I will be speaking on July 26 and 27 at the JA Jewelry Show at the Javits Center in two sessions entitled “Social Networking – Best Practices”.
Click here for the press release from National Jeweler.
Look forward to seeing you there!
July 17, 2010
June 12, 2010
An Exciting Jewelry Show – JCK Las Vegas
We had an exciting show in Vegas this year, not just trading diamonds and jewelry, but educating and networking. We also rolled out a new product, The Social Jeweler, which was received very well.
Some highlights included being on a panel about Social Media in the jewelry industry that was featured in JCK Online:
JCK 2010
Ron Samuelson, of Samuelson Diamonds in Baltimore, said he’s seen a big spike in traffic as a result of his presence on social networks. “The other day I had two customers come in that I knew from Twitter and nowhere else,” he said. “I believe it’s helped me very much.”
It certainly has been useful for getting publicity. Samuelson notes that he’s been written up in the Wall Street Journal and Baltimore magazine.
“Every single reporter is on Twitter,” he said. “Before, you needed a PR agency to get press. Now all you need to do is hit an ‘at reply’ and you can get the attention of a New York Times reporter.”
The full article: JCK Las Vegas: Social Media Can Help Jewelers, Panel Agrees
I also spoke at the Couture Show that was featured in National Jeweler in this article: ABJ Panelists Help Solve Social Networking Issues
Then on Sunday I was interviewed by Engagement 101 magazine for a video that will be out in a few weeks. Here’s the writeup on the shoot:
And of course, we were buying (and selling) some great jewelry! Below is a stunning bridal set from Lieberfarb, a Michele Diamond Deco Watch and a BIG yellow cushion cut diamond ring. Come by and check them out!
To check out my Vegas blog post for some more personal stuff please click here: JCK Las Vegas
June 2, 2010
Samuelson’s Diamonds Featured in JCK Online – “Social Climbing”
JUNE 2, 2010: Samuelson’s Diamonds, Baltimore’s Downtown Diamond Destination, was featured in the June 1st Edition of JCK Online in the article titled ‘Social Climbing’:
Technically, this isn’t social media, but it’s essential to have a hub on your website that you can quickly update on your own without the aid of a programmer. When it comes to search-engine rankings, Google loves fresh content, and a blog is an easy way to add keyword-rich new stuff to your site. Use your blog to reach out to your customers. Offer them resources to aid them in decision-making; share the expertise you and your staff have worked so hard to acquire. Schechter suggests checking out Verragio (verragio.com) and Samuelson’s Diamonds (baltimorediamonds.com)—two sites that do it right.
Samuelson’s is continuing its focus on being a leader in the jewelry industry in social media and cutting edge technology.
The original article, “Social Climbing”, can be found here. A special thanks to our friend Michael Schechter of Honora Pearls for writing this informative piece.
May 20, 2010
‘Authenticated Pages’ Mean More Trouble For The Little Guy?
UPDATE: All indications point to Facebook reversing themselves on this.
Hello,
As of last night, we’ve removed the recently-added authentication requirement for setting custom landing tabs on Pages. The requirement was instituted as part of a Pages quality initiative, and we apologize for the inconvenience this caused to our developer and business community. We are re-investigating the situation, and will not make any further changes without first giving our community standard notice and lead-time.
Thanks for all your feedback,
Matt Trainer
Facebook Developer Network Team
Good sense prevails, I think.
(My original article follows below)
In what is no doubt a move to combat spam and scams, Facebook has done the following:
… Facebook recently made a change requiring that Pages be authenticated before enabling the ability to set a landing tab beyond Wall or Info. To be eligible for authentication, a Page must have greater than 10k fans or the Page admin must work with their ads account manager. …
This is potentially a good move, since it requires page owners to actually have a relationship with someone at Facebook (this is fine for small biz) whereas spammers and scammers in particular would shy away from any kind of relationship which could be used to trace their identity when their malfeasance is discovered.
But what is odd is the ambiguous language: ‘must work with their ads account manager.’ This implies that these page Admins must be paying ads customers – in other words, the little guy must put some skin in the game to prove he isn’t a crook.
Then again, presumably there is no required ‘minimum spend’ (Don’t see this anywhere) for being able to work with a manager to authenticate your page. While the attitude is typical of large bureaucratic organizations (guilty until proven innocent) when dealing with small players, the effect may be, in the long run, positive for small businesses and Facebook, provided that Facebook does not use this as a blatant opportunity to extract a toll from small or medium sized businesses.
Looked at in a different light, this could be more evidence that the switch to ‘like’ and the attendant changes were Facebook finally jumping the shark. I’m holding out hope that they retain their good sense.
May 14, 2010
Who Wants a Facebook Alternative?
Almost everyone I know complains about Facebook. Sometimes its the constantly changing interface, the privacy debacles, the spam, or even just service outages that are the cause of these complaints. Sometimes I think it’s like people riding a train complaining about it; sure the train could be better, but who is going to do anything about it?
Some guys from New York – freshly minted college guys of course – have put their money (or in this case, their summer and perhaps the rest of their lives) where their mouth is. Their project is called ‘Diaspora‘:
Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network from daniel grippi on Vimeo.
They’ve already raised over $100,000 ($135,815 as of this writing, according to KickStarter) from people who want to see this live. (They originally thought they might raise $10,000!)
The skinny is this: Unlike most ‘aggregation’ services, this is not some site somewhere that is trying to grab as much of your data for itself as it can (like, um, Facebook?) but rather a piece of software – a seed as they have it – which can be planted in a variety of places including (it seems) your own website, interact with everywhere else (Facebook, Twitter, etc) but let you choose how much data you want to share, and your own data remains your own (such as a list of friends) so long as you do not wish to share it.
It appears that there will also be a ‘turnkey’ service available – for hosting it no doubt – which raises the single question everyone might be thinking right now. In all probability, running Diaspora will not be ‘free’. Now, Diaspora will not cost anything itself, but you will be responsible for hosting it, or paying for the turnkey service (which logically must be a form of hosting with Diaspora pre-planted.)
My prediction is thus: If they can make the turnkey cheap enough, they can bust Facebook’s bubble. It might take a miracle, or a disaster (a privacy-related disaster no doubt!) for this move to take place.
To me, it is quite pleasing to think of this as internet homesteading; I log into my own seed, and there I get everything I have on Facebook, but not on Facebook at all. And if someone isn’t on Diaspora yet, I can still interact with them (via Facebook’s open graph) and best of all, Facebook does not know who all my ‘friends’ are.
And if you can’t pay or figure out how to host it yourself, chances are someone you know and trust can. Now that’s a local internet.
May 7, 2010
Ron to Speak in America’s Best Jewelers at the Couture 2010 Jewelry Show
MAY 6 2010: Third generation Baltimore jeweler Ron Samuelson of Samuelson’s Diamonds, Baltimore’s downtown diamond destination, will be speaking in the America’s Best Jewelers breakfast education series during the 2010 Couture jewelry show in Las Vegas, June 3-7 2010. The topic will be Social Media Best Practices.
Details about Ron’s appearance:
Saturday, June 5
7:30 a.m. to 8 a.m.–Breakfast
8 a.m. to 9 a.m. -”Peer Panel 3: Social Networking 2–Best Practices.” Join your fellow jewelers to continue the social networking discussion, concerning maximize return from social networking. What are realistic expectations? What tools do you need to get started? How do you gain customers?
The presenter for this session will be Ron Samuelson, chief executive officer of Samuelson’s Diamonds, an 87-year-old, family-owned business. The retailer’s Facebook fan page, titled simply “Diamonds,” boasts more than 300,000 fans.
We hope to see you there!
The original article is available here: National Jeweler – America’s Best Jewelers announces speaker lineup.
April 22, 2010
You Should Be Paid to Use Facebook
Have you ever seen those groups on Facebook that declare boldly, “We’re against Facebook charging for usage”? The “Petition against Facebook charging money”? Search for it, if you want; but know this: Facebook will never charge money for usage. In fact, I’d argue that they should be paying you for logging in an noodling around.
Take a look at F8: Zuckerberg, if you get past the jargon, wants to map all of the relationships on the web. Why? Because this is valuable to businesses, large and small. It is valuable to non-profits. It is valuable to governments. It is valuable to regular citizens. It is valuable to everyone.
If you want information on people’s needs, likes and habits, you need as many people as you can get. This is what you’d learn in any statistics class.
If you’ve ever tried to use a US appliance outside of the country, you also know that you need the same format to connect to the same network. Therefore, to make a map of the network of all these folks, you need them all in the same place, on the same format.
In short, they need everyone to get on Facebook.
Charging a fee for Facebook would raise the cost of entry (literally!) and mean that there are fewer people for Facebook to add to their map.
Facebook doesn’t charge because they know the value of each person they add for free will outweigh a subscription fee significantly.
So think about this: Why doesn’t Facebook pay us to use it?
April 15, 2010
Samuelson’s Diamonds and Gemvara, Ring for Spring Giveaway in National Jeweler
APRIL 15 2010: The Ring for Spring Giveaway launched through Samuelson’s Diamonds’ Diamond Fans page on Facebook, sponsored by Gemvara, was reported on today by National Jeweler:
Baltimore–Maryland retailer Samuelson’s Diamonds is constantly busy on the Facebook front, regularly adding photos of new designs and posting updates on giveaways and rare diamonds from around the world. But one of Samuelson’s latest updates might take the cake for being the retailer’s most interactive to date.
Samuelson’s Diamonds, whose Facebook fan page is simply named “Diamonds,” has partnered for a jewelry giveaway with Gemvara, an online jewelry marketplace that launched in February and allows shoppers to pick from thousands of jewelry designs and then customize the pieces to their own tastes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
This is the latest and biggest in a series of contests and giveaways that Samuelson’s Diamonds has been involved in. To customize your own ring, start here.
The original article is located here, “National Jeweler – Retailer teams up for custom Facebook giveaway“
March 19, 2010
Facebook Groups for Business Collaboration
This is David here. I’m Ron’s brother-in-law, married to his sister, Ellyn. I’ve been here at Samuelson’s Diamonds for about six years and I handle lots of the finance and marketing related issues for the company.
We’ve been talking about how video needs to be a more active element of our marketing efforts and we sat down recently with a creative video production group to put together some concepts for Samuelson’s Diamonds. As we were wrapping up our meeting – keep an eye out for some great videos next month – we brought up the idea of collaboration.
How would we effectively share our ideas with one another? I don’t know about you, but I tend to get ideas at all kinds of weird hours and in some pretty strange places. Instead of trying to keep an email chain going indefinitely and having to search Gmail or Outlook for the one email that someone forgot to “reply all” to and is now MIA, we decided to use Facebook as our tool of choice. Although Google Wave is exactly structured for this type of cooperative work, Facebook is a much better option from the standpoint of familiarity. We all know how to update, share, join, invite, etc. Nobody has to be educated or trained. We simply set up a private group, invite the people involved and start adding thoughts, content, comments and more.
Just when you thought Facebook was exclusively a place for social networking and viral marketing, turns out it can also be used for doing actual work!
February 11, 2010
Changes in Facebook – Thoughts about Social Media
For the umpteenth time since last year Facebook has changed its interface. (actually, it’s the second, I think) It seems a kind of petty thing to comment on, but given that 400 million people use Facebook, it is more interesting that you don’t see commentary on this kind of thing in the mainstream.
Facebook is free. Additionally, as a part of web 2.0, it is in a real sense ‘permanently broken’ or incomplete. Nobody really knows what we’re doing, and so things change and adapt quickly. However, a real question arises – if it is true that for instance Facebook will be launching a gmail clone – will people begin to actually rely on it for vital communications? If this is so, what will a fairly moderate interface change mean? Given that people on the web are about as vocal every day as strikers are on the day of the ‘general strike’, can a service like Facebook ignore comments? What are they to do if a change removes key functionality (such as in this case, viewing updates from a specific application or status updates alone)?
It can easily be argued that Facebook is free, and therefore, you pay for what you get. But Facebook itself does not have that attitude; that’s a ’screw you’ attitude that they’d never be caught uttering. Therefore we can assume that despite being free (on the front end, anyhow) Facebook wants to give its users the best experience possible, as though they were being paid for all of this. (They are, but not directly by us.)
What is interesting in all of this is that when I spoke to Ron, he mentioned that his iPhone app still had the same functionality. In other words, the same Facebook ‘data’ is sitting there, there is just a new ‘terminal’ we who are using the Web need to use. It makes me think that going forward we will see Facebook clients, much the way we see clients for Twitter. The difference is of course that Facebook is many times more complex! Imagine though, if you could get a Facebook client for 1.99 – Facebook gets a cut of that – over a possible group of 400 million folks?
And what about how widely used (and despised?) it is… I am reminded of everyone carping about Microsoft whenever they try to change something. Difference is, we have to accept the change on Facebook. With Microsoft at least there is a few years for us to adapt. And yet we keep using it!
Free, rich communication is valuable; just like a very generic & flexible operating system is. Maybe Facebook will give up trying to play nice and annoy us until we pay to stop the annoyance. I’ll bet they won’t lose people – where else will they go? Twitter?
Or maybe the value is like that of a huge fan page – everyone is there! How can you take credit for that?
