Do you remember going to dance clubs? Hanging out at the corner or in the schoolyard with your friends? I mean, your real friends. These days you may never even meet your friends in-person. Times have changed. It is time to change with the times.

We rely on Social Media to help us connect with friends, grow business relationships big and small, and reach customers locally and globally. Social Media is your oyster.

There are many common forms of Social Media including:

• Concepts, slogans, and statements with a high memory retention quotient, that excites others to repeat.
• Grass-Roots direct action information dissemination such as public speaking, installations, performance, and demonstrations.
• Electronic media with ’sharing’, syndication, or search algorithm technologies (includes internet and mobile devices).
• Print media, designed to be re-distributed.

Doing your Social Media homework can be lots of fun. It may be as simple as going to your local library and signing up for free courses. You are likely already enjoying the benefits of Social Media on websites that have podcasts, videos via YouTube, sharing photographs via Flickr or Picasa, reading or writing blogs, checking in on events or reading social news via Digg or NowPublic. It is your turn to learn more about it. Check out this video Social Media in Plain English !

How do YOU like to socialize?

• Social Networking is widely known as Web 2.0. Connect you with your friends, people with similar interests, potential employers, and find more connections.
• Social Bookmarking sites allow you to organize your favorite sites, tag them for keywords, and keep them all in one place. However, what makes these sites social is the ability for you to share them with others.
• Social Recommendation sites create user generated recommendation sites. Sites like Digg, Netscape and StumbleUpon encourage users to submit items they like and then give others the opportunity to vote on them.
• Social Content sites are where users create and manage the content from photos to videos, information on a topic, and everything in between.

Got Social Media? Make the most of it.

The unemployed and under-employed are not just thinking outside but jumping outside the box to create a meaningful and financial viable future. If this describes you, you know it’s time to move your cheese and learn how to create your own web site. By taking control of your destiny, you will reduce your frustration from applying to non-existing positions that remain posted to an extremely competitive job market.

Being out of work brings emotional and financial stress but being out of work also allows you the opportunity to reassess, discover yourself, and direct how you can not only routinely seek work but create a future that is satisfying in accordance with your own talents and dreams.

No previous experience is necessary to start and to be successful in your creating your own web site. Consider–Where are you? Where do you want to be? Have an idea of what you actually want to accomplish and how you want your web site to look. Think of web site an extension of you—your ideas, your thoughts, your creation, you hope for a brighter future; this is your story. Promote yourself professionally with online resumes, join occupation groups, develop a business, link to meaningful, related sites, start a blog or comment on blogs that relate to your topic.

Create your own web site from A-Z. As a beginner and layperson, just take a step by step approach through the whole process. Here is a snapshot of what you need to learn. Read more details about The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Making Your Own Website.

1. Get Your Domain Name
First, get yourself a domain name. A domain name is the name you want to give to your web site. You have to pay an annual fee to a registrar for the right to use that name. Think of registering a business name in the brick-and-mortar world; having that business name does not mean that you also have the shop premises to go with the name.

2. Choose a Web Host and Sign Up for an Account
A web host is a company that has many computers connected to the Internet. When you place your web pages on their computers, everyone in the world will be able to connect to it and view them. Sign up for an account with a web host so that your web site has a home.

3. Designing your Web Pages
Next, design the web site itself. Look at well-known, successful sites to probe your imagination as well as newly-created sites created by those attempting to move out of the unemployment sector to new horizons.

4. Testing Your Website
Test your web pages as you design them in the major browsers: Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 6, the latest versions of Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. These browsers are free which you can install.

5. Collecting Credit Card Information, Making Money
If you are selling products or services, you will need some way to collect credit card information. You should read up on how to accept credit cards on your website.

6. Getting Your Site Noticed
When your site is ready, you will need to submit your site to the search engines, particularly Google. Promoting your website is critical.

Take a deep breathe and create your future.

You want your website to ratchet up to the top of the search heap. Without question, it’s competitive and time-consuming. Be aware that an elevated search position may not help your sales if the language in your site is not relevant to your goal.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from free search engines. When your site appears high in the search results list, the more visitors will click on your site. With the need to search for information in mere seconds, you’ve got to be on top of your game.

Sure, you can stay up to speed with recommended books on the topic.

Now, as you embark on your SEO, be realistic about your results, buckle up, and put on your thinking cap. Sit down with a cup of tea and take the time to understand your purpose, your constituents, your visitors, your buyers. How do they think, how do they click through information, what is their mindset? Knowing your visitor is essential and the keyword density checker is a tool that you can use to improve not just keyword density but keyword frequency, keyword prominence, and keyword proximity. Which keywords are relevant to your website and pages?

Keep it simple for the visitor. Have a clear purpose. Be sure each page has go-to links with your contact information. Have only useful links. Keep it easy on the eyes, graphically. These ideas and more gives your website the deserved marketing share that you are striving to achieve.

SEO can also refer to “search engine optimizers,” a term adopted by state-of-the art consultants who perform optimization projects for clients to enhance their search engine exposure. It takes understanding of the competition, a methodical approach, and tactics to get to a high ranking position.

Make SEO your priority and get started now ! If you don’t your consumers may change their minds and you will be behind the eight ball. Your website is one of the most important places where you want to be in the thick of traffic.

Below are some of the most common mistakes that businesses and people make when it comes to social media networking. Try to avoid all of these.

1. Setting up a blog, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter page and then not providing updates. Would you send out a blank newsletter to your customers ??

2. Thinking I understand social media and I can just do it myself. It may be more cost-effective or time-effective to delegate certain social media responsibilities to a company that specializes in it or for someone else to handle.

3. Forgetting that social media is about creating interaction with your clients or customers, not just about sending out information.

4. Clicking onto a site for “business” and then getting distracted by other information or friend updates.

5. Spending too much time on sites you enjoy and not fully evaluating whether that particular site is the most effective one for your time and efforts.

So many companies and products are reviewed online by opinions of their customers. Today, more than ever people are posting their personal opinions. They are posting them – Positive and Negative.  Services like Yelp make it easy for people to review personal experiences of other customers.  Yelp has shifted the way testimonials are viewed. They are right in front of you, at the click of a mouse. You can read whether or not a restaurant has excellent, good or bad service and the quality of their food.  You can even get a full understanding of a restaurants atmosphere just by reading the reviews posted by other people that have been there.

If you are planning a vacation, Trip Advisor is a company that allows all reviews to be posted right on the site.  If you want to understand what a hotel is like in Venice or if a hotel has a view of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, just click on Trip Advisor. They will let you know.  They even reveal the date and time of the most recent posts so that you can see if it is out dated.  I recently went on a trip to St. Thomas and I reviewed two hotels that I was debating on staying at.  I ended up picking the Ritz Carlton based on reward points, etc. but my point here is that the reviews were right on target.  They even instructed me which side of the hotel had the best view of the ocean, which side had be renovated and what restaurants where best to eat at off of the resort.  It was a phenomenal experience and I am so grateful that I was able to read the reviews before hand.

So my point is here, for companies.  Hug your customer- you may never know what review they might post.

Interesting news hit the web today as Google released “Google Goggles”, a brand-new addition to Google Labs. It is an experimental application for Android devices that supports visual search.

How does it work? Just open the application and snap a photo. Google (Google Wave) will process the image and return search results. The photo search functionality eliminates the need to type or say anything on your mobile device. It also adds context to your real-world surroundings.

While the technology is pretty amazing, they admit that it is still the beginning. Selected image searches work seamless. For example : photos of books, business cards, artwork, places, logos and landmarks. Image searches for food, animals, plants and cars are still in the works.

Watch the video below for a demonstration of Google Goggles.

Often I hear from my customers how do I back up my content on my blog. So I did some snooping today and I found the below tutorial on the wordpress.org site. You will need access to your ftp information and some knowledge of how the blog is set up to do this by your self. Please if you are not comfortable leave it to the professionals.

Create a Regular Database Backup

Every post and page you write in WordPress is stored in a MySQL database. There aren’t separate files for each page or post. It’s important to regularly back up your database in case something goes wrong (such as with a rogue plugin or a misguided upgrade attempt). You can manually back up your database by using a tool like phpmyadmin, but it’s much easier to simply use the WordPress Database Backup plugin.

To create a regular database backup schedule:

• 1. Download and install the WordPress Database Backup plugin.
• 2. In your blog’s admin panel, go to Manage > Backup.
• 3. In the Backup Options section, select Email backup to and then enter your email address.
• 4. In the Scheduled Backup section, select Once Weekly.
• 5. Select any tables you want to include. These tables refer to data from any plugins you’ve added, not to your posts and comments.
• 6. Click the Submit button at the bottom.

Each week, you’ll receive an email with your database. The database is light and won’t take up much space in your email program. If your site ever crashes, you can restore your entire site’s posts, pages, categories, and tags (but not images) through the database file. Images are stored in wp-content/uploads folder

Now more than ever, company marketers are challenged with improving performance with fewer resources and shifting marketing budgets from traditional to digital tactics like SEO and social media. There are significant benefits from combining search engine optimization and social media marketing tactics ranging from increased social network discovery via search to the ability to attract links for improved SEO.

Implementing a social media marketing program without optimizing content is leaving money on the table. Useful social content (blog, video, images, audio) that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking.

1. Find the Audience:
Understand their behaviors, preferences, methods of publishing, and sharing.
Most companies that are involved with the social web in the channels where their customers spend time have a good sense of where to start. Get involved.
2. Define your objectives:
Objectives are often driven by marketing or sales, and SEO has long been directly accountable to substantial improvements in web sales. Social media is not direct marketing. The role of SEO in a social media effort is to directly influence discovery of social communities or content via search.
3. Establish a game plan:
The game plan for reaching objectives in a combined SEO and social media effort will often focus on content and interaction, since it is content that people discover and share. Whether a keyword-focused strategy for reaching goals means publishing new content or creating an opportunity for consumer-generated content, it must involve proactive promotion and easy sharing ability.
4. Creating a strategic mix:
The strategic mix for a social media marketing effort is based on doing the homework of finding where the desired audience spends its time interacting with and sharing content. Much of the content creation and promotion for a social media marketing effort happens within the strategic mix and optimizing content for keywords.
5. Measure your goals:
Leveraging both social media monitoring services as well as web analytics can provide marketers with the insight to improve results. Marketers can use specific measurement tools to monitor the effect of their social web participation as well as the search engine performance of SEO efforts.

Extend the value of your investment. By involving SEO insight in a social media marketing effort and vice versa, marketers, public relations and advertisers can extend the value of their investment. Well optimized social media content marketing efforts can attract new network participants via search and help increase sales.Advertisers and companies that fund social media campaigns can continue to realize the traffic benefit from optimized interactive content long after the campaign has ended.

Search Engine Optimization

Facebook announced yesterday that it has secured a $200 million investment from the Russian firm Digital Sky Technologies. This is a deal that places the value of the social-networking giant at $10 billion. What does this mean for small business and entrepreneurs ?

It means opportunity !

As more and more users and businesses join Facebook, it will become a way in which small businesses can increasingly take advantage of a free network and low-cost pay per click advertising. Facebook today, allows personal users to create a business fan page. Once this page is created it allows individuals to post/support/and even give a thumbs up. This is a great way for entrepreneurs and small business to utilize their social network.

This investment comes in a time where many people talk about the down turn in the economy, loss of jobs and lack of marketing funds available for organizations. There is an opportunity out there… we just have to take advantage of it.

Facebook gets $200 million investment from Russian Firm

I watched a very interesting video the other day that featured this company as arguably one of the best companies in the world that fully understands the definition of customer service. The company is Zappos. They started in 1999, and have been growing at a rapid rate ever since, largely due to their company values and culture. Every small and large business can reference this business perspective of valuing your employees and also valuing your customer as the #1 priority. Your customer and employees are the key players that keep your business running. Trust your employees to let them be themselves, let them be creative and empower them with the understanding that their ideas will be implemented and heard. Experience the success together…

Care about your employees as people. Care about your customer. Watch this video…
“WoW your customer “ These guys get it !

Love Your Customer