St. Louis Missouri (MO) Small Business Social Media Marketing

Join us for a Webinar on December 3

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/777444579
Thursday December 3, 2009, 7pm Central Time

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN, owner of SeriousSocialMedia.com

Social Media Marketing for Business Owners- Local and World Domination is Possible

Please attend to learn more about:

*What social media marketing “is’ and what it means to for small business owners

*How social media marketing can decrease the cost of your current marketing budget by decreasing reliance on print and pay-per-click campaigns.

*Which accounts you should sign up for, and which ones you should avoid.

*See actual screenshots of what it looks like when your business dominates the first page of google naturally! (all a result of social media marketing)

*How much time and skill it takes to set up a good program.

*Learn from the pros- one hour of amazing content that will show you how to get the most attractive lead generation website ever put together for your Home Care, Elder Care, or Senior Service  business (or maybe you need more than one!).

*Learn the secret search engine optimization techniques that will work for any website that you currently own.

*Learn why web masters are TERRIBLE about making changes to your site, take way to long, or never respond at all- and what you can do to change all of that once and for all.

*Learn about the “new” websites that allow you to make some changes on the fly all by yourself, and meet a web designer who is not only a sales professional like you, but is obsessed with great customer service.
Title:           Social Media Marketing for Business Owners- Local and World Domination is Possible
Date:         Thursday, December 3, 2009
Time:         7:00 PM – 9:00 PM CST
After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista
Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.4 (Tiger®) or newer
Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/777444579

Today is the big day! Listen at 5:30pm on 97.1FM Talk – Dave Glover Show

Our commercials go live today, so be sure to listen!

http://www.SeriousSocialMedia.com

Whoo hoo!

What does it cost to think?

The Original Post: What is the cost of thinking? Can be found at: http://www.relationship-economy.com/?p=5232

Your boss says”Our competitors are stealing our customers using this social media stuff. We need to use this stuff and do it better than our competitors and we need to do it NOW!”

You are then tasked with “doing it” but you have no experience or knowledge of what to do. So you look for help and find an outside resource whom supposedly has the experience and knowledge to know what to do. You bring the option of hiring this person to your boss and they ask about the cost and what will they get from using this resource.  You tell your boss the cost but aren’t sure exactly what it is you’re going to get. Then your boss says “I know we need to do this but I don’t know what it is or what we’ll get from it”.

How can a company put value on something they don’t understand?  How can they understand if they have no reference to “think about it”?.

What Is Required To Think?

Thinking about social media cannot increase understanding without the appropriate knowledge. Anything new or innovative takes time to understand and determine how to use it effectively.  In order to think effectively one must first acquire the knowledge necessary to think about using social media strategically, tactically and with specific purpose. Without the knowledge thinking will only produce the wrong outcomes because your thoughts are limited to what you know, not what you don’t know.

The reality is that learning to leverage social media requires people and organizations to reThink everything. This thing everyone calls social media has serious strategic implications and to just “do it” without gaining the knowledge to think about what needs to be done is a sure disaster.

Think About This

A business runs on communications. Without being able to effectively and efficiently communicate you end up wasting time and money. Money represents time and cost in rework, fixing misunderstandings, setting the wrong customer expectations and  not effectively and efficiently communicating to your employees, customers and your market.

The cost of not thinking about these issues is increased cost. However being able to “think” about these issues may require the infusion of new knowledge which may not exist in your organization. W. Edwards Deming once said “knowledge required to change the existing system to a better system must come from outside the existing system”. Why? Because the existing system is blinded by its own thinking. Get it?

Thinking About Social Media?

Who isn’t? The Corporate Executive Board said “Most companies are embracing social media—but too many are wasting their efforts through sloppy management”

More than 70% of companies are already using social media; many are planning to increase their spending on social media across the coming years. Whether for learning from customers, building their brands or a range of other hoped-for outcomes, companies are clearly diving in.

If you dive into the social media water without knowing its depth or where the rocks are you are likely to break your neck.  To avoid breaking your neck you should first get the knowledge about that which your about to dive into.  Without knowledge people, and entire organizations, perish.  Think before you jump. But before you can think effectively you must first get new knowledge.  Social media knowledge doesn’t come from self appointed gurus or experts who know how to get you followers and traffic. The cost of thinking increases when you don’t think. Get it?

What say you?

Posted by Lee Odden on Oct 5th, 2009

Original Text and Post available at: http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/10/social-seo-channels-of-distribution/

At several conferences I’ve used the image above to illustrate how a blog can be the centerpiece to a social SEO effort where objectives are focused on raising brand awareness and improving customer relationships in a way that is beneficial to search engine visibility.

I see several key opportunities with a unified SEO and Social Media strategy:

1. Social media involvement produces content. Content that is optimized and linked to, does well in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Therefore, optimized social content and the digital assets that are common to social media (images, video, audio and widgets) are all optimization opportunities.  Better search engine visibility means more traffic to social media content from customers that are looking for it.

2. Of the top 20 search engines according to comScore qSearch in August 2009, 3 are search functions within social media web sites. YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google. MySpace and Facebook are also in the top 20. In fact, Facebook’s percentage of increase from July to August was more than double any other search engine in the top 20.

The increasing popularity of search within social networks presents optimization and analytics opportunities. Marketers need to realize search doesn’t just happen on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Twitter is many things, including social network, messaging platform and search engine.

3. While great content is instrumental for great performance within organic search results, publishing in a vacuum is naive. Creating distribution channels for great content can drive awareness, traffic and inbound links. Optimized content with a quantity of quality incoming links results in superior search visibility.

Social networks and media sites that have social networking functionality offer prime opportunities to interact with communities of interest and can be particularly effective as distribution channels.

If there were ever a legitimate way to automate link building, it would be the RSS disribution and syndication functionality to promote new content to people who are interested. Those same people are often publishers in the form of blogging, reviews, comments and new features like Google SideWiki with the ability to link out to what they’re interested in.

The diagram above illustrates this situation well, where a blog is the central repository of content and social media sites around it are the developed networks of communities and channels of distribution for quality, keyword optimized content.

What other opportunities do you see with Social SEO?

I’ll be presenting on this topic today at 9:45 during the MIMA Summit, Salon C.  If you’re attending the sold out event, I hope to see you there. If not, check out the live video stream on the MIMA Summit web site. We’ll also be liveblogging the event here, so watch for more posts later this morning and afternoon.

Coming Soon! Twitter to Launch Lists Feature

Nick Kallen @nk from the project lead on twitter lists reported that twitter is testing a new feature with a small subset of users.
Their idea is to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts. For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends etc.

The Lists would be public by default (but can be made private) and the lists you create are linked from your profile. Other Twitter users can then subscribe to your lists. This means lists have the potential to be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.

A Benefit for St. Louis Small Business Owners: Twitter Launches List Feature

The Twitter platform team started working on this feature because of the frequent requests they received from people who were looking for a better way to organize information on Twitter. Of course, that means not just twitter.com—the Platform team will follow up in a few days with information on the Lists API. This will allow developers to add support for Lists into their favorite Twitter apps.

They’re just doing limited testing for now. But once they’ve tested the feature out a bit, they’ll launch it for all accounts!