I have young children, so one of the things I have noticed about younger kids is that there is strong marketing that targets them. I am sure I remember having television commercials and radio advertisements aimed at me when I was small, but these days I sit on the parenting side of that coin and watch it all with a business knowledge too. There are products and services that are heavily marketed to kids. Once they become school age, most kids have an allowance, friends who influence them, and personal preferences; a perfect combo for higher end marketing.

The question then becomes whether or not there are avenues to market to this sector online. Mike Sachoff just wrote an article called “UK Kids Ignoring Facebook Age Limits”, in which he reveals that ”a quarter of children in the UK aged 8-12 who use the Internet at home say they have a profile on Facebook, Bebo or MySpace, although the minimum age is 13”. We can be sure that if kids of that age group in the UK are on social networking sites, then the kids on this side of the pond will also be there. As well, 21 percent of kids from 8-15 download or watch TV or movies on the Internet. And 18 percent of kids from 8-11 visit blogs.

So, we know that kids are on the internet, but how much are they engaging in social networking sites? Even if 93 percent of the kids on social networking sites are being monitored regularly by their parent, as reported by Mike Sachoff’s article, it doesn’t mean that marketing through these sites is unavailable to them. In fact, there may be evidence to show that this age group is actively engaged in propelling social marketing. Take the case of 16 year old singer Justin Bieber and his increasing fame that is being fed by a mania of tweeting on Twitter. Chris Crum writes about “Twitter Business Lessons from Justin Bieber” and he notes that “Bieber has frequently been a trending topic for over a month straight. The tweets just keep pouring in, and they’re generally not spammy.” Of course, Justin has also been releasing new songs (including one that was for relief efforts in Haiti), made plenty of television appearances, and had a birthday this month. He’s been busy and interesting, so there is lots for his fans to tweet about. And tweet they do! Considering his fan base is primarily young girls, it’s not a big leap to assume they are the ones who are engaging in conversations about him on Twitter.

Knowing that there is a growing presence of kids and preteens on Twitter, Facebook, and more, means that including online engagement as part of your developing marketing plans for products and services for these age groups is becoming even more important.

There is an idea out there among some of us that we need to choose one avenue for a presence on the internet: social media, like Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace; blogging; or a website. Some will say it is overkill to have two or more. Others will talk about the time it takes to keep up with more than one. And still other people believe that the newer technologies are taking over, making a business website or blog obsolete. All of these perspectives are narrow ones.

Although a website is a large undertaking (or can be) when first put up, it really is the face of your business online. So, for convenience and argument’s sake, I am going to take it out of the equation and we will assume that your business has a great website and that it is bringing clients to you. So, you have clients coming in and your website is fantastic…do you need social media and blogging? Or has social media made blogging obsolete?

In his article “Blogging vs. Twitter: It Shouldn’t Be About the Format” Chris Crum argues (and I completely agree with him) that social media and blogging fill different, complementary niches. As Chris says, “Social networks drive traffic to blogs. Blogs drive followers to social profiles. If a reader is interested enough to read your blog on a regular basis, there is a good chance they are interested enough to follow you on Twitter, and likewise if they care enough to follow you on Twitter, they may be interested in what you have to say on your blog.”

And really, that about sums it up: social networking (be it Twitter, Facebook, or otherwise) can drive traffic to your blog. Where Twitter and Facebook allow you small, catchy bylines and quick conversations with people, a blog is a place to flesh out ideas and write out more complex thoughts. To me, it’s a little like the difference between the short answer tests and the essay question tests (if you are interested, yes, I was one of the students who was extremely good at the essay questions).

The best news is that we don’t have to choose one over the other. Social networking can take up time. Blogging takes up more time. And inspiration can be found for both forms, but then recycled into an interest in your presence on the other. For example, I can write a catchy phrase into Twitter about how I am contemplating blogging and it’s relationship to Tweeting. Then I link it to this blog post.

In the end, it’s good business to have all of your online efforts working together.

Sometimes when I read about a new software package or a new electronic device, I think “would I use that” and other times it is “how would I use that”. Today I admit I am just wondering how far social networking will end up taking us. I get Twitter and Facebook and am regularly excited about new social networking possibilities, both socially and professionally. But today I read an article about Apple filing a patent for a system that would allow people in close proximity to “discover each other” via social networking. Which is a compelling thought on one hand, but leaves me envisioning handshakes abandoned and people gathered in a room together chatting on their iPhones and iPads. It’s extreme, I admit, and unlikely to ever come to be quite like that, but it did give me an interesting visual and sometimes I wonder if anyone else has these ideas too.

The article that caused me to ponder how far social networking will go, entitled “Apple files mobile social networking patent request”, gives a few details about the prospective patent. The title of the patent requested is “Group Formation Using Anonymous Broadcast Information” and it gives a description of a system of token exchanges that allows mobile devices that are within a certain range to discover each other and form a group. Apple suggests that these groups could facilitate “at events like concerts, conferences, meetings, rallies and weddings.”

A more complete explanation of Apple’s intent with this patent is that “User interfaces, filters and search engines can be provided to the users to enable users to search and manage groups. The groups can be used with various applications—e.g., calendars, address books, e-mail, instant messaging — to provide additional content and services to the users. If the geographic location of the group at the contact time is known, then members of the group can be targeted to receive location-based services (LBS) and content.”

While my first reaction is an image of extreme isolation in a crowd, as I think about shopping situations, I can see some extremely beneficial uses to a location-based group. Say, like me, you are an avid reader. At some point, you’ll walk into a new bookstore. If you are the owner of the bookstore and know about mobile groups, you can have a group set up for your store, which lists the sales of the week, future book signings and appearances, and even potentially a catalogue of your inventory. As a customer, I can walk into this new store, join the group, and then have a variety of information at my fingertips. It’s a win-win situation for both people in that group: the bookstore sells books by providing me with easy information.

Certainly, using these tools for the benefit of your business will take some thinking and creativity, but if Apple and other social networking sites are finding a market for them, surely we can put them to good use in the business world too.

It seems easy to let your online time take over your entire life, be it business or personal online time. There is so much we can do now online, from keeping up with our friends to watching television to marketing our businesses, and it seems like the list of things to do in order to accomplish these online tasks is endless. And it can be. However, as Kim Albee of Genoo told Webpro News, it can be “broken into bite sized chunks” and made more manageable.

So just what are small and medium sized businesses managing these days? Social media, websites, search engine rankings, and lead capturing are four of their top issues. In larger companies, there can be several people or a whole team to manage these projects, but smaller companies often have one person doing it all or several people adding portions of these activities onto their already full workload. While accomplishing these tasks is important to the overall health of the company, managing them well is also key.

Depending on which online tools and features your company uses, your efforts can be focused to produce excellent results in a minimum time frame. Let’s think about social media sites: it’s easy to get swept away in all of the possibilities of your social media. On Facebook alone, you can have online chats with your friends, play games, schedule activities, become a fan of different groups and businesses, post your own updates, and read the updates of all of your friends. A person could potentially spend an entire day navigating Facebook.

In Chris Crum’s article “Look for Ways to Manage Your Social Media Time Better” he lists a few great ways to cut down on the noise crowding out your online time, including

- Use the list features for Facebook and Twitter to organize the feeds you are getting and view from a single group of people at a time, rather than wading through all of the feeds from everyone on your list.
- Use browser plug-ins to make your online tasks smoother. This may take up a bit of time to research and implement in the beginning, but that time and more will be recovered in the long run by using the right tools for your browsing habits.
- Organize your news feeds too.
- Use down time, like when “waiting for your food to arrive at a restaurant, waiting at the dentist’s office” to check on your social media through your mobile devices.

However you manage your online time, be sure to do it mindfully to ensure that the internet is working for you, rather than allowing yourself to get swallowed by internet activities. For small and medium sized businesses, where managing tasks is even more crucial, these recommendations can be the line between success and failure.

News in the world of internet marketing is filled with talk about Google’s latest venture: Google Buzz. Although I’ve heard a few negative remarks about how Google is trying to have their hand in every internet venue imaginable, word on the street is generally a tone that is interested in this development. I’m not surprised at that combination, since we all love to have the things we want to do on our computers and on the internet packaged up nice and neat, but then we tend to complain when one company provides it. Finding a happy medium in that situation is a bit of a quandary.

After reading about the features promised in Buzz, I am eager to try it out and see what I think of the experience it provides. Let’s take a quick look at some of the features of Buzz:

- Runs through Gmail
- Permits users to post status updates, photos, and links to their network
- Allows users to pull in activity from other sites, including Twitter, Flickr and Picasa
- Will have a mobile component, which can combine with wireless operating systems to include features like voice-recognition postings and a GPS-enabled ability to attach the user’s location to posts
- Enables real time comments, weighting the comments by other users similarly to Google’s search engine results in order to sort through them in a similar fashion to your Google search
- Automatically sets the people you email or chat with frequently as your friends

Despite how Buzz seems to be trying to replace some social networking sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn, while integrating other sites, like Twitter, into the usability of their latest brainchild, Google claims that they aren’t trying to edge in on anyone else’s territory and are just trying “to listen to their users”, according to Gmail product managed Todd Jackson. However, there is talk of Buzz being marketed to companies as an interoffice communication tool, which is definitely a competitive move against AOL Instant Messenger service.

Only time will tell if Buzz will be a success and to what degree. The success may hinge not on what Buzz can do at this moment, but on the potential expansions – from updating your status by phone to enabling Twitter updates through your Buzz account to linking Buzz to other emerging Google tools – and the reception Google receives in the social media arena. And the good news is that Google knows they have their work cut out for them. Spokesman Bradley Horowitz said, “We’re not launching this today because we think we’re done. We don’t think that’s how a product like this is built.”

It’s going to be interesting to watch the progress of this tool and see what kind of audience it ends up getting.

The big trend in electronics and software is flexibility. We all want our gadgets and our programs to do as much as possible, as easily as possible. Since the death of Windows 3.1 and single use computing morphing into a multi-use experience, we want our laptops to run music, download email, check the weather, and help us to write the next report all at the same time. Instead of logging into Twitter proper to post your tweets, there are programs that allow you to send off tweets via third parties, so you don’t have to go to the trouble of logging in and out several times a day.

Social media is all about connections, but as our abilities with our social media programs grow, so do the demands on networking sites to get bigger and better. Those who do not grow may not survive in this market and mindset. Our electronic consciousness demands solutions to our problems, whether they are perceived problems or real ones.

LinkedIn is responding to this mindset and positioning itself to be seen as an innovative service by allowing its users to edit their profile layouts. It probably seems like such a basic step to make to most of us, but the article “LinkedIn Allows Users to Edit Profile Layouts” points out, “most people like having a measure of control” and LinkedIn is smart to cater to that desire.

What does editing your profile layout mean anyway? Well, if you’ve ever had a resume to write that had a special case, like a stay-at-home parent who is returning to the workforce, a career change, a layoff, or even just inexperience, you’ll know that sometimes putting the right information front and center can make the difference. In this case, having tabs that can be dragged and reordered in LinkedIn allows you to do the same thing as reordering your resume. In the resume writing field, people pay substantial cash for a professional to do just this for them. Now you can just click and drag a heading to accomplish the same thing.

According to Aaron Bronzan, an associate product manager at LinkedIn, this change is “just the first of a huge number of enhancements that are coming to your LinkedIn profile in the upcoming months.” Which means that LinkedIn users and social networking gurus will be waiting and watching for changes in the next while.

You wouldn’t send a flawed resume out into the world to represent you, so it makes sense to demand the most from your online networking tools, be they social or professional. It’s good to see LinkedIn stepping up and making changes to ensure that their users are getting better representation.

Although sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn are all incredibly popular options for social media, it is wise to examine your intended use and fit that use with the right site when planning your marketing strategy. There are many success stories with each possibility, such as the story about Pizza Hut using Twitter essentially as a cross between customer service and marketing, but today’s article by Doug Caverly, entitled “New Twitter Stats Highlight Lack of Stickiness” show trends in social marketing that shouldn’t be ignored.

The crux of the article is that many people and businesses sign up for Twitter and either never use it or use it a few times. Even more concerning is that some accounts have never taken the time to build a network of followers on Twitter. Here are the bare statistics that have come to light:

- At the end of 2009, there were 75 million Twitter accounts, with July being the peak month for increased membership
- Each month 6.2 million new accounts are activated (2-3 per second)
- 25% of accounts have no followers
- 40% of accounts have never sent a single Tweet
- 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times

These are grave statistics for Twitter to consider, and surely, there will be growth in the future and changes to address the underlying issues that may be contributing to the statistics that show a large number of users either give up on it before they really get started or just fail to build any network on the site at all. Still, with the growth rate that Twitter is maintaining, there’s no need to throw your hands up and walk away. The fact is that lots of users are employing Twitter: if you just flip around the statistic on how many people are not using Twitter more than 10 times to find the 20% that are using it repeatedly, we see that 15 million users are tweeting. That’s still a respectable number.

For now when assessing your online marketing strategies, it is important to be aware of some of the limitations of social media. It’s not just up to Twitter to fix itself, but up to us to know how we will use these tools effectively. Working creatively with sites like Twitter and Facebook can gain your business followers and sales, but it will still be work to get a network up and running. They won’t run on their own and they do need regular attention. Internet marketing experts can guide you through this process, which may be the edge needed for your business to gain ground in this new realm of marketing.

Late last week women on Facebook began posting their bra colours. The aim of the game was supposedly to raise awareness for breast cancer. And, indeed, the creator of the Facebook group called What’s Your Bra Color??? promised to donate $500 to Susan G. Komen’s foundation for the Cure if that group had more than 1,000 members by this past Monday. The casual campaign to post bra colours has garnered media attention and netted the What’s Your Bra Color??? Facebook group 4,500 members.

Some critics claim that the meme is only a pointless flirtation device, aimed at teasing men. Others claim that we are all already aware of breast cancer. While still others, including Susan G. Komen, praise the action, saying anything that gets people talking about and thinking about breast cancer is a boon. And it did get attention! The fact that the colours have vanished from Facebook statuses, but there is still talk about whether it worked or not is proof that it got people talking.

Regardless of your stance on this particular rash of Facebook posts, the deeper awareness for SEO and internet marketing gurus is a reminder of the deep reach that social media now employs in our society. If a post about bra colour has received this kind of attention, both on Facebook and from the media at large, it is worth talking about social media as a tool for attention for your business.

We’ve talked about the importance of social media within your marketing campaign before, but it bears repeating with this kind of example of its potential impact at our feet.

One big aspect of social media is that it is a new spin on the old adage about word-of-mouth being the best sales tool out there. Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are the electronic versions of word-of-mouth. Although there is some time and energy taken in setting up and maintaining accounts, when your business takes off in these electronic spaces the word-of-mouth rule begins to apply. The bra colour campaign is a perfect example of how well a focused, fun idea can capture the attention of a social media group, sell that idea, then result in action. It’s a perfect business marketing model. The next time a business tells me that they are hesitant to employ social media in their marketing plans, I am definitely going to use this example to show them that social media can get people talking about your business and products.

Now, I have to go and find an old picture to post, pick up the closest book and pick a sentence to post in my status, and make sure my settings are set properly. Social media really is all what you make of it!

As someone with a vested interest in SEO tactics, I’m always interested in what the official word is from the biggest players on the scene. Namely, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo. Every so often their officials put information out there that especially catches my attention.

I like the way linking works. It fascinates me that linking can help to build your ranking on Google. As much as I try to wrap my brain around it, there is always another caveat and always something new to learn about this technique. It’s a little like editing the English language: just when you think you have all of the exceptions and rules figured out, something else crops up to dig into and to consider. Basically, I like it because I learn something new all the time and there is always a curve ball somewhere. Not everyone finds these sorts of things entertaining, but suffice it to say that those of us who do are incredibly entertained by Google and linking.

Here is Matt Cutts from Google, answering the question: “Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?”

Chris Crum covers this video in his article “How Google Rates Links from Facebook and Twitter”, and he and Matt both basically tell us that Facebook and Twitter links are ranked the same way as every other link out there. Matt Cutts goes so far as to pointedly say that Google’s search criteria does not discriminate based on platform. A link is a link is a link in the world of Google searches.

This claim does have a bit of a caveat to it (it’s those exceptions that tickle me so much) in that Facebook pages can have private settings. When a Facebook page is not public, Google cannot crawl it or rank it. And most links on Twitter are nofollowed anyway, which changes their interaction with Google.

So, if you thought that a .ed or a .gov website would carry more weight in the rankings, you’ve now been reassured straight our of the mouths of Goggle that their search techniques just don’t work that way.

I’m a big fan of finding people. It comes from my rather transient, military childhood. I lived all over Canada, in Europe for four years, and then in Asia for a year. The Asian stay was of my own making, but the rest was part of my childhood. It gave me a global view, before “going global” was the catchphrase of the day. And it means that I like to make friends and meet new people. Essentially, tools like message boards, Facebook, and Twitter are a boon for people like me.

The downside to meeting new people and seeing new places all the time is that inevitably you lose some of them along the way. So I have been thinking about how I can now find people easily online (gone are the days of calling 411 and hoping you have the right city to get a phone number), access pictures and mapping of things I have seen and done, and search for businesses. You can bet that although I love to support a local business, I won’t decide to forgo the pleasure of purchasing the latest gadget if I can get it online or contact the business that carries it through online methods. Sometimes I will find a store online from sheer nostalgia of times gone by.

Lately, I have been investigating Twitter and Twitter related applications. The one to catch my eye is Twellow. Twellow is essentially the yellow pages of Twitter. As they put it:

Twellow is a directory of public Twitter accounts, with hundreds of categories and search features to help you find people who matter to you….[we] allow you to update your Twellow profile and categories, add links to your other social media profiles, create an extended bio with whatever information and links you would like to add, and easily follow other Twitter users right from Twellow!

Twellow is available in the USA, Canada, and Australia. I was poking around online this morning and discovered that Twellow has been released to the UK now too, which follows their trend of increased availability. As Chris Crum said in his article “Twitterers in the UK Can Now Easily Find Locals”: TwellowHood is an incredibly useful tool for Twitter users, because it brings Twitter closer to home. It makes it easier to find people you know or local businesses/organizations you wish to follow.

I’ve talked about mapping and having your business show up on local search factors for Google. The fact that Google and a Twitter offshoot are both promoting this aspect of online marketing is no coincidence, because sometimes location matters. No matter how you look at it, increasing the ways in which your customers can find you – be that by location, keyword, or business type – can only be good for business.