Montage Communications is a PR, social media and SEO content marketing agency.

We work with the South West RDA, Pilgrims Choice, SACO Apartments, Connexions West and Connecting Bristol, to name but a few!

To find out how we can help you manage your reputation, increase awareness of your services, generate website traffic and improve search engine rankings, call 0845 644 5404.

Twitter

A popular micoblogging social network where users communicate via 'Tweets' using 140 characters or less. If you find someone that you think is interesting then users 'follow' another Twitterer's Tweets. User can also directly address another using the @ sign called a 'mention', however beware.... all the other followers can see this too!

If two users follow each other they are called 'friends', friends earn the right to direct message (DM) each other in private.

Twitter is a very open and fluid network very much like a networking party, where you are part of local conversations but still have the ability to 'listen in' on people that you are not following using Twitter searches.

Using Twitter Lists users can group useful Twitterers by subject or other categories.

Interesting fact: Twitter was the most popular word in the English language in 2009 according to the Global Language Study.

Wordpress

One of the world's most popular open source blog publishing platforms at the forefront of enabling bloggers to take a march on the world's media.

As the software is open source and specifically for blogging, it is agile and has vast amounts of features of plugins or widgets created by the Wordpress community for the community. This allows Wordpress blogs to quickly adapt and Mashup other social media technologies as the market develops.

At Montage we prefer Wordpress technology for all our blogs - it gets great SEO results whilst being very user friendly.

Interesting fact:

Wordpress blogs produced 61,885,772 words yesterday (08/0310) - for the up-to-date number of bloggers using Wordpress on a daily basis visit www.Wordpress.com.

Flickr

The world's most popular dedicated photo sharing site, Flickr has a strong sense of artistic and photographic community. Many of Montage's pictures are shared on this site. We are always surprised to the lengths fellow photographers go to help others, give feedback or tips around photography, location or subject.

The site has branched out into other areas such as travel, tourism or niche interest areas (yes there are a lot of train spotters on the site!). The main area for social networking is sharing pictures on Flickr groups and you can follow your contacts' and friends' photography photostreams too.

The site provides numerous ways of tagging and collating content and even geo tag photography on a map, so local photographers can find and share content easily.

Interesting fact:

Flickr is the largest dedicated photo sharing site. However the site with the most photos goes to Image Shack which has a staggering 2o billion images and Facebook (the fastest growing) has 15 billion unique images (2009).

Facebook

One of the world's largest social networks, Facebook is loosely based on the original concept of "Facebooks" at College/Universities in the USA, where students have a page describing themselves. The site has evolved to become more of a personalised newsfeed from the lives of its users.

For now, you have to be friends with another user to see their profile page, to see each others private details and post on someone's wall on their profile. Users can share links, photos and video on Facebook.

There are numerous ways to communicate on Facebook, through status updates (that all friends see), direct (private messages) and even a live chat feature when both users are on the site at the same time.   Finally there is a "poke" feature where users poke each other as a friendly greeting or to say Hi.

Many consider Facebook to be about established networks of friends and for more personal forms of communications (like sharing pictures of your children), however with the increased use of groups and fan pages by corporates or blog feeds being fed into the site, there is an ever growing commercial feel to it.

Interesting fact:

If Facebook was a country it would be the world's 4th largest (bigger than Japan).

Digg

Regarded by many as the largest social news site on the web, Digg is where users digest and analyse content from the web and vote for it up and down (called Digging and Burying respectively).

Vast amounts of traffic and customers can be gained by getting enough votes for your content and story to get it onto the front page of the site.

A word of caution, spamming Digg with marketing messages will not earn you friends and may even get your story buried, or worse, your account banned.

Interesting fact:

Digg has a loyal core audience and evangelists driven by numerous social "Town Hall" events and webcasts, where Digg users can debate community rules and technical updates.

RSS

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the unsung hero of the world of web 2.0.  It really powers the way we seamlessly communicate across various different blogs, micro blogging, bookmarking and news sites. The true benefit being that one post can appear on several sites without the need for additional administration.

Essentially it's a really simple way of sharing content across numerous sites, we all use RSS every day without pretty much noticing. RSS technology also provides you with a method of getting relevant and up-to-date information sent to you for you to read in your own time.

The power of RSS can really been seen when collating feeds across numerous sources on the web and "mashing up" the content in a useful format for the user. So for example you can agrregate serveral news, picture, microblogging and bookmarking feeds onto one page so an entire region can be monitored in one go.

Interesting fact:

People who use RSS and news aggregators to consume information on the internet tend to cover 15 times the number of sites in comparison to conventional methods.

YouTube

The daddy of the online video world, YouTube can create or break a brand within hours! Famously Dominos Pizza go caught in a crisis PR storm after employees uploaded video of dubious hygiene practices in the kitchen, within 24hrs this made it into the New York Times...

Many brands have had huge sucess on YouTube such as Samsung getting over 11m views for a viral video about "Extreme sheep hearding".

The site allows the user to upload short (less than 10 min) videos, share them with friends who can comment on them and if they like them favourite them too.

Organisations or budding Directors can set up their own channel to promote their projects, services and projects through a series of videos.

Content is king on YouTube, but if you hit the mood of this community, worldwide news headlines could possibly follow.

Interesting fact:

YouTube experiences over 1billion views a day.