Google Buzz is the latest update from Google.  Went live yesterday, looks to be Google’s effort to break into the social media market.  I personally tried it out a bit, it ties directly to Gmail.

It does do updates regularly, and appears to share the information with anyone who follows you.  A lot of people have commented that it looks to be an imitation of Twitter.  The nice thing is that you can connect to other sites, to reduce all the different social machines that need maintenance.

The default for me was to activate sharing with Picasa and Google Reader (I didn’t select either of these).  The other options available are visible in the image above.  The blurred domain is a site I set up on BlogSpot/Blogger through the same account.  With Twitter, it will read your Tweets, but from what I can tell it only reads to Buzz, not vice versa.

Looks like Google’s still ironing out the kinks on this, I’m sure plenty of people will be giving feedback for it.  For now I find it nice since I don’t have the mass of content that is dealt out on Twitter, and so far it appears to still stay within actual social connections (and hasn’t spread into the marketing machine yet).  So every “buzz” I’ve gotten so far has been from a friend, making an actual comment on life instead of a business telling me how good their merchandise is.

I don’t know if it’s automatic for all Gmail users, but from the amount of people I’ve seen pop on with it, I’m guessing it is.  It’s just another option underneath the Inbox, and it will show updates for some “buzz”es (but not all) within the Inbox.  It appears it will post the updates for anything you have contributed to to your Inbox, with the little Buzz logo next to it.

We’ll see if it’s something that gets used a lot or not, should be able to tell within a few weeks how well it’ll work.

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Doing SEO for an e-commerce site is tricky.  Almost all the pages are virtually identical, so it’s hard to determine how to do standard SEO for these pages.  Here are five quick tips to help you do some solid SEO for your e-commerce site (a shortened version of the excellent explanation on Search Engine Land):

1. Do solid SEO on product pages. Focusing on these will help draw traffic to each specific product.  Standard SEO rules apply here – especially remember the title tag, as that will make a big difference.  And keep it search engine friendly – using a lot of Flash or something else the spiders don’t like is not recommended.
2. Proper categorization. Every product fits into specific categories.  Making sure you use this as best you can will help.  If selling a television, keep all categories in mind, such as a brand name, the size of the television, the type of tv, so forth.  The more detailed your categories, the easier to find (good SEO).
3. Avoid duplication. Having duplicate pages is a big SEO no-no.  If you have your URLs structured based on categories, then you can often have each category branching through other categories to a single product, resulting in different URLs but the same content (duplicate pages).  To avoid this, you can use parameters (the same URL, different arguments) or even just 301 the duplicate pages all to one single product page.
4. Use the on-site search engine. To start, having a good on-site search engine is highly recommended for all internet marketing purposes.  If you have one – checking the queries people put into it are easy ways to see what people are searching for that couldn’t find it naturally.  This is a big “SEO THIS” sign.
5. Social media! Yes, get on board.  By letting people comment on your products or share them with others through social media, you can often get more inbound links than you might expect.  Just make it easy for users and visitors to be able to share, whether it be through on-site widgets or a site blog, or even profiles on social media sites.

These tips will help your products on your e-commerce site be found, both through social media and through the search engines.  These tips are a revised version of the excellent explanation by Aaron Bradley on Search Engine Land.

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This is kind of older news (as in more than four days old), but you may have seen Facebook’s new privacy settings on your account.  It’s caused a bit of a hubbub for some people – there’s concern about private information being available to the major search engines.  Is there truth to this?

Well – yes.  And the settings they asked you about were just a touch on the full privacy settings.  If you care about what’s freely available to the world, you’ll want to step in to the main privacy screen.  Here there are additional settings that Facebook didn’t display on that first update on the settings.

And there’s even more to it.  Danny Sullivan has gone through it all in explicit detail on his blog, in this listing.  I’d highly recommend going in and checking it out, to make sure you’re happy with what Facebook is showing the world.

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It looks like holiday shopping this year has moved even more heavily online.  As companies are realizing that more people are actively searching online for their commercial searches, they’re starting to see the value of search engine optimization.

Because of this, the IT industry is starting to anticipate a high demand for SEO skills in 2010.  (Yay for us professional SEOs!)  In Great Britain alone, demand for SEO and online marketing skills went up by 40% last year.

The skills of SEO, pay per click management, social media marketing and web design are all being looked for, ideally in a combined package.  SourceWire has all the details in an article based on this story in the UK.  (And I have to add a little something something here – Tulsa Marketing Online does in fact do SEO, PPC, social media and web design.  Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.)

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Social media’s been the big thing lately.  Mainly because it’s something almost everyone uses.  Not that many people know what search engine optimization is and the difference between on page optimization and off page optimization, or what PageRank sculpting is.  But you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t have a Facebook account.

Well, social media is very effective for business promotion – but the key to using it well is knowing how to make it tie into SEO.  Doing good social media is building relationships, and this fits in with SEO by making sure that these quality relationships help build your site and site pages’ reputation (in a good way, hopefully).

Adam Stafford from TechRadar has a great article on how these two things tie together and how to make them work, plus some great examples on how some companies have made them work well.

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For those of you who don’t know who Danny Sullivan is – one, if you’re an SEO, shame on you.  Two, if you want to learn about SEO, learn who he is.

At any rate, Danny Sullivan is one of the most respected SEOs on the planet.  He knows his stuff.  He works diligently to learn about search engines (in particular, Google) and how they operate.

SEO is something that is becoming more and more well-known, as people and businesses realize this is how sites are to be found online.  Because of this, there are a lot of gimmicky SEO plugs (“Pay only $200/month and 1st page listings in 90 days!” types of stuff) going around.  They really annoy me.

Apparently Best Buy is getting in on this.  And they’re including social media in their “be found online” mix.  It’s through a company called “CloudProfile”.  And it’s FREE.

The best part?  They pitched to (of all people) Danny Sullivan.  And he’s taking them up on their offer.  See his word on it here.

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Social media is the newest online wave of excitement.  Everyone is getting into it, and a lot of people are wondering – how can I make it work for business?  Well, there are several ways to do it, but not all of them are functional.

ZippyCart has put together a good list of specifics you can use to guide your business through Facebook, Twitter, and more.  Look through them to help improve your business social media.

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Nowadays the web is getting more and more attention.  People are realizing that businesses are made by being found online.  The methods of doing that are through creating good web pages, having an online presence through blogs, social media, online advertising.  And tied into almost all of this is search engine optimization.

If a business uses any of the other means (social media, blogging, site design), then it all comes down to wanting to be found online, to gain a presence.  And this ties into SEO.  Whether or not you realize it, if you have a Facebook account, you’re helping one site or another with search engine optimization.  Every link you post makes a difference.  On Twitter, any link posted can have an impact on visitors and the search engine listings.

Anything online will make a difference in SEO.  The key to doing good search engine optimization on purpose (as opposed to on accident, as a surprising number of sites have done) is to continue learning what changes impact the search engines.  As it is now, social media is starting to have an effect.  But that doesn’t mean you just need to put one post and you’ll shoot up three pages.  The trick is learning how it all ties together.

A good SEO stays educated on many aspects of the internet.  Just because you learn the basics doesn’t mean you’ll still be an expert SEO four years later (or even one year later).  The internet is a changing beast, and knowing these changes can make a big difference in your placement online.

And if you choose to hire someone else to do the search engine optimization for you, make sure that you’re happy with how educated they are on these changes.  Learning the basics of SEO is easy – but mastering it is more than just a few steps above that.

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Social media is the next step in the evolution of the internet.  This is important because it closes more gaps between individuals, eliminating the old hurdles such as distance, cost of communication, age, gender, stereotyping.  The internet is slowly bringing many of these barriers down.

Whether or not this is good or bad may be argued, but in the eyes of an internet marketer (such as you and me), there is much good because of this.  Social media establishes a means of communication unlike anything else.  And the reason it differs so much is because of the personal level is introduces.  Through social media, you meet *individuals*, not companies, not groups, but specific people.  People socialize best by meeting individually, not by reading a statement another person wrote, or by listening to a recording made.  Social media is all about getting closer to specific individuals.  This allows a closer relationship, trust is endowed, many opportunities arise.

To get started with social media, there are many options.  You can set up a Twitter account, the one-line version of blogging.  You can go a longer route, set up the oldest version of what could be considered social media, a blog.  Create a Facebook account and find contacts.  Whichever way you choose, the key is to initiate a connection point.
- If it’s a blog, it should be one that has a very open invitation for comments, it should link to other blogs or other social media sites you are using.
- If it’s Twitter, find other contacts.  Find people whose tweets you are interested in, follow them, then find who they’re following.  Eventually people will start following you, as well.
- If it’s Facebook, search for people who are like-minded.  If you’re specifically wanting individuals knowledgeable in your market, search for the authorities for your market.  You’ll find a lot of people use Facebook – you should find many.

The key is to use more than just one social media source.  And it’s good to try getting into as many as possible, not just for the benefits of social media marketing, but also to establish your name in each of these sites.  If you’re a big name in internet marketing, especially, as other people will take advantage of using a well-known name in social media if you don’t do it first.

To get a good idea of what social media sites to hit, here are some of the major ones:
- Facebook.com
- Twitter.com
- MySpace.com
- LinkedIn.com
- YouTube.com
- Blogger.com
- Wordpress.com
- Friendster.com
- Classmates.com
- LiveJournal.com
- Flickr.com
- Flixster.com
- StumbleUpon.com
Keep in mind, some of these are very specific to market types.  You will not use Flixster in the same way you would use Classmates.com, but for internet marketing, they all have their uses.  From a marketing perspective, the key to using social media is to select the appropriate one for YOUR MARKET.  There are plenty of social networking sites, you can find many more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

And this is the best way to get a good amount of followers for any one particular website.  Use the social media site in the way it was designed.  To get a spike in followers, viral marketing is key.  To get a gradual growth, you must establish yourself as an authority figure for something specific within your market.  For example, for YouTube, for viral marketing, you would need to create something that has immediate attention capture ability, something that viewers would want to pass on.  For the gradual growth of followers, be consistent.  Put quality videos out that handle questions for that market, and do it consistently.

Realize that to get a good number of followers, you can’t be limited to just one social media network.  If you use Twitter, link to your Twitter page from your blog (Eben Pagan is a fan of this technique), from Facebook, from MySpace, from YouTube.  Put your YouTube video posts in your blog, put them on your Facebook account.  The key is cross-linking social networking sites.  This is one of the most effective ways to grow your business online.

Now in order to turn this into a money-making machine, the marketing must be done in the same way you gain followers – by using the social networking site as it was designed.  If you put up raw sales copy on Twitter, you will likely have a lot of people unfollowing you.  That is abusing the system.  For Twitter, talk about how you’re excited about your new endeavor, and the landmark accomplishments you complete as you finish them.  If your excitement is genuine, it can be contagious.  If you have anything to share related to your progress that is linkable, post it!  When you finish, share it as though you are sharing it with your FRIENDS, not with your market’s customer-base.  This can also be done on Facebook, MySpace, and even YouTube.  Use YouTube to make a video log of your progress.  Post the videos on your blog.

To cross-link different social media sites, keep your eyes out for relevant “widget” apps, or “plugins”.  In this way you can have your last tweet on Twitter show up as your status on Facebook (Twitter plugin), or have a blog entry appear on your Facebook page (using Mirror Blog).

To see how effective social marketing can be, look at any of the major internet marketers.  Jeff Walker used Twitter to follow his PLF 2.1 launch and answered questions about it on Twitter (a nice tie in with use of social proof) (http://twitter.com/JeffWalker).  Frank Kern uses his blog heavily for his product launches, and uses the comments section for social marketing nicely (http://masscontrolsite.com/blog/).

Keep in mind this is only for the internet marketing market – these techniques can be used for ANY market to make contact with individuals, and communicate directly with them.

Other resources to help your social media marketing:
- Flock: The Social Web Browser – makes it easier to have the major social networking sites quick and handy
- Delicious – Been around, but a quick way to see what people are looking at
- Technorati – Essentially a bookmarking site for blogs
- Digg – Still one of the internet authorities – shows sites that are socially approved, or “dugg”
- Reddit – Similar to Digg, another social networking biggie
- OnlyWire – Sends links of your choice to several well-known bookmarking sites and social networking sites
- Ning – A free online service to create your own social website
- Squidoo – A very powerful site to connect to several different sites/resources, either personal or business, using “lenses”

Social media marketing is still growing.  Learn to use it in the way it’s intended, and you can have social marketing grow your business in a huge way, as well as connect directly with many people involved and interested in your market.

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