The social media sphere is busy, it’s 24/7. People often ask me, how do I have a social marketing strategy without being chained to my desk? The answer is use tools. You need to automate what you can, semi-automate what you can’t. Automation is not a dirty word on social media if used correctly.

Here are 5 Ways To Run Your Social Media in less than 30 minutes each day!

1.  Schedule

Scheduling your news and topics means you are using your time effectively. If you have a global market, you can’t really be expected to stay up 24/7 and send manual updates at particular times aimed at peak times in different time zones. It’s an impossible and unrealistic expectation. By automating these types of updates, you will be using your time effectively as well as optimizing the timeliness of your marketing. You can use MarketMeSuite to schedule from inside the app, and tools like Bufferapp to have as a handy plugin in your browser if you see some interesting content.

2. Automate RSS

RSS feeds are a great way to disseminate informative and useful content to your audience, and it’s automated! Many blog platforms allow you to connect your blog to your social media accounts so that when you publish a blog post, a link to it automatically gets posted to your social media entities such as your Facebook business Page or Twitter feed. This enables your friends and followers to get instant notifications when you publish new content, and can save you the time of manually posting links yourself every time you publish something new. RSS feeds are a great way of getting your content, articles, and news out to the masses, just be sure to give the author credit. If I were to tweet out all blog posts from DIYmarketers.com, I’d want to set up a “prefix” to say “New on @diymarketers” or “RT @diymarketers.”

3. Auto DM

This is a feature to be used with care. While it’s not always appropriate for individual accounts, it’s a huge help for business accounts to send a “hey, thanks for following me, and here’s a link to my blog…”

You can cycle through different messages, and turn them on and off as you need. Think of it as an extra little push to get your customers to engage with you outside of Twitter. Be sure to track replies though! If someone thanks you for it, send a real time DM acknowledging it.

Here is a quick list of examples to create the perfect DM:

• DO say thank you for following- This shows a human side to your business which the follower can connect with
• DO provide them with only relevant and useful information-  For example, provide a link to your websites blog which means they stay up to date with all your business news and promotions. You could also send them to a link which has tutorials or helpful documentation so they know where to locate what they need immediately.
• DO send them details of how to get help and support if they need it. For example, here at MarketMeSuite we let new followers know they can tweet :@MarketMeHelp if they have any questions through the DM service. It’s quick, informative and to the point, everything a DM should be.
• DO NOT send more than one DM to a new follower. This is vital, just have one Message go out per user or you will be flooding them  unnecessary  information.  If it doesn’t fit in one DM, then write a blog post explaining that you are grateful for their interest, add your business details and help information and link to that in a single DM. Sending more than one looks spammyand messy, avoid this if you can.

4. Unfollow

This is a “semi automated” part of your social 30 minutes because Twitter has a firm stand on unfollowing behind the scenes. In other words, it MUST be user controlled. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it quickly! With MarketMeSuite you can populate an entire list of who is not following you back and decide to dump or keep.

A handy feature is that if there’s someone who has no hope of following you back (like @oprah), but you enjoy reading their posts, you can whitelist them so they stop showing up in the unfollow list.

5. Geo-Target

The socialsphere is big and busy and you have to cut through the clutter. It’s often very hard (and time consuming) to connect with the people who are actually potential customers. Using tools to geo-target helps you shave hours off the search. Below is a pic of “reply campaigns” in MarketMeSuite which is what I use to geo-target.

Imagine you’re a chiropractor. With MarketMeSuite you can actually geo-target a campaign just to 25 miles from your office.

This type of geo-targeted tweeting is a tremendous time saver. As nice as it is to chat with someone with back pain in Norway, you need to fill your office in New York. The results are pretty staggering too. 85% of replies sent using this method elicit some kind of reply.

Key Take Away

Only you know your company, its ethics, and your audience, so it’s up to you to determine what works best for your business. Just always be sure to have that touch of humanity in your online presence, because behind every computer sits an actual person, not a robot. But with that said, part of being human is that you don’t have time to be at your desk 24 hours a day and it’s overwhelmed with everything that’s going on in social media. Use automation and semi-automation to maintain a presence and cut through that clutter, and focus on being effective on social media.

Attention Small Business Experts!  Here’s a New Way to Add Dollars to Your Bottom Line!

There is nothing that a marketing person loves more than finding new ways to add customers and profitable revenue to the bottom line.  So when the folks over at Mindflash approached me with their latest innovation, I got really excited because I just knew that you would be too.

A Little About Mindflash

I was originally approached by Mindflash when they launched their online training platform.  At that time, this product was aimed at larger organizations who had internal training needs and wanted to save money on expensive training software.  Since my audience consists of small businesses and consultants who could only dream of being big enough to HAVE a training department, it wasn’t a good fit.

But NOW – Mindflash has launched some new features that I think you will REALLY love.   The Mindflash Marketplace is an online platform where anyone can sell a course or presentation at absolutely no cost.

This new feature, which developed out of the requests of many previous Mindflash users, provides an exciting new way for experts, consultants, and small business experts and professional trainers to make money with their hard earned knowledge, as well as a way for those seeking new skills to avoid hiring programmers or dealing with merchant accounts. With over seven billion ‘How-to’ Google searches to date, Mindflash Marketplace fills the high demand for high-quality online instructional content.

How Does Mindflash Marketplace Work?

Anyone can use Marketplace to create professional courses from content they already have. Some example courses include ‘Negotiations’, ‘Social Media Business Basics’, ‘Closing the Deal’, and ‘Transit Systems’. It all starts with a blank course template. Here you can upload files (e.g. Powerpoint, video or Youtube formats, PDF’s, etc.), make Quizzes, Descriptions, and more. Users can setup reminder and course management details, Question Types, Handouts, and three different types of Certificates. Mindflash lets you preview your test before it goes live. It also provides a full suite of reporting programs to track how well your courses are selling, as well as a way to invite trainees yourself. There’s also a feature that allows customers to contact the instructor, which can be setup as well, and ways to link to your course through your blog or email. Once all this is done, you just decide the price. The minimum is $9.99. Once the course is live, customers can preview the first three slides then purchase your course with just a click.

Revenue Sharing With Mindflash Marketplace

There are no setup or subscription fees with Mindflash. The fees are commission-based, meaning Mindflash will take a small percentage of money made through the course (though even this fee is waived in the beta, which will go through the end of October). The commission is 15%. All transactions will be handled through credit card, though Mindflash handles all the necessary processing fees. Customers will use a PayPal account to get their payments to you. At the moment, funds are dispersed through Paypal every two weeks. There are additional plans in the works for commission discounts for high volume sellers (those making $10,000+/month). And once your courses start selling, Mindflash provides an platform to track your various earnings. Again, all this is totally free.

Why Choose Mindflash Marketplace?

There’s no question that the Mindflash Marketplace is the first service of its kind. Similar sites have a much different fee structure. Digital Chalk, for example, has a $299 start-up cost, as well as a per course listing cost and a transaction cost. With these types of programs users can lose hundreds of dollars before they even sell anything. Mindflash is a great platform for both experienced professionals and those just starting out looking for an easy, low-risk solution.

Additionally, though it has limited functionality at the moment, Mindflash plans to do a lot of the marketing work for you. If you have a blog, web page, or other established network anywhere in the world, Mindflash Marketplace will help you get the word out. Right now there’s a Public Course link that can be pasted around the web, and Mindflash hopes to integrate the marketplace with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter within the next month.

Mindflash Marketplace is the perfect way for industry experts to monetize that expertise, especially in an economy where supplemental income and marketable skills are increasingly important. It’s a simple, innovative way for millions of people to connect and share resources, and it’s all entirely free. There’s no reason not to give it a shot and make money sharing your knowledge with the world.

A big part of online promotion is creating content that can be shared.  This includes email newsletters, article submissions, press release distribution, and blog post writing.  Social media is a great place to share this high quality content once it has been created.  Social media is important for numerous reasons.  It helps to build a brand and improves SEO.  Businesses are realizing that it’s not just a fad and that it’s time to get involved, if they haven’t already.  One of the most important decisions that needs to be made is who will be the social media voice that represents the company and brand.

The first thing that needs to be decided is whether the voice should be a brand or a person.  Should the Twitter profile that’s promoted for business use be “CompanyX” or “JaneDoe” (President and Founder of Company X).  This usually depends on the company.  If it’s a product based company, it might be easier and more acceptable to use the brand name.  If it’s a service based company, it’s more about forming relationships and establishing trust with an actual person.  Certain situations, especially in the service industry, need that personality.  People like to put a face with the company name.

Once you’ve decided that the voice should be represented by a person at the company, the next step is to determine who that person should be.  Depending on the company, the right person differs, but it could be anyone including the owner, President, CEO, or VP of Marketing.  This decision is extremely important because the brand will be built in this person’s name.  You need to think about whether or not this person will still be working at the company in 2 years, 5 years, or 10 years.  If the brand is built in their name, and then they leave, they take all of that brand equity along with them and it’s like starting all over again.  The name needs to be consistent across all marketing channels including all business and social profiles.  One of the possible dangers of using a person is that the personal and professional sometimes blend together.  If an account is being used for business reasons, the content needs to remain professional at all times.

It’s also important to consider if more than one person should represent the brand.  For a small business, only one person should be the voice of the company.  If there are too many people it’s not consistent and could lead to confusion.  Seeing one name promotes brand recognition.  People see the name over and over and get who that person is representing.  The brand behind the name is less recognizable as more names are used.  For a large corporation that has numerous divisions, it is more appropriate to have multiple people representing the brand because they can represent the various divisions or products lines.  In this case, using only one name will cause too much clutter since the information isn’t relevant to everyone.

Determining the social media voice is the first step in establishing and building a presence in the social media space.  This is a decision that will affect major online marketing initiatives, so it needs to be made wisely.

This post is part of a “Blog Carnival” that’s being hosted by Tea Silvestre from The Word Chef Blog.  The theme of the carnival is “Building Business Relationships” it’s part of a series of posts on the subject from a variety of small business experts.

Building referrals is just as important now as if was in the past.  In fact, I think it’s much easier and more cost effective now to develop and build those relationships than it had been in the past.  What I think is more difficult is keeping those referral conversations alive and focused.

Social media tools make it infinitely easier to find and connect with people, but because so many social media tools use a “timeline” format you can see and start a conversation one minute and forget about it the next simply because the screen has been refreshed with new conversations and posts.  This makes it difficult to move referral and opportunity conversations forward.

Here’s my killer time-saving and stress-reducing recipe for cooking up new business using a social media based referral strategy.

Total Time: About 2 hours to create social media accounts and generate list and about an hour per day managing your system

Yield: Profitable New Opportunities and Customers

Difficulty: Easy Peasy if you stay with it

Ingredients:

• No more than 3 specific marketing goals
• Twitter account – in your name, brand name or company name
• Facebook account
• LinkedIn account
• Try Nimble.com as a tool to integrate your social media conversations and create action items from those conversations
• A list of about 200 names, you can create a list or just go down your email address book and pull the people you think can help you get referrals

Directions:

1. Set your marketing goals and objectives. These goals should look like something like this: “Launch a webinar series targeting pet shop owners in March” or “Find 5 market research contacts at big box stores who want to use our online survey tool”.  Setting clearly defined marketing goals will guide your social media networking strategies.
2. Create a list of 200 referral contacts.  Use your email database to create a list of 200 people with whom you want to have referral relationships.  Go through that list and label people “friends and family” then “partners” and finally “influencers”.   As you are labeling and grouping your contacts, you might get ideas about the ways in which they might be able to help you achieve your goals i.e. “Introduce me to the CEO of company X”.  I’d recommend that you write that next to their name while you are thinking about it, it will save you time later.
3. Work your LinkedIn Contacts.  Go through your list of 200 and find everyone on LinkedIn.  If you are not connected to them, connect with them.  If they do not have a LinkedIn account, then you will have to manage that relationship via email and face-to-face methods only.  As you are doing that, you can send them an email message touching base and asking to schedule a catch-up call to discuss what they’ve been up to and how you can help each other.  You can also share what you’ve been up to and what you are looking for – they might respond with a connection or introduction on the spot.    Another great idea is to leave an endorsement for people as you check their presence on LinkedIn.  Leaving an endorsement for them will prompt them to leave one for you and to get in touch with you to catch up.  It’s a wonderful surprise and great “gift” to receive.
4. Search Twitter for conversations around your goals.  Notice what the conversations are and who is having the conversations.  Create a Twitter list of the people labeled “Networking” or maybe even around your goals such as “market research” (to use our previous example).  Take 15 minutes a day to monitor the conversations on that Twitter list and engage in conversations with those people.  Follow their links, re-tweet their content, comment on their links and articles.  Of course, don’t forget to search for your list of 200 on Twitter and add them to your Twitter list.  This way you are tracking their conversations as well.
5. Use Facebook to Network with Friends and Family.  Many businesses are hip to creating Facebook Fan pages, but your personal page may be more powerful as a networking tool.  I recommend posting pictures of what you are up to around your business and sharing with friends and family.  A friend of mine is in the promotional items business and often takes pictures of creative T-shirts and other items at trade shows that he things are very effective.  It tells us where he is that day and it gives us ideas that we can use for our promotional projects.  If you own a restaurant, take a picture of the daily special, if you are making a sales call or want to connect with someone, just ask your friends and family.  But don’t oversell on Facebook, it will be perceived as spamming and can backfire.
6. Check out Nimble.com.   My new favorite social media and sales management tool is Nimble.com.  It was developed by Jon Ferrera, the CEO of the successful sales CRM tool Goldmine in response to his peeve of having referral and opportunity conversations fall through the cracks.  Nimble will integrate your email, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts and show all the conversations in one stream or separate streams.  What I love about it is that it allows you to see all these conversations in one place and then you can also create an action item for yourself around that conversation.  Nimble is basically a social CRM tool that increases the value and ROI of your social media conversations.

Now, you might think all this will take an entire day’s worth of work.  Well, I won’t lie to you – the set-up probably will.  In reality, you can spend a day planning and strategizing your referral system – but once it’s done and you’ve focused your efforts, all it will take is about 15 to 30 minutes a day of working your system to keep those relationships and sales opportunities flowing your way.

This post is part of the  The Word Chef Blog  Blog Carnival hosted by Tea Silvestre.   Join us for a fun and informative  1-hour Tweet Chat about Business Relationships, how to build them and nurture them on Thursday, September at 1 pm Eastern / 4 pm Pacific.  Your participation in the Tweet Chat enters you into a drawing for a $50 Amazon Gift Card.

Involver is an easy to use Facebook Tab Tool that integrates social media channels into your Facebook page

I visit a lot of Facebook business pages. I’m always poking around, checking out different small businesses, liking and commenting. That’s part of what being an internet marketer is all about.

In many cases, the Facebook page is my first point of contact with a business. When I get there, I’m looking for the goods. I want to see what they are all about and what they have going on.

More often than not though, I’m greeted by pretty well nothing. Sure, there’s the info tab. But the navigation guide on the left is pretty bleak and leaves me wondering, is there anything else you’re doing online?

Creating tabs on your Facebook page is a golden opportunity to highlight what else your company is up to on the web. Many businesses shy away from them, however.

They’re not sure how to get things set up.

Or they break out in hives when they hear works like HTML code.

Or they search for apps and get inundated; so many of them are glitchy, hard to set up or come with a fee.

The tool that I’m going to share with you today is one of the easiest Facebook tab integrations that I have yet to come across. There are TONS options available, but this one stood out for me because of how simple it is to set up. And the best part? Totally free!

Facebook tab tool – Involver

The folks at Involver (http://www.involver.com/applications/) allow you to choose 2 social media channels to integrate in your page. (You can go beyond this with their paid options, but the costs are a little high for a small business). My favourites personally are the Twitter, Flickr and You Tube integrations.

In a few clicks, you can have these up and running on your Facebook page. Just follow these instructions:

• Log into Facebook as yourself the person (not the page)
• Go to http://www.involver.com/applications and click the “Install” button on the app you want to integrate
• You will then be prompted to choose which page you want to add the application to. Select your business page.
• A button will come up, asking you to “Add”. Click it.
• You will then be asked to fill in your company name, and your phone number. (they will only ask you this with your first app). Plunk in your info, click to accept the terms and hit “Save changes”.
• You will then be brought to a page where you can get the tab configured and link it to the social media account. So for Twitter for example, it will ask you to add your username (don’t forget to click the “add” button). Once you have the settings filled in, click “Save changes.” Note – you are always able to go back and adjust the settings.
• Go back to your page, and you will see your new tab. (If you don’t see it right away, give it a couple of minutes). Your likers can now check out all your recent activity.
• Power tip: If you want to be a little more clever, you can change the default name that’s generated on your tab. So, for the Twitter tab, the default name is, you guessed it, “Twitter”. Go to the “edit” area of your page and click “apps.” Find the app that you added and click “Edit settings.” You can now enter a “custom tab name.”

To see an example in action, have a look at my You Tube tab (http://www.facebook.com/MartinaIring?sk=app_57675755167) that was created with Involver and note how I’ve customized the name to “Small biz videos”.

Use Involver to Create Customers Out of Facebook Visitors

Your Facebook page should not be a standalone entity. To be effective, it needs to integrate your communications and drive your Facebook fans deeper into your business and deeper into the content you produce. Some fans may never go to your website again after the first visit (or maybe they never even visited it in the first place!).

By adding these tabs, you can encourage your likers to check you out on other online channels, expose them to what you’re up to and hopefully connect with you there too. And if they’re say not on Twitter yet, they can still get the benefit of all the great stuff you tweet. You are creating a page that is a valuable source of information.

You’re also boosting your credibility. You’re giving off the impression that your page is well cared for and that you’re darn savvy. These tabs look pretty fancy, don’t you think? So they were easy as pie to implement. Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me…

So give Involver tabs a try and come back and let me know how it went. Feel free to share links to your Facebook page so I can come and check you out. And if you have other applications that you love for getting tabs, let us know.

Do it yourself marketing has seen several evolutions in the past several years. With the advancement of internet technology and then the social media revolution, DIY marketing has had to make several adjustments. In many ways, marketing has become intrinsically married to the internet and social media culture. For many DIY marketers, this can be a struggle. While it’s impossible to market something without it being seen or heard by the public, it is also a challenge to manage new technologies and multiple social media accounts. These three tools can help you manage your various social media accounts for simpler and more successful marketing.

1. TweetDeck: This application is by far one of the most popular social media managers available. Allowing users to view their Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, and Twitter accounts all from one interface, TweetDeck simplifies social media for the mega user. Use TweetDeck to stay up to date on local events and marketing opportunities, while also, easily managing your correspondence with customers and business associates on your various platforms. Tweetdeck enables you to divide your contacts into columns, so that you can separate specific groups of people into different areas. This allows you to manage your marketing schemes more quickly and easily.

2. Gist: This tool allows users to collect all of their contacts from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, email, and more in one centralized location. This organizational help can be invaluable for marketers trying to manage their network. Gist provides you with the latest news, blog posts, and tweets from anyone in your professional network when you want to receive it and where you want to receive it. Because Gist is so customizable, it can be extremely useful for nearly any user. By gathering the essential information from your inboxes and social networks, Gist provides the perfect way to speed up your marketing potential. Use Gist to become more productive with marketing and connecting to professional contacts.

3. Ping.fm: While Gist is more focused toward organizing your many social media contacts to simplify managing networks and new updates, Ping.fm focuses on making posting to various platforms simpler. This tool allows users to ping a message or data to multiple social media accounts from one location. This can be especially useful for DIY marketers, hoping to get their company or product seen through social media outlets. Ping allows you to select which accounts you want to post to and really speeds up the process of getting your voice out there.

With all of these tools and services free to download and use there is really no reason DIY marketers looking for some aid with managing their busy social media accounts shouldn’t try all of them. Check them out and decide which services would be most valuable for you and your marketing efforts. Social media is a great way to get your ideas out to the public and to develop a strong professional network. As social media expands and evolves, tools and applications for managing these accounts will become ever more useful.

About the Author:  This guest post is contributed by Patricia Garza, who writes about gadget, technology, design, social media, e-learning related articles at online university rankings.

In today’s technology-based world, social media is a crucial aspect of your marketing campaign. Think about it, everyone has a Facebook account, a Twitter handle, or a LinkedIn profile. And now, with smart phones proliferating the market, all of these social networks can be accessed with the touch of a button anywhere in the world (well, anywhere that has signal). This being said, DIY marketing strategies have embraced social media as a tool that can project their brand across the planet, no matter how large or small their company may be. To become a household name organizations no longer have to be the biggest, most lucrative in the industry – they just have to know how to use Twitter.

It naturally follows that social networks are something that you need to become involved in; however, there are many horror stories of brands being ruined by poor social media skills, stories that you want to avoid reliving at all costs. So how do you build your brand across the range of social media applications without ruining the reputation of your company? The process is simple, but it takes hard work and a lot of patience. When you get it right, though, all of the effort will certainly pay off.

Susan Gunelius recently wrote an article on Entrepreneur about a similar topic that provides a jumping off point for our own discussion. Her article can be found here.

1. Know your target demographic. Some social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, are used by a wide variety of individuals and can be confidently incorporated into any social media campaign. Other sites should be investigated before committing a great deal of time to them.

Consider this scenario: you have opened a teen clothing store, geared toward kids aged 12 to 18, and want your social media efforts to speak directly to your target shoppers. In this case, LinkedIn is most likely a lost cause, as these customers will probably not be involved with this social networking site. Does this mean that you ignore LinkedIn completely? No – the site can still connect you to others in your industry; however, you do not want to focus all of your attention on this account, simply make an informative page and check up on it regularly.

1. Appoint a social media manager. Your brand must be consistent in voice and your accounts must be maintained regularly, so the best way to ensure that your campaign runs smoothly is to have one person handle it. Remember that this will take up a good deal of time and, while it may not be generating income now, it will eventually, so be sure to give the individual enough time to truly work on the project. Only choose someone you trust to work diligently, though, because the Internet is full of distractions.

When you go over this project with your social media manager, be sure that you communicate the image you wish to build clearly. For example, some companies simply post links to their website and to other important information, while others open up a dialogue with their friends and followers. The best approach is one that is natural, which brings us to point 3.

1. No one wants to hear you promote your business all the time. Social media is about getting the word out, true, but it is not about shameless self promotion. Share some links to your brand, some updates on sales or specials that are currently going on, but also share links and information that you think your followers will be interested in. Be careful to keep this professional, though. The last thing you need is an inappropriate link under your business’ name.

Most importantly, be a real person on the other end of the computer, be someone that can relate to followers and open a discussion with members of the target demographic. This will earn their trust and, ultimately, their business.

1. Consider starting a blog. Blogger, WordPress, and Tumblr are all ways for you to enhance your brand and really illustrate the core values of your company. Posts should be made regularly and should pertain to important issues that readers will face. Remember, do not just promote your company – offer entertaining and informative information that will have people looking forward to the next post. These also, as Gunelius mentions in her article, provide additional entry points for consumers.

The most important aspects of building your brand through social media are to remain visible and consistent. By doing these key things, you should attract the attention of consumers who will eventually begin to invest in your company. Remember, though, that this is not just about driving sales, this is about building a relationship with a community. Doing so may not cause your monthly revenue to spike, but it will cause your organization to have a more positive reputation and to be trusted by a larger amount of consumers.

Terry Crenshaw covers economic trends in the United States and writes for www.peterorszagsite.com. Terry is especially interested in tracking the ideas of Peter Orszag and other economic experts as the economy attempts to recover from the recent recession.

It takes more than setting up a website to find success online these days.  A company website is certainly the foundation of any internet marketing strategy, but it’s more about the overall online presence of the company.  A target audience member should be able to interact with a company or brand via many different touchpoints online.  In order to build a robust online presence a company needs to be involved in inbound marketing tactics like SEO, blogging, social media networking, and opt-in email newsletter distribution.  Each of these tools can help to build a positive reputation online and lead to an increase in sales and conversions.  Each of these strategies work over the long term, therefore it’s necessary to be consistent.

The following are 4 inbound marketing strategies in which consistency is important:

SEO

Search engine optimization is the practice of making changes to your website and your online presence in order for the search engines to find and deliver targeted visitors to your website.  It’s not a quick fix or a onetime strategy.  SEO works over time.  Once targeted keywords have been chosen and the on-site SEO component has been completed, the second phase of SEO begins, which is link building.  Link building is an ongoing campaign to increase your website and brand visibility in the search engines and online in general.  Since it’s assumed that as a website grows over time that it will have more links pointing to it from outside sources, the links need to be developed over time at a consistent rate that seems natural.  If links build too quickly that can raise a red flag with the search engines.  Links that build steadily over time build trust.

Blogging

Blogs are a great way to share your knowledge and establish yourself as an expert and thought leader in a given industry.  In order to find blogging success, it’s important to post on a regular basis.  Blogs gain loyal followers over time and the worst thing that you can do is abandon them.  Stick to a routine.  In addition to being viewed favorably by your readers, new blog content provides an opportunity to be viewed favorably by the search engines.  The search engine spiders love new content and will come back to crawl and index the website every time that something new is posted.

Social Media

Social media is certainly not a fad.  Millions of people use social media on a daily basis to share and connect.  In addition, “social signals” are now a search engine ranking factor.  It’s important to have a social media presence.  While it seems obvious, many brands forget that social media is about being social.  It’s about establishing relationships with your fans, followers, and connections and providing them with content that is valuable to them.  To use social media correctly, it’s important to be active daily.  A social media profile that remains stagnant is missing the point and won’t improve the bottom line.

Opt-In Email Newsletters

Contrary to what some may believe opt-in email newsletters are still an extremely effective way to market.  The recipients have opted-in because they want to receive messages from you.  It’s a captive audience.  In order to stay top of mind it’s important to send messages on a regular basis.  While you want to avoid being too pushy or annoying, consistent messaging keeps the brand top of mind.

About the Author: Nick Stamoulis is a Boston SEO consultant and the President and Founder of Brick Marketing, a search engine marketing and SEO services company.

Related articles

• 10 On-page SEO Tactics for 2011 (kaiserthesage.com)
• “Likes” Rival Links as Google Takes Page From Facebook (mpdailyfix.com)
• Small Business News: SEO for Small Business (smallbiztrends.com)
• The Future of Search and Social Media: SEO and Social Media Integration (thesearchagents.com)

Are you a CEO, entrepreneur or business owner who still doesn’t see the benefit of social media?  Don’t worry, you’re not alone.  Besides, social media isn’t the right communication strategy for every business, just like a hammer isn’t the right tool for every job.

Every CEO is wired to focus on return on his investment of time, effort and money.  And the faster that investment pays off, the more likely he or she is to take the time to learn it.  Social media is a gardening or farming project.  It requires daily discipline and investment in building relationships that may not pay off for years, if ever and most of the payback is indirect.

While many social media experts and marketers are quick to chastise business owners for not participating (and I was among the first) I’m going to salute them.  And instead of wielding criticism, I’m going to outline some alternatives that just might address social media hating CEO’s concerns.

Uncontrolled Bad Press. A CEOs biggest fear is being caught off guard by an uncontrolled complaint gone wild.  The first thing they think about is the poor CEO of Comcast the day that YouTube video hit.  Paul Gillin the author of The New Influencers said it best when he wrote “Conventional marketing wisdom long held that a dissatisfied customer tells ten people. But…in the new age of social media, he or she has the tools to tell ten million.”

Alternative: Create Your Own Community. While many companies have customer lists, I’m willing to bet that most of them are gathering dust.  Sales has their list of customers, marketing has their list and accounting has theirs.  There is no master list and there is no one person responsible for taking care of the most valuable asset any company has — the one that actually pays YOU.

Create a customer advisory panel from all those customer lists that you have.  Take the time to profile them and then start conversations with them.  Customer advisory panels are lists that you own.  Customers sign up to be part of your panel in exchange for incentives and rewards.  If you’re in an industrial market, your customers might sign up to be in your panel for the sheer impact that they would have on your product development and customer service initiatives.

Managing a customer panel is a lot easier than you might think.  You need an online survey software that has a panel management system.  I use Survey Analytics and their MicroPanel Platform.  I find this platform easy to use with enough technical power to customize with your own HTML, but also good looking enough to just use one of their templates.

Social Media doesn’t have enough ROI for the effort. This is a common critique of most social media channels and I can absolutely see why.  It’s not hard to get the impression that there are lots of people pushing information out and very few people having a conversation that actually leads to business.  Sorting out the good stuff from the vapid comments can be a challenge and feel like a time waster.

Alternative:  Crowdsource. You might know this as a “Wisdom of the Crowds” concept.  The idea is that more brains are better than a few.  Crowdsourcing applications like Get Satisfaction or IdeaScale make is really easy to create a space where your customers and prospects can share their ideas around your product or service.  Users register and contribute their ideas, other users can vote ideas up or down as well as brainstorm and add to existing ideas.

I don’t care about what you’re doing… Twitter’s focus on getting people to answer the question about what they are doing has created a perception that nothing valuable is really shared during those conversations.  Even the ground-breaking eye-witness reports of political revolutions hasn’t really inspired many CEOs to start tweeting.  The benefit of Twitter’s immediacy is often lost on the unstructured bits of information and opinion that are prevalent.  There just isn’t enough immediate, relevant gratification for most business owners.

Alternative:  Run mobile research surveys. If you’re a CEO that wants all the benefits of social media without the distraction of conversations that are unrelated to growing your business and improving your customers’ experience, then you really ought to consider running mobile surveys.

Mobile research is a relatively new technology.  Online surveys delivered on a mobile device has been available for a while, but research specifically designed to engage your customer in a quick, fun and useful way is now possible by using a new tool called SurveySwipe.  SurveySwipe allows you to select an audience from our community based on the demographics you’re looking for, or upload your own list and ask them a short series of questions.  You can get an answer in less than two hours.  Not only that, but the community can also take pictures of the products and services they are interacting with and show you how they are using them.

Get Social Media to Work for YOU

Social media can seem like a time suck.  Especially when you think about how much time it takes to build a community and foster those relationships.  There’s nothing wrong with that — unless you’re trying to make a business decision and you feel like you’re making it in a vacuum.

I’ve shown you three alternatives that use the social media technology and infrastructure to help you make better, faster decisions and still engage your customer and build profitable relationships.  Give them a try.

Related articles

• Social Media Equity and Return on Investment (marketingtechblog.com)
• 6 Social Media Tips for the Creative Entrepreneur (aleasemichelle.typepad.com)

We all know about Goldilocks and the three bears, the nursery rhyme which apparently teaches children to aim for mediocrity and avoid extremes (I guess).  But we can all relate to the fact that sometimes porridge is  too hot, sometimes it’s too cold, and sometimes it’s just right.  The same is true for any solution, and especially when you’re shopping on a DIY marketer’s budget.

Shopping for a CRM solution is a great example.  The majority of the well-known CRM’s that are on the market today were developed in a day and age when the only companies that could afford CRM were large enterprises.  Of course, this means that the solution was designed to meet the needs of large enterprises.  What are those needs?  Sales force continuity, for one.  Executives need a way to keep a disparate sales force of hundreds of feet on the street all working in one direction.  Secondly is reporting.  Those same executives are in dire need of stats and figures to know how their company is performing.

Notice what is not high on that priority list: the efficiency and ease of day-to-day sales activity.  It’s no accident that many sales professionals despise CRM.  The CRM’s that many sales people have experienced weren’t built to meet their needs.  They were built to meet the needs of the not-so-sales-focused executive in the sky-rise who probably couldn’t name a single field sales rep without reviewing an HR file.

For the DIY marketer, this porridge is too hot.

So, what does the small business owner do if not buy “big business” CRM?  He relies on inexpensive and free solutions to supply parts of the CRM solution.  It starts with an email address book or even a cell phone.  This becomes the unofficial customer and prospect list.  On sporadic occasions, this list must be exported and uploaded to an email marketing service to send a newsletter or some other form of “e-blast.”  An array of sticky notes on a desk corner and a whiteboard covered with scribbles becomes the unofficial task list.  When cash flow becomes a real issue, the most sophisticated solution of all is born: an excel spreadsheet comprises the pipeline forecast.

But, what many DIY marketers soon discover is that this porridge is too cold.

Small Business CRM cannot be just a re-packaged and re-priced version of the same big business CRM that dominated the market in the 90′s and early 2000′s.  But, by the same token, small businesses cannot compete without a cohesive CRM solution, something grander than a hodge-podge of spreadsheets and sticky notes.  Small Business CRM’s like AddressTwo are designed specifically for small businesses.  They’re easy-to-use and actually enhance day-to-day sales activity.  They recognize that in a small business envronment, the “executive” who demands reports and control is the same person who makes sales calls.

This CRM is Juuuust Right!