In almost every conversation that I have with people about using Social Media to build their brand I end up advising them to either start blogging, or commit more time and effort to their already present blog.  The beauty of blogging is that the software required to set one up is very easy (at least for a bare-bones setup) but in order to help your blog stand out you may need a little help.

Plugins on WordPress serve a variety of different purposes, many only operate on the back-end (so readers and website visitors won’t even know they are there) and others provide unique functionality to your blog that will make it unique and memorable.

Let’s start with some of the back-end plugins:

Akismet – Should just need to be activated and then you can stop worrying about spam on your blog.  I would not question anything stopped by Akismet unless there is an email from a reader asking what is wrong with my comments.

Google XML Sitemaps – I am no SEO expert, but Search Engines love sitemaps. This plugin makes one for you that updates Google, Yahoo and MSN of changes made to your blog.

Now to look at some plugins that will encourage interaction with your readers:

Add to Any- I actually prefer this to the TweetMeMe button because it simply takes the reader to twitter with the text for the tweet already entered in the status text.  They can edit it if they want or just send it out.  Also not needing to authorize a third party to access their account eliminates an obstacle to someone tweeting your post.

podPress – Helps turn your WordPress blog into the ideal place to host your podcast.

Contact Form 7 – Simple and easy form readers can fill out to contact you.  Why make it hard for fans of your writing to reach you?

CommentLuv – Comments (and links) are like currency in the blogging community.  One of the best ways to increase traffic to your blog is through though filled and genuine comments.  Encourage people to provide the comments on your site by using this plug-in.  It allows for a plug to one of the commenter’s posts or tweets or diggs.

And lastly, some cosmetic plug-ins I hope you like as much as I do:

Favicons – This allows you to chose a small thumbnail image to appear on the tabs where your website is open.  Helps make your blog look more professional.

WP-PageNavi – I know I hated the fact that there was always just a link at the bottom of my blog to view older entries.  this is a plug-in that instead allows your readers to browse through your blog by page number.

WPtouch iPhone Theme – This allows your blog to be much more mobile phone friendly.  Also people will easily be able to toggle between the mobile view and the standard view.

Content is king when blogging, you can break all the rules you want and if you continue to provide a constant stream of valuable information then you will be fine.  These are just some helpful tools to make your blog function and look more professional.

So, I have been having a long term discussion with Keith Curreri, a freelance web designer and personal friend of mine about whether or not a “tag cloud” looks unprofessional on a blog.  He feels that they have no place in a professional blog, but I am not so sure.  So, in an effort to get the last word I wanted to talk about the uses and benefits of tag clouds.  By the time I was ready to start writing, I was pretty sure he was right.

To clarify, I think they can be incredibly useful to a blogger, they allow me to see what topics I am writing about heavily on my various blogs and make sure that I am not spending too much time talking about extraneous topics and ideas.  However if I lookback at each blog I have written for, or helped set up, none of them have one!  Most of the time I end up going a little tag happy in the interest of SEO.  By the time I have a well established archive of posts, there are two or three terms that end up dominating the majority of the cloud. 

My advice is to leave the tag cloud off your professional blog.

I have recently been employed as a Marketing Specialist at a local B2B marketing firm and it got me thinking about the specific challenges of social media marketing when it comes to attracting companies as clients, as opposed to people as consumers.  After a while I realized that there is little difference at all between the two.  Social media marketing as you know is about building relationships with your customers and it isn’t really like you can accomplish this when dealing with a company’s twitter account that mainly just feeds links and press releases.  The main difference for B2B is that in order to see benefit, the goal is to reach the decision makers at prospective clients.  By simply placing a link to the company website on your profile and being yourself, while making sure you act like a professional, you will be able to do this.  The three main reasons that B2B companies fail miserably at social marketing are:

Only existing as a company, not as individuals – As I said, being yourself and being open about where you work is enough to have an impact.  If you work at creating relationships on these mediums as yourself then people will trust YOU.  If they trust you they will do business with you.  This effect is multiplicative too; using multiple employees creates more relationships that will generate business relationship with your company.

Expecting too much, too soon – Management is often resistant to social media, and especially so in the B2B environment.  The benefits of social media marketing are pretty widely known, so there are a fair few that you can convince to give it a try, however there is still not an understanding of how it works.  Managers in a consumer driven environment are also in the same boat, but with B2B having fewer clients that say a retail store has customers, it is harder to see the returns from your efforts.  When you start to be focused on the sales you lose sight of your goal, and when that happens there is no chance of success.

Pulling the plug early – Nothing frustrates me more than seeing a campaign get stopped after 3 weeks.  What did you expect? How long does it take to go from meeting a client face to face to signing a deal? Now imagine meeting someone online and not even trying to sell your service to them at all? Why kill a campaign until at bare minimum that amount of time?

Going to the wrong place, or only one – Twitter is awesome, but it isn’t for everyone.  There are a wide variety of B2B companies out there and they need to appeal to different groups of people, so Twitter may not be the best place to start. You need to focus on where your market is at first.  After you and/or your employees really know how to use the first social network, encourage them to try using other ones as well, or to start blogging.  If they are forming genuine connections then they will drive clients to your business so why limit the number of connections they can create?  Blogs are an exceptional way to not only form  relationships, but to position your employees as thought leaders in your field.  This will reinforce the trust that forms through social media.

Last night Twitter announced today that they are going to start putting “Promoted Tweets” into their popular social networking platform.  At the start they will only appear in search results and they will be related to the search content, but there are plans to move them into personal twitter streams as well.  Early reaction to this news has not been good, but personally, I am surprised that it has taken this long!  At least they didn’t implement a hasty run of the mill form of advertising.  With the immense growth of Twitter over the past few years there has also been an increase in costs for the company, and that’s what it is… a company.  In order to keep providing undisrupted top quality service they have to have a more substantial stream of income.  How can we expect any different?  To me, this is not an issue; it can only lead to a higher quality of service.  Also, for those of us in the Social Marketing industry, they have strengthened the ability of their platform to drive traffic.  And after all, I plan on running ads on this website.

Recently I started helping a friend try to develop a way to communicate better with people inside a new organization he was starting.  We discussed a few different options, the first of which was an internal blog.  This idea didn’t last long as we wanted to place everyone on the same level, we didn’t want the members of the organization to be stuck leaving comments and not having much other functionality.  Plus, their ideas are just as important as ours so a blog was not going to cut it.

Next, I remembered about a platform I had had minimal experience with known as Elgg, which is an open source social networking platform.  We installed it on our web server, and instantly knew that this was the direction we wanted to go.  We were able to create a private or public social network to collaborate with people all over the country that will be involved.  While I really like Elgg it has some issues, switching themes is destructive to the content on the site, the custom GUI is not very intuitive, and many themes we liked actually made the limited and poor navigation not function correctly.

We were trying to find alternatives to this service and Keith Curreri (who is involved in the project, designed my other website, and is a close personal friend of mine) suggested using BuddyPress.  We set it up on the web server and later that day we knew this was what we should be using.  The second day we spent customizing the site adding some functionality to suit our individual needs, and setting up the profile pages and a landing page.  Since then we have begun bringing people in slowly to start participating in the process.  From here our plan is simple, let our users refine the experience.  Our network is primarily a place for young business professionals to collaborate and help each other with individual or group projects (Check out DevCab).  I have been doing some reading lately on how blogs can increase internal communication with-in a company, and it is quite tremendous.  Blogging will allow managers to pass information to everyone in a single location, not through individual emails or memos, or mailing lists.  An internal blog can also become a knowledge base, a place where people can go to print off spreadsheets, re-read a memo, or check the time of a meeting.  However, this project has helped me to realize how companies can take the next step with collaboration and go beyond passing information in only direction… down.  Making a private social network for you and your employees is an excellent way to allow them to develop relationships that cross departments, as well as collaborate on team projects at anytime as opposed to calling a meeting and getting everyone in the same room.  Also this is a place that will allow exceptional employees to stand out, they will initiate conversations that raise interesting questions, reach out to other members of the company to help them, and provide valuable feedback that would not normally get heard by the right people.

Many business are scared of encouraging the use of social networking tools at work, worried that it can foster poor time-wasting habits and procrastination.  But lets be honest, people are going to waste time and procrastinate no matter what the circumstances (no, not all people, but I’ve never had a job where many if not most people were looking to goof around or slack off whenever possible).  By providing an accepted place to talk to co-workers, comment on industry related news and form relationships with management as well as colleagues, you will foster a more open and well informed working environment.

Many companies that use blogging or other forms of social media to their advantage do face the challenge of keeping it from impacting the productivity of employees.  While it is an incredibly valuable tool you must keep it from being a burden or being abused, so put out a policy for employee use of the website.  A clearly defined policy will tell users how you expect them to use the site, and how much time is acceptable to spend using it during the normal work day.  People that violate the policy should be treated no differently that someone who uses a different communication method inappropriately.

So you decided to get started with using Social Media to represent your business but where do you start?  First you need to find out which medium is right for you, do this by visiting all the major social networking websites at try to where your market is.  This can take some time, but you should be able to get a very good idea for the number of potential customers on each site.  Where ever the largest community is, you should be to.  For example on my fantasy football blog I use twitter to reach my audience.  I made this decision because of the huge number of NFL players and analysts that have a presence here.  This makes it a popular place for the average fan to go for information, which also made it the best place for me to start.  For starters make a personal account that you can use to get a feel for how your audience uses the medium to communicate.  On twitter many people use hashtags to be able to communicate with only people that have similar interests.  It won’t take long to notice that the people in your field are doing very little as far as promoting themselves.  The goal on these mediums needs to be provide value to your market, not to get new clients.  If you effectively, and genuinely participate in the conversation with your target audience then that will come on its own.

Avid internet users are very passionate about what they believe in, and because of this they can smell a phony from a mile away.  It is not a bad thing to let someone know about your businesses services from time to time, but in general I try to promote five times the amount of other people’s content as my own.  The last thing I want to mention is to stick with learning one medium at a time.  Being present on zero social mediums one day and then every last one the next is going to seriously limit the effectiveness of each one.  It also forces you to be less genuine, trying to post on each account will cause you to promote mostly your content for lack of time and make you look like a spammer in the eyes of the average user.  All of these mediums can provide value to your business but as with anything you get what you give, so if you want to create value for your business you need to create value for the community.

Today I started this website in order to discuss trending topics in the world of Social Media and Social Marketing.  I do freelance work with businesses and individuals that are interested in developing a strategy to increase awareness about their product or brand as well as increase traffic to their website.  Please email me if you are interested.