What you decide to do with your Twitter account will also vary widely by your company’s industry, size, and location. But here are some general pointers for things you SHOULD and SHOULD NOT do with your company’s Twitter account:

- DO have a personality, talk like a person, share stories. No one wants to follow a boring robot, unless your account is a boring robot with a specific function.

- DO NOT get carried away or tweet too far off topic. We’d love to occasionally learn about your employees or general industry or local topics. We generally don’t want to hear your views on politics or sports.

- DO share links, photos, and videos. If you’re a retail store, pictures of your newest items could be a great sales pitch. If you’re a tech company, sure, show us some of your press. If you’re a cafe, maybe a video of your superstar barista.

- DO NOT spend too much time retweeting customers saying nice things about you. Once in a while, maybe. But too often, companies blast 4 or 5 tweets of praise in a row. Many people simply unfollow those accounts.

Read the rest at OPEN FORUM

So what is search engine trust?
For the purpose of keeping things simple, I would identify a site’s trust by 3 different simple criteria:

• Website Age – (most importantly the first time it was indexed)
• Total # of backlinks and the overall age of those links
• Total “trustscore” of other backlinks (How many .edu’s, .gov’s, high ACTUAL PR links, etc.)

Most trust criteria revolve around some dependence on age, which is actually a pretty good signal of quality. From things folks at Google have said in the past, the trustbox (or sandbox if you must) was the unintentional effect of some other filters that were implemented. Realizing that age was a great signal all the way around to defend against the overdependency on links, they’ve went buckwild with age variables ever since.

So this explains why new sites are taking longer to show up in search. Blogs are effected too but not as severely, being very well optimized and by nature putting out fresh content into the index, often daily.

Two or three years ago:
SEO = Content + high PR links

Created: a micro-economy of link buying solely for google rankings

Now
SEO = Crusty trusted domain + content

Will create: use your imagination.

So now an overdependance on trust will create new distortions. Go read the rest of his lengthy post. Its a keeper.

Kristie T at the Home Business Blog writes that her biggest first-year mistake was “not reaching out to other bloggers soon enough.” She adds that she has worked on this, and “Now I have a sense of community with other bloggers.” I would add that it might feel really weird at first to leave comments and write an email or two. But most bloggers are really cool and happy to help and almost always write back! (Guy Kawasaki probably won’t write back. Unless you’re Arianna Huffington.)

So it’s not all about your own blog. Get out there and contribute to the community. You might get some good link love in return (its good to make the Google algorithm happy). [When available use a trackback for instant reciprocal link goodness.]

The second most important tip is write often.[I am working on that one myself]

Maybe you don’t feel inspired. Liz Strauss has 10 Reasons to Write and Publish Every Day.

We write to record our thoughts . . . and by recording them we think them through, rearrange, and re-organize them. We make our ideas clearer. We make our thinking stronger and more easily understood. We carve a path that a reader, a listener, another person can follow from our minds to their minds, from our hearts to their hearts. Writing is a connection waiting to happen.

That is great motivation right there. Writing will clear you head and bring better understanding. If you are writing a business blog isn’t that the value added; the hard won insights that distinguish you from the average practitioner. Sometime those insights come in the act of putting your thought into words for public consumption. So write and become wiser.

My favorite from her list is #3

Writing every day helps us develop a voice that is natural and consistent, strong and confident, and attuned to readers. Everything we write has an audience. Even when we write for ourselves, we go back to read, listening to what we wrote. We question. We consider. We critique our choices.

Have you any thoughts about developing your blogging voice? Trials, tribulations, false starts. You are not alone. Share your ideas here.

“The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts. “
~ Malcolm Gladwell, “The Law of a Few,” The Tipping Point

Activating a Social Media campaign requires more than the mere creation of a blog, making a post to a message board, or uploading a video on YouTube. Reputation lies at the crux of any successful word-of-mouth campaign, in Social Media or mainstream media.

So begins a great post by JB Smith at Results Matter blog.

Its all about online reputation.

A key aspect of long tail success is piggy backing on the hits. Hits are not going away. But they are not the only game in town anymore. Chris uses examples from Amazon showing how they use analysis of buying patterns to recommend other books or songs you may like.

IF YOU LIKE BRITNEY, YOU’LL LOVE…Just as lower prices can entice consumers down the Long Tail, recommendation engines drive them to obscure content they might not find otherwise.

What does this have to do with business blogging?

A key maxim of Internet marketing is to tap into what people are already searching for. Let the “MSM” or “mainstream media” generate the awareness and inquiries. That is their forte. The business blogger can find out what is hot related to their field by monitoring an alert created in Google News. If you can tie into a general news item all the better.

See, you have a secret weapon. While other SEO’s are sweating over optimizing static pages for past historical high volume keywords you are in instant karma mode. Read the news that morning, write a post in your blog about it and the relevancy to your business. Be sure to title the post using the same keywords that would bring up the original article.

Wham! By afternoon you post is intercepting the same keyword searches.

Even better, use HitTail to monitor the long tail search traffic this post generated and use its suggestions for another round.

Free organic traffic, at your beck and call.

Well we all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun

John Lennon

Let’s explore how blogging positively engenders credibility and trust, and in turn influences each of the above “numbers”:

1. Blogging generates leads.
   Internet marketers whom we at Alliance Software have introduced to blogging are telling us that they’ve entered a whole new world of
   lead/traffic generation strategies. PPC is not under any immediate threat, nor is SEO, but social media marketing is booming! Lead generation here is closely aligned to bookmarking, linkbait, viral strategies and a great way to effectively access the “long tail” of search engine and directory traffic. I don’t have room here to unpack all this, but Darren might, on the day
2. Blogging can increase your conversion rate.
   The jury is in: the long-form salesletter sells, but the conversion rates are very very rarely extraordinary. However, this morning I was on the phone to a top-gun internet marketer discussing my ideas for this post, and he excitedly explained to me how he has seen extraordinarily high conversion rates from blogs, compared to long-form salesletters. He attributes this order-of-magnitude increase in conversion rate to the much greater credibility and trust levels he and his business partner have established with their target market, thanks to the highly relational and transparent conversational style of their blogs.
3. Blogging can help you sell more stuff to your customers.
   I asked this same marketer about sales volume, and he explained that his customers were happy to pay a premium price, if only they could gain greater “access” to him and his business partner. (My client sells educational products to the personal investor market.) What a perfect justification for blogging, as a means of delivering greater value to your customers, who are asking for ever more value (in this case, access to/dialogue with the “gurus” themselves).
4. Blogging helps you sell more expensive stuff.
   There are few more effective ways to engage your customers, survey them, and determine what premium product/services they’re willing to pay for, than blogging. There can be challenges to keep your eavesdropping competitors out of the most valuable and juicy conversations, but that’s usually a price worth paying, I think. Blogging can also function as a very effective “suggestive/up sell strategy” in the form of case studies, customer interviews/ testimonials, etc.
5. Blogging is dirt cheap and highly effective marketing.
   Finally, blogging costs remarkably little. Frankly, the biggest cost is time, not money. As blogging proves its worth to internet marketers, we will see them diverting internet marketing expenses away from SEO, PPC and banners to social media marketing (SMM), which includes blogging, as well as bookmarking, participation in effective marketing spend may well deliver sizeable savings, even in the short term.

Again, it’s all about the unique value that blogging and online social engagement has in building credibility and trust with our marketplace.

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