It’s a great idea for businesses and entrepreneurs to get inside the minds of their followers and fans.  You have access to a wealth of feedback and inside information about your services through the eyes of your actual clients.

Having said that, if you operate in a town like Nanaimo with only 80,000 people you’ll be facing some challenges before a social media campaign starts working for you.  Here are my ten tips for making social media work in a smaller market.

1) Tweeting is a luxury that you probably can’t afford.

Twitter is cool, but there isn’t much to be gained beyond the glory of tweeting.  Realistically, you just won’t get a huge amount of followers, those followers won’t convert to business and unless you’re really active, most of what you say will get lost in the crowd.  If you have a small hotel or restaurant you may see some success by posting ‘web only’ specials.  I really only recommend it for businesses with 50 employees or more, or those who are already spending a lot of time marketing their business online.

2) Blogging is still awesome.

Blogging is still a great way to generate content, build links and boost your search rankings.  Most hosting accounts come free with WordPress or some other blogging CMS and support text, images and videos.

3) Lifestreaming is the new blogging.

I could dedicate a whole post to this.  Lifestreaming is a new way of documenting the activities surrounding your life using a chronologically-ordered collection of information.  For instance, I have everything connected to my WordPress Blog including my twitter feed, my deviantART account, my Facebook fan page and my LinkedIn profile.  I get good, link rich content and a free post every week with links to my activity around the web.  Watch out for more like this in 2010, as the trend will be to invent new ways to aggregate everything for me in one place. It takes a bit to wrap your mind around it, but a good place to start is here.

4) Facebook fan pages.

Don’t link to your personal Facebook profile for business use unless they’re inseparable.  Creating a fan page allows you to have the same posting and communicating ability, but limits customers to only seeing business related content, not your cousin Judd’s halava recipe.

5) Social media is the tortoise, not the hare.

Slow and steady wins the race.  A new friend here, a new connection there.  Unless you’re Gary Vaynerchuk, you should just be content to spend no more than an hour a day on social media marketing campaigns.

6) Examine your goals before diving in.

Different social media campaigns can get different results.  Blogging will increase rankings and SEO, but isn’t always a great sales tool.  Twitter may give a temporary boost of traffic, but the effects aren’t long lasting.  Flickr is a great way to share photos, but won’t generate much for new business.  You can increase chances of conversion with custom landing pages and links, but these strategies are usually beyond the purveyance (and budget) of most small business entrepreneurs.

7) Maybe you don’t need it at all.

Ignore all of the networks, TV shows, superstars, pundits and adverts and examine what your actual market is.  Are there any other general contractors on Twitter?  Are there any CGAs with Facebook pages?  What % of people in Nanaimo do you think are on Twitter?  What’s the dialogue like for the average entrepreneur?  If you don’t see anyone doing it in your industry, don’t look at it as an opportunity to reach an untapped market, because it probably isn’t.

8) Try before you buy.

Organization and timing are very important and it will take you several hours to set up the social channels so before you commit to branded social media pages, launch a test campaign and see how you feel about the results.  A simple one or two week campaign in the beginning is a great way to gauge the response of your customers to this type of marketing

9) How will you inform people?

If you build it, it will sit there.  That’s my new motto for 2010, because it’s not enough anymore to just build a site and profile.  Conventional SEO (page titles and content) are just a foundation these days and unless you are alone in the market, are probably not sufficient to build up decent rankings.  Having a twitter page and a Facebook page will not entice people to communicate with you, you have to work it and continually provide value.  Asking people to join is a great way, if you have a newsletter list.  Advertise on your web site, and incentivize people who join and follow you with exclusive promotions.

10) Who dares, wins.

It’s not that the internet is dominated by 17 year old’s with a penchant for lolcats, it’s that the internet is dominated by 17 year old’s with a penchant for lolcats.  Edgy content wins every time, so you’re better off having a video of a car driving through your front widow or a faux haunting than you are having walkthrough tours of your custom built character home.  I’ve often said that a great social media campaign is one that gets people who would never use your product or service to talk about it.

That about sums it up, of course it’s up to you to decide if social media marketing is right for your clients.  Be organized, be daring and you could be the next willitblend.  You never know!

Now that the ‘lympics are over I’m seeing social updates about “back to normal”, “what now?” and similar sentiments.  What I’m feeling is a bit different, instead of “what now?” I’m thinking “what’s next?”

Sounds the same, but has a different impact.  I was in sales management for many, many years before my time in SEO.  A huge part of successful sales is motivation and energy.  Taking positive feelings and pouring them into your job, your life and allowing them to generate their own momentum.

It would be easy to allow the games to become tainted with scandal.  To suggest that the negative impact on the community, and the country, wasn’t worth the $4 Billion.  I don’t think you can place a price on the good will and pride of a nation.  Assuming that you could, I think that those two weeks were some of the best $150 I ever spent.

If we let the games, Canada’s most successful games, fade into nothing but memories then nothing is gained.  I want to take something more than memories.  I want momentum; action.  I am inspired.  I am committed to working harder, and reaching higher.  Are you?

Matt Cutts is the head of the Google Webspam Team, and for a long time has been the lead evangelist/spokesperson for Google and their products via his blog.   I tuned in today to see if I could glean anything new and stumbled on a recent repost of the state of the index speech from Pubcon 2009.

Some great tips about using the Google Wonder Wheel for keyword research, cool developer tools and  (most importantly in my mind) verbal confirmation that Meta Keywords aren’t used by Google for anything (yay!).  I admit that it’s been so long since I’ve seen a picture of Matt I didn’t know he shaved his head. I’m thinking that he’s starting to look like Jeremy Schoemaker.  Check out the computer generated rendering above.

I won’t rehash the whole thing as Matt has done a great job of articulating the finer points.  It’s worth a watch, because if I learned something – it’s almost certain that you will too.

The Dude talks of takin’ it easy, man.  What will come will come, and when it comes – you just take it and move on.  It’s a philosophy that has served me exceptionally well during my years in marketing.  There’s a lot of literature out there talking about what works in marketing, where it works, what doesn’t work, what works to what degree.  There are hundreds of discussions debating the validity of one method over another.

Debating the validity of one method over another is, well, kind of pointless and not dude-like at all.  Everything works.  If it didn’t work, it probably wouldn’t exist.  There are varying levels of effectiveness, though I don’t think one can debate what that is without trying it.  It’s a marketer’s responsibility to learn and experiment with whichever disciplines they want to specialize in, because when you can prove your answers to the questions of viability it’s easy to get work.

If you don’t know the answer to a marketing question, it’s ok.  Have a seat, take a sip of your white russian and think about your options in terms of  time, money and risk.

If you have the time, you can do the thing yourself.
If you can’t do the thing yourself, you’ll need to scrap the idea or pay someone else.
If you find a cheap and fast solution, it will be accompanied by a massive risk.

There’s nothing wrong with risk, or spending time or money.  If black-hat SEO didn’t work (cloaking and scraping for example) people wouldn’t keep doing it.  Sure, it’s insidious, but it works.  It works most effectively when seasoned hatters sit at the helm of the spam-train.  It works least effectively when you have to search for “how to do black hat SEO”.  It will probably destroy your brand and your reputation, but it definitely works to generate revenue.  White hat SEO takes a long, long time but there’s virtually no risk and the payout always happens, eventually.

This is where Dudeism is helpful.  There is a path of least resistance, and there is a path of utter improbability.   The path of utter improbability contains great treasure and great rewards but is a hard and dangerous journey.  The path of least resistance is cool, meandering, easy and breezy but the pay is terrible.

What about you?  Would you rather take massive risks for a possible quick payout?  Would you rather pay for perfection?  Or take the time and do it yourself?  Whichever you choose, the Dude abides.

Since I started looking at Magento last year, I’ve been extremely impressed with it as an eCommerce solution; I really thought it would be a great tool for Robbin’s Wreaths.  The eCommerce framework is sound and there seemed to be a lot of extensions and add ons for it.

I say ’seemed’ because I didn’t really spend a lot of time looking at it; probably an hour all told.  Knowing the the design for Robbin’s is on it’s way, I decided to have a look at the SEO options for Magento.  Thankfully, the kind folks at Hosting Nation allowed me to use their Magento demo to experiment with the options available.

I have to give a tip of the hat to Yoast, who did this amazing article on SEO for Magento.  If you’re a novice, the steps might be a little daunting.  I’m a salty old SEO dog though.  I’ve done SEO for Joomla and Virtuemart.  I’ve done SEO for WordPress and other custom PHP sites, even coordinated on a strategy for a giant .asp eCommerce site.

This is the first time I’ve ever done SEO for Magento, or used the system at all. I’m going into it virtually blind, counting only on Yoast’s tutorial to guide my way.

Step one: Configuration

This part is simple.  Once logged into the admin area of Magento, I follow Yoast’s steps to set global configuration and SEO settings.  Next, he recommends canonicalizing your domain – basically redirecting the WWW to non-WWW version (or vise versa).  No problem there, I can just refer to my URL Canonicalization Script and copy the rules over to a new file.   I continue with the tutorial and complete the configuration by installing the two extensions Yoast provides for meta management.  The whole process has been a breeze up to this point, much less complex than installations I’ve done with other content management systems.

Step two: Optimization

Easy.  Navigate through the upper menu to the page, category or product you want to add keywords for.  Open the meta information screen for the project and add the keywords you want.  Save, and your titles are added.

Now, there are a lot more steps to optimizing your site laid out in Yoast’s post and I haven’t finished about 90% of them.  I did accomplish what I set out to do, check my options for Magento SEO and make sure I had it down before tackling Robbin’s Wreaths.  No problem, within 20 minutes I had my first title entered into the system.  The most amazing part is that I’ve never used the system before. Now that I’ve started, I’m really looking forward to more.  Thanks to Yoast, and Magento, this is going to be a pleasure.