There are several factors you should consider when selecting a social media channel. Target audience, product/service characteristics, amount of internal staffing/resources, time and technology savvy are just a few. Another one to consider is simply the volume of traffic and use of a social media channel.

Good place to get solid data is Hitwise. The latest data tracks everything from top 20 Websites (ranked by visits), top search engines by volume/visits to top 20 social networking websites. No suprise on the results, Facebook (for the week of 9/26/09) was the number one most visited social networking site at 41%. MySpace, YouTube, Tagged and Twitter round out the top five.

If you want to know where to focus your Internet marketing efforts this data can help! Enjoy!

Today I am teaching a lunch-and-learn for the Law Offices of Hoyt and Bryan, LLC on the Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media. With the sudden onslaught of social media in the workplace, some folks are left overwhelmed with what to do and what not to do when it comes to marketing your business online. Feel free to download the powerpoint and enjoy!

There are many do’s and dont’s and lots of experts are writing on this topic. Some of the best articles/blogs I’ve read are:

• Mind Your Facebook Manners
• Annoying Habits in Social Media
• Six Annoying Habits of Social Media Promoters

My list of Seven Deadly Sins are:

1. Over posting your status
2. Mixing business with pleasure
3. All sales pitch no value
4. Tweeting, Digging and Facebooking the same post
5. Mirror, mirror on the wall
6. Peek a boo posting
7. Doing nothing

I’m going to record portions of the seminar today with my handy Flip and will upload for your viewing pleasure later today. Stay tuned. I’ll also explain more on each one right here on the blog. But for now gotta go! Don’t want to be late!

There’s a lot of chatter about marketing and advertising, social media and seo programs… but what about PR? I just got off the phone with Carol Flammer, who is a Public Relations extraordinaire and Social Media smartypants! Carol is president of Flammer Relations, Inc., and managing partner of mRELEVANCE, LLC, an Internet Marketing, Social Media and Public Relations firm with offices in Atlanta and Chicago. She had so much great information to offer for all our “DIY-ers” out there, and I couldn’t wait to share it with you!

“PR is how you tell your company’s story. It could, and should be, the basis of your entire marketing program.”

So why is PR important to your company? PR is your on-going brand message. If you think about your social media efforts – like blogging – it can’t exist without stories! Your editorial calendar originates with your PR, and content is key! You don’t have to have a PR agency to start some simple PR efforts on your own, but there are some places where having an experienced PR agency or writer will make a big difference, and we’ll give you some of those pros and cons in just a bit. The key to having a successful PR campaign – either on your own, or with an agency – is that you have to be committed to it, just as much as you would be committed to your advertising campaign.

Carol shared with me that she gets approached by potential clients saying that they’d like to give it “one month to try it out”. Having a successful PR effort won’t happen in a month. To garner real results from PR efforts, you need to be open to using PR for 4-6 months. Public relations is an on-going effort.

Oh, the forgotten about “written word”. Carol says, “you can’t forget the power of the press release!” Print PR is much more measurable now because of the online community. You can easily measure results and tracking by having your releases turn up in online venues. Read more »

The Flip Video Camera

Hello there, it’s Kristen Weaver, your Roving Reporter back on duty!

School is back in session, and I was fired up for this morning’s Social Media seminar “Flip over the Flip and YouTube”, presented by Meredith and sponsored by WOAMTEC.

We started off the morning just getting everyone logged in and fed (because what’s a good day at school without a hearty breakfast?). I grabbed a blueberry bagel, banana and Orange Joice. Breakfast of champions, no?

Meredith begins our session talking about all the ways that using YouTube will help with your organic search optimization. So fascinating to me. I’ve used YouTube before, but only for videos of my cat (who wobbles). I was very excited to get it started for my photography business and open a new “channel” – but I had no idea how much it can help your ranking! Basically, Google owns YouTube, which means that when you tag your videos, Google will start to search and rank them as part of your business. We also got to hear a great testimonial of how this worked for a local company! I’m sooo on this!

Read more »

In my seminars and workshops, I frequently talk about the dramatic plunge in consumer confidence and how that impacts their willinging to buy your goods and services. I cite a study conducted by PR firm Edelman which studied “informed publics” between the ages of 25 to 64 and explored this group’s level of trust in four institutions: business, government, media and NGOs. Results reveal the lowest across-the-board levels of trust since the survey began ten years ago. What does this mean to you? Your consumers don’t trust you!

The solution I am proposing is to use social media to reestablish trust by allowing your raving fans to do the selling for you! Who do consumers trust? Each other! We naturally trust our neighbor’s referral over any type of formal advertising. Traditionally this has been called “word-of -mouth” marketing.

Here is the GREAT news. Social media is word-of-mouth networking on steriods. And, this is no longer just my supposition. Today eMarketer.com published a study that confirms online advertising trust is on the rise worldwide. “According to the “Global Online Consumer Survey” by Nielsen, 41% of worldwide Internet users trusted online advertising.” In fact, the study reveals the number one advertising tactic trusted by consumers is “recommendations from people I know”. You should definitely check out this fantastic article by eMarketer.com.

This strategy will require risk on your part. What if the reverse happens? What if someone says something negative? Can negative comments destroy all the trust you’ve worked to build up? Yes, if you don’t have a service recovery plan in place. You need a step by step plan in place to handle any negative posts. The plan should answer the following questions:

• How fast will you respond?
• What will your message be?
• How will reassure your other online followers?

With a plan a place you can effectively handle negative posts. AND, get this….you can actually earn MORE trust by allowing an honest dialogue to take place, showing that you have a plan in place and that you take your customer’s concerns seriously. This is the mark of a trustworthy company.

But, let me quell your concerns about negative posts. I monitor a lot of “business” social media sites. I don’t see a lot of negative posts EXCEPT for the big “corporation” type companies. Why? No one wants to fire the first shot across the bow. I believe we are all thinking “If I start the negative avalanche it will eventually catch up to me!” We are afraid to say something negative about another business in fear someone else will do it to our business. Make sense? In fact, I mostly find social media pages for small businesses to be a sickening love fest of unrealistic proportions!

Start allowing your past, current and future customers to talk to each. They can sell you better than you ever will. Open up the dialogue and reap the rewards.

We practice what we preach! Please post a comment below and we invite you to disagree! And, we invite you to become a fan of the Internet Marketing Hotline on Facebook!

Need help with social media? Sign-up for Meredith’s Social Media Boot Camp, Aug. 11, 18 & 25 at the HBA of Metro Orlando.

Today I had the pleasure to speak for the Altamonte Springs Woamtec Chapter and what lovely ladies! Their energy and enthusiam was contagious. Thank you for having me!

I shared with them my ”fab five”…my five favorite FREE online tools. As a busy power mom, I use these tools on a daily basis. I believe technology should make our lives easier not harder! If a technology tool doesn’t save me time and/or money it is off the list! Enjoy my list and I hope they make your life easier as well!

Read more »

If you’re in business for yourself, I want you to stop everything you’re currently doing and follow these simple instructions.

1. Enter www.google.com (or try Bing, Yahoo, Ask…) in your address bar. Click Go.

2. In the search bar, type in some key words in your industry. How would people find you?

3. Where do you rank?

If you’re not on the first page of results, it’s time to re-evaluate your web content for keywords, metatags and possibly invest in a serious SEO program.  I don’t want to get in to anything too technical for the purpose of this blog – but I did want to cover some of the basics and why these things are critical to the success of your company. Read more »

At the rate social media sites are popping up, it’s hard to keep track of the new stuff when you’re still trying to figure out making a Facebook Fan page! So I did a little research, and came up with the top new and interesting social media places that are going to start making a big impact on the way we all work!

You don’t need to run out and sign up for every one of these, but see what you think will work the best for you, and start there. You can use this list as you become more familiar with some of these applications and continue to add them to your arsenal of business tools!

12seconds - You like video? You like Twitter? What an ingenious way to connect the speed of Twitter, with the personalization of  web video blogs. 12 Seconds is a micro-video-blogging site that limits your video to… you guessed it, 12 seconds. You can connect your 12 Seconds account to your twitter and facebook pages, so they automatically update whenever you post a video. You can even upload from your mobile phone! On a fun note – one of the cool things on 12seconds is the daily challenge Check it out! http://12seconds.tv

Read more »

Are you having trouble keeping all of those little status updates current? I mean, really – there’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace… and it never ends! By the time you update your third website, the first one is already outdated!

There have been a lot of new widgets and applications that you can add to your blog, website and other social media places that will feed directly from your twitter account – but some are still incompatible, like LinkedIn.

So what’s a gal to do? Check out ping.fm! Ping is a free service which allows users to post to multiple social sites simultaneously.

As social media grows in popularity, more of these “hybrid” sites are popping up, allowing us to pull all of our other websites together with one simple interface. Ping is one of the most inclusive sites, with the easiest level of usage and broadest range of coverage.

Read more »

If you are like me, you already have tons of phone calls and emails to keep up with. Just the thought of adding more online to-do tasks like updating LinkedIn and remembering to “tweet” routinely on Twitter is mind blowing!

Here is the good news. It gets easier. Several months ago I made a dedicated effort to be more active with social networks and here is the secret; using social media is just like any other habit you want to cultivate, make it part of your daily routine and it happens.

Read more »