However, that’s where the two components of social media marketing come into play. And without an understanding of this, you’re dead in the water as soon as you hit a Web 2.0 domain.

The vast webspace comprised of “social media” and “Web 2.0” properties are actually, from a marketing perspective, two kinds of sites and there are, as of right now, over 2000+ of them:

1. Social Media for Networking

2. Social Media for LinkBuilding

In his book, the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, Steven Covey recommends that we begin with the end in mind. That “habit” is just as salient in an off-line world as it is in the Social Media world. So, we encourage all of our clients to think about what results they want from social media marketing. Is it to brand you or your product? To bring more referral traffic? To help with search engine optimization?

Michelle goes on to say, “It’s important to have your goals prioritized too so you know exactly where you should focus your energies at any given time. Is branding (Networking) more important than SEO (Linkbuilding)? Is referral traffic (Linkbuilding) more important than branding (Networking)? ” The answers to that question will bring clarity and allow you to develop a cohesive approach to your internet marketing strategy. In addition, it will help you set an accurate online marketing budget.

So, can you do it yourself? Yes…but if you’re a small business owner you already have a full time job. You could also consider outsourcing your social media managment needs to a Social Media firm like thirdRiver.

In her blog, SearchAmelia, tommielee, had this to say about the Social Media Manager as a new job in the new economy:

“Many small and midsized business entrepreneurs, as witnessed in our workshops, do simply not have the time to learn how to build, manage and profile themselves in the Social Media circus. And a circus it is but… unfortunately not getting involved means “Not Mattering Anymore” and you WILL lose out and could face extinction because your competitors are either more internet savvy or understand the importance of engaging with customers on social media.

Just as a refresher for some and an eye opener for others, Facebook today is the third largest country (if it where a country) in population with a little under 500 million users, responsible for over 40 billion sign-ins per month and well over 500 billion human interactions. Twitter is a distant second, but is gaining momentum regarding interaction and messages send and ranks now as the 6th largest, traffic wise, website in the world while YouTube, not strictly a Social Medium, is adding 25 hours of video per minute, 24 hours a day, as people and businesses getting into high gear of personal branding.

Foursquare, Flickr (yes, even them), Google Buzz are gaining traction in the circus and with more than 220,000 iPhone apps of which a good 20% are geared towards social media, as well as the development of social Android apps, the forest is growing into a jungle where trees are becoming more difficult to uniquely identify.

What tools to chose? Which networks to follow? How much time is needed to maintain the social media status? How to push the products and services in the social marketplace? All good questions and this is where the Social Media Manager Job description and thus services come into play. The job has grown exponentially in the last several months and consequently demand and job open positions is staggering. One small Job market website alone has over 17,000 Social Media Manager job openings listed.

A very recent survey shows that 91.5% of all small and medium sized businesses are considering a Social Media Manager while 85% who already have a social media manager have seen more than abnormal growth. These are staggering numbers if one realizes that there are over 30 million small businesses in the US alone. Many small businesses share a Social Media Manager and consultancy fees totaling $10,000 per month for a manager are not abnormal. Even if one considers that only one in 50 small businesses considers a Social Media Manager to take care of their social media needs, this would mean that 600,000 companies would be in a need to hire about 200,000 Managers in the next 3-6 months.”

To read the entire article, click right here.

As a small business owner, you are well aware you cannot NOT have a presence on Social Media sites…whether they be networking or link building sites. And as we’ve already said, “have your goals prioritized so you know exactly where you should focus your energies at any given time. Is branding more important than SEO? Is referral traffic more important than branding?”

If you have any questions, shoot us an email or just pick up your iPhone, Droid or ….gasp…landline phone…. and call us…we’d love to help YOU.

Just a little over a month ago, Google announced its new search index: Caffeine. For those who have yet to do their homework on the announcement, the first thing to know about Caffeine is that it is not a rankings algorithm update; rather it is a new indexing system. According to the Google blog,

Today, we’re announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.

Some background for those of you who don’t build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you’re not searching the live web. Instead you’re searching Google’s index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need.

So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, we’ve built Caffeine. The image below illustrates how our old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine:

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

We’ve built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it’s a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come.

Why is Google Caffeine good for me?

Underline it, highlight it, draw circles around it, asterick’s, star it…whatever …here’s the thing…fresh content is more important than ever! In a world of real-time, right now, in the the moment results brought to Internet users from Facebook,  Twitter, Foursquare, et al…. Google has to pay attention to providing most up to date results, especially if they want to stay atop the two social media giants

SEOBoy has this to say about what you should do:

* Sitemaps – As Google more frequently indexes information, make sure you’re updating and resubmitting your sitemap. For en e-commerce client who regularly adds products to their site, I like to generate a map 2x a month.

* New Content – I can’t stress this point enough. The more unique, fresh, and relevant content you have on your site, the better you’re going to perform in search. Managing a website is not easy. If you want to be an authority on a topic or product, and thereby rank better, you have to prove your worth with great content. There is no such thing as setting up a site and sitting back while the rewards roll in.

* More Activity: Not only will you need to generate more content on your website, but in order to succeed in the world of Caffeine, you’ll need to be active on the real-time sites as well, which means Twitter, Facebook, etc.

This last point leads me to think that Caffeine could actually bring some huge changes to the SEM/PPC industry. If you’re already a client of the third river marketing, then you already know we’re ahead of the “Google Caffeine” curve by utilizing WordPress as a CRM platform because it allows you, as a client, to easily make quick changes to your website and add fresh, relevant content very quickly. In addition, we’ve long advocated using your website as the HUB for all your social media, which is why we rarely, if ever design a site that does not incorporate and link to a clients’ Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts.

Web 2.0 is all about being where the people are and engaging and interacting. Social Media is here to stay and just as a company as large and far reaching as Google has had to adapt their business model to it….your business needs to adapt to it as well.

If you have any questions about this or the whole idea of “Social Media Management”, feel free to reach out. We’re here and ready to help.

Sources: Official Google Blog, SE O Boy

Broadway Books, Portland Oregon

It is a story about blogs, burritos, and books, (I know – a seemingly odd threesome)  and how it saved Broadway Books, an independent bookstore in Portland.

You can read the entire article here.  It is a great read and made me want to stand up and cheer.

A couple of interesting things stood out for me in the article.

1. Turning to social media to help the business was more of a knee jerk reaction than a planned marketing campaign … therefore it was very authentic and heartfelt.  A good reminder for us who use social media for business that sometimes the best laid plans get trumped by total authenticity and passion.
2. It brought a different set of buyers into the store than they usually got.  A great illustration of how you can start connecting with entirely new audiences using social media.
3. The power of ‘going viral’.  What was posted by just one person … ended up being shared with thousands.  Who could ask for more?

While the local bookseller still has challenges ahead in this economy and social media is not necessarily a magic bullet, it looks like they are fully embracing it and it has made a real difference in their business.  Way to go Broadway!

I’d love to hear your stories of how you’re using social media in your business to attract new prospects and clients.  Just leave me a comment below.  And if you’d like to discuss your social media strategy, give us a call at 503.581.4554.  I look forward to the conversation.

~ Tim Fahndrich is the President and Chief Relationship officer with The Third River, Inc. a Salem Oregon web design and marketing firm.  He is passionate about people, technology, and relationships, and loves to help his clients harness the power of the web.

And as usually is the case, most hands went up for Linkedin … BUT, there was a lot of questions as to “what do I do with it?” There is SO Much you can do with a Linkedin profile, but I thought I’d just share two quick things with you today.

1. Be sure to fill out a complete, keyword-rich profile:

Linkedin takes the longest when setting up your profile because there is a lot to fill in. Past employment, current employment, specialties, etc. But having a complete and keyword rich profile can definitely improve the Linkedin experience and results for your business.

2. Linkedin use a multi-tier connection approach:

One thing that many people don’t know is that Linkedin has 3 tiers of connections. You have your connections of course (level 1), but it also can show you who they are connected to (level 2), and through the Linkedin search engine, also shows a 3rd level.

So let me bring both of these points into a practical, real-life example that I used this morning…

I have a friend (virtual of course – I’ve never met him in person) who was looking to help his dad move to another state. He jumped onto Linkedin and typed in the “Realtor” and the city his dad was moving to. In the search results, a Realtor on the second level of his network showed up.

Now my friend did not know this Realtor, but he was able to talk to their mutual connection and find out if he was worth his salt or not and be a good fit to help find a house for his dad. Turns out the mutual friend gave a glowing recommendation (which can also be done on Linkedin), and the Realtor was enlisted successfully to find a house for my friend’s dad. My friend was able to get a warm referral from a trusted source, and everybody was very happy.

Had the Realtor not filled out a keyword-rich profile and made connections on Linkedin … this transaction would never have happened.

If you’d like to maximize your Social/Business Networking websites and take full advantage of all they have to offer for your business, give us a call at 503.581.4554.

Also, please feel free to connect with me on Linkedin.com

• Contact you for an appointment
• Purchase a product or service
• Sign up for a class
• or [insert your desired action here]

However, the reality is that most people are not ready to “take action” immediately – particularly when it involves money or a time commitment.

That’s why it is important to offer ways to “connect” with your visitors. We all know that it takes between 7-21 contacts for a prospect to hear or see your message before they buy, right?  So why not provide a way to stay in front of them for at least 7-21 times… and turn them into an actual lead instead of just a browser.

There are a number of different ways to do this.  I’ll talk about two here;

• Set up an email newsletter and ask for their name and email address.
  • Make it very visible and easy to sign up.  Usually, the upper side of your left “sidebar” is a good place to place your form.
  • Offer an “ethical bribe” to give them added reason to sign up.  It may be a FREE special report, access to an audio recording with tips and tricks for your industry, or a discount on products and services coupon … something to get them to take action.
  • Do not try to do this in-house.  We strongly recommend using either Aweber ** or Constant Contact **.  Yes it is a monthly investment, but it is absolutely worth it.

• Provide easy access to your social media profiles, such as Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter.
  • This is one of the simplist ways of connecting with your prospects … but many people are still not doing it on their web site.
  • By inviting them to “connect” with you via social networking, it provides a less-threatening way for them to find out more about you and whether or not they want to be in your “space” … and ultimately do business with you.

When your visitors connect with you in one of these ways, they now become a lead … someone you can build a relationship with over time.

Leads are much more likely to become buyers and referral sources over time … and isn’t that what we all want for our business?

If you’d like help setting up your lead generation systems, give us a call at 503.581.4554.

(** We are an affiliate of both Aweber and Constant Contact and receive a commission if you purchase their email marketing services)

After a quick chuckle I realized that many of the terms that I use everyday in my business just don’t make sense to many of my friends who are not involved in internet marketing.

So feeling bad for excluding him, I quickly explained what #followfriday meant and how it is used on Twitter, one of the web’s most popular social networking sites.

So if you don’t know what #followfriday, hashtags, and Twitter are, here is a quick explanation;

• Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networking sites that allows you to set up a free profile and connect with other people.  People that use Twitter are often called “Twitterers” or “Tweeps” or “Tweethearts”.
• Twitter allows you to update your “what are you doing” status in 140 characters or less.  This is called a “Tweet”
• To engage other “Tweeps” in conversation, include the “@” symbol in front of their Twitter name.
• “#” is called a hashtag.  This is used when people what to associate their “Tweet” with a particular subject, event, show, etc.  This is then easily searched by going to Twitter Search and typing in the “#” + “followfriday” (example).  This is a great way to track all conversations happening around that particular topic
• “#followfriday” happens on Fridays and is used in a Tweet when one Twitterer wants to recommend that you follow another Twitter.
• Here’s an example that I used today: “If you’re not following @MichealSavoie, you should be. He is very much a servant at heart #followfriday”

If you’d like to know more about Twitter, I recommend a good starting point is a book by @JoelComm called Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time

You can also check out a recent video blog post about social networking sites and whether to connect or not.

Social networking is one of the best ways to develop relationships online for your business.  I highly recommend that you get started right away.

If you need help setting up and implementing a social networking strategy for your company, let us know and we’d be happy to talk about the options with you.