All three platforms are also developing new and innovative ways to target advertising messages, based on the overwhelming amount of data they possess about their users. Marketers should explore the paid opportunities social networks offer with as much thought and effort as they experiment with the “earned” and “owned” aspects that these networks provide.

Depending on your business objective, one platform will likely prove more useful than others. In this article, I will explore the functionality each provides and how you can integrate the paid activity for maximum impact and return.

Facebook Ads

Facebook’s advertising platform is by far the most developed and widely used of the three major social networks. Offering a self-serve platform very similar to the early Google AdWords interface, Facebook advertising is available to even the smallest businesses with the most limited budgets.

Examples of Facebook ads.

Because the platform is still developing and underutilized, prices remain low for clicks and impressions when compared with more mature channels like Google AdWords and online display advertising.

Facebook allows users to target messages by a host of different criteria, which are determined from users’ profile information. Whether you want to reach 24- to 35-year-old women or 55- to 65-year-old men, people who like gardening or people who like jazz music, Facebook can deliver that demographic due to its scale and targeting capability.

Because much of the data Facebook has is of a demographic and interest level, Facebook advertising is very effective at B2C targeting. It also offers geographic targeting, which works well for metro areas and cities, but is somewhat lacking if you want to target rural areas specifically. Facebook advertising is relatively ineffective for B2B advertising, because the information it bases its targeting on is largely of a personal nature.

Facebook also allows users to run ads to attract “Likes” on their pages, which can help you grow your community on Facebook into a business asset. Paying for Likes can help your “owned” messages on Facebook reach a wider audience, and can be a prudent investment if managed closely. Before running Facebook ads to acquire Likes, however, it is very prudent to think through in rough terms the value you think you can obtain from having that line of contact with individuals.

Connect with real people with a real interest in your products.

LinkedIn Ads

On the other hand, LinkedIn advertising is tremendously effective for B2B industries because of the professional information LinkedIn uses to target its advertisements, which are called “LinkedInAds”

Examples of LinkedIn advertising.

LinkedIn allows you to deliver advertising only to people with certain qualifications or titles, such as VP of operations or director of marketing. This makes the advertising spending very efficient, and fast movers can also take advantage of the current low prices on the platform.

When setting up your LinkedIn campaign, also make sure to see if there are any relevant groups that you could use for your targeting. LinkedIn Groups draw users back for longer sessions, and this can be a great way to reach targeted individuals while they are considering business issues and topics in the group setting.

LinkedIn Ads are quickly growing in popularity, so be wary of quick spikes in the cost of advertising if you choose to establish a campaign through this network.

Reach your exact audience with LinkedIn Ads.

Twitter Ads

Currently the most underdeveloped advertising platform, Twitter only offers advertising to large brands at this time, in the form of “Sponsored Tweets” or “Promoted Trends.”

Advertisers pay per impression to have their tweet show up at the top of feeds when certain hashtags are used or for certain search terms on Twitter’s search engine.

Promoted Trends give users something new and exciting to discover

An advertising platform that connects advertisers with tweeters.

As a result, Twitter advertising is neither practical nor attainable for most marketers and businesses today. To warrant the valuations it has received, however, Twitter will almost certainly begin to offer an advertising product to smaller customers as it focuses on its monetization efforts.

Due to the real-time nature of much of the communication on Twitter, it holds tremendous promise for marketers, if the eventual mass-market advertising application can effectively harness this power to make ads more relevant and timely. Twitter’s value to smaller advertisers and marketers remains on the “earned” and “owned” side of the equation for the time being.

Example of Twitter advertising.

Overall

Marketers should think about their target customer base and begin experimenting with social media advertising to reach them at a lower cost. Each platform offers specific features and benefits that will be more relevant to some businesses than others. I suggest a “test and invest” approach in these new channels to determine what works before spending large sums.

What has been your experience with social media advertising? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Social media allows you to match data generated by social interactions with individual’s preferences and general interests. This creates useful profiles that give marketers insight into how to tailor future offers and products to their customer base.

In this article I’ll show you five ways to use the data generated by your social network profiles—and those of your competitors—to expand your reach and sales.

#1: Listening Data

Nearly every social media plan tells you to begin by “listening,” but what are you listening for? Monitoring news related to your local business environment and industry can give you a sense of the conversation around your products or services, but social listening allows you to expand this information and make it more relevant.

Specifically, you can gather data about the reactions to your products and campaigns as measured by interactions with messages on Facebook, retweets, mentions on Twitter and comments on your blog.

Measuring the volume, sentiment and relevance of these interactions—and tracking this data over time—will allow you to determine how new products, services and/or offers are received by your customers.

Here’s a view inside Gatorade’s mission control, where the brand reviews insights from social data to drive marketing improvements.

Tools like Google Alerts and HootSuite allow you to monitor basic volume of interactions. If the volume grows to the point where manual tracking is not feasible, there are a few paid products like Radian 6, Meltwater Buzz and Scout Labs that allow you to track data in a more automated fashion.

Some large-scale examples of using listening data for product development and service improvement include Dell’s new Social Media Listening Command Center and Gatorade’s Mission Control. How can you model your listening campaign on these examples?

#2: Benchmarking Data

In the past, it was difficult or even impossible for business owners to know how their efforts and branding stacked up against their competition, aside from observing the general performance of the competitors’ businesses and anecdotal information. Social media data allows you to understand your performance relative to your competitors, because so much of it is publicly accessible.

Once you gather the listening data based on your own company profiles, compare it to that of your competitors to gain perspective on your performance.

Observe the size of your communities relative to your competitors. Also, analyze the relative activity of those communities. Do your fans and followers post more or less frequently than your competitors?

Additionally, you can dig in to see who is following your competition and your own profiles, and compare to see who has more relevant community members for your industry.

Note the relative level of effort required to gain the number of interactions your competitors are driving. If you’re receiving either more or fewer interactions than your competitor, but posting with the same frequency, note the differences in your content and what is driving the disparity in results.

Be sure to account for competitors in each social channel on which you are active, and if possible, benchmark yourself against competitors that are active across multiple channels.

#3: Strategic Forecasting Data

RapLeaf, a social data company, provides insights on customer trends.

While market research groups provided one channel for companies to learn about the interests and perceptions of a few customers, companies like RapLeaf allow you to identify your customer base by revealing key insights and trends about what social networks your customers use, other popular websites for customers, relative location trends and relative demographic trends.

The use of social data allows you to hone your financial performance projections and product development, especially if you produce specific promotions for each social network, and can track revenue and profit from the activities on individual channels. Knowing this kind of information about your consumer base allows for more accurate targeting and the power to personalize campaigns.

#4: Real-time Tracking Data

Traditional advertising channels like radio, television and print were able to provide estimates of effectiveness through quantifying radio ratings, television viewership or magazine sales; however, these ads were effectively impossible to track with any real certainty. Social data allows marketers to view relevant and real-time trends including how campaigns are performing at given time and how alterations to campaigns affect results.

Tools like HootSuite provide real-time tracking of social data to drive business decisions.

Not only do these tracking mechanisms allow businesses to see how a campaign is performing, they allow them to view consumer data at a granular level, identify positive or negative trends and make instant modifications.

This ability, combined with the real-time tracing of consumer sentiment, can mitigate wasteful spending or funding for a campaign that isn’t working as planned.

#5: Reflection and Insight

No matter the level of preparedness a company has in listening, gauging relevance, forecasting and implementing, there’s still a degree of uncertainty in social media. The advantage of robust data tracking services is that you never find yourself guessing why something worked or what caused it not to work. Here is a great post on how to analyze Twitter performance, for instance.

Consumer feedback is usually statistically significant, mostly unsolicited and readily available for companies looking to reformulate their efforts. By understanding a campaign through the targets’ points of view and gaining the ability to quantify their evaluation process, social data can be an invaluable tool for marketers.

How will you use social data in 2011 to grow your business? Is there a particular suggestion that you’ve already implemented and can discuss? We’d love to hear what’s working for your business, so leave your comments in the box below.

In addition to the main local social networking applications—Foursquare and Gowalla—Google, Facebook and Twitter have added geolocation features to their services to tap into this trend.

As users provide more information about their location, serious privacy implications are beginning to surface. For instance, a Webroot study released in July 2010 found that more than half of survey respondents who used geolocation services were worried their privacy was at risk.

Privacy Problems

The first wave of criticism about the privacy implications of geolocation social networks followed the launch in February 2010 of Please Rob Me, which combined people’s physical location through geolocation services with data about their residence from other public data.

When people were “checked in” at other places, unscrupulous individuals could find out and take advantage through Please Rob Me, though the site’s founders said they were only trying to demonstrate the problems posed by sharing geolocation data.

In March 2010, the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a lawsuit with the FTC alleging that Google violated people’s privacy by making geolocation data available to the general public in its Google Buzz product.

The geolocation privacy backlash continued with the launch of Facebook Places, which enabled users who had recently checked into a place to see all other users who had been there through the “Here Now” feature.

This launch prompted the American Civil Liberties Union to put out a data sheet on how people could protect their online privacy and voice concerns about the practice of listing physical locations through geolocation services.

Social Networks React

An example of a Facebook Place

To assure users that participating in geolocation social networking was safe and controllable, social networks began to provide additional privacy controls. This was likely in response to the concern and potential litigation regarding privacy and by the spate of violence through Craigslist connections.

Twitter users can select whether to include their whereabouts for each message. Privacy advocates were never as keen to target it for criticism, though many of the same negatives exist for sharing location data in this way. Twitter also lets you delete your entire geolocation history, which makes users feel more comfortable with the choice to display location data.

In response to the privacy backlash, Google made the option to make contacts private more prominent. It also allowed users to block Buzz followers directly from profile pages.

Facebook addressed privacy generally after several separate privacy issues
arose over information-sharing settings, but has yet to make public statements about the implications of Facebook Places on privacy.

Potential Solutions

Face2Face is a geolocation social networking service that restricts location data to user-specified friends.

Startup geolocation companies are popping up to serve the supposed market need for a service with the best of both worlds. Once such company, face2face, markets itself as “a discreet way to let your friends know when you’re nearby.” It restricts geolocation data to specific friends set by the user, giving more control over the privacy question back to the end consumer.

Another way to protect against negative uses of geolocation data is to take precautions to avoid tying your current physical location to your home address. Jason Falls gave this sound advice in a column he did on safety tips for Gowalla and Foursquare.

In the Webroot study mentioned above, many users of social networks—geolocation social networks in particular—did not follow best practices to keep interactions on these networks safe. For example, 31% of survey respondents accepted friend requests from strangers. These types of shocking data points show that people are probably not treating online interactions with enough caution, especially those with a geolocation component.

Geolocation social networks do raise some privacy concerns worth noting, but prudent use of each service, including understanding how to properly establish privacy settings, clears up much of the concern. As long as you’re smart about it, geolocated interactions will stay as harmless as other online social interactions.

Location-based Social Network Users: What are ways you protect your privacy while enjoying these services? Have you ever had an issue with privacy on any of these services? Leave your comments in the box below.

While major social networks offer tremendous reach and millions of users, sometimes that scope can actually be distracting for certain interest groups that have a more narrow focus. BuddyPress is a great solution for groups that want to set up their own social network to concentrate interactions around a shared cause.

BuddyPress allows users the opportunity to create a social network with specific membership and publishing rules. These features make the BuddyPress platform useful for all sorts of organizations and groups.

On a technical level, BuddyPress is a set of features combined into a plugin that turns any WordPress blog into a private social network, or “Social networking in a box,” as the tagline goes. BuddyPress allows the same user-friendly publishing and drag-and-drop functionality that WordPress users know well.

BuddyPress, like WordPress, is free to download and install, and it boasts a robust community of developers who add features to the offering on a regular basis. The site also has an in-depth “codex” that contains documentation for how to install the plugin and extend it.

#1: Potential Uses

Companies can struggle to share information about projects and campaigns effectively through emails and intranets. A BuddyPress blog can allow effective commentary on company information, and you can password-protect the data so it’s only accessible to team members. The ability to protect data while also allowing social features like threaded posts, comments, and status updates provides the collaborative power of social networks along with the protection of a private network.

Other private network options like Ning and Dolphin are more expensive than the hosting costs associated with BuddyPress. Just be sure to have adequate security on your BuddyPress installation just as you would on your WordPress blog to avoid any data breaches.

CUNY demonstrates how BuddyPress can be used to foster professional communication, using groups and individual blogs to share ideas and organize activity.

#2: Group Collaboration

Often when sharing information about an event or coordinating activities, crucial details can either get lost in emails, or only shared with a portion of the group. BuddyPress allows the group to dedicate a space for information about an event or mission, which can be useful for collaboration, especially if all team members aren’t in the same location or have busy schedules. The ability to put certain information behind administrative access can be really useful for events where it’s necessary for leadership and participants to see different information.

#3: Collecting Topical Information of Interest

Icon from the TastyKitchen BuddyPress community inviting people to join the network

As Tasty Kitchen demonstrates, BuddyPress is a great way to add social functionality to a shared set of interests. Instead of creating yet another food blog and making users interact only through comments and external sharing of the content on social networks, Tasty Kitchen has used WordPress to make its own social network around the main content repository.

• Users submit recipes that the community can then review and comment on.
• Users can also build profiles where they list their favorite recipes and information about their cooking style.

You can use BuddyPress to establish a similar community around a topic of your interest.

Potential Drawbacks to BuddyPress

• Cost of Installation – While BuddyPress is free to download, you’ll need to host the program yourself. Hosting costs are very minimal but it is an expense to consider compared to creating a group on a public social network such as Facebook.

• Gaining Reach – Facebook and Twitter have millions of users, so gaining a following for your community is easier through viral sharing and promotion. To publicize your BuddyPress community, you’ll need to integrate with these networks and others to push traffic to it. Consider if that effort might yield more results if the traffic was staying on the public networks before beginning a BuddyPress community.

• Privacy – While the features of BuddyPress are useful and plentiful, many companies will have reservations about using BuddyPress due to concerns over sharing confidential information. Some of these concerns can be offset by paying for stronger security from the hosting provider, but that increases the cost of the installation.

Overall, BuddyPress is very feature-rich and worth a shot if you’ve got collaboration needs or an interest that hasn’t been well-served by the public social networks. Though there are drawbacks to using BuddyPress, in sum, it’s a very useful, inexpensive solution that can provide some clear benefits to your organization.

Have you tried BuddyPress? What are the positives or drawbacks? Let us know your comments in the box below.

As online publishing platforms and social networks have exploded in popularity, there is a new need to aggregate and search the dynamic “real-time” web.

New platforms hold much promise for marketers who want to understand trends and customer problems in real time. In this article I review three of the top real-time search engines (in no particular order), and each has a unique profile that fits certain use cases particularly well.

#1: OneRiot

OneRiot is the largest real-time web search engine today. It aggregates information about popular topics from Twitter and other social media sites.

OneRiot consolidates all these articles into one headline that you can click that leads you to a list of articles associated with a topic. This is a great way to see multiple articles on one topic all at once and in real time.

Instead of having to search different news sites looking for a hot topic, users can access OneRiot’s aggregated real-time information on the topic. Also, OneRiot does a good job of blending hot topics from different spheres. It has a balanced mix of entertainment news and hard news, but seems to concentrate more on entertainment news.

OneRiot has a bar on the right side of the page that breaks common topics into categories. If you’re looking for the latest news on trends or culture, politics or technology, you can easily find it.

Though OneRiot focuses on news organization sources and provides more reliable information, it lacks the personal touch from integrating commentary from individuals into the feed. This eliminates how the public is reacting to the news. OneRiot is great for lists of news articles related to the topic, but it’s important to get the public’s take on these articles as well.

The best way to use OneRiot for online marketing would be to use its search results about important topics. You could give your audience up-to-date information aggregated from multiple social networks. For instance, if you sell cars, linking to the OneRiot results page with the latest information about models you sell could be a great way to display feedback for people who own your cars.

By going to OneRiot, you can quickly see what the most frequently posted information is at the moment. Overall, OneRiot has the potential to be a great source for generating organic leads.

OneRiot’s real-time results display information about the first person to tweet a story, up-to-date news coverage and social media commentary on those news items.

#2: Collecta

Collecta has more of a mainstream U.S. and international news focus, and does not offer the entertainment and lifestyle content that OneRiot integrates into its results. As a result, Collecta is a great source for people who want important news stories and like to view several sources to understand the breadth of angles on a topic.

The main page displays a general headline for each topic and then three suggested articles related to the topic. This makes it easy to read and gives it a professional, news-style approach. Also, Collecta does a great job of gathering recent social media updates from several sites such as WordPress, Digg and niche blogs; whereas OneRiot seems to pull most of its content from Twitter.

Collecta aggregates multiple sources and displays them based on recentness. There is the option to filter results based on the sources of data you want to include in the results.

Though Collecta does a good job at pulling information from multiple sources, its user interface makes it somewhat difficult to see the information it’s pulling from Twitter and other social media sites. The first suggested article on the homepage is usually an article related to a popular topic, but the next two subheadlines are the newsfeeds for the various social media sites discussing the topic.

The best way to use Collecta for online marketing would be to scan a variety of social media sites updated with the latest information on your business and industry within seconds. Collecta maintains a newsfeed that is updated by the second with several personal and professional social media accounts listed. This is a great way for marketers to research how the public is responding to a topic in real time.

#3: 48ers

48ers focuses more on the collective reactions of individuals to news events in real time. The site is great if you’re searching for keywords and want to see what people are discussing about a certain topic. For example, during the eggs recall you could enter a search for “eggs” and see the discussion on all social media sites about eggs.

The tradeoff here is that if you aren’t aware of a particular topic, you don’t know to search for it to explore it further. Twitter and Google have both overcome this problem by adding trending results and searches. The main page of 48ers is set up almost like Google where you type in one word and review the results. The difference is that 48ers results are social media results, not news articles or irrelevant articles about eggs from last year.

This is a great source for viewing the most up-to-date information on a particular topic, but it isn’t great if you don’t know what everyone is already talking about. OneRiot and Collecta are superior to 48ers in this respect because they offer the functionality of 48ers while also offering suggested hot topics.

48ers has a more streamlined interface than either Collecta or OneRiot, but it also integrates multiple data sources and offers the ability to filter results based on source.

The best way to use this site for online marketing is to analyze a larger number of social media results on a particular topic and discover brand mentions or industry discussions. Results are being pulled by the second and you have a lot more content to work with compared to the suggested social media results from OneRiot and Collecta.

The Final Word

All three profiled real-time search engines offer benefits, and it’s not clear who will plug the holes in their service first and offer the most compelling real-time search offering.

These independent companies are also competing with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other larger companies that are offering some version of real-time search and actively seeking to improve them.

Have you used real-time search engines? Do you think they hold promise? Let me know your thoughts in the box below.

In response to the increasingly social nature of the web and the need for collaboration, Salesforce has introduced a social and collaborative function for its users called “Chatter.”

Similar to a combination of Google Wave, Twitter and Facebook, Chatter allows users to form a community within their business that can be used for secure collaboration and knowledge-sharing.

The application is free to people who already have a Salesforce account, and it is available for a $15 per user fee to businesses that don’t already use Salesforce, albeit with limited features.

To decide if Chatter is right for your business, check out these key features and drawbacks.

Pro #1: Follow Documents as Well as People

For teams collaborating on a big presentation or proposal, this feature is awesome! You can receive updates on the progress of any document, whether it’s a PDF, PowerPoint, or Word doc, and respond with guidance or comments to your colleagues in real time. This is a killer app for businesses that have dispersed workforces.

Chatter in action. Here, a team is collaborating on an upcoming presentation in real time, and providing contextual information to guide the discussion.

Pro #2: Follow Specific Service Records or Sales Cycles

Tracking the lifecycle of a customer service request or sales prospect is an incredibly valuable feature of Chatter. Managers especially may find this tool useful, as it gives them a top-level view of the progress on all key accounts. This is also a useful tool for attributing activity to individual employees.

Pro #3: Integrate Twitter Data into Your Profile

The Chatter system makes it easy to follow companies or individuals from within your broader Salesforce profile. The integration allows for data from companies to be appended to their internal records, so you can see the latest news from businesses while processing additional deliverables for that company.

Pro #4: Collaborate Securely

Using public social network tools to collaborate can leave important proprietary information out in the open, which no business wants to do. Chatter enables the same ease of use and accessibility of public social networks, but all collaboration takes place in Salesforce’s secure cloud, which tens of thousands of businesses already trust with highly sensitive information.

Pro #5: Post Status Updates Within Salesforce

Knowing what your key employees and teammates are doing during the workday can dramatically increase productivity and the quality of work, as this ability lowers distractions and enables more knowledge-sharing.

Chatter status update. Jim Halpert, one of the main characters on NBC's The Office, shows an example of status updates within the Chatter platform. Chatter updates are within the company firewall, and help to inform your colleagues of what you're currently doing.

Con #1: Need to Be a Salesforce User for Full Access

Salesforce licenses cost more than $700 per user per year for the professional version. If your business is not using Salesforce currently, this can be a hefty investment. Also, non-sales employees likely do not have licenses for Salesforce, which could restrict the benefits you gain from beginning to use Chatter for projects.

Con #2: Best for Mostly Large Organizations

Because it is an enterprise-grade solution for an enterprise-grade sales management platform, very large businesses have the most to gain from implementing Chatter. Smaller firms with fewer locations have less need for this sort of collaboration, and moderately priced solutions like 37Signals’ Basecamp and Campfire might by better-suited to their needs.

Conclusion

Overall, Chatter feels like a big step in the right direction for sales organizations to get more social and community-oriented with their sales approach. The application can decrease duplicated work, increase the efficiency and speed at which a sales team acts on opportunities and improve internal communications. Though it’s rather costly and probably more useful for large businesses, Chatter is powerful enough to warrant further exploration of your business needs.

What do you think about Chatter? Have you tried it out? Leave your comments in the box below.

The two hottest location-based social networks—Foursquare and Gowalla—are taking different approaches to the market, and seeing unique uptake patterns as a result.  While these companies have repeatedly said they don’t view each other as competitors, the activities on networks are similar.

What’s more, several other companies are making the case to be included in the discussion about the top location-based network, including Booyah’s MyTown, which has more users than Foursquare and Gowalla combined.

Let’s take a look at how the location wars are unfolding and which of these services might be ideal for your marketing strategy.

The Contenders

Foursquare

Foursquare, founded in 2009, has attracted more than 1 million users.  Users have the ability to “check in” at local businesses, bars, and restaurants, are able to find friends at different locations and have the ability to become “mayor” of a given location, which often entitles them to benefits and discounts.  Users also receive “badges” for completing certain tasks and doing activities a certain number of times.

Foursquare offers an excellent city guide in cities where it is well-established, and has a fun aura of competition arising from users attempting to check in at favorite spots more than others.  Until recently, the network was limited to large metropolitan areas, so it was not as robust in smaller areas as other services.  Because the site does not use GPS for its check-ins, like Gowalla does, it can be gamed as a result.

Gowalla

Gowalla is seen by many as the main location-based social competitor to Foursquare, but despite being founded in 2007, it has only attracted a quarter as many users (250,000) as Foursquare.

Gowalla also allows users to check in at local establishments, but is more framed around an idea of “social gaming.” The network allows users to discover, capture, and share places and events with friends through a slick user interface that is one of its key differentiators.

Gowalla has also been available throughout the U.S. for some time now, and has established communities in some areas where Foursquare has failed to gain traction. However, Gowalla’s small install base does make it harder to find the connections that make social network entertaining and useful for businesses.  It also had limited handset availability at first, and only recently rolled out an Android version (Blackberry version in beta), which has further slowed its adoption.

MyTown

MyTown was founded by Booyah in 2007, and has rapidly become one of the most popular iPhone applications ever.  It has about 2 million users, making it more highly trafficked than either Foursquare or Gowalla.

MyTown allows users to “buy” and “own” their favorite stores and hangouts using virtual currency. This ownership model allows users to collect “rent” from others when they check in at shops they “own,” increasing the fun competitive nature of the application.

The large user base holds exciting opportunities for marketers in general.  The problem is that large install base is restricted to the iPhone, which limits further adoption potential.  The lack of handset choice plus the gaming aspect of the service makes it less attractive as a social network, though the gaming offers more potential services and features than other platforms.

The Battles

Commercial Potential

Foursquare is in the lead when it comes to catering to small- and medium-sized businesses.  The company has built its feature set to be useful and valuable to small business owners, because its platform incentivizes users to visit local establishments more frequently with its “mayor” system. The company also has created a “Foursquare for Business” dashboard that will provide additional info on user activity. The company has also landed many commercial partnerships, including with Starbucks and Bravo, which indicates an evolving business strategy that eventually should include much smaller businesses.

Gowalla is geared more toward interaction among users, and it has yet to deliver a clear commercial strategy.

MyTown uses contests to generate revenue, but the platform is again designed more as a multiplayer game than a transactional platform.

Functionality

Foursquare has pulled in front in the feature department, and it has received the most media attention because its core functionality is the most robust and easy to use.  Gowalla’s initial launch had many bugs and a choppy user experience, but its second try was much improved.  MyTown is the simplest and its features tend more toward gameplay than user interaction.

Fun

Though it may not be as useful yet for businesses or have as many features, MyTown is currently more fun for its users. What makes MyTown weak on the other counts makes it win this battle.  The comparisons here are a little skewed, because Foursquare and Gowalla are more social networks than social games like MyTown, but MyTown’s superior signup numbers show just how entertaining users are finding the service.

Look and Feel

Gowalla is winning currently in the design battle, however. The company’s CEO is a former designer, and the slick, attractive user interface displays a close focus on look and feel.  Foursquare and MyTown are both more functional than eye-catching, and their value is more in the interactions that take place than the visual aspects or display features.

Conclusion

Though all of these platforms offer great potential opportunity for businesses, only Foursquare is large enough and commercial enough currently for businesses to consider using it as part of their digital strategy.  Though they are emerging and growing rapidly, Gowalla’s scale and MyTown’s lack of a clear business focus keep them from being must-use applications like Facebook and Twitter.

Location is one of the hottest spaces around right now, however, so don’t be surprised if all of these players eventually command a large enough audience to have a significant business impact.  The early location battles are over and Foursquare is the leader; however, the larger war for location dominance is far from finished.

Have you “checked in” to these platforms? Which one are you a fan of?  If you’ve leveraged location-based platforms for your business, how are they working? Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the box below.

It’s time to debunk the big myths that are keeping business owners and marketers on the social media sidelines.

Myth #1: My Customers Aren’t on Social Media

Wow, if I had a dollar for every time I heard this one….  Seriously, this myth keeps more businesspeople from interacting with potential customers through social media than any of the others.

The fun part is all you need is a little data to convince people that their target customers are indeed on social networks.

For instance, 80% of female Internet users have become fans of a product or brand on a social network site and 72% said they learned about a new product through social media.  As the graph here shows, more than half of Facebook and Twitter users are over 35, not to mention LinkedIn.

Social networking is a true cultural phenomenon, and there is no demographic that isn’t represented substantially on one or more sites.

This chart shows demographic information for social media sites, demonstrating that they are accessed by a wide variety of age groups. (Courtesy of Pingdom.com.)

Myth #2: I Can’t Measure the Impact of Social Media on My Business

The social media return on investment debate has been picked apart by so many intelligent and creative marketers, you would think it wouldn’t make this list.  But it continues to rank high on the list of objections about social media and I completely understand why.

Since the interaction mechanisms are different with social media than traditional marketing, judging purchase intent and likely customers from social media behavior is a new skill for many marketers.

It doesn’t have to be overly complicated though, and if you put in place some of these methods to tie online behavior to offline actions, you can track the impact social media is having on your bottom line.

Pay close attention also to the referrals from social media sites on your web pages and these people’s behavior compared to users who get to your site through other means.

Myth #3: I Don’t Have Time to Manage Social Media

Learning how to interact on social networks is very easy, because it simply involves talking with people and having candid conversations about interesting topics.  Though you do need to spend some time interacting with people and posting useful, engaging content, the returns on your time should be enough to make social media interaction worthwhile.

After some basic exposure, you’ll see how similar social media interaction is to offline conversations, and it should come naturally.

Some helpful tools can make interaction a breeze, including HootSuite or TweetDeck for Twitter interaction, and Ping.fm to post updates to multiple profiles from a single interface.

Ping.fm client for managing multiple social media profiles from one location.

Myth #4: If I Engage on Social Media Sites, I’ll Get Loads of Negative Comments

Nobody likes to hear negative feedback about their work, product or service.  Many businesspeople fear that their social media profiles will be overrun by people posting complaints and competitors “flaming” their brand.  But the beauty of social media interaction is that transparency and responsiveness rule the day.

If a customer chooses to voice a complaint publicly, you have the chance to demonstrate your customer service ability to a wider audience.  If the person is unreasonable and continues to post negative information, people observing the dialogue are more likely to admire your efforts to right the situation, rather take to heart the angry customer’s complaints.

Plus, sometimes your customer base does the heavy lifting for you, like this gem from the American Airlines Facebook page.

Myth #5: Social Media Is Hard Work

Well, this one isn’t a myth, but it’s worth addressing while we’re at it.  Sure, successfully growing and interacting with a community on social networks require dedication and reasonable, sustained commitment.

If that sounds like hard work to you, well, it is, but the rewards justify the effort. If you’re allergic to hard work, then you probably shouldn’t be in business anyway.

Take some pride and joy in the interactions you have with your community and soon, what may have felt like another item on your to-do list will actually be one of the best parts of your day. And when you start demonstrably affecting sales and capturing purchase intent with social media interaction, then the hard work will be worth it.

I hope these myths won’t hold you back from engaging in social media interaction any longer.  There are customers out there waiting to talk to you and all you have to do is join the conversation.

Which other social media myths do you think need to be “debunked”?  Have you fallen victim to any of these? Do you have anything to add when addressing these myths? Leave your comments in the box below.

Here’s one of the biggest questions for businesses: Will the time they spend interacting on Facebook and Twitter affect their sales? Though they spend the considerable effort necessary to create thriving social media communities, small business owners and marketers often fail to drive floor traffic, inbound calls, store sales, and other offline business success metrics.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Savvy marketers will begin to tie the development of communities on social media networks to increased revenue if they implement a few of these simple steps that make sense for their specific business.

#1: Place Your Phone Number on All Social Media Accounts

Use Google Voice to track incoming calls from your social media profiles.

If your business has a more consultative sales process, starting conversations on your blog or social networks is a great way to generate leads.  A natural extension is to place your contact phone number on all of your social media presences and on each blog post for the customers who find you via search.  Using a separate Google Voice number that forwards to your main account lets you track the number of inbound calls you receive from your social media activities.  Though Google Voice is currently invite-only, invitations are available for $1 and less on eBay.

#2: Promote Offline Events on Social Media

Facebook has an especially robust function for creating events and promoting them.  Facebook events allow you to post pictures and event location information, while also inviting your fan base to participate.  You also can message all attendees to remind them about the event or give special instructions.  Creating a Facebook event page then gives you a landing page that will direct visitors to your blog and Twitter followers too.

Here's an example of using Facebook to promote a large social media event.

#3: Offer Coupons Exclusive to Social Media Channels

This is my personal favorite.  Make specific offers through each social media channel you use, like 10% off a purchase if you print a coupon from Facebook, or “buy one get one free” if you use a code sent out in a Tweet.  Keep a spreadsheet of the different offers and the response rate, and you’ll begin to generate really useful data about the best way to optimize your marketing campaigns for each channel.  Incentives are a great way to build the size of your social media communities. Also, giving fans and followers an incentive to follow you shows the importance you place on social media outreach.

Kohl's example of an exclusive offer delivered to social media community members. They also encourage users to share the offer with friends, increasing its reach.

#4: Host a TweetUp

Here's a sample invitation to a TweetUp. Charity events and cocktail hours work especially well for drawing attendees to TweetUps. Photo credit.

The best way to cement interactions online is to meet your contacts face to face, and there is no better way to do this than to host a TweetUp.  While you probably won’t bring more than 1,000 members to your event like Ford did in the largest TweetUp ever, TweetUps let you form more personal relationships with your local followers. Here’s a great in-depth resource on how to host a successful TweetUp.

#5: Connect Social Media and Email Campaigns

Many businesses have established email lists they use to stay in touch with customers.  Drive visitors on your social media accounts to sign up for your email list to receive more information about your business.  Getting social media visitors on your email list can connect you with people you might not otherwise reach with social media.  Bolstering your email list gives you an additional way to inform people about offline events and specials, in case they don’t see a specific offer you make on a social media channel.

The best way to close the loop between social media and offline action is to promote your social media channels offline as well—adding another way for you to stay in touch with your customers in between purchases.  I hope these suggestions help you start thinking about ways to convert your social media fans and followers into loyal customers. I’m sure you have many other great suggestions on how to drive offline action with social media outreach.

Have you tried any of these? Which ways did I leave off my list? Please comment in the box below.

How can social networks become useful marketing and operations tools for smaller businesses that don’t have a large customer base?

This question has kept many small businesses from interacting on social networks, as a recent study showed that only 24 percent of small businesses had begun social media marketing.

Here are five tips to optimize your small business’ social networks to attract more customers online.  Small business owners and marketers do not have the luxury of lots of free time to monitor social networks, so these tips are intended to help you be as efficient as possible.

#1: Make Your Profiles About More Than Just Your Industry

While you should be demonstrating expertise on your Facebook fan page and your blog, you should also be adding local context to this information.  What does the information you are providing mean for your specific region?

If you are selling homes, provide information and links about the local area, as well as the real estate you are offering.  As a small business, you are competing against large national news sources, so provide something the big guys can’t afford to give—local perspective.  The Wydler Brothers Realty Team does just that, offering insights on the Washington, D.C. market as well as homes they are offering in the area.

On their blog, Wydler Brothers Realty offers advice on the general DC area, in addition to their expertise in the real estate industry.

#2: Offer Value

By far the most important tip to getting value from social media for your business is offering value to the customers you want to interact with.  First, make sure your social media presences contain all the information a customer needs to find you on and offline, and provide a clear idea of what your business offers.

Second, define what you’ll be offering your potential customers in return for their attention and time.  You can offer promotions or discounts specifically for fans of your Facebook page, for instance. 

If you do not have the budget for special offers, make sure the content you are offering is valuable to the potential customers you are trying to reach.  Envision the need you are filling for the target customer and serve the customer with useful information related to your business or industry.

Rackspace sees high interaction from polls. Smaller hosting companies could learn from what the market leader is doing, and replicate the types of activities that drive engagement.

#3: Show Consistency

Nothing is more likely to reduce the effectiveness of small business social media outreach than inconsistency and spotty participation.  You can’t expect potential customers to revisit your Facebook profile if it is hasn’t been updated in the two weeks since they first visited, or expect them to make a purchase from your Twitter outreach if you only post 2 updates per month.

For example, Naked Pizza, based in New Orleans, messages its followers on Twitter 1 to 15 times per day.  It is now receiving 20 percent of its total revenue from these interactions.

#4: Diversify and Connect

It takes some time investment on the front end, but reaching out on multiple social platforms—then connecting the different presences with the same themes and message—is crucial to reaching the most possible customers on social networks.   You don’t want to replicate the same message on every platform, either.  Though services like ping.fm are great for simplifying content posting, try to add something unique to each social media presence you maintain.

#5: Be Competitive

Observe your competition and their social media activity.  If your business is the only one in your industry and region interacting on social networks, congrats, you’re ahead of the curve.  But more likely than not, your competitors are experimenting on social networks, too.  Observe what they are doing to grow their base.  Which tactics are working?  Which are not?  This is exactly what you’d do in a competitive assessment offline, looking for ways to improve your process by evaluating your competitors.

Remember to stay persistent, as it takes time to establish robust presences on social media sites.  If you act on these five tips in your social media outreach, you will leverage your time effectively, and see improved results from promoting your small business on social networks.

What techniques have been most successful for you on your business’ social media presences?  Which of these tips do you see the most/least potential in?  Let us know by commenting in the box below!