Be an Expert, and Customers Will Find You by Zack Stern

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Your medium- or small-business can live or die by its marketing. One of the greatest angles costs you no capital. Establish yourself as an expert in your field by offering advice through websites and magazine trade articles. Readers will migrate to your business, and you can point potential customers back to the articles for an extra marketing push.

To get the best results, find publications and topics that fit. I know a therapist who has written about meditation for spirituality and yoga websites. He uses mindfulness in his practice and has built up a stream of clients who have found him through those articles. Consider these tactics for nearly any other service-based business.

You can get similar results--but it can take more work--building up your own audience. Many, local real-estate blogs, for example, give details about market conditions in a specific area. If the content is good, offering home-buying tips and tutorials, readers will associate that help with the author. If that author leaves a blurb about their day job, readers will seek them out.

In either case, be an expert about your industry, but don't shill for your business. Readers see through any overt selling. The real marketing comes after you help the readers and they seek you out. Make the connection then, and they'll see you as an expert, not a pitch-man.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/17/AR2009061703346.html

Hey, Just a Minute (or Why Google Isn’t Twitter) By Randall Stross

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Google moves faster than some of its critics think. But even if didn’t, the more important question is this: Do we really want Google’s search engine to swallow Twitter’s output as fast as it comes, without filtering, analyzing and ranking by authority?

“Real-time search begets real-time spam,” writes Danny Sullivan, the editor in chief of the Web site Search Engine Land.

Anyone who signs up to follow a particular Twitterer receives tweets instantaneously, as they are dispatched (when the system is functioning). Filtering is not an issue in such cases: The 1.77 million followers of Britney Spears presumably look forward to receiving every morsel of information broadcast from her account.

But if one wants to search Twitter for tweets about a topic — say, about Ms. Spears, but encompassing anyone’s tweet that happens to mention her — Twitter’s data fill an ocean in which it’s hard to find specific fish.

Twitter’s search page says, “See what’s happening — right now.” But Twitter’s database was not originally designed to be searched like Google’s was. Last year, in fact, Twitter bought another start-up, Summize, to provide it with search functionality.

Even so, search performance on Twitter is sluggish compared with the live tweet stream. Mr. Sullivan notes that Twitter’s search service does not consistently deliver real-time results: 20 or more minutes often pass before a given tweet appears in search results. At Google only hundredths of a second are needed to check its index when a search phrase is submitted. But to prepare, the company re-surveys the wide Web to update that index on a schedule that the company does not divulge. Some Web sites, like those of news organizations, are checked very often. Others await their turn in a rotating schedule of visits by Google’s crawler, the software that collects copies of Web pages.

Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, says that Larry Page, one of Google’s co-founders, has consistently pushed the company’s engineers to index the most active Web pages faster. When the frequency was increased to hourly, Mr. Page insisted that the interval be referred to as “3,600 seconds” to emphasize that it would be reduced further, which it was.

Google checks news feeds constantly but does not so easily pull in tweets. At a press event in London last month, Mr. Page was asked to comment on any plans that Google had to search Twitter in real time. After praising Twitter for doing a “great job” in showing information to users in real time, Mr. Page said he had long been pushing his search teams to index every second. “They sort of laugh at me and go, ‘It’s O.K. if it’s a few minutes’ old,’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘No, no, it needs to be every second.’”

A number of search start-ups have appeared recently that differentiate their offerings from older search engines’ by playing up their specialized focus on the real-time Web. For example, OneRiot, based in Boulder, Colo., covers Twitter among other social media, but it has an intriguing means of reducing Twitter spam: it does not index the text in tweets — it plucks only the links, reasoning that the videos, news stories and blog posts that are being shared are what others will be most interested in.

OneRiot follows the link, checks for spam by comparing the content of the page with the content of the tweet, and then uses its own algorithms to figure out where the link should go in its always-changing index of “hot” items.

Strictly speaking, this is not real-time processing. But checking links before adding them to the index seems to be time well spent.

Tobias Peggs, general manager at OneRiot, said his company could process, check and index a link within 37 seconds. When asked why he bothered to measure the seconds if it took 20 or more minutes just to receive searchable tweets from Twitter, he explained that the delays at Twitter’s search site did not affect his company’s search service, which receives the data stream at the same time Twitter’s own search engine does. Because one venture capital firm, Spark Capital, has invested in both OneRiot and Twitter, OneRiot has “access to Twitter data that other third parties don’t,” Mr. Peggs said.

GOOGLE crawls Twitter’s Web site — the frequency is not disclosed — to collect the same links included in tweets that OneRiot collects, and these may show up in Google’s search results. If Google were to negotiate direct access to the tweet stream that OneRiot enjoys, it presumably could move just as fast and match OneRiot’s lists, like “most shared today” or “today’s hottest videos.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/business/14digi.html

Smart Social Networking For Your Small Business by Frederic Paul

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Next to mobility and cloud computing,
social networking was the talk of
Interop this year--especially at a
conference session devoted to social
software tools and a portion of the
Unconference, where real SMB users
talked about how to make the most of it.

But perhaps the best thing I learned
about social media came in a meeting
with security vendor ESET. Just as at
a recent Intuit ( INTU - news - people )
town hall where I discovered Social
NOT-working, at Interop, ESET director
of marketing Liz Fraumann shared the
abbreviation for Social Media as "So
Me." Perfect, isn't it?

Anyway, Social Software Tools: A
Critical Evaluation offered useful
insight into the choices SMBs need
to make when moving into social
networking. Tony Byrne, founder of
CMS Watch, started with a useful
breakdown of the complex world of
social networking, beginning with
separating external and internal
applications, depending on whether
the connections occur inside or
outside your company:

External

--Branded community

--Tech support

--Reader interaction

--Partner collaboration

--Professional networking

--Hosted user blogs and blog
comments (you host, but don't
control, user postings)

Internal

--Project collaboration

--Enterprise collaboration

--Enterprise discussion
(especially useful after
a merger or acquisition)

--Information organization/
filtering

--Knowledgebase management
(collaboration)

--Communities of practice

--Enterprise networking (intranets
and/or Facebook groups for
employees); vendors include
Ning and Lithium

Of course, where social networking
takes place is only the first part of
the puzzle. The networking itself
can take many forms:

Social Networking Functions

--Blogs; vendors include Six Apart,
Google's ( GOOG - news - people )
Blogger and Automattic's WordPress

--Microblogs (Twitter)

--Wikis; vendors include MediaWiki
(the foundation of Wikipedia), Atlassian,
MindTouch and Socialtext)

--Project tracking/participation software

--Multimedia (video/audio, internal or
external, including YouTube)

--Information ranking/filtering--voting

--Discussion forums

--Presence/instant messaging (IM)

--Public social networks, including
Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing and MySpace

Each of these functional applications
has its own uses, strengths and
weaknesses.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/05/social-networking-interop-entrepreneurs-technology-bmighty.html