Written by: Michael R. Macias

Far too often in the business world the term return on investment (ROI) is used to justify actions or strategies. Though the term certainly has a place in the small business sector, it doesn’t fit everywhere. And there is one place it should never be used-social media. Imagine if all of us treated our “real” friends based on the concept of “ROI” like we do with our “virtual” ones. Chances are it would look a little something like this: “Today I hung out with Billy, but got nothing in return, so I won’t be doing that again, even if we’ve been friends for 20 years.” We’d all end up without any friends if we lived our lives that way. Well, the same rule should apply to any social media efforts your small business engages in. Using Facebook shouldn’t be about tracking ROI, or measuring the benefits of your friends. Granted, there are metrics or insights, available to show you how effective your messages are, but that shouldn’t define your efforts. Social media is about more than just sales conversions or coupon deliveries…it’s really about relationships. Today’s consumers want to feel connected to a brand, and have a personal relationship with it. It’s about engaging people, inspiring them, motivating them, and encouraging them to appreciate your brand. When you decide to dive into social media, think about treating it exactly as you would a new friend. As you get to know them, and they get to know you, you start to like each other more, and the next thing you know, you are introducing each other to new people. I believe in the business world we refer to that as word of mouth marketing. So before you try to rate your “virtual” friends, or create a system to track their value, stop and think, “Would I do this to Billy?”

This was a guest post and thank you Michael for taking the time to write this great post. You can find out more about Michael and his business at his website www.insidethecube.com . An impressive website and it is worth taking the time visit. Also you can follow Michael and his business on twitter http://twitter.com/CreativeQube.

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There is a service called ‘gravatar’ which many wordpress.com users will be familiar with. However gravatar is also used by many non-wordpress based systems also.

To add a ‘gravatar’ image you can either do so via wordpress.com or signup directly at gravatar.com . Importantly set the email address that you use when commenting around the web. Then if gravatar is used by that site it will display your profile image (avatar).

To create a stronger social presence you could use the same image you use at facebook, twitter etc .

Link: http://en.gravatar.com/

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It is currently suffering an ‘ongoing denial of service attack’. Which unfortunately I’ve seen too often with other services recently. Whatever your reasons for using twitter, be it personal or business I’m sure it won’t be long until it’s back up. Hopefully just a matter of hours until full service is restored.

To check for further updates you could visit: http://status.twitter.com/ . However perhaps we all should leave the service alone for a few hours to deal with the crisis, put on the kettle and get on with some work.

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You can place a link on your site, people can follow and you can setup modules for discussion, photos and much more…. or just leave it for a place to occasionally place a bit of news and a link.

Also I noticed within a week the facebook page for my business appeared on google. So another way to find my business. Quite nifty, did I say it was free?

http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Do you already have a facebook page for your business? Drop us a note in the comments and a link to share.

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First, Twitter is community based, and this means if the community likes what they see they can share (“Re-tweet”) your content with their friends. Through Re-tweeting your posts, news and content shared through Twitter can be spread through not just your friends and followers, but your follower’s followers, etc. Depending on the content of your tweet and how impressive it is (for example, breaking news or a beautiful piece of artwork), the number of Re-tweets it receives will broaden your contents impact. This also applies to things such as blog posts and articles – sharing these through Twitter is also a good way to increase your blog audience.

To demonstrate the so-called “Twitter effect”, I have screenshots of 2 different pieces of artwork I submitted yesterday around the same time to my DeviantART page. The first of these artworks I posted to Twitter, and the other I did not. The difference in hit counts after 1 hour of being submitted is large.

The piece I submitted above wasn’t linked on Twitter – instead, it was simply left to be navigated by fellow DeviantART users who watch my new pieces.

Now, this 2nd piece submitted, as you can probably tell, has quite a big difference in views compared to the un-posted piece.

Now, why is this? Well, Twitters timeline effect is similar to the “Digg effect” – where an article submitted to Digg recieves such a large number of hits that it could possibly crash the articles web server depending on the amount of traffic it receives. Twitter has the same basic effect as Digg does – the audience that your posted links and messages reach is extremely large, and this makes Twitter an invaluable marketing tool. The amount of people that your tweets can reach through search engines, Twitter’s own search tool, and the public Twitter timeline will vary depending on certain variables such as the time and day of the week and the amount of active Twitter users at the time, but regardless, the exposure your business can get through this method of marketing is monumental and, even more so since Twitter is a free service with millions of users, should be an automatic part of every bloggers, artists, freelancers and small business owners advertising arsenal.

Twitter is one of the most powerful networking and marketing tools you can use that is available for free, and I highly suggest that everyone makes use of it to leverage your business and promote your brand. The results will not disappoint!

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Don’t speak at people, communicate with them
If you follow someone back then expect to respond to their replies if they are not offensive. People often fail to understand that good dialogue is part of business (or just being nice!) and thus should be used on twitter when possible.

People will understand you can’t respond to everyone if you have many hundreds or thousands of followers. However this isn’t the case for the majority of twitter users and some fail to understand the twitter service completely. Either not responding to people or doing so via direct messages (privately) when there was no need.

Don’t alienate people in the attempt to try and create an image. Don’t follow people back if you don’t want to respond to their replies is a good practice. It is okay if you were busy for quite a while and are late responding.
The numbers game
Don’t try and add four thousand people, send out product updates and then wonder why twitter disable your account or nobody is interested. Choose a few people to follow for a while before you start writing twitter messages. Gain a better understanding of twitter and try and widen the content you tweet when you do. Slowly choose a number of people to follow and over time a number of people will hopefully choose to follow you.

The RSS feed
Have another blog such as blogspot or wordpress? Why not grab your twitter micro blog rss feed and place it on the other blog (in a side column for instance). Visitors to your other blog will see this feed and some who use twitter may choose to follow you on twitter.

Manage your time
There is software available that will automatically notify you when people have updated, this isn’t always good. Twitter can quickly become addictive and you can get carried away very easily. Treat twitter like email, check it regularly, but don’t let it have an impact on productivity if checking during the working day or spending time with others.

To begin with, just use twitter via your browser if able. Then try software for the iphone, blackberry or desktop that provide instant updates. Only once you have learnt to manage your twitter time.

Consider how many people you actually do want to follow
Some people follow everybody back that follows them and jolly decent that is! However consider how many you actually do want to follow. When someone follows you and you are notified, read their twitter messages before making a decision.

Be careful what you tweet!
Don’t think your competitors, colleagues, family or friends are reading your tweets?

Don’t lose track of why you are using twitter and be weary of what you tweet. If you are using twitter for personal use, then don’t think someone you work with or know won’t look you up. Don’t believe others won’t discover that drunk2much is actually you if you regularly mention your company name, location and other details to identify you! Worse yet, that colleague you just complained about, might of also just read the complaint!

Be extremely weary of letting off steam on twitter. It might be inappropriate and also not truly represent yourself. A twitter comment you wrote in anger can be quickly deleted, but might already have been read by others.

Replies

Also regularly checking ‘replies’ is useful as you might receive messages from people who are not following you.

Right that is enough twitter tips from SBT. We welcome all feedback and your twitter tips.

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- Youtube
Add the following to your favourite rss feed reader (replacing keyword 1 & 2 with your actual keywords):

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?orderby=updated&vq=keyword1+keyword2

- Twitter
The same for twitter just add the below rss url to your feed reader and replace the keywords:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=keyword1+keyword2

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LinkedIn is a social networking service for the business world. An essential service for any business person. We’ve mentioned it before briefly on this blog, but now go into more detail.

LinkedIn is easy to use and feature rich, even just for the free version. Indeed the majority of people I doubt need the current paid offerings (unlimited searching and more). Some key features of LinkedIn:

• Find old and current contacts on the service and connect.This enables you to stay in contact, regardless of new contact details and changes in locations.
• Invite people to join LinkedIn and connect with you.
• Provide recommendations and receive recommendations from contacts.
• Ask the community questions on many subjects and provide answers.

My list of features probably doesn’t do it justice. There are also other features such as looking for jobs and there are many recruitment people and execs using LinkedIn as a recruitment database.

Do you need help or want to answer a question or two?

The question and answer section of LinkedIn is a key feature. It allows you to easily ask the community questions covering many different categories such as marketing, telecoms etc, there will be a business category you will find interesting. It is also a great way for people to connect with others, but be aware that even if someones answered, their advice could be biased or incorrect.

The LinkedIn main screen is very well layed out. You will notice they have advertising (dark blue box on this screen in the above example), but it never takes away from the user experience. You will find that LinkedIn doesn’t require much of your time to learn how to use and become beneficial.

LinkedIn does by default make people searchable via search engines, but this is limited information and you can easily turn this feature off. Also you can share as much or as little education and work history as you want in your profile. So you can setup your LinkedIn account quickly and then add to it when you have a free moment. Once I had initially setup LinkedIn I found myself spending anything from five minutes to twenty minutes a day for a while updating my profile, adding contacting and primarily reading and answering community questions. Then once in a while I write a recommendation also.

So LinkedIn can mean many things to different people. A simply way to stay in touch, a means to recommend colleagues or generate opportunities. Perhaps be offered an interview for a job or participate in the excellent Q&A section…and more. If your not signed up to LinkedIn take five minutes to get the ball rolling today. www.linkedin.com

Stephan Spencer wrote a good post on LinkedIn also. Well worth a read: http://www.stephanspencer.com/community/deriving-value-from-linkedin

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Yammer (www.yammer.com) a twitter like experience for business users was initially recommended to us by Richard McKay http://www.richardmckay.com/ via twitter. Thanks Richard.

All those who share the same domain for their business email addresses can sign up and are automatically added to a private network for that domain name. You setup your profile, configure how you are going to use Yammer and then leave twitter like comments and respond to others, but Yammer goes so much further. This is a micro-blogging tool aimed at the business world.

What was a pleasant surprise was that you can also interact with Yammer via jabber, aim or gtalk instant messaging clients and there is also a adobe air client, blackberry client and an Apple client on its way (awaiting apple approval to be in the store).

Another feature which we liked and that Twitter doesn’t have is automatic notification via your browser windows of new updates. Saves you having to click to check if there has been an update.

Yammer provides the ability to tag and search messages / threads. To write a message with a tag and then for people to explore all messages in the company network for that tag is fantastic. Allows new people to the company to get up to speed (acting as a knowledge base), understand issues and people’s involvement more, then engage in discussion if they want. You can also use the system as a company directory allowing workers to find people and their contact details.

So what are the negatives? Trust obviously. You are trusting a third party service to manage your data securely, have backups, trusting their team and hoping major security issues don’t arise that make your data vulnerable. However it is entirely your fault if you put something sensitive there and an issue arises. However you will notice you are using a https connection when logged into Yammer via your browser.

Obviously if you do use the service, don’t go posting passwords etc and evaluate what you and your fellow employees should post or discuss via the service. Create your own inhouse guidelines before posting.

What are features we would like to see? Well the service only launched yesterday so I am sure new features will find their way onto the service over time. The ability for users to create ‘sticky’ messages would be good. So even if a message has not been active recently, it stays at the top of someones profile. A way for comments to be marked urgent or important. An xml export feature for messages would be nifty. Perhaps a way to create private groups within the business network.

The service has a fantastic feature that twitter doesn’t have also. It sends you an email when someone responds to one of your messages. Twitter only does this when someone responds to a private message. Obviously this might not be scalable in the long term as the network grows, but we will wait and see.

This overview also doesn’t do the service full justice as there are paid administrative features as well for you to consider and they are very reasonably priced.

I think Yammer is something Small Businesses should consider, especially those with remote workers. Oh and by the way Yammer took top prize at TechCrunch50 yesterday. Congratulations Yammer!
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/10/yammer-takes-techcrunch50s-top-prize/

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• That the Indian restaurant down the road had a twitter account. Then occasionally a twitter about whats hot (literally) and whats new with a promotion word that gets you a free starter etc that week, only mentioned on twitter.
• That a Spanish bar I know had a detailed list of their cocktails on a web site with descriptions and personally recommendations by previous clients or the manager. Promoted their special evenings without you having to see the poster outside (useless now as I don’t live locally). It would make each trip more fun and enjoyable.
• That the hovercraft company I use on occassion instead of the fastcat service had a desktop widget telling me the weather, risks to cancellation of service, known transport delays in the area, some useful relevant info, occasional promotion and allowed me to book within a few clicks a ticket and reserve a seat on a specific crossing.

The list could go on, what would you add to the list?

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