When it comes to advertising there are many business owners who literally cringe. Are you doing this now? There is a good chance that you are because many advertising methods cost money. As a business owner you want to make money not spend it, right? Unfortunately, if you believe that all forms of advertising take money, you are sadly mistaken. Although you may have to spend money to make your business what you want it to be, there are ways to promote your business and the products or services that you sell without having to spend any money at all.

Is your curiosity peaked yet? There is a good chance that it is, rightfully so.

One of the ways that you can promote your online business, without having to spend a dime, is by using something that is readily available online. That thing is an online social networking website. A large number of internet users, in fact millions of them, belong to at least one social networking website.

When it comes to social networking, there are many individuals who think of online friendships or online relationships. While these types of relationships are the most common, did you know that social networking is also used for businesses? In fact, that was originally how social networking got started. If you are a small business owner, especially one that operates an online business, there is a way that you can use social networking sites to your advantage.

Although social networking websites are traditionally focused on those that would like to make online friends or develop online relationships, there are networking sites that are designed for business owners. These websites will not only allow you to share your business information with other business owners, but it will also allow you to develop close relationships with those that share an interest that is similar to yours. Essentially, this means that you could not only learn valuable business information, but you could also walk away with a new business partner or a new friend.

Move over, social networking websites with a focus on businesses, are a great way to promote your business. However, this does not mean that you should completely forget about the other online social networking websites, the ones that are designed to make online friendships. Although you may not learn any valuable business tips by joining Yahoo! 360 or MySpace, you may be able to get new customers and new customers is exactly what your business should want and need.

If you are looking to join an online community, you will need to create your own profile or profile page. If you are planning on joining a traditional social networking website, to gain access to millions of potential new customers, you are urged to be careful when making your online webpage or profile. One thing that internet users hate is being solicited for business.

This does not mean that you cannot use social networking to your advantage; it just means that you need to be careful with how you do it. Instead of creating a MySpace page or a Yahoo! 360 page for your business, you are advised to make one for yourself, but, of course, you will want to include information on your business.

By joining a social networking website, especially one that is popular and has a large number of members, you should be able to generate interest in your business, including the products or services that you sell. Who knows, but that interest generated could turn into sales; thus making your social networking experience more than worth it.

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ST. LOUIS — The extent of the fence-mending between St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa and Twitter.com was clear to see Friday night, when a co-founder of the social networking site was invited to throw out a first pitch.

It’s a far cry from earlier in the season, when the manager filed a lawsuit after an unauthorized page using his name made light of his DUI charge and the deaths of two Cardinals pitchers in recent years. The lawsuit was dropped in late June, not long after La Russa said Twitter agreed to consider donating to his Animal Rescue Foundation.

Jack Dorsey, a left-hander wearing a vintage game-worn Bob Gibson jersey, floated a pitch in the general direction of Cardinals infielder Joe Thurston before the NL Central leaders played the Chicago Cubs.

The 32-year-old Dorsey, who grew up in the city, was honored as person of the year at suburban Webster University earlier Friday. He received a key to the city along with a proclamation that adhered to Twitter’s guidelines of no more than 140 characters at an event that was billed as a “tweetup.”

Dorsey was impressed that the proclamation even included three statements beginning with whereas, and a fourth beginning with therefore. He was perhaps more impressed with the advice he got from La Russa before striding to the mound before being honored with one of four “first pitches.”

“The first thing he said to me was ‘Don’t throw it in the dirt,”‘ Dorsey said.

Dorsey said Biz Stone, the other co-founder of Twitter, and another co-worker toured the facility recently and added, “They loved it.” Dorsey got a promise from La Russa to take him out to dinner in the San Francisco bay area.

“We resolved it,” Dorsey said. “He was great.”

The lawsuit was the first encountered by Twitter, and resulted from what Dorsey called a misunderstanding related to the site’s terms of service. The lawsuit prompted Twitter to tweak those terms.

The Animal Rescue Foundation, or ARF, tweets. Not La Russa, who claims to know little about computers.

“I don’t even know where to find it, I really don’t,” La Russa said. “Do you just Google Twitter?”

Dorsey said he’d love to tutor the manager.

“It would be awesome to get him on Twitter officially,” Dorsey said. “That would be fantastic. I’ll work on it.”

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Answer: Social media can be a powerful tool for B2B marketers and business owners. It can be used effectively to monitor prospects, drive referrals; create new business opportunities; and attract the right talent and more… Although the effectiveness of social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) may vary by industry, LinkedIn seems universally effective for B2B marketing.

In B2B industries, nothing is more valuable than the quality of your relationships. Whether you realize it or not your success in business depends on your ability not only to establish key relationships, but to leverage, influence and add value to your relationships.

Create new business opportunities

Social networks, such as LinkedIn are like muscles. The more you use them, the more you’ll get out of them. The power of social networks is founded on its size and strength. The trick is balance these two aspects of your network. When it comes to networking, size matters. LinkedIn is a great place to connect with everyone you know professionally and personal contacts that are willing to share connections with you.

LinkedIn users with a free subscription can search and access a portion of social network’s 34 million members based on their connection count. This includes: their immediate connections; second degree contacts (friends of friends); and third degree contacts, and people with a mutual connections. You don’t have to have a huge network to reap results. For example, people with more than twenty connections are thirty-four times more likely to be approached with an opportunity than people with less than five.

Look at the networks of your most satisfied customers. Identify prospects who may have similar needs and use your relationship with the satisfied customer to fuel your contact. This can be done by contacting the prospect directly and highlighting your shared contact (aka satisfied customer). Or, you can ask your satisfied customer to make an introduction on your behalf.

Great networks take great amounts of effort. Think of the most successful people you’ve ever known and they will always seem to know the right person to call on in any given situation to influence or effect the desired outcome. This type of influence doesn’t just happen. It results from years of painstaking social networking.

Drive referrals

Social networks generate referrals. LinkedIn is the most powerful B2B referral network in the world. If you do a good job, one customer might tell three to five of her colleagues, family and friends about you. Using LinkedIn, these results are amplified. When someone writes a recommendation for you on LinkedIn, their entire social network is notified. And, the information is immediately available for the customers and prospects that view your LinkedIn profile.On social networks, you promote your network, and your network promotes you.Solicit LinkedIn recommendations from satisfied customers. Ask them to describe aspects of your working relationship that they value most. Choose customers who have a flair for writing. Don’t be afraid to ask customers to write about specific projects or company characteristics: your creativity, your ability to solve problems, your leadership, etc. Ideally, you’ll want a series of recommendations that compliment each other If someone writes a recommendation you don’t like, you’re not obligated to display it. And, LinkedIn provides tools that let you request updates to recommendations.

Write unsolicited recommendations for businesses you have worked with. This generates goodwill on behalf of each recipient – which strengthens your network. As an added benefit, you’ll often get a recommendation in return.

Be known as an expert

Being an expert on LinkedIn will boost your credibility and build goodwill with prospects. To do this, visit the ‘Answers’ area of LinkedIn to view questions from other LinkedIn subscribers on a variety of topics. Answer questions related to your indusry and personal area of expertise. When you provide the best answer to a question, the submitter can identify your answer as ‘best.’ If you provide the best answer enough times to a topic, you’ll be designated as an ‘expert’ by LinkedIn.

Know your customers — and competition

Linked is a great CRM tool for B2B. You can track the activities of prospects, competitors, and customers and use the information you learn to fuel successful contacts:”LinkedIn is a rich source of information for your sales team about the prospect, so I put it in another class,” said John Rasco, president and founder of RefreshWeb. “What you have to realize about social media marketing is that it’s seeding information for people to find. It’s not a broadcast medium for promotions.”

Find talent

Use social networks to create relationships with prospective employees before you need them — especially if your B2B industry requires a lot of specialized education. Identify thought leaders and skill practitioners in the industry by monitoring their activity on LinkedIn, Twitter and contributions to industry blogs. By creating relationships before you need them, you’ll loose less time when you are ready to add an employee or need to replace an existing employee.

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I’ve been discussing Social Media a lot lately with the business manager for Paralegal Associates.

More over, I’ve had to do a lot of explaining as he come from an era of print ads, cold calls, and letters by hand. I can always answer his questions, except for one.

What is the ROI?

I didn’t have a ready answer and based on the research I have done…no one else really has an answer either.

Social media is about interaction. How do you apply a number to a conversation? You can’t easily do so.

Eventually there will be a way to evaluate it. For now, I will just look at my own experience as a justification of my time spent on social media.

I started on Twitter early this year around end of January/beginning of February. Around that time I also started my Wordpress blog. This now the beginning of September, so we will say that I have been on for 7 months.

In that period of time I have made countless contacts, a few of which I can proudly call friends and I communicate with outside of the social media world. I have made professional contacts who had given me loads of advice regarding my career plans and my getting my business going. This is all well and good, but here is the main point:

In that time period, I have signed up 4 clients all off Twitter. That right there justifies my time. My business has a marketing budget of zero. It is all on social media. The budget will increase as I go to self-hosting blogs and more sophisticated aspects of social media.

More important you tell me, what start-up business can get clients with a marketing budget of zeros using ‘Only’ social media?

I will be addressing this topic more as I do more research into how to understand the ROI and as I have more experiences using social media. Keep checking back for updates. What are your thoughts on the ROI of social media?

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A recent survey of 172 marketeers found that 66 percent of respondents were utilizing social media in 2009, up from 20 percent in 2007, according to the New York-based Association of National Advertisers, which conducted the survey with BtoB Magazine and mktg., a marketing communications firm.

While the numbers keep growing, it’s important for companies to understand how to effectively optimize social media platforms and avoid some of the more common mistakes in order to best maximize their online branding efforts, experts say.

“It isn’t enough just to have an account,” explains Denise Wakeman of DeniseWakeman.com, a Los Angeles-based online marketing/blogging consultancy.

“The key is participation.”

If you’re not interacting and communicating with your audience, then you’re wasting your time, she notes.

With that said, here are a few social media marketing mistakes to avoid if you want to make the greatest impact:

INCONSISTENCY: If you commit to a social network, then stay visible to your audience by regularly tweeting, updating your Facebook page, etc., says Debbie Weil, a Washington, D.C.-based corporate social media consultant and author of “The Corporate Blogging Book” (Portfolio; $23.95). If you’re not consistently providing useful and/or relevant information to your audience, they’ll lose interest, she says.

BEING TOO ELUSIVE: Make sure when people go to your social networking page they see more than just a company logo. Attach a name and a face to your profile/description, Weil says. “Be a person,” she says, noting that even cable giant Comcast ties a face to its Twitter site, @comcastcares, by posting a photo and contact information for its twitterer-customer service manager, Frank Eliason.

BEING TOO SELF-PROMOTIONAL: Too often, companies use social networking sites to just tout themselves, says Hilary Topper, author of “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Social Media, But Were Afraid To Ask” (iUniverse; $27.95) and president of HJMT Communications, a public relations and social media firm in Westbury. It’s OK to promote your company, but it shouldn’t be the main focus, Topper says. “If I tweet five times a day, one in five might be promotional,” she says.
connections

* Facebook Inc. Facebook Inc.
* National Collegiate Athletic Association National Collegiate Athletic Association
* Google Inc. Google Inc.
* LiveJournal
* John Quincy Adams John Quincy Adams

MAKING IT ALL ABOUT BUSINESS: You’re trying to use social media to create conversations and relationships, so don’t be afraid to get a bit personal, Topper says. “There’s a balance,” she notes, adding that there’s nothing wrong with showing your human side with some personal posts.

FAILING TO ENGAGE: Spark conversations by posting relevant links, articles, commenting on other people’s sites, etc., recommends Arthur Germain of Communication Strategy Group, an East Northport-based brand marketing agency. “Listen to your prospects and customers and have a conversation,” he says. Posting photos can be a great way to engage your audience, too. The Inn At Fox Hollow understands this and has a photo gallery on its Facebook page, as well as links back to photos on its main Web site through specials it posts on Twitter. The Woodbury hotel launched a new Web site last year and also has a blog, general manager Franklin Manchester says.

COLLECTING FOLLOWERS & “FRIENDS”:Some businesses base their success on the number of friends or followers they have in their social networks, Germain says. It’s less about numbers than about trying to build a relevant community and having good conversations with people, he says.

HAVING NO BLOG: A blog can be a great place to direct social media traffic since it’s more conversational than a corporate site. “Your blog is your home base,” Wakeman says.

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First, we’ll look at how “Google Analytics plays a part in measuring social media traffic.” Then, we’ll review how it can help with tracking phone conversions. Finally, we’ll look at how to link your AdWords account to your analytics account for better ROI tracking.

Measuring Social Media Traffic through Advanced Segmentation

One of the most challenging things about getting involved with social media is measuring effectiveness. Tool vendors are scrambling to build tools that will allow the measurement of sentiment, profitability, traffic, etc. If you’ve already set up Google analytics, then you’re on your way to measuring social media traffic. Let’s take a closer look.

The idea here is to set up a segment to monitor traffic from either one specific site like Twitter, or multiple sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Let’s set one up for analyzing Twitter traffic. After you log into Google Analytics, find the gray Settings box on the left. Here, you’ll find a link to “advanced segments.” Then:

1. Click on “create new custom segment” in the upper right corner.
2. Look under the green dimensions box and click on “traffic sources.”
3. Drag the “source” rectangle and drop it in on top of the words “dimension or metric.”
4. For the condition, select “Matches regular expression.”
5. For the value type in twitter\.com. (Note: If you want to use Facebook or LinkedIn, the syntax would be facebook\.com or linkedin\.com.)

Name your segment below and click on the button “create segment” and you’re done. To activate the measuring, go back to your dashboard and look in the upper right for “advanced segments.” You should now see a checkbox for Twitter Traffic. Check it and apply. That’s it.

Now you should see any Twitter traffic in relationship to all of your traffic. If you would like to track multiple sites at once, then in the “value” box just put a “|” symbol between each site like this: twitter\.com | facebook\.com | linkedin\.com.

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You’d think with all the attention and buzz showering down upon Facebook these days that it would be the hands down leader in social networking. Think again. The market share leader, at least according to Hitwise is MySpace. Last month, Rupert’s Murdoch’s social media platform captured upwards of 34% market share, outpacing Facebook by more than 10% (see following chart)…

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Well, the reality is that no social media in general will not be dead by next year. However, social media will be dead for you and your business by next year if you do not follow a few simple rules.

1. Do not spam ever. Not only is this terrible for relationships, but many social networks are cracking down on spam, making it so that your account will probably be deleted or suspended if you continue to spam.

2. Focus on relationships and list building via social media. I know you have heard this hundreds of times but the truth is that this are the only two activities that work for building a business with social media.

3. Stop the time wasting activities on social media. This includes mafia wars, chasing brown cows, selling vegetables at the market and a myriad of other games and applications. These are good and fine if you are only using social media for entertainment purposes and many people are, but if you are serious about using it as a business tool then you simply cannot afford the time.

4. Develop a plan and solid goals for your social media activities. You cannot afford to try and target anyone and everyone.

5. Know who your target market is and focus, focus and then focus more on building relationships with these people and adding them to your list.

Learn more about how to build a business with social media as well as online business, hints, tips and tricks.

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There’s a few other aspects of internet privacy you may want to take into account, however, and we’ll try and push you in the right direction.

Consider the quote above. Days later, after posting that quote on his Facebook page (and after he removed it, as well), Dan Leone was fired from his position that he held with the Eagles organization for six years. It’s just one of many stories floating around on the Internet involving employees getting firec for their online activities, and it bears repeating.

The anonymity the internet provides and the lack of understanding some people have with various social networking sites can give people the feeling that they can say or do anything. After all, it’s online, it’s not real life.

How can it possibly hurt me? Well, Dan Leone found out the hard way. With more and more people getting online, posting a message on your Facebook or Twitter has become less sending an email to your friends saying “my employer sucks” (although, that’s a bad idea, too) and more standing in front of their offices with a megaphone and saying the same thing.

It’s not just posting offending Facebook statuses towards your employer that’s a bad idea. Employers are actually actively looking at their employees’ social media pages and checking up on them. Sometimes, people save their employers the trouble. Sometimes, you don’t do anything incriminating, but your blogging can cause a conflict of interest at work, like it did with PittGirl.

Let’s also not forget the personal side of this whole thing. It’s one thing to have your boss see your drunken antic pictures on Facebook. How about having your mom or grandma see it?

Which brings me to a good rule of thumb. Before posting anything – anything – online under your own name, you should ask yourself: “How would this affect me if my coworkers or family saw this? Granted, it’s kind of like the old rule of thumb don’t do anything that would make your mother cry (although if I followed that rule, I’d never leave the house except to go to work).

(Just kidding, mom.)

The internet isn’t the Electronic Wild West it used to be – more and more companies are becoming web savvy, not only using the internet to promote their business, but also to communicate with and weed out potential and existing employees. With that in mind, here’s some suggestions.

Learn How To Use The Privacy Settings on Facebook and MySpace.

This is especially important once Facebook implements their Twitter-style real-time search of status updates. This is a great article on different privacy settings available on Facebook, and there’s one about MySpace as well. It’s not going to be 100% foolproof, but it can reduce your chances of someone seeing your posts when you don’t want them to.

Just keep in mind that it might not be 100% possible to keep someone who you haven’t “friended” from seeing what you’ve put on Facebook.

LiveJournal Is An Interesting Alternative.

If you are looking for a good place to post your thoughts and feelings and drunken pictures, Livejournal isn’t a bad idea. One of the original blogging communities, Livejournal gives you the option of only allowing your Livejournal “friends” from seeing your posts. So far, I haven’t found a way to see any of these nonfriend-proof entries so it would appear to be pretty secure. Just make sure you keep in mind who you have on your friends list.

Don’t Use Twitter If You’re Paranoid

By paranoid, I pretty much am referring to everything we’ve talked about so far. While Twitter doesn’t ask for nearly as much personal information as Facebook or MySpace does (essentially name and website – the web’s version of “name, rank and serial number”), it also doesn’t offer nearly as much privacy options as some of the other social networking sites.

Yes, you CAN choose to have only selected people read your Tweets. That sort of defeats the purpose of Twitter, though.

A Little Bit Of Common Sense Goes A Long Way

What’s important to remember is that whatever you do online, you need to keep in mind who is going to be reading it. Because, let’s face it, the only thing worse than being an Eagles fan is being an unemployed Eagles fan.

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Online social networking sites leak personal information, a new study has found, raising the possibility that users of such sites can be tracked everywhere they go online.

The study, “On the Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information Via Online Social Networks,” was co-authored by Balachander Krishnamurthy, a researcher at AT&T (NYSE: T) Labs and Craig E. Wills, a professor of computer science at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, and presented last week at the Second ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Online Social Networks in Barcelona, Spain.

The researchers say that social networks leak information through a combination of HTTP header information — the Referer header and the Request-URI — and cookies sent to third-party aggregators such as Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s DoubleClick, Google Analytics, and Omniture, among others.

As a consequence of this leakage, third-party aggregators can potentially link social network identifiers to past and future Web site visits, thereby identifying a person and his or her online activities.

“The ability to link information across traversals on the Internet coupled with the wide range of daily actions performed by hundreds of millions of user on the Internet raises privacy issues, particularly to the extent users may not understand the consequences of having their PII [personally identifiable information] available to aggregators,” the study states.

The study notes that while the privacy policies of the third-party aggregators typically declare the sharing of non-indentifying information, they don’t make it clear that an identity can often be derived from supposedly non-identifying information.

“What we are clearly trying to establish with this work is that these third party companies are receiving information about us from online social networks,” said Wills in a phone interview. “When you or I create an account on an online social network, there’s a unique identifier that’s always associated with your account. That account number is being passed along to these third party aggregators. And along with the cookies these aggregators are already maintaining, they now can link that cookie to a social network identifier.”

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