At this point, even the most inexperienced Web marketer is aware of the vital role that social media plays in promoting a brand on the Internet. Of course, almost everyone has a presence on at least one of the major social destinations, mainly Facebook and Twitter, but what many people seem to overlook are the seemingly endless amounts of smaller, alternative social networks at their disposal.

In addition to the "Big 5" social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Tumblr), there are a wide variety of different places that users can go to be social on the 'Net. Some of these sites are aimed at specific lifestyle markets, some provide specialized services like user reviews or checking in, and some are simply older or smaller takes on the social network platform that we all know and love.

There are obviously many ways for marketers to approach social media. It would certainly behoove everyone to make their presence felt on Facebook and Twitter, because the number of users and levels of engagment on those two sites are so astronomically high compared to their competitors, but beyond that, the sky is really the limit for companies trying to optimized their Web profiles.

This issue becomes more difficult to address when you consider the very broad defintion of "social media." For some, social networks are only those like Facebook or Myspace that are built around the idea of users having their own unique profiles, which are the focus of the site. Others define social much more loosely, referencing any site that gives users a chance to share and interact with content. Because of this, the opportunities for social media marketing are, in a way, limitless.

Local businesses probably want to seek out services like Yelp or Foursquare, which give users a chance to write reviews or check in to local shops, respectively. Companies that operate in more niche markets by offering products or services most useful to a specific group can seek out social networks that serve the interests of these unique customers. Other businesses have the opportunity to market themselves in unique ways, such as in pictures or video, by jumping on board with specialized social networks that focus on these types of content. Here's a list of some of the best social media sites on the Web today that covers all of these areas and more.

"The Big 5"

Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

Google+

Tumblr

Athletes

As someone who runs (or, in my case, has befriended runners) will tell you, it is a very social activity. This website takes the communal nature of the sport to the next level, by allowing runners to share their experiences with like-minded athletes around the world.

Athlinks

Education

The first is a great site geared mostly towards college and high school students to work together and seek help in their schoolwork without having to plagiarize or turn to the unreliable Wikipedia for answers. The second provides a network for teachers to share and get ideas.

Cramster

Teachers Recess

Music Lovers

To many users, the Web and music go hand-in-hand. One of the most popular uses of the Internet for many people is to listen to, share and discuss music with others, making it a natural move to create social networks based around the idea of, surprise, listening to, sharing and discussing music with others.

Last.fm

iLike

Finance

Everyone's always seeking financial advice and/or business information, so why not turn to the Web?

Tip'd

Jigsaw

Wesabe

Seeking Alpha

Pet Lovers

People love pets, and for those people who really love their pets, these sites offer a place to turn to get advice and share stories about their favorite four-legged creatures.

Dogster

Catster

Gamers

The classic stereotype of "gamers" is that they're all very anti-social, but with the advent of online gaming over the last decade, it has become one of the more social hobbies in which one can particpate. These sites allow users to connect with other gamers while sharing their individual accomplishments online.

Raptr

gamerDNA

Food and Cooking

Yum! This is the digital-age equivalent to your grandma sharing recipe cards with her friends.

FoodPals

BigOven

Bakespace

Artists

This popular art-hosting site has become a haven for those wanting to share their original content with the world.

deviantART

Travel

Social networks based around travel allow users to seek out information about potential destinations based on actual user feedback, which provides practical information for trip planning.

TripIt

Dopplr

TripAdvisor

Avid Readers

Another group that isn't usually seen as the particularly social, readers now have a variety of places to visit online to share with like-minded individuals about what they're reading and what they've read, as well as get recommendations for new books.

GoodReads

Shelfari

Film Buffs

Like music fans and readers, those among us obsessed with movies also love to talk about them and share ideas and recommendations, and this site allows users to do just that.

Flixster

And more!

There are plenty of other great social destinations that offer a variety of options and services for users, as well as great opportunities for marketers to spread their message on the Web.

YouTube

Friendster

MySpace

Xanga

A Small World

Pinterest

StumbleUpon

Instagram

Bebo

Foursquare

delicious

Flickr

LiveJournal

Yelp

Twitter: A Playground for Email Marketers

A recent post from the official Twitter Blog tells of how much the number of tweets has grown in the past years, minus spam. From 5,000 tweets daily in 2007, to a sudden leap to 300,000 the following year, and a huge 2.5 million messages in 2009. The bottom line today: an average of 600 tweets every second!

While there are no conclusive breakdown of figures to explain that immensity, one is left with a feeling that if the law of statistics and probably do not exclude Twitter, then this social media behemoth is indeed a rich goldmine just waiting to be tapped by savvy e-mail marketers.

With all the world using social media, it’s an easy step for e-mail marketers to integrate their campaigns with Twitter. Despite its 140-character limitation, and the low-key “thin” APIs, the elements are already in place that allows e-mail marketers to wage a successful campaign here.

* Wearing Two Marketing Hats in Twitter

Unlike traditional email campaigns, many marketers may still be in the dark of how to go about integrating email campaigns in the Twitterdom. They may scratch their heads because of the alien nature of the social media service when compared with traditional email systems.

After all, the messaging system here is a far cry from traditional email. There are short tweets instead of multi-paragraphed messages. There are text-based posts rather than graphic-rich communications. Subscriptions here are of the form of followers and following. And most importantly, messages here are sent and received in “real-time”.

The last characteristic is an important difference when conducting the marketing campaign, because it urges e-mail marketers to evolve in order to tap into Twitter’s immense customer base. The nature of communication in Twitterdom is more suited for customer relationship-building — it is active and two-way. Users participate through questions and feedbacks, contrary to emails which simply park the message on inboxes and wait for what happens. As such, marketers must learn to “listen” to customers to deliver the campaign suited for their specific preferences.

* Integrating Twitter with E-mail

E-mail marketers must go the roundabout way in the Twitterdom to conduct their campaigns. It’s all about luring customers with interesting tweets that link to email sign-ups, and emails that link to Twitter. Here are some ways to do this:

1. Create useful tweets with links to the full article’s landing page. In the landing page, there can be an option to sign up to get the full version of the information. If the information is valuable enough, Twitter followers can be made instant email subscribers in this manner.

2. Create Twitter pages for every products or services offered, for fine-grained user segmentation that allows delivery of better-targeted campaigns.

3. Dedicate an account solely for customer support, and man them with qualified personnel to handle customer questions, requests and feedbacks.

4. Promote the Twitter account on other marketing channels, for example, as a signature in e-mail campaigns, a footer in newsletters, or a website link, or by quoting customer tweets in other social media accounts.

This unique nature of real-time social media services like Twitter urges e-mail marketers to re-think their ways and perspectives in order to come up with cross-channel marketing campaigns. Failure to do so is a big loss and a denial to tap into a huge customer base all ripe for the picking.

Social Networking Is it for you?

A question I am frequently asked goes something like this, “With all the different social networking sites out there, how do I know which which is right for me, and how do I find the time to keep up with it?”

Great question! One that I am sure we’ve all asked ourselves at some point or another, right? This much is clear: If you don’t have a purpose for utilizing social media you are going to feel much like a person who has been thrown into the water and can’t swim! You are going to panic, and try to keep your head above water however you can. Not only is this scary, but it is exhausting. I would answer the above question with this question, “What is your primary reason for wanting to use social media?” Please don’t say ‘because everyone is doing it’. That is not a good reason. You need to have a well-defined reason so that you can then determine which site, or sites, you wish to spend your time on.

Here are five questions to ask yourself to help you determine which networking site(s) you want to utilize:

1. What is your *main* purpose for utilizing social media? Be specific with this question. Don’t generalize.

2. Who is your target audience?

3. What specific results will your social media efforts have on your target audience?

4. What is your comfort level with social media? Are you new to social media? Are you an intermediate user? An advanced user?

5. How much time do you want to devote to social media per day? Per week?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you can begin to explore what social networking site(s) are the best fit for you based on the answers you’ve provided.

The big three in Social Media are: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Here’s how I like to think of these:

* LinkedIn is like putting on a suit.

* Facebook is like casual Friday’s.

* Twitter is like an afterwork party or hanging out on the weekend.

Business happens on all three of these sites just as it does in the traditional workplace during the day and after hours. I use this analogy only to provide an idea of how ‘business’ or ‘casual’ the site is. I, personally, am on all three of these social networking sites. They all ‘fit’ for me. The key to finding a fit is that you will then get involved. Don’t just sign up to sign up. You *must* get involved in some fashion. Whether that is joining a group and participating, or answering questions, or tweeting about some useful information, you must be involved. Remember, people need to know, like, and trust you *before* they will consider doing business with you.

As for how much time you need to spend on these networking sites, that will really depend on your purpose and target audience (see questions 1 and 2 above). Plan on at least 30 minutes a day. Block this time off on your calendar, set a timer (here’s a really cool no-cost one: http://www.nestersoft.com/timeleft/index.shtml ) for 30 minutes, and get busy! Once the timer goes off, you are done for the day. Wasn’t that easy? Doesn’t that sound manageable? If you find you really enjoy this, do this exercise again at the end of the day. As with anything, it is all about what you find comfortable, because when it’s comfortable you’ll do it!

3 Ways To Alienate Your Peeps a.k.a.

As I put the final touches on my new report and what it means to businesses of all industries — online and offline — there are several things which have hit my inbox this week as great examples of how NOT to market your business and I want to share a few of them here.

1. I received 3 emails from someone whose list I’ve been on for well over a year and received so few communications that I completely forgot I was on her list (okay, that’s a mistake in itself, but not the one I’m focusing on). The 1st email mentioned that she’s been busy and asked how I was (that’s it…just a few words). I forget what the second was and the 3rd is to sell me a $700 program. Seriously? No contact in “forever” and then sell me a $700 program after asking how I am? There are no words.

2. Another program offer/sales page talking about how “in demand” the coach is and that she isn’t often able to include 1-on-1 time with her clients, but will for a limited time as part of a larger program (limited time and number of people not included in her sales page) and ending with how much she cares about my success and always over-delivers. There’s no doubt that she and I differ on the definition of “over-deliver.”

3. The following is an excerpt from an email sent to me yesterday (name withheld for privacy reasons): “Hi Sandra, I have been in a couple of programs recently. One at a platinum level that I still could not talk directly to my coach unless in a small group 1 hour call once per month… I am currently trying to leave a program that is not delivering what it sold and certainly not giving me the real information I need to move forward to a profitable business model.” The concerns here are obvious: 1) This individual will likely never invest in anything else offered by either of the two program hosts she’s currently involved with, 2) She may have shared her poor experiences with her friends/colleagues who will have less than overwhelming respect for the program hosts and 3) Others in the same programs are likely feeling/experiencing the same lack of happiness/results — all of which have longer term impact for the programs’ hosts.

Marketing our businesses isn’t just the promotion/launching of new programs, products and services. Or posting on social media and our blogs. Or sending out a consistent ezine.

Marketing our businesses takes places every day in every action and interaction — with current clients, former clients and acquaintances. It’s how we show up in everything we do.

In other words. . .”Ordinary things, done consistently, create extraordinary AND consistent results.”

Top Ten Reasons Your Business Should Utilize Facebook

1. There are over 400 million active Facebook users and over 50% of the users login everyday.  This means there is a huge, global audience to market your company to.

2. Facebook is a great place to distribute information about your company including events, photographs, videos, articles, blog posts as well as your business hours and contact information.

3. Social networking sites like Facebook allow you to connect with your customers on a personal level.

4. You can use the discussions feature to create surveys, ask questions and gather valuable information from your customers.

5. Having a Facebook page will give you a stronger presence with the search engines, especially with Google’s new social search function.

6. The Facebook Fan Box is a powerful tool that you can place on your blog, website, YouTube page or even your email newsletter that allows visitors to see your company’s Facebook page and even become a fan without ever leaving your site.

7. Facebook Connect allows users from a multitude of sites to access and post information to Facebook without leaving the site they are visiting, such as eBay, Etsy and all the major social bookmarking sites.  If someone sees a product they like or reads an interesting article, they can easily post it to their Facebook profiles.

8. 20 million people become fans of Facebook Pages each day and more than 1.5 million local businesses have Facebook Pages.  Your competition most likely has a Facebook page and you do not want to fall behind this important way to build your business.

9. As Facebook Mobile grows in popularity, more and more people are spending time on Facebook since they do not have to be at a computer and can access the site from anywhere in the world at anytime.

10. Facebook is growing internationally so you can easily target those in other countries and add international customers to your demographic.

Twitter 101: Tips to Get You Started

I have a confession to make: I was not an early adopter of Twitter. To be honest, I didn’t get it. I didn’t get the language. It seemed like a string of links to even more things I had no time to read. It felt overwhelming. LinkedIn and Facebook made sense as a perfect extension of networking I was already doing, but the charm of Twitter eluded me.

Sound familiar? I hear the same thing from many people, but what I discovered when I actually engaged on Twitter has turned me into a devotee. Twitter has been one of the greatest learning tools of my career.

If you are hesitant to join Twitter, you are not alone. However, I want to encourage you to give it a shot. Set up an account, follow some people and learn some things. People on Twitter are very generous with their time and knowledge. Yes, you will spend time on Twitter that you already don’t have, but you will also learn things that will make you more valuable, smarter and “in the know.” I use Twitter instead of Google for information gathering, and it has made me more productive.

Change is all around us, and the only way we can move forward is to change together and collaborate. I am still a newbie, but if I have inspired you to try, here are some tips to get you started:

1) Come up with a goal for trying Twitter. Is your goal to interact with the media or journalists? Is it to gain exposure for personal branding in your area of expertise? Is it to learn from others who are experts in their field? Or is it to increase traffic to your Web site or blog?

2) When you sign up, complete the profile as fully as possible. Add a photo, short bio, user name and real name. People want to know who you are. Your bio should reflect your goal. Make sure you include the URL for your site, blog or Facebook page.

3) There is no need to panic if you don’t have a ton of people following you. If you post good information, people will find you slowly and steadily.

4) You may have multiple goals for Twitter, feel free to have multiple accounts. At our firm we have 11 accounts and each one has a different audience and purpose.

5) Start off by sharing your knowledge. I bet you know a lot about your industry and your business. Think of Twitter as a great way to share that information. If you read something helpful, share the link on Twitter and let others benefit from your find. Generosity is a good business practice.

6) Because we are limited to 140 characters on Twitter, you will need to learn about shortening URLs. I use a site called Bit.ly because it helps me track my shortened URLs. Or you can use a web site called Hootsuite which allows you to shorten URLs, track them and manage multiple accounts. It’s kind of like the Swiss Army Knife of Twitter.

7) Learn the common abbreviations. We created a helpful postcard for our clients. Please feel free to print it for yourself.

If you read something you like on Twitter, remember to retweet it. It’s a great way to give credit to people who are putting out good information. If you want to join the conversation, use reply.

9) Follow people you already follow in other ways: Journalists you admire, comedians who make you laugh, or authors who inspire and teach.

10) Be a good community member. A good rule of thumb is to have a 4 to 1 ratio for self promotion. One self-promotional tweet to 4 that will help others or engaging in the community through reply or retweet.

7 Reasons To Love HootSuite

Twittering has progressed from a social “message burst” to a full-fledged social media tool, and more applications are being developed around its unique appeal. There’s a new player in this scenario, and it’s a hoot to use! The newest in social media, HootSuite, is pegged as a “social media dashboard”, offering a lot of valuable Twitter resources for those of us that like to Tweet a lot or have multiple accounts.

Below are the reasons why we love this great new tool:

#1 Multi-tasking is a breeze

Got two or multiple Twitter accounts? It’s much convenient to maintain these accounts without having to crack your head open. The Multi-Editing feature allows you to access and maintain your tweets in each account with easiness, and still maintain privacy of your own Twitter password. Switch back and forth or post to all of your tweets using the HootSuite dashboard and you no longer need to log in and out again!

#2 Ease in running a business

Social networking has turned in to an income-generating channel, and HootSuite has taken that into a new direction with Multiple editors. You can have a “business” Twitter account with Multiple Editors, and have someone else Tweet information as needed, perhaps have one person tweeting about sales and marketing promos, while another respond to direct messages you may receive! You can even embed your Google Adsense code to your account, and generate additional revenue!

#3 No sweat tweet scheduling

Scheduling an event, and decide on sending out tweets at various times informing people that the event is coming up? This tool makes it pretty easy to schedule using its date and time feature and send it out later. That way, you don’t have to spend all of your time tied up to the screen and tweeting every so now and then.

#4 Link shortening for optimum impact

HootSuite shortens links within the system. This amazing tool also allows you to monitor your mentions, even your RTs (tweets re-tweeted by others). Apparently, it’s like a miniature Google Analytics program for your tweets, where your tweets have metric value!

#5 Light and not hard on your computer’s memory

HootSuite won’t affect the performance and speed of the computer since it’s online based. A very much similar applications like TweetDeck eats up a huge deal of processing time on the hard drive.

#6 Saved keywords

This great tool allows you to save some of those keyword searches and recover them at the click of a button. No more searching or deciding on the keywords to join in a trend or continue one, as you can have them accessed with ease.

#7 Fantastic navigation

The HootSuite dashboard is set up with ease in mind similar to the Twitter homepage and easily tabbed. Tabs like “Home”, “@Replies”, “DM’s”, and the like make it a no brainer to use. The display lets you look at information appropriate for a certain account, including keyword monitoring, direct messages, and Groups.

5 Important Reasons Why You Should Not Miss Out On A Great, Free Squidoo Lens For Your Business

There are many excellent ways to market your website online but one often overlooked, free facility, is the creation of a Squidoo lens.

A Squidoo lens is for all intents and purposes a free website page hosted on the Squidoo website, enabling you to create and edit content of your choice utilizing various excellent editing modules. This content can be an overview of your business or may be the promotion of a specific product or service.

If you are unsure of the value to your business of creating this type of page or lens, run through the 5 important points below outlining why:

1. Your Squidoo page is permitted to have links pointing back to your business website which as we know can offer huge SEO benefits. These links are dofollow links, in other words they allow the search engine robots to follow the link to your website, as opposed to a nofollow link which doesn’t permit search engine robots to follow the link.

Therefore the dofollow links are of more value.

2. Due to the fact that the Squidoo website is such a highly ranked, large site, quite often you can find that your Squidoo lens can actually rank higher than your own website, especially if your website is new or not very well optimized. And it goes without saying, that the more time your Squidoo lens is online at higher the search engines will rank it.

3. There are some excellent editing tools available when creating your lens and they are extremely easy to use. These editing tools known as modules and you can find a module for pretty much anything you would want to include in your lens, including adding music, graphics, video, links, large text and lots more.

4. The Squidoo site is incredibly easy for even a web novice to create great content and is also visually excellent. You can select a template with colour to suit your company branding.

5. If at a later date you would like to return to your lens to add further content, this is a very easy process. You can also create further lenses on other subjects, which for your marketing campaign can only be great news.

So there you have it, my 5 great reasons why it would be crazy to not take full advantage of this free and excellent marketing service. I really like the Squidoo website as it has a very user friendly feel about it. I think the creators have done a first class job in putting together a very helpful and informative website.

Have a look and make your own decision but remember, this service won’t cost you anything and in this day and age, you can’t grumble about totally free online marketing.

Would Jesus have tweeted?

With all this social media around I have asked myself if Jesus would have tweeted: “Performed miracle at Cana wedding. Guests thirsty and restless. Asked mum to fetch more water”, or “Cranking out a few parables after lunch with Stephen Fry”?

Recently, the Pope was in Britain and warned of “aggressive secularism. Meanwhile, the Vatican has launched www.pope2you.net, linked to Facebook and an iPhone App. Recently I have become extremely bored with Mashable and TechCruch stories on iPhone apps and decided to turn my attention to the effects social media, in particular, and the internet in general are having on our lives

One such article suggested that humankind is in the midst of a radical and unprecedented transmutation of its collective society, such as in debilitating disparity between rich and poor, globalised economic insecurity and a species-threatening ecological crisis. Perhaps.

Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry on The Ten Commandments in the televised Intelligence Squared debate asked how “the Galilean carpenter” would feel about the wealth of the church, attacked its hierarchy and the “twisted, neurotic and hysterical way its leaders are chosen”, while Ann Widdecombe led to the familiar story of Moses and how he came to write down the ten basic rules passed to him by God. With social media so dominant in our society, would that have been posted on Facebook, one wonders.

A friend of a friend, Simon Critchley, recounts in his book The Book of Dead Philosophers that Voltaire, after decades of denouncing the Roman Catholic Church, announced on his deathbed that he wanted to die a catholic, while Heraclitus, who believed that everything was in a state of flux, died, according to one account, of drowning in cow dung.

He goes further to suggest that philosopher Francis Bacon, the great champion of empirical method, died of his own philosophy: in an effort to observe the effects of refrigeration on a freezing cold day, he stuffed a chicken with snow and caught pneumonia. Then we have Julien Offray de La Mettrie, atheist and hedonist, who died after eating large amounts of truffled pâté and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who saw life and death as part of the same timelessness, died the day after his birthday after a friend had given him an electric blanket as a present. “Many happy returns,” the friend said. “There will be no returns,” Wittgenstein gaily replied.

Our consciousness seems to have manifested itself, almost exclusively, on the narrowed values of competition, individualism and externalised success, and the West’s collective rationale has now been set on individualism and materialism that has been grossly overemphasised and reinforced.

When you look at the casino culture of our ruthlessly unregulated financial institutions, they remain tied to our paradigms of separation and competition. Politically and economically, these values stretch institutional ambition beyond traditional borders as we are now witnessing with the emergence of China and India.

But back to basics: Copernicus was credited with contributing the first comprehensive cosmology that replaced the Earth with the Sun as the centre of our system of revolving planetary bodies; Galileo furthered the popularity of Copernican astronomy with observable proof via telescopic advances; Kepler began constructing a bridge between astronomy and the laws of physics that was completed by the work of Newton. Their proven assumptions required cultural adaptation of religious ideology.

However, the once mighty Catholic Church shunned and silenced such discoveries; and these days the religious seem to have taken it upon themselves to have a mightier voice than that of Darwinian biology, and other geneticists, at a time when these ideas were instrumental in bridging a material view of the cosmos with a secular view of nature and evolution.

Maybe Jesus’ followers would, beyond doubt, have retweeted the words, “He’s the one who made it possible to have direct contact with God. We don’t need a middle man,” and restricted the last part of the phrase for lack of character space. Well, the bankers may have come out in revolt over that but I’m sure history has shown us that we only reorient institutions and practices that mirror our assumptions and shifting values of the interconnectedness of digital cooperation.

Postmodernism tends to be a loose composite in all this and is influenced by scientific studies and personal observations that seem to suggest experience is subjective. Similarly, deconstructionists point out the fallacies of objectified or rational truth and the limitations of reductionism.

Or, to use Mr Critchley’s account in On Heidegger’s Being and Time, we should see this as a radicalisation of Husserl’s phenomenology, particularly his theories of intentionality, categorial intuition and the phenomenological concept of the a priori, if you get my drift. Philosophers do indeed die in the strangest of circumstances, as the entire idea of searching for “truth” is in itself now an existential.

But to get back to the point, “Would Jesus have tweeted?” I rather suspect he would have or Barack Obama would have been tweeted beforehand: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time.”

5 Reasons You Should Use LinkedIn Groups for Business Social Networking

Today, social media networks allow business professionals to network like they never have before. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter allow business professionals to connect with people within their industry from all over the world. Social networking sites not only allow professionals to expand their contacts faster than ever before, but it also lets them share news, tips and tools of the trade in seconds.

LinkedIn currently has over 75 million professionals who are actively participating on the site today. The site includes many features such as allowing users to upload their full resume, updating their status to let the world know what projects they are currently working on and participating in group discussions. Many LinkedIn users take advantage of these features, but there are still some that aren’t sure how to make the most out of them.

LinkedIn groups are a great way to interact with other professionals in your field by sharing information and building contacts in other parts of the world. Although joining many groups can make you look more important and connected, it can also be overwhelming to maintain. Aren’t sure how to use LinkedIn groups?

Here are 5 tips for getting the most out of groups, provided by the LinkedIn blog.

1. Make a commitment to a few groups that focus on your greatest professional interests

LinkedIn allows business professionals to network and collaborate with others that they may have never spoken to otherwise. If you haven’t joined any groups yet, pick a couple that spark your professional interest and jump right into the conversation. According to LinkedIn, many of the most active members find that their participation in the right groups “directly enriches what they do at work.”

2. Post news on group discussions

One of the easiest ways to start participating in groups is to post current news and ask an open-ended question. This will start a conversation and you will be able to see what stance your fellow professionals take on the issue. Expressing your opinion on a certain news piece will give you a chance to show others your professional expertise. This will boost your credibility and increase your chances of making useful professional connections. To find material, subscribe to industry-related newsletters, RSS feeds, Facebook feeds, company blog or Twitter.

3. Take advantage of the “Following” tool

Groups make social networking online easy by giving professionals a great way to keep track of which news stories their colleagues think are interesting and what they have on their minds. To keep up with all the current information, subscribe to the digest emails that summarize the activity of a group. Also use the “Following” tool to watch specific discussions that interest you. This will allow you to sit back and observe then jump in the conversation when you feel you have something provocative to contribute.

4. Get your coworkers involved

Why not create your own LinkedIn group and invite some of your trusted coworkers, clients and/or customers to join? You already discuss your professional interests with them which make them the perfect people to collaborate and network with on LinkedIn. Once other professionals see the intelligent discussions you are having, they’ll want to join the group too and you’ll be able to engage in a broader collaboration than you ever felt possible.

5. Learn more about the professionals on LinkedIn

Make sure to click through the profiles of your fellow group members to spark conversations about what they’re currently working on. As your relationship and conversation grows, you can invite them to become a professional connection. The more connections you make, the more chances you have to expand your business and learn from others in your industry.

LinkedIn groups are a powerful way to reach out to others in your field, get noticed and improve and grow your professional network. Groups also allow you to discuss important issues with others and collaborate with other professionals. Best of all, they are completely free to join, which means you can start online networking with LinkedIn groups today.

The Most Common Traits Of Social Networking Sites

With the development and frequent use of internet, more and people are keeping in touch with one another. Not just keeping in touch with current friends but making new ones from others with common interests and views. Because of this, social networking sites like Youtube, MySpace, Hello Hello, Friendster and Facebook have increased exponentially.

Within each of those sites, there are different niches. Niches as in online communities with common passion be it business, hobbies, political views, religion, sex just to name a few. Each niche allows you to post blogs, comments, photos and videos. The same goes for your friends and anyone whom you accepted as friends.

Signing up for social networking sites is easy. Simply fill up the eapplication form and answer a few questions. Such as your name, age, gender, profile, user name and password. It is not compulsory but highly recommended that you upload your photo so that people will know they are communicating with the real person rather than someone hiding behind the PC screen.

When you are done, you get opt for your profile visibility. You can choose to let everyone or just your friends to see everything. Most social networking sites will respect your decision whichever that may be.

Once you hit the enter or submit button, your profile will be seen by people from all over the world and your list of contacts will grow. Some are people you already know while others are people you do not know but have the right whether to accept their friend request or no.

However not all social networking sites started that way. One good example is Classmates which is specially set up to help you locate your classmates from secondary school and college.

To outdo one another, each social networking site developer have to come up with new features and benefits quickly. Some of those include blogging, community niches, mobile interactions, RSS feeds, social gaming networks etc.

It is not compulsory for you to join all social networking site available. Just 1 to 3 popular ones will do. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are great examples.

Despite all the hype and popularity, the one thing that most social networking sites cannot totally control is privacy of users. This is especially when they meet people who are not really whom they claimed to be online and ended up as victims in either money scams and rape scandals.

Lottery and Nigerian scams as well as guys luring gals out under the pretext of dating and friendship but ended up raping them are the most common incidents that emerged over the years.

These are the common traits of most social networking sites no matter how established and popular they are. What distinguishes them is their target audience and features that eventually persuaded you to sign up as their member.

Still social networking sites is the easiest and fastest way to make friends in different parts of the world. You no longer can share interesting experiences or things you like with them and they are great places to drive traffic to your sites since their accounts are usually free and more and more people signing up.

You can find out more about social networking sites via Google search and your friends who have been on some of those sites. But whichever your choice, the best way is to join them first which are usually free. That way, it will be much easier to determine which ones work best.

Social Networking: Is it for you?

A question I am frequently asked goes something like this, “With all the different social networking sites out there, how do I know which which is right for me, and how do I find the time to keep up with it?”

Great question! One that I am sure we’ve all asked ourselves at some point or another, right? This much is clear: If you don’t have a purpose for utilizing social media you are going to feel much like a person who has been thrown into the water and can’t swim! You are going to panic, and try to keep your head above water however you can. Not only is this scary, but it is exhausting. I would answer the above question with this question, “What is your primary reason for wanting to use social media?” Please don’t say ‘because everyone is doing it’. That is not a good reason. You need to have a well-defined reason so that you can then determine which site, or sites, you wish to spend your time on.

Here are five questions to ask yourself to help you determine which networking site(s) you want to utilize:

1) What is your “main” purpose for utilizing social media? Be specific with this question. Don’t generalize.

2) Who is your target audience?

3) What specific results will your social media efforts have on your target audience?

4) What is your comfort level with social media? Are you new to social media? Are you an intermediate user? An advanced user?

5) How much time do you want to devote to social media per day? Per week?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you can begin to explore what social networking site(s) are the best fit for you based on the answers you’ve provided.

The big three in Social Media are: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Here’s how I like to think of these:

- LinkedIn is like putting on a suit.

- Facebook is like casual Friday’s.

- Twitter is like an afterwork party or hanging out on the weekend.

Business happens on all three of these sites just as it does in the traditional workplace during the day and after hours. I use this analogy only to provide an idea of how ‘business’ or ‘casual’ the site is. I, personally, am on all three of these social networking sites. They all ‘fit’ for me. The key to finding a fit is that you will then get involved. Don’t just sign up to sign up. You *must* get involved in some fashion. Whether that is joining a group and participating, or answering questions, or tweeting about some useful information, you must be involved. Remember, people need to know, like, and trust you “before” they will consider doing business with you.

As for how much time you need to spend on these networking sites, that will really depend on your purpose and target audience (see questions 1 and 2 above). Plan on at least 30 minutes a day. Block this time off on your calendar, set a timer (here’s a really cool no-cost one: http://www.nestersoft.com/timeleft/index.shtml ) for 30 minutes, and get busy! Once the timer goes off, you are done for the day. Wasn’t that easy? Doesn’t that sound manageable? If you find you really enjoy this, do this exercise again at the end of the day. As with anything, it is all about what you find comfortable, because when it’s comfortable you’ll do it!

What to Expect from Web 3.0

The buzz is growing about Web 3.0, but as usual you have to
filter out all the hype, self-serving PR, old-fashioned
nonsense, newfangled marketing verbiage and other noise. You
will then find a few facts that you can grab onto and try to
figure out what’s going on. The first thing to remember is that,
like “Web 2.0,” the term Web 3.0 is not an official term of any
sort, does not represent any particular protocol or standard,
belongs to no one – and is used, misused and made nearly
meaningless by everyone. It is, quite simply, just an arbitrary
“version number” that, at most, describes how the Internet is
built and how it delivers services, at least as of the
freeze-framed moment in time that represents the end of 2.0 and
the start of 3.0.

Sometimes it is called the “semantic Web,” but perhaps the
less-used term “everyware” is more descriptive. The new scenario
is one of ubiquitous computing, the advent of cloud computing
where a “thin client” (no- or low-powered PC, or even just a
monitor and mouse) runs cloud-based applications using
cloud-based data and services. The Apple iPhone, iPod and iPad
are all examples of formerly standalone devices that were
integrated into the Web, and connect people in a seamless,
real-time and very simple way with – well, with everything, from
libraries and department stores to other people, anywhere in the
world.

From Read-Only to Interactivity

One of the Web’s true “parents” was Tim Berners-Lee, who had his
own notion of how the technology and the Internet developed. The
first phase of the Web had read-only capabilities. It was
essentially a spectator experience until read-write
functionality came along (sure, call it Web 2.0) that included
services to enable contribution, collaboration, content creation
and interactivity. The next step in Berners-Lee’s version
vision, Web 3.0, is heralded as “new territory,” where users can
assemble and run their own applications, create all sorts of
cooperative and collaborative enterprises, and truly put their
ideas in motion rather than simply uploading stuff to this, that
or the other site.

People with money invested in other, still-useful devices -
phones, PDAs, fax machines, etc. – don’t have to worry about Web
3.0 making them obsolete. In addition to letting users create
their own tools, Web 3.0 is another step in the evolution of
usage and interaction in which the Internet holds multiple
databases and content that will be accessible to many
non-browser-based devices and applications. The obvious uses
will be video that streams from a PC to a TV, picture frames
that receive wireless updates from an online or local photo app,
and phones that display items recommended by your trusted
sources – friends, review sites, experts – when you’re shopping.

From Data to Knowledge

In addition to the foregoing characteristics, Web 3.0 is also
said to encompass other important advances. For one thing, all
sorts of inputs are possible, which means all sorts of new
combinations become possible. Content can be made even more
broadly relevant when it’s related to GPS, so that social
networking, for example, can be enhanced by knowing who is
where and doing what.

More importantly, you will get more and better control of your
data and be able to establish a number of personalization
systems to “wrap” your personal information with different
levels and types of protection – so that you can share it
widely, narrowly or not at all. Over time, the accuracy of
recommendations and trustworthiness of ranking systems will help
us determine which data sources to take seriously and which to
avoid.

From Business Faxes to Online Games

With the rise of “linkable web apps” you will be able to use all
of your different desktop, server and mobile devices and
applications – telephones, fax machines and online fax services,
instant messaging, pagers – and control them from a single
browser window on your desktop, smartphone or handheld device.
All of it will take place in an always-on, always-everywhere
environment, with functionality embedded sometimes in hardware,
sometimes in software, sometimes in both – so that when you need
to take care of business without downloading the capability,
you’ll be able to do so.

Along with more of the visual and voice-based services that are
already starting to proliferate, there will be more lifelike
avatar interactions in the growing virtual social networking
world. This will lead to social shopping trips and virtual
reality gaming far beyond anything currently being done.

In mid-2009, the “Wall Street Journal” ran a story on the
development of Web 3.0 capabilities and the promise of
ever-greater interconnectedness among technologies, products,
services and people. The story even gave us a yardstick by which
to measure the success of Web 3.0, if in fact it does succeed.
If, as the WSJ puts it, “computing could become as integrated
and invisible as electricity and just as important” – and we can
attribute it to the new and improved Web – we’ll know that the
promise has lived up to the hype. Here’s hoping!

LinkedIn – Best Practices For You and Your Business

LinkedIn is a professional, business networking tool that is too
easily lumped into the social networking service. Even though
many of the same modes of operation are employed, the focus is
on professionals, professional dialog, professional
opportunities, and companies.

This list of LinkedIn best practices was compiled from my work
with clients, colleagues and friends who are trying to maximize
their professional opportunities. I hope it is also helpful for
you.

Get LinkedIn
If you are working, you need to be LinkedIn. If you are not
working, you really need to be LinkedIn (however, it would have
been better to be LinkedIn when you had a job). If you are a
college student, you need to be LinkedIn. The president of the
United States is LinkedIn… just do it.

Add Your Picture
A photograph not only personalizes your profile, it completes
it. Even though LinkedIn may no longer use a faceless silhouette
like other social sites, as shown here, you must keep in mind
that this profile is about you, put a face on it.

Finish Your Profile
If you are currently using LinkedIn, or at a minimum signed up
for it, finish your profile. Your profile should display 100%
Complete. If not, LinkedIn makes it easy with a profile wizard.
Typically, you can click on anything green and the wizard
recommends ways to increase your profile completeness. It will
suggest things to do like; write a recommendation, request a
recommendation, add more people, add another job, add
educational info, etc. The wizard helps get you to a point of
basic critical mass; displaying your completed profile
(education & job information) and about 20 connections.

Personalize Your LinkedIin URL

Which looks better to you?

Linkedin.com/pub/coco-design/4/74b/8b3

- or -

Linkedin.com/in/CocoDesign

Of course the second one is more marketable, more professional,
and easier to remember. More importantly, you need to get your
personalized LinkedIn URL before someone else, with a similar
name, gets it first.

Now that you have a personalized URL, add it to your business
email signature so that everyone who gets an email from you -

1) knows you are using LinkedIn,
2) can request to connect to you, and
3) learns about your capabilities when they review your profile.

Answer Questions
This is a great way to build credibility and expertise points.
When you answer a question on LinkedIn, the person who asked the
question can mark the best answer. The more “best answers” you
have, the more expertise credit you receive in your profile.
This is also a great way to connect with people of similar
interests or issues.

Asking questions is a good way to receive help from other
industry experts and colleagues. It is also good for informal
polling. Just do not make it a sales promotion. You will chase
people away.

Ask Others if They Use LinkedIn
When you meet someone that you would like to maintain a
professional connection with, ask them if they are using
LinkedIn and if the would mind if you sent a connection request.
This is generally a good question after trading business cards.

Grow Your Connections
Once you have your account to 100% with 20+ connections, you
will have created a little momentum. To help keep that going,
review your connections’ connections. Chances are you will know
a few of those people. Then each time someone connects with you
take a quick look at their connections… you may find one or
two that you have a relationship with as well. Send a link
request.

Important – Do NOT send invites to people you do not truly have
a relationship with. If you receive too many “I don’t know
this person” clicks on your request, you will be required to
know everyone’s email address to request a connection in the
future. Bad juju.

Give and Get Recommendations
LinkedIn is like a living, online professional resume/vita. What
makes LinkedIn better than a resume that says, “References
available upon request”, is that references are displayed for
all to see. These recommendations are written in the words of
the sender, you cannot edit them. If there is a problem with a
recommendation, you can easily request a revision or choose not
to display it. Note: you can only request a recommendation from
someone who is currently using LinkedIn.

Outbound Links
Your profile allows you to have three outbound links with labels
like “My Company”, “My Website”, “My Blog”, etc. I
recommend you change the label to “Other” for all three since
you can add personalized keywords to the label enhancing the SEO
for the target sites. For example, I could link to this article
with the label text “LinkedIn Best Practices Article” to help
with my search engine rankings for that keyword phrase. You can
also use the “Other” label for Facebook & Twitter links.

Join Groups
By joining Industry and interest-related groups you are
connected with a larger group of professionals within that
sector. This makes it easier for you to invite others in the
same group to connect without the need for knowing their email
address. Again, you need to be careful here. Unsolicited
invitations could get you hit with a few “I don’t know this
person” clicks.

Jobs Area
The jobs area is not only for people looking for work. It is
also an excellent place for businesses to list job
opportunities. Our small company does not use Monster, Career
Builder, Ladders, etc.; it would simply be too overwhelming.
When we are looking for someone, we only use LinkedIn Jobs. Not
only can I review the person’s professional profile and
associations, we can get an idea of how closely we are
connected. Job postings can be sent directly to people in your
list of contacts and they usually have good recommendations for
potential candidates.

LinkedIn Company
If you are a business owner add your company to the Company’s
area. If your company is already listed, make sure the
information is accurate and up to date.

Install the Toolbars
LinkedIn has both a browser toolbar and an Outlook toolbar. The
former works well with Gmail, with both IE & Firefox and, of
course, the latter works with Microsoft Outlook. The toolbars add
a LinkedIn icon next to a person’s email addresses in your
mailbox. This enables you to see their profile information and
makes it easier to send an invitation to connect.

Givers Gain
Bottom line, the more you give the more you get back. The more
information you share about yourself, the better the search
feature will return you or your company as a result. The more
recommendations you give, the more likely someone is to give you
one. The more questions you ask or answer the more likely you
are to connect with people of similar interests that you may
never have had the opportunity to meet.

Dummies Guide to Facebook Marketing

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 4
years, you know how popular and widely used Facebook
is today.

Just a couple of years ago, you had to relentlessly
encourage your family and friends to join this social
networking website (shortly after others had convinced you
to join). Nowadays, it’s rare to find someone who hasn’t
got a Facebook account.

At last count, there were over 350 million users on
Facebook and this number is continuing to grow. It overtook
MySpace as the number 1 social networking website on the
planet last year and is just behind Google when it comes to
online traffic. You can then understand how important
Facebook marketing has become for websites everywhere.

It’s Not A Pitch Zone

The most important thing to remember about social media is
that it is not a place to blatantly and endlessly pitch
your product or service. If you do this, then you will not
get any favors from social media users, will get
largely ignored and even receive bad reviews.

Social media is actually used for building relationships
with potential clients in the market. There are a number of
ways you can do this:

- you can post helpful information (links) that helps
them solve a problem.

- you can personally chat with them to assist them.

- you can create content addressing the needs of users
and post it.

The bottom line is that you want to be seen as genuine and
helpful. This way, word can get out that you’re the real
deal and before you know it, people will become interested
in what you have to offer in terms of products and services.

Of course, the things you share on social networking sites
such as Facebook shouldn’t be the nitty gritty stuff that
you have to offer. You should share helpful information in
the form of teasers that will interest people enough to ask
and wonder if there’s more. Offering free stuff is great
for getting attention too.

How To Market On Facebook

The great thing about Facebook is that from the outset, it
has encouraged all users to use the website as a means of
sharing information and marketing whatever they please. As
a result, it has developed many ways for users to do this.
You are not obliged to use every single one of them, but a
combination of them can only improve your Facebook
marketing.

Pages

This is probably THE marketing tool out there on Facebook.
On its website Facebook describes Pages as “a public
Profile that enables you to share your business and
products with Facebook users.” It is specifically designed
for promoting a business and everything it has to offer.
People can then become a Fan of your page and when they do
this, they let their friends know that they’ve become a Fan
of your page via their News Feed. The potential for your
Page to gain a lot of popularity in a small period of time
is great.

Of course, it’s all dependent on the content you give out
for people to use. You need to show them a reason to become
a Fan of your Page as well as a reason for staying on.

Events

Create events to be held at a certain date and time.
Depending on your type of business, you can create one for
a local or international audience. It can be any one of the
following:

- seminar: It should be introductory and free but you
could promote a paid one too.

- webinar: A seminar conducted online which anyone in the
world can join.

- product/service launch: If you are about to launch a
product or service, this is a way to gain attention.

The best part about creating an event on Facebook is that
it can go viral, and before you know it, people will be
attending your event in droves.

Advertising

Finally, about a year ago, Facebook introduced an
advertising service where people can put ads promoting
their website or their Facebook Page and they pay per click
(PPC) or impression (CPM). It works in a similar way to
Google Adwords.

You can target your ads to certain geographical locations
but in addition, given the nature of Facebook, you can
attach your ads to social actions. For example, if you were
a wedding photographer and wanted to promote your services,
your ads could be set up to appear only to females between
the ages of 24 and 30 and whose relationship statuses
indicate they are engaged.

It must be noted, however, that Facebook Advertising is
still in beta mode which means that it will only improve
in the near future.

Embrace Facebook

If you want to market your website online, you would be
absolutely nuts not to use Facebook marketing as one of
your key strategies. Just be careful not to get caught up
in it too much because it can become a very time consuming
activity.

Building Brand Identity – Marketing With Twitter

Twitter, the net’s networking success story, is intriguing and
intimidating because of its message limitations: they can be 140
characters, and no more.

This is to say; each message sent on Twitter can be no larger
than the previous sentence. Not an additional letter, space,
period or dash can be added. These limitations have proven to be
the greatest asset and the greatest challenge for people trying
to use Twitter for any number of purposes.

On the advantageous side, the short messages have created an
entire culture of Twitter-fluent writers. The brevity of the
message stretches creative muscles, making people use every trick
to get the most information into the fewest characters. On the
other hand it creates a severe headache for the marketing minded,
as it doesn’t leave much room to present a case. Thus the vast
majority of Tweets are short little social comments or updates,
and most marketing revolves around calling attention to
particular links.

Of course, there are always ways around limitations, and Twitter
is something that every seriously market-minded organization
needs to embrace in order to see continued success on the web. In
the case of short message services like Twitter, the key lies as
much in the peripheral data that builds up around the message as
in the content itself.

Be SEO Minded

Twitter profiles are now ranked by search engines, Google in
particular. Every SEO technique you’ve learned now has a new,
exciting purpose.

For example, consider the biography you’re able to construct
using Twitter. This is a ripe opportunity to develop some brand
recognition right away. Put the title of the brand you’re
marketing in the bio, and consider including the most relevant
keywords in your profile. As ever, do so in a way that respects
the user’s intelligence, and gives them something worth reading.
Simply stringing together a chain of keywords is not the way to
go.

Include keywords in your Tweets as well, taking care not to be
terribly obvious about it. The first 20-30 characters are the
best place, as later words are of decreased importance in a
Google ranking search.

Identify Your Audience

Each brand rises and falls on the whim of the audience, known in
this case as tweeple.

There are a number of applications available to help you with the
process of identifying the tweeple that you want to cultivate
into an audience. Twitterholic (http://twitaholic.com/) can help
you identify the movers and shakers based on their Twitter
traffic and their location. If you know your field or brand
well, you can use this to locate groups with similar interests
and woo them to your feed. Tweepz (http://www.tweepz.com/) is a
similar tool, focusing on location, and Twitter itself has a
‘near this location’ feature that can be used to identify
tweeple nearby your center of business.

Let’s Give Them Something to Tweet About

Yes, Twitter is an effective way to quickly distribute
information. But its real power is in its ability to create
conversations about something interesting.

In theory you could simply gather up a large user list of tweeple
and start spamming them with links promoting your latest gig.
This is a surefire way to get flagged for abuse or ignored
entirely, and thus is rather counterproductive to good marketing
goals.

Instead, consider using alternative methods to drum up those
conversations that travel like wildfire.

For example, there is the technique of Alternate Reality Gaming.
This is a phenomenon based on the idea of taking ‘real’ events
and building a game out of them. Last Call Poker was an ARG that
intended to drum up sales for an upcoming video game, GUN.

LCP spread out information about gatherings, online incentives,
and other attractions to get people excited about the western
theme of the game. Tokens such as poker chips and other goodies
were given out at these events, and GUN went on to have a very
successful launch. People were invited into the world of the
western, and the chatter eventually included 8 million
participants.

This kind of rogue advertising is tailor-made to work with
Twitter. Locations and dates can easily fall within the 140
character limitation, as can short explanations. Consider
creating an ARG with a short story designed to work within 140
characters, locate an audience with the assorted Twitter tools at
your disposal, and plan some exciting events to promote your
brand. The chance to get involved always gets people talking, and
the more esoteric games can span entire continents.

There are other methods, some more appropriate to each individual
brand. Perhaps a modest bicycling business isn’t suited to
promote a large ARG experience. They could, however, organize a
bicycling flash mob by hopping onto the local bike hobbyist
twitter feed and posting a date and time. The trick is less which
technique you use, and more that you do your best to make it
relevant. As always, strong content and clear presentation will
win out over gimmicks and sales speak.

Also, consider one last thought. The introductory statements of
each section in this article are Twitter compatible, and so is
this one. Good luck and happy Tweeting.

Top 10 Tips for Using Twitter

When it comes to social media, no one “gets it” as well
as Twitter. According to Econsultancy, as of Jan 2010,
Twitter has 75 million user accounts, with about 15
million of that total being active users. See
http://tinyurl.com/yetgcru . That’s a lot of people
sending a lot of Tweets. This micro-blogging service
makes it easy for small businesses and entrepreneurs
to stay in touch with those who choose to follow them,
and stay updated on new products, services, special
offers, industry news and more. It’s a win-win for
both the Tweeter, and their followers.

When it comes to using Twitter, there’s a right way and
a wrong way to use it. Your messages must be kept short,
under 140 characters, and they need to be helpful or
informative. Don’t carry on about what you ate for
breakfast, or the fact that you just brushed your teeth.
People will unfollow you faster than they can hit
the button, even if you do have good oral habits.

I’ve been using Twitter for a long time now and here’s
what I’ve found works best when participating in this
close knit community of few words.

1) Regular Postings: Now I’m not saying you need to post
every day, although that would be nice. You do need to
make an appearance on a regular basis. It’s like school -
you need to show up to pass. Be a contributor that your
followers get to really know and look forward to your
Tweets. If you’re the type of person who needs to plan
ahead, you can always use a service that allows you to
schedule tweets in advance, such as

http://www.socialoomph.com/

2) Retweet: If you see Tweets posted by other users that
you think your followers would like, then retweet them. It
only takes one click, and you’ll also be creating goodwill
with other Twitter users at the same time. If you’d like,
you can add a personal thought or comment before sending
it. Also, make it easy for others to retweet your posts
by adding RT buttons to your website or blog. It’s easy
with http://tweetmeme.com/about/retweet_button

3) Be Helpful: Keep in mind Twitter is a form of social
Media, so social interaction is key. It’s not all about
you. Whenever an opportunity arises to answer a question,
participate in a survey, or help solve a problem, do so.
In this way you’re participating in the community. This
also will help your brand and image when others know
they can count on you for support or feedback.

4) Don’t Be A Follow CopyCat: Don’t follow everyone who
follows you. This is probably my biggest pet peeve when
it comes to Twitter. So many people turn this feature on
to auto follow those who follow them. Why would you
want to do this? I’d prefer that those I follow are
people and topics I’ve hand-selected that interest me,
and not a mish-mash of followers who may be ranting
about things I have no interest in. Be selective in
who you follow or your Twitter stream could quickly
fill up with junk or spam. For quality people to
follow, see – http://followontwitterlists.com/

5) What to Tweet: Make sure that the tweets you post
are helpful and/or informative. Late breaking news
pertaining to your industry, as well as any specials or sales
you may have going on are always good topics. If you
find something you think your followers would like,
especially if it’s free or a bargain, share the love.
Plus, if your tweets are good, it will encourage others
to retweet them. For ideas see -

http://www.artbizblog.com/2009/07/what-to-tweet.html

6) Comment: Particpate in the community by commenting
on other people’s tweets. If you can answer a question,
do so. It never hurts and people really will appreciate
it when you take the time to comment on what they  have
to say. It lets them know that others are actually
listening to what they have to say in the “Twitterverse”.

7) Say Thank You: When someone takes the time to retweet
one of your tweets, make sure to reply to them with a
“thank you”. Manners rule online as well as off, and
they’ll like the fact that you noticed the retweet
and took the time to show some gratitude. It may even
inspire them to retweet more of your tweets in the
future.

Be Personal: Again, I don’t need to know what you
ate for dinner, but every now and then you should show
your human side with a creative thought, quote, or
other statement. Let people know you’re “real” and
not just a lean mean business machine. You want to
tread lightly in this area. Too personal is overkill,
but a little can help in establishing a connection with
your followers.

9) Post Pictures/Video: Remember, Twitter is not just
for text. It’s easy to post short videos, and pictures
too. It’s nice to mix it up a little and share content
in other formats as well. Here are some resources

http://freenuts.com/video-sharing-websites-for-twitter/

10) Talk About More Than Yourself: It’s not all about
you, so please don’t make all your tweets one big marketing
message, such as only tweeting about your latest press
release, blog posting, or article that was published. No one
will want to follow you if you’re one big commercial. Yes,
some of this is fine in moderation, but you need to walk
a fine line and mix it up with other helpful, interesting
topics.

Now it’s time to start putting these tips into action.
Social media is all about participating and listening
to what others have to say. It’s all about creating and
sharing information and becoming part of the community.
If you approach Twitter in this fashion, you’ll not
only have a lot more fun, but your followers will like
and respect you – and if that doesn’t strengthen your
brand, nothing will.

Twitter: Followers, Niches, and Myths

Twitter has certainly emerged as one of the most popular
social networking/blogging platforms of the past few years.
There are various reasons why Twitter has become so wildly
popular. It is a simple concept where brief messages can be
sent to loyal followers. This is why Twitter is so helpful
to small businesses. It can aid in promoting a business in
the most cost effective manner. Really, this is one of the
very best systems for promoting updates, info, and deals to
the followers of the Twitter account.

The one problem here is that most entrepreneurs look towards
quantity as opposed to quality in their followers. This can
prove to be a huge mistake since you never want to sacrifice
quality when looking to amass Twitter followers.

How do people make such a mistake? Well, they look at
volume as being the secret to their success. The problem
here is that the process is not going to be a very
successful one. Rather, it can prove to be disastrous more
than anything else because your business ends up promoting
itself to those that are really not interested in the
products or services you are offering.

Yes, some people will sign on to be followers of your
Twitter account with no real interest in being customers.
That is why you need to develop a strong niche following
as opposed to a large following.

The bottom line here is you do NOT want a large list of
followers. You want an EFFECTIVE list of followers.

Some may consider this notion to go against the grain in
which a Twitter account should be approached. After all,
Twitter is wildly popular so why not follow the trends? The
average Twitter account has changed dramatically since
July. The number of followers the average account maintains
has jumped from 70 to 300. This has led many accounts to
increase their number of postings. In July, the number was
in the range of 119. Today, it has jumped significantly to
420.

But, is there a great deal of benefit from such increases?
In all honesty, if the followers are not going to purchase,
the numbers do not really mean much. That means all those
increases in updates have less value as well. Again, you
want your efforts to be effective. Promoting volume in your
approach is not the way to achieve any true level of
success.

One problem with a large number of followers is that your
tweets need to be adjusted to handle larger volumes. That
means your tweets need to be clearly understood by all. As
such, you need to promote a generalized approach to the
tweets. This is not always the best method because you are
not providing detailed and specific information in the
tweets. This means those that are serious potential
customers may lose interest in the tweets or cease taking
them seriously. This is not a good thing if you are
seriously trying to sell a product or service.

It becomes a full time job to sort and respond to the real
people who are interested in you. Twittering without
engagement of your audience defeats the entire process of
marketing. I believe many people are using twitter as
“lets throw it out there and see what sticks”. I can tell
you from testing that this approach does not work. No
wonder people are leaving twitter in droves.

This leads to a more potentially serious side effect. If
more members of Twitter venture towards promoting generic,
uninteresting, and uninspiring tweets so as to boost the
volume of people reading, the health of the social network
site will not stay strong for long.

Basically, why would anyone would want to follow Twitter
when the tweets decline in value? This would certainly not
be a positive in terms of the ability for a small business
to procure new customers that are vital to the health of
the business.

Again, exploring options for expanding a business’ success
should center on niche marketing. This approach needs to be
taken with Twitter or else the value of Twitter will
decline. Based on what we are seeing, the decline will be
difficult to avoid in the future based on current actions.

Does this mean that Twitter is decidedly lacking in value
for those seeking to utilize what it has to offer? No, no
one is making such a statement as it would be a decidedly
inaccurate one.

Twitter, in fact, has taken steps to promote niche
marketing. This is evident in the ability to devise
“Twitter lists.” Twitter lists allow you to take certain
members of your massive group of followers and put them in
a particular category. You can then promote your tweets to
individual members of these various lists. So, you can
present wide, generic tweets as well as individualized
tweets to those that may be considered more serious
potential customers.

For example, you can create a group of people that have
already made purchases in the past. Then, you would be free
to issue tweets directly to such individuals as you wish.
This would be an effective form of niche marketing that
would be far more beneficial than putting forth perpetually
generalized tweets. One of the other problems with having
1,000′s of non-niched followers is seeing through the noise
of twitter.

As such, it is best to look towards growing these
individual lists in order to expand the potential to niche
market. Yet, many will seek to put forth the exact opposite
goal. They will look towards greatly expanding their number
of followers into the thousands while never stopping to
examine whether or not such a massive list truly boosts
their success potential. Such a strategy is a flawed one
that will not lead to the empirical success that is sought.

And, if you are not looking to succeed with your business,
then why even bother being in business? Twitter has
tremendous value and it delivers great benefit to those
looking to expand their small business’ promotional
strategies in a cost effective manner.

In conclusion, try not to become hung up on the notion
of greatly expanding your followers’ list. Seek to promote
effective niche marketing strategies instead.

Can Google Become the Next Facebook?

Is it just me but didn’t Google recently put everything on its
main homepage except for Google Buzz? What’s up with that? For
heaven’s sake, they even put the PacMan game in their logo for
two days running… you would think some of the brightest minds
on the planet would have figured out by now if Google truly
wants to compete on the new memeyouyou web, they simply have to
fully integrate all their programs into one homepage or at least
place Buzz right there along side the Gmail button.

Google Buzz has all the ingredients to finally make Google your
one-stop center on the web. It can be THE place for sharing not
just your conversations but photos, videos, and everything else.
Will it live up to its full potential and become a true Facebook
killer?

The main reason Facebook is such a threat to Google is not
because of the massive amount of users it has, but the amount of
time those users stay on Facebook. If you just look at the Alexa
comparison alone, Facebook users spend over 30 minutes on the
site, which is triple the time users stay on Google. Facebook
also beats Google in the bounce rate and page views per user.
Could all the recent changes to their SERPs be, not only
Google’s answer to the upcoming Bing/Yahoo marriage, but a
strong way of presenting a real challenge to Facebook’s
overwhelming stats.

Web users are lazy and they want a one-stop solution to meet all
their needs. They want to connect with friends and family, they
want to broadcast to the world, they want to search for
something to buy, they want to be entertained… iGoogle should
be that solution/center but I don’t believe it quite passes the
test because there is still no Google Buzz?

The main problem with Google is that it has no well-defined
center which users could call their own. Perhaps I am reading
this wrong, but have Google users fully bonded with iGoogle?
Putting the privacy issues aside, I don’t think they have
embraced it in the same way web users have embraced their
Facebook. What is missing are all the elements that are present
in Google Buzz, but again we seem to have two disjointed
programs rather than one solid rallying point.

For many web users, Facebook is the starting point of their web
day… in many cases, it is probably the only place they go on
the web religiously each day. Why? Because all their
friends/family are on there and they don’t want to miss out on
any news or gossip. Not checking your Facebook page has become
the ultimate faux pas of this new social media etiquette.

No one is going defeat or compete with Facebook you say?

Not so fast! Even empires come and go; a web site is even more
fickle, especially if something more convenient comes along.
Does anyone remember MySpace which is still a very popular site
but no longer has the numbers it once had. Facebook or even
Google could suffer the same fate if something better comes
along.

Google’s main business is online search. It is its bread and
butter, which may have blinded those in charge from seeing the
bigger picture. The bigger payday.

Google owns so many popular sites within the top 20 including
YouTube and Blogger… if only they could better connect all
their interests into one SuperSite or one SuperDevice for those
thinking within the box. Online search can still be the main
course, but you need to corral all of these different users into
one starting point or center with a couple of Billion users
logging in each morning to start their web day. Just imagine the
ad revenue potential that would generate for the big G.

Impossible you say, but not really, all the ingredients are
there to form this SuperSite but it needs one big bang to get it
going, to create a center of the web universe, which will be
Google.

Whenever I think about Google, I am reminded of a class 5
Hurricane with all these popular sites and programs swirling
around it like mad, but there is no eye to this hurricane, at
least not yet. Google needs a solid center to draw everything
into focus and get everyone at the same starting point. Whether
it is the Google search page, Google Buzz, Google Profiles,
Gmail or iGoogle… but it all needs to be pulled together if
Google wants to truly compete with Facebook for all the marbles.

5 Common Facebook Tactics – That Don’t Work!

There are about ten common Facebook marketing tactics. (You
can probably think of more, but most are a derivative of
one of these ten.) It may surprise you to learn that five
of these tactics don’t even work — that’s fully half!
Now, no Fire God will suddenly appear to smite you if you
happen to have done one of the following things. They are
definitely mistakes, but they aren’t irreversible. In fact,
they’re really only mistakes in one sense of the word.

My perception of these as “mistakes” isn’t about breaches
of the unwritten Facebook etiquette either – I dance on
those lines myself from time to time.

Rather, I’m calling them mistakes from a perspective of
effectiveness, versus the alternative behavior. Whether
they’re wrong in terms of just coming across as rude or
politically incorrect is another matter altogether.

Having said that, off we go.

Mistake #1 – Posting Signature Links on Profile Walls with
Your Introduction

I asked someone why they did this once, especially since
I’d already been to their site and purchased the item they
were selling on that page.

She said: “I saw someone else do it.”

“How did it make you feel?” I asked.

“I felt kind of used. But I figured if that’s what it takes
to be successful, that’s what I’ll do, even if it doesn’t
seem quite right.”

Now that’s deep.

I understand though, because once I made the vow to become
successful, I also made a vow to do “whatever it takes”. At
the time I thought it meant hard selling and being pushy. I
later found it meant hard work, and doing what’s right even
if there’s a lazier, easier way.

Even if this was at one time effective in terms of getting
clicks from random profile visits, Facebook is now much
more stream-driven than it is profile-driven.

And that’s a huge part of why this is a mistake in terms of
effectiveness.

Not to mention that people who see these postings as rude
or attempts to spam can remove or hide them. They may even
drop you as a connection, which cuts you off not just from
them, but from their network.

You’re not missing out on anything by omitting that
signature link. Your name, hyperlinked to your profile IS
your signature link. If your profile is set up correctly,
prospects will get to your site from there.

Mistake #2 – Pitching

If you want to pitch people on Facebook, buy an ad on
Facebook.

It doesn’t have to be a Facebook ad – buy one in a popular
Facebook application. No matter how good your elevator
pitch is in real life, it doesn’t translate in online
networking. Let me give you a hypothetical example from the
real world.

Imagine you go to an after-work bar. People go there to
relax with work friends, to meet potential mates, on actual
dates, and to get to know other people in the business.

You’re unwinding with colleagues when someone walks up, and
without forewarning, tries to sell you some steak knives.
When you stare blankly, they shrug, and move on to the next
person.

We all may chuckle to ourselves, and wonder what that
person is thinking… but are you ever the knife salesman
when you’re on Facebook?

Honestly, when I first came here, I was tempted to be.

Thank God my better judgement stopped me. I’m telling you
that to say this – if you’ve been the knife salesman don’t
be ashamed, you didn’t know any better. It’s not like they
issue marketing lessons with your incorporation papers.

Just make a vow, right now, to always check yourself before
you post. Ask yourself “Am I Networking or Pitching?”

Mistake #3 – Artificial Bonding

I’d respect a person more who was upfront with me, and said
they were hoping we could work together, or do some
business, than someone who pretended to care about me in
order to get me to have a conversation that they could then
direct to their pitch.

I wouldn’t buy from them, at least not then. But at least
I’d still respect them, which means I could change my mind
in the future.

Pretending to like people until you get the chance to try
to sell to them is really just pitching with a little bad
foreplay first.

Bad foreplay isn’t better than none at all.

Mistake #4 – Favoring Uphill Marketing Over Downhill
Marketing

Again, this is a mistake in terms of how effective it is.
In my own experience, as well as in case studies of
clients, it always works out better when you create a
fantastic marketplace presence and people are drawn to you
in droves, seeking to do business with you, rathere than the
alternative.

The alternative, of course, is when you go out and pursue
customers and clients one by one.

That’s not to say that you should stop advertising, bidding
on projects, or being a go-getter in any way.

It means that while you’re doing that, also create a
situation where customers are flowing towards you, seeking
you out, asking for help.

It’s much less work to get from interest to sale when they
come to you.

Mistake #5 – Fishing on Dry Land

A long, long time ago, I was in a network marketing
company. Now defunct, the products they have greatly
enhanced, possibly even saved, my life. The products were
targeted to people who cared about being healthier and
eco-friendly.

At first, I was so excited about what had happened to me,
that I told every single person who would listen. I would
try and go product by product and explain how great
everything was.

After failing Very Hard for about three months, I narrowed
my focus.

I bought a bottle of the mineral complex, and some sample
sized containers. Then I gave a sample to every single
person I could think of who had a health problem that might
be related. Orders started pouring in.

Ever since that day, I have remembered two things. First,
the one that’s relevant here – proper targeting greatly
increases sales. Secondly, give a free sample of something
needed to those most starving for it, and they’ll be back
to buy more.

A few well-timed, well-placed interactions with the right
profile are the main things you need to do the equivalent
of offline networking on Facebook. A great profile is just
as important as being appropriately dressed at a networking
function offline.

Back in the days when newsletters first hit the Internet, they were usually published in text format because many email clients did not support HTML email just yet. One of the problems many publishers faced was long URL’s being split in half and not being clickable to the reader. To solve this problem, shortening services started to spring up that would take a long URL and cut it down to a reasonable size.

With the popularity of Twitter and the confines of 140 characters, URL (link) shortening services are in high demand once again. When you have such a small amount of space to work with, no one wants a long URL cutting into that precious real estate.

There are a variety of shortening services to choose from, each having their own specific features and benefits. Most of them do work hand in hand with Twitter, allowing you to Tweet the link once it’s been shortened. If you’re an avid Twitter user this is a useful feature to have.

Some only provide a basic shortening service, but many allow you to view stats and metrics on your newly shortened links if you register. If you’re doing any form of social media marketing, it’s nice to be able to see if anyone’s actually clicking on all the links you’re sending out to the “Twitosphere”, or posting on Facebook and other sites. Tracking will give you an indication that you’re being heard and that people are actually paying attention to what you have to say.

Another important thing to look for is whether or not the shortening service uses 301 redirects. This is the most search engine friendly, and forces the search engine to look at the destination URL, not the domain of the shortening service itself. A 301 stands for a permanent move, not temporary. What this means is, you want the links you’re sending out to be given acknowledgment by the search engines, not the shortening service itself. Make sense?

Many allow custom URL’s, which allows you to use your name or company name in the links you create. This is great for branding purposes. Think of it as a vanity license plate. Instead of being just a regular URL it’s your special creation.

Let’s review a few options:

1) http://TweetBurner.com – A bare bones tracking service which allows you to shorten any link and then share it instantly with your Twitter followers or Friendfeed. Basic stat tracking is available so you can see how many people clicked on your link.

2) http://Cli.gs – A shortening service which includes full analytics. You can create links that include your brand in them. Free to use. It’s easy to send your links to Twitter with one click.

3) http://Bit.ly – This is Twitter’s default shortening service and used by Tweetdeck.com. It allows you to track performance of your links in real time. Easy to share generated links on Twitter, Facebook, even Gmail. It also offers many extra tools and plug-ins such as a browser bookmarklet and browser sidebar.

4) http://MyTwitterToolbar.com – Free to download and comes complete with a massive list of URL shorteners as well as over 50 Twitter tools. Also includes 100 Twitter tips.

5) http://www.TwitClicks.com – A fairly simple service that allows you to shorten a URL immediately and tweet it. Can also see complete stats. Detailed stats show percentage of browsers used and locations of those who clicked. Check out a short video on how to use it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1ScPeCd6X4.

6) http://www.ExpandMyUrl.com – This service takes a shortened link and gives you the true URL that it points to. Perfect for the paranoid individual who wants to know where the shortened link will send them.

7) http://www.TwitPwr.com – A short URL service which also includes analytics and stats. Their home page shows the top 25 users with the most TwitPwr and also a “hot URL” list of those URL’s that get the most clicks. Free to use.

http://1link.in – A multiple link shortening service. Simply type in a list of links and get one link back for all. If you click on the newly shortened link it goes to a page showing details of what sites that link points to, and asks if you want to open them all. If you answer yes, multiple windows will open for each site.

9) http://Go2.me – A different type of link shortening and discussion service which creates shorter links which also contain a chat window to exchange comments with your readers. It’s also easy to share on Twitter, Facebook or email with one click.

10) http://Tw.itter.me – You can customize the shortened link with your name or company name. From what I saw no stats are available.

11) http://budurl.com – Another popular service which shows you a real time view of your inbound clicks. This free service allows you to track up to 250 Budurl’s. They provide 3 pay levels of service from $4.00 a month to $49.00 a month. There is a 21 day free tríal on any paid service. You can start out free and upgrade your account at any time.

12) http://Tr.Im – Trim those long URL’s and instantly share them on Twitter. If you want stats, you’ll need to register. Offers many different tools and extensions to make for easier sharing, such as a Firefox extension that allows you to view your tr.im stats and tweet your new links quickly.

13) http://short.ie – Keeps all your shortened links in one place. Tracks clicks and allows you to instantly share your list with friends. It can also be connected to your Twitter account for more features. Customization of URL’s also available.

14) http://hootsuite.com – Not really a URL shortening service, but has the ability built-in. Hootsuite is a “Twitter Toolbox” loaded with features which are all free. They use ow.ly as their built in link shortener.

If you haven’t tried a url shortening service, you’ll want to find one that fits your needs and start to really utilize it in your marketing activities. Finding out who’s clicking on your links, time of day, where they’re from and other information will be very valuable in your ongoing efforts as an Internet Marketer.

Remember, when it comes to social media marketing T.M.I (too much information) is a good thing, unlike when your Aunt Ethel wants you to sit with her and go over every detail of her latest vacatíon [grin]. One is helpful, the other just downright painful.

When George Clooney was recently asked about his take on Facebook at the Toronto Film Festival, his response was short: “I’d rather have a prostate exam than a Facebook page.”

Now, that’s probably understandable when movie studios (his potential clients) have his number on a speed dial, and pesky paparazzi (freebie seekers and unqualified prospects) chase after his every move.

But unless you already have more prospects and high quality clients than you and your business can handle, your approach to Social Networking should be drastically different.

Frankly, a little over a year ago I considered online networking a total waste of time. Fortunately, I was able to recognize how wrong I was. And I wasn’t the only one that had a change of heart on this.

After Dell revealed they generated a cool million dollars in extra sales in 2008, (ahm, make it a cool $3 million by June’09!), many other companies large and small started paying attention to this social networking “fad”!

Just consider a few of these facts:
• Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks initially considered online hang-out places for kids and teenagers are now attracting a much more demographically diverse crowd.

• Big brand names, like Ford, WholeFoods, Comcast, IBM, Dell, Southwest Airlines, and many, many more are establishing a strong presence on social networking hubs like Twitter and Facebook.

• Facebook membership has just passed the 300 million mark (that’s nearly the population of USA!) and Twitter is marching towards 18 million users by year’s end! That’s a lot of potential customers!

• Although, started with college kids in mind, over 50% of Facebook’s members now are over 25 years old, over 55% are women (the new buying power), 51% have an annual income of $75K, with 33% claiming to bring home $100K or more.

• Finally, Facebook has become one of the most trusted companies in America, and people spend three times more time there than on Google!
Got your attention now?

Good, let me give you just five basic tips on putting this massive connection power to your advantage.

1. Get Started! Open an account on every social media and social networking platform you come across. Even if you are not actively using all of them, (which you won’t) you should reserve your name, the name of your company, your brand, or your key products, because those are like real estate locations – once the prime spots are gone, they are gone! For example, I have the vanity url facebook.com/adamurbanski – but there are at least six other Adam Urbanskis who won’t ever be able to grab that link! I also have twitter.com/adamurbanski, youtube.com/adamurbanski and many more like this – are you getting the point?

2. Get Involved! Just opening the accounts won’t do anything for you. You must be actively involved. Choose the best three platforms for you – where you can find the largest population of your ideal clients and it’s the easiest to connect with them. Each platform provides search tools that enable you to find people you already know, current customers, as well as hubs where most of your ideal potential clients already hang out, so you can become visible to a lot of them very quickly. And start connecting and talking! But first…

3. Listen, Listen, Listen More The most important thing you must remember is that social networking is NOT ABOUT YOU! It’s ABOUT THEM! So don’t listen twice as much as you talk (I mean “post”), listen 10 times as much! Find out what the current topics are. What people are concerned about, what information and solutions they are looking for. Then make your posts relevant to other people’s needs! Here is a hint – nearly all of the social networking services and tools, at least the basic version of them, is free! So don’t go out there pitching your high-priced wares. Give, give, and give some more first! If your focus is on getting and taking, you will get a big fat NADA from your networking efforts. But if you focus on giving, you’ll be abundantly rewarded in return.

4. Get Attention! Following all the rules is for sissies! So don’t be a social networking pansy – have an opinion (in fact, have lots of opinions on everything!) and voice it loud and often! People admire people with opinions – even if they don’t agree with you, they will stick around to watch what will happen next. Social networking experts are quick to dispense all their “must not break” rules (heck, I’m doing it right now!), but the fact is, this is such a new media that most of the effective approaches are still to be discovered. And the only way to do so is by stepping on some toes and breaking some norms.

If you want a “safe” way to practice this, follow my PET formula: polarize, entertain, teach!

- POLARIZE. Whether you piss people off or make them love you, they will pay attention. If they are indifferent, they will leave!

- ENTERTAIN. People will always choose fun over education. If people laugh w/ you, they like you… Plus, when they laugh – they learn!

- TEACH. Gary Veynerchuk says “give good s#!%.” And he gets how PET works, because that phrase rubs some people the wrong way, it entertains, and it teaches! Peeps love good tips they can use right away – so share some!

5. Automate! The purpose of social networking is to CONNECT WITH PEOPLE on a very personal level. Still there are some tools that can help you impress your fans with your “omnipotent online presence” and get more networking done in less time.

RSS blog feeds, FriendFeed.com, Ping.fm, TwitterFeed.com, SocialOomph.com, TweetBeep.com, and TubeMogul.com are just a few of a plethora of tools and services – most of them free – that will kick your online socializing into high gear!

Here is my final take on it. And I really want you to get it! In April of 2008, from a stage at one of my boot camps, I called people who use Twitter “lazy idiots with no life” (yeah, how is that for polarizing, huh?) But at the same boot camp earlier this year I had my Twitter networking activities to thank for clients from Australia, Singapore, Netherlands, Spain, England, Hungary, and a few other countries. Needless to say, I changed my tune. I’ll leave it to your imagination as to what I now call professionals and entrepreneurs who refuse to recognize the client attracting power of social networking. Better yet – stop wondering, and if you aren’t involved yet – get started now!

Twitter is a wildly popular microblogging service. It involves writing Tweets, which are short updates of a maximum of 140 characters that tell your followers what you are up to. Although your Tweets are technically supposed to answer the question, “What are you doing?” Twitter has moved far beyond that. Tweets are used to share stories, link to photos, promote content, break news, and a whole lot more. Twitter has also become an incredibly important tool for social media marketing professionals. Here are 12 ways in which Twitter can be used in your social media marketing campaign.

1. Sharing Links to Items of Interest

As soon as you read something online that you think is interesting, it is easy to share it on Twitter with all of your followers. Twitter is highly effective in this manner because it is such a quick way to be able to reach a large group of people. You can also get a lot of great ideas for blog posts from Twitter since many new ideas and stories are floating around that haven’t even made it to the blogosphere and definitely not to mainstream media.

2. Building Your Network

Using Twitter is a great way to build your network because it allows you to find and follow people with similar interests. You can use Steeple to find people who live in your geographical area. You can also use other tools that help you find new people to follow based upon who your Twitter friends follow.

3. Build Relationships within Your Current Network

People in different networks often use Twitter to connect with their contacts instantly rather than using instant messaging for that purpose. Furthermore, many people use Twitter to connect with their network during events like conferences.

4. Re-Distributing Content from Your Blog or Website

Twitter can be used to redistribute content from your blog or website. However, you should take care to do this thoughtfully since many of your Twitter followers may already read your blog. For that reason, you may want to avoid using a blog plug-in that automatically Tweets your posts. Your best bet is to Tweet your content manually and customize each Tweet so it doesn’t get old.

5. Get Involved in Live Tweeting Events

Twitter launched at SXSW last year, catapulting microblogging conferences to fame. Live Tweeting events are great because they are a form of citizen journalism that allow you to connect with several new people in your niche while making active and valuable contributions to current discussions in your community.

6. Pitching Stories to Journalists on Twitter

You can send a direct message to a journalist who is following you on Twitter to pitch a story idea.

7. Communicating with Your Team

You can use Twitter as a company intranet that connects all of your employees. Twitter can be particularly useful in this regard if you have a virtual business with employees in different geographical locations. You can set your updates to private for security reasons. Anytime you are working on group projects, you can stay in touch with your team members using Twitter.

8. Brand Monitoring

Stay up to date with any mentions of your business on Twitter. If there is anything negative, you will be able to counter it quickly. You can also use Twitter as a way to receive feedback from your customers and improve your business. Just ask your followers to give their opinion on something. For example, if you designed a new website, ask your followers what they think about it and get their constructive criticisms so you can make your site design even better.

9. Acquire More Votes on Social Media Websites

If you have submitted a story to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or any other social voting website, tweet a link to that submission to try to score more votes from your followers. If your followers like what they see, they are sure to vote for your content.

10. Hiring People

Looking for a programmer, designer, or writer? Whatever type of professional you seek, try finding them on Twitter. Simply send your followers a tweet telling them you are looking for someone for a job. They can either recommend someone to you or offer themselves for the job. Using Twitter in this way is ideal for finding qualified freelancers. It is much more convenient than putting out a classified ad.

11. Build Your Personal Brand

When you use Twitter to talk about things as mundane as what you ate for breakfast or how you are going to sleep early tonight, you make your followers feel like you are casual and approachable. Even those running a company that has a cold, corporate brand image could create more appeal and build a unique personal brand using Twitter.

12. Streamline Electronic Communications

When you use Twitter, you’re likely to find yourself using IM, email, and other electronic communication methods less. Twitter not only provides public chatting through Tweets, it also allows you to send direct messages. Twitter will help you streamline your electronic communications, allowing you to scale back online.

Twitter is a micro-blogging site that asks you a basic question, “What are you doing?” It allows anyone with an account to write up to 140 characters in a text field as a means to update, comment, promote or communicate to others who are “following” you. When people follow you, they see what you’ve recently contributed when they login. They see your “tweets”, which are the messages you leave.

And of course you can follow others who tweet about the things that interest you. As an Internet marketer you may want to follow other Internet marketers, for example.

Like anything, and this is especially true of working with social media, the more you give, the more you get. In other words, the more often you tweet the more activity you’ll generate. Some suggest that you tweet a few times a day, every day. Not every tweet needs to be profound. But they should all be useful.

It’s important that you don’t abuse Twitter for marketing and promoting your products, services or affiliate links. Most of your tweets ought to be about offering your followers useful and valuable information. Only once in a while should you try to use Twitter to promote something. Otherwise you’ll be perceived as a spammer, and no one wants that tag.

Imagine if you had a large number of people following your tweets? Some people have tens of thousands following them. If you had something to promote and you had a large following, you could quickly and efficiently alert a lot of people of your promo. It acts sort of like a mass emailíng blast to your house email list, but it’s a heck of a lot easier and faster. This is the power of Twitter.

One thing that I’ve noticed with Twitter is that it can seem overwhelming at times. The sheer information on Twitter, the ‘how-to’s', tutorials and all the other ubiquitous advice on how to use and take advantage of it can seem hard to understand and implement. So here’s an easy-to-understand list of the top ten ways in which you can use Twitter to market yourself, your business and your website.

The Top 10 Ways To Use Twitter for Marketing:

1. Use it to promote new pieces of content you or your company create to drive traffic to your site. From online articles to blog posts or from videos to webinars, each time you add something to the Web that is of value, tweet about it and include a link. (Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short.)

2. Use it for learning new marketing ideas, strategies and techniques. If you follow the right people, and you have to be picky about who you follow, you’ll get pointed to a good amount of useful tutorials, videos, e-zines and other things that teach you about marketing.

3. Use it to get new customers. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in your product or service. There are many ingenious ways to search for people on Twitter. For example, if you sell red widgets you could go to http://search.twitter.com and find people who have tweeted specifically looking for red widgets. To do this, type the following into the search box: red widgets?

• You’ll notice a lot of the results will be of others selling red widgets. These ones will all obviously have links in them to direct people to the site they’re selling red widgets on. To weed these people/tweets out, use the negative sign like this: -http red widgets?

• Since every link has ‘http’ in it, using the negative sign in front of it will cause your search results to not include any tweets with links in them.

4. Use it to build your email list. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in the monthly newsletter you send out to your house email list. Invite these people to join.

5. Utilize Twitter plugins or add-ons such as TweetMyBlog or The Twitter Updater, which both automatically make tweets of every new blog post you publish. Also check out TwitThis. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the Web page and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their followers on Twitter. Finally, look at TweetLater, a service that allows you to write lots of tweets at once and then schedule them to go out over time.

6. Use it to build buzz about an upcoming product or website launch.

7. Use it to better brand yourself or your business. Remember, when someone wants to learn more about you or your company, they are increasingly using sites like Twitter for research. You could easily use Twitter to establish yourself as an authority in your field.

8. Use it to update followers on breaking news regarding your company. If your company is mentioned in a new article, tweet about it and include a link to the article. Or if you’re at a conference or trade show, you could tweet what you’re doing and invite people to visit you in person.

9. Use it for business networking, master-mind groups (see Napoleon Hill), and getting yourself seen by high-profile people in your industry.

10. Use it as an instant messaging system to keep you and your team on the same page during projects. This is especially useful for those who work with teams spread out in different cities or countries.

You should note that this top 10 list is not in order of importance or in any particular order. I suggest that you give Twitter a try if you haven’t already. See if you can apply a few of these techniques and tactics to help you take advantage of Twitter as a marketing tool.

And one more important thing to remember is that there is no silver bullet in marketing. You should always be trying and implementing numerous tactics when marketing your business. Don’t only rely on Twitter or any other one thing. Instead, use Twitter (or any other Web 2.0 site) as simply one more tool in your entire social media and marketing toolbox.

If you don’t understand why the Real Time Web is huge, you will soon.

Thanks to micro-blogging sites like Twitter, a constant stream of human-posted content has infiltrated the Web. This growing infiltration has created a bottoms up approach to content creation that via the progressive support of rapidly developing applications has and will continue to empower every individual to co-create what is deemed as “important” on the Web. The Real Time Web serves as both the database that informs us of what is happening right “Now” and the human touch to the content that will compete with the traditional algorithms for what is deemed as “valuable” content to us all.

Its challenges lie in the filtration and mass integration of both the content and the act of sharing to the Real Time Web. There remain major aspects of the Web that have not yet integrated “searching” and “sharing” of the Real Time Web, including traditional search. But as filtration and integration progress the Web will take the form of a living breathing database.

Here are 5 reasons why Real Time Search will help the Real Time movement change the Web and your experience forever.

1. The “Now” Factor

We saw it with Michael Jackson’s passing. We saw it with the Iran Protests and we see it more and more everyday — the Real Time web provides us with what is happening right “Now” and with vivid detail from around the globe. “We” is driving the “Now” factor.

2. We Become Co-Creators

The Real-Time web offers us the ability to become co-creators in not only content but also in what is deemed important. Why? Because we decide what is worth sharing, discussing and having opinions on. This behavior serves as a natural selection of valuable content. Certainly the current web allows for creation of content, but what is deemed as important/valuable is mostly left up to a few individuals, organizations and a bunch of robots. The Real-Time web, once fully integrated, will change that.

3. Humans vs Machines

Have you ever clicked on blue links that lead you to a piece of content dating back to a year ago? Search results lose relevancy each day due to the amount of new content hitting the internet. Spiders, web crawlers and engines decide what content is relevant via algorithms and those results can be manipulated via intelligently structured content (SEO). Real-time search enables users to receive information via conversations and people instead of machines. Take a look at your web results today. Would you rather receive cold content determined by algorithms or what the crowd and people value as good and bad?

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4. Facebook Factor

With over 300 million users creating and wrapping themselves around content, once Facebook opens up its search API to the web what do you think will happen? Better yet do you think there is value in being able to search a database of 300 million users’ opinions and experiences? Searching Facebook may be the factor that tips the overall experience of the web into one that is very different than today. Facebook may be the tipping point to where bottoms up (sharing & contributing) will go head to head with tops down (crawling & optimizing).

5. A New Breed of Search Engines

If there existed a search engine that was capable of aggregating and rendering results based on what was shared, peoples opinions and conversations, would you be interested in that search engine? If you knew that there were 6 conversations that provided a fantastic account of a design firm you were considering would that be more valuable to you than the top 3 links on your current search engine results? Would you have more value for SEO based search results or human conversation driven results? How about both? Real-Time search, once developed, will render a new breed of search engines that will capture this new value the New Web has to offer.

At the moment, Real Time Search is only in its infancy, as is the Real Time web. Twitter and the like are simply representations of a big movement that will continue to occur with the creation of more similar services, more adoption of those services and more integration of those services.

What is clear is that our daily use of the Real Time Web’s driving platforms — Twitter, Facebook and the like — is unprecedented. The Internet is no longer simply just a disconnected 3rd party container of tops down aggregation, “We” is now part of its determination. And, search as we know it will soon change to accommodate, thereby delivering a completely different experience of the Web.

If your business website doesn’t have a blog, get one. A blog, if done right, can act as a direct and indirect mechanism that brings large amounts of qualified visitors to your site, many of whom may become customers.

This is mostly related to the way blogs interact with search engines and the traffic I am speaking of will come from search engines, mostly Google.

Before I explain how you can do this to help your website, let me first give some background on how search engines work, Google in particular.

When it comes to optimizing your website (or blog for that matter) for search engines you must always keep in mind two things: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is the elements of a Web page that better optimize it to be found and ranked well in the search engines. These elements can include on-page content such as the actual sentences and paragraphs on the page, the headlines (or headers or Hx tags), the links, the links’ text, the title tag and much more.

Off-page optimization means the things that are done on sites besides your site, namely link-building. Off-page optimization is the process of creating links (or causing others to create links) on other websites that point to your site. Inbound links as these are often called have a major impact on how well you rank in search engines. Generally speaking, the more inbound links, the better. But the quality of the sites with these inbound links, or the way the search engines perceive the sites, is even more important.

To rank on the first couple of pages on the search engines requires work on both on-page and off-page optimization.

Two additional and important pieces of information that you’ll need to understand are related to site content and internal links.

Search engines also very much love new, original and quality content, and they like to see your website regularly adding this kind of new content. You don’t need to add pages every day, just add pages at the same rate over time. So if you add a page a week to your site, keep it at around that same pace, or increase or decrease gradually.

A website can be considered a living entity in a sense. It certainly shouldn’t be static. It should grow over time. And the fantastic thing about content is that the more of it there is on your site, the more chances you have of getting found in the search engines.

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The idea that inbound links help your search engine rankings that I explained above can be extended to your internal pages as well. In other words, the more links to a particular page coming from other pages within the same site will boost that page’s rank as well.

Think of it this way. If you had a ten page site, including a product page and every page on the site contained a link to your product page and, if all other things were equal, your product page would rank higher than the rest of your site’s pages (besides the home page which is given a little extra weíght).

Now let’s consider what would happen if there were only you and your competitor in your industry (if only that could be true!) and your site still had those ten pages while your competitor’s site contained one hundred pages. Furthermore, your competitor set it up the same way as you where he added a link to every page on his site that pointed to his product page. If all other things were equal, his product page would outrank your product page every time. Why? Because he had 100 internal links pointing to his product page and you only had 10.

If you put all these pieces together now, on-page optimization, off-page optimization or link building, content creation and internal linking, can you begin to see why a blog may be a good thing? A blog helps with all of these.

A blog that is regularly updated is providing a mechanism for adding fresh content on a regular basis. Plus, it’s so easy to use a blog that anyone can use them, so even if you or your employees don’t know a thing about Web pages and HTML, you’ll still be able to add new content to your site.

Consider this. If you add fresh, quality content to your blog on a regular basis by writing posts, something the search engines love, and within each post you link to an important page within your site, let’s say your product page for instance, you’re now building links to help your rankings using your blog. With this additional link your product page gets that much more boost in the search engines.

Remember how I explained that links from within your site help your rankings? Adding links within your blog posts pointing back to your other important pages that you want to rank well is a great way to help your rankings.

And every time you publish a new post, you’re giving the search engines one more entry point into your site. Your site will quickly get bigger, and with each new page your site gets more visible.

Keep in mind that the links you make within your blog posts should be relevant. Only link to your product page from a post that has to do with your products. And also, blog posts ought to be useful to your site visitors. The less you talk about your products and instead offer useful, free information that people can use, the more traffíc and repeat visitors you’ll get.

Remember that people really don’t care about you, your website or your products, they only care about how you can help them. If you sell furniture, a blog post about how to find the best deals on furniture would be far better than a post about how your chairs are the best in the world.

One important thing to remember is that if you plan on creating a new blog for your business as a way to augment your website be sure you put the blog on your actual domain. This means that you would not use a remote service like Blogger.com. Instead, you must have the blog on your business website’s address (or domain). For example, if your website address is http://www.yoursite.com/ then your blog should be located at http://www.yoursite.com/blog or http://blog.yoursite.com/

By adding a blog to your business website you are creating a way to get additional traffic. You’ll get direct traffic from your posts, which get indexed by the search engines and drive traffic to your site from searches. And, you’ll get indirect traffic from your other site’s pages ranking well in the search engines because they have links pointing to them from your blog posts.

You’ll be regularly adding fresh content to your site, which search engines love, thereby creating more ways to be found in the search engines at the same time. And each post provides a new chance to create a link or two to other pages and blog posts on your site, thereby boosting those pages’ rankings.

Like I suggested at the beginning, if your business website doesn’t have a blog, go get one.

It seems like there’s an over-abundance of social sites nowadays. For a newbie, it can be quite intimidating when first joining a network or two and building a community. A handful of questions may run through your head:

• Which networks to join?
• How to participate?
• What’s enough, or too much?
• How will it help my business?

So, to answer some of these, I’d like to present my “Social Media For Dummies” overview. First, a quick recap of my favorite networks and what they’re about.

Facebook – The ultimate platform for keeping up with (stalking) friends. I joined Facebook way back in 2005, you know, when it was just for college students and before you could even share photos (gasp!). I’ve witnessed the evolution of this mega-network over the years, and it has become, not only the 4th largest website in the world, but the best place to find people, keep up with them, and inform them. It is the son of Classmates.com on every possible steroid ever ingested by humans. The ability to share and communicate with friends and colleagues is seamless. Overall, Facebook is a great place to start your social networking endeavors.

LinkedIn – A must-have in every business person’s arsenal of tools. If you are (or hoping to be) in business of any sort, LinkedIn is a great place to set up shop. Very similar to Facebook, minus the annoying applications, plus job postings and resumes. This is where you network with those in your industry, join groups, research companies, and prospect clients. Build your credentials by asking colleagues for recommendations or head to the “Q&A” section to provide advice.

Twitter – Share, Learn, Meet. I wouldn’t be surprised if Webster adds a new definition for “tweet” this year. Within the first half of 2009, Twitter has gone from nearly 5 million users to over 23 million. It is the social media platform of choice at Fortune 100 companies. Easily share links, pictures, videos, articles… Oh, and personal updates… with followers. Twitter is kind of like the cocktail party of social networks. Here, you can easily reach out to strangers by tuning in to their tweets or quickly replying to them. A limited amount of customization keeps annoying advertisements and outlandish profiles at bay, unlike the outdated MySpace.

Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, reddit, etc. – Social Bookmarking to share and store your favorite links. You just read an article over at NYT.com that you loved. Use one or more of these bookmarking sites to share it with the world. Looking for information or articles on a certain subject? Head to one of these sites and search your topic, you’ll be able to peruse a list of articles or sites that others have found useful or interesting. Not only are these great for sharing, but storing sites for later use as well. Say you have a home desktop, a netbook for travel, and a work computer… customize your bookmarks and easily access them on each computer without updating each machine.

FriendFeed – All of your networks in one place. FriendFeed lets you put all of your networks in one big stream. Users can see your Facebook status, latest Tweet, pictures posted on Flickr, blog post, bookmarked article and much more when they follow your feed. Much like Twitter, but a whole lot more.

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These are the networks that I tend to spend most of my time on and are probably some of the key ingredients that should be in the pot. Every person and business is different and may need to change their recipe accordingly, but the key to all of these is to contribute and become a part of the conversation.

Now What?

So, now that we’ve covered some of the major players in the social networking field, it’s time to discover how we can use them. As a person in business, especially an industry with a significant amount of its target market online (which is really all of them now), you’ve got to understand that these networks are an integral part of their lives. Just like in previous decades where television commercials were considered a major part of any advertising/marketing plan because every one watched TV… now, as many are leaving cable in the dust and turning to the Internet for their information and entertainment, it’s more crucial than ever to join the ranks of the digital pioneers.

However, the people using these networks are smart. They don’t fall for blatant advertising traps like they used to. They want to know that there’s something in it for them. If your product isn’t it and that’s all you’re talking about on Twitter, then they’ll ignore you. Social networks aren’t about advertising – they’re about building relationships.

Say you run a small business, maybe you own a restaurant, a clothing boutique, a PR firm or a chiropractic firm… What is in it for you?
• Take a look at your customers or clients when they’re in your office or store. Are they on their iPhone or Blackberry checking email? Did they mention finding you online? Did they hear about you from a friend? If you can answer “yes” to any of those questions, then you’re missing out on connecting with your customers and should probably put on a pot of coffee, cause you’re going to be here for a while.

• Social media is a chance to be at your market’s finger tips when they look at their phone or get online in a friendly and non-obtrusive way.

• You can quickly address customer service issues by communicating directly with the customer.

• Prospect new clients.

• Learn about trends in your industry, stay up-to-date with competition and network with power players in your industry.

• Provide existing customers incentives, coupons or interesting information to keep them tuned in to your brand.
Many people will pay thousands of dollars trying to get these things with traditional techniques. Social media is free… despite, of course, any operating costs like time and possibly design fees to add a professional touch. You need to be on here… Do a Google News search for “small business social media”. BusinessWeek, LA Times, NY Times will be some of the publications insisting you buck up and make it happen.

How to Participate Effectively:
• Do not start a social media campaign if your intention is free advertising. No one will listen and you will waste your time. Period.

• Take a minute and figure out what you want to get out of being involved in social networks. Research how other businesses have been successful. Make a plan. Mashable is a great place to learn about social media.

• Twitter is a great place to find people in your area, geographically or by industry, and interact with them. Start a conversation, always give if you ever want to receive and don’t constantly advertise. No one likes spam… so don’t spam your followers with pleas to go to your website or go into business with you. Provide your followers a coupon or discount if you’re hoping for business from them… Keep them up-to-date on any changes to your menu or services… Share fun pictures from happy customers… Follow-up with an unhappy customer or use your competition’s bad customer service as a great way to introduce you into their lives. Just remember to keep it real, be you, because every one wants to know that there’s a human behind your username.

• Facebook is generally most successful for companies with a large following or customer base. But that doesn’t mean you should skip it… create a personal profile so you can network with friends and family. By being there, you can instantly share things about your business with people who already like you and will probably listen more than the average stranger. By keeping your brand in their mind, they’ll be more likely to spread the word and pass you along to their friends, and so on. Word of mouth, my friends…

• LinkedIn is a must for anyone in business. Very straightforward here, like a virtual resume on steroids. It’s always good to network with past and present colleagues and continue to build relationships, because you don’t know when you may need them or vice versa.
Last Words: Keep your brand consistent among all of the networks you decide to join. Monitor your brand using tracking tools. And remember to Collaborate, Communicate, and Participate.

The social media movement has expanded the number of people we can reach and connect with on a personal level. The new relationships and connections we create with people all over the world can have a profound effect on our personal and business growth. We learn about cultures and nations that we were, perhaps, previously ignorant of. None of this is a new concept, but what may be is how quickly you can destroy your business by using social media incorrectly.

Transparency is a Utopian Concept

Not too long ago, Michael Fortin wrote an article titled Don’t Be Transparent, Be Authentic Instead. That article is an important read for any social media wrangling business blogger and you can search for it online.

That article is the tip of the iceberg in the concept of ‘transparency’ being too Utopian to work within the jaded confines of our society. Of course, true transparency is ideal. Many things about a perfect world are. Unfortunately, as a group, most of the world isn’t ready or willing to accept true transparency without penalty.

When Transparency Fails

Let me give you a couple of examples of transparency failure we’ve seen.

Failure 1: We had a copywriter who was posting on Twitter about the work he was doing. He made several posts within a few hours which were ugly complaints about a client and how ‘stupid’ he felt that client was. We obviously considered this unacceptable and immediately removed him from our list of subcontractors, but think about this: If he was hoping to use Twitter to get more client work – how many potential clients just read that and thought… “I’m not going to risk being badmouthed on here, I’ll find someone else.” Everybody gets frustrated, but what if the client he was working on read that? Put it this way, if you wouldn’t say it to your client directly – don’t post it either.

Failure 2: We had a designer who was a day late returning her design phase work. When we contacted her, she said she had a family emergency the night before and was unable to send in her work because she wasn’t home. A quick check on Facebook showed that she was actually out at a party that night and posted multiple times while drunk talking about how much she was drinking and even hinting at wanting to bring a man she met there home with her. Obviously, we relieved her of the design work, handed it to another designer who caught up on the time schedule, and didn’t again work with her. In this case, people are allowed to have a life, we understand that. But if you cannot get your work done and have to lie about why – it’s a problem. If you do not have enough class to not post details about your ‘wild nights’ to everybody on your social networks — that’s also a problem.

How We Monitor Social Media Conversations

My business has been around for over a decade and is very focused on client satisfaction and excellent treatment of our web design clients. We have a network of hundreds of copywriters, designers, and coders who work with us on projects. However, even with screening of those experts when they come on board with us – you don’t always know someone until you have observed them over a long period of time.

That’s why we monitor what they say online.

How do we do that? Well first we get as many of their social profiles as we can. Usually, we ask for a list of them. We’ve also found that most people won’t provide them all. We then Google search the usernames of the ones they have given us because most people use the same usernames over and over. We also monitor blogs, and check for listings of social networks on those.

We have a system set up to consolidate all their social media comments into one master feed. That master feed can then be browsed directly to see what they’re up to, but that’s a lot of things to read each day. What we do is take the master feed, run it through a filter that creates two sub-feeds based on certain things we think are important to monitor. The first sub-feed is created by running the master list through a keyword & synonym filter that pulls out words related to business – for instance, “client” “business” “work” etc… The second sub-feed has a filter that runs their posts through a check for foul language and words like “sex” “drugs” “drunk” etc… There are hundreds of words in each filter.

Seem a bit ‘big brother’? It probably is – but reputation and client treatment is very important to us.

Here’s the thing: If we can read it and you can lose work with us over it… how many POTENTIAL clients did you lose also?

7 Ways to Edit Yourself

We’re not suggesting you stop having a life and stop making mistakes. You can post about those things and it simply makes you a more interesting person to read about. Just use common sense:
• If you wouldn’t say it to a client or boss – don’t say it where they can read it either.

• If you wouldn’t say it to your grandmother – don’t say it on your public posts.

• If you wouldn’t say it to a police officer – don’t post it on your social networks. For that matter, don’t do it either.

• If you plan to lie to your boss – don’t put the truth where they can see it.

• If you plan to go out and get drunk and know you have a tendency to post while drunk – give your phone to a friend to keep for you.

• Learn how to use privacy settings and understand how visible your posts are on different social networks.

• If you want a place to vent – create a completely different identity for yourself to do that. Name no names in your posts, and make no connection to your other profiles or email addresses.
Consider it all part of Internet Etiquette. Social networks are great to hear more personal things about someone and we encourage people to share a bit of themselves online (using normal cautions etc..). In the long run, full transparency is too Utopian for our modern world to handle well. We’re still at a point in our societal growth that when someone seriously calls a client an idiot – they tend to get a bit upset about it.

The way I see it, NBC has little chance of survival in the next ten years. They’ve proven themselves so caught up in the normal TV schedule way of thinking that they fail to understand their audience, what little of it is left.

Their lack of knowledge about social media, how it’s formed and how it can control the conversation is part of their failure in this situation and may very well be part of their failure as an organization.

Conan O’Brien on the other hand was able to harness the internet and social media to make a stand and, in the end, become more famous than he ever was before.

I’m going to explain this slowly, for the folks at NBC, if they are reading this. Let’s think of Conan O’Brien & Jay Leno as a brand, and that the internet is the next big media thing, where there will be millions and millions of Americans making decisions about their life based on what they read on the internet. When people run a search on this website called GOOGLE, they get thousands of pages of choices that they can read about the topic in which they are interested. That perhaps in the future, someday, consumers and people who watch television (aren’t they the same?) will be able to type in “Conan vs Jay” and get real time results that help shape their thinking about the subject, and therefore create brand identification and/or brand alienation depending on what happens.

Now for the rest of us, who understand Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and a bunch of other three word phrases with Affiliate, Marketing, Search and Interactive in them, here is some more high level explaining.

NBC, as a company, is still very much focused on Television being the predominant source of entertainment in the next ten years and hasn’t done much thinking beyond that. Despite paying people like Jay & Conan ridiculous amounts of money, their audience base plummeted each year as more and more people turned to independent internet entertainment. So they did not consided exactly what might happen, if they started to make changes in their schedule, move Jay Leno back to his previous slot and basically kick Conan to the curb.

Jay Leno, as funny as he might have been, isn’t exactly a representative of a modern, fast-paced, growing generation. He might get some people to stay up and watch the news before falling asleep during his monologue – but on the whole, no one can say he has his finger on the pulse of… well… anything.

You say, and perhaps the executives of NBC say, “we need to prop up our affiliates and their news shows, before we lose them.” So what? Television as a medium is on the way out, or at least changing. I don’t know anyone who actually watches the news at 11, let alone cares that Jay or Conan are right after it. The news has no relevance, since most of us have already learned about it 6 hours earlier from some blog or websites. As for humor and jokes, we’ve already spent most of the day on YouTube instead of doing our job, watching some kid falling down five flights of steps while eating a cheeseburger. Jay Leno isn’t going to keep our attention for more than one minute, while we wonder what his chin would like in 3-D.

So, what does this have to do with marketing? First of all, Conan O’Brien has managed to come out looking cleaner than a toothbrush at a Palin family reunion. When you google results regarding his dispute with Leno, you find tons of commentary and articles supporting him, putting him out there as the champion of the people, the underdog, the teabagger of comics.

While it’s more than likely he will just appear on another network, there is also a chance that he will take this momentum and create something completely unique on the internet. Anything he does on the internet will immediately be covered with millions of links, tweets and AIMs – all pointing to his new project. With the NBC money that he is walking away with, he could easily just make his own website, his own comedy channel, his own comedy network and become very wealthy on just the buzz surrounding his name.

I sincerely believe that Conan knew exactly what was going to happen, and used the internet to his advantage. Many of his writers and publicity team are very modern, having grown up on the internet. They knew that if they needed good publicity they would only have to turn to the internet in order to get the point across.

They used social media to covertly create “I’m with CoCo” groups while at the same time constantly making sure there was new “buzz” to pass around on twitter. From posts on Craigslist of Conan selling himself to the highest bidder for favors to late night tweets from the writing staff to their fan base, they knew that they could always win the war with an audience – that frankly is a lot more internet savvy than the Leno fan base.

Anyone engaged in social media marketing, needs to look closely at how Conan did this, how he made it seem to be organic and natural and then allowed it to seemingly take its own course. He knew how to create buzz, but more importantly content for internet buzz fodder. He knew that the one-liners that could be posted on Twitter were a thousand times more powerful than any ten minute monologue that could be spoken by …urhmm… that other guy.

Web video is a communication technique that provides a viewer-experience that delivers several big advantages over broadcast: first, the length of your presentation is for the most part a non issue other than the degree to which your content and delivery holds your audience’s attention; second, the cost to produce and present professional online video is far more affordable than broadcast; and third, Web video provides the chance to intellectually and emotionally engage your audience with a memorable viewing experience, and involve them physically by prompting direct-response action. On the other hand, broadcast does provide a mass audience, but not necessarily an attentive one like your website.

As we have seen in previous installments of Killer Campaigns, the commercial broadcast industry, despite its economic and time constraints, has plenty of good examples of techniques that can be used effectively in Web video campaigns, if you understand how certain elements affect an audience.

It’s easy to misread a commercial’s true marketing effectiveness and assume the big flashy special effects and grandiose production stunts are what makes a commercial work, but in fact those kinds of things generally only make a commercial more expensive. True the big-deal aspects of a production may attract attention, but it’s the small things that are the most important, the most effective and the most affordable. It’s the things you hardly notice like writing, casting, music, performance, and campaign consistency that have the most impact on a presentation’s ability to communicate, influence and persuade. It’s the production techniques to which the audience pays little attention that maximizes sale-conversions and increases the bottom-line. Take nuts for example.

Color Me Nuts

Nuts, the edible kind, not the irritating relative kind, are about as generic as you can get. So how do you go about creating a marketing campaign for something as mundane as nuts?

The Wonderful Pistachio “Get Crackin” video campaign and micro site got a lot of things right. This series of videos use the same format, style, message, and color in order to turn a nondescript, seemingly unbrandable generic product into a hip, sexy brand. Each element of the presentation re-enforces the other leaving a lasting brand impression without blowing anything up, or spending a fortune creating animated baby skateboarders.

One element that turns this campaign into a great campaign rather than just a very good one is its use of color. What could be simpler?
Watch the: Pistachios Newly Weds Do It Video

The campaign’s consistent use of a signature color palette, green and black, combined with a great tagline and a series of clever sketches deliver the kind of memorable impression that prompts instant recognition and impulse-purchasing when seen on store shelves.

Watch the: Pistachios Dominatrix Do It Video

One video is not a campaign, so Paramount Farms had seven different videos created, all following the same formula so the audience’s recognition and retention was enhanced and re-enforced every time they watched a new video segment.

Watch the: Pistachios Mobsters Do It Video

This technique is not new; in particular Danone uses color co-ordination effectively in their television commercials to distinguish their various brands of yogurt: Activa uses a green color palette, DanActive uses yellow, and Silhouette uses purple. The Danone commercials don’t have the edginess of the pistachio campaign but their use of color is well thought-out and effective even though the messaging is pretty standard.

The edgy style, consistent format, and color branding definitely qualifies the “Get Crackin” videos as a Killer Campaign.

The Color of Money

Another campaign that makes an impression by means of its clever use of color is the Edward Jones “Join Us” campaign. If you’re not familiar with the commercials they are available on YouTube but unfortunately the embed option for them has been disabled.

These commercials were shot on a white background in black-and-white, a technique that draws special visual attention to the yellow-and-black Edward Jones logo. The whole package is very clever from the way the videos are shot, to the dialog, the music, and of course the clever use of color, or lack-there-of.

The same visual style was repurposed for a companion print ad campaign further establishing and enhancing the brand image in the minds of the audience.

Edward Jones Companion Print Ads

The Audacity to Believe

Is on Board With the Crazy Idea

Signature Color Branding

Colorcom is a color consultancy located in Hawaii and New York. According to their website, color branding increases recognition by up to eighty percent; it aids memory processing and storage; and it attracts attention, increases comprehension and mentally engages the viewer. That’s pretty powerful stuff, and you don’t have to be a mega corporation with deep pockets to implement color effectively.

Color Affects, a London-based color consultancy, explains how color affects perception on a physiological level through the electrical impulses that pass from the retina to the hypothalamus area of the brain that controls our hormones and endocrine system. The hypothalamus controls behavior patterns, sex and reproductive functions, metabolism and appetite among others.

Color By Association

Color by itself is not enough to get the job done. The pistachio campaign added the format, style, messaging and performance elements in a consistent campaign that re-enforced the message and the brand.

In the end, Web videos are not as much about making a sale as they are about making contact: contact in the sense of connecting to an audience on an intellectual and emotional level. Web videos designed merely to flog some product or service have built-in limitations, and an abbreviated shelf-life, whereas video presentations designed to engage can become eternal

If you aren’t already connected to the social media revolution, it is time to get your head out of the sand and harness the power of the digital network. If you want to get out ahead of your competition and make consumers excited about interacting with your brand, social media is the way to go. It isn’t an overnight marketing fix, it takes time to build a following, but if done correctly you can use social media to drive people to your website and ultimately to your front door. Are you ready?

After building your incredible website and blog, it is time to build a Facebook fan page. Before you run away at the thought of building your page, let me assure you that it is easy to get started, and I am going to walk you through it. But, of course, if you get stuck or need additional help with the more complicated aspects, we’re always here to help. (But I promise; set up is easy.)

The first thing you need in order to create a Facebook fan page is a personal profile. What? You don’t have one yet? Time to get one! I am not going to waste time walking you through profile set up because the steps are pretty self explanatory. Just go to Facebook, fill out the information to get started and let the steps guide you. You can probably set up a basic profile in about 15 minutes. After setting up your personal profile, spend some time poking around Facebook and getting to know the site – have fun. Check out some of your favorite companies’ fan pages and connect with friends.

Now to set up a fan page.

Once you are logged into Facebook, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Advertising,” and then click “Pages.” There is some great information here about fan pages, so take a moment to read through the information and when you are ready click “Create Page.” As you go through the set-up process, remember that in any branding and marketing it is important to categorize your company in the right area to help people find you. So choose carefully.

One of the great things about Facebook is the ease of set up navigation. From here, setting up a fan page is really about following the prompts. Rather than point out each step, let’s look at the important ones to get your personal branding going.

1) Photo – Before you do anything else, make sure you have the perfect photo for your page. Maybe your logo is the best photo for your page, but maybe not. Think about other branding materials you have, maybe something seasonal. Obviously, you want your fans to see your photo and recognize your brand – that’s the goal. But if you have a creative image that is also recognizable, it might help your fan page attract fans with an element of fun.

2) Write something about your company – See the little box under your picture that says “Write something about your company”. This is very important because this is one of the items that is visible on every tab of your fan page. This is your elevator statement in 250 characters or less. Be sure to include a link to your website here, and in order to make your link clickable, don’t forget the http:// before the www. (Note: this statement can be changed at any time, so it is a great place to highlight a promotíon or other important happening for your company.)

3) Wall Settings – Another important tool in the set up of your page are the wall settings. You have to decide if you want visitors to be able to post messages for everybody to see or if you only want your messages shown. Unless you have a super controversial company, I recommend starting with allowing everything. It will help you build your wall faster because people like to post messages. If the posts become out of control or unflattering, you can always delete individual posts or change the setting later. (You will find “Wall settings” under “Edit page.”)

Once you fill in all of the basic information, you have successfully created a fan page. Don’t forget, it is easy to change, so don’t sweat it.

Now you are ready to take your page live. It is important for you to let people know about your page. This is where having an already active personal profile comes in handy because if you already have a lot of “friends” who are interested in your company, you can “suggest” your new page to them.

Alright you have a page. You have suggested to all of your friends – now what? Now you start the real work. Marketing and branding takes time and attentiveness. You can’t just set up this page and hope people find you. If there is nothing on your page that interests people, no one will become a fan. Social media is fun – your fan page should be too. Post interesting things about your company, but don’t be afraid to post something fun too. Try posting open-ended questions (to entice responses from your fans) such as “What is your favorite XYZ?” “What do you plan to do for the XYZ holiday?”

Posting links and/or photos are also a great way to get people interested, plus they are more visually appealing so people are more apt to pay attention. Posting links to your website has the added benefit of pushing people to your site to find out more. Try posting on your fan page every time you update your blog – “Check this out” and attach a link to your blog.

Remember, the most important reason you have a Facebook fan page is to use it as a branding strategy to promote your personal brand. So, if your company is very “green” conscious, share tidbits about being green. If your company is all about marketing and branding (like us), you might post pictures of events, links to blog posts and information about the companies you help brand.

Those are the basic features of a Facebook fan page, but once you get going you will realize that there are many more things you can add to your fan page such as customizable apps, connecting the page to your Twitter feed, and much more. But you can’t do any of the fancy things until you get started with the basics, so for now create your page and start building your fans. Oh, and don’t forget to include a new link on your website to let people know they can become a fan on Facebook.

And that is how you can use Facebook as a branding strategy for your business.

Twenty-One Top Twitter Tips

You’ve heard about Twitter–that curious, strangely addictive social-networking technology that facilitates torrents of truncated messages among millions of users. You might even know your hashtags from your re-tweets. But how can you make money with it?

Forbes canvassed scads of businesses and pricey social-networking gurus looking for honest answers. Admittedly, we were skeptical. After all, how much can you accomplish in 140 characters or less?

Turns out there are myriad ways Twitter can have an impact, and not just as a marginal marketing tool. Indeed, we found 21 clever ways to use Twitter–for everything from boosting sales and scouting talent, to conducting market research and raising capital. Chances are, there will be many more.

“I believe Twitter is a communication platform,” says Nathan Egan, founder of Freesource Agency, a social-networking consultancy in Philadelphia. “In a year or two, everyone will be on it, using it in totally new ways.” Better yet, getting results “doesn’t take a year or six months, but a matter of weeks,” adds Mark Schaefer, head of Schaefer Marketing Solutions in Knoxville, Tenn.

Some strategies take more time, or are more industry-specific, than others. Taken together, though, this collection of techniques and real-world examples constitutes a powerful online arsenal for companies large and small. Herewith, some highlights:
Coupon Campaigns

Congratulations for getting to the end of this sentence. “As an online culture, people are not reading; they’re scanning,” says Dell Computer’s Stefanie Nelson, voice of @DellOutlet. “The shorter and more direct your message is, the more successful you’re going to be.” Dell tweets links to coupons at Dell Outlet’s Facebook page, which shoppers use during checkout at Dell.com.

This strategy works for small companies, too: The abbreviated offers are easy to produce–you don’t need an ad agency to write 140 characters. California Tortilla, a chain of 39 causal Mexican restaurants based in Rockville, Md., spread coupon “passwords”–through its Twitter feed @caltort–that must be spoken at checkout to be redeemed.
Viral Marketing

In July, in honor of its 10th birthday, London-based do-it-yourself Web site builder Moonfruit gave away 11 Macbook Pro computers and 10 iPod Touches. Contestants had to tweet using the hashtag #moonfruit. (Hashtags collate Twitter responses.) Nearly a month after the contest ended, traffic to Moonfruit’s Web site is up 300%. Sales are up 20% this month, more than paying off the $15,000 investment. And the Moonfruit Web site has climbed onto the first Google page for “free website builder” (it used to be on the fourth).

Word to the wise, says Moonfruit founder Wendy White: Such campaigns must be courteous and fit with a company’s brand, lest you draw the ire of the Twitter-sphere: “There’s a fine line between annoying people and getting the thumbs up.”
Artful Customer Service

Frank Eliason, director of digital care at Comcast, uses Twitter to help 200 to 300 subscribers a day with issues ranging from sporadic Internet service to errant e-mails. Frank and his team receive direct questions at the @comcastcares account and search for complaints. Twitter has a built-in search, but it’s more efficient to set up a permanent search on one of the free, third-party Twitter applications, such as TweetDeck.

Eliason’s key to success: maintaining friendly relationships, not foisting unwanted advice. “If they want assistance, they’ll let me know,” he says. Eliason has a 10-person help desk at his disposal, but small businesses can use Twitter to provide better customer service, too. Even a little help goes a long way.
Focus Groups

Back in the old days (last year), companies actually paid customers to solicit their opinions. There were 3.37 million mentions of Starbucks on Twitter through early May 2009, and all of that information is available for less than the cost of a frappucino. “There is a major element of Twitter that’s about listening and learning,” says Brad Nelson, the man behind @Starbucks. “Twitter is a leading indicator.” Collecting the information is as simple as searching for references to your company.

Morgan Johnston, manager of Corporate Communications at Jet Blue, abolished a $50 fee for carry-on bikes after hearing complaints via Twitter. “Think of Twitter as the canary in the coal mine,” says Johnston. “We watch for customers’ discussions about amenities we have, and what they’d like to see made better.” For a more formal approach, lob a simple post asking for feedback and provide a hashtag to collect the responses.
Poaching Customers

“Twitter is not just a kid story,” says Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs. Brogan should know: He is one of several Twitter experts advising companies on how to spy on their competition and to swoop in with a better service or discount.

Freesource’s Egan describes how to do it: Using TweetDeck, set up a permanent search for all permutations of your competitor’s name, as well as words that convey dissatisfaction (“sucks” or “hate”). Public replies to those new prospects are dangerous, as your competition may see them, so the best bet is to follow them and get followed back, allowing you to send direct messages.
Customer Expectation Management

Bad things happen–it’s how you condition customers to deal with it that counts. Jet Blue tweets flight delays. In April, when a Stanley Cup broadcast was interrupted, cable provider Comcast used Twitter to immediately inform its subscribers that the culprit was a lightning storm, and that transmission would soon be restored.

Small companies–like United Linen, a linens and uniform company in Bartlesville, Okla.–can manage expectations this way, too. When a major snowstorm hit the area, Marketing Director Scott Townsend used Twitter to let customers know deliveries would be delayed. “It was a great way to send information to everyone,” he says. “They understood we wouldn’t be there, but they wanted to know what our status was and updates as the situation changed.”
Corralling Eyeballs

During last year’s NBA Eastern Conference Finals between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Orlando Magic, Turner Broadcasting managed to weave social-media feeds into its home page. Fans accessed the conversation by logging onto Twitter through TNT.com, and the tweets were also posted on Twitter with links back to TNT.com. Those forums mean more Web traffic–and thus more advertising revenue. “It’s exciting to sell this to an advertiser,” said Liza Hausman, vice president of marketing for Gigya Socialize, the brains behind the integration technology.
Vendor Selection

Twitter can snag customers, but how about suppliers? Crowdspring, an online marketplace that marries businesses with graphic designers (see “The Creativity Of Crowds “), used Twitter to build up its stable of contributors–now 12,000 strong globally.

Business travelers can apply this same logic: Tweeting that you’re about to visit a city can scare up discount offers from hotels, bus companies and other travel-services providers.
Conflict Resolution

Wiggly Wigglers, a Herfordshire, U.K.-based marketer of gardening and farming supplies, was recently overcharged $10,500 by British Telecom. Five months passed without restitution.

Finally, Wiggly owner Heather Gorringe hit the Twitter-sphere, asking if anyone else had had problems with BT. @BTCare sent Gorringe a message within 30 minutes promising help; two days later, the bill was amended. “When I phone them up, I’m an isolated call to deal with, so I’m less important,” says Gorringe. “But if I tweet, and 1,193 people re-tweet, 100,000 people see it within 30 seconds.”
Employee Recruitment

Sodexo, a food services and facilities management company, trains its recruiters on Twitter and other social media. An automated program sends prospects a direct message whenever a position opens up, and the messages are opened 30% of the time.

The trick, says Arie Ball, vice president of talent acquisition at Sodexo, is to be as personal and engaging as possible: “People get an insider’s view, a sense if this is a company they want to work for.” The company says that using Twitter as a recruitment tool has helped cut its investment in online job boards by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Raising Capital

As in the physical world, no one likes to be solicited for contributions online. A better Twitter tack: Don’t ask, just inform.

Last Thanksgiving, Epic Change, a nonprofit that encourages people to tell their stories to transform communities, launched the Tweetsgiving Web site, with the help of theKbuzz, a word-of-mouth marketing firm. Tweetsgiving asked people to tweet what they were grateful for, and compiled the responses at #tweetsgiving, with a link back to the Tweetsgiving site, where users had the option of contributing money to build classrooms in Tanzania.

Over the 48-hour campaign, 15,000 people came to the Tweetsgiving site; 360 donated, for a total of $11,000. “We never asked people to give,” says Stacey Monk, founder of Epic Change. “We got people invested in their own, personalized way.”

Gain Links Or Make Friends – Which is Better Online?

There’s much to be said about the respective values of social
media and SEO, both as individual entities and a collective. A
cornerstone of search engine optimization is linking, while
social media is all about being, well, sociable. But which is
better today?

That’s very much a question that’s open to debate, depending
on who you ask, you could expect to hear a whole range of
answers. Networking has become ingrained in the Internet
marketer’s psyche, building relationships while interacting
with your fellow professionals and consumers. But can it really
compete with building an impressive linking infrastructure when
it comes to marketing your website online?

Let’s start with the positives…

Both techniques work in very different ways. You build links by
making requests, payments (only to the right people -
directories and the sort) and creating content that causes a
stir. Networking can of course help this process. When you get
noticed by more people, they may be inclined to link to you;
there’s no guarantee of course, but social media is a way of
raising a profile and showing off your expertise to the world -
prime link bait conditions.

There are easy ways to get links and hard ways. Even if you
create a fantastic blog, a great new piece of shareware or a
stunning design, there’s no guarantee that people will find
you. Quality links are often those that happen organically, the
kind of thing that you can’t force. Article submission and
press releases will guarantee at least one (sometimes more) link
back to your site; while the every little bit helps strategy is
a good one, that link can take time to gain and time is precious,
particularly when the outcome doesn’t quite justify the means.

Of course the main reason most people create an article or
release, at least in an SEO capacity, is to get it picked up and
syndicated across a number of sites. The dream ticket is a major
news agency picking up a story on their newswire and sending it
global; this, of course, is extremely rare. For this to happen,
it needs to be relevant, it needs to be interesting and it needs
to offer something new. Regurgitating the same stuff over and
over again may save time, but that could well prove to be a
false economy.

But once again we’re thrust back into the realms of Web 2.0. If
you want to get people talking about your content, you may first
need to start shouting about it. Herein lies the weakness though
of social media.

…Now for the negatives

There is still a cloud of mysticism that hangs over the social
side of the Internet. Just how effective is it? If you have the
time to dedicate to interact with the wider community day in day
out, then the benefits can’t be argued. Normal people have
become celebrities, while the celebrities themselves have been
out there growing legions of new fans. All very positive. But
what is the value of a follower or a friend? Commenting on
blogs, reciprocating tweets and conversing offers a fantastic
community spirit; allowing users from all around the world to
get involved in a continuous conversation.

What all this won’t do, necessarily, is improve your site and
its strength. You might get traffic, in fact you will almost
certainly get traffic, but if this comes from the same basic
group of people, none of whom have the slightest interest
in using your business or buying your products, is it really
worth the investment of time? Friends and followers aren’t just
an ego trip; it shows a level of influence and provides a wider
sphere of influence. A strong linking strategy though goes
further.

Every link you earn will join a wider group of inbound pointers.
Google likes websites that people like pointing to. Therefore,
Google likes nothing more than a site with links going to all
pages, coming from a variety of sources and in a natural
fashion. While there are dangerous links out there, toxic ones
that will cause more damage than good, these can be avoided and
banished if need be.

Whether it’s on a directory, bolted onto an article or has come
from a respected source organically, the power of the link is
hard to question. Aside from a permanent new gateway for
targeted traffic to find you, it adds vital strength to your
website’s overall profile. PageRank maybe all but defunct, but
that doesn’t mean that links are treading the same path.

We would never discourage people from using social media; it has
fantastic potential and is evolving all the time. But if website
promotion and search engine marketing is what you’re looking to
do, the tried and trusted link may well prove a more
constructive use of your time. It maybe a quieter way of going
about things, anti-social even, but links get you seen on search
engines and search engines get you seen by consumers.

Your online profile may ebb and flow, your popularity wane, but
when you build a strong link profile you create stability and
open the door to continued development. They are the foundation
to any successful site; so while it’s always nice to have
flighty friends, the stability and long-term benefit of a link
is still very much the method of choice for most.

The first Matt Cutts Answers Questions About Google video of the year has been posted, and in it Matt addresses links from Twitter and Facebook, after talking about his shaved head again. Specifically, the submitted question he answers is:

Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?

Essentially, Matt says Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It’s just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).

While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do still come with things to keep in mind. For one, with Facebook, you have to keep in mind that a lot of profiles are not public. When a profile is not public, Google can’t crawl it, and it can’t assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it can’t fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public, it might be able to flow pagerank, Matt says. With Twitter, most links are nofollowed anyway.

“At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just like we’d treat links from WordPress or .edus or.govs or anything like that,” says Cutts. “It’s not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific platforms might have issues, whether it’s not being crawled or it might be nofollow. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank.”

There you have it. Matt’s response probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to most of you, but it’s always nice to hear information like this straight from Google.

20 Tools for Tracking Social Media Marketing
By Merle (c) 2010 MerlesWorld
(http://MerlesWorld.com)

Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter make it easy
for people to come together and share opinions, experiences and
thoughts on a number of topics. Smart companies understand this
and are using the power of social media to connect and inform
their customers, and potential customers. Referred to as “Social
Media Marketing”, it’s a smart way to open the lines of
communication between you and your prospects.

Social media activities run the gamut from Blogging, micro
blogging sites such as Twitter, social networking communities
such as LinkedIn and Facebook, video and music uploading sites,
discussion forums, photo sharing and more. With so many
different sites and ways to participate, it can be difficult to
keep track of all your efforts.

Participating in social media doesn’t take a lot of money, but
it is very time consuming and businesses want to know that all
of this investment in time is paying off. Before launching a
campaign, you should have a firm grasp on what it is you’re
trying to accomplish. Is it increasing website traffic? Getting
more ezine subscribers? Having more people download your free
ebook or whitepaper? Or maybe you just want to work on your
company’s brand image. Whatever it is, you need to have a plan.
As the old saying goes, “If you don’t know where you’re going,
you’ll never get there”. Have your game plan intact before
getting started in marketing yourself, or your company with
social media.

There are many different forms of social media, so it’s
impossible to use them all. Pick three or four, and funnel the
majority of your efforts there. Even if you won’t be working
them all, at the very least you should claim your name or
company name on as many social services as possible. You don’t
want to find out later that someone has the user name that you
want. If you need to see if your chosen user name is available
try http://Namechk.com which checks dozens of social media
networking and bookmarking sites all at once to see if it’s
available. Claim your name now so you won’t end up being sorry
later.

So how do you monitor all the buzz? How do you monitor your
brand and protect your hard earned reputation? I thought you’d
never ask. There isn’t one fool-proof method but there are many
services and tools out there that will make it easy to see who’s
talking about you online. Some are free and others will make you
pull out your wallet.

These “online reputation management” tools, as they’re often
referred to, will help you to define keywords or phrases you
wish to track and then watch for any mention of your company
name, products, or services. It’s important to defend and monitor
your online reputation. Similar to High School reputations,
protecting your image online is the name of the game, and just
as in real life, everyone has one to maintain.

Let’s take a look at some of the measuring and tracking tools at
your disposal:

1) http://BackTweets.com : A search engine for Twitter. See
who’s tweeting your links and more. Can also sign up for email
alerts of new findings.

2) http://Addictomatic.com : A little different than the others,
you type in a keyword, topic or phrase and out it goes searching
the top blogs, news sites, Google, Technorati, Ask, YouTube,
Flickr, Digg, Topix and more. You’ll be given a personalized
results page to bookmark with everything it finds related to
your topic.

3) http://Buzzoo.net : All about Internet buzz, it tracks
several different websites to bring you what’s “hot” right now.

4) http://Surchur.com : Search for the latest and greatest on
topics that are popular right now. Type in a keyphrase and it
searches blogs, social news sites, photo and video sites for
your chosen topic.

5) http://Commentful.Blogflux.com : This service watches for
comments on blog posts, Digg, Flickr, and others and notifies
you of any findings.

6) http://AlertRank.com : A better way to organize and sort
Google alerts. Get a daily report emailed to you in a
spreadsheet format of what it finds.

7) http://BoardTracker.com : A search engine for forums only.
Monitor discussion boards and be notified by email when a thread
matching your search terms is discovered. Free to use.

http://www.google.com/alerts : I’ve been using this “secret
weapon” for years. Simply type in your name or company name and
receive daily emails of results found. They do the work, you
receive the links. Free and nice.

9) http://BrandsEye.com : An online reputation management tool
with a real-time, concise overview of your online reputation.
Multiple levels of services and pricing available. Starting at
$1.00.

10) http://Twazzup.com : Another Twitter only search engine.

11) http://SiteMention.com : Type in your url and find out
what’s being said about you. The results returned are gathered
from Google Blog Search, Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, MySpace,
Digg, Delicious and many more.

12) http://Brandwatch.net: This service tracks your brands,
companies, even the competition. Sign up for free weekly updates
on any brand. Their detailed reports break down what sites like
you, your most talked about features, weekly summary of all
blogs and forum activity. Very similar to the old “press
clipping” service.

13) http://Trackur.com : A tool that scans many websites,
including blogs, news, image and video sites, forums and
notifies you of any mention of your brand, products/services.
Easy to use and affordable. Prices vary depending on need, a
personal account is only $18.00 a month, corporate account
$88.00 a month with other options also available. Try a
“personal” account free for 14 days.

14) http://FiltrBox.com : This one searches online news sources,
Twitter and others to find out what’s being said about you or
your company. Pricing is based on the number of users, but there
is a free version that provides “5 filters” and 15 days of what
they call “article history”.

15) http://SocialMention.com/alerts : Just like Google Alerts
but for social media. Enter your keyword phrase and email address
to be notified of any new findings. Searches blogs, microblogs
like Twitter, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, videos
and more.

16) http://BlogPulse.com : A search engine that searches only
for data posted to blogs. Enter your keyword, hit submit and
off it goes to gather results.

17) http://BackType.com : Billing itself as a “conversational
search engine” they index millions of conversations from social
networks, blogs and other social media.

18) http://sm2.techrigy.com : Industry insiders claim this to be
the leading social media monitoring solution online. Choice of
free or paid version. Free is limited to five searches and 1,000
results. There are three paid professional levels: Gold, Diamond,
or Platinum.

19) http://ReputationDefender.com : This paid service finds out
everything there is to know about you online, and if negative
information is found they try to have it removed. Different
types of plans are available such as “My Reputation”, “My
Privacy”, starting at only $14.95 a month.

20) http://Topsy.com : Topsy will track your tweets that have
been retweeted so you can find out who’s been sending you all
that “link love”. Type in your Twitter user name and you’ll be
amazed at what you find.

If you’d like to track incoming traffic from your various social
media profiles, an easy way to do it using Google Analytics can
be found here http://Tinyurl.com/kuc9rL

Just as there are many ways to market your company using social
media, as you can see, there’s a multitude of tools and services
at your disposal to track and see if all of that hard work is
paying off. Smart companies realize the importance of social
media in their marketing efforts and are utilizing it on some
level. How smart are you?

HyperRealism as a Motivating Factor in Web Video
By Jerry Bader (c) 2010

If there is one thing every Web business executive can agree on,
it’s that websites need to motivate people to act. That action
can be to place an order, send an email, pick-up the phone, or
maybe just join a mailing list, but whatever the intended
response, your website must cause a reaction. It’s a case of
simple cause and effect.

The issue is one of successful communication. What you say and
how you say it are what motivates people to connect with your
company, the solution provider. Websites, blogs, social
networking, and mobile sites are merely venues for
communication. All the Facebook friends, Linkedin contacts, and
search engine traffic in the world doesn’t mean a thing if you
have nothing interesting, memorable, and persuasive to say to
them.

In our view, Web Video is the most powerful communication tool
available to businesses today, but if you don’t use it properly
it isn’t going to help, and the same thing applies to copy,
graphics, photos, and blog posts. What you say and how you say
it are the critical elements of whether or not, people respond
to your website presentation.

What Needs To Be Said

Marketing consultants have for years suggested the use of
Mission Statements as one way to get companies to focus their
thinking and communication efforts into something meaningful.
They are intended to be a kind of ‘Rosetta Stone’ for
corporate communication, but instead, they have become a
graveyard for innocuous platitudes and inane statements of
self-congratulation. It’s too bad because the idea of a core
guiding statement that defines purpose and personality is
central to developing a framework for marketing communication
content and delivery.

If websites are about motivating action, what do we need to
communicate to our audience to achieve that objective? If
Mission Statements aren’t the solution, what is? The answer is
not a price proposition or a feature proposition but rather a
presentation of emotional value because it is the most
persuasive motivating factor you can offer. It is something that
your competitors can’t copy, undercut, or even compete with.

Your Emotional Value Proposition Is Your Brand

If you ever thought branding didn’t apply to your company, well
now you know better, because branding is nothing more than the
implementation and communication of your company’s emotional
value statement: the core guiding principle used to formulate
all marketing communication efforts, including website video
presentations.

In Lee Eisenberg’s book, ‘Shoptimism’ he outlines four
reasons people buy things: to make themselves happy, to
transform themselves, to express themselves, and to achieve a
sense of permanence. Each of these reasons is based on an
emotional value, which is why all the features and price-cutting
in the world can’t compete with a well-established emotional
return.

Presenting Value in Marketing Communication

Eisenberg’s four reasons to buy are really a variation on
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs that form a pyramid of need, want,
and desire: the basis for everything we require and everything
we crave, starting with survival and ending with
self-fulfillment. Most of us have moved up the pyramid from
basic survival and procreation needs to more sophisticated
desires based on belonging, identity, and self-actualization,
the elements that form an Emotional Value Marketing
Proposition.

Most sophisticated marketers understand the power and importance
of self-actualization as an emotional trigger upon which a brand
identity can be established and promoted; however a distinction
must be made between the audience’s desire for individual
fulfillment and a company’s objective of meeting its marketing
goals.

In a Web-based business environment populated with newly minted
entrepreneurs who do not distinguish themselves from their
businesses, it is easy to understand why this confusion exists.

A business is a living breathing entity unto itself and should
not be confused with it’s owners, managers, and employees. It
may be trendy to think you are your brand, but unless you’re
Tony Robbins, with his personality, performance skills,
resources and ‘shtick,’ it’s best to implement a less
egocentric strategy.

Where self-actualization in marketing plays out is as a basis
for presenting the emotional value you offer your audience: a
desirable value that motivates that audience to act, and thereby
fulfill your corporate marketing goals.

An ego-based misreading of self-actualization has led to a
plethora of self-promotion and do-it-yourselfism that works
against business success. It’s the fulfillment of your
audiences desires that management needs to be concerned with,
not their own.

Perception, Reality, and Communication

Once you’ve figured out what your Emotional Value Proposition
is, the next thing is to figure out how to present it, which
brings us to the idea of hyperrealism, a term we use for
developing effective Web-based video presentations.

Marketing communication is essentially a storytelling discipline
that relies on shorthand reference and pattern recognition
wrapped in the context of an idealized reality, what we call
hyperrealism. In art, hyperrealism is intended to convey
something deeper and more significant than what mere reality can
convey, and the same principle holds true for marketing
communication. Reality is messy, complex, and confused, while
hyperrealism is simplified and focused, a prime directive in any
effective marketing, branding, and advertising strategy. You
need to simplify in order to clarify, in order to persuade.

HyperRealism As A Concept Development Principle

Every sane human being understands gangsters and serial killers
are bad, yet television audiences flock to consume episodes of
the ‘Sopranos’ and ‘Dexter.’ In the same way most of us know
the images presented by Victoria’s Secret bear little relation
to reality. These examples may be obvious, but all effective
commercial presentation is stylized, not because it’s an effort
to mislead, but rather because it needs to focus and clarify a
message aimed at engaging and connecting to an audience on an
emotional level.

In order to connect to your audience your marketing presentation
must communicate something more than the lowest price, or the
latest feature, it must show the way to that idealized version
that viewers have of themselves that only exists in their minds.
Once you come to grips with that reality, you’re on your way to
developing a successful marketing communication strategy.

It’s ok to say “no” to Twitter if that’s your thing. There’s a chance that it just doesn’t fit into your strategy or help you achieve your goals. That’s cool. However, if it is your thing, you may be interested in how Google ranks tweets. That is if search marketing is your thing.

Do you see Twitter as important to an effective search marketing campaign? Share your thoughts here.

Google and Microsoft almost simultaneously announced deals with Twitter a few months back, that would give the companies access to tweets in real-time to fuel their respective search engines’ real-time results. Microsoft immediately launched their version, but it was separate from the regular Bing search engine. Google waited a while, but eventually started incorporating real-time results right into regular Google SERPs (including not only tweets, but various other sources).

After the Twitter deals were announced, Bing came out and said, “If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower.”

Amit Singhal Google was not as vocal about how it would rank tweets and other real-time results, but the company has now shed a bit of light on that via an interview with MIT’s Technology Review. David Talbot interviewed Google “Fellow” Amit Singhal, who has led development of real-time search at the company. According to him, Google also ranks tweets by followers to an extent, but it’s not just about how many followers you get. It’s about how reputable those followers are.

Singhal likens the system to the well-known Google system of link popularity. Getting good links from reputable sources helps your content in Google, so having followers with that some kind of authority theoretically helps your tweets rank in Google’s real-time search.

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

But that’s only one factor.

Do you commonly use hashtags in your tweets? If your goal is to rank in Google’s real-time search index, you may want to cut down on that practice, because according to Singhal, that is a big red flag for a lower quality tweet. This seems to be part of Google’s spam control strategy.

Another noteworthy excerpt from the interview:

Another problem: how, if someone is searching for “Obama,” to sift through White House press tweets and thousands of others to find the most timely and topical information. Google scans tweets to find the “signal in the noise,” he says. Such a “signal” might include a new onslaught of tweets and other blogs that mention “Cambridge police” or “Harry Reid” near mentions of “Obama.” By looking out for such signals, Google is able to furnish real-time hits that contain the freshest subject matter even for very common search terms.

Well, we certainly know more about Google’s strategy for tweet ranking now, but there are still plenty of questions about it. What is Google’s stance is on Ghost Tweeting? Are Google’s ranking factors a good reason to create and follow more Twitter lists in hopes for gaining more reputable industry followers?

The factors mentioned aren’t the only ones Google employs. It’s not like Google is going to tell us everything. It also helps to keep in mind that real-time search spans far beyond just tweets. Still, Twitter is clearly a big part of it, and even the significance of tweets themselves will evolve in time.

Google says it hopes to factor in geo-location data (with regards to tweets) into the real-time search results at some point. Google and Twitter engineers frequently collaborate on real-time search, which Google itself says is evolving.

By the way, it stands to reason that Google’s strategy for ranking tweets probably shares similarities for how it ranks content from other sources drawn from for real-time search.

Below are a few directories that are not being penalized by Google and still pass on PageRank.

Link Web Services: http://www.LinkWebServices.com
Web University: http://WebUniversity.LinkWebServices.com
The Web Store: http://www.LinkWebServices.com/mm5/merchant.mvc

Link-Building (Backlink) Strategies

Welcome to the Link-Building portion of Web University.  Link-Building is an extremely important, fast paced, quickly changing approach to raising your websites reputation and of course ranking on all major search engines.  Although some strategies such as ‘Press Releases’, ‘Anchor Text’ and ‘Directory Submissions’ don’t carry the same weight (power) they once used to, all major search engines still use the number of Backlinks to your site as a sign of how popular your website is on the Internet.  You’ll find this to be very similar to a High School popularity contest, the more friends you have, the more popular you become.

General Directories:

Directories give a website their first ‘authority’ links and they are also the second fastest way for search engines to find and index your website’s pages.  The following directories are the major players you want to submit to:

·         DMOZ (Open Directory Project) www.dmoz.org = Free

·         Yahoo! Directory www.yahoo.com = $299.00/year

·         Best of the Web = $99.95/year

·         Business www.business.com = $299.00/year

·         GoGuides = $69.95

·         JoeAnt = $39.99

If your competitors are in these directories, you should be too; if they are not, this will help you rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).

Niche Directories:

Niche directories are directories that specialize on a specific industry.  Search the web for directories in your particular industry and submit each of your pages to them; this type of directories may yield more valuable links than general directories.  Niche directories will typically allow you to submit “Text Anchor Hyperlinks” which are much more powerful than their image counterparts.  This is a fantastic way to outperform your competitors as they may not have taken the time to research and submit their web pages to them.

Social Media Profiles:

Social media is one of the most powerful methods to quickly get your link onto the screen of hundreds if not thousands of users.  Creating a Social Media profile is easy and LinkWebServices.com will provide you with an advanced template containing all of the most popular questions they will ask you so when you start creating your profile all you have to do is copy and paste from your template.

http://www.linkwebservices.com/downloads/Link_Web_Services_Social_Network_Integration_Profile_Template.pdf

Secret Strategy: create three profiles: 1. Company Name, 2. Your Brand, 3. Your Individual (Personal) Profile. This will triple the number of people you can reach and multiply the number of backlinks to your website.

Most media sites DO NOT pass on Google Page Rank, but some of them do (i.e. Meetup.com); always keep an eye open for a stronger backlink opportunity with a site that allows anchor text and passes Google PageRank to your links.

SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) Link Building:

How do I get ahead of my competition? Easy! Do a Google Search for the top keywords you want your web page to be found by, take a look at the top ranking sites, find out who is linking to them and get them to link to you.  Also, see if the top ranking sites for your keywords would be willing to include a link to your site on their high ranking pages.  Take a look at their websites and find out if they have a “links” or “resources” page you can add your link to or just give them a call and ask them.  Remember, always create value for the other person before you ask for something (Anthony Robbins); brainstorm some ideas of things you could contribute to their site, a blog post, an article, a reciprocal link.

Blogging:

Blogging is powerful, efficient and fast! Once your blog is created and a few posts have been added, search the web for “Blog Directories” (another good place to search is Website Magazine) and submit your blog to them.  You MUST make absolutely sure you add your domain or sub-domain link to the post or your efforts will be for nothing; when the blog directories include your blog, that hyperlink becomes a powerful Backlink to your site. To maximize the blog’s potential, make sure your blog provides an RSS feed people can subscribe to.  If you don’t have the time to blog, consider a Ghost Writer or Freelance writer to take care of your posts for you; a great place to find them is at Elance.com.  Make sure you promote every single post through your Social Media Profiles and you’ll see people start to follow you on Twitter, Facebook and all other major Social Media Networks available.

Articles Targeting Social Media:

Articles are a fantastic way to create backlinks while it has the wonderful side-effect of advertising you as the expert in your field.  Articles can be time consuming and some people may consider them hard work, to whom I would recommend hiring a Ghost Writer or Freelancer to write your articles.  For this particular portion of Link-Building, it is best to already have your Social Media Profiles created and an active Friend/Follower network already in place. The idea here is to create content that is appealing to the people in the social media networks, thus, your topic has to be social media related.  Not all articles will return great results, but once one does, not only will it make up for the others, but it will give you a better idea of what people are interested in.

Link Farms:

Avoid them at all cost.

Link Web Services: http://www.LinkWebServices.com
Web University: http://WebUniversity.LinkWebServices.com
The Web Store: http://www.LinkWebServices.com/mm5/merchant.mvc

On the Google Search Bar, enter one of the Google Commands below and replace www.LinkWebServices.com with your website information.

·          Cache:

o    Description: Displays cached version of the site

o    Example: cache:www.LinkWebServices.com

·          Cache + Keyword:

o    Description: Displays cached version of the site and highlight the specified keywords

o    Example: site: www.LinkWebServices.com Keyword Here

·          Link:

o    Description: Displays the number of links back to the specified page (backlinks)

o    Example: link:www.LinkWebServices.com

·          Related:

o    Description: Displays all web pages that are “similar” to the specified web page

o    Example: related:www.LinkWebServices.com

·          Info:

o    Description: Displays all web page information for the specified page

o    Example: info:www.LinkWebServices.com

·          Site:

o    Description: Displays all pages of the specified site that are indexed on Google

o    Example: site:www.LinkWebServices.com

·          All In Title:

o    Description: Displays all pages that contain all the specified keywords in the title

o    Example: allintitle:www.LinkWebServices.com

·          In Title:

o    Description: Displays all pages that contain any of the specified keywords in the title

o    Example: intitle:www.LinkWebServices.com

·          All In URL:

o    Description: Displays all pages with the specified URL

o    Example: allinurl:www.LinkWebServices.com

·          In URL:

o    Description: Displays all pages with the specified URL anywhere in the address

o    Example: inurl:www.LinkWebServices.com

Link Web Services: http://www.LinkWebServices.com
Web University: http://WebUniversity.LinkWebServices.com
The Web Store: http://www.LinkWebServices.com/mm5/merchant.mvc

Top 50 Video Sharing Sites

Top 50 Video Sharing Sites

Link Web Services: http://www.LinkWebServices.com
Web University: http://WebUniversity.LinkWebServices.com
The Web Store: http://www.LinkWebServices.com/mm5/merchant.mvc

You Must Use Social Media to Promote Your Brand

If you think Twitter, Facebook, and other online social media communities are only for teens, you’re missing out on valuable and free marketing platforms for your brand (book, business or product).

Further, if you’re not on social media, you’re risking losing your own potential clients/customers to those smart business people who are utilizing social media.

Which social media platforms you focus on depends a great deal on what your brand is. Here are seven excellent reasons why you must use social media no matter what you are promoting:

Reason 1: It’s the Most Cost-Effective Online Advertising.

The current most popular social media platforms being used for business are free: Twitter.com, Facebook.com and LinkedIn.com. (LinkedIn does have an upgrade that costs, but it’s not necessary to get this upgrade.) And this is “relationship” marketing to targeted markets. “Free” is definitely more cost-effective than spending money on online advertising techniques such as Pay Per Click or banner ads.

Reason 2: You Can Have Global Reach With Social Media.

The world is now a global marketplace. Why not reach this global market? Many of the most popular social media platforms have this global reach, and you can see this clearly illustrated on Twitter. At any time of day or night you can see real-time “tweets” from people in Japan, England, the U.S., India and many other countries.

For example, if you have a book that might appeal to anyone in the world who reads in English, why limit yourself to just promoting in the U.S.? Thanks to Amazon people outside the U.S. can buy your book even if it is only available in U.S. stores.

Reason 3: You Can Attract Targeted Groups of People as Potential Clients/Customers for Your Brand.

Social media enables you to join groups of people with the same interests and goals. On LinkedIn and Facebook you can join groups as varied as Children’s Book Writers to eMarketing. If you choose groups to join based on your brand, you’ll be putting yourself in front of the exact groups of people you want to reach as potential clients/customers. This can pay off in increased sales for you.

Reason 4: You Can Form Your Own Community by Using the Community Aspect of Social Media.

Once you are active on social media platforms and have people who are your followers (Twitter), your friends (Facebook) and/or your connections (LinkedIn), you can start your own groups of highly targeted interests. You can create a niche market in your brand, book or business and share your knowledge with others who join your community.

These people can become your loyal followers, friends and connections – and they can help spread your marketing message to their followers, friends and connections.

Reason 5: You Can Use Social Media to Establish Your Expertise.

People like to do business with people they know, like and trust. By sharing your knowledge for free online with the people in the social media groups you belong to, you can establish yourself as an expert. This can pay off in increasing potential clients/customers’ trust in you.

And you can also receive invitations for blog “interviews” or BlogTalkRadio show interviews or podcasts. And these interviews lead to more free exposure for your brand and more free promotion for your expertise.

Reason 6: You Can Use Social Media to Find Cross-Promotional Partners.

Amazingly in the world of social media, people who would be considered competitors in the off-line world are teaming up to provide products and services to their combined clients/customers.

And these clients/customers are very responsive to these cross-promotions (often called joint ventures) – especially when introduced to a second expert by a first expert they already know, like and trust.

You and your cross-promotion partner can each get access to the other person’s “list” (the names of interested clients/customers collected at a website) and thus you’ve greatly expanded your potential client/customer pool.

Reason 7: With a Few Keystrokes You Can Announce New Updates of Your Activities.

Your updates on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn take seconds – and you’ve announced to your followers, friends and connections what you’re doing or what you’re offering or what you’re speaking on. And there are even online applications that allow you to update your status across several of your social media accounts at one time. So it is as easy as 1-2-3 to keep in front of your potential clients/customers.

In conclusion, once you become active yourself on social media platforms, you’ll find many more reasons to promote your brand, book or business on social media in order to attract targeted potential clients/customers. And you’ll look back at your pre-social media days and wonder how you ever did marketing without using online social media.

Is Social Media Worth Your Time?

Everyone – from politicians, businesses, musicians, celebrities and many other groups of people – uses social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social networking outlets to spread their message, build their businesses and connect with others.

Do they know something we don’t?

Networking, whether online or offline, is a great use of time when done properly. As with anywhere you spend your time, knowing why you are doing it, how you will measure success and having a plan is the best approach.

With that said, I jumped in with both feet last year with the guidance of a social media expert, and I have found clients, joint venture partners, speaking engagements and other great connections through various social media outlets. I am a member of more social media outlets than I can count, but I currently focus on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. While I am not an expert in social media, here are five reasons to take some time to learn the benefits of social media.

1. There Is No Cost

There is no direct cost unless you opt for an upgrade, if one is offered. I haven’t paid for an upgrade and have steadily increased my list to include over 1000 followers between just three social media outlets, and without much effort.

2. Build Your Business by Connecting With Peers

Are you interested in finding joint ventures, affiliates, guest experts or other peers you can bounce ideas off of? In the last few weeks alone, I have located one large joint venture partner and have had several other partnership opportunities cross my desk. Business owners just like you are using social media to connect with others who are interested in using your articles, hosting you as a guest expert on teleseminars, webinars and live events, and even creating projects together!

3. Build Your Business by Following Reporters You Are Targeting

Would an article written by a certain reporter make your year? Follow them on Twitter or Facebook and see what is of interest to them and what they are writing about. You never know what golden nugget you’ll find by following them online that may open the door at the right time. Follow them and invite them to follow you as well! Or with LinkedIn you can find out how many degrees you are from them. You may surprise yourself by being only one or two degrees away from your target!

4. Showcase Your Expertise, Build Your Platform and Attract New

Clients

Social media is an interesting animal. While many people use it to increase their businesses, you must be mindful about outright promotions. Generally speaking, heavy marketing of your products and services on these sites is a big no-no. Here’s how I do it. I’ll post something like this: “Just got off the phone with social networking guru Nancy Marmolejo. Now I’m off to finish writing my sales page for the Business Breakthrough Series.” People who are intrigued will check you out and may end up deciding to follow you and … bingo! They have just entered your world!

5. Reach Large Audiences

The world is your oyster in social media. There are only a few businesses that are truly limited by geographic boundaries, especially if you are in the information marketing business. Being active on social networking sites eliminates geographic boundaries and allows you to reach a vast number of people from all over the world. If you have products and services that can be purchased by anyone in the world, being active in social media is an absolute must for you. I recently held a teleseminar with people from over 10 countries in attendance, all from the comfort of my home office! And my sweat pants!

So, is social media worth the time? It depends. Social media is absolutely the wave of the future, and you will need to know something about it at some point. However, whether you work it into your plan for 2009 depends on your goals. If you have a goal of increasing your reach to prospects either locally or internationally, you can do that quite effectively through social media. However, if you can cannot and will not commit to learning how to “tweet” on Twitter or communicate on Facebook or use your connections on LinkedIn, it will not be worth your time.

My advice to clients when they are just starting out is to select one social media outlet, whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, and master it before jumping into every outlet possible. You obviously need to schedule time for connecting, so select the social networking outlets that will benefit you the

most.

Now that I am experiencing the financial results of my online efforts, I understand why this is such a great use of my time and I’m hooked!

Simple Twitter Tips that Attract Clients and Partners

According to Mashable.com, a leading authority on social media, there are currently over 12 million users on Twitter. Another resource called istrategylabs.com reports that 46% of Twitter users are college grads, and another 17% have post graduate degrees. Furthermore, 47% are between age 18 and 34, and another 31% are between 35 and 49. Males and females are evenly ranked, with women accounting for 53% of users and men 47%. If your target market falls within these demographics, actively participating on Twitter is probably worth your while.

Twitter is simply a micro blogging service. What does that mean? It means that you write short updates (140 characters maximum) called “tweets” and send them out to your followers. And it is a marketer’s dream come true – it’s an easy way to stay in front of your target market and showcase your authority at no charge!

The myth around Twitter is that Twitter users (called tweeple or tweeps) tweet about useless information such as what kind of coffee they had with breakfast. Yes, some of that exists and it is actually important as you’ll see below, but once you understand the power of connecting on Twitter, you may become a Twitter convert, just like me.

So, if you’re on Twitter or considering starting, the question becomes, “what do I tweet about that will make this a useful tool for me?” Here are some categories you can consider for your tweets. There are others but these will get you started:

Industry Tips

This is a big one. You are on Twitter to showcase your expertise, so industry tips act as your credibility builders. Here’s how to do it: Create a list of high value tips (remember – no more than 140 characters long) and send one or two out every day. If you don’t want to have to manually do this yourself every day, consider a free tool called TweetLater.com to set up your tweets in advance. If your tweets are really good, others will send them out to their lists as well. This is called a “re-tweet,” and it’s a super way to quickly build your list of targeted followers.

Here is one of my recent tweets that had a great response:

Connect Others: Be willing to connect others even if it has nothing to do with your business. What goes around, comes around.

About Your Business

Use this category sparingly. In other words, if you use Twitter as a place to advertise your products and services too much, people will stop following you. This is not what Twitter is about. It is really about raising awareness of you and your business and impacting others. Use the 80/20 rule here. For every eight tweets about things other than your business, you can post two things about your business.

Here is an example:

Hey Columbus: I’ll be on Fox tomorrow at 7:45 where you can see me interviewed about my new book, Flourish!

Re-Tweets

When someone re-tweets you, they are giving you the highest compliment you can get on Twitter! It means that the person who re-tweeted you thinks that what you said is worth sharing with their own list of followers. This is like having someone ask you to a meeting so they can introduce you their entire list of contacts. When you get a re-tweet, send them a short tweet thanking them! Re-tweet others who are tweeting things that you agree with or want your

followers to read.

If you are not familiar with Twitter, the example below probably won’t make a lot of sense because of all of the abbreviations, but they are necessary given that you only have 140 characters. Abbreviations are outside the scope of this article, but just know that it’s really not as scary as it looks!

RT @getgreatcopy: New blog post: The Sixth Habit of Highly Effective Communicators http://bit.ly/ 175XGS Gr8 stuff Jan, as usual.

Quotes

Tweeps seem to love quotes. If you are also a fan of quotes, compile a list and send one or two out every day. Again, you can use tweetlater.com to set these up in advance so you don’t have to manually enter them every day. Simply set up these tweets for a month and then watch your re-tweets happen!

Here’s an example of one that I recently posted: