It is because of this momentum that the San Francisco Bay Area Working Group of SEMPO  organized its September Meet-Up last week around the topic of how best to organize social marketing campaigns.  Hosted by Google at its San Francisco office, the event was simulcast live to Google’s Santa Monica office, where the newly formed SEMPO-LA Working Group gathered to also participate in the event — a SEMPO first, I think.

Event panelist Pierre Legrain, product marketing manager for monetization at Twitter, provided some of the most memorable examples of how search marketers should leverage his channel. He spoke about the recent announcements from Twitter that include Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends, and its recently added Who to Follow feature.

Data that Legrain shared from the recent Old Spice social media phenomenon showed remarkable conversation spikes that coincided with releases of  company videos on YouTube and Facebook (among other channels).  One can imagine that by using Promoted Tweets or Promoted Trends, a brand could activate social conversations with promotional text and links — which, obviously, should be highly measurable and accrue to the bottom line.

Co-panelist John Yi, Strategic Program Manager for APIs at Facebook, also showed compelling examples of campaigns that leveraged its targeted ads, Facebook Pages, and its Analytics-like tracking and reporting dashboards.  A recent campaign by Starbucks, in which the coffee retailer promoted a free pastry giveaway through targeted advertising, the “Like-o-sphere,” and its own well-branded page, showed once again the highly effective ways in which a brand can activate its markets through targeted engagement with audiences.   According to Yi, the campaign was so successful that it increased intent to purchase by 94 percent.

Perhaps the most entertaining presentation came from panelist Rick Silvestrini of YouTube (owned by Google), who started with — naturally — a video case study showing how a brand with no traction or name recognition was able to generate millions in revenue by simply producing a highly effective video for its YouTube channel.  Silvestrini really hammered home the point that YouTube – and all social media, really — provides a level playing field.  Marketing success need not be the sole domain of big brands with big budgets.  As many start-up or smaller brands were represented in the audience, the message hit home.  He also pointed out the obvious linkages between YouTube and Google’s core search marketing offerings.  Also interesting, and core to SEMPO, was his assertion that YouTube is the Web’s second largest search engine — even ahead of the Bing-Yahoo combination — proof that understanding the “rules of engagement” in this slightly off-model search engine should be a key concern of search marketers.

As panelist Tezza Yujuico, Chief Sausage Maker (a.k.a., COO) of Athena East, a social marketing firm, pointed out, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube each represent unique opportunities to engage with audiences.  But all three are also synergistic.  Indeed, these three natural competitors (gathering, graciously, on Google’s turf) demonstrated over and over again how  each can feed into the other.  YouTube is the vehicle of choice for video content producers the world over.  That content is embeddable in blog posts and distributable via links on Twitter.  YouTube videos are also playable in Facebook newsfeed updates and Facebook Pages.  Each drives traffic, attention and engagement to the other.

Every day, according to Facebook, campaigns on its site increase search traffic by an average of 2.8x and CTRs by 50 percent.

What Yujuico really emphasized is by firmly establishing clear goals for social campaigns that complement, and indeed feed, search marketing efforts, Web marketers can effectively leverage each channel in concert.  And because of constantly increasing measurability across all platforms, the ability to show precise ROI on a total Web marketing effort is nearly unparalleled.

As more and more SEM professionals are called on to broaden their responsibilities, SEMPO may want to add an additional “S” — for “social” — to its own title.  Indeed, many in the audience already have.

Google “Everything” (also referred to as “blended search results”, or “universal search”) provides companies with several opportunities to appear on the first page of natural search results. The days of search results pages (SRPs) being limited to text links are ancient history. SRPs now includes a variety of results, from tweets to images and videos. We encourage you not to limit yourself to just one link presence on the first page, but to go for as many listings as possible. The larger your presence on that first page, the better your click-through rate (CTR) and brand recall will be.

We’ve compiled a list of eight opportunities for landing on page one of SRPs for your keywords that are relevant to most business types, together with a “Cliff’s Notes” version of key points on how to optimize each of them.

1. Organic Search Text Link. This is the traditional listing we think of that used to be the sole content of SRPs on Google. Key optimization points here include:

• Have a properly configured page (good page title, etc.) with relevant and original content related to your target keywords.
• Attain high quality, relevant links from authoritative sources for your keywords with a variety of relevant inbound link text.
• Have a URL that is short and relevant to your business name and keywords.
• To bolster your CTR, make sure your page title is less than 64 characters and includes your keywords at the beginning and your meta description tag is succinct and also includes your keywords at the beginning. Both your page title and meta description tag should be unique. For more on Google’s page title and meta description recommendations read here.

2. Paid Search Ad. These are the traditional AdWords text ads that appear at the very top and down the far right-hand side of the results. To optimize your quality score and CTR you can:

• Choose your keywords wisely – it’s actually good to double up. If you rank well for a keyword in natural search or get natural search traffic for a keyword, you can actually increase traffic and brand recall for that term by also having a paid search ad appear for it.
• To have a strong CTR, write ad copy that is highly relevant. This requires very tight ad group organization so you can get highlights in 2 or more lines of your ad copy by incorporating the keywords from your ad group directly into your ad copy in more than one location.
• Offer something unique from the competition in your ad copy.
• Have your ad take up as much space as possible on the page. Take advantage of location display, site links and product feed links to get more “free” lines of space to have your ad stand out.

3. Local 10-Pack Listing. The 10-pack is the box within the set of natural search results that includes a map and a listing of 10 local businesses. When the local 10-pack appears, it takes up a monster amount of space. In order to make your way into the 10-pack, you can:

• Claim your business listing on Google local. Also make sure your listing is accurately submitted to Localeze and InfoUSA.
• Complete all of your business information on Google local – every single field. When categorizing your business be sure to focus on search queries searchers are likely to use.
• Include images of your business with your local listing.
• Get reviews. Reach out to customers and offer incentives for them to post reviews.
• On your website itself be sure to include your local phone number and business address across your pages.
• Get inbound links to your site from local authorities and location oriented sites, such as local news organizations or local business associations.
• Submit a Geo Sitemap to Google – instructions can be found here. There’s also a great free tool that helps you create a Geo Sitemap.
• For more information on the Google 10-Pack, check out our blog post.

4. An Image. Images can also appear in the blended search results. In order to have your images appear here you can:

• Optimize your image alt attributes to include your target keywords.
• Optimize your image file name with your keywords. Be sure to separate the keywords in the file name using dashes.
• Optimize your image title tag, but this one doesn’t carry as much weight.
• Ensure the text surrounding the image on your page is relevant.
• If possible – try some inbound links, or even internal links with descriptive anchor text to further re-enforce your relevancy.
• Avoid going overboard on the number of images on any page, ensure the number of images is appropriate for the page content size.
• Include the word “picture” or “image” along with your keywords – these are very popular search terms.
• Make sure the image links to your website.

5. A Video. I’ve seen some search queries generate up to eight video listings on the first page of the results – what an opportunity! If you can your video to appear here, you can:

• Create and submit a video sitemap to Google.
• Include your keywords within the video sitemap, in the Title, Description, Tags and Category.
• Optimize your thumbnail image – include the code for the image in your sitemap, specify which one Google should use, make it 80X60 pixels and make sure it’s very relevant to the target keywords so searcher are likely to click on it.
• Get inbound links (even internal) with keyword rich anchor text.
• Make sure the content on your page that surrounds the video is highly relevant.
• Include the word “video” in with your target keyword phrase . Video is a very popular search term.
• Host your video on your website, so that you reap all the benefits.

6. News Listing. Especially for hot topics, news listings frequently make it to the first page of Google’s search results. To have your news item appear here, you can:

• Submit a News Sitemap to Google.
• Only submit original-content news, not republished or from a syndication feed.
• Make your news timely. Check out Google Trends to find keywords phrases that are currently hot and trendy for Google. Use these exact terms as target keywords for your news article.
• Make it a dynamic article – include recent updates and allow comments.
• Include your location. Google loves to show results closest to searchers, so let Google know the location the news article is relevant to and where it’s coming from.
• Have a strong publisher reputation. This can be influenced by how much and how often you produce original content for your news category.
• Do some basic article optimization – URL with keywords, relevant title, keywords in the content, etc.
• Include a .jpg image with relevant alt text and caption with no link.
• CTRs matter — so focus on relevant images and your best lines first to bolster your click-through rate.

7.  Twitter Feeds. Another aspect of universal search means that Twitter feeds can be included on the first page of the Google results. Here are some tips to get your tweets onto the first page (for a primer on Twitter and associated lingo, check out this blog post first):

• Make your twitter handle relevant – your company name is a great choice since it will add to your first page presence. Or, make your handle something simple based on target keywords.
• Be sure to include your target keywords into your Twitter bio and page description.
• Get as many “high quality” followers as possible. These should be highly credible sources for your target areas with high volumes of followers themselves.
• Make sure the first words of your tweet include your most highly prized keywords.
• Use a hash tag before your target keyword, but limit yourself to one hash tag per tweet.
• Your hash tag keyword should also be included in your tweet content if you can do this naturally.
• Timely topics and re-tweets are great – another great use for Google Trends.
• Not only can you tweets appear, but your twitter profile can appear on the first page of the results, too, so be sure to include a link from the Twitter profile to your website.

8.  Product Listing. Feed your products to Google Shopping.  Try thinking outside the box here: you can feed your available hotel rooms, pictures of your software product, pictures of homes for sale — it doesn’t just have to be traditional e-commerce products, but anything that’s for sale on the Web.

• Set up your product feed into Google.
• Provide very frequent updates to your feed — daily, if possible.
• Do some link building on your specific products.
• Include keywords in your product names, product descriptions (in the first words), and product images (separated by dashes in the image file name).
• Optimize your product categories for specific keyword terms.
• Fill in every single detail for the product that you possibly can.
• Don’t use any marketing or sales terms in your product feed.  Stick to words that people would use to find you, not necessarily how you refer to things.
• Including holiday or special event terms can be really beneficial for more long-tail terms.
• Connect to your Google AdWords account so that you get your products to also display along with your AdWords ad.
• Always set your location.
• Get ratings. Offer incentives to get a volume of high rates.
• Have a competitive price (including tax and shipping, if applicable).

As with everything else online – the following four main principles apply and will always get you results:

1. Make great, original content…
2. …from your searchers eyes (that is, use terms your searchers use to look for your offerings)…
3. …that is popular (thanks to links, ratings, followers)…
4. …and locally relevant (whether at the country level or a small town level, always indicate where you are from).

Happy first page domination to you!

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.

Twitter is suddenly more all over the news than usual. So what’s all buzz?

Turns out, lot’s of things.

First, let’s start with the big event: today was the first day of Twitter’s inaugural developers’ conference called Chirp. This is a gathering of just under 100 geeks at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts who build applications that rely on Twitter feeds (or APIs) to provide a Twitter-related service to end-users (that would be you and me.) Company co-Founder and CEO, Evan Williams said that developers using the Twitter API make about three billion calls a day into the service.

These applications make it easier for individuals and businesses to, for instance, send tweets from their desktops or mobile devices across multiple accounts (Seesmic or TweetDeck), or to send pictures via Twitter (TwitPic), or to analyze how well you or your brand is doing in the Twitterverse.

Second, a bunch of numbers were announced today. Company co-Founder Biz Stone said Twitter now has nearly 106 million registered users and adds about 300,000 new users per day worldwide. So, that’s a lot. What’s really notable is that about 75 percent of Twitter’s traffic is from outside Twitter.com – that is, all those applications I mentioned above are driving the lion’s share of tweets that are broadcast around the world every day. The other big number is that Twitter handles about 19 billion search queries per month either on its own site or via the API – which makes them second only to Google in total search queries per month.

That takes us to the third thing: revenue. Since it broadcast its first tweet in March, 2006 everyone has wondered one thing: how will Twitter make money? Four years later, they’ve got an answer. Promoted Tweets.

According to Twitter COO, Dick Costolo, Promoted Tweets will be a system whereby businesses can bid to promote their own tweets into top-of-stream conversations around particular topics. For instance, say you’re Paramount Pictures and you’re promoting a new movie with opening night parties in cities around the U.S. So you blast out tweets saying “Find an opening night party at a theater near you.” Today, you send that tweet out and it quickly becomes buried under all the tweets that follow it. With Promoted Tweets, each time someone includes your keyword – say, the movie’s title, or the name of its principal star – your tweet will quickly follow-on that tweet to the same group of followers. If Paramount’s tweet gets re-tweeted, clicked-on or favorited, such actions will somehow accrue to the benefit of the advertiser (it isn’t exactly clear how, but I’m guessing its akin to Google’s performance-based quality score for ads in its AdWords system).

“All that exist in our monetization platform are tweets,” Costolo said. “Everything is a tweet. A Promoted Tweet is a tweet. You can do anything to a Promoted Tweet that you can do to a regular tweet.”

Pretty cool. Especially for those of us in the advertising and marketing world looking for ways to appropriately engage in the twitterverse without looking pushy or like we’re trying to interrupt something. Bidding on search keywords became Google’s cash cow; it’s clear Twitter is hoping that bidding on keywords in tweets could become a big cash generator for them.

Speaking of money, the fourth big thing is that Twitter is now developing features and functions within its own sphere that will compete directly with some of the applications built by the very third-party developers Twitter is hosting this week at Chirp. As you might imagine, this is profoundly anxiety-producing for start-ups who’ve built their whole business model around the Twitter API and features that heretofore were absent from the core Twitter offering. So there are more than a few geeks sweating over this. Still, Twitter’s new monetization scheme is something they’re willing to share with Twitter developers who build Promoted Tweets into their applications – in fact, they’ve proposed a generous 50 / 50 split for advertising revenue. So, bad news and good news for developers.

But why, you may ask, should I care about the whole Twitter phenomenon at all? Isn’t it just another fad??

Well, in the same way that blogging seemed to come out of nowhere and then radically altered the ways in which people acquire and consume news, entertainment and information, Twitter is altering the realm of casual conversation. Its created a global water cooler and, from time-to-time, an outlet for breaking citizen-reported news. Remember that immediately following the devastating earthquake in Haiti, the first accounts out of the country were via tweets and TwitPics. The same has been true for countless other natural and man-made disasters over the last four years.

Many also believe that Twitter played an outsized role in the extraordinary campaign for the U.S. presidency in 2008. And because Twitter updates now flow seamlessly into Facebook updates, which is also enjoying phenomenal growth among all age segments, more and more people around the world rely on Twitter – whether they know it or not – for their just-in-time / just-enough news, gossip and daily life updates.

Which leads to the last big announcements relating to Twitter this week:

• Google announced that it will make the entire Twitter archive available via its search engine in the coming weeks.
• Microsoft’s Bing announced that it will now elevate relevant tweets in its search results based on real-time trending data.
• Google has also announced that it is incorporating Twitter’s “@anywhere” API, which Twitter announced last month and which makes it easier for third-party websites to incorporate Twitter functionality, into Google’s new service Follow Finder. Just enter your Twitter handle and Follow Finder will recommend other Twitter members who are not yet in your “following” list.
• The U.S. Library of Congress will now officially archive the entire Twitter archive dating back to its opening day in March 2006. Now anything you may have tweeted during that time – and I mean anything – is now resident in the august chambers of our nation’s most prestigious library. Horrifying, no?

Twitter’s impact on the social and cultural landscape worldwide is, presently, incalculable, and its clear the young company isn’t content to rest on its laurels. These changes, together with the exciting new apps still yet to emerge from its ecosystem of developers, portends more exciting announcements to come.

Last week’s announcement of Google’s (relatively small) acquisition of Aardvark, the real-time social Q&A start-up, received a fair amount of buzz.  Which was on top of the abundant buzz generated by Google’s release of Google Buzz.  Which, of course, follows last year’s buzz about Google Wave.

Though Wave, a social collaboration tool, is kind of uber-geeky and not particularly intuitive, Google Buzz draws on a now well-known metaphor: the news feed.  And while it has generated some early heat around privacy issues, Google Buzz (in its most current form – they’ve been updating it nearly daily in response to user reactions) draws on your Gmail and chat contacts to form an instant social graph.  That graph enables you to stay connected with your contacts in much the same way you would via Facebook or Twitter (or, more accurately, FriendFeed before Facebook acquired it).

Once the collaboration aspects of Wave are refined (and become better understood) and are then married with your Buzz social graph, it’s easy to see how folks might fall in love with all the ways in which you can make things happen whether for work, family events or social occasions.  Add in Aardvark, which lets you ask a question and which instantly calculates what person within your social graph is most capable of expertly answering your question within about 10 minutes, and suddenly you have a social platform many times more powerful and interesting than what’s currently available elsewhere.

So what, you may ask, do Aardvark, Buzz and Wave have to do with search?

First, it’s all about social.  Google sees the rise of social networks including Facebook, and to a lesser extent Twitter, as a challenge to its search hegemony.  After all, if you can get answers to questions, or advice on what to do, or find the information you’re looking for via a trusted social network, that is one less search you do on Google.  Which means one less opportunity for Google to offer up ads.

The other reason, then, is that by building its own social tools into the growing user base for Gmail, Apps and iGoogle, their algorithms will be able to see what sorts of conversations, questions or responses you offer not only through email correspondence or in a collaborative exchange on Wave, but also via Aardvark and, by extension, Facebook and Twitter.  Which represents an opportunity to serve highly targeted, extremely relevant ads in ways that go well beyond the keyword search.

While many consumers chafe at the idea that ads might be targeted to them based on their (presumably private) conversations or collaborative activity, the truth is those ads are likely to be of real service at the exact right moment in time.

Obviously, should this play out as imagined, this is great for Google.  But it’s also great for advertisers.  And, I would argue, it’s good for consumers, too.  While there are very legitimate privacy concerns with the way Buzz was initially rolled out, continuing changes are addressing those concerns.

Before you know it, Aardvark, together with a good Buzz, could find itself riding an awesome Wave.  Which means search marketers have something to look forward to.

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

Social Graph Content in Search Results

Moving quickly to capitalize on its growing relationship with Twitter, Google is now publicly testing a new search feature called Social Search.  Available now via Google Labs, Social Search triangulates your contacts in your Gmail chat buddies, your Gmail contacts friends, family and co-worker groups, and people you’re publicly connected to on other social sites (such as Twitter and FriendFeed), which Google calls your Social Circle, to find social media those folks may have produced that relates to your search query.

In a blog post at Google Labs, Google’s Matt Cutts says you should login and do a search:

If there’s relevant web content written by people in your social circle, it will automatically show up at the bottom of your search results under a section called “Results from people in your social circle.”

To see even more social content you can click the “Show options” link at the top of the results page and then click on the “Social” link.

In addition, any blogs you subscribe to via Google Reader will be considered part of your Social Circle and new, relevant posts will be added to your search results.

Social Search also exponentializes your social circle.  In an interview with Laurie Sullivan over at MediaPost, Cutts said:

If I follow my best friend, and he’s following five people, Google will add those five people to my extended social circle since it’s likely some of those connections will be mine as well.

Remember, you can only see the social content in search results if you’re signed in via Google Labs.  Go check it out for yourself, or take a look at this video on Social Search that Google prepared:

Tweets from users on Twitter have hit the big-time: they’re now going to be featured in search results on Bing and Google.

For those geeks among you who follow news from places like Twitter, Google and Microsoft (maker of Bing) like I do (it’s not a particularly scintillating life I lead…), you were no doubt enthralled with yesterday’s unfolding events.

First there was this blog post by Biz Stone, Twitter’s chief:

…there are already tens of thousands of Twitter apps and more to come because people want the choice to consume and create tweets wherever and whenever they prefer. The folks over at Bing took a keen interest in Twitter and worked fast to establish a working relationship with us in line with our open approach.

Twitter is providing Bing access to the overwhelming deluge of public, real-time tweets rushing in from all around the world so they can help you find those that make the most sense right now. While Twitter currently presents tweets based simply on timeliness, Bing is experimenting with new solutions such as “best match.” We hope more working relationships with organizations in the search business will mean even more variety for users.

Which, of course, was a not-so-coy reference to Google (OMG!) Sure enough, the ever-present and elegant Marissa Mayer, Google’s chief guru around all things search, sent a tweet (”Google and Twitter!! Yay!! http://bit.ly/183svN“) announcing they, too would integrate tweets from Twitter. From her blog post:

…we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

Here’s Yusuf Mehdi, a senior vice president at Microsoft, previewing Twitter integration with Bing search results at this week’s Web 2.0 Summit here in San Francisco:

This is great for users because Twitter is often the place to get first-person, “on-the-ground” reports of breaking news or leaking information. By seeing real-time results of tweets from Twitter relating to any given topics in context with other information, particularly reports researched, verified and edited by professional journalists, can be a powerful way to stay informed. It’s also a great way to forensically understand how it is events unfold because there are so many points of view on the event.

It’s great, too for advertisers on Google and Bing who bid on search keywords. Because there is a finite amount of search inventory for the vast majority of keywords, any opportunity to increase the volume of searches overall creates more opportunities for advertisers to insert relevant messages when and where audiences are expressing a related interest. The challenge for advertisers, of course, is keeping track of rising and falling memes (or topics) in order to place timely bids on keywords or phrases relating to those topics or issues that are suddenly on the rise. Still, it’s an opportunity.

Set Up Your Account On Twitter Wisely. When you first set up your account, be sure to pick a user name that is easily / readily associated with your business.  At Yield Software we use “YieldSW” on Twitter and everywhere else.  If your business is named Kathy’s Kupcakes, choose “kathyskupcakes” as your user name.  (Hopefully that’s not a real business! If it is, I swear that was a random choice.)

Remember this formula: Followers = Social Capital; Social Capital = Success. You can begin to build followers by first uploading your address book to Twitter to discover who is already on Twitter.  Follow all those people.  They will get an email saying you’re now following them and will be given the opportunity to follow you in return.  Put a “follow me on Twitter” button on your Website, blog, email auto-signature and business cards.  You can also see who’s following Yield Software on twitter.com/YieldSW or any other account you follow, and then choose to follow some or all of those folks.  They, in turn, may follow you.  Finally, you can go to sites like whoshouldifollow.com and summize.com to see recommendations about others you might like to follow.  The more people following you the greater the opportunity for you to intersect with folks who will find benefit from your business.  So get out there and start raising some social capital!

Get Organized and Be Efficient. There are a number of things you can do and tools you can leverage to make your tweeting enterprise more productive.  First, when you sign up for Twitter be sure to enable the mobile phone feature so you can send updates to Twitter via SMS text message. If you have an iPhone, download one of a number of great Twitter apps (I use Tweetie). If you manage more than one Twitter account (i.e., one for personal use and one for professional purposes) you can manage these efficiently from you desktop using the Hootsuite.com web application; the Seesmic desktop app also enables you to track multiple accounts.  If you’re managing just one account, use TweetDeck or Seesmic, which are both cool desktop applications (built in Adobe Air), to not only keep track of the folks you follow in real time, but to add your own updates; set up saved searches for topics you care most about; monitor tweets from or about your key competition; and to search for or follow folks who are new to you. (Links to helpful services can be found at the end of this post.)

Synch Twitter with Other Social Networks. Using FriendFeed, you can manage all the content for your social Web subscriptions in one place.  Using the simple interface, you can add your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Yelp and many other accounts to keep them all coordinated.  Then, when you add a new tweet to your Twitter stream, your Facebook update, for instance, will be automatically populated with the same message, thus enabling you to keep your followers up to date no matter where it is they typically find you. (The Tweetie app on my iPhone automatically updates both Twitter and my Facebook news feed; increasingly, these sorts of cross-platform update features are being built into social and other Web environments.)

Never, Ever Forget Twitter is a Broadcast Medium. Once you’ve hit the “enter” key, it’s out there.  Forever.  And can’t be taken back.  So don’t take tweeting for business purposes too lightly.  Tweeting when angry or with a few cocktails under your belt can have terrible consequences for your business relationships.  When sending a tweet, always – ALWAYS – double check your message before hitting “send”.  The best rule of thumb is to be respectful at all times.  You can still be charming or funny or ironic or serious – but don’t send a tweet you wouldn’t be comfortable using in a conversation with one of your customers.

Tweet Often, But Not Too Often. Folks follow you because you regularly tweet about things they find useful or interesting or entertaining.  By grabbing a spare moment here or there to blast out a tweet via text message, for instance, you’re reminding folks that you – AND your business – are open, available and ready to engage.  Each and every tweet need not be substantive, but neither should every one of your tweets be completely silly.  A good friend and serial entrepreneur, Dave Sifry, has a simple personal motto that he lives by, which is “be of service.”  I keep this motto in mind every time I tweet (though I do slip in quite a few “lifecast” tweets about my lunch, my dog or the weather, which I hope provides the service of levity from time-to-time!)

Folks who begin using Twitter for the first time almost immediately discover there is a vocabulary in use throughout the “twitterverse” that can, at first, feel confusing.  Over time, you’ll begin to see the logic of it all and will incorporate this vocabulary into your own without really realizing it.  To get you started, here’s a few translations for you:

Twitter: The proper name of the social networking phenomenon, officially known as “micro-blogging”, which enables people to update their followers with posts of no more than 140 characters.

Tweet: A posting of no more than 140 characters to one’s followers on Twitter.

Twitterverse: The total universe of people actively using Twitter.

Twitterati: The most engaged users of Twitter; the folks who are avid users and understand the rules, conventions and social mores of the twitterverse.

Lifecasting: The practice of tweeting about every little thing you do, think, see or experience throughout your day. Some do this very, very well and the tweets are compelling and entertaining. Lifecasting is a particular talent, however, and I recommend following those who are good at it for a while before attempting this yourself.

Auto-DM: A much-hated, much-derided, but still over-used way of automatically responding (literally “automatic direct message”) to someone who follows you with a canned response. For instance, say I just followed you and a moment later I get this automatic direct-response tweet from you: “Thanks for following! Check out my website at www.iamsodarnirritating.com!!”  Everyone hates these and the twitterati looks down their collective nose at those who use auto-DM to tweet.

The “@” Symbol.  This is important. When addressing or referring to another in the twitterverse you do it by using their user name or handle (for Yield Software it’s “YieldSW”).  So, instead of tweeting “I love Yield Software!”, you’d tweet “I love @YieldSW!” (and we love you, too.)

The “D” Convention. When you want to send a direct message to someone on Twitter, but don’t want the whole Twitterverse to see it, add a “D” at the beginning of your tweet, followed by a space and the user name of the person you’re addressing on Twitter. (In Twitter, Seesmic, TweetDeck, HootSuite, Tweetie and other Twitter apps there are buttons that enable direct repsonses.) So, to tell Yield Software you need help with setting up multivariate testing of a landing page you’d send this tweet: “D YieldSW I need some help setting up multivariate testing.” Remember: in order to direct-message someone, you must be following them AND they must be following you.

The “RT” Convention. When you see a tweet that you like or feel would be informative to all those following you, you can “retweet” that post.  Everyone following you will see the retweet and the person who originally wrote the post will see that you retweeted it, which promotes a lot of good will among the twitterati. Most Twitter apps have a retweet button to make this easy and efficient. Or you can copy a tweet, paste it into the message box and put “RT” and the “@username” of the original poster in front, and hit the post button. So, say I just sent out a tweet from @YieldSW that you see in your Twitter feed as: “YieldSW Our customers totally rock.”  You could retweet this by copying and pasting this tweet into the message box on Twitter and typing “RT @” in front of “YieldSW” (there’s no space between “@” and “YieldSW”.)

The “#” Convention.  The hash symbol (”#”) is a way to add tags to your tweets.  Tags provide context or identifying information that enables more efficient searches across the twitterverse. (Think of the dogtags folks in the military wear around the their necks, which provide identifying information about a service member should they become injured.) For instance: you might tweet “Yield’s Web Marketing Suite has improved the ROI on my PPC campaigns. #SEM”  This means that your tweet refers to the Search Engine Marketing profession. When someone does a search on Twitter to see recent tweets about Search Engine Marketing or SEM, the #SEM tag helps the engine capture your tweet in the search results.  Folks also use it around specific events. When the popular South-by-Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas was in full swing, thousands of people were blasting hundreds of thousands of tweets either beginning or ending with the tag #SXSW.  Still others will use the hash tag as a way of communicating context. For instance: “I just got a new puppy. #happy”

A Summary of Useful Links

www.twitter.com

www.friendfeed.com

www.tweetdeck.com

www.seesmic.com

www.hootsuite.com

www.tweetvolume.com

Tweetie for iPhone

For more blog posts in this series, go here.

On first blush, Twitter can look and feel like a complete waste of time.  Essentially you get 140 characters to say something to all the people who follow you.  And any cursory review of these updates – called tweets – will reveal many, many people who “lifecast”; that is, people use their 140 characters to give an update on what they’re doing or thinking or seeing in any given moment in time such as eating lunch or getting ready to board a plane.

So why would you want your business on a service that has a whole lot of people tweeting about the joys of a grilled cheese sandwich?  Because a deeper view into Twitter will reveal that the number of people using their 140 characters for more serious and helpful purposes are growing in number every day.  Choosing to be one among these more substantive tweeters (even if you occasionally give in to the gratuitous lifecast tweet about your cat, lunch or child’s school play) can have very positive benefits to your small or growing business.

At Yield Software, we use Twitter (you can follow us at /yieldsw) and many of my co-workers and I tweet using personal accounts (you can follow ME at /djg2theworld).  Building a community on Twitter is a really powerful way to stay connected; to build interesting networks of stakeholders and allies; and to keep all those interested in your work updated on what’s new, different, changing or not functioning quite right.

What follows is a list of benefits to using Twitter for your small or growing business after which I’ve included a number of tools that might be helpful to you as you begin to tweet for yourself.

1. Market Research and Customer Service: Monitor what people are saying about you, your company, and your product.  Using one of a number of tools (listed below), keep tabs on the conversation about those topics you care about most.  Where there’s an opportunity to respond (to questions, to criticism, to praise) you should do that immediately.  Where you discover market intelligence, incorporate that into your business strategies.  And where you see trends emerging (or falling flat on their faces), make note of it and figure out if getting out in front of something emergent might be the right strategic move for your business.

2. Networking: Increasingly, our personal and professional networks make all the difference in terms of maintaining an edge in business.  Foster large and thriving networks via Twitter and other social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.  Each time you make a new business contact – whether a customer, a business partner, or a new vendor – be sure to add them to your online social universe by following or “friending” them.  If new contacts don’t include their Twitter handle, LinkedIn profile and the like in their email signature or business card, ask them for that information and invite them to follow or friend you. Most social platforms also have a great search system. (And be sure your auto-signature in email includes links to your Twitter profile, as well as others.)  Each new contact is a portal into a whole new universe of potential contacts.

3. Competitive Research: Again, using one of several tools available to you, regularly monitor your competition on Twitter.  To the extent you see new initiatives or missteps on the part of your competition, use that information to keep your edge and win in your space.  If your competition isn’t actively tweeting on Twitter, make sure you set up a saved search in one of the tools listed below so you can see when someone in the “Twitterverse” is talking about your competitors.  You can gain real actionable intelligence by being a smart and active listener on Twitter – and chances are, your competition is keeping track of you, too, so don’t let yourself be at a strategic disadvantage.

4.  Get Answers: Often, people are afraid of asking questions in public forums for fear of looking or sounding stupid.  It’s time to get over that fear!  Twitter has emerged as a wonderful place to seek answers for all kinds of questions.  I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen business owners or leaders inside corporations put an open-ended question out there (including ones where I thought “gosh… everyone knows that!”) only to see them receive an abundance of thoughtful responses from all sorts of people just trying to be helpful.  It’s frankly heart-warming to see.  So don’t be afraid to put questions out there.  But be genuine about it: don’t play games with folks by asking bogus questions designed to drive a promotion.  By being genuine and open, you’ll see people respond in kind.  And that could help you and your business in ways you can’t even imagine.

5. Give Answers: The corollary to number 4 above is that because so many people put questions out there, you have an opportunity to respond with answers where you have something helpful to say.  Seize every opportunity to be helpful on Twitter.  Besides the good karma, people may just “re-tweet” your response to their own networks, which may prompt folks you’ve never interacted with before to follow you, thus building your network.

6. Make Offers: People on Twitter love a deal.  (But then I guess that’s true everywhere!)  If you have a credible deal to offer to folks on Twitter, put it out there.  Make sure you put a link into your tweet announcing the deal and that the landing page for the link speaks to the Twitterverse specifically with an immediate action.  Discounts are good.  Free is better!  Come up with something really compelling; you’ll be surprised just how fast your offer spreads around the world!

There’s no denying the growing ubiquity of Twitter. By using this emerging medium intelligently and in a way that adheres to the social standards of the Twitterverse, you can make real progress against your business marketing goals.

A Summary of Useful Links

www.twitter.com
www.friendfeed.com
www.tweetdeck.com
www.seesmic.com
www.hootsuite.com
www.tweetvolume.com

For more blog posts in this series, including “Basic Twitter Etiquette“, go here.