Everyone has gone social: you, your competitors, your partners, your customers, your leads, your friends–everyone.  So now what?

It’s time to set up a system to mine all of the qualitative data that is floating around out there and put it to good, practical use.  Try using this list of 13 truly useful things you can actively learn from monitoring social media:

1. Who’s in bed with the competition?

Who’s blogging favorably about them?  Who’s providing them with good reviews?  Who’s following them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and active in their community?  Who’s presenting with them on webinars and co-sponsoring collateral with them?

Get some good monitoring going on around your competitors names, and keep an eye on their online reviews and their social media account followers and activities.

Find their biggest fans and start to court them away.  Everyone knows how big a competitive win is – but a competitive win who is loud in the social media world is the biggest competitive win of all.

2. Who loves you?

Similar to above, who’s blogging about you? Tweeting about you? Commenting about you on Facebook? Giving you positive reviews?

It’s standard practice to reward someone who refers you new business, so make it standard practice to reward those who are essentially referring you to the masses.  Provide these “fans” with some appropriate reciprocal love.  Perhaps it’s a link back, or a coupon or some other offer.  But make sure you let anyone who speaks positively about you know that you are listening, you really appreciate it and you’d love it if they do more!

3. What do people love the most about you?

Monitor trends in positive mentions about you in reviews, blog posts and other social media channels such as Twitter.

Sometimes what we may think are our biggest selling points are not what people love us  for most.  Pay attention to what people like  best about you, and start to actively promote those.  One technique we like is to actively call them out in your search ads using quotations.  Quotations lend more trust than just touting yourself, plus it will be in your audience’s own words.

4. What do people dislike the most about you?

While you’re poring through all of your praise, also start to document trends about any negative comments, or “if they only had….” comments.

Use “if only they had” information to inform your product development, road map and / or inventory adjustments.

5. What are your competitors hiring for?

Keep an active query in your reader (i.e., TweetDeck or HootSuite or Seesmic) that monitors job postings for your competitors.

One of the biggest hints about what they are up to next can be inside of those job postings.  Many companies are surprisingly candid about direction and weaknesses inside of their postings.

6. What are your competitor’s future plans?

Along those same lines, keeping an active query in your reader that includes your competitors name along with the word plans or powerpoint or pdf docs.

Many companies are surprisingly lax about what gets out into the web, you’ll be surprised about how much free competitive intelligence will flow your way.

7. Negative keywords for PPC campaigns.

Keep a query of your head keyword terms inside of your reader and monitor the headlines and themes of blog postings and news articles that are coming in.

Add anything and everything that isn’t relevant to you as a negative keyword in your ppc advertising campaigns.

8. New target keywords for PPC campaigns.

Same query as above, but this time monitoring for new ways people are talking about your space, or new needs and reasons that are rising up.

Take advantage of these by adding them in as new target keywords to always have your PPC campaigns on top of current trends.

9. Who are the influencers and thought leaders in your space / area?

Same head terms query – both of blogs and also of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Use this to identify who the big influencers are online in your space.  Then, make them your best friends and court them to talk about you.

10.  Hot topics for blogging

With that same head terms query, you can easily get a pulse for what is trendy.

Use trends to write blog posts about with your own opinion, expertise, and helpful information.  When you promote trendy blog posts, they will garner you the most value.

11.  Audience profiling

Where is your audience and how do they participate?  Do they blog? Do they write reviews on local sites? Do they attend webinars?  Do they download podcasts? Are they active on FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo Questions or other communities?

Monitoring your audience’s activities and where they are most prevalent will help you figure out where to spend your precious marketing dollars and dedicate your marketing content and time.

12.  What should your Sales Tools & Collateral address?

What don’t they like about you? What is your competition promoting as their biggest advantages?  What are the current hot topics and needs?

Develop sale collateral around these so your sales force is always armed with the latest and greatest sales objections they are likely to run into and the most prevalent ways of discussing the current market climate and needs.

13.  Link building opportunities

Did someone mention you, but forgot to include a back link?

Reach out to them and kindly request that they add a link!

It’s all free data, so start to make social media one of your best sources of information today!

A great pay-per-click (PPC) keyword strategy is central to any campaign’s success, so getting your list right is absolutely critical. Once your campaign is live, the Yield Web Marketing Suite works every day to make recommendations to you about new keywords you might consider together with negative keyword recommendations. This guide, then, will help you create a great keyword list in advance of launching a new campaign in four easy steps: 1) Questions; 2) Keyword Tools; 3) Variations; and 4) Assembly.

1) Questions.

Use the following question categories to start making your list. As you go through and answer these questions, keep your thoughts organized into the different buckets – we’ll keep using these categories in future steps. Throughout this guide we’ll use an example of a restaurant for you to get a feel for how it works.

Names: What are all the names of the products or services that you sell? (i.e., restaurant, dining, dinner, bar, grill, happy hour, brunch, buffet, steak joint)

Adjectives: What are common adjectives used to describe those products? (i.e., steak, fine, fancy, all you can eat, affordable, 5 star, best)

Attributes: What attributes does your product have? (i.e., fireplace, live music, bands, entertainment, lounge, full bar, gift cards lakeside, lakeshore, shore, on the water, views)

Searcher Desires: What actions does the searcher want to take with your product? (i.e., eat, takeout, drink, dance, walking distance)

Website Actions: What are the actions you want people to take on your site? (i.e., reserve, reservations, order)

Website Information: What types of information do you offer on your site? (i.e., reviews, specials, pictures, menu)

Location: Where are you located? (i.e., San Mateo, San Mateo, CA, San Mateo, California, Bay Area, South of San Francisco, Close to town, in town, by town, around town, near town, local)

Emotions: How are your searchers feeling, or what do they want to feel? (i.e., hungry, romantic, casual, low-key, cozy)

Events: Under what circumstances does the searcher need you? (i.e., special occasion, group party, valentines, anniversary, thanksgiving, girls night out)

2) Keyword Tools.

Now that you’ve got a starter list, let’s expand it beyond the terms that you naturally think of. Following are some great tools you can use to expand your keyword list. As you find related terms through these following keyword sources, put them into the buckets you started to use above. It will make building your actual keyword list later on much easier. Also, as you go along and see words that you don’t want your ads to appear for, and make note of those for your negative keywords list.

Thesaurus.com: Enter your words from above and jot down all the applicable terms for saying the same thing. Their visual thesaurus can is a great way to see the data. Jot down antonyms that you wouldn’t want your ads to appear for as negative keywords.

Quintura.com: Enter some of your key product phrases from above. Click on items that are related to you to see more ideas appear. Be sure to read through the results on the right-hand side of the page for even more ideas.

Google Search: Wow, this one seems boring, eh? But, it’s a great tool. Enter you basic keywords – as you are entering pay attention to the related searches that Google displays as you type. Then after you click search take some time to read through the ad copy, the organic listings and check out some of the websites. You’ll be surprised how many variations on your keywords you’ll discover here.

Google WonderWheel: As long as you’ve got Google open, click on the Show Options link at the top. Then on the left-hand side click on the Wonder Wheel option. This works in a similar way to Quintura. Just click around the wheel to find related terms.

Google Related Searches: One more option inside of Google is the Related Searches. Click on the Related Searches link (you’ll see this right above the Wonder Wheel option). Click on any of the related searches at the top to view their results and scan through the page for great terms.

Competitor Websites: One of those few times your competitors actually have some value to offer you! Visit your competitor’s websites and look at the terms they use to describe their product and make sure you’ve got those covered as well. This is also great insight into the keywords they are likely using in their pay per click campaigns.

Google Alerts: Sign up for a comprehensive Google Alert pertaining to your product. This is a fantastic source to find out how people are talking about your product and what they are looking for. It’s also one of the best sources to develop a robust set of negative keywords.

TweetBeeb: Keep track of what people are saying about your product type, industry or location on Twitter. Similar to a Google Alert, but based on Tweets.

Yahoo Answers: Do a search for your product or industry and look for the terms that people are using to talk about it and what they are typically seeking.

3) Variations.

You should now have a pretty hearty list of categorized words and also a great start at a list of negatives. Now it’s time for just a few finishing touches to the words that you have identified so far.

Singulars / Plurals: Make sure to include the singular and plural version of all of your keywords.

Hyphen, Non-Hyphen, 2 words, 1 word versions of the word: web site, website, web-site,

Apostrophe and non-apostrophe versions of words: San Mateo’s, San Mateos

4) Assembly.

Drum roll please… all that’s left is to assemble your keyword research! Here’s how to put your keyword phrases together:

Names + Adjectives (lakeshore restaurant, fine dining restaurant)
Names + Attributes (restaurant with live music, byob restaurants)
Names + Searcher Desires (eat at bar restaurant, Chinese takeout)
Names + Website Actions (restaurant reservations, order restaurant gift card)
Names + Website Information (restaurant reviews, restaurant menus)
Names + Location (restaurants in san mateo, local breakfast buffet)
Names + Emotions (romantic restaurant, cozy steak joint)
Names + Events (restaurant for valentines, thanksgiving brunch)

To branch into longer-tail keywords, just use combos of three categories at a time. For example: Event + Name + Location (i.e., “special occasion restaurant in the bay area”).

Now you are off to the races. If you don’t have a big enough budget to support your fantastic list, start small and slowly introduce more as you find the keyword niches that bring you customers.

One common scenario we run into is a business that is located in a particular area, but provides service to people across the country, or multiple countries.  A few examples here include real estate agents, travel guides and hotels – pretty much any business that focuses on relocation or visitors.

For these types of advertisers we find that running campaigns targeted toward their local area is often not productive.  We’ll use the real estate agency as an example here – many people like to check out photos of houses on the market and what they are listed at in their own neighborhood, but they have no intention of buying or selling and if they did, they already have a realtor that they would use.  These searchers can spend a bunch of money from a PPC ad perspective for zero return.

Often time real estate agents find many more leads by advertising to the rest of the country and excluding their local geographic region to avoid those curiosity browsers.

Google has a very easy-to-use geo-targeting feature called excluded locations in which you can set that you want to target all of US and Canada, except for San Francisco metro, for example.

However, for these types of businesses this exclusion feature will not work.  Although it does exclude searchers from this area, it also sets up the cities in the metro area as negative keywords.  These excluded locations are secret double agents – you will see the exclusion set up in your geographic targeting, but you will not see them listed in your negative keywords list, even though they prevent keywords with these cities listed in them from appearing.

So, if you are a real estate agent targeting keywords such as “san francisco ca houses for sale” and “san francisco ca real estate”, your ads will not appear for these search terms if you have excluded the San Francisco metro geographic area from your ad display.

The workaround?  You must set up you geo-targeting the “positive” way – checking every state individually and all the metros in California that you want included (except for San Francisco metro).  This way your ads won’t appear locally, but Google won’t block your ads from appearing for your keywords which include the location.  The Yield Web Marketing Suite enables this activity simply by clicking the Geo-Target button in the Campaign view.

People like to talk about what size of keyword is best to advertise for. There’s always lots of hype around long-tail keywords, but we still see a majority of campaigns with very short-tail keywords.

We are here to tell you that you can have a successful PPC campaign regardless of keyword size; however, different sizes do require different strategies and with them come varying levels of difficulty.

Our recommendation to advertisers is usually to start off with the medium tail keywords and through daily research, build out a very robust negative keywords list and a hearty set of long tail keywords to help branch out into more profitable territory and broaden exposure.

We are excited to announce that we just launched our patent-pending Negative Keyword Recommendation Engine as part of both the Yield Web Marketing Suite and Yield Web Marketing Suite for Agencies. This new feature is now available to all new and existing customers.

The Negative Keyword Recommendation Engine analyzes volumes of your historical traffic segmented by keyword, ad group and campaign. It then aggregates data based on common terms and uses sophisticated algorithms based on a variety of criteria including search volume, bounce rate and conversion rate to automatically recommend negative keywords for addition to each of your campaigns and ad groups.

While there are many facets of a search marketing campaign that are critical for success, many search engine marketers forget to pay enough attention to one of the most important aspects of their campaign. You launch your campaign by setting up keywords, groups and ad copy. However, you’ll inevitably discover that you want to spend your marketing budget even more effectively.

This is where “negative keywords” come into play. In short, negative keywords (also called “excluded keywords”) prevent your ads from showing when the search query includes one or more keywords that you have specified you want to exclude. For example, if you are a realtor and have a phrase match for “real estate agent”, you may attract searches looking for “real estate agent classes”. By adding “classes” as a negative keyword, you will ensure your ads are not shown for people looking for classes on becoming a real estate agent. By narrowing your focus of your advertisements, you will ensure that you wouldn’t be paying for clicks from people not interested in your offering. In addition, you will improve your quality score and, as a result, lower your cost per click by improving the relevancy of your ads.

You may ask, “Why wouldn’t I want to pay for any click I can get? After all, if the user wasn’t interested in what I was advertising, they wouldn’t click on it!” The answer is that people may click on your ad for a variety of reasons. They may not read your ad correctly, read it in the wrong context, or not even read it at all before clicking on it. Typically, they will realize they are in the wrong destination and immediately leave — which is called a bounce. In other words, you paid for the click and they weren’t remotely interested in what you were offering.

You can access negative keyword recommendations by navigating to your paid search campaign and clicking “Manage Negative Keywords” or clicking on any ad group to see the group detail. The pages displayed will show both your currently selected negative keywords and any negative keyword recommendations (note: we will only recommend negative keywords when you have enough traffic for us to make relevant recommendations).

By using the Yield Software Negative Keyword Recommendation Engine, you can be sure you are continuously tuning your campaign to eliminate targeting irrelevant traffic, improve the effectiveness of your search marketing budget and increase the ROI of your campaigns. (Who knew being so negative could produce such positive results?)