I am a little disappointed that some of my favorites from this last year are not in the running (Jott and Things), but there is a good list of new technologies and if nothing more, the Crunchies vote page is a great place to get a quick overview of the most eye-catching technologies from this last year.

Even if you don’t vote, go to the Crunchies page and see what you might be missing.

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1. Twitter is a micro-blogging site in which you can post articles comprised of 140 characters or fewer.
2. A Twitter account is free. It is easy to start, and only takes a couple of minutes. Start Your Twitter Account here.
3. A ‘tweet’ is a post. Any time you post a new thought, idea, announcement or link, it is referred to as a ‘tweet’. Start tweeting.
4. Twitter is a connectivity tool that acts like a giant conversation. You can read what others are saying, and they can read what you are saying.
5. To monitor what someone is writing, you ‘follow’ them. When you follow someone, their posts appear in your Twitter feed on your Home page. Follow Me.
6. When people are interested in what you have to say, they can ‘follow’ you, too.
7. To follow someone, simply visit their ‘Home’ page in Twitter and click the Follow button under their profile picture.
8. Twitter keeps track of all the people you are following, and those who are following you. Their is a handy stats display at the top of your Home page.
9. To find people or topic threads in Twitter, use http://search.twitter.com. This tool will become your best friend, and is where you can conduct searches and research.
10. There are lots of philosophies on what to post, and who to follow. But there are no rules. Keep it clean and find birds of your feather.
11. You can reply to other people in Twitter in two ways; public and private.
12. To reply publicly, simply include the person’s Twitter name in the post. A Twitter name is preceded by an ‘@’ symbol, and looks like this: @carysnowden
13. A public reply will be seen by all your followers, and might look like this: ‘Hey @jack_hadley, thanks for your comment on this article.’
14. To send a private reply or note, simply replace the ‘@’ symbol with a lower-case ‘d’ and a space, like this: ‘d jack_hadley, don’t tell anyone about this note.’
15. When you get in with a group and want to tag all your tweets so that the group can follow them, you will use a ‘hash-code’ or ‘hash-tag’.
16. A hash code is a special word that you make up and agree to use within your group. Hash codes are not private, and can be used by anyone else, too.
17. A hash code should be unique, and the prevailing convention is to use a ‘#’ symbol in front of your unique word. An example would be ‘#socialht’.
18. I would add this hash code to any of my tweets that I want to highlight for the group.
19. Now, when I go to http://search.twitter.com, I will search for the hash code ‘#socialht’ and be able to see all the comments intended specifically for my group.
20. You can search for other hash codes, or other topics, to learn what people are saying about you, your company, your favorite band, or anything.
21. You can tweet from a computer or phone. I use Twittelator and Twitterific for iPhone, but there are others, too.
22. You may eventually get invited to a ‘Tweetup‘, or a group social where like-minded people come together in person to meet each other and talk in person.
23. Take a look around our site for interviews and panel discussion about how people use Twitter; it is quite amazing, and incredibly useful once you get a handle on things.

Let me know if you have anything to add to this quick list.

PS: Each line in this article would qualify as a ‘tweet’ in length, and represent a typical comment in Twitter.

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So the question is posed; when constructing my social media strategy, which should I include; LinkedIn or Facebook?

The obvious answer is ‘both’, however there is a reason for each, and they are not the same.

LinkedIn seems to have been designed from a ‘Rolodex™’ viewpoint, and therefore is considered by most of it’s users to be just that: a place to keep your database of contacts. One of the great advantages of LinkedIn is that, as a ‘Rolodex’, the information is usually current and comprehensive. It is literally the best place to look when you want to know where an associate is in their career.

On the other hand, LinkedIn has not caught on as a social meeting place, and is therefore not a great place to nurture and cultivate relationships. For the most part, LinkedIn users send and receive invitations to connect, and that’s it. Not really a whole lot of interaction after ‘I Accept‘. There are reasons for this shortcoming of LinkedIn, not the least of which is that LinkedIn was popularized by the business culture before social networking was introduced to the workplace. Younger business graduates who literally grew up on social networking with MySpace, and later, Facebook, have unintentionally introduced social networking to the business world. And my how things have changed…

Enter Facebook; the fasted growing social network environment on the Web. The fastest-growing demographic on Facebook is the 25-and-older crowd, with many of those listing ‘business executive’ as their background. And while it lacks the professional breadth of LinkedIn, Facebook has a strong suite of social tools that prompt interaction and breed familiarity. Facebook is good at what it does, which is to keep people connected and aware of each other.

There are those who scoff at throwing sheep at each other, or at sharing a favorite YouTube video of Billy Idol. And this type of goofiness is not always appropriate for every business. However, you’d probably be surprised at how many virtual karate chops resulted in a request to meet for lunch, and you would be hard pressed to name a deal that didn’t first get its start on a lunchtime napkin.

So the bottom line is this: you should have a personal LinkedIn account to keep your business associates apprised of your career status, and impressive corporate history. However, if you want to proactively touch the most people at the highest frequency with the least effort; get yourself, and your marketing team, on Facebook.

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In a remarkable acknowledgement to the micro-blogging service, this article about the Mumbai tweets indicates that Indian authorities are appealing to tweeters not to provide strategic information lest they tip off the terrorists.

The power of Twitter can be seen in a Twitter search for ‘Mumbai’. To perform the search, go to http://search.twitter.com/ and type in the word ‘Mumbai‘ into the search field. The resulting page will be a continuous stream of comments generated by anyone posting on Twitter with the hashcode ‘#mumbai’.

Basically you will get a real time stream of comments from people in and around the events; citizen reporters giving the news raw and uncut.

Comments seem to include eye witness accounts of live action, from people who are reporting on what they see in real time. The action is fast and furious, and more exciting at times than watching events unfold on TV.

Twitter is a powerful tool, not only for watching events unfold around the world, but also to perform research on aspects of your social marketing strategy. With a real time stream of feedback, comments, and information about your product, your competitor’s products, and related trends, the amount of instant feedback you can collect is truly amazing.

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Recently, he used Twitter to announce a temporary position in his company. He was able to make a hire “within nine minutes after post”. Now there’s a success story for you! Paul is also using Twitter to share company ideas to the public, and to keep his ‘ear to the track’. He also gives us a hot tip on using Yammer to share information within your business.

Listen to our interview podcast for the rest of the story, and to get in interesting insight into how a successful business executive is using Twitter to build success.

(Duration—8:40)

Paul Allen is the successful entrenpreneur who founded MyFamily.com, 10x Marketing, and FamilyLink.com (including ‘We’re Related’ on Facebook). Paul is a respected leader in the Utah business community, and has achieved global recognition through his blog at http://www.paulallen.net

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Try this: type ‘site:sitename.com‘ into your Google Search Field at the top of your browser. Make sure to replace ’sitename.com’ with your own site URL, and to leave ’site:’ intact at the front. If you don’t know where to find your search bar, simply go to http://www.google.com and start from there. Hit ‘Enter’.

The resulting search page will show you all the pages that Google knows about. In order of rank.

You’re first page should be your Home page. If it is not, you are either concentrating more effort on a secondary page (not always a bad thing), or you have not promoted your Home page correctly. The second page on your list will be the second most highly ranked page for your site. Surprised? I was; my second page was my Privacy Policy, which has a lot of great content on it, but rarely gets any attention from me, and has no conversion objectives, whatsoever. Time to make a change…

By the way; you can use this trick to see what your competitors are doing in the search engines, too.

Keep an eye on this page for tips on how to promote your home page so that the search engines find it, and place it first (whether you are searching your own site, or for your particular business type). We’ll also show you how to buoy up your secondary pages, and how to make them effective sales tools, too.

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