Now that the search engines are doing much better at incorporating social-network pages and signals into search results, and analytics packages are becoming more able to track social-originated website traffic… it’s a good time to bring your website up to social snuff.

You don’t need to go all the way to building a private social network …even though there are now tools such as EPIServer CMS to simplify that.  Posting on Social Media Today, Ashley Hedlund identifies a number of things you can do fairly easily – beyond blogging, which you definitely should be doing – to make your website more social and engaging, without losing its top-notch level of control and flexibility.  The first few are fairly obvious;  the rest, perhaps less so… – Making your website more social (it’s not all that hard)

If you provide a product or service that delivers value and customers find the experience of obtaining those products or services is at least satisfactory, there’s a good chance you are receiving some quantity of leads by way of referral or word of mouth.

It’s a simple reality of business – if people need what you sell, they are more confident about purchasing it if they get a vote of approval from someone they already trust.

Most businesses realize this and put some energy into generating referral leads, but my belief is that firms that also put energy into act of converting referral leads can dramatically amplify the power of referral. – The Art of Referral Conversion

Creating a Facebook page for your company can be useful, but limited in terms of reach and connectivity. Here’s how to optimize your personal profile for business.

If you’ve already tried suggesting your company page to all of your friends and sharing its content on your wall, here are a few tips on customizing your personal account to share personally and directly with your friends.

Be Selective With Your Profile

It’s good to fill out your profile, but be choosy with the information you share. After basic information and education/work, consider trimming your profile to these fields:

People Who Inspire You: Who wouldn’t want to meet an inspired person?
Quotes: One or two can sum up your opinions and personality nicely.
Books: They are great for starting dialogues.

Make sure you give out enough information, but not so much that your profile looks cluttered!  Keep things simple and relevant. – How To Use A Personal Facebook Profile For Business

Here are the top Internet strategy, marketing and technology links for the week of August 28, 2011… [Read more...]

POEM, or Paid vs. Owned vs. Earned Media, is a strategy framework that ad buyers and planners use to segment campaigns and channels. Paid/owned/earned gave us a common working language to organize our conversations and separate the big buys from the experimental backwaters. However, in 2011, the concepts behind paid/owned/earned will break the back of your media team and send money leaking out of your strategy. The world has changed and a new media framework is needed.

Paid/owned/earned is both a classification system for media types and a relational model describing how those media types affect each other. Originally, paid/owned/earned were envisioned as discrete entities: Either you bought massive reach in a channel you controlled (paid), or you had the intern send out some tweets to your followers (earned). Now, thinking of paid and earned as two unrelated initiatives will get you in some real trouble, strategically. – Why Social Marketers Must Rethink the Paid, Earned & Owned Media Framework

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to listen to and participate in some of the most creative and inspiring conversations on topics important to women at this year’s BlogHer conference in San Diego. From discussions on the importance of media literacy, lessons in food photography and perfecting product reviews, BlogHer 2011 had it all.

After attending a few sessions on food blogging, healthy eating and creative writing, it became clear that advocating for a healthy-eating lifestyle is a successful model for influencing change. I offer this recipe for blogging your way toward social change: – Recipe for Social Change: The Write Way