Editor’s Note: This is a contributed guest post.

Social Media Day isn’t just some vague recognition of social media. It’s actually something entirely new in human history. The human race has never been in instant contact with itself in real time before, without the limitations of nationalities, language and political boundaries. This was a unique event, where cultures could actually mix. It’s also a new sort of human interaction, “SEO for the soul”, as well as social media marketing, the newest, biggest thing in marketing.

The big day was a pretty good indicator of how strongly social media is influencing the world. Social media sites are making news in their own right now, and the response to Social Media Day was a lot bigger than the simple old broadcast cross links to other countries.

This was only the second annual Social Media Day, and it went off the scale in terms of participation.

The idea of “believing” in media is perhaps a little over the top these days, but in terms of putting social media into practice, there’s no doubt that Social Media Day was a big success. 90 countries across six continents were involved. The general meetups were more than double last year, another sign of expanding horizons in a medium which is still, let’s face it, in its very early infancy.

The truth is that social media is an entirely new medium and nobody’s really too sure what it can do.

It’s evolving in ways nobody would have dreamed possible. Nobody really knows how many people there are active on the social media sites, but it’s somewhere around at least three quarters of a billion people at the very least. That’s the biggest single demographic on Earth for any kind of media, ever. Facebook alone has more people than the entire United States.

There’s another interesting fact becoming obvious. The marketing industry is trying to get into this gigantic electronic super-power’s buying power. This is also the most mobile market on Earth.

The truth is that social media is very unlike any other kind of media, able to react quickly to information and spread the message around the world on its own terms.

Cynics may note that this means that marketing, of all things, is becoming a social media enabler, adding more commercial power to the social media phenomenon. History tends to follow the money wherever it goes. Facebook, for example, is becoming a lot better organized as the Facebook marketing companies figure out that social media is simultaneously the ultimate impulse buying point of sale and the most demanding.

Homo Consumer Sapiens can be a tough customer. Social media users are also real online users, determined to get what they want, looking for real information about their purchases, and trying to get the best deals. Social Media Day showed that there’s a new human reality at work, changing lifestyles with a few clicks. Don’t be surprised if the next Social Media Day or the one after it turns into the biggest media event in history. It’s just a matter of time.

• Minimize junk. Are you falling into the trap of putting every little detail about your life online? It is important that you keep focused on why you are involved in a certain group or medium. Remember that each of your posts needs to be important. Unless you are Brad Pitt and there is a mountain of followers drooling on your every word, make sure that you and others in your company are relevant.
• Keep it consistent. As with every element of your company’s operations it is important that you keep standards of communication. Setting rules regarding tone and appropriateness for all of those in your company is of utmost importance. This may take some of the fun out of it, but one mistake could spread and be very damaging for your business. Perhaps you should consider those working for you have both their own personal and professional profiles.
• Management. Some amount of randomness may be beneficial to creating and keeping interest, but using certain software programs to manage, schedule and assess the effectiveness of your company’s posting will be greatly beneficial to understanding your SEO efforts. Perhaps there are better times and better ways that your team can be collaborating (working together), and only analysis of your efforts will allow you to see this. There are several premium and free-ware options available.
• Encourage participation. Having the technical means and the content to stir debate amongst your followers and readers is extremely important. Making sure that you have your networks set up correctly so that you have specific areas for participants to engage in, and you can moderate, are of the utmost importance. The two skills of being a good content developer, and intangible asset, and having the technical know-how, are extremely important.
• Ahead of the curve. Learning from others in your industry can be very beneficial, however, it is those who are ahead of the curve, and dare to do something different, that often reap most of the rewards. You will need to use your imagination and creativity if you are to stand out. Respect the intelligence of your readers and understand that they are already getting used to many of the same tricks to get their attention floating around out there.
• Keeping it real. This must be one of the all-time important factors of any company’s activities. Remember, people are not stupid, and as soon as they even get a hint that your company is not being real, they will drop you in a flash. Just because you are not communicating face to face, don’t think that they cannot read between the lines. Let them know where you stand from the beginning unless you and your people are extremely experienced in true guerrilla marketing.

It is important to not get overwhelmed with the potential and possibilities of any campaign. Some people believe in an online social Karma. Take on your company’s online activities like any other element of your business, step by step, and seek professional advice, after all it is your financial future.

This process took much longer than I expected, but I finally found the tool that fits exactly what I was looking for.

To me, a great social media metrics tool needs to have the following criteria:

a. A dashboard outlining the most important statistics (preferably, this should be customizable)

b. Analysis of several social media channels (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.)

c. Ability to write into Google Analytics

d. Web monitoring so I know what is being said about the brand all over the web

e. Ease of navigation. I don’t want to spend an hour trying to generate one report or finding one set of information.

To note, I wasn’t looking at the big guys like Radian6 and Awareness Inc., and I also knew that search.twitter.com and Google Alerts simply were not enough for me. I decided to set my sights on the little guys doing big things (I tend to support them as the company I work for – Backupify – is such).

Here are the pro’s and con’s of the services I tested out:

HootSuite Pro

hootsuite.com/pro

I’ve been using HootSuite for over a year now and find it great to schedule and manage Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn status updates. However, I was not able to gain any metrics from my messaging unless I upgraded to a Pro account. A few months ago I received an email from HootSuite offering a week-long free trial of Pro. I tried it out but was not too impressed with what it gave me.

Pros:

• Great for managing mentions
• Easy way to schedule tweets
• One platform to go to for message sharing which is a huge time-saver

Cons:

• I found it hard to manage re-tweets
• Analytics were definitley sub-par
• I wasn’t able to measure much more than overall activity. I could not drill down into any other types of data (i.e. keywords, mentions per day, etc.)

ViralHeat

I was introduced to this tool over a LinkedIn discussion. While it did have its benefits, overall I found it to be very buggy.

Pros:

• I liked the email alerts it gave me
• Good custom reports
• Showed me trends from week to week of activity on social media
• Easy distinction between Twitter and Facebook performance

Cons:

• Mentions were not accurate whatsoever. If I was trying to manage the term “Backupify” on the social web, it would show me a ‘relevant’ tweet related to something like “doctors in Botswana”…
• Interface was subpar – it took me awhile to figure it out
• Overall it provided me inaccurate information which made me not trust it. Most of the information it gathered for me made me scratch my head wondering how they even pulled in that data and found it relevant to my search criteria.
• My tipping point was when I deemed this tool as insufficient for what I was looking for and it became IMPOSSIBLE for me to unsubscribe. There was no unsubscribe button. I had to search around to even find a support email and when I emailed them to politely unsubscribe me, I received no response whatsoever. To this day I am still registered even though I don’t use it.

Actionly

actionly.com

While Actionly did have some good benefits, I don’t think they’re quite there yet in terms of providing what I was looking for.

Pros:

• Allowed me to compare social web buzz of Backupify in relation to competitors and other terms which was great
• Showed trends of increased/decreased followers, mentions, etc.

Cons:

• The generated reports were not actionable whatsoever, even if I tried to tweak them manually
• They did not have Google Analytics integration at the time (I believe they will be soon)
• No good dashboard view

Argyle Social

argylesocial.com

I still use Argyle Social today (and have been for about four months) but not to the capacity that I need. This along with my chosen metrics tool provide me what I need.

Pros:

• Great social sharing capabilities right from a web browser
• Shows general trend of clicks via social media on the dashboard
• The founders and developers keep me in the loop with all future developments and even made a point to contact me directly to gain my feedback on their app which I really appreciated
• Allows me to breakdown clicks based on different social campaigns I have set up
• Shows share of clicks by social medium

Cons:

• I wish the dashboard showed me stats such as: most clicked posts, top keywords, top influencers, etc. Instead, I have to dig in manually to find out what is working and what is not
• They do not yet have integration with Google Analytics

And the winner is…

Raven Tools!

Why I Chose Raven Tools:

raven-seo-tools.com

Raven Tools provides me with everything and more I was looking for:

• Comprehensive, actionable dashboard
• Keyword analysis
• Competitive monitoring
• Integration with Google Analytics
• Inbound link manager
• Analysis of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube
• Customizable reports
• Oh, and did I mention that they offer a 30 day free trial? I have yet to pay this service for all this awesome stuff! I never thought I’d say this, but I’m actually looking forward to being able to pay them for all they do for me!

Cons:

NONE! I honestly have not found one drawback of Raven.

As you can see, it’s been a long road to find the right tool, but sometimes when you know what you want and need, it takes a little longer to get there. I want to give a big thanks to all the people on LinkedIn that helped me learn about these tools and for those that ultimately recommended Raven to me.

Currently, I’m using a combination of Raven Tools, Argyle Social and Google Analytics (although Raven integrates with this, I can dig into more data on Analytics itself) to measure social activity, and therefore how I’m performing at my job. If I want to perform well, my metrics tool must as well.

Have you tried out any of these tools? Do you use Raven Tools? Are there different requirements you have for a social media metrics tool? Let me know in the comments section below.

Note: I am not affiliated with any of these tools in any way nor was I paid to promote or demote any of them. This is solely my opinion based on extensive trials and testing.

I was included in a panel of some of Boston’s most influential and connected people, including Jonathan Kay of Grasshopper Group, Cheryll Morris of Pinyadda, and Ali Powell of Hubspot.

Below is both the presentation I did and a video that one of the attendees (Zach Cole) took while I was speaking. Feel free to share and use the presentation!

Much like you built up your reputation in school, creating an online presence is just as valuable, if not more. Creating an online influence for yourself can help you gain valuable connections, teach others (and learn from them too), develop power of persuasion, and become regarded as a thought leader.

If you are in the marketing industry, you may idolize people like Chris Brogan and David Meerman Scott for their high influence, visibility and knowledge. I, like many of you, have sat down wondering how to become like them.

Here are 20 key tips to follow to build your online influence:

1. Don’t talk about your service or product. Instead, talk about customer problems and needs and develop meaningful content around those.

2. Be transparent. You will become more credible and trustworthy if you are honest online.

3. Follow great people.

4. Online to offline. Make connections online and continue the relationships offline at events or meet ups.

5. Start conversations with others. If someone shares your article on social media, writes about your product, criticizes you, or asks you a question, answer. That is key to building relationships.

6. Be early in the news cycle so you share information that people are looking for and haven’t seen anywhere else. If you are able to write about or share breaking news, people will come to you more for industry leading breakthroughs.

7. Share good content consistently. When people come to expect you to share and post content regularly, and it is good content, they will keep coming back to you.

8. Let your passion shine. The more devotion and passion you show in your work, the more others will see it and believe it. This will bring them into your content and will entice them to engage with you.

9. Talk about others. If you can praise others, discuss great companies, review an outstanding product/service, etc. people will recognize that, appreciate it, and perhaps return the favor.

10. Repeat your tweets. I will always remember what Guy Kawasaki said about retweets: It is a good practice to RT an article about four times over the course of a day for it to get noticed and shared.

11. Understand your audience and build content around that. If you are a lawn mowing manufacturer and know your audience is interested in lawn care, write about that.

12. Don’t try to be all things to everyone. Instead, master one niche. It is best to focus in on one particular topic (for me it is internet marketing) and share your expertise. Don’t try to write about five different topics; people will get confused about what you stand for if you do this.

13. Be active on other people’s communities. If you want to be seen and noticed, you have to go find other people, not hope that they will come to you. If your audience hangs out on a niche social network site, get involved there and in turn they may come into your community if you build effective relationships on their site first.

14. Listen, then engage. If there is a breaking news story in your industry, a massive online attack on your brand, or a common theme to your listeners’ questions/comments, understand them and then engage.

15. Network with other influencers. Once you have become influential in some degree, begin speaking with others that are already there.

16. Share your ideas. Long gone are the days where we secretly held in every trade secret. Today, it is best to share your knowledge and help everyone around you grow and improve. If you help your industry as a whole improve, then you are in turn helping yourself and your business.

17. Make friends. The more you can enhance a friendship online (and continue it offline) the better you will fare online. If you appear to just be networking for the sake of getting fans and retweets, people will quickly pick up on that and be turned off. However, if you are genuine and building friendships, people will like you and want to talk to you.

18. Give more than you get. The more you can share news and expertise, the better. If you can help your audience, they will appreciate that and that appreciation can go miles towards building your online influence.

19. Use social media to compliment existing message channels. Just because social media is hot now doesn’t mean you should abandon your traditional ways of reaching others. If you are used to interacting with your audience via forums, email, podcasts and events, keep doing those. You can use social media to continue those relationship and gain new ones.

20. Make something worth talking about. David Meerman Scott calls this a ‘worldwide rave.’ If you can create novel, interesting content, others will talk about it and share. If you are simply reposting content that others already put out, you won’t attract many viewers.

What are some ways that you have built your online influence? Have you implemented any of the above 20 methods? If so, which worked best/worst for your or your company?

The initial rules of marketing and advertising were to interrupt people in order to sell them a product or service, costing businesses millions of dollars from their budgets each year. The rules of marketing and advertising have changed dramatically. Now, buyers are finding the answers to their problems online via blogs, social media, websites and forums.

This week, [I] had the chance to interview David Meerman Scott, a leader at the forefront of Internet marketing and PR, about how he is assisting and creating this shift. He also dives into creating new marketing campaigns for startups in the Boston area, and let’s [me] in on his Grateful Dead fascination.

As you may know, Scott currently resides around Boston, but is known worldwide for his ideas that are scripted in his two books, The New Rules of Marketing and PR and World Wide Rave.

New Rules is currently published in 24 different languages, and for good reason. Not only does Scott speak throughout the United States on new marketing, but all over the world. Scott also spent a majority of his 25-year marketing career overseas. He was the Asia Marketing Director for Knight-Ridder and afterwards was based for almost ten years in Tokyo and then Hong Kong.

No boundaries or borders have or will stop Scott from carrying out his passion and message. His twenty-five dedicated years to the marketing industry illustrates this.

Out of all the places in the world, Scott has now settled in Boston. I couldn’t help but ask why he chose to reside here of all places. He told me, “While Madison Avenue in NYC is the center of offline marketing, Boston is the center of new (web based) marketing with all the plugged in people and companies located here in the Boston area. When you attend local events such as tweetups, you’re not just meeting the top people in Boston, you’re meeting some of the most influential new marketers in the world.”

Rightly so, as Boston has been named as the world’s marketing and social media hub, and just yesterday we announced that Boston is still on top as the #1 Global Innovation Economy.

Since most are already familiar with Scott’s widely documented and agreed upon marketing theories, [I] decided to instead ask him how to create a successful marketing campaign for a start up company around the Boston area based on successful and failed campaigns that he has seen.

“[The] main thing is to NOT focus on your company’s products and services. (Nobody cares about your products except for you and others in your company),” Scott told us. This is why it is highly advised to never self-promote your brand on social media or blogs because no one wants to read about you; they want to read about their problems and how they can be solved.

“Most of the implementation challenges people tell me about involve the shift from marketing products and services to the much more effective approach of focusing on a buyer persona and creating information that helps solve problems for buyers,” continued Scott. I learned of this exact concept while in college, as I was assigned to read his book New Rules of Marketing and PR for one of my courses. This was one of the most resonating points from his book at the time.

“A secondary challenge is to get marketers away from a reliance on offline marketing techniques and [get] started with online initiatives.” Companies that have used traditional advertising and marketing find it very difficult to let go of offline activities and switch to a more uncontrollable online marketing strategy.

To alleviate some of their concerns, Scott has created a Marketing Strategy Template which you can access here. This is a simple two-page plan to help companies, “shift out of the comfort zone of preaching about products and services and advertising features and benefits.”

Parallel with corporate online marketing is Scott’s strong belief in personal branding. You will see his personal brand laid out very well on his website, blog, and Twitter page. Scott took the time to explain the difference between corporate and personal branding from his perspective.

“Well, all marketing comes down to people working with people. So all branding, at itsessence, is personal branding. Companies like Toyota and BP get in trouble because they develop these big corporate brands but when you look closely in a time of crisis, it falls apart because nobody knows or can engage with the people.” We saw this all too well during BP’s crisis management efforts that failed miserably for awhile.

Before [I] ended [my] interview with Scott, [I] had to ask about his passion for the Grateful Dead since he and Brian Halligan of Hubspot wrote their new book Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.”

Aside from being an avid fan, Scott found himself, “amazed that the band could attract such a huge following. When I really thought about it, I realized it was because of their marketing. So did my friend Brian Halligan who is CEO of HubSpot. So we decided to write a book about it.”

While Scott is a local resident to Boston, he is making his own worldwide rave for new marketing concepts. I, and probably many of you as well, have emulated many of his strategies both personally and at our jobs to learn the new ways of marketing and PR.

To keep up to date with David Meerman Scott, I highly recommend checking out his website, reading his blog, attending some of his speaking engagements, and following him on Twitter. You will be surprised how much you will learn from him very quickly.

Note about Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: “In this spirit, Brian and I are donating 25 percent of the royalties from our book to the Grateful Dead Archive at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to support further study of the Grateful Dead.”

I originally wrote this article for BostInnovation under the New Marketing Column, as I am their New Marketing writer.

I am a huge proponent of using social networking to promote a business, but first it must be understood that each message channel has a specific audience; especially Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook is now a mainstream social network with 500 million users and counting. 50% of users access Facebook via the web every day. Twitter had 106 million users as of this April so it is growing but certainly not mainstream yet. 75% of Twitter users access it via a 3rd party client such as HootSuite or CoTweet instead of the website domain which suggests most Twitter users are more technical. The average social networker would not know how to download a third party app, nonetheless know which one to use, to access Twitter.

Due to the large disparity between the two social networks, different messages need to be created for each channel.

Since Twitter is largely a technical crowd, they are looking to receive news about new products/services, innovation, gadgets, and statistics.

Facebook users, on the other hand, are there to talk with friends about more mainstream topics including trends, gatherings, celebrities, and their daily lives.

If you are trying to reach customers and leads via social media, it is crucial to keep that in mind.

At Backupify, I manage both our Twitter and Facebook accounts. On Twitter, I am able to tweet about OAuth, Twitter trends, Google Apps, net neutrality, and the like. On Facebook, I have to alter the messaging and post items like Facebook developments, Google trends, privacy, etc. Since our service is high tech in the first place, most followers and fans get the general idea, but I still need to tweak the messages accordingly.

I just started using a tool called Argyle Social, which is still in beta, that helps me measure which posts do best on each channel. You have the option to post any article on Twitter, Facebook or both and then track that URL using their web interface. The more clicks a post gets, the better it does. This helps me measure and tweak my posts according to what Argyle Social reports. If I post something too technical or non-conversational on Facebook and I see that it did poorly, I’ll know that it was the wrong post to put up and will avoid doing that in the future. If I post a really popular topic on Twitter and it gets, say, 200 clicks, I’ll know followers want more of that since they are highly interested.

When managing your Facebook and Twitter accounts for your company, always keep in mind who your audience is. The more you post about irrelevant information to them, the less people will follow, interact and engage with you. If done right, though, you can gain very passionate and smart followers who will become brand evangelists for your company.

Five years ago you would never have had access to as much information as you do today. Now the question arises, “Is there too much information available at my fingertips?”

You might not have thought twice about the slow yet apparent increase of information that is available on the web until now. In fact, I hardly thought much into it until I read this article.

The upside to the matter is that no longer do you have to dig through a book, purchase a $500 research report or conduct a focus group to gain information that seems quite simple to obtain today.

On the other hand, our eyes are glazing over so much of this information that we are becoming far less able to soak in pages of data and would rather read quick snippets of information from article titles. For example, say you conduct a Google search for “Percentage of businesses on Twitter.” You might get a great result from eMarketer offering an extensive three to ten page report all about this. But do you choose it? Probably not. Instead, you take in what the title says, “Study finds 56% of businesses use Twitter” and do a quick scan of the first few paragraphs.

This demonstrates the inability and time deficiency that we have to sit down and read a real report anymore. Our depth of knowledge is limited but our breadth is expanding. We are now taking in more types of data but at a shallower level. Many psychologists and scientists question if this will in turn make us more stupid.

They worry that we will not be able to think deeply and thoughtfully into any one topic anymore. While we may be well versed in many topics, what does that do when we are asked to go into detail on a particular subject and can’t?

This debate boils down to focus vs. plethora of information. I stand on the fence about the issue but would have to lean in the direction of saying that in general it will be a good thing. I believe that the more well versed a person is in the world on many different topics, the better off they will be. This is not to say you should know a little about biology, green energy, social media marketing, architecture and pollution, but that you should have a broad focus on a particular industry or topic and take in bits and pieces of data all over about that.

For example, my specialty is high tech internet marketing. Do I read intensive reports on this regularly? Nope. Instead, I set up Google Alerts, subscribe to about twenty blogs, follow around 350 people that are tech and marketing related on Twitter and watch videos related to these subjects. This gives me an expansive and thorough understanding of the general state of Internet marketing. Instead of honing in on one very particular part of my speciality, I like to use the plethora of data to my advantage by expanding my knowledge and expertise to a more general category.

A few months ago I wrote a post titled ‘Information Overload or Filter Failure’ which discussed that maybe we are just having trouble creating our own data filters in our minds. To combat this, pick out particular topics you want to be aware of while scanning the web. While scanning through your Google Reader, email and Twitter feed, act as a keyword catcher and focus on picking up only articles related to those. Don’t let the data explosion overtake your whole Internet experience and let it ‘dumb you down’ as experts are calling it.

As a tip, I try to read a book a month to allow myself to not become too entrenched in only learning from what the Internet has to teach me. I also do this to be able to immerse myself into a longer story and focus on reading hundreds of pages of the same piece rather than snippets. I have realized recently that this has been a bit of a struggle to do since I read so much online now, but I am sticking to my mission to do this and it definitely helps. Try that out too and let me know if it works!

How do you react to this issue? Do you feel dumbed down by the Internet or do you think it can provide us with an opportunity? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below!

You might also want to follow me on Twitter to learn more @kristinedziadul.

With over one hundred million Foursquare users to date, you might think it is more popular than it really is. In fact, Forrester Research found that only 4% of the adult, internet-using population has used a location-based application and only 1% of all adults check into locations once a week. Compared to social network behemoths like Facebook and Twitter, this is quite a small user base.

While Foursquare has integrated with the History Channel and has an ad on Bravo it is still not mainstream, but is getting there.

While many marketers believe Foursquare is not worth integrating into their marketing program, I think it CAN be a viable marketing channel, if not now, then in the near future.

Take a local restaurant, for example. They could create a check-in for their location, monitor who checks in, see if they tweet about it or share it on Facebook, and keep track of repeat visitors. With some simple monitoring, they could begin to view trends of who comes in on a regular basis and how they share it.

From there, the restaurant manager can create a special promotion or coupon for the user to reward them for their loyalty. Of course, getting a coupon from just using Foursquare will generate some local buzz which can only help the restaurant. Just like any social network, word will spread fast and more people will want to visit this venue and check-in frequently to get rewarded as well.

Now, take a large company like Target or Macy’s, for example. They could use a tool such as developed by Burlington, Mass based Awareness which can help them monitor and track visits to their locations. They can easily see trends and develop a rewards program for frequent visitors, such as 20% off an entire purchase after 5 check-ins.

Many companies and marketing agencies may view creating a Foursquare marketing campaign as a complex process, but all it really needs to have is a simple understanding of the people who check-in and how often, and then a type of promotion to give loyal visitors.

If large companies like Target and Macy’s begin to adopt these reward programs, it is sure to gain traction and press quickly. The great part about Foursquare is that it can be used anywhere, from a local boutique to a large clothing department store, meaning anyone can create a program around the application.

Even with their recent partnership with the History Channel and ad on Bravo, they have gained some serious traction, and now have over 40 million check-ins to date.

It will be very interesting to see how local to world-wide companies begin to use Foursquare in their marketing efforts. As more companies join the bandwagon, users are sure to follow. Within the past year alone they have significantly increased their user base, so it is only expected to grow exponentially from here.

How has your company used Foursquare to engage visitors? Do you see it as a viable marketing channel now or in the near future?

Note: I originally wrote this article as a guest blog post on 4squarebadges.com

Social media is a very powerful tool to help leverage a press release on the Internet today. This pas week I demonstrated how to best leverage a major press release primarily via social media. Yes, the release was going to be circulating the web and sent out to major sources (i.e. TechCrunch, CRN, BusinessWire, etc.) but I also needed a way to leverage it within my company’s direct community.

Backupify, the company I work for, was launching a major new service, Google Apps backup. We had great connections all over the tech industry and with bloggers, but also wanted to share it within our own network of contacts.

Here is how we leveraged the press release on social media:

1. We created an outreach program via Facebook and Twitter. As different sites released their coverage of our release and the press release went out later that afternoon, we tweeted it out and shared it on Facebook to let those who may not see the articles otherwise have a chance to read and share it.

(note: we had other sites release their coverage of our new service first to give readers a heads up about the event and get them familiar with it before the press release was published later in the afternoon. This seemed to work very well).

Not only were we able to share about five different articles on social media, but we saw over 120 retweets of them over the course of the day (and more days after). This was social proof that people were reading and liking what we were doing.

It is one thing to push articles out to blogs and sites whose job is to showcase press releases and service reviews, but it is another to have true fans and customers read and voluntarily share that same data.

This helped us confirm that people were out there reading about us, liking what they read, and willingly sharing it. In the age of social networks and sharing, it seemed like an obvious move to utilize our social connections to leverage our backup launch.

2. Aside from simply tweeting it out to the Twitterverse and sharing it on Facebook, we specifically asked brand evangelists to share it in their networks as well. As you can imagine, this helped the message spread even further on the Internet.

3. I retweeted others who commented on our new product release.

4. I kept our Google Alerts open on our RSS to monitor for every new mention of Backupify on the web. From there, we were able to share and comment on the articles to be actively involved with writers and readers.

I have been analyzing the buzz around our release ever since then and there is such an immense amount of tweets, status updates, new news articles and blogs that picked up the press release. Overall, social media was a huge aspect of our product launch and our fans and followers led the pack in spreading the news at lightening speed.

How have you used social media to help leverage a major press release? What were some of the results? Tell me your story below!

Paid search involves keyword bids, conversions, click-through rates, measurements and analytics, and ROI, whereas social search is engagement-based, brand building and hard to measure.

It is important to realize that these both provide different results so you must focus on their strengths individually.

Many companies rush into their paid and search strategies and try to combine them. However, it is best to treat each as its own entity to optimize their benefits. For paid you need to focus on conversion rates and cost vs. ROI. For social you must build a brand community and create positive engagements within your market.

Don’t expect the strategy of paid search to work for social, and vice versa.

For example, if you set a goal of 100 conversions a week for your paid campaign, you can’t expect the same for social since social is based on building your brand on the Internet and increasing awareness. However, together they can produce great inbound marketing results. By creating a compelling social campaign where you drive consumers to your site via social media and engage with them, they will be more willing to look into what you offer.

Consider this: a friend walks up to you and asks you to help them achieve a goal. Five minutes later a complete stranger asks the same favor. Who will you be more willing to help out? Your friend, of course! The same goes for social conversions. If you engage with your community online and create meaninful relationships, they will be more willing to talk to you and look into your product. This can then drive up your conversion rates, assisting your paid campaign.

Many think that social campaigns cannot create ROI, but if done right with a paid campaign, it certainly can.

So how can you best leverage these two strategies to work together?

Make social campaigns search friendly. Optimize your social messages using tags and keywords. For example, if you tweet about a new blog article, include the keywords you are trying to rank for. Search engines are now much more social friendly and even pick up on tweets. This can then drive leads to your site.

Try new keyword tests on social media. Since social media is free (well, almost) it is much easier to do A-B keyword testing than on a paid search campaign. Test different messaging throughout a specific time period and see which message either created the most buzz or drove the most traffic to your site.

Study the social media-sphere for trending topics around which to revolve your paid campaigns. There are several tools that can help you find the buzz around your industry, including Radian 6. If you can track what people are saying about your industry, product/service category, or brand itself, you will make search keywords much easier to find.

By leveraging the benefits of both search and social campaigns together, you can create an extremely compelling inbound marketing strategy. Each can assist the other, but the strategies must be focused on individually to bring out each tactic’s strengths.

Does your company use both social and paid search campaigns? If so, have you noticed an increased response? Leave your comments below.

In the attention economy today, we don’t find information, it finds us. Those who are great at SEO and understand how users search can tailor their messages to us so we naturally find it either in search engine queries or through social media searches. If they target the SEO to the right users and they find the information relevant and interesting, it has a higher likelihood of becoming virally spread throughout the Internet world.

Many times people will ask their advertising or marketing agencies to create a ‘viral’ video or ‘viral’ blog post. However, you cannot just create something and call it viral, hoping it actually becomes viral. It is quite the opposite. You must not only create the content that is likely to spread, but make it easy for the right audience to find it and share it among their social graph.

If you are interacting on social networks to try to spread your ideas, then you should have at least a few good personal contacts on those sites. When you know someone personally, you are more likely to favor them and talk favorably about them to others. You can use this to your advantage by starting to share your content with people you know and they can begin the viral spread of the content.

Dan Zarella, a social media scientist, has defined several ways ideas can become contagious. In his research, Zarella has found that for ideas to spread, they must be novel. People will not keep sharing content that has been covered by hundreds of other sources and people before you. Find topics that are fresh, interesting, and even controversial since they will be new and interesting to your target audience.

While most content can go viral just by people liking it, you can also reward those that share. As Brian Solis pointed out in a recent blog post, social influence has a cascading effect. If you reward the people who share your ideas, they will feel encouraged to keep sharing. This will also motivate them to keep finding great, new information to share with their networks.

If a person has a plethora of followers or readers who are a significant part of your market and you can get them to pass along your content to them, they need to be rewarded. Your goal in viral marketing is to find those key influencers who know other key influencers and followers and get them to spread your word. Essentially, and in the words of Solis, “ideas are worthy of sharing, when there is incentive to do so.”

When we think of viral marketing today, the idea of it has changed. It is not about creating content that is deemed naturally viral, it is targeting great information to those who will be most interested in it and are social sharers. This is the same concept for any type of marketing, you must create targeted messages to the attentive market. As Solis stated in his post Redefining Viral Marketing, “Designing social objects based on the psychographics rather than demographics of those you wish to reach and inspire, proves critical in the viability of engendering personal connections – connections worthy of sharing.”

I started off college as a marketing and advertising major, and upon graduation became heavily involved with social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube) to network, share ideas, and meet potential employers. I then developed a blog to demonstrate my ideas and theories to showcase my passions and knowledge.

After about a month or two of networking on Twitter, I ‘met’ Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of Hubspot and investor in Backupify (among several other things). He stumbled upon my blog and commented on it to give me more advice about entering the Boston marketing field.

Rob May, founder and CEO of Backupify saw that Dharmesh also tweeted to me (and then was driven to my website that Dharmesh commented on) and made the connection.

Rob then tweeted to me asking if I was looking for a job around Boston this summer, we exchanged emails, and then met up in person for an informal dinner interview. About a week later, I received a job offer from him to be Backupify’s Marketing Analyst and take over most of the company’s marketing initiatives. I was absolutely thrilled with this position since I would be able to utilize my social media and blogging expertise which I have done for my personal brand, and now I can do that for a company that I strongly believe in.

Because of the amazing way that my career search journey turned out, I encourage all who are looking for a job/career to start demonstrating their skills and they will get picked up. I never imagined that my dream job would find me just by me doing what I loved to do, but it worked out perfectly.

If you love writing, start blogging and networking with fellow bloggers. If you love social media, start tweeting and making online connections. If you love humanitarianism, start volunteering and keeping track of your connections there. I guarantee it will land you a job if you act with diligence and passion and make connections in the field you are interested in.

Yes, it means you lose control of your content. Yes, it means being in places your buyers are, not where you want to be. Yes, it means you must take a leap out of your comfort zone.

However, it is more than worth it. Why? Read on…

You don’t have anything to lose because you can always delete something that is not working out. Social media can actually be very fun and exciting for you and your company.

So why social media?

1. Tell Your Story. If you create buyer personas for your market demographics, you can then tailor your company’s story directly to an interested market. You may have different personas in or between social media sites, and every persona has different needs. You can create several different stories and promote them on social media and your interested market will pick that up. It would be great to even interview your market and find out what they want or hear their story to share on your community site.

2. Earn Attention by Publishing Your Way In. The old way of marketing was to buy advertising space, beg your way into media through PR and buy your way in by direct selling. Now, you must earn this attention by publishing your content on YouTube, a blog, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and more.

On the web, you are what you publish.

3. Encourage Sharing. Those interested markets will willingly want to share information they find valuable. It is not word of mouth anymore, it is word of mouse. The mouse (or trackpad) helps listeners share your story with others. Consider yourself lucky to have these Internet marketing capabilities which allow interested people to share your information so quickly and to a large following. You can encourage sharing by making a link on your blog for readers to retweet, share on Facebook or Google Buzz, send in an email, or submit to delicious or other bookmarking sites. You can add the same capabilities to an email as well.

4. Lose Control of Your Content. This may sound like a scary statement, but it is the best and fastest way to gain viral attention. You must lose control of your content in order for it to be shared and spread around the Internet. You can do this by giving out free information or tools to help your market succeed and solve their problems. They will appreciate this and spread the word. Hubspot does this VERY well with all their free webinars, tools, and blogs.

5. Put Down Roots. Be in the places where your buyers are, not where you want to be. It is much easier to gain attention in spots where your market is already comfortable being instead of enticing them to join a site where you are. For example, if your market is a huge NFL following, you must be on NFL related blogs and sites to talk to them and gain attention.

6. Point the World to Your Virtual Doorstep. One you have established great content, a firm standing on social media sites, and a good following, then drive people to your site through inbound marketing. No one will visit your site if they have no idea who you are, what you do, and what you write about. That is why you must first get involved on sites where your market is, develop relationships, THEN drive them to your site and get a lead.

Although social media may seem scary to a company who is afraid of negative feedback, wants a firm hold on their content, and does not know how people will react to them on social media, it can gain you rewards two-fold. By allowing yourself to lose control of your content, share it, and manage your fear, you are taking a great leap and starting a viral rave.

You may find markets that you didn’t even know existed who want your product or service, people may love what you do and are willing to share it, and your market may need and want your free content and become very loyal to you. The possibilities are endless when it comes to social media.

Social media is actually a very natural thing for the Internet. The Internet was designed to be a collaborative, social environment and up until recently, it really was not. Finally it has come full-circle and people are using it in a social, collaborative way. So by getting on social media, you are doing exactly what the Internet was intended for.

Get out there and make those valuable connections and talk to and listen to your market!

It is never about you, your products, services, goals, etc. It is about your community and what they want. The Internet was designed to be a collaborative social environment; hence social media on the Internet. Therefore, when you establish some type of community around your brand online, whether it is on Twitter or on a Ning community, you must talk about the consumers’ interests, feedback, and build on the relationships.

Consider your community a gift. If people are forming a community online to talk about your product, or joining your already established community, be thankful for that. To show your thanks, ask your community to discuss their thoughts, ideas, feedback, concerns, improvements, etc. This helps to build better relationships and confirms the reason why each consumer is there.

Think of it like this: You walk into a grocery store and are immediately greeted by the store manager who proceeds to tell you who he was, his position, how long he had been there, what he had done to improve the store, and then guided you around and told you about every fabulous feature of the store during your shopping trip. Annoying, right? Instead, wouldn’t you want to be in the store (preferably not even bothered by the store manager unless you want to ask a question, give feedback, or be greeted) and do what YOU needed to do?

The same goes for a community. People come there out of self interest to get something out of it. Whether that is to find out more about your product, ask a question, give a suggestion, or just praise the great job the company is doing. Consumers do not want to enter your community and be bombarded with brand advertisements and features; quite simply they do not care. The only real thing they care about is how their problems can be solved and how you can help them get there.

Your community may look to you for their success, so give them more tools to succeed. For example, a customer of CVS may join the forallthewaysyoucare.com community to share medical stories, gather resources, speak with others for ideas, and join forums on particular topics of interest. They do this because they know that your site serves as a resource to help solve problems and give them tools to succeed. They do not go there to be bombarded with sales pitches or advertisements. This methodology is called “Equip Instead of Sell!”

So whether you are in the biomedical, high tech, toy, or food industries, it is still never about you in social media. Talk about the customers and their thoughts and concerns, and you will realize amazing relationships will start to grow, and in turn ROI (return on influence) and ROI (return on investment) will shortly follow.