What: Beyond the Hype: How to Profitably Use Social Media Tools to Grow Your Business
When: June 10, 2009 - 2:00pm EDT
Where: right on your computer.

Click here to register; original press release from Small Business Trends is here.

“Make Your Website Work for You” — Expert panelists give tips on how to maximize and get the most out of your website.

When: Tuesday, April 28, 2009, 8am-10am
Where: Samsung Experience, Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, (3rd floor), New York
(click here for a map)

Topics of discussion will include:

• Free web analytics tools and how to use them
• Free tools to insert video, photos and audio onto your site
• What your website needs to have to for 2009

Panelists include:

• Paul Burani, Clicksharp Marketing
• Melanie Gass, CenterPoint Solution, LLC
• Court Cunningham, Yodle

Agenda:
8:00-8:30: Networking and light breakfast
8:30: Panel discussion

Registration is $10 for MCC members, and $20 for non-members.
Click here to register.

This event is sponsored by CenterPoint Solution & pattiedesign, and will be moderated by Philip Kent Kiracofe, Chief Technologist, Coldwell Banker Previews International.

Click below for a video previewing of some of the fundamental concepts behind Google Analytics:

So around this time last week, it became apparent that the Baltimore Sun was playing around with page titles, trying to make the same page look like multiple pages in order to increase search engine exposure and, potentially, artificially inflate advertising inventory. And over at Search Engine Journal, Loren Baker was all over it like Tommie Harris on a scrawny quarterback:

You see, even though Hollywood has taught us that man can triumph over machine, in the case of search engines you’ve got a unique paradox — the machines themselves are created, maintained, and continually improved by some of the brightest technological minds on the planet.

But search engines are smart enough to see that the rest of the page showed little or no changes, and using whatever review process they use (likely some combination of automatic flagging and followup manual review), they slapped back by docking the Baltimore Sun in its Google News rankings.

All because someone thought they could pull a fast one. And if I was a betting man, I’d say there’s a good chance their domain will linger on a “questionable” list for some time.

Was it worth it?

“Web Prospecting – Low/No Cost Practical Tools to Grow Your Business”

Hosted by Samsung Experience
Sponsored by Administaff

On the agenda:

“In 2007 just over half of Internet users (56%) participated in some form of social media. One year later, that figure has risen to 75%.” (Source: Forrester Research)
Effectively Using Social Networking Sites
Paul Burani, Clicksharp Marketing

“Only 8% of search engine users click past the third page of search results.” (Source: iProspect)
Website Optimization tips
Leo Legaspi, Legaspi & Carlson, LLP

“14 million - for free! [the number of US business in the two
primary directory databases at SIBL].”
Using Library Lists
Ken Johnson, New York Public Library

“For every $1 spent on email marketing, there is a $47.25 return on investment.”
Email Marketing
Wendi Caplan, Constant Contact

When: Thursday, December 18, 2008, 8-10am
Where: Samsung Experience, Time Warner Center
Address: 10 Columbus Circle, 3rd floor, New York City (map below)
Contact: Luna at events@manhattancc.org, (212) 473-7805
Fee: $10 MCC members, $20 non-members

Network/Lite breakfast till 8:30 am — event starts promptly at 8:30am and ends promptly at 9:30am. Afterwards, network and explore the Samsung Experience space and hands-on experience of their products.

View Larger Map

But we’re all on Facebook.

It looks like Matt Dickman at Techno//Marketer has been celebrating the official eclipse of Facebook’s 100 million user mark… with some hard-nosed number crunching.  In his e-book The Face of Facebook, you’ll find a staggering array of metrics that seem to elude general fact-finding (the data is from September of 2008).  Some are obvious: the US has the most registered users (approximately 29 million Americans on Facebook).

Others are a little less obvious, and if you look at some of these cross-eyed, they really raise some interesting questions about Facebook as a platform.

A) What country has the largest share of citizens on Facebook?

1. Canada
2. Norway
3. United Kingdom (U.K.)
4. Australia
5. Chile
6. Denmark
7. Hong Kong
8. Iceland
9. Sweden
10. Singapore

You generally expect to see the Scandinavian countries turning up for metrics like these… but Canada?  I’d be willing to lump them in with the Nordic region and call Facebook a hockey-centric platform, but then the Brits and Aussies had to spoil the show.  And then Chile comes in out of left field and shows us that Latin America can be at the technological forefront as well.  Someone should control for this data against demography, to see how this list turns out after you balance for age distribution among populations.  Any takers?  Winner gets a York Peppermint Patty.

B) What country is growing the fastest on Facebook?

1. Italy
2. Uruguay
3. Belgium
4. Slovakia
5. Slovenia
6. Serbia
7. Denmark
8. Switzerland
9. Bosnia
10. Chile

Lately there are a lot of reasons to bet against Italy when it comes to innovation (I am an Italian national, if I can admit it, I hope we all can).  So this was kind of a surprise.  But if you piece together fragments of the former Yugoslavia, it becomes pretty obvious: prowess in football (or what Americans call soccer) is clearly driving growth on Facebook.  (Of course perennial hall monitor Switzerland crashes that party.)

Interesting to note that in terms of volume of users added in the 30 days leading up to this research, Chile was #1 and out of nowhere, France at #2.  But then step back and it all makes sense: France is still stewing from the shaming of its country following a dramatic loss to Italy in the 2006 World Cup final, and this is payback.  Personally, I’d rather have the Cup.

3) What age group is growing the fastest in the U.S.?

Let’s get serious for a second; this is one thought ought to make any marketer perk up.  We’ll dispense with the drama and just say it: the 36-40 age segment is growing the fastest on Facebook.  If you want to broaden that a bit, it’s really the 31-50 crowd that is adopting it the fastest.  A social network where you can sell to both baby boomers and teeny boppers?  I’m not sure Doc Brown ever made this prediction in Back to the Future… but if he had, he would have been right (like everything else).

Great Scott! Facebook didn’t

look like this in 1955!

There’s a ton of other information in Matt’s ebook (one more time, that’s The Face of Facebook), and I recommend you download it and read it when you’ve got time to really process what’s inside.  There’s a health appendix to stimulate your inner nerd — and also a handy guide for kicking off your first Facebook ad campaign, if you’re new to the platform.  (This will nicely complement the resources made available by Facebook itself, starting with with Facebook Ad Help Center.)

Have fun with all this.

Chances are, if you’re the type of person who likes to be informed — which characterizes just about all of us who use search engines with any regularity — than the less you know about something going on in the world around you, the more likely you are to fire up your go-to informational resource… and start demanding some answers.

Back in August, two-time Republican Presidential candidate John McCain jolted the country out of a sleepy summer daze with his announcement of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Most of America collectively blurted out, “Who?!?!” And many went to Google to find out more.

As soon as the news of her nomination broke, Sarah Palin went from an unknown to a sensation. (click graph to enlarge)

According to its proud creator, Google Trends is a tool from Google Labs that shows the most popularly searched terms from the beginning of 2004 to now. It has evolved over time to depict these terms in a visually-friendly format which allows the user to spot correlations and make an educated guess or two about their meaning. As of today’s writing, a Nov. 5th story that ran in the Intellectual Conservative entitled “Sarah Palin 2012″ reminded the electorate of a potential future run at the White House, and fired up enough people to give her another little boost (that’s the “F” flag in the graph above). Sometimes these change over time, but you can see what the full dashboard looks like for the whole timeline. Note the interesting trend since Election Day: news volume down sharply, while search volume still showing signs of life. Looks like the news media may have forgotten her, but her fans have not.

This is no passive trend, either. Last October, southern California fell prey to its usual deluge of wildfires. The Orange County Register plotted major fires on a Google map, serving both for public awareness of the hazard, as well as helping them to mobilize fire-fighting resources where they were most needed. Search Engine Land picked up on a bunch of other area organizations doing the same thing.

Watch out for that San Fernando Valley, it gets hot down there!

Why is all this important? Think about the role search engines are playing in our society:

1. Virtually everyone on the internet uses a search engine with regularity.
2. The range of behaviors modeled in search engines is becoming more diverse.
3. Search engines, and other digital media, are awakening the general public to the limitations of traditional media. (The Virginia Tech massacre of 2007 comes to mind.)

In other words, it’s not just all about business. It’s not about the ads on the right hand side of Google, or the popups in Facebook, or the email spam offering Free Shipping for the holidays. All this technophilia goes to prosocial applications as well.

And while you’re thinking about that… consider this. Earlier this week, on their official company blog, Google made this announcement (read the official release):

Looks like both even some of the red states are singin’ the blues during flu season. (source: Google Flu Trends)

“Our team found that certain aggregated search queries tend to be very common during flu season each year. We compared these aggregated queries against data provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and we found that there’s a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week. As a result, if we tally each day’s flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness.”

Translation — “When people come down with the flu, they seem to be going online and searching for treatments and cures. By tracking the movement of this search engine activity, we can see where it’s spreading, how fast it’s moving, where we need to allocate resources, and much more.”

There you have it, folks. From Alaska to Maine, with a detour in Los Angeles and probably a million places in between… Google is reinventing the search engine to do more than just sell products. But I’m guessing no one will complain if the local pharmacy up in Maine loads up on cold and flu medicine.

Do you remember the first time you ever heard the word Internet? For me, it was 1993 — I was watching the news on one of the major networks, and the anchor invited viewers to provide feedback over the phone or by “logging on to the Internet.” On the screen, they showed an email address.

That was fifteen years ago, when to most people, the Internet and email were one of the same. Nowadays, everybody is talking about Web 2.0 and social media, all the new ways in which people communicate. Email seems to be taking a backseat.

But the fact remains that virtually everybody on the Internet has at least one email address, and they check it with regularity. It’s a captive audience, and — when treated right — a lurative. Maybe that’s why we saw a study by Datran earlier this year indicating that four out of five marketing executives expect further increases in email marketing budgets.

Here are just three of the reasons why it would be premature to discount email marketing in favor of social media.

• Control over your content. When you’re running your own email campaigns, you make every decision on the look and feel of your communications (and get more value out of your copywriters). In search and social media, your branding is largely at the whim of the parent sites. There are many examples out there of well-designed email marketing — I particularly like FileMaker’s emails. (This email features Bento, which incidentally is a fine product to help manage home-grown email campaigns.)
• Simplified analytics. Even if you’re not using a service like Constant Contact (which offers built-in tools to analyze open rates and click-through), you’ve got options. With a Google Analytics account and Google’s URL Builder, it is very easy to segment your different end-user groups. For example: if you put out a press release and want to alert all your clients, partners, as well as industry professionals, you can create unique tracking URLs for each, so that your Analytics will clearly differentiate them by all the essential metrics: bounce rate, pages per visit, navigation path, and more.
• Email and social media are not all that different. Think about what make social media unique: refined targeting, direct feedback loops, facilitated conversation, latent viral potential. Ever send a customer an email? Ever receive a chain letter? It’s not all that different.

Here’s the icing on the cake: because email as a communications medium is much more mature than most of its alternatives, most marketers of growing businesses are likely to have more experience and a bigger audience on the email channel.

You’re invited to another Taste of Technology (remember the Social Media event from September?)

Email Marketing: Boosting Profits and Getting Closer to Customers (read more)

When: October 20, 2008 (630-830pm)
Where: Samsung Experience, Time Warner Center
Address: 10 Columbus Circle, 3rd floor, New York City

Tickets are $49, but thanks to the event’s organizer, Ramon Ray, Clicksharp is offering complimentary tickets to the first ten respondents, and a $10 discount to everyone else.

Meanwhile, here are some other valuable resources on email marketing:

• Email Insider: a MediaPost blog with several great columnists
• Campaign Monitor: more of a design standards and best practices angle on email marketing
• Marketing Sherpa: look no further for good case studies
• AWeber: yes, it’s riddled with sales pitches, but there’s a decidedly small business tone which you’ll appreciate.

Our 2004 presidential election marked a major coming out party for YouTube, which turned grassroots campaigning on its head (think that had anything to do with their eventual 2005 acquisition by Google?).

In 2008, Twitter is well-placed to leave the same mark. The #Debate08 topic was active and engaging, with real time feedback pouring in from all angles and spin cycles. Amidst all the action, a third figure emerged. We’re not talking about Joad Cressbeckler.

We’re talking about Popeye’s Chicken.

With the candidates jockeying left and right, Twitterers across the globe chattering back and forth, Popeye’s came through with a dose of wisdom:

Then, after each candidate lauded himself for being the only one to truly forge bipartisan consensus, it was Popeye’s who was reaching across the aisle:

Obama and McCain continued, landing some blows and dodging others. Not to be outdone, Popeye’s delivers the knockout punch:

Currently Popeye’s only has 367 followers on Twitter. Will tonight’s performance boost sales? Not likely, in any noticeable way. This is branding reincarnated: the trivial cost of generating a bit of content today will pay off a hundred fold down the line:

• A few lucky people will always remember Popeye’s playing a unique role in the discussion
• A few others will tell their friends and colleagues the next day
• A few marketing executives at Popeye’s now have a better handle on what is still an emerging technology

Social media lesson learned: in this day and age, it’s still acceptable for the uninvited to show up in conversations where they would previously not belong — provided they add value and make themselves memorable.

Chicken and electoral politics? Change is truly upon us.

In case you missed it, here’s the presentation (you can also download a PDF):

Here are a few of the points which came up in discussion:

• Getting started with Social Media? There are a ton of good resources out there, but Fathom SEO does a good job of tying social media to SEO strategy.
• A very strong list of social media marketing case studies among large corporations.
• For a range of SEO tools, many of which are free, look no further than SEOmoz. The one we spoke about was the Crawl Test.
• Scott mentioned Howcast as a great video site for uploading how-to videos.
• Here’s a white paper called “Small Business Guide to Web-Based Video Marketing” which specifically focuses on video, and how TubeMogul is such a useful tool for video marketing.
• These are some good SEO-friendly plugins for Wordpress:
  • HeadSpace - automatically maps user-generated information to fields that are important for SEO.
  • Google XML Sitemaps - this will ensure that every new post you create is added to a sitemap, and Google is sent a reminder to crawl your domain.
  • Sociable - no direct SEO benefits, but by driving traffic to your social media outposts, you’ll have more critical mass to transform into search “equity.”

If I missed anything, or you have other ones to add to the list, please feel free to leave a comment.

Thanks again.

Let’s take a moment to recognize all the contributors: our organizer Ramon Ray of SmallBizTechnology.com, our moderator Stephen Wellman of Ziff Davis Enterprise, and our other panelists:

• Jennifer Shaheen, Technology Therapy Group
• Jasmine Sandler, Agent-cy
• Stephanie Frasco, The E.Factor

And, of course, you the attendees. Thanks for providing compelling questions, and bringing so much energy to the evening.

Below are some of the products and trends, either mentioned in discussion or otherwise relevant:

• General facts and figures
  • Number of U.S. adults using social media at least once a month in 2008: 69 million. (source: eMarketer)
  • Social network ad spending: $920 million in 2007, $1.43 billion in 2008, $2.6 billion by 2012. Compound annual growth of 19%. (source: eMarketer)
  • Social media’s share of total online ad spend in the U.S. was 4.4% in 2007, 5.5% in 2008, will grow to 6.3% by 2012 (source: eMarketer).
• B2B marketing on social media
  • B2B ad spending on social networks is still a drop in the bucket… just $15 million in 2007, and will grow to $40 million in 2008 (source: eMarketer). B2B’s share of total social network ad spend is currently just 1.6%, but will grow to 8.0% by 2012.
  • LinkedIn is strong in the B2B segment, especially to establish your company as an authority on a particular topic by using the Q&A functions.
  • If your business caters to a local clientele, Briz.com offers its users a platform to consolidate marketing communications, perfect for event marketing and other promotional marketing. This site also can be leveraged for customer relationship management (CRM) applications.
• Twitter
  • An article about how the Virginia Tech massacres created new awareness of Twitter as a potential solution to the sluggishness of emergency communications.
  • Here are some Twitter feeds worth following just to see how it’s being used: Popeye’s Chicken, Home Depot, Intel, Whole Foods, Clicksharp Marketing (you may know them) — and be sure to see how the popular TV show “Mad Men” is using Twitter.
• Blogging: the article about Procter & Gamble recruiting all the “mommy bloggers.”
• Video - Stephanie mentioned TubeMogul, which is a fantastic resource for syndicating video content. This product was featured in a recent white paper entitled “Small Business Guide To Web-Based Video Marketing.”
• Website Analytics. Stephanie also mentioned Google Analytics as a “must have” resource for business owners to track the efficacy of all marketing efforts. This product is available to the public, and featured in a recent Clicksharp video, “Google Analytics for Business Intelligence.”
• Non-profit organizations and social media marketing:
  • We discussed Jones Soda, the Seattle-based beverage manufacturer which has been putting the Causes feature of Facebook to good use. (Here’s a link — see slide 35.)
  • Here’s another interesting tactic to consider. We know how difficult it can be to ask for money. What if you host your content on a website showing ads with Google AdSense, and when you communicate directly with your audience, tell them “we won’t ask you for a donation — but every single visit to our site generates revenue which we will donate to the cause. So every single person you forward this to, it’s like making a small donation.”
• Wikipedia: the next time around, we hope we’ll get a chance to look at this medium, often criticized for its quality control and overlooked for its social potential. There’s more to Wikipedia than you might have first guessed: “Wikipedia: a marketing channel as powerful as it is free”
• RSS (really simple syndication). (Video: What is RSS?) Jennifer mentioned AideRSS; I’d never heard of this until tonight, but at first glance it seems like an invaluable tool for market research and competitive analysis.

And for one more treat… here’s a pretty strong list of large well-known corporations and their brands appearing in popular social media campaigns: Social Media Marketing Examples (thanks to Peter Kim).

See you next time.