Social media marketing is a way of promoting your site or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that can bring new eyes to you, your business, and your product or services.  There is no other low-cost promotional method out there that will easily attract you new  visitors, some of whom may come back to your website again and again.

Chris Brogan advises businesses, organizations and individuals on how to use social media and social networks to build relationships and deliver value. He is a social media expert and we had the great opportunity to meet him and hear him speak this weekend at SOBCon08.

Chris blogs, writes articles, and makes media of all kinds at his site! He is a pioneer at this and if you haven't discovered his wisdom, stop by his sight and pay him a visit!

Social media marketing is here to stay. It's part of the Web 2.0. You need to learn it and understand it.  Maki at DOSH DOSH, another social media expert says, "Every site or business that wants to expand and become profitable, needs a core group of supporters who will be willing to make purchases or recommend the site to others.

The more supporters you have, the faster word spreads about your site. Social media marketing is an excellent way to get people to come into your site to take a look at at what you have to offer. You will grow when there are a group of loyal visitors ready to always act upon what you have to offer."

Derrick Sorles and Michael Snell - We Help "Pull"  New Business To You!
            Your Business MD's- Business Blog Consultants -Web 2.0  Consultants and Strategists 

My whole life I have provided customer service. And 99% of the time, I made it outstanding customer service. It's not hard to do! The customer is handing you money for something - and you want to deliver a great experience, so that they keep coming back! It's not rocket science!

But we have all had it happen to us. You are having a great day. You walk into a store or a restaurant and get a bitter, unhappy person to wait on us. Or, maybe YOU are having  a  really bad day, and it's affecting your mood. And someone tries to provide you good service and you bite off their head for no good reason at all, other than the fact you are having a bad day.

Todays post has nothing to do with blogging or Web 2.0. But it DOES have to do with helping your business be better. And I assume if you are a reader of this site, that's why you are here. How to take your business to next level, in some way.

Customer service is in such a bad state right now. I can not tell you how many times I have gotten awful service in the last couple years, yet the person delivering the bad service, thinks nothing of it.  It usually has even nothing to do with someone's bad mood. They just don't care. You know how many nightclubs and restaurants I am a "regular" at?  The owners know me by face and  yet 80% of them never even stop and say  "HI" to me.

GREAT customer service can make a mediocre product shine.  And BAD customer service can tarnish a great product.  Just this past weekend we had brunch at our favorite Chicago Sunday brunch spot - Angelina's. The food is great! The crowd is fun! But you can ALWAYS be assured of mediocre-bad service from the waitstaff! We just accept it because we like the food, a lot of friends eat there. and it's a great location. However if I was Brad Pitt,  I can guarantee my waiter at Angelina's would deliver 5 star service!

Over the weekend, I met author Donna Cutting at the SOBCon08 blogging conference. In her new book The Celebrity Experience: Insider Secrets to Delivering Red Carpet Customer Service, Donna  shares stories about how YOU can do a better job of providing customer service. This book is packed with stories about GREAT customer service from the hotel, food and beverage, airline, and so many other industries that if you have a job that relates to customer service in some way, this book will have something you can relate to.

Combining the best practices of the Hollywood celebrity scene with those of the business world, The Celebrity Experience is the extreme makeover of customer service! Learn how to generate buzz and positive word of mouth about your business by giving your customers the red carpet treatment.

Imagine a world where red carpets were rolled out for you wherever you went and you were always greeted by name and with a smile. Imagine being admired and complimented by strangers on a daily basis. Imagine if those who did business with you always bent over backwards to cater to your personal desires and needs. If that sounds like a fantasyland, it is. And it's called Hollywood! But the principles can be applied to any business.

It all comes down to ATTITUDE. Until you develop the right attitudes in your team, or in yourself, you cannot deliver great customer service. I read a great line  at 1000 Ventures that said, YOUR ATTITUDE DETERMINES YOUR ALTITUDE!


Derrick Sorles and Michael Snell - We Help "Pull"  New Business To You!
            Your Business MD's- Business Blog Consultants -Web 2.0  Consultants and Strategists 

         

WOOPRA! THE NEXT BIG THING?

Woopra is a revolutionary Web analytics tool designed from the ground up to break all the rules. By splitting the service into a client + server application, they've radically decreased the load on network resources, and enabled the graphing and analysis engine to harness the power of desktop processing.

SO WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?  Woopra is the world's most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. You can see who is at your site LIVE and in real-time. PLUS, get this, you can start chatting with viewer LIVE, while they are on your site reading/viewing! It's awesome! You monitor who's hitting your site, where they come from, and how they found you, instantly!

It is in beta testing right now and you must have an invite to join. I saw the invites on EBAY for about $25 this week! While at SOBCon08 over the weekend, LORELLE, the WordPress expert, was kind enough to give us all an invite. So today I signed up and will give it a whirl!



Woopra redefines Web Analytics by enabling instantaneous information transfer combined with the ability to immediately act on each action. Woopra changes website management discussions from “how should we change things in the future” to “what should we do right now?

Woopra enables websites with both “proactive” and “reactive” chat functionality. Webmasters can remotely initiate sessions with visitors, or embed “Click-to-Chat” buttons within a site to accept inbound requests. This breaks the virtual wall between visitor and webmaster.

This is all pretty cool !  Watch for it!


Derrick Sorles and Michael Snell - We Help "Pull"  New Business To You!
            Your Business MD's- Business Blog Consultants -Web 2.0  Consultants and Strategists

Write for your readers and write for people searching for the information you can offer.  That's the bottom line really. I was at the SOBCon08 conference last weekend and overheard two bloggers talking about how Google, allegedly, ranks websites. Google has an intricate recipe for their algorithm and rest assured, they change that recipe often!

Some online publishers are so obsessed with trying to figure out who Google ranks them. Just do a good job and it will happen. - We know that Google looks at incoming links to your posts from links that have authority. It someone with a Page Rank of 7 is linking to what you are talking about, that's a good thing.

I have read that using good anchor text for your links is good - but be careful, it can look spammy. You always want to hyperlink good keywords. Never hyperlink words like  CLICK HERE. So if you sell PET SUPPLIES, And every outgoing link uses the words PET SUPPLIES, Google can look at that as anchor spam. Instead, vary your keywords. CAT SUPPLIES, DOG SUPPLIES, CAT PRODUCTS, PET PRODUCTS, etc.

Search engines also look at frequency of posts. If you post once or twice a week, for a year, that shows consistency. If you launch a blog, as some people do, with 90 posts the first 30 days,  then  let it set empty for  2 months, and throw another 10 posts on it, that shows inconsistency.

I have also read domain age is taken into consideration. When you buy your domain, but it for at least 2 years. 5 is even better. And don't wait till the last day of it's life to renew it. Renew early. Show that you are in it for the long haul.

Keyword density and keyword search are also important. How are people finding you? Keyword search results are constantly monitored. What keywords brought the visitor to your site and what keywords they used to search once on your site are important. Google is looking for relavancy. A properly optimized web site with relevant keywords and keyphrases will receive highly targeted traffic from serious prospective buyers, which in the end, will better help those visiting prospects convert into buying customers. AND Google will see that.

So don't get too caught up in your page rank with Google, your authority numbers at Technorati, your Alexa ranking.... write good stuff and everything will fall into place!


Derrick Sorles and Michael Snell - We Help "Pull"  New Business To You!
            Your Business MD's- Business Blog Consultants -Web 2.0  Consultants and Strategists

Blogging, Web 2.0 and social media must be examined very differently when it comes to return on investment. A blog account and domain is usually less than $50 a year, plus your staff time. If bring 5000 new eyes to your business, is it worth it?  If you get 5 new clients, is it worth it? If even a few customers are helped as a result -  the cost is cheap!

 

Katie Paine is an expert on blog ROI. And she was quoted in Paul Gillins The New Influencers.  She is a vetran public relations executive and has spent the last fifteen years researching, writing and speaking on the topic of measuring the value of public relations and social media investments. She believes nearly everything online is measurable; it’s just a matter of choosing what to measure.

 

We always say, and she agrees, blogging and social media marketing is a competitive necessity and can be a competitive advantage. If you are not out there building new networks and webs, chances are your competitor already is. If he is not, great! You get the first mover advantage. If he is, you can catch up.

 

Paine has said for her own business, she likes to monitor click-throughs from her blog, to her website.  We also monitor very closely performance on Google key search terms and the traffic those bring in. Good search performance is money in the bank. If you can “own” your keywords, that’s  a huge ROI, that isn’t quickly translated to dollars, but will, eventually.

 

It’s all about search. We say it time and time again. Can you be “found”  easily online. Are you coming up in keyword searches. Search is the best thing that ever happened for small business. Many companies can not afford costly pay-per-click campaigns around certain keywords. However,  through blogging and Web 2.0 strategies you can come up in the same searches and reach an international audience for much less.

We had a client recently spend $5000 with us. Within 90 days he had traffic, owned 4 of 6 keywords on Page One Google, AND he got a new client for $4000! THAT'S HUGE ROI! That DOES NOT usually happen. We usually caution clients to view their investment and ROI over a one year period. It takes time to plant all the seeds and watch them grow. But the return is that people have so many new channels to find you and your services -  besides just 1 static website. 

Remember, it's all about SEARCH! Can you be found?


Derrick Sorles and Michael Snell - We Help "Pull"  New Business To You!
            Your Business MD's- Business Blog Consultants -Web 2.0  Consultants and Strategists 



 

A lot of people ask me if it really helps getting listed in blog directories and I  always say, "It can't hurt!"

I read somewhere that Google  frowns upon those mass directory listings. Where you pay one price and get listed with 200 or 300 directories. Whether that's true or not, I don't know.  My recommendation is that if it's free to get listed, get listed. The more places your site listed, the more exposure for you.

The very first place to get listed with any blog is Technorati. Hopefully if you have a blog, you have already claimed it there. Technorati is the recognized authority on what's happening on the World Live Web, right now. And when you claim your blog there, you can monitor the blogs incoming links to it and you can usually see some  traffic if your keywords are properly used and your posts are tagged properly. 

BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog are also good sources  to be listed with. Both are directories as well as social media sites and are good places to network and get exposure for your blog.

LS BLOGS has a page rank of 6 and offers fast approval. Blog Top List has a page rank of 6 and blogs are listed by a scoring system. Blog Hop is more of a search than a directory. A good opportunity for qualified traffic. They have a page rank of 6. Search 4 Blogs has a ranking of 6 and we have had good luck with.

And of course DMOZ. It's the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. Your site must be 6 months old and it's trickey getting into the right category and takes a while to show up. But they are an authority. 

 Derrick Sorles and Michael Snell - We Help "Pull"  New Business To You!
            Your Business MD's- Business Blog Consultants -Web 2.0  Consultants and Strategists 

   OUT OF CONTROL???

YESTERDAY  on TechCrunch  there was a great story about  *WEB 3.0 - And Reducing The Noise.
 
*For some reason, I could not create a hyperlink to it - this is the URL
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/17/web-30-will-be-about-reducing-the-noise%e2%80%94and-twhirl-isnt-helping/


twhirl is a desktop client for the Twitter microblogging service. Most of the features available on the Twitter website are accessible through twhirl, too. - In theory, it supposed to help you keep your TWITTERING accessable and orgainzied, on your desktop. I don't know about you, but my desktop is pretty full already with files and current projects I am working on.

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch says, " Twhirl solves one problem (the need to constantly visit the Twitter and Friendfeed Websites), only to create another one (information overload that clutters your desktop).
Even Robert Scoble, the biggest Twitter whore on the planet who follows 21,000 people and receives one Tweet per second, can’t deal with it anymore!"



All of these social networks require time. And you can't be everywhere, all the time. So I think each individual has to figure out how many hours they can devote and where they want to devote the hours. You could spend 40 hours a week, easily, on one blog, and all the networking! Don't try to be everywhere...you can kill yourself!


 Derrick Sorles and Michael Snell - We Help "Pull"  New Business To You!
            Your Business MD's- Business Blog Consultants -Web 2.0  Consultants and Strategists 

 
           COMMON MISTAKES BLOGGERS MAKE

I  just recently became a reader and fan of Matt McGee's Small Business SEM site.

Today he did a great post that I want to reprint here and share with all of you - but stop by his site also - he has great information there!


"A client recently asked me to share a few blogging tips and recommend some good articles to read. I went a little overboard with the recommended reading portion of that task, and then decided to go whole-hog and put together this huge list of 61 recommended articles and posts about blogging. Now you can just bookmark this one article and you’re all set!" - some of the highlights include...

General Blog Tips

• Top Ten Blogging Tips & Insights from a Novice Blogger | Avinash Kaushik

 

Promoting Your Blog

• How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic – The Ultimate Guide | Copyblogger

 

Writing & Blog Content

• Five Common Headline Mistakes and How to Avoid Them | Copyblogger

 

Corporate/Business Blogging

• 20 Best Practices for Launching a Corporate Blog | Jennifer Slegg

 

There are over 60 articles on his whole list. Stop by his site and check them out. - This a great list Matt! We have a lot of clients who come to us asking a lot of questions that are covered in these articles. You just have to take the time to educate yourself and absorb all of this information.  You can't learn it overnight.

 

Google's technology playground.  Have you been here yet?

"Google labs showcases a few of our favorite ideas that aren't quite ready for prime time. Your feedback can help us improve them. Please play with these prototypes and send your comments directly to the Googlers who developed them." - it says on the site.

I have been using the Google 411 information for a while now. But I found some other neat things here as well.

Check it out!


Derrick Sorles and Michael Snell - We Help Bring New Business To You!
   Your Business MD's- Business Blog Consultants/Web 2.0 Consultants and Strategists

   

We heard about TWITTER exactly one year ago. And I just didn't get it. Why would someone really want to know if I was having a cup of coffee? Or running to a meeting? Or heading to the beach???

But I read a post from Michael Martine / Remarkablogger this week, that got me thinking. It's about networking. It's about exposure. It's about sharing. Now, I get it! How is someone supposed to find you, if you aren't there? We preach that all the time to clients...sign up and create a profile on every site you can. Be there. Be everywhere. And people will find you. The Web 2.0 and Social Media is about connecting people. MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, MySpace, Facebook, Shelfari....be everywhere.



I love CommonCraft!  They have done a TWITTER demonstration.

Even if you don't TWITTER at first, start following people. Make some connections. Check out the TWITTER BLOG. They have a new tool called QUOTABLY, where you can follow the replies to conversations.

I am hooked now! It is an integral piece of the pie!



Derrick Sorles and Michael Snell - We Help "Pull"  New Business To You!
    Your Business MD's- Business Blog Consultants -Web 2.0  Consultants and Strategists