Despite the fact that Twitter has more than 32 million users, has received massive publicity from both celebrities and government, and produced remarkable results for companies like Dell and Zappos, many business executives still don’t “get” Twitter. Granted, there is an awful lot of noise (“Just got back from the gym…eating pizza again for lunch…watch a Seinfeld rerun”), self-promotion and spam-like content on the world’s most popular microblogging service—and to newbies it can seem like a bizarre online cocktail party where everyone is shouting and no one is listening—but for those who understand and learn to use it effectively, Twitter can be a powerful business tool.

Here are seven reasons every business needs to be on Twitter.

To Interact with Customers

For most business, it’s far easier and more profitable to generate continued or new business from existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. Growing existing customer business requires ongoing communication. Staying in touch with customers on Twitter is not only more real-time than many other techniques, it’s also far more cost-effective than direct mail, attending trade shows, picking up the phone, or even maintaining a customer newsletter. It’s not that Twitter can replace other touchpoints completely of course, but it can reduce the required cost and frequency of high-touch interactions.

To Interact with Prospects

Just as many of your customers are probably on Twitter, so are your prospects. They care far less about your advertising than about what your customers are saying about you, and how you respond. An active Twitter presence enables you to demonstrate strong customer service, rather than just claiming you offer it (after all, who advertises poor customer service?).

To Influence the Influencers

Industry analysts, journalists, bloggers and other influencers from most sectors of the economy are well-represented on Twitter. Tweeting content of your own that will interest them (i.e. not just your marketing materials), retweeting content they post, and engaging in dialog is a great way to get these people talking, and writing, about your company. It’s less formal, more “social” and usually more effective than “cold” outreach.

To Gain Market Intelligence

The fact that customers, prospects and industry thought leaders are all using Twitter make it a valuable tool for monitoring the topics and concerns being discussed. This is a great potential source of new product/service enhancement ideas as well as topics for blog posts, white papers or other content.

To Become a Resource

Prospects don’t care about your products or services—they care about solving their problems. Demonstrating your knowledge of their industry and their challenges, for example by tweeting your thought-leadership blog posts and white papers, makes you a resource they can go to for helpful information. That gives you the opportunity to explain how your products or services can help them, in a consultative fashion.

To Give the Business a Personality

Business websites are, necessarily, one-to-many communication. No matter how compellingly your site presents your value proposition, it’s still formal and impersonal. Twitter is a much more casual and conversational. Again using the example of Zappos, CEO Tony Hsieh has been successful on Twitter by sharing his personality. Unlike a company website, Twitter is immediate, informal and personal.

To Be Part of the Conversation

As noted above, your customers, prospects and key influencers are already having conversations about your industry, your competition—and quite possibly your company—on Twitter. If you aren’t participating in that conversion, you’re missing valuable intelligence, business opportunities, and possibly even the opportunity to prevent damage to your firm’s reputation.

Twitter is far more than a 140-character soapbox for celebrities, spammy “Internet marketers” and the incorrigibly obnoxious. Savvy business tweeters can filter out the cacophony and create valuable dialogs with key participants in their marketplace.

This piece was originally published in the Web Market Central blog.

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As we wind down 2009, it’s time to think about what matters for 2010.

My friend Seth Godin has pulled together a remarkable group of more than 70 people who each contributed a one-page essay with a one-word title to create a free ebook called What Matters Now.

What Matters Now will inspire you to make some changes in 2010, and to keep doing work that matters.

Download What Matters Now. (Note: 3 MB file size.) Please share!

Read Seth’s blog post about the ebook here.

Remember, big thoughts and small actions make a difference.

Make something happen in 2010.

We need your help.

Please share.

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Social media marketing is going to be HUGE in 2010 and we are finally seeing some decent budgets being formulated. We started out the first 2 quarters of 2009 helping the small business community mostly, but have realized that mid-size firms have demonstrated to us the budgets are now there and they are seeing the value more and more (which is a very good sign for the economy too). We will continue to help our small businesses of course, and are still finalizing the coaching and subscription services we have been discussing (I know well over-due) but things have been very busy in the trenches.

I wanted to share with you some frequently asked questions we ask prospects before engaging in a social media marketing engagement:

1.  Is your business involved in social media yet?

2.  What’s working / Not Working?

3.  Why do you think your company is ready to engage in social media?

4.  Do you have a social media plan for 2010?

5.  Are you measuring your results?

6.  Are you keeping an eye on your competitors online?

7.  What is your differentiation factor?

8.  Is your website web 2.0 friendly?

9.  On a scale of 1-10 how would you rate your customer service?

10.  On a scale of 1-10 how would your customers rate your customer service?

11.  Do you have staff members who can commit the time to training?

12.  Are you breaking the news first for your industry and developing yourself or your firm as a thought leader for your consulting or legal practice?

Well, this is EXACLTY what we help our clients do everyday; prepare them to listen, teach them to engage, and change their mindset into the 21^st century digital economy. But I must warn you that if you think everything is perfect when it comes to social media marketing your wrong. There is NO one tactic you will try that will get you 2 million views to your you tube channel (unless you are using Scott Stratten or better known as @UnMarketing on Twitter- make sure you follow this Jedi Marketer for some un-believable insight.)

Just like traditional marketing, you have a lot of options (tools) to consider. I know your boss is telling you to stretch your dollars as much as possible, BUT at the same time get the most effective response from your audience while not trying to sound to “spammy” right? Well then social media marketing may be the answer you’re looking for. Remember, marketing is getting the horse to the pond, and a sale is getting the horse to drink.

I know marketing is more complex than that, but you get the idea. It’s all about the marketing message you portray and the call to action that’s key. With some heavy research from our research team, we may be able to offer you the “fast track to social media for business” which many of our clients have experienced.

Look forward to hearing more from our growing business community.

The Social Networking San Diego Team via socialnetworkingsandiego.com

I sent a tweet this morning http://bit.ly/1hnIpA after stumbling on a job posting that had typos and bad grammar.  Now I am not pointing fingers at the poster, I have never claimed to be a master of the English language or its grammar.  I can even point out examples of emails I have sent that have been corrected by management.  Honest mistakes I believe, what I keep questioning though is, what does it say about the company?  Without knowing anything else other than the job requirements and responsibilities, is it wrong to think that this job might be a start-up, a fortune 500, or a non profit?  Does it matter?

Seeing that listing, my mind raced back to all the job placement workshops I have attended; both throughout college, and as the requirements have changed due to the demands placed with Social Networking.  It always seemed to be emphasized of the importance of correct grammar and punctuation, with the results being that your resume, (out of hundreds) would simply be thrown away.  I think the same holds true today with our online presence on networking sites such as LinkedIn, commenting on blogs,  even twitter (unless your using services such as TweetShrink.  Hard to get it all in 140 characters.)

With proper grammar set aside, what are you doing to leverage your presence online as you search for your next job?  With Google Trends showing LinkedIn with the most worldwide traffic these days, I thought I would submit 4  Tips to Build your LinkedIn Profile.

1. Maximize Your LinkedIn Headline

This is not your job title. Your headline is key to someone finding and picking you out of a search. This search could be either in LinkedIn or Google.  Google gives LinkedIn a top page rank, and someone could actually find your LinkedIn profile in a google search, before finding it inside of LinkedIn. Before changing my headline, I did a Google search for the company I currently work for. Notice what the #1 search result is; even over the companies website.

The headline should address 2 things:

1. What you do functionally.
2. Who you serve (target market.)

2. Recommendations

Below is a screenshot from a slide deck of mine on recommendations in LinkedIn.  If you believe in Karma, this it where it will come into play. Giving and receiving recommendations will carry more weight, then putting it on a resume.

3. Get the Word Out

Use LinkedIn “status updates” to let your network know that you are looking for a new job.  You may also wish to let others know that you are looking to connect with individuals around your industry or brand.

4. Join Groups and Engage

Thoughts?  What do you think about the proper use of language grammar in the employment market and industry?  What has your experience been with HR and recruiters around best practice and tips. How has building your LinkedIn profile help you position yourself in your industry.  Are you an authority in your market?

Continue the conversation and leave your comments below.  Thanks for stopping buy.

1. Optimize WordPress Permalinks

The most search-engine friendly permalink MUST includes the post title (%postname%) in the link,having keywords in your URL is an absolute must, In your WP admin panel, click on the “Options” tab, then the “Permalinks” sub-tab, and choose the option just below the “Default” permalink option. My suggest permalink structure is /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ or /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html .

2. Optimize WordPress Post Titles

The post title is the most important part of the blog post for many reasons. From your reader’s perspective, a descriptive and compelling title helps them decide if your post is worth reading or not. From an SEO perspective, think about the keywords or phrases people might type into a search box to find your post, and use those words or phrases in your post title.

3. Optimize WordPress Page Titles

According to most SEO experts, the page title tag is one of the most important tags on your page. In most WP themes, you’ll find the page title tag in the Header Template, and the default version ususally looks very poor SEO. I suggest you to use a WordPress plugin so call “All in One SEO Pack” to fix that problem.

4. Optimize WordPress robots.txt

The robots.txt file is used to instruct search engine robots about what pages on your website should be crawled and consequently indexed. Most websites have files and folders that are not relevant for search engines (like images or admin files) therefore creating a robots.txt file can actually improve your website indexation. Here is an SEO optimized WordPress robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /trackback/

5. Use Google Sitemaps Plugin

Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. WordPress user Arne Brachold has made the sitemap creation and submission process fairly simple with his Google Sitemap plugin. This plugin will create a sitemap for you and submit it to Google.

6. Use Wordpress Anti-SPAM Plugin

Akismet is the best automated spam killer that actually gets better as it learns from the whole community marking new spam comments as spam.

7. Use Related Posts

Amaury BALMER’s Simple Tags plugin is a perfect tool to manage perfeclty your WP 2.3 tags, which can show related posts on your post and rss feed. Not only does it enhance your blog’s usability, but it also helps create a dense link structure throughout your site, which makes it easier for the search engine spiders to find and index older blog posts.

8. Use Ping services

Use the Update service function, to inform tracking services that you have updated your weblog. By default, Wordpress pings rpc.pingomatic.com, which is good (if you don’t want to change this, you don’t have to).

9. Make your content searchable

Make sure your navigation bar is present on all pages of your blog. Your previous posts or atleast the popular ones should be linked to all pages so they get spidered easily.

10. Update your blog frequently

Update your blog frequently using all the rules mentioned above and your blog will surely get top rankings in a short time.

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