Image credit: Flickr user - lindyireland

In my previous post I wrote about local business listings and business review websites. I really believe they are, for the most part,  a cool  marketing and business networking tool. However,  my last post was about PR nightmares you can get yourself into, just by having a business listed in the wrong sites:  sites that  have a incoherent  policy concerning anonymous and fake reviews.

However, PR nightmares can  happen to anyone, anywhere on the web. Ever since the web started and people began to interact, there have been people using the perceived anonymity or virtual connections to slander and harm others. My first “social media” experience happened more than 20 years ago when I installed a 14.400 external modem on  my Mac Classic and logged into a BBS. That was also my first encounter with a “troll”.

The fact that you expose yourself and your business to this kind of problem,  doesn’t mean it is a good idea to shy away from social media. “Au contraire”; it is a very bad idea.

I would dare to say that these days, you have no choice but to get involved with social media. Not just because it is an excellent marketing tool, or because every day more and more people are searching the web for products and services, rather than relying in printed Yellow Pages and traditional advertising media, and social media is beginning to significantly  influence search behavior and search engines.

Make no mistake: no matter what kind of business you run, its size, location or wealth,  the  conversation about your company  is happening or will happen eventually, whether you are there or not.  A lot of it might be good, because you know your business and you know that you are good at what you do. But eventually someone will come along and say something bad. I know, and you know that it is impossible to please everyone. Now tell me: when that conversation happens wouldn’t you want to know what it is all about?

Social media  allows you to interact with customers, increase brand awareness, network with partners and other local businesses, but most importantly, it allows you to manage your company’s reputation in real time. If you don’t do anything else in social media to grow your business, you still need to monitor your reputation and need to know what people are talking about you. Monitoring your reputation  is crucial for success in today’s environment, and timing is fundamental.

So here are a few simple steps to help you do just that:  monitor your reputation and deal with common social media problems.

1 –  Be the best you can be.

We know you are pretty good, but how good is your staff? How is your sales team? Are they well trained, not only to sell but also to be courteous, helpful and educate the client? Is your service team organized, fast, reliable? How about the people answering the phones? How does your company handle customer complaints? These are not the times to offer anything less than excellent service. Because if your customers are not happy, they now know they can broadcast their dissatisfaction over the web, for the whole world to see.

2 – Make friends.

Negativity bias is the name given to a psychological phenomenon that causes us to lean towards a negative piece of information when presented with a choice. If we are given a given a very good and a very bad piece of information about someone we don’t know, we tend to believe the negative one. Or even if we don’t believe totally in it, we can’t really avoid the fact  that the negative information will, at some level, influence our relationship with that person.

When you combine that, with a medium in which a bad piece of information about a person or business can be broadcast to millions and in real time, we have the makes of a PR disaster.

One bad review against you, appearing in the places people go to search for you, can have a serious impact on  your business.

Since in many of these instances you can’t simply make it go away, you will have to counter it with an army of friends and fans. What is a bad review when you have a legion of people vowing for your trustworthiness?

Network on and off-line, get involved with the community, walk the extra mile to create positive relationships, nurture evangelists, harvest the power of word of mouth.

3 – Monitor, monitor, monitor.

Thanks to modern technology, you don’t need to spend your day in front of the computer monitoring your reputation everywhere. There are free tools that allow you to monitor your company, your brand, your products and even your competitors.

Make sure you sign up for email updates and review alerts in all of the services you list your business in, and by all means, check these emails often. Set aside a few hours every week to spend updating your business listings and networking in these sites.

Use Social Media monitoring tools. Two I am particularly fond of are: Social Mention and Google Alerts. They are extremely easy to set up, very thorough,  and the results are emailed to you. You determine the keywords, how deep you want them to look for them, and how often you want reports. You will have periodic accounts of every single mention of the chosen keywords. If you are a heavy Twitter user, sign up for  HootSuite and monitor streams of keywords related to your company, brand and products.

4 – Don’t say good bye to your customers.

Even if the kind of service and product you provide is something that someone would buy once in a lifetime, don’t let go of your customers just yet. Think of them not as buyers, but as business relationships and nurture these relationships to the best of your abilities. Offer them a newsletter, send them a holiday card, give them a bonus for referrals. Become a household name.

5 – Let your customers know they can review you.  Harvest testimonials.

If you provided a good quality product or service and you know your customers are happy, don’t  be afraid of asking them for a review or a testimonial. Mail or email them a feedback form. Ask them to review your business on review and business listing sites. Give them the URL of your listings.  Truly happy customers will love the chance to help you.

6 – Credibility Badges

The business associations you are involved with, give you credibility online as well. If you are a Better Business Bureau accredited business or a member of the local Chamber of Commerce, or the Local Chapter of your professional association, if you are involved with a worthy cause, if you are certified by an official regulation entity,   if you have a patent, or an award, make sure your virtual profiles and business listings include that information.  Establish yourself as someone that is an expert in what you do, a trusted source of information in your industry and actively involved in the community.

In my next post I will be discussing a few damage control techniques.We well discuss different approaches you can use, when you get a bad review or find yourself victim of an unreasonably disgruntled customer,   a troll or a malicious competitor.

Image credit: Flickr user - snappybex

Picture this:

You are a small business owner and you have this nice little storefront downtown. You provide great products and services, you have a good clientele, you are happy with the business and your customers, very satisfied.
One morning you come to work, to find that, in the middle of the night, someone sprayed some slanderous words about you and your business all over your window.

No one saw who did it, and you don’t know anyone who could be so disgruntled as to do such a thing. You have never had a complaint filed against you anywhere, never a lawsuit, never left a customer concern unresolved.

You call in the local authorities, report the problem and ask them to help you find the one responsible for that.

The authorities not only tell you they will not help you find the culprit, even though they have the means to do that, as they make no attempt to patrol the area to prevent further incidents. To make matters worse, they do not allow you to erase the words from your window. They give you only a couple of options: you can either spray paint an answer on your window, or you can have your good customers come and spray paint some good words about you. The “logic” being that enough good words will eventually cover the bad ones.

You try to answer to the complaint only to find, each morning, that the attacks are escalating. Still no idea of who is behind them. For all you know it can even be a competitor. Authorities won’t even answer your calls anymore.

As a result of this, your storefront is trashed, your reputation is in the gutter and your client base is dwindling. Your little enterprise is going down the drain.

Does it sound like the plot for a Twilight Zone episode?

Well, truth is that this sad little parable depicts the kind of nightmarish non-sense many small business are going through in some review and business listing sites.

Small businesses rely heavily on sites like these to build a local network. Don’t get me wrong: for the most part they are a wonderful, fool-proof, and cost effective way to market a small business, especially if you are not an internet marketing professional, or if you don’t have a big marketing and advertising budget.

You don’t even need to have a website. You can open an account in some of these services for free, create and broadcast ads and coupons, publish photos, videos, create and distribute newsletters, start a blog, network with local merchants and customers, capture reviews. What is not to like?

Unfortunately a few of these sites managed to run away with what would be an excellent idea, and pretty much ruined it for everyone.

This is an article about these very few bad services.  Yet,  let me stress once again that most business listing and review sites will give you some measure of control over fake and anonymous reviews. I know it for a fact. I reported bogus reviews for several clients, in different services and in the vast majority of them,  the report was immediately investigated and the bogus review was taken down.

As for the not so transparent sites, they all  make two basic mistakes, which combined can have disastrous consequences for small businesses and start-up:

1-     They allow anonymous reviews and will not reveal whatever information they have about the author. They make no effort to verify the veracity of complaints or arbitrate disputes. Basically, anyone can go to one of these sites and start to anonymously slander a company, for no particular reason. Some of these services will tell you that they have a “review filtering system” or algorythm, which supposedly filters out bogus reviews and spam.  The criteria used for these filters however, are as arbitrary as they are cryptic.  And definitely, not as efficient.

2-     They give businesses no control over these anonymous reviews, not even if the business pay for their listings. They will not, under any circumstances, allow businesses to delete them. The only option they have is to “answer” to the complaint (not resolve, because to resolve a complaint you would need to know who is complaining). In many of these sites however, the business’ answer is “threaded” under the complaint and (… you guessed…. ) not visible, unless the visitor clicks on a tiny little link to see the appended comment.

All a visitor sees on the company profile are the slanderous reviews right under the company information.

And it gets worse: some of these reviews rank along with the company name in searches and appear under the company’s profile in Google Local.

When you try to reach the site’s customer service and complain about it, you will pretty much get the same response. (That is, of course, if you ever get any). They will tell you that the reason they allow anonymous reviews is so that customers can file complaints without the fear of being bullied or sued by the companies they complain against. As if the bulk of businesses  and entrepreneurs  found in these sites were mobsters and bullies.

We all know better than that!  I work closely with many of these businesses. They are honest, hardworking people, who are trying to market their equaly honest business through these services. In this economy many are barely getting by and they don’t have millions of dollars to lawyer up and fight back. Some of them are even A Rated, accredited  Better Business Bureau members with no record of legitimate complaints filed, ever.

There are, indeed, unscrupulous businesses.  But there are also fake reviewers, cyber bullies and  trolls. There are also dishonest competitors looking for an opportunity like that to eliminate a local opponent, none of which is addressed in these websites practices and policies.

Long story short: the businesses are the only ones being damaged, even when they are spending money on the website.

And there is very little they can do about it, except chew their losses.  These websites are protected under the Communications Decency Act or “CDA”, 47 U.S.C. § 230. There is a clause in the CDC that releases social websites and public forums from any liability over user generated content, exempting them from having to patrol their users and the things they post. That means that, many times, their own Terms of Service are rendered unenforceable under this clause. They are just a bogus formality to protect the service and not their users.

Once again, these websites ran away with a good thing  and ruined it for the rest of us. The CDC was meant to protect innocent eyes and the general public from outrageously obscene content and exempt sites that host user generated content from any liability over user posted content. Fair enough. How does that translate in letting anonymous reviewers trash a company’s virtual storefront with bogus complaints, beats me.

These listings, (which many businesses pay for, by the way,) are many times a business’ only virtual storefront. The sites offering the service only have  users and traffic , because business are listed in them for review. As much as these businesses understand that complaints are part of doing business, it is only fair to give  owners a chance to resolve them or, if not possible, because the review was posted anonymously, allow them to delete them from their virtual store front. Specially if the website is not willing to help arbitrate such claims.

In my experience, customers that have a legitimate complaint will seek resolution, not file anonymous slanderous complaints. They will give enough information in their complaints to let the business owner know who they are and the nature of the claim because they seek reparation, not revenge. Anonymous, generic and slanderous complaints are mostly bogus.

As for the business owners reading this, a few words of advice:

1- Do not shy away from business listings and review services thinking you will protect yourself. These sites will  sometimes scout the web, Yellow pages and Google Local for business listings and list you whether you chose to be there or not. Some sites allow anyone to list any site to write a review. So not being in them is not an option in most cases. In addition, the vast majority of these services is fair, reliable and have coherent policies. Only a handful of them are problem.

2 – Before you claim listings you find in these sites and before you give any of them your hard earned money for “premium memberships” and the like, do your homework. Go to their forums and take a look on their policy concerning user reviews. If you see businesses complaining about the inability to remove or report bogus reviews, beware. Do not pay for premium membership and most of all, do not promote your listing in these sites, (as they will ask you to do, by putting badges and widgets in your website, Facebook, etc.).

3 – Look for the good guys. There are many of them to be explored. List your business on them, promote your listings there, instead. Stop pumping juice into these dubious sites and, hopefully, search engines will catch up and make things right soon enough.

4 – If you already have listings on these sites, monitor them closely, and act quickly at the first sign of trouble.

5 – If you are already a victim of slanderous bogus reviews and feel that they are damaging or might damage your business in the future, don’t panic. Your best bet is to consult an online reputation management specialist right away.

However, as I understand,  many of you have no means to do so.

In my next post I will be discussing simple online reputation repair measures that will, in most cases, if not eliminate, at least minimize the impact of bogus, slanderous reviews on your business.

Organic searches are still the main generator of traffic for most sites and in most cases the main  lead generation tool.  However this recent study by Comscore indicates an interesting trend towards and increasing weight of user generated content in customer’s purchase decisions. People now have tools to easily check a company’s trustworthiness or a product’s reliability using social media and polling other users.

In other words, typical search engine results are no longer the final word when it comes to selecting a service providers  or products. Sensitive to that, search engines algorithms are leaving their purely mathematical comfort zone and paying more attention to what is going on in Social Media, trying to make sense of all the buzz and computing social media mentions and references when trying to sort a broad range of results, to better serve the new audiences.

However, as I see it, they still have a long way to go because – lets face it – in many levels (specially at local and hyper local levels, and in the “not-so-glamorous” industries, which are the subject of this blog) search engines still reward sleazy tactics like keyword stuffing and spam, rather than content and relevance. I notice that in niches where there is no “big kahuna” setting the standards, it is still quite possible to manipulate rankings with *ahem*”black-hat hocus pocus”. There I said it!

If there is no “good guys” to set the standard, so that the  algorithm knows what good content looks like,  the “not so good” guys end up getting away with a lot of things.

Search engine are indeed becoming more intelligent, and as we speak, I know of a lot of SEO guys out there that are cringing and bracing for impact, as Google’s Caffeine is reportedly being implemented.

Now, in industries in which search engines became the main lead generation tool, ethical SEOs are faced with a huge ethical and technical challenge: doing the “right” thing, or working by the SEO book can literally mean causing a website to lose  a lot of business to an unethical, spammy competitor.

Now, if you are a SEO consultant for a small local business,  try to explain to your client that you are just doing the right thing while he sees  his competitor’s awful website rank way above his own and is booming while his business in struggling to make enough for the payroll.

Chances are he is either going to fire you and hire someone else, or…. ask you to do whatever it is that his competitor is doing. Not a lot of business have the fuel to keep running for long  in this economy, when they can’t get any leads because their SEO consultant is taking the  higher ground, doing the things by the book and waiting for the search engines to catch up. For many many small business that is just not an option.

For the SEO Internet Lead Generation professional it is a  gamble with tricky odds. They go by the book and lose rank to a spammy competitor,  the client lose leads, the SEO gets fired. They use some gray or black hat techniques to help the client, they risk having the site penalized,and if that happens the client is mad, the SEO gets fired.

Is there a way out of this conumdrum for small business? I’ve been debating that for a long time. In my opinion there are two ways out of it, or rather one way that combines two main approaches.

1- Networking. And by networking I mean not only via Social Media. But actual, effective business networking. Mouse work combined with leg work.

2- Thorough off site SEO/Social Media effort, with local focus,  heavy enphasis on relevant link building, article marketing, content syndication and viral marketing strategies.

In  my future posts I will be elaborating on these two approaches.

This post is translated (poorly and with a few impertinent edits) from a great post I read at a friend’s blog. (Thanks for allowing me to translate it, Han!)
Han Badalamenti, the guy who wrote this, is not a Social Media marketer. He is a Social Media user. He is one among the millions of social media savvy users you are trying to market to, one of the guys who you are planning to target with your Social Media strategy. He is writing to other users but what he says applies to Social Media Marketing as well
He, like many others in this environment,  knows what he wants and he knows that, when it comes to Social Media, he has a choice. He can pick who he wants to listen to. He knows what every Social Media user knows and so many Social Media Marketers seem to ignore.
Let’s hear what he has to say, shall we?

5 Reasons Why I DON’T Follow you on Twitter
This is a text for you that logs on to Twitter everyday only to see that the number of people following you is dwindling. If you are asking yourself: “what did I do wrong”, here are your answers.
My friend, here are the 5 mains reasons why the idea of following you on Twitter gives me the creeps:

1 – You post too much
It is extremely irritating to log on to Twitter and find the same name repeated 80 times in my timeline, with only a few posts from all the other people I follow sprinkled here and there.

I am sorry if it hurts your ego but I do not use Twitter with the sole purpose of reading what you post. When my timeline begins to look like you personal page, something is very wrong.It gets even worse if the above is combined with the following item on this list:

2 -You don’t say anything relevant

I know, nobody has an exciting life all the time. I am also well aware that the core of the Twitter concept is to use the tool to mainly answer to a single question: “What are you doing?”

However you, my friend, are taking this way too seriously. No one needs a detailed log of each and every one of your mundane and uninteresting daily activities. I don’t particularly care to know exactly when you are at work or at home. Out to lunch? I don’t care. Back from lunch? Please post something useful like “You’ve got to try this X dish from Y restaurant. It is delicious!” Spare me from twits like “bologna sandwich with diet coke… yum”.

Furthermore, twitting about all your social activities (snip) is a pain in the neck. Also, I do not need to know that all your friends are on Twitter with posts that have more @names than content. Ok I get it, you are popular and you have a life and I am probably jealous because I’d love to be like you. Now a quick reality check: nobody can be cool and a show-off at the same time.

Here’s a simple idea. Before clicking that “update” button, ask yourself this simple question: Do this tweet have any potential whatsoever to become a relevant piece of information, or even a source of amusement for any of your followers? Will it make them think? Laugh? Enjoy? Like it for any reason? Is it at least an honest attempt to accomplish that rather than a narcissistic tweet? If the answer is “no” or “I don’t know”, don’t click that button.

3) You pollute my timeline with replies

Picture the following: You are at a party, sitting at the dinner table surrounded by several people. In such a social situation you will often switch between talking to everyone in the table to addressing a single person or small group around you. When you are talking to everyone at the table, they will naturally expect that you talk about subjects that interest everyone or in which everyone can participate. If all you have to say is “Hey Diane, we need to get our nails done, How about Thursday?” you are better off talking to Diane alone without disrupting the conversation and getting everyone’s attention to address a single person. Get the idea?

Twitter is like the world’s biggest and most crowded and most flexible dinner table. One in which everyone can talk at the same time and still be heard. However, in an environment where the laws of physic do not apply, good manners and common sense become even more important.

The Reply feature is great when it comes to commenting or answering to a specific Tweet, Replies have the added bonus of appearing only in the timelines of the people who follows the person being addressed in the reply. And that is why you should not abuse the feature to chat with someone you know. Direct messages should be used or personal matters and conversations. Did you ever give them a try?

“Yeah, but then I can only talk to people who follows me”, you might say. Well, you can use email and Instant Messengers as an alternative. I mean… think about it. Somehow people use to hold entire conversations before Twitter. Heck! People used to have conversations even before the existence of the Internet! Can you believe that?

4) You flood …….. my timeline …….with …… incomplete …….. posts.
Make no mistake: the simpler the tool, the higher the number of people misusing it.
Instant messengers give you about 400 characters to say something.
However
Most people
Talk to you
Like this.
Using
Several
Separated messages
Until the sound
Of the “new message” alert
Drives you insane.
(It is more or less like that, only the content is usually grossly misspelled and so filled with intrusive emoticons the message becomes unreadable)
In Twitter however, the character limit is 140, and all of a sudden everyone needs to write long posts. Go figure.
Everyone was guilty of that at some point. It happens. But if you fo it often, it is time to publish a blog or start using Woofer instead.

5) Your overuse of meaningless hashtags.

Hashtags are stupid #thereisaidit
Their usefulness is questionable. You don’t need the “#” to transform an expression into a trendy topic – which also has questionable usefulness. Most of the time we only use it for fun, ending a post with a sarcastic hashtag like #ohreally, #rocketscience , etc…

It is quite funny when used with moderation. Obviously that is not the case nowadays. People hashtag random terms with no real purpose or ends every post with a “funny” hashtag .
If you are caught within the follow/unfollow Twitter dynamics and still following some obnoxious users just because they are your friends, send this to them. They might get a clue.

(My personal take on hashtags: Hashtags are highly valuable to organize content in Twitter and organize some people around the same subject.

For example:
During our annual convention, we used a hashtag to send updates via Twitter, to employees and customers of over 300 dealers worldwide. We had all the tree house team posting updates live and whoever wanted to know what was going on in the several events and seminars, only had to search for the hashtagged term.)

No, SMM is not a part of  SEO either, and calling it SMO (Social Media Optimization) doesn’t make it any different. A top-notch SEO expert is not necessarily a Social Media Wiz, and vice-versa. They are different specialties with a different focus.

Allow me a “girlie ” analogy to better illustrate my point:

A hair dresser and a pedicure specialist work in the same field, yet we would be better off not trusting the first with our toes and the second with our “dos” just because they work in the same salon.

What happens in Internet Marketing is about the same that happens in the beauty parlor: different professionals with different skills collaborate towards a great result.

Social Media can eventually, and often does, contribute to better search engine rankings. You are building links, you are spreading the word, you are generating buzz and eventually people will respond giving you more links, more buzz and more attention. You are using keywords quite often; you are publishing company related content in relevant places. Combine all that off-site work with excellent SEO and your rankings will most likely improve.

Sometimes, so much, people tend to call Social Media Marketing “off-site SEO”. Another HUGE mistake, if you ask me. The focus of a good Social Media professional is totally different of that of a SEO professional.

Let me point just a few of the differences:

• A SEO professional thinks “rankings”, that is their focus. Their job is to come up with ways that will make your website appear in a good position in search engine results, every time someone punches in a query related to the website he is working on. A SEO professional is a person that has unparalleled knowledge about search engine algorithms, as well as website coding and organization, able to make the crawlers read, understand and index the site.
• A Social Media Marketer, although mindful of SEO concepts, has a different focus: people. Not bots, not crawlers, not algorithms. A Social Media Marketer’s job is to get people to find your site, love, visit, mention and link to it. We are evangelists for the companies we represent and our mission is to make people happy about these companies.
  Our goal is not better rankings or even better traffic, although, as I said earlier, that is often a result of well applied social media efforts. Our goal is to spread the word,  improve a company’s reach, reputation and conversion rates through online branding and reputation management strategies.

Good SEO and SMM professionals can clearly see and respect these differences and the boundaries, and will often collaborate. Sadly that is hardly the norm, and because the people who buys these services doesn’t usually have a good grasp on this matter either, we often have one type of professional trying to sell both services or, while being very good at one specialty, passing and selling him/herself as the other.

The result is disastrous: SMM consultants that can’t get the site to rank and SEO specialists spamming the web with keyword stuffed (and usually quite poor) content and using popular SM platforms to publish an obnoxious amount of promotional links and sales pitches, to artificially inflate  inbound link count, but adding no relevancy whatsoever.

And I am not even touching the spam bots in this post because it would be like kicking a dead dog.

I am fortunate enough to work in a place that has very good SEO pros and I learned a lot with them. They never cease to amaze me. We often exchange ideas and collaborate and so far we’ve been getting great results for the clients. (Well, we get paid for performance, so we better know what we are doing… *laughs*)

I had to write this post as I know many small businesses are in the process of buying such services, and it is a good idea to verify exactly what kind of specialty is being offered, which services and how much your provider really knows about it. But I can tell you this, concerning Social Media: be very suspicious of any provider who promises huge numbers, and fast results. You know the drill, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Small businesses asking me if they should open Social Media profiles in their names or the company’s.

Here’s my take on this: in most cases, people buy from people. Social Media is about people,  so Social Media Marketing should be too.

The Social Media crowd is not very fond of companies without a “face” and “faces” without a little bit of humanity. Understandably so. Spammers are out there creating mass profiles and flooding social gathering sites like Twitter with sales pitches, phishing scams, phony links, mass “follow” apps, and spam bots and taking the fun out of Social Media just like they almost ruined email, before email clients developed smarter filters.

Social Media platforms are coming up with good filters too, but ultimately the users are the ones calling the shots and manually deciding who they want to listen to. That is the beauty of Social Media.

The huge problem with many  marketers is that they have a hard time understanding that marketing in this environment is  a 100% opt-in. Meaning, they will only listen to you if they so chose. They have the power to block you completely of they don’t like what you have to say and, to make matters a tad more complicated, it is no longer a one-sided deal. You talk to them, you can bet they will talk back to you… and about you!

You say “look at me”, and they say “why should we?” and you better have a very good answer to that.

That said, it is easy to understand why people are more open to other people than they are to business profiles in Social Media sites. A business is an “entity” trying to sell them something. A solicitor. Someone who is only there to make a buck. A professional, on the other hand, is a human being, tied to a business.

However, it will all definitely boil down to how you conduct yourself out there. Having a personal profile and acting like an obnoxious spam bot, talking only about your company, product, service and website will lead you nowhere.

So my answer is: open personal profiles and act like a human being. Talk about you business but also about things that interest you and your audience. If you want to list the business only, look for Business Directories and Local Search Sites like Merchant Circle and Insider pages, which also have business related Social Media features.

Open a Facebook Fan page for your business and a Company Group on LinkedIn and brag all you want about your business there.

You are thinking maybe of something you can do and administer yourself in your spare time, or have your secretary or someone in marketing do, just so you will not be completely absent. Is it possible?

Well, in my experience,  yes and no.  Of course it is better to be out there somehow,  than not  at all.

However, success in Social Media is directly proportional to the amount of effort you put into it. Except in the rare cases when some content suddenly goes viral, the ones who succeed in Social Media marketing spend a great deal or time (and money) doing it.

So is there hope for you? To some extent there is. You can pick and stick with one or two of the suggestions I am listing below and follow through. It is actually better if you focus on one or two than if you try to spread your campaign and is unable to keep it up.

Keep in mind that the very essence of Social Media is content. It is all about creating and sharing content, then talking about it, generating discussions, buzz. Social Media is a gigantic cocktail party. You better not start a conversation if you have nothing to talk about, or no time to properly address your audience and peers.

That said, here are my picks for this particular moment in time:  (Social Media changes quickly. Places that are hot now, are bound to be abandoned as soon as something better happens.)

• Facebook profiles for owners and/or marketing/PR/customer service employee, and a Facebook fan page for the company (This is very important: profiles are for people, fan pages are for entities and companies. Facebook users frown upon user profiles with pure company information on them). For more on using Facebook for Business, reffer to this pretty cool webinar from Hubspot
• LinkedIn profile for all the key employees, LinkedIn business profile,  and a LinkedIn company group
• Twitter accounts for interested employees and company.
• An in-site blog or news page with a consistent flow of new content to be promoted on the above media (otherwise you will run out of stuff to talk about defeating the purpose of being involved in it)
• Optimized and consistently updated  profiles on Merchant Circle and Insider Pages.
• Listings on Yahoo Local and Google Local
• YouTube account.

Please stay tuned as my next posts will walk you through each one of these platforms and help you get the most out them.

• Meet and network with new people in your area
• Form groups of peers with similar interests
  Whether it is you favorite band, sports team or old TV series there are literally thousands of people out there who share the same passion and interest, willing to connect with someone like you. Interest groups are a great way to get started in Social Media, as you will immediately connect with like-minded people of all walks of life.

• Share ideas, news, knowledge
  You can surf the web compulsively, subscribe to every relevant newspaper and magazine, and have CNN on all day long and you still won’t have access to nearly as much relevant content as you will if you build connections in social media. It is like having a gazillion eyes out there, scouting the web for you. Your web friends will dig out and share things you might have a hard time finding on your own. They will also share their personal views and expertise on a number of subjects.
• Filter content according to your own interests.
  Social media tools allow you to filter out anything that you find irrelevant, and allow you to follow exclusively the sources you trust and enjoy getting information from.
• Have fun
  Did I mention social media is fun? Just like in real life social gatherings, social media is all about who you know and who you chose to surround yourself with. Connect with the right people and you will have yourself a really good time.

There is however, a huge business potential within Social Media that is fortunately still untapped by many of your competitors and horribly misused by others. Because people think always of Internet Marketing in terms of immediate  returns, cheap advertising and  measurable profits,   Social Media Marketing is largely abused. The former heralds of the hedious “email blaster campaign” concept, which are now left to drift in a sea of increasingly smarter email spam filters, are resorting to social media platforms and bringing with them the same irritating mentalityand the old formula of quick and cheap “volume advertising”. However I t ruly believe that, those who tale the time to explore Social Media properly now, will put themselves light-years ahead of the competition. So what is in it for you?

• Network with other businesses
  It is the new world order. Small is the new big. Hyper-local is true expansion. Listening is as important as talking. Connecting is more important than advertising. Network with business in your area, create referral rings, group discounts, group sponsored area events, generate cross-advertising and cooperative advertising opportunities.
• Communicate with potential customer
  How many people are there in your market not giving you a call right now simply because they either don’t know that they have a problem, a wish, or a need you can solve and fulfill,  or have no idea that the very thing  they need and want  can be provided by you? Social Media allows you to talk to these potential customers, answer their questions and address their concerns.
• Educate the public to broaden your market share
  Turn your company and brand into the household name for whatever it is that you do. Social Media gives you many simple and affordable opportunities to educate a huge number of prospective customers. Imagine a world in which your brand becomes the synonym of your product or service.
• Establish yourself as the local authority
  You are the authority in what you do. Second to none. You are it. Get into social media and let the locals know it!
• Monitor your own reputation over the web.
  Unfortunately not everything is that easy in social media. The same freedom you and your satisfied customers have to communicate, the disgruntled employees, not so pleased customers and dirty competitors have too. Eventually someone will badmouth you, whether you use the web or not. Now wouldn’t you like to know when that happens and wouldn’t you like to be alerted so that you can take action and resolve the issue? Reputation is gold these days. You need to monitor yours.
• Build inbound links to your website
  For the search engine algorithms, one of the main indications of a website’s trustworthiness is the numbers of links on other websites pointing to it. In other words, the more people they see linking spontaneously to your website, the more likely your site will be deemed relevant and rank better. Social media is a great way to sow some link love.
• Ability to generate leads independently of search engine rankings.
  Let’s say your competitor hired a good SEO company and managed to get a better rank in searches than you. (Recent studies show a significant increase on the number of people who shop for local products and services over the Internet and as your competitors begin to see the Internet as a good source of leads, that is bound to happen.). Why should you be held hostage of search engines when it comes to lead generation? Social Media allow you to directly generate leads, as it allows you to seek your customers wherever they are and bring them to you.

On my next posts, I will be discussing every popular platform and show you how to explore their potential. I will teach you how to look for opportunities in your local area, how to establish, maintain and monitor your web reputation, how to utilize your keywords and your site’s description to make the best of your social media efforts, how to develop viral content and strategies and more importantly, all the dos and don’ts of Social Media.

Please feel free to use the comments session of this site to ask questions.