Strategy is Integral to all Social Media Campaigns

1) No strategy. Maybe you created an account on Facebook and MySpace, even Twitter. But that’s where you stopped, or slowed down. With Social Media Marketing, the first 3-6 months are crucial to the creation and building of your presence. You need to go-go-go like the energizer bunny. If you slack, you’re not going to make it.

2) No consistency. This ties into strategy in that you’re not being consistent. You do an hour one week, ten hours the next week, stop altogther for a week, then start it all again. You need a day-by-day, week-by-week plan that you stick to. If you don’t have the time, hire someone to be consistent for you.

You Need to Be Subtle During Your Social Media Marketing Campain

3) You’re selling at people. Subtlety is key to Social Media Marketing, as is transparency. You need to let people know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, engage and court your visitors and potential visitors and really work at building your authority and relationships with people as opposed to just selling them shit.

You Need to Be Active in Promoting Yourself Through Social Media

4) You build it, expecting them to come. You sign up for Facebook and MySpace, then wait, expecting a rain of people to become your friends or contacts. If you’re lucky and work in a big company with lots of people to invite to your accounts, you’re in a better position than the little guy who hasn’t got a lot of contacts online and is a little confused about the whole thing. In this case, the little guy has to go out and find people, invite them to be contacts, and do it non-sleazy, totally transparently.

5) You only sign up for Facebook and MySpace.

Social Media Marketing Campaigns Require Patience

6) You expect too much in too little time. A good Social Media Marketing campaign takes patience and time to do well; starting from scratch, you probably won’t see results for several months or longer. It’s not magic; it takes dedicated effort and a LOT of time.

Businesses Embrace Social Media to Survive Economic Downturn

Will Businesses Turn to Social Media

This encompasses something I’ve been thinking a lot about as the economy has been spiraling downward, and that’s probably crossed your mind too.

In an economy that is increasingly failing, many companies are looking for easier, cheaper ways of marketing, thus turning to the online sphere.

In the current economic market, many companies have seen their marketing and advertising budgets cut, forcing them to find other less-traditional, more creative avenues for their marketing campaigns.

Enter Social Media Marketing. Whether a company decides to keep it in-house or hire out, Social Media Marketing is an effective, cheaper marketing solution to traditional marketing.

It has the added benefit of drawing a company closer to clients and potential clients and opening a pathway for businesses to communicate with clients on a more personal level, creating company and brand loyalty, a factor that is increasingly important in today’s market.

Social Media Marketing - Increasingly Important in the Market Today

Additionally, whereas you might pay, say, around 2000/mo if you’re a small to medium-sized company for a full-time Social Media Marketing campaign, you’re looking at thousands of dollars for traditional marketing campaigns, at the very least.

Just hiring a PR firm to handle your press can run higher than 5000/mo.

Business are slowly coming to this realization as well, seeing Social media as a means of surviving and thriving in the economic downturn.

As David Carrter states, Social Media Marketing supports two things you absolutely must do during economic uncertainty.

1. Get close to your customers.
2. Do more with less

However, it still remains to be seen what role Social Media will play in this economy now and into the new year.

However, optimizing your Wordpress CMS will only help strengthen its rankings in the SERPS and while there are various ways to ensure this, one of the best ways to help yourself along, especially if you don’t have a webmaster; is to use this list of Plugins:

Akismet
http://codex.wordpress.org/Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

Advanced TinyMCE Editor
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/

Adds advanced features to the standard TinyMCE WordPress rich-text editor.

cforms II
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cforms/

cforms II offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager Support, Database tracking and many more.

Clean Archives
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/clean-archives-reloaded/

Displays a compact monthly archive instead of the default long list.

Sociable
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/

Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites like Facebook, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Digg and many many others.

GeoPress
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/geopress/

GeoPress adds geographic tagging of your posts and blog. You can enter an address, points on a map, upload a GPX log, or enter latitude & longitude. You can then embed Maps, location tags, and ground tracks in your site and your blog entries. Makes your feeds GeoRSS compatible.

Google Sitemaps
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.

Gregarious
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gregarious/

Allows you to add social media bookmarking buttons to your posts or pages.

Head META Description

Insert HTML META description tag: excerpt/content brief for post/Page, description for category, and blog tagline for everything else.

Jerome’s Keywords
http://daven.se/usefulstuff/wordpress-plugins.html

Allows keywords to be associated with each post, which can be used as meta keywords and for creating a local tag system.

Random Posts
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/random-posts-plugin/

Displays a configurable list of random posts.

Samsarin PHP Widget
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/samsarin-php-widget/

A text widget with support for codes including HTML and PHP. Good for adding buttons and links to a widget and customizing it; snippets of code and etc.

All-in-one-SEO
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines

WP-PostRatings
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-postratings/

Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.

WordPress Reports
http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-reports/

Generates reports from Google Analytics and Feedburner data .

Anarchy Media Player
http://an-archos.com/anarchy-media-player

Plays mp3, flv, mov, mp4, m4v, m4a, m4b, 3gp, avi, asf and wmv hypertext links directly on your webpage. Adds buttons to the post editor for embedding swf movies including Google Video etc. Edit all player options in Options > Anarchy.

Recent Comments Plugin
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/get-recent-comments/

This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar.

“Print My Post” Plugin
http://www.ivonson.com/wordpress/wordpress-print-post-plugin

WP-Polls
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-polls/

WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you want. It now supports multiple selections of answers.

Flickr
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tantan-flickr/

This Flickr plugin for WordPress will allow you to pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site. There is a pretty simple template provided which you can customize to 100% match the look and feel of your own site.

But does this mean you should give up your blog? Of course not. Much of the time you need the space to craft a well-written article or post; brevity is great, but not particularly conducive to exploring topics in depth.

And yeah, you’ll get your trolls at times,no matter what post-er, article-you add to your blog, and that’s why we have the power to manage our comments.

Blogging IS one of the cheapest forms of self-promotion available, but most people don’t have the knowledge to do it correctly, so yeah, there are a lot of dead blogs floating around, I’ll give him that.

But there are twice as many more that are still living, breathing entities that exist solely for the person writing the blog, and if people happen to stop by, great.

There are people like freelancer Meg Fowler, a fabulous writer who has a large following both on her blog and on Twitter, who have greatly benefited from blogging, even if its just on a purely personal level.

She also used the strength of her blog to showcase her writing and segued into online freelance writing. While she may not yet be internationally known, she wouldn’t be known at all if it wasn’t for her blog.

Yet he advises people like Meg to pull the plug:

“Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.”

Riiigght.

I do agree with him that pure text blogs are a thing of the past, increasingly people are turning to media like pictures and video to enliven their posts, and video blogs have quickly become mainstream.

Again, another evolution in  blogging that ensures it won’t die, or become obsolete.

I have clients for whom a blog added to their site, optimized and used correctly, has bumped their rankings in the search engines by generous leaps and bounds.

Its happened with blogs I’ve created and written for as well, so the evidence that blogs done right, provided by handy-dandy analytics, is there.

And sure the blogosphere is getting crowded and half the stuff is obsolete, but its become self-correcting.  Without competition, innovation remains shackled; the more crowded it gets, the harder people try, the more they shine and the more the dead wood floats into Google’s supplemental results ( we can hope).

Perhaps Wired should remove all its blogs-er, columns, since the whole idea is obsolete. I’n sure that would ho over well. Uh huh.

LinkedIn groups function much the same way basic groups do on other networking sites; you can’t do much more than post messages, reply to them, leave comments and add new stories. However, they are a great way to create a community for your service, website, product or company.

So how do you create a LinkedIn Group? Read on for a step-by-step guide…

1) First, login to your linked in profile. To the left hand side of your profile, you’ll see a tab that says “Groups.”

LinkedIn Group Step 1

2) Click on the plus sign next to groups and a list of the groups you belong to/have created will drop down. If you want to edit your group, click on the one you wish edit (you can only edit the ones you created - in this case I clicked on the Authority Domains one I set up for the purpose of this example).

To create a group, click the “Create a Group” tab:

LinkedIn Group Creation - Step 2.5

3) After you click the “Create a Group,” you’ll see the screen below (it takes you directly to “Manage”). Simply fill out the information accordingly (its pretty self-explanatory–remember to use your keywords in both the Group Name, Summary and Description). Save the changes:

4) As soon as you’ve saved the changes, you’ll see a page under the Overview tab. This tab does exactly what it says: it gives you an overview of all the activity that’s been going on with your group:

LinkedIn Group Creation Overview - Step 4

5) Discussion tab - You can see what members of your group are talking about:

LinkedIn Group Discussions

6) News tab - You can see the latest news submitted to the group:

7) Updates - You can see what updates people have made

Members - Here is a list of members; only managers can edit this area:

9) Settings - Here you can modify your group settings as needed:

10) Manage - Here you can manage your account and settings, add up to ten people as managers, add , block or delete members, delete the group, pre-approve members, invite them, edit info & settings and change owner:

11) When you first login and click on groups, you’ll see a notification that looks like this when someone has applied to join your group:

LinkedIn Joined Group Notification

“Vote on November 4th Democracy works best when we all participate. Please take time to vote on Election Day. Google’s 2008 Voter Info Map can help you find your local polling place. Find your local polling place.”

We found it particularly amusing that Google is messaging users via their AdWords accounts, but its still kinda cool. Just a tidbit for you to nibble on today:)

Two of the best ways to go about marketing yourself through Facebook besides your main profile are Facebook Groups and Facebook Fan Pages. While both are similar in concept, there are some key differences to keep in mind when you’re setting them up.

I would advise you to create both a group and a fan page, because while they perform similar functions e.g. as outlets and communities for your like-minded fans/visitors/clients/friends to meet and share about whatever topic you’ve chosen for your page or group, they offer several different options.

Here’s a breakdown of what they offer side by side:

The Pomegranate Phone is an experiment in viral marketing launched by the government of Nova Scotia on October 1st - 300k worth of an experiment, to be exact.

Touting itself as the ultimate all-in-one gadget offering a mobile phone, mp3 player, gps system, internet, global voice translator, camera, video player, movie projector, coffee brewer, razor and harmonica in one, plus accessories like t-shirts, docks and speakers, this “pombomb” as many in the social media sphere are calling it, was an attempt to spread the word about Nova Scotia’s Come To Life tourism campaign.

There have been debates about the effectiveness of the campaign, with several people labeling it a “pombbomb” on Twitter and calling it a viral marketing failure.

However, according to a blogger at Brightwhite, the creator of this campaign, Stacy Jones-Oxner, the site got over 21k visitors in its first 4 days of existence, the majority of which made it to the REAL target, the Nova Scotia tourism site.

However, the links to the site are hidden well, and unless you just happen to click on the correct one, you won’t get there. There are those of us who see something like that and try everything, then there’s the average user who might try out a couple things and move on. But that’s just my humble opinion.

I think people will definitely forward this to friends, family and co-workers, but I don’t think the majority of those people will click over to the main Nova Scotia site.

Now, I do have to give props for a clever idea, I just think the main goal is too hidden, and what does the phone have to do with Nova Scotia? Is it saying they like coffee, shaving and gadgets, and if you do too, come on over? Maybe if it its meaning, message and links were a more obvious and a less hidden…who knows.

For now, I’ll leave you with pictures and this thought: someone make that phone for reals, stat!

As a regular phone:

As a coffee brewer:

As a global voice translator:

As a shaver:

As a harmonica:

As a home movie projector:

With accessories:

How Do You Ban a User From Your Facebook Fan Page

At this time, there is no way to remove or ban a user from being a fan of your Page. However, if a fan is abusive, you can block them from posting content on your Page. To do so, please click on the “Block” link found underneath the posted content.

Additionally, you can report the user or the user’s postings on your Page to Facebook by using the appropriate report links.

Facebook will review the reported material and remove anything that violates their Terms of Use. If warranted, Facebook will either warn or disable the user.

Make sure any plugin you use has at least three stars; if it doesn’t but you really want it, make sure you do the research.

Also, check to see what version of WP you have. When you follow any of the links below to download a plugin, double check to make sure it’s compatible with your version of Wordpress.

With plugins, the process is pretty simple in general:

1. Download the file;
   
2. Extract the files from it if its zipped to your Plugins folder on your computer;
3. Upload the files to your wp-content/plugins folder;
4. Activate it in the Wordpress manager under “Plugins.”

Here are the top 20 Wordpress plugins you can’t live without:

Some of these plugins like the Wordpress Print Post Plugin have special instructions, so make sure you read them carefully. Otherwise, enjoy and have fun playing with them.

PLUGINS I CONSIDER NECESSARY

Advanced TinyMCE Editor
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/

Adds advanced features to the standard TinyMCE WordPress rich-text editor.

Akismet
http://codex.wordpress.org/Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

Anarchy Media Player

http://an-archos.com/anarchy-media-player

Plays mp3, flv, mov, mp4, m4v, m4a, m4b, 3gp, avi, asf and wmv hypertext links directly on your webpage. Adds buttons to the post editor for embedding swf movies including Google Video etc. Edit all player options in Options > Anarchy.

cforms II
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cforms/

cforms II offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager Support, Database tracking and many more.

Clean Archives
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/clean-archives-reloaded/

Displays a compact monthly archive instead of the default long list.

Sociable
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/

Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites like Facebook, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Digg and many many others.

GeoPress
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/geopress/

GeoPress adds geographic tagging of your posts and blog. You can enter an address, points on a map, upload a GPX log, or enter latitude & longitude. You can then embed Maps, location tags, and ground tracks in your site and your blog entries. Makes your feeds GeoRSS compatible.

Google Sitemaps
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.

Flickr

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tantan-flickr/

This Flickr plugin for WordPress will allow you to pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site. There is a pretty simple template provided which you can customize to 100% match the look and feel of your own site.

Gregarious
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gregarious/

Allows you to add social media bookmarking buttons to your posts or pages.

Head META Description

Insert HTML META description tag: excerpt/content brief for post/Page, description for category, and blog tagline for everything else.

Jerome’s Keywords
http://daven.se/usefulstuff/wordpress-plugins.html

Allows keywords to be associated with each post, which can be used as meta keywords and for creating a local tag system.

Random Posts
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/random-posts-plugin/

Displays a configurable list of random posts.

Samsarin PHP Widget
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/samsarin-php-widget/

A text widget with support for codes including HTML and PHP. Good for adding buttons and links to a widget and customizing it; snippets of code and etc.

All-in-one-SEO
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines

WordPress Reports
http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-reports/

Generates reports from Google Analytics and Feedburner data .

WP-PostRatings

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-postratings/

Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.

“Print My Post” Plugin

http://www.ivonson.com/wordpress/wordpress-print-post-plugin

WP-Polls
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-polls/

WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you want. It now supports multiple selections of answers.

Recent Comments Plugin
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/get-recent-comments/

This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar.

OPTIONAL PLUGINS

Smart Youtube

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/smart-youtube/

Smart Youtube is a Wordpress Youtube Plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos in your post, comments and in RSS feed.

Exec PHP Plugin
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exec-php/

The Exec-PHP plugin executes PHP code in posts, pages and text widgets.

Umapper

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/umapper/

The UMapper plugin is a universal mapping platform that makes it a snap to create engaging maps and add them to your blog posts. Microsoft Virtual Earth, Google Maps, and OpenStreet are all supported by this truly universal plugin.

Wp-Gravatar

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-gravatar/

This plugin lets you use Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with your comments. But that’s not all; scroll down to see what else this plugin does for your site. The plugin has been tested on version 2.1, 2.2, 2.3.1, 2.3.2, 2.3.3 and 2.5. Should work on all versions from 2.1 and upwards. It will also detect the Prologue theme from Automatic.

Twitter Tools
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

Author Image
http://coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/author-images/

Adds the author’s image to posts if wanted.