And loweth on the 8^th day God sat back and admired the world he had created and he knew it was good. ‘You probably want to get on Twitter and tell everyone about that’ whispered Lucifer.

Theres no real mystery, get as many friends as you can and get them buying! Right? Wrong, there are some deadly sins you must avoid when beginning your social media marketing.

Social Media Management Mistakes: Lust
You have to work hard to nurture your community. You are the gardener and they are your flowers. Dont just throw manure at them and leave them in the cold. Treat them with love and attention, water them and in time they will reward you with fruit.

Social Media Management Mistakes: Wrath
‘I bloody hate these things there just for spotty teenagers and speccy nerds with too much time on their hands.’ Understand these groups, they aren’t now but they could well be your best fans, build brand loyalty by showing your human side. Most social media sites have great ways to contact new members built into them, they are after all ’social’. Use these tools to grow your own friends group carefully and non-aggressively.

Social Media Management Mistakes: Sloth
Early on it can get tough, just like an infant your page will need continual care and may keep you awake at night, but if you stick in there eventually it will start to respond coherently and even start to walk on its own.

Social Media Management Mistakes: Pride
It is vital to avoid shameless self promotion and continuous product heavy content, especially when you’re not actually saying anything of value. No one likes a show off and no one wants to be continuously sold too.

Social Media Management Mistakes: Envy
Obviously don’t link to your competitors but definitely link to interesting blogs and pages similar to your own. Don’t be afraid to direct people away, if where you sent them was valued they will definitely come back.

Social Media Management Mistakes: Greed
Everyone has that shameless friend who relentlessly tries to pick up every possible girl at a bar, perhaps they are successful? It’s all about quantity they’ll say, but everyone notices the man who leaves with the prettiest, coolest and funniest girl at the end of the night.

Just because you have 7000 members does not mean anyone will buy anything from your site. Count success in sales not members. It is important to find people interested your product or a similar product and treat them to news, views, discounts and just like the hottest girl at the bar, make them feel special.

Social Media Management Mistakes: Vanity
Everyone needs to know about my product it’s the best on the market, people will flock to tell me how great my company is. Err no they won’t. Have a look on the Facebook Coca Cola site, they employ people around the clock to delete negative messages from members they didn’t listen to and didn’t understand!

Ric McHale

Every day at work someone raises an interesting question that stumps all of the Miro team. A race then ensues to see who can get the answer the quickest from the internet. I have decided to monitor the speed of results, and so, I have designated a different search engine to everyone in the office.

Stay tuned, as I will posting the findings online.

Julian Wilkins

In life there are generally 2 groups of people: tidy ones and untidy ones. Those who fill the dishwasher, pop in a tablet, turn it on and those that leave dirty cookery stacked high in the sink to go mouldy and turn the kitchen into a festering hole. As a web developer you must be the former. You must be clean, both hygienically speaking and in terms of the markup and coding you produce.

Creating websites with clean and concise code which conforms to the latest web standards is paramount to producing high quality, fast and SEO efficient sites. A site that is created and can be validtaed using W3C’s validation tools will aid future proofing and accessibility. A badly created HTML page may work in the current crop of browsers but that does not mean that future version will be so forgiving.

Always write XHTML making sure it is as stripped down and lightweight as possible, use no unnecessary tags or attributes, after all a Formula 1 car has no radio or cup holders (it doesn’t need them). All styling for a page should be contained within style sheets using validated CSSand applied to the page using either class names or by tag Id. Not only will this help any future development that you may make to a site it also means that any other competent developer can look at the code and easily understand how it work.

Spending more time to produce the best output you can will not only benefit your clients but will also benefit your own team of developers, easing any future updates and giving SEO potential a head start.