TECH BEAT

By Sean Connors

Looking for a way to better expose your product offerings and services in this challenging economy? Use the power of social media marketing - for free!

If you have a business, then you should already know by now that you should at least have a small website for you business. Face it - some demographics don’t even know what a “phone book” is anymore, and others find it easier to Google your business than to thumb though a printed book. If all you have is a website for your business, however, you have not yet fully entered the 21st century. To do that, you need to understand how your business website is or could be networked with folks using the Internet.

Traditionally, promoting your site on the web would be just a matter of understanding how site design interfaces with organic/natural listings in the top search engines (with enough quality links back to your site to trump your competitors), and then maybe running some Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns on services such as Google AdWords, etc. That is, most of what you could do was to tweak your site copy and other aspects of site content such as meta title, description and keyword tags to compete with your competitors for “natural” listings and possibly pay for position via PPC advertising.

That may have suited your needs for online marketing in the past, but times have changed folks! There is now a new wave of marking that is much easier and more powerful than the old school optimization for search engines. It’s called social media marketing.

In a nutshell, social media marketing is the Internet version of “word of mouth advertising” - only with the power of the Internet, this “word of mouth” can go viral as people share among their social networks. For example, picture this...you have a WordPress(.org) blog on your site where you have created a post describing a fabulous new product. On the post you’ve embedded a YouTube video about it and you’ve placed social media icons to make it easy for visitors to share your post on their Facebook profile and/or share it on StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us, etc.

Then you send out a tweet on Twitter about it. A follower of yours on Twitter clicks through to your blog post, leaves a comment about how awesome this new product looks and then shares your post on their Facebook page; their friends see it and share it with their own friends on Facebook, on their Del.icio.us bookmarks, share it on their StumbleUpon profile and/or tweet about it to their own followers on Twitter.

Then their friends and followers spread it even further throughout their own networks. With just a blog post, a video and a tweet, your exciting new product is exponentially distributed throughout the net. And best of all, it’s all free!

Who wouldn’t want to take advantage of that kind of publicity?

To do it, you don’t have to get as involved as all of that, though. You may not want to keep up with a blog or make videos to post on YouTube, or even set up a Facebook Page. At the very least, you take a moment out of your busy schedule to see how social media marketing could be just the form or marketing you need in a “down” economy and how you could make the best use of it for your businesses. A down economy is not the time to scale back on your marketing! It is the time to move aggressively on your marketing so that you might position yourself ahead of weaker competitors.

You just need to stay a nose ahead of your competitors - get the angle up on them. Start using social media marketing vectors to surpass them in their “old school” online marketing strategies. I don’t mean to suggest that you shouldn’t keep focus on solid copy writing for EVERY page on your site, pay attention to meta tags such as the Title of each page, the meta description of it, or the string of keywords you ascribe to your Keywords meta tags. This is a game that has been played for over a decade and while things change here daily, you still can and should play this game.

Promoting your business via social media marketing will be equally as powerful or even more powerful than traditional online marketing - as much of online marketing is moving to social media at this point. Creating the media to facilitate taking your product and service offerings viral on the Internet gives you an opportunity to get a “word of mouth” buzz that was never before possible.

Learn more about how all manner of technology can facilitate your business online by joining the Redwood Technology Consortium (www.redwoodtech.org). And visit http://ccbootcamp.eventbrite.com/ to learn about an upcoming E-marketing Bootcamp on October 21 in Crescent City.

Sean Connors is the owner of and Chief Project Manager for Web Merchant Services and a business member of the Redwood Technology Consortium. Drop by Connors WMS blog at http://blog.WMSmerchantservices.com.