Social Media and Social Technologies have many new building blocks and take time to impliment
Keep an eye on these folks to learn the current trends in Social Web Technologies
The social wave just keeps getting bigger every time I look. Today I was building out my profile on Plaxo and found this great Web TV Show http://thesocialweb.tv/ If you are planning to work with a social community for your business then there are 39 and counting episodes that review a lot of the current trends and technologies in social media. These guys are sharp and have a lot of interesting guests and comments in their conversational format.
Couple thoughts on how I have positioned our use of social media.
My Social Framework
In addition to managing our 6 corporate portals and contributing to my blog, I currently manage several social network profiles; Facebook for connecting with family and friends, MySpace for my music profile, Plaxo and Linked In for business and professional networking. Then Twitter to communicate with industry pros and a community that connects with my Blog at www.cnpintegrations.com/myblog/ (so far around 20,000 followers). On top of that since we are using Social Media for part of our SEO strategy. We have accounts on Flicker, Digg, Stumbled Upon, Picasa, Delicious and many many others... to connect our messages and inter-link with each other. There are more that I will get involved with over time but this is plenty to keep me/us busy along with getting any real work done or saving time to spend with my family.
Careful with how you spend your time
This is such a time commitment and I see so many folks involved with even more than we are... I do wonder when they sleep. The trick is before you just start signing up that you think out a strategy of how you plan to use these tools to best serve your purpose and that will consider what will your best use of time. I had been advising folks to get active with a blog for years before I actually started posting regular on mine just because I did not have the time to commit to it. I knew the affect it could have on our site traffic but unless you are ready to be consistent then it could waist time since it has to grow over time and you need to continue to contribute content or you lose your readers and when you start up again you have to build a new audience from scratch. Make sure you establish your priorities and stay focused so you can get the best return on your time and talent investment. Each implementation is as unique as the individuals involved in making them happen. There are unique considerations for all of the social technologies that require thought and a keen eye on current trends if you want to implement them successfully or now waste a bunch of time. Remember all we have in this world is our time and once it is spent we cannot get it back.
Internet provides powerful networking opportunities that allow users to effectively target their audience by logging on to social sites like LinkedIn, Digg and more . Take advantage of these tools by asserting your company's presence online and reaching more potential customers, business partners and employees.
Social-Media/Social-Bookmarking Sites
Share your favorite sites on the Web with potential clients and business partners by commenting on, uploading and ranking different newsworthy articles. You can also create a member profile that directs traffic back to your company's Web site.
Reddit: Upload stories and articles on reddit to drive traffic to your site or blog. Submit items often so that you'll gain a more loyal following and increase your presence on the site.
Digg : Digg has a huge following online because of its optimum usability. Visitors can submit and browse articles in categories like technology, business, entertainment, sports and more.
Del.icio.us: Social bookmark your way to better business with sites like del.icio.us, which invite users to organize and publicize interesting items through tagging and networking.
StumbleUpon: You'll open your online presence up to a whole new audience just by adding the StumbleUpon toolbar to your browser and "channel surf[ing] the Web. You'll "connect with friends and share your discoveries," as well as "meet people that have similar interests."
Technorati: If you want to increase your blog's readership, consider registering it with Technorati, a network of blogs and writers that lists top stories in categories like Business, Entertainment and Technology.
Ning: After hanging around the same social networks for a while, you may feel inspired to create your own, where you can bring together clients, vendors, customers and co-workers in a confidential, secure corner of the Web. Ning lets users design free social networks that they can share with anyone.
Squidoo: According to Squidoo, "everyone's an expert on something. Share your knowledge!" Share your industry's secrets by answering questions and designing a profile page to help other members.
Furl: Make Furl "your personal Web file" by bookmarking great sites and sharing them with other users by recommending links, commenting on articles and utilizing other fantastic features.
Tubearoo: This video network works like other social-bookmarking sites, except that it focuses on uploaded videos. Businesses can create and upload tutorials, commentaries and interviews with industry insiders to promote their own services.
WikiHow: Create a how-to guide or tutorial on wikiHow to share your company's services with the public for free.
YouTube: From the fashion industry to Capitol Hill, everyone has a video floating around on YouTube. Shoot a behind-the-scenes video from your company's latest commercial or event to give customers and clients an idea of what you do each day.
Ma.gnolia: Share your favorite sites with friends, colleagues and clients by organizing your bookmarks with Ma.gnolia. Clients will appreciate both your Internet-savviness and your ability to stay current and organized.
Professional-Networking Sites
Sign up with these online networking communities as a company or as an individual to take advantage of recruiting opportunities, cross-promotional events and more.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a popular networking site where alumni, business associates, recent graduates and other professionals connect online.
Ecademy: Ecademy prides itself on "connecting business people" through its online network, blog and message-board chats, as well as its premier BlackStar membership program, which awards exclusive benefits.
Focus: Focus is a business destination where business professionals can help each other with their purchase and other business decisions by accessing research and peer expertise. Most importantly, Focus provides open, quality information for all businesses that is freely available, easily accessible, and community powered.
YorZ: This networking site doubles as a job site. Members can post openings for free to attract quality candidates.
Xing: An account with networking site Xing can "open doors to thousands of companies." Use the professional contact manager to organize your new friends and colleagues, and take advantage of the Business Accelerator application to "find experts at the click of a button, market yourself in a professional context [and] open up new sales channels."
Facebook: Facebook is no longer just for college kids who want to post their party pics. Businesses vie for advertising opportunities, event promotion and more on this social-networking site.
Care2: Care2 isn't just a networking community for professionals: It's touted as "the global network for organizations and people who Care2 make a difference." If your business is making efforts to go green, let others know by becoming a presence on this site.
Gather: This networking community is made up of members who think. Browse categories concerning books, health, money, news and more to ignite discussions on politics, business and entertainment. This will help your company tap into its target audience and find out what they want.
MEETin.org: Once you've acquired a group of contacts in your city by networking on MEETin.org, organize an event so that you can meet face-to-face.
Tribe: Cities like Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, New York and Chicago have unique online communities on tribe. Users can search for favorite restaurants, events, clubs and more.
Ziggs: Ziggs is "organizing and connecting people in a professional way." Join groups and make contacts through your Ziggs account to increase your company's presence online and further your own personal career.
Plaxo: Join Plaxo to organize your contacts and stay updated with feeds from Digg, Amazon.com, del.icio.us and more.
NetParty: If you want to attract young professionals in cities like Boston, Dallas, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Orlando Fla., create an account with the networking site NetParty. You'll be able to connect with qualified, up-and-coming professionals online, then meet them at a real-life happy-hour event where you can pass out business cards, pitch new job openings and more.
Networking For Professionals: Networking For Professionals is another online community that combines the Internet with special events in the real world. Post photos, videos, résumés and clips on your online profile while you meet new business contacts.
Niche Social-Media Sites
Consider linking up with one of these social-media sites to narrow down your business's target audience. You'll find other professionals, enthusiasts and consumers who are most likely already interested in what your company has to offer.
Pixel Groovy: Web workers will love Pixel Groovy, an open-source site that lets members submit and rate tutorials for Web 2.0, email and online-marketing issues.
Mixx: Mixx prides itself on being "your link to the Web content that really matters." Submit and rate stories, photos and news to drive traffic to your own site. You'll also meet others with similar interests.
Tweako: Gadget-minded computer geeks can network with each other on Tweako, a site that promotes information sharing for the technologically savvy.
Small Business Brief: When members post entrepreneur-related articles, a photo and a link to their profile appear, gaining you valuable exposure and legitimacy online.
Sphinn: Sphinn is an online forum and networking site for the Internet marketing crowd. Upload articles and guides from your blog to create interest in your own company or connect with other professionals for form new contacts.
BuzzFlash.net: This one-stop news resource is great for businesses that want to contribute articles on a variety of subjects, from the environment to politics to health.
HubSpot: HubSpot is another news site aimed at connecting business professionals.
SEO TAGG: Stay on top of news from the Web marketing and SEO (search-engine optimization) industries by becoming an active member of this online community.
General Social-Media Sites
The following social-media sites provide excellent opportunities for businesses to advertise; promote specials, events or services; and feature published, knowledgeable employees.
Wikipedia: Besides creating your own business reference page on Wikipedia, you can connect with other users on Wikipedia's Community Portal and at the village pump, where you'll find conscientious professionals enthusiastic about news, business, research and more.
Newsvine: Feature top employees by uploading their articles, studies or other news-related items to this site. A free account will also get you your own column and access to the Newsvine community.
43 Things: This site bills itself as "the world's most popular online goal setting community." By publicizing your company's goals and ambitions, you'll gain a following of customers, investors and promoters who cheer you on as you achieve success.
Wetpaint: If you're tired of blogs and generic Web sites, create your own wiki with Wetpaint to reach your audience and increase your company's presence online. You can easily organize articles, contact information, photos and other information to promote your business.
Twitter: Is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you answer the question, "What are you doing?" by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called "tweets", to your friends, or "followers."
Yahoo! Answers: Start fielding Yahoo! users' questions with this social-media Q&A service. Search for questions in your particular areas of expertise by clicking categories like Business & Finance, Health, News & Events and more. If you continue to dole out useful advice and link your answer to your company's Web page, you'll quickly gain a new following of curious customers.
Job Sites
If you want to secure high-quality talent during your company's next hiring spree, you'll need to maintain a strong presence on popular job sites like the ones listed below.
CareerBuilder: Reach millions of candidates by posting jobs on this must-visit site.
The Wall Street Journal's CareerJournal: The Wall Street Journal's CareerJournal attracts well-educated professionals who are at the top of their game. Post a job or search résumés here.
CollegeRecruiter.com: If your firm wants to hire promising entry-level employees, check CollegeRecuriter.com for candidates with college degrees.
Monster: Post often to separate your business from all the other big companies that use this site to advertise job openings.
Sologig: Top freelancers and contractors post résumés and look for work on this popular site.
AllFreelance.com: This site "offers self-employed small business owners links to freelance & work at home job boards, self-promotion tips" and more.
Freelance Switch Job Listings: Freelance Switch is the freelancer's online mecca and boasts articles, resource toolboxes, valuable tips and a job board.
GoFreelance: Employers looking to boost their vendor base should check GoFreelance for professionals in the writing, design, editing and Web industries.
Yahoo! Hot Jobs: This site is often one of the first places that job seekers visit. Post open opportunities and check out informative articles and guides to gain insight on the hiring and interviewing process.
Guru.com: Build your company's repertoire with top freelancing professionals by advertising projects on this site, otherwise known as "the world's largest online service marketplace."
The original source of this article is InsideCRM.com, part of the Focus network of sites. I was in the middle of compiling my own and stumbled upon this great list. We hope you find it useful.
Over the past three years I have engaged several folks to work on our SEO and Google AdWords programs. Everyone has a little different approach and each vender has strengths that the others did not. For the most part I felt yuck adwords statistics and number crunching all so boring... I just wanted to pass the buck and run as far away as possible. Yet the results have the most dramatic effect on our sales. To not hone my skills up front was a very expensive lesion learned. Like any technology if you are going to direct teams to manage this for you, you have to know and understand the rules of the road and how to navigate the ship in changing waters. I feel like quite a goof for not digging deeper into this earlier in this process. I guess having worked with some talented SEO folks it was always a bit intimidating. I have recently found it is not really that difficult but requires some skill, patients and consistency over time. If you are someone like myself whom enjoys more instant gratification this can be rather frustrating. I will not get in to the great techniques we are learning for Google adwords since there are several great books on Amazon that can steer you in the right direction and this is part of our secret sauce. What I can tell you are a few things we tried and some of our lessons learned.
SEO for Joomla.
On the SEO side we went through our content after researching keywords to make sure we had the right density but we made some mistakes early on our Joomla CMS configuration so this did not work as well as we had hoped for natural search. Over time we found ways of optimizing the Joomla CMS environment to get better results. The key things that are important in a Joomla CMS optimization for
Search Engine Optimization:
1. (SEF) Search engine friendly URLs. There are a number of components that do this and depending on whether you are using Joomla 1.0 or Joomla 1.5 there is a little different process for implementing this.
2. Meta tags and Keywords management. There is a great component from iJoomla.com called meta tag generator that allows you to manage the keywords and meta tags for your articles from a central location.
3. Careful use of Style attributes such as H1, H2 and H3 tags and bold etc. In Joomla 1.0 there are a couple things you need to do under the hood to optimize the templates use of these tags and then you have to make sure you implement the content management consistent with this. There are a couple great Joomla SEO books available that help guide you. Check Compass Designs web site for more information.
Directory Submissions:
This worked out pretty well and we had a great team implement a couple rounds of over 1200 directory submissions. This created a nice boom of traffic to our site but these have to be updated often and it is helpful to submit alternate pages. Most of the directories require manual submission since they have captua codes to avoid spiders from flooding them. I had a nice piece of software that would do small batches to a couple hundred directories that showed some quick results in traffic but the real key to success was working with a vendor that had an extensive list of over 6000 to rotate to over time.
Landing Pages - Lead Capture:
This was an effort to set up but can be a real powerful tool with significant impact on the conversion results. The landing pages must have targeted content based on the source that is driving traffic to them. If you have an adword campaign for Customer Relationship Management you need to have a page with targeted content and Keyword optimization for this campaign. In our case we integrated lead capture forms with a few select fields. Our goal was to direct the user to three options. Fill out the form, call us or go visit the web site at a page of our choosing. There is a real art to synchronizing the messages in your landing pages with the ads and associated keywords. Effective use of related video or graphics on the page is also something that can really give the campaign a boost. If you get your message wrong here you will not get good conversion. They will come and say "Yikes! ...another ad... bub bye." We ad some light (4-5 links back to main site) at the bottom so that it feels more like a mini site vs. an ad.
The adwords for us has been on and off success and failure. Everyone that we has worked with on this had a different take on how to structure the ads and manage campaigns. While it is important to track and manage your campaign in a way you can optimize your results to improve over time, often if you need to drive traffic quickly to offset a slump in sales or current event it is more important to make sure your message and content is in sync than how deep you are tracking the results. This is one of those gut things you have to balance with statistics and strategy. Creating ads is really a science but having them connect with the pulse of the folks you want to attract takes a little more intuition. There are a ton of great tools in Google and elsewhere that can help you do more than just get a good ad campaign initiated. If you are intuitive with these tools you can really gather a significant amount of business intelligence regarding your competition. For small businesses this is best gathered and most efficiently managed if you can get a little hands on with developing these campaigns. Since your ability to compete effectively moving forward will most likely involve the internet. So you had better start getting savvy about these tools and how to use them. Adwoords can help you connect quickly with a large audience of folks with an itch to scratch related to your products and services. Great book: Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords
Social Technologies and the blogosphere;
Well it is a no brainer that social communicates are taking over the web waves and having the connections to the popular social networks and rss feeds built into your web framework helps you syndicate your articles and take advantage of a bit of the Social technology groundswell. Each of the many social networks has unique demographics and features that you want to review for the best audience you wish to attract. You will need to get involved and contribute to the conversations to get traction and link backs to your site. You also may want to segment which you will use for more of your professional verses personal profiles. The real power that kind of blew my mind was how blogging and twitter seemed be like gasoline on a fire. With the blog being the fire and twitter being the gasoline. The buzz right now to build a following is to have something to say that is honest and somewhat personal. In this new digital world we still want to communicate with humans vs the technology itself. So I started this blog a couple years ago and posted very little but I wanted to be cool and say "Hey yea I have a blog" so I posted some pictures and shared a few stories. Once I discovered twitter and looked at what many folks were doing "ding" the light bulb finally went off. When building a business the first rule in sales is to meet greet and relax before you try to sell anyone anything you have to sell yourself and build confidence that they can come to you for solutions to their pains. This is where blogging can help you communicate your message, corporate philosophy, approaches to doing business and other information that will build trust and confidence.
Being a Thought Leader:
The most successful bloggers are "Thought Leaders" where they are helping to inform folks by being ahead of the trends and often they help set them. So when you can find a voice for presenting interesting information that folks can identify with and where the information you present is useful, naturally you will grow an audience. When you throw the power of twitter at this it actually gives you a real time platform to drive folks to your blog. At the time of this article I am rapidly approaching 6000 followers on twitter and when you post links to your blog with this many followers, most likely someone in this group will go there. If you catch them with something interesting, they may RT or retweet you or send reply's (wink wink nuge nuge fellow twits... please RT this!). This pushes the information into the "twitosphere" that may get pushed to every other social network depending on the buzz that is created. Stop and think about this for a minute. You can now as an individual working from your spare bedroom or basement office reach out to and connect with the market place like never before. It really can be a powerful set of tools if you use it effectively. Look at how Ashton Kutcher competed with Media Giant CNN for the most followers on Twitter through his grass roots campaign and won. (http://twitter.com/aplusk) as of today he is up to 2,057,829 followers. Man... I would love to get a RT from him for "our company voice"!
Press Releases on the web:
This is by far one of the most effective tools for getting your message out quickly. An earlier blog post on my blog lists 23 links for web sites that can push your press releases out to the world on the web . What this does is puts your "News Worthy" message out in circulation on the web for quite some time. Other bloggers may take this and expand upon it and perhaps add their two cents worth. This actually cascades across the web and cell phones reaching a huge audience very quickly. I sent out a release last year for the info@hand training support we offer and some new training modules we built. I was blown away when I did some Google searches at how many articles and other sites had picked this up and added to their syndication feeds. Regular press releases can really help get good track backs to your site and get your message syndicated quickly and over time for great results.
Conclusion:
There is no real silver bullet since all of this stuff takes time, patience and has to happen in concert with each other. There should also be a thread linking everything together with a pulse and rhythm just like conducting an orchestra. I remember a funny trick they used to do at the state fair where they would have a kid conduct the orchestra... they would give him/her the baton and whatever they did with it the orchestra would play. This often led to some very funny and unpredictable results. I kind of equate this to running an effective eMarketing campaign. If you write a good score and then study all parts, cast the right players, practice a lot, understand how to conduct the orchestra, keep a solid beat of consistency, then and only then can you create powerful music that will compel, inspire and motivate your audience. If not you are paying a lot of talented musicians to follow you on a goose chase and you could waste a lot of cash and miss potential opportunities.
One of the great techniques for building traffic to your blog and growing the Google page ranking of targeted content is to post in forums with links back to your blog or web site. This technique is referred to as "back linking". Here is a list I found of 100 Forums that you can use to grow your back linking campaigns.
What you should do is go to each site, sign up for an account. This is usually required to be able to post comments or discussion threads. Once you have an account consider some short comments you could post that are relative to the forum topics or in some cases you can insert your own discussion threads to convey an even longer message. In each of your comments or threads make sure you create links that push traffic back to the URL's that you are trying to build.
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