their latest posts – make those comments valuable to enhance discussion and demonstrate your writing skills and expertise in the industry. CoPromote their posts using Broadcasting tools and widgets. Do this for at least a week or two before pitching content to them.

4. Research and pitch great topic ideas. (Join others in our live Markethive Work Shops)

Don’t create the content first and then try to find it a home. Once you’ve found the right blogs and started engaging with the blogs themselves, you’ll get a feel for the type of content they publish.

To get an even better idea of what content is successful for each blog, subscribe to them in your Markethive back office blog platform. Then you will be able to see the site’s latest traffic scores. The higher score, the more comments, tweets, Facebook likes, and other social shares the post received. Use these high-scoring posts as an indicator as to what content does well on each blog.

Now you can message via the Markethive message system or request to join their group saying that you have recently enjoyed reading their blog (as evidenced by your commenting & social sharing) and would like to contribute to their site as a GROUP member. After reading their guidelines, you would like to see if they would be interested in the following topics. Then add three to four great post ideas that you believe will fit their audience to choose from. And of course, if you’ve done guest posts elsewhere, include some of your best links. If not, just include some great links from your own brand’s blog.

5. Create Awesome Content.

Once you get approval from a GROUP, your next job is to create an awesome piece of content. Make sure it fits the theme of that blogging GROUP and that it has the overall feel / tone of the GROUP blog you are submitting to. Also be sure to add in relevant links throughout your blog post – not to your own properties, but internal links to the blog itself. This shows the blog owner you’re really giving it 100% for them and their audience and not just trying to promote yourself.

The self-promotion piece should come at the end with your guest bio. Check out other author bios on the blogs and create yours to match. This is where you can say you are John Smith, an industry enthusiast from ABC Company.

Again, be sure to consider the blog’s guidelines and previous guest author bios when deciding to add one or more links back to your brand. The blog owner ultimately reserves the right to edit it as they feel is necessary.

6. Support your GROUP post once it goes live.

It’s not over yet. After that guest post goes live, you should give it your unconditional love in the form of social sharing with your brand’s audience on Twitter, Facebook, etc. as well as coming by to respond to comments. That kind of response on your guest post will further boost your brand’s reputation as a great guest blogger as well as a confident authority in your niche.

Don’t Forget Blog Commenting

Blog commenting is a great branding and authority building exercise you can do on any blog in your niche. I would suggest subscribing to the top blogs in your industry in Google Reader, and each time there is a new post, be sure to read it thoroughly and add a valuable comment. Remember this isn’t about link building – this is about building your brand’s presence online as an authority in your industry.

Get a Disqus account as well as it is a sort of social network of people that comment.

You can use the blog’s previous comments as a guide as to how you should format yours. Some blogs require you to only use your real name, while others are a little more lenient in using your name – your company. I would suggest linking your comments to your blog as people are more willing to click through to a brand’s blog than their main website.

Your Online Branding & Authority Building Strategy Using Blogs

What is your brand’s strategy when it comes to building your brand’s authority using blogs? Be sure to share what you find brings your brand the best results in the comments!

Create a Consistent Brand Image for Each Profile

Have you ever visited a company’s social profile, and you were not sure that it belonged to the company? One of the most important parts of branding is keeping a consistent image across all of your online properties so that no matter what path a person takes from one property to the next, they will always know it is your brand. For example, someone might:

Find your fan page through a friend’s activity stream and then follow it to your blog, then website

See a tweet from someone they are following, visit your Twitter profile, and then continue onto your website.

Start at your website, then go to check out your social profiles to see if your company is engaging with fans. Engaging is fuel and grows awareness, authority and respect. Comment, recommend. Just drive by liking and endorsing does no one any good and makes you look like a tire kicking couch potato.

Just like you wouldn’t want pages on your website to be different themes, you will want your social profiles to do the same. Markethive also leads the way in doing it right as well:

MARKETHIVE

Markethive probably does the best with branding between their website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube accounts as shown above. All five are branded with the honey comb logo, color theme and climbers ascending Mt. Everest in representation of the entrepreneurial social community of entrepreneurs helping each other achieve their agendas, so you can feel the consistency moving from one property to the next.

BMW

The above shows BMW’s branding between their website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube profiles. Each online property uses the same color scheme and is currently focused on automotive technology. The logos are all consistent, and the auto focused in the pages is different perspectives, the coloring and themes are consistent as well

BOLTHOUSE

Bolthouse’s (organic farm fresh juices) branding between their website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube profiles as shown above uses the same color scheme, logo, and focus on their primary product, carrots and selections of juices. Excellent example of branding and consistency!

Help People Find Your Profiles

I do a lot of competitive analysis in my line of work, and one of the most frustrating things I have to do is search for a brand’s social profiles. Don’t hide your social media presence – flaunt them! Be sure to:

Put Social Icons on Your Website – Let visitors to your website know that you are engaging with your audience on social media as well by adding social icons to your website design. The most common places to place them include the header / menu bar, sidebar, and footer. They don’t have to be large and in charge – BMW’s are none existent on their main page and Bolthouse are right up top left of center where they should be and get the job done..
Put Social Links in Your Communications – Do you send emails regularly? Add social links to your email signature. Do you send newsletters? Add social icons to them.
Make Your Profiles Search Friendly – If I Google your brand name + Twitter, I should get your Twitter handle in the search results. To make this happen, be sure that the name of your social profile (and the username if possible) matches your brand name. You might be tempted to keyword optimize your profiles instead of optimizing them for your brand name – this is something you need to resist. You can learn more about social media SEO on how to optimize for both effectively for search engines.

Another frustration is the direct sales industry.

Even though the size of this industry is huge by any comparison with a market measured in the trillions, even the top 100 fail miserable branding with social media. Do not be like them, rather show them a good example with your efforts. After several days of research I was able to find one such company that at least had the top 5 Social Medias registered with a similar array (not the same name) of usernames. The super majorities only have a token Facebook page, even less with Youtube and Twitter and nearly nonexistent with a Google+ and for that almost none of them are engaged.

BEACHBODY

Team Beach Body with a yearly market of 250 million, struggles with social media but has managed to set up the top 5 social medias, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin and Google+, albeit, the account usernames vary, and across the media branding is seriously lacking. It becomes painfully clear this industry needs Markethive or at least their distributors seriously do.

Get Engaged with Your Followers, Fans, and Subscribers

You probably know that it is important to maintain an active account by posting lots of updates, and that it is best to do something other than blasting advertisements non-stop about your brand. So the question is, what should you be doing to stay active in your social networks? Get engaged with your audience, of course. Here are the top networks to get socially engaged in for your brand.

Twitter Engagement

If you’re goal is to build a strong presence on Twitter and demonstrate your brand’s authority in your industry, you need get involved with your following. Some ways to do so include:

Monitoring Brand Mentions – If you use Twitter itself, just do a search for your brand and save the search for future reference. If you use a Twitter management tool like HootSuite, create a keyword search column that will constantly update you with brand mentions. Anytime someone says something about your brand, whether it is good or bad, you should be responding to it if at all possible. This may mean adding some extra team members to your social media GROUP as a response staff. But over time, if people see that you are always on top of any discussion of your brand, you will gain trust and receive lots of great word of mouth marketing. People will tell their followers what a great response they’ve received from you and likely recommend you based on their satisfaction level.

Monitoring Industry Conversation – One of the best parts of Twitter is that you can jump into any conversation, anytime. So if you are a company providing Inbound Marketing services and technologies like Markethive, you can monitor anyone who talks about Inbound Marketing, SEO, linking, Entrepreneurial interests, and other related topics and just answer simple questions that anyone asks about those topics demonstrating your expertise.

Curate the Best Content – Even if you are the best content creator in your industry, people often like to see a second opinion. Find out who other authorities are in your industry and share their opinion on industry topics with your following. You will gain more relevant followers simply for sharing the best news.

Facebook Fan Page Engagement

There are several different ways you can engage with your fans using your fan page that will keep your current fans active and bring new fans to your brand. These include:

Updating Your Fan Page on Facebook – It’s tempting to use HootSuite and other automated programs to update your fan page. But it’s becoming more and more obvious that if you want your updates to show up in fan’s news feeds that the updates must be organic, or originating from your fan page itself. So take the extra time to disable all of your autofeeds and start updating your fan page manually on Facebook. And when people start engaging with your posts or posting directly on your wall, be sure to respond to them. If they know they’re getting response, they’re more likely to return. No one likes a one-way broadcast.

Try Out Different Types of Updates – Don’t just post links or ask questions. Spice it up – add some video updates and photos. Different types of people like different types of content – be sure to try to cater to everyone by mixing your content up!

Thanks to the last major update to Facebook fan pages, you are able to use Facebook as your fan page. This means you can like pages as your fan page instead of your personal profile and then comment on them as your fan page. If you can find pages that are not direct competitors but whose audience will be interested in your brand, you will want to get active on them. For example, social media consultants should be living on Social Media Examiner’s fan page to connect with other individuals and businesses looking for social media help.

LinkedIn Engagement

If your brand isn’t on LinkedIn, you are missing out. LinkedIn allows you to add a company page where you can post your products, services, job openings, and even send status updates to your company followers including your latest blog posts. But some of the best branding and authority building activities for this network lie in the activity of the professional profiles including:

Participating in Groups – There are lots of great, active groups on LinkedIn in a wide variety of industries. Find the groups that have your potential client base within them and start getting active in discussions and posting useful content. Just be sure not to do anything that the group moderator would consider as spamming!

Answering Questions – The next best area to build a great professional reputation and strong authority in your industry is in LinkedIn Answers. There are questions asked every day in topics ranging from administration to technology. The people who answer the most questions are also featured on the answers’ home page as the week’s top experts!

Gaining Recommendations – Last, but not least, is recommendations. You can get recommendations on both the company pages and the professional profiles of your employees. Imagine if someone is browsing your company’s page and sees that the top employees have a ton of recommendations. It will show that you have a lot of experts in the industry which will make potential clients even more confident in your brand!

David

Spamming and Photo Journalism

My latest post was a photo blog. I showered friend and followers with 15 photos. I received a complaint.

First let's try to understand what my project is not. It is not a MLM. It is not a program that requires a distribution network nor do I have a product or service to sell, a seemingly contrary position relative to the typical Markethive pursuit.

My project is a humanitarian project about the unseen and unattended menace of waste and as such it needs to provide education and attention.

Now about the photos.

I have discussed the image situation with the tech center and with Tom. Markethive does not handle images like WP does, no media library or storage to call from.

A comment from Tom about this; “When we upgrade the News Feed to work like Facebook with Images and Video the necessity of single posts for a large cluster of Images will improve as well”.

In order to use photos in your blog post on Markethive, the image must not be wider than 550 px and uploaded to your profile page. If you want it on your news feed,you post to you profile page and that's exactly what I wanted.

When I assembled the photo blog, I embedded these photos in the post using the link to that image on my profile. When I push this post to my social network every image links back to my Markethive profile. When the search engine scans the post it is obvious that where it came from and who. That to me is beneficial to me and Markethive.

The complaint called it spamming and me not understanding what I am doing on Markethive. The claim is that I am trying to “dominate the newsfeed”. On the contrary I was just setting up my post.

There are other ways to do this for sure. I could have uploaded the images to one of my blogs and then linked the images form there. Or, I could have uploaded to one of my groups, but only the members of that group would have seen them. None of these options were what I wanted.

My program is centered in and around Markethive and always will be. It is a “social” site and everyone is welcome to have an opinion but I try to understand first before casting my opinion.

It is obvious that the one who complained did not observe the content just the number, a rather shallow observation, me thinks, nor did they go to the actual blog post, they just wanted to pontificate.

Markethive is somewhat of a social anarchy, in that there are no rules except be respectful. There is no boss and there is no police.

Just one more thing. The value of a relationship (friend) is relative. There is no relationship that has the value to be leveraged as a threat. If a member in Markethive threatens you with the loss of a friendship in order to effect you activity, take the loss.

If you are discomforted by my activity, you have your options.

David

Elon Musk is From Mars

A business magnate – His mission is to be the first entrepreneur on Mars with the purpose of setting human civilization on the path to the colonization of the solar system.

SpaceX: Dragon 2 will look like a real alien spaceship

Elon was born an entrepreneur into a family of entrepreneurs. His mother, Maye (Haldeman), a model from Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada,was a dietitian and a beautiful fashion model. His father, Errol, was an electromechanical engineer and what a family member described as a "serial entrepreneur." Yes, Errol was from Mars and Maye was from Venus, you might guess as to how it was going to work out.

From these parents he was cast into society a virtual “stranger in a strange land”.

A nerd, yes a NERD, carefully schooled and coached by his parents into exceptionalism.

An “exceptional” nerd living in a South African culture which at the time was a “manly man” type of culture. As you might expect, he was abused and beat by his school mates, finally thrown down a flight of stairs and hospitalized for a week.

A nerd, at twelve, he used an artifact of a computer, Commodore VIC-20, wrote his first game and sold it for $400. The beginning of his own path of being a"Serial entrepreneur."

He finished schooling in a private school, then ran away on his own to Canada and enrolled at Queen's University in Ontario and lived in a dormitory for foreign students. He graduated with degrees in economics and physics and went to Stanford on a full ride for two days, quit to start his first business Zip2, a web software company.

It sold and Musk received $22 million for his share.

Is he from Mars?

He grew up in South Africa without ever really considering himself South African. Like the rest of his family, he was just passing through.

The Musks were a race nearly as much as they were a family, with a specialized awareness of themselves as wanderers and adventurers. Every Musk is able to tell the story of forebears whose accomplishments serve as an inspiration and whose energy endures as an inheritance — a grandfather who won a race from Cape Town to Algiers; a great-grandmother who was the first female chiropractor in Canada; grandparents who were the first to fly from South Africa to Australia in a single-engine plane.

An inside point of view.

"Without sounding patronizing, it does seem that our family is different from other people," says Elon's sister, Tosca Musk. "We risk more." They risk everything.

Well, maybe Mars.

Entrepreneurial success at the top

“I am the Alpha Man in all relationships.” “Am I insane?” Elon Musk

Elon Musk is one of America's top entrepreneurial successes. He is one of the most remarkable billionaire entrepreneurs in America. As of January 2016, he has an estimated net worth of US$12.4 billion, making him the 39th wealthiest person in the US. [Forbes]

As an entrepreneur, most of Musk’s wealth came from starting and owning companies, rather than salary. He is Tesla’s biggest shareholder, with a 23 percent stake, runs closely held Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and is chairman of SolarCity Corp.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk is a man with vision. The founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors, SolarCity and SpaceX – all extraordinary companies in four completely different industries.

Musk somehow delivered the biggest advantage that these industries have seen in decades and he did it in what felt like one Fell Swoop.

Is he really preparing to rule Mars?

Here is a look at the character of Elon Musk through the lens of the PayPal episode.

The PayPal War

More than any other executive today, Musk has dedicated his energies and his own vast Fortune to inventing a future that is as rich and far-reaching as a science fiction fantasy.

That's what separates Elon from mere mortals, he's willing to take an insane amount of personal risk. when you do a deal like that it either pays off or you end up in the bus shelter somewhere.

Musk continually asks, “what do you think, am I insane?”

The creation of x.com would ultimately reveal a great deal about Musk's creativity, relentless drive, confrontational style, and foremost his leadership. Musk would endure the experience of being pushed aside in his own company and the pain that accompanies a Grand Vision left unfulfilled.

In March 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company, with US$10 million from the sale of Zip2. One year later, the company merged with Confinity, a company which had a money transfer service called PayPal

The merger was never harmonious., Management did not agree, the engineers didn't agree. It reached a tipping point in which his partners staged a coup to try to throw him out.

What followed was one of the nastiest coups in Silicon Valley's long illustrious history of nasty coups. The opposing management and employees gathered one night at Fanny and Alexander, a now defunct bar in Palo Alto, to brain storm how to push Musk out.

They decided to sell the board on having the old CEO return as CEO. Instead of confronting Musk directly with this plan. This conspiracy decided to take action behind Musk's back.

Musk had been married in January 2000 but had been too busy for a honeymoon. Nine months later in September, they planned to mix business and pleasure by going on a fund raising trip to Indiana and ending it with a honeymoon in Sydney to catch the Olympics.

As they boarded their flight one night, X.com Executives delivered letters of no-confidence to the board asking for their support.

He heard about what was happening while he was in flight to Sydney. When he landed he immediately hopped on the next plane back to Palo Alto.

It was shocking and underhanded but here was how he handled it. For a brief period he challenged the board to reconsider its decision. In that brief period, he realized that the “force” was not with him. He relented the CEO position quietly.

Musk relented, but started talking to the new management, and said it wasn't so much that he wanted to be CEO but had determined there were some pretty important things that need to happen and he was not sure they were going to happen. After discussing these, they agreed that they would make these things happen.

Concluding the situation, he says, “I mean, it's not the end of the world.”

He showed incredible restraint. He embraced the role of being an advisor to the company and kept investing in it, continuously increasing his stake as PayPal's largest shareholder. You would expect someone in Elon's position to be bitter and vindictive but he wasn't.

In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for US$1.5 billion in stock, of which US$165 million was given to Musk. Before its sale, Musk, who was the company's largest shareholder, owned 11.7% of PayPal's shares.

At the end of all this, Elon would say that this is not a normal business environment, and you have to suspend normal business thinking.

“Life is to short for long grudges.” – Elon Musk

Near Death

After PayPal, while considering the state of the universe, he decided to go on vacation, his first. He and His wife traveled to South Africa. While there he contracted the most vile of the strains of Malaria.

The symptoms only started showing after their return back to the US. Thinking it was only the flu they waited until he couldn't get out of bed before taking him in to the emergency room.

Of course, he was misdiagnosed and hospitalized. After a few days, his signs were very bad, very bad indeed.

He was near his end when a visiting doctor casually strolling down the hallway passed his room and leasurly noticed his chart. The doctor recognized the condition immediately for what it was and administered the correct treatment.

Elon spent 10 days in intensive care and recovered. The visiting doctor was never mentioned again.

I guess the doctor dropped in from Mars for a stroll down a hallway?

Shortly after his recovery, he commented “vacations are not healthy and I never plan on taking another.” As far as anyone knows, he never has.

Space-X Mars and Beyond

“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.” Elon Musk

Here's a sign. At the headquarters of SpaceX in Hawthorne California, visitors will find two giant posters of Mars hanging side-by-side on the wall leading up to Musk's cubicle. The poster on the left depicts Mars as it is today, a cold Barren Red Orb. The poster on the right shows a Mars with a humongous green land mass surrounded by oceans. The planet has been heated up and transformed to support humans. Musk fully intends to try and make this happen so he has a place to retire.

Turning humans into space colonizers is his stated life's purpose. “I would like to die thinking that Humanity has a bright future in space.”

Mars in his own words

“You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on… So it's a fixer-upper of a planet.” Elon Musk

“I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.” Elon Musk

“Mars is the only place in the solar system where it's possible for life to become multi-planetarian.” Elon Musk

“My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars – this is very important – so you don't have to carry the return fuel when you go there.” Elon Musk

“Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket – half a million dollars. It can be done.” Elon Musk

“In order for us to have a future that's exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we're a space-bearing civilization.” Elon Musk

Elon Musk is from Mars.

Today, he demonstrates the great drive of American Entrepreneurship, he takes and manages risks without concern and he does this daily. He witnesses his own failures almost every day and keeps moving forward.

Failures are those events that guide him on his path.

Is he remarkable? Yes, in a billionaire sort of way. He is obsessed with succeeding. His mission is to succeed in manifesting his “ideas”, not success in and of itself and not the money, its the act of succeeding. Money is just another tool for chasing his ideas to successful completion.

I have read great science fiction authors my whole life, 100's of them. These authors create the future in stories. When Elon Musk “writes” science fiction it appears before your very eyes.

He Channels Mars. He is a Martian and really wants to take us home with him.

Resources:

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, by Ashlee Vance. A biography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

http://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/, Forbes “The Worlds Billionaires”

The Chronicles of Musk, the first Mayor of Mars City. Mars City Library 2075 edition

And news article to numerous to list, there are about 5 new ones a day.

Note: Just in case you may have missed any of my previous blog posts, I post here on one of my active projects. It is a new social network for entrepreneurs, completely free, and very unique. It could be a great thing for your business. It is called MarketHive. Just click —-> HERE <—- to find out more.

If you are interested in participating in this effort to lift these children to inspiration, please join me in the Markethive group “Green Fire”. It is from here that we will start a crowd funding campaign to aid Green Fire in its mission – The Children of the Landfill.

David

My Gmail was just attacked – Steps I took

This is the message I received from Google this morning.

Someone has your password

Hi Michel,

Someone just used your password to try to sign in to your Google Account _________@gmail.com

Details:
Sunday, March 20, 2016 10:52 AM (Eastern Daylight Time)
Quebec City, QC, Canada*

Google stopped this sign-in attempt, but you should review your recently used devices:

Steps I took

I did a review and adjusted the permitted accounts, as suggested.

Next I went to the website http://passwordsgenerator.net/ and generated a 16 character password and then changed the account password..

It is becoming more important to be secure. I try to follow the suggestions on the same website.

Passwordsgenerator.net site security suggestions:

To prevent your passwords from being hacked by social engineering, brute force or dictionary attack method, you should notice that:

1. Do not use the same password for multiple important accounts.

2. Use a password that has at least 16 characters, use at least one number, one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter and one special symbol.

3. Do not use the names of your families, friends or pets in your passwords.

4. Do not use postcodes, house numbers, phone numbers, birthdates, ID card numbers, social security numbers, and so on in your passwords.

5. Do not use any dictionary word in your passwords.

6. Do not use something that can be cloned( but you can't change ) as your passwords, such as your fingerprints.

7. Do not let your Web browsers (FireFox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE ) store your passwords, since all passwords saved in Web browsers can be revealed easily.

8. Do not log in to important accounts on the computers of others, or when connected to a public Wi-Fi hotspot, Tor, free VPN or web proxy.

9. Do not send sensitive information online via HTTP or FTP connections, because messages in these connections can be sniffed with very little effort. You should use encrypted connections such as HTTPS and SFTP whenever possible.

10. When travelling, you can encrypt your Internet connections before they leave your laptop, tablet, mobile phone or router. For example, you can set up a private VPN on your own server( home computer, dedicated server or VPS ) and connect to it. Alternatively, you can set up an encrypted SSH tunnel between your router and your home computer( or a remote server of your own ) with PuTTY and connect your programs( e.g. FireFox ) to PuTTY. Then even if somebody captures your data as it is transmitted between your device( e.g. laptop, iPhone, iPad ) and your server with a packet sniffer, he'll won't be able to steal your data and passwords from the encrypted streaming data.

11. How secure is my password? Perhaps you believe that your passwords are very strong, difficult to hack. But if a hacker has stolen your username and the MD5 hash value of your password from a company's server, and the rainbow table of the hacker contains this MD5 hash, then your password will be cracked quickly.

To check the strength of your passwords and know whether they're inside the popular rainbow tables, you can convert your passwords to MD5 hashes on this MD5 hash generator, then decrypt your passwords by submitting these hashes to an online MD5 decryption service. For instance, your password is "0123456789A", using the brute-force method, it may take a computer almost one year to crack your password, but if you decrypt it by submitting its MD5 hash( C8E7279CD035B23BB9C0F1F954DFF5B3 ) to a MD5 decryption website, how long will it take to crack it? You can perform the test yourself.

12. It's recommended to change your passwords every 10 weeks.

13. It's recommended that you remember a few master passwords, store other passwords in a plain text file and encrypt this file with 7-Zip, GPG or a disk encryption software such as BitLocker, or manage your passwords with a password management software.

14. Encrypt and backup your passwords to different locations, then if you lost access to your computer or account, you can retrieve your passwords back quickly.

15. Turn on 2-step authentication whenever possible.

16. Do not store your critical passwords in the cloud.

17. Access important websites( e.g. Paypal ) from bookmarks directly, otherwise please check its domain name carefully, it's a good idea to check the popularity of a website with Alexa toolbar to ensure that it's not a phishing site before entering your password.

18. Protect your computer with firewall and antivirus software, download software from reputable sites only, and verify the MD5 or SHA1 checksum of the installation package whenever possible.

19. Be careful when using online paste tools and screen capture tools, do not let them to upload your passwords to the cloud.

20. If there are important files on your computer, and it can be accessed by others, check if there are hardware keyloggers( e.g. wireless keyboard sniffer ), software keyloggers and hidden cameras when you feel it's necessary.

21. If you're a webmaster, do not store the users passwords in the database, you should store the salted hash values of passwords instead.

David

FBI warns automakers, owners about vehicle hacking risks

FBI warns automakers, owners about vehicle hacking risks

Friday, 18 Mar 2016 | 6:22 AM ET

vehicle hacking risks

The FBI and U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a bulletin Thursday warning that motor vehicles are "increasingly vulnerable" to hacking.

"The FBI and NHTSA are warning the general public and manufacturers — of vehicles, vehicle components, and aftermarket devices — to maintain awareness of potential issues and cybersecurity threats related to connected vehicle technologies in modern vehicles," the agencies said in the bulletin.

In July 2015, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles recalled 1.4 million U.S. vehicles to install software after a magazine report raised concerns about hacking, the first action of its kind for the auto industry.

Also last year, General Motors issued a security update for a smartphone app that could have allowed a hacker to take control of some functions of a plug-in hybrid electric Chevrolet Volt, like starting the engine and unlocking the doors.

In January 2015, BMW said it had fixed a security flaw that could have allowed up to 2.2 million vehicles to have doors remotely opened by hackers.

"While not all hacking incidents may result in a risk to safety – such as an attacker taking control of a vehicle — it is important that consumers take appropriate steps to minimize risk," the FBI bulletin said Thursday.

NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind told reporters in July 2015 that automakers must move fast to address hacking issues.

Ida Mae Boyd
MarketHive Alpha Founder
Skype me at imboyd681
please include in the Skype Contact message "Market Hive"

David