Places largely appeals to a younger crowd. Since it can only be used by those with a Facebook app on their smart phones, it eliminates many traditional consumers.

However, for companies attempting to reach the elusive younger crowd, those who spend little time listening to the radio, reading mailers or newspapers, or clipping coupons, these location based applications may become a gold mine.

If the customer is willing to allow a business to view their location, nearby businesses can instantly offer coupons or deal, grabbing the consumer at the point of making a purchase decision.

Businesses could also make offers to friends of those who check in, encouraging them to join their friends at a particular location and make a purchase.

Facebook has already announced its intention to allow restaurants and other retail locations to “claim” their locations. This would allow them to direct targeted advertising to frequent customers.

Need some ideas for some virtual offers you can make on location Facebook Places? John Jantsch at http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2010/09/07/5-ways-for-small-businesses-to-get-in-the-location-game/ has some ideas for using rewards programs, group buying, coupons via Goodle places, mobile coupon networks, or social location games to bring customers into your door.

With only a fraction of Facebook’s users even tuned into Places, you certainly don’t want to make it your primary source for advertising. But with a growing number of younger consumers “checking in,” you don’t want to ignore it, either.


Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer gives some relevant tips that are useful for any health insurance company beginning involvement in social media.

1. Develop a plan, then get commitment from the top levels of you company. You need a CEO and board behind the idea and your proposed implementation of the idea before you dabble. If not, you may have the rug pulled out before you even get started. The top level involvement will also help assure compliance with regulation requirements.

2. Be proactive about compliance. Don’t try to skirt regulation requirements simply because you’re using social media. Work closely with your compliance officers to explain social media interaction, then work out solutions that integrate best practices for compliance as well as interacting in social media. This may mean you have a pool of approved Tweets from which you can pull, or that there is a delay of hours or days in responding to some questions, but that’s part of the equation.

3. Know your Media. It’s important to know your media tools and how they are used, and then educate your team, including top executives, on how those tools work. Let
them know that corporate blogs don’t need to be on the front page of the website, for example. Also, that there can be a review and approval process for any customer-
generated content, as long as that review process is clearly stated on the blog.

Some executives won’t understand a moderated environment or how moderation works – make sure you’re prepared to explain it.

4. Have a team approach. Making a single person in charge of all social media, moderating input and making comments can be exhausting for that individual, and may cause problems for you down the road, if they go in a direction that you didn’t like. The team approach is by far the best.

5. Shorten timelines for review. Social media does, by nature, demand a kind of immediacy. This will likely involve a streamlined process for communication review. Aim for 24 to 48 hours on most comments, but allow for a quicker interface if there is a situation that demands it.

If you take the appropriate precautions and plan ahead, there is every indication that the health insurance industry could benefit from utilizing social media opportunities with their customers.

First, when choosing a domain name, make sure to use a keyword or a variation of one of your keywords in the name. If your first choice is taken (and it likely will be), add a related word before or after the keyword.

For example, if you’re aiming to be the top seller of mardi gras beads online, mardigrasbeads.com is likely taken. Choose bestmardigrabeads.com, or mardigrapartybeads.com or a similar name. Look at alternative Top Level Domain (TLD) suffix, such as .net.

If you already have a company main page, you may want to set up another page to link to your home page and gather more hits. You may choose a blog, an ecommerce page, an article site for expert advice, a landing page or a forum. Any of these can be configured for the best SEO effectiveness.

Some basic hints are to use text rather than pictures when possible. Use text as links, don’t provide an image for the viewer to click. Put labels under the photos that spiders will pick up.

You’ll want to include a sitemap of your page, both HTML and XML. The search engines use the XML graphical representation of your site to gather information about your site; especially important if you have a new site.

Don’t use lots of Flash if you want to be highly ranked on the searches. Google and other search engines still can’t find the links and text hidden in a graphic format like Flash. The worst offenders are those who construct their sites with Flash – not search engine friendly.

Don’t duplicate content. In other words, don’t have the same paragraphs of text or the same articles on two different pages of your site, and don’t post an article on your site and submit the same article to a directory. Pages that duplicate content are ranked lower and a seen as less valid and valuable. Keep your content unique.

The professionals here at Webdatamation can make SEO work for you by using the best SEO practices when building your site.

Piwik is a PHP-MySql based program. In order to get started, you have to first download this software from their website and get it installed on your own web server. It just takes as less as 5 minutes to set things up and get going. At the end of the set up process, the software generates a javascript code. You just need to copy and paste this code onto the web pages that you would want to track. There is also a plugin that would automate this process for you! Simple?

Okay, you would still probably argue that Google analytics is the most popular amongst all and that Piwik is just no big deal. However, let me mention here that alternative open source web analytics solutions have their own advantages:

The software is installed on your own server and your sensitive corporate data prevented from being exposed to third party websites
Provides a more professional look and feel, does not have to connect to a third party site for analytics
More manageable and maintainable

Piwik is one such software that not only promises, but also delivers. Being an excellent alternative to Google analytics, Piwik is unique and stands out the rest. Here is a list of features that would make you pick Piwik:

If you are a developer, you can build your own plugins with Piwik! It allows you to add and remove features. Yes, Piwik’s features are coded inside plugins!
You can publish your data in a number of formats including the most popular ones: xml, json, php, csv, etc.
The user interface of Piwik is fully customizable. Creating a report in Piwik is as easy as dragging and dropping widgets into their respective placeholders.
Easily embed graphs and charts in your website dashboard or blog
The graphs are interactive and you can view brief stats just by rolling your mouse over them!

Piwik may be a new kid on the block, but is gaining instant popularity. The official blog is updated on a regular basis and the Piwik team is trying hard to come up with more new exciting features.

I would pick Piwik for now. At 1.9 MB, what more can I ask for? You have any questions?

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If you want to see some excellent graphics and analysis explaining Web 2.0, subscribe to Ross Dawson’s blog, Trends in the Living Networks.

A New Conversation

Social networking has removed many of the obstacles that got in the way of better understanding prospects and customers, and serving them. Here are a few insights from trying to stay up with how Web 2.0 is changing how companies interact with prospects and customers:

• Overbalance the scales with offers of knowledge, not sales hype. Instead of blasting out PDFs that tell prospects how great your company is, think about setting up weekly webinars where you invite in an industry expert that freely shares their knowledge of what’s working in the area your products, services or software deliver value. Before you dismiss this as just for the Fortune 1,000 realize that industry experts need PR coverage too and often you can get them do these in exchange for promoting their practice.
• Define a Web 2.0 strategy now for your company and start executing on it fast. The two best bloggers in this area are Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li of Forrester who write Groundswell. These two authors, through their analysis of social networking and the Web 2.0 landscape, continually show how transparent and more connected previously isolated social networks, both in private and commercial areas, have become. What also emerges from their analysis is that when Web 2.0 technologies are used for connecting with customers, sales hype is dead. Informative, knowledgeable content that solves a complex question or problem for a customer is all that matters. Blogging to deliver solutions to customers in the form of knowledge generates real leads. It takes some companies a year or so to see any sales from this, yet it is hardly time wasted. These companies have changed how relevant they are to customers by delivering significant value without first asking for an order. Sales follow knowledge.
• Consider your own YouTube University. Getting a channel on YouTube to upload videos that can be inexpensively produced is another approach to gaining a reputation as a company willing to share knowledge with potential and present customers. The development of your own YouTube University also needs to have periodic updates, fueling new traffic in the process. It’s a fairly large resource commitment to make, yet getting your best product experts onto your own YouTube channel can increase your company’s credibility across the industry and with prospects.
• Work with any channel, technology or services providers to offer them participation in your trade shows and events, and vice versa. This works well as many partnerships have overlapping customer bases, yet have their own unique market segments as well. Developing this type of partnership significantly reduces the costs of trade shows and increases face-time with prospects, a critical part of lead generation.
• Understand that Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) AdWords is only as effective as your landing pages, lead management process and continual managing of keywords. Google has delivered some exceptional tools in this area during 2008, including the ability to optimize a landing page design by testing it iteratively before its launched. This is the largest lead generation strategy for many technology companies, and their continually improving of landing pages and key words generates significant results.

Knowledge Is Power

I’ve not spent years studying lead generation, yet what I have seen is that many companies are still doing very well with leads despite news about the economy this year.I’m convinced it’s because they have worked very hard using the strategies discussed here to get and stay relevant to prospects and customers. They’re delivering more knowledge, value, insight and intelligence than anyone else.

As a result, they’re trusted more and sales happen. Lead generation cannot be reduced to a series of causal factors; it all begins with trust in your company. In a Web 2.0 World, earning and retaining that trust is much more about offering insight and knowledge first.

Delicious will show the which users are linking to (bookmarking) which URLs, sorted by most recently bookmarked.  Go here:

http://delicious.com/url/

Enter your company URL, or whatever URL you want.  Click the arrow to get your results.

Here’s where it gets fun.  Delicious feedifies that results page, so you can subscribe to a feed for any URL, and by doing so, whenever someone bookmarks your site at delicious, your feed will have that new link at the top of your feed.

Make it even better…The feed option is nice, but for those of you who have already used it, it’s also lacking in a couple key ways. The feed links show the Delicious username, but nothing more. The link will always be you company URL, since that’s the URL you searched for. So, if you click the link the Delicious RSS feed gave you, you always end up right back at your own URL. This is big fun, but not very useful.

Here’s how to make that delicious feature far more useful. Once you have the delicious search result, notice you have a search result URL string that’s unique. Open another window and head over to the always trusty TrackEngine.com.  If you don’t have an account, get the free account now.  Then, take the Delicious URL string for your URL search and Track it.

By doing it this way and not relying on Delicious’ own RSS feed version, now you will receive a private email from TrackEngine any time a Delicious user links to your site, and that email will include of the entire delicious page results with the most recently bookmarked username at the very top of that page, highlighted in blue.

If you’re brave, don’t wait until after your publicity/link building campaign to do this. Get a baseline link count before you start.

The obvious limitation here is that this is only useful as a peek into the bookmarking activity at Delicious.  The world is bigger than Delicious. But…as you go through the process at Delicious, you might notice you can do similar things with other bookmarking and social media tools.  Wondering if your site has been tagged by anyone at Technorati?  Set up a Technorati Tag Alert.

Even Google Alerts can be tweaked and then re-tweaked in a away that will then send you almost real time blog mentions of URLs.  Keyword search Google Blogs for link:yourURL.  Toggle the search result by clicking over on the right side where it says “Sort By Date“. Now look back to the far left where it says Blog Alerts.  Click Subscribe. Bingo.

You now have three separate email alerts ready to notify you of new links, in near real-time, from blogs (Google), tags (Technorati), and bookmarks (Delicious). And you can’t beat the price.  Free.

Now what?

As those alerts arrive, take them and forward them via email to your clients.  Those emails become real-time proof that your link building and content publicity efforts are working.

1. Build a real team. There are so many Web 2.0 companies that are either run in a virtual environment or with just a few people in a basement somewhere. It’s not a good strategy because any ideas that could germinate with a larger team – and I mean about 5-8 people or so — will be stagnated with just one or two employees. If you can’t afford a real team that includes a developers and designers, folks in marketing and accounting, and a sales agent or two, you might just have an idea, not a company. It reminds me of my experience this week with a rental car company staffed by just a couple of people. (Yes, I was trying to save a buck.) One of the employees was out sick, so that left one person to transport people to and from the airport, do the paperwork, and deal with frustrations. In the same way, one person can write a blog, but it takes a company to make a real Web 2.0 product that actually does something.

2. Don’t let the team get too big at first. Digg has stayed a small, tightly run company for some time — even though they could probably be a lot bigger. Microsoft, when they create a new Web site product like PhotoSynth, will limit the team size to about five people, even though they could obviously make the teams a lot bigger. There’s something about the small team approach to creating a Web 2.0 product. It reminds me of the example in the book Tipping Point where Malcom Gladwell covers the company Gore-Tex and explains how they keep departments small and break them up when they get too big. Same goes for Web 2.0 — big teams don’t work.

3. Stay together in the same room. I heard about the “newsroom” approach at Text 100 (a PR agency) where everyone is working, talking, and sharing information together in an open room. I think it hearkens back to our classroom experience where we all first learned to collaborate, and forces people to be contributors and not stay isolated. It’s also easier to stay on mission when everyone around you is on the same mission. Whether it is right or wrong for all companies, it seems to be the model that works for Web 2.0.

4. Get your message out to the blogs. This one is more controversial — I just had a meeting where someone said the best way to get attention is by building a great product. Maybe. When GM or Microsoft build a great product, people notice. With so much competition in Web 2.0, and so many options around for doing our work online, making something great is more like a root assumption than a good marketing plan. If a site like TechCrunch or Mashable hears about your site and finds it compelling, you can attract a massive audience. I get inundated now with requests to cover new Web 2.0 companies, and at first it was mildly annoyed. Yet, it’s a good thing because people are working hard to get the word out about Web 2.0 sites and they know that independent (positive) coverage is critical.

5. Stay on the course. It might be tempting to give up on a Web 2.0 idea, even after you create a team, acquire funding, find your niche audience, and maybe even get a write-up at TechCrunch. I’m convinced that — by far — the most important characteristic in starting a company is just sheer perseverance. Eventually, you can work out the bugs, raise more awareness, and tap into a much bigger user base.

So, we’re all wasting a lot of time clicking on links. Maybe you arrived here because of a link. (Or, I should say: I’m sure you did arrive here because of a link.) The question is: what are we all going to do now that we know everything? I have a few suggestions to think about.

1. What if we acted on every new piece of information we found? This could be world-changing, when you think about it. Just found out about a race war? Get involved and fight for the rights of every person, regardless of their ethnicity. Did you learn about hurricane damage? Jump on a plane and start throwing junk into dumpsters. Did a celebrity do something really stupid? Well, there’s not much we can do about that, I agree. Still, many of the Fark links can inspire action.

2. Every link on Fark can also give us an opportunity to engage in more dialog. This is more possible with the serious links, which can equip us with the knowledge to educate others. I think one of the main reasons Fark is so popular is because we all want to share what we know, we’re all trivia hounds who want to be well-armed with juicy information at the next family reunion. (I also hold this same theory about the most popular magazines, such as Wired – we read them because we want to be able to share our knowledge with others. I’m not saying it’s bad, but I think magazines cater to this idea.)

3. Some links are just for fun – so have a good laugh. If you think the one about France and bathing is funny, let it out – we’re all hiding behind computer screens and internalizing everything these days. Go ahead and repeat the joke in person at the water cooler – it means you can get up and move around (even if the water cooler is more of a concept than a reality).

4. Go ahead and be offended – no, really. Too many of us are just putting up with a lot of abuse on the Internet and in real life. It’s okay to post in the comments of a blog post when you don’t like the opinion of the writer, that’s where the community aspect of the Web shines brightest. In the early days of the Web, all we had was HTML pages and really bad Times Roman headlines. There was very little feedback (although some of you may remember those archaic BBS systems that served as the precursor to Usenet and blog comments.) If enough people complain about an offensive site, maybe the owner of the site will finally realize it’s time to take the link down.

5. And try this: stop clicking for a few days. Find out if you think about finding new links, and if you crave that information fix again. If you just have to click, well…

Start Small

Many times when people think about getting publicity for their business, their wishlist goes something like this:

• I want to be featured in Forbes
• I want an interview in Inc Magazine
• I want to sit down with Donny Deutsch on the “Big Idea”

Having lofty goals is great, but it’s not always possible. Many times, it’s much more realistic (and effective) to start smaller. Think about all of the blogs that are out there. Find out which ones your potential customers read on a daily basis? Determine the ones that reporters for those bigger publications use (Who are they quoting? Who are they linking to online?). Start there. Most times, it will be easier to get featured on a smaller blog than a major publication. You can then use this coverage later on when you pitch bigger publications.

Hang Out In All The Right Places

Social media has made it so much easier to build relationships with people and get noticed. A great place to start for this is right on Twitter. Use one of the Twitter search engines or directories (I really like Twellow) to find reporters who are in your space. Simple searches — like this one for “reporter” — can be really helpful. Connect with them. See what types of things they are looking for. Become an invaluable resource to them.

When you have somewhat of a relationship built up, connect further through places like Facebook and LinkedIn. It’s all about building those relationships. Once you have a relationship with someone, they are much more likely to want to write about you or your company. But don’t forget, just like everyone always preaches good content, the same is true here. If your products or services aren’t really that good, you’re not going to get too far.

Traffic Is Noticed

Let’s say you’ve now built some relationships and received some initial press coverage. Promote that content just like you would promote something from your own site. Do you have strong accounts in social networks? Get it out in StumbleUpon. Get it on Digg. Share it with everyone. This will have a two-fold effect.

First, it will get more coverage for you. The more people who see it, the better.

Second, newspapers, magazines, TV stations and other media outlets are all thirsty for traffic. Many of them look very carefully at what articles are most viewed for the day (more views = more ad revenues). And many times this trickles down to the reporter. Do you think he or she would probably want to write about you again, if they got a big pat on the back from their boss? Of course they would….