Social media marketing has been changing the way business utilize communication technology, combining different mindsets with flexible rules and non-existent standards. Nearly every company entering the “social media fray” is trying to create something new,in preparation for this I have collected a list of sites and authors that have some incredible resources for making strategic plans.

I urge every client at here at 123SocialMedia to educate themselves and listen to the conversation. It is far more effective to spend some educational time so that you know enough to ask the right questions. It is also far more effective to understand what types of like-minded campaigns have succeeded or failed in the social media space (while your thought may sound original, it may have lived and died a hundred times already.)

• The first author: Peter Kim, has an amazing resource of over 300 brand examples to look at. He has the most comprehensive collection I have found to date (I highly suggest you visit!) In addition to that piece, Peter Kim also has an article at Mashable covering the 22 steps to Social Media Marketing. One of the most valuable pieces of that article is his mention of the username check tool (one of my favorite free services) that tells you if a username is available on 75 different networking sites.

• 110 Ways Retailers are using Social Media is a good breakdown by Linda Bustos provides a platform breakdown of businesses using Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, and other applications.

There are many other resources for finding specific examples on platforms: here are a few that I have found useful.

What is all the Twitter about?

SocialBrandIndex has a useful breakdown of brands using Twitter.

Want to share your images?

Geoff Northcott covers brands using Flickr.

Want to understand Facebook?

Inside Facebook talks about improved SEO with Brand Pages.

Are there any other platforms and campaigns that you are specifically interested in hearing about? If so, leave a comment and I will point you in the right direction.

We often hear the question: What corporate social media sites use Wordpress?
After all- It is free open source software. It is often followed with questions like: Who would use free software to run a significant corporate site? Lets take a look at a few…

Big Media Sites

• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• CNN

Companies you may have heard of:

• General Motors
• Ford
• Reuters

Some governmental sites:

• Library of Congress
• NASA
• United States Post Office

The list goes on and on.

As a media platform Wordpress has revolutionized the way information can be rapidly syndicated across the internet. This transformation is due to several main reasons:

1. Wordpress is a widely popular blogging platform- In 2007 it had 3,816,965 downloads.
2. It is user friendly (and becoming friendlier) - For business usage, Wordpress has the ability to become more intensive or scaled back for user education. The visual interface for administrators can be customized for any user level, and the visual design for visitors can be altered to serve any brand need. A pivotal feature of the admin side of Wordpress is its “Office-like” user interface that allows anyone who can muster sending e-mails or editing a Word document the ability to make a site change.
3. It is scalable- Wordpress can be hosted through Wordpress.com for free or downloaded and installed on nearly any web server. Small business users can run popular sites off virtual hosting services, while full 100k+ user sites can easily be managed on dedicated servers. In addition to Wordpress single user, there is also Wordpress MU (multi user) that allows thousands of blog platforms to interact or form a community.
4. It has an almost unlimited support group of developers. As of 8/30/08, they have contributed 2,809 plugins that have been downloaded over 11 million times. Each plugin represents anything from a single new feature (such as extra e-mail functionality) or robust applications that manage intensive functionality. The cost in labor-hours for the development expertise that is freely given by community developers often exceeds thousands of dollars.
   
5. It has unequaled customization and design options. There are thousands of free visual templates that allow Wordpress to fit nearly any business need, as well as hundred of premium templates that include extra functionality and visual appeal. Under the Wordpress platform, a site can maintain an unlimited number of static pages or use the systems dynamic properties to manage information.
6. It doesn’t tie companies to excessive licensing restrictions. Per Wordpress- “Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 5 web site without paying anyone a license fee.”
7. It offers data security. Wordpress is based on a fairly simple database design that is governed by multiple levels of user permissions (i.e. you can define what different people can see) and dozens of plugins allow for monitoring how users interact with the data, where they came from, where they go, and how they can control other users on the platform.
8. Wordpress is based on the social web. This is an important point. Wordpress is constantly being enhanced and modified by thousands of different individuals and businesses every day. Those interactions constantly develop niche application that integrate with other web platforms and applications like YouTube, Twitter, Google, Flickr, Linkedin, Digg, Stumbleupon, OpenSocial, etc. This mutual development from other platform users creates unique mash-up functionalities.

123 Social Media is based off the Wordpress platform and we fully endorse it as a business tool for many of our own projects. We run into many projects that utilize complex proprietary content management systems that have less than half the features and present more technical hurdles than they do solutions. If you have questions about the capabilities of Wordpress, add some commentary below or contact us.

In our “100 Days of Social Media” post, several readers wanted to know a few top reasons our site was pulling in an audience. The most basic reason: we cast a very wide net. Sites are made up of many pages beside the homepage and in the social media world, a site becomes more defined as a larger “web brand”.

In the real world, a brand can exist in conversation, on shoes, cars, napkins, and t-shirts (look at NIKE.) In the social media world, multiple points of interaction have created a huge effect on how brands are communicated. One issue is understanding how linking from outside of your site to sub-pages within it and around it (that are relevant), and to the people you are trying to reach.

One of the key reasons social media is relevant: search traffic from Google. Regardless of how many links point at any one page, eventually it will become neutral in relevancy to the keywords that drive traffic. The main 123SocialMedia.com site has roughly twenty keywords that score high results, followed by 200+ article pages that have been optimized and promoted for various search terms that attract traffic. (You can read our article on social media keyword tools to help identify some useful phrases.)

Simply put: When setting up a proper linking for search engine results, an effective strategy is to link to interior pages of the site AND outside sites that carry your brand message.

If you are initially doing this on a new site, the whole idea is to create a pyramid that builds upon the foundation you have. After a page scores for a term, it can push several weaker ones, and lend strength to a few stronger ones as well. It also means that once a visitor is on your site, that they are provided with more options for staying on your site.

Imagine this basic structure:

In the eyes of Google, you need so many relevant pages linking to any specific page in order to push it to the next level. The basic concept would be best visualized by the graphic on the left- a pagerank 2 item is surrounded by seven pagerank 1 pages. From a very generic idea: the higher the pagerank, the more likely specific terms on the page will rank for keywords in search results.

While 25 pagerank 1 pages may have enough power to create a pagerank 3 item, it is generally easier to create a well-thought structure lower ranking pages that have the ability to promote several important ones.

These basic page structure does not always align or connect with other pages, which is where relevance and freshness of the content become involved. If any one page becomes old by not having enough interesting content before earning some links from the world wide web, the content in the eyes of Google becomes stale and slowly disappears from the search results.

The complicated part of visualizing this whole concept is to realize that pagerank ranges from 1 to 10. When you understand that pagerank needs to have support from different directions to have healthy search engine result for a keyword (commonly referred to as SERPs), then the whole thing begins to resemble a complicated mess of building something out of LEGO blocks that have been pre-assembled by five year olds.

A unique problem to this project building is degradation. Old content pages may disappear from Google’s indexing, creating a foundation for your project that IS relying on a foundation that is slowly falling apart over time. Imagine the diagram on the left with ratings from 1 to 10 (and having a few disappearing sections!)

So how do you fix that?

Reason Two: Social Media Profiles and Anchor Text

The big problem is that most sites do not have too many pages that can be ranked for too many keywords, and some of those disappear over time. A standard brochure site may only have 5 to 15 pages. That means roughly 5 to 50 terms can be placed against those pages based upon the amount of textual information (relevance) on them. Once the basic pages of your site are written to be maximized for a term, you need to have X number of pages pushing them along and supporting them in the “pyramid of power.” If you need to build one of those fancy projects with high ranking in the search engines you need to make sure you have plenty of pieces to build with.

This is where ANCHOR TEXT and SOCIAL MEDIA SITES become important. Anchor text is the word that a search engine relates to a link. If I link to my site and use the words “visit my site“, then the search engine relates 123SocialMedia.com as being relevant to a search for “visit my site”

If I link to my site and use the words “social media training“, the search engines lend some of that relevance to the page I am pointing at. If I had a page that had specific relevance (aka articles or blog post) I could be more specific and get additional relevance. For instance, this post on social media training - things you should read today.

Now imagine there are a thousand social media sites out there that you can build profiles on: these could be Linkedin, Myspace, Facebook, Technorati, Digg, Stumbleupon, Jobster, Squidoo, Newsvine, or hundreds of others.

Each of these social media sites has several main benefits to your traffic strategy.

1. It can serve as a branding point for your information. Every single profile creates a possibility for brand exposure. While an active profile and community presence is more significant, having a profile merely for owning your brand presence on that site can be very helpful to prevent identity theft of your brand, to explore features and conversations on the site, and establish “secondary brand points” in search results.
2. Secondary brand points. One of the largest pitfalls of most companies and professional brands is that they rely on one point of contact- the company site (to maintain a corporate image.) In the world of the social media web, search engines and audience members may be exposed with five to ten additional sites of like-minded content. If someone Googles your brand, they may see your information and nine additional sites. If someone is on a social network- they may see various “people who liked this, also liked A, B, and C.” options. In either case, having secondary brand points allows you to dominate certain keywords and search criteria around your brand.
3. Search Engine Links. A lot of your organic search traffic comes from knowing how linking affects keywords and anchor text. Depending on the social media site (profile, community, or article) there are anywhere between 1 to 10 links that can be established on one page. Some of these links can be pointed at a target site, some of the links can be pointed at other secondary brand points, and all of them can be leveraged to push several sites.

With a grasp of how this organized chaos should be structured, imagine how your new social media world looks in a diagram:

If you take anything away from this article, take these two points:

1. DO NOT GO AROUND SPAMMING THE WEB! Provide useful information about your company and profession. If the community doesn’t make sense for you to participate in… find another community (trust me, there are plenty that are completely relevant.)
2. PERSISTENCE AND A CREATIVE MIND ARE YOUR BEST TOOLS. There are thousands of different ways that social media strategies can be implemented for business. There are no ironclad right or wrong ways of doing things, yet trying to do nothing is a guaranteed way of getting no where.
   

If you have any questions about this idea, please leave a comment. If you have a good promotional technique for using social media let us know about it.

On the web, your name can (and is) your reality. However naming yourself online isn’t that simple. Choosing a domain name for a business web presence is one of the most critical items in your promotional venture: your domain name will be the nexus of your business for months, years, or even decades.

There are a list of things you should consider before embarking down your online venture:

• 1) Define your brand. It is more than words, but will be flavored by them. Your business brand is an image of who you are. Ask your friends, family, and peers what your ideas inspire when the words are read.
• 2) The idea of a business brand is to be memorable, yet effective in communicating the purpose of your business. It is usually more effective to focus on communicating your purpose, rather than just developing your widget as a term.
• 3) If you can’t get a .com, choose again. There are plenty of other extension like .net and .info, but whatever case that is: you will need to also have the .com extension or risk losing your brand before it has ever been established. (Businesses should register the .com, .net, .info extensions for a business)
• 4) If you think of related names in the process, register them today. $10 today is a lot cheaper than the impossibility of getting it tomorrow. In the case of 123socialmedia.com, we registered 100+ domains with the term “social media” in it.
• 5) Keep it short. A good domain name should be one to three words long. It should not include hyphens or any other characters that are out of place. Shorter domains are generally better for two basic reasons: they are easier to spell and remember.
• 6) Don’t be scared of going long. Yes, I just said “keep it short”, but having a long domain name has the benefit of saying exactly what you do. Long domains also pull some weight in keyword search results, so having “social media” in the 123socialmedia.com domain helps a site rank for those terms.
• 7) Multiple Domains are Okay! So many businesses lock on to the idea of having one site to send readers to. While having focus is good, multiple domains and sites allows a company to have different presentations for different audiences. Multiple domains and sites can also allow a single business to have multiple results in search engines, which allows them to conquest the first page of search results on terms that drive results.
• 8 ) Recognize how you can misspell your own domain. If you have any words that do not carry clearly when spoken or are easy to misspell, register the misspelled version of the keywords. $10 for a misspelled version of your own site name is a very affordable way of preventing client loss or competitive problems in the future.
• 9) Buy alternate domain names today. At less that $10 a piece, alternate domain names can provide a very reliable way to promote your business and help protect your reputation. If you have any public figures in the business, make sure to spend the $10 to buy personal name domains (www.firstnamelastname.com) and any slogans or catch phrases.
• 10) Realize that your domains are being promoted to both humans and search robots. They each like slightly different things and you should create a strategy for having multiple domains and how they coordinate relevant traffic to your business.

Bonus point: If you are trying to use a new domain for competitive search engine ranking, register the domain for five years. Search engines give credit to the length of a registration to help identify if a new site is a spam site being used to manipulate the search results. By committing to a longer stay, you help establish your virtual reputation in the eyes of engines like Google and Yahoo.

Do not jump the gun! Remember that a domain choice has many different angles to it. It can easily be compared to choosing a real world location for your business: where will it be? what does the neighborhood say? who will see it? how long will you be using it?

If you are a small business, then $50 to $100 to secure a domain name for a few years may seem like a major investment. For larger companies, spending $500 to $1000 for a larger competitive search optimization and brand protection effort is a good investment (for instance, do you own www.yoursitesucks.com?)

Understanding that a good domain may mean the difference between five visitors a month or five thousand, greatly changes how your business functions online. With a well organized strategy behind multiple domains, different niche streams of visitors become easier to reach and increase the chance that they will convert into business results.

Darren Rowse of Problogger fame has an excellent guest post by Dustin M Wax regarding “Nine Signs of an Effective Blog Post“. Many good writers fail to realize some of the subtle nuances in writing online (such as for blogs or online communities) and this piece by Dustin breaks down some exceptional points. For additional pieces like it here, you can also read Effective Social Media Writing and Blogging Like a Kid.

“You sweat blood all night, hunched over your keyboard, typing away at your blog’s next masterpiece. Finally, you click “Publish”, the post flies into the ether, and then, you wait.”

The following nine points are all well defined in Dustin’s article, but I also think there is some wonderful knowledge trapped in the basic essence of his nine points:

1. The headline draws the reader in.
2. A concrete detail or visual illustrates the benefit promised in the headline.
3. The lead expands the theme of the heading
4. The layout is clear and skimmable.
5. The post covers the topic in a logical sequence.
6. The post is persuasive.
7. The post is interesting to read.
8. The post is believable.
9. The post asks for some action.

These points are a good resource for any writer trying to grab a hold of the ideas behind social media and blogging. On a more technical level of moving readers into a post, I would also point out that writers looking to harness the promotional and viral aspects of blogging go through some additional steps before posting an article:

• Analyze Your Keywords - This article on social media keyword tools shows you how to look at keywords and phrases that will help draw relevant traffic to your article.
• Have a Traffic Strategy - while browsing through social media keywords, think about the bigger picture of who and why you are reaching readers. If you are reaching journalists, your information should be provided in a more concise format for reprint. If you are reaching consumers, tone your message to the audience appropriately. In either case, realize that monetizing your traffic may have a delay depending on the length of your sales cycle and the information you are presenting.
• Ask Readers to Subscribe- this may sound simple, but check the bottom of this article and look at the “if you like this article, why not subscribe?” button. Selling your services and keeping your readers informed are often the same thing when it comes to social media. Provide useful information on a consistent basis and you will develop a longterm audience that provides a healthy marketing channel over time.
• Link to the post to your other articles- Once you have someone on your site and they are reading your information, encourage them to stay around a little and read more information. By directing readers to other helpful information you can increase your traffic and develop stronger relationships with your readers.
• Keep Your Articles Focused - if you are trying to develop a readership, try to keep on-target with your core articles. This also applies to the technical side of search engine optimization for your articles, if you are trying to rank for competitive keywords you may need to produce 3 to 10 articles that revolve around the same relevant keywords.
  
• Use Related Keywords - Before publishing articles on your site, try to plan a few articles in advance so that you can coordinate keywords between them. As good example is for real estate terms, if you want to rank for the phrase “seattle real estate” then you could produce several articles on other local terms such as “Bellevue Real Estate” or “Bothell Real Estate”