Here’s the good news: A new (and free) tool may be just the solution you’re looking for.

Looking for Something New?

Collaboration, innovation and communication—all three have become corporate buzzwords. But they are also critical components to any company’s success. These are three areas where organizations are constantly looking for new ideas and social media tools are increasingly playing a larger role in that process.

Businesses have a need to communicate. They’re always looking for new and different ways to foster collaboration among employees and ways to innovate—faster and more efficiently. “How can we come up with new ideas while using the least amount of resources?”

The list of tools that can fulfill these needs is long, but Posterous Groups, a recently launched social media tool (that’s free), should be considered as a way to meet these business needs.

For the uninitiated, Posterous Groups is one part Facebook group and one part email listserv. In essence, a Posterous Group page is really a living, breathing, collaborative document. And again, like Posterous itself, it can all be done via email.

Posterous Groups represents an easy, simple opportunity for brands to collaborate with, learn from and communicate with customers, brand ambassadors, volunteers and external partners.

The key Posterous Group benefits and features include:

• Uber-easy to set up. Simply email the name of the group and group member emails and your group is ready to go (no blog/platform account necessary).
• Privacy is assumed. Posterous Groups defaults to a private group setting, which means content shared within the group is protected from prying eyes outside the organization (if you wish).
• Post a variety of media formats. PDFs. Microsoft documents. Photos. Video. You name it and you can post it to Posterous Groups.
• View content on the go—easily. Posterous Groups is also optimized for viewing from mobile devices, including iPads. A nice inclusion as more folks are accessing online content via smartphones and tablets.
• Receive daily email summaries instead of instant notifications. For more active groups, this is a nice feature. Keeps you more connected and plugged in to what’s happening within the group.

Daily email summaries make it easy to stay current on Posterous Groups.

• Fantastic photo-sharing capabilities. Just my opinion, mind you, but Posterous recently added a new slideshow feature that makes this functionality even better within Groups.

Slideshows are a great photo-sharing feature to add to your Posterous Groups.

The biggest advantage of Groups is the ease of use and the fact that everything is wired right to your inbox. After all, who doesn’t have an email address in 2011? Even that guy in accounting who thinks blogging is “never going to catch on” can still participate using Posterous Groups.

And remember, photos, video and other files you post to the Group are hard-coded into your emails—no big attachments. And finally, while conversations occur on email, they’re forever archived on your Group site so members can go back and track discussions that occurred weeks ago in just a few seconds.

So, what does all this mean for brands? There are a number of organizations already using Posterous as a blogging platform. One of my favorite local brands, Punch Pizza, uses Posterous to share photos and coupons, which are routinely redeemed en masse at Punch restaurants.

Punch Pizza routinely offers online-only coupons through its Posterous blog.

Chevrolet is one of the few brands using Posterous Groups.

Nationally, Chevrolet has been using Posterous for more than a year now to promote talk about the Chevy Volt.

And Twitter app TweetDeck is also using Posterous as its primary blogging platform.

But, by and large, not too many brands are using Posterous Groups—at least not groups that we can see.

That doesn’t mean opportunities don’t exist, because they certainly do. Given that Posterous is an email-based platform and it’s extremely easy to use, I’ve long felt more risk-averse companies have a big opportunity with Posterous as a means to start blogging—and I think with Groups, there are a number of clear opportunities, too, both internally and externally, for organizations.

Internal Applications for Posterous Groups

#1: Company intranet

Probably more appropriate for small businesses and non-profits—organizations that can’t afford an off-the-shelf solution. But think about it. Doesn’t Groups offer much of the same functionality as an intranet? Document, photo and video sharing, all accessible via email or the Internet. And remember, it can be private.

Sure, it’s not behind a firewall on your company’s servers, but you have to weigh the advantages and benefits versus the potential risk. This certainly presents a different way to think about an intranet, but I tend to think it’s a collaborative (and very easy) way to get your internal teams involved.

#2: Special interest groups

Look inside any company and you’ll find a number of special interest groups. Some are more formal than others; running clubs and bowling teams, for example. What if you had a way to give them a private space online where they could stay connected between meetings or events? They could use this area to post photos, videos and just share information about the next event or meeting.

#3: Team communication

Just as Posterous Groups is a great tool for special interest groups within your organization, it’s also a perfect tool for business communication between teams. Think about it from a marketing/PR standpoint.

Your team could use a Posterous Group as a project-planning tool, a way to brainstorm ideas across geographically disparate offices (complete with photos and video), a vehicle to aggregate and share media coverage with the team and a tool to share organizational updates and news. Again, all in one spot—as opposed to the different areas this information probably exists now.

#4: Short-term collaboration

For those who have managed a new agency relationship, consider all the information you need to share with that partner to get them up to speed. Wouldn’t it be great if you could house all those documents, images, usernames/passwords and graphics in one easy-to-find and common area? Hello, Posterous Groups.

External Uses of Posterous Groups

#5: Promotional/corporate event pages

Think about the promotional and community events your company participates in regularly. Wouldn’t it be great to have one spot where you could house RSVPs, key event information, promotional coupons, offers, photos, videos and interviews with customers and participants after the event? How are you doing that now? Would Posterous Groups present an interesting alternative?

#6: Private brand ambassador groups

What about creating a private group for your most cherished brand ambassadors? A space where you could share special offers, rewards programs and sneak peeks at upcoming marketing campaigns? You could also use the Group as a means to communicate with these ambassadors. Even use Groups as a way to run new product designs by them and get initial input and ideas. A plethora of options here.

#7: Volunteer groups

For non-profit organizations, Posterous Groups would be a great way to keep in regular contact with one of their most important audiences: volunteers. Many non-profits say one of their biggest challenges is not having enough touchpoints with volunteers. Groups would provide an easy solution. After all, who doesn’t have access to email? (Even that 77-year-old woman who volunteers on Wednesday evenings has access to email.) And the best part? The volunteers themselves could contribute meaningful content to the Group.

You could ask volunteers to post photos from events that they capture—photos that you could use in newsletters and brochures down the road. You could also share news about upcoming events, organizational priorities and more detailed instructional information that would only be relevant to volunteers. This is a great, low-cost, easy way to keep in touch with your volunteer force.

#8: Customer forums

Your customers have questions. Why not address them all at once using Groups? You could even provide video responses to more complex customer issues/questions (I’m thinking about tech products here). Sure, there are definitely other ways to organize customer forums online—but Posterous Groups is free, easy and would tend to stay in front of customers because Groups would alert these folks via email each time a new post is made.

Those are my ideas about how brands could use Posterous Groups. What do you think? Any creative ideas on how your organization might take advantage of this new tool? Leave your comments in the box below.

Ahhh yes, the lovely LinkedIn.

She warms me up with friendly introductions to powerful decision makers. She brings a smile to my face from the absurd amount of targeted traffic to my websites. And she goes WAY over the top with the number of direct sales referrals she gives me.

It’s a digital romance we have, and I’ll profess my love for her ’til the end of time.

In all seriousness, I’m a big fan of LinkedIn because of the direct business I receive from it. And although I’ve written books about LinkedIn, given webinars and presentations on the topic and written articles like Top 5 Ways to Market Your Business With LinkedIn, I’ve never done a dedicated article about the advanced applications… until now.

Get More With LinkedIn Applications

In this article I want to share with you the top apps you can leverage to get more leads, traffic, product sales, brand awareness, ticket sales, investors, sponsors, consulting engagements and more.

Let’s dig into some of my favorite apps and how to get more from them.

Add Your Blog to LinkedIn

Surprisingly, I’ve seen some of the top bloggers in the world miss out on displaying this app. Failing to include this WordPress app on your profile is a huge mistake because it can help you drive more traffic and shows those who come to your profile how to learn more about your expertise.

This is a simple app that every blogger should have on his/her profile.

Autoplay a Video!

Imagine someone lands on your profile and instead of seeing the same old boring profile, they hear a voice. This voice either comes from you or a raving fan giving a testimonial. This technique is used so rarely that people can’t help but be shocked when they hear a voice and watch a video on your profile.

Adding the SlideShare.net app allows you to showcase presentations you may have, but it also allows you to add a video that autoplays when people land on your profile. Currently the video must be on YouTube for it to work, but it definitely adds a nice touch. Learn more about how to add video to your LinkedIn profile here.

Showcase Your Books or Others’ Books

Many bloggers are coming out with their own books, but are forgetting about a valuable resource to help promote and sell more of them: their LinkedIn profiles! The Reading List by Amazon is great because it helps you to stand out while adding to your credibility.

Even if you don’t have a published book on Amazon, you can still add this app and include the top books that you’re currently reading to give others a better sense about your interests and ongoing education.

This allows you to add a picture of your book on your page.

Syncing With Twitter on LinkedIn

I synced my Twitter account to LinkedIn when this app first launched. Some said they were annoyed when they saw all of the Twitter updates come to their home feed, but after about a week people got used to it.

I find that I often get as much or more interaction from my Twitter updates that sync to LinkedIn than those same updates on Twitter. Your messages don’t get lost in the feed as much on LinkedIn and there are threaded conversations similar to Facebook so you can continue the dialogue for days after.

I recommend doing this if you’re active on Twitter as you will look like you’re interacting on LinkedIn and continuing to stay on top of the minds of your LinkedIn connections even if you don’t use LinkedIn very often.

A great way to stay connected and updated.

Feature Your Events on LinkedIn

Hosting a major industry conference, regional networking event or maybe a small TweetUp and want to get more exposure and ticket sales? If so, look no further than the most powerful events promotion tool online today—LinkedIn Events app.

An example of a major professional event by Gary Vaynerchuk.

Here's an example of how powerful promoting your events on your profile can be.

You can see how many people have RSVP’d for your event, who’s interested and who’s exhibiting. You can also see a picture of those who are attending or interested, their industry, how you’re connected to them, what company they work for and more.

There are a few features I wish they would add to help event organizers promote better (like adding a messaging ability to all of those members who are interested), but other than that, I love the way you can use this app to get the word out about your events.

More Advanced LinkedIn Apps

There are a handful of other apps I haven’t mentioned that help a variety of industry professionals.

Business Apps:

There are a number of general business apps. Some of my favorites include Box.net Files, Tripit Travel, Google Presentation, Huddle Workspaces and Polls.

Legal Apps:

There are two apps specifically for lawyers. The Legal Updates app allows you to “get legal news that matters to you and your business. (Lawyers, upload your articles and other content. Be found for your expertise on LinkedIn).”

The Lawyer Rating app allows you to “showcase your Martindale-Hubbell® Peer Review Ratings™ and Client Review Ratings™ to further validate your stated credentials and help you make the right connections.”

Designer App:

The Creative Portfolio Display allows you to “showcase your creative work in your LinkedIn Profile with the Creative Portfolio Display application. Free, easy to manage, and supports unlimited multimedia content.”

There are a number of other apps that you may or may not feel are valuable to include on your LinkedIn profile, but my suggestion is to try a few out and see how you like them.

Since the release of the advanced application section on LinkedIn, they continue to release new apps every so often. Make sure to check the application section for future updates, or find out more by following the LinkedIn blog.

Have you tried using any of the advanced LinkedIn applications on your profile? If so, what is the one you like the best, and why? I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments box below.

Using social media to research competitors can provide useful information for any business looking to create a smart strategy.  Learning about your competitors’ activities can give you insight into what works and what doesn’t.

The beauty of social media is that there’s a ton of information about your competitors that is public. And not only is their strategy public, but the reaction to that strategy is public as well. Let’s take a look at some of the things you can learn about your competitors through different social networks, search engines and other outlets.

Competitor Research Through Twitter

Twitter can be a great source of information, because you not only can view a user’s tweets (assuming they’re not private, which generally business Twitter accounts aren’t), but also a user’s followers and the conversation that’s being directed toward him or her.

Finding Competitors

If you have a specific list of competitors that you would like to research, your best bet on finding their Twitter accounts is to visit their website and look for their social links (usually near a Twitter icon in the header, sidebar or footer of their site). Alternatively, you can Google the company name and Twitter to find their account.

If you haven’t compiled a list of competitors, or your main competitors surprisingly don’t use Twitter yet, you can use Twitter search directories such as Twellow and WeFollow to find other companies in your industry that do.

Tweets

The first and most useful information you can learn from looking at a competitor’s Twitter account is simply the strategy they’re using. By viewing their latest tweets, you can see if their strategy includes promoting lots of discounts; direct replies to their followers; or sharing articles, fun facts or other kinds of tweets. You can judge the success of their strategy simply by looking at their follower count.

Followers

Have you ever wanted to see your competitors’ client list? If so, you might just be in luck, because on Twitter, you can view any user’s followers. Thanks to the new Twitter design, you can easily click on a Twitter user’s followers and see, just by scrolling down the page, a short piece of information about each of their followers from their bios.

Twitter gives you a great overview of any Twitter user's followers.

Then you can click on each one to learn more about them, like their follower-to-following ratio, location and their latest tweets.

Alternatively, you can get an overview of a user’s followers by using Twitter tools like Tweepi, which allows you to see follower details all on one screen, including bio information, location, number of followers and following, number of updates and even when they last tweeted.

Tweepi shows you important Twitter user information in one shot.

Replies

Now, let’s take the research deeper. You don’t want just to know who’s following your competitor on Twitter—you want to know what kind of feedback that competitor is getting as well.

If you do a simple search on Twitter for the replies to their username, @yourcompetitor, you’re bound to learn some valuable information.

Monitor the @mentions of your competitors for fan sentiment.

In the above example, you can see that @Target’s fans like their latest commercial, selection of Christmas items, pricing on certain products and even one of Target’s charitable contributions during the holiday season.

Most Popular Content

Another great Twitter search tool is Topsy. This one is specifically for researching what content on a website gets the most retweets—a sign that it’s the type of content that people like and something that you should consider emulating for your own blog or website.

See the most popular pages tweeted from a competitor's website.

In the above search, you can see a few important things in particular—this company uses services similar to Sponsored Tweets for Twitter advertising, as marked by the #ad hashtag after the first tweet. They also received lots of good feedback and changed their in-store return policy, news that’s being shared often.

Competitor Research Through Facebook

Facebook is one of the top social networks for businesses, and another one where you can find out a lot of information about your competitors’ strategy and fan interaction.

Finding Your Competitors

Again, just like with Twitter, you can find your known competitors’ Facebook fan page links on their website or simply through a Google search. But if your competitor isn’t using Facebook fan pages, you can use the Browse All Pages directory on Facebook to find companies in your industry that are using the search or the category types listed, such as products, services, restaurants and more.

Strategy

There are lots of strategic elements that can be determined by viewing a competitor’s Facebook fan page. To get a full view of what they’re doing, you may have to Like their page with your personal profile.

Once you’ve become a fan, you’ll be able to see all sections (formerly tabs) of their profile. You’ll be able to find out if they’re using their Facebook page as lead generation through gathering email addresses, feeding other social media accounts or blog posts through their page, eliciting customer reviews, creating amazing landing pages or using premium applications from Involver or North Social.

The main strategy you’ll want to check out is how they use their wall for fan interaction. Do they post their latest offers, videos, blog posts, news, photos or other items? Why is this valuable? Because not only will you see their activity, but you’ll also see how it goes over with their customers.

Fan Activity

Unlike Twitter where you have to do a special search for a competitor’s replies to their @username, you can see fan response (or lack thereof) directly on each item of your competitor’s wall. This is a great way to gauge what fans in your industry like the most, from discounts to random status updates, simply by seeing the number of Likes an update receives and reading through the various comments.

See the popularity of an update on your competitor's Facebook fan page wall.

One particular thing to note is that it’s not always updates from the official fan page that get interaction. In the above example on Toyota’s fan page, it’s a fan posting on their wall that got other fans’ attention—a key reason to make sure that your page shows both your updates and those from fans.

Favorite Pages

Facebook fan page owners can add other fan pages as their favorites.

Find your competitors' additional pages through Favorite Pages.

This is a key area to check out, as it may lead you to find more competitors’ fan pages, revealing more of their ultimate Facebook strategy.

Competitor Research Through LinkedIn

Thanks to the new company pages on LinkedIn, you can learn some interesting information about how your competitors are using LinkedIn for business.

Finding Your Competitors

Locate your competitors’ company profiles on LinkedIn via their website, a Google search or using the search box at the top right-hand corner of your LinkedIn screen.

Followers

You can browse a company’s followers using the link in the top right corner of the company profile page showing their follower count.

View a company's followers on LinkedIn.

If you’re not directly connected to followers of a company (first connections) or sharing a connection with a follower (second connection), you’ll only be able to see a limited amount of information about a company’s followers, although it might still be enlightening.

Employees

You can also view information about a company’s employees if they’re connected to them on LinkedIn. If you do share connections, use the links for first connections and second employees in your network (shown in the box above) to see more details about those employees.

Also, don’t miss the helpful statistics about employees, including the following information compiled about all employees linked to the company:

• Job function composition—percentage of staff who are administrative, research, development, sales, marketing and executive.
• Annual company growth—a line graph that compares your competitor’s growth with others in the same industry and of similar size.
• Employees who have changed their title—a line graph that compares your competitor’s employee changes with others in the same industry and of similar size.
• Employees at the company with new titles.
• Years of work experience—a bar graph that compares your competitor’s employees’ experience with others in the same industry and of similar size.
• Highest education degree attained—a bar graph that compares your competitor’s employees’ education (bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, associate’s degree, certification, and high school diplomas) with others in the same industry and of similar size.
• Most common universities attended—a bar graph showing percentages of employees from the top five universities that they have graduated from.

Strategy

With the new company pages, companies can add more information to their profile. View their Recent Blog Posts and Activity on LinkedIn to see what your competitors are doing to boost their profiles and gain new followers.

More Competitor Research on Social Media

Want to go beyond the top three social and professional networks? Here are more ideas on social networks and websites to research your competitors.

• YouTube—check out your competitors’ video marketing strategy by finding their YouTube channel and seeing what types of videos they post and their popularity through number of Likes and comments.
• Social Mention—use this real-time social media search engine to find your competitors on other social networks, and view mentions about your competitors by other social media users.
• Geo-based social networks—are your competitors taking advantage of Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, Whrrl or other location-based social media? Find out and be sure your company is “check-in” friendly if applicable.
• Boardreader—don’t just focus on social media! Some of the strongest, most loyal community members can be found in forums. Boardreader will help you find your competitors and any talk about them on forums and message boards throughout the web.
• Local search and review directories—does your business have local competition? Be sure to check out your competitors’ profiles on review sites such as Yelp, Merchant Circle, Google Places and more to find out if they’re garnering reviews from their customers, sharing discounts and taking advantage of local search to dominate in search results.

Do you research your competitors via social media? Please share your tips below, as well as valuable information you learned from doing the research and analysis.

What’s New This Week?

Foursquare Supports Brands Without Physical Locations: Up to now Foursquare was only for businesses with a physical location. With Foursquare for Business, “brands that are not tied to a specific physical location” can now use Foursquare’s Pages and Custom Badges in their social media marketing mix. Find out more about what this means to you here.

Brands can now use Foursquare in their social media marketing.

Verizon and Apple Team Up to Deliver iPhone 4 on Verizon: Americans will now be able to use an iPhone on the Verizon Wireless network. You can find out more about how Verizon’s iPhone will impact mobile marketing here and about the new iPhone hotspot feature here.  Will you get an iPhone or change your mobile service?

Facebook to Distribute AMBER Alerts: “It’s another sign that web services like Facebook and Twitter are becoming the fastest ways to disseminate information to the largest number of people,” says Inside Facebook.

You can Like the Amber Alert page at www.facebook.com/AMBERalert.

Groupon Raises $950 Million: In case you missed this, check out how well Groupon did in 2010, expanding from 1 to 35 countries, growing subscribers from 2 million to over 50 million and working with 58,000 local businesses worldwide.

Groupon grew substantially in 2010.

Salesforce Acquires DimDim: Many small businesses will no longer have a free web conferencing service through DimDim. Salesforce will disable free DimDim accounts on March 11, 2011. Businesses might be interested in noting how Salesforce is integrating DimDim with their Chatter platform, “combining collaboration and communication into an integrated service.”

Facebook Rolls Out Their New Profile Layout to Everyone: If you didn’t make the change earlier, remember to take a few minutes to check out what’s new.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBVa1SFvMyI

Here’s one more new social media tool worth a look:

Pixable: A new Facebook app for viewing your friends’ photos on Facebook in one spot without clicking through their profiles.

And don’t miss this:

Social Media Examiner Announces Blogging Success Summit 2011: This is your chance to hone your skills with some of the best in the industry for this key social media tool.

What social media news caught your interest? Will you try out Foursquare for Business?  What do you think of the other news items this week? Please share your comments below.

Understanding the concept of social graphs will not only enhance your proficiency with social media marketing today, it will also help you foresee emerging trends. This will significantly help you be fully prepared when new web technologies are launched.

The term social graph was first used a few years ago by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, specifically in reference to the Facebook platform. Your social graph is a digital map of your personal identity, your primary Facebook friends and everything you share with them.

That definition has since been expanded to include other platforms, such as Twitter, Flickr and even Google. So, to be clear, you have many overlapping social graphs. This social data is of great interest to businesses that are trying to connect with you, and should be of equal interest to you for reaching your future customers.

The social graph is a contextual matrix of relationships.

Facebook and the Open Graph

When Facebook launched sweeping changes to their platform on April 21, 2010, social graphs were suddenly thrust into the spotlight. That’s when Mark Zuckerberg coined a new term—Open Graph.

The objective of Facebook Open Graph is to integrate all of your social graphs—on Facebook, of course. This is accomplished through the Facebook API, which is a digital handshake that connects your Facebook identity, connections and content with Facebook pages and outside websites and blogs. You probably know it best in its most popular form as the Facebook Like button.

Facebook Like creates communities of like-minded people.

When you Like a Facebook page or site that has embedded the Facebook Like feature, you’re instantly connected with everyone else who has Liked that site. You have effectively joined a new community, and now you have the benefit of many new associations.

Unfortunately, the positive side of connecting businesses with consumers in this way was overshadowed by the privacy uproar associated with Open Graph. That has since been remedied by allowing you to control what you share, if anything, with your new community.

If you can integrate millions of social graphs that are rich with personal data, you have a Frankenstein’s monster of a database that is infused with social context, and therefore, human-like qualities.

Similar to Frankenstein, the Open Graph is not really human, but it has the possibility to come awfully close as more social data is stitched together. The power of a database that truly emulates human behavior is undeniable. Whatever happens in the future, one thing we’re sure of is that day in April was a game-changer for social marketers.

How Social Graphs Tell a Story

Searchable content has always been the foundation of the Internet. Bill Gates is credited with stating that “content is king”—and at the time he said that (he wrote it first), he was right. However, that was before social networking changed the game of search to what it is today; one where context is king.

As your messaging or content on the social web is shared, it gathers context and builds nodal relationships that tell a story. By understanding this, you can more effectively enhance your social graph by creating useful content that favorably represents who you are and what you do best with your expertise.

Context—Social networks are all about context. Whom you associate with tells a great deal about you. Context not only tells us who you are, but by associations and comparisons, who you are not. You may be very similar to colleagues you associate with, but there is enough data to discern a difference. That association may be what helps you to be discovered, but it is the distinction that will get you hired.

Nodes—When you map out your social connections, you’re essentially connecting the dots. Think of these dots as nodes on a complex matrix. The more nodes there are on your social graph, the more readily you can be defined, and therefore located. Nodes are landmarks or junction points on a map that helps users navigate the unknown and find exactly what they need or want, which ideally is your business.

Sharing—Sharing on the social web is what creates nodes. If you share content that someone finds useful, they’re likely to share it with their community, thereby connecting you with their friends—which creates even more nodes.

Why Social Search Is a Game-Changer

When Facebook introduced its Open Graph, Mark Zuckerberg made the statement that if we can take the social graphs of a multitude of social networking or sharing sites, we could “create a web that’s smarter, more social, more personalized, and more semantically aware.”

A semantically aware web takes advantage of relationships and associations. You’ve already experienced how social semantic search works if you’ve made multiple purchases on Amazon. They understand your preferences and they cross-link them with the preferences of people whose social graphs are similar to yours.

As new technologies are integrated with this growing body of social data, you can expect search capabilities to rise to breathtaking levels, giving more accurate, more personal and timelier search results.

Here are some steps you can take to create a representative social graph:

Create Social Objects—In addition to relationships with people, you also have relationships with objects that further define your social graph. Social objects are anything that is searchable on the web. This obviously includes people, but also images, videos and music clips. All of these objects interact to tell a story.

Fill in the Gaps—As social graphs are merged, they become mutually more descriptive and complete. Yet for most of us, our social graphs are largely empty space. This is why it’s important to be actively engaged and share on the social networks, both on a personal and professional level. When you do this, you’re managing your destiny by building your social graph, which is always best accomplished with your direct involvement.

Consider Location and Time—Social graphs are digital maps that lead us to places. As social graphing is accomplished more frequently in real time and location, better decisions become possible. While there may a number of businesses like yours that are suited to someone doing a search, the person is more likely to choose you if you’ve recently engaged in conversations that keep your social graph fresh and relevant.

What This Means for Business

At the recent Web 2.0 Summit, Mark Zuckerberg said, “Over the next five years every industry will have to redesign itself around social.” This is a statement that I believe holds a great deal of merit. Businesses need to realize that social is not just changing how you should market, but even how you’ll be doing business in the future if you expect to prosper.

It remains to be seen whether Open Graph will become a reality. While the technology is available, there are political and economic boundaries that prevent it from readily happening. Nevertheless, what’s trending is typically going to happen at some point in the future.

Here are some likely possibilities:

The Future Web Is More Personal

Let’s face it, people are interested in people. Human interactions of all kinds add context that illuminates, clarifies and cuts through the clutter. There is no question that semantic search will transform our roles as both consumers and business professionals.

The Future Web Is More Intelligent

Every piece of data that gets added to every social graph makes the entire system more intelligent. The more the system knows, the more discerning it will be. It becomes a better decision-maker. What is Microsoft’s Bing, which also happens to power Facebook search? A decision engine.

The Future Web Is More Open

Social graphs overlap and extend across the globe.

Imagine a web that has perfect access to information—a social web that is a digital copy of our physical world.

While this may sound like science fiction to some, could you have imagined 10 years ago that you would someday be carrying a handheld device that would help you find a business, navigate your travel there in real time, let you know which of your friends has recently visited and what recommendations they left for you?

What do you think? Is science fiction now becoming science? What challenges and possibilities do you see? Let us know your comments in the box below.

All images from Shutterstock

If you heard about a marketing strategy that could substantially lower your marketing expenses and return 600% or more of your investment, would you be interested in learning more about it?

When Social Media Examiner surveyed 1,900 marketers in 2010, half said they wanted to learn more about this strategy.

Of those just starting out in social media marketing, 65% wanted to learn more about it. And 81% of all the marketers surveyed said they would definitely increase their use of this strategy.

No, it’s not Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or YouTube.

Sure, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were among the top four social media tools among this group of marketers.

But what was first?

Blogging!

Did you know that Technorati ranked Social Media Examiner the #1 small business blog in the world just five months after it was launched? “We didn’t advertise, didn’t rely on the press and almost none of our traffic is coming from search engines,” said its founder, Mike Stelzner, in March 2010.

Blogging Isn’t Just for Moms Anymore

If you work for a large corporation, you’re probably not blogging yet, are you? Oh sure, you might have your own personal blog centered around your interests, hobbies or political views.

But I’m talking about a corporate blog. A blog sponsored, written and monitored by your company.

I’ll bet these are some of the reasons you or your company isn’t blogging:

• You don’t know what to write about
• You think your employees are too busy to blog
• You don’t want to reveal company secrets

If you’re a small business owner, did you know that nearly half of your competitors will be using a blog for marketing purposes by next year?  What’s holding you back?

Maybe you’re wondering “How can I make sure my message is noticed and not buried in all the other noise?”

Here’s How to Get Your Blog Working for Your Business

Suppose you could hire 23 of the biggest names in blogging to give you proven tips and techniques for using a corporate blog to generate leads, win customers and achieve your sales goals.

Suppose each of those experts came to your home or office and gave you 60 minutes of their time. Each one could easily charge you hundreds of dollars.

But suppose you got all of those experts for less than $300. Not $300 per expert, less than $300 for all of them.  Only $300 for 14 hours of highly implementable training.

That’s exactly what you’ll get when you sign up for the early-bird discount to attend Social Media Examiner’s Blogging Success Summit 2011. It’s an online conference scheduled throughout the month of February 2011. You won’t need airline tickets, hotel rooms, a rental car or a week of fast food.

All you need is an Internet connection and speakers.

Just look at this partial list of the 23 instructors:

• Richard Jalichandra, Technorati CEO
• Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett, authors of the best-selling book, ProBlogger: Secrets to Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
• Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book
• Douglas Karr, co-author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies
• Joe Pulizzi, co-author of Get Content Get Customers
• Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger
• Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner
  
• Rick Calvert, co-founder and CEO of BlogWorld
• Denise Wakeman, co-founder of The Blog Squad

You’ll also hear from people in the trenches – bloggers and social media marketers from Ford, McDonald’s, Southwest Airlines, Sony, Cisco and Procter & Gamble.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn:

• The State of the Blogosphere: What Businesses Need to Know
• Transforming Your Small Business Blog Into a Lead Generation Machine
• 20 Actionable Techniques to Enhance Your Blog’s Content
• How Big Businesses Are Leveraging the Power of Blogs
• How to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings With Blogging

HubSpot found that businesses with an active blog get 55% more online traffic than those without a blog.

Which part of that statistic are you in?  What do you think your competitors are doing?

To learn more about the upcoming summit click here.

What are your blogging plans for 2011? Please leave your comments in the box below.

These apps allow you to customize your landing tabs, add your blog, add videos and photos, add chat, add polls, contests, geolocation, scheduling, email, ecommerce and much more.

Why Facebook Apps?

Why add apps to your Facebook Business (Fan) page? By customizing your Fan page with apps, you can significantly enhance the user’s experience. And, the more you keep your fans engaged and coming back for more, the more likely you’ll increase your “viral visibility.”

In other words, every time a fan interacts with your Fan page, it’s free advertising for you because each fan’s activity goes out into their stream (their wall and their friends’ News Feeds). To find the best apps to enhance your Fan page, you could spend endless hours browsing Facebook’s Application Directory:

Facebook App Directory

However, there are literally tens of thousands from which to choose. Even clicking on the Business category as I’ve done in the screenshot above, we get apps like Bartab (send friends real drinks for $1) and Hugs and Hearts. I don’t know about you, but these are hardly business apps in my opinion!

There’s also Appbistro where you can browse their comprehensive directory of apps for businesses.

Now that Facebook nixed the ability to have our own custom content/apps on the Wall tab (left column), we need to get even more creative to ensure content on tabs is actually seen and that your fans interact with it; otherwise there’s not much point in having a dormant app that doesn’t enhance the user’s experience.

You can track your metrics via Facebook Insights and see which of your tabs gets the most clicks as shown in the screenshot below:

Facebook Insights - Tab Views

However, it may be that very few of your tabs get much visibility except the actual Landing tab (my top scorer in the screenshot above). Your Landing tab is the default page that visitors see who have not yet joined your page (click Edit Page > Manage Permissions > select Default Landing Tab).

So, my recommendation is to focus on those apps that actually publish content to your own Fan page stream (your page wall and the News Feed of your fans). Plus, add a few apps that allow for heightened engagement at specified times, such as live streaming video and live chat apps as I’ve detailed below for you.

Custom Landing Tabs

Let’s start with custom content as it’s important to have a branded Landing tab for your Facebook page. In fact, as reported by InsideFacebook, BrandGlue founder Jeff Widman discovered that a custom Landing tab DOUBLES conversion to fans:

We ran an A/B test just four weeks ago to guesstimate the efficacy of a landing tab. We drove visitors to the fan page of a major brand using ads. Those ad-driven visitors converted to fans at a rate of approximately 47% WITH a landing tab. When we turned off the landing tab, those same ad-driven visitors converted to fans at approximately 23%. A VERY noticeable loss in conversions over the course of the campaign.

The most popular app by far to add your own custom content has been Facebook’s own Static FBML. Facebook will be replacing all FBML tabs and apps with iFrames at the end of 2010, at which time you’ll be able to create custom tabs using iFrames. However, Facebook will continue to support any and all tabs/apps created prior to when FBML gets deprecated. See the Developers Roadmap for updates on the timeline of changes.

By way of example, here’s the Landing tab for Social Media Examiner’s Facebook page. Note the call to action (“Click the Like button”) and the seamless branding:

Social Media Examiner Facebook Fan Page - Landing Tab

Apps for adding custom content/branded Landing tab:

Here are my top two recommendations:

• Static FBML – you’ll need to be familiar with coding or use a WISIWYG editor first. See Tabfusion’s Free Facebook Page Tab Maker here.   Plus, review these two helpful tutorials.
• TabSite – free version with two TabSite subpages or choose from three paid levels. Complete WISIWYG editor; tabs within a main tab. TabSite is one of my favorites. It’s a very easy-to-use interface. I created the “RESOURCES” tab on my Facebook page using TabSite.

TabSite - Facebook App

Facebook custom tab apps:

• Welcome Tab
• iwiPage

For easy-to-use templates, check out these options:

• Static520 – UPDATE 12/21/10 – some users have reported this app provider is not working properly.
• Pagemodo
• FanPageEngine
• PageLever
• SplashTab
• FaceItPages – UPDATE 12/30/10 – added this provider to the list.

These sites offer suites of apps, including custom Landing tabs. Some apps are free, some have a fee:

• Involver
• MiproApps
• Tabfusion
• NorthSocial
• Momentus Media
• Friend2Friend
• ShortStack Lab
• Avenue Social

Involver.com - Facebook Suite of Apps

For a helpful review of some of these apps, see this post on TechCrunch. Plus, read Jay Baer‘s review of several of these apps here. For a list of over 50 Facebook-approved developers, go here.

Designers/developers:

If you’re looking for full hands-on customization service at very affordable rates, my top choices are:

• HyperArts
• Likeable Media
• Custom Fan Page Designs

See also:

• KickApps
• FanPageGenerator
• Say It Social
• Hilinsky Consulting
• 140ology [Update: added 12/21/10]

Enterprise-level customization:

• Vitrue
• Buddy Media
• Context Optional
• Sprout
• Friend2Friend
• Avenue Social

ContextOptional.com - Social Marketing Software and Services

See the complete list of Facebook Preferred Developer Consultants here.

Your Blog

Once you’re happy with your custom Landing tab, it’s time to import your blog’s RSS feed. My favorite app – used widely by many bloggers on Facebook – is Networked Blogs. It’s free and relatively simple to set up.

Networked Blogs - Facebook app

Once you’re set up and have a few followers, you can place the Networked Blogs widget on your blog for added visibility. Any time you have the chance to display your fans’ faces, go for it!

Networked Blogs - Facebook widget

You can add the Networked Blogs app to your personal profile in addition to your Fan page, if you wish. Alternate methods for pulling in your blog posts include:

• Facebook’s Notes app (can be a lag time and is sometimes buggy).
• Any of the RSS apps; e.g., RSS Graffiti, Social RSS or others.

RSS Feed and Content Publishers

You can easily import any of your content that has an RSS or Atom feed. For example, I import my Twitter favorites and Google Reader Shared Items using the RSS Graffiti app.

RSS Graffiti Facebook app

RSS/Content apps include:

• RSS Graffiti
• Social RSS
• Involver – RSS Feed (free version posts to the tab, Pro version posts to the wall)
• North Social – RSS Feed
• Objective marketer (complete publishing platform – used and recommended by Guy Kawasaki).

Video – YouTube and Viddler

I’ve been searching for some time for the ultimate YouTube app – one that automatically publishes new uploaded videos from your channel to your Facebook page wall, has a nice-looking tab, is easy to navigate and doesn’t take users away from your Fan page to view videos. Plus, if I were really waving a magic wand, I’d love it if YouTube gave us the option under their “Activity Sharing” feature to post liked or favorited videos to our Fan page (versus profile).

The closest I’ve found is YouTube Channels – I like their interface but the downside is they charge a monthly fee of $4.99 and I couldn’t get the Publish to Wall feature to work, so I canceled my subscription. Check out the YouTube Channel app by Involver (screenshot below) or the YouTube Video Box app.

Involver's YouTube Channel Facebook app

If you have a Viddler account instead of or in addition to YouTube, check out the Viddler app.

Twitter

I’m not a big fan of importing all tweets onto your Facebook wall, unless you don’t tweet that often! A more effective solution is to only publish select tweets TO your Fan page using this app:

• Selective Tweets – once set up, this app allows you to post your tweets to your Facebook page simply by including “#fb” at the end of the tweet (or there is an option to include #fb anywhere in the tweet but I don’t recommend that option as it’s too easy to make a mistake!). You can choose to post tweets to your personal profile and/or Fan page.

Or, my favorite solution as mentioned in the RSS Feed section above is to only import your Twitter Favorites. I do this using the RSS Graffiti app. To find the RSS feed URL for your Twitter Favorites, with the new Twitter design the only way is to view your Twitter account while logged out:

Another Twitter solution is to simply install an app that pulls in all your tweets onto a tab, but doesn’t publish in the stream. I’m not sure there’s much benefit to this, as I say the primary goal here is to get into the News Feeds of your fans.

• Involver’s Twitter Facebook app
• North Social Twitter Feed Facebook app

To publish your Facebook content TO Twitter as tweets, connect your page using Facebook’s own Twitter app. You have a choice of six different types of content: Status Update, Photos, Video, Links, Notes and Events. Facebook’s publisher (the field where you type your updates) takes up to 420 characters; whereas tweets are 140 characters. With this Facebook to Twitter app, your content will automatically be truncated with a link back to your Facebook page which can help increase engagement by bringing your Twitter followers onto Facebook.

Facebook's Twitter app

Flickr Photos

To display photos from your Flicker account, you might want to try the Flickr Tab app. See also the suite of app providers above.

SlideShare

If you have slides up on SlideShare, display them on your Facebook Fan page! You’ll have a nice display on the SlideShare tab, but I haven’t found that adding new slides automatically publishes to the wall. So, as you add new slides (and/or videos) to SlideShare.net, also publish the URL right on your Facebook page wall. What this does is pull in an actual player very similar to the video player with the blue play button icon. Your fans can play the slideshow right on your wall, and of course like and comment, providing that coveted News Feed ranking.

SlideShare Facebook app

Reviews

Facebook has a Reviews app that you can add to your Fan page. The cool thing about this app is whenever a fan writes a review, it goes out into their stream (their wall and friends’ News Feeds). If you have a particularly negative review, spam or trolls, unfortunately there’s no way to remove individual reviews. If that ever happens, you could remove the app altogether. Otherwise, I think the Reviews app is an often-overlooked goldmine for businesses to have on their Fan pages!

Live Video

One of my favorite apps to spark immediate real-time, live engagement is Vpype. You can launch a webcast at any time (or scheduled time) to your fans and the app then posts an announcement on your wall. The app can hold up to 300 viewers with a live chat alongside your webcam broadcast. You can easily record and archive your shows; recordings include the full chat transcript too. Plus, you can even download the FLV file of your shows. The app tab is aptly named “Shows.”

Vpype Facebook app

Read my review here from when I beta-tested the app for Vpype.

Alternatives to Vpype include:

• Livestream
• JustinTV
• UstreamTV
• Linqto (going live January 2011 – this should be a very popular webinar/livestream app!)

Live Chat

Along with offering impromptu or scheduled live video broadcasts, you could also offer live chat sessions with your fans. One such app I’ve tried and like is Clobby. The one downside of this app is the obnoxious banner ad at the top of the chatroom as you can see in the screenshot below. However, simply scroll the page down enough to hide the banner while chatting.

Clobby - Facebook live chat app

Whenever you open your chatroom, you can publish an announcement to your Fan page wall, which of course goes out in the stream and fans start coming over to chat. Publish a tweet as well to get even more people in the chatroom! You could host a regular live chat for your fans; I suggest capturing the chat stream with an app like ScreenFlow for Mac or Camtasia Studio for Mac or PC – that way, you have an archive to refer to.

For a more upscale chat room, see Involver‘s premium Facebook Connect Chat app. [UPDATE: 12/21/10 - this app is not displayed on Involver's website but IS available if you contact them.]

FAQs

If you find yourself continually answering the same questions for your clients and community, be sure to compile a Frequently Asked Questions section – the simple FAQ Page app allows you to have an FAQ tab on your Fan page that you can direct fans to when answering questions on your wall. A couple of things to note about this app: you can’t reorder the questions once inserted, so you may wish to compile your FAQs and all their answers in a separate document before pasting each one in. Also, it would be great if each question had its own unique URL so you could just share the link in answer to questions on your wall, but this isn’t the case.

FAQ Facebook app

Polls and Quizzes

For a poll or quiz app to work well, you want your fans to quickly and easily participate and for that activity to spark more engagement and visibility. If users have to jump through extra hoops to participate, they’ll likely just move on. This screenshot shows the Fan Appz poll app live on the Family Guy Fan page – I like how the app provides the option for voters to share (on their personal profiles) and also to share on their Fan pages!

FanAppz.com Poll app for Facebook

Some choices include (free and paid):

• Poll
• FanAppz Polls and Quizzes
• Widgetbox Poll app
• Involver’s Poll app

Contests and Promotions

Facebook’s rules around contests, drawings, competitions and sweepstakes are rigorous. Though many Facebook users are either unaware of the rules or choose to ignore them, I personally feel it’s not worth the risk to administer a promotion of any kind that doesn’t adhere to Facebook’s rules. In one fell swoop, you could lose your carefully built Fan page.

Facebook Promotions - Target example

The safest way to run any kind of contest or drawing on your Fan page is to use a third-party app such as:

• WildFire
• Fanappz
• Vitrue
• BuddyMedia
• Votigo
• ContextOptional
• BulbStorm
• NorthSocial
• Momentus Media
• Friend2Friend
• Strutta

Apps for Local Businesses

With the boom of LBS (Location-based Services), local business have more ways to integrate social and mobile media than ever before. Why not show off your Foursquare customer check-ins with an app on your Fan page?

Plus, be sure to claim your Facebook Place page: just search for your own business name on Facebook and look for the link at the foot of the Place page that says “Is this your business?” Once claimed, you’ll have the opportunity to merge your Place page with your Fan page. The resulting new page looks rather different, so think carefully about this. (For examples of merged pages, take a look at Iron Horse Vineyards and The Ellen Show).

• Foursquare Place Widget – see screenshot below
• Yelp Reviews by North Social
• Store Locator by Involver
• Facebook Places and Deals

Foursquare Place Widget - Facebook app

Appointment Scheduling

Make it super-easy for your Facebook fans, clients and prospects to book time with you. Add a tab synched with your appointment scheduling platform of choice. Remember, each tab has its own unique URL; you can easily direct your fans to your appointment tab.

• Schedulicity app (requires a Schedulicity account)
• Genbook BookNow! app (requires a Genbook account)

Schedulicity app

Contact Forms

Ideally, you have your own email marketing service provider as outlined in the next section. However, perhaps you wish to get started with a simple contact form on your Facebook page. Here are a few options:

• Contact Me

ContactMe app

Embed on an FBML tab:

• Response-O-Matic
• JotForm
• Allforms

See this helpful post by Tim Ware at HyperArts with a review and tutorial on JotForm and Allforms.

Email Marketing Apps

Your Facebook Fan page can be a tremendous source of traffic and a means to collect email addresses of your fans. Plus, some email marketing service providers have a feature that allows you to post your latest enewsletter to your Fan page. Check out any of the following:

• Mailchimp
• Constant Contact
• Nutshell Mail
• Delivra via TabSite integration. (See Delivra on Facebook)
• AWeber

NutshellMail - Facebook integration

Ecommerce Apps – Sell Products on Your Page

Many Facebook page owners often ask me if it’s okay to put up “Buy now” buttons and actually try to make sales directly from their Fan pages. I say “Go for it!!” If your fans are already spending time on your page learning about you and your products and services, you just never know when someone might be ready to buy from you. There are a few choices for adding a shopping cart tab to your fan page, including:

• Ecwid – free, run your own store, mirrored on many sites
• Payvment
• ShopTab
• VendorShop [UPDATE: added 12/21/10. Thanks to Krishna De for the tip + review.]
• OWJO [UPDATE: added 12/21/10. Thanks to Krishna De for the tip + review.]

Ecwid - Ecommerce app

See also this related blog post on Social Media Examiner: How to Sell Products via Your Facebook Page.

What do you think? Do you use any of these apps?  What has been your experience?  Also, have I missed any Facebook page apps you’ve tried successfully?  Please add your comments in the section below.

There are a lot of obvious elements you need to include to make a blog reader-friendly: quality, compelling content, good navigation, a contact page, an about page, focus and clarity about the subject of the blog… and there’s a lot of not-so-obvious or overlooked things that can really help make a blog stand out if they’re implemented.

While I do have my own list of do’s and don’ts included, I decided to get input from other smart, savvy bloggers. I posted a request on LinkedIn Answers and received many great do’s and don’ts. I’ve grouped the tips into five categories: Planning, Content, Design, Marketing and Engagement.

#1: Planning Your Business Blog

Do: Know your “Big Why” – Why are you in business? What is your purpose and ultimate goal for serving others? Clarity about your purpose, your goals, your ideal client and how you transform people’s lives will help guide all the content on your business blog.

Do: Know what you mean when you say successful. Are you trying to get more sales? Develop relationships? Inform current customers? Having a specific goal for your blog will shape the rest of your strategy. From Cordelia Blake

Do: Keyword research before starting a blog. First, compile a list of keywords (and, more importantly, keyword phrases) you think your business should rank for. Then, go to Google Keyword tool and type in those phrases to find out how many actual searches are done per month. You would be surprised how different Google’s list may turn out from your own. Use the list Google suggests as your starting point. From Boris Mahovac

Use the Google Keyword Tool to find keywords that have a large number of searches.

Do: Define your target audience and develop a content strategy that they will find interesting, entertaining or informative. Don’t focus too closely on product. As a Twitter friend once said, “If you make dog food, don’t talk about dog food, talk about dogs.” From Heidi Cool

Do: Give it time. It takes a while to build real relationships. From Christopher Gronlund

Don’t: Hide the author of the blog. Make sure you have a real-live person behind the blog. Add his or her photo, name and role in the company. It’s OK to outsource to get help, but for the most authentic connection, have a real employee available to guide, answer questions and provide a true look inside the organization. Even if you only have a few people in your company, this is vitally important. From Phil Gerbyshak

#2: Your Blog Content

Do: Be real.

Don’t: Be stuffy, dull and pompous or use bizspeak jargon. A blog isn’t a lecture hall or a billboard (i.e., one-way or solely self-promotional communication), but is ideally a place for people who are hungry for good information to find you and start to see you as a reliable and trustworthy resource. From Caitlin Kelly

Do: Find an optimal posting schedule that works for you. The more you post on your blog, the more traffic you’ll attract. But more than frequency, focus on posting quality content consistently and constantly.

Do: Establish an editorial calendar that helps you plan for future articles and topics. Set reasonable deadlines. If you know you can’t publish daily, don’t establish that as your goal.

Don’t: Publish junk just to keep up with your calendar. It’s better to miss a post than to post gibberish. (Heidi Cool)

Do: Keep the Four E’s in mind when writing your blog posts: Educate, Entertain, Engage and Enrich. Mix it up to ensure your message is delivered in the way that your ideal reader wants to consume it.

Do: Create Scannable Content. People have different reading patterns on the web than they do on the printed page. They tend to scan down web pages rather than read every word. So give them what they want! Break up your content with shorter paragraphs, headings and bullets. Add images. Incorporate video. From Chris Cree

Do: Create compelling, keyword-rich titles that address your audience’s needs. From Rich Brooks

Do: Use a variety of post types. Some posts can be a quick paragraph, while others are a deep dive into an important issue. Posts can be based around a video, or based around text content. If you mix things up you’ll keep the blog interesting, expand your list of post ideas and fight the tendency for blogger burnout. From Kyle Deming

Don’t: Get too self-promotional. At least 80% of your content should focus on helping your audience. (Rich Brooks)

#3: Blog Design

Do: Blog on your own domain, period. It should also be under “yourdomain.com/blog” subdirectory rather than “blog.yourdomain.com”. This lends some of the search engine goodwill earned by your blog to your root domain. From Scott Allen. (Just about everyone made this recommendation.)

Do: Customize your templates and menus to make it easy for readers to explore page articles. Make good use of categories and tags. (Heidi Cool)

Do: Give your blog readers the tools to amplify your message to their own communities. Have retweet/tweet buttons, Facebook Like button, Digg, StumbleUpon and other relevant social sharing buttons on your blog posts. This falls under marketing and engagement as well. When designing your blog, make sure you include plugins and widgets that can support spreading your content far and wide.

Don’t: Hide author, contact, and subscription information. Make sure you have pages that are easy to find in the navigation so your reader can find out more about you and your company and can contact you with questions and feedback.

Make it easy for your audience to connect with you.

Do build an opt-in mailing list and autoresponder. Don’t rely solely on an RSS feed for your readers to get your blog updates. Most people do know what an RSS feed is; they do know how to opt in to get email. I see this mistake on 90% of the blogs I review. Check out Feedblitz, Feedburner and AWeber for email delivery of your blog content.

#4: Marketing Your Blog

Do: Build time into your schedule to market your blog. You’ve got to put some effort into steering people to your blog posts so that they actually find the great content you’re creating. (Chris Cree)

Do: Automate syndication of your blog posts to your social profiles. Make sure your posts are showing up on your Facebook page, Twitter stream and LinkedIn profile, at minimum.

Do: Find the right balance of keywords. Keywords are important for improving the ranking of your blog in search engines and for increasing visibility and readership. However, more is not always better. You want your blog post to read like a conversation you’re having with a person face to face. From Emily Madsen

Do: Repurpose your blog content in multiple formats and syndicate it on other content-sharing sites. Recreate your content in audio and video formats in order to leverage your time and extend your reach on the web.

#5: Engaging Your Audience

Do: Make time to respond to all of the comments you receive. A primary purpose for business blogging is to build a strong relationship with your audience. When you reply to their comments, your readers will appreciate your personal interest and this will build credibility and trust in your expertise. From Sydni Craig-Hart

Do: Spend as much time engaging as you do creating content. Some of that can be on your own blog replying to comments, but a substantial portion of it MUST be on other blogs in your industry. Competitors are a touchy situation—you really have to take it on a case-by-case basis. But for vendors, clients, industry associations, industry thought leaders/authors/speakers, you should definitely identify all of them and be engaging on a regular basis. (Scott Allen)

Don’t: Disable or heavily censor blog comments. Commenting is one of the best ways to engage and you may get called out if you filter out all negative comments. Use negative comments as an opportunity to respond graciously. (Kyle Deming)

Do: Have a clear plan in place for handling criticism and negative comments. Take the high road and respond to these comments carefully and politely. (Heidi Cool)

Don’t: Take for granted you know what your audience needs. Survey and ask them what three things they struggle with in their business. This one exercise could have you supplied with relevant blog posts for weeks. But also, you’ll be providing great information to your readers to keep them coming back for more. From Terri Brooks

Create simple surveys with SurveyMonkey.com.

Do: Be as authentic as you possibly can. People know when they’re being fed a party line or propaganda. We know when we’re being marketed at or PRed at. Be as real as the circumstances allow. From Erica Friedman

What would you add? Do you have some business blogging do’s and don’ts that are not covered here? Leave your comments and ideas in the box below.

SmartBrief recently partnered with Summus Limited to survey more than 6,000 of its readers across a variety of industries.

They benchmarked and measured the state of social media usage among businesspeople. The data identified eight prevalent trends that give great insight into the social media behaviors, beliefs and challenges of the majority of businesses today.

#1: Companies Are Still New to Social Media

Most companies (66.5%) have adopted social media in the past 18 months. About half of the companies reported they’ve only been using social media for about a year and about 20% reported they’ve adopted social media practices in the past 13 to 18 months.

The graph above is a great reminder that most businesses are still very new to the social media arena.

#2: Businesses Focus in on the “Big 5″

Companies are focusing their energies on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and blogs. Data suggests that companies focus their time and efforts on the “big 5″ because they’re able to find their customers there.

Unfortunately companies may be missing out on valuable niche groups by not extending their reach to the less-popular social sites. Flickr, for example, has a large audience even though it’s not as popular as Facebook or YouTube.

Based on the graph above, Facebook is the leader in social media platforms; however, Twitter is close behind in the minds of business professionals.

#3: The 2-Year Confidence Mark

It takes time for companies to incorporate social media effectively. The data identified a 2-year mark where businesses begin to gain confidence in their social media activity.

More than 25% of the companies using social media for 2 or more years say the tools and platforms have been fully integrated into their business model. In addition, more than 50% say they have a well-developed or fully developed social media strategy.

Note the 2-year mark in the graph above. This is where the majority of companies start feeling more confident in their social media strategies.

#4: Companies Are Broadcasting Versus Connecting

Brand-building is currently the primary purpose for business social media usage. However, the research showed that most companies are using social media to broadcast information versus using it for two-way communication.

This is unfortunate. Many companies are missing the opportunity to build stronger relationships by listening to their clients or customers, instead of doing all the talking.

As indicated in the chart above, the most popular social media goal among the respondents was to "increase awareness and interaction with our brand."

Unfortunately, most companies still continue to broadcast messages more than they use social media tools to engage and connect with their customers and prospects. Perhaps this will begin to shift as companies become more confident in their social media activity.

#5: Businesses Turn to Internal Sources for Social Media Support

Communications, advertising and marketing agencies are the leading adopters of social media. However, an interesting finding of the study showed that agencies are not the preferred source for social media support. Most of the companies surveyed have opted to create and execute their social media strategy using internal resources.

The marketing, communications and advertising agencies were the clear early adopters of social media, but businesses have been reluctant to turn to these agencies for social media support.

The resistance to look to an agency for support may be a partial reason for the 2-year "ramp-up period" highlighted in the chart above.

Perhaps the learning curve could be shortened if companies looked to the experts and early adopters for support as they build their overall strategy.

#6: Social Media Adoption Obstacles

Lack of management support and confidentiality concerns top the list of obstacles to social media adoption. There was a clear lack of management support for those companies who have not yet adopted social media. 33% of the respondents pointed out they weren’t the decision-makers and 14.7% stated “management resistance” as an obstacle to social media adoption. To add to this, 33.1% pointed to “confidentially issues” as a reason for not adopting social media.

As we’ve seen in numerous studies this last year, companies are still struggling with employee social media usage and how to manage it internally.

In this chart, it's interesting how 33.3% of the respondents saw their lack of decision-making ability as an obstacle for social media integration in their business. Likely, the majority of the people responsible for social media management are not in a traditional management role.

#7: Lack of Social Media Measurement

Less than 15% of the businesses using social media are measuring return on investment. Over 33% are not measuring return on investment at all. It seems that many businesses struggle with identifying what to measure, how to measure and how to interpret the data when they are able to gather results.

Among those businesses that are measuring their social media activity, the focus is on usage and incoming traffic. Interestingly, most are not using traditional business metrics.

As this chart shows, only 14.7% of respondents answered "yes" to the question "Is your organization measuring your return on social media investment?" This shows that businesses know they should be using social media, but they don't necessarily understand why.

#8: Companies Lack Confidence in Their Social Media Strategy

While 60% of respondents say their companies are using social media, there’s low confidence in their social media strategies. One of the most interesting findings in this report was how the respondents rated their social media strategies. Only 14.2% described their strategies as “very effective,” while a low 7.3% described them as “very revenue generating” on average.

Based on this graph, it's clear that most of the companies surveyed didn't have confidence in their social media strategy.

Based on the fact that most companies are not tracking their success (as seen above) and most are trying to build their social media strategy internally, it makes sense that most are lacking confidence in their overall success in the first few years.

The full “State of Social Media for Business 2010” is available here from SmartBrief.

Now it’s your turn. Where does your company stand versus the social media benchmarks mentioned above? Are you confident in your social media strategy? Share your experience and comments in the box below.

So he set up a Facebook fan page with the help of his parents. In just one week, he got more than 1,200 fans and raised $400!

“I can understand using Facebook for a fifth-grade science project,” I hear you saying. “But how do I use Facebook to market my business? I keep hearing that I should include social media in my marketing campaigns, but I don’t have a clue how to do that.”

You’ll be happy to hear that your clueless days are over.

A recent Nielsen report showed people spend 7 hours a month on Facebook, but only 2 hours a month on Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN.  That’s a huge opportunity.

One of the biggest names in Facebook marketing has written a Facebook marketing textbook just for you. Mari Smith partnered with Chris Treadaway to write Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day.

Yes! It’s another “Hour a Day” book. So you know you’ll be getting the equivalent of a college semester’s training in the privacy of your own home, at your own pace.

Facebook is every marketer’s dream, because in no other medium can you:

• Show your ad to 1,000 people for only 20 cents. Not 20 cents apiece, 20 cents total.
• Create lifelong fans of your business for only 27 cents per fan.
• Target divorced male executives between the ages of 40 and 55 who have an MBA from Harvard Business School and work at specific companies in Chicago.

Targeting Customers With Surgical Precision

You can target Facebook members by location, age, sex, education, language and even by their workplace. So you could target your ad to married men over 40 with a college degree who work for a particular company. You can throw in a couple of keywords that members list in their profiles to get even more specific.

And Facebook asks its members for a LOT of information! Not only gender, birth date and location, but also favorite TV shows, college major and even religious and political views!

“Facebook advertising is perhaps one of the most effective and inexpensive ways available to target specific people based on profile data that they have entered voluntarily,” write Smith and Treadaway.

But Facebook isn’t just about ads. And that’s just as well, because Facebook ads are the same, interruptive, “in-your-face” form of traditional advertising in a new medium. Many Facebook members may just ignore them.

“Although Facebook’s pay-per-click model of advertising offers competitive rates… Facebook users have been consistently obstinate when it comes to responding to advertising on its profile pages,” write Smith and Treadaway. “As an advertiser/marketer, Facebook has an extremely large, desirable audience that [has] refused to click ads.”

“Facebook members are typically not in the habit of clicking on ads,” say Paul Dunay and Richard Krueger in Facebook Marketing for Dummies. “They are on Facebook for social purposes, as opposed to browsing and discovery.”

Facebook Is More Than Just Ads

Fortunately, there’s a lot more you can do on Facebook than just running ad campaigns. But only if you follow the primary rule of social media marketing: Find your evangelists and then give them everything they need to help you market your business for free.

Before you even begin a social media marketing campaign, you need to answer the following questions:

• What is the goal of your social media campaign? Increased sales? Better customer service?
• How will you measure success? What metrics will you use?
• Do company executives view social media as a risk or an opportunity?
• Do you have employees who are interested in helping with the campaign?
• Can you provide enough interesting content on a regular basis to attract potential customers and keep them engaged?

And your company executives will have to answer the following questions:

• Should you promote your brand, your company or your products/services?
• Will you need a policy governing what information can be shared on social media?
• Will every update have to be approved in advance? By whom?
• Will you communicate directly with customers via social media?
• Will you manage the project internally or outsource it?

And this will be a team effort. No single person has all the skills necessary to run a large corporate social media marketing campaign. And the leader of the team has to be “one part visionary, one part marketer, and one part politician,” according to Smith and Treadaway.

Here are some Facebook metrics you can track:

• Number of new Facebook fans
• Number of wall updates/posts
• Number of likes and comments
• Number of customer interactions
• Amount of money spent on advertising
• Advertising cost per fan

This is just a taste of what you will find in Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day. The authors cover the gamut of Facebook marketing, beginning with Facebook basics and working through to Facebook analytics, Facebook Connect, and Facebook apps. They end the book with interviews from six industry experts who predict how Facebook may evolve.

If your prospective customers are spending more time on Facebook than any other site, shouldn’t you be there too?

Social Media Examiner gives this book a 5-star rating. Be sure to grab a copy if you want to master Facebook with only an hour a day.

Have you read the book?  Do you think Facebook will change the way businesses connect with customers? Please leave your comment in the box below.