Photo by Wendy Piersall

Social media can become even more powerful when you combine it with offline PR efforts and use it to supercharge your real-world business networking.

Probably the most important benefit for a lot of people getting on social media is the people you’ll meet, interact with, and start to build relationships with. I’ve met hundreds of interesting individuals since I started blogging in 2006—many of whom have become friends, mentors, clients, and business partners. But nothing beats meeting these people face-to-face.

Where to Network Offline

After your first few months blogging or interacting on social media networks, attending some of the big new media conferences like South By Southwest Interactive and Blog World Expo can go a long way to help you establish A-list contacts and boost your profile online.

If you’re looking for local events to attend, you can scan the headlines at Upcoming , or do a search for a BarCamp conference or Tweetup in your city to network with and learn from other people who are also passionate about social media and technology. Or search through the groups on Meetup.com to find people who share your interests.

Once you have your blog set up and start to gather a following, you can use it as a platform to organize your own offline networking events too!

Find People You Want to Get to Know

Almost every organized conference will have a website where attendees will gather. You can search through the speaker and sponsor lists to find what sessions and talks interest you the most (and who you might want to connect with), and some sites even make their registration lists public or have user forums where you can easily see who else plans on attending.

If not, search through Twitter for mentions about the event you’re interested in attending and see who’s talking about it. Send out a couple status updates on your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles letting your friends and followers know you plan to be there and see if anyone else will be there too.

Click through and explore the profiles of anyone who’s talking about it. Once you get a sense for what speakers, businesses, and attendees might be at your conference or event, make a list of individuals you’d want to meet in person.

Eliminate the Cold Approach

Now that you’ve researched who you want to meet, try to connect with them online before the event. If you find them (or they find you) through Twitter, send them an @reply or a direct message to tell them you plan on being there. If you find other people talking about it on Facebook, shoot them a message. If you can connect with them on their blog, look for their contact details and try to send a personal email.

Keep it brief, but tell them 1) something about yourself or why you’ll be attending the event, 2) how you came across them or why you’re interested in what they’re doing, and 3) let them know you look forward to meeting in person.

Reaching out to people before the event can be a lot easier than walking up to someone you’ve never met before and having cold introductions or worse, that universally-dreaded networking moment when you’re left awkwardly standing there waiting for them to finish talking to someone else.

A majority of people welcome these kinds of online introductions, and many will even click through to look up your profile or your website to learn more about you, so connecting early will differentiate you from the rest of the crowd. You’ll already know a thing or two about each other, which will give you something to talk about and elminate that uncomfortable feeling when you’ve just met for the first time and nobody knows what to talk about (”Uh, so what do you do?”). They’ll be more likely to recognize you when they see you in person, and they might even come seek you out.

Now, go enjoy your networking event and make some friends!

Cody is a nomadic entrepreneur & lifestyle designer who helps social changemakers & other remarkable people spread their message on the web.

Photo by PatrickSmithPhotography

There are plenty of companies out there that get involved in social media, but they use it solely as a channel to hock more of their goods, refusing to authentically connect with their audience and solve customer problems. I’ve sent off complaints and left angry public tweets about plenty of companies that were completely ignored .

But then there are good companies that actually care. They listen to customer feedback, help solve problems, address problems when something goes wrong, and build consumer trust by taking responsibility for their mistakes.

Here are three excellent examples to follow while you’re building your online presence and figuring out how to integrate social media in your company:

Zappos

Online shoe retailer Zappos has been notable in the past few years for their stellar service and successful use of new media to connect with customers. After sharing a quick note on Twitter about how impressed I was with an article on their corporate culture , I immediately received a personal note from the main Zappos Twitter account with a cheerful offer to set up a tour of the Zappos facilities next time I’m in their headquarters, Las Vegas!

One of Zappos’ core values is to “Create fun and a little weirdness”, and it shows in the company’s whacky, uninhibited corporate culture. CEO Tony Hsieh shares his funny, helpful musings on Twitter , and they really utilize social media to add personality to their brand, highlight interesting company developments and engage with consumers.

Lesson: Pay close attention to who’s talking about you. If you reward those who have positive things to say, they’ll come back time and again.

Starbucks Coffee

Starbucks created a huge hit when they launched their “My Starbucks Idea ” site in March, 2008. The site leverages the power of “crowdsourcing”—encouraging community members to submit suggestions for new products, how to improve the experience in the store, and how Starbucks can get more involved in the community and social responsibility campaigns. The most popular ideas are highlighted and frequently implemented: things like free coffee for Gold Card members on their birthday, the Starbucks VIP card, and a free cup of coffee when you buy coffee beans were all user-generated ideas.

The site generated over 70,000 ideas in its first year, and showcases a great blog that documents ideas from submission through implementation. Their creative approach both gives Starbucks a way to measure consumer demand directly and demonstrates how much they value customer feedback, giving consumers the sense that they actually can have a personal influence on the direction of the company.

Lesson: Asking your customers what they want directly will always be a win-win. Transparency and publicly implementing their ideas will lead to huge success.

Comcast

I know, I know—I’ve had my own fair share of complaints about the mammoth cable, internet, and phone provider myself. Before Comcast’s new customer service manager Frank Eliason came along, entire communities like comcastmustdie.com were forming to share their complaints when the company wasn’t listening—bashing the carrier and having a devastating effect on public perception.

The @ComcastCares Twitter Guy turned all that around when he quickly built a team that monitors social media mentions and responds quickly to customer complaints with offers to help, creating a lot of happy feedback for a company that has a record of finishing at the bottom of customer satisfaction rankings, and demonstrating the power of Twitter as a customer service channel.

Lesson: Listen to what your customers have to say. If you set up systems to monitor the discussion, you can create a powerful tool to help ensure customer satisfaction and increase consumer trust in your brand.

What other social media campaigns do you follow for a great example of how to do it right?

Cody is a nomadic entrepreneur & lifestyle designer who helps social changemakers & other remarkable people spread their message on the web.

Photo by Chaval Brasil

If you’re a PR professional who’s just starting to utilize social media marketing, or a business owner who knows you need to get involved online but you just don’t understand it all yet, it’s okay. Relax. We’re here to help you.

It can be difficult to wrap your head around all this “social web” stuff and understand the jargon, when you didn’t grow up with MySpace and blogs like some of us have. Social media requires you to think differently about marketing, and it encompasses a vast array of networks where people connect and share information, as well as tools that you can use to promote yourself online.

Here I’ve collected some of the best, most straightforward videos and presentations to help you learn about each of these tools and why you should be using them:

The Social Opportunity — Video from Network Solutions’ Solutions Stars Video Conference: “Small businesses have a fantastic opportunity to bypass conventional media and advertising to directly reach their stakeholders.”

Blogs in Plain English — Video from Common Craft: “A short introduction to blogs – how they work and why they matter.”

RSS in Plain English — Video from Common Craft: “An introduction to RSS as a way to save time reading web sites.”

Social Networking in Plain English — Video from Common Craft: “A short introduction to the concepts behind social networking websites.”

Social Bookmarking in Plain English — Video from Common Craft: “A short introduction to the concept of social bookmarking, using Delicious as the example.”

Twitter in Plain English — Video from Common Craft: “A short introduction to the micro-blogging service Twitter.”

How to Use Twitter for Business — Video from Ed Dale of 30DayChallenge: “This video shows how a fantastic small business is using Twitter to enhance his business – Fantastic example”

Social Media Strategy — Slide presentation from Vanina Delobelle: “What are social media? Why does a company need to set up a social media strategy? In what consists the strategy? How to measure the success?”

Social Media ROI — Measuring the Unmeasurable? — Slide presentation from Yongfook.

Social Media Metrics — Mining the social media conversation — Slide presentation from Pop Lab: “How do you measure the impact of your social media campaign? Kelsey Ruger’s presentation on some of the things that you can track and measure in a social media campaign.”

These videos and presentations should give you a comprehensive understanding of the social media tools out there, and you can also share them with your colleagues and staff to convey the benefits that social media marketing can provide your business.

Cody is a nomadic entrepreneur & lifestyle designer who helps social changemakers & other remarkable people spread their message on the web.

Photo by brainbikerider

On the social web, people are talking about your brand whether you’re participating or not. Do you know how to follow the conversation?

I have my own social media toolkit set up so that virtually any time anyone mentions my name, my company name, or links to my website , anywhere online, I’ll see it. I can then choose whether it’s something I should leave a thank-you comment on, share and promote to my own network, or take action to correct a mistake I may have made. You can no longer control the discussion. You can’t prevent people from saying whatever they want to about you online, but you can participate and guide the discussion. If you want to have an influential role in the conversation about your brand online, you need to be listening.

Want to know what peo­ple are say­ing about you on blogs? Twitter? Social networks? It’s easier than you might think, and in this post I’ll show you how to set up your own “lis­ten­ing sta­tion” with a few free tracking tools and your RSS news reader.

Free Tools for Brand Monitoring Online

The first thing you need to do is figure out what you’re listening for. You want to pay attention to mentions of your name and your brand, but you also probably need to keep track of related conversations about your industry. First of all, write down all the following to plug in to your searches:

• your name
• your company name
• any brand-related mentions
• your website addresses (URLs)
• possibly your competitors’ names
• important niche keywords

Depending on the size of your organization, and who’s in charge of collecting and analyzing data about your brand online, your ideal listening station might be your email inbox. A lot of the services below will provide free email alerts, but another invaluable tool for collecting data online is RSS. If you’re not familiar with it, RSS is a useful built-in technology in most social web services (blogs, news feeds) that allows you to subscribe and get new updates as they occur.

1. If you don’t already have an RSS feed reader, the first step I’d recommend is that you set up your own free Google Reader account to collect incoming links from the tracking services below.

2. Set up Google Alerts for any key­words relevant to your industry or niche. Google Alerts is a mainstay in anyone’s online monitoring toolkit. It’s wise to set it to send email notifications and forget about it, but realize that alerts will often come in several days to several weeks after they occur. Select the com­pre­hen­sive search option, then you can either opt to receive alerts via email OR by RSS feed. If you set the “Deliver to” option to Feed, click “Create Alert” and then on the fol­low­ing screen, select “View in Google Reader”. Repeat as necessary to subscribe to as many keyword notifications as you want.

3. Next, let’s search the blogosphere for mentions. Many different options exist for tracking blog post mentions. Google Blog Search is a very straightforward search similar to the default Google search engine. Enter your company name and URLs, perform a search, and then look at the bottom of the sidebar on the left where it says “Subscribe” and select the RSS link.

Alternately, another useful tool that will let you search the blogosphere as well as many social networks like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and more is Social Men­tion . Right beneath the search box, click the link to “select social media sources”, run your search, and then sub­scribe with the RSS feed link at the top-right of the search results screen. Add to your Google Reader and repeat as necessary. (Note: selecting the BoardReader and BoardTracker options here will also crawl through forums and discussion boards to deliver results for your niche keywords.)

4. If you’re a PR professional or work with a larger company, you may also want to add Google News to your arsenal, which will monitor traditional media outlets and press releases through the news wire services. The Google News search function is also very similar to Google Blog Search in step 3 above, but when you perform your search, scroll down to the bottom of the page and look in the footer (below the navigation and bottom search box) for the RSS subscription link.

5. Next, let’s see what people are saying about you on the web’s largest platform for discussion! Twitter Search crawls Twitter.com and will give you the equivalent of Google Alerts for any mentions there in real-time, with no delays. Run a search for your rel­e­vant key­words, your username (i.e., codymckibb in my case), as well as your full name in case users say something about you without using your username. In the top-right of the results page, click on “feed for this query” and add it to your Google Reader account. You can also use Twitter’s Advanced Search to get a lot more specific, find tweets from particular users, or get results by geo­graphic area.

6. Twitter is a massive network where people are constantly sharing links and updates, but the one drawback about Twitter Search is that it will miss many messages that link to your site with “shorturls”, or short links that redirect to your URL (services like bit.ly and tinyurl). BackTweets is a great service that will track any shorturls that linkback to your sites. Enter your site URL and perform a search, and subscribe with the orange radio button in the title where it says “Search Results for yourdomain.com”.

Putting It All Together

Now you’ll have several RSS feeds delivering a wide variety of mentions into your Google Reader account, where you can collect and organize them however you see fit. Here’s how to tidy them up:

1. Go to Google Reader , click the “Settings” drop-down in the top-right corner, then click on “Reader settings”.

2. Select the Sub­scrip­tions tab.

3. Now you can easily rename your feeds or start orga­niz­ing them into fold­ers (by key­word, company, source, client, etc.) by using the “Change folders” drop-down box and categorizing them into existing folders or creating new folders.

It’s as easy as that. Now you’re properly set up to listen across the social media landscape, which will help you keep your finger on your industry’s pulse and jump in and respond quickly to mentions about you or your brand!

Cody is a nomadic entrepreneur & lifestyle designer who helps social changemakers & other remarkable people spread their message on the web.

Social media is more than just one more new method of marketing or advertising online. Social media is a living, breathing, growing organism, and it is based in communities. The fact is, if you’re not active in this growing industry, you will be left behind. People are talking about you, whether you’re present in those discussions or not.

You can’t keep sending out one-way communications in this new business environment. People no longer trust advertising; people trust people. Consumers trust their peers’ opinions. So you have to make personal connections.

Social media is about listening to the communities you serve. It is about establishing a rapport with your target audience. Seeking out influencers in your market. And more importantly, not looking at it as a market, but as a community made up of individuals. This isn’t one-way PR communications, it’s a dialogue—a conversation.

Unfortunately you can’t simply build a great blog and expect people to show up. The website itself is only about 20% of the work—there’s still a long laundry list of things you’ll still need to do to be successful. Many people don’t realize the hard work required when they first take their business online—but proper developers and consultants do much more than just give you a front-end web design—they’ll provide their expertise when you have questions, coaching through your learning process, promotion of your campaigns, help with your market research and search engine optimization, help measuring the effectiveness of your efforts, and hopefully access to the right connections within their networks.

A good social media consultant pulls some weight online and understands how your community will respond negatively or positively to different tactics . He’ll be honest with you when he knows you need to invest some extra work to create a great product. You deserve that, because a great product hardly needs promoting.

With the right consultant, you can set goals, you can learn how to develop your voice and communicate through social media in a personable way, you can identify and establish relationships with the right people in your niche , and you can learn how to use the web as a listening tool and a research tool to understand your market and give your followers what they want.

More importantly, having a consultant who is experienced as a blogger and social media user on your side will help you avoid the pitfalls . The “blogosphere” community is self-policing and sometimes unforgiving. If you don’t engage the community properly you may risk a huge loss of rapport. A social media consultant can help you present yourself and your company effectively and transparently. A good social media consultant is someone who has a great reputation in the online community; others speak of him well and trust his opinion; the things he shares are valued in the community, and he thus can provide tremendous value to the clients he represents.

A social media professional will use all the online tools available to spread the word about the organizations or campaigns he represents—much like traditional PR. But, compared with many traditional media, social media marketing is a strong and cost-effective tactic to compliment your other marketing efforts.

Cody is a nomadic entrepreneur & lifestyle designer who helps social changemakers & other remarkable people spread their message on the web.

The number one thing that will make you successful in social media is to write about and to do what you’re passionate about. Don’t blog just for the sake of blogging, and don’t blog to make money. The A-listers who make a 6-figure income (see: Steve Pavlina and Darren Rowse ) didn’t start out to make money—they just wrote about what they truly had a passion for, that they could keep coming back to each week, each day, and add value to the discussion. And then they did it for years. That’s what will pull in readers and keep you motivated.

Once you build a foundation of flagship content on your topic, you’ll be ready to start sharing your new site with the world. Here are several methods to increase your traffic and to promote your blog for free:

1. Write what you’re passionate about, but also what your readers want. If you’re not passionate about your niche, you’ll put out low-quality content and quickly run out of things to say. That’s a no-brainer. But also be sure to concentrate on what your readers need help with. Write with their interests in mind, even write as if you’re speaking to someone in particular who you know would find your content helpful.
2. Write awesome headlines. Remember that most people buy books based on the title, not the contents. Many social media users will decide whether to click through to your site solely based on the headline. Make sure it draws readers in, as well as targets your desired keywords. See Copyblogger’s Brian Clark for awesome copywriting tips .
3. Start commenting on other blogs. The most effective way to find your target audience and get your name out there is to start engaging on similar blogs in your niche. I’d recommend using your name, not a business name or keyword phrase. This won’t send huge amounts of traffic, but it will get your face and your link in front of other bloggers and highly-targeted potential readers—and after people see your name a few times, and if you’re contributing something of value to the discussion, eventually they’ll be interested enough to click through and read more of what you have to say.
4. Link to other bloggers as frequently as you can. Not only is it good karma to share useful external resources with your audience, but when you reference other bloggers’ articles in your posts, blog software like WordPress will automatically send “trackbacks” to the other sites you link to. Trackbacks are links that frequently show up similarly to blog comments on the other blogger’s site. Sometimes the original article will include a link back to your site that readers can follow, but more importantly this will bring your site to the attention of other bloggers, letting them know you mentioned their article. Link relevantly and regularly to the major players in your niche!
5. Engage with your readers. Send a thank-you email or respond in some way to as many commenters as you can, as it will show your readers that you value their feedback, and they’ll be much more likely to come back again and add to the conversation on your site (as well as eventually recommend it to others).
6. Leverage the social networking sites . Do your best to form new relationships with other bloggers and your target audience through Facebook , LinkedIn , and especially Twitter . You can also submit your articles to bookmarking sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon , where potential readers might take notice and help share your links.
7. Write guest posts on other sites. Find the biggest bloggers in your niche, or your favorite blogs that seem like they have a related audience that you’d like to reach. Write on as many other sites as you can—besides adding great content to your own site, guest posts are the most effective way to expose yourself to new audiences and build relationships with more experienced bloggers.
8. Write list posts. Lists (like this one) and “How-To” posts are some of the most popular articles online. Don’t make every post a list post, but when you format your content in numbered or bulleted points or steps, it breaks things down into simple, useful language for people, and it’s easily scannable. Readers LOVE lists and step-by-step instructions!
9. Interview people. Ever wanted to ask some A-list blogger, author, or other role model a couple questions? Why not try to pitch them on an interview so they can share their knowledge with a larger audience, and you can show another perspective on your topic. You never know who might be willing to sit down and give you an interview. (P.S. video is a huge hit with readers!)
10. Participate in blog carnivals. A blog carnival is a blog post that features a roundup of several articles from different blogs, frequently collected once a month or even once a week. The carnival host collects links to different members of a niche to showcase the best content around the web. They’re easy to participate in—just search BlogCarnival.com for something in your niche and submit your links.
11. Submit your blog to Google , DMOZ , and other search engines. On WordPress, you can also use a plugin like Google XML Sitemaps Generator to automatically create a sitemap and ping the search engines with your updates when you add new content, which will help you rank in the search engines much faster.
12. Submit targeted articles to EzineArticles.com . Write helpful, keyword-targeted articles and submit them to article directories like Ezine Articles, which then become available to other people to republish on their website or in their newsletter. You can include one to two sentences and link back to your website or blog, so anytime anyone reprints your article you get incoming links. When you use your hyperlink anchor text wisely, this is also a great way to improve your SEO .

I hope you find this resource post useful. What are your tactics for pushing free traffic to your blog?

Cody is a nomadic entrepreneur & lifestyle designer who helps social changemakers & other remarkable people spread their message on the web.

Photo by luis.martinez

A majority of businesses today still market themselves by placing ads in the paper, in magazines, or television commercials and other TV spots. If you can get yourself on Oprah, then by all means go for it, but we all know that these days newspaper readership is down tremendously, and even though a publication might have a huge circulation, a half- or quarter-page ad in print can easily get lost without readers ever noticing it.

You need to direct your marketing dollars into things that get directly to your target market. For some markets, that might mean you actually don’t want to get too involved online, so I’m not going to try to sell you something you don’t need. You need to really narrow down your niche and compare it to the demographics of the media channel you’re considering advertising in. But the web has become home to millions and millions of consumers, of nearly every demographic, and when used properly, social media can be a fantastic way to connect with consumers who feel suffocated by advertising in this bad economy.

If you think social media might be right for you, and you haven’t put the time and energy into learning to properly build relationships there yet, here are four good reasons why you should:

1. Track your ROI

With a proper web storefront, an inexpensive company blog , or even participating on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, you can easily track and analyze your efforts. You can see precisely where your traffic comes from, who is talking about you and your organization, you can review how well your individual marketing campaigns perform, and how much revenue your company can produce from which tactics. Compared to traditional press like TV and magazines, you have much more powerful tools at your fingertips to measure the return on your time and money investment. Surprisingly enough, perhaps the most effective way to analyze how well your traditional media marketing works is actually to run a print-to-web campaign !

2. Get Personal

Even more practically, the game-changer about the social web is that it makes your marketing revolve more around relationship-building, which can help your business succeed in an economy where consumers are increasingly ad-blind. When you put the right people at the helm as representatives of your organization—the ones who are passionate about it—they can get comfortable showing people their personal side, instead of just a cold, sanitized company brochure. Social media, even when used to promote your business, is a personal world—others want to learn more about you—so tell them about your interests outside of work, share the articles and trends that interest you, talk about the events you go to, and let people see you as a real person. When visitors feel they’ve established a more personal connection, you’ll build trust and enjoy more loyalty from your customers.

3. Save Tons of Time

The cool thing about all this social media relationship-building is that the tools will allow you to form 1-on-1 relationships with thousands of people at the same time, in much the same way that email marketing has been used by a successful few in the last decade. Networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook allow you to send a message to 2000 people at once, and build individual relationships with members of a large community. A blog will help you broadcast important news and updates that thousands of people around the world will see too, saving you a tremendous amount of time. Just imagine how long it would take networking at conferences to pass out business cards and tell 2000 people about what you do! And because of the nature of search and the way the social web works , a majority of the people who your message reaches will be the people who are actually interested in what you have to say, rather than other businesspeople who are only listening to be polite at your networking events.

4. Build your Tribe

The most important benefit of going social is that you’ll build a community of followers and help foster connections between members of your community. This is the new power of social media that wasn’t available through traditional media. Whereas you used to have to have a real-life event like a conference or a workshop to get your tribe together in one place, on the social web, others will help share your message and talk to each other through blog comments, forums, webinars, Twitter, Facebook groups, and more. In addition to the products and services you provide, this is a tremendous value you can offer to the people who look to you as an authority.

Are you ready to get started?

Learn about the three different kinds of social media , and some initial steps to take for successful social media networking .

Cody is a nomadic entrepreneur & lifestyle designer who helps social changemakers & other remarkable people spread their message on the web.