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

Quote: Most powerful branding mechanism since TV

Word of mouth is on steroids, amplified by social networking and new media tools. How do you as a business take advantage. Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV has the answer: PHCC –>>

1. Patience
2. Hustle
3. Content
4. Community

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.

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.