Microsoft Office Live Small Business (http://www.smallbusiness.officelive.com) and marketing expert John Jantsch have created a free eBook titled “Let’s Talk: Social Media for Small Businesses,” designed to help readers prioritize and navigate the social media landscape. The entire book is available for download at: http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/socialmedia/.

The book offers the following tips:

• A web site is priority one. Social media tools can enhance and extend a web presence and ultimately drive more visitors back to your site. If you already have a web site, its content should be up to date and give visitors a clear call to action, such as who to contact or how to get more information.
• Bet on blogging. Blogging is the doorway to other social marketing and where businesses can likely get excellent return for the time invested. Why? Because search engines love blog content.
• Manage your online reputation. Monitor sites where licensees or other customers could potentially post reviews about your organization. Reviews on sites such as Yelp, Citysearch, Insider Pages and others often influence people who are researching businesses in their local area.
• Cover more ground in less time with RSS. RSS can be thought of as two-way plumbing — it allows users to push and pull information out and in from multiple places.
• Network, network, network! If you’re not working at expanding your social network, you need to be. The more people that know and hear about you, the more they can recommend it to others. Social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn are great tools to expand contacts and customer lists.
• Play with new toys. Social media is constantly evolving, and there is no telling what the hot tool of tomorrow will be.

Go to: The Earth Times

Posted December 2nd, 2008 under Intellectual Property Marketing

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