I’ve been honored again to have an exclusive article of mine published by Women Grow Business. Yes, I am honored to serve on Network Solution’s Social Web Advisory Board, and Women Grow Business is a Network Solutions Publication.

But it’s not like inclusion is automatic.

So yeah, I am hereby bragging about this awesome event.

The article is about how far you should take exporting your social media “chores” as a business person. Where’s the line? I’ll give you a hint, but first let me say this.

As I’ve always said, I believe that as long as there’s not social media deity, anything the social media service you’re using doesn’t prohibit, goes. I put this under the heading that I hate getting telemarketing calls but that doesn’t mean that someone should be allowed to shoot them for doing their job. Nor does it mean the method is not sometimes effective.

Sure, I think there’s a better way, but I don’t always know all the circumstances – I can only tell you what I’ve gotten results with and seen others get results with. I can take my expertise and experience and speculate, but nothing more.

So, while my article shouldn’t be considered the Bible on Social Media Surrogacy, do know that it comes from seeing companies just like yours attempt and flourish – or fail.

Getting back to the article and what crosses the line of social media surrogacy – I think it’s fine to hire someone to make you a Twitter page, or help you form strategy.

Does everyone who want a blog have to invent, and then use WordPress in order to have a blog? No.

And why shouldn’t someone log in to your account and delete obvious spam requests for connections? Frowning upon that would be like me telling you Akismet shouldn’t filter your spam or you should answer every phone call at the receptionist’s desk yourself.

So what’s not okay? What have I seen attempted and end in failure a couple of hundred times? And why?

You’ll have to read “The Limits of Social Networking Surrogacy “to find out.

(Sound problem on video has been fixed.)

It’s a bit more clear how Google Social Search Impacts Your Business with visuals, as the video above “How Google Social Search Gives Your Social Media Efforts More Impact” will show.

Here’s a quick summary of what you’re looking at, followed by a few points I didn’t make in that video.

In the video I compare the search results without being logged in to Google to the results when I’m logged in. We take a look at the social circle page too. When you see the results live, you start to understand that just by participating in social media and including social links in your Google profile, you have given the people you are directly connected to, as well as the people they are publicly and directly connected to, another way to find you – in Google search.

Now it’s true that at least for now, these results are at the bottom of the page. But if people know they are there, and they feel that people they know are giving them personal suggestions for where to look for content, I believe they’ll make the effort to look at those results – ESPECIALLY if they haven’t found what they’re looking for in regular search.

I know I’d rather get David Bullock’s or Brent Leary’s suggestions on social media for business or social CRM than Google’s.

And what I didn’t say in the video, in case you didn’t piece it together, is that Google social search effectively gives you another shot at being exposed in searches you may never come up in on your own. There are only ten top organic spots for social media in the former, regular version of Google search.

But with these new results, you have three more chances, through social search, news and blog results.

Sure, not everyone is logged in when they search in Google. But they never had a good reason to do it before.

And that’s the wrong way to look at it anyway. I’m more focused on how, if I have 10,000 connections in Twitter, who each have about 100 connections, how much bigger my Google audience can potentially be from just that one social site addition to my social circle.

If for some reason, you aren’t already getting amazing results from your social media participation, this should be new incentive for you – more free traffic from Google is rarely a bad thing.

In a future update I’m going to do a longer free video, for newsletter subscribers and my Warrior forum friends only, about some things you’ll want to do in order to get in on this action. It won’t be in the blog, so if you want to know about it and you’re not a warrior, click through to the site and subscribe in the box below where it says “free ebook’ or send any blank email to 0-gridlock@aweber.com.

As we’ve discussed recently, there’s a lot of confusion around the issue of social media and getting a return on one’s time and social investment, to the point that some people think social media for business is ineffective.

If you’ve been thinking that lately, think about how happy you’d be if social media helped you get into your target market’s path through Google. According to a recent announcement by Google, social media may now be able to help you in ways you hadn’t ever dared to dream.

Everyone knows that social media can already help you with search in 3 ways, the first being the own 1, lease 9 method of making your mark on all of the top ten results, which I discussed in Traffic Reality about 4 years ago in great detail. The second, of course, is in getting links to your site from social media profiles or voting submissions, the third that popular submissions get rapid link boosts from multiple sources.

In October, Google started an experiment called Google Social Search, which you could opt in to, in order to see information from what Google is calling your social circle, in your search results.  Last Wednesday, they also rolled out Google Social Search Results to anyone who is logged into a Google account when they search.

What could that mean to you?

Well, if you’ve been cultivating a social presence in Twitter, for example, and become connected to 1000 people, all those people, and  their connections, will be added to your social circle, from which Google will pull extra search listings to be integrated into the current set when a user is logged in.

Of course, when you start to think that even though Google has a dominant market share, even if a full 25% of them have a Google account and are logged in, you might think that doesn’t give you much of a boost.

That’s not necessarily true. You have to look at three factors: first, are you the only person in your niche that the person searching is connected to?

If you’ve been building your social network for quality from potential clients and customers rather than only quantity, where you just follow peers, auto-follow friends and existing friends so they’ll follow you back, the answer is, probably.

Second, personal suggestions are stronger than what any search engine says. Being found in search helps dramatically. But when it comes down to the tie-breaker, folks buy from folks they know.

Third, it’s not just the people you’re connected to, it’s the people THEY are connected to as well. If you look at the video below,  it says towards the end that the people your friends are connected to are included in your extended social circle.

Well, that means you’re included in the friends of your friends as well.

How many people could that be if you have 1000 Twitter friends who have 1000 Twitter friends?

Add in the recent changes to Google Reader, the move to Google Caffeine, even Google Friend connect starts to look extremely relevant, as Chris Lang alluded to this past summer.

Of course, this can be blown out of proportion – social media is important, as is search, to traffic generation. But they are each one tool in a well rounded strategy. It’s folly to lean on any singular method to get traffic to a site to the exclusion of all others, because if your strategy fails or its effectiveness changes over time, you’re putting your entire business at risk.

So keep in mind as you strategize that you still have regular search engine optimization to contend with – your primary Google traffic focus ought to be the people who are not logged into Google, as they are the majority.

Remember also though that even they have live updates from social sites like Twitter, streamed into results.  So, like it or not, ignoring social media or denying its influence is to do so at the peril of your own business. And hyper-targeted traffic to a smaller audience is still more money in your pocket at the end of the day. Keep it all in perspective is my only warning.

If you’re not already seeing a return on your investment in social media through better links, higher traffic, and viral spread of your messages, now is the time to fix whatever is wrong with your social media traffic strategy.

In upcoming posts, we’ll be discussing more about Google’s Social Moves and what you need to do in order for your business to maximize your social media returns across the board.

A sound social media strategy is already critical for you to gain or keep your edge over competition. Now it’s factoring into search strategy as well. Search is now social. Get ready.

This past week I’ve had social media on the brain.  The more I teach about social media as part of a traffic generation or marketing plan, the more I realize how ineffective it can be in the wrong hands.

There is a famous LinkedIn discussion stating that Social Media for businessis is crap, which has even spawned its own group. The irony that it was posted in LinkedIn and generated 2000 responses doesn’t escape me, however it did make me wonder how many people really get how to use social media, and how to measure the results of what they’ve been doing.

The part of the thread I saw made some great points, and just reinforces my belief that the general thrust of marketing social media marketing is absolutely backwards and confusing the issue. Not to mention that it turns off the people  it was most meant to help.

Then again the money I make from products and services about social media is minuscule in relation to my overall income from teaching traffic generation and building traffic systems, so perhaps I’m the wrong person to ask. I’m just not in the camp that thinks social media is the Second Coming. I think it’s one tool in a huge toolbox.

But I digress.

I bring that up to be very clear that I’m not asking whether social media as a marketing tactic, traffic generation method or way to facilitate networking is a con.

Nor am I asking if the people who call themselves social media experts are con men.  As much as I make fun of people who call themselves social media experts (as opposed to those who are called social media experts by others), much of it is tongue in cheek. If you compare me to Mark Joyner, I’m not a marketing expert.

Of course that’s not a title I claim either, but you see what I’m getting at – many of the self-proclaimed experts may not know as much as I do, but they know more than they need to in order to help a newbie.

So I don’t look at titles, I look at results.

No, I’m talking about the topic of my last social media guide on Social Media Traffic  Strategies, in which I taught that the core mission of using social media was to get other people to do what you wanted – buy, subscribe, visit your site, or in spreading your content, cause others to do the same.

I didn’t stop there either, I went through a how-to process that some people feel is dangerous – it is generally frowned upon to teach people how to get other people to do what you want them to do.

Today, I was led to these thoughts by a post at Cornwall SEO, regarding Social Media Myths.

And while I don’t quite agree that social media isn’t about conversation, I will say that the extent to which it is, is to get people on your side, and engaged in your content, product, site, cause, struggle, whatever.

Why?

Because at some point you want them to do something for you.

And in black and white, stark naked on the page it looks so… Machiavellian.  On its surface it sounds so manipulative and…. cold.

There are two theories to answer this.

Theory one – it is manipulative if we’re being honest, because everything is. At the core of all our marketing actions is a selfishness. Even when we give we’re doing it to receive – even if it’s to receive that good feeling that comes from giving.

That seems like one of those “dark but true” things. But take a look at theory two:  while it’s true that we are committing acts of marketing for our own selfish gain, social media is showing us that it’s deeper than that.

Because with social media we are on the spot to be the initiator if we want results. The return good deeds seldom come as the fruit of the originating tree. So in order to be any good at social media, it can’t be all about what’s in it for me or our actions ring hollow and we end up with no connections.

Otherwise we have our choice of other, less touchy-feely, interactive ways to get similar results.

We can buy links.

We can place ads.

We can use IM or email instead of Twitter and Facebook and still convey information.

We can trade favors privately to get content spread.

And we don’t.

So I don’t think that social media is about the ultimate con job…

BUT I’ll stop short at saying it doesn’t follow some of the same rules…

27,000 visitors from StumbleUpon in one week is my personal high score for generating social media traffic. 40k is my overall best in one day.

But if you ever look at my SU profile, by all outward appearances, I’m a pretty average user.

I don’t have 1000 subscribers, like Andy Beard, who can rock my server with one stumble.

And my both my Stumbling record and number of reviews certainly pale in comparison to someone like Zaibatsu.

And yet. Whether you’re talking social media or online news site, online reputation management or offline social networks, I seem to have a knack for knowing where all the pressure points are, and where to apply – or relax – force, to get the coverage that I want, and to pass that on to my customers and clients.

You can’t buy social media traffic, with the exception of Stumble Ads and Facebook Ads, which really aren’t the same as what I’d call social media traffic – even under those circumstances, it’s just not the same.

It’s the same way you can’t buy good vibes. Either you can get them, or you can’t. You can’t pay someone to genuinely feel good about your products, services, and customer support. Though I’m sure in this economy, lots of people would fake it really well if you offered them the right price.

As I get closer to retiring, I’ve wondered- and studied, what it is that I’m doing differently , more and more frequently. What  am I dong in half an hour on StumbleUpon that has the same effect as what some others do in 40 hours?

As it began to dawn on me, I started to take notes. This excerpt is from a PDF guide I wrote about what I have logically concluded, and repeatedly tested, to be the Secret to my Success in drawing social media traffic and generating massive traffic in general. [download it | pdf].

For the next 24 hours, I’m not going to ask for your email address or anything else in order for you to read it. After the opening day sale is over, there’s no more free peeks – you’ll have to give somethin to get somethin. wink wink.

Have a Happy Weekend. If you’re in the DC metro area, remember to stop by Faith Gifts and Stationery in Laurel Mall across from the Macy’s to visit me between 11 am and 2 pm. You can corner me and ask me questions about your web site.

I hardly ever watch TV live, and today was no exception. But Mashable has a portion of today’s Twitter appearance featuring @Oprah and @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher), who reached 1 million Twitter followers, beating @CNN, so I ended up seeing the Twitter-relevant part of the show in a fairly timely fashion after all.

Here’s the video:

After the Twitter on Oprah post, Mashable posed some critical questions:

Do you think Oprah’s audience will flock to Twitter? Moreover, what will the impact of Twitter becoming so mainstream?

My comment was getting way too long, so I made a new post out of it.

Because of the way it was presented in the first of the videos from the show, I think yes, some of Oprah’s followers will flock to Twitter.

Not in a mass migration of millions, but certainly the type of thing we saw with people who joined Twitter to follow the election, and in particular, @BarackObama. What Ashton said about the ability for one person to go up against the news is appealing to a lot of people from business, personal and activist perspectives.

(And yes, only 6% of CNN’s audience uses Twitter, but that’s still about 2 million people. Four years ago, how else would any celebrity talk directly to an audience that size in their own voice, at a cost of near zero?)

Will they all expect to get a million followers? No, and they don’t need to, but the opportunity to have your voice heard, to be able to influence decision-making in an area you care about, or thought leadership on a topic you’re interested in, is a powerful thing.

The second question was even more interesting to me. What’s the impact of Twitter becoming mainstream? Of course dollar signs danced in my head. I’m a Capitalist little piggy, what do you want from me?

Seriously speaking, once Twitter and other Social Web properties go mainstream, we lose things and we gain things, as always.

And yes, one of those things is a larger audience to indirectly (!) peddle our wares to, for the business person. It means more people to get to join our causes to the activist. It means more of our friends from the non-virtual world may be reached via Twitter, which is really powerful since we can take Twitter with us on our cell phones.

We may lose the intimacy of the Twitter community, but we’ve been losing that bit by bit since Twitter began, and people started using it for different things and in different ways than some of us were used to, particularly this last year. It’s logical – the more people there are surrounding any given thing, the less intimate it becomes. It’s possible to feel and experience intimacy as part of a crowd when you’re one of many thousands or millions, but it’s more plausible the fewer those numbers are.

The thing to remember about Twitter though, is that you’re in control of the volume of the signal and the ratio of signal to noise.

You decide who to follow.
You decide who to return-follow.
You decide how long you’re on Twitter and to what end.

Sure, you can’t force people not to follow you but you can block them. And since the people who care if and why you follow know they have to keep you interested to retain you as a subscriber, they work harder to give you what you want. In the end, that’s good for everyone, I think.

People who we believe don’t “get it” will ultimately fail at capturing our attention. We’ll be inconvenienced by their attempt to overwhelm with noise but not for long.

Besides, as long as they leave Favrd alone, we’ll all know who the cool people to follow are, right?

OMG DO THEY KNOW ABOUT FAVRD????

(Just kidding.) What do you think is going to happen? Respond below or click the retweet button, and I’ll follow the discussion back to Twitter.

I’m back again, continuing the Facebook Business Basics series.  

If you went to my Facebook page, you saw two videos about how you can find people on Facebook who may be interested in you and let them come back to your site. This video talks about  what to do once you have someone viewing your profile.

Okay, so when we last left our discussion, I was talking about what’s considered spammy at Facebook, and why spam at Facebook will ultimately fail. That leaves us with the question – how do you get people in Facebook to visit your site without spamming them?

How can you increase your exposure at Facebook without seeming like a spammer?

As I’ve said before, if you want to blatantly market on Facebook, you have a several options you can exercise without looking like a spammer.

1. Get a Facebook Business Page,
2. Buy a Facebook Ad,
3. Participate in or Create a Group,
4. or Leverage Your Profile.

Now, I’d never discourage you from doing any of these, in fact, you should do them all.

But I’m not going to write about them all here today. The first two are pretty self-explanatory. You create a business page – if you know how to build and manage a community, you’re all set. (If you don’t, still a discussion for another day.) And who doesn’t know how to buy an ad? Yes, there are more effective ways to use ads on Facebook, but at the end of the day, the basics don’t need to be covered.

Networking through groups and leveraging though? Not as common-sense based as you might think.

For now let’s take groups. It’s an easier topic, and leveraging your profile will probably take an entire day of videos, which I’ll start on tonight or tomorrow.

The reasoning behind joining groups on Facebook is simple: groups are mini-communities that have discussion boards, and often links, photo and video sharing areas, where people have agreed that they have a common interest, and want to exchange information about it.

Let’s say you teach people how to turn a $39 book into a $300 info-product with videos and audio CDs. You search groups and you find a book marketing group for authors.

Awesome, perfect market – if they’re marketing their books, they want to make more money, and if they want to make more money, your program is custom-made for them. There’s 2000 people in this group and you can just count the money flowing in…

Here is where most people go wrong. They go into a social group with an ad mentality, and start posting what are essentially, ads for their products on the wall (the general guestbook type area) or in the discussions. And it will backfire every time.

“But Tinu”, you might be thinking, if it doesn’t work, “why do people keep doing it”?

I’ll answer that, but first let’s look at why it doesn’t work.

The fastest revelation will come from the dating world. Ladies, please raise your hand if you would respond favorably to the following situation:

A guy walks up to you and says, “Hi, you’re cute, let’s have sex now.”

Anyone?

Yeah. If there’s 100 ladies in the room, maybe, MAYBE one chick has her hand up.

If I say, all desperate women put your hands down, that will drop to zero.

So why do people do it? The same reason why one in one hundred people respond. Desperation and/or just plain ignorance. Not stupidity, mind you. They just honestly don’t know the right way to do it.

And the desperate customer, you just don’t want to have. No matter what you offer them, they’ll claim it doesn’t work and ask for a refund. So, really, it doesn’t work at all.

Then what does work?

Value.

You will hear me saying this on the videos over and over again – add value, bring value, create value, enhance value. Value and being laid back.

Everyone wants the folks at Home Depot to help them buy a light fixture, but no one wants to be sold a lamp.

We’ll get into specifics in the next articles and videos, in just a few hours. Right now I have to stop for….

Family time. See you soon.

Find more videos like this on Website Promotion for Regular Folks

(You may need to click through to the original post if the video isn’t showing up. You can also click the lower right corner of the video to go full screen.)

Technically speaking, where does the experience of Facebook largely take place? See why you can get better results posting to your own profile (which updates the news feed that goes out to your connections) rather than publishing on other people’s profiles.

I’ve got lots more Facebook video for you, to view them just go to my Facebook fan page in the videos section. The next three videos in the series give you an airplane view of what you need to do to be in the conversational and activity stream of information we just talked about.

Why do you want to be in that stream? Because that’s where the interaction is happening.

photo credit: pbyrne

If you understand this, truly understand this, about social media, you’ll never be confused about how to benefit wildy from it.

Notice I didn’t just say “get traffic from it”.

The One and Only True Power of Social Media is that it is completely based on getting approval from others.

So to understand how to use that information, answer this question for yourself: in a situation where popularity is driven by approval, who is the most powerful person?

Hint: It’s not the person who Gets the most approval.

Ask me below and I’ll give you another hint. A big one. For free, but I will only deliver it in private. And if you guess correctly or figure it out, I’ll let you know that too.

Within the next seven days, I’ll write in public about the answer. You’ll have to figure out for yourself which writing is the answer though.

The more I think about what some people are doing wrong with social media, the more it occurs to me what other people are doing right, and how it can be emulated. I’m also realizing that I’m assuming that people know how to relate to each other, but that’s not necessarily true either.

Think about it – often, not always but quite a bit, people are congregating online to avoid offline encounter. It’s not always because they are shy or anti-social. Sometimes being online is more efficient than, say, having ten people fly out or conference call for a meeting.

Allan Cockerill started discussing what he says is the central issue to social media interactions:

These are social networking sites that we are talking about, and networking means relationship!.

If I don’t know you, why should I bookmark something for you?

And if we are friends in the online sense of the word, a string of links via instant message isn’t a friendship, it’s a dictatorship!

I would agree. You really have to think about what builds a relationship when you’re entering into these interactions, because if you enter into real connections with people, in the long run, this is what will work in your favor the most.

The difficult piece of the puzzle is two-fold.

1- We all have our idea about  the acceptable parameters of relating, on or offline, and,

2- Some elements of even a casual relationship akin to friendship are more difficult to imitate in an online-only connection.

Even if you don’t feel  that an ongoing link with another person in the online world is a friendship, by definition it is a type of relationship. The key to building better social media relationships then, is in remembering how certain types of casual relationships are formed, duplicating that in a suitable way online, and then show how they continue.

And we’ll ponder that next.