Social Media Defined

Finding read-worthy material in the endless vat of news sites, blogs, wikis, reviews and tweets that now clog the arteries of the internet has become increasingly difficult as the number of internet users around the globe approaches 2 billion.

How do I sort through the slush?! Where is all the good stuff, the meat, the substance, the newsworthy?!!

Enter stage left iGoogle and Alltop.

Two evolving and customizable solutions for squeezing the internet into a neat and orderly front page of feeds and highlights of all the juicy stuff you like. Here’s my quick rundown and synopsis of which of these sites are better:

Alltop was masterminded by the son of a rich and poor dad - Guy Kawasaki. The premise is to get all the top stories (get it?) in one easy to read place. The top 5 articles of whatever feeds you choose will be displayed. Some categories you can choose from include ecommerce, religion, and yoga. Once inside a particular category you can add any feeds listed to your personalized ‘MyAlltop’ tab. It’s easy to find feeds worth adding and there is plenty of content to choose from.

iGoogle functions in much the same way, except you can pretty much add anything you want to your personalized Google page. The functionality is more similar to app happy facebook, where you can find all sorts of cool bobbles called ‘gadgets’ to add to your page, not just feeds. Some gadgets are productive like the local weather or a to do list, others are just for giggles like hangman or joke of the day. And the list of gadgets is indeed as endless as your imagination.

So what’s my take on the two? iGoogle over Alltop.

iGoogle has the user friendliness you would expect from a company poised to take over the universe. Its way too easy to personalize, add, delete, and organize your home page with minimal effort. Alltop on the other hand is in my opinion a little bulky to navigate and customize. And besides, you can’t keep a pet hamster on your homepage like on iGoogle.   And I need that.

There’s just no comparison to the ease and functionality of the allpowerful iGoogle.

So what are your thoughts? Have I got it all wrong?

Forget contributing your paper resume to a tower of similar reading samples on some corporate recruiter’s desk, with a smart social media strategy you can place your name and credentials right in front of the people that make the hiring decisions.

The recent boom in social media usage makes it easier than ever for a job seeker to get their resume in front of the right person, but a word of caution for the eager job seeker: if you’re looking for a job using some form of social media, you’d better make sure that every profile you own on every network is free and clear of inappropriate material, photos, comments, etc. Don’t think that recruiters won’t go through your online ’stuff’ when considering whether to hire you or not. A quick glance through your facebook profile may give a recruiter every reason NOT to consider you for the job.

Once you’ve got your profiles cleaned up and somewhat professional looking, make sure to invest in your online presence on the most appropriate social networking sites. For all intents and purposes I would recommend LinkedIn. It’s the most powerful and well organized networking site out at the moment, and more importantly it’s the site that most professionals use to connect (9 million+ users). For a thorough runaround about how to effectively use LinkedIn, read over this brief post.

After you’ve thoroughly updated your LinkedIn profile and received a few choice recommendations, start reaching out to the appropriate people inside the organization you want to work in. LinkedIn has helpful company profiles of most any company, listing all the employees that are available to you on LinkedIn. Determine the most relevant contact and just send a quick note that you’re interested in learning more about the company over coffee- see how quickly you’ll find yourself in front of the right person without even mailing a resume.

Besides the mammoth professional networking site LinkedIn, there will most likely be more focused niche sites that you should invest time into as well depending on what industry you’re looking to get into, for instance:

NurseLinkup - Nursing
Model Mayhem - Modeling
FohBoh - Restaurant Industry
ActiveRain - Real Estate
Decorati - Interior Design
Fashionising - Fashion
TheBoaters - Boating
TappedIn - Education

The list of niche networking sites is growing/endless - just poke around a little and see what you can find.

There are of course social media sites that are designed specifically for the job seeker, I would recommend two that I’ve explored thoroughly myself; JobFox and VisualCV. These sites allow you to post an extremely thorough resume of your experience and your work, including samples of presentations, articles, or whatever else you’d like to share. Both JobFox and VisualCV are easy to navigate and suggest relevant companies or positions that might be a fit for you.

I would avoid trying to network with employers through casual social media sites such as facebook or myspace, stick to the sites that are designed for professional networking. Additionally, I would suggest sharing your resume on twitter and asking your followers for help locating opportunites. Twitter can be an effective tool for networking, especially for the job seeker. I’ve written previously about how best to utilize twitter if you’re new to it.

When jobs are in short supply, the job seeker needs to search out more creative ways of getting their credentials in front of the right person. Social media provides an effective and easy means of communication - use it!

Have your own suggestions for utilizing social media to land a new job? Drop a comment below.

Overview: The nachos bell grande of social news sites, Digg is a force that cannot be ignored in the social media realm.

Defined: Created in October of 2004, Digg’s popularity has skyrocketed with now an anticipated 3 million plus users. Nothing quite compares to the power of this beast. Like most other social news sites, Digg allows users to submit links to content around the web into a particular category on the site. Once the content has been submitted it’s up to Digg’s users to vote up (or Digg naturally) the stories that are most interesting to them or vice versa. The highest ranking stories filter through Digg’s algorithm and land neatly on the homepage. However, scoring a spot on Digg’s coveted ‘Top in All Topics’ list or even on the homepage is no easy feat, and many sites that do make it to the list can’t handle the onslaught of redirected traffic once they get there.

You may have doubts about the effectiveness of a system run by the people, but I will vouch that most often the good people of Digg produce some fantastic content so you don’t have to find it yourself. That being said, like many sites that are run by the tech savvy, Digg users tend to stand on the left of the political spectrum. That’s not to say that content of a less progressive standpoint can’t make it to the homepage, but I thought I’d throw that in as an FYI.

Once you create a personal Digg account of your very own, you can easily customize your own homepage, create a profile, and make friends with other Digg users as well.

Business Applications: Digg has enormous business application and possibility. Imagine the rush of traffic that landing on the homepage can contribute to your website or blog (we’re talking tens of thousands of click throughs). So how does one go about landing an article on the front page of Digg? Obviously there isn’t an exact science to this, it’s incredibly competitive. I will say most articles that make it do so because the user posting to Digg has a well established network of friends on Digg. You can’t just drop an article on the homepage without contributing to the site, well usually anyway.

Like other social networking sites, it’s important to make quality contributions, develop friendships with powerful and active players, vote for articles from your connections, and make appropriate comments. Comments are actually a little known way for users to drive some secondary traffic to their own sites. For instance; a link to your website about strategies for surviving a zombie outbreak would be an excellent addition in the comments section of a homepage Digg article on the newest Resident Evil video game. Get it?

Recommendation: The bottom line is, to get anything out of Digg you must first put something in. Usually. The payoff for proficient Digg users can easily overload your servers with juicy traffic. I recommend Digg for people that are willing to invest the necessary time, otherwise you can expect little success from the beast that is Digg.

I can’t believe how often I now hear the word twitter throughout my day anymore; from the local National Public Radio station telling me to ‘follow them on twitter,’ to local news networks boasting about how they are now tweeting, even my 50 something year old boss chats up her tweeting savviness. Every blog and website online (including this one) have a link to ‘follow’ them on this strange communication device. It seems that most everyone these days is happy to announce to the world that they participate in this trendy online service, even if they can’t correctly conjugate the word twitter.

I too have a twitter account, but after using it regularly for some time I’ve finally come to the point where I have serious doubts about its usefulness. It’s not that I don’t know how to use it or what potential it has for both business and individuals, I’ve already written my own thoughts about how to get the most out of twitter in an older post. In fact, I can still appreciate twitter when I receive actual information of value from experts in particular industries, local news, and other important updates from companies like Dogfish Head. Unfortunately, it is increasingly rare to actually find these few worthwhile ‘tweets’ amongst the onslaught of useless and trivial information within the ‘twitterverse’.

Due to the ridiculously mammoth amount of pointless information being shared on twitter (including those long personal instant messaging conversations between two users) many people on twitter have resorted to platforms designed to manage the garbageflow such as tweetdeck. Tweetdeck effectively allows you to screen out messages from people you don’t care so much about and create individual matrices of conversations, (ie lumping all personal contacts into one frame, all business contacts in another, all news sources into a frame and so on).

Honestly I don’t even know how people use twitter without tweetdeck, how can anyone possibly sort through so many pointless updates? Do I really care that someone I know is in the process of picking up their kids? Wondering what to wear? Getting psyched about National Mustard Day? Well, possibly the last update mentioned but you get the idea, it’s called INFORMATION OVERLOAD!! Even the most useful, informative, important tweets get lost in the mess.

Am I suggesting that twitter has lost its ability to be useful in some ways? No. Is it still worth investing time into? … Maybe. Call me a twiter, I just don’t think this trendy platform is the best use of time for business or personal use anymore.

I invite you to share your own recent success story with using twitter in the comments section below. My guess is that they are few and far between. That being said, I can certainly appreciate twitter success stories such as Kogi, this is how twitter SHOULD be used. Restaurants and news agencies are in my opinion the best positioned businesses to take advantage of twitter.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, twitter seems destined to become ever more overloaded with mindless nothings that increasingly drown out any value that might exist from this popular free service.

The current housing slump has proven to be a formidable challenge to Realtors recently. A poll conducted by Inman News in December of 2008 indicated “The number of Realtors in America is almost certain to drop by 20 percent or more by 2010.” I think most of us expect that number to be a lot higher in all honesty. That being said, in order for a Realtor to remain successful in these market conditions, some out of the box strategy is most certainly necessary. Luckily, the internet provides a countless number of tools that for the most part require little if any investment other than time to take advantage of. The following strategy is my personal recommendation to Realtors seeking to take advantage of social media, defined by three segments; Personal Networking, Self-Promotion, and Property Promotion.

Personal Networking:

Personal referrals are priceless commodities for anyone in sales, that’s pretty common knowledge. But after a time you may discover that you’ve made it amply clear to your personal contacts that you’re in the business of moving property and yet there are few leads in the pipeline.

At this point, it’s important to network with people a little further outside your personal network. It’s time to get in contact with all those acquaintances from high school, college, old jobs, etc. This may seem like a daunting task, but now it’s easier than ever through the use of popular social networking sites such as facebook and myspace. It’s not just a bunch of kids running the show anymore, people young and old are spending hours a day reconnecting with others on these networks- your mom included. All you need to do is create a profile and start seeking out people to reconnect with. You’d be surprised at how many people will gladly ‘friend’ you, ask you what you’re doing nowadays, even suggest you meet up for coffee to catch up.

This is of course a fantastic way to generate new leads and clients. I personally find facebook to be far superior than myspace or any other networking site for that matter. I would suggest joining and creating facebook groups and pages relevant to your location, making new friends, and sharing your newest listings on your profile. There’s really an enormous amount of potential for a Realtor with a proper facebook profile. I would also suggest looking into an application on facebook called ‘neighborhoods.’ It allows you to connect with people down to the development that they live in and list your own properties in the neighborhood as well. More about taking advantage of facebook.

There really are countless tools available on the internet for personal networking. I would recommend facebook as the most effective, but there are other niche sites that you may benefit from. Check out BlackWidowNetwork.com or ActiveRain.com for sites specific to Real Estate. Once you’ve mastered the social networking sites I would also suggest growing your network on twitter. Twitter can be a little confusing to get the hang of at first, if you’re not familiar with it feel free to browse an earlier article I’ve published that explains this popular medium in greater detail. Basically, twitter is a mix between instant messaging and blogging, you can follow updates from others and they can follow your updates to whatever you might be doing at the time. It’s a great way to find or share links, news, property listings, and whatever else you can think of.

Still hungry for ways to meet new people? Try joining your local young professionals organization, often they host regular socials, clubs, and sports leagues that are great for meeting new people. Another popular site that you may wish to make use of is Meetup.com. You’ll easily find any number of groups of people that are planning social events around a shared interest in your home town. The advantage of these types of social events is that you’ll often be the only Realtor at the monthly sushi meetup as opposed to the three dozen that have decided to show up at your local chamber of commerce mixer.

Self Promotion:

Credibility is king to a salesperson seeking to sell anything big or small, but especially big. Investing in a home is going to require that the buyer trust your experience. A fantastic place to showcase your skills online is LinkedIn.com. The site is similar to facebook, except that it’s entire demeanor is professional as opposed to social. With a LinkedIn profile you can post an online resume of your experience, accomplishments, and credentials. One of the most useful functions of LinkedIn to a Realtor is the Recommendation function; you can solicit any of your contacts to write a personal review of their experience with your services. LinkedIn also ranks high in google searches, allowing your curious clients an easy way to find out more about you online. More details about LinkedIn can be found in another previous post of mine.

If you’ve got a knack for writing and a good bit of expertise, consider publishing a column on a blog, community website, or local publication. Sharing a few secrets of the trade is a worthwhile trade for targeted advertising and public credibility.

Property Promotion:

Of course you’ll need to put your product in front of your purchasers. The internet offers the fastest and cheapest means of communication, and I would recommend taking advantage of the aforementioned social media sites such as twitter, facebook, and LinkedIn to share information to your online networks. Post pictures and ask your friends to help spread the word about your listings. I would also recommend posting video, it doesn’t take a professional producer to walk through a house with a camera and it gives tentative home buyers an easy way to check out your listing if they’re intimidated by or don’t have the time for a scheduled tour. This will of course require you to purchase a video camera, but not to worry, you can pick up a quality camera with 30 minutes of recording time for well under $100.

Blogging is as popular as ever and may also be worth giving a try. My favorite blogging platform is Wordpress, but there are many others out there that are easy to use and completely free for a basic site. One thing to keep in mind is that blogs are not a very focused means of promotion, as most people on the internet will have little interest in your services for the simple fact that they live thousands of miles away. However, blogs are good means of credibility and can certainly help you promote yourself and your listings. Getting traffic to your blog can be a bit of a challenge if you’re new to the idea; you can read about my personal recommendations for increasing website traffic in a previous post if you’re interested.

Final Thoughts:

Social media and internet technologies are changing standard business practice whether you want to admit it or not. Especially in times such as these, it’s important to embrace and take advantage of new tools. If you don’t, someone else will. I hope that this article gives you a few ideas on how to increase your pipeline and fatten your deal flow, or at the very least survive as a Realtor. Please feel free to comment on my suggestions and leave your own if you feel I’ve missed something, I look forward to your thoughts!

Overview: Powerful and widely used, LinkedIn is THE place for professional social networking on the web today. An increasing array of features and tools makes this platform a wise time investment for any professional.

Defined: There are currently more than 34 million LinkedIn users from over 200 countries around the world, including executives from every Fortune 500 company. With more users than any other professional social networking site, LinkedIn is a formidable place to build, maintain, and track professional contacts. In addition to management of personal contacts, LinkedIn is an effective means of self-promotion, providing users space to maintain a living and public resume of work and educational experience.

The main feature is your public profile, consisting of any work experience, education, specialties, or interests you’d like to share:

You’ll notice that others who view your profile can see what contacts you share in common, request one of their contacts introduce you via email, contact directly via email, or make a recommendation of your work.

Once you complete your profile you can connect with others individually, or import your entire address book and let LinkedIn send out invitations to connect on your behalf. Similar to most other social networking sites, users can create or join groups that interest them. These groups are excellent places to meet other professionals around a similar interest, or receive valuable feedback by posting questions in the forums.

There are also a growing number of applications that users can add to their profile, such as RSS feeds from a personal blog, local events, local job postings, polls, and other useful tools.

LinkedIn is smart, you’ll see on your personal homepage a few suggestions of people the system thinks you may know due to shared contacts, geography, or work history. Users can also see how many degrees of separation exist between them and others on the system, ie the number 1 means that you are connected, number 2 means the person is connected to one of your personal connections, and so on. Additionally, users can view which contacts you share in common with other users, see any updates that their contacts have made to their profiles, and search for people by any number of keywords, titles, industry and more. The advanced searching capabilities of LinkedIn make it a formidable tool in finding jobs, business partners, employees, and valuable information about businesses.

Users can look up a particular company and view a number of fascinating statistics about the business, including which employees are on LinkedIn, what their titles are, age and gender ratios, which employees are within the user’s personal network, common job titles, employees that recently left the company, and more:

Business Applications: It should be obvious to you by now that LinkedIn is full of valuable business applications. With so many people using the platform, users can effectively network, find business opportunities or potential new hires, build a portfolio of work recommendations, share events and news, and perform reconnaissance on other companies. If your company isn’t already listed on LinkedIn, you can add it, along with as much information as you wish. Maintaining a profile on LinkedIn is easy, fun, and increases your google page rank, making it easier for others to find you and your products and services. The ‘answers’ portion of the site is a fantastic way to quickly receive valuable feedback and ideas from professionals around the world. Use LinkedIn to track your professional contacts and keep in touch, make new contacts, and learn about someone before ever speaking with them.

Recommendation: Create a LinkedIn profile, import your address book, and start taking advantage of this tool. The majority of the site is completely free to use, with varying monthly plans for additional features and options. I would also suggest including a personal note with every invitation you send to connect with other users, and if you’d like to be recommended for your work by others it helps to recommend their work first (although there is no limit to shameless requests for others to recommend your work).

If you have any questions about using LinkedIn please post them in the comments section, I’m happy to address them.

Fantastic website not getting the traffic it deserves? Before paying Google to attract visitors for you, consider a focused, effective social media marketing strategy.

Given that your website is already pretty awesome and has up to date, quality content, a little time investment in a few social media platforms will go a long way. What’s that? There are more social media sites out there than you’ve got time left in your life to investigate? Quite right, fortunately I’ve already done the homework for you out of pure love of the industry- and plenty of free time. Here are my suggestions for increasing traffic to your site:

Bookmark your site with specific and general tags so others can find it. There are easily over 100 sites out there that allow you to bookmark and tag your own website to make it easier to find, don’t try to use all of them. I personally find delicious to be the best investment of time, or Mister Wong for European markets. Both of these sites are worthy tools, but if you really want to open the floodgates of site traffic then you should also invest in StumbleUpon. When bookmarking your site in StumbleUpon it’s best to leave a review, and since you are only afforded five tags, make them as broad as possible.

Blogs are trendy but they do actually work quite well. Integrating a blog into your website is an easy way to bring fresh content and visitors to your site. The real trick with blogs is to always provide the internet with quality content, in a semi-consistent manner. If blogging is a foreign science to you I would suggest following a few other blogs that interest you for a couple of weeks until you are comfortable with a particular style of writing.

Once you start cranking out high quality articles on your blog, make sure you spend some time promoting your hard work! Submit your posts to a few general social news sites, I recommend digg, reddit, and mixx. Now depending on the content of your website and blog, I would also suggest submitting your posts to more specific social news sites. For instance, Tip’d is a niche social news site for all things related to money and investing, NewsHeat is specific to political news, and so on and so on.

Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites are also a smart places to submit your blog posts to, as all of your connections will see your submitted link in their personal mini-feed. Twitter is a another platform I recommend sharing your recent post on, it’s sort of a cross between blogging and instant messaging that is wildly popular at the moment for both business and personal use.

Additionally, make sure that your blog has RSS and email subscription options displayed prominently on your site. It’s important to have a means of communicating with your visitors once they leave. While they are on your site, make sure it’s easy for them to share your website and blog posts on a social media platform of their choosing. There are a number of plugins out there that do this, I personally prefer Share This because of it’s clean appearance.

Hopefully you’ve gleaned a few ideas on how to increase traffic to your website by use of social media marketing. With a focused approach, a little time investment can yield commanding traffic flows to your site. Feel free to share your own tricks and techniques in the comment section below. Good luck to you!

Overview: Another social news site with more customizable features than McDonald’s. This site can effectively combine as many news channels as you can handle.

Defined: Newsvine was launched in 2005 and acquired by MSNBC in 2007, a social news site that implores users to ‘get smarter’ by submitting, writing, and commenting on news stories. Newsvine has nearly all the features of sites like digg and reddit, allowing the community to vote up or ’seed’ the most quality news stories from around the web so you don’t have to waste time looking for them yourself. What I like about Newsvine is the high level of customization. If you’re like me and start each day by first looking at a national news website, then a local news website, and finally a few social news websites, you can seriously save yourself some time by adding the RSS feed of each of those sites onto your Newsvine homepage. Line up the latest headlines from CNN, PennLive, and digg right next to each other, simple.

Other features of Newsvine include the normal friending, joining groups, commenting on or submitting content, and creating your personal profile. A nice addition to Newsvine’s features is the ability for users to earn 90% of all advertisement revenue from their personal homepage. I’m not sure that too many people earn decent coin from this feature, but it’s a nice incentive nonetheless.

Business Applications: Newsvine is not a terribly advantageous platform for businesses to utilize, but like any social news site, Newsvine is a good place to submit articles to in order to drive traffic to your site or increase awareness.

Recommendation: Newsvine is a great tool for neatly aggrigating various news sites and RSS feeds. For personal news browsing I find Newsvine to be a great tool and recommend trying it for a few weeks in place of whatever news websites you normally use.

Tripadvisor recently stated that 87% of travelers read reviews when planning their next trip, and a growing number of people are using online reviews and social media sites to determine where they choose to dine, even locally. Is your restaurant taking advantage of social media marketing? newspaper and yellowpage ads are not only expensive, but increasingly ineffective at reaching your potential patron base. Fortunately, social media marketing primarily requires no money investment at all, and minimal time investment if pursued with a focused approach. The following strategy is my recommendation for restaurant owners to increase business by use of social media in three online segments; branding, proactive response, and promotion.

Branding

To often I see fantastic restaurants depending solely on word of mouth from their loyal patron base to spread the news about how beautiful their establishment is and how incredible their cuisine and service. Word of mouth is obviously important, but without a proper website there is little legitimacy for potential customers curious about your restaurant, especially travelers. Unfortunately, when times get tough the first thing that tends to be neglected is the website- don’t do it. The website is what really captures a curious potential patron, what assures them their money will be well spent on an enjoyable experience. If you absolutely cannot afford a few thousand dollars for a professionally designed website, you can easily create a basic site at no cost using Wordpress or Microsoft Office Live. Websites need only to have a few things, but make sure you don’t neglect them: make sure you have up to date contact numbers and directions, photos of the restaurant, menus if possible, and an email signup. These are the absolute necessities. Also make sure that people can find your restaurant, update your business information on Google Maps Local Business Center or add your business if it’s not already listed.

Capturing customer emails is extremely important, make a point to encourage customers to give up their email addresses wherever you can, a comment card with the check is a smart idea. With these email addresses you can use a basic newsletter service such as Constant Contact to send out simple and cost effective monthly reminders, menu updates, and most importantly coupons. Nothing brings back a customer like freebies, even a 10% discount or free appetizer with purchase of a meal will do wonders. Along with encouraging email signups, also point customers to your other social media pages to write reviews of their experience, which brings us to the next section of social media strategy for restaurant owners.

Proactive Response

Restaurants can live or die by a few online reviews now that the majority of food connoisseurs are taking to the internet before they decide where to dine. With so many different places to write reviews online, it can be a nightmare to try and keep up with even half of them. That is, without the help of Google Alerts, a free Google service that will send you daily emails of any and all websites that mention your suggested keywords. Just enter the name of your restaurant into the ’search terms’ box and you’ll have no trouble staying informed about what people are saying after dining at your establishment. Naturally, as a busy restaurant owner you probably won’t have time to respond to every single review because they are posted to countless places on the internet, I’m going to recommend you stick to three: yelp, tripadvisor, and insiderpages.

These three services are some of the most popular places people will leave reviews of your restaurants, and it costs nothing for you to claim your restaurant from these sites. Once claimed, you can update contact information, add pictures, and most importantly- respond to negative reviews. Asking your customers to write reviews of their experience at your restaurant can be nerve-racking, but with a proactive approach you can both learn a great deal about what needs to be fixed and earn the respect of reviewers through honest responses and apologies. There is of course a strong temptation to write fake reviews or ask your friends and family to write fake reviews for you- DO NOT DO THIS. It is easy for regular users of that particular reviewing website to notice which reviews are fake and this will severely degrade your credibility.

Promotion

The third and final part of a strong social media strategy is promotion, and thankfully this can be done effectively without any financial investment, unlike costly newspaper advertisements. It’s important for a successful social media marketing campaign to have focus, try not to be spread yourself out over too many different platforms and websites. I recommend maintaining a facebook page, flickr account, and for those with a little extra time a twitter account. I DO NOT recommend restaurants keep a blog, simply because it’s too time intensive and not focused enough on potential customers.

A facebook page, however, is simple to create and provides a popular place for customers to interact with each other and show support for your establishment. If you’re unfamiliar with facebook you can read through a previous post I’ve written here. The best strategy when creating social media profiles is to copy other successful users, check out what other restaurant pages on facebook look like and repeat. The goal with the facebook page is to get as many ‘fans’ as possible, all fans of your page will act as free advertising and you can use the page to communicate with them as well. Don’t forget to encourage people to your website and newsletter list through facebook and vice versa. It’s also important to check your facebook page semi-regularly to respond to any questions you might receive and keep the page fresh.

Once you’ve got the facebook page mastered, open a flickr account and upload some photos of your restaurant. You don’t have to spend much time on this but by simply uploading some pictures and ‘tagging’ them with both general and specific keywords you can really show off that beautiful restaurant with minimal effort and time. Video tours and interviews are nice as well, but pictures are much easier and just as effective in showing off your restaurant.

Another strategy for those who have time is the use of a twitter account. I’ll call this a bonus promotion investment as it can take some time to build up a fan base. If you’re unfamiliar with twitter, check out my review of the application for a better understanding. The trick to twitter is to be personable, it’s a great way to interact with others in your area or around the world. I recommend using twitter to blast out quick reminders, menu changes and specials.

As mentioned previously, blogging is not the most effective use of your time to promote your restaurant. However, it behooves you to take advantage of local bloggers that already have a successful blog and regular reader base. Do a little poking around and find those local bloggers that have interest in food or local business and invite them to a free dinner for two in exchange for an honest review of your restaurant. Obviously you’ll want to make a good impression, but more likely than not you’ll have created a new loyal customer that maintains a strong web presence by investing only $100 or so. Local reviews can do wonders for your business.

To wrap it up, restaurant owners can no longer afford to advertise their business through traditional means, they must take advantage of social media to outperform their competitors. We all know how competitive and time consuming the restaurant business is, but with a focused approach to social media marketing business will boom regardless of economic conditions.

Overview: Tip’d is a niche social news aggregation site with a specific focus on financial news, tips, and ideas.

Defined: Relatively new on the social media scene, Tip’d was launched in September of 2008 to inform and engage investing newbies and gurus alike. Similar to digg, reddit, mixx, Newsvine, Propeller, and others, Tip’d users can comment on or vote for any articles on the site of interest to them, or submit their own financially related content. The idea is to allow the Tip’d community to aggrigate the highest quality articles by open voting. The top 15 articles are then displayed on the homepage. The latest comments, popular tags, fastest up and coming articles, and article categories are all found along the sidebar of the homepage for easy navigation to the most relevant content.

Adding content on Tip’d is as simple as hitting the ’submit a new story’ tab, adding a link, brief description, short summary, and a few tags. The entire site has a very clean design and simple navigation.

Business Applications: This is a fantastic tool for any finance related businesses that are seeking to increase traffic to their own sites. With such a focused niche, submitting articles on Tip’d is sure to reach your target audience immediately, whereas landing on front pages of mammoth sites like digg are increasingly difficult. For any other business, this is a a great place to find the latest on investing tips, trends, and general financial news.

Recommendation: Like many other social news startups, Tip’d lacks the critical mass of content and users to drive larger traffic streams to your website. However, the content that is pushed through the site is already commendable even with their limited user base, so I personally find this a useful place to obtain financial news. In time I can definitely see this site taking off, it’s the perfect place for financial bloggers to contribute to and has a lot of potential for financial news aggrigation.