Most people by now have seen the “Like” button — that little thumbs-up icon in Facebook that lets one user tell another the liked something they posted. When you click on that Like button, moreover, you also reveal the content you just “liked” to all your friends in your Facebook network, which is how so much content these days goes viral.

When Facebook introduced its Open Graph ecosystem earlier this year, it made it possible for any website — from corporate websites to e-commerce sites — to add the “Like” button next to any content of its choosing.  Want your shoppers to “Like” one of your products?  No problem: Facebook now provides a simple-to-add piece of Java script for you to add to your site’s HTML and voile! You’re now part of the “Like-o-sphere”. (We added Open Graph social plug-ins on the Yield Software site, including our product pages and the community pages you’re on now.)

But who clicks on “Like” buttons and what value can the addition of the little thumbs to your site produce?

Facebook has some answers.

First, people who regularly “Like” are some of the most connected and active people among the 500 million or so users of Facebook.  These folks, it seems, are the key influencers among their group of followers. According to Facebook:

The average “liker” has 2.4x the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user. They are also more interested in exploring content they discover on Facebook — they click on 5.3x more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user.

These active and engaged people are the Web’s curators: they’re constantly exploring, discovering and sharing, usually with their own sensibilities overlaying that which they curate into their streams.  They are the recommenders.  They provide warnings.  They shape opinions.  And they shape decision-making — from purchases to votes to charitable contributions.

They are also younger.  Again, from Facebook:

As publishers work to identify the best ways to reach a younger, “always on” audience, we’ve found that the average “liker” on a news site is 34, compared to the median age of a newspaper subscriber which is approximately 54 years old, as reported by the Newspaper Association of America.

Most marketers will tell you 34 is right in the middle of demographic sweet spot, and who it is they’re aiming to influence with advertising, promotions and other marketing tactics.  And when you successful win the heart and mind of that 34 year-old, you’re also winning all the hearts and minds of everyone she or he influences, particularly at the moment the “Like” button is pushed.

And the results?  According to Facebook, many publishers who’ve optimized their websites for Open Graph have seen impressive increases in traffic.  For instance: ABC News (+190%), Gawker (+200%),  TypePad (+200%), Sporting News (+500%), and  NBA.com (#2 referral source).  Facebook also sites evidence from publishers using their social plug-ins of increased site engagement and longer stays.

One more important data point from Facebook: Every day, according to Facebook, campaigns on its site increase search traffic by an average of 2.8x and click-through rates by 50 percent.

Given the ease of optimizing websites for Open Graph, there’s no real downside. More importantly, joining the “Like-o-sphere” is a relatively simple way to leverage key influencers’ power to move decision-making among their social networks.  Here are some quick tips to make this happen successfully:

Implement social plugins, beginning with the Like button. When a person clicks Like, it (1) publishes  a story to their friends with a link back to your site, (2) adds the article to the reader’s profile, and (3) makes the article discoverable through search on Facebook.

Optimize your Like button. By showing friends’ faces and placing the button near engaging content (but avoiding visual clutter with plenty of white space), clickthrough rates improve by 3-5x.

Publish back. Publishing engaging stories or status updates (things that are emotional, provocative, related to sporting events or even simple questions) increase on-Page engagement by 1.3-3x

Integrate the Activity Feed or Recommendations plugins. Highlighting most popular content on your site leads people to view more articles. Those who click on the Activity Feed plugin in particular generate 4x as many page views as the average media site viewer. Place it above the fold on your home page and at the bottom of each article for maximum engagement

Use the Live Stream to engage users during live events. The live stream box can serve as a way to reach your audience, facilitate sharing of your content, and get them involved in what you’re streaming, be it an interview, conference, or other type of event. This week we released new updates to the live stream box. More info here.

If you’ve been considering optimizing your site for Facebook’s Open Graph, hopefully the data here will provide the motivation to go ahead and get the work done.  It can’t hurt and chances are, it might actually help your business.

(1: Create a catchy title that will entice people to read your post.)

All I ever needed to know about great content, I learned at the movies.  These learnings can be distilled down into seven keys (hidden throughout this fantastic post!) (2: Keep the reader in active anticipation of what’s coming next.)

Upon reading his daily Google Analytics report, the internet marketing manager took his iPhone and, in a complete rage, threw it at his whiteboard.  He had tried everything and this was the end of the road for him.  (3: Grab attention so your audience will read on.)

According to analysts, 46.5 percent of all internet marketing managers were in complete and utter agony that month due to unprofitable pay-per-click campaigns. (4: Share some previously unknown, valuable data to emphasize significance.)

All these marketing managers have one thing in common: their hopes and dreams of overnight internet success were quashed by websites that seemed to care about giving visitors a good bounce more than taking their money.  (5: Enable the reader to relate to you and your story.)

How could he go on? As he paced around, he plotted one last course of action, knowing the boss would soon likely pull the plug on his campaign and show him the door.  Aha – he had the answer!  Forget this PPC, CTR, CPC stuff: social media marketing is all the rage these days.  He would start a viral marketing campaign using a chain letter!  That was sure to get the dollars pumping into the site!   (6: A little humor never hurts.)

He patched the hole in his whiteboard, gave his iPhone an apology kiss and set off to work.  In the world of online marketing, there is no such thing as giving up.  There are so many different options to try, you just need to keep testing new channels and messaging until you strike a balance that brings you the results you desire.  It’s OK to make mistakes as long as you are actively engaged in learning from them. (7: Motivate change or action; move your audience to think differently.)

We hope you are able to use all seven of these “hidden” keys to get two thumbs up (and a ton of links) from your readers.  It may take some time to regularly produce amazing content, so until your articles are getting a proliferation of “Likes” on Facebook or re-tweets via Twitter or multiple links from many blogs, be thankful there is no way for readers to throw rotten tomatoes online!  With practice, you’ll get there.

But, did you know?  There are many generous acts of kindness you can do right from the convenience of your home  laptop that will truly add value to someone’s life or business.

We’ve compiled a list here to help get you started!

1)      Write a glowing review of a product that you like on Amazon

2)      On Amazon, click the Yes button that you found someone’s review helpful.

3)      Write a glowing review of a place you like on Google Local.

4)      Write a glowing review of a place you like on Yelp.

5)      Retweet something you like on Twitter.

6)      Comment on someone’s blog post.

7)      Answer a question on a community forum, such as Yahoo Answers or Google Groups.

8)      Digg a news article you like on Digg.

9)      Make a blog post of interesting people to follow on twitter and tweet a link to it.

10)   Follow those who follow you on Twitter,  but you don’t currently follow.

11)   Tweet something glowing about a webinar, presentation or a blog post.

12)   Follow someone new on Twitter.

13)   Give out props or thank a colleague or friend via social media (Twitter or Facebook).

14)   Comment on a Linked-In post.

15)   Comment on someone’s Facebook status.

16)   Find a new friend to add on Facebook.

17)   Tell others about a product you love on Facebook.

18)   Write a nice tip about a  business on Foursquare.

19)   Say happy birthday to a friend on Facebook.

20)   Give a special promo offer  to your fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter.

21)   Thank a person who Retweteed you.

22)   Thank a person who commented on your blog.

23)   Link back to a person who linked to you or mentioned you.

24)   Follow a company you like on LinkedIn.

25)   Like an ad on Facebook.

26)   Like an article or product using their Facebook like button.

27)   Share an article you’ve read with others via any social media channel.

28)   Join a group on LinkedIn.

29)   Join a group on Facebook.

30)   Like a company’s page on Facebook.

31)   Forward an email newsletter you love to a friend or colleague.

32)   Share a YouTube video with someone.

33)   Thumbs up for a YouTube video you enjoy.

34)   Suggest a product to friend via Facebook , Twitter & Linked-In.

35)   Write a nice recommendation for someone on LinkedIn.

36)   Rate an iPhone app.

37)   Recommend a new friend to someone on Facebook.

38)  Scan and post some great old photos and share them with your friends and family.

Make today your day to volunteer in the online social media community and you’ll be sure to bring a smile to someone’s face.

School is back in session and soon homecoming will be upon us.  Girls across the country will be pursuing their dream to be voted homecoming queen.  What do these homecoming queen wannabes have to teach us about social media marketing?  When it comes to social popularity, the rules for success haven’t changed since high school.

1)      Be nice to everyone.  When success involves being voted by your peers, you need to be nice to everyone.  This is true for homecoming queens and social media marketing success.  How can you be nice to everyone on social media?  Behaviors that are akin to sharing a table at lunch include retweets, comments on blog posts, comments via tweets or on Facebook pages, voting for content, participating in polls and sharing content via other social channels.  Try asking people questions via social media channels – everyone likes to be the expert.

2)      Be attractive and well groomed.  Let’s be honest, if you aren’t attractive or well-groomed, you won’t get the vote.  What does this mean for social media?  Images used on Twitter, your profile page on Twitter, your page on Facebook, and your website all need to be visually attractive and easy to digest.

3)      Try enhancing your look. If you’ve been trying to go it alone, now is the time to get a professional to help you out with your logo or website to make sure you are presenting the best image possible.

4)      Try not to act slutty. Acting slutty can cause others to lose respect for you.  In the social media world this translates to acting salesly and self-promoting, making cheesy complementary comments to people in hopes that they will follow you, or being a copy-cat without attributing credit.

5)      Flirt! If you want to be someone that everyone loves, you’ll need to put a little pizzazz into it.  Conversations on social media channels shouldn’t be boring and drab – “hey, great article.”  Think about what it takes to be a successful flirt – making connections, getting personal, and being witty, engaging and humorous.  Your social media conversations need to leave your readers thinking – “I want some more of that!”

6)      Keep your grades up. Good grades add to your respect level, and make sure that you don’t get kicked out of school.  In social media marketing, this means staying on top of the pulse of your industry and the sentiment and burning desires of your target audience.  If you push any content that is off the mark, outdated or incorrect, you’ll quickly become an social media fail-out.

7)      Be yourself. Put your own unique personality into it.  Corporate speak and only professional news postings won’t build strong social connections.  Use your own voice in your content and give it some personality.  Include tweets and posts that give people a peak into who you actually are.  We love people who can add value socially and that we can identify with and feel like we know personally.

8)      Be comfortable everywhere you go. Shy, nervous, unsure people don’t rise to the top.  Be assertive and confident in your social media conversations.

9)      Be known. Even if you are amazingly attractive, witty and intelligent, if you aren’t well-known, there will be no crown for you.  How to get known online?  Join applicable online groups.  Follow all of the popular people for your space online.  Push content that is controversial or incredibly funny.  In your tweets be sure to use hash tags appropriately for keywords.  Push “best of” type lists that include valuable lists that link out to lots of other people.  Comment to the in-crowd online.  You can even simulate “dating” someone popular online – if you can get some social endorsements from a leader in your space and have some online conversations with them via social media channels, you will be tweeting with the in-crowd in no time.

10)   Hang out with everyone, unless they are into bad things. Make an effort to get to know everyone in your space that is active in social media.  Do this in an effort of self-learning and to build connections, not just to be cool.  Follow everyone who is interested in or a leader in your space.  If someone follows you, follow them back.  The only people to avoid are those who demonstrate obnoxious online behavior (like just going for sales) or are just pure copy-cats without giving credit where credit is due.

11)   Be Gracious. Be gracious to everyone who takes time out of their precious life to engage with you.  Be gracious to everyone who posts something that you find valuable or interesting.  If someone mentions you, thank them.  If someone makes a comment, thank them and be sure to comment back.  If someone links to you, link back to them.  If someone follows you, follow them.

When the day is done, just be grateful that unlike becoming homecoming queen, social media marketing success is something you can add to your resume.

You just know your blog is incredibly valuable, but how can you prove it?

To help measure the ROI of your blog, we put together 8 metric areas you can track. These metrics will enable you to track the value and costs associated with your blog, and compare results to other online marketing efforts such as pay-per-click advertising and SEO.  This cost and value comparison is very helpful when determining marketing budgets and resource allocation.

1)      Traffic. Easy to Track.

It’s easy to track traffic generated by your blog inside Google Analytics and other analytic applications. This chart tracks the traffic numbers from your blog along with the percentage of total traffic that it represents.  It’s important to compare the cost to attain this traffic, to the other methods of pursuing online traffic such as PPC and SEO.  If you know your SEO and Blog cost of work, you can pretty easily get to a cost per click.

2)      Traffic Engagement. Easy to Track.

This chart compares traffic engagement indicators including bounce rate, time on site, pages per visit and contribution to repeat visits across the different online marketing strategies.

3)      Links. Some Effort to Track.

This chart tracks inbound links to your blogs, along with anchor text and the “link juice” each link is contributing.  It compares inbound links to your blog with other website links attained through the more traditional SEO.  The goal here is to get down to the cost per link level to help compare the tactics.

4)      Keyword Rank & Click Share. Some Effort to Track.

This one can be a bit more challenging depending on the depth of your analytics system.  This one also assumes you are targeting keywords in your blog posts (which if you aren’t, you should be.)  This chart compares the rank of your blog posts, web pages and pay-per-click ads for target keywords, along with the % of clicks that each brings in.  Often times the CTR of blog posts in the natural search results is much higher than other listing types.

5)      Social Buzz.  Easy to Track.

This chart tracks the social buzz generated by your blog posts including retweets, social bookmarks, likes and social mentions.  While this chart is not a direct comparison to other online marketing efforts, it does help to articulate the value of your blog.

6)      Twitter Followers. A Bit Tricky to Track.

This chart measure the number of Twitter followers and quality of those followers achieved from your blogging compared to other social efforts.  You can do the same type of analysis for other social media venues in which you participate such as Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.

7)      RSS Subscriptions, Newsletter Subscriptions. Easy to Track.

This chart tracks how many site visitors from your blog signed up for an RSS feed or your newsletter, versus sign-ups you receive from other organic and paid traffic.

8)      Conversions. Easy to Track.

This chart tracks conversions from visitors who visited a blog post, or came to you via a blog post.  It includes the number of conversions, the percentage of total conversions, the conversion rate and the cost per conversion.  It’s also really important to track conversion assists and not just leave it all to last-click attribution.  You’ll be pleasantly surprised by how many conversion assists your blog contributes.

These metrics will help you articulate the value of your blog. This type of reporting also helps to focus your blogging efforts so you can continue to improve the value it provides.  It is quite rewarding to see the value, rather than just continuously creating content and hoping for the best.

If you check out popular crowdsourcing websites, you will find the “jobs” sections dominated by requests for social media marketing activities.  It can be difficult to get your social media up and off the ground–especially a regular, high-quality blog publishing effort–so it seems many small businesses have turned to what I would consider to be “black hat” techniques.

Consider the following most common social marketing “job” listings…

Blog and Article Writing. The pay for these ranges from $0.50 to $5.00 per article.  Most article requests range from 350 to 500 words and specify the keywords to be used and the keyword density.  These jobs seem to fall into a gray area.  If you can find good writers out there who can provide you with legitimate content, why not?  However, the quality of article you will get for the most popular price of $1.00 is very questionable to me.  It’s clear these businesses do not agree that truly valuable content is the best approach.

Now we will exit the lone “high-end” job category and get into the low-paying jobs.  Most jobs in this category pay anywhere from $0.01 to $0.50 for the tasks below.  (Personally, I think these folks could do better at the penny slots, or even begging on the street corner.)

YouTube. The jobs pertaining to YouTube involve getting paid for watching a video, voting on a video (some request likes only), leaving comments about a video, sharing a video or subscribing to a YouTube channel.

Twitter. Jobs pertaining to Twitter pay people to make tweets that link to a particular website (tweet included), retweeting messages, or becoming a follower for a business.

Facebook. These jobs typically pay for liking a Facebook fan page, leaving positive comments on a fan page, liking posts on a fan page or liking products or content on a company’s website.

Social Bookmarking. The tasks for social bookmarking are based on bookmarking a page on multiple social bookmarking sites.

Website Evangelism. This one involves posting a comment to popular forums, groups, or other related websites.  The post text and link are provided, along with posting frequency guidelines to avoid raising any spamming flags.  Obviously most of these are no-follow so it is not going to help with SEO.  However, these do certainly help drive traffic through online word-of-mouth which people attribute a high level of trust to.

Joining New Communities. This job involves getting paid to sign up for a new online social group or community.

Forums. These businesses are typically trying to quickly build out large forums in order to give their site more credibility.  Some tasks involve creating questions, most involve writing short answers to questions.

Contest Voting. You can get paid to vote for a particular participant in an online social contest, for example a best photo contest.

Posting Comments. This job requests that you post comments on forums, or on articles to help them appear more popular.

Blogger. This one involves getting paid to become a follower for a blogger account.

I will stop there, but it does get worse on freelancer sites — much worse.

Is it clever to employ the masses? Or, is this all shady?  The more I read the more in need of a shower I felt.  The things I value most about social media are the great content and the implied trust that comes with a comment or “Like” or other social endorsement action, and this type of behavior breaks both.

I am in no way saying that all crowdsourcing jobs are bad.  There are a ton of legitimate jobs out there and thousands of great ways to leverage crowdsourcing.

But, I was heartbroken to see all of the unethical social activity going on.  It’s probably even sadder to see what people will do for mere pennies – I mean, you can’t even get a gumball for a penny anymore.  (Although, in some countries this pay probably ends up working out to be a pretty decent job.)  The best way a business can get a social following — and the endorsements that come with it — is by diligently publishing high-quality content on a regular basis and winning fans for your efforts.  The pay-offs are often in the longer-term, but having earned it the honest way will mean you see real business benefits rather than just a list of hollow gestures.

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!

It’s been another big week in Silicon Valley. The annual Ad:Tech San Francisco Conference is wrapping up today after playing host to 12,000 visitors and a huge range of exhibitors anxious to show off the ways in which they’re innovating across traditional, online, search and mobile advertising.

At the same time, Facebook kicked off its Developers’ Conference, called F8, also in the Bay Area. Like Twitter’s conference last week, the gathering is for third-party developers of applications that live on Facebook itself and across its growing ecosystem. Founder Mark Zuckerberg (pictured above, at the opening of F8 on April 21, 2010) announced a stunning array of changes and new initiatives that will directly affect the nearly 500 million people who visit the site each month.

But wait, there’s more: Google, Apple and Yahoo!, all headquartered in the Bay Area, released their quarterly earnings reports this week. And what earning they are:

Google, though disappointing analysts, saw revenue increases of more than 20% over the same period last year, bringing in a total of $6.7 billion, with profits of nearly $2 billion. (What’s to be disappointed about?) Search advertising remains the principal driver of Google’s revenues and profits.

Yahoo!, which everyone said was on a death watch, also produced respectable results for the quarter. Revenues were $1.6 billion for the first quarter of 2010, a one percent increase from the first quarter of 2009. Income from operations for the first quarter of 2010 was $188 million. Nearly all this was driven by display advertising across its network.

Not to be outdone, Apple also reported stunning results last quarter, which officially made it bigger in terms of market cap than cross-town rival Google. Total revenues for the quarter were nearly $15.7 billion, with profits at nearly $3.4 billion. They’re selling more Macintosh computers, iPhones and iPads than ever; only iPods saw a small decline in sales—about a one percent decline. Increasingly, however, Apple is deriving significant revenues from sales of apps, various forms of entertainment and advertising.

Reading this, you might ask “What recession?” While Silicon Valley did see some impact from the Great Recession, which most economists believe is now over, it wasn’t as adversely impacted as many other sectors of the economy. And its rebound is pretty darn impressive.

Capitalizing on the robust return to growth of online display, search and mobile advertising–not to mention the massive adoption of smart gadgets like the iPhone and iPad–Facebook is moving aggressively to expand its ecosystem across much of the Web. In summary, Facebook’s new default is “globally social” – which is to say, it presumes all members of the social network want to be social not only on Facebook but wherever it may have extended its tentacles across the Web.

For instance, if you see a “Like” button next to an article on, say Huffington Post, and you click on that button, your endorsement of that article will appear in your news feed on Facebook for all your friends to see, comment on and share. That this button exists at all on HuffPo has to do with Facebook’s new Open Graph effort, which provides website publishers with simple tools to integrate Facebook features and functions directly into their own sites.

This new initiatives also means that the HuffPo will be more personalized to you – showing you, for instance, what your friends on Facebook previously read and shared on HuffPo.

Like Google’s search advertising engine, AdWords, Facebook will target ads to its users. But instead of using the words typed into a search query to dictate what sort of text-based ads to serve around search results, Facebook will target ads that are mostly text but also include a small graphic based on what users have declared about themselves in their profiles and news updates. It will also factor in your age, location, gender, education, and other demographic, psychographic and geographic considerations.

Facebook believes it can help advertisers more precisely deliver ads that are directly relevant to the person who sees them. Moreover, it’s hoping that because users see ads that pertain to their immediate needs, interests or desires, they’ll be more receptive to those messages. All of which, of course, should lead to better ad click-through rates, increased sales, and lower costs to market products and services.

At Ad:Tech, all the buzz what less about the kinds of ads you might expect to find on networks like Yahoo’s or AOL’s new Advertising.com platform, which serves the AOL network, and more about how to integrate better into the interactions and conversations you might find on social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. While advertising on networks is still big business, ad-buys on those properties are now a default in any ad plan. Everyone in the business is more interested in those 500 million monthly visitors to Facebook or the millions more who are publishing billions of tweets across Twitter’s network every day.

Another big topic is how best to leverage advertising on smart phones like the iPhone and Blackberry, and on tablet devices like the iPad – and how best to efficiently integrate advertising into the hundreds of thousands of apps people place on those devices.

Given the pace of technological innovation, you’d think the advertising models for all this new technology would be a little more advanced. But you’d be wrong. Seasoned pros and young entrepreneurs alike are struggling to find the right ways to best leverage the range of new advertising channels effectively and efficiently, and which also integrate well into the new experiences all this technology makes possible.

Whether leveraging mobile search to get relevant coupons and offers into the hands of those who’d use them right when they need them, to whether and how to place ads in apps like Condé Nast’s Epicurious such that they’re seen as helpful is still being hotly debated.

What is clear is that the future of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies remain pretty darn bright. Not to mention those earnings.

In our first post in this series, we discussed the underlying basics of social media marketing.  And in the second post, we covered the avenues you should use when executing a social media marketing strategy.  In this, our third and final post in this series, let’s go through a couple of examples to help spark some more ideas. What follows is a few sample business types with a list of items for them to tweet, post, blog and provide guides and tools about, while also encouraging community comments, photos and participation.

As you’ll see from the examples below, it would be easy to apply these suggestion to virtually any business (particularly any consumer-oriented business), so use your imagination and insert your own company into the examples that follow:

Real Estate Social Marketing

Be the spot people come to to find a home, sell a home, improve a home, conduct a move and get and stay involved in a local community.

Regularly Celebrate Your Wins

- Notification of Your Sales and Purchases

- Photos, Videos of home offerings – let the community help you market it – providing what they like best about it

Complementary Information

- Comparison grids of current homes for sale

- Mortgage rates

- Home owner incentives and tax rebate information

- Home owner guides to local resources and specials from local businesses – carpet cleaners, window cleaners, furnace maintenance, etc.

- Relocation information – where to stay, moving companies, packing and planning lists, become an online concierge for move coordination

- Reviews of local moving companies

- House remodeling contractors, contractor reviews, remodeling investment guides about where to spend money, post photos of clients before and afters

Industry Information

- Local Housing Trends

- Tips on things including selecting a realtor, buying a house, staging a house, selling  a house, buying  a foreclosure, making your home green, etc.

Community Information

- Local area events, annual festivals, attractions and activities – include calendar, updates, summaries, photos, and videos; Map on your website as a local guide

- Community involvement opportunities

- Community organizations to join

Participatory Forums

- Yelp, Yahoo Answers, Craigslist, City Data, ActiveRain, Real Estate Forum, Agents Online, etc.

Restaurant Social Marketing

Be the spot they come to to find out information about your restaurant, about the cuisine you serve, about fresh local ingredients and shopping, and about local area entertainment and logistics

Regularly Feature Your Differentiators

- Dinner specials, Happy Hour specials, games playing, restaurant events

- Photos of new menu items and specials

- Video tour of your restaurant

- Promotional rates to fans and followers

- Polls on favorite menu items; surveys for new menu additions

- Drink additions – have weekly cocktail specials including suggestions from community postings

- Welcome to groups who will be dining with you

- Photos of restaurant events and group parties

Complementary Product Information

- Nightlife guide – map, photos, reviews of all the close-by nightlife, new nightlife events

- Walking area map surrounding the restaurant – what else should they check out while they are with you?

- Parking guide and information

- Where to buy fresh local ingredients common to the type of cuisine you serve

- Information about the cuisine you serve – history, culture, health benefits, inspirations

Local Information

- Local area events (races), annual festivals, attractions and activities – include calendar, updates, summaries, photos, and videos; Map on your website as a local guide

Participatory Forums

- Yelp, Yahoo answers, Chowhound, City Data, Epicurious Restaurant Forum, Craigslist, Zagat discussion boards, Fodors Forums, local newspaper sites

- Reservations management via OpenTable.com

- Monitor and respond to negative reviews on local search sites

Wedding Planner Social Marketing

Be that one-stop shop for resources and information any couple might need when planning that special event.

Your Business Information

- Notification of upcoming weddings, wedding successes

- Photos, Videos of recent weddings

- Any specials on the services you offer

- Planning guides and checklists – be specific here – destination weddings, weddings with divorced parents, etc..

- Planning guide iPhone calendar app

- Tips on how to set the date, choose a location, get others involved, get prenuptials, amuse his mother, etc.

- Encourage recent newly weds and those currently planning to send in their own photos and videos

Complementary Product Information

- Current specials by wedding vendors – flowers, cakes, reception sites, hotel room blocks, etc.

- Comparison grids of wedding vendors by category – flowers, cakes, reception sites, officiants, rental companies, catering companies, hotels, limo companies, tux rentals, bridal shops, hair dressers,  registry stores, stationary shops, calligraphy artists, etc. – include your own client reviews here

Industry Information

- Trends in wedding ceremonies, wedding attire, etc.
- Links to feature articles, photo spreads or other material by mainstream media or bloggers in the field.

Community Information

- Any news pertaining to local wedding vendors or local wedding trends

- Events in your local area such as wedding expos or trunk shows at your local department stores

Participatory Forums

- Yelp, Yahoo Answers, Brides.com Forum, SuperWeddings forum, Top Wedding Questions, OneWed, Wedding Channel Forum, The Knot Message Boards, etc.

Social media marketing — like all marketing — is only as good as the planning, thought and commitment you bring to the effort.  By following much of the advice from this series of post, you should be off to a great start with your own program.  Good luck!

In Part One of our Social Media Marketing Series, we covered the fundamentals.  What follows is a checklist of great social sites to leverage along with how to get it going and the content you can put into each spot:

If you haven’t done it already, create a Facebook Page for your business (type “Facebook Pages” into the search box when in your personal Facebook account page to find the section, and then click on the “+ Create Page” button to get started).  Once this is done, the obvious next step is to get people to become “Fans” of your business:

- Ask all of your friends and family

- Run a contest to past customers, complementary businesses, or local organizations to get some fans

- Offer a promotional rate to Facebook fans

- Promote your Page in your website, newsletter, and any other place folks interact with your business

- Also promote your Page on invoices, receipts, business cards, etc. — just something simple will do.

- Become a fan of partner and other local businesses

Once your Page is set up and you’ve begun promoting it, be sure to consistently post content…

About your business, including events, rates,  successes, customer wins, new partners, photos and videos of offerings, links to your blog postings, etc.  If your business sponsors things like the local Little League or the Breast Cancer 3-Day, be sure to highlight that.

About your industry, including links to news articles, blog postings, videos, events and happenings – and your review of them.

About local stuff, including local events and happenings (i.e. the 4th of July Parade), what’s coming up, photos and videos of them, your summary of how they went, etc.

About products or services used before, in conjunction with or after yours, including news article links and links to blog postings, videos, reviews, photos, customer comments and the like.

Also encourage content submission from your Fans, such as…

Q&A with past, upcoming or potential customers.

Customer testimonials describing how great you or your products and services are.

Customer photos or videos of them using your product.

Polls of fans, where you post an open-ended question that encourages engagement and responses

Once your community on Facebook is thriving, always be responsive!  Be active in your community.  Respond to comments and popular items.  Be interactive by using “liking” (the “thumbs-up” feature) and commenting on posts from active community members.

Create a Twitter account for your business if you haven’t already.  Simply go to twitter.com and click the “sign up now” button on their homepage.  A wizard will guide you through getting the account set-up.  When getting set up, enter your own name as the account owner, but use your business name as the Twitter ID (or handle).  So, if your business name is Cookie’s Cupcakes, your Twitter handle could be @CookiesCupcakes or @Cookies-Cupcakes or @Cookies_Cupcakes.  If someone already has claimed your business name (it happens a lot), try adding your local telephone area code to the end of your business name (@CookiesCupcakes415 — which indicates it’s the Cookie’s Cupcakes in San Francisco… BTW: if there’s an actual business out there with this name, our choice of it is purely coincidental!)

If you have a blog on your company website (and you should!), grab a Twitter widget for your blog so your Twitter stream can be highlighted in the sidebar.  Most website developers know how to do this, so ask for help if you need it.

Next up: Get followers!

First, follow Twitter’s suggestions for uploading an address book to see who you already know on Twitter.  You’d be surprised just how many people you already know also have Twitter accounts; once Twitter has revealed these folks, follow them.  In most instances, they’ll follow you back.

Second, use some of the same techniques for acquiring followers as you did with your Facebook page.

Third, follow Twitter accounts who post content related to your business, accounts of partners and accounts of your followers.

Fourth, promote your @UserName handle the same way you would an 800 number, your fax number or your main business number — including your website, business cards, shopping bags, collateral material, promotions and the like.

Once the basic blocking and tackling is done, you should start posting content:

Link Twitter to your mobile or smart phone (follow the instructions on Twitter).  This enables you to quickly and efficiently send tweets out over Twitter on the fly.  If you link your Twitter account to your Facebook Page, anything you tweet via Twitter will also show up as new content on your Facebook Page (thereby killing two birds with one stone … er … feeding two birds with one seed … well, you get the picture.)

Tweet early, tweet often! Tweet “Just opened the store and there were customers already waiting to get in!”  Or “The Little League team we sponsor just won their game.  Woo Hoo!”  Or “Just posted about a new offer that I’m really excited about” and then include the URL of the blog post people should go see.

Don’t worry, be happy. Remember that whatever you tweet can’t be retracted, so stay positive.  Also, don’t worry too much if you don’t get things exactly right in the early days — you’ll to learn how people use Twitter and what the conventional uses of the medium are soon enough.

If you haven’t already, create a YouTube channel.  Simply go to YouTube.com and follow the instruction on the homepage for creating your own channel.

Once your account is created, post videos of product tours, videos of your products in use, tours of your store (if you have one), and the like. Also, post videos of local and industry events.  Another great way to use YouTube is by posting customer testimonial videos.  Encourage customers to take their own videos.  If you use one of the popular, low-cost Flip video cameras (also available in HD), it allows you to automatically upload videos you record to your YouTube channel simply by plugging it into your computer or laptop.  If you use a Macintosh computer or MacBook laptop, use the included video editing software to jazz-up your videos with titles, music and transitions (if you have kids, this can be a great project for them and they often figure out how to do it far faster than their parents!)

Put links to join your YouTube channel on your website, newsletter and other touch points.  And remember it’s easy to embed video in your blog posts.  Be responsive to all comments on your videos. And be sure to promote new video posting through Facebook and Twitter.

If you haven’t already, create a Flickr account.  Post photos of you, your products, your staff, pictures of your products in use, and pictures of products used before and after yours (the idea is to show how they fit with yours or what the end result is.)  Post photos of local and industry events.  As you upload photos, be sure you name them and add tags (they’re like categories) so they can be easily found in searches (for instance, if someone on Flickr is doing a search on “cupcakes” you want Cookie’s Cupcakes to show up in search results, so be sure to name the kind of cupcake you’ve photographed — red velvet, for instance — and tag the photo “cupcake, red velvet”.

Incorporate your Flickr photostream onto your website or blog page.  Include links to follow you on Flickr on your website, newsletter and other touch points.  And be sure to promote all your new photo content through Facebook and Twitter.

Give your own website a social focus. For instance — and this one’s important — start a blog.  And make sure it’s incorporated INTO your website and not part of a blog hosting website with a different domain name than your website’s.  Most website developers know how to do this and can help you to get set up.  Also, you can decide to build your business’s website on a blog hosting platform such as WordPress, which makes incorporating a blog so much easier.  There are many free and low-cost business website templates you can use on WordPress, and there are many website developers who can help you get up and going at a reasonable cost.

Once your blog is up and going, be sure to regularly post to your blog, including product reviews, industry events and news, and  local events and news.  What are questions you get from customers or what issues do they frequently run in to?  Use your blog to address these. Feature videos from your YouTube channel and when you post, insert photos from your Flickr stream — it’s easy to do both and really gives your blog professional flare.

Be sure you also add an RSS feed to your blog — again, WordPress makes this easy and a website development professional can also make this happen for you.  Promote all your blog posts via Facebook and Twitter.  You can use free applications like TweetDeck or Seesmic to make this simple and efficient for you.

Make sure you’ve established a presence for yourself on sites like Yelp, CitySearch, FourSquare and other social / crowd-sourced sites.  Remember that these sites enable your customers to not only find you — as they once did with the Yellow Pages — but to also rate your product or service quality, customer service, responsiveness, and the like.  Such sites can drive a great deal of traffic to your business, but can also kill traffic if lots of people indicate they didn’t appreciate their experience with your company.  Most companies don’t have anything to worry about — it’s only those companies who fail their customers that get into trouble.

Email out a newsletter to everyone on your email list.  Setting up an email newsletter is easy using services like Constant Contact or MailChimp — they include really nice templates you can customize with your own branding and help you to manage all your email lists.  And there’s no need to write something from scratch; simply repurpose content you’ve already developed and published on your blog – and include links to popular videos, photos and tweets from other Twitter users that people have found of interest.  Make sure there are plenty of links in your email newsletter back to relevant sections of you website.

Sign up for Google Alerts and set alerts for your business name and any competitors you may have.  You may also want to set one up for your own name if it is used a lot in conjunction with your business.  Google Alerts tells you when you are mentioned in the news, in people’s blog posts or tweets and and enables you to respond to both positive and negative reviews or comments.

Always send a kind word to someone who speaks of you favorably.

For negative reviews or posts, reach out the poster to learn more and find out how you can improve in the future.  (Be sure to do this non-defensively and without anger.  This is an opportunity to learn from a customer and to grow from negative feedback.  Getting into disagreements or fights with customers — particularly online — can lead to much larger negative consequences.)

It will very likely take some effort to build all this up.  It might seem awkward at first and feel a bit time-consuming.  So take it one step at a time.

Go slow and don’t worry if you feel like you are talking into a black hole for awhile.  Continue brainstorming on that rewards system to get an active community in place.

Once you get into the habit of these forms of communication, it will become second nature and the community that you develop will be rewarding to you professionally and to your bottom line.

Next Up — Part 3:  Social Media Examples That Work