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There are a number of reliable blogging platforms out in the industry.  Of course, I appreciate WordPress with your own domain as you can see.

These days, I either teach people to build their own website from scratch but that’s a long process which requires much more patience and time investment but it is completely possible.  For many business owners, I help business owers with some design work followed by training so they are up and running quickly and moving on towards an ongoing monthly communications and branding program for their business.

Either way, the key is a an effectve blogging platform.  Of course, having your own domain with WordPress is one of the most effective.  Some of the free services out there can result in outages and minor ones are alright although longer ones won’t bode so well for the average business owner.

How does an independent business owner make these determinations with all those choices out there?  Some are so easy to use but don’t provide the branding that people seek.  Private implementations are still the most effective and give the business owner the most mileage.  Choose one to provide both a website as well as a blogging platform.

Branding, search engine optimization capabilities and then ongoing attention to your communications are also key.  The decision making process is more involved than one might think at the beginning but taking some time to understand your decision will improve your overall results in the long run and reduce the cost of your initiatives over the short as well as long run.

It is like most business decisions in that good planning and doing things well the first time around will result in optimal results at the best cost.

This week, Facebook announced their Social Email Marketing service which will wrap together Text, Chat and Messaging together.  On a daily basis, over 4 billion messages both direct and instant messages are sent via Facebook.  Their marketing campaign over the last 12 to 18 months that “email is dead” has been brilliant.

In the marketing world, it’s well known that email is a key artery to both our online social networking lives, our mobile lives as well as professional lives.  In fact, read All Roads Lead to Email in order to understand more about how email is used as our focal point of our online activities.

Some interesting comments about Facebook’s announcement include that these conversations would be captured online forever.  It’s a little bit of a scary thought to capture in black and white all my casual conversations with online friends forever.   Also, Facebook has now been capturing and aggregating our conversations with friends online so we can each go and visit these past conversations and see our relationships at work.  I found it rather fascinating to see how much many touches happen between those who are closer to me and how some relationships aren’t all that close but the conversation can sometimes be a little on the richer side with each touch.

I laugh at the thought of being able to see my relationships visually with other people in terms of number of touches as well as the depth of each touch that we have with each other.  In the long run, I would imagine that I could see how each became closer, deeper and richer or how some might have melted away.  All those questions about what ever happened to those close friends from my past, now answered for us in a visual history of conversations, photo sharing and comments.

How fascinating is this brave new world?!

Recently, someone asked me how they get conversions from social media.  For some businesses, you can create a conversion point in social media.  For other businesses, it’s just the start of the conversion process so we don’t see the sales conversions happening on the social networking platform.

So, why use LinkedIn?  Here are some reasons why businesses use LinkedIn:

1. Visibility or Awareness
   Increase your visibility by connecting with more people.  The more people you connect with, the more connections will have access to your LinkedIn profile and be able to seek you out.  It’s who your network knows which is very important and being on LinkedIn is like having everyone’s extended Roledex connected to you indirectly when you’re trying to search for people.  If others are trying to locate services like your own, it’ll be easier for them to find you when you’re connected to their network.   Spend time connecting with your network online.
2. Brand Awareness or Become an Expert
   Beyond just a profile, its important to develop a brand to differentiate yourself from others in your industry.   Use blogs & micro-blogs to create a conversation about your expertise, service, processes and what your business solves for other people.  You’ll be remembered for your expertise and generating that awareness amongst people.  And, the great thing about your LinkedIn profile, blogs and other online sites is that your communications will stay there for people to read even after days, weeks or months have passed.
3. Become an Expert
   Start by joining groups.  Get to know some of the people within the group.  Then, begin to answer questions.  You’ll be rewarded for the best answers and soon, you’ll become recognized as an expert in your field.  Ask questions and you may find your next prospect trying to answer it.  Finally, the most advanced form of participation is starting your own group.  It does take more hours of management to take on this task.
4. Build Credibility
   Testimonials help others understand what we do well for other people.  It’s called Recommendations within LinkedIn.  Once you’ve completed something that people have enjoyed, request a Recommendation.  An automated, pre-created message is already there or you can customize it a bit so people might get more of a hint as to what to write up as a recommendation for you.
5. Page Rankings
   LinkedIn profiles rank quite well in Google.  So, you want to develop a good profile and also list your websites.  So, create a public profile of your account with FULL VIEW and also give it a URL with your actual name or your business name potentially.  That way, if people want to research your name or your business name, your profile will more readily appear in a Google search.  Cross promote your full profile on your websites and vice-versa.  The website feeds your profile  and your profile will feed your websites.  Using page rankings to feed each are vital components of getting found on the internet and the initial steps of the Online Marketing Funnel.
6. Improve Search Engine Rankings, Increase New Website Traffic
   The great thing about your account is that you can connect it to your website and certain platforms such as WordPress have an application within LinkedIn so you can feed your blog postings to your profile and get traffic back to your website as well.  So, this is the starting point for achieving higher search engine rankings, there’s still a lot more to the activities in order to achieve the optimal traffic volumes and search rankings to improve potential prospective traffic.
7. Run an Event
   Now, for some people, this a great way to convert on the network that you’ve spent time building up.  However, even if this isn’t true, this is not the only conversion point in an Online Marketing Funnel.   In fact, for most people, this is also just another step towards qualifying your potential prospects.

Social networking like other forms of business networking or in some cases, cold calling, is a great way to start a marketing funnel but like all sales or marketing funnels, it needs more care and attention in order to further qualify your contacts or social network of people.  If you want, conversion is a little beyond what I discuss here at this site.  But, feel free to visit the Yenius Interactive Marketing website to find out other steps in building up a systematic Online Marketing Funnel which will feed you and your organization with business leads.

Facebook Places was announced this week and slowly, it is being distributed to US accounts. After that, it will be distributed internationally.

In the meantime, foursquare has been the dominant social media platform for location-based social networking with 2 million users over its counterparts Gowalla and Brightkite.  With Facebook’s entry into the location-based social networking space, it will make location-based social networking a serious part of our social networking lives.  With over 500 million users and 20% already accessing Facebook via a mobile device, we’re going to see this form of social networking go mainstream.  Yahoo! entered the game in May 2010 with the acquisition of Koprol.  So, let’s take a short look at the upcoming Facebook Places.

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To learn more about Facebook Places, visit this page by going to http://www.facebook.com/places/

To set your privacy settings, visit this location:  http://www.facebook.com/places/#!/settings/?tab=privacy

Visit this location to access Facebook’s FAQ’s on Places: 

http://www.facebook.com/places/#!/help/?topic=places

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This is the Facebook Privacy Settings page so be sure you have CUSTOM settings checked and then click CUSTOMIZE SETTINGS.

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Once you get to the CUSTOMIZE SETTINGS page, find these two highlighted areas.  To limit access completely, you can set it to the example shown so that only you can view your own Check-ins and nobody else can tag your location.   This completely secures access to your Facebook Places.

Personally, I see Facebook Places as the next step to making our world a true global village again.  And, I personally hope to use location-based social networking to tell my loved ones, family and friends where I am or where I have been so we can stay connected around the globe wherever we may be.  And, of course, there will be many business applications for geographically-based businesses and professions.

The introduction of Facebook Places is very exciting for location-based social networking.

A lot of people ask me this question. And, I also still hear a lot of small business owners say that they don’t think that Twitter is very useful. Here’s Guy Kawasaki telling us one of the key uses of Twitter:

While your business might be a bit smaller and not need the presence or a far reaching customer service tool such as Twitter, make no mistake. The internet has started to turn the business world into one where we as business people reach out to our customers more and more.

It used to be that customers spent time searching for the companies which would provide them the services they needed. These days, business go in search of communicating to the customers that we want to woo. Twitter is one of the helpful tools in that search for courting our target audience.

Join us on August 23rd for the Social Media and Marketing Your Business networking event and hands-on workshop to learn more.