Darren Capik is the founder and President of Watch It Now Entertainment.  His business philosophy and his personal philosophy are closely aligned with the ideology that by pursuing a solid goal of bettering yourself through quality fitness and nutrition you can live a longer and more fulfilling life.  In an age of processed everything the process of fitness remains true and strong and Darren is committed to creating the best quality products to help others achieve a higher level of fitness and health.

You can also join us in the DK New Media office on Friday for the show by registering here. We are offering 10 tickets, so get your ticket before it is too late!

But wait… really… we missed LinkedIn, too? Google Business? Are you kidding me? Perhaps it was something a little stronger than beer.

Alright… we’ve made enough fun of the project manager on this infographic for Flowtown. Let’s get back on track… this social media cheat sheet provides a great foundation for small businesses to decide how to best leverage each social medium (listed). If you’re a small business – please don’t forget LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and Google Places, too, though!

There are few, if any, hard and fast rules about using Social Media. My job as the Social Media Marketer for Zoomerang, and now SurveyMonkey, means that I’ve learned a thing or two about what works and, more importantly, what doesn’t. The secret to Social Media Success is being open to trying new things, measuring your results, and using the metrics to figure out what works for you, your brand, and your audience. But I have 4 simple steps to get you started:

1. Don’t Assume. Ask
The secret to building a big social following is to deliver relevant, interesting content to your audience. But how can you create great content if you don’t know who your audience is? Ask! Create a simple survey and send it out to your followers, fans, and customers. Zoomerang and SurveyMonkey offer tons of free templates that you can customize by adding pictures, your logo, and company colors.
Ask who your customers are, how they’re using your product or service, and how satisfied they are. The more you know about your customers and what they want, the better you’ll be able to provide them with information they find useful and interesting.

2. Promote, Promote, Promote
Creating great content is the most important step, but it is only the first step. Once you’ve created that content, you have to promote it as far and wide as possible. That means Tweeting about it, posting it on your Facebook page, and relevant Linkedin group pages. Remember the 80-20 rule, which says that you should be responding to other people’s content 80% of the time, and promoting your own content just 20% of the time. It’s a natural rule of thumb—no one wants to hear self-promotional mumbo jumbo all day long.
But in practice you can blur the line a little bit, and it goes both ways. Comment on a blog or one of your fan’s Facebook posts, and if it’s relevant, include a link to your site. Re-tweet information that other people in your industry have said, if it’s not direct competition and will be useful to your customers. Check out Linkedin Answers, and when someone has a problem which your service or product could help solve, offer it. Just make sure you return the favor by commenting, re-tweeting, and liking your fair share (80%).

3. Outbound Marketing Is Soo 2011
These days it’s all about Inbound Marketing, which should come naturally once you’ve mastered steps 1 and 2. By providing your customers with interesting, relevant information, and promoting it through the right channels, it won’t take long before you’ve established yourself as a trusted expert in your field. People will come to your auto company blog, not just when they want to buy a car, but when they want to know what people are saying about 2012 models. They’ll start spending more time on your site, and get used to checking it since they know you post regularly (nudge nudge, wink wink). Your sales will correlate with the amount of time people are coming to your site, and that will correlate with how well you’re doing steps 1 and 2.

4. Don’t Fear The Negative: Be Proactive!
A lot of SMB decision-makers I talk to are afraid that going social will open them up to all kinds of negative publicity. I’ve experienced this first-hand—hardly a week goes by where there isn’t a peeved customer venting on our Facebook page, whether it’s directly related to our product or not. This can be scary, I know, but you have to remember that customers appreciate the risk you’re taking by putting yourself out there like that, and they will respect you for it. At the end of the day, they’re going to be more suspicious of the company that hasn’t taken the social plunge than one that occasionally catches some heat on their Twitter page. And for every disgruntled customer, we have 5 satisfied ones posting their satisfaction with our product. Their comments are more beneficial to our brand than the negative ones are hurtful.
Just remember to deal with feedback in a timely, positive manner. The customer may not always be right, but whatever frustration they’re feeling is justified, so acknowledge that, and provide helpful action steps they can take to rectify the situation. And not all feedback will be negative! When someone pays you a compliment, thank them for it, and ask them if they’d be willing to do a customer success story with you. They get their voice (and brand) out there, you get their organic endorsement, and everybody wins.

I hope these 4 tips help to get you started on your quest to be social! Please comment your feedback, other tips, or any questions you have! Happy socializing!

At issue is the incredible cost of these systems! Generating a return on a social media strategy takes time, so talking a client into adding a platform that is thousands of dollars a month is a bit extreme. I posed the question to some social media marketers, “Is there an affordable social media monitoring platform out there?” and didn’t get too many responses.

However, one response from Carri Bugbee has me very excited. Viralheat appears to be a robust social media monitoring and analytics platform built for the small and medium-sized business market (SMB).

I’m excited to begin using Viralheat to begin monitoring our clients’ social media presence. The system appears to be quite robust with many features listed:

• Real-time monitoring – this is a key feature. Many of the other systems are not real-time, simply aggregating data from other systems.
• Influencer analytics to identify followers with a large influence that can impact campaigns.
• Sentiment analysis to identify the mood of each and every mention.
• Viral analysis to identify tweets and mentions that have viral potential.
• Video monitoring of over 200 video sites.
• CRM integration to push leads to Salesforce or download via Excel.
• Geo Location capability to restrict your profiles by any location in the world.
• Dynamic Alerting capability so you can obtain instant notifications on mentions.
• API – so you can integrate the data with any external system you’d like.

Aside from the features, the most impressive aspect of Viralheat may be the pricing. Their opening package is $9.99 a month with basic features. A $29.99 per month package appears to have everything a small business needs to get started. A $89.99 per month package includes a branded agency package!

For the price, this may be one of the most robust social media monitoring packages I’ve found. If you know of more social media monitoring platforms for SMBs out there (not social media publishing), let us know in the comments. And – if you’re a user of Viralheat, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the system. We’re so excited that we signed up for an affiliate package (and those are the links in this post).

Produced by VideoInfographs

Starr is an international publicist and an “authority in social media marketing”. She has trained and worked with thousands of entrepreneurs and businesses around the planet including corporations, non-profit organizations, authors, CEOs and associations worldwide. She has over 1200 active and direct relationships with editors, writers and segment producers worldwide and has secured placement and coverage for herself as well as her clients in media outlets around the globe, including Oprah mag, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Good Morning America and The Today Show to name a few. In addition, she has secured major book, co-branding and licensing contracts for my clients worldwide through the power of social networking.

You can also join us in the DK New Media office on Friday for the show by registering here. We are offering 10 tickets, so get your ticket before it is too late!

Call me a product of a liberal arts education, but I firmly believe one’s worldview should be informed by as many sources and experiences as possible. Reading the latest book by an expert in your field is great. Consuming as many blog posts and news articles as you can about your industry is helpful. Attending conferences and sitting in on presentations to advance your career is advisable.

But it’s also important to look outside the usual orbit to help form your perspectives. There’s a great big world out there, and if you’re not taking advantage of it to the fullest you are missing out.

With that in mind, allow me to defer to the Kings of Rock, the progenitors of hip-hop, Run-DMC, and what they taught me about social media.

You Talk Too Much

Everywhere that you go, no matter where you at / I said you talk about this, and you talk about that … You talk when you’re awake, I heard you talk when you sleep / Has anyone ever told you, that talk is cheap?

The classic knock against Twitter has always been “I don’t care to read about what people had for lunch.” While it’s clear that there is more utility to Twitter and other social media channels than just detailing one’s culinary habits, it is possible to over-share.

There is plenty of research and the accompanying infographics providing evidence for the optimum number of social media shares per day. I’ll assume intelligence on your part and not expound further on that which is readily available.

Rather I recommend simple common sense in the matter. Nobody likes to be deluged-slash-spammed, even if they’re opted to subscribe to your posts. Quantity in no way trumps quality, especially if it means annoying your followers to the point of exodus.

It’s Tricky

It’s tricky to rock a rhyme, to rock a rhyme that’s right on time, it’s tricky.

One of the primary goals of social media engagement is amplification: convincing your fans and followers to be advocates of your brand and message by resharing your content. These followers are also following many other brands, celebrities, and their personal friends. How do you cut through all that other noise and inspire action?

One way is to optimize your posting times to help make your content stand out. There is no shortage of data that suggest certain days and times are better for posting content so it is more likely to be seen. It’s a good idea to take advantage of this data and do all you can to get your content out in front.

Hollis Crew (Crush Groove 2)

Got rhymes so def, rhymes, rhymes galore / Rhymes that you never even heard before / Now if you say you heard my rhymes, we’re gonna have to fight / Cause I just made the super-def rhymes last night.

As each update makes them smarter, search engines scour content more and more the way human beings do. This means they, like your readers, prefer original content. Content that is new and constantly fresh with your own (or your brand’s) unique perspective is crucial to gaining and maintaining a following.

It’s all to easy to cheat your way to fresh content by repurposing or republishing press releases or syndicating content. You have to make sure you’re publishing content that is interesting, relevant and valuable, and above all original. Otherwise you have no unique value proposition, and you’re not providing any new information or insights. That’s a quick way to a social media ghost town.

This time – in my opinion – Mr. Baskin nailed it. Every company has been jumping on the social media bandwagon, increasing marketing spend in that arena, but few are seeing the returns they had hoped for.

Burger King has grilled through a couple of CMOs and fired agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky after producing Facebook campaigns and viral videos that got lots of attention while the business witnessed six consecutive quarters of declining sales. via AdAge

At conferences and with colleagues, I’ve challenged them on numerous occasions to provide me with irrefutable evidence that social media campaigns can be carefully designed, planned and executed with an expected return on investment. The key here is expected… I can set expectations from email, pay per click and search engine optimization campaigns over time… but never social. We’ve not uncovered the magic algorithm to tap into the social psychy yet.

It’s not that I don’t believe there’s value in social media… I do. But I think there are two key elements of leveraging social media effectively:

1. The company wishing to leverage social must already be social! Inviting everyone to a conversation and then not responding, hiding, or trying to spin the response can do more harm than good. Many, if not all, of the successful social media campaigns that pundits write about belong to companies that were already social… before the mediums ever hit.
2. The company wishing to leverage social must have an effective online marketing strategy already in place. That is, they should have great sites, solid blogs, high converting landing pages, great search engine authority and an effective nurturing email strategy.

If you’re trying to leverage social media before you’re effectively utilizing, for example, a nurturing program to close leads that you’ve already developed a relationship and who are subscribed to you… you’re simply nuts. It’s much easier to close business off of established relationships than to throw some fancy, expensive application up on Facebook and expect a better response and return on investment! (Dueling chickens didn’t help sell burgers.)

I believe that social media is an amplifier. When you want to amplify a message – you must first have a relevant message, an audience to distribute it to, and a location for those listeners to come. Get all of your other branding, inbound marketing, search engine optimization, and even corporate blogging in place before you start throwing money at an expanded social media program!

I don’t believe social media is dead as a marketing strategy… I just think it’s always been misdirected as a center of a strategy when it should not be.

Today, I received an invitation to test out Flowtown. Flowtown is a new application that allows you to upload your email subscriber list and append social media to the list. I tested it with my email list and it worked flawlessly.

As companies continue to adopt social media, tools like Flowtown will come in handy to synchronize their following outside of email and into other social applications and networks.

Click through to the video of how Flowtown works if you don’t see it in your feed or email.

Pricing is 5 cents a record and there are some limits on the number of emails you can send. I’m impressed with quality of the service as well as the accuracy. They already have a Mailchimp integration so I was able to import my subscribers directly from an existing subscriber list within Mailchimp. Pretty nice feature!

The application updated over half of my records and appended Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, StumbleUpon and Amazon accounts where it identified a match. It took approximately 2 seconds per record and the system emailed me when it was completed. I tested about 20 of the appends and didn’t find any issues with them.

What I don’t like is that I can’t export the appended data (or that’s how it appears, anyways). If I bought it, I should be able to export it and just not view it. I’d love to use a system like this and push the data to another Email Marketing Platform. This would allow enterprise clients to upload a delta file of the customers they don’t have data for and manage the email in an external system where they’re storing many more data attributes.

As well, paying for every record is a bit risky if you have a crappy email list. With the past data append providers I’ve worked with, there was typically a base cost and a price per successfully appended record.

Still some pretty cool stuff – looking forward to seeing how their pricing evolves and if they’ll offer an API. There are more services and applications like this popping up – Rapleaf is one that I recently discovered. You can sign up at no cost at Rapleaf and see your own profile… it’s a bit scary, they identified me accurately across 22 different social networks and applications and even identified old email addresses that I had used! Rapleaf also allows you to opt-out of their database, a very very nice feature.

Yesterday I shared a tip from Apogee Search on buying links to a third party site. One other tip I received at the summit seems like a total beginner tip. To be honest, I thought that Google Adwords defaulted to an exact match, but they don’t! They default to a broad match (seems evil if you ask me)! There are 4 types of matching algorithms:

1. keyword = broad match
2. “keyword” = match exact phrase
3. [keyword] = match exact term only
4. - keyword = don’t match this term

At my Navy Veteran’s web site, I’ve seen a number of Veterinarian ads come up! I’m sure it’s hitting off of the keyword ‘Vet’, but the advertiser should ensure that he looks for Vet, while ensuring it doesn’t match ‘Navy Vet’ (Jim Brown of Evereffect educated me on this via Twitter).

One last note, if the old Adwords interface confused you… I’m right there with you. I logged in today and the new beta interface is quite nice. There should be a link in the top right to preview it if you get a chance. In the new interface, the keyword matching is totally hidden and you need to click a link to expand it!

In the past, I’ve done some pay-per-click advertising on my own and lost my shirt. I’m not sure it’s a strategy for amateurs like me – I’d leave it to the pros regionally – Pat at Hanapin and Jim at EverEffect.

Promoting a Third Party Reference to Your Business

In Austin, Apogee Search are the pros. CEO Bill Leake did a fantastic presentation on search engine marketing with way too much advice to write in a single blog post… but here’s one incredible tip he shared:

If your company gets some great press from a third-party website, perhaps a media article with a major industry site, start a Pay-Per-Click campaign that point prospects to that site rather than your own. It may seem counter to some advice on the web, violating the path of least clicks. However, the authority and trust a third-party site brings can significantly increase your conversion rates. Simply put, I think this is brilliant!

I had the pleasure of meeting with Jim Brown, President of EverEffect, a few weeks ago and it was an engaging conversation that extended a good 30 minutes over our time! Jim’s newest endeavor is an evolution in Interactive Marketing Strategies. To put it bluntly, Jim ‘gets it’. It’s not always about the award or the graphics, it’s about defining business goals and creating the strategy that’s going to carry you there.

EverEffect has just launched and is the latest in some talented startups here in the Indianapolis marketing technology scene. I wish EverEffect the best of luck! Only the most driven and open businesses will be ready for the results that EverEffect offers. Their approach is simple and follows all the rules of strategic database marketing… create overlapping strategies that find, get, and keep customers.

The $1,000 Giveaway only needs 4 more contributors and we’ll be off and running!

1. The Marketing Technology Blog – in for $100 + costs.
2. Recursive Function and Formspring are in for $100 + a $150 Silver Formspring package.
3. Hanapin Marketing and PPCHero are in for $100.
Search Engine People and the Search Engine People Blog has contributed $100!
4. GoCollege has contributed $100 (and advice to save you much more!)
5. Jim Brown and the Team at EverEffect are in for $100!
6. Reserve this spot now!
7. Or this one!
8. Or here!
9. Or here!

Click on the $1,000 bill for additional information on contributing to the contest: