With the help of Gmail, Google has turned Google Voice into a legitimate Skype competitor. Is it enough to make people abandon Skype for Google Voice calling?

The Skype software application has been around since 2003. Since its launch, it has garnered hundreds of millions of users because of its ability to make crisp and clear audio and video calls to both phones and other computers. It’s been the gold standard on voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) technology.

But Google has pushing its own technology hard.Google Voice  takes a different approach by providing each user with his own personal number that can call any telephone, along with features such as voicemail transcription and call screening. Last week, Google  integrated Google Voice into Gmail, providing a single, Skype-like interface where users can make and receive audio and video calls.

While Skype and Google Voice are different products with different goals, you can’t ignore their converging similarities. That’s why they’re the subject of this week’s Web Faceoff. Our question is simple: Do you prefer Skype or Google Voice for your VoIP and phone calls?

Let us know your answer in this week’s poll. Cast your vote by Friday, September 3 at 12:00 PM PT. Let us know what you think of the collision course between the two VoIP services in the comments.

Got the Mashable site to vote now: http://mashable.com/2010/08/31/skype-google-faceoff/

Is social media and social media marketing the same? The answer is No, there is a fundamental difference. Both have distinctly different roles and both have their part to play in making a business succeed.

The role of marketing is to create customer interest in products or services generating a strategy that underlies sales techniques and business communication among other equally or not so important components depending on your marketing strategy. Social media on the other hand adds a whole new flavor in the marketing pot. It affords a business the opportunity to personalize its brand and to get consumers and potential consumers to talk about the brand. By doing this you get to hear what the consumer likes and dislikes about your brand giving you the opportunity correct that down the line.

Social media and marketing is like oil and water and no not like the cliché where the two don’t mix. What I am saying is that if oil represents marketing and you set fire to it, it will continue to burn as long as there is enough oil. Now water represents social media, what happens if you add water to that fire? The answer, it will explode. So the question begs, do you want controlled fire that will keep your business going or an explosion that could take your business into the next dimension?

Source Clinton

Research by Scores.org

A very popular interactive website that has taken South Africa’s young and old by storm. It connects people, family and friends who hardly get to see each other. From near and far people are getting connected through facebook so fast, it will make your head spin. Free  to sign up and register, you can put up as many pictures as you want, join groups of celebrities  causes or just for laughs. Facebook is a great way to make friends with people from around the corner to across the pacific.

Facebook is the fastest growing social network in the world, with more than 300 million registered members. Anyone can sign up for Faccebook and interact i\with the people they know in a trusted environment.

Facebook for your business:

Assign an employee to create and manage your company’s Facebook page. It’s important to post new information, photos and videos regularly to keep it fresh.

Respond to messages and questions left on your page’s discussion board and “wall” wtihin 24 hours

Provide special offers, give- away or  other incentives to attract fans.

Facebook also offers a “share” button that you can add to your website to make it easier for your on tent to be shared on facebook.

Even if the music is not your fancy, there are definitely many things we can learn and do Social Media like Lady Gaga.

Twitter:
- Twitter indicated that it has more than 190 million users tweeting with more than 65 million tweets a day. (South Africa has 55,000 active twitter users as indicated in a recent study.)
- The use of an open API ensures that 75% of Twitter traffic is generated from outside of twitter.com
- Approximately 65% of the world’s top 100 companies have a twitter account
- Twitter’s search engine gets more than 600 million queries a day. Monthly, this is proportionately more than Bing and Yahoo.
- There are more than 70,000 applications currently using Twitters API

MXit (South African based Mobile Social Network):
- More than 20 million users in South Africa growing at 4000 new users per day.
- Estimated 25 million users log into MXit daily
- Approximately 350 million messages are share via MXit per day.

The above is just an indication of how Social Media is still growing and being adopted by users hungry for sharing and engaging via the web and increasingly more so via mobile.

1. Are You Using the Right Platform?

Below you can read the complete article on Mashable:

“Many companies, startups and well established businesses are frustrated because their social media presence isn’t larger or yet benefiting their bottom line. One of the big issues is that most companies start using social media thinking it’s the holy grail. It takes time, effort, and resources before this new media will have an impact on you brand….”