. Addict-o-matic: Enter your name into the site, and you’ll see the latest mentions arranged in boxes from sites such as Bing, Google Blog Search, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Flickr, FriendFeed, Bloglinks and more. Addict-o-matic also allows you to customize your results page by adding, deleting or rearranging the source boxes.

2. SocialMention: SocialMention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates and streams user-generated content. It allows you to track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, etc., in real time. The site aggregates information from over 100 social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg and Google. You can also set alerts for a keyword, which SocialMention will deliver to your inbox daily.

3. Technorati: Technorati is a search engine for blogs. You have two options for search: You can search mentions of someone’s name in blogs and you can search blogs belonging to that specific person. Other sites to search blogs: BlogPulse and BackType.

4. TweetBeep: TweetBeep is like Google Alerts for Twitter. The site e-mails you when someone tweets your name, company or product (you can also track who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they’ve used a shortened URL like ow.ly or bit.ly). Also try Twitter Search.

5. Yasni: Yasni is a people search engine that provides an overview of someone’s associated networks, including contacts, pictures and other publicly available information. In searching for a name, Yasni will aggregate mentions from sites including LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, Technorati and more.

Find Trending Topics

A few good places to Discover Trending Topics are: Google Trends, Twitter Trending Topics and Yahoo’s Trending Now. All of these tools reveal pop culture, breaking news, and sports. Once you discover a particular trending topic related to your business then determine how you can create unique content that can be indexed by Google and  show up in their real-time search results.

Understand your readers

Understand the audience for your content.  Find out what do they like? What types of activities do they enjoy? Is are they local? Are your readers  Gender/Race/Age Specific? Relate a trending topic to your business and prospects.

Plan Ahead

Know events that will be coming up so you can create content relating your website to event/pop culture event/breaking news evenat. Major events often become the focus of trending topics. These events are planned far in advance so its possible to create content ahead of time and publish it as the events becomes a trending topic.

Break the news

You want to have your finger on the pulse of real-time search and understand what is going that is of interest to your readers. Internet marketer, business owner and blogger, Barry Schwartz recently reported Google’s real-time search results included a “top links” section for the keyword “plane crash” after the tragic news of Poland’s president and over 90 others killed. The Top Links section shows the most popular and authoritative links based on the search query.

Social media is a great tool for research as well as customer service. Used effectively  social media can improve your profit margin.

There is a flip side is that it can become a distraction when using it as a tool for for employees. Sometmes it’s tough to see how stopping to read twitter or browsing the Facebook News Feed can be productive to business.

Social media is just like any other tool. Used right  it can make a major impact or wrong become a time sink. The challenge is to formulae a good strategy to use this as tool and minimize the distractons.

Make a Plan, Set Goals and Execute

Do you need more traffic to your website, or are you looking for more brand awareness? Do you want to prevent bad press before it happens, or are you more interested in creating a community that will generate good press? Decide on the goal first.

Once you have a goal, set a plan. Set up metrics to measure success and implement tools that will help you measure ROI.

Execute. Don’t be afraid to reach out, make mistakes, and be vulnerable. Even if you make a mistake.

Avoiding Social Media as a Distraction

- When you need to concentrate on an intensive tasks close social media windows and apps.

- Dont use the tools when your bored. This is for business not recreation.

- Prioritize. Focus on the tasks at hand before using social media to create more.

Search engines are becoming more and more aggressive as competition has become fierce between Google,Yahoo and Bing. People used to pay Yahoo $300 a few years ago to have their site “priority indexed”. Now its a race between the big 3 to get relevant information into results as fast as a possible. So being aware of how you engage on twitter, facebook and other networks is becoming more important.

2. 8% of People Have Been Fired For Negative Comments About job On Facebook

Online experts are now estimating that 8% of people being fired were not mindful of trivial things they posted about their job.

Entries on facebook can result in loss of income if a manager or potential customer takes exception. Be mindful of what you post on facebook there are people watching!

3. A Twitter prescience is important

Use Twitter make contacts and get your message out but sparingly. Frequent posts to twitter can make you look like you do very little work while no posts may seem like your unaware of its importance. Use Twitter like a front page headline to call attention to things that are potentially important to business and avoid being a chatterbox.

4. Your Social Network Is Potentially Worth Money

People are beginning to look to their friends for recommendations for products and paying less and less attention to ads. Companies are examining to embrace this as a new channel of selling products. If your perceived as a major influencer on a specific genre or region or over a group of people it could mean big bucks for you in the future.

Employers are also starting to look at professional directories like Linkedin and examining the number of relationships and the quality of those people when considering new hires. In many cases they are turning to Linkedin as a quality recruiting tool. Making your personal brand even more crucial in the very near future.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google searches getting more social (cnn.com)
• Social networks drive traffic to retailers and news sites (theequitykicker.com)

I saw this on Techcrunch as part of a longer article but it needs to be reposted.

Factor 4: Content is King?

Indeed, to paraphrase Viacom’s Chairman Sumner Redstone: content becomes more important than distribution mechanisms; as new channels of distribution creep up, it is the content that is always going to be necessary, hence the adage “content is king”.  If you fast forward to 2010, it’s true that with all of these social media aggregation and distribution tools, you are seeing media rise to the surface.  No one, after all, cares about the pipes; it’s what flows through the pipes that matters.  The context—Facebook, Twitter, email—in which people are introduced to media and consume it is becoming more important than the content itself.  Content is no longer king, context is.

You can read a recap of this entire study at http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/30/context-is-king-how-videos-found/

By submitting your pictures to social media sites you create one-way backlinks and more another way for people to find your site. Take advantage of this qualified traffic  by giving your picture a good title and add tags that make it easy to find.

If you have determined that the behavior of your customers is driven my images then Flickr is the most well known and highest trafficked tool. However Flickr is not a bookmarking site but consider the option to vote pictures up or down a part of a typical bookmarking site. There are others, though, that do have that feature included like vi.sualize.us, with a page rank of 5 ripe for one waylinks back!

Once you submit your picture, others can vote your picture up with the “like it” button. The more people that cast their vote the more traffic you are likely to get to your site.

Picfor.me  is another typical bookmarking site, with a “pick me” button to make the picture more popular. A great feature at Picfor.me  is to you add a bookmark button to your toolbar browser making it very easy to bookmark pictures. Once a picture is bookmarked, you will see that picfor.me logo in the top right hand corner of the picture.  There are many others, like  incredimazing (PR 4) and typeish (PR 4)  worth considering.

Picture book marking is an underutilized way for you to engange your customers with minimal competition.

Put your content to work and increase the visibility of site and the traffic that results from it.

Before developing a strategy around using a specific tool or group of tools  you must first understand your customers social behaviors.

Customers are adopting new ways to communicate with each other and companies must change in order to reach them. Too many self proclaimed social media consultants pitch a solution based on which tool is the most popular.  If you hire a consultant that uses this as a basis for a social media strategy then you will always be chasing after  the latest in popular trends.

First you must understand your customer’s behavior.

Here are some things to consider in understanding your customer better

1. Where are your customers online? Which of these communities or services best characterizes their behaviour?

2. What best characterizes your customers behavior on these sites? Do they upload pictures or comment for example?

3. How influential are you customers? Are they seen as reputable or  considered an authority in the service your provide by others?

4. How do your customers use social tools in regard to your service?  How do they use these tools to research new services or products?

There are  more things you can do to understand your customers. The point is these are things a consultant must do prior to identifying any strategy in regards to a specific social marketing tool.

If you have further questions please feel free to comment here or contact me at evilempireinc@gmail.com .

Provide a clear call to action. Whether you use graphic buttons or hot-linked text (or both), tell your visitor what they need to do. Copy tests here will give you the biggest bang next to testing headlines.

Write in the second person – You and Your. No one cares about you, your company, or even your product or service except as to how it benefits him or her.

Write to deliver a clear, persuasive message, not to showcase your creativity. This is business not a creative writing contest.

You can write long copy as long as it’s tight. Rule of thumb: Think longer copy when you’re looking to close a sale. Think shorter copy for something that doesn’t necessarily require a cash commitment..

Be crystal clear in your goals. Keep your body copy on point as a logical progression from your headline and offer. Every digression is a conversion lost.

Keep your most important points at the beginning of paragraphs.
Most visitors are skimming and skipping through your copy.

People read beginnings and ends before they read middles. Make sure you keep your most critical, persuasive arguments in these positions.

Make your first paragraph short, no more than 1-2 lines (lines not sentences.) Vary your paragraph line length from here. It breaks things up makes it easier to read your copy. And no paragraph should be more than 4-5 lines long.

Write to the screen. Take a piece of paper wireframe where your text, buttons, and design elements will go. Consider how much of your content will be seen “above the fold” or at the first screen. If so, you’ll want to make sure you repeat essential calls to action.

Remove all extraneous matter from your landing page. This includes navigation bars, visual clutter, and links to other sections. You want the reader focused solely on your copy and the offer you’re making.

Don’t ask for what you don’t need. Ask for only enough information to complete the sale or the desired action.

Assume nothing. Test everything.
These tips and techniques will get you started. Design elements are critical as well as video, audio, and other interactivity elements tomore deeply engage the reader and boost response.

Over the years many of us have use the business axiom “In Niches Are Riches”.

I’ve come to realize that there is even one better rule when deciding what to promote and develop in this industry.

Follow the crowd.

Pick a very crowded genre and create your promotion or content designed to feed a starving crowd in what is an established and sometimes saturated genre.

Why develop a new untested genre or a microniche when you can create a promotion where there are plenty pf people already looking for what your going to offer?

Why do you think there are so many sites for genres like celebrities or blow jobs? There are millions of people who what to get their jerk on to what may seem quite vanilla to the rest of your peers.

In the past I have recommended for people to get into business or wanting to expand on the web  to find a little niche that you can completely own.

But  you have to take into account how many people potentially will be interessted in what you have to offer.

There is also the copycat fear where competitors find that your making money off of a new micro niche and will will hastily run to clone what your doing and ruin your chance to make a honest buck.

What Im saying is you have to move out of the realm of get rich quick and live in the dawn of reality where competition and solid and ethical business practices will carry forward the next 3-5 years.

Besides developing a micro niche sets a limitation on how large your business will ever grow.

And gets back to my point  that going after obscure niches means you’ve got to put lots of feeder traffic sources together to make the financial picture work. This makes it hard to develop any kind of real relationship with your customer and in the end leads to the sleaze-and-squeeze  get rich quick business plan where you shake your new customer hard and hope for prechecked cross sales or  selling your maling list or even more questionable ways to stay afloat.

Consider Your New Genre Carefully

These days its very hard to stand out in the search engines even with paid placement. You can score a top page ranking for an obscure term but it’s near impossible or very expensive to get a page-one ranking for “sex” or “porn.”

Instead of being a big fish in a small pond become a small but crazy evolved and rare “standout fish” in a great big pond.

And make sure your unique angle isn’t overdone either.

If it’s not working, get weirder

The key is to be relatively on topic but have a standout offering among those massive schools of guppies.

Want to hear more that applies to your end of the business  then email me here and maybe we can fry up some good ideas for your to munch on.