Guest Post This week by San Diego Corporate Marketing Strategist Holly Reville

1.) What is Social Media?

2.) Branding

3.) Keep it Professional

4.) Messaging

5.) Where to Begin

6.) Networking

7.) Promote

What is Social Media? – Social Media is an ever-growing and ever-changing new phenomenon. It’s the new wave of meeting, networking and connecting with people, most importantly a new method of meeting new potential clients and marketing your business for free. If you stop for a moment to think about the magnitude of this it’s mind boggling. At any given moment there is a worldwide network of people at your reach. Isn’t that an amazing concept? No longer are we restricted to networking within our immediate geographical location. Best of all, people are friendly, helpful and knowledgeable. Those who are not, are weeded out and blocked fairly quickly. The big question that lies in everyone’s head is, “How?” This blog will give you some key insights on what you need to get started and successfully market yourself, product or company through the use of social media platforms.

Branding – In branding, your goals are to gain brand awareness, associate certain qualities and characteristics that make you/your company unique and over time gain brand loyalty. If you plan on marketing your business through social media it is important to keep brand integrity intact. Your brand is an extension of you and your company. How does this translate to social media?

A.) Avatar/picture – Make sure you use a good picture. A professionally taken picture is highly recommended, but if you choose to take your own just make sure you are dressed in a professional manner and have someone take it for you or use your timer. You do not want the “picture taken in the mirror shot showing the camera”. Use this picture on all of the social networking websites. This will give you brand consistency and increase recognition across platforms. It is important to use your picture. Social networking is about creating relationships, people want to know there is a real person behind the company façade and get to know that person.

B.) Name – You wouldn’t put a different business name on all of your sales material so make sure you don’t have different user names on your social networking websites. When social networking for your business it is common to have your full name or full business name as a user name, whatever you choose, just keep it consistent.

C.) Description – Be sure to describe your company, who you are and what you do on all of the social media profile pages. This is the first and possibly last place an interested person or potential client will go to find out more about you. Have a thorough, concise description and double check spelling and grammar. The description can vary from site to site and be custom tailored to the audience, just make sure all of the essentials are there to easily tell people about you/your company.

D.) Custom colors and background – Most of the social networking websites have an option to customize your page. When doing so try to make sure the colors and images used are consistent across all websites. This will also associate these colors and images to your brand and help you to achieve brand recognition.

For the rest of her VERY INSIGHTFUL post Click Here

Special Thanks to Holly For allowing us to share her work for our readers. Please subscribe to her blog- Thanks
Justin

Register Here <REGISTER NOW>

Doing Business In The Digital Age Through Social Networking Workshop

Heard of twitter?  Are you on linked-in and just Lost?

As busy professionals, you probably have heard lately between sales calls and meetings the talk about twitter or social networking right?  Well, we are extending a GREAT offer to our network to come take part in an interactive workshop where you will see why social sites like linked-in, facebook, and twitter can actually have BUSINESS value associated with them IF you know how to use these tools properly.

Our clients typically see these results from using these social tools effectively:  new alliances, new prospects, sales leads, competitive intelligence, industry trends, and even new business!  This can all be accomplished at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional marketing approaches like direct mail and telemarketing which are producing shrinking returns anyway.

Get an up-grade on your business development methods and marketing tactics or lose out to your web-savvy competition!

Once busy professionals realize the power of building BUSINESS relationships online, it actually increases business for them off-line too.  Think of this workshop as an instructional course on how to do business in the digital on-line world.

What? Doing Business In The Digital Age Through Social Networking Interactive Workshop

Where? Irvine

When? May 20th 6PM PST

What you will learn:

• How to generate prospects using on-line tools

• How to get more clients using social media and social networking

• Get an on-line marketing plan for your business to execute right away

• How to fully understand the internet puzzle

• Learn how to beat your competition on-line

• Learn why social media marketing is cheaper than traditional marketing & how to make $

• 299$ value (99$ introductory rate- next event will be more so sign up now!)

Register Here <REGISTER NOW>

BONUES Free E-Book with attendance- Social Networking 101 For Business Survival Kit

Who should attend?

Marketing Managers

Business Owners

Entrepreneurs

VP’s

Business Development Managers

Sales Professionals

Who is www.socialnetworkingsandiego.com

“Our mission and purpose with SNSD is to ultimately brand your

business locally and globally by driving traffic to your website,

generating pre-qualified leads, and helping your website rank

higher on Google.”- Justin French CEO

This is an Interactive and “How To”  Workshop on leveraging Social Media and Social Networking  Tools like linked-in and twitter to generate leads and build your business brand on-line!

More about Social Networking San Diego

http://www.socialnetworkingsandiego.com

SPECIAL BONUS- Refer 2 other business professionals get your ticket FREE!

Register Here <REGISTER NOW>

What type of results are you producing for your clients in social media marketing, social networking, and on-line marketing campaigns?

I am constantly asked- “so what are the numbers companies can expect with on-line marketing campaigns? Is it worth it? What will be my ROI?”

Well, first off, every industry is different. Think of your on-line marketing system like a gas pedal- the harder you press on the marketing machine (the more $ you spend the harder we step on the pedal) the greater your reach, exposure, and potential for more business.

I just refer them to our current case studies (see below) and a blog post i did here http://www.socialnetworkingsandiego.com/blog/
which states WHY companies need to formulate some type of on-line marketing strategy revolving around social networking and social media. Otherwise they will keep trying off-line approaches like direct mail, telemarketing, and radio and TV that are producing diminishing returns.

So i ask my audience- what are some of the returns you are producing for your customers? would you mind sharing below some of the challenges your facing in providing various consulting services to your customers? This way i can formulate more case studies for the industry. Your feedback is greatly appreciated

JustinRFrench CEO
Social Networking San Diego
http://www.twitter.com/justinrfrench

Social Networking San Diego:
Actual Existing Client Case Studies
Company names kept confidential due to confidentiality agreements

Company A
Start Date: 2/01/09
Website Grade prior to campaign: 43/100
Traffic Rank (Alexa) Top 16.91% (or 5,195,184)
Inbound Links 0
Blog (None)

Current Date: 3/31/09
Website Grade: 65/100
Traffic Rank (Alexa) Top 16.24% (or 4,547,459)
Inbound Links 151
Blog (off-site)

26% increase in traffic in 2 months!

Company B
Start Date: 1/28/09
Website Grade prior to campaign: 62/100
Traffic Rank (Alexa) Top) 4.81% (or 1,475,807)
Inbound Links 0
Blog (None)

Current Date: 3/31/09
Website Grade: 71/100
Traffic Rank (Alexa) Top 4.29% (or 1,316,909)
Inbound Links 53
Blog (off-site)

27% increase in traffic in 2 months!

Company C
Start Date: 2/01/09
Website Grade prior to campaign: 53/100
Traffic Rank (Alexa) Top 5.72% (or 2,857,215)
Inbound Links 0
Blog (None)

Current Date: 3/31/09
Website Grade: 91/100
Traffic Rank (Alexa) Top 1.33% (or 373,541)
Inbound Links 466
Blog (on-site)
75% increase in traffic in 2 months!

Contact me here http://www.socialnetworkingsandiego.com/free-webinar/
for a FREE Webinar and start forming your strategy Today-
and see if your firm is ready to discuss some of your on-line marketing challenges and what we can do to address these like we have been for MANY of our clients.

Hmm… Do you every wonder why there are so many articles on the internet about internet marketing? Is it any different than ordinary marketing and why? I mean, if you are planning to sell your products on line then a little marketing becomes essential to ensure that people buy your product. But other than setting up a website what else can you do?

It’s not that simple! Large companies have now learned that no matter how good your product, you have to be connected with the latest information and any other events that are happening within your industry circle. You also need to ensure that your product and your website is promoted on different blogs, and even free video sites like Youtube to get regular traffic or customers. And you don’t want just any customers; you want customers who want to buy and are serious about sales! And that’s what an outsourced marketing campaign can do for your website. It can get you “friend” connections with people of the same industry, high level relevant traffic of customers from the same industry and even contacts with a buyer or wholesaler from a completely different country. Outsourced marketing campaigns if done by a professional company like can Social Networking San Diego boost your business trends and make you many more useful connections in the industry over night.

Social Networking San Diego is a professional company that will help you implement the perfect marketing strategy based on the company’s specific needs, costs and budgets, marketing and sales department structure and various other requirements. They will also help you in social networking as they have a special internet marketing department staffed with professionals just for that purpose.

It does not matter if you are a small or big business; setting up an internet marketing campaign can be cumbersome due to the complexity of the World Wide Web. Blog marketing is a intricate balance between outright selling and plain content. And readers have come to expect valuable and reliable content from blogs. Direct selling by large companies through vigorous blog promotions can confuse readers and sometimes even put them off completely. Why waste so much time when you already have a niche internet marketing professional ready to help you out in an instant? It may cost you a small amount but its well worth it in the long run! Social Networking San Diego already has the network, the professionals and the expertise to do your work for you at a minimal cost!

Phone calls and telemarketing, billboards, pamphlets and newspaper advertisements are all old fashioned. The latest technology for advertising is social networking through the internet. Although traditional forms of marketing are still popular, the Internet has now become the latest source of entertainment, news reports and business too. The latest and fastest growing trend in the virtual world is simply, OUTSOURCED MARKETING VIA THE INTERNET.

This internet marketing system is used to drive traffic to company websites and derive the maximum profit from the visitors who visit the site. Almost all businesses now have a website created for them to increase awareness about their products and to showcase their business in detail. Companies spend huge amounts of money on these websites. But no matter how pretty your site is, no one’s going to visit it unless you ensure that the site is marketed on the internet. A site which no one visits is a waste of money and time. Social Networking San Diego is an internet marketing department that deals with making social networking simpler and more meaningful in a few effortless steps.

But don’t be fooled, internet marketing is not really that easy. You need some one who knows the ins and outs of marketing with in the least time possible. Social Networking San Diego is a site that is known not only for educating businessmen on the growing trends in the social network and internet marketing world for business but it also helps businessmen achieve a profit by optimizing their websites .

Social Networking San Diego also helps businesses to build up their brands with the help of internet marketing and social networking on a large scale. They have a professional marketing department that can place your advertisements or your company’s profile in prominent sites in such a way that it cannot be missed by search engines, blogs or high traffic sites like You-Tube. Readers and visitors of these popular sites will then get your reference for the product on reliable sites. The larger amount of visitors who realize and enquire about the product you are selling, the more the number of clients or customers who will visit your site with a serious intention of buying your product .

This process of social networking will soon replace all the traditional forms of marketing and advertisement. Social Networking San Diego is just one online company that is breaking new ground in this field. You can rest assured that your company and your product will enter world of internet marketing with Social Networking San Diego. Social Networking San Diego will help in fulfilling your advertisement goals through the internet. Just visit the official site and learn more about internet marketing and social networking.

SocialNetworkingSanDiego.com

this is a social media road map i found

I keep getting asked by fellow business professionals on linked-in discussions the following questions regarding social media and social networking for business.

1. How are you successfully using Twitter, microblogs, blogging, etc. in your corporate environment?

Justin’s Answer- personal branding, product/ service branding, customer service, industry news, trends, event promotion, competitor analysis, building BUSINESS relationships, etc.

2. How do you convince those that don’t “get it”?

Justin’s Answer- I tell them go get educated and come back to me in a year when your ready to build an on-line marketing strategy around your products or services and have it done right. Once companies wake up and start realizing 1-2% returns on direct mail and telemarketing is NOT working. Why do you keep doing things that don’t work? Stop throwing good money after bad ideas and work with an innovative marketing company. Maybe they should get educated on one of our many webinars about social networking, twitter training, or linked-in training for business. I don’t have the time or patience sometimes to deal with business people that “don’t get it”. Time is money!

3. How do you measure successful ROI?
We measure ROI for our customers with our own proprietary methods and software systems we have developed and it works great! We have paying customers, they see results, and we show them monthly reports. We have to measure the success of our clients online campaigns and report to them monthly or they wouldn’t be spending thousands of dollars per month with us!

4. I’m interested in hearing successes, failures, and strategies.

We have MANY success stores (see my blog http://www.socialnetworkingsandiego.com/blog/ or customer testimonial videos.

Failures; just know you will make some mistakes, get over it- just jump it try it, learn, and learn from your mistakes most importantly of course. You will learn, test, and refine the strategy. Try to have a plan at least. The alternative is to do nothing and fail. Need Strategies- see my blog or book some one on one consulting time with me and lets formulate an online marketing strategy together.

We even have an internet consulting team I can dedicate to your next on-line marketing campaign. Don’t have time to do all this social networking stuff yourself? No problem- we’ll do it for you. Give us a shot and we GUARANTEE we can increase traffic to your website IF you partner with us, sign up, and take our recommendations. It’s worked for these clients (see videos to the right) so maybe your business is ready to jump on board.

Is your business ready? What is your understanding of social media and social networking for business? Take the social networking IQ test here: business evaluation

Cheers
JustinRFrench twitterholic
Tweets by JustinRFrench

Executives Must READ-

Research, Education, Attitude, and Drive

These are the only ways to survive in today’s market place.

The Internet is NOT going away so get educated! Education is the #1 failure of internet marketing strategies so don’t let your corporation fall short. Take a competitive edge and gain first mover advantage. There are some very knowledgeable internet consultants out here in San Diego so grab a hold of one of us and start formulating a plan. Remember, business professionals don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan!

I assure you, there is no easy answer and no get rich quick scheme to internet marketing for business purposes. Myspace and Facebook are not just for personal use anymore! There is a BUSINESS use and us on Linked-In are well ahead of the curve. It just takes the right strategy and approach, and then my favorite- execution.

Its not if but when. Its not why but how. Its hard work believe me, and developing relationships just like in the off-line approach is where we as marketing professionals need to help educate the local business community.

But the firms must but be willing to “invest” in their online marketing strategy. its not an expense. I look forward to assisting you any way i can-

I would appreciate any executives or professionals you may know who are ready to turn their company around with a proven internet marketing strategy. We work strictly through close referral (off line and online of course)

Cheers,

Justin

“We consult and educate our executive level clients how to form a strategy on using social media and social networking sites like twitter and linked in to build business relationships and brand awareness in the digital online market place, which in turn increases traffic to company websites and increases sales.”

Please help me spread my message! I do Webinars, Internet Consulting for Business, Twitter training, Linked-In training, Social Networking Packages for businesses, and also Speaking engagements in educational facilities and corporations on this growing trend.

Justin French President
Social Networking San Diego
“We use social networking to grow your business”

Summary on Obama news conference, and 3 Tips for Small Business Owner Success in the digital age

Special Thanks to my followers and friends on Linked-In for you support! Yes we can!

1. Find out more about how internet marketing can help your business (this is the current trend)
2. Upgrade your Business Development Department- Develop a 21st century Business Development Strategy
3. Find a good CRM software to help keep track of leads

“business owners and CEO’s don’t plan to fail, they fail to have a plan”- twitterholic justinrfrench

Need help on any of this? Call Keith- 760-500-6043 and schedule an in depth internet marketing assessment for your business

JustinRFrench, CCNA

CEO & Chief Internet Marketing Strategist-

Social Networking San Diego

http://www.socialnetworkingsandiego.com

LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/itconsultantsandiego

Twitter http://twitter.com/justinrfrench

Twitter as a Marketing Media

Marketing through twitter! Does that sound odd or is that obvious? Many people are still uncertain about the use of twitter and other social networking podium for marketing products. The truth is that these networking sites work as a great channel for marketing in more ways than one. Marketing is about presenting your product to the mass in a way that gets you the attention of the consumer. Converting this attention into a value to your business is obviously the objective. Twitter is certainly the answer to a marketer’s prayers.

We at InRev are constantly trying to challenge tools and technologies to estimate their worthiness. We have already been testing the social networking tool through our web application InRev Twitin to evaluate the usefulness of Twitter as a business accelerator. Following are some interesting finding from the InRev team.

Below is the world map, categorized with respect to the time zone. Why Time Zone? Because, in marketing, timing is a crucial factor to determine its effectiveness. In today’s global market, we need to reach out to the wide range of the audience and understanding the timing difference is the key.

We have collected data from twitter and prepared a report which will reveal some very important and interesting facts.

Distribution of Population and their Tweets

The first step is to understand the population of the twitter users. The following graph shows the distribution of population with respect to Time Zones. Graph1 shows that the majority of twitter users lie on GMT-5, GMT-6, and GMT-8 Time Zones. These time zones cover: Pacific Time (US & Canada), Tijuana, Arizona, Chihuahua, Mazatlan, Mountain Time (US & Canada), Central America, Central Time (US & Canada), Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey, Saskatchewan, Bogota, Eastern Time (US & Canada), Indiana (East), Lima, and Quito. Furthermore, the distribution of tweets shows that the location with higher population has more tweets, which is obvious.

Graph 1 : Distribution of Population

Graph 2: Distribution of Tweet Count

The result from the above graph can be used to change your marketing strategies to increase your number of followers in twitter and to stay more visible in the online social media. This is very clear that most of the twitter user is from the western region and that their population is very large among the total population. This timing knowledge is very important here because this will give you the right time to tweet your products.

Category of People in the Twitter

Now we know that most of the twitter users are from the GMT – 5 Time Zone. Let us see what kind of people are twitting from that zone. The following tag cloud has been created by taking the description written by the people in their twitter profile.

Tag Cloud 1: Description of People at GMT – 5 (generated using http://www.wordle.net/)

The result clearly shows that most of the people are related to Social, Media, Web, Geek, Blogger and Marketing. Therefore, it’s evident that twitter is more popular among the marketers and media personals. This information is very important, as it shows you the profile of your audience and will certainly help to better market your product. To explore further, let’s see if this is the trend in other time zone.

Tag Cloud 2: Description of People at GMT – 6 (generated using http://www.wordle.net/)

Tag Cloud 3: Description of People at GMT – 8 (generated using http://www.wordle.net/)

Tag Cloud 4: Description of People at GMT + 1 (generated using http://www.wordle.net/)

The above tag clouds 2, 3 and 4 show some similarities with the GMT- 5‘s profile structure. Though, the marketing profile seems high, in terms of percentile distribution, it is only about 1.77%.

The scenario changes as we move towards east. The percentage profile of marketers changes to 0.89%. We already have a less share of population in the east and among them only few percentage of marketers. This could be due to the conservative nature of the eastern culture. We can see that the higher percentage of people in East is from blogging and student background.

Tag Cloud 5: Description of People at GMT + 8 (generated using http://www.wordle.net/)

Summary

All the above data analysis was carried out by taking a random population of 31691 of the current tweeter users. The cloud tag analysis was carried out with the help of tool at http://www.wordle.net/. The analysis does not present any precise statistical analysis or conversions. The goal of the analysis was to show the demographic distribution of the people on twitter and its implication on efficient marketing.

The analysis tells us that niche marketing is possible through twitter, if marketers are willingly to study the population of twitter more closely and understand them better.

Any Media or Marketing Analyst needs to segment the population to have better ROI on time they spend on Twitter; a generic line might not work.

Article by InRev, written by Deep Sherchan

About InRev

InRev Systems Bangalore Pvt. Ltd** *transforms business by making all possible information available at all times. InRev combines domain knowledge, trusted reporting structure and innovative applications to help companies advance their business decisions. It serves across all stages of Business Intelligence and Decision Management right from Data Extraction and Integration to Strategy Consulting using the intelligent insights of the business. More information can be found at http://www.in-rev.com.

Internet marketers know several strategies by heart to sell their goods in the simplest and the easiest way possible. Internet marketing can be hard work and after a few years you will get the hang of it. But for the beginners, here are a few simple strategies that you can use to move your goods as fast as possible.

Link building- Yes, links can make or break a site! Search engines crawl the internet day and night to find links to and from your site. Make a lot of links from your site to other related content sites, submit your content to free article websites and ask your blogger friends to give you links to your site. The large the number of relevant links the higher you come on the search results.. Search engine spiders also check the relevance of links so if you can link to authority and high ranking sites, it would make your content seem that much more valid.

Keyword rich- Find out exactly what keyword is relevant on your site and use that to make your site so much more presentable to the search engines. For the best marketing on internet tips, you can check with several webmaster tools present free on the internet which will help you find the best keywords for your site optimize it.

Site directories- There are several site directories present on the internet where you can submit your blog or website so that it can be catalogued. This provides search engines with one more link that they can use to index your site.

Email marketing in the internet- If you already have a database of customers who are interested in your product, then sending them regular updates is just one great way of ensuring visibility of your product. Don’t over do it; no one likes a whole box full of emails about your products. That’s called spam!

Marketing on internet Forums- Marketing on internet forum can get you eager visitors that you have invited personally. You can talk about your product, what it does and establish yourself as an expert in the field of interest that you are selling. Every time you sign off you can leave links to your site and the product you are promoting. The best part of this kind of marketing is that you do it yourself. And you can join as many forums as you want to promote your product.