Last night, a group of us attended the Mashable Summer Tour in downtown Chicago. It was a great time and as I would call it, a bash at the mash!

If you missed this awesome event, please try to make it next year. There are a lot of people, like you, who love to network and share what they do in the industry.

At the event we got a first look at a new service called “GoTelo.” This new start-up is kick ass and you need to check it out. Also on hand was Intel, boring, but they were there. There were a host of other sponsors at the event who shared insight on what they offer.

Overall, I would give this event an A+, but it’s probably a biased A+, because it was an open bar for two hours. The Mashable folks are a cool bunch and they’re very approachable, not like some conferences which are very clicky.

I am sure many people woke up this morning with a hangover, but it was well worth it!

ServiceLive and TechJaws would like to thank the Mashables – Adam Hirsch, Adam Ostrow, Karen Hartline, Brett Petersel, Vadim Lavrusik, Samuel Axon, and Brenna Ehrlich for putting together this annual event. I look forward to next year’s!

About Mashable:

Founded in July 2005, Mashable is the world’s largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news. With more than 17 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the most prolific blog reviewing new Web sites and services, publishing breaking news on what’s new on the web. Please visit http://www.mashable.com for more information.

In the last 6 weeks many of the friends I made and shared links with are no longer around and for good reason. They all had their StumbleUpon accounts put under review which means you will never get it back, you can count on that. This recently happened to me back in November 2008. I read the terms twice, but still could not figure why it happened to me as well.

After sending 5 emails over a 10 day period, I have still not received a response from the StumbleUpon gods. My friends also received the same cold treatment I did.

Facts: 10K+ sites “I Liked”, 300+ friends and 300+ subscribers. I also advertised 4 campaigns at $20 per. What could have gone wrong to be placed in that pile of orphans called under review?

My persistence paid off! I thought if you shared stumbles and stumble and review other sites along with making friends, than you would be playing by the rules. Not so fast, there’s more to it than that.

The send-to button is there to send pages to your friends. But how many do you send? It has nothing to do with the amount that you send, but what you send.

If you are only sending your own blog posts, SU obviously knows you are marketing your own site – and will probably discount the stumbles on your blog. You need to send pages from various sites to your friends to avoid being red-flagged.

Also, say your same friends thumb up your post every day. That is a pattern and you need to mix it up a little. My tip would be to send your blog post to 3 to 5 random friends and keep track of who you’re sending pages to. You need to only send your pages to a unique friend once per week, this will keep you from forming a pattern.

Happy Stumbling all!

The fundamentals of social networking differ to other forms of online marketing. Social networking isn’t about spending money to create visibility for your web site, blog or business. It’s about participation, being part of a community and contributing to it – in essence the fundamentals of social networking are:

1. Creating Awareness – especially in the early days you must be an extremely active user
2. Developing Relationships – make contact and develop relationships with influential users
3. Creating Something of Value – only content which is fun, interesting or useful will gain visibility
4. Building your Reputation – be active, contribute to the community and avoid overly promoting your content

There are a number of social networks – and the ones that really make a difference are (StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg and Propeller).

Each type of social network requires a slightly different marketing approach, although they all require the four fundamentals – creating awareness, developing relationships, creating something of value, and building your reputation.

TechJaws would like to thank everyone that has helped with submitting our blogs to social networks! I really appreciate it, and I will always be there for anyone that needs help.

There are many web sites that guarantee you thousands of web visitors for a small fee, but are these web marketing sites really providing you quality and targeted visitors? It’s very important to do your homework to be sure you’re getting the most our of your hard earned dollars.

Just a few tips to follow:

1. Are the web sites highly ranked with Alexa? (Less than 70K). Most of these sites are ranked in the millions. You would think they would have proof of concept by setting an example on how well they’re doing. Alexa recently made major changes on how they rank web sites by tightened up their algorithm. It’s a lot harder today to move up the ranks in Alexa.
2. They also promise that all traffic that is sent to your site are humans and not bots, I find that hilarious as we tested three web sites and all three sent bots. How do we know? Each and every visit had the same two octets of 171.23 in the IP address. Who do they think there kidding?
3. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Do your research before committing your hard earned dollars for some scam web site that makes promises that are just broken promises.

The best traffic is organic traffic or referral traffic from social networks. This kind of traffic will come in bursts, and eventually a visitor to your site will come back again because they find your content interesting. It’s all about the information you provide that will get repeat visitors to your web site.

You must ask yourself what Social Network do I choose? This is the most important question. If you’re a blogger and own a self hosted blog, social networks can be great traffic drivers to your site.

Social Network Humor:

I Ask, and I find myself doing a Backflip over my decision. I grow hungry and begin to Feed Me Links and Squidoo on the side. It was so Del.icio.us I had to Mixx up another batch. I have so many Fave foods to choose from, but I am so undecided on what to choose. I than ask my girlfriend to share Co.mments on what to eat. I than Digg through the refrigerator to decide what I want. I than StumbleUpon some leftover pasta my girlfriend made. I start to eat it and enjoy it so much I gave my girlfriend a big Hugg. I am still not satisfied yet, so I begin to look through the Yellow Pages and order Mister Wong Chinese. The door bell rings 30 minutes later and it’s the delivery guy, Yahoo!.

Social Network Tips:

It took a while to decide what social network I wanted to participant in. It’s important not to over extend yourself by participating in too many social networks. Keep it simple by selecting no more than 3, so you can put more time and focus, thus getting better results.

We’re always happy to hear about other Sharks out there in the water, and it makes us proud to know that there’s a music service out there just for Sharks like us.

It’s called Grooveshark, and it’s part Peer-2-Peer application, part online music streaming social network. If you’re anti-Peer2Peer or concerned about the legal aspects of sharing your music and downloading others’ music (and you should be), there’s Grooveshark Lite, which is just the web front-end and requires no installation of software to operate (click the screenshot below to see the full-size version):

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been at work and just wanted to hear one song really badly but didn’t have it in my music collection, and I’d scour the web trying to find it. Usually, I end up on YouTube and watch the music video for the song. Now I don’t need to, because I can find very nearly anything on Grooveshark Lite.

What do you use to satisfy that musical hankerin’ that sometimes hits us all? Let us know in the comments.

-The Raging Tech