There’s a right and wrong way to approach it though, and not appreciating why your potential customers use social networking in the first place will make things much harder and less effective. There are a quite a few social networking activities you could try, and I’ve already spoken about how to use them in previous posts on this blog. What I’m interested in now is not how you use them technically, but how you approach it all socially. Being IT proficient enough to create a twitter account and link to it from your site simply isn’t enough – it’s just the start. The following is my experience on social networking, but this also covers the experience I’ve gained from how my customers have fared.

For me, the golden rule of social networking is to be social. It’s all about having conversations, just like we do every day with humans. If all you do is post adverts about special offers then that’s not social networking, it’s advertising – and people generally have little time for advertising on social networking sites. It’s never okay to blast your social network in this way without ever attempting to really communicate with them. You have to be yourself and engage with people, and listen, join in and participate in your new community.

A lot of businesses fall at the first hurdle. They set up their facebook and twitter pages, and then start adding some content. Usually this content is fairly poorly conceived initially, but I can forgive any business this as it’s often something new to them and they are still finding their feet. Sometimes a business finds it hard to understand social networking because they assume that people will simply follow them. They place a link on their website or blog to Twitter and then sit back and wait for the followers to appear ‘en-masse’. And of course they don’t. And they won’t! At least not until the business engage personally with people they are genuinely interested in. Once they do, and once they begin communicating then things will start to happen. Get involved, follow people, interact with them, be interesting.

Having said all this you can take this too far. It’s all about quality, not quantity, and simply following people on Twitter in the hope that they will follow you back is often unproductive. I’ve seen people with tens of thousands of followers who are also following tens of thousands of people. Most of the networking they do will just be noise, and the people who they tweet to have no interest in them at all – in fact they are probably filtered out and are never heard. Every single person I follow on Twitter is there on merit, not just because I want people to follow me back. I mentioned in a previous article that I would rather have ten relevant followers than a hundred uninterested ones, and this still makes sense to me today.

An interesting exercise to try out is to have a look at your own twitter page. Go to http://twitter.com/yourname and here you’ll see a timeline of all your tweets. Scan through them and consider how you are perceived. Are you an interesting individual? Are you an asset to your community? Or are you just blatantly advertising and attempting to sell to all your followers?

I believe that the trick is to bring all your social networking activities together, and use each of them to back the other one up. To do this though, you need to be on the ball with no weak links. If you are using Twitter to drive people to your blog, then your blog must contain good, relevant content. Your spelling needs to be 100% accurate, long text should be broken into paragraphs and it’s got to look professional and be well organised. Likewise, there is no point in directing people to your Facebook page if you’ve only got four posts on there and the last update was six weeks ago.

So, the key is to be interesting and engaging. Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, a blog or a website try to look at it from the human angle rather than just another opportunity to sell. Long term you’ll find it much more rewarding, both socially and financially.

So, having all of this information at our fingertips within a few seconds is undoubtedly a good thing. Or is it? I’ve noticed quite a lot of instances over the last few months where many people are happy to accept things on the web as fact without even considering whether they are actually true or not. Whilst I’m not suggesting that we should question absolutely everything we read, I think that we should be more careful and certainly not take it as gospel.

Whatever you read on the web is often going to be someone’s opinion. The reader will then form an opinion from that opinion, and the cycle goes on. Before we know it we’re reading articles which contain very few accurate facts, and sometimes just blatant lies, but we just accept them as being true.

One of the worst culprits is social media, and in particular Facebook. There are numerous ‘fan pages’ around which many users have signed up to (some numbering hundreds of thousands) which are completely inaccurate. Let me give you an example. One of the most common themes is the ‘fact’ that Facebook are to begin charging users for access to the website in the middle of 2010. The charge varies from £3.99 to £14.99 per month, but they all have a similar message, something like:

We Will Not Pay To Use Facebook. We Are Gone If This Happens
(36,500 members)

. . . or . . .

I will not pay £3.99 a month to use Facebook from July 9th 2010
(711,000 members)

. . . or . . .

We’re against the £4.99 a month charge for Facebook from June 30th 2010
(110,000 members before being shut down after attempting to infect PC’s with malware)

The official Facebook line? Try this:

Question: Does Facebook plan on charging a membership fee? Over three-quarters of its users are going into a panic-induced assumption that this is true, even though there hasn’t been talk of a membership fee from the business press or Facebook itself. So can you calm the panic?

Answer: The answer is no, we are not planning on charging a basic fee for our basic services. Once again, that question stems from people thinking we’re growing so quickly we’re running out of money. We’re growing really quickly, but we can finance that growth. We’re not going to charge for our basic services.

It took me around one minute to find evidence to prove that there isn’t going to be a charge for Facebook, so why have nearly one million people blindly accepted this as fact without question just because somebody said so, with a few of them becoming quite angry at the prospect? So why do these groups appear? More often that not it starts with a sensationalist headline which results in the maximum number of people joining the group. These people are then subjected to any marketing message that the group admins decide to post, as these posts now appear on their Facebook walls. In the grand scheme of things this isn’t really that important, but it shows the potential of misinformation spreading via the internet.

There was a rumour spread that US President Barack Obama was a muslim and was sworn in on the Koran. In a poll conducted by CBS it was found that 7% of those interviewed believed that this was true. This doesn’t sound like it really matters until you consider that 45% of Americans stated that they would be less likely to vote for a candidate if they knew he or she was a muslim. It got to the stage where the President actually had to make a statement informing people that he was in fact a Christian and was sworn in on the Bible.

I quite often see people posting comments on social networking sites such as Facebook which contain few facts. Often they are opinions formed from assumptions or half truths, sometimes just from ignorance, but in almost all cases a few minutes looking around the web for evidence from credible sources would set the record straight and give them a fuller understanding of why things have happened or what the real facts of a situation are. This is where the true value of the internet really comes through.

I believe that we must take responsibility for the information we spread on the web. We have to check the facts, and be able to verify them from credible sources. We can say what we think, and we can certainly have an opinion, but too often people will simply accept what they read as the truth without questioning, and I find this worrying.

• http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_barack_obama_muslim.htm
• http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3194740.ece
• http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=7830237130

It’s estimated that there are around 3 billion web pages on the World Wide Web at the moment, and there are more being added every minute of every day. This means that each day the target of being listed on the first page of Google becomes more and more difficult. Even if you do manage to get that elusive listing, is it for a relevant keyword?

A great example of this is elmnet’s Google number one for the phrase ‘Is size really that important?’. This result comes top of the pile out of a few hundred million results so on paper sounds fantastic, but in reality it’s really quite useless. People searching using this phrase are incredibly unlikely to be searching for a blog article about the sensor size in digital cameras, and so our web page will be closed within a few seconds as the user goes back to the search results.

This doesn’t mean that I think that SEO is a waste of time. It clearly isn’t, and having a website which ranks highly for relevant keywords can be hugely beneficial. What we must be careful of is that we don’t see SEO as a magical answer to all our marketing questions because it’s not. Any business that relies solely on this is in trouble. Search results can vary according to location, previous behaviour, whether you are signed in or out of Google, which datacenter you hit, algorithm tweaks that happen every week and more, so are never as predictable or consistent as you may at first think.

A web marketing campaign needs to be robust and should be carried out using a variety of methods. Building a database of contacts and sending regular email newsletters should be considered, along with social networking applications such as twitter and facebook. In addition blogs can be used to attract inbound links and then there is the time honoured tradition of flyers, brochures, stationery and business cards. A well designed site, written in a standards compliant way with good content should be the final piece of the jigsaw, and is where all other marketing activities will feed in to. And we haven’t even mentioned SEO yet!

Include as much of this in your marketing plan as you can and everything should just fall into place, and the overall effectiveness will be far greater than if the bulk of your time is spent worrying about keywords and where you are in Google.

I spoke with a highly respected authority on all things web not so long ago, and he still insists to this day that for most smaller businesses simply having your web address on every email, letter, invoice, business card, quotation and estimate is just as effective a marketing tool as ranking well in search engines.

Twitter is similar to Facebook in that it’s a social networking tool which allows you to update people by writing short lines of text which is posted to your (and your followers) Twitter feed. Anyone can follow you, unless you protect your tweets, but doing that defeats the whole point of Twitter. So, the main difference between Twitter and Facebook is that you don’t need to know the person you are interested in to follow them. I follow a mixture of local businesses, international celebrities and family members!

The other noticeable difference is that with Twitter you are allowed a maximum of 140 characters to tell the world what you are doing. There are no quizzes, no applications, no photo galleries, nothing like that, just 140 characters of text. You can link to whatever you like, but Twitter’s appeal is it’s simplicity.

I have to admit that at first I just didn’t get it. Twitter just didn’t make sense. I can perhaps understand why Facebook users may be interested in what I was doing because I already know them, but why would strangers care? Who would want to know what I was having for lunch, or what I had bought at the shops that day? Once I started using it though it started to make sense.

So, how do you get the best out of Twitter for business? How can you make it work for you? As Twitter is such a new thing there are no hard and fast rules, and most of us are making it up as we go along, but I have a couple of rules of my own which work for me.

• Firstly, Twitter is a social networking tool. It’s about following people you are interested in, and in turn it’s about people who are interested in you following what you have to say. There is often an impulse to automatically follow anybody who follows you, but be selective about this. There is a bit of a backlash now against those who follow people purely to get them to follow back, so think for a second before you do this. There is no point in having 500 irrelevant followers, better to have 10 useful ones!

• Next, get involved with your network. Ask questions, post answers, provide links to content they may find useful, be an asset to them so that when they come to clear out those they no longer wish to follow you are not on that list.

• Be careful of how many tweets you post at once. There is nothing worse than blasting out a dozen tweets within a 30 second timeframe. This hogs your followers Twitter feeds and is the quickest way to get you unfollowed.

• Complete your bio info on your Tweeter profile. If somebody decided that they may like to follow you then they’ll want to know a little about you and where you are based before they do. Provide this to them or you risk losing them.

• Do more than promote your own agenda. Users who purely self promote won’t be followed for long. Of course self promotion is really what most users are after, but be sensible about this. Try and write a mixture of posts, some of which may refer to your site or blog, but others which comment on someone else’s blog, a news article or other item of interest.

To quickly summarise, I’ve found that the real benefits of Twitter come from being involved with the people you are following and the people following you. It’s not just about advertising your product to as many people as possible, it’s about becoming actively involved with them, engaging with them and benefiting from their experience in their field.

If you’re a business, and you’re not yet tweeting then you’re missing a trick. Get involved, sign up for an account and get following. Visit http://www.twitter.com to get started.

Three months on from that article I thought I would add some thoughts to the subject of using Facebook for business. It sounds perfect! Instant communication with interested potential customers, but there are a few things to look out for here, and a couple of golden rules that really shouldn’t be broken.

First thing to think about is mixing business with pleasure. A Facebook page tends to be a personal thing, and you’re likely to talk about all sorts of things on it. You need to decide pretty early on whether your page is to be used for yourself and your friends or for your business. It is possible to mix the two but you always must remember that whatever is seen on your page is an instant reflection on your attitudes, professionalism and personality to potential customers.

You also need to decide very early on who your business audience is going to be. If your company Facebook presence is purely aimed at being a networking tool for employees then that’s fine – but if this is the case then make the group private.

If your Facebook group is to be public then be careful what you post, and make sure that it can’t be read in a way that could harm your business reputation. Don’t post up incriminating photographs from your last drinking session, and don’t make offensive comments about people – no matter how much they deserve it! I always use the “Mum test”. Before you post your blog item, tweet or Facebook post read it back to yourself and ask yourself if you would be happy with your Mum reading it!

Remember also to take care when writing on friends walls, as whatever you write here is also visible to all friends of that friend. Eventually, as you use Facebook more, people begin to build up a picture of what you are like as a person. Even if you are posting from your personal Facebook profile rather than your Facebook business group people can still view your profile and put two and two together. It’s likely that they will also assume that this is what you are like as a business so naturally it’s important to make sure this is a positive impression rather than a negative one.

Finally, never repeat your posts over and over again. The same self promotion message posted more than once is the quickest way to get you blocked by your friends. Post it once, then move on.

Facebook is a very useful tool for business, but what you post is visible to lots of people, probably more than you may at first realise – so use with care!

We’ve put a variety of topics in here about all sorts of things that interest us, but at the back of our minds it’s also been a little experiment. If we write a post, how long will it take for a Google search to bring us up as a result? How can we use this to pro-actively market ourselves?

The trick is to write about things that you think potential customers will search for, hopefully meaning that they will see your post in their Google search results and potentially consider using you for their project. Here’s a list of our top ten search engine hits so far, in no particular order – and all from posts within this blog. We’ve included the ranking in Google out of the total number of returned results.

Bear with me on this one, and read right through to the last result, which we think is quite staggering!

• “Vive la Tour”
  Position 7 out of 4,630,000

• “Dragging the shutter”
  Position 11 out of 388,000

• “Nikon 85mm f1.8″
  Position 10 out of 577,000

• “Building up contacts”
  Position 4 out of 273,000,000

• “Should I sell online?”
  Position 6 out of 128,000,000

• “Free high res desktop wallpaper”
  Position 9 out of 597,000

• “Reasons for being standards compliant”
  Position 6 out of 9,330,000

• “Photographer portfolio online”
  Position 9 out of 10,400,000

• “The myth of the fold”
  Position 25 out of 175,000

And finally, our personal favourite:

• “Is size really that important?”
  Position 1 out of 108,000,000!

So, naturally at the end of this our top tip is to start writing a blog and link from your blog to your main website! We’d recommend having the blog on the same url as your website, for example our blog address is www.elmnet.co.uk/blog, rather than www.elmnetblog.co.uk.

The reason for this is that although having external links to your site is a good thing, the value of each of these links subsequently decreases if they are all from the same url. If you have ten links from your blog to your main site then every link counted after the first link is worth considerably less in Googles view.

It therefore makes sense to write good, search engine friendly copy, and then to host this on your main website domain and let other sites link to you because your content is interesting. This means that you now have many more inbound links from different sites all pointing to your domain, and Google can’t get enough of that!

We thought we would try a little experiment! We’ll write a new blog post based on the most interesting idea suggested to us, and in one month’s time we’ll see how it does when a Google search on the subject is performed.

You can suggest a topic by leaving a comment, dropping us an email, or  via twitter.

I always tell myself that I won’t be an early adopter of technology. I should wait until a new software package or operating system has been out for a couple of months and let all the other impatient idiots discover all the bugs. Of course after a couple of days I just can’t wait any longer and order the new product, and the new Apple operating system (OSX 10.6 – Snow Leopard) has been no exception.

Apple like to name their operating systems after big cats. We’ve had Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard and now Snow Leopard. The similarity in name of the new operating system to the previous incarnation is no co-incidence. The new Snow Leopard operating system boasts very few new features, and once installed looks incredibly similar to Leopard, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The bulk of the changes are all ‘under the hood’. It seems that Apple have made a decision – that rather than add new features and applications to appeal to the mass market they would rather simply improve the way it works and maximise it’s efficiency when used on modern hardware.

The biggest change has been to the main kernel. This is the central part of the main operating system, and it’s been changed considerably to work better with the new multicore processors available today. There are pleny of web articles out there which go into great detail about this so I’m not going to go there, but I will give a few comments of my experience in real life with the new system. At the end of the day this is what is important.

Installation was a breeze and required no input from me once it had started. It took around 40 minutes, and when the new system restarted just about everything worked straight away. No problems with the Adobe Creative Suite application, and of course all the Apple programs were fine. It was the most pain free upgrade I’ve ever done.

There are a few subtle interface improvements but nothing major, but the clincher for me has to be the improvement in performance. The Macs we’re running here are no slouches. We’ve got quad core Mac Pro machines with fast Intel chips and around 10GB of RAM, so they were fast to start with. Snow Leopard really does take this to the next level though, and I’ve found that there is a noticeable increase in speed. This is especially evident in the Apple applications like Time Machine and Aperture.

I estimate that Time Machine runs around 30% faster, and Aperture (my photo editing package of choice) runs like a rocket. From a standing start it opens a vault file of 15,000 images in around eight seconds, which is around two thirds the time taken under the previous system. Safari is so quick that you don’t even realise it’s done what you asked, and the new Mail application zooms along nicely too.

I haven’t noticed much difference in the Adobe Creative Suite, but I believe that when CS5 comes out it will be written to take advantage of the new operating system so we’ll hopefully see real benefits then.

But we’re just talking seconds here and seconds there aren’t we? This is true, but if you consider that Apple will charge you a couple of hundred quid to upgrade a processor by .3GHz and you can get a similar increase in performance with this £25 upgrade then it’s got to be a good thing.

Overall the OSX operating system is maturing very nicely, and is without question in my opinion the best on the market. It’s fast, reliable, stable, in fact it just works, which is all that most users want from their machines in the first place.

It sounds too good to be true! Your own online presence where anyone in the world can view your products, order them and pay for them from the comfort of their own home. Everybody wins – the customer gets what they want delivered to their door with minimal effort, and the vendor makes an unattended sale. It’s almost perfect!

Almost. There are certainly a few things to consider before you dive in setting up your own online store. I remember when I set up my first e-commerce site selling photography online. My work was already in a few galleries, and I found that quite a few people were looking me up on my website after seeing what I was producing. My first ever sale came through around a week or two after setting it all up, and I was very excited. It was for a 40″ x 6″ panoramic print and it was to be sent to Perth.

When I realised that it was to go to Perth in Western Australia rather than Scotland the euphoria quickly died down. My postage and packaging rates never took into account sending items abroad, and the sheer logistics of packing up a panoramic print to go half way around the world via air mail quickly made the whole transaction fairly worthless. I stuck with e-commerce for a while after that, but it never really worked for what I was selling. Customers understandably much preferred to visit a gallery and see the work framed, behind glass and on the wall before parting with their cash. The lesson here is that some items simply don’t suit being sold online.

Promoting an online store is crucial. You need to be able to tell people about what you have for sale, or you won’t sell a single thing. The best way I can think of explaining this is to consider an artist painting the most incredible picture ever. It’s a masterpiece, and it’s worth a million! The artist puts the painting on the wall in their house and then adds a price tag to it, informing all who see it that it’s up for sale. The artist then get’s a cuppa, sits down and waits for it to sell. And of course it doesn’t, because no-one knows that it even exists.

Another thing to consider is the value of the product (or the margin made) and the time taken to package and ship. If after Royal Mail have collected your parcel you have made the princely sum of £1 then it’s time to ask yourself “is it really worth it?”. You may have spent half an hour packaging the item, and another ten minutes popping up to the post office and waiting in the queue. Add into that the time it’s taken to add the items to the website and you may find that it’s actually costing you money. If you sell fifty each day then you can perhaps take advantage of economies of scale. If you sell five a week then it will quickly become an inconvenience.

The final thing to consider is do you have the time available to keep your online shop up to date and respond to your customers in a timely manner? An online shop with one hundred items will take more time than you think to set up. You’ll need to have a photograph of the item you are selling, and it will have to be a good one. You’ll need to add the item to the shop, and include a title, a short description, a long description, a price and full postage and packaging details. You’ll need to check your email constantly so you can act on any orders that come in. You’ll need to tell the system new stock levels as you sell products in your physical store (if you have one). You’ll need to keep the online shop up to date with special offers, and you should also take the time to market your store to potential customer via email newsletters. Obviously you’ll need to use Twitter and Facebook regularly to help things along, but you should be doing this anyway whether you are selling online or not.

Having said all this, e-commerce is undoubtedly a good thing. The opportunities are huge if you go about it in the right way. If you are a busy person then select a simple, profitable, easy to package range of products to start the ball rolling rather than attempt to put every item under the sun on your store. Get into a routine of checking emails, and set aside a time to bulk process orders as efficiently as possible. Consider selling gift vouchers for your physical store, this is a great way to easily sell online without the hassle.

If you want to take those first steps to becoming the next ‘Amazon’ then why not give us a call. There is a lot to think about, but we have been there any times before. We can certainly give you an overall e-commerce strategy rather than just provide you with the selling facility.

I have to admit I am genuinely impressed by the thought they’ve put in to this. It’s all very well having a shop  with a nice sign, some solid branding and a fancy website, but ultimately a delicatessen like this will be judged on the items it stocks and the service they offer.

We always expect delicatessens to be expensive, but I’ve found that this simply isn’t the case. The trick is buying seasonally from local suppliers. You’ll not find asparagus on their shelves in November, or spring lamb in the fridges in January. What you will find is produce that is ready now, and at a good price – certainly no more expensive than you would pay at the supermarket for an often far inferior product. Our favourites so far have been beef from Acomb Farm, the most amazing ice-cream from Beckleberry’s in Blaydon, and fantastic Brown Ale Bread from the Thomson Bakery.

I really think that this is such a good thing. A local business promoting the best that small providers in the region have to offer. Small businesses have such a lot to offer given the opportunity, and I think that we should support them whenever we can.

We would miss them so much if all that was left were the Sonys, Tescos and Microsofts of the world.

UPDATE: Just recently tried the most amazing home-made pies from the shop. Proper pies, with pastry all the way round, not just some excuse for a lid sat on top. Can’t recommend them highly enough!

I received one last month which was sent to me (and nine other people) from a friend of ours. The letter sounded authentic enough, and spoke about a boy suffering from cancer who wanted to be in the Guinness Book of Records for having the largest collection of compliment slips in the world. There was a London address included to send your compliment slip to, and you were also asked to pass on the email to ten of your friends.

Unbelievably this hoax is now twenty years old, and the ‘little boy’ has been declared clear of cancer for the last eighteen of them. Goodness knows how many letters have been sent to the address in London. There’s more info on this hoax, and variations derived from it at the Guardian’s website - click here to take a look.

There have been some classics over the years, here’s a few of my personal favourites:

• Bill Gates is sharing his fortune
• Good Luck
• Bloody Mary Curse (my favourite – forward this email OR YOU WILL DIE!! Nice!)
• Irish Friendship

So what’s so bad about them? Well, for a start along with spam mail they simply clog up the internet and slow everything down. It’s the classic, tell two friends, they tell two of their friends situation, and before you know it you’ve been personally responsible for a few thousand pointless emails flying around the web for no reason. Most importantly, what you have just done is added your email address to an ever expanding list which is just waiting to be collected and used to send you information about online casinos and viagra.

Generally, the best bet is to avoid them and don’t add to the already huge amount of internet traffic which is basically useless. If you are not sure then use Google and search for the title of the letter. It will more than likely turn up as a scam, and you won’t feel half as daft as you would when your friends tell you you’ve been fooled!