It seems like everyday I hear about a new social networking tool and read another article about how to increase my Twitter following or maximize my Facebook presence.  You can’t be everywhere but how in the world do you go about choosing the right networks to participate in? I have found there are 3 questions to ask myself when choosing where to spend my efforts online:

• What are these networks already talking about? - Most every social network has some sort of search tool. Plug in your keywords to see if your industry is already being talked about.  Sign up immediately and join the conversation if they are.  Don’t forget to include your Company name in the search.  Someone else may have already started the conversation about you.
• Where are your competitors? – If your competitors have a presence there, you should too. To find out where they are, go to their website or blog and look for links like “follow us on Twitter” or “join our LinkedIn Group”. You should also head to some of the post popular social networking sites and see if your competitors have created profiles/accounts/pages.  Be sure to check for activity in groups and discussion boards like in Facebook groups and in LinkedIn Answers.
• Where are your customers? – I think the best place to start is with your customers. Their activities should most closely mimic those of your prospects.  You can find out where they are by a quick survey to your customers.  Do you have a customer advisory board?  Use them to help you get started.  And there is always the hard way (not really all that hard but rather time consuming) which is to go out to different networks and search to see if your customers are already there.

Keep in mind that social networking is not right for every industry.  You definitely want to do your homework up front so you can be stategic in your social networking lead gneration.  If you feel like you are a little ahead of your time for your industry, I would start with something like LinkedIn.  It is the most professional of the networks out there and is kind of the gateway drug to other social networks.

Do you keep track of what is being said about your company online?   If you don’t, you should.  I am certain that the folks at Mzinga were shocked by what Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Analyst, said about them in his post on Monday.  Thankfully they were monitoring and able to respond.  He chose one of the most public forums at his disposal to publicly bash the company.  He says, “Why this post? It’s my obligation to have my clients best interest in mind, and this is the fastest way for me to reach them, by using the tools where we’re already connected.”  I find that a little hard to believe.  My guess is that email is the fastest way to reach his clients, not a public blog post.

I have a real problem with anyone using a public forum to bash a company before actually speaking with someone at the company directly or at least reaching out to the company directly.  Why do we feel in this online world that we can post something to Twitter, LinkedIn, or our own blog about another company without ever having taken the time to find out if our accusation is true or to resolve conflict we may personally have.  Jeremiah obviously has connections to the folks at Mzinga. Why not pick up the phone and chat with them first to confirm or deny the rumors he has been hearing.  When they gave him the answer that they would be making a public announcement in a week (in response to his tweets, not his direct reaching out), why couldn’t he wait?  Or if he felt this was truly something his clients needed to know, why not inform them privately?  (Sorry if I have gone on a bit of a tangent, but I fell very strongly about this subject.)

Jeremiah did respond with an apology on his blog.  But like one commenter said, “After reading that “apology”, it wreaks of: ‘I have been asked by my employer to write something, but do not believe that I am in the wrong.’”  I have to agree.  Read the post and apology and decide for yourself.

Lessons learned:

• Track what others are saying about you online – Google alerts is not enough.  Make sure you are tracking what is being said on Twitter (set up an RSS feed of your company’s name on Twitter Search) and LinkedIn.
• Respond quickly and pleasantly to everyone, analyst/blogger/customer/prospect
  
• If you don’t have something nice to say you shouldn’t say anything at all – I think we could all use reminding of this wonderful phrase our mothers used to say to us.

We launched our new search optimized website yesterday.  Thank you Leigh Anne for all your hard work!  After many months of research and lots of copywriting, we are all set and ready for the inbound leads to start pouring in.

As part of the new website launch we are also doing a PR blast.  Anyone that knows me well knows I’m not a PR person.  I get that it has its place but PR has always been very difficult to measure.  So instead of perfecting my PR skills, I’ve almost always outsourced this function.

But now, with social media and some pretty simple analytics we can see where we our visitors are coming from so we’ve built a PR program around the new launch.  To get over my dislike of writing news releases I’ve convinced myself that we’re doing these to support our SEO efforts as well as our overall awareness goals.

Here’s a few tips we used when drafting these announcements:

• Writing for our audience – we want to be sure that our audience understands our news and sees the value in what we are announcing, this is key to supporting out SEO efforts.  Important thing to remember here is the news comes first, SEO 2nd.  You have to make sure you don’t confuse or dilute your news by trying to overuse keywords or keyword phrases.

• Decide on your keywords before your start writing – this will help you make sure you are writing with these in mind.  Here, Leigh Anne keeps an updated list of our top keywords and keyword phrases on our white board, this way we’re looking at them every time we go to write something.  Trying to plug in your keywords afterwards will cause problems like I mentioned above.

• Links, links, links – be sure to link keywords in your press release back to pages on your website.  Best strategy includes already having optimized these pages with the same keywords.

• Optimize the important stuff – Be sure you are including your keywords in the most important places – your headline, your subhead, your boilerplate and your first paragraph.

• Press Release Grader – once again, a cool free tool from the folks at HubSpot.  Just copy and paste your press release in and it will grade the release based on language, content and SEO.  Don’t worry if you score a little low at first, it will give you tips for improvement.

• PRWeb – it’s what we use here – it’s worth it to upgrade (we use SEO visibility package).  You will be able to:
  • add links
  • add images
  • include in your own RSS feed
  • add Technorati tags
  • use SEO tools and statistics

We have seen some really great results since we started optimizing our releases.  From one release alone, we got over 100 new leads in a day.  It definitely makes the extra effort worth it.

This tip comes from our very own Marketing and Sales Operations Manager, Lauren Kincke.  Lauren is responsible for integrating and managing our marketing and sales systems.  She spends most of her time working to make these systems and processes help us be more effective and efficient.  She is an integral part in our closed loop marketing and sales system.

What do you arm your sales people with? A phone, a computer and a database of prospects (or worse, a phone book)?  How do you prepare them for what is to come, the rejection, or better still, the prospect who wants to buy?   How do we better equip our sales team and enable them to reach and exceed their goals? These are questions we recently decided to tackle at ReachForce…one of our answers came in the form of training.

Our typical training regime used to be comprised solely of a full-day quarterly kickoff.  During that time we would run through a few “sales” skills specific sessions, some background on our industry, and a piece on what we do and how we do it (for newbies).   Part team-building, part skills training, it was an exhausting day and by the end of it some of our more ADD inclined employees had mentally checked out.  Recently we decided to make some changes.  First, instead of only hosting training sessions on a once a quarter basis, each of our weekly sales meetings would be host to a mini-session led by a sales rep.  Second, our quarterly sales training meeting would be shortened to a little over half a day.

Some of the topics that have been assigned out (and presented) by our sales team are:

• Best Practices: Preparing for a first call – items to research/points to know prior to the call
• Overcoming Objections
• Winning Closing Techniques
• Managing Your Time Effectively
• Creating ‘Date Certain’ Decisions
• Call to action emails
• Bringing a proposal to life
• Upping the average sales price

Each of our reps was assigned a date and a topic.  There aren’t really parameters around what they prepare, some have used PowerPoint, some have just spoken and some have created handouts.  I can’t say that we’ve measured our results, but I can say that our reps have been able to put these things into practice as quickly as they are being taught.  One of the greatest things about this training is that it is led in a peer to peer setting.  We felt it very important to remove senior management from these meetings, thus alleviating the fear of looking stupid or asking questions.   Only our floor managers stay in the room with the sales reps, because our floor managers interact with our reps on a peer level, so they teach and learn alongside their fellow sales reps.

The topics listed above are just a few that we have come up with, our program certainly will continue to have fuel and the momentum of continuing education should have a great impact for us.  What kind of topics would your reps benefit from?

For those of you conversing out in the Twittersphere on your company’s behalf, here’s a little tip to leverage your web site visitors to get the word out about you on Twitter.  Create a simple link on your home page that links to the following url:

http://twitter.com/home?status=[whatever+status+you+want]

Be sure to replace the [whatever+status+you+want] with, well, exactly that.  For example:

http://twitter.com/home?status=Checking+out+ReachForce

To be safe, you’ll want to use the “+” character in place of any spaces in your status text.  When someone clicks on your new Tweet This link, it will take them to their Twitter login page and then automatically populate the “What are you doing?” box with the text that you put after the “status=” part of the link.  Below is an example of what happens when clicking on the link above:

Now that you have researched your keywords and have a nice long list, it is time to optimize the pages of your website.  You want to optimize each page for up to 5 keywords.  I use HubSpot’s Keyword Grader to keep me on track to use keywords that have a good number of monthly searches and are not so competitive that I will never have a shot at ranking well.  For some of your interior pages, a long tail keyword strategy will work well to reach a targeted audience (but that is a post for another day).

I recommend making a list of each page on your site and then choosing what keywords you are going to optimize for on each.  Using a spreadsheet will help you keep track of all the changes you need to make.  Here is a list of all of the columns I would create:

• Page Description (optional) – this is only for you to describe the page you are optimizing
• Existing URL – the current URL
• New URL – Here is your first opportunity to tell the search engine the most important keywords.  company.com/productname is not as powerful as company.com/your-keyword-here.  Dashes help the search engine know when to break the words up.  Note: if your product name is something that is searched often then you may want to leave it in the URL but for most SMB’s this is not the case.  Be sure to keep it short, this is definitely not the place to keyword stuff.
• Page Title – This is the text that appears in the (typically) blue bar of your browser window (and in the tab for that page).  Here is another place to add keywords rather than just list your company anme and products.  Keep in mind, the fewer the keywords the more strength each has and Google gives more weight to the first keywords than to the last.  Also, remember that humans will be reading these too.This is also the bold text that appears on the search engine results page.  Make it compelling to click on and unique for each page on your site.
• <h1> tag – These will show up on the page as your heading but in the html need to be properly tagged as <h1>.  Again the fewer the words, the more weight each receives.  Use target keywords to tell the search engines and humans what the page is about.
• Meta Keywords – these are not seen on the web page itself, only in the html.  You can list 8-10 keywords separated by commas.You may consider including your target keywords plus common misspellings of those keywords.  Meta keywords are not of much importance to Google but are more important for Yahoo and Ask. I find this is also a good place to keep track of the keywords I want to use as I update the content on the page.
• Meta Description – This is a 1-2 sentence description of the content present on the page.It is also hidden on the page and only seen in the html.  However, this is the description under the page title used in search engine results.  Be sure to include target keywords because the keywords searched on will be bolded in the description.  There is a 150 character limit on what the search engines will show.

I cannot makes changes to my site on my own, so my web developer was extremely grateful that I had laid out all of my changes in a spreadsheet.  It really helped him as we redesigned the entire site.  You can also implement these strategies as small changes one by one especially if you have a content management system at your fingertips.  Be sure to resubmit your sitemap to Google as you may changes so it knows to crawl your site.

Special thanks to Karen Rubin at HubSpot for helping me with my own website optimization.  It goes live next week!

In the spirit of my previous post about the signal-to-noise ratio element of Twitter, the edgy, thought-provoking site brainz.org has “a completely unscientific (yet accurate) look at social sites” that lives up to its title.  While the article doesn’t dissect the actual content of the various popular social networks, it does provide a candid analysis of the types of people that are hanging out on sites like Myspace versus Twitter versus LinkedIn, etc.  My personal almost-spewed-diet-coke-on-my-monitor favorite is their classification for 12% of Myspace users, which I will leave for your personal perusal.

There is a litany of other “20 reasons for…” and “30 ways to…” analyses on the site in Drudge Report-style simplicity that are pretty interesting as well, including a fun walk down memory lane with “12 Dead Technology Advertisements“, which conjured up memories of the old big three online service providers: Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL.  Ahh, the good old days.

Our marketing team recently put together a quick survey to see what their peers are doing these days. In fact, if you haven’t taken the survey, please do. We’ll be sure to share the results with you.

What we’re seeing so far is a lot of people wondering how others are using social media as part their marketing mix and how they are measuring these different activities. Since the world of social media is still new to most of us, I thought I’d share with you how we are incorporating it here at ReachForce.

We are using traditional programs to fuel our direct marketing efforts – newsletters, email marketing, customer campaigns and thought leadership content programs, knowing that prospects engage in different ways. We are also reaching them through the new social media tools available to us today.

Here’s how we’re doing it today:

• We’re making sure our Twitter following knows when we have a new blog post
• We’re very active on The B2B Lead. We’re now at over 200 tips for B2B Marketing and Sales teams
• We’re also out there reading other B2B Marketing blogs and commenting on them
• We’re answering questions in LinkedIn and if we have a tip about the topic on our blog, we’re pointing them back
• We’ve recently updated our company email signatures to include our blog and twitter accounts

While I’m not sure how to measure specifics on any of this, what I am sure of is that by adding social media to our mix of lead generation tactics we’re seeing:

• A dramatic increase in inbound leads
• More traffic on our blog and hundreds of people a month jumping from our blog to reachforce.com for thought leadership content
• More pick up and recognition from industry thought leaders

Have you found other ways to track your social media efforts back to lead generation?

Are your tweets optimized for Twitter Search?  Last week, I attended the Eloqua User Group event in Austin.  Somehow the conversation ended up on Twitter.  One of the Eloqua folks asked the group, “are you using Twitter?”  I was shocked when only those of us from ReachForce and Eloqua raised their hands (but that rant is for another day).  Steve Woods, CTO and co-founder of Eloqua, was there speaking to us about his new book, Digital Body Language.  He said uses an almost SEO strategy for his tweets.  I would call it more of a TSO (Twitter Search Optimization) approach.

If you are following a large group of people, it is almost impossible to read every tweet in your feed.  More and more people have started using TweetDeck and RSS feeds from Twitter Search to stay up to date on what people are saying about their company or certain keywords.  Following that logic, it makes sense to try to include keywords in your tweets so they will actually be read by the right people.

If you want to employ this strategy, you need to know two things: what other people are tweeting about and keywords relevant to your business (hopefully, you already have this one figured out).  Play around on Twitter Search to see how often your keywords are used (this is also a good way to find new people to follow).  You will find that certain keywords are used more frequently and in a more relevant way.  Keep a running list so you can be sure to use those keywords in your tweets.

I would love to hear from anyone else about how to use Twitter more effectively.  And if you’re not already, be sure to follow all of us on The B2B Lead:

• @ahawthorne
• @LAWallace
• @ReachForce

I don’t share my vacation pictures with everyone I know in real life so why do it in the social world? Jason would not have shared this picture with everyone in our office but it was out of his hands.  If you believe in complete transparency online, then this is not the post for you.  For the rest of you out there, this post will help show you how to manage your Facebook profile so you share only what you want to share with each of your friends.

Step 1: Login into Facebook and click on Settings -> Privacy Settings (it is in the top right).

Step 2: Click on Profile.  From here you can control who can see what on your profile.  The default setting allows your friends and those in your network to see almost everything.  For most of us, one of our networks includes the city we live in.  This means anyone in your city can see your full profile include pictures, videos and more.  If you want to specify exactly who can and cannot see your photos for example, in the drop down menu next to Photos Tagged of You click Customize… From this pop up you can select the option Some Friends and then list each friend you want to be able to see your pictures.

Step 3: Go back to the Privacy Settings page and click on Search.  This page allows you to control who can find you via the search feature in Facebook.  It is also automatically configured to create a public profile that can be found by search engines.

Step 4: Go back to the Privacy Settings page and click on News Feed and Wall.  Here you can choose what stories are published to your news feed to be seen by your friends.  There is a second tab on this page called Social Ads.  Click there and you can choose whether or not you want to appear in social ads.  Social ads are those that pair your profile picture with an application you use or page that you are a fan of.  By default, these will only be seen by your friends.

Step 4: Go back to the Privacy Settings page and click on Applications.  The page that you will see shows how applications interact with your information.  If you click on the second tab, Settings, you can control what informaton can be seen by your friends through applications they use.

Step 5: Go back to the Privacy Settings page.  The final option available is to Block People.  I only friend people I know, so I have never had to use this feature, but it is nice to know it is there if I ever do need it.  Feels a little like a virtual restraining order.

I love that Facebook allows us to easily share pictures and what is going on in our lives.  Without Facebook, everyone wouldn’t be able to see me hanging out with David Meerman Scott.  However, I like being able to maintain some privacy online.  This guy could have avoided being called a fairy.  Would your boss be so cool?