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23rd
APR

Adding the Facebook Like Button To Your Site

Posted by cgseo under Social Media, Web Marketing

Adding the Facebook Like Button To Your Site This content from: Duct Tape Marketing Some pretty big changes are brewing over at Facebook and I’m working on a full coverage type of piece, but for today I wanted to jump in and cover one little change that makes some sense for you to consider right now. Facebook has changed the idea of becoming a fan to something a little less committed – Like. Now you can like or recommend a fan page to your friends. The net effect is the same as your choice to like something is noted on your wall. The big change is that Facebook wants you to start sharing your likes from anywhere on the web. Look for web publishers to start installing the FB like button on web sites, blog posts and in reference to individual items and products. The video below gives an overview of the Like button installation process. You can use the FB tool easily get started or, if you know a little HTML and FBML you can do a fair amount of integration. I’ve installed both the Like Box (over in the right sidebar) and the Like Button (in each post) The code that is generated from the FB like tool gives you some flexibility but will only link to the page you give it. If you want to add a button as I have in each post you need to edit the code URL to include the WordPress < ?php the_permalink() ?> code for each individual post. You can control some of what’s shown on a person’s wall when they click the like button by adding meta data to your page headers. Facebook is using the emerging Open Graph protocol to help this along. The image below is another implementation of the Like button related to a specific product. In this case the format include pictures and details about who likes the product. Image credit: Mark Zuckerberg – World Economic Forum Related Posts: Google Adds Wonderwheel Search Results Option Platforms Change, Marketing is the Same TweetDeck Adds Lists and LinkedIn How to Target GMail Users with Highly Relevant Ads Some Video Thoughts on Social Media Powered by Contextual Related Posts Like this post? Share it with others

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22nd
MAR

7 Insanely Useful Ways to Search Twitter for Marketing

Posted by cgseo under Social Media, Web Marketing

Share 7 Insanely Useful Ways to Search Twitter for Marketing This content from: Duct Tape Marketing This article originally appeared on American Express OPEN Forum and is one of the most retweeted articles I’ve ever written so I thought I would share it with you here. As a marketing tool Twitter gets much more interesting and useful when you can filter out 99% of the junk that doesn’t apply to your objectives and focus on the stuff that matters. The basic search.twitter.com functionality is fine for searching things that are being said about your search terms. The advanced search function offers more ways to slice and dice the stream, but still leaves some room for improvement as it only searches what’s being said and where. From a marketing standpoint who is saying it might be more useful. Now that the search engines are all pretty geeked up over real time search you can create some very powerful searches and alerts combining Google and Twitter. 1) Target by occupation Let’s say you have a business that sells an awesome service to attorneys. A simple search on Twitter will turn up thousands of mentions of the word attorney, but many of them will be from people talking about this or that attorney or the need to hire or not hire one. That’s probably not very helpful for your purposes. However, if you cruise over to Google and use a handful of operators from the Google shortcut library (more on that here) you can create a search that plows through Twitter and gives you a list of all the users that have the word “attorney” in their title (username and/or real name) – Click on this search phrase and see what happens – intitle:”attorney * on twitter” site:twitter.com – what you’ll find is a handy list of attorneys of one sort or another on Twitter. Without getting too technical, this search basically asks Google to look in the title attribute of profile pages on Twitter – obviously you can use any word to replicate this. The * tells Google to find the words “attorney on Twitter” without regard to order or other words – “on Twitter” appears in the title of every profile page so we need that term to make sure we search profile pages only. 2) Target by bio In some cases searching through the optional biographical information can be more helpful than the username or real name fields. Maybe you’re looking for a very specific term or some of the folks you are targeting only reference their profession in their bio. Google search to the rescue here again. This time add the intext attribute, the word bio and our key phrase to search bios – So a search for web designers would look like this – intext:”bio * web designer” site:twitter.com . When you look at this list you might notice that none of the people on the list would have been found by searching in their title, as in the first tip, for web designer. Try it both ways to test for best results. 3) Target by location Location search by itself is simple using the Twitter advanced search tool – if you want a list of people in Austin you would use this in Twitter – near:”Austin, TX” within:25mi and Twitter would use the location field to show you Austin Tweeters. But . . . let’s say you wanted to target salons in Austin or maybe the whole of Texas – it’s back to Google to mix and match – (intitle:”salon * on twitter” OR intext:”bio * salon”) intext:”location * TX” site:twitter.com – we search the title, bio and location to get a very targeted list of Salons in Texas on Twitter. Note the OR function for multiple queries. 4) New sign ups Another handy thing about using any of the searches above is that you can also use the exact operators to create Google Alerts . By going to Google and putting in your search string as described above you’ll get everything they have now, but by setting up an alert you’ll get an email or RSS alert when a new attorney (or whatever you’re targeting) joins Twitter – I can think of some powerful ways to reach out to that new person just trying to find some new friends! 5) Keep up on your industry Some of the best information shared on Twitter comes in the form of shared links. In other words people tweet out good stuff they find and point people to it using a link. I love to use a filtered Twitter search to further wade through research on entire industries, but reduce the noise by only following tweets that have links in them and eliminating retweets that are essentially duplicates – “small business” OR entrepreneur OR “start up” filter:links – this gets that job done and produces an RSS feed if I want to send it to Google Reader. Don’t forget the “quotation marks” around two or more word phrases or you will get every mention of small and business. 6) Competitive eavesdropping Lots of people set up basic searches to listen to what their competitors are saying and what others are saying about the competition. I would suggest you take it one step further and create and follow a search that also includes what the conversation they are having with the folks they communicate with – not just what people are saying about them, but to them and vice versa – from:comcastcares OR to:comcastcares . 7) Trending photos Photos have become very big on Twitter and the real time nature of the tool means photos show up there before they show up most anywhere. If you want to find an image related to a hot trend, or anything for that matter, simply put the search phase you have in mind follow by one of the more well known Twitter image uploading services such as TwitPic and you’ll get nothing but images. So, your search on Twitter might be – olympics twitpic OR ow.ly (You can add more photosharing sites to expand the search). There, Twitter just go way more interesting didn’t it? Related Posts: Mining Twitter with Google Turns Up Some Interesting Stuff A Practical Use for Twitter Twitter People Search is Back Adding search to your site Google Alerts Hack Powered by Contextual Related Posts Like this post? Share it with others

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16th
MAR

5 Ways to Use Social Media for Things You Are Already Doing

Posted by cgseo under Social Media, Web Marketing

5 Ways to Use Social Media for Things You Are Already Doing This content from: Duct Tape Marketing One of the biggest road blocks facing small businesses when addressing social media is the question of return on investment. With so little time devote to what’s crying out to be done, adding something else or something new like social media can feel like a real burden. Sometimes the only way to rationalize and prioritize something new is to understand the benefits in relation to everything else your doing and take a new view based on that understanding. So much of what’s written on social media amounts to lists of things you should do, get on twitter, blog, create a Facebook fan page, and not enough on why you might consider doing it. While all those tactics may indeed be wise, I would like suggest a number of ways to use those actions to do a better or more efficient job doing things you’re already (or should be) doing. Start to think in terms of doing more with less effort, not simply doing more. If I can let small business owners get a glimpse of social media through this lens, they might just decide to go a little deeper. Here are five ways to look at it. 1) Follow up with prospects I love using social media tools as a way to follow-up with prospects you might meet out there in the real world. So you go to a Chamber event and meet someone that has asked you to follow-up. Traditionally, you might send an email a week later or call them up and leave a voice mail. What if instead you found them on LinkedIn, asked to be connected and then shared an information rich article that contained tips about the very thing you chatted about at the Chamber mixer. Then you offered to show them how to create a custom RSS feed to get tons of information about their industry and their competitors. Do you think that next meeting might get started a little quicker towards your objectives? I sure do. 2) Stay top of mind with customers Once someone becomes a customer it’s easy to ignore them, assuming they will call next time they need something or, worse yet, assuming they understand the full depth and breadth of your offerings and will chime in when they have other needs. Staying in front of your customers and continuing to educate and upsell them is a key ingredient to building marketing momentum and few businesses do it well. This is an area where a host of social media tools can excel. A blog is a great place to put out a steady stream of useful information and success stories. Encouraging your customers to subscribe and comment can lead to further engagement. Recording video stories from customers and uploading them to YouTube to embed on your site can create great marketing content and remind your customer why they do business with you. Facebook Fan pages can be used as a way to implement a client community and offer education and networking opportunities online. 3) Keep up on your industry Keeping up with what’s happening in any industry is a task that is essential these days. With unparalleled access to information many clients can learn as much or more about the products and solutions offered by a company as those charged with suggesting those products and solutions. You better keep up or you risk becoming irrelevant. Of course I could extend this to keeping up with what your customers, competitors, and key industry journalists are doing as well. Here again, new monitoring services and tools steeped in social media and real time reporting make this an easier task. Subscribing to blogs written by industry leaders, competitors and journalists and viewing new content by way of a tool such as Google Reader allows you to scan the day’s content in one place. Setting up Google Alerts and custom Twitter Searches ( see more about how to do this ) or checking out paid monitoring services such as Radian6 or Trackur allows you to receive daily email reports on the important mentions of industry terms and people so you are up to the minute in the know. (Of course, once you do this you can teach your customers how to do it and make yourself even more valuable to them – no matter what you sell.) 4) Provide a better customer experience It’s probably impossible to provide too much customer service, too much of a great experience, but you can go nuts trying. Using the new breed of online tools you can plug some of the gaps you might have in providing customer service and, combined with your offline touches, create an experience that no competitor can match. While some might not lump this tool into social media, I certainly think any tool that allows you to collaborate with and serve your customers qualifies. Using an online project management tool such as Central Desktop allows you to create an entire customer education, orientation, and handbook kind of training experience one time and then roll it out to each new customer in a high tech client portal kind of way. This approach can easily set you apart from anyone else in your industry and provide the kind of experience that gets customers talking. 5) Network with potential partners Building a strong network of strategic marketing partners is probably the best defense against any kind of economic downturn. One of the surest ways to attract potential partners is to build relationships through networking. Of course you know that, but you might not be viewing this kind of networking as a social media function. If you identify a potential strategic partner, find out if they have a blog and start reading and commenting. Few things will get you noticed faster than smart, genuine blog comments. Once you establish this relationship it might make sense to offer a guest blog post. If your use a CRM tool (and you should) you’ve probably noticed that most are moving to add social media information to contact records, add your potential partners social media information and you will learn what’s important to them pretty quickly. If you know how to set up a blog already, offer to create a blog of network partners so each of you can write about your area of expertise and create some great local SEO for the group. So, you see, you don’t have to bite into the entire social media pie all at once. Find a tool, a technique, a tactic that makes your life easier today and provides more value for partners, prospects and customers and you’ll be on the path to getting some real ROI on your social media investment. What social media tactics have you discovered that allow you to do more of something you’re already doing? Related Posts: Small Businesses Will Simply Become More Naturally Social 7 Simple Truths of Social Media Marketing 5 Tips for Getting More From Your Blog 5 Ways to Share Content to Create Referrals Create a Journalist Listening Station Powered by Contextual Related Posts Like this post? Share it with others

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15th
MAR

Google’s Forecast for Business Apps Is Mostly Cloudy

Posted by cgseo under Social Media, Web Marketing

Google’s Forecast for Business Apps Is Mostly Cloudy This content from: Duct Tape Marketing At the end of last year I wrote a prediction piece for AMEX OPENForum suggesting that 2010 would be the year that small businesses move more computing power online or, using the more trendy term, to the cloud. Google and Microsoft are both working very hard to create adoption of online versions of the most commonly used software tools such as spreadsheets, word processors and databases. In my mind Google just took a giant leap forward with the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace . The Apps Marketplace functions much like the iPhone or Android applications marketplaces, but all of the apps found here integrate in one way of another with the existing Google Apps suite of tools. With the additional functionality that can come with integration of tools to do just about anything look for Google Apps to take a giant leap in adoption from both enterprise and small business. Combine Google Apps and the souped up functionality available in the Apps Marketplace with GMail and Google Calendar and you now have the ability easily run you entire company with software and services in the cloud. Setting up your domain with Google Apps for domains , at $50 per year per user, allows you to create custom white label versions of the Google Apps for a seamless branded experience. Below are few examples of the types of applications found in the Apps Marketplace. Time Bridge – makes scheduling of meetings with various staff or even outside vendors much easier. Expensify – Easy expense tracking and reporting Survey Monkey – popular survey tool integrates into Google Apps Cordys Process Factory – helps users of Google Apps to create workflows, automate business processes TripIt – Share travel details such as hotels and flights with staff You’ll also find offerings from familiar names such as Intuit, FreshBooks, Vertical Response, MailChimp and Zoho. The online application space is getting very interesting and it still has a long way to go, but the near future have just been defined. Related Posts: Google Apps for Your Domain In Search of the Softwareless Office Get Your Google Alerts via RSS The Perfect Small Business Collaboration Tool Original iPhone Users Feel the Love Too Powered by Contextual Related Posts Like this post? Share it with others

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9th
MAR

Is Google Local Search For Sale?

Posted by cgseo under Social Media, Web Marketing

Share Is Google Local Search For Sale? This content from: Duct Tape Marketing I’ve always assumed that Google Maps (and other local search directories) would build up the free local directory, drive other for pay players out, get us hooked on their service, and then start charging to be listed in the prime spot. In this case the prime spot for local search is the Google Seven box shown below for a search for “Attorney Houston, Tx” Click to enlarge Something else you might notice is that while optimizing your web site to appear in the lucky seven box is a great idea, the majority of these results are sponsored. That’s right, Google is playing with selling enhanced listings in several cities and looks to be headed towards paid listings in local search. At first this may not seem like such a bad thing to those on the outside looking in, but it may price some folks out of yet another organic search option. Related Posts: Google Adds Local Search to Mobile Phones Google Local Finally Adds Ability To List Your Local Business Google Maps expands local view Yahoo Adds Local Featured Listings Where In The World Is Local Search? Powered by Contextual Related Posts Like this post? Share it with others

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