Have you been sitting around wondering if you should start a company profile on Twitter yet? You can clearly see that a great deal of your targeted audience is on there communicating with each other. So what are you waiting for? Twitter is not some big scary giant you have to just dive in and try it as part of your local advertising and local marketing strategy.

Many companies large and small are still testing the waters with Twitter. Some still have no clue how to utilize it to grow their business and some have spent countless hours refining their approach to find one that works. Twitter is something you must simply dive into and just start using until you find the approach that works best for your business. Local advertising comes in many different shapes and sizes and there no rules books to how you should spread the good word about your store, brand or whatever it might be that you are selling. The fact is that Twitter is very large and powerful marketing tool. If you don’t find a way or the time to apply it to your business model now chances are your competition will.

Twitter is not just for the large companies. Targeting a smaller local community with Twitter is very easily done. Getting on the site and trying various approaches will initially be the name of the game in order to find a way to use it. it will be important to try out different approaches to see how they will fit into your overall business strategy and local advertising and marketing campaigns.

If you are a local business that makes a living of selling products or providing a service than you know that budgets are tight and most businesses are being very careful they way they spend any marketing dollars right now. Most businesses are avoiding anything that has a long term goal on it but it is important to not avoid it entirely. There are many ways you can market your business or yourself online that only cost you time. If you have a business that has seen the door swinging open much less than usually than a few hours per week to brand your self online really should be a problem. Now is not the time to roll over and take a hit, it is survival of the fittest and only the best will be left standing when the dust settles. Here are a few ways to keep your branding moving forward.

1. LinkedIn: If you are an accountant, web designer or any type of service related business LinkedIn is a website dedicated towards business minded professionals can meet and network right from the comfort of your computer. LinkedIn is filled with opportunities to be able to engage in conversations and discussions with other industry professionals that might be looking for what you offer.

2. Blog Commenting: Do some research online and find other industry related blogs that are regionally targeted to your specific area and start leaving some educated comments on blog posts to get web traffic over to your site.

3. Set up a MySpace and  Facebook Page: Yes I know that people talk about all the hype about these sites and many people are clueless how to use them but it is important you venture into this area real soon, like yesterday. These social networking powerhouses allow you to search regionally and by demographics so you can really isolate the type of customer you are looking and then try connecting with them.

4. Twitter: Now for someone who still is not sure how to set up a MySpace page Twitter might be a little difficult to understand but just realize that you need to be there. Just look at it as the fast moving forum discussion you will ever see. You can see thousands of little conversations and really chime in at any moment. Over time this will brand your business or your name depending on which direction you are taking on Twitter.

5. Your Website: Before you look at all this other stuff take a look at your website first. Do you have one? If not climb out from under the rock you have been sleeping under and build yourself a decent website. Get someone that knows what they are doing not one of your buddies who took a class five years ago. If you do have a site ask yourself when was the last time it was updated? If the last time it was updated was during the dot com boom you are probably due for a revamping of your website. People judge a book by it’s cover every you go. Personal branding is important so make sure your website is new, fresh and inviting.

It is pretty clear that even just a few years ago local online marketing targeting people directly in your community was something that was still unclear. As time pushes forward companies will target local business at a greater depth than ever before.

Twello is a search tool that can help you find local Twitter users easily. Twitter has become a marketing phenomemon and companies across the world are trying to figure out exactly how to apply it to their business model. many Twitter users are trying to figure out exactly how it helps their business but one consensus is clear, it works. Twello allows you to find the people that you want to find. You can search by geographical location or industry so that you can connect with the right audience to target with your Twitter feeds. Whether you are a national business or a local florist you eventually apply Twitter to your online marketing approach and websites like Twello will give you the ability to refine your target. Social media marketing works best when your efforts are scrubbed leaving behind only the most targeted of individuals to engage conversation with. It is easy as a business or even person to waste time with social media. With so many other individuals to engage in conversation it can sometimes be difficult to make sure you are using your time wisely and engaing with the right audience.

Many business that survive on local business are trying to figure out just how to tie in Myspace, Facebook or even Twitter into their daily routine. There is no defined answer but not attempting to use any is defiently not the answer.

Most social profiles will allow you to target people geographically. It is important to engage in the communties and offer something of value. Try different things and see what works best for your business. Websites like Facebook really require a human behind the profile so building out your little section with a persona or employee to reach out to others on the website will be very important. Facebook groups are very powerful and starting a group and letting people join is one way Facebook can help you. Myspace is a bit more leniant when it comes business profiles. You can isolate a geographic target of individuals and locate people that you thinkl might be interested. By sending out freind requests, participating in online discussions and joing groups will be a great way to become visible in front of much of your audience. It is important as a business owner to not neglect this area of your audience. You have to make sure not to spam people or your profile will get shut off by many of the platforms. Test out different approaches and you will eventually find one that works for you. You can also take a look at how some of your competitiors approach targeting your local audience if you are skeptical on how to approach this area.

Local networking through social platforms is a very powerful tool and should be utlized by all local businesses. This type of marketing is here to stay and should be an area of focus for all growing local businesses in 2009.

It is no surprise that social media marketing does work whether on a national approach or even a local one. Never before has it been this easy to get in front of your audience than through social media marketing and networking. Most websites like Flickr and Facebook have the ability to instantly connect with your local audience with only a few clicks.

You can launch groups and search for specific users catering towards specific states, towns and even zip codes. These social sites have become not only a pathway but a highway of traffic to any growing business looking to utilize it the right way. When approaching these social media giants you must treat them with respect or they will chew you up and spit you out. Abuse their services and your account will be shut off without warning. When targeting local groups and people on these social networking sites you have to do it tastefully otherwise you will see one account after another being turned off and all your hard work will be washed away. But do it correctly and participate and engage its users to the sites full potential and the rewards could be great. The sites hold a tremendous amount of power and opportunity for any business large or small. Profiles offer the ability for users to leave feedback on products; sign up for news updates and also meet others that hold similar interests to be able to communicate regarding your business.

It is important for any local business to take advantage of the various social networking website out there. Most of these sites are a free service all you have to do is sign up and fill out your profile.

For any online business, customer feedback and reviews of their product are essential to increasing quality and sales. Many businesses employ people full time to test products and request feedback from customers to analyze the product and see where there can be improvements, or worse case scenario, see where the flaws are.

Waiting around for customer feedback can be a lengthy process, though, and often a fickle one as many people only call customer service when they have something negative to say.

With Twitter’s purchase of Summize, a search engine that specifically crawls Twitter posts, business will (eventually) be able to get some real time feedback on their products and services.

I know that some advertising blogs are pretty ho-hum on this subject, with a few people saying that Twitter essential bought its own search engine, but I disagree with the blasé response. Let me explain why:

People talk. People Twitter. People talk and twitter about the new products and businesses that that purchase things from. People have these conversations at random, often a half sentence here and there. This is a huge difference from the type of specific posts on, say, a blog or a review site. Summize searches the twitter posts for conversational sentiments related to your specific search terms and analyzes them for positive, negative, or whatever sentiments.

Just think about it for a moment… if you could zero in on all of the casual conversations in the world that mention your product… wouldn’t that be a gold mine of insider information about your business?

A negative review of your business or product is detrimental to your online reputation, but if it is managed correctly you can negate some of its worst impacts. When you find a negative review about your business, under no circumstances should you knee-jerk a reply defending your business. This can quickly devolve into a nasty thread of replies that will in perpetuity online, for anyone to read. You would not want have a heated argument in front of your customers in public, and make no mistake, an online post war is public indeed.

The best way to manage a negative online reputation slur is to take moment to collect yourself and then investigate the situation before your reply.

Your first course of investigating should of course revolve around the facts listed in the negative review.
Was the review about service? If it was, find out when, where, and who, and then interview that employee to understand what happened.
Was the review about a product? If it was, look into the product and the complaint to find out if that particular product had a flaw that caused an issue.

Whether or not you believe the negative review is substantiated, you need to look into the identity of the person who wrote it.

Who is the poster?
Are they connected to competitor?
What is there sphere of online influence?

If the negative review stands, because of a bad employee or a fault in the product, reply back that you have or are addressing the situation, and how. So many negative experiences can be turned into positive ones if the company takes the time to take action.

If the negative review is factually incorrect, ask for a removal or a retraction of the post, and explain why.

We have talked about one of the most important things for any business to manage, their online reputation. The ability to monitor what is being written about your business or products online is the key to keeping your business and product names out there in a positive light. A good review about your business can bring an onslaught of customers to your site and increase your product awareness, but that also means that one bad review can do just the opposite. It can challenge your business like nothing else, forcing your small business to overcome negative press in what was once a playing field reserved for only large businesses.

Monitoring your business’s online reputation, however, is only half the battle. It is very possible that you will find negative reviews and statements about your business that you will need to either refute or correct.

After you are actively monitoring your business’s online reputation, the vital part is to manage it.

When you find positive reviews about your business, don’t just sit back and congratulate yourself. Take the time to find out about the person who posted the review. Who are they? What is their sphere of influence in the online world? What did they like best about your business or product? If they mentioned any specific names of employees, take the time to thank that employee for a job well done.

When you have an employee that is really going above and beyond, your first order of business is to recognize them and make sure that you retain their services. You don’t want them heading off to a competitor.

We’ll look into dealing with negative issues related to online reputation management in our next post.

One challenging issue for businesses is the ability to monitor the ever-increasing reviews online. While at the outset this may seem to some as yet another online social media issue, the reality is that a business’s online reputation depends on how it is managed. Bad reviews are going to happen, but in oder to negate it’s impact, you have to know about it in the first place.

Reviews about a business can be anything from a one word deal, “The Oak Hotel – Sucks!” to a glowing or scathing three paragraph review that encompasses everything from dining to concierge service to room cleanliness. Believe me when I say that both reviews are going to matter to your business’s online reputation. It doesn’t matter if your business is being discussed on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Yelp, people will read it and your business will either soak in the glow of increased business or sit in the dark wondering where your customers went.

In order to manage your online reputation, you must monitor your business’s name and any derivations online. If you own The Oak Hotel in Boston, you would need to make sure you monitor phrases such as “Oak Hotel,” “The Oak Boston,” “Boston Oak Hotel,” “The Oak,” etc. You need to be completely up to date on mentions of your business whether it is in blogs, social forums, or travel sites.

By monitoring your business’s reputation, you’ll be getting a insider’s look on what customers think of your business, your products, and your employees.

Technorati Watchlist and Google alerts are two easy monitoring tools to help you look into what is being said about your business online.

Hyper Local Journalism is making headlines in the news, quite literally. Traditionally, journalists raced against time to be the first person reporting from a specific location, such as Disaster A. Whomever got there first got the story, the pictures, and the big bucks for breaking it to the news-hungry public.

Because video cameras weren’t an everyday item being carried about by consumers, and the ability to transfer that data was restricted to how fast your local mail carrier was. These things were not conducive to your every day person breaking the news.

With the full scale consumer embrace of cell phones with video capabilities and high speed data transfers directly from the mobile phone, the face of the news began to change.

Bigger news outlets found themselves one-upped on big stories that were reported first, on such sites as YouTube, by everyday Joes like you and I. It was then, and only then, that the news outlets so kindly began to ‘feature’ citizen eye witness reports on their sites. Unpaid, of course. The payment was the glory of having your cell video streaming on CNN’s website.

So how does this affect Social Media Advertising? By allowing consumers to gain a measure of control over what is shown as news , the products that they use and the events that they deem newsworthy are reaching a greater market.

Your new product could take months and years to take off with traditional advertising, but being featured in a Hyper Local Journalism streamed video on the news can skyrocket your sales in days.

If you have a products that is newsworthy and up-to-the-minute-relevant, consider submitting a video of it by Hyper Local Journalism.

It’s not news that more and more people turn to the internet to fulfill their consumer shopping needs. The trends began years ago and the convenience of it has grown so much that where analysts used to talk about Black Friday, they now talk about Black Monday.
So it was only a matter of time before shopping sites melded with social networking sites and became social shopping sites. The concept is based on the two simple principles for consumer shopping.

1. Consumers usually ‘ask around’ to get their friends and families opinions on a product before the buy it
2. After a purchase, most consumers like to voice their (loud) opinion on what they liked, and didn’t like, about their purchase and give recommendations about the product.

The new Social Shopping site Kazowie.com is essentially a social networking site for people who shop. Is it useful? Well let’s see….

1. Consumers enjoy it because they can apply the principles referenced above. They get to ask for opinions on what they want, and they get to voice their thoughts on what they got. They get recommendations and price comparisons
2. Businesses will love it because people will talk about their products, and every business knows that favorable reviews on the internet are advertising gold. (This is also where a business can drastically affect their Online Reputation too.)

According to their site, Kazowie will:

• Create a one-stop gift registry for weddings, events, or showers. Instead of choosing registries from a select few department stores, a user can compile products from any shop. The purchaser can navigate to an online store through the registry, or find the store locally. Kazowie can manage quantities and fulfilled items.
• Create discussions and recommend products.
• Support local shops without online presence by adding products with the name and address to buy it offline.
• Be an expert by creating a buyer’s guide for products.
• Create groups and invite friends to share products of interest with group members.
• Browse through and rate online shops; see what other products each has to offer.
• Create an opinion poll to get the best recommendations from friends, family and other users on the site.
• Subscribe to an RSS feed to be in touch with friends’ activities.
• Login or create an account with existing accounts from Yahoo, Google, OpenID, AOL/AIM.

As with any Social site, Kazowie will only be powerful if people use it but the bottom line is that, as a business with a product to sell, it might be worth your time to make sure you have a presence there.

Unlike Facebook or Myspace, Linkedin is a social media network designed for business professionals to increase their network and social contacts…which in the business world means to better their business contacts. It is also a place for people searching for jobs can list their skills and business looking to hire can list their criteria. Linkedin gives business people the ability to make the contacts that they need to survive in the social media business network.

Adam Nash at the LinkedIn blog wrote a blog about LinkedIn after his key speeches at the 2008 Social Patterns conference.

•

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network: the new medium for how business gets done. Our members find new ways to interact with each other and improve their business every day.
• LinkedIn a Purpose-Driven Network. LinkedIn was built and designed specifically with the business professional in mind. That kind of focus and relevance makes us as valuable as possible to the professional who comes to LinkedIn for the specific purpose of getting business done.

He also wrote a piece on the use of LinkedIn in the entertainment industry that is worth looking at.

Link directly to your media properties
As LinkedIn represents your professional brand online, use the three outgoing hyperlinks to send people right to your movie, music, or filmography online. Got your projects on iTunes? Netflix? Amazon? IMDb? YouTube? Link to these and enable people to review your creative efforts first-hand.
–
Keep checking the LinkedIn Blog to find out how other industries are using the site to open the right doors and develop opportunities for their companies and careers. I’ll be here doing the dirty work for LinkedIn, leaving no stone unturned to get the story. Special thanks to Marcio and Telemetrik for use of their song “Nova”!

Facebook is now confirming that their developer platform will go open source. This can have significant effect on the Social Media Marketing crowd by changing not only the volume of people using it, but also the demographic statistics that can be harvested. For advertisers, this change can mean a significantly better conversion rates and prices.

We’re working on an open-source initiative that is meant to help application developers better understand Facebook Platform and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running their own test servers, building tools, or optimizing their applications. As Facebook Platform continues to mature, open-sourcing the infrastructure behind it is a natural step so developers can build richer social applications and share what they’ve learned with the ecosystem. Additional details will be released soon.

Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim discusses some of the changes:

What does this change? After all, Google’s Open Social initiative has already created (or was supposed to create) an “industry standard” of APIs for social networking, and Facebook declined to sign on.
However, the implications of going “open source” change the impact of Facebook’s platform. While OpenSocial’s APIs are designed to be widely usable (ie generic), Facebook’s markup language, query langauge and JS library enhance the offering here.
OpenSocial is has some open source code, but their FAQ doesn’t indicate that they are currently, fully open source:

On the ball marketers are starting to figure out how to make Social Media Marketing pay off on a Local front. Social media marketing has many wonderful applications that be used for local businesses to join the party and cash in. While savvy marketers know how to strategize and pull off a great site for their clients, many businesses are having a go at Social Media Marketing without any professional help.

Social Media Marketing is the use of social media to market one’s business online or through digital media. Social media marketing has grown into a big slice of the Internet marketing pie, with websites like Flickr, YouTube, StumbleUpon, BlogCatalog, Digg, Facebook, and MySpace dominating the social networks.

One of the best ways for a small local business to join the Social Media Market is by creating a blog. Every business, no matter how locally defined it’s operations, should have a blog. The problems arise when businesses unfamiliar with the social media market forget that a blog should never be a little island unto itself. That would sort of defeat the entire concept of a Social Media network.

Do your research on local networks, defined by geography, market type, or whatever your particular business niche is, and build your site or blog to draw those people in.

With Social Media Marketing, you will need to be an expert on dealing with the integration of social networking, social media, online reputation management, and local SEO to bring it all together in one beautiful, cash rich advertising campaign.

Business owners new to the social media scene often confuse social media with traditional media such as newspapers, television, and radio; or worse yet, they think that social media optimization is simply creating a Myspace page.

Matt Goddard at R2i blogs wrote a nice piece about the difference between social networking and social media. It’s definitely worth taking a look at.

1. Social networks and social media are distinct but connected
2. Social networks are patterns of advice seeking and advice giving used to reduce the risk of decisions.
3. Social media is a popular platform for delivering the social message.
4. You need to establish whether the social networking exists in your target market and whether social media is viable channel of influence.

Further thinking about the guidelines that Matt is discussing, there are some questions that you need to ask when considering a social media marketing strategy:
1. Should your business host a blog?
2. Social Networking: Are there social networking sites or groups that target your industry? If there are, what kind of strategies can you employ to enter them?
3. Podcasts: Are there any podcasts in your target industry already? What can you offer as an alternative podcast?
4. User Generated Content : Are there videos or other forms of user generated content already being made public in your industry? How can you make a different, more noticeable impact?
One of the key points of the article is that businesses don’t want to approach social media optimization just because they’ve heard the term and it sounds nifty. They should make a concerted effort to look into the social networks of their target audience and see if there is a social market to go after with SMO practices.