Obtain Business Success Through Social Media Marketing: A How To Guide

10.06.2011 · Posted in Business

Social media marketing is a relatively new marketing strategy which involves increased social interaction online and it has accumulated substantial popularity over the last couple of years. There are lots of different sorts of social sites however all of these have in common that their users can get involved on the site by sharing comments, putting up their own personal content or making friends on-line. Social Media Marketing will allow you to accomplish your business goals whether these are looking for marketing, sales, pr, customer service or any mixture of goals.

Make use of an assortment of Social Media Marketing Tools

There are many types of social media and within this there are also several websites. Registering for as many of these as you can then using them properly is a good technique to boost your web traffic. A few of these social networking and also social media websites which allow you to connect with other people on the internet include Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr along with YouTube . Each one of these websites allow you to either create contacts through the website or else add content of your own to the web site. Use as many of these websites as you can and link them together and encourage your visitors to use them too; automate the process and use other tools to help you become more effective at social media marketing. Measure results: look at your inputs and correlate them with the outputs. In other words, see if what you’re doing is working, and identify which things generate the biggest buzz.

Link Your Social Media Accounts

A great way to lessen the length of time you need to spend on each social media website is to link them together. For example, many social networks allow you to integrate with Twitter so that when you update your Twitter status it is also shown on your social network accounts and vice versa.

Encourage the use of Social Media

Put up share buttons on your website pages that allow visitors to quickly and easily bookmark your pages on their social bookmarking accounts. Connect your website to Facebook and Twitter so that people can share links from your website on their Facebook or Twitter accounts, update their statuses through your website, etc.

Create incentives for people to join your social media network: make them feel like they’re a part of something exclusive. Stand out. The average Facebook user is connected to 80 fan pages, and Facebook has over 30 billion pieces of new content posted each month. You’re competing for attention, how are you going to get it?

Be Consistent

Many have failed in social media because they did not adhere to the consistency rule. Update consistently and produce new content on a timetable. People return once they know they could be missing anything.

Luckily for us some aspects of social media marketing, including updating your Twitter status, can be automated so that you set it up once and can then forget about it (at least for a while). Make use of this, notably if you are short of time, since it will lower the amount of time you need to allot to social media marketing.

Take care of your reputation

 

Do you know what’s being said about your items on the social web? If you do, do you like it? Being unable to answer on social media websites translates directly into a competitive disadvantage. These days, who can afford that? Make sure that your audience know that you’re there with them.

The author loves using Social Media Marketing Services from the SEO company KPI, whose services will help you build a down-to-earth, real-world programme that takes full advantage of the Social Web.

Obtain Business Success Through Social Media Marketing: A How To Guide

 

Tags: Social Media, social media marketing

 

“Exactly 140 characters,” Cohen said.

“What a ninja you are,” Ross said.

They looked at each other, thumbs poised above their BlackBerries.

“Whenever we do this, we get called out on it,” Cohen said. They did it anyway, in unison. “Three . . . two . . . one. . . .” Tweet. Upward of 500,000 people instantly learned that the Twitterers had been to Twitter.

On Twitter, Cohen, who is 28, and Ross, who is 38, are among the most followed of anyone working for the U.S. government, coming in third and fourth after Barack Obama and John McCain. This didn’t happen by chance. Their Twitter posts have become an integral part of a new State Department effort to bring diplomacy into the digital age, by using widely available technologies to reach out to citizens, companies and other nonstate actors. Ross and Cohen’s style of engagement — perhaps best described as a cross between social-networking culture and foreign-policy arcana — reflects the hybrid nature of this approach. Two of Cohen’s recent posts were, in order: “Guinea holds first free election since 1958” and “Yes, the season premier [sic] of Entourage is tonight, soooo excited!” This offhand mix of pop and politics has on occasion raised eyebrows and a few hackles (writing about a frappucino during a rare diplomatic mission to Syria; a trip with Ashton Kutcher to Russia in February), yet, together, Ross and Cohen have formed an unlikely and unprecedented team in the State Department. They are the public face of a cause with an important-sounding name: 21st-century statecraft.

To hear Ross and Cohen tell it, even last year, in this age of rampant peer-to-peer connectivity, the State Department was still boxed into the world of communiqués, diplomatic cables and slow government-to-government negotiations, what Ross likes to call “white guys with white shirts and red ties talking to other white guys with white shirts and red ties, with flags in the background, determining the relationships.” And then Hillary Clinton arrived. “The secretary is the one who unleashed us,” Ross says. “She’s the godmother of 21st-century statecraft.”

Traditional forms of diplomacy still dominate, but 21st-century statecraft is not mere corporate rebranding — swapping tweets for broadcasts. It represents a shift in form and in strategy — a way to amplify traditional diplomatic efforts, develop tech-based policy solutions and encourage cyberactivism. Diplomacy may now include such open-ended efforts as the short-message-service (S.M.S.) social-networking program the State Department set up in Pakistan last fall. “A lot of the 21st-century dynamics are less about, Do you comport politically along traditional liberal-conservative ideological lines?” Ross says. “Today it is — at least in the spaces we engage in — Is it open or is it closed?”

Early this year, Ross and Cohen helped prop open the State Department’s doors by bringing 10 leading figures of the tech and social-media worlds to Washington for a private dinner with Clinton and her senior staff. Among the guests were Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google; Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chairman of Twitter; James Eberhard of Mobile Accord; Shervin Pishevar of the mobile-phone-game-development company SGN; Jason Liebman of Howcast; Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby Awards; and Andrew Rasiej of Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference on the intersection of politics and technology. Toward the end of the evening, Clinton delighted those assembled by inviting them to use her “as an app.”

A few days later, they did. On Jan. 12, the Haiti earthquake struck, and within two hours, Eberhard, working with the State Department, set up the Text Haiti 90999 program, which raised more than $40 million for the Red Cross in $10 donations. Jan. 12 was significant for supporters of 21st-century statecraft for another reason. It was also the day Google announced that Chinese hackers tried to break into the Gmail accounts of dissidents. In response, Google said that it would no longer comply with China’s censorship laws and for a few months redirected Chinese users to its Hong Kong search engine. The dispute rose to a high-level diplomatic conflict, but it also gave added resonance to the 45-minute “Internet freedom” speech Secretary Clinton delivered a little more than a week later, in which she placed “the freedom to connect” squarely within the U.S. human rights and foreign policy agenda.

Within weeks, Ross and Cohen found themselves dining in San Francisco on the eve of a State-sponsored diplomatic mission to Silicon Valley.

“Dude, tomorrow is going to be awesome,” Ross said.

AT THE GOOGLEPLEX, in Mountain View, the next day, Ross and Cohen took the director chairs next to Schmidt, the C.E.O., for one of Google’s “fireside chats.” Dozens of Google employees were seated in the room, most with laptops open, while Schmidt quizzed the two in a slightly impish tone about their new methods (“Is it like calling up all the ambassadors and saying, Please use Facebook, Twitter and Google?”) and appreciatively referenced the Internet-freedom speech (“The Chinese are not so happy with me right now,” Ross said, “but they’re madder at you”).

At Google, and later at YouTube’s headquarters, Ross and Cohen stressed the political power of viral videos and the potential for mobile phones to become widespread public tools for education, banking and election monitoring (an idea borrowed from Sierra Leone and Montenegro, where volunteers used S.M.S. to report on voting irregularities). It is fair to say that Ross and Cohen are obsessed with mobile phones; they speak at length about telemedicine, tele-education and something called telejustice (the details of which they haven’t quite worked out yet). At an early-morning meeting in Palo Alto with mobile-banking experts, they looked for ways to expand a successful pilot program used to pay policemen via mobile phones in Afghanistan to another conflict zone in Congo. In both cases, as truckloads or planeloads of cash meant to pay policemen dwindled on their way from the capital cities to the provinces, so did the chances for lawful governance. Mobile banking is well established in places like Kenya, and cellphones are ubiquitous worldwide, even in poorly developed regions. Here was a way to use technology to address diplomacy, development and security concerns at once: direct payments to officers’ phones, which would be transferable to the phones of their distant families, could become a powerful tool for stability, even in Congo. Or at least that was the hope.

After the fireside chat, Schmidt sat in on a meeting with Google.org (the company’s nonprofit arm) in which Ross and Cohen described the difficulty U.S. embassies have in keeping track of services and resources in countries where the U.S. hopes to spur development — tracking, for example, nongovernmental organizations in Kenya.

“It would be fascinating to transform one of our embassies,” Cohen said, “and see if we can create a virtual aspect to make it a one-stop shop for everything that’s out there.”

“NGOs keep asking for a way to be able to understand, in a country like Kenya, who’s doing clean water, who’s doing education,” one Google employee said.

Several engineers chirped back and forth about the virtues of user-generated feedback and the challenges of multilayer mapping technology, until Schmidt cut them off. “We have a big operation in Kenya,” Schmidt said. “We have the smartest guy in the country working for us. Why can’t we just do this?”

This new marriage of Silicon Valley and the State Department can, at times, seem almost giddy in its tech evangelism. While it’s hard to argue with the merits of helping nongovernmental organizations communicate with one another, there’s a danger that close collaboration between the government and the tech world will be read as favoritism or quid pro quo. Anne-Marie Slaughter, director of the policy planning staff, acknowledged as much: “So Google sits here, and Microsoft and Twitter and Facebook, but for all those household names, there are others — and what are the guidelines to make sure that you’re being evenhanded, as government has to be? We’re just at the outset. Those are issues that are important but can be dealt with — we’re going to have to deal with them.”

AS MUCH AS Ross and Cohen extol the benefits of mobile banking and Silicon Valley partnerships, they admit that not every problem is best addressed with an app. Clinton, Ross assured me, “doesn’t believe you can sprinkle the Internet on something and everybody grows up to be healthy, wealthy and wise.” As the recent Wikileaks scandal suggests, new technologies may usher in as many diplomatic catastrophes as breakthroughs. (In June, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst claimed to have given 260,000 diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, a Web site dedicated to publishing confidential material.) When I asked Cohen whether sites like Wikileaks made the kind of diplomacy he advocates harder, he allowed that they posed a challenge: “All of these tools can be utilized by individuals for everything from Wikileaks to other negative purposes” — at least as the State Department sees it — “but that technology isn’t going anywhere. So we can fear we can’t control it and ignore the space, or we can recognize we can’t control it, but we can influence it.”

A series of events last year helped Ross and Cohen’s work gain traction by showing that connection technologies have become inextricably entwined with the challenges of foreign policy. In April 2009, there was the so-called Twitter revolution in Moldova. In July 2009, there was China’s regional-information blockade, including a total shutdown of the Internet, following the Uighur uprisings (“full” Internet usage was restored to Xinjiang 10 months later). And then, of course, Iran, beginning in June 2009, when the organizing power of cellphones and social media — and their ability to capture and disseminate images like the death of a young Iranian woman, Neda Agha-Soltan — arrested the world’s attention. (On the visit to YouTube in February, Cohen described the Neda video as “the most significant viral video of our lifetimes” and told the site’s senior management that YouTube is in some ways “better than any intelligence we could get, because it’s generated by users in Iran.”)

Most of the news that reached the West from Iran came via YouTube and Twitter. In June of last year, three days into the postelection protests, a Twitter post by the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi alerted Cohen that Twitter was scheduled to go down for maintenance. Cohen sent an e-mail message to Dorsey, the site’s 33-year-old chairman, without running it up the chain of command. Dorsey went to work — “I was definitely raising my voice” trying to find a way for the service to stay up, Dorsey told me. The New York Times broke the story of Cohen’s e-mail message. A flurry of public speculation ensued as to whether keeping Twitter up contradicted the president’s stated policy of nonintervention in the Iranian election. The same debate was under way among the secretary’s senior staff.

“There’s no precedent for what it meant to keep a social-media network up in a postelection environment,” Ross told me later. “There’s no casework. There’s no legal statecraft precedent for such things.” Secretary Clinton’s decision not to condemn Cohen’s actions was an example of her willingness to “ride the wave,” Slaughter told me. “Things were happening very fast; the stakes were very high. We didn’t put out propaganda to try to influence what was going on there. We simply made it possible for people to continue communicating.

“We weren’t set up to think about what we would do in that situation,” Slaughter went on. “Now we would be.”

The State Department recently cut financing for some activist groups based outside Iran that promote democracy and began to focus on providing information technologies that would facilitate communication among dissidents in Iran. Restrictions imposed by U.S. sanctions were lifted to allow for the export of instant-messaging and antifiltering software. But it’s not clear how easy it will be for companies to enable Iranians to download applications while keeping government censors at bay; even if they can, not everyone agrees that Twitter’s revolutionary power has lived up to the hype.

Evgeny Morozov, an academic at Georgetown and perhaps the fiercest critic of this brand of diplomacy, published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in February, charging that the State Department has been all too willing to sweep the dangers of Twitter diplomacy under the rug. “Facebook and Twitter empower all groups — not just the pro-Western groups that we like,” he wrote, pointing out that the Iranian government was also active online: “Not only did it thwart Internet communications, the government (or its plentiful loyalists) also flooded Iranian Web sites with videos of dubious authenticity . . . that aimed to provoke and splinter the opposition.” (The Iranian government later used Facebook to track Iranian dissidents around the world.)

When I brought up the op-ed, Cohen dismissed Morozov’s complaint. “The problem with his thinking,” he said, “is it neglects the inevitability that this technology is going to spread — so he advocates a very dangerously cautious approach that says it’s dangerous and we shouldn’t play in that space. What the Evgeny Morozovs of the world don’t understand is that whether anybody likes it or not, the private sector is pumping out innovation like crazy.”

In other words, the U.S. gains nothing from shunning the social media everyone else uses. “The 21st century is a really terrible time to be a control freak,” Cohen said. “Which is a quote Alec and I often use when explaining this.”

Yet control — over the message, who delivers it, who originates it — is still a cherished tenet of foreign policy. Morozov no doubt voiced the concerns of many when he wrote: “Diplomacy is, perhaps, one element of the U.S. government that should not be subject to the demands of ‘open government’; whenever it works, it is usually because it is done behind closed doors. But this may be increasingly hard to achieve in the age of Twittering bureaucrats.” (The fracas over Ross’s and Cohen’s seemingly frivolous Twitter posts during a recent trip to Syria, a country some lawmakers feel the U.S. should not be speaking with at all, would seem to bear him out. )

When I spoke to Clinton in March, she maintained that the benefits of connection technologies far outweighed the risks. “That doesn’t mean that there won’t be problems,” she said, “and there are a lot of people who are very risk-averse.” Clay Shirky, a New York University professor who has engaged in an ongoing debate with Morozov, has given similar advice to members of the State Department. “The loss of control you fear is already in the past,” he told me. “You do not actually control the message, and if you believe you control the message, it merely means you no longer understand what’s going on.”

It’s one thing for our diplomats to accept that they can’t be control freaks; it’s another to expect the rest of world to believe that they aren’t — or that social-media companies have no responsibility for how users interact with their services and with one another. What if governments don’t make a distinction between a user’s message and the message service? In May, Pakistan blocked access to Facebook after a user set up a page promoting “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.” Even longstanding allies of the United States — South Korea, Italy, Saudi Arabia and Australia — hold widely divergent views on rights of online assembly and what constitutes protected speech.

Then there’s the chance that, say, Twitter will be seen in some quarters as an extension of the U.S. government. On this point, State Department officials I talked to were philosophical. “This may be a huge difference between the governments that control information — or try to — and governments that don’t,” Slaughter says. “They have a harder time understanding the limits of our power. We can’t shut down CNN!” Still, there are real dangers when companies are conflated with states. “The risk,” Carlos Pascual, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, told me in February, “is if and when in a particular country — whether that’s China or Iran or Cuba or North Korea — there’s a perception that Twitter or Facebook is a tool of the U.S. government. That becomes dangerous for the company, and it becomes dangerous for people who are using that tool. It doesn’t matter what the reality is. In those circumstances, I think it’s still better to allow the tool to exist. But there is some sort of a line there, and we have to respect that line.”

LAST SPRING, Ross and Cohen began leading technology delegations abroad. These trips — or techdels, as they’re now called — to Iraq and elsewhere (Russia, Congo, Haiti) have since become a staple of American diplomacy. Software engineers, entrepreneurs and tech C.E.O.’s are asked to think of unconventional ways to shore up democracy and spur development. Though the delegations function as traveling idea labs, both Ross and Cohen are obsessed with producing “deliverables”: giving tech leaders specific assignments to work toward, like building support networks in the U.S. for fledgling Iraqi I.T. companies or finding ways to use crowd-sourcing to stop human trafficking in Russia.

In October 2009, Ross and Cohen jointly led a techdel to Mexico City. The idea was to generate novel solutions for countering narcotics crime, an enormous internal problem for Mexico but also an expensive and politically explosive border issue for the U.S. (The U.S. will spend more than $3.5 billion on drug interdiction this year, much of it in Mexico.) In 2009, Ciudad Juárez alone had 2,600 homicides; given the frequent collusion between gangs and the police, witnesses to crimes fear coming forward, which contributes to a kind of narcostate just the other side of the U.S. border. “The lack of trust in the police is a big part of the problem,” Ross says. “The whole concept of anonymous crime reporting has been lost.”

The techdel’s highlight was a meeting with Carlos Slim, the telecom giant and currently the richest man in the world (as well as a major stockholder and creditor of The New York Times). Pascual later told me that in the meeting, James Eberhard of Mobile Accord pointed out that even in the lowest-income neighborhoods of Ciudad Juárez, Monterrey and Mexico City, people have cellphones and use S.M.S. all the time. Why not have a free short code for text messages so that anyone could report a crime? All personally identifiable data would be stripped from the S.M.S. before it entered a centralized database. From the database, the information would be fed into federal and municipal police systems, then could be monitored by a third-party NGO and mapped on the Internet publicly — in essence bringing anonymity and transparency to crime reporting. Just as important, the actions taken (or not taken) by municipal police forces would also be publicly traceable and monitored.

“I think there was a personal reaction on the part of Slim,” Pascual says. “He’s fascinated by these 30-year-old entrepreneurs that are two generations behind him.”

According to Ross: “He went around the room and asked us all of our ages. He started nodding, and he goes, ‘This is wonderful.’ And he pushes this button and calls in his sons.”

The meeting was scheduled for 40 minutes but lasted two hours. Slim offered, on the spot, to sponsor the free nationwide short code.

The program, which is to be implemented this fall, has some easily recognizable challenges. How do you weed out false reports? How do you gain trust in the anonymity of reporting? Recently, Mexico attempted to register all cellphone users in order to counter telephone extortion rackets, but the personal data, which was to be held confidentially, was soon available for purchase at a Mexico City flea market. “If you get people using these cellphones and reporting crimes and it results in retribution toward somebody because the data really isn’t stripped away, then people will never touch it,” Pascual says. “We’ve got to work with our Mexican counterparts and NGOs, the government and outside of government, so that this is something that they adopt and they want and they sustain.”

THE UNDERPINNING PHILOSOPHY of 21st-century statecraft — that the networked world “exists above the state, below the state and through the state” — was laid out in a paper in Foreign Affairs in 2009 by Slaughter, before she became head of the policy planning staff. Cohen rereads the paper all the time. Ross gives it to all new U.S. ambassadors. It is crucial to how Cohen and Ross see themselves: equal parts barnstormers and brainstormers, creating and sustaining networks of networks. Ross and Cohen share all their contacts and remain in touch constantly, though they’re often on opposite sides of the globe. (“Jared and I divide and conquer,” Ross says.) Their closeness might come as something of a surprise: Cohen was appointed by Condoleezza Rice and still considers her a mentor; Ross was deeply embedded in the Obama campaign. And they pursued very different paths to the State Department.

Cohen, who sprinkled his undergraduate years with trips to Africa (his senior thesis was on the Rwandan genocide), managed to set up a meeting with Rice, then national security adviser, when he was only 22. As a Rhodes scholar, Cohen had ditched England for extended travel through Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, where he interacted daily with a younger generation closely interconnected through social media and wireless technology. “He had insights into Iran that frankly we didn’t have in the government,” Rice recalled when I spoke to her in March. “He was so articulate about it, I asked him to write up a memo that I could send to the president.”

When Rice became secretary of state, she tapped Cohen, then 24, for the policy planning staff, with an emphasis on youth outreach, counterradicalization and counterterror. In February 2008, large-scale protests against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) sprang up there and in close to 200 cities around the world, organized through Facebook and Skype and instant messaging. “It was the largest protest against a terrorist organization in history,” Cohen says. “In what I’m sure was the very first diplomatic engagement via an online social network, I found the group One Million Voices Against FARC, and I sent a message to the organizer of it. I said: ‘I’m with the State Department; are you the one that did this? I’m going to come down to Colombia and see you.’ People thought this was weird — like, almost eerily reminiscent of an Internet date.”

Rice told me: “He started social networks of people who could talk about how to combat terrorism worldwide. He put that together really pretty much on his own.”

Nearly a decade older than Cohen, Alec Ross spent his early postcollege years as a Teach for America recruit and was slower to join political life. In 2000, he helped found One Economy, a nonprofit dedicated to closing the digital divide that was instrumental in pushing Arabic-language content onto the Web. Ross was particularly successful in getting titans of business and technology, from Bill Gates to the former F.C.C. chairman William E. Kennard, to support his cause. Impressed, the current F.C.C. chairman, Julius Genachowski, picked Ross to run the day-to-day operations for Obama’s technology, media and telecommunications policy. In April 2009, Ross joined State.

As a Bush-era appointee, Cohen had been walking on eggshells. “There were all these haters trying to get this guy shot in the head,” as Ross puts it. “I read what he’d written, and I’m like, This guy’s actually brilliant; he’s going to be my partner.”

One apparent paradox of 21st-century statecraft is that while new technologies have theoretically given a voice to the anonymous and formerly powerless (all you need is a camera phone to start a movement), they have also fashioned erstwhile faceless bureaucrats into public figures. Ross and Cohen have a kind of celebrity in their world — and celebrity in the Twitter age requires a surfeit of disclosure. Several senior members of the State Department with whom I spoke could not understand why anyone would want to read microdispatches from a trip to Twitter or, worse, from a State Department staff member’s child’s basketball game. But Secretary Clinton seemed neither troubled nor bewildered. “I think it’s to some extent pervasive now,” she told me in March. “It would be odd if the entire world were moving in that direction and the State Department were not.” Half of humanity is under 30, she reminded me. “Much of that world doesn’t really know as much as you might think about American values. One of the ways of breaking through is by having people who are doing the work of our government be human beings, be personalized, be relatable.”

Just such an effort was under way one recent morning in Washington, where Ross and Cohen were meeting with Farah Pandith. Pandith is also the holder of a newly created position: special representative to Muslim communities for the United States Department of State. Born in Kashmir, Pandith emigrated to the U.S. at a young age. Now in her early 40s, she is a vibrant presence in a room and, since she was sworn in in September, has been to 25 countries trying to broaden the scope of U.S. interaction with Muslim communities. She had just returned from India, Pakistan, Qatar and the Netherlands, and she and her deputy, Karen Chandler, were ready for Ross and Cohen’s pitch.

“Here’s the problem we’re solving for,” Ross said. “It’s physically impossible for one office to engage 1.4 billion people across the planet in a way that involves a lot of air travel. We’ve got to work with you to build out a connection-technology strategy.”

“Wherever you go,” Cohen said, “there should be a trail of Muslim engagement behind you.”

“It’s the BOF strategy,” Ross said, pronouncing it boff. “Blowing out Farah.”

Pandith and her staff laughed.

For the next half-hour, Ross and Cohen riffed on BOF: how to take the undoubted asset that is Pandith — an articulate, attractive female speaking on behalf of the United States to a large, diverse population that continues to suspect this country’s motives — and scale her presence with technology so that her job promises more than a Sisyphean series of intercontinental flights.

“What you did in Doha with the secretary,” Ross said. “There’s nothing to have kept us from Ustreaming that, and going from an intimate meeting with Farah Pandith, the secretary of state and 12 civil-society actors to something thousands of times larger.”

“What you need is a really good hash tag,” Cohen said.

After a moment everyone agreed that “#muslimengagement” was too long.

“We don’t have to come up with that right now,” Ross said. “You have a body of great material. We ought to have somebody go through it and do grabs. Figure out over the course of whatever it is you’ve said, those things that can be encapsulated in 140 characters or less. Let’s say it’s 10 things. We then translate it into Pashto, Dari, Urdu, Arabic, Swahili, etc., etc. The next thing is we identify the ‘influencer’ Muslims on Twitter, on Facebook, on the other major social-media platforms. And we, in a soft way, using the appropriate diplomacy, reach out to them and say: Hey, we want to get across the following messages. They’re messages that we think are consistent with your values. This is a voice coming from the United States that we think you wanted to hear. So we get the imam. . . .”

“. . . the youth leader. . . .” Pandith said.

“We get these other people to then play the role of tweeting it, and then saying, ‘Follow this woman,’ and/or putting it on whatever dominant social-media platform they use.”

To do the translation, Ross and Cohen suggested the Muslim engagement office bring in 10 bilingual members of the Virtual Student Foreign Service, an internship program Cohen developed to assist U.S. embassies in dealing with social media. Pandith’s deputy sat mostly quiet through the meeting but then voiced a concern that must reverberate throughout the diplomatic ranks. College kids translating diplomatic messages from the State Department? In languages their supervisors can’t read?

“How do you make sure that what they’re posting is vetted?” she asked.

“In the 21st century, the level of control is going to be decreased,” Ross said, reiterating what Clinton told me earlier. “The young woman from Saudi who translates something to Arabic, what she’s translating is language that’s been vetted, but it’s not being handed over to a State Department translator, who’s handing it over to State Department public affairs, who’s approving it. We’re past that.”

Jesse Lichtenstein has written for The New Yorker, Slate, The Economist and n + 1; this is his first article for the magazine.

It was a Wednesday night in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, and Jared Cohen, the youngest member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, and Alec Ross, the first senior adviser for innovation to the secretary of state, were taking their tweeting very seriously. Cohen had spent the day in transit from D.C.; Ross hadn’t eaten anything besides a morning muffin. Yet they were in the mood to share, and dinner could wait. It wasn’t every day they got to tweet about visiting the headquarters of Twitter. (via @tangobusiness)

Recently we received some questions about how Google uses (or more accurately, doesn’t use) the “keywords” meta tag in “ranking web search results” (just pay attention about the tip involved) . Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob’s site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her “keywords” meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words “AliceCo” to his “keywords” meta tag. Should Alice be concerned?

At least for Google’s web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking. This video explains more, or see the questions above..

Las redes sociales en línea continúan dividiendo opiniones; por un lado están aquellos que se han metido de lleno en esta fuerte tendencia que ha transformado la forma de comunicarse de la sociedad, y por otro están esos que son escépticos en cuanto a un sistema que consideran riesgoso, falto de privacidad y, aunque muchos no lo admitan, un poco complicado y lejano a todo eso que conocen y a lo que están acostumbrados.

Las empresas han tenido su caso particular dentro del boom de las redes sociales, ya que no sólo muchas se han visto obligadas a aprender o a contratar a alguien para poder implementarlas y no quedarse atrás en cuanto a tecnologías y a nuevas formas de mercadeo y comunicación, sino que también han tenido que ingeniarse cómo manejar la otra parte de la situación, la del uso que los empleados hacen de las redes sociales externas como Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, entre otras, para que esto no afecta negativamente a la imagen de la organización.

Ya es mucho lo que se ha discutido acerca de los riesgos que corren quienes se expresan demasiado libremente a través de estas redes a las que millones de personas tienen acceso. Por otro lado, aquellos que publican fotos de las fiestas o que les cuentan a los demás lo aburridos que están en su trabajo, hoy lo piensan dos veces pues saben que los directivos de las empresas utilizan cada vez más las redes sociales para investigar a sus empleados y a esos que piensan contratar.

Pero, a pesar de lo evidente que es el aumento del uso de estas redes y de su influencia en las empresas, un nuevo estudio de la firma Manpower Inc. llamado “Social Networks vs. Management? Harness the Power of Social Media” (¿Las redes sociales contra el management? Aprovechar el poder de los medios sociales) recogió datos de 2100 empresarios del Reino Unido y reveló que el 75% de ellos aún no cuentan con unas políticas establecidas que reglamenten el uso que sus empleados hacen de las redes sociales externas como Twitter y LinkedIn.

Pocos directivos se benefician de las redes sociales

Al revisar los resultados de la investigación, es evidente que un porcentaje bastante reducido de los directivos se han arriesgado a explorar diferentes formas de manejar el uso que sus empleados hacen de las redes sociales, no sólo para protegerse de efectos negativos, sino también para sacar ventajas para sus empresas.

Solo el 22% de los empleadores encuestados afirmaron contar con políticas definidas para que sus empleados sepan cómo debe ser su comportamiento al usar redes sociales externas. Más de la mitad de estos (60%) aseguraron que contar con estas políticas los ha ayudado a evitar la pérdida de productividad; 55% manifestaron que gracias a estas normas se ha protegido la reputación de la compañía; 42% piensan que los han ayudado a proteger la propiedad intelectual y la propiedad de información; y 21% afirmaron que estas políticas han constituido una ayuda en cuanto a los esfuerzos de reclutamiento de nuevos empleados.

Mark Cahill, director ejecutivo de Manpower del Reino Unido, explica en una nota de prensa que “el uso de los medios sociales para construir y compartir relaciones está cambiando el mundo del trabajo. Es importante que las organizaciones lo reconozcan y que diseñen activamente una política que dirija el uso que sus empleados hacen de estos medios internos y externos, ya que éstos pueden tener un papel decisivo en la dirección de la motivación de los empleados, la productividad, la colaboración y la gestión del conocimiento”.

Sorpresivamente, a pesar de los múltiples ejemplos que se han conocido sobre el efecto de las redes sociales externas en las organizaciones, más de la mitad (56%) de los directivos encuestados no reconocen la importancia que estas redes tienen para sus compañías, ya que no consideran que éstas puedan impulsarlas de ninguna manera; además, el 95% de los directivos aseguraron que sus empresas jamás han sido afectadas negativamente por el uso que sus empleados han hecho de las redes sociales.

Del otro lado están los beneficios que destacan quienes participan activamente del comportamiento de sus empleados en el mundo de los medios sociales: el 11% de estos directivos afirma que las redes sociales externas pueden impulsar la construcción de su marca en el futuro, y el 7% manifiesta que estas redes son muy útiles a la hora de evaluar los candidatos antes de contratar a alguien en la compañía.

Consejos para un buen manejo de las redes sociales externas

Es comprensible que muchos directivos del mundo no tengan claro cómo deben acercarse a este mundo de las redes sociales -o si deben siquiera acercarse a él-, más si se trata del uso que sus empleados les dan al margen de la organización. Manpower da algunos consejos a aquellos directivos que quieran tomarlo de una manera constructiva y sacar provecho de las redes sociales:

• Comunicar claramente a los empleados lo que quiere lograr la empresa a través de las redes sociales, integrando las metas a la cultura organizacional y haciendo que todos las comprendan para evitar errores fatales al utilizar estos medios simplemente para no quedarse atrás sin establecer objetivos claros frente a toda la organización.

• Retar a los empleados a que innoven y sean creativos en los diferentes usos que pueden implementarse para mejorar el trabajo a través de las redes sociales. En muchas ocasiones, cuando los empleados sienten que están contribuyendo se comprometen más con su trabajo.

• Aprovechar a los expertos internos, es decir, aprender de aquellos que utilizan mucho las redes sociales en su trabajo, motivándolos para que compartan y enseñen sus ideas, implementando así las prácticas más constructivas.

• Dejar que los empleados tomen parte en el establecimiento de las metas y objetivos que se quieren conseguir con el uso de las redes sociales. Si ellos se sienten involucrados, se comprometerán más con el tema y participarán más activamente.

Cahill explica que “es crítico no insistir en que las políticas finales son definitivas; por el contrario, éstas deben poder cambiar y evolucionar a medida que evolucionan las tecnologías. Cualquier pauta para las redes sociales debe estar relacionada con las pautas de comportamiento globales de la organización. El objetivo es crear un sistema de gobierno en el que las redes sociales no sean vistas como una excepción, sino como una actividad que está íntimamente conectada a las prácticas globales del personal de la compañía. Es solamente por medio de una canalización creativa de sus usos que las organización podrán ser exitosas al recoger los frutos para obtener una ventaja competitiva sostenida”.

Es hora de que los directivos acepten que las redes sociales están aquí para quedarse y que ya han transformado gran parte de la forma de comunicarse, darse a conocer y trabajar. Está en sus manos decidir si quieren aprovechar las ventajas o quedarse atrás para siempre.

10 Técnicas para posicionar su Sitio Web en Google y otros buscadores

No voy a decir que posicionar un Sitio Web es cosa rápida ni que las técnicas aquí descritas brevemente son infalibles. Posicionar un Sitio Web es una labor que requiere conocimientos básicos y paciencia. Hemos de aceptar que las modificaciones que haremos en nuestra web, ya la han hecho anteriormente otros profesionales SEO en otros sitios Web en su labor de posicionarlos muchos de estos con temáticas parecidas a la nuestra.

Existen técnicas que ayudan a posicionar Sitios Web; algunas técnicas son lícitas y otras no tanto. Yo recomiendo que no se arriesguen a utilizar técnicas ilícitas por cuanto a más de resultar contraproducente, la despenalización en buscadores como Google puede llegar a ser toda una odisea. 
Una vez terminada la etapa de diseño del Sitio Web; verificado que no existen vínculos rotos y considerando que las imágenes incluyen su descripción con la etiqueta “Alt”, nos plantearemos  un plan de acción que incluya los siguientes aspectos:

1. La correcta ortografía y redacción, es la imagen de nuestra calidad profesional, la adecuada utilización de las palabras clave  en los contenidos de nuestra Web; es el primer paso para posicionar el sitio web. El uso de las palabras clave es muy importante pero debemos tener cuidado de no exagerar. Si lo que hemos escrito al leerlo en voz alta es incoherente o parece que hemos forzado la inserción de las palabras claves, casi seguro deberíamos corregirlo.
2.  La etiqueta de Titulo (meta-tag <title>) posiblemente es la etiqueta más importante si deseamos posicionar la página web en buscadores. Esta etiqueta debería ofrecer al usuario una descripción de la página en la barra superior del navegador para informarle dónde está; por tanto, el título debe ser una frase redactada correctamente, llamativa y con alta densidad de palabras clave, que describa lo mejor posible los contenidos de la página web.
3. La importancia que actualmente los buscadores más importantes dan a las Palabras clave (etiquetas <meta name=”keywords”>) a la hora de posicionar páginas web es muy baja pero igual optimizaremos cada página entre ocho y doce palabras por página separándolas opcionalmente con una coma según sean se prefiera o no la creación de frases cortas.
4. Algo similar a las palabras clave sucede con las Meta Descripción (<meta mame= “description” content=” ” >) sin embargo algunos buscadores lo utilizan para describir el contenido de nuestra Web por ello hemos de agregar aproximadamente 250 palabras (incluido espacios) que sin ser una repetición de las meta anteriores  servirán igual para el alta en buscadores así como en los directorios que solicitan esta información.
5. Las Etiquetas de cabecera ( Heading tags o Head tags) son de las más relevantes a la hora de posicionar páginas web en buscadores; para ello es conveniente utilizar la etiqueta <h1> al texto más importante de las páginas y también utilizar los head tags más pequeñas, como <h2> y <h3>, para las cabeceras de secciones o pies de imágenes.
6. Las Etiquetas Alt describen el contenido que acompaña a las imágenes y está orientado al uso de invidentes que a través de lectores de pantalla escucharán en voz alta el contenido de la propiedad ALT de las imágenes; lo cual, le confiere un valor añadido a su sitio web en el tema de accesibilidad.
7. Subir el mapa a varios buscadores como Google, Yahoo, Bing y adicionalmente inscribirla en directorios de páginas web y foros. Actualmente robots de destacados buscadores utilizan los directorios de Yahoo!, ODP, Páginas amarillas u otros directorios como Puntogato ó Ecuadorenred para indexar sitios web; por eso es importante el alta en casi cualquier directorio de empresas y sitios webs. Pese a la importancia que tienen estos enlaces a la hora de crear redes de información y captación de visitas, no debemos afincar todo nuestro esfuerzo únicamente en este método de posicionamiento.
8. El Intercambio de enlaces (Link Popularity) es una de las maneras de hacer acuerdos para crear enlaces recíprocos; lo cual debe hacerse con sitios de calidad; para ello bastaría con un E-mail enviado al webmaster de la web con la que deseamos intercambiar enlaces  manifestándole nuestra intención. No se olvide de incluir en el texto de la URL de enlace  las palabras claves por las que queremos que nos encuentren. El intercambio de enlaces es importante por cuanto abre puertas a nuevas visitas; de hecho, en los inicios de Internet, esta era la única forma de derivar visitas hacia otras páginas de la red de redes.
9. Anuncios patrocinados.-  Se puede favorecer el posicionamiento de nuestro sitio web  mediante “Anuncios patrocinados”  (ej. anuncios de pago por clic como ADSENSE de Google) ó mediante la “Búsqueda orgánica o natural” (búsqueda normal a través de Google, Bing, Ask, etc.). Antes de valorar la posibilidad de pagar los anuncios patrocinados tipo ADSENSE de Google; mi recomendación es procurar un posicionamiento orgánico, ya que este es el único que nos permitirá resultados sostenibles en el tiempo. A mediano plazo Inclusive si la campaña de posicionamiento orgánico es pagada a un profesional SEO, los resultados serán más económicos que los obtenidos mediante pago por “anuncios patrocinados”.
10. Para concluir con este pequeño decálogo hemos de actualizar y/ó incrementar periódicamente el  Contenido en la web procurando que sea interesante, pues esta es la mejor manera de mantener el interés de los visitantes, incrementar visitas y que nos recomienden a otras personas. Por lo tanto y según recomendación de Google: “proporcione contenido único y relevante que suponga para los usuarios una razón para visitar el sitio”.

Para terminar y no por ello menos importante; en lo relacionado con la programación de las páginas web, se han de considerar que los buscadores entienden a ciertas páginas web mejor que a otras por ello hemos de tener cuidado con: El código basura, el diseño de las tablas; el uso de marcos, el contenido flash, Javascript y los contenidos dinámicos que pueden influir negativamente en el trabajo de los robots de los buscadores.

CONCEPTOS BASICOS

Black Hat SEO
Técnicas “fuera de la ley” para posicionamiento, basado en mecanismos de búsqueda. Estas técnicas tienen como objetivo engañar al buscador para que determinado website se posicione mejor. No es aconsejado el uso de técnicas Black Hat puesto que los buscadores permanentemente evolucionan y detectan este tipo de engaños para penalizarlos.

Posicionamiento natural y Posicionamiento en enlaces patrocinados
Generalmente los motores de búsqueda generan dos tipos distintos de resultados: los “resultados naturales u orgánicos” que son los que están basados en el algoritmo imparcial de los buscadores y, por tanto, no implican inversión alguna en el propio buscador y por otro lado, los “resultados patrocinados”, cuya clasificación sí depende del dinero que se invierta en los anuncios.

SEO y SEM
SEO (Search Engine Optimization); significa “Optimización para Motores de Búsqueda”. Corresponde al posicionamiento en buscadores orgánico o natural. Al usar el término SEO hace referencia a los especialistas en Posicionamiento Orgánico o Natural.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing); significan hace referencia a la gestión eficaz de enlaces patrocinados en los motores de búsqueda.

Posicionamiento en Buscadores vs. Alta en Buscadores
Frecuentemente se confunden estas dos expresiones. El alta en buscadores es solo una inscripción del Sitio Web dentro de un motor de búsqueda. El alta en buscadores NO da buenas posiciones en los resultados de búsqueda solo implica estar y nada más que estar en la base de datos de los buscadores para determinadas búsquedas; pudiendo, aparecer en el puesto 50 así como en el puesto 5000 de los resultados del buscador.

Popularidad de enlaces (Link Popularity)
Es la cantidad de links apuntados para un determinado website.

Link Farm
Técnica de posicionamiento que consiste en intercambiar links de forma programada para que exista ganancia de Page Rank. No debe ser utilizado ya que se trata de una técnica Black Hat que puede ser penalizada por los buscadores.

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