While it’s tempting to use Facebook and Twitter feeds for promotion, such efforts are a recipe for social media failure. Follow the 4 steps outlined last week — approach social media from a customer service and technical sales point of view, create individual satisfied shoppers — and you will generate more positive PR and win more customers and sales as a result.

And, if you need help getting started in social media or improving your current social media efforts, just ask. We love sharing our social media knowhow and helping businesses get on the right foot with customers. That’s all for this week — wishing the U.S. readers a great Labor Day weekend.

In short, it takes time to sit down with an organization, discuss and understand business goals, create an information hierarchy, go through a design process, develop custom software, test and implement technologies, and train employees on how to manage a site from day to day and keep it “on-brand” over time. To be clear, by real web presence, we’re talking about something other than a “me-too,” cookie-cutter, “upload your logo into the corner and paste-non-professionally-written content into the blanks” template site that’s guaranteed to frighten away potential customers, or online donors in the case of non-profits. Professionally developed sites generally require the time of one or more salaried designers, writers, and programmers over the course of a few weeks (up to a few months for larger sites) annually to create and maintain a professional web presence. So how do successful small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) budget for and approach a professional website?

Websites typically exist as line items on corporate and non-profit marketing and development budgets. Where marketing funds were once allocated to Yellow Pages adverts, local, regional, and national print, radio, or television ad campaigns, print brochures, etc., today most organizations recognize their website as their absolute number one sales, marketing, awareness, promotion, and/or fund-raising channel. Successful businesses certainly treat their online business presence as such. Given your company website is likely the most important element of your brand image and sets the pace for your conversion process, you need to continually budget for the full scope of this branding initiative—not for “just a website.” So how should you budget for online marketing? Grab a calculator — let’s look at some known data and explore the numbers.

According to Counselors to America’s Small Business (SCORE) and U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), the average SMB total marketing budget is calculated as a percentage between 2% and 10% of sales while consumer packaged goods companies may spend up to 50% of sales for introductory marketing programs. In other words, if you’re a $3 million company, you should set a budget somewhere north of $60,000 (2% of sales) and up to $300,000 (10% of sales) pending your industry and other factors. Another approach according to SCORE is to estimate what your direct competitors are spending online and try to at least match that amount. Schoenfeld & Associates did a study outlining ad dollars as a percent of sales for various industries. The following are a few examples:

A less formal way to think of marketing budgets is in terms of salaries. If you’re a SMB and budget less on your corporate web presence than your lowest-paid employee, you’re probably out of the game. Is it time to visit the CFO to correct the web marketing budget?

If all you can do today is build a template-based website and drop in home-brewed web content from Tim in sales, I get it. That’s fine, but understand it’s not the same as a professionally planned, designed, written, programmed, and managed web presence. It’s not what the competition is doing. Do what you can for today, but start to plan ahead — consider how you can get from point A to point B. The success of your brand and SMB or non-profit organization depends on it.

So you’ve realized that social media is important and here to stay. You have a personal Facebook account and perhaps have even gotten into Twitter. Tagging pictures of friends and tweeting about the sandwich you’re currently eating is one thing, but how do you build a successful social media presence for your business? Posting random tweets about the office cat, or worse yet, sending out spammy promotional messages and adverts for business products and services is a recipe for social media failure. Here are four steps we recommend to customers trying to build traction in social media.

1. Research > 2. Participate > 3. Create > 4. Invite & Promote

It’s highly recommended you follow these steps in order, starting with research.

Step 1: Research

All social media sites exist as conversations between people. Chances are there are people already talking about your company, brand, competitors, or industry in general. Doing a bit of research will go a long way to understanding how customers really feel about your products and services, what they like and the frustrations they face. Three great places to start your research are Twitter Search, WhosTalkin, and Social Mention. Enter your company name, brands, or other keywords relevant to your industry. If you or your competitors have Yelp pages, you can Monitor Yelp Reviews on Your iGoogle Page. Other popular sites you may wish to monitor include:

Facebook: http://facebook.com/
Digg: http://digg.com/
Delicious: http://delicious.com/
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/
YouTube: http://youtube.com/
StumbleUpon: http://stumbleupon.com

Step 2. Participate

Once you have done some initial research, it’s time to join and participate on the sites your existing or potential customers are most active. Start by making the majority of your posts or tweets responses to existing conversations. Respond to Twitter users, Yelp reviewers, individual blog posts, forum posts, YouTube videos and more. Become a respected member of the online community. Use your real name and a photo of yourself versus a company logo for your avatar. People want to know that they are connecting to a human being, not a corporate role (e.g. – “Karen Carter, Nike Customer Care” versus “WidgetSoft Tech Support”). Represent your brand but avoid being spammy. Build equity in your name and your company by the quality of your responses.

Step 3. Create

Once you have made social network connections and actively participated in other online blogs and forums, it’s time to start creating your own content. Great ways to start are creating a company blog, setting up a business Facebook page, a Twitter account, and possibly a YouTube channel if you are able to produce videos. The content you create will be unique to your business but you should have plenty of ideas based on your research and participation on other websites. Just remember — advertisements and promotional content provide little value to readers so find other ways to reference your products or services. For example, if you manufacture running shoes, blog about marathon training. If you sell computer parts, create YouTube how-to videos on replacing RAM and upgrading hard drives.

Step 4. Invite & Promote

By now, you should have made some social media connections. You’ve done the research, participated in existing online forums, and are now starting to create your own content. It’s time to invite your new contacts to follow your blog and other social media channels. Be sure to include your business social media URLs everywhere possible — on your main website header, sidebar, or footer, in your email signature, and in your profile information on other websites. Speaking of, we invite you to follow TrendMedia using the social media icons on our own website header.

Follow these basic steps and your business will be well on the road to social media success.

If you are interested in establishing a social media presence or integrating the latest social networking tools into an existing website, TrendMedia offers all the tools and talent you need. Engage with us on a project-basis or for professional services — contact TrendMedia today.

Do you list contact email addresses on your organization’s website? If you do, chances are you and your coworkers will receive large amounts of unwanted SPAM as a result. It is well known that spammers use automated scripts to harvest email addresses listed on websites. One solution to the problem is to offer an email contact form instead. While this will eliminate some (not all) SPAM, a major downside is many site visitors will not bother to fill out a web form to contact your business. Clicking on an email address is simpler and allows people to use their own familiar email program. So what is a website owner to do?

A better solution is to obfuscate email addresses listed on your site. This involves some clever coding tricks that make email addresses appear normal to humans but unreadable by email harvesting bots. Perishable Press wrote an article entitled Best Method for Email Obfuscation? that outlines some of these tricks. The first, “reverse text direction” trick seems promising.

Ready to remove SPAM from your diet? Ask us to obfuscate your contact email addresses today.

Scheduled for release on October 1, 2010, The Social Network is a movie about the founding of social networking giant, Facebook. (If we don’t gain business insight from it, at least it might be entertaining.) Speaking of, we’re in the process of setting up a new TrendMedia Facebook page. Be a pal and “Like” us!

It’s browser wars 2010! Brian tests Google Chrome 5 against the newly released Apple Safari 5.