What happens when you blend social media? On a serious note, Read the book GroundSwell by people from Forrester Research.

1. Be an Active Participant
2. Have a Consistent Presence on Different Social Media Sites
3. Add Value to the Wider Community
4. Let Others Sell You

To find more opportunities to network with other business people.

Here are some more from Tinu Abayomi-Paul:

  1- The very nature of Facebook is viral.

2- Facebook is the ultimate in social presence marketing

3- Your target market tells you exactly what it wants, and they’re easy to find.

4- Over half of the people using it, use it daily.

5- Better, stronger online connections.

6- Hard core marketing is out of vogue and declining in effectiveness.

7- Your clients — and your competition’s clients — may already be on Facebook.

8 – Facebook friends are willing to continue the conversation.

Check the link above to read more details.

Luckily Brian Brown has written a good Facebook primer over at Work.com, Guide to Facebook Basics for Your Business.

The whole point of Facebook is to interact with a network of friends. A “friend” on Facebook can be an actual friend you grew up with, went to school with, etc., or it can be someone you meet online, like through a Facebook group.

Browse Facebook’s groups. Groups are made of Facebook members that have a common interest. When you find a group you like, join that group. This will give you the chance to market to the group and invite group members as “friends.

Facebook makes soft-selling easy. All you have to do is post a link to a sales page on your website (with the “Posted Items” application) and Facebook lets everyone in your friends list know you have posted the link by displaying it on their home page. Friends will also know when you’ve uploaded photos, or videos, or changed your profile.

Add your RSS feed to your Facebook profile. If you have a blog, or any website that produces an RSS feed, it can be added to your blog through various RSS applications. This makes your blog immediately accessible to your Facebook friends.

Tomorrow I’d take a deeper look.

Is that cool or what? Sign in was quick and interface is easy to use. Don’t know what it looks like on WAP devices … those users should just throw in the towel and move up to the iPhone.

Social networking site LinkedIn is extending its service from desktop PCs to mobile phones and iPods.

LinkedIn’s 19 million members can now view other members’ profiles, invitations and updates via the company’s Wap site, which went live yesterday in six languages.

A specially tailored version has also been made available for iPhone users.

“We want to help professionals network and the more information you have to do the job the better,” said Kevin Eyres, European managing director at LinkedIn.

“I think we will see a large number of our users pick this up. It is quick, convenient and there is nothing to install.”

The move follows similar efforts from Bebo, Facebook and MySpace.

Check out the videos at LinkedIn

Wow this is great. I am setting it up now.

Your most valuable asset is your professional reputation and the people who know you. LinkedIn is design to facilitate sharing these factors. LinkedIn is used by executives at all the Fortune 500 and membership is over 16 million. In fact over 200,000 are from the Philadelphia area.

He announced that LinkedIn would be supporting OpenSocial, Google’s free and open source API that will make web widget application portable across other social media sites that support it. This is huge. Here is a video of the announcement at Google.

The latest Nielsen NetRating has LinkedIn growing faster (189%) than FaceBook (125%). So if you are waiting for a engraved invitation this is it. Send me your email and I will invite you in my network[2.3 million].

The tool is the the ultimate time saver to building powerful social media accounts. One of the secrets of top Diggers, Stumblers, Navigators etc… is being the first to submit stories already becoming popular on other social news sites. For example you can browse Reddit to find good stories already submitted and be the first to submit them to Digg. You can browse Digg and be the first to Stumble pages that are becoming popular there. Most if not all articles on the front page of Digg are submitted to StumbleUpon and will get a lot of Thumbs up. If you were the first to Stumble that when the page reaches the Popular page for its tags and category on Stumble your account will be the one listed next to it, which will give you more friends and fans and so on.

More to come on maximizing StumbleUpon  traffic in future posts.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) combines the goals of internet marketing with social media sites such as Digg, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube and many others.^[1] The SMM goals will be different for every business or organization, however most will involve some form of viral marketing to build idea or brand awareness, increase visibility, and possibly sell a product or service. SMM may also include online reputation management.

Seomoz did a comparison of 30 Social Media sites ranked for business usefulness.
For this post I want to focus on my favorite StumbleUpon.

11. StumbleUpon

Their pitch:

“StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 1,284,477 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.”

Our take:

Anyone remember eTour? The site whose tagline was “Surf the Web Without Searching” didn’t survive 2001′s dotcom crash. StumbleUpon is Web 2.0′s eTour and it’s an absolutely fantastic way to wander through websites that potentially interest you. There’s no typing, there’s no “links” pages to seek out. There’s not much effort on a user’s behalf at all.

• To use StumbleUpon, you must download an add-on to your toolbar that lets you give sites a thumbs-up, thumbs-down and click “Stumble!”
• Submit your site to StumbleUpon by clicking the thumbs-up button when you’re viewing your homepage. If you are the first person to bookmark your site, you’ll be prompted to give it a title, briefly review it and fill out some other information about its content.
• If you’ve said your site is about technology, users who have specified technology as one of their interests will potentially be directed to your site when they click “Stumble!” You may only pick one topic.
• The tags you give your site will also influence traffic. Unlike topics, you may include multiple tags.
• There is also an automated system whereby StumbleUpon reads a page’s text and decided what it’s probably about.
• The system sometimes gets it wrong (pages containing mainly graphics are obviously hard for the categorizer). Users, however, can report mistakes if they feel a site has been categorized inaccurately.
• Getting noticed on StumbleUpon depends on whether users identify your page as one they enjoy by using the thumbs-up button. The more people who identify your page as thumbs-up-able, the more traffic StumbleUpon will send you.
• Also, if a user comes across your site and really doesn’t like it, they can click a little thumbs-down button on their tool bar before leaving, demoting your site’s status on the StumbleUpon network.
• Members can join StumbleUpon Groups and contact others on the site, although these social features aren’t nearly as interesting as StumbleUpon’s addictive ability to store and present websites that people like.
• Additionally, although it is a free service, members can upgrade their accounts to the status of “sponsor” by paying twenty U.S. dollars per year. Sponsors have access to extra features, such as the ability create new groups and to keep messages in their inboxes for longer.
• One could argue that there’s a psychological advantage to having your site discovered by a Stumbler. After all, they’ve told a program what they like, and the program has presented them with your site. Hence, people are somewhat programmed to believe that they’re going to like what they see.
• StumbleUpon is linkbait’s tool of choice. When stumbling, you’ll often find yourself arriving at pages well within a site. Rarely are you directed to a homepage.

When I have stumbled posts on my blog here I often get a traffic surge for three day with a peak of 3x normal. Imagine if you tell a few friends to give the same post a “thumbs up”.

I know we’ve said it before, but we’re continually amazed at Stumbleupon’s ability to drive traffic. If you have good, linkable content, it will send you a few visitors. But if you create truly great content, it will strike a cord with a lot of people and send you lots of traffic.

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal has added another twist which I also like to implement.

One form of social media marketing which I’ve found to be quite useful is submitting the sites which link to Search Engine Journal posts and other properties to StumbleUpon.

Example:

1. TechDirt links to Search Engine Journal post
2. I see traffic coming from TechDirt
3. I go to TechDirt post and submit it to StumbleUpon with lots of good tags and info
4. SU users find that TechDirt post
5. SU users click on the link from that TechDirt post to SEJ
6. More traffic to SEJ

It’s a form of rewarding or surprising those sites with some extra traffic, perhaps some links which will help with SEO, and the end result is more referrals to my site from the site which originally linked to me.

In such practice, by submitting sites or posts which link to your site to StumbleUpon, you are supercharging those links by adding more value to your incoming links and the sites which link to you.

Have I convinced you yet to give Stumble Upon at serious look? After you put the effort to research and write a good post don’t just relie on Google and al for everthing. Use the power of social media marketing to boost your visitor traffic. Once you see the results you will never look back. Had success with Stumble Upon? Share your story in the comments.

Passionate – Write about issues that are near and dear to your heart
Purposeful – Make sure you keep the end in mind; why are you blogging?
Present – Keep an eye on what’s topical today
Positional – Take a stand on an issue and follow it

Now Steve has another insight on a new career he sees developing the Geek Marketer.

My thesis is this: it’s very difficult for anyone in marketing to keep up with all the twists in the digital space because technology changes so darn fast. It’s like chasing a cheetah. Most marketers – be they clients or agency side – are heads-down running their business. Therefore, companies are creating a new role. They’re hiring people who act as translators between the ultra geeks and the marketers, if you will, and shepherd the development of pilot programs. More follows in my Advertising Age column “As Technology Develops, So Does Role of Geek Marketers”

That’s right up my alley. Some of my readers may be thinking the same thing. What do you say?