Social Networking

Social Bookmarking: Dos and Don’ts

One of the steepest learning curves I have encountered as the owner, writer and chief Search Engine Optimization guy of a blog site is with the art—and science—of social bookmarking. As I discuss in one of my recent posts Inexpensive SEO Strategies for Small Company Websites: Part III, getting websites to link back to yours (a.k.a. reverse-linking) is the Holy Grail of ...

Twitter for Small Business: An Interview with Shannon Evans

When you spend as much time networking as I do, you meet some pretty interesting people—people with things like motivation, ideas, experience, and a strong desire to help others become better at what they do. Shannon Evans (@shannonevans on Twitter) is one of those people: a development editor, literary coach, book reviewer, and author of the brand new small business ...

An Interview with Buzzom CEO Bhupendra Khanal (Part 2)

Below is Part 2 of a recent interview with Bhupendra Khanal, the architect behind Buzzom—a leading social marketing and Twitter account management tool. Mr. Khanal offered to share his time with Eric Rudolf, a career Internet Marketing professional and owner of THEsmallCOMPANYBLOG. Please follow this link to access Part 1 of this Interview. THE INTERVIEW: QUESTIONS 6 THRU 10 Eric: For marketing analytics ...

Social Marketing Automation: Interview with the CEO of Buzzom

Below is Part I of a two-part interview with Bhupendra Khanal, Founder and CEO of InRev—developers of Buzzom. Buzzom is one of the fastest-growing Twitter Account Management tools in the industry, and was recently featured in PC World’s list of Top 5 Twitter Ranking applications, as well as in a recent article in Forbes Magazine. Although he runs a company in ...

6 Blogging Lessons I Learned the Hard Way

When I wrote my very first post in October of 2008, I knew there would be a few things to learn about blogging. Back then, I figured my 16 years of small company marketing experience could take me most of the way, and I would simply fill in the gaps with a handful of articles and one good book from ...

Marketing Tool Review: SocialOomph Social Media Productivity

As a blogger who also has a day job, the lure of automated marketing tools is, at times, nearly impossible to resist. But as I discussed in a recent post titled Four Marketing Technologies That Are Ruining the Internet, most of the tools marketers have to choose from do little more than encourage us to clutter the Internet with artificially-generated traffic, ...

The Myth of Social Networking and Revenue Generation

As anyone who was once a member of an electronic bulletin board knows, social networks have been around for decades. Twenty years ago, only a handful of businesses had the forsight or the technical knowledge to consider utilizing something like a BBS for marketing purposes. But today, social media technology is much more accessible and easier to use; and the ...

57 Things That (Sort of) Increased My Twitter Clickthroughs

Until I am willing to manually approve each person who joins my Twitter community, I have no choice but to live with the reality that a significant percentage of my Twitter followers are MLMers, self-proclaimed SEO experts, and consultants who would love to help me run my business . . . even though I don’t actually have one. But the fact is, my target audience ...

17 Great Reasons Why Professional Marketers Hate Twitter

If given the opportunity, one would be hard-pressed to find a marketing channel that evokes a more polarizing reaction among professional marketers than Twitter. People who get paid to market for a living (the ones with things like degrees or experience or both) are rarely in the middle on Twitter: they either love it, or they go to bed each night hoping social networking’s newest ...

Real-World Benefits of Twitter for Small Companies: Part II

Like many of you who regularly visit this blog (over 6,000 now—thank you!) I have spent countless hours reading about, researching, and experimenting with Twitter over the last few months. My goal is to answer one simple question: “Can this technology be used to make a positive impact, financial or otherwise, on a small company?” This post will act as Part II in a series of posts focusing ...

5 Unbreakable Rules for Using Twitter as a Business Tool

Like most social technology sites in worldwide use today, companies big and small are scrambling to convert Twitter from a simple networking tool to a legitimate way of increasing revenues and decreasing costs. Unfortunately, most of these businesses are learning just enough about Twitter to be dangerous. And annoying. And in some cases, unethical. Although many of us would love to see each new Twitter account ...

Real-World Benefits of Twitter for Small Companies: Part I

More than any other social networking site in worldwide use today, Twitter owes a significant portion of its recent growth to pyramid schemes, egocentric celebrities, get-rich-quick gurus, and kids from Amsterdam with nothing better to do than collect thousands of new followers per week. While these people continue to tie up Twitter’s bandwidth by posting 140-character brain farts in rapid succession, my focus continues to be on the business ...

Competitive ‘Intelligence:’ When Social Networking Backfires

Today, I would like to take a minute and tell a story. A story about an actual, real-life situation in which a high-profile player in an extremely competitive industry makes a huge mistake the rest of us can learn from. At the small company I currently work for, we have a competitor I will call Randy. Randy is Founder and CEO of the ...

Simple Definitions of Social Media and Social Networking

As we move through the first half of 2009, I plan to develop and post a series of articles relating to monetizing (i.e. making money from) Social Media and social networking. These articles will outline my thoughts about these vehicles as they relate to small companies—specifically, whether or not I believe it is possible for small firms to directly or indirectly leverage Social Media ...