1) Can our customers or supporters become a tribe?

Do your customers talk about you? Do they tell their friends and family about the things you do? If the answer is yes, you have the beginning of a tribe. To use Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks, you must have the type of fans who talk about your organization and want to talk to other people who talk about your organization.They must also be of the demographic that uses these types of tools. If your average customer is over 65, there is a good chance they are not using Twitter. You shouldn’t either. However, if your customers are comprised mostly of recent college graduates, Facebook might be a good option for you.

2) Do we have anything of value to add to the conversation?

The whole point of social media is the “social” part. That means having a conversation. You are talking “with” your supporters rather than “to” them.  Do you have anything relevant to say? Do you have exclusive free content for members of your tribe (downloads, coupons, etc.)?Can you post information that solves your visitors’ problems? If you can, your tribe will grow. Address a need, solve a problem, or share an idea. Doing these consistently will grow your tribe.

3) Do we have the resources to commit to social media?

One of the big mistakes that companies and organizations often make is to throw up a Facebook page and never update it.  It takes time and energy to make social media marketing work. If you can’t devote some member of your staff to regular updates (or even better, a team of contributors), then don’t bother pursuing this type of marketing. You will quickly lose your tribe and never gain them back if you can’t offer a steady stream of fresh, relevant content.

Another reason to have a person or persons dedicated to this project is to interact with your tribe. You will get questions, comments, and hopefully donations or sales. To strengthen your relationship, you need to be able to answer questions, send a thank you, or address negative comments in a timely manner. Having a person dedicated to this also prevents you from relying on auto responders, which can kill the sense of community.

4) Are we willing to be transparent?

The last question deals with your level of openness. Are you willing to show your warts? Are you willing to see negative comments about your organization or company on your blog or Facebook wall? How will you handle those attacks?

Social networking etiquette demands a level of transparency that many companies and organizations find uncomfortable.  You must be willing to face negative comments and be willing to talk about your failures. Web hosting provider Dreamhost once blogged about a service interruption in such a transparent and humble way that their business increased and they earned a new level of customer loyalty. That takes guts –does your organization have the stomach to be transparent?  

Now that you have considered these four questions, you have a clearer picture on whether social media is the right internet marketing approach for your organization. If you answered yes to all four, you are ready to take the plunge. However, remember to make a plan, set realistic goals, and test and evaluate often. 

While its name is synonymous with searching the Internet to the point of a becoming a generic verb for performing a web search, Google is not without a competition. One push for "Caffeine" may have come from the outside: Microsoft has made it known that its Bing search engine is going to be the force behind organic search results for Google rival Yahoo!  Other speculation about the Caffeine update is that it is aimed at competing with recent moves made by social media players Facebook(which has recently acquired FriendFeed) and Twitter, which has the ability to perform real time searches.

Google has said the that project means an overhaul of its indexing system, or the process that creates a database of all known websites, together with the metadata used to describe them. This change is expected to cut down on the time it takes Google to index documents and allow them to be searchable. The company has said that Caffeine is not an effort to change the way that its index is used to generate the results of a search, however.

The new infrastructure is said to run below the surface of Google's search engine. For most users, that means there won’t be much, if any, difference in search results. But it seems Google believes web developers and power searchers might notice a change in the way the search engine operates. Rather than rely on post-release feedback, Google is conducting a taste test of sorts:  It is incorporating pre-release usability testing on a large scale by providing a developer preview before spring the product on the general public.

For online businesses that rely on Google to draw web searchers to their sites, it remains to be seen how the new algorithm will change the mix of organic search and pay per click traffic. Google’s historic preeminence in web searches has been due at least in part to using algorithms to figure the value of content—what search results represent the best answer to a user’s question, which advertisements are optimized to show on a given page, and which news articles are most worth a reader’s attention. Google’s organic and paid search listings are two separate categories and a web site’s performance in one does not correlate with the ranking on the other. Caffeine, however, may cause enough jitters for some businesses that they consider cutting their risk from relying on a sole search engine and diversifying by starting new campaigns on Yahoo!, Microsoft adCenter, or Business.com.

Ultimately, it’s likely that any changes in the popular consumption of the caffeinated Google will be a matter of personal preference: will it be a habit, an addiction, or will it just leave an aftertaste?

The result of this boom on the internet is the creation of a new marketing industry. Because each website and business is now at the mercy of online search engines, strategies and mechanisms must be in place which assures consumers they will find the products and services they are looking for.

The primary application within this field of marketing has been the pay-per-click program which companies like Yahoo and Google have perfected over the past few years. This approach basically places marketing ads online. As the consumer clicks on these placed ads, revenue is generated. Other programs and marketing strategies are sure to develop in the near future which makes Search Engine Marketing a multi-billion dollar industry.

So what makes this kind of marketing more effective and beneficial to the business, organization, or individual?

Since many consumers and vendors begin their search online for a product or service, it means that this online approach to marketing is often the first and perhaps even the only exposure opportunity a business may have with a potential customer. To insure that the customer finds the advertised organization, websites must intelligently anticipate how their product or service will be located.

Predicting the ways in which people search for goods and services is what drives this model of marketing. Certainly the selection of proper keywords increases the profitability of search engine marketing. Choosing the right keywords people are actually typing into their selected search engines can mean the difference between a very rewarding online ad campaign, and one that fails miserably.

Keywords will typically fall into a couple of different categories: generic or branded. There are sites and tools available online which can help you determine effective keywords. Aside from generic or organic keywords, there may be brand-specific keywords which should be utilized as well. It is crucial that a company understands the actual surfing habits and buying styles that internet searchers demonstrate when looking for specific services, products or information using today’s modern search engines.

With about half of the American public accessing the internet every day, making your presence known to them on the World Wide Web is the whole point of search engine marketing. This approach to advertising gives you the opportunity to market your company over the internet to countless potential customers, increase sales, and, therefore, increase profits. Search engine marketing is no longer an option, it's a necessity.

For more information on Indianapolis Search Engine Marketing and Indianapolis SEO services, Check out Deep Ripples.