Some businesses are still trying to eliminate employee’s use of social media at work. Managers are fearful of employee productivity with the distraction of updating your status and checking up on friends during a workday.
At FYIndOut we’re all about social media. We use it in both our personal and professional lives. The venue of social media among small businesses in a tight economy has been astronomically beneficial.

Regardless of the platform, from Twitter to LinkedIn social media allows for fast, easy, available connections that serve purposes in every area of a company. From checking potential employee profiles during a hiring process, to keeping 24/7 contact with sales leads and marketing campaigns, you can no longer deny the necessity for social media at work. It’s time for people to throw their old habits out of the window and start embracing social media as a the newest form of building revenue, and that means social media use at work.

(Photo Jump On The Social Media Bandwagon by Matt Hamm)

When those in business marketing discuss social media and how to make the most of it, many immediately say, “That stuff is great for B2C but I’m not seeing the value for B2B.”  While most will agree that the value to B2C is easier to find when you look at social media, there is value for B2B. You just can’t take the same path as your B2C counterparts.

The Big 3 in order of value to B2B:

Twitter is a fantastic tool to create relationships, monitor trending topics and engage with customers.  It’s astounding growth and viral demeanor has spread all around the world.   Twitter has become a great way to get involved in people’s real time discussions on various products, industries, and professions.  Connecting with new prospects, business partners, and media in your area has never been easier.  As the majority of B2B investments are not made immediately as in the consumer world, staying involved in the right conversations on Twitter can definitely boost a company’s share-of-mind with their prospects.

Linked in provides great business value in terms of recruiting and personal brand development.   In regards to B2B, getting involved in the right groups and interacting with others is a good way to build your brand.

Of course we can’t forget Facebook, with 300,000,000 users come 2010 it would be hard for any company to shy away and attempt to create a brand name for themselves.  While Facebook is definitely a consumer and B2C platform, many B2B companies are still creating fan pages while they try to figure out how to make the most of the platform.  With Facebook recently launching vanity URLs, there is at least the benefit of additional SEO value.

The key thing to remember about all of these platforms is that they were built with the goal of connecting people to other people. Depending on what your B2B solution is and who your customers are, joining these sites with no strategies or set goals is pushing a square peg in a round hole.  Companies need to have a strategy and know what platforms are best for them, if any.  As platforms continue to grow and companies continue to embrace social media, better opportunities will arise for B2B.  At FYIndOut, we’re pushing to be that platform.

One of the things we’re asked all of the time by companies is “Why should I take the time to list my business solutions on your site?  Even if it is free.”  And while we discuss the benefits such as:

• Amplifying your company’s word-of-mouth by letting customer refer and rate your solutions
• Compete based on your quality and not marketing budget
• Increase your opportunities to be found by prospects that have never heard of you
• ….and more

One of the best reasons to list your company and solution on our site is to immediately improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and inbound marketing. 

By adding your company and just one of your business applications or services to our site, you’re increasing the number of external web pages your company name and solution name are mentioned in and have inbound links in 15 pages. 

Every other solution added adds another eight quality pages explaining your solution to prospects and improving your SEO and SEM. Adding content such as white papers, case studies, presentations, and videos also make a direct impact on your SEO.  In addition, adding relevant tags to your content and solutions also go through as keywords on search engines.

Once again, the goal of our site is to be the central place for businesses to find and promote business information, applications, and services.  We want to connect buyers and sellers in Small to Mid-Size Businesses (SMBs) as efficiently as possible by using the same practices we’re all used to in our consumer lives to help our businesses.  As more and more companies join our site, the more value we add for everyone.  We built this site to help people, not search engines.

But in a day where the majority of traffic comes from search engines, every bit helps.  Listing on FYIndOut not only builds your brand and reputation with prospects, it also builds your SEO.

The current social landscape is evolving.  As a small to mid size business, the ability to listen, monitor and engage customers is more important than ever.  Why?  Because the millions of people (many of which may be your customers by the way) are using multiple social platforms every day. What if they are talking about you? Good, bad, happy or unhappy, customers are voicing their opinions. According to The Future Buzz, the number of Tweets to date is 1,111,991,000. The number of users who log on to Facebook at least once each day is 100,000,000 (Total Facebook users will reach 300 million by 2010).

Now, we aren’t listing shock statistics just to get your attention (did it work though?)  The bottom line is that the rapid growth in social media should be seen as an opportunity for small to mid sized businesses, and a prompt to create a social media strategy for your business as easy as “Monitor & Engage” (ME).

Monitor: The social web is expanding and it’s important to know what is being said about your brand.

Google Alerts are easy, convenient & free. Here’s how it works: Google alerts will scour the web, blogs, news videos and groups for mentions of your choice, then aggregate and organize the information for you.

1. Set up alerts with your companies name, industry keywords or even major competitors
2. Be specific to your industry
3. Set the notification as it happens, daily or weekly
4. Create an RSS feed so all the alerts come to you

Search.twitter.com is a search engine just like Google but it will only scour Twitter to see what people are talking about.  According to Nielson, between Feb 08 and 09, Twitter grew at 1,382%.  Of which, the primary age demographic is between 35-49.

1. Type your companies name, your name, industry, or buzz topics
2. See what people are talking about relevant to your business
3. If you find a worthy Tweet, friend the person or company and introduce yourself!

Engage: Once you see who’s talking about you, engage them!

Social media is all about communicating and creating relationships.  If a customer is unhappy with a product ask them why.  See if there is anything you or your company can do to fix this issue.  They will be very impressed that your company took the time to address them on a personal level.   If they’re a raving fan, thank them. It’s common manners that go a long way. Word travels fast on the web.  The more willing you are to share, Re-Tweet and communicate with your readers, the more likely they’ll help you.

This is only a basic list of services, please feel free to connect with me at twitter.com/brettkopf. As always, we welcome feedback and comments!

Today people venture to the internet for answers to anything and everything. Unless you live under a rock, you are aware of the immense choices for filtering restaurants, travel, entertainment, news or purchases. Between Yelp, Angie’s List, Digg, Zagat, Fandango and many others, countless options for ratings and reviews allow us to make the ideal selection for our every need. Be it a channel we prefer, or a review site we trust, we are continuously aware of the time and cost savings behind an efficient means of processing information. Anyone can write a great tag line, but only a seriously satisfied patron can write a good review (or in the opposite a bad one). This is how we live our daily lives, prioritizing time, money and efficiency.

Here at FYIndOut we venture to ask the question: Why not business? “Time is money” as they say, and internet searching consumes enormous amounts of time in a business day. Search engines, in all their glory, don’t offer an effective means of finding the best business product, service, or research. Scanning the thousands of keyword related results to your search will never guarantee you’ve located the best information, and few things are worse than realizing you made a bad choice when its too late.

Certainly there are options, throw the search to the interns, outsource your search process, trust the first click, or just pray. But wouldn’t it be easier to have a platform that did the search for you? FYIndOut offers that platform.

Everyone wants more time and we would like to give you more of it. FYIndOut offers a directory of B2B services and research with peer ratings and reviews that make finding simple. Give it a try.

(Picture Moving Sidewalks by Brittany G)

On Tuesday, I attended Keith Ferazzi’s Webinar, author of Never Eat Alone and newly released book Who’s Got Your Back.  Joining him was marketing guru Seth Godin and author of Duct Tape Marketing John Jantsch. Here are some key points in building meaningful, lasting relationships:

1. A broad network will give you a wealth of information
2. Real feedback is vital
3. Constructive feedback are important pieces of data and should be thought of as generous
4. Create a peer to peer support group to hold you accountable, kind of like AAA
5. Acknowledge the truth: letting your guard down is courageous, not weak!
6. Embrace others to achieve the success and dreams in their lives
7. Lifeline: Embrace one person that could be a lifeline relationship. Create a strong relationship with this person and care, genuinely.  “Lets sit and talk about where you are   going,  how can I help you?”
8. If your not happy with what you’ve got, don’t expect someone to just fix it
9. Go for your full potential and receive great success
10. If you can create circles of people who have something to talk about it helps everybody
11. Seth Godin: Go fail, fail often, fail with people it’s ok to fail with
12. Keith Jantsch: Just go do it

In our last release, our development team implemented SEO friendly URLs. This allowed us to change our URL’s from something like http://fyindout.com/research/Research.php?Id=361 to http://www.fyindout.com/research/title/Study_Cash_Flow_Margins_Declining . This is huge for search engine optimization and having FYIndOut’s vendors list higher on search engines like Google and Yahoo. It was no easy task. We ran into a few roadblocks until we finally (hopefully) got it right. This post outlines how we convert any text string to an SEO-friendly representation.

Replace spaces with underscores

Initially we thought “Okay, we’ll just replace all spaces with underscores”:

<?php
   $research_title = “Awesome piece of research!”;
   $seo_research_title = str_replace(“ “, “_”, $research_title);
   echo $seo_research_title;
   // ‘Awesome_piece_of_research!’
?>

This worked for about 50% of our text research titles. The first error we ran into was a title that had an ampersand (&) in it:

<?php
   $research_title = “Erberts & Gerberts have great sandwiches.”;
   $seo_research_title = str_replace(“ “, “_”, $research_title);
   echo $seo_research_title;
   // ‘Erberts_&_Gerberts_have_great_sandwiches.’
?>

The problem here is that ampersands are used as request variable delimiters. So in our code, that research title would show up as “Erberts_”. Again, this not what we’re looking for. So we started replacing all ampersands with underscores:

<?php
   $research_title = “Erberts & Gerberts have great sandwiches.”;
   $seo_research_title = str_replace(“&“, “_”, str_replace(“ “, “_”, $research_title));
   echo $seo_research_title;
   // ‘Erberts___Gerberts_have_great_sandwiches.’
?>

This fixed all occurrences of ampersands in research titles. This still didn’t solve all of our problems though. We’d still get database matching errors for colons, semi-colons, and a slew of other symbols. We considered using browser escape codes, but that would defeat the purpose of SEO in the first place. So the final fix was to throw out anything that wasn’t a letter, number or space. Regular expressions to the rescue:

Get rid of all the symbols

<?php
   $research_title = “Microsoft launches new search engine ‘Bing’!!!”;

   // Matches anything that’s not a digit, space, or letter
   $symbols = "/[^\d\s\w]/";

   // Matches 1 or more spaces
   $spaces = "/[\s]+/";

   // Replace all symbols with spaces
   $research_title = preg_replace($symbols, " ", $research_title);

   echo $research_title
   // ‘Microsoft launches new search engine  Bing    ’

   // Trim whitespace from the beginning and end
   $research_title = trim($research_title);

   echo $research_title
   // ‘Microsoft launches new search engine  Bing’

   // Replace all occurrences of one or more spaces with a single underscore
   $research_title = preg_replace($spaces, "_", $research_title)

   echo $research_title
   // ‘Microsoft_launches_new_search_engine_Bing’
?>

This is our final product. Let me walk you through it.

The first regex pattern, $symbols, uses negated character classes. ‘\d’ matches any digit, ‘\s’ matches any white space, and ‘\w’ matches any word character. The caret (^) preceding these character classes negates them all. Wrap that all in square brackets and then again in forward slashes and you there have a regex that will match anything that’s not a letter, number, or space.

The second regex pattern, $spaces, again uses character classes to match one or more spaces. ‘\s’ matches a space, so you wrap that in square brackets and add a plus (+) sign at the end so it matches one or more spaces. Wrap that in forward slashes and you’re done.

Finally, we return the string after replacing the symbols with spaces, trimming whitespace from the front and back, and then replacing one or more spaces with a single underscore.

Why trim whitespace?

The reason we have to trim whitespace is to eliminate underscores from appearing at the beginning and end of the text. If we used the title ‘Awesome piece of research!!!’ without trimming whitespace, it would result in ‘Awesome_piece_of_research_’. Trimming in between the regex’s eliminates those underscores from appearing.

Make it a function call

<?php
   function stringToSEO($string) {

      // Matches anything that’s not a digit, space, or letter
      $symbols = "/[^\d\s\w]/";

      // Matches 1 or more spaces
      $spaces = "/[\s]+/";

      // Replace, trim, replace, return
      return preg_replace($spaces, "_", trim(preg_replace($symbols, " ", $string)));
   }
?>

This is in fact the same function we use to generate SEO friendly titles. Feel free to use it in your web development, and if you have any suggestions or optimizations, post a comment or shoot me an email at ralph.holzmann@fyindout.com or a tweet at twitter.com/ralphholzmann.

Edit Bonus: JavaScript Version

function stringToSEO (text) {

   var symbols = /[^\d\s\w]/gi;
   var trim = /^\s+|\s+$/g;
   var spaces = /[\s]+/gi;

   return text.replace(symbols, " ").replace(trim, "").replace(spaces, "_");
}

BtoBonline.com recently released the results of a survey they did around marketing budgets for 2009 and 2010.  53% of the 495 respondents said that they expected their marketing budget to go up in 2010. You can download the study results here.

It’s no surprise that around 43% shared that their budgets in 2009 went down by a significant margin this year. Interestingly, 23% say their budgets actually went up this year.  65% said that their online marketing budget was increasing this year as well which shows the shift of marketing budgets from the more traditional methods over to online. 

In regards to where they plan on spending their online budget, 63.8% of respondents will increase spending on Web site development; 61.6% will increase e-mail marketing; 49.5% will increase search; and 46.2% will increase social media. the categories seeing The areas companies plan on focusing on in the second half of this year are Web site development (43.5%), e-mail marketing (44.1%), social media (35.2%), search (33.0%) and webcasts (24.5%).

When asked about social media, 50.6% of the respondents said their company uses it today as part of their marketing strategy. Those that said they use social media today stated that they do so in the following ways; Advertising (40.1%), Marketing Research (40.1%), Customer Feedback (48.9%), Generate Leads (51.9%), Thought Leadership (57.3%), and Other (11.8%).

It’s great to see that so many companies are using social media with the intent to generate leads and improve their inbound marketing via creating thought leadership content.  As marketers start to tie goals to their social media experience, we expect this area to continue to grow.

More and more small businesses are starting to get involved with social media and use it as another channel to communicate with their customers and prospects.  There are two major reasons for this:

• Money: Using most social media is free or with fees that are a percentage of most advertising options
• Easy of Use: Business owners don’t have to have an IT team on staff to use social media.  They can read various blog posts to learn how to make the most of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other platforms and learn how to make the most of them fairly easily.  That said, do not mistake ease of use for not needing a marketing plan or dedicating the appropriate amount of time.

The charts from eMarketers’ study of Small Businesses show that they are currently using social media mostly for networking, research and connecting with clients.  We believe that these trends will continue to grow and also that the SMB market will see significant growth in sharing and promoting their business solutions and references in manner that’s helpful to prospects without being as forceful as advertising. 

Please let us know your thoughts!

There is nothing worse than a websites avid users being disappointed with their service. Technology is never meant to go wrong. But in an age where it can and will, it’s important to recognize how to handle complications on your site that make a user experience anything less than satisfactory.

I want to applaud the sites that know how to effectively manage crisis. (I know you all know who you are.) Crisis management should never be about salvaging pride. It should be about keeping fans. Here is how they’ve done it:

The key is acknowledging your mistakes. If something goes wrong on your site your business is responsible. So don’t hide behind an IT veil. Identify it, publicize it, and apologize.

As a business you are already on a multitude of mediums that serve as platforms to converse with your users. Between twitter, facebook, blogs and list serves, there is no excuse for not distributing information regarding your error and the process involved in rectifying it. Not only does use of these mediums help everyone understand what’s going on promptly, it encourages people to come back and see the fixed product. It avoids client frustration and mitigates the uncertainty surrounding the waiting period. It gives people a sense of connection and importance to your company, and it helps you keep all those loving fans you’ve worked so hard to amass.

So, next time you find your business in a technological predicament, instead of passing blame pass information.

(Picture Dodgers Cubs Baseball 2 – 2008 Gm 2 by IHC2007)