Finding your customers and making sure they find you just got a little easier. Facebook yesterday introduced a service that allows users to communicate their locations with each other and allows businesses to market to them based on their location.

The feature, called Places, is aimed at helping users of the social network find friends and disclose their own location.

The debut of Facebook’s Places is just another step toward small businesses being able to better harness the power of social media marketing. Small business use of social media has been steadily on the rise, with nearly one-third of small businesses reporting they now use social media to promote themselves, according to a survey released this week by CareerBuilder. Leisure and hospitality industries are leading charge in the use of social media, with IT and retail companies also using it regularly.

But how, exactly, do small businesses with anemic marketing budgets put social media to work? BusinessNewsDaily reached out to a few savvy social media marketers and asked them share their success stories.

Plus size benefits: Plus size retailer IGIGI by Yuliya Raquel, is using Facebook to streamline its customer service. By responding to customer service inquiries publicly on Facebook, the company, which has dedicated one full time customer service representative to its social media outreach, is able to share information more efficiently. Instead of answering the same question over and over again, IGIGI can answer the question once and all Facebook users will get the information.

Bringing customers home: McMillin Homes, a San Diego, Calif.-based home builder discovered many first time home buyers are also Facebook users. The company posts updates there, advertises new communities and runs polls which encourages interaction between users and the company. McMillin says social media generates interest in its developments. It also uses Linkedin to attract investors.

But be prepared to really work at social media, warned McMillin Homes’ web manager Char-Lou Benedict.

“Marketing by social media can be intense. You can not afford a long decision process nor can you have stale content,” Benedict said.

Trade show promotion: Nielsen-Kellerman, which manufactures water-proof pocket weather meters and navigational instruments, uses social media to build interest in the company before trade shows. At one trade show, the company was able to draw attendees and press to the booth by actively Tweeting throughout the show.

“We got to speak with key press people and develop contacts which will result in product coverage,” said Monica Devlin, marketing coordinator for the Boothwyn, Pa.-based company.

Cooking up conversations: ROASTe, a Boston-based micro-roasted coffee retailer, uses Facebook to create a community of coffee lovers. They use it for news, promotions, contests, and to facilitate ongoing conversations with customers.

“Our Facebook and Twitter fans are also some of our most active customers,” said Scott Lush, co-owner of ROASTe. “Social Media has given customers another way to communicate with us, and a way for us to interact constantly with them. They are attracted to us because they see that we’re obsessed with gourmet coffee. They see how lively we and our coffee community are,” Lush said.

Source: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/social-media-helping-small-businesses-find-customers-0466/

By Pierre DeBois

Social media has brought unprecedented change in the way a business markets its services and products online, as well as how it communicates to customers.

But how much of that change is being measured?  From the latest industry surveys, very little, despite heavy investment.  Yet with more corporations employing social media for branding, lead awareness and sales, the need for relevant metrics has become essential to successful financial performance.  Books on social media have appeared, but few have dealt with metrics from an analytics framework.  Until now.

Jim Sterne is no stranger to the Web analytics community.  Founder of the E-metrics Marketing Optimization summit and co-founder of the Web Analytics Association, Sterne  has tirelessly guided the discussion of digital marketing.  Now, Sterne has created a short guide to optimizing your digital marketing called Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment.  I bought a copy to review, and feel that while the book is geared for large organizations, small business owners wishing to best manage their resources will benefit too.

Improve Your Social Media Gauge

Sterne says it best in the opening pages:

“This book is more for marketers who already know that social media is important and want to get a better handle on managing it as a serious business tool.”

And he wastes no time getting into the nitty-gritty of  measurement planning.  For example, Chapter 1 quotes a Web Analytics Demystified post on how to prioritize analysis around organizational requests:

• Is revenue at risk?
• Who’s asking?
• How difficult is the request?
• Can it (the analysis) be self serviced?
• When is the analysis needed?
• Why is the analysis needed?

A small business owner may not face all the aforementioned questions, but some of the questions may help apply some thought to developing a social media dashboard and asking the right questions around the three basic business goals in the book: increasing revenue, lowering cost, and increasing customer satisfaction.  Although referencing many corporate sources, the book complements social media beginner references, such as Chris Brogan’s Social Media 101, and also works well on its own.

Throughout the book Sterne combines numerous references to studies and resources, such as Groundswell author Charlene Li and Web Analytics 2.0 author Avinash Kaushik, regarding blogging ROI and opportunity cost.  Analytics resources like Eric Peterson’s Big Book of KPIs (a free e-book on business metrics) are also referenced.

Sterne first lays out the social media categories — blogs, microblogs, forums, review sites, social networks, bookmarking and media sharing.  Chapters 2 through 6 covers the kinds of measurement used — Reach, Influence, Sentiment, Triggering Action (Engagement) and Listening — while each social media category is included where appropriate.  Sterne takes time to explain what tools are available, and gives an overview of measurement results.  In an automotive example, he explains how hub-and-spoke relationships can measure influence and reach via tagging URLs:

“The first step is to code the links you publish so that when the are republished and re-tweeted, any clicks can be traced back to the original tweet or post.  That means a normal link like www.example.com becomes www.example.com?1234. You can count the number of times the code 1234 shows up in your analytics database to determine how far-reaching that post or tweet was.”

He then compares the tracking between subjects (power and style) in an example hub-and-spoke figure.

“You now have a clear understanding of what intrigues people most about your new vehicle. You have marketplace insight you can act on. You know how to tweak your tweets.”

This is analytic essence made into accessible language for small business owners and marketers alike.

Resources Available

For experiences with social media, Sterne uses familiar corporate examples, like Dell’s IdeaStorm, as well as some interesting how-do-they-do-its, like BestBuy’s use of Twelpforce to answer whatever Twitter-sourced questions appear.  Other tools mentioned include Twittratr, PostRank and Nielsen Buzzmetrics, along with a resource appendix that includes more on social media metrics, a free tool summary and insights from other respected marketers such as Jeremiah Owyang.

Chapter 7 focuses on business outcomes, with an underscore that social media is best seen as a long-term investment, warning that “regardless of what business outcome you are hoping, planning and working for…social media results take time.” Suggested metrics are offered here, while Chapter 8, Convincing Your Colleagues, brings up the current analytics challenges in organizations.  For example, Sterne notes the unspoken concern employees sometimes feel, in that they see analytics as more of a personal audit:

“First and foremost humans do not like being measured… ‘Accountability’ is another word for “We don’t trust you so we’re going to measure everything you do.”

Sterne then segues into an example given by a Symantec vice president which crystallizes the other challenge in introducing measurement responsibility and convincing departments of the benefits:

“Besides doing more with less, we’re asking people to add a page tag here and a reporting mechanism there. “

Sterne covers a few topics on organizational expectations and becoming a measurement leader (a recurring theme in many analytics books like Analytics At Work), though he admits at chapter’s end the topic of change management is too large to be covered effectively.  Still, you will definitely learn to manage people as much as the metrics and measurement tools given.

Glaring negatives are few. The book does not elaborate on the impact of some recent online developments, such as mobile devices (I know there has been discussion in some circles regarding measurement of digital magazine articles shared), applications and location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla.  Sterne does note this as he lays out the social media categories — “…more will appear before this book hits the streets.”  However, some further consideration would have given readers insight on how to prepare for more change in a fast-moving medium.

A Useful Guide

Overall, Sterne has taken a solid tone and approach with Social Media Metrics. It explains the value of social media in a style that complements strategies for organizations large and small, for-profit and nonprofit.  By any measure, Social Media Metrics is a truly helpful guide in the online marketing jungle.

Source: http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/08/social-media-metrics-business.html

Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing

1. Set Community Expectations
2. Provide Cohesive Branding
3. Be Up To Date
4. Live Authenticity
5. Participate In Dialog
6. Enable Peer-To-Peer Interactions
7. Foster Advocacy
8. Solicit A Call To Action

Last week, the Harvard Business Review published a long interview with Howard Schultz. The Starbucks CEO talked about the coffee company’s many moves to win back customers and battle against the ill winds of the recession. As evidence of Starbucks’ rebound, Schultz pointed to the biggest of the social networking sites out there. “We’re the number one brand on Facebook,” he boasted.

Starbucks, in fact, was the first brand to top the 10 million-fan mark. Just to put this in perspective, that’s more fans than the entire population of New York City (8.2 million) and all but seven states in the US. That’s more Facebook fans than its closest rival, Coca-Cola (8.3 million fans) and way more than other large global brands.

McDonald’s has 2.5 million fans. Target has 1.43 million, Abercrombie and Fitch 1.37 million, and the trendy teen clothier Forever 21 totals 1.27 million. Among high-end food and food-related brands, Ben and Jerry’s has 1.35 million Facebook fans with Whole Foods lagging behind with just 296,152 fans.

The other day, my Facebook page (I have 302 friends) told me that many people who like Barack Obama also like Starbucks. Turns out the president is one of Starbucks few Facebook rivals. He has 10.9 million fans, a few more than Starbucks. But Starbucks still has more fans than Sarah Palin (1.93 million), Mitt Romney (460,832), and Bill Clinton (353,583) combined.

Most pop culture figures don’t reach Starbucks’ level of fans either. Apart from Facebook leader Michael Jackson (16.6 million) and Lady Gaga (12.9 million), the coffee giant has more online backers than Bruce Springsteen (880,459), Adam Sandler (5.44 million), and even teen idol Justin Bieber (7.88 million).

When it comes to coffee companies, there is no contest. Starbucks’ closest competitor (in terms of its number of cafes across the US) Caribou has 154,754 fans. Peet’s has 45,497. Not long ago, Time Magazine wondered if the famed Portland, Oregon independent roaster Stumptown might be the next Starbucks. Not on Facebook. It has only 10,780 fans.

From the business side — and from the side of studying culture — what do all of these numbers mean? Clearly, brands and personalities have turned to Facebook to market their products, enhance their image, and communicate with their customers. But beyond that what does this new form of fandom mean, beyond a sort of crude measure of popularity?

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social-media/Neworking-sites-top-in-billing-rates/articleshow/6232505.cms

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook has launched a Web page devoted to staying safe on the Internet.

The “Safety Page” will highlight news and initiatives focused on ways people can keep data secure at the world’s leading online social-networking community, Joe Sullivan of Facebook said in a blog post.

The new page was intended to augment a virtual Safety Center that Facebook introduced in April and was based on a “security page” that boasted more than 2.2 million “fans”.

“Online safety is a shared responsibility,” Sullivan said. “We’ll continue to think of innovative ways to promote safety on our service and elsewhere on the Web.”

The number of people using Facebook topped the 500 million mark last week, meaning one in every 14 people on the planet has now signed up to the social netowork.

The launch of the Safety Page came in the wake of demands by privacy activists that Facebook give users of the booming social network more control over the use of their personal data.

A coalition of privacy groups, in an open letter to Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg last month, welcomed the social network’s recent overhaul of its privacy controls but said additional steps were needed.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social-media/Facebook-launches-online-safety-page/articleshow/6222131.cms

SAN FRANCISCO: Social networking site Facebook officially has 500 million users, the company has announced.

The milestone means that the six-year old website now reaches eight percent of the planet’s population, just 18 months after it passed the 150 million user mark.

Last month Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said there is a “good chance” that the social networking site could boast one billion users within three to five years.

Facebook has continued adding users at a record-setting pace despite growing concerns about the privacy policies of a site that has more data on its users than any other website.

Facebook marked the milestone with the launch of a special section in which users are encouraged to post their personal stories about how Facebook has affected them.

“Half a billion is a nice number but the number isn’t what really matters here. What matters are all of the stories we hear from all of you about the impact your connections have had on your lives,” Zuckerberg said in a video message.

“Instead of focusing on numbers, we want to help people around the world hear about these stories for themselves, and we want to let you tell your own story.”

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/internet/Facebook-reaches-500-mn-users-/articleshow/6199866.cms

Some helpful tips to lawyers using social media marketing to develop brand recognition.

Social media marketing is a fantastic way for your law practice to be noticed and to grow. It allows for potential clients and others to form “personal” online relationships with staff who may be blogging, tweeting or posting information online for others to see. This aids in developing brand recognition and in bringing a larger clientele through your firm’s doors; however, when using social media in a professional capacity there are a few things that should always be kept in mind

1. Don’t treat these communications any different from typical client communications – always maintain your professional integrity.

2. Assume that anything you say in an e-communication will be disseminated and read widely, so ensure you govern yourself accordingly.

3. Remember it is no more acceptable to discuss and disclose a client’s business online that it is anywhere else.

Source: http://www.fastpitchnetworking.com/pressrelease.cfm?PRID=44100

Over the last few years, Facebook has emerged as the most popular online destination. The world’s no.1 social network is almost essentially a part of most Netizens virtual life.

Whether its a birthday, recent holiday or any other important occasion (at times not-so important one too), everything is shared on social networks these days. It is also a medium to get in touch with friends, express your views on various happenings and solicit support for any cause or issue.

However, there are things that we should never be doing on Facebook. ConsumerReports.org recently listed 7 things that are a complete no-no on Facebook.

Using a weak password

The first thing that one should never have in Facebook is a weak password. With so much of your personal information at stake it is essential to have a strong password. Avoid names or words that can be found in a dictionary.

Give your complete birth date in your profile

Another thing that you should never do on Facebook is give your full date of birth in your profile. Your complete date of birth is just what identity thieves may require to potentially gain access to your bank or credit card account.

In case you have already done it, here’s how to edit the info: Go to your profile page and click on the Info tab, then on Edit Information. Under the Basic Information section, choose to show only the month and day or no birthday at all.

Overlooking useful privacy controls

It is imperative to restrict access for almost everything on Facebook. It is critical to provide restricted access to your personal info (including religious views and family information) and photos to only your family and friends. Also, avoid giving contact information like phone number and address.

Putting your child’s name in a caption

Another complete `no-no’ on Facebook is to give your child’s name in a caption. Also, don’t use your kid’s name in photo tags. In case someone else has tagged your kid, ask them to remove it.

Announcing that you’ll be away from home

This again can be dangerous and is akin to putting `no one’s home’ signboard on your door. Wait till you are back home to share details about your wonderful holiday. Also, be always vague about your trip dates.

Don’t let Search Engines find you

It’s easy to find details about anyone these days, courtesy Search engines. Make sure you don’t reveal yourself to everyone through these Search engines.

To make sure strangers can’t access your page, go to the Search section on Facebook’s privacy controls and select Only Friends for Facebook search results. Also, make sure that the box for public search results is not checked.

Allowing small children to use Facebook unsupervised

Facebook has limited its membership to ages 13 and above. However, children younger than this can do it, as there is no foolproof way on the site to detect someone’s age.

In case your youngone or younger sibling is on Facebook, become their online friend. This can be one of the best way to superwise them. You can also use your e-mail address as the contact for their account so that you receive their notifications.

Similarly, a child who posts the comment “Dad will be home soon, I need to get back to finish my homework” every day at the same time may inadvertently revealing too much about the parents’ regular comings and goings.

By Tom Simonite

It’s not unusual to have user profiles on multiple social networks, or even separate accounts on sites like Twitter–one for work and one for play. But Kyumin Lee at Texas A&M University has 60 Twitter accounts, and not because he’s popular.

Lee’s accounts are “honeypots,” designed to attract the attention of the spammers that increasingly use social networks to spread links to malware and phishing Web sites. Software developed by Lee monitors messages sent to the honeypot accounts to learn the tactics used by spammers.

“The concept of a honeypot is well established at the network level,” says Lee. Usually it takes the form of unprotected computers used to monitor spam e-mail or network-based attacks. “We decided to apply it at a higher level to learn about spam in social networks.” Lee is carrying out the project with A&M colleagues James Caverlee and Brian David Eoff, and with Steve Webb at Georgia Tech University. The work is partially supported by a research award from Google.

The honeypot accounts, like this one, automatically post updates drawn from a collection of 120,000 real tweets harvested from Twitter. The team has also deployed honeypots on MySpace, and created software that uses dummy profiles on both networks to learn about spammer tactics. “We have a bot monitor who contacts our profiles, ” says Lee. “It looks at what they put in their messages and also accesses their profile to see their demographic information and past updates.”

So far, Lee says, “our 61 honeypots tempted and collected 30,867 spammers on Twitter.” The data gathered by those bots can also be used to train “classifier” algorithms to identify spammers that haven’t yet contacted a honeypot. A classifier trained using the Twitter honeypots proved capable of correctly identifying spam profiles more than 80 percent of the time. A public Web service is being built from the trained model that will allow people to look up which accounts it considers spam, and submit corrections for any that are misidentified, says Lee.

By Erica Naone

The real dream of any advertiser is to grab the attention of the right person at the right time. A new approach to online advertising, known as real-time bidding, could help make that vision easier to achieve.

Real-time bidding involves auctioning off the opportunity to show an online display advertisement to a specific type of user at a precise moment. A San Francisco-based startup called Triggit recently scored $4.2 million in funding from two venture capital firms, Foundry Group and Spark Capital, based on the promise of its real-time bidding platform.

“Every person has a different value to different advertisers,” says Zach Coelius, Triggit’s CEO. He points to the advertising auction system used by Google for search keyword. People searching for particular keywords are bracketed together as likely having similar intentions. With display advertising, he says, the interests of the person visiting a page is less clear, and it’s more difficult to match an ad to the ideal user. It is increasingly possible to gather information about a user by looking at her browser’s cookies–tiny files that show which sites she has visited. But matching this information to advertising is a still relatively crude process.

Real-time bidding lets advertisers bid against each other to show advertising users based on different pieces of information about that person and their behavior. Bids and counter-bids are made in the microseconds before the winning ad is served up on a page.

Triggit’s technology processes about 15 billion Web impressions a day. The company works with 10 companies that provide data on Web users’ demographics and interests based on tracking the sites they visit online, and offers inventory from nine online ad exchanges.

When setting the price for a particular advertising opportunity, Triggit considers the user’s browsing history, the type of site currently being visited, and other details. The company then works out how much money the ads on a particular website are worth, and sets a price. An ad is automatically auctioned quickly enough to serve the ad to the user without perceived delay.

Coelius says his company has developed intellectual property in several areas: algorithms that deal with large-scale data and extract insights from it, technology that allows Triggit to process billions of impressions per day, and its user interface for advertisers. The company began to build its current technology in 2009. It received some of its initial funding from founders of Urchin, a company that was acquired by Google.

Coelius says real-time bidding helps advertisers deliver ads more effectively and drives up the prices that publishers can command for their ad inventory.

Seth Levine, a technology investor and managing director at Foundry Group, which recently invested in Triggit, says that real-time bidding is a new technology, and its potential impact isn’t yet clear. However, he believes that it promises “pretty groundbreaking” benefits to publishers and advertisers, particularly in cases when publishers have good data on the users of their sites alongside high-value content.

Levine was attracted to investing in Triggit because of the company’s ability to scale its technology to process a very large number of advertising impressions. “I don’t think all demand-side platforms are created equal, with the same ability to handle the firehose,” he says.

“We’re getting closer to buying people rather than buying dumb impressions,” says Marissa Gluck, founder and managing partner of the Los Angeles-based consulting firm Radar Research. She sees companies like Triggit as part of a growing trend, but adds that real-time bidding requires clever technology to work effectively and efficiently.

Gluck believes that advertisers and publishers will welcome real-time bidding. But while the benefits are clear for advertisers, she says, “the larger question is how they affect publishers.” Though companies like Triggit claim to help publishers by increasing their ability to sell inventory that might otherwise go unused, Gluck believes it’s too soon to say for sure whether real-time bidding will help publishers make more money.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/business/25773/page2/