Aaron Goldman is the founder and principal at Connectual, where he puts lessons learned from Google to good use in digital marketing consulting and matchmaking. This post is part of a blog tour celebrating the book launch, which has Aaron “appearing” at 30 blogs in 10 days.

In a post last week titled, “Don’t Make This Mistake: Social Media in Advertising,” Samir points out the challenges with using Facebook URLs as calls-to-action in TV and other ads.

As Samir wisely observes…

“Users with the intent to find you on Facebook could just as easily get lost into their Farmville game or peruse their photos before ever reaching your fan page. Instead of driving consumers to connect with you, you’re actually increasing Facebook’s bottom line.”

But that’s only for the people that actually type in the Facebook URL. What about all the people that didn’t notice or can’t remember that pesky Facebook.com-slash-whatever you used?

The ad that Samir uses as the example is a Unilever brand called Lynx and the URL listed (in all-lower case small font at the bottom of the page, mind you) is www.facebook.com/lynxeffectuk.

As my bubbie would say, “Oy vey!”
Would anyone remember that URL unless they, like Samir, had taken a picture of it?

And, then, when they went to type it in, would they be able to spell it correctly? That brand name has a lot of weird letters already without adding in the double-f in “effect” and “uk” at the end.

In my book, Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned from Google, I share 20 “Googley Lessons” from the world’s most ubiquitous brand to help marketers better engage their customers and prospects.

One of these lessons is “Keep it Simple, Stupid.” Looking at Google’s homepage and its lush white space, you can appreciate how little distraction there is from the task at hand.

As a marketer, you have to make it super easy for your audience to interact with you. That means not sending them on a Facebook scavenger hunt to find your brand page.

In Chapter 9 of my book, I share the lesson, “Track Everything.” I talk about how easy Google makes it for you to track all the ads you run though its system.

I also cover ways to track offline ads. One of those is through unique URLs. The key, however, is keeping it simple, stupid, when creating and promoting your URL.

On GoodURLBadURL.com, I cover best practices for choosing and displaying a domain name.

I won’t recap all of them here but let’s just say that http://www.yourbrandinalllowercase.com/withslashesandrandomwordsisbad but http://www.evenworseisfacebook.com/yourbrandwiththoseslashesandrandomwords.

Wouldn’t you agree that ThisIsBetter.com? And 411.YouCanEvenIncludeTracking.com.

Too many marketers overlook the URL itself in the obsessive quest to create an engaging experience.

Don’t wait for your audience to find their way to your house before planting a K.I.S.S. Make sure the address and directions are clear. Otherwise they may end up on the Farm(ville) or, worse, they might Google it and visit your competition.

Disclosure: I received a free copy of Aaron’s book which I quickly finished and heartily recommend you read.

Get Googley and Keep it Simple, Stupid! is a post by: Samir Balwani

Lately, there’s been this growing trend of including a link to the brand’s Facebook fan page in TV advertising. It’s really something I don’t understand – it is definitely a huge branding failure.

Here’s an example – Unilever’s Lynx product. Instead of using their brand name and inviting users to connect with the brand – they drive potential consumers to Facebook to connect with the brand.

Herein lies the problem. Facebook boasts about the amount of time users spend on site and number of pageviews – Facebook Users Average 7 Hours a Month. Advertisers sending consumers to Facebook just sent potential connections to an online black hole.

Users with the intent to find you on Facebook could just as easily get lost into their Farmville game or peruse their photos before ever reaching your fan page. Instead of driving consumers to connect with you, you’re actually increasing Facebook’s bottom line.

The Solution

Instead of using the Facebook link on your advertising, consider creating a “Connect” page. Example – Connect Online with Samir [http://samirbalwani.com/connect].

The page uses the Facebook Like widget and Twitter’s @anywhere to allow consumers to connect with me online without leaving my branded page. Now, instead of getting lost on Facebook users are perusing my latest posts and products.

Remember Branding

As the number of profiles and platforms begin to increase, it becomes easy to forget your brand’s website. Remember, social media API’s make it simple to pull their functionality into your website itself.

Don’t drive consumers to social media platforms, bring them to your hub. Capture visitor interest on your branded website and allow them to find your social media profiles from there.

How are you advertising? Are you spending ad money to drive consumers to social media sites? Does your business card include your Facebook fan page or Twitter account instead of a connect page?

Don’t Make This Mistake: Social Media in Advertising is a post by: Samir Balwani

The social media hub centralizes a brand’s digital communications, connecting social media profiles with the business website. As more social media platforms begin to emerge, the need for a central branded social media hub grows.

Bring People to Your Branded Site

Many brands use their individual social media profiles as their central communications hubs. For example, some businesses focus their attention on Facebook and continue to direct their consumers there. Instead of capturing the community on their own brand site, the business is losing potential consumers to Facebook.

Although a Facebook fan is important, it’s more important to immerse the consumer in your brand. Instead of driving visitors to your social media profiles, use the Facebook and Twitter API to allow users to connect with you online without leaving your site.

Make Multiple Connections

Most marketers look at profiles individually when planning their social media presence. Consumers have multiple profiles; a Twitter account and Facebook profile. Why not connect with a consumer on each profile and create multiple connections?

The social media hub creates an area where consumers can flow from one social media profile to another. Make it easy to grow your network and control how consumers navigation across your profiles.

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Leverage Different Platforms for Different Things

When building a social media strategy, go beyond the simple idea of creating a community and instead think about actions. What do you want consumers to do on each social media site?

Use the social media hub to outline the action you want consumers to take on each social media profile. Consider it a “call to action“. Explicitly define what they should do (take the quiz, fan us, leave a comment).

Build a Central Distribution Platform

The social media hub ties together a digital presence that would otherwise be fragmented and broken. The hub helps a brand create a cohesive strategy that integrates each social media profile.

Brands with popular hubs are able to tap into the community to help spread published content. Hubs are extremely effective when distributing information, delivering branded media, and new media public relations.

Control and Brand Your Most Valuable Social Platform

BMW has more than 1 million fans on Facebook. That’s 1 million people they convinced to perform an action and subscribe to their page. What if Facebook decided to charge for fan pages? Would BMW walk away? What if they had planned ahead and captured this community on their own site instead?

Your social media hub, your website, is the most valuable social media profile you have. It is the only one that allows you to directly control and own your content. With a branded social media hub, you’re in charge and not at the behest of another company.

Don’t let Facebook own your whole community. Use the tools of sharing they afford, but be sure to be building that community on your site with email newsletters, rss feeds, and a robust networking system.

Collect Consumer Insights

Finally, nothing beats the data collected by a site you fully own. Want to know how many people visited your site? Where they came from? How long they stayed? What they did? It’s all information you can get from Google Analytics or almost any other analytics package once added to your social media hub.

Facebook offers some data but it leaves a lot to ask for. Twitter and most other social media platforms offer nothing.

Analyzing data allows you to better understand your community and optimize your social media strategies. Don’t miss out on an opportunity to collect huge amounts of data by ignoring your brand hub’s analytics.

Where’s Your Hub?

A social media hub is a powerful aspect of an online marketing strategy. In my mind it’s a necessity. Without it, you lose control of your community, create a disoriented digital presence, fragment your content distribution, and lose out on a great deal of data.

Do you have a social media hub? What brand has created a good central hub? How are you connecting your sites? How are you using your social media hub? Leave a comment and let us know.

Why You Need a Social Media Hub is a post by: Samir Balwani

On August 18th, Facebook unveiled their features for tapping into the mobile “check-in” world. In regular Facebook fashion, they seemed to have forgotten about how people like their privacy, kinda…

What many people don’t know about Facebook Places is that instead of just letting me check-in to a place, I can also tag my friends. Where we are, shows up on both our Facebook wall and life stream. So, why not spoof my geo-location and start checking in my friends into random dirty places?

A Day With Kenny

Looks like Kenny went to Babeland, the sex toy shop in Soho.

Next stop, Amsterdam Coffee Shop to get some special brownies.

Oh hey, checked in by a friend? Let’s push it to your Facebook wall…

Errands With Rahul

Step one, tip off your friend’s significant other they might be getting a divorce soon…

Step two, make sure they’ve been seen in a Thailand sex bar…

Pushed to their wall. Thank’s for the great feature Facebook…

Helping Alexis

Alexis needed some emotional support, and I was there for her…

Faking Your Location

If you’re using Firefox it’s really easy to fake your location. All you have to do is go to “about:config”.

Accept the warning and then filter by “geo”.

Double click geo.enabled to make sure it says “True”.

We’ll be editing geo.wifi.uri to set our location. Insert the URL: “http://snaptome.appspot.com/loc/json?latitude=YOUR_LAT&longitude=YOUR_LONG&accuracy=10″ and edit the longitude and latitude as you want. If you’re not sure the exact coordinates of the places you want to visit, you can use this site.

Disabling Facebook Places Check-Ins

To disable the Facebook’s “check-in with a friend” feature, just login and go to your account’s privacy settings.

You’ll see a screen similar to the one below. From there, click on “customize settings”.

Finally, just disable “Friends can check me into places”.

Mess With Your Friends Using Facebook Places is a post by: Samir Balwani

Everyone know’s the three r’s: reading, ’riting (writing), and ’rithmetic (arithmetic) or reduce, reuse, and recycle.

Now, there’s one more – ratings, reviews, and recommendations.

These are three important aspects for marketers looking to make their products, content, or brand more enticing to consumers.

Ratings: The Community Filter

The first step is understanding the importance of ratings. Consumers continually rate everything they do. They’re used to rating music on iTunes, products on Amazon, and restaurants on Yelp.

The simple action helps us filter the good from the bad and helps users save time when making decisions. Consumers look to the crowd for their quick advice before committing their money. They sort by ratings, look at the number stars, and trust the active crowd to help make guide their decisions.

Ratings can make or break a business. The power of a five star rating evokes memories of five star hotels, while a one star rating puts you in the world of trashy motels. Of utmost importance is ensuring your business doesn’t get too many low ratings.

Understand that interactions or lack of interactions between your employees and consumers will mold your business’ online ratings. Making sure customers are happy leads to good ratings. Businesses must be proactive to keep from getting bad reviews.

Grow your positive ratings by closing customer service inquiries or emails asking consumers to rate your business. For example, a restaurant might put on their receipts a cue reminding people to go on Yelp to rate their evening.

Reviews: What People Think

Similar to their dependence on ratings, consumers look to reviews when choosing between products. They look to others for in-depth advice, hoping someone experienced what they are. Unlike ratings, reviews are not a quick indicator of a product or brand, they tend to outline exactly what went wrong or why someone liked a product.

Reviews can be extremely influential, especially for high priced goods, expensive restaurants, or with unsure customers. Many consumers look to reviews when making their final decision and will scan the text looking for potential pitfalls.

Although a few bad reviews is natural (you won’t please everyone), bad reviews that touch on the same thing highlight a potential problem. People are more likely to be motivated to leave reviews when something bad happened; consumers use reviews as a venting mechanism.

To build positive reviews, brands must do something exceptional. It’s here that company culture stands out. Companies dedicated to customer service and work to ensure consumers are always happy, will build positive reviews over time and minimize negative reviews by removing negative experiences.

Remember that every customer needs to be treated as a potential journalist. Reviews afford them disgruntled customers the power to disrupt consumer sentiment as potential customers come down your sales funnel.

Recommendations: Share With Friends

Recommendations are just as effective as ratings and reviews for getting someone to buy your product. Few things carry the same influence as a friend recommending a brand to another friend.

This idea of sharing makes the social web so exciting. Businesses can increase their reach from their current consumers, to their friends; creating a second degree of sharing. Maximizing the effect of recommendations, means going beyond traditional word of mouth marketing and using technology to facilitate conversations online.

Businesses need something that they can ask consumers to recommend online, before any actions can take place. Invest in an aesthetically pleasing website and build a digital presence.

Give people incentives to recommend the brand. Offer star customers or repeat buyers, coupons for bringing a friend. Create a newsletter that consumers can sign up for to get updates, discounts, and coupons. People are accustomed to using the forward button, especially if when asked.

Online recommendations come down to two basic ideas. There needs to be something to share and a reason to share it.

Just The Basics

Rating, reviews, and recommendations are the basics to social media marketing. Yet as simple it is to remember the three r’s, they’re the most powerful aspects of social media. The idea of social proof convinces consumers to buy product: good reviews can move mountains, bad ratings can spell disaster.

How are you taking advantage of these three basic aspects of social media marketing? What are you doing to build positive reviews? How are you getting your customers to recommend you online?

The Three R’s of Social Media is a post by: Samir Balwani

Mastering social media might be a challenge, but it definitely isn’t the most difficult part of creating a social media campaign. Many times, convincing your boss to embrace, fund, and champion social media can be the single hardest part of introducing social media to your company.

So how do you convince your boss to take you seriously, overcome their fears, and trust social media?

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The Power of Case Studies

Show your boss the opportunities social media presents. This will help build your boss’ interest. Selling a strategy is no different than selling a product. Identify and express the advantages of social media, and highlight what your boss and the company can gain.

The best way to illustrate the opportunities is by explaining what others have done.

Some good case studies to refer to are:
1. Four Social Case Studies from Coca-Cola
2. Social Media Micro Case Study: “X-Men”
3. @DellOutlet: Raising awareness, increasing sales, measuring results
4. “Three Killer Social Media Case Studies from SMC San Francisco”

Be sure to show both the positives and negatives of social media; outlining what has happened to brand that engage in social media and those that did not.

Remember, case studies should only be used to gain an understanding of the new marketing medium. Don’t let your boss turn a case study into your next social media strategy.

Minimize Fear Through Knowledge

Most managers and marketers understand the opportunities social media offer, but don’t leverage it from fear of making mistakes. The fear stems from a lack of understanding and knowledge.

It’s your job to show that not only do you know what you’re doing, but that you’re capable of navigating the brand through the social web.

Show your expertise by building your own personal brand with social media. Nothing is more reassuring than being introduced to a new marketing technique by someone who has already proven themselves.

Highlight Competitors…

Competitive intelligence is a powerful tool for forcing a boss’ hand. If your company is asleep at the wheel, while competitors are passing you by, it’s time to prove it.

Present an audit of what your competitors are doing, what social media profiles they have reserved, and how active their community is.

Competitive reviews clearly define the potential social media holds in your industry and it highlights missed opportunities.

Be The First

If none of your competitors are using social media, you’re in an even better position. Online, innovation is rewarded and being first means getting the most press.

Those that act as early adopters receive a free press and end up building an early community quickly. Two companies that have used this free press well are Pepsi and Starbucks.

Starbucks most recently received a lot of press when they decided to work with Foursquare to offer all store “mayors” free lattes. Pepsi’s announcement to fully invest in non-traditional marketing, made a lot of waves too.

The promises of free press is a very convincing argument for getting your brand manager to invest in social media.

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Build a Strategy

Outlining a comprehensive social media strategy illustrates your knowledge of the marketing medium and highlights the potential opportunities for the brand. It’s a great way to convince the brand manager that needs that extra nudge.

Most executives are afraid to fully commit to social media, so start small. Create a simple test campaign that you can use a case study for future endeavors.

The small campaign shouldn’t be the only strategy you create. As you’re creating the individual activation, building an overall brand strategy that explains the multiple ways the business can build and influence its online community.

Final Thoughts

Help your executives get over their fear of social media by outlining a clear road map to success. Online marketing doesn’t have to be difficult or scary – now convince everyone else.

What were the hardest obstacle you had to overcome? How did you do it? Who is the person most difficult to convince? Leave a comment now and share your thoughts.

Selling Social Media, To Your Boss is a post by: Samir Balwani

Mobile marketing has become more and more important as consumers migrate to the new platform. Location based sites like Foursquare lead the pack, but how do you make the most of the platform? What strategies work well?

Businesses have started to recognize the power of location based social media; its ability to get people to visit a store, attend a concert, or perform an action. The following are a few example strategies that businesses can take advantage of on Foursquare…

Create a Foursquare Special

Want to connect with consumers near your store? Foursquare grants you that ability. Users that check into venues near yours can be shown a pop-up offering them a deal for your store.

Businesses should be strategic with their use of this promotion. If your store is near a transportation hub, for example Penn Station in New York, you’ll be able to capture consumer attention as they check-in daily.

Other potentially high value stores include Apple stores, Best Buys, Starbucks, and popular restaurants.

If you’re near one of these high volume stores, it’s definitely worth working with Foursquare to create a “checkin deal”.

The Scavenger Hunt

For those with multiple stores and a willingness to offer some great deals, a scavenger hunt works well.

All you have to do is create a Facebook application which requires users to input a certain number of phrases or clues before unlocking some kind of prize. Have users that check in to your stores be presented with the clues they need to unlock the prize.

Obviously, the prize has to be cool enough to get users to visit each store. An amazing prize and online scavenger hunt could build buzz about the stores, build new Facebook fans, and introduce new consumers to new locations.

Leave a Tip Get a Tip

On Foursquare, the tips users leave can be a powerful social proof for new consumers. One way to build tips, is to offer an incentive. Similar to how we reward consumers for filling out surveys, why not tips.

Creating a promotion called “Leave a Tip, Get a Tip” which offers a user a coupon or dessert for leaving a tip on Foursquare, could build that social proof.

You just need a small reward to convince consumers to leave a tip. In return, you gain both a tip and the viral spread of your brand as they check-in.

Check In Days

Tweetups and online driven meetups have been an extremely powerful way of building a brand’s reach.

A great example is CoffeeGroundz in Houston, which often uses Twitter to hold meetups where they have great music and coffee. Their events almost always draw a big crowd and have now grown a culture of their own.

Another example is German Auto Body which used Reddit to host a free BBQ. The owner posted it online and it became a front-page story for the extremely popular social news site, Reddit. Once the event was over, the creator deemed it a great success and said that he’s thinking of hosting another.

Imagine if these events, explicitly incorporated Foursquare as well. Asking your online networked consumers to spread your brand messaging across their social profiles, as they check in to your free event – it’s a win win for both the brand and the consumer.

Best of all is that this strategy requires little more than reminding consumers that are at your meetup to check-in on Foursquare.

Final Thoughts

Foursquare has revolutionized location based social media and mobile marketing. It’s given marketers a platform to reach new consumers and make every store, restaurant, and location a shareable content piece online.

Taking advantage of this new medium requires little more than some ingenuity, basic resources, and a thirst to be unique. Do something fun, invite people, have them check-in and invite their friends – rinse and repeat.

What have you been doing with Foursquare? What strategies have you used that worked? Leave a comment and share!

Foursquare Business Strategies You Don’t Want to Miss is a post by: Samir Balwani

Building and promoting a “brand” has always been an important aspect of marketing. However, for as important as it has been it’s been a difficult metric to measure beyond simple surveys.

The Internet has changed how we can measure brand importance. Measuring branding need not be difficult. In fact, if you’re using Google Analytics, you have all the tools you need to measure branding trends online.

For those that don’t know what Google Analytics is, it’s an analytics package for your website that allows you to gather data about the people that visit your website, what they do on your site, and how they got their in the first place. Most people use the free software to track how many people visit their sites and to watch growth trends overtime.

But, Google Analytics offers a lot of detailed data and we can use filters to identify the trending we need. To track our branding, we’ll look at the search engine keyword data, specifically the keywords people searched to find your website.

Finding “Branding” Data in Google Analytics

The first thing we need to do is actually grab the data from Google Analytics. You’ll want to start by logging into the analytics site and choosing your site profile. Once you do that, you’ll see something similar to the screen below.

This is the original dashboard that highlights all the high level metrics. If you need a quick snapshot of your site, you could stop here. But for our technique, we’ll have to dig a bit deeper.

If you look at the date, you’ll see that Google defaults to one month. But, since we want to see the effects of branding over time. I’ve changed the time period to be five full months. This will give us a better understand of our brand’s growth over time.

Next, we’ll want to find the search engine data we need. Click on traffic sources in the left navigation bar to open a sub-menu that outlines all the potential traffic sources. Then, click on keywords, since we want to know exactly what people searched to find our website.

Once you click on keywords, you should see a screen like the one below.

This dashboard outlines exactly what people searched to find your site. It’s these keywords that we’ll use to show our brand trends. To do that, we’ll have to filter this list to only be brand terms.

If you scroll down the list to the bottom, you’ll see a filter keyword option. Enter the broadest brand term you can think of. For me, the term I filter by is “Samir”.

You can see all the keywords that included the brand name now. But since we want to see trending, I’m really focused on the graph. Problem is, the graph in its current form is much too choppy to really give us actionable data.

All we have to do is tell Google to smooth the graph out by plotting it with only monthly data points. Once that’s done, we can see the growth of our brand.

If we want to take this one step further, we can compare growth over time. Pull down the date menu and click the “compare to past” checkmark. Now we can have Google plot the last three months as on graph and the months before that as a separate graph.

I use this kind of data to measure the growth a brand and to justify certain digital branding spending. Having a metric that helps identify branding effects and growth is invaluable.

This data is great for measuring overall branding, product branding, the effects of specific campaigns, and much more. It just takes some filtering and ingenuity.

How do you measure branding? What are you doing with Google Analytics? Leave a comment and share your favorite analytics tips and tricks.

Measuring Brand Strength with Google Analytics is a post by: Samir Balwani

This is a guest post by Maria Ross, founder and chief strategist of Red Slice and author of Branding Basics for Small Business: How to Create an Irresistible Brand on Any Budget (2010, Norlights Press)

The old adage, “Is it the medium or the message?” has never held more weight than it does in today’s marketing arena. You have a story to tell (your brand message) and you have a dizzying array of mechanisms through which to tell it: Twitter, website, blog, ad, events, signage, Facebook, etc. etc….

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So when it comes to evaluating success, you have two factors to consider: the message and the medium itself.

Seth Godin’s blog talks about how organizations use PowerPoint appallingly these days. Never has a tool come along that seemed so easy to use, but people forgot about honing basic presentation skills before cutting loose on this software. It’s just like Twitter, blogs or DIY websites – just because you “can” doesn’t mean you “should” or even that you are doing it “right.” You could be doing more harm than good in communicating your message simply because of using the vehicle incorrectly. You have to adapt your message to the medium you are using so you leverage it effectively.

In addition, a third layer to consider is choosing the right vehicle to reach your target audience in the first place. So let’s say you have a great message AND you are using the medium correctly – you still might be singing beautifully to an empty room, because no one that needs to hear your message is actually present. This is what happens when you get caught up in the next new shiny thing or use social media incorrectly, and forget to evaluate if your target audience responds to it.

Messaging can be complicated. You can’t just assume messages “didn’t work” if they fail, simply because you got no response. Look at how you are using the media first: are you leveraging it fully, do you understand how audiences are properly consuming the information, and did you design the message to fit the specific medium? As an example, people that use Twitter to constantly promote themselves rather than creating useful content or engaging their followers usually get kicked off the island.

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Next, look at the medium itself and judge if it’s the right vehicle to reach the people you wanted to reach – meaning the ones who will buy from you or influence those who will buy from you. Hopefully, you put all this thought into it before you embarked on the campaign, but if not, take a step back and look at these factors.

It is way too easy to fall into the trap of doing something “because everyone else is doing it” and writing it off when things don’t go your way. But you have to consider both what you are saying and through which channels you are delivering that message before you can determine what went wrong. Then you can decide if you need to tweak the message – or find a new medium.

Guest post from Maria Ross, founder and chief strategist of Red Slice a branding and marketing consultancy based in Seattle. Red Slice helps businesses large and small tell their brand story so they can engage, inform and delight customers – and keep them coming back for more. She is the author of Branding Basics for Small Business: How to Create an Irresistible Brand on Any Budget (2010, Norlights Press)

Is the Medium or the Message Getting in Your Way? is a post by: Samir Balwani

Social media and digital communications have really grown as a marketing medium. The new strategies that the web have afforded can be extremely powerful. With that in mind, it’s important to learn as much as you can.

Getting started can be the hardest thing. To help people better understand social media marketing, I’ve outlined some important reading for individual topics in social media…

Facebook Basics

For many Facebook is a really important aspect of their social media strategies. Making sure you create a Facebook fan page that maximizes your return is important.

How To Create the Perfect Facebook Fan Page
Tamar from Techipedia wrote an awesome article outlining a few steps to creating a great Facebook fan page. She goes over the idea of creating a landing page, Facebook SEO, and FBML.

Who’s Blogging What: 2010 Facebook Page Marketing Guide
Recently, I took part in a really in-depth Facebook Marketing Guide that’s being published by HubSpot. The guide goes over everything from creating a fan page to building a loyal following.

Use Vanity URLs to Save You From a Branding Fail
Once you have your Facebook fan page ready, definitely check out the article I wrote on branding. Don’t make the mistakes many large brands do on a day to day basis.

Starting with Twitter

Many businesses have found value in the reach afforded to them through Twitter. The following articles should help you get started with Twitter and using it to market your business…

Twitter 101 for Business
For the very basics go to Twitter itself. The Twitter staff put together a great guide for Businesses getting started with Twitter. It includes case studies and best practices.

Using Twitter Search for Business
Even though a very short post by Chris Brogan, it is full of information. Being able to use search properly is a great way to find new leads and consumers.

The Ultimate Guide for Everything
A great guide that outlines how to get started with Twitter and what some successful brands have done. It gives you good ideas on what to do once you have your Twitter account.

Twitter Marketing: A Small Business Guide
I previously put together a Twitter marketing guide for small businesses. It’s relatively short, but reviews how to get started, how to use Tweetdeck, and what to do with your Twitter account.

Using Online Blogs

A blog or social media hub is an extremely important aspect of a social media strategy. Most marketers overlook the idea of owned media and determine that hosting a blog is too expensive and resource intensive. The truth is that a blog can be the greatest social media investment a brand makes…

Do You Have A Social Media Hub?
Really one of the most important things for your social media strategy is creating a social media hub. The hub acts as the anchor for the strategy and ties together all the social media profiles.

Study Shows Small Businesses That Blog Get 55% More Website Visitors
For many businesses, their social media hub will be their blog. Hubspot put together a great study showing the impact of a blog on a businesses’ digital footprint. Definitely check out this article if you’re curious about creating a social media hub.

New To WordPress – Where to Start
Almost always, I recommend WordPress for small business blogs and sites. Their “getting started” guide is a good way to learn more about the software and how you can use it.

Analytics and Metrics

Once your campaign has launched, you have to be able to measure and optimize the campaign. Knowing which metrics to track and how is important. The following articles explore the topic of analytics and metrics…

This is How You Measure Social Media ROI
This article reviews how you can possibly measure social media ROI. It reviews the pitfalls and obstacles to adding social media to the marketing mix.

HOW TO: Track Social Media Analytics
A short article that reviews the basics of pulling together some social media metrics. Shows you how to track social media shares and other important metrics.

Social Media Analytics: Twitter: Quantitative & Qualitative Metrics
As usual, Avinash puts together a great article that outlines his thoughts on Twitter metrics. He reviews both how to measure and draw analysis from the data.

Understanding Social Media Metrics: Basic Modeling
This more advanced post looks at econometric modeling and how it relates to social media marketing. Using the model, we can begin to determine what impact individual decisions have on our social media success.

Social Media Metrics: What We Need to Track Sales
Everyone wants to know what they need to do to track sales through social media. This post explores why it’s important to measure social media sales, what to track, and what tools to use.

Online Culture

The web has evolved our culture and changed our social norms. What is acceptable offline might not be tolerated online. How you say something online, might not be acceptable offline. Understanding the web culture is a necessary step for being successful online…

Culture, the Great Influencer on Corporate Social Media Adoption
Although the slideshare is gone, this article definitely gives some great insights into the idea of culture as a driving force for social media understanding through a company.

Social Media Requires a Cultural Investment
An article that explores how culture can affect the profitability of a company and explains why the evolution of culture is a necessity for social media success.

Alexis Ohanian: How to make a splash in social media
A TED video that highlights the idea of social media culture and gives a great case study that shows how the reddit community works.

Christopher “moot” Poole: The case for anonymity online
Another important cultural phenomenon online, the idea of anonymity. “Moot” the creator of 4chan talks about privacy and anonymity in this great TED video.

Final Thoughts

Just learning the basics of social media marketing, how you should act, what you need to do to begin, and how to measure your success, is extremely difficult. Reading as much as you can and testing out new ideas is the best way to gain the knowledge you need to be successful.

I’ve outlined some articles I recommend, but now it’s your turn. Leave a comment and share articles you believe helped you get started with social media. Don’t feel like you have to share only articles, give your advice or thoughts for those trying to get started.

Help! I Need Social Media Advice… is a post by: Samir Balwani