Monthly Archives: May 2012

Get Found on Social Media – Part 4 – Real-Time Social Search

In our previous post, Get Found on Social Media – Part 3 – SEO, we continued our series on how you can make it easier for people to find your social media efforts and talked about basic Search Engine Optimization techniques. In this post, we take a look an emerging trend – Real-Time Social Search – can help get you found on social media.

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Real-Time Social Search

As the social computing phenomenon gains momentum, search engine experts are increasingly talking about the growing importance of real-time search, or social search, by which they mean search that can tell you what’s happening on social media sites. Google recently revamped their search to add a real-time component, and has reached agreements to index Twitter[1] and Facebook[2] content.

Some pundits worry that the primacy of traditional search engines like Google, and the cottage SEO industry they support, may be threatened by the rise of social search, wherein recommendations and referrals from within social networking communities outpaces the referrals from Google, et al.

For example, after the 2009 Oscars, celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton recorded a single-day high of 13.9 million page views, and the site’s top traffic source was Facebook.[3] So what, you say? Well, Google is generally the top referrer for pretty much any site — the undisputed king. That Facebook dethroned King Google as the top referrer for a popular site was big news, and demonstrates the changing nature of search.

Google itself recognizes this trend, and has introduced social search features to its traditional search listings, as we discussed in the post Advanced Google Searching for Social Media. To summarize from that post, if you belong to the popular social media sites, and if Google can identify you (by you logging in to one of their services, like Google Docs, for example), you may be presented with search results ranked based on information from your social network.


Get Found on Social Media – Part 4 is the 65th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 208. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?Social Sites DefinedWhy Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

Next up: Dealing with Negatives


[1] ReadWriteWeb’s article on indexing Twitter: bit.ly/c1Rtd1

[2] SocialBeat’s article on indexing Facebook: bit.ly/cnsF2p

[3] GigaOm’s article about Hilton’s traffic: bit.ly/9zUexn

Get Found on Social Media – Part 3 – SEO

In our previous post, Get Found on Social Media – Part 2, we continued our series on how you can make it easier for people to find your social media efforts. In this post, we take a look at how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help get you found on social media.


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Search Engine Optimization

It shouldn’t be news to you that Google is most often the top way users find Websites. Your site will probably be no different. So you need to make sure that Google can find you and that when they do, they categorize you properly, and rank you highly.

The art and science of ensuring high placement on Google and other search engines is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A related technique known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) encompasses SEO and also adds online advertising on Google and other search engines. We talked about advanced Google usage to find your community in the post Advanced Google Searching for Social Media. Now let’s turn that idea — finding interesting people using keyword searches — around: How can you be found via keyword searches? That’s what SEO is all about.

The basic goal of SEO is to ensure that when people use search words that are relevant to what you do they find you on the first page of search results. This is generally done, at least in part, by selecting a set of keywords that are highly relevant to your site, and then optimize your site to feature these keywords. We led you through this exercise in the post Partner and Cross-Promote on Social Media.

There are lots of SEO consultants out there that will guarantee first page placement, and some are quite good, while others haven’t a clue, so it’s best to have a basic understanding of SEO before you consider using one.

All of them do some combination of the following SEO techniques. We only scratch the surface of a very deep subject here, but many of these techniques you can do yourself without high-priced consultants.

We’re indebted to a very fine post on ClickZ by P.J. Fusco[1] for much of the structure and material in this list. It’s one of the most concise and comprehensive lists of SEO techniques we’ve read.

  • Optimize Title Tags
    The title of a page is the part that shows at the very top of your browser window. It’s the part that is above the toolbar. It must describe the purpose of the page and it should also identify your site.The title tag of every page should begin with a uniquely optimal keyword phrase and end with consistent branding, such as the name of your business, or the name of the site.The words at the beginning of the title tag have more prominence and weight than the words at the end. The target length for title tags should be 65 characters (with spaces). The major engines recognize and index title tags beyond 120 characters, but only 65 characters are visible in the search results.
  • Ensure Each Page Has a Theme
    Just as you were taught in school that every paragraph needs a topic sentence, so each Webpage needs a topic, or a theme. This helps the search engine categorize your page correctly. If you’re tempted to dump all sorts of marginally-related information onto your yard-long pages, the search engines aren’t going to like you.
  • Optimize Heading Tags
    Second to the title tag, the <h1> is the most prominent location to accentuate your keywords. If you’re not familiar with the HTML <h1>, or heading, tag, it’s generally the first and largest heading on the page. It often is the title of a post or a section of a Website.There should be only one <h1> heading tag on a page, and like the title tag, it should begin with the optimal keyword phrase. Additional <h2> and <h3> tags, which denote secondary and tertiary heading tags, should help complement the targeted theme of each page. Unlike <h1> tags, there can be more than one <h2> or <h3> tags per page.
  • Optimize Body Copy
    The text of each page should contain introductory copy or a summary of the page text. Body copy should consist of at least three sentences with a minimum of 150 words. You should try to mention your target keywords as many times as you can in your body copy, without becoming annoying or unreadable. The general rule is to try for four mentions of a keyword per page. Of course if you have a set of 10 keywords, the result could be gibberish, so here’s where the art comes in.
  • Create a Meta Description
    A meta description is an invisible page component that is part of the HTML page header. You see it only when your page shows up in search results. Each page should have a meta description even though having one won’t improve rankings in the search engines. The major search engines ignore the meta description for the purposes of indexing your page. Having a good meta description can, however, increase the likelihood of users clicking on search results.Meta descriptions should be unique to each page and should contain no more than 265 characters. Typically, however, only the first 150 characters (including spaces) are displayed in the search engine results pages, so the meta description should include the relevant keyword phrases and end with a call to action.
  • Create Meta Keywords
    Meta keywords, like the meta description, are invisible parts of the HTML page header. They are lists of words that the page author think are important to describe the content of the page.Google and Bing pay no attention to meta keywords. Yahoo only reviews meta keywords for misspellings that might affect their indexing of the page. You should insert three or four keywords per page, ensuring that the words are pulled from the page. If they’re not, don’t bother producing keywords at all. Nonetheless, don’t make meta keywords a critical part of your keyword strategy.
  • Optimize Alternative Attributes
    You may have seen descriptions pop up when you run your mouse over a graphic or a link on a Webpage. These are known as alternative attributes, or alt tags for short. Create keyword-rich alt tags for all graphics and images. Also create mouse-over text[2] for any links on the page.
  • Optimize Videos
    If you are embedding videos on your Webpage, follow conventional title tag and meta data standards as already outlined. Embed one video per page and organize video content around the structures of your pages, sections, and the site.If you are using a YouTube channel for hosting videos, ensure that you optimize the following YouTube fields using your keywords:

    • Title
    • Description
    • Tags

There are plenty of other aspects of SEO beyond optimizing your site and its content. One very popular and effective technique is to increase the number and quality of the inbound links to your site.

An inbound link is when another site links to you. Google assigns a rank to all sites, and if a more-highly-ranked site links to your site, it confers some of its rank — its prestige — to your site. Plus, the more inbound links you have, in general, the more highly you will rank. And the more highly your site ranks, the more highly placed it will be on Google search results. Google takes a dim view of such site and may penalize you for linking to them.

A common way to increase a site’s rank is to run an inbound link campaign. This involves contacting other, highly-ranked sites, and asking them if they’ll link to you. It can be tedious, but it can also be quite rewarding. Beware of those who want to link to you in return for a reciprocal link. Be sure the requesting site is reputable and not what is known as a link farm — a site that exists to try to game the Google system so that they’ll get increased ad revenue.

As we’ve said, SEO and SEM are very deep and complex topics and you really may need a consultant to move much beyond the advice we’ve given here. Just be careful of too-good-to-be-true claims. It generally costs hundreds or thousands of dollars per month to stay on top of search engine results. Those who claim to be able to do this for you for less may not be able to deliver.

There are few absolutes in the world of SEO, but one of them is that as soon as someone figures out how to game the search engines, they’ll change their ranking techniques, and perhaps penalize previously-effective SEO techniques.


Get Found on Social Media – Part 3 is the 64th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 208. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?Social Sites DefinedWhy Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

Next up: Get Found on Social Media – Part 4 – Real-Time Social Search


[1] Fusco’s Site Redesign SEO Considerations for 2010bit.ly/d5VTjh

[2] You’ve seen mouseover text when you’ve moved the cursor over a link on a page, and popped up a little description.

Get Found on Social Media – Part 2

Get Found on Social Media – Part 2

In our previous post, Get Found on Social Media – Part 1, we started a series on how you can make it easier for people to find your social media efforts. In this post, we continue the series with some more ideas on getting found on social media.

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Establish an Inner Circle

Groucho Marx famously said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” Most people don’t feel that way, thankfully. Consider creating an exclusive club and offering some kind of benefit — perhaps only prestige — to its members. It might be as simple as first dibs on tickets to one of your events, or attendance at special briefings, or other exclusive access.

You might have various circles within the club, with the highest circle reserved for those who are your true evangelists, and who do the most to help build your community.

If you offer things for sale, consider creating a coupon club that lets participants get discounts. However, be careful not to establish the idea – in your mind or your community’s – that the only reason to interact with you on social media is to get discounts. Remember: social media is about creating and maintaining relationships.

Triangulate Your Social Media Presence

At the most basic level, what we mean by triangulation involves linking your social media properties together. So you should:

  • Tweet about your blog
  • Blog about your Facebook page
  • Link your blog to your Website
  • Link your Website to your YouTube channel
  • Link your Twitter feed to your LinkedIn and Facebook statuses
  • Put all your images on Flickr and link to them when you need images on your site or your blog

You get the idea: Send people who find you on one social site to your offerings on all your other sites. We mentioned the concept of social media as an echo chamber in a previous post. You’re trying to set up your own echo chamber to reinforce your presence. Of course none of this will work if you’re boring and don’t add any value on all your sites.

Beyond this rather mechanical view of triangulation, though, are other considerations such as your online brand. On all your sites you should use consistent graphics. Have your graphic backgrounds and logos professionally created, and use the same graphics everywhere. Include photos of you and your staff to personalize your brand.

Include links to your social media presence everywhere:

  • Email signature
  • Company letterhead
  • Traditional advertising

The idea is to maximize the ability of your community to find out all you’re doing online even if they just happen to glimpse a single tweet and check out your profile. Not only will your Twitter profile point them to your other sites, but when they arrive, they’ll see a consistent graphic and branding treatment. If they later run into another of your sites, this consistency reminds them of their previous experience and builds your brand.


Get Found on Social Media – Part 2 is the 63rd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 190. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?Social Sites DefinedWhy Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

Next up: Get Found on Social Media – Part 3 – SEO

Get Found on Social Media – Part 1

Get Found on Social Media – Part 1

In our previous post, Influence via Blogging on Social Media, we finished up our look at ideas for increasing your influence on social media. In this post, we begin a series on how to be found on social media.

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Get Found

Yes, you’ll need to do some work to get found on social media. There is no build it and they will come. The best way to get found is to provide something your community finds valuable. But that alone will most often not be enough. You’ll need to use a variety of online and offline techniques to build awareness in your community.

We take a look at several ideas for getting found in the this and the following posts.

Run Contests

The most sure-fire way to attract users on the Internet has long been to give something away for free. Years ago, this caused us to create the aphorism: “On the Internet, everything devolves to free.”[1] Well, what if you start out with free? Free is a crowd pleaser.

Years ago, Internet marketing guru Seth Godin promoted his book, Permission Marketing,[2] by offering the first four chapters to anyone who would email him at free@permission.com. He gave away 150,000 free copies. Was that stupid, or did it contribute to the book’s success? Godin went even further with Unleashing the IdeaVirus:[3] He gave the book away for free — two million copies worldwide. Sheer folly, right? Wrong. According to Godin, the hardcover edition went to number 5 on Amazon in the US, reached number 4 in Japan, and is the #1 most downloaded eBook in history.

So don’t be afraid to give away valuable stuff for free.

One way to give stuff away, attract attention, and create a little buzz is to run a contest. We can’t pretend to know what kind of contest you should run, but it should be fun, have a significant prize, and generate enough excitement that your followers tell their friends. In fact, make a secondary prize for the person who refers the most entrants.

Most of the time you’ll be giving away prizes that cost you something. But you can also give away something that costs you nothing: prestige. The prize could be nothing more than bragging rights, and be represented by something as simple as the ability to display a badge or other notice of the honor as part of the winner’s profile, or on their blog.

Microsoft figured this out more than a decade ago with their Most Valuable Professional (MVP) pro­gram.[4] MVP is an award presented by Microsoft for exceptional technical community leaders who voluntarily provide technical expertise within Microsoft support communities. This award has value to the awardees — helping convince potential clients that they know their stuff — and the winners in­variably have given hundreds of hours a year in service to Microsoft by helping people solve their technical problems with the firm’s software.

So your contest could not only be cost-free for you, but it actually could benefit your business.


Get Found on Social Media is the 62nd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 190. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?Social Sites DefinedWhy Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

Next up: Get Found on Social Media – Part 2


[1] Are we devo? bit.ly/an3gnK

[3] Godin’s Unleashing the IdeaVirus: amzn.to/dsGGpw

[4] Microsoft’s MVP program: bit.ly/drOKhY

Influence via Blogging on Social Media

Influence via Blogging on Social Media

In our previous post, Facilitate Viralocity on Social Media, we took a look at ideas for helping your social media efforts go viral, thus expanding your influence. In this post, we examine blogging as a way to make your voice heard.

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Blog to Influence

A major way you can influence your community is by blogging. Don’t let the sobering fact that tens of thousands of blogs are created each day stop you from starting your own. Make sure you know what you want to say, and what your point of view and style will be before getting started. You’ll need to do more than just start a blog and hope they will come; you’ll need to promote it. And once you get people to your blog, you must be sure you’re giving them something of value, not necessarily just your opinion.

You should include a blog on your Website for sure, and also on as many blog sites as you can. However, cross-posting – posting the same blog on multiple sites – is discouraged by Google’s latest site ranking algorithms. It’s possible to use a site such as Ping.fm[1] to put the same material on each site, but it’s best for your readers and for search engines if you modify it for the intended audiences on the other sites.

If possible, get yourself invited to be a guest blogger by a more-influential site. It’s a great way for both sites to benefit, and for you to find an audience. By the same token, having guests post on your blog can introduce their audience to your blog.

You can even ask other bloggers to blog about you, but you should have a good reason why they’d want to.

When blogging, always remember, like all social media, blogging is not a one-way channel. It’s not just a way for you to present your agenda and point of view. It’s a way for your community to respond to you. So you should definitely enable comments on your blog. Doing this may cause you a little extra work — monitoring and responding, and even removing offensive posts — but you’ll find the interaction not only stimulating, but traffic-building.

Everywhere you are on social media, think about making an offer of some kind, like offering help or more information if a reader takes some action. A good place to do this is as a standing part of your blog’s author bio. It can be as simple as, “Email me for more info on _____” or as a link to your site for more information. You can also take a page from Hotmail’s viral success and incorporate your offer and a link to your blog into your email signature.[2]


Influence via Blogging on Social Media is the 61st in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 190. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?Social Sites DefinedWhy Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

Next up: Get Found on Social Media


[1] Ping.fm: bit.ly/dwbqG3

[2] Advice on email sigs: bit.ly/9eCOfM

Facilitate Viralocity on Social Media

Facilitate Viralocity on Social Media

In our previous post, Partner and Cross-Promote on Social Media, we took a look at leveraging your partners to promote your social media efforts. In this post examine ideas for helping your social media efforts go viral.

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Facilitate Viralocity

You’ve probably heard a lot of talk about being viral online. It’s not about infection, at least not bodily infection, but about getting people excited enough about you that they pass your messages on to others.

One of the earliest and most impressive successes in building a business using viral techniques is Hotmail. Now known as Windows Live Hotmail, Hotmail was started by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in mid-1995. By the end of 1997, when Microsoft bought Hotmail for $400 million, it had 8.5 million subscribers. How did two Silicon Valley wage slaves start the free email movement and make millions? At the bottom of every Hotmail email message, the service tacked on the following text: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com.” So every message their 8.5 million subscribers sent could go viral. The best thing about this technique is it didn’t require any change in behavior by Hotmail users. They just went about their business, emailing people and spreading the word about Hotmail.

Many online marketers are absolutely obsessed with the concept of going viral, and many will profess to know how to be able to take your messages and make them viral.

But one thing to understand about viralness, virality, viralocity, or whatever you call it: It is not a technique. It’s a destination. There are no tried and true techniques for creating viralocity. Most often, viral phenomena seem accidental.

Take the Blendtec YouTube videos[1] for example.

Blendtec makes powerful blenders, and so someone got the bright idea of doing a series of short videos called Will it Blend? Starting way back in 2006, and featuring Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson, each video — designated either “Try this at home” or “Don’t try this at home” — blends a range of items from 50 marbles and a handful of golf balls to a new iPhone.

It was the iPhone blend video that went viral, racking up more than 9.8 million views, and counting. Combining the fetish power of the game-changing mobile phone with the eccentric idea of obliterating things with a blender equated to tremen­dous viralocity. Since the first iPhone bit it, the company has trashed a series of iconic electronic gadgets, including an Olympus digital camera, an iPad (11 million views), and an iPhone 4.

Was it planned this way? No. It was just a wacky— and cheap— bid for attention from a small company with a small marketing budget. It went viral because . . . well, just because it was bizarre, over the top, and cool, we guess. For almost no money, Blendtec has reaped more than 192 million YouTube views, 440,000 subscribers, and a 7X increase in sales.

So why do we mention this? Did you see the part about “almost no money?”

You could go viral as well. But to do so, you must be hooked into the zeitgeist[2] of your community, and the larger society. Offbeat, quirky ideas are what generally go viral. But if you try too hard (we’re looking at you, LonelyGirl15[3]) you could do more damage than good.

What you can do is enable your supporters to take viral actions, like embedding a link to your Website, Buy button, Facebook page, or other social networking site as signatures in their emails. Or enabling a Tell A Friend feature on your site, or add a social media sharing service such as AddThis[4] to your site so fans can bookmark you on Delicious or “Like” you on Facebook. You can offer your users branded badges they can add to their blogs or Websites

The first step to viralocity is to ask users to pass it on. We talk more about these techniques in the series that starts with the post How to Scale Social Media. Other ideas include the following list, created by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson[5] way back in 2000 but still very relevant more than a decade later:

An effective viral marketing strategy:

  1. Gives away products or services
  2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
  3. Scales easily from small to very large
  4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
  5. Utilizes existing communication networks
  6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

These attributes of viralocity may be simple, but, as we’ve indicated, going viral is more art — and luck — than science.


Facilitate Viralocity on Social Media is the 60th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 190. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?Social Sites DefinedWhy Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

Next up: Influence via Blogging on Social Media


[1] Blendtec’s YouTube channel: bit.ly/9pHXIh

[2] Google zeitgeist: bit.ly/cy2fhg

[3] LonelyGirl15’s YouTube channel: bit.ly/dBib9J

[4] AddThis: bit.ly/d6oL2B

[5] Wilson’s The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketingbit.ly/9be3Fg

Partner and Cross-Promote on Social Media

In our previous post, Aim to Influence on Social Media, we explored what you can do with your social media community. In this post we take a look at leveraging your partners to promote your social media efforts.

ContentSource: The World Wide Meme

Partner and Cross-Promote

Partnering is even more important and effective online than it is offline. By choosing the right strategic partners, you can leverage others’ traffic and followers and attract them to your community. You can also increase your prestige by associating with the right online leaders, creating a halo effect by borrowing their influence.

Social media is a good way to find new partners and create partnerships. In his 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report,[1] Michael A. Stelzner reported that 56 percent of those who invested 6 to 10 hours per week over a few months with social media marketing found new partnerships.

The benefits of having online partners can be great. You can multiply your efforts and mutually enhance each other’s success. You can offer a more compelling value to your community. You can benefit by associating with a partner, sharing in each other’s prestige and reputation. Perhaps more importantly, by partnering with a larger or more established online business, you can reinforce your own legitimacy and community standing.

Prospect for Partners

There are many ways to find potential partners using online media. We recommend that, after you’ve established some goals for having a partner, you use the following procedure:

  • Determine the important keywords for your business
    What are the first words that come to mind when you think about your business and your products? Write them down. Now put yourself in your community’s shoes. What words would they use to find you? Add them to the list. Organize the list into primary keywords — those that you think most people would associate with your product category — and long tail keywords — those that may have meaning, but are more peripheral. (Incidentally, you’ll probably want to use this list in your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) efforts.)
  • Search and see who controls the keywords
    Plug your primary keywords into Google. Who comes up on the first page? Assuming it’s not you, note the organizations and make a list of their names. Explore their Websites to determine how they might fit as a partner. Assign a 1 to 100 score based on their likelihood and desirability. Do the same for your long tail keywords. Then prioritize your list and use the top words in your content and to search for partners. Prioritize the resulting partner list and use it to make contacts.
  • Check sponsored results
    While doing your Google research, also take note of any AdWords ads you see. AdWords are those text ads that appear to the right of search results on Google. There may also be some sponsored results at the top. Evaluate the organizations behind these ads and adjust their scores.
  • Create a list of the influential blogs/forums
    Using your lists, search for blogs and forums that deal with your product category. You can use BlogSearch.com [2] or the various tools we’ve previously discussed. From the number of comments, tweets, or other measures of influence, create a list of influential bloggers and forums.
  • Listen to the blogs/forums
    Find out what people are saying about the organizations on your partner prospect list. If your prospects are participating, even better. You can start to engage with them on these sites. Research your prospects by finding out what social media sites they frequent.

Using this process, you’ve created a partner prospect list and been able to prioritize it. Now you can start to engage with these partners online, and draw them into a relationship. Start by commenting on their blogs or other posts and gradually introduce yourself that way.


Partner and Cross-Promote on Social Media is the 59th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 190. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?Social Sites DefinedWhy Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

Next up: Facilitate Viralocity on Social Media


[1] Stelzner’s 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report: bit.ly/JPUHwN