Here’s a social marketing plan to build your brand on the social bookmarking and social networking websites:

1. Be there or be square. The value of social media is in the relationships. Online relationships are just like offline relationships. If you aren’t there, you have no relationship. If you work at finding friends for 5 days, then go away for 6 weeks and come back, it’s not the same. You can’t just pick up right where you left off. That’s not how “social” works, online or offline.

You have to apply consistent, day-to-day attention, or you’ll just waste your time. And the more consistent you are, the more you remind people of your brand. Your market can potentially find you through every action you do. So be active on the social marketing websites. Every action you take opens the door for people to connect with your website or your blog or you.

2. Speaking of consistent - if you want to use the social media, it’s good to REALLY learn a handful of social bookmarking or social networking sites. Choose the same username for each. This increases your presence, gets you more notice, makes you more … social. If you want to promote your blog, maybe you focus on Technorati, StumbleUpon, and Digg. Start out by targeting 10 minutes a day on each, and do it. Keep a consistent message across all your social marketing profiles, consistent voice, style, topics you cover, avatar, etc. Doing this reinforces both your image and your brand.

3. Support the entire StumbleUpon community … or whichever sites you focus on. If you spend time on a forum, you’ll sometimes hear the guests grouse about the “drive-bys”. Those are the forum visitors who post once about whatever it is they’re promoting and then disappear for months … until they post about the next thing they’re promoting. They add no value to the group. They have no sense of community. They are looked on as scum by the “residents”. It’s tempting to just promote yourself. Millions of people use these sites. But what actually happens is, people take more notice of you when you become a useful social marketing resource. And that entices other social networkers to share your blog and speed up your popularity. If all you ever do is point to yourself, those others won’t participate as much.

4. Ride the “social” wave. If you do the first 3 items on this list, then you will have put yourself in position for #4. When your social marketing appears consistently across several social media and you demonstrate your desire to give people the best results possible when they search your niche, you will build a following.

And, of course, that’s why you joined most of these social marketing sites in the first place.

The aspect of LinkedIn with the greatest leverage is the ability to connect quickly (and sometimes emotionally) with powerful centers of influence whom you’ve never met. A strong social networking connection with the right person could change your life forever … maybe a lot of lives.

Bill Gates has asked a question at LinkedIn:

“How can we do more to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology?”

Wouldn’t it be worth your while - and fun, too! - to plan a continuing strategy of connecting with the movers and shakers in your field? Forum communities offer a lot of opportunities. Every social networking platform has its “big dogs.” How might it affect your future if your thoughtful contribution at LinkedIn Answers captured the imagination of one of the top people in your field?

It happens every day. Someone makes a quantum leap because they suddenly connected to someone who is REALLY connected. And as you make those efforts at LinkedIn and at forum communities or other social networking hotspots, you will get better and better at the strategy. As you read the responses of others who use the same strategy, you’ll get more of an idea of how to focus your response to strengthen your contribution.

Do you think Bill Gates will read these answers at LinkedIn? I’ll bet he does. Do you think a ton of other well-connected people will participate and also read these answers? I’ll bet they do. So here is just one of many social networking chances you have to leap-frog your competition. Answer Bill Gates’ LinkedIn question and REALLY nail it!

Answer Bill Gates’ Question

Flickr is a very useful tool to social bloggers, because a blog post with an image starts out with a definite advantage over a blog post with no image. A picture book is easier to read than “War and Peace.” The image on your blog post will draw in people who wouldn’t have stopped otherwise. And a GOOD image will make your words more memorable, more effective long-term.

Flickr hosts a seemingly endless stream of images, and you can freely use many of them for social marketing, no strings attached. Many images can be used commercially. You can even modify many of these photos. What’s the catch? Just give attribution to the photographer … a link under the image, back to their website.

If you also need photos for your commercial blog, go to Flickr and search only within the Creative Commons photo area … millions of photos are available for commercial use. Just click on the “Attribution License” category to find photos available for commercial use and which you can modify as you like.

Now click on “browse popular tags” and click on the appropriate keywords. If you don’t find them, use the Flickr “Search” box to enter keywords about the image you’re looking for. It may take more than 1 search (different keywords) to find what you want. When you see a result you like, click to see the full-size image. If you like it, then clicking “some rights reserved” brings up the Creative Commons license.

If everything checks out, download the image and use it on your blog as you want. Be sure to add a photographer credit under the image (”Photo by …”). Link the photographer name to their Flickr profile page.

A social marketing friend was playing around one day and discovered a new way to leverage the social content he writes. There are few things more satisfying than to get MORE use out of content you’ve already created.

Anyway, he dipped into his social blogging archive, back to April about 2 years ago. He published 14 articles that month. So he opened that file, and he opened a new text file. And then he took one paragraph at random from the first blog post and pasted it into the text file. He copied a random paragraph from the 2nd blog post and pasted it into the text file. He copied a random paragraph from the third blog post … well, you get the idea. He copied 8 paragraphs from 8 blog posts, then closed the blog archive to see what he had.

And you know what? This new “article” wasn’t half bad. The social content almost made sense as-is (or as-was). My friend chose a couple of new keywords to focus the article. Then he went into each paragraph, changed a word here, a sentence there, smoothed it all a bit, and in 5 minutes, he had a finished product. Sure, it sounds crazy. But try it … I’ll bet you can really leverage all your past years of social blogging.

Some other leveraging ideas:

• Look over your past blog posts for the best of the best. Take one that’s really good, get out your video cam, and film a 2-3 minute segment. Upload it to YouTube. Link to it from your site and MySpace and LinkedIn and any other social networking profiles you have.
• Keep track of every question that is emailed in to support, and every answer you give. Some of these Q & As probably suggest a “how-to” video you can do. Others may be appropriate to combine into a blog post.
• Outline an ebook you want to write. Write out the title for each chapter and section. Now write your blog posts with each of those titles as the headline. In maybe 2-4 weeks, you’ll have an ebook.
• If you have an active blog readership, do one blog where you ask questions about what resources people use to achieve certain results, or why they choose product A over product B. Then compile the results into a report to entice new readers.

To squeeze every last penny’s worth out of every single thing you do, plan ahead. Before you do it, whatever it is, think what other uses your social content could have. Blog. Article directory. Video. Podcast. Comment on someone else’s blog post. Ebook chapter. Free report for new subscribers. A somewhat different spin gives you a whole new article. The more you target multi-purpose content production, the more effective you will become.

There was a time when having a good social marketing network was a great asset. Today, it’s a 100% necessity. You can be certain your competition is constantly using online resources to build their own strong, experienced, knowledgable, wise, nimble network. With today’s avalanche of information heading your way, you’d better have not only a great network, but also a great way to quickly sample lots of good stuff, or you will spend your life sorting through garbage.

Tumblr.com is a micro-blogging utility. The idea is to build a social network of connoisseurs who pick through the information smorgasbord, delivering you only the tastiest snacks.

You have the option to host this social blogging platform on your own domain. You can use Tumblr to quickly post small bites of text, pictures, audio, video, & links. It’s similar to Twitter. Every person in your social network becomes your own personal editor, constantly focusing on content to publish only targeted key points, deciding this resource is important and that one is not. Then YOU glance at each thumbnail and instantly decide whether to look deeper.

Similar to the idea of the Blog Marketing Journal - but much shorter.

This is as easy and quick as social networking gets. You don’t even have to go to the Tumblr website. Just click on a toolbar icon to post a quote, picture, content, etc. You can even post content from mobile phones. It’s perfect for a large segment of the population that doesn’t want to spend their time writing a detailed blog post.

You can also feature as many as 5 RSS feeds, which means you can leverage the time you put into your social blogging. Tumblr is well-positioned to help solve your information overload problem, while making social networking much more productive for you.

LinkedIn helps solve a big problem. Most of us have companies to promote and products to promote, and that’s what we do. But more and more, people are seeing that companies and products come and go. Not knowing the future, your best long-term strategy is to take charge of your future. Effectively promote yourself whenever you have the chance.

Some productive ways to use LinkedIn:

1. Create a professional LinkedIn resume to put you in position for new career opportunities you would never have found otherwise. Your LinkedIn profile is a social networking tool that can prospect for you while you work and while you sleep. Every minute of every day, your face and credentials and achievements and testimonials are there for others to see.

2. Get a streamlined evaluation of prospects for your projects. A LinkedIn profile gives you a quick idea of the person’s background, profession, current job, work history, connections, entrepreneurial inclinations, and so forth.

3. Use LinkedIn as a constantly self-updating social networking Rolodex. Not only can you keep track of all your connections, but they certainly keep their own contact information current. If you have a lot of contacts, your own files no doubt are out of date. LinkedIn can solve a big part of that problem.

4. Seek out past employers, co-workers and other close contacts for a digital recommendation letter. (For some contacts, it’s best to write your own letter and send it to them for approval. Obviously, keep the superlatives realistic.)

5. Harness the enormous potential value in “LinkedIn Answers.” You can get response from some of the top entrepreneurs and professionals in your field on any question. They are on LinkedIn to build their network & credibility, so they have reason to give you their best answers. This is way different from asking a question on some forum where you don’t have a clue who the person is that’s answering, or their experience or credentials.

Other social networking sites come and go, but LinkedIn is a rock where serious professionals actively network. Use your LinkedIn profile as part of your long-term plan for social marketing.

“I’ve found headlines with numbers tend to produce more clicks, and longer headlines tend to produce less. Also my recent post titled “Weekend Fight & A Birthday Party” did well, I can only assume it’s due to curiosity. ‘What was the fight about?’”
Michelle MacPhearson
Social Marketing

Twenty years ago, the top direct marketers told you that your headline only had 7 seconds to capture a person’s attention. Today, in the internet social marketing age, you probably have half that time to attract a reader. Let’s say you’ve got 4 seconds to pull in your targeted social networker. How do you do that?

A few social blogging headline tips:

• Good titles are direct. They tell the reader exactly what benefit they’ll get from reading your blog post.
• Or - good titles arouse curiousity. You’ve hit the mark if you can get your reader to say, “Heck! What is THIS all about?” They have to read your post to find out.
• Better yet - really good titles do both.
• A specific number adds credibility to your title.
• Use strong action verbs to help spark an interest that gets the reader to read your blog post
• Don’t forget your SEO benefits. Your primary keyword needs to be in the title - the earlier, the better.
• Your post itself must have insightful, useful, valuable information. If you trick a social networker into wasting their time reading drivel, you have lost them forever.

If you do these things in every blog title you write, then you will write titles that get people to read your blog posts. To make that easier on yourself, focus on exactly who your target audience is. Then use a title structure to more effectively rivet social networker attention.

When writing a title, even if you don’t care about the SEO benefits, you should always have your keyword list open and visible. Those keywords are hot buttons for your targeted social blogging market. Use 1 or 2 of these keywords in your title to help pull your reader into your post..

A simple way to ensure that you get the social blogging keyword right up front and that you write a good title is to make the keyword your first word, followed by a colon. Then write a short title that follows the other principles.

A little practice can get you a big payoff. Get out your keyword list. Go to your MySpace page and click through some of the profiles. Notice 2 things: the line under the person’s name (on the left) and the first line of the “blurb” (on the right). These are critical titles - which most people waste. You know you want to create a magnet profile, so use your social blogging keyword list to improve each title to do that.

The more you practice, the more effective your own blog headlines will be.

Obviously, you want to maximize the social networking value of your blog. For that to happen, your blog content needs to be fresh and enticing and insightful and most of all, targeted to your market’s most passionate desires. If you do these things, they’ll keep coming back … and they’ll tell their friends.

But how do you get them there in the first place?

You do that by creating good entry points. One blogger calls it “Hansel and Gretel Marketing” (leaving crumbs around to help others find your blog). Your goal is to ultimately have your readers create these links themselves.

Until that happens, you need to be the one dropping crumbs in all the right places:

• Create really useful and thoughtful blog posts, then request a link from the top blogs in your niche.
• Guest-write a post now and then (best: feature a market-specific use of social networking) for other high-traffic blogs.
• Learn and use some basic Search Engine Optimization for your blog.
• Set up social marketing profiles at StumbleUpon, MySpace, YouTube, etc., and link to your blog in your profile.
• One idea that can easily go viral on the social networking media is a resource list. If you know exactly what your target market wants and needs, spend time creating a special blog post where you give them a resource list. This is exactly the type of post that can get you featured on StumbleUpon or Digg or other social bookmarking sites.

You can also comment on other blogs or forums in your topic and leave your blog url. But to do this consistently takes many, many hours a week. It’s probably more time-effective to invest a few hours creating that ONE special blog post that really optimizes your social network marketing.

BlogCatalog.com, the social blog directory, is putting the finishing touches on a new tool that will, on a single page, automatically cross-network and promote to your friends - and maybe their friends - all your social networking interests. Result? A realistic chance to go viral every time you Digg a new blog article or post a video to YouTube.

BlogCatalog’s new dashboard will be like the ultimate social network RSS feed. You will instantly get the social networking activities of all your friends … and they will get yours.

The new social blogging dashboard automatically:

• Displays your latest activities across social networks like Digg, Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, YouTube, and many others.
• Posts your profile updates, Digg submissions, Twitter comments, etc., right to your friends’ Dashboard - and maybe their friends, also, giving you a headstart on viral marketing.
• Energizes your profile page, causing other bloggers to return again and again.
• Streamlines your social networking, so you accomplish much more in much less time.

This viral social marketing tool was conceived to be the “dream team” of social blogging time-savers, taken from the wishlist of some of the top bloggers online. We’ll report on it again, as soon as it goes live.

“Googling” is everywhere. We’ve all heard of employees getting fired - or applicants not hired - because of their Facebook or MySpace profile. And when you search for a potential employer, you might find a list of lawsuits, complaints and “IHateAcme.com” websites. Or you might find a list of company press releases. Either way, there’s a good chance what you find will influence your impression.

To monitor that “you” brand:

1. Set up Google Alerts for your name
2. Check Technorati regularly for your name in blogs
3. Check Google Video for your name in videos

How can you help make sure that your “YOU” brand shows up positively & accurately?

Don’t reveal everything to the world in your social networking profiles or on your blogs. Think what you would want to find in the social media if you were hiring “you”. Then create a professional profile to match for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.

Register “yourname.com”, if it’s available. If not, get the .net domain or .org or one of the others. Set up a blog, if you don’t have one, with this domain name. Anyone who links will probably use your name for anchor text. Your blog can link to your Facebook profile, or YouTube video, or Flickr photos, etc. You can write up a bio for your “About me” page & link to a resume.

Link from your blog to your articles posted online, and to the positive pages created about you. Be sure to go to Digg & StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites to bookmark these pages.

Whenever you put something online, remind yourself: “This is eternal.” Because it pretty much is.

You don’t need to do all this reputation management today. But long-range, this plan will strengthen that brand of “YOU.”

Matt Ridout at SeoUnique Blog interviewed 5 “power” social marketers to see what makes them different from the rest of us, and to get an idea what the benefits are to someone who spends several hours a day at social bookmarking websites.

Some of their random thoughts:

• The sites they visit most are Mixx.com and StumbleUpon.com
• Each social bookmarking site has certain content that works better than other content. You have to hang out on the site awhile to figure it out.
• StumbleUpon.com has the most potential benefit for clients, no matter the size. It’s a great variation of personalities and interests; any niche gets good response, so long as you post good content; and you can use StumbleUpon to track what your friends think is important.
• Sphinn.com - social bookmarking for SEO, social marketing and social media. The SEO pros lurk here, so what you post better be good.
• Science & technology topics have a large following on social bookmarking sites, so the right science/tech post has high “viral” bookmarking potential
• The site most mentioned as “least liked” is Reddit.com, because it isn’t designed to be easy to use.

Overall, these power users choose a favorite social bookmarking site because it allows them to feel very “at home”. They find a site with a lot of other participants they respect, and that gives them the chance to build valuable relationships. Which, of course, is what social marketing is all about.

You can post and share your photos on Flickr, a website that Alexa ranks in the Top 40 for internet traffic. The “photo sharing” part is what makes Flickr such a hot social networking site.

A couple of strategies to get the most bang for your buck with Flickr:

1. Be sure to create a relationship-building profile, so social networkers can connect and bond with you. If you want to use Flickr to promote your “WidgetsRUs” business, tell them about you and tell them what you love about widgets. Link to your website and to your email. Use some part of one of your photos to make an icon to identify you on Flickr.

2. The photos you upload from your camera to your computer have some worthless gobbledegook jpg name. Change your photo name to “BestWidget.jpg”. Now the Search Engines can index your photo with a term that people are actually likely to search. And as you share this photo with other social networkers, encourage them to use their Flickr option of applying their own comments and tags to it. That will get you more Search Engine love.

Two simple strategies. Do the first and be consistent with the second, and you improve your social networking results from Flickr.

It’s called “social” for a reason. People go to StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking websites to share and learn and help each other and have fun … to be social.

If you use StumbleUpon only to promote a website, the “real” Stumblers will shun you. You are fairly easy to spot, because you skip the social aspect. You give your page “Thumbs Up,” and that is the end of your effort. But becoming part of the social mix is quick and simple: when you Stumble a page, write a review.

It doesn’t have to be lengthy, but it does need to be original. Don’t just copy wording from the page you are stumbling - that’s what most people do, and the SU pros mark you as a rank amateur with nothing to contribute.

Instead, find something really good on that target page - whether it’s your own page or not - some really good insight or technique, valuable to your target market. Write an original comment about that single point. A couple of sentences or a paragraph is fine, but be very definite about the point you make. When you do that, you help others make a decision, and you have become part of the StumbleUpon social bookmarking “in” group. You will attract fans, which is a very good thing for your business.

When you leave a review, you are not just telling other Stumblers about the webpage. You are telling them about YOU, making it much easier for your target market to find you and connect with you.

Every day you see new online gizmos and offline gadgets that put more power in the hands of consumers. A consumer can find your website this morning, subscribe, have some annoying experience which may or may not have been your fault, focus their anger in a quickie audio & video commentary, edit it, post it, bookmark it, link to it, and by tonight it could have been seen and/or read by tens of thousands of people. By tomorrow? It could go viral, and the universe will have seen it.

Today’s social networking media has created a world of Walter Cronkites. (If you’re under 30, he used to be on TV.)

What can you do to prepare for all of today’s new scrutiny? Some reputation management tips:

1. Listen to what consumers are saying. Use tools that allow you to find and recognize problems quickly, before someone uploads their investigative video. Monitor talk about your brand. Be sure to subscribe to daily newsfeeds for your brand and your keywords. A lot of sudden activity means you need to look more closely.

2. Consumer-reporters are out there 24/7 looking for material. Number one on their list is exposing bad customer service. Since it’s everywhere, bad customer service is easy to find. So improve your customer service, and let the bloodhounds sniff some other trail.

3. Make all your public communications as consumer-focused as possible. Talk about what you hear in #1 above. When people know you are listening to them, they are way less likely to attack.

They are watching you. With a few low-cost tools, anyone could be a professional spy. So guard your reputation. It’s good business sense to tweak your marketing plan to give your public the best possible experience in every area of your business. Don’t give the spies anything to talk about. Who knows? A good reputation management plan may cause some consumer/reporter to fall in love with you and upload their “good vibrations” video about your company. It does happen.

If you’re a first-timer shooting promotional video to place on YouTube or one of the many other online video sites, here’s a hard-learned video marketing tip:

When you hear a shotgun in the distance and you think, “The microphone will never pick THAT up,” … you are wrong.

My friend and her partner took the video cam way out of town into the woods recently. They shot 4 promotional videos for their small business. They were well-prepared with a checklist.

1. They were totally passionate about their candle-making business, and they were prepared to bring that passion to the screen.
2. This video would be HOT! They had rehearsed again and again at home, and they knew exactly which points to focus on.
3. They made sure the microphone was recording.
4. The checklist pointed out that the wind could ruin your sound, so they had waited for a breezeless day.
5. They knew a certain spot in the forest where they’d have enough light, but not too much.
6. They brought a tripod so the camera wouldn’t shake. They set it up several feet away, to film them both.
7. They shot a minute’s worth of video, then checked it out to make sure the sound and lighting were good.

It was perfect. They assumed that the quality would hold. So they began their production. Neither of them thought much about those 15 shotgun blasts off in the distance. No way the microphone would pick THAT up, right?

Wrong. The whole trip will have to be done over. What the video social marketing tip sheet didn’t tell them was that the further away the microphone is from the scene it’s filming, the more background noise it will pick up. At least they’ll get another chance to commune with nature.

If your video cam microphone is any good, it is sensitive to ALL sounds. In fact, it will actually hear stuff you can’t hear. And even if it’s not any good, you can pretty much figure it will hear anything you don’t want it to hear.

My friend has added 2 NEW tips to her promotional video checklist:

1. If you hear ANY sound in the background, just start over.
2. If you’ve travelled to a particular place to shoot your promotional video, always check the quality before you leave. You may save yourself a long trip back.