Back in the day when businesses first decided to tap into the explosive growth in social media sites for marketing purposes, most efforts failed miserably. One of the many problems was that staid old businesses failed to recognize one of the core concepts driving social media participation – it’s fun! Most businesses have a hard time thinking “fun”; preferring instead to think “money.”

In addition, businesses failed to understand another core concept – involvement and participation. Social media enthusiasts aren’t interested in being “told” things. They think they have something to say as well and want the chance to contribute and participate in a two-way conversation.

Businesses have begun to crack the social media code and companies like Dell and Starbucks report generating millions of dollars in revenue from their social media marketing campaigns. They and others like them have achieved success by recognizing that social media sites are communities and to benefit from the community you must first join it by contributing with something of value and inviting the participation of others.

If your business has reached the level of being a recognized and valued member of the community here are two relatively simple things you can do to excite and involve others – Contests and Discounts

Contests

There’s nothing more fun and exciting than a challenging contest that allows members of the community to get involved and compete with each other, having a good deal of fun along the way. You’ll need a little creativity to come up with something interesting, involving, and exciting, but here are a few thoughts about things to include.

First, keeping the contest on the site opens the possibility of going viral. For example, suppose contestants are asked to post their answer to a question like “Why I love (fill in one of your products); or “Ten ways I use (fill in one of your products)”. The winner is determined by the number of comments received. In concept this contest is simple and elegant and potentially very viral.

Although you’ll have to come up with an interesting prize, a contest that goes viral can be its own reward. People feel like winners because they have a good time joining in and following the contest. There are endless variations on the kinds of questions you can pose for the contest. For complex products you might want to use something like “5 Things I’d like to see added to (fill in one of your products).” With a contest like this you could involve some of your own employees as judges, with the contest winner being determined partly by the highest number of comments received from the community and party by judges’ scores.

Everyone likes to get a special break on things, especially when the discount or special offer they get is not open to everyone – only to those members of a select group. Discounts not only reward visitors for being a part of the community, they also drive sales!

I came across some interesting tips on multilingual SEO from Maria Nikishyna of Search Engine Journal this morning.

Language Recognition
Stick to only one language per page
Avoid side-by-side translations
Use the same language for all elements of the page: headers, sidebars, menus, etc.

URL Structure
Language-specific extensions are often used on multilingual websites to help users (and crawlers) identify the sections of the website they are on and the language the page is in.

Crawling and Indexing
Avoid redirects based on user’s perceived language: they could, in fact, prevent both users and SEs from looking at more pages on your site. Keep the content for each language on separate URLs
Don’t use cookies to show translated page versions
Cross-link page by page

Like anything else in internet marketing, whether its SEO, social media or pay per click advertising, its important to start with the end result in mind and be consistent as you build your site out. Get the basics right and move forward from there.

Advertising Age makes 11 Predictions on how Social Media that will affect marketers.

From an SEO perspective, here are the top 3 that predictions that are we are already seeing taking shape in our field.

3. Our interaction with search engines will be different

Real-time information in Google search, e.g. from Twitter, blog results and user reviews, will be more prominent. Google’s Social Search will change the way we interact with search engines by pushing relevant content from our personal networks to the front of search results, making them more personalized. The importance of digital-influencer marketing will increase significantly.

6. Influencer marketing will be redefined

As social media continues to permeate more and more aspects of not only the way we interact with digital media but also other channels such as digital outdoor, commerce or online TV, we will see the significance of influencer marketing grow dramatically. As a basic example, the inclusion of Twitter in Google search results or Google’s soon-to-be-released Social Search will permeate search results with content that will not be managed by Google’s infamous PageRank but by social influence and relevance to your social network. Discovering people that can help you to reach your desired consumer will become exponentially more effective and important.

7. Ratings everywhere

In today’s world, having a commerce site that doesn’t have user ratings could actually prove to be a detriment to sales. In the near future, brands and businesses will more frequently place user ratings and accept open feedback on their actual websites. User ratings will become so common that marketers should expect to find them woven into most digital experiences.

We are already seeing search engines provide Real-Time search results by adding Twitter or Facebook updates to their results pages and it is clear that social influence will become a more prominent ranking signal. And other every day we consult with clients and potential clients on reputation management on Google Local and review sites like Homestars.

So althought the predictions are made for 2012, there is no time like the present to start considering the consequences and planning strategies right now.

Is Apple headed for a showdown with Google? According to Ben Parr of Mashable, a heavyweight battle on the mobile advertising front is well underway.

While both Apple and Google, with the iPhone and Android respectively will succeed at building their own mobile advertising platforms, the key to success will be relationships with additional platforms, like BlackBerry.

The importance of  social networking just exploded overnight with Google’s announcement that they are extending Personalized Search to signed-out users worldwide. In the past, you had to be logged in to Google before they would give you search results tailored to your search history and personal preferences.

Using the -,+ and x icons, you could move a listing higher in your personalized results and even delete the result completely.

As of today, you no longer have to be signed in to Google to get personalized search results. Your results will be rendered based on your search history and clicks over up to 180 days of passed search information. If you don’t want personalized search results, you can disable customization by clicking on web history and then disable customizations based on search query.

So What Does This Have to Do with Social Media Marketing?

Think about it for a second. The average user is not going to read Google’s latest news on the personalization of search. They will continue to go about their daily business unaware of the changes.
If they are aware, many will consider the new policy as another step in Google’s quest to refine relevant results to the end user. Why should they do anything? Let’s put aside privacy issues for the moment while we consider the effect this will have on the keyword phrases your company is optimizing for.

Personalized search results will dilute your search engine optimization efforts

How Can You Optimize for Personal Search?

The effectiveness of using Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a strategy that has been debated for years. According to Aaron Wall, “Latent semantic indexing allows a search engine to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching search query text.”  Basically, you are using language in your web content to match Google’s algorithm with a given search term. Like anything else in search engine optimization,  your best course of action is to try it and see if it works for you.

Danny Sullivan’s Tips on Taking Advantage of Personalized Search

Titles & Descriptions are crucial: You need the clickthrough more than ever. Clickthroughs get your site as seen as possibly important to a particular person’s profile.

Get on the Google personalized homepages of searchers. That means offering them a feed or a gadget and encouraging take-up with an Add To Google buttons.

Put Google Bookmark buttons on your site, such as the one offered by AddThis. Getting bookmarked also helps you be seen as important.

Why is Social Media So Important?

Now, not only do you want use online and offline social networking to become an influence in your industry, you want to influence the search queries your target audience is using to find your products and brand.

Reading this post, a few of you probably noticed the Google result I posted.

Some will search Google for the complete term, Social Media Marketing Toronto Wolf21.   We just influenced your search query.  Eventually, you will search without the brand name, but we will still come on your search results page because of your search history.

Marty Weintraub’s Tips on How Can you Influence Search Queries in Your Target Market?

1. During phone calls say “search for THIS and click on It.”
2. Tell potential customers at meetings & pitches.
3. Email links to unpersonalized SERPs with instructions to click on the results.
4. Put SERPs link in blog Posts.
5. Never miss a chance to direct folks to content by way of  SERPs/click.
6. Making up words usually works, I.E. tell people “Go to Google and search for something like,  “The Mighty Rankinstanker.”  Say, “Click on the first result.” In this case the user has demonstrated to the engine he/she ‘likes” SearchEngineLand.
7. Go mass market. Make the call to action. Advertise:  Put “Go to Google.com, keyword ________ in your radio ad.

Some great ideas on influencing search queries associated with your business in 20110.

Link building is an important part of your SEO strategy if you want your website to rank in the search engine results for one or one thousand keyword terms. Since Google holds 80% (yes, you read that right) of the search market in Canada we tend to focus our link building efforts on quality inbound links from authoritative web sites.  Basically, we are doing what Google tells webmasters to do.

In the past, MSN was all about volume of links and they were never able to put a consistent strategy together in order to serve search engine results that could compete with Google. The results were simply spammy and inadequate.

With the launch of Bing, however, things have changed. The new search engine is very similar to Google and Microsoft is even communicating with webmasters more effectively in an effort weed out as much spam as they can.

Here are a few of link building tactics Bing suggests webmasters should avoid:

• The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time
• Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites
• Using hidden links in your pages
• Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known “bad neighborhoods” on the Web
• Linking out to known web spam sites

Here are a few strategies that should be part of your link building campaign courtesy of Bing.

• Write and publish concise, informative press releases online as developments warrant
• Publish expert articles to online article directories
• Use social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to connect to industry influencers to establish contacts, some of whom may connect back to you (be sure you have your profiles set up with links back to your website first)
• Launch a blog or interactive user forum on your site*

Head on over to the Bing community blog for more tips on link building if you want to rank well on Bing.

Coming from the yellow page industry, I have a background in call tracking. Back in the day, we used a unique phone number in every ad so at the end of each month, we were able to tell how many phone calls we received from a specific directory.  In some cases, the number of phone calls our clients received in major cities was astronomical, however, many of the calls came from  job seekers and tire kickers. There was still a lot of mystery in the research.

At the time, we thought this was ground breaking stuff. But fast forward to today and enter the internet marketing business and similar techniques seem almost medieval.

Today, with Google analytics, you can track almost anything your heart desires right down to keyword that resulted in a sale. Still, for an SEO company we need to provide as much ammunition as possible to make more money for our clients.

ClearResults is a call tracking company that provides call tracking solutions that:

* Identify what media is getting you results and eliminate those that are not.
* Increase your phone inquiry/close ratio
* Identify peak & low volume calling patterns.
* Calls can be recorded for later review.
* Web based real time reports available 24/7.

The call tracking system generates phone numbers dynamically, producing a different phone number if a visitor comes from Yahoo, Bing, Google or any other referrer. The system is called Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI).

In its simplest form, you can track a visitor down to the keyword phrase that they typed in to a given search engine or referrer when they called the dynamically generated phone number on your website. Powerful information for any SEO company to provide for their clients, especially in these days of data driven marketing.

Here is a great video on the emergence of large horizontal content sites of the like we have not seen before. Horizontal sites are websites like Wikipedia that are completely broad with no target market, building content without a niche strategy.   Laurence Couburn describes the shotgun approach that companies like Demand Media take to dominate the long tail of search results with horizontal search.

Demand Media has created their own algorithm that searches for long tail keywords that they can rank for and profit from by running ads against the content.

Some seo companies make a living with horizontal sites but with large companies entering the fray, the heat will be on for the small guy to look for other ways to get their message out.

Laurence Couburn’s Revealing Video on the Emergence of Massive Content Sites. (3:46)

On Nov 19th, Google announced that they have redesigned Google News, so that it will fit better on smart phone screens. It’s a small change in the realm of Google changes, but one that will be welcome by people who like their news and like their smart phones. For some it will make accessing their news a little easier and cleaner on their mobile device of choice.

And really, that’s what we all want out of our internet experiences: ease of use. Think about the last time you had an upgrade to a piece of software and it went a little haywire. I recently had an upgrade to my browser imposed upon me, only to discover there is a little bug in it that means I may or may not have to click three or four times on a link to get where I am going. They are losing me and I’ve been loyal to this browser for a few years now. It’s back to ease of use.

What if your client can’t find you? They use a search engine and your company doesn’t show up in the first few links. Worse than that: your company isn’t on the first page. How hardcore are you when searching? Do you ever reach the third page of search listings? Again, this is an ease of use issue.

We all get to the point where we think that it takes big changes to make a difference. It’s like when you tried to lose 20 pounds and the first week you decided to drop everything from your diet except vegetables and work out twice a day. It’s not sustainable to lose weight that way, and it is not sustainable to try to make business changes that way either. But when successful companies like Google show us time and again that small changes make a difference – that keeping up with your clients’ wish lists can be done by approaching one item at a time – you start to think about it in achievable chunks.

SEO practices can be implemented in small chunks. It isn’t an all or nothing affair in the land of internet marketing. Making Twitter work for your business, increasing hits to your website, driving traffic through search features and even backdoor practices, like Danny Sullivan’s approach to reading the Wall Street Journal through Google News are all possible, but if you try to implement them all by yourself and all at the same time, you may start to feel the room spin a little. They each have benefits and, used all together, can reap some spectacular rewards, but like the Google News redesign, one or two small things can make significant changes, increasing the ease of use factor for your clients. All without any spinning for your business.

I was just thinking about how linking up used to mean getting together with your friends for drinks or coffee. Or sometimes it meant phoning around to see if your buddies could go to a party. These days linking up is a reference that is about online life. I like my online life, don’t get me wrong, and I have adapted to the terminology, but I wonder if my kids will someday laugh at my old notion of linking up.

Socializing is now done on messaging clients, chat rooms, and online message groups. If that’s not enough for you, you can connect to your family and friends through social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook. They’ve even become verbs: “I’ll Facebook you.” would have been nonsense a few years back, but we all know what it means today (except maybe my 86 year old grandmother, and even then I am not sure). And a Tweet was a sound that birds made, not something you did with a social networking tool.

The brilliant part about all of these online social tools is that they can be used for professional networking and marketing too. Although some workplaces have had a reactionary view of them and have been vocal in banning applications like Facebook and other social networking tools from being used at work, there are many other businesses that are beginning to understand the scope of the benefits these tools offer to a company and its employees.

Melding social networking and business needs has been a core component of LinkedIn’s purpose, so it is no real surprise that LinkedIn is opening up its platform so that developers can amalgamate LinkedIn into their own business applications. The easier it is for users to use LinkedIn, the more traffic will flow through the site.

Twitter clients can already interact with their LinkedIn network updates, and IBM, Research in Motion’s Blackberry, and Microsoft have all approached LinkedIn about developing partnerships. Cross-functionality of social networking platforms will encourage growth and take this phenomenon to the next level. It is smart of LinkedIn to be part of the pack leading this movement.

As it becomes easier to use these internet marketing tools and interact with several of your favourites at once, we will see increased business networking. In the future, not only will it be possible to do marketing through these tools, but it may become easier to post jobs and find appropriate candidates to fill them, solve general business problems, and even coordinate workflow within a work group. The possibilities are vast.

For the moment though, I am just going to go and update my Facebook status, and chat with my online friends. I like being linked up.