First Step Towards Social Media Marketing !!

Nitesh Ambuj — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 07:07:29 GMT

Social Media Marketing is a new advertising methodology where you promote your business through different online social media channels. It’s not just limited to regular one way advertising technique but it also gives a chance to interact directly with your end user. It provides a flexibility to twist your marketing strategy as and when needed.

To understand the impact it is going to make, let’s look at few studies:

· According to a 2009 CMO Survey, currently 3.5% of marketing budgets is spent on social media marketing, with that figure predicted to grow to 6.1% within 12 months and 13.7% within five years.

· According to the 2009 Digital Readiness Report, "Essential Online Public Relations and Marketing Skills," a majority of organizations are now contemplating hiring social media specialists.

· In a 2007 study by eMarketer, commissioned by MySpace, it was predicted there would be a $1230 million spend on social network marketing.

· In a 2008 study by Forrester Research evaluating the social network marketing programs, only one of the 16 major firms it had reviewed had received a passing grade, with half of the programs scoring a zero or lower.

Social Media has become a golden marketing rush for many marketers across world. Real users talking about real products is an added advantage, though, tracking all the information floating in social media becomes little tough at times. When we tried to analyze real time data from Social Media we found many interesting outcomes. We can see many interesting trends – even popularity of brands, products can be measured over time. When we go little deep in user statistics we can find out the most talked about products, brands for a particular region and vice-versa. There are many such interesting patterns.

We believe that before marketing a product / brand through social media, a marketer must analyze data floating on different social media platforms. Keeping this thought in mind we developed ContextMine. It is collecting data from 100+ social media websites. It also analyzes data on different parameters like, message, user, location, etc. To know more about this, please visit - http://www.context.com/contextmine/index.html

Introduction to Sling

Nitesh Ambuj — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:48:07 GMT

Sling is a Web application framework based on REST principles that provides easy development of content-oriented applications.

Sling uses a JCR repository, such as Apache Jackrabbit, as its data store.

Sling started as an internal project of Day Management AG and has been contributed to the Apache Software Foundation and is currently undergoing incubation.

The main purpose of Sling is to develop a content-centric Web Application framework for Java Content Repository (JCR) based data stores.

Getting started with Sling

Pre-requisite

A Subversion client to get the Sling code
A Java 5 JDK
Maven ( > V 2.0.7)
cURL to create content

Setup & Install

Check out the code from Subversion repository:

http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/sling/trunk sling

This creates a directory named sling under the current directory, with the completed Sling source code.

In the top-level sling directory that was created by the svn command, run:

mvn clean install

This builds and tests all the Sling modules that are required to run the Launchpad.

If you don’t want to test the modules and just build them then you can run:

mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true

Start the Launchpad

Change to the launchpad/webapp directory under the top-level sling directory, and run:

mvn jetty:run

When server starts successfully it shows a message like this:

By default, Jetty is configured to run on port 8888.

Look at http://localhost:8888/sling where Sling displays the Sling Management Console page.

Sling Management Console Page will look like this:

In case of any error / issue, look into logs at below URL.

../launchpad/webap/target/sling/logs/error.log

Create some content

To create a content node (nodes are a JCR concept, a unit of storage) with cURL, use:

curl -F"sling:resourceType=foo/bar" -F"title=some title" http://admin:admin@localhost:8888/content/mynode

the entire command should be in single line

You can check the node at http://localhost:8888/content/mynode

It will show you a page like this:

You can see the node, content, resourcetype and other files at WebDAV client. Login with admin/admin.

WebDAV client URL: http://admin:admin@localhost:8888/dav/default/

It will show you a repository like this:

You can use cURL to create directories.

curl -X MKCOL http://admin:admin@localhost:8888/dav/default/apps

curl -X MKCOL http://admin:admin@localhost:8888/dav/default/apps/foo

curl -X MKCOL http://admin:admin@localhost:8888/dav/default/apps/foo/bar

Example 1:

I will create a resourceType.

I will create a content node.

I will render the content through resourceType.

Creating resourceType

Run below command

curl -X MKCOL http://admin:admin@localhost:8888/dav/default/apps/example1

curl -X MKCOL http://admin:admin@localhost:8888/dav/default/apps/example1/examplepage1

It will create a resourceType of example1/examplepage1

Create a HTML script which will use JCR data

html.esp

<html>

<body>

<h2>This is testing for Sling:Resources</h2>

</body>

</html>

Upload it to example1/examplepage1 resourceType

curl -X PUT -d @html.esp http://admin:admin@localhost:8888/dav/default/apps/example1/examplepage1/html.esp

Create content based on resourceType example1/examplepage1

curl -F"sling:resourceType=example1/examplepage1" -F"title=Example Title" http://admin:admin@localhost:8888/content/examplecontent

Render the content

You will see the content like this:

If you want to include some other esp in your html.esp file then you can include in like this:

<html>

  <body>

    <div id="header">

      <% sling.include("/content/header"); %>

    </div>

    <h1><%= currentNode.title %></h1>

  </body>

</html>

header.esp is a different esp file

We still do not have any complete solution / example but there are some sample scripts and servlets in the sling/sample module in the source tree. Going forward we may use them to do some more R&D on this.

Below are few URLs which might be useful if you are looking for more information.

Detailed project status:

http://incubator.apache.org/projects/sling.html

Detailed information on REST:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer

Detailed project information:

http://incubator.apache.org/sling/site/project-information.html

Documentation on Sling:

http://incubator.apache.org/sling/site/documentation.html